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As someone in the sciences (doing my PhD at Hopkins) these cuts have hit us quite hard. The NSF has basically been dismantled, and the NIH funding system has become much more restrictive. To me, none of this makes a whole lot of sense. These grants were pennies on top of the giant stacks of dollars that the military, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security represent. Yes you get a bunch of duds, but a lot of the research funded has an extremely high ROI. I get that Trump wanted to shut down "woke" research, but he could have done that without cutting overall funding (just mandate that the NIH can't fund transgender research, shutdown the diversity grants, etc.).
This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research. Which I can't really blame the Trump administration for. It was the idiot professors and students who tried to make the department officially pro-Palestine, admit a bunch of diversity PhD students who aren't up to snuff, and antagonize the administration because they thought Trump was a fascist who started this whole thing.
So it seems to me once again a case of Trump punishing the people who tried to screw him over, rather than something that genuinely would be the best move for the country.
So to avoid politicizing scientific research, we should water down the quality of the researchers and let a bunch of activists take over the institutions, and that would genuinely be the best move for the country?
Am I reading that right?
Sorry I think my response was a bit confusing because I don't want to pin the blame solely on Trump for this. Universities have played with fire for a long time and somehow seem surprised to be getting burnt. I just lament that the administration seems to be cutting down the tree rather than pruning some of the worst branches. We can punish woke without destroying the research apparatus.
The tree needs to go, dig up the dirt, salt the hole and burn anything still crawling.
There are no good branches. APAB.
When you’re a marine in Iwo Jima, you light fires at every cave entrance after you’ve thrown 3-4 grenades in. Then you move onto the next one. And the next one.
There’s nothing worth saving in there that just won’t slow you down and get your people killed.
That’s just where we are in the culture war. How could anyone be surprised at this point?
You aren't on Iwo Jima. You're on an Internet board with rules against waging the culture war.
Dial it back, please.
Huh. I rated that one Neutral, because I read it as an obvious metaphor for "raze the institution quickly, ignore the regrettable collateral damage, move on to the next head of the hydra", which is a solid - if bitter - policy prescription and doesn't go the "YOU WERE ALL GUILTY AND YOU WERE ALL LEGITIMATE TARGETS!" route of indiscriminately demonising whole groups.
On reflection, I can see that if one read it literally, or even as ambiguous, that puts a very different spin on things.
Don’t worry; I could tell that it was metaphor. Nobody wants to waste hand grenades in this economy.
But if you don’t think “there’s nothing worth saving in there” counts as indiscriminate demonization, what does?
Well, the actual sentence was:
It's a bit broken, but I interpreted that as roughly
"There might be friendlies in there, but the time and (expected-value) expense in lives of going in there outweighs the value of saving them."
There's a saying that "the exception proves the rule", i.e. if you note that no X are not Y (contrapositive: all X are Y), then this implies the existence of X that are Y. This is not how formal logic defines things, but most people consider it implicit in common parlance (indeed, one of the most common exact-words tricks is to violate this convention). And certainly, even in formal logic, saying that all X are Y does not imply that there aren't X that are Y. Hence, it's not saying there's nothing... saveable? Good? ...in there, just nothing worth the cost of saving.
Well, I mean, not quite nobody.
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