Comment by fc417fc802
18 days ago
Doesn't that depend entirely on the context? Telling the grocery store not to carry dairy products is an anti-dairy stance. Objecting to dairy products in the vegetable section is not anti-dairy it's pro-keeping-things-organized. Debating whether or not dairy ought to be allowed in the vegetable section is also not anti-dairy, at least in the general case.
Unlike milk, politics pervades everything. It's not like keeping milk cartons out of the vegetable section, it's like keeping the letter "p" out of the vegetable section.
You've broken the analogy. The broad categories of food equate to the broad categories of discussion topics.
How attention works, whether training on scraped data is legal, and whether or not the latter should be permissible are three distinct topics. Only the third is inherently political. The second has a close relation to politics but is ultimately a legal question as opposed to a political contest. The first has absolutely nothing to do with politics in and of itself.
> politics pervades everything
That's exactly the problem. Sometimes I don't want it to. If I pull up a spec sheet for a microcontroller I don't want to be bombarded with propaganda pertaining to the political tug of war of the day.
The fact that mundane actions can have political impacts when considered en masse does not imply that we can't or shouldn't have spaces for discussions that are reasonably free of political topics. It isn't always appropriate (imo) to discuss the political impacts of the task at hand. It's okay to have a space in which only the task itself is permitted.
The spec sheet being written in English is politics. The spec sheets of the most advanced microcontrollers, the cheapest microcontrollers, and the most widely used microcontrollers are exclusively written in Chinese. You don't have easy access to them. That's also politics.
Microcontroller is a broad category of electronic components. Maximum I/O current is orthogonal to microcontroller. Spec language is orthogonal to microcontroller. Politics is orthogonal to microcontroller, and orthogonal to maximum I/O current. The letter "x" is orthogonal to all of the above.
If we make a category of microcontrollers with French data sheets, we are intersecting two axes. That's analogous to vegetables that contain saturated fat or vegetables that begin with the letter "a" in Flemish.
Saturated fats pervade foods (but not all of them), the Flemish letter "a" pervades foods (but only 1/26 of them), electrical concepts pervade microcontroller spec sheets (all microcontrollers, but not all documents describing them) and politics pervades everything (some exceptions here too?)
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