It was obviously off topic; the topic is the news described in the title.
Veering into most-controversial-generic-tangent-associated-with-controversial-thing is the worst direction politicized threads can take on HN, and they're borderline to begin with. Whimsical or unpredictable tangents are ok, but generic ideological tangents are always off-topic. They're black holes: they suck everything in, including all the oxygen of thoughtful discussion.
Because these things are so generic you can always make a case for their relevance to a specific story, but the proof is in the pudding: what happens when discussions veer off this way? The pudding sucks. This one in particular is embarrassingly terrible. This pudding needs to stop forthwith.
You guys are going to need to find a way to back off on the US politics. I have no idea how... it's all I can think about myself right now, but it's a poisonous topic.
Yep. It's way more important than, say, how to write and maintain a large code base in Elixir. Politics can easily crowd out that kind of thing from the front page. I don't know what to say. I can't think about much else, but sooner or later, maybe things will return to some semblance of normalcy, and I do like the tech/startup discussions here.
Veering into most-controversial-generic-tangent-associated-with-controversial-thing is the worst direction politicized threads can take on HN, and they're borderline to begin with. Whimsical or unpredictable tangents are ok, but generic ideological tangents are always off-topic. They're black holes: they suck everything in, including all the oxygen of thoughtful discussion.
Because these things are so generic you can always make a case for their relevance to a specific story, but the proof is in the pudding: what happens when discussions veer off this way? The pudding sucks. This one in particular is embarrassingly terrible. This pudding needs to stop forthwith.