Would you please stop using HN for political and ideological battle? Regardless of what your politics are, fiery rhetoric is not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that do it. We've warned you several times already, so you need to fix this if you want to keep posting here.
When it comes to divisive topics, the guidelines call for comments to become more thoughtful, not denunciatory. Denunciation is a different type of game than the one we're playing here. Your non-denunciatory comments look fine, so this shouldn't be hard.
You may feel it necessary to your own safety to censor those of us who are paying attention to these things - but as history has proven time and again, you're shooting yourselves in your own feet by banning speech you deem unsuitable for your purposes.
Good, interested hackers can without doubt find other places to discuss the very relevant machinations of the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex and its negative influence in contemporary hacker culture - but if HN is no longer a safe, relevant place to be discussing the nature of whistleblowing, technology, or indeed world politics in the technical age, then so be it: why allow anything to be posted about Assange, at all, then?
I posted at length about this the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20013092. If, after reading that, you feel like there's a relevant point about how we moderate political threads that it doesn't address, I'd be happy to hear what that is.
There seems to be a misunderstanding in this bit:
> you're shooting yourselves in your own feet by banning speech you deem unsuitable for your purposes
Our purpose is to optimize HN for intellectual curiosity. You're right in that sense, but only that sense. HN moderation has no purpose related to Assange or any other hot topic, nor are we moderating based on what we agree or disagree with. I moderate comments I agree with every single day. Perhaps that sounds weird? After a while, one gets used to it.
If you take a step back and look at HN threads on topics with political overlap, you'll find that many HN users have figured out how to express their views thoughtfully, without resorting to fiery rhetoric or denunciation. You'll also find that many of them are expressing views similar to yours. Please be more like them. It's really just for good conversation. No one wants to be in the room that someone is blasting with a megaphone, regardless of the megaphone's views.
When it comes to divisive topics, the guidelines call for comments to become more thoughtful, not denunciatory. Denunciation is a different type of game than the one we're playing here. Your non-denunciatory comments look fine, so this shouldn't be hard.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html