What I say: I think the United States would better represent the citizenry by being broken up into a few major territories, since hostility and polarization destroy functionality at the federal level, and largely doesn't exist, in many cases, at the local level where ideology is more uniform even across party lines. Everyone would be more satisfied with their governments since they would have greater control over them and be better represented by them. Simply expanding greatly upon states rights would have largely the same function.
What it is interpreted as: Republicans don't believe in Democracy.
Why do I even bother. Even RPGCodex is capable of more nuance about people they hate.
As I've said before on here, this is a mistake. In part driven by the electoral college's winnter-take-all system in most states. Almost every state in the country falls within a 60-40 divide. Meaning the divide is not actually that large overall. But the split between how cities and rural areas vote can easily climb to 80-20. Majorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, for just two recent examples are from congressional districts in now blue states -- Georgia and Colorado.
I don't see how you'd break apart something like Georgia, for just one example, between Atlanta on the one hand and its surrounding areas on the other. But that's where the divide actually exists.
I think the charge of not believing in democracy actually does have some relevance here. When Democrats lose federal elections they're castigated for being too far left or for nominating a lousy candidate. And the party did do a lot of introspection, did nominate a somewhat moderate candidate with broad appeal. Elections aren't forever. And a party's platform can change.
Rather than thinking there is no solution, conservatives need to think about voters they have failed to appeal to, in some cases for generations, and how they can win them over. Conservatives have lost voters making less than the median income in the last two presidential elections (and probably more if I check).
Every time the Democrats lose, they are castigated for not reaching out to or understanding rural voters. When Republicans lose, the idea they need to win more votes in cities and suburbs isn't even mentioned. Partly because of the agency gap I've brought up numerous times. And partly because no one has any realistic belief Republicans will even pretend to do so.
You will NEVER hear an elected Democrat using a phrase like "Alabama values" as a pejorative. You can't even get started in Republican politics without knowing when to whip out "San Francisco values" or "coastal elites". I've been listening intently to them for 20 years. I don't need my decoder ring anymore.
The GOP has spent the last 30 years boxing themselves into a corner in which it's basically impossible for them to win majority support nationally. Luckily for them, our constitution provides them a way to win anyway. But it means they have ZERO incentive to moderate or reach out on anything.
What I say: I think the United States would better represent the citizenry by being broken up into a few major territories, since hostility and polarization destroy functionality at the federal level, and largely doesn't exist, in many cases, at the local level where ideology is more uniform even across party lines. Everyone would be more satisfied with their governments since they would have greater control over them and be better represented by them. Simply expanding greatly upon states rights would have largely the same function.
What it is interpreted as: Republicans don't believe in Democracy.
Why do I even bother. Even RPGCodex is capable of more nuance about people they hate.
As I've said before on here, this is a mistake. In part driven by the electoral college's winnter-take-all system in most states. Almost every state in the country falls within a 60-40 divide. Meaning the divide is not actually that large overall. But the split between how cities and rural areas vote can easily climb to 80-20. Majorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, for just two recent examples are from congressional districts in now blue states -- Georgia and Colorado.
I don't see how you'd break apart something like Georgia, for just one example, between Atlanta on the one hand and its surrounding areas on the other. But that's where the divide actually exists.
I think the charge of not believing in democracy actually does have some relevance here. When Democrats lose federal elections they're castigated for being too far left or for nominating a lousy candidate. And the party did do a lot of introspection, did nominate a somewhat moderate candidate with broad appeal. Elections aren't forever. And a party's platform can change.
Rather than thinking there is no solution, conservatives need to think about voters they have failed to appeal to, in some cases for generations, and how they can win them over. Conservatives have lost voters making less than the median income in the last two presidential elections (and probably more if I check).
Every time the Democrats lose, they are castigated for not reaching out to or understanding rural voters. When Republicans lose, the idea they need to win more votes in cities and suburbs isn't even mentioned. Partly because of the agency gap I've brought up numerous times. And partly because no one has any realistic belief Republicans will even pretend to do so.
You will NEVER hear an elected Democrat using a phrase like "Alabama values" as a pejorative. You can't even get started in Republican politics without knowing when to whip out "San Francisco values" or "coastal elites". I've been listening intently to them for 20 years. I don't need my decoder ring anymore.
I'll add my own observations to yours. Republicans aren't interested in better education because they don't want their base to be better educated. It's obvious to me. The sad fact is that there are some really educated conservatives with some very good points but they get buried under all of the anti-science bullshit spread by their ideologs. I think I've held my own when arguing conservatism in this forum but I'm having a hard time even motivating myself to argue anymore after QAnon and Trump...
What I say: I think the United States would better represent the citizenry by being broken up into a few major territories, since hostility and polarization destroy functionality at the federal level, and largely doesn't exist, in many cases, at the local level where ideology is more uniform even across party lines. Everyone would be more satisfied with their governments since they would have greater control over them and be better represented by them. Simply expanding greatly upon states rights would have largely the same function.
What it is interpreted as: Republicans don't believe in Democracy.
Why do I even bother. Even RPGCodex is capable of more nuance about people they hate.
As I've said before on here, this is a mistake. In part driven by the electoral college's winnter-take-all system in most states. Almost every state in the country falls within a 60-40 divide. Meaning the divide is not actually that large overall. But the split between how cities and rural areas vote can easily climb to 80-20. Majorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, for just two recent examples are from congressional districts in now blue states -- Georgia and Colorado.
I don't see how you'd break apart something like Georgia, for just one example, between Atlanta on the one hand and its surrounding areas on the other. But that's where the divide actually exists.
I think the charge of not believing in democracy actually does have some relevance here. When Democrats lose federal elections they're castigated for being too far left or for nominating a lousy candidate. And the party did do a lot of introspection, did nominate a somewhat moderate candidate with broad appeal. Elections aren't forever. And a party's platform can change.
Rather than thinking there is no solution, conservatives need to think about voters they have failed to appeal to, in some cases for generations, and how they can win them over. Conservatives have lost voters making less than the median income in the last two presidential elections (and probably more if I check).
Every time the Democrats lose, they are castigated for not reaching out to or understanding rural voters. When Republicans lose, the idea they need to win more votes in cities and suburbs isn't even mentioned. Partly because of the agency gap I've brought up numerous times. And partly because no one has any realistic belief Republicans will even pretend to do so.
You will NEVER hear an elected Democrat using a phrase like "Alabama values" as a pejorative. You can't even get started in Republican politics without knowing when to whip out "San Francisco values" or "coastal elites". I've been listening intently to them for 20 years. I don't need my decoder ring anymore.
I'll add my own observations to yours. Republicans aren't interested in better education because they don't want their base to be better educated. It's obvious to me. The sad fact is that there are some really educated conservatives with some very good points but they get buried under all of the anti-science bullshit spread by their ideologs. I think I've held my own when arguing conservatism in this forum but I'm having a hard time even motivating myself to argue anymore after QAnon and Trump...
I don't know if I would say "uneducated" so much as "incurious" or "willfully ignorant". There are plenty of people on both sides who are uneducated. I've seen lawyers and CEOs show up on the Capitol Hill rap sheet.
They also didn't go because they were feeling the weight of economic hardship. Economic hardship is digging in your car seat cushions to find $3.00 in change to put in your gas tank to last you the last two days before your paycheck. It's not booking airfare to DC.
But I have seen PLENTY of arguments on the far left the last two weeks (maybe proving that if you go far enough left, you meet the far right) that state if the economic situation was better, the storming of the Capitol wouldn't have happened. I mean, one of the most famous participants in this thing was a real-estate broker who hired a private jet to travel there. Tactical body armor, I'm quite sure, is also not cheap.
Round trip flights to DC from Dallas, right now, are about $350. Let's assume another $250 for hotels, and another $100 for food and other expenses. If you're spending $700 to attend a rally on the national mall and can't pay your rent or buy food, then, no matter how much I personally support the social safety net, that's your own damn problem.
There IS a difference between actually not having any money to get by because it's all accounted for by basic needs, and spending it on stupid shit you can't afford. Healthcare or food for your child and fun-time in DC with Trump are not the same things. I'd love to see an median income breakdown of the participants (though that is impossible, obviously). I'd wager it was above 50k a year.
Now, you WILL see an argument thrown at poor people that they also shouldn't spend money on even such things as their morning coffee at Starbucks. I think that's basically a bunch of BS, because you HAVE to treat yourself to something you enjoy, or what is the point of even going on?? But when you are poor, that stuff usually manifests itself as a nice meal, or a drink on sale at happy hour. Not traveling across the country.
Republicans aren't interested in better education because they don't want their base to be better educated.
I mean, you're not wrong. If Republican politicians cared about the education system they wouldn't have allowed it to have been transformed into a useless degree factory and indoctrination center into strange dogmas that get laughed out of conversations with normal people. The fixation on the elimination of "whiteness" and the multiple respected academic institutions that peddle this garbage and other creeds like it, is a consequence of the failure of Republicans to invest in and care about the fate of education. U.S education is more concerned with "decolonizing science"- their words, not mine- than it is in investing in the future technologies and skill sets that will ensure a lasting quality of life for generations to come, and certainly more than building a society that doesn't rip each other apart over stoked resentments and internal divisions.
Now look at it. Masters degree holders apply for jobs that require no education, college debt is so persistent it will hound you until your end days, U.S academic institutions exist in a weird cultural bubble and their pathologies regularly leak out into the culture. The people at the top in this country are idiots and it shows in the way they handle...nearly everything, really. If Republicans represented their base one bit they'd be singing my tune, since this is basically the standard conservative line from anyone who is informed.
The topic of education, which is overall terrible in this country, had me interested. So I went down a rabbit hole by looking at poll data on various political issues and I came across an interesting one: only 50% of adults have a positive view of higher education in this country. This is lower than I thought, but i'm glad to realize that the failings of higher education are so apparent that half the damn country sees it.
But it turns out it's not just higher education, it is nearly all U.S institutions that can barely crack 50% support. That means technology companies, corporations, etc. The institutional rot in this country is something that needs to be addressed.
Social media giants and technology companies have the most bipartisan negative support, so i'm convinced the massive wave of tech censorship, that goes way beyond the president himself but to nearly every conservative with a platform, is going to be handled in a bipartisan fashion, if not Democrats doing it themselves while they are currently in power. After all, it was the House Democrats who claimed that social media and technology companies had monopoly power, and recommend that they be split up.
Republicans aren't interested in better education because they don't want their base to be better educated.
I mean, you're not wrong. If Republican politicians cared about the education system they wouldn't have allowed it to have been transformed into a useless degree factory and indoctrination center into strange dogmas that get laughed out of conversations with normal people. The fixation on the elimination of "whiteness" and the multiple respected academic institutions that peddle this garbage and other creeds like it, is a consequence of the failure of Republicans to invest in and care about the fate of education.
IMO, this is a really unhelpful caricature of US university systems. It's not reflective of the education most students get, and it's also at odds with what the average student will actually experience at a four-year state college, which is where the overwhelming majority of college students will go.
It's also greatly belied by the fact that US universities *are* producing cutting-edge science and technology and are *still* prized institutions by people from all over the world seeking a practical education.
Republicans aren't interested in better education because they don't want their base to be better educated.
I mean, you're not wrong. If Republican politicians cared about the education system they wouldn't have allowed it to have been transformed into a useless degree factory and indoctrination center into strange dogmas that get laughed out of conversations with normal people. The fixation on the elimination of "whiteness" and the multiple respected academic institutions that peddle this garbage and other creeds like it, is a consequence of the failure of Republicans to invest in and care about the fate of education.
IMO, this is a really unhelpful caricature of US university systems. It's not reflective of the education most students get, and it's also at odds with what the average student will actually experience at a four-year state college, which is where the overwhelming majority of college students will go.
It's also greatly belied by the fact that US universities *are* producing cutting-edge science and technology and are *still* prized institutions by people from all over the world seeking a practical education.
I think it also greatly overemphasizes the cultural impact of colleges beyond whatever is taking place on any given campus. But they are ripe hunting grounds for conservative provocateurs to engage in arguments with ill-equipped undergrads and humiliate them, which is sorta like the Globe Trotters bragging about beating the Washington Generals every night.
Republicans aren't interested in better education because they don't want their base to be better educated.
I mean, you're not wrong. If Republican politicians cared about the education system they wouldn't have allowed it to have been transformed into a useless degree factory and indoctrination center into strange dogmas that get laughed out of conversations with normal people. The fixation on the elimination of "whiteness" and the multiple respected academic institutions that peddle this garbage and other creeds like it, is a consequence of the failure of Republicans to invest in and care about the fate of education.
IMO, this is a really unhelpful caricature of US university systems. It's not reflective of the education most students get, and it's also at odds with what the average student will actually experience at a four-year state college, which is where the overwhelming majority of college students will go.
Love when I quote the summation of my own experience and be told that it's not actually what I experienced, the real college experience is "something else". You think I learned about the existence of these weird topics from being online? Nope, I had the horror of hearing discussions about it in person. My own college emailed me apologizing for the election of Donald Trump and promising "students would be safe", as if he was gonna send in the army to raid our building. I was I was joking or exaggerating.
It's also greatly belied by the fact that US universities *are* producing cutting-edge science and technology and are *still* prized institutions by people from all over the world seeking a practical education.
Yeah, not really. The U.S is a long shot from the cutting edge of technology and science these days. See if you can spot a pattern. The real power players here aren't based in the U.S.
The U.S is also 36th in the world in terms of high school education. Considering that a majority of Americans have no college degree, this is their education baseline. The education system matters, and not just the top universities in the country, which are mediocre at best at this point.
Patent applications is an extremely poor measurement for whether a country is developing technology. Even worse is to use international corporations, whose employees do not belong to any single nation. It's a fatuous way to assert that the US is not on the cutting edge of technological or research progress. Moreover, even *if* these companies were staffed by nationals, those employees are still often times educated... at American universities -- the actual thing under debate. The data you presented does nothing to connect the dots between your claim that US universities have eroded in quality and the consequence that we're not producing real science. Even more absurd, the lists you provided are just patent *applications*, something that is affected by legal rules in each country -- another confounding point that makes your claim specious.
And even despite all these issues, even taking a naive reading of your evidence, the US is still, across the board represented in the top 10 countries across every metric you have offered. Even according to your own logic, that makes the US a world leader in developing technology.
Click on some of the articles and see the research institutions associated with the authors, many US universities. This is actually the daily work of research professors at US universities, regardless of what your anecdotal experience may have been. Unis outside the US are well represented too, but it's worth noting that the editors of these publications are US-based.
Where is all the "decolonizing science" stuff? I'm having trouble finding it. What I do see is an enormous amount of actual cutting-edge research.
Patent applications is an extremely poor measurement for whether a country is developing technology.
An extremely poor measurement? It is one of the standard methods to actually measure innovation. There are critiques here and there about its efficacy like any metric, but extremely poor is just based on nothing.
The top patent applicants worldwide are all technology companies, by the way. Patents are a fantastic marker for general innovation and, in particular at this point in time, of technology companies.
To get a real sense of what science is happening at US universities I encourage you to at least skim the content of the top prestige journals
Patent data as a measure of innovation performance is an accepted method to use. Skimming the front pages of a few journals is not.
Decolonizing science sounds like a postmodernist literary criticism theory buzzword. I've had my share of complaints about the state of literary criticism and theory in academia, but it's not like the natural sciences in the United States know, much less care, what literary critics think of their practice, much less are the former holding back the latter. High school education isn't top tier in the United States exactly, but we do still have the best colleges and universities on the planet and we're still churning out more technological innovations than anyone else, even compared to other advanced nations.
There's this idea that colleges are somehow liberal indoctrination centers, and if I'm being honest, the liberal skew of most college departments, whether it's a soft science like sociology or a rigidly apolitical hard science like chemistry or physics, is because conservatives aren't going there; not because there's an invisible forcefield keeping them out. Scientists lean liberal because conservatives are less likely to value science or want to become scientists. Conservative personalities then turn around and accuse higher education of ostracizing them from the club they chose not to join. Then a lack of education becomes a badge of honor and a mark of partisan pride.
Scientists would love to have more conservatives take classes and join their fields. I think I can speak for much of the left when I say I wish more conservatives went to college. Maybe if there were more conservative professors, conservatives would have a higher opinion of education. But you can't make folks become professors if they're starting out with the base assumption that college is a "liberal thing."
Conservatism's education problem is self-inflicted.
Yeah, I've met two professors I viewed as liberal ideologues. I argued with one despite the effect on my grades and still got my bachelor's. I dropped a class with a Marxist prof at Columbia and I still got my master's. Disagreeing with a professor doesn't actually hold you back in this country. If you decide that you don't feel comfortable in a certain ideological environment and decide to leave, the person holding you back is you.
Real talk, there's far more diversity of opinion in college than there is ANYWHERE else on the planet. If you haven't run into folks contradicting orthodoxy in college, you either stopped your education before you got to the interesting stuff, or you didn't dig into the reading.
Patent applications is an extremely poor measurement for whether a country is developing technology.
An extremely poor measurement? It is one of the standard methods to actually measure innovation. There are critiques here and there about its efficacy like any metric, but extremely poor is just based on nothing.
The top patent applicants worldwide are all technology companies, by the way. Patents are a fantastic marker for general innovation and, in particular at this point in time, of technology companies.
To get a real sense of what science is happening at US universities I encourage you to at least skim the content of the top prestige journals
Patent data as a measure of innovation performance is an accepted method to use. Skimming the front pages of a few journals is not.
As someone who's day job is actually in the IP industry, I can assure you that cherry picking something like "Patents per GDP" is a rather pointless and ridiculous measure of innovation. Literally. I spend 8 hour a day (or more) working on this field. I'm an Electrical Engineer (and historian) by trade. I see patent and patent applications daily.
The most obvious and immediate example of why I wouldnt dare use this metric relates IP law and how patents are issued, and the differences between IP law institutions in different countries.
Part of the reason you're being argued with is that you're applying your own anecdotal evidence for time at university, and then applying it writ large to the whole institution of higher learning. Ironically, you're complaining about people dismissing your personal observations when you're essentially doing the same thing (for anyone else who has a higher education and observed something different than the fallacious comment cited here "...have been transformed into a useless degree factory and indoctrination center into strange dogmas that get laughed out of conversations with normal people.")
Last point: just like your crusade against the media, it's worth noting that citing polls about politicized topics includes obvious bias. If the GOP is anti news media, then Republicans are likely to be biased into being anti news media too. This also applies to the anti-intellectualism of the GOP having a knock on effect that makes Republicans dislike higher education. This is why citing polls on the subject is only really worth a grain of salt.
I never graduated college due to external circumstances and my immediate reaction to them, but while I was there, I did quickly realize that what I had been taught in high school history class was watered down bullshit, ESPECIALLY in regards to the Civil War. I can't help but wonder how many millions more kids since me have been fed the propaganda that slavery was some kind of cute, ancillary issue worthy of maybe 3 to 5 pages in the textbook. Yeah, my history professor was definitely "of the left". Thank god, or it's possible I'd still be operating under the illusion that the nobility of the Southern Cause could be gleamed from watching "Gettysburg" in class.
And, yes, the conservative attack on academia is absolutely NOT new. In the aftermath of 9/11, during the Bush years, I watched FOX News alot, and there was a professor from the University of Colorado named Ward Churchill who made some rather insensitive remarks about those that died there, to insinuate everyone in this country had culpability for what we had done in the Middle East for decades. And FOX News (especially Bill O'Reilly) didn't just run a couple of segments on him, they ran hundreds if not thousands of segments about him. And while this is absolutely one of the original examples of the "cancel culture" people bitch about endlessly currently, it wasn't really about Ward Churchill, who wasn't really all that worthy of defense (which was the point). It was about taking higher education down a peg in general.
And since I'm on the subject (and I don't want to sound too much like "I used to walk uphill in the snow both ways" here), if you wanted to get a good look at "cancel culture", you should take a time machine back to 2003, and check in with anyone who was saying the Iraq War was a bad idea, especially Ashleigh Banfield, Jesse Ventura, and Phil Donahue, who all literally had their shows cancelled for asking tough questions about it. Then go watch some video of people literally making piles of Dixie Chicks CDs and running them over with a steamroller. The idea that this fell out of the sky sometime during the last 4 or 5 years is poppycock.
Now that I've drudged up some memories about how horrible George W. Bush was, it's frankly even more stunning that somehow, at long last, because of his actions (mostly non-actions) in 2020, Donald Trump managed to end up as a worse President. Because until March, I still wouldn't have said that. What a difference 9 months can make.
I have a basic academic background and worked a lot with people having worked in academic longer than I did. I'm also not in the US - and I can tell you that top US Universities are the most highly respected across the world, they do excellent science and excellent teaching. That includes many of the institutions decried as woke. Most of the cutting edge science is still being done there.
Where the US is struggling is the Education system that comes before University. There are certainly high quality schools, but there are also a lot of underfunded and otherwise struggling places.
The main reason why most cutting edge science is still being done in the US today is because it was the case yesterday, and many of the best scientists from other countries are drawn to US institutes for the same reason... Germany was in a similar enviable position before WW2. The best young scientists go to the US and stay there, because the best older scientists are teaching and researching there.
EDIT: I can tell also tell you that if the US Universities were not generally among the more left/liberal leaning places, this would change at least for young people coming from Europe. My suspicion is that the Trump presidency already did some damage in this regard, given how he is regarded in much of the EU. I can't predict the impact on students coming from Asia.
Wow, I couldn't have written a better article to portray my thoughts on how to fix the mess this country's in. It never occurred to me to use Teddy Roosevelt as an example, but it should have!
Wow, I couldn't have written a better article to portray my thoughts on how to fix the mess this country's in. It never occurred to me to use Teddy Roosevelt as an example, but it should have!
Dang, Politico is actually recommending they break up the tech companies as well. Very cool and goes with what I was saying yesterday, that there is hope for bipartisan consensus on this. Teddy Roosevelt is one of the better Presidents in our history, for sure. We owe a lot of the antitrust groundwork to him.
Today, as a new wave of monopoly power threatens the broader economy, the new administration has a range of challenges demanding bold solutions. There are already signs the Biden administration may acknowledge a new strain of tech monopolists, and could get bipartisan support in pushing back against them
Of course it has the usual obligatory leftist garbage- the terrorist genocide at the Capitol was worse than 1,000 Hitlers combined! No nation in history has never suffered such violence!- but other than that it's pretty damn solid. It outlines problems con pundits have been talking about for ages:
"we as a nation need to confront the fact that Americans today face a societal transformation more destabilizing than any other in our history. In just a few decades, technology and employers have reshaped the definition of “work” faster than our culture, traditions, and institutions can keep up. Working- and middle-class incomes have remained stagnant even as everyday costs have risen. And perhaps most important, we’ve seen a bigger shift in the racial and ethnic makeup of the electorate over the last 20 years than in the previous two centuries. As such, our generational burden now is to face down the deep-seated fear many harbor about being rendered powerless in the next cultural, racial, political, and economic order."
"The level of turmoil is easy to overlook for those whose lives have benefited from the changes. But Americans whose education ended in high school, who live beyond the footprint of a cosmopolitan bubble, or who have seen their neighborhoods inundated with “deaths of despair,” have a right to worry that the combined effects will leave their children bereft of any opportunity to claim the American Dream. That’s not license to abandon the principles of democratic governance or to break the law—far from it. But it is a worry the rest of us ignore at our nation’s peril"
Of course, in a way articles like this are just begging those people, that they acknowledge have no representation and no-one to care about them in the new economic order, to shut up and not rebel while their families die to overdoses without proper medical care and suicides happen every other day. To suffer in silence while they make empty promises about how Joe Biden is the next Teddy Roosevelt and will solve everything for them, have no fear. But at least acknowledging these people exist is a first step. And if they do anything to make their lives better I will be the first to say i'm wrong.
While Teddy did some good stuff the problems from the Gilded Age only grew until FDR, and despite the earlier New Deal attempts he only really managed to close the widening gap between poor and rich due to WW2 where the government had extremely high marginal taxes and unprecedented control over wage levels. Focusing on TDR over FDR seems strange to me.
Many minorities were left on the outside. Which I think is extremely important to remember when people tell Democrats and other people on the left that their focus on the treatment of minorities (especially Black people) is simply an unnecessary distraction from the rich/poor conflict. The one time in US history that the rich/poor conflict has been effectively addressed (WW 2 and the post-year wars) the minorities did *not* benefit close to the same extent. Believing it will be different this time requires a substantial leap of faith.
Did you read it? They explain why they use TDR over FDR in the first few paragraphs. In short, our time resembles TDR's time much moreso than FDR's. And they're not wrong.
Did you read it? They explain why they use TDR over FDR in the first few paragraphs. In short, our time resembles TDR's time much moreso than FDR's. And they're not wrong.
The turn of the 21st century is eerily similar to the turn of the 20th when you look at it historically. Even this pandemic is almost exactly 100 years after the last one...
The main reason why most cutting edge science is still being done in the US today is because it was the case yesterday, and many of the best scientists from other countries are drawn to US institutes for the same reason... Germany was in a similar enviable position before WW2. The best young scientists go to the US and stay there, because the best older scientists are teaching and researching there.
I always found this to be interesting. While I dont have a background in this exactly, I was essentially taught that at the turn of the 20th century, if you wanted to learn about engineering/physics, you needed to have some measure of German fluency, since almost all academic textbooks and texts were written in German.
Interesting stuff.
About the rest - I have no doubt that the US higher education system could be passed over and seen as not cutting edge in the future. I agree that if this happened, it would probably be as a result of the fact that A - we have serious school system issues in primary education before the university level, and B - the attempt to harm our education system due to conservative political animus, when the right wing seeks an "other" to attack.
Articles about the similarities between turns of 20th and 21st centuries. It's amazing what you can find quickly when you have a supercomputer at your fingertips at all times!
As of this morning, transgender Americans are once again allowed to participate and join the part of society that employs over 2 million people. I don't think we ever had a long or loud enough discussion about how shameful the military ban was, and that it was nothing less then enshrinement of second-class citizenship status.
In my experience it is mostly the funding of the education system across the globe that results in two things.
1. Because you need to get grants out creates unequal opportunities for students.
2. If you want to stay for a university career you need to get more grants leading to a lot of people not actually writing on innovations but more on extensions. This holds back progress and people who cannot land a grant because of reasons like niche areas of expertise or socially less expressive than others just leave university careers behind them while they might have contributed a lot in the research areas.
Found this to be an interesting article. It clearly has a leftward bias, but tries to approach most of the societal trends in a neutral fashion. I also dont think it's necessarily incorrect in either of two of its major thoughts:
A - That compromise might not be a very useful way to avoid the continued degradation of society's belief of Democracy based institutions
B - While both sides are responsible for the decline of support for democratic instructions, both sides are not equal in their contribution.
Found this to be an interesting article. It clearly has a leftward bias, but tries to approach most of the societal trends in a neutral fashion. I also dont think it's necessarily incorrect in either of two of its major thoughts:
A - That compromise might not be a very useful way to avoid the continued degradation of society's belief of Democracy based institutions
B - While both sides are responsible for the decline of support for democratic instructions, both sides are not equal in their contribution.
I saw an option 'C' in there, which seems to me to be the whole point of the article.
C - While one side is more responsible for the decline of democratic ideals, they are also the side that is more inclined to violence. Therefore, some compromise might be prudent.
It doesn't matter if you're 'right' if you're taken out of the equation. If fascism does rise again in this country, it will be a Hell of a lot worse than Nazi Germany ever was. We're probably orders of magnitude more powerful than either Germany or Japan were in 1940. I'm not saying to bow to the fringe right, but in your face mocking or dismissing them would be dangerous. We desperately need a middle-ground party but I don't see it coming any time soon...
Many such examples of this atm, but this is by far the funniest just because of how blatant and juvenile the favoritism and lack of objectivity is.
Did the world change, or was it just me? I will never trust mainstream media while it acts like this in public life. This is clown shit. I used to trust it, but when I was younger I don't recall such overt displays of...I don't even know what to call it at this point.
Many such examples of this atm, but this is by far the funniest just because of how blatant and juvenile the favoritism and lack of objectivity is.
Did the world change, or was it just me? I will never trust mainstream media while it acts like this in public life. This is clown shit. I used to trust it, but when I was younger I don't recall such overt displays of...I don't even know what to call it at this point.
To be perfectly honest, I don't know why you guys say that CNN is leftist or to the left. CNN panders to the left, but I'm willing to bet that it's board of directors is not left leaning. We're talking about a multi-million corporate giant here. Each year, CNN's ad revenue is in the millions. This is not a state-owned company operating in China, it's a private company operating in a capitalist country. It's a corporation that is 100% capitalist to the core. Allow me to repeat a platitude: the goal of a corporation is to make money. They pander to the left because that's their current business model, not because they believe in anything that the left believes. It would be the same as a restaurant owner who eats meat but opens a vegan restaurant in order to make money, not because he believes in what vegans believe.
To be perfectly honest, I don't know why you guys say that CNN is leftist or to the left. CNN panders to the left, but I'm willing to bet that it's board of directors is not left leaning. We're talking about a multi-million corporate giant here. Each year, CNN's ad revenue is in the millions. This is not a state-owned company operating in China, it's a private company operating in a capitalist country. It's a corporation that is 100% capitalist to the core. Allow me to repeat a platitude: the goal of a corporation is to make money. They pander to the left because that's their current business model, not because they believe in anything that the left believes. It would be the same as a restaurant owner who eats meat but opens a vegan restaurant in order to make money, not because he believes in what vegans believe.
The same can be said for Fox News and the right then. What's the difference?
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Every time the Democrats lose, they are castigated for not reaching out to or understanding rural voters. When Republicans lose, the idea they need to win more votes in cities and suburbs isn't even mentioned. Partly because of the agency gap I've brought up numerous times. And partly because no one has any realistic belief Republicans will even pretend to do so.
You will NEVER hear an elected Democrat using a phrase like "Alabama values" as a pejorative. You can't even get started in Republican politics without knowing when to whip out "San Francisco values" or "coastal elites". I've been listening intently to them for 20 years. I don't need my decoder ring anymore.
The GOP has spent the last 30 years boxing themselves into a corner in which it's basically impossible for them to win majority support nationally. Luckily for them, our constitution provides them a way to win anyway. But it means they have ZERO incentive to moderate or reach out on anything.
I'll add my own observations to yours. Republicans aren't interested in better education because they don't want their base to be better educated. It's obvious to me. The sad fact is that there are some really educated conservatives with some very good points but they get buried under all of the anti-science bullshit spread by their ideologs. I think I've held my own when arguing conservatism in this forum but I'm having a hard time even motivating myself to argue anymore after QAnon and Trump...
I don't know if I would say "uneducated" so much as "incurious" or "willfully ignorant". There are plenty of people on both sides who are uneducated. I've seen lawyers and CEOs show up on the Capitol Hill rap sheet.
They also didn't go because they were feeling the weight of economic hardship. Economic hardship is digging in your car seat cushions to find $3.00 in change to put in your gas tank to last you the last two days before your paycheck. It's not booking airfare to DC.
But I have seen PLENTY of arguments on the far left the last two weeks (maybe proving that if you go far enough left, you meet the far right) that state if the economic situation was better, the storming of the Capitol wouldn't have happened. I mean, one of the most famous participants in this thing was a real-estate broker who hired a private jet to travel there. Tactical body armor, I'm quite sure, is also not cheap.
Round trip flights to DC from Dallas, right now, are about $350. Let's assume another $250 for hotels, and another $100 for food and other expenses. If you're spending $700 to attend a rally on the national mall and can't pay your rent or buy food, then, no matter how much I personally support the social safety net, that's your own damn problem.
There IS a difference between actually not having any money to get by because it's all accounted for by basic needs, and spending it on stupid shit you can't afford. Healthcare or food for your child and fun-time in DC with Trump are not the same things. I'd love to see an median income breakdown of the participants (though that is impossible, obviously). I'd wager it was above 50k a year.
Now, you WILL see an argument thrown at poor people that they also shouldn't spend money on even such things as their morning coffee at Starbucks. I think that's basically a bunch of BS, because you HAVE to treat yourself to something you enjoy, or what is the point of even going on?? But when you are poor, that stuff usually manifests itself as a nice meal, or a drink on sale at happy hour. Not traveling across the country.
I mean, you're not wrong. If Republican politicians cared about the education system they wouldn't have allowed it to have been transformed into a useless degree factory and indoctrination center into strange dogmas that get laughed out of conversations with normal people. The fixation on the elimination of "whiteness" and the multiple respected academic institutions that peddle this garbage and other creeds like it, is a consequence of the failure of Republicans to invest in and care about the fate of education. U.S education is more concerned with "decolonizing science"- their words, not mine- than it is in investing in the future technologies and skill sets that will ensure a lasting quality of life for generations to come, and certainly more than building a society that doesn't rip each other apart over stoked resentments and internal divisions.
Now look at it. Masters degree holders apply for jobs that require no education, college debt is so persistent it will hound you until your end days, U.S academic institutions exist in a weird cultural bubble and their pathologies regularly leak out into the culture. The people at the top in this country are idiots and it shows in the way they handle...nearly everything, really. If Republicans represented their base one bit they'd be singing my tune, since this is basically the standard conservative line from anyone who is informed.
But it turns out it's not just higher education, it is nearly all U.S institutions that can barely crack 50% support. That means technology companies, corporations, etc. The institutional rot in this country is something that needs to be addressed.
Social media giants and technology companies have the most bipartisan negative support, so i'm convinced the massive wave of tech censorship, that goes way beyond the president himself but to nearly every conservative with a platform, is going to be handled in a bipartisan fashion, if not Democrats doing it themselves while they are currently in power. After all, it was the House Democrats who claimed that social media and technology companies had monopoly power, and recommend that they be split up.
IMO, this is a really unhelpful caricature of US university systems. It's not reflective of the education most students get, and it's also at odds with what the average student will actually experience at a four-year state college, which is where the overwhelming majority of college students will go.
It's also greatly belied by the fact that US universities *are* producing cutting-edge science and technology and are *still* prized institutions by people from all over the world seeking a practical education.
I think it also greatly overemphasizes the cultural impact of colleges beyond whatever is taking place on any given campus. But they are ripe hunting grounds for conservative provocateurs to engage in arguments with ill-equipped undergrads and humiliate them, which is sorta like the Globe Trotters bragging about beating the Washington Generals every night.
Love when I quote the summation of my own experience and be told that it's not actually what I experienced, the real college experience is "something else". You think I learned about the existence of these weird topics from being online? Nope, I had the horror of hearing discussions about it in person. My own college emailed me apologizing for the election of Donald Trump and promising "students would be safe", as if he was gonna send in the army to raid our building. I was I was joking or exaggerating.
Yeah, not really. The U.S is a long shot from the cutting edge of technology and science these days. See if you can spot a pattern. The real power players here aren't based in the U.S.
The U.S is also 36th in the world in terms of high school education. Considering that a majority of Americans have no college degree, this is their education baseline. The education system matters, and not just the top universities in the country, which are mediocre at best at this point.
And even despite all these issues, even taking a naive reading of your evidence, the US is still, across the board represented in the top 10 countries across every metric you have offered. Even according to your own logic, that makes the US a world leader in developing technology.
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/3 Scroll to physical sciences and then down
https://science.sciencemag.org/ Scroll to research articles and then down
https://www.nature.com/nature/volumes/589/issues/7842 Scroll to research then down
There's scientific american too, but I couldnt get their webpage to display the journal at the moment: https://www.scientificamerican.com/
Click on some of the articles and see the research institutions associated with the authors, many US universities. This is actually the daily work of research professors at US universities, regardless of what your anecdotal experience may have been. Unis outside the US are well represented too, but it's worth noting that the editors of these publications are US-based.
Where is all the "decolonizing science" stuff? I'm having trouble finding it. What I do see is an enormous amount of actual cutting-edge research.
An extremely poor measurement? It is one of the standard methods to actually measure innovation. There are critiques here and there about its efficacy like any metric, but extremely poor is just based on nothing.
The top patent applicants worldwide are all technology companies, by the way. Patents are a fantastic marker for general innovation and, in particular at this point in time, of technology companies.
Patent data as a measure of innovation performance is an accepted method to use. Skimming the front pages of a few journals is not.
There's this idea that colleges are somehow liberal indoctrination centers, and if I'm being honest, the liberal skew of most college departments, whether it's a soft science like sociology or a rigidly apolitical hard science like chemistry or physics, is because conservatives aren't going there; not because there's an invisible forcefield keeping them out. Scientists lean liberal because conservatives are less likely to value science or want to become scientists. Conservative personalities then turn around and accuse higher education of ostracizing them from the club they chose not to join. Then a lack of education becomes a badge of honor and a mark of partisan pride.
Scientists would love to have more conservatives take classes and join their fields. I think I can speak for much of the left when I say I wish more conservatives went to college. Maybe if there were more conservative professors, conservatives would have a higher opinion of education. But you can't make folks become professors if they're starting out with the base assumption that college is a "liberal thing."
Conservatism's education problem is self-inflicted.
Yeah, I've met two professors I viewed as liberal ideologues. I argued with one despite the effect on my grades and still got my bachelor's. I dropped a class with a Marxist prof at Columbia and I still got my master's. Disagreeing with a professor doesn't actually hold you back in this country. If you decide that you don't feel comfortable in a certain ideological environment and decide to leave, the person holding you back is you.
Real talk, there's far more diversity of opinion in college than there is ANYWHERE else on the planet. If you haven't run into folks contradicting orthodoxy in college, you either stopped your education before you got to the interesting stuff, or you didn't dig into the reading.
As someone who's day job is actually in the IP industry, I can assure you that cherry picking something like "Patents per GDP" is a rather pointless and ridiculous measure of innovation. Literally. I spend 8 hour a day (or more) working on this field. I'm an Electrical Engineer (and historian) by trade. I see patent and patent applications daily.
The most obvious and immediate example of why I wouldnt dare use this metric relates IP law and how patents are issued, and the differences between IP law institutions in different countries.
Part of the reason you're being argued with is that you're applying your own anecdotal evidence for time at university, and then applying it writ large to the whole institution of higher learning. Ironically, you're complaining about people dismissing your personal observations when you're essentially doing the same thing (for anyone else who has a higher education and observed something different than the fallacious comment cited here "...have been transformed into a useless degree factory and indoctrination center into strange dogmas that get laughed out of conversations with normal people.")
Last point: just like your crusade against the media, it's worth noting that citing polls about politicized topics includes obvious bias. If the GOP is anti news media, then Republicans are likely to be biased into being anti news media too. This also applies to the anti-intellectualism of the GOP having a knock on effect that makes Republicans dislike higher education. This is why citing polls on the subject is only really worth a grain of salt.
And, yes, the conservative attack on academia is absolutely NOT new. In the aftermath of 9/11, during the Bush years, I watched FOX News alot, and there was a professor from the University of Colorado named Ward Churchill who made some rather insensitive remarks about those that died there, to insinuate everyone in this country had culpability for what we had done in the Middle East for decades. And FOX News (especially Bill O'Reilly) didn't just run a couple of segments on him, they ran hundreds if not thousands of segments about him. And while this is absolutely one of the original examples of the "cancel culture" people bitch about endlessly currently, it wasn't really about Ward Churchill, who wasn't really all that worthy of defense (which was the point). It was about taking higher education down a peg in general.
And since I'm on the subject (and I don't want to sound too much like "I used to walk uphill in the snow both ways" here), if you wanted to get a good look at "cancel culture", you should take a time machine back to 2003, and check in with anyone who was saying the Iraq War was a bad idea, especially Ashleigh Banfield, Jesse Ventura, and Phil Donahue, who all literally had their shows cancelled for asking tough questions about it. Then go watch some video of people literally making piles of Dixie Chicks CDs and running them over with a steamroller. The idea that this fell out of the sky sometime during the last 4 or 5 years is poppycock.
Now that I've drudged up some memories about how horrible George W. Bush was, it's frankly even more stunning that somehow, at long last, because of his actions (mostly non-actions) in 2020, Donald Trump managed to end up as a worse President. Because until March, I still wouldn't have said that. What a difference 9 months can make.
Where the US is struggling is the Education system that comes before University. There are certainly high quality schools, but there are also a lot of underfunded and otherwise struggling places.
The main reason why most cutting edge science is still being done in the US today is because it was the case yesterday, and many of the best scientists from other countries are drawn to US institutes for the same reason... Germany was in a similar enviable position before WW2. The best young scientists go to the US and stay there, because the best older scientists are teaching and researching there.
EDIT: I can tell also tell you that if the US Universities were not generally among the more left/liberal leaning places, this would change at least for young people coming from Europe. My suspicion is that the Trump presidency already did some damage in this regard, given how he is regarded in much of the EU. I can't predict the impact on students coming from Asia.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/25/how-to-calm-americas-hundred-year-storm-461455
Dang, Politico is actually recommending they break up the tech companies as well. Very cool and goes with what I was saying yesterday, that there is hope for bipartisan consensus on this. Teddy Roosevelt is one of the better Presidents in our history, for sure. We owe a lot of the antitrust groundwork to him.
Of course it has the usual obligatory leftist garbage- the terrorist genocide at the Capitol was worse than 1,000 Hitlers combined! No nation in history has never suffered such violence!- but other than that it's pretty damn solid. It outlines problems con pundits have been talking about for ages:
"The level of turmoil is easy to overlook for those whose lives have benefited from the changes. But Americans whose education ended in high school, who live beyond the footprint of a cosmopolitan bubble, or who have seen their neighborhoods inundated with “deaths of despair,” have a right to worry that the combined effects will leave their children bereft of any opportunity to claim the American Dream. That’s not license to abandon the principles of democratic governance or to break the law—far from it. But it is a worry the rest of us ignore at our nation’s peril"
Of course, in a way articles like this are just begging those people, that they acknowledge have no representation and no-one to care about them in the new economic order, to shut up and not rebel while their families die to overdoses without proper medical care and suicides happen every other day. To suffer in silence while they make empty promises about how Joe Biden is the next Teddy Roosevelt and will solve everything for them, have no fear. But at least acknowledging these people exist is a first step. And if they do anything to make their lives better I will be the first to say i'm wrong.
Many minorities were left on the outside. Which I think is extremely important to remember when people tell Democrats and other people on the left that their focus on the treatment of minorities (especially Black people) is simply an unnecessary distraction from the rich/poor conflict. The one time in US history that the rich/poor conflict has been effectively addressed (WW 2 and the post-year wars) the minorities did *not* benefit close to the same extent. Believing it will be different this time requires a substantial leap of faith.
The turn of the 21st century is eerily similar to the turn of the 20th when you look at it historically. Even this pandemic is almost exactly 100 years after the last one...
I always found this to be interesting. While I dont have a background in this exactly, I was essentially taught that at the turn of the 20th century, if you wanted to learn about engineering/physics, you needed to have some measure of German fluency, since almost all academic textbooks and texts were written in German.
Interesting stuff.
About the rest - I have no doubt that the US higher education system could be passed over and seen as not cutting edge in the future. I agree that if this happened, it would probably be as a result of the fact that A - we have serious school system issues in primary education before the university level, and B - the attempt to harm our education system due to conservative political animus, when the right wing seeks an "other" to attack.
https://crimereads.com/the-eerie-similarities-between-the-start-of-the-20th-century-and-today/
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsday.com/amp/opinion/commentary/current-hysteria-has-parallels-with-early-20th-century-1.14619858
1. Because you need to get grants out creates unequal opportunities for students.
2. If you want to stay for a university career you need to get more grants leading to a lot of people not actually writing on innovations but more on extensions. This holds back progress and people who cannot land a grant because of reasons like niche areas of expertise or socially less expressive than others just leave university careers behind them while they might have contributed a lot in the research areas.
Found this to be an interesting article. It clearly has a leftward bias, but tries to approach most of the societal trends in a neutral fashion. I also dont think it's necessarily incorrect in either of two of its major thoughts:
A - That compromise might not be a very useful way to avoid the continued degradation of society's belief of Democracy based institutions
B - While both sides are responsible for the decline of support for democratic instructions, both sides are not equal in their contribution.
I saw an option 'C' in there, which seems to me to be the whole point of the article.
C - While one side is more responsible for the decline of democratic ideals, they are also the side that is more inclined to violence. Therefore, some compromise might be prudent.
It doesn't matter if you're 'right' if you're taken out of the equation. If fascism does rise again in this country, it will be a Hell of a lot worse than Nazi Germany ever was. We're probably orders of magnitude more powerful than either Germany or Japan were in 1940. I'm not saying to bow to the fringe right, but in your face mocking or dismissing them would be dangerous. We desperately need a middle-ground party but I don't see it coming any time soon...
Did the world change, or was it just me? I will never trust mainstream media while it acts like this in public life. This is clown shit. I used to trust it, but when I was younger I don't recall such overt displays of...I don't even know what to call it at this point.
Well CNN has moved pretty far to the left since the 90's so that shouldn't be a surprise...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mediabiasfactcheck.com/cnn/amp/
The same can be said for Fox News and the right then. What's the difference?