alt Hacker NewsI think this is wildly wrongheaded. The socially polite "no politics" is a critical insulator allowing normally non-socially acceptable behavior to grow.
I am convinced it is those in power not wanting an informed populace.
We are not in uninteresting times. People need to be engaging in world around them, not ignoring it.
A: "My neighbors are scared"
B: "Don't talk about that, we might get testy because I think your neighbors should be scared."
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The way to cause effective local change among people you know is to build meaningful relationships with psychological safety. They will figure out your political opinions with time, and they will be more subtly but durably influenced.
Jamming it into conversations with strong moral judgement attached to the opinion will make people dislike you, and it will not influence people who disagree with you. It will make them harden in their existing views because the emotional awfulness of what you are saying (implicitly accusing them of being bad people, or making them feel under threat) reinforces how correct they have been to have held those views.
Sounds like you could use some time in a group that bans discussion of politics.
I had to tell my parents to stop talking about politics because it was making me dislike them.
They weren’t informed citizens, they were just regurgitating whatever they happened to read in their newspaper that day.
If you pushed them on anything they said they didn’t really have any understanding beneath the headlines they had read.
It would be better for them if they could disengage from it but they don’t seem to want to.
There is nothing good coming out from their engagement.