The kind that uses logic and reason instead of rhetorical appeals to emotion. The 'personal is the political' is part of the culture in california and is common throughout the state. And if you don't believe me, you should go on a job hunt and tell every interviewer who talks to you that you're a republican.
Now that I think about it, I want to do just that and document the results. Should be interesting.
There is a group of guys where I work who call themselves VRWC[1] when they go to lunch together. This is in San Diego County. There may be liberal pockets in California but there are also conservative ones. Though Jerry Brown is governor now, we also have had such bleeding heart liberals as Reagan, Deukmajian, Wilson, and Schwartzenegger hold that title.
[1] VRWC refers to a Hillary Clinton sound-bite about a "vast, right-wing conspiracy."
While I don't entirely disagree, I wonder how you would run that sort of experiment. I've been on the interviewing side of the hiring table and if someone had brought up politics—either side—I would probably leave with a sour taste in my mouth. Bringing up a politics in such an unprompted and unprofessional fashion is a big red flag, whether I agree with their stance or not.
You might not bring the political questions at all. You might just casually mention a small detail, like "when I last visited [certain city] for a Republican convention,..." or something even more innocent and passing.
Interviewers are generally not allowed to ask you about your political positions or take them into account in any way. Frankly, talking about one's politics at an interview for an apolitical position would be so inappropriate as to reasonably raise concerns about the interviewee's impulse control and judgment.
Clarification (at least from a USA perspective): Interviewers are not generally banned from asking about your political affiliation. In many states, there are protections against discrimination based upon political leanings, but they are not implemented across the board nationally.*
As a good rule of thumb: if you really want the job, do not volunteer potential employers anything about yourself that you don't think would help you get hired. They aren't cops or courts; depending on how laws are crafted state-to-state, they are legally allowed to consider some categories of information that they aren't legally allowed to ask you outright if you volunteer it.
*There are protections in place for the bureaucracy itself, but they were implemented for practical reasons early in the country's history when it was observed that a party change leading to a clean sweep of the federal government right down to the last front-desk agent regardless of their capabilities in the task at hand was highly inefficient.
I meant most interviewers are forbidden from discussing it by company policy, even if it isn't forbidden by law. My state doesn't ban asking about political positions in interviews, but I know I'd be canned if I ever asked an interviewee about that.
I disagree with your idea that other states don't have some sort of pet peeve they will 'dock you points' for.
Go to Austin and look for a job while spouting off right-to-life and anti-gay marriage nonsense.
Go to Houston/Dallas and espouse the opposite opinion.
Go to Washington DC or Virginia and look for a job while being vocally against government involvement in your personal life and the spy state of affairs, or the military industrial complex.
Hell, let's take it further than job acquiring or state scope; ask anyone with lightly browned skin how they were treated nationwide after September 11th.
'personal is the political' is a nationally accepted doctrine, sadly. In my travels I haven't witnessed much different from state to state.
DC is definitionally composed of people carrying opinions across the spectrum. Being vocally opposed to those things you list is actually a job requirement for some places. DC's stereotype is a bit unnuanced.
Try going to D.C. and preaching that the government should be forcibly (or even peaceably) overthrown and abolished, and see how tolerant those "folks" actually are.
I think this falls under socially discriminating while being legally tolerant. [1]
I wonder why it's ok to discriminate as such. Should one just accept this behavior as part of a social contract? If someone were to say "I'll put a gun to your head" but does not do so, is it not ok to let them be?
While I wouldn't take it out on a child, I won't want to associate with somebody who was against gay marriage or try to save somebody who was against women's rights to their own bodies.
I feel that anybody who spends time with the people they strongly disagree with, when they don't have to, lack a moral backbone.
How does shunning someone for their political beliefs help advance your own beliefs?
Seriously.
Refusing to professionally engage with someone due to private political beliefs will do nothing but strengthen the resolve behind that belief. Instead of stepping across the battle lines into your exalted realm of enlightenment, they will circle the wagons and reload the muskets.
What if Tolkien had refused to befriend CS Lewis due to Lewis' atheism? Lewis would've remained an atheist all his life. Instead, through their friendship, Tolkien brought Lewis over, leading him to write one of the most influential texts in evangelical Christianity ever published.
I have a vague memory of some research recently (last few months) that showed it was nigh-on impossible to persuade most people of a contrary position to one they held. In fact, it helped to strengthen their existing beliefs.
But my google-fu/pocket-fu is weak and I can't currently find it.
You may be referring to the result that exposing people to evidence contradicting their beliefs actually increases the strength of those beliefs (older than a few months, though). Pop-sci level article at http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/
This doesn't reduce to "impossible to persuade most people of a contrary position." It just means that you have to employ methods of persuasion, i.e. rhetoric. This was obvious in classical Athens, when people heard news and discussed politics in public, but is apparently harder to grasp in our society.
Back then being or becoming Christian didn't mean an end to your career; perhaps some of this current hardness is due to the much nastier consequences of going against the mainstream?
Lewis' conversion was not due to a direct effort on Tolkien's part, but he woke up one day an believed (his words.) However, people who overplay the role of discussion in solving problems may miss the fact that a person may be influenced towards an opinion by exposure to certain ideas. What your words cannot do, time may do, with your influence as a driver. It is a well known technique to befriend someone in the hopes of influencing their opinion (you rarely can argue them directly into a differing opinion, as per Swift's dictum.)
Much of this wagon-circling is influence control or more caustically, hugboxing. If one never hears of a rational person saying things that are what is presently defined as 'racist', one can not make the association of 'racist' ideas being rational (be influenced by them.) Ergo why most people's reaction to some of these texts is 'didn't he learn not to be an a-hole?'
But the fundamental problem is that if some ideas which are considered 'racist' are in fact rational, and considered racist only because people are afraid of them, people who seek knowledge and truth would not want someone to close off this information from them, even if they ultimately decide the case is overstated.
Environments such as this work well when all opinions can be stated but none has the power to exclude. This condition is fragile and exists under tension, since many ideologies contradict one another harshly and some are designed to sophistically undermine thought to drive it towards their own ends.
It is however important to note that Yarvin's appearance here is not under the condition of him giving political opinions or having the power to exclude. One can only conclude weakness on the part of StrangeLoop's supporters, and if such ideas are even in their suggestion so much stronger than their own, they have already likely lost the battle.
In fact, it seems like their followers have tipped the apple cart on this one. Now everyone is wondering what Yarvin could be about that would get him banned?
Do you also feel the intense sense of extremely partisan, political divide in the US is desirable? Because that is what results from holing up in ideologically segregated communities where everyone agrees about nine-tenths of everything, and where one only encounters their political other in the form of a media caricature.
I do not think that the sorting of the population by politics is desirable, but I do think it is inevitable and that it presages a period of low-intensity conflict. America is not one place anymore. It has become a set of enclaves, and it's not just a left-right split. It has multiple dimensions: religious, economic, authoritarian/libertarian, racist/inclusive, etc.
