GDP growth was consistently higher in the 19th century, prior to the Fed, income tax, welfare and all the rest. Imagine what we could do with today's technology
My understanding is at least a portion of the people who voted for Trump did not vote for reactionary fascism, but for what he publicly said/says he'll stand for: standing up for the little guy against ruling elites, stopping imperialist wars, boosting the economy and giving people the famous "tariff checks", etc.
Of course he's done exactly the opposite (and more!), but it's hard to see that when we're being brainwashed by billionaire-owned media. Just like it's hard to see why the Democrats are just another corporate scam to profit the wealthy classes when we're being brainwashed by opposite-side billionaire-owned media.
I don't have a lot of faith or trust in the Democratic Socialists of America, but they might well unite most of the people (including Harris and Trump supporters) in common goals: healthcare for all, living wages, affordable housing, stopping the AI bubble and techno-fascism, etc. Basic stuff that's supported by most of the population yet despised by elected representatives from both parties.
They could use ignorance as an excuse the first time, but only those who were too young to see the first term can use it now.
One of the failures of the US media is to continue allowing these voters to hide behind such plausible deniability. They knew what they were asking for and they need to be understood as people who wanted this outcome.
I was about to say, we are over a decade now into "the Trump show," any excuses about his outsider status or not knowing stuff is gone. Trump is the establishment. These people voted for The Man and his plans. Then when we say "look what he did" (assuming they can even acknowledge a critique is valid) they go "well you made us vote for him." I swear I'll lose it if another Romney-Republican who believes this is a blip or whatever shares me yet another Peggy Noonan piece.
People said the same thing about Obama (cult of personality), who was also elected for a second term despite a number of big broken promises, including closing Guantanamo Bay, cutting the national deficit, passing cap and trade, creating a public health insurance option in the ACA, comprehensive immigration reform, and fostering bipartisanship
If you want to compare Obama and Trump insofar as “presidents generally don’t do 90% of what they say” that is valid but to imply their admins are/were anything alike beyond that would be ridiculous. I’m assuming that’s not what you mean but I just need to throw that out there.
The only other obvious comparison is the typical expansion of executive power we’ve (unfortunately) come to expect, though like the previous comparison, with Trump it’s different by orders of magnitude.
>If you want to compare Obama and Trump insofar as “presidents generally don’t do 90% of what they say” that is valid but to imply their admins are/were anything alike beyond that would be ridiculous. I’m assuming that’s not what you mean but I just need to throw that out there.
Yes you're right, I absolutely did not mean to imply that. I just forgot to say "orange man bad" as a signoff. Thanks
Trump was, and is, very explicit about his hatred of science, research, and the entire left in general. He ran on discrediting anyone who was slightly left leaning. Oh, it’s all fake news, Fauci is a murderer, etc.
So no, they knew, they just didn’t care. Or thought he was lying. Why would you ever vote for someone under the hope they’re lying? I don’t know, but they did. That’s, like, trump defense 101. He’s a liar, and somehow that makes him good? Shh shh shh… don’t question it too much.
Really all Americans want the same things, the things you’ve listed and more. The problem is the republicans would sooner die than give us any of that. In my state, the republicans have spent the last decade systematically destroying public school. You see public school is free, so we can’t have that. They’d rather fuck over hundreds of thousands of children’s futures than give poor people free education. It’s all about fucking over the poor, the black, the gay, the immigrants. Anyone else caught in that line of fire is collateral damage. Oops!
> My understanding is at least a portion of the people who voted for Trump did not vote for reactionary fascism, but for what he publicly said/says he'll stand for: standing up for the little guy against ruling elites, stopping imperialist wars, boosting the economy and giving people the famous "tariff checks", etc.
these people are either rubes, or else they heard the subtle dog whistles that implied other things, and thought the wink wink was for them and not the billionaire class.
The DoD has carried out a number of studies on mild traumatic brain injuries (MTBI), for obvious reasons. Not sure if the NSF keywords apply there but if they do then they can no longer do this work to help treat injured troops because it has the word evil word "traumatic" in it.
I mean if the DoD thought the projects were worthwhile to begin with, yes, I think it is eyebrow raising to cancel grants based on a keyword search for "solar energy," "hydrogen energy," "electrification," or "geothermal energy."
That the administration thinks these terms signify "wokeness" or whatever is depressing. Not difficult to imagine research grants with military applications using these words. Follow the war in Ukraine much? Energy infrastructure is frequently in the headlines.
Math professors at my alma mater were instructed to remove references to “inequalities” to increase their chances of getting funded. The <= and >= type of inequalities.
This is one a level that would be deemed too absurd for a sci-fi movie. But it's the reality.
Putting also words like "climate mitigation" on the list can only imply the list makers are true climate change deniers. Not just "we want to make more money with oil".
The comment is removed. I was also a bit confused, so I've looked it up. So a very rough overview: Under Trudeau in Canada some regulations around gender politics and climate change, got a bit out of hand in terms of absurd requirements to state how they are helpful in the matter. Even for trivial things, they were not a hard requirements but helpful.
Unlike the US gov in this post, they didn't slash projects with good intentions, they just changed and clarified the requirements.
Correction welcome, I am far away from canadian politics.
Same. I welcome correction, but I need evidence first. I'm not saying there wasn't something silly going on, but the commenter made it seem like the Canadian government did the opposite of DOGE to the same degree rather than just encourage connections to broader societal impact. Such a claim needs to be sourced.
Interesting that an entirely true comment has been removed via flagging. I not only helped write grants during the peak of that trend, but reviewed applications where I was expected to evaluate how other applicants satisfied those priorities of the funding body.
I think warning about the other extreme is valid. But the way you wrote your comment it could be perceived as justification of the categorical slashing of grants by the trump administration. Which doesn't seem right either, because the progressive canadian policies are still in place, just less nonsensical.
You comment was also just made invisible due to low rating. Which can be disabled in settings. So my fault thinking it was deleted.
I can still read it; it’s just been downvoted afaict.
But it does seem like a bad comparison if what the other commenter said is true. I mean, here we’re talking about a lot of legitimate research being cut for absurd reasons.
There's a way of saying "we need to acknowledge that it's probably bad when either 'side' does this, due to our commitment to a deeper desire for truth", and the original comment ended up sounding more like "Well, liberals did it too". I think what we aspire to here is the former, which is helpful; the latter is polarizing and gets us further from core principles.
FWIW, I have a few professor friends who are generally liberal but were required to write yearly personal diversity statements by their administrations, and knew they were rewarded for putting pathos and hardship in their stories. They hated everything about it but felt that it would set their careers back to speak out against it. I think it's very valuable to have unpolitical discussions about these things, align on deep values, and come to a deeper understanding of how we can support one another--rather than falling into camps and pointing fingers.
And also it doesn't justify the absurd overcorrection this admin has created.
This is not at all a reasonable response to a legitimate criticism of what many considered a pretentious overreach of the progressive movement. We can have a constructive discussion about all that.
But this level of insanity is another thing, and pointing out that it came about because the previous admin was incentivizing absurd behavior in the name of DEI or whatnot, is not doing their argument the kind of favour they expect
And a mention of morons being a transversal party of just occasional color, and a phenomenon that we have not finished assessing - a root cause in the shape revealed in this topics - is important here.
Here in France, anecdata from friends working in non-profits. So-called "DEI" is far from a requirement for grants, and depending on the administration may in fact be a factor to get rejected.
That being said, everyone in the associative movement is unanimous that you have to use the words and concepts expected by the administration (however absurd that is related to what you do), and that getting funding has 0 correlation with the actual social benefits of your action but everything to do with the bullshit you write in grants and how friends you are with the decision makers. (this opinion is shared both by people who succeed at getting grants and those who don't)
Yes, but no difficulty to believe it (in an informal Bayesian framework). Also reported interview experiences around the world in the past many years point to the same mentality - questions like "How do you believe you can increase [feeling of acceptance] in the classroom, Professor [of Physics]" (just an example).
You find it odd I don't need additional sources for the link that comes sourced and has been in the news for the past few years? I find it "weird" you don't need citations at all.
And for the next administration to be left holding the bag, teeing it up for another round of "see? SEEEE???? they're terrible at the economy!!" if a Democratic president wins the election
The next presidential campaign should narrowly focus on the long term effects of existing policies if not corrected and direct blame with name dropping. There is no more moral high ground in this fight. The ugly needs to be pinned on the current administration in way that it can never be removed again.
But of course the Democrats will try to keep their heads high and try to float over all of this mess instead of throwing the dirt back that gets flung around. It's not working anymore.
> And for the next administration to be left holding the bag, teeing it up for another round of "see? SEEEE???? they're terrible at the economy!!" if a Democratic president wins the election
The damage the Trump administration is doing/has done is nothing that any future administration can undo. The relationship with NATO members alone is unsalvageable.
Could be a core cadre of 5% of clearly compromised or foreign agents recruiting a vast amount of fools and putting them in the positions where they can do the most damage.
Or it could be a core cadre of 51% of clearly foolish Americans electing a vast amount of fools and putting them in the positions where they will do the most damage.
Hundreds of millions dramatically undersells what happened in Trump's ~first year back in office:
Trump personally made $3 billion during his 2nd term's 1st year. [1]
19-year-old high school graduate Barron Trump earned $150 million dollars. [2]
Also, Trump's children stand to profit from a $1.6 billion mining deal that Trump cut as president this term - 'Kaz Resources'. [3]
Also, "The White House Intervened to Get a $620 Million Deal for a Company Tied to Donald Trump Jr." - 'Vulcan Elements'. [4]
Also, "Trump’s Sons Land Massive Pentagon Deal as They Flaunt Corruption" via "Powerus" a company founded last year and which merged with a golf club in March. [5]
The Trump family cryptocurrency company received a $500m investment by the Emirati royal family, before the Trump admin announced that the Emirates would be allowed to import enough Nvidia AI chips to build the largest AI campus outside the US. [6]
Edit: As alluded to by walrus01, "The double life of Jared Kushner, mixing business with politics as emissary for his father-in-law Donald Trump … Ivanka Trump's husband has a career as an unofficial diplomat and a master dealmaker, juggling billions and focusing his activities on the Middle East and Near East. His latest coup, carried out with the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, was the $55 billion acquisition of video game giant Electronic Arts." [8]
While Trump and his family have made billions during Trump's first year back as president, for an example of how Republicans treated Biden family finances: in 2018, while Biden was out of office, Biden received a check from his brother with "loan repayment" written on it for 200K. Despite that Biden was not in office then, and the small amount (compared to not just thousands or even millions, but billions that Trump and his family have made in Trump's first year back in office), 5 years later, in 2023, Republicans were still investigating that $200K loan repayment. [7]
That's actually an excellent example - perhaps the closest thing to something real for Joe Biden to come out of the laptop was that in 2017, while Joe was a private citizen and held no office, an email between his son and his son's business partners had proposed Joe take a 10% share in a foreign deal his son was negotiating. 6 days later in 2017, Hunter replied that Joe had replied "an emphatic NO" when the idea was presented to him. https://www.vox.com/2020/10/22/21529237/hunter-biden-debate-...
Republicans spent years focusing on a potential deal that Joe had quickly said no to, which was while Joe was out of office anyway. Meanwhile Trump in both term 1 and term 2 has been actively getting foreign income, but crickets. (I realize you said /s.)
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
We want to put them in trauma.”
That was Russel Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget and key author or Project 2025.
Trump also said, "a whole civilization will die tonight".
They've successfully planned and executed a takeover of the US government that will take decades to undo, if it's even possible at all. Of course they are bright, you don't stumble into causing this much damage.
They are simply thoroughly evil. This is easy to mask as "stupid", but stupid people wouldn't be able to be so consistent.
Maybe you've seen something I haven't, but why do you think that regarding e.g. Russell Vought? His primary goal has long been to swing the US towards Christian nationalism, and he has made enormous strides towards that. People like him are well aware of the negatives consequences these decisions have, but to them it's worth the pain.
I can't truly say since I've never talked to him (and I hope it stays that way), but IMO I simply cannot imagine someone doing everything Russell Vought has done to America, without being fairly smart. Maybe he's just acting as a proxy for smart people, but someone behind Project 2025 etc. objectively must be very intelligent.
There's a reflexive tendency to assume that anyone implementing cruel and bigoted policies must also be stupid, regretfully, this is sometimes not the case. As you have so accurately described, it's a very careful and calculated plan to move towards a desired end state. Whether that desired end state goal looks something like Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale, and whether you're supposed to like that, or abhor it, totally other question...
Of course, how could I forget that people's motivations are solely filtered through their reasoning. Obviously no smart person has ever desired anything that brings negative consequences for the people around them, while increasing their own power. That would be too stupid.
Of course they can, but as I already said, you don't stumble into causing this much damage. Damage caused by genuine stupidity would be distributed more randomly.
Thought terminating cope from people unwilling to accept that they live in a nation full of cruel oinking swine, enough to control the government at the moment. No, they must be foreign assets. Thinking that way makes it easier to ignore the fact that the American individualist (read: selfish and cruel) ideology is baked into every aspect of the country's propaganda. Much easier to ignore it, write hagiographies that have the greed that drove the smugglers and wealthy elite to found this country's morals replaced by rapping stage actors. Craft narratives that the crumbling of the fine character of a nation practicing racial segregation until only half a century ago is actually the crafty infiltration of the savage slavic mind.
Apologies in advance for off-topic but I couldn't help but reading your sentence with the tone of a rapper. Like Deltron 3030 or Aesop rock. I think it would sound great.
If there's a text to speech for rapping I'd really love to insert your sentence.
I have no idea what your personal background is but it's very interesting that without me saying it or even alluding to it, you jumped directly to what is your presumption of what nation-state ("slavic", presumably you're thinking Russia) that might be controlling foreign agents.
You know it's possible for some groups of people to be a mixed bag of cruel, venal, greedy, feckless, foolish and compromised, right? Of course it's not likely that everyone in the administration is literally a recruited foreign asset.
I believe their point is that the talk about foreign interference is a red herring. The current administration reflects a deeper rot in the culture.
"As democracy is perfected, the office [of president] represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
I would say that the current maga goverment of the USA is the result of the culture, not the other way around. There might be _some_ funny business around the elections but overall the people that fall to/want exactly this government are not few
MAGA was just the normalization of politics which have existed within the American right and Evangelical Christianity since at least WW2, and which reached an inflection point with 9/11 and Obama's election. None of it is new and none of it is a foreign plot. Trump isn't a Russian asset, he's an avatar of America's hatred of itself.
Man, this is the kind of thing I have been trying to tell people. It's unsettling to think about, but I'm like, "look, there are no rules now, it's all a negotiation, the only real laws are the laws of physics and the rules someone selectively enforces under the threat of violence."
It would do us good if we remember this, because this sort of the basic state of nature that most people have lived under most of human history. I'm not saying this is how it should be, but a lot of people are still living in the pearl-clutched "but, that's against the rules!" despite there being basically no real rules for a decade.
When people realize that it's all nonsense, it's going to get weird.
There's entire books on developmental economics which explain how states create institutions that might appear to be rules based, but are ultimately just negotiation and favor. They get more money from developed countries and investors that don't look to deep, but ultimately the rate of growth is quite bad, because investing money in that kind of environment just has a poor rate of return.
All well described, with experimental numbers and everything, for countries in Africa and Latin America. Little did people realize that no, you can also apply this to developed countries when they suffer sufficient degradation.
I know a number of immigrants from economically struggling developing nations with endemic institutional corruption who very clearly see what's going on when they look at the behaviour of people who are running US federal cabinet level departments. It's all quite familiar, just on a higher budget.
The US has long been a bit of a dual system, with the world-leading and technology and wealth coexisting with a lot of poverty, violence, and discrimination; but this seems to be the point at which it becomes fully Latin American.
Could be considered "imperial rebound", from all the School of the Americas decades in which the US made Latin America more violent, right-wing, and less democratic for its own purposes, culminating in the invasion of Venezuela. I'm sure they'd have started on Cuba by now if Iran had gone as planned.
We are _in_ the weird stage. The President is someone who has realised the nonsense, because people around him for his whole life have enabled and facilitated the nonsense in order to earn some of his dad's money. And now, instead of his dad's money backing him, he has the US' money, he's got a whole new cabal of enablers and facilitators, and a line as long as roughly 30% of the US population awaiting to fill any role they could get to feed off that fat pipe.
But, yes, when this filters down, and it has started, there's going to need to be a significant amount of legislative strength shown in order to stop the wall from collapsing entirely.
We're going to need more than just "legislative strength" within the framework of our existing government, because this has shown that that framework is inadequate. I don't see a path to true recovery without a Nuremberg-style process in which essentially everyone who held any position of authority in this administration is called to account, in a manner that does not assume that that process must be done in accordance with pre-existing laws. As a simple example, it will require ignoring the Supreme Court ruling that the president is immune to facing consequences for "official acts" he has taken. Most likely it will require ignoring or scrapping the Supreme Court entirely.
I fear I do not believe the US has that legislative strength, nor the will to build it. I want to believe that justice is still possible, but big E's island, and the lack of any justice has crushed any optimism out of my soul.
I do not see how a prosperous future is possible for my family, so long as that future is in the US.
'The last decade has been the Democrats clinging onto the rulebook going "but a dog can't play basketball!" while a dog fucking dunks on us over and over' -@Arr
The Democrats are not controlled opposition; they do not secretly want the MAGA agenda and only pretend to oppose it. They simply don't have any power to stop it and are really bad at getting power to stop it.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."
The MAGA agenda is just a tiny sliver of what the government actually does (albeit, a particularly culturally obnoxious sliver). On most economic and foreign policy the two parties are in emphatic agreement. The Democratic Party mostly exists to keep itself in power regardless of the state of the country—in this sense, it is emphatically controlled opposition.
If they were effective opposition, half the party would be in prison right now.
Quotas were rules illegal in 1978. I listed them as one of a sequence of continued (and later ruled illegal) bigoted practices, over time.
> 1978 — Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978) — The UC Davis School of Medicine admissions program violated the Equal Protection Clause with the institution of quotas for underrepresented minorities. However, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.'s concurring opinion deemed diversity in higher education a "compelling interest" and held that race could be one of the factors in university admissions.
I think it is some sort of whataboutism without any regard to proportions. Some people have a really hard time emotionally dealing with systems that occusionally fail.
They refused to give money unless your application included a section explaining how you supported Democrat social ideology, during the Biden administration.
That's... sort of wildly spun. There was no funding fight, it was just an executive order. It didn't apply to public grants, only some federal agencies. It was largely unenforced.
Do DEI statements (which amount to "Our staffing decisions aren't discriminatory because...") constitute "Democrat social ideology"? Well, maybe! But it's spun, in exactly the same way that "Republican" ideology appears to be constructed around the "freedom to be racist and bigoted".
To be blunt: I'd rather live in a society that demands toothless DEI statements from the bureaucracy than one that defunds good science based on political language. And I suspect the same thing is true for you.
Over-correcting from too much competence? Can’t tell if that’s what you meant (presumably sarcastically) or if you mean over-correcting from too much previous attention to DEI…
Careful there! Spine without a brain is dangerous. It will just reflexively react to every stimulus without actually analyzing it. Not unlike some people are doing here. May be they only have a spine, and not much of a brain...
"Freedom of speech" crowd curiously picked whose speech is important freedom thing and whose speech is actually anti-free-speech, because it is uncomfortable for the former free speech.
Trying to remove this or that group from civil life and push them into helpless silent situation is important free speech. Protesting this person is not free speech, it is infraction against free speech. Offending certain group is important free speech and they should grow a thicker skin rather then responding. Responding to that is infraction, because bigot has free speech right to never hear something that does not make them feel good.
I understand your impulse to say that but political appointees are the opposite of "deep government" so your expectation about what their supporters would think is completely wrong.
They can't seem to decide whether Zohran Mamdani is going to first implement total sharia law, or full red banner style communism. In response I have already seen people printing a few satirical tshirts with a mishmash of soviet era/hammer and sickle iconography and minarets and moons glorifying the Socialist Peoples Republic of Mamadanistan.
It's very simple. Free speech means you should be able to say bigoted things and keep your job and/or highly paid speaking engagement. It doesn't mean you should be able to write an op-ed opposing genocide without being arrested, detained for months, and then deported. The "free speech" crowd has no interest in those issues.
I’ve found the “freedom of speech” crowd understands freedom the least; notably, that rights come with responsibilities. They want the rights, none of the responsibilities, and to be arbiters of the rights of others (again, they really don’t understand freedom and rights).
A similarly daft group are those who believe in “states rights”, and they make the same mistake: they want states rights, unless it contradicts other things they want. It’s not a real position, they’re fascists.
since when does freedom of speech cover "getting money from the government". there is broad latitude for to government to restrict the speech of employees in general (if you are a nonappointed employee of the executive branch you cannot lobby the legislature as a matter of separation of powers, if youre in the military or privy to top secret materials, theres a ton of things you can't say).
I don't think your argument is a genuine one in this case.
The government is and always has been the primary driver of science research funding. There simply isn't enough of a known payoff for private investors to bother and private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall. Or perhaps more accurately the government stepped in because private individuals would not and the risk was falling dramatically behind the world in research.
Now new administrations have always been able to influence grant awards. But rarely have they been so ... bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?
People have always been driven by ideology but the current US admin is just so stupid. Shockingly incompetently stupid. Even if you agree with their ideology do you really want this clown show being the ones implementing it in such a ham-fisted idiotic way?
> But rarely have they been so ... bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?
Depends what you (and they) think their job is.
RAGE was one acronymn thrown about and name-checked by the vice-president "Retire all Government Employees".
Russel Vaught said:
> We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down... We want to put them in trauma."
> There simply isn't enough of a known payoff for private investors to bother and private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall.
not true. in the us, the government funds only about half of all research and development expenditures.
> private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall.
you are certainly not thinking about university endowments. Numerically most university professors are operaring from a startup budget given by the university, not a grant. even in an r1, most professors do not come in with external money.
> bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?
i mean. i dont know which is dumber. thinking a keyword list is a good idea for cancelling grants or thinking that a grant application is the right way to filter for good science in the first place?
Well, the government funds science projects in general, and now they are limiting it based on a very loose list of terms related to ideas counter to their own ideology.
The idea of freedom of speech is to not limit expression of ideas counter to any one ideology.
Also, if corporations donating to political campaigns is speech, so should science funding be - which is now being restricted.
Their usual retort is: “we need more speech in the market place of ideas, not censorship”.
So why don’t they just fund right-wing-aligned projects instead?
if those scientists were to raise money from private donors would they find themselves in jail, or their property confiscated to where they couldnt continue research? that is the definition of "freedom of speech".
if you accept money from the government, you must also accept the fact that that money is political. complaining that losing a barely earned privilege is a loss of freedom of speech is a fucking slap in the face of people who have actually fought hard for freedom of speech.
Government funding is political full stop. it might be bipartisan but it's still political, by definition. if you cannot accept this your policy opinions will always be hopelessly distorted.
btw i have a phd in the hard sciences so i know what im talking about when i say grants are "barely earned privileges". they do not, in general, go to the most qualified or talented scientists, hence the word "grantsmanship" to refer to the skills required to obtain a grant that are not the pure scientific skill
I have very little knowledge regarding biology, but your suggestion seems less specific to me (I could imagine there are ways to research ovarian cancer that include male animals). Specific titles are important so research can be easily searched.
I think hacker types look at this list and think, "Wow--that's inept." But I also feel that the administration looks at the list and says, "No, it's absolutely brilliant."
And I figure that's because our goals are different.
The trump admin is a hive of scum and villainy worthy of a comic book universe, and Musk is inextricably linked. Thus anyone using twitter or grok or buying a Tesla or using starlink is complicit.
EDIT: or working for these companies!! Couldn’t pay me enough to do it.
Or take a page from IDN homograph attacks in phishing/whatever and replace certain 'a', 'e', 'o' letters with their unicode equivalent that's not English.
Which will have side effects affecting other realms (search and indexing etc.).
And besides, when a regime asks e.g to "prosecute all intellectuals - wearing glasses will be a sufficient criterion to identify them" workarounds are not the point.
My favorites are: exclusive, historically, pollution control, systemic. There had to be an absurd amount of false positives but I doubt they care when they are anti-science in general.
As bad as this is, I don't see how it is fundamentally different to the ways in which research grants have been doled out before. Hasn't it always been somewhat political?
Granted, the methods used here are asinine. But I don't think USG research has ever been apolitical and there have always been special words that grant writers knew to use and not use. Part of being in research is getting grants and it has always been a silly game. This just seems to take the silly game to whole new levels.
Liberal isn't leftish. Liberal is your Clinton/Biden types, who are center right on the global political stage. (And only in the weird broken US political scene are they considered left wing).
Looks like they accidentally put some right wing conspiracy language on the list. No one would ever seriously call their own policies "social engineering" when the word is associated with dictatorship and cyber attacks.
A lot of the DOGE-era bizarro stuff seems to have involved just throwing an LLM instructed to have MAGA conspiracy brainworms at every problem. It would not surprise me if this list was partially generated in that way.
Or it could be one of the conspiracy brained dead-eyed little brownshirts they sicced on the task that put it in there. Who knows. I'm not sure they even knew themselves.
>And some or all of the Black students across three sections of the course were offended by what they’d heard. So they wrote a letter to the dean of the Marshall School of Business, Geoffrey Garrett, among others, describing Patton as insensitive and incapable of teaching the three-week intensive communications course.
There is a possibility that some just did not care about the whole financing endavour.
If you don't particularly care for the life of cows, "looked a bit sad" and other false positive triggers become a sufficient marker for suspected "mad cow disease".
They did though, an llm filter is just as dumb. Don”t they have those interviews with the edgelord doge employees trying to justify the stuff they killed?
Adding to this, i think llms are just part of their game, they know well enough they aren’t accurate, but it plays into comments like this, where we’ll think an llm would make a smarter decision, but it’s just a smokescreen, they’re already looking at gaming the bots, musk trying to get grok to abide by his petty worldview is the most obvious ploy. But they’re already obfuscating sources of information as a matter of course, soon, we won’t know anything anymore, we’ll have to trust their machines.
I think they don't want to cut funding to math projects or engineering projects. They want to cut funding to research that goes against their politics. Cutting math research because "inequality" keyword is a bad look for them and just gives free ammo to their opposition. If they employed an LLM that wouldn't happen and they could still pursue their political goals.
I think their fixation on the machine is part accountability-laundering, part obfuscation as you say. They want a monopoly on not just information, but analysis, and breaking all information infrastructure that does not flow through their pet ideology robot is part of that.
>a handful of federal agencies confirmed earlier this month in court documents that they cut grants if researchers’ projects “expressed, or were presumed to express, viewpoints disfavored by the Administration.”
Why is this bad? The Administration is democratically elected so nominally represents the viewpoints of the majority people - why should taxpayer funding go to disfavored research?
>The UC researchers allege the grant terminations violated their First Amendment rights by targeting their work based on viewpoint and subject matter and have asked the federal judge overseeing the case to rule the revocations unconstitutional.
More weird fascist technocratic fantasies from academia. Why would you be constitutionally entitled to continued public funding?
I don't think anyone voted for the gov to use a crude, ridiculous keyword list with many more false positives than not to terminate the funding of any and all research that simply uttered a bad word regardless of context. I'm not sure why you're pretending they did.
I suggest you actually read the first amendment. Maybe you'll understand then.
Read all the comments here, at this time, there are no civil conversations. It's all a echo chamber. You won't find anyone who wants to engage in actual conversation about the topic.
There's numerous civil conversations happening. Why would you tell such an easily disprovable lie?
Could you explain how the people talking about their experience having to avoid specific words in their grant request were somehow uncivil? I'm not sure I understand. Was the objectively ridiculous nature of the situation being laid bare to you uncomfortable and thus "uncivil"?
At the time of writing your post 90% of them were talking about the article. That, obviously, necessitates talking about the administration. I guess you interpreted people saying anything other than "I love this admin" as "uncivil". But, well, you already moved from "none of the threads are civil" to "90% of the threads aren't complimenting enough".
You know that, of course, which is why you refused to explain how the people talking about their experience having to avoid specific words in their grant request were somehow uncivil. Very dishonest and abhorrent.
The only one in an echo chamber is you, apparently one you've hallucinated into existence. The only 'individual' here being uncivil is you trying to gaslight everyone into believing any and all criticism of an administration is "uncivil".
As stupid as this list is, there is seldom any reflection about why half the country felt this was necessary. I don't accept "because they are just dumb trump voters" as a reason. Obviously the left was doing some things that half the country felt were deeply unacceptable.
Also not allowed to use "solar energy", "Geothermal energy", "EV infrastructure", "electrification", "Hydrogen energy".
Welp, America, you either gotta kick this administration out, or enjoy cosplaying the 1800s.