There can be no doubt any more that Science (the kind that has an actual impact) in the U.S. is dead. If you want to stay a scientist, you have no choice but to emigrate.
The current admin tries to portray themselves as "strong man" but have the thinnest of skins. It is likely the EPA bosses don't want any studies which oppose their agenda. Be it renewables or coal mining. Don't follow the science, follow the agenda.
Trump and co. are the biggest "snowflakes". Trump can't even take a question from a reporter he doesn't like without threatening them with prosecution... for asking a question.
It feels like in the US we need collective, civic organizations independent of the Federal government. I would like to see the Democratic party and other left-leaning / governance institutions / activists on specific issues work to make priorities resilient of the government. Especially since working on many of these issues is popular and not particularly partisan. And many people in upper-middle class would rather donate/work on these causes rather than a private company squeezing 1% more profit.
California is what, the world’s sixth largest economy? But we (our political leadership broadly speaking) seem quite inept despite their abundant resources. Gotta to spend dollars on campaigning and gerrymandering instead, or you know losing 50 billion here and there to EDD fraud, or on high speed rail from Visalia to Modesto.
Federal taxes paid by California’s residents and businesses subsidize the budgets of the states who have made retaliatory gerrymandering efforts necessary. Spending money on Prop 50 is rational because California is on the verge of a durable situation of taxation without representation.
This same phenomenon shows why California will struggle to replace the federal government for funding basic research.
It never ceases to baffle my why Californians tend to opine towards a strong federal government when the documents authorizing it are structured such that California is virtually guaranteed to get the worst end of the deal. California has 12% of the population and 2% of the senators.
Every time Californians urge to give the federal government more power, even for "good" things, the rules of the game virtually demand it will be used against them. This might be a necessary evil for the bare minimums (military protection, federal court to settle contracts, enforcement of some federal laws), but I don't understand how Californians justify that every positive intention will be turned against them and carry on anyway.
Well, now that taker states have figured out how to hack the system and bleed giver states while doing things such as neutering the EPA without facing electoral consequences, attitudes seem to be changing amongst people who previously were all right with subsidizing taker states on humanitarian grounds.
This is something baked into the constitution from the beginning.
The entire reason we have the senate is because the less populated slave states didn't want to get steam rolled by the the more populated northern free states. It was an anti-democracy measure to ensure low population regions get over-represented.
It's perverse that the compromise isn't named for the states who were denying suffrage to enslaved people but who wanted to claim them as population for the purposes of representation.
And that is part of the reason why the 10th amendment left many/most the functions the feds are currently performing to the states, and barred the feds from performing them.
i.e. California for a very long time, and even on rare occasion today, is constantly harassed by the DEA over intrastate commerce of marijuana despite the federal government having no power to do so. Californians were basically made to fund the extra-constitutional enforcement against them voted for by other states with per-capita outsized votes.
Since the US Civil War, it has been the feds forcing the ex-slave states into granting representation for their minority populations. States don’t have the power to force fair elections in other states without the feds — so the appreciation for the feds is understandable among those who believe in equal representation.
Sclerotic severe gerrymandering of every seat in the House of Representatives, enabled by the Roberts Court, though, is new.
The voting population difference was massive. The entire reason for the 3/5ths compromise was because the slave states would have almost no house representation.
Adding up the 1780 numbers on that page, the numbers appear to be almost identical. But there's a catch: those numbers include enslaved people. who numbered at least 500,000 (see [1]).
The problem with representatives happened as a result of the Reapportionment Act of 1929 [1], which capped the house at 435 members.
tl;dr: the Republican party recognized that demographic shifts were going to make them a permanent minority in the House, so they refused to re-apportion the number of house members after the 1920 census, then in 1929 decided to cap the number of representatives permanently.
The simple fix is to repeal the law and apportion seats properly, likely by significantly growing the size of the House.
However, in typical Democrat fashion, they never bothered repealing the act and re-apportioning properly once they had power to do so.
The hsr hyperbole is pretty tired at this point. Turns out when you build a train between LA and SF serving a region in between that will have 15 million people in 40 years is pragmatic.
We could all band together and have another dedicated group collect money for it. It wouldn't be optional, either, because we mostly all agree it's valuable. Of course, there would have to be yet another group that sets how much money to collect, and how to spend it.
Oooh I love this idea. We could have some sort of process where everyone gets a say in deciding how the money is spent. Except maybe rather than everyone doing that you could have instead people whose job it is to do it, and everyone gets a say in deciding who those people are.
I wonder if this sort of thing has ever been tried.
It was tried once. Unfortunately it was ultimately killed off by a corrupt leader who took over the military and started deploying them the cities to stop crime. That leader ultimately strong armed the other elected officials into doing his bidding leading to the destruction of the once great nation. He ignored the law and the will of the people.
He was ultimately assassinated in 44BC. I believe his name was Julius Caesar.
To be fair Ceasar was replaced by a few even more oppressive wannabe tyrants. He never posted lists of his political enemies to be murdered and was generally pretty lenient.
Probably led to his downfall. Augustus made sure to squash all potential sources of opposition before taking over.
For sure. Julius ultimately just paved the way for the future tyrants. He consolidated the power into himself which made it a lot easier for his predecessors to take things further.
I understood what you meant, but the word you were looking for is "successors", not "predecessors". His predecessors were the senate, consuls, and the rest of the governing bodies of the republic.
Another thing is that I’m not sure he really ignored the will of the people. “The people” were severely oppressed and the policies they supported ignored and rejected for the past 80+ years by the tightly knit oligarchy at the top. The overwhelming majority of its citizens probably had no real reasons to do anything to “protect” the republic.
Also it’s not like Caesar was the first to do what he did. He followed in the steps of a much more brutal and oppressive conservative/reactionary tyrant who almost had him executed a few decades ago.
I suspect we'll end up with a patchwork: From activist private organizations / charities. To state gov'ts in blue states. To just private industry (given how solar is now the least expensive energy source). To just private citizens who would prefer to work for less money on something valuable than squeeze a tiny bit more profit as a corporate cog.
Ideally the Federal gov't gets back into play, but we shouldn't plan for that future. It's a nice to have, but its a single point of failure. Especially if the Supreme Court doesn't believe in the independence of agencies anymore.
As an example, the American Academy of Pediatrics now has their own vaccine schedule, which they didn't have before. Nobody in their right mind trusts the CDC / FDA on this right now.
For instance, it's a common trope that you need government because 'muh roads'
There are literally no public roads where I live. They are just easements on private property, so it's not even paid for by an HOA pseudo-government or anything like that. You can go miles and miles, basically 90% the way to town, without touching a single taxpayer dime. And I mean you personally, they are open to the public. It is so much incredibly more efficient than paying the county and having them take their cut and then have them hire someone who doesn't even give a shit about our community to upkeep them.
Imagine all the things we could get done if people donated (or privately bought) only 1/3 of what our taxes currently are, and we just shit-canned the notion of taxes. There was a recent government employee on here posting he needed 3 layers of management approval to buy a single capacitor. I'd bet you could get more out of 1/3 spending through competitive charities and enterprises than you could the government where you need 4 fucking people to buy a $.50 part and they have a monopoly and captive consumer (you pay up or they put you in tiny cage).
Even if they paid private enterprises and didn't donate, they could recreate much of government functions, this time not under a monopoly with a captive buyer. I presume many people would want many of those services even if they chose to buy rather than donate them.
You tried that with healthcare. Turns out lots of people want to buy it, it just costs a large multiple of what everyone else in the world pay because actually a bunch of private sector middlemen doing the same adminstrative roles the government does isn't automatically more efficient.
We did not try eliminating government from healthcare. In fact many of the high cost of private payments arise from regulation or a tragedy of the commons situation introduced by government (i.e. ER required to take everyone but with no answer how to pay).
Even if we just let the pesky poors die, the US healthcare system would still be more expensive on a per use basis than the rest of the world.
Now sure, the absolute amount spent would probably be lower if we just assumed that people that couldn't produce paperwork to prove they could fund their ER visit didn't deserve to live. If you prefer zero taxes and zero life expectancy for anyone unfortunate enough to need lifesaving treatment they can't afford, that's a perfectly valid preference. It's just intellectually dishonest to frame an argument that it's inefficient to let poor people live as an argument everyone would get more care if it wasn't for the pesky government paying for it.
Wait which is it. We have a "private" system where we save "the pesky" poor and regulate licensing, insurance, provide medicare/medicaid, have a quasi-public system for ER where private payers fund those who won't pay, or we don't? You just switched entirely to some soap box about why we actually do have a bastardized private-public system and then damned me for pointing out the very false basis that you presumed because it was "intellectually dishonest" for me to point out your argument was intellectually dishonest.
Your premise was we have some kind of private system; my thesis is the uncovered poor would be better off with that than whatever it is we have now where they can maybe go to the ER "free" but otherwise pay a gazillion dollars in regulatory and other imposed costs if they actually try to get some prophylaxis.
If you want to say universal healthcare could be better than whatever we have now -- sure I won't disagree with that. Right now we have about the worst imaginable public-private bastardized system replete with deep regulatory capture.
>If you prefer zero taxes and zero life expectancy for anyone unfortunate enough to need lifesaving treatment they can't afford, that's a perfectly valid preference
... this is not my thesis at all, as you're relying on "can't afford" being at the level it is now where the poor are being billed for all manner of things they wouldn't be in an actually private free market and you're also relying an an absurd premise there will be no charity or any other options for them. For instance, in the Philippines I could just walk into a private pharmacy and buy penicillin essentially no questions asked to treat strep throat on the private market for ~half a day's local wages. (Yes Philippines have public healthcare and hospitals but you're not gonna get that meaningfully in some rural barangay). In USA it takes me 1-2 days wages to treat strep throat because I must go to a doctor to write me magic piece of paper that say I will not go in a cage for having a prescription drug, pay all his regulatory overhead, pay regulatory overhead for a lab, then go to a highly regulated pharmacist and then buy my antibiotics from probably the highest-barrier industry in the US through an anointed company and supply chain blessed by the government. I am much better off having cheap, but non-free antibiotics to treat strep than having to wait until it becomes Scarlet Fever and going to the ER for "free" or being taxed into oblivion to get "free" antibiotics that are then administered in the most bloated and uncompetitive way by government to the point I give up other necessities to pay the tax.
> Wait which is it. We have a "private" system where we save "the pesky" poor and regulate licensing, insurance, provide medicare/medicaid, have a quasi-public system for ER where private payers fund those who won't pay, or we don't?
You have the fully private provision you insist is more efficient. It costs more for worse outcomes than every other developed country, who also have regulations. If your original claim that the private sector is so efficient it could deliver everything for a third of the tax cost of the current system, it's remarkable that you're actually paying a large multiple the cost of the fully socialised systems for many people to have no care or crippling copays.
Sure, you can move the goalposts by claiming that true private provision requires there to be no medical regulations. But in order for that claim to be remotely credible you'd have to be able to point to all the countries that have great outcomes from having no medical regulations or public healthcare at all (the Philippines where the government is the main provider of healthcare but it doesn't have the time or inclination to enforce regulations on OTC antibiotics doesn't count, even if its health
outcomes were excellent, which they're unsurprisingly not). Not gonna lie, if I'm suffering from the symptoms of a heart attack, I don't think antibiotics for half a day's pay are going to help, and literally the only efficiency argument for restrictions on ER rooms being allowed to employ extra admin staff to check insurance paperwork before deciding to administer treatment being an efficiency loss is that it's more efficient to let me die if I can't pay. As I've said, common argument but the complete opposite of your original setup where everyone gets the same outcomes for a third of the cost.
It's an extremely strong indication you've no experience with the US ER system that you think the efficiency issues are checking insurance at the door of a MI patient vs the fact they're required to at least entertain the hordes of people coming in with self reported "STD" or "doctor note for flu" when that kind of stuff shouldn't be appearing at the ER unless a lower acuity clinic has suspicion it might actually require emergent care. But of course why go to a clinic that is much cheaper when you can just show up at the ER and claim the pseudonym Pedro Sanchez with no ID and let the clinic bill it to all the other patients (which you insanely claim makes our system 'private' despite the fact all this happens at the behest of government), whom of course won't show up unless they're about dead because they not only will have to pay for these abuses but actually having something to lose. [Oh and how would I know this, only working ~1 yr in an inner city ER and seeing all the cases]
And you can argue that it would be better if those patients could get free urgent care instead of free ER to do the same thing at way higher cost, and I would agree that would be better than what we have now. But either way we're at an entirely different starting point.
What you can't argue is we actually have a private system in the US (and somehow miss the elephant in the room that over 1/3 of healthcare spending in the US is public Medicare/Medicaid, then add VA on top that) and then allude it's no true Scotsman or a moved goalpost if I point this out. In fact every time I do point it out, you just go back to morally proselytizing about dead poor people because it's a great way to distract from the fact you've lied and knowingly lied.
I mean, if we're in agreement that it'd be more efficient to have socialized healthcare than the non-socialized healthcare the US has, I'm not sure why you started off with the insistence that the private and charitable sector made everything so much more efficient it could provide all the actual benefits of the US government for a third of the cost.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't private hospitals entirely free not to accept EMTALA patients if they also choose not to accept Medicare funding? And that some do, and remarkably still manage to be significantly more expensive than the rest of the world. Weird all these profit making companies opting in to accepting the regulation though, if it's that big a burden.
Like I said, if it was easy to do so much better than socialized healthcare simply by abolishing regulations on the private sector (which itself is a different discussion entirely from whether private companies are intrinsically more efficient), it's surprising nobody seems to have achieved this, anywhere. The true purely private healthcare system that delivers the same or better health outcomes at lower cost doesn't exist.
I've never claimed I thought totally private healthcare might be 1/3 the cost of universal healthcare. I postulated the functions of our government as currently implemented might be able to achieve for 1/3 the cost if privatized. You invented some straw-man that argued I was arguing vs something else, something our government isn't even offering, so I'm unsure how you even got to the point you got to.
If you truly thought our health care was privatized it's all a moot point, because it wouldn't have been included in our original argument. In either case your point is moot because I never compared to hypothetical socialized healthcare but rather our current entire government system.
It blows my mind you would even use the "1/3" statement if you thought it was private because if it was private it wouldn't have even been in the subset of stuff I was comparing relative cost to. I never claimed private things would cost 1/3 the price of things already "private."
Paying for the inefficiencies of private healthcare is about half of US govt spend on providing services (the only larger spend is transfer payments, and you can't pay $4b in annuities to senior citizens from a private insurance scheme that takes in significantly less than that. So probably you need to cut healthcare by more than a third...). I actually believe the US could stay safe on a much lower military budget (though god knows what a private donor funded military would look like) but that's not getting the overall budget cut by a third even if you zero it out.
Mathematically impossible to achieve the functions of the US government for a third of the cost without cutting healthcare spend. Which has been demonstrated to be entirely possible by other countries, but only by choosing to let more people die or, ironically, removing some of the dependence on inefficient private companies for provision...
Obviously a lot of things can work more smoothly when people are willing to give away value for free.
Obviously people are a lot more willing to give away value when it costs them virtually nothing (like roads in a rural area with definitionally extremely low traffic)
Somehow when the county maintains them, the "virtually free" roads somehow become enormously expensive.
You can see the government having a monopoly and captive buyer causes them to be horribly inefficient, as they have no competition (and no private competitor will emerge when the price at point of use by their competitor is zero).
Or do you mean people can't try this out in areas that have already been developed by generations' worth of other people's private and public investments?
In places where there are already public roads, private roads cannot generally compete because the price at point of use is $0 and the maintenance cost are sunk.
Imagine for a moment I had a private school that was equal in all ways to a nearby public school including cost. People would say "why I already paid taxes for the public school, why would I go there and then have to pay yet again." No one would go to the private school. Whereas if they were not made to pay the taxes, they'd be about as equally likely to go to the private school as the public one, and the overall costs would be same.
It is very difficult to establish a robust private road system in a place with public roads. The public views the public road as an established asset rather than the reality (they are an ongoing subscription of maintenance costs). The costs are invisible to the public, even if they might be worse, they just see the road as "free" when they drive on it. This means the public can end up spending even more money with worse results than use of private roads, but be stuck in a local minima they will never escape from.
I build a private interstate next to a public interstate.
Lets say it costs me $0.20 / mi per honda civic that travels on it, and the public road costs $0.30 / mi per honda civic that travels on it in amortized costs.
At the point of use, the user sees my toll of say, $.25 / mi with some profit, and at point of use the user sees $0.00 for the public highway.
Who on earth would bother to take my toll road, even though it is more efficient and cheaper? They've already paid the tax, and not only that, it is largely invisible to them. The government will literally imprison them or take their shit if they don't pay it, it is a sunk cost, the government has violently usurped my competition via payment under threat of violence.
You can't compete with 'free' at the point of use enforced by a violent actor against a sunk cost. Yes if you buy a plot of land that appears to not even be accessible by vehicle without some kind of unknown corner-crossing easement (one linked), then you will win out vs the non-existent competition there, but of course if the government shows up and taxes you to build a road even then you would lose.
>Again, you keep suggesting that you're going to benefit from existing infrastructure someone else paid for.
No I'm talking about using infrastructure a private entity has paid for as competition.
Would you call it "unencumbered" competition if I started stealing a few bucks from everybody that goes to the gas station, then paid people to take my road with the ill-gotten gains instead of the public interstate, then declared that the government is free to compete unencumbered? Of course you wouldn't, I can't just take money from everyone at the gas pump, but the government can so that their public "toll" is already paid and I can't compete even if my road is cheaper.
The end result is public roads have a mobster-type clamp on the encumbered market. You can't compete with them because they have a monopoly on violence and use it to prepay the toll to game the price at the point of use.
>but wasn't provided to you as a potential customer by the public road?
Mine, where I live the roads for miles and miles are all private with public easements and are privately funded. Of course by your definition that would make the public road illegitimate, because it has unfairly poached a private road user (not sure I agree with that).
I don't believe you can 'solve' the tragedy of the commons by increasing the size of the commons. Public government is a tragedy of the commons and shrinking it as close to, if not to the size zero, would reduce not increase the tragedy of the commons.
I'm not opposed to say, privatizing many functions of government so that they are no longer commons. I feel this would solve that problem better than making the commons larger.
Let's start off with the first point "They are just easements on private property" That's what most public roads are. They are still owned by the public (the government) and maintained by the public (the government). Where I'm from, we have plenty of dirt and gravel roads just like this. Once every 10 years or so the county comes in and re-gravels them. They are mostly only ever used by private individuals and they cross through private land, but they are ultimately public. There are actual dirt roads which are also publicly owned but unmaintained.
Where there are private roads, they've been an absolutely nightmare. What's happened with private roads is rich individuals tend to like to throw up gates and no trespassing signs on the roads. Particularly if it blocks off public land, which they don't own, and turns it into their playground. That happens all over the country. In particular you'll see it happen to lakes an on beaches all the time.
But finally, you benefit from the public road whether you want to admit it or not. And particularly when population density goes up, public roads become much MUCH more important. The model you propose is one that only works if we are in very rural locations. It completely breaks down as soon as you need to get goods into a grocery store or supermarket. We subsidize with our taxes the damage done to roads by shipping products and goods. Because I like eating fresh fruit and vegetables, I don't mind that I'm paying a little more taxes so I can have access to those goods. Along with amazon shipments and my mail.
There's a reason no ideal libertarian society exists, because they go to shit when they are tried (see Argentina who is currently looking for a bailout from the US because of their dumb economic policies that you likely support). There are plenty of failed "free town" experiments. The book "A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear" is an amusing story about exactly how this system ultimately turns into a trash heap city.
Honestly I will just thank my lucky stars most people believe this fiction you present, because it's keeping the more libertarian areas cheap and without too many busybodies. It seems you've not heard of public access private easements or private trash service, and you haven't learned how to shoot a bear.
I pay like $50/month in property taxes and that's basically exclusively for public school and college, which while I'm not thrilled to be paying anything above $0 at least basic education has a massively positive ROI.
We don't have any sort of effective police/fire presence, public roads, any public utilities, or really any government services besides grade school education and it's been that way for 50+ years without any sort of apocalypse or us all being eaten by bears. Which is amazing because I don't have to worry about some asshole coming along to choke me out on the pavement were it I would have the bad judgement to sell a loose untaxed cigarette.
So far the place hasn't turned into a trash heap, and I've gotten the services I used to get by public services in other areas for 1/3-1/2 of what I was paying before.
I'm happy to have it as my little secret, but I hate to see y'all suffering.
Surely you realize this only works in low-population-density areas, with minimal economic disparity, and probably lots of self-sufficient property protection processes.
None of those factors are possible and/or desirable, in cities. And cities are necessary things.
What works where you are probably wouldn't work for most people. I'm trying to imagine any city with no police or fire protection, public roads, public utilities, etc.
If I (willingly) don't pay my taxes someone will put me in a tiny cage, violently ("tax evasion").
If I don't fix my road, I just can't go anywhere, which obviously forces me to voluntarily fix it. If I don't voluntarily fix it, I'm stuck until someone comes along with a backhoe, and given only the tiniest % of people will purposefully sabotage their ability to go buy groceries, the burden of having to fix a neighbors road is so miniscule that it fits well within tolerable natural rates of charity.
The end result is the county roads are enforced by violence (tax man will toss grandma out of her house if she doesn't pay up, and assault her if she resists), while the private roads are enforced by a mixture of voluntary action on your own property and some relatively rare charity for those who just don't give a shit if they ever leave their house.
The difference here is the government can initiate violence against me, while the people involved in the private roads cannot.
Your premise here is absurd. Let's suppose minimizing government is taken to the extreme and literally everything is privatized. Then there wouldn't even be a commons and everything would be privately owned. In no way shape or form does increasing the commons eliminate the tragedy of the commons.
Only the first of those has the potential for the kind of abuse you mention, I think, because it mimics the government kind of road in some ways where the maintenance costs aren't captured at the point of use. If it gets bad enough charging $0 you might need switch to some other kind of private road.
In any case this isn't nearly as bad as the tragedy of the commons situation if it is a government road, I think, at least as implemented. Our county roads have a tragedy of the commons situation where you could use the road and then some totally unrelated grandma gets dragged out of her house for not paying for it, despite the fact she's never even been on the road -- to me that seems strictly worse "tragedy of the commons" than even the public access private easement because at least under the private easement I can't initiated violence on unrelated persons for other people using the road.
It would seem quite hypocritical (and ironic) indeed to me for proponents of public roads to damn private roads under the idea of tragedy of the commons, so I'm not sure it's a valid indictment here that the tragedy of the commons is somehow becoming even more unsolved when roads are privatized.
That's not what I was asking. The definition - at least my def - is different, your cases don't explain how to solve it - indeed, there is no known solution, and that's the point. You can't get around government, which can solve some problems.
The only "known" solution is to privatize the commons. One way to do that in this example is to use a toll road.
It seems bizarre to damn some methods of private roads for not solving something you claim has no solution, then just glance over the ones that mitigate it.
You've shown no reason why you can't "get around government" but rather just dismiss the ways that just did.
Out of curiosity, why does this have to be a left-leaning initiative? I personally don’t use these political labels as I’m often confused by how they are used.
I suspect it's a minority of people on the right, and frankly, I've known people on the left (in Canada, at least) who antagonize science and various institutions for no other reason than gut feelings. People on extreme ends of political spectrums are problematic, period. They've always been present, but the Internet amplifies their mania to all of us like never before
In the context of the US in 2025 specifically, anything opposing Dear Leader's agenda will likely be tagged as left-wing, regardless of what it actually is.
This is rather silly, but then it is a rather silly regime.
Conservative people tend to protect their believes, no matter how wrong they are based on new evidence. Humanity has many examples of this happening through millennia, it is widely documented...
Kind of, but also, I've been watching my mainstream liberal friends update their beliefs about stuff, while conservatives still seem stuck. Certainly the point of being "progressive" is about being open to new ideas, and they don't entirely fail at their title. At least in America at the moment, I think the conservatives have it worse.
I think this has happened at times to all groups as well. Right now the conservatives are 'stuck' at least partially because of the cognitive dissonance required to elect and support the current admin.
I think people on the left arguably did the same with various social justice initiatives. Things got crazier by the month for a while until people were genuinely afraid to speak, people were being cancelled for dubious reasons, etc. I recall long periods of needing to be very careful about how (not just what) I said to peers and even some friends. This was a very left-driven phenomenon. While it was started with arguably good intentions, it got weird.
The right has adopted this, ironically, though in a different way and for different reasons. In both cases it's about ideological purity and power, though
Yeah, but part of what I'm seeing is exactly the left pulling their heads out of that mess, while the right is only digging in deeper, both on similar time scales.
Interesting point. I've generally intuited that the left would have carried on down that road were they to win the last election, but I could be wrong. And there has been a bit of a recoil from that kind of behaviour, so you're right about that.
They were already starting to pull back from the worst of the cancelly stuff starting a few years ago. It only took a few years before they realized that a lot of it was blatantly self-contradictory (e.g. broad representation in media is impossible if people are only "allowed" to tell "their own" stories). And they might also have gotten the hint that they were scoring a lot of own goals.
A lot of the other stuff, like actual policy, they're still pretty dug into. But IMO there's a greater proportion of that stuff on which they're just correct, so that's kinda respectable for me.
right and so do libertans ,communists and socialists.
Hanging on to false ideologies, no matter how disastrous, is not exclusive to right leaning its a human trait.
It surely seem like it's way more frequently the issue with right, rather than left. For example there are few if any examples of interfering with scientific work during the Baden administration, while there are many during the Trump one.
Is there much left in there besides extreme hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance? Their beliefs seem to be highly fluid and aligned with whatever the dear leader is saying at any given movement. Daily radical swings are not that uncommon..
Because the current right-leaning US administration (ok, some would call it far right - or rather, if you would go by the standards of pretty much any other country, you'd have to classify it as far right) is so fond of conspiracy theories and rejects science? But yes, in principle I agree that accepting scientific consensus shouldn't be a partisan issue...
we had a group like that called ACORN, and they worked to make sure as many people as possible were registered to vote. Being able to vote is popular and not particularly partisan. Somehow that group doesn't exist anymore! so strange
I mean it's entirely obvious from everything that this administration does that it fundamentally opposes the entire purpose of the EPA. They want people to think climate change is a hoax, and environmental regulations are in the way of earning money. Wind power is bad, and "clean coal" is good.
Can somebody explain the psychology behind these beliefs? I'm pretty sure they know how coal is mined. They must surely have heard about the black lung disease and COPD. Where does this 'clean coal' concept come from? And if that's about the products of coal burning, is it too hard to imagine breathing in hot air containing soot, fly ash, some obnoxious oxides, some unburnt VOCs and some extra CO2? Where have they seen perfect combustion of coal?
Ultimately, what is their motivation to reject their own experiences and endorse such wishful thinking? Why do they choose ideas that harm them? I'm looking for an answer that doesn't assume that they're stupid or insane.
> I'm pretty sure they know how coal is mined. They must surely have heard about the black lung disease and COPD
They do not, they have not, and they do not care. Those people livre purely in the world of words and rhetoric, where the only thing that matters is whether what you say gets a reaction out of people that will lead to you getting more power. Truth is what sounds good.
I know, as a rational educated person it is terrifying to realize that there are human beings who score 0% on the “cares about science and logic and history and truth” scales, but that is the beauty and horror of the human condition - there are many, many people out there whose thinking and mode of operation will be entirely alien to you.
> Can somebody explain the psychology behind these beliefs?
It stands in the way of them making money, and making (lots of) money is psychologically fundamental to their identity, to them feeling superior, maybe because they don’t have much else to show for, or more charitably because they haven’t been taught more healthy values as children. Anything that limits their ability to make money is hard for them to reconcile with their self-image. It’s much easier to play down, distort, or outright ignore other parts of reality in their mind.
I've begun wondering recently to what degree the American Psychiatric Association adding "the pursuit of money at all costs" to their book "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" would be both accurate, and a benefit to society:
It's a combination of never having learned the basics of science and now seeing the falsehoods they've been fed as equivalent to science.
Take the Tylenol thing. You can explain to one of them the scientific method, what a survey of studies is, why correlation often appears when there is no causation, etc. I experienced this last week: at the end of my explanation, the person (a 45-year-old) replied that he "simply disagreed."
The coal, the climate, etc. are all the same. There is a broad sense that because they've been convinced of the value of expanded oil drilling through lines like "Drill baby drill," their current perspective on it is of the same merit as actual scientific research.
I think it's simpler than that. They believe in what they believe specifically because it contradicts the views of people they dislike. I guarantee you that the person you were talking to got a real kick out of you wasting so much of your time trying to explain a position.
However, these people do have a weakness. They feel good when they win the attention economy and the emotion economy, and those are actually really easy to subvert with a little out of the box thinking.
"I'm glad they've finally figured out the cause of autism."
"Chemtrails?"
"No, they said it was Tylenol."
"I don't think so. Did you know that the number of chemtrails the government has put into the air has increased 7-fold since January?"
My experience has been very different from the one you're describing.
The person I was talking to is someone who cares deeply for me (and whom I care for deeply too), someone I've known for almost my whole life. He wasn't having fun contradicting me. In fact, it was making him visibly uncomfortable to do so. He was engaging in the conversation in good faith. He just doesn't have the foundation to understand what he doesn't understand. I'm optimistic that even though he came away still disagreeing with me irrationally, there is a chance that by exposing him to a fuller explanation, he'll seek out more information for himself at some point in the future.
Anti intellectualism is absolutely not new in the US. There is a kind of group think that is basically self reassuring themselves that "our ignorance is better than your knowledge".
There is nothing you can do about this. The more you try to educate people the worse people fall back to it.
Study your history. Hurting yourself to hurt others is a well-established political practice in America. Climate issues hit the marginalized much harder than whites.
While I agree minorities are going to feel the brunt of climate change I’m not sure in modern political contexts the motivation is racial.
There’s deep, growing resentment towards the entire so-called “Professional Managerial Class” - things like wind and solar power are a byproduct of their accomplishments. To kill these things off is a way to stick their finger in the eyes of undesirables; the fact that the externalities of this vengeful decision will mostly be felt by minorities is merely a convenient coincidence for the perpetrators
You have to remember we live in a nation that poured cement into public pools across the country just so they wouldn’t have to share them with black Americans.
I don’t think people realize how many private schools exist purely because of reintegration. People decided they would rather build new schools and pay private tuition on top of the taxes they pay for public education. Again, all of this was just so they wouldn’t have to share those schools with black Americans.
This is all recent history. Many of the people who did this are still alive.
This is unfortunately easy to disprove. Find your nearest republican and ask them whether they think climate change is "woke". Anything progressive comes up against cultural and racial resentments.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
100%. One of the key reasons the US didn't get universal healthcare in the Social Security Act of 1935(!) was because FDR relied on Southern Democrats who thought it was a threat to segregation. So yes they will definitely die for it. If we want to build a better social fabric, we have to deal with racism there's no other way.
Energy corporations and wealthy individuals funded the Heartland Institute who then ran public influence campaigns to discredit climate change. Conspiracy theorists and talk radio hosts predictably made a buck amplifying it. Conservative politicians, ever eager to lower taxes and reverse the growth of government, latched onto it as a wedge issue. Rural and blue collar America, angry at being left behind after deindustrialization, bought into the lies.
It didn't help that the threat was remote and abstract, that the cost was to be paid by future generations (mostly elsewhere), and that the elites who advocated fighting it were conspicuous in their own consumption.
All of these actors were entirely motivated by money and power. No whiteness required.
My theory is consistent repetition of messaging (Cialdini principles). The people aren’t stupid, they’ve been gradually brainwashed over years by propaganda like Fox News and “conservative” talk shows, or they have family/friends that repeat that messaging. It is at the point of groupthink where they all now openly celebrate bigots and extremists.
They probably don’t understand or care why tuna and others parts of our food chain are contaminated by mercury.
Maybe they just want to join a team and beat up on the other team. The fossil-funded GOP tells them each liberal position is evil, so the MAGAs reflexively go against it all, even if it means mutual destruction.
When I was a kid, it was common knowledge (IIRC) that you couldn’t trust lawyers or politicians. It’s crazy to me how people nowadays are putting so much trust in politicians.
> Can somebody explain the psychology behind these beliefs?
A lot is driven by contrarianism. They see what the other side wants and automatically fight for the opposite.
Among those who actually think deeper, they hold beliefs that putting restrictions on coal will make their energy bills explode or make industries in their town go out of business.
Some come from states with coal mining operations. They see the initiatives as an attack on their state.
There is also a lot of misinformation about clean energy. You can still find people who believe that it’s impossible to build enough solar or wind energy to make a difference so they believe it’s all just a scam to spend their tax dollars on useless ventures.
> I'm pretty sure they know how coal is mined. They must surely have heard about the black lung disease and COPD. Where does this 'clean coal' concept come from?
Modern mines are still somewhat dangerous but they’re not like the Zoolander style pickaxe and black lung operations you might have seen in history books. Modern mining relies heavily on machinery and many coal mines are surface operations. The number of humans involved has decreased every year for a long time while safety improves, much like how farming today doesn’t resemble farming of 100 years ago.
It’s not the safest industry, but arguing that we need to eliminate it to avoid black lung is going to be very unpersuasive to anyone in an area with mining operations.
> Can somebody explain the psychology behind these beliefs? I'm pretty sure they know how coal is mined. They must surely have heard about the black lung disease and COPD.
Of course they have? I'm sure you've seen pictures of miners back in the 19th century covered in soot? Why would the wealthy and powerful care about people who aren't them? You can't assume that everyone everywhere thinks "powerless people suffering and dying is wrong", that's quite demonstrably false. It might even be a plurality of people on earth who could not care less about the suffering of those outside of their immediate family and friends.
> I'm looking for an answer that doesn't assume that they're stupid or insane.
they just dont care! Why assume that people who ran for political office actually care about the welfare of others?
if the question is "why do this coal stuff when it's also unnecessary", well that gets into another MAGA value which is "dominance". That is, making people suffer and accept things that are horrible is also a big power play. Just watch any Game of Thrones episode for examples.
> Can somebody explain the psychology behind these beliefs?
"Wind power is bad" because Trump doesn't like the way wind turbines looked near his golf course.
Yes, the actual reason is that dumb.
Trump is the world's biggest baby back bitch and is the greatest proof we will ever have that the idea that we live in anything remotely approximating a meritocracy is one of the greatest fictions ever told.
The USA is big, but China bigger.
If the USA over optimizes on reducing greenhouse gas today, at the expense of our long term economic and world power, China, who cares for less about preserving the world will continue to destroy the world and claim the most power simultaneously.
So while we can reduce OUR footprint by taking ourselves out of the game, the world still loses.
So now try to find a less myopic solution where we remain powerful enough to get the whole world to tamper down their impacts.
We don't win by removing ourselves from the competition. And the competition has a high chance of killing us all. But rolling over is a guaranteed way to lose everything everywhere.
Oh and the prior commitments like the Paris accord were engineered to harm us while allowing China to dominate.
Anyone with a couple of marbles in their noggin can see that depending on a finite resource dug out of the ground for everything is not a good long term plan. Offsetting that dependence with infinitely renewable sources just makes sense. You mention China cares less, yet you fail to acknowledge China by far outpaces the US in its pursuit of renewables. Yes they still use a lot of coal, but they are actively adding more renewables. It’ll just take time. At least they are trying. Also look at their adoption of EVs compared to US.
This perspective relies on seeing Chinese lives as worth less than American lives. On average individual Americans contribute more to the problem than individual Chinese people.
One example is airline miles. Americans travel 2000 miles by plane every year. In China the figure is 1000 miles. So your argument is basically "sure, we could stop traveling by plane, but if Chinese people travel an extra 50 miles a year that wipes out our progress." But that's a pretty poor argument to justify continuing to do 2000 miles/year, if you genuinely think the problem should be addressed.
If both countries reduced to 100 miles/year, it probably wouldn't be enough. But this is an ongoing choice all around. It's not reasonable to suggest that Chinese people have less individual need for air travel. Looking at contribution per country and not per person is not reasonable.
> This perspective relies on seeing Chinese lives as worth less than American lives.
I'm not sure I follow this. If I was to summarise GenerocUsername's argument it would be "the Chinese government is less concerned with making their economy green, and if the US begins taking an economic/influence hit to make it's economy greener, it'll be yielding an economic advantage to China, which will canabalise more global industry in a non-green way, resulting in a net worse environmental outcome." They're claiming basically a fundamental ideological difference between the countries on climate change that, coupled with a claim of zero-sum international industry, means long term environmental outcomes are better if the US is a dominant international player today.
Sidestepping the argument itself which I believe has a number of key weaknesses (as outlined by others in the comments), can you go over how you're linking that to a devaluation of Chinese lives?
Well, China is now completely dominating the renewable energy sector. There were some efforts in the last few years of the US and some other western countries like Germany to catch up. But it kind of looks like this space will be ceded, for better or worse, to China.
But China is deploying more wind and solar energy than the USA. If anything the refusal to diversity energy sources is leaving USA even more behind the competition in the long term.
I see your point of view, but the fact is they are growing and so deploying new assets. The US is not growing and for us it is mostly about replacing assets. They have different payoff schedules. We have pre built infrastructure we are still paying off. You cannot just rebuild it mid lifecycle without taking massive losses.
> China, who cares for less about preserving the world
The premises of your argument are refuted by facts.
A larger percentage of people in China (compared to the USA) believe climate change is a serious threat to humanity and support policies to tackle climate change.
https://ourworldindata.org/climate-change-support
China also leads the world in tech that is crucial for the move away from fossil fuels (solar, wind, electric vehicles and batteries). You can easily look up evidence for this, if you feel any initial doubt.
This recent news article has a nice snippet on the current trajectory on climate change
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/24/china-doubles-down-...
"China pledged Wednesday to cut its world-leading levels of climate pollution by up to 10 percent during the next decade — one day after U.S. President Donald Trump urged global leaders to abandon the effort to halt the Earth’s rising temperatures."
> prior commitments like the Paris accord were engineered to harm us while allowing China to dominate
Who engineered them to harm us? You’re saying there’s a powerful pro-China cabal that designed the Paris accords on purpose to harm us and benefit China? Come on..
The whole idea of polarized opposite parties in the U.S. has gotten out of hand. like science is needed for humanity to further progress. To say the left needs to do this, and the right needs to do that is delusional in its own right. The joint effort comes first or should come first along with logical decisions not based on whether you like the opposite party or not. its about the nation as a whole.
It's because of the First Past The Post voting system that is used in the US, which means winner takes all.
If you want to understand why the US seems so uniquely politically divided, then you will understand once you understand how FPTP voting works and how it inevitably leads to binary politics. Most countries have a voting system that leads to broader representation. US politics will always be black and white and divided so long as FPTP voting is used.
Keeping a democracy requires people to understand it as well. At least in US it seems they'd rather elect a dictator wannabe who clearly said he wanted to be dictator for a day than elect a woman.
Of course they will say they are transparent while lying about everything. People have been falling for their lies since 2016. Why wouldn't they keep lying?
The real question is why are so many people completely willing to sell their country, community, and future to these liars?
Ask any trump voter and you'll find various racial nationalism answer to it.
They aren’t falling for the lies, the lies are a mechanism of signaling that candidate is willing to harm those outside of their tribe (they are willing to be corrupt), and sufficient people believe they are in the tribe.
I don't know why this is being down voted. The white Christian nationalist movement absolutely is willing to burn America to get what they want - they are willing to be corrupt, elect corrupt, forget their religion, hurt the out-group, and lie to give plausible deniability while doing exactly that.
Downvoters: Prove that this administration is not corrupt and not hurting people instead of downvoting - or just accept the truth.
They've said it explicitly, this is a bloodless coup (so long as Democrats allow it). They see themselves as destroying America and creating their own country with completely different rights and laws, and they're well on their way.
Although, considering that the EPA is and has always been something that I never really had a significant amount of contact with, I still end up with mixed thoughts about other topics unrelated to the EPA.
I’m sure a lot of comments here (including mine) are just from the reaction of the headline without reading the story, and a bunch more are from those reading the story without looking at the source material. But it does make for a good reaction from all sides, doesn’t it? Such is the internet culture.
The sources appear to be a combination of anonymous and the EPA employee union leader. The administration is flatly denying that such a meeting happened.
The only added context is that the studies being stopped are around water safety levels. PFAS are specifically called out as the Trump admin immediately pulled back PFAS regulations.
Claims of an EPA “publication freeze” look overstated. Two staffers say they were told to pause, HQ flatly denies it, and no memo has surfaced. Most likely it is a clearance bottleneck tied to the reorg that killed ORD. To staff it feels like censorship, to leadership it is process. Until documents leak I treat this as local slowdown, not agency-wide gag. The bigger story is the reorg itself which centralizes control and raises interference risk.
Culling staff and organisations in ways that lead to bottlenecks or institutional disorder is a classic suppression and censorship tactic. It's naive to think otherwise, especially given the current leadership.
It sounds like more "flooding the zone". Which parts are burying science and which parts are merely organizational incompetence? There's no way to sort it out because there are new incidents every day.
> Two staffers say they were told to pause, HQ flatly denies it
Presenting these two pieces of evidence in juxtaposition, as if they are equally trustworthy, is a bit misleading:
I think we're all well aware that pretty much any given career scientist, particularly one who has chosen to dedicate their lives to public service, is more trustworthy than the current administration, which is on record with tens of thousands of lies, most so lazily told as to convey contempt for the listener: They either think you're stupid enough to believe them, or don't care whether you do.
To take just one characteristic example out of the tens of thousands: the person ruling over the administration infamously hand-edited a weather map with a marker, to lie to the public about the path of a hurricane, then lied to the public about the markup itself to conceal the previous lie. Notably, they never even acknowledged either lie, much less apologized, meaning they still think it was a good idea, and still think that sort of blatant, shameless lying is ok.
That's to say nothing of the disdain the administration has for government and science in general: the long, strong track record there belies any claims of good faith, and indicates that actions they take which worsen one or both, do so with that as the primary motivation.
Probably less a grand gag order and more a clearance choke point from the reorg, but in a hostile political climate even routine slowdowns look like censorship.
More likely, based on the evidence, is more lies by the administration on the pile of tens of thousands, and another example of actual censorship by the administration historically most famous for it.
For an administration which claims that their primary goal is removing bureaucracy and making the government more efficient and effective, these whistleblower reports describing the exact opposite are pretty damning, and the objective is clear to all.
Could be, but whistleblower reports without documents are still thin evidence. Bureaucratic reshuffles often cause real slowdowns even without explicit orders. If a memo surfaces that shows politicals blocking publications, then it’s censorship. Until then it looks more like dysfunction weaponized by the broader political context.
Maybe, but whistleblower reports are solid evidence on their own, multiple corroborating witness statements even moreso. That's even if they aren't going up against the administration most infamous for lying and censorship, which obviously strengthens the whistleblowers' cases.
For an administration which claims that their primary goals are removing dysfunction and bureaucracy, and making the government more efficient and effective, these whistleblower reports describing the exact opposite are pretty damning, and the objective is clear to all.
Unless we get evidence to the contrary, the most likely explanation is that the administration most infamous for censoring and lying is censoring and lying.
Fair enough, I see where you’re coming from. Personally I’d want to see documents or journal confirmations before calling it outright censorship, but I agree the political track record makes it hard to dismiss the reports.
Indeed, totally losing the benefit of the doubt when it comes to matters of censorship and lying, is one consequences of being the administration historically most infamous for censorship and lying. Normally that is motivation enough for people to choose not to become infamous for censorship and lying.
If any evidentiary memos or documents are due, they are due from the administration (with credible independent verification, of course), since at the moment the whistleblowers are more credible based on their assertions alone, and so their claim currently prevails.
The Federal courts have reached this point too. There’s a “presumption of regularity” where the government has historically been seen as a mostly truthful arbiter that would make good faith efforts to follow court orders.
So when a judge would ask, “Do you plan to deport these people tonight?” to a government lawyer, if the lawyer replied, “No”, the court wouldn’t intervene because government lawyers obviously wouldn’t just lie to a judge presiding over a lawsuit. Well it turns out that they’re continually lying and being rewarded for it (Emil Bove for one). So courts are now suspending that presumption and ordering explicit actions with strict timelines for updates for basically the first time in modern history.
It’s astonishing at how little regard this administration has for the norms and structures that make up our government and how much damage they’re doing to the rule of law.
One of the worst instances of this was when the government lawyers essentially replied "We thought only the written orders count" when asked why they didn't comply. I'm not a lawyer, but from the reactions of actual lawyers this is not how it works in court, at all.
Cato - one of the few actually principled right-leaning think tanks have written extensively about this (and other instances of Trump administration contempt). It’s just as bad as you’ve described and infuriating for anyone who actually values the rule of law.
Those ‘two cases’ were from the first months of this term - needless to say there have been many further cases since then. And more to the ‘systemic collapse’ point, Appeals Courts staffed by Trump-appointed flunkies are gutting the contempt proceedings and the Supreme Court is refusing to step in..
Fair, but linking more cases doesn’t automatically prove systemic collapse either. Appeals and the Supreme Court setting boundaries is still part of how separation of powers works, even if you dislike the outcomes. The deeper question is whether courts still have effective levers to enforce compliance, and right now contempt looks more symbolic than binding.
There can be no doubt any more that Science (the kind that has an actual impact) in the U.S. is dead. If you want to stay a scientist, you have no choice but to emigrate.
The current admin tries to portray themselves as "strong man" but have the thinnest of skins. It is likely the EPA bosses don't want any studies which oppose their agenda. Be it renewables or coal mining. Don't follow the science, follow the agenda.
Case in point - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBllzAb_vAk
Kevin Hall's study didn't find ultra processed foods being addictive like cocaine. It seemed to have rubbed the RFK MAHA agenda the wrong way.
>but have the thinnest of skins
Trump and co. are the biggest "snowflakes". Trump can't even take a question from a reporter he doesn't like without threatening them with prosecution... for asking a question.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/maybe-trump-threatens-abc-...
https://archive.is/PFA7n
It feels like in the US we need collective, civic organizations independent of the Federal government. I would like to see the Democratic party and other left-leaning / governance institutions / activists on specific issues work to make priorities resilient of the government. Especially since working on many of these issues is popular and not particularly partisan. And many people in upper-middle class would rather donate/work on these causes rather than a private company squeezing 1% more profit.
Great idea. Who pays for it?
California is what, the world’s sixth largest economy? But we (our political leadership broadly speaking) seem quite inept despite their abundant resources. Gotta to spend dollars on campaigning and gerrymandering instead, or you know losing 50 billion here and there to EDD fraud, or on high speed rail from Visalia to Modesto.
Federal taxes paid by California’s residents and businesses subsidize the budgets of the states who have made retaliatory gerrymandering efforts necessary. Spending money on Prop 50 is rational because California is on the verge of a durable situation of taxation without representation.
This same phenomenon shows why California will struggle to replace the federal government for funding basic research.
It never ceases to baffle my why Californians tend to opine towards a strong federal government when the documents authorizing it are structured such that California is virtually guaranteed to get the worst end of the deal. California has 12% of the population and 2% of the senators.
Every time Californians urge to give the federal government more power, even for "good" things, the rules of the game virtually demand it will be used against them. This might be a necessary evil for the bare minimums (military protection, federal court to settle contracts, enforcement of some federal laws), but I don't understand how Californians justify that every positive intention will be turned against them and carry on anyway.
Well, now that taker states have figured out how to hack the system and bleed giver states while doing things such as neutering the EPA without facing electoral consequences, attitudes seem to be changing amongst people who previously were all right with subsidizing taker states on humanitarian grounds.
This is something baked into the constitution from the beginning.
The entire reason we have the senate is because the less populated slave states didn't want to get steam rolled by the the more populated northern free states. It was an anti-democracy measure to ensure low population regions get over-represented.
You have it backwards. It was mostly the smaller, Northern states like Delaware that were opposed to proportional representation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise
It's perverse that the compromise isn't named for the states who were denying suffrage to enslaved people but who wanted to claim them as population for the purposes of representation.
And that is part of the reason why the 10th amendment left many/most the functions the feds are currently performing to the states, and barred the feds from performing them.
i.e. California for a very long time, and even on rare occasion today, is constantly harassed by the DEA over intrastate commerce of marijuana despite the federal government having no power to do so. Californians were basically made to fund the extra-constitutional enforcement against them voted for by other states with per-capita outsized votes.
Since the US Civil War, it has been the feds forcing the ex-slave states into granting representation for their minority populations. States don’t have the power to force fair elections in other states without the feds — so the appreciation for the feds is understandable among those who believe in equal representation.
Sclerotic severe gerrymandering of every seat in the House of Representatives, enabled by the Roberts Court, though, is new.
The differences in population weren’t that massive in the early years, though.
The voting population difference was massive. The entire reason for the 3/5ths compromise was because the slave states would have almost no house representation.
Still not that massive in relative terms
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colonial_and_pre-Fed...
Virginia would had still been the most populous or at least second most populous state if only white people were counted.
Also there were plenty of small states in the Northeast with very small populations.
Adding up the 1780 numbers on that page, the numbers appear to be almost identical. But there's a catch: those numbers include enslaved people. who numbered at least 500,000 (see [1]).
* Free states: 1,390,067
* Slave states: 1,390,302 - 500,000 = 890,302
> Still not that massive in relative terms
I don't know why you persist in saying this.
[1] https://userpages.umbc.edu/~bouton/History407/SlaveStats.htm
Persist in what? My original was that population sizes between states were relatively more even back then than now.
1780 is probably not the best year, though. e.g. New York was still a slave state. Of course the gap only grew bigger over time
With senators that's by design. But there are also issues with representatives, and I'm not sure how it came to be and if it can be solved.
The problem with representatives happened as a result of the Reapportionment Act of 1929 [1], which capped the house at 435 members.
tl;dr: the Republican party recognized that demographic shifts were going to make them a permanent minority in the House, so they refused to re-apportion the number of house members after the 1920 census, then in 1929 decided to cap the number of representatives permanently.
The simple fix is to repeal the law and apportion seats properly, likely by significantly growing the size of the House.
However, in typical Democrat fashion, they never bothered repealing the act and re-apportioning properly once they had power to do so.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929
How robust would the reapportioned seats be against extreme political gerrymanders? It seems like packing and cracking would still work.
Not all of us! I favor secession.
Because they’re rich.
In the US, the rich always win anyway. Full stop.
If you believe otherwise, I’m sorry to say, but you’ve probably not been paying attention.
Under the current administration, as under all administrations, it’s the poor and middle class states that have the problem.
The hsr hyperbole is pretty tired at this point. Turns out when you build a train between LA and SF serving a region in between that will have 15 million people in 40 years is pragmatic.
We could all band together and have another dedicated group collect money for it. It wouldn't be optional, either, because we mostly all agree it's valuable. Of course, there would have to be yet another group that sets how much money to collect, and how to spend it.
Oooh I love this idea. We could have some sort of process where everyone gets a say in deciding how the money is spent. Except maybe rather than everyone doing that you could have instead people whose job it is to do it, and everyone gets a say in deciding who those people are.
I wonder if this sort of thing has ever been tried.
It was tried once. Unfortunately it was ultimately killed off by a corrupt leader who took over the military and started deploying them the cities to stop crime. That leader ultimately strong armed the other elected officials into doing his bidding leading to the destruction of the once great nation. He ignored the law and the will of the people.
He was ultimately assassinated in 44BC. I believe his name was Julius Caesar.
To be fair Ceasar was replaced by a few even more oppressive wannabe tyrants. He never posted lists of his political enemies to be murdered and was generally pretty lenient.
Probably led to his downfall. Augustus made sure to squash all potential sources of opposition before taking over.
For sure. Julius ultimately just paved the way for the future tyrants. He consolidated the power into himself which made it a lot easier for his predecessors to take things further.
I understood what you meant, but the word you were looking for is "successors", not "predecessors". His predecessors were the senate, consuls, and the rest of the governing bodies of the republic.
> His predecessors were the senate, consuls, and the
Also Sulla and his opponents in the preceding civil war. Who paved the way for Cesar.
Another thing is that I’m not sure he really ignored the will of the people. “The people” were severely oppressed and the policies they supported ignored and rejected for the past 80+ years by the tightly knit oligarchy at the top. The overwhelming majority of its citizens probably had no real reasons to do anything to “protect” the republic.
Also it’s not like Caesar was the first to do what he did. He followed in the steps of a much more brutal and oppressive conservative/reactionary tyrant who almost had him executed a few decades ago.
I wonder what the Pinkerton’s schedule is like…
> have another dedicated group collect money for it
Sounds like S E C E S S I O N
lol...
I suspect we'll end up with a patchwork: From activist private organizations / charities. To state gov'ts in blue states. To just private industry (given how solar is now the least expensive energy source). To just private citizens who would prefer to work for less money on something valuable than squeeze a tiny bit more profit as a corporate cog.
Ideally the Federal gov't gets back into play, but we shouldn't plan for that future. It's a nice to have, but its a single point of failure. Especially if the Supreme Court doesn't believe in the independence of agencies anymore.
As an example, the American Academy of Pediatrics now has their own vaccine schedule, which they didn't have before. Nobody in their right mind trusts the CDC / FDA on this right now.
> Who pays for it?
Mexico
Charity, volunteer work, or private enterprise?
For instance, it's a common trope that you need government because 'muh roads'
There are literally no public roads where I live. They are just easements on private property, so it's not even paid for by an HOA pseudo-government or anything like that. You can go miles and miles, basically 90% the way to town, without touching a single taxpayer dime. And I mean you personally, they are open to the public. It is so much incredibly more efficient than paying the county and having them take their cut and then have them hire someone who doesn't even give a shit about our community to upkeep them.
Imagine all the things we could get done if people donated (or privately bought) only 1/3 of what our taxes currently are, and we just shit-canned the notion of taxes. There was a recent government employee on here posting he needed 3 layers of management approval to buy a single capacitor. I'd bet you could get more out of 1/3 spending through competitive charities and enterprises than you could the government where you need 4 fucking people to buy a $.50 part and they have a monopoly and captive consumer (you pay up or they put you in tiny cage).
> Imagine all the things we could get done if people donated only 1/3 of what our taxes currently are, and we just shit-canned the notion of taxes.
About a third as much, and this is assuming that people actually donate that much, which as a rule they don't, not even where people don't pay taxes.
Even if they paid private enterprises and didn't donate, they could recreate much of government functions, this time not under a monopoly with a captive buyer. I presume many people would want many of those services even if they chose to buy rather than donate them.
You tried that with healthcare. Turns out lots of people want to buy it, it just costs a large multiple of what everyone else in the world pay because actually a bunch of private sector middlemen doing the same adminstrative roles the government does isn't automatically more efficient.
We did not try eliminating government from healthcare. In fact many of the high cost of private payments arise from regulation or a tragedy of the commons situation introduced by government (i.e. ER required to take everyone but with no answer how to pay).
Even if we just let the pesky poors die, the US healthcare system would still be more expensive on a per use basis than the rest of the world.
Now sure, the absolute amount spent would probably be lower if we just assumed that people that couldn't produce paperwork to prove they could fund their ER visit didn't deserve to live. If you prefer zero taxes and zero life expectancy for anyone unfortunate enough to need lifesaving treatment they can't afford, that's a perfectly valid preference. It's just intellectually dishonest to frame an argument that it's inefficient to let poor people live as an argument everyone would get more care if it wasn't for the pesky government paying for it.
Wait which is it. We have a "private" system where we save "the pesky" poor and regulate licensing, insurance, provide medicare/medicaid, have a quasi-public system for ER where private payers fund those who won't pay, or we don't? You just switched entirely to some soap box about why we actually do have a bastardized private-public system and then damned me for pointing out the very false basis that you presumed because it was "intellectually dishonest" for me to point out your argument was intellectually dishonest.
Your premise was we have some kind of private system; my thesis is the uncovered poor would be better off with that than whatever it is we have now where they can maybe go to the ER "free" but otherwise pay a gazillion dollars in regulatory and other imposed costs if they actually try to get some prophylaxis.
If you want to say universal healthcare could be better than whatever we have now -- sure I won't disagree with that. Right now we have about the worst imaginable public-private bastardized system replete with deep regulatory capture.
>If you prefer zero taxes and zero life expectancy for anyone unfortunate enough to need lifesaving treatment they can't afford, that's a perfectly valid preference
... this is not my thesis at all, as you're relying on "can't afford" being at the level it is now where the poor are being billed for all manner of things they wouldn't be in an actually private free market and you're also relying an an absurd premise there will be no charity or any other options for them. For instance, in the Philippines I could just walk into a private pharmacy and buy penicillin essentially no questions asked to treat strep throat on the private market for ~half a day's local wages. (Yes Philippines have public healthcare and hospitals but you're not gonna get that meaningfully in some rural barangay). In USA it takes me 1-2 days wages to treat strep throat because I must go to a doctor to write me magic piece of paper that say I will not go in a cage for having a prescription drug, pay all his regulatory overhead, pay regulatory overhead for a lab, then go to a highly regulated pharmacist and then buy my antibiotics from probably the highest-barrier industry in the US through an anointed company and supply chain blessed by the government. I am much better off having cheap, but non-free antibiotics to treat strep than having to wait until it becomes Scarlet Fever and going to the ER for "free" or being taxed into oblivion to get "free" antibiotics that are then administered in the most bloated and uncompetitive way by government to the point I give up other necessities to pay the tax.
> Wait which is it. We have a "private" system where we save "the pesky" poor and regulate licensing, insurance, provide medicare/medicaid, have a quasi-public system for ER where private payers fund those who won't pay, or we don't?
You have the fully private provision you insist is more efficient. It costs more for worse outcomes than every other developed country, who also have regulations. If your original claim that the private sector is so efficient it could deliver everything for a third of the tax cost of the current system, it's remarkable that you're actually paying a large multiple the cost of the fully socialised systems for many people to have no care or crippling copays.
Sure, you can move the goalposts by claiming that true private provision requires there to be no medical regulations. But in order for that claim to be remotely credible you'd have to be able to point to all the countries that have great outcomes from having no medical regulations or public healthcare at all (the Philippines where the government is the main provider of healthcare but it doesn't have the time or inclination to enforce regulations on OTC antibiotics doesn't count, even if its health outcomes were excellent, which they're unsurprisingly not). Not gonna lie, if I'm suffering from the symptoms of a heart attack, I don't think antibiotics for half a day's pay are going to help, and literally the only efficiency argument for restrictions on ER rooms being allowed to employ extra admin staff to check insurance paperwork before deciding to administer treatment being an efficiency loss is that it's more efficient to let me die if I can't pay. As I've said, common argument but the complete opposite of your original setup where everyone gets the same outcomes for a third of the cost.
It's an extremely strong indication you've no experience with the US ER system that you think the efficiency issues are checking insurance at the door of a MI patient vs the fact they're required to at least entertain the hordes of people coming in with self reported "STD" or "doctor note for flu" when that kind of stuff shouldn't be appearing at the ER unless a lower acuity clinic has suspicion it might actually require emergent care. But of course why go to a clinic that is much cheaper when you can just show up at the ER and claim the pseudonym Pedro Sanchez with no ID and let the clinic bill it to all the other patients (which you insanely claim makes our system 'private' despite the fact all this happens at the behest of government), whom of course won't show up unless they're about dead because they not only will have to pay for these abuses but actually having something to lose. [Oh and how would I know this, only working ~1 yr in an inner city ER and seeing all the cases]
And you can argue that it would be better if those patients could get free urgent care instead of free ER to do the same thing at way higher cost, and I would agree that would be better than what we have now. But either way we're at an entirely different starting point.
What you can't argue is we actually have a private system in the US (and somehow miss the elephant in the room that over 1/3 of healthcare spending in the US is public Medicare/Medicaid, then add VA on top that) and then allude it's no true Scotsman or a moved goalpost if I point this out. In fact every time I do point it out, you just go back to morally proselytizing about dead poor people because it's a great way to distract from the fact you've lied and knowingly lied.
I mean, if we're in agreement that it'd be more efficient to have socialized healthcare than the non-socialized healthcare the US has, I'm not sure why you started off with the insistence that the private and charitable sector made everything so much more efficient it could provide all the actual benefits of the US government for a third of the cost.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't private hospitals entirely free not to accept EMTALA patients if they also choose not to accept Medicare funding? And that some do, and remarkably still manage to be significantly more expensive than the rest of the world. Weird all these profit making companies opting in to accepting the regulation though, if it's that big a burden.
Like I said, if it was easy to do so much better than socialized healthcare simply by abolishing regulations on the private sector (which itself is a different discussion entirely from whether private companies are intrinsically more efficient), it's surprising nobody seems to have achieved this, anywhere. The true purely private healthcare system that delivers the same or better health outcomes at lower cost doesn't exist.
I've never claimed I thought totally private healthcare might be 1/3 the cost of universal healthcare. I postulated the functions of our government as currently implemented might be able to achieve for 1/3 the cost if privatized. You invented some straw-man that argued I was arguing vs something else, something our government isn't even offering, so I'm unsure how you even got to the point you got to.
If you truly thought our health care was privatized it's all a moot point, because it wouldn't have been included in our original argument. In either case your point is moot because I never compared to hypothetical socialized healthcare but rather our current entire government system.
It blows my mind you would even use the "1/3" statement if you thought it was private because if it was private it wouldn't have even been in the subset of stuff I was comparing relative cost to. I never claimed private things would cost 1/3 the price of things already "private."
Paying for the inefficiencies of private healthcare is about half of US govt spend on providing services (the only larger spend is transfer payments, and you can't pay $4b in annuities to senior citizens from a private insurance scheme that takes in significantly less than that. So probably you need to cut healthcare by more than a third...). I actually believe the US could stay safe on a much lower military budget (though god knows what a private donor funded military would look like) but that's not getting the overall budget cut by a third even if you zero it out.
Mathematically impossible to achieve the functions of the US government for a third of the cost without cutting healthcare spend. Which has been demonstrated to be entirely possible by other countries, but only by choosing to let more people die or, ironically, removing some of the dependence on inefficient private companies for provision...
Obviously a lot of things can work more smoothly when people are willing to give away value for free.
Obviously people are a lot more willing to give away value when it costs them virtually nothing (like roads in a rural area with definitionally extremely low traffic)
Somehow when the county maintains them, the "virtually free" roads somehow become enormously expensive.
You can see the government having a monopoly and captive buyer causes them to be horribly inefficient, as they have no competition (and no private competitor will emerge when the price at point of use by their competitor is zero).
Yes it’s an imperfect system, but literally anyone anywhere can do what you’re describing. They don’t, hardly anywhere, because people don’t want to.
They don’t because the government is already confiscating their money to do (supposedly) exactly that.
Anyone can go buy a gigantic plot of land for dollars on the acre and do it. What are you talking about?
Here's a lovely 160 acre plot for $100,000: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/E1-4-Sec-15-T-24-R-89-Bk-...
Or do you mean people can't try this out in areas that have already been developed by generations' worth of other people's private and public investments?
In places where there are already public roads, private roads cannot generally compete because the price at point of use is $0 and the maintenance cost are sunk.
Imagine for a moment I had a private school that was equal in all ways to a nearby public school including cost. People would say "why I already paid taxes for the public school, why would I go there and then have to pay yet again." No one would go to the private school. Whereas if they were not made to pay the taxes, they'd be about as equally likely to go to the private school as the public one, and the overall costs would be same.
It is very difficult to establish a robust private road system in a place with public roads. The public views the public road as an established asset rather than the reality (they are an ongoing subscription of maintenance costs). The costs are invisible to the public, even if they might be worse, they just see the road as "free" when they drive on it. This means the public can end up spending even more money with worse results than use of private roads, but be stuck in a local minima they will never escape from.
Why are you ignoring what I just said?
You can go buy land anywhere you want (i.e. where there are no public roads) and your private roads can compete just fine.
Anyone has always been free to do this since this nation was created.
What's the problem?
Alright, lets imagine what you say.
I build a private interstate next to a public interstate.
Lets say it costs me $0.20 / mi per honda civic that travels on it, and the public road costs $0.30 / mi per honda civic that travels on it in amortized costs.
At the point of use, the user sees my toll of say, $.25 / mi with some profit, and at point of use the user sees $0.00 for the public highway.
Who on earth would bother to take my toll road, even though it is more efficient and cheaper? They've already paid the tax, and not only that, it is largely invisible to them. The government will literally imprison them or take their shit if they don't pay it, it is a sunk cost, the government has violently usurped my competition via payment under threat of violence.
You can't compete with 'free' at the point of use enforced by a violent actor against a sunk cost. Yes if you buy a plot of land that appears to not even be accessible by vehicle without some kind of unknown corner-crossing easement (one linked), then you will win out vs the non-existent competition there, but of course if the government shows up and taxes you to build a road even then you would lose.
Again, you keep suggesting that you're going to benefit from existing infrastructure someone else paid for.
It's not the public's job to provide customers for your toll road.
You can build your toll road and have unencumbered competition elsewhere.
>Again, you keep suggesting that you're going to benefit from existing infrastructure someone else paid for.
No I'm talking about using infrastructure a private entity has paid for as competition.
Would you call it "unencumbered" competition if I started stealing a few bucks from everybody that goes to the gas station, then paid people to take my road with the ill-gotten gains instead of the public interstate, then declared that the government is free to compete unencumbered? Of course you wouldn't, I can't just take money from everyone at the gas pump, but the government can so that their public "toll" is already paid and I can't compete even if my road is cheaper.
The end result is public roads have a mobster-type clamp on the encumbered market. You can't compete with them because they have a monopoly on violence and use it to prepay the toll to game the price at the point of use.
Huh?
What hypothetical car has the option to use your road or use the public road, but wasn't provided to you as a potential customer by the public road?
Agreed, when a public road provides your customer, it's hard to win that competition.
But again: you can just build your roads away from public roads, find your own customers, and then you don't need to compete with them.
>but wasn't provided to you as a potential customer by the public road?
Mine, where I live the roads for miles and miles are all private with public easements and are privately funded. Of course by your definition that would make the public road illegitimate, because it has unfairly poached a private road user (not sure I agree with that).
Are you questioning the idea of having goverments to solve tragedy of commons problem?
I don't believe you can 'solve' the tragedy of the commons by increasing the size of the commons. Public government is a tragedy of the commons and shrinking it as close to, if not to the size zero, would reduce not increase the tragedy of the commons.
I'm not opposed to say, privatizing many functions of government so that they are no longer commons. I feel this would solve that problem better than making the commons larger.
Where (vaguely, of course) do you live? That sounds so different from my experience in a city.
Rural AZ
This is a bad idea.
Let's start off with the first point "They are just easements on private property" That's what most public roads are. They are still owned by the public (the government) and maintained by the public (the government). Where I'm from, we have plenty of dirt and gravel roads just like this. Once every 10 years or so the county comes in and re-gravels them. They are mostly only ever used by private individuals and they cross through private land, but they are ultimately public. There are actual dirt roads which are also publicly owned but unmaintained.
Where there are private roads, they've been an absolutely nightmare. What's happened with private roads is rich individuals tend to like to throw up gates and no trespassing signs on the roads. Particularly if it blocks off public land, which they don't own, and turns it into their playground. That happens all over the country. In particular you'll see it happen to lakes an on beaches all the time.
But finally, you benefit from the public road whether you want to admit it or not. And particularly when population density goes up, public roads become much MUCH more important. The model you propose is one that only works if we are in very rural locations. It completely breaks down as soon as you need to get goods into a grocery store or supermarket. We subsidize with our taxes the damage done to roads by shipping products and goods. Because I like eating fresh fruit and vegetables, I don't mind that I'm paying a little more taxes so I can have access to those goods. Along with amazon shipments and my mail.
There's a reason no ideal libertarian society exists, because they go to shit when they are tried (see Argentina who is currently looking for a bailout from the US because of their dumb economic policies that you likely support). There are plenty of failed "free town" experiments. The book "A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear" is an amusing story about exactly how this system ultimately turns into a trash heap city.
Honestly I will just thank my lucky stars most people believe this fiction you present, because it's keeping the more libertarian areas cheap and without too many busybodies. It seems you've not heard of public access private easements or private trash service, and you haven't learned how to shoot a bear.
I pay like $50/month in property taxes and that's basically exclusively for public school and college, which while I'm not thrilled to be paying anything above $0 at least basic education has a massively positive ROI.
We don't have any sort of effective police/fire presence, public roads, any public utilities, or really any government services besides grade school education and it's been that way for 50+ years without any sort of apocalypse or us all being eaten by bears. Which is amazing because I don't have to worry about some asshole coming along to choke me out on the pavement were it I would have the bad judgement to sell a loose untaxed cigarette.
So far the place hasn't turned into a trash heap, and I've gotten the services I used to get by public services in other areas for 1/3-1/2 of what I was paying before.
I'm happy to have it as my little secret, but I hate to see y'all suffering.
Surely you realize this only works in low-population-density areas, with minimal economic disparity, and probably lots of self-sufficient property protection processes.
None of those factors are possible and/or desirable, in cities. And cities are necessary things.
What works where you are probably wouldn't work for most people. I'm trying to imagine any city with no police or fire protection, public roads, public utilities, etc.
I would really like to see private medical system problem solved in USA.
Government is just organized volunteering. You’re describing a government. You created your own mini government for your road maintenance.
If I (willingly) don't pay my taxes someone will put me in a tiny cage, violently ("tax evasion").
If I don't fix my road, I just can't go anywhere, which obviously forces me to voluntarily fix it. If I don't voluntarily fix it, I'm stuck until someone comes along with a backhoe, and given only the tiniest % of people will purposefully sabotage their ability to go buy groceries, the burden of having to fix a neighbors road is so miniscule that it fits well within tolerable natural rates of charity.
The end result is the county roads are enforced by violence (tax man will toss grandma out of her house if she doesn't pay up, and assault her if she resists), while the private roads are enforced by a mixture of voluntary action on your own property and some relatively rare charity for those who just don't give a shit if they ever leave their house.
The difference here is the government can initiate violence against me, while the people involved in the private roads cannot.
So how the tragedy of commons problem is solved?
Your premise here is absurd. Let's suppose minimizing government is taken to the extreme and literally everything is privatized. Then there wouldn't even be a commons and everything would be privately owned. In no way shape or form does increasing the commons eliminate the tragedy of the commons.
I don't think your definition of commons is the same as mine.
How would you maintain the road if I, who also uses the road, doesn't pay for maintenance?
There are a few kinds of private roads
-public access private easements (my road)
-public access non easement (grocery store parking lot, cost amortized by customers)
-toll road (some highways, etc)
-completely private road (only owner uses it, i.e. private farm road)
Only the first of those has the potential for the kind of abuse you mention, I think, because it mimics the government kind of road in some ways where the maintenance costs aren't captured at the point of use. If it gets bad enough charging $0 you might need switch to some other kind of private road.
In any case this isn't nearly as bad as the tragedy of the commons situation if it is a government road, I think, at least as implemented. Our county roads have a tragedy of the commons situation where you could use the road and then some totally unrelated grandma gets dragged out of her house for not paying for it, despite the fact she's never even been on the road -- to me that seems strictly worse "tragedy of the commons" than even the public access private easement because at least under the private easement I can't initiated violence on unrelated persons for other people using the road.
It would seem quite hypocritical (and ironic) indeed to me for proponents of public roads to damn private roads under the idea of tragedy of the commons, so I'm not sure it's a valid indictment here that the tragedy of the commons is somehow becoming even more unsolved when roads are privatized.
That's not what I was asking. The definition - at least my def - is different, your cases don't explain how to solve it - indeed, there is no known solution, and that's the point. You can't get around government, which can solve some problems.
The only "known" solution is to privatize the commons. One way to do that in this example is to use a toll road.
It seems bizarre to damn some methods of private roads for not solving something you claim has no solution, then just glance over the ones that mitigate it.
You've shown no reason why you can't "get around government" but rather just dismiss the ways that just did.
Out of curiosity, why does this have to be a left-leaning initiative? I personally don’t use these political labels as I’m often confused by how they are used.
It doesn't and yet it does. Primarily because big oil dumped a bunch of money into conservative media to demonize the EPA.
The EPA was originally put into place by richard nixon as was championed in a bipartisan fashion.
Because the right is trying to dismantle all those things
I suspect it's a minority of people on the right, and frankly, I've known people on the left (in Canada, at least) who antagonize science and various institutions for no other reason than gut feelings. People on extreme ends of political spectrums are problematic, period. They've always been present, but the Internet amplifies their mania to all of us like never before
Yes, extremes are problematic - marxism as left-left or fascism as right-right. At the moment though USA surely has a problem with the latter.
In the context of the US in 2025 specifically, anything opposing Dear Leader's agenda will likely be tagged as left-wing, regardless of what it actually is.
This is rather silly, but then it is a rather silly regime.
Conservative people tend to protect their believes, no matter how wrong they are based on new evidence. Humanity has many examples of this happening through millennia, it is widely documented...
> Conservative people tend to protect their believes, no matter how wrong they are based on new evidence.
You can replace the label "Conservative" there with just about any ideology or political leaning.
Kind of, but also, I've been watching my mainstream liberal friends update their beliefs about stuff, while conservatives still seem stuck. Certainly the point of being "progressive" is about being open to new ideas, and they don't entirely fail at their title. At least in America at the moment, I think the conservatives have it worse.
I think this has happened at times to all groups as well. Right now the conservatives are 'stuck' at least partially because of the cognitive dissonance required to elect and support the current admin.
I think people on the left arguably did the same with various social justice initiatives. Things got crazier by the month for a while until people were genuinely afraid to speak, people were being cancelled for dubious reasons, etc. I recall long periods of needing to be very careful about how (not just what) I said to peers and even some friends. This was a very left-driven phenomenon. While it was started with arguably good intentions, it got weird.
The right has adopted this, ironically, though in a different way and for different reasons. In both cases it's about ideological purity and power, though
Yeah, but part of what I'm seeing is exactly the left pulling their heads out of that mess, while the right is only digging in deeper, both on similar time scales.
> Yeah, but part of what I'm seeing is exactly the left pulling their heads out of that mess
I'm not seeing that; not yet anyway.
I expected to see that after the disastrous election that demonstrated just how fringe some of those vocal views were, but I did not.
It's subtle at best in "vocal views". I'm getting this mostly from casual conversations.
Interesting point. I've generally intuited that the left would have carried on down that road were they to win the last election, but I could be wrong. And there has been a bit of a recoil from that kind of behaviour, so you're right about that.
They were already starting to pull back from the worst of the cancelly stuff starting a few years ago. It only took a few years before they realized that a lot of it was blatantly self-contradictory (e.g. broad representation in media is impossible if people are only "allowed" to tell "their own" stories). And they might also have gotten the hint that they were scoring a lot of own goals.
A lot of the other stuff, like actual policy, they're still pretty dug into. But IMO there's a greater proportion of that stuff on which they're just correct, so that's kinda respectable for me.
Likewise, I think a lot of the problematic stuff came from legitimately good ideas. They were just co-opted by bad actors, so to speak.
right and so do libertans ,communists and socialists. Hanging on to false ideologies, no matter how disastrous, is not exclusive to right leaning its a human trait.
Conservatism as an ideology is intrisincally resistant to change. That's what makes it conservatism.
It surely seem like it's way more frequently the issue with right, rather than left. For example there are few if any examples of interfering with scientific work during the Baden administration, while there are many during the Trump one.
> protect their believes
Is there much left in there besides extreme hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance? Their beliefs seem to be highly fluid and aligned with whatever the dear leader is saying at any given movement. Daily radical swings are not that uncommon..
Because the current right-leaning US administration (ok, some would call it far right - or rather, if you would go by the standards of pretty much any other country, you'd have to classify it as far right) is so fond of conspiracy theories and rejects science? But yes, in principle I agree that accepting scientific consensus shouldn't be a partisan issue...
we had a group like that called ACORN, and they worked to make sure as many people as possible were registered to vote. Being able to vote is popular and not particularly partisan. Somehow that group doesn't exist anymore! so strange
Isn't this one of the goals of their Project 2025?
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I mean it's entirely obvious from everything that this administration does that it fundamentally opposes the entire purpose of the EPA. They want people to think climate change is a hoax, and environmental regulations are in the way of earning money. Wind power is bad, and "clean coal" is good.
> Wind power is bad, and "clean coal" is good.
Can somebody explain the psychology behind these beliefs? I'm pretty sure they know how coal is mined. They must surely have heard about the black lung disease and COPD. Where does this 'clean coal' concept come from? And if that's about the products of coal burning, is it too hard to imagine breathing in hot air containing soot, fly ash, some obnoxious oxides, some unburnt VOCs and some extra CO2? Where have they seen perfect combustion of coal?
Ultimately, what is their motivation to reject their own experiences and endorse such wishful thinking? Why do they choose ideas that harm them? I'm looking for an answer that doesn't assume that they're stupid or insane.
> I'm pretty sure they know how coal is mined. They must surely have heard about the black lung disease and COPD
They do not, they have not, and they do not care. Those people livre purely in the world of words and rhetoric, where the only thing that matters is whether what you say gets a reaction out of people that will lead to you getting more power. Truth is what sounds good.
I know, as a rational educated person it is terrifying to realize that there are human beings who score 0% on the “cares about science and logic and history and truth” scales, but that is the beauty and horror of the human condition - there are many, many people out there whose thinking and mode of operation will be entirely alien to you.
> Can somebody explain the psychology behind these beliefs?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Après_moi,_le_déluge
> Après moi, le déluge
That phrase is chilling, and perfectly describes what I've been feeling like where the society at large is heading.
Thank you for introducing it to me.
It stands in the way of them making money, and making (lots of) money is psychologically fundamental to their identity, to them feeling superior, maybe because they don’t have much else to show for, or more charitably because they haven’t been taught more healthy values as children. Anything that limits their ability to make money is hard for them to reconcile with their self-image. It’s much easier to play down, distort, or outright ignore other parts of reality in their mind.
I've begun wondering recently to what degree the American Psychiatric Association adding "the pursuit of money at all costs" to their book "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" would be both accurate, and a benefit to society:
https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm
I’d assume it would just fall under psychopathy.
It's a combination of never having learned the basics of science and now seeing the falsehoods they've been fed as equivalent to science.
Take the Tylenol thing. You can explain to one of them the scientific method, what a survey of studies is, why correlation often appears when there is no causation, etc. I experienced this last week: at the end of my explanation, the person (a 45-year-old) replied that he "simply disagreed."
The coal, the climate, etc. are all the same. There is a broad sense that because they've been convinced of the value of expanded oil drilling through lines like "Drill baby drill," their current perspective on it is of the same merit as actual scientific research.
I think it's simpler than that. They believe in what they believe specifically because it contradicts the views of people they dislike. I guarantee you that the person you were talking to got a real kick out of you wasting so much of your time trying to explain a position.
However, these people do have a weakness. They feel good when they win the attention economy and the emotion economy, and those are actually really easy to subvert with a little out of the box thinking.
"I'm glad they've finally figured out the cause of autism."
"Chemtrails?"
"No, they said it was Tylenol."
"I don't think so. Did you know that the number of chemtrails the government has put into the air has increased 7-fold since January?"
My experience has been very different from the one you're describing.
The person I was talking to is someone who cares deeply for me (and whom I care for deeply too), someone I've known for almost my whole life. He wasn't having fun contradicting me. In fact, it was making him visibly uncomfortable to do so. He was engaging in the conversation in good faith. He just doesn't have the foundation to understand what he doesn't understand. I'm optimistic that even though he came away still disagreeing with me irrationally, there is a chance that by exposing him to a fuller explanation, he'll seek out more information for himself at some point in the future.
Anti intellectualism is absolutely not new in the US. There is a kind of group think that is basically self reassuring themselves that "our ignorance is better than your knowledge".
There is nothing you can do about this. The more you try to educate people the worse people fall back to it.
Study your history. Hurting yourself to hurt others is a well-established political practice in America. Climate issues hit the marginalized much harder than whites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_in_swimming
While I agree minorities are going to feel the brunt of climate change I’m not sure in modern political contexts the motivation is racial.
There’s deep, growing resentment towards the entire so-called “Professional Managerial Class” - things like wind and solar power are a byproduct of their accomplishments. To kill these things off is a way to stick their finger in the eyes of undesirables; the fact that the externalities of this vengeful decision will mostly be felt by minorities is merely a convenient coincidence for the perpetrators
It doesn't have to be explicitly racist. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...
Lee Atwater would be proud. It started with Reagan and is used with exceptional effectiveness by the current Republican Party.
You have to remember we live in a nation that poured cement into public pools across the country just so they wouldn’t have to share them with black Americans.
I don’t think people realize how many private schools exist purely because of reintegration. People decided they would rather build new schools and pay private tuition on top of the taxes they pay for public education. Again, all of this was just so they wouldn’t have to share those schools with black Americans.
This is all recent history. Many of the people who did this are still alive.
I hear the Audubon pool was really nice too.
This is unfortunately easy to disprove. Find your nearest republican and ask them whether they think climate change is "woke". Anything progressive comes up against cultural and racial resentments.
> Hurting yourself to hurt others is a well-established political practice in America.
Some folks would rather literally die than have the 'wrong people' have an improvement in their lives:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness
Do not under-estimate the power of spite/hate.
As LBJ famously put it:
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
100%. One of the key reasons the US didn't get universal healthcare in the Social Security Act of 1935(!) was because FDR relied on Southern Democrats who thought it was a threat to segregation. So yes they will definitely die for it. If we want to build a better social fabric, we have to deal with racism there's no other way.
That's almost the same cover as JD Vance's "Hillbilly Elogy".
Energy corporations and wealthy individuals funded the Heartland Institute who then ran public influence campaigns to discredit climate change. Conspiracy theorists and talk radio hosts predictably made a buck amplifying it. Conservative politicians, ever eager to lower taxes and reverse the growth of government, latched onto it as a wedge issue. Rural and blue collar America, angry at being left behind after deindustrialization, bought into the lies.
It didn't help that the threat was remote and abstract, that the cost was to be paid by future generations (mostly elsewhere), and that the elites who advocated fighting it were conspicuous in their own consumption.
All of these actors were entirely motivated by money and power. No whiteness required.
My theory is consistent repetition of messaging (Cialdini principles). The people aren’t stupid, they’ve been gradually brainwashed over years by propaganda like Fox News and “conservative” talk shows, or they have family/friends that repeat that messaging. It is at the point of groupthink where they all now openly celebrate bigots and extremists.
They probably don’t understand or care why tuna and others parts of our food chain are contaminated by mercury.
Maybe they just want to join a team and beat up on the other team. The fossil-funded GOP tells them each liberal position is evil, so the MAGAs reflexively go against it all, even if it means mutual destruction.
When I was a kid, it was common knowledge (IIRC) that you couldn’t trust lawyers or politicians. It’s crazy to me how people nowadays are putting so much trust in politicians.
> Can somebody explain the psychology behind these beliefs?
A lot is driven by contrarianism. They see what the other side wants and automatically fight for the opposite.
Among those who actually think deeper, they hold beliefs that putting restrictions on coal will make their energy bills explode or make industries in their town go out of business.
Some come from states with coal mining operations. They see the initiatives as an attack on their state.
There is also a lot of misinformation about clean energy. You can still find people who believe that it’s impossible to build enough solar or wind energy to make a difference so they believe it’s all just a scam to spend their tax dollars on useless ventures.
> I'm pretty sure they know how coal is mined. They must surely have heard about the black lung disease and COPD. Where does this 'clean coal' concept come from?
Modern mines are still somewhat dangerous but they’re not like the Zoolander style pickaxe and black lung operations you might have seen in history books. Modern mining relies heavily on machinery and many coal mines are surface operations. The number of humans involved has decreased every year for a long time while safety improves, much like how farming today doesn’t resemble farming of 100 years ago.
It’s not the safest industry, but arguing that we need to eliminate it to avoid black lung is going to be very unpersuasive to anyone in an area with mining operations.
> Can somebody explain the psychology behind these beliefs?
They commonly arise when someone is getting paid by the coal company. Just boring human greed, not stupidity or insanity.
> Where does this 'clean coal' concept come from?
Here's a good overview of the marketing history behind the term: https://www.gem.wiki/Clean_Coal_Marketing_Campaign
They’re not beliefs. They’re claims aimed at maximizing profit. Or do you mean why do people believe their propaganda?
I legitimately think there is zero psychology. Its just money.
They got bought out by coal and petroleum, so now they just lie to support them. I don't think anyone can legitimately believe these things.
> Can somebody explain the psychology behind these beliefs? I'm pretty sure they know how coal is mined. They must surely have heard about the black lung disease and COPD.
Of course they have? I'm sure you've seen pictures of miners back in the 19th century covered in soot? Why would the wealthy and powerful care about people who aren't them? You can't assume that everyone everywhere thinks "powerless people suffering and dying is wrong", that's quite demonstrably false. It might even be a plurality of people on earth who could not care less about the suffering of those outside of their immediate family and friends.
> I'm looking for an answer that doesn't assume that they're stupid or insane.
they just dont care! Why assume that people who ran for political office actually care about the welfare of others?
if the question is "why do this coal stuff when it's also unnecessary", well that gets into another MAGA value which is "dominance". That is, making people suffer and accept things that are horrible is also a big power play. Just watch any Game of Thrones episode for examples.
> Can somebody explain the psychology behind these beliefs?
"Wind power is bad" because Trump doesn't like the way wind turbines looked near his golf course.
Yes, the actual reason is that dumb.
Trump is the world's biggest baby back bitch and is the greatest proof we will ever have that the idea that we live in anything remotely approximating a meritocracy is one of the greatest fictions ever told.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo
It's not even that they think it's a hoax.
They don't care what happens to our world because half of them are dispensationalsts and the rest just think: après moi, le déluge.
In a way it is? Let me explain.
The USA is big, but China bigger. If the USA over optimizes on reducing greenhouse gas today, at the expense of our long term economic and world power, China, who cares for less about preserving the world will continue to destroy the world and claim the most power simultaneously.
So while we can reduce OUR footprint by taking ourselves out of the game, the world still loses.
So now try to find a less myopic solution where we remain powerful enough to get the whole world to tamper down their impacts.
We don't win by removing ourselves from the competition. And the competition has a high chance of killing us all. But rolling over is a guaranteed way to lose everything everywhere.
Oh and the prior commitments like the Paris accord were engineered to harm us while allowing China to dominate.
Anyone with a couple of marbles in their noggin can see that depending on a finite resource dug out of the ground for everything is not a good long term plan. Offsetting that dependence with infinitely renewable sources just makes sense. You mention China cares less, yet you fail to acknowledge China by far outpaces the US in its pursuit of renewables. Yes they still use a lot of coal, but they are actively adding more renewables. It’ll just take time. At least they are trying. Also look at their adoption of EVs compared to US.
This perspective relies on seeing Chinese lives as worth less than American lives. On average individual Americans contribute more to the problem than individual Chinese people.
One example is airline miles. Americans travel 2000 miles by plane every year. In China the figure is 1000 miles. So your argument is basically "sure, we could stop traveling by plane, but if Chinese people travel an extra 50 miles a year that wipes out our progress." But that's a pretty poor argument to justify continuing to do 2000 miles/year, if you genuinely think the problem should be addressed.
If both countries reduced to 100 miles/year, it probably wouldn't be enough. But this is an ongoing choice all around. It's not reasonable to suggest that Chinese people have less individual need for air travel. Looking at contribution per country and not per person is not reasonable.
> This perspective relies on seeing Chinese lives as worth less than American lives.
I'm not sure I follow this. If I was to summarise GenerocUsername's argument it would be "the Chinese government is less concerned with making their economy green, and if the US begins taking an economic/influence hit to make it's economy greener, it'll be yielding an economic advantage to China, which will canabalise more global industry in a non-green way, resulting in a net worse environmental outcome." They're claiming basically a fundamental ideological difference between the countries on climate change that, coupled with a claim of zero-sum international industry, means long term environmental outcomes are better if the US is a dominant international player today.
Sidestepping the argument itself which I believe has a number of key weaknesses (as outlined by others in the comments), can you go over how you're linking that to a devaluation of Chinese lives?
Well, China is now completely dominating the renewable energy sector. There were some efforts in the last few years of the US and some other western countries like Germany to catch up. But it kind of looks like this space will be ceded, for better or worse, to China.
But China is deploying more wind and solar energy than the USA. If anything the refusal to diversity energy sources is leaving USA even more behind the competition in the long term.
I see your point of view, but the fact is they are growing and so deploying new assets. The US is not growing and for us it is mostly about replacing assets. They have different payoff schedules. We have pre built infrastructure we are still paying off. You cannot just rebuild it mid lifecycle without taking massive losses.
> China, who cares for less about preserving the world
The premises of your argument are refuted by facts.
A larger percentage of people in China (compared to the USA) believe climate change is a serious threat to humanity and support policies to tackle climate change. https://ourworldindata.org/climate-change-support
The US is much worse than China in terms of emissions per capita, both historically and today https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
China also leads the world in tech that is crucial for the move away from fossil fuels (solar, wind, electric vehicles and batteries). You can easily look up evidence for this, if you feel any initial doubt.
This recent news article has a nice snippet on the current trajectory on climate change https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/24/china-doubles-down-... "China pledged Wednesday to cut its world-leading levels of climate pollution by up to 10 percent during the next decade — one day after U.S. President Donald Trump urged global leaders to abandon the effort to halt the Earth’s rising temperatures."
> prior commitments like the Paris accord were engineered to harm us while allowing China to dominate
Who engineered them to harm us? You’re saying there’s a powerful pro-China cabal that designed the Paris accords on purpose to harm us and benefit China? Come on..
Yes
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The whole idea of polarized opposite parties in the U.S. has gotten out of hand. like science is needed for humanity to further progress. To say the left needs to do this, and the right needs to do that is delusional in its own right. The joint effort comes first or should come first along with logical decisions not based on whether you like the opposite party or not. its about the nation as a whole.
It's because of the First Past The Post voting system that is used in the US, which means winner takes all.
If you want to understand why the US seems so uniquely politically divided, then you will understand once you understand how FPTP voting works and how it inevitably leads to binary politics. Most countries have a voting system that leads to broader representation. US politics will always be black and white and divided so long as FPTP voting is used.
There's a great video by cpg grey explaining FPTP: https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
FPTP is bad but other methods are similarly flawed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk
Keeping a democracy requires people to understand it as well. At least in US it seems they'd rather elect a dictator wannabe who clearly said he wanted to be dictator for a day than elect a woman.
Fortunately the US demonstrated they can elect racial minority president, so different gender president can happen too.
It's a problem in Canada as well. I believe FPTP's issues are exacerbated by modern developments like social media, but it's just a hunch
In most Anglo-Saxon places that inherited FPTP. Some places like Australia have made changes that make it better. It is possible.
We've consistently voted against this kind of progress in Canada for some reason, but I agree, it is possible.
There is only one party that runs on a platform of denying science. It’s not “polarization” it’s evil.
Environmental Protection Agency --> Environmental Pollution Agency
And Trump said this would be "the most transparent administration in history" [1]. What a disgrace.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/videos/the-most-transparent-admin...
The lies certainly tend to be transparent.
It’s transparently corrupt, anti-science and totalitarian. They take every opportunity to make all of this abundantly clear.
Of course they will say they are transparent while lying about everything. People have been falling for their lies since 2016. Why wouldn't they keep lying?
The real question is why are so many people completely willing to sell their country, community, and future to these liars?
Ask any trump voter and you'll find various racial nationalism answer to it.
They aren’t falling for the lies, the lies are a mechanism of signaling that candidate is willing to harm those outside of their tribe (they are willing to be corrupt), and sufficient people believe they are in the tribe.
I don't know why this is being down voted. The white Christian nationalist movement absolutely is willing to burn America to get what they want - they are willing to be corrupt, elect corrupt, forget their religion, hurt the out-group, and lie to give plausible deniability while doing exactly that.
Downvoters: Prove that this administration is not corrupt and not hurting people instead of downvoting - or just accept the truth.
They've said it explicitly, this is a bloodless coup (so long as Democrats allow it). They see themselves as destroying America and creating their own country with completely different rights and laws, and they're well on their way.
Although, considering that the EPA is and has always been something that I never really had a significant amount of contact with, I still end up with mixed thoughts about other topics unrelated to the EPA.
I’m sure a lot of comments here (including mine) are just from the reaction of the headline without reading the story, and a bunch more are from those reading the story without looking at the source material. But it does make for a good reaction from all sides, doesn’t it? Such is the internet culture.
I read the whole article. There isn’t much more context beyond the article headline apart from an unconvincing denial from the press secretary.
Ditto.
The sources appear to be a combination of anonymous and the EPA employee union leader. The administration is flatly denying that such a meeting happened.
The only added context is that the studies being stopped are around water safety levels. PFAS are specifically called out as the Trump admin immediately pulled back PFAS regulations.
You could post that comment on every article. (Please don't.)
Interesting how little content you provides. Ironic.
Claims of an EPA “publication freeze” look overstated. Two staffers say they were told to pause, HQ flatly denies it, and no memo has surfaced. Most likely it is a clearance bottleneck tied to the reorg that killed ORD. To staff it feels like censorship, to leadership it is process. Until documents leak I treat this as local slowdown, not agency-wide gag. The bigger story is the reorg itself which centralizes control and raises interference risk.
Culling staff and organisations in ways that lead to bottlenecks or institutional disorder is a classic suppression and censorship tactic. It's naive to think otherwise, especially given the current leadership.
This administration does not seem to work via memos or anything with a paper trail.
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBdGOrcUEg8
> HQ flatly denies it
"HQ" believes climate change is a hoax, and this admin lies about anything and everything, we cannot take anything they say at face value
It sounds like more "flooding the zone". Which parts are burying science and which parts are merely organizational incompetence? There's no way to sort it out because there are new incidents every day.
Well, potato potatoe.
> Two staffers say they were told to pause, HQ flatly denies it
Presenting these two pieces of evidence in juxtaposition, as if they are equally trustworthy, is a bit misleading:
I think we're all well aware that pretty much any given career scientist, particularly one who has chosen to dedicate their lives to public service, is more trustworthy than the current administration, which is on record with tens of thousands of lies, most so lazily told as to convey contempt for the listener: They either think you're stupid enough to believe them, or don't care whether you do.
To take just one characteristic example out of the tens of thousands: the person ruling over the administration infamously hand-edited a weather map with a marker, to lie to the public about the path of a hurricane, then lied to the public about the markup itself to conceal the previous lie. Notably, they never even acknowledged either lie, much less apologized, meaning they still think it was a good idea, and still think that sort of blatant, shameless lying is ok.
That's to say nothing of the disdain the administration has for government and science in general: the long, strong track record there belies any claims of good faith, and indicates that actions they take which worsen one or both, do so with that as the primary motivation.
Probably less a grand gag order and more a clearance choke point from the reorg, but in a hostile political climate even routine slowdowns look like censorship.
More likely, based on the evidence, is more lies by the administration on the pile of tens of thousands, and another example of actual censorship by the administration historically most famous for it.
For an administration which claims that their primary goal is removing bureaucracy and making the government more efficient and effective, these whistleblower reports describing the exact opposite are pretty damning, and the objective is clear to all.
Could be, but whistleblower reports without documents are still thin evidence. Bureaucratic reshuffles often cause real slowdowns even without explicit orders. If a memo surfaces that shows politicals blocking publications, then it’s censorship. Until then it looks more like dysfunction weaponized by the broader political context.
Maybe, but whistleblower reports are solid evidence on their own, multiple corroborating witness statements even moreso. That's even if they aren't going up against the administration most infamous for lying and censorship, which obviously strengthens the whistleblowers' cases.
For an administration which claims that their primary goals are removing dysfunction and bureaucracy, and making the government more efficient and effective, these whistleblower reports describing the exact opposite are pretty damning, and the objective is clear to all.
Unless we get evidence to the contrary, the most likely explanation is that the administration most infamous for censoring and lying is censoring and lying.
Fair enough, I see where you’re coming from. Personally I’d want to see documents or journal confirmations before calling it outright censorship, but I agree the political track record makes it hard to dismiss the reports.
Indeed, totally losing the benefit of the doubt when it comes to matters of censorship and lying, is one consequences of being the administration historically most infamous for censorship and lying. Normally that is motivation enough for people to choose not to become infamous for censorship and lying.
If any evidentiary memos or documents are due, they are due from the administration (with credible independent verification, of course), since at the moment the whistleblowers are more credible based on their assertions alone, and so their claim currently prevails.
The Federal courts have reached this point too. There’s a “presumption of regularity” where the government has historically been seen as a mostly truthful arbiter that would make good faith efforts to follow court orders.
So when a judge would ask, “Do you plan to deport these people tonight?” to a government lawyer, if the lawyer replied, “No”, the court wouldn’t intervene because government lawyers obviously wouldn’t just lie to a judge presiding over a lawsuit. Well it turns out that they’re continually lying and being rewarded for it (Emil Bove for one). So courts are now suspending that presumption and ordering explicit actions with strict timelines for updates for basically the first time in modern history.
It’s astonishing at how little regard this administration has for the norms and structures that make up our government and how much damage they’re doing to the rule of law.
https://www.justsecurity.org/120547/presumption-regularity-t...
One of the worst instances of this was when the government lawyers essentially replied "We thought only the written orders count" when asked why they didn't comply. I'm not a lawyer, but from the reactions of actual lawyers this is not how it works in court, at all.
Cato - one of the few actually principled right-leaning think tanks have written extensively about this (and other instances of Trump administration contempt). It’s just as bad as you’ve described and infuriating for anyone who actually values the rule of law.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/carousel-contempt
Courts rarely punish agencies for contempt and trust erodes, but shame no longer works and two cases aren’t proof of a systemic collapse.
Those ‘two cases’ were from the first months of this term - needless to say there have been many further cases since then. And more to the ‘systemic collapse’ point, Appeals Courts staffed by Trump-appointed flunkies are gutting the contempt proceedings and the Supreme Court is refusing to step in..
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna223873
Fair, but linking more cases doesn’t automatically prove systemic collapse either. Appeals and the Supreme Court setting boundaries is still part of how separation of powers works, even if you dislike the outcomes. The deeper question is whether courts still have effective levers to enforce compliance, and right now contempt looks more symbolic than binding.