I consider myself a very politically informed person. I'm not a politically active person however, largely for the reasons mentioned in the article.
I considered myself a liberal by the standards of the time I grew up in. My views on some social issues, particularly 'free speech', are considered a conservative now. I am one of the people the article is concerning who will not publicly voice their political opinions in the workplace for fear of potential repercussions. One thing that particularly upsets me, is how willingly other people bring up politically sensitive issues in the workplace. I regularly hear woefully uninformed diatribes on geopolitics and American domestic politics (I do not live in America) in the workplace. Even correcting people who are clearly misinformed on clear matters of fact can cause offense. As a result, I do not enter into such discussions.
I feel as though I am more open-minded than many others. I am always ready to be corrected if I am wrong, and I am always willing to discuss my views with people subscribing to other political ideologies. However, I fear the repercussions of offending others who do not have an open mind. I also feel as though many politically active people are not acting in good faith. I feel that the safest option I will not regret is not to engage.
"However, I fear the repercussions of offending others who do not have an open mind."
You're dead right and it's damned terrible. I long for both formal and informal debates on many topics but without my opponents becoming annoyed or offended (as so often they do nowadays). These days it seems almost impossible to debate any subject without upsetting someone.
I now long for the type of television programs that I remember from my youth—talking heads discussing and debating serious topics. For instance, I remember Bertrand Russell, Malcolm Muggeridge and A.J.P. Taylor and many others and it was wonderful and exciting television.
What so many people fail to realize these days is that one can learn so much from discussions and debates of this kind.
Incidentally, such discussions always remind me of the wonderful formal debate between Socrates and the sophist Thrasymachus in Book One of Plato's Republic on the topic of justice. It's so good that every time I read it, it sends shivers of excitement down my back.
people have been programmed, on a massive scale, to react emotionally to certain learned key phrases and terms. when this automatic emotional reaction occurs, all logical processing ceases immediately, and the person you're talking to either immediately leaves the conversation (if you're lucky) or starts emotionally, verbally attacking you as though your non-conforming line of thought is a pathogen and their overreacting response is an antibody swarm. you're a strawman caricature of everything evil and wrong if you question basic learned political orthodoxy, even if you make it clear you're approaching the topic with an open mind.
TV and social media "debates" between politicians are 100% posturing, signaling, and rhetoric without any substance, and almost nobody can see it, everyone thinks their guy won.
it's as though we've forgotten how to think for ourselves and have opinions and stances that lay outside dogmatic groupthink. I even know a few people who think of themselves as "free thinkers" who nevertheless hitch their proverbial cart to some political eceleb personality's proverbial horse, buying into everything they say, wholesale.
people want to be told what to think, not how to think, as it's much easier that way.
About TV debates — A lot of these have moved to podcasts and YouTube these days. Eg the Oxford Union debates on YouTube, some of which are quite popular. I suspect some talk radio, eg PBS and BBC Radio 4, will also have interesting debates. Radio 4’s magazine programmes like The Life Scientific, In Our Time, The Public Philosopher, Reith Lectures etc certainly make for extremely interesting listening.
As a sort of counterpoint, I think it might be worth it to watch a classic of the 'free debate' genre, Buckley vs Baldwin[1], that happened in the sixties in Cambridge. It pitted a black civil rights activist against the young Buckley, later a stalwart of American conservatism.
I don't know if it's my bias speaking, but I felt that in the debate, Buckley comes across as a bully, with very little argumentative meat, who doesn't really respond to Baldwin's points. For what its worth, I didn't really like Baldwin's delivery either, but at least I felt there were substantive points there that were worth addressing.
In a way, this is probably the best one can hope for when you stage this kind of event - Buckley is, at least, well educated, but I can't help but think the debate might have been far more interesting if it was Baldwin vs Malcolm X - because ultimately the problem with the Buckleys of the world is that they defend institutions that were not built on ideals, but rather economics, and as such the defenses themselves are generally sophistic and without anything really interesting in them.
If I was a student, I would probably agitate to exclude a Buckley, and instead reach for a Malcolm, and I expect somebody would accuse me of being anti-free-speech, since the debate that would result would no longer span a societal divide, and both parties in the debate would be on 'one side' of the broader social issue. However, from an intellectual standpoint, it just sometimes is the case that interesting positions aren't evenly distributed across the terrain of popular feeling and political rhetoric, and a lot of people are simply defending things that are convenient or traditional but have no moral basis. So inviting those people is a waste of time - they're just (at best) going to come up with clever excuses for whatever already exists, or whatever they would want regardless.
> I now long for the type of television programs that I remember from my youth—talking heads discussing and debating serious topics.
There are orders of magnitude more such content now than there was for instance 40 years ago. There's probably hundreds of hours of your favourite philosopher/economist/pundit's lectures/debates/speeches at your fingertips. Click-click and you literally begin to hear them talk in less than 30 seconds. This probably includes those very programmes from ages ago!
This whole type of complaint reeks of "back in my day" appeals to nostalgia.
> I now long for the type of television programs that I remember from my youth—talking heads discussing and debating serious topics.
I never had that in my youth, but YouTube recently started suggesting videos from The Dick Cavett Show from the 60's and 70's. The show was broadcast on TV and I think counted as light entertainment, so I don't presume it's very special for it's time, but seeing these interviews conducted at a pace where people can actually express themselves with anything but pre-canned anecdotes, with an interviewer who is actually listening and engaging with the topic is such a breath of fresh air compared to what I am used to. A lot of the interviews I've watched seem like they touch on pretty controversial subjects for the time (religion, LGBT, race, drugs, alcoholism etc)
(of course it helps that the clips that get uploaded and recommended are of historical figures, so there's a lot of survivorship bias there)
Free to Choose is absolute gold if you want to see rational debate among diametrically opposed groups about modern political and economic topics. Compared to what we see today it looks like something from another planet.
Lot of advice floating about the workplace these days along the lines of be candid, join the conversation, bring your whole self to work, etc. The people giving this advice seem to have no conception that not everyone actively engaged in these topics is acting in 100% good faith. Being too open could so easily backfire. Encouraging this is borderline negligent. Indeed there’s entire branches of activism that rest on bad-faith ideologies. Good advice would be to avoid controversial and political discussions and to keep a strong separation between your private life and your work life. Instead, we have employers, especially universities, asking staff to promote their organisations through their personal social media accounts.
> join the conversation, bring your whole self to work, etc.
This is a classic honeypot. They want to weed out people who have views that do not align with current PC status quo. One of the reasons is that no company wants to be associates with an employee who has views that could damage company image and lose money. They want your whole self, so they can discard you if they think you are a liability.
I'm in the market for a new leadership role and I have a very well established leadership model that I've honed over the years to build high performing organizations. I was considering publishing my leadership writings (that I share with my employees when I coach them) on my LinkedIn so prospective employers could see whether I'm a good fit for transforming their organizations.
One of my former employees cautioned me that my since my leadership model doesn't virtue signal that I might find it hurts me more than it helps my prospects. I'm not sure what to make of this.
My take on these management aphorisms is that they are rarely actually meant literally. They're usually a form of signalling about how much you're supposed to love the Company/job. Worse, they are often adopted because management copy them from other firms they see as "successful" or "leaders" in a particular area.
If I were being more cynical, I'd say that managers or leaders love to talk about "Company culture" or "Company values" points like this because it allows them to mark their own work when they define success (although this may be unconscious). "We changed our company culture" isn't a statement that's easy to check or measure (it won't show up in eg engagement surveys), unlike "we grew earnings by x%", yet it also sounds much more "difficult".
A lot of the time it's effectively all an elaborate social game.
When I hear "bring your whole self to work", I think of gay people who couldn't mention their loved ones because that would out them. When you say there should be a "strong separation between your private life", I don't think you're expecting to never mention your family. Maybe your partner is sick and you're feeling stressed. In a supportive environment, shouldn't that be mentioned?
Even though the personal is political (such as the status of being gay), It sounds to me like you're thinking about political topics irrelevant to the organization when you advise people to "avoid controversial and political discussions". Whether the topic is relevant to your work depends on the topic, and it's up to you to make a cost-benefit analysis of whether it's worth discussing. I think that people should be able to discuss their family life and workplace policies, but I agree that broader political discussion may not be worth it.
I guess I'd like to end by saying that it depends. What don't you think should be discussed at work? Why shouldn't you discuss this with your colleagues? Personally, I think discussing a gay spouse should be fine and expected, and supporting genocide shouldn't be, but there's a lot of room in between those two extremes.
I would say that this is a failure of philosophy in political leadership. Not that philosophy was ever paramount in politics, but it was at least expected in the highest classes.
Everything devolves into tribalism without philosophy. It looks like people are discoursing, but they are really just signalling.
> It looks like people are discoursing, but they are really just signalling.
I was looking to put words on my feeling about this, and you did it perfectly.
I was wondering why suddenly so many people voiced the same engaged opinion, while I know for having discussed with them in private settings that they don't think deeply about society.
Now I realize that's because they want to look like they belong to a certain kind of people. It's not about ideas. It's about tribes.
Politics in English-speaking countries, particularly the US, seems to have partly become entertainment. Some of the "fans" appear more fervent than even the politicians themselves.
I'm an outsider and even I've been drawn into US politics, because it is entertaining. Sometimes it's more entertaining than a fictional story. But I doubt that this makes for sensible governing.
"Not that philosophy was ever paramount in politics, but it was at least expected in the highest classes."
Well some of it has been influential, works by Aristotle and Plato for instance. In another post here I've mentioned Plato's Republic (now well over 200 years old). Its arguments about justice are still the cornerstone of our justice system these days—or at least they're supposed to be.
"Everything devolves into tribalism without philosophy."
Unfortunately, that's true. It's not gone unnoticed that in recent decades many universities have closed down their liberal arts and often this includes their schools of philosophy. It's pretty terrible really.
What makes you think that tribalism isn't in philosophy? It is no pancaea or vaccine and has a history of basis of tribalism - the Great Schism for one. If there is a lack of tribalism in niche philosophies well, it isn't important enough to have a tribe.
> correcting people who are clearly misinformed on clear matters of fact can cause offense
This is modern anti-culture. It's a climate where "opinions" matter more than knowledge and consumerism matters more than democracy.
There are many employers. I am an employee, but I am first and foremost a citizen in a Democracy... If I have the courage to defend it and the will to learn/educate.
An educational system worth the title should provide understanding of society and democracy.
"It's a climate where 'opinions' matter more than knowledge..."
It's not just that. Sometimes the people don't understand the difference between their opinion and facts. Like I could point out some factual incorrectness and they see me as attacking their opinion. A lot of the time they coincidence, but sometimes I might be in favor of their opinion based on other facts and simply don't want misinformation to spread. Or we might share the same objective but that false information would lead to a flawed implementation that would block us from achieving a shared goal. Not to mention, I try not to attack an actual opinion, because everyone is entitled to one, even if it differs from mine.
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
From what I remember, in polite circles it was always known that you should never discuss politics and religion with anyone except your immediate family and close friends.
> Even correcting people who are clearly misinformed on clear matters of fact can cause offense.
This resonates deeply. I'm at the point where "I'm entitled to my opinion!" is a great signal to change the topic, never to return to the topic of politics with that person ever again
When someone comes at me with "I'm entitled to my opinion!" I reply, "You're entitled to your INFORMED opinion!".
I think since around 2008 with the rise of social media, so much of one's ego has been made public. More so than ever before. Its as if everyone is a public figure. Because of this, more people are incapable of accepting that they may be wrong, underinformed, or simply misinformed.
The result is that world becomes more and more boring. No interesting discussion can take place. Environment becomes more toxic and it's mainly due to radicals who perceive everything as offensive and everybody who disagrees as "nazi" or "racist" or "-phobic".
I'm not sure why everyone keeps scoffing at the idea of calling some of these folks Nazis or racists. It's not hyperbole or an exaggeration. We did have a rally with a bunch of white nationalists exercising their "free speech" to chant "The Jews will not replace us" and they ended up murdering someone there. We had a National Security Advisor to the President of the United States promoting replacement theory. There are countless other examples major and minor over the last 12 years. Just how much racism and bigotry has to be clearly and consistently demonstrated for the labels to stick?
I think one aspect of Polarization in the US is that a big part of it is our expectations of polarization. I think we strongly overestimate the degree to which we can predict someone's political views and world outlook from a single statement.
I am worried we are in a positive feedback were perceptions of polarization lead to self-censorship among the less polarized, which further drives the perceptions of polarization.
Worse yet, the language gets so abstract and contorted it becomes hard to find areas where there is strong consensus matter of practice. We can't agree on concrete policies because people can't agree on why something shoud be done and not how. And even when there exists consensus for both for some subset everyone wants to use it as leverage to get their entire position so we end up with more status quo. You see this with Republicans and Obamacare, as well as the DSA crowd and Medicare expansions proposed by Warren/Clinton/Butti.
I don't mean to pick on you a bit here, but this feels like a good place to express something I've been having trouble with.
My parents raised me to do my best to neither take nor give offense. Most of my peers as a child were taught the same way. Obviously we're not Vulcans; We will sometimes inadvertently give offense, or respond emotionally to something that may have been meant innocuously. Yet so much of what I see in public discourse is reveling in both sides of that equation: deliberately trying to provoke emotional reactions from others, intentionally adhering to uncharitable interpretations of others' statements even after they have explained themselves, and celebrating the drama resulting from these things.
Civil discourse simply cannot function if this is a substantial part of pubic culture. There is no way to have a productive discussion if even one of the parties is deliberately provoking an emotional response. There is no way to have a productive discussion if even one of the parties is deliberately misinterpreting another in order to justify their own emotional response. Yet the dominant forms of public discourse these days include heavy doses of both of these things.
I've been one to speak my mind. I see myself as having been punished for it. I was doing work a grade or two above mine but was held back from promotion. So I didn't make senior developer on that team. Then I was even in jeopardy of losing my job over a statement I made (not vulgar, disrespectful, or anything) so I have to switch stacks a couple times to move out of a bad area of the company. I'm 9 years in and just a midlevel. My trust in the company and my desire to work hard for them are abysmal.
"Even correcting people who are clearly misinformed on clear matters of fact can cause offense."
I was stupid enough to do this too. People were discussing the gender wage gap the way the TV reporters do - that a woman in the same job as a man, with all things equal, makes 80 cents on the dollar. So I brought up the BLS study that shows that the 80 cents number is about an aggregate comparison of all men and women in the workforce, and that the main driver of the discrepancy comes from the types of jobs that men and women are in. I wouldn't be surprised if I get downvoted on here for this comment too.
Not to get too far into a debate about this, as we're well off the path of the article now, but I'm genuinely not sure if you've thought of this. Your argument:
>the discrepancy comes from the types of jobs that men and women are in.
only comes down to just being a moving the goal posts sort of thing from disparity in pay to disparity in expectation and opportunity for young men versus women. It's not a compelling argument against a gender pay gap, overall.
Using your own metric of a broad view, it's probably more of a problem than a specific man versus a specific woman, because it points to a theory that societal norms serve to re-enforce the expectation of taking jobs in lower paying fields on women versus men.
Anyway, any workplace that wouldn't let you have a conversation about this topic, in a respectful, non-bigoted way is maybe not a healthy place to work. The problem is, these types of arguments are (in my experience as a professional) a thin veneer of 'civility' over a massive ocean of bigotry and idiocy in many cases. I'm afraid employers take a hard line, because it's easy to slip into that ocean.
I think it is still understandable though that making those kinds of technical corrections about a study could be perceived as "defining away the problem" or getting too technical about a (potentially) real societal issue.
The mere fact that you are talking about "TV reporters" way of talking about things communicates that you have a disdain for the way such issues are commonly discussed in the media or by the general public, and correcting their statement about the study also seems to suggest that according to you really there is no gender wage gap (or it's less of an issue than people would seem to generally think), it's all just due to personal choice or preference in what type of jobs they do or something to that effect.
You can of course agree or disagree about a lot of these things, but I do think that sometimes a "mere factual correction" can have additional connotations that are much more political and not just neutral statements. It's often the opinion or suggestion behind the factual correction that causes more offense.
HR departments are also being given the false impression that their latest "initiatives" have near-universal support because they only hear words of praise from the usual politically outspoken set. Everyone else keeps their mouths shut.
A large number of employees are in a "quiet seething" mode and are becoming increasingly disengaged from workplace culture (i.e., "I don't want to get to know any of you. I just want to do my work and clock out").
> Even correcting people who are clearly misinformed on clear matters of fact can cause offense.
This is so true.
I've seen polling showing that large numbers of people believe that the number of unarmed black men fatally shot by American police every year is in the "thousands" or even "tens of thousands". And the further to the left the media people consume, the higher they're likely to believe the number is.
The actual number of unarmed black men shot dead by American police in 2019 is thirteen.
Regardless of what you think about racism and police violence, this is a fact. People who think that "thousands" of unarmed black men are killed by police every year are not only numerous, they are wrong - so absurdly, wildly wrong by so many orders of magnitude that if you tell tell me that the number is in the thousands, I'm going to assume you're deeply uninformed on many other things, not just this one number.
Yet in the current climate I'd be afraid to even correct people on this enormous, inarguable factual innaccuracy.
(And good luck explaining to people that "unarmed" isn't synonymous with "innocent" - you can be unarmed and still give a cop a good reason to shoot you, for example by attacking the cop with your fists.)
Is it really too much to ask that we leave this stuff out of the workplace?
(Someone commented that it's "insane" to say that you should be able to shoot someone if they attack you with their fists and I typed out a long reply, but they had deleted their comment before I could post it, so I'm going to post my reply here so I don't feel like I wasted my efforts)
Yes, it absolutely is a valid reason to shoot someone, and anyone with training in firearms or self-defense would agree. You're not necessarily going to get shot for throwing a single punch, but you're increasing your chances of getting shot exponentially.
First of all, a fist can be a deadly weapon. It's possible to kill someone with a single punch, or knock them unconscious, or do all manner of nasty and permanent damage. Cops know this, as does anyone who knows anything about violence.
And this is crucial: every interaction you have with a cop in the US is colored by the fact that the cop has a gun on his waist. If you attack a cop with any kind of weapon, you've demonstrated that you're willing to use violence against him, and he has no way of knowing how far you're willing to take it. What if you get your hands on his gun? He knows that a single punch might be enough to disable him, even temporarily, and even a second's delay might be enough for you to grab his gun - and then he's fucked.
Cops don't carry guns for the exclusive purpose of stopping other people with guns. The point of a gun is to make someone stop doing what they're doing, and sometimes you really need someone to stop doing what what they're doing, no matter what they're armed with. We can't expect cops to be champion bare-knuckle boxers: if someone's attacking you with their fists, they're potentially threatening your life, and it's not unreasonable to use whatever tools are at your disposal to neutralise the threat.
Again: this doesn't mean that every use of fists should immediately be met with a death sentence. My point is just that guns can in some (not all) circumstances be a legitimate response to fists.
And on the more general point, that's not the only case in which it's justifiable for an unarmed person to be shot. In some cases of "unarmed" men being shot by police, the perp was trying to ram the cops with his car.
Conversely, not every case of an "armed" man being shot by police is justified either. Philando Castile had a gun in his car, but he didn't deserve to die.
"The actual number of unarmed black men shot dead by American police in 2019 is thirteen."
I think you mean, the reported number of unarmed black men shot dead by American police in 2019 is thirteen. (But surely we've learned that police reports are not necessarily completely accurate.) And I think that some people believe that a suspect's being armed is not justification for summary execution, barring extraordinary circumstances, so in their minds the caveat of "unarmed" is a distinction without a difference. Therefore they might be more concerned with the total reported number of black persons shot dead by American police, which is 235.
As long as we're on that subject, here's an interesting (albeit somewhat misleading) fact I discovered that I haven't seen cited anywhere else. While 235 fatal shootings by officers doesn't seem like a huge number compared with the total population, consider that there were about 697,195 police officers in the US in 2019, meaning that each officer had a 1/2967 chance of killing a black person that year. Contrast that with the oft-cited black-on-black murder rate: 7484 blacks were murdered in 2019. Let's (erroneously) assume that every single one was killed by a black male. The total black population in 2019 was 46.8 million, 48% of them male which comes to 22.4 million black males. So the chances of a black male murdering another black person is only 1/2933. That's right, a random police officer is very slightly more likely to have killed a black person than a random black male is likely to have killed a black person.
So if it's true that blacks ought to fear other black males, then the fear that some black people have of police officers as a class might be correspondingly justified.
If this was really a fact, surely you have a source for it?
Because if you are the one out of a group who comes up with a number drastically out of what other people estimate, it seems reasonable to assume you are the one who are in the wrong.
And of course unarmed doesn't mean innocent anymore than being armed means being in the wrong.
I am challenging you to a source for two reasons: to make sure you are not just making the number up, and because I want to see what the source defines as being unarmed and how they determine that.
In things like that I think that more scientific-oriented workplaces would not create this fear. People with a hard science background respect factual information.
And also the ethical implications of shooting 13 unarmed people in a year can still be a subject of debate.
Would you feel more comfortable in a company that openly encouraged / enforced political debate within a civil framework?
Is the problem (in your company and the world at large) that open respectful political debate has not got a common set of rules / words? If there was a phrase "I respectfully disagree - I understand that ..." was a phrase used by every TV host, Politician and Facebook poster, would prefacing your words with that make others more open to receiving it?
No, because companies have absolutely 0 incentive to stand by you if doing so becomes difficult. They are amoral, when they throw you under the bus it's like a lion killing a gazelle. Just something they do. You should not ever trust any company in any way.
Political debate used to have rules. Take this [0] debate between William F Buckley and Noam Chomsky about the Vietman War, for example. The two clearly detested each other but the debate was mostly civil.
Christopher Hitchens' debate are others worth watching.
I still speak my mind openly in the work place and invariably I find that most people are actually delighted when they realise they can have open conversations with me without fear of judgement. The vast majority of people are still entirely reasonable.
Of course you never know if you’re going to say the wrong thing to the wrong person, but I don’t go to work to make friends and I certainly don’t go there to be intimidated by bullies.
I can count the number of unreasonable people I’ve had to deal with on the knuckles of one finger and they all skulked away pretty quickly when they realised I was standing up to them.
I’m not trying to downplay what you’re saying. I think there is a culture of fear and I think it’s been stoked deliberately to a certain extent, but I also think it’s a lie. Most of the people you work with are probably like you. That may also explain why you don’t notice them ;)
Hmm. Seems like, in a political discussion/argument, the least open mind "wins", because they are the most impervious to evidence.
But the consequence is that the other side becomes less open minded too. They've tried arguing with someone who Just. Will. Not. Listen, who Just. Will. Not. Think. And when they run into the same arguments from someone else, they are less likely to be willing to listen themselves.
It's hard to stay open minded in the middle of this. It's a battle. There are areas I just don't want to talk about any more. So I guess I'm losing the battle, at least to some degree.
Whether there is legitimate fear of reprisal or not, work is not a good place to talk politics, religion, or any other topic that gets people emotional. Unless of course topic is relevant to your work!
> I feel as though I am more open-minded than many others. I am always ready to be corrected if I am wrong, and I am always willing to discuss my views with people subscribing to other political ideologies. However, I fear the repercussions of offending others who do not have an open mind.
This is how every open and critically minded person feels nowadays.
There is a clear line between two groups:
1. People who think the best way to learn, educate and explore other people's views is by having an open discussion, saying uncomfortable things and having an ear to be corrected and showing mutual respect.
2. People who think that saying something uncomfortable during a discussion is an act of offence itself and therefore must be muted even if it takes some form of aggression by one or many people in order to mute that person. A discourse is only allowed if people immediately subscribe to a specific ideological idea and people are not allowed to get to that point through saying or asking the wrong things but must somehow be born with those views or otherwise need to be extinguished by the mob.
Unfortunately the 2. group is getting increasingly more violent and aggressive in their approach which makes the 1. group increasingly more aware that they are in fact in danger to just be themselves and learn about life through sometimes tough discourse or mistakes.
So let me get this straight: one group is rational, open, and critically minded; while the other is irrational, violent, and aggressive. And people are clearly either in group 1 or group 2. Let me guess, you see yourself as belonging to group 1? If so, what a very convenient worldview you've constructed for yourself.
I would say exactly same is happening with health of human body or even how it's working. I simply stopped trying to correct others and talking at all about it. When people start conversing about it, I just shut up.
I believe that liberalism and conservativism concern different values, liberalism is about personal freedom (like freedom of speech), while conservativism is about preserving the existing values in the society.
It's quite normal as we grow up we become more conservative, especially successful people - we want to continue the success that was based on values we grew up with. That's why conservativism is associated with belief in authority - you need authority to enforce the values of the past.
So when you grew up, you perceived freedom of speech as a good value because it meant freedom, and now you perceive it as a good value because it was there when you grew up.
However, liberals moved on, and found other issues that concern human freedom, which were neglected before. So for instance, there is freedom to have a different sexual orientation, and be able to express it. Conservatives disagree with that value because it simply wasn't part of our culture in the past.
(Progressives - or perhaps socialists would be more fitting name - are based on another value, namely inclusion in the community. They are distinct from liberals.)
Libertarians have always been favorable to "the freedom to have a different sexual orientation"; it's not a "new" issue that was only discovered recently. However, conservatives and libertarians have always known that the freedom to live one's life as one desires can never extend beyond the point where others' freedoms are curtailed. Otherwise it's not actual freedom, but mere licence.
> how willingly other people bring up politically sensitive issues in the workplace
I'd say I'm a mix of conservative/Libertarian and this kind of blows my mind over the past few years. It seems like I constantly hear people on the left openly voicing their political opinions around crowds of people, and always speak in a way that they genuinely believe everyone around them agrees....and often have a condescending way of saying it. It amazes me how they seem to have absolutely no idea where the right-wing people are even coming from. I think this recent over-confidence is mostly due to them not realizing the major media outlets are essentially feeding them communist propaganda (if you don't agree with this I'd consider researching cognitive dissonance). I experience this on a regular basis, and it usually leads to me completely losing respect for that person purely due to the lack of awareness that person is showing.
The other dynamic, and what the leftists don't realize (or can't process), is that the left's arguments are primarily things that sound good in practice, but don't add up in theory. It always sounds good when someone says they want to help someone else, no matter who says it. This allows them to go crazy in public giving one liners about the surface level of their political policies ("everyone should have world class health care!", "everyone should have lots of money!", "No one should ever shoot someone else with a gun!"...all because they sound good (even to conservatives). Conservative policies take a bit more explaining to get their point across, and are much more focused on the logical and realistic side of things. No one likes to say "someone who doesn't work and doesn't contribute to society doesn't deserve govt handouts"...but it makes logical sense. That kind of talk doesn't exactly sound as good around the water cooler. Also, the time horizon for conservative viewpoints is often much longer (think about generations in the future and the impact today's decisions will have down the road). Compared to the left's policies that solve shallow issues today while mortgaging the well-being of future generations.
The simple fact is that conservatives have an easier time seeing where the left is coming from as a result of the left's primary policies being shallower and less thought out. These aspects also make it easier for the left to create snarky comments around. Conservatives however, simply don't agree and think it's all a pipe dream. They see the shallowness that the left is not able to. The left on the other hand, not only doesn't understand the right's overarching viewpoints...they also aren't even willing to try to understand where the right is coming from.
I think you over-dignify yourself as the "sane" side. You believe you can perceive all the flaws in your opponents reasoning, they're obvious to you - but reject the possibility that they feel exactly the same way about you. The humility you expect from them - you aren't displaying it yourself. The situation has far more symmetry than you assert.
The things you describe as political policies - they aren't. "Universal health care" and "minimize gun deaths" are goals, or value systems. You can make excellent pragmatic arguments for why they make sense (e.g. human capital is valuable), but as primary values they're motivated by emotion. Likewise, your perspective of "someone who doesn't work and doesn't contribute to society doesn't deserve govt handouts" does not "make logical sense" - it simply fits your value system, motivated by a sense of righteousness. You might be able to construct logical arguments for it, but let's not kid ourselves that's why you feel that way.
It sounds to me like you are doing the exact same thing you accuse "the leftists" of doing - oversimplifying the other sides views without actually considering their benefits and drawbacks, and writing them off as "feel good speech", while positioning your own political (and emotional) views as logical and rational.
The "logical" view you have given ("someone who doesn't work and doesn't contribute to society doesn't deserve govt handouts") is purely an emotional view. "Deserve" has nothing to do with any sort of logic or realism. What are the effects of such a policy? What are the effects on crime, homelessness, unemployment...?
Politics is complicated, there is no absolute right or wrong, and the effects of policies are complex and hard to predict. There are many trade-offs, and a lot of those are non-obvious. People also have different values, and will prefer different trade-offs. That is not necessarily better or worse, just different.
Another point I think is relevant is that I feel many solutions that you've described are easy to understand, quick fixes. In a world that is growing more and more complicated I think people are more prone to gravitate towards the simple.
Another reason, in my opinion for the leftist narrative being so captivating at the moment is that people are delaying adulthood, kids, family more and more. When you are young, or have little, true life experience you don't see why the simple solutions to help all these people wouldn't work. You haven't been in the trenches of life to realise that compromise is needed and that we don't always understand the 2nd or 3rd order effects that our actions will have.
Again all this is my own personal experience but I think it has some bearing on todays political minefield.
It sounds like you're saying "I only see these leftists using extremely shallow reasoning, and they don't understand that they're wrong because they don't look at my/our reasoning beyond a shallow level."
If you would look for more depth in the reasoning of the people you're disagreeing with yourself, you might be surprised at what you might find. The frustration you're expressing to me seems to be very symmetric, occurring on both sides of the spectrum.
> Conservative policies take a bit more explaining to get their point across, and are much more focused on the logical and realistic side of things.
>...
>Also, the time horizon for conservative viewpoints is often much longer (think about generations in the future and the impact today's decisions will have down the road).
Conservative policy in the US toward climate change right now is "it's a worldwide scientific hoax designed to take down the United States economy." That is not logical or reasonable. It expressly ignores the needs of future generations. Give me oil and economic growth now, externalities be damned.
>"everyone should have world class health care!"
The United States is the about the only western country for which the right-wing views this as illogical and unrealistic. Why? Maybe it is because sick people sometimes have trouble keeping a job, and
>"someone who doesn't work and doesn't contribute to society doesn't deserve govt handouts"
> My views on some social issues, particularly 'free speech', are considered a conservative now.
By who? Rosa Luxembourg, for example, was a free speech fundamentalist, and she is still far left of many left wingers today.
Free speech is a value that is often adopted, nuanced, and discarded by political projects from all over the spectrum - and it's naive to think that one side of the spectrum has a monopoly on its defense or denigration.
I have a few (really lovely) conservative friends who have expressed to me that they feel they can't express their political opinions outside of close friends and family because of the social risks involved with doing so. While I hold some "controversial" political opinions they're mostly related to fiscal policy rather than social policy so I've never personally felt like I couldn't express myself if I wanted to -- although I prefer not discussing politics in work environments.
However, last year I decided to start promoting conservative views I don't necessarily agree with that my friends hold to see what the consequences of this would be. I think people would be surprised at how open most people are to be honest. I've expressed conservative views on immigration, trans-rights and Trump as if they were my own and had very little push back outside of Twitter. I can contrast this with the fact that I've seen some people over the last few years express left-wing positions at work and have had at least equal push back. I especially remember one guy who expressed how he felt we should remove statues of historical figures who did things we wouldn't approve of today and got a very strong negative reaction in my office.
I wonder if the real problem here is that people who are conservatively minded are just naturally less comfortable with social conflict. I know my progressive friends are in all regards much more opinionated and seem far more comfortable with conflict, where as my conservative friends tend to be the types of people who avoid conflict.
Perhaps it's an age thing too. Older people who are generally more conservative and perhaps also less interested in getting into a heated debates on Twitter or in the office about some slightly controversial political position they hold. This difference in willingness to enter into social conflict may explain why conservatives feel they are in a minority despite making up about 50% of the population.
All I can say to those who feel oppressed is that as a bullied kid something I learnt from a young age is that it's hard to look myself in the mirror if I start trying to adapt my behaviour to please others. I much rather be myself and hated than try to conform at the expense of my identity. Be proud of who you are and never feel afraid to express yourself. If you're hated for that, so be it. It's better to be yourself than a coward.
> I wonder if the real problem here is that people who are conservatively minded are just naturally less comfortable with social conflict. I know my progressive friends are in all regards much more opinionated and seem far more comfortable with conflict, where as my conservative friends tend to be the types of people who avoid conflict.
Exactly, conservatives do not want change, and therefore do not want a conflict associated with the change. However, liberals and progressives push for changes because they simply do not value "do the things as in the past" nearly as much as their respective values, and every change means, potentially, a conflict.
It just takes one person to take offense to something for your life to be ruined.
It is not worth the risk talking to anyone about anything remotely "honest" unless you have known them for years and know how they will react.
This is a catch-22 because to really trust someone you have to be willing to talk to them (which kind of makes it moot to begin with, right?)
Even now I find myself curbing my opinion strongly based on which words have been weaponized with malicious connotation, lets not discuss which 'truth-telling business' could be seen as responsible for this.
Lets not discuss the other points which are too numerous to start on, and too political for the likes of this conversation. We could touch on the destruction of Western Academia as a point of origin for all this, we could muse on the comparable style of current social interaction to how things are depicted in 1984, or Communist Russia, but based on the keywords I already dropped, there is surely a large enough group of bots available to run this into the ground.
These are all my opinions, none of it is considered some unchangable, unalterable worldview, and I don't believe you can engage critically with anyone if you are not willing to compromise.
That being said, compromise comes from both sides, and one side is way better at yelling racist, sexist, misogynist, whenever the bargaining starts.
> I have a few (really lovely) conservative friends who have expressed to me that they feel they can't express their political opinions outside of close friends and family because of the social risks involved with doing so.
When I read things like this, I think back to [this tweet](https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...). What innocuous issues exactly are conservatives receiving so much backlash on? Most often I see this sentiment from people who just want to say how they really feel about immigrants and "PC culture" is ruining everything for them.
> Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
> Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
I'm also a politically informed person and, unlike you, I am politically active. What can I say? It's my hobby. People go skydiving on weekends, I engage in left-wing politics. But I'm quite afraid of the possible consequences. What if a prospective employer sees me handing out flyers? What would by colleagues think? Well-paid developer and activist, how does that even work? Aren't they all unemployed and living with their moms? Fact is, many people (certainly a large number of bosses, and those are the ones whose opinions matter) think that you can't work at a private bank if you think private banking shouldn't exist.
At every workplace I've been at, liberal (as in right-wing) views have been omnipresent and shared widely. I've often had to bite my tongue. If your coworkers celebrate tax cuts because it gives them more money in their wallets you are a downer for expressing doubts on its consequences for society. Don't argue with people expressing anti-immigration views because you will be labeled a "virtue signaler".
I have no problem working with people who do not share my views. I briefly worked with someone who was a member of a Nazi group once (he didn't know I knew). It worked fine.
What the hell? These terms are in no way synonyms.
You seem to be fairly extreme left, which is fine, but then labelling everyone to the right of you as "right-wing" is not a useful classification. "Left" and "right" are relative to the political centre, not to wherever you yourself happen to be.
I think in terms of politics, discussion today doesn't really matter and won't convince anyone. It's about identity, not opinions or facts, they don't really matter so when you are trying to argue with a conservative, he is right not to listen to you.
They may know that their worldview is all wrong, and they aren't fighting for it because it's right, but because there's nothing in for them in the alternatives: they need to preserve their black-collar workplaces for as long as they can, ideally till they retire (so they reject global warming and other concepts that definitely threaten them), they need value of their houses to stay or increase, or again they will never be able to retire, so they reject any multi-unit housing, affordable or assisted housing etc projects, and so on and so forth. They don't fight for their conservative ideas because they think they are right, but because they have vested interest in them being upheld at least for a while.
This is also why in Europe, politics is a lot less divisive. Because most people own nothing and have no vested interest in anything[sarc on], they are already on the hook of the Big State[sarc off]
> Only nine percent of the British adults we surveyed described politics as “very important” to their sense of identity, and only 22 percent had shared any political content on their social channels in the previous year
> When it comes to speaking their minds at work, one of these tribes—home of the “Progressive Activist”—is not like the others. “A powerful and vocal group for whom politics is at the core of their identity,” as More in Common describes them.
i see this more and more. the loud few make a lot of noise, the majority just want to do their jobs. companies have to cater to everyone... but at some point there’s too much virtue signaling at work
As an employer, we have a office policy that advises people to refrain from talking about religion or politics in the office place.
At first, there were two people who pushed back very very vocally to this policy and refused to abide by it. After a few warnings, one quit and the other did something inappropriate that caused us to fire her.
I was really surprised by the reaction after that. People came up to me and thanked me. It turns out those two people were an enormous distraction for everyone at work, and actively created a divisive and uncomfortable environment. They were obsessing about politics and could not stop talking about it with their peers - badgering anyone that disagreed with them. One of them even tried to use the company website and social media accounts to champion her politics.
After her termination, we discovered that she was also collecting client invoices on her desktop computer. Apparently, she had it in her head that we were secretly overcharging customers (she apparently did not understand how compound interest works) and was planning on reporting the company to the financial authorities. Note that even when you're innocent, an accusation of fraud can cause serious reputational damage as well as huge legal fees associated.
Activists are absolute poison to a company. I feel that company's efforts to placate them are usually recipes for them to backfire.
'For two-thirds of the population, talking politics sincerely, on the job, is uncomfortable. People who hold certain, commonplace views, stay silent believing that expressing those views will carry penalty not reward. '
This sounds like a recipe for disaster for any company. When I worked in the UK no part of my job description was about 'talking politics sincerely' or sharing my 'commonplace views'. I did that in the pub afterwards.
'Ethical Systems' appear to be a great way to stir up rancor and division with the usual cocktail of racialisation (the new segregationists) and genderisation of everything. I can't see how this would help productivity or enhance people's work lives in any shape or form. It reminds me of the first frame of a Dilbert cartoon.
People with, shall we say, radically progressive views, are more than comfortable to share them openly in the staff rooms, kitchens, before and after meetings, etc. without anybody contending with them. Anybody with more centrist, or God forbid conservative views, saves them for the pub afterwards or for their private gatherings. The Overton window seems to shift weekly.
I' not sure where you have worked, but the people who freely give their political opinions are grouped accordingly. They are not grouped by left/right, but by how annoying they are.
All are avoided if at all possible.
I have worked with people who's politics I greatly and deeply oppose. I liked them personally and never delved to deep into their political lives. However, where we have strayed I have tried to learn from their view point.
After all, if we cannot understand one another, how are we supposed to forge middle ground?
I think we really should start to teach _how_ to talk about things we disagree on. It appears that people think that re-iterating the same points (the ones that the "other" side find so extreme) at volume will change people's minds.
That's the case if the majority of people hold progressive views. I've encountered enough conservative companies where people had no problem sharing openly conservative views (some to an extreme that led to open racism).
In those companies, no one would've dared voicing progressive views. Doing that was the easiest way to become an outsider.
Could you point to some research on this, specifically ones that
account for the jobs where this happens (HN readers are likely in jobs that attract more middle class and higher education people, who are overwhelmingly left of the current UK median - go to a taxi driver mess room and compare conversations)
and
provide examples of the overton window shifting (yes, the rise of farage and ukip shifted it significantly in some aspects, but on the other hand civil unions and equal marriage has shifted it in others)
I'm willing to believe you that the overton window has shifted to the right significantly over the last 10 years on many aspects, but I'd like to see the evidence
I remember working at a company that had a library room which was sometimes booked for meetings.
Every single time I was in a meeting there, without fail, at least one progressive person in the room had to loudly make some negative remark about Ayn Rand and scoff, sigh loudly, or roll their eyes to express their disapproval. Maybe they'd do all three at once. It was a real meme. I think this was because the room had a poster with quotes from various authors and Ayn Rand may have been on the list, although I'm unclear in my memory.
I always found it funny, the behavior was over-the-top childish coming from grown adults. I just bit my tongue, they were otherwise decent people as coworkers.
Then you need to sense what is the workplace consensus on political topics and pretend you agree, otherwise you'll risk getting pushed away at work. I used to know a guy who was pretty vocal about legalisation of drugs and he was able to present his points very well. However everyone at workplace labelled him as a "druggie" and eventually he was dismissed as HR bought the rumours that he is doing drugs, which was of course false.
I love working in a place where using work resources for non-work tasks is strictly forbidden. It's been years since I got an email with even a scent of politics.
What do you mean by "the new segregationists" and "genderisation of everything"? Are people stomping in and replacing gender-neutral workplace restrooms with separate ones for specific genders? Is racial (or otherwise) segregation being put in place at your place of work? Are gender-neutral pronouns like "they" being replaced in company prose with "he" or "she"?
I assume that the previous poster sees “new segregationism” in the following behaviours:
* The de-nuancing of race by reverting to “white” vs “black” and sidelining all other “races”.
* The redefinition of racism to be exclusively something that “white” people do to “black” people.
* The rollback of cultural integration goals by ringfencing certain behaviours as either “black” or “white”, with any cross-pollination being branded “appropriation”.
* Elevating race as the primary lens through which all society should be viewed, thus abandoning the project of emphasising the content of our hearts and not the color of our skin.
I assume that the previous poster sees “genderisation” in the following behaviours:
* Confusing sex and gender, to the detriment of sex and with the aim of establishing the primacy of gender in all respects - legal, interpersonal and medical.
* Re-establishment of gender norms as the definition of identity, rolling back progress in challenging gender stereotypes.
Progressivism is the new Christianity, taking over the pagan landscape.
It used to be that politics (in the UK) was class based. You are this or that based on your background. Two people from different classes would understand why the other did not support the same political party. That was how it was, and nobody felt the other should not exist. Everyone felt the other had a place in society. These progressive ideologies are different. Everyone can be part of them. You can be a pauper progressive and also a billionaire progressive. Secondly if you are not one of them, you are the enemy, and you do not belong in society, and the aim is to eradicate you.
This is what changed.
No conservative in the 1970s would have thought, everyone in Britain should be a conservative. That would not make sense. They would not have felt that was something reasonable to demand, or even at all possible. But now you got progressives who think that is indeed what should happen. Everyone should be progressive. If you are not you need to be exterminated.
And paradoxically, they want to include everyone in their ranks, but they also stand for very little. When you have all kinds, within your ranks you cannot accomplish much of substance without upsetting your own comrades.
> Progressivism is the new Christianity, taking over the pagan landscape
Perhaps your comment is a bit of a rant with highs and lows, but this is a rather powerful analogy.
Growing up in Spain, a country with a very strong Catholic tradition, I hated the Church and its invasive prescriptions. Still to this day I count my lucky stars not having spent my younger years during the Franco dictatorship, where being Spanish was inseparable from being Catholic by law, or worse yet, during the Inquisition where by law you could end up in burnt alive in a public square.
Now, however, it's mostly Progressives who assume this role of telling people what to do. This includes companies of dubious moral standing (Google, Uber, and others) who are constantly reminding us of what's Good, mostly for marketing reasons.
I can't stand it now, as I couldn't back in the day with conservative Catholics. Can't everyone just fuck off and stop preaching their shitty gospel?
I was raised Catholic as well, and went to a Catholic school. I've drawn heavy parallels between the Catholic church in the 90s to progressive rhetoric. You're not alone.
I'm sure that in the depth of their hearts the coal miners not only understood but also accepted Thatcher as a fundamental and important part of society.
It's important to draw the similarities between attempting to have dialogues with Christians/Progressives, in that they both argue their position exclusively from an emotional standpoint, never from an objective one.
For example, say you suggested "God does not exist" to a Christian. More often than not you'll receive an emotional response: "You're going to hell, is that what you want?!", "So life is meaningless to you?", "I feel sorry for you", etc.
Say you suggested to a "Progressive Activist", something as objective as "You should defend the right to display the Confederate flag (while condemning the action itself)". Progressive Activists become irrevocably distracted by the emotional injustice that the Confederate flag represents to them. Responses often include: "No, those people are pieces of shit, fuck them", "Racists", "They're what's wrong with this country", etc.
The emotional disposition of Christians and "Progressive Activists" are nearly identical.
> No conservative in the 1970s would have thought, everyone in Britain should be a conservative
Like the points your making. I would add that by the standards of the early 20th century when progressivism started even a 1970s conservative is a progressive.
Even taking American conservatives, who are more conservative that than their British peers, conservatives are fine with social security, medicare/medicade (NHS), and fine with government run education, and fine with an unbacked U.S. dollar funding this modern welfare state. I.E. even American conservatives are mostly fine with the lasting policies of FDR; perhaps our most progressive president.
What am I getting at?
My broader point is that Progressivism is indeed the current state religion. Both parties are 'progressive' parties by historical standards. The only recent development is that we are now approaching near total domination of the cultural, political, and legal rings of influence by Progressivism and this has resulted in a new popular interest in actual reactionary politics as people wake up.
> everyone in Britain should be a conservative
This is important to understand because it is how we got here. Reactionary ideologies are not interested in global leadership, but rather local control. Progressivism is an expansionist ideology interested in global domination; which is why we are currently either all progressives or former progressives (like yourself).
I might be one of these progressive activists, and this is interesting to read and reflect on. I am quite vocal about culture, hiring, compensation etc, though I would definitely not say that I feel "confident being vocal" - it actually feels very exposed and quite vulnerable (in part because others don't necessarily share their own views). The reason I'm still vocal about it is that I care, I would feel much more satisfied if I can look back on my working life and feel like I was able to introduce structural improvements than if all I see is that I did what I was told and grew my bank account.
I am very worried about inequality and climate change causing massive issues down the road and the current system does not seem sufficiently equipped to address this - the "short term productivity" signal seems unlikely to lead to a solution by itself. So I guess fear plays a role as well.
What I would definitely not want is a mono-culture where everyone thinks like me, or large scale central planning, or anything of that kind. But I am desperate to find a feasible gradual path from where we are now to something more sustainable - if we don't find something gradual, I'm afraid change will be sudden and uncontrollable.
I know there is a lot of frustration about cancel culture, political correctness, virtue signaling, social justice warriors, etc. I think the issue here is mainly one of polarization and lack of effective discourse - it's easier to call people names than engage thoughtfully (which goes both ways). I hope we will find a way to get better at this collectively.
To some extent I think these are things that should be discussed and addressed internally rather than externally so I'll try to be generic. Key things are
(1) I'm a strong believer that anyone with a job should be easily able to get health insurance and be able to send their children to university (i.e. even if law doesn't enforce it I think a decent minimum wage for all employees is appropriate)
(2) people doing work of similar value should get similar compensation in the same organization/on the same team (i.e. location based pay adjustments should be minimal at most)
(3) hiring should be diverse w.r.t. background/class/education (i.e. search widely and resist hiring people's friends)
I think these are not just moral issues, I think a culture of fairness also benefits morale and gives people more confidence to contribute and feel heard. And I think these kinds of issues become especially important when considering public organizations and non-profits.
As someone who is definitely considered "a progressive activist" I may add my 2cents:
I am not quite sure what you mean with objections? If you mean that people are not willing to talk about those things: I accept it, and stop talking about it. (Aslong as it is no direct issue like those people using the N-word, or being racist in general.)
About disagreement: It would be pretty strange if everyone would have the same opionion? I ask people about their reasons and try to understand their point of view. If they have valid arguments that I was not aware of, I am open to change my opinion.
BUT: If people come at me saying: Climate Change is a hoax, The complete media and science is controlled by the elites etc... Then i stop talking to them, as they would never consider an argument opposing to their opinion as valid.
AND: If someone considers people inferior only because of their gender, their race or their religion? Then I tell them indirectly, to go and **** themselfs.*
* At work I would try to be more diplomatic. Otherwise a whole team dynamic could be destroyed. But In my personal environment, I am as direct as possible. I do not want those people in my life.
Objections and disagreements are pretty common (many of the things that I would like to change are not easily compatible with neoliberalism/the modern corporation). I try to use them as learning opportunities to understand other people's viewpoints and refine/revise my own. I do get frustrated as well though, sometimes things seem self-evident to me and then it's painful when that view is not shared - in some cases it's not about arguments but about the underlying value systems from which people derive their arguments (e.g. what does fair mean to a person). These things are definitely not easy to talk about and I also don't think that I always manage to find the right tone or approach, but I try to be persistent and adjust as I find out how things work.
This happens in American workplaces, too. In my experience, most people at tech startups think the same, especially non-product people (anyone who isn't in engineering, design or product). If you want to unconditionally love the mission of your company, chances are you have to set aside your own personal opinions.
It is statistically very unlikely that your personal viewpoints are exactly parallel to the company's. Nobody wants to hire someone who thinks for themselves. Which is a bit ironic, because the best people are the ones who don't give a shit what other people think and are willing to call bullshit on their own product and even their own co-workers if they have to. Seen a lot of groupthink in SF tech especially, and it gets old. SF tech is like fight club -- everyone knows it's cult-like, but nobody wants to talk about it.
Nobody wants to be the one misfit who rains on the parade, even if the parade is headed off a cliff. In my experience, VC money makes smart people less smart. Having an outsider's viewpoint is going to be extremely valuable in the coming years, but it's currently out of fashion.
This is the paradoxical struggle I've had, from day one, at the startup for which I work.
I was praised for being "fresh eyes" and having "creative ideas", only to be reminded "how we do things here" after producing something that I thought would be a progressive way of addressing the company's challenges.
I continue to try new directions, and every once in a while something sticks, but often times I just have to be "another pair of hands" and do things the established way, flaws and all, because often that's what they really want me to do but don't want to admit.
It's especially frustrating when I can see the consequences of this a mile away and know that I'll be the one to have to deal with it, but what can I do?
This is normal. If you are an IC or middle manager you are there to execute (do what your boss says). Defining process and culture is not your job. Whether your process is better or not is besides the point. Fighting this will only lead to political pain.
Had to leave one job already. Bashing white people on company meetings while going on about wonderfully diverse they were.
Their disdain in having to hire a white guy was constant.
Product was falling apart since they had nothing but juniors of the correct races sexes and orientations.
" If you want to unconditionally love the mission of your company, chances are you have to set aside your own personal opinions."
This research is not about 'company viewpoints', it's about 'workplace diversity of individual viewpoints'.
In fact, the article is very clearly about 'political' viewpoints etc. and doesn't refer at all to pro/anti-company thinking etc. which frankly deserves study but would represent a different kind of social artifact.
Personal politics has absolutely no place in the workplace unless you’re working in politics. Nothing good can come of it. Leave it to the pub and Hacker News.
My workplace is a wonderful bastion of big-P-Politics-free collaboration. It is an apolitical safe space. My colleagues and I absolutely do have political views, but there is just no reason whatsoever to share them at work.
“Bring your whole self to work” is a flawed goal unless you live to maximise shareholder returns.
Actually, it would be nice if you left politics out of HN, too. In theory you could talk about politics and policy in a way that's conducive to intellectual interest and curiosity, but I've literally never seen this happen here with any consistency.
The political threads are always littered with knee-jerk hot takes that just don't belong here from an intellectual POV. To be very clear about what I'm saying, this is not about ideology; I've seen this behavior come from all parts of the political spectrum, and I find it even more annoying when "my" preferred side is doing it.
I agree with you - but the standards elsewhere seem to be so much lower even than here that I think it's (possibly) worthwhile having political discussions on HN.
Of course, I would love to know of a place that discusses things even more sensibly.
I'm not sure there is such a thing as an "apolitical space" - it is kind of like trying to remain stationary on a moving train. Even if you don't discss contentious issues, political parties, etc, you are still part of social and economic systems premised on political views.
For example, one might say they don't talk about climate change/sexism/racism in the work place and therefore it is apolitical, but to another viewpoint not talking about these issues is political.
People were willing to live and let live when the psychos were confined to gender theory classes and unsuccessful bookshops but now that they are so prevalent and demanding that people indulge their delusions every waking second it seems people are starting to get sick of it.
I disagree with this, firstly on the principle that if you ask someone on a moving train to stand still they know exactly what you mean, and secondly because politics are acceleration rather than velocity - applying energy to push, rather than drifting in a direction.
> Even if you don't discss contentious issues, political parties, etc, you are still part of social and economic systems premised on political views.
Even if you don't rub it in my face, you're still sitting on an ass.
Having one doesn't make the work place a strip club, even if someone there likes to spend their off moments imagining how your concealed taint might look.
I think this is missing the thrust of the issue which is that is, for some groups, certain kinds of politics invariably involve work and are a moral imperative.
If this were about issues likee 'big vs. small government' then it wouldn't be a problem.
But it's about political issues like 'diversity in the workplace' and 'Corporate support for Social Justice' (such as BLM) - as the big Elephant in the Room subject.
So things like 'Thanksgiving is Covert White Supremacy' as part of your job training [1] and 'we must achieve certain diversity targets or we are racist'.
That kind of stuff.
There's a group (part of the 13%) that thinks unless you're on board all of that, you're a problem, basically it's a moral imperative and anything else is racism. There's other groups that believe in some of those things, but are open minded with respect to other's views. And of course a wide array of other opinions.
I really don't believe that most other political subjects are entirely so sensitive. 'Privatization of Amtrack' or whatever is simply not going to engender in/out groups.
Abortion, Gun Rights are probably trigger issues for some, but they are really easy to just avoid at the office.
> But it's about political issues like 'diversity in the workplace' and 'Corporate support for Social Justice' (such as BLM)
but the problem with this view is that we are implementing a policy in a political way. There are many ways to argue for diversity that are either purely economic or practical. The issue here isn't the policy, its who and how its sold/pushed through.
There are companies that are run by, or full of shouty political types. Part of the interview process is to sniff out that kind of company and avoid like the plague. The post you linked to is evidence of that.
The other thing to mention is that US based companies are far more willing to let their works talk politics in the open. In the UK you are rightly looked at as suspect if you speak out on politics or religion.
It’s a valid point that some political issues are workplace-oriented, but in my organization they manifest as HR policies and are not up for personal debate round the water cooler.
One problem is what counts as politics. For a past example, someone talking about their opposite gender partner would not be seen as political as someone talking about their same gender partner. Someone talking about getting married may not think it is political, but when that action is denied to another group then merely bringing up marriage would be a political action. Even today there are still groups who cannot get married.
Politics has a tendency to seep in. For example, at a job a long while ago a colleague made a "joke" about a gang rape that had recently been in the news. He started humming the Batman song and sang "Na, na, na, na, GANGRAPE, na, na, na, na, GANGRAPE, ...." I told him his joke was tasteless and offensive. He said it was "just a joke" and our colleagues mostly sided with him. Was he bringing politics into the workplace by joking about gangrape? Was I bringing politics into the workplace? "Politics free" just means that the politics of the majority dominates.
That just sounds like bad parenting and poor social adjustment. Actually, most of the problems in this entire thread could probably be tracked to bad parenting.
By reading the other threads about work-from-home, i realize that for a lot of people work is one of the few places where they can talk politics with a group of real people, which is the reason why it happens so often
If you hire women, you're acting politically. And if you don't hire women, you're acting politically. Pretending that you're not political is the comfort of being in a position where those politics don't effect you.
No, you choose to interpret it as such. Maybe it was only women who applied or a man would be utterly useless in the job for physical reasons or . . .
Of course you can put a gloss on anything someone says but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a substantive contribution to the actual circumstances which apply for that time and place.
I am so tired of constantly hearing about politics at my workplace. Politics have already made their way into the tv shows, music, video games, and online forums that I enjoy. At least let me disconnect from that outrage-fuel at work. It also affects team cohesion. I can easily collaborate with just about anyone when I don’t know their political beliefs. As soon as I find out someone holds opposing views on a topic I feel strongly about, I can’t help but dread my interactions with them. I would strongly prefer to not know what my coworkers think about (most) non-work related topics.
I think it boils down to lacking in writing. I used to watch shows that had a lot of political statements made through their worldbuilding and character interactions. These were good stories because to find a political message there you had to think about it and draw parallels yourself. More modern shows tent to just outright mention current political movements IRL or just straight up lecture people by characters doing speeches. It's very distracting because it clearly breaks away from the flow of the show. Even if the lecture is something I 100% on board with it may feel even worse because it feels like the show insults my intelligence.
It was less blatant. As another poster mentioned, the politics was part of the narrative. The GamerGate debacle was a big shifting point, where video games have become another cultural battlefield. I'm not picking on one side or the other, I just want to enjoy my video games in peace without people calling each other SJWs or racists or sexists.
Just as an example, there was a huge kerfuffle in Battlefield a few years ago because they added black and female playable characters. They proceeded to shove it in everyone's face so we could be in awe of how progressive they are, and then the counterparty threw a huge fit about how those people would not have been combatants in WWI. I don't particularly care either way about the change, because it doesn't impact my gameplay. I do care that for a while the entire community focused in on this one aspect that has almost nothing to do with the game itself. It makes me dislike both sides, because they're both getting in the way of the game.
Everyone is oppressed in some way. Unfortunately, everyone loses in the oppression Olympics. If you are oppressing others that you assume aren't oppressed enough, then you are an oppressor and the cycle continues.
Agree and resonate with my personal observation. I've personally completely and utterly stopped following politics. I do follow local elections and things that affect me and my neighborhood (HOA, municipality decisions, etc.).
What we're seeing is an emergence of anti-political movement that is directly in response to the echo-chambered, uncivilized and nauseating social media that's profited from this rage. Twitter and Facebook along with the entire for-profit media machine is going to be historically marked as the dark footnote of human disgrace, greed and exceptional lack of responsibility.
I predict that the anti-political movement is going to take off and pick up steam in the intellectual circles. We're exhausted and I can feel it.
> I predict that the anti-political movement is going to take off and pick up steam in the intellectual circles.
Only in anti-intellectual circles could an anti-political movement take off. Anyone with even a shred of intellect understands how important politics is for everyday life and that being anti-political means "I will have to accept what others decide for me without any recourse."
Politics may be an uncomfortable topic, but it's still a very important one.
> As soon as I find out someone holds opposing views on a topic I feel strongly about, I can’t help but dread my interactions with them.
I'm of the opinion that all views that my colleagues have that are not related to the work at hand does not/should not affect how we work together at all.
I've been hearing my colleagues personal political opinion, the spectrum goes to both ends. I personally don't mind at all, I'm more sensitive to code quality and bugs.
I miss all those old video games without politics.
Nothing political at all about escaping from Castle Wolfenstein and killing Hitler in the process.
No politics in Final Fantasy 7, just some lively ecoterrorists saving the world from an exploitative totalitarian megacorporation that's destroying the environment.
Or indeed in BioShock, a game that certainly wasn't a satire of Ayn Rand libertarianism of the sort that enchants many a Valley VC/founder.
I miss playing Call of Duty/Rainbow Six/other shooters where you could just grab an assault rifle as a serving member of the US military and shoot a bunch of Bad Guys, which had absolutely no politics in it at all.
It sure is a shame the terrible awful SJWs made games political because they let you play as a girl, or put two gay characters kissing for ten seconds in a cutscene.
I'm going to stop playing games and instead go and read a book I've just bought called 'Animal Farm'. I'm sure it isn't a metaphor for anything. I bet Star Trek hasn't got any politics in it either.
Readit News
I considered myself a liberal by the standards of the time I grew up in. My views on some social issues, particularly 'free speech', are considered a conservative now. I am one of the people the article is concerning who will not publicly voice their political opinions in the workplace for fear of potential repercussions. One thing that particularly upsets me, is how willingly other people bring up politically sensitive issues in the workplace. I regularly hear woefully uninformed diatribes on geopolitics and American domestic politics (I do not live in America) in the workplace. Even correcting people who are clearly misinformed on clear matters of fact can cause offense. As a result, I do not enter into such discussions.
I feel as though I am more open-minded than many others. I am always ready to be corrected if I am wrong, and I am always willing to discuss my views with people subscribing to other political ideologies. However, I fear the repercussions of offending others who do not have an open mind. I also feel as though many politically active people are not acting in good faith. I feel that the safest option I will not regret is not to engage.
You're dead right and it's damned terrible. I long for both formal and informal debates on many topics but without my opponents becoming annoyed or offended (as so often they do nowadays). These days it seems almost impossible to debate any subject without upsetting someone.
I now long for the type of television programs that I remember from my youth—talking heads discussing and debating serious topics. For instance, I remember Bertrand Russell, Malcolm Muggeridge and A.J.P. Taylor and many others and it was wonderful and exciting television.
What so many people fail to realize these days is that one can learn so much from discussions and debates of this kind.
Incidentally, such discussions always remind me of the wonderful formal debate between Socrates and the sophist Thrasymachus in Book One of Plato's Republic on the topic of justice. It's so good that every time I read it, it sends shivers of excitement down my back.
TV and social media "debates" between politicians are 100% posturing, signaling, and rhetoric without any substance, and almost nobody can see it, everyone thinks their guy won.
it's as though we've forgotten how to think for ourselves and have opinions and stances that lay outside dogmatic groupthink. I even know a few people who think of themselves as "free thinkers" who nevertheless hitch their proverbial cart to some political eceleb personality's proverbial horse, buying into everything they say, wholesale.
people want to be told what to think, not how to think, as it's much easier that way.
I don't know if it's my bias speaking, but I felt that in the debate, Buckley comes across as a bully, with very little argumentative meat, who doesn't really respond to Baldwin's points. For what its worth, I didn't really like Baldwin's delivery either, but at least I felt there were substantive points there that were worth addressing.
In a way, this is probably the best one can hope for when you stage this kind of event - Buckley is, at least, well educated, but I can't help but think the debate might have been far more interesting if it was Baldwin vs Malcolm X - because ultimately the problem with the Buckleys of the world is that they defend institutions that were not built on ideals, but rather economics, and as such the defenses themselves are generally sophistic and without anything really interesting in them.
If I was a student, I would probably agitate to exclude a Buckley, and instead reach for a Malcolm, and I expect somebody would accuse me of being anti-free-speech, since the debate that would result would no longer span a societal divide, and both parties in the debate would be on 'one side' of the broader social issue. However, from an intellectual standpoint, it just sometimes is the case that interesting positions aren't evenly distributed across the terrain of popular feeling and political rhetoric, and a lot of people are simply defending things that are convenient or traditional but have no moral basis. So inviting those people is a waste of time - they're just (at best) going to come up with clever excuses for whatever already exists, or whatever they would want regardless.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tek9h3a5wQ
There are orders of magnitude more such content now than there was for instance 40 years ago. There's probably hundreds of hours of your favourite philosopher/economist/pundit's lectures/debates/speeches at your fingertips. Click-click and you literally begin to hear them talk in less than 30 seconds. This probably includes those very programmes from ages ago!
This whole type of complaint reeks of "back in my day" appeals to nostalgia.
I never had that in my youth, but YouTube recently started suggesting videos from The Dick Cavett Show from the 60's and 70's. The show was broadcast on TV and I think counted as light entertainment, so I don't presume it's very special for it's time, but seeing these interviews conducted at a pace where people can actually express themselves with anything but pre-canned anecdotes, with an interviewer who is actually listening and engaging with the topic is such a breath of fresh air compared to what I am used to. A lot of the interviews I've watched seem like they touch on pretty controversial subjects for the time (religion, LGBT, race, drugs, alcoholism etc)
(of course it helps that the clips that get uploaded and recommended are of historical figures, so there's a lot of survivorship bias there)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spitting_Image
This is a classic honeypot. They want to weed out people who have views that do not align with current PC status quo. One of the reasons is that no company wants to be associates with an employee who has views that could damage company image and lose money. They want your whole self, so they can discard you if they think you are a liability.
I'm in the market for a new leadership role and I have a very well established leadership model that I've honed over the years to build high performing organizations. I was considering publishing my leadership writings (that I share with my employees when I coach them) on my LinkedIn so prospective employers could see whether I'm a good fit for transforming their organizations.
One of my former employees cautioned me that my since my leadership model doesn't virtue signal that I might find it hurts me more than it helps my prospects. I'm not sure what to make of this.
What this really means: make your whole self about work, then bring that self to work.
If I were being more cynical, I'd say that managers or leaders love to talk about "Company culture" or "Company values" points like this because it allows them to mark their own work when they define success (although this may be unconscious). "We changed our company culture" isn't a statement that's easy to check or measure (it won't show up in eg engagement surveys), unlike "we grew earnings by x%", yet it also sounds much more "difficult".
A lot of the time it's effectively all an elaborate social game.
The worst that i can think of is that people are hiding their true interests and thus lying to you.
Trendy, yet completely stupid advice.
Even though the personal is political (such as the status of being gay), It sounds to me like you're thinking about political topics irrelevant to the organization when you advise people to "avoid controversial and political discussions". Whether the topic is relevant to your work depends on the topic, and it's up to you to make a cost-benefit analysis of whether it's worth discussing. I think that people should be able to discuss their family life and workplace policies, but I agree that broader political discussion may not be worth it.
I guess I'd like to end by saying that it depends. What don't you think should be discussed at work? Why shouldn't you discuss this with your colleagues? Personally, I think discussing a gay spouse should be fine and expected, and supporting genocide shouldn't be, but there's a lot of room in between those two extremes.
Elaborate plz
Everything devolves into tribalism without philosophy. It looks like people are discoursing, but they are really just signalling.
I was looking to put words on my feeling about this, and you did it perfectly.
I was wondering why suddenly so many people voiced the same engaged opinion, while I know for having discussed with them in private settings that they don't think deeply about society.
Now I realize that's because they want to look like they belong to a certain kind of people. It's not about ideas. It's about tribes.
I'm an outsider and even I've been drawn into US politics, because it is entertaining. Sometimes it's more entertaining than a fictional story. But I doubt that this makes for sensible governing.
Well some of it has been influential, works by Aristotle and Plato for instance. In another post here I've mentioned Plato's Republic (now well over 200 years old). Its arguments about justice are still the cornerstone of our justice system these days—or at least they're supposed to be.
"Everything devolves into tribalism without philosophy."
Unfortunately, that's true. It's not gone unnoticed that in recent decades many universities have closed down their liberal arts and often this includes their schools of philosophy. It's pretty terrible really.
This is modern anti-culture. It's a climate where "opinions" matter more than knowledge and consumerism matters more than democracy.
There are many employers. I am an employee, but I am first and foremost a citizen in a Democracy... If I have the courage to defend it and the will to learn/educate.
An educational system worth the title should provide understanding of society and democracy.
It's not just that. Sometimes the people don't understand the difference between their opinion and facts. Like I could point out some factual incorrectness and they see me as attacking their opinion. A lot of the time they coincidence, but sometimes I might be in favor of their opinion based on other facts and simply don't want misinformation to spread. Or we might share the same objective but that false information would lead to a flawed implementation that would block us from achieving a shared goal. Not to mention, I try not to attack an actual opinion, because everyone is entitled to one, even if it differs from mine.
Isaac Asimov
Dead Comment
This resonates deeply. I'm at the point where "I'm entitled to my opinion!" is a great signal to change the topic, never to return to the topic of politics with that person ever again
I think since around 2008 with the rise of social media, so much of one's ego has been made public. More so than ever before. Its as if everyone is a public figure. Because of this, more people are incapable of accepting that they may be wrong, underinformed, or simply misinformed.
I am worried we are in a positive feedback were perceptions of polarization lead to self-censorship among the less polarized, which further drives the perceptions of polarization.
"Taking offence is an act of aggression"
My parents raised me to do my best to neither take nor give offense. Most of my peers as a child were taught the same way. Obviously we're not Vulcans; We will sometimes inadvertently give offense, or respond emotionally to something that may have been meant innocuously. Yet so much of what I see in public discourse is reveling in both sides of that equation: deliberately trying to provoke emotional reactions from others, intentionally adhering to uncharitable interpretations of others' statements even after they have explained themselves, and celebrating the drama resulting from these things.
Civil discourse simply cannot function if this is a substantial part of pubic culture. There is no way to have a productive discussion if even one of the parties is deliberately provoking an emotional response. There is no way to have a productive discussion if even one of the parties is deliberately misinterpreting another in order to justify their own emotional response. Yet the dominant forms of public discourse these days include heavy doses of both of these things.
"Even correcting people who are clearly misinformed on clear matters of fact can cause offense."
I was stupid enough to do this too. People were discussing the gender wage gap the way the TV reporters do - that a woman in the same job as a man, with all things equal, makes 80 cents on the dollar. So I brought up the BLS study that shows that the 80 cents number is about an aggregate comparison of all men and women in the workforce, and that the main driver of the discrepancy comes from the types of jobs that men and women are in. I wouldn't be surprised if I get downvoted on here for this comment too.
>the discrepancy comes from the types of jobs that men and women are in.
only comes down to just being a moving the goal posts sort of thing from disparity in pay to disparity in expectation and opportunity for young men versus women. It's not a compelling argument against a gender pay gap, overall.
Using your own metric of a broad view, it's probably more of a problem than a specific man versus a specific woman, because it points to a theory that societal norms serve to re-enforce the expectation of taking jobs in lower paying fields on women versus men.
Anyway, any workplace that wouldn't let you have a conversation about this topic, in a respectful, non-bigoted way is maybe not a healthy place to work. The problem is, these types of arguments are (in my experience as a professional) a thin veneer of 'civility' over a massive ocean of bigotry and idiocy in many cases. I'm afraid employers take a hard line, because it's easy to slip into that ocean.
The mere fact that you are talking about "TV reporters" way of talking about things communicates that you have a disdain for the way such issues are commonly discussed in the media or by the general public, and correcting their statement about the study also seems to suggest that according to you really there is no gender wage gap (or it's less of an issue than people would seem to generally think), it's all just due to personal choice or preference in what type of jobs they do or something to that effect.
You can of course agree or disagree about a lot of these things, but I do think that sometimes a "mere factual correction" can have additional connotations that are much more political and not just neutral statements. It's often the opinion or suggestion behind the factual correction that causes more offense.
THAT is the comment that will get you downvoted dude.
A large number of employees are in a "quiet seething" mode and are becoming increasingly disengaged from workplace culture (i.e., "I don't want to get to know any of you. I just want to do my work and clock out").
On the bright side, remote work helps with this.
This is so true.
I've seen polling showing that large numbers of people believe that the number of unarmed black men fatally shot by American police every year is in the "thousands" or even "tens of thousands". And the further to the left the media people consume, the higher they're likely to believe the number is.
The actual number of unarmed black men shot dead by American police in 2019 is thirteen.
Regardless of what you think about racism and police violence, this is a fact. People who think that "thousands" of unarmed black men are killed by police every year are not only numerous, they are wrong - so absurdly, wildly wrong by so many orders of magnitude that if you tell tell me that the number is in the thousands, I'm going to assume you're deeply uninformed on many other things, not just this one number.
Yet in the current climate I'd be afraid to even correct people on this enormous, inarguable factual innaccuracy.
(And good luck explaining to people that "unarmed" isn't synonymous with "innocent" - you can be unarmed and still give a cop a good reason to shoot you, for example by attacking the cop with your fists.)
Is it really too much to ask that we leave this stuff out of the workplace?
Yes, it absolutely is a valid reason to shoot someone, and anyone with training in firearms or self-defense would agree. You're not necessarily going to get shot for throwing a single punch, but you're increasing your chances of getting shot exponentially.
First of all, a fist can be a deadly weapon. It's possible to kill someone with a single punch, or knock them unconscious, or do all manner of nasty and permanent damage. Cops know this, as does anyone who knows anything about violence.
And this is crucial: every interaction you have with a cop in the US is colored by the fact that the cop has a gun on his waist. If you attack a cop with any kind of weapon, you've demonstrated that you're willing to use violence against him, and he has no way of knowing how far you're willing to take it. What if you get your hands on his gun? He knows that a single punch might be enough to disable him, even temporarily, and even a second's delay might be enough for you to grab his gun - and then he's fucked.
Cops don't carry guns for the exclusive purpose of stopping other people with guns. The point of a gun is to make someone stop doing what they're doing, and sometimes you really need someone to stop doing what what they're doing, no matter what they're armed with. We can't expect cops to be champion bare-knuckle boxers: if someone's attacking you with their fists, they're potentially threatening your life, and it's not unreasonable to use whatever tools are at your disposal to neutralise the threat.
Again: this doesn't mean that every use of fists should immediately be met with a death sentence. My point is just that guns can in some (not all) circumstances be a legitimate response to fists.
And on the more general point, that's not the only case in which it's justifiable for an unarmed person to be shot. In some cases of "unarmed" men being shot by police, the perp was trying to ram the cops with his car.
Conversely, not every case of an "armed" man being shot by police is justified either. Philando Castile had a gun in his car, but he didn't deserve to die.
I think you mean, the reported number of unarmed black men shot dead by American police in 2019 is thirteen. (But surely we've learned that police reports are not necessarily completely accurate.) And I think that some people believe that a suspect's being armed is not justification for summary execution, barring extraordinary circumstances, so in their minds the caveat of "unarmed" is a distinction without a difference. Therefore they might be more concerned with the total reported number of black persons shot dead by American police, which is 235.
As long as we're on that subject, here's an interesting (albeit somewhat misleading) fact I discovered that I haven't seen cited anywhere else. While 235 fatal shootings by officers doesn't seem like a huge number compared with the total population, consider that there were about 697,195 police officers in the US in 2019, meaning that each officer had a 1/2967 chance of killing a black person that year. Contrast that with the oft-cited black-on-black murder rate: 7484 blacks were murdered in 2019. Let's (erroneously) assume that every single one was killed by a black male. The total black population in 2019 was 46.8 million, 48% of them male which comes to 22.4 million black males. So the chances of a black male murdering another black person is only 1/2933. That's right, a random police officer is very slightly more likely to have killed a black person than a random black male is likely to have killed a black person.
So if it's true that blacks ought to fear other black males, then the fear that some black people have of police officers as a class might be correspondingly justified.
But I also think we should wonder: how many white armed men were killed?
Because if you are the one out of a group who comes up with a number drastically out of what other people estimate, it seems reasonable to assume you are the one who are in the wrong.
And of course unarmed doesn't mean innocent anymore than being armed means being in the wrong.
I am challenging you to a source for two reasons: to make sure you are not just making the number up, and because I want to see what the source defines as being unarmed and how they determine that.
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And also the ethical implications of shooting 13 unarmed people in a year can still be a subject of debate.
Is the problem (in your company and the world at large) that open respectful political debate has not got a common set of rules / words? If there was a phrase "I respectfully disagree - I understand that ..." was a phrase used by every TV host, Politician and Facebook poster, would prefacing your words with that make others more open to receiving it?
No, because companies have absolutely 0 incentive to stand by you if doing so becomes difficult. They are amoral, when they throw you under the bus it's like a lion killing a gazelle. Just something they do. You should not ever trust any company in any way.
Christopher Hitchens' debate are others worth watching.
Does these even happen any more in MSM?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DvmLMUfGss
Of course you never know if you’re going to say the wrong thing to the wrong person, but I don’t go to work to make friends and I certainly don’t go there to be intimidated by bullies.
I can count the number of unreasonable people I’ve had to deal with on the knuckles of one finger and they all skulked away pretty quickly when they realised I was standing up to them.
I’m not trying to downplay what you’re saying. I think there is a culture of fear and I think it’s been stoked deliberately to a certain extent, but I also think it’s a lie. Most of the people you work with are probably like you. That may also explain why you don’t notice them ;)
But the consequence is that the other side becomes less open minded too. They've tried arguing with someone who Just. Will. Not. Listen, who Just. Will. Not. Think. And when they run into the same arguments from someone else, they are less likely to be willing to listen themselves.
It's hard to stay open minded in the middle of this. It's a battle. There are areas I just don't want to talk about any more. So I guess I'm losing the battle, at least to some degree.
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This is how every open and critically minded person feels nowadays.
There is a clear line between two groups:
1. People who think the best way to learn, educate and explore other people's views is by having an open discussion, saying uncomfortable things and having an ear to be corrected and showing mutual respect.
2. People who think that saying something uncomfortable during a discussion is an act of offence itself and therefore must be muted even if it takes some form of aggression by one or many people in order to mute that person. A discourse is only allowed if people immediately subscribe to a specific ideological idea and people are not allowed to get to that point through saying or asking the wrong things but must somehow be born with those views or otherwise need to be extinguished by the mob.
Unfortunately the 2. group is getting increasingly more violent and aggressive in their approach which makes the 1. group increasingly more aware that they are in fact in danger to just be themselves and learn about life through sometimes tough discourse or mistakes.
It's quite normal as we grow up we become more conservative, especially successful people - we want to continue the success that was based on values we grew up with. That's why conservativism is associated with belief in authority - you need authority to enforce the values of the past.
So when you grew up, you perceived freedom of speech as a good value because it meant freedom, and now you perceive it as a good value because it was there when you grew up.
However, liberals moved on, and found other issues that concern human freedom, which were neglected before. So for instance, there is freedom to have a different sexual orientation, and be able to express it. Conservatives disagree with that value because it simply wasn't part of our culture in the past.
(Progressives - or perhaps socialists would be more fitting name - are based on another value, namely inclusion in the community. They are distinct from liberals.)
I'd say I'm a mix of conservative/Libertarian and this kind of blows my mind over the past few years. It seems like I constantly hear people on the left openly voicing their political opinions around crowds of people, and always speak in a way that they genuinely believe everyone around them agrees....and often have a condescending way of saying it. It amazes me how they seem to have absolutely no idea where the right-wing people are even coming from. I think this recent over-confidence is mostly due to them not realizing the major media outlets are essentially feeding them communist propaganda (if you don't agree with this I'd consider researching cognitive dissonance). I experience this on a regular basis, and it usually leads to me completely losing respect for that person purely due to the lack of awareness that person is showing.
The other dynamic, and what the leftists don't realize (or can't process), is that the left's arguments are primarily things that sound good in practice, but don't add up in theory. It always sounds good when someone says they want to help someone else, no matter who says it. This allows them to go crazy in public giving one liners about the surface level of their political policies ("everyone should have world class health care!", "everyone should have lots of money!", "No one should ever shoot someone else with a gun!"...all because they sound good (even to conservatives). Conservative policies take a bit more explaining to get their point across, and are much more focused on the logical and realistic side of things. No one likes to say "someone who doesn't work and doesn't contribute to society doesn't deserve govt handouts"...but it makes logical sense. That kind of talk doesn't exactly sound as good around the water cooler. Also, the time horizon for conservative viewpoints is often much longer (think about generations in the future and the impact today's decisions will have down the road). Compared to the left's policies that solve shallow issues today while mortgaging the well-being of future generations.
The simple fact is that conservatives have an easier time seeing where the left is coming from as a result of the left's primary policies being shallower and less thought out. These aspects also make it easier for the left to create snarky comments around. Conservatives however, simply don't agree and think it's all a pipe dream. They see the shallowness that the left is not able to. The left on the other hand, not only doesn't understand the right's overarching viewpoints...they also aren't even willing to try to understand where the right is coming from.
The things you describe as political policies - they aren't. "Universal health care" and "minimize gun deaths" are goals, or value systems. You can make excellent pragmatic arguments for why they make sense (e.g. human capital is valuable), but as primary values they're motivated by emotion. Likewise, your perspective of "someone who doesn't work and doesn't contribute to society doesn't deserve govt handouts" does not "make logical sense" - it simply fits your value system, motivated by a sense of righteousness. You might be able to construct logical arguments for it, but let's not kid ourselves that's why you feel that way.
The "logical" view you have given ("someone who doesn't work and doesn't contribute to society doesn't deserve govt handouts") is purely an emotional view. "Deserve" has nothing to do with any sort of logic or realism. What are the effects of such a policy? What are the effects on crime, homelessness, unemployment...?
Politics is complicated, there is no absolute right or wrong, and the effects of policies are complex and hard to predict. There are many trade-offs, and a lot of those are non-obvious. People also have different values, and will prefer different trade-offs. That is not necessarily better or worse, just different.
Another reason, in my opinion for the leftist narrative being so captivating at the moment is that people are delaying adulthood, kids, family more and more. When you are young, or have little, true life experience you don't see why the simple solutions to help all these people wouldn't work. You haven't been in the trenches of life to realise that compromise is needed and that we don't always understand the 2nd or 3rd order effects that our actions will have.
Again all this is my own personal experience but I think it has some bearing on todays political minefield.
If you would look for more depth in the reasoning of the people you're disagreeing with yourself, you might be surprised at what you might find. The frustration you're expressing to me seems to be very symmetric, occurring on both sides of the spectrum.
>...
>Also, the time horizon for conservative viewpoints is often much longer (think about generations in the future and the impact today's decisions will have down the road).
Conservative policy in the US toward climate change right now is "it's a worldwide scientific hoax designed to take down the United States economy." That is not logical or reasonable. It expressly ignores the needs of future generations. Give me oil and economic growth now, externalities be damned.
>"everyone should have world class health care!"
The United States is the about the only western country for which the right-wing views this as illogical and unrealistic. Why? Maybe it is because sick people sometimes have trouble keeping a job, and
>"someone who doesn't work and doesn't contribute to society doesn't deserve govt handouts"
Is that it?
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By who? Rosa Luxembourg, for example, was a free speech fundamentalist, and she is still far left of many left wingers today.
Free speech is a value that is often adopted, nuanced, and discarded by political projects from all over the spectrum - and it's naive to think that one side of the spectrum has a monopoly on its defense or denigration.
In practice, disagreement is met with explanations and accusations of ”shifting overton window”, ”new normal” and ”normalization”.
Meaning that, Yes, you do have the right of free speach, but No, you should not be saying the wrong things.
However, last year I decided to start promoting conservative views I don't necessarily agree with that my friends hold to see what the consequences of this would be. I think people would be surprised at how open most people are to be honest. I've expressed conservative views on immigration, trans-rights and Trump as if they were my own and had very little push back outside of Twitter. I can contrast this with the fact that I've seen some people over the last few years express left-wing positions at work and have had at least equal push back. I especially remember one guy who expressed how he felt we should remove statues of historical figures who did things we wouldn't approve of today and got a very strong negative reaction in my office.
I wonder if the real problem here is that people who are conservatively minded are just naturally less comfortable with social conflict. I know my progressive friends are in all regards much more opinionated and seem far more comfortable with conflict, where as my conservative friends tend to be the types of people who avoid conflict.
Perhaps it's an age thing too. Older people who are generally more conservative and perhaps also less interested in getting into a heated debates on Twitter or in the office about some slightly controversial political position they hold. This difference in willingness to enter into social conflict may explain why conservatives feel they are in a minority despite making up about 50% of the population.
All I can say to those who feel oppressed is that as a bullied kid something I learnt from a young age is that it's hard to look myself in the mirror if I start trying to adapt my behaviour to please others. I much rather be myself and hated than try to conform at the expense of my identity. Be proud of who you are and never feel afraid to express yourself. If you're hated for that, so be it. It's better to be yourself than a coward.
Exactly, conservatives do not want change, and therefore do not want a conflict associated with the change. However, liberals and progressives push for changes because they simply do not value "do the things as in the past" nearly as much as their respective values, and every change means, potentially, a conflict.
It is not worth the risk talking to anyone about anything remotely "honest" unless you have known them for years and know how they will react. This is a catch-22 because to really trust someone you have to be willing to talk to them (which kind of makes it moot to begin with, right?)
Even now I find myself curbing my opinion strongly based on which words have been weaponized with malicious connotation, lets not discuss which 'truth-telling business' could be seen as responsible for this. Lets not discuss the other points which are too numerous to start on, and too political for the likes of this conversation. We could touch on the destruction of Western Academia as a point of origin for all this, we could muse on the comparable style of current social interaction to how things are depicted in 1984, or Communist Russia, but based on the keywords I already dropped, there is surely a large enough group of bots available to run this into the ground.
These are all my opinions, none of it is considered some unchangable, unalterable worldview, and I don't believe you can engage critically with anyone if you are not willing to compromise. That being said, compromise comes from both sides, and one side is way better at yelling racist, sexist, misogynist, whenever the bargaining starts.
When I read things like this, I think back to [this tweet](https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...). What innocuous issues exactly are conservatives receiving so much backlash on? Most often I see this sentiment from people who just want to say how they really feel about immigrants and "PC culture" is ruining everything for them.
> Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
> Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
> Con: LOL no...no not those views
> Me: So....deregulation?
> Con: Haha no not those views either
> Me: Which views, exactly?
> Con: Oh, you know the ones
At every workplace I've been at, liberal (as in right-wing) views have been omnipresent and shared widely. I've often had to bite my tongue. If your coworkers celebrate tax cuts because it gives them more money in their wallets you are a downer for expressing doubts on its consequences for society. Don't argue with people expressing anti-immigration views because you will be labeled a "virtue signaler".
I have no problem working with people who do not share my views. I briefly worked with someone who was a member of a Nazi group once (he didn't know I knew). It worked fine.
What the hell? These terms are in no way synonyms.
You seem to be fairly extreme left, which is fine, but then labelling everyone to the right of you as "right-wing" is not a useful classification. "Left" and "right" are relative to the political centre, not to wherever you yourself happen to be.
They may know that their worldview is all wrong, and they aren't fighting for it because it's right, but because there's nothing in for them in the alternatives: they need to preserve their black-collar workplaces for as long as they can, ideally till they retire (so they reject global warming and other concepts that definitely threaten them), they need value of their houses to stay or increase, or again they will never be able to retire, so they reject any multi-unit housing, affordable or assisted housing etc projects, and so on and so forth. They don't fight for their conservative ideas because they think they are right, but because they have vested interest in them being upheld at least for a while.
This is also why in Europe, politics is a lot less divisive. Because most people own nothing and have no vested interest in anything[sarc on], they are already on the hook of the Big State[sarc off]
> When it comes to speaking their minds at work, one of these tribes—home of the “Progressive Activist”—is not like the others. “A powerful and vocal group for whom politics is at the core of their identity,” as More in Common describes them.
i see this more and more. the loud few make a lot of noise, the majority just want to do their jobs. companies have to cater to everyone... but at some point there’s too much virtue signaling at work
At first, there were two people who pushed back very very vocally to this policy and refused to abide by it. After a few warnings, one quit and the other did something inappropriate that caused us to fire her.
I was really surprised by the reaction after that. People came up to me and thanked me. It turns out those two people were an enormous distraction for everyone at work, and actively created a divisive and uncomfortable environment. They were obsessing about politics and could not stop talking about it with their peers - badgering anyone that disagreed with them. One of them even tried to use the company website and social media accounts to champion her politics.
After her termination, we discovered that she was also collecting client invoices on her desktop computer. Apparently, she had it in her head that we were secretly overcharging customers (she apparently did not understand how compound interest works) and was planning on reporting the company to the financial authorities. Note that even when you're innocent, an accusation of fraud can cause serious reputational damage as well as huge legal fees associated.
Activists are absolute poison to a company. I feel that company's efforts to placate them are usually recipes for them to backfire.
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This sounds like a recipe for disaster for any company. When I worked in the UK no part of my job description was about 'talking politics sincerely' or sharing my 'commonplace views'. I did that in the pub afterwards.
'Ethical Systems' appear to be a great way to stir up rancor and division with the usual cocktail of racialisation (the new segregationists) and genderisation of everything. I can't see how this would help productivity or enhance people's work lives in any shape or form. It reminds me of the first frame of a Dilbert cartoon.
All are avoided if at all possible.
I have worked with people who's politics I greatly and deeply oppose. I liked them personally and never delved to deep into their political lives. However, where we have strayed I have tried to learn from their view point.
After all, if we cannot understand one another, how are we supposed to forge middle ground?
I think we really should start to teach _how_ to talk about things we disagree on. It appears that people think that re-iterating the same points (the ones that the "other" side find so extreme) at volume will change people's minds.
In those companies, no one would've dared voicing progressive views. Doing that was the easiest way to become an outsider.
account for the jobs where this happens (HN readers are likely in jobs that attract more middle class and higher education people, who are overwhelmingly left of the current UK median - go to a taxi driver mess room and compare conversations)
and
provide examples of the overton window shifting (yes, the rise of farage and ukip shifted it significantly in some aspects, but on the other hand civil unions and equal marriage has shifted it in others)
I'm willing to believe you that the overton window has shifted to the right significantly over the last 10 years on many aspects, but I'd like to see the evidence
Every single time I was in a meeting there, without fail, at least one progressive person in the room had to loudly make some negative remark about Ayn Rand and scoff, sigh loudly, or roll their eyes to express their disapproval. Maybe they'd do all three at once. It was a real meme. I think this was because the room had a poster with quotes from various authors and Ayn Rand may have been on the list, although I'm unclear in my memory.
I always found it funny, the behavior was over-the-top childish coming from grown adults. I just bit my tongue, they were otherwise decent people as coworkers.
Then you need to sense what is the workplace consensus on political topics and pretend you agree, otherwise you'll risk getting pushed away at work. I used to know a guy who was pretty vocal about legalisation of drugs and he was able to present his points very well. However everyone at workplace labelled him as a "druggie" and eventually he was dismissed as HR bought the rumours that he is doing drugs, which was of course false.
* The de-nuancing of race by reverting to “white” vs “black” and sidelining all other “races”.
* The redefinition of racism to be exclusively something that “white” people do to “black” people.
* The rollback of cultural integration goals by ringfencing certain behaviours as either “black” or “white”, with any cross-pollination being branded “appropriation”.
* Elevating race as the primary lens through which all society should be viewed, thus abandoning the project of emphasising the content of our hearts and not the color of our skin.
I assume that the previous poster sees “genderisation” in the following behaviours:
* Confusing sex and gender, to the detriment of sex and with the aim of establishing the primacy of gender in all respects - legal, interpersonal and medical.
* Re-establishment of gender norms as the definition of identity, rolling back progress in challenging gender stereotypes.
Perhaps your comment is a bit of a rant with highs and lows, but this is a rather powerful analogy.
Growing up in Spain, a country with a very strong Catholic tradition, I hated the Church and its invasive prescriptions. Still to this day I count my lucky stars not having spent my younger years during the Franco dictatorship, where being Spanish was inseparable from being Catholic by law, or worse yet, during the Inquisition where by law you could end up in burnt alive in a public square.
Now, however, it's mostly Progressives who assume this role of telling people what to do. This includes companies of dubious moral standing (Google, Uber, and others) who are constantly reminding us of what's Good, mostly for marketing reasons.
I can't stand it now, as I couldn't back in the day with conservative Catholics. Can't everyone just fuck off and stop preaching their shitty gospel?
I'm sure that in the depth of their hearts the coal miners not only understood but also accepted Thatcher as a fundamental and important part of society.
For example, say you suggested "God does not exist" to a Christian. More often than not you'll receive an emotional response: "You're going to hell, is that what you want?!", "So life is meaningless to you?", "I feel sorry for you", etc.
Say you suggested to a "Progressive Activist", something as objective as "You should defend the right to display the Confederate flag (while condemning the action itself)". Progressive Activists become irrevocably distracted by the emotional injustice that the Confederate flag represents to them. Responses often include: "No, those people are pieces of shit, fuck them", "Racists", "They're what's wrong with this country", etc.
The emotional disposition of Christians and "Progressive Activists" are nearly identical.
The purges will come soon enough.
> No conservative in the 1970s would have thought, everyone in Britain should be a conservative
Like the points your making. I would add that by the standards of the early 20th century when progressivism started even a 1970s conservative is a progressive.
Even taking American conservatives, who are more conservative that than their British peers, conservatives are fine with social security, medicare/medicade (NHS), and fine with government run education, and fine with an unbacked U.S. dollar funding this modern welfare state. I.E. even American conservatives are mostly fine with the lasting policies of FDR; perhaps our most progressive president.
What am I getting at?
My broader point is that Progressivism is indeed the current state religion. Both parties are 'progressive' parties by historical standards. The only recent development is that we are now approaching near total domination of the cultural, political, and legal rings of influence by Progressivism and this has resulted in a new popular interest in actual reactionary politics as people wake up.
> everyone in Britain should be a conservative
This is important to understand because it is how we got here. Reactionary ideologies are not interested in global leadership, but rather local control. Progressivism is an expansionist ideology interested in global domination; which is why we are currently either all progressives or former progressives (like yourself).
I am very worried about inequality and climate change causing massive issues down the road and the current system does not seem sufficiently equipped to address this - the "short term productivity" signal seems unlikely to lead to a solution by itself. So I guess fear plays a role as well.
What I would definitely not want is a mono-culture where everyone thinks like me, or large scale central planning, or anything of that kind. But I am desperate to find a feasible gradual path from where we are now to something more sustainable - if we don't find something gradual, I'm afraid change will be sudden and uncontrollable.
I know there is a lot of frustration about cancel culture, political correctness, virtue signaling, social justice warriors, etc. I think the issue here is mainly one of polarization and lack of effective discourse - it's easier to call people names than engage thoughtfully (which goes both ways). I hope we will find a way to get better at this collectively.
(1) I'm a strong believer that anyone with a job should be easily able to get health insurance and be able to send their children to university (i.e. even if law doesn't enforce it I think a decent minimum wage for all employees is appropriate)
(2) people doing work of similar value should get similar compensation in the same organization/on the same team (i.e. location based pay adjustments should be minimal at most)
(3) hiring should be diverse w.r.t. background/class/education (i.e. search widely and resist hiring people's friends)
I think these are not just moral issues, I think a culture of fairness also benefits morale and gives people more confidence to contribute and feel heard. And I think these kinds of issues become especially important when considering public organizations and non-profits.
I am not quite sure what you mean with objections? If you mean that people are not willing to talk about those things: I accept it, and stop talking about it. (Aslong as it is no direct issue like those people using the N-word, or being racist in general.)
About disagreement: It would be pretty strange if everyone would have the same opionion? I ask people about their reasons and try to understand their point of view. If they have valid arguments that I was not aware of, I am open to change my opinion.
BUT: If people come at me saying: Climate Change is a hoax, The complete media and science is controlled by the elites etc... Then i stop talking to them, as they would never consider an argument opposing to their opinion as valid.
AND: If someone considers people inferior only because of their gender, their race or their religion? Then I tell them indirectly, to go and **** themselfs.*
* At work I would try to be more diplomatic. Otherwise a whole team dynamic could be destroyed. But In my personal environment, I am as direct as possible. I do not want those people in my life.
It is statistically very unlikely that your personal viewpoints are exactly parallel to the company's. Nobody wants to hire someone who thinks for themselves. Which is a bit ironic, because the best people are the ones who don't give a shit what other people think and are willing to call bullshit on their own product and even their own co-workers if they have to. Seen a lot of groupthink in SF tech especially, and it gets old. SF tech is like fight club -- everyone knows it's cult-like, but nobody wants to talk about it.
Nobody wants to be the one misfit who rains on the parade, even if the parade is headed off a cliff. In my experience, VC money makes smart people less smart. Having an outsider's viewpoint is going to be extremely valuable in the coming years, but it's currently out of fashion.
I was praised for being "fresh eyes" and having "creative ideas", only to be reminded "how we do things here" after producing something that I thought would be a progressive way of addressing the company's challenges.
I continue to try new directions, and every once in a while something sticks, but often times I just have to be "another pair of hands" and do things the established way, flaws and all, because often that's what they really want me to do but don't want to admit.
It's especially frustrating when I can see the consequences of this a mile away and know that I'll be the one to have to deal with it, but what can I do?
This is wishful thinking, and I've seen no indication that the current groupthink is going to do anything but grow more dominant.
Their disdain in having to hire a white guy was constant. Product was falling apart since they had nothing but juniors of the correct races sexes and orientations.
This research is not about 'company viewpoints', it's about 'workplace diversity of individual viewpoints'.
In fact, the article is very clearly about 'political' viewpoints etc. and doesn't refer at all to pro/anti-company thinking etc. which frankly deserves study but would represent a different kind of social artifact.
My workplace is a wonderful bastion of big-P-Politics-free collaboration. It is an apolitical safe space. My colleagues and I absolutely do have political views, but there is just no reason whatsoever to share them at work.
“Bring your whole self to work” is a flawed goal unless you live to maximise shareholder returns.
Actually, it would be nice if you left politics out of HN, too. In theory you could talk about politics and policy in a way that's conducive to intellectual interest and curiosity, but I've literally never seen this happen here with any consistency.
The political threads are always littered with knee-jerk hot takes that just don't belong here from an intellectual POV. To be very clear about what I'm saying, this is not about ideology; I've seen this behavior come from all parts of the political spectrum, and I find it even more annoying when "my" preferred side is doing it.
Of course, I would love to know of a place that discusses things even more sensibly.
For example, one might say they don't talk about climate change/sexism/racism in the work place and therefore it is apolitical, but to another viewpoint not talking about these issues is political.
People were willing to live and let live when the psychos were confined to gender theory classes and unsuccessful bookshops but now that they are so prevalent and demanding that people indulge their delusions every waking second it seems people are starting to get sick of it.
Even if you don't rub it in my face, you're still sitting on an ass.
Having one doesn't make the work place a strip club, even if someone there likes to spend their off moments imagining how your concealed taint might look.
If this were about issues likee 'big vs. small government' then it wouldn't be a problem.
But it's about political issues like 'diversity in the workplace' and 'Corporate support for Social Justice' (such as BLM) - as the big Elephant in the Room subject.
So things like 'Thanksgiving is Covert White Supremacy' as part of your job training [1] and 'we must achieve certain diversity targets or we are racist'.
That kind of stuff.
There's a group (part of the 13%) that thinks unless you're on board all of that, you're a problem, basically it's a moral imperative and anything else is racism. There's other groups that believe in some of those things, but are open minded with respect to other's views. And of course a wide array of other opinions.
I really don't believe that most other political subjects are entirely so sensitive. 'Privatization of Amtrack' or whatever is simply not going to engender in/out groups.
Abortion, Gun Rights are probably trigger issues for some, but they are really easy to just avoid at the office.
[1] https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/only-white-people-can-b...
but the problem with this view is that we are implementing a policy in a political way. There are many ways to argue for diversity that are either purely economic or practical. The issue here isn't the policy, its who and how its sold/pushed through.
There are companies that are run by, or full of shouty political types. Part of the interview process is to sniff out that kind of company and avoid like the plague. The post you linked to is evidence of that.
The other thing to mention is that US based companies are far more willing to let their works talk politics in the open. In the UK you are rightly looked at as suspect if you speak out on politics or religion.
Seems like people are conflating politics with decency...
By reading the other threads about work-from-home, i realize that for a lot of people work is one of the few places where they can talk politics with a group of real people, which is the reason why it happens so often
Of course you can put a gloss on anything someone says but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a substantive contribution to the actual circumstances which apply for that time and place.
Just as an example, there was a huge kerfuffle in Battlefield a few years ago because they added black and female playable characters. They proceeded to shove it in everyone's face so we could be in awe of how progressive they are, and then the counterparty threw a huge fit about how those people would not have been combatants in WWI. I don't particularly care either way about the change, because it doesn't impact my gameplay. I do care that for a while the entire community focused in on this one aspect that has almost nothing to do with the game itself. It makes me dislike both sides, because they're both getting in the way of the game.
* Two races: white and ""political""
* Two genders: male and ""political""
* Two sexualities: straight and ""political""
* Two body types: normative and ""political""
It used to be possible to do new things without being toxic. E.g. Ripley vs the female Doctor Who.
What we're seeing is an emergence of anti-political movement that is directly in response to the echo-chambered, uncivilized and nauseating social media that's profited from this rage. Twitter and Facebook along with the entire for-profit media machine is going to be historically marked as the dark footnote of human disgrace, greed and exceptional lack of responsibility.
I predict that the anti-political movement is going to take off and pick up steam in the intellectual circles. We're exhausted and I can feel it.
Only in anti-intellectual circles could an anti-political movement take off. Anyone with even a shred of intellect understands how important politics is for everyday life and that being anti-political means "I will have to accept what others decide for me without any recourse."
Politics may be an uncomfortable topic, but it's still a very important one.
I'm of the opinion that all views that my colleagues have that are not related to the work at hand does not/should not affect how we work together at all.
I've been hearing my colleagues personal political opinion, the spectrum goes to both ends. I personally don't mind at all, I'm more sensitive to code quality and bugs.
Nothing political at all about escaping from Castle Wolfenstein and killing Hitler in the process.
No politics in Final Fantasy 7, just some lively ecoterrorists saving the world from an exploitative totalitarian megacorporation that's destroying the environment.
Or indeed in BioShock, a game that certainly wasn't a satire of Ayn Rand libertarianism of the sort that enchants many a Valley VC/founder.
I miss playing Call of Duty/Rainbow Six/other shooters where you could just grab an assault rifle as a serving member of the US military and shoot a bunch of Bad Guys, which had absolutely no politics in it at all.
It sure is a shame the terrible awful SJWs made games political because they let you play as a girl, or put two gay characters kissing for ten seconds in a cutscene.
I'm going to stop playing games and instead go and read a book I've just bought called 'Animal Farm'. I'm sure it isn't a metaphor for anything. I bet Star Trek hasn't got any politics in it either.