Discussing technology without politics is sticking your head in the sand. Technology has a political impact, and technological choices are politically influenced.
Half the topics on HN would be very different if you took away the political context. Unless you only want to discuss programming languages at an academic level, it's almost impossible to ignore the politics.
"...and technological choices are politically influenced"
Nope. Technological choices are solely influenced by the problem one is trying to solve. The course of war, peace and espionage may be determined by politics but the choice of technology is totally influenced by the problems war and espionage may present that technology needs to be able to solve. You can't build a "liberal" radar or a "conservative" radar or a downright "communist" radar. You can just build a radar to detect aircraft.
People: let me provide a little advice, please. If you click on the poster's name you can see their avg karma. You don't have to respond to just any dumb thing said out here, especially not when a person's comments are consistently voted as not useful -- e.g., photon137. That's why those scores are public.
When someone tries to cast a complicated political question like this in terms of yup and nope, just assume they are a dumbass and move along. And have faith that other reasonable people will do the same.
Really? You've to resort to name-calling rather than provide a logical argument as to why my statements would be wrong?
Would you have called me a dumbass if we'd have met in real-life? Or would you have been more civil?
Should I assume this representative of your behaviour towards people you haven't met face to face? Or do you think people have a "karma" number floating on top of their heads when they walk about?
First, I didn't say you're a dumbass. I said, assume that the person is a dumbass. In real life, yes I would assume that you're a dumbass if you had given this kind of argument.
I also would have ignored you and moved on if I had heard you giving this kind of opinion. If pressed to give a response, I would have said it's not a serious argument. And the point is that people don't have to respond to everything that is said, and additionally, it's preferable that they don't as that leads to wasted efforts and irrelevant discussion. I was responding to the effort dedicated to your argument.
Personally, how I determine whether or not an argument is dumb is if the first formulation of the argument does not consider and respond to the most obvious challenge. Yours does not consider for example, that a nobody would be making a radar dish if it weren't for politics, not does it consider that the whole history of technology has been driven largely by military (and thus, political) needs. That seems to be a very obvious hurdle to your argument, which as I understand it is basically a semantic game where the term "technology" is confined to "a technician and the breadboard or terminal in front of him/her."
That you kicked off a semantic exchange with a flat out "nope" just seems smug, making it all the more amazing that the subsequent argument was so naive.
Actually, let me just say this: I'm sorry I called you a dumbass. That was out of line, regardless of what I think about your argument or the way you presented it.
1. Ad hominem isn't really a good argument for ignoring a poorly composed post.
2. If you think that avg karma is a good metric for measuring the usefulness of a comment, you might be confused about confirmation bias...
1. The argument isn't to ignore the comment because the author is dumb. The argument is to ignore the comment because the comment is dumb, prima facie. That is, a reasonable person who has thought about the issues at hand would easily conclude that the comment is not the product of serious effort or consideration.
Backpedaling when it's plain to see that you called him a dumbass doesn't work. You didn't attack his comment, you attacked his history of posts, using a flawed metric.
OK, interesting. I've averaged >10 karma per day for the last 3 years but my per-post average karma is pretty low. (Also "average" karma is calculated a bit strangely http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3148927 )
I'm seriously suggesting the underlying technology has nothing to do with politics. One can discuss buffer overruns and CSRFs and what not without any political overtones whatsoever (or should be able to).
There is no area of human life that hasn't been impacted by technology and very few of them actually involve politics in the traditional sense.
Forgiving tech media that covers political stories in the guise of "tech" news because tech is "inseparable" from politics is naive, at best. It is separable and should be. But then again, I understand media is indeed inseparable from politics.
"...people are inherently connected to politics."
I disagree. This varies from society to society - it might be true for America, not true for other places. People in those places know what the sphere of influence of politics is and many areas are totally separated from politics. In the US, in contrast, almost anything can be (and routinely is) made a political issue.
"Your question is: why am I so interested in politics? But if I were to answer you very simply, I would say this: why shouldn't I be interested? That is to say, what blindness, what deafness, what density of ideology would have to weigh me down to prevent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject to our existence, that is to say the society in which we live, the economic relations within which it functions, and the system of power which defines the regular forms and the regular permissions and prohibitions of our conduct. The essence of our life consists, after all, of the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves. So I can't answer the question of why I should be interested; I could only answer it by asking why shouldn't I be interested?" - Michel Foucault
I agree politics is a very important part of our society and people should be interested in it.
But technology is a means to solve problems whether they're presented by the struggle of humans to make their life better against the elements - in which case the solution would ought to be non-political - or whether they are presented by humans living, interacting and governing themselves in a society - in which case a solution may be driven by politics but is a solution nonetheless.
A blueprint of a missile doesn't say that it's driven by a particular ideology - it's just a solution for a political/social problem. Anyone can discuss it without involving politics. However, humans by their very nature add context to things (in this case, it'd be political) and that's perfectly alright. My argument is - ok, it is possible to discuss these things productively without involving politics or political opinions at all.
Huh? What is your definition of "politics"? What society are you thinking of? North Korea? Even there (maybe especially there) politics plays a huge role in technology.
Half the topics on HN would be very different if you took away the political context. Unless you only want to discuss programming languages at an academic level, it's almost impossible to ignore the politics.