How exactly am I part of the problem? I vote in every election I'm allowed to vote in, I didn't vote for Trump, I donate to political organizations that support causes I believe in. Because I don't go outside and hold a sign that no one is going to read I'm enabling this? Get off your high horse.
My wife is a Mexican immigrant. She's a citizen now, but that doesn't appear to be something that matters to this organization. There is no way in hell I am going to put her in jeopardy just to go protest.
I'm sorry, that sucks, it's a bad situation to be in :(
But I think we know from history, and other (attempted) authoritarian takeovers, that it only gets worse until people stand up and push back.
It's in their best interest to make everyone feel there's nothing they can do, there's no use in protesting etc etc.
I do think it works! And in addition to protests in the streets, and strikes, I think consumer boycotts would work. If a percentage of people stopped buying anything other than the necessities a lot of US companies would really feel it.
I don’t really disagree in principle, as I said I do try and donate to organizations that help with these things (e.g. ACLU, EFF).
I guess I am trying to say that there are multiple ways of fighting this, and without going into which is “better”, I think I am doing a little and I dispute being “part of the problem”. As I said, I vote in every election I am allowed to vote in, and I haven’t missed one in a bit more than a decade.
> The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ
No, not really? That would be true if we were talking about hiring anyone with a STEM PhD. Or 1 random person.
In this case we have people leaving, and it's a group. So it's more like: The assumption that 10k PhD's, that we saw fit to hire in the first place, as a collective, are worth the cost.
Seems likely that they are: The cost is low, let's say $2 billion per year? For reference, Trumps Big Bill includes $300 billion in new defense spending and "over a ten-year period is estimated to add roughly $3 trillion to the national debt and to cut approximately $4.46 trillion in tax revenue".
Also, let's say there were too many, and you should get rid of 10 000 of them. I doubt the guy who keeps rambling for 1 and a half hour [1] and keeps getting "Greenland" and "Iceland" mixed up, is going to do a good job with it.
Linking to actual sources would reveal that the keywords the IRS was looking for were politically biased, yes, but across the spectrum. The keywords included "Tea Party", "Patriot", "Progressive", and "Occupy." https://www.npr.org/2017/10/05/555975207/as-irs-targeted-tea...
Purely semantic arguments aren't helpful to anyone.
The word "bias" clearly has two senses in this context. The original term from signal processing indicates a persistent offset, which got appropriated in politics to reflect the idea of a "lean" in coverage. So now "Bias" means "politically charged in some direction or another".
So you can have a "biased" term ("occupy") next to another biased term ("tea party") in a search. And it's reasonable to call the whole thing a collection of biased terms even though by the original definition I guess you'd say they cancel out and are "unbiased".
Language is language. It may not be rational but it's by definition never "nonsense". Don't argue with it except to clarify.
Because of (1) all the people using them uncritically, (2) that they're elite projects in a field whose foudation of "what even are bugs here?" includes amongst its narratives stories of how elites can abuse them for personal gain
Then you are part of the problem. Get off your ass and do something, before it's too late. FFS!
reply