[dang]

> Can't we trust our fellow HN users to handle this discussion civilly?

Unfortunately, no we can't. That's clear empirically. We can all come up with speculations about why it is; mine is that politics is tribalism and activates the pre-rational brain.

What's clear from years of experience is that such discussions degenerate rapidly, that the degeneration compounds—i.e. the more it happens, the worse it gets—and that allowing it to go unchecked would kill what's valuable about this site. That's why the HN guidelines' definition of "off-topic" leads with an admonition against pure politics: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

There are some political topics that can be substantively discussed here, but that's because they're not pure politics: the drug is cut with something else. An example from yesterday is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841178.