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What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

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Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#561

Post by jimkleiber »

gameman144 wrote: post #485
hall0ween wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain more about the "highly discriminatory and ideological" behavior you've seen? Is it across the board, in the sciences? For example, is a neurosurgery lab at UC Davis working on glioma research either discriminatory and ideologically driven?

I can speak to one instance of this (which was before COVID and the events surrounding George Floyd, so apply context as needed), but I took a class on networking implementations in low-budget and rural regions. As part of the curriculum, there were distinct lessons (in this hard-science course) on feminist design, avoiding white-savior rollouts, and cultural relativism -- with much room to expound on their importanc…

I don't know if networking implementations in low-budget and rural regions is a purely STEM topic. The mere fact it talks about low-budget and rural regions suggests to me it interacts with geography and sociology and development economics, which to me makes sense that it'd incorporate ideas from those fields as well.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#562

Post by nlitened »

jmward01 wrote: post #490

This is a coup and we are calmly debating budgets. Debating the % of budget and how useful organization x is and if y will still get grant money, and, and, and... All of this is ignoring the big elephant in the room that there is one single person deciding everything that happens in government as if they were a king. The right thing to be debating is how we can stop this from continuing and how we can hold those resp…

> deciding everything that happens in government as if they were a king

Isn’t it what the head of executive branch supposed to mean?

Trump does exactly how he promised he would do if you elected him, and you guys elected him overwhelmingly to do exactly that.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#563

Post by newsclues »

belter wrote: post #551
newsclues wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how democracy works, I recall an election recently not a coup. Government is not a monolith, this isn’t the action of one single person, but the result of tens of millions people voting for change (that you disagree with).

> I recall an election recently not a coup. List of dictators that achieved power via what were at the time, free and fair elections: Adolf Hitler - 1933 Ferdinand Marcos - 1965 Alberto Fujimori - 1990 Robert Mugabe - 1980 Alexander Lukashenko - 1994 Hugo Chávez - 1998

Which of these was elected, lost power, and were elected again?

Normally dictators don’t let go of power

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#564

Post by jimkleiber »

chasing wrote: post #291
yibg wrote: post #93

Part of me thinks this is just incompetence. People put in charge to "change" things without knowing what the thing is or does and just randomly mashing buttons.

Incompetence. Mixed in with a fair amount of malevolence. Mixed in with that rich guy thing of really hating smart people because why do they always keep telling me I'm wrong and embarrassing me in front of people if they were really so smart why aren't they rich like me huh?

> Mixed in with that rich guy thing of really hating smart people because why do they always keep telling me I'm wrong and embarrassing me in front of people if they were really so smart why aren't they rich like me huh?

I never thought about it like this and it makes so much sense. I have financial (and maybe social) power therefore I should have intellectual power and if you show to people that you have more than I do, then I feel embarrassed and will use my financial (and social) power to make you feel embarrassed.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#565

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

nlitened wrote: post #562
jmward01 wrote: post #490

This is a coup and we are calmly debating budgets. Debating the % of budget and how useful organization x is and if y will still get grant money, and, and, and... All of this is ignoring the big elephant in the room that there is one single person deciding everything that happens in government as if they were a king. The right thing to be debating is how we can stop this from continuing and how we can hold those resp…

> deciding everything that happens in government as if they were a king Isn’t it what the head of executive branch supposed to mean? Trump does exactly how he promised he would do if you elected him, and you guys elected him overwhelmingly to do exactly that.

>Isn’t it what the head of executive branch supposed to mean?

In a nation governed by a constitution and laws, absofuckinglutely not. The chief executive is supposed to operate within the bounds of the constitution and the laws created under it.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#566

Post by scarab92 »

concordDance wrote: post #544
jmward01 wrote: post #490

This is a coup and we are calmly debating budgets. Debating the % of budget and how useful organization x is and if y will still get grant money, and, and, and... All of this is ignoring the big elephant in the room that there is one single person deciding everything that happens in government as if they were a king. The right thing to be debating is how we can stop this from continuing and how we can hold those resp…

I had an idea in my head about what the word "coup" means and why it is bad and I'm struggling to figure out how it applies to this situation (possibly because being no-American I don't get their news). My understanding is the USA executive is an obscenely powerful position by the standard of the rest of the Western world and they can also delegate that power to accomplish specific objectives. Is this a coup of Musk…

It’s not a coup in any literal sense of the word, not even in the autocratic sense.

The reason it’s being used is a combination of the US having never experienced a real coup, and thus it’s citizens not really knowing what the word means, plus one side of politics being sore losers after having lost an election and using whatever insult they can think of in order to deflect rather than self reflect on why they lost.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#567

Post by hikingsimulator »

newsclues wrote: post #563
belter wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I recall an election recently not a coup. List of dictators that achieved power via what were at the time, free and fair elections: Adolf Hitler - 1933 Ferdinand Marcos - 1965 Alberto Fujimori - 1990 Robert Mugabe - 1980 Alexander Lukashenko - 1994 Hugo Chávez - 1998

Which of these was elected, lost power, and were elected again? Normally dictators don’t let go of power

I do recall Trump not wanting to let go of that power, in it? It wasn't out of his own magnanimity that he stepped down. Checks and balances still worked, appallingly sure, but they still worked.

Not anymore.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#568

Post by bildung »

wholinator2 wrote: post #543
DarkmSparks wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not really a coup, its a default. US government is already using pension fund money to pay its bills since early January (aka special measures), the interest on their national debt is already more than they collect in taxes.

This is what i never understand. Okay, not enough money, soooo _tax more_. Or at least stop giving tax cuts to the richest people in the history of the planet? Like, implement a 5% tax on their wealth, and just fix all the problems. We could have services _and_ rich people, we just have to make insanely rich people contribute to our world like we all do to theirs

It's a strategy, called Starve the Beast. The idea is to collect taxes, which then forces the current government to cut expenditures. The current Trump administration is no difference, this is what all the talk about government bloat is about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

It's pretty clever in its cruelty: Once you have cut taxes, it essentially doesn't matter which party wins the next election: The have to gut expenditures anyway.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#569

Post by cubefox »

khazhoux wrote: post #357
kristjansson wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even quoting the NIH/NSF budgets (or their line items) misses the point of the current actions. Yes, they're smaller fractions of the USG budget, but they not immaterial. This is not an attempt to 'save money' at the NSF and NIH (and USAID). A serious, rational effort to reduce their costs / increase their efficiency does not start with grep-ing manuscripts for 'underrepresented'. Part Five of TFA is on the money. Th…

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Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#570

Post by bad_haircut72 »

newsclues wrote: post #563
belter wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I recall an election recently not a coup. List of dictators that achieved power via what were at the time, free and fair elections: Adolf Hitler - 1933 Ferdinand Marcos - 1965 Alberto Fujimori - 1990 Robert Mugabe - 1980 Alexander Lukashenko - 1994 Hugo Chávez - 1998

Which of these was elected, lost power, and were elected again? Normally dictators don’t let go of power

He tried pretty hard to not go, there was a riot if you recall. Also some calls to Georgia governor to find non-existent votes.
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