>Is small talk about the advocacy work you did over the weekend worse than my small talk about building drones over the weekend?

I think you're way more likely to find coworkers that get mad or upset over the advocacy work you did over the weekend than you are to find coworkers mad about you building a drone.

One of these topics seems to have a much higher chance of negatively affecting either you or your coworker in the workplace.

If you're enjoying some watercooler conversation with a coworker, would you prefer them chatting about the drone they built or the door-to-door-campaigning they did for <candidate you despise> 2024, or the protest they were at against <your preferred candidate>?

Even if you're fine discussing advocacy work for a cause you disagree with (like any adult should be), there's also a chance you're going to alienate or upset your coworker by not agreeing or being on "their side".

Talking about building drones doesn't have the high-stakes social stigmas that can have lasting, chilling effects in the workplace that a lot of tangentially-political topics do.

> If you're enjoying some watercooler conversation with a coworker, would you prefer them chatting about the drone they built or the door-to-door-campaigning they did for <candidate you despise> 2024, or the protest they were at against <your preferred candidate>?

Well, I’m the one who likes fiddling with drones in my free time, so I’d personally be more interested in that discussion! But that’s a different question than which of these conversations should be prohibited by the employer.

There’s a lot of things that aren’t political per-se you shouldn’t share with the broader group.

For instance, maybe my family has a history of killing wild animals for food. I wouldn’t share our kill shots with my company the same way I would with friends that are interested in hunting. Because I know it’s something a good chunk of people don’t want to see and it’s unnecessary to share.

Now imagine I had a few friends in the office who too supported this. And we went out of our way to not only share pictures of these killings (which are all legal) but started to intimidate people that didn’t like to see them.

And then we go a step further and plan a trip to Africa to hunt lions - all legal and on the up and up. And we share these relentlessly. And we don’t stop there. We post Big-5 trophies and endless shots of venison being butchered.

We also begin to loudly advocate NRA membership for colleagues and use company resources to recruit social events where we all go shooting together. We go further and decide we want THE COMPANY to support our gun rights. We walk out and protest our CEO who “doesn’t have the balls” to take a measly pheasant.

Who wants this?

> And we went out of our way to not only share pictures of these killings (which are all legal) but started to intimidate people that didn’t like to see them.

And your managements only way of reacting to that is banning all potentially political talk? Really? My boss would go "go make a #hunting channel and keep it there". And I presume if I tried to get him into gun rights activism the response would be "no, stop pestering us about it", repeated more firmly and with consequences if I kept it up.

This entire article and thread and Twitter are people complaining that the boss just said “no stop pestering us about it”.

You made my point?

If you don't see a difference between "don't talk about any political topics" and "stop pushing for the company to do something about your pet topic X", then yes, that is your point. But given you recognized a difference between "talking about your hunting" and "pushing for the company to support the NRA", I doubt that is the case.

The fable was about the slippery slope or w/e. Maybe not a Pynchon-esque metaphor here, but I’m not a writer.

But why is it different to pressure a company into publicly supporting 2a? It’s literally a right as sacred as speech or voting.

Why does that seem weird but other things not?

My point is that I don't think it's effective to respond to every "slippery slope" by not letting people anywhere near the slope and holding them back from talking about things they care about because they touch the slope. But rather to pick your point on each slope, which gives your people more opportunity to be open and,if it involves company policy etc, for you to get feedback - although the final decision about what the company does of course still rests with you. And if a topic just doesn't work, ban that.

Re the specific example: I'm not from the US, so a fundamental right to guns (or even just much in the way of gun culture) is culturally "weird" here. I didn't intend to suggest that this would be weird/off-limits to all companies everywhere. Which is kind of the point again: find what works for the topic for your people.

as per this company there would be no hunting or gun channel in the work slack because "politics"

Sounds great, to be honest.

What do you mean "what about"? Isn't it obvious - you don't talk about these interests at work. What's unclear about that? Is there something in your employment contract guaranteeing you the right to talk to your coworkers about anything that interests you? How would you feel if I spoke to you at the watercooler about my hypothetical interests in the supremacy of the Arian race?

I don't try talk about my gym routine with coworkers who aren't interested in gym workouts. It's boring to them and the conversation goes nowhere. So you should not try to talk about politics with people who aren't interested in your politics.

I think he's saying that being interested in politics is inherently inferior to being interested in other things, and people who like to read about politics are fundamentally lesser than people who don't know much about politics (and therefore we shouldn't care if banning "politics" affects them).

Yes, in fact those people who enjoy politics and advocacy outside of work should be actively discouraged from working in high performing organizations. I certainly filter them out during my interview process as they are more likely to be a liability than a great worker who gets the job done.