zlacker

Someone pointed out to me that "this is privilege" conflates two very different ideas. It can mean "this is an unfair advantage which should be taken away", but it can also mean "this is a benefit denied to some people, and it should be shared with everyone".

To take some old settled examples: sovereign immunity was a privilege to be taken away because everyone should be accountable under the law, but voting rights were a privilege to be extended because self-determination is good regardless of race or gender. Sometimes it's obvious what people mean, but sometimes it's very useful to be explicit about what's meant. I think "keep politics out of $X" extends across both categories.

To the extent that a space affects policy on some issue, banning 'politics' effectively empowers the people who benefit from the current state of affairs. As you say, it could still have a payoff worth the cost if some concrete good is being achieved, but I think it is a cost; in an ideal world people would be free to discuss both the current state of affairs and changes they'd like to see. But when spaces are genuinely divorced from any position on an issue, it seems like a privilege to share, to give more people the freedom and resources to at least temporarily step away from problems. Issues are harder to escape or forget for the people who are directly affected, so there is a privilege there, but I don't think the people harassing "rainy day moodboard" Tumblrs to post about Yemen are actually improving anything.

I'm not sure what the perfect balance is, but I appreciate that HN rules try to uphold that distinction. There's significantly more leeway to debate politics when tech engages politics (e.g. government contracts, codes of conduct, privacy), than there is to inject non-tech political discussion simply on the grounds that it's an important topic.

>>Bartwe+(OP)
> Someone pointed out to me that "this is privilege" conflates two very different ideas. It can mean "this is an unfair advantage which should be taken away", but it can also mean "this is a benefit denied to some people, and it should be shared with everyone".

You missed a third: “this is a product of a particular pattern of life experience which not everyone shares, and people should be mindful that it is not universal”.

IME, when a particular comment is described as coming from privilege, to the extent there is a “should” point along with the “is” point, the “should” point is about recognizing the different lived experience that the privileged comment disregards, not about resolving the difference in experience by universalizing either the privileged or unprivileged experience.