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Comment by kbar13 | Hacker News Reader

it turns out that enforcing "no politics" is often a political stance!

Of course, and we were well aware of that line of thinking. But the idea was to just try something as an experiment and see what would happen. It turns out that there is no space for experiment with this, not even for a week—there is only space for battle-to-the-death. That brought me a new level of understanding.

> there is only space for battle-to-the-death.

This is passive-aggressive and childish.

In another comment, you were lecturing me on community values. How do you think the above claim, applied to a wide swath of the site's users, fits with those so-called "community values"?

You're pretending to be above politics while engaging in it in a dirty, underhanded fashion.

Yes, in large part as it is a policy biased toward status quoism. Those with complaints against the status quo, reasonably or otherwise, are disadvantaged if discussion and debate are restricted.

I suspect this applies to societal taboos in general, though there may be an opposite effect -- forbidding certain types of discussion can rapidly destroy the status quo if the discussion that remains is biased in some way.

Any examples come to mind?

Problem is that attempts at change are important, so fights about what should change and in what direction get very very vicious. To use a non-political example: Some new starters want to switch to Rust, some lifers don't want to have to learn yet another toolset or be made redundant. The stakes are future career prospects and continued employment respectively. Imagine how much higher the stakes can be when you think your political opponents are plotting your genocide? (which is a real, if fringe, belief of some on both the American left and American right)

On the other hand, the status quo at least is known and not as bad as it could be (e.g. Bronze Age Collapse)...

Fads, or fad-generating phenomena, seem often to serve as highly-perceptible signifiers of deeper, hard-to-assess social and political patterns and groups, operating in a strongly information theoretic manner.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothin...

Everything these days seems to be politicised, but politics isn't so much the problem, it's the tribalism that it generates and why you were probably brought up to never talk about politics, sport or religion in a social setting.

Only to people that want to complain about their politics. The number of people who want to discuss political science is small.

I think you’re getting downvoted because there are plenty of us interested in political science here. Recently I’ve seen discussions of why we need civilian oversight of military, invoking Clausewitz, exploring why large transportation projects cost twice as much in the US as in peer nations, and how local zoning causes our infrastructure problems.

I think you're right. I didn't mean to downplay the interests of people here wanting to have civil discussions about politics. I've too seen very civilized discussions here involving politics recently. I've also noticed an uptik in political posts. Most of the ones that have 1000+ comments have the most number of downvoted comments I've seen here on HN. Most of those comments don't seem to have a genuine curiosity about political science.

I imagine the problem is no one could possibly agree on what politics is so you will have endless bikeshedding over if something classifies as politics.

Does a post on climate change count?

Does a post on city design and public transport count?

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