FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
23hr ago
Is it possible to share space with people who have evil, objectively incorrect viewpoints?
In some circumstances, observably, yes. You could examine how this happens. In some circumstances, observably, no, and this could also be examined. You could dig into what the breakpoints are, where one situation devolves into the other.
If the purpose of discourse is to arrive, together, at convergent notions of objective reality in the face of the vast impulse towards fiction and willful delusion, then when do you reject that which is demonstrably evil?
Not yet. Hopefully, not soon.
“For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”
Alternatively, see here.
The purpose of discourse is to arrive at the truth. But once you arrive at the truth, discourse has served its purpose, and therefore ends. This place exists to promote discourse; to the extent that your questions have been answered and you have arrived at certainty, you have no place here. This is a place of charity, and without doubts and questions, charity cannot exist.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Yes, I'm aware that if we assume a particular form of hard Materialism axiomatically, then Determinism or something much like it is a necessary consequence. But there is no actual reason to take that particular form of hard Materialism as one's axiom, and crucially, adopting it as an axiom appears, speaking strictly within the Materialist frame, to degrade rather than improve one's ability to make predictions about the material world.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
If better data arrives that goes against determinism, should we discard it? Because determinism has been a popular theory for a very long time, the various deterministic theories have been empirically tested, and they have been uniformly falsified. What you are proposing here is the final stage of Determinism of the Gaps, refusing to acknowledge all previous tests and all previous data, making no testable predictions at all, and relying entirely on, to put it succinctly, faith.
Sure, that might change in the future. Also in the future, the Son of Man might return on a cloud in glory to judge the quick and the dead. Also in the future, the stars in the night sky might be replaced by a high-score readout, and then reality as we know it gets turned off. But I have actually read a few of the old books, enough to know that what your argument is not particularly new, and what is relatively new is the part where you've (wisely) given up on making empirical claims or predictions entirely. I disagree that Determinism should be treated as the best available hypothesis when it now makes no predictions and all previous predictions it made have been falsified.
I do recognize that this is tangential to your main point, though, and my apologies. it's a bugbear for me.
Searle's Chinese Room is no more interesting than p-zombies - both are empty questions. If you are definitionally not allowed to observe an empirical difference then the answer to the question is mu, as both answers yield exactly identical predictions about the future and so are the same answer.
...
Since everything non-quantum is fully clockwork without free will, can we clean up quantum mechanics?
How does your belief in everything non-quantum being fully clockwork yield non-identical predictions to my belief in free will? I contend that in this case the answer is not mu, as my belief in free will delivers superior predictions about reality. My evidence for this is the way that every functional system we have relating to managing interpersonal interactions operate off the assumption of free will, zero functional systems for managing interpersonal interactions operate off deterministic assumptions, and every attempt to build such systems off deterministic assumptions (and there have been many) have uniformly failed.
But how could it be any other way?
Reality around us could not be baseline reality, and our minds have a connection to the actual baseline reality. It doesn't really matter if baseline reality is God or the simulation server in this case. Claims that our minds are deterministic must confront the fact that they do not operate in a deterministic fashion at any level, and most claims and even evidence to the contrary appear to have been falsified.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
I don't think they're capable of receiving and internalizing the message, unfortunately. It doesn't help that the creative talent pipeline is fucked as well. People chasing quality will find ways to produce quality in their small pockets; most of these large studios will probably just die. Welcome to the new Dark Ages.
But the market has more or less said, as far as I have seen, that it tolerates a lot of blue/woke design choices though?
You cite a bunch of correlated factors on the production end, all of which are accurate. It is indeed true that if all the major studios and all the major media outlets all adopt an ideological tack in the same direction, the industry as a whole will indeed move in that direction.
As for customers not buying a lot of new games or consoles anymore, that's gotta be partly down to the economy and due to publishers playing it too safe instead of creating anything very creative most of the time? They've been re-heating old formulas for too long.
There will always be excuses for why failure is the fault of nebulous outside forces and not the deliberate decisions of those in positions of authority. These excuses are not going to get Doctor Who another season. Take Star Wars in particular; they've just had a major triple-A game release within the last year or so. Searching for "star wars outlaws sales" gives me the following summary:
Star Wars Outlaws has sold approximately 1 million units since its release in August 2024, but it underperformed compared to Ubisoft's expectations. Despite receiving generally positive reviews, the game struggled in a competitive market and faced challenges related to the Star Wars brand's current popularity.
...Why would it face challenges related to the Star Wars brand's current popularity? Isn't the whole point of the Star Wars brand that it's about as close to universally-popular as you can get? Well, not any more, apparently.
They've been re-heating old formulas for too long.
Marvel released 21 movies leading up to Endgame, and I watched most of them. I watched I think two movies post-endgame. I'll never watch another marvel production again. I do not appear to be alone in this decision. Why is it that 21 movies = massive success, but 23 = dismal failure?
Is fairgames a reheated formula? New IP, in a genre that's not too overdeveloped. Obviously they had enough faith in it to invest in that trailer. How's it doing? Not so good.
Bungie made a money printer with Destiny and Destiny 2. It's now in serious trouble. Destiny 2 is my hole, it was made for me! I got in as free-to-play, spent increasing amounts of money on DLC, evangelized the game to other players. When the Lightfall DLC dropped, I went all-in and paid a hundred bucks to pre-order the whole expansion package. How'd that go? ...I quit Destiny for good. A lot of other people did too. Bungie's done massive layoffs, game quality has dropped into the toilet with tons of bugs and bad design choices.
But it's cool, they've got a new game coming, a revival of their classic Marathon IP. It's now been delayed, its lunch has been pretty thoroughly eaten by Arc Raiders, and its current trajectory is pretty clearly toward total failure. Sony paid 3 billion for this company, right about the time their output turned to literal shit.
More broadly, was Tolkien overdone? Was Wheel of Time overdone? You're telling me there wasn't actually a market for big-budget fantasy TV, after the dismal collapse of Game of Thrones? Witcher was shaping up to be a hit; why did it implode?
If tentpole IP is a bad investment, why did everyone invest so hard into it, and where's the better path forward that they're missing?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Were there particular cases you had in mind?
Bundy standoff versus CHAZ/CHOP seems like a pretty concrete example.
Concord is the example currently passing from myth into legend. A reported development cost of $400 million and most of a decade in development. The result:
Upon release, Concord failed to exceed 700 simultaneous players on Steam. Will Nelson of PCGamesN noted that compared to Helldivers 2, a multiplayer game released by Sony in the same year, Concord's player count was much lower than the 400,000 Steam players Helldivers 2 attracted at launch. Nelson attributed Concord's poor performance to a lack of uniqueness and a high price while competing in a heavily saturated market dominated by free-to-play games like Overwatch 2 and Valorant. One week after launch, on August 29, the game had 162 simultaneous players on Steam. It was estimated that less than a week after release, the game had sold a total of around 25,000 units, with sales of 10,000 on Steam and 15,000 on PlayStation.
Due to the magnitude of its commercial failure, it is cited by various publications, including The Guardian, PC Gamer, ComicBook.com, and Insider Gaming, as one of the biggest failures in video game history.
There's been a fair amount of competition for that title in the triple-A games market.
More generally, pick a popular media franchise and check how it's done over the last decade. The Witcher, Rings of Power, Wheel of Time, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Marvel, DC, superhero media generally. Willow got a revival as a streaming show that did so bad it's been literally scrubbed off the internet. Aliens, predator, terminator are in a bad way. Arguments over whether woke media were the future or a dead-end used to be quite frequent here, with reds generally arguing "get woke, go broke" and blues arguing "this is what modern audiences want". It seems to me that we don't have those discussions any more because the observed market outcomes have more or less settled the question. In fact, I would argue that the drop in quality has become so egregious and so widespread that it has had a measurable impact on customer behavior across the media landscape, with customers becoming significantly more reluctant to give new content a chance.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Speech is not inherently violent. Aesthetics are not inherently violent. The outrageous weirdness of modern culture has not yet given rise to 70s levels of violence. It's quite possible that they never will.
A good summary of my long-term participation here would be that I'm deeply skeptical that the assertion you lay out here fundamentally is or will remain true, but arguing it would require more space than is available in the present margin. Suffice to say, I think I have a good grasp of your argument here, and though I am very worried it is wrong, I can readily recognize that there's an abundance of persuasive evidence on your side.
To sketch out an initial sally, though, consider how you're approaching the concept of "violence" here. I assume you're referring to something like US homicide rate by year. I think the way most people look at that graph is that you have "US Society", and in the 1960s something goes wrong with "US Society" and a real murder problem develops, and then in the 90s "US Society" finally gets a handle on things and the problem largely resolves itself. So we look at the present situation, and we compare it to the 60s and 70s, and we say "by objective measures, this problem is not nearly as bad as what we had before, and what we had before was itself survivable, so we're probably going to be okay."
As I see it, a more accurate description would be that something went wrong with "US Society" in the 1960s, and a real murder problem develops... and over the next thirty years, that problem and the root causes giving rise to it pretty thoroughly destroy the previously existing "US Society" and replace it with a very different social order. The accumulated radical changes are eventually sufficient to get the problem being measured back down to a manageable level, but the old society is fundamentally and permanently changed in the process.
In the 1970s, we had tens of thousands of bombings in a world where dynamite and nitrogen fertilizer were available in hardware stores on a cash-and-carry basis. That world no longer exists.
In the 1970s, we had lots and lots of murders in a world with 1970s trauma medicine. Our current murder rate is not backstopped by 1970s trauma medicine.
In the 1970s, we had violent crime waves policed by cops filling out paper forms and relying on eyewitnesses. Now we have an automated surveillance state that would have given the East Germans wet dreams.
In the 1970s, we had a highly-cohesive and values-homogenous culture. Now we are polarized and atomized to an almost incomprehensible degree, and signs of broad-based values incoherence are rampant.
The question is, how should we frame current data? Is it the raw murder rate, or is it the murder rate versus the energy expended to suppress murder? The latter, it seems to me, gives a more sobering view.
Firearms culture, militarized policing, mass incarceration, pervasive surveillance, and radically advanced trauma medicine are among the bigger cards we played to get things back in line the last time social trends got going in the wrong direction. If they get going in the wrong direction now, we don't get to replay these cards; whatever we see is the trend with these adaptions already taken into account. I'm skeptical that many cards that big remain in our hand, and were such cards available, whether we would recognize a continuous "US Society" on the other side of playing them.
More generally, I'm not sure what is meant by speech and aesthetics not being "inherently violent". I observe a strong correlation between harshness of words and harshness of actions. Not a perfect correlation, certainly, but a much, much stronger one than we might infer from "...but words will never hurt me." Words have often gotten people killed. Words have often coordinated violence at every scale from the interpersonal to continent-spanning war. It does not seem to me that a clean demarcation exists where the words "those people are the problem, we should kill them" are totally fine, and it's only the mob actually coming together and killing those people that's the problem.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
And by contrast, the sexist/racist hiring for production of cultural products in the US has resulted in an astonishingly massive drop in content quality across the entire entertainment sector, and several of the most notable entertainment disasters ever seen.
My assessment of the current internet is that it probably has a far more significant population take-up of New Age religions, sex cults, exotic drugs, serial killers, and Godless communists than the 60s and 70s did. I'm not highly confident about the math, but it looks to me like what would be maybe a few dozen-thousand people in a handful of geographic hotspots is now multiple millions of people spread through every layer of society, fully normalized and monetized. See the seminal "toaster fuckers" meme for a straightforward description of the mechanism, then observe that the Trans movement we're now perhaps seeing the tail end of would not have been wildly out of place in the 60s or 70s, but there it would have been grassroots and confined to a neighborhood or two in each of a few major cities, and the current iteration has been nation-wide and received overwhelming support from most institutions of note.
I do not think our current era is winning the less-crazy game.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Would it surprise you to learn that arguments about discrimination, concern over those arguments, and actions taken to address those concerns have been a notable driver of sociopolitical change in our society for at least the last century?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Let me attempt to be more precise, then. Do you expect arguments against societal-level discrimination to continue to hold water?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Do you expect arguments against discrimination to ever hold water in any context, ever again?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
A very simple definition would go something like this: Modernism was the initial recognition that all the grand narratives of the old world have been smashed to pieces by technology and the War, Postmodernism is living in that "heap of broken images" and trying to have fun throwing the pieces around, and the "post-Postmodern" movements since then have been trying to will a grand narrative back into being.
Modernism drew deep on the coffers of civilizational history and set out to build a glorious cultural edifice.
Postmodernism noted that the work was not going well, but assumed that we might draw deep again so that the work might continue and something like the original goal might be reached.
We now recognize that the coffers are empty and that the work has failed, that the creditors are beating on the door and that there is nothing with which we might pay them.
Put another way, it seems to me that one of the notable features of Postmodernism was that, for all its critiquing, it appears to have assumed that the conditions in which it was born would obtain indefinitely, that the cultural assumptions and material realities it framed itself would ensure its own relevance. One might say that it did not take its own arguments seriously enough.
I direct your attention to the portion involving the following passage:
This is an entirely reasonable interpretation of Darwin's initial comment, and it seems pretty similar to the interpretation several of the posters went with when formulating replies, which were then ignored. I think what you wrote would have been a much better comment than what he went with, considerably less inflammatory, and somewhat higher in content. Unfortunately, the problem is that this is an argument you are imagining, not the argument Darwin actually is making. He absolutely is not claiming that Bezos or any other businessman has a right to sell whatever they choose. He absolutely is not arguing that private censorship is okay (or wrong), or even agreeing that state censorship is wrong (or okay). The argument you are imagining does not exist in that thread.
That may seem like a strong claim. Fortunately, I can prove it pretty solidly, because in that very thread darwin himself very explicitly said so...
[Insert lengthy quote from the comment under discussion]
...In other words, he doesn't actually endorse anything he wrote in that original comment. Nothing you described above was at all the argument he claims to be making, which is unsurprising since the argument he claims to have been making cannot be straightforwardly derived from what he actually wrote. Everyone in that thread who assumed he was speaking plainly and in good faith wasted their time, as you did just now, because he had zero intention of actually prosecuting the argument he implied he was making. His actual argument was that agreeing with BJ's position necessarily makes you either a socialist or a hypocrite, because the only possible response to private censorship is nationalizing the platforms. That's it. That's the entire content of his original post, according to a detailed explanation by the man himself.
Welcome to arguing with Darwin.
Given that his own explanation of his comment completely contradicts your understanding*, it's worth looking at what he actually said in some detail.
Yes, if you completely ignore the difference between government coercion and private businesses.
Did the original essay ignore the difference between government coercion and private business? No, in fact, because the essay is solely about why "book burning" is a bad thing in the abstract, not about whether people should be prevented from doing it, much less how this prevention might be accomplished. His final conclusion is that "book burning" is a loser strategy anyway, so there's no point in worrying about it. Darwin completely ignores the argument BJ made, preferring to substituting an argument that he himself finds more convinient. He does this, by his own admission, because he was annoyed that BJ was saying something negative about his preferred ideology.
Of course, it wouldn't be very persuasive for him to straightforwardly say "This abstract question is dumb, let's talk about a different concrete issue instead". What he does instead is frame his comment as an accusation: "you completely ignore [x]", rather than as a statement of his own views: "I think [x]". Because he does this in as inflammatory a manner as possible, people are too busy reacting to his snarling tone to notice he's pulled a switcharoo on the actual argument being made. Further, the frame of the discussion is now whether the OP did or did not ignore something important about an issue the OP did not even address; meanwhile, in darwin's mind, he has not even offered an opinion of his own at all, so he has zero reason to respond to those like yourself who "misinterpret" him as having done so.
I would be interested to hear how the above is best summarized as me "not liking his arguments".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
Maybe a better question for me to ask you, to get at our disagreement: You seem to think your behavior does not have a chilling effect on me or other left leaning posters. You say you have not banned me illegitimately. You seem to still think doing a long analysis of my posts comparing them to Darwin would be a fruitful exercise. So what are you apologizing for? What is the issue with, as you say, "overstating your confidence" that I am a liar?
My apology is for claiming that you were a known Darwin alt, rather than a suspected one.
At no point in this conversation have I claimed or even implied that you are a liar. You have stated that you are not a Darwin alt, and I have accepted that claim at face value, and offered an apology for mistakenly claiming otherwise, which seems to me to be the exact opposite of accusing you of dishonesty. A big part of the reason I'm willing to do that is that Darwin's previous alt made no particular effort to deny his identity when asked directly, so the denial and subsequent argument isn't a good match for his pattern of behavior. Unfortunately, you appear to have interpreted my willingness to withdraw the claim as proof that I made the claim flippantly with zero evidence, and then interpret my offer to explain the evidence prompting the claim as proof that my apology is insincere.
Imagine I decide to attend a book club.
Imagine that everyone at this book club wears masks and voice-changers to conceal their identities. Imagine that part of the job for the people running the book club is to identify people who've been kicked out for bad behavior and are trying to sneak back in, to prevent them from causing more trouble.
When it's my turn, I start talking about how I like a certain character and you, the authority figure, pipe up and say "Whoa, how can you say that about Character X? You're just like Bob, the member I had to kick out because I didn't like them 2 weeks ago, he always loved those problematic characters. Guys, the way this new member's going to engage in our club isn't right for us, I think he's being dishonest and manipulative exactly like Bob was. I know him from elsewhere and he's trouble. But I'm not actually banning him."
The situation here differs in several particulars.
Someone else starts a conversation about how the authorities suck, and how they kicked out Bob, one of the best members the book club ever had. I point out that Bob was actually quite badly behaved, and also that he was not kicked out and actually is still here; he stopped wearing the green mask, and now sometimes he wears the orange mask, and sometimes he wears the purple mask. You, in the purple mask, say, "Hey! Don't call me Bob! Why would you call me Bob! I'm not Bob!" I apologize and state that I appear to have been mistaken about the purple mask, you do not accept my apology, and the above transpires.
It seems to me that there are some crucial differences between these two descriptions, and that mine is considerably more accurate to the nature of the preceding conversation.
Beyond this, you have written much here, but it seems to me that the matter is quite simple. You can accept my apology or not, as you please, and you can ask for the evidence that prompted the original statement or not, as you please. I am still not clear on whether you would like it presented, or whether you would consider that a further attempt to smear you, and I am attempting to respect your wishes to the extent that is possible.
It is obvious that you have strong feelings about the matter, but it is not obvious why I should share those feelings. If you think I am a coward, that my apology is made in bad faith, that I am a bad mod, a flippant asshole, deliberately attempting to drive out blues, breaking the rules, making statements that beggar belief, etc, etc, that is your prerogative; I do not prefer that people hold such opinions of me, but I have also learned that my control over the thoughts of others is sharply limited. If you think I am violating the letter or the spirit of the forum's rules, report me to the other Mods, or make your argument to the forum at large, as you please. If you want to know what the Darwin pattern looks like, I'll note again that I've linked a previous discussion above and have offered to discuss it with whoever is interested. If you want to know why I (and apparently others) have mistaking you for Darwin, ask for details and I'll attempt to provide them. As it stands, you appear to be stating that you find the offer of such details extremely offensive, and also find the failure to present such details extremely offensive, and it seems to me that you cannot have it both ways.
At the end of the day, your emotions are your own business and I decline to involve myself in them further.
I'm sure this boogeyman you're discussing would be happy to know their reach has pervaded so far...
Darwin is one of the most prolific and notable commenters in this forum's history, and his participation shaped the space to a notable degree, both in terms of his sheer comment output, in terms of how people learned to think and argue in responding to him, and in terms of the number of otherwise-productive posters who flamed out trying to debate with him. Those who argued with him without flaming out often had their perspective significantly altered by their interactions with him.
And if that weren't enough, he's one of the most frequently-cited examples for Blues of the sort of high-quality poster this space drives away when they complain about the state of the forum, which is what happened in the above thread. When this happens, I point out that in the first place that he is not banned and that in the second place he was not, in my view at least, a good poster. I generally provide a link to evidence to support the latter position. It seems to me that this is a reasonable way to approach the subject.
...that (once again) random left leaning posters like myself are accused of being them for unclear reasons, with a tone of seething annoyance throughout.
I do not think anything I've written in this thread or the threads I've linked to can be fairly described as "seething annoyance", but writing is always open to interpretation by the audience.
It would be more accurate to say suspected alts, unless you're aware of some knowledge or evidence the rest of us are not privy to??
This is true, and if you say you're not a Darwin alt, I'm happy to take you at your word going forward, at least until I see solid evidence to the contrary. My apologies for overstating my confidence in your case. On the other hand, "left-leaning posters like you" are not accused of being Darwin. You and GuessWho were accused of being Darwin, and GuessWho claims this accusation is correct in his case. Proceeding on the assumption that you're being truthful, that's an accuracy rate of 50% for amateur writing analysis. An accuracy rate of 50% which doesn't seem too bad for amateur writing analysis, particularly when the resulting action is "I have a particular reason to engage with this person's arguments." We make a point of avoiding modding people we're personally engaging in discussion with; the best way to ensure I don't mod you is to get into a discussion with me.
It seems pretty obvious that a moderator of this community engaging in such behaviour would have a chilling effect on left leaning users.
Why, exactly? Again, Darwin continues to be cited by our remaining Progressives as a good contributor, and those of us who disagree do so through discussion, not bans. How does this produce a chilling effect, in your view?
How many people do you think you've wrongly accused of being this person over the years and banned because of it?
Well, apparently you're the first wrongly accused. To my knowledge, no suspected Darwin alts have been banned by me or any of the other moderators.
Perhaps a better question for the right leaning on the forum and moderators: If I were a mod of this community, how many people do you think I would ban and/or flag-accusingly for being sockpuppet accounts based on them sharing similar right wing views and my own amateur writing analysis?
I don't know how many people you would ban. I know we recently banned TequilaMockingbird for being a HlynkaCG alt, but he was a right-winger. We've banned a ton of alts for the guy who pretends to be a leftist and then spams minimal-effort White Nationalist/neo-nazi content, claiming to be "sparking a discussion." I think we banned a number of alts for Julius Bronson back in the day, and for the guy who kept arguing for legalizing pedophilia, though that last one I don't remember the details of as well. I'm pretty sure we've banned a lot more right-wingers for alting than we have left-wingers; the only left-wing alt I recall us repeatedly banning is Impassionata, who is extremely distinctive and hard to miss.
You're really going to do this smug evidence-free drive-by character assassination in public and then not respond when asked for details?? I find this behaviour cowardly and unbecoming of a moderator.
Effort takes time, and I wanted to be as precise as possible.
Where's your proof, other than that you don't believe multiple leftists would gather here?
Everyone seems to be in agreement that lots of leftists don't gather here. If you'd like some examples of posts of yours that seemed similar to Darwin's style, I can go digging for them if you like.
If you're a moderator and you know I've done something wrong, then you can ban me. Failing that it just seems like you have a bone to pick with a particular leftist and are taking it out on randos like me for no reason.
At no point was banning you or Darwin a threat I made. The OP claimed that Darwin had been banned. I pointed out that Darwin was not actually banned, and neither were his alts. I'll take you at your word that you aren't an alt, apologize for mistaking you as one, and reiterate that this entire chain is about how neither you nor Darwin are banned for conversing here.
What I do not like to tolerate is baseless lies with no attempt to even try to show evidence or reasoning in favour of a smug dismissal, especially by an authority figure such as a mod.
I linked quite an extensive analysis of Darwin's behavior above. If you would like me to attempt such an analysis of your posts, it might take a bit to pull together, but I'll give it a shot. Would that suffice as evidence? If not, what would satisfy you?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
If this is in fact an example of unconstitutional discrimination on the basis of religion, then I would not describe the removal of their independence as "for political reasons".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
Fair enough; I would be very interested to see the rest of the grading pile to get a sense of the actual quality spread we're looking at here. In any case, 30-40 vs 0 is still quite the divergence.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
I see a lot of people, myself included, thinking that it's very unlikely that this instructor in particular typically assigns zeroes to bad essays from their students. If we are correct that this is an unusual deviation from their standard grading practices, the question is why, and we think we have a pretty good idea of the answer. I'd be surprised if you think either of those assumptions are unfounded, but am prepared to be corrected. This seems very likely to me to be an open-and-shut case of unconstitutional discrimination on the basis of religion by a state employee, and I see zero argument for why it should not be pursued more or less exactly as it has been. The ACLU made its name off similar cases; were they wrong to do so?
The far more marginal question is whether this was a cunning plan on the part of the student. I would not bet on that question either way; I've seen lots of cases where people did things like this intentionally, and in fact setting these kinds of traps appears to have been a standard part of civil rights litigation since the invention of the discipline. On the other hand, average people are of average intelligence, and organic tribal friction is going to be orders of magnitude more common than cunning ploys.
If you disagree that this is likely to be a case of unconstitutional discrimination, I'd be interested to hear your reasoning. Do you think this instructor typically hands out zeroes? If not, do you think this essay in particular deserved a zero for reasons other than its viewpoint? Or if it was discrimination, do you think the student should have accepted their zero quietly, or else complained through the university system first? Why should Righties not rally around this dim but photogenic Bible Karen? What is objectionable about them doing so?
But what I see in the other side of the conversation is people frowning over these events, and then explaining their frowning with justifications that make zero sense, based entirely on transparently-isolated demands for rigor. This is not surprising, we are all tribal down to the white of our bones and this is what tribals do. I will certainly say that I do not consider it tiresome: it seems overwhelmingly likely that this is the law working exactly the way it's supposed to.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
The question isn't what grade you think is appropriate, though. The question is what grades similar essays normally get from the instructor.
It's unclear how much "investigation" this really requires, but it is clear that Fulnecky has won the battle.
The obvious place to start would be the following question: "Let's see the other essays submitted and the grades they received." I would imagine someone asking that question is why the school has so abruptly sided with Fulnecky, because I would bet a hundred bucks to the charity of my opposite's choice that there were objectively worse essays given better grades in that grading pile. Do you think I'm overly confident in that assessment, particularly given the school's response? If you don't, then what's the basis of our disagreement?
While the resulting grade of 0 seems slightly punitive and I don't doubt it was motivated by some level of personal offense, the professor's response hardly could be considered discriminatory.
You think that the grade seems punitive. I agree. I think the essay deserves a bad grade, and it seems to me you agree. The question is why it got this specific grade. How many zeroes has this instructor handed out over the last year or two or five? What patterns might emerge from how the instructor typically concludes that a zero is assigned? If, as many other people are noting, most instructors never give a zero for a turned-in essay exhibiting even the most minimal amount of effort, and this instructor is typically no different, then the obvious question is what was different here. And shucks howdy, wouldn't you know it, we appear to have a likely candidate right off the bat...
Religion is a protected category under civil rights law. I'm given to understand that discrimination in grading based on protected characteristics would be a straightforward violation of the student's first amendment rights, and is the sort of thing that institutions with deep pockets have been routinely taken to the cleaners for over the last several decades. Nor is this issue some mystery wrapped in an enigma; show the rest of the grading pile, and maybe the last few grading piles too, and one of two patterns should clearly emerge.
Again, the argument is not that this student wrote a good essay. The argument, which appears to have won more or less immediately, is that the instructor was nakedly discriminatory on the basis of religion against one of their students. No one is confused about whether or not this is an instantly career-ending offense in the general case, but until recently there has, by all evidence available, been a tacit understanding within Academia that Christians don't really have actual civil rights.
It's possible that Fulnecky is actually an ignoramus and the essay in question represents the best intellectual output she's capable of producing. On the other hand, it's entirely possible that the University should award her her erstwhile instructor's degree, because she just schooled them. I do not think that considering the later possibility represents "mental gymnastics", and again, this is a question we could easily answer by examining her other essays. I'd bet most of them read like median college student essays.
The possibility you ought to consider a bit more is that this is may in fact be an example of student activism, of exactly the sort Academia has openly claimed a mission to encourage and inculcate for many, many decades. In that case, the only novel bit here would be who it's aimed at.
...My confidence that the other commenters are correct, and that you are trolling. The part where you constantly hew to general statements and abstractions sort of gives it away.
What "violence" specifically are you referring to? Which "fascistic distortions of truth"? When I and others talk about such things, we have no trouble grounding the discussion in specific cases, and working toward general principles from there. You would be well advised to do likewise.
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