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.
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.
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
>. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Maybe in countries with multiple parties, proportional representation (or the like), and mechanisms to encourage voting like a holiday for elections.
But, everywhere else? It's a crapshoot..low turnout also doesn't help.
TIL Most voters don't have well defined policy preferences. Nor can they correctly associate political parties with their stated policy positions.
That doesn't mean they don't want services, that means that in addition to 74 million that voted against trump, 90 million more also didn't want him.
(It's like NULL values in SQL, only much worse because it's in real life.)
If nothing else, I do hope this 2nd trump administration wakes those indifferent up. Yes your choice matters. And yes, choosing nothing is a choice.
The majority of people wanted this.