I haven't looked at all those stories but I don't doubt you're right about most of them and definitely do see it. FWIW, for years I was the loudest advocate on HN for keeping some politics on-topic despite the site guidelines declaring most off-topic, and regularly made many of the same arguments people have been making over the last few days. I'd be making them right now myself if I weren't a moderator.
It's indeed the case that politics is inseparable from many clearly on-topic-here things and that it's impossible to define "politics" in a way that would justify banning it outright. I told pg that very thing when he was training me to do moderation here, and he agreed. Questions around this have come up so often, though, that proposing one experimental week off from politics, just to see what we could learn, seemed worth trying. And we've already learned quite a few things, one of which is just how inseparable the political dimensions of these stories really are.
It's indeed the case that politics is inseparable from many clearly on-topic-here things and that it's impossible to define "politics" in a way that would justify banning it outright. I told pg that very thing when he was training me to do moderation here, and he agreed. Questions around this have come up so often, though, that proposing one experimental week off from politics, just to see what we could learn, seemed worth trying. And we've already learned quite a few things, one of which is just how inseparable the political dimensions of these stories really are.