alt Hacker NewsCan anyone explain that "anti-science" crusade to me? This doesn't seem to have any effect than reduce America's standing in the world.
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They're isolationists. They do not care about America's standing in the world.
> reduce America's standing in the world.
That is the goal.
If you want to be an authoritarian ruler, truth is the first thing you have to eliminate! If noone knows what is true, a leader can tell you what to believe! Science is our method to determine truth! A führer cannot have that!
It's all outlined in Gulliver's Travels.
Pretty much every single part of Project 2025 is designed to reduce America's standing in the world, not just the anti-science parts of it.
It's a general trend across all authoritarian regimes; it's harder to be authoritarian with lots of international connections, with lots of strength and partnerships.
Autarky, authoritarianism, isolation, all go together (along with weak economies, etc., but the goal isn't to have the biggest amount of pie, the goal is to be able to control all the pie slices and take the biggest portion, even if the pie is far smaller.)
The primary goal of authoritarianism is consolidation of power among a small number of elites. Anything that can reduce that power is an enemy.
The essential weakness that the powerful elites have is that they are, by definition, outnumbered. So in order to consolidate and maintain power, they need to disturb any system that the masses can use to coordinate and form collective action.
(It's a kid's movie, but Hopper's speech in "A Bug's Life" captures this very well: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1hfo90u/hoppers_jus...)
Reality has a strong consensus-creating effect. We all live in the same material world, so simply by understanding it better and sharing that understanding, we will automatically trend towards having more common ground and more agreement.
That's a threat to elite power, so authoritarian governments have always been anti-science. They may pay it lip service, or attempt to harness it to their own ends, but they never want an entire populace that it well-educated and grounded in reality, because well-informed masses are harder to divide and conquer.
The steel man is that you can’t peer review your way to breakthroughs that change consensus, because peer review relies on consensus, so peer review has to be made subordinate to accountable decision makers.
If we do not have objective facts and data, the truth is whatever the loudest person says it is.
Studying the ocean temperatures verifies that climate change is not a hoax. "He" is making money off fossil fuels. That is enough of a reason for being anti-science. This is the same guy that decided that the COVID numbers would go down if we just stopped measuring them. Burying his head in the sand is his go-to solution for all problems.
I think this is part of an anti-climate change agenda, which is about protecting fossil fuel investments. Not sure that it is broadly anti-science, except maybe in the sense of being against public funding broadly.
If you believe that our leadership is being influenced by actors such as Vladimir Putin, then you see that this is intended.
Once you start asking what Trump would do differently if he actually were an agent or captive of hostile foreign interests, the rest will begin to make more sense.
There's a lot of collateral damage that could have been avoided if millions weren't being squandered on dubious "science" like studying grooming habits of trans aboriginals in the Central African Republic (a made-up scenario, but there are many like it).
At some point the baby's going to be thrown out with the bath water until the course is corrected.
They're ideological goals, not technical ones. If they don't make sense to you it's because you're not viewing it through their ideological lens.