Staying silent isn't an endorsement of the status quo. Similarly, we shouldn't have any expectation that company X or Hollywood celebrity Y owes it to us to denounce whatever the twitterverse currently finds distasteful. Entitled people on social media love the fact that they can bait companies into every political squabble nowadays.
> Staying silent isn't an endorsement of the status quo.
Yes, acceptance of the status quo without active opposition is endorsement of the status quo as good enough.
It may be “good enough” because you actually approve or “good enough” because it's too far down your list of priorities to do anything about right now or “good enough” because you can't even be bothered to care what's going on, among other options, but it all effectively amounts to the same thing in practical terms, however different they might be in terms of your internal feelings.
>If you stay silent, supporters of the status quo can simply say “see? people are happy with it; if they weren’t more would complain”.
And their fallacious reasoning should be laughed at. Loudly and often.
The alternate is even MORE conductive to enforcing the status quo. When people have to be maximally political all the time, they either have to constantly deal with the blowback inherent to sharing ideas that aren't palatable to the status quo, or outwardly agree with the status quo (for convenience and/or safety).
If everyone voices an opinion (but not necessarily THEIR opinion), supporter of the status quo can simply say "see? people are happy with it; if they weren't more people would be dissenting"
Supporters of the status quo can say whatever they want; that doesn't make it true. The absence of complaints does not imply that people are "happy" with the situation, and silence is not an endorsement of anything. Anyone who claims otherwise should take some time to learn about basic logical fallacies.
There might not be only one opposing view, but it's true that "staying out of politics" usually means handing more power to whoever is in power already.
Indifference ~= I support status quo Q, for any value of Q under consideration.
Indifference is a thing, and it's not a positive statement in support of anything. Attempts to portray it as such seems to be a trick to try to draw people into polarized political debates.
How about the view of looking for exceptions and false statements and questions politician not by a party line nor a policy but by individual reasoning for said content? Being critical of all.
Except for the dichotomy between "Change things" and "leave them more or less as they are".
If you choose to be politically active, there are a million roads you could go. But if you are inactive, then you are choosing a single road: allow those with power to keep on as they are.
Still, inactivity is not equivalent to choice. Otherwise we wouldn't have the term "negligence" (for when you really should be acting, but aren't), and the life in society would be an impossibility - after all, you and I, and most of us here, are very inactive about world hunger, human trafficking, human rights abuse, climate change, social justice, etc.
Moreover, inactivity/neutrality is different from just "supporting status quo" in the sense that when the status quo changes, you still remain inactive/neutral, instead of fighting against the "new normal".
"negligence" means, "choosing inaction when you _should have_ acted. It's a kind of choice. There is a bias that weights action more heavily than inaction, but that bias isn't 1:0, and that bias isn't supported by the authority of moral philosophical consensus
It's interesting to me that you assume I am as inactive as you are. As it happens, when I'm not writing code for my job, I'm engaged in activism for those very causes.
Remaining inactive or neutral is a choice. Even when that choice is made from apathy. And notice, when negligence leads to direct harm, we treat it as if it were a conscious choice -- with equivalent consequences.
Of course there are limits to what any of us can achieve, and we all prioritize things differently. My point wasn't that we can be perfectly active, attempting to solve all problems at once.
My point was that choosing not to engage is, in itself, a choice. A choice to let the course of events go as it will, with out attempting to affect it. History shows that often means letting those with power keep it and continue to govern as they will. That only changes when enough people choose to work to change things.
> But if you are inactive, then you are choosing a single road: allow those with power to keep on as they are.
Reducing politics to "choosing who has power" is a dangerous oversimplification, and one that I think is at the root of our shitty, polarized political culture that's unable to compromise on anything.
For Google specifically, they were never neutral in the first place. You are already getting results tailored to you.