Jesweez
5d ago
Those are obviously just the high profile ones. Most of these from our time won’t be remembered in a couple decades.
Jesweez
12d ago
Yeah the part where they invaded everyone to conduct industrial scale ethnic cleansing campaigns does kind of overshadow their views on tax policy.
Jesweez
12d ago
By that you mean "moral" corruption
Maybe that is the deeper issue but I had more in mind things like: the president and his associates running cryptocurrency scams on their supporters
That sort of thing didn’t used to happen in the US or even the developed world from what I know.
The moral corruption I perceive is that suddenly the US started acting in ways that I associate with third world governments, and there was only tepid criticism.
Well, as long as they were the correct color. They had quotas for that, just like they did in the '50s, for the same reasons they had them in the '50s
Affirmative action type stuff to me is a side note to what I’m describing.
I agree with conservatives about basing acceptance for jobs and studies on merit instead of skin color.
That doesn’t change the fact that we’ve essentially renounced the role as the country that hoovers up all the intellectual talent and high agency individuals from the world and puts them to work building things here on our soil.
Science that doesn't replicate isn't science, and the initiatives to do R&D were also suffering from the "so long as they're the right color" problem. I guess it's the age-old dilemma where you can either do science or you can sacrifice it to be anti-racist, just from the right's definition of anti-racism instead of the left's. Naturally, this is moral corruption to the left, just like ending racism the first time was to the right.
Look, science has flaws, but it works, damn it!
The survivability of cancer has increased dramatically over the past decades. That’s just one (set of) disease(s). Dementia, Parkinson’s, AIDS, diabetes, MS, arthritis, many of these conditions have seen outcomes quietly yet drastically improve over these past decades. Science is working and still acts as a fundamental engine advancing human wellbeing.
Materials science, computational techniques, and even odd niche branches of science such as looking at what chemicals are in the saliva of lizards, have delivered huge advances in recent decades. And surprisingly, most of this has happened in the US!!
You might be destined to get Alzheimer’s in the future and science poses the ability to save your very brain and being from a terrible fate. Or maybe you will experience a horrific accident and regenerative medicine techniques might save your life from becoming a living hell.
Scientific advancement is occurring, and is good for all of us, and despite our comfort and confidence in continuous advancement, it’s not guaranteed.
The current administration has been a storm that passed though science funding at every level, ripping up grants, discouraging a generation of youth from getting into the discipline, and discouraging people who typically would have come here to work in our labs to stay away and go elsewhere.
The sheer strength of our position as the center of the scientific world might allow it to hunker down and withstand all of this, but that’s not at all the outcome you would hope for.
No, only China. Nobody else invested into the tooling to manufacture the panels for the same reason the US couldn't- too expensive. The West has already lost the battle for renewable energy sovereignty (and already won the battle for forcing Europe into a dependence on American natural gas by successfully provoking a war in Ukraine); the only question is whether we want to pay now to redevelop indigenous green energy generation capacity, or pay later by having to do that anyway when China starts making diplomatic demands in exchange.
I agree and this one is complicated, but we had a role to play in a technological revolution that the entire world is going through and we decided it’s better to sit back and actually attack it rather than get in and help shape it.
It’s like if in the past upon seeing that the English were advancing with this new concept of coal fired trains and industry, we had decided to actively combat its establishment here to preserve the timber industry.
China has the lead but we could have played a role with innovating in this domain and then at least competing to help lead the global buildout that is (genuinely) occurring. Instead, China is the one and only benefactor, and for this is leaps and bounds ahead with the know how to produce and install this stuff and is doing so in every country across the planet. Not to mention that in any conflict has a decent shot at kicking our ass with massive swarms of cheaply made drones and batteries.
Were obviously just missing out on the next supercycle of technological development on the planet when we could have at least tried to be in the game.
Like I say we did stay in the game on AI, since it was genuinely our innovation which came from the US academia and tech industry. Currently it’s the only thing keeping the American economy afloat (although probably also is in big bubble territory).
But instead of navigating this time of challenges skillfully, focusing on our fortifying our competitive strengths, we just adopted the posture of an angry inwardly-turned nation that started attacking its own foundations of power and influence based on passing culture war freak out stuff.
In other words, stuff like affirmative action and all that is just some silly ornamentation we put on top of the most successful engine of power and influence of the modern world. We could have taken away the mild productivity-decreasing AA stuff and kept the foundation intact! Instead, we started chopping the entire thing down.
The baby can only be thrown out with its bathwater for so long. The lightening might be very hard to get back into the bottle, as each former center of world power and influence can attest.
Jesweez
12d ago
Yeah but that’s the same sort of thing someone from 2019 who was pro cancellation would have said about the cancelled party
Jesweez
12d ago
It’s so weird seeing the left switch back to defending free speech and offensiveness in comedy and the right now justifying firings over microaggressions.
I guess I got too used to the brief span of time between 2008-2024 and should just expect this kind of reversal in things I assumed were stable to happen several more times across my lifetime.
Jesweez
12d ago
Average lefty here, happy to respond with specifics?
I just sort of mourn the old United States where acting with blatant corruption was out of the pale.
Also as someone in science I mourn the days when the nation took pride in being a powerhouse in things like scientific research, and in being a place where people all over the world wanted to come and get educated here.
We had this really great thing going being not just the most economically powerful but also the most intellectually productive country in the world, and we acted as a vacuum sucking up all the intelligent and ambitious people from around the world and having them come here to build things with us.
Now we started with this mean style of politics which makes those same people not want to come here anymore. Some might still do it based on a risk-reward calculation, but even then, we’ve destroyed science funding in the country and so even the reward side of the equation also got hit.
Meanwhile, we’re destroying the open market of energy that we used to have and actively persecuting renewable energy technologies. Places like Texas were world leaders in renewables because the tech is just simply good and competitive. No more. Batteries and renewable energies are the technologies of the future of the rest of the world and we’re letting China and the rest of the world just absolutely eat our lunch there. While the world undergoes this technological revolution we just chose to sit it out.
So overall, largely because of Trump and his politics, we’ve become this angry inward focused power that is giving up the very sources of dynamism that make us powerful.
I guess the one thing we have is AI and it’s just about the only area where the United States has an advantage that the Trump administration isn’t trying to destroy while pursuing some misguided ideological end.
Jesweez
12d ago
What leftist movement has been obsessed with concepts like purifying the racial makeup of the country?
Nazis are called right wing because they share the same preoccupations as right wing politics all over the place.
Just as if someone today is obsessed with making the US or their European country a white ethnostate, it’s not hard to guess that that person winds up being right wing in many other ways as well.
The Nazis were a clear right wing movement that simply adopted a new level of extremism after observing the communists.
Jesweez
13d ago
As someone on the left I am almost always unconsciously framing my policy viewpoints in the language of the right.
And I feel that almost all of the advice for how to communicate for people on the left preaches this.
This bit of text was a big wake up for me!
Jesweez
13d ago
The fixation I’ve observed on this forum with the 2020 riots is certainly interesting.
Riots are not exactly an uncommon part of political life, yet judging from what I’ve read from many posters here these seem to have been the formative event for many right wing posters.
Interestingly I would have had no idea if not for occasionally browsing forums like this, and that it still seems to be the center of gravity toward which many conversations tend even now 5 years later confirms it.
Bringing back the civilian conservation corps would be cool
Good new deal program there that could get much broader support than only compulsory military service. Also would probably be a bigger benefit for the mental health of the youth, not to mention benefitting the country.
Even things like beautifying broken down or trashed areas, give people a way to serve the country that actually is visibly improving it.
I think both sides could agree on this sort of thing, but it’d be hard not to politicize it.
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