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Comment by 40acres | Hacker News Reader

Really frustrating to see this flagged: either we don't trust the moderators to moderate or someone simply doesn't want to have this discussion. We're all (mostly) technologists here, diversity in tech and the issues surrounding it are not going to go away, as this post shows -- people ain't gonna talk about this in the office, the least HN can do is provide a forum for tech workers to discuss the issue with guardrails on decorum.

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Political topics on HN often get flagged because they tend to devolve into flamewars pretty quickly.

Also it's largely pointless. Unlike technology arguments, where you can easily convince me to try switching from Sublime to VSCode or to give Rust a try instead of C++, etc. political beliefs are much more entrenched. Each side has a very hard time understanding and empathizing with the viewpoint of the other side.

Exactly, it's a lot like religion, except that at least with politics you can at least attempt to bring facts and data into the discussion in an attempt to disprove the other side's points. But people still treat it like a religion so it generally just isn't productive to discuss it, unless you're among people who are generally like-minded, and you're only hashing out finer points (e.g., would policy A or policy B be more fruitful for reducing global warming? Rather than arguing over whether global warming is real or not).

Even if this topic is worthy of discussion, the risk of damage to the community may be unacceptably high.

>A strange game. The only way to win is not to play.

As was called out explicitly in Anna Wiener's article on HackerNews earlier this month, HNers have some distance to go in ability to discuss these topics.

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