I hope you don't actually believe that USAID helped lives, it's literally a propaganda arm of the government directly intervening in the politics of other countries and being a covert operation for murder and financing dictatorships. That Americans think that sacking it costs "millions of African's lives" is the pinnacle of comedy.

I think I'd rather trust medical experts (The Lancet) and their assessment vs your statement that implied USAID didn't save lives.

Lancet is run by left-wing academic ideologues who do not practice medicine clinically, the publication advanced untested theories as policy during COVID and then recommended exceptions for BLM protesting.

The lancet is a peer-reviewed journal, so it doesn’t really matter if the editors practice medicine or not - because the authors and reviewers do.

> untested theories as policy during COVID and then recommended exceptions for BLM protesting.

I feel like the thing you’re trying not to say is “mask wearing”. Untested theories like mask wearing.

That's a sure way to stay brainwashed.

Seeing the low-effort Reddit-tier snipes on every single post remotely related to him is tiring. I don't think it's a lot to ask of the supposedly intelligent, logical HN crowd to keep the outrage limited to posts that specifically discuss those topics.

You’re obviously not above a low effort off topic reddit-tier snipe (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49355484), which means this is about opinions you disagree with.

Once a conversation has turned low effort I’m happy to “wrestle with the pigs” and get muddy.

Have you never heard the expression don’t feed the trolls? If you actually have a problem with the tone and not just the content, ignore them and move on

> We don't get to use technology for technologies sake, and pretend it doesn't have social and political consequences or connections.

Nobody is """pretending""" that in this thread.

The reality that is being asserted is that (1) politics doesn't have to be on-topic for every forum, (2) it's very explicitly not the focus of HN, and (3) even if it were on-topic the guidelines are very clear about ways to engage in a civil fashion and a very large number of comments on Musk-related posts are extremely clearly not doing this and breaking the guidelines.

Hence, downvoting and flagging are the correct things to do.

> politics doesn't have to be on-topic for every forum

The idea that you could separate “politics” from a topic as broad as technology is almost laughable. Yes, this is a bad place to discuss election outcomes and candidate nominations. But tech and its social implications are wrapped up in ways that can’t be separated.

A quick skim of your comment history shows you’re very happy to wade into politics, so I feel this is a bad-faith admonishment that attempts to point at guidelines to discourage opinions you disagree with.

Can you please not cross into personal attack? You're right, of course, that technology and politics cannot be separated, and your point about (I'm paraphrasing here) horse-race politics being off topic is well taken. But the last bit was over the line, and not necessary to make your substantive point.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html