The normal critical thought displayed by HNers seems to evaporate when the subject is politics or finance. Post titles that would otherwise be called link-bait, like "Goldman Sachs has engineered every US crisis" and "investment banks have caused world famine" (paraphrasing the title of 2 recent posts), are accepted as truth. Another example is any post dealing with HFT.

Subjectively, these discussions appear to have a lot more of downvoted (grayed out) comments. Either they're bad comments, or they're reasonable comments that are downvoted for going against the "hivemind". In either case, it's a bad sign.

This sort of post, while interesting, should be treated as articles about electoral politics and hence off-topic. But the only apparent solution is via moderation.