This is the type of thing that'd normally show up on CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report which has been published weekly since 1960 (my understanding is this is without fail).
But unfortunately the current administration has decided an ideological purification is more important than keeping the American public apprised of threats to their health.
So it wasn't published last week, and probably won't be this week either. "Politics don't matter" though ;) Bummer!
> then wouldn't they want to spread the info and blame it on the "dirty illegals" or whatever?
pretty sure the ideology is to remove every social safety net and service to "prove" government doesn't work and then the robber barons can swoop in and make it a paid service... and make it so the capital class gets to make and save more money as they can afford to buy any of those services that were cut. it's basically vulture economics but at the nation scale. it's not great.
This isn't really an urgent "alert" system per se, more of a knowledge dissemination system. Security postmortems more so than critical security patches.
We have good reason to believe it'd show up here given that Kansas's TB situation has had multiple bulletins over the years
The analogy breaks down in that rate of infection of a disease is historical but very much informs ongoing public health measures that should be taken.
One might conclude, given how closely the current administration has been following the project 2025 plan that was floating around, that the administration paused functions pending ideological purity checks on key personnel.
Read the data. There are many more latent cases recorded, and current new cases are not all recorded as the tally lags people sick right now.
You keep quoting that part and ignoring the rest of the article and the live data sources linked to it. The text of the article likely wasn’t from yesterday, as the reporter likely went around a week or two, gathered quotes, interviews, then spent some time in editorial revisions.
Maybe you can link to whatever data you're looking at. The article says one new active case and that the overall number of cases, including latent, are trending down. This is still consistent with this being a bigger deal last year than this year. The KS health data still shows 1 active for this year.
This goes way past teams bud. If you don't realize the kind of existential threat trump is posing to millions of people, you haven't paid attention to a single thing he's done since taking office.
Maybe the political climate is impacting a higher number of topical points that are being discussed on HN. When governments are changing, interfering, and impacting technology you're going to see it crop up more.
It's not a "rough start for HN", it's the current climate of the world through the lens of the US.
> The political commentary is infecting every thread.
Unfortunately politics has infected areas of our lives we took for granted. The stopping of reporting coming out of the CDC/NIH/HHS makes discussing health science articles more challenging. And this is a direct result of the new administration. While this article may not be vaccine related, the new administration wants a known anti-vaxxer to lead the HHS.
I would argue that being rabidly apolitical while a dangerous threat to western democracy has been growing in America for years is the rough part.
I'm an old person. I have a leftist bent. I used to get along with many conservatives, I just had different policy viewpoints than they did. What we are seeing now is a completely different political landscape where one of the parties is actively setting up a dynastic plutocracy in the open.
FWIW I have a ton of criticism for the "other" party too as an ineffective mess sucking the corporate teet almost as hard, just without the actual proto fascism.
Some yes, but maybe not you? Because you used the following language yesterday:
"Only a few short months ago, I was under constant attack from various public members of the Democratic party for being a white male with center-right views. The vitriol was quite unhinged, really." when asked for specifics you went to '...on CNN for example'.
* edit: I mean for use as ammunition in an argument. It's not that you're wrong—it's just that the cost (to the intended spirit of the site) outweighs the benefit (being right in an argument).
TBH this idea that each comment should stand individually on its (including HN's downplaying of the usernym with grey) seems like it contributes to some of the problems with modern discourse. When someone I know says something challenging, I know the context they're coming from, what I do agree with them on, what skills of theirs I respect, etc. Whereas message board comments are just tiny slivers of information with which you can agree or disagree.
Oh for sure. There's nothing wrong with people getting to know each other, and their views, by reading through past comments.
It's just not in the intended spirit of HN to track down contradictions and use them as gotchas in arguments. That's a narrower point. I've added an edit to the GP comment to clarify that.
Do I engage in politics on HN occasionally? Yes. Is it my primary motivation? No. I don't open up HN with the intention of having rigorous political discussions, even though I sometimes fall into them.
My comment history, which it seems you only partially perused, demonstrates this to be true. Especially if you go back a year ago before things became politically charged around here.
I also don't see what relevance my example has to this conversation. It sounds like you're trying to corner me into a specific label (Republican, maybe?). I guess thanks for proving my point about discussions around here?
I haven't used party labels on HN. You seem to be the one forcing an identity on me? I would respond but my post was out of bounds so I shouldn't elaborate/reference further.
FYI if you read my post history you will see I am a libertarian leaning (Santa Cruz hippie libertarian not Rand Paul 'my dad got me the job but I believe in everyone earning their way' libertarian) refugee from the Bay Area to a small town in a very red state. I don't have the agenda you think other than calling out hypocrisy and a desire for a functioning health system.
> This is the type of thing that'd normally show up on CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
The resurgence of TB has been the big story in infectious diseases for a while now.
Globally:
> The World Health Organization (WHO) today published a new report on tuberculosis revealing that approximately 8.2 million people were newly diagnosed with TB in 2023 – the highest number recorded since WHO began global TB monitoring in 1995. This represents a notable increase from 7.5 million reported in 2022, placing TB again as the leading infectious disease killer in 2023, surpassing COVID-19.
> After declining for three decades, tuberculosis (TB) rates in the U.S. have been increasing steadily since 2020, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s a disturbing trend given that 1.5 million die from TB every year, making it the world’s most infectious killer.
> The resurgence of TB has been the big story in infectious diseases for a while now.
It's been a big story since the 1980s, IIRC. I remember in college in the 1990s a biologist friend explaining that TB was the greatest disease threat to public health and it was being completely ignored.
Frankly, it's hard to get worked up about it. Notwithstanding that it is a serious public health threat, there's a strong political rhetoric aspect to the discussion, both in the popular and professional spheres. It's unfortunate. In the 1980s and 1990s it was all about how Reagan decimated our public health infrastructure. The arguments aren't per se wrong, but it's difficult to gauge relevance and prioritization about the threat of TB given how part of the medical and scientific community seem to have been border-line crying wolf for 40 years. Discussion centers around absolute numbers. Tell me what the per capita relationship looks like, especially per capita among the populations most vulnerable to acquisition and disease, and what the long-term trends look like. I see this in a lot of other adjacent public health discussions tainted by political hand wringing, such as food insecurity, etc--lots of absolute numbers. But global populations are growing. The US, for example, grew by 80 million people, or 30%, between 1990 and 2020. That's not to deny that tuberculosis is a growing problem, but we have many problems. And the constant drum beat of alarm causes some parts of the community to (increasingly) react in counterproductive ways. From an individual moral standpoint, that's on them, but from an epidemiological and sociological perspective, maybe the professionals bear a little blame, too, at least in terms of communication. We could all do better.
Rubbish, on all counts. Public health discussion constantly gives rates and percentages, not just numbers. And “they’ve been warning us so many times” - well, I hope you’ve also given up on applying security updates to any software or hardware you manage, since those have been getting issued forever, they must be crying wolf too.
My point isn't that agencies don't report incidence; my point is about when the discussion surfaces how it's discussed in the popular press, including editorializations in professional outlet. Were incidence rate flat or down between convenient points of comparison, but absolute numbers up, and an outbreak like Kansas happen, we'd be discussion absolute numbers. And even when incidence is up, the absolute numbers always headline. It's a subtle criticism I'm making, but I think an important one.
Nonetheless, while for 40 years TB has been discussed as a grace looming threat, note how absolute cases and incidence dropped steeply over most of that time. And while the drop has largely stopped, the US now has one of the lowest incidence rates in the world. But my takeaway is supposed to be that the US' TB measures are woefully broken because the drop has stopped?
The point is that if we'd put in a bit more effort 40 and 30 years ago, there would be 0 cases today (and if we put a bunch more effort in now, there will be 0 cases in 20 years). TB is awful, but it is curable and preventable. It's current existence in the world is a policy choice of the past few decades, and eradicating it is a choice we can make today.
> This is the type of thing that'd normally show up on CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report which has been published weekly since 1960 (my understanding is this is without fail).
> But unfortunately the current administration has decided an ideological purification is more important than keeping the American public apprised of threats to their health.
Looking at the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, this doesn't actually appear to be true. Going by that link you can read past MMWR reports, and they aren't (from everything I can see) doing weekly tracking of outbreaks, but rather publishing various articles about diseases the way a science journal would. I couldn't find anything about the Kansas tuberculosis outbreak in the most recent reports, so I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see anything about it in the next few MMRW reports.
For anyone unaware of us government agency structure. CDC is part of the department of health and human services ( HHS ) which has also frozen everything (see the NIH news as well).
Employees have been instructed to pull publications from review, not communicate with state health departments, and cancel long planned trainings.
These decisions will well and truly kill real people.
I’m an academic scientist part of a really large government funded research grant that employs hundreds of people. Last time, we had to fire half our staff immediately right up front because they said they were cutting our funding. They ended up not cutting our funding at all, but we had already fired everyone so it was lose lose- the Government spent the money but the research couldn’t be done. Just plain bad leadership.
I've had two grants in a row get killed for political reasons, and a third is on the chopping block. What really kills me is that we get through the unpleasant, unproductive scaling up part, are about to hit our stride, and then...gone.
We hired new people with less experience and restarted the projects, but in a lot of cases the projects were set back years with no reduction in the cost.
It was the policy of the granting federal agency- it was not our choice, we had to immediately start operating on the president's proposed low budget in case it were to pass, rather than spend money that might never exist.
This happened because Trump's administration essentially copy and pasted Heritage Foundation materials rather than carefully think through a realistic budget.
It's even worse than that: it's more like buying unrefundable materials to build a house today on an account/invoice, knowing you will likely be unemployed before the bill comes due, but after the materials are delivered. You're spending money up front that you don't have, and may never have.
If you spend full budget for the first half of the fiscal year, but a final budget gets passed later that cuts your budget in half- you get no remaining money for the year, and then end up firing everyone, instead of half. This is why the federal agencies have the policy of immediately acting on the lowest proposed budget, instead of waiting to see what happens.
> For anyone unaware of us government agency structure. CDC is part of the department of health and human services ( HHS ) which has also frozen everything (see the NIH news as well).
> Employees have been instructed to pull publications from review, not communicate with state health departments, and cancel long planned trainings.
> These decisions will well and truly kill real people.
These are the executive orders we are talking about.
Are you strong enough of a person to address this? Or must you insult people's intelligence by dishonest accusations?
Basically what you are saying is that me robbing you, and me making economic policy that might lead to increased unemployment which might lead to greater housing or food insecurity which might lead to increases in crime which might lead to you getting robber are indistinguishable.
Adults can differentiate between direct and indirect causal relationships…it is basically the cognitive development definition of adulthood (c.f. Work by Piaget)
The scary(?) part about Trump voters this time around is that the narrative up to last year forced most such voters underground. It's why election pollsters all failed across the board.
Source: Me. I voted Trump and proudly so, didn't deliberate in public much because noone was going to listen and nothing was going to change my vote anyway. Make America Great Again.
he's not responsible for an outbreak of a contagious illness. if he had been president 3 weeks ago the LA fire would have been linked to him. thats how it was for 4 years. then one day, nothing was the president's fault anymore. Nobody beleives that.
Trump offered tangible things while the opponent offered a much more though out philosophy and platform (even if one i disagree with).
The fact Trump offered to pardon Ross was enough to make me feel incredibly guilty for not voting for him. I was surprised he found a way to get to me like that, but reality and practical negotiation can be quite persuasive over ideology.
I suspect Trump had at least one important thing to enough people that is 100% achievable and physically real-- a part of a wall, a pardon, a $2000 -- that he could beat out someone offering ideas/hopes/dreams.
Submissions like that often get flagged because they are mainstream political news items. As the HN guidelines say: “If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.”
Mortality is taken over the population as a whole. You want the case fatality rate (probability of death if you're infected), which in the US is 7-9%. Globally, some countries have TB case rates >30%.
TB is a very ancient, very scary disease that's co-evolved with us. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that large parts of modern medicine were invented specifically to get a handle on TB because it has historically ravaged entire populations when left untreated.
You have the option of voting for a third party candidate. They won't win, but over multiple election cycles this increases the odds that a third party could eventually present a credible alternative.
In most states the electoral college representatives are not meaningfully bound to the vote as popularly voted. It is more of a cast for a suggestion, and they have on many occasions voted a different way in the college which is the real vote for president.
The people that didn't vote don't count, figuratively or literally. You may as well have pointed out that only .1% of all mammals supported this, after accounting for dogs, cows, raccoons, mice...
Everyone who chose not to vote effectively removed themselves from the set of people to be counted as either supporting or not supporting this administration.
That's not actually how 'support' works, especially when 'the' alternative was committed to arming a genocidal apartheid regime against the will of their own voters. Many. many people can no longer stomach to 'hold their noses' and vote in favor of open atrocity.
There's a whole lot of people who strongly disdain both parties, on that basis and others. They are not remotely proportionally represented by either government or media, but they do exist and they don't support this administration.
Btw, there are all kinds of electoral solutions to the two party bind which you seem to have entirely accepted. Neither party will ever willingly bring those in.
… Do you think President is the only thing on the ballot? Do you think that maybe, if everyone voted, the demographics might be different?
I’m so tired of this nonsense. If y’all bothered showing up for state and local races, you could even change elections in your state. But that would like, take effort, so I get why you’d rather shitpost about how worthless it all is.
Ah, so by “not voting” you meant “leaving one box blank while already filling out the rest of the ballot because what’s the point of wasting the ink”?
Sorry, that reads, to me, like post hoc justification for nonsense. The only people who talk about voting not mattering are people who don’t vote - not people who skip one or two boxes on the form. Maybe you’re different.
Or you can be an adult and vote for the best option. Harris and the Democratic establishment are certainly not saints and I could rant for hours at how bad they are, but she was a competent woman and at least tried to float solutions to our problems as opposed to being a party of billionaires who is happy to burn it all down.
A lot of people see their vote for president like picking a team to be on and couldn't stomach being on either team.
I try to rephrase it for them: you're not picking a team, you're picking your OPPONENT. And who do you think you're going to have a better chance of even picking the battlegrounds against?
I think it's related to the frustratingly common idea that a person's political involvement begins and ends with voting. We really have to do a lot better at educating people about how political involvement can be an anytime thing, not just every four years. Successful lobbyists (and those who employ them) have long ago figured this out, we need to make sure the common person does, too!
Exactly this! I just don't understand how this is hard for otherwise competent people to grasp. The explanation I've used in the past is the choices are either being stabbed in the face or kicked in the balls. Ideally I'd not have either, but forced between one or the other I know which one I'd pick.
David Sedaris: “I look at these people and can't quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention? To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it? To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.”
I'm not sure who told you that casting a blank ballot represents a "protest vote", but I assure you that is not how our current voting system is set up.
To be clear, voting systems should have explicit options for protest votes; an explicit "I reject all candidates" option. Unfortunately, ours does not, by design; a blank ballot instead means "I endorse all candidates". Pretending otherwise will not change this.
Playing the tape to the end, what happens is the protest votes win? Start a new election cycle? What happens if that cycle now extends past the end of the current admin’s term which cause their time in office to extend beyond 2 terms? How do you then prevent the incumbent from using that to their advantage to stay in office?
Jeebus, I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but dems the times we live in I guess.
I vote third parties. Blank counts as don't care, while a third party says I care and not you. When third parties get votes the majors pay attention less those third parties win.
I often am blank on things where I cannot find any information and so cannot have an imformed vote.
...which does just about as much as voting (that is, precious little).
If we're ever going to claw ourselves out of this (or any) mess, we need ranked choice or something like it. The giant douche / turd sandwich dichotomy needs to end, for everyone on any side of the political spectrum.
No matter what system of voting we use, unless we go back to only white landowning men can vote or something (doubt we want to do that), you can’t avoid the fact that 160 million+ people vote together for President.
The most viable solution looks less like changing to ranked choice and more like returning more governing power to lower levels of government (state and local) where there is less competition
Wait, though. It's not that there are too many voters. It's that the system of voting we use doesn't connect the vox populi to the means of social control.
If you're given the choice between two bad options, you aren't really given the choice. There's massive cross-aisle support for a lot of things (proper healthcare, more support for working families, lower inflation, holding the banks to some kind of standard, reducing corruption, etc.) that we could actually move the needle on if our votes mattered, but because the two parties have us between a rock (whoever we identify as our party) and a hard place (whoever the other guys are) it doesn't really matter who we vote for.
Now, I'm willing to concede that what you're talking about might be a thing, but there's really no way to know until we actually fix what we have and see if that becomes a problem. We've never really tried what we're supposed to have in the modern era.
Frankly, I'd like to see some format of direct democracy rather than representative. Always seemed a little like an obvious grift to me.
If you want to change the way voting works in the US (and oh boy do I), you first must win an election in the current system to gain enough power to do that.
So many american leftists just seem to ignore that and it makes things very difficult.
Not quite so, ballot initiatives are actually the best bet. They've been successful in local politics primarily so far, but the initial results are promising (1).
You're right, that the closer you get to that core of federal power the more resistance you come up against, but once there's a powerful enough popular groundswell (that is I suppose, and if and not a when) you can move to mass protests, general strikes, guillotines, etc. This is why it's important to talk about, esp. around those who don't really know about it yet.
> You could consider spoiling your ballot instead?
No. Either vote for one of the third party candidates (doesn't much matter which one), or vote write-in for a fictional character or "none of the above" or something.
Ballots are generally counted as long as they're legible. Voters aren't required to pick a candidate in every race, they can leave some blank. And in most states there were third party candidates listed as well.
> In a critical commentary, the co-editors-in-chief of the journal BMJ Quality & Safety wrote that the paper’s “headline-friendly” mortality rate — which was 10 times the rate suggested by prior studies — was so implausible that it risked undermining confidence in the entire field of patient safety research.
> Yet the notion that medical errors are the third leading cause of death persists. It’s trumpeted by patient safety advocates and trial attorneys, and became a line on a TV show. News stories continue to cite it.
Which academic has it right? The study you shared is critical of the sources used in the first, but also provides no new data sources. It’s simply skeptical about the rates.
Malpractice law is complex and time consuming. Determining it to be a cause or contributor to a death isn't quite like going "yup, that's pneumonia". Studies are what we use to estimate it, and this one was a big outlier.
Causality itself is a complex philosophical topic. I agree it probably can’t be established.
That’s why death reportings tend to use “died with X”. I understand that there is a sensitivity to ascribe liability or fault. But if someone dies in recovery from a surgery, or worse under anesthesia, that seems like something that could be identified and reported.
> But if someone dies to recovery form a surgery, or worse from anesthesia, that seems like something that could be identified and reported.
We do (for example: https://www.cdc.gov/healthcare-associated-infections/index.h...), but there's significant difference between "malpractice" and "died due to surgical/anesthesia complications". Perfectly administered anesthesia is still risky, which is why we don't give it for, say, mole removal.
Probably because you could die from medical malpractice tomorrow but the final determination will take many years to resolve in the courts. Is there much value in going back and revising a number of deaths from 2019? Maybe. If the numbers are large enough or reflect a pattern that could be corrected/improved. More likely is there is nothing actionable there.
The implication is that the scientific and medical communities rely on infrastructure built and maintained by the scientific and medical communities to communicate and coordinate.
The general media consumes sources like this, obviously.
Doctors read bulletins like this so they're aware of what's going around and it can inform their clinical practice.
I’m sure the geniuses at the neighboring health authorities are perfectly capable of monitoring nearby conditions without falling back on federal intervention.
How is it that Trump is so timely at cutting medical resources right before the moment it is most needed? Or perhaps such outbreaks are more common than you'd expect and it's the equivalent of leaving a firewall down for a day?
And yeah, I'm aware a bigger factor in this freeze was hiding the very obvious Bird Flu pandemic. Can't hide the eggs getting more expensive though.
Indeed. I'm just also find it interesting how timely some of his actions can immediately blow up on us.
And yes. It really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things but was such a common rationale for those who voted Trump. I'm shocked that he did not in fact keep a promise thst would have benefitted the working class.
I think they’ve muddled a few things together and are in part referring to the disbanding of the NSC’s Directorate of Global Health Security and Biodefense as part of John Bolton’s NSC reorg.
I don't know if any of these would count as being significantly sized, but Japan, Australia, and South Korea handled it a lot better than the US [1] when it comes to deaths per 100k. Interestingly, Australia and South Korea did have more cases per 100k than the US[2].
The Australian cases would largely have been after the vaccine was available, I think (though Australia did screw up the rollout; they could’ve done better there) so you’d expect a lower death rate.
An interesting thing to look at is the differences between European countries differing responses and how that worked out for them given many are connected via land borders.
I can show multiple videos up to the end of Feb 2020 where Anthony Fauci said this wasn’t something to be too worried about, it was going to probably remain under control…
I went skiing in Korea during the next to last weekend of Feb 2020. Best skiing of my time there, because the mountain was already empty of people due to public concern. By that time we were already wearing N95 masks: I remember discovering it was very hard to talk with both a ski mask and an N95 on.
By mid Feb, Korea was already covertly acquiring mask materials and preparing a ramp up in testing. I believe we had working PCR tests in my local hospital by mid March, and mask rationing in April. This made me very skeptical of the competence of the US public health establishment.
I hit the paywall. But if this is about the same thing I’m thinking of, one reason to be careful about the work China’s CDC was doing (at times with visiting staff from the US) is they were one (among many) source of lab leaks of SARSv1:
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. No country avoided it entirely, but a lot of them managed to get rid of at least half the deaths (keep in mind that that's with still with individuals people being rebellious), sometimes more.
Excess mortality per capita is the useful number to look at, since it's immune to scaling problems and the "but diagnosis!" argument. Although it may include "too scared to go to the doctor", that can't be too much of a contribution since that contribution shouldn't spike so much. Let's look at some numbers, smearing the spikes:
* in 2020-2021, South Korea's and Japan's excess death rate hovers below 5%
* in 2020-2021, Canada's, France's, and Germany's excess death rate hovers around 10%
* in 2020-2021, the US's excess death rate hovers around 20%
* in 2020-2021, Spain and the UK have spikes so high (but narrow) that I'm not even going to try to average it out. I would guess they're somewhere near the US for 2020 but better in 2021.
* in 2022, South Korea finally had a bad spike, but averaged over the year it's still only maybe 20%.
* in 2022, in almost all countries it hovers around 10%, and the timing of the swings is very similar between countries
* in 2023, in all countries it hovers around 5%
Source: first chart of https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid ; I've done the calculus by eye with rounding since I don't want to look up billions of numbers to do the math the hard way.
(Frankly, Korea and Japan did even better than these numbers say, since their population is skewed elderly in the first place)
The team that contained SARSv1? No one contained it successfully. In fact, there were many lab leaks of it. The outbreak itself was stopped by basic measures like masks and screening. But it also was far less infectious than SARSv2.
Blaming Trump for COVID-19 makes no sense for other reasons too. There are so many other people to blame first. Fauci for funding GoF research at WIV through EHA. The CCP for being secretive and denying there was an outbreak for a while and not allowing investigations in Wuhan for over a year. The WHO for repeating CCP propaganda like claiming there was no human to human transmission roughly fourth months after the first scientists fell ill at WIV. Do you remember Pelosi and democrats downplaying the pandemic and accusing those who wanted to close borders of racism? She apparently had no regrets about all that:
With all of this how can blame be placed on Trump? If anything his Operation Warp Speed program bailed out the planet from pandemic (with great work from vaccine manufacturers of course).
You left out how conservative media was adamant that it was a politically motivated hoax and ensured their faithful were kept in the dark about the looming threat.
Last week it was still the job of the previous administration to publish it and it was the last administration which created the problem in the first place. Ideological purification was also what the previous administration has done quite a lot by hiring people based on their sexual preference, skin colour, gender and other irrelevant to the job characteristics.
I wonder if we’d do better in discourse to stop pointing at an “administration.” It is a reflection of what a plurality, often majority, of people want.
It does make ones eyes glaze over when American politics is everywhere you look. In every thread, about every topic. And each comment thread has 50 highly emotional comments that you have to scroll through to find the 5 few thoughtful comments near the bottom discussing the article, without going off the rails.
Look at the top thread with 50 comments and count how many are discussing tuberculosis in America. It's just another starting off point for everyone to go in a hundred directions ranting about US politics and ignore the topic
The thread is about a tuberculosis outbreak in the US. Subsequent comments include conversations about a US federal government department agency publishing (or not) data on that outbreak.
This is all taking place on an online forum hosted in the US and managed by US entities.
And you (and like minded individuals) expect to not see US politics?
I appreciate that the US has an outsized presence on the intertubez, but you also need to realize you're first of all talking in the midst of Americans.
The ones that were published in the weeks prior to the current administration weren't talking about the Kansas tuberculosis outbreak either.
So we're not really discussing the "US federal government department agency publishing (or not) data on that outbreak." Someone's implying that's what happened, and then people are spinning off into political discussions without even looking into the link they provided to see if that was actually the case.
It's not just going off topic to discuss politics. People are actively spreading misinformation to justify going off topic to discuss politics, and lots of other people are joining in without bothering to check if what was claimed is actually true. Two-thirds of the comments now are using the claims about the MMWR to discuss politics, and it doesn't look like anyone actually looked at the MMWR to see what it actually is.
I at least didn't read any of the links because I couldn't care less beyond seeing what everyone was talking about in a thread about tuberculosis in the US.
My point still stands that if someone doesn't want to see conversations regarding the US, politics or otherwise, maybe he should stay out of threads regarding the US and maybe also find other forums not hosted in America and managed by Americans where the vast majority of participants will be Americans.
It's like taking a trip to Mars and complaining that all the dirt is red, y'know?
Online communities need constant self checking and introspection to not go off the deepend. This isn’t like Reddit where you can unsubscribe from the crazy big politics subreddits or unfollow people on Twitter. I still think the old ideal of HN where we have some higher goal than yet another US political rant forum is still worth fighting for.
> I couldn't care less beyond seeing what everyone was talking about in a thread about tuberculosis in the US.
I was interested in the issue in Kansas because I read the article. 66 people almost entirely in 2 counties isn’t exactly a national statistics collection issue
This is HN and I'm sure there are all kinds of filters people have made as add-ons if news like this truly bothers you. Users here are more than likely to make their own as well. You can also always reach out to Dang for feature requests. I'm never going to not want more flexibility in my newsfeed.
>. 66 people almost entirely in 2 counties isn’t exactly a national statistics collection issue
Patient zero starts somewhere. It's not national news per se when a few individuals die of an unidentified disease either.
Meh I don’t need 3rd party plugins, I spent years using them on HN and my iPhone doesn’t have browser plugins.
I don’t care enough anyway I just use HN less and less every year like all the old userbase. The only old usernames I recognize at the top of threads these days are the ones who like the politics stuff (I could list at least 4-5). Just my own nostalgia for a dying small community of thoughtful nerds.
I'm sorry to hear that but it seems that's simply a natural part of the internet. Even 4 Chan was susceptible to this cultural shift and it seems the whole point was the gatekeep as much as possible.
>This isn’t like Reddit where you can unsubscribe from the crazy big politics subreddits or unfollow people on Twitter.
Sure it is. This is the internet, Hacker News is just one website someone could choose not to patronize among countless others.
If you don't want to see US centric conversations, don't patronize American websites like Hacker News and certainly centralized American services like Reddit or X.
Around 20% of Americans voted Trump, and from polls most don’t like him, but always vote R. Die hard Trumpers are at best 10% of Americans. Trump didn’t even get 50% of the vote.
His views most certainly aren’t what a majority of people want, and he doesn’t try to expand by doing things the majority want. If anything he paints those not completely in his camp, which is the vast majority of Americans, as an enemy.
> His views most certainly aren’t what a majority of people want
I'm not sure what you gain by telling yourself that.
I could just as easily assert, without any evidence (i.e., like you), that every single person who didn't vote loves Trump and supports all his policies.
> If anything he paints those not completely in his camp, which is the vast majority of Americans, as an enemy.
That has nothing to do with whether people support him. 20 or more (exact number varies on the reporting) women say that he sexually assaulted them, he was convicted of one sexual assault, and yet white women still voted for him.
Experiments consistently and repeatedly show that when given practical descriptions of policy actions and outcomes, the majority of Americans do not choose the ones that republicans promote. BUT when told that they are Republican policies, then about half of Americans do support those policies.
Well then, liberal politicians aren't doing a very good job, are they?
This is like a cliche from the chess world, where the guy who lost the game, then does a postmortem to convince everyone that he was actually winning the whole time. "Except for that one little blunder."
The Dems keep losing losing losing, but rather than figure out how to fight better, you instead try to convince yourself that people support you. And then you go back to debating Israel v Palestine or trans pronouns while our own country descends into tyranny. (Literally - many progressives I know.)
Meanwhile, Trump owns the White House, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court!
The only lesson I get is that the segregation of education over 40-50 years or so is finally showing its consequences (well it did so 20 years ago. But it's only more polarized now). A chess player at least has the knowledge and willingness to improve and learn from lost matches. The average American... Not so much.
And you didn't really offer much feedback here. Which is part of the problems. I don't really care to bicker over single issue details like this.
If 80% of Americans didn't vote Trump, you're trying to claim they just as likely love him as those who did, even when polling of those voting for him show many dislike him?
Yeah, I'm not the one unable to read evidence.
Polls also repeatedly show people dislike a large amount of his policies.
And it's a fact he didn't even get 50% of voters to vote for him.
How can someone who couldn't be bothered to vote possibly count in a discussion of how many people support this administration? Putting aside people who were unable to vote, everyone who chose not to, absolutely 100% gave up their relevance in terms of what the people want. They took themselves out of the equation.
It doesn't matter if they did or not. If they supported Trump they would have voted. Ergo the majority of people don't support him. Non voters are still people, last I checked.
Definitely, which is why it's important to identify when politicians put the American public at risk like this. The connections between random high-level government actions don't easily map to real world outcomes for most people.
For sure. What I meant to articulate was that the admin is the only one it makes sense to point to. Saying "the electorate is stupid!" has no utility other than catharsis, though.
More accurate to say "people are selfish" if you want slightly less charged language. The common sentiment I hear is "I was doing better in 2020 than I was in 2024" and that was all the impotous to make people vote "not Biden".
That mindset makes sense on a surface level. So it's not stupidity. But the lack of introspection on if Biden made things worse or simply stopped things from getting much much worse was definitely not taken into account.
I'd personally call it stupidity. But it doesn't mean people are stupid overall.
I think it's incorrect to say "this is what the plurality wanted". I think very few, if any, Trump voters thought "Trump will be worse for public health and tuberculosis is something I want more of in America."
>I think it's fair to say a lot of Trump's apologists and defenders really did not understand the ramifications of his first presidency, and are not in a position to clearly anticipate the ramifications of his second presidency.
Speaking as one Trump voter among many others, I knew exactly what he accomplished in his first term and what a hypothetical second term could look like. I also understood what his campaign platform and promises were and by and large I support them, including significantly reducing the federal government overall across the board.
What we are seeing now with January 6 and pro-life pardons among other pardons, the new United States DOGE Service, exits from Paris Agreement and WHO, mass deportations of illegal aliens and securing of the southern border, tariffs on imports and especially on countries who aren't amicable, removal of DEI and other equity-based programmes from the federal government with extreme prejudice, among many many other policies and mandates are all things I expected and wanted to see when I voted for Trump.
No doubt there are voters who voted Trump simply along party lines or other reasons, but just as much are voters who gave the election some thought and voted Trump.
If you don't agree with me then that's unfortunate, but my vote isn't yours.
I clealrly disagree with a lot of your viewpoints. But I need to laser down on fhis:
>What we are seeing now with January pardons
Why do you expect and want to see this? What about that event resonated with you that you'd excuse those people? I expected this to be a bi+partisan shame on the country, so I just do not see the angle here.
Thank you. I expectedly disagree, but there's no point in arguing. I simply don't get much chance in this atmosphere to get well thought out answers contrary to my own views.
I'll just say this:
>correct this significant, and as far as I'm aware unprecedented, abuse of the judiciary and he delivered on that promise.
This is extremely common because "speedy" was simply never defined. Taking months over minor non-violent crimes like drug usage as an example. Given the chaos in identifying all suspects (IIRC they were never all fully discovered, an atrocity in and of itself in our police system), I'm not too surprised it took years to try everyone caught.
No one's probably chomping at the bit to re-define "speedy" better:
>a trial conducted according to prevailing rules and procedures that takes place without unreasonable or undue delay or within a statutory period.
but I think we both agree this is a very vauge, insufficient definition.
>Thank you. I expectedly disagree, but there's no point in arguing. I simply don't get much chance in this atmosphere to get well thought out answers contrary to my own views.
I also appreciate that we can have a peaceful, friendly, normal conversation about this unlike how these things would usually transpire up until just recently, so thanks.
To be charged with a crime signals the beginning of a trial, a conviction signals the conclusion of a trial with a guilty verdict.
From an archived DoJ page[1] at the year 3 (January 2024) mark, ~1200 defendants were charged and 171 were convicted (32 without a trial). 749 were sentenced in total.
So that's presumably still more than several hundred defendants waiting for what should be a speedy trial.
Again, that is not how we should operate in this country. If you accuse (charge) someone of a crime their trial should be brought as swiftly as possible as mandated by the Constitution. That this was not done is by itself enough cause to pardon them, let alone the exaggeration of the charges presented.
Also, to close things out:
>The 'back the blue' and 'tough on crime' party is a total farce.
Trump and Republicans enjoyed and continue to enjoy the approval and cooperation of law enforcement agencies across the country both before and after the pardons were issued.
> From an archived DoJ page[1] at the year 3 (January 2024) mark, ~1200 defendants were charged and 171 were convicted (32 without a trial). 749 were sentenced in total.
The number sentenced cannot be higher than the number convicted (and the source document, unlike your summary, does not make that impossible claim), since sentencing requires conviction.
> So that's presumably more than several hundred defendants waiting for what should be a speedy trial.
Many of them were charged substantially after the event, “Speedy trial” refers to the time from charging to trial (the time from event to charges is governed by statute of limitations, not speedy trial rights.)
I disagree in part with Trump's idea of Palestinians moving out of Gaza to Egypt and Jordan, not the least because it's violence incarnate. It's akin to the Trail of Tears[1] which was one of the most shameful bits of our history.
Now, why do I say in part? Because I am also appreciative of the sad reality that peace in the Holy Land simply is not possible with more than one sovereign state in it. It simply isn't, there are so many peoples who would kill and die over that piece of land that any multi-state arrangement is practically impossible. I don't care if it ends up being Israel or Palestine or some other country or entity ultimately in charge of the Holy Land, but it's inevitably going to be one and the path to get there will not be pretty.
I also find Trump's executive order on delaying the banning of TikTok legally (IANAL) dubious. His reasoning is that his administration hasn't had enough time to understand it and thus sufficiently execute the law as written, but the law doesn't provide for such an out. The courts can have their say if it comes to that.
As a Japanese(-American), Trump's seemingly apathetic position on Japan is somewhat concerning. However, the Japanese government also has its share of blame to take. Consolation is that Trump has been very cordial with the wife of the late Shinzo Abe and also Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, which means he at least has some level of care for Japan, and it's not like US-Japan relations would go completely sour anyway.
By and large though, I am satisfied and happy with what Trump has done and accomplished so far. I voted for this and I still stand by my vote. Let's Make America Great Again, any friends and allies who want to tag along are very welcome.
I saw that, and that wasn't a "Nazi salute". Any and all publications and pundits/influencers declaring it as such are wholly disingenuous and should be ashamed of themselves. The sensationalizing was a textbook example of taking things out of context and projecting your(the Left's) own biases.
If you can't understand that, let me put it in simpler terms: That was a "My heart goes out to you!" salute and I am happy for Musk for being happy that we the American people won the election against all odds.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
― George Orwell, 1984
One thing you could do to see what other people think the same is to video yourself doing this exact motion, then send it to your co workers telling them your heart goes out to them.
Many other people including many prominent Democrats[1] have also performed similar gestures in the past, granted while saying different things than "my heart goes out to you".
So no, that is not a Nazi salute unless you are going to be fair and count all such gestures from everyone as Nazi salutes.
People are free to hate Musk if they want, that's their prerogative; but if they are going to be disingenuous about it I am going to call them out and lose whatever respect I might have had for them.
>“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Ironically, it is "The Party" (the Left) telling me to reject the evidence of my eyes and ears and submit to their programming that it's a Nazi salute. Fuck that noise and I hope you realize the irony of your argument.
I won't repeat the stark and damning evidence that was given to you by dragonwriter that these claims are not only obviously false but seem like a desperate attempt to ignore the truth, which is that this is a nazi sieg heil salute being done forcefully and intentionally.
I'll repeat the question you didn't answer - are you comfortable doing this exact motion on video and sending it to your coworkers, family and friends? Do you think there might be fallout or repercussions?
I'll ask another question. Is there anything that he could have been done differently to make it more like a sieg heil? To me, it looks identical. What is missing that would in your mind make it a nazi salute?
Finally, if you did come to the conclusion that this was a nazi salute by the richest man on the planet at a political rally seen by the entire world, would that change anything for you personally?
>are you comfortable doing this exact motion on video and sending it to your coworkers, family and friends?
Sure, why wouldn't I? I'm not fucking Hitler and anyone worth caring about knows that.
>Do you think there might be fallout or repercussions?
No, other than from people looking to deliberately cause problems where there are none.
>Is there anything that he could have been done differently to make it more like a sieg heil? To me, it looks identical. What is missing that would in your mind make it a nazi salute?
Actually think, speak, and act like an actual Nazi.
>if you did come to the conclusion that this was a nazi salute by the richest man on the planet at a political rally seen by the entire world, would that change anything for you personally?
If I thought of this as a Nazi salute that also means he was doing many other things to demonstrate he's a Nazi, so no: Nothing in my thought process would change.
Proper judgments of a man's character are made over a sufficiently long period of time, one singular act isn't going to move the needle in a significant direction one way or another.
If I thought Musk was a Nazi now then I would have come to the conclusion he is a Nazi a long time ago (and to be clear we are speaking in your hypothetical scenario).
So even though Elon Musk went to a rally for the far right party in germany on january 9th, talked about immigration, hitler, said germans need to get over their nazi guilt, and encouraged people to vote for the 'far right' party, then gave a nazi salute in front of the world 11 days later, because you decided he wasn't a nazi a long time ago, he must not be now?
Do you have a description of what kind of evidence would convince you someone is a modern nazi or 'poor character'?
>the far right party in germany on january 9th, talked about immigration,
Yeah, being against rampant immigration(?) is a very Nazi stance. Sure.
Naw. There's nothing Nazi about wanting to control or restrict who comes into your country; entering a country as a foreigner is a privilege, not a right.
As an aside, efforts to exclude AfD from elections is what is actually Nazi about German goings on. It's not really my place to speak about Germany's domestic affairs as an American, but if you want my honest opinion the German Left is projecting on the Right with authoritarian fury.
>said germans need to get over their nazi guilt,
Speaking as a Japanese, in my opinion Germans should indeed get over their Nazi guilt. History should never be forgotten and the lessons should be taught and remembered, but to drag that guilt across generations is ridiculous. Children are not responsible for the sins of their parents, let alone farther back.
Japan needs to get over Imperial Japan guilt and be proud about being Japanese again too; Japan's case isn't quite as bad as Germany's but there's still a ways to go.
>Do you have a description of what kind of evidence would convince you someone is a modern nazi or 'poor character'?
There are many, some that come to mind include:
* Support racism. Hitler was big on elevating what he called Aryans as the One True Race and exterminating Jews with extreme prejudice.
Musk (and Trump, Republicans, as well as most sensible Americans for that matter) advocate for meritocracy, judging people by their character and capabilities without regard to race or other immutable traits because All Men Are Created Equal.
* Advocate for cruel and unusual punishment. The Nazis used gas chambers and other torturous and humiliating methods of maiming and killing.
Literally noone here in America wants that shit, and those who do are rightfully shamed into oblivion (see: Guantanamo, et al.)
* Advocate for and engage in regulation of speech and thought. The Nazis are a textbook on how to control a population to their bidding, even the Soviets drew lessons from them.
Musk has his share of hypocrisy (why aren't you picking those to criticize him over?), but fundamentally he argues and acts for free speech. Likewise Trump and most Republicans, and certainly any American who understands and respects the Constitution. Some Nazis they/we are.
* Gathering and centralizing absolute power.
Musk's job in Federal government is on a strict and temporary schedule set to expire in July 2026, and he doesn't even have any actual authority. That's not a Nazi, let alone a Fuhrer. Likewise Trump who has consistently advocated for States' rights and reducing the Federal government especially the Executive Branch, and Republicans who have always spoken as the party of small government (whether they are is a different matter).
Citing Nazi ideology without invoking Godwin's Law requires actual, real Nazis to be the subject of debate. Please stop calling everyone and everything you don't like Nazis at the first opportunity, you don't realize how hard you are shooting yourself in the foot by doing so.
> Musk has his share of hypocrisy (why aren't you picking those to criticize him over?)
Because I'm not trying to criticize Elon Musk here, I'm trying to understand the cognitive dissonance between seeing two picture perfect sieg heils back to back and denying that that's what happened.
It seems like you agree that the motion is identical, but you are saying that it is a sieg heil but not a 'nazi salute' because elon musk "does not" support racism, advocate for cruelty, regulate speech, or centralize power.
>Because I'm not trying to criticize Elon Musk here,
But you (and others like-minded) are. You're latching on to a Nazi salute you've projected onto him and trying to use it as the point of criticism. You yourself just admitted you "see [a] perfect sieg heil", even.
>It seems like you agree that the motion is identical, but you are saying that it is a sieg heil but not a 'nazi salute'
He did it while shouting "My heart goes out to you!" to the crowd, so it's not a "sieg heil" either. If he's saluting anyone/thing at all, he's saluting the people and the spirit of America.
I couldn't care less if it's identical, though if you really want my honest opinion on judging that: I wouldn't think of Adolf Hitler as the first thing; then again I don't have my mind in the proverbial Progressive gutter either.
>elon musk "does not" support racism, advocate for cruelty, regulate speech, or centralize power.
Yeah, or to rephrase: In what ways is Elon Musk a Nazi? In the true, real, proper sense of the term "Nazi". Not the dirty word "Nazi" that gets thrown around like candy on disagreeables.
What I think you need to ask yourself is: Why is "Nazi!" the first thing that comes to your mind and is that really justifiable?
You're quite welcome to hate Musk if you want to, I have no problem with that and Musk can defend himself if he feels the need. I couldn't care less. But I am concerned for your mental health if you need to scream Nazi allegations to justify it.
> Many other people including many prominent Democrats have also performed similar gestures in the past
Every time someone tries to support this they use stills, and when you pull the video of the events, its clear that—unlile Musk—while there may be similarity of hand position at one point, the actual gesture (which is a movement, not just a momentary position) is not the “Roman”/fascist/Nazi salute, while Musk's is exactly that salute.
>Every time someone tries to support this they use stills
Considering the vast majority of the hit pieces use stills of Musk, onus is on them.
>while Musk's is exactly that salute.
You can make practically anything into Nazi hate speech if you drill down hard enough putting any and all inconvenient factors aside.
There's plenty of valid shit to criticize Musk for, but if you're going to evoke Godwin's Law[1] or Reductio ad Hitlerum[2] to justify your distaste for him then I'm going to roll my eyes and move on. That shit didn't work before and it certainly isn't going to work now.
Yeah, that ain't a Nazi salute unless you hate Musk so much that anything he does is Nazism without regard.
I reiterate: Evoking Godwin's Law or Reductio ad Hitlerum is not going to work.
It didn't work when Harris called Trump a fascist, nor all the times before that, and it won't work now either. It defies context and it's not even funny let alone accurate.
What would it take for you to consider something to be a Nazi salute?
In the first video all the gestures from all the people are so similar that if they had been wearing motion capture suits and you gave any random person that motion capture data and asked them to pick out which one was not a Nazi salute they would do no better than chance.
>What would it take for you to consider something to be a Nazi salute?
The guy doing it would need to be an actual Nazi, for starters. Musk is many things and avenues of criticizing him are plentiful, but a Nazi in the real sense he is not.
People call Musk (and many many others) a "Nazi" simply because they hate him without paying regard to what a Nazi even is. Nazi is a dirty word, you call someone a dirty word to hate on him. It's all meaningless, and even worse the overuse of Nazi in this manner dilutes its meaning that most people eventually stop caring being called one.
Even symbols like the Iron Cross and Jerusalem Cross that have nothing to do with Nazism are labeled Nazi symbols, again diluting the value of calling someone or something a Nazi.
Stop calling everyone and everything you hate or even just slightly disagree with a Nazi. Seriously. It only signals a surrendering of thought given to any better arguments for your cause (Godwin's Law) and alienates you from everyone outside your small echo chamber. The worst chain of events is that if this keeps up, we absolutely will see actual Nazis come into positions of power and nobody will care because the boy cried wolf far too many fucking times.
1. Is there an argument here that the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report's unbroken publication record is so important it should switch votes?
2. They probably still filled the report in, so there is a chance it eventually gets published. No need to abandon hope yet.
Yes there's an argument that "having vs not-having functional contagious disease surveillance, alerting, and learning systems" can change political outcomes.
But unfortunately the current administration has decided an ideological purification is more important than keeping the American public apprised of threats to their health.
So it wasn't published last week, and probably won't be this week either. "Politics don't matter" though ;) Bummer!
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/