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In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

nytimes.com

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Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#371

Post by kelnos »

tharne wrote: post #183
commandlinefan wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To call this “equivalent “ yet.

Quoted post unavailable.

Don't forget that we put Japanese people (including US citizens with Japanese ancestry) in concentration camps during WWII. "Internment camps", we called them... what a euphemism.

And unfortunately our record isn't great on forced sterilization either:

https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/forced-sterilization-policies-us...

https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilizat...

https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2020/11/04/americas-forgotten-histo...

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#372

Post by eecc »

Aperocky wrote: post #165
ethanbond wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Errr... pretty sure the allegation is more specific than you suggest. The allegation was that he was being paid by China and did not disclose this on grant applications.

Case was closed, allegation was rejected. Witch hunt begins when allegation holds more weight then the verdict, and when it becomes the verdict, you can say goodbye to all semblance of rule of law, which surprisingly many here will condone depending on the subject.

Here, a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#373

Post by CamperBob2 »

kragen wrote: post #249
nonethewiser wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see an equivalent turn of events in the US. Could you share what you mean?

No, nothing equivalent to the Cultural Revolution has happened anywhere else ever. Hopefully it never will.

You don't see parallels with the Pol Pot regime?

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#374

Post by wayfarer1291 »

neither_color wrote: post #26

Last week, the government dismissed the case against Dr. Chen, which alleged that he had concealed seven Chinese affiliations in applications for $2.7 million in grants from the U.S. Energy Department. Prosecutors announced that they had received new information indicating that Dr. Chen had not been obliged to disclose those affiliations, undercutting the basis of the case. I feel like this part could use more detail…

One of these so-called affiliations was.. serving as an external grant reviewer for some proposal for the Chinese equivalent of the national science foundation (basic/ theoretical science). Which is of course ridiculous.. we scientists review proposals all the time and the government, in fact, doesn't want to know about it because it's extraneous pointless information. This was a rushed, and very dumb, effort by a US attorney in the final days of the Trump administration.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#375

Post by the_doctah »

pphysch wrote: post #357
KerrAvon wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How you can be "objective," live through the past twenty years, and wind up thinking "both sides" are equally problematic/at fault for the current situation? Maybe a little history will help? America has been prone to succumb to demagoguery for a long time. Here's a novel from 1935 that you should be familiar with: https://www.amazon.com/Cant-Happen-Here-Sinclair-Lewis/dp/19... The reason it's finally happening now i…

USA was created in the wake of perhaps the largest ethnic cleansing in human history (virtual entirety of the North American continent) and has been at war for >90% of its history. It has always been deeply racist (whether overt like KKK lynchings or subtle like census reporting and tokenism). Whatever these rightoids are allegedly plotting, you can't say they are "remaking" America into something radically new.

How does mid-millenium colonization of America prove current-year racism? This is pure CRT-adjacent nonsense. The use of words like "rightoid" does not help your argument.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#376

Post by thereddaikon »

perihelions wrote: post #189
throwawayarnty wrote: post #10

The worst part of these accusations is that your reputation is tarnished whether you are guilty or not. This instilled a sense of fear in every person even if they are innocent because you can still be targeted and your career ruined. If this scientist was just stating out, rather than already established, he would likely have had to quit science. There should be some penalty for false accusations that can compensate…

This case went beyond false accusations. According to the professor's lawyers [0], the government possessed exculpatory evidence and knowingly withheld it from the defense -- a theoretically-illegal Brady violation [1]. > " As my team of lawyers argued, Bonavolonta and his agents ignored basic exculpatory evidence, failed to interview critical witnesses until after I was arrested, and dramatically embellished facts i…

As I said in another thread, you cannot expect groups to self police. The legal system will never hold these people accountable because it works against their interests to. This is basic human nature and true everywhere. This is why companies don't admit to wrong doing for dumping waste. This is why the fia doesn't admit it fixed the f1 championship. And this is why dirty cops don't go to prison.

You want change? Make a 4th branch of government who's only power and purpose is to arrest members of the other three branches when they break the law.

Of course it ain't that simple. How do you keep them from getting corrupted and arresting people they don't like? Food for thought.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#377

Post by dnautics »

nobody9999 wrote: post #360
dnautics wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

going to quote my sibling child comment here: If you are, say a high ranking general at the pentagon -- which is a position directly paid by the government, then can you claim "first amendment" if you pass military secrets on to an adversarial government? Of course not. I suggest you think about why a general gets treated differently than a private citizen. Suppose you are a private citizen and manage to snap a pictu…

>I suggest you think about why a general gets treated differently than a private citizen. I didn't realize that being an academic at a private research institution was equivalent to being a member of the armed forces. Thanks for clarifying that for me. I should have realized that they were exactly the same thing. Please.

Listen, if you work at a private research institution and you raise funds through a nonprofit (like, say HHMI), then by all means, do what you want. You are not beholden to the taxpayer. Money from the government absolutely comes with strings attached. Do you think that an employee of Lockheed Martin would be able leak secret plane information on a government contract to an adversarial country with impunity, just because it is a "private company owned by private citizens", thus gaining "first amendment protections"?

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#378

Post by kelnos »

arrozconcosas wrote: post #296
rayiner wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true and that's unfortunate. At the same time, how do you balance national security versus avoiding situations like this one? One of my takeaways from studying the McCarthy era was that there really were a lot of spies and communist sympathizers in America at the time. It wasn't some figment of someone's imagination. Likewise, I think we have good reason to proceed under the assumption that China is trying to…

[Impact per unit of spying] X [number of spies caught] - [impact per unit of innocent person being impacted] X [number of innocent people falsely accused] = net impact to society Typically, the first part of the equation is wildly overestimated because by stopping spies in 1 area, they just find another way to do what they want to do and the impact happens anyways. Or the threat evolves over time but the policies do…

This was my thought as well. The comparison isn't exact, but this feels like a War on Drugs situation: you're never going to stamp out all spying, and as you try, a lot of innocent (or at least non-harmful) people will get swept up in the process and their lives destroyed.

Now, I think policing espionage is more valuable than policing drugs, and the dynamics certainly all aren't the same. But I think the bar for making espionage accusations -- just the accusations themselves -- needs to be much higher than it is.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#379

Post by greesil »

feoren wrote: post #354
greesil wrote: post #35

These things have a way of working themselves out. "Father of Chinese Rocketry" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xuesen Except for the 5 years under house arrest part. Wow.

Survivorship bias, perhaps? That is, all the stories you hear about like this are the kind that turn into stories you hear about -- you don't hear about anyone whose life is just quietly ruined, so it seems like they all work out fine. And of course nothing "works itself out" -- it's people who work them out. It doesn't have to be you -- it's OK to just read the article and move on with your own life -- but whenever…

At the macro level, if you're the policy-maker and doing the persecuting, stories like this should give you pause. Of course it's survivor bias for the individual.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#380

Post by kragen »

laputan_machine wrote: post #369
kragen wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

To me, his response to you was identically snarky as your response to him. I think you could both do with being a little kinder to each other

In the grandparent comment, he accuses me of lying and hypocrisy, neither of which is correct. The only thing I had accused him of is not knowing anything about the Cultural Revolution, which is obviously correct, since he had confused it with the Great Leap Forward.

Ignorance is not immoral; it's the state we all start in, after all.

So I do not agree that falsely accusing someone of lying and hypocrisy is "identically snarky as" correctly "accusing" someone of ignorance.

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