When people I know cry out and denounce China I say: yeah true, they’re not the paragon of democracy and there’s not much we can do about it now; especially when we’re blind to our own defections and we fail to address what is most certainly within our own jurisdiction
As likely flawed as this prosecution is, you are 100% playing into the hands of China's propaganda machine by making any whataboutism comparison whatsoever to the literal genocide China is sweeping under the rug.
They didn't say anything about genocides in China, simply state cover-ups. Right now you are doing whataboutism, actually - he was making a comparison. In any case, if you wanted to whatabout about genocides you'd pick cases when liberal democracies killed millions of people without any consequence, not about cover-ups, so I think you didn't interpret the comment reasonably.
I am not going to get into the semantics of the argument. If someone says "The US is not in a position to criticize China for <unspecified abuses> because of <specified abuses which are not genocide>, it is an attempt to draw moral equivalence between the two.
There is no equivalence to be drawn. There is bad, and there is evil. The two are not the same, and any sentence connecting the two is driven by bad faith or propaganda.
They aren't attempting to say that. They said that the US also does a lot of abuses that the US accuses China of doing. It certainly is not bad faith.
But here, I'll give you a nice fact that will help you be more rational : the US has killed more innocents in the Middle East over lies than China is even accused of imprisoning in Xinjiang. So if you want your measure of evil, there they are. Both are evil.
> ... the US has killed more innocents in the Middle East over lies than China is even accused of imprisoning in Xinjiang.
This confuses me. Isn't the # of people being imprisoned in Xinjiang in excess of a million? That seems like a higher number (that I'm aware of) have been killed in the Middle East by the US in their wars over the last few decades. (?)
The US has killed in excess of a million people in the Middle East. Around 650 000 people died as a result of the Iraq War, around 50 000 in Afghanistan, around 400 000 in Syria and around 20 000 in Lybia.
Of course, neither were purely by the US but rather by a Coalition, but none of them would have happened if it wasn't for the US.
I also include deaths from destruction of infrastructure and subsequent power vacuums, as is customary for crimes against humanity.
First, it's good that the state this time allowed her to avoid a potential police shooting by letting her turn herself in rather entering a home armed with fingers on triggers.
Second, whataboutism is part of the problem, not part of the solution. This article wouldn't even be published in China... and arrests that happen in China wouldn't be published in China. So how does it help to not publish when police overreach due to political interference?
I posted this elsewhere but you are just incorrect.
Yeah because those countries often allow someone to be turn themselves in and then offer the accused freedom of movement for 250 dollars (10% bail).
Oh wait they just poison (Russia), disappear (China) or hang (Iran).
Are there problems in the US? Oh certainly. But don't belittle the activists in authoritarian countries by saying someone who was arrested for downloading PII is somehow equivalent to poisoning members of an opposition party.
Cool you found one! I guess that makes up for all of the other examples of human rights and judicial abuses by China. Someone tell the Uyghurs, China is all good on human rights now!
He's also dead. Was it Covid? Did they allow an independent autopsy?
What western nation is actively engaged in genocide?
To be sure though, the CCP appreciates every bit of whataboutism they can get. They are also of the position that the west is worse than them, and that their genocide is entirely justified, just like every genocidal regime before them.
Arguably, the United States, both at home [0] and abroad (e.g., Yemen, where the US has been an active supporter of Saudi policy) as part of it's war with any entity seen as insufficiently hostile to Iran.) Of course, defenders will minimize, excuse, and rationalize each of the acts charged to be part of each of those genocides (and, in the latter case, claim that the US isn't responsible for the actions it actively supports but mostly doesn't carry out directly). But then, that's what people carrying out genocides tend to do (certainly, it's what China does with regard to the Uighur genocide), especially in the post-Nuremberg world, where there is a concrete international rejection of overt genocide.
This comment breaks the site guidelines badly. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and note this one: "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
This sort of thing, compounded, amounts to the death of this forum as a place for curious conversation, so please take better care of the commons here.
If someone were to give a jist of what happened without
giving personal/geographic info, one wouldn't be able to
ascertain whether it happened in Russia/China/Iran/<insert your fav "evil" country>.
-----------
Edit:
From the down votes it appears that I've hit a nerve here.
My reference wasn't this particular article but what happened with her in December. [0]
There was an armed raid of her house where her equipment were seiezed.
I see it as intimidation for going against the state. Perhaps others don't.
Yeah because those countries often allow someone to be turn themselves in and then offer the accused freedom of movement for 250 dollars (10% bail).
Oh wait they just poison (Russia), disappear (China) or hang (Iran).
Are there problems in the US? Oh certainly. But don't belittle the activists on authoritarian countries by saying someone who was arrested for downloading PII is somehow equivalent to poisoning members of an opposition party.
Because by saying there is any equivalence between an activist in HK who is risking their life, or a opposition party member in Russia who has already had an attempt on his life and a woman who was charged with a crime that was on the books before she was charged, and which is something she has admitted to doing, is to downplay the risks the folks fighting true fascism take
It’s true. Petty prosecutorial corruption is far too common everywhere for it to be labeled as “something you’d expect to see in Russia/China/etc” given the far worse things that go on in those places. But, please, let’s stop pretending this is something other than petty, obvious political corruption of prosecutorial power. We get it, she probably did something that is a crime by the letter of the law. What’s important—and I think you know this—is whether the decision to go after her so aggressively was the result of her going public about the covid data. For me, the suggestion that that isn’t the case here is comically naive or obtuse.
The response to her actions seem to be overkill. With that said, what she is accused of doing is illegal (especially downloading PII from the government).
Also, she is reaching far beyond her grasp. And sensationalizing quite a bit. I am sure she is intelligent and competent in her role, but that role is not that of an epidemiologist, data scientist or public policy expert. Why does this matter?
Well, focusing mainly on the public policy, nothing is cut and dry. Understanding how semi-dependent systems work together is incredibly complex. She is so heavily focused on COVID that she lacks the insight into all of the competing forces that make up a society. And yes, getting those forces wrong will also cost lives.
Finally, her dramatization of the number of deaths implies (as many people imply) that any actions (that are not blatantly unconstitutional) could appreciably decrease deaths. Outside of the island nations and China, deaths have a weak correlation with public policy. More suggestive correlations exist for population density (cases) and average age (deaths). And yes, there are outliers (Japan is older, Vietnam is denser) but there are even more outliers on the shutdown argument.
The reason this is myopic focus on lockdowns is dangerous is that if undermines the effective mitigation efforts that can help without ruining society. As soon as any leader attempts to ease anything you have the pearl-clutching "give me lockdown or give grandma death" crowd sensationally crying foul. Our ability for reasoned disagreement was a dead horse years ago, but Covid continues to beat it senseless.
South Korea is basically an island. Their only border is an impregnable military zone. Norway and Finland speak more to density than their geography.
But yeah, we need to learn what was different in Vietnam and Thailand. Vietnam is especially interesting, but it could be easily argued that one of their tools is unavailable here (forced detention at camps for the infected)
Chalking anything up to geography or density seems like a reach. Ireland and the UK are islands and are doing rather poorly. South Korea has high density. Canada has low density, but a highly urbanized population. It’s done better than the US which has similar urbanization but worse than the nations that I mentioned earlier.
Right it's pretty fucking willy-nilly no matter the conditions you are testing for correlation. The nations you mentioned all had pretty different public responses as well.
That is why I think it's dangerous to proclaim lockdowns are a panacea because with a few exceptions you end up with similar results but a fucked economy
It's dangerous because poorly executed lockdowns can be counterproductive. New cases are currently higher in many locked-down states than they are in Florida - this is of course a multifactorial process, but part of the story has to be that people have stopped complying with the lockdowns.
But the real tragedy is the lack of support for third world countries due to the contraction of the global economy. Millions will die due to a reduction in vaccines and treatable illnesses in the developing world. Millions. But it seems we are okay with that as long as _we_ don't get covid
England is an island in geography, but it has a lot of truck (lorry) traffic to and from the continent, via ferries and the rail line under the channel. It's not just containerized freight, the trucks with drivers drive on and drive off the other modes of transit.
Being an island isn't required; you need effective border controls, and effective control of population behavior. It's just a lot easier to have effective border control with an island; but England certainly didn't make use of that possibility.
It's relatively simple: lockdowns are effective to the extent that they reduce contacts between people. In countries that actually implemented strict lockdowns that substantially reduced contacts between people, transmission fell, R went below 1, and the epidemic receded.
The most effective strategy for countries that have large numbers of cases is to go into a strict lockdown, in order to bring case numbers down as quickly as possible. Then they can reopen to a much larger extent than they would otherwise be able to. China and several other countries have successfully done this.
The message sent via emergency comms was quite dramatic. Her insistence that the numbers were being cooked with malice to justify reopening is also attributing to conspiracy that which could be explained by differing opinions on how to clean up messy data (if someone tested positive on vacation, will they count in their home state or Florida?)
To me that doesn't pass the smell test. In my state, they've just changed the thresholds. "New science is showing XYZ so in response counties can now eat at restaurants if their shits under 20"
Right no shit. What I'm arguing is that people take the path of least resistance and it would have been far easier to announce a policy change than cook the books. I am saying that if opening up was the only reason, I do not believe that's the path they would take. Of course I'm just basing this off of my own feels.
Making a policy change has consequences. “De Santis made a terrible policy change, X people are now dead” is a very different headline than “after the data suggested Florida open up, X people are now dead”.
I don’t know if there is a conspiracy, but your argument regarding motivation is definitely not thorough.
I didn't interpret that comment the same way at all.
I think the gist of it can be summed up by (purportedly) Winston Churchill:
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."
If, as you suggest, you're using a semi-throwaway account specifically to discuss COVID, unless other folks know that, your posting history with this account would likely give that impression.
I’m not the person you’re replying to but I do think anyone who comes to HN to discuss primarily one narrow (and politically contentious) topic isn’t participating in HN in good faith. There’s no effort to “gratify one’s intellectual curiosity” or “have curious conversation” if you’ve arrived with an agenda.
Because you know the links I click on. Or maybe, and I know this is crazy, but maybe this isn't my primary account as people have been mobbed and cancelled for having contrarian views on Covid!
Well, in salmon30salmon's defence: the mainstream media are completely and utterly missing in action when it comes to COVID.
They only parrot what the gov tells them and investigate nothing these days.
There are countless credible scientists saying that we are getting this incredibly wrong on so many levels yet mainstream media does not mention anything other than government narrative.
When did you see any news coverage of criticism of the "vaccine"? I mean, on a scientific level, not government ineptitude at rolling it out.
Edit: I can't reply for some reason but here's a video talking about the "vaccine"[0] and here's the Great Barrington Declaration[1]. Here is criticism from the BMJ [2] stating that (according to my maths) it's only 19% effective... in addition, it's designed to TREAT the symptoms, not cure you... what kind of vaccine is that?
Credibility is in the eyes of the viewer: what you view as credible may not be what I view as credible.
And, to that end, whether you would agree with the criticism or not, there is none anyway. No questioning or investigation by media of any sort around COVID science. That was my point.
Even if a hillbilly right-wing conspiracy theorist came onto CNN to talk about aliens or lizard-people that would at least be something but there is nothing but acceptance that what the government says is the ONLY answer.
> but there is nothing but acceptance that what the government says is the ONLY answer.
To be fair there is a lot of non-government and also non-media sources of information about mRNA in general and mRNA vaccines.
Understanding how things work helps me make my own decisions about the safety. This talk was one of the better ones I found. It is clearly meant for other researchers or as a university lecture[1], so if they say something you don’t know or understand do pause often (I definitely had to) and get educated about the related science.
My conclusion: Most of this stuff is relatively old science. I was even taught parts of it in high school decades ago (i.e. not politicized). The only unknowns for me are the COVID specific spike protein, and potential overproduction/overreaction by my cells. Given many people (including some friends) have now been exposed to this specific spike protein, it is clearly inert from a non-COVID perspective. And therefore overproduction/overreaction seem to be not a big deal, given the inert nature of this specific spike. And of course now we have data from many people taking the vaccine that it’s not an issue.
Anyways, I don’t distrust the media, but I subscribe to “trust and verify”. Regardless of why you want to verify, the internet allows you to become somewhat educated on most topics in about a week. And if you wanted to spend 3 months you could even become very educated[2] on that specific topic. Might as well take advantage of it for yourself.
[2] it’s even possible to become an expert over the internet, but would require multiple years and enough dedication that’s it’s probably simpler to just go to college for the subject. But it’s definitely possible, so leverage it as much as you can.
I love you and thank you for coming to my defense but please do not link vaccine distrust with my views. I trust the data and the science behind the vaccines and believe we need to be getting them distributed as soon as possible
My point wasn't about vaccine distrust although that's part of it. It's more about not having a competent media that will at least say "we will question everything" and investigating along those lines. COVID is the prime example in my opinion so I provided links when asked.
I think it isn't the media not questioning, I think the media realizes that Covid is the gift that keeps on giving and they won't look that gift horse in the mouth.
It's like the trope about media coverage of plane crashes except instead of being an acute incident the media can play off of our fears day after day
This is the first point where 300 odd people were excluded from the analysis because of protocol deviations. Worryingly, this number was much higher in the treatment group. While I hope that blinding would have prevented any motivated exclusion, it's still quite concerning.
His second main point (which is actually really interesting), is that there were 3500 cases of symptoms consistent with Covid-19 that weren't revealed by a PCR test. I'm not sure what to think of this (and note that this number swamps the actual numbers of confirmed cases by about 10x), except that it matches with anecdotal evidence I've seen around negative tests in the presence of symptoms.
No relationship. Just bored on a day off. I am passionate about Covid related topics because I am frankly concerned by the rhetoric around Covid. It boggles my mind that this has become so politicized and opposition is equated with homicidal disregard for human life.
There is also so much sensationalism around Covid that it's impossible to actually discuss. Mask compliance for example. I've heard so many times that if only dumbfuck America would mask up we'd be sitting pretty. Except the US has some oh the highest mask compliance of western nations. People talk about anti-lockdown protests as being pawns for the far right and hating science, yet these protests are not unique to the US or the Right.
Essentially our response to a pandemic has devolved into people shouting memes at one another while 30 million unemployed are liking up at food banks. It's fucking crazy
I think in this case, you're getting back what you put into the conversation. I've never been accused of disregarding human life, and I've had a bunch of conversations here and elsewhere about COVID-19 response.
It feels like you're in what I call a "contrarian headspace" where you believe you've discovered something that's under-reported or under-represented, and you've grabbed firmly onto that belief, riding it into every conversation you can. Here be dragons, especially on HN.
I think, to retain my own sanity, I'm going to bow out of this conversation, but I do suggest you take a good hard look at how your beliefs landed you on the same side as the system crushing Rebekah Jones. What they're doing to her is, regardless of legal technicality, problematic, and if you're not able to see that because of your feelings about COVID coverage, you're in some trouble.
And likewise, you inability to see her as anything but a martyr against an oppressive system is informed by your tightly held belief that the government is for some reason downplaying Covid.
Oh is that not the case? Then don't attribute some armchair psychology to my motives. I in no way think I've "discovered" something underreported. I know full well that millions of people, from credentialed scientists to dumbfuck hillbillies see the same things I rail against.
I've been accused of disregarding human life for my views on Covid response. Which is funny as Covid has touched my family in painful ways.
Humans are complex beings, more so than your coined phrase captures. But I still love you! I hope someday we all can have a calm, reasonable discussion about epidemics. Because this will happen again, so we need to study our response here as much as possible
Police are raiding her house, pointing guns at her kids, continuing to come back with technically illiterate and nonsensical reasons to arrest her, because she's said something that someone in politics did not like. Why is this discussion even about covid? This is not an epidemic discussion, this is a political liberties discussion.
The discussion is about covid because that's the only factor informing people's opinions on the matter. If we didn't know anything about her Covid work - if the only information we had was that some random government ex-employee was arrested for allegedly misusing government credentials - nobody would presume to know what the full story is or what's motivating the prosecution.
This is a discussion about Covid because the accused was motivated by Covid. My argument is that the hysteria we've whipped up over this pandemic has caused people to take crazy risks to further a cause which only exists in our hysteria.
I believe Ms. Jones earnestly believes that she had to do these things to save tens of thousands of lives. If those weren't the stakes in her head, would she have downloaded PII and misused an alert system?
Essentially our rhetoric around Covid is mentally dangerous for many people and can cause them to act beyond reason due to their misinformed notion of risk
Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for and the guidelines ask everyone not to do it:
If the state’s data is garbage in the first place then the chance of a good-faith debate happening drops even further. I’m more than a little disturbed by the narrative that it’s OK for the state to lie as long as they are advancing a cause that you agree with. The underlying issue (covid) should not matter.
> The response to her actions seem to be overkill.
Not for an authoritarian!
> effective mitigation efforts
I'd like to see you spell out what these are and how her efforts are harming them rather than, you know, being shitty attempts in the first place that no reasonable person would have thought would work.
> her dramatization of the number of deaths implies (as many people imply) that any actions (that are not blatantly unconstitutional) could appreciably decrease deaths
Not any efforts, but this is an effective way to point out that the current efforts aren't working as well as virtually any other part of the world is able to do. I'd imagine copying the efforts from those parts of the world would be a reasonable thing to do.
She's a national hero and a journalist. I certainly don't see a way to exploit her to my own ends, and her ends are in the public good.
> FBI agents question NSA contractor Reality Winner, who was later charged with leaking evidence of Russian interference in U.S. elections. Even the most casual small talk takes on an air of menace.
That’s different, Reality Winner stole a secure document from a secure system, smuggled it out and gave it to a third-party. Do you know of any government or corporate employer that would condone such behavior?
Based on what I've read about the story, I don't believe she would have received the same level of mistreatment from Florida's state establishment if she was a man.
Outside of Disney World and Cape Canaveral, Florida is not exactly a progressive place.
On the subject of GamerGate - you know The Zoe Post is still online right?
On the subject of this, this is about ethics in epidemiology. We can't allow politicians to falsify data because the data doesn't support their political ideology. Sometimes the world doesn't align with our beliefs. The world isn't wrong, we are. We have to teach people to accept being wrong and align with the world.
The headline calls her a data scientist because that was her job title. You can have an opinion about the term but there are many people who have that job title, or that term in their degree, or generally work in that subfield of our industry so it's hardly NPR's fault for using the term too.
Public schools had a recent outbreak of title inflation, and now they have a page of people with titles like "Chief Learning Officer" and "Chief Legal Officer". They aren't on board of directors of a corporation with legal fiduciary responsibility and aren't carrying a sidearm in the military. They might be a chief, but the pretend Officer part is elementary school make-believe.
TSA scanner employees aren't officers either. They can't even arrest people, and that is why there is typically a bored cop sitting around nearby.
The Florida arrestee was a UI web developer. Scientist ha ha ha.
It seems that the general consensus here is that if a system is open, either without a password, or with a widely known password, it’s OK to go into that system. Even though accessing it may be a crime, reading the comments here it sounds like a lot of people are defending her because of the lack of security on the system as if it absolves her of liability. Did she not access the system without permission?
I think what it shows is that almost all people, if given power, would be petty tyrants and not philosopher kings. Crime X is evil when my opponent does it, but when my ally does it, you must look at the context and see she did it for a good reason and shouldn't be punished.
1) The judge in this video is not the county judge who is the source of the warrant against her. (The county judge, I believe, is the one who was appointed by DeSantis and immediately (suspiciously) approved the warrant against Jones that resulted in police guns being pointed at her and her children.)
2) The State prosecutor tried to levy all sorts of crap like no internet. That's probably typical. Note that this person had amazingly stable video / audio somehow.
3) Jones lawyer made some mild arguments about needing to get a job and use a phone etc. Said nothing about the DeSantis judge. The judge in this video immediately disregarded a lot of the prosecutor's asks and deflected a ton to the DeSantis judge.
4) The audio is extremely extremely bad, especially for one of Jones lawyers. The audio just goes garbled half way through his argument. Whoever this is (Zoom? MS? Cisco?) is really liable for screwing up tons of court cases.
In all, this video shows exactly how political the justice system is. This judge and the DeSantis judge are pretty night-and-day in their actions against Jones.
My knowledge of US justice systems is mostly from films... are judges in the US elected? I seem to remember prosecutors are at least.
I saw a terrifying series about people confessing to crimes they did not commit, and the struggle to reverse their sentences. One person, proven by DNA to be innocent, would still not have their charges dropped. The prosecutor said his community believed the accused guilty so he cannot go against them.
The "DeSantis judge" I mention was appointed by DeSantis (the Governer, who has been pro Trump on a number of issues). Here's an article that is (AFAICT) is rather neutral regarding the judge:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Ah. If he said that, he's more open than most, but IMO the more insidious effects are hidden. I keep this thread bookmarked (popped up on Reddit best-of a while back) as one of the best explanations of the internals. It aligns with what my colleagues who went into criminal law tell me: https://np.reddit.com/r/Anarcho_Capitalism/comments/2qv6o0/m...
> In all, this video shows exactly how political the justice system is
I've spent the past 2 months arguing against people claiming election fraud, and part of my argument has been that our judicial system is mostly fair and apolitical.
If what you're saying is true (and I maintain that it's not), then what happens to our claims of judicial impartiality in evaluating election fraud claims?
It’s not true, that judges are impartial. They are biased humans with everything that implies, and they additionally are appointed based on their interpretation of the law, which is an intrinsically political act.
Does this rise to the level of judges squashing election fraud claims? I have no idea and I’m not sure how to even begin to figure it out.
I have the same concerns that I think you're alluding to but the way you phrased that question has me more worried.
> ~ Y is not likely because of X
You're saying you were basing your argument on the fact that X ("judicial system is mostly fair and apolitical") and now that you're learning that X may not have been true you're wondering what that means about Y.
I think it's appropriate to question Y now that you're questioning X but I hope that Y has nothing to do with the decision to question X. It would be an ugly truth that you might have to live with but I hope you don't close your eyes to the reality of X because of what that could mean.
Sorry for the overuse of X/Y abstractions but unfortunately I think if we replaced the specifics in this case it would deter from the point I'm trying to point out which is if we think about the what outcomes follow a truth and we disagree with the outcomes (personally invested in arguing against that) then we might choose not to look at the truth.
That being said, idk if it's accurate to say the judicial system is not fair and very political
Let me be explicit: so many Americans, including many here on this very post, are tearing down are institutions with as much vigor as they can, all in the service of their partisan cause.
With Team Red, it's our election system is corrupt, and our judicial system is corrupt because it ruled the election system wasn't corrupt. Oh, and Congress is corrupt because it's dominated by Team Blue and Team Red traitors.
With Team Blue, it's our judicial system is corrupt, for reasons X, Y, and Z. In fact, all our insitutions are corrupt because of systemic Foo or Bar. Oh, and by the way, we're more or less the same as China.
With these kinds of attitudes, how can we expect to come out of this with our country intact? Because let me assure you, there are plenty of groups itching for a conflict to break out so that they can rebuild society in their image from the rubble.
Many of you have no conception of what it's like to live in a conflict or post-conflict zone. We're all privileged as Americans. Not because we're perfect as a country, but because we're a functioning, developed country, or at least we were before this great partisan insanity took hold:
Well the solution isn’t to gloss over it for them and just say “no the institutions ARE good.” I mean who is going to actually accept that.
If we want the other side to understand, we have to speak to them in a way that they’ll understand it.
When you say “with these kinds of attitudes, how can we expect to come out of this with our country intact?” I genuinely believe you are doing harm to your own cause because you have shown that you have an ulterior motive to honest seeking of the truth.
If I were to believe that parts of the country were truly and deeply corrupt, why would I want to remain intact with that? Don’t you cut tumors out.
Also if I didn’t know you personally, I’d probably conclude that you are someone in power trying to keep the status quo and maintain power. I’d be pretty unlikely to consider your arguments at that point.
"If we want the other side to understand, we have to speak to them in a way that they’ll understand it."
with
"If I were to believe that parts of the country were truly and deeply corrupt, why would I want to remain intact with that? Don’t you cut tumors out." and "I’d probably conclude that you are someone in power trying to keep the status quo and maintain power. I’d be pretty unlikely to consider your arguments at that point."
I was playing the role of many possible counter-arguments to the parent comment. None of the views I expressed were actually representative of me. I was saying 'if I believed...' because I think many people on the other side actually believe what I put out there and if parent wants to make change, he/she'll have to acknowledge it.
I personally don't actually believe that the country is irreparably divided and I try to bridge divides when I see it.
But I'm sure millions of americans are jaded beyond that point and take the positions I offered in my original comment.
> Also if I didn’t know you personally, I’d probably conclude that you are someone in power trying to keep the status quo and maintain power.
Ha, I'm broke because of serious chronic+acute illnesses that have bankrupted me, and not currently working. So I'd love to see a better medical system. But I've also worked in a conflict/post-conflict zone (several decades ago) so I know how much worse things can get - and that's where we're heading right now unless we can turn things around.
And tons of institutions need reform. But mostly not because of corruption, but rather poor incentives and archaic and poorly-thought-out laws. Our system is far from insalvageable.
But way to ad hominem, not engaging any further with you.
Something is amplifying dissent, and tricking us into misattributing the causes.
Personally I suspect it is just the result of information transmitting faster, and dangerous memes can parasitically reproduce within our minds and culture (a la selfish genes).
There are other reasons it could occur, but partisanship seems more like a decoy than a reason.
Yeah, I think it's social media and hyper-partisan media and government (the slow build) combined with a pandemic (the fast build). They've collided and now we're circling the toilet.
I don't see this as "team blue" vs "team red" any more. It used to be, back when team-red was confident it could control the populist tiger it was riding. But now it's team-status-quo vs team-revolution, and judging by their tactics, team-revolution would rule in a top-down authoritarian manner, where power is distributed based on fealty and relationship, rather than on process and institution like now.
I think it was your mistake to put so much emphasis on judicial impartiality.
Election results were certified, and challenges to them rejected, not because of judge impartiality (which is a quality of the judge), but because the facts of the election are independently verifiable (which is a quality of the world).
Judges are required to identify facts and apply the law to those facts. Doing so does not require impartiality, only adherence to reality. That is the judicial basis for rejecting challenges to election results.
If what you're saying is true (and I maintain that it's not), then what happens to our claims of judicial impartiality in evaluating election fraud claims?
Nothing, you just have to use the right arguments.
You don't need to argue that judges are unbiased. You need to argue that judges have uniformly concluded that there is no merit to Trump's arguments, EVEN WHEN those judges should be expected to have a Republican bias.
That said, what do I believe to be true?
Judges, being human, cannot avoid having biases. But historically both parties have believed in selecting judges who do their best to be objectively neutral while having beliefs about the law that slant their decisions towards the party. The result has been fairly neutral and fair.
However our growing polarization has lead to an acceptance of picking more openly biased judges. This is leading to an increased strain on our justice system. Particularly with recent appointees in lower level courts, you cannot expect the judge to be fair. This is much less of an issue with more senior judges because they were first appointed a long time ago when norms about objectivity were stronger.
And yes, I worry about the future implied by our continuing increase in bias. Right now a significant fraction of the country believes lies about a stolen election. They will someday come back into political power. When they do, armed with the belief that elections are stolen, they will more openly try to steal them back.
Over history, a number of countries created constitutions modeled on ours. The usual end for those countries was increased polarization leading to a breakdown in government, and eventually a declaration of martial law by the President, transforming it into a dictatorship. Nothing prevents what has happened elsewhere, happening here. Our democracy held together this time, but it is eroding. We should be very concerned with the current trend.
The judicial system as a whole may be apolitical but there are large pockets of corruption in the south. Pat my back kind of corruption. DeSantis is just following what Rick Scott and Marco Rubio have been doing for over a decade. Appoint someone to a position of power and blackmail them into doing what you want them to, threatening removal of the very position they were just appointed to.
> If what you're saying is true (and I maintain that it's not), then what happens to our claims of judicial impartiality in evaluating election fraud claims?
In the case of the recent election, a lot of judges who likely have some degree of pro-Republican bias (such as the conservative majority of the Supreme Court) rejected Trump's claims.
The Supreme Court is not impartial in election matters, as demonstrated when they resolved Bush v. Gore on party lines back in 2000. But when the people who are partial towards you reject your case, that's a sign that your case is really bad. If they could find a believable way to let you win, they probably would, but they just can't.
So the case against Trump's election claims isn't undermined by the partiality of the judicial system, it is actually strengthened by it.
> police guns being pointed at [...] her children.
I've seen body camera footage from this search warrant raid and never saw any guns pointed at her kids. Do you have a video that shows what you claim? I think this claim is misinformation.
The video from the bottom of the stairs shows the second
officer entering pointing his weapon at the top of the stairs where the husband and children were standing and they were already informed that's where the children were.
That video shows a cop pointing his gun up a flight of stairs, not at children. You claim he was pointing his gun at children out of frame, but the video doesn't show what was claimed. I've still seen no evidence to support the claim. If that's the best you can provide, then it's misinformation.
Her children were upstairs, and as soon as the cop pointed his gun upstairs, she starts yelling at him to stop pointing a gun at her children. While no video proof exists that he was or was not doing so, this is a pretty good indicator that he was. Since there's no indicator that he wasn't pointing a gun at her kids, at we can see that he is in fact pointing a gun upstairs where her family is, it's more reasonable to believe he was. Unless you have some sort of evidence that he wasn't.
Also, notice the lack of trigger discipline that they're using in the videos... Absolutely disgusting.
I think what's telling is that the only body camera footage released was the officer outside of the house that didn't show the officer aiming up the stairs at all. There were 4 officers that entered the building so are we just supposed to assume that the only one with a body camera was the only one who didn't get any footage of inside the house?
They released the body camera footage supposedly as proof that the raid was proper, but they don't even have any footage of what they're disputing. Had there been any real sense of danger or concern about officer safety why would they all just stand around out in the open for 13 minutes where anyone inside with a gun could just start taking pot shots at officers with plenty of cover for themselves but none for officers?
So she was employed to make a dashboard for Florida, made the dashboard, they pressured her to make the numbers look better, she quit and made her own publicly accessible dashboard with the "real" numbers on it.
Either after creating her own dashboard or just before, she took resources from work and published a message on the work network which is why she's now being brought in for questioning and charged.
With that in mind, wtf are all the other comments in this thread talking about? Its like they're talking about a completely different article or smth.
She might not have had the qualifications to make the judgement about what data was correct. She was defying the team of epidemiologists. She had a degree in geography and communications. She might have been over-reaching here. She already walked back a number of her commments.
Well none of that is referenced in this article. Do you have a decent source for these claims?
Also I don't think looking down your nose at the quality of her degrees in doing yourself any favours. This article claims she wrote the code that pulled the stats together so at the very least there was some familiarity with the problem set. You'd figure implementation issues are just the matter of a Github review or smth, so how did it get to her being fired and all this crap happening?
I'm not "looking down my nose" at anyone. I realize that capability does not come from degrees alone, but it's a legitimate question that should be asked. There are plenty of people who can code but don't know anything about data science, but like to pretend they do. She was involved in setting up the dashboard, but that's an entirely different skill set than epidemiology. Aren't you suspect that the article didn't seek the opinion of any of those epidemilogists?
Well I don't have a degree in anything which makes me wonder if you'd ever listen to me on any subject ever.
I am not inherently suspect or not suspect of the article. We discuss it and then if other data turns up we discuss that. If you have a former colleague of hers being on the record or her previous employer is going to make a statement then sure but if you're just gonna speculate then I'm kinda "nah".
I'm not speculating anything. Maybe she's one of the best data scientists out there, I don't know. But the article expressed little interest in asking what should be an obvious question. Or why she may have been fired. Sure, it's unfair to speculate, but we should expect some fair journalism.
I agree, the emotion and division around this case seems a little odd. Another commenter states:
> She was defying the team of epidemiologists in publishing bad data
Whereas your take is:
> they pressured her to make the numbers look better
And I'm sitting here thinking, between potentially corrupt state government officials, and a potentially dishonest individual making claims against said state government, are we going to get down to facts and evidence instead of debating our feelings? I'm not believing either party based solely on he said / she said arguments.
> Jones has said she lost her job after refusing requests to manipulate data
I'd appreciate it people cited what they were referencing because it appears some posters are just saying stuff without tying it back to a source making it hard to trace all the "he said, she said" and various sources.
> they pressured her to make the numbers look better
I'm surprised more people don't know how common this is in other states. I have a bunch of anecdotal evidence and articles on both sides of the aisle contending either the numbers are too high or too low - depending on your political affiliation.
This whole COVID affair has been politicized from the outset, which is sad. It feels like the scientific data is being manipulated on both sides to create a political narrative in order to benefit one party or the other.
It looks like politics has overrun the scientific community.
s/she took resources/she allegedly took resources/
But yes, that's my take on the case.
Prior to this, the press downplayed that she allegedly used shared credentials to the department messaging system, and she made a name for herself before the raid by being very public about concerns with the data on the dashboard, so the "story" was that the raid was retaliation.
This could be someone trying to silence her, but the court seems to be shutting that down very well with reasonable bail. She's also very passionate and convinced she did the right thing, so using the messaging system (despite sloppy credential management, this would be illegal) is in character for her.
We have a state government actively retaliating against a whistle blower and people are so casual about it. So many people here are "China is worse". I'm sorry, I don't live in China, so I am more worried about my own country targeting whistleblowers.
They will always be targeted, smeared and used for purposes such as pushing a narrative, or setting a frightening example. This is the case everywhere throughout the world, this is the method of state power. "At least we are better than China" is a soothing proverb whose purpose is to make you feel better and do nothing. I wonder what proverb Chinese use.
Not so sure this story is that of the virtuous whistleblower the article portrays. She has a degree in geography and communications. It's unclear where her knowledge of data science comes from, but she clearly wasn't hired for that. She was defying the team of epidemiologists in publishing bad data. The risk of bad data is just as bad as no data. But the term, data science seems to becoming the new catchall phrase that can mean everything and nothing at the same time.
My job title is data scientist, just as hers was. It's far less of a catch all title than the job title software engineer is. There are so many different kinds of software engineers, but only a few kinds of data scientists. Of the kind of work she was doing, in 2020 roughly 60% of data scientists did the same kind of work. Yes, not all data scientists create dashboards, but calling the job title a catch all is pretty far from reality.
Now a private citizen, Jones continues to take issue with the way the state is calculating its coronavirus positivity rate. The official Florida site says there are more than 1.3 million "total people tested" in Florida, of which about 73,500 were positive, resulting in an "overall percent positive" rate of 5.4%.
But Jones says that figure is misleading.
"I actually wrote the script to create that data, so I know exactly what it looks like," she says, adding that she's audited it and checked it with several other statisticians to make sure it's correct.
She says that on the state's dashboard, any person who tests positive will be counted as a positive test only once, no matter how many times they test positive. But a person who tests negative will be counted over and over again each time they test negative for the coronavirus.
Jones says that because many residents, such as health care workers, require repeated testing, the state's dashboard is artificially deflating the true positivity rate.
Her dashboard still shows the same positive numbers as the state dashboard. The difference is the state dashboard separates numbers by residents and non-residents, while her dashboard combines the numbers.
>any person who tests positive will be counted as a positive test only once, no matter how many times they test positive. But a person who tests negative will be counted over and over again each time they test negative for the coronavirus.
Which is a reasonable assertion about "the data".
This is where the point about her not being a data scientist comes into play, and needs to be cleared before going into anything else, such as her personal life/drama. She, like many others, including those in this comments section, are running afoul when it comes to familiarity with the subject matter of the data.
You get counted as a positive case "only once", because (early on in theory) you only get the disease once. Whether that's true or not is beyond her paygrade, to say the least.
That's not even the crux of the issue, so maybe we should get a little introspective about our own qualifications while we're at it. The problem is that negative tests are counted each time, while positives are per-person. So one nurse could account for 100 negative tests, so the presentation is misleading.
>The problem is that negative tests are counted each time, while positives are per-person.
The point I was making is that whether this is a problem or not is not a resolved scientific issue, which presupposes the data and presentation.
Furthermore 'this' is a 2 fold issue: do you count negatives more than once; and, do you count positives more than once? These are 2 separate matters; however, I would say counting negatives more than once is the least controversial part.
There are a whole bunch of different intersecting issues here.
If she illegally accessed the network that's a crime. She shouldn't have done that.
Either way there are questions here about the heavy handed response and whether Florida fiddled their covid numbers.
Even assuming she is 110% guilty (given the nature of computer laws, everyone is guilty but that's another discussion), I'm not convinced that everyone who emails themselves some documents before they leave gets a swat team at their houses. Or if that is the case, Florida must have a lot of swat teams...
You're correct, no Swat. I misunderstood the term raid that everyone has bandied about...
I am a limey brit. Is it normal over there for people serving a warrant for a non violent crime to draw and point their guns like that? To my foreign eyes it looks a bit nuts even if its not the full "battering ram and tear gas" I'd expected.
I guess we'll see what the court actually finds on due course.
I’m no expert in this but I have a brother-in-law who is a police officer and a brother whose is a defense lawyer who deals with these cases sometimes; here’s how I understand it to work basically.
If you refuse to come to the door for 20 minutes, yes I suspect police will draw their guns if they have to force entry into your house to get you.
So basically they come to the door and the procedure is “knock-and-announce” — they can’t just immediately come and break your door down unless a judge has signed off on that specifically.
Police are required to wait a “reasonable” amount of time. Usually that’s more than 20 seconds but not more than a couple minutes for you to open the door.
If you refuse to open the door after a reasonable amount of time, the police are allowed to make a “forced entry”.
At that point, having to force entry into a house is itself an escalation and a violent act, and they would reasonably want to be prepared for any response they might encounter since the people inside have already indicated they will not come easily. Meaning it’s more likely they will draw their guns in a forced entry situation.
Uhm, what is missing from most of these 'but whistleblower!' comments is that this woman is an unhinged stalker who, after having an affair with one of her students, went off the rails and was fired from Florida State University in 2017 for it: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8344121/Married-Flo... .
That link has mugshots and parts of the court proceedings, this is not 'slander' from what I can tell.
Now, she might still have been pushed in one direction or another, but she has a documented history of being unstable to the extreme; to say that it seems she has a penchant for attracting drama is to put it mildly.
It could be slander, because unfortunately the daily mail has a history of making up garbage.
Getting fired from a university, getting called in to a psych ward to make sure she was okay, and then immediately after being let go is pretty irrelevant to the case. I'm no lawyer but I'm pretty sure this would be objected as irrelevant if anyone tried to use it in the court case. For all we know it may even be defamation.
Yes I know about the Daily Mail's reputation, but the court documents are linked in the post. I don't have PACER access so I can't verify, but this is one that would be very easy to refute. Also, there are many other online sources reporting on this, and they have been for a long time (see e.g. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6999800-Jones-Stalki... )
Is all of this relevant to the whistle blower case? Well, it might not be, but this sort of backstory does call up many questions. How did a person with a history of inappropriate sexual conduct with subordinates get a management position in the first place?
There is a presumption that any relationship between a teacher and their student is non-consensual. This is memorialized in nearly every school’s code of conduct that I have ever seen. If it happened then it was sexual harassment at a minimum and most likely rape.
The article doesn't say she was a professor, so it's hard to say. It really is a garbage article. As far as I can tell everything in the article is hearsay, which doesn't help. Even the evidence is based off of hearsay.
>any relationship between a teacher and their student is non-consensual
That's because teachers teach students typically under the age of 18. Professors teach adults. She obviously wasn't a high school teacher. Some universities have no policy against professor student relationships, though in the last 10 years that has quickly been changing.
Stop spreading misinformation. THE COURT CASE IS LINKED IN TFA, and I linked it again (from another source) above. The article does say that she was an instructor. Not a tenured professor but the person she had the relationship with was her student. All of this is described in the unhinged 300+ page document she wrote where she herself documented in cringy detail how their "relationship" unfolded (WHICH IS PART OF THE COURT CASE).
Just because two people are adults doesn't make a relationship between them not dodgy; think about how bad it is for a doctor to date a patient. The situation here isn't quite as bad (well, if you start stalking a former student after they break up with you, I guess one could also argue that this case is much worse than some other situations where everything unfolds amicably), but still, relationships between people in power and those over whom the power is wielded are not just socially frowned upon, they are recognized as Bad News (if not always strictly illegal) for a long time now.
I'm not sure why you're so insistent on defending if not a sexual predator then at least someone with highly questionable judgement. And again, maybe all of this has little to do with the whistleblower stuff, but there is no question about whether or not it's true that she had an inappropriate extramartial affair with a student, stalked him after he tried to end it and was fired over the whole ordeal.
An instructor is not a professor. When I was in junior high, high school, and at college, I taught a lecture or two regularly. I was no teacher or professor, but I was a lecturer / instructor, while I was going to school. It says nothing.
>THE COURT CASE IS LINKED IN TFA
If you look at the court case the only thing in it that is not hearsay is a dented bumper. Furthermore, she was dismissed. Because of a lack of evidence it never would have held a candle in court because it was all hearsay.
This is the problem with articles like this. They defame people, and the average person who has no legal background eats it up as the wholesale truth.
>I'm not sure why you're so insistent on defending if not a sexual predator then at least someone with highly questionable judgement.
Woo.. there is nothing in there that says she is a sexual predator.
>And again, maybe all of this has little to do with the whistleblower stuff, but there is no question about whether or not it's true that she had an inappropriate extramartial affair with a student, stalked him after he tried to end it and was fired over the whole ordeal.
It has nothing to do with the whistleblower stuff. It has to do with how garbage the article is. Falling for it is embarrassing. The fact that articles like these today are legal, is a sad state of affairs. In the US up until the 80s, articles like these would be against the law for hopefully obvious reason.
Look man, I was an instructor at a research university. At no point did I think it was OK to fuck my students. At no point did I think it was OK if my TA fucked our students.
In fact, not only did I not think it was OK, it was pretty clearly relayed to me that it was not OK per the university's employee guidelines. I was told to not even let a student close the door during office hours "just in case."
The line that's crossed isn't about the title someone has but the power structure in place. Any teacher/student romantic or sexual relationship is verboten at every educational institution because of power dynamics. If what she's alleged to have done is not sexual misconduct then why the fuck was everyone so mad about Harvey Weinstein?
Not sure if you're just trolling now... It's the same as 'arguing' with an anti-vaxxer at this point.
I'm not going to go into detail on the power relationship here. If you're going to deny that a university instructor and a student have a power disbalance between them, and that sexual relationships between them are usually illegal but certainly pretty much always inappropriate and against all policies, I'm not sure what to say anymore.
I linked AN ACTUAL POLICE AFFIDAVID that confirms that this woman not only wrote a lengthy document on their affair, but also how she posted that online, wrote the victim's job about it in an attempt to hurt him, and posted the victim's naked pictures online (among other things). I'm not sure what sort of evidence you would consider valid short of you being there watching it happen. And this is just the AFFIDAVID, there is a lot more out there, easily verifyable from various sources. But maybe someone should call the Tallahassee Police Department, ask for Kameron O'Hara, and verify that he actually wrote the affidavid, as you seem to think that someone forged this whole document including forging the name and signature of an actual office of the TPD (which he is, that's easily verified with a single Google search)?
"and the average person who has no legal background eats it up as the wholesale truth."
That's rather rich considering that between you and me, I suspect there is only one person with a law degree, and it's not you.
If all of this is 'hearsay' and 'made up', where did the mugshots in the OP come from? Let me guess, it's all deep fakes set up by the Cabal, as a pre-emptive move to discredit her in case she would go on 2 years later to become a whistle blower for a virus outbreak nobody knew would happen for at least 6 more months? Please.
Could this worker have drawn attention to faulty code or shoddy methods with a typical blog post or news article? I have a feeling that the allegations, firing and potential trial are just increasing her profile beyond what it would've been, thus further exposing the case to scrutiny.
To scrutinize her, I worked for a time as a data analyst in the pandemic too. There was a lot of shoddy work in many places, but no one of the many great employees I worked with hijacked mass communication software to send an inane message. Look at her message's text, it reads like a Tweet, there's no substance to her critique of her government in the actual message in question (she offers some more detailed objections elsewhere).
For their part, Florida did a very poor job with COVID. The governor was part of the crew of the GOP who detests science and reason, it seems, or at least capitalizes on those feelings in the populace. I understand why they fired her, you can't have data analysts hijacking your software to send mass messages of protest. I'm not sure if the message really did much damage in the end, saying it distracted fellow employees...is that very damaging?
Comparing this to the case at Google, for instance, where the engineer wrote up a long essay with many data points and actual structure...I can't help feeling that both employees' messages were greatly disseminated by the hierarchy's response to them, though I believe her Tweet had much less discussion and text to generate a broader debate here on HN or elsewhere.
>but no one of the many great employees I worked with hijacked mass communication software to send an inane message.
What she's alleged to have done is basically on par with a fired employee sending off a net send on their way out the door.
>I understand why they fired her, you can't have data analysts hijacking your software to send mass messages of protest.
She was fired before the message was sent. She publicly stated that she was pressured to modify the data provided to make it look like the state was handling the pandemic better than they were. She did draw attention to this by going to the media, this was after she had been a thorn in the side of the state for a while.
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