[olalonde]

Sadly, a lot of people genuinely believe that everything is political. I recently expressed hope for the "no politics" guideline of HN be more strictly enforced and was told that "not talking about politics is politics". Frustrating to deal with this mindset...

[jtolmar]

I'm certainly one of those people. What is the boundary between "politics" and "not politics?" Who gets to decide?

Your employer probably has more effect on your day to day life than your government does. Why would you be allowed to debate what the latter should do but not the former?

[olalonde]

> I'm certainly one of those people. What is the boundary between "politics" and "not politics?" Who gets to decide?

It's common sense. Anything that revolves around government, elections, laws, etc.

> Your employer probably has more effect on your day to day life than your government does. Why would you be allowed to debate what the latter should do but not the former?

I meant the exact opposite (I forgot that politics could be taken to mean "office politics" or "company politics"). Getting involved in government politics or activism is your role as a private citizen, not as a company employee. Regarding "company politics" (work hours, office arrangement, project management methodology, managerial decisions, coffee machine model, etc.), I guess it's up to your employer to decide what is up for debate.

[patmcc]

>>It's common sense. Anything that revolves around government, elections, laws, etc.

Go ahead and google 'Taiwan' and then 'Canada' or 'Japan'. Taiwan (in the right sidebar thing) is listed differently compared to the others. They're listed as "Country in $X" - Taiwan is not.

That's political. Or is it not? It's "just search", sort of.

[olalonde]

I don't see where you're going with this. I never claimed that Google was not political (your example wasn't very convincing though, it simply reflects the fact that Taiwan isn't widely recognized as a country). Also, a more charitable interpretation of the comment you are referring to would be that "search doesn't have to be political".

[patmcc]

Your initial comment was "Sadly, a lot of people genuinely believe that everything is political"

Taiwan being a country or not, and what shows up in a google search about it, isn't political for you, or for me, or for many people around the world. It may be very political for the people who live in Taiwan (or China).

Nearly everything is political to someone. So it's not very easy to draw a hard line between political or not. A "no politics" rule is very difficult to enforce in a meaningful way for that reason.

[olalonde]

You came up with a super dubious example which doesn't help support your point. Plus if you could convince me that those Wikipedia populated information boxes were politically, I could simply argue that Google should stick to returning links in its search results.

> Nearly everything is political to someone.

Saying that something is political to only a few people is an oxymoron. For example, there are some people who do not recognize Donald Trump as the US president. Is it political to state that the US president is Donald Trump? Absolutely not.

HN is an example of a community where a large majority of the content is apolitical. Drawing the line is really not that hard.