Then talk to dang and attempt to convince him that the voting system needs to be purely based on the truth (or lack thereof) contained within a comment. As it stands, the voting system is primarily intended to surface comments and posts that foster the discussion of interesting things.

Considering that things like attacking the messenger and bad-faith discourse (via insults, etc) are counter to the stated HN ethos, I don't feel it's unhelpful to downvote assholish comments for the sake of being assholish, even if the comment has accurate factual information that is relevant.