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).
What does this mean? If this is yet another “if you’re not for us you’re against us” argument (e.g. if you don’t discuss police violence in the workplace then you necessarily support police violence), then this is false on its face. If this means “the decision to not discuss politics—especially politics unrelated to one’s work—at work is itself a political decision” then fine, but what’s the point? Is the idea that it’s a self-inconsistent position? If so, how? One can discuss even the policy not to discuss politics at work without discussing e.g. police violence.
one inconsistency is that Coinbase is based in SF. Would you consider "sorry, I didn't get a lot of sleep due to police sound grenades going off until 3am" a political statement?
> > Would you consider "sorry, I didn't get a lot of sleep due to police sound grenades going off until 3am" a political statement?
> No, of course not.
Awesome. So it follows that you would have no issue then with a coworker stating: "Police activity in SF has negatively impacted my ability to do work". Congratulations, you have a significantly broader definition of acceptable workplace speech than Coinbase.
> Awesome. So it follows that you would have no issue then with a coworker stating
Of course I wouldn't have an issue (ignoring for the moment that you're apparently conflating me with coinbase), because this isn't a political statement.
> Congratulations, you have a significantly broader definition of acceptable workplace speech than Coinbase.
The issue was never about people expressing their political opinions, but their demands that _Coinbase_ express political opinions and get mired in what police in SF may or may not be doing.
I think this is a very simplistic take. The reason we’re seeing a crackdown on this is not because companies are making a political move to support the status quo. It’s because they’re trying to weed out and get rid of legitimately problematic and toxic people who abused the previous culture.
For instance, there was an instance not too long ago at Facebook where one engineer publicly attacked another completely peaceful coworker on Twitter because the latter declined to put a BLM statement on the landing page of an open source project they maintained. The former employee was eventually fired. These kinds of antics are deeply divisive and destructive to the workplace.
> For instance, there was an instance not too long ago at Facebook where one engineer publicly attacked another completely peaceful coworker on Twitter because the latter declined to put a BLM statement on the landing page of an open source project they maintained. The former employee was eventually fired. These kinds of antics are deeply divisive and destructive to the workplace.
It is unclear from your comment which employee was fired, unless "former" is intended in the ordinal sense (ie. "first") rather than temporal (ie. "prior"). Can you clarify?
My wife works for a huge social media company that you've definitely heard of, and some of her higher-ups have told her they're worried that the rise of employee activism is going to tear the company's culture apart. I told her she should tell them to follow Coinbase's example.
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.
you don't need to be actively aware of gravity to not float off the ground. You can act politically without being aware of that fact, that just means you're not conscious of what's driving your decision making.
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.
You are taking a "consequentialist" stance implying that if something has political consequences, then it is political. There are several problems with this.
First, literally anything could have political consequences, from a solar flare to a fly landing in someone's hair. This logic easily devolves into absurdity. Famously, Chinese government under Mao declared sparrows "public animals of capitalism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
Second, when anything could be political, the moniker "political" (like any other inflated moniker) loses a lot of its meaning. And yet real politics is still done by real people with real consequences.
Third, raising everything to the status of political is an example of politicization. This is typical of totalitarian regimes. Totalitarian regimes are in fact characterized by the fact that literally everything is raised to the realm of political, the realm of rule by the regime. By pressuring others to be political, you are creating a totalitarian environment, a very unpleasant environment for most people to be as we already know from some very bitter 20th century lessons.
Fourth, politics is about having political enemies. When political enemy (opponent) does not exist, there is no politics as such. By insisting that people act politically, you are simultaneously insisting that they have enemies. There are profound moral problems with this, whether you are Christian or even not religious at all.
The solar flare isn't political obviously, but the response to it is. human disaster usually is the consequence of bad responses to catastrophes which have been declared inevitable. (see the current American covid response). Something that actually is in the realm of politics is shoved into the category of thoughts and prayers.
>Third, raising everything to the status of political is an example of politicization. This is typical of totalitarian regimes
Politicisation isn't bad and the only thing your post is any evidence of is the typical midbrow "no politics or gulag" logic that every conservative American who is afraid of engaging in political conflict has been repeating ad nauseam. You may think you appear smarter if you complain about tribalism every five minutes and act like you're above the fray, but you are not. It's just a silly straw-man made by people who are afraid of political change.
Respectfully disagree. You're essentially arguing that they're not politically motivated in staying at/leaving their job. That's fair. Nevertheless their actions translate either support, inaction, or opposition. The implication which MLK argues is that inaction is harmful to the movement.
You are taking a consequentialist stance, deciding that if something has political consequences, then it is political. But literally anything could have political consequences. A solar flare could have political consequences. A fly landing on someone's hair could have political consequences. This does not mean that flies are political!
If everything is political, then the moniker "political" is meaningless.
