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Comment by fnovd | Hacker News Reader

>There are a ton of other sites where you can follow and debate politics all you want.

But where do you draw the line of what is 'politics' and what is 'cool nerdy tech stuff'?

Is a breakdown of 538's method of poll aggregation too politically charged, even if there's a perfectly good overlap of math and statistics?

If Trump makes an out-of-left-field statement about repatriating corporate money, are we prohibited from talking about how it will affect Apple?

A blanket ban of 'political threads and topics' seem harsh, even if just for a week. I personally haven't found the political content on this site to be out of bounds, considering the monumental political upheavals we've been witnessing over the past year.

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I think dang and the other moderators are capable of making pretty good judgement calls.

It's often pretty obvious from the ensuing conversation what kind of post it is: are people discussing the politics, or the technical thing that's kind of related?

It's a lot like that classical definition of pornography. I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. If a topic gets a lot of downvotes this week, it means it crossed the line for a lot of people. Simple :)

> I can't define it, but I know it when I see it.

See, that right there is a political statement in and of itself.

It's a definition that's ripe to be abused. It means topics can be censored and discussion silenced, not for breaking any specific rule, but by possessing too much of some subjective quality.

You'll just have to trust the moderators then. They're good people. Maybe they'll screw up a bit, but it's not the end of the world. Too much politics, OTOH, could easily lead to this site going down the drain.

yeah, and in that case about pornography, censorship was shot down.

Politics is about who to blame and hacking is about solving problems. (Blaming is the opposite of solving problems.)

Interesting world view, and not one that I share.

Politics is about how resources are allocated in society and can often be a very effective solution to problems.

Politics is even more about how society wants resources to be allocated than it is about how they are allocated. That makes it an important and all-pervasive topic

That reductionist view of politics is part of the problem. Politics is the process of making decisions applying to all members of each group. It's essential and a part of what makes us human.

In modern vernacular it seems that that sense might be better expressed as "policy", rather than "politics".

Politics is the process to decide upon the policy.

Consider that the machinery to make group decisions and allocate resources already exists (laws, institutions, government, etc). It is imperfect and can be improved. But what is relevant here is that groups of people wish to alter the machinery in certain fixed (uncreative) ways. The unconscious motive is that of preserving their own identities.

An extreme case would be a Dr Evil figure who will not examine his own heart and needs the world to burn just so he can pretend to himself that he's a good person. So he makes the world burn. At every stage convinced of his own righteousness.

This explains why 'war is the continuation of politics by other means'. What passes for peace is trench warfare where the only progress is sideways. Improving the machinery may be desirable but in practice politics is dominated by preventing inevitable perturbations from escalating into open hatred and violence.

(More parochially one can tell when politics is influencing the discussion because there is always blaming going on.)

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