Comment on Political science
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months agoIt’s not useless.
It’s specifically not useless because people forget this.
Where there is disagreement, there is politics.
Telling Mariah Carey to leave politics in her b-sides is, inherently, not possible.
testfactor@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It’s true that where there’s disagreement there’s politics. It’s also true that where there’s agreement there’s politics. There’s politics in Mariah’s B-sides and A-sides and in the font chosen in the album cover. The material the disc is made out of is politics, and so is the air that transmits the sound waves to your ears.
My point is that if everything is political, then calling something political loses all meaning. The term political is, then, useless.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
But how would you tell someone of the world’s politics without it?
You don’t seem to agree, but it’s kind of incontrovertible.
All communication is rhetoric. The way that you stand, the clothes you present, the style of speech you adopt—but rhetoric is just the name for all of that.
Colloquially, political just means something is more terse than usual.
But that’s the thing I’m arguing about. The usual, the normal, is still at odds with the fringes. There is no debate between the political instigators and normal, apolitical society, who would like to return to a time when trans people weren’t in movies (or blacks, or women)—there is only politics.
I’m just saying, a lot of people are afraid to rock the boat, and they need to get off that shit.
testfactor@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The issue I have is that when you say that “trans people deserve equal rights,” and “I prefer my toast with butter on it” are equally political, I can’t take that position seriously. You might as well be saying they are equally “clifnibble” for all the meaning of has.
What you’re doing here is an “everything is a sandwich” type thing. Taco, sandwich. Ravioli, sandwich. The planet earth, basically a ravioli, so sandwich.
While that’s a fun thought experiment, and maybe technically true depending on how you define the word, if someone started trying to eat dirt because they said they wanted a sandwich, I’d call them nuts.
Yes, all things are political, if you define the word political that way. But when you start spouting off about how someone butters their toast being political, you’re reducing issues that actually matter down to that level.
And look, I do understand what you’re driving at. You are pushing back against people who don’t want to involve themselves “in politics.” I think it’s horribly reductive to paint them all as wanting to go back to the 1950s. I think most are probably fine with the LGBTQ+ community, and aren’t looking to go back to some racist “utopia.”
I think most just want to live their lives. They have families and jobs and parents with failing health and financial pressures. There are thousands of marginalized groups. They would happily throw a dollar in a donation tin for them, but they don’t have the emotional bandwidth or time to travel to DC and stand in protest, or argue with strangers on the Internet over it.
They’re not scared to rock the boat, they just have shit to do that has a far more immediate impact on their life and mental/physical health.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
Equally political…?
Mate, I don’t imagine that Mariah Carey’s latest album and the Rosa Parks Bus Boycotts are, like, the same severity. I don’t really know how to respond to that.
No.
I’m pushing back against people who don’t see politics. Who view being “normal” and doing what society expects of you as anti-transgressive.
To coerce people into normal society is transgressive. After all, you can’t do that without power.
What I’m describing is a “no standing still on a moving train” kind of situation. I’m challenging the idea that “being normal” or “maintaining the status quo” or “not rocking the boat too much” is a moral good. That “difference” is political, and “the same” is where we ought to be. The idea that the real problem with society is that people complain too much.
Somebody can agree with everything I just said and never talk to their congress person once.
But in the 1950s, people wanted the rabble-rousers about women to shut up, didn’t they?
The issues today are different, but it’s all the same.