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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   22385 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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'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

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