2008: >>348994 >>278434 >>243561
2010: >>1934367 >>1542380 >>1320152
2013: >>6157485
Sound familiar? Those are just the first few I found. In those arguments, pg was in favor of keeping politicized stories if they were intellectually interesting and not just about politics:
2008: >>243614
2011: >>2403775
We've kept the original rule that a political story on HN needs to have something intellectually interesting, but we've also tightened it. For example, when a thread turns into a political flamewar, we moderate it more than pg used to. There were many past submissions that neither users nor moderators would allow today, like these from ten years ago:
Just look at those threads! (Edit: also interesting how the item IDs more than doubled in the first half of 2008.)