[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.