this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Its not though, typically software exists to serve a basic function at its core, and it could be used or contributed to by anyone for any number of things.
You are thinking of software as if it exists in a vacuum. Software that is libre is a political statement. Software that is proprietary is also a political statement. Lemmy choosing to be decentralized/federated/interoperable is also a conscious political decision just as Apple chose to create its own proprietary ecosystem instead of caring about interoperability.
You can grow potatoes for political reasons too. Everything a human being does might be politically motivated, but that doesn't mean potatoes are political.
Anyone can take that same software, that was created as a particular political statement, and use it for the completelly opposite political reasons to make a completelly different political statement. Just the same way as many have used songs in contexts that are completelly politically opposite to what the original author of the song intended.
In the end, the only thing that's political is the goal/purpose/motivation of an action, not the result of the action. No piece of software/hardware/thing is political when you dettach the artist from the art and just see it for what it is, regardless of what the author might have wanted you to see it as.
historically speaking, when you consider its domestication by indigenous people in South America, its appropriation by Spanish colonizers, its resistance to looting by marauding armies compared to grain crops, and the freaking Irish potato famine, I think it becomes quite clear that the potato is a politically relevant crop and could reasonably be considered political.
The existance of potatoes in western diet might be politically motivated (just like every food, not just potatoes), but that's not the same as saying that potatoes are political.
Also, even if the potato had never been involved in any of that and had been always peacefully and respectfully used... wouldn't that history also be political? Why would violent conflict be more of a "political" thing, when non-violence is as much of a political movement?
you are out here acting like something being political is a high bar when it really isn't.
EVERY food meets that same criteria. So of course the bar is not high under that categorization.
The problem is that calling a physical object "political" just because it can be placed in a political framework makes no sense, because then everything is "political" at that point, thus making the term pretty meaningless.
It would be like saying "potatos are emotional" just because it's possible for someone somewhere to get emotional about a potato.
What's political are human opinions, intentions and actions. Not a chunk of metal, nor the root of a plant.
Would you seriously say that food is NOT political? With famines being a major driver of social unrest and mass death? With government power being highly linked from ancient times to the distribution and taxation of grain crops? With its impacts on public health and chronic diseases? With the many land reforms throughout history? With the freaking Food and Drug Administration and the Farm Bill and the US Department of Agriculture and the presidential candidates at the Iowa State Fair eating corn dogs as rustically as they can muster? With the existence of the vegan movement? I could easily go on but I think it's pretty clear that you at the very least picked a bad example of something that's not political.
Lol. There is no example that isn't political by your criteria. Can you give me one?
Not among foods at least.
Not in food and not anywhere. Can you give me one or can you not?
And you seem to assume that something is more political when it causes unrest.. as if the lack of unrest was making things less political. Are you confusing "political" with "cause of human conflict"?
Even rocks have political repercusions, not only historically (I wonder if humans would even exist without Earth being a rocky planet), but also being necessary today for the survival of people across all social classes since we continue to rely on it for a lot of our structure, creation of tools in tribes and processes in our industries. And it's not without conflict between classes either, with quarries being worked on by the lower classes for the benefit of the rich.
I mean at this point you're just making my argument for me. my point in the first place was that most things are political and you're asking me to give a counterexample. if you believe that most things aren't political come up with the counterexample yourself.
No. My point is that either EVERYTHING is political (using your criteria) or no physical thing is political (using mine).
Do you agree? (not asking if you agree with my criteria... but whether that's what we are discussing)
The fact that there's no example of something that can be non-political in your criteria is actually true to what I was exactly saying.
Now..
Under your criteria: the word "political" becomes meaningless, since you can always apply it to everything.
Under my criteria: only actions / events / purposes / opinions can be political. So a potato or a rock or a mathematical algorithm aren't things that are "per se" political. Though the actions that led to them, or the intention / purpose of their existance might be. As can be all the actions humans might take when pursuing food or any other item of value. Even when that item of value is not political on itself.
I just don't see the issue with a lot of things being political. I don't think it diminishes the meaning of the word and it matches the way the word is commonly used.
"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.
How do you measure it?
Popularity contest? over which population? What's popular in America is not the same as what's popular in the Middle East.. what's popular among trans circles might not match what's popular amonst traditional familymen. If we do an actual statistics count we might be surprised about what topics are actually of interest to the common folk.
I don't think measuring how "political" something is makes much sense... whenever I see someone applying a measure like that what they are measuring is not the amount of real impact on the human race a particular societal philosophy will have, but rather how it will affect a particular group in a very particular case, or sometimes how "trendy" it is. But most philosophies, when analized deeply in they purest form, are usually atemporal, and their importance is absolute.. not something that changes with time or with the trends.
Of course you can have your own way of seeing things. I expect most people do. I probably am a minority in how I don't see any sense to use "political" like that... since aparently a lot of people use it.
I don't think it makes sense to determine what is or isn't political by measuring the amount of politicality either. What makes something political is that some people say it's political. And since I'm a person and I say that everything on Earth is political, that makes it so. QED.
Hahaha. I mean, sure. You are entitled to have your own definition, just the same way I'm entitled to having mine.
In mine, "someone saying it's political" is not what makes something political. I think I already talked about that. Let's agree to disagree :P
We do agree that measuring the amount of "politicallity" makes no sense. So at least there's that.
it's not more of a political thing, therefore they would both be political. although I'm not convinced that a crop that's strictly nonviolent would even exist
Exactly. If you use that criteria to categorize physical things (instead of human intentions/goals), then you'll find everything is political, and thus that classification would be totally useless.
Even numbers and mathematics would be political by that criteria... even regions of space we haven't visited would be. It's trivial to find a political frame from which to see anything, all you need is to have an opinion about how it has affected / can affect humanity. So that criteria makes it a pretty useless term.
Physical objects aren't any more "political" than they are "emotional". Are potatoes also emotional?
Potatoes are commonly described as a comfort food so I think it would be fair to describe them as emotional, although it would be a bit of an odd way to word it.
Yea, also every form of food. Even mathematics can ellicit emotions. Everything can be emotional when you apply that same sort of odd logic.
When you apply human properties to things and want to see things under humanity's framework... then everything is human.. potatoes are human too then. This is just an odd antropo-centric way to describe objects, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
That's true. It's the human element that creates the political attribute.