> Telling people not to be political is a political act
No. If there's a group to discuss ice cream, but they keep talking about Trump, it's not a "political act" to say "hey guys, aren't we here for ice cream?"
Otherwise every forum devolves into the loudest, most vocal slurry and loses its personality.
I'm Canadian. Let's talk about the tech, not your failing country, please. Or I'll go somewhere else for ice cream, and yall can have your millionth community to talk about the same self obsessed political topics ad nauseum.
But this isn't a thread about ice cream...? It's about SoTA emerging technologies that pretty much everyone agrees is going to have consequential effects on society.
When people say "don't talk about politics" that gets twisted up with partisan squabbles (like your example of bringing up the president during ice cream).
But talking about the quality of your streets, your local schools, your annoyance at the trash pickup service, or the data center in town that is using illegal gas generators and actively spewing methane around poor communities with little recourse...
All of that is "political".
Political means who gets to make decisions about how resources are allocated, at varying levels and scales of society. All the way down to the community level and all the way up. Who gets affected by the allocation of those resources. Where power is concentrated or distributed to or from.
Every thread on HN about open source, big tech, startups, etc. are invariably going to be political.
People caring about a trillionaire's outsized power in the tech industry and society at large is inextricably linked to the technology his companies create.
> If there's a group to discuss ice cream, but they keep talking about Trump, it's not a "political act" to say "hey guys, aren't we here for ice cream?"
Depends who is selling the ice cream.
So Trump ice cream would be not about Trump at all?