token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
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
2mo ago
Depends on exactly what you mean by "no sexuality". Age-appropriate sex ed is important for children to know how to report sexual abuse (and to know that they should). Here's one organization's "Sexuality Concepts for Children (Ages 4-8)" (just what I found on a quick web search, the group's Wikipedia page doesn't even have a "controversies" section; exactly what should be on that list is not something I'm an expert on).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
It's interesting to see this written from the opposite perspective since it's a constant complaint on /r/politics that Republicans falsely accuse Democrats of doing $BAD_THING and then later actually do $BAD_THING themselves claiming they're just reacting. Of course, that interpretation relies on the belief that Republicans were actually lying.
To be concrete, you mention the example of the IRS targeting conservative organizations under Obama. The Democrats' narrative on that is that it's a misinterpretation of the facts: there was no targeting of conservative organizations, those organizations were just bad at doing their taxes due to a combination of the grassroots part of the Tea Party movement just legitimately being new to running organizations and getting things wrong and anti-tax advocates unsurprisingly not being the best at actually paying their taxes. I'm sure there's been plenty written about which side is right, but my point is that the author of the article probably actually believes that those examples are not symmetric.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
The Republicans in the legislative branch have purposely thrown away their majority, and caved on every significant issue the Uniparty truly wanted. FISA courts stayed, endless money for foreign wars stayed.
So you're annoyed Republicans have not used their legislative power to vote against the policies initiated by the Republican Party under GWB in the 2000s? Why exactly did you expect them to do so?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
This is such a strange take. Those women didn't want to go on a date with men like you (conservative) and you didn't go on a date with them. Sounds like their filtering is working and you just don't like that it's a filter they care about.
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
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
9mo 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
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
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.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
It’s a global analysis of how transgenderism is part of a larger, coordinated agenda to reshape human society. Howard isn’t just writing about what’s happening now—he’s looking ahead to where things are going. And the picture he paints is not pretty. He discusses the corporate interests backing this movement—multinational companies, big tech firms, and global NGOs—and how their financial power is being used to push this agenda on a global scale: Microsoft, PepsiCo, and the World Bank funding LGBTQ initiatives, pushing transgender policies in schools, and influencing national governments to adopt more inclusive laws. This is a big-money, top-down movement that’s being sold as “justice,” but at its core, it’s about control.
Don't leave us in suspense. What horrible things is the shadowy cabal pushing for faux-“justice” going to enact upon society?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo ago
The FairTax would make it so the truly rich couldn’t spend money without the government getting a quarter of it.
The FairTax proposal does not tax anything rich people spend a lot of money on.
The section of Wikipedia page on FairTax titled "Taxable items and exemptions" says:
Also excluded are investments, such as purchases of stock, corporate mergers and acquisitions and capital investments. Savings and education tuition expenses would be exempt as they would be considered an investment (rather than final consumption).
It also says that rent would be taxed. It's not specified there, but reading into the sources, I see buying a house would not be except for new construction (unclear exactly what that means if most of the price of the house is the land it is on? Is that amount re-taxed every time a new building is built on it?).
Sure, rich people spend more on food and other everyday expenses than poor people, but not a lot more. Many more expensive purchases (housing, education, companies) are exempt from the tax or could easily just be made in a different country (yachts, private planes) and carefully never "imported". Those purchases are currently made with money that's at least theoretically taxed as income.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
I can't imagine there being another round of top-down enforced lockdowns. Although H5N1 could be bad enough that a lot more people would be isolating voluntarily.
But, really, your assumption would be conspiracy, not the much simpler explanation that public health is bad when you cut funding for public health?
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
6mo ago
You can expect to wait months for an office visit. And if you need something more than the primary care physician can do, that’s another couple of months to see whoever can fix the problem, and another couple of months to actually get anything done about it.
Is this supposed to be a description of the worst case under a theoretical cheap system? Because this describes a process faster than what I went through this year in the US with top-tier employer health coverage in a major city. While at the same time I regularly see stories online from people in Europe paying for health care through their taxes being astonished about the concept of waiting for a specialist. Are they lying? Is the care they are getting really that much worse? Surely any place other than the US has health care that counts as "cheap" compared to the US?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
I agree people don't tend to do it here, but in general these days I mostly see people use "content note" instead of "trigger warning" to specify topics that the reader might not want to read without implying that it's specifically about triggers, which are often too random and personal to tag. For instance, I see a lot of posts on Mastodon (which has explicit support for warnings so a post with warnings shows only the warning until you click on it to unfold the full post) with the warning field mentioning "us pol" because enough people on social media don't want to hear about US politics. Additionally, social media generally has a way to filter on keywords (either explicit warnings or just anywhere in the text), so including a straightforward warning can be a way to hope you hit a keyword filter so people who don't want to read something never see it.
But also, it's definitely possible to reference undesired content without describing it in detail. "Gore" or "abusive relationship" gets the point across well enough warn someone without eliciting the response they might have to the actual content. And depending on the warning and the person, it may be sufficient to know it's coming / maybe a part they might want to skim over.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
Polio doesn't work like that.
IPV which we use in the US (and basically anywhere where with the infrastructure to manage the necessary cold-chain) has no effect on infection or transmission of polio. It is highly effective at preventing severe disease (although polio normally presents as just a cold with no distinguishing symptoms, so we've never actually studied the vaccine's impact on mild disease), which is what we mean when we say the US has "eradicated polio". In practice, polio spreads largely through poor sanitation, not direct person-to-person contact, so improved sanitation has probably actually reduced spread a fair bit, but there's no reason to believe the vaccine has done so. And we don't know because no one tests for polio (although there's some small push to start doing some wastewater testing).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
Omicron ended the pandemic.
While I agree that Omicron as an event, i.e. the infection wave around January 2022, was the end of any real mainstream concern about COVID, there's pretty good reason to believe the apparent increased transmissibility of Omicron was an illusion: there's no significant differences in transmissibility between COVID variants (the technical term in that paper is "SAR" for "Secondary Attack Rate").
In other words, we would have seen a much smaller wave in the winter of 2021-2022 if everyone acted like they did in the winter of 2020-2021 (when vaccines were new enough that only the highest priority/luckiest had gotten them), but they didn't. Probably due to people worrying less about being careful due to vaccines, although probably also a good amount of people feeling like they had had enough of isolating after several months.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
Trump is supposedly pro-choice as well. It's not really relevant if the Republican majority and think tanks that select the legislation and judicial appointments for him aren't and he just goes along with whatever they want. It may very well be the case that gay marriage is in less danger from Trump than it would be from a different Republican president, but it seems unlikely to make a big difference.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
Just a few days ago I was reading multiple posts on this forum about how the $44 billion Elon spent on Twitter was worth every penny to the Trump campaign and now the Harris campaign spending $1 billion is a sign the big money is on the side of the Democratic Party?
I have no idea how much was spent by whom on each side (and quite possibly no one does), but the war chests of the official campaigns seems like at best a weak proxy for estimating that. (I'm sure there was also quite a bit of money spent on trying to get Harris elected that's not being accounted for in the $1 billion her official campaign touched.)
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
8mo ago
To illustrate my point, there was a Chinese national in Michigan that voted because LOL apparently? And when he went out of his way to report that he shouldn't have been allowed to vote... well he's in trouble but the vote is still going to count.
Wait, what? Why are same-day registrations not given provisional ballots in Michigan like they are in other states?
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.
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