How do you create a brain drain and lose your status as eminent destination for scientists and researchers?
The United States seems to be sending out questionnaires to researchers at universities and research institutes outside of the United States, asking them about their political leanings. Dutch universities are strongly advising Dutch researches not to respond to the questionnaires, and warn that they are designed to stifle free speech and independent research through intimidation.
Universities of the Netherlands (UNL) has also warned researchers about the questionnaire. The USGS questionnaire asks, for example, whether the researcher’s organisation works with ‘entities associated with communist, socialist, or totalitarian parties’, whether the research project has taken ‘appropriate measures’ to ‘defend against gender ideology’ and whether the project has ‘measurable benefits for US domestic industries, workforce, or economic sectors’.
↫ Universiteit Leiden
Researchers trying to enter the United States are also facing intimidation tactics, with the United States government going so far as to refuse entry to scientists critical of the Trump regime:
A French scientist was denied entry to the US this month after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration, said a French minister.
“I learned with concern that a French researcher who was traveling to a conference near Houston was denied entry to the United States before being expelled,” Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister of higher education and research, said in a statement on Monday to Agence France-Presse published by Le Monde.
↫ Robert Mackey at the Guardian
Being denied entry is one thing – being arrested and sent to a string of prisons is another, like this Canadian woman:
Our next stop was Arizona, the San Luis Regional Detention Center. The transfer process lasted 24 hours, a sleepless, grueling ordeal. This time, men were transported with us. Roughly 50 of us were crammed into a prison bus for the next five hours, packed together – women in the front, men in the back. We were bound in chains that wrapped tightly around our waists, with our cuffed hands secured to our bodies and shackles restraining our feet, forcing every movement into a slow, clinking struggle.
↫ Jasmine Mooney at the Guardian
If you’re a scientist or researcher planning on going to a conference in the US (or, say, a developer wanting to go to a tech conference), you should reconsider. Even if your papers are in order, you could end up on a plane to a concentration camp in El Salvador before you can even call a lawyer – while being told that any judge standing up for your rights should be impeached.
The United States’ war on free speech, science, and research goes far beyond intimidating individual scientists and researchers. The Trump regime is actively erasing and deleting entire fields of science, most notably anything involving things like climate and gender, and openly attacking and cutting funding to universities that disagree with the Trump regime.
Almost immediately after being sworn in as president on 20 January, Trump put his signature to piles of executive orders cancelling or freezing tens of billions of dollars in funding for research and international assistance, and putting the seal on thousands of lay-offs. Orwellian restrictions have been placed on research, including bans on studies that mention particular words relating to sex and gender, race, disability and other protected characteristics.
↫ Nature
US President Donald Trump’s latest war on the climate includes withdrawing support for any research that mentions the word.
He has also launched a purge on government websites hosting climate data, in an apparent attempt to make the evidence disappear.
↫ Corey J. A. Bradshaw at The Conversation
The Trump administration has fired hundreds of workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the US’s pre-eminent climate research agency housed within the Department of Commerce, the Guardian has learned.
[…]“There is no plan or thought into how to continue to deliver science or service on weather, severe storms and events, conservation and management of our coasts and ocean life and much more,” he said. “Let’s not pretend this is about efficiency, quality of work or cost savings because none of those false justifications are remotely true.”
↫ Dharna Noor and Gabrielle Canon at the Guardian
Intimidating current scientists isn’t enough, either – the scientists of the future must also suffer:
US President Donald Trump has signed an executive orderto dismantle the Department of Education, fulfilling a campaign pledge and a long-cherished goal of some conservatives.
[…]In its statement, the American Federation of Teachers said: “No-one likes bureaucracy, and everyone’s in favour of more efficiency, so let’s find ways to accomplish that.
“But don’t use a ‘war on woke’ to attack the children living in poverty and the children with disabilities.”
↫ Ana Faguy at the BBC
But what about intimidating university students who don’t fall in line with the regime? Well, we can’t forget about those, now, can we?
After immigration agents detained Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil over his involvement in pro-Palestine protests on campus, President Donald Trump promised it was just the beginning. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has since arrested at least two more students who are in the country on visas — one of whom had recently sued the Trump administration on First Amendment grounds.
↫ Gaby Del Valle at The Verge
A Cornell University PhD student earlier this month sued the Trump administration seeking to stop the president’s order aimed at foreign students accused of “antisemitism”. Days later, lawyers at the justice department emailed to request that the student “surrender” to immigration officials
↫ Maanvi Singh at the Guardian
These are just a small selection of stories, and I could’ve picked a dozen more still if I wanted to. The point should be squarely (roundly?) driven home by now: the United States government seems to be doing everything in its power to scare off the very people an economy based on science, technology, and innovation needs to thrive, and this hasn’t exactly gone by unnoticed in the rest of the world.
It started with individual universities in Europe stepping up to attract US researchers and scientists, like the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium:
The Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) is opening 12 postdoctoral positions for international researchers, with a specific focus on American scholars working in socially significant fields. These prestigious fellowships come with substantial funding (€2.5 million) as part of the European Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) program. Additionally, as part of the Brains for Brussels initiative of Innoviris, VUB aims to actively attract American professors looking to relocate. In collaboration with its Francophone sister university ULB, VUB is also providing 18 apartments for international researchers seeking temporary residence at the Brussels Institute for Advanced Studies.
VUB’s initiative is a response to the alarming political interference in academic research by the Trump administration in the U.S. The university is taking a firm stand against these developments.
↫ Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Another example, the Aix-Marseille Université in France:
In a context where some scientists in the United States may feel threatened or hindered in their research, our university is announcing the launch of the Safe Place For Science program, dedicated to welcoming scientists wishing to pursue their work in an environment conducive to innovation, excellence and academic freedom.
↫ Aix-Marseille Université
It seems universities the world over are seeing an increase in applicants trying to escape the purges in the United States:
Universities around the world have reported seeing an uptick in applications from U.S.-based researchers, who face an increasingly uncertain climate under President Donald Trump’s administration. And some countries and their institutions are already looking to use the opportunity to attract new talent and reverse the steady migration of scientists to the U.S. in recent decades.
↫ Catherine Offord at Science
Governments in Europe soon picked up on this, and are now asking the European Union to launch concerted efforts to attract scientists and researchers fleeing the United States:
In a letter addressed to research commissioner Ekaterina Zaharieva on Wednesday and seen by Science|Business, 13 governments asked the EU to show solidarity and welcome “brilliant talents from abroad who might suffer from research interference and ill-motivated and brutal funding cuts.”
“The current international context reminds us that freedom of science can be put at risk anywhere and at any time,” they wrote. While the new US administration is not named in the letter, the implication is clear.
↫ Juliette Portala and David Matthews at Science|Business
Curtailing freedom of speech and attacking academic freedom are classic elements of the authoritarian and fascist playbooks, and the end result is always the same: a massive brain drain as academia are either murdered, sent to work the fields, or in less extreme cases like what’s happening in the United States today, flee the country to offer their knowledge and expertise elsewhere. The effects of brain drain are well-understood, and will impact the economy of the United States harshly; especially the very technology companies supporting the Trump regime will start feeling the squeeze as it becomes harder and harder for them to attract the top talent they need. In fact, they’re already worried about what they have wrought.
Freedom of speech and academic freedom are under heavy assault in the United States, and it’s going to affect every American, from researchers and academics, down to classic cases of “I never thought leopards would eat my face”, like when a Trump voter saw his wife arrested, facing deportation to Peru (he still supports Trump, and doesn’t regret his vote – that’s going to make for interesting dinner conversation).
Authoritarian purges employ hatchets, not scalpels, and every American in the bottom 80% is going to suffer the consequences.
Looking at the market, their push into Ai research, and the exploits of Solarwinds, the previous elections, etc. My bet is that their target is the Chinese and the Russian students, NOT European students.
These two groups are very well trained in doublethink. I doubt that questionnaires or some social net account screening will work here.
This assumes more rationality than there is in the Trump admin. They are simply “anti-other” – who the “other” is could matter less, because it’s just a scapegoat to direct the anger of the population, who have been extracted now for 2 or 3 generations.
The United States is finished. Europe and Europeans better get used to that. We aren’t coming back. What you are witnessing is autocivilicide,
CaptainN-,
Yeah, that’s the entire game plan, 100% predictable. Every single problem gets blamed on political foes and predecessors. This is so embarrassingly obvious, yet no matter how stupid the deflections get, much of the public actually likes that he blames scapegoats for their problems, such is hatred. No matter how dumb it gets, and boy does it, it’s an RDF that resonates for his base even though they’re being played for fools.
I still hold out hope for a return to democratic (small ‘d’) normalcy, but….the pillars of democracy are taking such a beating that it’s just not a given. Ironic that people would democratically elect the one that could end up overthrowing democracy. A sad case of history repeating itself in a horrific way. People of the future will ask how we allowed this to happen; hatred is a powerful motivator.
To the inevitable future commenter(s) reminding all that “this is supposed to be a tech news website”:
tl;dr: These are the most important news of our time.
A bit longer: The Americans, through actions of the government and power and influence of their State, have been the (very flawled and often biased) friends-of-last-resort of the democracies of their world. Now that the we are not so certain of their commitment, there’s real risk that another young generation will be lost to a sea-of-mud a la Somme, blitzkrieged into oblivion or napalmed into submission.
So, please, spare us of “but this is a tech news place” bs.
Shiunbird,
I appreciate your point, everyone’s effected and the tech sector sector isn’t immune. I don’t expect Thom to not share his opinion but I also get that people don’t want to hear about geopolitics here and I don’t think we should call this opinion “BS”. Understand the that every other news outlets covers it too. and it’s nice to have some place to “escape” from what every other media outlet feels compelled to cover too.
I probably wouldn’t mind if osnews stuck to more technical topics, although a lot of these events affect me close to home and I am worried that my opinions and speech could be used against me as the administration goes on it’s witch hunt. I’m glad to see others speaking out against what’s happening, the question really becomes whether this coverage belongs here on osnews…I think we can make a case for yes and a case for no. Perhaps a compromise would be to limit the coverage to some number of articles a year so we don’t get overwhelmed by political content? Naturally at the end of the day osnews has to decide for itself.
“Understand the that every other news outlets covers it too. and it’s nice to have some place to “escape” from what every other media outlet feels compelled to cover too. the question really becomes whether this coverage belongs here on osnews…”
Where else should it go when it effects the technology sector directly it is a topic for discussion here. Sticking your head in the sand and ignoring it will not help anyone. This needs to be countered at every opportunity unlike the spinless Democrats, I salute anyone who has the the guts to continue to get it done.
RedGreen925,
I think it is wrong to assume we’re ignoring it. I’m certainly not and I understand what’s at stake without having to be reminded of it all the time. I wasn’t against osnews talking politics now and then, but I also completely understand why people don’t want every waking moment to be around the shit show that is trump, it’s exhausting. I hate his agenda to curtail freedoms, his corruption, unrooting democracy while building up fascism and oligarchy, vilifying our neighbors, etc. When he controls the narrative it makes all of us dumber; even those who don’t take his side end up wasting our brain cells on him.
Like I said you could make the case for and against covering it and ultimately the decision lies with osnews themselves. I just don’t feel it’s necessary to be so dismissive of those who feel they already have enough of this demagogue in their lives, many of whom are on the same team but just want a reprieve from the daily grind. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
This gives me the opportunity to understand what’s going on overthere, because it’s really puzzling to me as european.
I’m not talking about the typical MAGA Regular Joes. Their behaviours are crystal clear to me. I cannot disagree more, ofc, but there’s nothing unexpected in their bags full of hate.
But the other half of Americans? Is all this sh*t acceptable?
That’s what is scaring me more. The indifference.
I’m not judging, I really want just to undestand.
Because it seems that we’re reading Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil, here…
TheClue,
Well, two things: I am not American, and my concern about the treatment of immigrants isn’t just on behalf of others, it is concern for myself and my family personally. Secondly, my own opinions have never been that representative of the public at large.
That said, most people I know here are lifelong republicans. It’s really tough for me to explain the mental disconnect between their own votes and things like accountability. I think it’s best explained by understanding that at least for many of them political affiliation as seen as more of a club than a choice on election day. Voting/registering republican has much more to do with social identity than a vote on the issues. I compare it to fans supporting their sports team: blame the other party for everything without being critical of their own. This “us vs them” is heavily ingrained in US culture. When it comes to the opposite party, everything gets vilified, yet when it comes to their own party standards go out the window. Look at how they crucified democrats for using non-government systems, and they brush it off now that they were caught using non government systems for top secret info. It couldn’t be more two-faced, but this is a fair representation of US politics.
This philosophy becomes quite fascinating to pick apart when looking at DOGE’s massive government layoffs affecting Republicans. They don’t seem to register the hypocrisy that everyone loosing their job is just like them, but good luck pointing that out since their view of merit is mixed up with political affiliation – it’s a mistake when they get laid off, but when the other side gets laid off, that’s ok.
You may be more interested in hearing about swing voters, but to my knowledge, I don’t know any swing voters at all so I can only speculate about their reasons for swinging for Trump: There was a pro-Palestinian movement that swore not to vote for Democrats, it looks like they followed through. There were protests over Democratic “DEI” initiatives. There were major complaints over inflation at the grocery store and price of gas under Biden. Corruption was being cited as a problem too. Some of these reasons seem incredibly ironic and ill advised, but nevertheless could be reasons a swing voter might cite for their choice.
..which is why every other news site is infested with this same kind of news
..which is why we come to a news site dedicated to a specific topic (operating systems) to escape from being constantly bombarded by this kind of news.
May i remind you that you do have free will, and are not forced to click on, or even interact, with any posts on this website you do not wish to interact with.
Let me warn you about the cycle of war. First economic hardship, then blaming the “others,” then radical leaders, finally followed by war. What happened in the U.S. is for the last 50 years we 100% decoupled gold/silver from the dollar (Nixon). While fine in theory, we ignored that from that point the rich were becoming the super rich and the income gap between the rich and poor kept growing year over year. Now were far beyond the point where every previous nation with that level of income inequality collapsed. And generally we’ve just printed more money to prop up bad economic policy. E.g. free trade is good in theory, but now you compete with slave labor from around the world and that keeps packing up and dropping anchor in a different country once those countries start getting Triangle Shirt Waist factory laws in place. The jobs are gone, and the people that did them are not willing to be retrained (and if we trained them all in the skilled trades like plumbing, there would be way too many plumbers). With the development of massive container ships allowing competition from much lower quality of life countries, we’ll you get the kind of people that vote for Trump. Too dumb to see the whole picture, too dumb to learn new things, and want something simple to blame (Democrats and Foreigners in this case). To everyone in Europe, remember this all can be prevented if you don’t let income inequality get out of control, which is easy to do when using a Fiat currency system. We’ve just printed more money until our quality of life sank to be similar to that of 3rd world countries for the average person, while we should have been taxing the rich appropriately considered just how heavily the world is now automated and their machines are special, not them (Amazon, Shipping companies, etc.)
I live here in the United States, and I didn’t vote for the orange-haired buffoon or any of his party. I do not support him or the party’s actions, or their beliefs in any way, shape, or form. That said, can we stop the political commentary on this site? I come to this site to read about OSes and developments and such, not on how bad my country’s current governement and/or policies are. I understand Thom that you don’t like what the USA is doing – trust me, I get it. But can we drop this type of reporting/posting? I mean, it’s not OS or engineering related at all. If you want to impact the current US administration, contact the representatives of your own countries and pressure them to cut all ties with the US in all their various capacities. But let’s leave the osnews.com site for OS news, okay?
Setting aside the fact we can post whatever we want here, how does a brain drain not affect the tech sector? How is that not relevant to tech?
Politics and tech are intertwined. OSNews has been reporting on politics since the day it was founded in 1997.
I’m with you on this, politics and tech _are_ intertwined. Some proofs being all that brain-drain movement, and the UE starting to look for real to alternatives to US-provided tech, e.g. in the cloud providing.
I don’t know if we can all post here what we want. My comments have a tendency to… expire after a while. Often when I disagree with you. Though I’m sure that’s just a glitch, because we value freedom of expression around here!
This is a pretty serious insinuation. I’d be surprised, since I’ve never seen any comments disappear, even when sometimes borderline insulting. And there’s plenty examples of disagreeing comments that have never “expired”.
I can confirm that some comments just mysteriously disappear
Plenty of my comments have “disappeared”. Some things just can’t be said.
I agree with you Thom. The whole field of computing was essentially invented during the small disagreement of 1939-1945. You can’t deny that the circumstances around the construction of the Colossus and the burgeoning field of computer science weren’t in some way intertwined with the politics of the day.
Heck, some more modern subjects, like the rise of AI and the need to regulate it, are highly political in nature, as is the possible espionage benefits of quantum computing. How about the need to diversify chip manufacturing away from Taiwan? Is that not political as well?
Just because you don’t like a subject, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t discuss it. People keeping their mouths shut and ignoring the tyrants is what start the small disagreement of 1939-1945 in the first place. Lets not let history repeat itself.
The123king,
I strongly agree with your sentiment. I am extremely concerned about what’s taking place. There is mass ignorance over the rise in authoritarianism – the alarm bells are justified. However the majority of educated individuals such as those on osnews, are already in agreement so it’s not really clear to me that osnews has any barring on the outcome. Anyway it seems like more people are in favor of political coverage here than not, which is ok by me. But I do understand why some people think it’s a bit much and I don’t think it’s beneficial to push them away if it can be helped.
I am extremely concerned about the rise au authoritarianism too. To be honest, i think it is inevitable for any large hierarchical social group to fall under this spell. It only takes the right person to hijack the head and we are all screwed. And with technology, the amount of screw potantial is constantly rising. I think our only way out as a species is to find how to create decentralized alternatives to all of our institutions.
From a systematic perspective it should help create societies with more resilience baked in. It cannot be done instantaneously, maybe a coop-ization will occur when communities will become owners of their local infrastructure.
I’m totally in with that. Yes, mainstream medias are covering the political subject already, but very few are looking at from the technical/scientifical point of view.
And even less from the computer scientists’ point of view.
This is absolutely inacceptable, if you consider how computer science and technology are actively being used as weapons in the hands of the regimes. This is EXACTLY what OSNews should speak about.
For those who didn’t noticed already: scientific research is at risk (let alone democracy at all).
Without science, our future is at risk too.
Forget me if I don’t care only about CHANGELOGs atm.
Ha, No German ever voted for Hitler. At least, not when asked 1945. Ok, I trust you did not vote for him.
What makes me wonder is, that there are not hundreds of thousands US citizens on the streets?
Compared to what is happening in Turkey or Serbia, it is just nothing.
Still he has so much backing that it hurts.
And yes, this all has an affect on science, technics and so for all working in this field.
Because one goes down the street only when directly threatned or damanged.
Americans who didn’t voted for Trump do perhaps disagree with his agenda in principle, but it’s just business as usual.
Or perhaps they feel so much beaten and tired that they cannot react. I could understand this: we’ve a far right populistic government in Italy, too and I’m still waiting for the left wing to react.
Still, kidnapping and expelling protesting students, plans to invade Greenland, cutting University funds, dealing with regimes, blackmail the allies and label europeans as parasites should ring a bell to me…
On the matter of employing ad/content blockers, Thom has previously espoused a philosophy of “your computer, your rules”. In that spirit, I offer the following rules to whomsoever may find them useful.
http://www.osnews.com##article > header > .post-info > .thecategory > a[href$=”/clown-car/”]:upward(article)
http://www.osnews.com#?#article > .front-view-content :has-text(Trump):upward(article)
EDIT: I don’t know how to format WordPress comments. In the above rules, the URLs should simply be taken as the raw domain name.
I feel like this is a “Then they came for me” thing for Tech and Operating Systems. Remember, idiots constantly want to backdoor SSL and other essential encryption for email, shopping, etc. Speak out now or get `1984’d later.
Look up Rumeysa Ozturk – a Turkish college student, here on a student visa, who got disappeared by ICE yesterday for writing a pro Palestine article for her college paper. When I say “disappeared”, I mean it. There is video footage recorded by her neighbors; a bunch of plainclothes ICE agents in masks, no badges or anything, just swarmed her, put her in flexicuffs, and marched her off to an unmarked vehicle with tinted windows.
Shit is getting wild here. And you know who’s aiding and abetting it? Tech companies. The crowdsourced doxxing, the government mass surveillance, the censorship, the propaganda, all relies on companies like Google and Microsoft cooperating. In the case of some of them (your Peter Thiel/Elon Musk/Palmer Lucky crowd) the companies are pretty much writing the playbook for the Trump administration, rather than the other way around. So yeah, it is tech news.
I cannot agree more. When tech is used as a political weapon, then politics is tech news
There’s only one thing to say: FAFO!!!
What an incredible display of shooting your own feet, it’s almost unbelievable!
I’m not just interested in operating systems but also the world I live in. If there is something on OSNews I don’t want to read I just scroll past it.
There’s simple solution: just don’t go there.
Tech migration from the United States into Europe? Setting everything else aside, this part at least is excellent news for Europe’s efforts towards reindustrialization and technological sovereignty.
As someone who has been living and working in the USA on a green card since 2007, pretty much everything about this shift, not only in government administration but in the way people here barely react to or frequently even cheer for it, is terrifying. Even as a legal immigrant here I just don’t trust them to honor the “Permanent” part of my Permanent Legal Resident card. I have given up any hope that things will ever improve in this country, as it has been made obvious since the first Trump administration that the whole system is fundamentally broken and that nobody has any intention of fixing any of it. Personally, I’d love to join the brain drain! I’m originally from South Africa but I’ve been actively looking into moving to Europe – hopefully within the next two years. While going back to SA is always an option for me, the reality is that I left there at a young enough age that I barely have any knowledge of or relation to that country anymore.
Sadly, almost all of my professional experience is in graphic design which is not really something most countries feel the need to hire externally for – especially worse as more companies are fooled into thinking AI can just replace us (sure, they will figure out over time that the current AI solutions marketed are inadequate, but it makes now a rough time to look for a job while they all experiment with it).
MourningKnight — it sounds like you have a front-row seat. I have a theory:
Electing a fibbing felon as one’s president — not once but _TWICE_ — is what happens when “tax cuts!” has been the mantra for decades.
The result is that you have generations of citizens who can’t tell fact from fiction because their public school systems were whittled down to just warehousing the children, all thanks to fewer taxes.
And fewer taxes for education then increases the brain drain by shrinking the local “supply” of brains.
That is definitely part of it. The Republicans also have a vested interest in fucking up education here as much as possible (since being less educated is correlated with voting for them), and the Democrats… have kind of been sitting on their asses and failing to counteract that, for a bunch of reasons (having their own corporate donors chasing short-term profits, being a cargo cult around Bill Clinton style “third way” politics, etc).
It’s the same reason that back during the Bush admin, Republicans opposed the expansion of broadband Internet into rural areas. They figured more information = more informed voters = less people voting for them against their own interests. And it looked like that would happen for a while, too, until social media ate our collective brains and turned the Internet into Dur Sturmer writ large.
This is, sadly, very true. In fact, you may have seen that Trump recently ordered the Department of Education be dismantled. Sigh…
I think they are okay now with internet being more available to people since they have realized they can basically mind control people into voting against their own interests with the likes of TikTok and Twitter. Plus, at the end of the day, even those who are “outraged” by it frequently will just sit down with a burger and beer, then watch Netflix until they forget about the issue all together.
Indeed, most of this is being touted as ways to save the tax payer money and decrease the national debt. Which people just eat up because money is literally all anyone seems to care about here… and TikTok. Personally, I am all for paying taxes since they usually at least contribute to things that better serve people and help with employment – this should of course be common knowledge to everyone but in the US people just can’t seem to understand it.
It does all make me wonder: in the years to come, as the government here will likely employ very few people, a mix of AI and robots (which Musk and Nvidia’s Jenson are really pushing to be the next big thing) rid most people of their jobs, and the vast majority of US Americans likely won’t be educated beyond a primary school level… what COULD people even do for a living? Like, economies only work when money actually circulates through them, right?
MourningKnight,
I don’t object to paying taxes either if that translates to better services and a relief from other burdens. Unfortunately the problem we face in the US is that we often get the worst of all worlds. We pay taxes and still have the stress of privatization. Tax breaks go to the wealthy and corporate subsidies instead of making education, housing, and healthcare more affordable & accessible. Politicians have fought tooth and nail against progressive uses of taxes like single payer government healthcare. Things are so messed up with US health care there were collective cheers when the CEO of a health insurance company was murdered. In a well functioning system the benefits would be more directly felt, but as it stands we’re paying an awful lot for bombs, subsidizing billionaires, and meanwhile government services including social security, the post office, etc remain on the brink of insolvency. Other countries are doing a better job than we are using taxes to advance the public interests, but here it’s no mystery that people don’t believe their taxes are going to good use. Alas, it doesn’t help that they keep voting in the politicians who are responsible for this state of affairs, trump included.
No no, please, keep all these political articles coming. The more this site turns into an echo chamber of anti-AI and orange man bad the faster things will change. Definitely!
Oh, so you are the sort of person who goes to YouTube and watches every video on the homepage, in order, then leaves comments like this on each one that isn’t of interest to you. No? Why act like that with any other site then? If something is of no interest to you then why even read it in the first place?
And, frankly, it’s largely echo chambers all over social media and investment firms that helped make all this political and AI nonsense happen in the first place, so why not have an echo chamber against it all?
bornagainenguin,
I don’t know if you meant it the way I am interpreting it, but calling for this site to turn into an echo chamber seems like a very poor choice of words. It typically equates to the media and masses amplifying messages without being very informed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)
I’ve been quite critical of echo chambers because they encourage people to approach topics religiously rather than intellectually. Not only are religious debates dull, but it tends to decrease the intellectual level of discussion. This may be a poor analogy, but consider apple’s “reality distortion field” during the Steve Jobs era. Discussions would frequently turn away from rational debate towards “religious” angles. Now I put it to you which way should we be aiming to combat this: encouraging a more religious mindset around android, windows, etc to help balance out pro-apple religion? Or encouraging people to think independently, rationally and act less like sheep? This is my view on tech/politics/AI/etc. We need to be more than an echo chamber for the opposite side, we need to do better than. I don’t want to be a mindless zombie, I want to be rigorously challenged.
Thank you for all the answers. I’ve read all carefully.
I agree with the idea that “you are just free not to read political articles”. It is a nice thing, in my opinion, that there’s nowhere to hide from the issues at hand. It is the digital analogy of not allowing one to cover their own head with the groceries paper bag.
You may choose to ignore the issues. You may choose to try to catch a break out of it. But this is serious, and it is not the time to catch a break.
Bullies win through silence and our (very wrong) conflict-avoidant culture. So the time of silence must be over by now. You can still choose to ignore the protests, the articles, and the banner. You may choose to give yourself a break from them. But they should be there, visible, all the time.
Shiunbird,
“Nice” is clearly the wrong word. I also think you’ve made a mistake in your calculus: whether osnews covers politics or not, it’s totally implausible that there’s even a single person here who has their head in a paper bag; almost the whole damn world is trump news 24×7.
I know it is serious, but it doesn’t mean that everyone’s entire life should revolve around Trump, That’s a horrible way to live. I always maintain that the choice of what to cover remains with osnews. Furthermore I get that some feel it should be covered here. I don’t object to such opinions, however I strongly criticize this idea you are peddling that people shouldn’t be allowed to catch a break. Even though the message is obviously different, the idea that you can’t get away reminds me of propaganda in North Korea. As the hunger games taught us, we start to look more like the villains when we use the same tactics of our enemies regardless of our own perceptions of righteousness. My point is that politics don’t have to be covered everywhere and it’s not wrong for people to have some place to escape the political bombardments.
Fair points.
I may be underestimating how much many of us is exposed to news. I often go out without my phone and I do not have social media accounts, besides youtube. And I do make the point that mealtimes are apolitical here at home, full stop, so I have my breaks and, perhaps for many of you, it is way harder to catch a breath.
But the opportunity is here for the others to engage and, as others have mentioned, you can always choose not to open an article or not to engage in the comments thread.
One thing that I appreciate about Thom’s reporting is that he gives enough information in the header to give me the choice not to open an article. Some of the outlets I really enjoyed watching on youtube now annoy me because, if before the video title would allow me to choose whether I am interested in the topic, now they have turned into “YOU DONT BELIEVE WHAT HAS HAPPENED THIS TIME”, with the thumbnail of a person facepalming.
If for many this acts as clickbait, for me it means instant disengagement, exactly because it takes away the authority to decide for myself. So, as long as Thom remains transparent, I guess we can all choose to engage or not.
Actually I don’t see Trump as a problem, he’s a muppet, like the two old blokes that talk rubbish on the theatre balcony. The big problem are the faceless hoard behind the curtain pulling the strings, when Trump shouts or rants if you are smart you’ll be looking the other way, there is someone in the background that needs a little more light!
cpcf,
Clearly Trump’s vanity is being used to manipulate him. I think we saw elements of this playing out on camera in the Ukraine meeting with president Zelenskyy. Clearly a pre-planned, but Trump may not have been privy.
Nevertheless it doesn’t lessen the dangers of a president with authoritarian tendencies and personal vendettas against those upholding democracy. They are being extinguished under his direction. I would say it’s very much a problem even though he’s not the only problem.
The “faceless hoard” are the billionaire class, and they are also the ones controlling the muppet. Authoritarian rule is very good for oligarchs, if the authoritarian ruler is their friend.