I don't doubt it. A lot of people obviously do. My point is that it is not desirable for people to want to come to Hacker News to talk about politics.

I see your point, chc. And you are right. Talking politics on a site like HN is defacto undesirable. But the NSA dogs made feces mandatory conversation--if we want to live our lives *shit free--and so the door once opened just gets wider. It is sad. All this stuff is really sad.

People do talk about politics though. They do it everywhere all over the place and even those who claim to not want to talk about politics end up talking about the politics of not talking politics. I am not sure it is possible to stop them.

I believe this is because Reddit is like 4chan... everyone knows it, everyone uses it - including those who are just plain stupid.

HN, in contrast, is mostly known in educated circles and so does not attract as many trolls and idiots as Reddit does.