I think there's an argument you can never fully ban it and there are ways to subtly inject and influence politics.
But my point was that Facebook could survive and thrive in a hypothetical situation wherein engagement over political content/disinformation was removed.
I don't want to start a meta flamewar, but I don't think HN has ever officially banned political discussion tout court. There's always been a fair amount of it on the site for the past decade, as far as I remember.
Yes indeed. That's the policy on stories, though. I think the policy on political discussion in comments (which often occurs in threads for "non-political" stories) has always been fairly unrestrictive.
There was a period a few years ago where a total ban was attempted, then rolled back after a couple of weeks - users protested by flagging everything and writing a comment saying how X was in fact political.
Value measures bereft of an encompassing political framework tend to very quickly degrade in terms of who can enact more existential violence on the other, and even that, given enough time for adaptation can stabilize into an equilibrium indistinguishable from a polity.
This is the driving force behind symbiosis, family rearing, community building, business, justice systems (and the necessity of blind spots with regards to Law Enforcement to universally apply) and the "taming" of the criminal element as a much needed escape valve for development away from dysfunctional political dead ends. Quite to the contrary, all life tends toward the political, and politik as it happens makes all other value measures besides existence possible.
So quite to the contrary, from the system-centric point of view, in which a eukaryotic organism can be considered a policy of living tissues, extant fauna, and set of evolvedmechanisms for keeping everyone alive and in check, the stable political equilibrium from which all other activity inherent to prolonged existence can take place, the political is life.
I think what people mean when they say everything is political is that the actions of our politics shapes just about every aspect our lives. You might think that driving to a restaurant to buy a meal isn’t political, but everything about is the result of decisions of voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. How smooth the drive is dependent on how much money your city allocated tax money for road maintenance and how city planners decided to lay out your area. The laws and regulations, and the competence of the enforcement, on safety effect your chance of getting sick. The laws on tax burdens, labor laws, minimum wage laws, trade agreements, etc. factor into the price of your meal. Your level of disposable income to go buy meals is effected by those labor laws, wage laws, cost or rent or a mortgage (which itself is effected by city planning of what types of space can be built where), and on and on.
The point of “everything is political” is to snap people out of the mistaken idea that politics is just abortion, voting, gun rights, and tax loopholes.
Partly true. On the other hand I think it is a common mistake to attribute economic success to politics. Sure, they lay the framework, but that doesn't mean they are responsible for success or failure. Of course politicians like to claim it anyway.
> The point of “everything is political” is to snap people out [...]
Oh, wow. That can make sense, but I had a complete different interpretation. I understood it as prompt to reflect on everything you do with an examination if it furthers partisan goals.
Yes - I think it's absolutely necessary to distinguish between "political", and "partisan". Not everything has to be partisan, and jamming everything into the two-party framework has a destructive Procrustean effect that leads to people making all kinds of increasingly stupid claims.
> On the other hand I think it is a common mistake to attribute economic success to politics. Sure, they lay the framework, but that doesn't mean they are responsible for success or failure.
I agree that it is a common mistake. It is difficult to draw direct lines to individual ups and downs to policies and that trying to do that is usually a tool used to swing voters more than what is actually happening. But I think it can’t be overstated the effect political decisions have, in the aggregate, of shaping the economic situation. Internally, look at the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, and the resulting construction of 50,000ish miles of highway over the next 2 decades. While it is a bit harder to draw a direct line from all that to the rapid growth of Walmart and their newfound ability to transport large amounts of goods faster and to more places than rail, it is easy to say that that political decision had a profound effect on how the country operated over the last 60 years. The country would look very different in almost every facet had that not happened.
Externally, look at the trade agreements and foreign policy decision in the post WWII cold war era. If the US had not decided to embrace Japan as a trading partner and had not imposed strict controls on their post WWII government on military spending, the money from the Marshal Plan, the Japanese government’s decision to rebuild the economy through the central planning of the MITI, would they have exploded into the technological powerhouse they became? Maybe, but I can’t imagine it would have looked anything like what they did end up with.
> I had a complete different interpretation. I understood it as prompt to reflect on everything you do with an examination if it furthers partisan goals.
I think it is both. To snap you out of the idea that politics is just those big talking point issues that politicians and voters focus on (or that politicians convince voters to focus on). That it is a lot of everyday things that you may rarely think about being connected to “politics” and partisan actions.
