Unfortunately, you won't always find content you're looking for. It's just statistics. The article is political in nature and the comments are likely to be as well; if it's not what you're looking for, you may safely ignore it and rest assured that it's a statistical anomaly that won't undermine the entire community.

the article, or the opinion espoused by the commenter you replied to?

In other words, you come to HN for one aspect of the Political world , and not all of them?

Myself, I don't come to HN for ANYTHING in this thread. It's all interesting, in it's own right, but has little to do with 'hacking'.

But, then again, civil liberties are a set of issues that can broadly affect us all.. maybe that was the grand position of whoever thought this was HN worthy.

I don't know. Maybe it's beyond us all, and the OP has some insight as to how the whole GITMO situation can be solved with functional programming and 'high-availability clustering solutions', and he's just trying to nudge us into finding the solution.

One can be hopeful.

> But, then again, civil liberties are a set of issues that can broadly affect us all

If HN's front page were open to anything and everything, and links were voted for based on their importance in the real world, the actual Hacker News content would be completely buried. The real world is far more important than most of what's on Hacker News, so paradoxically, if we want to maintain the quality and focus of HN, real world articles like this need to be excluded, even if we all agree they are very important.

The entire process of "approving" articles is democratic. The community of users decides what is interesting enough to appear on the front page. If you personally disagree that a particular article should be on the front page, well ... your only recourse is to flag it. If a democratic site is not what you want, then you don't want HN.

Actually, there are moderators who can and do kill stories, more or less according to the guidelines ( http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ). If a completely democratic site is what you want, you want reddit.

Democratic Reddit, where votes can be bought for 20-for-$1 https://coinbase.com/checkouts/35297a275c385a75d231fd4a6edd5...

So this is more like real-world democracy than textbook democracy.

I meant political content. Thank you for your reply.

What people find puzzling is that you didn't criticize the submission of the (political) article to HN in a new comment, or even in a reply to the top comment, but rather a in reply to a very specific viewpoint.

I didn't downvote you because I didn't agree with you (even though I don't), but because your comment is underspecified, un-argumented, and thus without any value.

I read his comment as simple sarcasm.

You just have.