I'd need links to be specific, but the general answer is that HN has had many threads on these topics. Some don't get flagged and some do. We sometimes turn off the flags when an article is particularly substantive. But there are also many articles on these topics that aren't so substantive, and those are especially prone to flamewars. The quality of the article has a lot to do with the quality of the resulting discussion, so we tend not to override user flags on the less substantive sort of submission.<p>From our point of view as moderators, these subjects are not necessarily off topic on HN, but it depends on the specific article. Is it conducive to intellectual curiosity, the main value of this site (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>)? Or is it more focused on stirring up anger and rallying support to a cause? What's its information-to-indignation ratio? There isn't necessarily anything wrong with indignation—on the contrary, it can be very important in the larger social context, more important than most things on HN—but because its effect is to promote flamewar rather than intellectually curious discussion, we are more likely to moderate it here. We have to, or the site would soon go up in flames (i.e. become dominated by political battle), which would destroy the things it exists for.<p>The community is often in disagreement about which topics belong on HN. People who feel strongly about topic X tend to think that HN hasn't enough X and even that X is being suppressed. But frontpage space is the scarcest resource on the site. There isn't enough to go around, so every X ends up getting shortchanged. Beyond that, when a topic is repeated often enough, it becomes predictable, and predictability is the enemy of curiosity. We try to moderate HN for variety because the community strongly prefers that. My sense is that most of the time when X gets marked as [flagged], the flags are a sort of coalition between users who don't want to see X because they disagree with it, and users who actually agree with X but are tired of its predictability. If it were only the first group, there usually wouldn't be enough flags to win the tug-of-war against upvotes.<p>If you think an article is particularly substantive and shouldn't be marked as flagged on HN, you (i.e. anyone) are welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look.