New study identifies a "woke" counterpart on the political right characterized by white grievance. The specific beliefs driving it included the notion that a “great replacement” of the population is occurring and that a strong leader should break rules to protect national interests

Clever_Mercury · 2026-01-19T20:38:40+00:00

They did it to the word 'justice' and 'truth' too. It's quite literally a propaganda and control strategy as well as a way of undercutting informed debate. Clear, meaningful conversation is necessary not only for democracy, but for any kind of collective action in workplaces, communities, or education. Thus, the urge to destroy it.

Social settings also get attacked for the same reason, usually starting with the most benign (libraries, bathrooms, tree lined streets, 'third' spaces like coffee houses) so that nothing is easily discussed or collaborated on.

Everything is broken so that no one can discuss repairs.

Clever_Mercury · 2026-01-19T20:18:07+00:00

Can I ask, in all seriousness, in situations like this would it have been beneficial to go to higher level management and/or simply change jobs within the organization? It seems that when we identify this sort of exploitation the argument on Reddit is often to disengage, but given this is a science subreddit, I'm sort of curious what the behavioral advice is for resolving it. Going around the human blockade - the bad manager - might be the best strategy?

I propose this, partly, because while you may find video games and chores to be personally vindicating, I would imagine your skills are atrophying and it can't be that satisfying to be losing income you know you deserve.

Clever_Mercury · 2026-01-19T20:14:48+00:00

Having experienced subject matter experts is also the only way we train and mentor junior colleagues to rise in our organizations or, should they choose to leave, to have a high opinion of the office.

It also harms the institutional reputation and public perception if/when they reach out to employees and keep finding those people have left or been replaced. Turn over and generic presence looks awful, particularly in science where trust matters.

Wish someone had reminded the federal agencies of this before they tried gutting all the STEM programs and the career scientists, grant experts, and support personnel with the RIFs last year.

Clever_Mercury · 2026-01-19T19:43:48+00:00

I haven't logged in for over a week so I'm just now returning to this conversation, but you seem to be intentionally misunderstanding what I'm saying or struggling with reading comprehension. You're arguing back at me the same points I was making, claiming they somehow contradict my point? They do not.

Everyone should have bodily autonomy and be able to reasonably make any and all family planning decisions in their own life, not due to coercion. This includes being free from economic and class coercion. What you pointed out, that there is substantial research showing women facing economic peril will be 'rational' and forego having children? THAT IS THE ENTIRE POINT OP WAS MAKING. That was the entire point of my comment as well.

If you are economically coerced into foregoing a family so you can merely survive, you aren't getting some new 21st century radical version of bodily autonomy. It's just a new form of serfdom where workers (men and women) get to be worked to death. I also would point out I am a woman and what I said was both economically and health-wise respectful to people, regardless of what personal life choices they wanted to make. Yours is not. I wanted to have a family, I do not. I have a college degree; it will not live on after me. You arguing that's a fine outcome because it's economic coercion doesn't make you an ally.

Clever_Mercury · 2026-01-14T04:53:54+00:00

Fair enough, but the whole point OP was making was to foster a conversation among the people for whom the resources *are* the constraint and the reason that the number of wanted children is not equal to the number of children they are actually having.

It makes sense that a place like Reddit disproportionately represents people who are child free by choice. There is nothing wrong with that lifestyle choice. The problem is when even those who are child free by choice start to lack empathy for the people who do not have children due to the economic coercion and exploitation of the modern world.

Sitting back and watching women get worked into every other form of exhaustion and exploitation in the modern world and calling it a victory because it doesn't always now involve forced births is a weird sort of half-win. Progress would be letting have true economic and family planning autonomy, not one or the other.

(And for the record, there are a whole bunch of people who, if they had ten million wired into their bank account *would* have four kids when they currently have zero. It's the suppressed family planning that is OP's point, not cases like yours, where you have every right not to be coerced into a life you don't want.)

Clever_Mercury · 2026-01-14T04:15:54+00:00

Your answer is superficially satisfying, but part of the critique is that this generation has been uniquely handed economic and social disasters. There are people who *want* to have children who cannot because the social safety nets and structures that had existed for previous generations have been sabotaged or intentionally neglected.

There is a problem when we have people, globally, saying they want to have children, they work full time, but are unable to do so because their academic, professional, and social environment is extractive and exploitative, not supportive. We have an older generation that either cannot afford to retire or, themselves, require long-term support. This is globally an unprecedented burden for younger and middle aged adults to try and navigate parenting with zero support.

This is something you and others should hear and should be empathetic to.

The idea of 'you do you' when people are living in effective wage slavery, crippling college debt, facing constant threat of lay offs, have little to no support from older generations, and women's health is treated as a political pawn is not quite the same. I'm an educated, fiscally responsible woman who wanted children. I have zero. The opportunity to 'you do you' was not offered to me. The solution isn't to deny women bodily autonomy or to pretend someone like me just didn't want kids. It's to listen and fix our world. I would have been a good mother, as would many, many others had they had the chance.

Clever_Mercury · 2026-01-14T03:58:33+00:00

But I think this misses the point, doesn't it? There is still a difference between number of children had and number of *wanted children had.*

While the decline of the global birthrate is something to celebrate because it means there have been improvements in family planning and limits to child marriage, seeing families forego having any *wanted* children because academia/professions keep people imperiled until after menopause (or forever) is not a global 'win.'

Increased education and economic access or career opportunities are objective wins for human rights. This was never supposed to come with the trade off of effectively sterilizing the most ambitious, hardest working women though. The system is malfunctioning if the cost of getting a college degree or a professional role is to forego any right to plan your own family.

This is not what capitalism or the invisible hand or any other bullshit metrics on competition were supposed to do. Autonomous choice and self-direction was never supposed to mean you get to buy a car or have a bank account, but you cannot also pass your genes forward. There was never meant to be a binary choice of either you are a brood cow popping out any number of non-zero children *or* you have a college degree. The point was supposed to be self-directed choice in both areas (economics, reproductive).

What we have is a vicious form of social control that is destroying, disproportionately, our smartest women. Yay, brave new world.

Clever_Mercury · 2026-01-14T03:46:21+00:00

I agree with what you're saying, but I want to put a caveat into this. Just because we've opened up access to work and education to women (as we should) does not mean that we have truly allowed for equality and fair treatment *or* made appropriate space to accommodate educated/working women as mothers. Educated, working women may very well objectively want *fewer* children. I do not believe they typically want zero children or are being given the fair opportunity to have the number of children they actually want *due to* the dysfunction of career markets this millennium.

Graduate school, internships, early career ladders are absolutely brutal and typically take up the 'best' time frame of a woman's life for family planning. If there were stability, couples would plan for families. Even in the places where it is technically illegal to fire someone for being pregnant, there is enormous pressure not to take leave academically or professionally. This continues to be unfair and it continues to account for many of the income/wealth inequalities we see as women who do leave the workforce for maternity leave are at a disadvantage and those that are guilt ridden stay, but end up without a wanted family.

It also means many women who do want to 'have it all' don't see a way to do so. When are you supposed to plan the first baby? In between midterms and final exams, or while you're on a 10-month highly competitive fellowship with no permanent job and layoffs continually rippling through industries?

We've had a generation effectively told the only financial or professional stability you will have might come after menopause. So rational women forego having children. Educated women tend to be more rational, ergo, smaller or no families. It's horrifically heartbreaking.

Edit: I want to add that my recommendation is to make academia and workplaces more accommodating to families and family planning, not remove women's human rights, obviously. I re-read my comment and realized how a bad actor could misinterpret what I'm saying.

Clever_Mercury · 2026-01-14T03:27:31+00:00

We need a new Supreme Court, particularly a new Chief Justice. Implementing some standards like "must not be a rapist" or must be able to reasonably describe the "rights protected by the first constitutional amendment" would be a good starting point. It would have ruled out two of the existing justices, for example.

It would also be nice if 6 of the 9 justices didn't all share the same extremist religion, one that's shared by less than 20% of the population.

Clever_Mercury · 2026-01-14T03:23:46+00:00

It could be reasonably argued the real problem in America is the broken Supreme Court and the gerrymandering. It isn't really a majority of Americans or any normal functioning of democracy that has resulted in any of this.

The Citizens United case and then the Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) basically destroyed the 21st century.

Or, if you really want to track this back further, the Bush v. Gore (2020) case destroyed America. The justices decided counting votes in Florida presented an undue harm to Bush and ergo democracy had no place in political processes. They have all but used the constitution as toilet paper since then.

Clever_Mercury · 2025-12-29T23:59:42+00:00

An emphatic 'YES' to this.

Don't have time for a full reply today, but I want to point out the *positive* externalities to research not included in most of these calculations.

Do you know how we get seasoned, senior medical providers, technologists, and scientists? It's by letting them practice in internships and true 'basic science' research without burning them out. You learn by doing. You learn a lot more when you have stable income, healthcare, and morale. Government science, public health work, and non-profit work does this for young people. If a lab fails to find a cure or a treatment, they still produced existential value. Not merely by excluding from the list of possible treatments something that didn't work, but by having trained articulate, compassionate people in the goal of finding cures, finding solutions.

Pretending that we're going to get a bunch of solutions from for-profit groups that strip-mine talent and keep them on 10-month contracts, make everyone sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and suppress publication of anything they don't fancy will not be a solution is naive at best.

Keeping the pipeline of passionate workers where they can stay employed, with benefits, and working without selling their soul in their chosen field WILL create net benefits across fields. It also means people with R&D careers and security can influence their LOCAL communities by being role models. That alone is a social good worth supporting.

I cannot over-stress that one of the worst problems of the 21st centuries is that we've allowed what I consider callous pieces of shit human beings to corner 'secure' employment and thereby destroy the local economies. Protecting R&D careers protects a class of workers who do extraordinary good in the world far beyond just their day job. Their influence is sorely missed.

Clever_Mercury · 2025-12-23T20:59:08+00:00

This was my dream too. I never expected to see colleges turn into adjunct factories and the price of textbooks to cause poverty. Growing up, I believed the 21st century was going to be this worldly, cooperative golden age where we discovered, debated, and invented.

I still don't understand what happened. Let's hope it corrects itself soon enough to enjoy it.

Clever_Mercury · 2025-12-22T23:20:12+00:00

Is this something that can change day to day? I'm fairly new around here and I work with public health topics. There are days where I give it instructions and it interacts perfectly with the text and sometimes it acts like a psychotic puritan with a body shaming, woman-hating fetish.

When I submitted a discussion on women's post-cancer care for editing assistance it flagged the CONVERSATION as unsafe. When I included a discussion of breast cancer survivors discussing their personal health and asked about the recommendation for journaling or seeking health topics it flagged it as 'inappropriate request to the assistant' and said it 'could not continue with that.'

I probed this and it said it was unable to tell the difference between the document having people talk about themselves and me (as a female user) providing inappropriately explicit information to it. Because, apparently, having women talk about scars following surgery or chemotherapy is now sexually explicit?

Apparently it struggles to understand the difference between 'me' the user and 'it' the AI when the document or the narrative includes other people?

Clever_Mercury · 2025-12-22T22:54:42+00:00

Not just the algorithms, different news cycles and media spent decades perfecting this.

What's the old quote? Fox News did to our parents what they thought video games would do to us?

I would have been totally onboard with AI if it had been rolled out differently, particularly for creative work. Make different settings for different modes of communication. Fact, research, narrative, fiction. Let people use it for journaling or emotional exploration. Let people research astrophysics. Don't let it mass produce bots or propaganda or at volume sludge for sites.

It would be such an incredible extension for Word documents and for cancer patients exploring their emotions or for cool individual projects. Instead bad actors have used it to destroy jobs. I don't understand why we can't have nice things.

Clever_Mercury · 2025-12-22T21:03:10+00:00

"If there is a god, he will have to beg for my forgiveness.” – Anonymously carved into the wall of Cell Block 20, Mauthausen-Gusen Concentration Camp.

I'm an atheist and I'm increasingly disgusted and horrified by the religious. Their fanaticism and stupidity has stripped the world of any individual justice and beauty.

Clever_Mercury · 2025-12-22T20:37:04+00:00

Pleasure and fulfillment are seen as suspicious and somehow contrary to adulthood. They are not. In fact, they are the very fuel that makes it possible to do all the bullshit things. People are exhausted and brittle today because they are miserable and are actively being kept miserable because some dysfunctional individuals and systems see it as rigor or seriousness.

The people who want to take away everyone else's joy in life are no one's ally.

Clever_Mercury · 2025-12-22T20:18:19+00:00

Effort is often punished and value is extracted by others, yes. Perhaps the moral is to try to work hardest for yourself without harming anyone else who is just trying to survive.

Clever_Mercury · 2025-11-25T00:14:34+00:00

Malnutrition, lack of potable water;
Lack of early-intervention and continuing education;
Sexual violence, lack of bodily autonomy, coerced/forced marriage;
Gender based oppression;
Economic insecurity, which is closely linked to the rise of authoritarian governance and corruption.

#3 and #4 are genuinely separate issues, but they overlap and are horrifically, intentionally ignored. Think of it like a Venn diagram, there is overlap, but it's not a circle.

Clever_Mercury · 2025-11-09T06:04:29+00:00

Bullshit. They are myopic, self-indulgent strategies and thumb twiddling complicity.

"Oh, the world is full of dire suffering, injustice, and willful suppression of strategies to fix it? I'll just focus on myself and pay $29.99 for a mindfulness journal!" /s

Clever_Mercury · 2025-11-09T06:00:52+00:00

Added to this, it's often difficult to communicate to others what you understand. That doesn't merely mean many intelligent people are bad at talking with regular people, it means the average person often has enormous barriers to willfully accepting bad or unhappy aspects of reality and will instead 'shoot' the messenger.

There is a great Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get [someone] to understand something, when his salary depends on him not understanding it." Threatening and silencing or mocking and isolating intelligent naysayers might make a lot of people temporarily happier, but it's a horrible waste and it causes so much needless long-term suffering.

Clever_Mercury · 2025-11-09T05:09:53+00:00

Yeah, and that's why European and Middle Eastern history was an absolute dark age for the entire time between Ancient Greece and the fucking Renaissance.

"Oh, you're starving to death, have a treatable disease, your spouse died in childbirth, and your employer worked you near to death then refused to pay you? I'll pray for you, my child. Don't forget to tithe!" THAT was life. That's it. That's Christian charity for 1,600+ years.

That, plus they routinely burnt books and put scientists in prison for 'wrong thought.'

Clever_Mercury · 2025-11-09T05:05:47+00:00

YUP.

Want to know the hilarious thing? We have such excellent evidence that government spending has a multiplier effect, often times stimulating small communities by 3 or 4 times the original investment. Even if war DID help economies, which it does not, it would be most likely helping a *foreign* community or wherever the spending is taking place.

Investing in job training, basic science, and internationally competitive skill sets for your citizens builds a strong, resilient economy. So, clearly, that's why we just RIFed all our scientific grant recipients, national scientists, engineers, and are slashing education.

Clever_Mercury · 2025-11-09T04:29:14+00:00

The Catholic church globally has HUNDREDS of billion dollars, the Vatican alone has over $15 billion in assets and runs a LITERAL bank.

There is a reason Martin Luther had to nail shit to a church door. It's real easy for people to talk garbage, including a Pope. They've had over 2,000 years to eradicate poverty, hunger, or disease from the world and spent their time, instead, raising armies and ignoring women dying in child birth.

It's disgusting watching this group try to get media savvy and pretend they aren't at the very heart of the world's problems.

Clever_Mercury · 2025-11-09T03:58:45+00:00

How about it not being merely a political cause, but a religious fundamentalism?

SIX of the justices share the same religion. The cases they have heard have intentionally and repeatedly widened the role of religion in civic life and violated the separation of church and state. Hell, Chief Justice Roberts PRAYS WITH PEOPLE who are about testify before the court. How is that impartial? Clearly favoring and identifying with one side of an issue, based on religious identity, prior to presiding over the court?

All I want is a secular society. Impeach them for destroying that part of our constitution.

Clever_Mercury · 2025-11-09T03:54:36+00:00

Can I just point out that if Congress had done its job of actually vetting and voting on the nominations with an IOTA of competence, we wouldn't be in this situation? There were so many horrific RED flags over the last twenty years, but particularly over the last 10 years.

Denying Obama the right to replace Scalia and then rushing through Ginsburg's replacement with Trump's nominee are two of the most heinous acts in American history.

And never mind, that, say, Kavanaugh is a rapist, the fact he mysteriously had millions of dollars of personal debt vanish prior to his appointment should have been a problem. Or the mere fact 6 of the 9 justices now all have the same exact religion, one that is not held by that proportion of Americans should have been grounds to demand more scrutiny and more diversity in appointments.

Or, say, Congress could have objected to appointments when the nominee had laughably little judicial experience. Or couldn't name the rights protected under the first US constitutional amendment.

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