if a court overturns or reinterprets that, then it is the law. America is a common law country, not a civil law country. The process of litigation and court precedent is how laws work in a common law country, so I don't see how your framing of the situation is really all that valid.
Common law countries also benefit from common interpretations of laws, which leads to stability for both the citizens who live and businesses that operate in that country. “Calvinball” is technically possible in all common law countries, as long as you move fast enough for the courts to not catch up. So while you are technically correct, I do not want to live in the version of America where your technical correctness is tested to the limit of its bend-but-not-break strength.
The superpower built on the US dollar fiat monopoly that was enforced by military lead? The one that Trump is trying to reassert in a misguided attempt at preventing a decline in US quality of life down to a more realistic level? You seem to think Trump is the cause of this, and not the world gaining the ability to dictate their own affairs and not be the victim of CIA global chess games and other neocolonialist machinations. Trump is just a symptom of the backlash among the American public unable to adapt to the increasingly clear reality of the loss of purchasing power that is downstream of the rise in non-American economies and their productivity. But yeah, I guess if you view things simply, all of this started in 2016, and hasn't been brewing for decades and decades since the post-ww2 order was obviously not the end of history as once believed lol.
US financiers enjoy the benefits of the global dollar, and have immense political influence.
What's completely incomprehensible is that the people suffering consequences of the Triffin Dilemma double down on the US dollar as the reserve currency. If they really wanted to bring back manufacturing, jobs, and compete with China, we'd give up the dollars special status. It's amazing how easily it is to misdirect blame to immigrants, libs, etc. Absolutely wild.
> If they really wanted to bring back manufacturing, jobs, and compete with China, we'd give up the dollars special status
IIUC that was actually an explicit goal laid out in Ron Vara's book. It's obviously hard to tell where the line is between deliberate policy and mere narrative-chum for useful idiots to latch on to. But the impression I've gotten is that many of Grump's moves are in line with this goal, but fail to achieve it because the Dollar is so damn sticky (at least in the near term).
Also, the truth is that supporting manufacturing jobs to compete with China could always have been straightforwardly done by taking the surplus wealth gained by being the world reserve currency (ie being able to trade paper dollars for real goods), and directly spending it on subsidies for domestic manufacturing. But the policy over the past several decades has been instead to simply give away that wealth to Wall Street in the form of artificially low interest rates that create an asset bubble (ie the fake "fiscal responsibility" that the Republican party had been promoting)
Describing the political machinations of institutional academia as a category where summary executions are applicable is the type of thing that led to the Soviet Union instituting Lysenkoism for decades and other profoundly anti-intellectual absurdities since all the academics were just randomly killed for a generation. We don't need that. That's hysterical emotional overreaction which is the opposite of rational academic behavior. The NSF will just get funding in the next administration, this isn't the end of the world. If they just hasten the grant awarding pipeline in 2028, it'll be a blip in the scheme of things lol, these grants can be like 5 years long. You're talking about a field of very smart people, everyone is just being more frugal and putting off big purchases and doing research that isn't expensive and things aren't blowing up lol.
I'm in academia, so NSF cuts are very misguided in my view, and hopefully will be reversed in the next administration. But the first two sentences of your post immediately contradict one another. You say America is in a state of lawlessness, and then immediately describe the American legal system. So that's exactly what following the law in America has always meant. America is a common law country, not a civil law country... Litigation and court precedent is how laws are tested and affirmed in common law countries, unlike civil law countries. So that legal system isn't lawlessness, its the way law works in common law countries, which America is one of the few not using the Napoleonic code.
well that specific scenario is its own mess of competing authorities. Theoretically, the president is commander in chief, so he controls the armed forces. But congress has the authority to make a declaration of war. But the president as commander in chief can direct troops for national security or other purposes. Military action can happen without a war being declared. It becomes a bit of a game of semantics because the argument is that war is different than military action, then the legal interpretations of words and whatnot becomes the focus. Courts tend to not really go too deep into this issue, I suppose. It's something of a gray area. So the counterpoint is that the law wasn't ignored, it was interpreted differently, because of this concept that military action isn't necessarily war. Courts usually will spell out these interpretations more clearly and refine the law, but when it comes to war, I think they don't want to litigate that too quickly.
Oh good God, I can't listen to this intellectual rot a single second longer.
This is not a gray area unless you're intentionally pretending to be an idiot to steal power.
Congress is the only branch allowed to declare war. Taking targeted military actions against another country repeatedly on their own soil with no provocation is not a "special military action" it's a fucking war.
It's not funny or coy or clever to pretend otherwise. The intent is abundantly clear and it is abundantly clear it is being violated.
People like you sanewashing the actions of this admin are a major part of the problem.
Even if this were how the system was designed, it is time to acknowledge that it is fundamentally broken and needs change. It is mind boggling that the response to these issues amounts to WONTFIX.
Have you seen a japanese newspaper? the characters alone are very information dense. and a newspaper front page can be very information dense just by the nature of the language/writing system.
otherwise, a lot of japanese webpages just seem impossible to navigate to me. Some images are clickable, some aren't, you still have to scroll to reach where you're going. It's just a bit like a maze, and a lot of what you see is kind of useless.
To be fair, Japanese headlines use a specific writing style that is much more compressed than normal text, like how English newspaper headlines drop words like “a” or “is” to save space.
if you actually think China would even entertain the idea of funding some of the scientific research conducted in the US over the past few decades, you have a fantasy view of what is going on outside the US. That political controversy wouldn't even arise because it's such a nonstarter that it could never even become a controversy.
Past being the key point. Because, right now it's all Dumpty all the time, until we boot his weak tools and fools November. I'm confident we are stronger than that two bit corrupt fraud, and will get back to where science funding is a priority. Hopefully our state of affairs is much more temporary than what China is subjected to. But there's absolutely no question whether the dunce parade in the US is anti science.
the amount of people arrested for online activity in England is not the best example to use if you're arguing that such events are rare.
otherwise, your incredulity to such a belief is why the far-right continues to gain a constituency in Europe and elsewhere. so instead of dismissing the concern, which fuels the far-right, you could just acknowledge it is a real thing people are experiencing, and that it doesn't help a liberal free society to criminalize thoughts that are unsavory to the political elite.
The "real thing people are experiencing" is posting unambiguous hate speech or calls for violence, and then getting in legal trouble for it. Calling it "online activity" or "just sharing their opinion online" is the actual blatant misrepresentation of what's happening on the ground, akin to saying someone robbing a store was "jailed merely for getting food for dinner that night."
it's all about funding. for every 1 person nervous about intellectual safety in the US, there are 50–100 waiting to fill that spot, if not 1,000–10,000. Funding has been cut in academia, and less positions are available as a result. No country is remarkably filling this gap, aside from a hilariously few more availabilities and some more graduate student positions (who operate as the scientific labor in Europe and other countries, before graduating and having to come to the US for job opportunity).
As others have pointed out, presumably the outcome is that higher value scientists are favored, and higher impact research is demanded. When industry demands certain research, the funding appears because private entities will fund those positions and those grants. The widespread funding of all avenues of science is a great feature of American intellectual culture and hopefully it doesn't vanish. But it was a remarkably uneconomical arrangement and a total aberration of history, so I wouldn't hold my breath about it sticking around through the tides of history, it was more of a fluke, and many in academia wishing to regenerate that fluke are a bit delusional and a bit tied to the idea of a golden era like the boomers dreaming of the 1950s suburbs. A great deal of research is important science, but totally worthless for the foreseeable future on an economic basis. We might not yet conceive of why this research does have economic value, but it's so abstracted that as it stands, the value isn't tangible and it's thus impossible to defend reasonably.
Scientific freedom doesn't mean the freedom to expect a subsidized career on the basis of non-lucrative research. It's more of a privilege to have such a lifestyle that is downstream of a wealthy empire. Since America is going bankrupt, the dollar-reaper is coming for the superfluous. So, there goes your funding for conure breeding or the health benefits of community gardens and expect more stability if you're researching crop diseases or livestock vector research.
There are weapons that can permanently paralyze an entire city. Not paralyze infrastructure or traffic... but permanent incurable paralysis of all the people in any area exposed to the weapon. That is still a 20th century technology.
That's a hell of a claim, and unless you're talking about some kind of chemical spray or seeding some weaponized microbe across the city, you could at least post a link or name that explains what it is.
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