I have a more (in some sense) pessimistic analysis. People overall, including antivax and anti-lockdown proponents, are generally fully aware that the issue is vulnerable population. But policy-making is about who takes priority when, and many people ...

https://twitter.com/redlightvoices/status/1472540475886292995

... are waiting to hear when their own needs/wants will finally take priority in the context of the pandemic. Reminding people at this point about illness and vulnerable populations signals that politicians are *still* not going to focus on other people's priorities ...

Just had an extensive discussion with colleagues at our online office holiday party on what constituted cake. I brought a number of objects that could be considered cake (for instance, a single tortilla chip sprinkled with sugar) and we judged whether they were cake or not. The tortilla chip was rejected because it did not involve egg. However, we later identified cake and cake-adjacent foods that do not involve egg, so clearly that was not a good criterion.

So (and this is a subtweet) there is a sort of cultural/applied linguist that sees "traditional" "theoretical" linguistics (exemplified by anything to do with Big Noam) as not only empirically wrong but actively harmful, because they seem to view any discussion of language ... ... *qua* language apart from the communities of usage as being normative in nature and therefore actively harmful, in that the establishment of constraining norms (I think is the argument) acts as a sort of subtly colonizing prescriptivism.

Had a bunch of my books shipped over from Canada finally, after having left them there for like 9-16 years depending on the book. I apparently still have the vintage copy of van Riemsdijk's Ph.D. thesis I borrowed from @norbertsyntax and never returned. It represents to me the good kind of linguistics, the kind modern progressive people apparently aren't supposed to do now.

So I've spent most of my academic life being a computer scientist either embedded in the humanities or humanities-adjacent. And one thing about humanities and soc sci is that (a) they're very very white compared to STEM academia (which is, uh...) despite often good intentions,... (b) the far-right is not entirely wrong about the socio-political influence (in ways more than merely educational, they're *a* hand that rocks the cradle), and (c) there are aspects of minority cultures that *can* be criticized and a devaluing of hum/soc sci is one of them.

So the whole #covid19sverige Swedish virus "experiment" controversy has been framed in terms of "herd immunity" and that's not at all what the conflict is (even @neil_ferguson agrees that it's not about herd immunity). #coronasweden Rather, it's a conflict about an approach to risk management. Sweden's most serious critics promote an approach that involves using "easily" computable worst-case scenarios for virus death and acting accordingly... #COVID19sverige #coronavirussweden

Re the megathread on the "success criterion" of minimalism, generative grammar, etc. I remember running (as a Ph.D. student at UMD) a one-semester reading group on mathematical linguistics along with @TimTheLinguist. It was attended for a couple of sessions by Norbert Hornstein.1

https://twitter.com/spiantado/status/1123994904026406914

At the end of the second one (this must have been in 2007?), Norbert thanked us for running an interesting reading group, but expressed that he didn't quite see the point of the effort to develop these formalisms (Lambek-style stuff, mostly) to fussily derive all uttterances.