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Comment by stonogo | Hacker News Reader

There is no such thing as "apolitical."

This is a more nuanced version of the "silence is violence" position. You're either an activist or you're part of the problem. You're either with us or against us.

It's a position that makes total sense and seems unassailably true to...well, people that are tuned in politically. People that don't care or don't connect the dots between politics and their actual life are pretty dang apolitical.

When I was a college student and in my early twenties I was aware that my opinions on political stuff changed a lot. So I didn't worry about politics much, I had an opinion about right and wrong but didn't take it seriously. That is apolitical.

To be apolitical is to make the tacit political statement, "Things are okay enough for me to not care." It's very difficult to be truly apolitical in a nation where a birthright to political interest in whatever you deem fit has been vested in you since... well, birth. Assuming you're American.

That's a reason, but not the only one. Others include, but aren't limited to:

- The world is too complicated for me to know who is correct

- Both options on the table suck

- My voice doesn't matter

- I trust others do better than I would

Not taking a stance between essentially two choices for how things should be done is not the same as saying things are being done okay.

> To be apolitical is to make the tacit political statement, "Things are okay enough for me to not care."

But the point is, they don't care. Which makes this position apolitical, an absence of political opinion. The fact that they aren't spurred into political actions due to personal suffering does not mean that there's no such thing as being apolitical.

In this case, yeah, it does. To not care either way is to be okay with ceding your right to care to others. Which is... a choice. An opinion on the worthiness or usefulness of having that choice. The only way to be apolitical is to never have had a choice... And since duress makes having a true stance impossible, there's no way to be apolitical.

Being apolitical just means that instead of trying to change society you make the best out of it. Of course it makes more sense for privileged people to be apolitical, but plenty of people without privilege are apolitical as well.

Examples of apolitical people who doesn't fit your description: Illegal immigrants who try to keep theirs heads down and just work, women who adopt a conservative role instead of fighting it, slaves who picked cotton instead of making a fuzz, Gays who pretended to be straight and even married etc.

If you think a bit, being political is almost always more work than not being political. So it is mostly very privileged people who engage in it. The rest are just trying to get by, they don't have the time or energy to spare being political.

None of these are examples of "apolitical" stances. They are people on the margins who are not able to vocalize what they feel to be in their best interests, either way. To hold an apolitical stance under duress is not really to hold an apolitical stance.

Saying that something is apolitical is like saying someone is speaking with "unaccented English". By definition, you can't say anything in any language without an accent, it's just that some accents, by virtue of being default, get promoted to the status of "unaccented".

That's not true. For example, homotopy type theory is apolitical.

If you strip it of context then sure. Grad students working on pl research are largely funded by the government, often by the military. They work in a subfield that has low adoption among undergrads, especially undergrads from schools other than top ranked schools. The work seeks to solve a specific set of problems in cs and software engineering, which may or may not be the most impactful problems out there. We also see vast differences in formal methods between US and European institutions both in coursework and in research.

Yes, in my experience people that say things like "no need to drag politics into this" really mean "no need to drag political opinions that are different from my own into this".

I'd rather not have annoying protestors disrupting the education I paid for and bugging me with pamphlets even if I agree. I counter-protested some annoying walk-out over the election result at college with a "Krusty Krab Unfair" sign and some of them got mad at me, so at least I got back at them a little. Outrageous that some professors weren't counting absences though.

Way to prove my point. You wanting to deny others right to peaceful assembly is you getting political. You just don't realize because you (obviously) agree with yourself.

Please peacefully assemble 100 feet outside of somewhere I didn't pay tens of thousands to be.

Protest doesn’t work unless it it causes extreme inconvenience. You’re telling the protestors not to protest.

Americans have a completely impotent understanding of protest. Protest and asking nicely are NOT the same thing. You do the former when the latter doesn’t work.

Not sure about anyone else but disruptive protest has the opposite effect of its intention on me. It inclines me to like the movement less if people are going of their way to inconvenience me in its name.

You're going to rip some refugee family apart to invisibly spite some trust fund kid protester who is fully insulated from any negative externalities of Palantir?

You want to have your cake and eat it too. You can't both be a jerk to people and expect them to also support your cause simply because you aren't the beneficiary of your cause.

The victims have already "asked nicely" for people to support their cause. Tupac explains this well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0XMJMphPT4

> Protest doesn’t work unless it it causes extreme inconvenience

Extreme inconvenience for who/what you are protesting, inconveniencing the average Joe is counter productive and will turn them against you.

You're right though, apart from in some mythologized version of the Indian independence movement peaceful protest has never done jack. You need to throw your body on the gears and the levers etc.

Or you could try engaging with the system directly?

There are a lot of political movements that achieve a huge amount without getting serious about protests. Any modern democracy gives people the option to get involved with shaping how the government works.

Waving the broad brush of generalisations, usually the people protesting are doing so because is because they have no chance of getting the numbers to effect change - because the majority simply doesn't care about whatever their special interest it, or will actively resist it because it is secretly a fringe issue. If they have a chance of capturing majority opinion, they'd be too busy using effective channels rather than protesting.

"You may well ask: 'Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?' You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored."

- Martin Luther King, Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail

> Protest doesn’t work unless it it causes extreme inconvenience. You’re telling the protestors not to protest.

No. This is the kind of misguided logic that protesters use to do things like block freeways, stand on caltrain tracks, and trespass on private property.

When protest causes extreme inconvenience, more often than not it inspires ire for the protesters. None of my friends that were stuck in traffic when BLM protesters blocked highways in Oakland came away from that experience with an improved opinion of BLM.

It's not really that misguided because in general it does work.

One has to understand that the inconvenience you feel by being inconvenienced by a protest is truly a tiny fraction of the "inconvenience" that motivated the protestors to protest. You know, have some empathy.

If a woman seeking an abortion has to drive 4 hours to the next state because protestors stormed the abortion clinic, would you tell her to "have some empathy" for the protestors? Or how about a bunch of white and Asian tech workers disruptively protesting women and URM ERGs in objection to discriminatory hiring processes (e.g. diversity quotas). If not, then you're at least conceding that only some protestors are justified in causing "extreme inconvenience" and that others are not justified in causing inconvenience. And in my experience, whether or not a person feels a protest is justified in causing inconvenience largely correlates to whether or not they agree with the protest - a pretty hypocritical position in my view.

Empathy works both ways. Protestors that lack empathy for the people they're disrupting aren't going to get good reactions from most people because most people don't like to be disrupted.

Yeah, I think only some protestors are justified in their action because I think some protestors have stupid immoral beliefs. I would say that if a group is storming an abortion clinic, I'd at least have to concede that they're doing what has been demonstrably effective in accomplishing their goals.

I don't see any hypocrisy. I want what I want, and I don't want my enemies to get what they want. We can't both get what we want if our views are incompatible.

The abortion protestors would not be effective because fortunately the bulk of society does not agree with your belief that protest grants license to disrupt other people's lives and we have enacted legislation to prevent protestors from interfering with the operation of abortion clinics, businesses, transportation, etc. If abortion protestors did that, they get hauled to jail. Same deal with BLM protestors blocking highways. Protestors have a right to be heard, not a right to disrupt the lawful activity of others.

> I don't see any hypocrisy. I want what I want, and I don't want my enemies to get what they want. We can't both get what we want if our views are incompatible.

You're essentially saying, "it's good when I do it, it's bad when people I disagree with like do it." This is hypocrisy, justifying actions for oneself but criticizing others for doing the same. And not to mention, I frequently find that this mentality fosters enmity between people with different views - you even referred to protestors espousing views you don't approve of as "enemies".

If you are absolutely determined to inconvenience other people then congratulations; everything can be political because you have the power to make it so.

However this is a hostile approach. If you can't get results through the usual political channels, trying to inconvenience the neutrals into compliance is a dodgy way of proceeding. I'll accept that nobody in politics plays fairly, but the people being harassed by an organised protest are completely reasonable in claiming that they were apolitical and the protestors are forcing politics upon them.

We have a word, 'apolitical', because it is a possible state someone's opinions can be in.

Or we just don’t need politics to infest every aspect of life, public and private. Voting only happens every other year.

Or maybe they just want to come to work, write some code, get a paycheck, and go home. I don't know what any of my coworker's political stances are and I kind of like it that way.

In my experience, the people who insist that there is no such thing as being apolitical are the ones most averse to political views different from their own. More often than not, people who insist that coworkers should bring politics into the office neglect to consider that many of their coworkers probably hold views they consider morally wrong or harmful. For instance, several co-workers who made such statements had also called all Trump supporters white supremacists (attributing the label to all supporters was explicit) and that apprehending any illegal migrants at the border is inherently racist. Something tell me these people have a pretty specific image in mind when they're encouraging their co-workers not to be apolitical in the workplace.

Then political is a meaningless word, the results are the same.

You seem to be implying that being apolitical is a political position in itself, much like how atheism is a religion too.

Do you consider baldness a hairstyle?

    Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun  
    A man whose allegiance
    Is ruled by expedience
    Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown
    "Nazi, Schmazi!" says Wernher von Braun

    Don't say that he's hypocritical
    Say rather that he's apolitical
    "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
    That's not my department" says Wernher von Braun

    Some have harsh words for this man of renown
    But some think our attitude
    Should be one of gratitude
    Like the widows and cripples in old London town
    Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun

    You too may be a big hero
    Once you've learned to count backwards to zero
    "In German, und Englisch, I know how to count down
    Und I'm learning Chinese" says Wernher von Braun

-- Tom Lehrer, That Was The Year That Was, Reprise Records 1965.

Tom Lehrer performing "Wernher von Braun " live (1967):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

His amazing wit is just as biting today as it was when he originally composed most of his songs over half a century ago.

Indeed. But the echo chamber resents their apolitical being equated with amoral. Lest they develop ethics, and bite the hand of mass consumer surveillance that feeds them.

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