The institutions and trust that generations of Americans carefully built has been gleefully torched by cruel incompetents in the space of a handful years. The damage, physical and social, is incalculable. The unpunished crimes, endless.
The reconstruction, if it happens at all, will take decades. It was all so unnecessary, so foolish.
The American Empire is gone and not coming back. It rose in a very different world and once these competitive advantages in science and elsewhere have been squandered they won't ever get back to the same level; there's too much competition from other countries now and too little faith that the US won't do this again.
As much as I hate it, we're heading into a more violent and less prosperous world. Whatever that morphs into long term almost certainly won't be as nice for Americans as the recent past was.
Our capitulation to Iran, a third rate military power that we chose to attack and then lost to, is really driving home the point at the moment.
I think this is an offensive and self fulfilling view. Americans are too dumb to do science so we need to rely almost entirely on foreigners from almost entirely the same two countries to do it for us. There's lots of holes in this scheme. I don't really want politicians to control funding for science but then again we've become somewhat of a degree mill and there's a lot of useless careerism in academia.
I will give an example. Did we need years and years of funding for a lab to work on an obscure programming language for multiprocessing that basically only that lab ever used? Probably not. How much of funded science is just useless waste for a group of people to play with things like this? A lot, I would speculate. There isn't really a good way to spot what's useful and what isn't but let's not pretend academia is a purely selfless institution.
> Our capitulation to Iran, a third rate military power that we chose to attack and then lost to, is really driving home the point at the moment.
Uh....that's more the fault of a president who thought a totally normal thing (arms treaties with expiring restrictions) was a "scam" (not to mention, a black man he hates was responsible for said treaty) and ripped up said treaty. We literally were in a treaty, with Iran, that was doing all the things Trump said he wanted.
Then thought he could bully a country he probably thinks of as "a bunch of sand", ignoring the fact that a quarter of the world's oil drives right by them. I've heard foreign policy analysts say that it seemed like Iran never realized how much power they did until Trump pissed them off, they responded, the shipping industry universally said "ohhh hell no" and dropped anchor....and Iranian leadership looked around and said "........wait. We've been able to do that THIS WHOLE TIME?!!!" and then their plan become to outlast Trump's administration.
Iran realizing they can cripple the world economy is a genie that will not be put back in its bottle, even as countries scramble to decarbonize. Oil is still required for lubricants, plastics, and chemical production.
Add in the fact that the US military is being run by a guy who is more concerned about people being clean-shaven than actually running the military as an organization and by all accounts, barely managed ~2 dozen soldiers, then in civilian life failed, repeatedly, at managing businesses. Who has kicked out or pissed off dozens of senior military leaders, as well as pissed off anyone who was remotely debating whether to reenlist.
If we want to prevent this from happening people need to be able to trust their government and feel their interests are shared by their representatives.
I honestly think the decline started sometime in the 80s when it was accepted that everything is solely about profits and nothing else. It took a while but the enshittification of the country is accelerating. The latest developments are in my view just a symptom of this much longer trend.
The retrogression perception is correct; but the specific timeframe is so incorrect that the back of my head blew out like a pinata.
The goal is - and I am not picking on the reactionary wing alone, this impulse has broad support across our ideologies - de-industrialization. The complexity of post-Enlightenment civilization is being rejected, in favor of some hypothetical state. This puts the past timeframe as far back as the 17th century.
But not a "real" past. No one can recreate the past. Only their idea of the past.
And of course, when you "create" anything, too much and too quickly, you risk systemic collapse. Not a problem if you imagine you will be Immortan Joeing around in your Death Wagon, but odds are, I'm sorry to say, against it.
The piñata bit is a bit hyperbolic, but largely I agree that it’s a movement built against the principles of the enlightenment, and the movements of modernism and post-modernism that grew out of it.
It’s like: what if we took all of the principles of the enlightenment, and forced them through a sieve that served our racist, xenophobic, chauvinist world view? Rediscovering eugenics and pseudoscience, especially for christofascist ambitions and exploitative grifting.
Trump is a populist doing populist things, including attacking the intellectuals.
Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years, which frankly was a pretty dumb "victory" to celebrate, because now they voted in a dumb gorilla that is just smashing things as revenge.
Conservative views are very anti science, look at their consensus on climate change. Of course the universities were going to be mostly liberal.
Like at their core conservatives are against change, that’s the “conserve” part of their name and science is a process that constantly updates our understanding of reality.
The US in 1950s was very big on science. Nuclear, space, biology, etc, etc. Science seemed to have an answer to everything. I frankly don't remember a time when science was in such a low regard among the US public; maybe in the Deep South in 18th century.
Not really even that. The 1950s had a lot of problems in terms of racism and sexism, but wealth inequality was much lower than today with extremely high tax rates for the wealthy (under Eisenhower, a Republican!) And most relevant to this discussion, science and scientists were respected and well funded.
Then there would be someone else who'd come. Considering they came to US and not to other places out of Europe. It would mean conditions were favorable in US.
I'm not sure what you're trying to imply, as I can't parse what you mean by "there would be someone else who'd come." Getting the world's 100 greatest plumbers won't fundamentally change the course of the course of the US economy for the better, getting the world's 100 greatest physicists to come to the US certainly puts the US on a path towards world economic domination.
Point is, the 1950s had highly international science, and the US welcomed international scientists and benefited hugely from them.
The US in 2025 and 2026 is extremely hostile to international scientists and is hurting greatly from it.
"And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now."
You could rewrite this the other way for the prior administration, simply replace the word "include" with preclude.
The institutions that built US science dominance were built in the 1950s. A fraction of Americans voted to bring America back to a cartoonish pastiche of images of the olden times (from 1950s, 1920s and 1800s) that they didn't know never existed and they didn't know that partly 'cause of education cuts starting in the 1970s-1980s.
Things were considerably better in the '50s than whatever this is that we're living through. Especially for scientists. A lot less inequality too.
The only way in which we're "getting back to the 50s" is that it's now ok again to be openly racist and blatantly suppress the voting rights of black Americans.
They don’t want the 1950s. We were pretty science forward then. The problem is they don’t really want to live in a world driven by facts because it eats into their privilege and they would rather have that.
The institutions and trust that generations of Americans carefully built has been gleefully torched by cruel incompetents in the space of a handful years. The damage, physical and social, is incalculable. The unpunished crimes, endless.
The reconstruction, if it happens at all, will take decades. It was all so unnecessary, so foolish.
The American Empire is gone and not coming back. It rose in a very different world and once these competitive advantages in science and elsewhere have been squandered they won't ever get back to the same level; there's too much competition from other countries now and too little faith that the US won't do this again.
As much as I hate it, we're heading into a more violent and less prosperous world. Whatever that morphs into long term almost certainly won't be as nice for Americans as the recent past was.
Our capitulation to Iran, a third rate military power that we chose to attack and then lost to, is really driving home the point at the moment.
I think this is an offensive and self fulfilling view. Americans are too dumb to do science so we need to rely almost entirely on foreigners from almost entirely the same two countries to do it for us. There's lots of holes in this scheme. I don't really want politicians to control funding for science but then again we've become somewhat of a degree mill and there's a lot of useless careerism in academia.
I will give an example. Did we need years and years of funding for a lab to work on an obscure programming language for multiprocessing that basically only that lab ever used? Probably not. How much of funded science is just useless waste for a group of people to play with things like this? A lot, I would speculate. There isn't really a good way to spot what's useful and what isn't but let's not pretend academia is a purely selfless institution.
3 replies →
> Our capitulation to Iran, a third rate military power that we chose to attack and then lost to, is really driving home the point at the moment.
Uh....that's more the fault of a president who thought a totally normal thing (arms treaties with expiring restrictions) was a "scam" (not to mention, a black man he hates was responsible for said treaty) and ripped up said treaty. We literally were in a treaty, with Iran, that was doing all the things Trump said he wanted.
Then thought he could bully a country he probably thinks of as "a bunch of sand", ignoring the fact that a quarter of the world's oil drives right by them. I've heard foreign policy analysts say that it seemed like Iran never realized how much power they did until Trump pissed them off, they responded, the shipping industry universally said "ohhh hell no" and dropped anchor....and Iranian leadership looked around and said "........wait. We've been able to do that THIS WHOLE TIME?!!!" and then their plan become to outlast Trump's administration.
Iran realizing they can cripple the world economy is a genie that will not be put back in its bottle, even as countries scramble to decarbonize. Oil is still required for lubricants, plastics, and chemical production.
Add in the fact that the US military is being run by a guy who is more concerned about people being clean-shaven than actually running the military as an organization and by all accounts, barely managed ~2 dozen soldiers, then in civilian life failed, repeatedly, at managing businesses. Who has kicked out or pissed off dozens of senior military leaders, as well as pissed off anyone who was remotely debating whether to reenlist.
4 replies →
The soft power the US has lost will take a generation or more to rebuild if it's ever rebuilt.
If we want to prevent this from happening people need to be able to trust their government and feel their interests are shared by their representatives.
We need people to be less racist and stop voting for politicians they hope will hurt the right people.
2 replies →
I honestly think the decline started sometime in the 80s when it was accepted that everything is solely about profits and nothing else. It took a while but the enshittification of the country is accelerating. The latest developments are in my view just a symptom of this much longer trend.
I for one welcome -the ̶̶̶̶̶screw ̶̶̶̶worm- our new AI overlords.
The retrogression perception is correct; but the specific timeframe is so incorrect that the back of my head blew out like a pinata.
The goal is - and I am not picking on the reactionary wing alone, this impulse has broad support across our ideologies - de-industrialization. The complexity of post-Enlightenment civilization is being rejected, in favor of some hypothetical state. This puts the past timeframe as far back as the 17th century.
But not a "real" past. No one can recreate the past. Only their idea of the past.
And of course, when you "create" anything, too much and too quickly, you risk systemic collapse. Not a problem if you imagine you will be Immortan Joeing around in your Death Wagon, but odds are, I'm sorry to say, against it.
The piñata bit is a bit hyperbolic, but largely I agree that it’s a movement built against the principles of the enlightenment, and the movements of modernism and post-modernism that grew out of it.
It’s like: what if we took all of the principles of the enlightenment, and forced them through a sieve that served our racist, xenophobic, chauvinist world view? Rediscovering eugenics and pseudoscience, especially for christofascist ambitions and exploitative grifting.
Trump is a populist doing populist things, including attacking the intellectuals.
Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years, which frankly was a pretty dumb "victory" to celebrate, because now they voted in a dumb gorilla that is just smashing things as revenge.
> Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years,
Any citations on this?
21 replies →
Conservative views are very anti science, look at their consensus on climate change. Of course the universities were going to be mostly liberal.
Like at their core conservatives are against change, that’s the “conserve” part of their name and science is a process that constantly updates our understanding of reality.
16 replies →
The fifties are when a lot of this infrastructure got its start.
They want the 1850s.
[flagged]
We funded research in the 1950s . This is more like the 30s.
The US in 1950s was very big on science. Nuclear, space, biology, etc, etc. Science seemed to have an answer to everything. I frankly don't remember a time when science was in such a low regard among the US public; maybe in the Deep South in 18th century.
Not really even that. The 1950s had a lot of problems in terms of racism and sexism, but wealth inequality was much lower than today with extremely high tax rates for the wealthy (under Eisenhower, a Republican!) And most relevant to this discussion, science and scientists were respected and well funded.
In the 1950s the US had lots of foreign scientists.
In fact if the US hadn't had its huge influx of foreign scientists fleeing the Nazis, who knows where we'd even be today.
Then there would be someone else who'd come. Considering they came to US and not to other places out of Europe. It would mean conditions were favorable in US.
I'm not sure what you're trying to imply, as I can't parse what you mean by "there would be someone else who'd come." Getting the world's 100 greatest plumbers won't fundamentally change the course of the course of the US economy for the better, getting the world's 100 greatest physicists to come to the US certainly puts the US on a path towards world economic domination.
Point is, the 1950s had highly international science, and the US welcomed international scientists and benefited hugely from them.
The US in 2025 and 2026 is extremely hostile to international scientists and is hurting greatly from it.
1 reply →
You're not wrong, but let's not forget that some large number of scientists (cough Werner von Braun cough) were fleeing prosecution as Nazis.
"And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now."
You could rewrite this the other way for the prior administration, simply replace the word "include" with preclude.
The institutions that built US science dominance were built in the 1950s. A fraction of Americans voted to bring America back to a cartoonish pastiche of images of the olden times (from 1950s, 1920s and 1800s) that they didn't know never existed and they didn't know that partly 'cause of education cuts starting in the 1970s-1980s.
I don't think this era of ignorance and anti-intellectualism can be compared to a previous point of time in modern America.
In the 50s taxation on wealthy individuals reached almost 90%.
And somehow they still managed to be very rich!
Even the 1950s allowed for Operation Paperclip. This time is different.
Things were considerably better in the '50s than whatever this is that we're living through. Especially for scientists. A lot less inequality too.
The only way in which we're "getting back to the 50s" is that it's now ok again to be openly racist and blatantly suppress the voting rights of black Americans.
Americans, broadly, didn't vote—those who did are obviously brainwashed cultists.
They don’t want the 1950s. We were pretty science forward then. The problem is they don’t really want to live in a world driven by facts because it eats into their privilege and they would rather have that.
Back to the 1930s.
People in the 1950s were convinced that the nuclear family was a disaster and the leading cause of divorce/poverty.
Huh? That seems counter to my perceptions. Any links to expound upon that?
Nicole Rudolph just did a video on this topic. I haven't watched it yet though.
Probably because the nuclear family doesn’t include grandparents helping.