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Can't we just say that political {cultural, esthetic, gastronomic, religious, ...} ideological flamewars are off-topic simply because they are not about hacking?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Generic discussion of all kinds tends to be against the mandate of the site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), but political and ideological ones stand out because of how rapidly they degenerate and how much damage they do.
Edit: I've added nasty to tedious and predictable above. Maybe that makes the point clearer.
2. The HK protest movement is not about “communism”. The left in Hong Kong, apart from a very small section represented by newspapers such as Ta Kung Pao, is against the CCP and government. That is because the people you refer to as communist here don’t care very much for class struggle or Marxism. They care about power, and so they have sided with the oligarchs instead of the professional and working classes. That’s why they kept laissez-faire capitalism but not the limited progress towards democracy under the British that took place in the 1990s. For this reason there are large numbers of tycoons in the HK political establishment.
3. It is unhelpful to try to shoehorn one’s bugbears into everything without reference to the specificities of the particular situation into which one is trying to shoehorn something.
DDR, People's Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia...
Basically the only country in Europe that didn't exit Communism peacefully was Yugoslavia, and the reason for the violence wasn't Communism, it was resurgent nationalism/religion.
Here is how the first attempt went down in Czechoslovakia, some twenty-one years prior to the Velvet Revolution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring
The difference was that the Soviet machine was in full swing then. They rolled in the tanks, and that was that.
Poland, 1981-83:
The formal end of the DDR preceded the end of the USSR.
"East Germany made about 200,000 people into political prisoners." [1]
1. https://www.dw.com/en/gdrs-victims-continue-fight-for-justic...
Edit: hilarious, I'm getting downvoted for pointing out that the toppling of communism in Romania was very violent. Never expected HN to be a red block stronghold. Kind of hilarious.
HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Gun confiscation is the canary in the communist coal mine.