[dang]

We've banned this account for using HN exclusively for ideological and nationalistic battle and ignoring our request to stop (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35347522). That's not ok on HN, regardless of what you're battling for or against: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

In case anyone is worried about us "banning $user just because you disagree with their $views" - I've spent countless hours protecting and defending HN commenters who happen to be posting contrary views on China, just as on any other topic. You can see years' worth of this at https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod, which is a list I made when this worry came up once before.

So yes, it's certainly ok for people with different backgrounds to defend minority views on HN—that's an important principle here. It's not ok, though, to just use HN for destructive flamewar. We have to ban accounts that do the latter regardless of what they're arguing for.

Accounts arguing for contrarian positions are under greater pressure because they get surrounded and pounced on by the majority in ways that can feel very much like being ganged up on. This makes it understandable that they tend to become defensive (i.e. aggressive), resort to snark and fulmination and flamewar, etc. But even though it's understandable, it's not ok, and we don't have a choice but to ban accounts when they are doing this with no regard for HN's rules.