We are embarking on a population-level Darwin Award experiment. Once the stupid people die off the overall population's resistance to stupidity will increase a little bit.
But getting there means a huge number of innocent, non-stupid people will die.
What matters is reproduction so unfortunately the Darwin Awards are often misleading (even Idiocracy is better at highlighting that reproductive success is what matters). Death is often irrelevant.
Covid deaths were mostly people past reproductive age, so you really can't generalize much about evolution from the deaths.
What I find fascinating is the voting is this thread.
What I find to be reasonable comments from me are getting downvoting in a way that never usually happens on HN! Is it me? I didn't think that the HN community would turn so hard against the CDC and basic infectious disease research.
A big cross-section between civilian and military technology leads to strong military strength... E.g. manufacturing, drone parts, many commodity resources etc
For there to be democracy, there must be accountability. For there to be accountability, there must be some sense of truth, and under that some sense of trust of each other.
What we have seen happen over the past decade is quite similar what happened in Russia in decades before it: complete dismantling of trust, of the idea of truth, of the idea of honesty or integrity. And in that space of uncertainty, a new sort of ruling class is enabled to control the population.
Anti-vaxxers used to be a tiny minority, and living in a crunchy leftish area, they were concentrated around me, and I got into arguments with them all the time. Now, they are no longer leftists, they are MAHA/MAGA, because their fundamental view of the world is not left/right, it's authority/antiauthority. Vaccines were rejected as much because of the idea of an authority "knowing stuff" as it is about the ickiness of something impure being injected into the body, as much as they love the idea of "everything natural" including "natural" infectious disease.
We've destroyed the idea of expertise and authority based on knowledge that's open to anybody who wants to put in the time to learn, and replaced it with authority that exists merely because it hated the past authority, and became what it hated.
Form what its worth, I urge people to pick up Network Propaganda.
Online speech, moderation and regulation are things I am focused on, and this book does a better job of putting all the parts together.
You can often hear someone on HN talk about “I would rather have many voices than let someone decide what is true.”
Thing is, that is standing up at a battle line which has been flanked entirely.
In the simplest sense - the information economy is no longer functional. Its been co-opted by private=government mutations. None of the old hacker culture rhetoric is graded to combat it.
The current shtick is to promote a fringe theory. Have a talking head state the fringe theory on Fox. Then have a government functionary state that the Fox mentioned said theory. Then have Fox state that a government functionary mentioned said theory.
If you are someone who has a counter theory, you just don’t get platformed.
In my life there have been two huge destructions of public trust.
The first was the Iraq war, which could only be the result of either bald faced lies or gross incompetence or both. We blundered into the desert and set a trillion dollars and countless lives on fire and have nothing to show for it. Tons of people across the spectrum knew this was a terrible idea and were silenced or ignored.
The other was the 2008 bank bailouts. The problem isn’t that the state stepped in to avert a depression. The problem is that they did it by handing the very people who caused the crash a bonus and a promotion and then proceeded to reinflate the housing bubble to lock two generations out of home ownership. The response was that the Eastern establishment saved itself at the expense of the country, or that’s how it looked to a ton of people all across the country and the political spectrum including myself.
There have been smaller cuts but those are the big obvious ones.
You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.
Unfortunately these two characters are not reformers. They are vultures. They are frauds and con men dining on the corpse of trust.
I’m not Russian but I imagine that the failure of the Soviet regime and the hollowness of its propaganda did a number on trust over there, and that Putin and his allies are likewise vultures.
> because their fundamental view of the world is not left/right, it's authority/antiauthority
Except that (given the vagaries of the English language) that sounds like they would be "anti-authoritarian", but they're exactly the people cheering on the current authoritarian government.
However, I suspect that the sense of "authority" you mean is more like "expertise", or "intellectual", with a dash of "perceived establishment" thrown in.
(No shade on you for this—like I said, English is frequently ambiguous and tricky to clearly word things in.)
>We've destroyed the idea of expertise and authority based on knowledge that's open to anybody who wants to put in the time to learn
Let me stop you right there. Actual credentialed experts who disagreed with the mainstream narratives put forth by other experts were censored, had their careers threatened, and were lumped in with "anti-vaxxers". Social media was censored. If you want to win people over and get them to trust you, you need to accept that they may not agree with you, and you don't get to silence them. The financial interests of pharmaceutical companies further muddy the waters.
There exists a large set of "experts" in every field of interest who want you to know that their work is absolutely essential and if you disagree with them, you're wrong. Some of these fields have massive epistemological issues and conflicts of interests. These experts are often proven to be extremely wrong. Sometimes, the best thing you can do in life is to disregard the "experts" and trust your own personal interpretation of a situation, and "do your own research"... If nobody ever thought different from "experts" we would still be in the dark ages thinking that the sun revolves around a flat Earth.
We also subjected a lot of the population to vaccine mandates in order to retain their employment. That makes sense for some workers, sure, but it bred a lot of resentment toward authority.
No, their concern was specifically over mRNA and how it might screw with the body.
Over 2021 and 2022 it very much felt like the pro-vaccine crowd was the anti-science crowd: While they were dismissing all concerns with things like the overly-simplistic "that's not how it works, it's DNA -> RNA -> proteins like we learned in school", the MAGA crowd was talking about reverse-transcriptase enzymes and sharing studies like https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/44/3/73
Their concerns were never addressed, just ignored. It's not surprising they stopped trusting authorities like the CDC.
The alternate take is that improved information publishing and distribution platforms (the internet) have allowed the exposure of some pretty corrupt and questionable relationships between the authorities and the industries they regulate (regulatory capture).
Previously people only got their information from the authorities and newspapers. Newspapers were owned by the industries (either directly, or via advertising). Now we can see diverse view points from others in various fields, and it is clear when "doctors say ..." that doesn't mean that all doctors believe that to be true. We can now see that NIH scientists that approve drugs are allowed to approve drugs where they have a patent and commercial interest in the drugs they are approving, which is mind-bendingly wild that level of corruption is allowed.
People can also question where the studies are to back guidelines from authorities. Like what is the scientific basis of the food pyramid? Turns out that was created by the Department of Agriculture to support grain farmers, not because it is a good diet for humans. Or that the deaths and injuries for many infectious diseases had significantly declined before their respective vaccines hit the market, and that the authorities have been cherry picking the points of the graph to hide how much of the improvement happened before vaccines were available.
The biggest change is the availability of diverse voices in an industry being able to be heard, rather than just a select few chosen by "authority", aka power, aka money.
There are moments when it looks like the plan is quite literally to cause a mass die-off. White that seems paranoid at best, and very cynical at best... that is the obvious outcome of low vaccine compliance. We can see this from death rates before the vaccine era.
I agree this is how it feels, its like the evil and corrupt of this country are actively convincing huge swaths of the poor and uneducated to basically undermine and kill themselves. A good chunk of this thread is a handful of people so detached from the actual plot that they are hell bent on carrying on a vendetta against a doctor and scientist they've never met, because they feel like his advice to the american people personally wronged them in some unforgivable and most egregious way.
When people can’t distinguish between the opinions of YouTube or Fox News commentators and decades of scientific research, it’s hard to know what the rest of us can do except watch in disbelief and abject horror.
We should all be concerned. I was watching Ken Burns, and it seems Washington ordered all his troops to be inoculated for Smallpox, and it made a huge difference in that war. Vaccines are good science, and the amount of testing we do to check safety is simply astonishing. We got extremely lucky with Covid-19, it was a warning shot, and we are taking away the wrong lessons from it. When bird flu comes with 50% mortality (half of the people you know will die, mostly children) we will go into complete lockdown with a required MRNA vaccine and we will thank God or Providence that we have people with the knowledge to make them.
Now, he's on the extreme end because no other cancer researcher has ever gotten quite that much, as far as I know. But there aren't even accusations that he gave favorable results to any drugs form companies that sponsored him, as far as I have every heard, it was merely that he didn't disclose that destroyed his career.
This is a level of honesty and transparency that does not exist in most of society, and we should be proud in the US that science is so clean compared to every other aspect of our society.
And for all the big money, pharma is far far more honest than grifters like those in the anti-vaxxer space who do not disclose how they are making their money, and who do directly benefit from pushing unproven experimental treatments that do not go through the same rigorous vetting that standard pharma does.
My advice would be to try and let this go, it was years ago. The only thing statements like this are going to convince people of is that you are unhinged and cannot get over being asked to wear a mask few months. I think for the most part we get it, we understand that you believe your liberties and freedoms were trampled on because you were asked to show consideration for fellow human beings, that despite all of us having experienced wearing a masking and know exactly what it actually feels like, we understand that it isn't what most of us would consider a desirable experience, but neither is it the great injustice you all are claiming.
Seeing someone in a mask might make your blood boil or send you into a white hot rage; for the rest of us I suspect we just feel empathy at someone who is sick or doesn't want to me.
> The privilege that American scientists have taken for granted—one that is now being trampled—is the ability to go about their work free of political interference.
Communism style solutions ("it is better to have everyone being extremely poor, rather than having some poor and some rich people") is a terrible solution.
Trampling on everyone because other group got trampled earlier is not a solution at all.
Presenting insane and deadly pseudoscience as science is stupid, dangerous and will kill people.
But claiming that there were no problems whatsoever and no political interference at all is a really dubious claim. This kind of reality denial is unhelpful and further erodes whatever trust was left.
Both Repubs & Dems have lots of blood on their hands for their intentional mishandling of COVID (continued to this day, since the pandemic is not over) in service to our archaic consumption-first economy:
I think you're taking issue with the wrong thing here lol. There may have been something before (it's the real world after all), but what RFK is doing is quite frankly insane.
This essay rubs me the wrong way in that it continues to invest in this coastal elite attitude that the masses should do what we say because we are the experts. These people continue to miss the forest for the trees by avoiding the question: why have Americans lost faith in institutions?
I largely consider Trump a symptom of a larger disorder, I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.
Two thinkers come to mind to me in this case:
1. Hannah Arendt, particularly her writing in The Human Condition (and maybe as an analogue: the Anthony Downs book on Bureaucracy and perhaps Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society I think?):
> Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.
Another comment talks about accountability, but a bureau is composed of people "just doing their jobs" without the personal accountability that helps keep systems accountable.
Per Downs, bureaus eventually become mainly obsessed with their own survival over their original mandate, and it requires careful design to avoid this consequence.
2. Christopher Lasch: The idea that government institutions are required to force an centralized objectivity for democracy to survive is just about the opposite of what I think we actually need, per Lasch:
> "[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."
> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."
The attitude as espoused in this essay will not do any work to re-establish trust with Americans, it continues a long line of unaccountability or reflectiveness from the "adults in the room" on their own contributions to the degradation of the system by pretending Republicans or Trump are a unique aberration.
>this coastal elite attitude that the masses should do what we say because we are the experts
I think this attitude, that the work the CDC and other boring agencies do is elitist, or that those who defend it are elitist, is the root of distrust. The fact is that these agencies do the long slogging boring work to establish what works and what doesn’t, only to be undermined in social media for clicks and ad impressions.
The CDC had a very good reputation around the world for the work it did. Since covid everyone on the internet is somehow a health expert and the actual people doing the mountains of boring and thankless work are now seen as nothing more than gatekeepers to the social media platforms.
> "[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."
> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."
These are nice sentiments to have but it does not work in the real world. At a certain point certain problems are too complex for a regular person to understand.
You don’t think it’s more one party spending 40 years undermining Institutions to be able to gut them starting with Reagan’s “The Most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’”? partially caused by the business elite working to gain influence over government since the Powell memo and partially caused by irrational fear of communism via socialism and partially by conservatives never wanting another Nixon and starting their own mouthpiece with Fox News, etc etc?
Why have Americans lost faith in institutions? Because other institutions convinced them to.
Fox News, Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, etc. This has been an organized effort for decades. It's embarrassing how "out in the open" the endeavour has been the whole time, that it can hardly be called a conspiracy.
There's definitely a Science communication problem because Science isn't about who is saying the things, but facts speak for themselves. The reliability, repeatability, and accuracy of what people say is far more important than who they are or where they come from, or whether they live on the coasts or in the "heartland" or whatever.
It's a real problem that there are a lot of ignorant people in the US that cultivate and defend themselves from the "other"--those elite liberals. They make it about identity and in-group dynamics rather than about facts.
The rest of your comment is just flat-out attack against all institutions and government without even considering whether this evil "bureaucracy" is just another mundane structure to administer the boringness of a functioning government.
> I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.
I mean, come on. Trump called COVID a "Democrat hoax" just weeks into the pandemic. Pile that on top of thousands of other lies and anti-science bullshit. Trump didn't build the bus that's carrying us off the cliff, but he and his supporters in the media have the gas pedal to the floor. They love people being ignorant and misinformed, and it's disgusting.
> The privilege that American scientists have taken for granted—one that is now being trampled—is the ability to go about their work free of political interference.
It really did work like that. Government agencies in general are largely insulated from politics. You do your day to day work and wouldn't even notice a change of administration.
The political appointees set the overall direction, and so projects come and go -- more or less at the same rate as they do even under the same administration.
Having the President interfere so directly with ongoing operations is unprecedented. Maybe that's a good thing; people wanted a change and they got it. But it's not usual.
We live in the fattest and sickest country in the developed world; we were on our way to extinction long before the current administration took office, and the solutions are clearly not more of the same.
[+] [-] dreamcompiler|3 months ago|reply
But getting there means a huge number of innocent, non-stupid people will die.
[+] [-] robocat|3 months ago|reply
What matters is reproduction so unfortunately the Darwin Awards are often misleading (even Idiocracy is better at highlighting that reproductive success is what matters). Death is often irrelevant.
Covid deaths were mostly people past reproductive age, so you really can't generalize much about evolution from the deaths.
[+] [-] Gud|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|3 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tim333|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] epistasis|3 months ago|reply
What I find to be reasonable comments from me are getting downvoting in a way that never usually happens on HN! Is it me? I didn't think that the HN community would turn so hard against the CDC and basic infectious disease research.
[+] [-] FrustratedMonky|3 months ago|reply
States with lower Covid Vaccine coverage had more deaths.
Technically, are Red States correct that they will achieve herd immunity, by letting their weak die off?
[+] [-] bookofjoe|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jmclnx|3 months ago|reply
I have seen articles recently that states China now leads the word in mRNA research, which is the future of vaccine research.
Soon I expect the US to only allow praying over people for medical treatment, we are not far from that with the recent ACA changes.
[+] [-] robocat|3 months ago|reply
A big cross-section between civilian and military technology leads to strong military strength... E.g. manufacturing, drone parts, many commodity resources etc
[+] [-] epistasis|3 months ago|reply
What we have seen happen over the past decade is quite similar what happened in Russia in decades before it: complete dismantling of trust, of the idea of truth, of the idea of honesty or integrity. And in that space of uncertainty, a new sort of ruling class is enabled to control the population.
Anti-vaxxers used to be a tiny minority, and living in a crunchy leftish area, they were concentrated around me, and I got into arguments with them all the time. Now, they are no longer leftists, they are MAHA/MAGA, because their fundamental view of the world is not left/right, it's authority/antiauthority. Vaccines were rejected as much because of the idea of an authority "knowing stuff" as it is about the ickiness of something impure being injected into the body, as much as they love the idea of "everything natural" including "natural" infectious disease.
We've destroyed the idea of expertise and authority based on knowledge that's open to anybody who wants to put in the time to learn, and replaced it with authority that exists merely because it hated the past authority, and became what it hated.
[+] [-] intended|3 months ago|reply
Online speech, moderation and regulation are things I am focused on, and this book does a better job of putting all the parts together.
You can often hear someone on HN talk about “I would rather have many voices than let someone decide what is true.”
Thing is, that is standing up at a battle line which has been flanked entirely.
In the simplest sense - the information economy is no longer functional. Its been co-opted by private=government mutations. None of the old hacker culture rhetoric is graded to combat it.
The current shtick is to promote a fringe theory. Have a talking head state the fringe theory on Fox. Then have a government functionary state that the Fox mentioned said theory. Then have Fox state that a government functionary mentioned said theory. If you are someone who has a counter theory, you just don’t get platformed.
[+] [-] api|3 months ago|reply
In my life there have been two huge destructions of public trust.
The first was the Iraq war, which could only be the result of either bald faced lies or gross incompetence or both. We blundered into the desert and set a trillion dollars and countless lives on fire and have nothing to show for it. Tons of people across the spectrum knew this was a terrible idea and were silenced or ignored.
The other was the 2008 bank bailouts. The problem isn’t that the state stepped in to avert a depression. The problem is that they did it by handing the very people who caused the crash a bonus and a promotion and then proceeded to reinflate the housing bubble to lock two generations out of home ownership. The response was that the Eastern establishment saved itself at the expense of the country, or that’s how it looked to a ton of people all across the country and the political spectrum including myself.
There have been smaller cuts but those are the big obvious ones.
You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.
Unfortunately these two characters are not reformers. They are vultures. They are frauds and con men dining on the corpse of trust.
I’m not Russian but I imagine that the failure of the Soviet regime and the hollowness of its propaganda did a number on trust over there, and that Putin and his allies are likewise vultures.
[+] [-] danaris|3 months ago|reply
Except that (given the vagaries of the English language) that sounds like they would be "anti-authoritarian", but they're exactly the people cheering on the current authoritarian government.
However, I suspect that the sense of "authority" you mean is more like "expertise", or "intellectual", with a dash of "perceived establishment" thrown in.
(No shade on you for this—like I said, English is frequently ambiguous and tricky to clearly word things in.)
[+] [-] wakawaka28|3 months ago|reply
Let me stop you right there. Actual credentialed experts who disagreed with the mainstream narratives put forth by other experts were censored, had their careers threatened, and were lumped in with "anti-vaxxers". Social media was censored. If you want to win people over and get them to trust you, you need to accept that they may not agree with you, and you don't get to silence them. The financial interests of pharmaceutical companies further muddy the waters.
There exists a large set of "experts" in every field of interest who want you to know that their work is absolutely essential and if you disagree with them, you're wrong. Some of these fields have massive epistemological issues and conflicts of interests. These experts are often proven to be extremely wrong. Sometimes, the best thing you can do in life is to disregard the "experts" and trust your own personal interpretation of a situation, and "do your own research"... If nobody ever thought different from "experts" we would still be in the dark ages thinking that the sun revolves around a flat Earth.
[+] [-] conradev|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] NotGMan|3 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mhb|3 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Izkata|3 months ago|reply
Over 2021 and 2022 it very much felt like the pro-vaccine crowd was the anti-science crowd: While they were dismissing all concerns with things like the overly-simplistic "that's not how it works, it's DNA -> RNA -> proteins like we learned in school", the MAGA crowd was talking about reverse-transcriptase enzymes and sharing studies like https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/44/3/73
Their concerns were never addressed, just ignored. It's not surprising they stopped trusting authorities like the CDC.
[+] [-] abe_m|3 months ago|reply
Previously people only got their information from the authorities and newspapers. Newspapers were owned by the industries (either directly, or via advertising). Now we can see diverse view points from others in various fields, and it is clear when "doctors say ..." that doesn't mean that all doctors believe that to be true. We can now see that NIH scientists that approve drugs are allowed to approve drugs where they have a patent and commercial interest in the drugs they are approving, which is mind-bendingly wild that level of corruption is allowed.
People can also question where the studies are to back guidelines from authorities. Like what is the scientific basis of the food pyramid? Turns out that was created by the Department of Agriculture to support grain farmers, not because it is a good diet for humans. Or that the deaths and injuries for many infectious diseases had significantly declined before their respective vaccines hit the market, and that the authorities have been cherry picking the points of the graph to hide how much of the improvement happened before vaccines were available.
The biggest change is the availability of diverse voices in an industry being able to be heard, rather than just a select few chosen by "authority", aka power, aka money.
[+] [-] josefritzishere|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nullocator|3 months ago|reply
When people can’t distinguish between the opinions of YouTube or Fox News commentators and decades of scientific research, it’s hard to know what the rest of us can do except watch in disbelief and abject horror.
[+] [-] jaybrendansmith|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] NotGMan|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Calavar|3 months ago|reply
https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov
[+] [-] epistasis|3 months ago|reply
I remember a very famous cancer researcher who destroyed his career by not disclosing these relationships:
https://cancerletter.com/the-cancer-letter/20180914_1/
Now, he's on the extreme end because no other cancer researcher has ever gotten quite that much, as far as I know. But there aren't even accusations that he gave favorable results to any drugs form companies that sponsored him, as far as I have every heard, it was merely that he didn't disclose that destroyed his career.
This is a level of honesty and transparency that does not exist in most of society, and we should be proud in the US that science is so clean compared to every other aspect of our society.
And for all the big money, pharma is far far more honest than grifters like those in the anti-vaxxer space who do not disclose how they are making their money, and who do directly benefit from pushing unproven experimental treatments that do not go through the same rigorous vetting that standard pharma does.
[+] [-] calvinmorrison|3 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nullocator|3 months ago|reply
Seeing someone in a mask might make your blood boil or send you into a white hot rage; for the rest of us I suspect we just feel empathy at someone who is sick or doesn't want to me.
[+] [-] matkoniecz|3 months ago|reply
Communism style solutions ("it is better to have everyone being extremely poor, rather than having some poor and some rich people") is a terrible solution. Trampling on everyone because other group got trampled earlier is not a solution at all.
Presenting insane and deadly pseudoscience as science is stupid, dangerous and will kill people.
But claiming that there were no problems whatsoever and no political interference at all is a really dubious claim. This kind of reality denial is unhelpful and further erodes whatever trust was left.
[+] [-] swed420|3 months ago|reply
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240802024326/https://docs.hous...
Capital interests own and control both parties, so it's no surprise we are getting results where it's okay to set the meat grinder to high.
[+] [-] whateveracct|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] croes|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] SirensOfTitan|3 months ago|reply
I largely consider Trump a symptom of a larger disorder, I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.
Two thinkers come to mind to me in this case:
1. Hannah Arendt, particularly her writing in The Human Condition (and maybe as an analogue: the Anthony Downs book on Bureaucracy and perhaps Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society I think?):
> Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.
Another comment talks about accountability, but a bureau is composed of people "just doing their jobs" without the personal accountability that helps keep systems accountable.
Per Downs, bureaus eventually become mainly obsessed with their own survival over their original mandate, and it requires careful design to avoid this consequence.
2. Christopher Lasch: The idea that government institutions are required to force an centralized objectivity for democracy to survive is just about the opposite of what I think we actually need, per Lasch:
> "[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."
> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."
The attitude as espoused in this essay will not do any work to re-establish trust with Americans, it continues a long line of unaccountability or reflectiveness from the "adults in the room" on their own contributions to the degradation of the system by pretending Republicans or Trump are a unique aberration.
[+] [-] Isamu|3 months ago|reply
I think this attitude, that the work the CDC and other boring agencies do is elitist, or that those who defend it are elitist, is the root of distrust. The fact is that these agencies do the long slogging boring work to establish what works and what doesn’t, only to be undermined in social media for clicks and ad impressions.
The CDC had a very good reputation around the world for the work it did. Since covid everyone on the internet is somehow a health expert and the actual people doing the mountains of boring and thankless work are now seen as nothing more than gatekeepers to the social media platforms.
[+] [-] rdedev|3 months ago|reply
> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."
These are nice sentiments to have but it does not work in the real world. At a certain point certain problems are too complex for a regular person to understand.
[+] [-] conception|3 months ago|reply
Seems more like a well concentrated effort to me.
[+] [-] digdugdirk|3 months ago|reply
Fox News, Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, etc. This has been an organized effort for decades. It's embarrassing how "out in the open" the endeavour has been the whole time, that it can hardly be called a conspiracy.
[+] [-] titzer|3 months ago|reply
There's definitely a Science communication problem because Science isn't about who is saying the things, but facts speak for themselves. The reliability, repeatability, and accuracy of what people say is far more important than who they are or where they come from, or whether they live on the coasts or in the "heartland" or whatever.
It's a real problem that there are a lot of ignorant people in the US that cultivate and defend themselves from the "other"--those elite liberals. They make it about identity and in-group dynamics rather than about facts.
The rest of your comment is just flat-out attack against all institutions and government without even considering whether this evil "bureaucracy" is just another mundane structure to administer the boringness of a functioning government.
> I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.
I mean, come on. Trump called COVID a "Democrat hoax" just weeks into the pandemic. Pile that on top of thousands of other lies and anti-science bullshit. Trump didn't build the bus that's carrying us off the cliff, but he and his supporters in the media have the gas pedal to the floor. They love people being ignorant and misinformed, and it's disgusting.
[+] [-] vatsachak|3 months ago|reply
They also furthered the anti-vaxx crowd, which is a bad thing
I think what people don't understand is that effects of the vaccine are smaller than the effects of the actual virus.
It was an accidental leak of a crafted virus from an internationally funded lab. The world was just SOL
[+] [-] baggy_trough|3 months ago|reply
Hilariously blinkered.
[+] [-] jfengel|3 months ago|reply
The political appointees set the overall direction, and so projects come and go -- more or less at the same rate as they do even under the same administration.
Having the President interfere so directly with ongoing operations is unprecedented. Maybe that's a good thing; people wanted a change and they got it. But it's not usual.
[+] [-] anthonyknox1|3 months ago|reply