token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
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
2mo ago
This is where the narrator voiceover comes in to correct me that 2020 was not in fact a fairly normal year lacking in chaos or bad things for Americans.
I'm really not sure how we got the narrative that the liberals were crying wolf over the bad things Trump was doing, and then an actual catastrophe happened as a result, and somehow you still think they were crying wolf?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Gamergate always seemed like a lot of the two sides talking past each other, and this post strikes me as no different.
The counter to "there's lot of ethics problems in videogame journalism" was never "no there aren't", it was "duh, everyone knows that; no one takes videogame journalism seriously. Why are you harassing women about it?".
To be clear, it was pretty clear early on that the laptop was genuine. Glenn Greenwald had a good post on that.
Now, other people in this thread have presented good evidence suggesting the laptop was indeed genuine, but after he helped launder the Russian hacked emails through Wikileaks and denied any Russian connection, I'm supposed to take Glenn Greenwald said it wasn't the Russians as evidence that it wasn't the Russians? Is this a troll? I'm reminded of the old joke about how if the CIA tells you the sky is blue, you should probably go outside and look, get then get an eye test and look again just to be sure.
EDIT: Yes, I know Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange are different people. One of the things he's known for is being one of the most mainstream vocal deniers of the Wikileaks-Russia connection.
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
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.
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
Your link doesn't say that. It says the emails were genuine, and dances around implying that means the laptop was. I though the claim was the that the emails were acquired by the Russians via hacking and laundered through "finding" the laptop. Your link provides no discussion or evidence of that claim, just asserts it's false without evidence and tries to claim legitimacy by linking to a New York Times article which also does not discuss the provenance of the laptop.
I have not looked into this issue to have any strong opinions on where the laptop actually came from; I am not making any claims either way. I'm merely pointing out that your link isn't either.
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
10mo ago
I read that article and I'm not clear on what they're claiming is the new information. The Wuhan lab for studying coronaviruses was studying coronaviruses isn't news; of course they were working with SARS-CoV-1-like viruses and how to make vaccines for them, that's their job. Nor is the fact that China actively covered up any research into the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
The article makes no attempt to engage with the evidence for the market hypothesis (link is to a podcast discussing the papers, but there's also links to the papers): (1) the market is epicenter of the early cases and (2) there were two separate introductions to the market weeks apart of two separate lineages of SARS-CoV-2. It's certainly possible that SARS-CoV-2 was twice introduced to the market and nowhere else via two separate lab leaks that coincidentally happened near the specific stalls where the animals hypothesized to be most likely the source of a spillover were sold (maybe someone at the lab sold an infected animal to someone who then sold it at the market? Maybe the market is just the busiest place the accidentally infected people from the lab went, and they quickly realized they should isolate so the market spread swamped any other spread, and the position within the market was coincidence?), but that requires more evidence than "look over there: scary virus lab with military funding".
And, as I've mentioned before on this topic, China desperately wants the cause of the pandemic to be anything but a market spillover because the market hypothesis puts the blame squarely on China for stopping enforcement of the post-SARS measures they had in place to prevent exactly that from happening.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
I'm afraid I can't access any counterarguments from your video since it's nearly 2 hours long.
BTW, the show notes point to the research papers discussed on the podcast if you would rather see the arguments in that format (providing quote from the internet archive because the TWiV website appears to be down for me at the moment):
- Huanan market was epicenter of COVID-19 (Zenodo) 11:33, 22:54, 27:47
- Two spillover events launched COVID-19 pandemic (Zenodo) 35:09
The podcast is an interview with the lead author on the papers going over the arguments, although presumably in less detail than the papers themselves.
My understanding is that the first paper shows that the cases show a pattern that strongly suggests the first human cases occurred at the market and not at the lab. And the second paper shows there were multiple spillovers both at the market, which is also inconsistent with the source being the lab.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-covid-lab-leak-theory-just-got-even-stronger/
This link predates the publication of those papers by a few months. I acknowledge that the lab leak theory wasn't a total nonsense conspiracy theory, but the accumulated evidence points pretty strongly against it at the moment. And, more importantly, whether or not it's right, it's a distraction from actions we already know we should be taking (but aren't) to prevent future pandemics.
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
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
6mo 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
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
[...] in terms of restrictions etc?
Once you're talking about things like how we should handle restrictions, you run straight into the problem that it's way easier to have documentation on who has been vaccinated and when than who has been infected and when. IIRC, in Europe restrictions based on vaccination or recent infection did exist in some places. The US does have checks of vaccination or prior infection for some diseases... well, at least chickenpox, not sure of any others, but that's partially because prior infection is a contraindication for that vaccine.
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
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
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
1yr ago
If the system can just arbitrarily decide to not protect them, that seems like pretty good evidence it's not acting in their interests.
The BLM movement's main issue is that they believe police-as-we-know-it is a bad (and in particular systematically racist) way to handle public safety / law enforcement and that those issues should be handled by different organizations than what we currently call "police" (or at least that the current police should play a smaller role). The police murdering black people directly and the police deciding to do nothing about others murdering black people are both reasons for black people to not like the police.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
I assert that the linkage between the BLM movement and its activism and the increase in the murder rate, particularly for black men, is the clearest, most obvious linkage in social science in the last generation, and possibly since the invention of the discipline.
Surely the obvious counterpoint is that the BLM movement utterly failed at the ballot box, with multiple major cities having elections resulting in the side pushing for increased police funding winning (or not even having a serious candidate pushing for any kind of police reform).
But I'm guessing your claim is that the protests themselves discouraged the police from doing their jobs, leading to less effective policing (per officer/dollar spent). Which seems to just prove BLM's point that the current way we do public safety / law enforcement is bad for black people.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
it wasn't the Russians and that the linked emails were likely genuine
You're still trying to smuggle in this claim. "email were likely genuine" and "it wasn't the Russians" are two separate claims. You've provided evidence for the first but not for the second.
AcocadoPanic's link does go as far as claiming the data appears to have really come from an actual laptop that Hunter Biden used, at which point Occam hints pretty strongly at the laptop in question really having been Hunter Biden's (as opposed to some more complicated plot where Hunter Biden's laptop was hacked by Russians, its contents copied onto a sufficiently similar laptop and that laptop laundered through the repair shop). But you didn't provide that evidence, you just claimed you did and linked to something else.
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.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo 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.
NPR is too far left? That's certainly a take.
I have the impression of NPR as their spin being similar to NYT: representing the most milquetoast "centrist" corporate Dem position possible, with token discussions of "diversity" or minority rights while completely eliding any structural issues or suggestions for real leftist/progressive reform. Often so blatantly that it feels like the editor deleted the paragraph discussing them and immediately hit publish.
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