[dang]

Many politicized topics appear on HN. That's inevitable and it's fine. The problem is that people start doing political battle in the threads: flaming each other, bashing their enemies, and so on. That turns the threads into flamewars, which are aptly named because, like fire, they consume everything. We can't allow that; it would destroy HN's mandate, i.e. the gratification of intellectual curiosity. So we have to moderate. The values by which we do that are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

The goal isn't to eliminate political discussion from HN, but to prevent the community from destroying itself. One reason people want to have political discussion here is that HN hasn't already destroyed itself for thoughtful, substantive conversation. This attraction makes it particularly vulnerable, so we all have to be careful. It's ok to comment on politics, but not ok to do it in the usual browbeating way.