Rosencrantz2
5d ago
For punters who are willing to pay something for something unique. If lots of people all do the same formerly unique thing, they don't get a share of the spoils of fame, they (potentially) all get nothing.
Rosencrantz2
6d ago
It may not be required for a crime to have taken place, but it certainly seems to have been a major sentencing factor. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce83pj1ggmeo
When sentencing Connolly at Birmingham Crown Court last October, Judge Melbourne Inman KC highlighted that her X post was "widely read" and had been reposted 940 times.
He also pointed to other posts that "included further racist remarks" and emphasised the seriousness of her offence was due to an intention to "incite serious violence".
Rosencrantz2
6d ago
Perhaps she could have tried pleading innocent on this basis, she didn't though. Her tweet said 'Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care', so I imagine lawyers could debate exactly where this falls on the spectrum with inciting statement at one end and expression of apathy at the other.
Rosencrantz2
6d ago
If there were 800,000 women doing the same thing as Bonnie Blue, then each of them would make on average 1 pound a month, but since 799,999 women said "nope" then one single woman gets to harvest all the demand.
This doesn't sound right. If 800,000 were willing. I'd guess the allure of it would fade and the pie would shrink.
Rosencrantz2
7d ago
But the parent CAN cut off access to the credit. Who is to say that men can take power back from women? It's true that they could do so if they mobilised collectively. But we don't know that they can do that, any more than dogs or birds, say, could all at once attack humanity. Peasant revolts don't prove anything because (as you note) women are integrated into every part of society.
Rosencrantz2
8d ago
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.
Rosencrantz2
8d ago
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.
Rosencrantz2
8d ago
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.
Rosencrantz2
9d ago
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.
Rosencrantz2
9d ago
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.
Rosencrantz2
20d ago
Well (1) hypocrisy exists, and (2) those wars, to the extent they were popular (they weren't at all) were not generally thought of as 'let's go and get this territory for ourselves', but more as 'we have to do this to keep our special relationship with America' or 'we have to do this to stop WMD attacks'.
Rosencrantz2
20d ago
Most people in the UK feel that wars of aggression and invasion are a fundamental red line that shouldn't be rewarded under any circumstances, due to obvious lessons from history. In the mind of the average Brit it's really no more complicated than that.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
I can't disagree when it comes to much academic writing and yet phrases like 'it is well understood' are just falling foul of what could be another strongly enforced rule against passive phrasing and the smuggling in of contested facts. My hypothetical version of the Motte would discourage such shady thinking just as strongly as it would discourage emoting.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
On a tangent, has anyone tried a version of The Motte that aspires to remove personal feelings from the debate in a more wholesale way a la scientific journals, where the first-person is discouraged? It would obviously be a somewhat idealistic standard, but it might help further 'optimise for light rather than heat'. As HereAndGone notes, some people here do express their own satisfaction about some outgroup's misfortune pretty frequently and while it's neither sarcasm nor mockery, whether they want (let's say) women to be enslaved is not actually germane whatsoever to any debate, other than as one tiny and discouraging data point about one anonymous poster's emotional stance.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
The actual consequences of killing a boatload of migrants in cold blood are far broader than just the deterrent factor though, so the utilitarian calculus is not obvious. E.g. It might lead to diplomatic isolation for the country responsible, protests and counterattacks, legal cases against the killers, etc.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
This taps into a key point which is that for a huge range of activities, it's hard to know if they ever actually contribute and how much, regardless of whether they add to GDP or don't at all, and that even activities that fail completely can still 'contribute' in a loose sense of being in the direction of something others approve of. Even claiming benefits but being a good friend could plausibly bring far greater economic and moral good to the world than not existing as you might (just for example) unknowingly save someone from suicide.
For this reason one should think very carefully before deciding others are unproductive or parasitic based only on headline facts.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
What would your argument be for why meritocratic hiring would be likely to prevent feminisation? Is it that the high-merit candidates are low on feminine traits, regardless of their gender?
(It seems meritocratic university entrance is leading to more women than men in many subjects, but perhaps those women are more masculine?)
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
I am confused whether she thinks merit is a separate quality from masculinity. E.g. could you have lots of extremely talented women who get a job on merit but then, by their fundamentally feminine traits and preferences, ruin the workplace nonetheless? Or are merit and maleness the same thing to her, in which case you could safely allow a whole bunch of very 'male'-leaning women like her into a workplace, as long as you vetted them carefully?
I think in the latter scenario she can probably unhypocritically keep her job, it's just she'll also have to adopt a notion of merit that is divorced from ability to directly perform a job function, and is instead all about degree of fit to a male workplace culture.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
I don't see how she can say that. Her whole argument is that once the field is >50% female it changes to become worse. If that is not the case and a female majority profession works out just fine, then I don't even know what she is trying to say.
I think I agree with Hereandgone -- if meritocratic employment results in women dominating a field, quotas would have to be implemented to prevent this from wrecking the field. OR she is admitting that some female dominated communities can be truth seeking, competitive etc. and in that case it seems she just has a problem with certain specific corporate cultures rather than with their gender composition.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
I think the author is saying that she is smart and got her position through merit, and is willing to prove it, but she thinks most women in high positions did not. Does this make her kind of an asshole? Hell yes but she did say she's a disagreeable sort of person.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
A progressive is hardly going to agree that the truth-seeking traits are the same ones as the female-excluding traits.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it?
This paragraph is amazing. As if the primary characteristic of people who are oriented towards the sole goal of 'open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth' is their gender! A small proportion of academic communities in history have managed to take this kind of pure truth seeking as their goal. To see gender as the main faultline of truthseeking vs other interests is identity politics at its worst.
Rosencrantz2
2mo ago
Claim (1), that these are all just jokes, seems doubtful. Many 'ironic' posters pretty clearly are using their irony for plausible deniability, and do basically believe the things they think they're being ironic about, so I guess to the assertion that these are all just jokes, I'd say 'I don't really believe you. Some of them are, some of them aren't.'
Rosencrantz2
2mo ago
Large pizzas are usually a good deal for the same reason as 16" vs 12" sounds like only a third more pizza.
In the UK we would think of him as leaning a bit right wing, not a leftist (and not an intellectual either, he's more of a morning TV show host, though he has edited newspapers and is influential in the media industry).
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