American conservatives have a long and well-earned reputation for not knowing how the things that they break worked before they broke them. Now, they have added a lethal weapon to their wildly-wielded ball peen hammer: ignorant, entitled nepo-baby, insanely lucky billionaires who have no clue that they were lucky or that their luck was undeserved. In a few mindless months Musk, with his collection of DOGE boys, set the United States back decades. In fact, any reasonable person would have to suspect that Musk has a political and economic connection to Putin, his DOGE-damage was so complete. One small part of the intellectual decimation Trump and Musk have unleashed upon the United States was well documented in this Substack post: CANADA JUST RAIDED AMERICA'S GREATEST MINDS LIKE A SMILING FUCKING ASSASSIN. And, as awful as that story is, it’s just the tip of the US Titanic’s iceberg.
The article describes the evacuation of "sixty-four research chairs, half a billion dollars over eight years, roughly a million a year each, for the kind of people America spent decades and obscene fucking fortunes training." The only disagreement I have with the article is the wildly hopeful prediction that the United States could make a comeback by restoring trust with only "a decade of adult behaviour.” Of course he moderates that hopefull prediction with the facts, “nobody with a functioning lab, a mortgage and a career’s worth of unfinished work is betting all three on Washington locating a decade of adult behaviour down the back of the couch. . ." And that’s just to restore our best and brightests’ trust in their own government and fellow citizens.
"A decade," my ass. As the article mentioned several times, all of this expertise was built by generational careful planning and management. We're talking generations, not "a decade." It is, for me, impossible to imagine the shattered remains of the United States being adult and sane for more than 4 years and even that will be marginal. I realize this article was written by an Australian and Australia hasn't been a major contributor in any of these areas until incredibly recently. So, Maybe, the author just doesn't have a feel for how long rationality has to be sustained to build a functioning, world-class higher education system, an internationally respected scientific community, and anything resembling a national direction and purpose.
And that’s just a wild hope to rebuild internal trust and competence. Eight years of Obama’s rational administration and the resulting guarded international hope that the US was turning a corner was practically blasted from international memory with Trumps insane self-promotion, boorish behavior, and consistent incompetence. Four years of Biden trying to hold the country together with Republican Congresscritters doing everything possible to continue the national decay and disgrace did little-to-nothing to restore any hope that the US might be salvaged. The 2024 election followed by 20 months of MAGA/Trumpian insanity undid it all and, without dramatic restructuring (like the platform presented by the Democratic Socialists of America), the country is doomed to slide into fascism fatally spiked by a fools’ oligarchy. Canadians are even blowing off visiting their relatives in the US. Whether this decline will be followed by another American democratic revival is anyone’s guess.
I’m just short of 80-years-old and I have zero hope that the country will rise out of this sewer in my lifetime. The shards of respectability and trust the US had, pre-Trump, was almost all bult during and immediately after WWII, with brief and mild recoveries during Democratic administrations. Like Trump, Woodrow Wilson abused and ignored the Constitution so blatantly, dragging the US into WWI, that what small bits of goodwill American soldiers created in that “Great War” conservative American politicians decimated between 1919 and 1941. Every Republican President since Eisenhour and done significant damage to the country’s credibility and trust, the working middle class, national unity, and the economy.
Today, that same lack of understanding applies to a near majority of American citizens if not a solid majority. There's plenty of blame to go around, but I think the core problem is that the original European Invaders of North America brought with them severely flawed genetics and then doubled-down on those defects to produce a voting public that is impossible to educate, mired in 15th century religion and superstition, and irrationally proud of sun-intolerant skin color. Those core defects have also resulted in creating a country that attracts people of all races and creeds with the same flaws.
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