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Comment by MonkeyMalarky | Hacker News Reader

Well the difficult thing is that apparently every day mundane activities can be "political" depending on who is doing them and in what context. Even a character in a show or video game suddenly becomes a political statement (to some people) just by being female, or brown, or gay, etc.

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Well, yes, everything is political whether we like it or not. Even not having a character in a videogame that represents a minority can be a political statement. It's far too broad a brush to paint to be useful for anything

No, like you said, everything CAN be a political statement but, more often than not, everything is not, by default, a political statement

But we’ve reached a political climate where anything characterized as political is so. It’s unavoidable, and I think that’s the intention of this law. It wasn’t created to provide some fair and balanced public experience for citizens on private platforms. It was created to threaten large tech companies that make some politicians uncomfortable.

I agree actually, that's fair. Assuming a default position to not be a political statement does complicate things when you try to classify what is political due to giving the status quo a bit to much leeway, but honestly this classification is a waste of time.

Everything is a statement, intentionally or not. The characterization of what is mundane is itself a political statement.

I imagine you could assume that everything is, indeed, a political statement, to at least one person in the US.

I will ignore that irrational person incapable of seeing the context of a situation

I kinda of want to go back in time when politics was sort of on the back burner. Both left and right wing politics is unrecognizable to me. Everything is politicized and taken into conflict where it need not be.

Maybe I was in college and didn’t pay attention to this stuff or maybe the world has really gone mad.

Start treating people as people and not some political entity embodied in an activist form. Most of my friends are on the sidelines, thankfully. I treasure my relationships more, there isn’t too much time to live.

I’m exhausted.

Some might say that you and your friends' ability to sit on the sidelines is a form of privilege not available to everyone. Along with this idea that in the past, politics was more polite, or less bothersome or whatever.

Maybe for some people, participating in politics has been a matter of life and death - something they don't have the luxury to ignore.

This is a terrible argument - a secular Pascal’s mugging, conveniently invoked to force everyone and everything into politics; a currently un-ironic “think of the children”!

It is not healthy for our society to demand that 100% of things be politicized - to claim that not politicizing stuff is immoral because some issues are profoundly impactful for some people!

I want the good, the equitable, the right, the just and far, far less of the political! Politics deserves the deference due politics in any particular situation - not that derived from catastrophizing the most extreme outcome and then universalizing it into the quotidian!

| Some might say that you and your friends' ability to sit on the sidelines is a form of privilege not available to everyone.

I say the ability and demand to turn everything into politics and require the same of everyone else is itself a form of privilege!

Jeez, save some exclamation marks for the rest of us.

If what other people want is bad, inequitable, wrong, or unjust, then wanting the good, the equitable, the right and the just is politics itself.

True, it is the sign of bad times. Deglobalization is going to cause more hurt. I expect a rough ride for next decade or two until we come to our senses.

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