> âThey physically grabbed us, forced us out of the conference center, and now are telling us we can no longer attend this meeting,â Kelly told MedPage Today, which first reported the incident. âTheyâre taking our lanyards. It really has come to this in America. Censorship is real. America needs to stand up. Scientists, stand up. Physicians, stand up.â
It's become very evident from the outside that the best time to stand up was yesterday, and you might already be too far down the slope to be able to quickly recover for this. I really do feel for all Americans who just want to have a normal life with an average quality of life or above, but at one point the environment around you change so quickly that that stops being even a possibility in the future. If your life hasn't been affected yet, it will be shortly.
The best day to stand up against the ongoing censorship and repression might have been yesterday, but the second-best day to do so is today. You really need to start caring about this before it's way to late. One "no kings protest" every 6 months is not gonna do anything, what you need is wide solidarity across industries, and a real general strike across the country. The second you do this, you'll see that the many and poor can control the few and rich.
I completely agree with what you are saying, but I have grown too cynical to believe it will ever happen. American capitalism has been very effective at ensuring 2 outcomes:
- The population is kept just comfortable enough to become complacent, with easy access to intoxicants, brainrot media and fast food. Now there are even robots that can do our thinking for us. A large percentage of people are brainwashed into thinking that all change is bad because it will cause them to lose the paltry, ersatz freedom they have rather than gaining real liberty.
- The labor pool is kept large enough that any of us could be replaced immediately with no significant loss to our employers. As the ISP mantra goes, âwe have nothing to lose but our jobsâ.
Yes, we know that they couldnât replace _all_ of us at once, but combine points 1 and 2 and you will start to understand why there is no appreciable labor movement in the United States.
What chills me the most, is the self-censorship Americans engage on social media today, everywhere online. It seems Americans today are afraid of talking clearly about general strikes, protesting, rape, sexual violence, censorship and more "taboo" topics, and I'm guessing it's because the platforms kind of shadow-ban people quickly for it.
Growing up, I always heard Americans bragging about freedom of speech, and how important it is. I'll admit I swallowed that wholesale as a young impressionable person in another country, and I still believe in it, just not the American freedom of speech flavor I suppose. But it's so sad to see the state of affairs compared to just ten years ago, where discussions could be freely held, even on mainstream social media, and people weren't afraid of talking about things with clear words.
But the chilling effect is in full effect today, and I think it's having a large impact on how well (or not) the working class could actually mobilize. Because as soon as anyone mentions "general strike" on social media, they seem to disappear into a black hole and that stuff never shows up in people's feeds. Regardless of the size of the labor pool, if you can't organize people somehow, especially across a large country like the US, it's short of impossible to actually get any change in reality.
Americans don't talk about "general strikes" because they don't care about general strikes and never really have. That concept doesn't have a place in American culture. I know socialists keep trying to make it salient but that is like trying to impose democracy on Afghanistan.
You have to work with what you have, not what you wish you had.
> Americans today are afraid of talking clearly about general strikes, protesting, rape, sexual violence, censorship
Americans are talking about protesting, rape, sexual violence, censorship all the time ... and I mean literally all sides - liberals, conservatives, leftists, feminists, MAGA ...
The chilling effect on speech on social media platforms is because they are ad funded, nothing more. Advertisers have no desire to be associated with controversy.
If someone wants unfettered speech, it has to be someplace for which they are willing to pay the hosting and moderation bills. "Private businesses don't owe you a platform for your speech" as the American left liked to say.
oh man, "we have nothing to lose but our jobs" really cracked me up in a sad way
It's not "captialism." Sweden is capitalist. Norway is capitalist. It's about America going from a high-trust wealthy society, to a low-trust, mostly lower class society with increasing wealth inequality.
If you look around the world, this is effectively the natural state of affairs: India, South Africa, Nigeria, Russia... they all have the same pattern. The US and the West was the outlier in the '50-'90 because we had a lot of wealth redistribution AND free markets. Then the boomers were like, fuck that, we want to all be rich... and they mostly are, but everyone else is fucked.
Government is hard, you need people to give a shit. We decided we don't care somewhere along the way.
1984 ended up being a playbook rather than a warning
This might be reading too much in to minor drama at a diabetes conference. The gentleman in question could have gone to protest outside (and probably did).
The article linked doesn't even say what exactly they were protesting (beyond a rather vague "attacks on scientific research" which could mean a lot of things).
Their so-called "protest" was just distributing an article already published in the journal of the medical association to which this conference is attached, which probably discussed matters of interest for the attendance, like the future of research financing in this domain.
I can hardly think of a more peaceful form of protest, which only intended to make aware the participants about the content of the article. Those who were not interested presumably refused to take the article copy or did not read it.
Even on HN you can still see claims that USA is a "free" country where anyone can say anything about the government, without consequences. This example shows clearly that this claim is false.
I'm no doctor, but I suspect the conference organisers wanted the conference to focus on diabetes. Rather than exploring whether the USA is a "free" country where anyone can say anything about the government, without consequences.
> Even on HN you can still see claims that USA is a "free" country where anyone can say anything about the government, without consequences.
The first amendment applies to public spaces. Not private conferences which are invite-only. You're on an anti-U.S. tear in this discussion but lack understanding of the basics.
For the same reason I can't show up at your office and start handing out religious materials and/or pornography (take your pick) to everyone showing up for work and claim it's a free speech issue and my right to do so.
As someone else pointed out below, this exact argument was used to ban apps lacking "correct" moderation from the app stores a few years ago.
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> This might be reading too much in to minor drama at a diabetes conference.
Indeed, my view and perspective is built by a culmination of recent events, not based on a single event. The widespread self-censorship Americans currently engage in (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434091) is also a large part of it.
I don't have any "index of events" handy that could explain why I think the slope is so evident currently, but based on the ongoing journalistic suppression, individual self-censorship, centralization of control and power in governments and society together with lots of other smaller incidents like this one and others, makes it pretty clear to me at least.
Conferences have dozens of people distributing pamphlets, papers, ads, and all manner of literature. To share a publication from an authoritative body with peers is a common action.
The conference invited Jay Bhattacharya (the NIH director), who I guarantee was not going to give a technical speech, since beyond an 30-year-old, never-professionally-used generic medical degree, he knows approximately dick about diabetes or anything relevant. These guys were handing out copies of an article outside that room. He didn't show and sent a substitute, who was surely going to sing the same song.
By letting NIH political operatives in, the ADA made the conference itself a political event.
> The article linked doesn't even say what exactly they were protesting (beyond a rather vague "attacks on scientific research" which could mean a lot of things).
It does mean a lot of things, and the Trump administration is doing roughly all of them. Sorry about your lack of basic knowledge of current events.
>> If your life hasn't been affected yet, it will be shortly.
If your life hasnt been affected yet, you arent paying attention. Or, it has been affected for the better because you are one of the many who generally support the movement.
Youâre pretending like the vast majority of people are being oppressed by some military government but easily forget that tens of millions of us support the president and arenât intimidated whatsoever by anything people like you could do.
All oppressive regimes have die hard supporters. The f'ed up thing is that they may even become the majority. Hence voting cannot fix it.
Yeah, itâs well known that oppressive regimes have 10s of millions of supporters.
Or maybe your ideas are just bad, and maybe the other side thinks your ideas are weak and doesnât want any part of them.
How would you âfix itâ without voting? And if it involves âforceâ why do you ever think weâd let you do that?
> Youâre pretending like the vast majority of people are being oppressed by some military government
I wasn't, or at least I don't think I am. What did I write that gave you that impression? I mainly wrote about freedom of speech and censorship, and nothing of meat about the military really, but maybe I don't realize what I wrote sounds like.
That's precisely the issue, the power dynamic needs to flip. The state of USA and more worryingly the direction it is in is horrifying.
Headline is weird. It's not a copyright thing, as I had assumed. It was because it was an editorial criticizing how the administration is running the NIH.
It was because the group made the mistake of inviting the federal appointee currently running NIH.
This would probably have been fine if this administration was not comprised of individuals that cannot abide any sort of pushback.
The protest would not have been needed without the official there - but their presence made the organizers so nervous that they tossed the editor in chief of their own journal.
The problem is how deep the federal dollars go into these systems that enable fear of pulling it. That is the mechanism of control. Our own tax dollars being weaponized.
> problem is how deep the federal dollars go into these systems
The problem is no state AG suing to stop OMB and HHS from illegally re-appropriating funds directed by the Congress for diabetes research. Like, the multi-year funding shenanigan called out in the article is literally accounting fuckery.
True!
And not an arbitrary editorial, but:
> > Some questioned how handing out reprints of an editorial published in the ADAâs own journal, at the ADAâs own annual conference, could be construed as a violation of that code.
You're not allowed to hand out your own articles you've published in the journal that the conference is about? One could start questioning what this conference is really about, if authors aren't allowed to provide a copy of their work to people they talk to... No one bats an eye about that almost every paper author shares their papers with you when you email them, but when you do so in person it's suddenly a problem?
TFA makes the same point -
>The scientists were not disruptive or disorderly in their conduct, based on the videos posted by MedPage Today, although the fact that they were handing out reprints just before an NIH representative was scheduled to speak might be construed as a form of protest. But it could just as easily be argued that such actions fall under valid scientific dissemination and discussion, the conferenceâs stated objective.
Protesting is not allowed by the rules.
Though there is a good case that breaking that rule is the best action. Getting kicked out probably did more for their cause then their protest. They just need the guts to publicly stand by.
Others have already quoted TFA, which rightly points that the distributing (by some of the coauthors) of an article published in the journal of a medical association, at the conference of the said medical association, a conference which has the claimed purpose of exchanging information between the members who attend the conference, can hardly be called a "protest" or a "violation of the code of conduct".
There are few cases where it is so clear cut that only the organizers have violated the code of conduct, and not those who were expelled from the conference.
Yeah this is like pointing out that itâs raining, when it is raining, at a conference about rain, when the only controversial thing is that a massively corrupt administration has announced that thereâs no such thing as rain.
If assertions of truth are cast as an anti-government protests, that says a lot about the government.
Yep, the article itself, Misguided Brushes of a Pen Continue to Dismantle and Destroy Biomedical Research in the United States: We Can No Longer Afford Complacency and Fear. We Must All Act Now!, is marked as "free" and is available without a paywall- https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/49/6/901/164764/Mi...
".Some questioned how handing out reprints of an editorial published in the ADAâs own journal, at the ADAâs own annual conference, could be construed as a violation of that code.."
The God Emperor is not to be questioned.
Burn the Heretic. Kill the Mutant. Purge the Liberals?
Link to the editorial: https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/49/6/901/164764/Mi...
My understanding is that is the expurgated version.
What was deleted from this version?
I'm hoping the Streisand Effect will take hold, and this editorial becomes the most read article ever of that journal. I've posted this news on my FB (yes...) page. And I downloaded a PDF, in case the journal takes the editorial down.
Well, there is one problem here: not everyone is interested in diabetes/nutrition. So the Streisand effect may kick in with regards to the ousted individuals, but I am not sure it will generate more interest in the topic/paper at hand. For instance, I am not particularly interested in diabetes per se; I'd be more interested in molecular medicine and what not. Either way the current administration is very hostile to science. It is kind of a sign of a dictatorship model. Trump wants to be the final authority. His cognitive decline is enormous though, it's like a broken stick that will remain broken.
Good point, so here's how I worded my FB post without even mentioning diabetes (URL truncated here because that's how FB displays them, but it works):
"Scientists were ejected from a meeting of the American Diabetes Associate for distributing printouts of an editorial that had appeared in the ADA journal. Here's the link: https://diabetesjournals.org/.../Misguided-Brushes-of-a.... The article highlights "the many threats the current U.S. administration pose[s] to the health of our nation". I recommend that you do read it: it is not technical, you don't need to have a degree in medicine or biology to read it. What do people not understand about the First Amendment?"
> What do people not understand about the First Amendment?
Are you implying that the ADA is bound by the First Amendment in this case? If so, can you elaborate how?
> It is kind of a sign of a dictatorship model.
I believe that the time for counting signs of dictatorship had gone already. The signs were counted all before Trump was elected. For example: https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...
Now it is funny to look for signs enabling us to decide whether Trump presidency is a personal enrichment or a vanity project. It seems that it is both, but I can't decide what is more important to him.
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Now available from my gopher server which gets a lot of traffic for an "obsolete" protocol ;)
Science funding in the US is in crisis. We need to stand with those bold enough to point out that the emperor has no clothing.
The ending of that story is interesting:
> The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.
From https://americanliterature.com/author/hans-christian-anderse...
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> own downfall by tribalist regressors.
As an outsider, itâs not clear to me who you are referring to as tribalist regressors here.
Would you mind clarifying?
He means people who supported Trump. Itâs not a very accurate description of them, but he has a point otherwise.
Almost all of these don't apply to diabetes science. Its just the unfortunate nature of the average populace collapsing the complicated nature of scientific work and real human issues into problems that affect "science". Also, bad actors that want to twist the uncertainity of certain scientific areas into fake news.
Are you talking about science, or politics? I don't think any of this applies to diabetes research.
You're commenting under an article about politics, not about diabetes research.
All this proves to me is the current US admin. is intent on turning China into the number 1 scientific research country.
At this rate, English could be replaced by Mandarin as the main international language of commerce. The only thing that could hold it back is the writing system.
If China could convert its writing to use the Latin alphabet I think that could happen with the US now on the path of destroying its research institutions.
I used to do this when I was in grad school as a matter of principle. F the man.
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