token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
This is a very strange assertion. That photo of Zooey Zephyr looks like someone early on in transition to me. I've seen multiple people like that in queer spaces (adults who started their transition as adults) where 2-3 years later they look more or less like a woman because they've actually been taking hormones long enough (and possibly have gotten some surgery, idk, I've never interrogated any of them on the details of their transition). I guess it's a little surprising to me that she's not closeted or identifying as non-binary at that stage in her transition. (I did some superficial web searching and couldn't find any information on when she came out as trans.)
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
11mo ago
I want everyone to feel represented and like they are part of society. People who feel like they aren't part of society tend to make for poor neighbors and sometimes attempt revolutions.
And I think that politicians that feel like they have to convince more of the population to vote for them are more likely to enact policies that are good for everyone as opposed to a narrow section of the population. Even if I happen to be part of the narrow slice of the population my elected politicians happen to decide is worth listening to (I don't seem to be currently), I'll always live near people who aren't.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
I'm suspicious of the concept of "good" governance divorced from asking who it is good for. Although I'm pretty comfortable drawing an age line somewhere and declaring everyone younger than that is a child and too immature to know what's best for themselves. Politics involves a lot of balancing competing interests and the interests of people who are not represented are unlikely to be given much weight. I see people talking about that in this thread about poorer people voting less so not needing to worry as much about their political opinions. I see people in left-leaning spaces complaining young people don't vote enough so politicians don't have to care about the future (read: climate change). The point of the OP's proposal is to more strongly represent parents so their interests are more strongly weighted, with the idea that those interests would hopefully align with their children's future interests and therefore the future of the society as a whole. None of these groups' interests are a priori the "right" interests for a "good" government to focus on.
But in a democracy, I think it's important that the people believe they are represented, even if everyone would be happier with the policies chosen by genius dictator @token_progressive. (Please don't make me dictator. I'd be really bad at it.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
I recently traveled to Italy and was surprised that just about no one was wearing mask.
My friends who lived in NYC in February 2020 are very over COVID and have been for a while. On the assumption they they all got it already, so it's over for them. It would make sense for Italy having been hit hard early to have similar feelings.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
No, although I'm not sure how strongly I feel about that as it may be possible to design a direct democracy that doesn't have the problems that stem from its simplest form.
Part of making sure everyone feel represented is to structure the government to 50%+1 can't overrule the rest easily and not having direct democracy is part of how we do that. Although I suppose there's no reason you couldn't have non-representative democracy but still require a higher threshold than 50% or a more complicated threshold like 50% of every region for some definition of region (or some other way to slice the population?).
Ballot initiatives are a form of direct democracy and I do think they give a good alternative for when elected legislators fail to be representative... but they also don't provide a way to negotiate details or amend the text, so they often result in poorly written laws. For instance, for the states that voted on recreational marijuana via ballot initiative, those initiatives weren't just "should recreational marijuana be legal", they were "should recreational marijuana be regulated by rules X, Y, Z". Maybe you could have a technological solution to that looks something like liquid democracy and Git forks/pull requests on legislation... but no one has done that, so it's hard to know whether there's actually something feasible in that design space.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
I'm not even sure what you're trying to say. I guess civil rights is a bare minimum I'd hope minority interests being represented in government to accomplish. But there's a lot more to representation than not having basic rights withheld from you.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
There's also https://getindie.wiki/ specifically for the fandom wiki problem.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
I wonder if 8 hours of work a day for the 5 workdays managed to become a popular standard due to it cleanly cutting in half the 16 hours a day that most adults are expected to be awake. It's just easy to wrap your head around the idea of cutting up the day into thirds of 8 hours each.
This was explicit in some of labor movement arguments for the 8 hour workday. For example, Wikipedia has this banner reading
8 hours labour
8 hours recreation
8 hours rest
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
The fewer hours worked, the larger proportion of your working time is overhead seems like a sensible observation. But it doesn't lend itself to any specific choice of what amount of overhead is acceptable. And there's also a trade-off of the more hours worked, the larger proportion of your working effectiveness is lost to fatigue. And both of those trade-offs likely vary widely job-to-job. And possibly in non-obvious ways, given that as a knowledge worker, my time "not working" regularly includes having some work problem in the back of my mind.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
I don't follow sci-fi cons all that closely but I do follow some authors on Twitter Mastodon that care, and I recall them being pretty upset at the idea of Worldcon in China with Cixin Liu as a guest of honor (given his public positions on the Uyghurs). And I didn't remember the details mentioned below of accusations that an organization within China rigged the vote (by purchasing lots of voting memberships), suggesting the general Worldcon community wasn't a fan of holding Worldcon in China.
I was pretty surprised by your comments in this thread about the left giving China a pass... but I think there's a difference between business/media and individuals here. Left-leaning business and media rely on China's business enough that they don't they want to say much. But left-leaning individuals on social media have plenty negative to say about China's government in my experience. Some of it complaining about Disney appeasing China.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
I'm not familiar with local politics in Jacksonville past hearing from multiple people that the Florida State Democratic Party is incompetent, if not actively working against their stated ideals, including actively pushing away people wanting to help. Maybe the local party in Jacksonville is better or you can find some local politician you can connect with, but the other approach might be looking into local citizen lobbying groups that care about the issues you care about like a local branch of Strong Towns, a local transit organization, or something else. One way to find such organizations is looking for lists of endorsements of candidates with views you agree with, but other than that I don't have any ideas.
I don't think "blue politics" is a meaningful term if you're talking about policy on housing and public transportation. Most large cities in the US are dominated by the Democratic Party and there are major intra-party arguments over the appropriate policies, and to some extent they are issues that cross party lines (e.g. YIMBY free market arguments may appeal to some Republicans). Looking at Donna Deagan's campaign website, "zoning" is mentioned quietly in one section and transit isn't mentioned at all. My interpretation is that she's unlikely to make big changes on either, but maybe I'm missing some local details.
A few states have been making zoning law changes at the state level recently because the local levels haven't been willing to do anything. But some of that is that no one municipality wants to make a change while their neighbors don't, so zoning at the state level fixes some coordination problems. Jacksonville's weirdly large size (compared to other urban areas where the metro area is legally organized into many more municipalities) might make it easier for zoning changes to happen at the municipality level.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
I've regularly heard the joke that part of what you're paying a restaurant for is not knowing how much butter/sugar they added.
I had seen calorie counts in some chain restaurants and apparently calorie counts are required in US chain (20+ location) restaurants as of May 2018. Of course, calorie counts is the bare minimum amount of nutritional info.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
A couple quick thoughts:
I'm not sure if bullying exactly fits under the category of "hate crimes", but I definitely have seen people talking about moving away from trans-unfriendly states has greatly reduced or even eliminated the anti-trans bullying they / their children have encountered. These laws are seen as the government condoning that bullying, so the two aren't really considered separable. My understanding is that the danger to trans children is mainly suicide, and both bullying and the government denying them recognition of their identity or appropriate medical care contributes to that.
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
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
10mo ago
I'm still confused; the context is talking about the not wealthy people trying to hold these "luxury beliefs" that they can't afford to and it's hurting them.
Wanting to abolish the police is voting against your interests only if abolishing the police actually increases crime that hurts you (worded vaguely because it's reasonable to claim, say, shoplifting in my neighborhood hurts me indirectly even though I'm not a direct victim of the crime). The progressive views on reforming law enforcement and the justice system usually talk about how they believe the desired changes would reduce crime (usually pointing to science saying so). I fully understand that most posters here disagree. But describing such things as "luxury beliefs" goes against the honest belief of those who hold them that they would make life better for everyone.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
I think we're talking past each other. For instance, I could just as easily describe "tough-on-crime" as a "luxury belief" because a common talking point of the pro-reform point of view is that doing so increases crime by unnecessarily putting people in prison so they build connections to criminals and pushing them away from the non-criminal economy, and therefore the rich isolated from crime can afford to revel in punishing criminals but the less isolated people in cities can't afford such beliefs. This would be an absurd way of structuring a political argument that is using the term "luxury beliefs" to sneak in an assumption that pro-reform view is correct. But I don't see any difference between that and any other uses of "luxury beliefs" in this thread.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
The actual policy changes after the 2020 protests have been pretty much entirely in the "tough-on-crime" direction. I understand there's serious disagreement over how or if to reform law enforcement, but most of BLM's recommendations haven't been implemented anywhere---and certainly not the recommendations of the prison abolition movement---so I don't see how you could possibly blame the murder rate on them.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
For the most part, movies/TV have a long pipeline (the main exception being talk shows like Last Week Tonight), so you wouldn't expect to see a lot of immediate impact. The previous writer strike lasted 3 months and 8 days and resulted in several TV shows having shorter seasons and some getting cancelled entirely, and I often see it credited with contributing to the rise in reality (i.e. unscripted, so no union writers needed) TV... and that was twice as long without all that huge of an impact. Wikipedia has a vague list of shows "impacted" by the current strike; it currently looks like at least some of those will have delayed or omitted episodes this season.
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
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
10mo ago
The reasoning for that supporting the market hypothesis is that it suggests the virus was spreading among animals within a farm that sold its animals to the market. It's exactly what you'd expect a zoonotic spillover event to look like. But it could also be explained by other theories, for instance the lab repeatedly selling infected animals to the market.
A far simpler hypothesis for why this could happen is that both lineages were circling in humans prior to the market
That's not supported by the data. In order for this to be true, either (1) the data has been manipulated to omit cases not linked to the market, (2) all of those humans were closely linked to the market, or (3) all of those humans were very careful (or coincidentally happened to) not spread the virus except at the market.
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.
Are you using FB Purity? My normal ad-blocker doesn't do much on FB.
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