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Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

It's almost as though we need a president interested in some kind of trade...conflict with China. If only we had one of those.

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Please don't post unsubstantive comments here or take HN threads further into political flamewar.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21204717.

It's an interesting commentary on the state of discourse that the mere suggestion that the sitting president may have done something good is considered political flamewar bait.

It's an uninteresting commentary on the state of the Hacker News guidelines. Please read and follow them when posting here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm legitimately unsure which of those you think my comment contravened. Unless, as I said, you are implying that the suggestion Trump did something good is intrinsically political flame bait.

It was snarky and flamebait and unsubstantive, and arguably off topic. That's a bunch of guidelines. The bar for a good comment here is much higher than a snarky drive-by partisan one-liner, and all users need to respect that, regardless of their politics.

> Unless, as I said, you are implying that

It would be the same if your comment had put Trump in a bad light or any other divisive figure in a good light or a bad light. I know it's hard, when you get a moderation reply, not to interpret it as the mods secretly being on the other side of the argument from you, but however natural it is, that reaction is incorrect.

Please don't turn this political discussion into a political discussion.

Edit: Please remember that only negative comments regarding President Trump are allowed in this political discussion about free speech.

Many topics discussed on HN inevitably have some political overlap. That doesn't make it ok to post flamebait, cheap one-liners, and so on. This standard is well established here, and if you read the HN guidelines you'll find much there that expresses it. For example: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." In other words, when the topic becomes political, that's when the guidelines matter even more, and commenters need to abide by them. Otherwise we end up with internet flamewar the same as most other places on the internet, and that's not interesting. All scorched earth is the same.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You might also find these links helpful for getting the spirit of this site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

Satire is sometimes the most effective means of pointing out an unfair bias (See: South Park). It seems clear to me that bringing to light a clear political bias is not only applicable to the topic but offering a thought provoking viewpoint on how free speech is not only being threatened by an external entity (China in this case), but domestically by our peers.

The question asked was about US leadership doing something about this problem. The comment was immediately discounted using dismissive language (by you) implying that there is no evidence, while providing none yourself.

Now you've chosen to tie it off with a condescending link to rules you've chosen to selectively enforce under the guise of being "constructive".

The current president has been doing things to resist the power the CCP has over our economy: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/trump-us-chi...

What I posted was bog-standard HN moderation, a routine thing where we try to limit the tendency of threads to go into outright flamewar and keep the discussion more substantive. That's the idea of this site and it's what the bulk of the community wants.

Would you mind familiarizing yourself a bit more with how HN works? The links I posted upthread are a good place to start.

If only we had a president that was interested in uniting the entire Western World to actually make something happen... Instead, we're fighting it by ourselves, and fighting all of our allies at the same time (for no reason). Our Western allies are too busy fighting a trade war with us to try to force China to start meaningfully liberalizing its economy.

A broken clock is right twice a day.

If only having a trade conflict with China were literally the only problem in the world we cared about.

Like a Trade Scuffle?

I hate Trump for a lot of reasons, but I support his way of dealing with China.

He's not even pretending to care for the oppressed people in China. They'll get thrown under the bus just like the Kurds are right now with Turkey.

The president asked for the assistance of Chinese government to help him get dirt on his political opponents in the U.S.

https://www.apnews.com/c4fc388b22f549e0a67925cab8cd7e93

I don't support his methods which seem ineffective and actively net deleterious.

From above:

A broken clock is right twice a day

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