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Previously (106 points, 4 hours ago, 77 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864192
Comments moved thither, thanks!
That one is flagged. Do you have the ability to merge threads?
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864192
Why is this post being flagged?
Because HN can't be seen to discuss the military take-over of the seat of government of one of the most powerful countries on earth. It would be unseemly. The coup will not only not be televised, it won't even be discussed.
It’s more likely that users are flagging these posts because of the Reddit-tier commentary
Most of the commentary on this forum approaches Reddit-tier. People will flag political content because it's political, and for no other reaon.
The discourse on HN has always been held to a much higher standard than Reddit, and the unfortunate truth is that if we want to maintain HN as a center of intelligent conversation, we have to often flag the topics that lead us away from it. I'm not saying every political thread should be flagged, but I think most of them should be.
The pretense is that the discourse on HN has always been held to a much higher standard than Reddit, primarily by comparing the worst of Reddit with the best of HN, which is specious. If you compare the average comment of HN to the average comment of any programming subreddit, the only real difference is that humor tends to be verboten on HN. But that comes at a cost of increased performative cynicism and rancor.
You've been here since 2012 and are an active contributor. You really believe that the quality of discourse is the same as Reddit on average? Maybe you don't spend enough time on Reddit. It is literally a cesspool of humanity. Hacker News has little in common with it.
Well put.
Because it’s off topic. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> What to Submit

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

The Hulk Hogan and Pope dying stories aren't flagged. Hell, the Hulk Hogan was unflagged.

The leader of the most powerful democracy on earth doing authoritarian actions and eroding norms is worth discussion.

> Hell, the Hulk Hogan was unflagged

That story spent all of 9 minutes on the front page. Turning off flags is separate to restoring to the front page, and we don't think it's a good look to have a [flagged] tag on any bereavement post, no matter who the deceased is.

It's worth discussing, but do it elsewhere. Use a different forum, one where it is on topic.