Sounds like you've had a lot of shitty political conversations.
However, everything is politics.
It's impossible to avoid discussing politics the same way it's impossible to avoid discussing money. Even if you aren't directly talking about it, you are always talking about it. It just takes some fancy conversational footwork to pretend like you aren't.
The moment you discuss the arts, you are inherently discussing the funding of the arts, which is a huge political topic.
If you discuss science, you are absolutely discussing the politics around research funding, publication, access to information, etc.
If you discuss housing...oops, there's a TON of policy inherent in the subject of housing.
You literally cannot talk about anything without some underlying relevant policy, and therefore politics being a fundamental part of the discourse, whether overtly acknowledged or not.
If what you mean to say is, overtly discussing broad strokes, hot button political issues as they directly relate to current campaigns/politicians, that's a very narrow band of political discussion, and yes, I too tend to avoid it since I find minimal utility in it as few people have much actually valuable insight.
Right now, a major political issue in my city is that most of the residents find a certain architectural drawing to be ugly. That's it, a bunch of people find a drawing to be ugly. This is a massive political issue that is heading to court and is an ugly battle of different agencies desperately trying to attack each other with policy. It's costing a fortune and political careers will live and die with this issue.
...because a lot of people find a drawing ugly.
...I mean...it is REALLY ugly.
It's also impossible to pretend to avoid the subject of politics unless you live in a veritable monoculture of privilege. It's literally impossible to avoid political discourse in a community that doesn't have safe drinking water or has ongoing conflict with police.
Everything is politics. Everything.
Puppies, pandas, food, water, books, sex, roads, houses, cottages, clothes, weather, trees, rivers, music, churches, festivals, landscaping, tv/movie production, video games, education, socks, underwater basket weaving...it's all marinating in policy.
Politics=policy=EVERYTHING
I totally support avoiding non-productive conversations and agree that a lot of the off-topic conversations here are excessively reactive, but it's the internet, it's excessively reactive. It's not politics that's the problem, it's reactive conversations about sensitive issues with strangers on the internet that gets out of hand.
Bring up literally anything emotionally sensitive online and you're in for an epic cluster fuck of reactivity.
It is what it is.
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"Money is the mother's milk of politics." Jesse Unruh
Unruh's verity encapsulates the inescapable entanglement of money and politics.
Their inseparability means that politics cannot be avoided here since this website is largely about money.