In case anybody misses your point, I'd like to add on to it by pointing to some scary changes at the American Bar Association - https://pacificlegal.org/american-bar-associations-equity-st... and American Medial Association - https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-rel... among many others.

It doesn't appear that this is a fixable problem now.

That’s a good example of how neutral institutions reframe contentious policy proposals as if they are universal values that are beyond debate.

“Equity” and “diversity” sound like something “non-political” that everyone can get onboard with. But in practice those terms are used to champion expressly race conscious hiring and promotion. That’s not only political and debatable, it’s unpopular among the very minorities on whose behalf it is invoked: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america...

This happened with an open-source video game I wanted to contribute to, of all things...

I thought I'd found a welcoming community that was interested in building something cool, and I could learn some C# while contributing to something really unique and creative.

That turned out to be sort of right, but the senior maintainers decided that it's also cool to shove their politics down everyone else's throats and ban anyone who so much as sniffs at it.

They intentionally flag-wave their political stances in Discord to bait people into mentioning it, and if they don't like someone's thoughts they ban them and pat themselves on the back for ostensibly removing "toxicity" and "intolerance". When I asked them to stop doing that they tried to bait me into saying something they didn't like, and stated that their political views aren't political at all - more like natural law.

From my perspective, these people (regardless of political affiliation) act pathologically and crave the camaraderie and support of being part of an in-group, and enforce that in-group, because they probably feel generally insecure. They don't really understand the implications of their behavior, nor do they actually care about their supposed cause, they just want to feel in control and validated, and they found a venue for it.

To stop this pathological politicization you have to create an environment of security. That isn't going to happen any time soon, so I'm not sure what the point of any of this is - just avoid them and find/create communities that don't allow politics.

Which game? This sounds awfully familiar.

> To stop this pathological politicization you have to create an environment of security.

But in your example, the problem was the person in charge. If it's your community, then by all means, create the right environment. But if it's a situation like your example, then what? You, the random newcomer, can't really alter the environment very much. You can stay and accept it, or you can leave, but the environment is already problematic. Now what? How can you un-politicize such a community, when you aren't the leader?

I meant general societal stability. Our society is problematic, so there's no escaping that!

> A lot of well meaning people are seriously damaging the country by injecting politics into spheres that the public broadly needs to perceive as “neutral” such as law and medicine. This is usually accompanied by efforts to reframe contentious policy debates as “non-political.” Which of course makes no sense because lots of things that aren’t political in the abstract quickly become political when it comes to people advancing specific remedies or ways of restructuring society.

And there are people who pretend that progressive changes to society are inherently political, and also imply/openly advocate that conservative keeping of status quo isn't. Just because status quo benefits them doesn't mean that keeping it, is rational non-political option.

Humans have an inherent status quo bias and will perceive changing the status quo differently than maintaining the status quo. “Infrastructure” institutions, such as law and medicine, which depend on broad public support and the perception of neutrality, thus cannot be seen as actively seeking to change the status quo. Of course, they must also not be seen as resisting changes to the status quo from non-infrastructure sectors of society. Put differently, stable democracy calls for a well policed distinction between sectors of society that lobby for change, and sectors of society that are expected to neutrally referee, or provide expert guidance, without being agents of change themselves.

Do you have in mind something like what happened with tobacco in the 60s, when the Surgeon General documented negative health impacts publicly and extensively, but ultimately stopped short of recommending any action against it? In my experience, most people see the little label on cigarette packs as grossly inadequate.

Problem with maintaining status quo is that for example someones pay may be the same or can grow a little while economy grows around them, they end up having relatively less and they can afford less. So status quo may squeeze people dry, while they still have things they don't want to loose. And they will loose them maybe not today, but definitely tomorrow.

Why do you think they’re well-meaning?