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Comment by whyenot | Hacker News Reader

This is surgery with a butter knife. It's going to cause a lot of unnecessary disruption and pain which could have been avoided with a more nuanced approach. What we are seeing with this and some of the new administration's other initiatives, is the abandonment of US soft power in the world.

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Huh, I like the way you phrased that: "abandonment of US soft power in the world". But I think there is also punitive aspect: they are intentionally "punishing" the people at NIH they perceive as being liberal and favoring other countries.

It's a good point. There is a target on the back of scientists who do research that is perceived as social science but is infact biology. Seems like they then construct myths of waste/corruption (just read this thread) and punish everyone.

the purge is real :)

Even if these idiots wanted subtlety they're too stupid to make it happen. They just want to do big, bold things but have no idea how to actually make anything better.

I knew a guy who was the president of a co-op house at UC Berkeley (basically, a student-run housing system decoupled from the university). They had regular meetings and he described one of the challenges: while most people who came to the meetings just wanted to vote on measures to buy food and change policies, there was a subgroup that "just wanted to fuck shit up". You know, like during a protest there are always some people who go around doing unncessary damage to unrelated/innocent businesses. They just enjoy breaking things and enjoy making people mad.

It's not a perfect analogy but I see Trump and his cronies as a "fuck shit up" contingent- they seem to genuinely enjoy making their enemies unhappy by breaking things, regardless of the societal cost of their actions.

I was at some of those meetings, though unlikely to be the exact same ones :)

At the meetings I attended the furious debate was whether we allowed a volunteer group cook food in our kitchen to feed homeless people. The interesting thing about this debate was that to make a decision, you had to have a position on what the coop was, Was it cheap housing for students, or was the cheap housing something that emerged from committing to a practice of cooperative behaviour?

Supporting the volunteers cooking in our kitchen came at a cost, many volunteers were homeless, some had mental health issues. I felt it was morally right to let them use our kitchen, And I know that for this I did get labeled by some as pursuing chaos as performative social justice points and to upset opponents, But from my perspective I sincerely believe it was the right thing to do.

When parallels like this are revealed, it really makes me wonder how the orange cult people and I ended up on such different paths, both as a response to dissatisfaction with the status quo, why have the stories they’ve been told resonated with them when they seem so inauthentic to me, and why is the more progressive ideology that seems reasonable to me so distasteful to them

I like this analogy. I've had the thought many, many times over the last 8 years that many people seem to like breaking things because their perceived enemies will be unhappy.

Was this co-op perhaps Barrington Hall? I had good friends that lived there while at UCB. To my young eyes it was absolute anarchy.

Cloyne. I think barrington had been shut down by then?

Was shutdown around '89. Was there from '80-84.

I doubt anyone would deny the policy actions themselves are clumsy but it's important to remember that a majority of the country believes they are directionally correct. People were desperate to escape the rot of the status quo and chose the high variance option. Michael Moore described it best when he noted that Trump was the human hand grenade that was being tossed in frustration, with a faint hope that things would settle better after the carnage.

>have no idea how to actually make anything better

True, but that is not their intention.

They certainly don't know how to do this stuff with any sort of grace or subtlety but perhaps more importantly... they don't care to.

They perceive no value from "soft power" stuff like the NIH and to a large extent consider it to be (part of) the enemy.

And most of their voting base really doesn't understand a single thing about the NIH. I mean, truly: the average American doesn't know what that program even is. Other than occasionally getting roasted for funding some ridiculous-sounding project like studying depression in chickens or something.[1]

So the only real "win" here for the new ruling party is to burn it down and then brag that they saved "the American taxpayers" $XYZ billion dollars.

(Which will wind up directly in the hands of the rich via tax breaks, and by definition can't really benefit poor people because they already pay little tax)

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[1] Most of the time these "ridiculous sounding" programs are actually pretty relevant and/or useful if you look into them.

I sometimes like to imagine if I was president ... how hard would it be to find someone in a given department who could lead it and know better than the communication restrictions as we have here.

Granted, I fear the folks in charge now DO know better and the side effects are intentional ... but I wonder if it would be possible to pick someone and get it reasonably right.

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