Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being an insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
6hr ago
Immigrants are taking our jobs, except when they're mooching off welfare. (You can make this not-doublethink by phrasing it as "either immigrants are taking our jobs, or they're mooching off welfare". But at that point the fig leaf has wilted and you might as well just admit that you don't have principled economic reasons to oppose immigration.)
...are you familiar with various techniques on how to conduct welfare fraud?
I would like to know what makes this different than piracy, if anything.
Piracy is illegal under international law; sanction enforcement with the ascent of the flagged country is not.
The US says it had a "seizure warrant" for it. What does that mean?
It means it went through the procedural process to receive a warrant for seizure, the exact jurisdictions of which apply depends on the case- but which often includes the country under whose flag the vessel was under.
Was the vessel subject to US laws at any point, violated them, and this is the result?
Not just US laws, but the laws of other states- such as those it is seeking the flag protection of. Who, themselves, have interests that are subject to US law, which is why US sanctions have so much international influence.
The US says that the tanker is sanctioned. What does this mean? Economic sanctions usually mean, "I won't do business with you," can a sanction mean, "I won't let you do business with someone else, and if you do I'll seize your vessel in your waters?" At what point is a sanction a war with fancier language?
Not here, since your analogy breaks down in two places- 'your waters,' which gets into the degrees of territoriality at sea which do not prohibit various actions, and 'your vessel,' which goes to the country of flagging, not the nation of proximity or travel.
The most relevant factor in play, and most common in cases of of sanction enforcement against ships that try to seek protection of the sovereignty of other states, is if / when the nation whose flag a vessel is sailing under agrees to rescind protection / allow a seizure. This can be the formal permission of a seizure warrant, and can happen when the flag-state whose sovereignty would be infringed is provided with evidence / reason to rescind protection.
This is where sanctions law comes into play. International law not only recognizes the sovereign right of states to say 'I won't do business with you,' but also 'I won't do business with people who do business with you.' Many states, in contexts where their own significant interests are not on the line, will happily give their own sovereign ascent to sanction enforcement at sea rather than fall afoul of the sanctioner's sanctions.
"Guyana's maritime authority said Skipper was falsely flying the country's flag." Does this impact the legal calculation?
Massively. Ships don't have legal rights to sail the seas unmolested under international law, states have legal rights to sail ships unmolested at sea. This distinction has two effects.
First, if a ship is falsely flying under a country's flag, it has no actual legal protection. The legal protection derives from the sovereignty of the flagged nation, not the ship itself. There is no sovereign infringement to Guyana if Guyana never extended its sovereignty to the ship.
Second, if a ship is recognized as falsely flying the flag of a country, that country is far less likely to try and to provide political cover to it, and far more likely to agree to the political actions of a requesting power. Such as acceding to a request to support seizure, whether through supporting a warrant or otherwise.
Outside of the numerous questions, I'm getting Iraq war vibes from this. "They support terrorism! They have weapons of mass intoxication! The people will thank us, the leader is a dictator, etc etc."
'Trump is being a neocon' is the latest Trump Bad take, and Jon Steward recently spread it further (although he didn't start it- that's been the Venezuelan and associated angle since this started).
Will the US have boots on the ground in Venezuela in a year?
Maybe. I wouldn't advise betting one way or the other.
It seems so contrary to Trump's MO, what is going on here?
Did you read the US national security strategy that released last week? That is the second Trump Administration setting out it's MO.
While most of the media has fixated on the European dynamic, one of the more significant parts is the strategy's elevating of the Western Hemisphere in the order of administration priorities. There's a fair deal of subtext and background context as to why and what purpose and how Venezuela stands in there.
The more relevant point for your question is that Venezuela is one of the personal priorities of Marco Rubio, who is not only the Secretary of State but also Trump's National Security Advisor. He is the first person to hold both positions in the Presidential cabinet since Kissinger, and both positions give him substantial influence over American strategy such as the NSS. They also give him substantial influence over American policy, since Trump prefers the pageantry of being President to actually managing the bureaucracy, and Rubio is able to present his desires as aligning with Trump's stated goals (which Rubio helps write into stated policy).
There's some messy legal philosophy stuff involved, here; the actual behaviors are not new.
'It's not illegal is a lawful president does it; it is illegal if Trump does it' would be a take on how it's being presented. Here is a 2020 Biden administration seizure of an Iranian vessel, and Obama administration naval seizures, also Iranian related.
The novelty here is the Iranian connection in the context of the ongoing US military buildup / gunboat diplomacy off of Venezuela. The seizure is quite plausibly pretextual, even if it turns out to be informationally accurate / procedurally legal under US law.
Dean
Flairless
7hr ago
Should an asylum be run by its inmates?
Why not? There's nothing pejorative about an asylum institution, unless you're trying to smuggle in the connotation of an insane asylum in particular. But if you have to have insane inmates as analogous to the citizenry of a country for that analogy to hold as a pejorative, it can be trivially dismissed as a false analogy, or just as trivially inverted to say that the government officials are the incompetent crazy people who really shouldn't be in charge of things.
Dean
Flairless
8hr ago
In so much that the world was the United State's oyster, it was because the Europeans destroyed themselves and had ruined much of the world via imperialist squabblings, not because the Americans destroyed the Europeans or their spheres of interests.
This is a hyperagency versus hypoagency point of the allocation of agency and responsibility. Just because the Americans benefited from being the last economy standing does not make the Americans responsible for the various european decisions that destroyed each others economies.
Dean
Flairless
18hr ago
It indeed was written to go both ways. The number of alliances that have died after a suppressive elite supported from afar was overthrown is uncountable, as are the number of alliances that are stillborn because one party excepts assistance / pardon for suppressing domestic opposition.
It does not help the European Union that it is not actually a treaty ally of the United States, but rather that its elites tried to transfer the benefits of alliances with various national members to the EU itself.
Dean
Flairless
18hr ago
The American strategic bombing campaigns in WW2 were not what destroyed the infrastructure of Russia, Britain, France, Italy, Romania, Czechoslavakia, Austria, or the Netherlands.
The American strategic bombing campaigns in WW2 didn't even destroy the German war industry, even if you ignore the British and Russian strategic bombing campaigns. Germany as a European competitor was destroyed by occupation and post-war partition, during which it was still a relatively rich and industrialized portion of both super power camps both relative to the rest of Europe and much of the world.
The vast majority of infrastructure damage in Europe during WW2 was done via land-based artillery, urban fighting, and deliberate sabotage to deny infrastructure to the enemy. Plus occupational plundering of heavy industry, which was a signature of both the Nazi and Soviet occupational forces and centralized economic planning.
This is without addressing that the US was hardly the party that finished the European war, given the roles of not only the British but particularly the Soviet Union.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
There are entire volumes of 'self'-critiques of the problems in American foreign military sales practices that undercut American competitiveness below what it 'could' be. The American arms deal failures tend to be in the form of 'the other party went elsewhere rather than sign a deal' rather than 'the deal fell apart after being signed,' but there's no shortage of Americans placing the blame on the American side for partners making arms deals with countries like China.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
Except of course that there aren't many subcontinentals coming here
There are. 'Many' is a wiggle-word, but there are enough coming that their presence is notable, even if more recent arrivals are just more proximal / visible examples of the broader trend of other migrants coming in and replacing cultural symbols rather than adopting them.
EU institutions and bureaucrats are unironically proud of EU being regulatory superpower, some of them really believe in how they are essential for regulating the whole world.
It's practically dark humor that EU efforts to be a regulatory superpower abroad are fuel to the EU-US divorce, which in turn justifies further strengthening the EU institutions. It may be all according to keikaku to some EU advocates, but I've heard many express incredulity about how various US political leaders might take issues with attempts to fine American companies with great political influence into compliance with European Union political interests.
The sort of default Atlanticism that might view continental political propaganda as unobjectionable but Russian political propaganda as toxic is passing away with the Boomers. The emerging generations filling the bureaucracies are increasingly likely to see it either from a neutral principle lens, in which case either European propaganda is just as bad or Russian propaganda is just as harmless as the other, or through a partisan friend-foe lens. The later case is just as bad in its own way, as it means the European-Russian axis only matters in so much that it provides a stick to beat the opponent with, regardless of from which direction.
Geopolitical alliances crack when one party is seen as the partisan partner of one's own domestic political opponents. Sometimes that crack can be overcome by sufficient time, see the South Korean left's political evolution regarding views on the US following the dictatorship period. But actively pursuing it unprompted is somewhere between feckless, malpractice, or a deliberate tradeoff for shorter-term priorities considered more important.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
Have you ever heard of a major French arms deal that fell through that the French admitted to being the cause of its failure?
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
Also, there are tons of groups that caused very limited friction when they immigrated and it has limited correlation with how "familiar" the group is.
Which, in turn, is sidestepping the point of 'critical mass' and 'displacing local culture with their own.'
The uncanny valley effect applies as much to cultural trappings as human faces. An english-speaker in a city full of english-language signs can feel comfortable, even if there are the occasional oddities of atypical roofings or words. An english-speaker in a city of completely unfamiliar languages may not feel completely at home, but accept it as categorically foreign. It is when the city is in the process of the halfway transition between one or the other, and particularly when moving from the familiar to the alien, that unease rises.
In Sweden, in 1980 7% of the population was foreign-born. In 2000, it was about 11%. In 2020, it is roughly 20%. It is historical circumstance that that later growth was more from sub-continentals than less familiar continentals. Unease and opposition to the foreigner would still be on the rise if it was Russians or French driving that demographic change.
You don't even have to reach into alternate history to find examples of dislike of French or Russian culture following from the French or Russian leaving their borders into others and their new hosts having to deal with it.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
I think most here would be fine with reading slightly worse grammar and spelling along with the certainly that they aren't reading AI stuff.
Tank heaven for that.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
I have heard variations of '[X group] is the worst, and the more people are exposed the more they agree' of just about every variation of [X group] that has been a critical mass growing minority elsewhere.
The process of being distinct and displacing the familiar is itself what is unpleasant and unadmirable to many host nations, regardless of what continent the arrival comes from.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
In the 1950s the United States had quite recently literally destroyed the infrastructure of its major European competitors
...as opposed to the Germans, Russians, British, French, and other Europeans doing so with the second generation-ruining war in a lifetime?
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
Are you making a positive claim that academic evaluations do not, or ought not, incorporate normative expectations of domain relevancy?
No. I am making the claim I actually made. Since you quoted it, I'll spare you the re-citation.
Welcome to the Motte, by the way. I am flattered you made your first comment of this account to engage with me in particular. I look forward to your long and consistent posting record going forward.
This feels like an untenable position; can you point to another equivalent domain of human interaction where such a positive claim would be supported?
The point I did make on it being unreasonable to punish people for a standard not established? Trivially- as should you.
If you want to make any appeal to normative expectations, a bedrock principle of conflict resolution and the application of rules is an odd one to feign ignorance of.
I can't imagine a high school calculus teacher accepting "because my mom told me so" as an acceptable answer in a proof whether or not the syllabus explicitly stipulated mathematical reasoning as a grading requirement. Most people don't begin asking a stranger on the street for directions with an explicit enumeration of acceptable sources of knowledge yet would be unnerved if informed the source came from a dream.
Possibly you cannot imagine it because these are non-equivalent scenarios deliberately framed to be ridiculous. There is a reason you start with a scenario in which there is an objective correct position to have such that a deviation is a failure, just as there is a reason that neither scenario reflects the format of an open-ended position-agnostic assignment that is grading for structure.
Arguing about the biblical implications of a psychological claim does not provide any evidence of the students learning or growth in the field of psychology and consequently does not satisfy the academic integrity requirements of the university.
The later does not follow from the former, particularly when the former rests on false premises.
By its nature, being able to argue about the biblical implications of a psychological claim already demonstrates that the student has learned enough about the psychological claim to link it to a major social / cultural / societal effect influencing the psychology of billions of people. This, in turn, demonstrates growth in the field of psychology, as someone without such growth would not have been able to identify, apply, and discuss the link.
You may dismiss the link, you may deny the link, but growth in understanding in the field of psychology does not depend on your approval of the link.
Students are obligated to read, understand, and agree to the terms in the handbook every year by the way.
Hence why the graduate grader appealed to other factors to justify their arbitrary decision to ignore the rubric they were supposed to grade by. A standard which they agree to apply every time they agree to take on the course and issue it to their students.
I am as familiar with the practice of searching for another excuse to justify the abuse as you. I am also familiar with its limitations towards the misdeeds of the adjudicator.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
Trauma reactions, both health and suppressed, can support this.
Healthy trauma survivors may be changed, but they don't think on it because they're trying to move on and focus on the rest of their lives instead. They can be physically / mentally scarred, but scar tissue isn't something you necessarily pick at.
Suppressed trauma survivors are also changed, and also don't think about it because avoidance is easier than the void in the sense of self/control/understanding. So they bottle it up and do not think about the bottle as much as possible.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
Are we to believe that microcenter retained CCTV footage of every cash register for over a year?
...were you under the impression that they didn't?
The cost of CCTV footage is in installing the CCTV, not in retaining the footage. Once you actually have any sort of retention system, the marginal costs are pretty cheap, and can be compelled by regulation.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
It's somewhat common-sense within the profession and I'm not sure I could even find an explicit statement of it in an academic text.
Then the profession's common-sense may far less imbued with beneficent academic rigor than commonly perceived, and so be less deserving of public trust and deference. The social sciences do struggle with this, and deservedly so with the replication crisis of the things that do find their ways into academic texts.
On the other hand, I could find explicit statements in academic texts of how arbitrary and even retroactive application of rules is unjust in an ethical sense and bad policy from a professional sense. I could also find academic texts of how professional gain public trust and deference from being self-regulating, and how efforts to circle the wagons around a colleague who abuses their position from within the profession loses that public trust and deference that separates a profession from a mere line of work.
If you disagree then I would rather hear your counterargument, affirmatively stated, instead of continued needling.
I already have, and you continue to evade and excuse rather than address: it is unreasonable to punish people according to a standard which is not established.
If you will not stand by or take the time to defend the opposite from first principles, or even second, why should others give you yet another argument to to pick at tertiary principles? The first were already more than enough to cause you to flee both the motte and the bailey.
It is true that institutions fail students and play "culture warrior" at times, but I suppose I would have rather Fulnecky started by going to her school instead of immediately escalating. For every controversy we hear about, there are many more cases that go successfully resolved.
That you would prefer the victim to play by the preferred rules of the abuser is clear, but not a compelling reason to defer to. Particularly when you started your OP with rather unsubtle contempt for the victim in question, and used it to make an outgroup swipe for a lack of deference you've avoided every challenge to justify deserving it.
That you are attempting to smuggle in an appeal to an unfalsifiable majority is of no consequence. I could just as easily say 'for every case that goes successfully resolved, there are even more that go unsuccessfully resolved where the abuse stands.' You might challenge it, and I might raise the decline of conservatives in academia over time and the admissions of ideological discrimination as supporting evidence, but it would remain just as fallacious an appeal.
Especially because the instructor is an untenured grad student, it is reasonable that the school could've sided with Fulnecky. Graduate students are not gods in academia the way tenured profs are.
And they are not gods because when they try to play as such by imposing their own personal politics in lieu of objective standards, they find they can be crucified in the court of public and political opinion and not be the beneficiaries of higher intervention.
It is a salutary lesson for untenured grad students everywhere, and more likely need to learn it if they are to overcome the institutional rot and collapse of professional reputation their tenured professors have cultivated for them to inherit.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
Unfortunately, I don't have the bandwidth or time to argue in the didactic, premise-driven way you'd like me to.
Unreasonable and arbitrary standards are usually trotted out for convenience, true.
Let's use the "reasonable person" standard here. Do you think the final paragraph of the essay is reasonably in accordance with the standards of writing in undergraduate academic psychology? My answer is no. If you share your thoughts on that paragraph, perhaps we can inch closer to a shared vocabulary here.
Sure. My answer is 'you have not provided an established standard by which it is not in accordance.' It is also exceedingly unreasonable to use a position of authority to formally punish people for something that is not against the rules. The actual material of the paragraph is immaterial- if it is not forbidden, it is unreasonable to punish it as if it were forbidden.
I think going to the institutional office would be effective in getting the grade changed, or at least bring more clarity and consistency, yes.
Why should you think that, given the plethora of examples of the American culture war in universities including open discrimination by institutional offices against red-tribe-coded faculty and students?
I suppose I have trust in that sort of thing.
Should neutral observers believe your trust in that sort of thing is warranted or indicative of good judgement, given the last decades of American culture war observations and admissions in American academia?
It would be corrective to the extent that the graduate student would be more responsible going forward and likely illustrate to Fulnecky where her writing could improve.
Why do you believe the graduate student would be more responsible going forward under a course of action with a long and contemporary history of American academic institutions discriminating in favor of the graduate student's preferences and practices?
To try and address as many of your pointed rhetorical questions as possible in one fell swoop,
They were not rhetorical. Sharp, yes, but not rhetorical. Your answers, please, because your comments below avoided rather than answered them.
my view is that Fulnecky should have known better than to submit an assignment with this sort of argumentation, especially as a junior.
By what standard?
This is not a rhetorical question- this is a crux of the issue. If there is no agreed upon or mutually acceptable standard by which Fulnecky should be judged, there is no reason to not dismiss or act against those who would try to impose one at the expense of her or others who might find themselves at odds with it. There is no scissor statement involved with opposing a who-whom abuse, nor
The methods used in the field of academic psychology are specific and any deviation from them, especially a major one like this, requires some justification.
Again, by what standard?
You have not made the argument that her methods would self-evidently fail in the field, let alone by the standards of the course work. You have assumed a conclusion without justifying it, and used that to blame a victim by no clear standard.
Learning to work in a field involves learning to speak its language, to participate in the academic community. Perhaps other professors have let it slide but I do not fault this instructor for not doing so.
For a third time- by what standard?
Whether you do not fault the graduate student may only an indication of your inclination to side with politically favorable punishments along a who-whom axis. A way to demonstrate against that is a consistent standard, and to not arbitrarily punish people for violating the standards you wish were established but do not violate standards that are established.
For someone to break a rule, there must actually be a rule.
The rubric, especially for such a small potatoes assignment like this, need not state every single possibility nor are there really objective criteria.
It does and there are, or else it is not a rubric nor a reason to detract points.
Plenty of professors give out zeroes for less,
Please identify the plenty of professors at the university in question who do. American universities are notorious for their grade inflation, not their grade negation.
and my quickly jotted belief that she deserves "some points" is just because I hate to see any student get a zero for an assignment they at least submitted. They hurt. But that doesn't mean a 0 wasn't deserved.
It absolutely does, unless there is a standard by which a 0 would have been deserved.
I am speaking of this event as suspicious because there are ways it could have been handled other than immediately rushing to a political advocacy group.
Would they have been as effective, timely, and as deterring against future political prejudice as going to a political advocacy group who could be trusted to not bury it?
Most universities have mechanisms for reporting or investigating grading issues. I find it questionable that Fulnecky didn't, say, send an email, offer to discuss it in office hours, or speak to the U of O's office of institutional standards, or whatever they call it there.
Is there a non-motivated reason to believe that is a good question to have?
By your own account, Fulnecky was subject to an arbitrary retaliation by the official representative of that institution, who in turn felt confident enough in her position to do so and provide a publicly-releasable justification. That institution in turn would have many incentives to try to downplay, hide, and otherwise minimize any public awareness of the incident, as demonstrated by many other downplays/dismissals/etc. over the last quarter century.
It may well be in an abuser's interest to have the institution they are a part of investigate itself, and even in the interest of those more sympathetic of the abuser than the abused, but there is no obligation of a target of abuse to put the abuser's interests above their own.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
It's yesterday's news at this point, but the recent University of Oklahoma essay controversy has continued to fester in my brain for the sheer incongruence of reactions. In case you haven't heard, Samantha Fulnecky, a junior studying Psychology, received a 0 for submitting an essay whose central argument was essentially a blunt appeal to Biblical inerrancy. While I find this a suspect choice in even most religious studies courses, the assignment tasked her with reviewing a journal article about the effects of social pressures on adolescent gender presentation and identification - hardly something the Bible addresses directly. In response, the graduate student instructor, who is trans, gave her a zero. Fulnecky, in her (apparent) indignance, complained to the local chapter of TPUSA that this is an act of religious discrimination, and sparks flew. And they've kept flying. Fulnecky received an honorary award from the Oklahoma state Congress and has been speaking about her situation on Fox News. The university has sided with Fulnecky, placing the instructor on indefinite administrative leave until...the situation blows over? It's unclear how much "investigation" this really requires, but it is clear that Fulnecky has won the battle.
Was the grading rubric's scoring criteria such that biblical inerrancy merited a 0? If so, why have you not provided that? If not, what is the confusion?
It's a rather standard practice in teaching environments that scores are generally a cumulation of different aspects. Are you unfamiliar with it?
This is not a case where a student submitted a carefully argued theological analysis, but instead appealed to the most straightforward of scriptural arguments and didn't even cite the verses in question!
And? What about this merits a 0% according to the assignment rubric?
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.
Why not?
Why is this not consistent with a punitive, discriminatory intent by someone who would have reason to believe their response would be posted on social media, and thus might want to coach their response to garner sympathy/support/credulity from people like yourself?
I think Fulnecky deserved some points, but not many.
Why not by what grading rubric?
She lacks one of the most foundational skills a college-level writer needs: adapting your ideas to your audience.
Who is her audience supposed to be?
If her audience is supposed to be the sort of graduate student who would assign a 0 over personal offense, then this indeed might be a failure on her part. On the other hand, if her graduate student grader was not supposed to be that sort of graduate student, then it was the graduate student who failed her.
I don't blame the gymnasts - this case has been elevated to levels that are suspiciously unjustified, in my view.
What, in your view, is suspiciously unjustified about this, as opposed to straightforwardly unjustified? Is your opinion that the state legislature should at least have taken a few more days / weeks to take notice, absent some sort of duplicitous informing of the media? Would a more honest or sincere media have buried the story?
But is that really all it takes?
Petty tyrants being exposed and taken down has been a popular format for millennia. What more is required?
Read the essay and let me know what you think. I don't want to be mistaken for consensus-building here, and I would welcome any and all steelmans for the pro-Fulnecky position. Maybe I've been cut by yet another scissor statement (in this case, essay).
Well, you've provided no objective grounds by which she objectively deserved a 0, but you seem to be taking offense that there's pushback. I don't see why there's any need for a steelman for the pro-Fulnecky position, when the position that seems far less justified is the anti-Fulnecky stance.
This is further evidence to me that red-tribers have completely abandoned most institutes of higher education.
A woman voluntarily in an institution of higher learning is apparently arbitrarily and excessively punished for her dissent in a fashion you have taken greater offense to the objection of than to the punishment itself... and you take this case as evidence that red-tribers have 'abandoned' higher education?
All this to say: I think universities are really going to have it rough under this administration. They've already been sued to hell and back. If the red tribe couldn't turn the university system around by playing nice, they're going to do it by force - social, legal, or otherwise.
As well they should, since they are a considerable part of the population base paying a considerable part of the expense. Any institution that depends on consistent taxpayer support in social, legal, and other forms is well advised to self-regulate itself to maintain that support, and not to antagonize large parts of the electorate to the degree that they withdraw or even invert those critical factors against the institution.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
It's no more bizare a cope than the idea that refinery repairs are a trifling expense in the midst of a war that was draining reserves even before primary income sources started going boom, or that progressively smaller relative material advantages negate manpower limits.
Ha, feudian slip.
One of those was deliberate. ;-)
More options
Context Copy link