Politics creep into every news aggregate out there. I kind of like the idea of Hacker News not being one of them.

Indeed it does. Flags are disabled here, and now we get a long and extensive back and forth of all the sorts of arguments normally shut down as bigoted tout court.

Excuses from above about it being good for the community strikes me as eerily similar to the "national security" argument: in order to defend a free community from those who seek to harm it, we don't need to uphold the principles that it was founded upon. Hm.