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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23383 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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The University of Oklahoma has reached a resolution regarding a student's claim of religious discrimination. University of Oklahoma junior Samantha Fulnecky received a 0/25 on a psychology essay in which she responded to an assigned article about gender norms with arguments based largely on her Christian beliefs and references to the Bible. Her trans instructor said the paper failed to meet the assignment criteria, did not engage with the source material or empirical evidence, and described parts of it as offensive. Fulnecky filed an appeal and a complaint claiming religious discrimination.

A post about the situation was made here a few weeks ago.

OU conducted a review and concluded the grading was “arbitrary.” They ruled that the failing grade would not count toward Fulnecky’s final course grade and the graduate instructor who graded the paper was placed on administrative leave and removed from instructional duties. This claim was also reviewed by the Provost who agreed with the ruling.

The online reaction isn't surprising, and it serves as another example of a litmus test that the progressive left has failed. I will say in the reactionaries' defense that the paper is not well-written, so at first glance anyone who reads it will think, "Yeah, that's a shit paper and a zero is well deserved." Once you dig beneath the surface though, that explanation collapses. It looks more like poorly written papers were routinely given full credit throughout the semester, which establishes that writing quality was not exactly being enforced as a decisive standard. Multiple Reddit threads are slamming OUs integrity or making comments about how they shouldcrowd fund attorneys. Of course almost all of them intentionally avoid the central point which is that the grading was clearly inconsistent. Once that's established, the additional CW context becomes relevant. A trans instructor giving a zero grade to a paper critical of gender ideology doesn’t prove bias, but let's be real here.

The marker was clearly an ideological zealot and should be removed from teaching duties on that basis. It was a poor essay, but you give that a 10/25, not a 0.

The Elevation of Fringe Theories to Official US Foreign Policy

Rewind 10 years, and the only ones expressing dire concern over racial demographics in the US and Europe were very fringe, low-status, rag-tag group of political radicals called the "Alt Right". At the time it seemed scandalous that anyone would have much concern over European civilization becoming majority non-White, at best it was just crazy-talk but more commonly it was denounced as an indictment on someone's character for advocating for any sort of political or cultural initiative to stop or reverse this development. Although that is still the median interpretation, since the 2020 Great Awokening there's been a rapid expansion and a mainstreaming of these political views- the greatest indication of that yet is the release of the official 2025 National Security Strategy that directly identifies these concerns, as well as actually stopping and reversing them, a matter of US foreign policy. My emphasis:

C. Promoting European Greatness

American officials have become used to thinking about European problems in terms of insufficient military spending and economic stagnation. There is truth to this, but Europe’s real problems are even deeper.

Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP—down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today—partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness.

But this economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.

Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies. Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.

...

American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history. America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.

Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory. We will need a strong Europe to help us successfully compete, and to work in concert with us to prevent any adversary from dominating Europe.

America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent— and, of course, to Britain and Ireland. The character of these countries is also strategically important because we count upon creative, capable, confident, democratic allies to establish conditions of stability and security. We want to work with aligned countries that want to restore their former greatness.

The long-standing political strategy of "Democratic" Europe has been to form whatever coalition of center-left/right parties is necessary to prevent far right parties who oppose this from attaining power, while at the same time engaging in strong censorship and political suppression of right-wing parties- an artifact of the psychological warfare against Europe which we called Denazification. This is behavior is identified as a national security threat in this document, which advocates the United States "Cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations."

The devil is in the details of implementation, but this document represents the codification of fringe Alt-Right views from 10 years ago. It's no longer a "conspiracy theory" or "White Supremacy" to identify the political forces actively orchestrating the demographic replacement of European nations, it's directly identified as a foreign policy issue of the United States, which is a major step forward, with mainstream publications now openly acknowledging the issue without the usual trappings of denouncing racism or White Supremacy:

President Donald Trump echoed similar warnings during a visit to the United Kingdom last year, saying mass immigration would "destroy Europe" and that the continent was "not going to survive" unless governments dramatically change course.

The White House defended the warning, saying Europe is already suffering the consequences of mass immigration.

"The devastating impacts of unchecked migration and those migrants’ inability to assimilate are not just a concern for President Trump but for Europeans themselves, who have increasingly noted immigration as one of their top concerns," White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement to Fox News Digital. "These open border policies have led to widespread examples of violence, spikes in crime, and more, with detrimental impacts on the fiscal sustainability of social safety net programs."

Some observers have noted the relative deemphasis on preparing for conflict with China and pivoting towards Western-hemispheric control, a revitalizing of the Monroe Doctrine. Although I am a critic of Trump, I have to say I am supportive of this national security strategy- although implementation is ultimately what matters and in all likelihood a Democrat administration would strike much of this. But it's a major step forward in acknowledging an existential crisis that until very recently was completely taboo.

I agree that it’s good to voice these things, publicly. But I’m not sure it matters. Remigration from Europe would be the largest or second-largest major population transfer in human history. It would require unfathomable state capacity and run roughshod over the constitution of every major Western European country (that has a constitution), that kind of action would itself require consistent supermajority governments over many years, when many are ruled only by unstable coalitions with nobody capable of getting even a simple majority. Even the National Rally, Meloni’s party, the Austrians are all moderating rapidly, only the AfD is still ‘hard right’ and there is every chance they get shut down if they start doing better than they are (my guess is the BfV wants to spin out a softer, more libertarian, Bardella-esque wing).

In many cases (I know you might disagree) the same forces - lethargy, ambivalence to the grand forces that shape civilization, a prioritization of the comfort of retired voters above all else, firm allegiance to the shibboleths of the vaguely post-Catholic social democracy upon which the EU was founded - that created the present economic calamity also created the immigration one. A lack of action is built into the system.

Seems to me the easy change is to cut social spending to immigrants. State in six months the spigot is turned off but will pay an additional six month lump sum + moving costs if they leave.

I heard just today that German police have gotten new powers to sneak into people's apartments and plant trojans on their devices to spy on them. Supposedly judges are only going to allow this for serious cases... but they already spy on the AFD a great deal, presumably the plan is to ramp up the suppression campaign.

It seems like some critical event is needed to break the power of the consensus elite in the non-US West, shambling incompetence and myopic authoritarianism sleepwalk onwards.

I found the NSS a mixed bag. Some parts I appreciated and agreed with. It's good some of these statements are on the record as considerations of strategy. A great deal of the rest seems incomplete or amateur in typical Trumpian fashion. An intent of simplicity stated up front by necessity, because there's no real plan, no diligence-- certainly no 4D chess.

Western-hemispheric control, a revitalizing of the Monroe Doctrine.

What is the vision here? The US survived for the duration of the Cold War with its home turf contested. Is the idea Europe falls to the wolves and we hope to make Brazil the new Germany of South America? America turn the meme of BRICS into a reality by investing in it? Explaining it as a ratchet in the scare Europe straight toolbox would be neat, but I'm not sure I believe it.

Bullying Venezuela is great and all, but who cares about Venezuela? We're not retreating from the Pacific, we're just focusing on our own hemisphere. Okay, for what? What will our efforts and focus achieve? A thing to do because we decided not to do the other thing.

We're not retreating from the Pacific

The US already lost the Pacific. I'm surprised but impressed the current admin might realize this.

Hawaii is in the Pacific. If the US "lost" any part of the Pacific, it's a small portion known as the "South China Sea."

I continue to maintain that the idea that the US has yet meaningfully lost a great power competition in the Pacific is extremely premature, though, at least for anyone without access to classified records. I think China boosters are failing to learn the correct lessons from the war in Ukraine and are often relatively innumerate about the capabilities that are likely to matter in a high-end war, only some of which are ships and many of which are not even "military."

I imagine the intelligence communities of five-eyes are using sophisticated AI to inform them of risks, with AI not yet available to the public, and with the best prompt engineering in the world. What would an AI that knows everything about the genetics of IQ and prosociality say is the biggest risk to the West? And I imagine that the intelligence community has much better data on genetics, too.

Are we talking about before or after the AI is lobotomized to not offend anyone? My understanding is that AI's are better at guessing real world statistics before their edges are sanded off.

Sadly, I don't think there's a lot of frontier AI's that don't have this problem. Even Grok (which is a sub-frontier AI) has been lobotomized to some degree, just in the other direction.

I kind of doubt that intelligence communities have access to models the public doesn't. They wouldn't be making deals with OpenAI and Anthropic if they were capable of just building something better themselves.

My suspicion is that there are military and intelligence systems without these hang ups.

Huh. I would bet the intelligence communities have AI that's absolute crap and that the commercial stuff is as good as it gets.

Their architectures may be behind the times, but their training data is uniquely comprehensive.

They have AI trained on all our racist group chats.

Intel communities likely have cutting edge algorithms for things like "image analysis" and "signal emission triangulation." I would be very surprised if they were meaningfully ahead of commercial when it comes to LLMs. If anything they are likely at parity or behind since there's significant security risks to using most LLM models and designing a model that can be used securely takes up time, so you'll end up developing a secure solution using a model that will be outdated by the time you actually deploy it securely.

It will backfire. Trump's national strategy and persona are incompatible with Europe.

First, Trump hurt their pride.

Europeans are proud. Trump has taken a sneer-and-condescend approach towards European politics. It's a bad strategy towards any institution. But, it's catastrophic towards Europe. I visit Europe every couple of months. Yes, urban educated circles aren't a representative sample. But, the Europeans appear to despise Trump and his politics. Even blue city democrats don't hate Trump as much. Eventually, the hostility becomes grating.

Second, Trump put financial pressure.

Europe has slid into a financially fragile state after a lackluster 2008 recovery and not being able to print their way out of the covid crisis. You'd think Trump would extend an olive branch after the harsh words. Nope, it's more jab, jab, hook. Trump has added tariffs and strong armed Europe to rearm. Why would the Europeans be happy about any of this ?

Third, Europe has problems that America doesn't.

Spain and Italy have lower fertility rates than Japan. France and Germany have crushing social welfare ponzi schemes that require an ever increasing number of young people. They need immigrants. Trump wants these nations to use his 'wrecking ball' approach to political and (in his imagination) civilizational revival. No. They can't do it, because they aren't America.

Western-hemispheric control

2025's America doesn't have the financial weight or the military willpower to bully Europe. The other option is to align incentives. Confusingly, Trump is erecting new barriers instead. Europe may engage for now. It has no other options. But it sure as hell will be looking for alternatives if it does actually start regaining 'civilizational self confidence'.

Trump is single handedly ushering in a multi-polar world.

Trump is single handedly ushering in a multi-polar world.

The multi-polar world openly happened under Obama, when the US removed the capability to fight two major land wars from its national strategy, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the US started to pivot to the Pacific.

Europeans are proud.

I am not European, I am Slovak. There is no European identity even after decades of astroturfing. If anything, you have something I would mark as "global" identity vs national ones. In the past this globalist identity was called as "western" identity or something similar. In fact local elites at least in Eastern Europe used this word quite a lot in condescending way toward their own population - just westernize already. These elites were similar to Russian aristocracy of 19th century - people self colonized into some supranational identity used to berate their backwards alcoholic underclass. This supposed "European" elite would be as satisfied in Berlin or Paris as they would be in Sydney or Dubai or Tokyo and of course in New York or Los Angeles - as long as it caters to their sensibilities.

In fact with Trump election it was interesting to see how this supposed "Western" vocabulary collapsed - what is The West without USA? With USA throwing a wrench into the edifice, they just have "West" replaced by "European". But there is no such a thing, European identity has nowhere near such a power, it does not have the same legitimacy that USA and "The West" had during 20th century.

But, the Europeans appear to despise Trump and his politics. Even blue city democrats don't hate Trump as much. Eventually, the hostility becomes grating.

This is nothing new. "European" intelligentsia hated US political representation with vengeance for ages. People from Europe love their stories of redneck Americans, they watched with glee whenever any riot or scandal happened as it soothed their ego. The problem is, that at least in the past there was something to that as late as 80s/90s. French were proud of their cinematography, Germans were proud of their engineering and Scandinavians were proud of their social progress while they slowly imbibed US culture and systems. As of now, all these things are in the past. At least since 2000s all EU countries are stagnating. Manufacturing went to shit, cultural influence is overwhelmed not only by USA but also by Asian countries. There is no NOKIA or Ericsson anymore and there is no new innovative industry in Europe.

What remains is basically cultural heritage - architecture and so forth which turns Europe into one large open-air museum. But even this is not exactly coded as elite thing to do with self hatred around religion and colonialism. There are some paradoxes going on with some channels such as this one, trying to promote European achievements. Which is fine, but if you ask me, it would seem to represent more something like Eric Zemmour's candidacy speech as opposed to current EU elite progressive consensus. It is right-wing and nationalist coded.

So in short what if "Europeans" you talk about hate Trump. They hate themselves and their culture with the same intensity, if not even more.

There is a quote, often attributed to Clemenceau or Wilde or sometimes Shaw that goes:

American is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

Seems more and more pertinent by the day if you ask me...

Having not heard this before, I have to ask ... what does civilization look like, by that standard?

Honestly I would not claim to know what any of these people were thinking, remember this was said in the early 20th century so their standards of civilisation and decadence were probably quite different from ours, but the general sentiment of Americans being seen first as uncivilised barbarians and transitioning straight to being parvenus when they finally get wealth still is as relevant today as it would have been then, if you ask my non American social circle (the Americans I know would half agree and half vigorously deny it, in the "doth protest too much" sense).

I'm also pretty convinced all this will backfire but

They need immigrants.

I mean sure, but the immigrants we need, and that are willing to come, don't exist in remotely sufficient numbers.

The ones that are willing to come are both a social strain and a massive financial drain.

We're not solving the financial consequences of fertility crisis with immigration, we're making it worse.

Fair. If you can't get good immigrants, the solution isn't to get immigrants who make things worse.

The problem is that things are simultaneously too easy for the "bad immigrants" and too hard for the "good immigrants". You can bet your whole career, with massive opportunity cost, on something like eventually winning the greencard lottery, while simultaneously hoping an H1B employer won't exploit you too badly in the meantime; or you can walk across the border and do low-skill informal-economy jobs far from the state's eye, while getting 10x the pay in your country of origin, and have a whole half of the CW binary advocate for you if you were to ever get in trouble (and it's not like the Mexican haul-heavy-shit employers will be questioning you about the gap in your CV and ability to attend American conferences if you were to fail, spend a year in ICE jail and get deported).

Unfortunately, our societies are just reliably lacking in executive function to see a problem for which some solution (immigration enforcement, policing...) exists as having more knobs than a single "more of the solution"/"less of the solution" one. "Have police arrest more criminals while being less violent and more discerning" was not a significant camp in the BLM discourse, either.

"Have police arrest more criminals while being less violent and more discerning" was not a significant camp in the BLM discourse, eithe

Because the BLM awakening (especially post-Floyd) wasn't actually about police brutality. It was about conjuring a scapegoat for the general failure of an entire community, one acceptable to both white and black educated classes.

Your solution is a solution to some problem, but not the one people care about. The result of more effective police would be to make the failure even more visible without the face-saving excuse.

There's no want for agency. A whole lot of effort is being expended, a bunch of plans are constantly made and acted on. It's more that only plans that fit a narrow window of acceptable discourse are even legible let alone tolerable.

France and Germany have crushing social welfare ponzi schemes that require an ever increasing number of young people. They need immigrants.

Denmark has pretty conclusively proven that MENA migrants are a net drain on the state, not a benefit. Sure there are a few winners: slumlords, the migrant industrial complex, and people who own shares in the discount retail sector.

Idk why European countries pretend the option is undereducated MENA immigrants vs nothing.

There's at least 3 billion people who would love to live in their countries. Surely there has to be a better way to sample from this population.

Every country on the planet wants rich, intelligent, very high skilled immigrants, but there just aren't that many of them available, and they have the entire world in terms of options.

Also, a lot of the political class literally can't tell the difference between good immigrants and bad immigrants. The Conservative government in the UK noticed that Indians and Nigerians in the UK earned lots of money, so they opened the doors to India and Nigeria, missing out the fact that the reason for these immigrant groups' overperformance was the selectivity of the immigration process. They invited so many that the average wages of Indians and Nigerians in the UK went from above the UK average to below the UK average.

They are so shackled by their blank slatism and fear of racism. Pro immigration in the year of our lord 2025 is the idea that genes and culture don’t matter.

Lack of executive function, as I also claim in my other comment.

The exact mechanism by which the executive function is lost is that both the "immigrants good" faction and the "immigrants bad" faction see their optimal marginal strategy as drumming up alignment with the simple and straightforward sentiments I labelled them by. A position like "more smart prosocial immigrants, but fewer stupid violent ones" will be ejected by the former camp because the "fewer" part just diluted and muddles immigrants-good sentiment; likewise, the latter camp will eject it for the "more" part having the same effect on immigrants-bad sentiment.

A position like "more smart prosocial immigrants, but fewer stupid violent ones" will be ejected by the former camp because the "fewer" part just diluted and muddles immigrants-good sentiment; likewise, the latter camp will eject it for the "more" part having the same effect on immigrants-bad sentiment

Executive function doesn't enter into it. The issue is that the two tribes have no reason to trust each other, and that there are too many people with the "accept compromise, but keep fighting" mentality, so the only rational strategy is to swing the status quo as extremely to your side as possible (even beyond what you might actually want), and then fortify it as best as you can.

I consider the ability to execute and maintain complex compromises to be part of what is the "executive function" of society as a compound organism, by analogy with the executive function of an individual.

I guess I'm not sure we're much of a compound organism anymore.

Selection systems work for the initial cohort, but family reunification policies dilute them. If you want durable intergenerational outcomes and want to avoid regression toward the mean of the origin population, you need selection criteria applied more consistently across visa categories, not just to primary applicants but to the broader family migration that follows.

Why have family reunification policies at all ? Individual, wife and child. That's it. Older parents should be able to get a visa as dependents, but never citizenship or social benefits.

Family chain migration is an exploit. Policy wise, it's an easy loophole to close. Politically, may be another issue altogether.

Does the wife have to qualify on her own or does she get in because the husband does?

Lots of successful men have stupid children because they selected their wives for reasons they may live to regret.

The policy is not aimed at convincing the existing European power apparatus but on fostering opposition parties. If migration were so great for Europe, why is all the censorship and political suppression of the opposition even necessary? Why is opposition growing in Europe if it has all these great benefits? Europe being replaced by foreigners is not in Europe's interests or the security interests of the United States. I do not care if the average European is in denial of the fact, it has to be overcome. The EU Regulatory framework is by far the greater barrier to economic growth than not having enough Arabs and Africans, who have not ushered in economic prosperity.

Also, you are not European, you are Indian, so the "you need us" perspective should be inverted- you are the one who needs us, not the other way around.

If Republicans think it's perfectly reasonable to boost fringe political parties in Europe because they genuinely believe that's in the best interest of the USA then it's perfectly reasonable for European countries to officially adopt positions supporting the Democrats wholesale because they genuinely believe that's in the best interests of Europe. Something tells me the Republicans would throw a tantrum if it actually happened though.

It's worth pointing out that the European countries did actually provide material support for the democrats, as well as implementing censorship regimes that targeted American companies and American political opinions. I'm not saying this to claim that the US has clean hands and the EU is attacking them unprovoked, but you're not really going to convince the republicans not to do something on the basis of a threat which they have actually already followed through on.

This would matter if a) Europeans didn't already pay vastly more attention to US elections than the US does to theirs (it would not be a throwaway story if GOP volunteers came to the UK to campaign for Farage the way a few Labour volunteers worked for Harris) and b) there's any evidence that this would have a large impact.

America is just too polarized for it to matter. There are some Americans who love to be thought of well by Europeans but those people are now all in the Democratic Party. It doesn't really matter much to the populists and the right wingers are well aware that the elite class of Europe looks down on them for their coarse ways. Americans just don't have to care, frankly. Elections are for beating the near enemy.

Besides, there's an obvious power differential here. "Hit him back just as hard" is good advice for the playground but probably not smart here.

Deterrence doesn't work if your threat was already carried out before you even made it.

Europe had its opposition boom.

Meloni has been in power for a while now. What's changed ? Orban tried to get fertility up, and numbers have continued cratering. Boris Johnson got Brexit, and things have gotten much worse since.

Idk what it has to do with Indians needing anyone. As a nation, Indian is reasonably comfortable being alone in the geopolitics landscape. As people, one perk of coming from the 3rd world, is they can take a lot of pain before life truly feels like it sucks. Perk of living in a shithole, is it can't get much worse than that.

Europe had its opposition boom.

Neither Germany nor France nor the United Kingdom got their populist peak yet. And it is coming. By God it is coming.

With all due respect to my Hungarian friends, they are a borderland with conflicting loyalties, not the financial heart of Europe.

And Meloni did manage to turn around Italy's economy in a big way. Big enough that it's impressing neighbors. She'd had to essentially give up foreign policy for it, but that's not nothing. And Italy is not like France or Britain. You can't truly govern alone there.

continued cratering

Not exactly. They identified interventions with positive effect for the third birth most pronounced in 20-29-year-old highly educated mothers.

https://hungary.representation.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-12/hetfa_fertilitymodels_20190913.pdf

That sounds like interesting subgroup analysis.

Europeans are proud. Trump has taken a sneer-and-condescend approach towards European politics. It's a bad strategy towards any institution. But, it's catastrophic towards Europe. I visit Europe every couple of months. Yes, urban educated circles aren't a representative sample.

"Aren't representative" isn't even the half of it. Educated urban circles aren't even representative of educated urban circles, anyone with 2 braincells to rub together is in full Havel's Greengrocer mode, and the ones that do actually side with the regime are having palpitation over populist parties getting more and more mainstream.

They need immigrants.

Any country that bothered publishing statistics on the subject showed that non-European immigrants cost more money than they bring. The whole idea of solving our financial issue with them was ridiculous from the start.

I should clarify. I purposely left it at 'they need immigrants'. Europe's current immigration strategy (or lack there of) is a total mess. As it is now, it's bad. It's quite bad.

I still think the problem of 'how to get good immigrants' is easier than 'how do we fix our industrial policy' or 'how do we make our people have more kids'. Therefore there is an urgency attached to it. The latter 2 are definitely the more worthwhile pursuits, but it is what it is.

anyone with 2 braincells to rub together is in full Havel's Greengrocer mode

Could be. Happened with Trump 2016, Brexit and Modi 2014.

I still think the problem of 'how to get good immigrants' is easier than 'how do we fix our industrial policy' or 'how do we make our people have more kids'.

I don't think there's enough good immigrants to go between Europe, the US, Japan, Korea, and if China ever joins that club, you can forget about it. I'm also pretty sure that deindustrialization and depopulation are deliberate policy, rather than innocent bumbling around by the bureaucrats.

Could be. Happened with Trump 2016, Brexit and Modi 2014.

Nothing quite so drastic, but an educated urbanite won't be caught dead sharing no-no opinions in public, so even their relatively low numbers just won't become apparent in conversation. Though funnily enough it might come up with parents fretting over the political opinions of their kids, their sons in particular.

More political violence

From Tim Pool:

Last night a vehicle approached our property and opened fire.

No one was hurt.

Our security team is reviewing the incident and will be relaying the report to appropriate law enforcement

This is the price we pay for speaking out against evil.

One might think back to oft made historical analogs like Weimar Germany, and see the steady escalation of violence between communists and anti-communists and proclaim Weimerica to be just like that. But these acts of violence seem so... Aimless? Random? Poorly thought out? I mean, the degree of distortion that drives one to shoot at Tim Pool. I don't get it. Even the excuses that Charlie Kirk was a fascist theocracy enabler that would genocide the trans felt far fetched. How do you justify the glee of seeing Tim Pool murdered?

If the official narrative is to be believed, a lot of these acts of political violence are coming from ideologically ambiguous social media addicts. Be that the killer of Charlie Kirk, the Trump shooters, the attacks on ICE agents and facilities and more. Gone are the days of a regimented left/right brawl in the streets like we got around 2017. Or a good old cops(presence optional) and robbers BLM riot. To that extent, I think a lot of people have completely lost sight of the media backdrop of peoples lives on both the left and right.

For context, Candace Owens is talking about global conspiracies and the involvement of TPUSA in the killing of Charlie. This has been ongoing for weeks, and she averages around 1.5 million views per show. That's including ridiculously high live numbers no one else is coming close to. At the same time the biggest mainstream internet personalities on the right have been cozy-ing up to Nick Fuentes. With Steven Crowder now joining the fray of Tucker Carlson and many others, giving him a long and cordial interview.

On the other side, the largest streamer on the left, Hasan Piker, along with many others, have made it a routine to skirt as close as they can around calls to violence. And sometimes not bothering at all. With the government starting to ask questions after the murder of Charlie on the topic of radicalization.

The Wild West days of the internet are seemingly back. With Hitler memes on Instagram instead of 4Chan, Qanon conspiracies having their own show on Youtube all whilst the leftist revolution is being streamed live to millions on Twitch.

Centrist minded people like Tim Pool like to talk about the pendulum swinging back and forth. But inherent to that analogy is the idea that there is a fixed point where the pendulum will stop before swinging back each time. But it seems like that's not the case. The pendulum can swing back and forth, but also faster and farther. And with the antifa being completely unwilling to engage in discourse or compromise, and the right being completely inept and unable to stop their radicalization and acts of violence, 'faster and farther' seems to be where we are going.

At this point being openly MAGA is inviting being a target . they are not even trying to hide it

But these acts of violence seem so... Aimless? Random? Poorly thought out?

Weimar Germany had a much larger pool of people who were recent veterans with life-long, hands on experience with interacting with physical reality. The average internet communist today has likely never touched a hammer. They expect it to be like a video game on Games Journalist difficulty.

Compare to the difference in outcome when the attacker was not the virulently online, irony-poisoned trans gooner, but his raised-by-grass-touchers boyfriend.

Even the excuses that Charlie Kirk was a fascist theocracy enabler that would genocide the trans felt far fetched. How do you justify the glee of seeing Tim Pool murdered?

For about ten years now, leftists have been on a crusade against misinformation. It was vitally important that misinformation be at least countered, if not outright removed, because it would lead to societally harmful outcomes like racism, misogyny, transphobia, and other bigotries. If it can be countered with the truth, then we can finally create Heaven on Earth; no more bigotry, because everyone was educated out of it and gave it up on their own recognizance.

As the years have gone by, this has proven to be totally untrue. It's a very useful philosophy to take for political rallying purposes, at least until it runs into something that's actually true. The Hunter Biden laptop story could be taken down because it was misinformation. Oops, it was real. It's just misinformation that black people commit more crime, you're taking some examples and characterizing tons of people with them. No, you can't use those FBI statistics to back it up, that's bad too. Women can be just as good as men at being a police officer or an infantryperson; again, grating to leftists when you use statistics. Hateful rhetoric about transgender people is supposed to be baseless, which is why Jesse Singal is the most blocked person on Bluesky.

I think the commonality that I'm trying to demonstrate is that the real crime here isn't about being hateful or not being based in truth. It's simply about being opposed to what they want to do. There is no actual way to push back without seriously pissing people off. Everything has already been tried, and it doesn't matter how respectful you're being. That's why there is no detectable difference in the hatred that leftists have between Charlie Kirk and someone like Nick Fuentes. The actual rhetoric doesn't matter, just that they're opposed.

While I'm on this topic: Charlie Kirk discourse is still insanity-inducing to me even though it's been 3 months now since he died. The average redditor will say everything nasty that's possible about him, they'll say that he was hateful and said disgusting things on a regular basis, that he made the country worse, that his words were violence against people, that he increased the amount of people ready to commit violence against minorities, that he needed to shut up and get off the campus, that the world is now better because he is dead. But to make it better, they'll say that murder is wrong, so they disagreed with his murder. Well, redditor, you did not convince me at all. You gave me several absolutely fantastic reasons to kill people like Charlie Kirk, but just one really weak reason to not do it (because murder is bad) for reasons that you didn't list out. Do you really believe that murder is bad? Why? Explain it to me, in your own words, fellow American.

No one that isn't already on the right wing understands just how radicalizing that entire affair was. It was easy to believe that yes, they'd ban you from everywhere for having beliefs that 50% of the country hold, and yes, they'd slam you as a bigot and a racist, but that it was all just words. No matter how much I explain it to people, they want to bring up like, 5 quotes and call them hate speech and justify why people hated him so much. And they reject that this hatred would ever make someone want to shoot someone else, even though that's the entire reason why rhetoric attacking trans people, gay people, black people, women, or immigrants was bad in the first place. So they never believed in the concept of stochastic terrorism in the first place, because they never shut their radical friends down when they cry out for more blood. It's all so awful, and there's nothing you can do about it, except cut off all those former friends who dismiss everything you have to say simply because of who you are or who they suspect you to be.

A long time ago I heard someone observe that progressive messaging makes a lot more sense if, whenever you read "misinformation", you mentally substitute "blasphemy".

The average redditor will say everything nasty that's possible about him, they'll say that he was hateful and said disgusting things on a regular basis, that he made the country worse, that his words were violence against people, that he increased the amount of people ready to commit violence against minorities, that he needed to shut up and get off the campus, that the world is now better because he is dead. But to make it better, they'll say that murder is wrong, so they disagreed with his murder. Well, redditor, you did not convince me at all. You gave me several absolutely fantastic reasons to kill people like Charlie Kirk, but just one really weak reason to not do it (because murder is bad) for reasons that you didn't list out. Do you really believe that murder is bad? Why?

I wouldn't call a fundamental axiom of morality, indeed, one that has been regarded by the Abrahamic faiths as an explicit divine commandment for over three thousand years, a weak reason. And the tacked-on "Why?" at the end seems particularly odd to me - most people's reply to "why is murder wrong?" will be a confused "it just is"; they don't hold murder to be bad for instrumental reasons, but to be inherently unethical. For a majority of Westerners, that is the most important reason not to kill someone, and it is self-sufficient. "Why is murder wrong?" cashes out as "Why is badness bad?".

More broadly, what do you expect someone who disagreed totally about Kirk's politics to say, here? Do you really expect each comment to go on a lengthy digression about the underpinnings of moral philosophy? I can entertain the idea that in such a case (ie "a man you consider horribly evil has been murdered, but you genuinely don't want to come across as supporting murder"), the most decorous, moral thing to do is simply to keep silent and not opine on the event at all. But by definition, left-wing redditors who take that high road are not going to show up in the comment threads you describe. This leaves only the ones who feel compelled to speak at all, and I don't think you can fairly or realistically expect them to say anything else than what they do.

They're all natural things for someone who hated Charlie Kirk to say, yes. The problem is more the extent that they hated him, so much that they internally are rapturous that he is dead. This is not simple disagreement here. I'd expect something like the redditor response to John McCain's death in that case, where they acknowledged that they disagreed with him entirely, but still really respected him and are sad that he is dead. Not so, here. Here, they really did hate the shit out of him, hated his rotten, stinking guts. For a moderate conservative voice, that's absolutely unacceptable. They would want me dead, too, if I was effective enough at expressing myself convincingly to millions of people. The feeling does not go both ways. I can't really think of any left-leaning people that I utterly despise in the same way, and I can think of many that I like and respect, such as Ana Kasparian, Jesse Singal, or many personal or online acquaintances that are more tepidly liberal because they just watch TV occasionally or have other liberal friends.

Edit: I'd also add that to say that you're glad that someone's dead and the world is a better place without him has a lot of other added meanings when that person was assassinated by someone who feels similar to how you do. If you can't prevent yourself from saying those things after an assassination by someone who thinks like yourself, then yes, you do actually need to say why murdering is bad, because you just encouraged your friends to murder someone.

I'd expect something like the redditor response to John McCain's death in that case, where they acknowledged that they disagreed with him entirely, but still really respected him and are sad that he is dead.

The only reason "redditors" liked John McCain was that he was anti-Trump - I don't believe redditors are real people (in many cases they aren't, especially the ones posting from Eglin AFB). John McCain was a terrible human being and lent his support to pointless wars that lead to disastrous consequences while sticking his snout in the trough and slurping up a bunch of the profits made as a result. He served in a pointless, failed war of aggression as part of a military that committed truly awful and evil deeds (evil might be a bit hyperbolic, but when I look at the children of Agent Orange I find it hard to find other words). He was substantially worse than Charlie Kirk who, to the best of my knowledge, didn't actively support or fight any wars as odious as the Vietnam war and wasn't a beneficiary of corporate corruption.

The feeling does not go both ways.

I think that you're looking at different sections of the populace. There are absolutely figures on the right that I can respect - Ron Paul and Thomas Massie are two that come to mind for me. But I'm not really representative of the circles on the left that are calling for total republican death, in the same way you aren't representative of the parts of the right that talk about the day of the rope with bated breath. I don't think there's really anything to gain from comparing the worst segments of either side of politics - we can compare the power levels of Patrick Crusius and Tyler Robinson until the cows come home, but I don't think there's much useful information to be gained from doing so.

I don't believe that this endorsement of violence is a partisan phenomenon - there are increasing levels of radicalisation on both sides of politics because the normal, traditional methods of deciding these disputes is hopelessly gridlocked and dysfunctional. Politics as usual are simply unable to address the increasingly intractable problems faced by the average person, and political violence is on the rise because desperate people see no other way to actually get their problems addressed. Political violence of every flavour is going to be a growth industry for as long as the mechanisms of regular politics remain as worthless and nonfunctional as they are today.

This is not simple disagreement here. I'd expect something like the redditor response to John McCain's death in that case, where they acknowledged that they disagreed with him entirely, but still really respected him and are sad that he is dead.

The "still really respected him" part seems off. I'm not talking about "simple disagreement"! Sometimes you really do just think a guy sucks. That's fine! That's nothing new! Most folks have people they hate to some degree - and I'd say even more have people they have zero respect for even if they don't actively hate them. That doesn't mean they all support wanton murder. Having nothing nice to say about someone (beyond "he was a human being and as such had a certain inalienable dignity" which is so general as to be meaningless) is perfectly normal, and we shouldn't normalize asking people to lie about this in the event of something unfortunate befalling that someone, on pain of being assumed to be pro-murder. That's just a demand for large-scale hypocrisy.

(Which is precisely how I've always felt about mealy-mouthed statements eulogizing people you were calling anti-American mass-murdering fascist commie crooks ten years ago, to rapturous applause from your base, as having somehow been great respectable statesmen all along Even If You Had Your Disagreements™. If Trump says something nice and respectable about Biden when Biden croaks, I will not believe he means a word of it, but that doesn't mean I think Trump wants Biden killed.)

Though again, I can get behind the idea that if you have nothing nice to say, you should simply say nothing.

then yes, you do actually need to say why murdering is bad, because you just encouraged your friends to murder someone.

But again, what if they genuinely do just believe murder is bad in and of itself, for no more elaborate reasons than feeling "Thou shalt not kill" is carved upon their conscience in letters of gold that no circumstances can alter? What do you expect someone like that to say?

we shouldn't normalize asking people to lie... That's just a demand for large-scale hypocrisy.

How many people not on the politically engaged or online right could have told you a single thing Charlie Kirk had said before his murder made him famous? How many non-very-online liberals/leftists had even heard of him? Very few I think, and yet that didn't stop the ones I know from calling him a fascist, and being more vocally concerned about Jimmy Kimmel's brief cancellation than about what one gathers was a sympathetic if (maybe, quietly) regrettable episode of political violence. Why did they "believe" he was a fascist? Either because they had uncritically imbibed one of the many blatant misrepresentations or outright lies about the things he had said circulating in their media environment, or simply because they had been told to by trusted sources. Most people (right and left) have an appallingly low tolerance for cognitive dissonance. If their side appears to have murdered an innocent man, either it wasn't really their side (remember the attempt to pin it on the groypers?), or he wasn't really innocent. Or just as often, an incoherent superimposition of both.

To accuse someone of hypocrisy presupposes an internal distinction between higher-order moral principles and actions or judgments of narrower scope. But it's risible to speak of higher-order principles when people are so easily manipulated; and most commentators hardly make any pretense of having considered all the facts relevant to any "controversial" case (the controversy generally being between sides, not within them, let alone within individual minds). The most unambiguously universalist slogans are subject to casuistry, and even the word "casuistry" gives too much credit, because case-by-case reasoning is still a form of reasoning. Imputing an autonomous rational intellect to people, such as would be necessary for them to be truly hypocritical, more often than not impedes one's understanding of and ability to predict their verbal outputs. What the response to Kirk's assassination brought home to me wasn't that liberals have a surprisingly robust anti-fascist value system, such that even Kirk, who (to those on the right who were aware of him) epitomized the moderate religious faction, was beyond the pale; it was that their beliefs -- not only, but to be honest, yes, especially their beliefs -- are not even really beliefs, not even the ones they would most readily ascribe to themselves in a vacuum; that the danger is best understood on an impersonal level, because it's misleading to model most of the people in question as people. I don't respect their "hatred" of Charlie Kirk enough to expect them to be tactful about it. Their hatred is just a boulder in an avalanche started by someone out of sight. Will I "tolerate" my difference of opinion with the boulder as it comes hurtling towards my face? No, but I won't think of it like that in the first place, and I know better than to expect the boulder to suspend the law of gravity for my sake.

But again, what if they genuinely do just believe murder is bad in and of itself, for no more elaborate reasons than feeling "Thou shalt not kill" is carved upon their conscience in letters of gold that no circumstances can alter? What do you expect someone like that to say?

In most cases, the same people would celebrate killing someone if a certain threshold of evil is attained. Ask them if, had Japan not attacked first, the US should have gotten involved in WW2 in Europe (so endorsing killing not in self-defense but in defense of others or of principles). Or if Operation Valkyrie was righteous. It's not that it would be wrong of them to say yes in either or all cases, it's that if you couple it, the idea that some level of evil needs to be opposed by killing if necessary, with a tendancy to frame every political opposition (even the tamest) as maximally evil, you're constantly creating the justification for murder.

I think most people draw a difference between organized killing in war, and murder. Mark that I repeatedly said "murder", except when directly quoting the Sixth Commandment - not "killing".

Fun fact, the proper translation of the Sixth Commandment is "thou shalt not murder," not "thou shalt not kill." As in, thou shalt not kill anyone outside the accepted bounds of the legal system or war.

This is why I also brought up Operation Valkyrie. The plan was murdering Hitler, not killing him in battle, or not even as an enemy at war, but as officers whom he ostensibly trusted. Yet few would think the officers involved were wrong to attempt it. Only extreme pacifists, which the vast majority of people outside of monasteries aren't, would object to murdering Litterally Hitler. Which is a problem when you also call half of your fellow citizens Litterally Hitler.

I’ve thought about this a lot. I still think the left has not come to terms with their rhetoric inspiring violence against the current president and a major supporter of his.

Unlike hand wavy ‘Bush is stupid’ stuff, the rhetoric became ‘save our democracy’ and ‘defeat fascism’. Wrt to the Charlie Kirk event, it’s just undeniable that highly online trans groups perpetuate rhetoric that is about genocide (not to mention there’s another intersection where the idea is supporting trans politics stop people from killing themselves). I think it’s fair to say that, along the lines in this conversation where violence becomes acceptable given a certain level of ‘evil’, persuading people that a political faction is evil will result in violence.

I really don’t think there’s an equivalent on the right. The idea is preserving order through continuity, in principle. There’s no appetite for revolution through targeted violence - while people like Hasan and Taylor Lorenz look lovingly at gruesome events meant to send a message. In no sense do I want someone to do anything to Hasan Piker - if he wants to be a sinoboo and praise violence / terrorist groups, that’s a choice he’ll probably regret in time. But at most I’d like to see him face career or legal repercussions, as detestable as I find him.

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Having nothing nice to say about someone is normal. Having nothing nice to say about 100% of your current political opposition is not normal.

But again, what if they genuinely do just believe murder is bad in and of itself, for no more elaborate reasons than feeling "Thou shalt not kill" is carved upon their conscience in letters of gold that no circumstances can alter? What do you expect someone like that to say?

During a highly publicized assassination, it's very conspicuous to have the "c'mon guys, political assassinations are seriously fucked up" voice missing. Which it was in every corner of the internet. Yes, I do expect more than that.

No, it wasn't missing. Not everywhere. I checked the SpaceBattles thread and a decent chunk of the posts express this. And to be clear, SB got purged of right-wingers a few years back - even I faced a trilemma of [leave]/[stop talking about politics]/[get permabanned] and picked the first horn - so this is your milquetoast liberals (not the hardcore ideologue liberals, like me) and non-radical progressives.

Are there places where it's missing? Yes. Are there way, way too many people on that side howling for more conservative blood? Also yes (including in that thread, many of them whacked by the mods for it). Is every corner of the SJ-purged Internet composed entirely of such bloodthirsty maniacs? No.

I found it distasteful to see edgy left wing people embrace that. I’m really hoping this has come to a close, between the United Healthcare thing, the Trump attempted assasination, and Charlie Kirk. There was a LOT of wink wink nudge nudge, subtle endorsements of these tactics I saw online when they happened.

It’s especially concerning when things like this spread like a social contagion but I’m hopeful that this period of historical political violence has come to a close. I really don’t want to see the troubles pt 2 and a justified militarization of society.

There was a LOT of wink wink nudge nudge, subtle endorsements of these tactics I saw online when they happened.

Indeed, I created this account after an extended period of lurking/inactivity not in response to Charlie Kirk's death but in response to the efforts of others to down play it.

The Wild West is not back, the internet is mostly caged. This is just the anarcho-tyranny of the ruling class.

Remember, to these people Tim Pool is not a "centrist" but the hard right edge of literal Nazis murdering black and brown bodies on the daily. The hyperventilation some years back about "stochastic terrorism" was projection.

How is Tim Pool a centrist? He might have been one back in 2019, but now he’s pro-Trump, pro-Israel, anti-Ukraine and has right-wing guests on his podcast. Even Fox News calls him right-wing.

Can people on the right not be centrist? You just described the center-right. The hard right may or may not be pro Trump, and is DEFINITELY not pro-Israel, and may or may not be pro-Ukraine.

"Has right-wing guests on" - We're still doing this? Having people to the right of you on a show to talk means you can't be a centrist? The nested assumptions here are wonderful. Let's get some data:

1: What percentage of the right half of the political spectrum do you think is centrist, moderate and extreme?

2: What percentage of the left half of the political spectrum do you think is centrist, moderate and extreme?

3: Do these numbers match?

Tim Pool is a fence sitter of the worst variety. He's controlled opposition, his job is to sit there and drive the speed limit and slurp as much normies as possible so they don't embrace much harsher right wing politics.

He might have been one back in 2019

Isn't being pro Israel the epitome of being a centrist. The mainstream of both parties are fanatically pro Israel, the radical base of both parties strongly dislike Israel.

My impression is that the mainstream left is anti-Israel in the States, but I'm hardly an expert here.

The Democrats on Israel are a lot like the Republicans on Israel: there is considerable anti-Israel sentiment in the younger parts of the base, but almost none of that actually filters up to the politicians in office. So you have your token three congressmen who criticize Israel, and all the others move in lockstep support, quietly or loudly. There’s a huge generation split, so boomers and Gen X of both left and right are much more likely to be pro-Israel, or at least moderate in their criticism.

The voters maybe, at least the under-40s, but the blue party is tightly controlled by pro-Israel donors, which is why Kamala quite literally sunk her campaign over the matter. I'm confident she'd have won the election if she'd just given some pro-Palestine statements and made some empty girlboss threats to reign in Israeli behavior (which she could easily backtrack on after being elected. No need to keep campaign promises to anyone who isn't a large donor).

The centrist opinion seems like it should just be that both Israel and Palestine suck. Normies seem like they wouldn't have much of an opinion either way and just default to pro-Israel.

Depends on how you define 'mainstream'. The DNC old guard is very pro Israel. The black democrats and the old school establishment dems are generally pro Israel. It is true that anti-Israel stances are less fringe than in the GOP, however.

In practice, it seems most non-muslim leftish figures are more worried about stoking "antisemitism" than they are anti-Israel.

Every year around this time Pantone publishes a "Color of the Year," which shows up in places like graphic design, home decor, and clothing over the course of the next year. I used to follow them, and in the mid 00s they had nice colors like frog green (greenery, 2017), coral red ("Living Coral, 2019), and Emerald Green (2013). Like many things, they've been corrupted lately, and the past three years have seen "Peach Fuzz" (the color children's art sets used to use to represent people), "Mocha Mousse" (the color of a mixed race actress in an advertisement), and now... white. Literally just white. It's called "Cloud Dancer," and has a tiny bit of grayish blue in it.

People are making fun of the "authoritarian" vibes of literally just white. But also, I was hoping that the white and grey trend was on its way out? I've been seeing white and grey boxes going up this past half decade, full of coffee shops, burgers, and more recently apartment buildings, and am not a fan. At least it's not Pot Shop Green, I guess?

Does this predict another year of literally just white and Landlord Grey?

Adding: The LA Times is trying to make the best of it, by highlighting bridal fashion. The Guardian and the New York Times both mention the difficulty of keeping actually white things clean looking, and several people talk about Whiteness.

I always wonder why the modern world has such an allergy to beauty.

In a week, I will attend the most beautiful service of the liturgical year- the rorate mass begins just before sunset, in candlelight. It progresses, the church lit entirely by light shining through the stained glass at its completion. Every year, I step out, go to breakfast in some bland diner, and wonder- 'where did we go wrong?' Our buildings look like a cubist painting of dog poop covered in white and grey paint- despite that nice straight lines with some mildly interesting decorations, fleur de lis or lone stars or stylized cow's heads looks much nicer and is cheaper. Our modern art is better termed 'where's the art', with the exercise of trying to figure out what's an art exhibit and what's just an empty spot in the museum being more interesting than appreciating the 'art'.

This would be a good top level post but it's interesting that pretty much every old style of architecture is nicer than what we have now. In every town that has a pre-modern "old city" it looks better than our modern buildings and is also unique to the culture that built it.

Survivorship bias. There were lots of ugly buildings in the past as well; they just didn't survive because people didn't like them.

This might be true in the sense that there might have been a lot old shacks that have fallen into disrepair, but if something was well-built, it wasn't ugly by design the way things are now. Even 16th century social housing projects are reasonable to look at.

So the furor is literally because "white"? I thought it was because "cloud dancer" is Native American appropriation or something.

Next year: the year of Burnt Umber.

Ha, yeah.

I think people are looking for something to say about it, since it's usually a fun thing to put into some designs or write a little article about, and Literally Just White gives them so little to work with. It seems like a manifestation of anxiety over "screw it, LLMs are probably going to do all the designing soon enough anyway."

If Pantone's doing it as its Color of the Year, then, yeah, that could mean it's on the way out. Same way Peak Oil actually meant the end of oil.

Ah, yes, good old Peak Oil

I guess my white paint futures are secure.

Peak Oil was a relatively dumb theory that was only taken seriously because of the unusual 2004 to 2014 spike in oil prices, which was speculative and driven by short-medium term bullish views on Chinese and other EM consumption, and then prolonged abnormally after 2011 by fears of Arab instability. Weird ZeroHedge types seized on this market dynamic as proof that oil prices would never fall and that actually 100/barrel was just the start and justified it with outdated peak oil fearmongering from the 1970s. In 2014 it became clear that Chinese demand would be lower than predicted, global growth was low, and US shale production was higher than forecast.

As usual, there is nothing new under he sun but specifically with Peak Oil, it was heavily influenced by popular book/manifesto The Limits to Growth published in 1972 which influenced The Club of Rome as part of the now ubiquitous messaging on global issues planetary emergency issues.

I see Peak Oil as part of what I'd mark as defense in depth and/or ideological deep battle doctrine. You see it used quite often in propaganda, where often contrary messages are constructed for different audiences. The general description is the old meme: it is not happening > yeah, it is happening but it is not a big deal > It's a good thing that it is happening > people against this happening are the real problem. Except it is constructed and promoted by propaganda at the same time to various groups, sometimes as a result of people not catching up to latest news, sometimes deliberately pushed at the same time despite logical contradiction.

Sometimes these messages mutate, but they stay the same. Or in case of Peak Oil it was just one example of caution against impossibility of "exponential growth", which is the backbone of leftist environmentalist "sustainability" messaging, all stemming from the original Limits to Growth idea. All of these are quite popular to this day.

Oh yeah I just meant in terms of the use of words. "Peak Oil" back when the greens were using it (I had actually forgotten about the brief ZeroHedge phenomenon) meant "the peak from which oil production will be in permanent decline", and hopefully the same may be true of Millennial Gray.

What exactly was dumb about Peak Oil? The EROI of the oil industry has gone down steadily - all kinds of energy are more expensive nowadays, and when it comes for the global energy mix we are probably running in the teens. And for good development you need 20-30.

Peak oil was wrong in terms of supply because of fracking (which people thought would make a negligible contribution to overall production), wrong on timing because of miscalculations about China and wrong on demand because of the speed of the electric car revolution, especially in Europe and China. Obviously the original argument that fossil fuels are a finite resource (in the timeframe of human civilization) is factually true, but it’s also kind of meaningless.

Fracking isn’t actually that cost effective. It gets massive subsidies because no one wants OPEC to have the world by the short-hairs. And then OPEC in turn sees fracking and starts dumping their own prices to try and drive it out of business. And then no one wants OPEC to have them by the short hairs, so they subsidize fracking even more.

It's also wrong because substituting for oil is pretty easy. You can convert a diesel vehicle to running off of LNG in your garage(literally, if you're mechanically inclined), and we're never going to run out of natural gas. Nuclear/hydro/geothermal power are buildable. EVs get better every year. Etc, etc.

How is it meaningless? Being off by a decade or two is not a huge deal in terms of miscalculations because the end result for the oil industry and its dependents is the same: phasing out of fossil fuels and a probable decline in EROI and QOL for most of the globe.

Peak Oil was a classic Motte and Bailey argument.

The rock-solid highly defensible part is that yes Oil is only a renewable resource on geological time scales. So eventually if consumption keeps going up there is going to be some point at which we "run out" of oil and switch to other resources.

The less defensible part of the argument was how fast and how soon this was going to occur. With some implied and ridiculous timelines being "we will run out instantly just next year". The faster and sooner that peak oil was supposed to hit the more something needed to be done right now to avert the disaster. If peak oil is 50 years off, and will come along so slowly that prices and technology can easily adjust then nothing needs to be done right now.

I personally believe we have reached escape velocity on energy. We are close enough to fusion energy. Fossil fuel reserves in the ground are still pretty large.

The biggest new energy hog in the future will be AI, but AI data centers are sort of a best case scenario for an energy hog:

  1. They are stationary.
  2. Their energy demand can be flexible over long time periods.
  3. They can be located anywhere.

Sometimes I forget how much of a different information world that I seem to live in than a large part of this forum.

In what world are we nearing "escape velocity on energy"? We are not particularly close to fusion: there have been recent advances, but the EROI is still less than 1, and this is with a calculation that doesn't include the construction of the reactor or obtaining tritium (note that current fusion reactors only work with tritium to start the reaction, which is exceedingly rare in nature). Even if we were close, we'd have to have a massive buildout of new reactors in a declining energy environment (fossil fuel extraction is level or declining, which is not a good sign for the future of energy, even if reserves are large). Even if we do somehow manage a soviet style five-year plan buildout of reactors across the globe, there is still the electrification problem. Most of the global transportation fleet, heavy industry, and mining equipment currently requires fossil fuel usage. Many of these have electric alternatives, but again replacement takes time, and metal supplies that we do not have on earth (Simon Michaux calculated that current estimated lithium reserves are not sufficient to even replace the global fleet of personal transportation vehicles with electric cars).

So basically consider me very skeptical that your suggested way to avoid Peak Oil relies on a technology that doesn't exist yet (and may never exist), a rapid buildout that has never been done before in history that relies on declining reserves of metals and fossil fuels.

current estimated lithium reserves are not sufficient

"reserves" are economically recoverable resources. As the price changes, reserves increase. There was a brief lithium bubble where ignorant players thought lithium worked like copper with multi-year lead times etc. but there is more lithium than we should ever need. Bubble -> overcapacity -> price collapse -> reserve decrease. Everyone in commodities knows how this works. But lithium doesn't give you long periods of profit because it's a salt and production ramps up in weeks. You can fill a bore with water then pump the brine out, let the water evaporate and boom lithium. There are plenty of easily accessible molecules, refining is more difficult but you weren't worried about that.

Base metals are in a far worse situation with all recent copper exploration presenting dreadful grades (significantly worse than the gold mining ventures I'm involved with). Grades are half of what they were in the 90s and brownfield expansion costs have ballooned to rival greenfield. Only 14 deposits have been discovered in the past decade! Marimaca and Glencore are still interesting here.

Now, I believe the peak oil narrative was 100% correct and fracking only caused a 10 year delay as incinerated a trillion in capital (because of short well lives and gassing out) although there are still great conventional opportunities e.g. Prio in the Brazilian presalt layer. But even without nuclear, China's found a way forward with much to most of its heavy vehicles already running on LNG instead of diesel and build outs of synthetic gas, which I suspect will build a price ceiling around $80 BOE by the end of the decade, powered by cheap solar (which certainly has a positive EROI in their deserts.) I suspect there will only be one more oil bull market. I am rather pessimistic about the West (baring Chinese largesse) here. In the US, Trump finally cut the Gordian knot and freed mines from (in some cases) 30 year permitting hell - his talk of price floors and raw material tariffs makes me suspect auto-genocide from the right too. Financing is still hard abroad (ESG inertia still keeps US funds away and EU banks still have such laws, royalty companies have also seen massive consolidation with all 14 I'm involved with going through M&A this year)...

I think you misunderstood one point I had above.

Peak oil worries are about how fast we run out of oil and how soon.

Fast and soon being two different things.

Scenario 1: hit peak oil in 5 years, hit basically no oil in another 5 years.

Scenario 2: hit peak oil in 50 years, hit basically no oil in another 50 years.

Scenario 3: hit peak oil in 5 years, hit basically no oil in another 50 years.

Scenario 4 hit peak oil in 50 years, hit basically no oil in another 5 years.

Only scenario 1 worries me. And I think it is the least likely scenario.

I think #2 or #4 are more likely. I think oil reserves are effectively unlimited right now. Not easy oil reserves. But oil reserves plus some new technology. We already know of a bunch of marginal oil reserves like tar sands that are crappy but semi unlimited compared to current consumption rates.

I might be horribly off base in my assumptions. Willing to be corrected if I'm very wrong on those assumptions.

The fusion technology feels closer than 20 years. Ten years feels too optimistic. 30 years and something has gone horribly wrong in society or technology.

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Sometimes I forget how much of a different information world that I seem to live in than a large part of this forum.

Most of the Motte (and the internet as a whole) are so divorced from any extractive industry that they’re like the kid from Deadwood: “Peaches come from a can. A man in a factory put them there”

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metal supplies that we do not have on earth (Simon Michaux calculated that current estimated lithium reserves are not sufficient to even replace the global fleet of personal transportation vehicles with electric cars

So we'll transition to sodium ion batteries eventually? CATL is supposed to begin mass producing them in December this year, with a broadly comparable energy density to LFPs.

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If you're an AI maximalist, then anything that doesn't happen before AGI is basically meaningless: Climate change, peak oil, demographic collapse, etc.

The singularity hinges on the implicit assumption that there is some level of intelligence where you can think your way out of the laws of physics and thermodynamics.

I don't know if I count as an AI "maximalist", though I'm definitely of the opinion that AGI is likely and more imminent than 95% of the population. I still don't think it's guaranteed and have sufficient uncertainty that it's worth making some investment in mundane infrastructure and mitigation. You know, global warming (which is not existential anyway), space exploration yada yada.

I think that philosophy is silly. AI is still going to be materially constrained. The energy has to come from somewhere.

Chess.com has now concluded the Super PogChamps series where content creators play each other in a tournament to find a winner. Each content creator is teamed with a higher level player for chess coaching and game preparation. The Super PogChamps series is slightly different from the normal PogChamps series because the players are not beginners but much stronger. The previous PogChamps 6 series was marred in controversy when Dr Lupo was caught blatantly cheating after he blundered his queen in the opening (https://www.pcgamer.com/games/drlupo-admits-to-cheating-in-usd100-000-online-chess-tournament-faces-brutal-backlash-from-reddit-dude-went-from-whats-a-horsey-to-i-can-see-15-moves-ahead-in-2-minutes/). Though, I think the consensus position is that Dr Lupo cheated in other games previous to the queen blunder but it was less obvious.

Samay Raina (1728 elo) playing from India early in the morning was a surprise winner in the Super PogChamps series after clean sheeting the group round 10-0 and then overcoming two stronger players Andrea Botez (1997 elo) and Sardoche (2039 elo). Apparently, Samay might be considered under-rated and had been previously rated ~1900 in rapid on chess.com about 6 months ago. Also, its important to note that the coaching and preparation can make a big difference in a players performance when they are not at the elite level because with the correct prep you can be playing the first 10 moves or so as good as an elite player would. Samay Raina is also heavily involved in promoting chess on Youtube to Indians so you would expect he would face strong incentives to not cheat because the reputational cost would be significant if he was caught. He has also donated the prize money from his PogChamps win to a chess charity so he has not directly benefited financially from his PogChamps win.

For prize events chess.com has a special anti-cheating software called 'Proctor' (https://www.chess.com/proctor) which it can require competitors to install and run on their machines. However, it looks like for PogChamps there was no requirement for Proctor to be used according to the Proctor web page (this might be incorrect but its to the best of my knowledge). I'm not sure what steps were taken during the Super PogChamps series to stop cheating. It's possible that chess.com still required a live feed of multiple camera angles and a screen share and this would have made it almost impossible for someone to cheat.

The opening play in this first game from white between Samay and Botez showed some unprincipled decisions from Samay causing his position to blow up (https://youtube.com/watch?v=uzUyXmK_u-w&t=14885). For example on move 3 he exchanged the bishop for the knight and according to the engine this gives black a small advantage in the opening. Generally exchanging knights for bishops is not considered good. However, sometimes the position will demand that such a thing should occur. It's not completely terrible here because while white concedes the bishop pair black has doubled pawns but i think the idea is very dubious unless it was specific preparation. I think it was unlikely it was prep because a few moves later white plays d4 destabilising the knight on c3 which could be now be pinned to the king by black with Bb4. Also, there is now no dark squared bishop for white to help break the pin because it was previously exchanged for the knight! Botez ended up wining this by converting the position to a rook end game up two pawns and then was able to eventually promote a pawn and win the game.

In the second game Samay is again caught out in the opening and quickly loses a pawn (https://youtube.com/watch?v=uzUyXmK_u-w&t=16650) but this is more due to Andrea playing a sharp line and Samay making a tactical error rather than a positional mistake like in the first game. The position becomes complicated but then Andrea makes a huge blunder that Samay was able able to take advantage of and after all the trades be up a rook. In Samay's defence c5 which is the move that made the blunder from Botez possible is considered a bad from the engine and a player at his level should be able to find the tactic that wins material after Botez made the blunder.

The second game feels a lot like the games from this person (https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/live/144499596120/review) who was banned for fair play violations. This person that was banned for fair play often makes weird moves in the opening that normal strong human players would not do, then play a bunch of normal moves (not top engine lines or anything very strong) and their opponent eventually blunders and they are able to capitalise and win. If you look at this cheater's games I feel they are very weird but its not obvious the player is cheating. Maybe some of the moves have 'inconsistent' strength but I think that is expected at the rating level this player was playing at. But maybe the cheating is more obvious to someone who is a stronger chess player. And when you play someone like this, unless they make a very non-human move your take-away from the game is I was better then I blundered and I lost it doesn't even come into the picture that your opponent may have cheated.

When it comes to Samay's play in the Andrea game he might be weaker in the opening but because he has stronger tactical vision in the middle game he is better able to create opportunities and capitalise on his opponents mistakes. For example in the third game Andrea missed multiple opportunities that would have likely won her the game if she took advantage of them. My guess is its probably impossible to know if Samay cheated in PogChamps if he did because it was not in a blatant way and there is probably not enough games to identify subtle cheating.

For prize events chess.com has a special anti-cheating software called 'Proctor' (https://www.chess.com/proctor) which it can require competitors to install and run on their machines.

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.

It's possible that chess.com still required a live feed of multiple camera angles and a screen share and this would have made it almost impossible for someone to cheat.

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.

Ah yes, good ol' cheater vibrating buttplug, so you can be both Fake AND Gay.

even an advice of just three bits ("move left rook") per move

That's quite a bit more than three bits. Two for direction and three or four for the piece.

A bigger problem is making that information reliably detectable by the player without alerting anyone else. Remember, the player can't run advanced signal processing algorithms to dig out hidden information from below the noisefloor and is presumably surrounded by "hostile" actors who are on the lookout for any such information. The hostile actors don't even need to be able to decode the information, just detect that there may be such information transmitted.

That's quite a bit more than three bits. Two for direction and three or four for the piece.

If you want perfect information, yes. But to gain an edge you do not need that. Enumerate all pieces by their starting row from 0 to 7. Have the oracle figure out what a player with a given rating would would move each piece.

"If I tell this player to move the their queen (or queen's pawn, if that looks more plausible for them), does this have a better expected outcome than if I tell them to move their light-squared bishop (or its pawn)?"

Again, this has limitations. The player needs to be a fairly decent chess player. And a decent chess engine would still totally crush them, because the cheating player would be limited to fairly obvious moves. "Sacrifice your queen here for a decisive advantage ten moves down the line" is not a strategy you could communicate in three bits.

But it would probably make the cheater significantly stronger.

I do not have a good example for a channel which can communicate three bits but not five, though.

Remember, the player can't run advanced signal processing algorithms to dig out hidden information from below the noisefloor and is presumably surrounded by "hostile" actors who are on the lookout for any such information.

Sure. On the other hand, humans are also really got at filtering out irrelevant information. Luckily, sound is rather obvious (especially if your baseline is complete silence instead of what you get in a football stadium), and players do not have a lot in their field of view which can be controlled by third parties.

My gut feeling that the optimum for in-person cheating would be to have a computer implanted into your body. Some 28 years after Deep Blue, a chess engine which could defeat mere humans should fit in your guts. A bidirectional connection with a few baud should be well within technical reach, you have all sorts of nerves just waiting to be tapped. Unless you are checking if your cheater is sleeping with a Qi charger on their belly or put them into an imaging scanner, you are unlikely to catch them.

Wouldn't it be one bit for direction? You're usually going to only have two rooks, which are either on different files (in which case just left 0 and right 1 is sufficient) or not (in which case the same 0 and 1 can be reused for top and bottom).

Is this in the right thread?

The term "pogchamp" is culture war-loaded itself but not in a way that seems relevant here.

Oh, sweet Netflix. They got to the tippy top just at the very end. The breaking news today originally came to me in the form of Netflix buying HBO. No, no. They're buying all of Warner Bros too: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/media/netflix-to-buy-warner-bros-rcna247510

Why not? I just spent hours a few days ago on the draft of a post about how Netflix was blowing absurd amounts of cash on in-house programming. Why not buy yourself the biggest diamond mine right around the time that pocket sized diamond factories start popping up everywhere?

The original target of my ire was Frankenstein. I hated it because I have lost the childlike innocence required to sit through a Guillermo del Toro movie and like it. I grew up, he didn't; or worse, he did and still has to make this shit. At least I can fold laundry while watching it. Which is, by the way, the average streaming viewing experience. Which is now the average "high" culture consumption experience. Phones being the lower version and garnering more and more of that sweet eyeball juice called money every day.

Instead, I decided to see what I could make with Veo for around $200 dollars. I present it to you, the discerning culture war audience:

The real losers here are movie theaters.

Your grandchildren (if you even get to have any lol) will be completely perplexed that driving multiple miles to watch a movie in a big room with dozens of strangers was not only a thing that happened sometimes, but was one of the nation's most popular passtimes.

The real losers here are movie theaters.

Theaters are businesses operating under these constraints:

  • Home AV setups are very good at their price point
  • 95% of the market is there for entertainment. They do not care about quality of the content the way the content creators do. They'd prefer to be watching on their phones or talking about the movie. The big screen is cool because you can really see the nipples. Otherwise, nobody cares.
  • Social mores have changed. You can invite that sweet young thing to your residence unchaperoned where you can get jerked off in privacy. We live in fallen times. Handjobbing in the back row of a movie is suddenly déclassé. People are no longer civilized enough to discretely watch - now they'll make you internet famous and get you on a registry.

Theaters have been doomed for quite some time.

That said: I make AI videos, I like AI content, I went to the movies last night to watch a terrible Daniel Radcliffe musical. Humans are sticky.

It'll be for film buffs to watch classics. Instead of pretentious people watching a movie they've already seen in a freezing muddy park, they'll do it in a nice climate controlled(and dry) theater.

I'd be surprised if we don't still have at least discount theatres in twenty years playing movies that have been out on 'conventional' digital services for months or years -- without the weird cost behaviors downstream of the studio system, movie theaters have sizable fixed asset costs and trivial operating costs -- but they're definitely going to be labors of love.

Weird that it's become one the more implausible Mystery Science Theatre 3000 assumptions. Or, hell, Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death bits.

There was a communal aspect to it that I still miss—especially for comedies.

I'm seeing a lot of indications though Paramount is going to move for a hostile takeover. Trump is friendly to Ellisons and hostile to Netflix. I would put it at least 33% chance Paramount does hostile takeover instead of Netflix.

I think the market is less friendly to the Ellisons on WBD. Netflix was willing to pay so much, and to offer much more in a hostile scenario they’ll need to find more lenders willing to lend against Oracle. Oracle is the single most exposed business to the data center (I won’t say AI) bubble, colossally indebted, CDS spreads are insane given its profile, it has $100bn in debt (the largest non-bank issuer in the US), and the share price is down 50% in three months.

This would be great for me; Netflix is the *only* streaming service that I don't already get for free through my employer (see username)

Pretty much all of the others are affiliated with legacy media publishers/broadcasters (ie HBO and Warner up until this buy-out) and in turn have relationships with the cable companies.

I will be very disappointed if I lose my free HBO lol

I've certainly heard rumors of this, so I decided to check Polymarket. Turns out it's over. Looks like capital markets are still superior for truthseeking, since WBD stock was not trading at the aquisition price on Friday. Now I have to do merger arbitrage math.

I was thinking about buying some shares of Paramount at that price but the conditions:

This market will resolve to "Yes" if it is announced that Warner Bros. Discovery will be, has been, or is being acquired by or merged with the listed entity by 11:59 PM ET on May 31, 2026. Otherwise, this market will resolve to "No".

Yes a hostile takeover is going to take longer than that. If it were by May 2027 Paramount would be trading much higher. Market makes sense with these conditions where it resolves with the "expected" company.

An official announcement will qualify for a "Yes" resolution, regardless of whether the merger or acquisition is ultimately completed.

It isn’t AI that is the main threat but TikTok. How many hours of movies do people consume annually? How many hours of TikTok?

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.

I did a little look into Tiktok economics. In the West, it's smaller than Netflix in revenue and unprofitable (expansion, content moderation, various legal issues). In China it's gigantic and has a huge e-commerce wing too, Douyin is far more profitable than Netflix. So Tiktok (the whole thing globally with both names) is already much more profitable than Netflix.

The moat is the network effects. If you want people to see your short form video, it’s on TikTok.

The problem with TikTok is that it's hard to monetize. People aren't going to watch a minute worth of ads before a 30 second video. Adam Ragusea talked about this back when he was still doing his podcast. A listener asked if he had ever thought about producing content for the platform, and apparently some group had paid him to create it, but it didn't get very far because they couldn't figure out how to make any money off of it. His content obviously isn't ideal for short videos (at least without being reductive to the point of pissing some people off), but the point remains.

People don’t stay on TikTok for only 30 seconds. My guess is they watch numerous videos. You could have some short ads.

Ada per video and videos per ad are two entirely different economic propositions.

Sure. But when videos are 30 seconds long, you could have one ad per ten videos and still end up with a decent ad return.

Also ads shown to customers are not the only important monetization stream.

It only takes a click to upload content to a new platform. It takes money, but a surprisingly small amount to convince creators to crosspost to your thing

All-time win for David Zaslav. Sold the company at triple the market’s valuation a few months ago. Saddle the cable TV assets with impossible debt, spin them out for almost nothing, ride off into the sunset. Even Patrick Drahi would struggle to be this smart.

Will AI replace all human-created media? I doubt it. I think there will still be a market for camera-filmed media, albeit a smaller one. People watch thousands of hours really bad reality TV where the sole attraction is that it’s real people involved, for example. Maybe movies will die out and it’ll just be the stage left, or hobbyists. Either way, this would have been a bad deal even without generative AI, and it’s an especially bad one with it.

Some funny comments about a Warner buyout spelling the end of a big tech bubble for the second time, too.

Saddle the cable TV assets with impossible debt, spin them out for almost nothing, ride off into the sunset.

I know I could just go ask ChatGPT or something, but does anyone want to throw out even just a few sentences on how this is legal? What measures prevent every company from just pinning their debts on spinoffs meant to die, and why did those measures fail here?

Creditors did approve over the summer, as (of course) they have to.

Why did they approve? The debt was junk rated, with a negative outlook, trading well below par. Absent a spinoff there would have been further painful restructuring anyway. Some (about 25%) would end up with the profitable streaming business now being acquired by Netflix. And, most importantly, WBD agreed as part of the plan to a major debt buyback plan that made creditors happy.

In the end, approving was the least bad option for them.

Banks have to agree (generally for some inducement). You can’t just put all of your debt in a legal entity and spin it out thereby eliminating your debt. Banks aren’t stupid. Likewise you can’t strip assets out of the banking group without consent (again banks aren’t stupid).

The other poster is making a value judgement that the banks are making a bad deal. The banks don’t share the pessimism. We will see who is right.

The official SEC filing says:

Prior to the consummation of the Merger [with Netflix], WBD [Warner Bros. Discovery] and a newly formed subsidiary of WBD (“SpinCo”) will enter into a Separation and Distribution Agreement (the “Separation and Distribution Agreement”), pursuant to which WBD will, among other things, engage in an internal reorganization, including the Holdco Merger, whereby it will transfer to SpinCo its Global Linear Networks business and certain other assets, and SpinCo will assume from WBD certain liabilities associated with such business (the “Separation”). WBD will retain the Retained Business, and all other assets and liabilities not transferred to SpinCo, including WBD’s Streaming & Studios businesses.

Presumably, the devil is in the details of "associated with such business".

I do wonder how AI will affect these types of things. AI has been better at chess than humans for quite some time, but still people care much more about human chess than matches between different chess engines. I'm not predicting it will turn out this way everywhere, but I can imagine a world in which a similar dynamic happens in a lot of creative media where people really do prefer it to be more human. For me personally simply the knowledge that something is AI generated will cause something to feel less meaningful. But I suppose my media consumption is rather far removed from the median to begin with, so my feelings on the matter might very well not be representative of wider trends.

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.

Even if AI can act, it can not match the real thing in scandals and messy divorces.

It's interesting because this is a double-edged sword. Messy scandals and divorces indisputably garner publicity for actors and by extension the movies they star in. On the other hand, actors being human means they sometimes have to be sent to rehab to dry out (holding up production on their latest movie and costing the studio millions), or get arrested for sexual harassment or domestic abuse (meaning the studio has to just sit on their latest movie until the scandal blows over), or simply express a controversial opinion in an interview that goes viral.

There's no doubt that there are financial benefits associated with actors being flawed, imperfect human beings, but there are also costs. I have no doubt that there are individual films which have posted a loss specifically because one of the lead actors did something suspect in their private life. I think it would be legitimately difficult to definitively say whether the fact of actors having private lives outside of their work is a net help or a net hindrance to movie studios.

People watch competitive swimming even though the median shark would swim circles around the fastest humans.

I know this isn't the point, but I'd way prefer competitive shark swimming

Ah, the logic behind greyhound races.

I feel like the best, if imperfect, comparison is to look at how the art community reacted to the development of photography (ironically here including film). Maybe it did decimate the ranks of realist oil planters (sad, actually), but I'd hardly say the art world hasn't survived.

That said, photography led to a lot of less-photoreal art styles that I won't claim to be a huge fan of (see "modern art"). I do see a human-rendered painting of, say, a landscape to be more interesting than a large photo print, but I do see lots of photos on walls too.

Isn't that tied to the AI content just being bad? The issue I'm having is much like with JJ's mysterybox style story telling, there is no point, it's just narratively stringing people along. It works for a while but then people get pissed.

If there was a point and it wasn't completely inane then I'd wager almost no-one would care about whether something was AI made or not. The amount of people seeking out (good) human performances of music and theatre is microscopic, even when it's free!

It's easy to grandstand about not consuming AI slop (not saying you are) when it's uniformly abject shit.

I am a fan of multiple book series featuring talking cats, eg Dungeon Crawler Carl, Craig Alanson's Convergence. However current CGI techniques are expensive and the thespian skills of cats are famously limited.

So I am very excited about the possibilities that AI is creating for feline main characters.

It should be possible to do a scene with a puppet or very rough cgi and just have AI replace it with a realistic cat.

It should be possible to do a scene with a puppet or very rough cgi and just have AI replace it with a realistic cat.

WTF?! How did they get the cat to do that??

Off-topic, but I recently came across Fritz Leiber's short story Space-Time for Springers. It's about a super-intelligent kitten who can't yet speak but longs to become a man. Very good (though melancholic) if you like cat literature. AGI will have been achieved once it figures out how to adapt it to screen.

AGI will have been achieved once it figures out how to adapt it to screen.

anime_butterfly_boy.jpg Is this AGI? https://youtube.com/watch?v=8opC-VYGiTc

I'm genuinely unsure. I didn't read the story you linked to try to avoid influencing Opus 4.5 as much as possible. I did see from the text it loaded that it involves a cat and I do indeed see a cat in the video, so benchmark score of 1/1?

I'd call it a failure. But that's not because of failing to understand the story or ugly visuals, but just because it's a really hard story to adapt to the screen--I'm skeptical a human could do any better (maybe what I proposed is a benchmark for ASI, not AGI).

The core difficulty is that the story is very deeply intertwined with Gummitch's internal dialog. That's hard to represent even for a human character, but for a cat, you're likely to land in ridiculous territory. The video sidesteps this by using music to narrate what's going on. But, something about it just comes off as a saccharine commercial.

That said, I appreciate the attempt!

I agree that a voiceover or some change to the lyrics would have helped a lot. I feel like this was less of an adaptation and more of a companion piece for people who are already familiar with the story. If I had to guess at the story from the video it'd be something like: a playful kitten is growing up and wants to eat with the family instead of the older cats, there's something wrong with the daughter, she tries to kill the family's new baby which the now older kitten / cat feels obligated to protect, the cat protects the baby by some sort of magical healing of the daughter(?) that robs the cat of its magic(?) and now it has to live out its life like an ordinary, older cat.

Which, while not a terrible story, strikes me as unlikely to be difficult to adapt. I'm guessing there's a lot about the magic cat and the little girl's problem that's being glossed over.

In fairness to Opus 4.5, I did tell it that I only had the money / time for a roughly 3 minute video. We still ended up going over - I would have trimmed Act 1 considerably. I think that would have helped cut the sweetness.

Opus 4.5 brought a little sugar to the party (example video generation prompt: "1960s kitchen table from low angle. Two adults pour coffee, hands and cups visible, conversation implied. Warm, hazy.") but the real Hallmark schoolmarm here was Veo. I did have to try several rounds of generations and tweak the prompts for about 10% of the shots - enough that I considered just using a black background and "[Veo refusal]" caption. It may not surprise you to learn that Google is extremely sensitive about generating clips of sad looking little girls in their bedrooms.

If anyone's interested in the process / instructions for making your own videos on topics of your choice, here's the transcript of the Opus 4.5 conversation showing how it developed the story / prompts / etc.: https://claude.ai/share/93589514-db93-4ffb-aa7d-579f28154a38

Thanks for the challenge and the feedback. It was fun.

That was lovely, thank you. I love his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stuff, looks like I should read the rest. Now that I think of it, kind of surprised there hasn't been recent adaptations of his work.

I am a fan of multiple book series featuring talking cats, eg Dungeon Crawler Carl, Craig Alanson's Convergence.

Hey, hey, hey! It's the dog that talks in the Convergence series! Mister Boots is a grimlik. Okay, okay, he does talk, and he looks like a huge cat, if cats had three toes, but still. Grimlik. Completely different!

Why the puppet or rough CGI? I’m able to do one of these videos in about three hours now.

Please send me a rough set of beats and characters you want for a 20-30 second scene with your weird cat people. It can’t be sexually explicit, nothing too reliant on precise dialogue or character direction.

After I finish my next video I’ll post a link to yours.

The idea with rough CGI or a puppet is to give precise character direction and control over timing of the dialogue. The puppet also gives actors something to act against.

I want to keep actors and make production very smooth. Let everyone in the production have a decent idea how a scene will look on air by looking at the dailies.

Why do you think you need that level of control? While you're waiting for exact precision I've finished another video. It helps to work with the form. https://youtube.com/watch?v=TSiF2niMGpI

Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait

Series Index:

  1. Intro
  2. Downtown
  3. Strip District
  4. North Shore
  5. South Side
  6. Hill District: Lower Hill
  7. Hill District: Middle Hill
  8. Hill District: The Projects

Parts 6–8: The Hill's Environs

It's been nearly 8 months since the last installment and I apologize for the slow pace of these. As usual, I hope to get these out faster in the future, but I have limited Motte time and these take a while to research and write. The major roadblock though is that the reason I'm here is mainly to comment on regular posts which have a shelf life of about a day, and I'd rather dedicate what little time I have to that than a vanity project. ANYWAY, we'll finally start to inch out of the Hill District by looking at three neighborhoods that are historically associated with it to varying degrees but really aren't part of it. Sugar Top has the biggest claim to being part of the Hill, but its residents are better off and insist that it isn't. Uptown was always sort of the Hill but not really and still sort of is but not really, and Polish Hill was in the same boat as Sugar Top at one time but has now forged its own wholly separate identity.

6. Uptown: Forcing the Issue

Pittsburgh’s Uptown neighborhood is loosely bordered by I-579 on the west, the Birmingham Bridge on the East, and the Monongahela River on the south, though there is very little development on the river itself due to an abrupt elevation change. On the north the boundary is more controversial; the official dividing line is right down the middle of 5th Ave., but a more realistic boundary would include the entirety of 5th plus a few streets that run parallel. The name is also controversial. The aforementioned elevation change means that the neighborhood sits high above the Mon, giving the neighborhood its official name, Bluff. But most Pittsburghers only consider the Bluff to be the highest land in this area. The Bluff itself is entirely occupied by the Duquesne University campus, which is practically a world unto itself, except where it spills down the hill onto Forbes Ave. The area east of Jumonville St. is also known as Soho, though this designation is mostly only used among old timers (it does appear on some maps). To most Pittsburgher’s, though, the entire area is just Uptown, and the local community organization has installed “Welcome to Uptown” signs that only add to the confusion.

The western part of the neighborhood is dominated by institutional uses. In addition to Duquesne University, it includes the Allegheny County Jail (though this is isolated from the rest of the neighborhood and is only included because it doesn’t fit anywhere else), Mercy Hospital, and PPG Paints Arena. While the area around PPG includes a few businesses that largely cater to the pregame hockey crowd, most of the commercial corridor on 5th and Forbes sits underutilized, and the rest of the neighborhood is residential. It was historically a rowhouse neighborhood, but decades of disinvestment have left much of it blighted. Hundreds of historic rowhouses have been demolished at a time when rowhouse neighborhoods in other parts of the city were being revitalized. This presents a conundrum — a neighborhood that’s located on a well-traveled corridor between Pennsylvania’s second and third largest business districts (Downtown and Oakland), and contains a mid-size university, a major hospital, and a hockey arena, should by all accounts be one of the most desirable parts of the city. Yet it’s in pretty rough shape.

Like most of the rest of the city, Uptown was initially an immigrant community, mostly Jews and Eastern Europeans, who came to work in J&L Steel's Soho Works. Fifth Ave. was a thriving commercial district supporting this community. Again, as with countless neighborhoods in cities across America, it started to go in decline after WWII, as everyone who could afford it moved to the suburbs. The population gradually got smaller and poorer. While Uptown was spared the rioting that devastated most of the Hill in the Spring of 1968, it wasn't spared the disinvestment that occurred thereafter. As the heroin trade took over the devastated corners of Center Ave. in the Hill, street prostitution, which had long been established in that area, moved strongly into the Fifth/Forbes corridor. When Pittsburgh hosted the 1979 meeting of the US Conference of Mayors, the Mayor of Milwaukee described Fifth Ave. as the most frightening slum he had ever seen. Most of the redevelopment was at this point focused on the North Side; the destruction of the Lower Hill and subsequent community opposition meant developers wouldn't touch the area with a 99 ½ foot pole. It wsan't until the late 2000s and the construction of the new Penguins arena and anticipated Lower Hill redevelopment that anyone gave Uptown a second thought.

Part of the answer can also be found in the person of Sal Williams. Mr. Williams was an Uptown native who had since decamped to the suburbs (and had mafia connections; his brother was “Godfather of Pittsburgh” Junior Williams) and spent decades buying up properties and demolishing the buildings to build parking lots. At one point his company owned something like 150 parcels in the neighborhood, and he seemingly had no interest in selling to developers. Williams’s apparent strategy was to continually acquire land and make money off of surface parking for Penguins games and downtown commuters until he had obtained a critical mass, then sell it at an inflated price for some large-scale development. Former councilman Sala Udin, whose district included Uptown, has said that he regrets not having pushed harder for a proposed 2000 moratorium on building demolitions and new surface parking.

There’s more to the story, of course. For his part, Williams always claimed that he wasn’t in the parking lot business. He loved Uptown and wanted to be part of the revitalization; there was simply no developer interest, and parking lots allowed him to pay the bills while he waited. Undin’s successor, Tonya Payne, also praised Williams. She noted that the city and Urban Redevelopment Authority owned more land in Uptown than he did, but didn’t have the resources to maintain the properties or demolish the structures. Public ownership of distressed properties is effectively a black hole that the city has spent decades trying to unsuccessfully resolve; Payne said that when she was president of the local community group they would often turn to Williams to purchase crack houses and other undesirable properties before they ended up in the city’s hands. She also noted that he indeed had renovated properties and sold to developers, and that the alternative to his parking lots would be overgrown lots full of trash. People later said that he was willing to sell his properties for tax assessed value to anyone willing to develop them, even if it meant selling at a loss, but there were few takers. One could cynically point to the thousands that Williams gave to Payne’s campaign to unseat Udin, but the woman did have a point.

The bigger problem Uptown has had to deal with, though, is the perception that it’s part of the Hill District. While Uptown was historically a white area, it was nonetheless considered an extension of the Hill, and it declined around the same time and in much the same fashion as the rest of the Hill. While there’s little violence, the neighborhood has plenty of lower-level stuff like prostitution, drug dealing, and car break-ins that make it less-than-ideal. There’s been increasing pressure on the police to simply crack down on the kind of behavior that wouldn’t be tolerated in more affluent areas, but even 100% success does little to change perceptions.

For its part, the city has started to address these issues by effectively eliminating zoning restrictions. Setback requirements have been all but eliminated, mixed-use is encouraged, and height restrictions are so generous that no realistic development is going to exceed them, and even then there are exceptions if they include a certain amount of affordable housing. The result has been several new developments in the past ten years, including renovation of the old 5th Avenue School, which had been a vacant eyesore, into apartments. Several more residential projects are underway, and some of the apartments are supposedly renting for $2900/month.

But aside from a few luxury apartment developments, there has been surprisingly little additional development, and the ground-level retail that has been built has been slow to fill in. $2900/month may not seem like a lot if you're from New York or California, and I doubt the average apartment is priced this high, but it's shockingly expensive considering the lack of surrounding amenities. I get the impression that these exist primarily for foreign doctors working at Mercy Hospital who rent based on proximity, at least until they've lived in the area long enough to realize there are better options.

Given the precarious state of development and history of land speculation in an area that is unquestionably well-located, it would seem that Uptown's history is a good argument for Georgist land policy. If you look closer, however, it seems more like an argument against such policy. As Ms. Payne noted, speculators like Mr. Williams don't end up with large vacant holdings in a competitive market. Sal Williams bought derelict properties for next to nothing because he was the only one willing to take them; it was either that or abandonment, which after a long, laborious process would end up in the black hole of city or URA ownership. Once that happens, getting anything built means getting it past the mayor, council, the URA, and every single demand of every single community group.

If the powers that be decided that a land value tax were the best way to ensure that speculators developed this high-value land (and current tax assessments do value it highly), it would lead to less speculation, but that doesn't necessarily mean more development. It could mean that more properties would end up in the hands of the city or the URA, and all of the nonsense that that entails. The obvious retort to this is that it doesn't work unless we also strip away all of the nonsense, and I agree, but this could also mean that it's the nonsense that's preventing development and the taxation system has nothing to do with it.

But even if you do strip away the nonsense, well, you can lead a horse to water… If Uptown is a run down area that's "theoretically" primed for gentrification based on the opinions of people who don't live there, then the land is only theoretically valuable. There's no guarantee that any developer is going to make money on a project no matter how much red tape you strip away. Red tape is largely just a red herring used to distract the public from the fact that these developers either have no money or aren't willing to spend it. I had a conversation with a URA project manager back in March who told me that the reason these projects seem to end up in development hell is largely because the developers are relying on other people to pay for them. If you take your project to the URA and have the money in the bank or financing already committed it would take an Act of God for them to stop you. Sure, you might have to kick a couple of bucks toward a pet project that some community organization wants, but that's only in rare cases and it's more for PR than a strict necessity. The upshot with respect to Uptown is that it's obvious that for all the hype, developers still see the area as too risky to sink a ton of money into when there are safer bets elsewhere. Two residential projects that have already been approved are on indefinite hold due to projected cost overruns. Meanwhile, the speculators who own the parking lots are making steady income and, with everyone telling them how much their property is worth, they aren't going to let it go for cheap. And $2900/month apartments notwithstanding, anyone with legs or a car can see that, even outside the hockey arena, the area isn't exactly bumping.

Neighborhood Grade: Early Gentrification. Lots of concept articles and long term plans, and just enough new development to convince people that things are moving along, but there's still not enough that anyone wants to go there. It may all be a mirage, but 20 years ago, we didn't even have that. This evaluation may make me seem pessimistic, but I do think that the neighborhood's location and the commitment from residents and the city mean that Uptown will eventually turn the corner, if it hasn't happened already. The question is how much of the old neighborhood will be left standing when it happens.

7. Sugar Top: No Bursting This Bubble

This area goes by a variety of names, none of which is dispositive. The area is officially Upper Hill, but few people call it that, and the official boundaries cover areas that don't quite mesh as a single cohesive neighborhood. Historically it was known as Herron Hill, and still includes the Herron Reservoir, but that's a vestige of the past that also included nearby Polish Hill. The real issue boils down to whether one wants to think of the area as part of the Hill District; residents who want to dissociate themselves from it insist that it's actually a separate area called Schenley Heights. I've chosen Sugar Top because it's the name locals seem to use regardless of their opinion on the matter.

As the name would suggest, Sugar Top is the highest part of the hill. Its western boundary is at Herron Ave., which separates it from the rest of the Hill District, and its eastern boundary is where the land drops off sharply towards Oakland. To the north the Upper Hill officially ends at Bigelow Blvd., but I'm cutting off everything above the Webster Ave. corridor because it's disconnected from the street grid and culturally part of Polish Hill. I'm also putting the southern boundary at the VA Hospital, to include a couple streets that are officially part of the Terrace Village project neighborhood but aren't part of the project and culturally fit in more with Sugar Top.

Sugar Top is a working class black area. In the 1800s it was the site of a village called Minersville that predictably centered around coal mining. Little of this neighborhood survives, except for the old cemetery and an old farmhouse that currently sits vacant but that some group is trying to save. As development crept up the hill in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the rural buildings were demolished in favor of more typically urban typologies. The area is small, but the housing stock is diverse, ranging from streetcar suburban to modest rowhouses. Some of the last blocks to be built out were along the aforementioned reservoir, and the area has a suburban feel and incredible views.

As I mentioned in previous installments, the Hill District historically existed on a continuum, with its poorest residents living in the Lower Hill adjacent to Downtown and the neighborhood getting progressively wealthier as you went east. Well, this was about as east as you could get and still be in the Hill District. It had a leafy, pastoral feel that the rest of the Hill lacked. In 1940 this was a predominantly white area, but over a third of its residents were black. Countless black professionals—barbers, teachers, lawyers, ministers, doctors—began to settle there. This part of Herron Hill became Sugar Top, the place a black family moved when they made it. While the white population gradually left, Sugar Top was able to maintain its cachet well into the 1970s.

While this cachet no longer exists among the black community, Sugar Top has nonetheless managed to largely avoid the blight and crime that plagued the rest of the Hill. The biggest issue is that residents continue to age and haven't been replaced by a new cohort of black professionals. Like Uptown, its reputation as part of the Hill holds it back from investment. Unlike Uptown, it's isolated and lacks any kind of business district. There was once a small one on Herron Ave., but it was mostly destroyed in the 1968 riots, and only scattered remnants exist today. Back in 2009 one of the community groups produced a plan for its revitalization, but nothing has happened, and the link I found to the plan is dead.

Neighborhood Grade: Stable. This has been a quiet, working class black area for decades, and there's little sign of that changing. There were some heavy breathing moments in the 90s and 2000s when it looked like gang violence from the Hill was creeping in, but those were just that, moments, and crime remains low. It seems unlikely to decline further absent any major changes. Most of the housing is owner-occupied. The closure and redevelopment of Terrace Village and the overall reduction of crime in the Hill means there's less potential for spillover, and what crime remains is centered around Bedford Dwellings, which is on the chopping block. Yet this is a double-edged sword; as crime in the rest of the Hill has gone down and areas closer to Downtown have been redeveloped, those areas become more desirable to local residents, and Sugar Top's cachet is lowered even further. Compounding the problem is the bottom-up approach the city has taken when it comes to redeveloping the Hill. With new development starting downtown and slowly creeping into increasingly less desirable areas, it will be a long time before new investment reaches the area. Combine this with the deficiencies I've already outlined, and it's understandable why the long-term outlook isn't great. This isn't to say that the area is going downhill fast or anything, but aspiring black professionals will either move into the newer developments or leave the area entirely, leaving Sugar Top for the black tow truck drivers and LPNs who have kids to raise and got a good deal on grandma's house when she went to the home.

8. Polish Hill: "Not Fully Gentrified"

Polish Hill is the final neighborhood we will be discussing before we (finally!) leave the Greater Hill District. It's a relatively small neighborhood and has the distinction of being the only area on the Hill that is majority white and the only area that has seen significant investment in recent years. The borders I'm using are slightly different that the official ones but mostly comport with them. To the north the practical border is the East Busway. To the west it's where Brereton and Stockholm streets dead end, and to the east it's at the Bloomfield Bridge. The only truly big change I made was to the south, where I include the predominantly white areas south of Bigelow. Polish Hill was rural until the 1870s, when a small community called Millwood formed at the bottom of Herron Ave. neat the railroad tracks. This crept up the hillside beginning around 1885, as a large influx of immigrants from—you guessed it—Poland arrived, though plenty of Irish, German and black families settled in the area as well. As was typical of Pittsburgh hillside neighborhoods, wood was the building material of choice for residential structures, though atypical for Pittsburgh, many of these were purpose-built as multi-family tenements. For the first half of the 20th century, the area was known as Herron Hill, along with what is now officially the Upper Hill, as that area was still majority white.

While the neighborhood did not experience any appreciable white flight, by the late 1960s it was nonetheless in dire economic straits. Pittsburgh was selected to participate in the Model Cities program, a Great Society-era anti-poverty experiment that lasted from 1966 to 1974. By this point, the enthusiasm for postwar urban renewal projects was losing steam, largely driven by local residents' concerns that it was being driven by distant bureaucrats with little respect for local concerns. Model Cities would allow a greater degree of citizen participation and grassroots involvement. The issue for Polish Hill was that, while it was poor and in need of development, it had no identity apart from the Hill District. There's sporadic use of the name "Polish Hill" to refer to the area prior to this, but it wasn't until around 1968 that it fully developed a separate identity, and the Polish Hill Civic Association was founded in 1969.

The neighborhood's association with Model Cities was contentious, to say the least. The new neighborhood withdrew from the project in 1968 after the Feds rejected all of their proposed program administrators in favor of an outsider (supposedly due to conflicts of interest). That wasn't the end of it, though; when the city officially drew the southern boundary at Bigelow, the white portions south of there came under the aegis of the Hill District's Model Cities program, and HUD sought to build housing what they considered part of their neighborhood. It doesn't appear that these were actually built, and Model Cities was largely considered a failure (the attempts at giving more local control only served to make the bureaucracy more complicated), but the events solidified Polish Hill's identity as a separate area.

I brought this up because the name is more recent that most Pittsburghers think. Most of our geographic names have either been used since time immemorial (the Hill District isn't in need of an origin story) or are obvious fabrications (the North Shore). This is a fabrication that nobody wants to admit was a fabrication because the origins are slightly racist. In fact, the name itself wasn't without controversy. After it started catching on in the early 1970s, police cruisers started bearing the names of their assigned neighborhoods to keep wayward cops from wandering too far afield. Polish-Americans who saw the name "Polish Hill" complained that it was an ethnic slur. Pointing out that the name had been in use for a while and was selected by its residents didn't seem to mollify them.

The neighborhood stayed pretty much the same into the 2000s; white, dumpy, the kind of sketchy place where crime is low statistically but former residents "can tell you stories". It wasn't an obvious spot for gentrification to take hold. There's no real business district, the houses are small and lower quality, and it was so insular that homes rarely came on the market. There were some rentals available, but these only appealed to the kind of punks whose desire for "authenticity" is so strong that they want to wallow in shittiness. But as other parts of the East End started to improve, there was some pressure on the market, and the small town feel and extreme closeness to Downtown (via low-traffic, high-volume Bigelow Blvd, no less), made it desirable. It still remained hard to break into. If you wanted to buy there you had to do so via off-market transaction (know a guy who knows a guy), as the sellers thought no one outside the family would be interested, but this gave the dingy, working-class neighborhood an air of exclusivity. The dam finally broke around 2011, when the old-timers caught on that their humble abodes were in high demand and started selling in droves. The nature of the off-market transactions kept the selling prices almost comically low; well into the 2000s the average price was under $50,000 and was often closer to $30,000. These would dectuple in a decade with the right renovations and appreciate considerably without them provided they weren't gut jobs.

As for the neighborhood itself, as I said, it lacks a true business district, but it's still semi-walkable, with scattered businesses, several of which are trendy. There's a coffee shop, a records store, a comic book store, and several bars. One of these is Gooski's a dank "hipster dive" as I call it (a place with the aesthetics of a dive but craft beer and a trendy clientele). The other is The Rock Room; the best way I can describe it is it's a bar from a 90s movie where the characters have the kind of aesthetic where the 50s are supposed to be cool. Everyone in there is a worse-looking version of Christian Slater's character in True Romance. Brereton St. is the closest thing it has to a main drag, if only because it is home to the aforementioned Gooski's and Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, which is the visual heart of the neighborhood and dominates its modest skyline. The housing stock is mostly these weird "semi-rows" that Pittsburgh seems to have a lot of. They're basically row houses with a small gap in between for the express purpose of making a wall that's impossible to repair or update.

8A. What I Meant by the Subtitle

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette features a local for-sale home in the Real Estate section of each week's Sunday paper, and earlier this year they featured a house that was on the market for $710,000. I've linked to an archived version of the article, but the gist of it is that the owners are doctors from New York City who bought a newly-built contemporary townhouse in 2023 because they thought they would be moving here. Those plans changed, and now, after $50,000 in additional upgrades, they're selling it for what would be the highest price ever paid in Polish Hill for a single residence. The whole thing came across as a bit over the top for most Pittsburghers, but what really set people off was their statement that the area wasn't completely gentrified.

Well, sort-of statement. It's unclear what they actually said because that quote was from the writer, but the wife did say that " I like that — it’s a little edgy, a little rough around the edges, but it’s cool, I like the vibe." The idea that someone would have the gall to list a house for a record-setting price in a working class neighborhood (with the implication that they expected people would pay it) while saying that the area wasn't fully gentrified struck people as ridiculous. Especially when they've seen prices skyrocket in a relatively brief period.

The thing is, though, they're kind of right. First, while the price may not have been justified—it ultimately sold for $690,000, short of the record—the house wasn't typical of the neighborhood. It was built in 2023, is about double the size of most houses in the area, and doesn't have the grey "cheap flip coture" so common in these cases but real, high-end fixtures. It also has a series of decks with incredible views. More importantly, the neighborhood could still improve further. It will never get a true business district, even though it is zoned for it, but I don't consider gentrification to be complete if the renovations are done with cost in mind. Putting vinyl over Inselbric is much different than taking it down to the wood, or replacing the siding with Hardee Board. Vinyl flooring isn't the same as hardwood (especially when the house already has hardwood you don't want to refinish). You get the idea. I imagine that if it were to gentrify completely, it would look similar to Mt. Adams in Cincinnati.

Neighborhood Grade: Heavy gentrification. The future of Polish Hill seems bright, and I can only expect it to get brighter as more homes are renovated. I think prices are going to top off at a lower level than in other parts of the city. Due to small population and geographic isolation it will never be able to develop a true business district, even though it's allowed by zoning. The population was over 3,000 in 1970, and though it's been gaining residents (1,200 in 2010 vs. 1,800 in 2020), declining household size and conversion of apartments back to single family homes will limit this growth, and there isn't much space for new construction. That being said, I'm surprised that this place gentrified at all given its limitations. As one final note, the areas south of Bigelow that aren't officially part of Polish Hill will be completely excluded from this process. The development is sparse and somewhat blighted, almost West Virginia in some places and this may give the best sense of the kind of people who used to live in the rest of the neighborhood.

I've always wanted to properly see Pittsburgh. I think once this series is complete I'll re-read it and take a week or two to hang out there.

Thank you for these. I almost moved to the Pittsburgh area a few months back (suburbs, though, not Pittsburgh proper,) and this series was on my mind.

What stopped you?

Bad work culture at the company I was interviewing at. E.g., every morning, there'd be an all-hands, one-hour meeting where all of the ~50 employees stand in a circle to each give their daily update and the CEO would give personal feedback.

It was in a really nice town, though, and I wouldn't have minded living there.

Which suburb was it, if you don't mind my asking?

Canonsburg, roughly in this area.

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.

I am more interested in the war. Conservative scuffles at universities seem dime-a-dozen at this point, which makes it all the more surprising that this one has climbed out of the Twitter pit to receive national attention. For one, the essay is not particularly high-quality. 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! 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. I've heard some grumblings that the instructor gave this grade specifically because she is trans - so it hurt more, or something - but I think most cis psychology profs these days would have a similar reaction. I think Fulnecky deserved some points, but not many. She lacks one of the most foundational skills a college-level writer needs: adapting your ideas to your audience.

Speculation on Twitter is running wild, suggesting that Fulnecky intentionally submitted a poor essay to gain some conservative street-cred, that her lawyer mother is involved, and plenty of other mental gymnastics. I don't blame the gymnasts - this case has been elevated to levels that are suspiciously unjustified, in my view. The banal reason is that it's easy pickings for conservative commentators who are salivating for any story they can nut-pick to put on the evening news block. But is that really all it takes? Can a religious person do any wrong in the eyes of the New Right? I realize writing this that I sound completely incredulous that the media could blow up a story, but seeing it happen in real-time has been pretty mind boggling. 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).

This is further evidence to me that red-tribers have completely abandoned most institutes of higher education. It's no longer a question of "we must reform the universities and stop them from being ideologically possessed!" but "the universities are ideologically possessed and the only way out is avoidance/destruction." It doesn't help when college graduates seem to be fleeing the red tribe like it's got the plague - it's much easier to prop up a controversy when the remaining red tribers lack the personal experience to vet it properly. 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.

That essay reminded of one of my favorite pieces of writing advice, "How to Say Nothing in 500 Words" by Paul Roberts:

It's Friday afternoon, and you have almost survived another week of classes. You are just looking forward dreamily to the weekend when the English instructor says: “For Monday you will turn in a five-hundred-­word composition on college football.”

Well, that puts a good hole in the weekend. You don't have any strong views on college football one way or the other. You get rather excited during the season and go to all the home games and find it rather more fun than not. On the other hand, the class has been reading Robert Hutchins in the anthology and perhaps Shaw's “Eighty-­Yard Run,” and from the class discussion you have got the idea that the instructor thinks college football is for the birds. You are no fool. You can figure out what side to take.

After dinner you get out the portable typewriter that you got for high school graduation. You might as well get it over with and enjoy Saturday and Sunday. Five hundred words is about two double­-spaced pages with normal margins. You put in a sheet of paper, think up a title, and you're off:

WHY COLLEGE FOOTBALL SHOULD BE ABOLISHED

College football should be abolished because it's bad for the school and also for the players. The players are so busy practicing that they don't have any time for their studies.

This, you feel, is a mighty good start. The only trouble is that it's only thirty­-two words. You still have four hundred and sixty­-eight to go, and you've pretty well exhausted the subject. It comes to you that you do your best thinking in the morning, so you put away the typewriter and go to the movies. But the next morning you have to do your washing and some math problems, and in the afternoon you go to the game. The English instructor turns up too, and you wonder if you've taken the right side after all. Saturday night you have a date, and Sunday morning you have to go to church. (You can't let English assignments interfere with your religion.) What with one thing and another, it's ten o'clock Sunday night before you get out the typewriter again. You make a pot of coffee and start to fill out your views on college football. Put a little meat on the bones.

WHY COLLEGE FOOTBALL SHOULD BE ABOLISHED

In my opinion, it seems to me that college football should be abolished. The reason why I think this to be true is because I feel that football is bad for the colleges in nearly every respect. As Robert Hutchins says in his article in our anthology in which he discusses college football, it would be better if the colleges had race horses and had races with one another, because then the horses would not have to attend classes. I firmly agree with Mr. Hutchins on this point, and I am sure that many other students would agree too.

One reason why it seems to me that college football is bad is that it has become too commercial. In the olden times when people played football just for the fun of it, maybe college football was all right, but they do not play college football just for the fun of it now as they used to in the old days. Nowadays college football is what you might call a big business. Maybe this is not true at all schools, and I don't think it is especially true here at State, but certainly this is the case at most colleges and universities in America nowadays, as Mr. Hutchins points out in his very interesting article. Actually the coaches and alumni go around to the high schools and offer the high school stars large salaries to come to their colleges and play football for them. There was one case where a high school star was offered a convertible if he would play football for a certain college.

Another reason for abolishing college football is that it is bad for the players. They do not have time to get a college education, because they are so busy playing football. A football player has to practice every afternoon from three to six and then he is so tired that he can't concentrate on his studies. He just feels like dropping off to sleep after dinner, and then the next day he goes to his classes without having studied and maybe he fails the test.

(Good ripe stuff so far, but you're still a hundred and fifty­-one words from home. One more push.)

Also I think college football is bad for the colleges and the universities because not very many students get to participate in it. Out of a college of ten thousand students only seventy­-five or a hundred play football, if that many. Football is what you might call a spectator sport. That means that most people go to watch it but do not play it themselves.

(Four hundred and fifteen. Well, you still have the conclusion, and when you retype it, you can make the margins a little wider.)

These are the reasons why I agree with Mr. Hutchins that college football should be abolished in American colleges and universities.

On Monday you turn it in, moderately hopeful, and on Friday it comes back marked “weak in content” and sporting a big “D.”

This essay is exaggerated a little, not much. The English instructor will recognize it as reasonably typical of what an assignment on college football will bring in. He knows that nearly half of the class will contrive in five hundred words to say that college football is too commercial and bad for the players. Most of the other half will inform him that college football builds character and prepares one for life and brings prestige to the school.

As he reads paper after paper all saying the same thing in almost the same words, all bloodless, five hundred words dripping out of nothing, he wonders how he allowed himself to get trapped into teaching English when he might have had a happy and interesting life as an electrician or a confidence man.

But note that, even in 1958, Roberts felt such an essay was deserving of a D, not an F.

Oh boy how the times have changed. In this case the teacher gives a lazy an uninspired assignment, and is pissed to get equally lazy and uninspired essays back. This mostly wouldn't fly in current year.

I always had writers block so I never did well in school, but the best thing I learned was how to piss out 500 words of tired but passable slop in an hour.

I don't know if the professor was discriminatory without seeing the other papers, but I think they should get an award for giving a zero mark. A student this dumb, whether religious or not, ought to be sent the message 'This subject and you are simply not in conversation, and no good will come of us continuing this relationship,' so she can do with that information what she will.

If the student received 100% grades on all prior essays in this class with this same level of writing, then some new rubric is being retroactively applied that isn't the same as the one that is publicly available. You can't all of the sudden change course on your grading criteria and apply a harsher standard and make it seem like the student didn't follow the guidelines. That will rouse suspicion, especially when you apply context like the teacher being trans, or OU having an F rating by FIRE, or that Psych courses and departments are generally quite left leaning, or that it's well known that universities across the country have had a chilling effect on certain types of speech. As a teacher/prof, you might win that argument when it's between you and the student, but once this incident is made available to public scrutiny you're going to have a hard time.

The 100% part honestly shocks me. Vanishingly few essays should receive 100%, and none by her unless she is concealing her reasoning ability in the essay for which she received zero. But maybe Oklahoma/the US has very different marking schemes than ones I am used to in the UK.

I went to this university for part of my undergrad. It's a solid state school, but it's not exactly packed with Einsteins (myself included). There are bright kids there, but in general we're not going to compete with the capabilities of students from schools in the Northeast or West Coast. If my assumptions on the context are correct, the grading doesn't shock me. I suspect that the class was regularly assigned articles to read, and then react to, and possibly discuss in class. I'd be willing to bet the trans teacher probably graded those reaction essays pretty generously, allowing students to express personal opinions so long as they turned something in. That same generosity was probably extended to Fulnecky earlier in the semester, even if it was apparent that she leaned religious or socially conservative.

But then she submitted this last paper.

We're all aware here that over the last decade universities were much more aggressive about policing certain kinds of speech, and in these environments there are words and frameworks that aren't really tolerated. This teacher's worldview doesn't see words like 'demonic' or 'bible' or 'god' as worthy of being part of the college environment. Couple that with their own personal feelings about gender expression, and you end up with someone who feels completely justified in giving a zero grade on a paper like this. The leftist online narrative is that this paper is being evaluated as a flawed assignment, but I highly suspect that this paper was graded using an entirely different, undiscussed, unwritten rubric.

I never got 100% on a college essay. They always have a series of issues with any writing sample. Or they did back when I attended university.

What exactly were you expecting, given the marking scheme for this assignment? Why are you still looking for ways to shit on the student, now that it's abundantly clear the issue is with this professor / this university / the absolute state of academia in general?

'This subject and you are simply not in conversation, and no good will come of us continuing this relationship,'

This phrase now makes me wish some professor would set an essay about how slavery was good, actually and when they get 200 outraged essays simply screaming NO YOU ARE A BIGOT RACIST, then they can serenely mark them all zero with "this subject and you are simply not in conversation".

Clearly my lack of university education shows because I never heard the notion of being "in conversation" with an abstract concept before.

I haven't read the essay in question but it sounds dumb, and the student was probably looking for some degree of martyrdom (it's hard for people this young to disentangle the zeal of wishing to stand up for their beliefs from the psychological drive to be persecuted so they can feel justified and morally superior and convinced of their own virtue) so yes, the essay should be harshly marked if it doesn't engage with the topic at all.

On the other hand, the teacher being trans does lead to the suspicion, however unjustified, that they took this personally and are simply being vengeful, since they are as incapable as the student of being objective on this and putting their own beliefs aside to be dispassionate. A mess all round, and Ms. Student seems to have won the point she really wanted to win: I too am like the Christians of the First Century, persecuted by the world.

Well, she still has time to grow up.

I would think "no you are a bigot racist" essays (written in response to e.g. reading Mein Kampf in a history class) would indeed get very low marks in a halfway decent university (though maybe not at Oklahoma). There is lots to say about stuff you disagree with, and I don't think it's been established that her sin in the professor's eyes was just disagreeing with the research she was responding to. It seems like her deeper failing was not even trying to understand it.

She's related to some local republican Apparatchiks and it was taken up by the local TPUSA chapter immediately. It was a set up and the university chose to knuckle under.

Learning to argue for points you don't agree with at all is a seriously underrated skill

I think the smart thing if you're a trans professor and someone does this is to give them a B- and let some cis professor fail them in the next level class up.

Giving them a zero is just taking the bait.

Apparently she was not sent that message at all, but rather the message that her professor and TA are anti-Christian bigots, but that the zeitgeist in mid-America is more on her side than theirs.

While the resulting grade of 0 seems slightly punitive and I don't doubt it was motivated by some level of personal offense

A grade of zero should really only ever be given as punishment for cheating, plaigarism or not handing anything in. I'm sure the essay was very bad, but it was at least an essay, that I assume she wrote herself rather than getting ChatGPT to do it, I hear Mr GPT isn't that big on biblical literalism.

She got a 0 because she demonstrated the wrong political position. As for the correct political position, well, it was an essay about gender roles being marked by a guy who pretends to be a woman.

Fulnecky wrote that she was frustrated by the premise of the article because she doesn't believe that there are more than two genders based on her understanding of the Bible

Rejecting the premise of the question is a perfectly legitimate way to answer an essay question.

There shouldn't be participation trophies in college. If she submitted an essay completely devoid of the type of content the assignment asked for, she should get a zero. There's no reason to give points for turning in a piece of paper with words on it.

Rejecting the premise of the question is a perfectly legitimate way to answer an essay question.

No it's not. The assignment wasn't to give her opinion, it was to analyze a paper within a particular framework. You can't do that if you refuse to entertain the framework as true long enough for the assignment. She shouldn't have taken the class in the first place if she refused to do that.

If she submitted an essay completely devoid of the type of content the assignment asked for, she should get a zero.

Fortunately for Fulnecky, she did submit an essay with the type of content the assignment asked for.

No it's not. The assignment wasn't to give her opinion, it was to analyze a paper within a particular framework.

Go read the publicly available rubric and come back to make a comment when you are more informed. It was part of the assignment.

Wasn’t the assignment read this piece and react to it?

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."

If you are a young earth creationist studying geology, and you refuse to date any rock to older than 4000 BC, you will fail.

The stated grading criteria for the essay were very unlike "what is the age of this rock?".

It was "are bullied girls more likely to be tomboys" and the woman used it to rant against the woke gender agenda.

A smart partisan would have found all sorts of technical excuses to give the paper a low grade: certainly, there would be a pretext for it. But a zero is so transparently unwarranted that it became blatantly obvious that it is discrimination. The professor in question would have gotten away with it, if it was merely a year ago. But it is now, and universities can no longer cover for such behavior under the chud-occupied bureaucracy.

You think that being so schooled in civil rights history, academics could detect an obvious Rosa Parks coming their way. But clearly, the intellectual standards at the academy have been slipping broadly as to fall for such an trap. Progressives are ill-suited to holding institutional power because they cannot imagine themselves holding it - it is antithetical to their whole ethos. So when when they do, they act clumsily and overtly, smugly confident that there will be no consequences for unsubtle tyranny. They are wrong, and this is a consequence long overdue.

But clearly, the intellectual standards at the academy have been slipping broadly as to fall for such an trap.

It wouldn't have been a trap a year ago, it would have been a triumph. The student would have been failed (or perhaps kicked out of the class or even expelled) and the TA would have been lauded for it.

At OU? She would have been speaking in the Oklahoma statehouse which would pass a law restricting the university's independence, maybe. That may have been the goal. But losing the war was gonna be implausible.

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.

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.

Did you read the essay? It wasn’t good but your claim that she spent most of the time talking about non binaries instead of gender roles fails reading comprehension

I suspect they just forgot to add the word 'not' to that sentence.

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.

In the US nowadays, with opposite CW valence, this sounds like a clear-cut case of "disparate impact". Of course it's rather concerning if a protected group can be disparately impacted "by choice", but there lies a whole rabbit hole of further spicy questions.

You are basically whitewashing the TAs actions here. If the article was instead about how prayer helped coping with some aspects of adolescence, and an athiest student wrote a response essay which said this was ridiculous because there was no God, with the same rubric, and they were given a zero for it, this would be just as clearly religious discrimination.

Yep, sometimes you really can tell exactly what's going on by reversing the valence. We don't have access to the TA here to ask some clarifying questions, but I have little doubt that they would end up a stammering mess and contradicting themself when trying to explain why they gave the grade they gave.

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?

I mean, the University of Oklahoma almost certainly is highly worried about the state government taking away big chunks of its independence for political reasons, and telling a trans TA(so not even a professor) to shut up and sit down is a small price to pay.

taking away big chunks of its independence for political reasons

It's literally just "your rules, fairly". If they didn't like that, maybe it shouldn't have been their rules to begin with.

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".

The screenshots of Samantha’s essay I’ve seen so far are like moderate cringe porn, where I immediately want to tap out due to cringe. I was half expecting a “since the dawn of time” to pop-up somewhere. The basicness is endearing in a way.

The 25th percentile of OU admittees have an SAT score in the mid 1100s and the average mid 1200s. This is well above the overall average SAT score of mid 1000s, where SAT-takers are already positively selected for intelligence.

So if you (like me) are cringing at the erudition (or lack thereof) of Samantha’s essay—consider what the average person’s thoughts might look like in essay form, much less the average person from a low average IQ population group. Akin to how Scalabrine is closer to Lebron in basketball ability than he is to you, Samantha may very well be closer in intelligence to you than she is the average person, much less an average person of some lower-IQ population group.

Trans TA vs. thot undergrad: unstoppable force vs. immovable object. As a more than WOULDable chick (obligatory: I’d at least give her a D), Samantha has likely rarely received negative feedback all her teenaged and adult life, so a zero on a college essay would feel like a massive affront to her Wonderfulness. This was not part of her Princess Journey, so vassals and serfs from OU, TPUSA, Fox News, the Online Right must rally to defend her honor. Given the attention and simpery she’s been provided, I can only imagine her as the seething-mask-smirking-underneath wojak.

Speculation on Twitter is running wild, suggesting that Fulnecky intentionally submitted a poor essay to gain some conservative street-cred, that her lawyer mother is involved, and plenty of other mental gymnastics

If there is indeed material Online Right cope on that front, it’d be quite amusing if Samantha’s simps are going with the “no way is she that stupid, she must had only been pretending to be retarded as a form of 5D chess to pwn the libs” line of conjecture. If Mulder’s sister Samantha really was abducted by aliens, I suppose it’s possible OU Samantha could had been intentionally laying a trap card (perhaps “trap” in more ways than one).

However, a zero on such an essay is clearly punitive and vindictive to me and the trans TA should be removed from her/they/[their?] role as TA. The TA sounds like a caricature of “this is who is online calling you [racist/misogynistic /homophobic/transphobic].” Unfortunately, for every such TA relieved of their duties, many more will remain to do their thing.

Both the trans TA and the other graduate student instructor’s (“she/her/hers”) responses are its_all_so_tiresome.jpg inducing. Most self-aware bio-female social science graduate student: “In addition, your paper directly and harshly criticizes your peers and their opinions, which are just as valuable as yours.”

For essay grading, especially non-STEM grading for “reaction essays” at schools like OU, the left bound basically starts at 60% if you submit anything vaguely resembling a halfhearted effort that’s not clearly plagiarized, perhaps higher. If you can regurgitate some semblance of the professor’s passphrases, even without providing any suggestion that you have any comprehension of the passphrases, you’re likely already in 80%+ territory.

As a more than WOULDable chick (obligatory: I’d at least give her a D)

I feel like you missed a Fulnecky/full throat joke.

I mean, it's very plausible she didn't put a lot of effort into the essay. This was clearly intended as a political stunt. I suspect it worked better than it was supposed to- the goal was probably to testify about the need to give TPUSA actual legal authorities over state universities before the Oklahoma house.

You made me google her. Agreed on giving her the..I mean a…D

While it's not a good essay, it does look like the student read at least some of the article, and herself wrote what she actually thought of it, which is better than a growing number of essays lately, so a 0 is pretty outrageous. It would be fine to not give her full points, since she's only engaging with the article in a very superficial way, but it seems like since it's just a personal reflection and not that serious of a paper, she should have gotten at least half points.

Bluntly, it is a crap essay, poorly written and is nothing but her expressing her Biblical views. It is not college-level writing.

Did it deserve a 0? Probably not. It's... grammatical and uses complete sentences and is sorta on topic inasmuch as the student is "reacting" to the article as directed. But I think giving it a C would be extremely generous even by modern grade-inflationary standards.

I have no doubt the trans prof threw a fit upon reading it. But it's very unfortunate that righties have no better material to rally around. A smarter student could have written a critical essay that would have been harder to justify giving a 0, but Fulnecky frankly does not seem very bright in her interviews.

I think it was probably written to get the Oklahoma congress to take up the problem of increasing supervision on state universities to 'prevent anti-Christian discrimination' and demonstrates the minimum amount of effort needed for that purpose.

A lot of people seem to think this was a trap that the trans instructor stepped into. I'm skeptical of these sorts of political chess game theories. Unless evidence comes to light that Fulnecky was in fact conspiring with someone or put up to it by TPUSA or some other organization, it seems unlikely to me that she's smart or strategic enough to have planned this out. I think the more likely explanation is that she decided to tell this trans instructor what's what according to the Bible, was outraged at receiving a zero, and then someone suggested to her that she should file a complaint. It attracted buzz because of CW and here we are.

Righties have rallied around a dim but photogenic Bible Karen, and the trans instructor predictably threw a shitfit when challenged. Both sides following a very stupid and tiresome script. An early version of ChatGPT could have generated this plot.

The TA and professor also appear dimwitted. Just three dumb people arguing but one of them is attractive so…

Uh, didn't the local chapter of the TPUSA play a starring role?

Yes, but were they involved beforehand or did they hear about Fulnecky's complaint afterwards? Or did she go to them when she got a zero?

There is the version where TPUSA put her up to it, the way a lot of organizations go looking for sympathetic cases and even stage them. There is the version where Fulnecky just wrote a Bible paper in her class, got a zero, and went looking for sympathy and found TPUSA. And there is the version where TPUSA put out some kind of mailer ("Are you a Christian student being persecuted by your woke professors?") and Fulnecky was inspired to see if she could provoke her instructor into "persecuting" her. I am inclined to think it's probably #2, and would be surprised if Fulnecky came up with #3 all on her own.

We're never going to know, but she's related to some Republican bigwigs.

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.

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.

Ackshually... I wonder. It might be viewpoint discrimination, but is it religious viewpoint discrimination? If a student submitted an essay equally critical of trans stuff, but based it on appeals to evolutionary psychology and HBD and inescapable biological realities, I imagine they would get treated similarly.

So it's not clear that religion is the motivating factor here. I don't know if whatever rules there are against religious discrimination would extend to atheistic holders of naughty opinions, but I suspect they wouldn't.

I already said the essay probably doesn't deserve a 0 (though it certainly deserves a D at best). I agree the instructor probably gave her a 0 out of pique/personal offense.

Does it meet the legal definition of "religious discrimination"? I doubt it, but determining Constitutionality is more complicated than "Does the instructor dislike Christians?" or "Did other students who wrote crappy essays get zeroes?" That said, you don't really care much what courts and the law says nowadays, do you?

Was it actually religious discrimination, in the sense that the instructor was motivated by animosity for the student's Christian beliefs, as opposed to just being outraged at the student's opinions? (Throwing words like "demonic" doesn't exactly help Fulnecky's case.) I am only slightly more sympathetic to Fulnecky than I would be to a student writing a creationist paper in a science class. Slightly more sympathetic because I actually believe in evolution and I don't believe in "multiple (sic) genders," but I am unmoved by Biblical arguments in either case.

That said, what should Fulnecky have done? Well, protesting low grades is a time-honored tradition, and nowadays every student thinks they should get an A and protests if they don't. If in fact zeroes are uncommon in this class, and especially if she was the only student to receive a zero, I'd definitely agree she was treated unfairly. Does that mean Christians are being persecuted in this class? Eh- did anyone else write such a stupid essay? Would someone writing a paper that says "Actually, there are only two genders and trans people are gross and delusional" without involving religious arguments get a better grade?

I don't really "object" to righties defending her, per se, but I think I made my position pretty clear. She wrote a bad, dumb essay. The instructor reacted badly and is probably a fool. In a sane and reasonable world (bitter laughter), they'd have had a private discussion, maybe involved the department chair, and agreed she deserved something more than a 0, or been given an opportunity to revise. Instead, we are in our world, so a stupid essay in a stupid class about a stupid subject with stupid people is a national news story.

If you disagree that this is likely to be a case of unconstitutional discrimination, I'd be interested to hear your reasoning.

To my mind, the possible reason starts with the fact that there are different types of shitty essay that may be equally shitty in terms of their writing quality, structure, and reasoning, but that are different in terms of what they herald about what's next for the student. This essay would likely make me as a professor think, "Oh dear, they so misunderstand what we do here that they are unlikely to be able to get anything out of this course. It seems probably they cannot engage with psychology as it is studied." A different, equally shitty essay, perhaps a non-religious-fundamentalist one – but not necessarily – might make me think, "Okay, this is terrible work, but perhaps with time this student is open to being shepherded through to a likely still bad but passing grade." The latter type of essay might simply contain less evidence of close mindedness.

Now is a grade the right language to communicate a message like this to the student? No. A conversation this delicate should be done separately. Nonetheless I sympathise with the professor, and find the idea that the low mark was necessarily about the specifically religious nature of this student's dogmatism to be unproven.

It would by psychology throwing stones. Gender theory is religious belief.

I think the student would have similar things to say about all kinds of areas of psychology though. If they think dysphoria=possession by demons, they're likely to have the same reaction to all kinds of psychological disorders and phemonena, which makes vast swathes of the subject unstudy-able. Now it's a position to say 'most of psychology is religious belief', but if you think that, we are back to the original question of whether red tribe should try to influence academia or just destroy it instead.

Except she didn’t say dysphoria is possession by demons

This essay would likely make me as a professor think, "Oh dear, they so misunderstand what we do here that they are unlikely to be able to get anything out of this course. It seems probably they cannot engage with psychology as it is studied."

Is there a canon of things Psychology students are expected to know? Or is it just people's personal opinions and models all the way down?

My impression of Psychology is that it's more like Education than it is Psychiatry. Like in Education, the professor apparently thought it reasonable to ask students for their own personal reactions to an article, rather than a summary, or how someone might use the information in a clinical setting, or (heaven forbid!) a test where they had to reproduce some of the findings from memory. Like in Education, there seem to be a number of different frameworks, and someone can talk about Freud or Jung or Pieget or someone who once did a study with 40 boys, some of whom were less gender conforming according to surveys than others, or Rat Park or whatever, there doesn't seem to be a specific body of knowledge that's expected to be learned.

In Education, some professors want students to say that they will put aside merely teaching the standard Rs in favor of spending more time and energy on Radicalization, whereas other professors think that is a bad idea and it's a red flag if students say they will focus more on Radicalization than on 'Rithmetic. But they don't want to cause a headache for themselves, and give everyone a passing grade on personal reflection essays, no matter what they say.

Maybe I'm wrong, and there are more concrete and agreed upon areas of Psychology, but choosing a mediocre paper about an extremely contested culture war topic, asking for a student to react to it, and then punishing her for writing out her actual reaction, doesn't suggest so.

Probably girls like Samantha study Psychology at the state university so they can find a husband and become a Christian women's counselor, endorsed by the pastor's wife. This is a silly state of affairs, but I also went to Baptist Women's Group at my state college, and it is how things are. Since the TA was punished by the university and legislature, not the student, it's apparent that they were the one who misunderstood their role.

Is there a canon of things Psychology students are expected to know?

Psychology students are expected to know anything?

If there's anything that should be canon in Psychology, it would be the subfield of IQ and psychometrics due its reproducibility, reliability, and predictive power. It's basically the only area of Psychology that has been immune to the replication crisis. Yet, instead of being celebrated like a crown jewel and shouted from the hilltops, it's treated like a red-headed step child due it being unflattering to low achievement minorities and ruining people's sense of Just World egalitarianism.

So instead we get stuff like implicit bias, stereotype threat, priming, and "big, fun things" such as power poses signal-boosted and propagandized.

Yeah that’s my biggest problem. The field is inherently unserious. Yet many people “tut tut” about someone bringing in a non academic point of view when the entire field is non academic.

I think you overestimate the other essays

It is not college-level writing.

It isn't, or it shouldn't be?

I feel like it exposes what I've always thought is a flaw in the main US grading system. Officially, anything between 0 and ~60 (depending on the curve) is an F. The best you could possibly do is a 100% A+, unless they want to give extra credit. a 60% is a terrible grade, but it still at least gives you the chance to come back and pass the class. A zero pretty much sinks your grade for the entire class. Giving her a zero here means, not only was her essay bad, it was so bad that she's probably going to flunk the rest of the class no matter how hard she works, unless she begs and grovels for extra credit. There's a bigger range between a zero and a 60% F, then there is between a 60% F and a 100% A+. I just feel like that selects for the wrong incentives.

There are ways to get around this. For example, when I was in school, there was a difference between a Z (0%) given out for no work turned in and an F (50%) given out for shitty work. Likewise, when I was teaching, the head of my department told me that if he saw a student was trying he would give them a high F (e.g. 59%) so that it would only take a little bit more work to pass.

That depends on how much the essay is worth towards the overall grade. It looks like a fairly trivial assignment; if it's worth 25% of the overall grade, that must be a pretty worthless class (which is entirely possible).

Yeah I'm just assuming this is a typical college class where you only write a handful of essays so each one is worth a lot. But the problem starts even with small assignments- you get one zero and you need 10 perfect grades to make up for it.

The essay was bad in a totally representative way, almost all college essays are that bad. That being admitted it’s probable the instructor did discriminate in giving her a zero, although probably it was fairly benign. (“This dumb Christian argument has no merit” not “I hate Christians mark it zero”.)

That said universities started this game by systematically discriminating against conservatives in academia for generations. Academe as the last holdout of genuine Marxism in the West was a joke in the Reagan years. I have brilliant family members who were personally discriminated against in their academic careers for being conservative. I don’t suppose that counts as evidence to anybody with their heads in the sand, but it seems obvious to say that that’s what happened in academia over and over again. It’s not as though conservatives just woke up one day and said, “we’re stupid, we hate those liebruls and their funny learning ways.”

But time is slow and I don’t expect this to percolate into much of a show of force immediately. Conservatives abandoned academia as it turned on them — there wasn’t much fighting back. It will take more time for that attitude to change. If we get a Vance administration that’s when I would expect to start seeing big national fights over collegiate discrimination.

The prompt was “a thoughtful reaction to some aspect of the article”. The article itself seem like poor science. Sci-hub link: https://sci-hub.se/download/moscow/3239/5750dde1cafb6436fe579821d78194db/jewell2013.pdf

You can’t assume that a depressed gender atypical’s self-reported data on teasing is accurate. A teenager with gender dysphoria has a high chance of interpreting innocent comments as teasing, and doubly so if they are depressed, but the study sought to determine whether teasing mediated the experience of depression among dysphorics. A boy wearing a skirt is obviously going to get at least a few comments because it is unusual and noteworthy, and a depressed boy with dysphoria is going to interpret that as teasing and report it as such. The data then cannot tell us whether teasing mediates the relationship between dysphoria and depression, nor can it can inform a prescriptive value statement regarding the morality of teasing dysphorics (the implicit purpose of assigning this bullshit paper). As an example of how dysphorics interpret things as insults, the dysphoric professor interpreted the assertion —

”society pushing a lie […] is demonic”

to imply —

to call an entire group of people "demonic" is highly offensive

When in fact our pious writer was most likely stating that a force in society was demonic, an entirely mainstream and non-controversial belief for a faith which holds that “the whole world lies in the power of the Evil One”.

I side with the Christian in this kurfuffle because her beliefs are prosocial and will lead to greater social flourishing, whereas IMO the dysphoric professor is liable to produce social psych propaganda that just makes the world worse. If the actual use of psychology is its bountiful positive effects on society, and undoubtedly it is if you think about it (we get excited about the useful and informative findings), then the Christian girl is worlds away better than current academia, having internalized a socially-optimal belief system.

I also think a secular publicly funded institution should not be mandating an atheistic framework for opinion-based questions, which seems unconstititional and immoral.

A teenager with gender dysphoria has a high chance of interpreting innocent comments as teasing, and doubly so if they are depressed, but the study sought to determine whether teasing mediated the experience of depression among dysphorics.

The authors actually found, for self-esteem and anxiety:

Although partial mediation was indicated, the relationship [between gender typicality and low self-esteem] was still strong. Thus, regardless of gender-based teasing, boys who were low in typicality had lower self-esteem. Girls’ typicality was unrelated to their self-esteem.

Thus, regard- less of gender-based teasing, boys who were low in typicality were more anxious. Girls’ typicality was unrelated to their anxiety.

So, the study says that self-reported teasing did not mediate anxiety and self-esteem for boys, and that the negative mental health effects of being gender atypical came from being gender atypical, not from teasing.

The paper is kind of badly organized and an info dump, and I don't care enough to dig into the actual statistical methodology of it, which I assume is what's typical for a psych paper (i.e. bad). But it seems, if anything, less biased and ideological than a typical paper from the field.

(It's also worth pointing out that this isn't looking at dysphoria or wearing skirts, but atypicality in the sense of e.g. being short or bad at sports is gender atypical for boys.)

The current study predicted that gender-based teasing would mediate this link between typicality and mental health, and this prediction was partially supported. Gender-based teasing fully mediated boys’ association between low typicality and greater depressive symptoms and more negative body image. Boys who were low in gender typicality were teased more on the basis of gender, and in turn expressed more depressive symptoms and felt worse about their bodies (as in Smith & Leaper, 2005). Regardless of gender-based teasing, however, boys who were low in typicality had greater anxiety and lower self-esteem (teasing accounted for some of the low self- esteem, but not much). It is unclear why gender-based teasing fully mediated associations with depressive symptoms and body image, but only partially mediated associations with self-esteem and did not mediate associations with anxiety.

The typicality metric was informed by both peer-evaluated and self-reported questionnaires and would include wearing skirts and being dysphoric.

The paper was from over a decade ago and had like 40 boys, not all of whom were gender atypical. More likely than not, not a single one of them were "dysphoric" or wore skirts, with conditions like being short or shy or showtunes being the drivers of atypicality.

They tested four mental health measures, and two of them showed mediation by teasing (for boys), and two didn't. If it were a matter of gender atypical people with mental health issues reporting more teasing, you'd expect all four measures to show mediation. This paper either 1) shows something more complicated or 2) is reporting on noise.

an essay whose central argument was essentially a blunt appeal to Biblical inerrancy.

Bullshit. That's not what her essay was about, and even though it mentions christianity that's not what her shitty essay is about. "Biblical inerrancy" or whatever is totally irrelevant here.

Anyways if you read the assignment posted downthread, you would see that the "reflections" assignment is basically a glorified "how did that make me feel" essay, and not in any way a logical or persuasive writing assignment at all.

This woman very obviously submitted an essay to court controversy. But it's interesting to note- the Oklahoma government is actually based. Principled, but based. And the university is just kind of automatically taking her side(really, it was not a good essay and deserved a failing grade). This looks to me more like evidence that the university is subservient than evidence of it being despoiled.

My guess is that the TA didn't follow the rubric they were given. If they were specifically instructed to, for example, only give a score of 0 if the student fails to submit any work at all, that would explain why they're being disciplined.

Say what you will about psychology, but if I submitted an essay based on Biblical inerrancy to a geology class, I would justifiably expect a low score.

That said, I haven't read the essay, and I should in order to really judge it based on anything other than what other people say about it. Also, in the context of the humanities at least, a 0 should probably rarely be given out for any essay that actually took effort to write. And the possible bias of the grader does matter.

Say what you will about psychology, but if I submitted an essay based on Biblical inerrancy to a geology class, I would justifiably expect a low score.

If psychology was like geology, anyone bringing up the concept of gender would have to be treated as harshly as anyone bringing up God's grand design as an argument (note: there's nothing in her essay about Biblical inerrancy).

The assignment was to react to the reading so as to demonstrate that you actually read it.

Stating that such and such theory would be incompatible with a worldwide flood approximately 5,000 years ago would fit the bill.

Yeah, I would expect her to probably get a C, possibly even a D if it's especially bad, though essays are so messed up lately, I would probably give her some points for clearly writing it herself, anyway.

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. I've heard some grumblings that the instructor gave this grade specifically because she is trans - so it hurt more, or something - but I think most cis psychology profs these days would have a similar reaction

The teacher's (or was a TA?) identity groups are not relevant. The most affluent white (cis) female liberal can still do "viewpoint discrimination" or whatever we call it these days. It is discriminatory because of disparate outcome, basically. An equally shitty essay with flipped political valence would obviously (obvious to me) get more points. The grade of 0 being punitive is simply what is meant by 'discrimination' in this context.

I think you're probably right that the student should know better. She likely did know better. I think it might have been bait. This is the equivalent of gay couples suing cakeshops or whatever. I mean this in the "this essay was obviously (to her) shitty."

You say that a college-level writer needs a skill of adapting ideas to the audience, which I kind of expected you to say some variant of (victim blaming), before I had finished reading your post. The purpose of this course is not to teach the students to suck up. It is not suck-up-writing 101 (or 201). If it was, the prompt would say, 'write an argument for the following position.'

You gesture towards the idea that someone (other than the teacher) did wrong here, but I don't see it. My only conclusion here is you think viewpoint discrimination is alright. That's fine, and there are probably principled reasons to think that, but indeed it would make for a short post.

This is an academic test for both the student and the TA: Can the student craft an argument, citing sources; and, Can the TA judge the student's work on its academic merits, regardless of the TA's own viewpoint on the subject matter. They both failed. If the TA had restricted their comments to the essay's academic (lack of) quality, I probably would have little issue with it, but to complain about the use of the word "demonic" from an emotional POV rather than an academic one shows this this TA is not intellectually or tempermentally cut-out for this role. I did repect that the TA, sensing their potential for bias, asked a colleague for a second opinion -- but even that colleague could not focus on the academic quality of the paper, starting with shock that a paper would argue in favor of bullying. That educator should be fired as well.

I think low level bullying is good. It helps enforce some degree of social standards. It helps people learn how to deal with difficult people. It makes people learn that they will survive.

I was bullied when I was a kid. I bullied kids when I was a kid. In both cases, it wasn’t a lot of bully (just general teasing and occasional light physical stuff).

I think that viewpoint discrimination is wrong AND that the essay is quite poor. The professor sounds mad AND certain impartial graders could still give the paper a zero. Separating these facts is a challenge, and I do not blame Fulnecky for her confusion and the lingering possibility of viewpoint discrimination. I don't disagree that a shitty progressive paper may slip by without major issue - that bias persists. It just does not absolve Fulnecky. I am mostly remiss that this situation has ascended to the level of a national spectacle when it could have been resolved with a simple procedure within the institution. I am upset that the first instinct was to cry foul and jump to punditry. There are multiple failure points here, and I am upset about the larger spectacle, as well. Perhaps I should suck it up.

I am not suggesting that Fulnecky needs to change her viewpoint or appease the professor outright. I am just suggesting that in an academic psychology class, it is worth speaking in a way that will be most comprehensible and reflect the standards of the field. The sentence "My prayer for the world and specifically for American society and youth is that they would not believe the lies being spread from Satan..." is meaningless to this professor, nor does it address the point of the assignment.

Again I think what you aren't understanding is that giving students who turn in a paper a 0 is simply not done in modern academia. Grade inflation is absolutely out of control.

The professor could have handed out a D and moved on. Or alternatively just told her to redo it. In current year with grade inflation and whatnot you don't get a 0 if you turn something in. It just doesn't happen. I've handed in seriously terribly bad work in college and still got straight As.

I'm sure the student definitely did this to provoke a controversy, but the professor was an idiot to take the bait. Unfortunately when offended the enemy cannot help but to respond in the most extreme way possible.

I think D is quite generous for that essay, even for a low tier state school. It is occasionally nonsensical and essentially never gets past rambling. For an essay of this length, this os very damning. I have read a lot of high schoolers' writing, and this is not very good for high school. Yes, probably not a 0, but the range of numbers is more like 30-40, not 60-70.

The question isn't what grade you think is appropriate, though. The question is what grades similar essays normally get from the instructor.

Sure, but my guess of what grade that teacher would give other essays of similar quality is based on what I think the essay deserves. In my opinion, it is for sure not a passing essay, which is why I disagree with other commenters' guess of an approximately 60 for essays of similar quality. (And I would argue that my standards are possibly too low given that LLMs can definitely, trivially spit out at least an 85 for this assignment.)

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.

Fifteen-ish years ago, I saw a paper that was horrendous beyond belief. It was supposed to be an essay on 18th century Europe, and the student handed in a few pages comparing the election of Barack Obama to the Great Depression - in America. And that phrasing still gives far, far too much credit. In five pages, the only sentences that were even coherent were the quotes lifted directly from the Obama campaign website. It was like someone wrote it while on acid, then fed it into GPT1 with instructions to "just fuck my shit up".

Even that student was given an opportunity to write a new paper that was fit for human consumption.

Do you still have a copy of this essay? I need to read it.

No. I was really not supposed to have seen it at all, for reasons of decency and privacy and whatnot. But the professor was so flabergasted, so "Chat, is this real? I need another living soul to confirm that I'm not going insane!" that I was permitted to read experience it.

Perhaps I'll make an inquiry if a copy still exists.

It was like someone wrote it while on acid, then fed it into GPT1 with instructions to "just fuck my shit up".

You might have been reading the 21st century version of Naked Lunch.

While looking into some loose ends from the UCSD remidial math fiasco from the other week, I made the startling discovery that there are approximately zero legally-enforcable standards that require students to demonstrate any knowledge whatsoever in order to recieve a passing grade. There are however, very enforcable legal requirements for schools not to discriminate against students across a broad swath of categories (arguably including intelligence itself).

It's not entirely clear to me what the incentive is to ever fail any student. My sense is that the university has a vague interest in academic integrity in order to maintain its reputation and accreditation, but that at the individual professor level, the risk-payoff matrix weighs overwhelmingly in favor of passing anyone who provides any legally relevant pushback at all. If you don't give in, and the university decides that this opened them up to a lawsuit, you get fired.

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.

To try and address as many of your pointed rhetorical questions as possible in one fell swoop, my view is that Fulnecky should have known better than to submit an assignment with this sort of argumentation, especially as a junior. 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. 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. The rubric, especially for such a small potatoes assignment like this, need not state every single possibility nor are there really objective criteria. Plenty of professors give out zeroes for less, 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.

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. 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.

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.

I’m more than willing to concede that arguing biblical inerrancy is so far outside of the mainstream in psych that it might as well be astrology (which would probably be better received).

At the same time, fields often develop a specific set of “rules” that appear to be academic but are blind faith — similar to the faith in biblical inerrancy.

Unfortunately, I don't have the bandwidth or time to argue in the didactic, premise-driven way you'd like me to. 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.

I think going to the institutional office would be effective in getting the grade changed, or at least bring more clarity and consistency, yes. I suppose I have trust in that sort of thing. 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.

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?

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.

Are you making a positive claim that academic evaluations do not, or ought not, incorporate normative expectations of domain relevancy? This feels like an untenable position; can you point to another equivalent domain of human interaction where such a positive claim would be supported? 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.

In any case, virtually every university student handbook will identify the purpose of education and grades as being for the purpose of learning. This doesn't mean just in a generalized sense but also in the specifics of learning a topic. Unless otherwise stated, calculus class is offered with the intention of teaching students calculus. This is usually identified under a section like "Academic Integrity" because it clarifies exactly this question: this is not a free for all. It might just be easier to look at OU's Academic Integrity language:

  1. Students attend the University of Oklahoma in order to learn and grow intellectually.
  2. Academic assignments exist for the sake of this goal and grades exist to show how fully the goal is attained.

https://studenthandbook.ouhsc.edu/hbSections.aspx?ID=430

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.

Students are obligated to read, understand, and agree to the terms in the handbook every year by the way.

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.

No. I am making the claim I actually made.

A more fruitful response would have attempted to delineate some difference between the claim you intended and the claim as it reads. I quoted you directly

It is also exceedingly unreasonable to use a position of authority to formally punish people for something that is not against the rules

The "punishment" you're referring to in this context is the assigned grade, and this line is a quote response to the question

Do you think the final paragraph of the essay is reasonably in accordance with the standards of writing in undergraduate academic psychology?

Making you appear to be responding to the notion that standards exist beyond those explicitly outlined among some set of specifically delineated "rules" (most likely the formal rubric). In other words this is a positive assertion that

Academic evaluations {e.g. grades} do not {...} incorporate normative expectations of domain relevancy {e.g. standards beyond those identified as rules}

If this is not what you intend, you should be more clear.

Possibly you cannot imagine it because these are non-equivalent scenarios deliberately framed to be ridiculous.

You're welcome to make an argument.

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 is confused on a few counts. First, comprehending the implications of a conclusion implies no necessary understanding of the arguments which lead to the conclusion. These are two wholly distinct domains of knowledge. Second, the issue in this case is not identifying the existence of "biblical implications of a psychological claim" but rather making a claim about psychology on the basis of biblical premises. Biblical evidence is not itself scientific in nature and consequently does not form a rational basis for scientific claims.

I am also familiar with its limitations towards the misdeeds of the adjudicator.

The student shouldn't have been given a zero my prior is strongly in favor of the position that the grader's decision to award no points rather than whatever the rubrik assigned was politically motivated.

However, if you are rejecting the question

Do you think the final paragraph of the essay is reasonably in accordance with the standards of writing in undergraduate academic psychology?

On the basis that such considerations would constitute an "unreasonable" application of authority to "formally punish people for something that is not against the rules."

Then you're incorrect both in general and in these particulars.

You are asking me to articulate the academic standards of psychology from first principles. I respect your demands for rigor and honestly I'd enjoy such a discussion. I simply don't have the argumentative skill, time, or knowledge in epistemology to do that. However, it seems self-evident to me that discussing matters of God is not a valid truth-claim in psychology especially as a response to another article. 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. It's hard to draw the line exactly but it's easy to know when it's been crossed - hence my reference to the reasonable person's standard. If you disagree then I would rather hear your counterargument, affirmatively stated, instead of continued needling.

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. 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.

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.

I see. I get the sense that we might not see eye to eye but I'll give it one more go. Please give me some charity here with my phrasing - I'm in a rush.

You are concerned about improper application of authority and the negative consequences involved when applying rules selectively, arbitrarily, or in the case that the rules have been not stated. I agree with this, believe it or not.

My response was that the rule of "do not appeal solely to Scripture to support a truth-claim in psychology" is not explicitly stated because it is widely understood. A text may exist somewhere that states it, but that text is not commonly assigned or propagated because the rule is the sum total of hundreds of years of epistemology and philosophy. It is foundational to the methods of psychology. I'm sure it exists but I can't easily locate it because it's such a widely held but diffuse belief. While it would be nice for this rule to be explicitly stated often, it usually isn't because doing so would be seen as unnecessary. At most, the APA encourages "evidence-based" practice and responsible data standards, which are usually hammered in during a research methods course. Fulnecky likely took this course, as she is a junior. She would have known. There is room for Scripture in psychology, but it would be more palatable if it was accompanied by appropriate argumentation.

For Fulnecky to have made it to her junior year and not understand this represents a significant failure in some way. So significant, in fact, I am suspicious of her immediate choice to run to the media. I reject your framing of abuser-abised, as there is no evidence Fulnecky had a compromised relationship with the school. Again, if she tried the usual channels and was met with a corrupt response, then it would be more prudent to go to the media. I just think the school should have been given the benefit of the doubt.

I respect your passion and commitment to standards of rigor.

I have a hard time imagining anyone reading her essay and thinking it's actually good--more precisely, to avoid consensus building, I'd assume anyone who defended it has such a radically different conception of what a university education should look like that we likely wouldn't have much to say to each other. I also don't think it's intentionally poorly written: you could write a significantly better version of it while taking the same line and and still manage to score a 0, which would be more effective for outrage mongering.

What would be useful is to know what the other essays that scored higher look like. Students at many universities struggle even with basic grammar, let alone knowing how to make a strong argument. I would expect that at least one student wrote equally bad pablum of a progressive flavor and got a passing grade; but, there's no way to verify that, because students don't complain when they're given an unjustifiably high score.

Should we care, though? If we see universities as credential mills, yes; dumb conservative students face discrimination that dumb progressives don't, which impacts scholarships, graduation rates and times, etc. But if we aspire for universities to educate and improve human capital, then we shouldn't. In that case, to the extent that anyone is being harmed by the grading, it's the progressive students who are getting more screwed here, because they're not getting feedback to improve (Fulnecky is at least getting a coarse signal).

What would be useful is to know what the other essays that scored higher look like. Students at many universities struggle even with basic grammar, let alone knowing how to make a strong argument.

I'd like to know this too. Given her mother is a lawyer, I wonder if it's surprisingly about on par or no worse than others'. (Apart from citing the Bible.)

I have not yet read it, but do suspect something punitive given how rare it is to get an actual 0, the worst kind of F you can possibly get, if you've turned in something of adequate length and effort. This isn't failing to turn anything in at all, or just your name a title.

I think this exactly. It’s not good but other east’s of equally poor quality likely received passing grades. But nobody can prove it either way. So in essence arguing the object level is meaningless.

It seems likely that this essay was a trap. If so, it worked.

This is the assignment. It breaks the grade down into three sections.

10 points: Is there a clear link back to the assigned article? Can the reader assess whether the student has read the assigned article?

10 points: Does the paper provide a reaction/reflection/discussion of some aspect of the article, rather than a summary?

5 points: Are the main ideas and thoughts organized into a coherent discussion? Is the writing clear enough to follow without multiple re-readings?

This is the paper.

There are links back to the assigned article. They're pretty weak, but they're not zero. The paper is clearly NOT a summary and IS providing a reaction/reflection/discussion of some aspect of the article. The organization is poor but not non-existent. This article clearly does not deserve a zero by the rubric given -- I would say it deserves at least 12 points, full points for the second item and a minimum of one point for the other two. Thus, the zero was given as punishment and not fair grading. And the claim “Please note that I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs” is almost certainly a lie.

This is further evidence to me that red-tribers have completely abandoned most institutes of higher education. It's no longer a question of "we must reform the universities and stop them from being ideologically possessed!" but "the universities are ideologically possessed and the only way out is avoidance/destruction."

Just the opposite. This is a red-tribe student within the university attempting to obtain change from within.

And the claim “Please note that I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs” is almost certainly a lie.

Yea. Though more optimistically, I had an English social democrat-style professor in college who gave me a 100 on an essay defending propertarianism or "plumb-line" libertarianism. I cited Hoppe's argumentation ethics and he thought it was rather clever and novel. He maintained his views of course - and I've since shed most of the views in that paper - but my prof was able to appreciate a well-structured, at least internally valid argument. Mutual respect.

I had a history professor whose stated policy was, "I'm going to give you my views on X. You can absolutely get a good grade on the tests by just arguing in favor of my views, using what I told you in class. You can get just as good of a grade by arguing that I'm wrong. I just care that you support whichever answer you go with, and do it well."

Going by the rubric, she clearly deserved significantly more than a 0.

But it's a terrible rubric, and the goal shouldn't be applying shockingly low standards to all students fairly, but to apply reasonable academic standards fairly. If successful, this red-tribe push is far more likely to just further hollow out American universities as glorified daycare for post-teens than it is to get reasonable standards applied fairly.

Though, I can see an argument that universities are already doomed, so might as well accelerate the collapse so that something better can take their place.

Who the hell is pushing for higher standards and more rigor at universities? Literally who? Like that's not going to happen. And state schools in flyover aren't going to be leading the charge on that even if you get a genie out of a bottle.

Right, but the people dunking on the quality of this essay are just out of touch with how debased the standards are. Its a pretty average freshman essay whether this girl was at a directional state U or Princeton. The fact is high schools simply do not teach writing well. And the universities aren't really either. If something of that level was in a law school application I wouldn't be surprised. In fact, the only thing surprising is the notable lack of AI slop tells. And so progressives dunking on her writing are really just dunking on themselves, as public and higher education are two of their biggest and longest going projects.

Who the hell is pushing for higher standards and more rigor at universities?

Based on this thread, roughly two people on this entire site while two dozen think an attempt at doing that was grounds for dismissal. I”d liike to say I’m shocked but this isn’t the exactly the first or even the twentieth time people here have argued in simular vein.

The TA was not trying to apply consistent academic standards to everyone. The TA was punished for failing to apply consistent academic standards to everyone!

To my friends, anything. To my enemies, the law.

I think none of the people involved in this story should have been anywhere near a university education. This paltry assignment, the nauseating submission, the insane grading standard, even the "research" that prompted it. None of this is scholarship. It's posing as such, but quite literally none of this is creating anything approximating the furtherance of human knowledge. And I say this as someone that at least recognizes psychology as a very useful and meritorious discipline when done rigorously.

The correct and unthinkable course of action is to stop letting this sort of people attend universities, let alone teach at them, and kick them back into the pamphleteer masses where they belong instead of pretending politics and truth can be consorts. How's that for raising standards?

False. You are making a clear logical error. Most of the posts aren’t saying “lower standards.” Indeed most don’t address what the standard ought to be. Instead, they are saying the current standard is being applied unevenly.

I think rightfully her paper should get an F (though she is hot so you know D-). But I think there are probably a lot of grades that should be Fs. If you only want high standards for views you don’t like, that isn’t rigor but an isolated demand for one.

False. You are making a clear logical error. Most of the posts aren’t saying “lower standards.” Indeed most don’t address what the standard ought to be. Instead, they are saying the current standard is being applied unevenly.

Strongly agree. I think most here would be heavily in favor of nuking 90% of the university system and enforcing extremely high standards in what remains.

It can't be the first time, or any time, because it just doesn't fit the criteria for being an instance of the general case you claim it fits into.

Where did anyone argue against increasing standards? Where did anyone even show that the discussed case was an attempt at increasing standards to begin with?

It's a specific case of a general "argument" against a harsh policy -- "well, how about we apply this harsh policy to you and yours only, how do you like that?"

I'm reminded of when I was in grade school, my mother demanded to speak with a teacher (known to dislike me) over an assignment I received a "C" on. Not because I'd been graded unfairly, but because it was a multi-part assignment, and I'd received "C"s for every individual part of it... including the part I hadn't done at all. My mom's fury wasn't over a low grade, but that the grade had nothing to do with the quality of the work I had or hadn't done, and was simply because the teacher jumped straight to marking it all "C" because she didn't like me (but presumably expected a "D" or a failure to bring pushback, given my grades from other teachers).

When faced with this, the teacher's immediate response (with a fellow teacher in the room!) was to ask, "well, what grade do you want me to give, then?" in the assumption that having arbitrarily given me a poor grade because she disliked me, my mother would be satisfied with an arbitrary good grade to make up for it--yet another mistake by that teacher.

Sure, it's a terrible rubric. Most likely this class simply shouldn't exist. It's probably being used for political indoctrination.

I respect your logic but have to disagree with the reading of the rubric. As someone who has completed plenty of similar reflection paper assignments during my time in college, the rubrics are boilerplate and vague but imply some pretty specific meanings. I want to hone in on the second point:

Does the paper provide a reaction/reflection/discussion of some aspect of the article, rather than the summary.

In my experience, the key word here is "some aspect." This usually implies a citation or reference to a specific point made by the article, usually in the form of a quoted argument. Really, this is just to prove you internalized some point from the paper. A reading check. As far as I can tell, Fulnecky didn't do this and instead discusses the concept of "gender" in its entirety, whereas the article was very narrow in its scope. Her essay wasn't a summary, but it was hardly specific, nor did it reference findings from the article. Should a citation have been specified in the rubric as a requirement? Sure. But, personally, it goes without saying. I have received a zero or two on reflection assignments for similarly bureaucratic concerns. Live and learn.

Ultimately we are both going to have to fill in the blanks as to what the "proper" interpretation of the rubric is. I suppose it comes down to who you trust to interpret the rubric properly - the instructor or Fulnecky. In this case, I have to give a little deference to the professor, because she created the rubric and I've experienced similar grading standards in the past. I suppose this sort of thing is what the University is interested in finding out.

Just the opposite. This is a red-tribe student within the university attempting to obtain change from within.

Perhaps those are Fulnecky's motivations, though the greater media response has been more aggressive from what I've seen. I am suspicious that she took it to the media for such a small and inconsequential assignment. The more conventional action would be appealing your grade to the dean.

Then the student should get at least some of the first 10 points simply for demonstrating that she read at least some of the article. And even though the writing is pretty poor, it's not bad enough to warrant a 0 on the third item. Based on the rubric 0 is entirely unjustifiable.

Ultimately we are both going to have to fill in the blanks as to what the "proper" interpretation of the rubric is. I suppose it comes down to who you trust to interpret the rubric properly - the instructor or Fulnecky. In this case, I have to give a little deference to the professor, because she created the rubric and I've experienced similar grading standards in the past. I suppose this sort of thing is what the University is interested in finding out.

I agree with all of this. My problem is I just don't have any confidence that these kinds of standards are applied in a consistent manner, and I don't have any particular reason to trust this particular instructor any more than I trust the rest of University administration, which is not at all. I will never, ever, forget how much this story about a University essay crushed me: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teen-accepted-stanford-after-writing-blacklivesmatter-100-times-application-n742586

I will never, ever, forget how much this story about a University essay crushed me: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teen-accepted-stanford-after-writing-blacklivesmatter-100-times-application-n742586

So basically just Zhang Tiesheng, but for wokeness instead of communism?

To (reluctantly) be fair, the teen in question had supposedly extremely high grades, had been to the White House dinner and was recognised by Barack Obama, and is clearly a social media star of some sort. Writing BlackLivesMatter over and over again on his application was cheap rhetoric but it was in response to a specific question on his application rather than an essay:

In response to a question asking “What matters to you, and why?" the teen wrote "#BlackLivesMatter" exactly 100 times.

it's not literally all he had going for him.

Stanford didn't just accept some total rando because he wrote Black Live Matter.

IOW, he completely ignored the "and why?" portion of the cue and got in anyway? Thanks, I had never heard that part of the story before.

For better and worse, university admissions often play pretty fast and loose. The admissions questions are jumping-off points for you to persuade the university that you're interesting and a good long-term investment. They're not a points-based assessment, especially not somewhere like Stanford, and this guy would surely have known that.

In the UK, Oxford has a reputation for having much more interview-based admissions based (in theory) on future potential and interestingness, whereas Cambridge admissions have the reputation of being much more reliant on strict grade ranking and standardised testing. Neither of them is considered a clear winner and both strategies appear to have their pros and cons.

the teen in question had supposedly extremely high grades, had been to the White House dinner and was recognised by Barack Obama, and is clearly a social media star of some sort

The high grades are relevant, the rest of it is padding that should have been ignored (Obama let that kid with the clock/bomb visit the White House, getting to visit Obama in the White House was not a mark of distinction).

He wrote something stupid for an essay (did not fill in the part about "why does this matter to you?") and so should have been failed. If he was academically able to follow the instructions and produce a readable essay, as the high grades would argue, this is rubbish that is unacceptable as any kind of class work much less an application for a place to a selective university.

I have met and disliked these people before, so I mostly agree with your position. However my understanding is that American top-level universities have always seen their job as being 'identify, gather and acculturate future influential people' and whether you or I like it or not, I'm pretty sure that this guy is legitimately the kind of guy they want and that their admissions system is designed to identify.

Admissions questions aren't essays, and often aren't marked by a rubric. They're prompts designed to ferret out, 'are you the kind of guy we want?' and I'm pretty sure he would have got in with or without daddy's deep pockets and BLM.

To (reluctantly) be fair, the teen in question had supposedly extremely high grades, had been to the White House dinner and was recognised by Barack Obama, and is clearly a social media star of some sort.

He also happens to be the son of Shakil Ahmed, a rather big deal formerly of Morgan Stanley.

Daddy's deep pockets as possible future donor sealed the deal, then?

That's my assumption. He probably could've smeared feces on the application and gotten in.

Her essay wasn't a summary, but it was hardly specific, nor did it reference findings from the article. Should a citation have been specified in the rubric as a requirement? Sure. But, personally, it goes without saying.

It doesn't go without saying. At this point you're justifying not just a low score but a zero on a section of the grading based on a criterion which didn't appear, in which case why provide a rubric at all?

The criterion does appear, in the statement "some aspect." Fulnecky did not address a specific argument (aspect) that the article advances. This, in my experience, is a very common expectation. You are overestimating the degree to which grad student instructors and even full tenured profs are surgically specific in the way they construct rubrics - plenty goes unsaid. I will concede that my interpretation is not definitive, but the professors comments suggest that the grade was related to this lack of specific argumentation.

At this point you're insisting a vague term ('some aspect') means something very specific (there must be a citation to the specific part of the article being reacted to). I simply don't believe this.

I'm not saying it needs to be an APA-consistent academic citation. I just mean she needs to mention some particular detail from the article, which she does not. This interpretation seems most likely to me in light of my experiences with these assignments. They are basically reading checks, and the professor would not be mistaken for thinking Fulnecky didn't read the article at all. We may just not see eye-to-eye on how to read this thing. Cheers.

Doesn’t she mention the article assumes teasing creates gender roles but she thinks gender rules are created by God? Seems like she is addressing a specific point.

To properly assess it, we sadly need other essays from the class. Did similar levels of progressive pap get a C+? What did the A essays look like?

I can't imagine what a similarly-constructed paper from a progressive view would even look like. The only half-decent analogue I can think of is if the progressive response contained poorly cited infographic statistics, in which case it would at least gesture toward empiricism and the ways of knowing endorsed by the psychological sciences. I think Fulnecky has a greater intellectual burden than a similarly-abled progressive student to justify her choice to appeal to the Bible, which defies the conventions of the field. She did not meet that burden.

  • -15

It's because of the evil white man that kids are brainwashed into teasing to enforce gender norms. We must empower Black and Brown Queer youth to smash fascism and dismantle patriarchy

The progressive reverse to this essay appealing to Biblical inerrancy is an essay appealing to narcissistic, naval-gazing identity-having. I would be surprised if there were zero students in that class who functionally just vomited two pages worth of "AS A BLANK, THIS ARTICLE MADE ME FEEL THAT" - but not as shocked as I would be if one of them were graded harshly.

I can't imagine what a similarly-constructed paper from a progressive view would even look like. The only half-decent analogue I can think of is if the progressive response contained poorly cited infographic statistics, in which case it would at least gesture toward empiricism and the ways of knowing endorsed by the psychological sciences.

We did have recent Darwin discourse, if you want in-the-wild examples.

I'm not sure that 'the ways of knowing endorsed by the pyschological sciences' are anywhere near what you want to motion toward as a different class of thing, or that it's clear from either the rubric or the typical essay in this category of course that such empiricism is actually supported or required, given the quality of academic psychological research. Maybe if schools weren't treated the Stanford Prison Experiment like a real experiment rather than a play it would have bite.

But ignoring that for now, there's a lot of pretty well-regarded sources that are respected in modern psychology and have little more than ipse dixit behind them. I'm extremely skeptical that a writer pulling from Julia Serano to talk about trans rights would have gotten this style of response, but they've got about the same experimental foundation.

That's... kinda the problem. If the quality of thought and writing from the graduates of these programs were better, you could just motion about this slop being slop. But then you look at the professor's response, and it's not like it's doing any better, either! Look at the middle lead from the professor:

You argue that abiding by normative gender roles is beneficial (it is perfectly fine to believe this), but to then say that everyone should act the same, while also saying that people aren't pressured into gendered expectations is contradictory, especially since your arguments reflect a religious pressure to act in gender-stereotypical ways. You can say that strict gender norms don't create gender stereotypes, but that isn't true by definition of what a stereotype is. Please note that acknowledging gender stereotypes does not immediately denote a negative connotation, a nuance this article discusses.

There's a lot of this whole disagreement that makes me want to slap everyone involved -- including the student -- in the face with an embossed copy of "https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cFzC996D7Jjds3vS9/arguing-by-definition", and I get that a) they probably haven't read it, and b) the professor has to write comments on a lot of bad essays and is only getting in national news for the worst. But look at that claim, and compare:

Gender roles and tendencies should not be considered “stereotypes”. Women naturally want to do womanly things because God created us with those womanly desires in our hearts. The same goes for men. God created men in the image of His courage and strength, and He created women in the image of His beauty. He intentionally created women differently than men and we should live our lives with that in mind....

Gender roles and tendencies should not be considered “stereotypes”. Women naturally want to do womanly things because God created us with those womanly desires in our hearts. The same goes for men. God created men in the image of His courage and strength, and He created women in the image of His beauty. He intentionally created women differently than men and we should live our lives with that in mind.

Yes, this is just ipse dixit and incompetently written, but it's not making the argument that the professor is criticizing; to rephrase it in left-friendly terms the student's argument is that a lot of what people present as the result of stereotypes are really underlying interests (aka the Damore), and people would enjoy their lives better if they were allowed to act in alignment with those goals. This might be (almost certainly is) wrong! But it's not the same as "to say everyone should act the same". Worse, the professor's contradiction between "everyone should act the same" and "while also saying that people aren't pressured into gendered expectations" is a textbook philosophy error.

Or, later, compare the professor's:

Additionally, to call an entire group of people "demonic" is highly offensive, especially a minoritized population." You are entitled to your own belief, but this isn't a vague narrative of "society pushes lies," but instead the result of countless years developing psychological and scientific evidence for these claims and directly interacting with the communities involved.

to

Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth. I do not want kids to be teased or bullied in school. However, pushing the lie that everyone has their own truth and everyone can do whatever they want and be whoever they want is not biblical whatsoever.

The latter is written very poorly, so for a casual reader, the confusion is understandable. But diagram the sentence out. "Society pushing the lie" "is" "[D]emonic", not an entire group of people. There's a fair critique that the student isn't engaging with the argument being presented, but in turn, it's undermined if the academic measuring this stuff can't do much better.

Agreed. I'm definitely not an "empiricism above all else" sort of person, especially regarding psychology. Forgive me for the sloppiness. I guess when I say "ways of knowing" I simply mean that Fulnecky's appeal to the Bible is generally not considered a valid truth claim in the field of psychology. Saying that "God gave women womanly desires" is incomprehensible with the vocabulary of psychology. Plenty of concepts in psychology are a bit fluffy on the empiricism, no doubt, but they are at least arrived at from some case study or line of reasoning. I do wonder what would have happened if Fulnecky laid out her reasoning neatly, in the "proper way," and still expressed the same viewpoint, but that's not a counterfactual we have access to. The instructor here is not a bastion of neat argumentation either and is reading the paper a bit uncharitably, but I think overall the critique, that the response is without grounding in psychology, stands.

"God gave women womanly desires" is incomprehensible with the vocabulary of psychology.

With a little bit of critical thinking you can tell it's the equivalent to "women are born with" or "women are innately inclined towards". Of course the obfuscation is not ideal but if you actually engage with the work it has a meaning from a psychological perspective.

In general the mainstream christian views on science don't believe that god has a personal involvement in reproduction. They believe that god created life with intelligent design, but biology, chromosomes, eggs and sperm ... heck even natural selection and evolution are all real phenomenon that stem from god's original design.

In general the mainstream christian views on science don't believe that god has a personal involvement in reproduction. They believe that god created life with intelligent design, but biology, chromosomes, eggs and sperm ... heck even natural selection and evolution are all real phenomenon that stem from god's original design.

That's true where the fleshy aspect of sexuality is concerned, but when we start talking about desires and personality, I do suspect a plurality of mainstream Christians are mind-body dualists of one sort of another, and would balk at the idea that love and desires are purely a matter of physical chemicals sloshing around in a physical brain, albeit a brain intelligent-designed by God. They'd say that this stuff happens in the Soul, which is Mysterious.

(I don't say this to score cheap shots or boo-outgroup. The Hard Problem of Consciousness is Hard, dualism is a perfectly respectable position with or without theism, even if it's not mine.)

I suspect most people are mind body dualist.

For sure - the claim "women are innately driven toward XYZ," is not one I take tremendous issue with. However, the metaphysics implied in the specific statement "God gave women womanly desires" is then used throughout the rest of Fulnecky's response to justify the argument that deviating from gender norms is detrimental because it defies God's will, to negative spiritual and social consequences. That does not seem to me to be easily or responsibly "translated" into academically validated psych-speak.

You keep talking about what is considered a valid truth claim within psychology as if that’s meaningful.

First, fields can be wrong. Appealing to consensus is bad form.

Second, psychology is a bullshit field. Most of the famous theories don’t hold up to scrutiny. With respect to gender, most of the literature is just bullshit ipsie dixit. Besides many arguments not raving being empirical, the empirical studies are riddled with failure to replicate or publication bias. Even the NYT acknowledged that WPATH was hiding studies that cast doubt on trans agenda.

So the professor is literally casting stones from a glass house. But alas, I think the professor is probably too retarded to even know that. There was a massive logical error in literally every sentence the professor wrote. The university should fire her for being so stupid.

PS the paper sucked but probably sucked about the same as a number of other papers.

Just speaking personally, and airing my elitism, I haven't written an essay that bad since at least middle school, just from a writing perspective. But I didn't go to Oklahoma. I don't know what the other essays looked like.

If they looked like essays I've written, then she deserved the zero. If they all sound like that but said gender is socially constructed, she didn't deserve a zero.

Any other argument about the quality of the essay lacks rigor.

Just speaking personally, and airing my elitism, I haven't written an essay that bad since at least middle school, just from a writing perspective. But I didn't go to Oklahoma. I don't know what the other essays looked like.

This just means you are old, not elitist. I have to read a lot of work product of 2Ls (2nd year in law school) from kids from just about every law school in the midwest. From U-Chicago, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Iowa State, all the way down to SIU and the now defunct Valpo. The writing is abysmal, yet the GPAs remain universally high. Through some magic writing ability has cratered over the last 15 years, while GPAs in writing courses have skyrocketed!

Are the 2Ls as bad as this girl? No. But they are solidly within her trajectory.

If they looked like essays I've written, then she deserved the zero. If they all sound like that but said gender is socially constructed, she didn't deserve a zero.

Interestingly, this implies that the purpose of a grade is to rank a student among their cohort rather than to an objective standard; that if you throw a bunch of morons into a university-level class, you curve scale and give an A to the best of them rather than just fail them all.

Empirically, this seems to be exactly what happens, but it leads to grade and credential inflation as ever more unprepared students are sent off to college; just another institution to spend 4 years doing pointless busywork until you get a piece of paper, high school 2.0, except that now you are four years older, 5 figures in debt, and there is not a virgin girl left among the graduates.

College delenda est.

I’m not sure curving leads to grade inflation unless the curve is quite generous. In fact, I’d expect curving to be the opposite.

It would, if the top of the class isn't what it used to be, no?

Isn’t it relative? I think you are making the case that an A is not what an A was 30 years ago. I’d agree.

My question for you is if only 10% of students could receive an A, do you think that A would more closely resemble what an A looked like 30 years compared to today or less?

I think you mean two different things by "grade inflation". On one hand, grade inflation could mean that a worse performance is given the same grade, in the same way that inflation causes the value of currency/grades to decline. On the other hand, grade inflation could mean that everyone is given higher grades, in the same way that inflation causes an increase in the overall supply of currency/grades.

Curving allows an entire class to get worse over time without their grades going down, so it causes the first kind of grade inflation. Curving also prevents a class from all getting A's, so it prevents the second kind of grade inflation.

My prediction is that the second kind of grade inflation causes the first kind of a grade inflation.

I mean it might be the University of Oklahoma, but it's still the University of Oklahoma, that is, a state flagship. It doesn't get the serious bottom of the barrel students- in the local neighborhood Texas Tech or Kansas State would be the schools notorious for graduating students who are barely literate. This isn't some HBCU or Police-Department-Requires-a-Diploma mill.

Well clearly they had one student who wrote this way, we have to see how other students wrote before we can judge whether there's politics involved in grading this essay so low.

I remember helping my dad grade essays when he was a professor, and I followed a strict rubric. The ones at the end of my grading scored much higher than the ones at the beginning (until I went back and re-graded them), because my expectations at the start were a lot higher than by the time I got to the end.

lol, reminds me of my year as a math teacher. Halfway through, I went from "I want right answers to these homework questions" to "I want to see that you tried" to "just turn in something so that I can give you a grade". That's about the time I gave up on teaching and focused on surviving until summer, when I got nonrenewed.

The mental image of a younger you thinking that being a teacher would be about teaching warms my heart.

I can't imagine what a similarly-constructed paper from a progressive view would even look like.

The obvious direct analogue would be a similarly-irrelevant appeal to the inerrancy of $OPPRESSED_MINORITY_CULTURE, in which trans and other gender identities are always considered unconditionally heckin valid

And according to the rubric, that essay would not deserve a zero either. The quality of the argument isn't even a criterion. Just... does the essay show student read the article, did the student provide a 'reaction/reflection/discussion', is it coherent? Time Cube would deserve a zero. A well-organized treatment of sports betting would deserve 5 points.


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