> It is unfortunate factual statements are not allowed on here

People use the words 'facts' and 'factual' a bit magically in internet arguments. There are infinitely many facts [2]. They don't select themselves; people do that. When they do it as part of curious conversation, great; when they do it as part of flamewar, well, the 'flamewar' part is the high-order bit. We're trying to avoid that here.

In the GP case, a barrage of links about everything from Vietnam to Ukraine to Robert Kagan is not curious conversation—it's boilerplate, as I said, meaning it reads like pre-existing material designed to be copy-pasted into ideological arguments. Even if all that is "facts" and all 100% correct on all the underlying issues, doing that is still boring and not what HN is for. How would you enjoy a conversation where someone insisted on reading all that stuff out to you?

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...