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Wellness Wednesday for November 6, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Stop believing the propaganda.

This is a good message. I've called out more-liberal friends on this one, at least when the propaganda is really obviously objectively false, to good effect. I don't think I've completely convinced anyone that "the fact that someone as smart as you falls for this stuff so easily once you identify it as being on Our Side is also why you should cut Trump voters a little more slack about the stuff they fall for", but at least there's motion in the right direction. I think this comes easier from me (Libertarian voter, can steelman Trump but would still pick Harris for "lesser of two evils" if I was in a swing state) than it would from an actual Trump supporter, but if you actually cast your vote for Harris then you're in an even better position to insist that you're offering constructive rather than malicious criticism. When the Boy Who Cried Wolf finally gets eaten, IMHO it's perfectly fine to point out that his prior lies were part of the problem and that you don't have to be Pro-Wolves-Eating-People to notice.

We're not descending to Christian fascism!

Also probably true, and personally I'd note the "we have to take away Musk's companies" and "we have to ban The Misinformation" style left-wing fascism while I was pointing it out. But I've never gotten the chance, since I'm not friends with anyone this panicked, and if you do then being very careful about how you try to calm them down might indeed be the way to go here for the sake of the friendships.

We're not going to have a national abortion ban!

Maybe not? Probably not anything sweeping. But I wouldn't be surprised to see something relatively weak, third trimester with rape/incest exceptions or something. With a decent Republican lead in the Senate and probably a small lead in the house, there's at least a chance.

This will almost certainly not affect your life in any way!

And this is almost certainly wrong. It won't be the most important thing in most people's lives, but the federal government writes laws by the thousand and writes regulations by the million and spends dollars by the trillion. Even the second and third order effects on people not directly impacted can be huge.

But I wouldn't be surprised to see something relatively weak, third trimester with rape/incest exceptions or something. With a decent Republican lead in the Senate and probably a small lead in the house, there's at least a chance.

I can't see Democratic senators skipping the filibuster on an abortion ban, Republicans not having three or four Senators flake if the rest of the Republicans try to nuke the filibuster over it, and then there's the lawsuits. The 2003 Partial Birth Abortion Ban had a third of the Dem Senate cross over to get passed, as a comparison.

That said, I think there are stronger examples. At the regulatory level, I'd expect to see the EMTALA abortion rule nixed, either by the Trump admin removing the rule and/or refusing to support it, and there's a variety of funding levers that can get tweaked (at least until the APA challenge) even if 'officially' no Medicaid money was supposed to have gone to abortion. There's likely to be a lot changed on trans matters, whether through judicial avenues (Skrmetti's getting heard in December, but there's a number of follow-up cases slotted in) or regulatory ones (compare the Dear Colleague letter volleyball). College debt delays and forgiveness might not have survived judicial review moving forward, but they're definitely not going to survive a Trump admin.

And there's a lot of stuff on this sorta path in a variety of spheres. Some of them are unlikely for structural reasons -- a lot of people have tried to pull Project 2025's radfem porn opposition as likely to result in active prosecutions or financial chicanery that the Trump admin just won't be able to pull the DoJ or CFPB into focusing on -- but most of them much more plausible. Sometimes just because the Biden admin made such hilariously aggressive rules, and these people are upset that they're going to lose the benefits of them. But that's still a thing with impact.

This will almost certainly not affect your life in any way!

And this is almost certainly wrong. It won't be the most important thing in most people's lives, but the federal government writes laws by the thousand and writes regulations by the million and spends dollars by the trillion. Even the second and third order effects on people not directly impacted can be huge.

I should say, won't matter in any legible way versus the counter-factual.

Like, obviously inflation affected people but it is debatable whether this would have been worse than high unemployment, and it's not clear at all that Biden would have done one and Trump would have done the other.