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Given the word "politics" has many different meanings you need to state your definition here if you want people to understand your post

• the_af 4y ago
  I think the context is pretty clear in both comments. "Politics" in this context means a form of communication, consensus and decision making in a group.
  • bee_rider 4y ago
    The first comment was clearly talking about the internal, institutional politics of things like professional societies, academic fields, etc, while if we look at the other branch of this particular subthread we have a pretty long post about things like the media and international politics. Perhaps it is impossible to nip talk of the latter type of politics in the bud, though.
    • interroboink 4y ago
      I'm not especially convinced that the two are entirely separate. It feels to me that they sprout from the same source, more or less. I suppose it depends on where you want to draw a line around a very fuzzy word ("politics"). My intent in bringing up the issue originally was that when you have larger groups of people interacting, you get larger-scale patterns of communication. People form groups and sub-groups; people give support to groups based on trust of that group or one of its representatives, rather than getting to know everyone individually; higher-level conglomerations of ideals form because tracking every issue in detail is too much, etc. There's a lot of gunk that comes along with that. But it is not all bad, or destructive. It can even be _con_structive. I think that generally applies to institutional politics as well as national/world politics.