katedevil
Lesley Carhart 
Just a warning, I am immediately blocking, and sometimes server blocking on, "stop posting about politics if you're a insert profession here" takes. Technology is politics. Education is politics. Security is politics. The people who work in these fields, and more, are intimately impacted by politics. Some peoples' lives, families, and livelihoods are in danger. It's all politics, stop content and tone policing if you're one of the few people who's currently insanely fortunate to be relatively unimpacted. It's asinine.
Kevin Thomas ✅@hacks4pancakes I am with you 1000%!
@kevinthomas a bit enraged to see it here, too. But Mastodon is thankfully growing.
Alex@hacks4pancakes @kevinthomas *waves hands* yeah, that, 100%
justin ferguson@hacks4pancakes And, more to the point, no one is unaffected, it's just that too many people stick their heads into the sand and pretend to be until it's too late.
kira :3@hacks4pancakes "no politics" is an extremely political stance
Phillip Hallam-Baker@chrisisgr8 @hacks4pancakes It only ever applies to politics they disagree with.
I was in a Facebook CNC group where the admin used to approve posts of people posting Dixie Swastika carvings and then booted people for saying the confederacy were a bunch of stinking slaving traitors.
Julie moved to @@chrisisgr8 @hacks4pancakes "No politics" is almost exclusively "only *my* politics."
Sindarina, Edge Case Detective@hacks4pancakes Hear hear! 👏🏻
terra@hacks4pancakes There's a great adage from second-wave feminism: "The personal is political"
shrmanator@hacks4pancakes 💯 "it's all politics" is my take as well. Politics is the social fabric of humanity and it's so easy to pretend like you can just stop taking about it and just "get back to work". Most of the people who want you to stop talking about politics have a vested interest in making sure you don't learn this.
@hacks4pancakes The people doing that are attempting agenda denial.
When people know their arguments are full of shite, the best rhetorical argument is to avoid the argument entirely.
So, forget the fact that the orange pussy-grabber is the leading candidate for the GOP nomination, anyone who is pointing out that Trump is a liar, a traitor, a thief, a rapist, etc. must be ridiculed for letting the orange pussy-grabber 'live rent free inside their head'.
So, when it is a Republican accused of anything criminal, we must not speculate or discuss anything because they are to be considered innocent until guilty but the latest Fox News faux scandal of the day is gospel truth years after it is proven a fabrication.
Oh and never mention the fact that the Tories were behind Brexit, the Tories prevented the country having a second referendum and so the Tories are now absolutely responsible for the Brexit catastrophe AND YES, WE CAN REJOIN.
Adam Katz@hacks4pancakes Agreed, folks need to stop posting about stopping posting about politics 😃
Philip Mallegol-Hansen@hacks4pancakes To suggest that profession and policy can be divorced is (wait for it) a political take.
It’s unavoidable. Deal with it.
Dany🇮🇹@hacks4pancakes thank you! You make a good point. There’s things happening in our world that affect us infosec workers. Like for example data privacy laws, nation state hackers, etc.. people don’t want to have hard conversations, that’s the problem.
Kevin@hacks4pancakes the people who "don't pay attention to" or "don't like talking about" politics are usually the ones who can afford to not care - usually due to some sort of privilege that not everyone has the luxury to indulge in or hide behind.
John Shirley@hacks4pancakes yeah politics at its most basic is just a means of communication; but it's a vital one. It's ubiquitous. And there is so much at stake now...it's irresponsible to exclude it.
rye
Shawn@hacks4pancakes everything is politics. I think it’s a sign of a broken democracy rooted in not enough people being given easy access to voting, thereby strategically disenfranchising voters, that we live in a country where the other side isn’t just disagreeable, we’re terrified of what they are going to do to us. We are forced to stay awake and engaged because if we sleep on a race for state house in another state, right might start disappearing.
Tindra@hacks4pancakes my kingdom for my colleagues (for whom the distinction legally matters) to learn the difference between “political” and “partisan”.
Bro the entire existence of the military is political. Talking about your annual pay raise, or the condition of the barracks, is political.
DanaBlankenhorn@hacks4pancakes I would add that sports is politics. College football, especially, exists for politics. It's how schools attract attention and state funding. That's why they subsidize it.
Eric McCorkle@hacks4pancakes Take, maybe hot, maybe not: scientists, engineers, and experts generally have a responsibility to consider the political implications of our work and be involved in policy. Because technology is in most cases, neutral, it falls to humans to guide it in the right directions.
Jacob Kramer-Duffield@emc2 @hacks4pancakes agree with everything except the last part - technology is never neutral! There are always politics embedded in a technology, up to and including the fact of the technology itself.
@jaykaydee @hacks4pancakes That's a fair assessment. I was deliberately flipping a common trope on its head to argue in the opposite direction.
femaven@emc2 @jaykaydee @hacks4pancakes I’d say technology itself is indifferent and can be used or misused like any other tool.
@femaven @jaykaydee @hacks4pancakes This is why the responsibility to use it to the right ends cannot and should not be abdicated. The techbro line of "tech is neutral, so I don't have to care about politics" is logically incoherent.
New Goliath@jaykaydee @emc2 @femaven @hacks4pancakes
How are ICBMs, torture prisons, strip mining equipment, and gas chambers technologies ever used for good?
@NewGoliath @jaykaydee @femaven @hacks4pancakes Hence my specific use of the phrase "in most cases".
Also, some of those are examples of negative uses of more fundamental technologies.
@NewGoliath @emc2 @femaven @hacks4pancakes right. Their politics are embedded in their very being. As with all technology!
Mary Branscombe@emc2 @hacks4pancakes technology is absolutely positively NOT neutral: Kranzberg's first law is 'Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral' to which I always add the corollary that it is an amplifier. things that are OK at human scale become inhumane at inhuman scale. I call it the tyranny of efficiency and it's important we don't fool ourselves about how much guiding we get to do
🅱🅻🆄🅴🅱️@emc2 @hacks4pancakes I do not believe technology is neutral. Technology creates mechanics in the game, and those mechanics change the balance of the game.
A blue shell could be considered technology, and it acts as a rubber band mechanic.
Obviously it's more complicated than that. Probably the biggest problem in our world is that the game designers are also players in the game. This leads them to design games which benefit themselves. At least in theory. I think overall it's been a bad time, but how do you stop it?
@emc2 @hacks4pancakes more concisely, how do you make a game designer that's not part of the game? Until then, the balance will always shift towards broken. At least that's my gut feeling.
rook🎶Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun🎶
Wes Morgan@hacks4pancakes Absolutley. With all credit to at-feminemi1y on Twitter, my favorite phrasing of this idea has to be:
“I stay out of politics” is such a weird way to spell “my rights as a human being aren’t up in the air every 4 years and I have no problem with the fact that yours are”
Extinction (our fate)@wesmorgan @hacks4pancakes I think of it this way too: "I am a coward and an intellectual lightweight who doesn't understand how decisions are made, or how consequences are weighed. And I am unwilling to stand up for a single principle, or even articulate one."
@wesmorgan @hacks4pancakes the sentiment of staying out of politics is the privilege afforded to my white cishet men.
Ron Bowes@wesmorgan @hacks4pancakes "I stay out of politics" is a political statement that means, "I support the current status quo"
alexia@hacks4pancakes thank you for using your platform to say this. it’s all political AND as tech workers we may actually have outsized roles in the political landscape because technology is a multiplier that cuts across sectors and regions.
Alan Miller 
🇺🇦@hacks4pancakes I can see the argument for trying to avoid political discussions given how divided things are, but a "no politics" rule also carries whiffs of "I understand my stances may be indefensible therefore I don't want to be called on to defend them."
And on the other side you get people exhausted from trying to interact with people who didn't *seem* that impaired......
And on the other side you get people exhausted from trying to interact with people who didn't *seem* that impaired......
naught101"Politics is stressful, I can't handle it right now" seems like a pretty valid take, but is also very different from telling others not to talk about it.
corbeaucrypto@hacks4pancakes I once heard someone say, "Politics is just group decision making". I agree! Telling someone to stop posting politics is tantamount to telling them to stop participating in group decision making.
Divisive!
b4ux1t3 
#1️⃣@hacks4pancakes The worst part is, I get the sentiment. I'm tired of having to care about politics, especially because I'm directly impacted by a lot of them.
I'm exhausted with politics.
But there are better ways to stick your head in the sand than telling others to "just stop talking about it".
maya 
now at catgirl.globalNo one is safe until we all are. And it'll take more than one disenfranchised minority acting at a time to get on top of this.
Max Leibman has moved!@hacks4pancakes I’m always very curious to peruse the timeline of people who post “stick to _____” admonitions to see whether *they* ever post about politics.
Or, do they follow their own advice and stick to whatever it is that they do but aren’t particularly known for?
Cat Food Casserole@hacks4pancakes
Everyone is a citizen of whatever country and it is their RIGHT to express themselves about politics and some would say duty.
Everyone is a citizen of whatever country and it is their RIGHT to express themselves about politics and some would say duty.
peejaybee@hacks4pancakes a lot of people don't realize how much of a luxury it is to know that you're going to be okay no matter what happens in the political realm.
Mad Dog Ace Run@hacks4pancakes
It is hard to strip politics out of our lives. I mean, are we just supposed to ignore the politicians when they do stupid stuff or should we speak up?
It is hard to strip politics out of our lives. I mean, are we just supposed to ignore the politicians when they do stupid stuff or should we speak up?
Zeke@hacks4pancakes it's my personal political opinion that the instance blocking is out of control around here
Ryan Egesdahl 
@hacks4pancakes Some people seem very intent on believing the lie that politics is a subject only experts should discuss. Those people are what I call idiots. Anything which involves people is political. Those who pretend otherwise demonstrate their own ineligibility to engage in serious discussion.
☀️LightOfNight🌙@hacks4pancakes thank you. Art is politics too and always have. Block anyone saying stay in your lane.
Adrian@hacks4pancakes I will always support the “stop posting about politics if you’re a crown/state/etc prosecutor or other flavour of cop” crowd because 99 times out of 100 the politics they’re posting is just irredeemably awful and if it wasn’t they probably wouldn’t be in that profession in the first place
CindyG@hacks4pancakes
Thank you!
Thank you!
Kenneth P Mitton@hacks4pancakes nothing happens in a vacuum, so true
Hexorg@hacks4pancakes what do you think about “stop talking about politics”… if you’re a politician? It’s all just rage statements and accusations anyway. Virtually no politician posts solutions to problems, just promises to find solutions. I’d rather read about their stances and approaches on their campaign sites.
mctsonic@hacks4pancakes so well said - thank you for wise words. You have support and underlining of these sentiments.
author_is_ShrikeTron🔠💉x5@hacks4pancakes The morality you live in action IS politics. Nobody can avoid it.
@hacks4pancakes wish I could pin this to the federated timeline
Daisy Murphy@hacks4pancakes
I work in the vortex that is politics and economic development.
I’m NOT interested in problem identifiers identifying problems but with no ideas. I would rather discuss solutions with people who want to solve problems.
Can I stay here?
I work in the vortex that is politics and economic development.
I’m NOT interested in problem identifiers identifying problems but with no ideas. I would rather discuss solutions with people who want to solve problems.
Can I stay here?