token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
It's standard practice in elections to never do anything without both a Democrat and a Republican present. I assume the laws don't mention those parties by name, but I'm not sure exactly how they are worded. And by "a Democrat and a Republican", that probably means an election official attesting they are of that party, not, say, someone who currently or has held elected office for that party.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
The linked article says the "security" was someone remotely watching a camera feed:
Capitol Police are conducting a full review of the incident at Pelosi’s home and its protective services division and sharing updates with lawmakers, according to a GOP aide. The department is considering any short- or long-term changes to protocol that need to be made.
The review will also include the Capitol Police’s command center, which was monitoring the security camera feed from Pelosi’s home, according to a person familiar.
Unclear where the camera (cameras? or just one) were pointed. I think the story is that the attacker broke a window in a side/back door, so maybe there was no camera pointing at it? But also, security cameras don't help a lot in this kind of situation; I guess they could have called the police a little sooner? I would think home security cameras are mostly useful for identifying intruders when the residents aren't home.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
The FAQ page includes the chart you asked for (up to December 2020), which shows there was a pretty big jump in early 2020, but nowhere near as large as it looks on the official chart (i.e. around 2x instead of around 10x).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
While I agree it's not the mainstream narrative, I have definitely seen pushback on the framing of Chinese "wet markets" being the source of pandemics being racist with the clarification that
-
"Wet market" is defined by Wikipedia as being the Singapore government invented term for what in the US we would call a farmer's market or public market. By using the Asian term for it that we don't use, it artificially sounds more distant and exotic. And ignores the actually important part: live animal markets without proper health and safety protocols, letting us pretend we don't need to ask whether our handling of live animals carries pandemic risk.
-
Related, there's no particular reason to think that there's anything special about China here other than China being really big so an outbreak at a completely random market across the world has a good chance of being in China. That said, the specific animals and local viruses in the local ecosystem may also have more pandemic potential in that region (coronaviruses seem to come from bats in Asia... but maybe that's just where we've been looking for them post-SARS)... although currently scientists are keeping an eye on H5N1 avian flu and live animal sales of chickens happen everywhere and sound a lot less exotic to a US audience.
Monitoring live animal sales everywhere (and which probably extends to keeping up with surveillance of pandemic-potiential viruses in wild animals), and making sure they're conducted safely is a massive, expensive project. Which means there's a massive demand for thought-stopping narratives for why we don't need to do it.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
I've regularly heard the joke that part of what you're paying a restaurant for is not knowing how much butter/sugar they added.
I had seen calorie counts in some chain restaurants and apparently calorie counts are required in US chain (20+ location) restaurants as of May 2018. Of course, calorie counts is the bare minimum amount of nutritional info.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
I wonder if 8 hours of work a day for the 5 workdays managed to become a popular standard due to it cleanly cutting in half the 16 hours a day that most adults are expected to be awake. It's just easy to wrap your head around the idea of cutting up the day into thirds of 8 hours each.
This was explicit in some of labor movement arguments for the 8 hour workday. For example, Wikipedia has this banner reading
8 hours labour
8 hours recreation
8 hours rest
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
The economics of internet infrastructure are weird.
Yeah, which is why I'm not entirely sure if Netflix or Comcast is right on the "double-dipping" claim.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
I didn't get around to writing a comment about it on that thread, but I was thinking that the policies don't necessarily have to be as narrowly focused on carefully only giving money to people with children. There's multiple issues going on, but one of them is certainly that there's people who would want children but can't imagine ever affording them, which could be significantly improved by making (family-sized, i.e. 2-3+ bedroom) housing and education less expensive (leaving aside precisely what policies would best accomplish those goals). That's not a direct subsidy to people having children, but it makes those wanting to have children more able to do so.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
The Democrats haven't had the ability to pass legislation without multiple Republican votes for several years, certainly not during the Biden administration, other than the reconciliation exception. I don't know what exactly falls under that exception, so maybe they could have done it that way, I guess. Of course, most likely they couldn't have gotten every Democratic senator to agree, so it wouldn't have mattered anyway.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
NYTimes employees in conjunction with GLAAD released a letter
They did? That link currently starts with
UPDATE: Thursday, February 16, 2023
[...]
[...] GLAAD confirmed to us that they did not deliver a copy of our letter to the New York Times. We look forward to clarification from the Times.
Not sure what's going on there, but it sounds like there were two different letters getting conflated?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
And COVID still exists. But we also thinned the herd of near death people which should pressure excess deaths down.
Not sure it's sufficient to explain the data, but it does not seem obvious that we would expect COVID to kill more people than it causes long-term harm to to the extent of putting them in the "near death" category. Obviously both happen at quite low rates, but Long COVID does exist (and deaths due to it may not be recognized as COVID deaths). Also I recall people talking about a similar noticeable dip in healthiness of the population post-1917-flu, although it seems like it would be difficult to disentangle any population-wide trends from the effects of WW1.
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
2mo ago
Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids.
I don't think this really changes your point, but "all the gay people" is definitely an exaggeration here. I definitely know people whose queerness is central to their counter-culture identity of "down with heteronormative patriarchal capitalism" or whatever, including speaking out against nuclear families. And queer artists who joyfully include the same themes in their work.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
It certainly wasn't that bad pre-2020, but probably a large part of why it got so bad is that Seattle's downtown has never been a place normal people went very often. Away from the touristy waterfront (which doesn't have many tourists in the winter, hence your lack of wait at the "original Starbucks" which I assure you was quite packed this past summer), it's pretty much just office buildings. Outside of 8-6 on weekdays, pre-2020, it was completely empty other than where the public transit transfers are. You could go blocks without seeing another human, even in the summer at mid-day. A lot of restaurants didn't bother opening for dinner or on weekends because they were only for office workers, and the nearby nightlife neighborhoods (Belltown and Capitol Hill) are not that far a walk (or short transit ride).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo 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
2mo ago
Opioids definitely do affect different people differently. I've had them prescribed once to take after a surgery. I took one dose immediately after the surgery and decided I'd rather no pain medication at all than a second dose. (Pretty sure I took ibuprofen, not nothing.) I've discussed this with others and gather this isn't an entirely uncommon reaction, although certainly far from a majority opinion.
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
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
9mo ago
Spoilers for a 21 year old anime but in .hack//SIGN,
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
I still haven't heard a remotely sane answer for why vaccines had to be agonisingly slowly tested while the bodies piled up, because mumble mumble bioethics consent
It sounds like you think the vaccine trials could have gone faster by doing challenge trials? I'm not sure that's true, but even if we could have gotten the vaccines approved faster, I'm not sure that would have sped up the rollout much: for several months after approval, they were hard to get because there just weren't enough doses manufactured (first doses in around December 2020, took until May or June to really get everyone access (so by then the prioritized high-risk groups had gotten access); and that was with throwing money at ramping up manufacturing before approval). Maybe there was some way to throw even more money at manufacturing them faster, but my understanding is that really wasn't the case since there were supply chain issues like suddenly needing a lot of specialized machines for vaccine manufacturing, and ramping all of that up could only happen so fast.
And that's not even accounting for the potential absolute disaster of rolling a vaccine out to everyone that didn't actually work, or worse, actually was dangerous, which, in addition to the first-order effects, could have super-charged the anti-vaccine movement.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
There's a lot of different interpretations of that going on in this thread. Let me attempt to summarize/categorize them (I'm probably missing some options?):
-
["Pedophilia"] They are literally going to rape children.
-
["Encouraged transition"] They are going to convince children to become gay/trans.
-
["Acceptance"] They are going to convince children it's okay to be gay/trans, resulting in more of them behaving as such.
-
["Liberalization"] They are going to convince children to have liberal values, including being accepting of gay/trans people, but also things like not attending church.
(Giving these names to try to be less confusing than referring back to the numbers.)
I think the people chanting meant the some mixture of the last two. It sounds like the right is most vocal about being concerned about (2) "encouraged transition". Which the left generally believes is not really a thing ("born this way"); of course, whether the chanters believe it's a thing and whether it actually is are two separate questions. Although there's some wiggle-room there for (3) "acceptance" for things like bisexuals deciding whether to engage in homosexual behavior or not.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
I think you might be in more of a bubble than you realize. It's a regular talking point in progressive-leaning political forums to claim horrified that conservatives treat their children like property. It's surprising to me to see people like you in this thread literally saying as much in so many words.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
(fanfiction is illegal)
The Organization for Transformative Works would disagree. That's the non-profit that runs AO3 and was pretty explicitly created to make sure AO3 can be run as a non-profit legally. The community is pretty aggressive about making sure fanfic they host is not even getting close to edge of "not for profit" (e.g. I see posts telling people to not mention on AO3 if a particular piece was commissioned and not to explicitly mention accepting donations), but they're pretty sure fanfic is legal even if charging for fanfic is not. Of course, there's plenty of sites that host derivative works that have ads that haven't gotten sued, so who knows where the courts would actually draw the line.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
(Replying here, but @anti_dan's sibling reply makes some similar points, so tagging them, too.)
I pretty often see low-effort comments on /r/politics and similar spaces accusing the Republican Party of being the party of pedophiles, providing evidence like their support for child marriage (which, in current law, is actually pretty mixed between red and blue states, more common in blue states, if anything), inspecting children's genitals to maintain sex segregation in sports (that link is Politifact calling BS on that claim), and politicians convicted of child molestation (obviously, that was an older case, actual comments often include more recent cases that haven't actually made their way through the legal system, so it's less clear they're even actually true).
In case I haven't made it clear in my tone, I think claiming the Republicans are pro-pedophile is absurd. As far as I can tell, everyone is anti-pedophile (and, similarly, anti-rape) right up until someone in their in-group (for some scope of in-group) is accused and then they don't want to do anything about it. I doubt there's a meaningful difference there between the left and right on that, and trying to cherry-pick examples is just culture warring.
It's way too early to make this computation. The national popular vote always trends Democratic in the weeks after election day, mainly because California has a lot of votes that they count slowly and they tend to be heavily Democratic, but also just more densely populated areas in general tend to count slower and tend to be more Democratic.
I'm certainly interested in these numbers, but come back in a few weeks to a month after the results are certified to do any kind of meaningful analysis on vote counts or turnout.
(I've seen a lot of talk on the left about how the Democrats would be holding the House if Florida and a couple other states hadn't been illegally gerrymandered (just passing along the Culture War vibes, I haven't looked into these claims in detail). Florida counts quickly, so it's possible there's enough data to do this analysis at the state level there.)
More options
Context Copy link