token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
There certainly are people who believe in not forbidding their minor children from engaging in sexual activities (which is very different from believing no parents have the right to do so), but it certainly doesn't seem to be a particularly popular opinion even among progressives. I was trying to find survey data on this question as it seems like something likely to exist, but my Google-fu is failing me.
Maybe you're confusing this with the progressive view on abstinence-only sex education that sex education should cover harm-reduction measures other than just abstinence?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Many Democratic lawmakers and liberal activists have criticized Youngkin’s recently announced education policy changes. Most prominently, the new policies prohibit teachers from using personal pronouns “not on a student’s official records.” They also reverse a previous state policy “allowing students to use bathrooms that align with their preferred gender.”
Even if this is pure conflict theory, doesn't this quote show Han the Red Tribe shot first? Or do we take another step back and original creation of the policy that was reversed was the first shot?
I was actually considering making a top-level post (wasn't sure if it belonged here or in the Sunday small questions thread) on the "who shot first?" question in the trans rights culture war of the past several years. The story from trans rights side I see in person and on progressive social media is basically that trans people want to be left alone and anti-trans people (usually "TERFs") want trans people to stop existing in public, which necessarily results in extending to causing trouble for gender-non-conforming cis people including tall women and other possibly-mistaken-for-trans categories. They cite things like bathroom bills suddenly being an issue when trans people have existed forever, using whichever bathroom seemed appropriate.
Obviously there's a disconnect here as a law that the first group would likely interpret as "encourage CPS to step in when parents are abusing their trans children for being trans", the parent reads as "hurt the outgroup as badly as possible".
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
(@wlxd as well)
It's very notable that there's a massive double standard in how differently this stuff gets treated depending on the political affiliations of the rioters or protestors.
It's a little jarring how I see pretty much the exact same comment made by the other side on left-leaning social media. I see commenters on the left furious about how the January 6th protesters were handled with kid gloves, including being allowed to go home instead of being arrested immediately while the BLM protesters were tear gassed and roughed up by the police and kettled and arrested.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
People (gay, straight, bi, whatever) who don't want children aren't that rare. Nor are older people who say they would have chosen to not have children if they had ever considered that as a choice. I'd expect wanting children to be a majority view for the obvious evolutionary physiology reasons, but it hardly seems like a universal one. Are you saying all of those people are lying to themselves?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Isn't that what upvote is supposed to mean already? Votes are supposed to mean "adds/subtracts from the conversation" not "agree/disagree".
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Uncharitably, [...]
At least you realize you're being uncharitable. I like reading this forum in part to try to understand how the right thinks about their ideas/policies; I'm pretty sure "The Cruelty Was Never the Point" despite how often the left is unable to come up with a reason for a policy they oppose and conclude their outgroup must be evil science-deniers, there's just no other explanation. Pretty sure "evil science-denier" is unlikely to ever be a useful way to model a person/group.
I do want to drop in with what I understand of the left's point of view on things sometimes, but often there's just such a large inferential gap that I don't think I'm up to the task. And the inferential gap goes the other way, too, of course: sometimes when having in-person political discussions I try to steelman the right's POV based on arguments I read here and often have trouble not having it reduced by my conversation partner to "but the right is wrong about $FACT" (similar to your comment about how the left is obviously wrong about racism if you look at the facts).
Even if Google doesn't have anything useful for them to do, I occasionally hear people claim the big tech companies try to cast a wide net and hire everyone smart they can, so those smart people aren't working for their competitors (or, worse, starting an actually disruptive start-up).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Since the default state of humans is to not be vaccinated, externalities need to be set relative to this.
This proves too much. The default state of humans is famously to live lives that are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Maybe you're going for a libertarian argument that the state should be doing nothing or almost nothing, but otherwise this seems like a strange conception of the responsibilities of the state to me.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Okay yeah the fact that the US is implicated explains a lot.
Yeah, it explains why China wants to push the lab theory as opposed to the market theory which implies China is unwilling or unable to enforce its own laws that they knew existed to prevent pandemics.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
One issue is that Twitter has a weird combination of real name and username culture, and this is a definite nudge in the direction of more real name culture on Twitter. Facebook is regularly cited as evidence that real names don't prevent abuse, but they do scare off users only willing to contribute (pseudo-)anonymously. This is, of course, a recurring argument on the design of social networks.
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
1yr ago
Cultural appropriation is an issue that involves more nuance than the media tends to give it. The part of those complaints that made sense to me is that they didn't know what the things they were baking were and making confidently wrong comments about how they were supposed to be. See this tweet about the s'mores challenge:
me: I feel no special attachment to my american identity
paul hollywood: you see, it’s essential to carefully apply the blowtorch around the edges of the s’more—obviously we don’t want a gooey mess
me: I must throw him into the boston harbor
with the follow-up
I should clarify that the dessert featured in the technical looked delicious, I would like to eat it, the ganache and meringue sound heavenly and the digestive biscuit is a good substitute for graham cracker
but it is at best a s’more-INSPIRED dessert, not a s’more
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Yes you can say they are a bunch of jerks.
I'm unclear on the distinction you're drawing between saying "If you do X, you're a jerk." and "You shouldn't do X.". I would think the former implies the latter.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
So, I want to talk about the REPUBLICAN PLAN TO DESTROY SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE. I went to look and see if this is something that anyone is actually talking about, but what I'm mostly finding is onion links in partisan outlets that link to stories that link to stories that link to stories that have that one time in 2010 that Mike Lee said we were going to have to do something about SS going insolvent. Are there any actual, current plans by actual Republicans to do anything that could reasonably be called "gutting SS/Medicare"? My impression is of desperate, disingenuous fearmongering, but I only have so much tolerance for digging through Dark Hinting from the outgroup, and I'm not entirely discounting the possibility that there is something serious in there.
(I had seen those headlines and hadn't dug deeper. Here's what I found with a quick web search.)
I think you're talking about New York Times articles like "Republicans, Eyeing Majority, Float Changes to Social Security and Medicare". For concrete proposals, it links indirectly to https://banks.house.gov/uploadedfiles/budget_fy22_final.pdf which includes details such as
-
Increasing the Medicare/Social Security age and enshrining future increases in law by tying them to life expectancy.
-
Privatizing Medicare/Social Security.
These (and a lot of other details I didn't read carefully nor am at all qualified to analyze) are framed as responsible ways to keep those programs running. And, of course, the minority party always proposes things when out of power that they never seriously try to enact when they think they might actually pass. But the House Republicans (well, the RSC which is apparently 156 out of 212 current House Republicans) really did publish a wishlist of what they want in a budget and it included those things.
The linked article "Entitlement, Spending Cap Plans Linked by GOP to Debt-Limit Deal" quotes Republican politicans talking about that plan in interviews for that article published October 11, 2022, and that the plan itself was published in June.
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 /r/politics consensus is pretty much that Trump obviously deserves to go to prison, but nothing will happen to him because he's rich / Democrats are too scared of the Republican backlash to do the right thing.
(Other replies capture the facts on the ground; I'm talking about the feelings from the anti-Trump side of the Culture War.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
there is no acceptable Republican because Republicanism is evil. Get rid of the populists, and the moderates left are next for the "this guy is the worst person since Hitler" rhetoric. The only acceptable outcome is a single-party state, where the Democrats are in control forever, and then the real work of reform and restructuring can happen.
I don't think this is exactly an inaccurate view of a significant segment of the left, but I think it oversells how unified the Democrats are. There's a good amount of messaging that the Democrats are an awkward alliance of the left and center-left (erm, whatever those terms mean) that is held together by defending from the evil Republicans that want to destroy elections and ban contraception, and if the Republicans were out of the way, they could hold elections on actual policy, not whether or not to elect the evil(TM) candidate. Although I guess you may be saying that no matter how far the Overton Window moves left, the right side (even if they're currently part of the Democratic Party) will always get called an evil that must be defended from as opposed to a legitimate alternative to be discussed on merits.
Mitt Romney was a dangerous theocrat who was going to implement the Handmaid's Tale if elected.
Admittedly, I haven't read past the Wikipedia summary, but it certainly sounds like Mitt Romney's position on abortion has changed a lot in the past several years:
In a 1994 debate with Senator Ted Kennedy, Romney said: "[...] I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it, and I sustain and support that law, and the right of a woman to make that choice, and my personal beliefs, like the personal beliefs of other people, should not be brought into a political campaign." Romney had endorsed the Freedom of Choice Act which would define legal access to abortion as a federal law even if Roe is overturned.
[...]
In 2020, Mitt Romney signed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.
(He made other anti-Roe comments in the intervening years according to that article; I'm just trying to stick to minimal interpretation of his comments and the published amicus brief just seemed like the most clear-cut one.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
the activist actually sees who you vote for which puts more pressure into the quid pro quo.
If there's anyone watching strangers' ballots be marked and taking them to ballot boxes, that's massively illegal and they should be serving jail time, excepting maybe some cases where people legitimately need help filling out their ballot (mainly thinking some elderly/blind people here), which should be handled very carefully.
My understanding of "ballot harvesting" claims is merely that activists were delivering the ballots, with similar GOTV concerns that activists can selectively give rides to the polls to only people they expect to vote the way they want.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
the interlocutor can confirm that you have in fact voted, and even who you voted for.
Do you think these people are opening the ballot envelopes and resealing them? Or do you think there's a lot of people going door-to-door insisting on committing a felony (violating the secret ballot) with witnesses?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
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.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
People change their opinions in response to new information. Elon Musk's public image has gotten both a lot harder to ignore and a lot more explicitly right-wing recently.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
The exact laws are state-level, but this very weird website provides the following:
- Forty-four states have a constitutional provision guaranteeing secrecy in voting (AK, AL, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, HI, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT, NC, ND, NE, NM, NV, NY, OH, PA, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, WA, WI, WV, WY).
- The six remaining states, and the District of Columbia, have statutory provisions referencing secrecy in voting (DC, NH, NJ, OK, OR, RI, VT).
- All 50 states and the District of Columbia have legislated specific exemptions to secret voting, mostly to allow voters with disabilities to request assistance in the voting booth, should they wish it. This narrowly tailored exception demonstrates the priority state legislators have placed on ballot secrecy.
You can go read the election laws for any state online. For example, this appears to be the relevant section of Oklahoma's voting laws, although I'm not quite sure how to interpret it. My non-lawyer interpretation is that I see requirements that the ballot be secret, and that description of "ballot harvesting" may cover watching someone fill out an absentee ballot, although it's not clear. And the punishment is not specified there.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
I'm not even a Musk fan, but this basically admits that the widespread opposition to Musk largely exists for explicitly partisan reasons - for committing the crime of holding the "wrong" political opinions and daring to express them.
Now I'm confused. I thought the topic of discussion was partisan opposition to Musk. There's other reasons to dislike him (his recent apparent incompetence running Twitter being the most salient at the moment). But a lot of the people pre-ordering electric cars are likely be to Democratic partisans, and it makes sense they would want to distance themselves from a brand that suddenly has much more visible ties to the Republican party.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Define "incompetence".
Fair. There's a lot of people commenting on his apparent incompetence like having destroyed the verification system (the checkmark now means "is really who their username says they are or paid Twitter $8"). Whether that actually will lead to Twitter being less profitable in whatever timeframe you want to give him remains to be seen.
[...] None of this suggests a particularly Democrat-slanted customer base.
That surprises me. Thanks for the info.
I'm not seeing how you could possibly stretch that language to defining puberty as abuse. Maybe you're going for puberty falling under "allows to be created or inflicted upon such child a [...] mental injury on the basis of the child's gender identity" since children are generally unhappy about puberty and puberty sorta involves development of a person's gender identity? That doesn't really make sense, so I feel like I'm failing to steelman your claim.
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