Deep expertise is not a blank check for funding. There is only so much money to go around and at some point you have to articulate your value to those paying for it (in this case, the tax payers and their representatives).
Yes, this means a high level summary generally focused on ends rather than the gory details of the means.
An expert acting in good faith should be able to provide this or, in the spirit of the Feynman technique, I would argue they aren't much of an expert at all.
> Deep expertise is not a blank check for funding.
Sure. But the people vetting your proposals should have useful expertise in assessing it. Individual grant proposals for scientific research should essentially never be something a congressional rep is deciding on.
Someone needs to assess, say, the B-21's radar absorbent coating project, but it'd be a mistake to think some random pediatrician is the right one to do it.
Congress does not, by and large, get down to that level. They are typically approving a line time that encompasses a form of lump sum (i.e. "$100 million to NSF across these categories").
Defense spending would typically be a gruesome bidding process.
But either way, your proposal must at some point speak to something a generalist would understand. And that is how it should be - anything else is taxation without representation.
I think it's been pretty well established that most legislators do not take the time to understand the details of bills prior to voting.
Moreover, these articles refer to an attempt to question how grant money already given (and presumably spent) was used.
Scrutiny is an inherent part of the powers of the purse. I.e. "we gave you $100 million to provide disaster relief, economic development in our sphere of influence, etc - what did you do with it?"
It's fair to want to retain the spending being questioned, but Congress is explicitly responsible for this function.
None of the articles I found went into more detail than the NY Times one. What they all say in common is that the French researcher was denied entrance. If the US version is true (and I can't be sure either way), then the presupposition would be that individual was already on a DHS list, not that customs necessarily found it.
As for whether they knowingly let a spy leave, that would depend on a full timeline.
> As for whether they knowingly let a spy leave, that would depend on a full timeline.
No it does not if the defense for denying him entry was knowing that he was a spy?
Stop arguing out of both sides of your mouth. So far both proffered explanations are unacceptable.
To be clear the two answers so far have been,
1: we found personal comments of him on his phone critical of the administration and denied him entry based on that, which is unacceptable on free speech grounds
Or
2: he was known or found to have secrets from one of our nuclear labs and was denied entry based on the fact that we knew he had these forbidden files, and we let him go. This is unacceptable on national security grounds.
That's a false dichotomy. The severity depends on what the individual attempted to remove. Nuclear secrets might be unacceptable to allow him to leave. Something more administrative might not be worth the jurisdiction hassle to prosecute but still get the individual flagged against re-entry.
If he stole documents I don’t want my government only flagging him for denial to reentry. If he stole documents from our nuclear labs I want him in cuffs.
How am I being inconsistent if your “false dichotomy” claim persists?
I didn't say anything about Inconsistency, so I will set that to the side.
My entire point is that these things are seldom so black and white as put forward. The US administration has a self serving answer, but so do the French and this anonymous scientist. Which do you think is less professionally damaging for a European, being denied entrance due to views on American politics or being denied based on mishandling of classified material?
In an ideal world, I would prefer to see any mishandling of classification prosecuted, that seldom is how it works.
Without knowing a timeline, it isn't even clear which administration was running things under which events.
Nothing in your response outlined a possibility that was not in 1 of the 2 options given by my own government.
I don't give a fuck what the French or Europeans think. I am holding my own government accountable to what are ostensibly the values we share(freedom of speech and national security) and finding them lacking. It requires zero input from the French scientist in question for me to be upset with the situation
And no, I don't need a timeline to understand this because my problem with the government's own explanation does not have a time based component
> the critical difference between secular ideology and religious ideology is that (in a properly functioning society) you can challenge/question/probe secular ideology.
This feels like an odd statement, given how many of the most repressive regimes in human history were or are secular. Maybe the "properly functioning" part is doing the heavy lifting, but if so, it makes the statement almost meaningless.
> Require human moderation. That naturally limits scale.
Does it? Does a human need to examine everything posted? You can certainly send letters without them going through a human moderator. Only what is flagged by a scanner? What if nothing is flagged? What should be flagged?
There was no greater cause of human suffering in the 20th century than the worldwide attempts to build communist governments.
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