What really puts all of this into perspective for me is I work in academia and one of my friends works for a defense contractor. He told me the maintenance cost per flight hour of F-35 was a bit more than $40k, which is significantly more than I make in a year as a grad student. It's crazy basic science is what's been the focus of so many cuts while it's so cheap.
I wouldn't assume that this is about cost cutting. If the goal were saving money, the cheapest option by far would be to leave the hardware in the water and just stop funding the monitoring. Instead the plan is an expensive operation to send ships out to extract 900+ instruments from under two miles of ocean.
It's clear that this is driven by performative climate denialism and a pro fossil fuel stance. The Trump administration made a billion dollar deal with an energy company to stop construction of offshore wind farms and redirect the investment into fossil fuel projects. Trump constantly talks about the "green new scam" and "climate alarmism". And on top of signaling to his base, Trump met with oil executives at Mar-a-Lago before the 2024 election and pitched them on rolling back climate regulation in exchange for $1B in campaign cash. Destroying the instruments that would document the consequences and might spark alarm and activism is one way to hold up his end of the deal.
But… why? Climate change is very much real and even stubborn deep-right voters like my father now ‘believe’ in it. Ok, some people make some cash. But wouldn’t they anyway? I don’t understand this need to keep pandering to a minority and to destroy ecosystems.
It's the very definition of a culture war and in addition sadly evidence of limited intelligence. Even the most red blooded oil man wouldn't do this because this data is also useful for petroleum drilling and logistics - it's a whole other kind of person driving this.
Science is antithetical to rule-by-decree or other forms of despotism, since it strives to disprove any and all claims. The powers that be simply don't like to be told "you're wrong", and that is the core of what science does. It's as simple as that.
It's the deep desire for a sort of restorative authoritarianism: someone who can reduce the complex state of the world into "the way it should be".
The resentment is not versus fate or calamity but against those people who study and give voice to complexity. If someone can just shut those people up and make them go away, we will be restored to a simpler and more moral world. Where tragedy can rightly live in the realms of Gods and Mystery.
I would gently remind those that prefer such simplicity that not all nations do. We are not alone in the world. The nation that better understands the complexities of the natural world will, all else being equal, utterly trounce the nation that persists in fictionalizing existence. Unless you want to re-write your national anthem in Mandarin, you will someday need to (re-?)grapple with the complexities of the universe.
I don't think Trump or any of his appointed lieutenants think any of this through. It's the result of decisions made by emotion, not logic. "Vibe-governing" in other words.
Climate change, and science in general, is associated with nerds, boring reality, obstacles to immediate gratification, and effects on poor people.
Fossil fuels are associated with large wads of cash, action films, and sticking it to the libs.
Decisions might have terrible consequences. Who cares? Thinking things through is boring, and the people making the decisions are rich enough to be insulated from anything that might happen and old enough to not be around when it does.
The government knows it's real, these are generally well-educated people who went to decent schools. But, I would challenge that most right-wing voters know whether it is real. Where I live in rural America the vast majority are pro-fossil fuel, anti-EV. EVs are seen as "gay" or "feminine" by the folks out here. So the choice to use fossil fuels might just be some performative machismo, allowing their pick-ups to output black smoke, make a loud noise and look "tough."
Those are the majority of the Republican voters at this stage. To make them happy you do things like spend millions to tear up infrastructure which challenges their worldview. This should result in increased votes for the current administration at the mid-terms. So even if climate change is a real and current threat, you need to say it isn't to get re-elected.
I don't believe they do any of this for votes. I think somebody within the administration has a personal grudge against science, especially anything related to climate change.
I think that attitude may change if there is ever an EV that could be competitive in a NASCAR event. For now, the closest we are likely to see is a hybrid, because EVs don't have enough range.
> So the choice to use fossil fuels might just be some performative machismo, allowing their pick-ups to output black smoke, make a loud noise and look "tough."
Might be linked to petrol cars being cheaper to buy for the same amount of car? That seems like an easier explanation. There is a masculine element in that men want to be seen to own big things to show off, but I doubt it has anything to do with liking black smoke. If they wanted loud noises they'd go a motorbike or get an obnoxious horn.
I was in the gas station recently and heard a girl talking to her friend. She said she'd never date a guy who didn't drive a pick-up and would definitely never date a guy who paid with a [credit/debit] card. She said "cards are for girls."
There are still a ton of cash transactions out here in the sticks. When I ask why they say they don't want the government knowing their business. But I guess from that conversation it also helps you get a date?
No, it’s tribalism of sorts. For men they’ll often paint something they don’t understand with words like that. I grew up in a culture that did that and won’t go back. Many many humans lack basic curiosity about the world.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about if you don't know anything about rolling coal and you don't realize people like to drive loud cars.
I've had several friends tell me they just couldn't drive an EV because it just doesn't have a soul, meaning it doesn't have that roar for its performance. It being nearly silent as it accelerates hard is missing half the point. It's a common thing among car enthusiasts.
I can attest that a lot of “car culture” and “motorcycle culture” people want the car or motorcycle to be as loud as possible. Where I live they’re frequently interrupting conversations and waking children up. It’s a major nuisance.
1) I doubt the rolling coal people are a particularly large group. Sounds niche.
2) They could buy an EV then put some sort of smokestack on it. If they're going to convert their car to preformatively blow black black smoke and make extra noise sure, ok. But an close consideration that isn't actually a reason to prefer a petrol car over an EV. They'd get to exactly the same end point and probably annoy the people they're trying to annoy even more starting with an EV.
The major factor for people buying a petrol-powered car is almost certainly the cost. If electric cars were cheaper they'd mostly switch over to them and then rig them up to own the libs instead.
You are, I see, a member of the "reality-based community" as Karl Rove presciently put it back in 2004. You live in a mental space where you critically evaluate facts and make decisions aimed at maximizing your outcome in life.
You would do well to explore this great nation of ours and realize that a wild and terrifyingly large number of its inhabitants travel in an almost unimaginably different headspace.
The men who roll coal are not doing it in cheap beater cars. A Ram or F-150 Super Duty is a $40-80,000 vehicle which requires $200-$5,000 in modifications so they can pull up next to a Prius ($28-36,000) and belch out thick black lib-ownin' ball-crushin' smoke, damaging their own engine in the process. You may ask them why, to which they'd spit a wad of brown tobacco in your face and scream in primal rage into the air: because f*k you, that's why.
1) I see multiple people doing it every day and my commute is <5mi.
2) These people hate fake engine noises even more. Making it blow fake smoke and make fake noises would be even more of a turn off. Once again, not knowing that really shows you don't have a clue about what you're talking about.
> The major factor for people buying a petrol-powered car is almost certainly the cost.
If the main reason was the cost they wouldn't be spending almost $100k on SUVs and pickups that get like 14mpg to go get groceries and pickup the kids from school.
Eradicating species, destroying economies, and eliminating entire ways to enjoy nature's bounty here on earth –– a small price to pay to hurr hur hurrr... own the libs ;)
The DSM needs to be updated soon for this type of sociopathic cynicism. It can't be kept with the rest of society.
People are going to give you all sorts of answers that are based on strategy or negotiation or interests, but I think it basically all boils down to "to own the libs." We have to remember that before this all started, he was registered as a Democrat. He doesn't (or didn't) give a shit about any of this, but people that said no to him do, so he's going to do his level best to break it all. It's just spite, and glee at being able to make people bewildered, angry, and sad. That's all so much of this is.
Because we have actual retards in office. People keep looking for a deeper explanation. There isn't one. They are actual stupid people. They do stupid things.
It all makes sense when you realize QAnon basically runs the white house now. There’s a very insulated type of American who lives in their own world, that unfortunately lots of voters are apparently sympathetic to. It’s probably seen as a victory against the climate change hoax or something along those lines.
It’s seen in Crusader terms. A bunch of things which are not Christian, for example controlling social order at all costs, are adornments on nationalism. The apocalyptic parts of QAnon slot into their belief system. So many other religious movements rely on salvation. Another commenter mentioned ancient China. Big political upheavals swept ancient China based on very slight new ideas about salvation.
I have seen some chatter where 2nd-term Trumpism has been (very imperfectly) compared to Mao's Cultural Revolution.
Obviously there are many differences, no question. But it's actions like this where a bit of the comparison seems apt -- fervent, nonsensical anti-intellectualism / anti-science actions done purely in the name of ideology.
Why else would one actually go out of the way to dismantle a working ocean observation system, which provides a rich amount of data for multiple purposes?
The only action that seems to make sense is that:
A) Some of that data can be used to observe climate change issues.
B) In Trumpism, it is not enough anymore to propagandize that climate change is not happening. One must also actively suppress anything that could suggest climate change is happening, no matter how much the cost, no matter how much it hurts other non-related things.
The entire motivation of Trump and the MAGA movement is "fuck you, libs." The left likes green energy and scientific research performed on the environment so the right hates that stuff even if their actions also hurt themselves.
I don't believe Trump himself makes any of these decisions, and as for deals I don't think he remembers what happened yesterday let alone a deal made on the campaign trail. Parties in his administration are actively trying to destroy science and cripple any kind of climate research or green energy development, even if it costs nothing. Whoever they are, they make these plans and then get him to sign while he's awake.
The post boxes were more about crippling mail-in votes. In Washington Bill De Joy had at one point dismantled several of the sorting machines which dramatically slowed how fast mail gets dispatched. The result was that you could no longer mail your vote the day before election day and have it arrive on election day.
The crazy thing is that the oil companies confessed to a misinformation campaign and at least publicly talked about change/reform (of course, they're still oil exploration/refinement companies so not abandoning that). But they did discuss responsible use of fossil fuels in transition towards renewables.
But Trump was fooled and is more committed than ever to the since-abandoned misinformation campaign. It took on a bigger life than Exxon ever could've imagined.
The snowflakiest of them all - they can't handle unbiased readings from instruments that survey our planet.
The Mauna Loa CO2 data is still up.[1] Trump tried to kill off the CO2 measuring, but that doesn't seem to have happened. The Mauna Loa data goes back to 1958, measured at the same point, far from any CO2 sources. 315ppm in 1958, 441ppm today, and almost a noise free curve with mild seasonal variations. Clearest trend in global warming.
I don't think Trump was "fooled" by anything. His policy positions reflect what makes him and his cronies money, and what keeps him in power. That's it. He doesn't care about truth or correctness. Just money and power.
I submit that the "is malice or incompetence" heuristic can be broken by pathological inputs which result in an indefinite runtime, and that we've encountered some of them in the last decade.
The correct response when that happens is to say "both" until/unless the perpetrators want to plead just one or the other.
How many million graduate students do you need to give the US the military hegemony and political influence over allies and adversaries that the F-35 program provides ?
Looked at from a policy maker's viewpoint, things look very different.
Wouldn't take very many at all, we've now learned these past four years (and even the past 2 months). All you need are drones, that are pennies on the dollar cheaper than trillion-dollar militaries. Depending on the munition, a single bomb we drop on Iran could cost between $40,000 and a couple million dollars. Think of all the high-end drones you could buy instead.
In the Russian-Ukrainian war the GPS guided shells that the USA was sending to Ukraine cost about $40k a pop, where as you can get at least a dozen drones for that price.
Even the fanciest self propelled artillery is getting destroyed by these little cheap buggers.
> Wouldn't take very many at all, we've now learned these past four years (and even the past 2 months). All you need are drones, that are pennies on the dollar cheaper than trillion-dollar militaries.
You make an incorrect conclusion which is unfortunately both quite popular and incorrect among westerners who read two and half editorials about Russo-Ukrainian war in some NYT/WAPO/whatever and think they now understand modern warfare. The reality of the situation is that drones are a very useful tool, but any side achieving actual air supremacy would result their fighters and bombers cruising over frontline and enemy towns on low altitudes taking out any high-value targets at whim. The situation would be similar to boots-on-the-ground phase of The Iraq War, resulting one of the sides to rapidly gaining ground and winning the war. Keep in mind that the cited "40k per-hour" price is quite cheap compared to per-hour operation cost of any kind of big ground force.
In fact, last thing US wants is to be in Russia's shoes unable to meaningfully advance into the territory of by all measures much weaker enemy.
That isn't really accurate, small drones are enough to antagonize regional neighbors. They are far from being able to project influence, stabilize international trade, or even remotely protect a territory from an enemy that isn't concerned with civilian casualties.
> project influence, stabilize international trade, or even remotely protect a territory from an enemy that isn't concerned with civilian casualties.
We just failed to do all of those things quite visibly.
Iran made a choice not to escalate to destroying desalination capabilities and that's why a lot of Saudis and Emiratis are still alive. It's not because we protected them.
Because they didn’t want the retribution that would follow. That’s what protection looks like. Assured destruction when it’s not mutual is pretty motivating.
Not being able to stop random killings or destruction from small arms fire has nothing to do with military power projection.
Military power projection is the reason the US was able to destroy a significant portion of Iranian leadership, nuclear infrastructure, and weapons infrastructure with no retaliation from Iran back in the US nor any pushback from any of Irans allies.
Military hegemony has nothing to do with being a perfect police force that can stop anything from happening anywhere.
>but we still couldn't have stopped them with our vaunted carrier-based power projection, or with our exhausted ABM capabilities.
Who is “we”? Your account started posting nothing but anti-US stances and pro-China/Iran stances since this conflict began.
I'm American, also that's considered bad form. 2/3 of Americans were against this and think it was a failure.
Military hegemony in the gulf region would mean being able to force Iran to stop attacking gulf targets, rather than negotiating a ceasefire because both sides are hurting. What we have is a multipolar situation, it's not arguable, it's right on the scoreboard.
A hegemon would be able to unilaterally open the straits.
Best for everyone to recognize it and act accordingly. It's got nothing to do with cheerleading, that stuff is for rubes.
> Military power projection is the reason the US was able to destroy a significant portion of Iranian leadership, nuclear infrastructure, and weapons infrastructure with no retaliation from Iran back in the US nor any pushback from any of Irans allies.
First, Iran doesn't have allies, it has friends of convenience (Russia like the military cooperation but don't like the cheap oil competition, China love the cheap oil competition but don't care for the damage, etc).
Second, US bases and US allies (in the actual sense of the word) were attacked by Iran, successfully. US and all its allies were also impacted by the trivial closure of the Hormuz. US allies now will forever know that the US is not a reliable ally and can't protect them; stocks of crucial materiel were wasted on achieving nothing; and high oil prices will cost the US domestic politics dearly. US power projection whacked a few nutjobs from a regime full of them. Oh, and they're a theocracy that believes in martyrdom! And the new supreme leader is a strong proponent of nuclear weapons (unlike his predecessor and father), and saw half his family blown up in front of him.
> Military hegemony has nothing to do with being a perfect police force that can stop anything from happening anywhere.
Being unable to enforce your will on an enemy is not "hegemony". Iran will walk out of this conflict with their nuclear programme back on track, a revenge minded regime, and maybe even a toll on an international strait to fill up their coffers.
US military deterrence has been a paper tiger ever since Biden told Iran "don't" [1], and Iran did, and Biden did not respond. Now whoever the sitting US president would be - Trump or anybody else - must restore that deterrence. There is no nice or easy way to do that. The last time the US had to do that was during WW2 and the enemies were not floating heavy, extended media campaigns and funding US universities at the time.
The reason why Iran was even back in the nuclear game was because a moron pulled out of the JCPOA that was giving them concrete steps and carrots to get them to stop.
An agreement that had independent inspectors from several countries accessing utilities and leaving behind tamper resistant (and tamper revealing) instrumentation at regular intervals (along with the usual back and forth robust discussions).
The sort of gear that could count atoms from Fukushima drifting across the oceans to end up in HVAC filters in middle North America.
The JCPOA agreements were set to expire in January 2026 - and then Iran could continue their nuclear ambitions. The only people who could support those agreements either:
1. Didn't read them and know that they expire in 10 years.
2. Think that 10 years is a long enough time in the future where whatever happens then doesn't matter to their current goals.
3. Would like to see a nuclear-capable Iran.
For what it's worth, January 2026 already passed 5 months ago.
So, there would now need to be new negotiations as to the future of the Iranian nuclear program? Except with Iran in a weaker position than they actually are today, due to a decade of no progress on enrichment.
How is that worse than the current situation? Iran is closer to nuclear capability now than in your counterfactual, yet those who disagree with you are the ones who want a nuclear-capable Iran?
Or alternatively, in 2026 Iran would have been hooked on closer economic cooperation and trade, (relative) reformers would be in power, and the deal would have been renewed. Yanking the deal all but guaranteed that the hardliners would go back in charge, because they were proven right - the US could not be trusted to keep its word, so negotiations don't matter, the only thing that would actually protect them is nuclear weapons.
> Would like to see a nuclear-capable Iran.
Postponing their nuclear programme with at least 10 years is absolutely worth doing. Because realistically you cannot, I repeat, cannot force them to stop it. If the regime wants to continue, it will and their facilities deep under the mountains are impenetrable.
> Or alternatively, in 2026 Iran would have been hooked on closer economic cooperation and trade, (relative) reformers would be in power, and the deal would have been renewed.
Oh, so you expect to change their culture and their value system. And do that in only 10 years.
That's called imperialism. I believe it's no longer fashionable.
> Oh, so you expect to change their culture and their value system
What do you mean culture and value system? You think isolation and nuclear weapons are parts of the Iranian culture????
And yes, Iran had multiple bouts of reformer presidents. Reformer within the limits of what the Supreme Leader would allow of course, but there is still a massive gulf of difference between them and the hardliners. A few years of visible economic development under reformers would have nudged things in the reconciliation direction.
Again, yanking the deal, even before the current strikes during negotiations, ensures that Iran will never fully trust the US. So realistically, what other choices do they have other than procure nuclear weapons for protection?
You said that "closer economic cooperation and trade" might lead to "(relative) reformers would be in power". Westerners "reforming" other cultures has not been fashionable for about half a century.
Who is talking about westerners here? What even is your argument, because it seems you're just throwing random catchphrases around.
The topic is Iran. A theocracy with an unelected supreme leader with final say on political decisions and candidates for all elections in the otherwise relatively democratic system. Reformer in their context (hence the relative qualifier I used) is people like Ahmadinejad who are for rapprochement and trade with the world, but without too many concessions. We're not talking about socially progressive or "western" or anything of the like. They are infinitely better than the hardliners aligned with the IRGC who are against anything other than autarky and building more strategic security via stuff like nukes. The reformers got their way with the JCPOA, and were proven wrong by the orange moron destroying that. Since then the hardliners have been in power and they are not going anywhere now.
- Calling for the destruction of the state of Israel
- Provided funding, training and arms to Hezbollah and Hamas
- Condemned by the UK, Germany, Austria, and even the UN
- Condemned the Palestinian Authority for holding peace talks with Israel
- A nice quote of his: "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country."
Thank you for explaining to all those who won't listen to me because I'm Israel and therefore biased, what a "reformed" Iran would look like. Now they can understand just how hateful the current "unreformed" Iran looks like.
Is Iran, ran by hateful men, but open to trade, integration, reform, inspections and having a lot to lose perfect? Of course it fucking isn't. But realistically it's the best we could have had.
Instead we have Iran ruled by even more hateful men. Men that saw their families blown up in front of them, and have nothing to lose. The economy is already shit, and they don't care about regular people, and as we saw in the recent protests, power structures are intact and they do not hesitate using them to enforce their rule. Men who were demonstrated multiple times that American promises don't mean anything. Those men also have a pretty clear path on how they'd be left alone - Kim's nuclear weapons / threat of destroying Seoul.
How is that any better? It isn't. It's drastically worse for everyone, from the common Iranian suffering under the regime to every single one of us that will have to live under the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons and worldwide economic disruption via Hormuz and direct sabotage.
Not at all. Iran was rewarded with progressive sanction relief and progressive unblocking of their own money that was seized decades ago, as long as they continued cooperating.
This is a great example of where the Israeli perspective diverges from the American.
The classic American perspective wouldn't worry about that because being part of our market is so attractive. There is a win-win here, they are not mindless orcs.
Yes, living under constant rocket threat does affect one's perspective. I personally was injured in an Iranian rocket attack on Israel. My children have had their camp counselors kidnapped and murdered. And their teachers. And thier friends. My daughter attended the funeral of a close friend who was murdered in his home, along with his sister and brother and both parents.
I could go on. I know two women whose babies were both burned to death due to Iran. I could tell even worse stories. Suffice it to say that us who actually live under Iranian threat treat the threat seriously. It is not theoretical for us.
Give us some credit, we have our bigots but it's been 25 years and we also have hospitality culture like everyone else. The average person, even if they voted Trump, would be kind and grant human-ness to a muslim they met in person. Look at the Borat sketches, he's there with southern conservatives acting like a freak and they STILL act like gracious hosts to the foreigner.
Acknowledgement of edit: I rephrased the sentence you're replying to in order to try to be less inflammatory.
Are you asking how the 2002 Millenium Challenge showing that the US Navy would lose any directy military engagement with Iran by a large margin is relevant to "The American navy was already a paper tiger ~20 years before your example with Biden"?
It was more son that they have space to escalate. It was strategic decision. They did attacked those when their plants were attacked.
US does not have capability to destroy them. It can make lives of civilians hard, as it tried, but foreigners attacking civilians dont make regimes fall.
Iran didn't attack the desalination plants because that would amount to actual warcrimes - and they care about their public perception in the broader community of nations. Unlike, of course, Israel and the USA, who don't mind turning a few schools and hospitals to smithereens.
You might call this "assured non-mutual destruction", and of course it helps that the US is located away from Iran's immediate neighborhood, but destroying the lifelines of the GCC countries would assure an economic collapse globally that the world has never seen before. Imagine something on the lines of oil at $300 a barrel, zero fertilizer, zero semiconductors, zero plastics, the works. And Iran could just as easily turn Israel to glass, with a death by a thousand papercuts (or drones, whatever your flavor). Of course, all of this at a huge cost to itself.
Protecting territory is pretty pointless for many countries, who would be facing neighbors they cannot remotely match in capability. Allowing civilians to be slaughtered is a cheaper and more effective method of warfare for these. Protecting civilians well is difficult even for very well armed countries with expensive defense systems, letting them die brings many martyrs and propaganda opportunities and breeds hatred for the enemy.
Something tells me a war with china isn’t going to be carriers duking it out but carriers filled to the brim with aviation and naval drones that seek and destroy enemy craft. As Iran has shown, you don’t need to attack the USA directly to destabilize its influence. The US market economical influence has been far more important for force projection and stabilizing trade than anything else and by all accounts Trump has pissed away allies on that front too. US force projection for trade stabilization is for minor things like protecting against pirates - you don’t need million dollar missiles for that.
> an enemy that isn't concerned with civilian casualties
You mean like when the Zionists openly stopped food from getting into Gaza, while the western governments were backing the Zuonists? Those people concerned with civilian casualties?
An enemy unconcerned with civilian casualties, give me a break.
If you mean Operation Spiderweb, the Ukrainian Osa drone only had a range of 5 miles/ 8km (one-way) and had to be launched from the roof of containers simultaneously transported unknowingly by Russian truckers and that was a covert operation that took 18 months to set up. So no that particular model couldn't attack even 10 miles away.
Ukraine has other long-range strike drones but haven't heard of more than a thousand miles range.
Details, details. The drones got the job done, didn't they? Getting a truck to within a few miles of the target is still pretty cheap compared to traditional weapons-delivery methodologies.
Spiderweb was a modern-day Doolittle Raid. It didn't scale, at least not immediately, but it still changed the tenor of the war. It put the Russians on notice that they weren't safe. Not that the Russians care, but most countries would. Imagine if someone attacked an Air Force base in the US with similar tactics and a similar outcome...
How not? Precision kills with 0 warning. You can just bring one on a plane to whatever country and have the thing charge with solar/powerlines until your target is getting coffee outside on a nice day. Or whatever.
Ok, I'm not even sure what to reply here, that makes no sense and doesn't accomplish any of the things I mentioned. It's also not even particularly feasible and just not at all how any sort of wartime operation is likely to work at scale.
But I am sure of who I wouldn't put in charge of critical military operations.
Drones are not a strategic weapon. When you talk to the Ukrainian military, with their actual expertise in drone warfare, the general consensus is that drones are an inferior replacement for artillery (note that ex-Soviet military systems are a lot heavier in artillery use than NATO military systems) that they use because they can't get the artillery shells that they need but they can get drones in sufficient quantities. It hasn't enabled any strategic breakthroughs in the Russo-Ukrainian War, it is merely served to lock in the grinding stalemate it's been in since October-ish 2022.
The US war on Iran also demonstrates the problems of drones too: the US is currently able to wage a war 6000 miles away from its shores, because of the use of an awful lot of weapons systems that aren't drones. Iran is unable to dislodge that military, or even meaningfully impact its ability to carry out said war, not 100 miles away from its shores, despite a heavy use of drones to attempt to do so.
The war also demonstrates another big issue... the continued delusion of many civilian and military leaders that strategic bombing alone is sufficient to win a war despite this failing literally every single time it's been attempted in the past 100 years.
> that they use because they can't get the artillery shells that they need
That used to be true, but I don't think that the case anymore. UA is now striking logistics ~150KM behind the contact line with drones. Regular artillery can't do that. Guided rockets maybe could, but they'd be more expensive and come in smaller quantities.
> US is currently able to wage a war 6000 miles away from its shores
For a rather restricted use of "wage a war". They did not stop Iranians from doing their thing. Bombing alone does not have a history of winning wars.
> How many million graduate students do you need to give the US the military hegemony and political influence over allies and adversaries that the F-35 program provides ?
Well, given that the Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed for months despite Iran's military supposedly being decimated, and the President of the United States is now threatening to bomb one of our closest Mideast allies (Oman), a reasonable person might ask where this military hegemony and political influence you're referring to is.
Because it would require a boots on the ground invasion to occupy the entire portion of Iran overlooking the Strait.
The strait is physically open but no insurance company will cover massive oil carriers because they are so easy to hit with small weaponry from the ridges of Iran.
Why doesn't the US government just insure them itself then? A quarter of a billion dollars is a major risk to an insurance company with no internal capacity to mitigate the risk itself, but it's not even a rounding error in the federal budget and the US government would then be expressing confidence in the ability of its own military to ensure safe passage.
And even if they had to pay a claim, it would cost the population less than the higher gas prices, since increasing supply lowers the market price for all supply, not just the incremental units.
That would require an act of Congress. So implicitly, the majority party in the House and Senate don’t want to do this. Ask yourself, who is in power right now?
> Because it would require a boots on the ground invasion to occupy the entire portion of Iran overlooking the Strait.
Which even the morons who started this conflict know is suicidal because Iran has literally at least a million loyal fanatics (Basij, the same organisation doing unarmed meat waves against Iraq)!ready to die for the regime, and the terrain is in their favour.
After all has been said about the ages of Biden and Trump, it’s ironic that having presidents with experience living through Vietnam and the Soviet-Afghan war has been so useful for their two terms.
The US could/can, they're just not willing to undergo the mass casualties it would take to put boots on the ground and put those boots up the ass of the people controlling Hormuz. Which absolutely cannot be achieved purely by air.
I'm not interested in a lengthy semantic debate about what "can" means but I'd hope we could agree at least one possible interpretation includes things you're unwilling but able to do.
Is it the case that if someone doesn't do something some time then they can't do that thing? Like, if you were playing basketball and Lebron James walked by and you threw the ball to him and said "dunk this!' and Lebron said "no, I'm not willing to" does this mean Lebron can't dunk?
Because personally, I'd still take Lebron on a basketball team even if he wasn't willing to dunk the ball that one time.
> if you were playing basketball and Lebron James walked by and you threw the ball to him
Yes, this is a terrible analogy for the war in Iran. Hugely unpopular, costing Americans vast sums of money daily, headed for possible catastrophe. Very much not a low-stakes "Lebron walks by" situation.
Better analogy with Lebron would be: championship game with a title on the line. He gets possession as time runs down and the team needs him to score or make a play that scores. It's not okay for him to then say he's fully capable of scoring but doesn't want to at just that moment for reasons.
NB: this is not to say the US military couldn't cause untold damage on the region. This is obvious, anybody can look at recent history to see that the US military is more than capable of destroying a country in the region.
Rather, this is an object lesson that war is politics by other means, and here we tried to do war without any politics and it has not gone well for us.
I will remember from now on that you can compare war to Lebron playing in a championship game but not to him playing in a pickup game.
But to be clear, the comment I replied to was one in which you made an abstract point that it doesn't make a difference to someone if you can do something but in practice don't/aren't willing to and I think that this is obviously wrong (just because Lebron didn't dunk doesn't mean he can't or is a bad ball player). You don't like the Lebron analogy, that's fine. Let's use a war analogy: in 2025 Pakistan and India, two nuclear armed countries, exchanged significant fire. Neither was willing to use their nuclear arsenals. Should we now conclude from this that they can't use their nuclear arsenals and are therefore equivalent to being non-nuclear countries? I mean who cares if they have nuclear weapons which can (can't?) kill millions if this one time their political will wasn't there for them to use them in their defense?
> Rather, this is an object lesson that war is politics by other means, and here we tried to do war without any politics and it has not gone well for us.
Be careful not to trip over your rhetoric in an attempt do display profundity. If war is politics by other means, then doing war is always done with politics. This whole statement is word salad nonsense.
> I will remember from now on that you can compare war to Lebron playing in a championship game but not to him playing in a pickup game.
The stakes of a given situation matter to the disposition of the participants. Is this not obvious?
I'm really confused as to what your larger point is. Nobody disagrees that the US military can kill untold numbers of people and cause untold damage in Iran and the wider region. Was this the point you wanted to make? Yes, the US military is capable of killing everyone in the region, which would make the Strait "open" again.
> If war is politics by other means, then doing war is always done with politics.
The problem is doing so has not/does not appear to be on a path to achieve the stated political aims of the administration, inasmuch as they have been willing to articulate aims.
Anyway, you're being insulting and not making coherent points. Good evening/morning/afternoon.
His statement about war and politics is a reference to Clausewitz, the famous military strategist that apparently you have not read nor have heard referenced, which is surprising given how often this quote comes up in military-political discussions, articles, and books.
(It’s ok, nobody in the administration has read him either. And before you accuse me of partisan hackery, the prior admin was just as incompetent.)
If you cannot afford doing it, then you cannot do it. What's the purpose of having the capability to do something if you cannot afford the losses of doing it?
US military ain't some unstoppable force in all possible scenarios, it was stopped and won over quite a few times, last time I recall by taliban sheepherders. In some cases like first Iraq war yes, but they don't wage those wars anymore. And all mental limits re casualties are very real limits just like other.
Its like saying russia could/can conquer whole Europe, if only X, Y and Z. That effectively means they can't, as we see playing out right now despite them trying desperately to achieve this very thing.
Part of the reason that Americans prefer to lose that war is because the enemy is called "sheepherders", implying innocent civilians, when the military is winning. The blurring of when a militant is referred to as a civilian has proven to be a very effective tactic to reduce the American population's tolerance for war.
I'm confused, are you insinuating that the Taliban essentially ran a PR campaign to portray themselves as sheepherders to garner sympathy from the US population to reduce its appetite for fighting them?
No, I am stating that there are strong elements in popular media, news providers chief among them, who seek to weaken US influence and use US public opinion to drive that change.
I suggest that you query for "Qatari influence in US media" in your favourite search engine or LLM. Many media bodies operating in the land of the free do not represent the interests of the people of that land.
> How many million graduate students do you need to give the US the military hegemony and political influence over allies and adversaries that the F-35 program provides ?
All good questions 3 years ago.
How many would rely on US weapons or their US relationship today?
And then there is the unimpressive show in the Middle East.
We haven't been able to produce a complete F-35 since Feb 2026 because we lack the necessary rare earths to do create their electronics.
Why? Because we stopped doing that work (and science) in the 90s and now China produces over 90% of rare earths on the planet and said the US can't have any for military purposes (its being negotiated).
There are zero under and post graduate programs that specialize in rare earth extraction and refining outside of China. None. And China has barred their scientists from collaborating with any colleagues from the US on the topic.
Sooooo, you're right, the F-35 program offers a lot, but can it do so "by itself" and does it provide that value in an economically viable way? Much less clear cut of an answer.
Block 4 is the only version they'd dare put up against a peer air defense, and Block 4 is delayed, delayed, delayed, and . . nowhere in sight, at the moment.
There has been two and a half decades of FUD billowing around the entire program, like the world's most expensive fart, so don't expect to know the truth until they fly the thing past Zamami Island in anger. But I personally will be mentally prepared for disappointment, with some bitter despair as digestif.
If policymakers genuinely cared they wouldn't have let things get so bad that allies are considering to have orders cancelled for the Saab JAS 39 Gripen
Without those people being trained at the level of grad school in workforce, you would not have enough people to even maintain a good checklist for F35. The program will go down within a year.
Grad schools do more than research, they train people for these industries, for the shop floor.
Yeah, 11 f35 lost to motor/software issues. Only modern war plane that have those issues.
Its minumum speed is worse than the f16, which make drone interception an issue (f16 are already a bit to fast for that according to Ukrainians), despite a pretty low takeoff speed. It should be capable of less, i'm pretty sure it's software limiters tbh, the wing design seems fine, even if the weight is a bit high (i mean, you don't need to be able to fly at 15 knot like a Rafale, but still).
It _still_ have cooling issues that brick it if you don't bring an external cooler after it landed (which is crazy to me, how did Lockeed not fix that? it's like half the reason why the availability rate is so low).
The availability rate is slow (as said earlier) but it is still more expensive than other jet yearly, despite 2/3rd of the flight hours.
F35 pilots now have less flight hours per year than recommended by NATO (a lot less) (which used to be below US standards btw), and while US f35 pilot still have more hours than their russian conterpart (~145 vs 120), it is very possible that smaller countries who made the mistake of buying them without an economy strong enough to bear the costs might fly their pilot less than 100 hours per year and complete the rest in sims (which, as demontrated by the russian, is a _very_ bad idea) (i'm afraid Greek pilots will suffer from this, which would be a shame)
On the "political influence", it's wrong. Selling the F35 cost the US influence in Norway (thank you wikileaks). In fact, each time the f35 lost a competition, political influence was expended to make the country still buy it. Imho, scientists and scientific conferences are a better way to get influence over allies and adversaries (Cas9 is probably the best example, without Doudna having an international recognition and the conference being hosted in the US, Charpentier might have gone to another RNA specialist)
[edit] to be clear, i think the f35 is a great plane for the US, and a good plane for rich countries who want to go on offensive wars, mainly due to its EW capacity that are second to none and its ability to penetrate enemy territory (which is second only to other US planes). I do also think that it still needs _massive_ improvements to be usable by regular, defensive armies, and the US expending political power to sell it to countries who don't want/need to attack their neighbors was a mistake. Also, not a good cold weather plane, which make it even worse for Norway and Canada.
Also i think its software impairs it, because the wing design seems almost perfect for its missions, and at least on paper, the reactor seems great too
After potus ordered massive degradation of F16 radars used by Ukraine on his emotional whim making them useless, which btw were gifted by other NATO countries (!!), nobody, absolutely nobody wants US jets anymore, F35 or not.
Every single European country that already ordered them had immediately afterwards long hard talks about completely cancelling those orders and most ended up at least loweing massively the ordered amount (I presume due to contractual requirements and some money already sent, nobody expected backstabbing crooks on the other side when they were signed).
At this point its trojan horse and much worse than having nothing - it gives illusion of certain (extremely expensive) capability, but only if you lick specific ass hard and frequently enough, peppered with a billion here and there flowing in the right hands. Even then, the other side may be licking harder and thats it. Its ridiculous, and intensively insulting to every decent human being.
Except they've traded it all away with idiotic chest thumping. There was a bargain on the table for the US, and we've just chucked it in the trash.
The military isn't some limitless resource, and lead by incompetence, it is useless. There are no policy makers in this administration, they go on vibes and bad ones at that.
Even a guy named mad dog said that diplomacy was cheaper than bullets.
> the military hegemony and political influence over allies and adversaries that the F-35 program provides
Hilarious to say this, given the very public and very significant failures of US foreign policy these past couple decades, not least of all the current special military operation.
Nah, I'd say that common "americans" (really: US citizens) are perhaps a bit on the dumber site. Not only confuse they constantly a continent (America) with a country (USA), they also have no idea about history. Or logics. You wrote "ALL of tech" ... no lets check.
Cars - Germany (Gottlieb Daimler, but he didn't patent it), Germany (Carl Benz which made the first patent).
Motorbikes - Germany (Gottlieb Daimler)
Train - invented in Germany
Radio transmission - UK (James Clark Maxwell described them theoretically), Germany (Heinrich Hertz created/used them first in experiments)
X-Ray - Germany (Gustav Röntgen)
Telephone - Germany (Philipp Reis, your Bell bought examples and reverse engineered them)
Bookpress with movable letters - Germany (Johannes Gensfleisch a.k.a. Gutenberg)
Lightbulb - Germany (Heinrich Göbel)
Periodic system of elements - Russia (Dimitri Mendelejew) and Germany (Justus Lothar Meyer)
Dynamo / Generator - Germany (Werner von Siemens)
Vaccination - UK (Edward Jenner)
Gliding plane - Germany (Otto Lilienthal)
Pain killer - Germany (Felix Hoffmann, Aspirin)
Relativity theory, Quantum theory - Albert Einstein, Planck,
TV - Germany (Manfred von Ardenne)
Cathod ray tube in TVs - Germany (Conrad Röntgen experimentally, Ferdinand Braun with horizontal and vertical directivity of the ray)
Computer - France (Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace) for mechanical ones and Germany (Konrad Zuse) for electric ones
Atomic fissure, used in plants and bombs - Germany (Otto Hahn)
Chip cards - Germany (Jürgen Dethloff, Helmut Gröttrup)
MP3 music compression - Germany (Fraunhofer Institut)
Electricity - actually already in ancient greek they used electrostatic charging of amber. And one century before Christ they had actual batteries in Bagdad! But then a plethorary of european scientists brought the work forward: UK (William Gilbert, Francis Hauksbee, Joseph Priestley, Henry Cavendish, Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday), Germany (Otto von Guericke, Ewald Jürgen Georg von Kleist, Georg Simon Ohm, Carl Friedrich Gauß), Italy (Luigi Galvani, Allesandro Volta), France (Charles du Fay, Charles Augustin de Coulomb, André-Marie Ampère), Netherlands (Pieter van Musschenbroek), Denmark (Hans Christian Ørsted).
I actually terminate this electricity list here. I could go on and on.
Also note that physical units named after their discoverer indicate some kind of importance of the relevant invention. So we have e.g. Volt, Ampere, Coulomb, Farad, Gauss, Watt, Ørsted, Tesla, Weber as units. None of them is based on USA's academia.
If we look at unit names outside of electricity we also find outdated ones like Röntgen or Curie. And still used ones like Plack constant, Newton, Pascal, Kelvin, Becquerel, Gray, Sievert. So where are the USA american ones if "all" of technology is supposed to stem from their academia?
IF we want to trace the roots, then perhaps we need to go back to antique greek philisophers. Because western academia itself traces itself there. But then again ... something like that existed also in ancient India and maybe China.
Does the F35 do that? Wasn't Iran shooting those down recently? If there's anything Iran has taught us it's that airpower doesn't win wars, allies do. The US will leave the middle east with their tail between their legs. This is the beginning of the end of the American Empire.
For the privilege of spending enormous sums of treasure flying around dropping bombs on brown people what did we get?
I would have rather seen that spent on giving lunch to every school age child or paying graduate students a wage above poverty level. At least something useful would have been accomplished
> I would have rather seen that spent on giving lunch to every school age child or paying graduate students a wage above poverty level. At least something useful would have been accomplished
Yeah I guess the only thing we’ll give away for free these days is $100,000 bombs.
I'm sorry, but this is like the most ignorant take ever. The world is essentially one life supported regime away from having a level of stability in the middle east that has quite literally never been achieved. Iran and their regional proxies have been almost the only source of middle eastern discontent in the last two decades. The stability of the region is already vastly improved from any time in the past and the dismantling of the IRGC will create a wave of vastly improved living conditions for hundreds of millions of people.
Iraq has for the first time ever entered in the high category of HDI.
Okay so Iran is responsible for the insurgency in Iraq, the Arab Spring, AQAP in Yemen, Islamic State, the ongoing situation in Syria, proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and the UAE and much more…
I think it’s extremely clear that the major contributor to instability in the Middle East over the past two decades has been the United States.
I think it's fair to say that pretty much no-one is a fan of the Iranian Regime. (And we'll ignore for the moment that the regime is a a direct by-product of previous US intervention.)
The regime is all kinds of bad, but you cannot change govts from without. Stability comes from people changing govts from within. Every time the US has changed a govt to support themselves it has ended badly.
This latest war has not unseated the IRGC, indeed it has entrenched it further. This is not surprising; they are the largest organised structure in the country. There are no other structures of comparable size or influence in the country.
Unfortunately the US military does not just project power. To justify its existence (far beyond the realm of self defence) it actively creates and enjoys conflicts. And increasingly those conflicts are showing the real limitations of military power projection.
By contrast the soft influence projected by technological leadership, USAid etc are much more influential. It's not surprising that support for these alternatives are the first target of a govt susceptible to being influenced. A trillion $ industry will not go quietly into the night.
Yes, of course, the US could deploy troops into Iran. They could topple the IRGC if desired. But it would be very expensive politically. (And I don't mean to the Republicans, but that also) but to the Military Industry. Because the electorate clearly indicated that after Afghanistan the appetite for foreign wars is dwindling. Another debacle in Iran (even more than the debacle it is now) would be disastrous.
I have no love for the Iranian regime. But no military intervention from outside has the ability to improve it. And the Iranian people will not support a US puppet govt - that influence was burned in 1956.
Govts change when people inside rise up to change them. Recent examples in Afghanistan, South Africa, Romania and even Iran (1979) show this over and over again.
Interestingly the Soviet Union fell because the satellite states broke away. Because the people in Poland, Hungary etc rose up. Not because of outside intervention.
This latest war in Iran follows a long tradition of US and UK meddling in the region, all of which is designed to get oil, not create stability. Indeed this latest foray has created instability in the supply of oil, and that is an unforgivable sin to the US public.
>The world is essentially one life supported regime away from having a level of stability in the middle east that has quite literally never been achieved.
> The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built.
George Orwell, 1984.
The Republican project is one of making the population dumber while enriching military contractors and other private interests. This achieves it perfectly.
Because it’s an excuse, the trump admin is lying. All the time, you should never take them at their words. They have never been about cutting costs. Just look at Trump deficit. They are very openly going after science because it goes against the fake reality they are selling to their cult members
Basic science is often cheap, I don't know where you're getting it's generally expensive. I've yet to meet someone whose equipment costs as much as any of the stuff my friends design for defense contractors. Even the head of the lab I'm in is making less than my friends are making as engineers and the lab equipment is pretty cheap compared to the stuff my friends are designing (we have a radar that cost maybe a couple hundred thousand but that's the majority of the equipment cost for the past decade).
Idk what your idea of budgets are for these sorts of labs but I think most engineers would be shocked at the shoestring budgets they run on (at least the ones I know are a fraction of the cost of a single engineering team).
The “whole thing” is never cheap. Running something like a university — providing the environment, infrastructure, administration, facilities, compliance systems, equipment, libraries, grants offices, laboratories, and institutional platform that allow professors and graduate students to do research — is itself extremely expensive.
After all, if you look at the fiscal budgets of major economies, public spending on education and research is often much larger than military spending.
The cuts that don't make much economical sense are ideological, its because they need to give something to that part of the coalition. Somewhere someone is having an erection when hears about these cuts and say something like despite everything supporting Trump was worth it after all.
I’m sure this has nothing to do with 3.1 million graduate students versus 500 F-35s.
For actual context, F-35 program receives $9B per year (amortized over lifetime), which is $3000 per year per graduate student. Erasing the F-35 program entirely would make something like a 10% difference in graduate wages, while destroying the US Air Force as a modern military.
So no — your request to fund graduate students is more expensive than the F-35 program and delivers at best marginal results.
When you math through per unit or per capita or per year, we already spend more on education and science than the military — and it’s unclear further science funding to the detriment of the military would improve things.
Where did you get that the number of federally funded graduate students is 3.1 million?
Note that many will have industry, international or self funded (for MS it is less common to have funding). The 9B figure for maintaining the F35 you just said is very close to the entire annual budget of the NSF. Which is the main funding source of most of non medical research.
Also we are not talking about military budget, just the F35 maintenance program here.
The $9B figure is total amortized to yearly: research, development, production, and maintenance across the near century of lifetime (1990s-2080s).
I took the total number of graduate students, to spread the money across them. We could also look at the same number as, eg, funding an increase from 3.1M to 3.3M or 3.4M graduate students.
I stand by my original claim:
A 10% increase in graduate salary or number of students doesn’t justify dismantling our air force.
$9B/yr is less than half of the Pentagon's more recent estimate of $2T through 2088 for the F-35 program (according to Wikipedia and its sources, which is all I have to go on).
And again, the F-35 is not synonymous with the entire air force.
The F-35 is absolutely synonymous with our entire airforce through 2088.
The F-22 is still a viable Air Superiority Fighter but there's about 100 of them. It cannot hold back a peer air force. The primary point of the F-35 was a cheaper F-22 that we could build 3000 of.
4th gen fighters like the F-18 cannot compete in an air war with a large amount of stealth fighters using modern long range missiles, like China is fielding. They would be defeated before even seeing a blip on their radars.
Without the power of Air Superiority, all the rest of our air force is basically useless. B2s and B21s might still be usable, but they cannot maintain a strategic bombing campaign on their own. The money spent on 4th gen missile trucks is pointless.
Giving up the F-35 is equivalent to total abandonment of our "Best Air Force" doctrine and would require a significant shakeup of how we view the military, and billions poured into other parts of the military to make up for giving up the sky. It also means capitulating to China in advance. Though, if we are willing to do that, we could save like half the military budget every year.
Just have to abandon the entire pacific, Japan, and South Korea, and the Philippines, and Australia, and Vietnam, etc etc etc.
You are both comparing stuff that is nonsensical to compare $ amounts on. Would you give up science for more F-35s or vice versa? probably not or not by much.
Defense is a legitimate thing to worry about. For example, Vietnam defended itself against America. We do not defend, we attack and pillage resources from the global south. Real defense is honorable and to be celebrated. However, the US military is not an institution that does those things and they cloak themselves (well until recently) in rhetoric designed to confuse the public.
The poster said they work in academia, not the part that has to do with science, so it seems unfair to compare the F35 to all of academia when they were complaining about science being cut.
Later, after the math showing that graduate students as a whole are more expensive than the F35 program, you claim that the U.S already spends more on education and science than the military.
The claim is of course somewhat unclear, because what comprises science spending. Is Darpa science and not military. Does Nasa count as science in this claim? If Nasa does then it might be that you throw all the budgets of NOAA and the EPA and other similar organizations into the Science pile. I say it just because I am unsure how you are calculating one part of your budget. Actually the education part I am going to suggest that is just higher education.
Higher education is around 100 billion a year, without student loans which doubles that.
The U.S government spends also approximately a couple hundred billion for Science, if I am reading this correctly
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf26314
which does a lot of work putting government and business spending together which gives you a number essentially what the government spends on the military.
I can easily construct something that shows the U.S does pay more for science and education than it does for military, but only by being IMHO somewhat misleading, for example by throwing K-12 spending together with the higher education payments and mixing federal and state monies, so to clarify what I mean when I say the U.S in these kinds of conversations and what I think most people mean is "the federal government"
I suppose that the original poster also meant the federal government or it wouldn't make any sense to mention F-35s either.
Under this limitation I believe that the combined ratio of science and higher education is at best 0.8% of GDP and military is 2.8%.
Although it is not really possible to trust very much the data one receives from the American government any more so I am uncertain.
for example this document - I am just having a hard time to trust what data goes into these various parts as federal spending in that area.
At any rate the military 2.8% I am quoting based on looking around is historically low. I would expect, especially given Iran, that it would be more in line with the historical 4.1%.
other issues - Veterans Administration budget is always not calculated as part of defense spending, because they are separate agencies. So when people say military budget they may be keeping that separate, however putting them together of course increases the amount spent
I happen to believe this document on money more than others, because publication controlled by congress and not the executive.
> I can easily construct something that shows the U.S does pay more for science and education than it does for military, but only by being IMHO somewhat misleading, for example by throwing K-12 spending together with the higher education payments and mixing federal and state monies, so to clarify what I mean when I say the U.S in these kinds of conversations and what I think most people mean is "the federal government"
I disagree: total tax burden and allocation is the relevant aspect, regardless of pointless semantics about which government unit disbursed the funds.
You admit the fact:
US governments spend more on education and science than the military, as measured by total funds allocated to purpose.
I think you’re the one being misleading by quibbling semantics about who dispersed the money: US taxpayers give more of their tax money to science and education than the military.
You focus on the federal government rather than totals is precisely to obscure that fact — which you know to be true, but find inconvenient for your politics. Hence the semantic quibbles.
>You focus on the federal government rather than totals is precisely to obscure that fact — which you know to be true, but find inconvenient for your politics.
Or scientists know how to count and see that one number is larger than another; and understand that that's an important factor in many political systems.
It doesn't. The republicans are able to stop things a lot of the time because Democrats don't have a strong majority in either house. They can barely scrape together a 50% plus 1 vote by bringing in people who are "Democrat" but for example refuse to allow public option healthcare or shut down of coal plants.
Republicans have voters that understand your guy has to be in the seat before you want something to happen. They correctly understand that if you just vote for more guys, you get more of what you want to happen, and correctly identify that the solution to not getting what you want is to get more seats in the next election.
I can never understand the shocking lack of civics education from people who get upset at democrats for not having power when the system describes in plain language that you need numbers for the power.
When Mitch McConnell prevented the vote to appoint a new supreme court justice, it was because he had that power as senate majority leader. If Democrats had a senate majority at that time, he could not have prevented the vote.
The republicans can have 1 senator in the senate and they somehow shuck and jive to get their way. They never fucking lose in implementing their outright evil. Break some rules, use strategy, set up some game pieces. Do something, anything. The democrats couldn’t even get a Supreme Court justice seated with 6 months to go for the next election.
The last time Democrats had a full majority they passed the most consequential climate legislation ever. The time before that, health care reform. Republicans couldn’t do anything to stop it. It’s how the system works. It’s not some movie script.
Oh, please, that’s not true. But yeah, you need 60 seats there in order to just ram things through. Right now Democrats don’t even have a plurality of the voting public so it’s not surprising that they are completely powerless.
> Democrats couldn’t even get a SC Justice…
On this one though I’ll fully agree with you, they were 100% ratfucked on Garland’s nomination. In no universe was that more than 0% ethically justified. That was a craven and cowardly scheme.
I wish I could find it but Simon Clark, someone who specialized in climate science, had put out a video about how we were only recently able to model the AMOC and it's shifting patterns thanks to this measurement we were doing
I've become a big fan of Simon lately. It's difficult to make videos about such a serious and all-encompassing topic without either falling into some combination of doomerism, misinformation, or apathy. He's got a real talent for bringing his expertise to a general audience, and I always come away from a video being clear about what the problem is he's talking about, why it matters but importantly how we deal with it (and how I can deal with it personally, without falling into the "only individual actions matter" trap)
Yrah probably someone at doge or the dept of war watched that and suggested dismantling it. What's next, closing down the NOAA because it's a "con job" and climate change is "a hoax"?
The GOP rigs elections in their favor and it's well known, but they don't have the power to throw out an additional 87 million votes if they don't go in their favor.
The logical conclusion then if despite everyone voting D then getting their votes tossed out is either violent revolution or liberation with the aid of another nuclear-armed state.
In our modern democracies, we are highly dependent on our information economies to build consensus.
Those economies have essentially ceased functioning as competitive markets for ideas, globally.
In general, newsrooms don’t make enough money to independently cover local news, and are consolidated under political/private parties. Journalism isn’t dead, but it is definitely on life support.
America though, has a further metastasized issue, in that there exists market capture. Republicans and their media apparatus have effective agenda setting power over a large enough section of the populace.
The short version of it is that in the right leaning media sphere, the rules of journalism have changed. A common through line for headline stories begins with a fringe theory on the internet. This fringe theory shows up on some podcast, which then gets repeated by a guest on a channel like Fox. This in turn gets alluded to by the White House, and then it can be reported on as a position that the Executive is considering, making it fact.
The GOP didn’t need to throw out votes, provided it could muddy the waters effectively enough.
The research by Roberts, Faris and Benkler, is what this is based on.
Reality always wins in the end, so now with the increase in oil prices, the limits of information dominance are visible, and they will need to leverage their strength in other domains to gain advantage for the upcoming elections.
It was a scheduled Trump win, from how demotivating Harris was. Sure Trump demotivated a little over a million or two from bothering to show up to the polls for him, Harris was five to ten times that number (depending on whose numbers you use).
The will of the plurality you mean? He didn’t win a majority of the votes. He is the legitimately elected office holder; but it was not the will of the people, it was the outcome of this particularly electoral process. Many American electoral processes require a run off without a majority for this reason, and it’s an intensely weak platform to claim a mandate from - not only did more people not vote for you than half the voters, if you add in the people who could vote but didn’t, it’s by far not “the will of the people”.
I apologize but I don’t understand this metric - you’re saying Trump would have gotten the majority if republicans who didn’t vote for him had voted for him ? That’s some serious squinting and if you do that I’ll just take everyone who voted for Biden in the primary and add it to Harris and now she won close to 70% of the votes? Maybe add in Obama’s last election results and every democrat that ever ran in any races and Trump then got about 0% of the votes.
Sadly you can only count the votes the candidate who ran actually received. And he had a plurality - the weakest of all possible victories other than his victory of Clinton where she had more votes than him and still lost on an arcana.
It's important to note that thousands of people are giving their time every day for climate change work, doing thankless jobs for very little pay. The fact that the US chose a corrupt man over these people, the fact that millions of people sat out the vote, is a real slap in the face of the people who try to fight this, day after day after day. And many young people seem to have just given up. It's your future, others are fighting for it, join them.
I'm not sure people realize just how dire this is. The politics of the largest, most powerful country on Earth are dominated by people who truly believe in dispensational premillenialism [2]. For these people their time on Earth is limited. Wrecking the Earth doesn't matter. The afterlife is forever. Senior government officials take seriously bringing on the apocalypse through a red heifer [3]. In fact, it's the cornerstone of Christian Zionism [4].
And what began this political movement? Racism [5], specifically a ruling that schools in the South couldn't be both tax-exempt and segregationist.
No, climate is perhaps my least aligned issue with this administration. I may end up voting Democrats next time, we'll have to see how bad their platform is again. I just wish I could vote to protect our climate and our borders at once.
Oh, I thought you were actually asking a question, but you were just trying to score some kind of gotcha against the evil Trump voter. As expected from 3 month old accounts, my bad for not checking.
Trump's tax cuts and climate policy is identical to what he did last time. Why did you vote for him if you were going to be unhappy with those policies?
If you didn't like him doing those things, which he clearly signaled he would do and nobody had any intention of stopping him, what did you vote for him for? How did those reasons outweigh the damage he does with his tax cuts and climate policy?
> Why did you vote for him if you were going to be unhappy with those policies?
I voted for him for his other signalled policies that I did agree with, obviously. I deemed those more important than the climate policy and tax policy.
> what did you vote for him for?
Primarily cultural issues, which he delivered on beyond what I expected. Examples include the EO to change university admission processes away from DEI, which will have a huge positive effect on my Asian children, and a reduction in immigration and H1Bs.
I'm guessing you need permission to go deploy a bunch of buoys off the coast of Oregon, and that permission may be difficult to obtain for foreign research projects in the current US political climate.
I think you may have a hard time monitoring the Atlantic current if your sensors are all deployed off the coast of Oregon so it seems to me that this administration would jump at the opportunity to deploy those sensors off of the Oregon coast. Then they could tell the people that they are carefully monitoring the situation and can't find a problem. Nothing to see here, literally.
But the US is already doing it, it’s already there. It benefits the entire world to have this data. It’s not expensive.
Why reinvent the wheel? More, why not let another country take it over?
The reason is because there are those with ties to the American government’s current administration that have decided they will benefit tremendously from climate change and don’t care about its consequences.
In a great many cases when it came to academic measurement regarding any geological event or phenomenon, the US has historically been at the forefront and shared data with its allies. Very few of those countries have their own measurement systems set up because the US already has them ready to go anyway.
When the second wave of Trump idiocy hit academic institutions by forcing foreign institutions to sign a document indicating they "do not support DEI", this caused some major trouble. Public institutions gave in to the Americans' demands because there was no way to gather the information necessary to finish research in a reasonable time frame.
I think it's time Europe treated the USA the way they want to be treated, as an outsider and a potential threat, and that it's time to stop seeing them as a partner when it comes to science. We need our own measurements, our own instruments, our own satellites, our own databases, and we need to invest now.
Unfortunately, anti-intellectualism isn't just on the rise in the USA. Plus, now now that many countries are struggling with the increased fuel prices thanks to the USA's invasion of Iran, it's hard to find money to invest in science that a worrying amount of people choose to ignore/pretend doesn't exist because it doesn't suit their personal interests.
"Bad voting" has consequences that excede the scope of the term: Re-installing them will be more difficult and expensive than simply dismantling them. These kind of objectively-destructive things should be far more difficult to execute.
American science now needs to be tied with a military project so it has very sharp teeth to defend its upkeep. It's possible to track both submarines and ocean health with an all-in-one, billions-of-dollars expensive network.
1. The ocean observation system began operating in 2016 and was expected to continue for 25 years.
2. It cost $48 million annually to operate the network. The Trump administration repeatedly tried to shutter it, proposing to cut its funding by 80 percent in both 2025 and again in 2026. Congress pushed back, restoring the money.
3. “One of the real tragedies here is that collecting data effectively at this site was a huge engineering challenge, and it’s not the kind of thing where you can just leave your notes for the next person who comes in,” Dr. Palevsky said. “There’s a lot of expertise that has the potential to be lost.”
The administration is, as I understand it, in violation of the constitution by shutting this down. It was funded by Congress, twice. The executive branch cannot just legally not spend that money.
A time honored practice of dysfunctional institutions when confronted with a problem is to stop paying any attention to it. Problem gone. It's one of the derivatives of quality control.
Just one more thing that is being destroyed. There are thousands more that you aren't hearing about. If it exists then it must be destroyed. The intention is nothing less than to make rebuilding impossible. If you still have illusions that the US government has not been taken over by a death cult yearning for the apocalypse then you need to put down your phone and look at the scale of what is happening. Legality means nothing; they are doing everything they can to ensure that there will be no institutions left to hold them accountable.
Climate Activist: The oceans are getting warmer & global currents are threatened by imminent collapse - we must do something!
Big Oil: Prove it!
Climate Activist: Data gathered between 2016 and 2026 shows ...
Big Oil: That's old news! Do you have more recent data?
Climate Activist: Well, no, because Trump2 dismantled the ocean observation system in 2026 ...
Big Oil: So you have no data to back up your claims?
Climate Activist: Not recent data, no, but ...
Big Oil: Case dismissed! Why should anyone take action based on subjective opinion, not backed up by hard data? For all we know the oceans could have miraculously cooled & the currents are fine!
It's mostly just about getting the data out of the news cycle. If you don't have new data on the oceans warming then there's no news story, so less pressure on Big Oil to greenwash their industry.
"Valuable to society" and "valuable in the sense that it produces a profit for a business funding it" are different things. This is the reason why we have government funding.
Your premise here is i think incorrect. so I’m not claiming any links between nation state actors, and our current administration, but the nation of Russia plans to benefit greatly from climate change, and the opening of trade routes in the Arctic. Having control over Greenland directly or indirectly through intermediaries also benefits them to this end coincidentally. Having another country, also be the scapegoat for the cause of any negative consequences also greatly benefits them. If this is the light you shine on vents, everything seems to make a great deal of sense actually.
None will. But hide them in a box, away from where others can see, and they will happily sign a piece of paper that says they do. One so called a ballot.
That wasn't arbitrary, and it wasn't for no benefit. It was so that landowners along the coast could continue to use faulty sea level studies to justify state road and infrastructure investments.
To be clear: this is not about saving money -- in fact it's expensive to remove all this equipment
This is about removing the ability to measure in order to undercut the claims of global warming ("we don't have sufficient evidence")
In the future historians will look back at this administration the way we look at the Roman Inquisition who persecuted scientists for challenging their accepted dogma.
This strikes me as one of the recent moves by our political/capital class where they think that if they just remove the information that’s inconvenient for them, people will stop caring and let them do what they want. You only need to listen to the bosses who so many of us work for to know that they think climate change is just an inconvenience in the way of progress. Only time will tell if this strategy will work or not.
It's arguably not particularly inconvenient for the us political class? the us has been on a tear reducing per capita ghg emissions (also trade corrected ghg emissions). this has been going on for five decades now (consistently 2.5) independent of whether administrations or congress have been red or blue
iiuc us per capita emissions are not far from 1910s levels
I don't trust the trade corrected numbers, China uses a ton of coal still and is ever increasing in their manufacturing of good sent to the US. The number for the US has mostly gone down due to switching to natural gas from coal.
> ever increasing in their manufacturing of good sent to the US.
no, factories are closing and workers are protesting due to factory shutdowns in china. if you go to target, most things are made in bangladesh, pakistan India, maylaysia, thailand, vietnam where before they'd all be from china. also us consumption generally is decreasing, and anyways, transportation and direct energy was always the biggest contributor.
I’m more referencing the narrative that climate change is being used as a political point to enforce a global political state which stifles innovation (for example read the Project 2025 document around page 417 https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade...). They do make some fair points in there but the primary change to the EPA that is being proposed is focusing on decentralizing the response to climate change to the states. In a vacuum where climate change is a matter of air quality this isn’t a crazy idea but the reality is that this is a global issue which is inconvenient if you want to prioritize growth/innovation over all else and the general idea behind climate conservationism is a powerful political force which the whole world is trying to shape right now for their benefit. There is right wing conservation which largely focuses on local, narrow issues (such as whale habitats being used as a reason to cancel offshore wind). There is also left wing conservation which pushes the more global climate change view and more large scale changes such as carbon taxes, increased stimulus for renewable energy, and often more regulation. Multiple things are true here though: 1. A lot of our regulation is pointless and serves to just increase cost and lock-in existing players as dominant forces in markets. This definitely stifles innovation so there is pushback against climate related changes for fear this will continue or worsen. 2. Climate change is a powerful force in modern politics which serves as a binding force for many disparate factions and is creating many grassroots movements. The impact of these on innovation isn’t clear (nor is it the point) but increased climate awareness is certainly increasing pushback against greenhouse gas emission intensive industries such as datacenters (in their current forms until renewable capacity can catch up) 3. Climate change is very real and is already increasing the cost of doing business and being less aware of it isn’t going to help. This will also stifle innovation as costs mount in the coming years.
I see this move as an attempt to stifle 2 by hiding 3. It seems like a bet that if we don’t focus on the global issues (like a collapsing current) then much of the political power behind climate change disappears since we are frankly quite lucky in the US to have a beautiful, and largely clean environment/air. Grassroots movements and politically powerful messages are likely an annoyance for those who want to keep doing business as usual since it benefits them to do so. Not trying to make a strong claim that our current response to climate change or what anyone in particular is doing is right or wrong but it seems clear that climate change is a powerful message that pushes for much grander scale changes than most people are comfortable with especially those with strong private interests in ignoring it.
Assuming the interlocutor is stupid, at any scale, 1-1 to the whole of american politics probably just highlight that you don't fully grasp their point of view, because then it wouldn't be stupid. You'd be able to explain it to them and get them to see the matter from your perspective. If you can't do that, then you don't know you're right, you might be, but there's no way for you to know, truly.
So you are defending the move? Why rip out basic science for no benefit other than to signal that you don't care for it if it goes against your narrative? Seems 100% stupid but I am open to your interpretation.
No, this is specious. I've tried to have conversations with reactionaries on topics that we both are even aligned on. It would always be crickets the moment I deviated from the reactionary talking points. The elusive point of view that is "not grasped" is merely some combination of religious fundamentalism and spiteful destruction. Which are both ultimately just rooted in stupidity.
> ... “removal of all in-water infrastructure” belonging to the Ocean Observatories Initiative at sites along the coasts of Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and North Carolina, and in the waters between Greenland and Iceland.
...Why is Europe reliant on the US for monitoring oceans between Greenland & Iceland, i.e within European territory & therefore European monitoring? Shouldn't they have their own infra to work from?
Then stop using the roads and everything else that tax money paid for. If you keep using things that's been paid for using taxes the government will only feel more entitled to collect it.
They aren’t. The US built monitoring infrastructure there because it’s our project, and that’s where the science needs to happen.
It’s the same reason that many more countries than just Argentina built the Pierre Auger observatory, or that the Vatican built the Pope Scope in Arizona.
Article seems a bit biased. Similarly like some other ones where he cut research funding to then later resume it, with almost no significant loss, but the Democrats cried about it all over like if funding was completely stopped. They always tell one side of the story that fits the narrative.
Just to be clear I am against this as well, just the journalism is so filthy now.
Cutting and/or other randomizing activities makes planning for everyone involved very, very hard.
Congrats, the funding came back that time; but jobs were already cut, people already got deported whose college time depended on it, the professor got axed because the college couldn’t afford it anymore, etc.
Stability is worth its weight in gold in some areas. This isn’t that.
What really puts all of this into perspective for me is I work in academia and one of my friends works for a defense contractor. He told me the maintenance cost per flight hour of F-35 was a bit more than $40k, which is significantly more than I make in a year as a grad student. It's crazy basic science is what's been the focus of so many cuts while it's so cheap.
I wouldn't assume that this is about cost cutting. If the goal were saving money, the cheapest option by far would be to leave the hardware in the water and just stop funding the monitoring. Instead the plan is an expensive operation to send ships out to extract 900+ instruments from under two miles of ocean.
It's clear that this is driven by performative climate denialism and a pro fossil fuel stance. The Trump administration made a billion dollar deal with an energy company to stop construction of offshore wind farms and redirect the investment into fossil fuel projects. Trump constantly talks about the "green new scam" and "climate alarmism". And on top of signaling to his base, Trump met with oil executives at Mar-a-Lago before the 2024 election and pitched them on rolling back climate regulation in exchange for $1B in campaign cash. Destroying the instruments that would document the consequences and might spark alarm and activism is one way to hold up his end of the deal.
But… why? Climate change is very much real and even stubborn deep-right voters like my father now ‘believe’ in it. Ok, some people make some cash. But wouldn’t they anyway? I don’t understand this need to keep pandering to a minority and to destroy ecosystems.
It's the very definition of a culture war and in addition sadly evidence of limited intelligence. Even the most red blooded oil man wouldn't do this because this data is also useful for petroleum drilling and logistics - it's a whole other kind of person driving this.
Science is antithetical to rule-by-decree or other forms of despotism, since it strives to disprove any and all claims. The powers that be simply don't like to be told "you're wrong", and that is the core of what science does. It's as simple as that.
It's the deep desire for a sort of restorative authoritarianism: someone who can reduce the complex state of the world into "the way it should be".
The resentment is not versus fate or calamity but against those people who study and give voice to complexity. If someone can just shut those people up and make them go away, we will be restored to a simpler and more moral world. Where tragedy can rightly live in the realms of Gods and Mystery.
I would gently remind those that prefer such simplicity that not all nations do. We are not alone in the world. The nation that better understands the complexities of the natural world will, all else being equal, utterly trounce the nation that persists in fictionalizing existence. Unless you want to re-write your national anthem in Mandarin, you will someday need to (re-?)grapple with the complexities of the universe.
Reactionary politics, greed, stupidity. Pick any three.
> even stubborn deep-right voters like my father now ‘believe’ in it
I don't believe that, sorry. I mean I believe you that your father says so. But I don't think that holds for most right voters.
Your father believes it because, presumably, he is not paid to deny it, like the president and his lackeys are.
I don't think Trump or any of his appointed lieutenants think any of this through. It's the result of decisions made by emotion, not logic. "Vibe-governing" in other words.
Climate change, and science in general, is associated with nerds, boring reality, obstacles to immediate gratification, and effects on poor people.
Fossil fuels are associated with large wads of cash, action films, and sticking it to the libs.
Decisions might have terrible consequences. Who cares? Thinking things through is boring, and the people making the decisions are rich enough to be insulated from anything that might happen and old enough to not be around when it does.
The government knows it's real, these are generally well-educated people who went to decent schools. But, I would challenge that most right-wing voters know whether it is real. Where I live in rural America the vast majority are pro-fossil fuel, anti-EV. EVs are seen as "gay" or "feminine" by the folks out here. So the choice to use fossil fuels might just be some performative machismo, allowing their pick-ups to output black smoke, make a loud noise and look "tough."
Those are the majority of the Republican voters at this stage. To make them happy you do things like spend millions to tear up infrastructure which challenges their worldview. This should result in increased votes for the current administration at the mid-terms. So even if climate change is a real and current threat, you need to say it isn't to get re-elected.
I don't believe they do any of this for votes. I think somebody within the administration has a personal grudge against science, especially anything related to climate change.
Those 2 motives are not mutually exclusive! Both may apply at the same time.
I think that attitude may change if there is ever an EV that could be competitive in a NASCAR event. For now, the closest we are likely to see is a hybrid, because EVs don't have enough range.
> So the choice to use fossil fuels might just be some performative machismo, allowing their pick-ups to output black smoke, make a loud noise and look "tough."
Might be linked to petrol cars being cheaper to buy for the same amount of car? That seems like an easier explanation. There is a masculine element in that men want to be seen to own big things to show off, but I doubt it has anything to do with liking black smoke. If they wanted loud noises they'd go a motorbike or get an obnoxious horn.
I was in the gas station recently and heard a girl talking to her friend. She said she'd never date a guy who didn't drive a pick-up and would definitely never date a guy who paid with a [credit/debit] card. She said "cards are for girls."
There are still a ton of cash transactions out here in the sticks. When I ask why they say they don't want the government knowing their business. But I guess from that conversation it also helps you get a date?
No, it’s tribalism of sorts. For men they’ll often paint something they don’t understand with words like that. I grew up in a culture that did that and won’t go back. Many many humans lack basic curiosity about the world.
Look up the phrase "rolling coal".
These people do exist, unfortunately.
For those who don't live adjacent to rednecks: https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=rolling+coal
If "petrol cars" wasn't a dead giveaway of not being American, the rest of the comment confirms it. No clue what you're talking about.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about if you don't know anything about rolling coal and you don't realize people like to drive loud cars.
I've had several friends tell me they just couldn't drive an EV because it just doesn't have a soul, meaning it doesn't have that roar for its performance. It being nearly silent as it accelerates hard is missing half the point. It's a common thing among car enthusiasts.
I can attest that a lot of “car culture” and “motorcycle culture” people want the car or motorcycle to be as loud as possible. Where I live they’re frequently interrupting conversations and waking children up. It’s a major nuisance.
1) I doubt the rolling coal people are a particularly large group. Sounds niche.
2) They could buy an EV then put some sort of smokestack on it. If they're going to convert their car to preformatively blow black black smoke and make extra noise sure, ok. But an close consideration that isn't actually a reason to prefer a petrol car over an EV. They'd get to exactly the same end point and probably annoy the people they're trying to annoy even more starting with an EV.
The major factor for people buying a petrol-powered car is almost certainly the cost. If electric cars were cheaper they'd mostly switch over to them and then rig them up to own the libs instead.
You are, I see, a member of the "reality-based community" as Karl Rove presciently put it back in 2004. You live in a mental space where you critically evaluate facts and make decisions aimed at maximizing your outcome in life.
You would do well to explore this great nation of ours and realize that a wild and terrifyingly large number of its inhabitants travel in an almost unimaginably different headspace.
The men who roll coal are not doing it in cheap beater cars. A Ram or F-150 Super Duty is a $40-80,000 vehicle which requires $200-$5,000 in modifications so they can pull up next to a Prius ($28-36,000) and belch out thick black lib-ownin' ball-crushin' smoke, damaging their own engine in the process. You may ask them why, to which they'd spit a wad of brown tobacco in your face and scream in primal rage into the air: because f*k you, that's why.
Rolling coal is extremely not niche. I live in a progressive place and I see it regularly.
I'd encourage you to pause and learn about the culture from the many posters here before making surface level assertions.
Appalachia area is a big place... Its not niche.
Feelings don't care about your facts. It's far cheaper to be vegetarian than not, how many vegetarians do you know?
1) I see multiple people doing it every day and my commute is <5mi.
2) These people hate fake engine noises even more. Making it blow fake smoke and make fake noises would be even more of a turn off. Once again, not knowing that really shows you don't have a clue about what you're talking about.
> The major factor for people buying a petrol-powered car is almost certainly the cost.
If the main reason was the cost they wouldn't be spending almost $100k on SUVs and pickups that get like 14mpg to go get groceries and pickup the kids from school.
> They'd get to exactly the same end point
This statement is enough to make it perfectly clear that you have no idea what you're talking about.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Respectfully,
Tribalism.
Many deep-right voters do not believe in climate change. They're a big part of Trump's base.
You don't need a chart these days. I live in Boulder Colorado, and I can't imagine that we'll have more than 10 more ski seasons.
Upside - Aspen loses it’s arrogant environmentalists and it starts mining silver again.
Wow yeah such a great upside!
Eradicating species, destroying economies, and eliminating entire ways to enjoy nature's bounty here on earth –– a small price to pay to hurr hur hurrr... own the libs ;)
The DSM needs to be updated soon for this type of sociopathic cynicism. It can't be kept with the rest of society.
People are going to give you all sorts of answers that are based on strategy or negotiation or interests, but I think it basically all boils down to "to own the libs." We have to remember that before this all started, he was registered as a Democrat. He doesn't (or didn't) give a shit about any of this, but people that said no to him do, so he's going to do his level best to break it all. It's just spite, and glee at being able to make people bewildered, angry, and sad. That's all so much of this is.
Which part of trump making billions of dollars from oil oligarchs is the confusing bit? His incentive structure is clear.
https://xkcd.com/3226/
Because we have actual retards in office. People keep looking for a deeper explanation. There isn't one. They are actual stupid people. They do stupid things.
I'd encourage you to express this sentiment without the slur. Disability advocates have been pressing hard to reduce its usage.
It all makes sense when you realize QAnon basically runs the white house now. There’s a very insulated type of American who lives in their own world, that unfortunately lots of voters are apparently sympathetic to. It’s probably seen as a victory against the climate change hoax or something along those lines.
It’s seen in Crusader terms. A bunch of things which are not Christian, for example controlling social order at all costs, are adornments on nationalism. The apocalyptic parts of QAnon slot into their belief system. So many other religious movements rely on salvation. Another commenter mentioned ancient China. Big political upheavals swept ancient China based on very slight new ideas about salvation.
That's how the Chinese empire collapsed. They had scientists and explorers until one day the emperor decided that knowledge upsets harmony.
You don't know anything about China.
I have seen some chatter where 2nd-term Trumpism has been (very imperfectly) compared to Mao's Cultural Revolution.
Obviously there are many differences, no question. But it's actions like this where a bit of the comparison seems apt -- fervent, nonsensical anti-intellectualism / anti-science actions done purely in the name of ideology.
Why else would one actually go out of the way to dismantle a working ocean observation system, which provides a rich amount of data for multiple purposes?
The only action that seems to make sense is that: A) Some of that data can be used to observe climate change issues. B) In Trumpism, it is not enough anymore to propagandize that climate change is not happening. One must also actively suppress anything that could suggest climate change is happening, no matter how much the cost, no matter how much it hurts other non-related things.
The entire motivation of Trump and the MAGA movement is "fuck you, libs." The left likes green energy and scientific research performed on the environment so the right hates that stuff even if their actions also hurt themselves.
Remove the source of evidence and its easier to deny the claim.
I don't believe Trump himself makes any of these decisions, and as for deals I don't think he remembers what happened yesterday let alone a deal made on the campaign trail. Parties in his administration are actively trying to destroy science and cripple any kind of climate research or green energy development, even if it costs nothing. Whoever they are, they make these plans and then get him to sign while he's awake.
That cheapest option may not be the cheapest option in the long-term when the next Democratic president would re-activate the devices.
Same reasoning as removal of many post office boxes in last days of Trump 1 term.
The post boxes were more about crippling mail-in votes. In Washington Bill De Joy had at one point dismantled several of the sorting machines which dramatically slowed how fast mail gets dispatched. The result was that you could no longer mail your vote the day before election day and have it arrive on election day.
Quid pro quo
Oil industry pays and Trump delivers.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/09/trump-asks-oil-exec...
The crazy thing is that the oil companies confessed to a misinformation campaign and at least publicly talked about change/reform (of course, they're still oil exploration/refinement companies so not abandoning that). But they did discuss responsible use of fossil fuels in transition towards renewables.
But Trump was fooled and is more committed than ever to the since-abandoned misinformation campaign. It took on a bigger life than Exxon ever could've imagined.
The snowflakiest of them all - they can't handle unbiased readings from instruments that survey our planet.
The Mauna Loa CO2 data is still up.[1] Trump tried to kill off the CO2 measuring, but that doesn't seem to have happened. The Mauna Loa data goes back to 1958, measured at the same point, far from any CO2 sources. 315ppm in 1958, 441ppm today, and almost a noise free curve with mild seasonal variations. Clearest trend in global warming.
[1] https://gml.noaa.gov/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2/co2_mm_mlo.txt
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/01/climate/trump-cuts-mauna-loa-...
I don't think Trump was "fooled" by anything. His policy positions reflect what makes him and his cronies money, and what keeps him in power. That's it. He doesn't care about truth or correctness. Just money and power.
I submit that the "is malice or incompetence" heuristic can be broken by pathological inputs which result in an indefinite runtime, and that we've encountered some of them in the last decade.
The correct response when that happens is to say "both" until/unless the perpetrators want to plead just one or the other.
To be honest this sounds more like an excuse and cover for having a bunch of ships and submarines in places they'd normally wouldn't be at.
How many million graduate students do you need to give the US the military hegemony and political influence over allies and adversaries that the F-35 program provides ?
Looked at from a policy maker's viewpoint, things look very different.
Wouldn't take very many at all, we've now learned these past four years (and even the past 2 months). All you need are drones, that are pennies on the dollar cheaper than trillion-dollar militaries. Depending on the munition, a single bomb we drop on Iran could cost between $40,000 and a couple million dollars. Think of all the high-end drones you could buy instead.
Everything is changing. Including our influence.
In the Russian-Ukrainian war the GPS guided shells that the USA was sending to Ukraine cost about $40k a pop, where as you can get at least a dozen drones for that price.
Even the fanciest self propelled artillery is getting destroyed by these little cheap buggers.
> Wouldn't take very many at all, we've now learned these past four years (and even the past 2 months). All you need are drones, that are pennies on the dollar cheaper than trillion-dollar militaries.
You make an incorrect conclusion which is unfortunately both quite popular and incorrect among westerners who read two and half editorials about Russo-Ukrainian war in some NYT/WAPO/whatever and think they now understand modern warfare. The reality of the situation is that drones are a very useful tool, but any side achieving actual air supremacy would result their fighters and bombers cruising over frontline and enemy towns on low altitudes taking out any high-value targets at whim. The situation would be similar to boots-on-the-ground phase of The Iraq War, resulting one of the sides to rapidly gaining ground and winning the war. Keep in mind that the cited "40k per-hour" price is quite cheap compared to per-hour operation cost of any kind of big ground force.
In fact, last thing US wants is to be in Russia's shoes unable to meaningfully advance into the territory of by all measures much weaker enemy.
Unless the drones take out your air bases, and the AA rockets are biting at the low altitude flights. Sorry it's never that simple.
That isn't really accurate, small drones are enough to antagonize regional neighbors. They are far from being able to project influence, stabilize international trade, or even remotely protect a territory from an enemy that isn't concerned with civilian casualties.
> project influence, stabilize international trade, or even remotely protect a territory from an enemy that isn't concerned with civilian casualties.
We just failed to do all of those things quite visibly.
Iran made a choice not to escalate to destroying desalination capabilities and that's why a lot of Saudis and Emiratis are still alive. It's not because we protected them.
Because they didn’t want the retribution that would follow. That’s what protection looks like. Assured destruction when it’s not mutual is pretty motivating.
Sure, but we still couldn't have stopped them with our vaunted carrier-based power projection, or with our exhausted ABM capabilities.
US Naval doctrine has been a paper tiger ever since that Millenium Challenge exercise.
Not being able to stop random killings or destruction from small arms fire has nothing to do with military power projection.
Military power projection is the reason the US was able to destroy a significant portion of Iranian leadership, nuclear infrastructure, and weapons infrastructure with no retaliation from Iran back in the US nor any pushback from any of Irans allies.
Military hegemony has nothing to do with being a perfect police force that can stop anything from happening anywhere.
>but we still couldn't have stopped them with our vaunted carrier-based power projection, or with our exhausted ABM capabilities.
Who is “we”? Your account started posting nothing but anti-US stances and pro-China/Iran stances since this conflict began.
I'm American, also that's considered bad form. 2/3 of Americans were against this and think it was a failure.
Military hegemony in the gulf region would mean being able to force Iran to stop attacking gulf targets, rather than negotiating a ceasefire because both sides are hurting. What we have is a multipolar situation, it's not arguable, it's right on the scoreboard.
A hegemon would be able to unilaterally open the straits.
Best for everyone to recognize it and act accordingly. It's got nothing to do with cheerleading, that stuff is for rubes.
> Military power projection is the reason the US was able to destroy a significant portion of Iranian leadership, nuclear infrastructure, and weapons infrastructure with no retaliation from Iran back in the US nor any pushback from any of Irans allies.
First, Iran doesn't have allies, it has friends of convenience (Russia like the military cooperation but don't like the cheap oil competition, China love the cheap oil competition but don't care for the damage, etc).
Second, US bases and US allies (in the actual sense of the word) were attacked by Iran, successfully. US and all its allies were also impacted by the trivial closure of the Hormuz. US allies now will forever know that the US is not a reliable ally and can't protect them; stocks of crucial materiel were wasted on achieving nothing; and high oil prices will cost the US domestic politics dearly. US power projection whacked a few nutjobs from a regime full of them. Oh, and they're a theocracy that believes in martyrdom! And the new supreme leader is a strong proponent of nuclear weapons (unlike his predecessor and father), and saw half his family blown up in front of him.
> Military hegemony has nothing to do with being a perfect police force that can stop anything from happening anywhere.
Being unable to enforce your will on an enemy is not "hegemony". Iran will walk out of this conflict with their nuclear programme back on track, a revenge minded regime, and maybe even a toll on an international strait to fill up their coffers.
US military deterrence has been a paper tiger ever since Biden told Iran "don't" [1], and Iran did, and Biden did not respond. Now whoever the sitting US president would be - Trump or anybody else - must restore that deterrence. There is no nice or easy way to do that. The last time the US had to do that was during WW2 and the enemies were not floating heavy, extended media campaigns and funding US universities at the time.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/shorts/A8ce6wzoReA
The reason why Iran was even back in the nuclear game was because a moron pulled out of the JCPOA that was giving them concrete steps and carrots to get them to stop.
An agreement that had independent inspectors from several countries accessing utilities and leaving behind tamper resistant (and tamper revealing) instrumentation at regular intervals (along with the usual back and forth robust discussions).
The sort of gear that could count atoms from Fukushima drifting across the oceans to end up in HVAC filters in middle North America.
The JCPOA agreements were set to expire in January 2026 - and then Iran could continue their nuclear ambitions. The only people who could support those agreements either:
1. Didn't read them and know that they expire in 10 years.
2. Think that 10 years is a long enough time in the future where whatever happens then doesn't matter to their current goals.
3. Would like to see a nuclear-capable Iran.
For what it's worth, January 2026 already passed 5 months ago.
So, there would now need to be new negotiations as to the future of the Iranian nuclear program? Except with Iran in a weaker position than they actually are today, due to a decade of no progress on enrichment.
How is that worse than the current situation? Iran is closer to nuclear capability now than in your counterfactual, yet those who disagree with you are the ones who want a nuclear-capable Iran?
Or alternatively, in 2026 Iran would have been hooked on closer economic cooperation and trade, (relative) reformers would be in power, and the deal would have been renewed. Yanking the deal all but guaranteed that the hardliners would go back in charge, because they were proven right - the US could not be trusted to keep its word, so negotiations don't matter, the only thing that would actually protect them is nuclear weapons.
> Would like to see a nuclear-capable Iran.
Postponing their nuclear programme with at least 10 years is absolutely worth doing. Because realistically you cannot, I repeat, cannot force them to stop it. If the regime wants to continue, it will and their facilities deep under the mountains are impenetrable.
That's called imperialism. I believe it's no longer fashionable.
> Oh, so you expect to change their culture and their value system
What do you mean culture and value system? You think isolation and nuclear weapons are parts of the Iranian culture????
And yes, Iran had multiple bouts of reformer presidents. Reformer within the limits of what the Supreme Leader would allow of course, but there is still a massive gulf of difference between them and the hardliners. A few years of visible economic development under reformers would have nudged things in the reconciliation direction.
Again, yanking the deal, even before the current strikes during negotiations, ensures that Iran will never fully trust the US. So realistically, what other choices do they have other than procure nuclear weapons for protection?
You said that "closer economic cooperation and trade" might lead to "(relative) reformers would be in power". Westerners "reforming" other cultures has not been fashionable for about half a century.
Who is talking about westerners here? What even is your argument, because it seems you're just throwing random catchphrases around.
The topic is Iran. A theocracy with an unelected supreme leader with final say on political decisions and candidates for all elections in the otherwise relatively democratic system. Reformer in their context (hence the relative qualifier I used) is people like Ahmadinejad who are for rapprochement and trade with the world, but without too many concessions. We're not talking about socially progressive or "western" or anything of the like. They are infinitely better than the hardliners aligned with the IRGC who are against anything other than autarky and building more strategic security via stuff like nukes. The reformers got their way with the JCPOA, and were proven wrong by the orange moron destroying that. Since then the hardliners have been in power and they are not going anywhere now.
You are talking about reforming Iran. You used the word yourself.
> people like Ahmadinejad
Oh, this guy:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel
- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-23538717
Let's look at some of his policies:
- Holocaust denial
- Calling for the destruction of the state of Israel
- Provided funding, training and arms to Hezbollah and Hamas
- Condemned by the UK, Germany, Austria, and even the UN
- Condemned the Palestinian Authority for holding peace talks with Israel
- A nice quote of his: "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country."
Thank you for explaining to all those who won't listen to me because I'm Israel and therefore biased, what a "reformed" Iran would look like. Now they can understand just how hateful the current "unreformed" Iran looks like.
Look, in geopolitics it's good to be realistic.
Is Iran, ran by hateful men, but open to trade, integration, reform, inspections and having a lot to lose perfect? Of course it fucking isn't. But realistically it's the best we could have had.
Instead we have Iran ruled by even more hateful men. Men that saw their families blown up in front of them, and have nothing to lose. The economy is already shit, and they don't care about regular people, and as we saw in the recent protests, power structures are intact and they do not hesitate using them to enforce their rule. Men who were demonstrated multiple times that American promises don't mean anything. Those men also have a pretty clear path on how they'd be left alone - Kim's nuclear weapons / threat of destroying Seoul.
How is that any better? It isn't. It's drastically worse for everyone, from the common Iranian suffering under the regime to every single one of us that will have to live under the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons and worldwide economic disruption via Hormuz and direct sabotage.
The Just Cash Pallets Over Americans agreement, where Iran was rewarded for all the wrong things.
Not at all. Iran was rewarded with progressive sanction relief and progressive unblocking of their own money that was seized decades ago, as long as they continued cooperating.
They only had to cooperate until January 2026, then they were free to carry on with their nuclear ambitions.
This is a great example of where the Israeli perspective diverges from the American.
The classic American perspective wouldn't worry about that because being part of our market is so attractive. There is a win-win here, they are not mindless orcs.
Yes, living under constant rocket threat does affect one's perspective. I personally was injured in an Iranian rocket attack on Israel. My children have had their camp counselors kidnapped and murdered. And their teachers. And thier friends. My daughter attended the funeral of a close friend who was murdered in his home, along with his sister and brother and both parents.
I could go on. I know two women whose babies were both burned to death due to Iran. I could tell even worse stories. Suffice it to say that us who actually live under Iranian threat treat the threat seriously. It is not theoretical for us.
>The Israeli perspective assumes the muslims are mindless orcs that can't be reasoned with as humans.
It seems that the American perspective after 9/11 has become more or less the same.
Give us some credit, we have our bigots but it's been 25 years and we also have hospitality culture like everyone else. The average person, even if they voted Trump, would be kind and grant human-ness to a muslim they met in person. Look at the Borat sketches, he's there with southern conservatives acting like a freak and they STILL act like gracious hosts to the foreigner.
Acknowledgement of edit: I rephrased the sentence you're replying to in order to try to be less inflammatory.
The Millenium Challenge was 2002, predating Biden by about 20 years, and was the same year Iran was named as part of the "Axis of Evil".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil#2002_State_of_the...
Yes, Iran had had nuclear ambitions for decades. How is that relevant?
Are you asking how the 2002 Millenium Challenge showing that the US Navy would lose any directy military engagement with Iran by a large margin is relevant to "The American navy was already a paper tiger ~20 years before your example with Biden"?
It was more son that they have space to escalate. It was strategic decision. They did attacked those when their plants were attacked.
US does not have capability to destroy them. It can make lives of civilians hard, as it tried, but foreigners attacking civilians dont make regimes fall.
Lol, classic American exceptionalism.
Iran didn't attack the desalination plants because that would amount to actual warcrimes - and they care about their public perception in the broader community of nations. Unlike, of course, Israel and the USA, who don't mind turning a few schools and hospitals to smithereens.
You might call this "assured non-mutual destruction", and of course it helps that the US is located away from Iran's immediate neighborhood, but destroying the lifelines of the GCC countries would assure an economic collapse globally that the world has never seen before. Imagine something on the lines of oil at $300 a barrel, zero fertilizer, zero semiconductors, zero plastics, the works. And Iran could just as easily turn Israel to glass, with a death by a thousand papercuts (or drones, whatever your flavor). Of course, all of this at a huge cost to itself.
Protecting territory is pretty pointless for many countries, who would be facing neighbors they cannot remotely match in capability. Allowing civilians to be slaughtered is a cheaper and more effective method of warfare for these. Protecting civilians well is difficult even for very well armed countries with expensive defense systems, letting them die brings many martyrs and propaganda opportunities and breeds hatred for the enemy.
Something tells me a war with china isn’t going to be carriers duking it out but carriers filled to the brim with aviation and naval drones that seek and destroy enemy craft. As Iran has shown, you don’t need to attack the USA directly to destabilize its influence. The US market economical influence has been far more important for force projection and stabilizing trade than anything else and by all accounts Trump has pissed away allies on that front too. US force projection for trade stabilization is for minor things like protecting against pirates - you don’t need million dollar missiles for that.
> an enemy that isn't concerned with civilian casualties
You mean like when the Zionists openly stopped food from getting into Gaza, while the western governments were backing the Zuonists? Those people concerned with civilian casualties?
An enemy unconcerned with civilian casualties, give me a break.
That isn't really accurate, small drones are enough to antagonize regional neighbors.
Such as a Russian strategic bomber base thousands of miles from the front?
If you mean Operation Spiderweb, the Ukrainian Osa drone only had a range of 5 miles/ 8km (one-way) and had to be launched from the roof of containers simultaneously transported unknowingly by Russian truckers and that was a covert operation that took 18 months to set up. So no that particular model couldn't attack even 10 miles away.
Ukraine has other long-range strike drones but haven't heard of more than a thousand miles range.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb
https://sofrep.com/news/deepstrike-campaign-drone-attacks-ag...
Details, details. The drones got the job done, didn't they? Getting a truck to within a few miles of the target is still pretty cheap compared to traditional weapons-delivery methodologies.
Spiderweb was a modern-day Doolittle Raid. It didn't scale, at least not immediately, but it still changed the tenor of the war. It put the Russians on notice that they weren't safe. Not that the Russians care, but most countries would. Imagine if someone attacked an Air Force base in the US with similar tactics and a similar outcome...
How not? Precision kills with 0 warning. You can just bring one on a plane to whatever country and have the thing charge with solar/powerlines until your target is getting coffee outside on a nice day. Or whatever.
Ok, I'm not even sure what to reply here, that makes no sense and doesn't accomplish any of the things I mentioned. It's also not even particularly feasible and just not at all how any sort of wartime operation is likely to work at scale.
But I am sure of who I wouldn't put in charge of critical military operations.
Drones are not a strategic weapon. When you talk to the Ukrainian military, with their actual expertise in drone warfare, the general consensus is that drones are an inferior replacement for artillery (note that ex-Soviet military systems are a lot heavier in artillery use than NATO military systems) that they use because they can't get the artillery shells that they need but they can get drones in sufficient quantities. It hasn't enabled any strategic breakthroughs in the Russo-Ukrainian War, it is merely served to lock in the grinding stalemate it's been in since October-ish 2022.
The US war on Iran also demonstrates the problems of drones too: the US is currently able to wage a war 6000 miles away from its shores, because of the use of an awful lot of weapons systems that aren't drones. Iran is unable to dislodge that military, or even meaningfully impact its ability to carry out said war, not 100 miles away from its shores, despite a heavy use of drones to attempt to do so.
The war also demonstrates another big issue... the continued delusion of many civilian and military leaders that strategic bombing alone is sufficient to win a war despite this failing literally every single time it's been attempted in the past 100 years.
> that they use because they can't get the artillery shells that they need
That used to be true, but I don't think that the case anymore. UA is now striking logistics ~150KM behind the contact line with drones. Regular artillery can't do that. Guided rockets maybe could, but they'd be more expensive and come in smaller quantities.
> US is currently able to wage a war 6000 miles away from its shores
For a rather restricted use of "wage a war". They did not stop Iranians from doing their thing. Bombing alone does not have a history of winning wars.
> How many million graduate students do you need to give the US the military hegemony and political influence over allies and adversaries that the F-35 program provides ?
Well, given that the Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed for months despite Iran's military supposedly being decimated, and the President of the United States is now threatening to bomb one of our closest Mideast allies (Oman), a reasonable person might ask where this military hegemony and political influence you're referring to is.
If we have military hegemony, then why can't we open the strait of Hormuz?
Because it would require a boots on the ground invasion to occupy the entire portion of Iran overlooking the Strait.
The strait is physically open but no insurance company will cover massive oil carriers because they are so easy to hit with small weaponry from the ridges of Iran.
So effectively, there is no military hegemony, as the U.S. cannot afford the costs of using it.
Why doesn't the US government just insure them itself then? A quarter of a billion dollars is a major risk to an insurance company with no internal capacity to mitigate the risk itself, but it's not even a rounding error in the federal budget and the US government would then be expressing confidence in the ability of its own military to ensure safe passage.
And even if they had to pay a claim, it would cost the population less than the higher gas prices, since increasing supply lowers the market price for all supply, not just the incremental units.
That would require an act of Congress. So implicitly, the majority party in the House and Senate don’t want to do this. Ask yourself, who is in power right now?
> Because it would require a boots on the ground invasion to occupy the entire portion of Iran overlooking the Strait.
Which even the morons who started this conflict know is suicidal because Iran has literally at least a million loyal fanatics (Basij, the same organisation doing unarmed meat waves against Iraq)!ready to die for the regime, and the terrain is in their favour.
So that's not military hegemony.
After all has been said about the ages of Biden and Trump, it’s ironic that having presidents with experience living through Vietnam and the Soviet-Afghan war has been so useful for their two terms.
But the difference between Vietnam and Iran is that Trump had a plan to get out of Vietnam.
The US could/can, they're just not willing to undergo the mass casualties it would take to put boots on the ground and put those boots up the ass of the people controlling Hormuz. Which absolutely cannot be achieved purely by air.
> The US could/can, they're just not willing to undergo the mass casualties it would take to put boots on the ground
It doesn’t matter what the reason, if you can’t do something you can’t do it.
I'm not interested in a lengthy semantic debate about what "can" means but I'd hope we could agree at least one possible interpretation includes things you're unwilling but able to do.
Generously, what difference does it make to any person if you technically achieve some result but in practice are not able to realize that end state?
Is it the case that if someone doesn't do something some time then they can't do that thing? Like, if you were playing basketball and Lebron James walked by and you threw the ball to him and said "dunk this!' and Lebron said "no, I'm not willing to" does this mean Lebron can't dunk?
Because personally, I'd still take Lebron on a basketball team even if he wasn't willing to dunk the ball that one time.
> if you were playing basketball and Lebron James walked by and you threw the ball to him
Yes, this is a terrible analogy for the war in Iran. Hugely unpopular, costing Americans vast sums of money daily, headed for possible catastrophe. Very much not a low-stakes "Lebron walks by" situation.
Better analogy with Lebron would be: championship game with a title on the line. He gets possession as time runs down and the team needs him to score or make a play that scores. It's not okay for him to then say he's fully capable of scoring but doesn't want to at just that moment for reasons.
NB: this is not to say the US military couldn't cause untold damage on the region. This is obvious, anybody can look at recent history to see that the US military is more than capable of destroying a country in the region.
Rather, this is an object lesson that war is politics by other means, and here we tried to do war without any politics and it has not gone well for us.
I will remember from now on that you can compare war to Lebron playing in a championship game but not to him playing in a pickup game.
But to be clear, the comment I replied to was one in which you made an abstract point that it doesn't make a difference to someone if you can do something but in practice don't/aren't willing to and I think that this is obviously wrong (just because Lebron didn't dunk doesn't mean he can't or is a bad ball player). You don't like the Lebron analogy, that's fine. Let's use a war analogy: in 2025 Pakistan and India, two nuclear armed countries, exchanged significant fire. Neither was willing to use their nuclear arsenals. Should we now conclude from this that they can't use their nuclear arsenals and are therefore equivalent to being non-nuclear countries? I mean who cares if they have nuclear weapons which can (can't?) kill millions if this one time their political will wasn't there for them to use them in their defense?
> Rather, this is an object lesson that war is politics by other means, and here we tried to do war without any politics and it has not gone well for us.
Be careful not to trip over your rhetoric in an attempt do display profundity. If war is politics by other means, then doing war is always done with politics. This whole statement is word salad nonsense.
> I will remember from now on that you can compare war to Lebron playing in a championship game but not to him playing in a pickup game.
The stakes of a given situation matter to the disposition of the participants. Is this not obvious?
I'm really confused as to what your larger point is. Nobody disagrees that the US military can kill untold numbers of people and cause untold damage in Iran and the wider region. Was this the point you wanted to make? Yes, the US military is capable of killing everyone in the region, which would make the Strait "open" again.
> If war is politics by other means, then doing war is always done with politics.
The problem is doing so has not/does not appear to be on a path to achieve the stated political aims of the administration, inasmuch as they have been willing to articulate aims.
Anyway, you're being insulting and not making coherent points. Good evening/morning/afternoon.
His statement about war and politics is a reference to Clausewitz, the famous military strategist that apparently you have not read nor have heard referenced, which is surprising given how often this quote comes up in military-political discussions, articles, and books.
(It’s ok, nobody in the administration has read him either. And before you accuse me of partisan hackery, the prior admin was just as incompetent.)
It's more like you ask a paralyzed person to lift his arm and he says he doesn't want to.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/science/discovering-that-...
If you cannot afford doing it, then you cannot do it. What's the purpose of having the capability to do something if you cannot afford the losses of doing it?
This is just a different way if saying that we can't.
US military ain't some unstoppable force in all possible scenarios, it was stopped and won over quite a few times, last time I recall by taliban sheepherders. In some cases like first Iraq war yes, but they don't wage those wars anymore. And all mental limits re casualties are very real limits just like other.
Its like saying russia could/can conquer whole Europe, if only X, Y and Z. That effectively means they can't, as we see playing out right now despite them trying desperately to achieve this very thing.
I'm confused, are you insinuating that the Taliban essentially ran a PR campaign to portray themselves as sheepherders to garner sympathy from the US population to reduce its appetite for fighting them?
No, I am stating that there are strong elements in popular media, news providers chief among them, who seek to weaken US influence and use US public opinion to drive that change.
Why would the US news media seek to weaken US influence (or stop war)? Seems much simpler to assume that "sensationalism sells"
I suggest that you query for "Qatari influence in US media" in your favourite search engine or LLM. Many media bodies operating in the land of the free do not represent the interests of the people of that land.
> How many million graduate students do you need to give the US the military hegemony and political influence over allies and adversaries that the F-35 program provides ?
All good questions 3 years ago. How many would rely on US weapons or their US relationship today?
And then there is the unimpressive show in the Middle East.
Curious -- from where do you think the basic research originated that allowed the F-35 program to exist at all?
We are certainly not naive enough to think that Lockheed Martin does basic research.
Not nearly as clear cut as you make it out.
We haven't been able to produce a complete F-35 since Feb 2026 because we lack the necessary rare earths to do create their electronics.
Why? Because we stopped doing that work (and science) in the 90s and now China produces over 90% of rare earths on the planet and said the US can't have any for military purposes (its being negotiated).
There are zero under and post graduate programs that specialize in rare earth extraction and refining outside of China. None. And China has barred their scientists from collaborating with any colleagues from the US on the topic.
Sooooo, you're right, the F-35 program offers a lot, but can it do so "by itself" and does it provide that value in an economically viable way? Much less clear cut of an answer.
Block 4 is the only version they'd dare put up against a peer air defense, and Block 4 is delayed, delayed, delayed, and . . nowhere in sight, at the moment.
There has been two and a half decades of FUD billowing around the entire program, like the world's most expensive fart, so don't expect to know the truth until they fly the thing past Zamami Island in anger. But I personally will be mentally prepared for disappointment, with some bitter despair as digestif.
If policymakers genuinely cared they wouldn't have let things get so bad that allies are considering to have orders cancelled for the Saab JAS 39 Gripen
In the right case just one. The US invasion of Afghanistan required some extremely rare language knowledge to be successful.
The frustrating thing for me, having worked as an avionics technician, is that the F-35 is actually a waste of all that money
Manned aircraft are largely a waste of money in the era of drone warfare.
Without those people being trained at the level of grad school in workforce, you would not have enough people to even maintain a good checklist for F35. The program will go down within a year.
Grad schools do more than research, they train people for these industries, for the shop floor.
The F35 program is essential! When the USA will finally conquer free healthcare?
Yeah, 11 f35 lost to motor/software issues. Only modern war plane that have those issues.
Its minumum speed is worse than the f16, which make drone interception an issue (f16 are already a bit to fast for that according to Ukrainians), despite a pretty low takeoff speed. It should be capable of less, i'm pretty sure it's software limiters tbh, the wing design seems fine, even if the weight is a bit high (i mean, you don't need to be able to fly at 15 knot like a Rafale, but still).
It _still_ have cooling issues that brick it if you don't bring an external cooler after it landed (which is crazy to me, how did Lockeed not fix that? it's like half the reason why the availability rate is so low).
The availability rate is slow (as said earlier) but it is still more expensive than other jet yearly, despite 2/3rd of the flight hours.
F35 pilots now have less flight hours per year than recommended by NATO (a lot less) (which used to be below US standards btw), and while US f35 pilot still have more hours than their russian conterpart (~145 vs 120), it is very possible that smaller countries who made the mistake of buying them without an economy strong enough to bear the costs might fly their pilot less than 100 hours per year and complete the rest in sims (which, as demontrated by the russian, is a _very_ bad idea) (i'm afraid Greek pilots will suffer from this, which would be a shame)
On the "political influence", it's wrong. Selling the F35 cost the US influence in Norway (thank you wikileaks). In fact, each time the f35 lost a competition, political influence was expended to make the country still buy it. Imho, scientists and scientific conferences are a better way to get influence over allies and adversaries (Cas9 is probably the best example, without Doudna having an international recognition and the conference being hosted in the US, Charpentier might have gone to another RNA specialist)
[edit] to be clear, i think the f35 is a great plane for the US, and a good plane for rich countries who want to go on offensive wars, mainly due to its EW capacity that are second to none and its ability to penetrate enemy territory (which is second only to other US planes). I do also think that it still needs _massive_ improvements to be usable by regular, defensive armies, and the US expending political power to sell it to countries who don't want/need to attack their neighbors was a mistake. Also, not a good cold weather plane, which make it even worse for Norway and Canada.
Also i think its software impairs it, because the wing design seems almost perfect for its missions, and at least on paper, the reactor seems great too
After potus ordered massive degradation of F16 radars used by Ukraine on his emotional whim making them useless, which btw were gifted by other NATO countries (!!), nobody, absolutely nobody wants US jets anymore, F35 or not.
Every single European country that already ordered them had immediately afterwards long hard talks about completely cancelling those orders and most ended up at least loweing massively the ordered amount (I presume due to contractual requirements and some money already sent, nobody expected backstabbing crooks on the other side when they were signed).
At this point its trojan horse and much worse than having nothing - it gives illusion of certain (extremely expensive) capability, but only if you lick specific ass hard and frequently enough, peppered with a billion here and there flowing in the right hands. Even then, the other side may be licking harder and thats it. Its ridiculous, and intensively insulting to every decent human being.
Well, US is actively pulling back from doing just that as well and leaving the job to NATO.
All it takes is one announcement that the US is cutting on efforts to understand future climate disasters for that “influence” to disappear.
You’re right that it’s all policy making and that’s why you’re supposed to elect competent politicians and administrators.
Except they've traded it all away with idiotic chest thumping. There was a bargain on the table for the US, and we've just chucked it in the trash.
The military isn't some limitless resource, and lead by incompetence, it is useless. There are no policy makers in this administration, they go on vibes and bad ones at that.
Even a guy named mad dog said that diplomacy was cheaper than bullets.
I hope Canada cancels our contract to buy these from USA. I don't care the cost, it's not worth it.
> the military hegemony and political influence over allies and adversaries that the F-35 program provides
Hilarious to say this, given the very public and very significant failures of US foreign policy these past couple decades, not least of all the current special military operation.
America had scientific hegemony and political influence over its allies.
All of tech traces its roots to American academia.
American tech enthralls more of humanity than American military has ever fought.
Nah, I'd say that common "americans" (really: US citizens) are perhaps a bit on the dumber site. Not only confuse they constantly a continent (America) with a country (USA), they also have no idea about history. Or logics. You wrote "ALL of tech" ... no lets check.
Cars - Germany (Gottlieb Daimler, but he didn't patent it), Germany (Carl Benz which made the first patent).
Motorbikes - Germany (Gottlieb Daimler)
Train - invented in Germany
Radio transmission - UK (James Clark Maxwell described them theoretically), Germany (Heinrich Hertz created/used them first in experiments)
X-Ray - Germany (Gustav Röntgen)
Telephone - Germany (Philipp Reis, your Bell bought examples and reverse engineered them)
Bookpress with movable letters - Germany (Johannes Gensfleisch a.k.a. Gutenberg)
Lightbulb - Germany (Heinrich Göbel)
Periodic system of elements - Russia (Dimitri Mendelejew) and Germany (Justus Lothar Meyer)
Dynamo / Generator - Germany (Werner von Siemens)
Vaccination - UK (Edward Jenner)
Gliding plane - Germany (Otto Lilienthal)
Pain killer - Germany (Felix Hoffmann, Aspirin)
Relativity theory, Quantum theory - Albert Einstein, Planck,
TV - Germany (Manfred von Ardenne)
Cathod ray tube in TVs - Germany (Conrad Röntgen experimentally, Ferdinand Braun with horizontal and vertical directivity of the ray)
Computer - France (Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace) for mechanical ones and Germany (Konrad Zuse) for electric ones
Atomic fissure, used in plants and bombs - Germany (Otto Hahn)
Chip cards - Germany (Jürgen Dethloff, Helmut Gröttrup)
MP3 music compression - Germany (Fraunhofer Institut)
Electricity - actually already in ancient greek they used electrostatic charging of amber. And one century before Christ they had actual batteries in Bagdad! But then a plethorary of european scientists brought the work forward: UK (William Gilbert, Francis Hauksbee, Joseph Priestley, Henry Cavendish, Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday), Germany (Otto von Guericke, Ewald Jürgen Georg von Kleist, Georg Simon Ohm, Carl Friedrich Gauß), Italy (Luigi Galvani, Allesandro Volta), France (Charles du Fay, Charles Augustin de Coulomb, André-Marie Ampère), Netherlands (Pieter van Musschenbroek), Denmark (Hans Christian Ørsted).
I actually terminate this electricity list here. I could go on and on.
Also note that physical units named after their discoverer indicate some kind of importance of the relevant invention. So we have e.g. Volt, Ampere, Coulomb, Farad, Gauss, Watt, Ørsted, Tesla, Weber as units. None of them is based on USA's academia.
If we look at unit names outside of electricity we also find outdated ones like Röntgen or Curie. And still used ones like Plack constant, Newton, Pascal, Kelvin, Becquerel, Gray, Sievert. So where are the USA american ones if "all" of technology is supposed to stem from their academia?
IF we want to trace the roots, then perhaps we need to go back to antique greek philisophers. Because western academia itself traces itself there. But then again ... something like that existed also in ancient India and maybe China.
A beautiful comment! Thank you!
None if catastrophic climate change kills everyone.
Does the F35 do that? Wasn't Iran shooting those down recently? If there's anything Iran has taught us it's that airpower doesn't win wars, allies do. The US will leave the middle east with their tail between their legs. This is the beginning of the end of the American Empire.
For the privilege of spending enormous sums of treasure flying around dropping bombs on brown people what did we get?
I would have rather seen that spent on giving lunch to every school age child or paying graduate students a wage above poverty level. At least something useful would have been accomplished
> I would have rather seen that spent on giving lunch to every school age child or paying graduate students a wage above poverty level. At least something useful would have been accomplished
Yeah I guess the only thing we’ll give away for free these days is $100,000 bombs.
> Does the F35 do that? Wasn't Iran shooting those down recently?
No. One was damaged by ground fire and landed at a US base.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/f-35a-lands-after-taking-f...
You may be thinking of the F-15s shot down by Kuwaiti "friendly fire".
I'm sorry, but this is like the most ignorant take ever. The world is essentially one life supported regime away from having a level of stability in the middle east that has quite literally never been achieved. Iran and their regional proxies have been almost the only source of middle eastern discontent in the last two decades. The stability of the region is already vastly improved from any time in the past and the dismantling of the IRGC will create a wave of vastly improved living conditions for hundreds of millions of people.
Iraq has for the first time ever entered in the high category of HDI.
https://www.undp.org/arab-states/press-releases/iraqs-human-...
Okay so Iran is responsible for the insurgency in Iraq, the Arab Spring, AQAP in Yemen, Islamic State, the ongoing situation in Syria, proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and the UAE and much more…
I think it’s extremely clear that the major contributor to instability in the Middle East over the past two decades has been the United States.
> over the past two decades
1953 was somewhat more than two decades ago.
I think it's fair to say that pretty much no-one is a fan of the Iranian Regime. (And we'll ignore for the moment that the regime is a a direct by-product of previous US intervention.)
The regime is all kinds of bad, but you cannot change govts from without. Stability comes from people changing govts from within. Every time the US has changed a govt to support themselves it has ended badly.
This latest war has not unseated the IRGC, indeed it has entrenched it further. This is not surprising; they are the largest organised structure in the country. There are no other structures of comparable size or influence in the country.
Unfortunately the US military does not just project power. To justify its existence (far beyond the realm of self defence) it actively creates and enjoys conflicts. And increasingly those conflicts are showing the real limitations of military power projection.
By contrast the soft influence projected by technological leadership, USAid etc are much more influential. It's not surprising that support for these alternatives are the first target of a govt susceptible to being influenced. A trillion $ industry will not go quietly into the night.
Yes, of course, the US could deploy troops into Iran. They could topple the IRGC if desired. But it would be very expensive politically. (And I don't mean to the Republicans, but that also) but to the Military Industry. Because the electorate clearly indicated that after Afghanistan the appetite for foreign wars is dwindling. Another debacle in Iran (even more than the debacle it is now) would be disastrous.
I have no love for the Iranian regime. But no military intervention from outside has the ability to improve it. And the Iranian people will not support a US puppet govt - that influence was burned in 1956.
Govts change when people inside rise up to change them. Recent examples in Afghanistan, South Africa, Romania and even Iran (1979) show this over and over again.
Interestingly the Soviet Union fell because the satellite states broke away. Because the people in Poland, Hungary etc rose up. Not because of outside intervention.
This latest war in Iran follows a long tradition of US and UK meddling in the region, all of which is designed to get oil, not create stability. Indeed this latest foray has created instability in the supply of oil, and that is an unforgivable sin to the US public.
>The world is essentially one life supported regime away from having a level of stability in the middle east that has quite literally never been achieved.
Agreed, but I wouldn't call Israel a regime.
> The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built.
George Orwell, 1984.
The Republican project is one of making the population dumber while enriching military contractors and other private interests. This achieves it perfectly.
Because it’s an excuse, the trump admin is lying. All the time, you should never take them at their words. They have never been about cutting costs. Just look at Trump deficit. They are very openly going after science because it goes against the fake reality they are selling to their cult members
Someone has to pay for the kings mistakes and it might as well be you.
Kings don’t make mistakes. The people under them do.
Basic science is never cheap, but none of that money goes to the grad students.
Then again, military weapons are indeed insanely expensive.
Basic science is often cheap, I don't know where you're getting it's generally expensive. I've yet to meet someone whose equipment costs as much as any of the stuff my friends design for defense contractors. Even the head of the lab I'm in is making less than my friends are making as engineers and the lab equipment is pretty cheap compared to the stuff my friends are designing (we have a radar that cost maybe a couple hundred thousand but that's the majority of the equipment cost for the past decade).
Idk what your idea of budgets are for these sorts of labs but I think most engineers would be shocked at the shoestring budgets they run on (at least the ones I know are a fraction of the cost of a single engineering team).
Some of that money goes to the grad students.
Source: I paid grad students the majority of my research funding for 16 years, and so did all my colleagues.
Unless you’re building a new facility at CERN, etc, the bulk of research cost is people.
I don’t think this is really about salary.
The “whole thing” is never cheap. Running something like a university — providing the environment, infrastructure, administration, facilities, compliance systems, equipment, libraries, grants offices, laboratories, and institutional platform that allow professors and graduate students to do research — is itself extremely expensive.
After all, if you look at the fiscal budgets of major economies, public spending on education and research is often much larger than military spending.
The grad students get facilities along with their salary and benefits, yes.
The cuts that don't make much economical sense are ideological, its because they need to give something to that part of the coalition. Somewhere someone is having an erection when hears about these cuts and say something like despite everything supporting Trump was worth it after all.
I’m sure this has nothing to do with 3.1 million graduate students versus 500 F-35s.
For actual context, F-35 program receives $9B per year (amortized over lifetime), which is $3000 per year per graduate student. Erasing the F-35 program entirely would make something like a 10% difference in graduate wages, while destroying the US Air Force as a modern military.
So no — your request to fund graduate students is more expensive than the F-35 program and delivers at best marginal results.
When you math through per unit or per capita or per year, we already spend more on education and science than the military — and it’s unclear further science funding to the detriment of the military would improve things.
I understand why you want more money, though.
Where did you get that the number of federally funded graduate students is 3.1 million?
Note that many will have industry, international or self funded (for MS it is less common to have funding). The 9B figure for maintaining the F35 you just said is very close to the entire annual budget of the NSF. Which is the main funding source of most of non medical research.
Also we are not talking about military budget, just the F35 maintenance program here.
The $9B figure is total amortized to yearly: research, development, production, and maintenance across the near century of lifetime (1990s-2080s).
I took the total number of graduate students, to spread the money across them. We could also look at the same number as, eg, funding an increase from 3.1M to 3.3M or 3.4M graduate students.
I stand by my original claim:
A 10% increase in graduate salary or number of students doesn’t justify dismantling our air force.
$9B/yr is less than half of the Pentagon's more recent estimate of $2T through 2088 for the F-35 program (according to Wikipedia and its sources, which is all I have to go on).
And again, the F-35 is not synonymous with the entire air force.
The F-35 is absolutely synonymous with our entire airforce through 2088.
The F-22 is still a viable Air Superiority Fighter but there's about 100 of them. It cannot hold back a peer air force. The primary point of the F-35 was a cheaper F-22 that we could build 3000 of.
4th gen fighters like the F-18 cannot compete in an air war with a large amount of stealth fighters using modern long range missiles, like China is fielding. They would be defeated before even seeing a blip on their radars.
Without the power of Air Superiority, all the rest of our air force is basically useless. B2s and B21s might still be usable, but they cannot maintain a strategic bombing campaign on their own. The money spent on 4th gen missile trucks is pointless.
Giving up the F-35 is equivalent to total abandonment of our "Best Air Force" doctrine and would require a significant shakeup of how we view the military, and billions poured into other parts of the military to make up for giving up the sky. It also means capitulating to China in advance. Though, if we are willing to do that, we could save like half the military budget every year.
Just have to abandon the entire pacific, Japan, and South Korea, and the Philippines, and Australia, and Vietnam, etc etc etc.
You are both comparing stuff that is nonsensical to compare $ amounts on. Would you give up science for more F-35s or vice versa? probably not or not by much.
Ok, but the military is being used for bad things not good things in one of the most easily defended countries in the world, a pure waste.
> military is being used for bad things
Seems that sending a bunch of people with guns/bombs/etc to another country is almost always bad.
The military doing good things like ... um ... helping out during natural disasters or genuine peacekeeping is entirely a rare thing.
Defense is a legitimate thing to worry about. For example, Vietnam defended itself against America. We do not defend, we attack and pillage resources from the global south. Real defense is honorable and to be celebrated. However, the US military is not an institution that does those things and they cloak themselves (well until recently) in rhetoric designed to confuse the public.
The poster said they work in academia, not the part that has to do with science, so it seems unfair to compare the F35 to all of academia when they were complaining about science being cut.
Later, after the math showing that graduate students as a whole are more expensive than the F35 program, you claim that the U.S already spends more on education and science than the military.
The claim is of course somewhat unclear, because what comprises science spending. Is Darpa science and not military. Does Nasa count as science in this claim? If Nasa does then it might be that you throw all the budgets of NOAA and the EPA and other similar organizations into the Science pile. I say it just because I am unsure how you are calculating one part of your budget. Actually the education part I am going to suggest that is just higher education.
Higher education is around 100 billion a year, without student loans which doubles that.
The U.S government spends also approximately a couple hundred billion for Science, if I am reading this correctly https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf26314 which does a lot of work putting government and business spending together which gives you a number essentially what the government spends on the military.
I can easily construct something that shows the U.S does pay more for science and education than it does for military, but only by being IMHO somewhat misleading, for example by throwing K-12 spending together with the higher education payments and mixing federal and state monies, so to clarify what I mean when I say the U.S in these kinds of conversations and what I think most people mean is "the federal government"
I suppose that the original poster also meant the federal government or it wouldn't make any sense to mention F-35s either.
Under this limitation I believe that the combined ratio of science and higher education is at best 0.8% of GDP and military is 2.8%.
Although it is not really possible to trust very much the data one receives from the American government any more so I am uncertain.
for example this document - I am just having a hard time to trust what data goes into these various parts as federal spending in that area.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
At any rate the military 2.8% I am quoting based on looking around is historically low. I would expect, especially given Iran, that it would be more in line with the historical 4.1%.
pgpf on https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-spends-more-o...
other issues - Veterans Administration budget is always not calculated as part of defense spending, because they are separate agencies. So when people say military budget they may be keeping that separate, however putting them together of course increases the amount spent
I happen to believe this document on money more than others, because publication controlled by congress and not the executive.
Atlas of Military Compensation (Biden) https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59475
If we also ask congress for Scientific research funding https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48307 (also under Biden)
about 50% of the 0.6%-0.7% of GDP it reports is to the Department of Defense.
The military industrial complex is getting money from all sorts of things that we describe as separate, but are really part of it.
> I can easily construct something that shows the U.S does pay more for science and education than it does for military, but only by being IMHO somewhat misleading, for example by throwing K-12 spending together with the higher education payments and mixing federal and state monies, so to clarify what I mean when I say the U.S in these kinds of conversations and what I think most people mean is "the federal government"
I disagree: total tax burden and allocation is the relevant aspect, regardless of pointless semantics about which government unit disbursed the funds.
You admit the fact:
US governments spend more on education and science than the military, as measured by total funds allocated to purpose.
I think you’re the one being misleading by quibbling semantics about who dispersed the money: US taxpayers give more of their tax money to science and education than the military.
You focus on the federal government rather than totals is precisely to obscure that fact — which you know to be true, but find inconvenient for your politics. Hence the semantic quibbles.
>You focus on the federal government rather than totals is precisely to obscure that fact — which you know to be true, but find inconvenient for your politics.
thank you for adhering so well to HN guidelines.
It's cheap but it's prestigious. Ideologues and fascists hate that.
> Democrats in Congress have said they will “fight” plans to dismantle the system
Putting “fight” into quotes here is terrific amount of low level shade for a scientific publication. chef’s kiss
"Proffer a strongly worded capitulation" was probably too much for publication.
Or scientists know how to count and see that one number is larger than another; and understand that that's an important factor in many political systems.
interesting how that logic only applies about half the time.
It doesn't. The republicans are able to stop things a lot of the time because Democrats don't have a strong majority in either house. They can barely scrape together a 50% plus 1 vote by bringing in people who are "Democrat" but for example refuse to allow public option healthcare or shut down of coal plants.
Republicans have voters that understand your guy has to be in the seat before you want something to happen. They correctly understand that if you just vote for more guys, you get more of what you want to happen, and correctly identify that the solution to not getting what you want is to get more seats in the next election.
I can never understand the shocking lack of civics education from people who get upset at democrats for not having power when the system describes in plain language that you need numbers for the power.
When Mitch McConnell prevented the vote to appoint a new supreme court justice, it was because he had that power as senate majority leader. If Democrats had a senate majority at that time, he could not have prevented the vote.
You have about as much political power as a US party in the minority of all three branches. Mind letting us know what you’re going to do about it?
The republicans can have 1 senator in the senate and they somehow shuck and jive to get their way. They never fucking lose in implementing their outright evil. Break some rules, use strategy, set up some game pieces. Do something, anything. The democrats couldn’t even get a Supreme Court justice seated with 6 months to go for the next election.
The last time Democrats had a full majority they passed the most consequential climate legislation ever. The time before that, health care reform. Republicans couldn’t do anything to stop it. It’s how the system works. It’s not some movie script.
> 1 senator…
Oh, please, that’s not true. But yeah, you need 60 seats there in order to just ram things through. Right now Democrats don’t even have a plurality of the voting public so it’s not surprising that they are completely powerless.
> Democrats couldn’t even get a SC Justice…
On this one though I’ll fully agree with you, they were 100% ratfucked on Garland’s nomination. In no universe was that more than 0% ethically justified. That was a craven and cowardly scheme.
51 votes can get rid of the filibuster. You don't need 60.
The Supreme Court displays Democrat in abilities in a nutshell.
Republicans ignored ethics to not-seat Garland. But equally RBG decided not to retire when democrats held the presidency and senate, despite her age.
She is not the first person to put personal ambition ahead of country. There are plenty other examples, on both sides of the isle.
I wish I could find it but Simon Clark, someone who specialized in climate science, had put out a video about how we were only recently able to model the AMOC and it's shifting patterns thanks to this measurement we were doing
Edit: probably not this one but atleast tells us why measurement is needed https://youtube.com/shorts/-X5EhUbzLTY?si=_N92PNUiTi3STat6
I've become a big fan of Simon lately. It's difficult to make videos about such a serious and all-encompassing topic without either falling into some combination of doomerism, misinformation, or apathy. He's got a real talent for bringing his expertise to a general audience, and I always come away from a video being clear about what the problem is he's talking about, why it matters but importantly how we deal with it (and how I can deal with it personally, without falling into the "only individual actions matter" trap)
Yrah probably someone at doge or the dept of war watched that and suggested dismantling it. What's next, closing down the NOAA because it's a "con job" and climate change is "a hoax"?
Look, all I know is DOGE made huge cuts to the NOAA and the National Hurricane Center. And well the 2025 hurricane season speaks for itself.
Let's not forget those from the big tech (you know the names) who kneeled before the king.
77,302,580 Americans made it happen. 87,037,184 voting-elligible Americans sat it out.
Sat it out, or were forced out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_efforts_to_restrict...
Some were forced out, sure, but enough could have voted to prevent this shitshow.
We may need a sankey.
The GOP rigs elections in their favor and it's well known, but they don't have the power to throw out an additional 87 million votes if they don't go in their favor.
The logical conclusion then if despite everyone voting D then getting their votes tossed out is either violent revolution or liberation with the aid of another nuclear-armed state.
In our modern democracies, we are highly dependent on our information economies to build consensus.
Those economies have essentially ceased functioning as competitive markets for ideas, globally.
In general, newsrooms don’t make enough money to independently cover local news, and are consolidated under political/private parties. Journalism isn’t dead, but it is definitely on life support.
America though, has a further metastasized issue, in that there exists market capture. Republicans and their media apparatus have effective agenda setting power over a large enough section of the populace.
The short version of it is that in the right leaning media sphere, the rules of journalism have changed. A common through line for headline stories begins with a fringe theory on the internet. This fringe theory shows up on some podcast, which then gets repeated by a guest on a channel like Fox. This in turn gets alluded to by the White House, and then it can be reported on as a position that the Executive is considering, making it fact.
The GOP didn’t need to throw out votes, provided it could muddy the waters effectively enough.
The research by Roberts, Faris and Benkler, is what this is based on.
Reality always wins in the end, so now with the increase in oil prices, the limits of information dominance are visible, and they will need to leverage their strength in other domains to gain advantage for the upcoming elections.
It was a scheduled Trump win, from how demotivating Harris was. Sure Trump demotivated a little over a million or two from bothering to show up to the polls for him, Harris was five to ten times that number (depending on whose numbers you use).
So 164,339,764 made it happen?
I don’t like any direction this administration has taken, but acting like it’s not the completely legitimate will of the people is BS.
The will of the plurality you mean? He didn’t win a majority of the votes. He is the legitimately elected office holder; but it was not the will of the people, it was the outcome of this particularly electoral process. Many American electoral processes require a run off without a majority for this reason, and it’s an intensely weak platform to claim a mandate from - not only did more people not vote for you than half the voters, if you add in the people who could vote but didn’t, it’s by far not “the will of the people”.
> He didn’t win a majority of the votes
Donald Trump plus candidates who withdrew from the race and endorsed Donald Trump DID get a majority of votes though.
I apologize but I don’t understand this metric - you’re saying Trump would have gotten the majority if republicans who didn’t vote for him had voted for him ? That’s some serious squinting and if you do that I’ll just take everyone who voted for Biden in the primary and add it to Harris and now she won close to 70% of the votes? Maybe add in Obama’s last election results and every democrat that ever ran in any races and Trump then got about 0% of the votes.
Sadly you can only count the votes the candidate who ran actually received. And he had a plurality - the weakest of all possible victories other than his victory of Clinton where she had more votes than him and still lost on an arcana.
If those who sat out were forced to vote for one of the two major party candidates, Trump’s margin may have been larger.
I think liberals and progressives have a higher propensity to vote, so you can’t assume the non voters are less likely to lean Trump.
How long were the lines to vote in black neighborhoods?
https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/104/6/1341/9774...
Why not name them?
Zuck Musk Bezos Pichai Thiel
Add more
Missed Tim Cook.
Let’s map their names to the companies they run. Then reflect on whether we buy their products: Apple, Google, Amazon, Tesla/SpaceX, Meta.
Maybe we need a new FAANG acronym for the new American authoritarian-cozy rightward-veering tech industry.
Let’s see, we’ve got:
Meta
Amazon
Google
Appl… oh
A subgroup of MAGMA, for owners of secret volcano lairs.
Don’t forget SpaceX! That would be SMAGMA
Brockman
It's basically 'Don't Look Up' at this point, stripped of all metaphor and potential to entertain.
“Don’t Look Up” stripped of entertainment was just “Don’t Look Up”
I think it was just reality, unfortunately
Dell, Lawnmower Man
Ellison and Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia
It's important to note that thousands of people are giving their time every day for climate change work, doing thankless jobs for very little pay. The fact that the US chose a corrupt man over these people, the fact that millions of people sat out the vote, is a real slap in the face of the people who try to fight this, day after day after day. And many young people seem to have just given up. It's your future, others are fighting for it, join them.
This makes sense.
Facts cease to exist because you ignore them. I think Huxley wrote that.
"Ignorance is strength" would be the Orwellian take.
‘If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any’ - Trump on COVID19
The Power of Positive Thinking is one of the few books Donald Trump has really internalized and it shows in his approach to a lot of issues.
There’s also the deluded cynics who profit from fossil fuels. Why mess up their good time??
We live in a post-factual world [1].
I'm not sure people realize just how dire this is. The politics of the largest, most powerful country on Earth are dominated by people who truly believe in dispensational premillenialism [2]. For these people their time on Earth is limited. Wrecking the Earth doesn't matter. The afterlife is forever. Senior government officials take seriously bringing on the apocalypse through a red heifer [3]. In fact, it's the cornerstone of Christian Zionism [4].
And what began this political movement? Racism [5], specifically a ruling that schools in the South couldn't be both tax-exempt and segregationist.
We live in the dumbest timeline.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkWl7NaGprE
[3]: https://medium.com/@nour_alhakk/the-red-heifer-and-the-u-s-a...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism
[5]: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-ri...
All true, but you know what do we have to blame for most of that?
The Internet and social media. It did in a few years was mass media had been working toward for the better part of a century.
The tumor continues to grow, everyone knows its getting worse daily. Still no one dare speak of the cure.
Those who voted for this: are you happy here?
No, climate is perhaps my least aligned issue with this administration. I may end up voting Democrats next time, we'll have to see how bad their platform is again. I just wish I could vote to protect our climate and our borders at once.
What's your second least aligned issue?
Tax cuts benefitting the wealthy, I suppose. It's not a close second though, I care a lot about the environment.
I guess throwing people into unmarked vans and disappearing them was a real winner for you tho.
Oh, I thought you were actually asking a question, but you were just trying to score some kind of gotcha against the evil Trump voter. As expected from 3 month old accounts, my bad for not checking.
As opposed to a fine vintage of 6 months.
Hi, I've been here forever.
Trump's tax cuts and climate policy is identical to what he did last time. Why did you vote for him if you were going to be unhappy with those policies?
If you didn't like him doing those things, which he clearly signaled he would do and nobody had any intention of stopping him, what did you vote for him for? How did those reasons outweigh the damage he does with his tax cuts and climate policy?
> Why did you vote for him if you were going to be unhappy with those policies?
I voted for him for his other signalled policies that I did agree with, obviously. I deemed those more important than the climate policy and tax policy.
> what did you vote for him for?
Primarily cultural issues, which he delivered on beyond what I expected. Examples include the EO to change university admission processes away from DEI, which will have a huge positive effect on my Asian children, and a reduction in immigration and H1Bs.
I'm asking in good faith here. If it's so critical, then why couldn't the same data be collected and published by another sovereign nation?
I'm guessing you need permission to go deploy a bunch of buoys off the coast of Oregon, and that permission may be difficult to obtain for foreign research projects in the current US political climate.
I think you may have a hard time monitoring the Atlantic current if your sensors are all deployed off the coast of Oregon so it seems to me that this administration would jump at the opportunity to deploy those sensors off of the Oregon coast. Then they could tell the people that they are carefully monitoring the situation and can't find a problem. Nothing to see here, literally.
The system measures other currents too, as detailed in the article. The coast of Oregon was just one of the places mentioned.
It could be.
But the US is already doing it, it’s already there. It benefits the entire world to have this data. It’s not expensive.
Why reinvent the wheel? More, why not let another country take it over?
The reason is because there are those with ties to the American government’s current administration that have decided they will benefit tremendously from climate change and don’t care about its consequences.
Or even the UN? That organization that this administration wants no part of...
What makes you think the US is the only country conducting such experiments?
In a great many cases when it came to academic measurement regarding any geological event or phenomenon, the US has historically been at the forefront and shared data with its allies. Very few of those countries have their own measurement systems set up because the US already has them ready to go anyway.
When the second wave of Trump idiocy hit academic institutions by forcing foreign institutions to sign a document indicating they "do not support DEI", this caused some major trouble. Public institutions gave in to the Americans' demands because there was no way to gather the information necessary to finish research in a reasonable time frame.
I think it's time Europe treated the USA the way they want to be treated, as an outsider and a potential threat, and that it's time to stop seeing them as a partner when it comes to science. We need our own measurements, our own instruments, our own satellites, our own databases, and we need to invest now.
Unfortunately, anti-intellectualism isn't just on the rise in the USA. Plus, now now that many countries are struggling with the increased fuel prices thanks to the USA's invasion of Iran, it's hard to find money to invest in science that a worrying amount of people choose to ignore/pretend doesn't exist because it doesn't suit their personal interests.
"Bad voting" has consequences that excede the scope of the term: Re-installing them will be more difficult and expensive than simply dismantling them. These kind of objectively-destructive things should be far more difficult to execute.
American science now needs to be tied with a military project so it has very sharp teeth to defend its upkeep. It's possible to track both submarines and ocean health with an all-in-one, billions-of-dollars expensive network.
Don't Look Up was supposed to be satire.
It is the answer to the next generation question: How did we get here?
Deutsche Physik, but with more idiots.
Here's a frankly better article from the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/climate/ocean-observatori...
A few points:
1. The ocean observation system began operating in 2016 and was expected to continue for 25 years.
2. It cost $48 million annually to operate the network. The Trump administration repeatedly tried to shutter it, proposing to cut its funding by 80 percent in both 2025 and again in 2026. Congress pushed back, restoring the money.
3. “One of the real tragedies here is that collecting data effectively at this site was a huge engineering challenge, and it’s not the kind of thing where you can just leave your notes for the next person who comes in,” Dr. Palevsky said. “There’s a lot of expertise that has the potential to be lost.”
The administration is, as I understand it, in violation of the constitution by shutting this down. It was funded by Congress, twice. The executive branch cannot just legally not spend that money.
This is what you get when worm infested brains lead the country
Don’t blame the worms, they’d have done better on their own…
Or insect infected brains (ref: Braindead TV series)
Carl Sagan on Military Spending and Climate Change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C6co5qXEE4
How much money do you think the United States has spent since 1945 on the Cold War? $10 trillion (in 1990).
A time honored practice of dysfunctional institutions when confronted with a problem is to stop paying any attention to it. Problem gone. It's one of the derivatives of quality control.
Just one more thing that is being destroyed. There are thousands more that you aren't hearing about. If it exists then it must be destroyed. The intention is nothing less than to make rebuilding impossible. If you still have illusions that the US government has not been taken over by a death cult yearning for the apocalypse then you need to put down your phone and look at the scale of what is happening. Legality means nothing; they are doing everything they can to ensure that there will be no institutions left to hold them accountable.
Vote next November like your country depended on it (it does), even if orange guy sends right wing goons to terrorize swing districts. Vote.
The Atlantic Currents are at risk of collapse , or is it the system ?
Any journalist investigating this would be advised to follow the money.
10 years from now:
Climate Activist: The oceans are getting warmer & global currents are threatened by imminent collapse - we must do something!
Big Oil: Prove it!
Climate Activist: Data gathered between 2016 and 2026 shows ...
Big Oil: That's old news! Do you have more recent data?
Climate Activist: Well, no, because Trump2 dismantled the ocean observation system in 2026 ...
Big Oil: So you have no data to back up your claims?
Climate Activist: Not recent data, no, but ...
Big Oil: Case dismissed! Why should anyone take action based on subjective opinion, not backed up by hard data? For all we know the oceans could have miraculously cooled & the currents are fine!
It's mostly just about getting the data out of the news cycle. If you don't have new data on the oceans warming then there's no news story, so less pressure on Big Oil to greenwash their industry.
If the data is that important & valuable, then they should have no trouble getting the funding to keep it operational.
That doesn't happen overnight, or in time for the program to not be dismantled.
As TFA shows they're having plenty of trouble.
"Valuable to society" and "valuable in the sense that it produces a profit for a business funding it" are different things. This is the reason why we have government funding.
Private control of public data which is needed for the commons has worked very well so far.
HAHAHAHAHHAHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Good one.
I'm dead serious.
Where are the charities who're supposedly aligned wuth such a mission? Where're the blue states?
Blue states are too busy giving welfare to the red states.
Money doesn't magically materialize to save things from hitting the floor when Trump has a brilliant idea like this.
We gave up taxpayer-funded sex reassignment surgeries for inmates for this crap.
So you will jump in?
The EU? Russia? My bet is on China
Just doing random evil things for no benefit? At this point it's just wanton vandalism. Punks in suits smashing windows and setting fire to cars.
Can anyone here, hand of heart, say "I agree with this decision"?
Your premise here is i think incorrect. so I’m not claiming any links between nation state actors, and our current administration, but the nation of Russia plans to benefit greatly from climate change, and the opening of trade routes in the Arctic. Having control over Greenland directly or indirectly through intermediaries also benefits them to this end coincidentally. Having another country, also be the scapegoat for the cause of any negative consequences also greatly benefits them. If this is the light you shine on vents, everything seems to make a great deal of sense actually.
None will. But hide them in a box, away from where others can see, and they will happily sign a piece of paper that says they do. One so called a ballot.
They probably think it's "cutting costs" or "reducing waste" or something. At least the fraction of the motive that isn't just corruption.
Remember when North Carolina banned sea level rise? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/12/north-caroli...
That wasn't arbitrary, and it wasn't for no benefit. It was so that landowners along the coast could continue to use faulty sea level studies to justify state road and infrastructure investments.
This, too, isn't mindless vandalism. It's worse. It's greedy, it's short-sighted, and it's cruel.
To be clear: this is not about saving money -- in fact it's expensive to remove all this equipment
This is about removing the ability to measure in order to undercut the claims of global warming ("we don't have sufficient evidence")
In the future historians will look back at this administration the way we look at the Roman Inquisition who persecuted scientists for challenging their accepted dogma.
Paul Samuelson: When events change, I change my mind. What do you do?
Trump: If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.
Previously https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5733236-gallup-stops-pres...
Don't look up!
Or down. You know what, just strap those vr goggles on and stop looking at anything real at all!
I hope they’re able to pause this before they start destroying it.
But like the east wing I’m sure they’ll do it before there’s a chance.
Fuck this timeline
This strikes me as one of the recent moves by our political/capital class where they think that if they just remove the information that’s inconvenient for them, people will stop caring and let them do what they want. You only need to listen to the bosses who so many of us work for to know that they think climate change is just an inconvenience in the way of progress. Only time will tell if this strategy will work or not.
It's arguably not particularly inconvenient for the us political class? the us has been on a tear reducing per capita ghg emissions (also trade corrected ghg emissions). this has been going on for five decades now (consistently 2.5) independent of whether administrations or congress have been red or blue
iiuc us per capita emissions are not far from 1910s levels
I don't trust the trade corrected numbers, China uses a ton of coal still and is ever increasing in their manufacturing of good sent to the US. The number for the US has mostly gone down due to switching to natural gas from coal.
> ever increasing in their manufacturing of good sent to the US.
no, factories are closing and workers are protesting due to factory shutdowns in china. if you go to target, most things are made in bangladesh, pakistan India, maylaysia, thailand, vietnam where before they'd all be from china. also us consumption generally is decreasing, and anyways, transportation and direct energy was always the biggest contributor.
I’m more referencing the narrative that climate change is being used as a political point to enforce a global political state which stifles innovation (for example read the Project 2025 document around page 417 https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade...). They do make some fair points in there but the primary change to the EPA that is being proposed is focusing on decentralizing the response to climate change to the states. In a vacuum where climate change is a matter of air quality this isn’t a crazy idea but the reality is that this is a global issue which is inconvenient if you want to prioritize growth/innovation over all else and the general idea behind climate conservationism is a powerful political force which the whole world is trying to shape right now for their benefit. There is right wing conservation which largely focuses on local, narrow issues (such as whale habitats being used as a reason to cancel offshore wind). There is also left wing conservation which pushes the more global climate change view and more large scale changes such as carbon taxes, increased stimulus for renewable energy, and often more regulation. Multiple things are true here though: 1. A lot of our regulation is pointless and serves to just increase cost and lock-in existing players as dominant forces in markets. This definitely stifles innovation so there is pushback against climate related changes for fear this will continue or worsen. 2. Climate change is a powerful force in modern politics which serves as a binding force for many disparate factions and is creating many grassroots movements. The impact of these on innovation isn’t clear (nor is it the point) but increased climate awareness is certainly increasing pushback against greenhouse gas emission intensive industries such as datacenters (in their current forms until renewable capacity can catch up) 3. Climate change is very real and is already increasing the cost of doing business and being less aware of it isn’t going to help. This will also stifle innovation as costs mount in the coming years.
I see this move as an attempt to stifle 2 by hiding 3. It seems like a bet that if we don’t focus on the global issues (like a collapsing current) then much of the political power behind climate change disappears since we are frankly quite lucky in the US to have a beautiful, and largely clean environment/air. Grassroots movements and politically powerful messages are likely an annoyance for those who want to keep doing business as usual since it benefits them to do so. Not trying to make a strong claim that our current response to climate change or what anyone in particular is doing is right or wrong but it seems clear that climate change is a powerful message that pushes for much grander scale changes than most people are comfortable with especially those with strong private interests in ignoring it.
"If We Stop Testing, We’d Have Fewer Cases" - Trump
That will fix it!
I hate this timeline
For real. Cant fix stupid. Its so sad.
Assuming the interlocutor is stupid, at any scale, 1-1 to the whole of american politics probably just highlight that you don't fully grasp their point of view, because then it wouldn't be stupid. You'd be able to explain it to them and get them to see the matter from your perspective. If you can't do that, then you don't know you're right, you might be, but there's no way for you to know, truly.
So you are defending the move? Why rip out basic science for no benefit other than to signal that you don't care for it if it goes against your narrative? Seems 100% stupid but I am open to your interpretation.
No, this is specious. I've tried to have conversations with reactionaries on topics that we both are even aligned on. It would always be crickets the moment I deviated from the reactionary talking points. The elusive point of view that is "not grasped" is merely some combination of religious fundamentalism and spiteful destruction. Which are both ultimately just rooted in stupidity.
> ... “removal of all in-water infrastructure” belonging to the Ocean Observatories Initiative at sites along the coasts of Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and North Carolina, and in the waters between Greenland and Iceland.
...Why is Europe reliant on the US for monitoring oceans between Greenland & Iceland, i.e within European territory & therefore European monitoring? Shouldn't they have their own infra to work from?
That stretch of ocean is closer to Canada than it is to mainland Europe.
All the more reason as to why it should be Canada monitoring that portion of the ocean.
What should we be spending tax money on? The only thing this admin seems interested in paying for is killing Iranians and paying off J6th protesters.
The tax money shouldn't have been collected in the first place. It should've stayed with the people.
Then stop using the roads and everything else that tax money paid for. If you keep using things that's been paid for using taxes the government will only feel more entitled to collect it.
They aren’t. The US built monitoring infrastructure there because it’s our project, and that’s where the science needs to happen.
It’s the same reason that many more countries than just Argentina built the Pierre Auger observatory, or that the Vatican built the Pope Scope in Arizona.
Article seems a bit biased. Similarly like some other ones where he cut research funding to then later resume it, with almost no significant loss, but the Democrats cried about it all over like if funding was completely stopped. They always tell one side of the story that fits the narrative.
Just to be clear I am against this as well, just the journalism is so filthy now.
Cutting and/or other randomizing activities makes planning for everyone involved very, very hard.
Congrats, the funding came back that time; but jobs were already cut, people already got deported whose college time depended on it, the professor got axed because the college couldn’t afford it anymore, etc.
Stability is worth its weight in gold in some areas. This isn’t that.
Have you considered that he has had to walk back the cuts because of the outcry?