271–280 of 606 posts
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Considering the degree of "hate speech" a Tweet would have to contain to land someone in jail includes direct incitements of violence, I'm scared to ask what sort of opinion you'd like to share that you feel you legally cannot. The claim that you get thrown in jail in London "just for sharing your opinion" is a myth, unless your opinion is, "round up everyone of race X, put them in a hotel, and burn the hotel down."
the amount of people arrested for online activity in England is not the best example to use if you're arguing that such events are rare. otherwise, your incredulity to such a belief is why the far-right continues to gain a constituency in Europe and elsewhere. so instead of dismissing the concern, which fuels the far-right, you could just acknowledge it is a real thing people are experiencing, and that it doesn't hel…
https://x.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1050391663552671744?lang...
Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
Con: LOL no...no not those views
Me: So....deregulation?
Con: Haha no not those views either
Me: Which views, exactly?
Con: Oh, you know the ones
In all important areas such as clean energy, fusion energy, biotechnology and AI the Chinese government is heavily investing in and pushing Chinese companies to lead the world. China Is Outspending the U.S. to Achieve the ‘Holy Grail’ of Clean Energy: Fusion See: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/13/climate/china-us-fusion-e... America's lead in biotechnology is slipping, while China has made synthetic biology a nation…
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It bears repeating: for everyone who insists that the US Executive Branch isn't compromised by our enemies, what different actions would someone who was compromised and trying to speedrun the destruction of American power, influence, and hegemony have taken?
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Let's start with abandoning science funding, abandoning investments in and tax credits for renewable energy sources that are the future. Then there's applying political pressure to academic institutions to drive even more researchers away, abandoning the civil service and science/reason-based governance. Move over to the medical sector and put a dangerous anti-science nut in charge, kill off funding and research.
You pull out of international organizations, trade deals, and treaties. You throw temper tantrums and tariffs around, flip flopping day to day and making it impossible to predict the costs of doing business. You antagonize the rest of the world and give them a constant stream of reasons to stop doing business with you, leaving you isolated, weaker, and poorer.
Then, sure, let's go briefly to immigration. America has been great because it has been where all the smartest people want to be. Our political and academic environment caused the smartest people around the world to want to be here, and the US benefited massively from their contributions and inventions.
So you build a culture demonizing anyone not a specific shade of white. You destroy visa programs. You send thugs to universities to harass people and make them unwelcome. You tell students and researchers who went home to see family that they can't come back to the US. Then you send thugs into cities to terrorize and murder people. So you give all those brilliant scientists even more reason to leave the US, take their contributions with them, and never return.
That's how you kill America.
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German universities are now telling any US researcher who looses their funding that they will be funded at a Germany university and get help with their visa application.
Is this true? Is there a link to the policy? Anything is possible, but this sounds fishy. German research funding isn't known for either generosity or particularly wide reach.
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China is trying. Around the time the US announced restrictions on the H-1B visa, China announced the K visa for attracting immigrants [1]. At this point in time, I don't think people are lining up to get K visa to go live in China. But if the current trajectory continues in the US, who knows how things will be in 5 years? [1] https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-entry-exit-k-visa...
China has a global reputational problem that will take decades to fix. The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does. Nobody sane is going to believe rhetoric claiming that the US is somehow worse than a country that keeps 1.5 million people in concentration camps, and where people work 70 hours per week, no matter how many times…
I don't think this is the case at all.
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> China or Saudi Arabia can wave their money around, but at least some people will be repulsed by the obligation to keep their mouths shut and praise the Dear Leader. I mean we are literally putting people in concentration camps right now. Kinda hard to take the moral high ground at the moment. Scientists are fleeing the United States for their safety, just like they did from 1930s Germany.
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It’s the same in the US. Proximity to a city correlates strongly with all forms of openness. It holds nationwide. There aren’t really blue or red states, just predominantly urban or rural ones. I still don’t quite understand why. The contact hypothesis makes some sense but can that explain the whole urban rural divergence? Rural populations will even vote hard against their own interests in other areas over culture w…
There's more pressure in rural areas to conform in the sense that people know people that can make your time more difficult if you don't. If you get blacklisted in the bush gl finding any work and that's a survival issue. In the city you can walk around anon most of the time and people are more used to others being different. Dump a new high rise of foreigners that don't speak the local language in a metro area and n…
Dump a few hundred foreigners in a town of 5000 and that’s very noticeable and some people will find it jarring. Dump ten thousand foreigners in a metro of three million and nobody will notice.
The point about conformism and exile cost is good too. Cities present endless options for social circles and employment. Little towns not so much.
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Idk, I think a much more effective way to destroy the US would be to send armed gangs through the streets and have them kidnap people from their houses at random. That would cause far more destruction than merely telling people you were doing that without actually doing it.
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It always has been in America. Literally, the history of policing starts with armed gangs looking for escaped slaves, and never went away from those roots. You can see this in their "us or them" combative mentalities, their utter refusal to hold officers accountable even when obviously guilty, their tactics when governments try to impose rules on them, and everything else they do.
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"Concentration camp” is a term that predates its (somewhat euphemistic, when done in retrospect) use for the camps eventually used in the extermnation campaign by the Nazis (which also started out as concentration camps, in the more usual sense, as part of what was nominally a deportation program.) Though concentration camps are almost always part of systematic, ethnically-targetted abuse, even when they aren't part…
Yes. For example, the U.S. also had ethnically-based "concentration camps" (but not extermination camps) during WWII. But these are not like the concentration camps of the 1940s. "Detention camps" are a more accurate descriptor -- both technically and connotatively -- when they are holding foreign nationals prior to repatriation.