Also, many of us have no problems with postmodernity and consider ourselves part of the political left. Which is fine, programming and god forbid "startup culture" should not be monolithic.
inspire lots of repeated, rehashed discussion.
Hey you probably don't know this, but some guys working in sausagefest industry segments, like IT, exhibit uncivilized behavior around women, and I theorize acting like apes doesn't exactly encourage ladies to help us fix the sausagefest problem, bet you never heard about that story before! However, story 234243 on that topic adds nothing so it gets flagged. Aside from adding nothing new, its often of the anecdote - generalization anti-pattern which also adds little to the conversation. "Once, postgresql didn't work, therefore it always universally sucks for everyone and all applications". Eh, flush it.
I feel the NSA stories are the same. We get it; they're intercepting as much internet traffic as they can get and trying to break SSL (which they haven't succeeded at it without the help of 3rd parties providing signing keys). It's always the same comments (my personal favourite are the Americans who are mostly outraged at the fact they're being targetted, like the rest of the world's privacy is somehow lesser) and adds nothing to the conversation.
Despite a fear of dredging up a flamewar, what you're describing is a turf war where according to various executive orders the FBI is supposed to be spying on us, and the NSA is supposed to be spying on them. Its a (astroturf? planted?) distractor from the core issue of a whole lotta spying going on. And that's the long format explanation of why it adds nothing to the conversation.
Besides, most Americans I know aren't upset that it's happening to them to the exclusion of all others. That it is happening at all is the most common and most reasonable complaint. That it's not explicitly couched in concern for non-US-citizens does mean it implicitly discludes them.
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pg has a very known bias against "political discussions".
I would argue that all discussions are political, and anyone that can say with a straight face that they "don't like politics" doesn't realize how political that statement is.