[roenxi]

It says a lot about how confused political discourse gets that the author considers these things "not politics". Politics is all about value judgements and arguing about where we are going.

If things like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... don't immediately become intensely political then somebody is being very ineffective at politics. There seems to be a weird assumption here that politics is fundamentally in bad faith and people aren't acting from value judgements and reason.

[Kamq]

> It says a lot about how confused political discourse gets that the author considers these things "not politics".

"Politics", used in this context is used to mean: the set of topics that professional politicians and certain media figures are arguing about, that are liable to cause big arguments that leave everyone involved feeling bitter and not change anyone's mind.

Interpreting the term in a literal manner is not useful.

[roenxi]

> that are liable to cause big arguments that leave everyone involved feeling bitter and not change anyone's mind.

Then go with a really fun topic. Why are the professional politicians consistently talking about things that cause big arguments that leave everyone feeling bitter and stubborn? Are they actually leading people to discuss the important political issues, or are they trying to stir up division and a fanatic voter base? Is the nature political discourse going to lead to a good outcome for either side of the argument? How should fair compromises be achieved?

If the call here is for interesting discourse then sure, all for it. Good list. But the title shows a confusion. Arguing politics isn't going down a list of talking points. Anyone doing that with their own family just isn't acting like a smart cookie and needs to understand that they are really bad at politics to the point where they might be damaging their own community.

[Kamq]

A lot of people have family that can't handle discussions adjacent to politics without moving into politics.

The point of the list is not to generate interesting discussion. It is to generate interesting enough discussion while minimizing the chance of the discussion blowing up at a family gathering.

[MarkPNeyer]

Any disagreement, if you pursue it long enough, reveals one of two things. :

If participants are skilled communicators and can stay calm and listen to each other, what gets revealed is a different set of lives experiences. This is rare and exremwlr valuable.

If participants are not skilled and do not stay calm (as is most often the case when talking about things we care deeply about, cannot experience directly, and cannot control, ie most of the world), what gets revealed is a bunch of anger and hurt feelings.

[scarface74]

That’s the issue, what’s important to some people aren’t important to others.

I could care less about what consenting adults do that don’t affect others. But some people have a really deep seated religious beliefs that I can’t for the life of me emotionally understand.

I don’t care about illegal immigration because it doesn’t affect me. They aren’t competing for my job or the job of anyone in my social circle.

I haven’t spoken to him in awhile because…life. But there is someone I consider a friend who is the polar opposite of me. I’m a Black guy working remotely in BigTech, came from an upper middle class family, and if I were 20 years younger, I would be considered your typical “tech bro”. He is your stereo typical “MAGA” (no insult intended) - white, army veteran, anti illegal immigration, gun enthusiasts, grew up in rural America and had to take care of himself since he was 17.

What he is not is racist. He is the only White guy at a predominantly Black church. He’s married to a Vietnamese lady who he loves dearly and is all for supporting anyone who goes through the immigration process legally.

We don’t agree on some things. But I can understand where he is coming from.

[elhudy]

> I don’t care about illegal immigration because it doesn’t affect me. They aren’t competing for my job or the job of anyone in my social circle.

This seems like kind of a naive take. Illegal immigration affects your country>state>community>social circle>family>personal well being in that order. You might be several orders of magnitude removed from its effects on a personal level but that doesn’t mean it isn’t affecting you. E.g. simply the fact that illegal immigration is happening in your country means it IS influencing nationwide politics which in effect influences voters and your local politics. Your anecdote about your friend is testament to this.

Your opinion on illegal immigration matters, man, whether it affects you directly or not!

[scarface74]

How is that argument any different than arguing that the country supporting gay marriage will lead to the “eternal damnation of this great country?”. Of course I don’t believe that. But for conservative Christians the order is

<h1>YOUR IMMORTAL SOUL</h1> > country>state>community>social circle>family>personal.

They have a deep emotional belief that supersedes everything else.

They think that anything that doesn’t put “God first” is “naive”

Yes I know HN doesn’t support HTML markup.

[elhudy]

I’m not following…

What i am saying is that regardless of whether or not you take a stance on illegal immigration, the fact that the issue is ingrained in our political system means that it does in fact affect you albeit indirectly. It follows that you should probably have an opinion on the matter and be open to discussing that opinion even if you are not directly affected by it.

[boppo1]

>What he is not is racist. He is the only White guy at a predominantly Black church. He’s married to a Vietnamese lady who he loves dearly and is all for supporting anyone who goes through the immigration process legally.

I think there's a real problem right now that these people are often represented as strictly being racists / their beliefs being strictly the result of racism. It is often true, but, as in your case, it is often not true. But that heuristic has become pretty absolute among anyone who believes themselves to be "on the right side of history".

I'm glad you don't have that knee-jerk reaction.

[scarface74]

I wish I could say that I was always so open minded. But he really opened my eyes about my own “isms”. I never had any reason to interact with that demographic. I grew up middle class and knew poorer Black people. Spent half my time going to a predominantly White private school - by definition with people that were at least middle income families - and when I graduated from college I worked in tech. When would I ever interact with anyone from “rural White America” on a day to day basis.

Ironically, until last month, I lived in not only one of the least diverse counties in GA, it was a famous “sundown town” until the mid 80s. It would be really easy to make assumptions here - none of which are generally accurate from my experience.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WErjPmFulQ0

[MarkPNeyer]

How do you determine what does and doesn’t affect other people?

At some level, everything anyone does affects everyone they interact with. You and I are affecting each other right now, in some small way.

It seems like what lots of people do is say, “some of these causal effects are unimportant to me, and so I can approximate them as being zero.”

[bombcar]

It’s also very interesting how everyone apparently agrees one side is perfectly correct and never wrong and the other side is always wrong and abject evil.

Perhaps politics changes us more than we want to admit?

[boppo1]

That side believes the other side is mostly made up of people like this:

https://youtu.be/Hdk3a9pI_jA

And frankly, that's a pretty big problem for a side to have. I think a good question that isn't being asked in earnest is "why would those people, who seem to have a stable income and lifestyle, subscribe to such a radical view of reality?"

There are legitimate views from the side viewed as 'evil', but most of those people seem to have gone silent since no one is listening.

[feet]

When the Q adjacent views and white supremacy ideas are gaining popularity and nobody on the same side of the aisle with the Q people and white supremacists are saying "hey that stuff isn't right, we don't agree or believe that" I think it's safe to assume that they're saying "hey we are actually okay with Q believers and white supremacists"

[SQueeeeeL]

If you still believe that either political party in America has any real differences (besides caring slightly more or less what people do with their private parts) I'm kinda surprised you bother to browse this particular forum, there's a lot of better places where people read simpler books you should probably be hanging out digitally

[vharuck]

>Politics is all about value judgements and arguing about where we are going.

In my opinion, politics is about deciding where society should go. It's inherently about directing shared resources and convincing/forcing others to do things. All politics is based on value judgements, but not all value judgements are political.

E.g., for prompt #4, I can say my child's school focuses too little on "the classics." I might not want to change the curriculum, just teach him the classics myself at night. That's not really a political discussion, because I'm not involving or intentionally affecting people outside my family.

But honestly, if any term reaches the point where "Everything is X," then X is a useless term.

[roenxi]

> But honestly, if any term reaches the point where "Everything is X," then X is a useless term.

#2 goes directly to economics. #3 goes directly to the One Child Policy in China (one of the worlds most intense political policies!) and the intellectual underpinnings of eugenics.

#4 is a firestorm topic in the US that links directly to a current culture war, #5 goes to a major issue in the medical system which is how people die. If I bought up #7 in my family the conversation would veer into veganism as a political statement and probably get ugly because we have a practising vegan at the table.

#1, the Guinness World Records might be safe. Might. Maybe. #6 isn't directly political but I can guarantee that the term "human progress" is a risk of bringing up some very stiff argumentation if people are in a mood to quarrel. What we call "progress" is hardly at a consensus.

For someone who argues from principles, this list is extremely politically charged and is going to obliquely hit a bunch of hot-button topics. It goes to principles that are perennial features of politics at all levels of society.

If the goal is to avoid a big argument that'll need to be negotiated directly. If someone is going to argue, these topics are likely hit-and-miss for being likely to quiet people down. I would not bring up a lot of them when talking to my family, that is for sure.

[MarkPNeyer]

> For someone who argues from principles

I think this is actually what makes the last seen non-political to some people.

In lots of cases, I think people don’t have abstract principles that guide their thinking. Their political ideals are a collection of specific beliefs without a unifying set of abstractions that links the beliefs together into a coherent thesis about what is good.

[throw827474737]

> It says a lot about how confused political discourse gets that the author considers these things "not politics".

Another pro tip for argues over the holidays: don't be that nit-picky... even if you are right on some level, I'm not sure who would call such topics current political discourse topics (:

Best tip though: keep the discussions away, delve in the happy shared past, dream about a better future, or just enjoy the moment! Merry christmas!

[kome]

> I'm not sure who would call such topics current political discourse topics (:

me, them, a lot of ppl here... they are intensely political topics, it's your conception of politics to be very narrow: electoral politics news.

[jnet]

I don’t think it’s being nit-picky at all. The first thing that struck me reading the list was how intensely political it was.

[Spooky23]

It’s not really politics per se that are no go zones, but the insipid and asinine partisan stuff.

The easiest thing to do is to check out the NY Post, and don’t talk about anything they are upset about. Of course, if Uncle MAGA is looking for a fight, the only way to win is not to play.

[lettergram]

In a democracy or republic (any form of representative government) inherently every discussion is political.

As each person decides who will represent them, or in a direct democracy where everyone votes on laws, discussing ethics, logic, news, is paramount.

> politics - The art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the administration and control of its internal and external affairs.

Every one of these questions touch on administration of societal affairs. There’s a fun nativity calling these questions non-political. The questions themselves already assume certain positions as well.

I personally think politics is important to discuss. But if you REALLY want to avoid real discussion - sports, weather, food, gardening, or play games is the best bet.

[Eisenstein]

What would you consider to be an example of a non-political question that would result in a meaningful and lively discussion that is not specific to a certain subject (for instance: not sports, academia, media)?

[roenxi]

You can't discuss anything important and uncertain without running in to politics. Politics is the society-level discourse on "what is important? what are we certain about?".

People get stuck thinking that politics mean Republicans v. Democrats. The Republicans don't represent the interesting parts of right wing thought (they can't even put in a serious attempt to balance the budget!). Ditto Democrats and the left (insert favourite example from the long list). Most of what they argue about is distracting trivia or flat-out intellectually dishonest lies. Avoiding that at Christmas is a good idea, but ideally avoid that in all in-person discussions of politics.

[jasode]

>You can't discuss anything important and uncertain without running in to politics.

I do understand your exact point. This wide umbrella of "everything is politics" is akin to "all roads lead to philosophy" : https://www.xefer.com/2011/05/wikipedia

That said, I can also what understand what people mean when a dinner host says, "let's not discuss politics". (Previous comment about that interpretation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14473441)

Even though I perfectly understand what roenxi means by "You can't discuss anything important and uncertain without running in to politics.", I'm still able to grasp what the dinner host means by "no politics".

Likewise, the HN moderator dang tried the experiment of "no politics for a week". However, people didn't want to use the "dinner host" meaning and would rather litigate on the "but all roads lead to politics" meaning to make dang look naive in his social civility experiment.

[roenxi]

As you might have detected; I enjoy arguing. People aren't going to escape arguing with me by trying to be clever picking topics - I'm great at connecting things together. As early as number 2 we've launched into the whole capitalism v. socialism debate which is a firestorm in the making. A fun one, in fact.

If a family has anyone intelligent and disagreeable, this list won't help. And as strategies go, trying to control what topics come up is a great way to generate some bad feeling. Believing there are important topics that people refuse to discuss is a really good way to drive a wedge into a situation and split people apart. Indeed, it'll also hurt the person bringing the topics up if they believe they have to start squelching or moderating their beliefs to make life easy for someone with ideas they don't respect.

There is an implicit call here for some sort of family agenda where the time is spent uncovering shared values and goals. Which is a great idea, and which this list does try to go to. But everyone will get better results if they go in saying "this is time to identify commonalities" rather than trying to change the topic or pretending that the root problem is politics. It isn't politics, it is either an impossible situation or bad strategy at the personal level. Trying to change the topic is a good tactic for about 3-5 minutes, but it doesn't deal with the root causes that make arguments bubble up.

[Eisenstein]

What would be a good term that defines 'politics as discussion topic' as you clarified above, but excludes 'poltics as partisan bickering' as apparantly the author of the article defines it? Wouldn't it be useful to have a word we can use for this?

[roenxi]

That'd be great, then I could claim all my partisan talking points where this new word and denigrate all my opposing partisans as undermining the foundational principles of the new word.

The article is a call to polite and interesting political debate. It is a good idea. But it is, nonetheless, politics around the dinner table. Can't escape it, learn to enjoy it. Practice some tolerance, learn some respect and be polite. Learn that you don't have to have the last word, I more or less everyone on HN knows that trick.

The options are politics or unimportant trivia. Can't talk about something important without running in to people's principles and risking a heartfelt argument.

[Eisenstein]

I think you may have missed the point of my question. Is there a way to define the type of conversation you are talking about butmake it clear that it doesn't 8nclude topics for which viewpoints are bound to be relatively fixed. I think you might agree that a conversation about the existence of God with mixed company or about civil rights with your racist Uncle is going to be unproductive and lead to shouting matches. Let's define this type of discourse and make it distinct from 'poltics'.

[roenxi]

It is impossible. It cannot be done. The incentives around politics are too clear - there privileging things some group of people think is acceptable discourse would bringing down the entire edifice of liberal political tradition.

[dale_glass]

An argument about an old book, like LOTR, maybe.

Though this only works because the politics of Tolkien's time have been mostly forgotten. LOTR is intensely influenced by politics, some extremely hamfisted (eg, how the Shire is ruined by all the industrialization), but in many cases one side decisively lost the argument to the point that few remember there was even anything to argue about.

That's still not a guarantee though. Those topics didn't magically disappear, and you can still run into the odd person who'd care to argue for the side that lost.

[pbhjpbhj]

Trolley Problem? It certainly leads on to politics however.

[civilized]

What the author is trying to avoid is conversations like

"well YOU blah blah blah vaccines blah blah blah Tucker Carlson blah blah blah Twitter blah blah blah misinformation blah blah blah insurrection!!!"

"well YOU blah blah blah woke racism blah blah blah Hunter Biden blah blah blah Twitter blah blah blah groomers blah blah blah drag queen story hour!!!"

[whiddershins]

This is political philosophy and morals.

For most people politics is about current laws, policies, and politicians.

[yucky]

Anybody that turns everything into something "intensely political" is a toxic person, and should be avoided. Spending quality time with friends and family is more valuable than trying to force them to think like you.

[mannykannot]

Indeed - agreeing to disagree is not something one does intensely.

[jliptzin]

Politics today means things like Hunter Biden’s laptop.