It is weird. Dan would probably say it's because political or geopolitical topics "have a tendency" to too easily devolve into ridiculousness or nastiness and lead to low quality threads, and because that's not what HN is for, they're mostly avoided.
The flip side I find is sad. A community of bright people who are not (at least in this forum) making their voices heard and crucially debating ideas which are central to society - especially at this time of rapid change.
Even worse, because the kind of long forming and focus that you can get here is denied such topics here, basically the only place to discuss it is X.
But at the same time, it's okay. If there was a solution to this, I'm sure Dan and the community would have already discovered it. I know it seems like censorship (by the community as a whole, somehow ~~ and may it is), but it's probably just for the reasons Dan would say.
Still, I can't help but feel society is a little worse off for the lack of ability to really dig into these topics on this forum, and specifically to have them aired (and even foisted upon) the same people working in technical and engineering fields who are shaping society. It both makes these people more vulnerable to unconsidered ideas in the geo/political space, and makes the work product which shapes society less likely to be well-conceived from the basis of its geo/political and social implications.
And also it's a bit weird how easily such topics do slide into low quality here. I guess it's self-reinforcing in that if you don't practise it, you don't get better. My feeling is YC is distinctly uncomfortable with geo/politics overtly perhaps because of the uncomfortable background of the very overt consequences of startups, but also probably primarily because it would seem such topics would just "get in the way" of the business of doing business in startups.
