1. relating to the government or public affairs of a country.
Not the one the parent probably means:
2. (DEROGATORY) done or acting in the interests of status or power within an organization rather than as a matter of principle.
Whatever a company does, it relates in some way to the public affairs of a country.
Either in what you offer, or what you need to produce your offer. Your company is hopefully affecting the public affairs of your country in more than one way.
And that I think had very much a place at work.
The delineation between public affair and private matter seems to be quite arbitrary at times.
I would say abortion is a private matter, or who you marry or which combination of sex chromosomes you have, but all those things are very high on the list of things being discussed.
Here I have to say, I'm more likely to give the point, that those topics are not professionally relevant, but neither is sports.
It's safe to say that a company can impact the public affairs of a country by creating economic value without taking an official speculative stance on e.g. the racial distribution of unjust police killings. It's pretty obvious to me when people talk about "leaving political topics out of the workplace" they mean "topics which are unrelated to one's work".
Arguments like "abortion is highly related to site reliability engineering" are pretty overtly disingenuous in a very clear-cut fashion.
> Here I have to say, I'm more likely to give the point, that those topics are not professionally relevant, but neither is sports.
Sports don't cause the same degree of strife in the workplace. No one is demanding anyone's termination because they like a different sports team or because they were caught in a photograph gesturing in a way that looks vaguely like the hook 'em horns gesture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hook_%27em_Horns).
Even deciding what is political or not is political. If you try to limit the definition to something putatively objective like "directly relating to the function of government agencies" a great many topics are immediately ambiguous: institutionalized racism? marriage? the environment? the economy?
> Even deciding what is political or not is political
No, the distinction is not whether somebody _decides_ if a topic is political or not, but that the conversations' intension is to convert the other party that your point of view is correct for society. I.e., you have to undertake political activism towards something for the topic to be political.
It's like religion as a topic of conversation, vs religious conversion. Two people can be talking about religion, but if neither is trying to "convert" the other, then this is not a religious conversion.
But if one party is talking with the intent to convert the other party to said religion, then it's a religious conversion. And the argument is that this should not happen in the workplace.
That's totally fair, I hadn't considered it from that perspective. In my mind politics are things like the tax rate. So a social issue could never be political.
To me, "everything is political" is a bumper sticker version of the assertion that what is and isn't "political" in the sense of "political statement" is often way more subjective than we sometimes recognize it is.
If a coworker talks about his husband, is that a political statement? To some people, absolutely, right?
How about someone mentioning a concert that they've gone to, for an artist that's outspokenly political one way or another? Just a concert, right?
What about talking about a great movie or TV show, if those are, I don't know, "Sorry to Bother You" or "Lovecraft Country"?
Can you mention that you went to a gun show, or a shooting range?
Can you recommend a Jordan Peterson book?
Can you put an NRA logo on your car?
What about a BLM logo?
What about on your T-shirt?
If a coworker goes through a gender transition, how does that get handled in a way that everyone, across the board, considers apolitical? Good luck with that: the very act of transitioning is, to a significant portion of the population, itself political.
So, I mean, sure, not literally everything is political, but if you give the statement a bit more of a generous reading than "Come on, are you saying ice cream is political? Harrumph!", you can see the point being made.
To me, the deciding criteria is the intent of the person undertaking said action. Are they taking an action to express their allegiance to a political movement? Are they taking action to attempt to convince/recruit people to a cause they believe in?
Or are they taking action not for such purposes? For example, a gay person talking about their spouse to a colleague without the intent to change any political beliefs of anyone around them?
Do you believe end to end encryption is political? Do you believe that companies should disable E2E encryption in order to be "apolitical" in the eyes US's attorney general?
How do you believe Coinbase, a cryptocurrency corporation, will remain "a political" in the design of their systems given the changing political climate around crypto? Does that just mean bowing down to whatever the administration says? Do you believe Coinbase will remain "apolitical" is the US begins to enact policy that causes Coinbase users to find alternatives?
Do you believe Coinbase employees will have no opinion on the way the justice department handles cryptocurrency?
But you're deliberately avoiding the point that coinbase wants to make - which is that if the topic is relevant to the business (as determined by the owners of the business), then it's considered on-topic for work place political discussion and activism.
But if it's unrelated to the business, then the business is no place to undertake such activism.
> I'm curious what your definition of political is, because my gut feeling is that (Almost) nothing is political.
Politics is more than just the rituals of government officials or what gets written about in the politics section of the newspaper:
> Politics (from Greek: Πολιτικά, politiká, 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics)
For instance, this effort to create an "apolitical workplace" could probably be understood as political project to stamp out elements of bottom-up democratic political culture in favor of a more autocratic political culture. At work we keep our heads down and follow the edicts (mission) of our leaders.
This does seem to be the standard Libertarian worldview, but no matter how much you intend to ignore the world around you, it exists and you're a part of it, and you answer to your neighbors.
> This does seem to be the standard Libertarian worldview, but no matter how much you intend to ignore the world around you, it exists and you're a part of it, and you answer to your neighbors.
One clever way to deeply entrench a political decision is to convince others that it's not a political decision at all. If you're successful, you've erected a barrier against your opponents by interfering with their ability to even conceive opposition to your position. It's sort of like the concept of Newspeak.
The opposite strategy is to talk about politics constantly, so that it's painfully obvious who's in the minority.
Which is better for a gay man in Saudi Arabia? A company where people only talk about work, or a company where everybody is expected to take a stance on homosexuality?
> The opposite strategy is to talk about politics constantly, so that it's painfully obvious who's in the minority.
> Which is better for a gay man in Saudi Arabia? A company where people only talk about work, or a company where everybody is expected to take a stance on homosexuality?
You're talking about something completely different. What I'm talking about is basically falsely depoliticizing a political decision, so people think it's something that cannot be changed, like nature or something. The reference to Newspeak, which was imagined as a way of dismantling the mental machinery of political opposition, should have made that clear. That you missed it is ironic given your username.
If you want to map the experience of a gay man in Saudi Arabia onto what I was talking about, he would marry a woman and not even think things could be any different.
The objection you and others are making to TFA is that you can't choose to be apolitical, because everything is political. Your contribution is to propose that people might claim things are apolitical to prevent people from realizing the truth about how political they actually are.
Your appeal to newspeak is pretty pointless, as it applies only inasmuch as it does to anyone who might claim that something is its opposite, for example the slogans "the personal is political" and "silence is violence".
Sure, if you accept lies like that, you may lose the ability to think about the true nature of those things.
But you haven't really contributed anything to the conversation. You're just saying "ah, but what if they're /lying/! To /trick us/!"
> The objection you and others are making to TFA is that you can't choose to be apolitical, because everything is political. Your contribution is to propose that people might claim things are apolitical to prevent people from realizing the truth about how political they actually are.
You're still not really getting what I was saying. Directly claiming something is apolitical won't actually create the state I was talking about. To do that you actually have to get a bunch of influential people to talk about some political idea like it was obviously some kind of natural or social law or something.
Not everything is political, but many people are ignorant of the political nature of many things.
> Your appeal to newspeak is pretty pointless, as it applies only inasmuch as it does to anyone who might claim that something is its opposite, for example the slogans "the personal is political" and "silence is violence".
You're thinking about the slogans like "freedom is slavery," which weren't Newspeak and would have been unexpressible in it.
> But you haven't really contributed anything to the conversation. You're just saying "ah, but what if they're /lying/! To /trick us/!"
I'm not sure I'm contributing the the conversion that you want to have, which makes it a little baffling why you're engaging with me and not one of "the others" who seem to be who you really want to engage with.
HTTPS is political (see attorney general of united states). Do you use HTTPS on your websites? (a step against the U.S. government position) Have you turned HTTPS off in your browser? (a step towards the U.S. government position) Do you implement forward perfect secrecy for HTTPS connections? (more against U.S. government position) How do you weigh it's threat to national security against it's protection from criminals for individuals and companies?
All of these actions can be viewed as political statements. Everything is political.
I'm curious what your definition of political is, because my gut feeling is that (Almost) nothing is political.