The US should not put up with any, even a temporary form of such censorship of the parts of the government that are doing scientific research and environmental stewardship. There should be another march in a week or two to support scientific freedom. Trump does not determine scientific truth, peer review and the scientific method does.
Yes it's amazing we put up with it for so long and then voted for Harper again!! My guess is it was apathetic young voters and frightened Boomers who lost 1/3 or half of their retirement savings in 2008 just as they were going to retire.
Harper even changed Government of Canada to the Harper Government too bizarre at the time even more bizarre looking back.
There was supposedly a secret portrait library of all portraits of Harper viewing by appointment only.
This is a vacuous statement. Science is an inductive exercise and suffers from the problem of induction. It's difficult to make the case that real truth can come from it at all. In lieu of this, peer review is a very good heuristic for sifting out bunk science.
Yeah, let's put peer review into perspective. In a topic about Trump, censoring scientists. I can see the "give science back to the people" anti-intellectual slogans coming up.
Those "anti-intellectual slogans" I think you mean can also be seen as arguments for a return to enlightenment values instead of an entrenched, elitist dogmatism.
Behind those slogans is the idea that intellectual life doesn't belong to a chosen few, but to everyone who's interested and willing to engage their capacity for independent thought and critical thinking, and those who are willing and eager to engage with other people with different opinions.
It's not a useful heuristic any more. I'd say about 40% of the 'reputable' scientific literature in chemistry and biology is flawed to the point of uselessness.
i think it's perfectly appropriate to call a true statement vacuous. for instance, a counterfactual conditional is always true; that fact makes the particular truth of a particular counterfactual conditional completely uninteresting, or vacuous. it's true, but in a hollow, empty, vacuous way. what use would there be calling a false statement vacuous?
Okay sure, I made a bad generalisation. Some true statements can be uninteresting. The point I was trying to make was more that the parent commenter was making a true statement about epistemology that is relevant and useful to the discussion.
Maybe it could have been better elaborated, but I don't think it deserves being down-voted and replies of what seems like moral disgust.
Do you not believe grigori Perelman's proof of the poincare conjecture? Do you believe in arsenic life? The first is still not peer reviewed, and the second very much was so.
These are some more well known cases. Having been there I'd say probably about 40% of peer reviewed material in chemistry and biology is seriously flawed.
We really have this problem where peer review is held up as a scientific standard. It shouldn't be. The scientific standards are independent replication and confirmation through prediction of a derivative result.
That is not to say all scientific peer review is flawed. If it appears in the journal organic syntheses I'll believe it, every time. (In order to get published an editor has to repeat the experiment in their lab, there are often liner notes)
>Do you not believe grigori Perelman's proof of the poincare conjecture?
Yes, because his peers spent serious time checking it and found no flaws. Peer reviewed doesn't need publication in a journal.
>Do you believe in arsenic life?
No, because peers found it flawed.
You're conflating peer review with simply getting past initial peer reviews. The more peers that review a claim, the more likely it is correct. The flawed ones are almost always not reviewed much at all.
And I'd bet there is a significant gap in correctness between things that are barely peer reviewed over things that are not.
I am looking for reasonable explanations for this, but keep coming up blank. I grew up in a country where this sort of censorship and fact hiding was the norm, and hated it.
I now live in a country that is much freer, but for the first time since 1938, no longer has an active US ambassador, with no replacement in sight, since President Trump fired all US ambassadors to foreign countries on the afternoon of his inauguration... [0]
Meta: people say they keep looking for explanations. Explanations are offered. Then the explanations are downvoted and an argument ensues.
It may be fine that you don't understand or like the explanations, but saying "I really don't understand X" and then punishing anybody who tries to explain it isn't much of a way to have a reasonable public discourse. (This wasn't directed at you, just at the community at large. I've seen several of these comment questions and they never end well. Might be time for a politics pause for a day or two)
Agreed. Anything remotely neutral about the new administration is met with a mob and pitch forks.
Discussion is good. Saying you don't understand because you don't agree with answers is like saying you don't understand why a homosexaul is homosexual.
> Saying you don't understand because you don't agree
You can't make an assessment about whether you agree if you don't understand - the latter must must happen before the former can come to pass. It would either be the case that you don't understand because the explanation is complex or it contains logical fallacies...the latter applies to your statement above.
> is like saying you don't understand why a homosexaul is homosexual.
It's fine to say you don't understand why a homosexual is homosexual - however it's not fine to impose restrictions, punishment, violence or torment for what goes on between consenting adults. You're allowed to find it odd or not to your taste, but you're expected to live and let live.
> Last time I checked, that's called "bigotry"
Bigotry is intolerance stemming from a preconceived opinion that isn't based on reason or experience. And I'd agree that the liberal/progressive side can exhibit such intolerance - I've been on the receiving end despite considering myself progressive. But if we're going talk about the old classics like racism, homophobia, and sexism -- the conservative side knows the art better than any.
He said "conservative". You think Lincoln was a conservative?
The Democrat's decision to support civil rights and the Republican southern strategy shift to appeal to voters who opposed civil rights radically altered both parties. The Republican party shares a name with the Party of Lincoln, but that's about it.
How does one downvote a comment on HN? I thought maybe there was some reputation or age requirement, but I've been here a while now & I still don't see any option to downvote comments.
I think you need over 500 karma to downvote. I couldn't downvote for my first few years here (and I probably only downvoted posts once or twice since I could)
I actually upvoted @DanielBMarkham, because I thought his comment added value, and he did explain very well that it wasn't aimed directly at my post! :)
My point was more that if you're being 'punished' for a comment, it's not the person you're replying to that is doing it - that is, it's not the person asking for the explanation that's punishing it.
I think that the GP is being unfair, though. Complaining about arguments specifically on the topic of politics? That's the essence of politics - conflict and how to deal with it. If people didn't disagree on a topic, it wouldn't be political. Outside of political topics, I'd say the bulk of explanations offered on HN are upvoted or at lest left neutral.
The explanation is basically the Trump administration wants to control all media messaging (as most administrations do), but is so far behind on staffing the posts at EPA and others that the secretary level people who should be in place to handle this haven't been nominated in most cases, let alone confirmed.
The fact that their solution to their own failure to get people in place is to make things worse by releasing a blanket gag order is another self-inflicted PR wound. If the "gag order" is in place after they have media people in place, or if it lasts more than a month or so, then I'd be worried.
This is while Trump attempts to appoint Scott Pruitt to the head of the EPA. He's a noted opponent of the EPA who frequently litigates against it on behalf of the fossil fuel lobby, denies man-made climate change, and would like to dismantle the agency's power altogether.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/us/politics/scott-pruitt-...
That's what makes me think this may mean mass defunding/shutting down of departments. Pruitt is a clear offense to the institution of the EPA. You'd put someone like that over a department and tell that department to "shut up" if it were about to get the axe.
Well that's the thing the administration doesn't seem to get: you shouldn't try and micromanage things if you don't know how it works. And they're so paranoid about their media "image" that they leave the chance for FUD to creep in without encouragement. And not everything in their agenda is acceptable to most Americans, so it's hard to tell what's FUD and what's just their usual policy.
For reference, the vast majority of Obama's first cabinet had been nominated (and largely confirmed) January 21st (the day after his inauguration). While certainly not always the case, given the pageantry associated with The First 100 Days, most American Presidents have been similarly prompt with their cabinet nominations.
In a parliamentary system, the opposition party already has a shadow government that should be ready to take over in 5 days or less. Since they don't have that in the U.S., they have a transition period to build up the "shadow government" and get it ready to take over. A competent candidate would have it all up and running right now, though with some variance depending on how long the party has been out of power.
Gag orders are placed on employees all the time, in or out of government. This is nothing new, just something for people to nitpick and go negative before they even know what's going on.
The existing social media managers are openly hostile to the new boss, with irrelevant-to-their-organization tweets going out about the inauguration crowd-size?
Point taken, but I believe when Obama did it, there was already someone appointed to take the outgoing ambassadors place immediately (at least, here, it was the case).
A changing of the guard in these roles is (as the article I posted pointed out) the norm.
However, In the current case, no one knows who the replacement is, or when he/she will be taking on the role, thus leaving us officially without an ambassador for the foreseeable future, and also resulting in the longest gap in 70 odd years that we have not had an official ambassador.
It's pro forma for the ambassadors from the outgoing administration to proffer their resignation effective noon on Inauguration Day. The incoming president then says, no, no, please stay on until we have your replacement set up.
A transition team who knows these things would have done that - the Trump team, though, since he was not actually expecting a transition, had no idea how to run one. And accepted all the resignations.
This is the same reason the commander of the D.C. National Guard was dismissed at noon on the same day.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
The incoming president then says, no, no, please stay on until we have your replacement set up.
... which constitutes a rejection of the resignation. Later, when a replacement is confirmed, what happens if the offer to resign is not repeated? Do ambassadors get normal Civil Service protections?
I don't think it actually matters in the short run. Career FSOs do the actual work in embassies, which is why you see big campaign donors and mid-level party hacks appointed as ambassadors to all but the most powerful countries.
> Point taken, but I believe when Obama did it, there was already someone appointed to take the outgoing ambassadors place immediately (at least, here, it was the case).
Unless I'm misremembering, that wasn't the case. Obama was appointing ambassadors regularly for a few months.
Not an appointee, but it's worth noting that there is a deputy chief of mission at every diplomatic post. This person is always a career diplomat with extensive experience, and is in place for precisely this reason. To take over and run the mission until a politically appointed ambassador is present.
> The existing social media managers are openly hostile to the new boss, with irrelevant-to-their-organization tweets going out about the inauguration crowd-size?
But wasn't it the Parks agency that tweeted about the crowd size, not the EPA?
And is the current administration simply going to shut down or fire everyone who shows any form of push back towards the regime? Isn't that what they do in places like, oh say, North Korea?
If you're an employee of the government, working to publicly undermine the policies of the person elected to lead your branch of government doesn't seem like a good way to keep your job.
I can't think of many instances where Executive Branch employees used official outlets to undermine a sitting President's policies in the past. Can you?
Yes. Where a new admin hasnt lined up a new ambassador, normal practice is to have the old one continue until the replacement is worked out. This admin, for whatever reasons, is months behind the normal schedual. A list of names should have already have been circulated on the hill so that they could be vetted and agreed upon asap. To leave such a post unfilled breaks diplomatic protocols and can be taken as a slight.
This admin, for whatever reasons, is months behind the normal schedual.
This admin must really suck to be "months behind" after 5 days.
Please describe your process for properly vetting, nominating, debating, and confirming all (or most) ambassadorships in 4+ days, since you see that as "normal practice". Extra credit: name any three administrations that have done so.
I would hope that the Secretary of State would have some say in ambassadorships, in which case the process would also be constrained until the SecState nominee is confirmed.
The administration shouldn't have had every post already filled. What is unusual here is that an incoming administration usually asks the current ambassador to stay until a replacement is appointed.
The Trump team immediately accepted all the ambassadors resignations, which is what is unusual.
He was elected months ago. Even so, responsible campaigns start working this stuff out even before the election. Teambuilding should not be left until the last minute.
1. The National Park Service hosted the event. Seems like it would make sense to post public information about the crowd size when there was a lot of public debate and misinformation about it. I understand your frustration thinking they would always look out for the president's best interest, but this was a pretty clear fact they were posting, not some kind of political opinion.
2. December 3, 2008. That's when that article was published about giving notice and starting to find replacements. Same as every other president does.
3. Serious question. Are you paid to do what you are doing right now? I have a really hard time understanding why you would post that link which is specifically framed to spread misinformation as it is about a completely different point in the presidency. Seriously, this is your country. Why would you intentionally attempt to misinform your fellow citizens?
EDIT: I expect a response. You said Obama did the "exact same thing". Which is an outright falsehood and posted an link that is from a different period to intentionally misinform people. In some countries what you just did would be considered a crime.
(Non-US citizen. Very Anti-Trump. Unpaid poster. Unhappy I need to state all this.)
To my surprise, jquery is pretty much correct about it being the same thing as Obama did. This[1] is the best summary of the situation I can find:
1) Obama (and all new incoming presidents before him) did ask for the resignations of all non-career, politically appointed ambassadors.
2) Obama (and Bush) did grant extensions to some ambassadors. However, this was a (very) small number. Exactly how many it applied to is unclear, but to quote the the article I linked above:
in the past two inter-party transitions (Clinton-Bush, Bush-Obama) only about 10 political ambassadors have gotten extensions.
Basically, I'd judge that the reporting of The Independent article linked above is misleadingly critical of Trump.
I also think that jquery's point below about Obama literally auctioned off the posts is incomplete. Most ambassadorships are given as rewards (by both US parties). Most countries do the same: ambassadorships to friendly countries are political rewards and the countries actually want someone who is close to the leader of the country they represent. I don't think the moral case against that is entirely clear, but I can see arguments both ways.
You're right, Obama didn't do the "exact same thing." He literally auctioned off the posts, giving the ambassadorships to campaign contributors and bundlers ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-ambassador-nom... ). It's easy to find replacements if you don't care about qualifications and just reward your donor list, I guess. One of the ambassadors was so bad, staffers working for her requested transfers to Iraq and Afghanistan - http://www.politico.com/story/2011/02/report-rips-us-envoy-w...
So, yes, some posts may be left without an immediate replacement, but it's not cause for panic if the alternative is immediately filling the posts with unqualified campaign donors.
EDIT: These are undisputed facts in response to a hostile question accusing me of being a paid actor (ridiculous, my account is 8 years old) posting things that would be a "crime" in other countries. People down-voting this should check the irony considering they're upset at the President for censorship.
You were incorrect and you admitted it, which is good, but then you immediately move the goalposts and then use that to pretend that you were justified in your original assertation.
That's a shady rhetorical technique, and I suspect you're arguing in bad faith. That's worth some downvotes.
My interpretation was that GP meant that Obama did the same thing (firing existing politically appointed ambassadors) and then in addition filled the positions with people who had donated to his campaign (hence not the "exact same thing", but worse).
I really don't know the facts here, but my cursory reading of the Wapo article does seem to suggest that Obama did essentially the same thing in 2008. Or am I missing something?
It is corruption if a president lets campaign contributions influence their choice of appointees to political positions. Whether or not Obama did that is another discussion, but just because Trump will do the same, we should not hold any other president to a lesser standard.
Honestly as a bystander to this conversation it seems like an easy enough mistake to make. The presidents did the same thing but at different times... Doesn't seem like a big deal. Doesn't nearly seem like enough evidence for "intentional attempt to misinform."
As someone who may be influenced by this discussion I am way more interested in why you think his point about nominating donors is not significant enough to discuss. Isn't that a sort of misinformation by non-acknowledgment?
Except that they stopped giving estimates over 20 years ago:
"For decades, the National Park Service provided official crowd estimates for gatherings on the National Mall but no longer does.
The policy changed after the Million Man March in 1995, a gathering of black men meant to show renewed commitment to family and solidarity. The park service estimated 400,000 people attended the march, making it one of the largest demonstrations in history in Washington.
But organizers believed they reached their goal of 1 million participants and threatened legal action. No lawsuit was filed, but the dispute was enough to get the park service out of the head-counting business."
At the Boston march, networks couldn't handle load - it was the first time I haven't had network access for hours in years. Maybe this wouldn't preclude the network registering my phone's requests (and our phones were reporting signal bars) but it's to be considered that our cellular infrastructure isn't built to handle massive protests at this scale.
It is absolutely reasonable to question good faith on the internet. SPAM, bots, and paid shills have been here almost from day 1. The entirety of web2.0 was jumpstarted by services creating fake accounts to create the illusion of an already existing community.
It is a very interesting question how to fight this fact, and we need to discuss it, not silence any discussion of it.
Unless you have evidence of jquery's having been paid to post this, please don't make the accusation.
The number of true believers in various viewpoints, willing to lie in order to sway the audience vastly overwhelms the amount any organization's payroll could handle.
jquery, as many conservative and liberal commenters before him, believes that a lie to persuade someone for his noble cause is justified by its outcome. I disagree with this tactic vehemently, but it is used by many earnest believers.
Parent asked a question; it's not really an accusation.
I used to be on board and would have defended the mindset that asking the question is an accusation in and of itself. But now, over in /r/france, we have this stuff going on:
At this point, I think it's sometimes fair to ask that question. There is no doubt that HN does have paid shills; if you turn showdead on, you'll often see some of the more egregious ones. The question is about the subtle ones.
Of course, that's what the current administration wants: For nobody to be certain of anything. Nerdwriter made an excellent video about it a couple of weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geEVwslL-YY
Hm. When was the last time a government wanted its citizens not to be sure of what's true, what's false and each others' affiliations...
Your post is in gray. Even though I believe the last two sentences in your post justify a downvote, I gave you an upvote because the first two sentences are absolutely true and provide important perspective in this discussion.
I actually think the fact that many people in the US coming from less free/developed countries is a problem (not the fact that they are here). They might come here thinking..wow this is great..this must be how it's supposed to be (together with the existing citizens who constantly hear they live in the greatest/free-est country on the planet). While when e.g. a Northern European comes here they are amazed by what kind of shit-show it sometimes is in this country.
I think it prevents real change from happening. Questioning why things are they way they are. Should some of the fundamental just be changed/replaced? What country do we want to live in? Do we want people worrying about going bankrupt because they got sick or went to school? Do we want to worry about drinking lead poisoned water? etc etc.
Sorry, I went way off topic. Trump apparently also want to defund PBS/NPR. I see a clear pattern here. None of these ideas will save substantial money and will erode democracy. Who else is going to educate the busy citizen about world events? CNN/Fox?
NPR is one of the worst propaganda outlets. It insulates it's listeners from opposing viewpoints to a degree that I think is unhealthy, I'm often in awe of the sophistication of it. When they have a opposition expert on, it's very rarely someone I consider credible. They misrepresent the viewpoint of the opposition, and it's hard to believe it's not deliberate. I watched them (along with the rest of the MSM to be fair) lead their flocks to war many times now. Like FOX, xNBC, CNN (worse than even NPR) they represent the global government faction. Each plays it's part, but it's not really different. Government should not be funding the media at all.
Note that this is not a closed system where there is no private news/tv.
Also, look at DW (Deutsche Welle) and BBC. Whatever your opinion, these still provide much better information than whatever you can get in the US (well, you can actually get BBC/DW).
How about letting the media stand on it's own legs? Why should NPR be special? Even their name is a dishonest appeal to authority. It's not random that they have show titles like "Talk of the Nation".
As far as I know, NYT does not receive public funding, but I think this window is instructive on how the "elite" media views themselves:
In my line of business, I get to inherit web and mobile apps from other developers all the time.
One thing I never do is to completely shut down the app and take it offline while I scour through the code to ensure everything is ok. Not unless there is a glaring problem or security hole that is already evident.
It is ironic that the person giving the orders to restrict his subordinates from tweeting can still continue tweeting his stream of consciousness stuff carte blanche...
> It is ironic that the person giving the orders to restrict his subordinates from tweeting can still continue tweeting his stream of consciousness stuff carte blanche...
Kind've, kind've not. If you're a government agency and you employ a new staffer outside of PR, you're not expecting them to tweet stream-of-consciousness. Trump, on the other hand, was largely elected because he did do this and it's expected of him.
What evidence is there of this? From this vantage point, it looks like he was elected despite his Twitter falsehoods (read: lies) and stream-of-(un)consciousness, not because of it. He lost the popular vote by three million votes. He is historically unpopular.
He did lose the popular vote, and I'm definitely not a Trump apologist. But however you want to carve it, over 60 million people got out there on election day(-ish) and spent effort to vote for him in a non-compulsory election.
I'm first in line to criticise the primitive Electoral College, the cancerous state of US gerrymandering, and the vapidity of the two-party tribal system, but voter turnout was high. Bush and Gore each got 50M votes in the 2000 election. Obama/McCain was 70M/60M (also: McCain's loss was much greater than Trump's). Clinton/Trump was 65M/62M. Unless Trump's numbers were rapaciously Russian-ified, he still put in a solid showing with voluntary voters.
Trump's appeal was his unorthodox, un-polished dog-whistle politics, and his faithful lapped up his 'tell-it-like-it-is' approach, even if the 'like-it-is' part was fabricated out of whole cloth.
Except, in the general case, that isn't true. Many of the Park Service social media accounts that were shut down do disseminate emergency information.
That part of the "shutdown" was rolled back once the issues were understood, but in the interim those kinds of Twitter feeds were pointing people to their Facebook page for up-to-date information. I guess we're lucky that no one included Facebook in the shutdown order and even luckier that there was no relevant emergency while the social media policy was being clarified.
I've worked in government (thankfully not US federal) and when departments review their specific operations/policies, they rarely grind to a halt, it's business as usual while things get evaluated/decided and policies built behind the scenes.
The only reason that you'd do something this public is to make it a spectacle and give people the impression that you're doing important busy work at all levels; or to try to assert/show dominance.
The new management of the agencies want to review the social media policies.
With the aim of installing Orwellian-style thought control practices† at every level, affecting every last publicity statement, blog post, and tweet. You forgot that part.
† Based on what his press secretary (and other lackeys) attempted to have us believe about the size of the inaugural day crowds (and the millions of people who voted fraudulently in the past election) -- in addition to things Trump himself has said about climate change, and a whole bunch of other issues -- that's not hyperbole; that's quite literally what's happening.
This is different than every Presidential transition of power, how? I don't see what's Orwellian about it. Presidents have always controlled the official department media their agencies put out.
This is different than every Presidential transition of power, how?
It's the aims of the control, and the utter brazenness with which the new administration attempts to manipulate facts and reality in general that are different.
There's never been an administration (well, maybe in the 19th century; but I mean, not since the dawn of modern journalistic reporting) that blatantly and transparently lied about such publicly known and immediately fact-checkable things as crowd sizes on inaugural day.
I don't see what's Orwellian about it.
This morning the press secretary asked you -- yes, you -- to not see anything wrong with the fact that President still believes that "millions of people voted illegally" in the last election. And that he has "studies and evidence" on which he bases that belief.
Don't forget that he's press secretary for the one guy who actually made accurate polling assessments prior to the election.
If your source on disproving the "millions of illegal votes" is one of the same sources that thought Hillary was going to win in a landslide, then you have nothing to say.
I'm not going to say I agree there were illegal votes, but I am holding out for better evidence.
There is a Harvard rebuttal to that study, but that doesn't change the fact there is a study supporting the President's position.
The inauguration was the most-watched in history (person + tv + live-streaming), yet the "reality" I'm seeing in California is that Obama's was far more popular. Who is bending reality? It depends on the reality you're already pre-disposed to believe.
True, but this isn't a case of people speaking from their own point of view. The social media account represent the Departments in an official capacity.
Except that there is no management, because they haven't staffed the administration as fast as usual, so they just put out a gag order instead of risking someone going "off message". It's incompetence coupled with ineptitude.
The firing of ambassadors is not very surprising. WikiLeaks revealed that many of Obama's ambassador appointments were basically sold to the biggest donors as a form of fundraising for the DNC. This became a hot campaign topic.
Meh. This is pretty common in the private sector in various forms, either explicit or implicit. I wouldn't call this censorship. They can still, I presume, communicate their concerns with oversight groups.
I don't know how saying governemnt officials should speak through a specific medium is 'censorship'.
Any organisation will want to control its message, and having your officials use a channel that's 140 characters maximum leads to only being able to talk about issues in the most flimsy of ways.
Personally, I think there should be less Twitter and more published in-depth reports.
Because Trump is the boss. It's the same way that most companies don't allow random department heads to speak directly to investors, but force everything to be filtered through the board meeting notes, and SEC filings.
What the EPA reports may be factual, but the presentation of facts, when they are spoken of, and how often, are all political practices.
Is it important for the EPA to tweet daily "hey guys, you know climate change is caused by humans?". No, we know it is and don't deny it is. What's controversial is: how do we reign in the problem, what are we willing to give up to do so, and how do we coordinate with our allies and competitors ?
The EPA's tweets may not be helpful in getting Chinese support, or encouraging a positive practical debate on how 3rd world nations can both improve their economies with limited technology and still be part of the climate change solution----or even if such a thing is necessary in the short term.
I think you must be taking boss to mean something differently from me.
Your direct report, is your boss regardless of if you are in civil service or not---often your 'boss' is not an elected official, but part of the bureaucracy.
Your bosses direct report is also your boss (transitive law), and so on till you hit the pinnacle of the executive branch---Trump.
Everyone these days is ostensibly "pro-science," just as many anti-vaxxers claim to be "pro-vaccine." The administration merely wants to review the scientific integrity of the EPA's work, and prevent the likelihood of any erroneous, possibly non-scientific data from being spread.
Who has the administration added to the candidate pool that has the necessary skill and qualifications to verify the scientific integrity of the EPA's work? This is really reaching for a rationalization.
Title appears to be clickbait. The original AP story [1] says this restriction applies to the agency's social media accounts. It does not say this restriction applies to employee's personal social media accounts, as thehill.com implies. This is the relevant section from the AP article:
> Emails sent to EPA staff and reviewed by The Associated Press also detailed specific prohibitions banning press releases, blog updates or posts to the agency's social media accounts.
Judging from other comments, a lot of people did not interpret it as you did. People are asking if this is a 1st amendment violation and if this is censorship.
Agreed, but those same people are also likely to mistake an employer's banning of employees tweeting under the company name as also an infringement of the 1st amendment.
This is surprisly reasonable compared to what I thought it was going to say when I heard about it first from others. The first I heard it was "A total media blackout" on the EPA and other departments.
This article just says, that buzzfeed says, that goverment employees can't post on Twitter and Facebook claiming their personal opinion is policy. Unless I misread something, let me know if I did, or if this article is just wrong.
Edit: Other sources indicate other kinds of communications are stopped also, it seems that it could be totally nefarious or just part of some kind of re-organization. Are scientific papers block or not? Everything seems confused, but the general tone seems to be hugely negative, what do know for certain?
From what I can tell, there was a notice that public-facing communication be put on hold. Then EPA employees started howling that since peer reviewed articles are public, the administration had just ordered a gagging of all scientific endeavors. The administration put out a clarification that of course scientific articles weren't banned, upon which the media jumped on this as evidence that "aha! So you did ban science and now we made you back down!"
I'm no fan of Trump but this behavior by the left is absolutely idiotic.
It's more than a social media blackout, it's getting spun to exclude they're holding up EPA operations and grants, and restricting the publishing of Department of Ag research.
As far as private accounts go, there are already social media policies in place just as in most other large organisations. They already have policies that govern scientific papers as well and those haven't been overridden. The administration just doesn't know how to communicate what it wants (which is for no one to talk to the media without "their people" in place), and to make it worse they don't have a timetable on when their media people are in place because they don't have people who know what they are doing running the transition. This gives government employees who have their own agenda (and not necessarily left-vs-right wing either) the ability to control the message by leaking to the press.
It's downright impressive how comic-book-evil this administration is. Next up, the white house will presumably be moved to a volcano base with overly large ventilation shafts.
I don't really see evil. I see a combination of incompetence and hard right-wing policy.
I really don't like the latter, but at least you can argue it (e.g. pulling out of TPP is a perfectly reasonable position to take).
The former is just... ugh. Huge numbers of unfilled positions, firing all the ambassadors with no replacements, completely unqualified cabinet nominees (DeVos, Carson, Perry).
He appears to be exceptional at one thing, manipulating people. The right wing have been manipulated by Trump for his own agenda, which I suspect is just a lust for power. People seem to miss that Trump is trying to set up a dynasty, he plans after he ends as President to ensure his daughter/son/son-in-law are all succeeding him, like the Bush's or the Kennedy's but much greater.
Trump saw an opportunity and went for it with everything he had. He used modern tools and knew how to apply it to the modern public. He knew his audience and his audience also knew how to navigate the new medium.
I doubt he expected to do so well when he started but apparently the old world institutions and cultural protections of pre 1990 are well and truly dead.
Tomorrow someone else is going to navigate this path, and they are going to do it better.
The problem here is that there are two different typical definitions of "far-right", possibly even three.
* Minarcho-capitalist, "Snow Crash"-style. Absolutely minimal government, only contracts and property titles being enforced. On everything else, you're free-to-starve.
* Religious dominionism, Mike Pence style. "Electrocute the gay away". Scary and weird. Kinda like a Middle Eastern country.
* So-called "right-wing populism", aka fascism. Trump's typical style. Very nationalistic, often claiming to adopt left-wing economic policies like industrial management and regional equalization while actually installing policies more similar to the minarcho-capitalists, but with more corruption. Dog-whistles to religion but no real religiosity. Military parades in the streets, Orwellian blatant lies, etc. Cult of leadership.
The last two are essentially the same, differing only in window dressing, and the first isn't far right (while the Republican Party has made some selective rhetorical mods in the direction of minarchism -- particularly at the federal level over issues where they want states to be free to pursue policies more right-wing than there is federal support for at the time of the argument -- minarchism isn't particularly right-wing at all.)
You have to look at it from the Trump teams point of view. They honestly don't see that the 'free speech' argument holds water. They see it as abuse of a public position to spread falsehoods.
Basically EPA employees in the Trump Team's view are perpetuating climate alarmism ( again in the TT view ).
So they are stopping that.
Just flip it around just for a second. I'll choose an equivalent that would cause liberals to shut down the twitter of an official.
Imagine a Department of Health official was tweeting photos of aborted foetuses and keeping a tally "350 aborted this month. #whatawaste".
There would be calls to stop that official speaking out.
Yes, but there's a difference. Abortion is in many ways an issue of personal conscience, rather than a simple scientific determination.
Climate change on the other hand, isn't controversial in reality. It's been made controversial because some people have an interesting way of deciding what is true or false.
There seems to be a certain mindset that treats wishful thinking as equivalent in power to empirical evidence. So they start with what they want to be true, and work backwards from there. For example: "It's inconvenient for my business interests if climate change is true. Therefore it must be false."
Some people even work themselves all the way to: "... and therefore climate change is a conspiracy invented by jealous scientists to screw over successful capitalists like me".
That argument holds for everything. It is the full relativism: there is not good or bad, there is not true or falsehood, there are just opinions.
That reasoning is flawed, as true facts exists and there are ways to get to that facts like the scientific method. And morality exists, not every action is just relative.
The last part is that oil industry has paid big to silence science about climate change. "Conflict of interest" is another big point against Trump teams "point of view".
This is so terrifying. Fixing environment that was destroyed takes a very long time. Public land and parks that were given to companies can probably never be taken back. Not to talk about mountains that were mined. All this might be gone forever for some silly, antiquated mining or similar.
Lol. By your logic, we should revert all farmland west of the Appalachians back to native prairie because it used to be public land before people moved there.
No, OP's logic is that we can't revert farmland west of the Appalachians back to native prairie because it's practically impossible to "undevelop" land back to its natural state. Thus we should focus on protecting currently undeveloped land.
OK, I just watched for at least the 20th time some republican tell a TV audience that EPA regulations have gotten "way out of control" and no one will ask "EXACTLY WHICH REGULATIONS?"
To be fair, the audience for that comment isn't aware of _any_ EPA regulations and has no curiosity about it. They see the EPA not as a complex organization with multiple goals and many tools to help them achieve those goals, but as a part of something fundamentally wrong-headed.
look man. these are job creators. if they want to dump solvents in an estuary (god, who uses words like estuary really), and bootstrap our way to a brighter future including pastel tinted vinyl siding, who are we going to side with? some pinhead whining about some cranes and shit or a red blooded american businessman just trying to help his community?
Do you guys seriously have no self awareness? You seem to view trumps supporters not as a complex group of people with multiple goals but as part of something fundamentally wrong-headed.
The comment in question was "EPA regulations are way out of control." That's not a Trump thing, the sentiment has been around for decades in mainstream American politics. And the entire EPA has a decent handle on the regulations, so they are obviously in control, even if they're extremely bad. So I'm not sure it's meant as a statement of fact. It's meant as a statement of principle. That's what I meant when I said the audience for the statement isn't saying "I'm personally disappointed in EPA regulation #N", they're saying "The EPA is doing it totally wrong".
That chemical spill was a disaster caused by an accident when the EPA was trying to manage the wastewater from a gold mine. The wastewater was created by unregulated gold mining in the 20s. Trump wants to return us to those days when industry was unregulated and created the pollution that has taken decades to clean.
Actually, prior to the EPA property rights were the method of pollution control. However, under property rights there was 0 pollution allowed. Courts began to consider that some pollution must be allowed to allow the economy to thrive.
So the EPA came into formation not exactly for the purpose to stop pollution, but to decide just how much is allowable.
Hardly. The man he has installed as the transitional leader of the EPA is a firm climate change denier, but is also strongly opposed to the Endangered Species Act as a violation of property rights. The nominee to head the EPA is not much better. This administration represents a clear and present danger to the environment and every species on the planet. I think Obama was just a tad better.
>For too long, we’ve been held back by burdensome regulations on our energy industry. President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule.
As opposed to every other government organisation in Washington which are all totally apolitical, and totally competent.
The focus isn't on what the EPA does or doesn't do, but on what the administration is trying to do, whether that actually matches up with how business is usually done in the organisation, and how this looks to the rest of America.
Not sure I disagree with that order. The NPS intentionally retweeted a political statement. (Showing the crowds for Obama's inauguration and Trumps) It was a very stupid thing to do.
How in the world is a picture of actual reality a "political statement"? How on Earth can an unedited photo of something that really happened be construed in this way?
Reuters went on record with an (apparently) EXIF-derived timestamp of 12:01:18 EST, and PBS has a seven-hour time lapse substantiating the image. It is not fake.
There have been side-by-side comparisons provided many times over by the same parties at the same vantage points, taken at roughly similar times (tens of minutes at most). The Trump pics, during much warmer weather with a bit of a drizzle, are sparsely populated compared to the Obama pics of roughly the same moment in inaugural event time, and a far colder 28 degrees outside, are far more packed. There's nothing fake happening here. There's even an awesome time lapse covering, I believe, a roughly 7-hour period. There's video and photo evidence of the Pres & VP walking along with empty stands behind and beside them. None of the photographic proof has been doctored—which would make it fake. The only thing fake here are the claims of the proof being fake.
It's only a "political statement" because the President continually repeats the most obvious lies, to the extent that he appears to be mentally ill.
Paul Ryan said today that there was no evidence of wide-spread voter fraud. Since the President still keeps telling obvious lies about the subject, was that a "political statement" on Ryan's part?
It's not appropriate for the official social media account of a government agency to tweet political content that criticizes the current President. That's going too far, and I'm not surprised at all that they were told to shut it.
NPS is in charge of the National Mall. They are heavily invested in the truth of statements about their work. Just as it was appropriate for intelligence officials to state they believed Russia hacked DNC servers, it is appropriate for the agency in charge to correct, lets be generous, misstatements about how many people attended an event they helped coordinate.
It is incredibly appropriate for the security services to state suspicion/evidence of foreign maleficence. (If it's true.. if it's a political suggestion.. they should be punished for propaganda) Although, Wikileaks has been nothing but consistent in stating it wasn't rush that gave them the leaks.
It is fine for NPS to report occurrences. However, it was not fine for them to make a comparison of inaugurations.
The offices of the government should and always should remain neutral. They should be judged on doing their job properly. Should the EPA pretend to be Milo on how they think that Trump's/Rep party's ignorance on Global Warming is bad? No they should be advising us on upcoming, and current threads, showing superfund cleanup efforts, creating effective change, etc.
It's hard to judge an organization correctly when it's trying to play politics. When you're wrestling with a pig, you're going to both get dirty, but in the end the politican likes it.
Comparing objective reality between two points in time is not partisan. It is factual. It is the truth. If the crowd had been larger than previous years, would you still object?
Fewer people attended the inauguration. I'm sorry that bothers you so much, but it's the truth. If your solution to someone sharing the truth is to make them shut up, then you got some serious issues.
I've heard people say that this was a reaction to some tweets that an employee sent out about the inauguration crowd sizes. If so, that would be a pretty heavy-handed way to discipline that single employee.
I didn't know we had so many HN commenters that are experts at the inner workings of Presidential transitions and for a fact know what's going behind the scenes of the current transition. In some cases they somehow know individual thoughts and motivations of people they likely don't know.
Why was this even posted here on HN? I don't think it's okay that HN should become a microcosm of the political economy of the United States. Well, for whatever it's worth, I hope California gets serious about secession.
I flagged the post. Hiding the post is good for the user, but not good for the community. Political posts on HN are fine, but should be relatively limited--otherwise they would begin to dominate and ruin HN--and avoid alarmism (which this article did not). In most cases, when politics is encouraged as a topic, it becomes an echo-chamber as the winning partisans downvote the minority until the minority is completely gone (see /r/politics).
I've seen so many intellectual forums overrun and finally ruined by political posts (and they usually start with harmless posts) that do nothing but engender the highest levels of divisiveness among members. Would be sad to see HN fall into such a situation.
It's important to remember that the Constitution is, in effect, more than just the text as you read it. All parts of the law, but particularly the Constitution, are "interpreted" by the judiciary, and these interpretations have the force of law. In particular, the First Amendment as interpreted by the courts is a lot more complicated than just what it says.
For example, your strict reading would suggest that the states could make a law restricting freedom of speech (&c). But the Supreme Court ruled in 1925 that the First Amendment precludes such actions by the states:
Just like a private company can have speech codes without running afoul of the first amendment, so can the US Government for its employees. That's all it is - not some law, but an employer mandate.
The first amendment applies to law governing speech.
Twitter accounts belonging to government agencies represent the government, not individuals. Individuals and the press are the ones whose free speech is protected.
Right. He can't stop you from saying what you want to say. He can stop you from saying what you want to say on an official Federal government platform.
For that matter, many employers can do that. I can say whatever I please, but not with my company name on it.
Exactly, can't believe so many people here lacking basic understanding of professionalism. You can't use office account to deliver your personal message.
We'd need a specific example to determine if the communications were a personal message, raw data supporting climate change or (unlikely) 5 sigma confidence level results in say a temperature trend.
Personally, I struggle with the idea that scientists working for the federal government have to report to or be muzzled by the current administration. I see these people as working for the country not for the administration but I'm naive and optimistic in general so I'm sure many people will point out that it would be a crazy way to run a country.
In the Canadian case, scientist needed to request permission to attend conferences months in advance and, from what I understand, if there was the least chance of bad press coverage from the scientific results being presented, then the person was not allowed to attend. I believe there was a similar muzzling of attempts to publish in peer-reviewed papers. That sort of thing is clearly not acceptable behaviour for a government administration. Government organizations like the EPA are not companies trying to maximize profit by selling a widget, they are researchers and regulators trying to determine the best path for everyone in the country with respect to economics, health, and environment.
Depending on the jurisdiction of the lawsuit, the judge (or panel of judges) will probably have the right to file an injunction which can prevent even the president from doing something. The Republican party got into the habit of using state Attorney Generals to sue the Obama administration and the resulting injunctions drastically slowed or killed some aspects of his policies. You can bet many of the Democratic party AGs are just itching to do the same thing, especially those with political ambition in heavily blue states. I don't know if the President has ever been held in contempt but it's a reliable process for preventing policy implementations.
I think this order's authority probably comes from the fact that Trump is the head of the Executive branch, not from any legislative power. That is, they're in a boss/employee type relationship.
Presedential power has grown a LOT in the past 50 years. I still think we have a strong enough constitution to prevent a Hitler, but not as sure as I would have been in the previous generation.
It almost entirely depends on the willingness of Congress to enforce the rules, and more importantly the spirit of the rules.
I say "amost" because the Supreme Court has a part to play, but it's in a bad shape right now (highly polarized, split 50-50, with an opening for just about any old stooge to be helicoptered in).
The US should not put up with any, even a temporary form of such censorship of the parts of the government that are doing scientific research and environmental stewardship. There should be another march in a week or two to support scientific freedom. Trump does not determine scientific truth, peer review and the scientific method does.