Live data from Hacker News

Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it

muckrock.com

61–70 of 113 posts

Re: Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it

#61

They already deleted the main USAID YouTube channel, likely so news media can't easily pull any public domain footage of projects in various developing nations.

Found one for ya: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcla7WoWIpQ The USAID Office of Transition Initiatives (USAID/OTI) began its program in Haiti in January 2010 as part of the post-earthquake response, supporting short- and medium-term activities aimed at stabilizing Haiti through support for community revitalization, improved governance, and economic strengthening.

Whether this is a great or awful example probably depends on one's views of USAID. They were associated with the Red Cross there in the high profile failure that managed to spend more than $1.5 billion to ultimately build a total of 6 permanent housing units. [1] While that was definitely more Red Cross than USAID, the video also makes no secret of what one of the major issues with USAID is. It uses the pretext of aid, but generally has the goal of manipulating the politics in other countries, which often leads to conflict. Quoting literally from that video,

---

... the following november the election represented a potential flashpoint for instability but also an opportunity for haitians to determine their own future. usaid coordinated the first televised presidential debates and supported voter education campaigns including a mobile strategy using text messages to help with political awareness ...

---

Ironic because it's rather clear who USAID was endorsing [2] because his opponent (who lost) [3] ran specifically on a platform of a "more independent Haitian state, one less reliant upon and subject to foreign governments and NGOs." The USAID (and Bill/Hillary Clinton) backed candidate was roiled in numerous claims of corruption, subsequent vote rigging, backing Haitian criminal gangs, and was ultimately sanctioned by the US and Canada for involvement in cocaine trafficking into the US. Incidentally, as the video also mentions, USAID spent their money not on the people, but the government - they built the units for this lovely fellow's government to reside in as the Presidential Palace was severely damaged in the quake.

[1] - https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Martelly

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirlande_Manigat

Re: Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it

#62
post #53

What do Trump supporters here think of this?

There are two types of Trump supporters.

One type thinks that the data being disappeared is "trans DEI libtard lies".

The other type believes that the federal government should collect no data because it is stealing a Job Creator's god-given right to act as a middleman in all aspects of human culture and charge money for access to that data (because that's, somehow, more efficient).

Re: Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes — the people the US Supreme Court ruled were illegally discriminated against are just “playing victim”.

I'm curious, what would you call banning transgender individuals from the military then?

[flagged]

Re: Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it

#64
post #50
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The difference is those were private platforms not giving a soapbox to certain politicians that were quite clearly violating private terms of service. This is the federal government deleting taxpayer-funded content, data and studies. They are not similar in any way and to imply otherwise is a disingenuous comparison.

[dead]

Re: Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn’t shaming anyone for condemning DEI, I was shaming them for being bad at solving problems.

[flagged]

I guess OP is referring to stuff like Trump's baseless claims that DEI was a factor in the recent plane crash. I hope we can agree that that's an absurd position regardless of our own perspective on DEI.

Re: Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, what would you call banning transgender individuals from the military then?

[flagged]

> There’s lots of disqualifying psychiatric and personality conditions

Looking at your link, I can see how the conditions specified there would make someone less effective as a soldier. I can't say the same for gender dysphoria.

Re: Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it

#67
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I guess OP is referring to stuff like Trump's baseless claims that DEI was a factor in the recent plane crash. I hope we can agree that that's an absurd position regardless of our own perspective on DEI.

[flagged]

Re: Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it

#68
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any idea why this is such a big deal to Nazis? I know they go after other people too, but it's really eerie watching it replay scene by scene.

There's been a few posts on HN suggesting reading Timothy Snyder. When the Nazis began labeling "enemies", they kind of didn't know where to stop. So it was Jews, non whites, gays (today it would be all lgbtq), communists, the list was big. When they invaded Poland, they ran into combinations of things they hated, so now they were dealing with Jewish Communists (whereas in Germany they were just Jews, or in Russia, t…

It's inherent.

https://archive.org/details/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism/

> The struggle for total domination of the total population of the earth, the elimination of every competing nontotalitarian reality, is inherent in the totalitarian regimes themselves; if they do not pursue global rule as their ultimate goal, they are only too likely to lose whatever power they have already seized. Even a single individual can be absolutely and reliably dominated only under global totalitarian conditions. Ascendancy to power therefore means primarily the establishment of official and officially recognized headquarters (or branches in the case of satellite countries) for the movement and the acquisition of a kind of laboratory in which to carry out the experiment with or rather against reality, the experiment in organizing a people for ultimate purposes which disregard individuality as well as nationality, under conditions which are admittedly not perfect but are sufficient for important partial results. Totalitarianism in power uses the state administration for its long-range goal of world conquest and for the direction of the branches of the movement; it establishes the secret police as the executors and guardians of its domestic experiment in constantly transforming reality into fiction; and it finally erects concentration camps as special laboratories to carry through its experiment in total domination.

and

> Any, even the most tyrannical, restriction of this arbitrary persecution to certain opinions of a religious or political nature, to certain modes of intellectual or erotic social behavior, to certain freshly invented "crimes," would render the camps superfluous, because in the long run no attitude and no opinion can withstand the threat of so much horror; and above all it would make for a new system of justice, which, given any stability at all, could not fail to produce a new juridical person in man, that would elude the totalitarian domination. The so-called "Volksnutzen" of the Nazis, constantly fluctuating (because what is useful today can be injurious tomorrow) and the eternally shifting party line of the Soviet Union which, being retroactive, almost daily makes new groups of people available for the concentration camps, are the only guaranty for the continued existence of the concentration camps, and hence for the continued total disfranchisement of man.

> The next decisive step in the preparation of living corpses is the murder of the moral person in man. This is done in the main by making martyrdom, for the first time in history, impossible: "How many people here still believe that a protest has even historic importance? This skepticism is the real masterpiece of the SS. Their great accomplishment. They have corrupted all human solidarity. Here the night has fallen on the future. When no witnesses are left, there can be no testimony. To demonstrate when death can no longer be postponed is an attempt to give death a meaning, to act beyond one's own death. In order to be successful, a gesture must have social meaning. There are hundreds of thousands of us here, all living in absolute solitude. That is why we are subdued no matter what happens." [Rousset]

[..]

> The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive) robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual's own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never really existed.

> This attack on the moral person might still have been opposed by man's conscience which tells him that it is better to die a victim than to live as a bureaucrat of murder. Totalitarian terror achieved its most terrible triumph when it succeeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist escape and in making the decisions of conscience absolutely questionable and equivocal. When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children, for whom he is in every sense responsible, to their death; when even suicide would mean the immediate murder of his own family — how is he to decide? The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. Who could solve the moral dilemma of the Greek mother, who was allowed by the Nazis to choose which of her three children should be killed?

> Through the creation of conditions under which conscience ceases to be adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible, the consciously organized complicity of all men in the crimes of totalitarian regimes is extended to the victims and thus made really total.

[..]

> If we take totalitarian aspirations seriously and refuse to be misled by the common-sense assertion that they are Utopian and unrealizable, it develops that the society of the dying established in the camps is the only form of society in which it is possible to dominate man entirely. Those who aspire to total domination must liquidate all spontaneity, such as the mere existence of individuality will always engender, and track it down in its most private forms, regardless of how unpolitical and harmless these may seem. Pavlov's dog, the human specimen reduced to the most elementary reactions, the bundle of reactions that can always be liquidated and replaced by other bundles of reactions that behave in exactly the same way, is the model "citizen" of a totalitarian state; and such a citizen can be produced only imperfectly outside of the camps.

Re: Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Found one for ya: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcla7WoWIpQ The USAID Office of Transition Initiatives (USAID/OTI) began its program in Haiti in January 2010 as part of the post-earthquake response, supporting short- and medium-term activities aimed at stabilizing Haiti through support for community revitalization, improved governance, and economic strengthening.

Whether this is a great or awful example probably depends on one's views of USAID. They were associated with the Red Cross there in the high profile failure that managed to spend more than $1.5 billion to ultimately build a total of 6 permanent housing units. [1] While that was definitely more Red Cross than USAID, the video also makes no secret of what one of the major issues with USAID is. It uses the pretext of ai…

You can’t just walk into a third world country and expect the candidate pool to be a bunch of noble laureates (we barely have such a candidate pool in the West). Logistically, I would try organize via the government too for maximum effect.

Nonetheless, your investigation is important. We need way more testimonials to get to the bottom of these things. Are programs like USAID a grift, or are the people cancelling it the grifters, or is the answer the dreaded middle?

This is the only way we’re going to re-find the spirit of this country (because it is absolutely absent at the moment). Americans have always been proud of programs that carry the legacy of the Marshall Plan.

I don’t want to get rid of a program just because it failed, anything can fail. We need to know if the people getting rid of these things even believe in goodwill and charity. They may not, in which case debating the finances and accounting is the obvious distraction.

This is less about if we have the money in the room, and more so about did we put people with the right fucking hearts in the room.

An uncharitable person will fight goodwill even if it’s free.

Post reply on HN