I was going to say.... HN is full of politics. Not always the Red vs Blue kind, but there's political discussions constantly. At any given time several front page stories are explicitly political, and several more are implicitly political (e.g. cryptocurrency).
Discussions without politics are a bit like science without the mathematics field: If you take the larger definition, there's hardly any way to avoid it. Especially if you define things like crypto currency as political, it's basically impossible to have a tech discussion without scratching it.
What people mean when they say that is that political topics are usually a side concern to the technical topics at hand, not pure political discussions. The off-topic, angry and/or ad-hominem comments are also quite rare - yes, they exist, but compared to (most of) Reddit and Twitter it's very relaxed. And policy is almost never the primary topic, unless it directly affects the tech field.
Richard Stallman once said that "geeks like to think they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone." When people imply that there is such a thing as an a-political take on the world we live in, what they're saying is that they cant identify the mainstream ideology that they themselves are adherents of. As such things which adhere to it look "natural", without "bias", or "non-political."
> political (“about how society ought to function”)
I feel like this is a technical definition of political, but that's not how the layman uses the word.
I tend to hear the word political used as a synonym for the current arguments within a society, especially those that professional politicians feel the need to weigh in on and/or there is a significant chance of legislation around.
So, for example, a passionate essay about a Georgism and a land value tax might be political under the technical definition, I don't think it would qualify as political under the layman definition. There's not a sufficient mass of people trying to institute a land value tax for a society wide argument to occur. I don't think the average person would describe aforementioned person as political, I'd say they'd be more likely to be written off as a kook.
Could also be a regional difference. I'm not intimately familiar with all the dialects of the english language.
Right, it's an equivocation that often comes up, when people try to tell you that basically almost everything is political, ergo you are already allowing politics, ergo you must allow all politics, ergo I must be allowed to spew the generic mindless stuff on your platform too.
Orwell introduced the term duckspeak in 1984, and it best describes the way how people understand "politics". “Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all.”
People usually don't have a problem discussing societal issues, most discussion topics somehow relate to how we live and work together and is political in that way, but more people have issues with the sort of partisan politics where the point is to score points against the "other team" over all else, painting the other side with vile adjectives, generalizing them, considering your own side as obviously, axiomatically good etc. You know it when you see it.
