Professor Krugman: as a scientist myself, who writes about other people's science so i can share it with the public, i've already noticed that much of the science i've been writing about lately are studies out of Europe, Japan and China, with a few -- or NO -- american collaborators. That said, as a child growing up amongst mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers (MAGA before they joined the cult a couple decades later), i already experienced their hostility towards science and its practitioners because they openly attacked me and ended up shunning me for studying and working towards becoming a scientist myself.
EDIT: my apologies, everyone, i edited a typo out of my comment.
Trump and his minions are abusing this country, its people, and its resources, just like the abusive partner in a relationship. They are working to separate the US from the world, claiming only they can “fix” things, things that they broke, by the way. They are undermining this country in every way possible to put themselves in control and line their pockets.
Abusing? They’ve destroyed it already. I don’t think anyone yet understands how utterly total Trump’s destruction of America actually is. It will take a century for the damage to be undone. America brand isn’t worth the orange shit in Trump’s diaper.
Trump is simply the front man. I think you give him too much credit. He’s incapable of any strategy - even a weak strategy. The GOP has been at this for as long as I’ve been voting. About once every third term, a democrat will win and spend 2 terms fixing stuff, getting it somewhat back to normal, and then a republican will cheat his way in and voila! It’s all f’d up in no time. Don’t believe me? Think back to Clinton…balanced the budget and Bush2 gave everyone $200 and all the pre- MAGAs thought he was God.
Trust me when I say this is bigger than Trump. The party needed a salesman. He needed a job that would keep him out of prison. You don’t think he’d actually put in an honest day’s work, do you?
The conservative mind needs an enemy. That enemy has been provided by the likes of Fox News that for years have painted a strawman liberal that represents everything wrong with our culture and America. They are 100% emotionally convinced this strawman is real/exists and is destroying the fabric of society by pushing equal outcomes over equal opportunity. And by electing Trump, they've finally been let out of their cages to openly attack the strawman liberal and put it in its place. This is also driven by the likes of subverted and mentally ill billionaire Silicon Valley sociopaths following this same agenda that aligns with MAGA. Convinced that our liberal education system and scientific community have conspired to push their unfair liberal agenda down everyone's throats.
This person's beliefs are cartoon in nature and read like the character of Palpatine in Star Wars. The US needs order and discipline to strike down this liberal strawman and keep it in its place.
This is what we are up against and why you can't win arguments against them or even sway them. They'll tolerate destroying America and democracy to avoid having the strawman liberal ruin their lives, that only exists in their heads.
Exactly, the abused partner feels helpless. Join and fight back. They are breaking faith with America, in a cruel and evil way. Deliberately, and with carefully planned chaos. Helpless is never an option.
I am not a scientist, but I have encountered many examples of people being opposed to their children getting an education and a good job. It is hard to believe. I think that all parents should want their children to be successful and have a good life. In my experience, success and happiness comes through education.
Of course, most industrious and smart people are, at some point, going to start thinking for themselves and questioning things. That is what many people don't want.
You're describing the one's who just want their offspring to >believe<, just like they do. Because they're idiots. The zealots are a prime example of what Darwin was talking about.
That is definitely a trend in the working class. My son did welding and was getting an AA. The attitude amongst his fellows was that you didn't need the AA, just get enough technical skill to get a job. I heard the same from another person in the automotive program. They look down on college educated.
I have also run into people who are afraid that they are going to learn too much. Or learn something that they don't need. In my experience, nothing that one learns is wasted and there is no telling when something that you learned will unexpectedly come in handy.
Regardless of what field one is going into, whether welding, plumbing, engineering, teaching English, or whatever, get as much education as you can and get it as young as you can. And get certifications, such as welding, contractors, plumbers and gas fitters' certifications, when you are young. Depending on where you are, documented credentials can count for a lot.
It is so much easier learning things when you are young and have lots of energy and no family responsibilities. Everything you learn won't be useful; but a lot of it will. And documented credentials go with you if you leave a job.
I heard similar things from a family member who works in welding. He describes people who "doubt the science of face masks" so they don't wear them while doing welding in dangerous and dirty environments where you are kicking out not just the welding gasses but actual pollution, then they develop other problems but claim to not understand why.
It is stunning how self-reinforcing ignorance can be, even to the point of death.
So, the problem should eventually self-correct, right? I hope that at least some skilled (and even non-skilled) workers are not as stupid and survive. Our life would be hard without them.
I think this "looking down on the college educated" is a form of jealousy or sense of inferiority.
I've noticed that many with little education that present alternate facts, will defer, on an individual basis, when you explain things to them. They just don't have enough education to understand the particular issues. Or maybe aren't capable.
That reminds me that a perfectly intelligent uncle of mine, who got married right out of high school instead of going to university, would "discover" new laws of physics and refuse to believe different standard explanations taught at university.
I would rather have a welder or a plumber who understand Keynesian economics, evolution, Nietzche, etc.. But just wants to do something useful and often well paid.
People can be intelligent, creative and kind but not be interested or capable of getting a college education. One of my sons is a lead software developer but barely made it through high school algebra. He got into it when all they cared about was who could do the work. He learns by doing and loves programming. He's gotten attitude from some who are scornful that he doesn't have a college degree.
We need to be careful about assigning worth on the basis of educational attainment. I think the arrogance of the college educated has turned off a lot of working class folks. It is important to have the same respect for a janitor as for a scientist.
Look at Elon Musk. He's college educated and has fallen for a whole bunch of conspiracy theories. Trump is surrounded by college educated idiots.
I don't understand the desire to be ignorant. I still remember well the day when my then 5 year old grandson, meeting me randomly in the grocery store, proudly told me he was the smartest child in his kindergarten class. He later skipped a grade and is now a 20 year old senior in pre-med at Boston University. We're all proud of him and his equally smart (in different fields) brothers. Our family would be devastated if a child didn't want to learn.
No, if you want to keep them, barefoot and pregnant, send them to a school in Detroit, Baltimore, DC, Chicago, LA, Philly, where the Democrats and unions have controlled the schools for 30 years, the reading scores and math scores go down decade after decade, and a solution like charter schools is killed in the legislature.
Those mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers hate science because it so easily pokes holes in their "gospel". To them, "science" means "intelligent design", because they lack any measurable intelligence themselves.
i was a fierce advocate of evolution (i'm an evolutionary ecologist and ornithologist) and was one of the soldiers in the "intelligent design" war -- i was ready to be arrested for teaching evolution in a classroom, although it never quite got that far, despite numerous threats.
Let me know, Doctor, when you figure out which came first, protein, or DNA.
It seems that evolution needs DNA to work on? That if there is no DNA to mutate, that there is no mutation, no reproduction, and no reproductive selective advantage?
Or why is the pre-Cambrian explosion of life is completely contrary to the Darwinian tree?
Or how have the insensate elements of C, H, N, O, P, S, with a couple of trace elements thrown in, working with only covalent and ionic bonding, and the resonant structure of carbon rings, against every rule of entropy thermodynamics, produced a genome of information more complex by orders of magnitude, than any silicon chip- which took hundreds of years of scientific development and millions of man hours of intense thought and labor to produce.
When you and I look at the text of Leninger’s BIOCHEMSTRY or, say, KING LEAR, or Segel’s ENZYME KINETICS, do we wonder, “huh! I wonder how the properties of the paper and the ink combine to produce this marvelous meaning, these equations, this abstract thought, this prose, this human emotion, this conflict and comedy and drama?“
No, we do not think that. Because we know, do we not, know that the meaning was created by sentient intelligence and MEANING IS INDEPENDENT OF MEDIA. INFORMATION IS INDEPENDENT MEDIA.
Yet, as scientists, we know these things, HENCE, why would we look at the most compacted, intensely dynamic storehouse of information and meaning in existence, and assume it arose out of the mechanical properties of the media it is made up of. Wow! That takes a LOT of faith!
Sorry that you found Christians around you to be insensitive, hypocritical and possibly abusive. I have seen a great deal of that in my family, as well. Sadly, those are traits shared by all human beings of all persuasions.
Total BS virtue signaling. Nobody has received anything but accolades for teaching evolution in America since the 1930’s except in a backwater. It’s all I ever heard at HS, UC in biochem and genetics and medicine in the 70s and 80s… where I watched “special admissions students“ be admitted with GPAs and MCATs of 2.6 and 45th percentile, versus 3.6 and 90th percentile for everyone else.
Your generation of “scientists” seem quite comfortable with ideological litmus tests and a deconstruction of merit. The Soviet era communists would be proud!
And I'm going to say you got hurt that people smarter than you who weren't other white men received opportunities previously reserved strictly for (checks notes) white men.
I guess I would leave my response to Thomas Sowell, Jason Riley, Clarence Thomas, Glen Loury, Ben Carson, Larry Elder, Rep. John James, Condi Rice, Tim Scott, or millions of other black Americans, who stand on their merit and don’t play the race card at every drop of a thought.
Efforts in the ‘70’s onward to include minority and underprivileged students from less privileged schools led to students in medicine & other scientific pursuits who became leaders in minority populations. These new physicians could provide care where privileged white docs refused to tread. So they were not the top academicians, they were competent & caring clinicians. I know because they were my classmates.
Excuse me, being mentally capable does not exclude being compassionate. Except that, the recent SCOTUS judgments ending racial preferences, came from cases filed by classic minorities: ASIANS and JEWS.
Why do you want to discriminate against Asian and Jewish students who have excelled academically? Are you a racist? An antisemite?
How about our fellow Americans, first generation refugees from the progressive ideology of Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam? Many of them are right out of poverty. Should their achievements and their aspirations give way to the melanin content of poorly achieving students, for political reasons? Are they not your fellow colleagues as well?
How about all of the excellent Indian physicians in our system? Many of them have very high melanin content, along with excellent objective metrics. Don’t you respect them?
Or perhaps you think, intellect and intelligence are not necessary, that excellence in medicine is not a worthy goal? That patients do not deserve the best that medical schools can offer them?
When you are racist, everything is about race. Black or white. As Jim Crow law and the history of the antebellum South showed, this is very bad for a country. Why perpetuate it? Do you think dividing economics up as racial spoils is some improvement on that?
A diversion to presence or absence of COMPASSION is merely an illogical and poorly thought out cover for an emotive, subjective call to… racism. As chief Justice Roberts said, “ the way for a society to end racism, is to end racism.“
Along the way, you might support the establishment of charter schools, which have been demonstrated to improve black, academic achievement considerably. You will have to fight big city Democratic parties to do this however… they like to keep their constituencies ignorant, and poorly educated. Take a look at the stats and metrics of education in Baltimore, Chicago, LA, New York, and DC if you’d like to work with something objective. Read some Thomas Sowell. Think and grow.
Or you can just marginalize and dehumanize the voice you don’t want to hear.
You give no space to millennia of abuse to black, Indigenous & (later) brown communities. That a few could develop the ability to complete a medical education should be supported by our schools. Probably 75% or more of med school applicants can successfully graduate, but there’s only room for a much smaller number. Who says the brightest make the best physicians. As a society, why shouldn’t we grant 10% or so of the spaces to underrepresented minorities. At least those few can rise into the upper middle class & as I said, some will return to service in their own communities. And since I’m Jewish, I don’t think I’m antisemitic, altho you might disagree! Your words smack of the elitism that abused minorities here have suffered from for innumerable centuries.
I was denied admission to med school by all but one because I have Type 1 diabetes, despite having elite credentials. Yet I have practiced medicine for 49 yrs so far. Have you faced discrimination like that?
This mishmash of responses makes no sense. As others have pointed out the "Intelligent Design" Dover case was in 2005. Moreover in today's aggressive home schooling and "school choice" movement there is a strong push from and for religious schools which avoid teaching evolution among other things. That is a clear push for isolation.
As to scientists pushing for litmus tests, name some. You cannot throw that out with no backing. To be clear demanding that people actually cover things like COVID honestly or accept that the link from Vaccines to Autism rely on faked studies is not a litmus test, it is what the evidence actually shows.
How about this: the new guidelines out of NSF for recipients of grants requires adherence to the White House definition of “antisemitism “ AND disbanding any and all efforts at creating diverse faculty and staff through inclusive and equitable education. As a researcher in inclusive STEM education (both training faculty and impacts in the classroom) I assure you this is an attempt to curtail my academic freedom.
“Inclusive STEM”. I’m sorry, what’s that? Do you mean high-scoring minorities that don’t have the right skin color are excluded? Did you not note that the recent SCOTUS decisions ending race based preferences were based on cases filed by ASIANS and JEWS? The classic disadvantaged and discriminated against minorities?
The freedom that “cancel culture“ and deconstructive identity politics denies to many. Back to Lysenko! but the raw antisemitism boiling out of American academia has surprised even me.
I guess the patients I’ve cared for, and the physicians I’ve taught my skills to, in Africa and Latin America, not to mention here in the US, felt differently.
You know, the sheer self-righteous hatred emanating from American Progressives, the tribalistic behavior and lack of self awareness- it’s straight out of the M23 guerrilla movement in the DRC.
But we are a developed country, and a study of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, or Stalin’s Red Terror in the 1930s, might resonate better with a thoughtful person. I’d recommend to you GULAG ARCHIPELAGO by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, WILD SWANS By Jung Chang, And THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO, BETWEEN HOPE AND DESPAIR, to gain some insights.
I read GULAG ARCHIPELAGO in 1977. I've almost finished WILD SWANS (reading now, recommended by a Chinese friend).
I'll look at that third book you recommend and possibly add it to my reading list.
" the sheer self-righteous hatred emanating from American Progressives, the tribalistic behavior and lack of self awareness"
You just described Trump and the project 2025 tribe, Quite frankly, I think the progressives have held back far too much, and it's about time they expressed some hatred for the haters.
Trump is destroying the country. I suppose a few people will hate that . . .
Interesting and unprecedented action by the Guard and Marines putting out the little kitchen fire in LA.
What is Trump's long game, and why might progressives be against it?
Hatred toward what, exactly? Ignorance? Nazism? I guess you think the Allies in WWII had 'self-righteous hatred' when they went after Hitler? If I'm off-base, please explain exactly what you mean by 'self-righteous hatred'.
My experience with proto-MAGAts is they are anti-learning in general. My maternal grandmother told my parents why waste money sending me to college; I should have a useful and practical job. My mother told them to leave; she made sure I never had to deal with them again. Forty years later, I retired with a graduate degree and a career working in museums.
Okay so “There are Americans who want to go there” (to Harvard; same is true of other good schools) — but “there” means the institution full of brilliant professors and others drawn from the world over — that WILL NOT EXIST any longer. So instead of fewer Americans being able to attend Harvard or wherever, ZERO Americans will be able to attend the Harvard or wherever they wish they could attend. Hello?
Unfortunately, easy to visualize what the MAGA contingent want to do to higher ed...just look at what DeSantis has done in FL. The institutions there are being demolished wholesale right now.
The tech bros convinced Trump in the idiotic motto “move fast and break things”.
I really want our mainstream media to start critically analyzing those kinds of slogans and claims — “tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves” for example — instead of credulously regurgitating them. The first time I saw an article in a mainstream media outlet debunk Reagan’s magical tax fairly claim was a WaPo article in 2008 that went after Rudy — but not Reagan or Dubya — for making that claim. Even today when journalists do bother to refute that budget-busting lie they rarely if ever point out that both Reagan’s and Bush’s tax cuts exploded the debt with little added economic growth — they prefer to blame Trump as if he thought up that insanity all by himself.
Today the media still repeat the lie that Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility and cared about the debt before Trump. Reading between the lines it’s clear that the media has bought Republicans assumption that they only way to balance the budget is to cut social spending, not to raise taxes or strengthen tax collection. I believe that is also the reason they tried so desperately to blame Biden for inflation and refused to acknowledge that our economy was thriving and we were clearly headed to a “soft landing”. They can’t admit that the kind of spending Biden did to grow our economy would not be a major disaster.
The British economist Simeon Wren Lewis writes about the UK’s similar bias which he calls “media macro”
Sure you can 'cut social spending' and balance the budget that way, and then what will you do about all the starving, toothless, shoeless people hanging around the streets unable to pay a rent or feed their children-just the way it was in prior centuries before 'social spending' was introduced ? Some will eventually die off, of course, only to be replaced by the next generation of the same !
What austerity? The budget blows up spending overall—while cutting it for the weak & vulnerable—and explodes the deficit. Elon’s not right about much (even in non-politics) but he’s right about that. Republicans aren’t against “spending” unless it’s about things DEMOCRATS care about. They never care about deficits unless Democrats have some power in DC. The partisan debate isn’t about the “size” of government; it’s about the ROLE of government: What, not how much, is in the budget! And that’s how it’s ALWAYS been.
Yeah, the entire previous four years were an exercise in the media furiously blitzing the airwaves with the story of what their ideology said would *have* to be true, rather than what was actually happening. And it worked.
Simon Wren Lewis has labelled this blatant bias “media macro” in regard to the British broadcast media’s obeisance to conservative economic policy, especially the emphasis on austerity. He rightly includes the BBC in that criticism.
I recently listened to the Pitchfork Economics podcast interview with Bruce Bartlett. Bartlett was a highly respected Republican adviser who worked for Reagan and both Bushes and is considered an expert on tax policy. Bartlett left the Republican Party over Bush’s wildly irresponsible, budget busting. tax cuts. He also pointed out that Clinton had had a significant budget surplus that he was using to pay down the national debt. (Gore campaigned on continuing that policy while Bush openly called for destroying the surplus with tax cuts.) Then he said something I had never heard before — if Bush had simply continued Clinton’s policy of paying down the debt it would have vanished by the end of Bush’s presidency. He also excoriated the media for continuing to promote the insane belief that Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility. How is it that we never hear a discussion of this?
We could also call it “lazy journalism”. Doing real investigative work is very hard and takes resources. It’s just easier to report the press releases and what the politicians are saying. Also, so many of the reporters are very young and not well educated. They along with many citizens don’t understand many of the complexities of our government and institutions.
But when they do stand up and state the obvious, for instance that Trump and Miller are world class haters, a comment that is empirically true, that reporter gets put on leave for lack of objectivity.
A reporter is supposed to report. What did this person do, what did they not do what they should have done, etc. "World class hater" is a useless designation.
Objectively speaking, Trump and Millers policies are hate filled. Why is this not reported? Why is Trumps incoherence not reported. Your argument is the canard not to report what is happening right in front of us. Why is a Trump never called a liar? He can’t open his mouth without making something up but the media acts like what he says is true when they know it’s not.
I’ll add to this a quote from Jeff Tiedrich’s substack today “the Mad King isn’t using the laws of our land for toilet paper — he’s ‘charting new territory.’ thanks for clearing that up, LA Times.” Jeff is objectively commenting and the Times is sanewashing the facts hiding behind a claim of objectivity.
I for one am tired of the media not starting from the point of reality as opposed to pretending lies and in this case, institutionalized hate is something else.
I said, report. Report what is happening. Simply designating a label has little value. If you repeat it enough, it does not become stronger, it becomes weaker. What do I care about a "Mad King" comment. I want to know who are bankrolling these developments. And why.
In the past the US had a number of great newspapers, the LA Times being one of them. They researched topic. That quality disappeared thanks to the internet. Who still reads a printed newspaper? Quality reporting has gone to magazines, but most people who work for minimum wage do not have the time to read them nor the money to take a subscription. So, enter Fox"News". Also we got "social media" - full of echo chambers. People repeating lies, half-truths, and opinions based on them.
Many have called Trump a liar, reported on how he habitually stiffed his vendors, how he cheated people with his "university", how he and his father broke the law in NJ. But producers and networks saw a chance to make a lot of money by turning him into a "real estate mogul". The - reprehensible - program The Apprentice showed him coherent and decisive, a man who knew what he was doing. All thanks to the beauty of editing. But those who observed his stumbles and fumbles, were muzzled by NDA's.
I came to this country some thirty years ago and was amazed by the inequality, the poverty, the lack of a health insurance system, and the hatred towards others (also against immigrants). Also how easily people conned one another - just to make an additional few bucks.
Sandra, agreed. But it is also the shortened cycle. In the past you had a day to call and get information and comments. Now you have barely an hour - the internet is waiting!
The media is mostly owned by rich people. It's no surprise they parrot the "trickle down" agenda. It used to be hidden a bit, but now, with Fox and WaPo, etc., it's right out in the open.
I think he was too busy *eating* the cakes: look how obese he is! (No offense to fat folk, but someone like him is in no place to lecture anyone about “waste, fraud, and abuse”; anyway, projection is his specialty!)
It's astounding to make the comparison, but the entire MAGA rolling catastrophe is looking like an even stupider, and likely more consequential, imitation of Mao's cultural revolution and great leap forward, rolled together. If this continues unchecked for the next couple of years, the US, like China, will take decades to recover.
Oh I don't know about that. Germany seems to have done quite well, as has Japan. For that matter, all Western European nations were once under totalitarian rule and seem to have recovered.
I'm an old person and remember the era of protests against the government in the 60s and early 70s during America's war on Vietnam. Hearing Agent Orange threatening to order the California National Guard to confront the protesters in LA my first thought was Kent State and the 13 wounded and 4 dead in Ohio. It was the beginning of the end for Nixon. Sure, we're all gonna die, but I hope the National Guard doesn't start shooting people in order to send the current criminal regime in the White House packing. Be safe, my children.
This from WP today "...the lesson Trump’s critics and opponents should take from this weekend is in the wide gap between what actually happened in Los Angeles and what the administration insists happened. So eager to show how they crushed dissent, officials revealed very clearly that they hadn’t. So desperate to show strength, they showed weakness. Any state or organization that faces threats from the administration in the future would do well to remember that Trump has less of an iron fist than a virtual reality one."
It sounds like the Guard has mostly remembered what exactly they gave an oath to and it wasn't Agent Orange guy, it was the Constitution. It seems only 300 of the 2000 he ordered actually showed up. You can go home now, weakend (sic) warriors.
For sure it takes decades. I think it's debatable just how much fraying is really occurring. Merz seems very pro-democracy. Ishiba's a right-winger, but hardly an authoritarian. Macron is quite liberal as is Starmer. And so on.
I doubt Farage will land in 10 Downing. That would be like reinstalling Boris.
True about Hungary and Turkey, but they're the outliers. Poland is split - a right-wing president and a more liberal prime minister.
Complacency? This Saturday we're taking to the streets again by the millions. I'd hardly call that complacency.
//
It's a great reminder of the imperative that we continue to Rise! Resist! ✊✊✊
The next nationwide rally is this Saturday, June 14, yes >that< June 14, be there or be square!
Let's ruin Chump's B'day. We need 3.5% or the population, or around 12,000,000 people to be present. So bring all your friends and families. Spread the word as far and wide as possible. Let's all get out there with a Howard Beale spirit and yell "We're as mad as hell, and we're not gonna take it anymore!".
More positively, Canada, Australia and Romania have all rejected the far right. Farage is highly unlikely to be more than a fringe annoyance. Starmer needs to be more radical and less focused on fiscal 'prudence'
Yes, we recovered, but a lot of damage could never be undone. Greece for example was culturallly, politically and socially never the same after only 7 years of a rather mild dictatorship.
In the overall scheme of things, 7 years is a drop in the bucket. It takes decades for real recovery to take place. It's not unlike evolution - which occurs over millions of years. We're not much different from our earliest predecessors from 300,000 years ago, except in a few microscopic ways.
It was the dictatorship that lasted 7 years, not the recovery. The damage has not been fully undone yet, 51 years later, and some things will never recover. The impact it had on greek music and literature for example, is irreparable-and that is only one small aspect.
True, but this is a different situation. Unless Trumpkopf attempts to conquer the world, we'll end up in a different - and better - position than did the defeated axis powers. We won't need help to recover.
Absolutely. It took pressure to get the ball rolling, but once it got going, it kept going. All dictatorships have to end that way. The pressure can be external or internal. Let's hope we can keep it internal. It'll be a little less messy that way.
It is not as extreme as it used to be, after the crisis of 2012-15, and especially after the extreme Left had the opportunity to govern (and failed miserably). But it was so for a long time.
Right. That's my point. "It's not as extreme as it used to be" means it improved over time. It will improve further over more time, but it won't happen in an instant. It can take many decades, or even a century. But it can and will happen.
"Germany seems to have done quite well" is true as long as you only look at GDP per capita.
But this article of Krugman's is about science. And the Germany that was the world's gravity center of science before the war, when people came to Germany because that's where scientific progress happened, and people learned German just so they could read publications written in German, and possibly enroll in Germany's universities --- THAT Germany is dead, and it's never, ever coming back.
Therefore I honestly don't quite understand how people don't panic when they see the parallels between the destruction and devaluation of academia in Nazi Germany, and the ongoing destruction and devaluation of academia in contemporary America.
We can't know that it'll never come back. Things could change in a future we can't predict. I'm not clairvoyant, so I won't attempt to predict the future. Germany still has great engineering - especially in motor vehicle department. I'm not prepared to write off >any< country. They could potentially return as a scientific powerhouse at any time.
Don’t count your dystopian chicken before they hatch; if history—and I’m talking about 2018 here—is any guide, the GOP is likely to get routed in 2026 and 2028 for all his—why else is DJT in such a hurry? He knows he’s a lame duck who doesn’t have very much time to do his foul stuff. Our job is not to bitch and moan about America going to hell, but to work like hell to ensure that that doesn’t happen by guiding and helping Democrats to rescue America. Remember, things seemed to be hopeless for those who opposed the oligarchy in 1929–after Hoover won in a REAL landslide, not a squeaker like DJT. And then came FDR to the rescue. It’s always darkest before the dawn—but the dawn only comes if we all fight for it. (If Democrats truly seize the opportunity—a very big if—2028 could be like 2008. The political backlash to the Iraq War made Obamacare possible; the great irony of politics is the ability to use bad to get good.)
When I was kid, both political parties were obsessed with the notion that we were falling behind the Soviets in science (Sputnik, etc.) Now we have embarked upon a program of unilateral disarmament in every branch of science. And the party making it happen is the one which was most hysterical about the Russian threat 60 years ago. WTF?
There is a strong correlation between the collapse of the Soviet Union and hyper partisanship in the US. Without an external enemy, the negative focus turned inward.
The external enemies, two in sequence, forced the US to turn into the wealthy relatively well run country people think of as current US. Absent the massive increase is capabilities of the federal government, and industrialization brought on by WW2, the US would be nowhere near as wealthy as it is now. Absent the threat of the USSR, and the ideology of communism, the wealthy and racist in the US would have continued Jim Crow laws, beating down the unions, and isolationism post war. You can characterize most of the MAGA ideology as an attempt to reverse the "damage" caused by FDR, and Johnson.
The irony is that the Sputnik aftermath began the ongoing trend of cannibalizing the arts, humanities, and critical thinking to feed STEM. We did not improve our results in science, engineering, and math and bred generations ignorant of art, truth, and beauty.
They are afraid. They have always been afraid. If they are afraid of the Soviets then they want a strong country. If they are afraid of their countrymen, then they want a weak and compliant country. It is rule by cowardice. The best thing we can do is not allow those who would intimidate us control us. Why do they need so many guns? Cowardice. Why do they fear immigrants and imagine they are all rapists and gang members? Cowardice.
Parties change. Politicians die and retire. Most of the people in Congress weren't even born when Sputnik went up. Some of the PARENTS of the people in Congress weren't even born then.
All that is happening must not be seen one issue at a time. It is more reasonable to see it as all one coordinated effort to destroy American global leadership….the economic, the military alliances, the educational from k- research, free press, independent judiciary, congress that debates issues, health of the citizens, life expectancy…. Who is benefiting in addition to the Trump world getting richer? The Saudi and Qatar, Putin oligarchs,
An eerie analogy. The biggest error is to believe DT and MAGA were stupid. It's rather an evil and precisely prepared strategy of power politics. The goal appears to be fascism. But what will happen once the US cannot anymore refinance their staggering burden of debt by issuing treasury bills, i.e. once the US dollar, still the global currency, is replaced by the renmimbi or so? This can happen very soon. Can MAGA survive that?
It clearly hasn't dawned on them - and never will - what a blow to the economy this will be. Mao sent the University Professors to work the fields. Maybe that is tRump's plan for the US after his barbaric deportations of all the farm laborers... Note: I went to Home Depot yesterday for a few things - prices up significantly. Just sayin'...
Prez Trump c.s. can deport the illegal laborers thanks to the laws that were put in place in 1996. Prez Clinton and then-Senator Biden were very much in favor. No one cared about these migrants - who from then on had to run the risk of perishing in the desert or drowning in the river. So what ?
Congress never enacted legislation to make possible for them to come here legally. If you need a worker, give them (and family) a Green Card. That way they are also no competition for US workers. This goes for legal work-bound immigrants too.
Immigration that way could be a lot cheaper, fairer, while better for the US economy. But why do things the clever way? Who would benefit?
We have needed a rational guest worker program for many years, but it never makes it to a vote in Congress. If they are kept undocumented, they have no rights and can be exploited.
That is the real reason why Trump sabotaged the immigration bill last year. He didn't want a rational guest worker program. He wants chaos and violence to gain more power.
He and his fellow fascists are mad on power. This will not end will for America.
I don’t support guest-worker unless it has a pathway to citizenship. The last thing we need is to maintain a huge population that can’t vote because they’re not citizens.
I lived and worked in S FL for 40 years and I knew a lot of undocumented immigrants. Many of them just want to work here and help their families back home. They would be happy to be able to travel back and forth easily. And many wanted to return home when their working days were over.
👆👆👆👆🎯We also need more immigration judges to process those already documented, but not approved, but the republicans always block that at the behest of their donors.
Do you know how much Green Cards are available for the Millions of asylum applicants who arrived in recent years? "In 2023 the US granted asylum to 54,350 individuals" according to the American Immigration Council (AIC).
Migrants who use the asylum seeker loophole hope that it will take years before a decision is made. They know their chance is slight, but one can always pray for a miracle.
P.S. Immigration judges have nothing to do with other categories of Green Card applicants.
Each proposition simply adjust, or adds to, the alphabet soup of non-immigrants, all with different rules. No one had/has the guts to come with a simple proposal.
- Do away with that cumbersome Visa Lottery.
- Stop the family reunion at absurdum. (For some countries the waiting time in Cat. 3 and 4 is so long, that for them this option barely exists anymore).
- Do away with all non-immigrant designations for people who come here to start a business or to take a job for which they are needed. Just issue them Green Cards. (No more "guest workers"!)
Then use temporary work permits for people needed short term (max. a year) and make employers pay them at the level of consultants. Because amazingly, there is currently no visa for the technician who needs to come here to help install some system or the other.
A system like this would be far more useful for the US economy, fair for immigrants, fair for employers, and save a lot of money at DHS and Department of State in unneeded file-processing.
Whole industries benefited, the situation turning into a GOP bonanza. The country got huge numbers of cheap, exploitable, non-union laborers who can't vote. The GOP got another racist wedge issue.
The interesting thing now is if the immigrants organize on a large scale, like the farm workers did under Chavez, and stage a giant national strike, (A real "Day without Mexicans") This would be more effective at bringing down Trump than all the hand wringing so far by the DNC.
Only legal farm workers can organize - to a certain limit. Only US citizens (not even the naturalized ones) are safe at the moment. I lived for many years in CA, met many people without status. They are not just Mexicans, they come from all over Middle and South America and also from Africa, the Middle East, etc. They have family back home that they send money to and they have their own family here in the US. They have a lot to lose, therefore will keep their heads down. Newly minted US Citizens often voted GOP. Dems profited just as much from sponsors using illegal labor (farming, dairies, slaughterhouses, hospitality, construction). And they also found big sponsors in the H-1B dependent industries. (Only Prez Obama made a small change for H-4 visa holders.)
If the ICE round ups continue, at some point it becomes better to engage in a mass "labor strike" than to wait to be rounded up. The brains behind MAGA know this, and we can expect them to go absolutely berserk if there is any sign of organization by the enormous numbers of deportation targets. They're not really worried about illegal alien criminals, they're terrified about mass action by the so far silent and exploited work force.
Oh. I had forgotten about that insipid movie. Are you an immigrant? Any idea how many risks are involved? When the Delano Grape Strike happened, the "anti-immigrant" legislation was not in place yet. If migrants are clever, they better self-deport before ICE snatches them. There is no empathy for migrants. What do you think mass action will achieve? Green Cards all around?
All this endless Democratic soul-searching and self-recrimination is counterproductive. But for pandemic-induced inflation, Kamala Harris would be president today. She still very nearly won—just 1.46% short—and a recent poll showed voters preferring *her* in a hypothetical do-over.
However, 4 years, even 2 years, is an eternity in politics—and as circumstances change, what’s a winner or loser changes. Democrats need to take *advantage* of things, not replay the last fight. While I serious doubt they’ll be on the next ticket, BS & AOC’s anti-oligarchy theme is exactly what the party’s *message* needs to be.
That may be behind the attacks on Columbia, but he never applied to schools outside of New York city. Melania wanted him to be schooled a short distance from their Manhattan apartment.
Yes but there is more to the story. “Our” Germans worked for the Army at Redstone Arsenal, and the Navy had a competing team, with an American rocket. They were given the go-ahead to use their Vanguard rocket to launch the first American satellite. After two or three blew up on the launch pad, the Army was allowed to have a go, and they succeeded on their first attempt, using a rocket based on the V-2.
And not only Jews! Moreover after the war numerous Eastern European scientists fled the antiscientific and repressive Soviet regimes. The contributions of immigrant scientists were immeasurable.
Science and educational bodies are centres of liberalism. Therefore they have to be ‘tamed’, subdued or eliminated. These along with other centres of liberalism, which include the civic services, law enforcement and the military/intelligence have to culled and controlled. Finally an assault on the judiciary system and free press. Once these democratic structures have been weakened, you can seek to embed an authoritarian and illiberal but nominally democratic system of control in the US. This is a well developed and influential extremism that’s being rolled out. DJT is merely a facilitator and acceptable face of what lie’s beneath. It’s JDV that you have to watch as its falls to him to embed this in American politics. In effect you are merely charting the various components which are the roll out of the Plan. The US is in midst of a political revolution run by very dangerous individuals who have well meaning motives. There frustrations with liberalism and its impact on politics; intellectual arrogance; ignorance of the lessons of political history ( my forte ) and sociopathic lack of concern for the masses are a toxic mix and a very dangerous situation is developing.
I am not convinced that GOP voters understand this but if they do, then l perhaps rather optimistically, believe they will begin to resist. The danger is clear and present. I fervently support and hope your culture, society and good fortune as a nation will survive these tests.
They say they are but that is self delusional if they mean it. It is a belief system built on intellectual arrogance ( we know better, leave the politics and governance to us, we are smart and rich ) but will morph into self interest. It always does and history shows it does with only minor exceptions. Exceptions that do not endure or can be replicated, English history is littered with these observations.
Not much to rule over. Reminds me of an old tale I read in high school: The Tiger fought a war with the Lion to be King of the Beasts. All the animals fought, and only the Tiger survived. He “won”, but it was the most Pyrrhic victory: no subjects to rule. In short, you can’t be King of the Beasts if there aren’t any!
We bear the burdens of insecure political leaders who resent those smarter than themselves as they seek a comfortable place of superiority with which to rule the masses. 'Tis easier to dumb them down than to fall down from their rise.
How can the US excel if knowledge and research are censored? We won’t. All the hard work since WWII to improve US education standards will just go down the drain. We will fall by the wayside mighty fast.
It is not quite true no one expected the inquisition. Here is my blog post from Nov last year in which I listed those who would be persecuted, including members of the scientific community.
It goes back at least to the tobacco company’s campaign against the science proving tobacco was responsible for millions of deaths. They hired the PR company Hill and Knowles to run it, which they did by attacking the scientific data with misleading spin. Hill and Knowles was later hired by Big Oil to “debunk’ the scientific evidence of global warming.
In between those two campaigns, H&K helped the first Bush administration lie us into the first Gulf War. They were the ones behind the “Nayirah” false testimony about Iraqi soldiers stealing incubators from Kuwaiti babies and leaving them to die.
I'm a researcher at NIH, have about 10 years there total. I have loved it and the community of scientists and clinicians who dedicate their lives to helping people heal. These (MAGA) people are so busy being ignorant and angry, they won't even question the lies they're sold about us. We study all sorts of things beyond vaccines, I work on a skin bacteria that helps heal eczema, many study how environmental toxins may cause various common diseases, there are labs that study natural therapies. Mainly, scientists there tend to simply study how the body works so that the underlying causes of various diseases and conditions can be prevented or treated more effectively. I've always been grateful to be a public servant in this realm, it's literally my childhood dream come true, and now it's a nightmare.
I fear for our country, our future. The only thing I feel I can do is take time to communicate with the public and share the wonders of life that the past century of scientific research has unveiled.
The most important thing is to keep up the good work. To the great, adversity is just one more bit of challenge like turning of the level of difficulty in a computer game. You’ll still win.
Thanks so much for the support, every gesture helps. I’ve been inspired by how we’re all doing our best to continue our research despite all the adversity. I think our dedication is stronger than their will for destruction.
I’d say “bless you,” but it sounds too MAGA-y. But bless you anyway for the work you do. My brother worked at USDA, focused on bird flu and was passionate about the work he was doing. To me the removal of smart people who really care is the worst crime of this administration.
The seeds were sown in the 80s and 90s, when the Christian right renewed attacks on Darwin and the theory of evolution by natural selection and pushed crank alternatives such as ”intelligent design” and “design theory.”
Professor Krugman: as a scientist myself, who writes about other people's science so i can share it with the public, i've already noticed that much of the science i've been writing about lately are studies out of Europe, Japan and China, with a few -- or NO -- american collaborators. That said, as a child growing up amongst mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers (MAGA before they joined the cult a couple decades later), i already experienced their hostility towards science and its practitioners because they openly attacked me and ended up shunning me for studying and working towards becoming a scientist myself.
EDIT: my apologies, everyone, i edited a typo out of my comment.
Trump and his minions are abusing this country, its people, and its resources, just like the abusive partner in a relationship. They are working to separate the US from the world, claiming only they can “fix” things, things that they broke, by the way. They are undermining this country in every way possible to put themselves in control and line their pockets.
Jenn has distilled the goals of Trump and minions excellently. To dominate a country, you must first weaken and destroy it.
Abusing? They’ve destroyed it already. I don’t think anyone yet understands how utterly total Trump’s destruction of America actually is. It will take a century for the damage to be undone. America brand isn’t worth the orange shit in Trump’s diaper.
Trump is simply the front man. I think you give him too much credit. He’s incapable of any strategy - even a weak strategy. The GOP has been at this for as long as I’ve been voting. About once every third term, a democrat will win and spend 2 terms fixing stuff, getting it somewhat back to normal, and then a republican will cheat his way in and voila! It’s all f’d up in no time. Don’t believe me? Think back to Clinton…balanced the budget and Bush2 gave everyone $200 and all the pre- MAGAs thought he was God.
Trust me when I say this is bigger than Trump. The party needed a salesman. He needed a job that would keep him out of prison. You don’t think he’d actually put in an honest day’s work, do you?
The conservative mind needs an enemy. That enemy has been provided by the likes of Fox News that for years have painted a strawman liberal that represents everything wrong with our culture and America. They are 100% emotionally convinced this strawman is real/exists and is destroying the fabric of society by pushing equal outcomes over equal opportunity. And by electing Trump, they've finally been let out of their cages to openly attack the strawman liberal and put it in its place. This is also driven by the likes of subverted and mentally ill billionaire Silicon Valley sociopaths following this same agenda that aligns with MAGA. Convinced that our liberal education system and scientific community have conspired to push their unfair liberal agenda down everyone's throats.
Here is one of their ringleaders> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
This person's beliefs are cartoon in nature and read like the character of Palpatine in Star Wars. The US needs order and discipline to strike down this liberal strawman and keep it in its place.
This is what we are up against and why you can't win arguments against them or even sway them. They'll tolerate destroying America and democracy to avoid having the strawman liberal ruin their lives, that only exists in their heads.
Exactly, the abused partner feels helpless. Join and fight back. They are breaking faith with America, in a cruel and evil way. Deliberately, and with carefully planned chaos. Helpless is never an option.
I am not a scientist, but I have encountered many examples of people being opposed to their children getting an education and a good job. It is hard to believe. I think that all parents should want their children to be successful and have a good life. In my experience, success and happiness comes through education.
Of course, most industrious and smart people are, at some point, going to start thinking for themselves and questioning things. That is what many people don't want.
Better to keep them barefoot and ignorant?
You're describing the one's who just want their offspring to >believe<, just like they do. Because they're idiots. The zealots are a prime example of what Darwin was talking about.
That is definitely a trend in the working class. My son did welding and was getting an AA. The attitude amongst his fellows was that you didn't need the AA, just get enough technical skill to get a job. I heard the same from another person in the automotive program. They look down on college educated.
I have also run into people who are afraid that they are going to learn too much. Or learn something that they don't need. In my experience, nothing that one learns is wasted and there is no telling when something that you learned will unexpectedly come in handy.
Regardless of what field one is going into, whether welding, plumbing, engineering, teaching English, or whatever, get as much education as you can and get it as young as you can. And get certifications, such as welding, contractors, plumbers and gas fitters' certifications, when you are young. Depending on where you are, documented credentials can count for a lot.
It is so much easier learning things when you are young and have lots of energy and no family responsibilities. Everything you learn won't be useful; but a lot of it will. And documented credentials go with you if you leave a job.
(Documented creditials would have been a big plus for me.)
I heard similar things from a family member who works in welding. He describes people who "doubt the science of face masks" so they don't wear them while doing welding in dangerous and dirty environments where you are kicking out not just the welding gasses but actual pollution, then they develop other problems but claim to not understand why.
It is stunning how self-reinforcing ignorance can be, even to the point of death.
Smart employers will not allow working without face masks because they will be liable for injuries.
I agree. I was surprised to learn how lax they were. Goggles yes, the pain of that is immediate, but masks? He says they just keep taking them off.
Weird and foolish.
So, the problem should eventually self-correct, right? I hope that at least some skilled (and even non-skilled) workers are not as stupid and survive. Our life would be hard without them.
The problem seems to be that stupidity like that spreads faster than the consequences of it.
I think this "looking down on the college educated" is a form of jealousy or sense of inferiority.
I've noticed that many with little education that present alternate facts, will defer, on an individual basis, when you explain things to them. They just don't have enough education to understand the particular issues. Or maybe aren't capable.
That reminds me that a perfectly intelligent uncle of mine, who got married right out of high school instead of going to university, would "discover" new laws of physics and refuse to believe different standard explanations taught at university.
(fix typos)
I would rather have a welder or a plumber who understand Keynesian economics, evolution, Nietzche, etc.. But just wants to do something useful and often well paid.
They’re *afraid* of “smart” people
People can be intelligent, creative and kind but not be interested or capable of getting a college education. One of my sons is a lead software developer but barely made it through high school algebra. He got into it when all they cared about was who could do the work. He learns by doing and loves programming. He's gotten attitude from some who are scornful that he doesn't have a college degree.
We need to be careful about assigning worth on the basis of educational attainment. I think the arrogance of the college educated has turned off a lot of working class folks. It is important to have the same respect for a janitor as for a scientist.
Look at Elon Musk. He's college educated and has fallen for a whole bunch of conspiracy theories. Trump is surrounded by college educated idiots.
I don't understand the desire to be ignorant. I still remember well the day when my then 5 year old grandson, meeting me randomly in the grocery store, proudly told me he was the smartest child in his kindergarten class. He later skipped a grade and is now a 20 year old senior in pre-med at Boston University. We're all proud of him and his equally smart (in different fields) brothers. Our family would be devastated if a child didn't want to learn.
No, if you want to keep them, barefoot and pregnant, send them to a school in Detroit, Baltimore, DC, Chicago, LA, Philly, where the Democrats and unions have controlled the schools for 30 years, the reading scores and math scores go down decade after decade, and a solution like charter schools is killed in the legislature.
Supported especially by those already barefoot and ignorant.
Those mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers hate science because it so easily pokes holes in their "gospel". To them, "science" means "intelligent design", because they lack any measurable intelligence themselves.
i was a fierce advocate of evolution (i'm an evolutionary ecologist and ornithologist) and was one of the soldiers in the "intelligent design" war -- i was ready to be arrested for teaching evolution in a classroom, although it never quite got that far, despite numerous threats.
Wow. You're a true warrior!
Let me know, Doctor, when you figure out which came first, protein, or DNA.
It seems that evolution needs DNA to work on? That if there is no DNA to mutate, that there is no mutation, no reproduction, and no reproductive selective advantage?
Or why is the pre-Cambrian explosion of life is completely contrary to the Darwinian tree?
Or how have the insensate elements of C, H, N, O, P, S, with a couple of trace elements thrown in, working with only covalent and ionic bonding, and the resonant structure of carbon rings, against every rule of entropy thermodynamics, produced a genome of information more complex by orders of magnitude, than any silicon chip- which took hundreds of years of scientific development and millions of man hours of intense thought and labor to produce.
When you and I look at the text of Leninger’s BIOCHEMSTRY or, say, KING LEAR, or Segel’s ENZYME KINETICS, do we wonder, “huh! I wonder how the properties of the paper and the ink combine to produce this marvelous meaning, these equations, this abstract thought, this prose, this human emotion, this conflict and comedy and drama?“
No, we do not think that. Because we know, do we not, know that the meaning was created by sentient intelligence and MEANING IS INDEPENDENT OF MEDIA. INFORMATION IS INDEPENDENT MEDIA.
Yet, as scientists, we know these things, HENCE, why would we look at the most compacted, intensely dynamic storehouse of information and meaning in existence, and assume it arose out of the mechanical properties of the media it is made up of. Wow! That takes a LOT of faith!
Sorry that you found Christians around you to be insensitive, hypocritical and possibly abusive. I have seen a great deal of that in my family, as well. Sadly, those are traits shared by all human beings of all persuasions.
Thank you for the discussion.
Total BS virtue signaling. Nobody has received anything but accolades for teaching evolution in America since the 1930’s except in a backwater. It’s all I ever heard at HS, UC in biochem and genetics and medicine in the 70s and 80s… where I watched “special admissions students“ be admitted with GPAs and MCATs of 2.6 and 45th percentile, versus 3.6 and 90th percentile for everyone else.
Your generation of “scientists” seem quite comfortable with ideological litmus tests and a deconstruction of merit. The Soviet era communists would be proud!
Ummm, you haven't been paying attention. The Dover case was in 2005. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2005/12/20/federal-court-strikes-down-intelligent-design-curriculum/#:~:text=In%20his%20lengthy%20decision%2C%20District,continue%20fighting%20for%20the%20policy. Here, more recently, in Oklahoma: https://ncse.ngo/antievolution-legislation-oklahoma And even more recently, in West Virginia... https://www.science.org/content/article/west-virginia-opens-door-teaching-intelligent-design
And I'm going to say you got hurt that people smarter than you who weren't other white men received opportunities previously reserved strictly for (checks notes) white men.
I guess I would leave my response to Thomas Sowell, Jason Riley, Clarence Thomas, Glen Loury, Ben Carson, Larry Elder, Rep. John James, Condi Rice, Tim Scott, or millions of other black Americans, who stand on their merit and don’t play the race card at every drop of a thought.
thank you. i just dug up those news stories but you beat me to sharing them.
Efforts in the ‘70’s onward to include minority and underprivileged students from less privileged schools led to students in medicine & other scientific pursuits who became leaders in minority populations. These new physicians could provide care where privileged white docs refused to tread. So they were not the top academicians, they were competent & caring clinicians. I know because they were my classmates.
Excuse me, being mentally capable does not exclude being compassionate. Except that, the recent SCOTUS judgments ending racial preferences, came from cases filed by classic minorities: ASIANS and JEWS.
Why do you want to discriminate against Asian and Jewish students who have excelled academically? Are you a racist? An antisemite?
How about our fellow Americans, first generation refugees from the progressive ideology of Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam? Many of them are right out of poverty. Should their achievements and their aspirations give way to the melanin content of poorly achieving students, for political reasons? Are they not your fellow colleagues as well?
How about all of the excellent Indian physicians in our system? Many of them have very high melanin content, along with excellent objective metrics. Don’t you respect them?
Or perhaps you think, intellect and intelligence are not necessary, that excellence in medicine is not a worthy goal? That patients do not deserve the best that medical schools can offer them?
When you are racist, everything is about race. Black or white. As Jim Crow law and the history of the antebellum South showed, this is very bad for a country. Why perpetuate it? Do you think dividing economics up as racial spoils is some improvement on that?
A diversion to presence or absence of COMPASSION is merely an illogical and poorly thought out cover for an emotive, subjective call to… racism. As chief Justice Roberts said, “ the way for a society to end racism, is to end racism.“
Along the way, you might support the establishment of charter schools, which have been demonstrated to improve black, academic achievement considerably. You will have to fight big city Democratic parties to do this however… they like to keep their constituencies ignorant, and poorly educated. Take a look at the stats and metrics of education in Baltimore, Chicago, LA, New York, and DC if you’d like to work with something objective. Read some Thomas Sowell. Think and grow.
Or you can just marginalize and dehumanize the voice you don’t want to hear.
You give no space to millennia of abuse to black, Indigenous & (later) brown communities. That a few could develop the ability to complete a medical education should be supported by our schools. Probably 75% or more of med school applicants can successfully graduate, but there’s only room for a much smaller number. Who says the brightest make the best physicians. As a society, why shouldn’t we grant 10% or so of the spaces to underrepresented minorities. At least those few can rise into the upper middle class & as I said, some will return to service in their own communities. And since I’m Jewish, I don’t think I’m antisemitic, altho you might disagree! Your words smack of the elitism that abused minorities here have suffered from for innumerable centuries.
I was denied admission to med school by all but one because I have Type 1 diabetes, despite having elite credentials. Yet I have practiced medicine for 49 yrs so far. Have you faced discrimination like that?
This mishmash of responses makes no sense. As others have pointed out the "Intelligent Design" Dover case was in 2005. Moreover in today's aggressive home schooling and "school choice" movement there is a strong push from and for religious schools which avoid teaching evolution among other things. That is a clear push for isolation.
As to scientists pushing for litmus tests, name some. You cannot throw that out with no backing. To be clear demanding that people actually cover things like COVID honestly or accept that the link from Vaccines to Autism rely on faked studies is not a litmus test, it is what the evidence actually shows.
How about this: the new guidelines out of NSF for recipients of grants requires adherence to the White House definition of “antisemitism “ AND disbanding any and all efforts at creating diverse faculty and staff through inclusive and equitable education. As a researcher in inclusive STEM education (both training faculty and impacts in the classroom) I assure you this is an attempt to curtail my academic freedom.
“Inclusive STEM”. I’m sorry, what’s that? Do you mean high-scoring minorities that don’t have the right skin color are excluded? Did you not note that the recent SCOTUS decisions ending race based preferences were based on cases filed by ASIANS and JEWS? The classic disadvantaged and discriminated against minorities?
The freedom that “cancel culture“ and deconstructive identity politics denies to many. Back to Lysenko! but the raw antisemitism boiling out of American academia has surprised even me.
It's not ideological litmus tests as much as litmus tests for bullshit.
Man, H.Walther, you really got hurt when you didn’t get into medical school didn’t you? All those wimmin and other unworthies chosen before you.
But hey, from our point of view the
admissions process worked in your case: one more white asshole screened and rejected!
There are lots more important admissions criteria than GPA and MCAT scores. Compassion is one of them
Wow.
I'm really, really, glad you are not my doctor.
Sorry Renee Marie I have no beef with you. It’s just people like h.walther
I was replying to h.walther. I guess that wasn't clear.
I guess the patients I’ve cared for, and the physicians I’ve taught my skills to, in Africa and Latin America, not to mention here in the US, felt differently.
You know, the sheer self-righteous hatred emanating from American Progressives, the tribalistic behavior and lack of self awareness- it’s straight out of the M23 guerrilla movement in the DRC.
But we are a developed country, and a study of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, or Stalin’s Red Terror in the 1930s, might resonate better with a thoughtful person. I’d recommend to you GULAG ARCHIPELAGO by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, WILD SWANS By Jung Chang, And THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO, BETWEEN HOPE AND DESPAIR, to gain some insights.
I read GULAG ARCHIPELAGO in 1977. I've almost finished WILD SWANS (reading now, recommended by a Chinese friend).
I'll look at that third book you recommend and possibly add it to my reading list.
" the sheer self-righteous hatred emanating from American Progressives, the tribalistic behavior and lack of self awareness"
You just described Trump and the project 2025 tribe, Quite frankly, I think the progressives have held back far too much, and it's about time they expressed some hatred for the haters.
Trump is destroying the country. I suppose a few people will hate that . . .
Interesting and unprecedented action by the Guard and Marines putting out the little kitchen fire in LA.
What is Trump's long game, and why might progressives be against it?
WILD SWANS gives a view of it.
American progressives exhibit tribal behavior? Tribal like inverse MAGA?
Is that all you got?
We’re about to go full tribal here
Hatred toward what, exactly? Ignorance? Nazism? I guess you think the Allies in WWII had 'self-righteous hatred' when they went after Hitler? If I'm off-base, please explain exactly what you mean by 'self-righteous hatred'.
Pot calling kettle black!
Our “generation of scientists”? 🙄
1984 is here
Indeed it is. In fact, it arrived four years early - in 1980.
Good for you and for us that you hung on to your destiny.
My experience with proto-MAGAts is they are anti-learning in general. My maternal grandmother told my parents why waste money sending me to college; I should have a useful and practical job. My mother told them to leave; she made sure I never had to deal with them again. Forty years later, I retired with a graduate degree and a career working in museums.
Professor Krugman.
oops.
Were they against you studying science because it conflicts with religion, their one true source of "knowledge"?
Okay so “There are Americans who want to go there” (to Harvard; same is true of other good schools) — but “there” means the institution full of brilliant professors and others drawn from the world over — that WILL NOT EXIST any longer. So instead of fewer Americans being able to attend Harvard or wherever, ZERO Americans will be able to attend the Harvard or wherever they wish they could attend. Hello?
Unfortunately, easy to visualize what the MAGA contingent want to do to higher ed...just look at what DeSantis has done in FL. The institutions there are being demolished wholesale right now.
DT doing what he does best: destroying things.
Destroying Things happens to be his initials too!
Coincidence? Hmmmmmm. 🤔
Oh, that is perfect. It’s going on my next protest sign!
Eff off spam bot.
The tech bros convinced Trump in the idiotic motto “move fast and break things”.
I really want our mainstream media to start critically analyzing those kinds of slogans and claims — “tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves” for example — instead of credulously regurgitating them. The first time I saw an article in a mainstream media outlet debunk Reagan’s magical tax fairly claim was a WaPo article in 2008 that went after Rudy — but not Reagan or Dubya — for making that claim. Even today when journalists do bother to refute that budget-busting lie they rarely if ever point out that both Reagan’s and Bush’s tax cuts exploded the debt with little added economic growth — they prefer to blame Trump as if he thought up that insanity all by himself.
Today the media still repeat the lie that Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility and cared about the debt before Trump. Reading between the lines it’s clear that the media has bought Republicans assumption that they only way to balance the budget is to cut social spending, not to raise taxes or strengthen tax collection. I believe that is also the reason they tried so desperately to blame Biden for inflation and refused to acknowledge that our economy was thriving and we were clearly headed to a “soft landing”. They can’t admit that the kind of spending Biden did to grow our economy would not be a major disaster.
The British economist Simeon Wren Lewis writes about the UK’s similar bias which he calls “media macro”
https://cepr.org/voxeu/blogs-and-reviews/how-broadcast-media-created-mediamacro
Sure you can 'cut social spending' and balance the budget that way, and then what will you do about all the starving, toothless, shoeless people hanging around the streets unable to pay a rent or feed their children-just the way it was in prior centuries before 'social spending' was introduced ? Some will eventually die off, of course, only to be replaced by the next generation of the same !
Press needs to call it what it is: Austerity programming.
Austerity programs don't work.
See Greece 2008.
This is what US is headed for under the austerity budget.
Krugman, could you write a piece to explain this?
What austerity? The budget blows up spending overall—while cutting it for the weak & vulnerable—and explodes the deficit. Elon’s not right about much (even in non-politics) but he’s right about that. Republicans aren’t against “spending” unless it’s about things DEMOCRATS care about. They never care about deficits unless Democrats have some power in DC. The partisan debate isn’t about the “size” of government; it’s about the ROLE of government: What, not how much, is in the budget! And that’s how it’s ALWAYS been.
Cuts that create austerity for the majority.
Cuts to healthcare, education, anti-poverty programs, science research, etc.
Yeah, the entire previous four years were an exercise in the media furiously blitzing the airwaves with the story of what their ideology said would *have* to be true, rather than what was actually happening. And it worked.
Simon Wren Lewis has labelled this blatant bias “media macro” in regard to the British broadcast media’s obeisance to conservative economic policy, especially the emphasis on austerity. He rightly includes the BBC in that criticism.
https://cepr.org/voxeu/blogs-and-reviews/how-broadcast-media-created-mediamacro
I recently listened to the Pitchfork Economics podcast interview with Bruce Bartlett. Bartlett was a highly respected Republican adviser who worked for Reagan and both Bushes and is considered an expert on tax policy. Bartlett left the Republican Party over Bush’s wildly irresponsible, budget busting. tax cuts. He also pointed out that Clinton had had a significant budget surplus that he was using to pay down the national debt. (Gore campaigned on continuing that policy while Bush openly called for destroying the surplus with tax cuts.) Then he said something I had never heard before — if Bush had simply continued Clinton’s policy of paying down the debt it would have vanished by the end of Bush’s presidency. He also excoriated the media for continuing to promote the insane belief that Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility. How is it that we never hear a discussion of this?
We could also call it “lazy journalism”. Doing real investigative work is very hard and takes resources. It’s just easier to report the press releases and what the politicians are saying. Also, so many of the reporters are very young and not well educated. They along with many citizens don’t understand many of the complexities of our government and institutions.
But when they do stand up and state the obvious, for instance that Trump and Miller are world class haters, a comment that is empirically true, that reporter gets put on leave for lack of objectivity.
A reporter is supposed to report. What did this person do, what did they not do what they should have done, etc. "World class hater" is a useless designation.
Objectively speaking, Trump and Millers policies are hate filled. Why is this not reported? Why is Trumps incoherence not reported. Your argument is the canard not to report what is happening right in front of us. Why is a Trump never called a liar? He can’t open his mouth without making something up but the media acts like what he says is true when they know it’s not.
I’ll add to this a quote from Jeff Tiedrich’s substack today “the Mad King isn’t using the laws of our land for toilet paper — he’s ‘charting new territory.’ thanks for clearing that up, LA Times.” Jeff is objectively commenting and the Times is sanewashing the facts hiding behind a claim of objectivity.
I for one am tired of the media not starting from the point of reality as opposed to pretending lies and in this case, institutionalized hate is something else.
I said, report. Report what is happening. Simply designating a label has little value. If you repeat it enough, it does not become stronger, it becomes weaker. What do I care about a "Mad King" comment. I want to know who are bankrolling these developments. And why.
In the past the US had a number of great newspapers, the LA Times being one of them. They researched topic. That quality disappeared thanks to the internet. Who still reads a printed newspaper? Quality reporting has gone to magazines, but most people who work for minimum wage do not have the time to read them nor the money to take a subscription. So, enter Fox"News". Also we got "social media" - full of echo chambers. People repeating lies, half-truths, and opinions based on them.
Many have called Trump a liar, reported on how he habitually stiffed his vendors, how he cheated people with his "university", how he and his father broke the law in NJ. But producers and networks saw a chance to make a lot of money by turning him into a "real estate mogul". The - reprehensible - program The Apprentice showed him coherent and decisive, a man who knew what he was doing. All thanks to the beauty of editing. But those who observed his stumbles and fumbles, were muzzled by NDA's.
I came to this country some thirty years ago and was amazed by the inequality, the poverty, the lack of a health insurance system, and the hatred towards others (also against immigrants). Also how easily people conned one another - just to make an additional few bucks.
Sandra, agreed. But it is also the shortened cycle. In the past you had a day to call and get information and comments. Now you have barely an hour - the internet is waiting!
When it comes to the economy the problem isn’t laziness but bias. See my new comment above.
All of you have made excellent points.
They also don't know history accepting Ragan republican lies as fact.
The media is mostly owned by rich people. It's no surprise they parrot the "trickle down" agenda. It used to be hidden a bit, but now, with Fox and WaPo, etc., it's right out in the open.
For personal gain. So let’s DO SOMETHING about it https://open.substack.com/pub/bobbowden209566/p/wtf-are-we-doing-about-this-horror?r=1pv3tg&utm_medium=ios
Exactly. Trump is the boy who threw cake at birthday parties!
I think he was too busy *eating* the cakes: look how obese he is! (No offense to fat folk, but someone like him is in no place to lecture anyone about “waste, fraud, and abuse”; anyway, projection is his specialty!)
Always when it shows up his deficiencies. Instead of lauding the capacity of others and their brilliant contributions.
It's astounding to make the comparison, but the entire MAGA rolling catastrophe is looking like an even stupider, and likely more consequential, imitation of Mao's cultural revolution and great leap forward, rolled together. If this continues unchecked for the next couple of years, the US, like China, will take decades to recover.
It'll take decades to recover from the damage already done.
That all depends on how much backlash there is to the damage. The more voter backlash, the less time it’ll take to recover from this.
The larger, more visible damage, yes. The more subtle aspects that fly below the average radar will be last in line.
Yes, I thought the same. We elected Mao Zedong.
China didn’t prosper until after he died. Mao left a great legacy of cruelty, mass death, starvation, poverty and stupidity.
I continue to see this assumption that, no matter how far we sink into totalitarianism, the US will "recover".
History shows us the exact opposite.
Oh I don't know about that. Germany seems to have done quite well, as has Japan. For that matter, all Western European nations were once under totalitarian rule and seem to have recovered.
I'm an old person and remember the era of protests against the government in the 60s and early 70s during America's war on Vietnam. Hearing Agent Orange threatening to order the California National Guard to confront the protesters in LA my first thought was Kent State and the 13 wounded and 4 dead in Ohio. It was the beginning of the end for Nixon. Sure, we're all gonna die, but I hope the National Guard doesn't start shooting people in order to send the current criminal regime in the White House packing. Be safe, my children.
This from WP today "...the lesson Trump’s critics and opponents should take from this weekend is in the wide gap between what actually happened in Los Angeles and what the administration insists happened. So eager to show how they crushed dissent, officials revealed very clearly that they hadn’t. So desperate to show strength, they showed weakness. Any state or organization that faces threats from the administration in the future would do well to remember that Trump has less of an iron fist than a virtual reality one."
Encouraging.
I remember all that too.
"Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming, we're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio".
Hopefully, the National Guard will show more honor than the Evil Klown in Chief.
It sounds like the Guard has mostly remembered what exactly they gave an oath to and it wasn't Agent Orange guy, it was the Constitution. It seems only 300 of the 2000 he ordered actually showed up. You can go home now, weakend (sic) warriors.
Apparently only 300 were deployed, but 2000 actually arrived. We're not out of the woods yet. I wish we were.
That was my first thought too.
It took 2 world wars and extensive reconstruction to achieve recoveries that are already fraying.
And they had the Marshall Plan to help them rebuild. It’s unlikely China will help us rebuild and return to democracy.
They might have to, they need the consumer market that the US represents.
For sure it takes decades. I think it's debatable just how much fraying is really occurring. Merz seems very pro-democracy. Ishiba's a right-winger, but hardly an authoritarian. Macron is quite liberal as is Starmer. And so on.
Starmer's approval has plummeted, with Farage poised to step into the void.
Hungary and Turkey are no longer democracies. After defeating a dictator, Poland has once again surrendered to a right-wing populist.
I understand the desire to believe we will overcome this moment, but there is widespread denial and complacency in the US.
We're less than 6 months into Trump 2.0, and the country has largely normalized the near-total implosion of institutions.
I wish you well.
I doubt Farage will land in 10 Downing. That would be like reinstalling Boris.
True about Hungary and Turkey, but they're the outliers. Poland is split - a right-wing president and a more liberal prime minister.
Complacency? This Saturday we're taking to the streets again by the millions. I'd hardly call that complacency.
//
It's a great reminder of the imperative that we continue to Rise! Resist! ✊✊✊
The next nationwide rally is this Saturday, June 14, yes >that< June 14, be there or be square!
Let's ruin Chump's B'day. We need 3.5% or the population, or around 12,000,000 people to be present. So bring all your friends and families. Spread the word as far and wide as possible. Let's all get out there with a Howard Beale spirit and yell "We're as mad as hell, and we're not gonna take it anymore!".
https://www.nokings.org/
P.S. Stay the hell away from D.C.! Don't give him an excuse to declare martial law!
More positively, Canada, Australia and Romania have all rejected the far right. Farage is highly unlikely to be more than a fringe annoyance. Starmer needs to be more radical and less focused on fiscal 'prudence'
Yes, we recovered, but a lot of damage could never be undone. Greece for example was culturallly, politically and socially never the same after only 7 years of a rather mild dictatorship.
In the overall scheme of things, 7 years is a drop in the bucket. It takes decades for real recovery to take place. It's not unlike evolution - which occurs over millions of years. We're not much different from our earliest predecessors from 300,000 years ago, except in a few microscopic ways.
It was the dictatorship that lasted 7 years, not the recovery. The damage has not been fully undone yet, 51 years later, and some things will never recover. The impact it had on greek music and literature for example, is irreparable-and that is only one small aspect.
That's strange. I would think the arts would be the first thing to recover. How did the dictatorship impact the arts for so long?
They recovered with tremendous help from the great country we used to be.
That's very true. We provided the resources, i.e., capital, but they had to provide the initiative.
Because the US helped them back up. China and Russia a going to be gloating over America‘s smoldering ruins.
True, but this is a different situation. Unless Trumpkopf attempts to conquer the world, we'll end up in a different - and better - position than did the defeated axis powers. We won't need help to recover.
In the case of Germany and Japan, the U.S. pushed them to write new constitutions. Also. There was rhe Marshall Plan
Absolutely. It took pressure to get the ball rolling, but once it got going, it kept going. All dictatorships have to end that way. The pressure can be external or internal. Let's hope we can keep it internal. It'll be a little less messy that way.
It is not as extreme as it used to be, after the crisis of 2012-15, and especially after the extreme Left had the opportunity to govern (and failed miserably). But it was so for a long time.
Right. That's my point. "It's not as extreme as it used to be" means it improved over time. It will improve further over more time, but it won't happen in an instant. It can take many decades, or even a century. But it can and will happen.
"Germany seems to have done quite well" is true as long as you only look at GDP per capita.
But this article of Krugman's is about science. And the Germany that was the world's gravity center of science before the war, when people came to Germany because that's where scientific progress happened, and people learned German just so they could read publications written in German, and possibly enroll in Germany's universities --- THAT Germany is dead, and it's never, ever coming back.
Therefore I honestly don't quite understand how people don't panic when they see the parallels between the destruction and devaluation of academia in Nazi Germany, and the ongoing destruction and devaluation of academia in contemporary America.
We can't know that it'll never come back. Things could change in a future we can't predict. I'm not clairvoyant, so I won't attempt to predict the future. Germany still has great engineering - especially in motor vehicle department. I'm not prepared to write off >any< country. They could potentially return as a scientific powerhouse at any time.
Don’t count your dystopian chicken before they hatch; if history—and I’m talking about 2018 here—is any guide, the GOP is likely to get routed in 2026 and 2028 for all his—why else is DJT in such a hurry? He knows he’s a lame duck who doesn’t have very much time to do his foul stuff. Our job is not to bitch and moan about America going to hell, but to work like hell to ensure that that doesn’t happen by guiding and helping Democrats to rescue America. Remember, things seemed to be hopeless for those who opposed the oligarchy in 1929–after Hoover won in a REAL landslide, not a squeaker like DJT. And then came FDR to the rescue. It’s always darkest before the dawn—but the dawn only comes if we all fight for it. (If Democrats truly seize the opportunity—a very big if—2028 could be like 2008. The political backlash to the Iraq War made Obamacare possible; the great irony of politics is the ability to use bad to get good.)
When I was kid, both political parties were obsessed with the notion that we were falling behind the Soviets in science (Sputnik, etc.) Now we have embarked upon a program of unilateral disarmament in every branch of science. And the party making it happen is the one which was most hysterical about the Russian threat 60 years ago. WTF?
There is a strong correlation between the collapse of the Soviet Union and hyper partisanship in the US. Without an external enemy, the negative focus turned inward.
You might be on to something there.
The external enemies, two in sequence, forced the US to turn into the wealthy relatively well run country people think of as current US. Absent the massive increase is capabilities of the federal government, and industrialization brought on by WW2, the US would be nowhere near as wealthy as it is now. Absent the threat of the USSR, and the ideology of communism, the wealthy and racist in the US would have continued Jim Crow laws, beating down the unions, and isolationism post war. You can characterize most of the MAGA ideology as an attempt to reverse the "damage" caused by FDR, and Johnson.
Excellent observation about the MAGA movement.
And what did you find after turning inward? Immigrants!
Bet you're right.
Except for spending billions on Musk’s quest to colonize the hell hole that is Mars rather than protect earth by combatting climate change.
Building a rocket to planet Ketaminia.
The irony is that the Sputnik aftermath began the ongoing trend of cannibalizing the arts, humanities, and critical thinking to feed STEM. We did not improve our results in science, engineering, and math and bred generations ignorant of art, truth, and beauty.
And critical thinking.
I think the results in STEM did improve pretty drastically - but at some expense, perhaps.
We've entered the Twilight Zone.
They are afraid. They have always been afraid. If they are afraid of the Soviets then they want a strong country. If they are afraid of their countrymen, then they want a weak and compliant country. It is rule by cowardice. The best thing we can do is not allow those who would intimidate us control us. Why do they need so many guns? Cowardice. Why do they fear immigrants and imagine they are all rapists and gang members? Cowardice.
Exactly.
Parties change. Politicians die and retire. Most of the people in Congress weren't even born when Sputnik went up. Some of the PARENTS of the people in Congress weren't even born then.
The ruthless stupidity of their policies baffles me.
It's not stupidity, it's by design. Donald is using Adolf's playbook to create a totalitarian state. History is repeating itself. Again.
All that is happening must not be seen one issue at a time. It is more reasonable to see it as all one coordinated effort to destroy American global leadership….the economic, the military alliances, the educational from k- research, free press, independent judiciary, congress that debates issues, health of the citizens, life expectancy…. Who is benefiting in addition to the Trump world getting richer? The Saudi and Qatar, Putin oligarchs,
This is not all incidental and unintentional.
The military in the streets is all part of this.
And the fanatics that want a Theocracy.
The extremely rich don't have nationalities, only common interests. As you point out, it's the oligarchs who are benefiting.
And/or to wreck the country. But again by design. Feature not bug.
And this feature is documented - 900 pages of Project 2025.
An eerie analogy. The biggest error is to believe DT and MAGA were stupid. It's rather an evil and precisely prepared strategy of power politics. The goal appears to be fascism. But what will happen once the US cannot anymore refinance their staggering burden of debt by issuing treasury bills, i.e. once the US dollar, still the global currency, is replaced by the renmimbi or so? This can happen very soon. Can MAGA survive that?
They will just print money if it comes down to it.
That doesn't work for very long.
That is why he kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches beside his bed during his first marriage.
It clearly hasn't dawned on them - and never will - what a blow to the economy this will be. Mao sent the University Professors to work the fields. Maybe that is tRump's plan for the US after his barbaric deportations of all the farm laborers... Note: I went to Home Depot yesterday for a few things - prices up significantly. Just sayin'...
Prez Trump c.s. can deport the illegal laborers thanks to the laws that were put in place in 1996. Prez Clinton and then-Senator Biden were very much in favor. No one cared about these migrants - who from then on had to run the risk of perishing in the desert or drowning in the river. So what ?
Congress never enacted legislation to make possible for them to come here legally. If you need a worker, give them (and family) a Green Card. That way they are also no competition for US workers. This goes for legal work-bound immigrants too.
Immigration that way could be a lot cheaper, fairer, while better for the US economy. But why do things the clever way? Who would benefit?
We have needed a rational guest worker program for many years, but it never makes it to a vote in Congress. If they are kept undocumented, they have no rights and can be exploited.
That is the real reason why Trump sabotaged the immigration bill last year. He didn't want a rational guest worker program. He wants chaos and violence to gain more power.
He and his fellow fascists are mad on power. This will not end will for America.
Guest workers programs are a most shameful invention. You need someone ? Issue a Green Card. Either you want us, or you don't. Period.
I was happy that no more H-1B's were created. Each H-1B means an H-4. Each H-4 means a broken life (usually a woman's) under current rules.
I don’t support guest-worker unless it has a pathway to citizenship. The last thing we need is to maintain a huge population that can’t vote because they’re not citizens.
I lived and worked in S FL for 40 years and I knew a lot of undocumented immigrants. Many of them just want to work here and help their families back home. They would be happy to be able to travel back and forth easily. And many wanted to return home when their working days were over.
👆👆👆👆🎯We also need more immigration judges to process those already documented, but not approved, but the republicans always block that at the behest of their donors.
Do you know how much Green Cards are available for the Millions of asylum applicants who arrived in recent years? "In 2023 the US granted asylum to 54,350 individuals" according to the American Immigration Council (AIC).
Migrants who use the asylum seeker loophole hope that it will take years before a decision is made. They know their chance is slight, but one can always pray for a miracle.
P.S. Immigration judges have nothing to do with other categories of Green Card applicants.
Each proposition simply adjust, or adds to, the alphabet soup of non-immigrants, all with different rules. No one had/has the guts to come with a simple proposal.
- Do away with that cumbersome Visa Lottery.
- Stop the family reunion at absurdum. (For some countries the waiting time in Cat. 3 and 4 is so long, that for them this option barely exists anymore).
- Do away with all non-immigrant designations for people who come here to start a business or to take a job for which they are needed. Just issue them Green Cards. (No more "guest workers"!)
Then use temporary work permits for people needed short term (max. a year) and make employers pay them at the level of consultants. Because amazingly, there is currently no visa for the technician who needs to come here to help install some system or the other.
A system like this would be far more useful for the US economy, fair for immigrants, fair for employers, and save a lot of money at DHS and Department of State in unneeded file-processing.
Whole industries benefited, the situation turning into a GOP bonanza. The country got huge numbers of cheap, exploitable, non-union laborers who can't vote. The GOP got another racist wedge issue.
The interesting thing now is if the immigrants organize on a large scale, like the farm workers did under Chavez, and stage a giant national strike, (A real "Day without Mexicans") This would be more effective at bringing down Trump than all the hand wringing so far by the DNC.
Only legal farm workers can organize - to a certain limit. Only US citizens (not even the naturalized ones) are safe at the moment. I lived for many years in CA, met many people without status. They are not just Mexicans, they come from all over Middle and South America and also from Africa, the Middle East, etc. They have family back home that they send money to and they have their own family here in the US. They have a lot to lose, therefore will keep their heads down. Newly minted US Citizens often voted GOP. Dems profited just as much from sponsors using illegal labor (farming, dairies, slaughterhouses, hospitality, construction). And they also found big sponsors in the H-1B dependent industries. (Only Prez Obama made a small change for H-4 visa holders.)
The Day without Mexicans was a movie reference. The concept applies more broadly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Day_Without_a_Mexican
If the ICE round ups continue, at some point it becomes better to engage in a mass "labor strike" than to wait to be rounded up. The brains behind MAGA know this, and we can expect them to go absolutely berserk if there is any sign of organization by the enormous numbers of deportation targets. They're not really worried about illegal alien criminals, they're terrified about mass action by the so far silent and exploited work force.
Oh. I had forgotten about that insipid movie. Are you an immigrant? Any idea how many risks are involved? When the Delano Grape Strike happened, the "anti-immigrant" legislation was not in place yet. If migrants are clever, they better self-deport before ICE snatches them. There is no empathy for migrants. What do you think mass action will achieve? Green Cards all around?
All this endless Democratic soul-searching and self-recrimination is counterproductive. But for pandemic-induced inflation, Kamala Harris would be president today. She still very nearly won—just 1.46% short—and a recent poll showed voters preferring *her* in a hypothetical do-over.
However, 4 years, even 2 years, is an eternity in politics—and as circumstances change, what’s a winner or loser changes. Democrats need to take *advantage* of things, not replay the last fight. While I serious doubt they’ll be on the next ticket, BS & AOC’s anti-oligarchy theme is exactly what the party’s *message* needs to be.
All because Barron couldn't get into the Ivy League.
That may be behind the attacks on Columbia, but he never applied to schools outside of New York city. Melania wanted him to be schooled a short distance from their Manhattan apartment.
In Nazi Germany the leaders scoffed at what they called "Jewish science" and hung on to "Aryan science". Naturally the Jewish scientists left.
They left, came here, and helped make us the most advanced, powerful nation in the world.
Soon to be joined by said Nazi scientists…at least the aerospace ones.
The Soviet Union grabbed pretty much everyone from Peenemunde who didn't defect to the Americans.
As Kruschev pointed out after the success of Sputnik, "It just goes to show that our Germans are better than your Germans."
Yes but there is more to the story. “Our” Germans worked for the Army at Redstone Arsenal, and the Navy had a competing team, with an American rocket. They were given the go-ahead to use their Vanguard rocket to launch the first American satellite. After two or three blew up on the launch pad, the Army was allowed to have a go, and they succeeded on their first attempt, using a rocket based on the V-2.
As Tom Leher's song noted: Once the rockets go up who cares where they come down, that's not my department says Werhner Von Braun.
Exactly. And now we will suffer the same fate. Our best and brightest are leaving and will make other nations stronger.
And not only Jews! Moreover after the war numerous Eastern European scientists fled the antiscientific and repressive Soviet regimes. The contributions of immigrant scientists were immeasurable.
I thank them for my education as a physicist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro
And naturally Hitler lost the war and was driven to suicide!
Paul, a British viewpoint.
Science and educational bodies are centres of liberalism. Therefore they have to be ‘tamed’, subdued or eliminated. These along with other centres of liberalism, which include the civic services, law enforcement and the military/intelligence have to culled and controlled. Finally an assault on the judiciary system and free press. Once these democratic structures have been weakened, you can seek to embed an authoritarian and illiberal but nominally democratic system of control in the US. This is a well developed and influential extremism that’s being rolled out. DJT is merely a facilitator and acceptable face of what lie’s beneath. It’s JDV that you have to watch as its falls to him to embed this in American politics. In effect you are merely charting the various components which are the roll out of the Plan. The US is in midst of a political revolution run by very dangerous individuals who have well meaning motives. There frustrations with liberalism and its impact on politics; intellectual arrogance; ignorance of the lessons of political history ( my forte ) and sociopathic lack of concern for the masses are a toxic mix and a very dangerous situation is developing.
I am not convinced that GOP voters understand this but if they do, then l perhaps rather optimistically, believe they will begin to resist. The danger is clear and present. I fervently support and hope your culture, society and good fortune as a nation will survive these tests.
I'm not sure they are well meaning...
Agree. They're predators.
They say they are but that is self delusional if they mean it. It is a belief system built on intellectual arrogance ( we know better, leave the politics and governance to us, we are smart and rich ) but will morph into self interest. It always does and history shows it does with only minor exceptions. Exceptions that do not endure or can be replicated, English history is littered with these observations.
I suspect there was a modifier missing like "not".
I have often wondered who is actually in control in the White House. I don't think it's DJT.
the Project 2025 people, who are smart and focused, unlike Trump, and fully evil in quite different ways.
Russell Voight.
This is the the credo of MAGA world -
“Those who lack a basic understanding of science will likely drink the kool-aid served by Charlatans and deniers.” - Don Rittner
They've been guzzling it with their Schlitz.
Iv drip, in the form of Fox Propaganda channel.
PBR
That's what the more sophisticated "highbrow" trailer dwellers go for.
"An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes."
-- Sun Tzu
Not much to rule over. Reminds me of an old tale I read in high school: The Tiger fought a war with the Lion to be King of the Beasts. All the animals fought, and only the Tiger survived. He “won”, but it was the most Pyrrhic victory: no subjects to rule. In short, you can’t be King of the Beasts if there aren’t any!
THAT is a fabulous quote.
We bear the burdens of insecure political leaders who resent those smarter than themselves as they seek a comfortable place of superiority with which to rule the masses. 'Tis easier to dumb them down than to fall down from their rise.
Um, ya know, Television, yeah, Television.
How can the US excel if knowledge and research are censored? We won’t. All the hard work since WWII to improve US education standards will just go down the drain. We will fall by the wayside mighty fast.
It is not quite true no one expected the inquisition. Here is my blog post from Nov last year in which I listed those who would be persecuted, including members of the scientific community.
https://www.jandehn.com/post/american-shitstorm-2-0
Thanks for sharing. PK level
Your blog posts are interesting reading and very prescient.
Many thanks!
It is a coordinated attack against science and facts everywhere.
It goes back at least to the tobacco company’s campaign against the science proving tobacco was responsible for millions of deaths. They hired the PR company Hill and Knowles to run it, which they did by attacking the scientific data with misleading spin. Hill and Knowles was later hired by Big Oil to “debunk’ the scientific evidence of global warming.
In between those two campaigns, H&K helped the first Bush administration lie us into the first Gulf War. They were the ones behind the “Nayirah” false testimony about Iraqi soldiers stealing incubators from Kuwaiti babies and leaving them to die.
Minor correction: Hill & Knowlton - place the blame where it’s due.
Read up on Curtis Yarvin.
He is the architect of much of Trump and conservatives’ aims to tear down democracy to its foundations.
If they are not stopped, they will succeed.
Heather Cox Richardson has a You tube conversation with Gil Duran that is very illuminating about Curtis Yarvin.
Thanks, Martha!
I’m enjoying the clips on Heather‘s website. If you’re interested, the New Yorker has an extensive article on Yarvin. Probably has a paywall.
Correct. Only Some of the ideas but the spirit of the revolution lies with him.
I'm a researcher at NIH, have about 10 years there total. I have loved it and the community of scientists and clinicians who dedicate their lives to helping people heal. These (MAGA) people are so busy being ignorant and angry, they won't even question the lies they're sold about us. We study all sorts of things beyond vaccines, I work on a skin bacteria that helps heal eczema, many study how environmental toxins may cause various common diseases, there are labs that study natural therapies. Mainly, scientists there tend to simply study how the body works so that the underlying causes of various diseases and conditions can be prevented or treated more effectively. I've always been grateful to be a public servant in this realm, it's literally my childhood dream come true, and now it's a nightmare.
I fear for our country, our future. The only thing I feel I can do is take time to communicate with the public and share the wonders of life that the past century of scientific research has unveiled.
Edited for typo/clarity.
The most important thing is to keep up the good work. To the great, adversity is just one more bit of challenge like turning of the level of difficulty in a computer game. You’ll still win.
Thanks so much for the support, every gesture helps. I’ve been inspired by how we’re all doing our best to continue our research despite all the adversity. I think our dedication is stronger than their will for destruction.
I’d say “bless you,” but it sounds too MAGA-y. But bless you anyway for the work you do. My brother worked at USDA, focused on bird flu and was passionate about the work he was doing. To me the removal of smart people who really care is the worst crime of this administration.
The seeds were sown in the 80s and 90s, when the Christian right renewed attacks on Darwin and the theory of evolution by natural selection and pushed crank alternatives such as ”intelligent design” and “design theory.”
They never moved past the Scopes "monkey trial".
Or Galileo’s trail. Or Aristarchus’.