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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

Taking "no stance" on a political issue is itself a political stance for the status quo. It is impossible to not be political

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No stance means just that. Redefining terms and imposing a will is the overtly irrelevant and aggressive political posturing that these policies are trying to avoid.

If the outcome of society would be the same if you exist or not then you are not political. For example if you don't vote and don't support any political causes, then the people who take the time to get involved decides everything and you had no influence.

There are 4 levels of competence. For all the people who know they are incompetence and therefore abstain from voting there are a lot of people (possibly more) that don't know their incompetence and decide to vote regardless. If you're not voting because you're uninformed, you're probably much more informed than many of the people who are voting.

> don't know their incompetence and decide to vote regardless

That's a very wrong way to understand what democracy means. If you're incompetent, you are still afforded a vote. And you sleep on the bed you make.

and in any case, the incompetence voter implies that they could be voting "wrong". This is a deep and insidious implication because implying something can be wrong also implies the other "competent" voters are "right". The very notion that one side is "right" is very anti-democratic.

If one million people don't care about changing the status quo and 50 do, the status quo will won't change. If one person doesn't care and 50 do, it's much more likely. The status quo exists in everyone who does nothing to change it, even if they don't move to actively affect things.

Isn't 'no stance' just the 'null stance'? Similar to how one must reject the null hypothesis to accept another, one must reject the null stance to take another.

That is a mis-characterization. My no-stance stance is not that I support that status quo, it's that I'll try to care about myself and my friends and family no matter what you political idiots do. Communism? Sure. Fascism? Whatever. I'd rather that you didn't, but it's more productive to mitigate it for myself than to get involved either way.

Is it selfish? Probably, and I'm open and proud about that.

So Individualism? That's pretty clearly a political philosophy / ideology.

Yeah, the same way atheism is a religion and "off" is a TV channel.

Individualism as a political philosophy would be smth like advocating for libertarianism/adjacent stuff, etc. The apolitical stance is the apolitical stance. I do not engage in politics unless it's a minimum-effort activity like the default mail-in voting (WA). Sure, I may know approximately what the best way to organize society is, and if aliens landed and put me in charge I'd become political; but as it is, I do not care, mostly because it's not productive, but in no small part because actively caring about how to organize society is heavily correlated with being very wrong (IMHO).

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