quiet_NaN
1d ago
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.
If your religion says that you can drive at any speed on any road, and you write that down in your driving test, you will fail your driving test. That is the only way to run a society without a state church.
Now, from what I have seen, the question for the essay was about gender roles and not about the existence of non-binaries, which is what she spent most of her argument on. A failing grade is such well deserved.
Is it plausible that she got a zero for picking her beliefs most likely to offend her prof instead of going on some other mostly unrelated tangent instead? Sure, and yes, that would be unfair.
I am also not sure how discrimination law works, exactly. Surely not everything downstream from a religious belief must be ignored. If I go to a job interview stark naked and predictably do not get hired, can I turn around and successfully sue them if nakedness is required by my religion?
My gut feeling as a godless European is that there is a difference between being directly discriminated against based on your religion and being indirectly discriminated against because of behaviors required by your religion which break popular social norms or laws.
So a prof who decided that no Christian students would pass their class would be discriminating based on religion, while one who simply decided to give zero points to any essays which argued for gender essentialism without citing scientific sources would not.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
A grade of zero should really only ever be given as punishment for cheating, plaigarism or not handing anything in.
This depends a lot on the prof in question, and also on the range. 0 out of 5 is very different from 0 out of 100. (It seems it was zero out of 25, which indeed seems a bit harsh.)
Rejecting the premise of the question is a perfectly legitimate way to answer an essay question.
It depends. Let's leave aside the fact that the topic of her essay is obviously culture war ground zero (and if the Christians and the Grievance Studies people end up wiping each other from public universities, I could not be happier). If you decide to study a certain subject, you need to engage with its premises a bit. Not necessarily believe they are true in your heart of hearts, but at least make legible arguments with them.
If you are a young earth creationist studying geology, and you refuse to date any rock to older than 4000 BC, you will fail.
If you are studying medieval French poetry, and are of the perfectly legal opinion that French is just strange monkey noises which do not convey any deeper meaning, you will fail.
If you are studying mathematics and believe that every axiomatic system is self-contradictory, and use this belief in your 'proofs', you will fail (with zero out of 100, no less).
If you are studying Catholic theology and not only are an atheist, but also believe that nothing which Augustine wrote could possibly be worth knowing, you will fail. (A lesser form of this is why I would not make a good theology student.)
None of these beliefs prevent you from completing your subject per se. A geology student who rephrases the question as "What does Satan want me to believe about the age of this rock?" can still ace his test. A mathematician can privately be a fan of falso while also being willing to construct proofs under lesser axiomatic systems. If I had sufficient incentive, I could probably learn enough doctrine to pass a theology class.
From the AP link:
Students were asked to write a 650-word response to an academic study that examined whether conformity with gender norms was associated with popularity or bullying among middle school students.
IMHO, the fact that there are people who conform more or less to gender norms is certainly one of the less controversial ones as far as gender study findings go. You do not have to pay lip service to gender nonbinary to engage with this question. (Also, I have the suspicion that most Christians would not consider each and every gender norm to be good. I mean, Andrew Tate and Stoya are both beyond the 99th percentile of fulfilling some gender norms, and it seems most Christian parents would prefer their middle-school kids to behave androgynously rather than emulating them.)
So without looking up the 'study' and the exact phrasing of the question, this looks more like, "geology student was asked to describe coastal erosion, gets on a weird tangent about the earth is 6000 years old for most of her essay while failing to mention water."
quiet_NaN
1d ago
For competitive spectacles like chess, I think there is always a niche to see humans compete. People watch competitive swimming even though the median shark would swim circles around the fastest humans.
But acting is non-competitive, typically. Animated movies are a thing. Many popular franchises invest heavily in CGI, which is completely orthogonal to human acting ability.
That being said, actor name recognition might be a huge draw for a part of the audience. Some people will have crushes on hot actresses and actors and watch all their movies out of general principle, and follow their life off-screen. Even if AI can act, it can not match the real thing in scandals and messy divorces.
But the obvious solution here is for real people to license their name, image and likeness to AI movies, then spend their fortunes on scandalous pursuits as customary. After all, audiences are fine with watching their favorite actors faking death scenes and their favorite porn stars faking orgasms, so this would be just more of the same.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
For a company wanting to increase shareholder value, that is not the relevant metric. The relevant metric is how much money their respective audiences generate for TikTok or Netflix.
My gut feeling is that short video platforms relying on content creators have very little in the way of a moat. Nothing is stopping people from uploading their videos on multiple platforms, and if a company tries to squeeze their viewers too hard through obtrusive ads or payment requirements, they can switch to another platform with little hassle.
By contrast, video platforms like Netflix which offer their own content have a moat. If you wanted to watch Game of Thrones and were unable or unwilling to infringe copyright, then you had to pay for HBO. The alternative is to decide that you are not into your favorite series and watch another series with another streaming provider (or watch TikToks or read a book). This gives the companies which own their content's copyright a lot more leeway to squeeze their customers.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Mind you, the rule by fear that is implied by deterrence/the government monopoly on violence is usually exempted from the definition of terrorism unless you are a particular brand of anarchist
When the government does it (above a certain threshold, which is likely very low for anarchists), we call it terror (or crimes against humanity, sometimes), not terrorism.
Of course, there are a lot of special cases, such as government A sponsoring terrorists or freedom fighters in country B, as has happened with bin Laden in multiple stages of careers.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Apparently, the FBI have opened an investigation into the video made by military and intelligence officials, presumably to see if it reaches the benchmark of 'sedition'.
What update am I to make from that? If Trump tweeted that Harris was BBQing babies, I am sure his lapdogs at the FBI would dutifully waste taxpayer money to investigate her for child murder and cannibalism, not release a press statement "this is absurd, we are not looking into that."
quiet_NaN
5d ago
We do not have to accept moral lectures from the same politicians behind Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc.
If it is any consolation, I was against these invasions/interventions as well. Obama wisely got the Nobel before he started his campaign of drone strikes against weddings. (The main difference being that the logistics of capturing someone in rural Afghanistan might be slightly more difficult than capturing a small boat in the middle of the ocean. But international humanitarian law should be followed even if it is not convenient.)
The purpose of a military is to kill people.
Respectfully, I disagree. The purpose of a hitman or an SS-Totenkopfverband is to kill people.
The purpose of a military is to achieve military objectives. Frequently, this involves blowing stuff up, which incidentally also tends to kill bystanders. Sometimes, it involves incapacitating enemy soldiers, and the best ways to do so often involves killing them.
Now, I am personally sympathetic to Tucholsky's claim ("soldiers are murderers"), but I reject your framing that this is all there is to the military. I see them more like Walter White, someone willing to murder when their goals demand it, and less like cultists of Bhaal or Khorne, who murder for the pure joy of it.
I am skeptical that honor has ever been a dominant force on the battlefield, but I believe that it is something which can slightly lessen the horrors of war. If you have your soldiers kill helpless combatants, that will affect the self-understanding of your troop.
If your belief is that Trump is lying about who was killed, you should just say that. Because a passing knowledge about American satellite tech reveals that we have an extremely good idea of who we’re targeting and the risk that these drug smugglers are actually innocent fish peddlers is on the same order of magnitude as discovering we lost the moon.
This is a fully general argument against due process. After all, with the data the NSA has on US citizens, we could just trust them to designate bad people and have the cops shoot them.
I think that in response to Trump blowing up boats, other countries have decided not to share their intel on drug smuggling any more. I do not believe that the US has the tech to identify drugs on boats from satellites.
Now, it could be that the US has ground assets to reliably identify all drug-smuggling boats, but it could also not be the case. My mental model of Trump says that he is unlikely to accept "Sir, we have no positive ID on any drug smugglers at the moment". In such a situation, it would be in the self-interest of the commander to identify the most suspicious boat and destroy it. After all, nobody will go through the wreckage and find out what amount of drugs they were carrying. If you say you had ironclad evidence that they were carrying drugs, who could prove you wrong? Probably some Latinos (and the left) will cry about how you murdered innocents, but realistically that would happen in either case.
This is, of course, why we need due process: not because the government will never have ironclad evidence for its violence, but because we can not trust them to tell the truth about their evidence.
But then again we should not worry, because you estimate the probability that a commander acting on less-than-perfect evidence would target an innocent boat as similar to that of losing the Moon (which is p<1e-10, conservatively).
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I think that originally, narco-terrorist referred to people who made a fortune dealing narcotics and then started using violence for political ends, e.g. in Columbia.
This is basically not a thing in the US. Any drug lord with two brain cells knows better than to pursue political goals by blowing up people on US soil. None of them want the Bin Laden treatment, after all.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Claim: ‘The View’s Whoopi Goldberg Makes Up a Song to Slam Trump for Building White House Ballroom
Publication: ABC News
Reporter: Whoopi Goldberg
Category: Left-wing lunacy
Unfortunately, there is no further information. One would think that the point of a fact-checking website is to provide evidence. This seems to be the article.
Now, the claim was not made by ABC News/Goldberg, and seems factually correct. But don't let this legal trickery get into the way of our narrative. The Trump administration is clearly persecuted by the left-wing mainstream media in a way which is at least twice as bad as what the Nazis did to the Jews.
Claim: Teen allegedly killed by soccer coach died of acute alcohol poisoning, family’s attorney says
Category: Bias, Omission of context
The only part which mentions the Trump administration is this:
[Suspected child-murderer] Garcia Aquino is an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, multiple law enforcement sources told The Times in April. The sources were not authorized to speak publicly about the case. About two months before President Trump launched widespread raids targeting immigrant communities in Los Angeles, the Department of Homeland Security posted on social media about the alleged crime, describing Garcia Aquino as a “depraved illegal alien who should have never been in this country.”
(my emphasis)
Really, the perfidy of the woke left knows no bounds. Here we have a perfect feel-good story about a murdery rapey illegal from El Salvador, and they have to ruin it by calling him "undocumented" and claiming that ICE raids targeted immigrant communities.
On the other hand, this whole website was probably created by an intern with Grok in half an hour.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Even if president Newsom (or whomever) will have such ambitions, I think the SCOTUS will not like him banning the Republicans, and the army will likely not obey his orders to occupy the SCOTUS.
Also, given the context, I think the Nuremberg trials were rather fair. Some Nazis were actually acquitted, and a few more only received prison sentences (and were quickly released once the 'newly democratized' Germans took over).
If the Democrats released a statement to the effect that they considered the attacks on suspect civilians which the US navy had just shipwrecked by missile strike a war crime, and were going to send the whole chain of command to the Hague (e.g. the spiritual successor to the Nuremberg trials) to answer for it, I would actually applaud that. (Sadly, this is not going to happen, because a military which will follow the orders of the president without hesitation is useful to whomever is the president.)
There's not even a need to have a dictatorship - DSA, Communists and Democrats can duke it out while successfully excluding anybody to the right, see California for example.
Most successful Democratic politicians are not terminally stupid. Unlike the (mostly newcomer) MAGA crowd, they have long thrived under the present political system. Anyone who has heard of the French and Russian revolutions knows that it is impossible to coordinate around "let us use violence (or other dirty tricks) to get rid of the outgroup, but then forsake dirty tricks and play fair among ourselves". If moderate Democrats (think Hillary) coordinate with DSA and commies to get rid of the Republicans, the next act in the play will inevitably be SJ Democrats and the far left coordinating to get rid of the moderates. Russia and the USSR are/were in fact one-party systems where elections do little to influence policy. The skillset to thrive in such a system is likely very different from the skillset required to win primaries.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Here is my heuristic: if Trump is promising the American people the Moon, he can safely be ignored. (Excepting Ghislaine Maxwell, whose quality of life he really did improve substantially.) If he promises to attack his enemies, then he can be expected to at least make a good faith effort to do so, consequences be damned.
How well the latter will work depends a lot on the specifics. His progress on defeating free trade is rather impressive (though I think there is still a court decision pending if he had the authority to enact tariffs on that scale). Directing his AG to attack his enemies has mostly been meh, because he does not do a good job of convincing the courts. Getting rid of illegals and/or Hispanics is something where he is actually making progress due to his willingness to spend a ton of taxpayer money to have his goons deport school girls. Sending the national guard to cities to punish them for voting against him is more meh, for the most part he is making the liberals mildly uncomfortable.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Pardons are, for better or worse, a topic in the realm of criminal procedure in that they decide if someone will go to prison or not. I think it is reasonable that the standard for forged pardons applied is the same as for other criminal evidence.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I will note that some people (e.g. Eliezer) predict that ASI will indeed drastically reduce socioeconomic inequality between humans. Just not in a good way.
In case alignment is as simple as the billionaires believe, I guess that the median AI billionaire will probably be willing to yield half a steradian of the light cone to the rest of us, which would still imply an enormous quality of life increase over our present state.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
The lack of smart phones is only the tip of the iceberg of what makes the 1950s dreadful. There is a lot more tech which has made live more bearable since these days. Medicine is a big one, dying of something which we could cure in 2025 will severely impact your QoL. Social techs are another, unless his daughter wants to be a tradwife, I think it highly unlikely that raised on SJP (like everyone is, to some degree), she will appreciate the roles which 1959 can offer to her. For me personally, even the idea of going back to an age where indoor smoking in public buildings was normal would be a hard no. The ability to own property in a somewhat desirable location without being a millionaire would be nice, though.
Unlike in South Park, there is no immigration to the past or future or exchange of goods with other times in the real world. Inflation is typically tied to a basket of reference consumer goods, and there is certainly some leeway in what you consider equivalent.
On reflection, I think that the utility of having 12.5$ in 1959 is dwarfed by the requirement of having to live in that time. Another consideration would be to simply ask "would you rather have invested 12.5k$ in 1959 or 100k$ in 2025?" That one is not even worth debating, because the stock market has increased 60fold since then.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Are there any cases where this has been established beyond reasonable doubt?
I would consider even a short verbal exchange ("Mr President, we have another ten pardons ... " -- "Just sign the damn things!") to be sufficient that the president had granted approval.
So the only cases where the non-involvement of the president could be established beyond reasonable doubt would be either with a staffer confessing or them bragging in writing about being able to bypass Biden.
Given Trump's history of outrageous claims on little to no evidence going back to Birtherism, I would be very surprised if he had any evidence which would convince a jury, rather than just blabbering.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Here are some things which Democrats could do to escalate maximally once they have the presidency:
- Have spooks murder anyone associated with the Trump administration.
- Establish a dictatorship, outlaw the Republican party, sending any Republicans to gitmo.
- Bomb neighborhoods which voted overwhelmingly for MAGA.
- Deprive white unmarried men of the franchise.
This is just from two minutes brainstorming, there is likely more.
My best guess is that the Democrats will do none of the above, and the things which they will do will generally be less escalating than the stuff on this list. Sure, they will go through any pardon given to Trump's allies and read the fine print, searching for any offenses which are not covered by the pardon. And they will certainly overturn many of Trump's EOs, just as Trump is overturning many of Biden's EOs.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
There is a vast gulf between executive orders and pardons.
With EOs, he can just sign another EO declaring the first one void. Just tweeting about it is not enough, though.
My guess is that at least half of the EOs are probably non-partisan stuff which most presidents would generally want to keep, and just getting rid of all of them will be unpopular, but if each president was willing to have their staff go through all the current EOs and evaluate them, that would sound beneficial.
Pardons can not be reverted, it would defeat their whole point. Now, if a criminal had personally conspired with White House staff to get a pardon without the president noticing, forging his signature etc, then my guess is that the courts would indeed declare such a pardon void.
But in any cases where the beneficiary of the pardon did not obviously illegally conspire on his own behalf, I think it would be generally beneficial to let the pardon stand, rather than creating a situation where pardons no longer offer legal certainty.
Also, Biden's broadest pardon scandalously benefits Hunter Biden. The persons inside the WH who had any interest in pardoning Hunter are Biden and his wife, not anonymous staff who were running his administration.
Finally, Trump is a master of wielding pardons as a political tool. One might be excused to think that he would have the sense to avoid establishing any precendent where pardons are declared null and void.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Is Trump, strictly speaking, in the chain of causality which caused the national guards to be shot? Without a doubt.
Does this mean that he is legally or morally responsible? Hell no.
Personally, I am of the opinion that his deployment of the national guard is a waste of taxpayer money. But I do not generally want politicians to make decisions based on how some crazies might react, because that would yield a lot of power to the crazies.
Some crazies see gay night clubs as a provocation which drives them to murder. Others are similarly enraged by national guard deployments. Luckily, the crazies are few and far between, so the optimal strategy is to bury the dead and not yield an inch policy-wise.
Now, if he had ordered the national guard to parachute over Kabul, or if a troop of national guardsmen had opened fire on civilians in DC, then I would lay the dead at Trump's feet, because causalities in battle deployments and excessive force are both outcomes which I want politicians to consider (which does not mean that their risk is never worth it, obviously).
quiet_NaN
10d ago
Even steelmanning your argument though, why would we grant citizenship to someone willing to sell out their country to an invading power for a paycheck?
So your claim is that the Taliban regime ca. 2004 was the obvious Schelling point for Afghans interested in the long-term thriving of their country, and those who did not support the Taliban were clearly defecting from the common good of the country?
Personally, I think the loyalty of a population is earned, not given. Citizens of the US or modern Germany should display some loyalty to their government because it represents an equilibrium which has a higher utility than any other equilibrium they are likely to establish working against the government.
By contrast, less optimal regimes do not deserve loyalty. In 1945, Hitler was just the mobster in power, Stauffenberg blowing him up would not have let to a lower utility equilibrium, hence it was not treason to try to do so. Nor were the exile Germans who aided the Allies betraying Germany, because even with the Soviets, Ally-occupied Germany was a far better place for the Germans to thrive than Nazi Germany.
The real world is not Civilization where governments change but annexation is forever.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
That's why the combined power of the US bloc lost to semi-literate goat-herders, the people we were allied with were in many respects worse than the Taliban and commanded less legitimacy among the population.
This sounds like a cope. I am certain that allying with child-fucking warlords did not help win the hearts and minds of the Afghan population, but I also think that the eventual outcome was overdetermined the minute W invaded. Even if the US had made a point of murdering every alleged boy-fucker on the spot, the fact remains that few Afghans preferred freedom and democracy to the point where they were willing to die for it, while plenty were willing to die for the Taliban cause.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Potato, potato. As Bierce observes,
There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another
I will grant you that killing in self-defense is meaningfully different from murder.
I might even grant you that there is sometimes a difference between killing out of murderism and accepting killing someone as an acceptable side effect in pursuit of another goal.
But I have read enough Tucholsky to reject the premise that murder dressed in uniform ceases to be murder.
If the US navy is shooting boats of suspected drug smugglers in international waters near Venezuela, arguing about the difference of that and what is generally understood to be murder is splitting hairs.
Directionally, what Obama did to Bin Laden seems to be mostly the same thing, at least based on my priors. Could be that he forced the hands of the US troops when they were trying to take him into custody, and could be that he was on the verge of giving the order for 9/11 2.0, which is why they had to storm his compound right away, but likely the US just decided that it would not bother with a trial.
Again, least upsetting murder committed by the US ever, though.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
That you hate Jay Jones and hope someone shoots him? Well, you can say you hate him, but no, you can't openly wish death on him.
To nitpick, I have stated the sentiment that I would celebrate if a public figure died of natural causes and not gotten a warning for it.
While neither is a nice sentiment, I think there is a clear distinction between the wishing for someone to die and wishing for them to get murdered. One is poor taste and possibly makes me a terrible human being, but the other is calling for or condoning violence, which has a corrosive effect on civilization.
To further complicate matters, there are certainly cases where homicides are widely celebrated. The death of Bin Laden has been widely celebrated, for example. (Yes, you can argue that Obama's SEALs were doing their utmost to bring him in alive to stand trial in NY, and he somehow thwarted them by presenting a clear and present danger, so they had to abandon their objective and kill him (so the public would not be celebrating a murder but a killing in self defense), but given the general US policy of drone strikes against individuals suspected of terrorism, I think it much more likely that they fulfilled their objective. -- Personally, I would have liked to see him stand trial, but of all the deaths from W's war on terror, his is certainly in the lowest percentile of upsettingness.)
So empirically, it seems to depend on the victim if a homicide can be praised or not, at which point we are mostly haggling over price.
I am not saying that people should be able to call for the murder of anyone (and I do not think there is a CW topic whose outcome could be improved by murder, actually), I am just stating my opinion that it is hard to make hard and fast rules about these things.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
This is the first thing which makes me, if not exactly sympathetic to Trump, then at least unsympathetic to Comey.
Criminal procedure exists for a reason. There are plenty of jobs in the world where you can do just fine by sometimes taking shortcuts instead of doing everything by the book. Criminal investigations is not one of them. If you find yourself lying to a judge so that they will bless you violating someones constitutional rights, or engaging in parallel construction, then you are the villain. If you can't do your job while keeping within the law, then at least be honest, quit your job, wear a batman mask and beat up suspects in the night, don't pretend to serve the law while breaking it.
Sure, Trump going after you is roughly orthogonal to you having acted in a criminal manner, and this very much does not scale to a systemic solution, but if your allegations are true then I would consider a conviction at least a happy accident, like a bolt of lightning striking a serial killer.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
I think that there is a vast gulf between people voting as representatives and people voting on the base.
Secret elections are obviously better at establishing common knowledge of what the base actually wants.
But for a representative, it is more important that they be accountable to their electorate. If 3/4th of the senate vote for something deeply unpopular, you do not want every senator to be able to tell his voters "no, I totally voted against this. It was all the other lying senators to vote for it."
For important personnel decisions (where there may be a lot of pressure to vote a particular way), the fix would be not to have representatives vote but just let the base vote. In secret, obviously.
Obligatory xkcd. If you want to have a chess match without cheating, place the participants and a referee in a bug-swept, sealed and EM-shielded room, take a video and release it after the match has finished. Then put all three of them into an MRI.
For a cheap, low stakes solution, contract a notary to set up a device prepared by the org holding the competition, and observe the participant during play, and publish it with a three move delay.
This seems to be a lack of imagination on your part.
A move can be described within 12 bits even if the player is barely aware of the rules. For an actually good player who can form a list of likely moves, even an advice of just three bits ("move left rook") per move would likely put them on a superhuman level.
There are a ton of ways to inconspicuously encode that information. Background noises from outside. Low intensity lasers selectively emitting light to where the cheaters eyes are, but not where the cameras are. Good old RC vibrators in bodily cavities.
Nor is it hard to get the game state to the chess engine. If you are broadcasting live, you just grab that. Otherwise, anything in a player's home can be a camera capturing the screen.
Anti-cheat spyware can at best show the lack of any known cheating software solutions. The idea that it could show any compromise by someone who has full hardware access and a freedom to chose whatever components they want is laughable. With a budget of 100k$, the modification of a computer monitor to copy the video stream, extract the chess board and modify pixels to indicate a move seems within reach. If you mandate that the player captures the output of their monitor on camera at twice the monitors resolution, this just means that the player will need to bother to add hardware to the camera to redact clearly defined patterns.
If you can become a successful streamer by playing online chess, then there will always be people for whom a bit of technical sophistication to get an edge is worth it.
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