My understanding is at least a portion of the people who voted for Trump did not vote for reactionary fascism, but for what he publicly said/says he'll stand for: standing up for the little guy against ruling elites, stopping imperialist wars, boosting the economy and giving people the famous "tariff checks", etc.
Of course he's done exactly the opposite (and more!), but it's hard to see that when we're being brainwashed by billionaire-owned media. Just like it's hard to see why the Democrats are just another corporate scam to profit the wealthy classes when we're being brainwashed by opposite-side billionaire-owned media.
I don't have a lot of faith or trust in the Democratic Socialists of America, but they might well unite most of the people (including Harris and Trump supporters) in common goals: healthcare for all, living wages, affordable housing, stopping the AI bubble and techno-fascism, etc. Basic stuff that's supported by most of the population yet despised by elected representatives from both parties.
Math professors at my alma mater were instructed to remove references to “inequalities” to increase their chances of getting funded. The <= and >= type of inequalities.
Meanwhile there was a period of time in Canada where to have a chance at funding from federally funded programs, regardless of how absurd or tenuous the relationship to the work, one had to prominently shoehorn “climate change” and “equity” into every grant proposal.
Even provinces and municipalities followed suit. Non-profit community org looking to install some signage and a trash receptacle at the start of a walking trail? Please explain in 300-500 words how this advances the causes of DEI. Studying the genome of a viral pathogen impacting raspberry farmers? Explain how the DNA extraction kits, centrifuge, hot water bath, and pipette tips you’re requesting funding for relate to challenges arising from our changing climate.
You find it odd I don't need additional sources for the link that comes sourced and has been in the news for the past few years? I find it "weird" you don't need citations at all.
The comment is removed. I was also a bit confused, so I've looked it up. So a very rough overview: Under Trudeau in Canada some regulations around gender politics and climate change, got a bit out of hand in terms of absurd requirements to state how they are helpful in the matter. Even for trivial things, they were not a hard requirements but helpful.
Unlike the US gov in this post, they didn't slash projects with good intentions, they just changed and clarified the requirements.
Correction welcome, I am far away from canadian politics.
Interesting that an entirely true comment has been removed via flagging. I not only helped write grants during the peak of that trend, but reviewed applications where I was expected to evaluate how other applicants satisfied those priorities of the funding body.
And also it doesn't justify the absurd overcorrection this admin has created.
This is not at all a reasonable response to a legitimate criticism of what many considered a pretentious overreach of the progressive movement. We can have a constructive discussion about all that.
But this level of insanity is another thing, and pointing out that it came about because the previous admin was incentivizing absurd behavior in the name of DEI or whatnot, is not doing their argument the kind of favour they expect
I can still read it; it’s just been downvoted afaict.
But it does seem like a bad comparison if what the other commenter said is true. I mean, here we’re talking about a lot of legitimate research being cut for absurd reasons.
Same. I welcome correction, but I need evidence first. I'm not saying there wasn't something silly going on, but the commenter made it seem like the Canadian government did the opposite of DOGE to the same degree rather than just encourage connections to broader societal impact. Such a claim needs to be sourced.
Yes, but no difficulty to believe it (in an informal Bayesian framework). Also reported interview experiences around the world in the past many years point to the same mentality - questions like "How do you believe you can increase [feeling of acceptance] in the classroom, Professor [of Physics]" (just an example).
Here in France, anecdata from friends working in non-profits. So-called "DEI" is far from a requirement for grants, and depending on the administration may in fact be a factor to get rejected.
That being said, everyone in the associative movement is unanimous that you have to use the words and concepts expected by the administration (however absurd that is related to what you do), and that getting funding has 0 correlation with the actual social benefits of your action but everything to do with the bullshit you write in grants and how friends you are with the decision makers. (this opinion is shared both by people who succeed at getting grants and those who don't)
This is one a level that would be deemed too absurd for a sci-fi movie. But it's the reality.
Putting also words like "climate mitigation" on the list can only imply the list makers are true climate change deniers. Not just "we want to make more money with oil".
They can't seem to decide whether Zohran Mamdani is going to first implement total sharia law, or full red banner style communism. In response I have already seen people printing a few satirical tshirts with a mishmash of soviet era/hammer and sickle iconography and minarets and moons glorifying the Socialist Peoples Republic of Mamadanistan.
It's very simple. Free speech means you should be able to say bigoted things and keep your job and/or highly paid speaking engagement. It doesn't mean you should be able to write an op-ed opposing genocide without being arrested, detained for months, and then deported. The "free speech" crowd has no interest in those issues.
since when does freedom of speech cover "getting money from the government". there is broad latitude for to government to restrict the speech of employees in general (if you are a nonappointed employee of the executive branch you cannot lobby the legislature as a matter of separation of powers, if youre in the military or privy to top secret materials, theres a ton of things you can't say).
Well, the government funds science projects in general, and now they are limiting it based on a very loose list of terms related to ideas counter to their own ideology.
The idea of freedom of speech is to not limit expression of ideas counter to any one ideology.
Also, if corporations donating to political campaigns is speech, so should science funding be - which is now being restricted.
Their usual retort is: “we need more speech in the market place of ideas, not censorship”.
So why don’t they just fund right-wing-aligned projects instead?
if those scientists were to raise money from private donors would they find themselves in jail, or their property confiscated to where they couldnt continue research? that is the definition of "freedom of speech".
if you accept money from the government, you must also accept the fact that that money is political. complaining that losing a barely earned privilege is a loss of freedom of speech is a fucking slap in the face of people who have actually fought hard for freedom of speech.
btw i have a phd in the hard sciences so i know what im talking about when i say grants are "barely earned privileges". they do not, in general, go to the most qualified or talented scientists, hence the word "grantsmanship" to refer to the skills required to obtain a grant that are not the pure scientific skill
I don't think your argument is a genuine one in this case.
The government is and always has been the primary driver of science research funding. There simply isn't enough of a known payoff for private investors to bother and private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall. Or perhaps more accurately the government stepped in because private individuals would not and the risk was falling dramatically behind the world in research.
Now new administrations have always been able to influence grant awards. But rarely have they been so ... bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?
People have always been driven by ideology but the current US admin is just so stupid. Shockingly incompetently stupid. Even if you agree with their ideology do you really want this clown show being the ones implementing it in such a ham-fisted idiotic way?
> There simply isn't enough of a known payoff for private investors to bother and private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall.
not true. in the us, the government funds only about half of all research and development expenditures.
> private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall.
you are certainly not thinking about university endowments. Numerically most university professors are operaring from a startup budget given by the university, not a grant. even in an r1, most professors do not come in with external money.
> bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?
i mean. i dont know which is dumber. thinking a keyword list is a good idea for cancelling grants or thinking that a grant application is the right way to filter for good science in the first place?
> But rarely have they been so ... bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?
Depends what you (and they) think their job is.
RAGE was one acronymn thrown about and name-checked by the vice-president "Retire all Government Employees".
Russel Vaught said:
> We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down... We want to put them in trauma."
"Freedom of speech" crowd curiously picked whose speech is important freedom thing and whose speech is actually anti-free-speech, because it is uncomfortable for the former free speech.
Trying to remove this or that group from civil life and push them into helpless silent situation is important free speech. Protesting this person is not free speech, it is infraction against free speech. Offending certain group is important free speech and they should grow a thicker skin rather then responding. Responding to that is infraction, because bigot has free speech right to never hear something that does not make them feel good.
I’ve found the “freedom of speech” crowd understands freedom the least; notably, that rights come with responsibilities. They want the rights, none of the responsibilities, and to be arbiters of the rights of others (again, they really don’t understand freedom and rights).
A similarly daft group are those who believe in “states rights”, and they make the same mistake: they want states rights, unless it contradicts other things they want. It’s not a real position, they’re fascists.
Man, this is the kind of thing I have been trying to tell people. It's unsettling to think about, but I'm like, "look, there are no rules now, it's all a negotiation, the only real laws are the laws of physics and the rules someone selectively enforces under the threat of violence."
It would do us good if we remember this, because this sort of the basic state of nature that most people have lived under most of human history. I'm not saying this is how it should be, but a lot of people are still living in the pearl-clutched "but, that's against the rules!" despite there being basically no real rules for a decade.
When people realize that it's all nonsense, it's going to get weird.
'The last decade has been the Democrats clinging onto the rulebook going "but a dog can't play basketball!" while a dog fucking dunks on us over and over' -@Arr
There's entire books on developmental economics which explain how states create institutions that might appear to be rules based, but are ultimately just negotiation and favor. They get more money from developed countries and investors that don't look to deep, but ultimately the rate of growth is quite bad, because investing money in that kind of environment just has a poor rate of return.
All well described, with experimental numbers and everything, for countries in Africa and Latin America. Little did people realize that no, you can also apply this to developed countries when they suffer sufficient degradation.
I know a number of immigrants from economically struggling developing nations with endemic institutional corruption who very clearly see what's going on when they look at the behaviour of people who are running US federal cabinet level departments. It's all quite familiar, just on a higher budget.
The US has long been a bit of a dual system, with the world-leading and technology and wealth coexisting with a lot of poverty, violence, and discrimination; but this seems to be the point at which it becomes fully Latin American.
Could be considered "imperial rebound", from all the School of the Americas decades in which the US made Latin America more violent, right-wing, and less democratic for its own purposes, culminating in the invasion of Venezuela. I'm sure they'd have started on Cuba by now if Iran had gone as planned.
We are _in_ the weird stage. The President is someone who has realised the nonsense, because people around him for his whole life have enabled and facilitated the nonsense in order to earn some of his dad's money. And now, instead of his dad's money backing him, he has the US' money, he's got a whole new cabal of enablers and facilitators, and a line as long as roughly 30% of the US population awaiting to fill any role they could get to feed off that fat pipe.
But, yes, when this filters down, and it has started, there's going to need to be a significant amount of legislative strength shown in order to stop the wall from collapsing entirely.
We're going to need more than just "legislative strength" within the framework of our existing government, because this has shown that that framework is inadequate. I don't see a path to true recovery without a Nuremberg-style process in which essentially everyone who held any position of authority in this administration is called to account, in a manner that does not assume that that process must be done in accordance with pre-existing laws. As a simple example, it will require ignoring the Supreme Court ruling that the president is immune to facing consequences for "official acts" he has taken. Most likely it will require ignoring or scrapping the Supreme Court entirely.
And for the next administration to be left holding the bag, teeing it up for another round of "see? SEEEE???? they're terrible at the economy!!" if a Democratic president wins the election
The next presidential campaign should narrowly focus on the long term effects of existing policies if not corrected and direct blame with name dropping. There is no more moral high ground in this fight. The ugly needs to be pinned on the current administration in way that it can never be removed again.
But of course the Democrats will try to keep their heads high and try to float over all of this mess instead of throwing the dirt back that gets flung around. It's not working anymore.
> And for the next administration to be left holding the bag, teeing it up for another round of "see? SEEEE???? they're terrible at the economy!!" if a Democratic president wins the election
The damage the Trump administration is doing/has done is nothing that any future administration can undo. The relationship with NATO members alone is unsalvageable.
Hundreds of millions dramatically undersells what happened in Trump's ~first year back in office:
Trump personally made $3 billion during his 2nd term's 1st year. [1]
19-year-old high school graduate Barron Trump earned $150 million dollars. [2]
Also, Trump's children stand to profit from a $1.6 billion mining deal that Trump cut as president this term - 'Kaz Resources'. [3]
Also, "The White House Intervened to Get a $620 Million Deal for a Company Tied to Donald Trump Jr." - 'Vulcan Elements'. [4]
Also, "Trump’s Sons Land Massive Pentagon Deal as They Flaunt Corruption" via "Powerus" a company founded last year and which merged with a golf club in March. [5]
The Trump family cryptocurrency company received a $500m investment by the Emirati royal family, before the Trump admin announced that the Emirates would be allowed to import enough Nvidia AI chips to build the largest AI campus outside the US. [6]
Edit: As alluded to by walrus01, "The double life of Jared Kushner, mixing business with politics as emissary for his father-in-law Donald Trump … Ivanka Trump's husband has a career as an unofficial diplomat and a master dealmaker, juggling billions and focusing his activities on the Middle East and Near East. His latest coup, carried out with the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, was the $55 billion acquisition of video game giant Electronic Arts." [8]
While Trump and his family have made billions during Trump's first year back as president, for an example of how Republicans treated Biden family finances: in 2018, while Biden was out of office, Biden received a check from his brother with "loan repayment" written on it for 200K. Despite that Biden was not in office then, and the small amount (compared to not just thousands or even millions, but billions that Trump and his family have made in Trump's first year back in office), 5 years later, in 2023, Republicans were still investigating that $200K loan repayment. [7]
Could be a core cadre of 5% of clearly compromised or foreign agents recruiting a vast amount of fools and putting them in the positions where they can do the most damage.
Or it could be a core cadre of 51% of clearly foolish Americans electing a vast amount of fools and putting them in the positions where they will do the most damage.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
We want to put them in trauma.”
That was Russel Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget and key author or Project 2025.
Trump also said, "a whole civilization will die tonight".
Thought terminating cope from people unwilling to accept that they live in a nation full of cruel oinking swine, enough to control the government at the moment. No, they must be foreign assets. Thinking that way makes it easier to ignore the fact that the American individualist (read: selfish and cruel) ideology is baked into every aspect of the country's propaganda. Much easier to ignore it, write hagiographies that have the greed that drove the smugglers and wealthy elite to found this country's morals replaced by rapping stage actors. Craft narratives that the crumbling of the fine character of a nation practicing racial segregation until only half a century ago is actually the crafty infiltration of the savage slavic mind.
I have no idea what your personal background is but it's very interesting that without me saying it or even alluding to it, you jumped directly to what is your presumption of what nation-state ("slavic", presumably you're thinking Russia) that might be controlling foreign agents.
You know it's possible for some groups of people to be a mixed bag of cruel, venal, greedy, feckless, foolish and compromised, right? Of course it's not likely that everyone in the administration is literally a recruited foreign asset.
I believe their point is that the talk about foreign interference is a red herring. The current administration reflects a deeper rot in the culture.
"As democracy is perfected, the office [of president] represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
I would say that the current maga goverment of the USA is the result of the culture, not the other way around. There might be _some_ funny business around the elections but overall the people that fall to/want exactly this government are not few
The trump admin is a hive of scum and villainy worthy of a comic book universe, and Musk is inextricably linked. Thus anyone using twitter or grok or buying a Tesla or using starlink is complicit.
EDIT: or working for these companies!! Couldn’t pay me enough to do it.
Or take a page from IDN homograph attacks in phishing/whatever and replace certain 'a', 'e', 'o' letters with their unicode equivalent that's not English.
Looks like they accidentally put some right wing conspiracy language on the list. No one would ever seriously call their own policies "social engineering" when the word is associated with dictatorship and cyber attacks.
A lot of the DOGE-era bizarro stuff seems to have involved just throwing an LLM instructed to have MAGA conspiracy brainworms at every problem. It would not surprise me if this list was partially generated in that way.
Or it could be one of the conspiracy brained dead-eyed little brownshirts they sicced on the task that put it in there. Who knows. I'm not sure they even knew themselves.
As bad as this is, I don't see how it is fundamentally different to the ways in which research grants have been doled out before. Hasn't it always been somewhat political?
Granted, the methods used here are asinine. But I don't think USG research has ever been apolitical and there have always been special words that grant writers knew to use and not use. Part of being in research is getting grants and it has always been a silly game. This just seems to take the silly game to whole new levels.
They did though, an llm filter is just as dumb. Don”t they have those interviews with the edgelord doge employees trying to justify the stuff they killed?
Adding to this, i think llms are just part of their game, they know well enough they aren’t accurate, but it plays into comments like this, where we’ll think an llm would make a smarter decision, but it’s just a smokescreen, they’re already looking at gaming the bots, musk trying to get grok to abide by his petty worldview is the most obvious ploy. But they’re already obfuscating sources of information as a matter of course, soon, we won’t know anything anymore, we’ll have to trust their machines.
I think their fixation on the machine is part accountability-laundering, part obfuscation as you say. They want a monopoly on not just information, but analysis, and breaking all information infrastructure that does not flow through their pet ideology robot is part of that.
>a handful of federal agencies confirmed earlier this month in court documents that they cut grants if researchers’ projects “expressed, or were presumed to express, viewpoints disfavored by the Administration.”
Why is this bad? The Administration is democratically elected so nominally represents the viewpoints of the majority people - why should taxpayer funding go to disfavored research?
>The UC researchers allege the grant terminations violated their First Amendment rights by targeting their work based on viewpoint and subject matter and have asked the federal judge overseeing the case to rule the revocations unconstitutional.
More weird fascist technocratic fantasies from academia. Why would you be constitutionally entitled to continued public funding?
Read all the comments here, at this time, there are no civil conversations. It's all a echo chamber. You won't find anyone who wants to engage in actual conversation about the topic.
"Humanities" is literally on the list. As in, do not fund any Humanities research.
Also not allowed to use "solar energy", "Geothermal energy", "EV infrastructure", "electrification", "Hydrogen energy".
Welp, America, you either gotta kick this administration out, or enjoy cosplaying the 1800s.
Car powered by coal combustion via fast energy transmission systems. "Chemical coal".
>enjoy cosplaying the 1800s.
Thats what they voted for, dont know why they would get rid of them now.
My understanding is at least a portion of the people who voted for Trump did not vote for reactionary fascism, but for what he publicly said/says he'll stand for: standing up for the little guy against ruling elites, stopping imperialist wars, boosting the economy and giving people the famous "tariff checks", etc.
Of course he's done exactly the opposite (and more!), but it's hard to see that when we're being brainwashed by billionaire-owned media. Just like it's hard to see why the Democrats are just another corporate scam to profit the wealthy classes when we're being brainwashed by opposite-side billionaire-owned media.
I don't have a lot of faith or trust in the Democratic Socialists of America, but they might well unite most of the people (including Harris and Trump supporters) in common goals: healthcare for all, living wages, affordable housing, stopping the AI bubble and techno-fascism, etc. Basic stuff that's supported by most of the population yet despised by elected representatives from both parties.
My friend lost their research grant because they had “accessibility” - they were going to make sure to accommodate screen readers.
Math professors at my alma mater were instructed to remove references to “inequalities” to increase their chances of getting funded. The <= and >= type of inequalities.
Meanwhile there was a period of time in Canada where to have a chance at funding from federally funded programs, regardless of how absurd or tenuous the relationship to the work, one had to prominently shoehorn “climate change” and “equity” into every grant proposal.
Even provinces and municipalities followed suit. Non-profit community org looking to install some signage and a trash receptacle at the start of a walking trail? Please explain in 300-500 words how this advances the causes of DEI. Studying the genome of a viral pathogen impacting raspberry farmers? Explain how the DNA extraction kits, centrifuge, hot water bath, and pipette tips you’re requesting funding for relate to challenges arising from our changing climate.
Humans are a stupid stupid stupid bunch!
Citation needed.
Weird that you want a citation for this but the GP.
You find it odd I don't need additional sources for the link that comes sourced and has been in the news for the past few years? I find it "weird" you don't need citations at all.
The comment is removed. I was also a bit confused, so I've looked it up. So a very rough overview: Under Trudeau in Canada some regulations around gender politics and climate change, got a bit out of hand in terms of absurd requirements to state how they are helpful in the matter. Even for trivial things, they were not a hard requirements but helpful.
Unlike the US gov in this post, they didn't slash projects with good intentions, they just changed and clarified the requirements.
Correction welcome, I am far away from canadian politics.
Interesting that an entirely true comment has been removed via flagging. I not only helped write grants during the peak of that trend, but reviewed applications where I was expected to evaluate how other applicants satisfied those priorities of the funding body.
Because it’s a stupid whataboutism
And also it doesn't justify the absurd overcorrection this admin has created.
This is not at all a reasonable response to a legitimate criticism of what many considered a pretentious overreach of the progressive movement. We can have a constructive discussion about all that.
But this level of insanity is another thing, and pointing out that it came about because the previous admin was incentivizing absurd behavior in the name of DEI or whatnot, is not doing their argument the kind of favour they expect
I can still read it; it’s just been downvoted afaict.
But it does seem like a bad comparison if what the other commenter said is true. I mean, here we’re talking about a lot of legitimate research being cut for absurd reasons.
The comment isn't removed, it's [dead]. Turn on showdead in your profile and you can still see it.
Same. I welcome correction, but I need evidence first. I'm not saying there wasn't something silly going on, but the commenter made it seem like the Canadian government did the opposite of DOGE to the same degree rather than just encourage connections to broader societal impact. Such a claim needs to be sourced.
Yes, but no difficulty to believe it (in an informal Bayesian framework). Also reported interview experiences around the world in the past many years point to the same mentality - questions like "How do you believe you can increase [feeling of acceptance] in the classroom, Professor [of Physics]" (just an example).
Here in France, anecdata from friends working in non-profits. So-called "DEI" is far from a requirement for grants, and depending on the administration may in fact be a factor to get rejected.
That being said, everyone in the associative movement is unanimous that you have to use the words and concepts expected by the administration (however absurd that is related to what you do), and that getting funding has 0 correlation with the actual social benefits of your action but everything to do with the bullshit you write in grants and how friends you are with the decision makers. (this opinion is shared both by people who succeed at getting grants and those who don't)
We had some trouble with a geology grant that mentioned "mineral inclusion".
Yes, same with "diversity" for cellular diversity in the brain. Millions of dollars of grant money withdrawn.
This is one a level that would be deemed too absurd for a sci-fi movie. But it's the reality. Putting also words like "climate mitigation" on the list can only imply the list makers are true climate change deniers. Not just "we want to make more money with oil".
Its important to note that US deficit spending is breaking records. They can't even pretend that they're saving money.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/u-budget-d...
432bn/month is that right?
Deficits only matter when they can be blamed on Democrats. Basically all the (Republican-owned) media agrees on that.
You would think the "Freedom of speech" crowd was up to to arms over a list of banned words from the deep government.
But no, they still seem to busy on Twitter being angry about a Muslim Mayor in New York.
They can't seem to decide whether Zohran Mamdani is going to first implement total sharia law, or full red banner style communism. In response I have already seen people printing a few satirical tshirts with a mishmash of soviet era/hammer and sickle iconography and minarets and moons glorifying the Socialist Peoples Republic of Mamadanistan.
It's very simple. Free speech means you should be able to say bigoted things and keep your job and/or highly paid speaking engagement. It doesn't mean you should be able to write an op-ed opposing genocide without being arrested, detained for months, and then deported. The "free speech" crowd has no interest in those issues.
since when does freedom of speech cover "getting money from the government". there is broad latitude for to government to restrict the speech of employees in general (if you are a nonappointed employee of the executive branch you cannot lobby the legislature as a matter of separation of powers, if youre in the military or privy to top secret materials, theres a ton of things you can't say).
Well, the government funds science projects in general, and now they are limiting it based on a very loose list of terms related to ideas counter to their own ideology.
The idea of freedom of speech is to not limit expression of ideas counter to any one ideology.
Also, if corporations donating to political campaigns is speech, so should science funding be - which is now being restricted.
Their usual retort is: “we need more speech in the market place of ideas, not censorship”.
So why don’t they just fund right-wing-aligned projects instead?
Hypocrisy all around.
if those scientists were to raise money from private donors would they find themselves in jail, or their property confiscated to where they couldnt continue research? that is the definition of "freedom of speech".
if you accept money from the government, you must also accept the fact that that money is political. complaining that losing a barely earned privilege is a loss of freedom of speech is a fucking slap in the face of people who have actually fought hard for freedom of speech.
btw i have a phd in the hard sciences so i know what im talking about when i say grants are "barely earned privileges". they do not, in general, go to the most qualified or talented scientists, hence the word "grantsmanship" to refer to the skills required to obtain a grant that are not the pure scientific skill
I don't think your argument is a genuine one in this case.
The government is and always has been the primary driver of science research funding. There simply isn't enough of a known payoff for private investors to bother and private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall. Or perhaps more accurately the government stepped in because private individuals would not and the risk was falling dramatically behind the world in research.
Now new administrations have always been able to influence grant awards. But rarely have they been so ... bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?
People have always been driven by ideology but the current US admin is just so stupid. Shockingly incompetently stupid. Even if you agree with their ideology do you really want this clown show being the ones implementing it in such a ham-fisted idiotic way?
> There simply isn't enough of a known payoff for private investors to bother and private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall.
not true. in the us, the government funds only about half of all research and development expenditures.
> private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall.
you are certainly not thinking about university endowments. Numerically most university professors are operaring from a startup budget given by the university, not a grant. even in an r1, most professors do not come in with external money.
> bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?
i mean. i dont know which is dumber. thinking a keyword list is a good idea for cancelling grants or thinking that a grant application is the right way to filter for good science in the first place?
> But rarely have they been so ... bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?
Depends what you (and they) think their job is.
RAGE was one acronymn thrown about and name-checked by the vice-president "Retire all Government Employees".
Russel Vaught said:
> We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down... We want to put them in trauma."
"Freedom of speech" crowd curiously picked whose speech is important freedom thing and whose speech is actually anti-free-speech, because it is uncomfortable for the former free speech.
Trying to remove this or that group from civil life and push them into helpless silent situation is important free speech. Protesting this person is not free speech, it is infraction against free speech. Offending certain group is important free speech and they should grow a thicker skin rather then responding. Responding to that is infraction, because bigot has free speech right to never hear something that does not make them feel good.
I’ve found the “freedom of speech” crowd understands freedom the least; notably, that rights come with responsibilities. They want the rights, none of the responsibilities, and to be arbiters of the rights of others (again, they really don’t understand freedom and rights).
A similarly daft group are those who believe in “states rights”, and they make the same mistake: they want states rights, unless it contradicts other things they want. It’s not a real position, they’re fascists.
These people who work for this administration are all so grossly and maliciously incompetent.
Should be criminal.
A lot of it is! We live in lawlessness (for those at the top) in the US.
Man, this is the kind of thing I have been trying to tell people. It's unsettling to think about, but I'm like, "look, there are no rules now, it's all a negotiation, the only real laws are the laws of physics and the rules someone selectively enforces under the threat of violence."
It would do us good if we remember this, because this sort of the basic state of nature that most people have lived under most of human history. I'm not saying this is how it should be, but a lot of people are still living in the pearl-clutched "but, that's against the rules!" despite there being basically no real rules for a decade.
When people realize that it's all nonsense, it's going to get weird.
'The last decade has been the Democrats clinging onto the rulebook going "but a dog can't play basketball!" while a dog fucking dunks on us over and over' -@Arr
There's entire books on developmental economics which explain how states create institutions that might appear to be rules based, but are ultimately just negotiation and favor. They get more money from developed countries and investors that don't look to deep, but ultimately the rate of growth is quite bad, because investing money in that kind of environment just has a poor rate of return.
All well described, with experimental numbers and everything, for countries in Africa and Latin America. Little did people realize that no, you can also apply this to developed countries when they suffer sufficient degradation.
I know a number of immigrants from economically struggling developing nations with endemic institutional corruption who very clearly see what's going on when they look at the behaviour of people who are running US federal cabinet level departments. It's all quite familiar, just on a higher budget.
The US has long been a bit of a dual system, with the world-leading and technology and wealth coexisting with a lot of poverty, violence, and discrimination; but this seems to be the point at which it becomes fully Latin American.
Could be considered "imperial rebound", from all the School of the Americas decades in which the US made Latin America more violent, right-wing, and less democratic for its own purposes, culminating in the invasion of Venezuela. I'm sure they'd have started on Cuba by now if Iran had gone as planned.
Won’t matter as long as people have Netflix and Chipotle
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_state_(model)
This is fantastically interesting, thanks!
We are _in_ the weird stage. The President is someone who has realised the nonsense, because people around him for his whole life have enabled and facilitated the nonsense in order to earn some of his dad's money. And now, instead of his dad's money backing him, he has the US' money, he's got a whole new cabal of enablers and facilitators, and a line as long as roughly 30% of the US population awaiting to fill any role they could get to feed off that fat pipe.
But, yes, when this filters down, and it has started, there's going to need to be a significant amount of legislative strength shown in order to stop the wall from collapsing entirely.
We're going to need more than just "legislative strength" within the framework of our existing government, because this has shown that that framework is inadequate. I don't see a path to true recovery without a Nuremberg-style process in which essentially everyone who held any position of authority in this administration is called to account, in a manner that does not assume that that process must be done in accordance with pre-existing laws. As a simple example, it will require ignoring the Supreme Court ruling that the president is immune to facing consequences for "official acts" he has taken. Most likely it will require ignoring or scrapping the Supreme Court entirely.
They are quite competent at causing enough chaos for those with inside knowledge and wealth to exploit.
And for the next administration to be left holding the bag, teeing it up for another round of "see? SEEEE???? they're terrible at the economy!!" if a Democratic president wins the election
The next presidential campaign should narrowly focus on the long term effects of existing policies if not corrected and direct blame with name dropping. There is no more moral high ground in this fight. The ugly needs to be pinned on the current administration in way that it can never be removed again.
But of course the Democrats will try to keep their heads high and try to float over all of this mess instead of throwing the dirt back that gets flung around. It's not working anymore.
> And for the next administration to be left holding the bag, teeing it up for another round of "see? SEEEE???? they're terrible at the economy!!" if a Democratic president wins the election
The damage the Trump administration is doing/has done is nothing that any future administration can undo. The relationship with NATO members alone is unsalvageable.
It's easier to understand if you consider they might literally be agents of a foreign government.
Never see malice where incompetence is a sufficient explanation.
They are making hundreds of millions of dollars on the grift. They seem quite comptent.
Hundreds of millions dramatically undersells what happened in Trump's ~first year back in office:
Trump personally made $3 billion during his 2nd term's 1st year. [1]
19-year-old high school graduate Barron Trump earned $150 million dollars. [2]
Also, Trump's children stand to profit from a $1.6 billion mining deal that Trump cut as president this term - 'Kaz Resources'. [3]
Also, "The White House Intervened to Get a $620 Million Deal for a Company Tied to Donald Trump Jr." - 'Vulcan Elements'. [4]
Also, "Trump’s Sons Land Massive Pentagon Deal as They Flaunt Corruption" via "Powerus" a company founded last year and which merged with a golf club in March. [5]
The Trump family cryptocurrency company received a $500m investment by the Emirati royal family, before the Trump admin announced that the Emirates would be allowed to import enough Nvidia AI chips to build the largest AI campus outside the US. [6]
Edit: As alluded to by walrus01, "The double life of Jared Kushner, mixing business with politics as emissary for his father-in-law Donald Trump … Ivanka Trump's husband has a career as an unofficial diplomat and a master dealmaker, juggling billions and focusing his activities on the Middle East and Near East. His latest coup, carried out with the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, was the $55 billion acquisition of video game giant Electronic Arts." [8]
While Trump and his family have made billions during Trump's first year back as president, for an example of how Republicans treated Biden family finances: in 2018, while Biden was out of office, Biden received a check from his brother with "loan repayment" written on it for 200K. Despite that Biden was not in office then, and the small amount (compared to not just thousands or even millions, but billions that Trump and his family have made in Trump's first year back in office), 5 years later, in 2023, Republicans were still investigating that $200K loan repayment. [7]
[1] https://theweek.com/politics/donald-trump-presidency-wealth
[2] https://www.timesnownews.com/world/us/us-news/how-did-barron...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/28/world/europe/trump-lutnic...
[4] https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-jr-vulcan-de...
[5] https://newrepublic.com/post/209840/donald-jr-eric-trump-mil...
[6] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/02/trump-uae-cr...
[7] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/31/politics/fact-check-evide...
[8] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2025/10/07/the-dou...
Heck, all of that is like the tip of an iceberg, before anyone even googles like "kushner + saudis"
Could be a core cadre of 5% of clearly compromised or foreign agents recruiting a vast amount of fools and putting them in the positions where they can do the most damage.
Or it could be a core cadre of 51% of clearly foolish Americans electing a vast amount of fools and putting them in the positions where they will do the most damage.
Some direct quotes are,
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
We want to put them in trauma.”
That was Russel Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget and key author or Project 2025.
Trump also said, "a whole civilization will die tonight".
These people aren’t very bright, are they?
> Never see malice where incompetence is a sufficient explanation.
¿Por qué no los dos?
Thought terminating cope from people unwilling to accept that they live in a nation full of cruel oinking swine, enough to control the government at the moment. No, they must be foreign assets. Thinking that way makes it easier to ignore the fact that the American individualist (read: selfish and cruel) ideology is baked into every aspect of the country's propaganda. Much easier to ignore it, write hagiographies that have the greed that drove the smugglers and wealthy elite to found this country's morals replaced by rapping stage actors. Craft narratives that the crumbling of the fine character of a nation practicing racial segregation until only half a century ago is actually the crafty infiltration of the savage slavic mind.
I have no idea what your personal background is but it's very interesting that without me saying it or even alluding to it, you jumped directly to what is your presumption of what nation-state ("slavic", presumably you're thinking Russia) that might be controlling foreign agents.
You know it's possible for some groups of people to be a mixed bag of cruel, venal, greedy, feckless, foolish and compromised, right? Of course it's not likely that everyone in the administration is literally a recruited foreign asset.
I believe their point is that the talk about foreign interference is a red herring. The current administration reflects a deeper rot in the culture.
"As democracy is perfected, the office [of president] represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
I would say that the current maga goverment of the USA is the result of the culture, not the other way around. There might be _some_ funny business around the elections but overall the people that fall to/want exactly this government are not few
more likely alien race
(And/)Or maybe uncaring ("psychotic", technically speaking) exploiters of the system of incentives... "Conformists".
Biologists I know were reporting that they'd changed their grant proposals to study e.g. ovarian cancer in "non-male" mice
Testosterone-challenged mice?
Not sure if that would get additional funding or have it cut.
Ah, yes, what could go wrong?
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
Americas cultural revolution
ancestral values coming back
*devolution
Related:
Banned Words List
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49319573
The trump admin is a hive of scum and villainy worthy of a comic book universe, and Musk is inextricably linked. Thus anyone using twitter or grok or buying a Tesla or using starlink is complicit.
EDIT: or working for these companies!! Couldn’t pay me enough to do it.
"admin" is what we call a regime that works properly. This one doesn't, so it's a "regime".
I guess this is from the Bush-era usage of "regime"? It doesn't normally have a negative implication.
When was the last time you heard a change of government as a result of democratic election referred to as “regime change”?
Regime is what western countries generally, usually call countries they don't like
> Musk is inextricably linked
That's understating it. Musk was the lead role in the cutting, he'd have OK'd the list if not partially authored it.
Lysenkoism, but we are not commies, we pinky-promise.
I wonder if just injecting a typo into each banned word when its used will be enough to bypass the keyword search for auto-banning.
Or take a page from IDN homograph attacks in phishing/whatever and replace certain 'a', 'e', 'o' letters with their unicode equivalent that's not English.
This is what right-wing Twitter brain gets you.
That's just "Twitter brain" at this point, right? Hard to imagine anyone leftish still being there.
They all went to reddit. It is essentially liberal social media now.
Reddit is overwhelmingly liberal, not leftist.
> green new deal social engineering policies
Looks like they accidentally put some right wing conspiracy language on the list. No one would ever seriously call their own policies "social engineering" when the word is associated with dictatorship and cyber attacks.
A lot of the DOGE-era bizarro stuff seems to have involved just throwing an LLM instructed to have MAGA conspiracy brainworms at every problem. It would not surprise me if this list was partially generated in that way.
Or it could be one of the conspiracy brained dead-eyed little brownshirts they sicced on the task that put it in there. Who knows. I'm not sure they even knew themselves.
As bad as this is, I don't see how it is fundamentally different to the ways in which research grants have been doled out before. Hasn't it always been somewhat political?
Granted, the methods used here are asinine. But I don't think USG research has ever been apolitical and there have always been special words that grant writers knew to use and not use. Part of being in research is getting grants and it has always been a silly game. This just seems to take the silly game to whole new levels.
I'm confused because you offer up that it might have always been this way but without evidence then ask us if that's the case.
Why not use an LLM to filter research they don't want to fund? Keywords list seem like the dumbest way to go about it.
"Dumbest way to go about it" is SOP for this administration.
They did though, an llm filter is just as dumb. Don”t they have those interviews with the edgelord doge employees trying to justify the stuff they killed?
Adding to this, i think llms are just part of their game, they know well enough they aren’t accurate, but it plays into comments like this, where we’ll think an llm would make a smarter decision, but it’s just a smokescreen, they’re already looking at gaming the bots, musk trying to get grok to abide by his petty worldview is the most obvious ploy. But they’re already obfuscating sources of information as a matter of course, soon, we won’t know anything anymore, we’ll have to trust their machines.
I think their fixation on the machine is part accountability-laundering, part obfuscation as you say. They want a monopoly on not just information, but analysis, and breaking all information infrastructure that does not flow through their pet ideology robot is part of that.
You answered your own question.
>a handful of federal agencies confirmed earlier this month in court documents that they cut grants if researchers’ projects “expressed, or were presumed to express, viewpoints disfavored by the Administration.”
Why is this bad? The Administration is democratically elected so nominally represents the viewpoints of the majority people - why should taxpayer funding go to disfavored research?
>The UC researchers allege the grant terminations violated their First Amendment rights by targeting their work based on viewpoint and subject matter and have asked the federal judge overseeing the case to rule the revocations unconstitutional.
More weird fascist technocratic fantasies from academia. Why would you be constitutionally entitled to continued public funding?
Read all the comments here, at this time, there are no civil conversations. It's all a echo chamber. You won't find anyone who wants to engage in actual conversation about the topic.