One thing I couldn't understand was that they could have just banned gambling sites. Gambling services are only a small part of bitcointalk. But it is not the main purpose of bitcointalk. Bitcointalk aims to educate people about bitcoin. Gambling can be seen as a side service. Banning the whole forum is pointless.
You can't expect the government would think like that, since they have full control, everything that they think wrong it's wrong. Just like they think mixer or tumbler is full of illegal money with a purpose to laundering money, while it's not. They didn't realize if fiat and centralized entity are can be used for money laundering since it's private and no one know except the internals.