[sT370ma2]

"Care to provide specific examples of what you have tried and been unable to say because the government explicitly tells you not to? " I would love to, despite your setting up a straw-man argument. I posted a link to this article: http://misc-stuff.terraaeon.com/articles/no-vote.html on Hacker News. It received about 2000 page views in less than 30 minutes before it was pulled from the feed.

[cecilpl2]

Did you just conflate Hacker News with the government?

[thr0wawayf00]

Wait, are you saying that Hacker News is the government? What does having a post getting removed from Hacker News have to do with what the government tells us to say? I'm sorry but I don't follow this line of argument at all.

[sT370ma2]

The article doesn't say the government is the reason children could not have decent chemistry sets in the 1970's and '80's. That's the straw-man argument. However, I can't prove that fear of the government, due to what could be seen as an anti-government article, is the reason Hacker News pulled the post from the feed. I really don't know.

[int_19h]

Given the topics quite routinely discussed here, I very much doubt that. But the article in question is a really short piece, and, so far as I can see, it's strictly politics - what makes it HN front page material? (popularity by itself is not a valid metric here)