token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo 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
5mo ago
Not sure why you think there aren't checks and balances. The Republicans just control the majority of the House, Senate, and Supreme Court in addition to the Presidency. Balances don't impact consensus policies. There's some court cases about things the Trump administration has done so far and maybe that will have some impact. But it's misleading to claim Trump is doing anything without the approval of Congress. Congress can't pass legislation quickly, sure, but also they would rather stay out of sight and let Trump take the fall for anything that goes wrong.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
(although by that measure, 2000 is way more likely)
The plurality of voters cast votes in favor of Gore in sufficient states to pass 270 electoral votes, and yet Gore did not get 270 electoral votes or become president. "Stolen" seems like an accurate descriptor.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Pidgin is what you're thinking of. It does that for instant messaging services, including apparently having a plugin for Facebook Messenger that has recent issues on GitHub, so it seems to still be working for some people. There's also XMPP and it's modern competitor/replacement Matrix which have a concept of bridges which means you log into your one Matrix account but have that account bridged to other protocols (so similar concept, just putting the multi-protocol support in a different place in the architecture).
Needless to say, none of this is terribly user-friendly, largely because none of the companies running these services want third-party clients to work, so there's a continual arms race of protocol changes. For similar reasons, there will never be a commercial product because third-party clients are likely explicitly against the terms of service. Back when MSN and its ilk were popular, the arms race was less heated and they were more usable.
Also, this is all about instant messaging. Maybe that's all you care about, but if you want to keep track of non-chat-structured posts, then the closest I know of to a similar multi-protocol client for social media posts is setting them all up in an RSS reader. And for similar reasons, social media companies make it difficult to access posts that way, although it works for some / has worked for others in the past (e.g., I used to follow Twitter feeds via RSS).
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
Looking at just the effects of the executive orders Trump has made so far:
-
Direction to State Department to not recognize trans gender identities. Unclear exactly what this means in practice, but this will likely make it difficult or impossible for many trans people to get/renew passports. I know many trans people renewed their passports early expecting this (and the Biden State Department literally worked overtime to fulfill those requests before January 20th).
-
Less serious, but Return to In-Person Work at best inconveniences many government workers. The intention is almost certainly to encourage federal workers to quit (just like tech company RTO policies are interpreted as stealth layoffs).
Those are the only two that I see that have immediate impact on the lives of people I know, but many of the others will likely lead to noticeable effects.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo 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
6mo ago
I know a guy who married a prostitute made good
That wording makes it sound like a relationship with an ex-sex-worker, not a current sex-worker. Or at least the guy thought they were no longer a sex-worker and turned out to be wrong about that.
If the guy believed being "good" requires not being a sex worker, then I can see how the relationship went poorly.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
Then when she's ready to settle down after having had her fun and marry a Western or local man, she can just pretend she was an angel all along.
You do realize sex workers are capable of having relationships while also being sex workers, right?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
Surely too much debt is a problem, but cashflow issues be solved by either reducing spending or increasing revenue. And when you're talking about a government's budget, increasing revenue can be some combination of increasing tax rates and increasing tax base/GDP. Obviously, much of political disagreement is over exactly which policies will maximize GDP, and Republicans routinely state they believe things like DOGE will increase economic productivity by getting the federal government out of the way. On the other hand, the Democrats believe better regulations, which require funding the federal government, will maximum GDP. And they're in favor of raising taxes.
Additionally, it's unclear the current situation is "too much" debt. The Total Public Debt as Percent of Gross Domestic Product and Federal government current expenditures: Interest payments charts don't look great. On the other hand Federal Outlays: Interest as Percent of Gross Domestic Product looks high, but nowhere near a historical high.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
it's clear that most "age gap" stuff is just older women being angry at older men not finding them attractive as they once did.
While this may be true, my only exposure to the "age gap" discourse is 40-something women posting on Tumblr about how the teens/20-somethings policing age gaps are talking nonsense.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
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
Of course the other hole I've dug myself is I purchase most of my games on GOG first, then Epic, and lastly Steam. Because my top priority is how easy it is to check out without saving my credit card number, and Steam is by far the most odious, wanting my full address and phone number, and always attempting to greedily save it all by default. But Steam also has the best Linux compatibility, so fuck me I guess.
I've gotten to the point that I sometimes forget to check ProtonDB before checking a Steam game without a Linux native build because I just never run into problems anymore. I hear that's not always true for the latest AAA games. For GOG/Epic, Heroic Games Launcher is only a little less smooth than Steam, and will handle WINE/Proton for you (it also has an option to list the games in the Steam interface).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo 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
7mo ago
The idea of "neutral" being correct journalism is nonsense. The truth is not neutral. How would you feel about an article making an off-hand mention of
financier Bernie Madoff
or
German doctor Josef Mengele
Such a piece would surely have to either be satire or journalistic malpractice.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo 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
7mo 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
7mo ago
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.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
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"
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".
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
I agree people don't tend to do it here, but in general these days I mostly see people use "content note" instead of "trigger warning" to specify topics that the reader might not want to read without implying that it's specifically about triggers, which are often too random and personal to tag. For instance, I see a lot of posts on Mastodon (which has explicit support for warnings so a post with warnings shows only the warning until you click on it to unfold the full post) with the warning field mentioning "us pol" because enough people on social media don't want to hear about US politics. Additionally, social media generally has a way to filter on keywords (either explicit warnings or just anywhere in the text), so including a straightforward warning can be a way to hope you hit a keyword filter so people who don't want to read something never see it.
But also, it's definitely possible to reference undesired content without describing it in detail. "Gore" or "abusive relationship" gets the point across well enough warn someone without eliciting the response they might have to the actual content. And depending on the warning and the person, it may be sufficient to know it's coming / maybe a part they might want to skim over.
It's interesting to see this written from the opposite perspective since it's a constant complaint on /r/politics that Republicans falsely accuse Democrats of doing $BAD_THING and then later actually do $BAD_THING themselves claiming they're just reacting. Of course, that interpretation relies on the belief that Republicans were actually lying.
To be concrete, you mention the example of the IRS targeting conservative organizations under Obama. The Democrats' narrative on that is that it's a misinterpretation of the facts: there was no targeting of conservative organizations, those organizations were just bad at doing their taxes due to a combination of the grassroots part of the Tea Party movement just legitimately being new to running organizations and getting things wrong and anti-tax advocates unsurprisingly not being the best at actually paying their taxes. I'm sure there's been plenty written about which side is right, but my point is that the author of the article probably actually believes that those examples are not symmetric.
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