token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
China has another reason to play up the lab leak theory: the leading scientific theory (spillover resulting from improper handling of market animals) implies that COVID-19 is their fault. After SARS they clamped down on live animal markets, but over time, while they remained illegal, the government didn't seriously enforce the laws against them. In other words, they knew what they had to do to stop a pandemic, tried, and failed (or gave up). That makes them look culpable and/or incompetent, so they don't want too high a confidence assigned to that theory.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Ah, my mistake. Apparently Nevada does allow ballots to be received (but not postmarked) after Election Day, up until the Saturday after. I would expect each newly received group of ballots would be associated with a list of voters whose names are on the ballots, but I don't know how precisely Nevada actually updates their voter lists. Hourly reports are normal during Election Day since they're important for campaign's day-of get-out-the-vote efforts (although this likely varies state-to-state), but they might not report as precisely for partway through mail-in ballot counting. (The obvious thing to do if you have a collection of suspiciously sourced ballots is to survey a random sample of the voters and ask them if they actually submitted a ballot, but this works better if you can better narrow down the voters to survey.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
The current top comment on the /r/politics post on this is:
“Trump just vowed to push for term limits for members of Congress and a lifetime ban on lobbying for former lawmakers, both of which were promises from his 2016 race — and both of which his White House never sought to adopt in any of the four years he was president.” - NYT
(Post did not include a link to NYT, but here is the source from an article titled "Trump Announces 2024 Run, Repeating Lies and Exaggerating Record".)
I pretty much agree. I wasn't happy about Trump being elected but at first I was hoping there may be some silver lining in him actually being serious in his claims to care about corruption. But that hopefulness didn't last long. (Also, I'm not entirely sold on term limits; I think looking at other structural reasons for incumbency like first-past-the-post elections making it difficult to run an ideologically similar campaign is probably a better idea.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Yeah, that and the similar argument for lifetime lobbyists is a common argument against term limits... that seems like a pretty good argument to me.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
I thumbs down almost all videos I watch by habit now in order to avoid the algo getting any uppity ideas about what it feels like I should be watching.
What's the benefit to viewing YouTube videos logged in? I don't use YouTube a lot, but when I do, I always use a clean browser session. Modern browsers make this easy with private/incognito mode.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Interesting. That makes sense.
the subscriptions feed that shows you new videos from channels you've subscribed to
BTW, YouTube does support RSS. The URL looks something like https://youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=... where the channel_id is a long string of letters and numbers.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Again, I just felt embarrassment and I was confused about why the adults were overeacting and wondered, as I often did, if they didn't remember what it was like to be a kid.
I definitely remember thinking it was weird when at some point as a kid I realized that assault was illegal for adults but utterly ignored for kids.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
I definitely see the people I follow on Twitter talking about trying to migrate to Mastodon. But I can't say any of them have much confidence in it as a platform. I've also seen a lot of "yeah, no idea where the next place is, here's my permanent personal website that will always point to my socials".
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
I haven't used Mastodon (well, or Twitter except for following people manually / via RSS), but it sounds like the moderation support is pretty bad. It's really weird that they have decentralized hosting of accounts/feeds but not decentralized moderation. I understand individual instances may want to ban users, but it seems like there's no moderation mechanism for posts on other instances more fine-grained than banning an entire instance that won't moderate in a way you like. Which seems like it defeats a large part of the purpose of having separate instances if they effectively need to clump into groups that agree on moderation policies.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
The priest was recommending $200 phones that were basically like iPhones that wouldn't let you install apps on them.
$200 will get you a perfectly functional smartphone. Whoever is selling a $200 dumbphone must have great profit margins.
(I do know a few people who intentionally chose to not use smartphones, but not many.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Best thing is I have no idea what bubbles you are even talking about.
I've only seen them discussed indirectly like in this thread, but this is about iMessage which supports both normal SMS/MMS (displayed in the app with a green background) and Apple's iMessage protocol (display in the app with a blue background), effectively making it very clear which people you're texting are using an iPhone because iMessage is iPhone-only.
As you said, if people just use another messaging app that's cross-platform, this doesn't come up.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Progressive positions are wet paper bags.
I frequently hear the same about conservative positions from progressives. I'm not sure there's anything deeper here than "I think my political opponents are wrong." which is trivially true. The main reason I read this forum is because I think it's highly unlikely that politics can be reduced to "my political opponents have bad arguments and are wrong and should feel bad listen to my side's obviously correct arguments", and part of that is trying to learn to steelman conservative arguments.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
When I pointed out that this would require the same sentiment from the left: stop going for trans rights, extending term of abortions or stop going for women quotas in professions and so forth.
I'll grant you diversity quotas as a culture war topic the left is actively pushing on... but from my perspective the abortion and trans rights issues look entirely defensive from the left. The left wants the status quo ante of Roe v. Wade and wants trans people to be left alone. The right is the side making those into culture war issues, not the left.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
I'm much more concerned about tiktok dividing the younger generations and pitting groups against each other. This is probably more algorithmic than intentional, but this effect is almost certainly worse than the privacy concerns.
Yeah, this seems like the obvious problem with social media controlled by your geopolitical enemies. Maybe they don't want to call attention to it because that leads to the question of why is it okay for any company to be able to manipulate our youth that way?
I regularly see claims like that with no evidence that anyone actually believes that. The closest I've seen is arguments over whether puberty blockers are appropriate for trans teenagers (and the pro-trans people like to point out that no one thinks puberty blockers are inappropriate for cis teenagers when medically indicated). I'm not sure exactly what age children are normally allowed to make medical decisions without parental approval, I'd assume 16? But it probably varies by jurisdiction. And it isn't a trans-healthcare-specific thing.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Even if we assume that the left is "just defending", I do not see why this should be redeeming in any way.
The comment I was replying to started
I recently had a discussion with a guy who had a take along the lines "We should focus more on economy and not on culture war
The "just defending" is relevant because it's a claim that if the other side stopped talking about it, it would no longer be an active culture war fight leaving more air in the room for discussions about economics or whatever other political issue is more important. You and the other replies have given some reasonable pushback on that actually being the case for the two issues I mentioned. Maybe it is true in the other direction for diversity quotas?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
trans men are pretty new to a lot of people's radars.
Women secretly passing as men is a common literary trope partially because there are multiple instances of it happening historically. How many of those would identify as trans men by today's definitions is impossible to know (probably some, certainly not all?). But all of them would have expected to be treated as their identified, not birth, gender.
That said, putting trans people on people's radars is exactly what the left is accusing the right of here. Until the right started making noise (and laws) about which bathrooms people were using, it wasn't something people were paying attention to, so trans people were often able to fly under the radar.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
the right wants the "status quo" of people with penises and Y chromosomes to have separate bathrooms, prisons, sports teams, and certain other facilities from people with uteruses and lacking Y chromosomes.
I think this is a major part of the disagreement. Genetic testing for Y chromosomes is not exactly something done often. Literally checking people's genitals to determine which sex-segregated group they belong in as opposed to relying on appearance of secondary characteristics which can be faked with varying levels of success (generally much easier for trans men than trans women, the latter usually requiring some amount of surgery to pull off) or just trusting their identification or (possibly faked) documents also seems like an escalation.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
If they cared that much, I would have expected a bill on the floor of the House the next day
I definitely saw social media comments on the left annoyed at this... but also, this is all about noisemaking, not policy. No one was under any illusion that such a bill would pass the Senate, so it's just a question of whether it was good politics to force a (virtual filibuster) vote in the Senate. Maybe the Democratic Party made a tactical error by not forcing a vote (i.e. maybe making Republican senators commit to their abortion views would have been bad for them in the midterms... but I'm guessing the Democrats would have held the vote if they believed that), but they lacked the power to pass a bill so it seems strange to blame them for not doing so.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
The left, once they won on same-sex marriage pivoted to this specific battle and pushed it forward with aplomb, anything the right did was directly in response to that.
The left pushed it forward? To my memory, the North Carolina "bathroom bill" was what pushed the trans rights discussion to the national stage. You apparently remember things differently? Wikipedia does mention various events leading up to the passage of that bill.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
As for trans issues, was the enstunnening and enbravening of Caitlyn Jenner before or after the bathroom bill?
Quoting Wikipedia:
Jenner publicly came out as a trans woman in April 2015, announcing her new name in July of that year. From 2015 to 2016, she starred in the reality television series I Am Cait, which focused on her gender transition.
The NC bathroom bill passed March 23, 2016. The Wikipedia article claims it was in response to a Charlotte city ordinance passed February 22, 2016. Both of those dates are after April 2015, so I guess Caitlyn Jenner coming out as trans was first.
(I honestly did not know who Caitlyn Jenner was past "famous trans woman" until looking up the Wikipedia article to make this post.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Thanks for agreeing with me.
Okay, I know that's not what you meant. Gender-segregation of bathroom by sex-on-birth-certificate as opposed to apparent gender is new.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
If no one cares, then why did the law under discussion get passed which does the following:
The bill amended state law to preempt any anti-discrimination ordinances passed by local communities and, controversially, compelled schools and state and local government facilities containing single-gender washrooms to only allow people of the corresponding sex as listed on their birth certificate to use them
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
My understanding of the social norm is that people would be unhappy if someone who appeared to be a woman entered the men's bathroom or if someone who appeared to be a man entered the women's bathroom. I find it hard to believe that instead of going by appearance, checking sex recorded on government issued ID is something that would have occurred to anyone prior to this Culture War fight.
Arizona requires all ballots to be received by election day (unlike a small number of states which only require them to be postmarked by election day), so they have publicly announced exactly how many more ballots there are to count (538 has been making comments about what percentage of the remaining votes would need to go to which candidate for them to win). (Which may be more than the number of votes in the remaining races in the case of undervotes, spoiled ballots, or ballots that otherwise fail the verification process.)
I'm not sure exactly how their process works and if they have finished examining all of the outer envelopes, but by now I would expect them to have done so, in which case they also would have published a list of exactly whose ballots they have (and the number of the names on that list would be an upper bound for the number valid ballots in the final count).
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