I don't doubt that your strong feelings on this topic are sincere and justified. And yes, the word drama is a bit harsh—which I normally avoid. But you really did do some egregious things.
You posted 18 fulminating comments in a row, some of which would normally be bannable offenses (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16577259), sent us demanding and even threatening emails, and posted this off-topic meta-thread trying to gin up outrage about moderation, all because of a routine community action that happens every day on HN. That's what I meant by drama. I'm not going to ban you for posting things like "feck off ya mook" today. Everybody goes on tilt sometimes. But getting banned is the expected outcome for behavior like that, so please don't do it again.
You felt this story should be on HN. Other users felt it shouldn't be. That's normal. The flags won over the upvotes, indicating that the bulk of the community doesn't agree with you. I don't see why your preference should matter more than theirs, especially since the mandate of the site (intellectual curiosity yes, political flamewars no) at first blush points rather in their favor than yours.
We're always fine to hear counterarguments, but when the 'counterargument' consists of calling names like despicable, etc., merely because HN is behaving the way it always has, you actually create a persuasive reason not to give you what you want: you're showing what kind of discussion would result from doing so.
If you want to influence what discussion takes place on HN, you need to do two things. First, you need to really grok the mandate of the site and make your case based on that. Otherwise your argument will amount to demanding that HN be a different kind of site than it is, which doesn't hold water. And you also need to really grok the values of the site (civility and substance yes, snark and attack no) and demonstrate how the discussion you want can adhere to them by adhering to them yourself. Otherwise you'll have influence all right, but in the reverse direction.
I understand how strong these feelings can be and why. Torture is wrong. If we were to let that determine HN moderation, though, HN would soon become only about that and things like that, which would kill HN. We work to make sure that doesn't happen, but not because we don't care about more important matters.
Of course it's routine, and you guys mostly showed your unfamiliarity with the site by acting like you uncovered some shocking new scandal in Hacker News users flagging the political news of the day off the front page.
You'd do better to familiarize yourselves with what HN is and how it works before jumping to confrontational conclusions, stimulating though that is. It's not as if any of this is secret.
You felt this story should be on HN. Other users felt it shouldn't be. That's normal. The flags won over the upvotes, indicating that the bulk of the community doesn't agree with you. I don't see why your preference should matter more than theirs, especially since the mandate of the site (intellectual curiosity yes, political flamewars no) at first blush points rather in their favor than yours.
We're always fine to hear counterarguments, but when the 'counterargument' consists of calling names like despicable, etc., merely because HN is behaving the way it always has, you actually create a persuasive reason not to give you what you want: you're showing what kind of discussion would result from doing so.
If you want to influence what discussion takes place on HN, you need to do two things. First, you need to really grok the mandate of the site and make your case based on that. Otherwise your argument will amount to demanding that HN be a different kind of site than it is, which doesn't hold water. And you also need to really grok the values of the site (civility and substance yes, snark and attack no) and demonstrate how the discussion you want can adhere to them by adhering to them yourself. Otherwise you'll have influence all right, but in the reverse direction.
I understand how strong these feelings can be and why. Torture is wrong. If we were to let that determine HN moderation, though, HN would soon become only about that and things like that, which would kill HN. We work to make sure that doesn't happen, but not because we don't care about more important matters.