Red
Well-Known Member
“Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.”
For the most part, authoritarians don’t like the intellectuals of their societies. And often go after them early in their consolidation of power. We can certainly see this happening in Trump’s attacks on Harvard University. And he did say he “loves the uneducated”. Well, duh, of course!
But, as this piece in today’s The Atlantic points out, this is not just an attack on higher education in the United States. Trump is involved in a broad based effort to destroy human knowledge. Sound extreme? Sure does not seem so to me, IMHO. The Big Lie is a deliberate distortion of History. But science and medical science have also not been spared this rather insane effort on Trump’s part. It’s been very transparent, and very easy to see. Heck, the guy who wrote “The Art of the Deal” for Trump was of the conviction that Trump hadn’t read a book in years.
Anyway, I think this piece is spot on. And, while there are a fair number of Trump threads, this attack on human knowledge itself is ridiculous, and highly destructive. So I may use this thread for Trump’s attacks on human knowledge itself, a destruction somewhat lost in all the political trauma many of us experience in dealing with fascism arriving in the Oval Office
Making America Dumb Again? Why?! A good percentage, no idea the exact number, are apparently willing to embrace stupidity, and support Trump’s effort to destroy human knowledge itself….I’d liked to hear how Trump apologists/MAGA justify something so WRONG? But they can’t, nobody can.
www.theatlantic.com
The warlords who sacked rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.
Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.
These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.
By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.
Perhaps the most prominent targets of the attack on knowledge have been America’s institutions of higher education. Elite colleges and universities have lost billions of dollars in federal funding. Cornell has had more than $1 billion frozen, Princeton had $210 million suspended, and Northwestern lost access to nearly $800 million. In some cases, the freezes weren’t connected to specific demands; the funding was simply revoked outright. Johns Hopkins University is reeling from losing $800 million in grants, which will force the top recipient of federal research dollars to “plan layoffs and cancel health projects, from breast-feeding support efforts in Baltimore to mosquito-net programs in Mozambique,” The Wall Street Journalreported.
In some cases, the administration has made specific demands that institutionsadhere to Trumpist ideology in what they teach and whom they hire, or face a loss of funding. Some schools are fighting back—Harvard, for example, is suing to retain its independence. “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard’s president said in a statement.…..
……The Trump administration’s attack on knowledge is not limited to academia, however. Across the government, workers whose job is to research, investigate, or analyze have lost funding or been fired.
These are people who do the crucial work of informing Americans about about and protecting them from diseases, natural disasters, and other threats to their health. Thousands of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been let go, including most of those whose job it is to maintain workplace safety standards. Experts at the Food and Drug Administration including, according to the Times, “lab scientists who tested food and drugs for contaminants or deadly bacteria; veterinary division specialists investigating bird flu transmission; and researchers who monitored televised ads for false claims about prescription drugs” have been purged. Workers in the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service research team, who develop “tools to model fire risk, markets, forest restoration and water,” have been targeted for layoffs. The Environmental Protection Agency’s entire research arm is being “eliminated.” The administration has made “deep cuts”to the Department of Education’s research division.
The most devastating cuts may be those to the government’s scientific-research agencies, such as the NIH and NSF. According to CBS News, since January, more than $2 billion has been cut from NIH and 1,300 employees have been fired. One former NIH employee told CBS that “work on child cancer therapies, dementia, and stroke slowed or stopped because critical lab and support staff were let go.” The administration is also trying to halt financial support for projects that commit wrongthink, and has already drastically reduced the number of NSF grants.
For the most part, authoritarians don’t like the intellectuals of their societies. And often go after them early in their consolidation of power. We can certainly see this happening in Trump’s attacks on Harvard University. And he did say he “loves the uneducated”. Well, duh, of course!
But, as this piece in today’s The Atlantic points out, this is not just an attack on higher education in the United States. Trump is involved in a broad based effort to destroy human knowledge. Sound extreme? Sure does not seem so to me, IMHO. The Big Lie is a deliberate distortion of History. But science and medical science have also not been spared this rather insane effort on Trump’s part. It’s been very transparent, and very easy to see. Heck, the guy who wrote “The Art of the Deal” for Trump was of the conviction that Trump hadn’t read a book in years.
Anyway, I think this piece is spot on. And, while there are a fair number of Trump threads, this attack on human knowledge itself is ridiculous, and highly destructive. So I may use this thread for Trump’s attacks on human knowledge itself, a destruction somewhat lost in all the political trauma many of us experience in dealing with fascism arriving in the Oval Office
Making America Dumb Again? Why?! A good percentage, no idea the exact number, are apparently willing to embrace stupidity, and support Trump’s effort to destroy human knowledge itself….I’d liked to hear how Trump apologists/MAGA justify something so WRONG? But they can’t, nobody can.
The New Dark Age
The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself.
www.theatlantic.com
The warlords who sacked rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.
Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.
These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.
By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.
Perhaps the most prominent targets of the attack on knowledge have been America’s institutions of higher education. Elite colleges and universities have lost billions of dollars in federal funding. Cornell has had more than $1 billion frozen, Princeton had $210 million suspended, and Northwestern lost access to nearly $800 million. In some cases, the freezes weren’t connected to specific demands; the funding was simply revoked outright. Johns Hopkins University is reeling from losing $800 million in grants, which will force the top recipient of federal research dollars to “plan layoffs and cancel health projects, from breast-feeding support efforts in Baltimore to mosquito-net programs in Mozambique,” The Wall Street Journalreported.
In some cases, the administration has made specific demands that institutionsadhere to Trumpist ideology in what they teach and whom they hire, or face a loss of funding. Some schools are fighting back—Harvard, for example, is suing to retain its independence. “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard’s president said in a statement.…..
……The Trump administration’s attack on knowledge is not limited to academia, however. Across the government, workers whose job is to research, investigate, or analyze have lost funding or been fired.
These are people who do the crucial work of informing Americans about about and protecting them from diseases, natural disasters, and other threats to their health. Thousands of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been let go, including most of those whose job it is to maintain workplace safety standards. Experts at the Food and Drug Administration including, according to the Times, “lab scientists who tested food and drugs for contaminants or deadly bacteria; veterinary division specialists investigating bird flu transmission; and researchers who monitored televised ads for false claims about prescription drugs” have been purged. Workers in the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service research team, who develop “tools to model fire risk, markets, forest restoration and water,” have been targeted for layoffs. The Environmental Protection Agency’s entire research arm is being “eliminated.” The administration has made “deep cuts”to the Department of Education’s research division.
The most devastating cuts may be those to the government’s scientific-research agencies, such as the NIH and NSF. According to CBS News, since January, more than $2 billion has been cut from NIH and 1,300 employees have been fired. One former NIH employee told CBS that “work on child cancer therapies, dementia, and stroke slowed or stopped because critical lab and support staff were let go.” The administration is also trying to halt financial support for projects that commit wrongthink, and has already drastically reduced the number of NSF grants.
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