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by DrJokepu
3720 days ago
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I'm not really familiar with the details of this whole LambdaConf drama, but your argument keeps showing up on my Twitter feed regularly and I never found it very convincing to be honest. I don't see why hosting an event is necessarily a political act and I don't see why when people say "I don't want this to get political" it means that they're happy with the status quo. People keep repeating these arguments online as if they were self-evident truths and never really explain well (or at all) why these statements are true. In particular, an argument could be made that someone could find being forced to be surrounded by politics boring and tedious even if they agree with these ideas. If you don't believe me, just read the comments in any political HN post (such as this one); I guarantee you that you will find many of the comments obnoxious, even some of the ones you agree with in principle. |
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People live in society together. Broadly speaking, political decisions are decisions about what the rules for how we should go about living and working together are. We tend to think of things as _obviously_ political when the community has a debate about whether or not something is acceptable (like abortion). But because politics sets the boundaries of social life, it also defines its interior.
For example, you and I (probably) both agree that it's totally reasonable to go to Starbucks and buy a cup of coffee. We don't think of this as an action anywhere near the boundaries of acceptable conduct, and so we both think of it as not having a whole lot of political meaning. A Marxist, however, would argue that we're participating in an exploitative system because we're using private property, shopping at a capitalist-owned business, etc.
We both don't buy their argument, but simply because they've made it, we're forced to concede that buying coffee is political act. By buying coffee, we're saying we're comfortable with the structures that created Starbucks, or that we judge any harmful consequences of buying coffee to be less important than our day to day convenience. The fact that the action is normal doesn't change the fact that at some point _we decided it was acceptable_, and that decision was _definitely_ political.
To give another example, the Free Software Foundation, is explicitly founded on the idea that everyday acts have political meaning, no matter how normal they are. Take this passage from their site (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...):
>>>With proprietary software, the program controls the users, and some other entity (the developer or “owner”) controls the program. So the proprietary program gives its developer power over its users. That is unjust in itself, and tempts the developer to mistreat the users in other ways.
>>>Freedom means having control over your own life. If you use a program to carry out activities in your life, your freedom depends on your having control over the program. You deserve to have control over the programs you use, and all the more so when you use them for something important in your life.
The FSF is arguing that the way you distribute software is a political decision, not just a matter of technical convenience, and they're totally right to point this out.
Anyway. To bring it back to LambdaConf, De Goes is clearly wrong to claim that things have "become" politicized. It's more accurate to say that giving a speaking slot to racists was political acceptable and has become politically disputed. De Goes doesn't like that things have gone from acceptable to disputed, so he claims he doesn't want things to be "political". But things were always political, it's just that previously they weren't controversial.
This is why people who argue against "politicizing" issues are implicitly arguing for the politics of the status quo. They're arguing against change.