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Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

> I was searching for an apolitical, more progressive, and intellectual space

This is a concept I struggle with. HN tries to be culture and politically agnostic, but culture and politics drive everything. I think it's intellectually lazy to suggest that this shouldn't be a place for smart people to discuss important issues because the reality is that those places are woefully uncommon.

Begging for forums and content to be apolitical is just willfully wearing blinders. It may be great for mental health, but it's probably not great for society. It's on the same philosophical slope of "I don't want to be political, I just want to make great bombs for whoever."

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I am probably jaded. The way I see it, activisms and politics are occupations of the wealthy. I want to be wrong, but when I observe the political landscape, I find this to be true. I have no interest in being an activist or a politician. I disapprove of many ideologies and policies, and I vote accordingly, but trying to make minds beyond my own has only reduced my quality of life.

> Begging for forums and content to be apolitical is just willfully wearing blinders. It may be great for mental health, but it's probably not great for society.

Politics is still largely a national affair. One will often observe online discussions of some topic which isn’t in itself nation-specific get derailed into tangents about US national politics - and for non-Americans, that can be an annoying and alienating distraction. So an online space with cultural norms (or moderation) against political tangents can be more globally inclusive as a result.

Even transnational politics tends to be somewhat region-specific: Brexit was a much bigger deal for people in France than for people in Japan, for cross-strait or inter-Korea relations it is the other way around

Of course, intellectually curious people will often be interested in reading intelligent takes on the politics of the other side of the planet, even if it has minimal relevance to their own life. But a lot of online political discussion isn’t like that, it is just tribal point scoring and repetitive predictable talking points that have been said a thousand times before

Code is law, and it's becoming more & more like this every day, so it's kind of weird that people insist it's feasible to be able to discuss technology without any of the its consequence & implications.

Plus, when i try to think of something apolitical, HN is clearly not the first thing that pops to mind. Yeah, it 'tries', indeed

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