This isn't good for the PSF, but if these "poison pill" terms are a pattern that applies to all NSF and (presumably) other government research funding, the entire state of modern scientific research is at risk.
Regardless of how you, as an individual, might feel about "DEI," imposing onerous political terms on scientific grants harms everyone in the long term.
The direction of political winds shift over time. An organization like the PSF cannot assume an open-ended liability like that. DEI today, but what tomorrow? As we have seen, political leadership in the US has shown itself to be unreliable, pernicious, and vindictive.
US leadership is undermined by the politicization of these grants. That is something that members of this community, largely a US-based, VC-oriented audience, should be deeply, deeply troubled by.
I don't think that's a good summary of what happened.
From your wiki link
> In 2013, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), under the Obama administration, revealed that it had selected political groups applying for tax-exempt status for intensive scrutiny based on their names or political themes. This led to wide condemnation of the agency and triggered several investigations, including a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal probe ordered by United States Attorney General Eric Holder. Conservatives claimed that they were specifically targeted by the IRS, but an exhaustive report released by the Treasury Department's Inspector General in 2017 found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.
> The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration's audit found (page 14): "For the 296 potential political cases we reviewed, as of December 17, 2012, 108 applications had been approved, 28 were withdrawn by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 cases were open from 206 to 1,138 calendar days (some crossing two election cycles)."[11] Bloomberg News reported on May 14, 2013, "None of the Republican groups have said their applications were rejected."
The IRS took some stupid shortcuts by trying to look at keywords (including those linked to liberal causes) for more scrutiny of if they met the criteria of a non profit. There's no evidence this was done based on partisanship and it did not cause any groups to be rejected
The Trump administration is definitively coming after 501c3s. I run a nonprofit and all the movement around us has been preparing for this since these laws were first announced. Ironcically, the laws to investigate nonprofits were first proposed under the Biden administration to attack the Palestine movement, and like most things in the Palestine movement, they were quickly turned against the rest of the country.
"The FBI stated it found no evidence of "enemy hunting" of the kind that had been suspected, but that the investigation did reveal the IRS to be a mismanaged bureaucracy enforcing rules that IRS personnel did not fully understand. "
The sad irony is that the staff understood it perfectly, the organizations were not legitimate 501c groups (since at the time we had enforceable rules around political activity by nonprofit groups) but through extremely bad faith investigations where Congressional republicans literally forbade the IRS from reporting on their barring of climate and ‘progressive’ groups when investigating the ‘scandal’ so that even today people mischaracterize it as an example of IRS political targeting.
Even the people buried deep in the most podunk regulatory department you've never even heard of are smart enough to re-order the priority list on a change of administration. They don't need to be told and there is no paper trail. They just know what's good for their boss's boss's boss's boss^n is good for them and that kicking a potential hornet's nest is bad for them.
And even if you personally want to hassle someone with friends in the right places, what are the odds every other leaf of every other part of the organization(s) does? There will always be someone who has no morals and wants to climb the ladder who's happy to read between the lines and drop the ball.
It's just how it is. On some level, I'm not even sure this is a bad thing. If the executive can't change prioritization implicitly then the organization is either stupid or unaccountable.
It could be revoked if they are found to engage in illegal discrimination-Solidified by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1983 case Bob Jones University v. United States. based on public comments made by board members, such evidence seems replete.
Also, I don't get that an Organization such as the PSF operates at a $5 million dollar budget which quite arguably provides Billions or even Trillions in revenue across the Tech sector.
This is an unfortunate state of all open source. The entire economic model is broken, but PSF is one of the better operationalized groups out there.
Not to completely change the topic, but to add context, the Ruby Central drama that has unfolded over the past few weeks originally began as a brainstorm to raise ~$250k in annual funds.
Surely you mean "they are badmouthing". Enough to be expelled from the PSF.
Some official report from the PSF does not invalidate decades long observations. I see increasingly that programmers rely on PDFs from foundations and official statements from bureaucrats rather than look at the source code.
I'm not taking a stance, I just want to point out that the previous grant system (the "dei" one) could very easily and justifiably be seen as "imposing onerous political terms" on funding as well. You could say the pendulum motion has too large an amplitude.
Prior to the current administration there's been a ratcheting up of political influence / social engineering on science grants as well. The last DoE Office of Science grant I applied to had a DEI requirement that was also used during screening. My preference would all this political influence be dialed down.
Did it have a claw back clause? If not, then it's quite different than the current situation?
Also, DEI in recruitment / screening can be important to ensure that the results of the study apply not just to the majority demographic. It's just common sense.
They do apply, also for NIH funded research. I work in healthcare research and all the investigators I know have had to go to great lengths to whitewash their grant proposals (you can’t use the word “gender” for example, you must say “difference” instead of “disparity”, etc etc…)
It’s absolutely bonkers. However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.
> However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.
It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway. I don't mean this negatively: they're broad but still subject matter experts, parachuting in new people would be administrative malpractice, and they know just as much what conclusions can and can't be drawn from an analysis plan.
> It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway.
Historically, yes; as well as firing leadership and moving decisions usually made further down the chain up to the new leadership, this administration has also fired a lot of the existing grant reviewers in most of the big health an science grant-issuing agencies (and probably smaller ones, too, but those would have made fewer headlines) as part of the political purges of, well, a lot of the federal civil service earlier this year.
Its not fraud. The grant proposal accurately describes the research occurring, and people evaluating the grant will have no misconception about what they are funding. The problem is that political appointees have been applying dumb keyword searches which block research that has nothing to do with the issues they object to. Like using privilege in the computer security sense. Or bias in the statistical sense, unrelated to political leaning.
Take a look at the comments left by that profile. I don’t think that they would be able to understand what you are saying here, all they see is red.
A partial recent comment “qcnguy” made: “DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology. Requiring the PSF to dump DEI if they want the money is good for everyone, because DEI is bad for people”
It's worth pointing out that this profile has been around for three months and already has enough karma to have access to the "flag" and "vouch" tools.
It's also worth pointing out that despite this thread being full of ridiculously low quality posts, I haven't flagged any of them. That's the sort of thing DEI leftists do, not everyone.
It doesn't matter if you have used them in this thread or not. An account of your age and your disposition should not have access to automated moderation tools, period.
Moderation via easily gamified populism is the worst kind of moderation.
Because the leftists flagging and downvoting everything they disagree with in this thread are clearly exemplars of excellent user moderation? Knock it off.
This is a contradiction. There's no such thing, only shades of bad, and HN has about the worst possible implementation.
For what it's worth, I didn't flag or downvote you. YC is seemingly fine with your behavior, and I've seen much worse out of people who have been here longer. I'd rather your mask-off rants be out in the open than swept under the rug.
> The entire point is to create misconceptions in the people evaluating the grant. That is grant fraud.
No and no. It was just explicitly and intricately explained to you how that's not true, and you didn't even engage with the explanation.
The censors are filtering words not on the meaning of the words but based on the existence of other meanings of words. It's blatantly horrific behavior, in violation of any basic code of ethics or morals.
No fraud is being described in these comments by the grant applicants. However, among those trying to perpetrate political correctness on the a non-political process, unethical behavior abounds.
> Undoubtably their searches have also been finding lots of research that is related to what they object to. You can't use the existence of mistakes to claim that deceiving the government therefore isn't fraud. That's not how the law works.
First, having political objections to some types of research and imposing that sort of political filter is highly unethical in these scientific positions. Second, because they sometimes execute this political censorship successfully does not justify the inaccurate political censorship.
Nobody supporting anything like this has a leg to stand on about laws or legality or anything relating to the rule of law. The Trump administration is acting completely lawlessly, ignores court orders, and has zero regard for the constitution.
I don't recall the government making hugely significant financial decisions about science funding on those grounds, any more than people "falling over themselves" to shave two characters off the default branch name. Nor do I remember DEI being quite as harmful to the humans as master/slave relations in the US. But, it is completely in line with these sorts of politicians and their supporters to criticize people for something, and then act 10x as bad.
I didn't engage with the explanation because nobody has provided one. This whole thread is just people asserting that it's OK to change a few words and continue doing what they were previously doing, because Trump. There's no deeper logic and that's not an intricate explanation. It is, in fact, fraud.
Nobody here is actually confused about any of this. You're all defending fraud because you hate the victims of it, not out of any intellectual principle. The government doesn't want to fund certain kinds of work. People who want to grab money for that work anyway are manipulating the language they use whilst refusing to change what they're really doing. That is grant fraud. Merely asserting it's not over and over will not help you when lawsuits start flying.
That's academics. The PSF, despite how awful this blog post makes it look, is at least doing what it's supposed to be doing: taking the requirements seriously and refusing the money.
> First, having political objections to some types of research and imposing that sort of political filter is highly unethical in these scientific positions
Python hacking isn't science! But if you want to talk about academic research instead, the time for academics to make this argument was 50 years ago. Nobody is going to buy the idea it's unacceptable to be political from academics of all people. There is no group more blatantly political: if it's unethical to impose "political filters" on "scientific positions" then academia needs to engage in massive purges of itself because it's overrun with unethical behavior.
> The Trump administration is acting completely lawlessly, ignores court orders, and has zero regard for the constitution.
It and its congressional allies literally makes the law, there is nothing in the constitution requiring the government to fund DEI and it is doing so because it won an election in which it said it'd do all these things. It's academia that's acting lawlessly, ignoring direct orders from its funding sources and has zero regard for the constitution - which puts the executive and Congress in charge of grant funding, not grantees or the PSF.
That's definitely not the requirement! The requirement is to avoid doing certain kinds of "research" that the government disagrees is valid research to fund, characterized by the principles underlying it.
They may have started by using certain keywords to find examples of such grants to terminate, but the requirement itself has nothing to do with words and everything to do with the intentions.
The “requirements” are vague and still being litigated against congressional intent, but the problem is the scale: when you have so many complex things to review and only a few trusted political apparatchiks, they end up doing things like simple keyword searches for terms like “diversity” and “inclusion” blithely aware of those being used in fields such as geology.
I know this because I know people who’ve had to take time away from their research to keep their grants from being cancelled.
And maybe they'll get that back eventually, but academia can't complain about rough handling when it steadfastly refused as a bloc to fix its own ways for so long. Outsiders trying to fix them will always create a lot more collateral damage than insiders fixing the problems, but when insiders refuse, outsiders will take over.
Also, frankly, I heard a bunch of such stories and very often the grantees were misrepresenting their work. It actually did have DEI content in it and they were pretending it didn't. You can see how many people in this thread are arguing that all you have to do to comply with the requirements are use a thesaurus or misrepresent their work and then continue anyway. For as long as academics insist on total warfare and malicious compliance, expect universities to be blowtorched.
this and many other grants were singled out because of words used in their description. you seem quite certain that 'diversity' here isn't referring to the degree to which the genome of these animals is similar to different to other of their species, but instead a leftist dogwhistle hiding racist intent, and this researcher lost their position because they are really a secret racist and deserves to be 'blowtorched'.
you celebrate the ruin of the career of a highly trained person, frankly a national resource, because they used a word to describe their work that you think has evil connotations.
I should have been clear that it’s particularly with respect to word choice. All of the research we’re doing is accurately described by the proposal. It’s just codified in this weird new way of speaking where you can’t say certain trigger words which offend the snowflakes up top.
For me personally, I really don’t care if it’s grant fraud or not. We’re doing research into how to improve the healthcare and quality of life of less privileged groups. Our work is about helping people, full stop. It’s one of the best ways I could ever want my tax money being spent.
Right, academics think they're above the law and that it's OK to lie to conservatives to advance their agendas. So why should anyone believe you, when you say it's all above board? If you don't care about engaging in financial fraud you don't care about misrepresenting things on Hacker News either, for sure.
The culture of dishonesty and extremism in academia is why it will eventually be liquidated. Expect to see academic funding driven to zero and university property seized in future. There will be no more academics. It'll take years, but mass lawlessness of that kind won't be tolerated forever.
> I am going to add my own stronger language than yours: if you don’t feel positively about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you are sending a message that you instead support homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion.
This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking.
It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else. That's not "pro homogeneity" - only someone whose perspective is entirely warped by this one factor would think that way.
> It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else.
You often don’t know who the “best” person is for a role until they’re in it. Diversity is good because it allows for different perspectives and catching your own blind spots. Because we don’t understand different backgrounds as well as our own, we can fail to understand the unique strengths someone brings to the table simply by being different.
We've yet to establish such a system, so I'm not holding out much hope (and anyone who has been through a handful of tech interview loops ought to realise this)
We can?
I'm pretty sure companies have spent billions trying to achieve this and failed. The best they can do is maybe sort of sometime hire people that are good enough
This is also sounds like mystical thinking or some kind of idealism. What safeguard prevents the interference and subversion by the class(es) that already control hiring and cause the problem that society desires to solve?
A meritocracy would of course, benefit everyone, but in creating systems that decide merit, we demonstrably have always created biases that preserve the control of someone involved in creating those systems.
Yes, we bias towards people we think will do work that benefits the organisation's end users or customers. That's what we want as end users or customers.
Diversity is good when it is either applied in a neutral and identify-agnostic way, or if we as a society all agree on which groups deserve getting benefits and which ones don't.
The first one is sadly horrible disliked and tend to lose support as soon the "wrong" demographic get benefits. If you have a diversity program to benefit minority X, and then later X become majority, then the program get canceled rather than applied for any new minority. The programs always get designed with a specific target in mind.
Similar for the second, if a group get popular support, diversity programs will help those while ignore any similar but disliked group. The program is not there to fix diversity, it is to help the intended group. When the political environment becomes polarized, it becomes very clear which groups get support from which side.
It has been very clear by diversity programs, and those who oppose diversity programs, that no one want a difference in perspectives, or for that matter catching their own blind spots.
Any system that tries to not hire for competence has a known, conscious blind spot. That's much worse than a system that arrives for the best but has accidental blind spots.
It's funny how the quest for "unique strengths" entirely ignores people with pale skin who grew up in trailer parks in Appalachia or farms in the midwest, despite the fact that they are dramatically underrepresented in our industry and in elite universities.
The DEI policies favor people with dark skin (as long as they're not Asian) and 1250 SATs from wealthy suburbs over pale skin 1450 SATs from rural backwaters. It's discrimination, it's "diversity" only on the surface. Incredibly shallow, condescending, and dehumanizing. It's so shallow that in most of the places it's implemented, it doesn't differentiate between descendants of slaves and recent West African immigrants, some of whom are wealthy descendants of the elites who captured and sold slaves in ports like Lagos.
And before you call me a bigot:
My kids are "bi-racial", so if you think i'm a nazi, ask yourself why I hate my wife and kids.
I agree with you, and I am a minority, but as someone from the midwest, sometimes people here fail to succeed because they are lazy, like any other person. Midwesterners are modest, and this is great, but the stereotype that we are somehow more hardworking is lost on me.
Also, certainly someone can have principled opposition to DEI without being called a Nazi. But frankly, having a wife or kids "of color" doesn't necessarily prove anything one way or another. Lots of plantation owners in the 19th century also had biracial kids while somehow maintaining their raging bigotry. We humans are quite skilled at compartmentalizing.
i'm one of those poor whites you're talking about (from another region; ethnic and economic bases covered though). you believe falsehoods.
> And before you call me a bigot: My kids are "bi-racial", so if you think i'm a nazi, ask yourself why I hate my wife and kids.
i would never ask you that. but i wonder if you should ask yourself how your views could potentially negatively impact your relationships with your family.
And thank you for the condescending, pious, moral superiority in the "your views" comment. It perfectly encapsulates the quasi-religious nature of the DEI adherents.
Would you still be the best person for your current role if you'd been excluded from your education and training/previous roles based on your ethnicity/sex?
Definitely not, if I'd not had the relevant education, training, or experience. But we have a giant, expensive state and corporate apparatus to correct this, but it's not based on this actual experience. It's based on demographics. Making it incredibly inaccurate.
>It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else.
No human being has ever objectively evaluated a candidate on their "merits" and ignored their ethnicity, sex, etc.
That's not how the human brain can work.
That does not mean I support the "if you aren't with us, you're against us" ideology, but this absurdist belief that the majority of humans do a good job of avoiding prejudice has never ever been supported by reality.
If that were true, American race based slavery would not have been controversial, it would have been utterly undoable. It was possible because it is trivial for the human brain to dehumanize others. It's an integral part of our brain that was used for generations to maintain social alignment. It doesn't go away just because we banned slavery.
Human biases are so bad, most of the point of science is to stop trusting human reasoning at all.
We have to triple blind studies with medicine, because despite everyone involved being fairly educated in the domain, they will still fuck up data with their biases. Doctors will accidentally fuck up a drug trial because they are human. They don't want to, because they know that would be a huge waste of resources and time and human labor, but they do because the brain doesn't care what you think you want. It isn't constructed to.
And I'm not talking bias as some political bullshit. I'm talking bias as in, human beings will reliably make the same statistical mistakes because our brains overfit a few data points all the damn time, and only attempt to even fit data points after we've already made up our mind.
Statisticians will still experience gambling fallacies.
Are these people actually attested? In my experience, virtually everyone I've ever seen make a strong argument against "DEI" ended up having some... unsavory attitudes more generally. Scratch hard in discussion or check post histories[1] and you end up at some variant of white nationalism or men's rights, almost every time.
Basically no one goes to bat for "wanting the best people in a role". People get political when they feel aggrieved. "DEI mania" is always a response to "I think this is going to hurt people like me".
> virtually everyone I've ever seen make a strong argument against "DEI" ended up having (...) men's rights
So people who dislike a cultural type of discrimination also dislike practical discrimination against men? People who dislike what is going on in general, also have practical opinions how the situation could be improved in practice, how to make the situation more fair?
This is akin to being surprised that people who are actively against animal abuse are also helping animal shelters.
If groups of people are disadvantaged from birth and then throughout their life, it's unlikely they will be the best at anything.
But you could imagine that the person with the best potential was part of that group.
In effect, an unjust society that doesn't allow fair equal opportunities from birth and throughout life is sub-optimal at yielding the best candidates for any given role, as it artificially restricts the pool.
The other complexity is the inherent bias in the assessment process. How people assess who is best qualified has tons of bias. Again, that means the selection is sub-optimal at finding the actually best candidate.
It becomes hard to talk of meritocracy when most people's performance derive from circumstances like birth, wealth, connections. Someone else might have performed even better had they'd been given the same circumstances.
Finally, you have the problem of not maximizing everyone's potential even if they're not going to be the best.
Obviously we can't have the best at every job. Only one company will have the real best at any given role. Most jobs will be done by the average performer. That's a mathematical truth.
Thus raising the average has tremendous lift in raising quality of work accross the board.
In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower. That might mean some need more than others, disabled people are a good example, they'll need lots of compensating equipment and what not to maximize their potential and raise their overall effect to society.
To me, those are the basis problems that people were trying to solve. Obviously, a lot of the solutions to these became performative dances, but I think the problem statement aligns well with what you have too.
The idea being that the person right now that we seem best qualified is truly the best isn't true unless we achieve a better system at maximizing people's potential.
You have a lot of incorrect logic. I will only comment on one.
> In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to
> max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower.
Wrong. There are limited resources and it is not feasible to give every person every opportunity. "Let's give everybody a chance to become an opera singer, an Olympic 100m winner or a lotto winner, to see how they will use that chance. Even if they won't be any good at this and waste money, at least they will raise their starting position, improve on their potential and raise the average!". This is just silly. No, it is mathematically impossible to give every opportunity to every person.
If anything, giving extra resources to worse people (with lower potential) is a waste of resources (money, human). It makes no sense to make a potentially brilliant mathematician an below-average kindergarten teacher, while forcing a good teacher-to-be, to become a 20-years-in-a-making-junior-vibe-programmer. This is a terrible idea for economy, society and individual people (including the ones that DEI are trying to promote). People have different preferences and different abilities (some have in many areas, many have in a few, some are terrible at everything). Maximizing potential should be based on an individual's merit. Fair and equal opportunities will naturally lead to different results, because people are different. You can't simultaneously have equity and equal opportunities, discrimination (racism, sexism, DEI) and inclusion, equity and efficiency.
"Give everyone what they need to max out their potential" is not "give everyone every opportunity". That’s a strawman.
Floor, not ceiling. We set a floor of real opportunity (nutrition, basic health, safety, functional education, accessible selection processes). It doesn’t promise bespoke elite tracks for all. Removing constraints is different from subsidizing every aspiration. By doing so, you lift the average, and allow the best to develop to their fullest, growing society's total output.
If the signal of ability is suppressed by early disadvantage, you’ll misallocate talent. Low cost, well aimed supports (early literacy, assistive tech, unbiased hiring screens) improve matching, which is exactly what meritocracy needs to place the brilliant mathematician in math and the gifted teacher in the classroom.
We have noisy priors shaped by wealth, networks, and bias. They need removed so that comparative advantage can actually surface. That raises both the mean and the max.
We're talking about true meritocracy: merit, not circumstances.
Funnily enough, we agree:
> giving extra resources to worse people (with lower potential) is a waste of resources (money, human)
That's exactly my point, currently we spend resources on a bunch of people that are only circumstantially better, remember pro-sports before black people were allowed?
Spend your resources to realize the best to be the best, and to make even the worse better. That gives you full global maximum.
It's not an "us vs them" situation, that's just a strawman argument.
The real point is that you either believe that all humans are worthy of the same rights and respects by default then you're a bad person.
Such people aren't against "us" they're against everyone apart from their select group of the "right kind" of people.
This isn't a quid pro quo or zero sum bullshit. This is a matter of being a moral person or not. It's not even an opinion, it's the cold hard fact that if you think entire groups of people are subhuman, unworthy of basic rights, and fit to be abducted abused and deported, you are a bad person. It's that cut and dry.
You either think all people should be equal or you don't. You either want a civilized society for everyone or you only want it for the "right kind" of people. One of these stances is objectively moral and the other is objectively bad
And that's exactly the point. DEI and other "positive" discriminatory practices are making the field uneven for people. People should be treated as individuals, representing themselves and standing for their own abilities, instead of being treated as members of whatever group. Those type of racists, sexists and DEI activists are objectively bad people.
> This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking.
This is the paradox of tolerance is invoked.
The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now.
If you are “with that” then yes, you are against us.
This is not to say that I am intending to be hostile and unwelcoming to those who have been deceived by this regime. Germany had to go through the deprogramming process at the end of World War II. They didn’t just throw every single ordinary person who ever supported the Nazi party in jail or socially shun them for life, they went through a healing process.
> The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now.
I think this is in itself a huge problem. You've been told this, repeatedly, for 10 years, which explains why so much of the political violence (and celebration thereof) is on the left in the US. Why do you still believe dogwhistles to be a bigger problem than actual violence?
I haven’t been told this, I have witnessed it as a primary source. I watched Trump tell cops that they should rough up suspects. I watched Trump tell the January 6 crowd that they need to fight like hell or they’ll lose this country. I watched Trumpers erect gallows for Mike Pence. I watched Trump tell the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by like they were his personal goon squad. I watched Trump say that second amendment people could help stop his opposition.
This “violence on the left” that you speak of, I haven’t personally seen a whole lot of it.
No Kings was the largest protest in American history and not a single person was arrested for any protest infraction in New York City. The NYPD publicly announced it.
How many people wearing Joe Biden hats breached the capitol? Is there any left-wing violence in the past few decades of America that you would call more extreme than breaking into the capitol building?
How many conservatives celebrated Nancy Pelosi’s husband getting beaten? I remember Donald Trump Jr. said that a Halloween costume would be funny.
Yes, that’s basically the one notable example. Now the challenge becomes whether you can name two more without looking anything up.
Because I can name January 6 (capitol police officers lost their lives, Trump rioters intended to harm Nancy Pelosi specifically), Nancy Pelosi’s
Husband as mentioned above, Charlottesville (counter-protestor run over by a car intentionally), the two
Democratic Minnesota lawmakers who were injured recently, the pizzagate shooter, pulse nightclub (bonus: perpetrated by an ISIS sympathizer, a right-wing extremist terrorist group)
People don’t wonder why you shy away from the trans movement, we know it’s got nothing to do with left wing violence and more to do with creating a scapegoat class that is rare enough (<1% of the population) so that most people don’t know any of them. Gay men didn’t work as a scapegoat class because just about everyone eventually knew a gay man and figured out that they are normal, nice people.
Agreed it's not really to do with violence per se, even though that is a concerning behavior amongst a small number of activists.
People on both the right and the left, and in-between, are shying away from that movement more because of the demonstrably negative impact on women's rights.
"so much of the political violence (and celebration thereof) is on the left in the US"
Biiiiiiiig citation needed. By every available metric, right-wing terror attacks dominate the political violence numbers in the US. I don't know what fantasy world you've been living in, but frankly it sounds pretty sweet to me.
And mass violence is a worse problem than targeted violence. Whether or not you think they deserved it, the notable cases of left-wing violence in the last year have been individual targets. When the right commits violence, they roll up to a synagogue and gun down everyone inside. Or a gay nightclub. Or they slam a couple planes into buildings (yeah, if you're going to lump the left together, then you can't complain when the right gets lumped together).
That doesn’t surprise me at all. Islamic radicals aren’t that different in belief system from a lot of Christian nationalists.
We have all seen family portraits where people pose with American flags, bibles, and guns.
American Christians talk about how the woman/wife is subservient to the husband, how women should stay at home and forego a career and perform traditional roles at home. Many denounce and try to restrict contraceptive access. Many insist that women should/should not dress a certain way.
American Christian talk about how being gay is a sin and how America is a Christian country, not a secular democracy, how we need to have the Ten Commandments in school and in government buildings.
American Christians even grow beards, wear tactical/military-style gear, and drive pickup trucks just like Islamic radicals! (Okay that last one is a a half-joke but it’s kind of funny how the similarities bleed into the aesthetic).
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck…
It's the Left that:
- is against Israel
- supports Hamas
- is against neocons and meddling in the Middle-East
- is anti-free speech
- is fanatically religious in their beliefs that have no base in reality and are cheering on the death (professional cancelling or real) of the people who dare to disagree with their delusion
- are antiscience (antibiology, for one)
- are for mutilation of children
The list can be continued.
My point is that classifying Islamists as right-wing is an attempt to gaslight people, to lie to them, is purposefully misleading. Context and public perception matter.
To paraphrase:
```
Biiiiiiiig citation needed. By every available metric, left-wing terror attacks dominate the political violence numbers in the US. I don't know what fantasy world you've been living in, but frankly it sounds pretty sweet to me.
And mass violence is a worse problem than targeted violence. Whether or not you think they deserved it, the notable cases of right-wing violence in the last year have been individual targets. When the left commits violence, they roll up to a synagogue and gun down everyone inside. Or a gay nightclub. Or they slam a couple planes into buildings (yeah, if you're going to lump the right together, then you can't complain when the left gets lumped together).
```
Both he and you are empty talkers who simply insult the other side without any basis.
> if you don’t feel positively about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you are sending a message that you instead support homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion
No, because we are not talking about Boolean variables where you can discover the logical opposite by negation. These are words with deeply fuzzy meanings. Supporters can support the best possible meanings, and opposers can oppose the worst possible meanings, and be closer to consensus than this binary, polarized, with-us-or-against-us rhetoric might imply.
I am going to going even further than you and suggest if you are an American do not support America First, that means you instead support America Last.
If you believe that, you should think about what other countries and groups support those kinds of things, and what kind of company supporting terrorist groups puts you in.
No, there isn't a legitimate reason not to want America First.
Yes, it's important we call out anyone and stand against people who want to tear down America and fully pursue all applicable laws that apply to this destructive behavior.
I am going add more on top of that: we should automatically assume bad faith of anyone still willing, in 2025, to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt.
> DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology.
Much of the DEI work stems from people looking around a decade or so ago at tech conferences, and noticing that they were almost entirely comprised of men.
There's way too much to address in a single comment, so I'll share one specific thing the Python community has done over the past ten+ years that's made a world of difference: The talk proposal process has been standardized so identifying information is hidden in the first round of reviews.
That one change helped shift the dial from almost entirely male speaker lineups to a much more balanced speaker lineup. As a result, we get a much broader range of talks.
There is nothing "immoral, hate based, and anti-truth" about efforts like this.
>> The talk proposal process has been standardized so identifying information is hidden in the first round of reviews
Making the talk proposal process blind seems more like meritocracy than DEI. The people opposing DEI [claim to] want qualifications to matter and race/gender/whatever issues not to.
> Making the talk proposal process blind seems more like meritocracy than DEI. The people opposing DEI [claim to] want qualifications to matter and race/gender/whatever issues not to.
Making a process blind to the person applying is a common DEI tool. Orchestra auditions are the famous one that I know about off the top of my head. Some links I googled and skimmed for rough quality, not vetted for serious study and may only be a starting point:
> Making the talk proposal process blind seems more like meritocracy than DEI
... I mean, that's because they're the same thing, presuming that you use the literal definition of 'meritocracy'. Now, 'meritocracy' is sometimes used to mean "only hire straight white guys who went to one of about four universities", but that it is being used as a euphemism, not in its literal meaning (however, these days it is so often used in that euphemistic sense that it has become honestly pretty pointless as a term.)
Sure. Is it doing anything to push people away? Yes, it pushes away people who disagree with far left ideological ideas, like when it purged Tim Peters who worked on Python for 20 years.
Stop leftists waging ideological war against long term Python contributors and it will be a more inclusive place, whilst acting in a moral way.
if you were to poll this very forum, you would find out that it is too almost entirely comprised of (biological) men. shall we apply the DEI principles here and give female posters +100 free karma on every comment/submission?
Wrong fallacy. A strawman argument is where you claim someone else said something that they didn't, you put words in their mouth. hn_shill didn't do that.
machomaster says it's reducto ad absurdum. It's not that either. There's nothing absurd about the proposal, it's exactly the same idea as many other DEI policies like female-only shortlists, which are found in politics or female only bonus/prize pools found everywhere.
It's no fallacy! What they did was pose a hypothetical designed to test people's commitment to their stated principles. Does a minor change in context cause someone to recoil from their own ideas? If yes, the ideas are bad and they haven't thought it through.
It is reducto ad absurdum, though. Because the effeciency of absurdity lies not in the universality of it (if the origin was 1 in absurdity, you would push to 11), but in the subjectivity. So that everyone could surprisingly understand how absurd the original explanation is, "this would be just absurd!". Objectively, it doesn't require to raise the antics.
Kinda like Hindus could ask beef-eating Westerners if they would eat a horse. Or pork vs. dogs. Or to suggest that we should reverse the situation and let sole parenting of children given to the same percentage of men as is currently given to women.
All these are objectively on the same level, but would be described as absurd suggestions with a huge list of explanations of why "you are absurd, they are a totally different thing".
PSF made their own choice based on their own politics and optics. Note that requirements had nothing against diversity or fairness. It was fairly specific: "discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
DEI was weaponized in the USA, where in quite a few instances, people couldn't get promoted or hired because of their race (typically white or asian). It was about preferential treatment, where you would get hired because of your race, and not merit.
I am all for diversity, I am all for fairness, and I don't think we should exclude people based on the color of their skin or their socioeconomic status.
Yet, that is exactly what DEI did, and I have seen it firsthand many, many times.
> Note that requirements had nothing against diversity or fairness. It was fairly specific: "discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
Are we reading the same thing? You are quoting something that says that the PSF's standard DEI policies are a violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws, which the PSF does not agree with, and likely no court would ever agree with.
Compliance with law is always mandatory, but by signing a contract that misstates the law and in fact endorses a particular and incorrect interperation of the law, means that actually litigating the law correctly lately in the courts is harder.
Further, by carrying out the PSF's existing policies, the PSF is carrying ou their principles, rather than your derisive and inaccurate characterization of that as mere "optics."
> I am all for diversity, I am all for fairness,
If you were actually for those things, you'd be for what the PSF does! That's what they do! Instead you are supporting the oppression of those things with your comment.
On the ending of “DEI” (itself an eviscerated approach to addressing the minimal demands to address over two centuries of american slavery, indigenous genocide, patriarchal violence, anti-trans, anti-queer violence) as targeted death making. The list of the scientific establishment’s participation, complicity, neglect is long. Some programs called immediately to mind include:
> DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology.
This is called getting high on your own supply. It was never any of those things, but lies like the ones you are spreading were perpetuated to push back against the idea of equal fairness for all.
As proof that you are spreading further lies, one only has to look at the long string of court filings that shows that the administrations' policies fighting DEI are outright racism, words that are coming from conservative judges appointed long ago that operate based on truth rather than whatever misinformation cult has taken over so much of politics these days. Here's just one of many many many instances of blatant racism being perpetrated through Trump's politicization of science funding.
> ‘My duty is to call it out’: Judge accuses Trump administration of discrimination against minorities—The Reagan-appointed judge ordered the NIH to restore funds for research related to racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people.
The "poison pill" terms are not at all a new thing. They have existed for a long time, and were one of the main drivers of the highly aggressive "guilty until proven innocent" cancel culture within academia, where a PhD gets accused non-credibly, is blackballed from NSF funding, exiled from academia, and years later it's discovered they were innocent of the charges.
The requirement that grantees not violate existing laws is common in Federal grants. Taking umbrage with the DEI coloration on this entirely reasonable and standard requirement is absurd. There could be a long laundry list of such clauses that all have equally zero weight ("don't promote illegal drug trafficking", "don't promote illegal insider trading", ...).
If it has zero weight, why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it? I would guess it's much easier to enforce a particular interpretation of the law via a grant agreement than having to argue it in court.
The "rule against surplusage": Where one reading of a statute would make one or more parts of the statute redundant and another reading would avoid the redundancy, the other reading is preferred.
"Judges frequently invoke anti-redundancy principles in the interpretation of legal language, whether it appears in classic private-law documents such as contracts or classic public law-documents such as constitutions and statutes."
Redundancy: When Law Repeats Itself, John M. Golden (2016)
> Why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it?
I would humbly suggest that it mentions this particular example because the NSF administrator serves under the pleasure of the Executive and they have been tasked to demonstrate that they are following the orders of the Executive branch.
However, the inclusion of this specific example confers no higher priority than any other possible example. It has no weight; it is inoperative.
If it's inoperative then it shouldn't be in the language of the grant. Full stop.
The language itself also overly broad. The stipulation from the grant didn't just cover activities funded by the grant itself. In the very language quoted on the PSF blog, they needed to affirm that as an organization they "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI." Read that again. The language expressly states that they cannot operate ANY programs that advance or promote DEI during the term of the award. So if a PSF member volunteers with PyLadies, would that count as "advanc[ing] or promot[ing] DEI?"
In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it. If something like this was found buried in a contract I was evaluating with my lawyer, we'd immediately redline it as overly broad and overbearing.
> If it's inoperative then it shouldn't be in the language of the grant.
It’s not inoperative. A contract requirement that is redundant with a legal requirement still has separate effect (that is explicit here since this clause is a basis for both cancelling an award that has already been made and clawing back funds that have already been disbursed, separate from any penalties for the violation of the law itself.)
> In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it.
If by “this kind” you just mean “incorporating existing legal obligations separately as contract obligations with contractual consequences”, every government contract has multiple such clauses and has for decades.
If by “this kind” you mean more narrowly incorporating the specific anti-DEI provisions and partisan propaganda about DEI inside the clause also incorporating existing legal requirements, I’m pretty sure you will find that most federal contracts that have had their language drafted in the last few months have something like that because of agency implementations of EO 14151. How many people are signinf them...well, I would say look at whoever is still getting federal money, but given the shutdown that’s harder to see...
You are claiming that if the PSF took the grant and the NSF, or the president, decided the PSF was promoting DEI they would not be able to claw back funds?
OK, I accept that as a possible reason why it might be written there even if it has no weight. But it still seems very likely that it's easier to terminate a grant - and harder for the PSF to argue against that - than to actually prosecute DEI work and prove in court that it's illegal.
You say, paraphrasing, "It's harder to prove that a DEI program violates Federal anti-discrimination laws than it is to simply terminate a grant to an undesirable grantee."
Ok. Suppose that's true. The government can terminate grants that don't include that language equally as easily -- and, indeed, I just found that there are multiple current cases against the government for doing exactly that: health grants [1], solar grants [2], education grants [3].
Is your point is that the inclusion of this inoperative language makes it easier than it already is for the government to cancel grants and to defend against the subsequent lawsuits until the plaintiffs are pressured into compliance from lack of funding?
Regardless of how you, as an individual, might feel about "DEI," imposing onerous political terms on scientific grants harms everyone in the long term.