token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
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
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
8mo ago
Robert F Kennedy, one the most vocal critics against the pharmaceutical and processed food industries. [...] In Trump’s victory speech, Trump proudly stated that RFK will “go wild” with his blessing provided he doesn’t touch fracking or the oil industry. [...]
Rumors of Thomas Massie being tapped for agricultural secretary. [...] He wants the legalization of raw milk[...]
I assume Trump voters want a return to the economy prosperity they recall from 2017-2019, not to the whole having a pandemic thing of 2020. Hopefully we get lucky and H5N1 doesn't jump to humans (and my understanding is it's more likely it won't than it will), but if you wanted to maximize the chance of another pandemic, these are the policies you'd enact. Not that Biden has exactly been pro-active in doing anything about H5N1.
Although if we get a sufficiently anti-vax federal government we can just have some old-fashioned polio and measles epidemics.
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
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
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
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
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
8mo ago
Surely you can see why an electoral victory for the anti-gay-marriage party might put a damper on the celebration of a gay wedding? Even if the Trump administration and/or Supreme Court doesn't revoke the federal recognition of gay marriage (as was suggested as a possibility in the Dobbs decision) or pass any federal level legislation to make it more difficult to exist as openly queer, they still live in a world where the majority vote didn't think those policies were a deal breaker. And "yeah, their policies are bad, but they're probably not going to manage to pass them, so it's fine" is not exactly reassuring anyway.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo ago
Sure, that's the way they act for the middle class when who are just buying enough stock to fill out a retirement account. But for the wealthy making investments large enough, they are buying power.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Are you implying there's some objective definition of "the country's goals", distinct from its democratically elected leadership? Where does that definition come from?
... yes? Sorry, I'm not even seeing how there could possibly be disagreement on that point unless you completely do not believe in the concepts of corruption or embezzlement.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
8mo ago
So why didn't he become a dictator during the first four years he was president? I've never heard a good response to this one.
Because his plot to overturn the 2020 election failed? Since the DoJ slow-walked the investigations, he's had four years to consolidate power and will have another four years before another presidential election. I don't see why the Republicans (probably not Trump, given his age, but who knows?) wouldn't try again or why anyone would be sure they'd fail.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
While I'm all for better sex ed and better access to contraception, the comment you replied to is talking about very-late-term abortions. These are almost certainly not unwanted pregnancies or they would have been aborted earlier. They are wanted but failed pregnancies which are some combination of non-viable and dangerous to the mother. The risks here are made significantly greater by "pro-life" policies which discourage administering medical care to pregnant people if there's at all some way to squint at it and pretend refusing that care could have resulted in another baby being born.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
I'm sorry, I don't understand the question. Wikipedia tells me "debanking" in the United refers to banks freezing crypto assets dropping Muslim clients? Neither of these I'm familiar with and I'm not seeing them mentioned in the top-level comment I replied to, although there's a lot of links, so I may have missed something.
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
8mo ago
As Rov_Scam mentioned, opposition to federal ID has primarily come from the right in the past (see religious-coded claims that ID cards are the "mark of the beast"), although both sides have expressed privacy concerns about the existence of IDs and/or the corresponding database (after all, that link I just gave was to Huffpost, not exactly known for their right-wing slant).
I have a hard time really caring about the supposed privacy concerns both because the IRS does a perfectly fine job not telling anyone my tax info that shouldn't know it and because my identity isn't private anyway: every registered voter's name/address is public information already. (And, honestly, I'm not sure I see the point of my tax info being secret either.)
There's not even really a need for the physical card. The whole point of a photo ID is to present a photo verifiable by a human along with a counterfeit-proof claim of some information about the person that's a photo of (for voting, the information that matters is name, address, and citizenship status). There's no reason other than the implementation complexity for requiring each person to carry around a plastic card instead of having the verifier look up that information in a database, which could alleviate fears of the cost of replacing an ID card.
That said, there's at least two separate issues that ID is being proposed to solve:
- Verifying the voter is who they say they are. That is, preventing the voter from voting as someone else who they know isn't going to vote, possibly because that someone else is a fake name they registered. Voters trying to vote multiple times does happen (I've already seen some news stories about people getting caught doing so this election), but it's difficult to get many additional votes this way, partially because it requires having voter registrations that you know will not get used legitimately.
- Verifying the voter is allowed to vote. i.e., they are a citizen and a resident at the address they claimed. This is the issue I think you're talking about; as there's a lot of non-citizens around, a significant percentage of them voting would be a lot of votes.* This could be verified by ID at time of voting, but it could also be verified by maintaining the voter rolls by some combination of requiring ID to register and checking the local voter database against some database of citizens. Election organizations already try to do this, but they are limited by the lack of a federal database of all citizens. I think some states collect social security numbers in attempt to approximate the "federal database of all citizens", but I'm not sure exactly how that part of the verification works.
*(Personally my preferred solution is to repeal the laws against non-citizen voting. The requirement to be a citizen to vote was added in most states as part of the wave of anti-immigrant legislation in the early 1900s. Before then, a stated intention to settle permanently in the United States was sufficient. Having a category of residents that don't get to vote is undemocratic.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
In the absence of a 'none of the above' option...
I don't think anywhere in the US puts an actual bubble labeled "none of the above" on the ballot, but you can leave it blank or write in Mickey Mouse.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo ago
I thought the general consensus was that it was a lab leak
The overwhelming scientific consensus is that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over at the market (twice), but that determining that with certainty is impossible without more evidence that likely can never be collected (i.e., too much time has passed and SARS-CoV-2 is everywhere).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo ago
That argument is equivalent to noticing that airplane crashes almost always happen near air traffic control towers and considering eliminating the air traffic control towers as a possible solution.
Of course, a lab for studying zoonotic coronaviruses is located near where zoonotic coronavirus spillovers tend to happen. You'd need a really good reason to put it somewhere else. You should be slightly surprised if a spillover happens far away from such a lab, not the other way around.
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.
Why is it so important to you that middle and high schoolers do not learn about gender and sexuality? Understanding those things is important for children and adolescents to understand what abuse looks like and how to avoid it and report it. And for them to know what a healthy understanding of themselves looks like and what healthy relationships look like, which is important for any person's happiness and wellbeing.
I believe that you honestly want what's best for your children and somehow think keeping them away from such information is better for them, but I read your posts and just hope your children against the odds manage to become well-adjusted adults despite your efforts.
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