"Everything is Political" -

[Anonimo]

I've seen this phrase crop up a few times, whether it was from some of the left-leaning blogosphere we tend to mock or from our own members as a means of deriding the former. I'm just kind of interested in hearing some of your experiences and thoughts on this kind of mindset

For example, I find myself coming back to this article from The Atlantic every now and then. It's about four years old, and I don't know if this is when the whole "Personal is Political" movement really started gaining steam. But on that note, I still find it very relevant and in my opinion, explains this problem perfectly.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politic...ed-even-though-most-americans-hate-it/274359/

As for me, I've accepted at this point that politics are always going to intrude on my life in some way or another. But I could never go around living a politicized life. It's something I've seen other people do, that people I care about do. Call me a bleeding heart or whatever but being in that kind of environment is both physically and emotionally draining. Life's to short and sometimes, I just want to enjoy something without having to go deep into a discussion about the cultural ramifications from whatever word salad perspective is in now.

 

[Alec Benson Leary]

I blame the rise of social media, at least in big part. Facebook's business model actively encourages echo chambers and the shunning of wrongthink, and reinforces it by propagating the fallacious assumption that your newsfeed gives you an objective picture of important current events. People legitimately believe that their way of thinking is "normal" and anyone who disagrees must be a crazy monster.

 

[Wallace]

As for me, I've accepted at this point that politics are always going to intrude on my life in some way or another. But I could never go around living a politicized life. It's something I've seen other people do, that people I care about do. Call me a bleeding heart or whatever but being in that kind of environment is both physically and emotionally draining. Life's to short and sometimes, I just want to enjoy something without having to go deep into a discussion about the cultural ramifications from whatever word salad perspective is in now.

From your keyboard to God's monitor.

Incentive is the big driver in politics. Barack Obama pointed out in his last interview with 60 Minutes that there is zero incentive for politicians to reach across the aisle and cooperate. Conversely, there's a major incentive not to cooperate with the other party; you get branded a traitor or a RINO/DINO, followed by facing a primary challenger that gets back by the party's money. The end result is a government that does only the the absolute bare minimum necessary to keep the system going--sometimes not even that--while selling on their own media outlets how much they are accomplishing, or preventing the other side from accomplishing. But ultimately, very little actually gets done, and nobody wins.

Some of it may be the end game of Karl Rove-style politics: fifty percent plus one is a mandate from heaven; at that point, you can safely stop offering the other side anything, because you've won. More likely, I see politics taking on the most cancerous aspects of fandom. The people on your team are irrevocably good, the people on the opposing team irredeemably evil. Anything your side does can be excused or rationalized, anything the other side does is sinister. Just take a look at all the Hillary Clinton apologists that came out of the woodwork in the last year. It's the fundamental attribution bias blown up to national proportions.

In extreme cases, you get people like Ted Cruz, whose crowning moment of glory was shutting down the government. He knows he'll never face the consequences of his actions because of his identity and because Texas is safely a red state. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a Democrat get elected in 2018 who engineers a shutdown of the government, and they'll be lauded as a hero from the left and jeered as a villain from the right.

This is cancer because it makes politics impossible. It invites people to judge politicians as “good” or “bad” depending on who they are, not what they do. It allows us to cast the people we don’t like as cartoonish figures who are entirely good or entirely evil, when in virtually every case—there are, of course, exceptions—politicians are an amalgam of good and bad. This is at least part of the reason for the polarized landscape of American politics; if you think your opponent is flat-out evil, how can you engage with them? When you take negotiation and compromise off of the table, how else are you supposed to get anything done?

What we have now is a politics of celebrity. The politics of fandom is an extension of celebrity culture: politicians are presented, first and foremost, on the basis of their personalities. In the Republican primaries, Donald Trump basically spent all his time shitting on his opponents’ perceived personal failings. If he discussed policy at all, it was only in the sense of vague promises that he’d get around to it at some point. So, we wind up with a celebrity president, and a bad case of buyer's remorse. Fandom came first, issues came a very distant second. As long as politicians continue to be treated like celebrities, and we view them through the same lens we would a sports' team, nothing's going to change.

 

[Positron]

The root of this is the obfuscation of the different senses of the word. In normal usage, political means "pertaining to governance and public administration", then some people stretch the sense of this word to cover "instances where one person or group exerts its dominance over another" -- and this naturally dovetails with the cool postmodern idea that literally everything is a power play, hence "everything is political". You can see people jumping around the two senses in everyday conversation:

"All the candidates are corrupt; I'm not going to vote. I hate this political bullshit."
"What's the matter with you? Whether you hate it or not, everything is political!"

And there is also the desire for people (not just academics) to elevate the mundane, to immortalize the ephemeral, and to rationalize the irrelevant. You'll be laughed at, and made to feel bad about yourself, if you're 30 and still watch My Little Pony, but once you've convinced yourself that watching the show is really a political statement, it doesn't feel so bad anymore -- and when people inevitably laugh at you, you can at least claim political persecution.

 

[Wallace]

As a phrase, it's been around since 1969, as the title of an essay by Carol Hanisch. She writes: "One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution." It's been interpreted in many different ways over the years. This essay goes into some of the history.

 

[RockVolnutt]

I vote for sending everyone who says that phrase to the moon.

 

[ComeoutandJULAY]

I think it has to do with one's interpretation of the word "politics," which in itself is a pretty blanket term that's given all sorts of meanings in different contexts. I want to share two definitions I found from The Free Dictionary.

The first one is "The art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the administration and control of its internal and external affairs." This is probably the most common definition of the word that I've seen crop up. In news sites, when you go to the "politics" section, you'll see articles talking about the U.S. government, the U.K. government, the North Korean government, and so on and so forth. Art is frequently used to make some kind of statement referring to some real-world government that can certainly be interpreted as political, and yes, sometimes it can be unintentional. We humans are quirky like that. Even if certain forms of media aren't explicitly discussing political power, they're still political anyway, which leads me to the other definition I've found.

The second one is "The often internally conflicting interrelationships among people in a society." Works about some kind of conflict to overcome, such as the struggle between good and evil, are seen as political, even when they don't necessarily have to do with government or aren't discussing some big real-world issue relevant to the times. Showing bad guys getting punched is a way to convey the message that punching Nazis (i.e., punching people who have done no more than disagree with you) is perfectly okay, for instance.

Furthermore, I've also heard the word "politics" used to describe behind-the-scenes events, such as the development cycle of a video game. It's sort of like how politics can be described as a behind-the-scenes look at our daily lives and the people who play an indirect but important role in shaping them, such as political figures as we often refer to them as. This is probably the biggest reason why you hear the retort "everything is political" all the time. When people say they don't want politics in whatever media they enjoy, they're usually referring to modern instances of the first definition or hot-button topics that are almost guaranteed to polarize the consumer base, things that could cause a whole shitstorm if, at the very least, they're not handled delicately. They don't want a message that boils down to, say, "Open all borders and accept all refugees!!" shoved down their throats in a work that otherwise has nothing to do with political struggle. Thus, there comes the big retort.

With all that in mind, even if this phrase may be entirely true, I feel that a lot of the time it's used as little more than an excuse to virtue signal, such as to complain about how there's not enough black gay Muslim trans quadriplegic women with <insert self-diagnosed mental illness here> in movies and television shows in the current year. It's also used to bully certain companies and celebrities, such as Nintendo and Taylor Swift, for trying to take a politically neutral stance and/or trying to avoid stirring up controversy. Because not talking about how horrible mean ol' Mr. Trump is or not acknowledging that giving Samus rocket heels is sexist is somehow harmful to our society.

At this point I'm just sick of seeing this phrase everywhere I look and I want it to die in a fire.

 

[AnOminous]

I think it has to do with one's interpretation of the word "politics," which in itself is a pretty blanket term that's given all sorts of meanings in different contexts. I want to share two definitions I found from The Free Dictionary.

The first one is "The art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the administration and control of its internal and external affairs." This is probably the most common definition of the word that I've seen crop up. In news sites, when you go to the "politics" section, you'll see articles talking about the U.S. government, the U.K. government, the North Korean government, and so on and so forth. Art is frequently used to make some kind of statement referring to some real-world government that can certainly be interpreted as political, and yes, sometimes it can be unintentional. We humans are quirky like that. Even if certain forms of media aren't explicitly discussing political power, they're still political anyway, which leads me to the other definition I've found.

The second one is "The often internally conflicting interrelationships among people in a society." Works about some kind of conflict to overcome, such as the struggle between good and evil, are seen as political, even when they don't necessarily have to do with government or aren't discussing some big real-world issue relevant to the times. Showing bad guys getting punched is a way to convey the message that punching Nazis (i.e., punching people who have done no more than disagree with you) is perfectly okay, for instance.

Furthermore, I've also heard the word "politics" used to describe behind-the-scenes events, such as the development cycle of a video game. It's sort of like how politics can be described as a behind-the-scenes look at our daily lives and the people who play an indirect but important role in shaping them, such as political figures as we often refer to them as. This is probably the biggest reason why you hear the retort "everything is political" all the time. When people say they don't want politics in whatever media they enjoy, they're usually referring to modern instances of the first definition or hot-button topics that are almost guaranteed to polarize the consumer base, things that could cause a whole shitstorm if, at the very least, they're not handled delicately. They don't want a message that boils down to, say, "Open all borders and accept all refugees!!" shoved down their throats in a work that otherwise has nothing to do with political struggle. Thus, there comes the big retort.

With all that in mind, even if this phrase may be entirely true, I feel that a lot of the time it's used as little more than an excuse to virtue signal, such as to complain about how there's not enough black gay Muslim trans quadriplegic women with <insert self-diagnosed mental illness here> in movies and television shows in the current year. It's also used to bully certain companies and celebrities, such as Nintendo and Taylor Swift, for trying to take a politically neutral stance and/or trying to avoid stirring up controversy. Because not talking about how horrible mean ol' Mr. Trump is or not acknowledging that giving Samus rocket heels is sexist is somehow harmful to our society.

At this point I'm just sick of seeing this phrase everywhere I look and I want it to die in a fire.

Congratulations on the most autistic post I agree with completely today. I was trying to come up with how to say this without being autistic but it wasn't possible. Someone had to do it.

 

[More Spicey Than Coolwhip]

I think the implications of this phrase gets pretty horrifying when hearing it used by certain people. I fell that the notion that every aspect of our lives is political can lead some to the mindset that the government should get involved with everything we do. The fact that this line seems to be used more by sjw college students who demand their universities ban certain words and actions only reinforces my suspicions that this phrase essentially justifies authoritarianism.

 

[Un Platano]

I mainly hate this phrase when it's applied to a refusal to make opaque political statements. It's established and logical in parliamentary procedure and other decision-making processes that silence is consent to a given opinion, but it's stupid to assume it's true everywhere. It doesn't make sense to apply it to non-political contexts, but it validates itself by presupposing that everything is political in the first place, and therefore it as a political statement can be applied to it.

 

[Replicant Sasquatch]

Many times when I hear "everything is political" it's usually a way to justify moralizing at someone or something you don't like. Which goes hand-in-hand with dictating to other people what they can or can't do when they aren't actually harming anyone. It's antisocial behavior for mean busybodies.

You absolutely should hold true to your political beliefs and I don't believe you need to get along with people who hold contrary perspectives. But when you get angry at Nintendo for saying they're not interested in political commentary then you're out of line.

 

[Lackadaisy]

It's an easy way to identify who's a complete cunt, so I respect it on that level.

 

[Alec Benson Leary]

You absolutely should hold true to your political beliefs and I don't believe you need to get along with people who hold contrary perspectives. But when you get angry at Nintendo for saying they're not interested in political commentary then you're out of line.

Hell, these days I go out of my way to talk to people who don't agree with my beliefs. It's the best way to learn.

Maybe that goes hand in hand with not getting mad at Nintendo for not making Mario trans or whatever. Getting mad at everything for not serving your politics inherently suggests that you believe everything should match your politics. People who value diversity would be disinclined to see things that way.

 

[Hui]

Everything is autistic.

 

[NARPASSWORD]

Not everything is political. Anyone that thinks that is a lolcalf at least.
And this is not just the left I'm referring to. Any rightwing nutjob that thinks this is just as crazy.
I just laugh at both sides and enjoy the show, and not hold any grudges over minor disagreements (unlike the ilk on Tumblr, Reddit, /pol/, Facebook, twitter, or hell, even here.)

 

[RockVolnutt]

You absolutely should hold true to your political beliefs and I don't believe you need to get along with people who hold contrary perspectives. But when you get angry at Nintendo for saying they're not interested in political commentary then you're out of line.

You should read the comments in articles about that. They then turn "not interested in political commentary" to mean "I'm okay with the status quo" and therefore they're okay with every bad political thing for then on. It's true cancer.

 

[BILLY MAYS]

All of you are political. This community is political.

 

[Richard29]

https://www.returnofkings.com/100887/12-reasons-why-liberals-and-progressives-will-always-be-losers

 

[KimCoppolaAficionado]

https://www.returnofkings.com/100887/12-reasons-why-liberals-and-progressives-will-always-be-losers

Of all the things you could have done today, you necro'd a three-year old thread about how identitarian politics is bad to fight the Culture War using an identitarian site that also believes, through action if not by words, that everything is political.

 

[Hux]

I always notice that the people I've known personally who think this tend to also be the most biggest miserable sadsacks I've ever known in my entire life

EDIT: oh shit, just noticed the thread was necro'd, fuck me then