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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

Politics doesn't belong in a professional environment.

So employees should be avoiding the topic.

My coworkers have no problem discussing Donald trump and republicans. They laugh about our president a lot. Yet when I bring up the Chinese government, silence could be heard.

Are they discussing politics or bonding over their contempt of Trump?

Those are quite different things.

I despise Trump, but claiming that talking about his shortcomings is an apolitical conversation is totally disingenuous. Politics isn't this bloodless process of determining the best policies by rational debate, as much we'd like it to be. Politics, as often as not, consists entirely of making the other team look bad, to raise the relative status of your own team. That's just how humans operate.

Sure.

My point is that "discussing politics (A)", where people bring their best arguments to the table and have a friendly intellectual discussion is very different from "discussing politics (B)", where people bond over hating the outgroup of the other political tribe.

And I did this because OP seemed to naively think that since his coworkers do (B), they would also be happy to do (A) with him. Trying to give him a clue before he hurt himself.

I don't like that attitude. We should be able to discuss politics without the need for judging each other.

I agree it would be nice, but I think there's evidence that not every employee will remain civil during such discussions.

Where does this ever happen well? There's a reason companies have made it a policy to avoid for decades.

Ideally, yes. That isn't the reality, so it's best to leave that for outside work. Religion is the same.

>Politics doesn't belong in a professional environment.

hmm i wonder if your boss feels the same way (i.e. that his/her business interests are completely separate from his/her politics). the idea that you're politically neutral at work - the very locus of political contention - is laughable.

Not in 2020. That goes against the "bring your whole self to work" mindset that's recently become popular.

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