ControlsFreak
No bio...
User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
15hr ago
Thanks for a cite to the type of settlement; that's valuable information.
But it's still a powerful tool, and one that's very hard to undo.
I guess where I'm at is that all this is fine. You and @WhiningCoil have identified a way to get money, and it is hard to undo that getting of money. But I guess I view it as that the following is the plan:
- Get Money (and give it to your preferred NGOs or whatever)
- ???
- Problem solved!
There doesn't seem to be anything special about this form of getting money as opposed to any other form of getting money (except that it's bad and the left did it, so it's a chance to get in a partisan dig). I'm not sure why I couldn't just swap some other form of getting money into this plan and conclude that it will solve the problem in the same way. I guess it's because you're deciding that you're going to get that money from the universities when you sue them? Uhhh, so how does that help? Is that what was demonstrated to work in the past? Did prior Democratic administrations actually fix something about the banks or whoever they sued when they got money from them? If not, then ??? If so, then my sense is that it would probably have been something about the thing that they actually sued about and other terms of the settlement that involved them changing some behavior (rather than just giving money) that actually 'fixed' them. And those things are totally missing from this plan.
This (bad, partisan) way of getting money may be doable and hard to undo, but it seems to not even have a passing familiarity with solving any of the actual problems we set out to solve. We were talking about ways to fix universities, the concern came up that future administrations might undo something, then we sort of jumped randomly to "this is a thing that's hard to undo!". I mean, we could have jumped to me eating a hamburger. It's hard to undo me eating a hamburger. But's it's not terribly relevant to the conversation in any other way, either.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
I don't understand how you say this doesn't work. It obviously has worked in the recent past!
Sorry, how has it obviously worked to reduce the ability to use the federal government as a weapon against universities? How has this strategy obviously worked to actually fix something at universities? I'm not following.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Thank you for providing something, though that link is a trainwreck in terms of having basically no real information to go off of. Thankfully, Cato and FedSoc have significantly better articles, with at least some traceable cites to see some real info. Still not super great. Near impossible to follow the cites to actual numbers, and when you do find actual numbers, they're pretty piddly.
Nevertheless, there shouldn't have been a single dollar done that way. Trump should have supported a statutory ban, and those settlements should have been thrown out on Constitutional grounds, as well. Frankly, if Trump started doing it, I would say that they should be thrown out on Constitutional grounds, too.
In my defense, your original comment went through quite the journey, talking about fabricating criminal conspiracies and just general government spending. I see that you're now focused solely on being upset about one specific thing that was done by Obama/Biden and want to use that specific thing.
Now, some thoughts. The context for all this was (your comment and mine):
Yes, but enforcement actions will likely cross from one administration into the next, in which case a friendly administration will just drop it. We've seen this repeatedly. All deeply embedded Democratic partisans need to do is run the clock out until one of their guys gets back in power, and then all is forgiven and things can ratchet another degree.
If that's your worry, then I'm all ears for your plan on how to reduce the ability to use the federal government as a weapon for partisan purposes against universities. Or, well, anything else for that matter. This isn't even a university problem. It's a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.
This strategy doesn't do anything to reduce the ability to the use the federal government as a weapon against universities. It doesn't do anything to actually fix anything with universities, AFAICT. ISTM that the purpose of the goal is purely extractive, as you viewed prior acts as extractive. You certainly haven't given a way that it should be done that is oriented toward fixing anything instead of being primarily extractive. As I wrote, there's nothing specific about universities. No reason why they should be the target for extractive suits rather than anyone else (except, I guess, you don't like them). Not really any grounds on which to go after them that could produce settlements that could conceivably be funneled to Elon. But whatever. Finally, it does nothing to alleviate your concern that the government is sometimes held by your opponents. In fact, as I responded, I think some on the right are worried about the risk of never-ending reprisals and descent into further banana republic, rather than actually contributing to a solution. But fair enough on your preferences. Perhaps you have a concept of a plan, but it clashes with your originally-stated goals, and it still has significant work to get to something real.
One final note is that connection to being able to continue suing is weak. Yes, money is fungible, but it was particularly ill-motivated in the original comment. Like, the thing that Elon lacks for being able to sue a future government is money? Lol wut? It sure sounded like there was something legal going on, rather than just money. Honestly, left wing NGOs probably get significantly more money through regular appropriations (and bullshit appropriations when they were, indeed, shoveling money out the front door during COVID/IRA/whatever). It took me a bit to realize that you were mostly just pissed about one terrible thing they did, didn't really have any specifics of how it could work the other way, didn't really have any sense of how it could actually fix the problems identified, didn't really have the qualities that one would naturally expect from a reading of your comment, and also worked against your originally-stated goal. Yeah, I was kinda dumb for not figuring it out for a while.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
I spelled out how exactly you were missing anything approaching a plan, specifically for universities.
I mean, I guess there's a sentence about somehow getting settlement money from them to Elon, but not a single sense of what that sort of thing might actually look like. How the mechanics of it could work. I'm not even looking for a complete strategy, but some sort of something that a person can squint at and say, "Ah yes, I can mayyyybe imagine how that might work." Call it, say, "concepts of a plan".
Indeed, you did not have that. You literally had:
Let Trump's DA start suing universities left and right, and structure the settlements so that they have to give some Elon headed NGO all the money, so he can sue them some more long after Trump is out of office.
That's it. That's all you had. We can just read your comment and see that that's all that you had. How is that supposed to work? Give me an example, an idea, a process, an anything. You claim my ignorance is "tactical". I claim my ignorance is just ignorance. I honestly have no idea how this is supposed to work. I mean, can I just sue you right now in a way that lets my neighbor sue you some more in case I die next year? Just all out of magic or something?
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Oh hey, if only I had an entire comment responding to that, which you seem to not have engaged with.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Definitely not. It's entirely internal reflection, and it hadn't even crossed my mind to actually mention it until I saw someone else say it.
FWIW, I've enjoyed our interactions (and your comments, generally), as well.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
I'm starting to outgrow this place
I've been thinking on this exact thing for a little while now. That there may be others having the same thoughts at the same time perhaps leans me more toward thinking that the quality has just gone down. Only slightly, though; there's always just coincidence.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
this method
is undefined, so one cannot determine how generally scoped your claim is. My comment was very clearly making a scope argument (about your own argument), so this is just non-responsive.
Alternatively, the most natural of the charitable interpretations is that you agree with my scope claim and acknowledge that your own proposal suffers at least the same defects.
Slightly less charitably, you're just doubling down on misdirection and obfuscation. Bad faith argumentation stuff.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
To the extent it is a problem, (1) is a problem for any scheme of enforcement. (2) is another form of a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.
But you're distracting from the real question, of course. It appears that even the Trump administration is coming around to the idea that it's best to go after specific things, where they are strong, and enforce them broadly, using the hook of federal funding and existing mechanisms. As I suggested months ago. Not indiscriminate chemo for no purpose, no rhyme or reason, just blasting randomly. It's not like blasting randomly is going to solve these concerns you're now bringing up. It's just silly misdirection.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
I slightly worry that if and when we do get one of those folks, it's not going to be good for me. Not because I think it's going to be someone who you think is in your image. It's probably not going to be that either. But it will likely be the forever boot in the face that @The_Nybbler is always concerned about.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Slight correction: You've never seen it before. Some of us have.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Fair enough as a description of your preferences. I think the right, in general, is debating to what extent to engage in a similar strategy, due to the risk of never-ending reprisals and descent into further banana republic (which I think folks who are somewhat aligned with you in this question would say the country already was). Nevertheless, there's nearly nothing in here about universities. I mean, I guess there's a sentence about somehow getting settlement money from them to Elon, but not a single sense of what that sort of thing might actually look like. How the mechanics of it could work. I'm not even looking for a complete strategy, but some sort of something that a person can squint at and say, "Ah yes, I can mayyyybe imagine how that might work." Call it, say, "concepts of a plan".
ControlsFreak
1d ago
If that's your worry, then I'm all ears for your plan on how to reduce the ability to use the federal government as a weapon for partisan purposes against universities. Or, well, anything else for that matter. This isn't even a university problem. It's a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Lying in applications for federal funding comes with significant institutional and personal penalties. That machinery is already in place.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Continued Evolution on "The Plan" to Deal with Universities
WaPo cites two anonymous "White House officials", one of which is described as a "senior White House official". They claim that the purpose of anonymity is "because [the plan] is still being developed". So obviously, take that for what it is. Plausibly just a trial balloon to see how it plays; plausibly just a push by one faction within the WH to change direction.
“Now it’s time to effect change nationwide, not on a one-off basis,” said a senior White House official
At least somebody at the WH is observing that doing things like indiscriminate chemotherapy wasn't working, and now little targeted things might be struggling, too.
The new system, described by two White House officials, would represent a shift away from the unprecedented wave of investigations and punishments being delivered to individual schools and toward an effort to bring large swaths of colleges into compliance with Trump priorities all at once.
Universities could be asked to affirm that admissions and hiring decisions are based on merit rather than racial or ethnic background or other factors, that specific factors are taken into account when considering foreign student applications, and that college costs are not out of line with the value students receive.
Huh. I wonder who suggested this sort of thing eight months ago. Of course, that person was also showered in downvotes for continuing to suggest something like this over "indiscriminate chemotherapy".
This was pretty straightforward all along. The playbook was already there. The hooks were already there. There are ways to affect change that are actually oriented toward the goals you want to accomplish. It seems like at least some people in the administration are continuing to find their way to it.
Of course, the wild response is wild:
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said the outlines of the proposal amounted to an “assault … on institutional autonomy, on ideological diversity, on freedom of expression and academic freedom.”
“Suddenly, to get a grant, you need to not demonstrate merit, but ideological fealty to a particular set of political viewpoints. That’s not merit,” he said. “I can’t imagine a university in America that would be supportive of this.”
Spoken as if universities weren't asked for ideological fealty to the left in the past. Some academics basically just tried to stay silent on the matter, while others jumped all over it.
A slightly less insane response:
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school, said “no one will object” if the White House simply requires universities to pledge compliance with existing law.
But Chemerinsky, one of the attorneys representing UC researchers in a lawsuit challenging terminated federal research funding, also said the administration’s view of what the law requires could be at odds with other interpretations: “It all depends on what the conditions are, and whether those conditions are constitutional.”
Chemerinsky said it would be a First Amendment violation to put schools at a disadvantage in competing for funding if they profess a belief in diversity, for example, because government is not allowed to discriminate based on viewpoint. He said it “would be very troubling” if the White House proposal deviates from the standards that have been used in awarding grants based on the quality and importance of the science, peer review and merit, and uses ideology as the judgment standard instead.
Still sort of lacking, as there was previously a (more-or-less, depending) soft disadvantage in competing for funding if one didn't profess a belief in diversity. If you want me to take this complaint seriously, then you should also say that the left having done that before was wrong. You should say so publicly and publicly commit to a position that the previous regime was, indeed, subject to the exact same concern that they were discriminating based on viewpoint.
But indeed, the Trump admin is in a legally privileged position here. They can, indeed, just demand that universities comply with existing law. I think Prof. Chemerinsky is being a bit coy about whether some universities will complain; my sense is that UCal has already been on a tighter leash for some of these things than many other unis... and yes, even just actually complying with the actual law is going to be a fight for some of them.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
God's chosen representative on Earth, Constantine the Great
Almost good satire, but just a tad too obviously ridiculous here.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
I ask it a few questions that are closely related to my research. When it inevitably is not very helpful, I go back to not caring which one I use for the trivial stuff in life.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
Truth is the central problem with your comments, though. It's not a minor problem that can be routed around.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
Yes? I'm not sure what you're adding by simply stating your own personal incredulity and declaring falsity. Someone else could equally declare your statements false. They're turned off by your falsity.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
My sense is that both of those topics have been subject to debate within the realm of Christian thinking long before modern science. The debate over the latter issue seems pretty unaffected by modern science, as well.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
because I could not longer believe that the earth is 6000 years old, because I could no longer believe that God would damn someone to an eternity of hellfire for being born in the wrong place
Man, it's not that hard to find a church that doesn't screw these things up.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
I was not the original commenter, so I made no such claim.
The extent to which game theory maps well to real world situations with humans participants is hotly debated, even among expert practitioners. My experience is that it is phenomenal how you can sometimes get abstractions for some particular problems that are quite beautiful and genuinely aid with intuition. However, as you increase the realism and complexity, many methods run into difficulty. Naturally, that's why we have a lot of work in those domains, to try to extend the set of formal problems where we have methods that work. There might be upper-level undergrad courses which can somewhat survey the simpler settings and mayyyybe touch a bit on the rest of the field, but I think it's most likely going to be a grad class, if one exists at your uni (you'd be surprised how rare they are), and honestly, it probably is still difficult to really survey the lot of it.
I don't know what the other commenter would say, but I personally have seen a ton of extremely shitty appeals to game theory when it comes to politics or morality. I haven't harped on the former yet (though it's been on the back of my mind to do so for a while), but I've definitely harped on the latter. The vast majority of folks who appeal to it for these purposes do not have any idea about these features of the field. The vast majority of them have, like, heard of the prisoner's dilemma. And that's sort of it. They know approximately zero more and just imagine the rest of the effin' owl in their mind.
variants of prisoner's dilemma that are mapped for real world situations - such as iterated prisoner's dilemma that can be used to study problems like nuclear arms race
I'll note the kind of funny bit that the classic iterated prisoner's dilemma is two participants, complete information. Yes, one can do imperfect/incomplete information or multiple-player, and there's a lot of interesting work there. Good luck if you think you're going to find someone in a forum like this who has a reasonable sense of the state of those parts of the field and is able to use it to usefully inform their view of politics/morality. It's always, over and over again, just repeats of arguments about chump-level understanding of variants of the iterated prisoner's dilemma.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
The classic prisoner's dilemma is one of complete/perfect information about the game, including the opponent's payoff information. There are a variety of incomplete/imperfect information games (some people distinguish between the two), where a player may lack information about the environment, their own payoff, other parties' payoff, some form of secret goal/intention/capability/etc.
You are right that there is one piece of information that is lacking, namely, what specific strategy the opponent will, in fact, choose. Given that this is generically a feature of almost all games that are considered in the field, it is usually not a feature that gains the moniker of "incomplete/imperfect information". That is reserved for those other games, and things like the classic prisoner's dilemma are, indeed, called "complete information games".
Games in which one knows what specific strategy the opponent will pick are, in my own view of the field, not even properly called "games". They are simply optimization problems.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
That's an interesting claim, considering that it came significantly out of atheism. E.g.:
Most movement atheists weren’t in it for the religion. They were in it for the hamartiology [the study of sin, in particular, how sin enters the universe]. Once they got the message that the culture-at-large had settled on a different, better hamartiology, there was no psychological impediment to switching over. We woke up one morning and the atheist bloggers had all quietly became social justice bloggers. Nothing else had changed because nothing else had to; the underlying itch being scratched was the same. They just had to CTRL+F and replace a couple of keywords.
I'm pretty doubtful that if one examines the continental->critical philosophy pipeline that may have undergirded some of the trend, one would find a pool of Christian heretics, either. I guess if you say that all the atheism is just Christian heresy (would be quite a claim) and that Wokism is just atheist heresy, blink and imagine some form of transitive property, you might be able to think that Wokism is just Christian heresy.
Potentially, perhaps. Like I mentioned, when I tried following the cites, it often was sort of piddly amounts of money.
Sure, but this has approximately zero to do with the these sorts of settlements, particularly, and more to do with the threat of lawsuits/regulatory action generally.
Where? When? How? At what point did they have to sign their name on the dotted line, with known penalties through known mechanisms, stating that they weren't doing those things?
Funny you say that, because my understanding was that there were clear regulations and universities had to (across the board) sign their names on the dotted lines affirming that they had satisfied certain cybersecurity requirements. Thus, the getting in trouble for it.
That's all perfectly fine. Kinda has nothing to do with these specific types of settlements. It's a complimentary strategy, yes. But it's clear that the admin is struggling with one-offs here and there. Thus, looking for a comprehensive, across-the-board way to use known hooks and known mechanisms to change behaviors.
Most importantly, none of this is "indiscriminate chemotherapy". We're soooooo far past that silly reasoning, which was my original point. Yes, you can use hooks in the federal funding process (across the board, with known mechanisms). Yes, you can use targeted lawsuits. Sure, I guess you can try to have some of those lawsuits produce (bad, partisan) payouts to your favored NGOs. None of those things are silly "indiscriminate chemotherapy".
More options
Context Copy link