I Cannot Remain Silent

We have not been a democracy or a representative republic for a long time, at a bare minimum we would need a new amendment to overturn citizens united and move to publicly financed elections to get back to that. You can claim you're represented in this current system, I understand that need, but it's not really accurate.

Assuming good faith, at the minimum this appears to be an inconsistent application of flagging articles as compared to many other recent comparable items that gained traction.

I agree. I get the wish to keep HN from being an (overly) political place, and I might agree with flagging this if it was a post on some random person's blog (even if that person is well known in tech). But this is not that. This a statement from a long serving and respected former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, someone who is eminently qualified to comment. Furthermore, it is a post that speaks not to any of the details, but to the larger picture of what is going on in the United States right now.

If there was a single post about the current situation that I would nominate to be allowed here, this is undoubtedly it.

I have no idea, but it's not just the flagging, I even bring it up and the negs pour in. Weird emails recently, too. I've no idea why it's gotten so bad lately, I guess when something is so divisive it's just bound to happen.

I get the comments can be cesspools and maybe that's why the fast flags, but censoring opposing views doesn't erase them, it hides them. I dont come for articles, most are reposted from other aggregators, I come for the comments, the discussions and the views.

As others have noted, it may be that the discussion here was spiraling into a negative cesspool of bad comments too quickly, and maybe that's why it got flagged?

I reposted a similar article as an experiment, although it's not nearly as good since it isn't the original source. It didn't get flagged but probably because it didn't gain traction quickly enough to garner comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17257112

What makes my fellow citizens my enemy in a riot?

>It sickened me yesterday to see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president's visit outside St. John's Church. I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump's leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent.

Who in Lafayette Square was a rioter?

The disabled veterans, the people standing around doing nothing, or the elderly female Episcopalian ministers?

This was not a riot but a peaceful protest that was covered by multiple camera angles (including the POV or a camera that got punched by a cop/fed/whatever while they brutalized journalists). Civilian riots in the next town over do not justify police riots to enable a tyrant to walk across the street to take pictures of an upside-down bible in front of a church while that same church's pastors were tear-gassed.

Not quite. The techniques the military uses to attack enemies are not the same as the techniques of law enforcement, nor should they be. This is why militarization of the police is generally frowned upon, and the use of military forces to quell civil unrest is also not a good idea.