token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
A UK judge has ordered that that the baby be killed. Her parents have protested this, saying that they don’t think the government should kill their baby.
Now wait a minute, the order is to stop actively keeping the baby alive, which seems pretty different from killing the baby, even if the end result is the same.
The court point of view is that they're ordering the parents to stop torturing their child, and that they can't condone the parents moving the baby to a different country that is willing to torture it. Obviously there's clear disagreement over whether the medical care is comparable to torture.
I don't think the court is obviously right here, but I think you're being unreasonable in claiming they're obviously wrong.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
I am for government getting out of the marriage issue completely and just letting people sign more specific contracts.
That's tempting (and a position I recall arguing for in in-person political discussions pre-Obergefell), but the government has assigned a lot of benefits to married couples including taxes, health insurance, immigration, and probably some others I'm forgetting. Getting the government out of marriage involves significantly changing all of those. Maybe possible, but it would be a large project with a lot of winners and losers on various issues.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
I don't understand how this is possibly the court's fault. I haven't heard of this challenge before, so maybe the article you linked about it is misleading somehow, but it sounds like the sequence of events was:
- Lindell proposes a challenge claiming he has evidence related to cheating on the 2020 election, offers a $5 million prize to the first person to prove him wrong to the satisfaction of him or an arbitrator he chose.
- Someone in fact convinces the arbitrator they have fulfilled the requirements of the prize; Lindell doesn't pay out.
- Just now, a court confirmed that, yes, the arbitrator really was convinced and that means Lindell has to pay out.
The court very explicitly did not look at the election claims; they only said "this was the terms of the bet; they were fulfilled, so you have to pay out".
It’s a remarkable situation. Evidence of election interference should be investigated by law enforcement agencies, with no need for a bounty to disprove the validity.
I'm really not sure why you think evidence of election interference isn't investigated by government authorities (reworded because I'm not sure if law enforcement or the secretary of state's office / election board is the appropriate authority, probably depends on the exact case). It sounds like Lindell didn't have any evidence and just threw together some unrelated obfuscated numbers and didn't expect anyone to call him out on it.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
So one side gets a Heckler's Veto until they are convinced of the legitimacy of the election?
This, but unironically.
The primary goal of an election is convincing the losers they lost to ensure a peaceful transfer of power. Selecting a winner is a significantly less important goal. If a large portion of the population doesn't believe the election (and therefore the government) is legitimate, that's the road to a coup or civil war. Or at least lower level societal dysfunction as more people reject government authority. It's still a problem even if their reasons appear to be nonsense.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
My understanding is that basically the reason we don't do that anymore is that as the federal positions mattered more, the state legislature elections turned into proxy elections for the federal positions and the state issues were getting ignored. If you're going to have an indirect system for selecting the federal positions, you would probably want to either (1) keep it separate from state elections or (2) decide to go even harder on giving power to the federal government (so it doesn't matter as much if the state legislatures aren't governing).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Echoing self_made_human, not telling you the reason doesn't mean they don't know the reason. They might not, but, also, it's standard advice to never give a reason in such a situation. Among other problems, giving a reason makes some people think the reason is a problem to be fixed and then the relationship will happen after all, not merely an explanation.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
More out of curiosity than anything else, what queer spaces do straight people want anything to do with?
I'm just relaying the (a?) classic gentrification story: the weirdos make good art / make the place "cool", more mainstream people notice and eventually overrun the place, outnumbering the people who made it cool in the first place, the vibe is dead. When it happens to a neighborhood, it's (negative connotation) gentrification. But the same pattern happens to social spaces. I've heard people talk about it in relation to kink communities and music subcultures.
That is, straight people aren't drawn to the space because it's queer, from their point of view the queerness is coincidental and often invisible. Of course, this is also the story queer people tell themselves; maybe the queer people aren't actually as cool as they think they are.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
Despite your woke-as-religion argumentation, you seem to be missing the "Original Sin"-analogue: a major part of the woke worldview is that everyone has internalized biases and everyone should be a work-in-progress of improving themselves by trying to reduce those biases but they will never be 100% successful. From this assumption, they conclude that attempts to ignore group identities will inevitably fail and that creating an unbiased system out of biased individuals requires explicit attention to bias.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
Let us not mince words: the role of holistic college admissions is to examine people as whole individuals, to account for every second of their lives and every bit of their cultural context, and to rank them from best to worst. Or, more precisely: to justify and to reify the values Harvard and its co-luminaries use to select best and worst.
No, it isn't. And you clearly show in the rest of your post that you know this is not true. Harvard is not taking a ranked list of individuals and selecting the best N from the list and accepting them or trying the compute the equivalent. They are trying to select the best student body of consisting of N individuals. I'm sure they have some rather high minimum quality bar to be considered, but after that, they're optimizing for group dynamics and various axes of diversity.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
Part of the problem here is that the optimal number of men (from the point of view of the organizers of the conference) is not zero. Having some allies that get their messages about gender discrimination out of the conference is very much so a goal of the conference, albeit not a primary one. Even if they could devise a rule that banned men but not "real" non-binary attendees, it's not actually what they want.
It seems like the actual solution probably looks like getting rid of the recruiters and thereby removing that incentive to attend from people not interested in the supposed main point of the conference.
(This feels parallel to discussions I've been involved in about non-queer people in queer spaces. Although I haven't personally seen such a space get overrun with non-queer people, my understanding is that they generally either have to fight hard to stay queer by being very explicit about being a queer space or end up splitting off and creating a new Really Queer This Time(tm) space every once in a while.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo ago
Well, that explains Bruce Schneier's most recent blog post "Improving C++". I'm generally a fan of Rust, but acknowledge there's a lot of existing code in C/C++ and rewriting code that works is asking for trouble; we should be making sure we have the tooling to retrofit the appropriate checks into existing code. That is, updating to C++29 or whatever is almost certainly going to be easier and less error-prone than porting to Rust.
Tivoization is the term for the problem you're talking about. And free software advocates have been raging against it since, uh, you could actually find someone who could remember the last time they saw a TiVo. With the recent EU fight with Apple and the Right to Repair movement in the US, it looks like there's a small push in the other direction at the moment. But that's not very reassuring.
It is weird to see an anti-government anti-Tivoization rant given that I've always seen it as an anti-corporate position.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
This seems like a strange perspective to me. Or maybe I'm missing your point. The Culture War isn't about the positive and beautiful because, and maybe I'm stretching the metaphor here, war isn't positive and beautiful.
Plenty of people are making beautiful arts and crafts of various kinds to enrich their lives and the lives of those around them. That's just not Culture War material.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
There was no gay sex in Lawrence. Indeed, there was no gay couple in Lawrence.
The plaintiffs were gay men, charged under Texas' anti-sodomy statute.
I'm not a lawyer, so maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure I see your point. The plaintiffs in Lawrence had a harm to bring a case over: they really were charged with sodomy. Is your assertion that the facts of the case didn't support the charge so it was dishonest of them to take a legal strategy of "that shouldn't be illegal" instead of "we didn't do that"? (I don't know, maybe they did try the "we didn't do that" line of defense in a lower court and failed? I can't imagine a case based on the word of a few gay men vs. the word of police officer eyewitnesses going well for the gay men.)
That seems different from the claim that no gay marriage website was ever ordered, so the whole case was actually about a hypothetical harm, which I thought was grounds for throwing a case out, as otherwise the courts would be flooded with hypotheticals and they already have trouble keeping up with the concrete cases.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
My understanding is that E-verify isn't changing any law; it's simply an enforcement mechanism for existing laws. While not enforcing a bad law may be better than enforcing it... it's still a bad situation. For employment of undocumented workers, the legal grey area means they get underpaid and poor work conditions because they don't have the legal recourse of reporting their employer for abuses. I think pushing for E-verify is about trying to corner the anti-immigration politicians into defining some official concept of a work visa so we don't have the current nonsense of de-facto work visas without labor laws. The actual result seems to be a complete lack of action on immigration because a compromise can't be reached but no one likes the status quo either.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
I'm not sure how much it makes sense to use polling data to predict other kinds of events. My understanding is that using polling to predict elections makes sense because you're essentially running the election early on a sample, so going from there to estimating the election results is what statistics is good at. And there are a lot of polls on elections people care about so you have enough data to do something with.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
The people I know who are the loudest about health care all have Type 1 diabetes. That Wikipedia article says
Within the United States the number of people affected is estimated at one to three million.
so around 0.3-1% of the population. One I know says they very intentionally went the route of working for a big company to have a stable corporate job with health care because they've known since childhood that their choices were stable employment or death. The ones I know who didn't luck into such a stable career are pretty angry about it.
Women with significant period symptoms (which are fairly common, albeit not universal) also tend to care about health care to get access to the medication to manage their periods (aka birth control).
But also, catastrophic events resulting in high medical bills don't have to be all that common before a lot of people have a friend or acquaintance who had trouble with such a situation.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
This seems to be missing part of the feminist argument which is that the advice they complain is "victim blaming" is often tied to claims that the advice doesn't actually affect the chance of rape. Which is also related to redirecting the discussion to claims that stranger rape is rare, so advice geared towards avoiding it is a useless distraction.
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
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
2mo ago
I think you two might be talking past each other. Whether or not the losers should have good objections is a normative statement. Whether or not their objections are a problem is a descriptive statement. If the losers refuse to accept the result of an election no matter how fair and transparent it is, you don't have a functioning democracy.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
More than that, it's aligned interests. The places I've lived where I was renting and planning on only living there a few years, you better believe I didn't give two shits about the future of the place. Owning a home really changes the incentive structure.
I hear this and it's such a strange concept to me. I live in an expensive west coast city. The people I know with close ties and care about the place are locals who, for the most part, have parents who own houses because they got into the market so long ago, and they can't imagine ever being able to afford to buy instead of renting. The people who own houses are either the aforementioned older generation or the people who moved here for high-paying jobs and can actually afford to buy into the market, but will happily hop off to some other city if the opportunity presents itself because the cost of owning a home just isn't a big deal to them. Obviously, I'm generalizing and a lot of people fall into neither group, but those two are very common in my experience and make me quite suspicious of claims that "landowner" is a remotely good proxy for "cares about the local government".
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
I think Aurora is the only book of his I read after enjoying the RGB Mars trilogy (+ The Martians short story collection in that universe). Those books go a bit off the deep end into the environmentalism and Marxism towards the end... but basically just I recommend skipping Blue Mars or noping out of when you've had enough. I also thought Aurora was overly preachy (and mind, this is coming from someone who literally goes by "token progressive" on this forum; I may disagree with him less you than you do, but it's still not fun to read), so it's good to hear most of his other books are good.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
Not sure gay marriage fits in that list. I think you might be misremembering just how unpopular it was 20 years ago (link to chart of Gallup poll results over time showing 35% support in 1999 and 42% in 2004 and apparently they didn't ask the question in the intervening time). In comparison, this article references a 2020 poll showing 34% support for "defund the police", although post-2020 the numbers go down.
(Other polling data I found researching for this comment: Support for abortion looks pretty flat at ~55%. Didn't find a good source on evolution, but actually teaching evolution increased from 51% in 2007 to 67% in 2019, whatever that means. I can't find any historical survey data on drag shows, but this YouGov poll says 25% of people said it's okay for children to attend them (which I'm guessing is the issue you meant) and a strong majority in all crosstabs for allowing them in general. Reparations are even more unpopular at 19% in 2021 according to that poll, although rising from 15% in 2014.)
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.
Would you mind at least translating the headline? So far I got
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