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I want to identify and discuss a stealth-CW trick that I find particularly irritating: the use of (predominately left-leaning) CW positions used as examples in some other piece of work. I mostly notice this in technical articles: you might be reading an article about writing a program that prints to the console, and the example code will say something like:
I find this quite insidious: it normalizes left viewpoints in a way that's hard to argue against. If you try to say anything, you risk being accused of derailing the discussion with irrelevant politics or otherwise being a Bad Person who violates the norms of a forum. Has anyone seen any examples of this and/or successful arguments deployed against it?
I'm on Duolingo where one of the tasks is to literally translate sentences from one language to another. So far, I haven't seen anything at all like what you're describing, though this platform seems tailormade for such behavior. Imagine being forced to translate "Gay rights are human rights" into French. We'll see if overtly political messages become more common as my French improves.
My kid was doing gr 7 math questions on khan academy the other day, and one of the questions was “The word ‘latinx’ first appeared in [dictionaries or Google or something] in 2007. How many years has it been in use?” It was the most hamfisted attempt. I would have expected something like “the Latinx population of the US is…”
It seems like a weaponized use/mention distinction, which is weird, because normally use/mention gets pulled out to defend apparent wrongthink.
In some ways it's endearing that with all the power of the American empire, they still produce this level of propaganda.
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