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Comment by zemo | Hacker News Reader

This submission is flagged too. Who is flagging these, and why?

It's very clearly against the guidelines, that's why

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

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I would certainly call secret police running rampant in a US city an 'interesting new phenomenon'.

Others would say this is exactly what they voted for. Unfortunately it's all about perspective, and after a decade of passively consuming hn, it's obvious where the sites interest lies in terms of moderating content.

Let them say it.

Can you explain? I haven’t been watching TV news, but I haven’t seen this being broadly covered elsewhere.

You’re saying this is trivial and uninteresting? Or just everything relating to the US government is “politics” and we can’t talk about it? Because I think the guideline is meant to be about the former.

I think there comes a point where the situation is so serious normal guidelines, intended for normal times, no longer apply.

It's still off-topic here at hn. The community is very international, similar things happen in dozens of other countries too. The front page would be full of politics, if those kind of articles wouldn't be flagged.

There are a lot of other platforms, that are open for any topic, including politics. Reddit is probably the most similar one to hn.

USA is not like other countries.

It is the most powerful country in the world, the strongest military power in the world by far, a global nuclear power, and the basis of European military security and peace - at a time of Russian military expansionism.

This is not the same as Haiti having problems.

There’s plenty of other forums and social media where such discussions happen. Hacker News does not want to be that place

Reply on news.ycombinator.com