I’ve never heard anyone told not to talk about those things because they’re political, but I could believe they were told not to talk about them because they’re controversial.
It is possible for a subject to be both political and controversial.
I think the fact that there are two sides to US politics, and those two sides split cleanly along almost every controversial topic, is causing the confusion. Because it's both.
Abortions are controversial because some people believe they should not be allowed to happen, while others belive women should be in control of their own bodies. Abortions are political because the Republican party has a publicly-stated policy of wanting to legislate against abortion. The Democratic party has a publicly-stated policy of wanting to maintain women's ability to get an abortion if they need one.
Thus a controversial topic is also political. Any discussion of the topic will inevitably reduce to a political discussion because the two political parties are so closely aligned with the two sides of the conversation.
Because of the way that US politics has been so data-driven, focus-group informed, every controversial topic is being used as a method of creating political traction. So everything controversial is becoming political. Even something as banal as wearing a mask during a pandemic is turned into a political statement.
> It is possible for a subject to be both political and controversial
I didn’t claim otherwise. I believe that people are told not to talk about their abortion because it’s controversial, but not because it’s political barring perhaps a few people who aren’t educated enough to understand the distinction.
> Abortions are political because the Republican party has a publicly-stated policy of wanting to legislate against abortion.
The Republican party’s political advocacy is obviously political, but it doesn’t follow that any given account of an abortion is political. Both are controversial, however.
> So everything controversial is becoming political.
Controversial things frequently are political, but that doesn’t mean any particular speech about a controversial topic is political speech. You seem to be confusing a prohibition about politics with a prohibition against any topic that has a political aspect. So at coinbase, a gay man could talk about his marriage despite that gay marriage is also a political subject (and also a controversial topic in some spheres, albeit probably not the SV spheres), but he (and any employee for that matter) couldn’t advocate for or against gay marriage policy or norms.
The phases I use in my response above explicitly often explicitly use the word politics. The people saying that are not being narrow with their definitions like you are here.
So if people live their life having people around them using the word politics like in my phrases above they will also start using the word that way. A way that does not match up with your definitions.
> You’re confusing “controversial” with “political”.
So when you say things like the above it comes off to me as unreasonable/uncharitable. Since the people you are talking to are using a set of definitions that are relatively common in my experience.
edit: unreasonable -> unreasonable/uncharitable
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> I’ve never heard anyone told not to talk about those things because they’re political, but I could believe they were told not to talk about them because they’re controversial.
Knowledge and understanding of a topic is required before reasoned action is taken. If you can not talk about abortion, birth control, sexual/gender discrimination, gay marriage, and more because it is controversial then we might be getting in to an area where speech is so restricted that it impedes knowledge transfer and understanding on those topics.
In order to have an informed populace then need to be exposed to things, sometime controversial. If you remove a reasonably large mechanism for that, conversation at work, it will have political consequences.
>Knowledge and understanding of a topic is required before reasoned action is taken. If you can not talk about abortion, birth control, sexual/gender discrimination, gay marriage, and more because it is controversial then we might be getting in to an area where speech is so restricted that it impedes knowledge transfer and understanding on those topics.
And you can research and discuss those topics outside of work.
You're not being paid to show up to work and form PACs. You're not being paid to show up to work to virtue signal about the most fashionable wedge issue of the day. You're not being paid to show up to work and sow discord by assuming moral high ground and vilifying the other side. etc., etc.
>In order to have an informed populace then need to be exposed to things, sometime controversial.
The political culture status quo at Bay Area companies is that this is an alt-right talking point.
>If you remove a reasonably large mechanism for that, conversation at work, it will have political consequences.
Conversation at work absolutely should not be a large mechanism for political discussion. It's work. If there are political consequences because workers are no longer allow to virtue signal all day, then that speaks more about their weak mental state than it does about politics.
> And you can research and discuss those topics outside of work.
In my experience in the USA it is common for conversations at work to be about family, kids, life experiences(good and bad), current events, etc. It is something people bond over and use to help form a common company culture.
Different companies vary what is allowed and or encouraged and experience different benefits and consequences.
> You're not being paid to show up to work and form PACs. You're not being paid to show up to work to virtue signal about the most fashionable wedge issue of the day. You're not being paid to show up to work and sow discord by assuming moral high ground and vilifying the other side. etc., etc.
I do not see anyone in this thread advocating for anything that extreme.
>>In order to have an informed populace then need to be exposed to things, sometime controversial.
> The political culture status quo at Bay Area companies is that this is an alt-right talking point.
I am not in the know about bay area culture but that does not match my limited view from the outside.
> Conversation at work absolutely should not be a large mechanism for political discussion. It's work. If there are political consequences because workers are no longer allow to virtue signal all day, then that speaks more about their weak mental state than it does about politics.
My focus on for this comment was not politic conversation in the work place but on how removing a large mechanism of knowledge and understanding transferal in the work place would have political consequences for society.
>In my experience in the USA it is common for conversations at work to be about family, kids, life experiences(good and bad), current events, etc. It is something people bond over and use to help form a common company culture.
None of which are politics, so we agree.
>I do not see anyone in this thread advocating for anything that extreme.
Did you by chance not RTFA? Employees are literally planning virtual walkouts because they felt that Coinbase didn't virtue signal enough.
>I am not in the know about bay area culture but that does not match my limited view from the outside.
Your limited view is in total contrast to reality. I've lived in the Bay Area for the past 8 years, and attempting to consider outside viewpoints that may be controversial might as well make you a Nazi sympathizer. https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/14/us/berkeley-ben-shapiro-speec...
>My focus on for this comment was not politic conversation in the work place but on how removing a large mechanism of knowledge and understanding transferal in the work place would have political consequences for society.
This is a non sequitur. No one is suggesting removing knowledge transfer and communication at work. People are suggesting limiting the amount of political activism at work that's outside of the scope of what you were paid to do (the company's general mission).
> This is a non sequitur. No one is suggesting removing knowledge transfer and communication at work. People are suggesting limiting the amount of political activism at work that's outside of the scope of what you were paid to do (the company's general mission).
I did not suggest anyone here was advocated for that in this thread. I provided examples above where people are told not to talk about, abortion, contraceptives, discrimination based on gender/sex, conversations about a gay marriage because they are "politics". Hence why some people are objecting to removing political conversations from work.
It was part of back and forth conversation with throwaway894345.
