I think it's also horrible that the article went into it at all. We're just fighting here as a result of it.

If they had left it at the person's name and good deeds, then we'd probably all be here discussing/praising that such a wonderful individual exists. No matter their race, gender, religion or nationality.

There's no leader without a follower, let's no underestimate the importance of the first reply.

'dang summarized the results of the detox week and has made some recent comments. Here are some, with some identifiable snippets only so it's not a list of links. I encourage you to read the comments themselves. They don't all directly address this, but I think they all shed some light on the topic.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969

There's no satisfying anybody about this: not the readers who want more politics, not the readers who want less, and certainly not the partisans on an issue.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522433

There's a lot more politics on HN right now than there usually is, which is appropriate since it reflects what's going on right now.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969

When there's a deluge of political stories, as in the last couple days, users heavily flag most of them. But there have still been plenty of major threads spending plenty of time on the front page. That's the status quo for HN: most politics are off topic, but not all. It's a delicate balance and an important one. Letting politics overrun this site would kill it.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13463480

On downsides of the Political Detox Week experiment: there are two comments in the thread.

Great. So let's just stick our heads in the sand and pretend that politics isn't relevant.