But:
1. Doing so is a political decision. 2. Your views shape your perspective and there will be actions and omissions that you take that impact politics in ways that you are unaware of.
To give you an idea of the types of historical figures that used the "you're either with us or against us" most famously...
Benito Mussolini
Vladimir Lenin
George W Bush after 9/11
Recep Erdogan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27re_either_with_us,_or_ag...
What I am saying is that your actions and omissions have political outcomes whether you want them to or not.
Do you mind quoting the GP on where you feel like he's trying to force people to polarize and why that makes you feel that way?
edit: Could those downvoting me please make an effort to help me understand parent comment's viewpoint instead of making low effort downvotes? I really don't feel like asking for clarification on something warrants a downvote without response.
You're not even allowing for the idea of opposition to exist which is a radical view pretty similar to the ones held by all the people you have mentioned.
But to people who are arguing that being “neutral” is actually a political stance and usually supporting of the status quo, you try to say they’re tantamount to Mussolini.
Really? Someone disagrees with you so your go to response is to bring up Mussolini?
Crypto is also very capable of moving huge amounts of money from hostile foreign nations to disruptive factions anywhere in the world. Claiming libertarian alliances could be an easy cover for those kinds of activities. That whole space has been a cesspool.
When the people in this thread are arguing for being apolitical, they’re arguing for companies not being involved in seeking to lobby for change in formal, legislated power structures. They’re not arguing for companies to not take a stance in cultural power imbalances, because to them, power imbalances enforced by a government and power imbalances enforced only by social norms are not the same thing, and only the former is actually covered by the term “politics”, i.e. the thing that politicians do for their job. The latter, in most countries, is usually just called social — and there’s nobody arguing that companies should avoid taking social stances.
Forming a company to do something is inherently a social stance — a stance in any culture-wars that might be shifted by the product or service the company provides. But forming a company to do something isn’t inherently a political stance. For a company to take a political stance, someone from the company would need to actually talk to a politician at some point, in their capacity as a representative of a company — i.e. to do the thing we call “lobbying.”
Tangent: associating “politics” with attention paid to cultural, non-legislated power imbalances, is really mostly a US thing. I think this might be because most other developed, democratic countries have a lot fewer such cultural, non-legislated power imbalances; for painful historically-segregationist reasons, their entire populations are mostly formed out of what in the US would be considered a single mostly-uniform voting bloc. And so politicians in most countries, can’t really base their platforms on the cultural stances of any particular bloc — there’s not enough variation in such stances that highlighting one would win you any points.
The US is unique in that it ended up as one country composed of many extremely-divergent blocs, but with there being basically no formally-recognized, legislated divisions between most such groups†. Compare to all-of-Europe or all-of-Asia (which are the most sensible comparisons, given the land areas involved): the people within those continents have long ago assorted into relatively-like-thinking groups, splitting off into their own smaller countries, historically not granting citizenship to those who are “not like them”, and so becoming each much more internally-uniform in both makeup and viewpoints. (And then, if one of those countries went on to conquer the other, the introduced power-imbalance would be a formal, political one, with real legislation — the sort of thing you do “politics” about — determining the relative power of the two sub-nations within the new merged nation.)
† The US does have one formally-recognized, legislated division, where both sides explicitly sit at a negotiating table within government: that division being the one between native/indigenous Americans and N-generations-naturalized-immigrant Americans. And guess which group in the US isn’t heavily invested in the culture war? That’s right, the native population. Because they form a politically distinct group — effectively an annexed nation, as above — whose problems are raised to the level of actual politics, rather than social debate.
No, I think that many are arguing for companies not to take a stance in cultural as well as legislative power balances. (I would argue that legislative power structures and cultural power structure are not so easily separated, as they inform each other).
Both concepts are covered by the term “politics”. The colloquial “office politics” is just such an example of that.
To sum up, I appreciate the direction you took to uncover the crux of disagreements that ate going on but I feel that your analysis is flawed because you assert that the issue is cut down a particular line (which I believe it is not) and then invalidate the opposing half through a projected misuse of the term “political” (when it is in-fact mot a misuse of the term “politial”).
To your aside: I would hesitate to say that this is a uniquely US thing. Womens rights would appear, to my relatively lay self, to still be a prevalent source of cultural and legislative power imbalance in many countries and blocs across the world.
1. Political intent - acting or omitting to act because of a political view point. 2. Political outcomes - the results of actions or omissions to act which impact politics.
I guess my point is that your actions and omissions have political outcomes whether you want them to or not.
We should also agree what “politics” means. I’m not simply referring to the science of government but to the decisions around the distribution of power, resources and status in groups of people.
It does not even stop there. If we choose to understand what's political in this way everything that humans choose to relate to (even things that do not exist beyond human imagination) have, of course, probably some influence on political outcomes.
Rain, an escaped alligator from the local zoo, the color of a button in a web form, etc.
I think that this second idea of what's political is merely the realization that we can choose to view everything according to it's political impact. Like a pair of glasses we might wear or might want others to wear.
...to stick with my example: One might end up making a long term study on how news about escaped zoo animals affect election outcomes. That might lead to surprising results. It's just not always guaranteed to be a very productive use of time.
I think there's probably a healthy middle ground here. It's not hard to argue that there's some reasonable moral expectations regarding company decision making. Like, don't construct gas chambers. (Local example from my German home region.)
On the other side it's easy to see that insisting on questioning every minor decision will lead to almost instant gridlock.
That's why I think that both radical positions are pretty hard to defend. A better society might hide behind pragmatic decision making with some reasonable, probably even academically shallow moral questioning of ones own actions. Not in corporate apathy or zealotry.
Artificially extending what's seen as political to excess is a pointless exercise that removes all meaning and usefulness from the concept.
That's bad because a shared understanding of some political sphere (which comes into existence through its boundaries) is really important for democratic discourse.
Some moral entrepreneur might argue: Politics should govern the bedroom for [reasons]! ... and others might object: No; the bedroom is a private sphere where politics has no say for [reasons].
... and over time there should emerge a shared understanding of which aspects of life are political grounds and which are taboo.
The bedroom case is mostly decided today. One side won (mostly LGBTQ&Friends) and now we see the bedroom as something that should be free from politics. ..like I think that the vast majority of people in the western world now sees sodomy laws as bad fit for modern democracies.
But there are other issues that are more contemporary: The idea that speech is violence, for example, is prime moral entrepreneurship. Western societies regulate violence in a certain way and this equivalence would suggest to treat both equivalent, one way or the other.
... and it's far from decided how speech will be treated in the future and we all have many open arguments on the matter.
It's a healthy thing for societies to continuously re explore their specific boundaries of politics.
I have difficulties seeing the "everything is political"-trope as anything but the proposal to be reckless regarding the process of a shared understanding of the boundaries of politics.
To rephrase: through political action (such as activism, lobbying and campaigning), societies should continuously reevaluate what topics are within the political sphere.
If how we decide what is or is not "acceptably" political is itself a political process, how can you honestly say certain things aren't political.
Claiming that bedrooms "aren't" is naive. There are still absolutely exist people who have and are and will continue to try and control what people can do in their bedrooms. Just because one side, and the side you presumably agree with, appears to have won the argument for now, doesn't mean that things are finished.
There are lots of things that I think should be outside of the realm of politics: basic human rights, white supremacy, a woman's right to choose. And yet.
So we return to the original question: how come those topics are "political", but in your opinion "bedrooms" aren't? (And would someone in the UK agree with you? They probably would, despite laws that affect them).
Who decided that bedrooms were off limits but uteruses weren't? How? Why? Can I change that? Those are all political questions.
And when you start into this meta-discussion of how do we make something political? The answer is pretty straightforward: you find people who are that there's an issue and you make noise about it.
When lots of people see a problem and make noise about it that problem becomes political. Disagreements, on a societal scale, are politics. So "this shouldn't be political" isn't much more than "I don't think the status quo is worth spending resources on". And, well, the people who think there's a problem will disagree on that. And thus: politics.
Yeah there are things that I wish we didn't disagree about, but I also am willing to stand by my convictions and say I disagree, instead of hiding behind "this isn't even a discussion, you're not allowed to bring up this complaint because this isn't acceptable politics". If you're fine with the way things are, say that.
No that's not what I've said. I talked about discourse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse
This difference is important since the discourse is in itself not framed by any material boundaries. This difference also answers your question on whether political action deciding on the scope of politics might be incoherent.
> Claiming that bedrooms "aren't" [political] is naive. There are still absolutely exist people who have and are and will continue to try and control what people can do in their bedrooms.
A shared understanding of what is political does not require every single person to agree on the scope of politics. In the end it's all about relative stability, not unanimity or majority or something like that.
> Just because one side ... won the argument ... doesn't mean that things are finished.
There I agree. I don't think the concept of "finished" exists in any human context.
> Who decided that bedrooms were off limits but uteruses weren't? How? Why? Can I change that? Those are all political questions.
This question on who specifically might make a specific decision seems to be a reoccurring theme in our dialogue. In modern societies that's usually a multitude of interlinked processes. Very rarely there's an isolationable agent/action relation relationship. ...and that's, of course, a good thing.
> ... this isn't even a discussion, you're not allowed to bring up this complaint ...
Who forbade you anything, by the way? I don't get why this conversation should be so confrontational or accusatory.
I have no strong feelings on any of the many crossroads in debating social science epistemology or democratic theory in general.
> Who forbade you anything, by the way? I don't get why this conversation should be so confrontational or accusatory.
You've said that certain topics are not acceptable. Presumably this means one can't discuss them. Maybe you don't intend to enforce this beyond the force of your moral condemnation, but you're still saying "you're a bad person if you bring up this topic because it's not part of the political discourse and we're only discussing political stuff".
In our previous conversation I'd argue that politics as power relations or as a specific set of societal institutions might be the most productive definitions just because both are compatible with our main argument.
Nobody said they can't discuss something. It's a good example though:
You might believe that someone who argues that something does not belong in the sphere of politics does not want to or is unable to discuss something at all primarily because you already very strongly believe that politics necessary includes everything.
If you were to step back from that premise for a second you would see that there might be other human endeavors, think science, philosophy, math .. and that those are discussed by people completely without any connection to politics (..or as you would probably argue: they're willfully ignorant of the political dimension of their actions and might even be motivated by subversive, ultraconservative intentions.)
I just of course can't make you realize that this is only one very specific worldview out of many. ..which might have its place and usefulness but probably wasn't meant to act inhibiting on its enthusiasts.
Some do believe that every action needs to be reflected according to its compliance with some religious dogma. For them, ignoring the religious dimension in any action is very suspicious, because they are able to see a religious component in any action. Surely others must appear as stupid or willfully ignorant to them.
They're driven by a specific set of religious premises and that's completely okay. We just wouldn't want them to be literally unable to understand that there are other worldviews out there with their own premises.
A strong conviction is born through the understanding of its opposing ideas.
> You've said that certain topics are not acceptable. [...] you're still saying "you're a bad person
Oh dear goodness, where? Would you mind to quote me on that?
Because I don't think any of this is true.
I could just as well say “no one should ever argue anything because then people could argue about every little thing and it would be impossible to do anything at all.”
At first I was like “ugh” - not a big fan of that kind of language change, but then I was like, well, if it does matter to some people, what is my investment in this particular term anyway?
I could see how it gets trickier as a company policy, as opposed to something chosen collectively by the group.
Nonetheless, with everything going on in the world right now - and I say this as an advocate of free speech and of freedom of expression in art - this seems like such a small thing to stress about.
Tbh if this is your big fear then I’d say maybe read more news?
Being excoriated for an honest slip Of the tongue or absent mindedness is a different story though and there are definitely people that do that.
In some ways I think the conversation to be had around changing how we use certain language is equally or more valuable than the change itself :).
IMHO the tricky bit is that, there is both an honest and genuine way to express concern around using "precisely the right language", so to speak, and, a malicious, not-an-honest-partner-in-the-conversation, gum-up-the-works way.
And also, I guess a "this-is-all-unpleasant-and-I-just-don't-want-to-think-about-it-or-think-about-the-historical-context-for-why-we-are-talking-about-this-in-the-first-place-I-have-enough-on-my-plate-as-it-is" kind of way.
Of course there is also virtue signaling or what have you; that's a thing. Human foolishness has no bias.
Obviously HN is not the right place for discussing specifics, but, IMHO, that's maybe the only way to have a real conversation around this stuff. Which takes trust and a shared safe space.
Which can be hard to come by these days.
That said, IMHO my patience decreases a bit, sadly, every day when I read the news. There's a context to all this, after all. And a very real history.