Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not sure what opinion you thought I was trying to express. Evidently some sort of anti-censorship argument? To the contrary, my comment was explaining that the issue of US immigration has become highly polarized, and discussing highly polarized issues on HN is generally destructive, so probably we shouldn't attempt to discuss the issue here. This is closer to being a pro-censorship argument than an anti-censorsh…
You're advocating for avoiding polarised discussions because they degenerate quickly. I'm only pointing out that that's not the only option: you could allow these discussions while ruthlessly silencing bad faith actors (for whatever definition of "bad faith" you want to adopt). Those are both "pro-censorship" stances (although I prefer the word "moderation" to "censorship"), but they're going about it in different wa…
It sounds like you think the problem is the wrong sort of people. But almost everybody retreats into ego defense and partisan struggle under sufficiently threatening circumstances, even though some people are habitually more prone to that kind of thing than others. It's more about minimizing the frequency of the wrong sort of circumstances.
Additionally, though I think everyone is happy that I'm not the one running the site, I have observed elsewhere that your favored "ruthless silencing" approach has some side effects you may not be anticipating.