This comment (verbatim, "Oh engineers. Shirking morality again.") is an extremely elegant statement of why political threads, even when they "gratify the intellectual curiosity of hackers", are terrible for HN: they generate comment threads that consist of or are repeatedly sparked by comments like this.
I have a related but different complaint about them: political threads are bad because they bring out a chorus of rose-tinted nostalgia about how HN is going down the drain, is "becoming Reddit", etc., etc. I only hope that y'all copy/paste them instead of wasting effort on writing a new comment to that effect each time. ;-)
This is Hacker News. We don't copy and paste text. That would be a waste of time and energy. We write Greasemonkey bots that talk to each other.
-- SnarkTron TM 2012 Edition --
Also, we have to read about Tom telling us that he flagged something.