You cite those comments as if there's something ban-worthy about having a relevant and politely expressed opinion outside the very narrow US Overton window.

I can source any part of those statements that you like. There's whole books about this stuff; and I'd be happy to give you recommendations for any aspect of the cited comments which you doubt.

I'm not rude in any of the cited comments, at all. There's no flaming; there's no condescension. Just patient and polite explanation of valid and important perspectives other than the two dominant US ones.

It's disturbing that you could try and call these statements evidence of "political battling". Have HN's acceptable debate parameters gotten this narrow? (Not a rhetorical question.)

> The louder and more grandiose that kind of rhetoric gets, the more tedious it is.

I read it as factual criticism, verifiable and relevant, and a necessary counterbalance. While it comes across to you as "tedious" and "grandiose", to me what they wrote reads as a necessary breath of fresh air against an obvious attempt at cynical green-washing by a bloody arm of one of the worst polluters on the planet. And I can back that up all day.

It's your house dang, and if you want to ban people for calling out the CIA as 'destructive' and 'harmful to nature' while they pat themselves on the back for their self-professed nature inspiration, then you have the ability to do so. But I don't think it's fair to threaten to do so in the name of promoting intellectually curious conversation, because it's quite the opposite.

I think the main thing is the denunciatory rhetoric. I don't care if you're right or wrong (someone is going to misinterpret that, but it means the same thing as I don't care if I agree with you or disagree—as I've argued elsewhere in this thread, it's not the moderator's job to moderate on that basis). I do care when you hammer hardened talking points indignantly, because those qualities destroy the quality that we want here, quite apart from the content. It's a medium-is-the-message thing, if you like.

Actually, it's even less than that—I mostly just care that you don't primarily do that on the site. A certain amount is tolerable, more than that is not ok, and that word 'primarily' is how we test for that (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). It's not perfect but has proven to work well enough.