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Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

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Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#151

Post by masonic »

whyileft wrote: post #42
jquery wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? To your latter point regarding the fired ambassadors, it's the most scandalous thing since 2008, when Obama did the exact same thing - http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2008/12/obama-gives-poli...

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…

  Are you paid to do what you are doing right now?
This is beyond the pale. Next comes Godwin?

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#152

Post by true_religion »

scrollaway wrote: post #139
jack9 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You were incorrect and you admitted it, which is good Ironically, you are incorrect and have strangely doubled down on it in some sort of pyrrhic victory dance of failure.

badsock has posted exactly once in this entire thread. Give your fellow HNers the benefit of the doubt.

It surprised me too. I thought he was the original poster, but the original commenter was 'jquery'.

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#153

Post by facetube »

3131s wrote: post #141
Vivtek wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ambassadorships for campaign contributors! Goodness, the base corruption of such a President! Good thing Mr. Trump would never do that kind of thing, like with the Department of Education or 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.

Then you agree that Donald Trump is corrupt?

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#154

Post by FLGMwt »

dnautics wrote: post #147
vmeson wrote: post #83

We went through this sort of censorship of government scientists and departments in Canada with the conservative Harper government: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/faq-the-issues-around-muzz... 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 s…

Peer review most certainly does not determine scientific truth.

Arguable, but lack of peer review certainly should inspire a lack of confidence in results.

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#155

Post by [deleted] »

dnautics wrote: post #147
vmeson wrote: post #83

We went through this sort of censorship of government scientists and departments in Canada with the conservative Harper government: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/faq-the-issues-around-muzz... 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 s…

Peer review most certainly does not determine scientific truth.

[deleted]

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#156

Post by dashundchen »

nikdaheratik wrote: post #76
cyberferret wrote: post #6

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 inaugu…

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…

Except it's not just social media. It keeps getting repeated as "social media ban" but there is more to it.

It's also freezing the distribution of grants and any new business of EPA for a week, if not longer. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

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-...

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#157

Post by facetube »

vacri wrote: post #77
cyberferret wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#158

Post by learc83 »

wooter wrote: post #150
icanhackit wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> But if we're going talk about the old classics like racism, homophobia, and sexism -- the conservative side knows the art better than any. Lincoln, a Republican, abolished slavery. And Roosevelt, a Democrat, interned Japanese Americans.

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.

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#159

Post by true_religion »

kafkaesq wrote: post #95
ColanR wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't forget that he's press secretary for the one guy who actually made accurate polling assessments prior to the election. So if you met someone on a street corner who pointed at the sky, and told you "Hey look, it's orange with pink polka-dots" -- would you think to yourself, "Hmm, I'm tempted to be skeptical -- but then again, when I asked this guy for the time the other day, he gave a correct enough answer. So m…

If yesterday I thought the sky was going to be blue, everyone else swore the sky would be blue, and this lone fellow told me it'd be a blood red sky---and he was correct right down to the particular shade of crimson it would be, then yes I would take him a little more seriously.

No one thought Trump would win. Even in the states he lost in, he lost be lesser margins than was predicted. Hiliary seemed to be inevitable---after all she is an actual politiclan, with real experience. The democractic machine is behind her, isn't it? She has the force of history behind her driving her to be the first female president. How can she lose?

Then she lost rather dramatically. I looked at the election results and saw a sea of red from coast to coast, with Hilary doing well in high population areas but losing majority everywhere else.

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#160

Post by facetube »

belovedeagle wrote: post #92
sqeaky wrote: post #26

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…

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 scienc…

Who is "the left"? Be specific.
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