MIT Current Graduate Student are 41% international.
Maybe opposing points of view should pick better candidates that will actually win elections. That's how it works, right?
I’ll take the bait. I think we need less electoral fetishisation. Our republic is woefully deficient on selection by lot, something which would seem to benefit e.g. our judiciary.
> opposing points of view should pick better candidates
Totally agree. But the primary-by-election system demonstrates, in a microcosm, why defaulting to electing everything isn’t a good strategy.
Well, what should a democratic society do when that democracy votes to overthrow it and do fascism?
You also have to take a good luck at the unelected legislative power of the supreme court, those clowns aren't doing democracy any favours.
I'm asking what should happen in such a scenario. Should a democratic society be able to vote to nuke their least favorite city? Should they be able to vote for slavery? Should they be able to vote to legalize raping kids?
What should a democratic populace not be able to inflict upon the less powerful segments of society?
We either accept "there are some things you shouldn't be able to democratically vote for" like, say, the Holocaust or reinstating slavery, or we do not.
You added Trump to the conversation, not me.
Most Trump voters didn't. A sizeable fraction have openly agitated for, and supported, violently overthrowing our elected government.
Less so when they elect/appoint them to national-level leadership.
Regardless what would you have us do? More autonomy for states? You can’t go out alone, and we have a nice red-blue state now to base a division on.
No state is a monolith.
Because blaming a foreign country for your woes just doesn't happen.
who in mississippi is blaming california for their problems, other than state politicians who think that is effective political rhetoric? all of the voters i know can read past that BS even if we have different political ideology.
idk this is just my experience growing up there and then later studying the south as an academic. we are used to being condescended to.
is that who you’re talking about?
I’m literally 10 toes down on the ground trying to do exactly the thing that everybody says should be happening which is democratizing community development and nobody gives a fucking fuck
they will show up when you give them resources but never step up to lead after
I’ve started so many goddamn community things but the second I pull back from them to let others lead nobody picks up the slack
I’m excruciatingly done with over and over and over trying to help people take care of themselves
I challenge this.
I think the TV media, social media, and politicians like to make us feel like we are very divided because that's what gets "the base" to give a shit.
But if you throw away all of the garbage on TV and the garbage online, how divided are we? Really?
I think if you strip away the distractions, the people in conservative Florida have a lot more in common with people in liberal NY than one might assume.
These places aren't homogeneous in their political tastes.
I live in a northeast blue state, but there are rural pockets that are still heavily MAGA. And I'm sure Mississippi has liberal enclaves.
That being said, I don't know what the "solution" to this problem is.
Democracy works, we just have bad partners right now.
Complaining about the outcome of an election is not equivalent to advocating for non-democracy.
Much of what the US executive has done to intimidate foreign residents is illegal if not anti-American, such as revoking visas for writing op-eds in a student newspaper that the political leadership dislikes.
The gutting of funding at various universities was also done as political punishment.
So, I'm not sure what your point was.
First Pass The Post is democratic, but the worst way of it. In most districts, 40-49% of voters are disenfranchised by gerrymandering.
Mixed Member Proportional is far more representative. If you assume certain minority groups vote as a bloc, then you can't gerrymander them away like our current system does. The proportion of people not getting representation is capped by 1/number_of_reps.
The whole "republicans in Senate stop the government from doing anything" needs to end. Parliamentary systems means the legislative body and head of state agree to work together. Our system means deadlock most of the time.
Finally, "senior members" of the parties in both houses are the only ones who decide what bills can be voted on. That's not democratic. Every member should be able to bring at least some bills up for an up-or-down vote. Make them vote down "healthcare for veterans" instead of killing it in committee or amending it to add "only if you strip women of bodily autonomy".
What I said applies to both parties. We're not really all that different but all the incentives align towards pleasing extremists. Do you really need any more evidence of this than people getting shot and people/press generally being okay with it?
Anything you build can be exploited against you when you're on the other side of the power balance. The solution is truly moving politics to the center.
Democrats who push gun control at the cost of everything else -- such as the possibility of turning Texas blue -- are a big reason why the party lacks power to influence anything else.
MMP means the person running on M4A gets ranked in the middle by everybody, which is enough for a seat.
You're responding to someone who's explaining to you that this is exactly the problem.
If an extremist can do whatever they want if they happen to excite people with a "platform that broadly appeals to enough Americans", then the problem is structural, and has to be addressed there, or literally everything you do and have can be undone by the next moron that riles people up again.
Anything.
Your patches will be the sources of your next exploits.
Some things are better. Game theory demonstrates this.
Especially when the suggestion is to talk about changing a bunch of variables at once.
That's akin to a revolution, which historically work out badly for the people clamoring for it.
Either we overhaul the system that got us to this point or we concede.
I'm tired of dumbasses in Montana having 50x the vote in the Senate and 4x vote on the POTUS as a Californian. That's not democratic.
> all the incentives align towards pleasing extremists
Systems create the incentive! Changing the system changes the incentives and is the only way we can reduce extremism.
2. They're probably up for the challenge. But also, that still doesn't solve the disenfranchisement much. My idiot neighbor with the Trump banner (in our 100% Democratic city and county -- Western Washington) will never have his vote make a difference. But if he could combine his vote with some fellow idiots out east, then they could pick the person that most represents them. And either that person will learn to compromise or they can just sit out while others do advance legislation. Just like in better republics.
1. Eliminate / work around the electoral college system, which makes it so that people in the most diverse, educated, and economically-productive parts of the country have dramatically less voting power than a small minority of people who live in more homogeneous, less educated, and less economically-productive areas. This would significantly change the messaging needed to win.
2. Eliminate first-pass-the-post voting, which encourage candidates with extreme views, eliminate anything other than (largely false) political binaries, make it possible to win elections while receiving a minority of the votes, and make it so that the only viable strategy is to vote for the lesser evil rather than somebody you actually want.
3. Get the money out of politics. Make untraceably-funded super-PACs illegal.
4. Gerrymandering should be super fucking illegal.
Other places do this. They're more democratic than the US, and while they still frequently elect stupid politicians, none of those are as bottom-of-the-barrel as what the US is able to scrape together.
Elections are won by spending, especially since Citizens United. Democracy has not survived oligarchical propaganda.
The narrative and data do not support Americans going abroad.
I think you're referring to a lack of competitive education for those coming outside of America and choosing Europe / China to study.
America losing foreigners in education institutions is not 'brain drain' in the classical sense. There is no emigration (the drain) involved. America receiving all those students and skilled labor over the years was brain drain.
However that's not what brain drain means. You would say "Iran had a brain drain in the 70s" not "America was brain draining Iran" makes no sense.
To study and work, yes. We learned the trick when the Nazis chased off their scientists, doubled down on it by capturing Nazi scientists, and then developed it into a multi-decade advantage throughout the Cold War and the 1990s. Looking back, we started fucking it up with the Iraq War and financial crisis (see: A123 bankruptcy giving China its EV industry) and are now closing the chapter triumphantly.
> Never gonna have a brain drain arbitrage opportunity like that again.
It’s sort of there for the taking for American elites. Someone just has to roll out a real red carpet.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-29/chinese-student-numbe...
Also US international students as percent of overall student population has been in the low end. Its mostly been universities around the world catering to international students because they pay a higher tuition and to makeup for a shortfall in domestic funding. Its much better for universities to educate the local population.
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2025/12/universities-cry-po...
For those who aren't aware, A123 made the batteries for the GM EV1, which GM famously killed after killing the CA clean air regulation that gave rise to it.
Whether to educate young Chinese nationals in the US who plan to return to their home nation isn’t a similar situation.
But I think it's actually a much deeper indictment of the incumbents who couldn't present a vision more appealing than the "madness on television".
No, the government was pretty blatantly not serving the people's interests when Trump came along. That doesn't make Trump a good solution to the problem, but nobody should be surprised when people vote for an outsider who says "I'm for you, and I'm going to help you take back your country from the out of touch elites who hate you and only look out for themselves". It would be surprising if that promise didn't resonate with people.
Which is ironic, given Trump has been pretty great for anyone who is rich or well connected.
Sort of, but that was always a pretty obvious tack to take, and I don't think there was ever a shortage of would-be leaders willing to play that role. So we're still left with the question of why the voters chose the most obviously untrustworthy guy to play it.
Unfortunately for the past 3 elections, it essentially came down to the obviously untrustworthy "outsider" vs the ultimate establishment candidate. For a lot of people, it's as simple as that.
What if the electorate is so stupid that it simply votes against women in order to affirm their personal desires to not be at bottom of the socioeconomic rankings, however delusional those may be?
> For the early part of his reign, he is said to have been "good, generous, fair and community-spirited", but increasingly self-indulgent, cruel, sadistic, extravagant, and sexually perverted thereafter, an insane, murderous tyrant who demanded and received worship as a living god, humiliated the Senate, and planned to make his horse a consul. [...]
> During his brief reign, Caligula worked to increase the unconstrained personal power of the emperor, as opposed to countervailing powers within the principate. [...]
> He had to abandon an attempted invasion of Britain, and the installation of his statue in the Temple in Jerusalem.
I'd imagine every great(in scale/importance) uprising/political tumult had some aspect of "but they're ruining everything!"
Everything for intellectuals and people with ties to the system that was functioning for that minority.
Coal miners don't care that international students aren't coming to the US anymore. That's not an important factor for them.
Edit: My point here is that you don't need hindsight to see how this aligns with historic precedent.
Isn’t that what the common folk chose? Was some of that not clear before the election?
The Clines, Justices and even Manchins have money. The miners are almost irrelevant.
Much more precedent for new elites putting themselves into a position of power while purporting to be channeling a popular uprising on behalf and for the benefit of the "common folk", who again do not end up better off for it, often quite the opposite.
It's sad and frustrating to see this play out again and again. As you say, you don't need hindsight to see how it aligns with history.
Who will listen to the "perception and needs" of the racist, misogynistic common folks who want to impose their religious liberty (by banning abortion) and and elevate their financial situation (by pushing downward brown and black people)? (The GOP, that's who.)
And don't you tell me it's a minority, when less than a week after the Supreme Court made the VRA null in practice, half a dozen states are rushing to eliminate any black representation. The whole GOP in those states (who already found a way to practice slavery through their carceral system - yes, there are black people picking cotton under the guard of armed white people on horses right now, today) is unanimous in erasing any power from black people. It is their first and foremost priority right now, despite everything else going on.
That's not the only symptom, or the only measure of progress. But it would be a good start.
Something I learned at The Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston [1] is that Southern slaveowners were almost all terifically leveraged. Slaves were purchased predominantly with borrowed money (from, I might add, the North). And slaves were expensive, making up a significant if not dominating fraction of estates' assets.
For Southern elites, therefore, abolition was an existential question. It meant bankruptcy and poverty, with insult added to injury in their creditors being Northerners. To my knowledge (and I'm no expert in this) the question of abolition paired with debt forgiveness was never seriously discussed by the Union.
So yes, Confederate racism absolutely condemns its common folk. But even a moderately well-read Southern commoner would understand that abolition meant financial crisis, taking out their communities' largest tax payers, donors, consumers and employers in one swoop.
I didn't walk away from the Museum sympathetic to slavery. But I did become more sympathetic to the South; in particular, to their bewildering decisions to continue prosecuting a war they were so very obviously, from a history textbook's perspective, losing. (To be clear, slavery is wrong. The South seceding was stupid. Not suing for peace after Gettysburg and Vicksburg stupider still.)
It also doesn't explain what happened after the civil war: the KKK and Jim Crow. The only possible explanation for these is...
I guess democracy was a mistake and we need to get back to inbread monarchy instead of the blood thirsty unwashed masses.
That seems all too nonsensical.
The median professor makes less than, say, an electrician. I am a professor in a good school, and I could probably triple my pay by going to industry.
This propaganda needs to stop.
"academic/intellectual/educated person" != "owner class"
I feel like that's the big misunderstanding between working class libs & working class conservatives.
I'm (working class liberal who went to college) not the one oppressing you (working class conservative). We make basically the same money and hold the same power, lol.
Clever of the (actual) conservative elites (1%, billionaires) to shift the blame to the intellectual class, when we don't own shit. We just piss you (working class conservatives) off at Thanksgiving with "new ideas" so we're an easy target.
Whether these slots should be finite or not is an independent problem, however for various reasons the slots are currently finite and potentially reducing in volume with income inequality.
Slots are being cut across the board. For international students as well as domestic ones. Also, we’re talking about a couple hundred seats. And again, of graduate students.
> Whether these slots should be finite or not
They’re grad students. Extremely skilled. Artisanly trained, pretty much. There are fundamental limits on how many we can productively have. I’m guessing none at MIT are wasted.
Even in the EU, graduate students and professors come from other continents.
Many are Indian and Chinese, but there are people from all over Europe, South America, Africa (certainly Australia but oddly I don’t know any OTOH)…it’s very diverse. But everyone speaks English.
Somehow Trump manages to do 1,000 nasty things and people talk around their effects a few weeks/months later. We may be bored of talking about him, or centering conversations about what he wrought, but that's a mistake.
In my very average undergrad university, the EE department had 2 American PhD students, and something like 6-10 international students.
MIT would always have more applicants than positions. The only thing that would drop total numbers of students should be fewer positions.
Which of course is just as much of an issue since it highlights a blatant attack on education in general.