To me it feels like a setup to look good in front of their audience without any proper desire to engage in true diplomacy.
How many business leaders, like you, let slide so much shit and instead focused on what was important for their business?
Even if Trump and Vance were disrespected, suck it up like the rest of us and do the thing that benefits the entire country. They met to make a deal to benefit the country; Trump failed to make the deal.
My prediction is ukraines got three options;
-Show europe that the US is an unreliable trading partner, and get them to commit atleast $500B, with SF troops coming to ukraine to train their troops. - Make a deal with trump. - lose their country.
The people in Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk would also reject any deal that doesn't involve Ukraine surrendering some of its land, either to Russia or to some sort of Republic of Texas limbo-state. So, even if Russia were taken over by a CIA asset, fighting there would continue unless extremely repressive measures were taken.
So that sort of deal is the only way to end the fighting with anything resembling humanity, even though Trump supports it. Stopped clocks, etc.
In an ideal world we could have a threat or two like this that would serve as outlets, but what I've actually seen is that having these discussions leads to them bleeding out into other threads that should have been unrelated. HN is going to need to more aggressively enforce its rules about political news if it's going to stay a haven for curiosity and not descend into just another place for angry politics.
Hopefully, however, these are not historic moments...
Desperate times...
Since the inauguration the HN crowd has not done a good job talking about politics. Where we used to be able to have some of the best discussions and comments on political issues I've seen on the internet, the last month or two has consisted primarily of hot takes and aggression, and I can get my dose of that anywhere else, I don't need it here.
What happens instead is, people start getting heated at each other and vitriol across the site increases. Folks who don't find that grace anymore exit the site and folks who are heated stay. This attracts other people who want to be heated. This creates a downward spiral across the community. This isn't HN specific, it's the same thing that happened to pretty much every other public internet community once they started featuring lots of discussion on polarizing politics.
The entire reason HN used to be high quality open internet forum is because politics wasn't a huge part of its contents. But the site has been under quality pressure for some time now and ever since the start of Trump 2024 it's started going downhill faster than it was before. That's fine of course, if folks just want to battle out politics and shout at each other or cry out in anger they can go ahead. But it won't be the "intelligent crowd here" doing it. Those folks will go elsewhere.
As an example, this thread is ridiculously large (2818 comments as of this writing.) There is no way for a reader to get much out of this without copious amounts of minimizing threads, scrolling randomly, or page-searching for terms. The only sense I can make of it is throwing the thread into Gemini and asking it to summarize it for me. The summary tells me nothing that my own thoughts and some social media comments I've read don't already tell me. So what has the "intelligent crowd here" really given us? I'm waiting for op-eds from the MSM and blog authors I follow to give me literally anything more rigorous than the slop in this thread.
Or you could, you know, jump from parent to parent and actually read the threads that interest you. I wholly disagree with your broad assessment. I have seen plenty of substantive, interesting comments in threads like this. Of course there will be duds, but that's equally true in threads about the latest front end web framework.
Intelligence and outrage are not mutually exclusive. Again, the world is not an apolitical place. If you do not represent and speak up for your own values, someone else will decide your fate for you. This forum, like all others is a chance to signal boost and stand for the values you care about.
The moderators have also done a good job of keeping the volume of these threads reasonable. Sure, on the new page they are rampant, for good reason, but only one or two max make it to the top thirty on a given day.
There is only one right perspective, and really no interesting questions to be asked. Please stop pretending otherwise.
It's the same thing here — he literally said as much today[1].
As a worldview, that is incomprehensible to me (and I suspect most people), but it really does help understand the choices Donald Trump makes. The spectacle — the attention paid — is what matters to him. How it looks on TV is what matters. How it actually is, is secondary at best, but often irrelevant.
He does a lot of things that "don't make sense" until you think of it that way. That the executive of a country as powerful as the USA perceives the world this way, and makes instinctual decisions on this basis without any credible effort to reason through the possible consequences, is of course very alarming.
As a US citizen, I'll admit that the "gravitas" of the USA as the "leader of the free world" was always carefully stage-managed. Still, it's depressing to watch momentous and crucial international wartime negotiations degraded to this reality-TV/pro-wrestling level, and so swiftly, for the whole world to watch.
[1]: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5169464-trump-ze...
If that's what it was, I don't think it worked. I think rather that Trump and Vance manufactured a conflict to use as pretense to do what they wanted to do in the first place, which was to cut off Ukraine from U.S. aid. Whether it flies with the American public generally is largely irrelevant to Trump at this point, as he's not constitutionally eligible to run for another term. (He might simply refuse to leave in 2028, but he doesn't need an election to do that.)