Ax falls on elite group of PhDs training to lead U.S. public health labs (opens in new tab)

I think it's only possible to disregard the dumb American stereotype if you're from a coastal city. If you've spent any time anywhere else outside of major metropolitan areas in America, you know that there's a very strong strain of anti-intellectualism in our culture. That's nothing new. And in fact, in many places, it's something that people take pride in.

I wonder if this will have a similar effect to Brexit. When the Brexit referendum outcome was Leave, I was in Cambridge. The head of one of the largest departments at the university told me the week following the result most applicants who had recently accepted tenure-track offers changed their minds and declined. Several prominent faculty members also began making plans to move to the EU. Over time, however, these effects have become less noticeable. But major funding uncertainty is a big deciding factor when you are starting your career.

Not us anymore, we fired all the spelling researchers.

You approach it by coordinating en masse to come up with a small list of reasonable demands, get widespread consensus on it, switch from W2 to I9 and withhold both your federal taxes and your mortgage payments until the demands are met. If they wanna play chicken re: crashing the system, well that's a game that two can play.

Or at least that's what my rough draft looks like anyway. Though I suspect that hunger may end up being a more potent catalyst for political change than anything I can plan. Unless H5N1 gets feisty first. COVID was a warning shot, if nature scores a direct hit, that'll be plenty catalytic too.

As for why: establishing a Mars colony is going to require the kind of sacrifice that a democratic government would prevent. So, down with democracy.

Here's the thing: you and he are also wrong about the overspending, unaccountability, and the bureaucratic class.

Those things exist in about the same proportion they exist in any other large corporation, and is not special to the government. There has been a decades long campaign of Just Plain Lies to tell you otherwise. He is failing to seek out the waste, fraud, and abuse because they do not exist in anywhere near the numbers you imagine.

The government does not spend its money on employees. Those employees administer grants and spending programs. That is where the money is, authorized by Congress and depended on by industry and states. The administration is not especially expensive. To seriously cut spending you have to cut those things, and just as with the mass firings, you'll find that each dollar is actually doing something important.

Serious control over the budget requires a serious consideration of our actual goals as a country. But the last election sent the decidedly non-serious message "government bad" and everyone seems shocked that that is exactly what they are doing.

Nothing that is being done by this government is in good faith. All of the things that these people complain about are projections about the things they are doing or want to be doing.

Unfortunately a lot of seemingly switched-on people are still under the illusion otherwise.

> How can I both endorse a politicians approach to the world and disagree with every particular action?

It is because you have deeply misunderstand his approach to the world.

He has never demonstrated any desire to bring prosperity to anyone outside of his family. I don't understand how any of this is surprising. They told us exactly what they were planning to do in the Project 2025 plan.

> How can I both endorse a politicians approach to the world

You mean, like the proposed ethnic cleansing of Gaza? Claiming Ukraine started the war? Threatening to take Greenland by force? Alienating Europe? Withdrawing from Climate Agreement and WHO? Cutting funds to USAID? Overall, becoming the new pariah of the world?

The idiom "Actions speak louder than words" comes to mind.

People lie, some people lie as easily as breathing. But it is impossible to bear out a lie when your actions give a clear picture of your true intent and motives.

We're in the end game now.

Doesn't every generic Republican always support all of those things? Did you support any more normal Republican alternative to Trump, given his bad performance during the initial outbreak of Covid?

Perhaps it's time to re-evaluate your priors and how you determine which kind of politician to support. This isn't a direct endorsement of alternatives, but if you considered your material conditions I think you would likely not land on Trump/Musk being the right executors of your wishes.

The thing I'd offer that you could perhaps consider that the people who push the "starve the beast" rhetoric are generally not in favor of accountability or efficiency but simply grifters leveraging people's shallow understanding of how government works - and that's the earlier cycles, not just the current obvious one.

The thing is that the ordinary cycle of government balances political interests with the need to actually accomplish things in an imperfect fashion. Whereas "broad cuts" tend to allow only the politically connected to survive since cuts have no rationality beyond "this government makes no sense".

He's targeting things that are discretionary spending.

Most of the federal budget the president cannot just cut.