The entire article is comparing modern America to Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR.
The past is a different country. The problems existing now are not the same as those of two empires from 100 years ago.
bell-cot · 54m ago
Kinda like reading a long, moralizing screed against a proposed law declaring pi to be 3.00.
Perhaps I know the subject too well. Or should quietly accept that The Atlantic needs a lot of click-fodder to pay the bills.
CommenterPerson · 40m ago
Well worth a read to the rest of us .. (who keep going on and on about, if LLMs are the best thing since sliced bread or not).
fuzzfactor · 6m ago
Well written and it's more than just the author's point of view being emphasized.
It's normal for someone who's taken a position fully in favor of "science" to show their bias against what they see as the most eminent threats. There's no attempt here to hide the bias, in fact there's a fairly respectable attempt to explain the reason for the bias which you don't always get.
Any anti-science crusaders from their point of view are not as sensible when they don't explain their bias either. Nobody expects it to be zero bias so when an opinionated person owns up to it this is just a little something that could lead back to better understanding.
You want to be able to compromise on the roots of disagreement, rather than mindless name-calling if you want to recover one of the most sorely-missed elements of greatness.
Naturally what brought this to mind is that the whole time almost nobody is paying any attention to the little detail where sliced bread has never been the best bread anyway :\
stego-tech · 43m ago
That’s The Atlantic for you: raising a decent point in the headline, and then squandering the article whining like a toddler who didn’t get candy at the checkout lane.
Taking the headline at face value, though, they’re not wrong at all, and this is something I’ve tried warning folks over myself for several years now. Our collective response to COVID was truly the alarm bells going off (vaccine conspiracies, anti-masking, denialism, etc), and now we’re seeing an anti-science (and anti-reality) administration celebrate the gutting of our scientific prestige in the name of nostalgia for -isms. While authors and commentators are handwringing over whether the US is “cooked” scientifically, those in the know or who are observant already know the answer is an emphatic YES.
With the present attack on science, we’ve effectively outsourced one of the last remaining industries that kept us afloat as an empire. We have no real manufacturing (at least of anything others want), and what we do make is of decreasing quality so that shareholders can get paid (e.g. Boeing jets, American cars, and now even SIG handguns - if we can’t make decent planes, cars, and guns, then what do we even export besides raw materials/agriculture?). Without science driving R&D, we won’t even have the patents on innovative new medicines, technologies, or energy sources that we can export abroad.
So yeah. We’re done as an Empire. This isn’t something we can roll back next election, and I don’t think the current crop of Americans have felt enough pain to suddenly grow cooperative and engage in self-sacrifice for the greater good.
foobarian · 16s ago
The only reason we even had good science is the arms race. When there was a thread of someone else getting nukes then the anti-science cohorts were silenced with a quickness, and large percentages of GDP were thrown at R&D, including poaching scientists from abroad, to get there first.
With nothing like that looming right now, there is no check and balance on the anti-science regiment, and so sliding downhill we go. Sadly I don't see this changing either, unless theoretical physicists turn up the basis for some new weapon.
margalabargala · 33m ago
I agree with most of what you wrote, but:
> American cars, and now even SIG handguns
SIG is a German/Swiss company, not American. American cars vary in quality wildly by manufacturer, with Stellantis being the worst offender of what you describe but Chevrolet being the least bad (at the moment).
Zigurd · 12m ago
Both Sig Sauer and Glock have US manufacturing. Currently, it appears that all Sig guns are made in the US and Sig is the biggest exporter of guns.
American gun culture and the gun business in America is a huge outlier internationally. I would find it hard to think of why that would be healthy.
The past is a different country. The problems existing now are not the same as those of two empires from 100 years ago.
Perhaps I know the subject too well. Or should quietly accept that The Atlantic needs a lot of click-fodder to pay the bills.
It's normal for someone who's taken a position fully in favor of "science" to show their bias against what they see as the most eminent threats. There's no attempt here to hide the bias, in fact there's a fairly respectable attempt to explain the reason for the bias which you don't always get.
Any anti-science crusaders from their point of view are not as sensible when they don't explain their bias either. Nobody expects it to be zero bias so when an opinionated person owns up to it this is just a little something that could lead back to better understanding.
You want to be able to compromise on the roots of disagreement, rather than mindless name-calling if you want to recover one of the most sorely-missed elements of greatness.
Naturally what brought this to mind is that the whole time almost nobody is paying any attention to the little detail where sliced bread has never been the best bread anyway :\
Taking the headline at face value, though, they’re not wrong at all, and this is something I’ve tried warning folks over myself for several years now. Our collective response to COVID was truly the alarm bells going off (vaccine conspiracies, anti-masking, denialism, etc), and now we’re seeing an anti-science (and anti-reality) administration celebrate the gutting of our scientific prestige in the name of nostalgia for -isms. While authors and commentators are handwringing over whether the US is “cooked” scientifically, those in the know or who are observant already know the answer is an emphatic YES.
With the present attack on science, we’ve effectively outsourced one of the last remaining industries that kept us afloat as an empire. We have no real manufacturing (at least of anything others want), and what we do make is of decreasing quality so that shareholders can get paid (e.g. Boeing jets, American cars, and now even SIG handguns - if we can’t make decent planes, cars, and guns, then what do we even export besides raw materials/agriculture?). Without science driving R&D, we won’t even have the patents on innovative new medicines, technologies, or energy sources that we can export abroad.
So yeah. We’re done as an Empire. This isn’t something we can roll back next election, and I don’t think the current crop of Americans have felt enough pain to suddenly grow cooperative and engage in self-sacrifice for the greater good.
With nothing like that looming right now, there is no check and balance on the anti-science regiment, and so sliding downhill we go. Sadly I don't see this changing either, unless theoretical physicists turn up the basis for some new weapon.
> American cars, and now even SIG handguns
SIG is a German/Swiss company, not American. American cars vary in quality wildly by manufacturer, with Stellantis being the worst offender of what you describe but Chevrolet being the least bad (at the moment).
American gun culture and the gun business in America is a huge outlier internationally. I would find it hard to think of why that would be healthy.