Linus’ thread: (CW: bigotry and racism in the comments) https://social.kernel.org/notice/AWSXomDbvdxKgOxVAm (you need to scroll down, i can’t seem to link to the comment in the screenshot)
“lot’s of things” != “everything”.
Is there one thing that isn’t political using your criteria? Or did you use “lots of things” because you do think there might actually be an issue if “everything” was political?
Imho, it diminishes the value of things when definitions are applied so liberally. It distracts. It suddently makes things now be about the root of a plant, instead of being about specific human actions.
Also: I just don’t see the issue with not flagging physical things as “political”. It’s still possible to discuss human behavior, or discuss about food distribution, it’s possible to talk about politics (the ideas and acts) without attributing human traits to a potato.
If everything is political then surely that’s a product of the political times we live in. When you’re trans like I am, politics isn’t something you can choose to engage with or not. Politics is something that people use to hurt you. And while I certainly envy those who think they can opt out of politics somehow, we live on a planet with a rapidly changing climate and an ongoing mass extinction event. Politics is going to come for you too, whether you refuse to see it or not, and the time it does may not be so far away.
That’s not to say that the “political lens” through which I see the world takes away the other meanings of things. The things I interact with in the world have other meanings and other aspects too, and in a lot of cases the political aspect is not the most important one. But the political aspects of things and the relations involving things are pervasive and important to fully understanding the world, so it is fairly accurate to say that everything on Earth at least is political in some way. Even your denial of the political aspects of things is part of this, as it’s part of your privilege to ignore politics.
Sent from my apartment where I pay the rent to a landlord, on a phone made using global supply chains, on a proprietary operating system based on open-source APIs and code.
I’m not saying people can opt out of politics.
I’m saying politics is in the actions, not in the objects.
A penis or a vagina are not political. But the decisions/assumptions people might make about them, are.
There’s no such thing as “political times”. Conflict has always existed. Trans people existed before too. It wasn’t any less political then than now. Even if some things might have changed, it’s not that before things were not politically motivated, either in one direction or another.
Maybe some topics oscillate in popularity with the mainstream tides. Maybe opinions evolve (sometimes to polar extremes). But that doesn’t make things today any less (or more) political than they were before.
Is the amount of politics something has supposed to be measurable somehow? If something is relevant to politics or has a political aspect it’s not inaccurate to describe it as political.
