token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
If we know how to make a vaccine for it, why was it not included in the annual flu vaccine this year? I was assuming the reason is that we don't know how to make a vaccine for a potential future H5N1 that can sustain human-to-human transmission because it doesn't exist and may be sufficiently different from the currently known strains that a different vaccine may be necessary (or, worse, that immune imprinting may mean a future vaccine against the pandemic strain wouldn't work as well).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
So why didn't he become a dictator during the first four years he was president? I've never heard a good response to this one.
Because his plot to overturn the 2020 election failed? Since the DoJ slow-walked the investigations, he's had four years to consolidate power and will have another four years before another presidential election. I don't see why the Republicans (probably not Trump, given his age, but who knows?) wouldn't try again or why anyone would be sure they'd fail.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
What do you think they'd be accomplishing by such protests? Surely protesting Trump shutting down the Department of Education by occupying the Department of Education so it can't function would be counter-productive. Are you suggesting the individual federal employees that are fired... keep working, treating their firing as illegal and asserting they still have jobs?
There's certainly been calls from the left for the Democrats to do more. But obstruction and destruction of the federal government is what their opponents want; it very unclear what they could do that wouldn't just be helping the Republicans. Maybe physically obstructing DOGE employees and thereby forcing arrests, to make it look more serious? That's still just handing more power over to the Republicans (by reducing Democratic congressional votes), as discussed down-thread.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
How? I don't see how it prevents you from getting a passport that states your biological sex.
Trans (or intersex) people may not have or be able to acquire identity documents that state their "biological sex". And if they do, photo IDs showing a mismatch between the sex marker on the ID and the gender presentation in the photo (or in person) are at risk of being rejected as valid ID.
The other effects you list also have some pretty awful consequences, but I don't know anyone directly affected by them, while I do know people who failed to renew their passport in time and will be left without one, and therefore be unable to leave the country, at some point in the next 4 years.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
I too wonder why prostitution or sex tourism is still so shunned. It's clear why the far left and far right hate it
Does the far left hate it? Maybe I just don't have any exposure to the group you're calling "the far left". I understand it's not a normie view, but I somewhat often see pro-sex-worker sentiment in places as diverse as the leftist Tumblrs I follow, my IRL friends' Facebook posts, and Ars Technica comments (mostly when in comes up in the context of anti-sex-worker laws like FOSTA-SESTA).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Starbucks closed more than a dozen locations, primarily located in downtown spots, citing safety concerns.
The universal response on local comment threads whenever this is mentioned is to laugh at the audacity of the claims that Starbucks closed their coffee shops due to "safety concerns" that somehow don't affect the multiple other coffee shops on the same blocks as the ones they closed. Specifically due to those coincidentally being the same Starbucks locations that were pushing to unionize.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
I can't imagine there being another round of top-down enforced lockdowns. Although H5N1 could be bad enough that a lot more people would be isolating voluntarily.
But, really, your assumption would be conspiracy, not the much simpler explanation that public health is bad when you cut funding for public health?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
As Rov_Scam mentioned, opposition to federal ID has primarily come from the right in the past (see religious-coded claims that ID cards are the "mark of the beast"), although both sides have expressed privacy concerns about the existence of IDs and/or the corresponding database (after all, that link I just gave was to Huffpost, not exactly known for their right-wing slant).
I have a hard time really caring about the supposed privacy concerns both because the IRS does a perfectly fine job not telling anyone my tax info that shouldn't know it and because my identity isn't private anyway: every registered voter's name/address is public information already. (And, honestly, I'm not sure I see the point of my tax info being secret either.)
There's not even really a need for the physical card. The whole point of a photo ID is to present a photo verifiable by a human along with a counterfeit-proof claim of some information about the person that's a photo of (for voting, the information that matters is name, address, and citizenship status). There's no reason other than the implementation complexity for requiring each person to carry around a plastic card instead of having the verifier look up that information in a database, which could alleviate fears of the cost of replacing an ID card.
That said, there's at least two separate issues that ID is being proposed to solve:
- Verifying the voter is who they say they are. That is, preventing the voter from voting as someone else who they know isn't going to vote, possibly because that someone else is a fake name they registered. Voters trying to vote multiple times does happen (I've already seen some news stories about people getting caught doing so this election), but it's difficult to get many additional votes this way, partially because it requires having voter registrations that you know will not get used legitimately.
- Verifying the voter is allowed to vote. i.e., they are a citizen and a resident at the address they claimed. This is the issue I think you're talking about; as there's a lot of non-citizens around, a significant percentage of them voting would be a lot of votes.* This could be verified by ID at time of voting, but it could also be verified by maintaining the voter rolls by some combination of requiring ID to register and checking the local voter database against some database of citizens. Election organizations already try to do this, but they are limited by the lack of a federal database of all citizens. I think some states collect social security numbers in attempt to approximate the "federal database of all citizens", but I'm not sure exactly how that part of the verification works.
*(Personally my preferred solution is to repeal the laws against non-citizen voting. The requirement to be a citizen to vote was added in most states as part of the wave of anti-immigrant legislation in the early 1900s. Before then, a stated intention to settle permanently in the United States was sufficient. Having a category of residents that don't get to vote is undemocratic.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
Looking at "Who Gets Abortions in America?" (NYT article dated 2021)... 60% of women who have abortions already have children, although only 14% are married, so "happily married women with children" aren't getting a large percentage of all abortions. That said, about 25% of women get an abortion at some point in their life, so it's not exactly rare.
Of course, that's not counting "spontaneous abortion" (better known as miscarriage). I was having trouble finding statistics for how many women will ever have a miscarriage, probably partially because it's tricky to define since well, I'll let Wikipedia explain:
Among women who know they are pregnant, the miscarriage rate is roughly 10% to 20%, while rates among all fertilisation is around 30% to 50%.
I bring up miscarriage because some of the concern over abortion bans has been over healthcare for miscarriages getting lumped in with abortions.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
In the absence of a 'none of the above' option...
I don't think anywhere in the US puts an actual bubble labeled "none of the above" on the ballot, but you can leave it blank or write in Mickey Mouse.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
This is such a strange take. Those women didn't want to go on a date with men like you (conservative) and you didn't go on a date with them. Sounds like their filtering is working and you just don't like that it's a filter they care about.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
Michelle Obama's name always comes up on these things because she's one of the few prominent people that the Dems could unite behind easily.
Looking at the "Career" section of her Wikipedia page, while Michelle Obama has been involved in politics plenty, she's never even run for an elected position herself. I really can't see the Democrats going for her, in addition to her being pretty clear about not wanting the job.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo ago
I thought the general consensus was that it was a lab leak
The overwhelming scientific consensus is that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over at the market (twice), but that determining that with certainty is impossible without more evidence that likely can never be collected (i.e., too much time has passed and SARS-CoV-2 is everywhere).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo ago
That argument is equivalent to noticing that airplane crashes almost always happen near air traffic control towers and considering eliminating the air traffic control towers as a possible solution.
Of course, a lab for studying zoonotic coronaviruses is located near where zoonotic coronavirus spillovers tend to happen. You'd need a really good reason to put it somewhere else. You should be slightly surprised if a spillover happens far away from such a lab, not the other way around.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
Depends on exactly what you mean by "no sexuality". Age-appropriate sex ed is important for children to know how to report sexual abuse (and to know that they should). Here's one organization's "Sexuality Concepts for Children (Ages 4-8)" (just what I found on a quick web search, the group's Wikipedia page doesn't even have a "controversies" section; exactly what should be on that list is not something I'm an expert on).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
Are you implying there's some objective definition of "the country's goals", distinct from its democratically elected leadership? Where does that definition come from?
... yes? Sorry, I'm not even seeing how there could possibly be disagreement on that point unless you completely do not believe in the concepts of corruption or embezzlement.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
That's a rather strange reading of what he said. Nowhere in there was any mention of her returning to prostitution.
How did you interpret
cheating on him when she wanted more spending money
then?
You think she'd be showing him undying loyalty otherwise?
No, but believing your partner is fundamentally a bad person sounds like a poor basis for a trusting relationship.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
I was confused reading your post because I was thinking "surely there's browser extensions to do what you want" until I got to
And I could always go for a dumb phone.
I'm one of those weird people who doesn't install social media apps on their phone. (Don't worry, I'm plenty capable of wasting my time scrolling on a mobile web browser.) And, yeah, I'd support legislation to ban companies from blocking third-party apps / pushing users to apps instead of web sites. That is, companies should not be allowed to take technological measures to prevent users from controlling their experience of social media (defined broadly) websites.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
You can expect to wait months for an office visit. And if you need something more than the primary care physician can do, that’s another couple of months to see whoever can fix the problem, and another couple of months to actually get anything done about it.
Is this supposed to be a description of the worst case under a theoretical cheap system? Because this describes a process faster than what I went through this year in the US with top-tier employer health coverage in a major city. While at the same time I regularly see stories online from people in Europe paying for health care through their taxes being astonished about the concept of waiting for a specialist. Are they lying? Is the care they are getting really that much worse? Surely any place other than the US has health care that counts as "cheap" compared to the US?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
I was replying to the section of the post asserting there was
a big-money, top-down movement that’s being sold as “justice,” but at its core, it’s about control.
I was asking what "control" they were seeking separate from their claimed goals that they frame as "justice". You provided examples of different ways of them lobbying for their public goals. Sure, lobbying is often bad, but it's not a special secret conspiracy attributable to woke NGOs.
You replied
Silly poster, he should have known that the only acceptable way to speak of shadowy cabals is to give them a name like "the patriarchy" or "systemic racism"
Those calling out "the patriarchy" and "systemic racism" blame many concrete effects on those and suggest many concrete changes.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
Sorry, I don't get the reference. I clicked your link and have no idea what it has to do with my post.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
Uhhhhhh I don't want to do a lit review so please forgive me if I get some of the details wrong but basically they try and predict well in advance which mutations are going to be prevalent the next year (like almost a year in advance) and make all the vaccines accordingly.
So it's more that a year ago or whenever they were actually selecting the strains for this year, H5N1 wasn't looking as scary, but maybe it could be included in next years' (assuming we don't get a pandemic and manage to rush a separate vaccine before then)?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
An amusing theory, albeit unlikely. But actually burning down the Democratic Party is probably the biggest gift Biden could give to the left (i.e. the leftist wing of the Democratic Party + those disenchanted due to being even further left), since they've been claiming for decades that the Democratic Party is too far right and the "real people" want a leftist party. Of course, building up a new political party from the ashes of the Democratic Party would take several years, and would likely just be filled with leftist populist grifters and not actually make anyone happy. And it's much more likely the Democratic Party just limps along continuing to not leave enough air for another party to take its place opposing the Republican Party.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
Polio doesn't work like that.
IPV which we use in the US (and basically anywhere where with the infrastructure to manage the necessary cold-chain) has no effect on infection or transmission of polio. It is highly effective at preventing severe disease (although polio normally presents as just a cold with no distinguishing symptoms, so we've never actually studied the vaccine's impact on mild disease), which is what we mean when we say the US has "eradicated polio". In practice, polio spreads largely through poor sanitation, not direct person-to-person contact, so improved sanitation has probably actually reduced spread a fair bit, but there's no reason to believe the vaccine has done so. And we don't know because no one tests for polio (although there's some small push to start doing some wastewater testing).
I've seen a lot of anti-feminist takes here and on similar message boards. But "feminists don't blame enough things on the patriarchy" is a new one to me. Same with the left and "systemic racism".
So the people openly trying to change society to be more accepting of LGBT people are... also secretly conspiring to change society to be more accepting of LGBT people? That seems pretty different from the claim that the movement is really about seeking "control".
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