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Comment by nopriorarrests | Hacker News Reader

People in this thread are trying to come up with some HR policies which can help mitigate the problem, such as "never discuss politics at work", but that, in turn, means not talking about presidential elections which were, objectively, the most important event of 2016. (quick test -- "what's important/surprising/almost impossible really happened in 2016?" -- we all know the answer, and it's not "Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill met in Cuba", or "Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff was impeached").

It's hard to make people not to talk about main event of the year, happening in their country, in real-time, and probably such ban is counterproductive.

Thinking about it a bit more, the underlying problem here is not politics per se, but exteremely polarized society. Not sure this is something fixable with HR directives.

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The thing is, the most important event of 2012 was the reëlection of Mr. Obama, and the most important event of 2008 was his election, and the most important event of 2004 was the reëlection of Mr. Bush, and that of 2000 his election. Somehow we all managed to get by in my workplaces back then. Yes, we all knew that we had different politics: yes, we knew that some of us were deeply opposed to others of us. But we moved forward and got the job done, because we weren't getting paid to kvetch about politics.

Russian trolls aside, millions of people voluntary and completely for free (as a beer) spent much more time kvetching about politics in 2016 then in 2012 or 2008. There should be a reason for it.

In Western Europe the amount of kvetching is ten times lower on average, meaning people really care about elections 4 weeks before and 4 weeks after and then move on with their lives, as opposed to US, where political fighting is never stops.

My pet theory (which may cause downvotes here) is that US democracy seriously differs from Western Europe. In Western European countries you have different parties with their different pet issues, but you don't have different ideologies.

In US, there are two different ideologies, having different views on everything -- gender, religion, race, well, any topic you can pick, actually. What we observe is these two ideologies maturing, crystallizing and diverging from each other.

I often wonder how it will play out, in a long run. ;)

> In US, there are two different ideologies, having different views on everything -- gender, religion, race, well, any topic you can pick, actually. What we observe is these two ideologies maturing, crystallizing and diverging from each other.

That's a really good insight. On many issues, I look at the viewpoints of those I disagree with and wonder how a sane person can think what they think; no doubt they look at me and wonder the same.

> I often wonder how it will play out, in a long run. ;)

Poorly, I suspect.

Yeah, this is unfortunate situation.

And getting back to Damore memo -- from what I know about large european IT companies (and I do know something), if such memo was published on some intranet in, say, Netherlands or Denmark, you will end up with some flamewar (not even guaranteed) and maybe locked thread, thats it. Nobody would be fired, and it's absolutely impossible to imagine such case resulting in nation-wide news story. Zero chance. Nobody will really pay attention, because why.

But when you have two opposing ideologies, even a symbolic victory matters. So even if the reason is just some words some random dude typed on some private intranet (lol), outrage on national scale ensues. Soldiers from both ideologies armies are recruited, downvotes fired, and we have something NYT and Wired writing articles about. Just because of some post on some corporate portal.

Good thing that this is still contained to online flamewars. Still.

> But we moved forward and got the job done, because we weren't getting paid to kvetch about politics.

No, the difference was that we didn't have modern social media amplifying and echoing and re-broadcasting all the noise; so political arguments burned themselves without a wide conflagration

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