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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1040 thread views

Transnational Thursday for November 27, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Which was not, to my very clear memory of the time, what anyone was actually arguing.

There was a time where "not anyone was actually arguing" for open borders, welfare for illegal immigrants, on-demand access for men to women spaces and women sports, teaching in elementary schools about gay sex, declaring "whiteness" a root of all evils and many other things that we are observing today. Slippery slope exists, and is very slippery. So if some people saw this discussion and thought "if we don't object, in a short time we'd have public schools with Ebonics as primary teaching language" they may be right or they may be wrong, but they certainly weren't out of line to suspect a possible trend.

I understand how it may be frustrating to actual linguists that didn't want to play politics, but the reality is the science is now serving the politics, not the other way around. And the science community, in the search for power and influence, largely made it so. So now those are the rules by which they'd have to live - the rules of politics.

the science is now serving the politics, not the other way around

This certainly seems on the face of it to be where we are--to some degree since COVID but probably well before that (e.g. the politicization of climate change and to what degree it is anthropomorphic.) I'd suggest that if we don't turn this around there is no way we aren't all completely fucked.

Well, not to worry, very soon all the teaching and sciencing will be done by LLMs, and nobody will remember it was ever otherwise, so it will all be ok.

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