Why do you automatically assume wanting to ignore politics translates to support of the status quo?
I've heard this argument before a lot, and it just seems like a massive assumption. You can't read peoples minds.
There are several plausible reasons to ignore and not discuss politics:
- You don't want to argue
- You don't think it will change anything
- You don't want to lose friends and acquaintances
- You don't want to find out someone you respect is "one of them"
- If the aggregate political beliefs of your industry does not match your own, you don't want to "out" yourself
- You want to change the status quo, but not in the way other people want it changed
- Your political beliefs are not strongly held
- You don't feel knowledgeable enough (I wish this was more common and people would share their opinions less when they know close to nothing).
I personally don't want to discuss politics much even if people agree with me - it either turns into a weird intellectual circle jerk, or gripe session about how evil the "other" is. Neither of which I really enjoy.
In short there are a lot more reasons to try and avoid politics than there are to seek them out. Being happy with the status quo is one needle in a haystack of other reasons.
> You don't feel knowledgeable enough (I wish this was more common and people would share their opinions less when they know close to nothing).
I think it's more common than you think to stay out of it. The unfortunate thing about the asymmetrical communication afforded by social media is that you don't see the hundreds of people that didn't engage with what someone said.
At least that's what I tell myself when i see a bunch of comments that are out there. All the people that aren't crazy probably just didn't want to engage.
> Why do you automatically assume wanting to ignore politics translates to support of the status quo?
Because it's true?
> I've heard this argument before a lot, and it just seems like a massive assumption. You can't read peoples minds.
One doesn't need to. Some logical reasoning is sufficient. Also, they often spell it out -- just like you did here:
> There are several plausible reasons to ignore and not discuss politics:
And they (almost) all boil down to "not wanting to rock the boat", i.e. tacitly or explicitly supporting the status quo.
> - You don't want to argue
= You value not arguing over changing something even if it were better to change it.
> - You don't think it will change anything
= You value not bothering over even trying to change what should be changed.
> - You don't want to lose friends and acquaintances
= You value your friends and acquaintances over necessary change even when they are against it
> - You don't want to find out someone you respect is "one of them"
= You covet your acquaintances so much you don't even want to know if they're actually for all that is evil in the world? Wow, that's really small-minded.
> - If the aggregate political beliefs of your industry does not match your own, you don't want to "out" yourself
Finally one that is at least understandable. But, still boils down to turning a blind eye to everyone supporting the (potentially evil) status quo in favour of making a living.
> - You want to change the status quo, but not in the way other people want it changed
= That is a political reason, only the tactical one of probably not getting your particular politics through.
> - Your political beliefs are not strongly held
= Again, valuing the political status quo over the discomfort of advocating your weakly held convictions.
> - You don't feel knowledgeable enough (I wish this was more common and people would share their opinions less when they know close to nothing).
Another at least semi-valid one. One alternative would of course be to educate oneself about one's weakly held convictions, so one could either abandon them if they turn out to have been wrong, or represent them with some conviction if they were right. I mean, what's the use of having any opinions at all if one is apathetic about them?
> I personally don't want to discuss politics much even if people agree with me - it either turns into a weird intellectual circle jerk, or gripe session about how evil the "other" is. Neither of which I really enjoy.
OK, true. Not very applicable to Twitter as a whole, though, AFAICS: it's big enough that there's always some non-apathetic discussion going on about pretty much anything.
> In short there are a lot more reasons to try and avoid politics than there are to seek them out. Being happy with the status quo is one needle in a haystack of other reasons.
Nope, as shown above almost all those reasons boil down to being more OK with the status quo than with trying to change it, which is a political stance in favour of the status quo. It's a tree-sized "needle" in a small-to-medium haystack.
Not saying you personally are an absolute arsehole for this stance; I'm much the same myself (as are, I assume, most of us). Just thought you should at least know that this is actually what you're doing, in stead of deceiving yourself (and, with the comment above, abetting others in deceiving themselves).
I don't argue for political view points because I'm fairly certain I have no power and my opinions and beliefs don't matter. You know, like 99% of us.
Maybe yours do matter. Maybe you're a player with NGOs, elected government, media, academia, big business, or civil service. Mine don't though, I'm just another peasant who wants to keep his family safe and healthy. I wish things could be better but I see no viable path for that to happen that involves arguing politics on the internet.
The one concrete thing that could improve things for me and mine is making more money. LARPing as somebody important on twitter by arguing politics would just be a distraction from that.
You are arguing your political viewpoint here. Because you disagree with mine, and because you want yours to be more common. The power you are exercising is one of influence. If you didn't believe your views mattered, you wouldn't bother to post here.
>If you didn't believe your views mattered, you wouldn't bother to post here.
lol wut? Not parent poster, but I post here precisely because I know my views don't matter. This is idle chitchat with people in a similar line of work. There were a few times I've actually had something to say, and you can bet your ass I didn't post it on Hacker News.
Ok? That's you, and I'll take your word for it. But you aren't the one who is very energetically engaged in an extended argument about what constitutes acceptable political dialog in various spheres.
But even taking you at your word, I think you're wrong. You clearly believe the view you're promoting here, and it's obviously important to you to contradict me, important enough to spend both your time and mine on it. There are a million ways you could spend your idle time, and it's not an accident that you picked this one over the other 999,999 options.
Why the fuck were @wpietri's perfectly valid comments above[1] flagged and/or downvoted to death? It's not like they were advocating either rabid racism or even rampant-PC anti-racism[2] -- they were just stating the rather inoffensive and uncontroversial[3] opinion that not speaking out on something isn't just "neutral" but actually supporting the status quo.
@dang, please un-deadify those if you can. (Yeah, I know: Don't argue about downvotes, yadda yadda. But also: Don't abuse flagging, right? So sometimes, in order to point out the latter, you have to do the former.)
___
[1]: i.e. not this one, but the grandparent and great-great-grandparent (or thereabouts).
[2]: Just to take the most inflammatory examples that came immediately to mind.
I don't know if this is true and this gets to the reductive nature of how people interpret political arguments. We've become so divided, the 'status quo' crowd and the 'not status quo' crowd don't even talk to each other. If you're conservative, you're mostly seeing people argue about what the status quo was, and if you're progressive, you're probably seeing people argue about what the status quo should be.
Everyone says politics is about values, but it's more than that. Politics is values plus an implementation. Sometimes I see the worst takes or disdain from people who's values I fundamentally agree with, but we disagree on the implementation.
> "my life as a member of group X should be better than that of other groups" is a political position.
This isn't at all what the GP said, and that fact is one of the biggest reasons we don't like engaging in these types of conversations: a hostile stranger is liable to stop in and hammer you with a comment that reeks of contempt and disdain, and egregiously distorts what you said.
"I don't want to experience all the worst experiences that anyone on the planet is having" is an extremely different statement from "my life should be better than anyone who is less fortunate than me". If you fail to distinguish these two, you're definitely just as guilty of the latter as anyone else.
So, sorry, we're not here for it. And if you want to persuade us into being here for it, distortion-loaded shaming definitely isn't the way to accomplish that.
> distortion-loaded shaming definitely isn't the way to accomplish that.
I'd go further and say the poster you're responding to is non charitable and down right hateful, violating at least two community guidelines:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
It isn't what he said, but it's apparently what he meant.
Again with the mind-reading. Maybe people don't want to talk politics because so many people debate in bad faith and not only put words in peoples mouths, but thoughts into their heads.
There's a reason they call Twitter the hell-site. Arguments like this run the place.
Like covering all your food in a bottle of Sriracha, political Twitter can be fun at first, but eventually you're going to get sick with diarrhea and need a break. In my case, a permanent one.
I am happy to do real things for marginalized people, like vote, hire fairly, support progressive policies, etc. but exposing myself to that place does no one any good.
Ok? Then you don't have to expose yourself to it. I'm not arguing otherwise. There are many good ways to step outside one's filter bubble.
For what it's worth, though, my Twitter experience is pretty different. I follow a wide variety of people. Some of my feed is politics. A lot isn't. If you just have it show you a strict time-ranked feed and discourage it from suggesting stuff to you, you can tailor the experience quite a bit.
I just don't think anyone has to be on Twitter to learn about (for instance) bad legislation that affects marginalized people so they can oppose it. It tends to bubble up into other media sources. And nowadays, those media sources will cite the big influential tweets anyway, so it's not even like you can escape from Twitter.
It seems like you're reading the original comment as saying "I feel justified in never thinking about marginalized people and systematically preventing myself from seeing anything that might prompt that thinking"... and I think that's a really big leap to make. There are ways to be informed without exposing yourself to the firehose of everyone's random opinions and feelings, which can be a complete lose-lose proposition, damaging your own mental health and relationships without helping anyone.
In my experience running joke and pseudonymous Twitter accounts most "respectable engineers" talking about politics on Twitter are not posting about their real problems as much as trying to appeal to signal they belong to a certain culture because it's beneficial for their careers or their public image. There's a lot of exceptions of course but honestly most good engineers will probably be tweeting the interesting political stuff that really affects them from behind an account for say "Signal", "Tor", "the EFF" or whatever and not with their personal name.
I am really into politics and participate in political debate on Slack or Discord servers and private Signal or Telegram groups with an identity that can be traced back to me with zero effort almost daily or weekly. Some are bigger than others. I would never ever do it on Twitter unless I was trying to start a side-gig as a journalist or a cult-leader or whatever. Not caring about what people on Twitter say about politics is far from not caring about politics at all.
I care about my public image only so far as how I can use it to help others.
Letting everyone know this is probably really good for your public image. You sound so selfless.
It's pretty sad to realize that there are people who go through life only doing things based on how what they do will benefit their image or perception by others.
Some people have the the ability to do it subconsciously, perhaps without even realising it.
> Some people have the the ability to do it subconsciously, perhaps without even realising it.
As an LGBT latino software developer thanks for this. I was not even thinking about "diversity issue" when I wrote the the grandparent post but I'm not surprised it's the first thing that came up from a "Twitter Star".
I didn't say that, you are the only one here talking about a fight and people who need stuff so I think I'll leave you to it as you seem to be the expert. As I said I was not even thinking about issues that affect me at the workplace when I wrote that, I was more thinking about like who has to be president of what country or whatever Facebook is doing or not doing.
> Your notion is that you should be entitled not even to hear about the problems of others
Everyone believes this. There are too many people in the world to hear about all the problems. The problem with twitter is not that you hear about peoples problems, it's that you hear about too many to grok. The most political people I know are still periodically taking breaks from twitter because it's too much.
They in fact don't. Everybody does acknowledge practical limits, of course. We can't hear about everything. But that's different than wanting to live in a "happier and stress-free [...] fantasy world". Many people are actively interested in making the world better not just for themselves, but also for others.
Seriously though. When he says "ignore politics" it doesn't mean you get to live without them happening. It means you get to decide not to care. Getting the reply doesn't mean you don't get to ignore it.
Everyone gets to decide not to care. I'm in a marginalized group and temporarily suspending caring is the primary coping mechanism for the stress political fights in, around, and about the group can cause.
It's not like I'm in a warzone where every moment is a struggle at the precipice of failure. While our progress will take continued dedication that I do feel obligated to lend my time to, I can let my guard down the vast majority of the time.
