To my worried eyes this looks too much like Russia circa 2000 for comfort. Or Turkey early in Erdogan’s reign. Whatever happens, it will be painful and damaging.
The US House of Representatives has 219 GOPers that voted to pass certain legislation. The US Senate has 50 GOPers that voted to pass certain legislation and voted to confirm many appointments.
A large swath of the US public voted to put those 219+50 people into Congress and voted to put a convicted felon [1] and rapist [2] in the White House.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/trump-trial-deliberations-jury-te...
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/30/appeals-court-upho...
You can’t put this on a few. It’s the genuine desire of the American voter.
Edit: come on people, read things in context. I was responding to someone who was implying that a majority of American voters support this. To support that assertion about any President's policies at a minimum you need that President to have received a majority of the popular vote.
When third parties get enough votes that a President gets a plurality but not a majority you can't really infer anything about what a majority of voters want.
Even if all the third parties were on the same side of the left/right spectrum as the President's party you can't infer much because if those voters agreed with most or all of the President's policies they would have voted for the President.
Voted for Trump: 77.3M
Voted for Harris: 75M
Voted for other candidates: 2.6M
Harris + others = 77.6M, which is greater than Trump's 77.3M
I think there's also a lot to unpack in "support for this". What is 'this' precisely? Many of Trump's policies and actions get poor results in polls.
The die hard ride or die for Trump types that are fully on board with everything are definitely not half the country.
Haha true! Though if the pedantry gets in the way of the big picture then it's counter productive, one may argue.
> I think there's also a lot to unpack in "support for this". What is 'this' precisely? Many of Trump's policies and actions get poor results in polls.
Fair point. It's the person that got the votes and it could be argued that people should have known what they voted for, even if many votes surely were cast more in the spirit of voting against the other side, and it's a common effect that once a side is chosen then the mind downplays the drawbacks of the "own" side in an effort to justify the choice.
I saw a poll the other day with a question like, "since 1990, has violent crime increased or decreased?" with the usual significant / somewhat options in each direction plus a neutral option.
There's clear data that shows a substantial reduction in violent crime in the US since the 90s. Despite that, slightly over half the respondents answered that violent crime had significantly or somewhat increased.
Only 9% of respondents gave the "significantly decreased" answer that aligns to the data.
Don't marginalize the responsibility of the people in the democratic process. It's too easy to just blame those in power. It's the people who gave them that power.
They also think they are not always correct, not always unbiased, and possibly not always honest; and the bias tends to be towards either things that benefit the urban elite, or "luxury beliefs" that have disproportionate costs on other people.
And the basis for that power is that they are supposedly right about things.
Group X does action A_x due to belief B_x. That B_x isn't logical or whatever doesn't matter. Members of group X generally don't know that group X is wrong, and instead think their own biases are common sense etc.
People are not perfectly rational spheres in a vacuum.
That you can substitute in a lot of different values for X, doesn't change any of this.
Spite politics is the ultimate form of post industrial vanity. People are so well off and have so little to worry about that their biggest ask from their leaders is to bully those who they don't like.
Though I don't agree with it, I think many conservatives feel the same way about e.g. trans rights - that it's a form of post industrial vanity.
Some don't like anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-climate rethoric. Others don't like trans-rights, anti-hate-speech, anti-christianity rethoric. For either side, those are not real problems which their opponents are concerned about.
That's an underappreciated aspect of current public discourse.
Wouldn't economics and sociology PhDs have both more room for bias in their work, and tend to have power over the economy and society?
"Experts" have a lot of sway over the public sector and legal system.
The public sector has increased to take up a huge percentage of GDP, and the legal sector has also arguably expanded a lot in power.
The perception is that a huge amount of public spending is controlled by the public service, and they tend to defer to academics if the executive keeps them in line.
Expertise in this case isn’t cheaply earned. It’s the top of a pyramid of intellectual effort.
Maybe because this thread is about a math PhD (Terrence Tao)?
I’m also surprised you believe academic economists have much power. These days, most politicians from both parties in the US proudly reject more or less all of mainstream economics. Sometimes, the work of academic economists can have some small influence on decisions at the Fed, so I guess that is something.
Sociologists don’t even have that. They’re more or less just talking to themselves.
The government is a large organisation and its middle management is both vast and powerful.
And this huge middle management is obliged (arguably) to listen to academia unless otherwise instructed by politicians (who are too few in number and mostly not talented in steering large organisations so much as they are used to just going with the flow and taking the credit).
If we take specifically the field of economics for a moment (since I know a bit about this one), what are examples of "middle managers" sticking to the recommendations of economists?
Because it's not hard to make a list of ideas that economists generally love and pretty much everyone else hates: paying organ donors, carbon taxes, land value taxes, charging for public parking, getting rid of minimum parking requirements, allowing surge pricing of various kinds, unilateral free trade, cash transfers instead of in-kind benefits, and abolishing the mortgage interest deduction. Honorable mention to congestion pricing, which economists of course love, but is interesting because support for it actually went up in NYC after implementation; support was pretty low before implementation.
The lump of gdp fallacy in which an urban Cafe is equal to a factory is maybe something I think is an issue?
Trump supporters disagree with economists on Carbon taxes, low tarriffs, and immigration.
And even economists to some extent pick and choose the issues they push from the less biased body of work they produce.
I’m confronting your assertion that academics have power in our society and you haven’t put forward any arguments that they do
The post you responded to asked about a specific aspect, namely political power, of math PhDs.
Your response was to state that surely other PhDs have bias in their work.
Are you not realizing that that's quite obviously a bad faith argument? Somebody claims that A has B and your respond that C had D, insinuating GP made connections between A and D or C and B. They didn't.
It's quite common to argue like that, but you did throw around the "bad faith" term. You need to measure your own behavior by that standard when accusing others.
You mean there were protests against genocide? Oops did I do an antisemitism by calling it a genocide?
- https://www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2025/04/berlin-humboldt... (April 2025)
- https://astafu.de/node/589 (February 2024)
(Both links are German language - that should not be a problem anymore these days I hope)
I don't see why you refuse to even consider that there is more than 1 and 0 absolutes.
The majority of protests does not create such headlines. We have had smaller and larger protests in many cities(here in Germany). People meet, walk, speak, and that is fine and nobody complains. But especially in 2024 that was not all that happened.
I read similar students about threatened Jewish students at US universities.
It is, as so often, caused by a violent and vocal minority. But if a hundred protesters are peaceful and only one hits you on the head you still have a very bad day as the victim.
- https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/five-jewish-coll... (Oct 2024)
- https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/06/04/antise... (June 2025)
Maybe it is getting better, this report says that in 2025 things have improved for both Muslim and Jewish students: "The biggest takeaways from Harvard’s task force reports on campus antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias" -- https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/29/us/harvard-reports-antise... (May 2025)
Something we have evidence of Israel actually doing:
1. https://mondoweiss.net/2012/05/operation-glass-houses-idf-ag...
2. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/4/10/mustaribeen-israels...
Israel is probably the “strongest” nation in figuring out propaganda and mass disinformation campaigns. It is extremely easy to say an entire protest is invalid because of the actions of a few either legitimate or illegitimate protestors.
This is why this tactic is so easily deployed across any protest that seriously threatens states. We saw the US use this tactic in BLM protests of 2020.
Anyway these protests are legitimate despite the events that you’re mentioning happening. “Fed posting” is a thing people are slowly learning to spot.
Then you are vastly underestimating what CIA and FSB are capable of.
Or Meta, but they don't count as a state actor (yet).
Are you accusing me? I waited patiently for years building a profile here, for this one moment, to derail this comment, yay!
> Anyway these protests are legitimate despite the events that you’re mentioning happening
And so is the violence I linked to. If you have ANY proof whatsoever that the lecture hall and the Jewish student were actually attacked by Jewish saboteurs - despite the identity of the people involved known - please post it.
Otherwise you are the one doing the shitposting here.
> Something we have evidence of Israel actually doing:
So now you can just tell everybody to ignore any and all events that don't fit your narrative? How convenient!
And by the way, those "protests" would gain a lot of credibility if they were also targeted against Hamas.
Not at all. I’m saying that it’s useless to measure a protest based off of an action of one or two individuals. Which is always just one or two individuals.
What do you mean? Over half the country voted for this.
However your punt stands.
I think a lot of those voted for the racism not the economic collapse.
Not voting was a vote for fascism. It's not up for debate at this point.
>I think a lot of those voted for the racism not the economic collapse.
Um, having grown up in the south I can assure you a lot of these people are full of spite and love to see other people hurt.
They definitely voted for the economic collapse, they're just too stupid to see that it will affect them too.