It makes no sense. Foreign scientists usually can't work on classified projects because they require clearance that is very difficult if not impossible for non citizens to obtain. Restricting foreign scientists from US labs is in my opinion a stupid move. What am I missing?
That nationalism is the new state doctrin? Foreigners are inferior by definition, so they cannot really help with research anyway, all they want to do is steal secrets. If you think like that, then it makes sense.
God, maybe I could buy if it it came with significant work to repair US education and investment in a domestic science workforce, but unfortunately in the US, these nationalist waves have to also come with a strong air of anti-intellectualism.
It's wild how the President literally said, "I love the poorly educated." It turns out that when you treat a PhD like a deep-state conspiracy and a high school diploma like a Nobel Prize, you just get a country that tries to fix its power grid with thoughts, prayers, and a sharpie.
It’s not the intellectuals who are pushing standards down. High standards inherently reject people, that’s inherent to the concept. The push for ever higher percentage of the population to get degrees means the average student keeps getting worse, as fewer of them are really seeking to be educated vs get a piece of paper. Public schools are pushed to raise graduation rates due to political pressure and higher education is ultimately a business and then responds to those forces.
You are 100% correct, but it is absolutely a bunch of useless intellectuals and their endless yapping who have pushed this crap on us. You are confusing intellectuals with smart people.
HR can very quickly sort people by levels of education. Most companies don’t give a fuck what someone learned in their history degree, but know on average they’re more reliable than someone that dropped out of college. Some college still puts people in a better bucket than high school graduates, which is a better bucket than high school dropouts.
Which is why the general population is trying to get that piece of paper. The day HR stops caring is the day this changes.
I know exactly what "intellectual" means. It's someone who has spent years obtaining credentials in an economically useless subject and looks down their nose at people who would lower themselves to actually do practical work. A brilliant mechanic who can fix anything and has made millions running his business would never be called an intellectual, but someone serving coffee with a phd in English literature would.
Credentials are largely unrelated to being an intellectual. Academics may be the word you’re thinking of.
A mechanic who’s been publishing poetry would easily qualify. Further labs also need people who maintain equipment, it’s a viable and hands on carrier path to maintain electron microscopes and such all day.
Crazy times. Getting strong vibes of the purge of "Jewish Science" in Germany in the 1930s from this. Until that point Germany was a world leader in the field and then they handed it to the US and never recovered the same status. Looks like the US is desperate to hand over the baton now.
"Foreigners are inferior by definition" - but USA approach says exactly the opposite. Foreigners are capable, so it is better not to share secrets and technology with them.
The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy. [0]
Because they likely have no family there and on nights and weekends there is less trouble and noise, so better conditions to get into an uninterrupted flow state to get things done?
Is that really something in need of explaining on a hacker site?
The US approach is fascistic. Fascism demands that enemies of the state be simultaneously incompetent dolts who could never compete with Real Americans who would be a drain on our resources, and hypercompetent idealogues who would steal our precious resources and send them back to a group that wants to harm us.
The issue is that when people start abusing words like "fascism" out of context they make those words lose meaning.
The US is definitely undergoing authoritarian tendencies, but it remains structurally constrained by separation of powers, federalism, and independent courts and media, features that fascist regimes systematically dismantle.
If you start calling everything fascism you are essentially helping those you call fascists because they can easily refute your thesis and gaslight you on the very realities of the authoritarian descent the country is going through.
Thank heavens for that separation of powers, otherwise the President would be declaring wars and levying tariffs willy-nilly, without even bothering to check with Congress first.
Presidents have been doing the undeclared war thing since the end of WWII. Nothing new there, the tariffs and other EOs have maybe increased markedly in the last few presidencies.
It's not just the war, obviously. This time the President has immunity levels that are unprecedented. And his cronies in Congress and SCOTUS don't seem inclined to rein him in on much.
What do you call it when the authoritarians start, then? Are we not allowed to call it that until we’re not allowed to go to the courts or to speak about what’s happening?
> You call it for what it is: an executive with authoritarian tendencies.
Okay, but that's beating around the bush and a very milquetoast way to describe it.
> easily refutable and you get called out for being a radical whatever.
This is equivalent to being punched repeatedly by a bully and being scared that he'll cry "assault!" when you punch him back. At some point, you cease to exist if you don't act.
Fascism is just a nationalism authoritarianism that is very hierarchical and believe in an "interior enemy" (for MAGA it's the deep state) that is the root cause of all their country isseus, and once it's purged the country can take its rightfull place at the top, and you with it.
I agree that US is not fascist yet, the hierarchy isn't set, and the economy isn't close to an extractive autarky, but philosophically, it's close, don't you think? I mean, ranting against traitors all the time is to me a very, very big point in favor of this being fascism.
> believe in an "interior enemy" (for MAGA it's the deep state)
It's their neighbors, not the "deep state". Renee Good and Alex Pretti were the enemy within. People in inflatable costumes or pussy hats are the enemy within. Uppity kids in high school who get thrown to the drown and put in a choke hold. People filming ice on public streets. They are the enemy within to MAGA. It isn't distant and abstract. It's personal.
Checks and balances have almost completely collapsed, we've got masked, lawless paramilitary forces executing citizens in the streets, kicking in doors without warrants, spending billions of dollars building concentration camps, ignoring habeas corpus, accelerating media capture by friendly oligarchs, the national security apparatus labeling anyone who criticizes this stuff as domestic terrorists, and you're here quibbling over semantics.
The US is not significantly constrained - the current SCOTUS is more like an agreived clerical council than serious arbiter of the Constitution, while Trump has clearly been hoping to do away with meaningful elections (and the failures are more so because of how oddly ineffective/silly his faction can be than real systemic resilience). Similarly, he has majorities in Congress, which are just enough to let him do whatever he wants. I will grant that these MAGATs haven't fully succeeded, but it's more like they're 2/3ds of the way there and oddly bad at parts of the game than separation of powers, the courts, etc., working.
On a different level I've been unsure whether it'sgood to call it facsism. But it's effectively at least a stepchild.
> it remains structurally constrained by separation of powers, federalism, and independent courts and media, features that fascist regimes systematically dismantle.
But the Trump administration (a.k.a. the executive branch) is trying to systematically dismantle these things. When people refer to fascism in the U.S. government, they don’t mean the entire government. They mean the Trump administration, which is the face of the U.S. government, has a great deal of the share of power, and is seeking more. The brand of far right nationalism, that the nation is in decline and violence must be used to restore it, along with the economic policies and deference to corporations and the wealthy, are things that make them more fascist than just authoritarian.
Saying that we cannot call it fascism until the transformation is complete doesn’t make sense - if a group of people have beliefs and goals that align with fascism, and are taking steps to impose them, you can call them fascist, even if they have not yet realized the full set of conditions that make the government fully fascist.
> The issue is that when people start abusing words like "fascism" out of context they make those words lose meaning.
So, rhetorical question: was Hitler a fascist during the failed Munich coup? Or did he suddenly became one when he was appointed chancellor? Are we not allowed to see what’s in front of our eyes until they build gas chambers?
- despite the current executive and its lackeys clearly stating they were going to do exactly what's happening (the dismantling of institutions, the violent, word-wise, targeting of any criticism, the tariffs, etc).
- despite the open attack to US democracy on January 6th 2021
Americans voted for all of this to happen.
What's happening isn't exposing a fault in a particular individual, that's way too convenient.
Not only they voted all of this, but keep believing this paranormal constitutional nonsense where winner-takes-all elections where you rule under no oversight, you have no opposition, and don't even depend on your own party support is actually a sane democratic system.
Of all the countries that slid in authoritarianism during the last 4 decades (from the Philippines to Russia, from Nicaragua to Belarus, etc) not one was a parliamentary republic.
All of them, literally all, where presidential republics.
Serbia used to be parliamentary republic. Nominally it stil is. In fact it is currently governed by SNS, former political party turned criminal organization.
> Not only they voted all of this, but keep believing this paranormal constitutional nonsense where winner-takes-all elections where you rule under no oversight, you have no opposition, and don't even depend on your own party support is actually a sane democratic system.
Honestly I’ve been filled schadenfreude with as the American civic religion collapse. Even the right is giving it up as they view it as too obstructionist.
The silver lining in all this is that the American people might come out a bit less retarded. It’s been fascinating to see the explosion of political thought amongst Americans in the last few years.
> The silver lining in all this is that the American people might come out a bit less retarded
I don't buy it, after January 6th and Trump getting re-elected, despite everything it will have to get much much worse before there's a conscious change.
difficult to have a change when you control just about all of the media. every decision now has a “reasonable” explanation and we past the point where people will en masse admit they fucked up. I have numerous friends who voted to the right in 2024 and it is fascinating to hear narrative after narrative and “excuses” why this is all good for us. nevermind that we had discussion in 2024 before election where just about every single reason they debated for voting to right has been shown that it was all BS… I am past the point where I believe there will be a change (it is not helping that alternative to this madness ain’t that great either)
It’s less about any of that. It’s more that I’m glad I won’t have to hear them deify the constitution anymore because they don’t care for it much anymore.
I don't believe that will happen. The Constitution will continue to be paraded as a tool to attack perceived enemies and protect allies. We already see it all over the place when MAGA talks about the 1st and 2nd Amendments.
The hypocrisy doesn't matter to them because it isn't (and never was) about the "ideals" of the Constitution, it is about punishing enemies.
For the political movement in control, the law and the constitution exists as a tool to protect the in group, and to restrict the outgroup.
That's why they get so upset at the elected veterans that did a simple video saying "the law says you must disobey unlawful orders," the reason that such a statement is viewed literally as "treasonous" and worthy of "hanging" according to Trump.
Using the law to restrict those in power goes against their fundamental understanding of law. There is no hypocrisy, just a completely different view of what is criminal: namely the other guys are all criminals.
Sorry, I deliberately left it open as while violence is a valid solution in extreme cases, but I meant it more as using all the faculties available to us. In any case, I will try avoiding statements that could be seen as violating site rules.
We did. And if anyone would stop to actually analyze it, instead of just insinuating that we're all yucky poopooheads for doing so (in the futile attempt to shame us into stopping), they might come to understand why. Whatever the alternative is to how we're voting, as exemplified by Europe, we don't want it. Maybe there are more options besides those two, but no one's offered those or even described what they could be. Europe certainly hasn't.
>not one was a parliamentary republic.
And thank god that we're not one then. We'd truly be hopeless.
Fascist mythos is simple: you're in the greatest nation, and the greatest "type" of human (genetics for the nazis, cultural for the Italian fascists, christian for some South american fascists early 20th century, your choice, but but beware one type of superiority easily bleed into others), but yet, inferior humans (neighbors) seems to have better lives. It's because of internal traitors(jews and communists mostly, "judeoblochevism" as a word exist for a reason, and it isn't because it was a material reality) that are bringing their own country down. We must purge them to finally take our rightfull place.
Fascism cannot exist without internal enemies, nationalist authoritarianism can. If your president/dictator is whining about internal enemies that infiltrated the government and capitalist society to bring it down, congratulation, it's not simple nationalist authoritarian tendencies, it's fascist tendencies.
Basically: if you add an "interior enemy" narrative to a right-wing authoritarism, you have fascism.
> You call it for what it is: an executive with authoritarian tendencies.
I think you misunderstand fascism. Fascism is not gassing certain minority group of people in concentration camps, that's called crimes against humanity. It might be an endgame to fascism if you are government that is allowed to commit those crimes without consequences, but the road to it is still fascism regardless whether you historically know how it ends. Calling press "the enemy of the people" as Trump did (also known as "Lügenpresse") IS a form of fascism. You don't need to push Democrats and immigrants into gas chambers to be full blown fascist. Overwhelming amount of actions taken by this democratic government ARE what most historians call fascism.
Fascism, in political science, has some clear requirements: a government that controls all branches of power, lack of elections and effective ban of free speech and other political parties.
It also requires ideological aspects such as nationalism and far right politics, otherwise fascism would apply to far left dictatorships which didn't have these traits.
You really going to say that Trump and his Administration does not control all branches of power?
During Third Reich neither press was banned nor elections. Look it up, Google is still free to research. Unless of course you want to endup at conclusion that Nazism and Third Reich wasn't fascism.
And what did it change? NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Tariffs are still here - this morning I accepted DHL package and had to pay it - and even if - Trump/Vence already said its actually good because we will use another vehicle which will allow us to continue collect the money. So it won't be called tariff - it will be called embargo fee. So yes, Trump continues to control all branches, one way or another.
It’s ridiculous, but it’s OK. Because we have other ways, numerous other ways,” the president said. “The numbers can be far greater than the hundreds of billions we’ve already taken in.
The nature of tariffs has fundamentally changed. Imports from all countries are subject to the same 15% rate which means no more deals or wielding tariffs as a punishment.
> when people start abusing words like "fascism" out of context they make those words lose meaning
The thing is, fascism has always been a bit of a loose term. It doesn't have a strict meaning. It was invented by one guy to name his government, not describe it analytically.
Mussolini invented the word "fascismo" to describe his movement, Fasci Italiani di Combattimeto.
So any use of "fascism" outside this one instance is by loose comparison to his government (because tight comparison would inevitably be unproductive: no government is exact the same as another).
The best we can do in a literalist manner is identify that the etymology is related to fasces, a bundle of rods tied together in Roman times (tying rods together make them far more difficult to snap in half), and recognize that the implication here is that a fascist government is focused on strength through unity.
It was then broadly adopted by Mussolini's adherents.
So, unless we only want to restrict "fascist" to an identifier for Mussolini's party and government, we have motivation to come up with elements of similar politics/government/partisanship by looking at the elements that made up Mussolini's movement:
He elucidates fourteen elements that make up fascism:
1. cult of tradition
2. rejection of modernism
3. cult of action for its own sake (i.e., intellectual reflection doesn't contribute value)
4. disagreement is treason
5. fear of difference
6. appeal to frustrated middle class
7. obsession with a plot (e.g., "there is a plot by foreigners to destroy us from within)
8. cast their enemies as both too weak and too strong
9. life is permanent warfare (i.e., there is always an enemy to fight)
10. contempt for the weak
11. everyone is educated to become a hero
12. machismo
13. selective populism
14. newspeak
I honestly feel like #11 is the only one we don't definitely have in the US right now. I wold prefer not to waste my time giving examples of the other thirteen, but if someone doesn't think it's obvious, I will respond at some point.
At its essence, if you take these fourteen points holistically, the vibe is "the 'right kind of' citizenry is in a constant state of hatred toward some other, and they should be pressured to take action without thought"
The trouble with this definition is that a large number of points fit the progressive left, too. Based on my experience (especially on pre-Musk Twitter, but in other places as well), 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, and 14 apply fairly well.
I think this framework really just describes "tribalism", and not specifically "fascism".
I think the difference is that in fascism these literal things are actually happening, whereas the worst you can say about “the left” is that you can make a bad-faith comparison and say that things are somehow metaphorically similar.
But you can really say that “disagreement is treason” means the same thing in fascism and in “the left”? Are you saying, for e.g., that unions and universities execute dissenters as a matter of course? “Fear of difference” under fascism means that differences you can’t control put your life at permanent risk. In the context of tribalism, it means being embarrassed.
So there’s really no comparison between a conservative feeling left out under liberalism to a minority feeling at risk under fascism.
> I think the difference is that in fascism these literal things are actually happening, whereas the worst you can say about “the left” is that you can make a bad-faith comparison and say that things are somehow metaphorically similar.
See, this is where I disagree. You can argue that many of these things are "actually happening", but doing so often requires stretching the definitions of these things, or conflating speech with action.
Take your example: I see all sorts of instances where folks on the right have accused others of treason, but there's a significant lack of actual charges. You're conflating rhetoric with action. Rhetoric is dangerous, yes, but the rhetoric we see from the right is just the next escalation in a constant game of escalating rhetoric from both sides.
I mean, calling Republicans "fascists" and "nazis" isn't exactly nonviolent rhetoric, either, especially the latter. There are actual fascists and Nazis among Republicans, for sure, but they don't represent anything close to a majority. There are fascists among Democrats, too!
The rest of your comment is just another great example of inflammatory rhetoric that isn't really representative of a reality that exists outside your own head, unfortunately.
>Based on my experience (especially on pre-Musk Twitter, but in other places as well), 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, and 14 apply fairly well.
I'd like to hear your rationale for that. In the meantime, I'll add my comments on those points. But first, let me set a ground rule for myself: this review covers the political left in the United States. A circle of thinkers with no sway over the government isn't considered for whether the left matches the qualities of a fascist government. If that circle does have sway, then sure.
>1. cult of tradition
I cannot think of a tradition the left holds in nearly religious sanctity. This might be a "fish can't see the water" thing, so I'd be happy to learn one.
>3. cult of action for its own sake (i.e., intellectual reflection doesn't contribute value)
You didn't list this one, but I will. The left is prone to subgroups fracturing off and calling for extreme reactions (e.g. "defund the police"), and then not strongly quashing these dumb ideas. I think it's a bias to being inclusive and not wanting to deny anything that comes from an oppressed person. Noble intent, but doesn't always lead down the best path.
>4. disagreement is treason
I think you're conflating "cancel culture" with accusations of treason. Trump has literally accused people disagreeing with him of treason ("Air strikes on drug smugglers is illegal, and you should refuse to do so"). Has a modern Democratic official accused somebody of being treasonous for disagreeing on a political matter?
>5. fear of difference
If anything, the left defaults to celebrating difference. And no, "fear of MAGA" is not enough to qualify as fear of difference.
>6. appeal to frustrated middle class
Yes. Everyone does that these days, but yes. It almost seems like a pointless quality to isolate, because any political party would appeal to middle class frustrations. Maybe the better way is to offer hope. In that case, both parties could do a lot better.
>7. obsession with a plot (e.g., "there is a plot by foreigners to destroy us from within)
The left is sliding down this path with fears about the midterm elections. To be fair, after the 2020 election, Trump did spread lies, prepared slates of fake electors, got Republican representatives to vote against counting voters from certain states, and instigated what ended up being a violent assault on the electoral certification. So it's not as crazy as "Democrats are busing in illegals to vote."
>8. cast their enemies as both too weak and too strong
Democratic officials have called this administration dumb, selfish, and cruel. But not weak.
>9. life is permanent warfare (i.e., there is always an enemy to fight)
After the assassination of Osama bin Laden, who was the enemy during the Obama years? That administration even had the laughable "reset" with Russia.
>11. everyone is educated to become a hero
I can't think of much evidence for or against this. Maybe it's just an American thing to lavish praise on "common people* doing amazing things. Neither party truly praises a humble life, despite mentioning it to cloak bad economic policy in "salt of the earth" rags.
>13. selective populism
I'll have to read the original work to see what this term means.
>14. newspeak
I genuinely would like to know some leftist newspeak. Again, fish and water.
That word makes a lot of people uncomfortable and many will shut their brains off when they see it. It's a perfect word to describe what's happening, but sometimes describing the characteristics of it is better for engagement.
There are a lot of reactionaries in today's political landscape.
Fascism isn't really a form of government though, it's a political ideology and aesthetics that we see echoed through different regimes. You can be a democracy on paper while in practice being a single party corporate oligarchy with a cult of personality surrounding the head of state.
Ur-Fascism describes the ideology of MAGA exactly. Clearly there's some apprehension admitting this, it's a strong-man political ideology that has evolved many times organically throughout history. It doesn't necessarily imply that the regime is bad or evil or anything but the problem ends up being that the term exists because governments that adopt this ideology end up converging on the same unsavory behaviors despite any initial differences. That convergence is I think what a lot of Americans are afraid of because we're already doing most of them.
So yes, the US has enough of the hallmarks to be considered a fascist state. It doesn't need to tick every single box for that title.
Edit from Wikipedia: Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement that rose to prominence in early-20th-century Europe.[1][2][3] Fascism is characterized by support for a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.[3][4] Opposed to communism, democracy, liberalism, pluralism, and socialism,[5][6] fascism is at the far-right of the traditional left–right spectrum.[1][6][7] What constitutes a precise definition of fascism has been a longrunning and complex debate among scholars.
Look up "On Fascism" by Umberto Eco, it's not that long and was written long enough ago that you can't say it was influenced by any of our current leaders.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Umberto Eco is a great writer, but whenever his list of ways to describe Blackshirts comes up, it fails.
First, it's very fuzzy. You don't have to have all aspects, but many aspects are present in many systems without it being outright fascist.
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Is 5 out of 14 enough to make something fascist? Are "Appeal to a frustrated middle class", "Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as 'at the same time too strong and too weak'", "Newspeak" and "Obsession with a plot" enough?
I think it confuses rhetorical devices like "Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as 'at the same time too strong and too weak'" and "Newspeak" as hallmarks of Fascism when they are just a tool.
George Orwell famously pointed that calling things "fascist" and "Nazi" is in itself an example of Newspeak, because it's not used to describe a government system that is far-right, authoritarian, and extremely xenophobic, but it's used as a label to say something is Bad™.
It also confuses its populist roots and enemies at the time. "The cult of action for action's sake," and especially anti-intellectualism.
---
Like take Starship Troopers, an extremely fascistic society. Let's score it on Eco's scale. It definitely has "Rejection of Modernism", "Disagreement is treason", "Cult of action", "Fear of Difference", "Life is Warfare", "Everybody is a hero", and "Newspeak". So 7/14.
- Cult of tradition doesn't exist that much per se. Granted, I could have missed it.
- Appeal to the frustrated middle class; as far as we see, there isn't one
.
- Obsession with plot isn't really a thing, because the Bugs aren't really a plot;
they are a clear and present danger. The internal enemies if any aren't mentioned.
- Casting enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak." Bugs are shown more or less realistically, they are a difficult enemy that can be defeated.
- "Selective populism". It's not so much selective populism as state enforced labor to gain citizenship.
- "Contempt for the weak" there isn't much out-group to belong to. The Terran Federation covers the globe, and almost everyone is a citizen. There isn't any contempt for underlings, even if there are military cross branch out-groups. Like real world counterparts jarheads, squids and wingnut.
- If Machismo exists, it's mutated to cover both sexes.
Granted, I might have missed a few, but still, shouldn't Eco's 14 traits light up more for a more fascistic society?
Sure, I see ultranationalism. And if I squint, I can see that a huge chunk of the US population is pro-Trump, but that's not culty overall.
You can still speak against him, as far as I can tell. Compare this to, say, Mao Zedong. If you spoke against him, your life was forfeit, and even that's not fascism.
If this is one of those fuzzy definitions, it definitely isn't on the strong side. Where is the rampant militarism, the worship of death, and of the military?
There's been quite a lot of worship of the military in america... Also haven't armed forces been deployed domestically a few times in the current presidency?
Sure, but Trump was not campaigning on that; if anything he campaigned on being the most peaceful president. Hitler didn't campaign on honoring treaty of Versallies, and avoiding war with neighbors.
> rampant militarism, the worship of death, and of the military?
See: the recent events in Minneapolis and the massive increase in funding for ICE. You don't have to look very hard to see what the new brownshirts are doing in blue cities and the MAGAs covering for them.
Oh also the federalization of the National Guard and US Marine deployment to Los Angeles. Things move quickly and people forget but that's exactly their playbook: flooding the zone with so much shit that it's hard to keep track.
There are generous ways to interpret a critique of "redditification".
1. An increase in comments that aim to gather social approval as opposed to advancing a conversation or sharing knowledge -- often including meta commentary on threads e.g., "reddit moment".
2. Topics start to become more general and lose the tech/startup scene focus of the site.
These are legitimate. Reddit threads are stereotypically full of noise and HN should avoid that.
However there's a third form of the critique that I think should be avoided.
3. Too many comments seem to reflect values and worldviews rooted in [socially] liberal ideals.
Because of this, it's probably useful to give some context for what in particular constitutes "redditifcation". That way dang and any other mods can try to address it with particular policy decisions.
How's it working out for you, spending a third of your income on rent but not actually having any rights to stay in the property you rent, and a further third on "health insurance" that'll take your money and run, leaving you to choose between a lifetime of debt or just plain dying if you ever get ill?
> You just don’t like anything else than your ideas, because you don’t like us. Sorry to be born.
Why do you think political ideology is an inborn trait? People don't like you because you actively choose to vote for things that bring about pain and suffering. Not because of your innate attributes.
Bro... you need a reality check. I'm the whitest male around. There is no 'anti-white' brigade. Maybe I'm crazy, but I don't think siding with the war mongering, child molesting, pump and dumping, christian nationals is the sane move.
I’m white Western born Usa male and have been very progressive and protesting and I don’t relate to you at all. I don’t have a weird belief people hate me because of my skin color or my heritage. Everyone knows you are not your hateful ancestors. You sound like you’re playing victim, which is very common rhetoric from conservatives.
You'll notice that The same dude was in charge in 2016 as 2026. The people warning about fascism were the ones who know what happens to the rhetoric and policies of 2016 when not countered.
Your usage of "Your side" is telling. It seems like this is a team sport for you and you've picked a side. Unfortunately you might have sided with fascists.
If you forewarn about a developing Fascist movement, you're simply taking away the meaning from the word until it's too late and the Fascists take power.
You cannot call anything Fascist, for there may be something more Fascist that may need the power of the word.
But ah! We couldn't call out their fledgling movement full of dog whistles and double speak so no one was aware enough to stop them as a fledgling movement!
Yeah the other side doesn’t over use socialism or communism or terrorist. And conservatives haven’t been refusing to make concessions in Congress and the Senate for decades.
The irony is that almost every single one of the countries these foreigners come from would do exactly the same thing were the shoe on the other foot. If running government-funded research to maximize the opportunities for native born people is “fascism,” then every country in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East is “fascist.” Borderless universalism is a niche idea even in the west, and virtually non-existent outside it.
> The irony is that almost every single one of the countries these foreigners come from would do exactly the same thing were the shoe on the other foot.
I'm having a hard imagining Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Norway, Switzerland, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, or Italy, to name a few countries of the countries from which scientists have come to work on NIST projects putting these kind of restrictions on American scientists coming to work on non-classified research at their labs.
Well, I would venture that they consider women more as property than people. Which is of course a disgusting way to relate to fellow humans, but dehumanization is all the rage with these people.
I don't think its about hate, its more like he doesn't believe in taking away something he cannot see with his own eye. Here his idea is that research and development will still continue happening even if overwhelming majority of people responsible for it in the past, will be gone.
Take COVID for example. We were fine with minor breakouts prior to Trump administration. They came in and Trump saw we are spending $3.7 million on safety measures in Wuhan Lab, fund designated by Obama (here comes first red flag right?) By his standard you could not SEE the protection so he wanted to look like Champion and save tax payers 3.7 million by removing that protection. We all know what came next and boy was damage more financially painful than mere 3.7 mil?
Its like a person who doesn't wear a seat belt because they never been in a car accident so they don't see the point. If given power they would remove mandates to wear seatbelts and have insurance companies deal with the outcome.
Trump is an actor, he isn't the scenario writer, and as such you never should focus on Trump.
This isn't a surprise when religious conservatism enters a traditional marriage with oligarchic conservatism¹. This is more a classical case of "you keep them stupid, while we keep them poor".
If even the Enlightenment is a heresy (Burke e.a), you will have to spin the clock back.
But you can't have your cake and eat it too, so the US will become closer to an Afghanistan, led by increasingly unruly lunatics and warlords. Women's rights, scientific progress, educated people with agency; it's all a threat. The conservative rage becomes violent because what it wants and believes conflicts with reality, so they have to smash that all down, including the progress.
Yes, they rather burn society down than to lose control. That is hard to grasp for decent people, so you see an endless stream of opinions trying and failing to come up with a constructive rationale, but when you can understand that there is a class of people with a non-constructive default mode like the rest of us, things will be much easier to understand.
The book banning has been going on for several years, and now we are in the escalation phase. The resent about women's rights, persecution² of transgenders, harassment of universities and scientists, in short: the Gleichschaltung³, should not be a surprise and has little to do with show- and stuntman Trump. It is unruly conservatism coming to its ultimate conclusion, confronted with shrinking religious control, with results of zero sum economics, with a shrinking voter base, with all gerry-mandering options exploited, and ultimately with having thrown away democracy. The clock is being turned back.
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1. This is the original definition of conservatism, to "conserve" the status quo of a very small class of owners versus large masses of poor people.
They do! I'm in academia and they hvae really attractive programs to get foreign academics in, they have special programmes just for this purpose. I don't think a lot of people still want to move to China, due to concerns about language, culture, quality of life, authoritarianism etc. but the government is most certainly promoting it.
I think the point is “it’s fair to Americans that’s what counts” is a nationalistic statement. Maybe it’s the way to go. But it’s not refuting the parent who’s saying the missing piece is nationalism.
I mean what is the point of a government of its people if not to serve those who elected it? It seems bizarre that one would elect a government to benefit others whose governments could give a rats ass about us.
Again that’s a nationalistic point of view. For someone unused to thinking about the world as “us” vs “them” where the designations of “us” and “them” are defined by national borders it can be surprising and seem like there’s missing information. There’s not missing information there’s a values/worldview mismatch.
If they can teach/lead us, then we can bring them in. If we have to teach them then we don’t need them and instead can cultivate our own talent.
I’m not against brining in talent that can teach us where we don’t have local talent. We can use them to jump start our own talent. I’m also not against extraordinarily talented business people who can add to the economy.
Elon Musk didn't come to the US as a businessman. He graduated from UPenn. So with your logic he shouldn't have been allowed to come here to get trained.
The majority of Americans want to preserve jobs for Americans. It’s a minority of people who would agree with your position. It’s like voter IDs. Even a majority of Democrats would agree with requiring IDs at polling stations. Only a minority are against it, according to polls. In addition many of the poorest of countries require IDs for voting but some people frame it as a fascist opinion. That would imply lots of the world is fascist as they implement ID requirements for voting.
The majority of Americans don't want to cripple their country's science capabilities, either in terms of funding or talent. Especially not on a xenophobic basis like this. Only a minority of trump voters, who are themselves a minority of Americans, are for this, according to polls[0].
Not sure what you're on about with voter ID, that sounds like a totally different topic you might have meant to post about in a totally different thread, so I'll focus on this one, in which the administration is acting in direct contravention to what The People want.
Then again, maybe this is purely a disagreement of principles. You already indicated[1] that you were in favor of politicians ignoring The People in favor of a minority of individuals who specifically voted for said politicians.
The idea of voter ID is fine. The problem in the US is the implementation. Those other countries have national ID systems and are good at making sure everyone gets an ID.
In the US there is no national ID. There are state IDs but a significant number of eligible voters do not have one and many cannot afford to get one. Even if there is no direct fee to get an ID it can cost a lot (sometimes over $100) to get the documentation needed. It is made more difficult and expensive by the patchwork record keeping in many states, which can require searching in many different counties for birth records for example if you aren't sure exactly where you were born. I think most states do have statewide record keeping now, but some have not gone through the old per county paper only records and scanned them and added them to the central system.
Worse, some states seem to have deliberately tried to make it harder for people who are likely to vote against the party that is making the rules to get IDs and easier for voters who are likely to vote for them to get IDs.
For example, under the guise of trying to save money they close down many of the offices that issue IDs. These closures mostly are in areas where groups more likely to be against that party live, often poor and/or minority areas. This sometimes leaves those areas with no place to get ID within 50 miles, which can be difficult for people in poor areas with no affordable public transit and low car ownership.
Another thing is picking what ID is acceptable. Say make hunting licenses acceptable as ID, but do not allow student IDs from state colleges.
Make an ID law that includes funding to pay for getting IDs for those who do not have them, including assistance and funding to find the required records, and that sets up a system to make sure that going forward new citizens get issues acceptable ID, and finally that has a way to grandfather in people who can show by clear and convincing evidence that they are eligible to vote and cannot reasonably obtain an ID, and most people who object will drop their objections.
But me as someone who dislikes all kinds of nationalism, I obviously would do both. Develope smart domestic scientists in collaboration with smart international students/scientists. Networking, collaboration, strengthening ties, connecting cultures despite of differences, you know all those humanistic ideals you actually find a lot in real science. Focus on the common goal, progress for all of humanity through new knowledge.
> I think the world got used to us being patsies where we spend our money on R&D paying foreigners
I can tell you're not in the business of training / employing people.
The best ROI is getting someone who is already trained (read you didn't pay for their K-12, their parents' teaching/maternity/healthcare) and just deriving value from their labor.
Leading a nation is not a business. In order to have a successful and self sustaining population we need to develop our own human capital. You want to take shortcuts —those are fine when you’re playing catch up, not when you’re in the lead. Also, it’s a governments responsibility to support and cultivate its own population and not dispose them for another population.
Absolutely true about creating talent. That does not mean you shouldn't take advantage of the easy talent available to you.
Please don't pretend like hiring scientists for a national lab has any effect on the colossal waste of human talent our nation is perpetrating—the problems begin so much earlier, and holding out for another American scientist at a national lab is doing nothing to address the ridiculous state of our human capital development.
Quite the opposite. The US got the best of other countries, those countries paid for their education but the US got the benefits. The braun drain was to the US
(later notable entry: Andy Grove, Intel CEO, was born Andreas Grov:
"By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis' "Final Solution," the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint... [where] many young people were killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them")
I think there is a difference between bringing in key proven talent at the apex that’s already proven itself and talent that needs to be developed. Both the US and USSR picked up proven talent from the Nazis, they weren’t siphoning up green talent on the hopes they’d develop into good scientists. We have our own population we often overlook and misdirect into Hollywood entertainment rather than achievement.
Speaking of unutilized talents, other than Hollywood, I'd also add a whole bunch of folks in tech who could be useful for defending their own homeland (hence, their own & their kids' future) but are busy doing the generic commercial stuff.
Every time I see something specific like this I wonder if there was something very similar and specific happening in Berlin ~90-93 years ago.
I've tried reviewing online archives of German books/newspapers but it's obviously very time consuming. The large LLM:s don't seem to index this area sufficiently.
It's easy to pin this all on a foreign enemy, but this "theory" is completely invalidated by noticing that Trump receives support from all the most powerful person of the country: Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Ellison, Bezos... America doesn't need foreign adversaries to destroy itself.
How many of these people have talked to Putin or other similarly-skilled Russian intelligence agents that convinced them that Russian style oligarchy would give them more power than liberal democracy?
I would guess most if not all. Bezos is the only one who I imagine might not have had detailed discussions. Musk was completely in the grasp of Putin, though that seems to have changed in the past month with the sudden change of heart and disablement of Russian military starlink inside Ukraine. Apparently it was implemented in a single day, and SpaceX staff was confused by the sudden change in heart. That is still consistent with Putin playing Musk like a puppet earlier when they had direct conversations.
I think there are a confluence of reasons for this behavior, and I while I think that foreign influence can't explain it all, it would explain a huge chunk.
Hanlon's razor still applies: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" [0]. He might be such a foreign agents, however we know that he is unintelligent and narcissistic, therefore everyone who makes him look stupid/bad is suddenly "public enemy number one."
It makes no sense to people who want to live in a globally-competitive democracy. But other people don't share that goal, and the moves make perfect sense in their context.
I think this is an important point. Think about the mindset it takes to understand this proposal as a "great" thing for America. What would you have to believe? What values would you have to change in order for a foreign scientist ban to be "great". Be sure to try to limit you understanding of science to wha you might receive from watching the most popular cable news channel as your definitive source of information.
This is not the mindset of all MAGA but it's a difficult exercise for most thoughtful engineers to try to live in that mind space for a while. It's a very different world, and I can only do it because I have many conversations with family members to draw on.
The goal is the grift + outrage. If you can get both, great. If you can get just one, a very solid win. Each time something is thrown into full chaos there stands a private actor or dozens to make 7-8 figures.
You’re missing nothing. This is just another boneheaded footgun by this admin. What a time to be live and be an American. I’m ashamed to be one and living internationally. Everyone is either pitying me or laughing at me because my government is so corrupt, stupid and incompetent.
More problematic than my own ridicule is what this will portend for US science and the US for leading science research. We must fight to keep the US a destination for cutting edge science and research and one way to do that is to attract the best and brightest from all parts of the globe.
And it's NIST, formerly the Bureau of Standards, not the NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration). Apparently having evil furriners being able to mess with the definition of the furlong or the hundredweight is a national security threat.
It feels like they are banking on their AI moment. Thinking that AI will do everything for them, they're isolating themselves like China historically did. Now all they have to do is create a proper AI that can surpass top notch researchers.
Used to be that America was great because the smartest researchers in the world wanted to come here, often escaping oppressive regimes to do so, and become American citizens (e.g., Albert Einstein)
So now all the world’s best and brightest scientists will move to China where they’ll be welcomed in open arms, enjoy living in a modern society with affordable electric cars, the world’s premier high speed train network, glimmering new subway systems, and ample affordable housing.
They’ll work on cutting-edge research projects that receive ample funding and support while American scientists wrestle with a federal government torn apart by anti-intellectual strongmen.
Are we tired of winning yet? It sounds like we are beyond tired of winning, we’d rather lose from here on out.
Seems like Russia and the USA are hell-bent on destroying themselves fighting forever wars to allow China and the EU to take the reins as the beacons of global stability and strength.
The language is still a barrier to that so it will happen slower than one would think. Top scientists from everywhere outside China generally know English and not Chinese.
That said, China is sponsoring lots of foreign students from belt and road countries to come there and learn Chinese, so its a work in progress.
I, uh, actually went and took a look at both, are you really really really sure you want to pit the clumsy awkward thing as the best challenger America is capable of putting in front of China's kung fu ninja robots? :)
>So now all the world’s best and brightest scientists will move to China where they’ll be welcomed in open arms
They'll also get to experience as much or more racism than they would have in America, but likely far more racism. In America you find racism in some (usually rural) areas, and people who are very accepting in other areas (big cities where most science research is typically done). I'm not sure China is going to be the easiest place to build a life for foreigners.
Of course this pitch is more like “white people might something resembling the kind of experience that natively born non-white people have in America.”
Is a black person whose parents grew up in segregation, redlining, etc, really getting a worse experience in China?
I know fully English speaking born in USA Asian people who avoid certain parts of the country over the racism they get from Americans.
This “lack of racism in the USA” only exists if you’re white.
Don’t forget that ICE is currently arbitrarily detaining people for looking/sounding foreign, and that actual US citizens and people with permanent residency status have been caught up in it.
At least in China they have their fucking paperwork in order.
>Is a black person whose parents grew up in segregation, redlining, etc, really getting a worse experience in China?
Some places won't server you in China, if that's what you're asking. It isn't as bad as some time in the past in the US, but it's not going to be smooth sailing at all.
>I know fully English speaking born in USA Asian people who avoid certain parts of the country over the racism they get from Americans.
Yes, and I covered that in my comment. Rural areas are always going to be worse for minorities.
>This “lack of racism in the USA” only exists if you’re white.
Where the hell did I ever say that??? Why are people reading things into comments that simply aren't there??
>Don’t forget that ICE is currently arbitrarily detaining people for looking/sounding foreign, and that actual US citizens and people with permanent residency status have been caught up in it.
Gee, no kidding. You don't say.
I'm really not sure what you're trying to call me out for, or why.
> Used to be that America was great because the smartest researchers in the world wanted to come here, often escaping oppressive regimes to do so, and become American citizens (e.g., Albert Einstein)
By this measure, America is now greater than ever.
Of course, it's convenient to pretend that Trump is building a racist dictatorship with a Gestapo, and that's why no one wants to move to the US. But the true is that the number of people around the world who would like to move to the US is higher than ever. Especially when the current administration is trying to purge society of foreign criminals.
> So now all the world’s best and brightest scientists will move to China
Yes, of course. It's practically the same thing. The only reason scientists go to China is because they are not allowed into the US.
The commenter claimed that there’s no ICE Gestapo, and that this administration is deporting criminals, but 74% of detainees have no criminal convictions and only 5% have any violent criminal record: https://www.cato.org/blog/5-ice-detainees-have-violent-convi...
ICE told officers in a memo to disregard due process and the 4th amendment:
I have no link for this one, but it’s worth pointing out that educated immigrants likely have the most options on where they want to live. They’re not in the same situation as a day laborer hopping the border to the closest country that has work available. The US doesn’t have to be a bad option available for that kind of person to say “nah, I’ll go somewhere else.” It just has to be a less good option with enough negative aspects, and they’ll say, eff that, I’m going to find a position in Germany/Netherlands/China/etc.
The one that couldn't afford a decent education? The ones that will be in debt for life (bribery risk)? The ones that paid money to be handed a degree, and wouldn't do an honest days work if their life depended on it?
Yeah, before this restriction was imposed, the USA was the worst country in the world in terms of scientific research and advancement.
Now that they have these restrictions in place, the USA will go from worst to best with the help of highschool-dropout equivalents who fudge their way through the interview and then complain about more than 2-3 hours of hard work per day (and demand 2-3 times the pay for the privilege). #winning !!!
By the way, would you mind linking to some of your research scientist job postings, so such folks can apply to work for you? I'm sure you can't wait to hire them, just like everyone else, right?
> AI might not be good, but it’s at least as good as 90% of them and it works 24x7
Sure. It's cheaper - now. Might not continue being that cheap. What prevents Anthropic from jacking up prices once the field is consolidated.
Plus, you're forgetting that anyone on an H1B visa still has to buy their food in the USA. While in the US, they contribute for good and for bad to the economy.
No offense but born-in-the-US citizens are... not great at the most demanding knowledge work. The ones that are have all been hired. Our education system is trash and normalizes getting Bs/Cs.
I see so many people complaining about H1Bs at tech jobs. At least the H1Bs pass the interviews!
I don’t think that’s an entirely accurate classification (as a former H1B and a naturalized citizen).
The leetcode nature of the whole process doesn’t lend itself to be motivating for people who aren’t really hungry for a job. As a US citizen you can say fuck it, I don’t need to deal with this shit. As an H1B you’re forced to deal with it otherwise you need to leave the country.
I’ve hired plenty of sharp and talented folks who were born here.
So that foreign nationals think it's a smart idea to move to the US and do research for us. So that when they complete their PhD they want to stay permanently and continue doing research that benefits the US. So that despite country humanity gets the smartest people together doing work that might benefit the entire world?
A full scholarship to somebody that decides to move back to their country because of racism and xenophobia still directly benefits the US if that research was done here. The smartest students in the world passing on the US does not help the US. With more policies like this the smartest students in the US might move to other countries so they can work with a larger pool.
How many promising American-born researchers are we missing out on because we give away valuable training and research opportunities to foreigners?
Don’t forget that America’s technological heyday—when Silicon Valley was built in the first place—came during and shortly after the Johnson Reed era of immigration restriction. Companies like Apple, Intel, etc., were founded between 1960-1980 (the decade on each side of when the foreign born population hit the historical low in 1970).
I’m sorry I’m smart enough to separate the two distinct concepts of “what US government policy should be” and “what personally benefits foreigners like me.”
Responses like yours really make me think that the bottom line for many people is doing whatever benefits foreigners.
Apple was founded by the son of an immigrant, Intel's 3rd employee was an immigrant, and have you been to Silicon Valley in the last 30 years? Half of the engineers are foreign-born. That's the reason why Silicon Valley is what it is.
These are not PhD students; they're already credentialed (either postdocs or full-time staff). We pay them to do research that aligns with our strategic goals so that we get the science.
Yeah, let's look at it through the national lense. For every researcher who defects to the US to make their PhD there and most likely stay, taxpayers of the country they came from have paid for the education of hundreds of students. Because they don't come from America where graduating essentially means a life of indentured servancy for all but the dynastically wealthy.
It's called brain drain, and doing the rest of the world the favor of putting on the brakes is something that would be quite far out on the spectrum you'd call "woke" if it was done for the reasons one would arrive at when really thinking it through (which clearly has not happened)
USA does not want to train scientists from other countries, who come home and can use that knowledge against interest of US companies, as a competition, or security. There are vast areas of science that are "double use". Will it help to keep stuff out of range of unwanted foreign actors? Hard to tell. Does it hurt USA soft power, sure. So the net result is to be seen.
Almost all NIST research is published in publicly available reports and journals and proceedings. If there is some research the US wants to keep away from foreigners they don't do it at NIST.
I will answer this question honestly. I used to be friends with a group of PhD students work worked in labs. Every week I heard their complaints. One relayed a story in which a Chinese lab mate / co-worker was refusing to following their boss (PI) directions or request, and shared secret results with another Chinese student in a competing lab.
- Their boss (the PI) had asked the Chinese student to train other labmates on some specific testing methods, they refused.
- The Chinese PhD student would simply ignore the PI emails.
- Then magically their study results end up leaked to another Chinese PhD candidate.
Chinese PhD types can 'buy' their way into labs. They have so much money no one wants to turn them away. Only the government can force it.
Most people have no idea what day-to-day life is actually like in PhD life / labs. It's a lot less "science" and way more "human drama" than you could imagine.
> Scientists from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria are considered “high risk.”
I think this makes sense from a national security perspective (although I doubt there is any scientist coming from these countries who are working on sensitive projects, maybe except China). Since there is too much trouble to figure out who is a spy, might as well ban all of them for the moment.
I do feel a strong nostalgia about the globalization era between the 90s and the 2010s, when I spent most of my life. But I understand it comes to an end, and I'm going to spend my second half of life in a much more splintered world.
This list of high risk countries is not new (with the exception of maybe Venezuela being recently added, I’m not sure). Researchers with these citizenships have faced extra security review before joining NIST for years, and last year the lab increased the level of security review for everyone (not just this list)
I can understand a clearly communicated need for additional security requirements. But NIST operates almost totally in open science mode, with the main exceptions of being industry cooperative agreements. I don’t think this move to shed international researchers by reneging on commitments from the lab has been at all justified from a security standpoint.
So as to not mislead anyone who didn't read the article, the section following your quoted text is:
> Researchers from lower risk countries have been told they could lose access beginning in either September or December if at that point they have been at the lab more than 2 years or, under a waiver, 3 years.
In other words: they're also looking to bar foreign nationals outside of that quoted list, which to my mind is less understandable.
It makes sense to stop poaching talented scientists and instead let them continue working for your adversaries? I don't understand how this improves national security. The proposed rule is actually worse than this:
> The changes are part of proposed rules aimed at increasing security that would limit, to 3 years, the maximum length of time visiting international researchers can work at NIST.
If researchers know that they cannot stay in the US permanently and will be forced to return to their home country in a few years, it guarantees that they must maintain ties to that home country and dramatically increases their incentive to spy. What would you do if your government asked you to spy during a temporary stay abroad, and threatened you with arrest upon your return if you refuse?
It doesn’t make sense from a national security perspective actually.
A better plan would be to encourage skilled immigration and offer compelling benefits and stability like family visas, free movement, and so on. That way, the best people would make their contributions to science and society here. It’s actually a masterstroke because it deprives other countries of their best people.
The current administration is filled with weak men and therefore chose policies that look “strong” but are actually rooted in personal insecurity
Oh my god the national security! Someone make up the hypothetical situations the national security might be compromised without proof of any of it! Let me pull out my wallet and take out my national security detector…yep it’s lower than before! Quick pile on the propaganda!
It's an institute that's about setting international standards. It's not secret, by definition. You can just visit their web page and read their publications.
Just feels like side effects of poorly thought out rules from above.
Not a lot, but what is your point exactly? There are a lot of really Chinese scientists working in the US, and the ones who are postdocs and research scientists at NIST are apparently being pushed out at the end of this month. They’ve already been vetted for security concerns, so that justification is kind of thin.
How many Taiwanese, German, Indian, French, South Korean, etc scientists are working in the US? The ones working at NIST are facing being pushed out at the end of September.
That was indeed the logic then. Keep in mind though that the internment was based on 'race' and 'ethnicity'. This action is based on citizenship and it's a job limitation not a forcible relocation into an open air prison.
It's a massive distinction. I live in Germany and if the government said I couldn't have a job because of my race or ethnicity I think that would be majorly problematic. If they said I couldn't because I'm American I would think that restriction should be reserved for narrow circumstances (secure projects) but it's generally acceptable.
I think the same method might be used again in a future conflict with China, when the question of life and death becomes serious. Not saying that I LIKE it, but I think it is at least plausible, and with a non-insignificant (note the double negation) possibility.
Man, if there were only something more reasonable... something in-between letting them spy at will and concentration camps. Hmmm, maybe we will think of something eventually.
Ok, then let them spy continuously I guess and then carry the know how home. Even countries openly hostile to you.
I mean it is unfair for sure but it's not your given right. If for example Chinese are literally breaking their law when they refuse to spy what else can you do?
> NIST researchers do not carry out classified research. As a result, Gallagher says, “It’s very difficult to see the security benefit this might have.”
Here in Canada when the new CPC took power its leader PM Harper muzzled scientists from speaking about most things but most of all anything about climate change. It also destroyed climate data claiming the ledgers were old fashioned, but they were the only copies.
The CPC political are the old centre-right PC party that combined with more right secessionist and (evangelical) Christian political parties.
Harper is still lurking in the shadows and pulling strings decade after being ousted as Prime Minister.
> It also destroyed climate data claiming the ledgers were old fashioned, but they were the only copies.
I don't know how long ago the library of Alexandria was burned down. But what I do know is that we never learn the lesson. It's rather stupid to store public research data (i.e, excluding classified info) at a single location. There are any number of unpredictable future scenarios that can lead to this same unfortunate outcome.
Scientists and politicians should work together and agree to store and host such research data in multiple countries, including with rival nations. That should make it a lot more resilient against such eventualities. It won't cause any security risk. After all, you were going to publish it anyway. Why waste the information worth a lot of money and effort?
But instead of that, many governments and greedy corporations go after independent groups who do exactly that - scihub and internet archive, for example. We as a species possess the stupidity of stubbornly avoiding the obvious right path.
Comparing a government intervening on data they challenged with one of their own agencies to the 'burning of Alexandria' is beyond delusion. holy cow.
For gosh sake, the internet is public, nothing is being truly erased, published papers will be there for literally all of time. The publishing industry may control some distribution for a very short period of time but it's not relvant in the grand scheme
> Comparing a government intervening on data they challenged with one of their own agencies to the 'burning of Alexandria' is beyond delusion. holy cow.
I'm talking about precious data being destroyed by anti-intellectuals because their predecessors didn't foresee that possibility. There are no delusions here. You're just being unimaginative, hyperbolic and histrionic.
> For gosh sake, the internet is public, nothing is being truly erased, published papers will be there for literally all of time. The publishing industry may control some distribution for a very short period of time but it's not relvant in the grand scheme
Is that what you see happening here? Didn't the Internet Archive race to save the data from the websites of US research institutions before they were deleted by the current regime? They could have done it with ease if they had started as soon as the election results were out. This is not to say that IA is inefficient. It's to point out that while the Internet has a great preservation ability, it's not perfect and hardly always the case. There are a lot of data that aren't sufficiently protected.
Instead of trying to even understand that possibility, you go on a shallow and low-effort dismissal with excess drama. Is that the quality of discussion now?
You're comparing some unpublished data to the Burning of Alexandria, a historical even so prominent that we're talking about it thousands of years later.
The is 'delusional' - or pick a more specifically appropriate term.
You're also claiming information oppression in the most open information system in history.
Anyone of almost 7 billion see that data - and for a few pennies - store it forever.
If nobody of 7 billion earth want to spend a few pennies to save something, then it's obviously not valuable in any way to anyone.
> The is 'delusional' - or pick a more specifically appropriate term.
If drawing parallels from history is being delusional, the entire world is. Comparisons may not match in scale but the intent is the key. And the intent is absolutely clear here. That's why I said that you are 'histrionic' and 'hyperbolic'. You're being dramatic in your over exaggerated outrage at normal things people do.
> If nobody of 7 billion earth want to spend a few pennies to save something, then it's obviously not valuable in any way to anyone.
'Nobody cares' doesn't equate to 'not worth it'. That's false equivalence. Climate data especially. Who knows what's backed up and what's not? That's why I said it has to be collaboratively backed up and hosted. Instead you create this fanciful scenario that doesn't exist, in order to reach incoherent conclusions that you use to perform your over-the-top drama.
Probably the most direct way to kick out the people they're actually worried about without invoking legal process for each one specifically, not least because if they did it on a case by case basis there would likely be an undeniable ethnic/national signal that right now is getting hidden in the noise. In other words, instead of targetting researchers for being Chinese nationals, and then subsequently having to defend ethnic discrimination in court, they're just going to throw the baby out with the bath water.
It’s the trump admin. They don’t care about the decorum you’ve described. They would have no qualms about looking racist. Have you not seen what ICE has been doing? Racism is a badge of honor, and so is flipping off the courts and public opinion. No I believe this is simply paranoia and racism driven by Miller and his cronies.
It's not about "looking racist"; or at least, it's not about public opinion. A racially targeted measure would violate specific laws and would be challenged in court, likely successfully.
This is a naive take. Are there specific instances involving individuals of many nationalities/ethnicities? Yes. Is ICE then ignoring race during its operations? Absolutely not. ICE agents are arresting people based solely on their physical appearance and accents. It is band faced racism.
ICE came into Maine with almost 2000 "targets". They arrested about 200 people. They ended up bragging about 17 "bad guys", and even that list is possibly filled with lies.
Some of the 200 arrested that weren't actually immigrants include a brown man who passed a background check and flew to Texas recently to fulfill immigration requirements to work for our local Law Enforcement. It includes tons of people who are legal residents and had papers on their person to that effect. Those papers are often left behind when the person gets kidnapped, which includes an unmarked van filled with ICE nuts screeching in front of someone's SUV in city traffic, jumping out, breaking the window to the SUV, dragging the man out, and speeding off, leaving a still running SUV sitting in the middle of the street, with papers. A literal kidnapping scene from a movie, but sure, totally normal and upstanding law enforcement activity. Our own cops, not exactly liberals, are finding it hard not to publicly call them stupid assholes. These cops are mostly Trump voters.
Don't stick your head in the sand and cry when people point out how uninformed you are. Their entire operation is almost entirely false positives. They've sent people who live here legally to other countries without authority.
It would be rather nonsensical to completely ignore ethnicity in your operations when the wide majority of illegal immigrants are going to be of that ethnicity. Obviously that would not justify widespread harassment of that group, but nothing like that seems to be happening. Mostly people seem to be trying to stop them from deporting people genuinely in the country illegally, which is divisive - independent of partisanship.
If the DNC has chosen this hill to die on, I don't think they're going to do anywhere as near good as they should do in November given Trump is engaging in some extremely unpopular and foolish behavior that people, again going beyond partisan lines, could easily rally together against.
I completely agree they're a thing, but at what scale? The current administration has deported something like 600,000 illegal immigrants. What do you think their accuracy rate is carrying out those deportations? An accuracy rate of 50% would mean there'd be 600,000 errors. An accuracy rate of 70% would mean we'd expect to see around 250,000 errors. An accuracy rate of 90% would mean we'd expect to see around 67,000 errors.
A quick search [1] on this topic showed 50 people have been wrongfully detained. Even if we increase that figure substantially, it implies an extremely high success rate, which isn't really possible if you're just engaging in widespread fishing expeditions.
Stopped ≠ detained. The government doesn't release stats on who was stopped. Kavanaugh stops are literally about using race as a criterion for the stop. No other probable cause is required.
Biden deported more people then any previous president and did not needed any of that. Fun fact, he even focused on criminals, proving that in fact, it is possible to not be dumb about it.
Meanwhile, what do we have here is complete breakdown of legal process, judicial orders being ignored and agency that repeatedly provably lies about everything. Including about multiple murders. All the accuracies rates you listed are absolutely terrible for anything that wants to pretend rule if law matters.
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The article YOU listed shows: nearly 20 children, including two with cancer. 50 Americans detained for being latino and no other reasons. From 130 Americans detained for protesting, 50 had charges dropped or rejected by court. That is so far. These were simply abusive detentions.
These are horrible statistics. In a democratic rule of law country, a few journalists wont be able such frequent and routine abuse of power.
> kick out the people they're actually worried about without invoking legal process for each one specifically
Why are we assuming either/both good faith and competence here? Is there anything about the policymaking of this administration that lends credence to that hypothesis? Are there pre-existing policy proposals you're imagining that have weighed pros and cons about this? Existing abuses you're imagining that this curtails?
No, let's be real here: this is yet another impulsive idea that some crank sold the president/cabinet on.
> Why are we assuming either/both good faith and competence here
There is obviously a breakdown in either communication or understanding here. I have assumed neither good faith nor competence. On the contrary, the strategy I supposed above would be in bad faith and a symptom of incompetence.
Deporting researchers from every country to make it look like they aren't ethnically targetting people is in bad faith, and resorting to such measures instead of simply identifying and deporting the problematic individuals demonstrates their incompetence.
The problem with China anyway is that during the many decades when China was badly lagging, they already stole every secret they could. But now China has a very serious education system, motivated and intelligent people, lots of universities and researchers and China isn't lagging behind anymore.
So even if the goal was to prevent chinese from spying on US companies, it's too little, decades too late, because China is now at the very top too.
Comes in stages. Used to be ambitious Chinese people wouldn’t go to Chinese universities for grad school (undergrad Chinese university to overseas grad school was a usual route). Now they definitely do. Next there might be foreign grad students in Chinese universities, then foreign undergrad students. Though you would have to learn Chinese I imagine, so that barrier is there.
Virtually nobody who isn't ethnically Chinese will be able to become a naturalized Chinese citizen, no matter how sincerely they dedicate their life to productively fitting into Chinese society. On paper it's legally possible, but in practice it just doesn't happen. There is also the matter of global comprehension of the English language vs Chinese. I think these factors together severely limits the number of foreigners trying to get into Chinese universities.
Honestly the best thing about America, historically has been diversity. Mei can come here and become American within a few years. That’s only possible in America( and probably Canada too).
But now we don’t want international students. The world’s smartest will go elsewhere.
In geopolitics you are forced to make deals with the devil. We armed and supplied the USSR to defeat Germany in WWII. In the 90s we gave an out of work China a wold franchise so we could make a few extra bucks with cheap labor and one billion consumers. Our blu collar workers would put down their dangerous and heavy machinery on the dank shop floor so they could take snazzy white collar jobs that were healthier and paid better because they use their American education to skill up their brains.
People were sold on that and many bought it. And now here we are living in the aftermath of us propping up systems incongruous to our own and living it down. It comes down to jockeying politicians like J Kerry and company who pretend they work for the people but in all honesty only work for themselves (remember Kerry never threw out his own war medals but rather reproductions he bought in the PX). Jane Fonda, her vanity sunk the nuclear energy industry for fifty years.
Nixon was also wrong. The people who pushed this design over the finish line were the likes of GHW and Clinton, to the protest of the likes of Bernie back then.
Are ethnic Chinese from Taiwan still allowed? If so it's probably just about the US' geopolitical rivals not being allowed perceived competitive advantages.
I don't find any materials on ethnic prohibitions. There are a lot of problems with that. Among them, it would either fail to achieve the goal. For example, let's say there was a Turk born and raised in PRC and totally aligned with the CCP: prohibiting Han from working in labs doesn't work.
Stephen Miller is a racist xenophobe. If you aren’t a white “westerner” (or the “help”) he wants you out. And shockingly currently has the power to do so, since we’re run by the incel administration
Disallowing foreign talent and relying on domestic potential the USA will inevitably fall to the scientific level of the rest of the competing nations. The latter are not attracting talent due to various reasons like language barrier or low economic motive. Now the USA has its own reason. The next scientific leader will be the one that poses no barrier.
I am noting two extremes in the comments which miss essential truths.
The first extreme begins with a true premise, but arrives at a false conclusion. The premise: as with manufacturing, the US should be minting more of its own scientists.
This is true. The US should have a more robust manufacturing base of its own. It should be educating more scientists.
However, the conclusion does not follow, namely, that the US should ban collaboration with, invitation, or employment of foreign scientists.
You don't build such things by going cold turkey. You cannot rebuild American manufacturing overnight, and you can't increase the number of home-grown scientists overnight either. This takes time and requires deeper shifts in the culture.
The second extreme is one that denies the premise above, or at least seems to deny its importance.
Collaboration with foreign scientists is good. That is unquestionable. There's also nothing wrong with attracting scientists. The problem is not collaboration or attracting talent, but rather a kind of parasitism that tries to make up for a country's own deficiencies in this manner as a permanent policy.
It’s worth mentioning that even if you find it possible to agree with some aspects of this, it’s impossible to reconcile the way everything is being done and the way its communicated with any kind of well meaning positive intentions.
> Sources at NIST contacted by ScienceInsider say they have yet to see any written versions of the proposed rules, which have been conveyed in meetings. Patrick Gallagher, a former NIST director now at the University of Pittsburgh, says the lack of clear communication and the short notice being given to foreign scientists is creating a sense of chaos. “I’m as disappointed as to how this is unfolding as to what is unfolding,” Gallagher says. “At the very least NIST owes an explanation to the country. If there is a good reason for what they are doing, they should flat out say what it is.”
This is the sort of "high agency", not waiting for permission mentality that works great for a startup thats making tinder for cats, but is really bad for foundational institutions that provide a critical service to not just the nation but humanity in general. I feel like musk and his DOGE initiative infected the government with this move fast and break things bullshit. Or they were at least correlational with it
not only that but they leveraged the 'compliance' mindset that comes with government institutions to do so.
This was first reported at least a week or two ago and only now are they getting aroun dto thinking about making it an actual rule (which takes time and process). The rules that aren't really rules for plausible deniability serve several purposes including normalizing compliance in advance.
I'll set aside opinions of the rule because people can really feel differently about the long and short term balance of security and soft power...but not rule rules is an approach to government I really struggle to see both sides of.
This whole thing feels like a troll. We should assume any new HN account created in the last 18 months is much more likely to be a bot, and now we got OpenClaw to worry about. Nothing stopping our true adversary or troublemakers from giving OpenClaw a plausible new identity and telling it to argue about given world view. Or pass whatever false information it can to try to change public opinion. Can you tell which replies in this thread are real vs propaganda?
Misleading headline. They are moving specifically to restrict high risk countries like China, Syria, North Korea, etc. Not all foreign countries, as the headline threatens.
> Researchers from lower risk countries have been told they could lose access beginning in either September or December if at that point they have been at the lab more than 2 years or, under a waiver, 3 years.
> Sources at NIST contacted by ScienceInsider say they have yet to see any written versions of the proposed rules, which have been conveyed in meetings.
And:
> Many researchers from these countries—particularly China—have been informed that their lab access will be reviewed by 31 March, and terminated if they have been at NIST for more than 3 years or pose “too high a risk”
So, the high-risk limitation is actual, and affected researchers were already notified by NIST. While no low-risk limitations are mentioned by or attributable to NIST. That part appears to be hearsay and speculation confidently jammed into the headline.
I find that to be misleading. Bob should be ashamed of himself. I hope he can do better. It took me a single paragraph to more clearly reword the article, and I'm not a professional writer.
It’s all foreign guest researchers by the end of September, high risk countries by the end of March. Your first quote doesn’t imply the NIST sources for this article don’t have firsthand knowledge that this is coming, it’s just that it appears the lab management is avoiding putting things in writing
> Researchers from lower risk countries have been told they could lose access beginning in either September or December if at that point they have been at the lab more than 2 years or, under a waiver, 3 years.
The word "could" seems to conflict with "It's all foreign guest researchers by end of September."
If you think that's what he meant, then it's clear that Bob has made things incredibly ambiguous since we disagree. Do you think he might have written the article, and especially the headline, in such a way as to make it more clickable?
I don’t know why the author of the article wrote “could”, but I personally work closely with some non-high-risk-country NIST foreign guest researchers. It’s been filtered down verbally through the management chain that the end of this September is the re-review deadline, and it’s not been stated as a hypothetical.
I'm aware of the political landscape in the US right now. But I must ask. What exactly are the policy makers thinking? Do they hold some sort of delusions about the intellectual superiority of their race? Or do they believe that they don't need scientific talent, research and knowledge to be a great nation and civilization? Or do they believe that these deficiencies can be resolved with money alone?
I'm puzzled by autocrats beyond a certain limit. Their actions don't really seem to fit any logic, if their intention is to be become unchallengeable and unassailable. This seems like ceding the advantage to any future rivals.
Every day the US looks a little more more 1933 Nazi Germany when all the xenophobic polices started. What even is a foreigner in a country where virtually everyone is descended from foreigners and immigrants?
Some years ago I came to the conclusion that the US would ultimately consider it a security risk to employ mainland Chinese born people (or even just people who had family in mainland China still) in any classified or sensitive industry.
I think I've now reached the point where it doesn't matter. Capitalism itself has made maintaining any kind of technological or scientific edge impossible. You don't need to break into some lab or plant sleeper agents or even coerce someone who has family back in the home country. No, it's far simpler than that.
When the US developed the atomic bomb some in American policy and military circles thought the Soviets would never get the bomb or it would take 20 years. It took 4. The Soviet hydrogen bomb was detonated th eyear after the US detonated ours.
In that case, the Soviets did run a sophisticated operations but also a bunch of people just gave them stuff for ideological reasons.
Let's compare that to EUV. The US restricted both the export of EUV lithography machines from ASML to China as well as the most advanced chips. The second was a mistake (IMHO) because it created a captive market for Chinese alternatives and it became clear to China that it was in their national security interest not to be dependent upon the US for chipmaking or chipsd.
Now China doesn't need to do anything sophisticated. It just needs to throw a bunch of money at some key reserarchers and engineers from ASML and elsewhere and say "hey, come work for us". What are you going to do?
Also, the US likes to paint this picture that China engaged in industrial espionage. And maybe they did. But they did so with the full knowledge and cooperation of US businesses who outsourced to China knowing this was going to happen but hey, it increased short-term profits, so who cares?
At the same time as the US cuts science funding so Jeff Bezos can be slightly wealthier, Chinese universities are surging in global rankings for research [1].
There's no getting this genie back in the bottle. It's too late.
>Also, the US likes to paint this picture that China engaged in industrial espionage. And maybe they did. But they did so with the full knowledge and cooperation of US businesses who outsourced to China knowing this was going to happen but hey, it increased short-term profits, so who cares?
At the same time as the US cuts science funding so Jeff Bezos can be slightly wealthier, Chinese universities are surging in global rankings for research [1].
This is the crux of the issue.
We've allowed extremely short term capitalistic interests of the wealthiest of the wealthiest to dictate our national policy in a great many areas, including taxation, academics, immigration, etc.
I liken the situation to a game of chess - on one hand, you have a team of Grandmasters and a supercomputer taking the time to evaluate each move and understand the positives and negatives of any possible move. On the other hand, you have a pigeon, who is there because someone who has already been the beneficiary of tremendous luck has convinced their side that putting a pigeon on the board is good for everyone involved.
America loves Nazis they’ve been obsessing over them for decades to the point they’ve been romanticized. And if there’s one thing Americans love more than not-thinking it’s romanticism and propaganda.
Americans loved Nazis in the 30s too, they never wanted to invade Germany and plenty held up Hitler as just the best guy who could ever be and saving Germany.
Tons of American leaders and industrialists and what we would now call "Thought leaders" openly and proudly talked about how awesome Hitler was and how great the Nazis were for dealing with the jewish problem. This wasn't because nobody knew Hitler was a hateful and Bad guy, they were proudly declaring how important Mein Kampf was to them and how well it described the "problem"
Henry Ford bought a local newspaper so he could print the fabricated propaganda "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" to an American audience. This is not a fucking joke, this is accepted history!
A decade later, Smedly Butler made credible accusations that several top Bankers had worked with the literal fucking Nazi party of Germany to overthrow FDR and install a Fascist government under Butler, because FDR was a communist or some bullshit. It was screamed and cried as a "Hoax" in the news at the time, but most historians agree that there was a conspiracy to do that, but it did not get close to execution.
These people only shut up when Germany finally declared open war against the US and started killing Americans and really only when the death camps became public knowledge and really turned some of america sour on the whole "The jews are the problem" thing.
But they never stopped hating. They continued their hate quietly, raising hateful kids and families, pushing local institutions to support hateful educations like "Slavery wasn't even that bad and the North was the aggressor in the Civil War" because they really are fine lying to your face. They fly the Confederate flag "for heritage" while they descend from french canadians in a northern state. They obsess over affirmative action "Taking up seats in top universities" as they actively avoid getting educated because education is a "Liberal propaganda" thing and meant to "brainwash" their hateful kids into being less stupid.
They build an entire alternative media ecosystem, going all the way back to Henry Ford's bullshit, and literally never ending, where THEY are always the victim, always suffering from oppression, always having a "War on christmas" or other horseshit for when their blatantly unconstitutional desires are shut down, or a business stops prostrating itself for them. They teach their kids that scientists are all part of a socialist satanic conspiracy to lie to them about everything from evolution to plate tectonics to (of course) global warming, and when that turns away supporters, they cover it up with a claim that science is all a fraud because the scientists want a "paycheck", as if there is any money in government funded science, because uneducated America is apparently so hard up and failing that a middling salary in a high pressure environment is considered worth selling your entire world for.
No, Nazis kicked out German citizens who they deemed to be Jewish
There are enough "enemies of the people" in the US at the moment that the MAGA leadership doesn't have to go after American citizens.
There's been rhetoric about how some Americans are not "real americans" but America seems a way off 1934 yet, and they're going about it in a different order. History never repeats, but it usually rhymes
>There are enough "enemies of the people" in the US at the moment that the MAGA leadership doesn't have to go after American citizens.
Tell that to any trans person that is an American citizen. They are literally trying to make "trans" into a terrorist designation.
Tell that to the many Latino American citizens who have been arrested by masked armed ICE agents, thrown into unmarked cars and taken away simply because of the color of their skin.
Official US policy is that Americans have nothing to fear. There are no explicit laws preventing American Citizens with brown skin from working in a school for example.
The US hasn't reached the level of "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" or "Denaturalization Law" yet, although you can easily see it's on the cards. The Brownshirts were around over a decade before then
People are downvoting me because I said we need to prioritize American citizens over foreigners, which shouldn't be a controversial stance, but the problem is there's this white guilt that pervades American society and people jump to thinking you're a racist at the first chance they get (see the other reply on my comment for example).
China, India, etc. aren't stupid and they take full advantage of this and push the racist angle every chance they get.
I'll say it again though: people need to wake up. These countries know they don't stand a chance at defeating us militarily so they're going to try a psychological approach, in addition to underhanded sabotage.
I have another comment in this thread saying "great news" and it was flagged. That's how brainwashed Americans are at this point.
If it was done by any other administration you can assume it went through a few layers of professional bureaucrats that considered multiple alternatives. But based on persistent observed behavior of the current president you just have to assume the worst possible intent.
I am not the defend the worst president in the history of the presidents of all mankind but I work in scientific community and this particular news is not “new” - spans both parties.
EO 14117 resulted in 6+ months of work for my team
Nothing that NIST produces can be trusted. In modern times, NIST is effectively an arm of the NSA. The job of NIST is to add vulnerabilities to everything for NSA to exploit. It's no wonder that they don't want foreign workers. Industry would be better off completely ignoring them.
I think there are of course valid security concerns and this could be logical solution free of way more problematic issues of dealing on case by case basis.
On the other hand this will play more to people choosing some other country to advance their science aspiration and slowly but surely erode pool of talent for the US to help it stay dominant.
Practically the US have used people like Wernher von Braun on good scale and very sensitive areas and it worked just fine for the country. Qian Xuesen might of course have couple of words on the subject of course
It makes no sense. Foreign scientists usually can't work on classified projects because they require clearance that is very difficult if not impossible for non citizens to obtain. Restricting foreign scientists from US labs is in my opinion a stupid move. What am I missing?
"What am I missing?"
That nationalism is the new state doctrin? Foreigners are inferior by definition, so they cannot really help with research anyway, all they want to do is steal secrets. If you think like that, then it makes sense.
God, maybe I could buy if it it came with significant work to repair US education and investment in a domestic science workforce, but unfortunately in the US, these nationalist waves have to also come with a strong air of anti-intellectualism.
Also, obedience to "right think". Which is why the need to force social media billionaires to tell the feds who is "a political enemy."
It's wild how the President literally said, "I love the poorly educated." It turns out that when you treat a PhD like a deep-state conspiracy and a high school diploma like a Nobel Prize, you just get a country that tries to fix its power grid with thoughts, prayers, and a sharpie.
Unfortunately you run into the same problem as Mao's China did after the Cultural Revolution.
Idiocracy was a documentary sent to us from the future.
In Idiocracy the president hires the smartest guy and is still trying to fix his country rather then intentionally destroy it.
We haven't reached the Gatorade event horizon, yet.
Where does the FIFA peace prize come in here?
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Isn't this the type of attitude that is giving cover to the types of actions the OP mentions, i.e. throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
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> we are importing foreigners to paper over the fact that we have ruined our own education system.
Are you familiar with any of these scientists we "imported" during the 1930s? Was that also a sign of a failed education system?
- Albert Einstein - Enrico Fermi - Leo Szilard - Hans Bethe - Edward Teller - John von Neumann - Eugene Wigner - Felix Bloch
Yeah, that's the thing, we've always imported scientists. So I'm unsure why HN User terminalshort is trying to connect this tendency to bad education?
From literally the very beginning of the US we have engaged in this practice. I think Priestley himself came here somewhere around 1793?
You literally wrote: "Some anti-intellectualism might be a good thing".
It doesn't get any more anti-intellectual than that, you put it down yourself in blackletter.
It’s not the intellectuals who are pushing standards down. High standards inherently reject people, that’s inherent to the concept. The push for ever higher percentage of the population to get degrees means the average student keeps getting worse, as fewer of them are really seeking to be educated vs get a piece of paper. Public schools are pushed to raise graduation rates due to political pressure and higher education is ultimately a business and then responds to those forces.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Educatio...
You are 100% correct, but it is absolutely a bunch of useless intellectuals and their endless yapping who have pushed this crap on us. You are confusing intellectuals with smart people.
HR can very quickly sort people by levels of education. Most companies don’t give a fuck what someone learned in their history degree, but know on average they’re more reliable than someone that dropped out of college. Some college still puts people in a better bucket than high school graduates, which is a better bucket than high school dropouts.
Which is why the general population is trying to get that piece of paper. The day HR stops caring is the day this changes.
It sounds like you have your own definition of "intellectuals", which appears to mean pretty much the opposite of what it usually means.
I know exactly what "intellectual" means. It's someone who has spent years obtaining credentials in an economically useless subject and looks down their nose at people who would lower themselves to actually do practical work. A brilliant mechanic who can fix anything and has made millions running his business would never be called an intellectual, but someone serving coffee with a phd in English literature would.
It really doesn't sound like you know exactly what it means.
Credentials are largely unrelated to being an intellectual. Academics may be the word you’re thinking of.
A mechanic who’s been publishing poetry would easily qualify. Further labs also need people who maintain equipment, it’s a viable and hands on carrier path to maintain electron microscopes and such all day.
That's a completely non-sensical take.
Crazy times. Getting strong vibes of the purge of "Jewish Science" in Germany in the 1930s from this. Until that point Germany was a world leader in the field and then they handed it to the US and never recovered the same status. Looks like the US is desperate to hand over the baton now.
To paraphrase the past, it’s “Amerikaner Physik”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
"Foreigners are inferior by definition" - but USA approach says exactly the opposite. Foreigners are capable, so it is better not to share secrets and technology with them.
Ah, Schrödingers Immigrant. Stealing all the jobs while leeching off the hard working nationals.
I assume the reasoning is if they're so capable, why would they need to steal secrets and technology?
I use "reasoning" in the broadest possible sense.
Exactly, why were these guys wandering around on nights and weekends?
Because they likely have no family there and on nights and weekends there is less trouble and noise, so better conditions to get into an uninterrupted flow state to get things done?
Is that really something in need of explaining on a hacker site?
(Or were you ironic? I cannot tell anymore)
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The US approach is fascistic. Fascism demands that enemies of the state be simultaneously incompetent dolts who could never compete with Real Americans who would be a drain on our resources, and hypercompetent idealogues who would steal our precious resources and send them back to a group that wants to harm us.
There's a one-word shortcut for all that: fascism.
Got to love the fact that a large amount of users of HN still refuse to see the truth before their very eyes.
The issue is that when people start abusing words like "fascism" out of context they make those words lose meaning.
The US is definitely undergoing authoritarian tendencies, but it remains structurally constrained by separation of powers, federalism, and independent courts and media, features that fascist regimes systematically dismantle.
If you start calling everything fascism you are essentially helping those you call fascists because they can easily refute your thesis and gaslight you on the very realities of the authoritarian descent the country is going through.
Thank heavens for that separation of powers, otherwise the President would be declaring wars and levying tariffs willy-nilly, without even bothering to check with Congress first.
Presidents have been doing the undeclared war thing since the end of WWII. Nothing new there, the tariffs and other EOs have maybe increased markedly in the last few presidencies.
George W Bush sought and received authorization for Iraq from Congress.
It's not just the war, obviously. This time the President has immunity levels that are unprecedented. And his cronies in Congress and SCOTUS don't seem inclined to rein him in on much.
Americans have forgotten that pieces of paper need to be backed up with threats of violence.
I honestly don't understand US politicians. In my country politicians have egos the size of mountains- they would never let themselves be sidelined.
What do you call it when the authoritarians start, then? Are we not allowed to call it that until we’re not allowed to go to the courts or to speak about what’s happening?
You call it for what it is: an executive with authoritarian tendencies.
Democracy is not an on/off light bulb, it's a material under constant stress that can bend a lot before breaking.
But if you start calling it broken, while it's bending your thesis is easily refutable and you get called out for being a radical whatever.
> You call it for what it is: an executive with authoritarian tendencies.
Okay, but that's beating around the bush and a very milquetoast way to describe it.
> easily refutable and you get called out for being a radical whatever.
This is equivalent to being punched repeatedly by a bully and being scared that he'll cry "assault!" when you punch him back. At some point, you cease to exist if you don't act.
What's missing from the general definitions of fascism?
Authoritarianism? Dictatorship? Fascism is a specific form of those that doesn't necessarily map to current forms.
How does it not map? Read Umberto Eco and I don’t really see any point that is not present at all in trumpism. Or, in more words: https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-... .
Fascism is just a nationalism authoritarianism that is very hierarchical and believe in an "interior enemy" (for MAGA it's the deep state) that is the root cause of all their country isseus, and once it's purged the country can take its rightfull place at the top, and you with it.
I agree that US is not fascist yet, the hierarchy isn't set, and the economy isn't close to an extractive autarky, but philosophically, it's close, don't you think? I mean, ranting against traitors all the time is to me a very, very big point in favor of this being fascism.
> believe in an "interior enemy" (for MAGA it's the deep state)
It's their neighbors, not the "deep state". Renee Good and Alex Pretti were the enemy within. People in inflatable costumes or pussy hats are the enemy within. Uppity kids in high school who get thrown to the drown and put in a choke hold. People filming ice on public streets. They are the enemy within to MAGA. It isn't distant and abstract. It's personal.
> ranting against traitors all the time
And the "enemy of the people", rhetoric, and the vermin that corrupts the nation’s blood. I mean, these people are not exactly subtle.
Checks and balances have almost completely collapsed, we've got masked, lawless paramilitary forces executing citizens in the streets, kicking in doors without warrants, spending billions of dollars building concentration camps, ignoring habeas corpus, accelerating media capture by friendly oligarchs, the national security apparatus labeling anyone who criticizes this stuff as domestic terrorists, and you're here quibbling over semantics.
The US is not significantly constrained - the current SCOTUS is more like an agreived clerical council than serious arbiter of the Constitution, while Trump has clearly been hoping to do away with meaningful elections (and the failures are more so because of how oddly ineffective/silly his faction can be than real systemic resilience). Similarly, he has majorities in Congress, which are just enough to let him do whatever he wants. I will grant that these MAGATs haven't fully succeeded, but it's more like they're 2/3ds of the way there and oddly bad at parts of the game than separation of powers, the courts, etc., working.
On a different level I've been unsure whether it'sgood to call it facsism. But it's effectively at least a stepchild.
> it remains structurally constrained by separation of powers, federalism, and independent courts and media, features that fascist regimes systematically dismantle.
But the Trump administration (a.k.a. the executive branch) is trying to systematically dismantle these things. When people refer to fascism in the U.S. government, they don’t mean the entire government. They mean the Trump administration, which is the face of the U.S. government, has a great deal of the share of power, and is seeking more. The brand of far right nationalism, that the nation is in decline and violence must be used to restore it, along with the economic policies and deference to corporations and the wealthy, are things that make them more fascist than just authoritarian.
Saying that we cannot call it fascism until the transformation is complete doesn’t make sense - if a group of people have beliefs and goals that align with fascism, and are taking steps to impose them, you can call them fascist, even if they have not yet realized the full set of conditions that make the government fully fascist.
> If you start calling everything fascism
Ok, but who is calling everything fascism? He's talking about one particular country at a particular time.
> The issue is that when people start abusing words like "fascism" out of context they make those words lose meaning.
So, rhetorical question: was Hitler a fascist during the failed Munich coup? Or did he suddenly became one when he was appointed chancellor? Are we not allowed to see what’s in front of our eyes until they build gas chambers?
Are you using fascism as an ideology or a governing structure?
Then better stop them before it comes to that stage.
How?
I'm European, and from my point of view:
- despite the current executive and its lackeys clearly stating they were going to do exactly what's happening (the dismantling of institutions, the violent, word-wise, targeting of any criticism, the tariffs, etc).
- despite the open attack to US democracy on January 6th 2021
Americans voted for all of this to happen.
What's happening isn't exposing a fault in a particular individual, that's way too convenient.
Not only they voted all of this, but keep believing this paranormal constitutional nonsense where winner-takes-all elections where you rule under no oversight, you have no opposition, and don't even depend on your own party support is actually a sane democratic system.
Of all the countries that slid in authoritarianism during the last 4 decades (from the Philippines to Russia, from Nicaragua to Belarus, etc) not one was a parliamentary republic.
All of them, literally all, where presidential republics.
Serbia used to be parliamentary republic. Nominally it stil is. In fact it is currently governed by SNS, former political party turned criminal organization.
> Not only they voted all of this, but keep believing this paranormal constitutional nonsense where winner-takes-all elections where you rule under no oversight, you have no opposition, and don't even depend on your own party support is actually a sane democratic system.
Honestly I’ve been filled schadenfreude with as the American civic religion collapse. Even the right is giving it up as they view it as too obstructionist.
The silver lining in all this is that the American people might come out a bit less retarded. It’s been fascinating to see the explosion of political thought amongst Americans in the last few years.
> The silver lining in all this is that the American people might come out a bit less retarded
I don't buy it, after January 6th and Trump getting re-elected, despite everything it will have to get much much worse before there's a conscious change.
difficult to have a change when you control just about all of the media. every decision now has a “reasonable” explanation and we past the point where people will en masse admit they fucked up. I have numerous friends who voted to the right in 2024 and it is fascinating to hear narrative after narrative and “excuses” why this is all good for us. nevermind that we had discussion in 2024 before election where just about every single reason they debated for voting to right has been shown that it was all BS… I am past the point where I believe there will be a change (it is not helping that alternative to this madness ain’t that great either)
The right have always had racetardism in them, they are just more blatant about it now.
It’s less about any of that. It’s more that I’m glad I won’t have to hear them deify the constitution anymore because they don’t care for it much anymore.
I don't believe that will happen. The Constitution will continue to be paraded as a tool to attack perceived enemies and protect allies. We already see it all over the place when MAGA talks about the 1st and 2nd Amendments.
The hypocrisy doesn't matter to them because it isn't (and never was) about the "ideals" of the Constitution, it is about punishing enemies.
For the political movement in control, the law and the constitution exists as a tool to protect the in group, and to restrict the outgroup.
That's why they get so upset at the elected veterans that did a simple video saying "the law says you must disobey unlawful orders," the reason that such a statement is viewed literally as "treasonous" and worthy of "hanging" according to Trump.
Using the law to restrict those in power goes against their fundamental understanding of law. There is no hypocrisy, just a completely different view of what is criminal: namely the other guys are all criminals.
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You've been breaking the site guidelines quite badly in your recent posts. Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop this?
Since "by whatever means necessary" is usually a phrase by which people advocate violence, that's particularly not ok here.
Sorry, I deliberately left it open as while violence is a valid solution in extreme cases, but I meant it more as using all the faculties available to us. In any case, I will try avoiding statements that could be seen as violating site rules.
>Americans voted for all of this to happen.
We did. And if anyone would stop to actually analyze it, instead of just insinuating that we're all yucky poopooheads for doing so (in the futile attempt to shame us into stopping), they might come to understand why. Whatever the alternative is to how we're voting, as exemplified by Europe, we don't want it. Maybe there are more options besides those two, but no one's offered those or even described what they could be. Europe certainly hasn't.
>not one was a parliamentary republic.
And thank god that we're not one then. We'd truly be hopeless.
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Fascist mythos is simple: you're in the greatest nation, and the greatest "type" of human (genetics for the nazis, cultural for the Italian fascists, christian for some South american fascists early 20th century, your choice, but but beware one type of superiority easily bleed into others), but yet, inferior humans (neighbors) seems to have better lives. It's because of internal traitors(jews and communists mostly, "judeoblochevism" as a word exist for a reason, and it isn't because it was a material reality) that are bringing their own country down. We must purge them to finally take our rightfull place.
Fascism cannot exist without internal enemies, nationalist authoritarianism can. If your president/dictator is whining about internal enemies that infiltrated the government and capitalist society to bring it down, congratulation, it's not simple nationalist authoritarian tendencies, it's fascist tendencies.
Basically: if you add an "interior enemy" narrative to a right-wing authoritarism, you have fascism.
> You call it for what it is: an executive with authoritarian tendencies.
I think you misunderstand fascism. Fascism is not gassing certain minority group of people in concentration camps, that's called crimes against humanity. It might be an endgame to fascism if you are government that is allowed to commit those crimes without consequences, but the road to it is still fascism regardless whether you historically know how it ends. Calling press "the enemy of the people" as Trump did (also known as "Lügenpresse") IS a form of fascism. You don't need to push Democrats and immigrants into gas chambers to be full blown fascist. Overwhelming amount of actions taken by this democratic government ARE what most historians call fascism.
> I think you misunderstand fascism.
I think you're projecting.
Fascism, in political science, has some clear requirements: a government that controls all branches of power, lack of elections and effective ban of free speech and other political parties.
It also requires ideological aspects such as nationalism and far right politics, otherwise fascism would apply to far left dictatorships which didn't have these traits.
And how do you call someone who advocates for the advent of such a government? A fascist. Which Trump and the MAGA right clearly are.
I suggest to learn what projecting means.
You really going to say that Trump and his Administration does not control all branches of power?
During Third Reich neither press was banned nor elections. Look it up, Google is still free to research. Unless of course you want to endup at conclusion that Nazism and Third Reich wasn't fascism.
> You really going to say that Trump and his Administration does not control all branches of power?
That must be why the Supreme Court struck down the primary piece of Trump's economic agenda.
And what did it change? NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Tariffs are still here - this morning I accepted DHL package and had to pay it - and even if - Trump/Vence already said its actually good because we will use another vehicle which will allow us to continue collect the money. So it won't be called tariff - it will be called embargo fee. So yes, Trump continues to control all branches, one way or another.
It’s ridiculous, but it’s OK. Because we have other ways, numerous other ways,” the president said. “The numbers can be far greater than the hundreds of billions we’ve already taken in.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/business/supreme-court-tr...
The nature of tariffs has fundamentally changed. Imports from all countries are subject to the same 15% rate which means no more deals or wielding tariffs as a punishment.
> when people start abusing words like "fascism" out of context they make those words lose meaning
The thing is, fascism has always been a bit of a loose term. It doesn't have a strict meaning. It was invented by one guy to name his government, not describe it analytically.
Mussolini invented the word "fascismo" to describe his movement, Fasci Italiani di Combattimeto.
So any use of "fascism" outside this one instance is by loose comparison to his government (because tight comparison would inevitably be unproductive: no government is exact the same as another).
The best we can do in a literalist manner is identify that the etymology is related to fasces, a bundle of rods tied together in Roman times (tying rods together make them far more difficult to snap in half), and recognize that the implication here is that a fascist government is focused on strength through unity.
It was then broadly adopted by Mussolini's adherents.
So, unless we only want to restrict "fascist" to an identifier for Mussolini's party and government, we have motivation to come up with elements of similar politics/government/partisanship by looking at the elements that made up Mussolini's movement:
- nationalism
- right-wing
- totalitarian
- violence as a means of control
etc.
Personally, I like Umberto Eco's delineation of what makes fascism (because he was an intellectual and grew up in Mussolini's Italy): https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...
He elucidates fourteen elements that make up fascism:
1. cult of tradition
2. rejection of modernism
3. cult of action for its own sake (i.e., intellectual reflection doesn't contribute value)
4. disagreement is treason
5. fear of difference
6. appeal to frustrated middle class
7. obsession with a plot (e.g., "there is a plot by foreigners to destroy us from within)
8. cast their enemies as both too weak and too strong
9. life is permanent warfare (i.e., there is always an enemy to fight)
10. contempt for the weak
11. everyone is educated to become a hero
12. machismo
13. selective populism
14. newspeak
I honestly feel like #11 is the only one we don't definitely have in the US right now. I wold prefer not to waste my time giving examples of the other thirteen, but if someone doesn't think it's obvious, I will respond at some point.
At its essence, if you take these fourteen points holistically, the vibe is "the 'right kind of' citizenry is in a constant state of hatred toward some other, and they should be pressured to take action without thought"
The trouble with this definition is that a large number of points fit the progressive left, too. Based on my experience (especially on pre-Musk Twitter, but in other places as well), 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, and 14 apply fairly well.
I think this framework really just describes "tribalism", and not specifically "fascism".
I think the difference is that in fascism these literal things are actually happening, whereas the worst you can say about “the left” is that you can make a bad-faith comparison and say that things are somehow metaphorically similar.
But you can really say that “disagreement is treason” means the same thing in fascism and in “the left”? Are you saying, for e.g., that unions and universities execute dissenters as a matter of course? “Fear of difference” under fascism means that differences you can’t control put your life at permanent risk. In the context of tribalism, it means being embarrassed.
So there’s really no comparison between a conservative feeling left out under liberalism to a minority feeling at risk under fascism.
> I think the difference is that in fascism these literal things are actually happening, whereas the worst you can say about “the left” is that you can make a bad-faith comparison and say that things are somehow metaphorically similar.
See, this is where I disagree. You can argue that many of these things are "actually happening", but doing so often requires stretching the definitions of these things, or conflating speech with action.
Take your example: I see all sorts of instances where folks on the right have accused others of treason, but there's a significant lack of actual charges. You're conflating rhetoric with action. Rhetoric is dangerous, yes, but the rhetoric we see from the right is just the next escalation in a constant game of escalating rhetoric from both sides.
I mean, calling Republicans "fascists" and "nazis" isn't exactly nonviolent rhetoric, either, especially the latter. There are actual fascists and Nazis among Republicans, for sure, but they don't represent anything close to a majority. There are fascists among Democrats, too!
The rest of your comment is just another great example of inflammatory rhetoric that isn't really representative of a reality that exists outside your own head, unfortunately.
>Based on my experience (especially on pre-Musk Twitter, but in other places as well), 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, and 14 apply fairly well.
I'd like to hear your rationale for that. In the meantime, I'll add my comments on those points. But first, let me set a ground rule for myself: this review covers the political left in the United States. A circle of thinkers with no sway over the government isn't considered for whether the left matches the qualities of a fascist government. If that circle does have sway, then sure.
>1. cult of tradition
I cannot think of a tradition the left holds in nearly religious sanctity. This might be a "fish can't see the water" thing, so I'd be happy to learn one.
>3. cult of action for its own sake (i.e., intellectual reflection doesn't contribute value)
You didn't list this one, but I will. The left is prone to subgroups fracturing off and calling for extreme reactions (e.g. "defund the police"), and then not strongly quashing these dumb ideas. I think it's a bias to being inclusive and not wanting to deny anything that comes from an oppressed person. Noble intent, but doesn't always lead down the best path.
>4. disagreement is treason
I think you're conflating "cancel culture" with accusations of treason. Trump has literally accused people disagreeing with him of treason ("Air strikes on drug smugglers is illegal, and you should refuse to do so"). Has a modern Democratic official accused somebody of being treasonous for disagreeing on a political matter?
>5. fear of difference
If anything, the left defaults to celebrating difference. And no, "fear of MAGA" is not enough to qualify as fear of difference.
>6. appeal to frustrated middle class
Yes. Everyone does that these days, but yes. It almost seems like a pointless quality to isolate, because any political party would appeal to middle class frustrations. Maybe the better way is to offer hope. In that case, both parties could do a lot better.
>7. obsession with a plot (e.g., "there is a plot by foreigners to destroy us from within)
The left is sliding down this path with fears about the midterm elections. To be fair, after the 2020 election, Trump did spread lies, prepared slates of fake electors, got Republican representatives to vote against counting voters from certain states, and instigated what ended up being a violent assault on the electoral certification. So it's not as crazy as "Democrats are busing in illegals to vote."
>8. cast their enemies as both too weak and too strong
Democratic officials have called this administration dumb, selfish, and cruel. But not weak.
>9. life is permanent warfare (i.e., there is always an enemy to fight)
After the assassination of Osama bin Laden, who was the enemy during the Obama years? That administration even had the laughable "reset" with Russia.
>11. everyone is educated to become a hero
I can't think of much evidence for or against this. Maybe it's just an American thing to lavish praise on "common people* doing amazing things. Neither party truly praises a humble life, despite mentioning it to cloak bad economic policy in "salt of the earth" rags.
>13. selective populism
I'll have to read the original work to see what this term means.
>14. newspeak
I genuinely would like to know some leftist newspeak. Again, fish and water.
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Thanks for your response!
This is an overfit model that contains many basic parts of human behavior and then tags them part of fascism just because the fascists did it.
As an example of the likely future of science in the USA, read about Trofim Lysenko.
That word makes a lot of people uncomfortable and many will shut their brains off when they see it. It's a perfect word to describe what's happening, but sometimes describing the characteristics of it is better for engagement.
There are a lot of reactionaries in today's political landscape.
> It's a perfect word to describe what's happening
I don't think it really fits, but the US is sliding towards illiberal democracy.
Fascism isn't really a form of government though, it's a political ideology and aesthetics that we see echoed through different regimes. You can be a democracy on paper while in practice being a single party corporate oligarchy with a cult of personality surrounding the head of state.
Ur-Fascism describes the ideology of MAGA exactly. Clearly there's some apprehension admitting this, it's a strong-man political ideology that has evolved many times organically throughout history. It doesn't necessarily imply that the regime is bad or evil or anything but the problem ends up being that the term exists because governments that adopt this ideology end up converging on the same unsavory behaviors despite any initial differences. That convergence is I think what a lot of Americans are afraid of because we're already doing most of them.
Ultra nationalist, cult of personality, using violence to suppress opposition... you don't see any parallels, really?
EDIT: Illiberalism is a tenet of fascism as well.
You forgot to couple with that the oligarchy. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
So yes, the US has enough of the hallmarks to be considered a fascist state. It doesn't need to tick every single box for that title.
Edit from Wikipedia: Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement that rose to prominence in early-20th-century Europe.[1][2][3] Fascism is characterized by support for a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.[3][4] Opposed to communism, democracy, liberalism, pluralism, and socialism,[5][6] fascism is at the far-right of the traditional left–right spectrum.[1][6][7] What constitutes a precise definition of fascism has been a longrunning and complex debate among scholars.
Ok, but what are the hallmarks of a fascist state?
Look up "On Fascism" by Umberto Eco, it's not that long and was written long enough ago that you can't say it was influenced by any of our current leaders.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Umberto Eco is a great writer, but whenever his list of ways to describe Blackshirts comes up, it fails.
First, it's very fuzzy. You don't have to have all aspects, but many aspects are present in many systems without it being outright fascist.
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Is 5 out of 14 enough to make something fascist? Are "Appeal to a frustrated middle class", "Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as 'at the same time too strong and too weak'", "Newspeak" and "Obsession with a plot" enough?
I think it confuses rhetorical devices like "Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as 'at the same time too strong and too weak'" and "Newspeak" as hallmarks of Fascism when they are just a tool.
George Orwell famously pointed that calling things "fascist" and "Nazi" is in itself an example of Newspeak, because it's not used to describe a government system that is far-right, authoritarian, and extremely xenophobic, but it's used as a label to say something is Bad™.
It also confuses its populist roots and enemies at the time. "The cult of action for action's sake," and especially anti-intellectualism.
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Like take Starship Troopers, an extremely fascistic society. Let's score it on Eco's scale. It definitely has "Rejection of Modernism", "Disagreement is treason", "Cult of action", "Fear of Difference", "Life is Warfare", "Everybody is a hero", and "Newspeak". So 7/14.
- Cult of tradition doesn't exist that much per se. Granted, I could have missed it.
- Appeal to the frustrated middle class; as far as we see, there isn't one .
- Obsession with plot isn't really a thing, because the Bugs aren't really a plot; they are a clear and present danger. The internal enemies if any aren't mentioned.
- Casting enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak." Bugs are shown more or less realistically, they are a difficult enemy that can be defeated.
- "Selective populism". It's not so much selective populism as state enforced labor to gain citizenship.
- "Contempt for the weak" there isn't much out-group to belong to. The Terran Federation covers the globe, and almost everyone is a citizen. There isn't any contempt for underlings, even if there are military cross branch out-groups. Like real world counterparts jarheads, squids and wingnut.
- If Machismo exists, it's mutated to cover both sexes.
Granted, I might have missed a few, but still, shouldn't Eco's 14 traits light up more for a more fascistic society?
Sure, I see ultranationalism. And if I squint, I can see that a huge chunk of the US population is pro-Trump, but that's not culty overall.
You can still speak against him, as far as I can tell. Compare this to, say, Mao Zedong. If you spoke against him, your life was forfeit, and even that's not fascism.
If this is one of those fuzzy definitions, it definitely isn't on the strong side. Where is the rampant militarism, the worship of death, and of the military?
Where is the rampant militarism
ICE budget increases.
NG deployed domestically several times.
Renaming DoD to DoW.
Invasion of ~2 sovereign nations
There's been quite a lot of worship of the military in america... Also haven't armed forces been deployed domestically a few times in the current presidency?
Sure, but Trump was not campaigning on that; if anything he campaigned on being the most peaceful president. Hitler didn't campaign on honoring treaty of Versallies, and avoiding war with neighbors.
And yet, off the top of my head, he has started as many wars as Hitler has
> rampant militarism, the worship of death, and of the military?
See: the recent events in Minneapolis and the massive increase in funding for ICE. You don't have to look very hard to see what the new brownshirts are doing in blue cities and the MAGAs covering for them.
Oh also the federalization of the National Guard and US Marine deployment to Los Angeles. Things move quickly and people forget but that's exactly their playbook: flooding the zone with so much shit that it's hard to keep track.
the worship of death? try all the videos of 'lethal kinetic strikes' on speedboats
> Where is the rampant militarism
ICE
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There are generous ways to interpret a critique of "redditification".
1. An increase in comments that aim to gather social approval as opposed to advancing a conversation or sharing knowledge -- often including meta commentary on threads e.g., "reddit moment".
2. Topics start to become more general and lose the tech/startup scene focus of the site.
These are legitimate. Reddit threads are stereotypically full of noise and HN should avoid that.
However there's a third form of the critique that I think should be avoided.
3. Too many comments seem to reflect values and worldviews rooted in [socially] liberal ideals.
Because of this, it's probably useful to give some context for what in particular constitutes "redditifcation". That way dang and any other mods can try to address it with particular policy decisions.
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No man, that's called an oligarchy.
Sounds like you're not a fan of socialism.
How's it working out for you, spending a third of your income on rent but not actually having any rights to stay in the property you rent, and a further third on "health insurance" that'll take your money and run, leaving you to choose between a lifetime of debt or just plain dying if you ever get ill?
> Government interference in people's lives is socialism.
No, that's called 'governance'. Literally the whole job of government is interfering in people's lives.
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> You just don’t like anything else than your ideas, because you don’t like us. Sorry to be born.
Why do you think political ideology is an inborn trait? People don't like you because you actively choose to vote for things that bring about pain and suffering. Not because of your innate attributes.
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Bro... you need a reality check. I'm the whitest male around. There is no 'anti-white' brigade. Maybe I'm crazy, but I don't think siding with the war mongering, child molesting, pump and dumping, christian nationals is the sane move.
I’m white Western born Usa male and have been very progressive and protesting and I don’t relate to you at all. I don’t have a weird belief people hate me because of my skin color or my heritage. Everyone knows you are not your hateful ancestors. You sound like you’re playing victim, which is very common rhetoric from conservatives.
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You'll notice that The same dude was in charge in 2016 as 2026. The people warning about fascism were the ones who know what happens to the rhetoric and policies of 2016 when not countered.
If you're talking about the president, no. Obama was the president in 2016.
Your usage of "Your side" is telling. It seems like this is a team sport for you and you've picked a side. Unfortunately you might have sided with fascists.
Isn't this a delightful Catch-22.
If you forewarn about a developing Fascist movement, you're simply taking away the meaning from the word until it's too late and the Fascists take power.
You cannot call anything Fascist, for there may be something more Fascist that may need the power of the word.
But ah! We couldn't call out their fledgling movement full of dog whistles and double speak so no one was aware enough to stop them as a fledgling movement!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45349597
"Your side"
So how do we respect each other’s ideals AND make peace?
Probably by not starting with "your side"
Yeah the other side doesn’t over use socialism or communism or terrorist. And conservatives haven’t been refusing to make concessions in Congress and the Senate for decades.
Ah, yes, let's concede just a bit of fascism, not a lot.
The irony is that almost every single one of the countries these foreigners come from would do exactly the same thing were the shoe on the other foot. If running government-funded research to maximize the opportunities for native born people is “fascism,” then every country in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East is “fascist.” Borderless universalism is a niche idea even in the west, and virtually non-existent outside it.
> The irony is that almost every single one of the countries these foreigners come from would do exactly the same thing were the shoe on the other foot.
I'm having a hard imagining Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Norway, Switzerland, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, or Italy, to name a few countries of the countries from which scientists have come to work on NIST projects putting these kind of restrictions on American scientists coming to work on non-classified research at their labs.
Imagine using this logic in the 1930s when scientists from Germany, Hungary, and Italy were flocking to the US.
Did the advances they helped spur actually maximize opportunities for native born people in the long run?
Would we be better off if we had blocked them from researching in the US?
you present a lot of conviction yet there is not a single source for your opinion that was presented.
He's from one of those countries.
> Foreigners are inferior by definition
Trump's first and current wife are foreign-born. VP's wife was born to immigrants. So, WTF? Republicans never make any sense.
Well, I would venture that they consider women more as property than people. Which is of course a disgusting way to relate to fellow humans, but dehumanization is all the rage with these people.
Trump hates science anyway, so why not fire all scientists? Problem solved. /s
Isn't what they're basically doing with the massive funding cuts and cover-ups?
I don't think its about hate, its more like he doesn't believe in taking away something he cannot see with his own eye. Here his idea is that research and development will still continue happening even if overwhelming majority of people responsible for it in the past, will be gone.
Take COVID for example. We were fine with minor breakouts prior to Trump administration. They came in and Trump saw we are spending $3.7 million on safety measures in Wuhan Lab, fund designated by Obama (here comes first red flag right?) By his standard you could not SEE the protection so he wanted to look like Champion and save tax payers 3.7 million by removing that protection. We all know what came next and boy was damage more financially painful than mere 3.7 mil?
Its like a person who doesn't wear a seat belt because they never been in a car accident so they don't see the point. If given power they would remove mandates to wear seatbelts and have insurance companies deal with the outcome.
Trump is an actor, he isn't the scenario writer, and as such you never should focus on Trump.
This isn't a surprise when religious conservatism enters a traditional marriage with oligarchic conservatism¹. This is more a classical case of "you keep them stupid, while we keep them poor". If even the Enlightenment is a heresy (Burke e.a), you will have to spin the clock back.
But you can't have your cake and eat it too, so the US will become closer to an Afghanistan, led by increasingly unruly lunatics and warlords. Women's rights, scientific progress, educated people with agency; it's all a threat. The conservative rage becomes violent because what it wants and believes conflicts with reality, so they have to smash that all down, including the progress.
Yes, they rather burn society down than to lose control. That is hard to grasp for decent people, so you see an endless stream of opinions trying and failing to come up with a constructive rationale, but when you can understand that there is a class of people with a non-constructive default mode like the rest of us, things will be much easier to understand.
The book banning has been going on for several years, and now we are in the escalation phase. The resent about women's rights, persecution² of transgenders, harassment of universities and scientists, in short: the Gleichschaltung³, should not be a surprise and has little to do with show- and stuntman Trump. It is unruly conservatism coming to its ultimate conclusion, confronted with shrinking religious control, with results of zero sum economics, with a shrinking voter base, with all gerry-mandering options exploited, and ultimately with having thrown away democracy. The clock is being turned back.
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1. This is the original definition of conservatism, to "conserve" the status quo of a very small class of owners versus large masses of poor people.
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47170928
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
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"It’s fair to Americans and that’s what counts."
Well, let's talk in some years how this worked out for you. If you don't want to anymore, we in europe are mostly happy to welcome smart talents.
If not developing domestic scientists but instead importing and developing foreign scientists is the way, why isn’t China doing it?
They do! I'm in academia and they hvae really attractive programs to get foreign academics in, they have special programmes just for this purpose. I don't think a lot of people still want to move to China, due to concerns about language, culture, quality of life, authoritarianism etc. but the government is most certainly promoting it.
They do
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03657-6
But there are people who get nervous if their people stay too long in China
I think the point is “it’s fair to Americans that’s what counts” is a nationalistic statement. Maybe it’s the way to go. But it’s not refuting the parent who’s saying the missing piece is nationalism.
I mean what is the point of a government of its people if not to serve those who elected it? It seems bizarre that one would elect a government to benefit others whose governments could give a rats ass about us.
Again that’s a nationalistic point of view. For someone unused to thinking about the world as “us” vs “them” where the designations of “us” and “them” are defined by national borders it can be surprising and seem like there’s missing information. There’s not missing information there’s a values/worldview mismatch.
Who benefited from all the years Elon Musk studied in the US and built his early companies? Certainly not south Africa.
If they can teach/lead us, then we can bring them in. If we have to teach them then we don’t need them and instead can cultivate our own talent.
I’m not against brining in talent that can teach us where we don’t have local talent. We can use them to jump start our own talent. I’m also not against extraordinarily talented business people who can add to the economy.
Elon Musk didn't come to the US as a businessman. He graduated from UPenn. So with your logic he shouldn't have been allowed to come here to get trained.
> I mean what is the point of a government of its people if not to serve those who elected it?
How about to serve the people it represents and governs over, rather than the small, loud, fascist minority that voted for them?
The majority of Americans want to preserve jobs for Americans. It’s a minority of people who would agree with your position. It’s like voter IDs. Even a majority of Democrats would agree with requiring IDs at polling stations. Only a minority are against it, according to polls. In addition many of the poorest of countries require IDs for voting but some people frame it as a fascist opinion. That would imply lots of the world is fascist as they implement ID requirements for voting.
The majority of Americans don't want to cripple their country's science capabilities, either in terms of funding or talent. Especially not on a xenophobic basis like this. Only a minority of trump voters, who are themselves a minority of Americans, are for this, according to polls[0].
Not sure what you're on about with voter ID, that sounds like a totally different topic you might have meant to post about in a totally different thread, so I'll focus on this one, in which the administration is acting in direct contravention to what The People want.
Then again, maybe this is purely a disagreement of principles. You already indicated[1] that you were in favor of politicians ignoring The People in favor of a minority of individuals who specifically voted for said politicians.
0 - https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/americans-wa...
1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47217163
The idea of voter ID is fine. The problem in the US is the implementation. Those other countries have national ID systems and are good at making sure everyone gets an ID.
In the US there is no national ID. There are state IDs but a significant number of eligible voters do not have one and many cannot afford to get one. Even if there is no direct fee to get an ID it can cost a lot (sometimes over $100) to get the documentation needed. It is made more difficult and expensive by the patchwork record keeping in many states, which can require searching in many different counties for birth records for example if you aren't sure exactly where you were born. I think most states do have statewide record keeping now, but some have not gone through the old per county paper only records and scanned them and added them to the central system.
Worse, some states seem to have deliberately tried to make it harder for people who are likely to vote against the party that is making the rules to get IDs and easier for voters who are likely to vote for them to get IDs.
For example, under the guise of trying to save money they close down many of the offices that issue IDs. These closures mostly are in areas where groups more likely to be against that party live, often poor and/or minority areas. This sometimes leaves those areas with no place to get ID within 50 miles, which can be difficult for people in poor areas with no affordable public transit and low car ownership.
Another thing is picking what ID is acceptable. Say make hunting licenses acceptable as ID, but do not allow student IDs from state colleges.
Make an ID law that includes funding to pay for getting IDs for those who do not have them, including assistance and funding to find the required records, and that sets up a system to make sure that going forward new citizens get issues acceptable ID, and finally that has a way to grandfather in people who can show by clear and convincing evidence that they are eligible to vote and cannot reasonably obtain an ID, and most people who object will drop their objections.
Here's a whole bunch of links about this.
https://www.projectvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AMERI...
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jul/11/eric-holde...
https://www.aclu.org/documents/oppose-voter-id-legislation-f...
https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/2018/Minority_Voting_Access...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/getting-a...
https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/4/7157037/us-voter-id-req...
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/07/644648955/for-older-voters-ge...
https://rewirenewsgroup.com/2014/10/16/well-actually-pretty-...
https://www.theregreview.org/2019/01/08/shapiro-moran-burden...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/heres-h...
https://scholars.org/contribution/high-cost-free-photo-voter...
https://now.tufts.edu/2018/01/23/proving-voter-id-laws-discr...
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/debu...
Because for their luck they don't have a liberal party they have to listen to
Because china is nationalistic as well?
But me as someone who dislikes all kinds of nationalism, I obviously would do both. Develope smart domestic scientists in collaboration with smart international students/scientists. Networking, collaboration, strengthening ties, connecting cultures despite of differences, you know all those humanistic ideals you actually find a lot in real science. Focus on the common goal, progress for all of humanity through new knowledge.
They do, aggressively.
> I think the world got used to us being patsies where we spend our money on R&D paying foreigners
I can tell you're not in the business of training / employing people.
The best ROI is getting someone who is already trained (read you didn't pay for their K-12, their parents' teaching/maternity/healthcare) and just deriving value from their labor.
Leading a nation is not a business. In order to have a successful and self sustaining population we need to develop our own human capital. You want to take shortcuts —those are fine when you’re playing catch up, not when you’re in the lead. Also, it’s a governments responsibility to support and cultivate its own population and not dispose them for another population.
Absolutely true about creating talent. That does not mean you shouldn't take advantage of the easy talent available to you.
Please don't pretend like hiring scientists for a national lab has any effect on the colossal waste of human talent our nation is perpetrating—the problems begin so much earlier, and holding out for another American scientist at a national lab is doing nothing to address the ridiculous state of our human capital development.
Quite the opposite. The US got the best of other countries, those countries paid for their education but the US got the benefits. The braun drain was to the US
> The braun drain was to the US
I see what you did there...
Freudian slip
Nazi scientists were brought in _after_ WWII, not during it.
A significant portion of the WW2 scientists were refugees from _before_ the US joined the war but after persecution had started. https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/scientist-refugees-and-manhatt...
(later notable entry: Andy Grove, Intel CEO, was born Andreas Grov:
"By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis' "Final Solution," the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint... [where] many young people were killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them")
I think there is a difference between bringing in key proven talent at the apex that’s already proven itself and talent that needs to be developed. Both the US and USSR picked up proven talent from the Nazis, they weren’t siphoning up green talent on the hopes they’d develop into good scientists. We have our own population we often overlook and misdirect into Hollywood entertainment rather than achievement.
You're actually right, I misread the first post.
Speaking of unutilized talents, other than Hollywood, I'd also add a whole bunch of folks in tech who could be useful for defending their own homeland (hence, their own & their kids' future) but are busy doing the generic commercial stuff.
Every time I see something specific like this I wonder if there was something very similar and specific happening in Berlin ~90-93 years ago.
I've tried reviewing online archives of German books/newspapers but it's obviously very time consuming. The large LLM:s don't seem to index this area sufficiently.
Can’t tell if missing /s, but the analogy is:
Jewish/socialist physicists:atomic weapons::”foreign“ AI scientists:automated targeting
I’m not looking forward to the loss of innocence of computer science that is parallel to that of physics from 1945 onward, but here we are.
Next up, “American science”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
I think that's quite far away. At least 12 months.
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Yes? I don't know why these can't all be true and can't all be a bad thing. Anyways, the US used to not be like this. So it's noteworthy.
It is often asked what an actual foreign agent would do differently if he were trying to destroy the country.
I don't think that's entirely valid. Nonetheless, there is enough overlap that the question keeps getting raised.
So... perhaps that's what you're missing?
Or, as the Canadian press wonders, right now, today and continuously, how can we tell if he’s lost his mind?
When he forgets to tell us how smart he is, and how many very difficult dementia tests he's passed. That's when he'll be fully scrambled.
It's easy to pin this all on a foreign enemy, but this "theory" is completely invalidated by noticing that Trump receives support from all the most powerful person of the country: Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Ellison, Bezos... America doesn't need foreign adversaries to destroy itself.
Two of the big names in your list there are not even americans.
They are, by any relevant metric...
How many of these people have talked to Putin or other similarly-skilled Russian intelligence agents that convinced them that Russian style oligarchy would give them more power than liberal democracy?
I would guess most if not all. Bezos is the only one who I imagine might not have had detailed discussions. Musk was completely in the grasp of Putin, though that seems to have changed in the past month with the sudden change of heart and disablement of Russian military starlink inside Ukraine. Apparently it was implemented in a single day, and SpaceX staff was confused by the sudden change in heart. That is still consistent with Putin playing Musk like a puppet earlier when they had direct conversations.
I think there are a confluence of reasons for this behavior, and I while I think that foreign influence can't explain it all, it would explain a huge chunk.
It's always fascinating people who don't know how things work openly spouting evidence of their ignorance.
Feel free to offer how you think things work, and why, if you can.
Hanlon's razor still applies: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" [0]. He might be such a foreign agents, however we know that he is unintelligent and narcissistic, therefore everyone who makes him look stupid/bad is suddenly "public enemy number one."
Notes:
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Their goal is to destroy science in the US because it comes up with results that are inconvenient for them.
It makes no sense to people who want to live in a globally-competitive democracy. But other people don't share that goal, and the moves make perfect sense in their context.
I think this is an important point. Think about the mindset it takes to understand this proposal as a "great" thing for America. What would you have to believe? What values would you have to change in order for a foreign scientist ban to be "great". Be sure to try to limit you understanding of science to wha you might receive from watching the most popular cable news channel as your definitive source of information.
This is not the mindset of all MAGA but it's a difficult exercise for most thoughtful engineers to try to live in that mind space for a while. It's a very different world, and I can only do it because I have many conversations with family members to draw on.
for comparison's sake, how many foreigners work in Chinese labs?
Why do you want to become China so badly? Why do you admire it so much that you want to copy it?
Not the GP, but I'll answer: their now-inevitable global leadership in technological and scientific advancements--that is what I want to copy.
You're missing the preparation for WW3.
like how WWII started after excluding Jewish scientists?
It did in Germany.
The goal is the grift + outrage. If you can get both, great. If you can get just one, a very solid win. Each time something is thrown into full chaos there stands a private actor or dozens to make 7-8 figures.
> What am I missing?
The age of counter productive selfishness which escalates to national and international politics.
You’re missing nothing. This is just another boneheaded footgun by this admin. What a time to be live and be an American. I’m ashamed to be one and living internationally. Everyone is either pitying me or laughing at me because my government is so corrupt, stupid and incompetent.
More problematic than my own ridicule is what this will portend for US science and the US for leading science research. We must fight to keep the US a destination for cutting edge science and research and one way to do that is to attract the best and brightest from all parts of the globe.
The administration has done nothing but be loudly and proudly racist and ant-science.
It mades all the sense in the world. It is terrible, but it makes sense.
They have brought incalculable shame and future suffering on the US.
Don't forget about the murders, illegal wars and covering up for rich pedophiles/rapists.
And it's NIST, formerly the Bureau of Standards, not the NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration). Apparently having evil furriners being able to mess with the definition of the furlong or the hundredweight is a national security threat.
> What am I missing?
Racism and Christian Nationalism
It feels like they are banking on their AI moment. Thinking that AI will do everything for them, they're isolating themselves like China historically did. Now all they have to do is create a proper AI that can surpass top notch researchers.
Did you miss who was elected president?
There isn’t much rationality since then.
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Are they qualified to do the work? Evidently not as they were passed over for their peers who happen to also be immigrants.
Used to be that America was great because the smartest researchers in the world wanted to come here, often escaping oppressive regimes to do so, and become American citizens (e.g., Albert Einstein)
So now all the world’s best and brightest scientists will move to China where they’ll be welcomed in open arms, enjoy living in a modern society with affordable electric cars, the world’s premier high speed train network, glimmering new subway systems, and ample affordable housing.
They’ll work on cutting-edge research projects that receive ample funding and support while American scientists wrestle with a federal government torn apart by anti-intellectual strongmen.
You ever see a Tesla robot demo like this? https://youtu.be/mUmlv814aJo
Are we tired of winning yet? It sounds like we are beyond tired of winning, we’d rather lose from here on out.
Seems like Russia and the USA are hell-bent on destroying themselves fighting forever wars to allow China and the EU to take the reins as the beacons of global stability and strength.
The language is still a barrier to that so it will happen slower than one would think. Top scientists from everywhere outside China generally know English and not Chinese.
That said, China is sponsoring lots of foreign students from belt and road countries to come there and learn Chinese, so its a work in progress.
A scientist moving to a country isn't usually expected to learn the local language, the vast majority of laboratories speak English.
I've seen a much more impressive Tesla robot demo: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8vsTNFUFJEU
Large scale movements are much easier.
I, uh, actually went and took a look at both, are you really really really sure you want to pit the clumsy awkward thing as the best challenger America is capable of putting in front of China's kung fu ninja robots? :)
>So now all the world’s best and brightest scientists will move to China where they’ll be welcomed in open arms
They'll also get to experience as much or more racism than they would have in America, but likely far more racism. In America you find racism in some (usually rural) areas, and people who are very accepting in other areas (big cities where most science research is typically done). I'm not sure China is going to be the easiest place to build a life for foreigners.
Of course this pitch is more like “white people might something resembling the kind of experience that natively born non-white people have in America.”
Is a black person whose parents grew up in segregation, redlining, etc, really getting a worse experience in China?
I know fully English speaking born in USA Asian people who avoid certain parts of the country over the racism they get from Americans.
This “lack of racism in the USA” only exists if you’re white.
Don’t forget that ICE is currently arbitrarily detaining people for looking/sounding foreign, and that actual US citizens and people with permanent residency status have been caught up in it.
At least in China they have their fucking paperwork in order.
>Is a black person whose parents grew up in segregation, redlining, etc, really getting a worse experience in China?
Some places won't server you in China, if that's what you're asking. It isn't as bad as some time in the past in the US, but it's not going to be smooth sailing at all.
>I know fully English speaking born in USA Asian people who avoid certain parts of the country over the racism they get from Americans.
Yes, and I covered that in my comment. Rural areas are always going to be worse for minorities.
>This “lack of racism in the USA” only exists if you’re white.
Where the hell did I ever say that??? Why are people reading things into comments that simply aren't there??
>Don’t forget that ICE is currently arbitrarily detaining people for looking/sounding foreign, and that actual US citizens and people with permanent residency status have been caught up in it.
Gee, no kidding. You don't say.
I'm really not sure what you're trying to call me out for, or why.
> Used to be that America was great because the smartest researchers in the world wanted to come here, often escaping oppressive regimes to do so, and become American citizens (e.g., Albert Einstein)
By this measure, America is now greater than ever.
Of course, it's convenient to pretend that Trump is building a racist dictatorship with a Gestapo, and that's why no one wants to move to the US. But the true is that the number of people around the world who would like to move to the US is higher than ever. Especially when the current administration is trying to purge society of foreign criminals.
> So now all the world’s best and brightest scientists will move to China
Yes, of course. It's practically the same thing. The only reason scientists go to China is because they are not allowed into the US.
There are a lot of leaps in this comment
So build an argument against it. I think hes right, so if you claim he is making leaps, feel free to fill in rhe gaps?
I’ll fill in the gaps. I didn’t initially want to respond to that person because they are MAGA-brained.
Basically, their whole comment is based on non-factual information.
US is discouraging talent by revoking student visas, China is offering more funding and incentives while the US has flat federal funding with future cuts likely: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-europe-us-scientists
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/science-resea...
China produces more research in top journals than the US: https://quincyinst.org/research/chinas-historic-rise-to-the-...
The commenter claimed that there’s no ICE Gestapo, and that this administration is deporting criminals, but 74% of detainees have no criminal convictions and only 5% have any violent criminal record: https://www.cato.org/blog/5-ice-detainees-have-violent-convi...
ICE told officers in a memo to disregard due process and the 4th amendment:
https://apneas.com/article/ice-arrests-warrants-minneapolis-...
Undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than US citizens:
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG...
More people are moving out of the US than moving in for the first time since the Great Depression: https://fortune.com/2026/02/27/trump-immigration-crackdown-w...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-08-22/la-na-im...
I have no link for this one, but it’s worth pointing out that educated immigrants likely have the most options on where they want to live. They’re not in the same situation as a day laborer hopping the border to the closest country that has work available. The US doesn’t have to be a bad option available for that kind of person to say “nah, I’ll go somewhere else.” It just has to be a less good option with enough negative aspects, and they’ll say, eff that, I’m going to find a position in Germany/Netherlands/China/etc.
The American citizens with top academic performance are already getting those jobs.
What you're effectively proposing is to prefer Americans with mediocre academic performance over top-tier international talent.
We actually have a glut of PhDs, which has been a factor in increased fraud and corruption
The one that couldn't afford a decent education? The ones that will be in debt for life (bribery risk)? The ones that paid money to be handed a degree, and wouldn't do an honest days work if their life depended on it?
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Yeah, before this restriction was imposed, the USA was the worst country in the world in terms of scientific research and advancement.
Now that they have these restrictions in place, the USA will go from worst to best with the help of highschool-dropout equivalents who fudge their way through the interview and then complain about more than 2-3 hours of hard work per day (and demand 2-3 times the pay for the privilege). #winning !!!
By the way, would you mind linking to some of your research scientist job postings, so such folks can apply to work for you? I'm sure you can't wait to hire them, just like everyone else, right?
> AI might not be good, but it’s at least as good as 90% of them and it works 24x7
Sure. It's cheaper - now. Might not continue being that cheap. What prevents Anthropic from jacking up prices once the field is consolidated.
Plus, you're forgetting that anyone on an H1B visa still has to buy their food in the USA. While in the US, they contribute for good and for bad to the economy.
No offense but born-in-the-US citizens are... not great at the most demanding knowledge work. The ones that are have all been hired. Our education system is trash and normalizes getting Bs/Cs.
I see so many people complaining about H1Bs at tech jobs. At least the H1Bs pass the interviews!
Disclaimer: born and raised in the US myself.
Not quite right. The US doesn't normalize getting Bs and Cs, it just gives As to everyone.
I don’t think that’s an entirely accurate classification (as a former H1B and a naturalized citizen).
The leetcode nature of the whole process doesn’t lend itself to be motivating for people who aren’t really hungry for a job. As a US citizen you can say fuck it, I don’t need to deal with this shit. As an H1B you’re forced to deal with it otherwise you need to leave the country.
I’ve hired plenty of sharp and talented folks who were born here.
I am not saying that sharp and talented folks aren't born in the US.
I am saying that our culture generally has resulted in fewer talented folks than the H1B population because we have a cultural focus on education.
For example, it is culturally acceptable in the US to get poor grades throughout K-12.
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Can you expand on how people failing interviews is filling the role you're hiring for?
"their" meaning what?
Whole worlds culture except US?
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So that foreign nationals think it's a smart idea to move to the US and do research for us. So that when they complete their PhD they want to stay permanently and continue doing research that benefits the US. So that despite country humanity gets the smartest people together doing work that might benefit the entire world?
A full scholarship to somebody that decides to move back to their country because of racism and xenophobia still directly benefits the US if that research was done here. The smartest students in the world passing on the US does not help the US. With more policies like this the smartest students in the US might move to other countries so they can work with a larger pool.
How many promising American-born researchers are we missing out on because we give away valuable training and research opportunities to foreigners?
Don’t forget that America’s technological heyday—when Silicon Valley was built in the first place—came during and shortly after the Johnson Reed era of immigration restriction. Companies like Apple, Intel, etc., were founded between 1960-1980 (the decade on each side of when the foreign born population hit the historical low in 1970).
Zero Americans are missing out because they already have a path to that work.
Your comments often lack evidence of these poor neglected Americans.
I’m sorry I’m smart enough to separate the two distinct concepts of “what US government policy should be” and “what personally benefits foreigners like me.”
Responses like yours really make me think that the bottom line for many people is doing whatever benefits foreigners.
Apple was founded by the son of an immigrant, Intel's 3rd employee was an immigrant, and have you been to Silicon Valley in the last 30 years? Half of the engineers are foreign-born. That's the reason why Silicon Valley is what it is.
because you get to keep most of them with a really small investment. isn't that obvious?
These are not PhD students; they're already credentialed (either postdocs or full-time staff). We pay them to do research that aligns with our strategic goals so that we get the science.
Yeah, let's look at it through the national lense. For every researcher who defects to the US to make their PhD there and most likely stay, taxpayers of the country they came from have paid for the education of hundreds of students. Because they don't come from America where graduating essentially means a life of indentured servancy for all but the dynastically wealthy.
It's called brain drain, and doing the rest of the world the favor of putting on the brakes is something that would be quite far out on the spectrum you'd call "woke" if it was done for the reasons one would arrive at when really thinking it through (which clearly has not happened)
Imagine if it were the other way around, and all the top American university graduates left to do their PhDs and postdocs in Chinese labs.
Americans would throw a fit and say it was a grave threat to American technological superiority, national security, etc.
It's obviously good for a country when it can attract the top talent from around the world.
USA does not want to train scientists from other countries, who come home and can use that knowledge against interest of US companies, as a competition, or security. There are vast areas of science that are "double use". Will it help to keep stuff out of range of unwanted foreign actors? Hard to tell. Does it hurt USA soft power, sure. So the net result is to be seen.
Anything that's "double use" is already treated with a distinct level of scrutiny.
Almost all NIST research is published in publicly available reports and journals and proceedings. If there is some research the US wants to keep away from foreigners they don't do it at NIST.
>What am I missing?
I will answer this question honestly. I used to be friends with a group of PhD students work worked in labs. Every week I heard their complaints. One relayed a story in which a Chinese lab mate / co-worker was refusing to following their boss (PI) directions or request, and shared secret results with another Chinese student in a competing lab.
- Their boss (the PI) had asked the Chinese student to train other labmates on some specific testing methods, they refused.
- The Chinese PhD student would simply ignore the PI emails.
- Then magically their study results end up leaked to another Chinese PhD candidate.
Chinese PhD types can 'buy' their way into labs. They have so much money no one wants to turn them away. Only the government can force it.
Most people have no idea what day-to-day life is actually like in PhD life / labs. It's a lot less "science" and way more "human drama" than you could imagine.
Are we supposed to generalize your third-hand anecdote about one Chinese PhD student to all Chinese PhD students?
> Chinese PhD types can 'buy' their way into labs. They have so much money no one wants to turn them away.
The way it works in the US is that labs pay the PhD students, not the other way around. I have never heard of a student paying the lab, ever.
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> Scientists from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria are considered “high risk.”
I think this makes sense from a national security perspective (although I doubt there is any scientist coming from these countries who are working on sensitive projects, maybe except China). Since there is too much trouble to figure out who is a spy, might as well ban all of them for the moment.
I do feel a strong nostalgia about the globalization era between the 90s and the 2010s, when I spent most of my life. But I understand it comes to an end, and I'm going to spend my second half of life in a much more splintered world.
This list of high risk countries is not new (with the exception of maybe Venezuela being recently added, I’m not sure). Researchers with these citizenships have faced extra security review before joining NIST for years, and last year the lab increased the level of security review for everyone (not just this list)
I can understand a clearly communicated need for additional security requirements. But NIST operates almost totally in open science mode, with the main exceptions of being industry cooperative agreements. I don’t think this move to shed international researchers by reneging on commitments from the lab has been at all justified from a security standpoint.
So as to not mislead anyone who didn't read the article, the section following your quoted text is:
> Researchers from lower risk countries have been told they could lose access beginning in either September or December if at that point they have been at the lab more than 2 years or, under a waiver, 3 years.
In other words: they're also looking to bar foreign nationals outside of that quoted list, which to my mind is less understandable.
It makes sense to stop poaching talented scientists and instead let them continue working for your adversaries? I don't understand how this improves national security. The proposed rule is actually worse than this:
> The changes are part of proposed rules aimed at increasing security that would limit, to 3 years, the maximum length of time visiting international researchers can work at NIST.
If researchers know that they cannot stay in the US permanently and will be forced to return to their home country in a few years, it guarantees that they must maintain ties to that home country and dramatically increases their incentive to spy. What would you do if your government asked you to spy during a temporary stay abroad, and threatened you with arrest upon your return if you refuse?
It doesn’t make sense from a national security perspective actually.
A better plan would be to encourage skilled immigration and offer compelling benefits and stability like family visas, free movement, and so on. That way, the best people would make their contributions to science and society here. It’s actually a masterstroke because it deprives other countries of their best people.
The current administration is filled with weak men and therefore chose policies that look “strong” but are actually rooted in personal insecurity
There have been many cases of US born citizens selling secrets to foeign powers (same here in UK).
As a side note (tangentailly related) I wonder if the US would have gained nuclear capabilities if it wasn't for foreign scientists.
>makes sense from a national security perspective
Does it? AFAIK NIST doesn't work on national security relevant research.
Oh my god the national security! Someone make up the hypothetical situations the national security might be compromised without proof of any of it! Let me pull out my wallet and take out my national security detector…yep it’s lower than before! Quick pile on the propaganda!
It's an institute that's about setting international standards. It's not secret, by definition. You can just visit their web page and read their publications.
Just feels like side effects of poorly thought out rules from above.
Exactly how many North Korean scientists are working in the U.S. right now?
Not a lot, but what is your point exactly? There are a lot of really Chinese scientists working in the US, and the ones who are postdocs and research scientists at NIST are apparently being pushed out at the end of this month. They’ve already been vetted for security concerns, so that justification is kind of thin.
How many Taiwanese, German, Indian, French, South Korean, etc scientists are working in the US? The ones working at NIST are facing being pushed out at the end of September.
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That was indeed the logic then. Keep in mind though that the internment was based on 'race' and 'ethnicity'. This action is based on citizenship and it's a job limitation not a forcible relocation into an open air prison.
I'm with you on the difference between labour limitations and imprisonment but
> Keep in mind though that the internment was based on 'race' and 'ethnicity'. This action is based on citizenship a
You say this like it's a meaningful distinction?
Surely it is? It would be a very different policy to say "anyone vaguely asian is banned from the lab, even if they're an American citizen"
Yes, we reserve additional scrutiny, roundup, and detention for people who are vaguely Latino.
It's a massive distinction. I live in Germany and if the government said I couldn't have a job because of my race or ethnicity I think that would be majorly problematic. If they said I couldn't because I'm American I would think that restriction should be reserved for narrow circumstances (secure projects) but it's generally acceptable.
I think the same method might be used again in a future conflict with China, when the question of life and death becomes serious. Not saying that I LIKE it, but I think it is at least plausible, and with a non-insignificant (note the double negation) possibility.
Man, if there were only something more reasonable... something in-between letting them spy at will and concentration camps. Hmmm, maybe we will think of something eventually.
Ok, then let them spy continuously I guess and then carry the know how home. Even countries openly hostile to you.
I mean it is unfair for sure but it's not your given right. If for example Chinese are literally breaking their law when they refuse to spy what else can you do?
But aren't they happy you bring them democracy? I am confused..
> NIST researchers do not carry out classified research. As a result, Gallagher says, “It’s very difficult to see the security benefit this might have.”
Here in Canada when the new CPC took power its leader PM Harper muzzled scientists from speaking about most things but most of all anything about climate change. It also destroyed climate data claiming the ledgers were old fashioned, but they were the only copies.
The CPC political are the old centre-right PC party that combined with more right secessionist and (evangelical) Christian political parties.
Harper is still lurking in the shadows and pulling strings decade after being ousted as Prime Minister.
> It also destroyed climate data claiming the ledgers were old fashioned, but they were the only copies.
I don't know how long ago the library of Alexandria was burned down. But what I do know is that we never learn the lesson. It's rather stupid to store public research data (i.e, excluding classified info) at a single location. There are any number of unpredictable future scenarios that can lead to this same unfortunate outcome.
Scientists and politicians should work together and agree to store and host such research data in multiple countries, including with rival nations. That should make it a lot more resilient against such eventualities. It won't cause any security risk. After all, you were going to publish it anyway. Why waste the information worth a lot of money and effort?
But instead of that, many governments and greedy corporations go after independent groups who do exactly that - scihub and internet archive, for example. We as a species possess the stupidity of stubbornly avoiding the obvious right path.
Comparing a government intervening on data they challenged with one of their own agencies to the 'burning of Alexandria' is beyond delusion. holy cow.
For gosh sake, the internet is public, nothing is being truly erased, published papers will be there for literally all of time. The publishing industry may control some distribution for a very short period of time but it's not relvant in the grand scheme
> Comparing a government intervening on data they challenged with one of their own agencies to the 'burning of Alexandria' is beyond delusion. holy cow.
I'm talking about precious data being destroyed by anti-intellectuals because their predecessors didn't foresee that possibility. There are no delusions here. You're just being unimaginative, hyperbolic and histrionic.
> For gosh sake, the internet is public, nothing is being truly erased, published papers will be there for literally all of time. The publishing industry may control some distribution for a very short period of time but it's not relvant in the grand scheme
Is that what you see happening here? Didn't the Internet Archive race to save the data from the websites of US research institutions before they were deleted by the current regime? They could have done it with ease if they had started as soon as the election results were out. This is not to say that IA is inefficient. It's to point out that while the Internet has a great preservation ability, it's not perfect and hardly always the case. There are a lot of data that aren't sufficiently protected.
Instead of trying to even understand that possibility, you go on a shallow and low-effort dismissal with excess drama. Is that the quality of discussion now?
You're comparing some unpublished data to the Burning of Alexandria, a historical even so prominent that we're talking about it thousands of years later.
The is 'delusional' - or pick a more specifically appropriate term.
You're also claiming information oppression in the most open information system in history.
Anyone of almost 7 billion see that data - and for a few pennies - store it forever.
If nobody of 7 billion earth want to spend a few pennies to save something, then it's obviously not valuable in any way to anyone.
> The is 'delusional' - or pick a more specifically appropriate term.
If drawing parallels from history is being delusional, the entire world is. Comparisons may not match in scale but the intent is the key. And the intent is absolutely clear here. That's why I said that you are 'histrionic' and 'hyperbolic'. You're being dramatic in your over exaggerated outrage at normal things people do.
> If nobody of 7 billion earth want to spend a few pennies to save something, then it's obviously not valuable in any way to anyone.
'Nobody cares' doesn't equate to 'not worth it'. That's false equivalence. Climate data especially. Who knows what's backed up and what's not? That's why I said it has to be collaboratively backed up and hosted. Instead you create this fanciful scenario that doesn't exist, in order to reach incoherent conclusions that you use to perform your over-the-top drama.
You did not drawn a 'parallel'.
A parallel to a Gov. not agreeing with Scientific reports would be
--> "Henry VIII scuttling census data"
Instead you made a hysterical comparison, out of proportion.
> Harper is still lurking in the shadows and pulling strings decade after being ousted as Prime Minister.
Do you mean he still has an impact or he is actively impacting things now?
This is not what happened, please. Some scientists working for government agencies had their public statements reviewed.
And the bit about collusion with secessionists ... while be ultra nationalist - is conspiratorial and nonsensical.
Probably the most direct way to kick out the people they're actually worried about without invoking legal process for each one specifically, not least because if they did it on a case by case basis there would likely be an undeniable ethnic/national signal that right now is getting hidden in the noise. In other words, instead of targetting researchers for being Chinese nationals, and then subsequently having to defend ethnic discrimination in court, they're just going to throw the baby out with the bath water.
That's my guess anyway.
It’s the trump admin. They don’t care about the decorum you’ve described. They would have no qualms about looking racist. Have you not seen what ICE has been doing? Racism is a badge of honor, and so is flipping off the courts and public opinion. No I believe this is simply paranoia and racism driven by Miller and his cronies.
It's not about "looking racist"; or at least, it's not about public opinion. A racially targeted measure would violate specific laws and would be challenged in court, likely successfully.
It could also be a signal that they intend to take on the world; so they could technically not be racist if "everyone else is a threat".
The Kavanaugh rule specifically permits it. If you’re taking odds that this Supreme Court will challenge the Kavanaugh rule, I’ll wager 1:1 against.
Not sure if you noticed, lower courts ruled against administration many times ... they were ignored.
And as a bonus upreme court practically ruled president can be lawless as he pleases.
That was so years ago, this is the point we're at now.
SCOTUS: Nothing Trump does is illegal.
Trump: "does illegal things"
Courts: You can't do this, it is illegal.
Trump: "ignores courts"
Courts: "shocked pikachu face"
There have been cases of British, Bulgarian, Canadian, German and Irish nationals also gotten in their claws. Seems pretty race agnostic to me.
This is a naive take. Are there specific instances involving individuals of many nationalities/ethnicities? Yes. Is ICE then ignoring race during its operations? Absolutely not. ICE agents are arresting people based solely on their physical appearance and accents. It is band faced racism.
If it was racism there would be extremely high false positive ratios. Is it observed?
Are you fucking kidding me? Pay attention.
ICE came into Maine with almost 2000 "targets". They arrested about 200 people. They ended up bragging about 17 "bad guys", and even that list is possibly filled with lies.
Some of the 200 arrested that weren't actually immigrants include a brown man who passed a background check and flew to Texas recently to fulfill immigration requirements to work for our local Law Enforcement. It includes tons of people who are legal residents and had papers on their person to that effect. Those papers are often left behind when the person gets kidnapped, which includes an unmarked van filled with ICE nuts screeching in front of someone's SUV in city traffic, jumping out, breaking the window to the SUV, dragging the man out, and speeding off, leaving a still running SUV sitting in the middle of the street, with papers. A literal kidnapping scene from a movie, but sure, totally normal and upstanding law enforcement activity. Our own cops, not exactly liberals, are finding it hard not to publicly call them stupid assholes. These cops are mostly Trump voters.
Don't stick your head in the sand and cry when people point out how uninformed you are. Their entire operation is almost entirely false positives. They've sent people who live here legally to other countries without authority.
It would be rather nonsensical to completely ignore ethnicity in your operations when the wide majority of illegal immigrants are going to be of that ethnicity. Obviously that would not justify widespread harassment of that group, but nothing like that seems to be happening. Mostly people seem to be trying to stop them from deporting people genuinely in the country illegally, which is divisive - independent of partisanship.
If the DNC has chosen this hill to die on, I don't think they're going to do anywhere as near good as they should do in November given Trump is engaging in some extremely unpopular and foolish behavior that people, again going beyond partisan lines, could easily rally together against.
> Obviously that would not justify widespread harassment of that group, but nothing like that seems to be happening.
Exactly that is happening in places ICE focuses on. Kawanaugh stops with, like, beating or multi day/week/months imprisonment are a thing.
With legal immigrants, strategy seems to be to hold them in as bad conditions as possible until they sign off own deportation.
I completely agree they're a thing, but at what scale? The current administration has deported something like 600,000 illegal immigrants. What do you think their accuracy rate is carrying out those deportations? An accuracy rate of 50% would mean there'd be 600,000 errors. An accuracy rate of 70% would mean we'd expect to see around 250,000 errors. An accuracy rate of 90% would mean we'd expect to see around 67,000 errors.
A quick search [1] on this topic showed 50 people have been wrongfully detained. Even if we increase that figure substantially, it implies an extremely high success rate, which isn't really possible if you're just engaging in widespread fishing expeditions.
[1] - https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
Stopped ≠ detained. The government doesn't release stats on who was stopped. Kavanaugh stops are literally about using race as a criterion for the stop. No other probable cause is required.
Biden deported more people then any previous president and did not needed any of that. Fun fact, he even focused on criminals, proving that in fact, it is possible to not be dumb about it.
Meanwhile, what do we have here is complete breakdown of legal process, judicial orders being ignored and agency that repeatedly provably lies about everything. Including about multiple murders. All the accuracies rates you listed are absolutely terrible for anything that wants to pretend rule if law matters.
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The article YOU listed shows: nearly 20 children, including two with cancer. 50 Americans detained for being latino and no other reasons. From 130 Americans detained for protesting, 50 had charges dropped or rejected by court. That is so far. These were simply abusive detentions.
These are horrible statistics. In a democratic rule of law country, a few journalists wont be able such frequent and routine abuse of power.
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What do you mean it’s not representative of reality? Or are you just saying you don’t agree with it?
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> kick out the people they're actually worried about without invoking legal process for each one specifically
Why are we assuming either/both good faith and competence here? Is there anything about the policymaking of this administration that lends credence to that hypothesis? Are there pre-existing policy proposals you're imagining that have weighed pros and cons about this? Existing abuses you're imagining that this curtails?
No, let's be real here: this is yet another impulsive idea that some crank sold the president/cabinet on.
> Why are we assuming either/both good faith and competence here
There is obviously a breakdown in either communication or understanding here. I have assumed neither good faith nor competence. On the contrary, the strategy I supposed above would be in bad faith and a symptom of incompetence.
Deporting researchers from every country to make it look like they aren't ethnically targetting people is in bad faith, and resorting to such measures instead of simply identifying and deporting the problematic individuals demonstrates their incompetence.
Researchers from "low risk countries" will be thrown out later this year.
The problem with China anyway is that during the many decades when China was badly lagging, they already stole every secret they could. But now China has a very serious education system, motivated and intelligent people, lots of universities and researchers and China isn't lagging behind anymore.
So even if the goal was to prevent chinese from spying on US companies, it's too little, decades too late, because China is now at the very top too.
I’m not seeing any ambitious people trying to get into Chinese undergrad universities.
I know a handful of folks who worked at them, and then found a more permanent position in the US.
Comes in stages. Used to be ambitious Chinese people wouldn’t go to Chinese universities for grad school (undergrad Chinese university to overseas grad school was a usual route). Now they definitely do. Next there might be foreign grad students in Chinese universities, then foreign undergrad students. Though you would have to learn Chinese I imagine, so that barrier is there.
Virtually nobody who isn't ethnically Chinese will be able to become a naturalized Chinese citizen, no matter how sincerely they dedicate their life to productively fitting into Chinese society. On paper it's legally possible, but in practice it just doesn't happen. There is also the matter of global comprehension of the English language vs Chinese. I think these factors together severely limits the number of foreigners trying to get into Chinese universities.
> I’m not seeing any ambitious people trying to get into Chinese undergrad universities.
If you mean internationally, there are some, mostly from Africa.
This has been happening for decades.
China spends a lot of money on international Chinese education. According to some , the top schools are now Chinese.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/06/18/...
Honestly the best thing about America, historically has been diversity. Mei can come here and become American within a few years. That’s only possible in America( and probably Canada too).
But now we don’t want international students. The world’s smartest will go elsewhere.
In geopolitics you are forced to make deals with the devil. We armed and supplied the USSR to defeat Germany in WWII. In the 90s we gave an out of work China a wold franchise so we could make a few extra bucks with cheap labor and one billion consumers. Our blu collar workers would put down their dangerous and heavy machinery on the dank shop floor so they could take snazzy white collar jobs that were healthier and paid better because they use their American education to skill up their brains.
People were sold on that and many bought it. And now here we are living in the aftermath of us propping up systems incongruous to our own and living it down. It comes down to jockeying politicians like J Kerry and company who pretend they work for the people but in all honesty only work for themselves (remember Kerry never threw out his own war medals but rather reproductions he bought in the PX). Jane Fonda, her vanity sunk the nuclear energy industry for fifty years.
Nixon (R) was the one to open China, fool. Your swift boating doesn’t work here.
Nixon was also wrong. The people who pushed this design over the finish line were the likes of GHW and Clinton, to the protest of the likes of Bernie back then.
Are ethnic Chinese from Taiwan still allowed? If so it's probably just about the US' geopolitical rivals not being allowed perceived competitive advantages.
I don't find any materials on ethnic prohibitions. There are a lot of problems with that. Among them, it would either fail to achieve the goal. For example, let's say there was a Turk born and raised in PRC and totally aligned with the CCP: prohibiting Han from working in labs doesn't work.
Stephen Miller is a racist xenophobe. If you aren’t a white “westerner” (or the “help”) he wants you out. And shockingly currently has the power to do so, since we’re run by the incel administration
Disallowing foreign talent and relying on domestic potential the USA will inevitably fall to the scientific level of the rest of the competing nations. The latter are not attracting talent due to various reasons like language barrier or low economic motive. Now the USA has its own reason. The next scientific leader will be the one that poses no barrier.
I am noting two extremes in the comments which miss essential truths.
The first extreme begins with a true premise, but arrives at a false conclusion. The premise: as with manufacturing, the US should be minting more of its own scientists.
This is true. The US should have a more robust manufacturing base of its own. It should be educating more scientists.
However, the conclusion does not follow, namely, that the US should ban collaboration with, invitation, or employment of foreign scientists.
You don't build such things by going cold turkey. You cannot rebuild American manufacturing overnight, and you can't increase the number of home-grown scientists overnight either. This takes time and requires deeper shifts in the culture.
The second extreme is one that denies the premise above, or at least seems to deny its importance.
Collaboration with foreign scientists is good. That is unquestionable. There's also nothing wrong with attracting scientists. The problem is not collaboration or attracting talent, but rather a kind of parasitism that tries to make up for a country's own deficiencies in this manner as a permanent policy.
It’s worth mentioning that even if you find it possible to agree with some aspects of this, it’s impossible to reconcile the way everything is being done and the way its communicated with any kind of well meaning positive intentions.
"Y'all asked for the truth".
> Sources at NIST contacted by ScienceInsider say they have yet to see any written versions of the proposed rules, which have been conveyed in meetings. Patrick Gallagher, a former NIST director now at the University of Pittsburgh, says the lack of clear communication and the short notice being given to foreign scientists is creating a sense of chaos. “I’m as disappointed as to how this is unfolding as to what is unfolding,” Gallagher says. “At the very least NIST owes an explanation to the country. If there is a good reason for what they are doing, they should flat out say what it is.”
This is the sort of "high agency", not waiting for permission mentality that works great for a startup thats making tinder for cats, but is really bad for foundational institutions that provide a critical service to not just the nation but humanity in general. I feel like musk and his DOGE initiative infected the government with this move fast and break things bullshit. Or they were at least correlational with it
not only that but they leveraged the 'compliance' mindset that comes with government institutions to do so.
This was first reported at least a week or two ago and only now are they getting aroun dto thinking about making it an actual rule (which takes time and process). The rules that aren't really rules for plausible deniability serve several purposes including normalizing compliance in advance.
I'll set aside opinions of the rule because people can really feel differently about the long and short term balance of security and soft power...but not rule rules is an approach to government I really struggle to see both sides of.
Read about the administrative state vs prerogative state. This is what the latter looks like.
History rhymes. The same happened in the 30s to Albert Einstein, Max Born, Lise Meitner, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, etc.
That’s not what the headline says. Changing headline is a violation of hackers news rules
This whole thing feels like a troll. We should assume any new HN account created in the last 18 months is much more likely to be a bot, and now we got OpenClaw to worry about. Nothing stopping our true adversary or troublemakers from giving OpenClaw a plausible new identity and telling it to argue about given world view. Or pass whatever false information it can to try to change public opinion. Can you tell which replies in this thread are real vs propaganda?
Reminds me of this one :D https://www.b4x.com/android/forum/attachments/usteam-jpg.114...
This isn't a meta–commentary about the Cloudflate block page?
Misleading headline. They are moving specifically to restrict high risk countries like China, Syria, North Korea, etc. Not all foreign countries, as the headline threatens.
From the article:
> Researchers from lower risk countries have been told they could lose access beginning in either September or December if at that point they have been at the lab more than 2 years or, under a waiver, 3 years.
Also from the article:
> Sources at NIST contacted by ScienceInsider say they have yet to see any written versions of the proposed rules, which have been conveyed in meetings.
And:
> Many researchers from these countries—particularly China—have been informed that their lab access will be reviewed by 31 March, and terminated if they have been at NIST for more than 3 years or pose “too high a risk”
So, the high-risk limitation is actual, and affected researchers were already notified by NIST. While no low-risk limitations are mentioned by or attributable to NIST. That part appears to be hearsay and speculation confidently jammed into the headline.
I find that to be misleading. Bob should be ashamed of himself. I hope he can do better. It took me a single paragraph to more clearly reword the article, and I'm not a professional writer.
It’s all foreign guest researchers by the end of September, high risk countries by the end of March. Your first quote doesn’t imply the NIST sources for this article don’t have firsthand knowledge that this is coming, it’s just that it appears the lab management is avoiding putting things in writing
> Researchers from lower risk countries have been told they could lose access beginning in either September or December if at that point they have been at the lab more than 2 years or, under a waiver, 3 years.
The word "could" seems to conflict with "It's all foreign guest researchers by end of September."
If you think that's what he meant, then it's clear that Bob has made things incredibly ambiguous since we disagree. Do you think he might have written the article, and especially the headline, in such a way as to make it more clickable?
I do.
I don’t know why the author of the article wrote “could”, but I personally work closely with some non-high-risk-country NIST foreign guest researchers. It’s been filtered down verbally through the management chain that the end of this September is the re-review deadline, and it’s not been stated as a hypothetical.
This is part of a plan to bring back inches, pounds, and the quarter-twenty.
I'm aware of the political landscape in the US right now. But I must ask. What exactly are the policy makers thinking? Do they hold some sort of delusions about the intellectual superiority of their race? Or do they believe that they don't need scientific talent, research and knowledge to be a great nation and civilization? Or do they believe that these deficiencies can be resolved with money alone?
I'm puzzled by autocrats beyond a certain limit. Their actions don't really seem to fit any logic, if their intention is to be become unchallengeable and unassailable. This seems like ceding the advantage to any future rivals.
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Are US citizens considered a race now?
I'm talking about those in power. Isn't that what they want?
Every day the US looks a little more more 1933 Nazi Germany when all the xenophobic polices started. What even is a foreigner in a country where virtually everyone is descended from foreigners and immigrants?
Some years ago I came to the conclusion that the US would ultimately consider it a security risk to employ mainland Chinese born people (or even just people who had family in mainland China still) in any classified or sensitive industry.
I think I've now reached the point where it doesn't matter. Capitalism itself has made maintaining any kind of technological or scientific edge impossible. You don't need to break into some lab or plant sleeper agents or even coerce someone who has family back in the home country. No, it's far simpler than that.
When the US developed the atomic bomb some in American policy and military circles thought the Soviets would never get the bomb or it would take 20 years. It took 4. The Soviet hydrogen bomb was detonated th eyear after the US detonated ours.
In that case, the Soviets did run a sophisticated operations but also a bunch of people just gave them stuff for ideological reasons.
Let's compare that to EUV. The US restricted both the export of EUV lithography machines from ASML to China as well as the most advanced chips. The second was a mistake (IMHO) because it created a captive market for Chinese alternatives and it became clear to China that it was in their national security interest not to be dependent upon the US for chipmaking or chipsd.
Now China doesn't need to do anything sophisticated. It just needs to throw a bunch of money at some key reserarchers and engineers from ASML and elsewhere and say "hey, come work for us". What are you going to do?
Also, the US likes to paint this picture that China engaged in industrial espionage. And maybe they did. But they did so with the full knowledge and cooperation of US businesses who outsourced to China knowing this was going to happen but hey, it increased short-term profits, so who cares?
At the same time as the US cuts science funding so Jeff Bezos can be slightly wealthier, Chinese universities are surging in global rankings for research [1].
There's no getting this genie back in the bottle. It's too late.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/us/harvard-global-ranking...
>but also a bunch of people just gave them stuff for ideological reasons
Which was rather infamously not used in the actual research but was gatekept and used to verify the work of the domestic scientists.
>Also, the US likes to paint this picture that China engaged in industrial espionage. And maybe they did. But they did so with the full knowledge and cooperation of US businesses who outsourced to China knowing this was going to happen but hey, it increased short-term profits, so who cares?
At the same time as the US cuts science funding so Jeff Bezos can be slightly wealthier, Chinese universities are surging in global rankings for research [1].
This is the crux of the issue.
We've allowed extremely short term capitalistic interests of the wealthiest of the wealthiest to dictate our national policy in a great many areas, including taxation, academics, immigration, etc.
I liken the situation to a game of chess - on one hand, you have a team of Grandmasters and a supercomputer taking the time to evaluate each move and understand the positives and negatives of any possible move. On the other hand, you have a pigeon, who is there because someone who has already been the beneficiary of tremendous luck has convinced their side that putting a pigeon on the board is good for everyone involved.
At this point it feels like the Trump administration is just trying to turn us into the hermit kingdom. Isolated, and brutally autocratic.
Oh, we're the John Birch Society, the John Birch Society
Here to save our country from a communistic plot
Join the John Birch Society, help us fill the ranks
To get this movement started we need lots of tools and cranks
https://youtu.be/pG6taS9R1KM?si=QqquYHFG2S7o7-73
Isn't this the same sort of thing that the Nazi's did?
America loves Nazis they’ve been obsessing over them for decades to the point they’ve been romanticized. And if there’s one thing Americans love more than not-thinking it’s romanticism and propaganda.
Americans loved Nazis in the 30s too, they never wanted to invade Germany and plenty held up Hitler as just the best guy who could ever be and saving Germany.
Tons of American leaders and industrialists and what we would now call "Thought leaders" openly and proudly talked about how awesome Hitler was and how great the Nazis were for dealing with the jewish problem. This wasn't because nobody knew Hitler was a hateful and Bad guy, they were proudly declaring how important Mein Kampf was to them and how well it described the "problem"
Henry Ford bought a local newspaper so he could print the fabricated propaganda "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" to an American audience. This is not a fucking joke, this is accepted history!
A decade later, Smedly Butler made credible accusations that several top Bankers had worked with the literal fucking Nazi party of Germany to overthrow FDR and install a Fascist government under Butler, because FDR was a communist or some bullshit. It was screamed and cried as a "Hoax" in the news at the time, but most historians agree that there was a conspiracy to do that, but it did not get close to execution.
These people only shut up when Germany finally declared open war against the US and started killing Americans and really only when the death camps became public knowledge and really turned some of america sour on the whole "The jews are the problem" thing.
But they never stopped hating. They continued their hate quietly, raising hateful kids and families, pushing local institutions to support hateful educations like "Slavery wasn't even that bad and the North was the aggressor in the Civil War" because they really are fine lying to your face. They fly the Confederate flag "for heritage" while they descend from french canadians in a northern state. They obsess over affirmative action "Taking up seats in top universities" as they actively avoid getting educated because education is a "Liberal propaganda" thing and meant to "brainwash" their hateful kids into being less stupid.
They build an entire alternative media ecosystem, going all the way back to Henry Ford's bullshit, and literally never ending, where THEY are always the victim, always suffering from oppression, always having a "War on christmas" or other horseshit for when their blatantly unconstitutional desires are shut down, or a business stops prostrating itself for them. They teach their kids that scientists are all part of a socialist satanic conspiracy to lie to them about everything from evolution to plate tectonics to (of course) global warming, and when that turns away supporters, they cover it up with a claim that science is all a fraud because the scientists want a "paycheck", as if there is any money in government funded science, because uneducated America is apparently so hard up and failing that a middling salary in a high pressure environment is considered worth selling your entire world for.
The US never atoned for Henry Ford, Charle Lindberg, and other Nazi loving capitalists.
They attempted a coup on FDR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
It has been mostly whitewashed in favor of "the greatest generation" and the WW2 hero narrative.
Restricting foreign scientists here is yet another way we are paying for this whitewashing and romanticizing of US exceptionalism today.
No, Nazis kicked out German citizens who they deemed to be Jewish
There are enough "enemies of the people" in the US at the moment that the MAGA leadership doesn't have to go after American citizens.
There's been rhetoric about how some Americans are not "real americans" but America seems a way off 1934 yet, and they're going about it in a different order. History never repeats, but it usually rhymes
Vance says anyone who didn't have ancestors in the civil war are not real citizens. https://www.yahoo.com/news/americans-civil-war-ancestors-gre...
And I suspect he has one particular side in mind
Yet still roughly half of America wants this.
Much closer to ~20%.
Just 43% of americans disaprove of the airstrikes, and voting intention is pretty much even (42%/47%)
Republican support has dropped 2 points in the last year.
>There are enough "enemies of the people" in the US at the moment that the MAGA leadership doesn't have to go after American citizens.
Tell that to any trans person that is an American citizen. They are literally trying to make "trans" into a terrorist designation.
Tell that to the many Latino American citizens who have been arrested by masked armed ICE agents, thrown into unmarked cars and taken away simply because of the color of their skin.
Official US policy is that Americans have nothing to fear. There are no explicit laws preventing American Citizens with brown skin from working in a school for example.
The US hasn't reached the level of "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" or "Denaturalization Law" yet, although you can easily see it's on the cards. The Brownshirts were around over a decade before then
Except this admin doesn't seem to strongly care about laws.
It is more than willing to implement its extreme nationalism via executive orders, regardless of what the law says.
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>Citizenship laws in the West are hardly very robust.
Guess you don't pay much attention. The administration has been stripping citizenship from naturalized citizens left and right.
They simply don't give a fuck.
I couldn't believe the surrogate thing you mentioned but it's true.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/chinese-billionaires-surrogacy-p...
We really need to wake up. China, India, etc. are walking all over us and we're still acting like it's the 1950s.
Interesting people are down voting you for doing little more than posting a WSJ article...
I kinda get why what I said could be viewed as controversial because my comment is clearly opinionated, but yours really isn't.
Would be interested in hearing from those don't believe this is something to be concerned about.
People are downvoting me because I said we need to prioritize American citizens over foreigners, which shouldn't be a controversial stance, but the problem is there's this white guilt that pervades American society and people jump to thinking you're a racist at the first chance they get (see the other reply on my comment for example).
China, India, etc. aren't stupid and they take full advantage of this and push the racist angle every chance they get.
I'll say it again though: people need to wake up. These countries know they don't stand a chance at defeating us militarily so they're going to try a psychological approach, in addition to underhanded sabotage.
I have another comment in this thread saying "great news" and it was flagged. That's how brainwashed Americans are at this point.
is not scary yellow chinese, and brown indians you need to worry about dude. Please put your priorities straight
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His regime needs the benefit of the doubt, but his behavior makes it clear that it doesn't actually warrant it.
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Does the 1 day old account have any type of source or information to back up this claim?
Yep, NIST does open, unclassified research. Hard to see the point.
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President Biden’s Executive Order 14117 is related
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2024-03-01/pdf/2024-0...
If it was done by any other administration you can assume it went through a few layers of professional bureaucrats that considered multiple alternatives. But based on persistent observed behavior of the current president you just have to assume the worst possible intent.
I am not the defend the worst president in the history of the presidents of all mankind but I work in scientific community and this particular news is not “new” - spans both parties.
EO 14117 resulted in 6+ months of work for my team
its real war time now, so makes sense
I know the administration was already doing that and largely xenophobic, it just also makes sense now that the same administration went to war
Last time I checked, only congress can declare a war.
Remind me again when was the last time congress declared war and how many other wars the US was involved in since then.
Do you think this is a good thing?
What specifically?
The fact that congress hasn't been involved in a declaration of war for a very long time.
and the President has complete control over the executive branch to lay off scientists
unrelated nuance then yeah?
The administration is doing what’s called “pragmatism”. Xenophobic will the reaction within society to justify it.
Nothing that NIST produces can be trusted. In modern times, NIST is effectively an arm of the NSA. The job of NIST is to add vulnerabilities to everything for NSA to exploit. It's no wonder that they don't want foreign workers. Industry would be better off completely ignoring them.
Not administration sympathizer but:
I think there are of course valid security concerns and this could be logical solution free of way more problematic issues of dealing on case by case basis.
On the other hand this will play more to people choosing some other country to advance their science aspiration and slowly but surely erode pool of talent for the US to help it stay dominant.
Practically the US have used people like Wernher von Braun on good scale and very sensitive areas and it worked just fine for the country. Qian Xuesen might of course have couple of words on the subject of course