Deported it is own citizens ️

Is there an edit button?

You mean in the Embassy of Ecuador in London? That’s hardly a prison.

Would you prefer that the British police entered the Ecuadorean embassy without the permission of the Ecuadorean government in order to extradite him lawfully in accordance with a lawful court order to not America to face trial for not clearly political espionage claims, especially when he would not be facing the prospect of up to the death penalty and in fact would probably have been released by now anyway?

This is the sort of adjacent controversy, a.k.a. flamewar tangent, that the site guidelines ask you not to introduce into a thread. The problem is that the topic has been gone over so often that there is no longer any curiosity in it. Curious readers move on, so only partisans—those who passionately identify with one side or the other—show up to comment. All they do is recite the same arguments that have been made countless times before, using stronger and nastier language against each other. We end up with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21864054.

Since HN's guiding principle is intellectual curiosity, it follows that once an ongoing story has reached a saturation level of repetition, it's off topic for Hacker News until significant new information emerges. Once that happens, discussion has a chance to attract the curious again because there's something new for the mind to sink its teeth into.

Actually, one can drop the word "controversial" from the above: any story is off topic once it has been repeated to saturation level. But it's only the controversial stories that people feel compelled to keep bringing up past that point.

The saturation threshold for repetition is far lower than people who feel strongly about a story think it is. That is, curious readers get bored and tune out far sooner than partisans imagine.

It's not that such topics are unimportant. Usually they have large importance, which is why people feel strongly about them. Rather, this rule has to do with the HN community's limited ability to function within its values. Once we get out of the functional range of curiosity, the needle goes into the red, and discussion reduces to two sides firing at each other from fixed positions. It's not in anyone's interest for HN to host such degenerate discussions, because the more we do that here, the more we condition the site to have more of this, instead of the curious conversation it actually exists for. Keep in mind that flamewars are the default end state of an internet forum; curious conversation is not. So they aren't sideshows that have no effect on the main attraction—they are actively poisoning it and hastening its decline.

Each of us has at least one topic that activates us and throws us out of the curiosity range, so the only long-term solution is to learn as a community to manage these reactions consciously in ourselves, and not let activation energy propel us mechanically into posting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html