It's funny how you can look at one mostly-benign comment that just happens to bring up politics (and mostly as a tangent to the point it wants to make) and see how it drives the whole thread off the rails. Just eyeball the torrent of BS political posturing this set off. I'm not blaming the author or anything; it just seems like a miniaturized version of a problem that hurts the whole site.
For whatever reason, all politics is now identity politics. Less important than the effectiveness of a policy is whether that policy is threatening to the ideology that accompanies a person's group identity.
It makes me wish we didn't have names for these things for people to rally around. If you replace "I'm a libertarian" with "I'm skeptical of government solutions without sufficient supporting evidence" notice how the lack of abstraction makes it impossible to avoid focusing on the issue at hand.
I have learned to try not to let my politics get too much in the way of what I talk about here, enough so that I am routinely criticized for being a libertarian (heh) or even sometimes a security-state conservative.
I'll every once in awhile throw a jab towards "libnerdtariasm", because while I do try to keep politics out of things as much as possible, I am still easily baited by nerd tropes.
Yeah, this is what happened here. It's an issue that makes me angry and I said something I shouldn't have. Do I get an "I derailed a thread on Hacker News" t-shirt? Definitely something I'll try not to do again.
"It makes me wish we didn't have names for these things for people to rally around. If you replace "I'm a libertarian" with "I'm skeptical of government solutions without sufficient supporting evidence" notice how the lack of abstraction makes it impossible to avoid focusing on the issue at hand."
This is a good point. I'll keep it in mind for the future. On less civil sites, it also at least makes someone work to invoke a string of identity-politics nonsense like "LOL LIBERTARIAN MOAR LIKE STRAIGHT RICH WHITE MAN AMIRITE?"
