I've asked you before to stop posting tedious harangues about HN. You've done it way too often, it's off topic, and has become annoying.
The site guidelines say most and probably for a reason. This article obviously clears that bar. The vast majority of political stories don't, so what you say downthread is far from true.
I think you've overreacted here. I don't think that brief 'jnordwick comment qualifies as a "harangue" and I think it raises a reasonable point: lots of things are "high quality" but not really germane to Hacker News.
You might hope that a story like this is one we can all find intellectually interesting and discuss without falling into a political vortex. But it's a political topic that reacts with almost every other political issue on HN, from US politics to Greece and the EU.
I think he's right and you're wrong, for whatever that's worth.
I'm not sure your point is borne out by the thread. Most comments are civil and substantive. It isn't the highest quality discussion but graded on a curve it's good.
My inclination was to penalize the article because of the triggery title. But I took a look and had to change my mind. The article is substantive and gratifies intellectual curiosity; that's the site mandate (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), so I'd say it's clearly germane.
The topic itself is troll city, of course, which is why I posted the sticky comment at the top. We have to judge this by the article, not overall topic. Even if nearly everything on a topic is crap or flamebait, occasionally something isn't, and it's important to how HN works to treat those exceptions differently—even though having blanket rules would be easier, and a lot of people mistakenly think we do have them.
Where most seems to mean all stories are allowed. This isn't a new or novel idea. The paper is even six months old.
Like i said, if this fits under that restriction then almost anything fits. You might just as well remove that line and start allowing all politics since that what it is in practice.
Any claim to be being a primarily technology-focused site is pretty much kaputt these days. Most stuff is intetesting, but it's reddit for the ycombinator set.
It sucks because I used to like to site. I much prefer reddits topic segmentation. Ideally it wouldn't be needed but in practice politics infects everything.
I worry you may be asking for a bit much in a thread discussing austerity and the rise of Nazism.