This is US specific collapse, it is somewhat local, but I think the pattern is worth noticing for everyone. Almost all scientists in the US I meet still have an irrational smugness that they are smart and this is going to turn out ok, it isn’t.

Careers in science in the US are over, period. I think this article is highly relevant because it demonstrates how il-equipped political centrism is in defending absolutely vital science from fascism and how most of the science world is still in denial about science being a political target to genuinely purge.

Pay attention, this is what genuine collapse looks like.

Pay attention to the imaginative apathy of successful smart people, their survivor-bias based personalities light up into brilliant comical foolishness in the blaze of this sunset and it is a great literary device to examine collapse and the empty centrism that makes fascism inveitable from. Everything is invisible or individual to US centrists and conservatives, their worldview is hopelessly broken deep in their mental drivetrains. You aren’t going to be able to fix it without taking the whole engine out…

“I left the field because of the policies he was putting in place,” she says. How she saw those policies playing out on the ground began to affect both her mental and physical health. “My whole family’s immigrants,” she adds. “So I really went into it wanting to help people like our family.” In the end, she walked away feeling “defeated and just broken down.” She still offers her services freelance to families who need it, but she knew by the end of the first four years of Trump that she never wanted to work in an official capacity for the United States again.

Centrists terminate their thoughts around this kind of thing, they are unable to feel meaningful degrees of empathy or take this sentiment seriously because they refuse to think critically about systematic cruelty.

But it’s not just the people who are currently planning to leave who should be of concern to the US: it’s the people who will never arrive. College enrollment has been down across the country for a number of years, partly due to a demographic shift caused by people having fewer children. It nosedived recently after the Trump administration’s change to student visas kept out the international students who would usually make up for the falling numbers of Americans. This sudden drop — a decline of 30-40 percent in new students from abroad, and 15 percent in international student enrollment in this academic year — could end up costing the US economy $7 billion.

The Centrist reaction to this is to condescend whoever brought this up as negative and simply say “We can still fix it! We can convince them to come to a place that may randomly jail and deport their families for no reason!” with a shrug.

…

A poll conducted earlier in the year found that three-quarters of research scientists at American universities are actively considering leaving the country. Another survey, conducted among postdoctoral researchers working at colleges across the country, found that more than half of all postdocs had been directly impacted by the Trump administration’s decision to cut funding to universities within just six weeks of the decision being announced. Many were turning up to their jobs every day and sitting at their desks or outside labs, unable to continue with their research because federal funds had been suddenly stopped. In a country where almost 90 percent of research is dependent on federal funds, that’s a serious problem — for the country as a whole, but also for academics’ careers.

We cannot fix it, the damage is already done, it will take decades at a minimum to rebuild from the ground up if we ever even do.

…

“New York was this huge global melting pot, and I grew up with so many different cultures around me that even when I traveled for the first time out of the country, I already felt like I’d been other places,” she says, “because you go uptown and you go to the Heights for Dominican food or where I was raised in Corona, Queens was half-Italian, half-Mexican, and Jackson Heights had Colombian food. So it does sadden me that the rest of the country can’t understand how beautiful it is to have that blending of culture and how that makes the US so special.”

What does an America that rejects this blend of communities look like? The data offers an unsettling preview. And though it’s all being done in the name of economic growth, the numbers also show that it’s the economy itself that stands to lose the most.