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by fluoridation 6 days ago
You didn't answer my question about what is not allowed to be challenged.

>Yes, in communities that try to claim that certain things are "political" and certain things are "not political", "banning cryptocurrency" could be rejected on the basis that it is "political". The point is that saying something like "we don't do politics" is absurd.

I don't understand what you're saying. You switched tracked halfway through the thought from talking about communities that distinguish between things that are or aren't political to rejection of taking political stances.

What is usually meant by "we don't do politics" is that an institution or organization will avoid picking sides on political issues. This is not merely not absurd, but pretty much necessary for any organization that doesn't have ideological goals and doesn't want to foster internal factions.

Like the sibling comment said, just banning cryptocurrency might be political or it might not, depending on the reason for it. Rejecting reasons such as "crypto bad" is a tenable position if an organization seeks to maintain a neutral stance.

1 comments

Every organization has ideological goals. That's what I'm getting at. Sometimes they are unable to recognize it because it's been normalized. What you define as "neutral" is not actually neutral. Such statements are themselves attempts at controlling what is normal/acceptable. The terms of acceptable discussion is context-dependent, but trying to set them at "politics" is contradictory, as I've explained.
To name one easy example, for-profit companies don't have ideological goals.

But just for the sake of argument I'll grant it and amend my statement: What is usually meant by "we don't do politics" is that an institution or organization will avoid picking sides on irrelevant political issues. A cat shelter doesn't need to have an official position on abortion to function, and in all likelihood having one would be counter to its purposes.

Maximizing profit is already an ideological goal. Some companies have others subordinate to it. For example Microsoft is committed to stack ranking, Google is committed to only promoting people who ship new products and then kill them, Apple is committed to each team not knowing what the other is doing so they don't leak it, and Oracle is committed to suing its customers for more money.