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Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the idea of having a space where we aren't constantly culture warring, but you have to bear in mind that if you ban political speech then you still inherently permit status quo political speech. And the status quo here is California liberalism.

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Nobody has banned politics on HN. There are a zillion explanations of this at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

Tedious, eternal flamewar is another matter. The point of HN is to have a place on the internet that isn't dominated by that.

As for "the status quo here is California liberalism", everyone thinks HN is dominated by the other side. The GP made the opposite claim (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26732300). In both cases it is imaginary.

I know you don't ban politics, that's why I chose the specific phrase "culture warring" - I think its a good policy. I think my phrasing after that point was just bad though as I didn't mean to b expand that scope to political speech in general.

Could well be confirmation bias on my part that this place seems to skew Californian in politics.

Posts that masquerade as “legitimate dissenting opinions just not getting a fair shake from the left by golly” but which really seek to undermine structures by which systemic racism can possibly be called out and held accountable for harm (like the framework of microaggressions) deserve to be flagged and shut down. They don’t serve any free speech or intellectual honesty purpose to preserve discourse and the psychological safety to disagree, and they are roundly disingenuous tools for filibustering actual legit discourse and progress. It’s just taking crass tools of hate groups and dressing them up with five dollar words and armchair discussion of academic freedom of expression, when really it’s just hostile noise jamming against progress.

I’m inclined to agree with you, but my sense of the status quo here is more libertarian than anything else. Might be confirmation bias.

I think some of the older membership is libertarian. I'm from the UK and my impression of California politics is that there's a strange mix of libertarianism, liberalism and leftism but that all three have strong socially liberal characteristics.

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