token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
I think you two might be talking past each other. Whether or not the losers should have good objections is a normative statement. Whether or not their objections are a problem is a descriptive statement. If the losers refuse to accept the result of an election no matter how fair and transparent it is, you don't have a functioning democracy.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
What's the number of kids who are put on puberty blocking or cross-sex hormones?
Those numbers were also in the article I linked: about 3.5 in 10 000 or 0.035% which is also about a tenth of the diagnoses of gender dysphoria. Looking more closely, according to that data, hormones are about four times more common than puberty blockers, which surprised me as I'd expect the relative prevalence to be reversed. Which I think shows that I'm not very familiar with medical interventions for gender dysphoria.
Do these surgeries prevent the child from ever becoming a breast-feeding mother?
A quick web search found articles like this one suggesting breast reduction very frequently (the author quoted their surgeon as giving them 50/50 odds; in my quick search I haven't found better numbers) prevents breastfeeding. The article I linked explicitly says "mastectomies" under the top surgery section although I know trans adults who have chosen breast reduction instead of mastectomy for their top surgery specifically with the goal of being able to breastfeed. (The internet also suggests breast augmentation rarely impacts breastfeeding, but usually only a short-term impact, so probably not relevant here.) In other words, around 10 times as many cis children as trans children will find themselves unable to breastfeed later in life due to gender affirming surgeries... but both numbers are pretty small.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
27d ago
I'd say ProPublica, The Atlantic, and The Economist are all mainstream left-leaning news sources I expect to do a better job of analysis than NPR. With the "analysis" part, I'm intentionally excluding Reuters/AP which I expect to be relatively trustworthy on the facts (of course with some bias on which facts they report and precisely how they present them), but analysis just isn't what they're trying to do.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
(or at least for their children to)
I thought second-generation immigrants nearly universally spoke English natively, with the possible exception of some insular religious communities like the Amish. Are there notable exceptions that I'm missing?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
Sorry, yes, I understand that. I'm saying I really have no idea what the other side to that story is.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
These days there's no reason to be wearing low-quality masks, which were common in 2020 when there were shortages of medical-quality masks. N95 or equivalent masks are now cheap and plentiful. And much more comfortable than cloth masks. Also, I know multiple people who have better than N95 respirators (P100, I think?), mainly for plane trips, I think, which are likely plenty good for protection from someone unmasked and infected. While most of my friends have gotten COVID at least once by now, I've never heard of anyone who thought they acquired it while wearing a mask, including multiple stories of groups of people getting COVID and the people with them wearing masks did not.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
I'm very confused. How it is not the exact opposite? This seems like a fairly central example of "don't teach women to not get raped; teach men to not rape". The advice can be paraphrased into "if you see a woman at a party and you think she's not in the right headspace to meaningfully consent to sex, don't try to have sex with her". It fits very cleanly into a sex-positive consent-focused framework.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
Part of the problem here is that the optimal number of men (from the point of view of the organizers of the conference) is not zero. Having some allies that get their messages about gender discrimination out of the conference is very much so a goal of the conference, albeit not a primary one. Even if they could devise a rule that banned men but not "real" non-binary attendees, it's not actually what they want.
It seems like the actual solution probably looks like getting rid of the recruiters and thereby removing that incentive to attend from people not interested in the supposed main point of the conference.
(This feels parallel to discussions I've been involved in about non-queer people in queer spaces. Although I haven't personally seen such a space get overrun with non-queer people, my understanding is that they generally either have to fight hard to stay queer by being very explicit about being a queer space or end up splitting off and creating a new Really Queer This Time(tm) space every once in a while.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
This is false. Needless to say, we don't have studies (at least not ones we trust) on the effectiveness of the vaccines China used. But we do have studies showing the ones the United States used remain highly effective against severe disease and death.
There's actually some weak evidence the Omicron-updated vaccines are worse against Omicron because we made them a half dose of the old vaccine and a half dose of the Omicron-adjusted version, which might be more similar to giving the vaccine at a half dose. (There is evidence the updated vaccine did a better job of protection against infection for Omicron... but it was never very high, never lasted very long, and the study suggested the currently circulating variants have drifted far enough that there's no measurable protection against infection anymore... probably will see a slight bump with the next formula update, but that's mostly a research curiosity.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
I see. And that along with the US Dept. of Energy's "low confidence" assessment of it being a lab leak does suggest there's some classified information that hints in the direction of a lab leak that can't be made public.
Who's "engaging in misinformation" now.
I'm pretty conformable pinning that one the newspaper publishing a detailed article doing lots of hinting at facts they can't support that contradict published research they ignore. Maybe they know something they can't share, but they haven't provided much reason to believe them in that article.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
traditionally sympathetic media outlets
CNN had some ownership/leadership changes in 2022 which included an explicitly stated goal of being more neutral. Whether they're a right-wing media outlet now depends on who you ask, but they're actively trying to shed their image as a pro-Democratic-Party one.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
My understanding of the problem with banning "gain of function" research is that the term is that any research on real viruses* is either (1) intentional bio-weapons research which we already have policies around (which generally read "Don't.") or (2) something that could reasonably be called "gain of function" because you can't do anything with viruses without allowing them to propagate and therefore evolve. And for (2) we already have rules about what experiments require what level BSL. Scientists tend to not approve of the proposal of "don't study real viruses".
*As opposed to pseudovirus models of some kind where you've ripped out most of the virus so you're pretty sure it's not dangerous. But, oh, yeah, to do that, you've changed the function of the virus. Has it gained function? Who's defining "gain" here? Truly not trying to play semantics games here: if only some experiments are "gain" of function, what's your process for deciding which ones those are? What happens if they're wrong? How is this any different from the current system?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
More than that, it's aligned interests. The places I've lived where I was renting and planning on only living there a few years, you better believe I didn't give two shits about the future of the place. Owning a home really changes the incentive structure.
I hear this and it's such a strange concept to me. I live in an expensive west coast city. The people I know with close ties and care about the place are locals who, for the most part, have parents who own houses because they got into the market so long ago, and they can't imagine ever being able to afford to buy instead of renting. The people who own houses are either the aforementioned older generation or the people who moved here for high-paying jobs and can actually afford to buy into the market, but will happily hop off to some other city if the opportunity presents itself because the cost of owning a home just isn't a big deal to them. Obviously, I'm generalizing and a lot of people fall into neither group, but those two are very common in my experience and make me quite suspicious of claims that "landowner" is a remotely good proxy for "cares about the local government".
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
Mathematical logic is a pretty wide field of which boolean algebra is only a small part of the basics.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
Despite your woke-as-religion argumentation, you seem to be missing the "Original Sin"-analogue: a major part of the woke worldview is that everyone has internalized biases and everyone should be a work-in-progress of improving themselves by trying to reduce those biases but they will never be 100% successful. From this assumption, they conclude that attempts to ignore group identities will inevitably fail and that creating an unbiased system out of biased individuals requires explicit attention to bias.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
That was not my layman's understanding of "standing", so thanks for the reference.
I've definitely seen people on the left complain about the difficulty/time it takes to get a test case through the courts for things like the recent abortion restrictions in various states. I wonder if this will lead to the left trying to use the same legal tactic to challenge those laws faster (and how that will go for them). Or maybe they already are and it's just not covered.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
There's a lot of different interpretations of that going on in this thread. Let me attempt to summarize/categorize them (I'm probably missing some options?):
-
["Pedophilia"] They are literally going to rape children.
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["Encouraged transition"] They are going to convince children to become gay/trans.
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["Acceptance"] They are going to convince children it's okay to be gay/trans, resulting in more of them behaving as such.
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["Liberalization"] They are going to convince children to have liberal values, including being accepting of gay/trans people, but also things like not attending church.
(Giving these names to try to be less confusing than referring back to the numbers.)
I think the people chanting meant the some mixture of the last two. It sounds like the right is most vocal about being concerned about (2) "encouraged transition". Which the left generally believes is not really a thing ("born this way"); of course, whether the chanters believe it's a thing and whether it actually is are two separate questions. Although there's some wiggle-room there for (3) "acceptance" for things like bisexuals deciding whether to engage in homosexual behavior or not.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
I'm still confused; the context is talking about the not wealthy people trying to hold these "luxury beliefs" that they can't afford to and it's hurting them.
Wanting to abolish the police is voting against your interests only if abolishing the police actually increases crime that hurts you (worded vaguely because it's reasonable to claim, say, shoplifting in my neighborhood hurts me indirectly even though I'm not a direct victim of the crime). The progressive views on reforming law enforcement and the justice system usually talk about how they believe the desired changes would reduce crime (usually pointing to science saying so). I fully understand that most posters here disagree. But describing such things as "luxury beliefs" goes against the honest belief of those who hold them that they would make life better for everyone.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
So one side gets a Heckler's Veto until they are convinced of the legitimacy of the election?
This, but unironically.
The primary goal of an election is convincing the losers they lost to ensure a peaceful transfer of power. Selecting a winner is a significantly less important goal. If a large portion of the population doesn't believe the election (and therefore the government) is legitimate, that's the road to a coup or civil war. Or at least lower level societal dysfunction as more people reject government authority. It's still a problem even if their reasons appear to be nonsense.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
We might hear about the odd obese person whose health problems were caused by something unrelated to their weight and carelessly overlooked by a GP, but for every one I'm sure there are at least 100 cases where the GP's snap diagnosis was right on the money.
And from the fat person's perspective, they go to the GP saying "I have this new issue; I've had this body type my whole life, so that part is not new." and the GP is ignoring their history.
(See also trans activists, who demand that healthcare professionals waste hundreds of man-hours asking 6-foot tall, bearded, broad-shouldered people if they are or have been pregnant recently.)
Well, that question has been on every medical history form I've ever gotten because they don't print different ones for men and women.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
My understanding was that no one really thought smoking marijuana was better for you than smoking tobacco, possibly even worse, if you smoked the same amount. But tobacco smokers smoke way, way more than marijuana smokers, so in practice marijuana is a lot less dangerous. And edibles exist.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
I've been meaning to compose a small questions Sunday post on this topic but haven't really gotten my thoughts in order on it. But I think it fits here, so I'll try: does concentrating wealth in the "innovators" at the expense of the lower classes to generate wealth on the "a rising tide lifts all boats" theory actually work? My particular concern is that "technology level" is not a scalar; just because a civilization puts more effort towards developing technology doesn't mean they're developing the right technologies. And what are the "right" technologies is always going to vary based on who you ask, and in an unequal society, who you're asking is whoever has the money (relative weighting here; obviously no real society is going to be 100% exactly equal in wealth across its population).
We see this in the pre-Civil-War South where there was no economic incentive to automate labor that could be done by slaves, probably hurting them economically in the long-term. Did/do we have a similar lack of emphasis on labor-saving devices for domestic work because that was seen as the domain of women, or did things like the washing machine and various kitchen tools really get invented more or less as early as they reasonably could have? Another angle on this is the general tendency of tech companies to make their products in a way that makes money for VCs, not to be useful to consumers (see "enshittification"). I've seen this proposed as a fully general argument against capitalism: innovations that solve problems are greatly disfavored over innovations that allow for rent-seeking / produce profit.
... as you can see, this isn't a top-level Culture War Roundup post because my thoughts on the matter are not well-organized.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
The people I know who are the loudest about health care all have Type 1 diabetes. That Wikipedia article says
Within the United States the number of people affected is estimated at one to three million.
so around 0.3-1% of the population. One I know says they very intentionally went the route of working for a big company to have a stable corporate job with health care because they've known since childhood that their choices were stable employment or death. The ones I know who didn't luck into such a stable career are pretty angry about it.
Women with significant period symptoms (which are fairly common, albeit not universal) also tend to care about health care to get access to the medication to manage their periods (aka birth control).
But also, catastrophic events resulting in high medical bills don't have to be all that common before a lot of people have a friend or acquaintance who had trouble with such a situation.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
That's the study I was referencing that shows that telling people to wear masks doesn't seem to do a lot. It's really hard to do a study on whether consistent mask use works because virtually everyone falls into one of two groups:
- Won't mask consistently.
- Will mask consistently anyway.
And furthermore, there's social desirability bias on telling a researcher studying masking that you're in group (2) if they are having you wear masks for a study.
Trying to put some actual numbers to this:
According to the NYT COVID data page, weekly COVID deaths in the past year have ranged from 490 (July 2-8) to 2,462 (Jan 7-13) or 0.9%-3.6% of all deaths. Of course, this is deaths from acute COVID, actual COVID deaths is somewhat higher than the official numbers, but hard to get good data on how much higher, so let's stick to these numbers. Also, going back further the numbers are a lot higher and less regular, I'm assuming the past year is a much better approximation of what to expect going forward than including any older data. (Also, I'm not seeing an official 2023 death count... looking I found this 2022 report published in May 2023 so it's probably just too early for finalized 2023 numbers.)
112k/52 = average 2,153 deaths/week from overdose deaths, doesn't seem hugely different from number of COVID deaths, although since overdose doses are mostly young and COVID deaths are mostly old, measuring in QALYs would likely paint a different picture... although if you're measuring QALYs, not trying to measure the impact of post-COVID conditions seems unfair, and I'm not sure how that would affect the conclusion.
There's also the obvious issue that COVID is practically unavoidable, although there's ways to reduce the impact (vaccination, antivirals,
not getting oldbeing healthier), while avoiding an overdose is straight forward: Don't Do Drugs(tm). Or, at least, that's the oversimplification in the popular conception of the two.More options
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