token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
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
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
This seems like a strange perspective to me. Or maybe I'm missing your point. The Culture War isn't about the positive and beautiful because, and maybe I'm stretching the metaphor here, war isn't positive and beautiful.
Plenty of people are making beautiful arts and crafts of various kinds to enrich their lives and the lives of those around them. That's just not Culture War material.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
I've been meaning to compose a small questions Sunday post on this topic but haven't really gotten my thoughts in order on it. But I think it fits here, so I'll try: does concentrating wealth in the "innovators" at the expense of the lower classes to generate wealth on the "a rising tide lifts all boats" theory actually work? My particular concern is that "technology level" is not a scalar; just because a civilization puts more effort towards developing technology doesn't mean they're developing the right technologies. And what are the "right" technologies is always going to vary based on who you ask, and in an unequal society, who you're asking is whoever has the money (relative weighting here; obviously no real society is going to be 100% exactly equal in wealth across its population).
We see this in the pre-Civil-War South where there was no economic incentive to automate labor that could be done by slaves, probably hurting them economically in the long-term. Did/do we have a similar lack of emphasis on labor-saving devices for domestic work because that was seen as the domain of women, or did things like the washing machine and various kitchen tools really get invented more or less as early as they reasonably could have? Another angle on this is the general tendency of tech companies to make their products in a way that makes money for VCs, not to be useful to consumers (see "enshittification"). I've seen this proposed as a fully general argument against capitalism: innovations that solve problems are greatly disfavored over innovations that allow for rent-seeking / produce profit.
... as you can see, this isn't a top-level Culture War Roundup post because my thoughts on the matter are not well-organized.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
This seems to be missing part of the feminist argument which is that the advice they complain is "victim blaming" is often tied to claims that the advice doesn't actually affect the chance of rape. Which is also related to redirecting the discussion to claims that stranger rape is rare, so advice geared towards avoiding it is a useless distraction.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
Let us not mince words: the role of holistic college admissions is to examine people as whole individuals, to account for every second of their lives and every bit of their cultural context, and to rank them from best to worst. Or, more precisely: to justify and to reify the values Harvard and its co-luminaries use to select best and worst.
No, it isn't. And you clearly show in the rest of your post that you know this is not true. Harvard is not taking a ranked list of individuals and selecting the best N from the list and accepting them or trying the compute the equivalent. They are trying to select the best student body of consisting of N individuals. I'm sure they have some rather high minimum quality bar to be considered, but after that, they're optimizing for group dynamics and various axes of diversity.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
I recently made a comment linking an article that gives the same numbers rae did, which might be the article you're thinking of: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-data/ . That article's total number of teens diagnosed with gender dysphoria agrees with yours (the years/ages don't line up so the numbers aren't directly comparable):
Overall, the analysis found that at least 121,882 children ages 6 to 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria from 2017 through 2021.
So, according to that article it is orders of magnitude more common for a teen to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria than for any medical intervention to be taken. That seems like exactly what you'd expect: we think medical interventions are a major step that should be carefully considered, and especially should be avoided for people under 18 because we think they are too young to make that decision. Although I don't know the ratio of adults diagnosed with gender dysphoria to those undergoing some sort of medical intervention to compare.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Most relationships require a draining amount of social performance (autistic masking) and it just doesn’t feel like it is worth the effort anymore.
If you want to socialize but not with people who expect autistic masking, perhaps try to find some friends who don't expect autistic masking. i.e., other autistic people or people who socialize with them regularly.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
Yeah, there's a reason "electoral reform" followed closely by "legislative reform" are at the top of that list and others like it. As far as I can see, the available levers to actually effect political change of this kind (i.e. movement on an issue other than what appears in the major party platform) are:
- Voting in primaries if there's some candidates running with oddball positions you might be able to push a major party towards. (State legislature is probably the appropriate level to target.)
- Running in primaries.
- Citizen lobbying groups. I don't like IRV but at least it's not FPTP and FairVote does seem to be making some real, albeit slow, progress in getting it adopted in various places in the US. That said, I'm not sure that generalizes as there's no real anti-FairVote interest group. The opposition is mainly inertia and not wanting to spend more money (and, cynically, elected officials not wanting changes to the system that got them elected, but at least they aren't going to say that). Basically every other issue on that list has an effective lobbying group willing and able to fight against changes.
Apparently, voting for a third party in a presidential election doesn't make the list. Sure, make your protest votes if you want, but as you say, the major parties will just ignore them unless they got a lot of the vote.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
There was no gay sex in Lawrence. Indeed, there was no gay couple in Lawrence.
The plaintiffs were gay men, charged under Texas' anti-sodomy statute.
I'm not a lawyer, so maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure I see your point. The plaintiffs in Lawrence had a harm to bring a case over: they really were charged with sodomy. Is your assertion that the facts of the case didn't support the charge so it was dishonest of them to take a legal strategy of "that shouldn't be illegal" instead of "we didn't do that"? (I don't know, maybe they did try the "we didn't do that" line of defense in a lower court and failed? I can't imagine a case based on the word of a few gay men vs. the word of police officer eyewitnesses going well for the gay men.)
That seems different from the claim that no gay marriage website was ever ordered, so the whole case was actually about a hypothetical harm, which I thought was grounds for throwing a case out, as otherwise the courts would be flooded with hypotheticals and they already have trouble keeping up with the concrete cases.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
I think Aurora is the only book of his I read after enjoying the RGB Mars trilogy (+ The Martians short story collection in that universe). Those books go a bit off the deep end into the environmentalism and Marxism towards the end... but basically just I recommend skipping Blue Mars or noping out of when you've had enough. I also thought Aurora was overly preachy (and mind, this is coming from someone who literally goes by "token progressive" on this forum; I may disagree with him less you than you do, but it's still not fun to read), so it's good to hear most of his other books are good.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Did people just not know what gender-affirming care was two years ago?
This seems likely. While trans issues have been floating around the culture war for several years now, two years ago, the media was mostly talking about COVID (in March 2021 most people didn't have access to vaccines yet, so COVID, along with the culture wars surrounding it, was still a major news item) and the George Floyd protests (although mostly in 2020, that Wikipedia page says the trial wrapped up in mid-2021; BLM and CRT were very much in the public consciousness). Given that, I'm pretty surprised the sum of support+oppose only changed from 93% to 97%; I'd have expected a lot more "Don't Know" answers to that question, especially two years ago.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
We might hear about the odd obese person whose health problems were caused by something unrelated to their weight and carelessly overlooked by a GP, but for every one I'm sure there are at least 100 cases where the GP's snap diagnosis was right on the money.
And from the fat person's perspective, they go to the GP saying "I have this new issue; I've had this body type my whole life, so that part is not new." and the GP is ignoring their history.
(See also trans activists, who demand that healthcare professionals waste hundreds of man-hours asking 6-foot tall, bearded, broad-shouldered people if they are or have been pregnant recently.)
Well, that question has been on every medical history form I've ever gotten because they don't print different ones for men and women.
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
A lot of these people are simply in denial about how Obama treated republicans
I'm honestly not even sure what you're talking about. The story on /r/politics is that Obama's primary failure was working with Republicans too much.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Sometimes at least. I definitely know some people vaguely on the periphery of my friends group that talk a lot about being autistic and at least one of them mentions an autistic partner who doesn't really socialize with anyone else because they don't have to mask around their partner.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
A couple quick thoughts:
I'm not sure if bullying exactly fits under the category of "hate crimes", but I definitely have seen people talking about moving away from trans-unfriendly states has greatly reduced or even eliminated the anti-trans bullying they / their children have encountered. These laws are seen as the government condoning that bullying, so the two aren't really considered separable. My understanding is that the danger to trans children is mainly suicide, and both bullying and the government denying them recognition of their identity or appropriate medical care contributes to that.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
The fact that fluids diffuse/disperse is fundamental to my baseline understanding of the physical world. In that what I intuit about physical reality without exercising any thought. I wonder what went wrong for anyone to mask outdoors ever at all and not see the futility of it.
Basically everyone has experience with dispersion in air from people breathing out via seeing visible breath in cold weather or seeing/smelling smoke from someone smoking. The former is generally visible about 1-2 feet away at most while the latter is quite noticeable several feet away. I'm not sure if it's obvious whether viral transmission is analogous to the first, the second, or neither. My layman's understanding is that smoke goes a lot further than viruses because the relevant particles are a lot smaller/lighter, but that's not obvious and I've seen tweets explicitly using the intuition of smelling smoke far away as a justification for outdoor distancing/masking.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Yeah, I don't see Trump winning without also having control of the House and Senate, although possibly by very small margins. And the past few years both parties have been filing down the filibuster, so it's possible a Republican trifecta would eliminate it in 2025 even though they were unwilling to do so in 2017, and therefore be able to push through more legislation. Unclear a narrow majority (of either party) could actually agree on much legislation.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Groups that believe they are summoning a god are usually called cults and are generally ignored or disliked. In fiction, when they're right and do manage to manifest a god, it rarely goes well for them.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Another complaint is that Sanders relies heavily on feedback from focus groups, which tend to favor broad and less inclusive programming.
[...]
Still, several Amazon veterans believe the system remains too dependent on those same test scores. “All this perpetuation of white guys with guns — it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says one. And another: “Relying on data is soul crushing … There’s never, ‘I know the testing wasn’t that great, but I believe in this.'” Graham declined to comment.
It sounds like the argument is that the pro-diversity people think the metrics are measuring the wrong thing. It's a common complaint, especially about older TV shows but also about high-budget movies, that they are targeted at the broadest possible audience so they end up being utterly inoffensive but also completely soulless. That may really be the most profitable strategy. But it's also possible the most profitable strategy is appealing to multiple narrower groups with different shows but getting them very invested. The creators of shows probably prefer the latter because no one wants to be part of a designed-by-committee production.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
That is more recent than any chart I could find. The Wikipedia page I linked has that data going up to 2021 and I had also found it on Statista going up to 2022. Statista does mention a methodology change in March 2020, although it doesn't sound like it should affect that number.
But that's counting encounters at the southern border, which is very different from the count of illegal immigrants (which, admittedly, is a hard thing to count). Is the idea that you expect that number to be proportional to the number who make it across that border unnoticed? I'd worry about changes in enforcement over time adding a lot of noise there, especially if there's any policy changes encouraging repeat encounters for the same person. Also, this is ignoring illegal immigrants that enter through other methods; are you particularly more worried about the ones crossing the border illegally as opposed to overstaying visas?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Christianity isn't like Judaism where Rabbis can make these decisions for people, especially Protestants.
Judaism doesn't have a church hierarchy like Catholicism. Jews famously don't agree on the interpretations of their religious commandments.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Haven't watched a video yet. Is there a transcript somewhere by any chance? It's almost three hours long which will take a while to get through even at 2x speed and YouTube's transcription feature is disabled. I found this page which lists zero transcripts for this Congress, so maybe a transcript will appear there in the future?
He is now claiming that Covid was Trump's fault because Trump was being too nice to China, and was too nice to Xi.
Yes, China lying about and covering up COVID-19 is primarily China's fault. But part of the US CDC's job has been to try their best to keep China honest in part by having personnel in China so they can keep an eye on things more directly and maintain relationships so even if the Chinese government wants to lie the scientists might not*. And Trump did reduce CDC presence in China and specifically removed the person in charge of being on top of emerging pandemics from China... although those articles mention Trump using the trade war as part of the reasoning, so that seems like evidence that being "too nice to China" isn't a good explanation, although it is a regular claim on /r/politics that Trump is/was too credulous of foreign leaders.
*See the story of how the genetic sequence got released by a Chinese scientist going against orders allowing for an early start on vaccines, discussed in this TWiV episode.
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.
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