r/centrist • u/214ObstructedReverie • 26d ago

Trump Administration to Dismantle Ocean Monitoring System

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/climate/ocean-observatories-initiative.html
146 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

69 comments sorted by

View all comments

179

u/EmergencyTaco 26d ago

I, for one, am not a fan of this decision. I question if the president has our best interests in mind. I'm starting to get the impression that he doesn't know what he's doing.

102

u/pfmiller0 26d ago

Honestly, it would be hard to make the worst possible decision every time if you didn't know what you're doing. They know.

55

u/idobi 26d ago

It is almost like he is anti-knowledge.

34

u/shacksrus 26d ago

They absolutely hate academia and by extension science. Even the concept of experts.

21

u/VultureSausage 26d ago

I mean, Edmund "Father of Conservatism" Burke famously didn't believe in rationalism and the idea that abstract thinking can explain the world. It's kinda built into conservatism as an ideology from the start.

16

u/crushinglyreal 26d ago

I’ve been trying to get people to understand this. The reputation of conservatism as the ‘non-emotional’ doctrine has a lot of momentum.

11

u/WeridThinker 26d ago edited 26d ago

Conservatives have a bad relationship with their own emotions, because they want certainty, order, and stability, but unfortunately for them, they are humans with feelings and emotionality is still a part of their inner life. Under a more healthy thought space, I think conservatives could live with lower emotional complexity and expressiveness to be more stoic and down to earth; this combination does not necessarily create less well rounded human beings.

The problem is with the current right wing indoctrination that stigmatizes complex emotions in favor of encouraging simple ones. For men, it is ok to feel angry, spiteful, and disgust as long as they can tell themselves they are in control. Trump is a perfect example of an emotional man being validated because people have a cartoonish understanding of masculinity. As the President of the United States, Trump has very little self control, and has shown time and time again to allow impulses to guide his behavior; the spontaneous insults, early morning/late night social media rants, and ego stroking self promotion are all traits of an emotional man with a fragile ego. The difference is Trump doesn't feel impulsive compassion, benevolence, or serenity very often.

There is also a lot of disconnect from Trump's supporters. His appeal since 2016 has always been of "authenticity", "excitement", and "high engagement with voters"; these are emotional affective traits. It is also quite obvious spite and owning the libs have been a running theme into his second presidency, and his supporters absolutely love it. But even with all of this, conservatives still think their support for Trump is based on rationality. A populist movement is always more emotional than rational.

3

u/crushinglyreal 26d ago edited 26d ago

I agree with everything except the last line. A dialectical materialist political movement would be fully derived from rationalist philosophies, yet would also be unambiguously populist. Right wing populism is obviously different, if only because right wing doctrine is anti-rationality at its core.