token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3d 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
9d 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
9d 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
9d 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
9d 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
10d 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
10d 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
19d 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
19d 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
19d 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
25d 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo ago
Yeah but who would buy cures that have waivers?
Probably approximately the same proportion of the population that uses software and websites with terms of service saying you promise to hand over your first-born have no privacy? i.e., nearly everyone because that's just every product on the market.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo ago
But how does adding yet another pro-Harris post to a sub-reddit that is already 100% full of pro-Harris posts drive turnout? It makes no sense.
Yeah, not quite sure what the strategy is here. Targeting non-politics subreddits / the global top posts to get exposure to Reddit users that aren't looking for political news could possibly be doing something. Maybe they're expecting Reddit users to repeat the messages to non-Reddit users, and giving them more talking points increases the chance that will happen / it will be effective? Or maybe they're concerned that even /r/politics posters might be too apathetic to vote?
Of course, there's also the possibility they're looking for their keys votes under a streetlight. That is, it really is the waste of effort it looks like; they're targeting Reddit because they know Reddit, not because it's actually a good target.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo ago
I constantly see claims that modern elections are 99% about turnout, not convincing swing voters, since politics is too polarized for there to be a significant number of swing voters. Maybe those takes are completely wrong, but it's certainly the received wisdom in any at all mainstream election analysis. Not sure that targeting redditors in particular is useful way to get out the vote of Democratic partisans, but the Democrats definitely believe that winning elections is about getting their own partisans to actually vote and discouraging Republican partisans from voting (e.g., by spreading negative news about Republican candidates). I say Democrats simply because that's the media bubble I'm in; I have no reason to believe the Republicans don't believe the same with the parties flipped.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo 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
1mo ago
Go search "Obergefell" in the text of the decision and you'll see multiple instances of asserting that sure the same arguments work just as well against contraception and gay marriage, but they pinky swear to only use them against abortion.
And if that's not strong enough evidence that the Dobbs decision threatens gay marriage, here's David French arguing it doesn't. But, more seriously, searching Dobbs and Obergefell found a news article on a recent dissent by Sotomayor on the topic in addition to multiple analysis articles pointing out that the Dobbs decision threatens those other rights.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo ago
But back to NIMBYism, building more affordable housing would actually make living here worse and it can be argued mathematically: median income in Eugene is $30k. In the US, the top 10% of taxpayers provide about 70% of government funding. If you invite people who make less than the top 10% into your town, you make your town poorer.
Municipal budgets don't work like that. The vast majority of cities are funded nearly entirely by property taxes. More density nearly always results in higher property valuations and therefore higher tax revenue; density dominates building quality: a very nice single family home will still be significantly less valuable than however many mediocre townhouses you can squeeze onto the same plot of land. I guess the non-obvious part is how the cost of infrastructure like roads (cheaper per household with higher density) compares to the cost of services like schools (which should approximately scale proportional to the number of students), which you get into elsewhere in this thread talking about the cost of public school per student.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo 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 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
1mo ago
That's a good point that those are not easy to distinguish. We'll have to wait for the statisticians to get their hands on all of the data (both the precinct-by-precinct results and exit polls) and see what they can come up with. Possibly there may be a way to try to collect some more data by polling, but asking people who they voted for in the past is notoriously unreliable.
The extreme case would be if there were zero votes in cities and all the votes came from rural areas, you could be pretty sure the effect of Democratic voters staying home was a stronger effect than people switching parties. Obviously the effects will be a lot smaller and less obvious than that, and the final vote totals won't even be completed for another couple weeks, so it will take time for people who know what they're looking for to have any kind of educated guess on the matter.
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?
More options
Context Copy link