Then in your model of the world, how would one not take a political stance?

If everyone takes a political stance in your model by definition no matter what their intents or actions are then it's a rather useless definition.

A non-political stance would be one which has zero side effects on anybody other than yourself. As soon as the actions you make and the decisions you take have an effect on somebody who isn't you, it becomes political.

Actually _taking_ a non-political stance is an exercise left to the reader.

You don’t help, but you don’t report them to the secret police either.

That is a choice.

Is providing food in supermarkets without political background checks "a political choice"? If so, then everything, including picking your nose with your left or right hand, is a political choice and the term "political choice" becomes utterly meaningless.

A segment of social media company staff also don't like that reality and want their social to censor the political parties / discussions they don't like and thus they toe the line and give unsatisfying non-answers at all hands and to the media.

Publishers are liable for everything posted on their websites. Platforms are not - as long as they make good faith efforts to take down or prevent posting of illegal content.

Both are allowed to engage in moderation, curation or "censorship". Engaging in such does not make a website a publisher.

Not really, no. That is not usually what people mean, when they say "take a political stance".

We can extend this to other examples. Do you think that a grocery store should ban people from their stores, if the individual is wearing a pro Trump, or pro Biden Tshirt?

I think it would be pretty silly to condemn a grocery store, for refusing to ban people from their stores, if they were wearing a "Vote for Biden/Trump" shirt.

Most people would find it absolutely and completely ridiculous to ban people from stores for doing that.

So then you agree with the vast majority of people that it is not a "political" decision to refuse to ban someone for wearing a "vote for Biden/Trump" shirt?

Cool. That is my point. Basically everyone would not call it political to refuse to ban someone for that.

Imagine someone walks into a grocery store naked.

Or wearing a t-shirt with a explicit image of a man and a woman having sex. Or two men having sex.

Or a t-shirt which says / shows something extremely inflammatory yet not illegal.

I could imagine various stores making various decisions in all of these cases, all of which would be the folks working in that store expressing their beliefs!

Humans are inherently social and thus inherently political (politics in the sense of politics as the negotiation and management of a community).

Or imagine someone walks into a grocery store and doesn’t wear a mask! Lol :):/:(.

Or wearing a "vote for Trump/Biden" t shirt.

In that situation basically everyone would agree that it would be ridiculous to say that the grocery store should ban people for wearing that t-shirt.

I think that most people would not call refusing to ban someone for wearing this t-shirt as a "political" decision.

Most people would agree that it is not political to refuse to ban someone for wearing a "vote for Trump/Biden" shirt.

If you do call that political, to refuse to ban someone for that, basically everyone would disagree with you.

But, in general, businesses businesses should generally have a fairly wide latitude as to what the t-shirt slogans they allow customers to wear. (Though I think we can imagine various slogans a business might deem objectionable.)

At the same time, businesses can reasonably have a fairly narrow latitude as to what employees should wear, even barring an official dress code, with respect to even advocating for a specific candidate--and that may even get into matters of company campaigning.

But the point is that basically nobody would call it a "political" decision if a store allowed customers to wear "vote for Biden/Trump" shirts.

Nobody would call that political, if a store allowed customers to wear those shirts in their store.

In China, for example, while I don’t know for sure I would bet you could not wear a t shirt with the face of say, a former communist party member who had opposed current clique in power (Ie the closest thing to an “opposition” politician that China has).

Or a democracy activist t shirt.

Point is, in the US, though we are lucky in that we often don’t have to think about it, our politicial principles of free speech allow for a lot of behavior.

Stores are demonstrating their political belief in freedom of speech if a store manager doesn’t kick up a fuss when someone walks in wearing a t shirt for a politician the manager dislikes.

Of course there are probably also laws or the manager is savvy enough to know they could get the store sued, but, you get what I’m saying I think / hope :).

You don’t notice it until it’s not there.

And thus, what often appears to be not making a choice, really is making a choice, albeit the default choice :).

A lot of bars and clubs have dress codes. Many ban wearing clothes that could be perceived as "gang" colors. It would be a terrible business decision for a grocery store to do this, but I don't think it's wrong.

That's simply not true. One can verify the truth or falsehood of your statement by applying the knife of logic. Draw your statement to its logical conclusion in order to determine if it results in absurdity.

Let's do that.

A person who has had their brain surgically removed will (quite probably) never mention politics or attempt to control other's communications about politics. According to your statement, that person's actions are political. Sorry, but that's absurd.

2. You wrote: Your conflation of passive inaction with an active choice to refrain from certain action is absurd.

That is only meaningful as a circular definitio0n. Choosing not to act differs from an inability to act. Why? How would you define the difference between the action of not acting and the action of not acting, because of not making a choice to act?

I wouldn't, because not making a choice to act in a particular way is very different from making a choice to avoid as policy acting in that way, or, as was at issue upthread, “Taking a stance to not” act in a particular way. Taking a stance is (for this subject matter, at least) political. Inaction on its own is not.