scarab92

24 ms·

271.
by scarab92 2y ago
Gaining voters from the right shouldn't be the Democrats primary focus. Their primary focus should be retaining voters, by broadening the range of opinions which are acceptable within the party. They are a decade down a purity spiral,
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by scarab92 2y ago
Gun rights would be another example. The difference I think, is that the purity spiral on the left encompasses the entire party. If your perspectives are too moderate you are shunned from the entire hemisphere of politics and often suffer a
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by scarab92 2y ago
Purity spirals are a social dynamic where members of a group compete to demonstrate ever-increasing levels of ideological purity. Moderate perspectives are seen as dissenters and are shunned as the group becomes more radicalised. It's
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by scarab92 2y ago
Sorry, that was directed at tsimionescu and their Hitler analogy.
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by scarab92 2y ago
I think a lot of the problem is policy bundling. Defence is a homogenous concept, or close to it, so people can confidently state they support it. Research is a messy mix of things people like and things they don’t. It is it significantly e
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by scarab92 2y ago
Clearly you don’t really understand what a purity spiral is. Ultimately, the left numerically cannot win an election until they escape it. It’s up to them whether they do.
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by scarab92 2y ago
Polling tends to show public support for certain disciplines (e.g. medicine, engineering, hard science) and not others (e.g. social sciences) I don’t think the public resent intelligence per se, but rather dislike when it is combined with j
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by scarab92 2y ago
It’s not a coup in any literal sense of the word, not even in the autocratic sense. The reason it’s being used is a combination of the US having never experienced a real coup, and thus it’s citizens not really knowing what the word means, p
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by scarab92 2y ago
This is going to sound partisan, but I genuinely think it’s because Trump connects with people on more levels than the Democrats do. The name calling is part of his blustery comedic Hollywood side, which people understand is different to hi
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by scarab92 2y ago
> a criminal, lie, swindle and rig puller like Trump > voter base is stupid > facist, nazi, coup Name calling typically results in people viewing you as immature. If the left ever want to reclaim the respect of voters, they need to
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by scarab92 2y ago
Purity spiral. The left won't be competitive in elections until they learn what it is, why it results in alienation of people who would otherwise support them, and find a way to escape it.
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by scarab92 2y ago
The left need to accept that they lost the election, that Trump won the presidency and the Republicans won control of congress. As much as you personally disagree with these decisions, they are in line with the broad policy positions Trump
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by scarab92 2y ago
It's not so much that people want to become partisan, but rather the culture of the discipline. The culture within the hard sciences is to challenge existing theories and narratives. The culture within the social sciences is almost the
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by scarab92 2y ago
I'm sure voters have more nuanced opinions than just "science" and "foreign aid". For example, I suspect the public strongly supports taxpayer funding of medical research, but strongly opposes taxpayer funding for s
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by scarab92 2y ago
It's the hard sciences I feel for because they typically deliver good returns on taxpayer funded research expenditure, and are generally disciplined enough to keep their head down and focus on their work, rather than engage in culture
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by scarab92 2y ago
Not really. He wanted Romney to win the Republican primary, believing him to be more pro-tech than the other candidates, but he ultimately he supported and voted for Obama in that election.
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by scarab92 2y ago
Academics should keep in mind that they rely on the generosity of taxpayers to fund their research. They don’t have an entitlement to other people’s money, and if they are perceived as wasting it or spending in discriminatorily then you sho
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by scarab92 2y ago
This is nonsense. The US is full of billionaires who came from underprivileged positions. Infact, your advice is worse than wrong, it is actively harmful, because you're discouraging people from trying by (falsely) telling them that th
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by scarab92 2y ago
This theory presumes there is shortage of talented researchers in other countries, which is not the case. There aren't countries with unfilled academic positions awaiting people from the US. If anything, the landscape is even more comp
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by scarab92 2y ago
Higher taxes do genuinely restrict economic growth, so it's not like raising taxes is a magic bullet. Personally, I think there is plenty of grift and wasteful expenditure we could look at addressing first, especially within the health
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by scarab92 2y ago
I don’t think that is a fair characterisation of Andreessen. He’s always been a Democrat, including supporting Obama and Clinton. His recent support of Trump appears to be a tactical reaction to some of the misbehaviour during the Biden adm
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by scarab92 2y ago
To be competitive in academia in Europe, you’re not going to have as much free time as you expect. You’re unlikely to be able to afford to live in the center of a dense Western European city on researcher wages, and most of the jobs aren’t
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by scarab92 2y ago
> That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway. Except that it’s the opposite of a lottery. It’s almost entirely based on your skills and the decisions you make. There are right-place right-time
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by scarab92 2y ago
There’s not that many jobs going in academia in other countries, and you’ll be looking at a significant pay cut due to the strong US dollar. Most likely, people who leave academia will be leaving for industry instead. I do feel for those in
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by scarab92 2y ago
CA, AU, and some EU countries are about to elect conservative governments
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by scarab92 2y ago
Diversity statements were used to facilitate race-based grant approvals. They should never have been legal.
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by scarab92 2y ago
Explain Trump getting re-elected in 2024. As on-the-nose as the Democrats are, I don't think that would have been possible if the public thought he orchestrated a serious attempt at a coup.
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by scarab92 2y ago
It used to be that way, with high diversity of opinions between subreddits. These days, all the default subs are left leaning, most are far-left leaning, which means most users have a partisan experience. This then impacts the overall makeu
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by scarab92 2y ago
Reddit changed. It’s a natural artefact of the voting systems it uses for recommending content. These tend to result in echo chambers because political extremism results in more engagement, and thus more extreme users vote more and have a l
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by scarab92 2y ago
If redditors were simply complaining about things like the attempts to stop birthright citizenship, then I would agree that it’s left leaning. What makes it far-left are the calls for violence all over the place, and the rejection of opinio

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