token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
Eliminating the people in charge of keeping China honest on containing pandemics only a few months before China proceeds to not even try to contain a pandemic and blatantly lie about it seems like it might be a little related. Sure, they may have failed to contain it if they did try.
To be fair, the more important line of defense would have been keeping China honest on enforcing the rules about live animal markets they implemented after SARS and then stopped enforcing after a few years; I'm having trouble finding a hard timeline on that, but that's definitely primarily Obama's fuck up.
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
6mo ago
Echoing self_made_human, not telling you the reason doesn't mean they don't know the reason. They might not, but, also, it's standard advice to never give a reason in such a situation. Among other problems, giving a reason makes some people think the reason is a problem to be fixed and then the relationship will happen after all, not merely an explanation.
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
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
3mo ago
Surely both parties are in favor of reducing poverty, although they are in great disagreement over the appropriate government actions in that area. That is, the Democrats are generally more in favor of transfer payments of some sort while the Republicans are generally more in favor of economic levers to make it easier for them to be employed (and perhaps also a longer-term view of a faster rising GDP lifts all boats), including reducing immigration to reduce competition for jobs. Both may think the other's approach heartless and/or ineffective, but it seems misleading to claim either party doesn't have "reduce poverty" as a goal.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
What do you mean by "evidence that masks work"?
Surely there's no meaningful doubt that COVID-19 is caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus particles, primarily entering through the nose and mouth, and the chance of infection increases with the number of virus particles (likely saturating at some point). Nor that N95+ or equivalent masks block the vast majority of such particles. Similarly, we also are pretty sure at this point that telling a population "wear a mask" has minimal public health benefits, since I hope we can agree that masks have no effect when not worn. To me, the non-obvious parts seem to be:
- Exactly how many virus particles are needed to infect. i.e. in a situation where you're exposed to a billion virus particles, if the mask reduces this a factor of a thousand to a million virus particles, but ten thousand are enough for 90% chance of infection, then the mask isn't very useful. This doesn't seem to be the case, but to get direct evidence would require some creative experimental design to study as the obvious study would be a titrated human challenge, which, uh, isn't going to get past a medical ethics board.
- If it's actually feasible for an individual to wear a mask at nearly all times they are actually in the presence of virus particles. This is difficult to answer because it varies greatly on the environment (how many people in their community have the virus, how carefully the people they come in contact test, ...) and the individual's behavior. If you live alone and never leave home and get everything via no-contact delivery, you can probably be pretty sure you're never exposed... but also, masking isn't relevant either. But I do know people who are medically fragile and extremely careful with masking whenever they leave their home, but still go out and travel, so it is possible. But, of course, nearly everyone is going to have a lot more human contact than that, but exactly what that contact looks like (lots of packed indoor concerts where everyone is screaming or just going to small restaurants and retail stores with very tall ceilings?) is going to greatly change the risk of exposure.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
None of my sources mentioned cancer. You just made that up. The only "mastectomies" mentioned were gender-affirming care for trans teenagers. They were being compared to breast reductions for cis teenagers and adults for the purpose of appearance and/or back pain.
And, @Gdanning, while I appreciate your attempt to defend me, you accepted @Tyre_Inflator's completely made-up attack on my argument as a given.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
(1) would require cooperation from the people running the election. But (2) and (3) do not as they only involve looking at publicly available information (depending on state may require an explicit request, but in many states you can simply go to the Secretary of State's website and click download). Why haven't the groups claiming election fraud done them? Or maybe they have?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
I'm not giving a "should". Maybe Hlynka is, but there's certainly multiple options how you deal with people not recognizing the legitimacy of a government. Simply ignoring them is the default, and works just fine if there aren't too many of them or they aren't particularly interested in taking action. On the other extreme is civil war. I think the US is leaning a lot closer to the former than the latter.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
More out of curiosity than anything else, what queer spaces do straight people want anything to do with?
I'm just relaying the (a?) classic gentrification story: the weirdos make good art / make the place "cool", more mainstream people notice and eventually overrun the place, outnumbering the people who made it cool in the first place, the vibe is dead. When it happens to a neighborhood, it's (negative connotation) gentrification. But the same pattern happens to social spaces. I've heard people talk about it in relation to kink communities and music subcultures.
That is, straight people aren't drawn to the space because it's queer, from their point of view the queerness is coincidental and often invisible. Of course, this is also the story queer people tell themselves; maybe the queer people aren't actually as cool as they think they are.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
Comically, this is almost exactly a common argument I see in favor of open borders: that is, that we already have "open borders" for capital and it causes exactly those problems so it's BS that we don't have open borders for labor, too.
Not claiming it's a good argument, but I've definitely seen it pretty often.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
Would you mind at least translating the headline? So far I got
- HISD = Houston Independent School District. I think that's saying it's the public school district covering Houston (and some of its suburbs?) and the "Independent" part is just part of how school districts are named/organized in Texas?
- NES = New Education System... whatever that is?
- SD = School District
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
Yeah, it makes perfect sense for Jews to be prejudiced against the guy [...] who moved the American Embassy in Israel to Jeruselam.
I believe the line "this, but unironically"? I think it's safe to say many people are unhappy when people take active steps to fulfill a prophecy when a popular version of that prophecy includes, among other undesirable effects, the destruction of their faith:
Many also believe that as this occurs, there will be an ongoing and mass conversion of Jews to Christ.
A lot of the Christians beliefs of what the "second coming" will look like are not great for the Jews. Or, really, any non-Christians, but the Jews in particular get used as pawns and then screwed over.
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
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
4mo ago
Is she actively trying to conceive and having trouble? I guess the pregnancy test is more concrete confirmation, but a late/missed period is hope even without that, and it hurts to have that hope and then lose it.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
Sorry, being sick sucks. Having to work while sick really sucks. I definitely see people blame forcing people to work while sick on US-specific idiocy so it's interesting to hear the same from another country.
I thought doing flu/RSV PCR along with any COVID PCR was standard? Maybe just in the US?
I guess he hasn't mentioned it in a bit, but for a while Daniel Griffin in the TWiV clinical updates was harping on the fact that COVID+flu happened enough and had a sufficiently different treatment plan that flu tests should always be done for COVID patients (I'm guessing he meant hospitalized ones?).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
I'm not even sure what you (and whoever "several of us" is?) are accusing me of.
I've been posting here since the /r/SSC days (mods here theoretically know what username I was using back then) without ever drawing the attention of the mods and try to keep to citable facts / widely held (within the left) opinions.
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
5mo ago
Apologies, a bit late to the thread, but I think this is missing an important aspect of the liberal POV.
I have multiple times seen essays* by people advocating for consent-based frameworks of acceptable behavior explicitly highlighting that consent and bodily autonomy isn't limited to just sex and that thinking that it is is missing the point. The examples given are using things like kids getting hugged or kissed by relatives should be allowed to say no to that physical contact and that kids should be able to opt-out of play-fighting at any time (I've seen multiple explicitly mention safe words for this purpose).
I think there's a very real chance that your ideological opponents when presented with your tennis hypothetical would think it was obvious that being forced into a non-work-essential tennis game with your boss would be unacceptable.
*Sorry, it's physically impossible to locate old Tumblr posts. I tried.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
I am for government getting out of the marriage issue completely and just letting people sign more specific contracts.
That's tempting (and a position I recall arguing for in in-person political discussions pre-Obergefell), but the government has assigned a lot of benefits to married couples including taxes, health insurance, immigration, and probably some others I'm forgetting. Getting the government out of marriage involves significantly changing all of those. Maybe possible, but it would be a large project with a lot of winners and losers on various issues.
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
4mo ago
Presidential primaries are not just about who wins the nomination and general election. They're also about policy. While it's obfuscated, the primary selects actual people to attend the nominating convention which both selects the candidate and negotiates exactly what appears on the party platform.
I doubt most of the pro-Gaza agitators honestly think they are going get Biden off the ballot, but they might think they can put enough pressure on him and the Democratic Party to change their official position on Gaza. They're probably wrong, but I'm sure there's people inside Biden's campaign watching this and considering what threshold of protest votes would make them consider what changes in policy. I suspect that threshold is much higher than we're seeing, but I'm really not sure.
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