I'd need links to specific posts to say anything about them, but you're right that other people also break the rules. That doesn't make it ok for you to break the rules! It's not ok for either you
or them to break the rules.
> the rules seem to be getting applied selectively
Every commenter with strong passions feels like the mods apply the rules selectively and must therefore be on the other side. The people you disagree with are just as sure that we're secretly on your side. I say that with confidence even though I don't remember anything about your views at this moment, nor which side any of you are on.
The reason is sample bias. Everyone notices other people breaking the rules, but which cases you notice depends on your pre-existing views. What we (I mean all of us, i.e. humans generally) notice is governed by what we dislike [1]. We assign the most meaning to the cases that feel most unfair or offensive to us. Since everyone selects these based on their own feelings, opposite feelings lead to different samples and opposite conclusions.
When you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we just didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted. Also, I'm the only moderator who responds publicly and I can only write so much—not just because I have other responsibilities to worry about, but also because if I make even a slight mistake, it can (and often has) made a situation worse. It's a little bit like writing software in, I don't know, Agda as opposed to JS or something. You can't do it as fast or as much.
Which posts I respond to vs. not is determined by two factors: (a) what has been brought to my attention by others; and (b) randomness. If you or anyone sees a post that ought to be moderated, you can bring it to our/my attention by either flagging it (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cflag for how), or in egregious cases, by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
Moderation can't be consistent in any way that would require reviewing all posts, but it can be relatively [2] consistent as long as we work with random-enough samples and handle them in a principled-enough way. That's what we aspire to. We're not perfect at it, but we do at least have years of practice.
This works well enough to signal to most of the community that (a) HN is moderated, and (b) that it's moderated reasonably fairly [3]. But it leaves many cases that don't get moderated all, which means there are plenty of data points which people can select to draw whatever conclusions they want to about HN moderation—and believe me, they do!
We've all had this experience in other contexts. Take cops and speeding tickets. There's always a "me? why me?" reaction when you get pulled over. Plenty of other cars were speeding faster! The cops must have ulterior motives for picking on me [4]. Even if my brain knows about random samples, the feelings still work this way. Another example is sports and referees. The passionate fans are the quickest to feel that the refs are making calls unfairly, and it always feels like the calls are unfair against your team.
One last point, in the unlikely event that you read this far... when I said "we don't care about your views" I did not mean to belittle your views or to imply that they're about something unimportant. On the contrary, the divisive topics are extremely important—far more important than most things that appear on HN. I just meant that we don't (or at least try our best not to) consider your views when making moderation calls. And of course by "you" I don't just mean you personally, I mean everybody.
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[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] I say 'relatively' because this is a complex problem with lots of failure modes, but they don't change the important point above.
[3] Wait, haven't I just contradicted myself, after talking about all the users who feel we're unfair? No, because the driving factor is the passions of the perceiver. The more passionately you (i.e. anyone) feels about a topic, the more this dynamic kicks in. Most of the community doesn't have strong passions on a given topic, so even when they see the same data points as you, they won't select them as evidence of unfairness. They'll also be more likely to notice cases of the mods scolding the other side as well, and to assign equal weight to those. In other words, the very things that indicate unfairness to you will feel like fairness to them. This is how the same moderation approach can both reassure the majority while at the same time convincing passionate partisans (on any side of any topic) that the system is biased against them. For a couple collections of vivid examples, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.
[4] And maybe they do? This argument doesn't prove there's no bias; it just shows that any system, even the most unbiased, will produce strong feelings of bias no matter what you do.