Comment by direwolf20
19 days ago
I wouldn't say that avoiding political discussion yourself because you can't handle it is a vote for the status quo, but telling others not to talk about politics is definitely a vote for the status quo.
19 days ago
I wouldn't say that avoiding political discussion yourself because you can't handle it is a vote for the status quo, but telling others not to talk about politics is definitely a vote for the status quo.
Doesn't that depend entirely on the context? Telling the grocery store not to carry dairy products is an anti-dairy stance. Objecting to dairy products in the vegetable section is not anti-dairy it's pro-keeping-things-organized. Debating whether or not dairy ought to be allowed in the vegetable section is also not anti-dairy, at least in the general case.
Unlike milk, politics pervades everything. It's not like keeping milk cartons out of the vegetable section, it's like keeping the letter "p" out of the vegetable section.
You've broken the analogy. The broad categories of food equate to the broad categories of discussion topics.
How attention works, whether training on scraped data is legal, and whether or not the latter should be permissible are three distinct topics. Only the third is inherently political. The second has a close relation to politics but is ultimately a legal question as opposed to a political contest. The first has absolutely nothing to do with politics in and of itself.
> politics pervades everything
That's exactly the problem. Sometimes I don't want it to. If I pull up a spec sheet for a microcontroller I don't want to be bombarded with propaganda pertaining to the political tug of war of the day.
The fact that mundane actions can have political impacts when considered en masse does not imply that we can't or shouldn't have spaces for discussions that are reasonably free of political topics. It isn't always appropriate (imo) to discuss the political impacts of the task at hand. It's okay to have a space in which only the task itself is permitted.
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