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Everything you do is implicitly political. To say you're non-political is just another political position itself - complicity with the status quo.
by malermeister 5y ago
Everything you do is implicitly political. To say you're non-political is just another political position itself - complicity with the status quo.
- disneygibson 5y agoWithout food, you can’t survive, therefore everything is implicitly about food. This line of thought is absurd. Words have definitions and boundaries for a reason.
- ygaitonde 5y ago> Without food, you can’t survive, therefore everything is implicitly about food. This, but unironically.
- mechanical_bear 5y agoHard disagree. Sometimes being apolitical is just a desire to not get involved and has nothing to do with supporting status quo.
- malermeister 5y agoNot getting involved always means at least tacitly supporting the status quo. To think otherwise is just an expression of privilege. There is no being apolitical.
- fleddr 5y agoNonsense. Silence means just that, silence. It could mean anything: I don't know. I don't care. I might care but don't have time to look into it. I care but it's not in my top 10 issues. None of these options support the status quo.
- ABeeSea 5y agoI doubt quoting MLK will change your mind, but considering what the Black community in America went through for 100’s of years; it’s worth consideration… >Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. >Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. >The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict. >The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. >The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people. >We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. >Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one’s soul. >Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. >The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” >In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. >He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. >History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. >Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
- fleddr 5y agoChange my mind about what? I was merely explaining how you can't draw strong conclusions based on silence. But I do love MLK quotes: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
- woodruffw 5y agoIt occurs to me that the content of one's character includes one's propensity for not being silent!
- BitwiseFool 5y ago>"just another political position itself - complicity with the status quo." / "To think otherwise is just an expression of privilege. There is no being apolitical." The challenge I have with this line of thinking is that you can literally apply it to any and all issues. The number of problems in the world are effectively infinite but our ability to take a meaningful position is finite and extremely limited. The default state of being is to not have taken a position on something. To insinuate that someone is privileged for not getting involved is a cudgel and a guilt-tripping tool being used against someone who doesn't share the same priorities as you do. It strikes me as "if you're not with us, you're against us", a sentiment that used to be loathed in the early 2000's but is now accepted and expected.
- tshaddox 5y ago> The challenge I have with this line of thinking is that you can literally apply it to any and all issues. That's not a challenge to this line of thinking, it's just another way of wording the exact same thing.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoI suppose I could have said "The problem I have with..." instead.
- joshuamorton 5y agoI mean yes and no. Yes there are infinite problems and there will always be worse of people who I could do things for. Guilt tripping someone into addressing all of them is unprodictive. On the other hand, the fact that I can choose which struggles I engage with, and am able to avoid ones I don't want to involve myself in is absolutely a privilege. Someone who may need an abortion may not be able to avoid caring about that issue. Someone less economically secure may not be able to avoid worrying about unemployment or healthcare policy. There's countless similar examples. You can absolutely acknowledge that you don't have the spoons/time/interest to deeply invest yourself in every social cause or issue. But you should also recognize that there are tons of people who also don't have the spoons/time/interest either, but have to anyway because the issue affects them and they can't afford to ignore it either.
- Jensson 5y agoAlways making things about politics is sign of a privilege, unprivileged people don't have the time and energy to constantly care about politics. You can see this that the more privileged you are the more likely you are to vote, to petition and engage yourself etc.
- mechanical_bear 5y agoMaybe I don’t have the privilege of time/resources/position to get involved. I have to keep my head down and GSD, not looking to rock the boat, endanger my position, or forgo income by spending time on such issues.
- fleddr 5y agoWhilst technically correct, I still object. Many if not most things aren't political in a meaningful way, but surely you can make them political. This is how you get "water is racist" and the entire movement of social justice becomes a thing of ridicule. The strategy harms, it doesn't help.
- malermeister 5y agoHow about this: Every economic interaction (which includes employment) is political. Would you agree with this?
- imtringued 5y agoTake one step back. The interaction might not be political in itself but the desire to be able to engage in it might be. As others said, buying a lawn mower isn't political. Demanding that the product you are buying is safe and that economic transactions are done with USD or Bitcoin is definitively political.
- fleddr 5y agoNo, not at all.
- emsy 5y agoI will think about it the next time I buy an old lawnmower on craigslist.
- ABeeSea 5y agoI hope you properly paid sales tax on that purchase, if required, as the political system in many US states requires you to.
- emsy 5y agoIf I take a dump I have to ensure to dispose it properly, because the fecal disposal is tightly regulated by many states, therefore taking a dump is a political issue.
- mattparcens 5y agoThe status quo is not necessarily a bad thing, for instance if you have a lot of activist coworkers who want to "burn the system to the ground," then I, for one, become a huge supporter of the status quo. One must remember that things can always get worse. Just because there exist concrete problems in society does not mean that you, or activist coworkers get to assume that you're/they're automatically right nor that you/they have workable solutions.
- jakelazaroff 5y agoBrian Armstrong has literally said he has a plan for Bitcoin to surpass the dollar as a reserve currency within the next decade [1]. That, to me, is an activist who wants to “burn the system to the ground”. [1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/coinbase-ceo-bitcoin-surpass-dollar-reserve-currency-within-15-years-1512429 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/coinbase-ceo-bitcoin-surpass-dolla...
- imtringued 5y agoIt doesn't make sense because the whole idea of having a reserve currency is stupid to begin with and it was discovered to be stupid in the 40s.
- asabjorn 5y agoDo you by complicity [1] mean the critical social justice concept that all white (or people that believe in classical liberal culture) people are complicit in the maintenance and harms of systemic racism (stopping a perfect equity utopia) and white supremacy (continuation of individualistic western liberalism, instead of collectivist group-based critical social justice)? [1] https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-complicity/ https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-complicity/ Edit: changed terminology from "classical white" to "classical liberal" culture. It diverges from critical social justice dogma by doing this, making my attempt at communicating with a Critical Social Justice adherent less in their language, but is hopefully clearer.
- ABeeSea 5y agoWhat is “classical white culture?” I’m not aware of any global culture associated with skin color. But feel free to enlighten me.
- Jensson 5y agoUSA has this strange notion where they group people by skin color and call that race and assume same skin color has same culture.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> USA has this strange notion where they group people by skin color and call that race No, we don’t. (There's two races where one of the common, not-generally-offensive names for each refers to a color, but people identified and identifying with each of those races have a wide range of skin colors, overlapping with those of most other races in both cases.) > and assume same skin color has same culture. No, we generally don’t.
- asabjorn 5y ago>> USA has this strange notion where they group people by skin color and call that race >No, we don’t. (There's two races where one of the common, not-generally-offensive names for each refers to a color, but people identified and identifying with each of those races have a wide range of skin colors, overlapping with those of most other races in both cases.) Correct, most people do not believe that skin color define them or their neighbor. The notion also generally does not make much sense, as Americans are incredibly racially mixed. However, a very aggressive and powerful minority that believe in critical social justice are enforcing racial stereotypes. To say you are defined by race is a bit like saying you are defined by nose size. It is an arbitrary trait amongst many. >> and assume same skin color has same culture. >No, we generally don’t. That is the Coinbase CEOs experience. People generally falsify preferences in public in order to not offend any Critical Social Justice activist that may ruin their life for saying the wrong thing. However, generally Americans are friendly and welcoming people that just want to live a good simple family life next to good neighbors of any creed.
- azornathogron 5y agoWhen I go for a walk with a friend, is that political? When I play a puzzle game on my computer? When I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? When I cook dinner? I suggest that there is much activity in life that is not political.
- tshaddox 5y agoI think it's pretty clear that when people say "everything is political" the "everything" is scoped specifically to scenarios where there is a decision to make and people disagree on how to make that decision. When someone says something like "meat is political" I don't think they mean that the physical substance on the dinner plate has this property, but rather that there are decisions to make that directly involve meat which people disagree about, and that politics is the (or at least one of the) processes by which decisions get made by groups of people when individuals in the group disagree.
- azornathogron 5y agoIt's not at all clear to me. What's the point in saying "everything is X" if you implicitly mean "everything is X except all the things that obviously aren't X"? If we all agreed on what was not political then no one would need to argue that "everything is political" in the first place, so if you want to have any interesting discussion at all then you need to actually say something about where the boundary is between political and non-political. Because it's that boundary that's contentious and might actually lead to some insight when discussed freely. The statement "meat is political" is a different case, because it is specific. It doesn't rely on an implicit clause that hides the actual concept of interest.
- tshaddox 5y agoIt’s just how people talk. They’re not making a universal quantification in first-order logic. If you ask someone what kind of food they want for dinner and they say “I like everything” you don’t conclude that they like genocide.
- imtringued 5y agoI agree, a lot of free market arguments just boil down to maintaining an imagined status quo. What I take issue with is that the real status quo is an unspoken rule that everyone understands but nobody ever talks about. Most of it boils down to appeal to nature in the form of "the strong rule over the weak" and actual freedom for all people is basically irrelevant.
- staysafeanon 5y ago>complicity with the status quo. This is a non-argument because "status quo" can be construed as anything and everything. It boils down to "you're either with us or against us." "If you don't actively support my pet cause on women's rights to own hand guns in California, it means you support the status quo. You support women being murdered and victimized without any recourse because you want to disarm them when they need guns the most! Supporting the status quo on gun rights is supporting women victimization!"