Scientific conferences are leaving the US amid border fears
nature.com
nature.com
We will probably be skipping the US for two international conferences I have helped organize. Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec, Halifax are all great alternatives for larger meetings from 2027 ti 20??.
I am hopeful that my fellow Americans will elect a responsible, intelligent, virtuous leader in 2028 to be sworn into office on that day.
I know I'm asking a LOT. However that's one of, if not the most, important jobs in the world. We all deserve to have someone at least that qualified there.
I’d only put 60/40 odds on the 2028 election not being temporarily suspended due to a state of emergency.
If you think 60/40 is the right odds, you have some opportunities available - to make fake dollars, at least: https://manifold.markets/AndrewG/will-donald-trump-attempt-t...
I bet you could find more than a few people here to take the other side of 60/40 odds in a $100 bet.
Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term. It’s stunning. This is not a “I wouldn’t vote for a felon/rapist/whatever” type of red line that falls apart when you question it - they are universally against it. I sincerely think screwing with the election terms or dates to prolong Trump’s term is likely to cause immediate and shocking support evaporation. Enough to embolden Congress to do stuff, and he won’t have enough control over any armed agency to do anything to Congress.
I think that a Trump who is trying to avoid prosecution for $crimes is much more likely to throw his weight behind a GOP candidate in early 2028. Vance or whoever. That’s his best chance to stay out of jail (for prosecutions political or legitimate, doesn’t matter). After a few solid months of propping up another GOP candidate, Trump’s base will be even less rabid about him specifically. He’s going to be old news in late 2028.
If Trump doesn’t support another candidate in 2028, then I’d start to worry. I just don’t see it happening - the game theory very obviously says he must support a not-him candidate by early 2028, and doing that will make it even harder to pull off shenanigans.
I don’t want to argue against your lived experience, but somebody is buying all those hats and yard signs.
I just think it’s telling that all the rabid Trump supporters I know aren’t there. Zero of them want to see him on the ballot a fourth time or otherwise pull shenanigans.
I would expect him and his handlers to look to other authoritarian regimes to see how to safely have democratic votes without any chance of losing power.
But put a name there, and I guarantee you that they will immediately flip and claim that they have to support Trump, because the alternative is going to be literal communism or whatever.
They said the same thing on Jan 6, 2021. Trump supporters had a very negative visceral reaction to that day.
But on Jan 7, 2021 the propaganda machine started up again and minds began changing one by one. Today, the very people who were running for their lives on Jan 6 are in support of officially teaching in schools that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats -- the very lie that cause the violence of the day, that caused so many to say "I do not support this". Four years later they voted for it again.
So when I hear tales of a Trump voter who is against something Trump has done, I just remember that they voted for him again after he caused an insurrection against the United States in an attempt to illegally overthrow a free and fair election.
If a voter can find their way to excusing that, they will find their way to excusing a third term. Here's how: "Yeah it's not ideal, but what am I supposed to do? Vote for a Democrat? They would be worse. We are choosing the lesser of two evils." Works every time.
Then Trump does them, and when questioned about that, they shrug it off.
thats not excusing trump supporters but also you can maybe understand why there is a predilection to just hope it goes away (because often it does)
They were very, very angry about the Greeland/EU mineral deal, which is why Trump immediately slapped a huge tariff on EU imports.
But Trump only cares about Trump. As long as he's getting attention, being on TV, scamming people, and cheating at golf, he's perfectly happy. He has no long term goals beyond that.
Trump can spout random bullshit all day long and neither he nor his supporters care. Meanwhile, all his detractors have to spend mountains of time disproving everything that comes out of his mouth.
Like, I don't understand your point here, I said stuff Trump has done, not stuff he said he's gonna do.
Yeah because it didn't happen (yet). Standard Trump supporter maneuver. If you went back to 2019 and asked them if they'd support someone trying to overthrow the result of a presidential election, you'd get the same visceral negative reaction.
Once it happens, they find reasons why it's okay.
What were their thoughts and reactions after Jan 6? Clearly it was not a red line for them, but just curious if you discussed it with them right after.
It's happened with every other thing he's done.
They don't support it until he does it, and then when he does it, they'll be ready to die on that hill.
He isn't the candidate people who actually hold on to any principles voted for, because he very explicitly has none, and he expects his supporters to not have any either. The only thing that matters is winning.
Everybody ingests at least some of their worldview and opinions from external voices. That's a reality of humans trying to navigate a complicated messy world. But it was really shocking seeing family members hold reasonable view "A", until the local talk radio station sprays out "A bad, B good", and then bam, instant complete retroactive reversal like they never thought "A".
The problem isn't that a political party is acting as hive mind, the problem is that the core pillar of conservatism they practice is 'I will use the law as a weapon against you, but I will not ever be bound by it'.
Which is no way to run a society, any I cannot have any respect for its disciples.
I worked on a farm in middle and high school at the time. Every blue collar dude, farmers, truckers, tradesmen all listened to Rush at lunchtime.
So no, these people are not to be trusted, there can be no negotiations, and no further reconciliation until they change their minds. Being "conservative" and "right-wing" is one thing. Being pro-Trump after February 2025 (and arguably January 2021) is nearly a crime.
And on the original topic, whether Trump ultimately decides to enjoy being kingmaker for the next presumptive nominee (someone's got to be pitching him an Apprentice style TV show...) in order to enjoy a happy retirement is moot when the presumptive nominee for Republican candidacy is going to be someone with similar policy and behaviour extremes. In fact, in some respects the prospects for things like collaborative scientific research if someone who espouses Trumpism but isn't Trump are probably even worse due to them being less incompetent and less straightforward to flatter/bribe into declaring that actually $organization or $country isn't terrible wokes or dangerous criminals after all and they in fact have a very strong relationship. Vance seems to believe some of his schtick. Sure, the successor probably won't be favourites to win a free and fair election in which they're saddled with Trump's mistakes and lack his charisma or cult, but if you're doing medium term planning you can't count on that faction being out of power forever
The Republicans have until the mid-terms to either fix the next election or install a no-compromise terror state.
Terrorising the population with ICE, suspending due process, and removing habeas corpus all suggest the plan is the latter. As is the absence of realistic reporting and criticism from a (mostly) captured MSM.
Sooner or later confrontations with ICE will turn violent, and then it gets very dark indeed.
This is why you can't get a working conversation in america, because the exchange of ideas and information is broken.
Would it be a new term if elections are suspended, or would it just be his second term continued?
I would expect some kind of brief "emergency" suspension followed by rewriting the rules and then a glorious re-election of our Great Leader.
This will change in the lead up to 2028. This is a pattern we've observed over and over again with Trump supporters, they draw a line, and once it's crossed they adjust to the new standard without fail. Trump now enjoys more popular support than ever before.
> That’s his best chance to stay out of jail
Absolutely zero chance he goes to jail. Not just because he's a former president and a billionaire, but also because it's a political impossibility. Even assuming Trump can't make a third term happen, and that the Democrats aren't indefinitely disaffected, holding Trump accountable is something that Democrats have proven themselves consistently unable to accomplish, nor do they want to, because it's a losing political agenda.
> He’s going to be old news in late 2028.
That's what they said in 2022.
When 2028 rolls around, the 4 years of straight up corruption, illegality, and power concentration will mean you wont have the tools to enforce your rules.
You are at your strongest, least tired, least weakened now. Today.
There is no tomorrow.
Americans have never lived most of their lives in a banana republic, so its understandable that they act as if there is a continuation of things.
There isn't.
Do you think the current VP has the integrity of VP Pence?
Then the clear culmination happened on Jan 6, 2021, that is certainly correct as well.
Its structural, not individual.
This idea that its a strange aberration of faith - Trump isn't the problem, hes just evidence that the efforts to counter watergate are working.
Its the Bannons, Stones and Murdochs of the world that create the media world for someone like Trump to exist.
Unless you are an actuarial expert with decades of experience in hedging geopolitical risks, you cannot meaningfully trade such events.
Changing leaders isn't enough to fix it. You all broke it, and until you re-establish norms for democracy, reinforce the checks and balances, and start holding criminals who hold office accountable, it's not going to get better.
I wish you luck, you will need it :/
1. Apparently none sees the (to me obvious) downsides of a two-party system where there is only black and white with cold-war logic of being either with us of against us, no grey zones and willingness for compromise.
and
2. monetary interests are so close to the political system by construction: candidates need to raise a lot of money during their campaigns which they get from companies, private persons and which is tied to their person. How can you not assume that all those people who get into office (senator, president, even judges as I learned recently) with money they got from someone is not in a conflict of interest right from the start? To me it seems there cannot be any independence.
Behind this is the biggest propaganda and PR machine in history, with mass media, social media, lobbyists, think tanks and policy institutes, client journalists, astroturfing operations, and individual politicians all generating compliant prepackaged talking points that either support the corporate line or distract opposition with noise.
The problem is those who benefit from it are also those who would have to do away with it. So they won't.
The problem is that people are realistic enough to also realize they can't just magically, out of nowhere, break the two party system. The "vote third party!!" people are useful idiots, and we all know it.
The fall of the two party system must be thorough and deliberate. We cannot start at a presidential election, much less like two months before the election, which is always when the "vote third party!" people crawl out of the woodwork.
They don't actually give a single flying fuck about third party. Otherwise, they would vote third party locally and then on a state level so they can build up their reputation for the presidency. And, they would at least decide on which third party to support. But they're too busy fighting over each other to decide that. So they're delusional enough to think their .5% polling candidate out of 5 other .5% polling candidates can overthrow the dems and reps.
It has to be coordinated. Two party system has been build up for a very long time. We need legislation on PACs, on voting, on the electoral college, and we need the cultural shift.
Those people are the only decent voters in America. The others are complicit in a holocaust.
You think I don't want a third party to win? Of course I do. But I'm not stupid, and I recognize that just going out and randomly voting for a third party is just a vote for the status-quo. This is part of the reason (just part, don't worry) that Trump won.
Until you, and others, can name me one specific third party and then also make your community and local representation at least 50% of the same third party, then I don't care. I don't want to hear it, nobody wants to hear it, you sound stupid, keep your mouth shut.
We have to do the work if we want results. Yeah, that means you too.
Note that, unlike many other reform suggestions, this one is actually viable because Congress can mandate it nation-wide, like it does today with single-member districts. All it takes is majority vote in both chambers (and yes, they should throw the filibuster in the Senate out to pass this if that's what it takes).
But there's a more fundamental problem, where neither party has offered suitable presidential candidates in the last 3 elections. Your system needs a bit of a reset. The Democrats have to return to their roots, and the Republicans have to get over the Cult of Trump. But i'm hopeful in time these two problems will resolve themselves in time and not mutually reinforce each other. Trumps Republican Party has a hard expiration date, and the Democrats will eventually have to listen to their voters if they want to win elections.
Were we witnessing the same elections? Because I saw one side of the ballot as suitable 3/3 times, and the other side… not event close. Were they perfect, no, but the difference in quality has been baffling 3/3 times.
The actual reality is that many people have a belief system that is wildly different than their fellow countrymen. And whew, what a set of beliefs to act upon and force upon the world.
Please present good candidates with a progressive program and an inspirational personal charisma and people will vote for them over the fascist. Does anyone have a sliver of a doubt that an Obama would beat Trump with a leg tied behind his back?
One team has to put out someone like Obama, and the other team can put up someone like Trump who can promise the moon is made of green cheese, and be lauded as a truth teller.
Working on facts, having them verified, building policy is not a competitive advantage, versus being able to pick a narrative and create facts that your voters want to hear.
Instead we field unlikeable Clinton, borderline senile Biden, replace him at the 11th hour with unremarkable and un-primaried Harris... Then we wonder how even a dumbfuck like Trump can beat them.
I like Bernie, I think he has the right attitude and voice to fight this kind of media battle.
The debate on Bernie vs Clinton is fundamentally reorganizing deck chairs on the titanic. Any Democrat candidate is playing with their hands tied behind their back, even when they facts, policy, research, effort, and genuine ability on their side.
Fixing the dem primary process - very much yes. Recognize that the playing field itself is prejudiced.
They're not divisive enough. Not nearly enough racism.
Populism works because you need to create an enemy within that will cause your following, the majority, to feel as though they are persecuted. As though they are victims.
This was pretty easy to do with white conservatives, the majority, because you can just tell them brown people are stealing their money and causing crime and drugs or whatever. Oh, and also woke, because women on TV. It's a lot harder to do with the left.
I mean, who do you point to? The bourgeoisie, typically, but uh oh - they own everything. They fund your campaign, and your news. So... who is going to spread your populist messaging? That's, like, the most important part of populism. That's why Radio started WWII.
Also, in the US we have a culture of rampant individualism. We don't hate the bourgeoisie here because we all have a delusion that we're just temporary poor, not systemically. One day we will be millionaires, so we can't target them! That's us! All made up of course, all propaganda, but ultimately still a huge challenge someone like Sanders needs to overcome.
Someone making $100K+ in a prosperous urban area might not see those things as too big of a problem. But someone making the median US wage or less while home prices continue to rise and police departments extort locals and basic education standards fall while secondary education prices rise have a big problem both for themselves and their children. I am not surprised people weren't enthusiastic voters, because many saw it as lose-lose. When people are offered either a slow death or a fast death, many will refuse to choose at all.
Biden.... He was more or less a decent person, but sadly he was mentally unfit for the job. Especially for the last 2 years the world witnessed the painful cognitive decline of an elderly gentleman. Nor did they appreciate the gaslighting by the administration, and media, telling them that Biden was fine when he obviously was not.
Hilary..... I can't remember what was wrong with her, maybe it was a complete lack of charisma, i dont know. Either way she was a mediocre choice at best.
The bribing might be costly but people are more than willing to buy Trump's merch.
I pin my hopes on that failure continuing.
It's not even a new gambit. Putin did exactly this back in 2008 after doing two terms as president, swapping with his then-prime minister Medvedev for 4 years. Medvedev was also a nobody before becoming the prime minister, and there was absolutely no way he'd be elected if people didn't treat him as a figurehead for 4 more years of Putin's rule.
The US elected Biden after Trump's disastrous first term, and immediately followed up with Trump's totalitarian self-destructive second term.
The reality is Kamala is a black woman, and Trump has been attributing everything evil in the world to people who are not white. Are we going to play stupid and pretend that has nothing to do with it? Or, are we going to at least try to be honest with ourselves about the current state of American politics?
The reality is people like feeling superior to others, whether it be lighter skin looking down on others, or men looking down on women. And even those below not wanting their own to make gains (such as other women).
My immigrant non white grandmother told me she wouldn’t vote for Harris because she’s a woman. This is a woman who basically did what men told her to do her whole life, and I suspect she doesn’t like the idea that maybe she could or should have fought for more for herself (or her daughters).
It would take time to re-establish trust.
At that point, why even bother with the hassle and uncertainty?
Plus he said that he intended to make the changes such as his supporters would never need to vote again. Things have already been dismantled in such ways that it will be impossible to build them back as they were.
Not to doom and gloom you out of hoping for the best but the Rubicon is rapidly fading into the distance.
At a "Believers' Summit" event hosted by the conservative group Turning Point Action in West Palm Beach, Florida, on July 26, 2024, Donald Trump told an audience of Christian voters:
"You gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don't have to vote again, we'll have it fixed so good you're not going to have to vote."
He also said: "Christians get out and vote. Just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years. You know what? It'll be fixed. It'll be fine. You won't have to vote anymore my beautiful Christians."
As a European, I’d like to add that the impulse response on the collective memory will be multi-generational.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-trump-has-said-about-pursu...
Even the folks in Wall Street weren't this dystopian, come on.
E.g. if Harris (another, at best, incredibly mediocre candidate) would've won, the post-Harris Rep presidency would've been even worse than the current one. Until there's a competent non-Rep president, every single subsequent Rep government will be worse, until there will be no more fairish elections - and likely we're already there. Someone like AOC - not policywise, people don't vote on policy, it doesn't matter. Attitude-wise. It's abundantly clear the DNC hasn't learned (or more likely, doesn't want to learn), so the next president will be another Hillary/Biden/Harris candidate who will either lose or make the next Rep win even more decisive.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding. It could be helpful to point to actual policy failings of Harris rather than handwaving about mediocrity.
Simple misreading is not the issue.
The misread number was almost two thirds of the entire population. That's the sort of thing I'd expect someone to catch as they're saying it because of how absurd it is.
Being better than shit doesn't mean good.
Is that something you'd expect POTUS to catch because of "how absurd it is" or not?
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/15/politics/donald-trump-exe...
Harris misspoke. Trump believes the majority of the American population would have died in 2025 had he not been in office.
The reality is she was much more intelligent, better spoken, and higher qualified than Trump. That's not the reason she lost, and anyone proclaiming otherwise is stupid. Yes, stupid.
Pardon me, are we opining about same Harris that was widely ridiculed for her word salads?
> But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that—because, look, child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t—you know, there’s something … You have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.
I can't identify the train of thought here.
The reasoning is that she's a black woman, so obviously she's stupid, and then we work backwards to word salad. That's how that happened.
In reality, she's very well spoken. 99.99% of all the stuff Kamala says is very easy to understand.
We can cherry-pick clips that represent 0.00001% of her speaking career all day. The fact is she's an educated woman who knows how to publicly speak, and she knows it well. Any other narrative is an alternative reality, sorry.
The democrats, as they exist now, are almost "controlled opposition". There's much to wager that if they succeeded Trump II, they wouldn't undo 10% of the damage he's done. I fully believe Harris could have done a correct job at maintaining the status quo, but that's not what the people want or need.
The democrats should stop showing weakness and trying to build bridges with fascists, and instead speak 24/7 about how vile and stupid this entire circus is. Then they should start advocating for big changes that will hype Americans: free healthcare, extra taxes on billionaires, etc.
There are fewer identity voters than there are economic voters.
They'd win more elections if they trended centrist on identity and progressive on the economy.
As has been quipped after they lost the last election, "poor" is its own identity.
But I don't believe that they need to be "centrists" on identity. What even is centrism anymore? This country has shifted so far right recently. I think the issue is that their "rainbow capitalism social justice" sounds hollow (because it is) if they don't consider economical class as an important matter. Start there and you can keep fighting against -phobias and -isms, just don't make them the center-piece of your messaging.
'I think all Americans that pay their taxes and contribute to our country deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'
Focus on multiculturalism and personal automomy as a star-spangled, patriotic American characteristic.
GOP: 'So you want to give trans people healthcare?'
Democrats: 'We want to give Americans healthcare. Why do you want to take it away from any citizen?'
Start throwing more punches, instead of being surprised every goddamn time the other side does.
Ah yes, rather downvote because it smells of victim blaming than actually coming to terms with the reality which has played a huge role in a superpower to spiral into facism. Seriously? Now's not the time for that.
> The left must change what they want
>It could be helpful to point to actual policy failings of Harris
You still don't get it at all, I literally stated it verbatim. It's not about policies, it's about candidates, attitude, messaging, narrative.
> The left must change what they want because otherwise the right will throw a hissy fit and start opening concentration camps?
As explained, this is not the case, there isn't a need to change the "wants" - that's the least of the concerns. But let's disregard that and imagine a world where yes, that is the case. Are we going to say "nuh-uh, we rather have concentration camps than change what we want"? If that would be the reality (which it isn't) then that's how things are. Start facing the reality we live in.
They were both shitty candidates, and the Democratic party needs to be honest about that and what allowed them to be run.
The turnout just didn't happen. Too many people are fine with it.
He has support because he's a populist leader that's going to tell you the country is failing and we need to burn it all down and, of course, it's brown people's fault. And that type of populist messaging really resonates with stupid, poor white people. Which is a growing fraction of the US as people get poorer overall.
From what I've seen on the wider internet, the support for Trump is mostly a personality cult. The policies are getting support because they are his policies. They are on the Good Side, and the woke leftists are on the Bad Side. If Trump changes his views, most of his voter base will change with him.
The big question is: what's going to happen when Trump isn't in power anymore? Will he be able to motivate his voter base into a JD Vance presidency? Don Jr.? He's not getting any younger either - what if he dies?
With Trump off the stage the Republican party will almost certainly fall into a state of crisis. The traditional conservatives have been decimated, and the fringe extremists won't be able to rally the moderates. The entire Republican electorate will be up for grabs, and it won't be pretty.
> With Trump off the stage the Republican party will almost certainly fall into a state of crisis. The traditional conservatives have been decimated, and the fringe extremists won't be able to rally the moderates. The entire Republican electorate will be up for grabs, and it won't be pretty.
Trump represents traditional conservatives. With exception of tariffs, he is doing exactly what they wanted for years. Likewise, republican moderates never disagreed or opposed Trump policies, they just wanted someone more presentable for it.
I agree with you but the point I'm trying to get across is that a disturbing amount of seemingly right minded people actually support him now on a policy level. Maybe they always did and feel comfortable to say it out loud now? I don't know.
But the deportations, skipping due process, defunding science, excluding foreign students, dismantling aid programs, cutting ties with Europe and Canada, stripping trans people of their rights, pulling support from Ukraine, not following the Paris Climate Accords, etc. etc. It's all stuff I've seen people here genuinely argue for.
They always supported it. Lee Atwater put it best:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N***, N***, N***.” By 1968 you can’t say “N***”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N***, N***.”
That was how conservatives thought until about 2008. Then all of a sudden someone (Obama) came along that really opened the flood gates when it came to big conservative racist feelings. You'd still have groups like the Tea Party who would frame their views as fiscal, but then someone else (Trump) started saying the quiet part out loud, when he ran with the whole "birther" movement, an explicitly and overtly racist idea.
This set up a real ideological battle in 2015-2016. You had the neocons represented in Jeb Bush, who were happy to keep the quiet part quiet. But the foil was Trump, who came down his golden escalator shouting the quiet part: "Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers and we need to build a wall to keep them out". That message resonated deeply with Republican voters. Jeb, Rubio, and Cruz ultimately lost in 2016 because they weren't willing to say the quiet part, and after Obama, Republicans really wanted to hear it.
Since then, it's been a constant drum beat of conservatives attempting to undo all of the social progress of the last 50 years.
Now, this is not to say that everyone who supports Trump does so for the quiet part. But, MAGA is an explicit quiet part movement, so for those who don't, you have to figure out your exit ramp. The 2021 insurrection was a good and obvious one, but if you're right minded and still on board today, you better figure out your exit soon, because whatever fiscal policy you think you're voting for, you're not going to get it; this road leads to apartheid, genocide, and no where good.
The demographic writing is on the wall for the GOP, and they know it. Basically everything they do, from gerrymandering to trying to dictate who is and is not an American citizen, should be read in that light.
If you notice the people who defend Trump or his policies don't even really believe them. Half the time the defense is, "well he's not really going to do that" (Trump is a liar). Or, "that's not actually happening" (deporting citizens or permanent residents).
While these defenses are completely delusional, it at least highlights that most Trump supporters consider him untrustworthy. They support Trump because they're living in an alternate reality where everything is great and nothing bad has happened yet. Everything is always just around the corner, but they kick the can down the road in their head.
Outlawing abortion, mass deportation of immigrants, killing foreign imports? Great to claim on election rallies to motivate your voter base, but it was never meant to be achieved. It's far more efficient to milk a "the Democrats want to murder babies" tag line for a few decades than to actually ban abortion and have to deal with the fallout when their voters see women they know dying because they can't get the healthcare they need. Claiming to do something about immigration is more efficient than actually doing it and losing all support from the companies relying on immigrant labor. Claiming to be tough on China is far better than losing votes due to tariffs making all prices skyrocket.
Traditionally the Republicans wanted to get in power, do nothing, and blame the Democrats for their failures. Trump screwed this up by actually doing the stuff he claimed he was going to do, and it's either going to end in an electoral bloodbath for the Republicans or a fascist theocratic dictatorship.
It's difficult to imagine how those tariffs benefit the oligarchs behind Trump and the GOP. They also seem very much ready to actually ban abortion federally this time, and carry out massive deportations. No matter how destructive to the country and their image these policies could be.
And here's pure speculation on my part: when you listen to interviews of the current administration it's like they don't even try to make what they do look good, or defend themselves. They are acting with the same shamelessness you would see in Russia, meaning they probably don't fear the next election day that much.
As for the democrats, they're basically controlled opposition at this point. The geriatric establishment only cares about retaining enough donor money, and will absolutely not put up a fight against the republicans.
In a darkly humorous sense, Trump embodies one civic ideal better than others before…
It's really difficult to 'vote against patriot...' it's a lot less difficult to not vote for the 'spy on Americans, everyone is a potential terrorist' act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
Though there are some general ideas within that wide-reaching legislation that deserve a review and carefully constructed process, rather than a slip-shod 'fix it fix it fix it' now knee jerk law.
Well, even if it wasn’t Constitutiionally impossible for Congress to bind itself in the future this way, it would be impossible to enforce such a subjective rule. (And e en if you could enforce such a rule on formal names, it wouldn't stop informal names with emotional appeal from being popularly used, regardless of the formal name.)
They could simply play golf that day or meet with their constituents.
None of this is to defend the democrats much either. They have had their heads up their asses politically in so many crucial moments that they did a lot to facilitate the voting in of this bullying orange buffoon, and currently, they're just barely raising the bar from a bare minimum of effort in trying to fight some of this president's more destructive policies.
Then there are the top-level Tech CEOs and how they're so grossly bending over and presenting their asses to the new administration. With Musk at least there's an element of authenticity to it since he's been espousing the views he currently shows off for quite a long time, but with people like Bezos and Zuckerberg, and others, the cynical and fundamentally cowardly about-face is particularly grotesque to watch.
the fact that roughly half of of the electorate is fine with how things are as well as virtually all of the republicans in the senate and the house are too "scared" to do anything (complete BS as this is the very definition of their job) is really an embarrassment of civilization and humanity - apes are more evolved than we are
The issues is that Dems must bring their A game, to compete against a clown squad that can and will fabricate issues that havent happened, and force the dems to debate on it.
This is also a thought experiment, not a real issue, because Americans do not have that long a time horizon.
The strongest, most unified, and capable you will be is now. By the time elections come around, you will be hounded, disorganized, isolated and unable to coordinate.
Huh? Harris campaigned with Dick Cheney. She removed torture from her platform to do so. She promised to keep arming Israel. She promised to be more harsh on immigration than Trump. She warbled about having "the most lethal military" at the DNC.
This was all tacitly endorsed by the party. So, how did you get the impression Democrats running from the right?
But because they are planned in advance they might be even more careful then. They won't just take the status today into account, but also their fears of how much worse it could get.
More than ever, it feels like America comprises two very different peoples.
Also, while there are a lot of people unhappy with your state, I wouldnt say the same for your citizens.
I may have to travel to the US this year with my family, for familial reasons, and it makes me more nervous than usual I must admit.
I am just trying to gauge if there are some criteria for pulling people in closed rooms.
Canada is no better, if anything they're worse in this regard.
The conferences and scientists leaving are the results of decades of policy undermining education and human rights, coupled with the rise of the alt-right, normalization of racism and misogyny, with a soupçon of neo-nazism that allowed a populist regime to rise to power. All of that was the pile of flammable things. The extrajudicial deportations, conferences and scientists leaving, and tourism crashing are the first tendrils of smoke rising in the corner. It's not too late for America to fix it.
For a concrete example, the stock market is going up and down every time the tariff threats change tone, but the layoffs that the tariffs will make inevitable won't be done until companies run out of financiers who can be convinced the setbacks are only temporary.
I’m not saying I agree, just clarifying the point of the previous comment.
It is annoyingly typical that they managed to interview a "historian who studies international conferences" yet fail to contextualise how large 6 conferences is in the scheme of things. Thanks to the Magic of the Internet [0] I can see that hundreds of thousands of conferences have taken place since their first appearance in the late eighteenth century which isn't that informative (averages to >333/year over 3 centuries I suppose).
[0] https://www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/profile/8008585/jessica-rein... & https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/52195/1/BJH2300063_R.pdf
The fact that 6 of them found this a big enough issue to move their conferences out of the U.S. is a huge deal.
The real impact will be felt 2-3 years from now.
I can say that this is definitely an issue in converastions for me.
[0] https://www.404media.co/hacker-conference-hope-says-fewer-pe... OR https://archive.is/QWmxO
Ignoring the original topic and the rest of the comment, this part sounds like actually a useful thing?
If the different groups don't converge, that suggests that at least one of the consensuses is being driven by something other than verifiable facts (groupthink? conflicts of interest? politics?). Which I'd think is a useful thing to bring to the surface like that.
Africaaners are enthusiastically welcomed and coming in droves, everyone else, quite the opposite.
Should tell you everything you need to know.
My colleagues outside the US say that a big part of why they are bailing on the US is the public response.
They see France protest over their own internal retirement politics. They don’t see the US public protest over global destabilization through our politics.
It isn’t just Trump. The American people are completely failing to read the room.
So I am done supporting my fellow Americans as much as possible too. Enjoy your conference randos, but fuck me food and shelter and healthcare seem a bit more essential.
Certainly some people must be doing something but it's notable that your response is the exception in a sea of people sharing the reasons why they've decided to do nothing.
Take a day off work to go to a rally or peaceful protest? “At will” employment means you can be fired the next day, no reason given. You got fired? Virtually all workers in the US get their health insurance through their employer, so now you and your family just lost access to medical care. It’s a really rough job market in many sectors, so it could take a few months to get a job. But since you got fired without cause, you can at least try to claim some unemployment benefits. In California, that maxes out at something like $450 a week.
Meanwhile in France if they want to fire you they have to give like 3 months notice (or pay you out for that time). Healthcare is socialized so no worries there. And if you still can’t find a job in a few months IIRC there’s fairly reasonable social benefits available.
No logical breakdown from an armchair is going stop parents with hungry kids.
This is the failing to read the room part I mentioned. Our biology is composed of biology not philosophy. It is self selecting. It’s biological imperative is select self.
Ok good you got some sort of Excel sheet breakdown. That’s just words.
This is what I’m talking about; American public is so dissociated due to economics that straight up ignores externalities. 8 billion people are the externality and it’s going to be hard for 300 million to ignore them and live in their narcissistic bubble much longer. Third world countries have rebuilt and don’t see the specialness in Murica or the point in sewing their shirts if they’re going to be so low affect.
Americans have to change not because of some philosophical position but because of physical reality not really caring about the excuses of 300 million; only half of which is cogent, and half of that actually intelligent. It’s not looking good, Bob.
That’s why other countries have social security. It provides freedom and courage.
This is the kind of exceptionalism that got you into this mess. You don't think things are stacked against the populations in countries like Turkey and Serbia?
Yes of course France is very different in terms of the freedom of the population, but why is that? Because they demanded it!
Activism IS expensive, its what people default to when other options have failed.
I mean consume less media. Stuff.
Take burden off workers in the sweatshops and learn to sew a shirt. How many new shirts does a person need a year? 2-3? That’s like what, a cold December?
Be a human not a battery in a Matrix pod propping up ad companies and Hollywood.
We live in a Newspeak bubble; it’s freedom to stare at screen.
Local culture in the US is hyper-normalized around money making metrics.
Boomers did all the drugs and lived. They convinced GenX and Millennials to Netflix chill, order grubhub and watch AI content
It’s so bizarre
Edit: this is what gets attention not blocking roads https://finance.yahoo.com/news/target-badly-misses-on-earnin...
Presumably they're working there because it's the least-bad option? If so, removing it so they have to go with the next-least-bad option might not be much of a help.
This answer is a euphemism for “don’t rock my boat.” Because if they ain’t sewing your shirts, you are. Your freedom from such is due to blowing Vietnam (and elsewhere) to a crater, fostering existing conditions. Not exactly informed consent.
The rest of the world doesn’t buy this analysis. They lived being oppressed by US military. They see Americans as the Taliban, not a great white hope Americans have been propagandized to see themselves as.
We know; you’re scared of change because you have seen your lived experience and know you cannot grow a potato.
But you’re just a meat suit and your personal story and literacy aren’t anyone else’s concern. And that’s under the political norm. You prefer no guarantee of healthcare. The risk someone else will obsolete your research. Oo so titillating.
Fine, have it your way. Let us continue under American norms where I can give zero fucks your meat suit exists.
Fortunately for me I have generational wealth thanks to the building and auto booms in the US, and EE degrees, hands on building useful machines and technology. SWEs exist so long as open compute platforms exist and there’s no guarantee governments around the world will forever allow that.
Should you find yourself shut out of employment opportunities, thoughts n prayers.
Ahhhh, the primitivist apocalypticism of the bourgeois socialist.
The reality is that it's not that hard. It requires learning new things and getting out of your comfort zone, lowering your expectations a bit and not expecting to do one thing and be done. This is how protest movements have always been.
Find something that aligns with one of your values and show up. Learn about more actions, join a chat group or calendar, and find what you can go to. Do not expect there to be one massive action that everyone shows up to first time. Do not burn yourself out.
Humans are social. Just showing up on the street reminds people that things aren't OK and there is something to protest about. Over time this builds people's consciousness and more people practice taking collective action.
What I found upon arriving was an unserious mob of hippies laughing and taking selfies to post on social media. I'd made signs supporting the rule of law. The signs of the other participants were an unfocused smattering of various political goals from "tax the rich" to banning Teslas. They included what I thought was an excessive about of profanity and crude insults. I think these are unserious people and what they're doing is performative and utterly pointless.
I do not see any viable action for individual citizens to take. Everyone out there clamoring for people to do something is just pushing their own political agenda. We had an election, one side won, that's how things go, ok. What's happened since however is a clear violation of the US Constitution in more ways than one can count, but it seems there is basically no one aware of or concerned about this. I feel like I'm at a football game where one side just took out a gun and shot the referee and while he lies on the floor bleeding to death both sides are still arguing over whether there was a foul or not.
You have to find your people. It can take a while. Change takes time, big social movements were decades into the making in the fringe before they reached the mainstream consciousness.
Get involved with your preferred local political party. Push for policy preferences that won't drive turnout for the opposing party and won't give that party a chance to nominate a clown and then still win.
Going to protests is usually not much fun. There are all kinds of people there that you might not feel much in common with. People will make signs that focus on things you don't care about. This is normal! Protests can also easily burn a person out, so people try to have fun if they can because it's important to sustain pressure. The fact that someone dresses up, has a joke on their sign, meets a friend and smiles, or takes a selfie is not an indictment of the person or their protest.
Resist the urge to wallow in contempt for those people, particularly when you haven't done anything that has been effective.
1. given a sober, nonpartisan review of past history, how far is too far for this administration?
2. what are you willing to do to stop it, how much are you willing to sacrifice.
i suspect that nothing the administration has done to date really clears the first bar. be prepared for the day it will, save your energy till then.
The only thing you can do is convince people, I think. Most folks are trying to stay in their bubble.
You don't think this is completely by design? Social media is probably the most powerful cultural force that every existed, by an order of magnitude. Just flood instagram with quirky posts about protesting with your favourite Marvel superhero franchise quips, and The Algorithm will take care of injecting it into the brains of five hundred million people before lunchtime.
Then they're not looking.
They see weekend warriors focused on their paychecks.
They don’t see coast to coast collective pushback for long term stability. Sure, America is big and pockets of tribal thought.
And so it’s unreliable. A hodge podge of asocial cults flip flopping around the rules every 2-4 years because of its distributed, async social nature, does not make a reliable ally.
Still not reading the room.
The risk of being turned away at the border always existed.
Yes it’s drastically increased now, but that’s a quantitative change which will have a quantitative effect.
What we are seeing now is a qualitative change in traveling behavior and that’s reflecting the qualitative change in the severity of punishment that may occur if there is a problem while trying to enter.
We've long dreamed about spending 3 months in the USA. Driving across Montana. Living in NYC. Just being there, absorbing it all. (We've both been a bunch of times and love it.)
We're both white Australians. Middle-aged. Low risk. But there's no way I'm travelling to the USA now. Why would I bother? If I need some North America I'll go see Canada. Or we'll just visit Europe.
The 'interrogation' before even boarding the flight was just ridiculous. And the process repeated after landing. Jeez.
It's been this way forever, according to them, they're never going to even bother now.
I was born in the Midwest, have lived my entire adult life in SF, and recently was relieved to get my permanent residency in Canada - moving to Vancouver, BC soon. My co-founder (who is Canadian but has lived in California for 25 years) and I know we won’t be able to attract world-class talent to a country that is trying to go back in time to pre-Enlightenment era.
Well done everyone. Well done.
For those without a choice, no threat of punishment/deportation will deter them.
For those with a choice? Arguably the people a country would want to visit/do business with/etc?
The choice is clear: the US is hostile and to be avoided.
In 2017, a friend doing his PhD in artifical intelligence in Germany was made to undergo a thorough interview at the border to determine if he is a threat on account of his work. Again, this was absurd to say the least.
In this March, my SO (French) chose to not attend a tier 1 conference in AI where she was going to present her work. She, having the brains for both of us, was prescient enough to cancel her trip in Feb-March, a bit before the current border policies came into full force and europeans were detained.
I have never gone, nor will I ever go to the United States. Not for scientific purposes or leisure. For over a decade I have been voicing concerns about hosting conferences in a country which is inaccessible or hostile to a vast section of the scientific community. I am glad to see this shift.
Plus cryptocurrency.
I mean.. it's still the USA.. bad government or not
But , yes! America is as good as ever for white men!
Most scientists are rational people. If they obey US immigration rules, they SHOULD never have a problem. There have recently been a few horrifying stories where this wasn't the case, but those are the exception and not the rule.
It's crazy how common the meme of "aloofness signals intelligence" has become among the folks at the top of the bell curve.
Typically folks who attend conferences fly over, stay the week, maybe even stay for another week as a vacation, then head back.
If anything, this is in the territory of acquiring a temporary visa.
Not that I would be surprised - given the lack of due process, it's easy to miss the fact that someone is actually a citizen. And of course, Trump has signed the unconstitutional executive order mandating that ICE should treat citizens that acquired their citizenship by jus soli be treated as non-citizens (if they were born on US soil to non-citizen parents) - so he clearly intends to deport some citizens.
I suspect not.
Sure, they SHOULD never have a problem. But, increasingly under Trump, they MIGHT have a problem despite this, especially if they are not white and/or come from a country that Trump is currently feuding with, and/or have publicly spoken out against Trump, Netanyahu, or their allies. One shouldn't base any serious decision on how things SHOULD be.
Also, these things are organised in advance, often years in advance. Honestly, who knows what it'll look like a couple years down the line.
You made a political statement here that might not be flamebait but is just as careless of reality as flamebait: not only because it ignores the number of people affected in each story (in the worst case, 50 people who literally followed the legal immigration process and still got "deported" to prisons in a different country than the one they came from [1]), but because your idea of "a few" is not mutually exclusive to someone else's idea of "too many". Your "SHOULD never have a problem" is a motte to the `most likely won't have a problem` bailey.
[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/50-venezuelans-imprisoned-el-salva...
I thought nature was about publishing research. This reads like a political opinion piece but is published as "news"?
The author has other similar articles like these about the "US brain drain":
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01540-y
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01489-y
What would help me get an accurate picture is how many conferences are typically held per month in the US and how has that number changed but instead we get fluff like:
"Some meetings have been put on hold" - which meetings?
"Several academic and scientific conferences in the United States have been postponed, cancelled or moved elsewhere" - Which conferences, what % of the total? more specifics?
"Organizers of these meetings say that tougher rules around visas and border control — alongside other policies introduced by US President Donald Trump’s administration — are discouraging international scholars from attending events on US soil. In response, they are moving the conferences to countries such as Canada, in a bid to boost attendance." - Which organizers?
EDIT: I found this resource which would be interesting to examine for trends: https://conferenceindex.org/conferences/science
EDIT2: there are some specific anecdotal examples towards the bottom of the paywalled article. This is still not meeting what I would consider accurate non-opinionated reporting.
Or would you mind sharing a snippet that expressed any political belief of the authors?
I could not find either
As for your specific questions, they are answered even in the paywalled version. Just keep reading past the first sentence
Nature does both: scientific news and scientific literature.
> Which conferences, what % of the total? more specifics?
This is probably the paywall getting you, because many specific conferences are listed.
> At the moment, there are no data available on how widespread the issue is
(Not surprising, remember it’s only May!)
Also, at the end of the article they mention some other conferences that seem unconcerned
The immigration crackdown is exclusively for illegal immigrants, in particular illegal immigrants who have been charged with crimes. Unless your conference is for illegal MS13 gang members you have nothing to worry about.
Then there's the other issue where the PUSA continues to demonize allied countries. Clearly something is wrong. So why bother travelling to the US again?
It seems reasonable that border control will someday make a mistake, detain someone, and then let them go, but this is rare enough that there aren't any recent instances of it, and it's not an ongoing problem.
You can say that's only one guy but if you are attending a conference do you really want to deal with that stuff? I wouldn't especially want the border force checking my phone for wrongthink about the dear leader.
You conveniently omitted the part where it says it was an accusation that was dropped. And no, exercising free speech rights, in private messages of all places, is not a crime. Especially when "hateful and conspiratorial messages" is just codeword for criticism.
My understanding is the refused entry is effectively the punishment. You wouldn't try him here, generally they try to have foreign nationals charged with the US crime in their home country, and it probably wasn't likely to happen.
Lastly a friend of mine in college was arrested by the FBI for a joke on social media during the Biden admin. They arguably take online behavior more seriously than in person
This makes no sense to me whatsoever.
I suspect the opposition party is literally just fear-bombing social media with what ifs and AI slop to further divide folks.
But if some conferences or even colleges full of people susceptible to that kind of misinformation begin to fail, I'm all for it.
Are the chances of getting deported high? No of course not, but America is certainly not rolling out the red carpet for international scientists right now.
Yes the rest of the world is wrong and Trump has the truth.
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/trump-musk-f...
There were a few other stories that made the news like a British citizen that was prevented entry to Canada and then arrested trying to return to the US (who wanted to work illegally in Canada but admittedly treated very badly by the Americans).
- https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-rele...
"Claims that CBP is searching more electronic media due to the administration change are false. CBP’s search numbers are consistent with increases since 2021, and less than 0.01% of travelers have their devices searched. These searches are conducted to detect digital contraband, terrorism-related content, and information relevant to visitor admissibility, all of which play a critical role in national security."
- https://www.trade.gov/feature-article/march-2025-air-passeng...
"Non-U.S. citizen air passenger arrivals to the United States from foreign countries totaled:
4.541 million in March 2025, down 9.7 percent compared to March 2024.
This represents 87.3 percent of pre-pandemic March 2019 volume."
In Canada there we also have a lot of people with strong feelings/emotional response to Trump's 51st state nonsense and tariffs. There is a real feeling of betrayal. There are practically zero issues with Canadians traveling to the US.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/250522/dq250...
"In March, Canadian residents returned from 2.7 million trips to the United States, representing a 24.0% decrease from March 2024 and accounting for 63.9% of all trips taken by Canadian residents in March 2025.
Meanwhile, US residents took 1.2 million trips to Canada in March, down 6.6% from March 2024 and representing 81.3% of all non-resident trips to Canada in March 2025. "
Basically the worries are real, fueled to a large extent by these sorts of articles, and in my opinion politically motivated (and I don't like Trump either) but the likelihood of running into problems is small and unclear if larger than it ever was.
very true based on my own observation. Source: I and many acquaintances I've know have crossed the border multiple times. It's completely the media.
Fair enough. (more accurately it's the gullible masses )
I'm sure the CBP would never dare to lie about such things in a way that potentially puts their egomaniacal boss in a more favorable light than he deserves.
A few things to consider:
- Organizations take a while to change. Is it more likely that the CBP is operating more or less as it has been or that it had some dramatic changes?
- Searching phones takes time and effort. To scale up this in a significant way while still supporting similar amount of traffic would require more people? extended waiting times?
- Do you know people who travel to the US? Have they had their electronic devices searched? Have we seen a surge of stories about electronic devices being searched? The numbers they claim are less than ~450 a month (0.01% * 4.5M). Do we have evidence to suggest the scale is significantly different?
- The CBP could simply have said nothing. What would be their reason for explicitly addressing this question? If it's a lie wouldn't they be concerned e.g. with needing to deal with this down the line? Do you think Trump reads these reports and rewards some person in the CBP for this? Feels very unlikely.
- CBP is a huge org. 65k people or so. If there was some major change or lie then presumably it'd leak somehow?
And you don’t need high numbers to produce a chilling effect you just target the right people and let others see: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/us/politics/hasan-piker-t...
That's certainly your right and I get where you are coming from but
> our enemy.
Calling the US your "enemy" is a pretty strong stance, especially considering how deeply tied our countries are economically and culturally.
Don't want to visit? That's fine, but let's not pretend for a second that every American supports all the things you oppose. Only a plurality, not a majority, of Americans even voted for Trump and more than 75% of us still consider you an ally.
But you might want to lay off the media and tone down the rhetoric and drama a bit. Shit like that is why things are the way they are now.
And these educated scientists are afraid.
It's already half way around the world for most and it's absurd to the rest of the world to pay $200 for a meal which can be beaten by most of the developed world...
But no, clearly tsa border control or political wind of the week...
e.g. https://healthjournalism.internews.org/article/decolonizing-...