I hope the scientists just get creative and are like. “Transg*nder” “The topic that shall not be named”. Just have some fun with the stupid censorship. Also, we must demand that this be overridden. Censorship is a mark of authoritarianism.
I have no fucking idea what we’re going to do. I don’t think a CDC biologist could even say something like “fetal alcohol syndrome.”
All this has made me glad that I do fairly cheap research at an institution where funding is nice, but not expected in the tenure packet.
Well they’ll have to call it “Acohol Syndrome of the Unborn.”
“post-conception product alcohol syndrome”?
Maybe “transgender” could become something like “truegender”…
Also in the banned list: “science-based” and “evidence-based.” I’ve noticed Trump voters call things “based” a lot, which I now interpret as “science-based” without the science, or “evidence-based” with no evidence.
Like fruit-flavored or cheese-flavored, meaning it’s only the flavor, not the actual food.
The way laws are passed in the US is totally broken. I wish we had a sympathetic Supreme Court that could just rule invalid any law voted on before a reasonable person can read it and/or has crap put in at the last minute. Maybe a page limit of 25 too. And anything fashioned in any way by lobbyists is verboten.
Evidence-supported.
The Supreme Court won’t save you. If Trump had its way, it will make things worse.
And then:
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
Yes, but whatever happens, they have got the Maxim gun and we have not…
Agreed. It should be a parliamentary rule, to prevent bad-faith crap. It’s obvious from how the government is structured that there were thoughts about that, but I guess it wasn’t enough.
I find it really rather interesting - and revolting, to be sure - that they’ve been deliberately twisting our system of government well past what should be the breaking point. I mean, it’s so twisted it’s hard to imagine it un-twisting, but we can’t say it’s actually broken just yet - and not for lack of trying, apparently.
In that context, the tax bill can perhaps be seen as a last-ditch all-in effort to straight-up enrich those who wrote the bill (e.g. those the lobbyists represent, not to mention the lobbyists themselves) and those who support it in congress (Corker being only the most obvious, other than Trump himself).
It honestly doesn’t make sense to me that they’d honestly think they can get away with what they’re doing for much longer, so they’re unambiguously, absurdly lying to the public about what the bill does, and pushing it through despite everything - because they know their days are numbered (outrageous number of votes Roy Moore got aside).
That maybe also explains a lot of the other things the Trump administration and the Republican congress are doing - they duped the country into putting them into power one last time, so they’re just going for it.
I’m honestly not sure if that’s the optimistic or cynical view of the situation.
It’s maybe also an irony to consider that what they’re doing is, when you really get down to it, what the founders were revolting against in 1776.
Hilaire Belloc’s satire on imperialism relevant as ever, and deserves reading. Substitute middle East for Africa and drones for Maxim Gun.
I’m not sure about that. At bottom a lot of 1776 was about rich people not wanting to pay taxes.
Specifically, not wanting to contribute to the cost of their defence against the French.
Remember when Trump was demanding money from NATO?
Tangent: I very much wonder about this, if anyone knows a good review. So much about the American Revolution is buried in mythology. The founding fathers were the greatest of political geniuses, you know, who fought a heroic war against the tyrant king and to create a nation of liberty.
The details aren’t so good. We have some tens of thousands of deaths, and tens of thousands more abandoning their homes to emigrate. The creation is a union marred by slavery that does not make a century before breaking. Some hundreds of thousands more deaths from that, and today you have something hard to say went so much better than non-revolutionary Canada or Australia. It doesn’t seem as impressive as Ben Gates would have you believe.
That makes the causes deserve another look. And it happens some of the grievances, like the idea that the British were conspiring with the Natives to ruin their own colony, look like distortions at best. So it’s very easy to imagine the whole thing was just driven by people ambitious to overrun the continent, without wanting to pay anything for the very war that made it possible.
However. I worry this is letting Britain off too lightly. It is not exactly unheard of for the European powers of the time to fight wars for elite gains and push the costs to a public that did not benefit, or to consider colonies as exploitable resources without concern about their welfare. Plainly not everyone felt things so intolerable given the net emigration to Canada, but I noticed even Zinn did not doubt punishing circumstances in his less-than-hagiographic summary.
Again, I wonder, and would love if someone could help put the situation in perspective.
There’s an interesting point here and it applies to the Spanish conquests too.
I’m going to summarise because I read this in dead tree and I’m away from home so sorry for any inaccuracies.
A friar who went out to a Spanish colony (forget which) was appalled by the Conquistadores. He went back and told the King that his new subjects were being maltreated which might turn them against Spain.
The King had not considered that all those American natives were part of the population of his empire and that made it greater than he had realised.
In the same way the King - who, remember, was Elector of Hannover and for whom in a sense both British and American subjects were “foreign” - might well consider that the native Americans might actually be a better bet as subjects of the Crown that the revolting (and sometimes criminal) white inhabitants.