There's also politically correct censorship going on, amazingly. This morning I submitted this: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/medias-bias-toward-englis... . It was dead on arrival, marked [dead] immediately, presumably because that blogger is "divisive" and "racially insensitive". Please read that and judge for yourself if it is interesting.
I would think that about 90% of Sailer's articles are too trollish for HN. (Consider the title of his book about Obama: "America's Half-Blood Prince".)
This article, however, made a very salient point, which I have heard from other people as well, particularly in regards to the conflict in South Ossetia. (Basically, he says that the American media is too sympathetic to English speakers around the world.)
"Or, possibly, the reason that teams with a higher number of white reserves have been winning more games is because whites are better team players about sitting on the bench without complaining about not starting. Perhaps white back-ups are less likely than black back-ups to poison the atmosphere and ruin the team spirit."
How could you possibly argue a point like that? It's pure trolling.
Anyways, I don't know if he's trolling a whole 90% of the time, but certainly < 10% of his articles are appropriate HN material.
i'd say it's a lot more likely it was killed because of the political slant. very few political articles are allowed to live around here, because they lead to divisive and unproductive arguments.
Stories about politics have a very high threshold to clear to be on HN, because there are many other places to discuss politics online, and few others to discuss the core HN topics.
I suppose reasonable minds can differ, but it doesn't delight my mind. I should be deeply interested in such an article, as an American who reads a foreign language (Chinese) and has lived abroad, but maybe precisely because I have that background I've seen better.
I gave that answer up-thread. I think people interpreted it as a political post. (Personally, I had nothing to do with flagging that thread. I didn't even notice it until it was dead and the metadiscussion began.)
We told you it's not good for HN by flagging it. We're disagreeing with you, because we believe it doesn't belong here. Now you come here and presume we disagree with the contents of the article and suggest we are morally inferior, because we have unethical reasons for flagging the article. You're not just wrong once, but twice.
No, the article was auto-killed. The blogger is probably blacklisted for being racially insensitive or something. Yet here is an example of one of his posts that did well on HN and generated much interesting commentary: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280544
I just tried submitting another article from his blog and again it was [dead] by the time I was redirected to the 'new' page, i.e. a few milliseconds. Here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=686436
