professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
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User ID: 1157
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
1d ago
the Sokal or Sokal Squared hoaxes are good things, of which I am one
It's one of those weird things about left vs right and the modern social media landscape, but I continue to think there's an important difference in showing that academic publishing is useless versus demonstrating the low (but not zero) standards of a Tiktok outrage-merchant.
also that the overwhelmingly negative reaction he received was very clearly both tribal, unreasonable and unnecessary
He took The Motte's offense particularly hard for obvious reasons, but the reaction of Blocked and Reported's subreddit was not much better from the "don't make yourself the story" angle and considerably less tribal IMO.
He learned an important lesson a hard way, and is at least as good faith as any other "personality" these days, and more so than many.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
1d ago
simple reason that they were carried out against minority groups
Petty nitpick, curious if there's other reporting that suggests it was targeted for some reason: North Carolina shooter was motivated against a minority group (in a schizo way) but carried out the attack against what was, afaict, a generic normie waterfront bar. Newsweek quotes the police saying it was targeted but that just seems to be the kind of thing they say in almost every case.
When I first heard about it I half expected it was some local that snapped and decided to target tourists and increasing prices.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
2d ago
There is no background check which can 100% assure you that someone is not abusive, or not a North Korean spy.
I don't expect 100% of background checks to be 100% perfect.
The guy in question has held at least 4 different jobs in four different districts (three different states plus DC). All four either didn't do a background or the background failed? Dude's got pretty good luck or the background check system school districts use is a farce.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
2d ago
Yeah I considered adding that in as the closest example that doesn't quite fit.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
2d ago
Then we should go back to calling each other hideous hermaphroditical characters
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
5d ago
Hate speech is used as evidence in prosecuting hate crimes, but technically that's just an enhancement charge and I don't really want to fight about this or dig for sources. Statement redacted.
The current standard for where speech stops being lawful is when it is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action.
Hate speech is another exception to lawful speech and doesn't require incitement. technically wrong, mea culpa
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
5d ago
And I've never gotten a good answer on how "imminent" applies: can I promote a planned riot as long as it's more than, say, 12 months from now?
Didn't the Supreme Court rule that Trump's speech on j6 didn't count?
It depends on the judge you get and how many appeals you want to suffer through, but my understanding of the Supreme Court precedent on incitement is something like "My fellow activists, let's go right now to burn down the courthouse!" and then you all go right then to burn down the courthouse. If instead you all go to lunch, and some of the the people you talked to burn it down tomorrow but you didn't repeat your speech before they did, that wasn't incitement.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
5d ago
revoke their honorary degrees
The honorary degree I had in mind was all the way back in... June 2025. The acceptance is strong and there's no movement to disclaim them.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
5d ago
I think the route from one to the other is shorter than you do, and the allowance of calling one's enemies Nazis (or cockroaches) makes it shorter still.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
5d ago
But I don't think anyone is honestly confused about this.
Nazis have replaced the concept of Satan and demons as the "ultimate evil" in secularized Western culture. I do not think this is merely a pedantic issue when it's not merely in accurate in the way of an ambulatory anus, but as an effort to mark one's enemies as not just bad, not just evil, but THE ULTIMATE EVIL beyond any and all redemption.
a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
New flair inspiration, thank you.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
5d ago
I'm not discussing actual communist regimes; I'm discussing American social mores downstream. The reality of who across the sea was worse is strangely uncorrelated.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
5d ago
They don't think an honest understanding of their beliefs or speech could have led someone to do what he did.
Did this person spend 2020 in a coma and blissfully unaware?
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
5d ago
they still get honorary degrees from one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the world.
It was June 2025. And the fact California has been a joke state with a fake justice system for 60 years is the reason she didn't spend 50 years rotting in jail instead of being feted as some sort of heroic philosopher.
But I should've been more explicit that I'm using the most famous examples as a sort of synecdoche for the larger associative problem. Too many liberals treat leftists as somewhere between misguided but admirably enthusiastic, and actually laudable. "No enemies to the left" was the wrong lesson to learn from the Civil Rights movement but it's the one that seems to have stuck out the long run. The right does not do this, the right should not do this in my opinion, but it's at the root of the problem Netstack is asking about- a particular kind of rot goes very deep.
So, when someone asks how does the left make a display of sincerity that they're really, really not associated with the psychos? I dunno, because history shows they're really fond of a subset of the psychos.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
5d ago
The voters who swung hardest against Biden in 2024 were working class non-white voters - roughly the group who were most likely to see their incomes keep up with Bidenflation.
Reaction to inflation is less "a carton of eggs continues to be 0.1% of the monthly food budget tacked to X% of the total budget tacked to my current income, and so the increase in price is irrelevant to my increased income" and more "holy shit eggs $10 a carton and not $2.50." Much of that was bird flu culling, not inflation, so prices have come back down... but some of it was inflation, so they're still higher than a lot of people locked onto as "the reasonable price of eggs." And since the culling was happening at the same time as the inflation, it gets conflated in the brain for a lot of people.
Orange juice shrinkflation annoys me more, though, and I would suspect that plays a role too. "I'm visibly getting less for my money" is more instinctive than a budget calculation.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
5d ago
Stacey Abrams, might've been even worse than Kamala. According to wikipedia Val Demings was one of the alternatives, but didn't get picked; maybe due to Kamala's higher name recognition from her failed primary run?
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
6d ago
"The left" has quite clearly thought of them as The Good People for a long time. Doing things the right doesn't is a big part of that.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
6d ago
antifa
What exactly is the redeeming value in not coming down on antifa like a pile of bricks? Like, fine, "antifa's just an idea" and all that nonsense, but Rose City Antifa, anybody that showed up like a jackbooted thug wearing all black and started violence at any number of locations over the last several years.
They volunteered for violence, they put themselves out there. Why exactly do you need to care more about their wellbeing than they clearly do? Why not give Antifa up as the sacrificial goat they so clearly want to be?
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
6d ago
the same enthusiasm
Half? A quarter? For the sake of ten normal people? How low do we have to go, here?
What constitutes a “serious attempt to resolve” this situation?
Ever see the movie Fail Safe? The book is good too but then you don't get the recommended dose of Walter Matthau. If you haven't...
One massive tragedy is traded for another to prevent an even bigger conflict. The negotiations are direct, between high-ranking individuals; the consequences immediate. How do you make such a trade when you're talking about distributed social phenomena across classes, across government and private sector and in-between, across generations?
You’ll rightly protest that you never had any control over the kind of person who would snap like that.
Decades ago, some terrorists and murderers did as terrorists and murderers do. They spent a little time in jail, then they got professorships, they got sinecures, they mentored a future president, they still get honorary degrees from one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the world. No right wing terrorist or murderer has gotten a sinecure. Not one of them is lauded by polite society or treated as anything less than what they are.
You may want to say "but that's only two... or three... or anyways, it's not that many people!" But that's kind of beside the point; not that many versus zero is an infinite ratio. "The left" may be big and diverse, but some portion of that big diverse tent is far more vertically integrated than the right. To be clear, I don't want the right to start rewarding terrorists! I don't want the right to be better at protecting its scum. But the problem of "the left" treating their terrorists somewhere between tolerable and laudable instead of scum worthy of, at best, a life rotted away in prison, has existed a long time. On the somewhat less evil end of the bias problem: if you riot on the left, you get kid gloves; if you riot on the right, you get the book thrown at you (to be fair: unless your guy wins and you get a pardon).
I don't know what it looks like to undo that. I don't know how the leadership of today undoes terrible decisions and stupid social trends started 60 years ago or more.
Would jailing Angela Davis for her golden years make a difference? Unfair in some ways, a costly signal in some ways, but would it matter? Denouncing and cancelling Destiny in some bizarre post-modern Sister Soulja moment? It's something, I guess.
I don't know, man. I don't want to take another step towards The Troubles. All I know is that boilerplate denouncements aren't enough, and no one seems to be trying anything else.
Edit:
Maybe some time in the stockades
Tell you what, let's put Biden out and throw some tomatoes at him, January 21 2029 we'll do the same with Trump, everybody has a good laugh and we have a Political Jubilee Year.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
6d ago
Or Bill Clinton.
Really I just think it's funny that this crazy letter to the editor from 1996 is even digitized to find.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
6d ago
I'd make the trade, if this means people that had a che shirt or hammer and sickle poster in college are treated the same as if they'd had a swastika poster- that is, completely excluded from polite society.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
6d ago
then it must remain appropriate for non-violent pro-immigration extremists to refer to ICE agents as Nazis.
No, because the Nazis were a real and defined party, of which there are approximately zero surviving members. Referring to them that way is way more biased and way more loaded.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
6d ago
56% of "very liberal" and 73% of liberal respondents say it is "always or usually unacceptable" for a person to be happy about the death of a public figure they oppose
90% and 91% for very conservative and conservative, respectively. Likewise,
55% and 68% say that "violence is never justified" "in order to achieve political goals".
88% and 83%.
You can quibble about the 50/50 comment, but man, I'd be bothered at just how much more acceptable being a ghoul and being a terrorist is among liberals; even if it's still less than half, it's twice as common as among conservatives.
No, but I have used Google Translate as part of an effort to help an elderly Chinese man communicate with a somewhat belligerent and unpleasant customer in his shop, and I have rarely appreciated the magic more.
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