Lear Burton
lear-b.bsky.social
Lear Burton
@lear-b.bsky.social
Sociology PhD Student @ UMD [Housing, Intersectionality, Social Mobility]
Reposted by Lear Burton
*trying to ignore the concentration camps*

i just need to lock in
July 3, 2025 at 2:11 PM
Reposted by Lear Burton
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
June 19, 2025 at 11:21 AM
Legendary one from the New York Times
June 19, 2025 at 1:06 PM
Reposted by Lear Burton
there really is no alternative to tearing up CBP and ICE root and branch
A US citizen with a learning disability who has just suffered a medical emergency asks a CBP officer for directions outside the emergency room. He ends up detained in an icebox for ten days and has the assistant secretary of DHS lying about him to the public at large. popular.info/p/us-citizen...
April 23, 2025 at 3:12 PM
Reposted by Lear Burton
meanwhile, prominent pundits continue to deny that there the administration adheres to a segregationist ideology
Thirty-eight of 43 experts cut last month from the boards that review the science and research that happens in laboratories at the National Institutes of Health are female, Black or Hispanic, according to an analysis by the chairs of a dozen of the boards.
Women, minorities fired in purge of NIH science review boards
Scientists, with expertise in fields that include mental health, cancer and infectious disease, typically serve five-year terms and were not given a reason for their dismissal.
www.washingtonpost.com
April 17, 2025 at 11:57 AM
Reposted by Lear Burton
We simply had to intentionally destroy the world’s strongest economy while dismantling our scientific and educational infrastructure to ensure that a team with a trans girl would never finish second place in the Mountain West volleyball standings again
April 2, 2025 at 10:30 PM
Reposted by Lear Burton
Annnnnnd unchecked racism that gave them more than it should have at the expense of Black folks.
The problem is: they've mistaken correlation for causation. They think their parents and grandparents had a good life *because* of manufacturing jobs. When, in reality, their parents and grandparents had a good life *despite* manufacturing jobs, because of unions, high taxes, and social policies.
April 3, 2025 at 9:51 PM
Reposted by Lear Burton
so is it the official view of the white house that race is a biological reality?
March 28, 2025 at 3:29 AM
Goodbye social science research. Worst part is how this is just the beginning.
President Trump's deep cuts to staff and funding in the Department of Education will deal a major blow to the public’s understanding of how American students are performing and what schools can do to improve. Here's how.
Are Schools Succeeding? Education Department Cuts Could Make It Hard to Know
At least 800 education department research employees and outside partners have lost jobs. The cuts will decimate research and data collection.
www.nytimes.com
March 12, 2025 at 7:07 PM
Reposted by Lear Burton
abundantly clear that this administration takes “discrimination” to mean “any regard for minority communities” and treats “merit” as a synonym for “white (and preferably male)”
I’m struck by the Trump administration’s attempt to redefine equality as discrimination against white people. This is a deeply racist idea that *equal outcomes* must be unfair, assuming white people are naturally at the top of the hierarchy.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/c...
March 12, 2025 at 1:15 PM
Missed the standup for science protest to go to a department meeting about impending losses to research funds -- fun time!
March 7, 2025 at 9:43 PM