401–410 of 774 posts
I don't think it can be understated how much saying 'no politics' is a political statement. Supporting the status quo is a political statement. And supporting the status quo in this political climate is a strange hill to plant your flag on.
I'm sure you meant "overstated".
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It’s precisely the type of messaging that happened after 9/11 too. “You’re either with us or against us.” Leave it to the woke crowd to take a page out of the Karl Rove handbook.
Why stop at Karl Rove? Tribalism is an inherent primal instinct in our species. We are all directly descended from brutal tribes at odds with other tribes over competition for limited resources. It's rooted in nearly all of our thinking, and you have to take active steps in your thought processes to avoid being biased by this inherent biological preference you have for the success of your kin versus the kin of others…
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Agreed. I think there are only two options for a company: 1) don't allow any activism in the company 2) allow ALL types of activism in the company Right now, it seems most companies only allow liberal activism but not conservative activism. This is a recipe for problems because it's arbitrary and not democratic.
Most conservative activism is just...wrong
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Everything else aside, the term makes sense. It’s not the reverse of racism. It’s racism in the reverse direction than the more “traditional” one.
I buy that reasoning standalone (albeit it's still prone to misinterpretation), but in context its advocates appear to believe it is congruent with or equivalent to 'equality'.
“Reverse” is not the most precise word for the term, but so long as there is no compiler error when a person uses the wrong word, human natural language will continue to be sloppy. Let’s stop being overly pedantic — that is one of the guidelines of this site
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Which, as your parent seems to not realize, is also a political stance. This dichotomy is exactly what MLK refers to in the Letter from a Bermingham Jail (i.e. positive vs negative peace).
For an action to be "political" in a strong sense, its performer it needs to be consciously thinking about their political alignment. Majority of people are economically motivated and do not engage in in-depth analysis of their actions or inactions and thus describing their actions as "political" is quite tendentious.
Most politics and also culture expresses itself tacitly. By requiring some sort of conscious intent you're actually ignoring what is arguably the vast majority of political interaction. For example casual sexism and systematic mistreatment of women was just "normal" but nonetheless political. Of course the people doing the subtle discriminating don't like to think of it as political, because that implies responsibility for action.
This began over something that doesn't feel "political" to me. For me, and perhaps many others, BLM is primarily about injustice. Is taking a stand against injustice political?
These narratives that fuel the culture war “decide” that certain groups are in or out. It’s entirely inaccurate but that’s what the popular narrative dictates.
BLM is, under this system, on the “left” side, along with other made-up narrative entities in this fictional drama such as “antifa”. To the culture war brawlers, entirely disconnected from the actual happenings, they alias to the same thing, the same people, the same group.
Coinbase has leveraged that system to cover for the fact that their silence on the matter of justice and human rights is extremely loud.
I am beyond sick of political activists in the workplace, so I hope this trend catches on.
I am beyond sick of folks in the workplace who silently accept the status quo, so I hope this trend does not catch on.
My company is becoming increasingly political and it's terrible. I'd gladly go work at a company where I didn't have to engage with endless political activism. If I want to hear everyone's opinions on everything, I'd find their facebook page or the HN usernames and follow them.
Is "apolitical" stance a bad thing? Isn't it the default, safe? I lived in country where you had to be "political" to be in management, it didn't end up well (East Europe, Soviet Union), I always (naively?) thought that West countries were wiser. So I prefer companies to not mess with politics.
The problem is that “political activism” also encompasses the ongoing american culture war, which indeed does not belong at work in any capacity. Reasonable people don’t want to engage with the culture war at work, and, increasingly, ever.
They want you to think the latter when they mean the former, and support them. The problem is that the “activism” they’re complaining about isn’t the culture war, it’s the fact that there was a widespread social movement to protest racist police abuse, and Coinbase management didn’t feel it important enough for them to participate. Many of their staff took an issue with that, which has absolutely nothing to do with the sort of “who are you voting for?” thing that springs to mind when you think of “political activism at work”.
Don’t get me wrong, advocating for human rights is indeed political activism, which is why their technique is so effective.
It’s intentionally designed to deceive you.