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Comment by noelwelsh | Hacker News Reader

Your statements are incoherent. Politics is decision making and power relationships within groups of people. It is 100% a political statement to adopt this policy as it exercises power over a group. You cannot function as a group without politics. "Where do y'all want to go for lunch" is also politics, as it involves group decision making and power relationships (Do you go to the vegetarian place? Do you avoid the spicy place?) It's a completely banal decision but it is still politics.

If what you want is a "don't piss off your coworkers by discussing topics unrelated to work that you know will annoy people" policy, that is fine, but don't pretend you are not engaging in politics.

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The politics of saying "no politics" is that you are drawing some line that separates some political issues into "politics" and others into "not politics". Because to truly avoid all politics is impossible; even if you believe banal, purely intra-personal politics are not political so much of the basic organization of a business & capitalism are politics. "Should we allow remote work" for example is a deeply political question that ties deeply into discussions about the rights/value of neurodivergent & disabled people in the workplace. To say 'I don't believe in God' is a deeply political and dangerous statement in some parts of the world, but fairly banal where I live. To contrast, in Indonesia, it is technically _unconstitutional_ to not believe in a "one and almighty God"

I wish people were at least honest about "no politics" to mean "lets avoid to unsafe, potentially divisive issues relative to our geographic location, and take the basic tenets of neoliberal, capitalistic society to be assumed". And yeah, that is a more than reasonable policy. Its a difficult policy in international spaces, because its very hard to not trespass that line when political contexts differ so strongly across the globe

> The politics of saying "no politics" is that you are drawing some line that separates some political issues into "politics" and others into "not politics".

I find someone's heuristics for deciding which category a statement falls into chiefly turns on if they agree with the statement. If they agree with the statement then it is not political, and if they disagree, it's political.

> take the basic tenets of neoliberal, capitalistic society to be assumed

Well, then any discussion about an illiberal oclocratic executive (such as 47's) should be fair game...

"Politics" is a stupid word because everyone has a different idea about what it means and so they all talk past each other.

The word “politics” is vague, and that only makes banning political discussions worse if it only becomes political when the higher-ups don’t like it.

Say your company has a possibility of working with some client company who is directly or indirectly involved with cause X. If it is “political” to talk about not working with them because of X, but it is “not political” to talk about working with them, then you see what I mean.

It doesn’t have to be a destructive conversation: one employee might say we should avoid them, but you might say we need to work with them because we need the money now and can drop them later when we are in a better place. Other employees could talk how cause X is not that unethical for reasons. If someone balks at a point of view incompatible with theirs and is incapable of expressing a viewpoint in a way that respects other views, maybe that someone is not mature enough and next time your HR can avoid that type.

Many people that ban political discussions miss the irony that it's a political decision.

Yeah exactly, the same people who shout the loudest about "everything is politics" and want to talk about it at work would go apeshit if someone at work said "I'm not comfortable with abortion", etc. HR would quickly be called and shut them down.

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