As one of HN's resident leftists, I drew attention to the story early and it got little traction. While the right has indeed begun screaming loudly about it, calling it an attack on white people and so on (Charlie Kirk@TPUSA, Jesse Watters@Fox, Benny Johnson@Newsmax have all made such claims in the last 48 hours), refuting their claims is not the same as saying the incident is not important.
It is, and I think both the Ohio and federal governments have done a poor job of addressing it, notwithstanding the slow-moving nature of the disaster.
It is political because nobody wants to actually help. By making it political, you take it out of your hands. It is someone else's fault, and you shouldn't have to fix it.
Not once in all of the threads on this topic have I seen someone ask "what can I do to help". Mud slinging and politics is easy because you can do it from a keyboard for free.
The American liberal media is not "left" they are liberal.
That being said, they are probably trying to downplay it because it's directly related to the railroad union strike that Biden shut down a few months back. They wanted more time off-- which would mean more workers and less hours.
It's literally front page news on all of the "left" news sources and has been since the accident.. a bunch of weird grifters are proclaiming the left has abandoned the town by not declaring a Federal disaster when it would be illegal to do so since the law only recognizes natural disasters.
What's so odd is the secretary of transportation himself downplayed it by saying "hey, there are a thousand train derailments a year [big whoop]!
Really so the implication is there are ~2.75 of East Palestine derailments per day and therefore no biggie? Or, the others are mostly very minor but I want to downplay this so I'll say this happens almost three times a day, big whoop, deal!
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
The idea here is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do.
The unions desperately wanted to fix the problems that lead to stuff like this and Biden forced them not to strike so I can’t see how unions would be the problem here.
I mean, Biden brokered a deal to avert the strike, worked with the house and senate to craft a law guaranteeing the railworkers the benefits they were seeking which was then filibustered by senate republicans, but that's apparently too complicated or politically inconvenient for HN to understand so they pretend like stopping the strike was the end of that story.
Wasn't it an amendment that Sanders added to Biden's bill, was blocked by Republicans, and then enough Democrats voted for the bill despite the fact that it didn't include Sanders' amendment that should have been part of it from the start?
Everybody who voted for it bears the blame for taking away the railroad workers' rights.
You could easily rephrase your comment as "Biden took away their only option for self-directed action and then passed the buck to an organization known for doing nothing."
Sometimes complexity doesn't actually add anything useful :) Focusing on the DC play-by-play is good for convincing yourself the other team is at fault, and not much else.
Sure, you could rephrase it to something inaccurate if it was your prerogative to "both sides" something that failed almost entirely along party lines after attracting the support of several very conservative senators. I'm not sure what value that adds though :)
Were the worked who wanted to continue striking allowed to, or not? Was the response of the Republican-dominated Senate predictable or was it a surprise? If I give fine china to a toddler who drops and breaks it, which party is really at fault?
The left is downplaying it because it happened on their guy's watch, and he's not doing much about it. In fact, the Biden administration just said that Ohio wouldn't get any disaster money for this. So either the derailment's consequences are nothing, or the left's guy is ineffective at dealing with the real world. The left therefore chooses to say (and even think?) that the problems are nothing.
I think it's about Pete Buttigieg and his 2024 presidential prospects burning away faster and more effectively than the chemicals in this terrible accident.
If Democrats think this unbelievably stupid approach will work in the election, they might as well be regarded as Trump supporters. The country is watching this incident with bated breath and tremendous skepticism.
Yeah unfortunately the media in the US just overplays every bad thing that happens under someone they don’t like and underplays the bad when their guy is in office.
But corporate media is just bad so I guess that’s about all we can expect.
Its one thing to claim certain organizations pick and choose what aspects of a story to focus reporting on, but I can't fathom how someone can come to the conclusion that is as utterly ignorant as yours other than being completely brainwashed.
