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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Ordinary political articles like this one are off-topic for HN. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Some political overlap can be ok, but for an article to be a good HN submission, the high-order bit needs to be intellectual curiosity.

In case anyone wants more explanation, I've written extensively about how we moderate political stories on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

Edit: Here are a couple examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 (April 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 (Nov 2019)

and some related points:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679 (July 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 (May 2018)

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OK, I will keep this in mind, however what's different about this particular political story is that it's also extremely historic, nothing like this has ever occurred in the history of the US and this is the first speaker to ever be removed in this way; at the very least this kind of instability can have impacts on things like financial markets. I would not share a simply political story like how Joe Biden is doing in the polls are something, that's clearly a stupid story.

I'd say it's "historic" but it's not important. It will roil markets less than a shutdown would, and that story would not be particularly HN-worthy either.

Sometimes I wish there was a way to designate some posts "off topic" but still be visible on the front page -- like a topical Jubilee Day. I'm genuinely interested in what some of the HN crowd think about (some of) the non-tech, non-intellectually-curious stuff that goes on in the world.

But I suspect that we'd all just turn out to be dopey ignoramuses, opining well beyond our knowledge, and the discussion would devolve into the same canned narrative crap that we see everywhere else.

HN probably has nothing to contribute to the discussion, and policing that line through downvotes and flagging is almost certainly the prophylaxis that keeps the infection at bay. Alas.

It is too early to say, if it is important or not.

TBF I also found this story to be intellectually interesting, like, why the Democrats quite amazingly voted in lock-step unison to vacate the seat, which is not at all how the Democratic party has behaved for the past 30 years (either in unison, or against the "status quo"). It flipped my own intellectual sticky bit at least.

What did McCarthy offer the Democrats for their support?

If I had to guess, it's a vote of no-confidence for McCarthy's willingness to bring forward a baseless impeachment inquiry, and to coddle his toddlers. But I repeat myself.

It's hard to write that sentence in a non-partisan way (and I didn't try). This goes nowhere good, conversationally. :)

I hear you, but I don't think it's possible for an HN thread about it not to just disintegrate into partisan bits, and nasty ones at that.

(btw, if you emailed recently, I'm sorry I haven't had a chance to answer yet - it's just the inbox doing its brutal thing. if that wasn't you, please ignore.)

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