Read it as a non insane person, found it a little rough around the edges but still a perfectly valid and relevant collection of statements. It's a sad world, one where anything that steps out a little bit of the approved "think here" zone is automatically flag killed.

I've read a lot of extreme things from both the left and right, and seen a lot of "insane screeds", but this wasn't one of them: https://improprietaryinfluence.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/a-st...

"After all, the people we are talking about are communists... Similarly, today, with the exception of a few points of economics, the ideas that almost everyone in communion with Harvard University believes are communist ideas, and would have been labelled as such even fifty years ago."

This is a core tenet of Moldbuggian neoreaction, that American and European politics are run by a "Cathedral" that adheres to communist beliefs. Claiming that mainstream political positions are communism is absolutely insane.

His view is almost coherent and makes me reflect on how I unconsciously polish the edges of my own ideas to make them fit. I can see him doing the kind of thing you or I or anyone sane might do to smooth out the rough spots in our belief systems, and seeing him do those apparently innocuous things with ideas that are obviously crazy encourages me to ask if I'm believing anything crazy myself. It has happened before.

I agree that submission was more than a little out there, but it's strange how little impact this event has had on HN, given the subject matter. Maybe this submission will break through.

The previous submission was #1 on the front page for a few minutes before it was flag killed.

It wasn't overtly racist or filled with profanity; perhaps some people just wanted to silence it.

To indulge in a bit of tinfoil-hatting re "some people just wanted to silence it": Tlon, Corp., the Red Hat to Urbit's Fedora, rejected Y-Combinator funding last year.

If you're implying that we'd censor an HN post because of some arcane YC-related detail, that's false. None of the people who work on HN have any knowledge of what you're referring to. We haven't the cycles to keep track of such things even if we wanted to—our hands are rather full—and they'd play no role in HN moderation if we did.

The post in question was downweighted by user flags. The only thing we did was unkill it so an ongoing discussion (such as it was) could continue, which is standard practice.

Thanks for unkilling it. The most fascinating part of this issue to me remains how "uninterested" HN is in discussing it (insofar as the mechanics of HN allow us to collectively express interest).

I'm not sure what you mean by "it", but this thread has 158 comments. That's not uninterested.

Fair point. I meant that if the HN front page were your only source of information, you'd have to be pretty lucky to have stumbled across any of these threads.

I don't have any objections to the way HN works, just surprised so many users see this topic as flag-worthy relative to those seeing it as an interesting discussion.

EDIT: Nevermind. I see this is back on the front page.

The communists locked their dissenters up in psychiatric hospitals. It would be better for us if we didn't simply labeled people for their ideas.

Yeah I posted this because I felt HN people are smart enough to question and discuss this decision without being told to do so by some goofy conservative blog. (N.B.: I didn't and would never flag that other submission, because goofy conservatives don't bother me and the actual topic was interesting, but I understand that tastes differ so I'm not surprised that others flagged it.)

The earlier post was flagkilled by users. We unkilled it because there was an ongoing discussion, but did not turn off the flags. That's what we do in nearly all such cases.

The current post was penalized by the flamewar detector, but we've canceled the penalty because the community clearly wants to talk about this, and what you posted is as close to a canonical source as we're likely to get.

Is it acceptable to flag such things? I only flag such articles because the discussion quality tends to be really low. There's little insight in the comments. While they may be important topics, and I'm sure some folks have interesting ideas, the results don't seem very useful.

Yes, that's an acceptable reason to flag such things, and many HN users do.