Yea, my question was more rhetorical.

For the record, I think it is a problem that someone can consistently drop hateful political rhetoric (I looked through hga's history) essentially without repercussions. It looks like he has some perfectly fine technical contributions, but that shouldn't be an excuse to regularly derail threads with hateful commentary.

Any new account which displayed hga's history of political commentary would be summarily banned. I'm skeptical that HN should allow such commentary to continue just because it comes from the same account that has technically good content.