They (the current administration) doesn't want to be competitive. They want to be in full control and willing to destroy any institution, organization or person that opposes them, internal or external.
were the banks nationalized? All capital over 1 million seized and redistributed? Private property collectivized? Abandoned properties commandeered for the homeless by the state? I must have missed it.
What's "communism" now? The public park? A library? What's the current communist thing that makes you couch faint?
were the death camps created? all minorities sized and placed into camps? all members of society involved in the war effort? expansionist wars being started? I must have missed it.
What's "fascism" now? Enforcing borders? Deporting illegal immigrants? What's the current fascist thing that makes you couch faint?
I never called it fascism. But doing things like tackling senators for asking questions in a public hearing and snatching children up off the street to send them off to forever jail doesn't look great.
I'm sure you'll defend it though, this guy has an R next to his name and you're on team R!
(I'm not on team D btw and never was so you can drop that pretext right now)
Marxism is when ultra-capitalist slightly right leaning politicians make boring policies to further enrich the American capitalist class. Oh and also some token "woke" stuff that doesn't really help anyone but I guess doesn't make anything worse either.
There's not a single Marxist in American politics at any level of power that matters. We have two neo-liberal parties that are both right leaning. One is ultra-right and one is ever so slightly right leaning.
> In what world is a party advocating for universal healthcare, free college, and expanded immigration "slightly right?"
1. Most of that party is not advocating for that, those are actually fairly fringe beliefs.
2. Our fellow capitalistic allies in the west have all of that.
3. The closest things the dems tried to universal healthcare was the ACA, and despite being obvious legislation, was fought tooth and nail. You had droves of people legitimately arguing that insurers SHOULD be able to drop you for pre-existing conditions. That's how unbelievably fucking propagandized our population is. We're advocating against ourselves every day.
I tolerate my normie family saying it, but it grates on me because of how many of the constituencies have switched sides by now. For instance, educated professionals were a major base for the original Nazi Party, while nowadays the fascists seem to really loathe that class stratum.
"For instance, educated professionals were a major base for the original Nazi Party."
Thats not entirely true. While there were definitely many people in education who supported the nazi party there were still quite a few in the education field during the beginning of Hitlers power who were not and many fled to other countries starting around 1933. https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/Online/5299/The-scientific.... it was why albert einstein spent a great deal of time in the US.
Through laws they shaped and molded the education to be inline with nazi ideology and only those who towed the line were allowed to continue to teach/study. heres a small article from the US Congress (shocked its still up) that discusses higher education in germany during nazi occupation. https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116973/documents/...
Basically if you disagreed with the nazi party you were fired/expelled in the beginning and later sent to camps. the entire point of studying history is so we dont repeat it and just looking at the amount of US universities bending to the republican parties ideals on what they believe is scarily similar to early nazi germany.
I dont get how people dont understand that the strength of the US for the longest time has been our diversity; especially in education. hell, after world war 2 we actively recurited many nazi scientist to help us with the space program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip many would argue it is the reason why we beat the soviet union to the moon. the harm that is slowly being done to this country will take decades to repair if it can be and i dont believe that is being hyperbolic
Not really. The nazis party had the same rethoric. Of course they recruited business leaders etc despite that. Just like people like Elon are part of the MAGA movement.
> Why would it be condescending to remind people actions have consequences?
I think yes, explicitly. I think every person on planet Earth is aware actions have consequences. That's never been a debate. The debate is always what consequences have come from what actions, and to what extent.
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Yeah, and my grandmother lived under Nazi Germany, although she was a supporter and not put in any camps. Call me an elitist all you want, I don't care.
I'd be fine with banning political discussion altogether on this site, but until that happens, I'm not going to self-censor as others confidently let their opinions be known.
They're afraid of losing to a primary challenger if they break with Trump. It used to be a Trump endorsement would hurt your campaign. Now a Trump critique is believed to be a scarlet letter. He's got a lock on the racist zealots that make up the most consistent voting bloc in the GOP.
I think the problem is that half of the country (has been made to) wants to sabotage itself. Therefore, they elect and keep in power someone that gives them exactly what they want.
Yeah, the way the Democratic Party self-destructed was indeed enlightening and frightening. And they continue to point fingers at each other and present specious arguments why they failed in the last election.
Meamwhile the Republicans, while making headway, aren't doing it in a way that will last beyond the next Democratic administration. I'm speaking of the overuse of executive orders when legislation is what is required.
DOGE has destroyed institutions that will likely not recover in the next Democratic majority term. If they sell off the federal lands or damage them with resource extraction, Dems probably wont have the bandwidth to fix that either. Those are just two examples but there are probably many more.
Harvard does not have "the best and brightest" students and that's a meme that needs to die as is discriminatory to literally all the other students in the US and the planet.
You are nitpicking. It is an elite institution that still attracts elite class people or else it wouldn't be worth so much to so many groups. There are hundreds of universities in the US, many of which have no kind recognition of the kind Harvard has.
One could also call it a bubble. Last as long as it lasts, which is as long as the stakeholders believe in it.
I think your argument doesn't hold. Just because people still believe something to be the case, doesn't mean it really is the case. It being "worth so much to so many groups" just means they believe in it being worth as much. A well formed argument would come up with examples of the brightest hailing from Harvard and perhaps statistics about achievements of former Harvard students.
Only if you look at one aspect of the school: A bubble wouldn't produce a cadre of skilled people that move multiple fields forward. The elite nature of the institution comes from people maintaining that elite status through accomplishment. You don't need a "belief" when the school continually produces many examples of excellence. Thats just hard evidence.
I think it may have been an [un]intentional callback to Trump saying that about who "Mexico was sending over the border" - at least that's how I interpreted it.
Harvard doesn't have higher academic standards for foreign students. So I don't think foreign students are any "better or brighter" than their American counterparts.
So if you can find equally qualified American students on the margin shouldn't you do so? I think an American university that benefits greatly from American taxpayers and institutions should primarily benefit American students. If you're picking truly exceptional student, that's one thing. But I don't think that's happening.
Academic standards are kind of irrelevant when it comes to Harvard undergraduate admissions.
Harvard is a tiny university at the absolute top of the prestige hierarchy. As far as they are concerned, every serious (non-legacy/donor) applicant is a truly exceptional student. At least to the extent it can be determined from the admission materials and a short interview. They could choose randomly from all good enough applicants with no noticeable impact on academic standards.
But Harvard is not in the business of educating the most deserving. Instead, they want to educate the ones who will be successful and influential in the future, and to give them the best networking opportunities possible. The standard joke is that if the admissions officer knew that the applicant would become a tenured professor at Harvard, they would reject the applicant for the lack of success. Most Harvard graduates fail to reach that standard, but it's better to choose a likely failure (and an unlikely unicorn) over a certain failure.
PhD admissions are another story. At that stage, Harvard starts caring a lot more about academic potential. They don't want to restrict their recruitment to the US, because Americans are only a small fraction of the people with access to good education. Especially because Americans are reluctant to do a PhD due to the low pay effectively mandated by public research funders.
> As far as they are concerned, every serious (non-legacy/donor) applicant is a truly exceptional student.
I know it's fun to dunk on legacy admissions but legacy students are actually more qualified by objective measures than non legacy. It makes sense that some genetics that predisposes children to an academic environment gets passed on. Not to mention the fact that their parents value education. This holds up even when you compare them against their non legacy peers in the same parental income bracket.
But foreign students pay foreign money which helps against the deficit.
On top of that many students stay in the US afterwards means a brain plus for the US and a loss their home country. These kind of braun drain is a big advantage for the US they know destroy.
Notwithstanding the unfounded isolationist argument, having international students is valuable to the university and the domestic students. A diversity of life experiences, knowledge, backgrounds, etc. results in better educational outcomes. But you probably wouldn't understand that concept.
I mean they will now with a candidate pool reduction of 96%...
The rest is kinda wild. I guess Ilya Sutskever should leave? Sergey Brin would have never started Google, Jony Ive would be in the UK, Jensen Huang and Nvidia would be hailing from Taipei, Elon Musk would be in Johannesburg, Linus Torvalds would still be in Finland, the Rasmussen brothers would have launched Google maps in the Netherlands, Satya Nadella would be in Hyderabad, the Broadcom CEO would be in Malaysia...
To me places like Stanford and Caltech are world class schools that happen to be in the US. Over 90% not being American born is what I'd expect from a globally renown world class institution because that's what the world population looks like.
China has many programs to attract top global talent. If you want to fast track the transition from Silicon Valley to Beijing, kicking out the foreigners is an excellent move.
Graduate level coursework at Peking is already in English. All these scholars have to do is get on a plane.
> You're beheading like 50% of the S&P my friend...
just a guess but i'd assume these decisions are being made on an emotional/ideological basis, not long term viability, but maybe i'm missing something obvious...
rather than say anything likely unconstructive myself in direct response to this, i would very much like to see you elaborate on your understanding of mao and what value and predictive power you find in this comparison.
Maoism and Trumpism share a certain self-sabotaging ideological fetish for the virtues of rural life that expresses itself politically more in destructive resentment of urbanites and urban institutions than productive development of rural ones.
It doesn’t actually matter if the foreign students are better or not: by having a mixed student body, with lots of cultures and backgrounds, students learn more from each other. They learn skills to work with other cultures, and ways of doing things that may be better.
Of course, in America’s future of autarky and Shogunate-style isolationism, those skills will no longer have any value, even to the elite. There’s no need to learn about other countries if everything we need is produced here and no one could ever threaten us once America is made great again. (/s maybe?)
I don't know. A lot of foreign students from Harvard are Chinese. Seems kind of weird that they were found to discriminate against American Asians and then they import foreign Asian students. Goes against the whole we want diversity thing, no?
> A lot of foreign students from Harvard are Chinese. Seems kind of weird that they were found to discriminate against American Asians and then they import foreign Asian students.
How do I put this delicately - the Race part is not what is bringing the difference in lived experience.
The university defines diversity broadly, encompassing race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic background, nationality, sexual orientation, and other aspects of identity.
Don't gaslight me and pretend they don't focus a lot on race when figuring out their student body. They report on it and it's a huge distinguishing characteristic when looking at median standardized scores across diff characteristics. There's little difference between socio economic groups, gender, nationality etc. But if you look across just Asian and non Asian students, the scores are dramatically higher with Asians meaning that they have higher standards. Courts found this to be true