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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

Pre-inauguration, discussion of Trump's immigration policies and their logical conclusion would have been shut down under the "no politics" rule.

Seems it only takes ~10 days of this stuff being real for folks here to admit that politics affects everybody and is a valid topic of discussion.

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There's been a lot of misunderstanding with respect to the appropriateness of politics on HN. 'dang has made a number of comments related to it recently. I've aggregated some of them. The quotes are just identifiable snippets from the posts themselves. If you're interested in this topic, I encourage you to read them in their entirety.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969

There's no satisfying anybody about this: not the readers who want more politics, not the readers who want less, and certainly not the partisans on an issue.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522433

There's a lot more politics on HN right now than there usually is, which is appropriate since it reflects what's going on right now.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969

When there's a deluge of political stories, as in the last couple days, users heavily flag most of them. But there have still been plenty of major threads spending plenty of time on the front page. That's the status quo for HN: most politics are off topic, but not all. It's a delicate balance and an important one. Letting politics overrun this site would kill it.

It's allowed here now because banning foreign nationals from traveling to the US has an impact on industries that are associated with foreign workers. Say, IT, and engineering.

I think the point the OP was making (correct me if I am wrong) is that the banning of political discussion may have been a bad idea as it was obvious that this was going to happen.

The leading Republican candidate has been constantly talking about these types of bans yet discussion on HN was not allowed during a time where perhaps discussion could have prevented Trump gaining power.

Now we are in "cure" mode. It would have been better to prevent this from taking place.

I suspect you dramatically overestimate the impact of the comment threads here.

It's not because this particular issue is associated with tech. I've collected some of the comments 'dang has made recently regarding politics and HN here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13538787

Guidelines: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

I think this counts as an interesting new phenomenon.

Is it new if they've been promising to do this for ~1 year? This is exactly my point, that people on here flame you into the ground if you talk about "politics", but it could be that some of us 1 year ago would have been legitimately trying to talk about what was to come.

Some day we're going to have flying cars. There, now when we actually get flying cars, no one is allowed to talk about it.

You see the point there? Lots of crazy people run for president and say crazy things, that doesn't mean you panic about it right then, because the odds of them getting elected is so slim. And lots of people say crazy things to get elected, then never do those things because those things would be crazy. What we have here is a crazy person who got elected by promising crazy things, and is now following through on those crazy things.

That's why this is novel even though he's been saying these things for over a year.

Sounds to me like you didn't accurately analyze the threat and now you are making excuses about how nobody could see it. People saw it.

PS: I have followed US elections before, I am a DC native and followed them since I was a kid (now in my thirties) - I have observed differences between campaign promises and execution/governance, but this one was still pretty easy to predict based on what we knew before. The bigger shock is that he won in the first place.

I didn't say no one could see it, I said it's novel.

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