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Comment by tinza123 | Hacker News Reader

Enough of these political posts on HN. If I want to see them I would head to r/news or NY Times. Strongly opinionated conclusion supported by piecemeal information aiming to inspire meaningless online battles with strangers? No thanks.

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I'm a relatively new user to HN. I've greatly appreciated how much more civil the conversations tend to be when compared to reddit. I have noticed, however, that news submissions, especially those which do not inherently have a technological aspect to them, tend to digress into what I can only assume are strongly held, but not adequately supported, opinions on the topic. These are then met by a flurry of flags. Further, submissions such as this one seem to directly contradict the HN guidelines, as it is arguably [1]:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

On one hand, this type of submission is not a new phenomenon and has been submitted to HN multiple times. If you search for Hong Kong arrests on HN, you get dozens of results; for example, [2][3][4][5], etc. On the other hand, I understand why people who feel strongly about this topic want to submit content pertaining to it past an initial submission some months ago.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25654143

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20846681

[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23698247

[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25654803

Your [3] and [4] aren’t about most pro-democracy legislators being mass arrested under the National Security Law, and are irrelevant to the current discussion.

Your [2] and [5] are similar to the current post, and are both 3 days old. So the mass arrest of pro-democracy legislators using the National Security Law IS a new phenomenon: only 3 days old!

When political posts like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25661474 are allowed on Hacker News (by virtue of a “new phenomenon”), I guess this post can live on, too.

> Enough of these political posts on HN.

You are under no obligation to view or comment on posts that are not of interest to you. Should you care very strongly against a submission or comment, you can always flag them.

Everything is political. If you don't think so, it means you're protected by at least some kind of privilege. Rather than denying that, think about what advantages you have in your life that insulate you from the struggles of other people.

Everything is A LITTLE BIT political. And we reserve the right on when to focus on the political or non political aspect. My pancake breakfast has ties to unions, lobbyists, international trade. Guess what, I’m just going to eat my pancakes.

"Everything is A LITTLE BIT political."

This is called minimizing/minimization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimisation_(psychology) https://counsellingresource.com/features/2009/02/23/minimiza...

You are just doing maximization instead.

>we reserve the right on when to focus on the political or non political aspect

This is a perfect illustration of the privilege I was talking about, thank you.

You seem to believe you’ve found some absolute truths: “everything is political“, “disagreement implies privilege“. These systems of logic absolve you of: seeing the gradients of truth, making real efforts in understanding a situation, asking questions, and making up your own mind.

Gradients of truth? If one side says the election was affected by voter fraud and the other side says it wasn't, it's not some enlightened path to say "both sides have a point, so there must have been a little bit of fraud". Sometimes one side is just wrong, either by an honest mistake or by active bad faith.

Some amount of voter fraud can swing an election. You could instead have more fraud in the direction that simply reenforces results. Is that more or less of a fraud problem? Creating fictional voting entities is highly problematic. Casting a vote a second after polls officially close is less problematic. It is enlightened to remember there are no absolutes. This allows one to see nuance rather than believing the only choices are no-fraud or fraud.

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