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For those of you who are inclined to say "HackerNews doesn't deal with politics", I hope that Lynn's story reminds you that any work you do is intertwined with

For those of you who are inclined to say "HackerNews doesn't deal with politics", I hope that Lynn's story reminds you that any work you do is intertwined with politics. While I appreciate that it's a difficult line to walk, to have productive and relevant political discussion in a forum like this, politics and social acceptance are a part of every aspect of our lives. Brilliant, kind, impactful people are kept from leading the life they want to lead every day because of societal intolerance for who they are. Incredible people like Lynn who have overcome that intolerance to lead a remarkable life should remind everyone of the suffering that others go through. There are uncountable other people who are not allowed to be themselves and who are suffocated in our society, with the lives of transgender people often ending in ostracisation or murder. One of the remarkable things about technology is that it enables trodden people to escape this tyranny to an extent once impossible. It enables marginalized people to be themselves in our world. Let us continue to enable that. Such "political" discussions and the impact technology has on them are an important part of the discourse here. I'm sad she is gone but I'm glad to see that this post is high up the front page. If you're inclined to denigrate transgender people, I encourage you to consider that they are trying to lead an honest life. I encourage you to consider what you're taking away from them and from the world by dehumanizing them. No matter why they are who they are.

IntelMiner 2y ago
Anybody who conflates human rights as "politics" are someone I simply cannot respect A persons right to exist is not political (This isn't a dig at OP but it's worth restating)
- marcuskane2 2y ago
  [flagged]
- nsomaru 2y ago
  Human rights are intimately woven into International Law and state sovereignty. The work of the TWAIL scholars is relevant, especially as regards how human rights are deployed to undermine the sovereignty of the global south following the rapid “decolonisation” of the mid 20th century. I’m afraid it’s almost impossible to divorce politics and human rights.
  - IntelMiner 2y ago
    Politics are intertwined in every facet of the human experience, because they're effectively the net result of a social group Some people however strive to "live above" politics, or to breathlessly demand things be "apolitical" based on their own biases. That bias in of itself being as "political" as anything else
  - vaylian 2y ago
    Politics follow ethics in democratic societies. However, our understanding of ethics is always developing. We now understand that homosexuality is ethical. We understand that transgenderism is ethical. There will be more things in the future where politics has to bow to our improved understanding of ethics. Ethics is always a foundation for democratic politics, because politics needs to govern how we as a society live together in peace.
  - BSDobelix 2y ago
    >I’m afraid it’s almost impossible to divorce politics and human rights. It is, example? Nord Korea signed it, the US and Canada just ratified it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_the_Child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_th...
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago
      > the US and Canada just ratified it Canada ratified it years ago (if we're not counting optional protocols), but according to https://indicators.ohchr.org/ https://indicators.ohchr.org/, the US hasn't. Do you have a source?
      - BSDobelix 2y ago
        https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/MTDSG/Volume%20I/Chapter%20IV/IV-11.en.pdf https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/MTDSG/Volume%20I/Cha...
        colejohnson66 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mminer237 2y ago
  > A persons right to exist is not political I don't think anyone is saying anyone else should not exist.
  - soganess 2y ago
    While I agree that everything is inescapably political, I think the subtext of quoted comment was not just exist as in "be alive", but exist as in "be alive with dignity + autonomy". Which (going by the wiki on Lynn) was clearly a strong point of contention / friction between them and greater society. The Alan Turing comparison springs to mind.
- docmars 2y ago
  I think an important distinction people are looking for is: It's not the mere existence of a person that's an issue, but rather the coercive, punishing activism that takes place around a false idea that human rights are at risk, while these personal choices are simultaneously being celebrated by nearly every government institution and major corporation in existence. The same activism requires full acceptance by parents, families, and children who do not want these choices influencing their personal lives. To say these rights are at risk is an outright lie. It's one thing to have a significant voter base opposed to those choices and still be fully able to live and express those choices freely and publicly — while it's a whole different issue to have governments actively enforcing a different private life against their will (specifically LGBTQ folks). (Edits: re-word for clarification)
  - polairscience 2y ago
    While I agree that institutions and corporations are more actively participating in human rights issues in the recent past, something I think is a really good thing, I don't see the aspects of that coverage that are coercive or punishing. Your argument disingenuous on two points: 1) Nowhere, in history, does "government actively enforcing a different private life against one's will" mean "you are forced to live or participate in a transgender life". For the entirety of history government and corporations have actively forced "different" people like Lynn to conform to your expectations of them. See Lynn being fired from IBM. 2) "To say they are at risk is an outright lie". The rhetoric and social norms around the existence of transgender people enables violent people to murder them. They are absolutely actively at risk. What other phrase, besides "at risk", would you use to explain that transgender people are 4 times more likely to be murdered. They are literally killed for being different and because we dehumanize them. I look forward to the day that what you say is true. That there are people who oppose those choices but that transgender people can live a free and public life without being murdered for being themselves. I think what you're putting forward sounds great.
    - docmars 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > A persons right to exist is not political It is, both in the literal sense of political as “relating to government or public affairs”, and also quite often in the frequently used sense of “controversial between political parties or factions”. The fact that your political view is that it should not be political (in presumably the latter sense) does not change the fact that it often factually is.
- Bostonian 2y ago
  Thirty years almost everyone believed that a person's sex is determined at conception and is immutable, and most people on earth probably still believe that today.
  - polairscience 2y ago
    You're using the word sex. There is a known, massively complex, relationship between sex and gender but it's not 1:1. For anyone. Or, if you think that's not true, then please describe to me how they're identical. In a group of men, in any place in the world, you'll find wildly varying accounts of what the male gender "is" all the way down to how their bodies should look. And, gender aside, the most important thing to consider is the existence of intersex people, the diaspora of their bodies, and to consider how you think we should talk about them. Sex is, even outside gender, in fact not immutable. It's biology. These people are also historically denigrated. Please imagine how ~150 years ago we collectively thought (and some people still think) that a person's race determined their intelligence. Historically "fundamental truths" usually end up with people being thought of as subhuman. The "fundamental truth" of sex, as it's presented by those who consider trans folks not people, is the same sort of truth. Biological sex is a spectrum, demonstrably. Gender is also demonstrably a spectrum. I don't care what people believe sex is or isn't. I care that we treat everyone, no matter how "weird" with respect.
    - umvi 2y ago
      > There is a known, massively complex, relationship between sex and gender but it's not 1:1 You could argue though that it's only complex because we (collectively) decided to complicate it in order to accommodate the preferences of small subsets of society. In some other country, society might collectively decide not to accommodate said wishes and instead treat sex and gender as immutable and indistinguishable. Such a course would result in a simpler classification system: XX = female, XY = male, anything else = unclassified (genetic defect handled on a case-by-case basis).
      - altairprime 2y ago
        The classification you've described is not valid for use with Homo sapiens, neither today nor in the future. It's based on the assumption that our genes control our organs, when they're merely a weighted suggestion at best. And, the Y chromosome is gradually withering away in humankind and is expected to disappear someday. Human beings can develop fertile male reproductive organs without it (see below), and evolution abhors exceptions that have no benefit and many drawbacks (such as colorblindness). > a simpler classification system: XX = female, XY = male This would, as with all other such systems that refer to X/Y chromosomes, be invalidated immediately upon contact with reality. I estimate that a couple million people worldwide have one set of fertile reproductive organs that do not match the binary view described – that is: men without, and women with, a Y chromosome. > it's only complex because we (collectively) decided to complicate it in order to accommodate the preferences of small subsets of society None of these people selected a "preference" at birth, and may go their entire lives and have children without ever realizing that their chromosomes and their reproductive organs do not match the XX/XY binary you've presented. > anything else = unclassified (genetic defect handled on a case-by-case basis) This would mislabel XXX, XXY, XYY people as "defects" for genetic circumstances that do not necessarily have any visible presentation, that people may not be aware of at all. It also mislabel some, but not all, intersex people as "defects". Intersex people span the entire spectrum of known chromosome combinations in human beings: Human bodies produce one or more sets of (often) fertile reproductive equipment regardless of what chromosomes are or are not present. Ironically, then, focusing on XX/XY classifications while disregarding the realities of human biology always results in an invalid classification system that is more likely to harm cis people than intersex people.
- demosthanos 2y ago
  It's a lot more complicated than that. What constitutes a human right is deeply tied up in questions of ethics that are not settled and have no universal acceptance even within a single culture. Any given person will have deep feelings about the human rights that their ethical framework demands, but those deep feelings will often contradict the deeply held feelings of other people. This means that which ethical framework we as a society use to decide what counts as a human right is an inherently political question: it's a decision that we try to make as a society in as nonviolent a manner as possible. And before we get too far off the deep end, I want to note that both sides of the aisle firmly believe that the other side ignores fundamental human rights that their side respects. This is what happens when good people operate with completely opposite ethical frameworks, and we won't get anywhere by just shouting that our framework is the only valid one.
- umvi 2y ago
  > A persons right to exist is not political I don't think anyone disagrees with that, I think the disagreement comes from the way that activists insist that the best solution for treating [gender dysphoria, etc] is to "socially and heavy handedly force everyone to complete the illusion by treating transgender individuals as indistinguishable from their biological counterparts in every way". That's not the only solution for treating [gender dysphoria, etc], just the current (and perhaps uniquely) American one, and it comes with a variety of problems the obvious of which stem from significant biological factors that make the illusion impossible to complete (sports, etc).
  - yawpitch 2y ago
    > sports, etc Just going to keep pointing out that human beings have very little sexual dimorphism compared to the other great apes, and that any difference is any sport that does not actually employ the genitals is probably more down to food access and/or training disparities than actual “significant” biological factors.
    - InitialLastName 2y ago
      > probably more down to food access and/or training disparities than actual “significant” biological factors. I'm not really going to defend the other side here because sports are (by definition) fundamentally arbitrary, but is this really borne out by reality? To use an easy comparison, elite adult womens' track and field athletes might be competitive against high school boys, but not at any higher level. Compare, for example, the international womens' records [0] to the records from this random high school nationals track meet [1]. What food access and/or training advantage are high school kids going to have over the most capable athletes in their sport? [0] https://trackandfieldnews.com/records/womens-world-records/ https://trackandfieldnews.com/records/womens-world-records/ [1] https://nbnationalsout.com/results-and-records https://nbnationalsout.com/results-and-records
      - yawpitch 2y ago
        You’re asking the wrong question… what we’d need to do is take a girl with the same height and muscle mass as a boy and give them both the diet and training (and societal and economic incentives and rewards) of a Usain Bolt from birth, then look for sexual dimorphism’s effect on their sports performance. Looking for support for your confirmation bias in stats that already are influenced by thousands of years of your confirmation bias doesn’t exactly make decent scientific inquiry. Again, when compared with the other great apes (never mind less closely related primates) we humans have relatively minimal sexual dimorphism, and no obvious biological reason to simply assume that two adult peers that had the same dietary and exercise and skills training regimes would have vastly different athletic performance characteristics, especially across a wide range of sports.
- throwaway984393 2y ago
  [dead]
- belorn 2y ago
  A persons right to exist is not political. There are however a bunch of things which is political like: Laws governing universal health care, laws governing minors rights to make decisions as minors, laws that makes distinctions between genders, cultural norms around bathrooms (which is mostly a stupid cost-cutting measure), and norms around cultural sports (which are fairly arbitrary). Out of those, the first two should likely remain being political, while the two last ones should be resolved, and the middle one should just not exist.
nh23423fefe 2y ago
But its still completely orthogonal. I don't see how "the work [I] do" ... "enables trodden people to escape this tyranny" Everything isn't politics and its ok to have a space where arguments about identity and politics aren't constantly surfaced.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
> any work you do is intertwined with politics. That simply is not true. Apolitical topics do exist, and it is incredibly annoying when people try to force politics into an apolitical topic (looking at you, Rust community).
- moomin 2y ago
  I mean, treating people with a modicum of respect shouldn’t be a political position, and it’s hardly the Rust community’s fault that it is.
  - skeeter2020 2y ago
    no kidding - even if politics exist in the subject you are always free to not accept it and rise above.
- bowsamic 2y ago
  Can you give an example of an apolitical topic? EDIT: unfortunately I can’t reply to the comments as I have been banned EDIT 2: I have been banned to reply to the commenter, dang told me EDIT 3: dang has now wiped all the upvotes on this message and given me 2 extra downvotes and suddenly another comment I made mentioning him in a totally different thread has been mass downvoted
  - dpkirchner 2y ago
    There isn't one. It's the very nature of politics that it affects everything we humans do.
  - analognoise 2y ago
    Almost everything can be discussed in an apolitical way - you just don’t talk politics. It isn’t a logic puzzle.
    - bowsamic 2y ago
      Yes you can decide not to mention the politics inherent in the thing but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. I’m wondering if the person I’m replying to can produce a thing where it truly isn’t there
PartiallyTyped 2y ago
I don't think it's feasible to separate technology from the people themselves. What we do, in some way or the other touches people, real people, people with feelings, dreams and aspirations. To ignore where such contributions to humanity come from, is to ignore a person's existence, their struggles and what makes them, well, them. I recently stumbled on [1], > I’m on the board overseeing Linux graphics. Half of us are trans. which is a reminder that so many years later, the same issues, vitriol and discrimination that Lynn dealt with still plague us. What are we, if we can not show empathy to people who struggle with something as fundamental as their gender identity? Who are we to deny them the life they want to lead every day? Who are we to dehumanize others? [1] https://rosenzweig.io/blog/growing-up-alyssa.html https://rosenzweig.io/blog/growing-up-alyssa.html
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
skeeter2020 2y ago
I didn't know much about Conway but read the wikipedia page after seeing this post. My take-away was the thing to celebrate was that someone could accomplish so much & have such a meaningful impact despite the politics and environment - wow! These contributions stand on their own regardless of how/when or where they were accomplished. This is an amazing piece of evidence in support of equality in origin and opportunity.
poszlem 2y ago
"Any work you do is intertwined with politics." This thought-terminating cliché is bafflingly popular on HN. It's a classic example of the motte-and-bailey fallacy, where the strong claim (the motte) is "everything is political," and the strong claim is "therefore, it's okay to bring politics into everything." (the bailey). Sure, you can MAKE anything appear political, but not everything is intertwined with politics. Many activities are driven purely by personal interest, scientific curiosity, or artistic expression, without any direct political implications.

IntelMiner 2y ago

Anybody who conflates human rights as "politics" are someone I simply cannot respect A persons right to exist is not political (This isn't a dig at OP but it's worth restating)

marcuskane2 2y ago
[flagged]
nsomaru 2y ago
Human rights are intimately woven into International Law and state sovereignty. The work of the TWAIL scholars is relevant, especially as regards how human rights are deployed to undermine the sovereignty of the global south following the rapid “decolonisation” of the mid 20th century. I’m afraid it’s almost impossible to divorce politics and human rights.
- IntelMiner 2y ago
  Politics are intertwined in every facet of the human experience, because they're effectively the net result of a social group Some people however strive to "live above" politics, or to breathlessly demand things be "apolitical" based on their own biases. That bias in of itself being as "political" as anything else
- vaylian 2y ago
  Politics follow ethics in democratic societies. However, our understanding of ethics is always developing. We now understand that homosexuality is ethical. We understand that transgenderism is ethical. There will be more things in the future where politics has to bow to our improved understanding of ethics. Ethics is always a foundation for democratic politics, because politics needs to govern how we as a society live together in peace.
- BSDobelix 2y ago
  >I’m afraid it’s almost impossible to divorce politics and human rights. It is, example? Nord Korea signed it, the US and Canada just ratified it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_the_Child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_th...
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    > the US and Canada just ratified it Canada ratified it years ago (if we're not counting optional protocols), but according to https://indicators.ohchr.org/ https://indicators.ohchr.org/, the US hasn't. Do you have a source?
    - BSDobelix 2y ago
      https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/MTDSG/Volume%20I/Chapter%20IV/IV-11.en.pdf https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/MTDSG/Volume%20I/Cha...
      - colejohnson66 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mminer237 2y ago
> A persons right to exist is not political I don't think anyone is saying anyone else should not exist.
- soganess 2y ago
  While I agree that everything is inescapably political, I think the subtext of quoted comment was not just exist as in "be alive", but exist as in "be alive with dignity + autonomy". Which (going by the wiki on Lynn) was clearly a strong point of contention / friction between them and greater society. The Alan Turing comparison springs to mind.
docmars 2y ago
I think an important distinction people are looking for is: It's not the mere existence of a person that's an issue, but rather the coercive, punishing activism that takes place around a false idea that human rights are at risk, while these personal choices are simultaneously being celebrated by nearly every government institution and major corporation in existence. The same activism requires full acceptance by parents, families, and children who do not want these choices influencing their personal lives. To say these rights are at risk is an outright lie. It's one thing to have a significant voter base opposed to those choices and still be fully able to live and express those choices freely and publicly — while it's a whole different issue to have governments actively enforcing a different private life against their will (specifically LGBTQ folks). (Edits: re-word for clarification)
- polairscience 2y ago
  While I agree that institutions and corporations are more actively participating in human rights issues in the recent past, something I think is a really good thing, I don't see the aspects of that coverage that are coercive or punishing. Your argument disingenuous on two points: 1) Nowhere, in history, does "government actively enforcing a different private life against one's will" mean "you are forced to live or participate in a transgender life". For the entirety of history government and corporations have actively forced "different" people like Lynn to conform to your expectations of them. See Lynn being fired from IBM. 2) "To say they are at risk is an outright lie". The rhetoric and social norms around the existence of transgender people enables violent people to murder them. They are absolutely actively at risk. What other phrase, besides "at risk", would you use to explain that transgender people are 4 times more likely to be murdered. They are literally killed for being different and because we dehumanize them. I look forward to the day that what you say is true. That there are people who oppose those choices but that transgender people can live a free and public life without being murdered for being themselves. I think what you're putting forward sounds great.
  - docmars 2y ago
    [flagged]
- 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter 2y ago
> A persons right to exist is not political It is, both in the literal sense of political as “relating to government or public affairs”, and also quite often in the frequently used sense of “controversial between political parties or factions”. The fact that your political view is that it should not be political (in presumably the latter sense) does not change the fact that it often factually is.
Bostonian 2y ago
Thirty years almost everyone believed that a person's sex is determined at conception and is immutable, and most people on earth probably still believe that today.
- polairscience 2y ago
  You're using the word sex. There is a known, massively complex, relationship between sex and gender but it's not 1:1. For anyone. Or, if you think that's not true, then please describe to me how they're identical. In a group of men, in any place in the world, you'll find wildly varying accounts of what the male gender "is" all the way down to how their bodies should look. And, gender aside, the most important thing to consider is the existence of intersex people, the diaspora of their bodies, and to consider how you think we should talk about them. Sex is, even outside gender, in fact not immutable. It's biology. These people are also historically denigrated. Please imagine how ~150 years ago we collectively thought (and some people still think) that a person's race determined their intelligence. Historically "fundamental truths" usually end up with people being thought of as subhuman. The "fundamental truth" of sex, as it's presented by those who consider trans folks not people, is the same sort of truth. Biological sex is a spectrum, demonstrably. Gender is also demonstrably a spectrum. I don't care what people believe sex is or isn't. I care that we treat everyone, no matter how "weird" with respect.
  - umvi 2y ago
    > There is a known, massively complex, relationship between sex and gender but it's not 1:1 You could argue though that it's only complex because we (collectively) decided to complicate it in order to accommodate the preferences of small subsets of society. In some other country, society might collectively decide not to accommodate said wishes and instead treat sex and gender as immutable and indistinguishable. Such a course would result in a simpler classification system: XX = female, XY = male, anything else = unclassified (genetic defect handled on a case-by-case basis).
    - altairprime 2y ago
      The classification you've described is not valid for use with Homo sapiens, neither today nor in the future. It's based on the assumption that our genes control our organs, when they're merely a weighted suggestion at best. And, the Y chromosome is gradually withering away in humankind and is expected to disappear someday. Human beings can develop fertile male reproductive organs without it (see below), and evolution abhors exceptions that have no benefit and many drawbacks (such as colorblindness). > a simpler classification system: XX = female, XY = male This would, as with all other such systems that refer to X/Y chromosomes, be invalidated immediately upon contact with reality. I estimate that a couple million people worldwide have one set of fertile reproductive organs that do not match the binary view described – that is: men without, and women with, a Y chromosome. > it's only complex because we (collectively) decided to complicate it in order to accommodate the preferences of small subsets of society None of these people selected a "preference" at birth, and may go their entire lives and have children without ever realizing that their chromosomes and their reproductive organs do not match the XX/XY binary you've presented. > anything else = unclassified (genetic defect handled on a case-by-case basis) This would mislabel XXX, XXY, XYY people as "defects" for genetic circumstances that do not necessarily have any visible presentation, that people may not be aware of at all. It also mislabel some, but not all, intersex people as "defects". Intersex people span the entire spectrum of known chromosome combinations in human beings: Human bodies produce one or more sets of (often) fertile reproductive equipment regardless of what chromosomes are or are not present. Ironically, then, focusing on XX/XY classifications while disregarding the realities of human biology always results in an invalid classification system that is more likely to harm cis people than intersex people.
demosthanos 2y ago
It's a lot more complicated than that. What constitutes a human right is deeply tied up in questions of ethics that are not settled and have no universal acceptance even within a single culture. Any given person will have deep feelings about the human rights that their ethical framework demands, but those deep feelings will often contradict the deeply held feelings of other people. This means that which ethical framework we as a society use to decide what counts as a human right is an inherently political question: it's a decision that we try to make as a society in as nonviolent a manner as possible. And before we get too far off the deep end, I want to note that both sides of the aisle firmly believe that the other side ignores fundamental human rights that their side respects. This is what happens when good people operate with completely opposite ethical frameworks, and we won't get anywhere by just shouting that our framework is the only valid one.
umvi 2y ago
> A persons right to exist is not political I don't think anyone disagrees with that, I think the disagreement comes from the way that activists insist that the best solution for treating [gender dysphoria, etc] is to "socially and heavy handedly force everyone to complete the illusion by treating transgender individuals as indistinguishable from their biological counterparts in every way". That's not the only solution for treating [gender dysphoria, etc], just the current (and perhaps uniquely) American one, and it comes with a variety of problems the obvious of which stem from significant biological factors that make the illusion impossible to complete (sports, etc).
- yawpitch 2y ago
  > sports, etc Just going to keep pointing out that human beings have very little sexual dimorphism compared to the other great apes, and that any difference is any sport that does not actually employ the genitals is probably more down to food access and/or training disparities than actual “significant” biological factors.
  - InitialLastName 2y ago
    > probably more down to food access and/or training disparities than actual “significant” biological factors. I'm not really going to defend the other side here because sports are (by definition) fundamentally arbitrary, but is this really borne out by reality? To use an easy comparison, elite adult womens' track and field athletes might be competitive against high school boys, but not at any higher level. Compare, for example, the international womens' records [0] to the records from this random high school nationals track meet [1]. What food access and/or training advantage are high school kids going to have over the most capable athletes in their sport? [0] https://trackandfieldnews.com/records/womens-world-records/ https://trackandfieldnews.com/records/womens-world-records/ [1] https://nbnationalsout.com/results-and-records https://nbnationalsout.com/results-and-records
    - yawpitch 2y ago
      You’re asking the wrong question… what we’d need to do is take a girl with the same height and muscle mass as a boy and give them both the diet and training (and societal and economic incentives and rewards) of a Usain Bolt from birth, then look for sexual dimorphism’s effect on their sports performance. Looking for support for your confirmation bias in stats that already are influenced by thousands of years of your confirmation bias doesn’t exactly make decent scientific inquiry. Again, when compared with the other great apes (never mind less closely related primates) we humans have relatively minimal sexual dimorphism, and no obvious biological reason to simply assume that two adult peers that had the same dietary and exercise and skills training regimes would have vastly different athletic performance characteristics, especially across a wide range of sports.
throwaway984393 2y ago
[dead]
belorn 2y ago
A persons right to exist is not political. There are however a bunch of things which is political like: Laws governing universal health care, laws governing minors rights to make decisions as minors, laws that makes distinctions between genders, cultural norms around bathrooms (which is mostly a stupid cost-cutting measure), and norms around cultural sports (which are fairly arbitrary). Out of those, the first two should likely remain being political, while the two last ones should be resolved, and the middle one should just not exist.

nh23423fefe 2y ago

But its still completely orthogonal. I don't see how "the work [I] do" ... "enables trodden people to escape this tyranny" Everything isn't politics and its ok to have a space where arguments about identity and politics aren't constantly surfaced.

bigstrat2003 2y ago

> any work you do is intertwined with politics. That simply is not true. Apolitical topics do exist, and it is incredibly annoying when people try to force politics into an apolitical topic (looking at you, Rust community).

moomin 2y ago
I mean, treating people with a modicum of respect shouldn’t be a political position, and it’s hardly the Rust community’s fault that it is.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  no kidding - even if politics exist in the subject you are always free to not accept it and rise above.
bowsamic 2y ago
Can you give an example of an apolitical topic? EDIT: unfortunately I can’t reply to the comments as I have been banned EDIT 2: I have been banned to reply to the commenter, dang told me EDIT 3: dang has now wiped all the upvotes on this message and given me 2 extra downvotes and suddenly another comment I made mentioning him in a totally different thread has been mass downvoted
- dpkirchner 2y ago
  There isn't one. It's the very nature of politics that it affects everything we humans do.
- analognoise 2y ago
  Almost everything can be discussed in an apolitical way - you just don’t talk politics. It isn’t a logic puzzle.
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    Yes you can decide not to mention the politics inherent in the thing but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. I’m wondering if the person I’m replying to can produce a thing where it truly isn’t there

PartiallyTyped 2y ago

I don't think it's feasible to separate technology from the people themselves. What we do, in some way or the other touches people, real people, people with feelings, dreams and aspirations. To ignore where such contributions to humanity come from, is to ignore a person's existence, their struggles and what makes them, well, them. I recently stumbled on [1], > I’m on the board overseeing Linux graphics. Half of us are trans. which is a reminder that so many years later, the same issues, vitriol and discrimination that Lynn dealt with still plague us. What are we, if we can not show empathy to people who struggle with something as fundamental as their gender identity? Who are we to deny them the life they want to lead every day? Who are we to dehumanize others? [1] https://rosenzweig.io/blog/growing-up-alyssa.html https://rosenzweig.io/blog/growing-up-alyssa.html

deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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skeeter2020 2y ago

I didn't know much about Conway but read the wikipedia page after seeing this post. My take-away was the thing to celebrate was that someone could accomplish so much & have such a meaningful impact despite the politics and environment - wow! These contributions stand on their own regardless of how/when or where they were accomplished. This is an amazing piece of evidence in support of equality in origin and opportunity.

poszlem 2y ago

"Any work you do is intertwined with politics." This thought-terminating cliché is bafflingly popular on HN. It's a classic example of the motte-and-bailey fallacy, where the strong claim (the motte) is "everything is political," and the strong claim is "therefore, it's okay to bring politics into everything." (the bailey). Sure, you can MAKE anything appear political, but not everything is intertwined with politics. Many activities are driven purely by personal interest, scientific curiosity, or artistic expression, without any direct political implications.