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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 m

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".

jimmaswell 7y ago
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.
- p1necone 7y ago
  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.
  - corndoge 7y ago
    Please peacefully assemble 100 feet outside of somewhere I didn't pay tens of thousands to be.
    - gaze 7y ago
      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.
      - jimmaswell 7y ago
        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.
        spamizbad 7y ago
        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?
        forgotmylogin2 7y ago
        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.
        gaze 7y ago
        The victims have already "asked nicely" for people to support their cause. Tupac explains this well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0XMJMphPT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0XMJMphPT4
      - flukus 7y ago
        > 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.
        roenxi 7y ago
        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.
      - couchand 7y ago
        "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
      - manfredo 7y ago
        > 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.
        gaze 7y ago
        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.
        manfredo 7y ago
        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.
        gaze 7y ago
        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.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - roenxi 7y ago
    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.
toasterlovin 7y ago
Or we just don’t need politics to infest every aspect of life, public and private. Voting only happens every other year.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
yesco 7y ago
Think of it another way, if we divide it purely on political party there is about a 50% chance you and the person you are speaking too are going to be different. Assuming you even are the same political party, you still are going to likely disagree about which issues that party should prioritize or even the direction the party as a whole should be going (even that is grossly simplifying the depth of the nuance). Now consider there are multiple people present, for every single person the odds of someone disagreeing and feeling alienated increases. It is more or less guaranteed that a rift in the group will come out of this, something very much undesired by the people asking you "to not bring politics into this". Finally consider you and the other person do by chance agree, using myself as an example: If I'm telling you "not to bring politics into this", it's because it's going to completely derail an otherwise productive conversation into mutual masturbation over each others ideals, something I don't have the stomach or time for.
ng12 7y ago
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.
manfredo 7y ago
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.
megla_ 7y ago
Why are the people trying to drag politics into everything always leftist? You people can drag border detaining and childrens hormone therapy into a python web framework.

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".

jimmaswell 7y ago

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.

p1necone 7y ago
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.
- corndoge 7y ago
  Please peacefully assemble 100 feet outside of somewhere I didn't pay tens of thousands to be.
  - gaze 7y ago
    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.
    - jimmaswell 7y ago
      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.
      - spamizbad 7y ago
        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?
        forgotmylogin2 7y ago
        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.
        gaze 7y ago
        The victims have already "asked nicely" for people to support their cause. Tupac explains this well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0XMJMphPT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0XMJMphPT4
    - flukus 7y ago
      > 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.
      - roenxi 7y ago
        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.
    - couchand 7y ago
      "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
    - manfredo 7y ago
      > 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.
      - gaze 7y ago
        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.
        manfredo 7y ago
        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.
        gaze 7y ago
        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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- roenxi 7y ago
  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.

toasterlovin 7y ago

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

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

yesco 7y ago

Think of it another way, if we divide it purely on political party there is about a 50% chance you and the person you are speaking too are going to be different. Assuming you even are the same political party, you still are going to likely disagree about which issues that party should prioritize or even the direction the party as a whole should be going (even that is grossly simplifying the depth of the nuance). Now consider there are multiple people present, for every single person the odds of someone disagreeing and feeling alienated increases. It is more or less guaranteed that a rift in the group will come out of this, something very much undesired by the people asking you "to not bring politics into this". Finally consider you and the other person do by chance agree, using myself as an example: If I'm telling you "not to bring politics into this", it's because it's going to completely derail an otherwise productive conversation into mutual masturbation over each others ideals, something I don't have the stomach or time for.

ng12 7y ago

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.

manfredo 7y ago

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.

megla_ 7y ago

Why are the people trying to drag politics into everything always leftist? You people can drag border detaining and childrens hormone therapy into a python web framework.