There are two overlapping concerns I’d like to address seperately:
- Politics topics on PG.
This is my main point I’m trying to argue is that folks here should be free and I’d argue encouraged to discuss state and international politics and how that influences them as an individual and informs their threat model. This is also the perfecr type of forum to encourage folks to practice tolerance because it is a smaller yet diverse (we got lefties, righties, innies, and outies here) mixture of people with varying attitudes. Yet, we all share the idea that privacy is a human right and thats a common ground we should always fall back to when learning how to coexist.
- Politics affecting PG recommendations.
I haven’t read every comment on this thread or on Reddit but I believe most of us here agree that Jonah’s freedom to express his political beliefs shouldn’t affect PG recommendations in the same way thay Proton’s CEO’s freedom to express his opinions on Trump shouldn’t cause people to believe that Proton’s product is somehow compromised.
On comparing ourselves with Tuta and others who avoid political discussion in the workplace or technical communities. First, they are not wrong or right for making such decisions if that is their policy, but we shouldn’t argue for homogeneity either.
Silencing political discussion and other aspects of our identity removes the humanity from the discussion and takes away another opportunity for us to truly know people we interact with while exercising our ability to have good faithed dissent. That’s also not going to the other extreme of saying you have to discuss or divulge your political interests, we should make the lanes on when and where to discuss it clear, and attempt to promote good faithed discussions with a code of conduct.
A lot of the elements we don’t like about police states and surveillance capitalism all stem from a lack of trust. If we don’t practice tolerance in small communities where we have so many other aspects in common, where do we practice it? Certainly not X or Facebook. Having political discussions about class and identity enables us to know that people who differ from us are trustworthy and are equally valuable and valid in their opinions. Especially those in a minority.
So, yeah still happy to have a more focussed discussion about this on another thread if PG folks are interested.