token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
16hr ago
That's a rather strange reading of what he said. Nowhere in there was any mention of her returning to prostitution.
How did you interpret
cheating on him when she wanted more spending money
then?
You think she'd be showing him undying loyalty otherwise?
No, but believing your partner is fundamentally a bad person sounds like a poor basis for a trusting relationship.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1d ago
I know a guy who married a prostitute made good
That wording makes it sound like a relationship with an ex-sex-worker, not a current sex-worker. Or at least the guy thought they were no longer a sex-worker and turned out to be wrong about that.
If the guy believed being "good" requires not being a sex worker, then I can see how the relationship went poorly.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1d ago
Then when she's ready to settle down after having had her fun and marry a Western or local man, she can just pretend she was an angel all along.
You do realize sex workers are capable of having relationships while also being sex workers, right?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1d ago
Surely too much debt is a problem, but cashflow issues be solved by either reducing spending or increasing revenue. And when you're talking about a government's budget, increasing revenue can be some combination of increasing tax rates and increasing tax base/GDP. Obviously, much of political disagreement is over exactly which policies will maximize GDP, and Republicans routinely state they believe things like DOGE will increase economic productivity by getting the federal government out of the way. On the other hand, the Democrats believe better regulations, which require funding the federal government, will maximum GDP. And they're in favor of raising taxes.
Additionally, it's unclear the current situation is "too much" debt. The Total Public Debt as Percent of Gross Domestic Product and Federal government current expenditures: Interest payments charts don't look great. On the other hand Federal Outlays: Interest as Percent of Gross Domestic Product looks high, but nowhere near a historical high.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1d ago
it's clear that most "age gap" stuff is just older women being angry at older men not finding them attractive as they once did.
While this may be true, my only exposure to the "age gap" discourse is 40-something women posting on Tumblr about how the teens/20-somethings policing age gaps are talking nonsense.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1d ago
I too wonder why prostitution or sex tourism is still so shunned. It's clear why the far left and far right hate it
Does the far left hate it? Maybe I just don't have any exposure to the group you're calling "the far left". I understand it's not a normie view, but I somewhat often see pro-sex-worker sentiment in places as diverse as the leftist Tumblrs I follow, my IRL friends' Facebook posts, and Ars Technica comments (mostly when in comes up in the context of anti-sex-worker laws like FOSTA-SESTA).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5d ago
There's certainly liberal content on most (if not all) social media websites. But the impact of their algorithms is almost universally to push users in the direction of right-wing content. Reddit's algorithms are theoretically transparent (i.e. officially what is highlighted is controlled by the votes of real people but there's regular claims of fake accounts being used to mess with the vote counts), so it may be one of the ones least affected by this.
But also, the nature of social media being a customized feed for every user means that it's very difficult to judge how liberal the median (or whatever) view of a site is. From my perspective, Tumblr is very woke, but I somewhat often see discussions of the conservative views being espoused elsewhere on the site.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5d ago
You seriously think social media is making teens more liberal? That sites known for right-wing QAnon conspiracy rabbit holes are somehow increasing support for trans rights?
The media has been talking about how surprisingly conservative Gen Z is (that is, the people young enough for social media / smartphones to be a major part of their teenage years but old enough to actually be 18+ for a survey). Wikipedia references social media as an influence making them more conservative.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5d 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
5d ago
I was confused reading your post because I was thinking "surely there's browser extensions to do what you want" until I got to
And I could always go for a dumb phone.
I'm one of those weird people who doesn't install social media apps on their phone. (Don't worry, I'm plenty capable of wasting my time scrolling on a mobile web browser.) And, yeah, I'd support legislation to ban companies from blocking third-party apps / pushing users to apps instead of web sites. That is, companies should not be allowed to take technological measures to prevent users from controlling their experience of social media (defined broadly) websites.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
24d ago
Of course the other hole I've dug myself is I purchase most of my games on GOG first, then Epic, and lastly Steam. Because my top priority is how easy it is to check out without saving my credit card number, and Steam is by far the most odious, wanting my full address and phone number, and always attempting to greedily save it all by default. But Steam also has the best Linux compatibility, so fuck me I guess.
I've gotten to the point that I sometimes forget to check ProtonDB before checking a Steam game without a Linux native build because I just never run into problems anymore. I hear that's not always true for the latest AAA games. For GOG/Epic, Heroic Games Launcher is only a little less smooth than Steam, and will handle WINE/Proton for you (it also has an option to list the games in the Steam interface).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo 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
1mo ago
The idea of "neutral" being correct journalism is nonsense. The truth is not neutral. How would you feel about an article making an off-hand mention of
financier Bernie Madoff
or
German doctor Josef Mengele
Such a piece would surely have to either be satire or journalistic malpractice.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo ago
I was replying to the section of the post asserting there was
a big-money, top-down movement that’s being sold as “justice,” but at its core, it’s about control.
I was asking what "control" they were seeking separate from their claimed goals that they frame as "justice". You provided examples of different ways of them lobbying for their public goals. Sure, lobbying is often bad, but it's not a special secret conspiracy attributable to woke NGOs.
You replied
Silly poster, he should have known that the only acceptable way to speak of shadowy cabals is to give them a name like "the patriarchy" or "systemic racism"
Those calling out "the patriarchy" and "systemic racism" blame many concrete effects on those and suggest many concrete changes.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo ago
Sorry, I don't get the reference. I clicked your link and have no idea what it has to do with my post.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo ago
While there seems to be a real effect of Trump pulling more of the non-white vote than the Democratic party apparatus thought possible (although it's still too early for quality demographic analysis of the 2024 election), Florida Cubans have been a reliable Republican voting bloc for decades. The narrative I've always heard is that the Cubans that live in Florida are the self-selected to be the mainly the ones that saw the socialist government in Cuba as their enemy ruining their lives and therefore the Republican line of calling the Democrats socialists is very convincing to them.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo ago
Silly poster, he should have known that the only acceptable way to speak of shadowy cabals is to give them a name like "the patriarchy" or "systemic racism"
I've seen a lot of anti-feminist takes here and on similar message boards. But "feminists don't blame enough things on the patriarchy" is a new one to me. Same with the left and "systemic racism".
So the people openly trying to change society to be more accepting of LGBT people are... also secretly conspiring to change society to be more accepting of LGBT people? That seems pretty different from the claim that the movement is really about seeking "control".
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo 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
1mo 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
Uhhhhhh I don't want to do a lit review so please forgive me if I get some of the details wrong but basically they try and predict well in advance which mutations are going to be prevalent the next year (like almost a year in advance) and make all the vaccines accordingly.
So it's more that a year ago or whenever they were actually selecting the strains for this year, H5N1 wasn't looking as scary, but maybe it could be included in next years' (assuming we don't get a pandemic and manage to rush a separate vaccine before then)?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo ago
An amusing theory, albeit unlikely. But actually burning down the Democratic Party is probably the biggest gift Biden could give to the left (i.e. the leftist wing of the Democratic Party + those disenchanted due to being even further left), since they've been claiming for decades that the Democratic Party is too far right and the "real people" want a leftist party. Of course, building up a new political party from the ashes of the Democratic Party would take several years, and would likely just be filled with leftist populist grifters and not actually make anyone happy. And it's much more likely the Democratic Party just limps along continuing to not leave enough air for another party to take its place opposing the Republican Party.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo ago
If we know how to make a vaccine for it, why was it not included in the annual flu vaccine this year? I was assuming the reason is that we don't know how to make a vaccine for a potential future H5N1 that can sustain human-to-human transmission because it doesn't exist and may be sufficiently different from the currently known strains that a different vaccine may be necessary (or, worse, that immune imprinting may mean a future vaccine against the pandemic strain wouldn't work as well).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo ago
Games having increasing delays is a very common feature. I'd argue that MMOs are a good example of this because while you may continually get loot, there's increasing delays in getting useful loot. Basically all video games have very quick rewards at the beginning in the "tutorial" section (which might not be explicitly set out as a tutorial, often just the early game introducing the mechanics via clearly intentionally easy levels) when teaching the mechanics followed by more spread out rewards. Which isn't necessarily exploitative: a more interesting, difficult challenge will of course take longer than the tutorial of "here's what the A button does".
But for a more pure version, you can look at "incremental games" or really any game with a gacha/loot box mechanic, which I understand is standard in generic modern mobile free-to-play games. Basically, there's a whole type of games where increasing the delay is combined with the option to pay real world money to shorten the delay.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo 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).
Looking at just the effects of the executive orders Trump has made so far:
Direction to State Department to not recognize trans gender identities. Unclear exactly what this means in practice, but this will likely make it difficult or impossible for many trans people to get/renew passports. I know many trans people renewed their passports early expecting this (and the Biden State Department literally worked overtime to fulfill those requests before January 20th).
Less serious, but Return to In-Person Work at best inconveniences many government workers. The intention is almost certainly to encourage federal workers to quit (just like tech company RTO policies are interpreted as stealth layoffs).
Those are the only two that I see that have immediate impact on the lives of people I know, but many of the others will likely lead to noticeable effects.
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