token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
Everyone does have to cast their vote by the time polls close on election day. Just some states think it's good enough for the ballots to be in the custody of the postal service (i.e. requiring a postmark by election day) as opposed to requiring ballots to be in the custody of the elections organization by that time. The argument is approximately that in a mail-in voting system, the postal service is effectively part of the elections organization.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr 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
8mo ago
This isn't the sort of thing that people are likely to be "wrong" about, because their evaluation of the economy is based on metrics that impact them directly.
That makes sense. Unfortunately, it's demonstrably false. Polls ask both "how are you doing economically?" and "how's the economy doing in general?" (but, erm, worded better by people who know how to ask poll questions). While the former doesn't exactly track the stock market minute-by-minute, the latter is consistently (at least in the past several years) strongly affected by partisanship. I totally believe that people's feelings about their own economic situation is difficult to judge from top-level economic statistics, especially ones biased towards measuring how well the economy is working for rich people, but people's assessment of the economy of a whole is strongly influenced by their political leanings over any observation of the facts.
Also, to be clear, this isn't a "Republicans are lying" claim. Both sides are heavily influenced by partisanship here. Look at the first graph in the first link I gave above: at Biden's inauguration the answer to "is the economy getting better?" flipped from around 50% of Republicans/10% of Democrats to around 10% of Republicans/50% of Democrats. That chart seems more useful for determining who is president than anything else.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
The Republicans in the legislative branch have purposely thrown away their majority, and caved on every significant issue the Uniparty truly wanted. FISA courts stayed, endless money for foreign wars stayed.
So you're annoyed Republicans have not used their legislative power to vote against the policies initiated by the Republican Party under GWB in the 2000s? Why exactly did you expect them to do so?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
Yeah, the Harris 2024 campaign website literally doesn't have a "platform"/"policy" section. The closest you get is the Meet Kamala Harris and Meet Tim Walz pages discuss policies they have implemented in the past, so we get a vague idea of the kinds of things they're in favor of. But the most concrete policy discussion is the Tim Walz page links to a page about Project 2025 explaining what policies they're against.
I understand the strategy: any time you give a concrete policy, some of the people that would otherwise support you are going to be against that specific policy, so the less you say, the fewer people you alienate. Harris/Walz have decided there's no upside for them to be talking much about policy right now and they may very well be right. But it's frustrating that just vibes is the level of political discourse we're at when theoretically elections should be a time to have a national conversation about the future of the country. Although realistically that mostly happens in primaries, not the general election.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
Trump still carried roughly 90% of the black vote.
Given context, I assume you meant Harris.
I’m very intrigued by one of the counter-narratives I’ve already seen congealing: Kamala ran too far to the right,
Obviously there's a lot of different takes on what happened in the election. One of the narratives is around Trump talking about the economy being bad and Harris not doing so. And for a certain segment of the left, running to the left would involve talking about left-leaning economy policies (antitrust/breaking up monopolies, stronger regulations, etc.), and Harris was avoiding doing so. So people who believe in those policies and believe they are popular are upset that they aren't being proposed (and think this is a plot by wealthy interests to keep pro-business policies around).
While I support such policies and wanted Biden (yeah, I know he wasn't on the ballot) to win because I think that was the best chance of such policies being enacted, I really don't believe they are broadly popular. If you directly ask the American people if they want food poisoning and monopolies raising prices, I assume you'd get a lot of "no"s, but if you bring them policy proposals to do something about it, they'll vote it down as wonkish and anti-freedom.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
Blue Tribe deliberately generated the largest increase in violent crime ever recorded, explicitly in pursuit of partisan political advantage.
This is an extraordinary claim. It's normal to think your political opponents' policies with respect to crime are sub-optimal, but an explicit goal of increasing crime sounds like cartoon villainy.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
It’s a global analysis of how transgenderism is part of a larger, coordinated agenda to reshape human society. Howard isn’t just writing about what’s happening now—he’s looking ahead to where things are going. And the picture he paints is not pretty. He discusses the corporate interests backing this movement—multinational companies, big tech firms, and global NGOs—and how their financial power is being used to push this agenda on a global scale: Microsoft, PepsiCo, and the World Bank funding LGBTQ initiatives, pushing transgender policies in schools, and influencing national governments to adopt more inclusive laws. This is a big-money, top-down movement that’s being sold as “justice,” but at its core, it’s about control.
Don't leave us in suspense. What horrible things is the shadowy cabal pushing for faux-“justice” going to enact upon society?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
Surely the question is whether those political goals are aligned with the country's. The claim is that Biden was furthering the US's political goals while Trump was furthering Trump's political goals. Needless to say, there's some room for interpretation on exactly which political goals are in favor of the US vs. only the president, but that distinction is essential to determining whether an act is corrupt. That fuzziness is a contributing factor to why corruption is often just an accusation against political opponents purely in the realm of public opinion and not actually tried in a court of law.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
Approximately no one dates based on politics.
"If I get pregnant, will my partner support me in getting an abortion?" is definitely something (some) women consider in their dating prospects. Although, there's certainly some amount of filtering by living in a city/more liberal area and assuming that's sufficient.
I do have friends who are single women in more conservative areas for job reasons who have pretty much given up on dating until they move elsewhere because their possible dating pool of non-conservative men is basically just their coworkers (since any liberal not stuck there by the job moves to a bigger city).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
There's certainly liberal content on most (if not all) social media websites. But the impact of their algorithms is almost universally to push users in the direction of right-wing content. Reddit's algorithms are theoretically transparent (i.e. officially what is highlighted is controlled by the votes of real people but there's regular claims of fake accounts being used to mess with the vote counts), so it may be one of the ones least affected by this.
But also, the nature of social media being a customized feed for every user means that it's very difficult to judge how liberal the median (or whatever) view of a site is. From my perspective, Tumblr is very woke, but I somewhat often see discussions of the conservative views being espoused elsewhere on the site.
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
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
1yr ago
I don't understand how this is possibly the court's fault. I haven't heard of this challenge before, so maybe the article you linked about it is misleading somehow, but it sounds like the sequence of events was:
- Lindell proposes a challenge claiming he has evidence related to cheating on the 2020 election, offers a $5 million prize to the first person to prove him wrong to the satisfaction of him or an arbitrator he chose.
- Someone in fact convinces the arbitrator they have fulfilled the requirements of the prize; Lindell doesn't pay out.
- Just now, a court confirmed that, yes, the arbitrator really was convinced and that means Lindell has to pay out.
The court very explicitly did not look at the election claims; they only said "this was the terms of the bet; they were fulfilled, so you have to pay out".
It’s a remarkable situation. Evidence of election interference should be investigated by law enforcement agencies, with no need for a bounty to disprove the validity.
I'm really not sure why you think evidence of election interference isn't investigated by government authorities (reworded because I'm not sure if law enforcement or the secretary of state's office / election board is the appropriate authority, probably depends on the exact case). It sounds like Lindell didn't have any evidence and just threw together some unrelated obfuscated numbers and didn't expect anyone to call him out on it.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
Oh, yeah, /r/politics has always had a lot of nonsense bad-mouthing of Trump. The difference I'm calling out is that the past few weeks, there's been a lot of re-runs of such stories from years ago.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Do you want to know why LA, San Fran, Portland, and Seattle are drowning in homeless while New York isn't?
Ah, yes, definitely a mystery for the ages. The following data is from this page. I included the "# homeless" for completeness and I understand the source has an incentive to overstate it. But I actually wanted to highlight is the large difference in number of shelter beds.
| State | NY | CA | OR | WA |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Pop | 19,571,216 | 38,940,231 | 4,233,358 | 7,812,880 |
| # homeless/night | 74,178 | 171,521 | 17,959 | 25,211 |
| /10,000 pop | 38 | 44 | 42 | 32 |
| Temp Beds | 65,899 | 24,033 | 2,953 | 7,342 |
| /10,000 pop | 34 | 6 | 7 | 9 |
| Permanent Beds | 36,480 | 33,660 | 7,895 | 9,359 |
| /10,000 pop | 19 | 9 | 19 | 12 |
| (Temp+Perm) Beds | 102,379 | 57,693 | 10,848 | 16,701 |
| /10,000 pop | 52 | 15 | 26 | 21 |
New York has way more shelter beds (I'm assuming all of these numbers are dominated by the cities... because I wasn't able to find finer-grained data easily). They're not getting in legal fights over their refusal to build shelters because they're not refusing to build shelters.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
Surely you can see why an electoral victory for the anti-gay-marriage party might put a damper on the celebration of a gay wedding? Even if the Trump administration and/or Supreme Court doesn't revoke the federal recognition of gay marriage (as was suggested as a possibility in the Dobbs decision) or pass any federal level legislation to make it more difficult to exist as openly queer, they still live in a world where the majority vote didn't think those policies were a deal breaker. And "yeah, their policies are bad, but they're probably not going to manage to pass them, so it's fine" is not exactly reassuring anyway.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
Sure, men tend to be more conservative than women. But community organizer types are mainly women not men.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
That sounds like nonsense. The Democratic organizational base has been Black women for decades. That's why the party hasn't moved left as much as the very-online contingent of progressives want it to. Those Black women are a lot more conservative (both in the "further right politics" sense and in the "less willing to shake up the status quo" sense).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
Thanks. I do remember hearing about that now that you mention it. I don't have anything to add past the links you provided, though.
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
You seriously think social media is making teens more liberal? That sites known for right-wing QAnon conspiracy rabbit holes are somehow increasing support for trans rights?
The media has been talking about how surprisingly conservative Gen Z is (that is, the people young enough for social media / smartphones to be a major part of their teenage years but old enough to actually be 18+ for a survey). Wikipedia references social media as an influence making them more conservative.
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
7mo ago
Yeah but who would buy cures that have waivers?
Probably approximately the same proportion of the population that uses software and websites with terms of service saying you promise to hand over your first-born have no privacy? i.e., nearly everyone because that's just every product on the market.
While there seems to be a real effect of Trump pulling more of the non-white vote than the Democratic party apparatus thought possible (although it's still too early for quality demographic analysis of the 2024 election), Florida Cubans have been a reliable Republican voting bloc for decades. The narrative I've always heard is that the Cubans that live in Florida are the self-selected to be the mainly the ones that saw the socialist government in Cuba as their enemy ruining their lives and therefore the Republican line of calling the Democrats socialists is very convincing to them.
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