As a former engineer this cuts me especially deep. Though I believe there is dignity in all honest work whether you are a garbage collector, an automobile mechanic or a nuclear engineer. It is a fact that the destruction in STEM being deliberately perpetrated by trump will cause great harm to this country for a generation or more.
Excellent piece. The US will become a scientific backwater in a few years because of Trump's policies. Many in the MAGA world, who hate elites, will rejoice--until they find that they have to drive 100 miles to see a doctor because of the complete collapse of immigration to the US.
Several years ago, the comic strip "Shoe" dealt with Republican reluctance to fund schools.. Senator Batson D. Belfry was bloviating away when a reporter asked why the Republicans kept trying to eliminate school funding. the Senator replied, "How do you think we keep getting elected?"
These actions described in Receipts when combined with all of the other actions of this administration make one wonder what the US will look like a decade from now (with the dictator party still in charge).
Hey Catharine…is the following video true? Because if it is, this seems like something right up your alley that would be a bombshell. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZThyvDnSQ/
Interesting video. It may well be true -- I don't have enough info to guess -- but even if it is, it probably won't have much effect. The concept is probably too complex for the the typical ICE-oriented mentality; certainly they couldn't follow the math.
This is the ultimate indictment of the brain-rot of the American right. For years we've watched people on the right exploit reasonable criticisms of the academic humanities in order to discredit the academic sciences. They've pandered to religious nuts to allow space for creationism to be given equal weight to the theory of evolution, and to the fossil fuel industry to downplay and/or discredit the science of global warming.
The end result is that American conservatives have gone from being the people that would once deliver hard truths to us bleeding heart liberals, to being the purveyors of their own brand of irrational, gut-brained, alternative reality. Their feelings don't care about your facts, and their facts are increasingly nothing but juvenile, crowd-sourced hokum, never put to any test aside from the outrage it triggers in knowledgeable, responsible people.
The anti-vaccine, complementary-medicine pushing, anti-pharmaceutical soft-headedness that were once mostly the sole province of the Dennis Kucinich's and Marianne Williamson's of the world, are now equally indulged by supposed conservatives, who worship the worm-infested brain of a Kennedy. "Ditto" for the kneejerk anti-authoritarian conspiracy theorizing by people with no concept of how to transition from theory to fact (and yes, I began this sentence with a sarcastic reference to the moniker once voluntarily adopted by the bovine-brained herd of cattle that Rush Limbaugh once cultivated, the forerunner of the modern right-wing doofus who lives only to own the libs).
The irony is that the once unapologetically elitist Republican Party has now had to cosplay as populist to placate the constituency they were forced to cultivate in lieu of a presenting an economic platform with cross-cultural appeal. Idealistic to a fault, ignoring the cost of social discord and cultural sickness, they indulged in self-validating platitutes of hard work and bootstrap ethics to con the working class into accepting less, in order to punish the unworthy. This required patronizing the same nativist, culturally entitled segment of the population which Southern Democrats once exploited for power, exporting their resentful, grievance-based political culture north of the Mason-Dixon line.
And so the once great Republican Party, forged from the lofty ideals of men like Abraham Lincoln, and until recently internally driven by pragmatic—if at times tragically cynical—intellectuals, is now the party of the uninformed rabble and the lawless mob. It is composed of politicians biding their time to retirement, and doing their best to avoid crossing their increasingly adolescent-minded base, whose ignorance of America's own history now rivals the solipsism that has long pervaded American culture. Accordingly, the country is being run like a mass-scale Lord of the Flies, by grown children giddy with the thrill of making big machines do big things and unconcerned with the consequences—so long as they don't impact them.
The Party has now lost control over their rank-and-file, which is so detached from the emprical reality we once jointly shared, they have come to lack the most basic critical thinking skills and can literally be convinced of anything. The laws which govern the reality they inhabit, where voluntary, self-interested, and most importantly un-falsifiable belief reliably supercedes objective knowledge, keep them inside a doom loop of denial, deception, and perverse apologetics. They give endless lip-service to a concept of Western Civilization rooted in the Middle Ages rather than the Enlightenment—seeing themselves as its gate-keepers—and are about as aware of Pax Americana, and its importance to American prominence and privilege, as a fish is aware of water.
That is, until the fish is suddenly and rudely extracted from that water by hook or net. Welcome to dry land, MAGA. Time to evolve, so that you can start breathing the same air as the rest of us. Or die out altogether.
This is all part of the rightwing’s attack on liberal education and education in general. It is a cornerstone of the PayPal mafia’s “networked state” dystopian fantasy for our future. It has been going on since Brown vs. Board of Education in 1953.
You asked for further examples. We all know that Patel, Bondi and the Insurrectionists are trying to erase 1/6. Related - Trump destroyed the FEC and as such the Hawley/ NRA trial is going nowhere. Bondi will make sure of this. Hawley should be in jail for misuse of campaign funds.
Further info finds that Sean Cooksey did nothing at the FEC during the Biden administration - he was appointed by Trump in this first term and Vance rewarded him with a cush job 8 years later- his personal attorney. More corruption and protecting of the 140 Insurrectionists in Congress as they try to make us believe there was no insurrection.
My god this whole article was terribly disturbing and depressing. I work in higher ed and worked with international students for years, the harm done cannot be fully told or measured. It is a huge self own with zero upside.
You asked for further examples. I'm a retired scientist and worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico for 31 years. I immigrated from Canada because it was attractive to do cutting edge science at a world-class institution. I originally came to work on laser fusion research, but when that particular project went away after a few years (as these things do), I wound up working for decades on remote sensing for detection of nuclear proliferation. That's a typical career path at the lab - people come for all the diverse and interesting science programs and wind up contributing the security of the US. Now since I retired three years ago, I only have second hand knowledge of what's happening, but my understanding is that many of the programs at the lab that attracted top-notch scientists have been cut way back, leaving little beyond the nuclear weapons program. The irony of focusing the lab only on nuclear weapons is that the science needed to do that comes from all those people coming to work on other things, and that talent pipeline will dry up without those other programs.
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian. Penning this sentence ten years after the accession of Adolf Hitler to supreme power, these words reflected tough lessons soaked in blood. Bonhoeffer formed part of a small circle of resistance to the dictator in Germany, risking his life for an ideal.
It was a dark time in his homeland. Total war had engulfed the world, and a totalitarian regime was controlling the country. Bonhoeffer pondered how this came to be. He thought about the nature of evil, but came to the conclusion it was not evil itself that was the most dangerous enemy of the good. Rather, it was “stupidity”.
For you can fight against evil. Evil gives people a queasy feeling in the stomach. As Bonhoeffer continued, “evil carries with itself the seeds of its own destruction.” To prevent willful malice, you can always erect barriers to stop its spread. Against stupidity you are defenseless.
“Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
We have witnessed it in the pro-Trump rallies, which resulted in an attack on the US Capitol. We have seen it in the BLM protests, which degenerated into wanton looting. We come across it every day in the filter bubbles on the internet, which often foster vitriolic groupthink. Stupidity is an ever-present danger, lurking at every corner of the political spectrum.
Yet, argue with the individual actors using logic and facts, and you get nowhere. Their brains are locked, captive to pre-conceived notions and biases. As Bonhoeffer noted, it is wiser to abandon all attempts at convincing the stupid person. It’s of no use.
Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity Explains The World Perfectly — 2021
As a former engineer this cuts me especially deep. Though I believe there is dignity in all honest work whether you are a garbage collector, an automobile mechanic or a nuclear engineer. It is a fact that the destruction in STEM being deliberately perpetrated by trump will cause great harm to this country for a generation or more.
Excellent piece. The US will become a scientific backwater in a few years because of Trump's policies. Many in the MAGA world, who hate elites, will rejoice--until they find that they have to drive 100 miles to see a doctor because of the complete collapse of immigration to the US.
See a doctor? MAGAts get their advice from podcasts and Dr. Oz
Several years ago, the comic strip "Shoe" dealt with Republican reluctance to fund schools.. Senator Batson D. Belfry was bloviating away when a reporter asked why the Republicans kept trying to eliminate school funding. the Senator replied, "How do you think we keep getting elected?"
These actions described in Receipts when combined with all of the other actions of this administration make one wonder what the US will look like a decade from now (with the dictator party still in charge).
My company is getting around the brain drain by hiring in India!
Hey Catharine…is the following video true? Because if it is, this seems like something right up your alley that would be a bombshell. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZThyvDnSQ/
Interesting video. It may well be true -- I don't have enough info to guess -- but even if it is, it probably won't have much effect. The concept is probably too complex for the the typical ICE-oriented mentality; certainly they couldn't follow the math.
Excellent article catherine thank you for your attention and facts.
This is the ultimate indictment of the brain-rot of the American right. For years we've watched people on the right exploit reasonable criticisms of the academic humanities in order to discredit the academic sciences. They've pandered to religious nuts to allow space for creationism to be given equal weight to the theory of evolution, and to the fossil fuel industry to downplay and/or discredit the science of global warming.
The end result is that American conservatives have gone from being the people that would once deliver hard truths to us bleeding heart liberals, to being the purveyors of their own brand of irrational, gut-brained, alternative reality. Their feelings don't care about your facts, and their facts are increasingly nothing but juvenile, crowd-sourced hokum, never put to any test aside from the outrage it triggers in knowledgeable, responsible people.
The anti-vaccine, complementary-medicine pushing, anti-pharmaceutical soft-headedness that were once mostly the sole province of the Dennis Kucinich's and Marianne Williamson's of the world, are now equally indulged by supposed conservatives, who worship the worm-infested brain of a Kennedy. "Ditto" for the kneejerk anti-authoritarian conspiracy theorizing by people with no concept of how to transition from theory to fact (and yes, I began this sentence with a sarcastic reference to the moniker once voluntarily adopted by the bovine-brained herd of cattle that Rush Limbaugh once cultivated, the forerunner of the modern right-wing doofus who lives only to own the libs).
The irony is that the once unapologetically elitist Republican Party has now had to cosplay as populist to placate the constituency they were forced to cultivate in lieu of a presenting an economic platform with cross-cultural appeal. Idealistic to a fault, ignoring the cost of social discord and cultural sickness, they indulged in self-validating platitutes of hard work and bootstrap ethics to con the working class into accepting less, in order to punish the unworthy. This required patronizing the same nativist, culturally entitled segment of the population which Southern Democrats once exploited for power, exporting their resentful, grievance-based political culture north of the Mason-Dixon line.
And so the once great Republican Party, forged from the lofty ideals of men like Abraham Lincoln, and until recently internally driven by pragmatic—if at times tragically cynical—intellectuals, is now the party of the uninformed rabble and the lawless mob. It is composed of politicians biding their time to retirement, and doing their best to avoid crossing their increasingly adolescent-minded base, whose ignorance of America's own history now rivals the solipsism that has long pervaded American culture. Accordingly, the country is being run like a mass-scale Lord of the Flies, by grown children giddy with the thrill of making big machines do big things and unconcerned with the consequences—so long as they don't impact them.
The Party has now lost control over their rank-and-file, which is so detached from the emprical reality we once jointly shared, they have come to lack the most basic critical thinking skills and can literally be convinced of anything. The laws which govern the reality they inhabit, where voluntary, self-interested, and most importantly un-falsifiable belief reliably supercedes objective knowledge, keep them inside a doom loop of denial, deception, and perverse apologetics. They give endless lip-service to a concept of Western Civilization rooted in the Middle Ages rather than the Enlightenment—seeing themselves as its gate-keepers—and are about as aware of Pax Americana, and its importance to American prominence and privilege, as a fish is aware of water.
That is, until the fish is suddenly and rudely extracted from that water by hook or net. Welcome to dry land, MAGA. Time to evolve, so that you can start breathing the same air as the rest of us. Or die out altogether.
This is all part of the rightwing’s attack on liberal education and education in general. It is a cornerstone of the PayPal mafia’s “networked state” dystopian fantasy for our future. It has been going on since Brown vs. Board of Education in 1953.
"[H]oovering" is not an American expression. The translation would be "vacuuming".
I'm an American, and I use it all the time, but I'm a bit of an Anglophile... People seem to know what I'm saying, tho.
"Idiot wind" constitutes an excellent description of the MAGA mindset in STEM education.
A silver lining: F@ck Texas and Florida. Cutting off their noses 👃 to spite their faces.
They're allowing measles to run rampant in their states, because they think it'll own the libs.
Bril.
You asked for further examples. We all know that Patel, Bondi and the Insurrectionists are trying to erase 1/6. Related - Trump destroyed the FEC and as such the Hawley/ NRA trial is going nowhere. Bondi will make sure of this. Hawley should be in jail for misuse of campaign funds.
Further info finds that Sean Cooksey did nothing at the FEC during the Biden administration - he was appointed by Trump in this first term and Vance rewarded him with a cush job 8 years later- his personal attorney. More corruption and protecting of the 140 Insurrectionists in Congress as they try to make us believe there was no insurrection.
My god this whole article was terribly disturbing and depressing. I work in higher ed and worked with international students for years, the harm done cannot be fully told or measured. It is a huge self own with zero upside.
You asked for further examples. I'm a retired scientist and worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico for 31 years. I immigrated from Canada because it was attractive to do cutting edge science at a world-class institution. I originally came to work on laser fusion research, but when that particular project went away after a few years (as these things do), I wound up working for decades on remote sensing for detection of nuclear proliferation. That's a typical career path at the lab - people come for all the diverse and interesting science programs and wind up contributing the security of the US. Now since I retired three years ago, I only have second hand knowledge of what's happening, but my understanding is that many of the programs at the lab that attracted top-notch scientists have been cut way back, leaving little beyond the nuclear weapons program. The irony of focusing the lab only on nuclear weapons is that the science needed to do that comes from all those people coming to work on other things, and that talent pipeline will dry up without those other programs.
sigh
As per this article written in 2021.
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian. Penning this sentence ten years after the accession of Adolf Hitler to supreme power, these words reflected tough lessons soaked in blood. Bonhoeffer formed part of a small circle of resistance to the dictator in Germany, risking his life for an ideal.
It was a dark time in his homeland. Total war had engulfed the world, and a totalitarian regime was controlling the country. Bonhoeffer pondered how this came to be. He thought about the nature of evil, but came to the conclusion it was not evil itself that was the most dangerous enemy of the good. Rather, it was “stupidity”.
For you can fight against evil. Evil gives people a queasy feeling in the stomach. As Bonhoeffer continued, “evil carries with itself the seeds of its own destruction.” To prevent willful malice, you can always erect barriers to stop its spread. Against stupidity you are defenseless.
“Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
We have witnessed it in the pro-Trump rallies, which resulted in an attack on the US Capitol. We have seen it in the BLM protests, which degenerated into wanton looting. We come across it every day in the filter bubbles on the internet, which often foster vitriolic groupthink. Stupidity is an ever-present danger, lurking at every corner of the political spectrum.
Yet, argue with the individual actors using logic and facts, and you get nowhere. Their brains are locked, captive to pre-conceived notions and biases. As Bonhoeffer noted, it is wiser to abandon all attempts at convincing the stupid person. It’s of no use.
Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity Explains The World Perfectly — 2021
https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/bonhoeffers-theory-of-stupidity-explains-the-world-perfectly-957cbb3fbac1