token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
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
26d ago
I'm not sure how the current precedent is worded, but any rule along the lines of "you can only ban sleeping on the streets to people whom you offer 'acceptable' shelter" of course is going to have a lot of arguments over what constitutes "acceptable" shelter. Which should probably be below a studio apartment and might be below what is acceptable to rent out (although the laws setting overly high minimums on what's acceptable to rent out are a non-trivial factor in the rise of homelessness, so, uh, those should probably be lower, too).
But we should definitely set the line somewhere and actually enforce public camping laws if a reasonable attempt has been made to get the person into "acceptable" housing. And I thought that was more or less what the precedent said.
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
A quick google overdose deaths topped 112k in 2023 an all-time record.
[...]
I believe an order of magnitude bigger problem than COVID.
Trying to put some actual numbers to this:
According to the NYT COVID data page, weekly COVID deaths in the past year have ranged from 490 (July 2-8) to 2,462 (Jan 7-13) or 0.9%-3.6% of all deaths. Of course, this is deaths from acute COVID, actual COVID deaths is somewhat higher than the official numbers, but hard to get good data on how much higher, so let's stick to these numbers. Also, going back further the numbers are a lot higher and less regular, I'm assuming the past year is a much better approximation of what to expect going forward than including any older data. (Also, I'm not seeing an official 2023 death count... looking I found this 2022 report published in May 2023 so it's probably just too early for finalized 2023 numbers.)
112k/52 = average 2,153 deaths/week from overdose deaths, doesn't seem hugely different from number of COVID deaths, although since overdose doses are mostly young and COVID deaths are mostly old, measuring in QALYs would likely paint a different picture... although if you're measuring QALYs, not trying to measure the impact of post-COVID conditions seems unfair, and I'm not sure how that would affect the conclusion.
There's also the obvious issue that COVID is practically unavoidable, although there's ways to reduce the impact (vaccination, antivirals, not getting old being healthier), while avoiding an overdose is straight forward: Don't Do Drugs(tm). Or, at least, that's the oversimplification in the popular conception of the two.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
I think you two might be talking past each other. Whether or not the losers should have good objections is a normative statement. Whether or not their objections are a problem is a descriptive statement. If the losers refuse to accept the result of an election no matter how fair and transparent it is, you don't have a functioning democracy.
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
1yr ago
I'm suspicious of the concept of "good" governance divorced from asking who it is good for. Although I'm pretty comfortable drawing an age line somewhere and declaring everyone younger than that is a child and too immature to know what's best for themselves. Politics involves a lot of balancing competing interests and the interests of people who are not represented are unlikely to be given much weight. I see people talking about that in this thread about poorer people voting less so not needing to worry as much about their political opinions. I see people in left-leaning spaces complaining young people don't vote enough so politicians don't have to care about the future (read: climate change). The point of the OP's proposal is to more strongly represent parents so their interests are more strongly weighted, with the idea that those interests would hopefully align with their children's future interests and therefore the future of the society as a whole. None of these groups' interests are a priori the "right" interests for a "good" government to focus on.
But in a democracy, I think it's important that the people believe they are represented, even if everyone would be happier with the policies chosen by genius dictator @token_progressive. (Please don't make me dictator. I'd be really bad at it.)
I always wonder how hyperlexia fits into this debate. It's unclear exactly how rare it is, but basically people can be divided into 95%+5% (or less? ~1%?) of the population who will never understand phonics but will likely manage to learn to read despite useless phonics lessons. And presumably some people who don't fit cleanly into either group.
Obviously if that summary is true, we should just not care that some of our students might not be getting anything out of phonics, since they'll almost certainly learn to read just fine anyway. But I wouldn't be surprised if hyperlexia were at least somewhat over-represented in teachers (just generally people who find reading easier/more enjoyable are probably more likely to go into reading heavy liberal arts fields?), and there's some amount of them typical-minding and simply not comprehending phonics because it's useless for them.
@ZorbaTHut Something weird is going on with the tilde/strikethrough parsing in this post. The preview always looks fine, but I can't figure out how to get it to show tildes without turning some of them into strikethroughs. According to the formatting help strikethrough is supposed to require a double tilde on either side, so a single tilde shouldn't count anyway. But I also tried escaping with a backslash and that didn't help.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
My understanding is that the best-practices as determined and accepted by education researchers have practically nothing to do with the standard practices actually used in schools. I regularly see friends in education complaining that grading (as opposed to mastery learning, for example), homework, and lectures (as opposed to project-based learning, for example) have pretty strong evidence against them but are nearly universal in actual schools.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
You don't need wild hypotheticals about a lab leak that probably didn't happen to find negligence leading to the COVID-19 pandemic. China actively covered it up for weeks (months?); not sure that's really even "negligence" at that point. Although the US's CDC not catching on sooner due to removing the person whose job it was to keep them honest in July 2019 probably does count.
And the leading scientific theory (spillover resulting from improper handling of market animals) implies that COVID-19 is due to Chinese government negligence. 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
Both unfortunately and fortunately, this is almost certainly wrong. That may be the mainstream media narrative, but it's the result of a little bit of bad science and a whole lot of bad science reporting. The science is tricky because a lot of different things are happening at once: vaccine rollout, vaccines waning, variants changing, population getting infected, etc. But despite really promising initial apparent effectiveness against infection, we have every reason to believe herd immunity against coronaviruses is impossible because the human immune system's immune protection from infection (i.e. mostly antibody based) wanes too quickly (as opposed to protection from severe disease which appears to be more driven by long-lived T cells). The original studies were misleading because they didn't have the time to look at long enough after vaccination.
The fortunately part is that it doesn't appear the virus has changed enough to noticeably evade the vaccines (by which I mean 3 doses of one of the mRNA vaccines) at all. The reduced effectiveness against Omicron appears to be due to the virus being better at evading the immune system not due to a mismatch between the vaccine and the virus. Although that's difficult to tell because it's hard to find an entirely immune naive individual to expose to Omicron (either the actual virus or a vaccine). From that perspective, China would actually be an interesting place to do some reason and get some more solid data... but that doesn't seem likely to happen.
Source: listening to a lot of TWiV. Apologies, writing in a rush, so not tracking down good specific episodes.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
This type of argument always confused me. Obama's actions were blatantly illegal and that seems like a pretty popular opinion in any left-leaning circle I've discussed politics in. You couldn't talk up Obama too much during his presidency too long without someone killing the conversation by dejectedly saying "drone strikes" (and I do mean literally the phrase "drone strikes" as a complete utterance; this happened to me multiple times). Sending every living former president to prison for life for war crimes would be overwhelmingly popular among the left.
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
1mo ago
I'd say ProPublica, The Atlantic, and The Economist are all mainstream left-leaning news sources I expect to do a better job of analysis than NPR. With the "analysis" part, I'm intentionally excluding Reuters/AP which I expect to be relatively trustworthy on the facts (of course with some bias on which facts they report and precisely how they present them), but analysis just isn't what they're trying to do.
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
4mo ago
Sorry, yes, I understand that. I'm saying I really have no idea what the other side to that story is.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
These days there's no reason to be wearing low-quality masks, which were common in 2020 when there were shortages of medical-quality masks. N95 or equivalent masks are now cheap and plentiful. And much more comfortable than cloth masks. Also, I know multiple people who have better than N95 respirators (P100, I think?), mainly for plane trips, I think, which are likely plenty good for protection from someone unmasked and infected. While most of my friends have gotten COVID at least once by now, I've never heard of anyone who thought they acquired it while wearing a mask, including multiple stories of groups of people getting COVID and the people with them wearing masks did not.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
I'm very confused. How it is not the exact opposite? This seems like a fairly central example of "don't teach women to not get raped; teach men to not rape". The advice can be paraphrased into "if you see a woman at a party and you think she's not in the right headspace to meaningfully consent to sex, don't try to have sex with her". It fits very cleanly into a sex-positive consent-focused framework.
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
9mo ago
This is false. Needless to say, we don't have studies (at least not ones we trust) on the effectiveness of the vaccines China used. But we do have studies showing the ones the United States used remain highly effective against severe disease and death.
There's actually some weak evidence the Omicron-updated vaccines are worse against Omicron because we made them a half dose of the old vaccine and a half dose of the Omicron-adjusted version, which might be more similar to giving the vaccine at a half dose. (There is evidence the updated vaccine did a better job of protection against infection for Omicron... but it was never very high, never lasted very long, and the study suggested the currently circulating variants have drifted far enough that there's no measurable protection against infection anymore... probably will see a slight bump with the next formula update, but that's mostly a research curiosity.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
I see. And that along with the US Dept. of Energy's "low confidence" assessment of it being a lab leak does suggest there's some classified information that hints in the direction of a lab leak that can't be made public.
Who's "engaging in misinformation" now.
I'm pretty conformable pinning that one the newspaper publishing a detailed article doing lots of hinting at facts they can't support that contradict published research they ignore. Maybe they know something they can't share, but they haven't provided much reason to believe them in that article.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Wait, the BBC is pro-caring about COVID now? The people in the UK I follow on social media are pretty annoyed at them for being part of downplaying COVID, similar to how I see people on the left in the US annoyed that US media is downplaying COVID. I guess they're annoying both sides.
Sorry, perhaps I was unclear. I understand why people buy actually new items instead of used items. The question is how the law defines "new" vs. "used" to avoid legal gymnastics to allow for legal tax evasion.
Thrift stores currently exist, many of them nonprofits. Why would anyone not buy all their clothes there at a 50-90% discount from retail?
This actually seems to be an interesting cultural thing. While division probably isn't actually quite so clean, I feel like a lot of people I know can be divided into "buys all clothes new, would never occur to them to shop at a thrift store" and "buys all clothes used, would never occur to them to buy new".
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
FYI, something went wrong with your formatting and both numbers show up as "1." for me.
I think this is actually a core worldview difference here. I'm well aware that people act differently in single-gender vs. mixed-gender spaces, and in my teens and early 20s actively avoided being in male-only spaces because there's a subset of men that act like assholes in male-only spaces. I'm not entirely certain if I've stopped encountering that due to selecting friends better, older people just being more mature, or just rarely finding myself in male-only groups, partially because essentially all of my socializing is now in explicitly queer-accepting or queer-normative spaces.
The idea of anyone I know acting differently purely based on the gender distribution of the group they're in, strikes me as strange. Sure there's significant personality differences based on the size of the group and awareness of sensitivities of certain individuals (e.g. not making sexual comments around prudish people). But as I said, I also mostly socialize in queer spaces where gender is naturally going to be treated differently.
More options
Context Copy link