[HN Gopher] NIH insiders reveal process stalling grants
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NIH insiders reveal process stalling grants
Author : SubiculumCode
Score : 80 points
Date : 2025-03-02 19:06 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bsky.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (bsky.app)
| mmooss wrote:
| The key cog is disinformation - see the outline of tactics in the
| OP thread, where it references using X to gain public support:
| One side has an effective machine, the other side has surrendered
| to the point where they won't even acknowledge the information
| warfare.
|
| In the normal human social and political world, people respond
| negatively to this kind of behavior, and the leaders (elected
| officials and appointed ones) lose their power, careers, and
| reputations.
|
| But with the disinformation machine, and with no effective
| opposition denouncing it or stopping it or offering effective
| countermessaging, the people conducting bad behavior can say
| whatever they want and get support, regardless of the absurdity
| or consequences - climate change; millions dying due to lack of
| health care (vaccines, pandemic, USAID programs, etc.); end of
| democracy and freedom; cruelty and brutality and brazen
| immorality; greed, fraud, crimes, etc.
|
| Almost everyone I know has surrendered about disinformation; they
| embrace victimhood - i.e., because they are 'victims', any
| behavior is justified. James Carville, the leading Democratic
| political consultant, recently wrote a NY Times op-ed which
| counselled Democrats to literally roll over, do nothing, and the
| opposition - Trump, the GOP - will destroy itself. It's as
| bizarre as the things their opposition claims; it's also been an
| explicit strategy of the Democrats going back to at least Hillary
| Clinton's campaign - it's a proud embrace of cowardice (usually
| people hide it!). Who follows or listens to cowards and victims,
| who revel in their cowardice because it's justified by victimhood
| - who is inspired by it? Who votes for that? It seems like a
| disinformation campaign has taken over them too; that is the kind
| of psyops used in war against opposition troops (I'm not saying
| that's the case, but how insane it is that the Dems and others
| adopt the outlook that psyops tries to impose on their enemies).
|
| Without effective messaging, there's nothing to do. If you put
| down all your guns (edit: metaphorically; i.e., your information
| warfare guns), you can't shoot back. Good people have enormous
| advantages in messaging: truth and goodness and decency; humans
| strongly prefer those things and can differentiate them to some
| degree - you can't fool all the people all the time.
|
| They aren't absolute advantages at all. You can still lose, you
| have to fight hard. If you don't fight, you're going to see what
| we see today. If you want to stop them, take away their messaging
| and IMHO everything else falls.
| worik wrote:
| I love what you say.
|
| I agree there must be a fight back.
|
| This has been cast as left/right - Ok. I can work with that.
|
| > If you put down all your guns, you can't shoot back.
|
| No.
|
| I urge those on the left, those who give a fuck, to fight back
| with with love and hope.
|
| The perpetrators of the coup in the USA got there spreading
| fear and hate. The temptation is to fight back with violence.
| But fascism thrives on violence and will only get stronger if
| you feed it.
|
| Love, and hope. That is what got a Obama elected - it works
| 9283409232 wrote:
| The answer is community. It's why Republicans in some states
| are trying to ban collective bargaining. Invest in your
| communities and in each other.
| mmooss wrote:
| How do you build community, or influence others, without
| effective messaging and effective resistance to
| disinformation about your community? If you gain any power,
| they'll come after you and smear you, and create a mob to
| attack you, and then what?
| 9283409232 wrote:
| I'm not saying you are wrong about building effective
| channels of communication. The few leaders remaining of
| the dems agree with you but, knowing what to do after you
| build those channels of communication is important.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I agree for now, but there may come a time where fire must be
| fought with fire. WWII would not have ended well without
| opposing armies.
| mmooss wrote:
| > No.
|
| > I urge those on the left, those who give a fuck, to fight
| back with with love and hope.
|
| When I said, "If you put down all your guns, you can't shoot
| back." I meant that metaphorically, in the context of
| information warfare. If you don't have an effective messaging
| and countermessaging, if you give up that fight, you can't
| defeat your enemy in that domain. I'm not advocating
| violence.
|
| > I urge those on the left, those who give a fuck, to fight
| back with with love and hope.
|
| > The perpetrators of the coup in the USA got there spreading
| fear and hate. The temptation is to fight back with violence.
| But fascism thrives on violence and will only get stronger if
| you feed it.
|
| I agree generally - that's why I talked about truth,
| goodness, and decency. My point is that you need an effective
| way to reach people and persaude them, otherwise you're only
| loving and hoping yourself.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I urge those on the left, those who give a fuck, to fight
| back with with love and hope_
|
| You can fight with love and hope and guns. (Figuratively.)
|
| Musk and the DOGE bros are breaking the law. At the very
| least that means Democrats in the Congress, governors' and
| mayors' mansions need to put aside norms and conventions. (I
| say arrest them [1] for violating the Privacy Act of '74.)
|
| [1] https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-state-officials-
| arrest...
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Politicians decry politicians supposedly directing science
| funding, so politicians direct science funding.
|
| Ignores that NIH inclusion polices is the result of scientists
| correcting scientific deficiencies (e.g. early assumptions that
| health researchers studying only male animal models was
| sufficient, because erroneously thought that treatments that work
| in men always work in women.)
| freehorse wrote:
| Similar to when they removed the accessibility guidelines for
| government websites in the anti-DEI crusade there, they now
| direct banning grants that include the word "diverse" as in
| "transdisciplinary", and probably quite a few more that offer any
| faint hint of what could be DEI.
|
| This is a common pattern in general in authoritarian regimes:
| censors tend to be overzealous because the cost (to them) of
| false negatives (not banning sth that they should) is much higher
| than the cost of false positives (banning sth they should have
| not). The more people will be involved in this bureaucratic
| censorship assembly line the more strict the result will be.
| immibis wrote:
| Other Hacker News commentators have sternly informed me this is
| not an authoritarian regime and I am just irrationally angry
| because my preferred candidate, equally good as all the others,
| didn't win.
| freehorse wrote:
| Oh, my sincerest apologies for the misunderstanding! Clearly,
| I must have been mistaken in thinking that any form of
| censorship or restriction on academic language could be seen
| as authoritarian. It's just my irrational anger speaking,
| obviously.
| sega_sai wrote:
| That's freedom for you -- you have a word 'diversity' in your
| grant -- no money.
| Spivak wrote:
| I really do wonder where we lost the plot and where the
| opposition for diversity programs became legitimately insane.
| Like even if I agreed with them, and on some parts I do, I've
| never hated anything in my life with the intensity currently on
| display. Not the least of which because the group implementing
| these programs might be called naive or misguided, but are in
| good faith trying to improve things.
|
| I don't particularly care for most of the implementations of
| diversity programs but I'm not so blind as to not see POSIWID
| and that you have to actually look at the outcomes to identify
| cases where systems aren't as fair as they might seem on paper.
| sega_sai wrote:
| I agree with this view completely. I think some of the
| programs probably went over the top in my view and I would
| not mind the pendulum swing back a little bit. But the
| current government seemed fixated for some reason and just
| want to kill it all and happy to act like a totalitarian
| state if you disagree.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| There's a contemporary belief amongst a large number of
| people that they're being persecuted. They've decided to
| "take charge" and become the persecutors themselves and
| think this is somehow reasonable. They weren't being
| persecuted in the first place, they're just delusional.
| Convincing them that they're delusional, of course, is not
| easy.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| They think people saying "your ideas are bad and we don't
| want to listen to you" is violence, and their idea of
| freedom of speech is that they should be able to force
| you to listen to them.
| retox wrote:
| In isolation, I would bet that people from both ends of
| the political spectrum could read this as about the other
| and be in complete agreement.
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