token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
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
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
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
8mo ago
Does this only apply to women's attire? i.e. is a man dressed sexy (whatever qualifies as such for this context... shirtless and showing muscles, wearing an expensive suit, etc.) in public also advertising himself as open to advances from any women he might encounter while out and about?
I understand interpreting attempts to appear attractive as an invitation to interact in a context like a bar or a party, but even there, I'd think the more relevant signal would be being at the bar or party without a visible date. Them being more attractive of course would increase your desire to interact with them, but I don't see why it necessarily is a signal of their desire to be interacted with.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
traditionally sympathetic media outlets
CNN had some ownership/leadership changes in 2022 which included an explicitly stated goal of being more neutral. Whether they're a right-wing media outlet now depends on who you ask, but they're actively trying to shed their image as a pro-Democratic-Party one.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
None of my sources mentioned cancer. You just made that up. The only "mastectomies" mentioned were gender-affirming care for trans teenagers. They were being compared to breast reductions for cis teenagers and adults for the purpose of appearance and/or back pain.
And, @Gdanning, while I appreciate your attempt to defend me, you accepted @Tyre_Inflator's completely made-up attack on my argument as a given.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10d ago
I honestly cannot even fathom being unable to see NPR's shift in the past 8 years. Someone has to have a bare minimum of observational skills and long-term memory, and then it should just be patently obvious.
I've never had a car commute, so I haven't listened to NPR on radio regularly since I was a child. My exposure to their current slant is mainly by reading articles and occasionally listening to podcasts. So I don't know what their day-to-day news coverage is like for the most part, which makes it harder for me to notice a change. But my interpretation of their bias is from articles of theirs I've read in the past few months.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
This feels to me like he's going for embodying the "No, it's the children who are wrong." meme. Millennials (who aren't remotely "children" anymore but make up the plurality of Swift's fans) and younger are mostly wondering what is wrong with Republicans constantly going on about the existence of hair dye and queer people; those are normal to most of those age groups. And just maybe it's a hard sell to women looking to date men and/or intentionally have children to vote for the party who has state officials making national news for actively trying to prevent women from getting medical care to prevent infertility due to pregnancy complications; that seems a lot more likely to be popular with older women who can feel ideologically pure about opposing abortion without being worried about it affecting themselves directly.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
More to the point, I think it's very valid to describe "cis" and "cisgender" as a slur, insofar as a slur is something you call a group of people who don't want to be called that
Is "straight" a slur? "Able-bodied"? "Neurotypical"? Those, like "cis", are all neutral valance ways of describing a person as normal along some axis. I'm guessing you're disagreeing that "cis" is neutral valance?
(This isn't even getting into people accurately described as such not wanting to be called "criminal", "con man", etc., and us not calling those slurs.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
Yeah, it makes perfect sense for Jews to be prejudiced against the guy [...] who moved the American Embassy in Israel to Jeruselam.
I believe the line "this, but unironically"? I think it's safe to say many people are unhappy when people take active steps to fulfill a prophecy when a popular version of that prophecy includes, among other undesirable effects, the destruction of their faith:
Many also believe that as this occurs, there will be an ongoing and mass conversion of Jews to Christ.
A lot of the Christians beliefs of what the "second coming" will look like are not great for the Jews. Or, really, any non-Christians, but the Jews in particular get used as pawns and then screwed over.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3d ago
drug addicts, criminals, and bums
One of these is not like the others.
This is a recurring problem in the discussions around what to do about the homeless: mixing up aesthetic dislike of visible poor people with not wanting people committing crimes around you. I'm generally of the opinion, although I realize many city police departments seem to disagree, that being homeless should not prevent you from being charged with a crime. But that's different from simply being homeless alone being illegal.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo 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
2mo ago
(1) would require cooperation from the people running the election. But (2) and (3) do not as they only involve looking at publicly available information (depending on state may require an explicit request, but in many states you can simply go to the Secretary of State's website and click download). Why haven't the groups claiming election fraud done them? Or maybe they have?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
This is one interpretation I see proposed in left-leaning comment spaces. But it also makes sense to me: children take cues from the adults around them, and adults are talking about these laws and the culture war around them.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10d 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
2mo 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
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.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
What do you mean by "evidence that masks work"?
Surely there's no meaningful doubt that COVID-19 is caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus particles, primarily entering through the nose and mouth, and the chance of infection increases with the number of virus particles (likely saturating at some point). Nor that N95+ or equivalent masks block the vast majority of such particles. Similarly, we also are pretty sure at this point that telling a population "wear a mask" has minimal public health benefits, since I hope we can agree that masks have no effect when not worn. To me, the non-obvious parts seem to be:
- Exactly how many virus particles are needed to infect. i.e. in a situation where you're exposed to a billion virus particles, if the mask reduces this a factor of a thousand to a million virus particles, but ten thousand are enough for 90% chance of infection, then the mask isn't very useful. This doesn't seem to be the case, but to get direct evidence would require some creative experimental design to study as the obvious study would be a titrated human challenge, which, uh, isn't going to get past a medical ethics board.
- If it's actually feasible for an individual to wear a mask at nearly all times they are actually in the presence of virus particles. This is difficult to answer because it varies greatly on the environment (how many people in their community have the virus, how carefully the people they come in contact test, ...) and the individual's behavior. If you live alone and never leave home and get everything via no-contact delivery, you can probably be pretty sure you're never exposed... but also, masking isn't relevant either. But I do know people who are medically fragile and extremely careful with masking whenever they leave their home, but still go out and travel, so it is possible. But, of course, nearly everyone is going to have a lot more human contact than that, but exactly what that contact looks like (lots of packed indoor concerts where everyone is screaming or just going to small restaurants and retail stores with very tall ceilings?) is going to greatly change the risk of exposure.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
If having people living near you constitutes a reduction in your quality of life, city living might not be for you.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
I'm just asking you to actually make an argument. I can think of plenty of (not mutually exclusive) steelmans for the lab leak theory:
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Strong priors for lab leak, so evidence for market hypothesis not updating you very far in that direction. I'm guessing this is the one you mean by calling me "outright stupid"?
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The scientists saying the evidence points towards the market hypothesis are intentionally misrepresenting the data, presumably because the concept of lab leaks make scientists as a whole look bad, although maybe also the specific scientists are under pressure from various governments or institutions to help cover up a lab leak.
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The scientists saying the evidence points towards the market hypothesis are being misled and credulous. e.g., China's cover-up included releasing data that points in that direction and omitting the data that doesn't.
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Some form of "both": i.e., lab leak via the market, either by animals or humans infected at the lab spreading via the market, so the market spread science is all true, but not indicative of spread from a wild animal.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
Is "Luxury Beliefs" just the right-wing version of "voting against their own interests"? @hydroacetylene makes this more explicit:
This is partly because living progressive values is an impressively dumb decision that takes real and quasi-religious commitment, but still.
Have you considered in your disagreements with your political opponents about policy the merest possibility that they might be right (or at least correctly accomplishing their own goals which may differ from yours)?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
letting teenagers vote will often not be ideal, but I think I would be in favor of such a policy?
While it's a very different policy than the one under discussion, I'm pretty strongly in favor of lowering the voting age to 16 as a way to encourage youth voting. The idea being that voting is habit; people who vote are a lot more likely to vote in the future, and building that habit seems much more likely to happen while living at home and having the influence of parents and high school civics classes than while 18-year-olds are adjusting to being out in the world on their own as adults (whether or not they're in college).
I'd consider the fact that 16-year-olds likely are heavily influenced by their parents and may just vote in line with their parents without really thinking about their own political beliefs and interests as a major downside of that idea. And I'd expect that effect to be significantly stronger the younger the child.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3d 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
3mo ago
[...] Is there a need to exercise your immune system as well? Probably.
This is a complete misunderstanding of the hygiene hypothesis. I acknowledge that our understanding of the immune system remains pretty limited, but we are pretty certain that getting sick is bad for you.
I am constantly in contact with Covid positive people, I go to crowded areas all the time
And that seems like a reasonable trade-off to me. I have no interest in most activities that involve being around a lot of strangers where masking wouldn't work (e.g. bars/clubs/concerts), and I trust my friends I do spend time with unmasked to isolate when sick and be honest about exposures, so it doesn't cost me anything to wear a mask as I go about my normal daily life and it reduces my chance of infection to basically nothing. But I understand most people like gatherings with strangers, so the tiny marginal protection from, say, masking on the bus to/from such gatherings, is completely irrelevant to them. Just trying to explain why there's a minority for which masking is rational.
I'm not entirely certainly this post is just straight up trolling giving how far I had to read into it before it being clear whether you were pro- or anti-trans.
What are you going on about? Gender-affirming surgeries on trans minors are exceedingly rare (that data does show a small upward trend, even controlling for population). That data gives under 30/year genital surgeries and under 300/year top surgeries on a population of about 40 million children. In comparison, gender-affirming surgeries on cis minors are about 20 times more common.
I'm not sure why any children are getting cosmetic surgeries; that seems like it's probably best left age-gated to adults. But they're rare enough that it sounds to me more like there's a handful a weird special cases, not that there's an epidemic of unnecessary harmful surgeries.
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