The comment is removed. I was also a bit confused, so I've looked it up. So a very rough overview: Under Trudeau in Canada some regulations around gender politics and climate change, got a bit out of hand in terms of absurd requirements to state how they are helpful in the matter. Even for trivial things, they were not a hard requirements but helpful.

Unlike the US gov in this post, they didn't slash projects with good intentions, they just changed and clarified the requirements.

Correction welcome, I am far away from canadian politics.

Here in France, anecdata from friends working in non-profits. So-called "DEI" is far from a requirement for grants, and depending on the administration may in fact be a factor to get rejected.

That being said, everyone in the associative movement is unanimous that you have to use the words and concepts expected by the administration (however absurd that is related to what you do), and that getting funding has 0 correlation with the actual social benefits of your action but everything to do with the bullshit you write in grants and how friends you are with the decision makers. (this opinion is shared both by people who succeed at getting grants and those who don't)

Yes, but no difficulty to believe it (in an informal Bayesian framework). Also reported interview experiences around the world in the past many years point to the same mentality - questions like "How do you believe you can increase [feeling of acceptance] in the classroom, Professor [of Physics]" (just an example).

Weird that you want a citation for this but the GP.

> But rarely have they been so ... bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?

Depends what you (and they) think their job is.

RAGE was one acronymn thrown about and name-checked by the vice-president "Retire all Government Employees".

Russel Vaught said:

> We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down... We want to put them in trauma."

> There simply isn't enough of a known payoff for private investors to bother and private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall.

not true. in the us, the government funds only about half of all research and development expenditures.

> private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall.

you are certainly not thinking about university endowments. Numerically most university professors are operaring from a startup budget given by the university, not a grant. even in an r1, most professors do not come in with external money.

> bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?

i mean. i dont know which is dumber. thinking a keyword list is a good idea for cancelling grants or thinking that a grant application is the right way to filter for good science in the first place?

if those scientists were to raise money from private donors would they find themselves in jail, or their property confiscated to where they couldnt continue research? that is the definition of "freedom of speech".

if you accept money from the government, you must also accept the fact that that money is political. complaining that losing a barely earned privilege is a loss of freedom of speech is a fucking slap in the face of people who have actually fought hard for freedom of speech.

The next presidential campaign should narrowly focus on the long term effects of existing policies if not corrected and direct blame with name dropping. There is no more moral high ground in this fight. The ugly needs to be pinned on the current administration in way that it can never be removed again.

But of course the Democrats will try to keep their heads high and try to float over all of this mess instead of throwing the dirt back that gets flung around. It's not working anymore.

> And for the next administration to be left holding the bag, teeing it up for another round of "see? SEEEE???? they're terrible at the economy!!" if a Democratic president wins the election

The damage the Trump administration is doing/has done is nothing that any future administration can undo. The relationship with NATO members alone is unsalvageable.

Could be a core cadre of 5% of clearly compromised or foreign agents recruiting a vast amount of fools and putting them in the positions where they can do the most damage.

They are making hundreds of millions of dollars on the grift. They seem quite comptent.

Some direct quotes are,

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

We want to put them in trauma.”

That was Russel Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget and key author or Project 2025.

Trump also said, "a whole civilization will die tonight".

I have no idea what your personal background is but it's very interesting that without me saying it or even alluding to it, you jumped directly to what is your presumption of what nation-state ("slavic", presumably you're thinking Russia) that might be controlling foreign agents.

You know it's possible for some groups of people to be a mixed bag of cruel, venal, greedy, feckless, foolish and compromised, right? Of course it's not likely that everyone in the administration is literally a recruited foreign asset.

Man, this is the kind of thing I have been trying to tell people. It's unsettling to think about, but I'm like, "look, there are no rules now, it's all a negotiation, the only real laws are the laws of physics and the rules someone selectively enforces under the threat of violence."

It would do us good if we remember this, because this sort of the basic state of nature that most people have lived under most of human history. I'm not saying this is how it should be, but a lot of people are still living in the pearl-clutched "but, that's against the rules!" despite there being basically no real rules for a decade.

When people realize that it's all nonsense, it's going to get weird.

Regime is what western countries generally, usually call countries they don't like

When was the last time you heard a change of government as a result of democratic election referred to as “regime change”?

I think their fixation on the machine is part accountability-laundering, part obfuscation as you say. They want a monopoly on not just information, but analysis, and breaking all information infrastructure that does not flow through their pet ideology robot is part of that.