I don't argue for political view points because I'm fairly certain I have no power and my opinions and beliefs don't matter. You know, like 99% of us.
Maybe yours do matter. Maybe you're a player with NGOs, elected government, media, academia, big business, or civil service. Mine don't though, I'm just another peasant who wants to keep his family safe and healthy. I wish things could be better but I see no viable path for that to happen that involves arguing politics on the internet.
The one concrete thing that could improve things for me and mine is making more money. LARPing as somebody important on twitter by arguing politics would just be a distraction from that.
You are arguing your political viewpoint here. Because you disagree with mine, and because you want yours to be more common. The power you are exercising is one of influence. If you didn't believe your views mattered, you wouldn't bother to post here.
>If you didn't believe your views mattered, you wouldn't bother to post here.
lol wut? Not parent poster, but I post here precisely because I know my views don't matter. This is idle chitchat with people in a similar line of work. There were a few times I've actually had something to say, and you can bet your ass I didn't post it on Hacker News.
Ok? That's you, and I'll take your word for it. But you aren't the one who is very energetically engaged in an extended argument about what constitutes acceptable political dialog in various spheres.
But even taking you at your word, I think you're wrong. You clearly believe the view you're promoting here, and it's obviously important to you to contradict me, important enough to spend both your time and mine on it. There are a million ways you could spend your idle time, and it's not an accident that you picked this one over the other 999,999 options.
Why the fuck were @wpietri's perfectly valid comments above[1] flagged and/or downvoted to death? It's not like they were advocating either rabid racism or even rampant-PC anti-racism[2] -- they were just stating the rather inoffensive and uncontroversial[3] opinion that not speaking out on something isn't just "neutral" but actually supporting the status quo.
@dang, please un-deadify those if you can. (Yeah, I know: Don't argue about downvotes, yadda yadda. But also: Don't abuse flagging, right? So sometimes, in order to point out the latter, you have to do the former.)
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[1]: i.e. not this one, but the grandparent and great-great-grandparent (or thereabouts).
[2]: Just to take the most inflammatory examples that came immediately to mind.
I don't know if this is true and this gets to the reductive nature of how people interpret political arguments. We've become so divided, the 'status quo' crowd and the 'not status quo' crowd don't even talk to each other. If you're conservative, you're mostly seeing people argue about what the status quo was, and if you're progressive, you're probably seeing people argue about what the status quo should be.
Everyone says politics is about values, but it's more than that. Politics is values plus an implementation. Sometimes I see the worst takes or disdain from people who's values I fundamentally agree with, but we disagree on the implementation.
