token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4d 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
4d 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
5d 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
7d 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
9d 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
9d 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
9d 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
9d 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
9d 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
10d 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
13d 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
13d 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.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
13d ago
Robert F Kennedy, one the most vocal critics against the pharmaceutical and processed food industries. [...] In Trump’s victory speech, Trump proudly stated that RFK will “go wild” with his blessing provided he doesn’t touch fracking or the oil industry. [...]
Rumors of Thomas Massie being tapped for agricultural secretary. [...] He wants the legalization of raw milk[...]
I assume Trump voters want a return to the economy prosperity they recall from 2017-2019, not to the whole having a pandemic thing of 2020. Hopefully we get lucky and H5N1 doesn't jump to humans (and my understanding is it's more likely it won't than it will), but if you wanted to maximize the chance of another pandemic, these are the policies you'd enact. Not that Biden has exactly been pro-active in doing anything about H5N1.
Although if we get a sufficiently anti-vax federal government we can just have some old-fashioned polio and measles epidemics.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
14d ago
Trump still carried roughly 90% of the black vote.
Given context, I assume you meant Harris.
I’m very intrigued by one of the counter-narratives I’ve already seen congealing: Kamala ran too far to the right,
Obviously there's a lot of different takes on what happened in the election. One of the narratives is around Trump talking about the economy being bad and Harris not doing so. And for a certain segment of the left, running to the left would involve talking about left-leaning economy policies (antitrust/breaking up monopolies, stronger regulations, etc.), and Harris was avoiding doing so. So people who believe in those policies and believe they are popular are upset that they aren't being proposed (and think this is a plot by wealthy interests to keep pro-business policies around).
While I support such policies and wanted Biden (yeah, I know he wasn't on the ballot) to win because I think that was the best chance of such policies being enacted, I really don't believe they are broadly popular. If you directly ask the American people if they want food poisoning and monopolies raising prices, I assume you'd get a lot of "no"s, but if you bring them policy proposals to do something about it, they'll vote it down as wonkish and anti-freedom.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
15d ago
Your suggestions don't sound terribly different from how it worked pre-1926. There's wording about people "who have declared their intention to become citizens of the United States". I don't have strong feelings about exactly where to draw the line at what counts, but in the current system, the best case requires living in the US for 5+ years and excludes plenty of people who end up living in the US for the rest of the lives. Describing those people as not having put down roots in the United States feels misleading to me.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
15d ago
As Rov_Scam mentioned, opposition to federal ID has primarily come from the right in the past (see religious-coded claims that ID cards are the "mark of the beast"), although both sides have expressed privacy concerns about the existence of IDs and/or the corresponding database (after all, that link I just gave was to Huffpost, not exactly known for their right-wing slant).
I have a hard time really caring about the supposed privacy concerns both because the IRS does a perfectly fine job not telling anyone my tax info that shouldn't know it and because my identity isn't private anyway: every registered voter's name/address is public information already. (And, honestly, I'm not sure I see the point of my tax info being secret either.)
There's not even really a need for the physical card. The whole point of a photo ID is to present a photo verifiable by a human along with a counterfeit-proof claim of some information about the person that's a photo of (for voting, the information that matters is name, address, and citizenship status). There's no reason other than the implementation complexity for requiring each person to carry around a plastic card instead of having the verifier look up that information in a database, which could alleviate fears of the cost of replacing an ID card.
That said, there's at least two separate issues that ID is being proposed to solve:
- Verifying the voter is who they say they are. That is, preventing the voter from voting as someone else who they know isn't going to vote, possibly because that someone else is a fake name they registered. Voters trying to vote multiple times does happen (I've already seen some news stories about people getting caught doing so this election), but it's difficult to get many additional votes this way, partially because it requires having voter registrations that you know will not get used legitimately.
- Verifying the voter is allowed to vote. i.e., they are a citizen and a resident at the address they claimed. This is the issue I think you're talking about; as there's a lot of non-citizens around, a significant percentage of them voting would be a lot of votes.* This could be verified by ID at time of voting, but it could also be verified by maintaining the voter rolls by some combination of requiring ID to register and checking the local voter database against some database of citizens. Election organizations already try to do this, but they are limited by the lack of a federal database of all citizens. I think some states collect social security numbers in attempt to approximate the "federal database of all citizens", but I'm not sure exactly how that part of the verification works.
*(Personally my preferred solution is to repeal the laws against non-citizen voting. The requirement to be a citizen to vote was added in most states as part of the wave of anti-immigrant legislation in the early 1900s. Before then, a stated intention to settle permanently in the United States was sufficient. Having a category of residents that don't get to vote is undemocratic.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
15d ago
Everyone does have to cast their vote by the time polls close on election day. Just some states think it's good enough for the ballots to be in the custody of the postal service (i.e. requiring a postmark by election day) as opposed to requiring ballots to be in the custody of the elections organization by that time. The argument is approximately that in a mail-in voting system, the postal service is effectively part of the elections organization.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
16d ago
To illustrate my point, there was a Chinese national in Michigan that voted because LOL apparently? And when he went out of his way to report that he shouldn't have been allowed to vote... well he's in trouble but the vote is still going to count.
Wait, what? Why are same-day registrations not given provisional ballots in Michigan like they are in other states?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
16d ago
Speaking of which- the really incredibly blue counties in Atlanta illegally extending early voting hours, what’s going on with that? Is there any way to stop the illegal votes from counting? Of course not.
AP News "Georgia judge rejects GOP lawsuit trying to block counties from accepting hand-returned mail ballots" says a judge has already reviewed the issue and said they're not violating the law. Apparently the law says that after a certain deadline, the drop boxes have to close and absentee ballots can only be accepted by handing them to an election official... so they kept the offices open so people could hand their ballots to election officials without having to do so on election day when presumably anyone could go to their polling place and hand in an absentee ballot, but at that point they might as well just vote in person (modulo rules about letting you hand in an absentee ballot for someone else; not sure what Georgia's laws say about that).
It is a bit disorganized that they would be deciding to do that last minute... but early voting is new enough and significantly more popular this year, so it's not surprising the election offices were caught off guard by its popularity and needing to increase resources.
There's also the related issue that apparently Cobb county messed up and sent out ballots late, which would be a reason for them to attempt to do their best to make up for their mistake so people could still return their ballots.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
17d ago
Looking at "Who Gets Abortions in America?" (NYT article dated 2021)... 60% of women who have abortions already have children, although only 14% are married, so "happily married women with children" aren't getting a large percentage of all abortions. That said, about 25% of women get an abortion at some point in their life, so it's not exactly rare.
Of course, that's not counting "spontaneous abortion" (better known as miscarriage). I was having trouble finding statistics for how many women will ever have a miscarriage, probably partially because it's tricky to define since well, I'll let Wikipedia explain:
Among women who know they are pregnant, the miscarriage rate is roughly 10% to 20%, while rates among all fertilisation is around 30% to 50%.
I bring up miscarriage because some of the concern over abortion bans has been over healthcare for miscarriages getting lumped in with abortions.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
20d ago
In the absence of a 'none of the above' option...
I don't think anywhere in the US puts an actual bubble labeled "none of the above" on the ballot, but you can leave it blank or write in Mickey Mouse.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
26d ago
Oh, yeah, /r/politics has always had a lot of nonsense bad-mouthing of Trump. The difference I'm calling out is that the past few weeks, there's been a lot of re-runs of such stories from years ago.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
26d ago
There's been a few stories like that hitting /r/politics the past couple week. By "like that", I mean, some reiteration of some vague bad-mouthing of Trump over something that's not actually very important and was reported on years ago. As someone who is no fan of Trump, I also am unhappy with this news coverage, albeit for different reasons: there's actual bad things to say about Trump; no need to report on irrelevant gossip. Actually talk about his policies and fallout from what he did during his term. But news organizations don't want to do that because it involves talking about regulating business (e.g., the FDA regulating food production) in a positive light and their owners don't want that.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
26d ago
The Republicans in the legislative branch have purposely thrown away their majority, and caved on every significant issue the Uniparty truly wanted. FISA courts stayed, endless money for foreign wars stayed.
So you're annoyed Republicans have not used their legislative power to vote against the policies initiated by the Republican Party under GWB in the 2000s? Why exactly did you expect them to do so?
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).
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