> I don't understand this "us against them" mentality because it leaves no room for nuance.

IMO it is just a rhetorical trick / social manipulation tool. On a landscape of political positions, there is a status quo area X. Who is against status quo is in non-X (complement to X). There is a side who wants to change status quo to position Y, which is a small and specific subset of non-X (which is necessary, because 'away from X' is not consistent position / direction).

The fair approach would be to negotiate with other members of non-X (and perhaps some border members of X) for political support and get some compromise position with majority support.

The "us against them" is just a way to manipulate (by guilt trip or other ways) members of non-X to support position Y, without giving any consessions for them and their positions. It may help for that goal if position Y is not explicitly stated, and the side is just marked / marketed as non-X.

You just described an (plausivly) emergent formulation of a motte-and-bailey. Very interesting.

"Y" is the bailey and "not X" is the motte.

I agree with the basic premise: productive people do not have time to engage in petty fights.

On the other hand, there are many situations where there is a silent majority of productive people who would literally need to speak up only once to topple an unfair system.

The unfair system can be an open source project that has been hijacked by a small group of ideologists, it can be bad working conditions in ware houses.

Certainly in the case of the open source project it would require just on mail per silent majority member to express dissent and shut down the bureaucrats.

Yet, even in the simplest case it does not happen. So there seem to be more powerful forces at play than just lack of time: Lethargy, craving irrational authority, prisoner's dilemma (who speaks up first).

I have a theory that for worse or for better, the silent majority of productive people are more inclined to work with what they've got than attempt to change the system because attempting to change the system is generally unproductive.

I feel this way. I would like to change the system, but if I get pulled into every cause I'll never get anything done.

It doesn't mean I won't speak up about anything, but I am picking my battles.

Some are also wary of unintended consequences .. complex systems almost never respond to changes as you imagine they would.

I can think the status quo sucks and that proposed attitudes and alternatives suck too.

Seeing a lack of acceptable options doesn't mean I am supporting any of them. That is a false choice.

And, besides, maybe I am addressing the same problems in another way, it's just not apparent given the false choice framing. For instance, maybe I think fighting racism through political confrontation and segregation is a dead end, so I am fighting racism on a local or personal level. And maybe it's none of your business how that's going so far.

I agree ... but the problem is that this discourse isn't operating in the context of a common meta-ethical framework. It isn't just that we just disagree about the empirical evidence of a few (important) policies or disagree about about a few key moral values (or tradeoffs between values) it is that we are no working from the same moral frameworks. We are finally seeing the legacy of postmodernism becoming mainstream and it doesn't operate from the same assumptions that were crafted in the enlightenment. Luckily enlightenment values still dominate background presumptions for meta-ethical discussions, but this is why you see references to religion in this thread, the aesthetics of the discourse have many similarities.

> For instance, maybe I think fighting racism through political confrontation and segregation is a dead end, so I am fighting racism on a local or personal level.

... that would mean you found an acceptable option.

Whereas if you were against racism, but never bothered to do anything about it, then you would be implicitly supporting the status quo.

Support goes beyond simple ideology. It includes social pressure, enforcing or reinforcing cultural norms and systems of privilege, even where and how you spend your money.

In what way does inaction support the status quo? Someone living in their parents basement is not really affecting things either way, for example.

This seems to basically be this meme:

"We should improve society somewhat"

"Yet you participate in society"

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

> In what way does inaction support the status quo? Someone living in their parents basement is not really affecting things either way, for example.

Yes, if you want to be pedantic, there exist possible states of being in which a person may have little to no effect on their environment by virtue of being physically isolated from it. Someone stranded on a desert island, or someone in a coma. A literal brain in a jar screaming into the void.

But that's not what this discussion is about. "Inaction" in the context of this discussion refers to expressing a stance of political neutrality, not to literal physical inaction. The (apparently controversial) question is whether political neutrality is truly neutral.

Neutral is still neutral by the definition of the word. Your logical conflict comes from your metaphorical misuse of the word "support", which literally means to apply force to hold something in place. There an important distinction between someone applying such force and someone not doing so, just as between that person and someone applying force to topple the status quo. A person refusing to take sides is not applying force either way. I'm not "supporting" a scaffold if I don't help you cut it down. The fight remains only between you and the ropes.

It's just the trolley problem. Inaction often carries consequence. You're not supporting the scaffold but you are not concerned about the consequences of it remaining in place. And if we're talking about systems the difference between supporting the system and ignoring the consequences of the system are so small as to not be apparent.

You are free to criticize a neutral person for their inaction. That doesn't make it right to twist meanings and try to hurt them over it with a worse charge they are not guilty of.

As for your last sentence, maybe those opposing "the system" were about to win, and by intervening against them I would prevent that. Now neutrality is apparently the same as supporting the opposition. Or we can just be accurate from the start and call me neutral.

I don't think meanings are really being twisted it's just colloquial discourse with a smidge of rhetoric. If inaction leads to 'the opposition' gaining an advantage it's easy to see why people might see that as defacto support and describe it as such even if that support is quite passive. I can also appreciate you don't enjoy being characterised this way and can definitely see causing that discomfort as being part of the point.

Well a half-truth is half true, but then of course it's also half false.

I've been thinking politics is increasingly just people lying about each other. Someone's behavior can be over-simplified and then pattern-matched to be a tiny bit like that of a literal socialist/racist/whatever. So you "round up" and throw the worst possible charge at them which can fit your evidence, intentionally creating what is almost certainly a false positive due to a terrible classification process. The lie (i.e. the degree to which their statement was rounded up beyond the evidence they have) is the part that damages the target. So people make it as big as possible. The worst possible names are always immediately diluted by overuse.

Same thing going on here. Not helping is partially like helping the other side, so stop thinking there and start rounding off information to make a lie that can hart them.

> I'm not "supporting" a scaffold if I don't help you cut it down.

Except that, in the case of society and politics, you and I are both the worker and the scaffold. You support my cutting down the scaffold by choosing to fall with it.

No, what he said is that no issue is big enough to distract him and Coinbase from making as much money as possible (setting aside how truthful he was).

It's also not a question of us against them. What we decide to do or not do all has a meaning, even just standing on the side. It is certainly possible to agree with viewpoints without acting on them, but it's not possible to support them.

> No, what he said is that no issue is big enough to distract him and Coinbase from making as much money as possible (setting aside how truthful he was)

Even if we take his words cynically, is this the wrong thing to do if that is the path he's chosen?

Context switching is very hard for an individual let alone an organization, and no one will ever agree what the most important issue(s) is/are (Racism, poverty, climate change, etc).

The way I see it is that it's about picking your battles. It's impossible to support and act on every good cause out there. I don't understand what you expect people to do.

I think it is the wrong thing to choose, but he is obviously free to take it as we all are. I don't expect him to do anything though and I don't think my take was cynical either. If problems we are facing in 2020 are not big enough to distract him from his focus, then it is difficult to imagine what would.

I agree that you can't support every good cause you agree with, but choices we make do say something about our priorities. What none of us has a right to is that others will not judge us for them.