Can't stand this phrase that literally came out of nowhere. People will try and justify it with walls of text about the oppressed, blah blah, when it's just an excuse for them to chide you about why you're wrong and why this issue intersects with their politics.
Everything is political now. Remember a year ago when you couldn’t wear a red hat in public without fear of someone attacking you physically? People are being canceled, fired from their jobs, ostracized in their communities, because they dared to have an opinion that differed from the mob. It’s all political now, and there’s not much we can talk about that someone isn’t going to try to make it political.
This isn't a new phrase that came out of nowhere, I've seen it in use for a few years now. I believe it became more mainstream with this Ted Talk; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=171flckdKic
My love of my partner and my nephews and nieces. My enjoyment of art. My appreciation of the natural world. You can do a political analysis of those things, but they are not intrinsically political. Of course, some on the left believe that there is nothing that isn't political. But I don't think they're correct.
For lots of people around the world the ability to love their partner is a very political thing - homosexuality being illegal in a majority of Africa, and punishable by death in parts of the world.
We could quibble about this, but I don't think that makes their love political. The repression is external to their love of each other, not part of it.
In fact, it would be a diminishment of their love to analyze it purely through a political framework—which is one reason many people don't like "everything is political". It diminishes many of the most important aspects of our lives.
> The repression is external to their love of each other
It’s not very “external” when the police are breaking down your door to force themselves into the middle of your activities. It’s something you need to be constantly aware of - if you want to have love at all, then you need to thread it through the government’s loopholes; if you do it in public, you are “an activist”.
It would be nice if “love” and “government” could be cleanly separated - but for queer people, that seems to be a fantasy that only straight people have the luxury of believing in :/
You made it 4 words into your reply before using veiled political language regarding your relationship with whomever you are romantically involved with. "Partner" became common in the mid 80s because it was a way for gay people to refer to their love interests without revealing their gender.
You say that art and love aren't political, but that's only useful when trying to split hairs about the subject.
You're missing the distinction I am trying to make. The language may be political, but my love for my partner is not the same thing as the language I use to describe it. It's why this conversation is important: we are not merely symbol processing units, we are human beings with perceptions and feeling that are not entirely mediated by language and politics.
That may seem to you as if I am splitting hairs. For me it's one of the most important distinctions in the world, and one that is lost when we insist everything is political.
You sit there and you tell us that there are things that you enjoy that cannot be described in a political manner. Nobody has ever suggested that your love for anyone is directly political.
Where you can live, who you can openly love, what jobs you can hold, what education you can have, what art you can view, and who you can fraternize with... these are all impacted, sometimes substantially, by political decisions.
Love is not some tangible item that sits apart from the rest of lived experience. It is created and nurtured THROUGH that lived experience. You love your partner in the way that you do because you have the freedom to do it. Your perception is colored by the free society in which you live, and by the attitudes of the people within that society.
I have a black friend from high school... a nationally celebrated former athlete, who started dating another high school classmate of mine in college. As soon as they were able, they moved away. She was a white girl with a black man, and even people they had grown up with were uncomfortable with the pairing. Her friends literally sat her down and informed her that her kids would look like her father, and didn't want her to experience the sort of emotional distress that a parent of a black child suffers when living in society. The negative attitudes of people around them at the time forced them to leave the state.
Most of my gay classmates also moved away, all to California, for similar reasons.
You're spot on. All of the things the GP mentioned have people literally fighting political battles to continue enjoying them. I find the GP's thinking common with people who haven't experienced friction doing "normal" things most people take for granted.
Is it right for you be taxed for using the sewer system? What are the environmental impacts of the massive scale of human shit having to be processed in treatment plants? Why does the government prevent me from shitting wherever I want, infringing on my freedom? First they take away your rights to shit on your neighbour's porch, then they take away your rights to see your kids on weekends. Stepping stones to tyranny.
That just means there’s a political element to human interaction, not that everything is political. Astronomy is about the cosmos, not politics, but astronomers engage in politics like everyone else. There’s an entire world outside of humanity, and some people are not interested in turning that into more human bickering, which you can easily find in explicitly political and news discussions.
People being allowed to look at stars is a political issue. I’m a big astronomy fan and I’d like more money to go to astronomers to do more research. That’s political…
Pipes to flush your shit into aren’t there because it’s a good idea to have them. They’re there because somebody made a political decision to require them.
There’s an old joke about the Network OSI layer: What are layers 8 and 9? Political and Financial.
I think the context with things like that refer to internal business politics and having diplomatic conversations versus State or National Politics.
Avoid religion and politics in general seems like solid advice as it’s too emotionally charged for most people to discuss purely logically. (Also, there are too many x factors and most politicians are relatively short term (speaking of USA here).
More accurately, everything is ideological at its core. I say this as science.
Even tabs vs spaces is an ideological battle. And so is for and against downvoting. I am against downvoting because I am against censorship and for free speech.
And to then say "avoid ideology" or to be modding a platform based on a "no ideology" ideology is like being against meaningful conversation on a conversation platform.
So we are left with excessive pampering and everyone walking on eggshells. Whenever something gets ideological, we can't handle it and so we censor it. Or hide behind a downvote. All because we're not allowed, and hence have had no practice.
The platform that can handle political discourse without breaking will be the next great social media platform. We owe it to ourselves to build it, instead of pretending this is already it, whatever your platform of choice.
Coupled with the new catchphrase "everything is political", this is quite impossible to do.