Hey folks! Happy Valentine’s Day. Fireside this week and then hopefully next week we’ll start into our look at the Siege of Eregion in Season 2 of Rings of Power and also the larger Tolkien legendarium. I confess, watching the show, my suspension of disbelief fell much faster than the city did. But in the meantime, for this week I wanted to talk a little bit about the structure of grant funding in the United States and how that funding fits into university finances and research more broadly.
Left and Center are Ollie, Right is Percy.
Of course the reason I am talking about this is that the NIH, NSF and other grant-making federal agencies are in the news lately. As you may be aware, on January 27th, the Office of Management and Budget, acting under the auspices of an executive order from President Trump, froze all federal grant funding; that memo was blocked by a court, so the OMB rescinded the memo, but kept the freeze in place, an action which was also blocked by the courts.1 Despite the court orders, quite a lot of grant funding still seems to remain frozen (though some is moving) and I’ve continued to hear from academic colleagues in other disciplines over the past week of programs still unable to access their funding. For reasons we’ll get to in a minute, unstable or interrupted funding can be quite bad even if funding is, in some notional sense, eventually to be resumed.
First, let’s specify the major grant-making institutions for academic research. They are (in order of size):
- National Institutes of Health (NIH); medical and health research
- National Science Foundation (NSF); non-medical science research
- National Endowment for the Arts (NEA); arts (both fine and performing)
- National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH); humanities research
And I want to start by being clear about the relative size of these entities, because whenever anyone talks about funding in the university space there’s always an assumption that the money being cut is either going to rock climbing walls (we’ll come back to this) or someone’s idea of the most niche indefensible course ever (‘woke basket weaving’), which folks generally understand to live in the humanities or in the arts.
The annual budget for the NIH, which covers funding for medical and health research to, you know, cure diseases and save lives, is $45bn, more than the other three major research grant-making institutions combined. The annual budget for the NSF is just shy of $10bn. Meanwhile the NEA’s budget is $207m, while the NEH’s budget is $200.6m. Which is to say the NEA and the NEH are each about 1/50th the size of the NSF and less than 1/200th the size of the NIH. Ironically, this means the ‘wokest’ academic fields are almost entirely insulated against federal funding cuts, because they never received a meaningful amount of federal funding in the first place.2 As Apuleius writes, “Do you not know, dummy, that ten wrestlers cannot strip a naked man?” (Apuleius Met. 1.15).
In graph form, that relative size looks like this:
And by the way, here is the graph if we include research allocations in the budget for defense:
When Uncle Sam funds research, he is extremely interested in weapons, very interested in medicine, somewhat interested in science and only accidentally interested in the arts and humanities. And of course, very little of the already very limited NEA or NEH funding is for ‘woke basket weaving,’ – a lot of it ends up funding pretty standard history research, or performing Shakespeare, and so on.
Now I should note, these institutions are not all structured the same. The NSF, NEH and NEA are primarily grant-making structures: their main job is to hand out research funds to other institutions (typically research programs at universities) to make research possible. The NIH does this too – at scale – but by contrast with the others, it also maintains its own very large and substantial internal training and research facilities. About half of the NIH’s funding is spent internally and about half of it externally, very roughly. Of course, that ‘extramural’ grant funding, around $26bn, still utterly dwarfs all three of the other grant institutions combined. Uncle Sam is very interested in medicine, for what I hope are fairly obvious public health reasons and medical research is very expensive because it requires massive clinical trials to make sure any new medicine or treatment is safe before it is made available to the public.
But I want to focus in on the grant funding here that is heading towards universities. To be clear, these federal grants don’t go out to every project or just any project. In most fields, federal grants (NIH, NSF, NEH, NEA, etc.) are the most competitive and thus most prestigious, meaning that Uncle Sam can pick and choose which research proposals or programs to fund and basically has his pick of the litter. Indeed, seeking and getting one of these grants is generally a project unto itself, with multiple stages of selection and approval, all of which require producing grant proposals and so on. These grants are not handed out like candy; there is a long approval process.
Once awarded, grant money is almost always channeled through an institution – generally a university; it isn’t just handed to a researcher. That funding stream is split typically into two parts: part of the money goes to the lead researcher (the ‘Principle Investigator’ or PI) and part of it goes to the university. The university chunk is termed ‘overhead,’ and the idea here is pretty simple: while the PI might pay for some specialist equipment, personnel and so on, there’s a whole lot that they don’t pay for. You aren’t building a new building for each grant, for instance, nor hiring all new staff, facilities or faculty. Likewise, the university already has a lot of the research equipment and spends money to maintain and update it. In all grants from all sources, the average overhead rate is typically 20-30%, but my understanding is that Congress actually stipulated an overhead rate for most federal grants at 50%, a result of the time the last Trump administration tried to sharply limit overhead rates.3 This distinction has become relevant recently with efforts to fix the overhead rate at 15%, well below the normal value, even for non-federal grants. It is certainly the case that some universities – infamously, many of them very well funded elite privates – negotiate absurd overhead rates well in excess of 50%, but 15% is too low for basically everyone. The point here is, the overhead rate is not simply graft: it is paying for something, namely for the facilities the university is bringing to the table to make the project happen. Without that overhead allowance, taking on a grant might become a significant net expense for a university, which given most university’s limited financial resources, would be a real problem.
The rest of the money comes under the control of the PI, but of course all uses of that money have to be justified and grant funding doesn’t usually arrive in one huge mass of funds, but is accessed over the life of the project. Now on my end, for something like an NEH project, the funding amount is often very small and the thing it is paying for is basically just the PI’s time and perhaps some travel (to archives, museum collections, etc).4 For big NIH or NSF projects (or larger NEH/NEA ones), of course the money may also go into hiring a lot of researchers. Indeed, in the STEM fields, it is standard that new PhDs spend a few years working this way as post-docs, supporting the research being done by the more senior tenure-track faculty PIs. Naturally, highly trained PhD researchers, even as post-docs, need to be paid so they can, you know, eat and make rent. But the result is STEM grants have to be much bigger: you’re not just making up a portion of one academic’s salary, but rather paying to staff an entire lab (and potentially fill it with expensive equipment and supplies) in order to run much larger scientific studies.
Science is really, really expensive.
All of which now brings us to some of the potential consequences of disrupting this ecosystem. Even just substantial delays or uncertainty in this system entails real costs. A lot of the folks working on these grant-funded research projects, the reserve army of post-docs, are not otherwise employed by the university: the university has hired them with the grant money. If the grant money stops or is disrupted, they don’t get paid because unlike permanent faculty, their salaries aren’t tied to department funds. Worse yet, at many universities, if you have someone whose funding line is dry for long enough, policies require them to be let go; you can’t simply keep a post-doc on the books for a couple of months waiting for the money to come back. Of course these are also frequently early career researchers, relatively fresh out of a PhD program, so they are also unlikely to have the financial resources to just ‘stick it out’ for weeks or months. This is why you saw a lot of scientists panic instantly over grant freezes even if they weren’t made permanent: a month-long ‘figure out what we’re doing’ freeze would still kill a huge proportion of research projects.
And to be clear, when we talk about letting research wither on the vine – because it is clear there is still a desire in the executive branch to cancel some of these ongoing grants – if you pay for 75% of a research project, you don’t get 75% of a result. Generally, you get 0% of a result. Cutting this sort of funding midstream means wasting the funds already spent for many of these projects, because they never come to completion to get you the desired output, but you already spent a bunch of the money (and you had a whole bunch of specialist researchers already spend a whole bunch of time).
The potential that some programs may be cut also creates significant problems. Proper academic research in almost any field – humanities, hard sciences, social sciences, etc – generally takes quite a lot of time to do well. It takes time to pull together research personnel, to get facilities together, to actually do the project; all of this can take years and so a lot of these grants are stretched over considerable amounts of time. For that to work, there has to be some confidence that a change in President or a change in Congress isn’t going to lead to already running programs to be cancelled, because, again: that means everyone just wasted months or years of time and all of the non-permanent staff and faculty find themselves suddenly unemployed. Often, by the way, those are researchers who have moved cross-country to take up these positions.
Now again, for the humanities, the impact of all of this is somewhat muted because NEH funding is so much smaller and so we generally have fewer things riding on it. But for many STEM fields, the disruption of the funding ecosystem – not even shutting it down, just creating a whole lot of uncertainty – threatens an entire part of the researcher-scientist lifecycle. Because the expectation in those fields is that after the PhD, researchers spend time as post-docs in labs run by professors who are hiring those post-docs with grant funds. Indeed, even before this, what is funding many of those early-career researcher-scientists in graduate school is likewise research assistant or lab assistant positions which are also sustained, at least partially, by grant funds. If a bunch of those programs are just cancelled every time the balance of Congress or the party in the White House shifts, you’re going to create 4- and 8- year cycle mass extinction events among scientific researchers, which hardly seems good for, you know, science.
Finally, there is the impact to universities themselves, and explaining this requires a quick potted history of the last 70 or so years of university finance. Now, when proponents of research cuts talk about how these cuts hit universities, they like to focus on the Harvards and Columbia’s – elite private research universities with massive financial endowments, to make the case that these universities can just ‘handle it.’ But most research doesn’t happen at these elite private institutions. There are, optimistically, a few dozen elite private institutions with that kind of financial backing in the United States and they tend to be, compared to other research universities, actually rather small. The entire Ivy League is just 8 schools with a combined academic staff of just 23,404. By contrast, the University System of Ohio alone has 34,000 academic staff; the Cal-State system 27,000; the UC system, 25,000; the UNC system, 13,000.
In short, the vast majority of academic research – sciences, humanities, all of it – does not happen at elite private institutions with huge endowments but rather in large state publics, which make up the overwhelming majority of R1 and R2 (the top tiers of research university) institutions. These universities, almost without exception, do not have the sort of infinite endowments or the ability to charge arbitrarily high tuition that the Ivies have: they are working on a budget.
The structure of that budget has changed over time. Initially, the idea with most of these large public institutions was that state governments would foot most of the bill for teaching and research, leading to the low tuition you always hear your parents and grandparents talk about. Beginning in earnest in the 1980s, the combination of stagnant state funding, rising college attendance rates and Baumol’s Cost Disease – the effect where, when an economy grows more productive, the things which cannot see large gains in productivity (a teacher can only teach so many students, a doctor can only see one patient at a time) become more expensive compared to everything else – lead to a break in that system. Rather than pay for this expansion of higher education and its rising costs with state funds, we opted to let tuition balloon upwards and foot the bill with student loans, with that debt eco-system made stable through federal money and bankruptcy laws that treat student loans differently from other forms of unsecured debt, which are extremely favorable to lenders and unfavorable to former students.
When the 2008 financial crisis hit, states cut back substantially on what state funding remained, but the gap wasn’t replaced entirely with tuition and more loans. Instead, a big part of the gap has increasingly been made up for with grant funding. That comes in two directions: student grants, like the Pell Grants ($7.3bn annually) which folks understand as a loan-free way for Uncle Sam to help you pay tuition but in practice is a way for Uncle Sam to pay universities to teach more students (since it allows a higher average tuition) and the research grants noted above at around $35bn and change. Combined with the insane leap in tuition (itself supported by loans), that has enabled public universities to survive despite the increasingly meager actual state-rather-than-federal funding. Now, to be fair, university mismanagement here has played a significant role too; the strategy of bringing in professional managers (the ‘business model’ of education) has been a disaster as those managers have engaged in endless unsustainable empire building and competitive student amenities.
But, and I want to stress this, research grant funding doesn’t go to student amenities or administrative vanity projects, generally. Quite a lot of that funding, after all, goes into the hands of the PI, not the university – and a lot of the ‘overhead’ (again, generally 20-30% of total awarded funds) is, in fact, legitimately overhead for the use of buildings and facilities. If you want to get serious about cutting costs within universities, I have some suggestions (beginning with a return to faculty governance, which showed itself to be quite a bit more frugal in the period before the 1990s than the modern ‘business’ model of university governance), but a blanket reaping of all federal research grants, with no matching provision of state-funds to make up the difference is not it.
We’ll see how this policy position evolves, but as stated now, the main results of the substantial uncertainty it creates along with cancelled, half-finished research projects is likely to be both rising tuition and falling research output, causing the average taxpayer to pay quite a lot more to get quite a lot less. If the uncertainty continues long-term, many of those expensive, highly trained and difficult to replace researchers are going to seek out positions in more stable countries and take the results of their research elsewhere.
On to recommendations!
The latest Pasts Imperfect newsletter including a fascinating discussion by Monica H. Green on how genetic studies are beginning to help us understand ancient sickness and trace the development of modern diseases. I think the point here is well made that we’re just at the beginning of learning what these new methods can tell us about the past and as a result, there’s going to be a lot of rapid shifting of what we ‘know’ and don’t know. Nevertheless, these new tools and methods are just astounding in letting us fill in some of the blank spaces in our knowledge of the past.
Meanwhile over at Peopling the Past, they have a good interview with Dr. Cara Tremain discussing the trade in – often illegal – antiquities, often the result of the looting of archaeological sites. While Dr. Tremain is mostly focused on Maya artifacts, the antiquities black market and looting are also a huge problem for the study of Greek and Roman antiquities as well. The fact of the matter is that while much of the looting happens in developing countries, the buyers for those illegal, looted black market antiquities are almost invariably in wealthy, developed countries and almost-certainly-illegal antiquities are frequently laundered into or through museum collections, even at well-known and prestigious museums. This is something of a separate, if related, issue to objects taken by imperial powers pre-1970, which are legal for them to have, if not ethical for them to have. Not only does looting often rob developing countries of their heritage objects, it also greatly damages our ability to learn from them, as looted objects are effectively stripped of their context and provenance (the chain of ownership from excavation to display), with the latter often being intentionally concealed by collectors or museums because honestly in provenance would be admission of a crime.
Meanwhile, in modern military news, folks looking for an update on the current state of the conflict in Ukraine would probably be best served by listening to Michael Kofman’s two-part update over at War on the Rocks as part of “The Russia Contingency,” which is, alas, behind the paywall. However, Michael has also done a shorter discussion of the situation outside the paywall with Ryan Evans in addition to a longer talk over on YouTube with the Decoding Geopolitics Podcast. Unsurprisingly, he gives a similar take in all three venues at greater or lesser length, which is I think valuable for its effort to present a neither excessively optimistic or pessimistic view: the Russians (and Ukrainians) are both neither four feet tall nor twelve feet tall.
Nevertheless, understanding the current situation is valuable, especially given as the United States’ position appears to be rapidly changing, with the new Secretary of Defense (foolishly) taking preserving Ukraine’s pre-war borders or having Ukraine joint NATO off of the bargaining table before even opening negotiations with Russia. It is likely that difficult but very consequential decisions are coming for both Ukraine and Europe more broadly, forced by this sudden shift in American political priorities and competence.5
For this week’s book recommendation, I’m going to step a little outside of my usual bailiwick and recommend D. Gambetta, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate (2009). This is one of those books that it pretty neatly summed up by its descriptive title: Gambetta sets out here to describe how professional criminals communicate to each other, not just through linguistic communication (that is, words), but also posture and actions (symbolic communication). The approach is almost anthropological in its nature (Gambetta is a sociologist) in that it makes deep and rich observations about forms and patterns of communication. While much of the focus is on the Sicilian/Italian mafia – where Gambetta has his deepest expertise – he draws widely on criminal communication in other contexts as well and his goal is to illustrate general patterns rather than specific usages (though the latter come out in the effort to illuminate the former).
Now of course there is a lot here if you want to understand the primary subject matter of how criminals communicate, but I think Gambetta’s work is valuable even more broadly as a tool to think about communication and social signalling generally. The subject of criminal communication is actually really useful, because criminal communication, by its nature, aims to be illegible to outsiders (particularly the law), but to signal clearly to insiders (other criminals) and that means that, while on the one hand it is a system with rules and functions, it requires explanation. That takes the familiar – how do you greet someone? how do you signal deference and why? that sort of thing – and makes it unfamiliar, which in turn has pushed me – and may push any reader – to think more deeply about other forms of communication that are more familiar.
Of particular note here is Gambetta’s use of the concept of ‘costly signals’ – actions which are designed to be, in a way, irrationally ‘expensive.’ A cheap signal, after all, can be faked by an outsider, but only a true insider is likely to be willing to give a costly signal; as Gambetta puts it, “a convincing signal of a criminal type is that which only a true criminal can afford to produce and to send.” Performing a serious crime or doing prison time work as costly signals because a non-criminal (like an undercover cop) is unlikely to be willing to perform them, precisely because they are, in a sense, so expensive. Of course we do the same sort of thing with all sorts of other costly signals, when you think about it: gift giving is less efficient than just giving money, but we do it precisely because it is irrationally expensive and in so doing signals genuine attachment. In my own work, I’ve used this sort of framework to think about the signalling inherent in Roman patronage relationships as well as in the macro-scale quasi-patronage relationship between Rome and its Italian allies. Rome’s actions in the third century, especially, can be understood in many ways as ‘costly signals’ of Roman fides. In short then, this is one of those books that is really ‘good to think with,’ even if you aren’t interested in the particulars of the logic behind prison fights or criminal nicknames.
That said, if you are interested in the logic behind prison fights or criminal nicknames, that too you will find here, in spades. Beyond simple scholarly value, anyone looking to write a convincing ‘rogue’s guild’ or fictional criminal fraternity could get quite a lot out of this book because Gambetta not only notes the habits of actual real-world criminal society, but also the reasons for those habits, the decision-making calculus that produces them. Inmates, for instance, look to signal their capacity for violence clearly, in order to avoid potentially costly violence, in part by accumulating what Gambetta terms ‘violence capital’ – history and reputation that signal their willingness to respond to provocation with violence. Thus on the one hand, young inmates are more likely to fight than older ones (which we might attribute to youthful exuberance, but equally, the young have accumulated less ‘violence capital,’ less reputation) and – perhaps counterintuitively – women inmates, despite being less likely to have ended up incarcerated for a violence crime, fight as much or more than male inmates, precisely because they are less likely to have a history of violence and need to establish a history in order to enforce their boundaries vis-à-vis other inmates.
So not only is this book a fascinating look into a modern criminal subculture, it is also a probing look at the way reputation and communication can work in a wider range of situations, from historical societies to fictional or fantasy ones.
- The legal problem, for the curious, as I understand it – I am not a lawyer – is that Congress limited the president’s power to refuse to spend money it had appropriated in law to be spent, back in 1974. Consequently, the president cannot legally simply refuse to spend money Congress has designated, by law, to be spent in a certain way.
- And someone will, of course, recoil against the idea that $200m is not a meaningful amount of federal funding, because that is quite a lot of money in an absolute sense, but it isn’t. The United States is, after all very big. There are, for instance, nearly 4,000 universities in the USA ranked by the Carnagie classification system, of which 270 are research universities. By the time you are splitting those grants a few hundred ways, you are talking about a very small component of a university’s arts and humanities funding. Put another way, the NEH and the NEA combined cost the average American taxpayer just $2.64 per year; these are, by Uncle Sam standards, not expensive programs.
- Why so high? On this, I am not sure, my sense is that the figure was driven by the high overhead demands of the fields – medicine, defense technologies, applied sciences – that Uncle Sam cares most about, but I am not in those fields to confirm.
- That time component works thusly: full time faculty have fixed teaching loads, which – if they have grant funds – they can ‘buy out,’ the idea being the grant funds are paying them to focus on their research for a given time period. So the grant money goes from Uncle Sam to the researcher and then to their department, on the assumption that the department would then use the spare money to cover the short-term teaching gap (for instance by giving another faculty member a bonus for teaching an ‘overload’ or by hiring an adjunct or VAP).
- I feel no particular need to conceal my low opinion of Pete Hegseth, who is both unfit by constitution and character for his position and is not widely respected by basically anyone within the broader national security or foreign policy community. The list of conservatives more qualified to run the Department of Defense is extremely long, almost preposterously so.
“medical research is very expensive because it requires massive clinical trials to make sure any new medicine or treatment is safe before it is made available to the public.”
I remember discovering, as the PI of a Biomedical research lab, that a million dollars is really not a lot of money.
As an assistant in the pharma industry during my mid-20s, I misread a label and long story short end up wasting something like $20,000 in failed experiments. I was depressed and convinced my career was over before it had ever really begun.
My boss told me to perk up and buckle down: for our employers $20k is invisible. As long as I can catch back up and prevent this mistake from holding up the overall project, then chances are that *nobody else will ever notice it happened*.
Real eye-opener.
As an apprentice i ruined a lot through a misunderstanding, it was IIRC more than double that money
“In this study, which included 63 of 355 new therapeutic drugs and biologic agents approved by the US Food and Drug Administration between 2009 and 2018, the estimated median capitalized research and development cost per product was $1.1 billion, counting expenditures on failed trials.”
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762311
I don’t think I need to add anything else.
The cost of the machines and reagents themselves are already so high. There is very little slack in the system/fat to trim. The only way to reduce costs this much is to abandon certain projects.
Gambetta’s sounds fascinating. But I have such a long list of unread books and I don’t see when I’ll ever get to finish them. I can’t afford to add another to the pile right now. :'(
I work for a private Drug company that does R&D research for NIH. They do have relatively decent overhead allowances, except there’s a couple of caveats:
1. We undergo annual audits to verify the percentage of costs that count as overhead. This is actually pretty intensive, and is called Incurred Cost Proposal.
2. They are very strict about what costs are allowed. I’ve had invoices in the $100k range kicked back because there was an $8 package of paper towels on it (which should be covered under overhead, even if we used it to clean up spills in the labs where we do research). They will go through the itemized expenses with a magnifying glass to see if something can be called a direct consumable, and whether everything ties out *exactly* to the penny.
I’m on the other end of that equation, auditing orgs that receive government funds. And yeah, consistency in allocating costs direct vs indirect is something we’re sticklers for since there are a lot of subtle ways to overcharge there… though rejecting over an $8 line item seems pretty extreme to me.
My lab (although not in the US) actually had the opposite experience with the auditing: Basically every month, our “consumables” bill got flagged as being way too high. Why? Because we were running an atomic force microscope, which uses extremely tiny tips manufactured to be an atom wide at the bottom. These things go for hundreds of bucks even for the cheap ones (and we couldn’t use those because we needed ones with magnetic plating), but they are consumables because they only last a few scans each before the tip is ruined. The accounting rules for the grant were just not properly set up to deal with this special case of consumables which cost more than a lot of normal equipment per piece.
Another problem is that the lack of funding in the us is likely going to affect the private research sector globally. In theory it would drive up competition for non grant funding worldwide by a huge amount, as companies try to find alternatives in order to stay salient.
I was wondering if you were going to ‘do’ the Siege of Eregion.. possibly as a praise-filled post for April 1st. Looking forward to it!
Sadly, April 1st is on a Tuesday this year.
Bret Devereaux is not required to upload exactly one post on Fridays, no more and no less. For a while there was a category called New Acquisitions for one-off non-Friday posts! Since the start of 2020, there have been three such posts, and somehow it’s 2025.
The reason I don’t expect an April Fools joke from Bret Devereaux is not that April 1st falls on a Tuesday this year. It’s because Devereaux never seems to have time for April foolery.
“… someone’s idea of the most niche indefensible course ever (‘woke basket weaving’) …”
I hope I’m not the only one now sitting here imagining interesting and valuable college courses that could fit that description. Seriously, the diversity of basket weaving traditions across various cultures and their connection to local ecology is pretty awesome stuff.
Ah but an anthropological symposium on basket weaving techniques cross culturally would be quite a different thing from ‘ underwater basket weaving’ which is the classic useless degree.
Funnily enough there is a university which has a course in underwater basket weaving as a way for people to get accustomed to spending time with Scuba gear and practise hand-eye coordination underwater.
Not to mention the role baskets played in society. We tend to think of them as primarily decorative and without much value because that’s how they exist in our culture, but in the past they were as ubiquitous as plastic bags are in our society.
I’m also curious as to what “woke” basket weaving is. There’s an interesting discussion to be had about the political differences between crafts (basket weaving, fiber arts, and the like) vs manufacturing (factories, foundries, refineries, and the like); the former tend to bring in Left-leaning folks, whereas the latter are stereotypically Right-leaning, despite there being no apparent political element to them.
This substack explains it: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-woke-science
In a nutshell, grant writers have been under pressure to put DEI buzzwords into their proposals whether that’s the focus of the research or not.
And why have they been under pressure? Hmmm
After what was revealed at USAID, I suspect that no amount of claims about what any government department does will suffice. Proof is required.
For the same reason Harvard claimed Elizabeth Warren was Native American: to look more diverse than it actually was.
Rephrasing the data which needs an explanation does not, in fact, explain it.
What, precisely, was revealed at USAID?
That many things they funded bore no relationship to what they claimed they funded. Check out Data Republican for the details.
I agree. I sympathize with the concerns raised by our host here, but right now I think it’s like the bombing of Dresden in WWII. Tragic, arguably unnecessary, but it doesn’t invalidate the war.
I believe that the “data” is already explained satisfactorily by the observation Dr. Devereaux already made, namely that the grant proposal environment is feverishly competitive. As a logical consequence, people will grasp at any straw they think might give them even a narrow advantage over the competition.
The linked Astral Codex Ten article provides an example of a proposal that is part of the Ted Cruz database of “[grant funding] diverted toward questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda…
The actual text of the grant proposal is:
An Energy Harvesting System (EHS) has emerged as an alternative to battery-operated Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Instead of using a battery, EHS self-powers its device by collecting ambient energy from external sources such as radio frequency, WiFi, etc. However, since such ambient energy sources are unreliable, their resulting power… often goes out… EHS leverages a capacitor… capacitors are at the heart of any EHS devices. Unfortunately, capacitors can be unreliable… losing their original capacitance over time. More importantly, attackers can exploit the capacitor reliability issue to cause incorrect outputs or degrade the quality of service in targeted EHS devices… This research project focuses on investigating attack surfaces and designing cost-effective countermeasures. The project outcome will lay the foundation for batteryless Internet of Things services by maintaining their quality of service and security. The project also aims to integrate research findings into undergraduate teaching and promote equitable outcomes for women in computer science through K-12 outreach program.”
So what we see here is an afterthought sentence tacked onto the grant proposal, presumably in hopes of giving the applicant an advantage over other, similar applicants that do not do this thing. Maybe some of the grant money actually does go to a K-12 outreach program for women in computer science, but it sure doesn’t sound like “advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda” to me.
In short, the grant applicants are hoping that someone who doesn’t really understand what they do will see “women in computer science” and think that’s good, and then Ted Cruz got ahold of the application and they see “women in computer science” and the word “equitable” and think that’s bad.
It’s not clear from the information provided whether this grant actually WAS approved because it promises to put money into a K-12 outreach program for women in computer science, or how much of the money is actually going to that, but canceling the capacitor research guys’ grant proposal over this seems rather counterproductive.
You do realize that what you are offering as evidence is in fact either not USAID or proof of my position? The grant you are discussing is NOT under the ambit of USAID’s purposes.
I’m presenting two specific and separate points. The first is “so what, exactly, was revealed at USAID?” You have replied “that some number of USAID grants had their funds going to purposes other than the nominal purpose.” I have not yet engaged with that.
The second point is a direct response to your question “and why have they been under pressure?” I addressed that at some length, by more or less summarizing Scott Alexander’s own response, with a bit of extra commentary along the lines of “I’m not sure they HAVE been under that much pressure, since the total percentage of grant proposals that even so much as salt in an extra line about how they’re going to do some career day for women-and-minorities stuff is pretty low.”
@Gamereg
I think you’re getting the scales reversed, personally. Your argument is, implicitly, “the grant freezes are to the war on ‘wokeness’ as the bombing of Dresden was to World War Two.” I would argue that what we are seeing strongly suggests something more like “the grant freezes are to the war on ‘wokeness’ as the Salem witch trials were to the overall Early Modern European pattern of witch hunts.”
Namely, that we are actually seeing an entirely typical example, not an exceptionally unfavorable example, and that the recurring pattern is of disproportionate harm inflicted against American institutions in general and against minority groups in particular, in pursuit of a threat that lives far more in the overheated minds of the hunters than it does in reality.
There were people quite ready to suggest that WWII was like the European witch trials, as well.
You do realize, BTW, that you had better hope that there are a lot of witches out there?
Because the government is currently spending annually more than a TRILLION dollars that it hasn’t got?
If we can’t cut witches, we have to cut the non-witches. No amount of complaining about the worthiness of non-witches will change that.
@Mary Catelli
I am rather suspicious of an avowedly partisan source (right there in the name) claiming that USAID fund was being misdirected. We have already seen, for instance, the “condoms for Gaza” incident, in which Elon Musk claimed that $50 million in USAID funding had gone to condoms shipped to Gaza in the land formerly known as Canaan, when in fact they were shipped to Gaza, Mozambique.
We have also seen things like “USAID was giving money to Politico, therefore the media can’t be trusted unless it’s reliably on Our Side” when in truth USAID was paying Politico for a subscription service that many powerful private individuals also buy, and which is expensive because organizations routinely charge other organizations a lot of money for highly specialized data services that require a large staff and a lot of work to maintain.
In short, we are seeing a significant amount of information presented by Republican elected and unelected political figures as proof of Biden administration or ‘deep state’ malfeasance that is, to put it mildly, incorrect. As such, I do not think that malfeasance can reasonably be assumed until the evidence is more thoroughly analyzed by a party that is both knowledgeable enough to avoid simple mistakes (“Mozambique is in the Middle East”) and neutral enough to avoid creative misinterpretations (“paying Politico, a private company, a fee for their services is proof that the government is controlling the media”).
She gives the data. You can look for yourself.
Or you can ignore it. But if you are not interested in facts, the facts are interested in you.
@Mary Catelli
I say “I do not trust in the accuracy of data from an avowedly partisan source when in just the past few weeks there have been multiple examples in the national news of this same party getting basic facts wrong or openly misrepresenting those facts.” Forensic accounting is a complex discipline for a reason, and one of the biggest reasons is that it takes real time, effort, and competence to get one’s facts straight so that one is not falsely accusing people of fraud.
Your reply is “she has presented the data, these are the facts.” This invites the question, how do we know that these are the facts? Any but the most basic of education teaches us, when looking at a source, to ask whether the source might have reasons to misrepresent, to cherrypick, or to misunderstand the evidence available to themself.
Are we to be confident that this source is telling the truth because she’s done her homework in detail, and would actually post retractions or apologies if she made a mistake? Or are we to be confident that this source is telling the truth because she’s come to the conclusion that all political enemies of the Dear Leader are guilty of terrible perfidy, which is the desired and therefore correct conclusion and which therefore validates what she says retroactively?
Considering you have opined freely on the other side with even less data, everything you say applies even more to YOU than to her.
@Mary Catelli
There were, indeed, people prepared to say it was wrong to fight World War Two against the Nazis. Namely, the Nazis. In every major ideological conflict, there will be people saying one side is right, and that the other side is right.
Thus, it is not useful to say “well obviously my side is right.” One must step back and go “by their fruits shall ye judge them.” We can show that fighting the Nazis was correct, regardless of the Nazis’ objections, by demonstrating that the Nazis factually started several wars, slaughtered millions of innocent people, and subjected many millions more to tyranny of the most violent sort in which actual Gestapo were kicking down actual doors and so on.
However, to make this argument in the context of current events, it becomes important to make sure one is in possession of objective facts, not of the propaganda of one side or the other. Suppose, for instance, that the claim is that there is some kind of massive malfeasance on the part of the Biden administration or the nebulously defined “deep state.” The evidence for that would logically need to come from a source that has a reliable history of not misrepresenting facts, of either not making factual mistakes or of openly retracting and admitting those mistakes, and a source that does not have strong incentives to seek personal gain by representing its enemies as villains.
I can take a historian’s survey of World War Two as factual because, and precisely because, I can rely on the historian to be neutral. “Neutral” does not mean “ambivalent between Nazis and anti-Nazis,” but it does mean “more dedicated to telling the truth than to making one side or the other win.”
The question I have to ask myself, if I am to trust “Data Republican” as a source, is whether “Data Republican” is more interested in telling the truth than they are in making the current presidential administration win and its predecessor lose.
The question I have to ask myself, if I am to trust “Data Republican” as a source, is whether “Data Republican” is more interested in telling the truth than they are in making the current presidential administration win and its predecessor lose.
No, the question you have to ask yourself is whether you have any reliable source at all.
“There were, indeed, people prepared to say it was wrong to fight World War Two against the Nazis. Namely, the Nazis. ”
When you want to defend cool reason, BTW, try to not indulge in ad hominem attacks on everyone who opposed the war.
@Mary Catelli
In the context of this discussion, the only specific factual claims I have made are not my own claims; they are claims from Scott Alexander’s blog, Astral Codex Ten. Scott Alexander is not, to put it mildly, famous for his hardened left-wing biases. Alexander was, in turn, was reviewing a list compiled by Republican senator Ted Cruz. If there are misrepresentations of the facts of the matter, then you will need to take it up with them.
My opinions are presented as such- opinions. We can dispute those opinions, but that is different from questioning the factual accuracy of a source. They are separate problems.
If we are to talk about what has actually been done with scientific and humanities grants, or with USAID, it is vitally important that we distinguish between what has actually occurred, and what people say has occurred. For people who value “the truth” over “my side wins,” that’s always going to be important.
For people who value “the truth” over “my side wins,” that’s always going to be important.
That’s a nice non-sequitur.
You have, by your own admission, refused to look at data on partisan grounds.
@Mary Catelli
I don’t see why I “have to” hope that there exists a trillion dollars per year of wasteful federal spending. The problem could be easily and simply resolved by returning to tax levels as they were at the end of the Reagan administration. Tax rates that were good enough for him, are surely good enough for us.
If the deficit were the true motive for the ongoing actions of the DOGE, then we would be seeing Musk and Trump angrily condemning the Congressional Republicans for proposing a budget with further major tax cuts in it. As even if theoretically the tax cuts would be so good for the economy as to justify it… this isn’t the time, surely. The deficit is an emergency, after all, surely?
“The problem could be easily and simply resolved by returning to tax levels as they were at the end of the Reagan administration.”
That you think the problem could be fixed by a route that will not happen does not change that it’s going to happen by cuts.
It is not “dismissal of a source on partisan grounds” to not want to rely on the truthfulness of a source that is itself strongly motivated to be partisan.
The problem is that the allegation here (massive, comprehensive, widespread corruption and malfeasance on the part of numerous government agencies, much of it apparently going on undetected throughout the first Trump administration) would normally be the kind of thing that sets the burden of proof on the hands of the people making the allegations.
We would not normally accept a claim like “the entire fruit industry is secretly plotting to poison us all” without fairly strong evidence from an institution that didn’t have reasons to try to destroy the fruit industry, for example. Or, if they do have such ulterior motives, we’d want our source to at least have a consistent history of getting their facts straight.
Applying the same standard to accusations of widespread government corruption does not strike me as an unreasonable expectation.
Ok, Mary. I looked at the Data Republican site. That looks like a potentially useful resource for searches on government spending, though comments and links are deeply partisan.
I also looked at Data Republican on X. A bit of scrolling got me a few posts insinuating wrongdoing along the lines of “I found a financial link between politician X and organization Y, of course they’re a deep state operative.” Another post said “this grant contains a line about processing fees for refugees, maybe they’re sneaking them into the USA somehow.” A graph with a heading claiming big US taxpayer spends on something – I couldn’t extract further information, since all text in the diagram beneath was tiny to the point of illegibility. Eventually I hit a “dubious expenses of the evil Clintons” post, and decided I had better things to do with my time… Frankly, rather disappointing.
I’m not particularly interested in defending USAID. That’s a big pot of money that I have no particular insight on. And foreign aid seems fundamentally one of the most cuttable categories of spending. But, at this point I’m honestly curious: what were you going on about?
Your comment does not back up your claim in your last sentence.
The “Data Republican” whose website has existed for less than three weeks and was already caught either lying or making a fairly straightforward error?
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2025/feb/07/social-media/no-this-graphic-isnt-proof-that-usaid-paid-chelsea/
I also wonder how Mary knows that the creator of “Data Republican” is a “she” when the observation from Politifact is
“It’s unclear from the website or its X profile who owns the site. The site was registered anonymously on Jan. 30, GoDaddy’s WHOIS database shows.”
I guess it’s always possible said creator (who appears to unironically use ChatGPT as a source – a brief look at the profile revealed phrases like “Per ChatGPT, they operate as a 501(c)(3) 521943638 which does show up in my award search.” – always a GREAT sign) had revealed more about one’s identity between the publication of said article and now. Though, it would be an interesting twist if Mary knows it’s a she because she’s talking about herself, as unlikely as it may be.
“I can take a historian’s survey of World War Two as factual because, and precisely because, I can rely on the historian to be neutral.”–And that is, unfortunately, the reason one cannot take much of today’s academic product (including Scientific American) as factual.
“The problem could be easily and simply resolved by returning to tax levels as they were at the end of the Reagan administration.”–That’s not really true. As the charts here (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S) make clear, both tax increases and expenditure reductions would be necessary to return to the deficits of the Reagan administration, which were fairly large in any event.
Correct me if I’m wrong Ey, but isn’t that explicitly just a graph of outlays, or payments that leave the government system, I.E. only conceptually half of the budget calculus? I’m not sure how it can be supporting a conclusion about how both spending cuts and tax increases would be necessary if it’s only showing spending.
Folks, Stop feeding the troll.
I’m not feeding the trolls, I’m writing so that other people don’t believe their lies.
@ey81
As pointed out, the graph you link is of federal budget outlays, and does not include tax income. It tells us that (discounting spending during recessions) during the Reagan era outlays were about 20.3-21.8% of GDP, whereas in 2023 and 2024 outlays were roughly 22.1 and 23.1% of GDP.
The hypothetical question “what if we taxed modern America at the same rates Americans were taxed in 1983-84” is hard to answer without someone specifically running those numbers. Notably, taxes were more progressive then than they are now, and the wealthiest slice of the population are proportionately wealthier now than they are then. Thus, the people whose income has increased the most would be taxed more heavily, and so one might well expect the government to bring in more receipts.
Perhaps this would be enough to reduce the deficit to zero. Perhaps not. It would certainly narrow the deficit greatly, while clearly not raising taxes to such an extreme as to make economic growth infeasible. Unless of course you wish to argue that the Reagan administration was a period of economic stagnation caused by high taxes.
If nothing else, “return taxes to Reagan levels” seems like a far more moderate and reasonable way to limit the national deficit than “arbitrarily fire hundreds of air traffic controllers and nuclear weapons safety inspectors, then panic and try to hire them back.” Which appears to be Trump and DOGE’s idea of a workable solution. This leads into my next observation…
“Thus, the people whose income has increased the most would be taxed more heavily, and so one might well expect the government to bring in more receipts.”
And there goes the classic lie.
No reasonable person expects that because those people would not passively pay. They would react to the tax rate. They would change their behavior. It is quite possible to see tax revenues fall by jacking up the rates.
@ey81
…Which is that your objection “And that is, unfortunately, the reason one cannot take much of today’s academic product (including Scientific American) as factual” appears to conflate “neutral” and “unchallenging.”
No man can rely upon a ‘neutral’ source to affirm his beliefs 100% of the time, or even 50% of the time, unless he is willing to sacrifice a previously held belief on the grounds that it is not supported by truth.
If I choose to go around insisting that the Earth is shaped like a bowl or a burrito, then the scientific community will simply and unambiguously tell me that I am dead wrong. If I am elected president and demand that all the maps in all the nation’s classrooms be ‘updated’ to reflect my beliefs about the shape of the Earth, then scientific publications may well condemn my actions in editorials. And if I then respond to that by defunding the “woke” scientists who are notionally trying to brainwash everyone in pursuit of their “globe-ist agenda,” then the scientific institutions may well start outright endorsing my opponents.
In such a scenario, none of this would be happening because the scientists have become any less trustworthy. It would be happening because I have wished that everyone around me would believe things about the world that are objectively not true, and the scientists are aware of this and not bowing to my wishes in the matter.
This doesn’t even try to answer him.
@Mary Catelli
Regarding tax rates, your contention is that returning tax rates to Reagan levels would not result in increased tax receipts (from the wealthy in particular, you may mean) because those being taxed would modify their behavior to avoid paying taxes.
However, if this were true, it would mean that all tax cuts since the Reagan era have been entirely pointless, since the rich are actually paying more money than they would under the old regime. The tax cuts are clearly a failure and reversing them would be a step in the right direction of preventing government overreach!
After all, the point was to take less money from American citizens in taxes, and especially less money from all those job creating millionaires, I have been told. If the wealthy are now paying more money than they would if taxes worked roughly the way they did in 1985, then it follows that the Bush and Trump tax cuts were in vain.
It also follows that the current ambitious attempts by the House Republicans to put together a budget (with a higher deficit ceiling and trillion-dollar spending cuts) that will permit them to make the Trump tax cuts permanent are sheer folly, since they would actually save the rich money by letting the tax cuts expire.
This seems… unlikely.
“However, if this were true, it would mean that all tax cuts since the Reagan era have been entirely pointless, since the rich are actually paying more money than they would under the old regime.”
What are you talking about here? If anything?
I looked at this “Data Republican” site and it’s a triumph of data without context. Perfect for the “do your own research” people to dig into, misunderstand, and then use to reinforce their prior beliefs.
I love the use of big eye popping numbers in red to bias the user towards the idea that the spending, whatever it’s on, is “bad” (unless of course it cost the tax payer $0).
What are these things actually doing? Is the amount funded appropriate? Are we deriving value that exceeds the amount spent? We don’t know, we just know we’re spending too much on it!
Funny your own analysis is also nicely vague.
What specific analysis would you like?
I looked at the website. It regurgitates reams of raw data without any analysis of any kind. Which is sort of the problem since you seem to be presenting it as evidence to back up… whatever it is you’re trying to claim. It makes no claims of its own, presents no arguments, and provides no actual analysis that I can see.
The visual design certainly wants to imply that the things it’s showing are bad… without any citation to an actual argument for why they might be bad.
It’s *maybe* useful as a search tool for experts who understand the context of the data being shown to make their own arguments for or against a specific position. For a layman, I’d argue it’s essentially useless.
@Mary Catelli
Regarding the idea of returning taxes to Reagan-era levels, the argument’s a bit subtle. But you did say, to paraphrase, that for all we know, putting taxes back where they were in 1985 might cause the government to bring in LESS money because “people would modify their behavior to avoid the taxes.”
However, if that were true, then all the subsequent tax cuts after 1985 were pointless, because they just resulted in the government (which you have assured us is very wasteful) having taken even MORE money from the rich (where, I gather, it properly belongs). If you’re right that returning tax cuts to 1985 levels would lower the government’s actual tax receipts, and if you’re also right that the government spends money immensely wastefully and uselessly, then the Bush and Trump tax cuts were extremely counterproductive by increasing the amount of money the government has available to spend!
Of course, I’m sure that this isn’t really what you believe. I’m sure you do really believe that if tax rates were increased by 1% in the real America that exists, the government would receive more tax money, not less.
The idea that returning tax rates to Reagan-era levels would somehow make the government LESS solvent is just a red herring, to avoid having to come out and say “yes, Ronald Reagan actually favored taxes that are much higher than what modern Republicans think of as ‘excessive,’ or “yes, these repeated rounds of tax cuts have never actually generated enough economic growth to pay for themselves, and they never will, the entire point is to undermine the function of the government to make it easier to convince regular folks that it doesn’t do anything for them.”
Your problem is that you are living in a bubble.
I notice that you repeatedly make up things to impute them to me, and — unsurprisingly — you lie every single time. You need to stop indulging in wish-fulfillment fantasies where people who don’t agree with you are the straw men you would like them to be.
The very fact that you make your claim about a 1% increase in taxes shows that you are aware that I’m right, and your changes would change their conduct.
@Mary Catelli
…What? What are you talking about? The reason I refer to “1% increases” is that I’m using a concept from calculus, where we can talk about small movements as a result of small changes. There’s nothing weird going on in this discussion thread that I can think of, and this isn’t me “secretly knowing you’re right.”
Just please, hear me out in good faith here. Imagine, hypothetically, a country where the government decides to tax specifically income gained from selling cars. For purposes of this, we just don’t talk about other taxes, they are not part of the scenario.
If the tax rate is 0.1%, then on even a $30,000 car sale, the tax is only $30. The seller still recovers $29,970. Clearly, in this situation, while a few people who deeply, deeply dislike taxes on principle might refuse to buy or sell cars, the vast majority of people will realistically not change their behavior in response to such a tiny tax and sell the car as they would anyway, albeit possibly passing the cost on to the buyer of course.
From the point of view of the government that did this, raising the tax rate from 0.0% to 0.1% will bring in revenue. The revenue will be nearly equal to “exactly 0.1% of the total sale price of all cars sold before the tax was established.”
If the rate is raised from 0.1% to 0.2%, we will see a similar effect. The bump in revenue will be (relatively) large, almost exactly what you’d expect by just calculating “0.1% more of the total sale price of all cars sold before the tax.” A little less than the last bump, but probably only a very little. Because almost no one will modify their behavior enough to offset the increased tax rate, given that the tax itself is too small to have much effect. You have a fairly good grasp of human nature, I’m sure- you know that almost no one would be deterred from buying or selling a car by the presence of a 0.2% tax.
You may well say “ah, but what about much higher taxes, since in real life taxes are much higher.” Well, at the opposite extreme, if anyone is still selling cars when 99.9% of the sale income will be taken in taxes (unlikely), then a final +0.1% bump to 100% of the sale income would obviously cut out the car market completely. No one would sell at all- people would indeed have “modified their behavior!” The tax would now bring in zero revenue, which by definition is less than it could have brought in before at some other lower value (probably below 99.9%).
But then we think about what is happening here. At extremely low tax rates, the “marginal return,” the increase in revenue for adding +0.1% to the tax rate, is substantial. At extremely high rates, the marginal return is actively negative
If we picked an intermediate rate, say 20%, well, increasing the tax from 20% to 20.1% probably WILL cause a more noticeable increase in evasion behaviors (such as delaying selling a car, such as buying cheaper cars because you don’t want to eat the 20% tax cost passed on to you as the buyer) than the jump from 0.1% to 0.2%.
In short, all those “behavior changing” mechanisms are insignificant when a tax rate is very low, become more and more significant as the tax rate rises, and eventually can in theory cause the tax receipts gained from the tax to decrease as the tax rate increases still further.
This, of course, is the Laffer Curve. The problem is that the Laffer Curve doesn’t actually say “if you raise taxes then the government always gets less money as a result.” If it did, then the reverse would be true- “if you cut taxes then the government always gets more money.”
First, this is a phenomenon we haven’t observed in real life. Second, this would make it deeply counterproductive to cut taxes if you want small government. And third, the fact that when we DO cut taxes we observe federal revenue decreasing tells us that if we raised taxes, we should observe the reverse effect.
While SOME wealthy people would modify SOME of their behaviors to evade SOME of the taxation, it seems very improbable that ALL of them would do so to such an extent as to cancel out the increased revenue one would normally expect from a tax increase to Reagan levels. After all, when taxes were at Reagan levels before, plenty of millionaires and billionaires were still making a killing on the stock market and working hard to become richer, just as hard as they do now!
Calculus? Now there’s a distraction if ever I heard one. The relevant theory is, of course, chaos theory: tiny changes can produce enormous effects in chaotic systems. And the tax system is clearly chaotic.
Furthermore since you then go on to argue that the effect of raising taxes will SOMETIMES raise revenue when your claim is that it will NEVER shrink revenue — you are oozing bad faith.
@Simon_Jester
Not just in theory, from r/AskEconomics (here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1hahf9t/comment/m18ptl4/) I recall there exist studies, which I did not had the time to read, which claimed that taxes had been raised above the revenue-maximising rate*.
However, as those involved effective tax rates (in 1981 Sweden) of about 80% it does suggest that your idea that the USA still has a lot of slack to raise revenue by tax rate increases is correct. Or at least on labour income, I suspect that there is less slack for taxes on corporations or capital income; because of capital flight and that part of their incidence falls on labour, thus reducing taxes on labour income.
Not to mention that tax revenue could also be increased without increasing rates by getting rid of exemptions and deductions of the type which should not have been introduced to begin with, like the mortgage interest deduction, or the sieve that is US’ corporate taxes.
* Note, usually being at the revenue-maximising rate would be a bad situation as it means that standards of living could be greatly improved at the cost of slightly lowering tax revenue. However, even after taking that into account I’d still say that the growth of debt is an indication that US’ taxes are too low.
@Mary Catelli
Or get better finance by more income
The Astral Codex Ten’s conclusion line is that of the science grant proposals Ted Cruz “flagged as woke,” only about 40% of them are “woke” in Scott Alexander’s opinion, and that many of the grants Scott flagged as “woke” were, essentially, STEM career day proposals that go on a little too long talking about getting women and minorities into science.
Scott Alexander’s conclusion is that about 2-3% of Biden administration science grant proposals are actually ‘woke,’ in his opinion. And strongly implies that only a fraction of those 2-3% are things a person could reasonably object to as intrinsically a waste of money. Which seriously calls into question the wisdom or even sanity of freezing all the grants, or even all the grants that trigger some kind of buzzword search (remember that, for instance, cis- and trans- are words that have specific technical meanings in biochemistry and are used routinely in technical discussion).
It’s not even clear to what extent grant writers have been “under pressure” to do this, given that the ratio of “Scott Alexander thinks this is woke” to “Scott Alexander thinks this isn’t woke” is about 2:3 in these grant proposals, while there’s an enormous number of grant proposals that not even Ted Cruz’s people thought were woke.
In short, we are seeing a massively destabilizing impact on the American scientific establishment as a whole, and I would argue that it’s all in the name of a witch-hunt aimed at finding and punishing people for “how dare you say you’re going to give some money to an outreach program for black kids who want to learn to code?” And even if we stipulate for the sake of argument that that’s wrong to do, it’s catching a LOT of people who didn’t even do that specific thing, which I don’t actually agree is wrong but whatever.
They’re trolling you and Bret’s failure to police his comments to ban them is an embarrassment, but well done on presenting your argument regardless.
Scott Alexander’s conclusion is that about 2-3% of Biden administration science grant proposals are actually ‘woke,’
An alternative explanation is that only 2-3% of them are bold enough to be explicitly woke. 40% hint and wink but do so in a manner that allows plausible deniability.
Insufficient evidence to determine which is true.
If Bret is going to ban people for arguing that government grants are wasteful, while allowing people to call others “evil racist scum,” he will be even more hypocritical than the average academic.
Ey, you’re evil racist scum who spreads what is, to be clear, hate speech. Calling women sexually manipulative or Arabs culturally violent to justify bigotry against them is the definition of hate speech, being classical misogyny and antisemitism. It’s a violation of TOS almost everywhere.
So is trolling and harassment, which is the only interpretation of Mary’s behavior here.
If you don’t like being confronted for your beliefs then don’t have them. If you don’t like calls for consequences for your beliefs then change. You can easily stop being hated by people like me by having some personal growth and changing. That’s more Arabs or women could do to counteract your biases.
@Dan: “If you don’t like being confronted for your beliefs then don’t have them.”
Given that you’re saying people hold beliefs that there is no evidence that they actually hold, this statement is utterly disingenuous.
“Given that you’re saying people hold beliefs that there is no evidence that they actually hold, this statement is utterly disingenuous.”
He can defend himself on that point. Given that his statements have invoked antisemitic and misogynistic language explicitly, so there *is* evidence, he’ll fail. But if my accusations are in error, he can dispute them, explain himself, *account* for himself.
Anyone who sees the evidence can defend him on that point, and since the evidence is right there, you are out of luck.
@Dan: You are the only person who thinks that.
@60guilders:
Dan is not the only person who thinks all, or necessarily even most, of the “thats” Dan has uttered.
@Mary Catelli:
You say “An alternative explanation is that only 2-3% of them are bold enough to be explicitly woke. 40% hint and wink but do so in a manner that allows plausible deniability. Insufficient evidence to determine which is true.”
No, actually, this one comes down to “did you read the blog post we’re all talking about” and “are you conflating different categories that are not comparable.” You are doing the latter, and to some extent calling into question whether you did the former.
Scott Alexander looked at a list compiled by Ted Cruz of research Senator Cruz believes to be “woke.” Alexander discovered that only 40% of this research is “woke” in Alexander’s opinion. Alexander then pointed out that since the original Cruz list was only a slim minority of all science grants given out under Biden. Now Ted Cruz would surely have picked, by and large on the whole, the most “woke” science grant proposals he thought he could find, his list of “look at how woke these are.” Since Ted Cruz’s list is only about 5% of all the grant proposals, if only 40-60% of those can remotely be called ‘woke,’ then the total of ‘woke’ proposals is only 2-3%.
So no, arithmetic tells us that for your alternative explanation to be true, Ted Cruz would need to have missed, say, six to ten “even more woke” NSF grants for each proposal he put on his list of “look at all the woke NSF grants.”
No one can, by analyzing the grant words, determine whether they are throwing in a sop to get the money, or hinting that they supporting the ideology with an attempt at plausible deniability.
Therefore you lie from the first sentence of your comment.
@Mary Catelli
It seems to me that insisting that every sentence along the lines of “this thing we’re doing will probably be good for poor kids” be treated as evidence of the writer being a secret member of the imagined “woke cult to destroy us all” is a tad bit paranoid.
Acting as though “we can’t actually know” whether the entire scientific community is just super-riddled with America-hating psychos seems, again, a bit paranoid.
It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a normal person would do unless they’d spent a lot of time listening to very strange things and adopting the beliefs demanded by those very strange things, to the point where they ceased to realize when they were being unreasonable.
“It seems to me that insisting that every sentence along the lines of “this thing we’re doing will probably be good for poor kids” be treated as evidence of the writer being a secret member of the imagined “woke cult to destroy us all” is a tad bit paranoid.”
Don’t be silly. When you throw that into a subject matter that has nothing to do with it, that shows that it is signaling. And there is no reason to assume one motive for signaling when another is not precluded.
And you know it, because your hyperbolical “woke cult to destroy us all” is your own invention.
I am not the one who invented the idea of a ‘secret woke cult.’ The far right did. We see this whenever someone talks about wokeness as ‘an existential threat,’ or proposes that there are broad conspiracies within the government to undermine right-wing politicians, and so on, and so on. These are all things I have read from within the past week- the accusations continue to happen and have been happening for years.
The King himself got in on the game with his own social media postings: “He who saves his country breaks no law.” The man is president of the United States at a time when it has a massive arsenal of weapons, no actual ongoing civil wars, and so on, and so on.
What is he implying that he’s saving his country FROM, if not some notional conspiracy or secret power bloc? It’s just not credible to deny that conspiracy theories about ‘woke’ or ‘the left’ play a role here.
“I am not the one who invented the idea of a ‘secret woke cult.’ ”
Rubbish. It’s not secret, it’s blatant. So your claim that it’s secret is indeed on you.
That not all of it is visible to the eye is also blatant, given Journolist and other instances where leftists have been caught conspiring. But that doesn’t make it a secret cult.
I would be very very careful with that crowd
With which crowd? Scott Alexander personally, the commentators on his blog posts, or some other person or group?
We have already seen, for instance, the “condoms for Gaza” incident, in which Elon Musk claimed that $50 million in USAID funding had gone to condoms shipped to Gaza in the land formerly known as Canaan, when in fact they were shipped to Gaza, Mozambique.
While it’s certainly amusing to think about how Elon Musk is ignorant enough not to know that there’s a province in Mozambique called Gaza, I’d also say that both “contraception for Mozambique” and “contraception for Palestine” are eminently worthwhile goals for the US to be spending money on. The total fertility rate in Gaza, Palestine is about 4 and in Mozambique it’s 4.5.
To say nothing of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, of course. It’s a pretty clear sign that modern conservatism is primary an expression of mass hysteria that “we’re giving condoms to people” is a gotcha for them. By any objective standard it should be apolitical.
Except of course for the total lack of evidence that this does any good.
Government officials in charge of reducing fertility LOVE condoms because you could just give them away and that the people wouldn’t use them didn’t ding them — but sterilization quotas demanded that you produce people for the operations.
The condoms in question are part of a larger effort to stem HIV infection, which has been going on for quite a while, not for contraception.
Don’t really see how that’s our concern. Maybe if we weren’t running a deficit…
Is Mary suddenly on the same side as the notable “Commanding Heights” socialist Indira Gandhi, known for, amongst other things, mass sterilization programs during “The Emergency” period? That’s quite a remarkable turn. I should also note that the more recent, and less coercive, iteration of those programs was also reportedly subject to some distortions – i.e. people long past their prime fertile age showing up to be sterilized and collect the financial reward at no real cost to them – and still counting the same in the statistics used to award those running the program.
Nevertheless, she does have a point that condoms are not apparently considered a particularly effective way of family planning – nowhere near not just sterilization, but the pill, IUD and other women-focused interventions. But as Dan noted, what THEY are considered effective at is curbing the spread of STIs – and STIs happen to include HIV. Mozambique is apparently the country with the 5th greatest HIV prevalence in the world, with around 12% of the entire population infected. HIV is effectively incurable, and the costs of condoms are still much lower than the cost of antiretrovirals – so contrary to Gamereg, it is actually quite a cost-saving measure. (Particularly since the plans to halt PEPFAR, initiated by Bush Jr., appear to have been reversed, so funding the drugs but not the condoms to reduce the need for those drugs would be particularly bizarre.)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-population-infected-with-hiv?tab=table
Is Mary suddenly on the same side as the notable “Commanding Heights” socialist Indira Gandhi, known for, amongst other things, mass sterilization programs during “The Emergency” period?
Has YARD lost all shame?
Obviously, YES. This vile, odious, bad-faith rhetorical question would never even have occurred to someone arguing with any degree of shame. It is obvious that no one reading my comment would even think that. YARD just wants to commit slander.
And then he goes off and tries to claim that condoms that aren’t used and don’t prevent pregnancy somehow prevent venereal disease.
Dan Davies has some useful words on the fallacy of giving credence to known liars: https://blog.danieldavies.com/2004/05/d-squared-digest-one-minute-mba.html. AFAIK there is no single word to describe the futility of checking the output of known liars and bs artists, as neither they nor their audience are at all concerned with the truth.
That would be nice, because that principle would shut down the entire MSM.
It should be noted that they did not in fact provide condoms to either of those places. It was for general fertility-related treatments and none of the money was spent on condoms.
“Don’t really see how that’s our concern. Maybe if we weren’t running a deficit…”
This is the larger conceptual failure of austerity movements. Spending a few million on population management and disease control, when those efforts can pay dividends on stability that ultimately benefit of in tangible and intangible ways, does not mean the deficit is meaningfully larger.
While I can’t prove to you this ultimately saves us money, mostly because it’s too complex to show how a stable developing world or reduced HIV spread benefits us besides to simply point out that it obviously does, a lot of USAID spending does directly-if we spend three billion on cancer research and prevent seven billion in lost revenue from premature deaths, we’ve made four billion as a nation. And USAID, while primarily aimed at foreign countries, absolutely does kickback to us when it comes to their research programs.
It’s also just, you know, not anything like a significant portion of the budget compared to items like the military. Either the program specifically, which is literally trivial, or USAID in general, which is insignificant.
The better point is that if you want to reprioritize spending you do that through congress. The president doing so is grounds for impeachment and imprisonment. Unelected officials doing so outside of their lawful remit is grounds for execution; it’s a coup, by the formal definition.
USAID was created by an executive order, not by law. Therefore the president can do as he chooses.
To call it grounds for impeachment casts doubt on everything else you say.
Because this is actually clear, direct, and coherent enough to actually constitute a thought and not trolling, I’ll respond for the benefit of anyone that might have similar misunderstandings.
You’re wrong in all but the most trivial sense, in a way that very few people understand.
Like most spending foreign aid spending is appropriated by Congress for certain tasks. In this case both development to specific countries and regional or global crises prevention, like HIV prevention.
The president then administers that money via agencies and departments, many of which he creates through executive order. Technically he can disband most of them as such…
So long as the money appropriated by Congress continues to be spent by whatever method or agency the president then invokes, in accordance with the manner Congress told the executive to do so. He could have DOD spend the money I guess, but it’d still need to be spent on what Congress approved.
He isn’t.
The way aid is being frozen isn’t constitutional. The president cannot simply halt payments that were agreed on, nor decide not to use appropriations Congress designated for a task, outside of specific criteria laid out in those appropriated funds. None of that was done here. The president *must* spend congresses money as Congress says. Period.
Failure to do that is a constitutional crisis and grounds for impeachment.
He can certainly stop it until it’s proven that it’s actually going to the cause for which it’s appropriated. Indeed, it’s his duty under the Constitution.
No, he can stop it after having determined it isn’t. He hasn’t. You can’t simply reverse causality; investigations come first, not action.
And, tellingly, he’d also have to then *spend the money again*, simultaneously with canceling prior payments. Or at least give Congress a clear plan to do so.
The things Trump and musk are disparaging are line items Congress funded, not examples of funds being diverted unlawfully. And Musk at least has shown he lacks the reading comprehension to understand a budget table, hence his repeated conflation of budget categories with singular items. Or he’s maliciously lying, pick one.
None of what was done is consistent with the presidents constitutional duties towards appropriations. He can’t unilaterally appoint a billionaire to cancel payments pending an investigation that hasn’t happened yet nor can he point to lawful payments and use them as evidence of fraud because he dislikes congresses appropriation.
Dan, the federal government is spending money without the accounting code to tell where it is being spent. Any other organization caught doing that in this country would already have accountants and corporate officials in jail.
Unless the bills specifically provided that the money had to spent in specified time frame, no, he’s free to stop it and then spend it.
The source on that is a man who thinks we spent three million on shrimp treadmills. To be clear, the amount was on the level of a few thousand. The credibility level here is zero.
And, to be clear, your source doesn’t say that; your source says that the Treasury *as an entire department* lacks those identifiers on some amount of it’s items over some timeframe, which given that it’s basically every scrap of money in the government is not surprising.
No amount of saying bad things about him will change that no one has even tried to deny that the code thing is true. Given the number of nonsensical charges they have made, they would have used that were it true.
Except as I explained you don’t even understand what it is. It’s not USaid, it’s the entire budget. Treasury handles literally everything except purely trivial items.
And the Treasury is a guarded system for several very important reasons, and, oh right, Trump fired a bunch of people who run it, in fact the very same people willing to stand up to him. The only people who could fact check Musk have been removed from the system or are on his side.
I’m also not saying “bad things” about him, I’m asserting he’s incompetent at fiscal management or has a history of lying about it, pick one.
Did I say it was USAID? No I did not.
And your defense would not avail in any other organization. People would be in jail.
And we’re off to Mary’s fantasy land again, hope someone else learned something.
You do realize that everyone can read my comment and knows that the fantasy is yours?
“Expanding participation of women and individuals from underrepresented groups in STEM” is written into law as one of the seven broader impacts criteria that (theoretically) get equal weight with the intellectual merit for proposals to the National Science Foundation. If Ted Cruz doesn’t like researchers inserting DEI buzzwords into proposals, he is a member of Congress and can introduce a bill to strike that line from US code. If such a law were passed (which seems quite possible given that Republicans control both houses of congress and the Presidency), the DEI buzzwords would all but disappear. There’s no need to throw away billions of dollars worth ongoing research, indirectly killing people who would have benefitted from that research, or to trample over the constitution by violating Congress’s legal and Constitutional powers over spending.
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:42%20section:1862p-14%20edition:prelim)
Dan,, Simon: Come on, guys, scroll to the bottom of the page I linked to. The Federal Reserve website has graphs of both federal tax receipts and outlays.
The point remains that if you have a progressive income tax in a society with greater wealth and income inequality than before, the same tax rate may well bring in a higher percentage of GDP. I find it entirely reasonable to imagine that if Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk were getting taxed by 1985 rules instead of 2025 rules, he might actually be paying a lot more money, for instance.
Because in 1985 the richest man in America was Sam Walton, and per the Fortune 500, he had… wait for it… a 2.8 billion dollar fortune. Inflation-adjusted, that’s 8.2 billion dollars.
In relative terms, today’s super-billionaires are a dozen or more times wealthier than the billionaires of forty years ago, AFTER adjusting for inflation.
Since the gap in federal spending as a percent of GDP between 2023-24 and the Reagan years is only about 1-2%, maybe 2.5% tops, of GDP, I am pretty sure returning taxes to Reagan-era levels would be helping here.
“the same tax rate may well bring in a higher percentage of GDP.”
You yourself know that the problem we bring up is real.
The point remains that you didn’t read to the bottom of the page.
We’re not responsible for digesting the entire website if you link it. I’m still uncertain as to what you think is actually indicated by the by-the Reagan tax cuts have pretty obviously been disasterous for revenues and accomplished nothing in terms of gdp growth, and nothing im seeing there refutes that.
My understanding is that we’re seeing a layering we have to do linguistic archaeology to; you can’t be so literal.
First, the “basket weaving” (sometimes “underwater basket weaving”) term is, as far as I know, an explicitly fanciful expression for college education that was never intended to be useful. The stereotypical example is a Literature major who gets a job in Sales or HR or something similar, as do 99%+ of the alumni of the same department. It is imputed that these students never cared much about Literature the subject, they merely wanted a degree of any sort (because it helps them get a job, because it confers on them the status of
nobilityprofessional/intelligentsia, because they got to establish social ties with other college-educated people their age, etc.) and they chose Literature because that was the subject easiest to get a degree in. I don’t actually know where the “basket weaving” part comes in; because the world is large and weird (and stupid), perhaps there really was such a course offered at some point by some college, and this went viral and the meme just stuck. A Literature student might be able to tell you exactly what sort of metonymy this is, whereby a case of excess (or an outright fable) is being used as a stand-in for a real thing in order to accentuate its strangeness. Or they might not, because they forgot all that as soon as they graduated.Second, in the early 2010s, these departments where the subject matter was not constrained, went woke. Rather than coming up with an unrelated noun (“wokery”?), some people prefixed the new adjective to the existing term, hence “woke basket weaving”.
” A Literature student might be able to tell you exactly what sort of metonymy this is, whereby a case of excess (or an outright fable) is being used as a stand-in for a real thing in order to accentuate its strangeness.”
Oh hey, well for starters it’s as if no one in this comment section has ever woven a basket (sorry Basil, I hope you don’t feel attacked). Grass or other fiber weaving into solid shapes can be done dry, and any sort of art basketry you might see from fibers typically will use cured materials so they don’t change shape after weaving. Wood basketry on the other hand is done with soaked wood pieces (very rarely decorative pieces use fresh-cut whole twigs) where the waterlogged parts are threaded horizontally through dry vertical staves and then left to dry; the heavier nature of the material reduces the amount of deformation incurred during the drying process. Normally this is done seated in front of the dry frame with a bucket of soaked “reeds (sticks)” next to you that you pull out of the water one by one.
It is possible to do the whole of the weaving with the frame submerged, and as far as I know that is a real thing people have sometimes done not-as-a-joke; I’ve only seen it done as a joke. It is substantially more difficult than weaving abovewater even if you are just putting the frame in the bucket in front of you; the practice becomes one of weaving by feel and muscle-memory rather than hand-eye coordination. However the phrase “underwater basket weaving” in English seems to invariably evoke the image of a person fully submerged in a pool which is preposterous (and also a thing many American Boy Scouts have done at summer camp).
Basket Weaving, Underwater is a plausible 20th-century 300-level Art School course, especially given how may fads for wicker furniture the West went through in the pre-war eras, but I don’t have any actual knowledge about that; what I do know is that the modern version of the attack, that uses this subject name specifically, is just the last distilled heir of a wide range of attacks on both the New Deal and the GI Bill, which vary from denigration of public art in National Parks to moral panic over the specter of American soldiers learning home economics. It is largely an artifact of the historical moment where conservatives were forced for PR reasons to diversify their attacks and move away from simple demands to burn degenerate books and paintings.
I laud your analysis of both basket-weaving and American political trends.
Most critics of the academic establishment (and most parents) would argue that basket weaving (of any kind) is simply not a suitable college course, because it lacks intellectual content. Witness the fact that illiterate peasant women do it quite well. It also isn’t useful for very many jobs, and it doesn’t do anything to fit citizens for the task of self-governance,, which are usually taken to be the purposes of education.
As a rhetorical matter, I think Basil Marte’s analysis is correct. When lack of academic rigor or other utility was the complaint, “basket weaving” (I never heard it prefixed by “underwater”) was the trope invoked; subsequently the adjective “woke” was prefixed to express later complaints.
Note how by using the word “trope” we can avoid having to figure out exactly what kind of metonymy (or maybe it’s just hyperbole) we are dealing with.
“Witness the fact that illiterate peasant women do it quite well.”
I won’t actually dispute your core thesis here because, well, I’m not sure I disagree (although welcome the freedom of people to dispute that)-but on this point specifically I think you’re missing that many things that illiterate peasants do is absolutely a highly trained skill which deserves study.
How farmers in a low development settings manage limited resources is actually a vitally important skill, even verging on a technology in and of itself. It’s practical to how isolated ecosystems, like those artificially created in greenhouses or space stations. Whilst I would much rather explore the practical aspects to that, the sociological ones would inform how a society functioning in a limited resource environment might develop.
I don’t actually believe basket weaving would be worth studying for those reasons, specifically, but I absolutely do believe there are things to study about illiterate peasant society in a practical sense because it could educate people on the self-governing of society.
In regards to the larger discussion-there’s nothing wrong with a proposal getting through that was based on a plausible thesis for why something like that matters and should be taught, even if it’s wrong. There are worse sins for an application process for either grants of course design to commit.
@ey81
As Dan points out, if “critics of the scientific establishment” would say that basket-weaving is an unworthy subject of academic study, then they have a poor understanding of what academics do and why, or of their own society, or both.
I would further add that their lack of understanding comes in a form that would make it hard to see how they might enjoy this blog, which routinely goes into great detail on things like how premodern societies did things just as irrelevant to most of us today as basket-weaving would be.
If one is going to study primitive communities, having an understanding of how they do things is going to matter. If one is going to study conditions related to those faced by primitive communities, likewise. If one wishes in the modern day to receive an education on how to weave baskets, where there is a shortage of skilled master craftswomen (literate or otherwise) to teach it to you via apprenticeship… one will have to go to an institution to learn it.
Universities also have gymnasia and sports programs, but it is surprisingly rare to hear detractors of academia argue that these should not exist because “throwing things, picking up heavy things, and running around in circles on a track” are skills illiterate peasant men can master.
Simon: At the universities I respect, one does not receive academic credit for going to the gym or even being on a team. That is an extracurricular activity. Maybe you went to a university I don’t respect.
That’s an incredibly weak “no true Scotsman” fallacy. It’s also utterly trivial to show that every major university spends far more money and gives more acclaim for sports than they do for any form of “wokism”, no matter what you define it as, and thus eliminate all institutions from your “true Scotsman” category.
It’s fine to say you just don’t like that either, but obviously that’d open you up to the counterargument that you should be complaining about the waste being spent on the large, powerful, prestigious, and exceedingly wasteful sports teams rather than the small and poor programs you seem to actually care about.
The only truly coherent reason to target “woke studies” over “rewarded for gym class” from your principles is that woke studies are politically vulnerable, which while not strictly speaking irrational is incredibly optically damaging and makes pushback from those people who disagree with you incredibly vehement.
“Most critics of the academic establishment (and most parents) would argue that basket weaving (of any kind) is simply not a suitable college course, because it lacks intellectual content.”
Yeah, that was the argument my parents made against my Jewelry Making class in college. They shut up rather quickly when I pointed out that the equations are the same whether you’re dealing with copper under a blow torch or limestone undergoing metamorphosis; that metalworking was in the family (the course was building on what my grandfather taught me as a kid); that casting and mold-making were extremely common skills in paleontology; that my Minerology professor was consulting with the jewelry professor to build a machine to mimic mantle conditions (some finicky metalworking was involved); and that creativity is as much a part of science as spreadsheets (Einstein played violin for a reason).
Basket weaving is even more significant because it was such a huge part of our history. Understanding the past via understanding its material culture is a HUGE aspect of archaeology and history these days, and for a generation or two understanding how the majority of the population lived has been a huge focus of that. You learn more about the past by studying the common person than by studying the gentles, and one quick way to learn about their lives is to live them. An anthropologist that hasn’t done the skills of the past is severely limited in their scope.
Finally, this mentality has some pretty dismal impacts on people in general. Look at how gifted students are treated. The average gifted student is treated poorly enough in the USA (there have been many studies on this); those gifted in creativity, rather than math and science, are treated even worse. This idea that creativity is somehow not intellectually valid (and to be clear, the argument that crafts aren’t intellectually valid IS arguing that creativity isn’t) is one reason for this. Art has been part of human existence for longer than our species has existed (I checked), and the vast majority of it wasn’t famous painters working under patronage, it was the lower classes going “Know what? I want this to look prettier. I’m going to carve a design into it.” (See 18th century sailors.)
Our culture, which believes that singing, painting, drawing, and crafts are either the province of children or professionals, is the absurd one. It’s one of many ways our culture lobotomizes us and cuts us off from much of what makes us human. As I understand it, it all stems from the idea, popular in the past, that research must be “disinterested” and that intellectuals must ascribe to the principle of “pure reason”, abandoning anything that’s not fully rational, by the extremely limited scope of that definition the person speaking chooses to use (it’s never consistent). And that’s just nonsense. Mr. Spock is a parody and a travesty, not an ideal.
To be clear, I’m not directing any of this at you. I’m directing it toward the mentality you are describing (and I acknowledge that describing is not defending!). The mentality you describe is elitist in the worst possible way, it damages people by cutting out a huge range of human activities, and denies clearly evident facts.
Your parents were right. None of that which you cite justifies Jewelry-Making or Basket-Weaving as an academic matter, because none of what you cite requires the academic to perform the work.
Experimental archelogy would, but then, that would really constrain what and how you did either skill.
“The list of conservatives more qualified to run the Department of Defense is extremely long, almost preposterously so.”
But but but he did a workout with Green Berets!!!
I am strikingly reminded of how the Russian army likes to performatively prove its strength by posting videos of its soldiers doing demanding but silly physical training such as human pyramids or a bunch of men in a “push-up” position on the ground jumping up into the air as a log rolls underneath them. This kind of (literally) elaborately choreographed exercise has nothing to do with being good at any aspect of modern war, but it is very good at playing the role of “good at war” in the minds of people who have a very crude and warped understanding of what soldiers need to be.
Umberto Eco identified this trend within fascism, and I think he did so rightly, though we also see the same pattern in the non-fascist authoritarian tyranny of the USSR to an extent with the big military parades in Red Square, for instance.
The North Koreans and ISIS too.
Simon, for some reason I can’t reply to your question on my above comment, but to answer: Scott and the whole crowd of ‘rationalists’ and commentators. They are far, far too credulous of far right wing nonsense (eg eugenics) cloaked in a veneer of respectability and pseudo-science. They’re also frequently blind to their own biases, and they think they are much smarter than everyone else (they’re also bizarrely obsessed with IQ).
I for one don’t trust anyone who uses the term ‘woke’ unironically (or outside the original meaning in AAV).
Fair enough. I have certainly seldom if ever heard the term “woke” used in a manner that suggests it means anything particularly coherent.
Same as it always was… DEI, political correctness…
O, come on. https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/of-course-you-know-what-woke-means
Ey…
A. That’s not a statement as to if Wokeness is used correctly. You can believe something exists yet most discussion can be disingenuous or malinformed. That’s an extreme flaw in your argument because, like terms like socialism of liberalism or leftism, the people primarily concerned with defining wokism are actually their opponents, and their opponents lie. Constantly. The actual usage of the term amongst movements was minor compared to the reactionary backlash.
B. That post is bullshit. Basically zero of the characteristics the poster ascribes to wokism fit anything but a cartoonish version of progressivism that was never dominant politically or intellectually, meaning the central tenant that it’s the dominant practice of those left-of-center is a lie. If you want to serious dispute that you’ll need to use your own words, not someone else’s, to defend them.
C. The only part of that post everyone can agree on is that the usage *by the right* refers to the dominant left-of-center ideology. If that’s the working definition of wokism then reactionary tendencies against it can and should be understood as a vague reaction against a nebulous political enemy a-la the Nazi reaction to “international bolshevism” in the 1930-40’s, which neatly ties the ribbon on what is actually happening here. And even if you truly believe it’s an accurate description of wokism with a *definite* political enemy the reaction to it is still a witch hunt by the right.
@ey81
Having read Freddie deBoer’s article, I do not feel that it provides a particularly coherent definition. It’s a lengthy definition and a confident one, but it is also a definition that serves the same purpose the word “woke” serves many of its users:
Namely, it conveniently blurs away the question of “so, exactly how far do you think we need to go?” Reading along with deBoer’s article, we might ask a series of questions, for instance:
1) You (deBoer) define woke as ‘academic’ in how it engages with social questions. Does this require the anti-woke to be inherently suspicious of the entire idea of academic study of social questions?
2) You (deBoer) define woke as ‘immaterial,’ in that it is overwhelmingly occupied with cultural rather than practical considerations with likely impact on the average citizen. The example given is that the ‘woke’ will praise the Academy Awards for giving out lots of awards to people of color, while ignoring passage of a right-to-work law in Michigan that will adversely affect many more people of color. However, we find that such laws are generally passed by the same people who identify as firmly ‘anti-woke.’ Is there something about being anti-woke that requires accepting or even embracing harm to minority groups?
3) You (deBoer) identify woke as “structural in analysis, individual in action,” at some length. This suggests that to be “anti-woke” one must both resist the idea that structural problems exist and the idea that one should be individually concerned with one’s own attitudes and behaviors. Is this considered to be desirable?
I could go on but there are four more serious points and quite a bit of essay after that.
The problem is that the term “woke” is not, in sincere practice, used as a term for “you have some laudable goals but have committed some errors such as underemphasizing the impact of anti-labor regulation on society in favor of purely symbolic cultural tokens.” It is used as a shorthand for “everything we should fight against and must save the nation from even if it costs us the rule of law and the traditional checks and balances of our government.”
“Anti-wokeness” is presented as some kind of moral duty of every right-thinking citizen and “wokeness” is notionally to be combatted at every point. This lends itself very readily to motte-and-bailey argumentation, which in turn is why people condemn the word “woke” as having a fuzzy definition. The anti-woke seem unable to agree on whether “wokeness” means some kind of torturous abstract academic practice of weirdos, or whether it means “someone told a bunch of black kids in a poor neighborhood that black people can be great scientists or leaders or businessmen even if there are obstacles in their way specifically because of their blackness”
Scott “Alexander” had privately expressed a belief that the “reactionary movement” (his own words) has “a high intellectual standard” and are correct about points such as “human biodiversity” (lamenting that “race issues helped lead to the discrediting of IQ tests”) and “the superiority of corporal punishment to our current punishment system”. His self-professed goal was to hone a more effective reactionary movement which would drop the obsession with Catholicism, monarchy/feudalism and “traditional gender”, but remain focused on “the correct criticisms of class and social justice” (and presumably on “human biodiversity”).
https://www.tumblr.com/thesiskindeffect/643415713308196864/repost-of-screenshots
This is true. The reason Scott Alexander* remains something of an interesting case to someone like me is that he’s got a lot, and I do mean a lot, of the trappings of someone who genuinely cares about objectivity, compassion, and many of the virtues we’d loosely call ‘Enlightenment,’ while also having this bizarre brainworm infestation that causes him to be actively horrible on many issues.
So occasionally he’ll do something almost no other self-identified “anti-woke’ person will do, and the brain cells that remain uneaten by worms will sort of lurch and go “hey, wait a minute, our movement is actually self- and other-destructive and something is very wrong here,” before the brainworms kick back in and go “om nom nom, yummy cognitive dissonance” and reduce the cognitive dissonance back into mere waste.
And he writes so much that you can actively watch this process happening, and it’s… darkly fascinating, in a way.
*(I will continue to use Alexander’s pseudonym because I’m not a fan of doxxing even when it happens to people I disapprove of, and he always meant to remain anonymous)
@Simon_Jester
Such as? I stopped reading when he got doxxed and stopped posting on Star Slate Codex. I barely read anything of his on Astral Codex Ten.
Is what you’re describing to be found in his older works? Or is this new brainrot? Because I didn’t find anything objectionable, let alone horrific, in what he used to write. If you have any examples, I’d like to look into those.
All I see in that provided link is an attempt to shame and terrorize a person off of the internet because he engages with the Wrong Politics™ and supports the Other Side™. I can’t help but see, within only the context provided in the link, Topher Brennan as anything other than an utter villain, and Scott Alexander as a martyr.
Maybe I should start creating an actual internet presence of myself, but stuff like this gives me pause, and makes me hesitate until the point when I am sure that I’d be able to nonchalantly shrug off any such potential reputational social terrorism.
“Maybe I should start creating an actual internet presence of myself, but stuff like this gives me pause, and makes me hesitate until the point when I am sure that I’d be able to nonchalantly shrug off any such potential reputational social terrorism.”
And that is why they do it.
George Orwell (in his essay “What is Fascism”) noted that the people or things called “Fascist” in his lifetime included conservatives, socialists, Communists, Trotskyists, Catholics, war resisters, war supporters, nationalists (Arab, Polish, Finnish, Indian, Muslim, Zionist, and Irish), farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, foxhunting, bullfighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, youth hostels, astrology, women, and dogs.
Yes, but they also called Nazis fascists. See, the thing is, we can construct fairly rigorous definitions of “fascism” that are specifically designed to exclude nearly everyone who isn’t actually putting on their Reich clothes, or on the brink of doing so. It’s not difficult.
But then you meet the guy who does literal Sieg Heil salutes on inauguration day, and the guy who fantasizes about being a modern-day Sulla, and the guy who calls it unconstitutional when a judge tells him to stop doing things because it’s breaking the law, and the guy who threatens to deport American congresswomen born in America for disagreeing strongly with him, and the guy who when he loses an election tries to have a mob attack the legislature and force them to ‘admit’ he actually won.
And frankly, calling THOSE guys fascists sounds fairly reasonable.
If all this were happening thirty years ago in another country and you didn’t have any particular investment in making sure the Dear Leader was victorious and unchallenged, you’d definitely have had no trouble going “oh yeah, those guys are totally weirdo authoritarian strongmen and may well be fascists.”
It’s only because a quarter century of Fox News and similar institutions just literally refusing to ever say anything bad about a Republican ever that the well has become so poisoned that a guy can, purely by virtue of having an (R) after his name, get millions of people angrily defending him with “how dare you call him fascist, he is just a strong angry man who is going to save our great nation from the impurities poisoning its blood by destroying all the corrupt invisible secret masters, and any violence or chaos he causes in the process is absolutely deserved!”
If Goebbels were reborn in modern America he’d be laughing at how easy it was- like pushing at an open door.
One hallmark of fascism was to impute your own conduct to other people.
Giving that you are telling lies to call other people fascist, your own logic applies to you.
There are actually people who really do wish to send people to concentration camps and take their children away for being conservative. Or lock them in their homes and refuse to let them go shopping and declare it’s their problem how they will eat — if they didn’t want to starve, they should have obeyed the Left.
We know this for a fact because they literally and publicly say so.
Dan, OTOH, is literally reduced to making paranoid claims about “tonal hints.”
Your lies to the contrary only underscore that it is not a nothingburger.
I’m fairly certain that’s a pretty accurate list of what Republicans call woke, actually.
The solution to this is always to actually define and discuss it. It’s trivial to define what’s fascist about MAGA, it’s not always possible to define what’s fascist about those other movement or groups, hence Orwell’s commentary.
It’s even more trivial to define what is fascist about you: you insist that there is conspiracy of people who want to murder you, and your idea of evidence is “tonal hints.”
That is not only a central fascist idea, it is notoriously central to the biggest problem with them.
Mary, I’m going to just flat out ask so I can say I did-cut out the harassment. Not only is that quote deceptive, you’re farming it from a completely separate conversation.
Cut out the act.
Everyone can see it’s a perfectly just quotation of what you said, and indicates exactly what you meant.
Not to mention that the compartalization you demand here is exact opposite of what you do.
I’m asking you to stop. What’s your answer, to be clear?
I’m asking you to stop. What’s your answer, to be clear?
Well I tried.
Yes, you tried to impose a double standard by which you could declare people wanted to commit murder because of “tonal hints,” but someone quoting your literal words is not producing evidence against you.
@Mary Catelli
Having observed the historical trend, a few years after the center-left started pointing to things and saying “wow, this is actual fascism,” we began to see the right pointing to things left of themselves, and saying it too. It is a common tactic of one who has been truthfully accused of something to attempt to reverse the accusation, especially after they have had some time to think of manipulations that will protect themselves. So if we are both calling the other fascists, then that specific point cancels itself out.
We are then looking at what actually happens in the physical world. Which side tries to set itself up to overturn election results? Which side has the self proclaimed fascists cheering it on? Which side specifically embraces the idea of concentrating power in the hands of an autocrat? Which side is suddenly enthusiastic about wars of conquest?
It is possible, with enough pretzel logic, to try and flip all these accusations around to point at the Democrats, I’m sure. But no one deserves to have such effort put out on their behalf. It is not honest, it is not worthy, it is only a way to debase oneself in the service of oligarchs who will never, ever repay that loyalty.
There is no respectability or merit in endless rounds of “I know you are, but what am I.” Look what the Dear Leader actually does, not what he says he does, not what those who flatter and praise him say he does, but what effects it has in the material world.
Having observed the historical trend, a few years after the center-left started pointing to things and saying “wow, this is actual fascism,” we began to see the right pointing to things left of themselves, and saying it too.
You lie.
I was there, I saw it, you are trying to pretend a recent origin for things that have gone for decades in order to lie about cause and effect.
It is a common tactic of one who has been truthfully accused of something to attempt to reverse the accusation,
Very true. To pick an open and recent example, the very people who claim that blacks are incapable of getting photo IDs and being punctual — that one was famously put about by the Smithsonian on our tax dollars — claim that the other side has the racists.
Attacking the person rather than their argument is neither convincing nor good form, Mary.
“Attacking the person rather than their argument is neither convincing nor good form, Mary.”
ROFLOL!
Behold, Fellagund’s way to attack me rather than my argument!
Speaking of signaling between criminals makes me think of signals between members of mystery cults in ancient times. What would be a costly signal in that context? Tattooing, castration, or some other sort of scarification?
At a guess, more likely it is costly and time consuming initiation rituals, of proving your devotion to the cult over years and with sacrifices. (Exact sacrifices probably dependent on class/wealth)
Some religious initiation rituals aren’t necessarily costly in terms of money, but are certainly costly in terms of pain/suffering (some of the Native American rituals to prepare for supernatural visions are coming to mind here).
Learning the theology. Firstly, the printing press doesn’t exist yet, practically speaking the only way to learn the stuff is by personal presence, which is building material in other ways. (You have to sufficiently look like you are actually interested, otherwise they kick you out. Presence also allows them to do unrelated things, basically in the genre of what we would call team-building exercises, such that by the time you learn a lot of theology, you will have also befriended several members of the congregation.) Second, even if you are a leisured elite, but especially if you are not, asking for hundreds of hours of your time is a major, expensive ask.
Will just point out that this is also true of radical groups today – learning the ideology is time-consuming and, unless you’re already sympathetic, extremely boring. The FBI even complained about how this frustrates attempts to infiltrate anarchist groups – they discuss esoteric points of anarchist and New Left ideology that are inaccessible to an undercover cop.
Hmm. This puts me in mind of some (possibly apocryphal?) family wisdom from a couple of generations back – that you could usually recognize g-men infiltrating your organization because they would be (a) the most ideologically fanatical and (b) the ones who regularly paid dues. Possibly an indication that the underlying groups had rather distinct notions of cost and virtue signaling?
Famously the Galli castrated themselves for Cybele and Attis. Priests of the Isis-cult shaved their heads, unlike the entire rest of Greco-Roman society. There is also occasional evidence from the Church fathers that members of other mystery cults were scarred or branded for devotional purposes.
Definitely tattooing.
I remember a recent discussion about Bukele’s crackdown, where the cops very aggressively targeted anyone they could find with a gang tattoo, and someone in the discussion wondered why gang members would be reckless enough to write “I’m in a criminal organization” on their bodies.
The response is costly signaling: by the time you’ve printed a gang logo over your entire face, you’re deliberately burned any chance to work for the government or civil society, and other people in the gang know it. So gang members are more likely to rely on you, leaders will trust you with sensitive info, etc.
Of course, it doesn’t feel that way from the perspective of the person doing it. People don’t think of gang affiliation as a mercenary investment, they think of it as a community they’re a part of. So tattooing a gang sign feels like proving your dedication to the community, becoming a real man, showing to your peers that you’re serious about the life and you’re not going to sell out and leave your family behind, etc.
It’s also generally a process where a “little brother” is walked through the need to get a tattoo by a “big brother” of varying levels of formality. Similar to other gang (and child conscript) initiation processes that involve harming someone respected by your birth family in order to cement your adoption of the new (criminal) family, the organization forces the inductee to perform the act that permanently separates them from alternate potential support communities while teaching them that the act was one they chose and a choice they should be proud of.
The term “social capital” exists to enable these sorts of discussions. As you note later by using the metaphor of “selling out” of the closely held social enterprise.
The tattoo signifies that the bearer has “bought into” the closely held social enterprise by spending the social capital of the “normal” society to buy social capital in the closely held one. They have exchanged dollars for (non-convertible) rubles, as it were.
I’m currently waiting on several PhD programs to get back to me after I sent out applications a few months ago, and yeah, let’s just say I’m having a bit of trouble sleeping at night.
Especially as they’re all chemistry/chemical biology.
I’m applying for long-term academic jobs (as well as research jobs in the private sector) right now. I *would* have trouble sleeping at night, except that 1) I’m overworked and sleep deprived so I don’t really have that much trouble sleeping in general, 2) there’s nothing I personally can do about the funding situation, and 3) as bad as the plans to trash research funding are, they aren’t the things that terrify me most about the current administration (the things that terrify me most are the chatter about annexing Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal).
Stopping payments to academia is Trump’s payback for the way he was treated by them.
“When you strike at a king, you must kill him.” They failed to kill him literally and figuratively and now they will suffer the consequences.
Would you care to expand on how academia “treated” Trump, and why Trump feels a desire for revenge, then?
“Scientific American” built up a reputation as one of the world’s premier science journals. For most scientific researchers and university libraries it was compulsory reading, and even Australian computer geeks like me would occasionally be reading Sci Am articles. And despite the title it was well respected worldwide, because English is the language of international science.
And then the “everything is political” and “silence is violence” types got their way and in 2020, for the first time in 175 years of publication, Sci Am endorsed a US presidential candidate, Joe Biden. And repeated this involvement in politics in 2024 by urging people not to vote for Trump.
You do realize those terms were either coined during or refer explicitly to the *civil rights movement*, precisely to describe how refusing to speak out against government oppression was an endorsement of it? Complaining that people are using them now that the government is abusing power in similar or worse ways indicates a pretty fundamental ignorance of the history of activism.
If you were aware, you must be either asserting that Trumps crusade to set up concentration camps outside of American jurisdiction, paying juntas to imprison citizens, and implement travel bans for minorities aren’t violations of civil rights, and/or you must be asserting that the civil rights movement was not correct in it’s claims then.
So were you speaking from a place of gross ignorance about the politics of a nation you don’t live in, or were you whitewashing civil rights violations current or historic? I’m genuinely curious if you merely don’t understand what you’re talking about at all or are a deeply evil bastard.
Hi Dan, thanks for sharing the historical context. I certainly didn’t know that. Would you be able to provide a link to its use in the Civil Rights movement? When I ask Google about “silence is violence” it thinks it comes from the Black Lives Matter movement (but then generative AI is experimental!)
I think Scifihughf is helpfully answering the question that was asked – why would Trump want revenge on America’s Scientific establishment? – and assuming this means he supports all of Trump’s policies and therefore that you should get angry with him, seems like a reach.
The black lives matter movement is directly informed by the rhetoric of the civil rights movement. Civil rights activists regularly showed up at their marches to emphasize this, they quoted civil rights activists in their speeches, and they turned their themes into slogans. When someone says “silence is violence” types they are referring both to them specifically and to the entire modern activism movement, but doing so in a way that betrays a gross ignorance of the rhetoric and history of activism.
And we shall see, but conservatives here absolutely oppose the civil rights movement and will gleefully lie about the history of activism to discredit it, so I’m feeling contextually validated that any tonal hints are sufficient to act as evidence that someone parroting conservative talking points does believe them and thus wants my family dead. And therefore that hating them is appropriate, of course.
But more pertinently he’s wrong. Trump isn’t lashing out against academia for cause. He’s lashing out because it hasn’t pledged loyalty. The train of logic he’s following might be what Trump says is the reason, but it’s very emphatically not the real one. Hence why organizations that aren’t supposed to be neutral are receiving the same treatment, along with organizations that are neutral but aren’t partisan for him. The only organizations or institutions he isn’t punishing are making loyalty oaths to him.
It’s useful in that it’s an accurate view into the rhetoric of an authoritarian, it’s not useful in that it’s true.
conservatives here absolutely oppose the civil rights movement and will gleefully lie about the history of activism to discredit it, so I’m feeling contextually validated that any tonal hints are sufficient to act as evidence that someone parroting conservative talking points does believe them and thus wants my family dead.
The normal term for someone who claims on the base of “tonal hints” that someone “wants my family dead” is clinical paranoia.
“now that the government is abusing power in similar or worse ways”
Very true.
And the election of Trump is proving it by showing what the government’s funding.
Consequently, calling for people to vote against Trump is to call for the silence to continue.
“Silence is violence” is absolutely not a slogan from the Civil Rights movement of the 60s. I was alive at the time, and it just wasn’t a thing. I’m also not sure about “Everything is political.” The 60s (actually more like early 70s) feminist movement coined (or at least popularized) the phrase, “The personal is political,” but that is subtly different.
Go read King’s words instead of Fox news interpretation of them. He spoke out against silent complacency multiple times. It’s directly informed by him, as is made abundantly clear by *asking activists who were active then what it means*.
What you said was
You do realize those terms were either coined during or refer explicitly to the *civil rights movement
You do realize that therefore switching the goalposts to the concept rather than the terms is admitting that ey81 is right, merely in the most ungracious manner possible?
Dan: I understand scifihugh to be making a completely different point. Two parts:
1) Quite early in the history of newspapers/magazines/journals they separated into different kinds of publications, addressing substantially different (even if overlapping) audiences. Newspapers that cover political issues, indeed newspapers that take sides on political issues, can and should exist. However, partly for practical reasons, partly as a continuation of established tradition, these are separate and should be separate from journals focusing on scientific issues. That SciAm suddenly got into politics is annoying to its readership in multiple ways:
a- It is mixing chaff into the wheat. Readers interested in politics already got their fill from other newspapers; they are reading SciAm for the science.
b- It is making an implicit status-claim that the political article is more important than whatever science-related article would have been on those pages otherwise. Since that article didn’t get actually published, this comes off as “science-in-general is less important than this political message”.
c- The ability to have semi-public discussions on any single particular topic (including but not limited to “science”; e.g. “2nd century BC wars in the West Med” is also such a topic) requires the existence of general norms of discussion. Most obviously, if participants bring up unrelated issues and respond to them, the discussion quickly stops being about its ostensible topic. There are remarkably few exceptions to this rule, on the level of “hey, the room is on fire, we should go outside”. On forums, the moderator wields the banhammer, and people are quick to remind each other not to feed the trolls. In person… people of this class are strongly socialized to respond, as a reflex, with a withering glare to trolls. In a journal, it is the editors’ job to throw out submissions that don’t belong. It is very very wrong for exactly the people who are supposed to enforce this norm to break it, especially without any apology, or apparently even understanding of why the norm is important in the first place. Partly this wrongness is that in the future, they will be less than reliable in enforcing this norm in their space (SciAm), and partly that their behavior also makes it more difficult to inculcate and enforce this norm everywhere else.
d- Despite widespread interest in it, and occasional loud insistence that it encompasses everything, “politics” is actually a fairly narrow field. Almost every person and organization is in fact outside it, and as such, can fully expect that there will be no personal punches thrown at them. However, if SciAm chooses to enter the fray and to throw punches, it must expect that punches will be thrown at it, personally. (Here I must admit that general antiintellectualism arrives not with your name on it, but titled “to whom it may concern”. Thus in the real case the important thing is less than SciAm in particular threw political punches, but that many organizations similar to SciAm did so. As such, SciAm would be receiving counterbattery fire even if it had been an exception and didn’t throw punches. But of course it did, thus we can elide this distinction.)
2) SciAm has what the Romans called auctoritas and as such it is speaking for “science” beyond its own pages. Certainly much of that auctoritas derives from simple quality-of-execution, but a fair bit derives exactly from its previous record of maintaining political neutrality and indeed sticking to its topic of “science” to the exclusion of all else. Thus, on the one hand, those editors who decided to have the journal take a political stance are burning down a resource accumulated over decades by their predecessors. On the other hand, though performing this act diminishes their voice in the longer term, at the outset they are still shouting loud and clear all the things listed in 1).
Putting it together: the current editors are taking the achievement of their predecessors, notably including their tireless effort in building up and maintaining scientific neutrality (as well as highly competent execution), and consuming it as fuel for their own project of tearing down scientific neutrality.
No I understood completely, this is precisely the liberal support for fascism that the civil rights movement was referring to.
First, as should be abundantly obvious to anyone with historical training, politics isn’t a narrow field in authoritarian regimes. All aspects of society get subsumed by the state in the quest of the central authority for power. Hence totalitarianism-an end state of authoritarianism that means precisely that.
Because of that there are no separate magistra. And as has been clear to geologists, climate scientists, sociologists, and biologists for decades, the Republican party has been on the track to increasing politicization of science research for their own political motives, irrespective of the separation of politics from academia. There have been unprovoked attempts to interfere in climate and evolution research by conservatives for a century, branching into vaccines and expanding in scope rapidly in the last decades.
Separation is a lie.
As for authoritas, as a matter of history academia as an institution has been neutral in the past during crimes such as the Holocaust and Jim Crow, and far from being vital to the mores of debate or the authority of the institution it represents a black mark that greatly and explicitly discredits them. Even today institutions regularly get called hypocrites for failing to stop the research or experiments of 1920’s eugenicists, which is a wound caused by their failure to recognize the limits of neutrality.
However simultaneously many academics did speak out. You can learn their names by reading the righteous amongst nations list.
When politics degenerates this badly any damage institutions could do to social norms by entering the realm is dwarfed by the damage they do by being inactive.
Being an impartial observer is only of credit, only an implement of authoritas, when neutrality is just or possible. Neutrality in the face of totalitarian politics isn’t. It isn’t just, it isn’t possible, it isn’t neutral, and it isn’t pragmatic.
This points to the actual logical statement and hence rhetorical argument of the slogan “silence is violence” and “everything is political”. State violence and the rhetoric and tactics that further it impede on all magistra. Neutrality in the face of that violence is neither possible nor just. Silence becomes an indication of loyalty to the regime, not a pragmatic preservation of authority. Trying to limit the scope of engagement to appropriate channels merely limits the exposure of people to their own complicity.
My entire point is that any understanding of the civil rights movement makes it clear this is what they have been saying for decades, *and they were and are right*. Sprouting that concept in the face of current politics is itself a rebuke to the validity of political activism and support for the regime.
” this is precisely the liberal support for fascism that the civil rights movement was referring to.”
Ah. So by that you mean any pushback against your authoritarian regime.
I’m talking about the slogan “Silence is violence.” Yes, there were people in the 60s who spoke against passivism and non-involvement. Brother Eldridge coined (or again, at least popularized) the slogan, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” But I don’t recall anyone equating passivism, even implicitly, with violence.
Then you weren’t paying attention.
“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
“Silence is violence” is a slogan that means, well, exactly what you are saying.
then you should not have claimed that the TERMS came from then.
Thank you @Basil Marte for explaining why the Sci Am endorsements upset so many people worldwide.
“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it” and “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” which I quoted, are subtly different from “Silence is violence” in ways that illuminate, for the careful analyst, one of the differences between the Movement and Wokeism. The Movement complaint was not that the Establishment maintains itself through violence–that’s a defensible position, but not one that was asserted at the time. The Movement complaint was that the oppressive current order maintains itself through “conformity,” through all the people living in their little boxes on the hillside. It’s a vaguely Gramscian concept, though I doubt that any 60s radicals had read Gramsci.
Because of its anti-Establishment, anti-conformist bent, the New Left did not aim to utilize the organs of the established order to bring about the Revolution. The idea that Scientific American could be part of the Movement would have struck Huey Newton or Bill Ayers as ludicrous.
Violence was justified by some New Left theorists (though not by Martin Luther King, of course), not as a response to the “violence” of the established order (which, as Dan’s quote makes clear, was asserted to be evil and oppressive, not violent), but as a way of shaking up and dislocating the conformity which maintained the existing order.
“The Movement complaint was not that the Establishment maintains itself through violence–that’s a defensible position, but not one that was asserted at the time. ”
I’m sorry, what? That’s exactly what the movement was asserting at the time too. They were complaining about both to be clear, but the justification for the violence of action was that conformity was being used to passively conform with what was, at it’s core, an openly and explicitly violent repression of rights. The is no real distinction here, it’s a difference without meaning.
I can continue with the quotes, if you really need further proof, but it’s clear enough that research into the topic will confirm that easily. Huey Newton explicitly mentions the violence of the state *numerous* times, for instance, when speaking on how the institutions of power, specifically those which convey media and information (the “Endorsed Spokesmen” speech stands out) were merely apparati of oppression that, when threatened, resorted to murder. The words are identical to the point of paraphrase or quote-it’s the same idea, manifested in different times.
You never answer my points; you always wander into irrelevancies (or sometimes invective and calls for censorship). “Silence is violence” was not a Civil Rights or Movement slogan (quoting other, vaguely similar sayings is irrelevant) and Huey Newton’s support for violence (which of course I know about) has nothing to do with my point, that he would have thought it ludicrous that Scientific American would or could be part of the Revolution.
I do. I’ve demonstrated with quotes that you are wrong. And quoting the exact same idea is hardly irrelevant. Again, your thesis is founded on the idea of a disconnect between the civil rights movement and modern activism that demonstrably isn’t real. You keep trying to argue a semantic point that isn’t valid on the face of it.
You’ve also failed to demonstrate what Huey Long would have thought about scientific American here, although to be clear that’s insufficient in a vacuum because the civil rights movement was larger than any one interpretation. However I’m exceedingly skeptical of that pretense because campuses and other academic institutions, along with members of academia, were deeply involved in the civil rights movement then, so the idea any activist would be against using a journal as an outlet for expression is pretty absurd on the face of it.
And I call for censorship and call you out for your bigotry. If you want to sprout antisemitism or misogyny go to hell and tell the devil your feelings; doing so in public should be met with rejection and righteous hate, everywhere. Notably you aren’t displaying any in this particular topic; you’re wrong, not malicious.
@Mary Catelli
The trick is, the kind of people who actually do want Dan’s family dead (whether Dan’s family members are LBGT, or of a racial minority, or what have you) have long since figured out how to communicate and recruit through coded language. They will continue to use this coded language right up until they are in a position to see Dan’s family stoned to death in the streets.
As such, if Dan chooses to ignore the coded language and refuse to treat it as a threat, he is in the awkward position of having little or no recourse against a threat that is very obvious to him until it has already killed his loved ones.
Do you want him to be in that position?
The trick is, the kind of people who actually do want me, and most of the country, dead have long since figured out how to communicate and recruit through coded language. They will continue to use this coded language right up until they are in a position to see me shipped off to the gulag and worked to death.
As such, if I choose to ignore the coded language and refuse to treat it as a threat, I am in the awkward position of having little or no recourse against a threat that is very obvious to me until it has already killed my loved ones and countrymen.
Do you want me to be in that position?
Oh, yes, you do. Because Dan uses that coded language. And so do you.
And now we see why engaging with “conservatives” is pointless.
If I’m concerned over a regime coming to power which has signalled hostility to my family and begun to infringe on their rights in *precisely* the same way as Nazi Germany, whilst sieg heiling corporatists rummage through my social security, I’m paranoid.
If Mary is concerned about an anonymous commentator on a blog hating them for gaslighting and lying, it’s a just and fully rational reactionary tendency that justifies aforementioned gaslighting.
They don’t believe in anything. They just have sides.
Or maybe Mary is legitimately a sociopath who can’t understand other people exist on a fundamental level to take their perspectives. It amounts to the same futility.
And now we see why Dan has such problems in argument. He literally can not recognize an argument for single standards.
You have to choose Dan. If the same argument you use also applies to me, the case for both of us stands or falls together.
If it is a just argument and means you are in danger of your life, it is a just argument and means I am in danger of my life.
If it is an unjust argument, you are a paranoiac. However, I’m not, because I was just showing that it applies to situations where you don’t want it to. To call someone who does that “a sociopath who can’t understand other people exist on a fundamental level to take their perspectives” is — a problem when trying to debate.
(You do realize that quote is coded language by the standards you apply to yourself?)
And now I’m as strong as the government so our threats have parity. What an absolute joke.
This is the quality of right wing thought. This is the tippity top, and it’s a fallacy a child could see.
“And now I’m as strong as the government so our threats have parity. ”
What, if anything, do you mean by that? Because if you need to be as strong as the government to have parity with someone who is not as strong as the government, we return to your double-standard problem.
@Mary Catelli
See, the thing is, there honestly is no history in any liberal republic of anyone rounding up all the nice honest folk who are just a bit conservative in their ways and pushing them into ovens. Something like that might happen in an actual-factual Stalinist dystopia after a violent revolution! But there are no real, as opposed to imaginary, large-scale Stalinist revolutionary movements of meaningful scale in modern American politics. And in actual reality you have nothing to worry about from them for the same reason you don’t have to worry about being skewered by a unicorn on the way to the post office.
Whereas even here in America, let alone if we look at other countries with a republican form of government, we have already seen quite a lot of examples of people being literally murdered for being gay, trans, black, “looking Palestinian,” or just “showing up at a demonstration that thinks cops shouldn’t choke people to death in public for smuggling bootleg cigarettes.”
There actually are people who really do wish we could have a race war or a purge of the LGBT people and just throw them all into ovens in America, they actually exist, and it’s a fairly consistent pattern that they vote for Trump. Dan does, in actual fact, have real reason to be worried about this trend.
Whereas the ‘woke communist’ conspiracy that you might imagine is out to destroy you, as opposed to merely “being unkind to you on the Internet because they think you’re not being very honest,” doesn’t… actually exist. It’s seriously a nothingburger.
So while yes, you can just copy-paste Dan’s arguments and write your own name in and say “aha, I can say it too,” you come across like Michael Scott in the office trying to deflect one of his supervisors telling him he did something wrong. It’s not convincing outside your head.
We can only hope that when the leopards come for Mary’s face she will bear her fate with grace and fortitude. For they will: those in power have made it quite clear that to them women are an inferior species, not to be trusted with authority and whose health and welfare is of no concern.
That thing’s a woman?
Bazinga!
In all seriousness if Mary was capable of understanding the futility of in-group out-group dynamics she wouldn’t be what she is. Everything she says amounts to “I am going to be a odious as possible and you’ll be just the same as me when I get a rise from you”, which is suicidal in a society where the rule of law isn’t rock fucking solid.
Get help, Dan. Your paranoia’s getting serious.
See, this here is what I’m talking about. Mary’s not even pretending to have consistent beliefs here; my concerns about the most powerful institution in history are paranoia, hers about me are justified. She either must acknowledge my fears or abandon her own disingenuous argument in face of the sheer scale difference between those threats, yet she’s incapable of that because it implies I’m a person and that she can do wrong. It’s open hypocrisy.
And further, in honor based societies this behavior is actually in and itself a liability. Even if Mary is the answer to that most disingenuous of far right questions (I cannot help but laugh at the absurdity of that) then her husband or father would still have been called to account for this blatant hypocrisy; this behavior can only exist in a society where liberalism is iron law, yet Mary hates liberalism. It’s darkly ironic.
Yes, this is open hypocrisy. You have literally stated that “any tonal hints are sufficient to act as evidence ”
You don’t have reasons to have concerns. You are imputing evil motives to people on insufficient evidence, and you have literally said so.
To glamorize this as “my concerns about the most powerful institution in history” is open hypocrisy.
Not to go into the last paragraph, which can only be described as your paranoid fantasies let loose as if they were evidence of anything but your paranoia.
Keep your fantasy life to yourself.
It bears considering that by the time the 2020 general election campaign season spooled up, we’d already seen several months of Trump-era COVID policies, which I will not go into here but which many scientists took a dim view of. We’d also seen several years of Trump-era policies on environmental regulation and climate change, again with a dim view.
I submit that Donald Trump’s desire to do things that the scientific community might reasonably see as an attack on the scientific community came first. Respected scientific institutions speaking against Donald Trump came second.
As a logical matter, we should expect apolitical institutions of American society to have some threshold where they start taking sides. We would hope that these institutions would resist takeover by, say, Zombie Hitler Risen From The Grave, or the Actual Stalinists, or George III is Back And Wants To Conquer You. Political neutrality is not a suicide pact, and a person who tramples on enough institutions with enough aggression should logically expect resistance, even if those institutions are normally politically neutral.
Even loudly signalling your intention to attack an institution can result in them siding against you. If an American political movement arose which proposed to repeal the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of religion, for instance, you would hardly expect churches to remain neutral until this repeal had taken place.
which many scientists took a dim view of.
And history is already taking a dim view of their view.
I think there is a difference between “a powerful man decided to take your resistance personally and sought to punish you” and “history took a dim view of your resistance.”
Might does not make right.
As an Australian, I probably have a different view on how serious a thread Donald Trump is. I agree with you that neutrality is not a suicide pact and that yes there is a threshold where even apolitical organisations need to take sides. The question for people like me, among the 95% of the world’s population who don’t live in the USA, is whether Donald Trump really qualifies as Zombie Hitler Risen From The Grave.
The neutrality or otherwise of scientific institutions has real world consequences. Is global warming actually happening? Do the RNA vaccines developed in the USA protect against Covid more effectively than Russian or Chinese vaccines? The Sci Am editorial decisions have made it easier for opponents to say “no, that’s just American politics”
Was it worth Sci Am burning decades of respect and gravitas to intervene in an election campaign? Especially as the results would seem to indicate doing so had no effect or was actually counterproductive?
Important qualifier: scientific institutions should be neutral, scientists should not be, cannot be. I’m not saying that Sci Am being neutral does not mean the editorial staff and contributors can’t vote, can’t campaign. But they do so as private citizens.
> Do the RNA vaccines developed in the USA protect against Covid more effectively than Russian or Chinese vaccines?
A paper in Lancet provided good evidence that once you get to three doses of either, it’s basically the same.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(22)00345-0/fulltext
> Between Dec 31, 2020, and March 16, 2022, 13·2 million vaccine doses were administered in Hong Kong’s 7·4-million population. We analysed data from confirmed cases with mild or moderate (n=5566), severe or fatal (n=8875), and fatal (n=6866) COVID-19. Two doses of either vaccine protected against severe disease and death within 28 days of a positive test, with higher effectiveness among adults aged 60 years or older with BNT162b2 (vaccine effectiveness 89·3% [95% CI 86·6-91·6]) compared with CoronaVac (69·9% [64·4-74·6]). Three doses of either vaccine offered very high levels of protection against severe or fatal outcomes (97·9% [97·3-98·4]).
It’s honestly hard to escape the impression that much of the hullabaloo around mRNA vaccines really WAS American politics – a form of coping with how “the world’s most pandemic-prepared nation” ACTUALLY handled a pandemic by insisting that at least the vaccines HAD to be world-beating and a massive leap forward, rather than a much more incremental improvement which data like the above shows it to be. In some way, this was reminiscent of a popular pre-2022 Russian meme/truism, where a stereotypical vatnik reacts to all the ways in which the West has a superior quality of life with “But at least our missiles are great!” or a variation of such. (Not so popular after 2022, for obvious reasons.)
A related phenomenon is the distinct overpraising of “Operation Warp Speed”, particularly by the (seemingly ever-shrinking) group of NON-antivaxxer Republicans, which presents as practically on par with the Apollo landings and ignores not only all the other successfully developed COVID vaccines (including by distinctly unglamorous nations such as Cuba and Kazakhstan) but also that the most effective of the Western vaccines, Comirnaty (AKA BNT162b2, AKA “the Pfizer vaccine”) did not need any of that funding whatsoever.
In contrast, attempting to connect “Is global warming actually happening?” with “just American politics” is supremely weird – unless the intent was to say you need to be deeply immersed in American politics to even question it. You can pick pretty much any country at random, and you’ll find official acceptance of it (as evidenced by all the signatories to the Paris Agreement, for one) at levels FAR more consistent than those in the U.S.
P.S. I personally found that Scientific American has had a significant problem with clickbait and selective presentation of science for years – sadly, under this blog’s rules, I’ll need separate comments for each of the examples of what I mean. That is a FAR greater reason to criticize them than anything to do with the endorsement (where I’ll just concur with ad9: Thinking that it’s a good justification for wasting countless research projects and setting back your own country for years is insane. As good an example of “Cutting off your own nose to spite your face” as any, and the “best” way to retroactively prove the people endorsing against you were right to do so.)
> And history is already taking a dim view of their view.
I pointed out in an earlier discussion that Mary’s position of “Any deaths associated with the Floyd unrest inherently make them worse than the non/less-lethal unrest of the same period (Yellow Vests, Hong Kong, “Freedom Convoy”) even if the latter resulted in far more economic damage” places even a small number of lives far ahead of the economy, in direct contradiction to pandemic policies generally favoured by American Right. The comment I replied to certainly does not help to resolve that contradiction in any way!
It’s also a very vague statement, but to give just one example – Trump’s obvious reluctance with endorsing masks*, never really trying to normalize wearing them by appearing in one and the like certainly hasn’t aged well! Let alone his position on hydroxycloroquine. (I won’t even focus on “the bleach thing”, since I’m sure we’ll all hear it was “misquoted” or the like.)
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/cmr.00124-23
* And for the record, you don’t need to remind me Fauci screwed it up at first too – I think the failure to replace him WELL before 2020 was yet another example of America’s gerontocracy.
“Trump’s obvious reluctance with endorsing masks*, never really trying to normalize wearing them by appearing in one and the like certainly hasn’t aged well!”
It’s aged splendidly. You do know the authorities your side cites have admitted they were useless?
I already anticipated that the woman who likes to drop claims we are expected to accept on face value is not going to read the links others may use to actually support their arguments and instead drop another such claim. This time, it’s a massively vague reference to “the authorities [on] your side”, where I’m apparently supposed to know exactly what she’s talking about without reading minds. However, I HOPE that the one who likes to talk about the principles of good faith and such in her other comments would like to demonstrate them by at least reading that link now. That link, and also this one.
https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/2/pgae065/7606553
I’ll know from her next reply to me (if there’s any) whether she did in fact do so.
There is no way you can not know that except through a failure to inform myself.
Haughty claims about needing references do not actually support your case, they only mean you have not followed the news on the very topic you claim to know so much about.
Mary, I don’t live in the U.S., remember? People’s information landscapes are different even within the same country. You seem to have a habit of assuming everyone in the world gets the exact same news you do on every subject.
Additionally, for some of us “follow the science” actually does mean reading the scientific papers directly, and not just going with what the talking heads say. Here is another one for your consideration.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2119266119
If your not being in the US makes you ignorant, then you should not hold forth at all, exactly because you do not know the subject at hand.
Given that you have held forth as if you know, the burden to have informed yourself on matters widely available on World Wide Web is on you.
Since you continue to ignore up-to-date research (two of the papers were from the past year and one from 2022), at least to date (there’s still time to change your mind and read them) I hope you’ll recall that the main global authority on medical matters is the WHO. Their position remains quite pro-mask, and the Australian guidelines are similar.
https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/coronavirus-disease-covid-19-masks
” I hope you’ll recall that the main global authority on medical matters is the WHO.”
You’re not ready for Vegas yet. WHO has been caught lying. Repeatedly.
@scifihughf
Well, Hitler wasn’t all that directly dangerous to Australians, himself. The Australians of his day damn well fought him anyway and were right to do so.
Trump isn’t specifically Hitler either! But you’re conflating an illustrative example with a direct statement of identical equality. The point is that we would hope that if a somehow-resurrected Literal Hitler at the head of Literal Nazis sought to take over America and turn it into Literal Third Reich Redux, that effectively 100% of American institutions, including those which are theoretically neutral in the matters of the American republic’s internal politics, would stop and say “this is bad.” We would hope that, say, the Super Bowl halftime show would not transition seamlessly and quietly from their usual fare to something out of Triumph of the Will without at least trying to say “zombie Hitler taking over would be a bad thing.”
The catch is that if a republic’s institutions are set up so that they will 100% resist someone who ticks off 100% of the Hitler boxes, they are probably going to 10% or 15% or even 20% resist someone who ticks off 20% of the Hitler boxes.
And I submit that this is not a bad thing at all. Because it greatly reduces the risk that someone will even try to pull a Hitler and turn their republic into a tyranny. It makes it much riskier to quietly intend to do a Hitler but be good at hiding it, because you’ll still tick some of the boxes.
Trump is not Hitler. But the Trump-Musk administration has ticked off a number of the Hitler boxes. Enough that if they didn’t want resistance from American institutions, they should have ticked fewer boxes. Fired fewer inspectors-general. Made fewer tweets admiring Sulla and Napoleon. Not openly declared that it’s unconstitutional for the courts to tell them to stop doing a thing. Probably not taken the guy doing sieg-heil salutes on the inauguration stage and made him the most conspicuously powerful and influential man in the government.
Obviously false on the face of it.
The number of Leftists who tick off vastly more boxes — such as, oh, staging demonstrations that call for the genocide of Jews — would then get even stronger resistance.
I actually doubt that ‘Trump is 15% Hitler’ is actually an enlightening analogy.
As Hitler did plenty of not bad things, like anti-smoking campaigns, and many of the bad things done by Trump, like claiming election fraud and inciting Vikings to attack government buildings instead of admitting he lost the election, had no counterpart in Hitler. So, I don’t see how that making Trump a percentage of Hitler clarifies anything.
We might just as well claim that Trump is ‘5% Hoover’ because both were protectionists or ‘5% Mao’ because both were incapable of admitting that they made mistakes or were wrong and had a tendency to humiliate both friend and foe. I don’t think we actually learn anything from such comparisons.
@Simon_Jester
I too think it is a very good thing that a *society* should resist someone who ticks off 10% or 20% of the Hitler boxes or is otherwise a threat. But my belief is that these lower level threats are best dealt with specialist institutions intended for that purpose: in Australia the Electoral Commission, Legislative Ethics Commission, various regulatory agencies and the law courts. Society benefits most from scientific research (including publication) when that is apolitical or neutral. Ditto law enforcement, or health care, or the military.
(Is law enforcement, health care etc truly apolitical and neutral? Of course not, human beings are involved. But that’s a goal I think we should strive for.)
If it isn’t Zombie Hitler Risen From the Grave, I would rather have a few institutions dedicating 100% of their efforts against threats to democracy rather than everyone doing 10%. (Although the “everyone” option needs to be available – eg Australia in WW2 fighting against Hitler.)
For another example, should US Army commanders be endorsing presidential candidates? If they perceive a threat to the republic, from either side, shouldn’t they do their part? But I don’t think the commander of the US 7th Army announcing “We support Harris” in Nov 2024 would have been a good thing.
(Again, this is as the representative of the institution. In private life the general and all the other soldiers are free to campaign and vote for whoever they want.)
For the specific example I used, I believe Scientific American in particular does a lot of good in the world by being seen as neutral. You yourself wrote in an earlier comment that “neutral” should mean “more dedicated to telling the truth than to making one side or the other win”. As far as I’m concerned, Sci Am endorsing presidential candidates was damaging neutrality *without* sufficient cause. (Basil Marte explained why in detail much better than I would have done.)
@Mary Catelli
And when someone who’s actually called for the genocide of Jews at a demonstration becomes a Democratic candidate for president, I will be very very seriously concerned. The thing is, the real Democratic Party, the non-imaginary one, ran an incumbent president who had given the Israelis billions of dollars worth of weaponry to prosecute an extremely one-sided war in Gaza. When he resigned, his vice-president did not disown his policies.
The real, non-imaginary Democrats, don’t even tick off the “wants to kill Jews” box. Biden actively suppressed pro-Palestinian campus protests, Mary. This was literally a year ago, less even.
Trump was very proud after the election about how many Palestinian-Americans voted for him in places like Dearborn because, in fact, they were angry at the Biden administration for supporting Israel so much. He accepted a plaque in Dearborn over it.
So the “the Democrats are being more Hitler than Trump THEY WANT TO KILL THE JEWS!” thing lands with a rather wet flop.
“And when someone who’s actually called for the genocide of Jews at a demonstration becomes a Democratic candidate for president, I will be very very seriously concerned.”
Says the guy who claims that Dan is entitled to accuse people — who are not running for president — of wanting to murder him on the grounds of “tonal hints.”
@Tus 3
I don’t think you’re applying an appropriate level of sensible interpretation to what I’m saying. I will clarify to avoid the problem, hopefully.
When I talk about a “Hitler list” of “Hitler boxes” that a leader can check off, I am not talking about superficial stuff like “having a stupid mustache” or “being opposed to smoking” or “having obsessive memory for military trivia” or “taking credit for building autobahns that were actually funded under his predecessor.”
No, I am talking about the specific list of only those things about Hitler that were actually a problem.
I’m talking about a list of things like “avowing his desire to purge out ethnic groups within his own country” and “using violent mobs to attack political institutions that might stand against him” and “organizing large paramilitaries while dismantling more law-abiding institutions of the state so that he could enforce whatever rules he wanted” and “invading Poland” and so on.
I am talking about a list where almost anyone who actually believes in the idea of wanting to live in a republic would agree that “Leaders Really Really Should Not Do This Thing” applies to nearly every item on the list.
Now, to be completely fair, some of the items on the list are things a person might do for innocent reasons! But if so, then they’re going to be things that, when viewed in combination with other things, are probably a problem.
For instance, “being prone to rages and to publicly berate and belittle other people” is a trait that is bad in a leader but not in itself proof that he is Hitler or even on the Hitler scale. America has had plenty of leaders with a bad temper or a tendency to use profanity before, and they were not Hitlers or even mini-kinda-Hitlerish.
But a trait like “prone to rages” might well belong on the Hitler list, simply because if that’s all then you’re only 2% Hitlerish and it’s really not a problem, but if it’s combined with a bunch of other stuff (“having an enemies list, using extrajudicial means specifically to punish perceived enemies, being prone to conspiratorial thinking,”) then it becomes an important part of what made Hitler bad.
So when I talk about a leader who’s ticking off 20% or 30% of the boxes on the Hitler List, NO, I don’t mean some kind of bizarre superficial things that anyone could innocently do. I mean things where if we were compiling a list back in, say, 2005, of “things that a normal person who is totally not going to overthrow the republic and become a fascist strongman would never do, things that may be signs that the guy you’re talking about is actually a fascist strongman or planning to become one…” things that would have been on that list back then.
@Simon_Jester
My excuses, I see what you mean.
Shortly after already having posted that Tuesday I began wondering whether I had not been too pedantic. In hindsight I should not have made that comment I think.
@scifihughgf
I see what you’re saying about how it would be desirable to have robust democracy-maintaining institutions that are specialized for that purpose, and who can be trusted to screen out the “20% of a Hitler” types and the “actually 80% of a Hitler but good at hiding it” types and so on, so that everyone else can be pure-quill 100% politically neutral all the time.
Unfortunately, the US has a bit of a problem in this department. Our constitutional structure and its safeguards have not been updated in a very long time, and the theory at the time of the Founding Fathers was that if a “man who would be king” ever showed up, that surely the ability of Congress to impeach him and the courts to throw him in jail if he broke the laws would be good enough to ensure that he wouldn’t actually be able to get away with it.
…That has not turned out well.
The congressional Republicans stonewalled any idea of impeaching our “man who would be king” even bare days after he had sicced an angry mob on the building they were in at the time. It would seemingly have cost them nothing to simply do as they did with Nixon and just admit “yeah, this guy’s a crook, let’s just find a new guy to put in charge next time!” After all, the Republicans did just that with Reagan and it worked out great for them! But that was… not on the menu.
We wound up with the Supreme Court making some decisions that would be rather surprising if one did not pay attention to the specific political balance of power on the court, granting our particular “man who would be king” very broad immunities and stalling or undermining a lot of the court cases that might have gotten him in trouble while he was still vulnerable.
So by the time the 2024 election campaign season rolled around, a lot of politically neutral centrist Americans (and they would be centrist by the standards of Australia or much of Europe) were looking at Trump and thinking “uh, this guy really does look like he’s planning to break down the republic entirely in order to secure more permanent power, and it doesn’t look like the institutions whose job it theoretically is to stop him are going to stop him short of the election itself.”
This put a lot of American institutions into a crisis mode where they had to decide whether to (1) start doing favors for Trump prematurely in hopes that he would be a kind tyrant to them personally if he won or (2) openly come out against Donald Trump despite not normally being all that politically active, because from their perspective, it honestly looked/looks like if Harris didn’t win the 2024 election, the next election might never be held.
I understand that you may not approve of this, but it really was something of a desperation move by institutions operating under unusual circumstances.
“and many of the bad things done by Trump, like claiming election fraud and inciting Vikings to attack government buildings instead of admitting he lost the election, had no counterpart in Hitler”
Munich beer hall putsch. Hitler tried to overthrow local elections by stopping the transfer of power and got arrested. Trump’s behavior is worse, but it happened.
Wait did I misremember those events? Bah, it’s been a while. Apparently there were no preceding elections…could’ve sworn the Nazis did that…
@Mary Catelli
The thing is, even if we stipulate that you have the right to apply Dan-level sensitivity to tone, the people the Democrats actually ran for president didn’t hint at a desire to kill Jews. In fact, when other people such as campus protest groups had even a handful of people chanting anti-Israeli slogans that could be interpreted as genocide, those protests were suppressed… with the direct aid and encouragement of the Biden administration.
When pro-Palestinian groups, including ones that didn’t call for killing Jews but just for “we want to stop shipping more bombs to Israel that Israel then drops on Gaza” which is hardly the same as saying “kill Jews,” tried to get a foot in the door with the Harris campaign, they were rebuffed.
There simply is no credible way to attribute “a desire to kill Jews” to mainstream Democratic politicians, because indeed mainstream Democratic leaders have signaled exactly the opposite. They signaled “desire to uphold Israel in particular” so hard that they actively alienated Arab-American voters! Voters who then in many cases voted for Trump! There is a picture of Trump accepting a plaque award in Michigan because of this! You can look it up.
You’ve already been called on this. Stop trying to impose a rule that what your side does only counts if the person is running for president unless you are prepared to impose that rule on Dan — and yourself.
You still haven’t answered. Basils comment explains why you would hold your position out of ignorance or evil, not which you hold it from. Either you don’t understand why the activists are right because you don’t understand the history involved, or you know it and are malicious. Explain yourself.
Lying for a second time only underscores that you are a liar.
Trump was explicitly and unprecedentedly opposed to science and science communication. He spent much of his time during COVID promoting conspiracy theories and preventing the CDC from doing their job, most likely resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people (we’ll never know how many because of his efforts to suppress data gathering). Now he’s all set to do it again, but more. So maybe take a break from science fiction and read a bit about science.
AIUI, you are claiming that Donald Trump has decided to wreck the scientific enterprise throughout America – halting Cancer research, for example – because a popular science magazine endorsed his opponent.
Am I to take it that you think this is an argument that makes Trump look good?
Do you think it matters if he brings Cancer research to a grinding halt?
I think the next four years will be very *very* hard for everyone except the very rich. If Trump cancels foodstamps (or fails to provide them through incompetence) I think we will see food riots fairly soon. Maybe someone should tell them about the food riots of ancient days – I understand that Rome was particularly vulnerable because they imported all their grain.
I doubt very much it’ll end up being better for the rich. For one their needs would be met more effectively under a Nordic style social state as under this hellscape, and for two it wasn’t benevolence that led to the original wave of socialist reforms, it was the explicit and direct threat of violence headed by people throwing fire bombs at the rich and assassinating politicians left and right.
And society has more tools for equalizing power through violence now. Not less.
More generally Fascism is self contradictory. It always destroys itself. It’s only ever a question of whom dies in the process and how long it takes.
Your argument is circular.
I’m probably being thick, but could you help me by spelling out the circularity more clearly?
His claim of self-contradiction is based on his claim of Fascism, but if it were indeed part of the essence, he would have to show self-contradiction to prove Fascism.
They won’t, being a trump supporter and all. They just feel compelled to attack any perceived critique of his policies.
Notice that lewytz, being a leftist and all, said this AFTER I had given what this claims I won’t.
On top of the usual leftist tendency to narcissistic belief that there is no legitimate way to oppose them.
@Mary Catelli
I do not understand why you see the post you replied as being circular. “Fascism” is a complex political concept. It has many traits, not just one. It is entirely possible that we could identify “fascism” by using some of its many other traits, and then recognize “aha, fascism also has the trait of being self-contradictory and self-destructive in the long run.” That’s not circular reasoning.
Irrelevant, because that’s not how he used it.
I’m not seeing it. To me, it’s an obvious assumption that you can find out you’re dealing with fascism by other means, then, believing that “fascism is self-contradictory and self-destructive,” expect that the thing you’re dealing with will contradict itself and self-destruct.
Insofar as Dan’s argument involves attributing self-contradiction and self-destruction to fascism at all, that DOES seem to be how he’s using the concept.
So much for your love of cool rationality. He’s threatening violence when he doesn’t get what he wants.
It’s incredibly enjoyable watching conservative word salad getting called out. Obviously there’s nothing to even engage with about Mary’s post, it’s beyond wrong and simply meaningless. I wasn’t even creating an argument for why Trump’s policies were fascist, they simply are on the face of it.
To be clear to reinforce Simon’s point, fascism contradicts itself primarily in how the central tenents of fascism, specifically fatalistic finality, the idea of how one big final expression of triumph, will simultaneously end class conflict whilst also creating a hierarchical power structure that renders it inevitable. Fascism can never win because the victory it desires stands in conflict to the conflict it aggrandizes and the imaginary traditional society for which it invokes nostalgia.
On a smaller, more practical level, so much of Republican policy is hypocrisy that it should be easier to say what isn’t self contradictory, except nothing is. The principles they espouse are utterly at odds with everything they do.
And finally the people who support fascism do so out of an economic and social anxiety where they feel that exclusionary policy will lead to them receiving benefits they believe they are entitled to, motivated by varying degrees of greed, while those same policies eroded the rights they need to achieve those benefits. Hence why people vote against democracy, destroying the system that gives them the power to improve their lives.
I was invoking one or all of those as an allusion to why it simply doesn’t work out for the fascist, ever.
Notice that this is exactly the word salad he imputes to others.
@Mary Catelli
You moved the goalposts. I’m not saying whether or not Dan did or didn’t say anything violent. I’m not saying whether that’s good or bad. I’m saying that when Dan says “this particular regime over here is fascism, and fascism is self-contradictory and self-destructive,” it’s not a circular argument.
Fascism can have Trait X, without it being necessary to prove Trait X to prove that fascism is present, so long as fascism has Traits Y and Z, which are themselves provably present or absent.
Irrelevant. That he phrases his argument badly does not mean I am not allowed to see that he is making a circular argument.
Weren’t you the one just harping about “coded language”?
Have you looked at the damp squibs of Leftist protest since USAID was cut off?
It is that, BTW, even more than the admittedly explosive information about what USAID was funding, that is producing rage on the Right.
Were there some gatekeeper leftist protest events somewhere? There usually are, only rightwingers ever really notice them. But the real flaw in your assertion is that rightwing rage has been “produced.” Stupid outrage is the essence of the rightwing, the emotion that all new facts are beaten into shape around, not some alien spirit evoked from them by surprise events. You can ‘make’ rightwingers enraged with toothpicks, Sunday School, water treatment, paint, weather, coin-operated children’s rides, stuffed animals, toast, haircuts, expensive thread, cheap thread, lightbulbs, serving alcohol, banning alcohol, plastic, electricity, cancer, peas, emails, radio, antibiotics, insomnia, pills for treating insomnia, ministerial obligations, Paris, electrolytes, air conditioning, numbers, text, rock music, geology, eyeballs, compost, T. E. Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence, postcards, banks, fanfiction, paying attention to them, and all sorts of other things.
It’s wiser to keep your bigotry hidden rather than so overt, especially in so childish a form. It merely underscores that your view of the right is affected ignorance.
Looking at the very long list of “things the right has been outraged over,” I can find a surprising number of them where I can specifically recall right-wing outrage over those things, directly or indirectly. I do not think this is a matter of mere bigotry; the American political right genuinely has given the honest impression that it can be ‘inspired’ to anger and to the belief that it is being conspired against very, very easily.
When everything from beer commercials to water fluoridation is being called part of the “woke conspiracy” by one person or another, and condemned in one place or another, it is hard to maintain the impression that one’s movement is calm, sober, and free of irrational angry outbursts. Or that one’s movement needs a clear and logical reason to motivate its outrage.
So what?
One, that wasn’t his complaint.
Two, the number of things, and the insanity of the things, that woke leftists have fomented rage over dwarf that list. They rage over everything from punctuality and hard work to the idea that a cop shot a black girl who was literally swinging a knife to stab another black in the throat.
I am consumed by righteous opposition to all forms of political conservatism. It is the politics of bigotry, immiseration, and despecialization; it seeks to undo civilization, subjugate free people, and kill the world itself.
You cannot comprehend being opposed where that opposition springs from a considered rational examination of reality, because conservatism is thoroughly founded on and steeped in distaste for outsiders.
And you talk like someone who’s never listened to a child.
And so you double down.
Since you are, in fact, steeped in distaste for outsiders.
(You do know it’s been shown scientifically that conservations and libertarians understand each other and liberals, but liberals don’t get either of them?)
American political conservatives and American political libertarians ‘get’ each other because they are actually more or less the same movement with only slight changes of emphasis. This is because there are very few real libertarians in American politics, as opposed to people who use libertarian rhetoric but adopt authoritarian means towards that end. The libertarian rhetoric helps them sound plausible and feel good about what they are doing, and so has become co-opted.
If you want a small and unobtrusive government, centralizing all power in the hands of a Maximum Over-Leader and letting him then delegate that power to unaccountable and unelected oligarchs is not a recipe for getting what you want.
Ockham’s Razor says; NAH!
Otherwise you would have to say that conservatives and libertarians are the same thing as leftists WITHOUT leftists being the same thing as conservatives and libertarians .
To thus offer a bad explanation of part of it to distract from the whole is — bad faith.
BTW, why AREN’T there protests? Is it the leftist position that what DOGE is doing is quite acceptable?
There are lawsuits, some effective. There is organizing, and a wide variety of left-of-center institutions are coordinating plans to resist longterm. I honestly don’t think it’s enough, but the administration is practicing terrorism in the original French sense, generating compliance from the populace by shock via transgression and direct threats.
In fact I don’t know if enough could be done; American leftism differs from other strains by placing extraordinary emphasis on the will of the electorate, holding that what the people say they want has to be respected somewhat even when it’s impossible or dangerous or just plain evil. This past election was the most high-information election in American history, possibly in world history. Some of that information was misinformation, but when a person is confronted with conflicting information they don’t magically become fooled, they just choose to believe the half that they want to believe.
The Republicans ran very openly and consistently on a program of building concentration camps for immigrants and corrupting the government into personal fiefs. The electorate responded positively to that, and there is never any way to really stop the American people from getting what they asked for, unless the people offering it were lying. Overall American liberal institutions are focused on building resilience in the face of an existential threat, which is not always flashy.
“The Republicans ran very openly and consistently on a program of building concentration camps for immigrants and corrupting the government into personal fiefs.”
Go lie down until you are feeling better, and realize we all saw what actually happened.
“American leftism differs from other strains by placing extraordinary emphasis on the will of the electorate, holding that what the people say they want has to be respected somewhat even when it’s impossible or dangerous or just plain evil.”
You do realize that the entire USAID scandal turns on the way this is clearly not true? That American leftism has been using corrupt means to undermine the will of the people and instead enforce the agenda of the left, even when the agenda is impossible or dangerous or just plain evil?
I can understand why you might have difficulty coming to terms with the results of your support for conservative policy. As you look around at what is happening, you may start to say more and more, “I didn’t want this.”
If you are American, and voted in the 2024 Presidential election, and did not vote to stop a Republican takeover…then what you did was vote for the sudden physical removal of at least 5% of all persons currently within the USA. This was a policy that was campaigned on proudly by the Republicans at the Presidential and Congressional levels, it builds on policies already implemented in Republican-controlled States in prior years, and logistical groundwork for enacting it was already happening even before the Inauguration.
This is not a policy that can or will be enacted by simply buying ten million bus tickets and then letting people see themselves out. On the contrary, it will be enacted using the same tools that have been used *every time it has been enacted anywhere else throughout the history of the world.* Agricultural transport will be retasked to moving people, armed state security forces will take people from homes and schools and workplaces, and large processing centers will be used to detain people until other countries bow to diplomatic pressure to take in the detainees or some other solution is found.
This all only ever goes one way, friend. You can tell yourself it isn’t what you wanted but for too many Americans it is already what they have voted for; we are all just waiting for the implementation of they said they wanted.
Notice the abrupt switch to an entirely different subject.
We were well aware that it would be painful. We are also well aware that you and yours deliberately set out to make it as difficult and painful as possible.
If you had not tried to make the law a dead letter, this would not be happening.
Just to clarify, what IS the argument being made here? Is it that the lack of protests YOU can see (since there definitely have been some – i.e. at the various Tesla dealerships across the country) means it’s not that important? Is it that every single protest in the past which had occurred (comparatively) quickly was funded and organized by USAID and so the agency’s dismantling had stopped them now and will stop them in the future? Or something else entirely?
Just in case it’s the former argument – across the entire Trump trial, the number of protesters never seemed to exceed small double digits (including those demonstrating in FAVOUR of the eventual verdict.) How would you feel about claiming that observable fact as the proof of “the rightist position [being] that what Bragg is doing is quite acceptable”?
Either way, I think the event below already provides quite enough example that what is happening right now IS important and unacceptable, regardless of how many people are sufficiently aware of the details to protest.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-administration-wants-un-fire-nuclear-safety-workers-cant-figure-rcna192345
> National Nuclear Security Administration officials on Friday attempted to notify some employees who had been let go the day before that they are now due to be reinstated — but they struggled to find them because they didn’t have their new contact information.
> In an email sent to employees at NNSA and obtained by NBC News, officials wrote, “The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel.”
> The individuals the letter refers to had been fired on Thursday and lost access to their federal government email accounts. NNSA, which is within the Department of Energy and oversees the nation’s nuclear stockpile, cannot reach these employees directly and is now asking recipients of the email, “Please work with your supervisors to send this information (once you get it) to people’s personal contact emails.”
> The Department of Energy did not immediately respond to an NBC News request for comment.
> ….The emails come after multiple staff — all civil servants — at the NNSA received termination notices late Thursday, according to a source with direct knowledge of the notifications. NBC News reviewed the termination notification, which included the subject line: “Notification of Termination During Probationary/Trial Period.”
> The NNSA is tasked with designing, building and overseeing the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.
I’ve certainly seen protests. The big 50 in 50 protest — that actually managed to get dozens of protesters in SOME of the 50 state capitals.
What’s interesting to me is that there have been so few protests (none at all of any size) at Columbia University this year, even though the situation in the Middle East is not appreciably different from last spring, and the new Administration is to say the least unfriendly to academia. I know that the powers that be typically blame any troubles on “outside agitators,” but I wonder if it was true in this case. (The campus has been closed to outsiders for the entire academic year.) Alternatively, a friend suggested that students were told over the summer by their parents or other sponsors to stop jeopardizing their degrees or visas. I don’t know what people on other campuses might have observed or what theories they might have.
@ey81
There were crackdowns on protest organizations at Columbia under the Biden administration, like Biden actually specifically provided support to suppress that. The Biden administration was in fact so pro-Israel in general that it drove quite a few Arab-American voters to vote for Trump, so you should probably bear in mind that what you call “the left” and I call “the center and left” isn’t some consolidated radical anti-Israel political bloc.
The thing about crackdowns like this is that they tend to reduce the likelihood of any future protests for a while. When a significant number of the student organizations that staged protests in 2024 have been disbanded or defunded or infiltrated by police agents, when many of the students were expelled or threatened with expulsion, it will be harder to organize another wave of protests.
@Mary Catelli
The “50 in 50” protests (their own slogan is ‘50501’) and the “No Kings on President’s Day” protests actually did draw crowds, often of hundreds or thousands in many states. It’s kind of ironic, really, that you were saying “clearly, Trump has neutered the artificial left-wing protest machine by defunding USAID and there are no left-wing protests,” and then literally like 2-3 days later there were nationwide anti-Trump protests, totaling in the thousands if not tens of thousands across the country.
One might be led to think that USAID was actually never a secret organ of funding “leftist” protest in America on any meaningful scale after all, and that it’s all just conspiracy theory logic like all the times DOGE takes a line item on the budget for X million dollars, crosses out the ‘m’ and writes in a ‘b’ or types in three extra zeroes, and then says “aha we found billions of dollars of wasteful DEI spending!” And yes, this has been caught happening.
One DOGE release actually claimed that literally 80% of ICE’s funding was going to DEI initiatives, because they tried to claim an eight million dollar program was an eight billion dollar program… when ICE’s total budget is only ten billion to begin with.
If a Democrat were caught doing this I imagine you would never trust them again.
You do realize I can read the news?
I have seen the articles that claim those numbers for those protests. I also have seen the photos they provide — and remember their long history of lying.
Bret attended the most recent “No Kings” Protests.
I dare you to accuse him of lying.
@Mary Catelli
The reason there aren’t “leftist” protests is that there are not, in point of fact, large-scale organizations of “leftists” capable of getting thousands and thousands of people into the streets in a hurry, especially not in the depth of winter. You may be under the impression that, for instance, the George Floyd protests of 2020 were the result of a “leftist organization” deciding that there should be a lot of street protests in some kind of centralized manner; this is not the case.
And indeed, efforts by the FBI and other institutions to disrupt “leftist” political organizations continued under the Biden administration, assuming we use a definition of “leftist” that does not include, say, Joe Manchin.
If your model if “the left” is that it is controlled by a set of secret masters, then you will find yourself predicting many actions by “the left” that simply do not occur. Indeed, “the left” is notorious for internal squabbling and a strong preference for bottom-up organization over top-down organization in this generation.
“The reason there aren’t “leftist” protests is that there are not, in point of fact, large-scale organizations of “leftists” capable of getting thousands and thousands of people into the streets in a hurry, especially not in the depth of winter.”
Irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how you claim you do it, it’s that you aren’t.
If there exists no mechanism by which the “you” in question can actually make the stated effect happen, then the argument you have presented has a bit of a hole in it.
Imagine if I argue “Mary’s little lamb cannot possibly be in danger, because if it were, she would fly to the rescue by flapping her ears.” You would of course immediately dismiss this as absurd, and rightly so.
The most obvious grounds on which to dismiss such a silly claim is that while Mary might have a little lamb, which might be in danger, it is vanishingly unlikely that Mary even has the power to fly by flapping her ears at all, let alone that she could save her endangered little lamb by doing so.
I contend that “the left” as you understand it does not actually have the power to create protests of the type you anticipate, under the present circumstances and in the present context. This lack of capacity is in large part engineered, since large institutions capable of putting a lot of feet on the street in a hurry are nearly always threatening to centrist politics, and always to right-wing politics if the feet in question do not belong to right-wingers.
“I contend that “the left” as you understand it does not actually have the power to create protests of the type you anticipate, under the present circumstances and in the present context.”
That was my point.
You don’t.
But you did. We all saw them.
Well, it turns out we were both surprised by the President’s Day protests, yes! The thing is, you presented an actual contingent argument going “we haven’t seen any protests yet, which proves that Trump blowing up USAID has neutered left wing protest in America because it was all astroturf corruptly funded by USAID all along!”
I presented, by contrast, an explanation for why we hadn’t seen protests yet, namely that organizing a sizeable protest on approximately three weeks’ notice in the middle of winter is perhaps an unrealistic thing that you should never have expected “the left” to do in the first place.
Then it turned out that no, it takes “the left” FOUR weeks for the grassroots protests to show up. Heh.
In my case, I am guilty of underestimating the prowess of left-wing organizers a bit. In your case, your entire argument has been torpedoed at the waterline.
Moreover, you are still evading my question of “when, exactly, has “the left” organized what you would consider a ‘rapid’ protest within recent memory that would match the conditions you yourself are claiming it can do?” You were clearly talking about some specific protest. Which one, and when?
Overhyping those protests does not change the facts on the ground. I had to actively go searching to find even a single article about any one of them.
Are you actually trying to deny that Leftist protests have been the major news story of the day in the quite recent past?
I genuinely don’t understand why so many people fall for that troll, which has all the factless free-association hallmarks of an LLM bot. There’s nothing to be gained by a response.
I also don’t understand how that account’s obviously insulting comments keep being allowed. Isn’t this comment section supposed to be moderated?
Actually, her Dreamwidth account proves there’s a real person behind the trolling.
It’s only been about four weeks since Trump took office, and nearly everything he’s actually done has been highly abstract (“raise tariffs on imported steel” or “delete entire government agency.”) It’s also the middle of winter.
Protests usually take considerable time to organize. They are usually over some specific concrete proposition (“pass this bill, yes or no” or “strangling this guy for bootlegging cigarettes, good or bad.”) Protests are also, in general, more likely to occur in summer rather than winter. A priori, we would not expect a great deal of protests, regardless of any notional USAID conspiracy to fund or not fund them.
I may be misunderstanding your argument here, but it sounds as if your argument is “the left has not loudly protested my leader’s actions, which therefore proves that all left-wing opposition to my leader was actually funded by a government agency my leader just deleted, which is an outrage.”
But if the left had loudly protested your leader’s actions, it seems likely that you would be saying that this, too, was proof of a government conspiracy to fund opposition to your leader.
It sounds as if all paths here lead to the forced conclusion “therefore, there is a secret deep state conspiracy to fund opposition to the great leader, which he inexplicably did not do anything about during his previous four-year tenure as chief executive of my nation.”
You do think we didn’t notice that protests could be organized really quick in the past?
Also, if you demand summer weather for your protests, the issue can’t really be important.
Which protests have been organized “really quick” in the historically recent past, especially in winter? I’m asking here, sincerely, out of matters of basic experience and fact.
If your argument is that people must really not care if they do things in summer but not in winter, then I can only point out this very blog’s articles on logistics. Organizing a large protest is very much a logistical exercise, and the logistics in question are very different and considerably harder in winter than in summer.
The weren’t “organized really quick.” They sometimes happened really quick, but they either weren’t organized (you do understand the possibility of popular outrage as an organic phenomenon) or there had been months of background organizing. The really memorable ones are memorable precisely because of the disorganization involved.
However, it cannot be ignored that Musk’s destruction for Twitter has seriously damaged global capacity for spontaneous mass protest, it was a genuinely useful tool for mass coordination and I think its absence will require a change in opposition tactics.
Nonsense! You have Bluesky, do you not?
The weren’t “organized really quick.” They sometimes happened really quick, but they either weren’t organized (you do understand the possibility of popular outrage as an organic phenomenon) or there had been months of background organizing.
BZZZTTTT. Thank you for playing.
We have, indeed, seen clearly organized protests very soon after the event that they protested about.
That’s right, conservatives are generally not hard to predict; the only time we’ve really have trouble predicting objectionable behavior is when a conservative politician or organization has managed to consistently lie over an extended period. We had like six months to prepare protests against the Muslim Ban, for instance, the only things that weren’t known were the exact day and how the media would cover it all.
You lie.
We have seen you throw together protests on the spur of the moment about things that you can’t possibly have predicted because they were triggered by happenstance events.
Give examples if you’re going to call me a liar. The issue is, you don’t actually know what you’re talking about because your awareness of left-organized actions is filtered entirely through rightwing channels.
This comment section could easily be the only place in your life where you can encounter actual nonconservatives and get sincere replies; your determined efforts to antagonize away that resource here suggests that anywhere else you might be able to actually learn from leftists are places where you have poisoned that dialog. It’s okay to realize you are wrong and try to grow from the experience; it will hurt a bit emotionally, but refusing to stop being wrong doesn’t make you correct, it makes you a mark.
So your position is — Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
I will continue to believe my lying eyes.
You do realize it is the very nature of protests to be public and if you need to explain them, they are total failures?
@Mary Catelli
I repeat my earlier question to you. WHICH specific protests do you contend were “quickly organized” by “the left?” I am not asking you to disbelieve your eyes, I am asking you to specify the thing you are already certain exists.
Suppose I claimed that I had watched a man rob my house. You would be acting quite reasonably and probably in good faith if, out of concern and curiosity, you asked me for a description of that man. Or if you asked me what was stolen.
If, when you asked such a simple question, I replied “are you suggesting that I’m lying about this,” the obvious response on your part would be “well, not until now, no.” My inability or unwillingness to provide any specific detail or example would not make me seem more credible, and indeed might call my credibility into question where it had not been before.
So again, which specific protests do you believe were “quickly organized” by “the left” within the relatively recent past?
Except, of course, you saw the robber too, so yes, asking for a description would be implausible on your part.
We have all seen them because they have been all over the news. For years.
“So your position is — Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
I will continue to believe my lying eyes.”
My position, Mary, is that you are spending a significant portion of your reading time choosing to fill your eyes with lies, and that when you find yourself reading the truth you react to it with a furious effort to argue it away. Instead of letting reality contaminate the purity of the comfortably false worldview you’ve acquired, you seek to drive other people out of conversation with you through a rapid rotation of personal attacks and subject changes and goalpost-moving and all-around stubbornness.
That’s a long-winded way to say that I should believe you over my eyes.
You need to get out of your bubble.
@Mary Catelli
WHICH protests? Just literally name a few of them. It’s not rocket science. Why do you keep dodging this question?
I think we both know what would happen. You would name a protest. I would then do like five minutes’ casual research, and it would be obvious to us both (if we don’t lie to ourselves) that the protest doesn’t really qualify as the kind of “instant protest” you seem to think happens all the time. Say, because people started planning it 6-8 weeks in advance, or because it happened under wildly different conditions.
And this would be fatal to your argument, because your argument here all this time has been “clearly we all know “the left” can just snap its fingers and have protestors show up at will, so clearly if they have not already done so it proves XYZ.”
I think you know this isn’t a reasonable argument, Mary. I think that’s why you keep avoiding just answering a very simple, very basic, very mundane question.
I feel like if I asked a someone “what is seven times six” and they went “hey, are you calling me stupid, like someone who doesn’t know what seven times six is, you’ve got a lot of nerve asking me a question like that!”
It makes you think that (1) this person probably doesn’t actually know that six times seven is forty-two, (2) they are probably bluffing to avoid answering the question and risking embarrassing themselves, and/or (3) they are going on the angry counterattack for the same reason.
“I feel like if I asked a someone “what is seven times six” ”
You need to stop feeling and start thinking.
If you thought, you would realize that if you asked such a question, everyone would realize you asked it in bad faith.
You are professing ignorance of major events in the very arena you are claiming special knowledge.
Mary, asking you a basic question about what you think is true is not the same as “professing ignorance.” Think about what you are saying. You are saying that all you need to do is say “clearly leftists can organize huge protests at the drop of a hat, you know the ones I mean” and everyone is supposed to just nod and accept it?
And you’re this resistant to basic factual questions like “name one?” If you, yourself, possess the knowledge you claim and logically must have in order to justify your own conclusions, this shouldn’t require you to resort to things like this.
If I say something like “it can be hard to perform labor in outer space, there are plenty of examples of astronauts getting exhausted trying to do work on a spacewalk,” and someone asks me “which ones,” I don’t get mad and yell at them for daring to ask me a basic question. I go to Google and look up accounts of Gemini missions or something and answer the question.
…
Please, Mary, you’re just making yourself look evasive. Stop dodging the question. If you meant some specific protest or set of protests, which ones?
Was it the George Floyd protests in 2020? Are those the ones you mean? Was it Occupy Wall Street back around 2010? Which ones did you originally mean on February 15th?
Simon, when you profess superior knowledge of protests and complete ignorance of major news stories, it is clear that you are not what you claim you are.
If the finer details of spacewalks were routinely broadcast on major news networks, and the other person claimed to know more about them than you do, you would take the question as evidence of bad faith.
You can’t see an elephant at 10 feet. I’m not going to believe anything you claim about seeing fernseed a mile off.
No Kings! No Kings!
On my side of the pond, one notable admission was that much of China’s “civil society” was specifically funded by the USAID in the express hope of undermining their political system. On one hand, that is EXACTLY what both the agency and the NGOs in general have been accused of all along over there (as well as in Russia, in Georgia, etc.) On the other hand, that also seems like a weird thing for “the Right” to oppose?
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/with-us-funding-freeze-china-nonprofits-are-facing-extinction-they-need-emergency-assistance/
> An entire ecosystem of vital China-related work is now in crisis. When the Trump administration froze foreign funding and USAID programs last week, dozens of scrappy nonprofits in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the US were immediately affected. Staff are losing their jobs; some organizations face imminent closure due to lack of funding; others are paring back their programming.
> In many cases, these organisations provide our last window into what is actually happening in China. They do the painstaking and often personally risky work of tracking Chinese media censorship, tallying local protests, uncovering human rights violations, documenting the Uyghur genocide, and supporting what remains of civil society in China. They provide platforms for Chinese people to speak freely; they help keep the dream of democracy in China alive. I’m not listing the names of any specific organisations at this time, because some prefer not to disclose that they receive foreign funding. Beijing believes funding that supports free speech and human rights is interference by ‘hostile foreign forces’.
> As China’s President Xi Jinping has squeezed Chinese civil society and expelled journalists, information from inside China has got harder and harder to access. The 2017 Chinese foreign NGO law crushed US and other foreign nonprofits based in China. Some moved to Hong Kong or elsewhere. The spending freeze may deal them a death blow.
> The research and other work done by these nonprofits is invaluable. It largely isn’t replicated by think tanks, universities, private firms, or journalists. If it disappears, nothing will replace it, and Beijing’s work to crush it will be complete.
> As a journalist who covered China for more than 10 years, I took for granted the numerous organisations I could turn to when I needed certain kinds of information. But Donald Trump’s foreign spending freeze has revealed how dependent these organizations are on a single government for their survival—and, by extension, how fragile our sources of information about China really are.
…..
> Providing funding for China nonprofits operating outside of China is directly aligned with the core interests of democratic nations. We base our security on the idea that democratic systems are the best way to guarantee the long-term stability, prosperity and wellbeing of citizens. Government budgets exist to preserve the democratic systems that make these goals possible; we don’t sacrifice these ideals to shave off a few numbers on a budget.
A key part of China’s agenda is to persuade its own citizens and the world, falsely and through deception and coercion, that democratic systems are not better. Beijing claims its system is the best way to guarantee economic prosperity and stability. It claims its one-party system is a meritocracy.
> It is difficult and time-consuming—though not particularly expensive—to do the work that proves Beijing is lying, and that what it offers is smoke and mirrors. Tools that allow us to uncover the flaws of China’s own system and the actual struggles Chinese people face, directly support the goals, security and resilience of democratic governments.
> Without the work that China nonprofits do, it will be much harder to show that China’s domestic model of economic and political governance is deeply flawed. If we can no longer prove that, it becomes much harder to understand why democracies are worth fighting for in the first place.
That piece above is notable for not actually bothering to link to any examples of “the work that proves Beijing is lying”. While I have to be charitable and assume they wanted to react quickly and did not have time to assemble backing evidence, the result is weak. Like much of the “elite publication” output nowadays, it can be easily parodied as “Democracy cannot fail, it can only be failed”.
P.S. It feels almost….passe to point this out, but there’s the whole matter of people’s lives depending on USAID and all. (Which is again rather contradictory with the stated concern over dozen or so lives lost in the 2020 unrest in earlier discussions.) Maybe a reminder from Cardinal Michael Czerny, head of the Vatican’s Caritas Internationalis would help. (Can’t link twice, so here’s the headline for anyone to look up.)
“Millions will die due to ‘ruthless’ USAID cuts, Vatican charity warns”
I am sure that one look at “Data Republican” is all it’s going to take to convince him he’s just having a grand ol’ overreaction, though!
“It feels almost….passe to point this out, but there’s the whole matter of people’s lives depending on USAID and all. ”
Then what are you doing posting comments when you could be donating?
“Then what are you doing posting comments when you could be donating?”
As if it’s not possible to do both.
Pick an argument in good faith Mary, I dare you.
Nonsense! The extent that Leftist causes have fallen apart show quite clearly that they not only do neither, a lot of the comment in various places was, in fact, driven by the money that should have gone to Leftist causes.
“Pick an argument in good faith Mary, I dare you.”
Didn’t take me up on that then did you.
Unless you’d like to provide any credible evidence for your assertion.
And off to bald face lying.
Pointing out the flaw in your argument is a good faith argument. Pretending it’s not — is not.
Oop, another one on the bingo card.
I asserted ‘it is possible to both comment on the internet and also give charitable donations’. I see nowhere where you have pointed out a flaw in this argument.
You have stated ‘leftists neither comment, nor give charitable donations’, and utterly failed to provide any substantiation for your points when prompted. Certainly seems like bad faith to me. Unless you’d like to prove me wrong by substantiating your claim…
You’ve also, bizarrely, stated that ‘leftist comments are driven by leftist charitable donations rather than actual people expressing their opinions’, which also requires substantiating.
You have stated ‘leftists neither comment, nor give charitable donations’,
Notice that Y puts into quotes something that is completely made up. And then imputes his own bad faith to me.
Not reading the previous comments. Another one on the bingo card.
I said ‘As if it’s not possible to do both [charitable giving and internet commenting].’
You said ‘The extent that Leftist causes have fallen apart show quite clearly that they…do neither [charitable giving nor internet commenting]’
Please enlighten me as to how else I should have interpreted that comment.
You had “falsify a quote and be called on it” on your bingo card?
@Mary Catelli
Do you consider buying the produce of American small farmers at subsidized prices without which they would be likely to lose their farms, in order to give that produce to starving foreigners in order to generate goodwill so that they will be inclined to support pro-American governments in the future and to abstain from attacking American corporate interests in their countries, to be a “leftist” cause?
Remember, here, that nearly all the cash is being spent in the United States, much or most of it specifically to rural small farmers. The US has no particular need of this food, as we are to put it mildly a well-fed nation. The food is then put to use somewhere where it will produce direct benefits, not for a vague clique of activists and professors, but for American oil companies, mining consortiums, and so forth, along with bipartisan US foreign policy goals as they have existed under Democratic and Republican administrations alike since World War II.
Ending that USAID program did not “destroy a leftist agenda.”
so you consider it a foolish program?
I had ‘Mary doesn’t read the comment she’s replying to properly’ yeah. I may have paraphrased it in the first instance, though I’m still waiting for you to explain how that paraphrasing was incorrect (after I have now spelt it out more clearly utilising direct quotes).
For reference, I also had ‘steadfastly refuse to provide evidence or elaboration when prompted’ (which we’re on a count of two so far) and ‘utilise pithy one-liner straw man arguments’ (which again, we’re on a count of two for this thread). The wildcard here being ‘cry ad hominem when called out for logical fallacies’, which we haven’t quite had yet.
You’re good when you’re talking about actual history you know about (the thing that comes to mind instantly is the American Civil War, though there’s certainly others). More of that please Mary.
“I may have paraphrased it in the first instance”
You are dodging the issue. You put it in quotes. That is, you claimed I said exactly that.
You lied.
Furthermore, there’s no “maybe” about whether you lied. Anyone can see you made it up.
To call me a lot of names just underscores your lying.
And what names have I called you? Quote them from my posts. Meanwhile you’ve confidently called me a liar a number of times.
I rescind the quotes around the paraphrasing but stand by my assessment of your points as accurate. Now we’re nowhere closer to you making a cogent refutation of my statements.
Care to refute my assessment as inaccurate?
I wonder if I should add ‘avoid responding to the original argument at all costs’ to the bingo sheet.
“Meanwhile you’ve confidently called me a liar a number of times.”
vs.
“I rescind the quotes around the paraphrasing”
Pick one. Trying to dismiss your lying in the same breath that you admit it is the same sort of deceptive conduct that led you to lie in the first place.
Lying is a mightily strong word for ‘incorrectly using quotation-marks for a paraphrasing that still accurately articulates what the original speaker stated’. But you do you I suppose.
If you’re not going to actually engage in defending your point beyond quibbling over some air quotes…well, it’s been nice chatting as usual Mary.
Shame we couldn’t quite get bingo, but we’ll try again next time.
No, it’s the exact word. You deliberately, willfully, and with full knowledge of what you do, claimed that I said something, and it was something you made up. That’s lying.
Quibbling is your evil attempts to weasel out of it after you had been caught red-headed.
Evil am I now Mary? Descending further down the rabbithole just to avoid defending your inane original comment I see.
I’ve already rescinded the offending quotes (I’d edit them out, but that would render this exchange perplexing to anyone eating popcorn while watching it unfold). If you want me to apologise or something then fine. I’m sorry I inadvertently used quotes when paraphrasing you. Doesn’t change the fact that the paraphrasing was spot-on accurate, and you have made zero attempt to refute that despite me prompting you to multiple times (which indicates to me that you *know* it’s spot-on accurate and are grasping for any other tenuous line of argument to distract from that fact…something that is also quite a pattern with your debates). I’ll try it one more time, just in case.
Do let me know when you intend to defend your point. I’ll be waiting.
“Doesn’t change the fact that the paraphrasing was spot-on accurate, ”
Then you would have used cut and paste and put my words there, because you would not have needed to paraphrase.
Also, that’s irrelevant. You lied. You claimed I said something I didn’t say, and you doubled down on it again and again, and finally you lie again by putting forth an apology that is not for what you did wrong.
Especially given that you just said, “If you’re not going to actually engage in defending your point beyond quibbling over some air quotes…well, it’s been nice chatting as usual Mary.”
Either you meant that to mean you were going to stop, and therefore by showing up again you made yourself a liar — or you meant it to be taken that way and were lying when you did so.
“Then you would have used cut and paste and put my words there”
I did. In this comment (which it appears you haven’t read):
“Not reading the previous comments. Another one on the bingo card.
I said ‘As if it’s not possible to do both [charitable giving and internet commenting].’
You said ‘The extent that Leftist causes have fallen apart show quite clearly that they…do neither [charitable giving nor internet commenting]’
Please enlighten me as to how else I should have interpreted that comment.”
I have doubled down on my paraphrasing being accurate to the above direct quotes of your posts. I see nothing that you have said that is stating my paraphrasing is inaccurate, other than to berate me for using quotes incorrectly. You have not engaged with the actual argument (which is, to be clear, whether or not you support the assertion that leftists do neither charitable giving nor internet commenting). If I have misconstrued this as an argument you have had ample opportunity to set the record straight about what you actually meant, but you haven’t.
This is even more puzzling because there is bona fide evidence that republican voters *do* give more to charity than democrat voters (which is available via a cursory google). A line of reasoning you could have pursued had you even the slightest inclination to engage in an actual good faith argument. But you haven’t. Because you don’t. It’s pathetic.
Call me a liar all you want. Doesn’t make your argument anything other than complete hogwash (and you know it, that’s why you’re avoiding engaging with it).
I also note that morally, there is a world of difference between actively murdering people and refraining from doing something, which may lead to deaths. Especially when giving aid has a long history of encouraging people to remain poor to keep on getting aid. (Especially when the people who actually get the aid are the people in charge, and the poor are not.)
At that, consider the story floating about about the woman who died for want of oxygen. The organization that let her die has millions in the bank. One can only consider that they murdered her to get a talking point.
“The story floating around” noted that “the organization” had received an explicit stop-work order from the State Department, so “millions in the bank” seems neither here nor there.
https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/2956406/refugees-death-in-thailand-blamed-on-us-aid-freeze
You’ll have to elaborate on what you would have them do instead.
The debate about aid dependency is quite complex and deserves a better discussion than a few pithy lines. I would just like to note that if we are to consistently follow the logic of aid encouraging behaviours which make said aid necessary and thus fostering dependency on it, then said logic could also be applied to the aid given to Israel and Egypt – yet it notably did NOT get cut.
Are you prepared to carry this “the law is the law” attitude toward Endymionologist’s complaints that the illegal aliens that were illegally enticed here by his side are now being legally deported?
Or does it only apply in cases of malicious compliance?
The idea that completely foreseeable deaths stemming from quite unambiguous language of the order given by the new Administration could only be caused by “malicious compliance” requires a massive amount of faith in their competence – faith which appears totally unwarranted in the light of recent events like the apparent inability to keep track of the personnel from National Nuclear Security Administration (linked in another thread).
And unlike Endymionologist, I’m aware that the number of deportations had been effectively flat throughout the past three presidential terms – Obama deported slightly more people in his 2nd term than Trump did in his first, and Biden’s figures appear very similar to both. The system is known to have been capacity-constrained, and the rollout of DOGE to date, including the caliber of the personnel it fields, leaves me with massive doubts that this current administration would get even close to living up to its stated goals.
I do want to pause a bit on “illegally enticed here by his side”. Do you believe Bush Sr. and Reagan were on the same side as Endymionologist? After all, here’s them during a League of Women Voters Presidential Forum in 1980. Of course, both of them want the law to be followed. Both of them also imply or outright state that the best solution is widespread program of legal work permits, and Bush Sr. notes that “IF those people are here, I would reluctantly say, I think they would get whatever it is that the society is giving to their neighbors”. The subject in this case is whether “the children of illegal aliens” ought to be able to attend Texan public schools for free. Would you define that as an “illegal enticement”?
I do want to pause a bit on “illegally enticed here by his side”. Do you believe Bush Sr. and Reagan were on the same side as Endymionologist? After all, here’s them during a League of Women Voters Presidential Forum in 1980. Of course, both of them want the law to be followed.
First, sane people start with principles and categorize people by them.
Second, your own evidence, adduced here, puts them in a different category than Endymionologist’s side, which has actively, openly, and clearly NOT wanted the law to be followed. From sanctuary cities onward. (Unless of course, the burden falls not on their fellow citizens but on themselves, see Martha’s Vineyard, or the buses from Texas, but even those did not bring them around to an awareness that the law must be followed.)
“Especially when giving aid has a long history of encouraging people to [do whatever it takes] to keep on getting aid. Especially when the people who actually get the aid are the people in charge.”
Now if that doesn’t sound like a certain saluting South African I don’t know what does…
And where is it wrong?
Taiwan was impoverished until it was cut off the US aid. Only when did it flourish.
To be clear, your position is that the Administration’s clear orders are immoral and unconscionable to the point that people are morally impelled to break the law to oppose them.
So your claim is that they were stealing the money to put it in the bank?
“Taiwan was impoverished until it was cut off the US aid. Only when did it flourish.”
I decided to look that up, and would it surprise you to know that’s not quite how it happened?
https://brill.com/view/journals/arwh/2/1/article-p47_4.xml
For one thing, before the US aid was “cut off”, it amounted to 12% of its GDP.
> As figures 1 & 2 show, the amount of economic and military assistance during 1950-1967 was nearly 4 billion USD; 90% was in gift, 10% was in loan, and the military assistance (60%) exceeded economic assistance (40%). The accumulated nominal GDP of Taiwan during 1951-1967 was 34.5 billion USD, and the US aid accounted for nearly 12% of nominal GDP at the same period.
It was also by far the most aid the US had given per capita, and a larger amount of money then what it gave to entire India.
> In comparison with other Asian and Southeast Asian countries in 1946-1959, Taiwan received the most US aid on a per capita basis. As Figure 15 shows, the per capita US economic aid or US military aid for Taiwan was the highest within 15 Asian countries, including Taiwan, South Korea, South Vietnam, Laos, Philippines, Cambodia, Japan, Thailand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Burma, India, Indonesia, Malaya, and Nepal. On a total aid basis, Taiwan (1.7
billion USD) was below Korea (2.8 billion USD) and Japan (2.5 billion USD), but above India (1.6 billion USD) and all the other Asian countries.
And that aid had achieved the following.
>Other than security and a low inflation rate, the US aid helped with Taiwan’s economic development in general. Economist Guoshu Liang has calculated the pure contribution rate of US aid for Taiwan’s economic growth rate in the period of 1953-1969 as 20% by applying the Harrod-Domar model and focusing on its making up the insufficient savings to investment and offsetting
the trade deficit.
> On the other hand, the US President Johnson’s Special
Message to Congress on Foreign Aid for Fiscal Year 1966 mentioned that in the decade from 1956 to 1965, Taiwan’s economy had the following outcomes: Per capita GNP increased 45%; 1/5 of GNP had been used for savings; Exports had been doubled; Industrial output had been doubled; The share of the private sector in economy had been doubled; and the private sector constituted 2/3 of Taiwan’s total industrial output in 1966. Agricultural productivity had increased 50%.
> These developments had achieved by the US aid to Taiwan
Only once all of that happened did the aid “end” in 1965 – only for the “Sino-American Fund” to be set up instead.
> After termination of the US aid, both the ROC and US governments concluded an “Exchange of Notes between the Republic of China and the United States of America concerning the Establishment of the Sino-American Fund for Economic and Social Development” on April 9, 1965. This Sino-American Fund was set up on July 1 the same year.
> The financial resources of the Fund included the surplus of the Counterpart fund and a reclaimable
amount in the future. At the beginning, the total financial resources of the Fund were 16.44 billion NTD (about US$409.98 million), which included 7.41 billion NTD (45.1%) for the loan of the US aid (principal) and 9.03 billion NTD (54.9%) for the net value of Fund. The aim of the Fund was to continue to assist Taiwan to engage in various economic and social development
plans.
> The amount for the public finance assisted by the Si-
no-American fund was more important in the early period than in the later period. The ratio of the Sino-American fund to the central government annual expense was over 10% by 1968. Due to the economic development, the ratio had shrunk with the expansion of the budget, and became under 2% in the late 1970s (Figure 14). This is because the Sino-American Fund was not as enormous as the US aid in the past, and the form of use was mainly to
supply the “seed capital” or mid-term capital to the projects mentioned above, and the government prepared formal budgets to continue the projects which had good performance. However, because of its flexibility and mobility in use, relative to the rigid government budget, the Sino-American Fund provided a risk-diversified fund without affecting the budget.
> The principal and interest of the U.S aid loan were fully paid by the Sino-American Fund by January 2004. This indicates that the Sino-American Fund had accomplished its tasks. The Fund was then incorporated into the National Development Fund of the Executive Yuan in 2005. Thus, the case of the US aid to Taiwan witnessed a complete course, from receiving the aid to achieving self-support development, and then to repaying the US
aid loan.
So even after “stopping” the earlier aid, the U.S. still gave Taiwan a long-term loan equivalent to about 10% of the aid it gave to the country throughout the previous 15 years. Get back to me where the current administration has planned anything similar for the programs it’s terminating. (There is also the matter that unlike Taiwan in 1965, almost no aid recipients today have that aid account to anything close to 12% of the GDP – and that’s from all sources, not just the US. However, calculating historical aid amounts – including Soviet and non-aligned aid – often complicates it for many countries.)
The quote “An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?” feels quite apt these days.
Emphasis on mundus. Totus mundus.
Codes of the Underworld looks like it might make a fun book in a similar vein to Maurer’s The Big Con and Language of the Underworld — indeed, I wonder if the title is intentionally referencing the latter. I definitely need to check that out.
Three supplementary factoids:
1. STEM grad students are also supported by grants. They get paid enough to support a single 24-year-old.
2. At least when I was in the STEM business, grants were often written for work already done, or at least well in progress. This practice amped up the “success” rate considerably. The money, if it came in, went for the next project. This was not good for junior faculty, who were just getting started and hadn’t built up a bank of results.
3. It’s important to separate research from development, although they’re both lumped under “R&D.” D is far more expensive than R. This means, to some extent, that comparing various agencies’ R&D budgets is not quite fair. IIRC, The NSF funds little D; DoD funds a lot of D. I think the NIH funds mostly R, but I’m not certain of this.
I’m a business analyst myself, but I’ve watched two family members work through STEM PHDs and Postdoc positions. I found it fascinating to observe the cash flows also laid out in this article. Bret’s description is good, and it’s hard to over-emphasize the prevalent anxiety about NIH funding even in ‘normal’ times.
One thing that I would describe slightly differently is that serious research at universities is best thought of as a collection of small businesses. Each Prime Investigator’s lab is largely a law unto itself. They bring in revenue in the form of grants, and then make their own decisions about staffing, training, and resource allocation. It’s an extremely competitive structure. The only way that you make the BIG jump from postdoc to PI is to secure funding of your own, and most new PIs don’t make it past the first 10 years because of how competitive it is to get and keep funding. Adding further uncertainty on top of this is brutal.
As a physicist, one thing that I would add is that a large chunk of science funding comes from the Department of Energy Office of Science (~$8b). Most of it goes to the national laboratory system, but a decent amount goes to universities (it’s a little hard to figure out exactly how much). The national labs also operate user facilities which are extremely important for academic researchers.
typo hunt:
> the ‘Principle Investigator’ or PI
Principal Investigator. (The thing being studied may be a principle of some sort.)
> given most university’s limited
universities’
“Inmates, for instance, look to signal their capacity for violence clearly, in order to avoid potentially costly violence (…) in order to enforce their boundaries vis-à-vis other inmates.”
Oresteia, Oresteia, Oresteia! The above is true not just of inmates, but also of criminals still at large (who have lost their ability to take their disputes in front of courts, since they would be immediately arrested) and of “primitive” societies that simply lack a court system.
The central problem of this system is the escalation-management question of how to deter murder in particular, since it, ahem, devalues one’s reputation of exacting personal vengeance. The primary solution is to feud, to build a coalition by pulling on whatever social ties exist — and indeed to preemptively show them as a means of deterrence.
An unfortunate property of such feuding is that often, the two sides end up recruiting at roughly similar rates. By bringing the issue to a court, where the act of arguing it out and the court proclaiming a verdict puts the violence-exerting potential of roughly everyone nearby onto one side — and as a side benefit, exhausting the pool of violence to be recruited — the litigants create a crushingly lopsided situation, allowing them to resolve the issue without bloodshed.
Interestingly, court systems tend to preserve relics of the system preceding them — partly because they can grow piecemeal, with especially sympathetic/charismatic “proto-plaintiffs” recruiting strangers into their feud coalition by preaching. For instance, in a society with a patronage system, a wronged party exhibiting their patron is a threat of him calling upon all his clients (and their clients, etc.) if/when it comes to settling the dispute by violence. In parallel, if the disputants find a shared patron (or when none is found, the king, if one exists) they serve as a convenient “unitary pot of force(!) capable of squishing either complainant” and therefore suitable judge. It turns out, the king’s role of chief warlord and chief judge are related — and that (unless the monarchy coexists with a robust tradition of courts) the king must perform the latter role, because failure to pass judgments results in internal violence!
Separately, my understanding is that in environments more naturalistic than a sex-segregated prison, women mostly get men to fight on their behalf. In courtless societies, women have an excellent reason to like “bad boys” — that of getting to live under their
nuclearviolence umbrella.Is there really any such thing as a completely courtless society, though? Some kind of justice system seems like one of the first thing any society, regardless of its level of technological development, sets up. Even insurgent movements that are *trying* to become a state often establish parallel court systems of their own.
Hunters and gatherers. Their justice systems are ad hoc, ruled by custom, and above all else, seldom feature anyone specialized — and even when they do have specialists, those are part-time.
An anthropologist working with Great Plains tribes recounted how one informant was very embarrassed about how the anthropologist was always asking about times when people behaved badly, and then noticed that he was asking more about the follow-up than the behavior, and finally realized that the anthropologist was studying their justice system. It dawn on him, to his great surprise, that they had a justice system — even before the white man came to put the red man in the stockade as he put it.
An anthropologist working with Great Plains tribes recounted how one informant was very embarrassed about how the anthropologist was always asking about times when people behaved badly, and then noticed that he was asking more about the follow-up than the behavior, and finally realized that the anthropologist was studying their justice system. It dawn on him, to his great surprise, that they had a justice system — even before the white man came to put the red man in the stockade as he put it.
This sounds very improbable. Source?
In the fashion of “these polities are not states by the narrow definition of the term”, you might say that these people are not a society, strictly speaking, just a troupe of the hairless monkey h. sapiens. But yes, there are hunter-gatherer tribes overwhelmingly operating on this principle, with maybe an occasional exception (particularly cool-headed shaman, whatever).
Approaching the question from a different angle: pardon, but the inmates are not reasoning this behavior out from first principles. (If they did, they would set up their own court systems, in order to solve the problem without anyone getting beaten up, rather than the current, brutal system!) So, how come they “know exactly what to do”, that their behavior produces data points that researchers could nicely fit a really elegant theory to, where nobody until quite recently knew that theory? The answer is that evolution did the math for them — we call this “instinct” — but that means our ancestors spent an awful lot of time in conditions where acting out this math was relevant.
On the other hand, I think (without being an anthropologist or historian) that every society with intensive(?) subsistence agriculture would have something. Any kind of infrastructure, whether physical (“mill”) or social (“advisory council of elders/experts”) is kind of impossible if intrasocial violent mortality is too high. Simply a high population density would create an ongoing bloody problem that people would want addressed.
And of course, nowadays people raised in nearly any society — and most definitely those societies that have moved beyond subsistence farming — are simply familiar enough with the concept of courts that mostly they can recreate them from scratch.
Foragers do have quite elaborate rules and mechanisms for solving disputes – usually going from compensation to escalating levels of violence if resisted. As an example, adultery (very frequent) in Tiwi society first required compensation; if the perpetrator was defiant then the victim could throw a spear to wound (not kill); if the perp refused more elders would join until either the accused was wounded or there was serious risk of death.
Social exclusion was a frequent punishment. If an offence was serious enough someone might be killed – but this was done by the band in a manner that signaled that it was not personal but a collective act.
I doubt that we will ever be able to observe a completly “court less” society. If for the only reason, that people need mitigator in case of internal conflict, so the group is strong in case of external conflict.
But we have plenty of evidence, that, as soon as the mitigators fail to enforce their decsion, feuds are common. And ability and readiness to enact violence to enforce their decision, just becomes important for the court, instead of the individual. Just take a look at the Tiwi Peter T describes further up. “Pay a fine, or we start lobbing spears at you.”
Ultimately, yes. In societies where feud was common, feuds have standards – eg in Scandinavia a killing that was declared to the nearest neighbour was cause for judgement, compensation etc; an undeclared or secret killing was murder – and the killer outlawed. More, the judgements were almost always backed by the prominent in the community, with strong communal disapproval if defied.
There as excellent book by Jacob Black-Micheaud (Feuding Societies) on the logic of feuds. It’s more than just a revenge cycle.
“Separately, my understanding is that in environments more naturalistic than a sex-segregated prison, women mostly get men to fight on their behalf. In courtless societies, women have an excellent reason to like “bad boys” — that of getting to live under their nuclear violence umbrella.”
Two questions:
1) What other environments are sex segregated?
2) What incentives do females have to get males to fight on their behalf?
We are told that while in mixed sex civil society, women get men to fight on their behalf and are less violent personally than men. In contrast, in women only prisons, women are more violent than men in men only prisons.
Does the same apply to sex segregated schools – i. e. that girls in girls only schools and universities are as violent or more violent in boys only schools and thus much more violent than girls in mixed sex schools and universities?
Does it apply to sex segregated workplaces – like, workplaces which are overwhelmingly women because men are unwilling or not qualified to work there and the few men around are not available for enough women to dispense with need to establish reputation for personal violence.
Also, about the incentives… A lot of the incentives for women to get men to fight for them is some sort of hope for sexual favours, which adult men want more than adult women are inclined to give.
How about prepubescent girls and boys, though?
Acceptability of prepubescent dating has recently increased. Yet prepubescent boys are probably less interested in sexual favours than adult males are. And in quite recent memory, there were strong social sanctions against cross-sex friendships despite mixed sex school environment – “boys/girls have cooties!”.
In a mixed sex primary school, are girls as violent as boys? If no, how do they avoid the need to establish reputation for personal violence, if they cannot get boyfriends to fight for them?
It isn’t just hope of sexual favors. People with superior psychological insight and empathetic capacity (i.e., women) are better able to manipulate others.
And therefore, based on a limited (but that’s all you need) amount of time teaching in co-ed environments, I can say unhesitatingly that girls are much less physically aggressive, but more manipulative, than boys. Is there really someone who thinks different?
I dunno, I’ve dealt with a surprising number of manipulative male students and socially awkward and non-manipulative female students.
Well yes, there are always outliers to any statement that applies to half of the human race.
I’ve dealt with so many outliers that it calls into question the underlying truth of the general statement, for me. Or, at least, makes me suspect that if there is a truth there, it is a truth of nurture, not of nature.
If it is punishable by horsewhipping to play basketball in Boronia, but mandatory to practice basketball for hours every day starting from early childhood in Boravia, then after a few generations you will begin to notice that Boronians seem to be a lot worse at basketball than Boravians. Oddly, this will remain true even when you put them together in “co-ed” environments where theoretically everyone has equal access to the basketball courts.
But any attempt to connect this to some kind of intrinsic biological difference between the Boronians and the Boravians will falter, because the truth is that this very measurable difference tells us nothing about any such thing. It instead tells us something about the laws and customs enforced in the two nations.
A great deal of women think different, but I’m sure you would regard that as just another example of them being devious.
“All I need is just enough exposure to provide the limited amount of data that can comfortably fit into my confirmation biases.”
So what you’re saying is that women are both less violent–hard to deny if you look at crime statistics–and less manipulative. Morally superior Victorian angels, in short.
@ey81
No, it would sound as though the contention is that women are not intrinsically more capable of being manipulative, and may or may not be forced into being manipulative by circumstance.
Most of us would agree that the mythical Odysseus was a thoroughly masculine man. However, Odysseus did not hesitate to resort to guile, trickery, and manipulation when faced with things he could not overcome through physical strength or through the prestige of his social position (that of a warrior-king).
If Odysseus found himself in the body of a Hercules, and blessed with even more divine favor, he would probably need to resort to guile less often. If Odysseus found himself in the body of Penelope, and in Penelope’s social position (surrounded by lustful heavily armed suitors) he would probably need to resort to guile more often.
Jesus fucking Christ. Someone needs to track down your ex students so they can sue your ass into bankruptcy. I have zero doubt if you’re saying this shit openly that you acted in an abusive and otherwise liable manner; these comments are extremely good evidence that you did so with malicious intent at that.
Get help, Dan.
This is open harassment, now.
The only person engaging in harassment is you.
Nice to see all the “conservatives” circle the wagons in defense of what is, to be clear, explicit misogyny.
No, it’s not harassment to point out that someone saying that women are sexually manipulative, using their personal experience as an authority as evidence, is on extremely thin legal ice. I know the idea of consequences terrify all of you, but when you testify as to your bigotry it can be used against you. If pointing that out is harassment, you’re responsible for your own treatment
This is the kind of behavior that even amongst chauvinistic societies was considered deeply pathetic-calling female students temptresses and manipulative was socially unacceptable behavior a *hundred years ago*, there’s no imaginable reason to be defending it from the perspective of tradition. Yet you just can’t help yourself, because hatred is your only actual ideology. If you believed in your own stated ideals you would not be defending him or pretending confronting him was harassment to justify your own.
This attempt to drown out rational discussion is disgraceful. And this harassment of rational argument with pathological intensity is unacceptable in a discussion space.
I’m confused. Legal liability for blog comments? Where did you go to law school?
If you actually want me to break this down via citing case law I suppose I could, but there’s actually a deep body of case law of precisely this sort of social media post being used as evidence, particularly in civil court.
To be clear the comment itself isn’t liability for anything except getting you banned for hate speech, and even that requires looking through multiple comments to defend.
But if you testify that your personal experiences as an educator let you know that girls are manipulative, accepting as a premise that girls are sexually manipulative and then using misogynistic language to address counterarguments, you absolutely open yourself to challenge on *any* perceived or potential bigotry in how you graded, taught, evaluated, mentored, and stewarded female students under various federal and state statutes, in basically all modern democracies.
It’s extremely good evidence to a judge or jury that, if any potential discrepancy can be identified, your actions were motivated by bigotry and rise to the level of civil liability. Its precisely the type of character evidence that is used in court all the time.
And the kind of person who volunteers that that their personal experience as a teacher is misogynistic on a public blog almost always has physical evidence somewhere. Private eyes and lawyers have latched onto less to begin investigations or justify discovery motions.
Ey81: “girls are much less physically aggressive, but more manipulative, than boys”
Dan: Ey81 is a misogynist incel who says that all girls are manipulative whores!
I will note here that Dan doesn’t seem to have any objection to the (by his standards) implication that all boys are violent brutes.
You missed the key point.
Ey: “I *as an ex teacher*, know through *personal history* that women are more manipulative than boys, and when challenged interpret counterarguments as someone saying women as ‘victorian angels’ rather than even engaging the point”.
I have problems with the idea boys are all violent, but unlike the idea women are all manipulative there’s not a history of using bigotry to justify denying boys opportunity and credit in academia.
And, notably, ey isn’t relying on *personal testimony* to inform his perception there, so it’s possible the *engage the point*.
” there’s not a history of using bigotry to justify denying boys opportunity and credit in academia.”
Yes, there is. In fact, it’s going on right now.
If you try to justify it with events involving other people long before these boys were born, you are the sexist in the discussion.
It is, indeed, generally a bad sign when a man with authority over young women starts talking about how in his experience women and girls are manipulative temptresses. I think you may be overinterpreting the evidence here, but it’s not a good sign.
Simon, stop being silly. Obviously K-4 girls are not temptresses. What a bizarre notion! Where do you get this stuff? (Not from me. My whole claim was that you don’t need to offer sexual favors to manipulate people, if you’re good at it. Do you think I offer opposing counsel at work sexual favors to get my way?)
In K-4 real life, while the boys are having hand fights in classroom, and real fights in the schoolyard, the girls are forming cliques and scheming endlessly to get the top of the social ladder. And sometimes, with their superior social skills, they egg the boys on to cause trouble.
And girls who aren’t manipulative are abnormal Victorian angels of purity, I suppose, in contrast to the typical female condition?
It’s coded language, to use a term that has come up. Actually it’s sexually coded language, too, as the line between moralizing and sexual coding is razor thin, and fetishization of minors with angel imagery is, unfortunately, very terribly real. In truth that was what I probably should have put my reply under, as it’s the part that set off alarm bells.
But irrespective of if that ever occurred to you it’s still misogynistic. And if your testimonial is personal experience it is troubling, and infuriating, to hear an ex teacher say that.
As the saying goes, if you hear the dogwhistles, you’re the dog.
That you read that into what he said says a lot more about you than about him.
Maybe people from vastly different cultures?
The psychological differences between men and women are at least partially culturally determined.
I vaguely recall there even were studies in which they had compared a matrilineal and a patriarchal society and it turned out that according to their experiment in the matrilineal society the women were more competitive than the men, something which is very unusual; though I don’t know how that those studies have held up since then.
Maybe. Is there someone here from a vastly different culture who can comment, or is this one of those hand-wavey arguments where we posit an alternative reality with no demonstrable existence, and act as if it is evidence of something.
Note that “competitiveness” is not the same thing as “physically aggressive” nor the opposite of “manipulative,” which are the terms under discussion.
That they are either their blood relatives (daughter/sister/etc.) and obviously they won’t let them be victimized, or else they are their girlfriend/wife and obviously they won’t let them be victimized. (Hopefully not both.) Compare the vertical ties of patrons and clients. The patron doesn’t provide each act of protection in (direct, explicit, transactional) exchange for some particular form of payment. It is an ongoing relationship, where a stream of payments is traded for a callable option of protection.
In schools and workplaces — perhaps with the exception of some staggeringly incompetent ones — violence is strongly deterred by the institution itself, so the entire issue is moot. You neither need to build a deterrent against severe violence, nor could you do so by exerting violence.
I think the way in which prepubescent children “fight” is somewhat unrelated to this discussion. They are protected by their parents; even if orphans, some other adult (“uncle”, without restriction of generality) does so.
“That they are either their blood relatives (daughter/sister/etc.) and obviously they won’t let them be victimized, or else they are their girlfriend/wife and obviously they won’t let them be victimized. (Hopefully not both.) Compare the vertical ties of patrons and clients. The patron doesn’t provide each act of protection in (direct, explicit, transactional) exchange for some particular form of payment. It is an ongoing relationship, where a stream of payments is traded for a callable option of protection.”
Yes. But the client needs to be able to produce a reasonable stream of “payments” for the patron to want that client.
“In schools and workplaces — perhaps with the exception of some staggeringly incompetent ones — violence is strongly deterred by the institution itself, so the entire issue is moot. You neither need to build a deterrent against severe violence, nor could you do so by exerting violence.”
Please spell out how “institution itself” deters violence at a school!
Prison, school and army (of conscripts) are all institutions where a large number of people are forced to be together by external authority (sentence of imprisonment, laws of compulsory education, conscription into the army) without option to leave the overall situation or the forced proximity of a fellow inmate who is victimizing him/her. There IS the supervision of a small number of overseers (prison guards, teachers and officers respectively) – but if the prisons often suffer from appreciable level of violence between inmates despite the level of supervision guards are able to offer, why would a school or an army be “exceptionally staggeringly incompetent” to have the same issue?
“I think the way in which prepubescent children “fight” is somewhat unrelated to this discussion. They are protected by their parents; even if orphans, some other adult (“uncle”, without restriction of generality) does so.”
No, I don´t think it is unrelated. And they aren´t protected by their parents.
Think of it like this: how common or widely accepted is it for a parent to spend full school days at primary school with his or her child to watch and protect the child even when the teacher is looking at the other way? How common or widely accepted is it for a parent to track down a primary school child (who, in a city school, is a total stranger to the parent, not a close neighbour or workmate) in order to physically violently chastise another parent´s child for bullying their child?
The only superiors who can protect a child at school are the teachers because only they are present at school. They are ineffective for much the same reasons as prison guards are ineffective to protect a prisoner in prison. But parents have much less opportunity to provide protection.
“Please spell out how “institution itself” deters violence at a school!”
I would like to think that most schools at least attempt to enforce a modicum of discipline, and that the best schools do it well.
Same with prisons. (I gather that in general European prisons tend to be less violent than American ones, and especially Latin American ones, which would suggest that they are mostly better run. I am not sure how my sources are defining “Europe”, though.)
“I would like to think that most schools at least attempt to enforce a modicum of discipline”
This is criminally irresponsible of you. There are schools that laugh off violence with “boys will be boys” and schools that punish the victims of attacks on the grounds that the victim didn’t try hard enough to get along.
““Please spell out how “institution itself” deters violence at a school!”
I would like to think that most schools at least attempt to enforce a modicum of discipline, and that the best schools do it well.”
But that is not “institution itself”. It is some sort of effort by school administration to deter violence – successfully or not.
“Same with prisons. (I gather that in general European prisons tend to be less violent than American ones, and especially Latin American ones, which would suggest that they are mostly better run. I am not sure how my sources are defining “Europe”, though.)”
Which is largely an effort on the part of prison administration to deter violence. Whose success depends on their efforts and conditions where they operate.
For an example of “institutional” difference, “workplace” is different from “prison”, “school” and “conscript army” in that the inmates have the legal option to quit. Which means that in case of an interpersonal conflict, it is easier for a bullied worker to resolve that problem by fleeing the place where he or she is being victimized than it is for a prisoner to just quit prison.
Legal but not always practical. Quitting does not guarantee finding a new job, and may diminish eligibility for unemployment benefits, as well as lead to uncompensated loss of seniority.
But this is not simple or undetailed “institution itself”. It means that in a workplace both inmates and supervisors have access to some options which are simply not available in prison. Workplace and prison differ by “options available”, which is the reasoning that needs to be looked into.
“I gather that in general European prisons tend to be less violent than American ones, and especially Latin American ones, which would suggest that they are mostly better run.” – New World societies generally are more violent than their European parent societies (i.e., Quebec is more violent than France, the US and Canada are more violent than England, and Latin America is more violent than Spain and Portugal). The reasons are debated by historians and sociologists. But I would hesitate to ascribe it to the European societies being better run, since the US is richer than any of them (with some minor qualifications), and Canada is richer than the UK.
I kind of wonder if this isn’t one of those authority versus violence issues.
The average student at senior school might be rebellious or independent, but they probably do have a conception of school rules as something they need to respect. So if you are a student at a reasonably well-run institution, you can have *some* trust that your fellow students will treat you as the rules of your institution demand without anyone having to get violent.
Criminals in a prison, however, are a social group defined by their refusal to abide by the norms and customs which their institution exists to represent. If you are a criminal in a prison, you can have no confidence whatsoever that your fellow criminals will treat you as the rules of the prison demands, except as enforced by violence or the latent threat of violence.
if you are a student at a reasonably well-run institution,
Enormous IF there.
” New World societies generally are more violent than their European parent societies…. But I would hesitate to ascribe it to the European societies being better run, since the US is richer than any of them (with some minor qualifications), and Canada is richer than the UK.”
So….using raw wealth as a direct proxy for good governance, with no other qualifications? To consider just how INCREDIBLY silly this is, I’ll just note that when following this logic, Qatar would be “better run” than nearly every other country in the world, including the U.S. – although even then, it would lose out to Ireland (the latter is true regardless of whether you use the PPP-adjusted GDP, or the nominal one.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Alternatively, we can consider factors which are perhaps more relevant to the wealth question. Such as that Canada (including Quebec) carries a population 3X fewer than the U.K. and France combined in an area that is about 12X larger than both of those countries, and correspondingly has far more natural resources to share between them.
Raw wealth is literally a matter of life and death. The standard of living will kill people when it goes down and save people as it goes up.
Average wealth can go up quite a lot, even while average quality of life and the general deadliness of society get worse, if the “correct” policies are in place to ensure that the wealth remains firmly in the control of an aristocracy.
Russia provides an illustrative example of this; Russia may well be richer in some sense now than under Brezhnev, but the average Russian little if any safer from either violence or the medical risks of living while being Russian.
“using raw wealth as a direct proxy for good governance, with no other qualifications? To consider just how INCREDIBLY silly this is . . . .”
Wouldn’t using prison violence as a direct proxy with no other qualifications (including no reference to the broader social patterns I mentioned) have the same problem? I’m not sure why an expression of caution occasions such a vituperative, ALL CAPS attack.
“Wouldn’t using prison violence as a direct proxy with no other qualifications (including no reference to the broader social patterns I mentioned) have the same problem?”
But isn’t that what YOU did, ey81? The statement you responded to simply suggested that prisons in some places are run better than in others. You are the one who had to interpret it as a suggestion of “a prison is run better = the whole society is run better” – and then respond to it with the silly suggestion country wealth correlates to nothing but good government, independent of any material circumstances on the ground.
Erm, I suspect some of these premises ought to be reevaluated.
> In contrast, in women only prisons, women are more violent than men in men only prisons.
Based on what? The one article I managed to find noted that in the UK, which apparently has been tracking that kind of thing the longest, that had been VERY recent – and not some innate law of nature.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/31/women-prisoners-more-violent-than-male-inmates-moj/
> Women prisoners are NOW (emphasis mine) more violent than men in jails, according to Ministry of Justice (MoJ) figures.
> ….The MoJ data, uncovered by Inside Time, the prisons’ newspaper, showed the rate of assaults by women per 1,000 prisoners has doubled from 195 in 2015 to 419 per 1,000 last year.
> The rate for men was similar in 2022 – at 255 per 1,000 – to 2015, when it was 242 per 1,000.
> Women prisoners remain less likely to commit serious assaults but the gap closed last year, with 25 serious assaults per 1,000 prisoners by women inmates, compared with 30 per 1,000 by men.
That is, until a few years ago, women’s prisons in the UK were less violent than the men’s in general.
> ….Prison watchdogs said the level of violence was “alarming” evidence of women with mental ill health being sent to jails because of the shortage of places to treat them in hospitals or in the community. They said this had been compounded by increased use of lock-ups of prisoners after Covid, where women could spend as long as 23 hours a day in their cells. In a report, the independent monitoring boards raised concerns over mentally ill women being sent to prison “as a place of safety”.
So, the people who actually regularly deal with prisons say it’s an obvious byproduct of a failed mental health policy but sure let’s go for….whatever the rest of your comment and the discussion that followed was instead.
Additionally,
“Acceptability of prepubescent dating has recently increased.”
What?! Where and compared to when? I suspect that C. S. Lewis (the guy who wrote Narnia and a few other books I haven’t read, but which are probably similarly overrated) might disagree with you on this one, for starters. From a Wikipedia article:
> C. S. Lewis in his partial autobiography Surprised by Joy described the social roles during his time at Wyvern College (by which he meant Malvern College) as including the role of “Tart”: “a pretty and effeminate-looking small boy who acts as a catamite to one or more of his seniors …” and noted that “pederasty … was not [frowned upon as seriously as] wearing one’s coat unbuttoned.
And I might as well drop this now.
“In a mixed sex primary school, are girls as violent as boys? If no, how do they avoid the need to establish reputation for personal violence, if they cannot get boyfriends to fight for them?”
They aren’t, so they don’t.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3736589/
> This study examined the factor structure of, gender differences in, and associations between relational and physical aggression in China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States. Children ages 7 to 10 years (N = 1410) reported on their relationally and physically aggressive behavior. Relational and physical aggression shared a common factor structure across countries. Unsurprisingly, boys reported being more physically aggressive than girls across all nine countries; surprisingly, there were no significant gender differences in relational aggression. In all nine countries, relational and physical aggression were significantly correlated (average r = .49).
To clarify what those final sentences mean.
> Building on this research, Crick and Grotpeter (1995) coined the term “relational aggression” to designate direct or indirect aggressive behaviors that harm social relationships, e. g., behaviors such as spreading rumors and excluding peers. Since then, research on relational aggression has proliferated, and an extensive body of research now describes developmental precursors and consequences associated with relational as well as physical aggression.
And I guess one more thing.
“Does the same apply to sex segregated schools – i. e. that girls in girls only schools and universities are as violent or more violent in boys only schools and thus much more violent than girls in mixed sex schools and universities?”
This seems like the closest thing to what you are asking about.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0140197114001468
> Bullying is a growing public health concern for South Korean adolescents. In our quantitative investigation, we analyze the frequency with which Korean adolescents in single-sex versus coeducational schools are targets of or engage in three peer aggressive behaviors (verbal, relational (social exclusion), and physical (including theft)). We use two nationally representative datasets, the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the 2005 Korea Education Longitudinal Study (KELS), and rely on propensity score matching (PSM). For adolescent girls, we find that being in all-girls schools mitigates both their exposure to and engagement in peer victimization. For adolescent boys, we find that boys in all-boys schools have significantly higher odds of experiencing more frequent verbal and physical attacks versus their counterparts in coeducational schools. Our findings strongly suggest that interventions to mitigate peer victimization and aggression in Korea should consider the gendered schooling contexts in which they are implemented.
The gap went from 195 to 242, to 419 to 255. And according to the graph in, your source violence among female inmates overtook that among male inmates in 2019.
Claiming the raise of violence among women to be a product, of failed mental health policy, raises the question why the violence was more or less flat among men in the same timeframe. And the claim that COVID-policies had something to do with it, raises the question why the rise started years before that.
“Claiming the raise of violence among women to be a product, of failed mental health policy, raises the question why the violence was more or less flat among men in the same timeframe. ”
Data seems to suggest that those comparatively few women who end up in prisons in the first place are more likely to have mental health issues than the men.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21355926/
> The sample comprised 1478 individuals (1208 men, 270 women) from two surveys of prisoners’ mental health: the 2001 New South Wales Inmate Health Survey, and a consecutive sample of prison receptions. Individuals were drawn from all of the state’s 29 prisons. Mental health and substance use disorders were assessed using the Composite International Diagnostic Interview.
> ….The overall prevalence of any mental disorder was 42.7% and the prevalence of any substance use disorder was 55.3%. With the exception of alcohol use disorder, women had higher rates than men of mental illness and substance use disorders. The prevalence of a co-occurring mental illness and substance use disorder in the past 12 months was 29% (46% among women vs. 25% among men). The association between cannabis use disorder and psychosis was significant for men only [odds ratio (OR)=2.4]. Among women there was a significant association between affective disorder and co-occurring alcohol use disorder (OR=2.4), and stimulant use disorder (OR=2.4).
A few other papers seem to say the same, but they are harder to quote from. If you want more details, I suppose you can ask the British prison watchdogs and bureaus for them. My goal was to look at the notion that the higher rate of inmate violence was somehow an innate characteristic of women’s prisons, as posited above, and those British stats are more than sufficient to disprove that idea.
The Gambetta book sounds super interesting—like Saviano’s Gomorrah. How would you describe the tone? Is it highly academic or more approachable?
The tone is approachable. It is heavily footnoted, but they are endnotes so you don’t have to look at them. He tells many fascinating (if of course sometimes quite morbid) anecdotes from criminal life.
It is a long time since I read this book, but I would like to second Pechmerle’s recommendation.
As a more journalistic work, Ghettoside also talks about escalation dynamics in regions of the US with less than effective law enforcement:
Haven’t read “Codes of the Underworld” but Gambetta’s book on the Sicilian Mafia (“The Sicilian Mafia”) is clear, approachable and extremely readable. I have almost never come across an academic writer with a more identifiable and appealling authorial voice.
On the topic of costly signals, there’s a fascinating paper by Berman/Laitin (2008), called Religion, Terrorism and Public Goods, which explained religious terrorism from a rather rational point of view. Basically, tgey argue that suicide-terrorism is a strategy which can nearly only be embraced by religious groups in regions with no central authority against hardened targets. Highly recommend reading it.
Tamils in Sri Lanka? Mucius Scaevola?
The Tamil Tigers were discussed by the paper as a special case – as a nominally atheistic group, but with certain rituals observed before a suicide attack (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w13725/w13725.pdf)
Taking your enemies with you has a long history. Explosives just make it more destructive and easier for one person to do. A good many soldiers are celebrated for eg calling artillery strikes on their own position (I know of a US and a Soviet example), blowing up the magazine in a last gesture of defiance or, in olden days, grabbing an enemy and jumping overboard. Humans are a sacrificial lot when they perceive their band to be at stake.
The LTTE as a group was secular Marxist/Communist, but South Asia is such a religious place in general that I’m sure most of their rank and file, and probably a lot of the elite, were *personally* religious believers of some variety.
Even political movements which were atheistic in their origin, like Marxist-Leninism or like the more homegrown Dravidian nationalism, realised pretty quickly that they would need to drop the official atheism to appeal to a mass audience in south Asia. (Communists and Dravidian nationalists of course remain strongly *anticlerical*, but that’s a very different thing than being atheist or antireligious).
Welcome to the Resistance.
You will of course, never vote for a Republican again,
Right?
As a matter of curiosity, why are you assuming he has voted for a Republican before?
And I don’t seem to remember any previous Republican President halting science grant funding. Things change.
Our Gracious Host DID write an article for The Dispatch last year (as mentioned during the Year in Review post, where I pointed out in the comments an apparent error with regards to flight hours, and that some of that article’s relatively sunny outlook appears to have been contradicted by another article published in the same place.) That is the kind of a publication one would be exceedingly unlikely to even consider writing for in the absence of any attachment to the Republican Party of the past (or in the presence of an attachment to its modern-day iteration, for that matter) so Comstar’s assumption about voting history, though unproven, is hardly unreasonable.
https://thedispatch.com/article/politicizing-americas-defense-capabilities/
To be fair, it is impossible to study history without being surrounded by voices trying to normalize and propagandize conservatism (doubly so for military history). It is not a huge failing to assume a professional historian at some point fell for some flavor of the ‘realist conservative’ grift.
I don’t think Comstar is correct in their assumption, and in fact it seems so poorly supported an assumption that I question their sincerity, but sometimes people are just hastily wrong.
I am in the DoD doing research. With the CR still in place we are also being jerked around. I have gotten less than 10% of the funding I was promised this FY. Some of that I was planning to send to academia but I must first cover my own team’s salaries. Add the chaos of “Fork in the Road,” the temporary halt on all obligations (it was lifted after a couple days), potentially firing everyone on probation (so far DoD is safe), and rumors of RIFs, everything is extremely chaotic.
You have my sympathy, since it seems fairly clear to you that you have been working to uphold the national interest and are now being prevented from doing so by ideology politics and the power of aspiring oligarchs.
Gambetta, Codes of the Underworld, is available at many public libraries as an e-book. Giving it a try myself now!
I am curious what percentage of DoD funding goes to funding science research. I’m in psychology and I know DoD is an important funder of psychology research.
Also, I remember when I was a postdoc lo these many years ago a friend who was in biodiesel research told me that the DoD actually funded a fair amount of alternative energy research, including biodiesel, because the Army is a massive user of diesel and conventional diesel has the annoying habit of becoming more expensive in reaction to international conflict. (IIRC they were also very interested in solar, presumably since the more things you can run on solar, the less diesel fuel you need to bring in to feed generators.) But that was years ago, alas, things might be different now.
I think another reason the military likes biodiesel is that it is less toxic, which is a good thing since military fuel is more likely to get into the environment, war being what it is.
Plus, of course, for every minute the military spends in combat, they spend many, many minutes out of combat doing routine activities, which includes (for instance) lots of vehicle maintenance and cargo handling being done by bored young men a long way from home. I imagine that simple fuel handling accidents are something of a problem for them, if not an overwhelming one, and a less toxic form of fuel might well be good for the military’s own people.
(I am reminded of the late author David Drake’s remark that a surprising amount of the danger he experienced in his tour of duty in Vietnam was the result of riding in vehicles driven by his fellow soldiers)
I am reminded of the late author David Drake’s remark that a surprising amount of the danger he experienced in his tour of duty in Vietnam was the result of riding in vehicles driven by his fellow soldiers
For complicated reasons, I spent some time once doing a detailed study of all SAS casualties in the Second World War, and it was extremely noticeable how many of them were either “died in a non-combat vehicle crash” or “drowned during training for small boat operations”.
Also true of law enforcement. Vehicular accidents make up a very high percentage of “line of duty” deaths.
You put a bunch of men under 25, into a place, and tell them driving saftey might not be the highest point on the priority list, and end up with a bunch of accidents.
I doubt that any car insurer would be surprised.
Also, DoD would probably like it if the world wasn’t as dependent on petroleum as it is, since that would mean we would be less likely to need to get involved in the Middle East.
If we could tell the Saudis that they could drink their oil for all we cared, the world would be a much more stable place.
This is a fundamental failure to understand the military industrial complex. You’re absolutely right that this would be completely in line with the purpose and intent of the DoD and utterly wrong in that it’s also never been anything like the policy or recommendation of DoD to decrease involvement in the middle east in any capacity, not on any higher level of policy.
In fact DoD routinely and aggressively pursues regional involvement from Israel to Saudi Arabia precisely because it makes the world more dependent on both Petroleum and the munitions and platforms that the US produces at extreme taxpayer expense. This is because it massively enriches industrial giants from Boeing to BP, which routinely employ ex-DoD officials as incredibly overpaid government contractors, along with speaking gigs on platforms such as Fox, ABC, CNN, etc. where they receive thousands of dollars to sit there for three minutes agreeing with whatever enriches those same industrial giants.
Of course DoD would also fund green energy if it represented a similar industrial pipeline for the corporate donors who run the military-industrial pipeline, and they do to a lesser extent, hence this thread.
The first sentence of your second paragraph has cause and effect completely reversed. Intervention in the Middle East does not make the world more dependent on petroleum; the world’s dependence on petroleum is why we intervene in the Middle East.
That’s because the argument is motivated. He wants the purported reasons for the purported actions to be true, so he claims the actions.
It’s a self reinforcing feedback loop.
If it exists. But you have to prove that it does first.
I could easily imagine that the US military-industrial complex could be in a co-dependent cycle with Middle Eastern oil, and at the same time that there are elements within the military-industrial complex in general and the DoD in particular who wish they could break that cycle in a simple, consequence-free manner.
I’ve met alcoholics who are aware that they are addicted and wish they could quit, but who would get very angry if an outside party went in and poured all their booze down the sink.
We might likewise imagine a nation whose military leadership is aware that its reliance on foreign oil is a dangerous vulnerability that it wishes it could partially close, and that directly or indirectly enables this vulnerability to persist by pursuing strategies in oil-producing regions.
I had a sociology professor who was on DoD grants
Regarding the Ukraine question: let’s be real here, the only way we’re getting back to status quo ante 2014 (which is what Hegseth was referring to) is if NATO throws troops into the fight, which I think we can all agree is not going to happen. There’s lots of reasons to think Hegseth is a poor choice for SecDef, from his personal recklessness to his lack of management experience (though given what The Smartest Guys on Paper have been producing for the past two decades, maybe it’s time to try the uncredentialed for a change); his willingness to say “We know this isn’t going to happen” is not one of them.
The problem is that it’s just bad negotiating tactics. Ukraine clearly can’t retake the 2014 borders alone, true.
But Russia has likewise taken 3 years and upward of 200,000 casualties to go from holding 50% of Donetsk province to 75% of Donetsk province, one of their four official annexation trgets. The idea they’ll take it *plus* Kherson *plus* Zapo *plus* install a new regime in Kyiv *plus* demobilise the UAF is just as farcical at this point. Yet they continue to demand nothing less as their *minimum position*.
But now that we’ve trimmed away our fat for free, any negotiations will have to open with our side making genuine concessions which will put pressure on the Ukrainians, which the Russians remain free to pay for by scaling back their own demands from ‘hilarious pipe dream’ to ‘highly ambitious’.
To put it bluntly, Russia’s ambitions to take over Ukraine are more realistic than any ambitions Ukraine has to go back to its pre-2014 borders, absent some kind of massive NATO intervention. It would absolutely break Russia economically to do so and kill off more of its young men than it can afford to lose, but they could do it if Putin and his inner circle decided that their survival depended on it. You know it, I know it, Putin knows it, and Zelensky knows it. Given the balance of forces, Russia’s current position is “highly ambitious.”
A resolute, pro-American, pro-Western US government could nonetheless extract significant concessions from Russia simply by threatening to continue doing as we have already done under the Biden administration, or even increasing our efforts. The situation is far more sustainable for the US than for Russia, and while it is clearly winnable for Russia and Ukraine may crack under the strain first anyway, it is not won for Russia yet.
Of course, the Musk-Trump administration is not pro-Western or pro-American, except insofar as upholding the West directly enriches the aspiring oligarchy now forming around the elderly king.
Either Trump or Musk would assuredly sacrifice entire Ukrainian provinces or millions of Ukrainian lives to Russia in exchange for, say, the quiet agreement on Putin’s part not to release any compromising tapes of intimate activity he might have involving them that might be… bad for their public image. Purely hypothetically. They might even do it for free, out of their own revealed admiration of the man.
I have extreme difficulty in buying this hypothetical blackmail argument. It requires that:
A) There is something so horrific that it would make Trump or Musk supports break with them.
B) They would *believe* the tapes or whatever rather say “fake news” “Photoshop”, or “AI.”
C) They wouldn’t come up with some kind of argument about how [horrific thing] isn’t really that bad, or was justified in this case to bump the trolley to the other line etc.
Over on the swing voters, they don’t pay attention to politics anyway, so they won’t notice or care.
“A resolute, pro-American, pro-Western US government could nonetheless extract significant concessions from Russia simply by threatening to continue doing as we have already done under the Biden administration”
Then the Biden administration would have extracted significant concessions.
You really do need to stop posting as if no one read the news.
CPT, all that’s required is that the tapes are bad enough to impel mass action, not break his support. If Trump believes a bunch of principles junior officers in dod might be motivated to arrest or shoot him after seeing what he was up to with his good friend Epstein, that’s enough to control him. To say nothing of a riot forming to storm the capital.
I don’t fully buy it myself, but it’s not implausible. I do believe someone like Musk might be under blackmail, or his stooges currently rifling through our SSNs at the Treasury might be; I actually think the later is more likely than not. They’re basically completely unvetted and precisely the sort of person who gets caught distributing intimate pictures of minors on discord or 4chan or what have you. All it takes is one of them getting caught by Russia, which is quite plausible, then someone planting the idea to hire them to Musk.
@cptbutton
I’m not saying Putin DOES have kompromat on Trump or Musk, but it absolutely wouldn’t surprise me if he did because it’s classic KGB tactics and there is a long, long, LONG history of very powerful men having (for instance) sexual histories they want to keep covered up.
I’m just saying, let’s be real here, just hypothetically, imagine Putin had a tape of Trump or Musk being, oh, let’s say being submissive in an intimate situation. A surprising number of powerful men do that at some point. Just hypothetically, ask yourself, “would Donald Trump push a button that dropped the entire nation of Ukraine into a volcano to ensure that that tape never came to light.” And frankly… I find it hard to imagine anyone familiar with the man’s general demeanor, attitude, and so forth would say “no, surely he would never consider doing such a terrible thing just for his pride’s sake.”
Trump really doesn’t like being embarrassed. Just saying. He is not a man you want in charge of your country if you like having leaders who can’t be manipulated by way of their vanity, pride, and fear of loss of reputation.
And it wouldn’t even have to be something like a sex tape. It could be something financial (“he wasn’t actually a billionaire until every oligarch in America started slinging him bribes after he won the 2024 election”) or a threat to reveal something that would validate other people’s suspicions (say, a tape of Trump promising something to Putin that he really shouldn’t have promised during his FIRST presidency).
And again, even if there is no such kompromat, Trump or Musk have been so generally positive and admiring of Putin on so many occasions that I can easily imagine them ceding valuable American interests to the man for free.
@Mary Catelli
The Biden administration was in the process of trying to wear the Russians down until they came to the peace table with an offer more reasonable than “Russia gets to keep all the chunks of Ukraine it wants and also ban Ukraine from ever being admitted to a defensive alliance that might protect them from being re-invaded by Russia in 2027 after the Russian army has caught its breath.”
Trump has punched out of this process because he is neither resolute nor pro-Western nor pro-democracy nor pro-American, except insofar as being pro- those three things results in Donald Trump or his immediate friends becoming wealthier, more powerful, or more flattered.
How would the Biden path be differentiated from being a useless and ineffectual sideshow? How would you prove it?
The Biden path would be distinguished from the path of “useless sideshow” by the sight of Russian military tanks catching fire and exploding and getting posted to YouTube. By the sight of Russian military arms exports imploding because everyone is getting a firsthand sense that maybe those guns aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. By the Russian fleet losing numerous ships and an entire seagoing military campaign to an enemy who has effectively no navy. By Russian military research institutions and supply centers deep within their territory literally catching fire and exploding. By the Russian military and political establishment fighting among themselves and prominent figures (say, the leader of Wagner) getting offed in the chaos. By Russia experiencing something like 40% inflation in a period of three years, which puts our own experiences with the COVID inflation spike to shame. With Russia becoming still more of an international pariah state.
All of which, uh, actually happened in real life. Russia has taken a lot of harm from the fact that the Ukrainians were prepared to resist them, and from the point of view of making the US look like a powerful, valuable ally at the head of a stable international system, it more or less worked out. Even if Ukraine eventually collapsed under such a policy from sheer military exhaustion, it would be after bleeding and weakening Russian power greatly. Remember how bad it was for the USSR to have to deal with Afghanistan and its aftermath? Ukraine has done much more harm to Putin’s Russia, in material terms, than Afghanistan did to the USSR. Arming Ukraine as a proxy was no ‘useless sideshow’ given Russian hostility to the idea of a US-led international order.
“The Biden path would be distinguished from the path of “useless sideshow” by the sight of Russian military tanks catching fire and exploding and getting posted to YouTube. ”
We all know what caused that, and nothing the Biden administration did had anything to do with it.
Except his “willingness to say this isn’t going to happen” is in fact one of them. It utterly fucks the US negotiating position to cede the hard power response before negotiations begin (nevermind how they aren’t even including the Ukrainians in negotiations). It’s not an acknowledgement that’s in any way intelligent. It’s braindead, just like the idea that giving people with no expertise power is somehow a good idea.
There’s a difference between “credentialed” and “actually knows what they’re doing.” The past two and a half decades have not presented us with evidence that the people with credentials actually know what they’re doing.
There speaks someone who has never called a plumber, or taken an Ozempic shot.
You and I both know that I’m referring to policymaking. Can the comedy.
I note you don’t cite someone who is actually working in the government to provide cover for the government.
“You and I both know that I’m referring to policymaking.”
No. I don’t know that. And I suspect that if I had talked about pharmaceuticals company’s inventing COVID vaccines, rather than weight-loss drugs, you would have been quite happy to declare vaccines useless and proof of the incapacity of the credentialed people who lead pharmaceutical companies.
“The past two and a half decades have not presented us with evidence that the people with credentials actually know what they’re doing.”
Here is a quick description of the US grand strategic position in 2024:
Largest economic, financial and military power in the world: the US
Second largest: China, the US’ main rival, barricaded away behind several island chains, all of which are controlled by US allies
Third, fourth, and fifth largest: all US allies
Sixth largest: former main US rival, now impoverished, desperately trying to regain control of its former agricultural heartlands and failing at colossal cost
Seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth largest: also US allies
Number of US enemies on US borders: none
I mean maybe they don’t know what they’re doing and they’re just very lucky, idk
Meanwhile, the US grand strategic position in 2000:
Largest economic, financial and military power in the world: the US
Second largest: economic frenemy and military ally.
Third, fourth, and fifth largest: all US allies
Sixth largest: barely a rival, barricaded away behind several island chains, all of which are controlled by US allies
Seventh largest: former main US rival, now impoverished, currently mired fighting a separatist movement.
Eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth largest: also US allies.
Call me crazy, but I think that between 2000 and 2025 the US has experienced a relative decline in its position.
I dunno. I think that only looks like a relative decline caused by US government incompetence if one believes that China could have been stopped from industrializing without triggering a nuclear war. Which seems rather unlikely. China didn’t get richer because the US “let” them. China got richer because it has a combined population less like “the US” and more like “the US and all of Europe put together” and already circa 2000 had a large industrial base that it was actively putting to work.
So, yes a large but importantly not irreconcilably hostile rival to the US rising in the form of China as pretty much bound to happen. Aside from that, well, the US strategic position in 2024 was just about as solid as in 2000. Not much net change there.
I agree with Simon. The “relative decline” was the result of Russia coming out of its decade-long Time of Troubles after it lost its empire, and China industrialising. Neither of those were in any sense the result of incompetence
by US policymakers and it is disingenuous to imply that they were – especially if you aren’t willing to say it out loud.
Actually, I can and I will. US policymakers’ incompetence put us into this situation via A. aiding and abetting China’s rise via favorable trade deals in the misguided belief that making the country more prosperous would make it more liberal, in the old sense of the word; and B. not taking Russia seriously. Had we brought them into the fold in the ’90s rather than leaving them to rot, we might actually have Moscow as an ally rather than an enemy.
@60guilders
Since being kind to Russia has flipped from being a Democratic/establishment policy position to being a Republican policy position, trying to establish that being kind to post-1991 Russia was historically a bad idea seems kind of strange these days from you.
As for China, I think you are grossly overestimating the degree to which “the rise of China” could have been prevented by the US adopting exceptionally harsh trade measures against China. China would not remain permanently trapped in a 1990-era stasis just because the US in particular kept slapping tariffs on them long after the Cold War ended. Furthermore, this trade war with China would not be without costs and opportunity costs to the United States itself, potentially undermining the US’s own strategic position as fast or faster than it undermined China.
One of the realities of getting into a rivalry with a semi-developed nation (like 1990s China) when you are already fully developed is that it’s a lot easier to achieve fast economic growth as a semi-developed nation. There’s a lot more low-hanging fruit and a lot of ways to exploit the differences between your economy and dozens of potential import/export partners around the world. Countries that are poorer than you will have a much easier time catching up than you will keeping the lead wide and open, if they are applying any competence at all to their internal governance and unless someone is actively looting them.
Ultimately, China is a country with roughly four times our population. Historically it was one of the, often just plain the, most powerful nations on Earth. Population, resource base, availability of educated workers and willingness to industrialize at scale matter.
It’s just plain absurd to imagine that a status quo of China remaining politically powerless and unable to project influence or economic growth forever, as if the relatively humiliated and debilitated state of China in the early 1900s could just last forever if only we kept smacking them down.
@SimonJester: You completely misunderstood what I said. Bringing Russia into the fold would have meant, say, bringing them into NATO. Or, in other words “You can’t claim this alliance is a threat to you anymore, since you’re a member.” Does that lead to some issues? Probably. Do we have, say, a war in Ukraine that’s killed several hundred thousand people? Probably not.
And sure, yeah, China was going to rise whether we willed it or not, but we didn’t have to actively help them, and actively help them we did.
Exactly how would bringing Russia into NATO prevent them from attacking Ukraine?
If you’re seeing “bring Russia into NATO” as the proper foreign policy goal of the US at some point after the Cold War, I have to ask how you think such a thing could have been made to happen. First, because NATO has standards and 1990s Russia was an economic and political basket case. Second, because after the 1990s you’re looking at Putin. And Putin has been revanchist for almost that entire time, and one thing NATO makes you do is forswear wars of aggression and annexation.
I don’t think getting Russia to join NATO was ever realistic. The fundamental US foreign policy error in Russia was in helping the oligarchs do “disaster capitalism” and massively disrupt the post-Soviet government, breaking up any power blocs that might have resisted rule by the oligarchs.
But I’m not sure the US had the leverage to prevent that, and even if they did, the damage was already done by, say, 1994-95. It doesn’t really tell us much about the Obama or Biden or even Trump administrations’ foreign policy.
“Bringing Russia into the fold would have meant, say, bringing them into NATO. Or, in other words “You can’t claim this alliance is a threat to you anymore, since you’re a member.”
You are under the impression that Russia wanted to join NATO but was prevented. This is not true. Russia joined the NATO Partnership for Peace, which was widely seen as the “waiting room” for NATO, in 1994, but did not apply to join NATO, largely for reasons of pride.
Russian president Vladimir Putin asked NATO SG George Robertson: “‘When are you going to invite us to join Nato?’
Robertson replied: ‘Well, we don’t invite people to join Nato, they apply to join Nato.’
Putin’s response was: ‘Well, we’re not standing in line with a lot of countries that don’t matter.’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/04/ex-nato-head-says-putin-wanted-to-join-alliance-early-on-in-his-rule
A 1954 request to join NATO from the USSR was turned down by NATO because the USSR, being a dictatorship, did not meet NATO’s governance standards.
https://archives.nato.int/uploads/r/null/3/7/37267/RDC_54_215_BIL.pdf
The US actually pretty drastically contributed to the whole oligarchy thing. Jeffrey Sachs was one of the key figures in shock therapy, and specifically advised the Russian premiers. There’s also relatively strong ties between various think tanks like the RAND institute and the early reformers like Gaidar who screwed everything up so bad that Putin seized power. Most pertinently even if you believe in capitalism as an idealogy liberalization was never going to work without American support, and Bush and Reagan were generally unwilling to do anything meaningful here. Clinton wasn’t any better, mind you, although he was late to the show.
The issue can be summed up as a sort of fundamental microcosm of what’s wrong with capitalism; the people trying to get liberalization to work were idealogically classical liberals, who believed in the free market. The people who ran the west were conservatives, who could’ve given less of a damn about liberalism compared to the interests of their personal capital class. Hence the efforts of fervent, misguided reformers got turned into a way to extract capital from Russia and deliver it to parts of Europe or the bank accounts of the elite. The exact same thing was and is happening here, it just took longer because less wealth was up for grabs and the population has more relative power compared to the elite.
Of course that’s the favorable interpretation. Sachs has come out for Putin on Ukraine, and while he might just be a useful idiot it could also indicate he got precisely the result he wanted when a bunch of oligarchs gained power thanks to his advice.
“A 1954 request to join NATO from the USSR was turned down by NATO because the USSR, being a dictatorship, did not meet NATO’s governance standards.”
That’s not quite what that document said. The exact words were “The North Atlantic Treaty Organ-
ization, which is much more than a purely military arrangement, is founded on the principle of individual liberty and the rule of law” – which sounds nice, until you recall that one of the FOUNDING members was Salazar’s Portugal – or that while both Greece and Turkiye had initially joined the bloc as democracies, both were in substantial turmoil at the time, and neither were kicked out during their periods of military rule – or indeed, after the conflict between the two over Cyprus, which remains unresolved today.
So, “NATO has standards” argument is again fairly revisionist. The same document points out later in the same paragraph that the USSR would have the ability to veto virtually every single decision of NATO as a member due to the unanimous consent, which seems like a far more important factor in the light of the above.
Anyway, while I don’t doubt that at one point there was a POSSIBILITY to get Yeltsin, Putin or any other leader in their mould to join NATO, it would have objectively been a short-sighted decision which COULD only have been made to work by playing to their pride and the historical weakness of Russian leadership to “First World” flattery long enough to cloud over some fundamental facts. Most notably – that with Russia in NATO, the Russia-China border automatically becomes a NATO-China border – and hence, land war between China and NATO suddenly goes from nearly unthinkable to a live possibility, and Russian troops would become the first in the firing line. Indeed, it would be reasonable to assume that the appetite for brinkmanship of Western leaders would go up substantially simply due to knowing another country would take the brunt of any war.
Hence, it’s probably not an accident that the discussion of Russia in NATO had also come at a period when military conflict between the West and China seemed at its most remote. Nowadays, it would be extremely hard to imagine such an offer being taken up seriously unless the security arrangement also included China. In fact, considering the way things have been going recently – including the well-known admiration of Trump for Xi and of Musk for the PRC system in general, and their recent remarks about hoping to reduce nuclear armaments and military budgets of all three nations – a formal alliance struck directly between the US, Russia and China may have gone from 100% implausible to only 90% implausible or less.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/05/trump-pro-china-moves-00202500
Viewed optimistically (i.e. the way Trump’s guru Norman Vincent Peale might have advised us to) such an alliance would be the greatest move in history to bypass the looming tragedy of the Thucydides Trap, eliminate the risk of major nuclear war and safeguard the future of global civilization. Pessimists, of course, might either invoke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact or suggest that the peace of such an order would be more like “a boot stamping on a human face, for ever”. Realistically, this idea is still but an idle thought, no matter how fascinating (or horrifying) we may find it.
“Here is a quick description of the US grand strategic position in 2024”
So, as pointed out by others, many of those points have already been true for a long time. I.e. the last point about the lack of enemies on the border has been true for at least a century by now. Island chains standing between China and the US is natural geography, not any planner’s genius – and if you refer to administrations in those places preferring the US over China, that is again something which had been true well before 2024 or even 2000.
The argument for post-2000 American decline is quite well-known: the country trusted too much in its “Peace dividend” and turned the defence industry into a domain of a few monopolies after “The Last Supper” in 1993 – supposedly to cut costs, yet instead allowing “the five remaining major weapons contractors — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman [to] squander billions on stock buybacks and bloated executive compensation”, wasting much of the defence budget on that, the largely unnecessary and ineffectual War on Terror (which also greatly weakened the American strategic relationship with the Islamic world) and on obsolete weapons programs driven by pork-barrel politics. Hence, unlike 2000, the country is far more reliant on a vast stock of aging weaponry and lacks the industrial base to quickly replace it – while the main rivals may lag in quantity and/or quality of their weapons, but have now proven they are more capable of replacing them. The article below explains that better than any summary from me.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/america-weapons-china-00100373
(In addition to the article’s points, I would also treat the mounting consequences of climate change today, in large part due to the lack of attention paid to climate change during those decades as yet another factor – particularly since Russia (along with Canada) is notoriously the country considered most likely to benefit from climate change, and it’s at best unclear whether the US is getting hit by it worse than China (after all, only one of those countries is prone to both hurricanes and massive wildfires.) Having said that, you can arguably lay most this on the feet of not-so-credentialed personnel in Bush Jr. administration – though one might also argue that it was Clinton’s responsibility to negotiate China’s WTO accession in a way which would have aimed to restrain their emissions and mitigate the spike we have seen in real life.)
@Simon_Jester
Nonetheless, if President Bill Clinton had adopted less an attitude of ‘helping China grow rich by doing such things as allowing them into the WTO so that they will then democratise through trade’, China would at least have been less strong, if maybe only very slightly, relative to the USA, without the need of a costly trade war.
@YARD
Not necessarily, according to NATO Article 6, Article 5 only covers member states’ territory in North America, Europe, Turkey, and the North Atlantic. So, theoretically China could even attack Hawaii without triggering Article 5.
Though, I don’t know whether there exist other obstacles for a hypothetical NATO Russia to remain fully neutral in a US-China War.
I wonder whether another problem might be fears of potential future conflict between Russia and China, if such a thing was seen as plausible back then, that might have soured European politicians on NATO having a border with China. Though as that was far before my time I don’t know whether such fears existed back then.
@Dan
Could you provide some clarification with what you are referring to with ‘shock therapy’? The measures to reach macroeconomic stabilisation, comparable to those in Poland which had not ended up with kleptocratic oligarchs taking over everything, Sachs had been involved in, or Yeltsin’s rushed and corrupt privatizations?
As those had been very different things: (https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/distinguishing-post-communist-privatizations), despite that some people keep on conflating them for some reason.
While the negotiating logic of these objections SEEMS unimpeachable, I do wonder how many ACTUAL political negotiations were conducted in this manner of two sides presenting unrealistic positions and hammering them down to something they could live with – as opposed to the entire talks breaking down until the side that has been losing climbs down even further. Some trade deals probably did occur in this manner, but I believe peace talks in recent history (at least for major conflicts) tended to followed the latter principle far more closely than the former.
After all, the newly born USSR didn’t try drawn-out negotiations but instead swiftly accepted major concessions to withdraw from the First World War through the Brest-Litovsk Agreement (German intelligence allowing Lenin and his coterie to leave the exile in Switzerland by crossing Germany in a sealed train wagon on the way to a ship which took them to Sweden, allowing them to reenter Russia through the Finnish border had undoubtedly contributed to that matter). Germany itself rapidly signed the Versailles Agreement a year later even though the war had yet to reach its own soil – hence the “stab in the back” narrative/myth (this makes me I wonder if future historians will also haughtily the narratives around the current negotiations as yet another mere “stab in the back” myth.) WWII was actually ended through a total/near-total defeat of the opponents so it doesn’t count, but the agreement to end (or, strictly speaking, pause) the Korean War was the story of negotiations breaking down until all the sides agreed to change nothing, making the last two years of the war virtually meaningless.
With the Vietnam War, one could well argue that South Vietnam would have had far greater chances of surviving as a separate state like the modern-day ROK (politically, not materially; objective limitations suggest its standard of living would at best be more akin to Thailand) had Nixon accepted the demand to push then-South Vietnamese President Thiệu out of power in favour of someone more pro-Hanoi in exchange for bilateral withdrawal from contested territory back in 1969 – rather than rejecting it but then opting for unilateral withdrawal 3 years later, sealing South Vietnam’s fate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords
I also find it darkly amusing how these points about Trump and Hegseth seem like the mirror image of ones made about Gorbachev and his closest coterie like Chernyshev and Shevarnadze (he relied little on the whole Politburo unlike his immediate predecessors, at times described as the most personalist Soviet leader since Stalin) by a huge number of Russians (and USSR nostalgics across its entire former territory). In their view, it also didn’t matter that it wasn’t realistic for the USSR to preserve the Warsaw Pact by 1980s – he should have had pretended it was and sought to drive a hard bargain, clawing back meaningful concessions from the West for every single Eastern European country the Soviet troops were ordered to withdraw from, rather than staying in place and attempting to prop up the allied leaders by force (and ideally, using those concessions to keep in the fold whatever still could have been retained, even if it was just the “core” republics and even if it required swapping out the unquestionably loyal but tired Stalinist-Brezhenivist leaders for reformist-but-still Communist fresh faces and the like). Instead, he was more smitten with capitalist leaders like Kohl then those like Hoenecker who spent their entire adult life in the service of his project, thinking that West Germans chanting his name during state visits was more important than his own citizens looking at him with growing disdain when he was still in power and cursing him bitterly after he left it. Again, the mirror image of what has been said about Trump and his attitude towards foreign leaders since before his first election.
You may consider such perspective and comparison wholly amoral, of course – following the judgement that the West acting to preserve freedom, will of the majority and/or an economic system which worked, as opposed to the USSR doing neither. However, one of the consistent lessons of this blog (i.e. the Gracchi series) appears to be the value of considering how events are perceived by all stakeholders, even those we do not agree with. Considering whether Gorbachev taking such an approach would have been realistic then might be a useful guide to now.
The trick is that with the Trump-Hegseth negotiations, we have a very clear night-and-day change in policy difference. The US went from “we will continue to support Ukraine and bleed Russia and we can keep this up pretty much indefinitely though I suppose the Ukrainians might crack.” to “this is obviously unsustainable and Ukraine needs to surrender right now.”
This didn’t happen in the immediate aftermath of some stunning Russian victory or Ukrainian defeat. It didn’t happen because some sudden disaster befell the United States that would cripple its economy and government (well, not that way).
It happened specifically because Biden is out, and Trump is in.
There are two superficially plausible interpretations of this.
One is that Trump and Hegseth are very insightful people who know a lot about strategy and military affairs and foreign policy, smart enough to make the Biden administration look like a bunch of blindly arrogant fools who absolutely knew there was no hope of extracting concessions from Russia…
And the other is that Trump and Hegseth just gave away a big prize to Russia in a major unforced loss for overall US foreign policy vis a vis Russia. Albeit one that is probably beneficial to Trump and Hegseth in particular because quite mysteriously much of their voter-base seems to have been convinced all along that Ukraine was going to collapse real soon at every point in the past three years, and that Putin’s a pretty good guy and deserves to win anyway.
The problem with the first impression is that when given the opportunity to demonstrate their great insight into foreign affairs and strategy and so forth on nearly any other topic, including relatively basic information like “so what is ASEAN,” Trump and Hegseth tend to choke.
So we are left either with “Trump hands over the keys to a kingdom to Putin because he wants to, not because it’s necessary or advantageous to the US…”
Or we’re left with “Trump is much more moral than his predecessors and understands that Ukraine is the rightful property of Russia regardless of anything the Ukrainians say about the matter.” Which, surely, is not your actual position.
I am sorry, but claiming that the way the war proceeded in the past year was more-or-less the intended outcome of the Biden Administration policy and that the US national security/foreign policy establishment was in agreement that this situation could have been maintained indefinitely is revisionist history. A figure no less influential than Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman at the time, Mark Milley (incidentally, anything BUT a fan of Trump) had already pressed Ukraine to negotiate for peace right after it reclaimed the Kharkiv Oblast (which, as we all know, had proved to be the high point of their military successes).
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russia-ukraine-peace-talks-milley-united-states-war-negotiations-rcna57827
You can also read plenty of reporting on how the war had not lived up to the Biden Administration’s expectations from the failed 2023 offensive onwards. That would be completely in line with the pattern of incredibly stubborn optimism bias and groupthink which had defined that Administration. You probably know the other examples of that bias, such as:
* There would be no Saigon-like scenes when the withdrawal from Afghanistan is completed.
* The inflation would be “transitory”.
* There would not be immediately visible and explosive consequences from relaxing immigration enforcement.
* 4th of July, 2017, would be “Liberation Day” from the pandemic.
And of course, the ultimate example: only the “bedwetters” think that Biden himself is no longer physically fit for a second term, or that the voters would reject him for that reason.
So, strictly speaking, one does NOT need to hold the current team in any high regard to believe that the core Biden team had an incredibly overrated view of their abilities and a tendency to underestimate every single challenge they faced, and the war in Ukraine was no different – so anybody else looking at it with fresh eyes would come to a different conclusion (or rather, the same conclusion which a few former members like Milley have had all along.)
P.S. “The Ukrainians might crack” appears to give the final call to Zelenskyy and assume his interests are the same as those of Ukrainian society. His gradually declining approval rating (now down to 60% according to The Hill) and an increase in metrics one should not want to be high (i.e. 78% of Ukrainians holding him personally responsible for corruption in the country, as can be easily looked up) suggests it is not so simple. In November, Gallup also published a report titled “Half of Ukrainians Want Quick, Negotiated End to War”. Now, only half of that half then said they supported territorial concessions to end the war (i.e. 25% of the country) – however, a very recent KIIS poll suggests the division on the question of concessions across the entire country is now 51% disagree/38% agree. If those numbers reverse outright but Zelenskyy would still call for continuing the war – would you be on his side, or on the side of the opinion poll respondents?
(Of course, you can argue that the Democrats won the midterms outright and the aid package was never delayed, those numbers would have never gotten to this point. Others would instead argue that it would have simply taken longer to reach the same point in that case. I.e. Milley was clearly of the latter opinion.)
The problem with your take on the situation is that Trump and Hegseth aren’t just “coming with fresh eyes to the idea that there needs to be a negotiated peace.” They’re actively making a bunch of unforced moves that strengthen Putin’s position in the negotiations, weaken Ukraine’s position, and entirely avoid even trying to coordinate with the European nations that have historically at least been backup dancers supporting the strength of the overall NATO/Ukrainian position.
The overall pattern simply cannot be explained as “a fresh objective perspective tells us that this is the only way, we have to get out of Ukraine now and make peace immediately.”
It is far more easily explained as “Trump and Hegseth just plain disagree with the idea that containing Putin is desirable, that Ukraine should not be forced to submit to Putin against its will, or that a united US-European front against Russian aggression is a good thing.”
Like, no, they’re not just smarter people now doing their best to achieve the same things as everyone else in a better way. They actually do have different goals and a different vision of the world order.
A Trump who didn’t fundamentally accept that Putin has some kind of right to own Ukraine wouldn’t keep making so many noises about his own right to own Gaza or Canada or Greenland.
These points are all incidental to the question I posed. I was not trying to look at their motivations in my first comment (where, for the record, I generally agree with you) – I asked when exactly did the supposed negotiating norm of “[avoid] unforced moves that strengthen [opponent’s] position in the negotiations” actually was seen in action AND worked while negotiating peace agreements. I brought up a range of major peace agreements from history in my first comment, and to me, none of them seemed to follow that pattern. You ignored all of that to imply the US policy had reversed out of the blue and with no material justification, and I pointed out this position (if not the motivations behind it) is not so different from what the senior members of the previous administration like Mark Milley were saying all along.
Now, the question still stands. WHICH peace negotiations actually proceeded in this idealized manner of a side giving up nothing until it sits down at a table and then trading concession for concession until an agreement is signed – instead of breaking down, then resuming months or years later after one side’s condition had worsened substantially and they are forced to accept a worse deal than before?
For comparison, here is how the recent negotiations in Gaza apparently went. If we consider that Ukraine’s position is closer to that of Gaza rather than Israel, for the simple reason that the war is taking place on their territory in both cases, do you really think this kind of an 8-month process in the midst of active fighting would be a good thing from their perspective?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Gaza_war_ceasefire#Negotiation_process
So two major points Yard.
First, your examples of groupthink don’t fill me with confidence. I can point to a couple real examples to reinforce, but not these.
“* There would be no Saigon-like scenes when the withdrawal from Afghanistan is completed.”
It’s not groupthink on this point, because there really were very few analysts saying that Afghanistan would fall that fast. This is more of a groupthink failure of the entire American intelligence apparatus, which has generally been ineffectual at estimating how people in the middle east think.
Rapid regime collapses that have caught intelligence agencies off guard are extremely common now, which probably indicates something about how organization and communication happen in these communities that isn’t tracked, which is in no way surprising to anyone who knows the perennial issue military intel has with bling versus boots. It’s very good at hacking intelligence networks and parsing large amounts of information, it’s also chronically understaffed with reliable informants compared to what they want to be doing.
“* The inflation would be “transitory”.”
It was. Until now.
Or rather, inflation defined as rate-of-increase was transitory, Biden’s policies were slow but worked. Inflation as price increase wasn’t, because the economy has basically no way to reduce certain key prices due to how global finance works. Generally inflation is reduced by increasing wages faster than inflation, not by decreasing prices, and the only way around that would be drastic action like price or rent controls.
Which, mind you, people want. But Trump is taking drastic action to raise prices, because no shit the fascist lied.
“* There would not be immediately visible and explosive consequences from relaxing immigration enforcement.”
There weren’t. Republicans lied. The crisis at the border is fabricated-there was an increase in migration, but everything that’s pointed at as evidence of a *crisis* was due to larger social issues like fentanyl smuggling or capital accumulation of real estate. Relaxing immigration enforcement didn’t cause any of the visible effects that Biden got blamed for and decreasing it won’t reduce them.
The actual incidents of groupthink, namely Biden’s political viability and the Gaza war, are much more damning. There’s been reveals that internal democrat polling indicated Biden would lose *New York or California* when he decided to run again, that’s how bad it had to be for him for Trump to get 400 electoral votes. His decision to go ahead with his candidacy, despite the fact that he was generally considered a one term president by the public, handed fascists the country.
So with that in mind, in relation to the second and more pertinent point-
The thing about Ukraine is that it is, to be direct, not here. It’s neither deeply vital that Ukraine strictly speaking “win”, nor is it damaging to us to continue the war. I think the administration is talking about defense cuts (which I neither oppose nor trust to happen), and we could cut defense by saving all the money we spend maintaining weapons and munitions by selling them to Ukraine, and pretty casually continue the war for as long as Ukraine was willing to use them. And Russia remains a belligerent, no matter Trump’s traitorous actions, and hence damage to Russia helps us.
As long as Ukraine is willing to fight real-politick says that we should help them. Them winning is immaterial-let them fight for centuries.
When it comes to morality, letting belligerents get away with expansionist war is more damaging to global peace than anything else that could possibility be done. And damage to global peace is more immoral than any real or imagined political suppression by Ukrainian politicians. This is ignoring the fact that Zelensky has, at multiple occasions, demonstrated a willingness to die for his country-something that is not consistent with a purely self-interested power grab by him. That’s not to say that he’s ontologically good, but it’s pretty good character evidence that he’s *not* just a tyrant, and that any dictatorial actions are taken out of what he believes is real necessity.
And, of course, self-defense is morally justified. As long as Ukraine is willing to fight let them. If Ukraine isn’t then they have the self-determination to figure that out.
Given that, practically and morally, supporting Ukraine remains the only defensible move. To say nothing of the irrationalism of negotiating for a third party without their consent and paralyzing your own negotiating position by making unprompted concessions with a belligerent.
Dan, you really shouldn’t debase yourself by spinning so hard for what is now widely acknowledged to have been a failed administration. Just recently, Obama’s Chair of Council of Economic Advisers, Jason Furman, has become the latest voice to admit that Biden pumped WAY too much money into the economy with the colossally misguided plan to continue giving stimulus checks long after they stopped being necessary – which also raised inflation everywhere else, since any global supplier who could sell for newly abundant dollars instead of the other currencies would obviously prioritize that, and supply less to the other markets. Ironically, even the infrastructure investments became much less effective due to the very same inflation.
https://politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/20/was-bidenomics-a-mistake-00204951
The Democrats really should have listened to voices like Larry Summers, who had perfectly predicted the inflationary outcomes of Biden’s policies, and scaled many of them down in response. Failing that, they should have at least owned that it was the stimulus which did it, and saturated the airwaves with the calls from Trump (and his Georgia Senators) for an even larger stimulus which would have driven even greater inflation, instead of coming up with ever-more excuses. (As Furman points out in the article “When people are judging Hoover, no-one cares that The Great Depression was as bad if not worse in Europe”.)
With all of your other points, one ought to invoke Occam’s Razor. Is it REALLY more plausible that the Administration which dramatically failed to accurately evaluate the fitness of its own leader happened to get the policies on nearly everything else exactly right, with the people just failing to get them – rather than to conclude they fell short practically across the board by following the same pattern? Have you ever heard of the expressions “Underpromise and overdeliver” and “If you are explaining, you are losing?” Biden promised to “Build Back Better” – that his administration would have the adults in charge and bring back calm and competence – and many voters felt anything but that (Ever saw videos of Trump asking at the rallies “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” to rapturous response?) no matter, the explanations from the media many of them lost trust in.
It would have made FAR more sense to pivot to claiming that the legacy of Trump and the pandemic left them with deep issues which they cannot address without initial hardship. That would have been “underpromise and overdeliver” – and it is the playbook which was successfully used to justify Cameron’s 2010-2015 then-profound austerity and win him a second term (only for the backlash to the same to drive the Brexit vote, admittedly) and which has also allowed Milei in Argentina to (so far) retain far more popularity than his predecessor while in essence executing the forerunner to DOGE. Instead, Biden repeatedly gave the impression of the events overtaking him, of trying to be soft, only to be forced to take firmer actions when things worsened and his approach seemed too late. (I.e. softening the border only to crack down in the final year anyway, or refusing to do a vaccine mandate in his honeymoon period when he still had the political capital for it, and instead ordering it right after the failure of “Liberation Day” and the Afghanistan withdrawal.)
“This is ignoring the fact that Zelensky has, at multiple occasions, demonstrated a willingness to die for his country-something that is not consistent with a purely self-interested power grab by him. That’s not to say that he’s ontologically good, but it’s pretty good character evidence that he’s *not* just a tyrant, and that any dictatorial actions are taken out of what he believes is real necessity. ”
I think you’ll find very few rulers, no matter who they are, who DON’T believe their actions are not taken out of “real necessity”. While I never called Zelenskyy a tyrant (your word, not mine) the argument that personal bravery is inconsistent with tyranny/authoritarianism falls apart when looking at both Roman history and at nearly every leader who has ever led a successful revolution. In recent years, Idriss Deby ruled Chad for 3 decades, “winning” elections with 60-90% of the vote in the atmosphere which often involved actual armed attacks on his opponents. Yet, he very clearly “demonstrated willingness to die for his country” – as he died commanding troops on the frontline (while putting down yet another rebellion), so would that justify how he chose to rule it? Isaias Afwerki signed an oath with blood from an “E” carved on his own arm to succeed or die liberating Eritrea from Ethiopia – then he turned Eritrea into what is commonly described as “The North Korea of Africa”. Compared to those examples, the idea Zelenskyy would rather sacrifice more of his soldiers’ lives in the hope of figuring out a way to win and be remembered as a victor then accept the growing consensus it’s unwinnable and go down in history as a failure is extremely plausible.
“When it comes to morality, letting belligerents get away with expansionist war is more damaging to global peace than anything else that could possibility be done.”
When an actual military man like Mark Milley says that the war now “serves no moral purpose” (from his recent remarks to Georgetown University) then maybe it’s a good time to take a look in the mirror and ask why he disagrees so strongly?
“we could cut defense by saving all the money we spend maintaining weapons and munitions by selling them to Ukraine”
Erm, Ukraine does not even have the money to pay its OWN weapon manufacturers. You can easily find articles noting that up to 50% of their production capacity is idle because they don’t have up to $10B required for the contracts they need. The money they would spend on such weapons (and on maintaining those weapons – if you think it’s an expense for the US, it’ll also be one for Ukraine) would in large part come from the aid they already received from the US and Europe. In essence, you could describe that proposal as an indirect transfer of EU funds to the US – and it’s unlikely to be popular there.
Remember, the EU might have largely ran out of surplus weapons to give, but it continues to provide tens of billions in financial support. Before the election, it’s Western Europe which was widely considered to have been the most reluctant part of the coalition. A year ago, one of the most important figures in Scholz’s party, Rolf Muetzenich, had spoken in favour of “freezing then ending” the war. A suggestion that the “realpolitik” U.S. policy to the war is “Them winning is immaterial-let them fight for centuries” could easily end up countered with the equally “realpolitik” European response of “Then you can pick up the ENTIRE tab – for centuries”.
Lastly, I should note that IF one believes that the West can always outproduce Russia in weapons in the long run, THEN one can both believe that Ukraine deserves to regain all of its territory AND that now is not the time for it to do so. In the early 1990s, Azerbaijan lost the Nagorno-Karabakh + its surroundings to Armenia, in a way which completely violated the international law. Yet rather than to keep fighting and losing, they froze the conflict, waited, rearmed – until some 30 years later, they comprehensively defeated the Armenian forces in 2020 to reclaim those surroundings, and took back the rest of the region practically without a fight in 2023. In theory, nothing stops Ukraine from attempting the same. (In practice, it appears far more politically palatable for everyone to keep dripping weapons into static frontlines then to build up a massive offensive force during peacetime – no matter if the latter can be convincingly argued to cost far fewer lives to achieve the same outcome.)
@YARD:
I haven’t had time to comment much on this thread, because I’ve had too much work going on and was also traveling out of town. Perhaps that’s for the best since the thread seems to have boiled down to depressingly boring and formulaic American liberal vs. American conservative talking points, on both sides (considering I’m neither one, it’s especially boring and irritating for me to read). I just wanted to jump in though to thank you for that comment, it was really interesting and thoughtful! The Trump vs. Gorbachev comparison is especially interesting, and I’ll have to spend some time thinking about it. Intuitively it makes sense to me though, and as someone with a very dim view of both of them, I’m not exactly saying that as a compliment to Donald Trump.
I especially didn’t realize that Gorbachev had had such disregard for the inner circle of the party, and was a “personalist” leader as you describe it, but I’m not really that surprised.
The United States and its allies do not recognise the right of conquest. Crimea was never given to Russia as part of a deal, and even Israel did not get its settlements approved until Trump. All that may be about to change.
I do not think the Musk-Trump administration has any problem with the idea of the right of conquest, and probably think it would be pretty cool if it went back into fashion.
Trump’s certainly been acting like he really, really wishes everyone would just accept that he’s personally taken over Canada and given it to the US as a gift if only he could get the army to go in there and take it away from the Canadians, for instance.
“Regarding the Ukraine question: let’s be real here, the only way we’re getting back to status quo ante 2014 (which is what Hegseth was referring to) is if NATO throws troops into the fight”
NATO could have supplied long range missiles, allowed them to be fired into Russia, supplied modern combat aircraft and so on. It hasn’t, mostly because its dominant member (the US) is afraid of Russia. It was the de facto policy of the Biden administration to make sure Russia did not lose the war.
The near equality at the front lines is because the previous administration wanted that.
Speaking of being real, the greatest single source of American dominance is a fleet of ICBMs. As extended deterrence fails, everyone is going to need their own ICBMs. Because they are needed, and if you cannot rely on American ones, you need your own. And I can’t think of any plausible way of arguing that any American ally ought to rely on American ones at present, or in the future. After all, unreliability in the present implies unreliability in the future.
I don’t think those points are particularly connected to military reality. For one thing, the IC in ICBM stands for “intercontinental” – meaning that it’s the weapon used to threaten those an ocean away, and is laughably excessive for preserving territorial integrity when such threats invariably occur from the immediate neighbours who are actually close enough to integrate such land.
(Furthermore, if “the greatest single source of American dominance is a fleet of ICBMs”, then Russia should be far more dominant than it is due to possessing the very same.)
The mention of “modern combat aircraft” appears to be yet another example of Gulf War revisionism. It seems like a very common trend in the past few years to look at what was unquestionably a resounding triumph for NATO with the chest-thumping tone of “this is what unrestrained NATO warfare/air power can do.” This rose-tinted view conveniently overlooks not just some inconvenient facts about military power than and now (i.e. back then, the U.S. DID spend 5% of its GDP on defence rather than the current 3.4%, and maintained a fleet of combat aircraft some 2.5 times larger than the present) but even the technological challenges of the Iraqi forces and ESPECIALLY the disarray which reined across their command in general and in their air force in particular. It was only 3 years before the Gulf War that the coup plotters in the Iraqi air force attempted to first shoot down his plane and then to bomb him on a parade, and he retaliated with purges which make the post-Prigozhin events look like a storm in a teacup. A MONTH before the Gulf War was the time Saddam chose to dismiss his Defense Minister and outright execute 16 major officers.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090105033157/http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj92/win92/hurley.htm
As the above shows, the “modern combat aircraft” of the West opposed aircraft which were not only decades older (with even the most advanced Iraqi plane, MiG-29, now forming the core of Ukrainian fleet but no longer used on the frontlines by Russia) but also with pilots whose training the source above describes as “negligible” and with no effective command. So, their only opposition was on the ground, from the SAMs which were developed in the 1960s and are no longer used by Russia – and even THEN, F-15s and F-16s have taken confirmed losses from those systems like Kub and Pechora and had to relegate the bombing of Baghdad to stealth F-117s to avoid taking further losses. Up until now, F-16s and the like have never been used against the systems like Buk, S-300 and the rest in large-scale combat (not counting a few meticulously planned Israeli raids on Syria and Iran) – and now that they do, they are kept well behind the frontline. Other non-stealth planes, such as the F-15s, F-14s, F-18s, Eurofighters, etc. all have similar or larger radar cross-sections and are unlikely to fare any better – while the stealth planes have never had to be maintained under the threat of attacks on their own runways and supply areas, and according to one report, are forced to go for scheduled repairs after a mere 15 flight hours.
Hence, I don’t think the counterfactual claims of either those aircraft or even the long-range missiles making a difference massive enough to actually win the war for Ukraine, no matter how early they would have been provided, should be taken any more seriously than, say, then-Ukrainian Defence Minister boasting in the first half of 2023 that he would celebrate the end of that summer on a Crimean beach – in the absence of all the systems now retroactively described as essential just above. A third or perhaps a quarter of the entire vaunted U.S. military stockpile (i.e. 7-10 times more armoured vehicles than what Ukraine actually received from the U.S.) might have done it, but providing all of that + the fuel, etc. to run it was never considered a serious possibility. Perhaps Ukrainians going for Kursk that year with the people and equipment they still had back then and in place of the real-world “counteroffensive” would have forced a favourable land swap too (at the cost of massive population displacement – not that the ultimate Ukrainian victory wouldn’t have involved the same, in fairness), but we’ll never know.
Too many people have forgotten how much of a meatgrinder industrialized war over large territory when it is not completely lopsided – including the one who started it, else it would have never occurred. Now, it’s beginning to look like the least costliest option for Europe and the world in the foreseeable future is to replicate the Korean DMZ’s belt of landmines alongside the entire de facto border with European Russia. That appears to work far better than even the nuclear deterrent (which hasn’t stopped either the Argentinian attempt to reclaim “Las Malvinas” nor the still-ongoing occupation of a sliver of Kursk Oblast.)
“Furthermore, if “the greatest single source of American dominance is a fleet of ICBMs”, then Russia should be far more dominant than it is due to possessing the very same.”
We can test the theory if you like. We can give Ukraine enough nukes to blow Russia to glory, and see if that has any effect on Russian policy.
https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collections-nuclear-deterrence-101/
Your post mentioned “dominance” and I responded to that, while now you are talking deterrence, which is a very different point. It is not ICBMs which allow the U.S. to “dominate” other countries in the conventional meaning of the word – that is, enjoy the fiscal freedom associated with fielding the world’s reserve currency, the power to sanction/tariff any country they like and invade just about any place besides other nuclear states, to lure just about any specialist they want (along with the kind of immigration that used to be considered desirable there even a few decades ago, but no longer), to have the cultural exports which are inescapable just about anywhere connected to the global markets – but its more “conventional” strengths. Russia lacks those, and so it cannot do any of those things in spite of possessing a similar amount of ICBMs. (For that matter, a Ukraine which DID have enough ICBMs to do what you propose would still not be able to do any of those things either.)
As for your suggestion….there are MANY issues here, starting with the fact that any possibility of this many nuclear weapons being used would hit the entire world really, really badly through nuclear winter (in the post you linked, Professor Devereaux rather downplays the recent scholarship on the subject, which tends to agree that even India and Pakistan exchanging their collective couple of hundred of nukes would cause a nuclear winter large enough to easily qualify for the worst disaster in human history.) Another obvious one is that as he himself notes, MAD only works if the enemy has reason to believe a preemptive strike would not work. A country you are at war with receiving nuclear weapons with the express hope of turning them against your country’s civilians is effectively the single best possible casus belli for a preemptive nuclear strike anyone could ask for. You would have to hope all the espionage (including from satellites) directed at the known nuclear storage sites would fail, that nobody chooses to leak anything, or that nothing is picked up on social media (people living near such bases seem to love posting about any unusual trucks they see.)
Otherwise, imagine you are in the Ukrainian military and have received word that your area is about to host your country’s first (post-1996) nuclear weapons, and the next thing which happens is you witnessing a mushroom cloud rise over one of the country’s cities (most likely Lviv – Russian propaganda loves painting it as a hive of Neonazis, so a strike on it would be by far the easiest to justify to its population) before the delivery of your nukes was completed, just how willing would you be about necessarily becoming the next target once the delivery is complete? Same goes for a scenario where the nuclear weapon delivery is allowed to cross the border only to get hit by a preemptive nuclear strike immediately after. Either one would be as good as losing the war outright – the country still has no nukes, possibly lost a city formerly untouched by the war, and the Japanese example suggests that the remaining military/civilian leadership would rather opt for a palace coup and some form of a surrender rather than attempting to go up the escalation ladder.
In general, a BIG issue with “nuclear intimidation to force the country to withdraw troops from the already occupied territory” strategy is that a) if it worked so easily, Russia should have already been able to get UKRAINE to withdraw from the four oblasts it (currently) contests in this manner; b) the cities Ukraine is most likely to be able to hit near its border like Belgorod or Bryansk (Russia’s missile shield may not be as good as it hoped, but it still exists, and becomes much more likely to succeed around Moscow or the deeper into the country you go) are barely known to most Russians – to the point I suspect most remaining Putinists would find it worthwhile to call Ukraine’s bluff against those cities for the sake of holding on to Donetsk and Sevastopol, which have much richer recent history in the popular consciousness. A “restrained” 1-1 exchange which swaps nuclear strikes on Lipetsk or Kaluga with those on Vinnytsia or Chernihiv would obviously devastate Ukraine far more and is not something for them to wish for. (And a nuclear strike against any Russian city with extensive WWII history like Kursk and Voronezh would also metaphorically “prove” the “denazification” propaganda right, and risk being particularly escalatory in every single way instead of doing the opposite.)
I suspect it’s reasons like this, rather than the goodness of their hearts, why the Ukrainians are still not trying to develop their own nuke from scratch even though they have quite enough fissile material for it, as explained in the article below. (To quote that post again; “Humanity has never once developed a useful weapon they would not use in extremis; and war is the land of in extremis.”) The part where even in the absence of Western support, the pro-nuke Ukrainian strategist is only willing to endorse nuclear development once the frontlines move about 100 km westwards – and seems to hold no hope of using those weapons to reverse territorial losses, rather than simply stem them – is quite telling.
https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/zelensky-nuclear-weapons-bomb-0ddjrs5hw
P.S. If you instead mean the more reasonable proposition that Ukraine should have retained the nukes it inherited from the USSR – then while obvious in hindsight, the issue with that proposition at the time was that the Ukraine of 1990s was quite different from today, and it was hard to tell where it would go from there. Back then, it was the kind of place where one of the then-President’s critics (Georgiy Gongadze) was found decapitated in 2000, and if his own bodyguard did not leak the tapes proving he ordered the murder, he could very well have gotten away with it and built the same kind of a dictatorship as Putin and Lukashenko. (Even after the tapes, the former Interior Minister was found shot in the head just before testifying about the case). Western leaders were extremely reluctant to let that kind of leadership keep nuclear weapons, and can you blame them?
P.P.S. The U.S. never really needed its ICBMs even for deterring an invasion against itself – the military weakness of its only neighbours and the oceans separating it from the other major powers have already achieved that a long time ago. As the post you linked to notes, the deterrent was to prevent the further Soviet push into Europe rather than to protect the U.S. itself, which never experienced a meaningful threat of invasion. This also means that any scenario where the U.S. has no meaningful allies to protect would largely obviate the need for American nuclear arsenal – so Trump’s recent talk about reducing nuclear arsenal is actually quite logical IF we assume he had already decided to give up on Europe anyway AND set the logic of THAT decision aside.
I am not sure I agree. Long range missles and modern aircraft would not have been enough, but they would have done a lot.
Remember, back in the summer of ’22, when the Ukrainians got those HIMARS systems. They got two dozen of those systems and enough amunition to shoot for 24 hours continuously.
The Russian still had the initiative back then. It took them several months and a major mobilisation to get it back.
Do you really think their position today would be as good today, if the Ukrainians would have been able, and allowed, to deny the Russian forces safe rail heads and airports 120 miles behind the front?
Well, there is a world of difference between “as good as today” from you and “The near equality at the front lines is because the previous administration wanted that…the de facto policy of the Biden administration to make sure Russia did not lose the war”, which is what I replied to. I feel that the narrative around those strike capabilities is a variation on the “industrial web theory” which had been extensively criticized on this blog before, as part of the broader criticisms of strategic bombing.
https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower-101/
In this case, of course, the long-range strikes would have been more targeted, but to me, they still appear analogous to the goals of Operation Linebacker in Vietnam – which, as the post notes, was explicitly intended to cripple supply provision through the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And as we all know, Linebacker did not allow South Vietnam to reclaim territory and win the war – even with the direct presence of numerous U.S. troops on the ground during that war. Some reporting may have credited HIMARS use as critical to the successful Ukrainian offensives of 2022, but that happened when opposing a far more overstretched force with poorly overlapping defensive sectors. By 2023, the remaining defences were far more consolidated.
In particular, recall that there already were three defensive lines in Southern Ukraine and that summer’s offensive ultimately stalled out after barely breaching the first line at Robotyne, and long before reaching the city of Melitopol which lay well behind all three lines – let alone reaching the coast, the ultimate goal of that offensive. Given the record of Linebacker and similar, I don’t see how whatever precision weapons could have been made available would have substantially changed that outcome. The Ukrainian position would have been better, but I don’t see how it would have been even close to victorious if the amount of ground force materiel would have remained at similar levels.
I think that ultimately, nothing you’ve said invalidates the conclusion you’re replying to. So far as I can recall, no country with a nuclear arsenal has ever lost a war except by choosing to walk away. No country with a nuclear arsenal has ever sustained an invasion to any territory that could remotely be considered worth escalating to nuclear warfare over (the Falklands are not worth obliterating Buenos Aires over; Ukraine occupying some few square kilometers of the Kursk oblast doesn’t remotely count by that standard when Ukraine as a whole has no way of subduing Russia as a whole).
Even if there are exceptions to this rule, or caveats like “someone might annex a random island full of sheep that you claim and dare you to do something about it because what are you going to do, kill a million civilians over a bunch of sheep?” it is still a pretty good standing rule. A pattern that one notices, compared to the much more mixed track record of “getting invaded and losing wars” experienced by nations without a nuclear deterrent.
Now, all this has been discussed at length long before I and probably you were born; my go-to source for it is Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War, published in 1960. The predictable consequence of this (and Kahn predicted it as a possibility, though one that in the end did not materialize) is that either all or most states will join a large bloc under the collective nuclear deterrent of one or more superpowers, or that every nation that has any hostile neighbors (or whose allies have hostile neighbors) will seek an independent nuclear deterrent.
Now, many of these nuclear deterrents may well be on IRBMs, not ICBMs! This is actually a bad thing. See, the problem is that short-ranged ballistic missile shots come from much shorter distances, and the response times are much shorter. So if you are worried about enemy nuclear first strikes, you have much less time to respond to a first strike before enemy nukes start wiping out your vulnerable missile silos if the enemy has IRBMs a thousand miles away instead of ICBMs eight thousand miles away. This, in turn, means that the likelihood of accidental launches due to misunderstandings or failures of early warning systems grows exponentially. As does the temptation to knock an enemy out of the nuclear war pre-emptively overall, because it is much more realistic to imagine that you actually COULD catch all the enemy’s nuclear forces and obliterate them in a first strike if they only get five minutes’ warning of an attack rather than thirty.
So the risk of accidental or deliberate nuclear war goes up massively in such a ‘many-polar’ nuclear world. This is bad.
The less-bad alternative is large blocs which rely on a single centralized control of nuclear weapons to forbid wars of conquest at the expense of any member of the bloc. The ultimate extreme example of this, “just give all the nukes to the UN and use them to enforce a permanent outlawing of war,” was suggested immediately after World War II by both some Americans and some non-Americans. But this has obvious problems because most major countries don’t trust the UN that much, often with reason. The more practical example is, well, the modern world as we knew it from the 1950s up through 2024. There would be, at any one time, about 2-3 serious superpowers with their own major nuclear arsenals. Nearly everyone had a security guarantee from one of those powers that their core territory could not be simply annexed without a nuclear response or at least a serious conventional attempt by a superpower to prevent the conquest.
And, not counting civil wars in which a nation is “conquered” by internal elements who don’t like the old regime’s politics, and occasional external crushings of quasi-pariah states like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia, that norm has largely held up for as long as nearly everyone now living can remember.
Now that norm is very much in question. Dozens and dozens of nations have historically enjoyed US security guarantees, but for so long as Trump or oligarchs aspiring to succeed him reign in the US, the ability to get those security guarantees enforced is very much in question. Ukraine is losing their guarantee after it was implicitly extended, quite fast, due to circumstances beyond their control. Taiwan may be losing it too, given some of the language coming out of the White House.
Who’s next?
Everyone has a lot more reason to tool up with nuclear weapons of their own. Which, again, brings the risk of accidental or intentional nuclear war much farther back onto the table.
This analysis is not bad per se, but it is rather one-sided. A more balanced look would have noted that the exact same things were being said after the regime change intervention in Libya, which proved the apparent folly of giving up one’s nuclear arsenal well before Ukraine – and yet, one is hard-pressed to point to any country which DID take measurable steps towards nuclear capability after not previously considering it in the aftermath of that.
For that matter, last year’s Israeli invasion of Lebanon was also interpreted by some as pushing Iran further towards completing its nuclear weapons program – yet this is also curiously absent from your analysis.
I should also note that “strategic ambiguity” towards Taiwan (which has less international recognition as an independent country than an UK-sized patch of Western Sahara with some 200k people in it) specifically exists to deny it an explicit security guarantee – Biden might have made it explicit in some press conferences, but that made him an exception to the official US policy, not the rule.
The “dozens of countries” you mention are mostly the EU states, and there are already talks about their two existing nuclear states, UK and France, extending their nuclear umbrella or sharing their weapons in some arrangement – a rather different scenario from random countries developing nuclear warheads out of the blue. For the argument to work well, it would be good to identify specific countries you consider to possess explicit reasons to develop nuclear weapons vs. the generalized “everyone”. It is also worth noting that once a country is small enough, its drive towards nuclear arsenal can be stopped fairly easily – while Israel’s extensive campaign of sabotage and assassination against the Iranian program may not succeed in the long run (though one may argue the program would have already succeeded without it), it’s only taken a single bombing raid against Iraq and then Syria to halt their nuclear programs.
YARD, let us happily take all of Europe as one country, rather than the dozens I see on the map. That still leaves Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia and Taiwan as likely new nuclear powers, neatly outnumbering the five “traditional” pre-Non Proliferation Treaty powers. So that is quite a jolt to the system in its own right, quite apart from what happens afterwards.
Only a matter of time: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/17/europe-france-uk-nuclear-shield-emmanuel-macron
(There is no way Germany is paying for nukes it has no control over, whatever fig leaf they put up for the NPT.)
IIRC, I suggested on this blog a few years ago that we might have a hundred nuclear powers in the world by the end of this century.
The thing is that Libya was already something close to a pariah state as far as the US-led international order was concerned. The real lesson of Libya for most countries in the world wasn’t “get nukes to keep someone from attacking you,” it was “don’t be a pariah state if you can help it because then the US government might just decide to splatter your regime all over the landscape purely to make a point if they think they can get away with it.”
And that lesson was already amply demonstrated by Saddam Hussein, and basically every non-nuclear non-pariah state was already taking it to heart if they had the option.
The difference is that now nations that historically WERE US allies and firmly integrated into the system are having to ask “can we rely on the US conventional or nuclear umbrella to discourage anyone from attacking us.” That’s relatively new, because that kind of security guarantee has been fairly good currency for the past 2-3 generations.
But (as Dr. Devereaux has covered elsewhere) the US alliance structure at this point covers most of the globe, so that is a LOT of countries potentially considering becoming nuclear powers to discourage aggression.
And the problem is that this kind of thing tends to cascade. China got nukes in large part because the USSR had them and tensions between the two countries were rising. India got nukes in large part because China had them. Pakistan got them in large part because India had them. Iran wants them in large part because both Israel and the US have them, and if Iran gets them, countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia are going to want them too if they can’t count on US security guarantees, and so on, and so on.
Arms races tend to cascade. They don’t stay limited to single regions of the world after a global norm of “the US will step in to prevent wars of aggression except under highly specific and exceptional circumstances which you can avoid by playing nice” has disappeared.
> That still leaves Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia and Taiwan as likely new nuclear powers
Well, I actually live in Australia and while I know this idea sadly enamoured some strategists here for a while, it appears completely insane to me. Even the nearest country which has the capacity to even contemplate an invasion, Indonesia, is separated by some 236 km between the two closest points. That is 1.5 times greater the 180 km width of the Taiwan Straight (which is itself approximately equivalent to the distance travelled by the D-Day ships). Furthermore, actually following that route would leave any troops which make it stranded in the jungle belt on the northern coast of the country, and they would have to move a further 1500-2000km by land roads (many of which run through scorching desert with no logistics to support an invasion force) to get to the cities where most people live. Alternatively, they can JUST force their navy to circle around the whole of Australia, adding a further >2,000 km. An invasion force from China would have to travel even more vastly stupid distance.
Now, remember that the aforementioned distances ALSO mean that only the ICBMs can reach out far enough from Australia to deter anybody (technically, IRBMs can reach Indonesia’s closest islands from the northern coast, but that’s an awful place to station anything, and they would not hit anything significant) – and ICBM development is an extremely long and complex process. Unless somebody is kind enough to just sell a working ICBM and its carrier to us/set up the hardened base here (which kinda goes counter to your entire premise) then by the time one completes its test flights, even Indonesia would likely already have a decently strong missile shield – and perhaps even weapons of its own developed in response. China, of course, already has a missile shield and I daresay it would always be able to build additional ICBM defences many times faster than Australia could build ICBMs.
In short, an invasion of Australia would be logistically a very stupid idea, whose benefits are incomparable to costs (just think that similar considerations would also apply to sustaining an occupation force, for one thing). Even should anyone appear to be foolish enough to try it (as opposed to just buying whatever they need from us, which we already do very willingly – look up Australia’s trade balances), investments in anti-ship and anti-air missiles would be literally hundreds of times more cost-effective than nuclear weapons – MUCH faster to scale up and also much harder to counter (the difference between protecting a fleet in the open sea travelling for days vs. protecting a country which built up air defences for decades.) Building nukes would also require a massively expensive missile shield anyway – we cannot possibly launch a nuke at nuclear power without expecting retaliation, and hitting just our state capitals and their satellite cities (about a dozen targets in total) would leave little but tiny towns and scattered farms as survivors.
With your other examples, Japan appears the most plausible to me, since it is well-known to be a so-called “turnkey” nuclear power, which has long had the capacity to construct a nuclear weapon in weeks at most if it really wanted to. Of course, the reason it hasn’t done that already is because diplomatic opprobrium and the physical costs of maintaining such weapons (not to mention the scars of being on the receiving end) are believed to outweigh the fairly limited risks of an invasion to date (i.e. Chinese troops would have to travel some 800km by sea to reach Okinawa from mainland and 700km from Taiwan – 4-5 times larger than the Taiwan Straight distance.)
South Korea is also rumoured to have that capacity, but the issue with it throwing nuclear weapons around is that the totality of the Korean Peninsula is slightly smaller than the UK and is comparable in size to Belarus – same Belarus where 15% of the country was hit by fallout from Chernobyl (which was admittedly very close to their border) so a use against their neighbour would blow back on themselves. It could theoretically deter an invasion from China that way (likely naval because of the DMZ) but the logistics of both the invasion and launching a missile through both the PRC and DPRK missile shields are far from optimal – and China could easily retaliate against any launch, failed or successful, by giving green light to the North to level Seoul with a conventional artillery barrage from across the DMZ.
The issue with Canada and Taiwan developing nuclear weapons NOW (as opposed to Taiwanese attempts during the Cold War) is quite simple. If they can no longer rely on their main ally to protect them from an invasion (or indeed, are about to be threatened by an invasion from that ally) then there is also nothing stopping conventional attacks on their nuclear weapons program akin to Israeli ones on Syrian and Iraqi programs. There is nothing much Canada can do against US bombers levelling whatever site they attempt to assemble a nuke at – assuming the attempt does not precipitate the very invasion they want to deter. Likewise, in the era of where PRC fields stealth aircraft and precision missiles, an attack on Taiwanese nuclear program wouldn’t be very hard. Even if it won’t succeed on the first try, national interest dictates they would try again and again until they succeed – and there would be little Taiwan could do in response.
The so-called “global norm” of “the US will step in to prevent wars of aggression except under highly specific and exceptional circumstances which you can avoid by playing nice had been effectively non-existent when the so-called “African World War” happened not too long ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War
“And the problem is that this kind of thing tends to cascade….Iran wants them in large part because both Israel and the US have them”
I notice you skipped over how Israel came to possess nuclear weapons. I suppose acknowledging they did NOT have any nuclear-armed neighbour but still decided the conventional threat posed to them was great enough to warrant it would have forced an acknowledgement that an active, unsettled border conflict is a more important prerequisite for the development of nuclear weapons than the presence of other nuclear states in the vicinity would have been too damaging to the point you wanted to make.
“the US alliance structure at this point covers most of the globe” – I have read the “The Status Quo Coalition” post too, and I don’t see where you got that conclusion from there.
“The difference is that now nations that historically WERE US allies and firmly integrated into the system are having to ask “can we rely on the US conventional or nuclear umbrella to discourage anyone from attacking us.””
It’s a bit worse than that. All else being equal, the longer the reach and the greater the power, of a country, the more countries it can threaten, and the more countries need to threaten to nuke it back. All else being equal, the country most countries need to be able to nuke is the United States.
I’m not sure how deterrence will work when there are a dozen countries that can nuke the US, and no easy way of telling which ones submarines fired.
YARD has helpfully shown us why they should acquire the weapons in any quiet moment. And the technology is hardly high-tech anymore, quite apart from the possibility of buying it off the shelf.
“I’m not sure how deterrence will work when there are a dozen countries that can nuke the US, and no easy way of telling which ones submarines fired.”
Spy satellites take snapshots of naval ports many times a day nowadays – certainly of those that are known to host nuclear-capable submarines. That gives warning when one of those is at sea – and a signal for hunter-killer subs to be on the lookout. If you can’t make a very long-range missile, your submarine will have to pass by a series of highly sensitive acoustic sensors giving further warning to hunter-killers or sub-hunting planes. (Remember, the sub cannot launch ICBMs from deep underwater, and there is also preparation time rendering it vulnerable.) In general, ICBM subs are not a silver bullet, and are rather closer to aircraft carriers in terms of needing a support network to deal with countermeasures.
“And the technology is hardly high-tech anymore, quite apart from the possibility of buying it off the shelf.”
Not that simple. These weapons and platforms are expensive and take a long time to develop and build, and it’s highly unlikely a country will build any more than what they think they absolutely need for their own security. So, a prospective buyer will either receive something the seller was going to scrap and that’s of dubious value for deterring the US in particular (i.e. DPRK apparently bought 10 scrapped diesel-electric submarine hulls from Russia in 1993, but those subs are notoriously noisy and easy to track compared to atomic ones – and it’s still taken them over 20 years to relaunch or reverse-engineer just one of those) or be waiting for decades. AUKUS is illustrative – it’s been signed in 2021, yet is not expected to deliver the first sub to Australia until over a decade later – and those subs, though atomic, don’t even have the capacity to launch missiles! (Not to mention AUKUS itself was preceded by over a decade of failed efforts to first develop modern subs domestically, and then to purchase them from France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUKUS
Long time reader, first time commenter; I just wanted to take a moment out of my day to say thank you for the calm and informative post (even as a PhD student myself, I have learned something new), rather than indulging in the “sky is falling” rhetoric that many even otherwise moderate outlets seem to do these days.
As to the book rec’cy, I immediately thought of the old “thieves’ kant” and “carny talk” that used to be plot points in several fantasy series, as well as staples of old tv shows, like “Dr Who”, where the subject would come up every so often.
The coded talk is also a hallmark of a lot of queer spaces in the previous century, and may still be in some circles.
So it sounds really interesting for a variety of reasons.
I won’t comment on Ukraine – as I have nothing of value to add to the discussion and my invective against the current mis-administration would only be a “ditto” to your very erudite comments. Glad someone is saying the obvious.
And as for RoP? Dear Sir, I salute you for dying for the rest of us by watching such subpart offerings, and I will honor the sacrifice of brain cells by reading you missive next week, but I will not be watching the show myself, as I hope Bezos loses money on the entire enterprise.
Any thoughts on War of the Rohirrim?
Thanks for reading, if you get this far down the comments.
I too would be curious to read Bret’s take on the War of the Rohhirm (even if it was just recycled Battle of the Hornburg, or as the movie put it, Battle of Helm’s Deep).
About costly signals, I’m immediately reminded of revenue stamp. It’s not that expensive but is still costlier than normal stamp. I’ve always wondered why it’s needed for important contracts, my initial guess is to reduce stamp.
“I’m immediately reminded of revenue stamp. It’s not that expensive but is still costlier than normal stamp. I’ve always wondered why it’s needed for important contracts, my initial guess is to reduce stamp.”
The reason for the state is, well, revenue.
The reason for the contracting parties is to get the state to enforce the contract in case of a future dispute.
After all, what incentive does a powerful third party like King have to intervene in a dispute, even when the alternative is violence and both parties are petitioning the King to resolve the dispute? A feud between two parties is violence but it is not violence against King, and the King might refuse to pick a side unless and until the feuding parties use violence against King and his men.
An obvious reason is profits of justice. Court costs, fines, amercements, unlaws and forfeitures for breaching King´s peace. These are from people who actually get in a dispute.
Stamp tax is collecting profits of justice from people who, by making of important contract, demonstrate that they have a prospective future dispute, and also that they have assets to lose by breach of contract, or to pay the King for prospective future justice.
People who make important contracts on unstamped paper, or orally even though before witnesses, are denying the King the revenues he is demanding for his prospective justice – for which the obvious revenge of the King is to deny his help enforcing the contract.
I just thought that it’s too cheap for that, at least currently. Or is it actually fair priced? It’s under one buck in my place.
It seems worth mentioning, by way of calibration, that national labs and private corporations both have overhead rates in excess of 100%. University overhead rates, by comparison, are a bargain (even at elite private universities)
Universities have grad students, and depending on the job undergrads, will will work for peanuts because their living costs are being subsidized by family, other grants, loans, work-study, etc, and often they are strongly motivated to do research because of program requirements regardless of the personal cost. There also aren’t workweek and overtime laws for research assistants and TAs, or at least that are very much tacitly ignored. This keeps university research overhead very low compared to places that have to actually pay their workers.
When discussing overhead rates, it is important to remember the cost basis they are calculated on. The nominal “50% overhead” (or indirect costs as we now term it) is based on “modified total direct costs” (MTDC), which is direct costs minus equipment over $5000. So $100,000 in direct costs results in $50,000 indirect costs, for a total of $150,000. The indirect costs are thus 33% of total project costs.
The “15% overhead” typical for private foundations is 15% of total PROJECT costs. For $100,000 in direct costs, the indirect would be about $18,000.
Another issue is what gets funded. Foundations prefer to fund projects with an immediate payoff. NIH and NSF take a longer view, funding projects that lay the groundwork for future progress, even if we don’t know what that would entail.
https://www.understandingwar.org/ is also a useful reference on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s updated daily. I’ve seen it referenced in major news outlets.
“if you pay for 75% of a research project, you don’t get 75% of a result. Generally, you get 0% of a result.”
That kind of is a sunk-cost fallacy though. It’s better to save the last 25% and get 0 results, than to keep spending just to get some, especially when you don’t care about them or explicitly don’t want them.
I have not delved into what exactly US research grants go into, but I have skimmed some of the grants done in my country, some of them in the milions of PLN, and many were quite eyebrow raising. Sure, multiple milions at the scale of the government is peanuts, technically speaking, but:
A) it is still milions not being spent on something else, government is not a botomless well of money
B) the size and reach of governments nowadays is truly vast, so if you want to make marked increases in efficiency and reduce the cost of operation without disrupting vital functions of it, you’ve thousands of such minor savings to do everywhere, and science, reaserch and funding is not exempt from that.
The part about academia just makes it far more palatable for propaganda and visibility purposes for all involved. Your average American won’t look fondly on milions being spent on some nieche reaserch that bores no visible impact on his life, while reaserchers and academia is very invested in the subject, and very vocal in the public square, so it’s a perfect subject to be major focus of discussion and political clashing, even if it is relatively minor in the grand scheme of government spending.
Now, an important and in-depth analysis of the subject would have to point to actual benefits of some of the reaserch done (mostly STEM, since it’s more practical than humanities – and also, as you point, a larger portion of it) vs the cost of it over the years. Obviously much more difficult to do and ironically, something that would require a lot of reaserch itself, but a concrete number of “We spent 100 bilion dollars on grants in past 5 years, here’s X bilion of direct benefit that created” is a much more palatable argument than complaints about how cutting it disrupts further reaserch. Because sure, it does, but if spending that money goes nowhere but to keep reaserchers clothed and fed, and line the pockets of companies supplying their equipment, what’s the exact point of spending that money?
That approach sounds nice, but is often actually counter-productive. First, ‘direct benefit’ is hard to measure, or often not measurable at all in any concrete way. What’s the value of funding history? Or the arts? We do these things because they are good to have, not because of any monetary return. Second is that the hard problems usually involve lots of research that does not pay off, but illuminates the solution space. Sometimes involving a decade or more of working away (aircraft detection is a good example – it required the invention of several new technologies plus several blind allies). The counter-productive is that a sharp focus on the immediate gain tends to deprive the foundational work. And a final is that whether or not the ‘public’ is persuaded of the value is not reliant on figures or gain but on attitudes in the first place – those suspicious of or hostile to the whole endeavour are to be won over with figures.
While I agree with Peter mostly, another point is this; that’s *explicitly congresses job*! If you have a problem with funding priorities ask Congress to change them! These grants didn’t spring from the aether, Congress set aside funding for them.
There’s arguably no significance to if the funding priorities are good to the conversation here, because the system for cutting back on funding isn’t being followed. It’s maliciously destructive.
If you mean solely in terms of PR, the only argument needed is that Musk and Trump are just outright lying while doing something they are, legally, not even allowed to do. They’re over counting savings in ways that would get basically anyone else arrested, let alone fired. There’s also the “small” issue that legally these aren’t savings, *the money is still budgeted*, it must be spent or it’s a constitutional crisis.
” These grants didn’t spring from the aether, Congress set aside funding for them.”
False.
Congress tossed a chunk of money over to be distributed as the executive saw fit. Witness that USAID was created by executive order, not by Congress.
In a democracy, elected executives control unelected bureaucrats.
The way Congress has gone MIA over the past 2 decades is honestly obscene. If I did that little at my job I’d get fired. But everyone just goes asking with if instead of holding their representatives accountable or even just asking their representatives awkward questions!
The thing is, for most people, THEIR Congresscritter isn’t the problem, it’s all the OTHER Congresscritters that are the problem.
Yeah, Congress is pretty dysfunctional, but that’s what happens when political parties and megadonars create a controlled propaganda environment. It’s extremely hard, nearly impossible, for alternatives to the big two to break into politics, which means members of those parties have an obscene quality of job security for public servants.
The increasing reliance on the executive to get things done is a failure of the entire system that is rooted in the systemic failure of political machines as institutions in the public trust-parties don’t represent us, they rule us. In a sane system Congress would do and be accountable for more everyday decisions.
Of course the Republican solution to that seems to be to burn it down and let a feudal corporatist technocracy take over, which gives focus to how pissed people are at the system given how that pitch *won an election* over the status quo.
I think there is another level of problem, specifically for science funding – overlapping funding. In short, science research has a lot of fixed costs (buying this or that tool) that mean a research lab that already has a lot of grant funding has an easier time getting more funding, while a lab that is short on funds tends to get left further and further behind.
Part of this is just the reality of scientific equipment – time matches on, better tools are invented, and the best labs will buy those tools, getting better data. But there are actually workarounds to that, as many of the best scientific tools are controlled by national labs or other national programs and are contractually required to give access to a wide array of researchers. So those programs can help to balance the field a bit with access to high quality scientific equipment.
But the other issue is the ever increasing scrutiny of science funding itself. In part due to public skepticism around funding, and in part due to the ever growing competition for a relatively fixed pool of grant funding, the requirements for a good grant proposal continue to increase. While novelty is prized, the thing that almost always impressed a grant committee is a guarantee of useful results. “
This sounds impossible – how could I guarantee the results will be useful if I haven’t done the experiment yet? Simple, I do (part of) the research before I get the grant. This sounds weird to anyone whose only understanding of science is the simple narrative of the “scientific method” (choose a hypothesis -> test that hypothesis). But it is a natural extension of how actual humans do science (collect data, formulate a hypothesis, collect more data to test it).
HOWEVER, this once again means that labs with grant funding (and therefore a steady stream of interesting data from which to create hypotheses) have an easier time creating good grant proposals.
This is another way in which “dying” research programs can get trapped in a funding death spiral, as they end up without enough funding to generate the initial results needed to make their grant proposal look good.
“But the other issue is the ever increasing scrutiny of science funding itself. In part due to public skepticism around funding, and in part due to the ever growing competition for a relatively fixed pool of grant funding, the requirements for a good grant proposal continue to increase. While novelty is prized, the thing that almost always impressed a grant committee is a guarantee of useful results.
This sounds impossible – how could I guarantee the results will be useful if I haven’t done the experiment yet? Simple, I do (part of) the research before I get the grant. This sounds weird to anyone whose only understanding of science is the simple narrative of the “scientific method” (choose a hypothesis -> test that hypothesis). But it is a natural extension of how actual humans do science (collect data, formulate a hypothesis, collect more data to test it).
HOWEVER, this once again means that labs with grant funding (and therefore a steady stream of interesting data from which to create hypotheses) have an easier time creating good grant proposals.
This is another way in which “dying” research programs can get trapped in a funding death spiral, as they end up without enough funding to generate the initial results needed to make their grant proposal look good.”
Recall the logic of an university operating as a collection of financially separate small businesses.
Compare a small business that is, for example, building houses.
House building is relatively predictable business. A house builder that takes an upfront payment to build a house has relatively good predictability of ability to build the house with target quality, time and cost.
Scientific research, for one, has a far higher risk – such as the possibility of the specified project proving impossible after large amount of costs. And not only. Scientific results are also devalued if someone else achieves the same result in the meantime. (Houses can be devalued if too many houses saturate the market in the vicinity, but there are more opportunities to sell the same house to another buyer).
So how do you sell nonexistent houses? For houses, the alternatives may be to build a house on builder´s cost and try to sell it as a complete house, or do a part of the building and try to find a buyer to fund completing it.
For scientific results, it also seems difficult to bargain for a fair market price for a completed project.
Death spiral is logical either way – the business needs to store risk capital to cover the cost of failures and starting projects. And so are problems starting up – it is hard for a startup without initial risk capital to collect the risk capital reserves to cover failures.
Well, some of the things that happened during the Chinese Cultural Revolution might provide perspective. As a means to bringing politically unreliable academics in line, grant cuts don’t quite rank alongside ‘shut down the schools and send the teachers to the countryside for re-education.’ And their education/research system recovered after a few decades, so… clearly this is nothing to worry about, right?
Wait, Trump also tried to go after medical research?
Elon Musk going after USAID already looked ‘stupid evil’ to me*. However, that seems even less wise to me.
Though, it is best to try to stay away from such news; I already have nearly suffered a ‘Trump poisoning’ from the newspapers and radios here constantly going on about their new President.
* What would happen with the US geopolitical position if so many countries were to receive foreign aid from the PRC but none from the USA. Did they think that the Soviets, which had killed around a million civilians in Afghanistan as collateral damage, had spent so much on foreign aid out of the goodness of their hearts?
What would happen with the US geopolitical position if so many countries were to receive foreign aid from the PRC but none from the USA.
Moot point, given where the spending was going.
And you have nothing better to do with your time then, that you spend over an hour each day arguing with a dozen different people in one comments section?
Do you?
Well, considering that you post like over a dozen time more comments here than me, I don’t think that is a very good retort…
A few random thoughts about this:
One way to get across “$200m is not a meaningful amount of federal funding” is to note that it is less than $1 per American.
Living in Massachusetts, the Boston Globe published an agonized story about how much money “we” would be losing. It turns out that the big NIH grant recipients in Mass. aren’t universities, but the handful of large, prestigious (rich) teaching hospitals in Boston. But I suspect their economics are reasonably similar to top-tier universities.
You write of the loss of researchers … but I get the depressed feeling that even if an entire cohort of new Ph.D.s gets forced out of the academic research industry, there is another cohort coming next year. One thing that’s clear is that the supply substantially exceeds demand.
My analysis … The NIH is still going to hand out grants, and researchers will still get them. The question is whether the researcher can find a university to host the research … because researchers can, will, and already do relocate to new universities to get better deals on their research. The incentive on a university is to bend the system to the point that the money they get for “indirect costs” exceeds the incremental cost of hosting the research, since that money can be used as part of the general budget. (Given what I don’t know, it’s possible that that is even explicitly allowed, as the research’s *proportionate share* of the university’s indirect costs is likely larger than the *incremental* indirect costs — fixed costs are in the former but not in the latter.) But the incentive on a university is to *accept* any research if the allowed overhead is less than the incremental costs. In that regard, the NIH has the upper hand, it’s a “monopsony”, a monopoly buyer of research services, nobody else is offering universities *any price*.
So the crucial question — which will shake out fairly quickly in the market — is whether enough universities will take the 15% overhead rate (as being at least their incremental costs of hosting research) to provide hosting for all the research the NIH gives grants for.
It’s funny that people who’ll complain until they’re blue in the face about deficit budgets are probably more likely to have something like a mortgage, and should have firsthand experience on how it’s neither disastrous nor ruinous to go into debt in order to buy something that is extremely useful.
A debt that is primarily owned by members of the American public, meaning that the process of repaying it is actually continuously cycling more money back to the American public in addition to them reaping the additional benefits of the things that the debt goes towards paying, whether it be national infrastructure, international stability and prosperity, or helping to ensure that the cultural, intellectual, scientific, and medical landscape of their own nation is thriving.
The long term consequences of being taxed less might not prove so rosy when there’s a less intricately furnished nation in which to actually spend that money.
(Although I suppose that’s not a going concern for people who were old enough to form political opinions fifty or sixty years ago.)
Come back when you have examples of people who complain and whose mortgages are going up every single year.
Until then, you are offering a distraction.
(As for people whose credit card debt goes up every year, I’ve noticed they know what a bad thing it is even when they do it.)
I mean, if a person isn’t on fixed interest and the rate goes up from when it starts, that is functionally the same as the mortgage increasing.
That and the likelihood that it’s not the only debt they’ll take on in their life. Across a period of around thirty years, it’s almost a guarantee; people often cannot afford to wait until one debt is paid off before taking on another.
That being in the life of one individual, rather than maintaining the substructure of one of the largest and most structurally and economically complex nations on Earth.
Incidentally, for any pensioners in the room, one wonders how much of their pension fund is invested in government bonds. How much of their livelihood in old age is maintained by the government needing to have debts to repay.
(Like, in addition to things like Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare, which are part of why it needs to go into debt in the first place, being by far one of the greatest expenditures of the federal government and a mounting cost due to the aging population of the country.)
In any case, it’s not a distraction, it’s illustrating the inconsistencies in the position that spending from a position of debt is inherently a bad or non-viable thing. A response to the cliche of “they shouldn’t invest money they don’t have”.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk could probably tell one a thing or two about that, having at various points in their careers founded the entirety of their personal and business spending on being up to their ears in debt.
Oh, and people taking additional mortgages is also a not uncommon thing.
Yes, and we all know what a terrible thing those second mortgages are. Do you not remember the housing crisis?
The 2008 crash was caused by subprime mortgages issued with deceptive terms to consumers (although mostly just to speculators and developers), not the occasions where financial necessity requires a person to take on additional debt against their house.
“I mean, if a person isn’t on fixed interest and the rate goes up from when it starts, that is functionally the same as the mortgage increasing.”
But it isn’t, and therefore should not be offered as an example.
“That and the likelihood that it’s not the only debt they’ll take on in their life. ”
Irrelevant. You have to show they are getting deeper and deeper in debt with no end in sight.
“it’s illustrating the inconsistencies in the position that spending from a position of debt is inherently a bad or non-viable thing.”
It’s a distraction from the actual problem of mounting debt by trying to lump it in with having debt at all.
These are things that really speak to differences in scale for debt incurred by the individual and by the government of one of the largest and most financially active countries in the world more than they undermine the principle that spending based on debt is unviable, I think.
After all, the spectre of mounting public debt has been invoked for decades by now, and yet the supposed collapse it portends has not occurred, nor seems to be in sight. Growing debt comes off more as a consequence of growing responsibilities due to a larger populace and economy than anything. The question is how commensurate that is with revenue streams and other general financial management.
(Also again referring back to the point that the vast majority of the debt is owned by the American public).
Although it somewhat deviates off from the originating point of “the debt is bad because it is incurred while spending on frivolities” rather than “the debt is bad because it is debt”. I find the initial point ought to be addressed first with “debt is not bad if what it’s incurred on is worth it (and the debtor is solvent enough to continuously repay it)”, and then move on to question whether it is really being spent frivolously.
Still, who knows. The crosshairs seem to have finally moved on to Social Security, so perhaps that actually will correct issues with the deficit.
Given that Musk is claiming that the fraud goes to “tens of millions” of claims (to a system that only services tens of millions), you might be able to let us know how that turns out.
History is chock-full of disaster that were seen coming, and yet dismissed as cavalierly as you are doing here, on the very grounds you are doing here.
And if the differences in scale make so great a difference, your original claim about people’s mortgage was absurd. Why therefore did you make it?
The shortsightedness and ignorance behind these cuts is appalling. We’re feeding stacks of hundred dollar bills into a shredder then bragging about the pennies we made by selling the shredded remains to a recycler.
I have a question for Bret: How did ancient book “publishing” work before the invention of the printing press (more specifically, in classical greece/rome)? How would an author even go about “publishing” a book he’s written? Every copy of a book would’ve had to be copied by hand by a scribe… So how/why were copies made? Were there “publishing houses”, or was this a bunch of ad hoc operations by some rich people?
Even more ad hoc than that, often enough. People who wanted a copy would have it made. Perhaps borrowing a book and doing it themselves, or getting a scribe to do it.
You gave a reading to a circle of your friends and admirers. If it took, professional scriptoriums would take it up – where a reader read to maybe 20 trained writers, the scrolls sold to libraries, gymnasia and the rich. We know that ‘novels’ circulated in the ancient world. so copying, while not cheap, was common and affordable enough to support this.
I understand it wasn’t the point of the post, but the grant focus really obscures other ways in which the federal government funds universities and humanities departments. For example, more than one fifth of the UC system’s <$50B operating budget is federal. It's DOE support, direct appropriations, and the enormous volume of federally secured cheap student loans. And those in turn support salary outlays. To pay for a full professor is to pay for his research, even if it isn't itemized that way.
I’m not sure whether to be amazed at so many comments on this post, or at how few have anything to do with the subject.
One of the points of public government grants, of course, is that those researchers accepting money must make their findings public. So it is remarkable when some of the people attacking the NIH and similar grants claim that there’s rampant corruption and no transparency.
https://grants.nih.gov/funding/explore-data-on-funded-projects
Lots of data; the NIH also has pages about how oversight of grants works, as well as three different ways to report projects which do not comply. Many of the people accusing the federal government of massive corruption appear totally ignorant of government systems and agencies specifically designed to prevent corruption. And it’s unclear whether grants will become less corrupt as many of the people employed full-time to monitor them get fired.
If the public data is wrong or censored–and I see no evidence for that claim–then presumably when Musk publishes the full data he’s recovering, everyone will have evidence of that. He hasn’t published any full records from anywhere thus far, though. One wonders if he ever will.
If the primary complaint here is that the federal government is getting screwed on indirect costs, then surely the way to address that complaint is to propose some sort of “means-based” limit on the indirect cost sharing between the NIH and grant-receiving institutions? Unilaterally cutting indirect costs to a point where they clearly no longer cover what indirect costs should cover, in the name of punishing a small list of schools which could afford to cover the full indirect costs, not only fails to ensure that institutions are paying their “fair share” but grants a future competitive advantage to the wealthiest schools who are supposedly the bad actors here. If future NIH grants only cover 10% of indirect costs, most schools could not afford to win a grant. Only those schools with huge endowments or other sources of funding could even compete for future money.
There’s an easy to use reporting system at the above link. It was effortless to select a subset of states and see how much money they received in 2024, for example, from the NIH. You can search congressional districts, too. The site even provides a handy list and totals number of grants and value for you. You can also drill down by organization. For example, Alabama received 722 NIH grants in 2024 for a total of $380 million; of these, 615 (for $334 million) went to the University of Alabama-Birmingham, which is where the medical school is. You can even see a break-down by PI. Click on the name and the system takes you to their specific project and a link to their project abstract.
The DOGE website seems to pretty much consist of X posts and I don’t see a single word about compliance, much less people to whom one could report a concern. Perhaps they need some time to develop something as useful as the NIH already has.