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Comment by tuckwat | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Seems like a pretty important story, man jailed for a meme post. Seems less like politics, and more like a story about government overreach/abuse.

It's mysterious that few if any defend the current administration's politics but almost immediately there was an uptick in people who are simply offended by political posts in principle. I wonder if people are just too weak to man up and admit they're okay with this, so they feign disinterest in hearing criticism about politics in general.

I can't speak for the person(s) you're referring to but at lest on HN it's generally always been anti-political.

The guidelines state:

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

Nearly everything we discuss here is political. Some people get triggered when the current administration gets criticized and pretend that's the line where politics starts, but it isn't. Accepting what the government does without question is the height of incuriosity. If the site owners had any interest in enforcing the guidelines, this place wouldn't be a cesspool of LLM shovelware self-promotion.

deep breaths, everything is going to be okay.

why, confronted with reality?

uh, bc /r/politics is all about politics and this post is all about politics.

Edit - I'm fine with the article, it's abhorrent and relevant. My tongue in cheek comment was about the comments. These comments give me the same feeling of Reddit - angry people arguing over whether someones death was justified or not.

Man getting jailed and having bail set at $2 million for a Facebook post isn’t “politics”.

Yes it is, by definition.

Then what was it? Standard procedure?

It’s a serious eighth amendment violation.

Yes, Dang has been manually unflagging stories recently so HN has become a very different place in the last half year or so.

HN has always had a trend of political posts. The James Damore story here got massive over claims of his freedom of speech being violated. The 'Twitter Files' which was a whole lot of nothing also blew up.

Dang can't really win here as someone else mentioned because we're in unprecedented times. Tech CEOs are going full mask off, like how the Salesforce CEO is asking for the government to send in troops to SF [1] or YC openly courting people deeply tied to the admin. So now you have people noting the hypocrisy of some users being tired of politics conveniently as it ramps up more and more into our personal lives and as tech becomes the government.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/10/salesforce-ceo-says-nation...

Downtown SF has been bad since Covid, as anyone that’s been there before and after can attest. Salesforce has a building in downtown SF. Wanting to have it be something close to pre 2020 levels of crime is very much precedented.

You could spend approximately two minutes looking up how that's going in Chicago and see how well it works.

As I already mentioned you could just ask people that live in SF:

https://x.com/andercot/status/1977098477399327009?s=46

These are unprecedented times and we cannot afford willful ignorance.

to be fair Dang can't win here. should HN devolve into a never ending shouting match between people who either aren't listening or aren't saying anything meaningful?

if HN shuts down a story they are accused of stifling discourse and picking sides (apparently _both_ sides to hear it)

and the truth is this is a hugely important series of events for everyone, tech included, regardless of 'side'.

I think the strategy of letting one of these simmer on the back burner every day is the best HN is going to be able to do.

but don't dig into the staff, I'm sure they're not enjoying any of this.

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