As much as I'd love to pile on to this question, HN isn't a place for general political arguments, and this isn't a productive discussion for this site.

“HN isn't a place for general political arguments”

I wish we’d stop lying to ourselves about this.

Yeah that rule is extremely stupid. Please do what you can to make the mods and admins realize that this rule should be removed. Politics is fascinating. HN is absolutely a good forum for it and it already is basically unenforced.

What rule are you referring to?

Not to post political stuff on HN

There's no such rule. I've written about this here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844

and in lots of previous places:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

If anyone has a question that I haven't addressed in there, let me know and I'll be happy to answer.

The guideline for comments I was leaning on to try to cut short what seemed like inevitable political ugliness:

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for.

For sure, but curious conversation on political topics is possible, and is not battle. It depends on whether one is posting thoughtfully or just trying to smite enemies.

That's the zone that we hope HN threads will inhabit when addressing politicized topics. Of course it's unstable and frequently deteriorates, hence all the moderation comments we end up having to post. But I don't know of a better alternative. As I explained at the links mentioned upthread, we can't ban all politics and we can't just let such threads run raw either.

"we" aren't lying about it to ourselves. It's enforced from the top down because VCs (such as the benefactors of this site) strongly prefer that their founders ignore culture and society to focus 100% on business. The lack of politics on HN is not some kind of community consensus.

HN has plenty of political, cultural, and social threads. I'm surprised you haven't noticed them. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22714705 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 for more explanation.

Political topics take over everything if you let them, so we have to moderate HN to prevent it from becoming all-politics-all-flamewar-all-the-time. Do you think we should just let it burn?

Nobody's trying to "enforce" anyone to "focus 100% on business". I do worry whether users' addictions to sites like this keep them from doing better things.

Or perhaps because political arguments online are 99.9999% ineffective at changing anything, and 99.9999% effective at causing discord.

I assume someone, somewhere was once swayed by a random stranger to change their mind, but it doesn't happen often enough to outweigh the costs.

Lucky for you, this crisis is going to last until the next administration (which might be the same as this one, depending on election results).

So far we've got $1200 checks going to all the little guys and $500 to their little children.

Which hardly seems like much. Maybe if you are unemployed, but if you are earning $75,000 a year how exactly does this help? There is not much to spend it on now anyway.