Bitter Scientist

"...the scientific system was never designed for equity..."

Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning The white Christian nationalist provocateur wasn’t a promoter of civil discourse. He preached hate, bigotry, and division

The Nation pulls NO punches, from @espiers.bsky.social

"There's no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign. Refusing to join in doesn’t make anyone a bad person. It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins “Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.”

'No Humans Involved': Ezra Klein and the Logic of White Liberal Sympathy The Charlie Kirk Debate — A Requiem for America’s Beloved Preachers of Hate.

"The sad truth is that white supremacy is not a deal breaker for many white liberals."

'No Humans Involved': Ezra Klein and the Logic of White Liberal Sympathy The Charlie Kirk Debate — A Requiem for America’s Beloved Preachers of Hate.

When intelligent public thinkers, such as Ezra Klein, valorize “Kirk as an example of, “practicing politics in exactly the right way,” . . .we are reminded that the blind spot many white liberals have when it comes to overlooking racism can never be overstated.”
open.substack.com/pub/wordsbyb...

Science is under siege from weaponised disinformation – posing a threat to human civilisation | Michael Mann and Peter Hotez From Covid misinformation to climate denialism, understanding the divergent paths of Australia and the US can help us fight the powerful forces that threaten our world

"Science is under siege from weaponised disinformation – posing a threat to human civilisation" | My oped in the @theguardian.com with @peterhotezmdphd.bsky.social on our new book #ScienceUnderSiege: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Trump vs. Higher Education: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) YouTube video by LastWeekTonight

John Oliver: "While get the appeal of thinking just one more concession, one more payoff might safeguard your independence or let you live to fight another day, it's worth asking at what point have you compromised so much that
the thing you're supposed to be defending is gone."

Columbia punished our kids for protesting against the genocide in Gaza. We condemn the university’s cowardice We are the parents of students who faced disciplinary actions for pro-Palestine activism. The struggle for liberation will not end with suspensions and expulsions

“The idea that campus activists would be suspended en masse for protest activity would have been unthinkable back in 1985 when Columbia divested from apartheid South Africa after years of student protest and pressure. But these are very different times…”

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Science Makes the U.S. a Great Nation History tells us what happens when great nations attack science

Science Makes the U.S. a Great Nation: History tells us what happens when great nations attack science www.scientificamerican.com/article/scie...

Politicizing Scientific Research Comes With a Hefty Price More oversight at the National Institutes of Health is slowing down innovation that could meaningfully improve people’s lives.

The Trump administration, seemingly determined to hobble the NIH, continues to devise new and insidious ways to politicize what has long been considered the crown jewel of US research.
My latest for @opinion.bloomberg.com (🎁 link):

Bhattacharya is the New Lysenko Starving the NIH through ineptitude, bitterness, and thirst for revenge

Привет, товарищи! It’s another glorious day in which Trump’s America is increasingly indistinguishable from Stalinist Russia, so I thought an armchair comparative analysis was in order.

Specifically about Jay Bhattacharya's twin from times past, Trofim Lysenko.
open.substack.com/pub/rasmusse...

Pink Floyd album cover of Wish You Were Here with two men in business suits shaking hands, the man on the right is on fire.

Today in Alaska.

Underrepresented minority faculty in the USA face a double standard in promotion and tenure decisions - Nature Human Behaviour Masters-Waage et al. report that underrepresented minority (URM) faculty in the USA face barriers in the promotion and tenure process, receiving more negative votes and fewer unanimous positive decisi...

‘URM faculty received 7% more negative votes & were 44% less likely to receive unanimous votes from P&T committees. A double standard in how scholarly productivity is rewarded is also observed, with below-average h-indexes being judged more harshly for URM faculty than for non-URM faculty.’

i will never not be amused by how the conservative world is governed by the kind of “affirmative action” they say happens in mainstream institutions. totally unqualified dipshits are handed the keys to institutions because they say the right thing and have the right look.

Federal Grantmaking Gets a Christofascist Glow-Up Read my zero star review of the new Executive Order

This Executive Order is a gross overreach of Presidential power and undermines democracy. It steals from taxpayers, will destroy science and the economy, and ultimately, America.

Congress must act now.
open.substack.com/pub/rasmusse...

Didn’t want to believe this was true. It’s true.

I don't know whether to be more offended by the illegality, the sheer gall, the stupidity, or the amateurish presentation. I'm going to go with the stupidity.

Brandon S. Gaut, the inaugural recipient of the Genetics Society of America Mentorship Award for 2025, shares his journey into academia that shaped his ideas on kind mentorship and fostering an inclusive environment. 

Read his story in his own words in #GENETICS: buff.ly/zZBnvPm

We already know that overselling findings and “story over substance” are a threat to scientific knowledge production.

I’m extremely worried that the massive restructuring of science funding will reproduce the same hype-dependent dynamic for research.

the one thing i genuinely did not anticipate from this administration was its vicious, know nothing hostility to any and everything that might even be adjacent to science and scientific research. they genuinely one to destroy the entirety of the nation’s research capacity. and for what, exactly?

trump is first and foremost a vehicle for delusional extremists — most of whom are total mediocrities — to impose their ideologies on the country, with vought as a paradigmatic example

I will be more blunt: many of these essayists are “aggrieved” because they were, in some ways, held accountable for their racist and/or misogynistic views or behavior and incorrectly blame “science” and not progress. It’s not a lack of curiosity that fuels this book, it’s resentment

when RFK says he wants to “end chronic disease,” what people hear is “he wants to cure us” but what he means is “i want to cull the weak”

How Liberalism Sabotages Itself Our intentional blindness to bad faith is a loophole fascists use to gain respectability and power.

Good intervention from @brianbeutler.bsky.social demonstrating that liberals need to internalize and act on the idea that right wing bad faith actors "view liberal freedoms as loopholes to exploit in their pursuit of power."
www.offmessage.net/p/how-libera...

This column on U.S. concentration camps is the one I hoped I’d never write | Will Bunch Andrea Pitzer literally wrote the book on concentration camps. I talked to her about how they came to America.

Epstein matters, but there's a much greater story of American moral depravity that ought to be leading the news

America is building an archipelago of squalid concentration camps. No one knows where this will end. The time to scream 'Never again'? Now!

My new column www.inquirer.com/opinion/us-c...

"Lesser Schools" and My Experience as a Black Texas Ex | Washington Monthly Fisher v. The University of Texas at Austin is in the Supreme Court again. The lawsuit centers on whether or not “less qualified” students were admitted to The University of Texas at Austin, at the ex...

"It’s just that, a court case requiring a little more decorum than a drunken undergrad, they simply can’t yell “get out the way nigger”."

I wrote this ten years ago, and I hate that it still reads like a banger cause nobody fucking listens.

If the Supreme Court allows #NIH to terminate ongoing grants because it changed its mind on priorities, it will be the end of NIH and the end of the US as a leader in biomedical science. Period.

thehill.com/policy/healt...

LHSC names 5 former executives in $60M fraud lawsuits LHSC contends a former executive masterminded a "fraudulent scheme" and he and others used funds they obtained to buy properties

Almost every major university financial fraud is done by administrators...yet note the difference between the comically instrusive surveillance and accountability for faculty over every dollar vs the complete lack of oversight for management spending (or stealing).

lfpress.com/news/local-n...

As Universities Cede to Fascism, Faculty Must Refuse to Follow Once upon a time, universities sought to be spaces where critical thought was championed, diversity was celebrated, and academic freedom was valued. Since the Civil Rights Movement, many universiti…

In my latest blog post I lay out some things we as faculty can do to ensure that higher education remains an incubator that prepares future generations for a multiracial democracy as opposed to an incubator for Trump's fascist agenda. Check it out!
educationallinguist.wordpress.com/2025/07/24/a...

it's never been about antisemitism

more evidence for “a bunch of AI cultists dismantled large parts of the federal government because they believed that their LLMs were intelligent and could do the work better” thesis