There are politics of the normal sort, then there re politics of the sort that transcend the normal. If for example, Trump declared war on China, I for one would hope that HN would put up a discussion thread so that smarter than average individuals meet to discuss important issues.
Basically what happens for very important non-technology news, is that users flag the post off the page (which is intended behavior according to the admins.) Then dang picks a post to resurrect and focus discussion on. I believe the last time this happened was when the US presidential election results came in.
