[dahfizz]

Can you define "institution" and "political" for me, then?

I would argue that there is nothing political about a local bakery, for example. Just a dude making some cakes. He may occasionally be forced to interact with the government, but his bakery as an institution has nothing at all to do with government organizations or political theory. By its nature, a bakery is apolitical.

[tpm]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution is as good as any. I would not consider a small (one person or family) bakery an institution. A large one (measured by number of employees etc) would be an institution, and defining the threshold is not important here.

Political - relating to the government or public affairs of a country

[dahfizz]

Okay. And your argument is that a large bakery is fundamentally related to government affairs? What about the nature of a large bakery is political?

[tpm]

My argument is that every institution is political whether it wants or not. Bakery is very obviously political because everyone tends to eat food and as such food is an evergreen political theme. Perhaps this is more visible in some countries than others, for example in a neighboring country the price of butter is a quite common item in TV news (really), and it's not a poor country.

But also other than that, a few years ago there were some articles about a bakery that refused to bake a wedding cake for gays, and it was a public affair for a few weeks. Is that political enough for you?

[dahfizz]

I just think we are talking about different things. I hear what you are saying, but I don't think that bakeries being tangentially related to politically charged topics make them a political institution. Bakeries also handle and store money, but that doesn't make them a bank. etc. The nature of bakeries as an institution is not political - they are not concerned with the organization of government and policies. They may interact with the government but that doesn't make it a political institution.

[tpm]

This started as a discussion about whether not-primarily-political institutions (like Scientific American) should have and publish political opinions. It was started by an attack of a political institution (Reason) saying they should not. That attack itself makes the target politically relevant.

Bakeries are in a similar position. Once an owner declines to serve a customer based on his (owner or customer) political leaning, it's politically relevant. If a politican attack bakers because (he feels that) the bread price is too high, it's politically relevant. I think there was an American civil rights movement in the 60's which was in a great part about equal access to services for all ethnicities. Was that not political?

> they are not concerned with the organization of government and policies

'or public affairs'. You wanted a definition and then you are ignoring it?