Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtlmtlmtlmtl | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile someone was using my late brother's name and face(in a list of supposed "vaccine casualties". My brother died from heart failure after lifelong illness, age 39) to spread vile antivaxx/protrump stuff.

All reports denied. It was glaringly obvious she was a paid misinfo troll.

View on HN

After my cousin passed away his mother took over the account. They used it to spew hatred and condemn people. I don't think the account was ever shut down.

Just a question, I don't pay much attention to politics, are the two related? are anti vaxers pro trump? The vaccine was developed on Trumps watch.

I figured it was just like any other boss, takes all the credit if it works. desperately tries to shift blame if it does not.

It amuses me, personally, seeing the "antivax" crowd quickly being equalized to all the other various "bad" people - 20 years ago, there was a strong but quiet "antivax" crowd and it was definitely not made up of Trump or even R-leaning people. It was quite the "hippy liberal progressive" if you had to qualify it.

But then again, twenty years ago you had all sorts of political positions you could take, now everything is simply binary. You have no agency.

It doesn’t sound it like it amuses you. You sound kind of miffed off about it.

Fair enough, it's a bit annoying because now you need about five seconds and you can replace almost anyone (at least online) with a tuned LLM without much thought.

It was fun to watch people disagree about things, that's mostly gone in the political world (and that world eats all discussion boards eventually, in my experience).

There's some correlation, and while Trump tried to take credit for Operation Warp Speed for a while[0], he distanced himself from everything related to "Covid is a threat" (including "it needs vaccines") when the tide shifted in his voter base and they went fiercely antivax, antidistancing, antilockdown, ...

[0] the process was pretty much the same speed for non-participants in non-participant countries, but okay: his administration made it a priority. Gold star for you!

I used to watch loads of political speeches, including Biden and Trumps because otherwise you take someone else's word for what they say, and I still remember the boo's he got in one of his early speeches after Biden was sworn in, the entire crowd booed when he said to go out and get vaccinated, then he said "if you want to" after he realized his 'goof.' It was like he was not paying any attention to his base since losing the White House (again this was like his second (I think?) rally since). Then he changed his strategy with his base on it after. So you're not wrong. I think he still brings it up, but briefly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com