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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24834 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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Slight correction: You've never seen it before. Some of us have.

Punishment for the lying depends on

  1. The lying being discovered and proven and

  2. Political misalignment between the punisher and the lies

That won't happen here. The lie will be very difficult to discover and prove to the standards necessary, and a friendly administration will almost certainly take over and put a halt to the attempts at punishment.

To the extent it is a problem, (1) is a problem for any scheme of enforcement. (2) is another form of a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.

But you're distracting from the real question, of course. It appears that even the Trump administration is coming around to the idea that it's best to go after specific things, where they are strong, and enforce them broadly, using the hook of federal funding and existing mechanisms. As I suggested months ago. Not indiscriminate chemo for no purpose, no rhyme or reason, just blasting randomly. It's not like blasting randomly is going to solve these concerns you're now bringing up. It's just silly misdirection.

To the extent it is a problem, (1) is a problem for any scheme of enforcement. (2) is another form of a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.

Which is why this method cannot work.

If indeed the Trump administration is "coming around" to the idea that things like having ideologues pro forma swear they aren't doing things according to their ideology rather than the formal rules will help, the administration is screwing up.

this method

is undefined, so one cannot determine how generally scoped your claim is. My comment was very clearly making a scope argument (about your own argument), so this is just non-responsive.

Alternatively, the most natural of the charitable interpretations is that you agree with my scope claim and acknowledge that your own proposal suffers at least the same defects.

Slightly less charitably, you're just doubling down on misdirection and obfuscation. Bad faith argumentation stuff.

"This method" refers to:

Universities could be asked to affirm that admissions and hiring decisions are based on merit rather than racial or ethnic background or other factors, that specific factors are taken into account when considering foreign student applications, and that college costs are not out of line with the value students receive.

My claim is that this will not work. University ideologues will just lie, and it will not be possible to punish them for it.

Oh hey, if only I had an entire comment responding to that, which you seem to not have engaged with.

Don't blame him. I already addressed the "sometimes the government is held by my opponents" problem, and when I said Republicans should do exactly what Democrats have done to harden their policy achievements, and listed specific means and methods they did of achieving this, you deployed tactical ignorance and said I hadn't laid out any plan at all, or even the concepts of a plan.

I spelled out how exactly you were missing anything approaching a plan, specifically for universities.

I mean, I guess there's a sentence about somehow getting settlement money from them to Elon, but not a single sense of what that sort of thing might actually look like. How the mechanics of it could work. I'm not even looking for a complete strategy, but some sort of something that a person can squint at and say, "Ah yes, I can mayyyybe imagine how that might work." Call it, say, "concepts of a plan".

Indeed, you did not have that. You literally had:

Let Trump's DA start suing universities left and right, and structure the settlements so that they have to give some Elon headed NGO all the money, so he can sue them some more long after Trump is out of office.

That's it. That's all you had. We can just read your comment and see that that's all that you had. How is that supposed to work? Give me an example, an idea, a process, an anything. You claim my ignorance is "tactical". I claim my ignorance is just ignorance. I honestly have no idea how this is supposed to work. I mean, can I just sue you right now in a way that lets my neighbor sue you some more in case I die next year? Just all out of magic or something?

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