There's mass downvoting and flagging in these sorts of threads, regardless of how well put or politely phrased a point is. HN isn't set up to handle political d

There's mass downvoting and flagging in these sorts of threads, regardless of how well put or politely phrased a point is. HN isn't set up to handle political discussion well at all, so I wouldn't read anything into it. I think it's a great question you raised there. I suspect it's for several reasons. Firstly, it's probably more complicated than censorship being effective or ineffective. My guess it, how effective it is depends a lot on how rigorously it's implemented. If people have other ways to communicate about a topic, like word of mouth in a big community, then censorship just attracts attention and causes a Streisand effect. But if a system is totalitarian enough to shut down nearly all discussion of a topic, everywhere and in every sphere of public life, then it's probably a lot more effective. Secondly, totalitarians act the way they do because of their beliefs, and one of those beliefs is that wisdom and virtue are highly concentrated in a few visionary people, whereas the "lumpenproletariat" are stupid, uneducated, practically cattle, and easily reprogrammed by speeches made by the few smart people. The idea that freedom of speech is good is predicated on the belief that wisdom and ideas are everywhere and can come from anyone, so, everyone must be allowed to speak and debate. If you don't believe that, if you believe wisdom and ideas only really originate in a tiny number of people just like yourself, then freedom of speech seems to have no value and censorship seems to be very effective at avoiding the people getting ideas (because they certainly can't generate ideas themselves). You see this basic dispute over how widespread ideas are crop up all the time.