token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
(fanfiction is illegal)
The Organization for Transformative Works would disagree. That's the non-profit that runs AO3 and was pretty explicitly created to make sure AO3 can be run as a non-profit legally. The community is pretty aggressive about making sure fanfic they host is not even getting close to edge of "not for profit" (e.g. I see posts telling people to not mention on AO3 if a particular piece was commissioned and not to explicitly mention accepting donations), but they're pretty sure fanfic is legal even if charging for fanfic is not. Of course, there's plenty of sites that host derivative works that have ads that haven't gotten sued, so who knows where the courts would actually draw the line.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
A trans person who wants to be 'left alone' need only choose the bathroom or facility that corresponds to their biological sex and I daresay they will be left alone.
Back a few years ago I saw multiple social media posts along the lines of this selfie of a trans man in a woman's restroom with a caption asserting the absurdity of that belief. Following the hashtags in that tweet finds some similar ones (although mostly a lot of screenshots of that one as far as I can tell).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
This is where the narrator voiceover comes in to correct me that 2020 was not in fact a fairly normal year lacking in chaos or bad things for Americans.
I'm really not sure how we got the narrative that the liberals were crying wolf over the bad things Trump was doing, and then an actual catastrophe happened as a result, and somehow you still think they were crying wolf?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
I want everyone to feel represented and like they are part of society. People who feel like they aren't part of society tend to make for poor neighbors and sometimes attempt revolutions.
And I think that politicians that feel like they have to convince more of the population to vote for them are more likely to enact policies that are good for everyone as opposed to a narrow section of the population. Even if I happen to be part of the narrow slice of the population my elected politicians happen to decide is worth listening to (I don't seem to be currently), I'll always live near people who aren't.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
I've been hearing "the new emissions standards are impossible to achieve affordably" all my life. Somehow they always manage to figure it out, either by changing the cars or changing the standards.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9d ago
I'm confused; notification settings aren't controlled within the app on Android, they're on the app info settings page which is identical for every app and allows you to disable types of notifications or all notifications for an app. Of course, the app might have overly coarse categories or lie about its notification categories, so you might have to disable more notifications than you intended, I guess.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
A lot of these people are simply in denial about how Obama treated republicans
I'm honestly not even sure what you're talking about. The story on /r/politics is that Obama's primary failure was working with Republicans too much.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
[...] Is there a need to exercise your immune system as well? Probably.
This is a complete misunderstanding of the hygiene hypothesis. I acknowledge that our understanding of the immune system remains pretty limited, but we are pretty certain that getting sick is bad for you.
I am constantly in contact with Covid positive people, I go to crowded areas all the time
And that seems like a reasonable trade-off to me. I have no interest in most activities that involve being around a lot of strangers where masking wouldn't work (e.g. bars/clubs/concerts), and I trust my friends I do spend time with unmasked to isolate when sick and be honest about exposures, so it doesn't cost me anything to wear a mask as I go about my normal daily life and it reduces my chance of infection to basically nothing. But I understand most people like gatherings with strangers, so the tiny marginal protection from, say, masking on the bus to/from such gatherings, is completely irrelevant to them. Just trying to explain why there's a minority for which masking is rational.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Yeah, I don't see Trump winning without also having control of the House and Senate, although possibly by very small margins. And the past few years both parties have been filing down the filibuster, so it's possible a Republican trifecta would eliminate it in 2025 even though they were unwilling to do so in 2017, and therefore be able to push through more legislation. Unclear a narrow majority (of either party) could actually agree on much legislation.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Why would a 19 year old ever get an mRNA injection, when they could get a shot of Covaxin?
Why is your example alternative vaccine Covaxin, which is not available in the US, and not Novavax, which is actually available in the US? Do you think the protein subunit technique used by Novavax is also not a sufficiently old-fashioned way of making vaccines? My understanding is that it looks to be on par with the mRNA vaccines for effectiveness while having much less in the way of side effects, while the inactivated vaccines like Covaxin work significantly worse.
Percent of New Yorkers ages 0-4 with completed vaccine series - 7.9%
This makes me think the vaccine could be seen as dangerous to parents. Keep in mind that all high-risk (on ventilator) children have probably been vaccinated, but some likely have not.
This is an incredible failure of public health messaging. While risk goes down for older children, COVID-19 is significantly more dangerous for children under 4. This CDC table shows triple the rate of hospitalization on somewhat fewer cases.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Put frankly, nobody really cares about this man. Nobody really cares about the median CAF victims: poor people, strippers, general lower-class coded individuals. Nobody really cares about people jailed on bogus charges, put through the justice wringer for ill-conceived reason, or shot to death by trigger-happy psychopaths. It's the just world fallacy in full effect: they probably had it coming anyway.
I totally believe you're right about this, but it still frustrates me. Even from a purely selfish perspective, this should matter to people. Holding people in prison or putting them through the justice system for stupid reasons is a waste of my tax money. Ruining people's lives by sending them to prison for no good reason means they're likely not going to be contributing to the economy (or, worse, become criminals and contribute negatively). We do this at a really large scale in the US, so this isn't exactly a small effect.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
I assert that the linkage between the BLM movement and its activism and the increase in the murder rate, particularly for black men, is the clearest, most obvious linkage in social science in the last generation, and possibly since the invention of the discipline.
Surely the obvious counterpoint is that the BLM movement utterly failed at the ballot box, with multiple major cities having elections resulting in the side pushing for increased police funding winning (or not even having a serious candidate pushing for any kind of police reform).
But I'm guessing your claim is that the protests themselves discouraged the police from doing their jobs, leading to less effective policing (per officer/dollar spent). Which seems to just prove BLM's point that the current way we do public safety / law enforcement is bad for black people.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
For my part, I remain puzzled over how some of their initiatives are termed anti-democratic. For instance, they want to allow businesses to reject certain customers/requests based on their faith.
I think from an American perspective, there's the idea that public spaces are for all* of the public because the alternative is segregation and we decided in the 1960s that that's bad. "Anti-democratic" doesn't quite fit, but I think the idea is that everyone is part of the same society is part of why it's important that everyone has a voice in how the society is run and there's some connection between being allowed to participate in society by being present in public spaces and being allowed to participate in society by voting.
*That is, businesses shouldn't exclude people by group/demographics; excluding individuals due to behavior (e.g. that specific person harassed the employees of that specific restaurant) is different.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Just to be clear, you're asserting that the person in the photo I linked should indeed use the women's bathroom? And you expect that to be the popular (or at least red tribe) consensus?
Do you think there are valid reasons for the social norm of penis-havers and people of menstruation being assigned separate lavatory facilities?
Why should the extant status quo be altered?
I'm rejecting the claim that that was ever the actual status quo.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
A UK judge has ordered that that the baby be killed. Her parents have protested this, saying that they don’t think the government should kill their baby.
Now wait a minute, the order is to stop actively keeping the baby alive, which seems pretty different from killing the baby, even if the end result is the same.
The court point of view is that they're ordering the parents to stop torturing their child, and that they can't condone the parents moving the baby to a different country that is willing to torture it. Obviously there's clear disagreement over whether the medical care is comparable to torture.
I don't think the court is obviously right here, but I think you're being unreasonable in claiming they're obviously wrong.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
This seems like a strange perspective to me. Or maybe I'm missing your point. The Culture War isn't about the positive and beautiful because, and maybe I'm stretching the metaphor here, war isn't positive and beautiful.
Plenty of people are making beautiful arts and crafts of various kinds to enrich their lives and the lives of those around them. That's just not Culture War material.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
There was no gay sex in Lawrence. Indeed, there was no gay couple in Lawrence.
The plaintiffs were gay men, charged under Texas' anti-sodomy statute.
I'm not a lawyer, so maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure I see your point. The plaintiffs in Lawrence had a harm to bring a case over: they really were charged with sodomy. Is your assertion that the facts of the case didn't support the charge so it was dishonest of them to take a legal strategy of "that shouldn't be illegal" instead of "we didn't do that"? (I don't know, maybe they did try the "we didn't do that" line of defense in a lower court and failed? I can't imagine a case based on the word of a few gay men vs. the word of police officer eyewitnesses going well for the gay men.)
That seems different from the claim that no gay marriage website was ever ordered, so the whole case was actually about a hypothetical harm, which I thought was grounds for throwing a case out, as otherwise the courts would be flooded with hypotheticals and they already have trouble keeping up with the concrete cases.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
No vax booster has ever been able to explain to me what the proposed mechanism is for exposure by blood to a small subunit of the virus providing better immunity than exposure by mucous membranes to the whole actual thing; this makes no sense whatsoever when you think about it.
One possible intuition for the reverse seems pretty straightforward: the full virus contains countermeasures against the immune system; the vaccine does not (and has a stabilized version of the spike to make sure it's visible to the immune system). On blood vs. mucus membranes, there's research into nasal vaccines, but there's yet to be one that actually shows better protection from severe disease, possibly because the protection from infection just will never be that great because of the way coronaviruses and the human immune system interact and severe disease happens when the virus gets into more into the blood/internal organs.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Cultural appropriation is an issue that involves more nuance than the media tends to give it. The part of those complaints that made sense to me is that they didn't know what the things they were baking were and making confidently wrong comments about how they were supposed to be. See this tweet about the s'mores challenge:
me: I feel no special attachment to my american identity
paul hollywood: you see, it’s essential to carefully apply the blowtorch around the edges of the s’more—obviously we don’t want a gooey mess
me: I must throw him into the boston harbor
with the follow-up
I should clarify that the dessert featured in the technical looked delicious, I would like to eat it, the ganache and meringue sound heavenly and the digestive biscuit is a good substitute for graham cracker
but it is at best a s’more-INSPIRED dessert, not a s’more
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
My understanding is that basically the reason we don't do that anymore is that as the federal positions mattered more, the state legislature elections turned into proxy elections for the federal positions and the state issues were getting ignored. If you're going to have an indirect system for selecting the federal positions, you would probably want to either (1) keep it separate from state elections or (2) decide to go even harder on giving power to the federal government (so it doesn't matter as much if the state legislatures aren't governing).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
Does this only apply to women's attire? i.e. is a man dressed sexy (whatever qualifies as such for this context... shirtless and showing muscles, wearing an expensive suit, etc.) in public also advertising himself as open to advances from any women he might encounter while out and about?
I understand interpreting attempts to appear attractive as an invitation to interact in a context like a bar or a party, but even there, I'd think the more relevant signal would be being at the bar or party without a visible date. Them being more attractive of course would increase your desire to interact with them, but I don't see why it necessarily is a signal of their desire to be interacted with.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
I'm not sure how much it makes sense to use polling data to predict other kinds of events. My understanding is that using polling to predict elections makes sense because you're essentially running the election early on a sample, so going from there to estimating the election results is what statistics is good at. And there are a lot of polls on elections people care about so you have enough data to do something with.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
While I agree it's not the mainstream narrative, I have definitely seen pushback on the framing of Chinese "wet markets" being the source of pandemics being racist with the clarification that
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"Wet market" is defined by Wikipedia as being the Singapore government invented term for what in the US we would call a farmer's market or public market. By using the Asian term for it that we don't use, it artificially sounds more distant and exotic. And ignores the actually important part: live animal markets without proper health and safety protocols, letting us pretend we don't need to ask whether our handling of live animals carries pandemic risk.
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Related, there's no particular reason to think that there's anything special about China here other than China being really big so an outbreak at a completely random market across the world has a good chance of being in China. That said, the specific animals and local viruses in the local ecosystem may also have more pandemic potential in that region (coronaviruses seem to come from bats in Asia... but maybe that's just where we've been looking for them post-SARS)... although currently scientists are keeping an eye on H5N1 avian flu and live animal sales of chickens happen everywhere and sound a lot less exotic to a US audience.
Monitoring live animal sales everywhere (and which probably extends to keeping up with surveillance of pandemic-potiential viruses in wild animals), and making sure they're conducted safely is a massive, expensive project. Which means there's a massive demand for thought-stopping narratives for why we don't need to do it.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
A couple quick thoughts:
I'm not sure if bullying exactly fits under the category of "hate crimes", but I definitely have seen people talking about moving away from trans-unfriendly states has greatly reduced or even eliminated the anti-trans bullying they / their children have encountered. These laws are seen as the government condoning that bullying, so the two aren't really considered separable. My understanding is that the danger to trans children is mainly suicide, and both bullying and the government denying them recognition of their identity or appropriate medical care contributes to that.
Is "Luxury Beliefs" just the right-wing version of "voting against their own interests"? @hydroacetylene makes this more explicit:
Have you considered in your disagreements with your political opponents about policy the merest possibility that they might be right (or at least correctly accomplishing their own goals which may differ from yours)?
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