Why did this story get flagged? I found it interesting and learned a bit more about the topic.
(BTW I'm just a regular user, not an admin or speaking for any admin)
Anyway, yes, HN isn't just tech news, but it does seem to have a strong aversion to highly political topics because they always, always devolve into angry arguments and HN values "civility" over all else. So the parent is right IMO: this really doesn't seem to be a good place to discuss this.
Maybe you haven't been paying attention, but these discussions usually do tend to devolve to incivility. Whether the topic is worth discussing is another matter; this site doesn't like uncivil discussion and tends to quickly ban people when this happens, so it makes sense that it would simply avoid these discussions altogether. These days, if you want civil political discussion, you either need to keep out people with very different opinions (so more like-minded people can discuss finer policy points instead of constantly arguing over extremely fundamental differences of worldview), or you need to have an extremely involved and active full-time moderation team to keep things civil.
That's called an echo chamber. That isn't discussion, it's just playing with yourself.
> these discussions usually do tend to devolve to incivility
This the internet, anyone is free to comment, and some amount of those comments will be in-civil. Don't reply to them, flag/report/downvote as appropriate. However - if a comment is one you disagree with, and you think it's uncivil, it's probably best to just take a step back because human bias (whether it's me, or you, or any other random HNer) is strong.
> you need to have an extremely involved and active full-time moderation team to keep things civil
In my experience, while a moderation team can do a lot of good, they can also simply turn a given community into an echo chamber of the moderation staff's views. See /r/politics on reddit for an example of this.
Next time you find yourself headed down the path of what seems like a disagreement turning into a real argument, take a moment to restate the points of your opponent you agree with. I usually use something like "So here are the points I think we agree on..."
Then, I usually like to highlight what seems to be the fundamental difference between the two statements, "It seems like we're in disagreement over X".
Don't assign value statements or qualifiers here. Your goal isn't to help or hinder any side of the argument when you do this, it's just to re-align the participants.
Often when people get upset in a discussion, it's because they feel like they're not being heard. They're making a case, and you're arguing something else, which causes frustration and anger. Taking a moment to re-align indicates you are listening to your discussion partner (or if you aren't being a good listener, will help find where you went off track).
As for being heard, maybe the problem is no one wants to waste their time and breath dealing with people with such different views. When literal decades have gone by and those people still cling to same views, there really isn't much point in trying to change their minds now.
On one hand, I do think that good hackers would generally find HK/China conflict interesting, as these are nations on the forefront of tech. On the other hand, it isn't exactly an "intellectual curiosity", but it definitely is political.
From the guidelines:
> What to Submit > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, 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.