I hope at this point people agree this has gone well beyond partisanship. Having a private citizen unilaterally gutting government agencies is an affront to the checks and balances of a functioning democracy.
People refresh all day here and often on the new post and new and comment feeds specifically, and many earnest users who take pride in maintaining a certain character to the site are quick to flag anything that's likely to devolve into noise and vitriol, like most political topics.
It can be frustrating to have them do that when you really wish you could to commiserate, explore, or debate the community on these topics, but bots aren't at play. Many people just don't see this as the right place to have these discussions and work to keep it that way.
While almost all of are political in some way, and most of us are tracking all these same events, we don't all want talk about it here.
I really wish people, widely, would stop blaming bots. I am sure there are plenty of bots doing lots of things, but by immediately attributing this behavior to bots I think we detach ourselves from a fundamental fact: there are a lot of US citizens that are so far drowning in propaganda that they actually manufacture reason for much of this insanity without much provocation or incentive beyond it being done by their tribe.
Yea, I got tired of people attempting to make comments like this and wrote a script to quickly analyze past comment history to see if they were truly being honest.
You have consistently and reliably posted your political views here. Please don't try to pretend that you hate the political discourse now that people are critical of your guy.
You should learn more about the political landscape. It will clear up a lot of these questions. And I mean that sincerely. If you see everything as left or right it’s quite confusing.
There's this growing sentiment among some Republicans that Trump isn't conservative enough and that Democrats, a centrist party relative to most developed nations, are left wing lunatics/socialists/communists.
I hope that we were beyond first-past-the-post voting. I would like to see a ranked-choice or star voting to determine whether something should be flagged.
I would also appreciate using tools like this AI system[1] to identify and limit hate-filled posts. It's only accurate about 90% of the time, but that's an acceptable loss for me, even if my speech gets filtered.
"Political" is not a binary true or false. There are plenty of on-topic articles here that merely have "political overlap" as dang[1] puts it, and they should not be flagged. To be fair, this article seems to be more towards the "purely political" side of the spectrum and was probably correctly flagged.
I think this rule is generally followed by HN's users, but for whatever reason, anything that touches "Elon" or "DOGE" always gets insta-buried, whether or not it's tech-related, whether or not it's interesting, whether or not it's worth discussing.
I don't think it's automated bots, but there is most certainly an online Elon Defense Brigade of real users out there trying to bury anything negative about the guy. I don't know what would make someone devote so much time to defending the honor of a billionaire. It's almost religious.
It's still here, and anyone who finds HN posts by rss or other means will see the headline, url & have access to this discussion (although it might be closed to replies by then)
The reason they are flagged is precisely because there isn’t much hope for discourse, not the other way around. Also, I think per the guidelines, these types of discussions are also not welcome:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
The guidelines also say the following, so I’ll just stop here:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
I am not calling anyone out - just pointing out this rule exists. I am pretty confused about this rule for what it’s worth. I feel like a lot of content I see on HN is political or ideological at a basic level - like articles about Trump or Ukraine or DOGE or whatever, which are everywhere since January. So if the discussion is “allowed” (like not flagged), I am not sure how to contribute to those discussions without being political or ideological myself. Maybe the rule exists because these discussions can easily become unhealthy - like aggressive comments, downvotes, etc.
I guess the argument for is that this is isomorphic to an outside contractor being granted access, providing a list of cuts, and the prez signing off on it. I don't like it but it seems like a difference in semantics and paperwork so I'm not sure if going after it is meaningful.
Prior Presidents more or less respected the need for independent agencies within the Executive, and the courts upheld the right of Congress to direct how money is spent meaning the President couldn't arbitrarily shutter an agency created by law written by Congress.
They don't. Very little has actually changed. For the people who voted for this, "unilaterally gutting government agencies" was what they voted for. For people who didn't vote, they don't seem to be saying, "Gosh, I didn't realize this would happen."
Last term it was, "He is your president you have to support him". Now it is, "The American people voted for this"
All the same meaningless phrases that do nothing to discuss issues, just an appeal to the masses.
Political sentiment has never been static. We'll see what people think when inflation sky rockets, they max out their credit, etc, and they have fewer social programs to reach out to for help.
Yep? I mean it's threatened every time by Republicans. But it's usually just grandstanding... Take Obamacare for instance. It was threatened to be repealed constantly, over and over, But even when they had full control and could do whatever they wanted it still survived.. at the end of the day, the elected officials know that it hurts their own people more to appeal it, so they just give the issue lip service and tweaks and fly a giant mission accomplished banner from the deck of their ship.
So on one side, I agree with you, who would think that they actually follow through with what they were saying over and over on the campaign trail.... And now they have.
"I never thought the party that's been saying for 20 years that they want to reduce government to the size where they can drown it in the bathtub would ever do anything drastic..."
Let's assume your first assertion is true, and I don't necessarily concede that, but for the sake of argument.
People frequently point out that Trump is doing more or less exactly what he said he would do, either explicitly or by way of Project 2025[1]—a detailed several hundred page diatribe and action plan for a second Trump term that he disingenuously claims to know nothing about, despite having employed nearly every one of its authors to work on his campaign and/or administration. That includes Project 2025’s principal coordinator Russell Vought[2], who Trump named to head the Office of Management & Budget, and who was policy director of the Republican National Committee platform committee from May 2024. So it is fair to say that we were warned.
But it is worth noting that an April 2024 NBC News poll[3] showed Trump leading voters who say they do not follow political news by 26-points. Meanwhile voters who said they read a newspaper every day supported Joe Biden 70% to Trump’s 21%. They very shrewdly targeted fire hoses of wedge issues, disinformation, and fear-mongering to millions of voters who reportedly do not follow politics, and who likely just felt like shit was better for them before 2020. It worked. But I am not so sure that these voters were equipped to know about, or fully understand the implications of, something like Project 2025. There is certainly room to speculate how many of Trump’s 2024 voters were voting for this kind of radical reshaping of American governance, rather than simply desiring a return to the pre-2020 status quo, before COVID-19 and its socioeconomic consequences violently rattled society’s cage.
It is true that Trump won his reelection with 49.8% of the vote, but that isn’t the same thing as 49.8% of voters. With only 63.7% of eligible voters casting ballots last November, Trump’s share of the vote narrows to just under a third of the electorate, significantly less than half. As I mentioned before, a large bloc of those voters do not engage with traditional news media. Along with the NBC poll I cited above, a survey conducted in November 2024 by Northeastern University[4] found that just 24% of Republican voters relied on news media, while the rest said they got their news from family and friends, as well as social media.
This means that while less than 1/3rd of eligible voters cast their ballots for Trump, only ~8.3% of the electorate entered the voting booth reliably informed, and still chose to support him.
Thing is, you can't assume that the 36.3% of eligible voters who didn't cast votes are opposed to this. Some surely are, and couldn't cast a vote because circumstances prevented them. But an awful lot of them seem to have said, "Eh, it makes no difference either way."
If you ask them why, many seem to cite American support for Israel in its war against Gaza. Others cite inflation.
It's hard to restrict democracy to those who are "reliably informed". I wish we could. The whole idea of democracy is that you shouldn't have to, because informed people will be able to have influence enough to win most of the time. That fundamental proposition seems to be in doubt.
Which check or balance do you think is being ignored here? The point of the executive branch is to be the one where unelected and loosely vetted administrators work.
Congress is mostly voted officials, the judiciary is the group that are carefully vetted for cultural fit and the executive is where the messy parts happen with oversight from the other two government branches. It is where people like Musk are supposed to be working - the president thinks he a good person to be wielding power.
> Which check or balance do you think is being ignored here?
Which check + balance is being adhered to?
Which actions aren't in violation of the constitution, are operating fully with stipulated oversight and clearly operate within established best practices?
This should be trivial to provide from the Most Transparent Administration Ever.
I don't think "All of them and everything" is really a serious attempt at a response. But a non-serious question demands an unserious answer! Trump hasn't been impeached this time round, for example, so that is check and balance that is being adhered to. And he gave the State of the Union speech which is an action unambiguously in line with the constitution. So there you go, there are checks that are holding and actions taken that are constitutional.
I assume they're cool with it. Why wouldn't they be? Musk + Trump probably don't care, it isn't data on them. Hire a bunch of interns and get them on the job.
My sense is they're going to shred any requests like this or just send back a "No Responsive Records" response for every one and dare someone to try to call them on it. But I envy your trusting nature.
I'm losing my mind. This thread is already full of people sanewashing DOGE and Musk. I don't even know how to debate with them, because we seem to live on entirely different conceptual planets.
Disordered discourse is a term Eliot Higgins is using to describe this and I like it. There is essentially no way out and they will take whole HN down with them I'm afraid.
Whole HN down? I don't even see all these off topic political flame wars you guys are having except when I feel particularly lazy and browse extra pages. Other than that my only interaction with them is to flag them. And I'm really grateful for other people flagging so I see less. The actual on topic hn content is not affected.
Read my bio and look at timestamps. I lurk for tech news and discussions. Once every couple weeks I read, get sucked into, and comment on a political discussion.
If I could wave a magic wand and ban posters of off topic political discussions off the internet forever so it doesn't happen, I would absolutely do it
Man it was really hard to not contradict you in detail and start discussing politics! Some people don't think it's so dramatic, let's leave it at that.
Also there are tons of places online to discuss politics. Maybe too many! there's no need to make everything about politics. One way to turn people against your opinion is to shove it in their face when they don't want it.
> there's no need to make everything about politics
I agree except this is a 'News' site where we discuss news. Occasionally there will be a lot of politics in the news that people want to discuss. Bannning that will diminish the value of this site.
The rules that define what kind of site this is say if it belongs on news sites it doesn't belong here. This is about as much of a news site as facebook is a book site.
Let's be exact here: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."
I'd say USA becoming a fascist dictatorship does qualify as an interesting new phenomenon, but YMMV of course.
Regardless of its merits it's a fringe opinion that most people disagree with. Every other news story (and a few more besides - microchipping! Pizzagate!) would be on topic by that standard, so we could discuss whether they have merit. The spirit of the rules is clearly against that.
I have my own hobby horses that most people disagree with, even though as far as I am concerned they stand on much more solid definitional ground than "fascist dictatorship" - for example, wage taxation is forced labor, so any new policy could be discussed as an interesting new phenomenon of "govt forces people to do X, at gunpoint". But if I'd want to discuss the finer points of whether it's ok to force people to do X at gunpoint I'd go to reddit.
> I don't even know how to debate with them, because we seem to live on entirely different conceptual planets.
Typically the process is to exercise empathy, look into their world, see what it is like and then check for any logical problems or general weaknesses. If you want to debate with someone persuasively you have to meet them where they are.
They don't care about logic and reason. We all know it. There are no stable moral or ethical values - transparency mayter then it don't depending on tactical needs.
On emotional level, they like it when someone else is harmed. And that is it.
> On emotional level, they like it when someone else is harmed. And that is it.
On the other hand I recommend you work on improving your empathy even if you don't use it for debating. That is ridiculous and you don't have the excuse of an upcoming election to get away with bad behaviour.
The pro-DOGE people generally want to pay less tax. That is a much better motivating theory. Will they get that? Probably not. But the emotional response (if any) is going to be much more on the greed or fairness aspects.
Many of these actions are explicitly about culture wars, most visibly the actions against trans people. There is no way to explain that in terms of taxes.
I can attempt empathy for their fear of trans people, but I don't know what to do with it. Their fear is inculcated by a vast propaganda machine, to which they are deeply wedded. Maybe over a few decades they will see that trans people simply aren't harming them, but it's not clear whether my empathy today will have any beneficial effect on that.
Everything they call "woke" is about culture wars rather than taxes, and there's a lot in that category. There have been many, many calls for "understanding" their position in the culture war over the last few decades, but it has only gotten louder and more virulent.
I think we may simply need to accept that we do understand them, but that what they want is simply unacceptable. That's an impasse, and it won't be resolved by empathy.
No, what you say is just what you want to be true. A comforting lie that is being repeated in various forms.
Listen to what those people say, watch what they do. They literally say they want to cause harm. When their politicians gets insulting or cause harm, they get more votes instead of less. Instead of listening and watching, you knee jerk sanitize it, use euphemisms and basically gaslight everyone else. I do actually read and listen to what conservatives actually say and write.
It is in project 2025. It is online. It is in conservative journals and articles. Talk to them in person long enough personally and they will tell you. It is the same thing with trade war. It is in Trumps rhetoric. And it was the same thing with abortions - it was totally paranoid to say they plan to remove protection for women ... until they actually did it. Again and again, their opinions and plans are sanitized and euphemized away. And then they get benefit of doubt no democrat or leftist is ever getting.
There were enough low tax republican politicians who lost against Trump. When centrist democrats adopt republican plans, the previously cheered on plans are suddenly bad and republicans who keep supporting them are suddenly ennemies too. And the reason is that it is not the economics or taxes.
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Also, speaking about empathy, why is there consistent expectation that empathy flows exactly one way? You are demanding that I am emphatetic to people who see empathy as weakness on an ideological level. And who are never ever asked to return the favor.
> Also, speaking about empathy, why is there consistent expectation that empathy flows exactly one way? You are demanding that I am emphatetic to people who see empathy as weakness on an ideological level. And who are never ever asked to return the favor.
You don't have to if you don't want to. I only bought it up because it'll probably help you feel good about life; it makes it easier to tolerate people who are disagreeable. You seem to be boxing with phantoms.
The issue here is not really that someone is "disagreable". It is actual real world harm that goes on.
> You seem to be boxing with phantoms.
Not really. I am just listening to what the people we talk about say or do. You want me to pretend their motivations and ideologies are something they simply are not.
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