What's the design? What's it made of? Where were the materials sourced? Why? Where was it made? Why? Was it supposed to be marked as potentially containing carcinogenics?

What's the design? -Don't know, it's a simple chair.

What's it made of? -Wood and fiber.

Where were the materials sourced? -No idea

Why? -Why what?

Where was it made? -Factory in a town over

Why? -Is it the first "why" or a different one?

Was it supposed to be marked as potentially containing carcinogenics? -Sorry don't follow this one. It's chair to sit on.

I guess you were trying to show that this chair is about just as political as decades running a space race between two world powers? It's a good try but I think we'll need better questions to answer.

Space can be political or it can be political. Response to Spootnik-level event is political. Gaming with expectable difficulties in space exploration, pointing fingers to the previous administration, is political. But those are different kinds of "political".

It sounds to me like you're starting from a position of "a chair is free of politics" and working backwards to justify that position. Without knowing where the materials came from, how can you declare it's free from politics, or perhaps you don't want to admit the possibility of it being imported, surrendering a toehold for an argument for trade and treaties.

What's considered "normal" for a chair in your corner of the world is determined by your history (and therefore politics). There are regulation that impact the materials and processes that go with making the chair, as well as quality

> Where was it made? -Factory in a town over

Why is the chair factory in the next town over and not your own? Is the factory unionized?

I mean, from a certain perspective, it absolutely is.

Where was it manufactured? What were the labor laws where it was manufactured? Was there any environmental impact in its construction? How was it shipped to you, and was there any environmental or safety impact of that transportation? If it broke the day after it arrived, would the manufacturer owe you a replacement, or would you have to replace it at your own cost (caveat emptor)?

These are all decisions that had to be made, and were largely made collectively through a political process. Your chair likely wasn't constructed with slave labor—which was a political choice. If the chair breaks within minutes of arriving, the manufacturer will likely owe you a replacement through its implicit warranty according to the UCC.

So, no, the chair itself doesn't have political opinions. But the chair does have many direct ties to political choices that we've made.

Everything is connected to everything else. Everything anyone does continuously gets tangled with everything else, in a bubble of causality that expands at the speed of light.

That's not a very useful perspective to have, though.

Similarly, everything humans do has some connection to politics. For most things in most contexts, that connection is irrelevant in practice. The only reason one wants to make obviously non-political things political, is to shift the conversation from rational, object-level, reasonable context, to one where truth and objective reality don't matter - and they want to do it, because that bullshit-land is where they live and they have a home-field advantage there.

Exactly.

That why asking "When was space not political?" is not very useful either.

> I mean, from a certain perspective, it absolutely is.

It's "absolutely" in the same category as running a space race for decades between two superpowers, sacrificing enormous resources including human lives? Ok, then....