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Reposted by Ethan Landes

Anon Opin @anonopin.bsky.social · 1d

Everyone assumes that Pluto would be pissed off about being de-classified as a planet, but nobody considers that maybe it doesn't want the responsibility of a planet and is quite happy just bumming around the solar system with the other dwarf planets.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 1d

Sure! Rebranding would be to be flooded over by noise from opposition to draw attention away from the truth behind the rebrand.

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Reposted by Ethan Landes

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 2d

Moving from antifa to "anti-fascist" is a mixed bag

Relabelling like this has nice shock value, causing people to revisit the phenomena with a new framing

It forces non-fascist opponents of antifa to awkwardly address that no, actually they aren't anti-anti-fascist, it's just that...

But:
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Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 3d

Not thrilled with the term ‘Antifa’. Sounds sort of sneaky. Anti-Fascist has a much better roar to it.

Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · 3d

"Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost 100 years in some instances, going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany."

- Jack Posobiec at Trump's roundtable on antifa

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 2d

As a bit of shameless self-shilling, I've written at least one good paper about this:

1) Is it a tastytaste or a greedgrab? The importance of label choice in language design www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

2) Conceptual Engineering Should be Empirical link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Is it a tastytaste or a greedgrab? The importance of label choice in language design

Everyone who has come up with a new idea or concept faces the same problem: they need to call it something. This choice is simultaneously arbitrary and important. The new idea could have any name, ...

www.tandfonline.com

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 2d

If anyone is interested in learning more about relabelling and activism, I highly recommend this episode of the Allusionist: www.theallusionist.org/transcripts/...

There's also a time capsule from the Clinton years, Lakoff's short book on political language, "Don't think of an Elephant"

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snipa — Transcripts — The Allusionist

www.theallusionist.org

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 2d

My hunch/verdict: Allies of antifa should regularly highlight it is an antifascist ideology, but it's not worth the effort to change the movements name. After all, there's a lot of money in conservative politics to find ways to twist this stuff around, and that's not a fight one wins.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 2d

Brushing it aside would also get easier psychologically.

When when we hear phrases over and over, we tend to stop paying attention to their component parts. "Anti-fascist" will lose (much of) its hermeneutic force.

Just as 100 years ago, a cold hot dog was an oxymoron, and now it isn't.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 2d

Brushing aside the bit about fascism would get easier over time. Opponents will find easy ways to do it. Perhaps by sticking to "antifa" in conservative settings - there were a good few years where "Obamacare" was only used on the right to avoid the title "Affordable Care Act"

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 2d

The above pros of "anti-fascist" would be strongest in the short-term. When terms are novel and fresh, people relate to them differently, and that's when the shock of seeing political others labelled as being against fascism will have the strongest benefit for the public image of antifa

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 2d

It would likely backfire.

Antifa would continue to be the target of political attack, and hearing bad things about "anti-fascist" would help launder the reputation of fascism.

People would think "if the anti-fascists are burning down cities, fascism is good in comparison"

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 2d

Moving from antifa to "anti-fascist" is a mixed bag

Relabelling like this has nice shock value, causing people to revisit the phenomena with a new framing

It forces non-fascist opponents of antifa to awkwardly address that no, actually they aren't anti-anti-fascist, it's just that...

But:
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Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 3d

Not thrilled with the term ‘Antifa’. Sounds sort of sneaky. Anti-Fascist has a much better roar to it.

Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · 3d

"Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost 100 years in some instances, going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany."

- Jack Posobiec at Trump's roundtable on antifa

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Reposted by Ethan Landes

Joel Morris @gralefrit.bsky.social · 3d

Thing I just learned. “Lede” as in “bury the lede” is a deliberate misspelling of “lead”. It’s part of a lexicon of misspellings used for annotations by journalists and subs so that notes on copy are removed, rather than included in the body of the text by accident. Others include “dek” and “hed”.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 4d

I find I get along most with philosophers who give off the energy that they regularly sit up in bed with the thought that what they are doing might be a huge waste of time and talent.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 4d

The UK is within spitting distance of having more murders portrayed annually on TV shows and movies set in the country than occur in real life

Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 4d

It's so incredible how low homicide rates are in Europe. The UK, with a population of 70 million people, had fewer than 600 murders in 2023.
www.connexionfrance.com/news/double-...

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 5d

B-29 be like

a man with his eyes closed looks at the camera

ALT: a man with his eyes closed looks at the camera

media.tenor.com

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 5d

I can't get over how well this Always Sunny clip illustrates what Susan Carey calls "placeholder concepts" - rather than a full grasp of a concept(ual structure), placeholder concepts are just memories how the concept is used in common circumstances

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNEA...

charlie is confused about pittsburgh

YouTube video by not EXION

www.youtube.com

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 6d

The UK's visa system is, if anything, more fucked. It's run almost entirely by a 3rd party, who uses confusion and fear to upsell document verification and priority services

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 6d

One of the more egregious examples of US-style neoliberalism is the introduction of CLEAR priority lines at the airport.

In exchange to a fee to a private corporation, you receive preferential access to a government service.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 6d

I opened the article expecting a feast of old boy winging about Marx and Foucault, and left the article quite unsated

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 6d

My read is we can put the blame squarely on capitalism.

Presumably many journals got hit with the same pressure from publishers as JPP: dailynous.com/2023/04/27/w...

Presumably many editorial boards didn't resist, which is how we end up with 61 article issues: link.springer.com/journal/1122...

Wiley Removes Goodin as Editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy (Updated) - Daily Nous

Robert Goodin, the founding and longtime editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy, has been removed from his position at the journal by its publisher, Wiley. Goodin wrote to the associate editors...

dailynous.com

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 6d

To be fair to Synthese, it's not necessarily new:

I repeatedly heard a story from c. 2018 that a department was considering expelling a PhD, but the PhD had a super technical publication in Synthese. The dept brought in a logician to decipher the article, who found it to be completely bunk.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 6d

Article Processing Charges

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 6d

What a headline for an article about how some classics departments are trialing having students speak in latin and ancient greek.

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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 6d

I have an experimental psych paper under review where we only added p values as a preemptive referee-pleasing measure.

And surprisingly I think the paper may be worse for them? If anything, some p values prevented us from making otherwise unobjectionable qualitative claims.

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 8d

I am once again BEGGING philosophers of causation to do a bit of public philosophy

Screen cap from Twitter. Original tweet:

Nicholas Wu
@nicholaswu12
Jeffries tells reporters there’s been no contact with GOP leaders since the shutdown started

“Republicans have shut the government down because they don't want to provide health care to working class Americans, and then they're running around the Capitol now lying about it.”

Quote tweet: Rachael Bade
@rachaelmbade
·
Oct 1
Thing is, DEMOCRATS shut the government down. Not Republicans.

Small technicality, I know.

(Facts are funny things!)

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