|
Discendo Vox posted:The FDA is also extending the comment period for its proposed rule that will render flavored cigars and all menthol-flavored cigarettes illegal. I popped into a convenience store today and there were ads with QR codes directing people to complain about the menthol bans right at the counter. I can't recall the last time I saw something like that quite so open.
|
#
¿
Jun 21, 2022 19:44
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 20:31 |
|
|
BIG-DICK-BUTT-gently caress posted:This is an outdated view of addiction, one that isn’t currently held by any major addiction medicine organization. Please educate yourself further before speaking out on topics of which you are ignorant. Willfully spreading this disinformation is harmful. You should take a moment to tell us how that's wrong and what the actual view is, because my understanding as a biologist-but-not-physician is that saying substance addiction (compulsive use despite physical, psychological, or social consequences) is a "social harm" is... self-evident? [ed: took too long, beaten]
|
|
#
¿
Jun 21, 2022 19:56
|
|
|
Gumball Gumption posted:Also I'll be honest I don't totally understand what DV means by civil harm in this case. I don't think nicotine addicts are really causing a lot of societal damage here and people are going to be jumpy about that sort of language because it sounds like a tough on crime soundbite, that addiction has civil harm. I don't think that's what DV means but I also don't understand what they did mean. Not answering for DV, but I have my own thoughts on it. Coupled with the magic of capitalism, we have corporations whose central goal is to keep you entirely captive to using their product regardless of cost, and a product which creates a legion of deeply loyal users who will fight to be able to continue using the product, which can then be politically manipulated in innumerable ways. It's considerably worse when the product also kills you, but even a truly pure nicotine delivery device is not ideal. In other words, the social harm from Hypothetical Ideal Vape Device is lower than cigarettes, alcohol, opiates (health consequences lower) and lower even than something like a gambling addiction (financial consequences lower), but not harmless because of how particularly addicting nicotine is.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 22, 2022 00:17
|
|
|
FLIPADELPHIA posted:Trump murdered a foreign head of state and bragged about it on Twitter. Really, the only thing notable about that is the use of Twitter rather than television. Remember Gaddafi? And we've had to worry about psychopaths nuking everybody since Nixon. The most atypical thing about Trump was that he was so boorish that people noticed the fascist elements; DeSantis would be able to operate more quietly.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 22, 2022 19:10
|
|
|
I think it's important to start here: Swimming's "solution" to this is just straight up transphobic bullshit, there's no defending it. And that's really the central problem with this topic: we can't honestly talk about whether MtF athletes upset competitive balance because most of this conversation isn't about that. Paula Radcliffe, women's marathon world record holder and probable doper, has come out swinging about "women's sport" but constantly says gross, transphobic poo poo in the process. So I'm always nervous about this conversation because I think, as a runner and scientist, that there's something we need to think about, but it's so steeped fundamentally in just being assholes to trans people that the only time I haven't seen this conversation go completely off the rails is when we've literally had a sub-elite trans woman in the room. Kalit posted:Just ballpark spitting here, but for swimming specifically, what about different categories such as lung capacity? Probably could use other measurements, but that seems like an important one. The problem with breaking down competitive groups by criteria other than sex is that there's no simply-measured characteristic that will have as large of an effect as sex on performance. Sex is clearly not trivially measured because it is not actually binary, but self-reporting mostly works. Every sport would need to develop new criteria, and you might be able to make it work by some multifactorial consideration of physiological parameters, but imagine putting every somewhat-competitive runner through a VO2Max test and a muscle biopsy before figuring out what group they run in. And you do have to do it with every somewhat-competitive athlete, because mediocre weekend warrior men can push elite women off the podium in some sports - just eliminating divisions and having one big open field simply doesn't work. An ELO/MMR approach also doesn't work for this reason because nobody wants to watch a race between elite women and a bunch of cis male nobodies.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2022 14:00
|
|
|
Edgar Allen Ho posted:Why do we need a hard scientific set of criteria for skill level? Let people compete at the bracket they've proven they can compete at in previous lower skill tiers. My belief is actually that both of these options are so stupid, destructive, and counterproductive that it's better to keep the current male v. female divisions and let trans women compete as women, even if there's an advantage.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2022 15:12
|
|
|
FlamingLiberal posted:So the Supreme Court essentially made all gun control regulation impossible today It doesn't kill off all forms of gun control. I'm not reading this as such an expansion as this writer, it seems to follow DC v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, which solidified the protection of handguns by the second amendment (which is dumb and a huge problem but we've had this problem for a decade now). This eliminates "may issue" concealed carry laws and will likewise kill some other permitting requirements (which is dumb). But this doesn't kill all permitting requirements and there's still plenty of other aspects of guns that can be regulated.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2022 16:15
|
|
|
Federal staff in DC are getting messages from places like the Senate Sergeant at Arms to prepare for poo poo Happening tomorrow, so I expect the abortion ruling is coming.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2022 18:23
|
|
|
Kalit posted:
It's pretty easy to just Google up good articles in support of a pretty basic and uncontroversial claim, so I'm not sure why we're dealing with leading questions instead of counterarguments. We can start here, which uses multiple sources to show how police departments spend their time. Since you haven't made a claim yourself, I don't know what else to say. https://www.vox.com/2020/7/31/21334190/what-police-do-defund-abolish-police-reform-training
|
|
#
¿
Jun 24, 2022 02:41
|
|
|
Have Some Flowers! posted:Probably sooner than we think. Here's the green light to reactionary activists to bring the cases forward: Loving follows exactly the same logic, but the coward won't mention that.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 24, 2022 15:46
|
|
|
small butter posted:So why are Biden and Harris colder on getting rid of the filibuster now (in their responses about legislation on abortion rights)? They seemed to be for it just last year. At some point after BBB failed, the administration decided that putting public pressure on Congress through the media was bad. They made a strategic decision to stop showing support for anything specific they didn't think they could get through Congress, and instead started telling voters to "make your voices heard" about vague solutions. I don't know, it seems like a massive failure of leadership to me, but it's clearly on purpose. Perhaps there's something going on behind the scenes, but they're being very conservative in the media. I guess they think that trying and failing is a much worse look than simply appearing not to try at all.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 28, 2022 14:17
|
|
|
I think the Democrats' problems go far deeper than messaging, but one of the big impediments to strong messaging is that Democratic voters are a huge coalition duct taped together and without all that much in common except acting as opposition to extreme social conservatism. The party can't settle on a clear message because something like economic populism is alienating to the PMC; they're nervous about going hard on social issues because they're trying to hold on to a lot of moderates; etc. It's why they function decently when they just have to yell about how much Republicans are terrible, but can't settle on anything positive themselves. Even the party representatives are also unable to come to agreement on a coherent platform - how do you sell that? Long term, the coalition needs to die and realign, but right now they're trying to alienate the part of the coalition that has energy, which seems counterproductive to me.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 1, 2022 21:42
|
|
|
projecthalaxy posted:OK so this is coming from a position of moronic ignorance but is there really no rule that says people get to vote for the President? Like I see the Constitution says the several states shall send electors to Washington to pick the President or whatever but there was never a statute or anything saying "by the way, hold a popular vote to see which electors you send"? I know a lot of the stuff like that is technically just party rules and norms and whatnot but you'd think we would have written down "people get to vote for the President" explicitly on the books at some point. the original system was explicitly designed to avoid popular election of the President -- it is not written down for a reason. states just eventually decided that was a better way to do it than to appoint electors by some other manner. states had mostly settled on using popular vote to pick the electors by the 1830s but there was never any requirement that they do so.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 5, 2022 18:27
|
|
|
projecthalaxy posted:So I tried to trace my rights just for my own interest, as it relates to voting for President. The US Constitution as mentioned punts the whole thing to the states, the NM Constitution says any US Citizen who is resident within New Mexico can vote in all elections for local, county, state, and fed officials as controlled by the US and NM houses of legislature, and that those must be ballot elections held on the same day across the state. The legislature punted the entire process over to the NM Secretary of State, who currently decides that the Federal Electors shall be apportioned entirely to the party that wins a majority or plurality of the popular vote for President within New Mexico but I'm having trouble finding anything that says they can't decide like tomorrow that actually they'll just say who gets our electors themselves and lol at you. the only real check is that it probably has to be decided before the election happens, and it'd be unpopular to say "lol gently caress you we pick" before the election happens
|
|
#
¿
Jul 5, 2022 18:43
|
|
|
yronic heroism posted:They could have charged him criminally, which depending on how far the family covers for him can really be an uphill battle but at the rate things are going with mass shootings we may see more hail Mary’s trying to get convictions for this stuff. The challenge for the justice system is where x is the number of mass shooters the number of dudes making threats could be 100x or even 1000x Not that you're really saying this, but I really don't think broadly stepping up criminal charges on juveniles is the appropriate method to prevent gun violence. If we have an insane country that makes it impossible to deal with guns intelligently then we can't just make independent issues way worse as a workaround.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 6, 2022 00:36
|
|
|
Diet Crack posted:I love how everything is about 'high capacity magazines' and not 'maybe we should stop selling guns to people with serious mental illness history' I'm so confused by how banning gun sales on the basis of "mental illness" became a popular plank, particularly when we're not even effectively keeping guns away from people with criminal records. I've always believed it's the worst solution and seems like it's only picked up steam because people have given up on anything coherent (like banning the sale of semiautomatic guns entirely), so why not go after the easy targets who we can easily get people to hate. At this moment, the court has (wrongly) determined that the individual right to bear arms is constitutionally protected. So this is suggesting that we should be able to eliminate constitutional rights based on an arbitrary extrajudicial list mostly pulled from the medical records of people who have voluntarily sought mental health treatment. I don't own a gun and don't want to and would still avoid seeking out mental health treatment if the government pulled that poo poo.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 6, 2022 13:33
|
|
|
Bar Ran Dun posted:My dude go watch the hearing that happened today. Rigel posted:There's not really even the wink and nod plausible deniability that most of us probably assumed Trump could eventually use to get off, playing dumb and surprised that his supporters went nuts. He doesn't even have that going for him. I'm curious, for those of you who believe this will end with Trump being tried and convicted: if that does not happen, will anything change in your approach towards US politics? Do you anticipate having to adjust your worldview or strategy in any way?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 12, 2022 23:07
|
|
|
Bar Ran Dun posted:Selectively reading there. Sorry, I didn't see your follow-up. It's strange and very counterintuitive to me that you would respond that way to that post when you consider yourself a fully neutral observer, so I made an incorrect assumption.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 12, 2022 23:23
|
|
|
Bar Ran Dun posted:He explicitly told everybody what he was before he was elected in his book. Outright “ I am going to disappoint them.” to people who thought he was what you thought he was. Again before he was elected All these rubes, believing in someone and hoping for the best. I fully admit that I embarrassingly took the bait as a naïve college student; what's shocking to me is how often I am lectured by liberals for having learned my lesson after being tricked the first time. The man singlehandedly murdered political enthusiasm for a generation.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2022 00:14
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:Yeah, and it's still not how it's legally defined, as all the articles I linked describe, including saying why the two quarter definition isn't adequate, where it comes from, and who and how the actual definition is applied. There is no "legal definition" of a recession. There is no formal definition of a recession at all. A recession is declared "official" when a group of Very Important People say it is, and there are no explicit criteria for it, public or private. The Politifact article does explain this well, which you could have quoted directly instead of linking and adding something incorrect. Consequently, everyone else on the planet has used the two-quarters rule as a convenient proxy, but there is now a full court press by the White House to point out that the government has never considered that official because it looks bad otherwise.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 28, 2022 14:03
|
|
|
Srice posted:Heck, to put it another way, has there been a period of time in US history post-WWII where there was a recession without two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth? I am pretty sure there isn't but I haven't closely examined every single instance so it's possible I missed one! We'd actually be looking for the opposite: a time where there was two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth without a recession. That would be a counterexample for when the rule-of-thumb has failed. I'm having a little trouble finding this broken down by quarter pre-2000 rather than annualized.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 28, 2022 14:10
|
|
|
Srice posted:I was thinking of hunting for an instance where it the rule of thumb didn't trigger a warning but yeah you're right that would be a much better way to approach it. So if we cross-reference to this: https://www.nber.org/research/data/us-business-cycle-expansions-and-contractions It appears that every time there are two consecutive negative quarters of GDP growth, it has been determined that we are in a recession. There are recessions on that list (2001, 1960) that do not also have the drops in GDP, and of course, the edges of the recession can not be determined by this metric. The White House is arguing that due to other economic metrics not lining up because of the generaled fuckedupness of the global economy between COVID and war in Ukraine, we might not be in a recession -- e.g. jobs and employment are still increasing. So it's not to say that the rule of thumb can't be broken, just that it would be seemingly unprecedented.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 28, 2022 14:38
|
|
|
Walensky is an academic who has never had a public facing position and consequently says really stupid poo poo when she's not reading from prepared remarks -- which is why the administration has spent $25,000 on consultants to try to make her less of a mess. She's really bad at that part of her job and her entire tenure has involved gaffes like this.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 30, 2022 23:11
|
|
|
Civilized Fishbot posted:If she's just loving up because she was trained to talk to doctors and researchers and not the usual American dummy, then she only needs a spokesperson who has the appropriate skillset, and she can stick to the stuff she's good at. I'd rephrase this, because her problem absolutely isn't that the population she's talking to is dumber. It's that she's talking about poo poo she didn't ever need to talk about. In the past, she'd have a position where everything could just be left at "at this time, this is almost entirely transmitted through MSM, we need public health interventions in that community" and there is no need to be cautious about stigmatizing language because nobody is listening who is going to hear that and think "gay disease!" She has an entirely new set of obligations now.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 30, 2022 23:43
|
|
|
Okay, let's not do this thing where we just make up context and lie about things that are easy to check. She didn't get asked "what's the deal with children?" https://youtu.be/9HMO9FI-MZQ It's bad even completely in context. I'll still defend this as nothing more than sloppy language from someone who sucks with the media, so I'm not calling for her head and I think it's an overreaction to do so, but it's not a good look and there are so many better ways to phrase that. You need to approach that way more cautiously.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2022 18:48
|
|
|
Gumball Gumption posted:You really just sailed past their point that bad messaging negatively impacts well meaning people who are trying to use them as a source of knowledge. They're not releasing accurate factual information if you read the complaints, they're focusing on a specific community in their broadest messaging which is obviously confusing people. The CDC and Walensky have made two major points: monkeypox spreads primarily through direct physical contact, and at this time, MSM are at highest risk by far. It's important to get both of those messages out there. It's important in broad messaging because it's essential that everyone at risk hears that, and it's important for the safety of that community that we allocate vaccine stockpiles correctly. What Walensky actually did was to state something so indelicately that it can easily do harm against MSM and more broadly the LGBTQ community. The CDC needs to walk a line between delivering accurate information to prevent the spread of disease and saying something that could stigmatize it, and she hosed up. How is this turning into people are outright saying Walensky is engaging in sophistry, lying, and refusing to release correct information? The worst you can say is that the emphasis is in the wrong place (and I agree, because I'm cynical and think it's guaranteed to spread, so you should try to get out ahead of that) but you also need to make drat sure that the most at-risk communities understand they're the most at-risk communities by many orders of magnitude, and I guarantee you do more harm to MSM by not mentioning that. Note that the CDC website handles this differently from how the pressers have gone. The at-risk communities aren't on the front page. https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/response/2022/index.html
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2022 13:49
|
|
|
Gumball Gumption posted:Which should all be done through targeted messages to those communities, not in your broadest messaging on national TV. The broadest messaging should be targeted towards those who have habits that put them at risk, in this case people with multiple sex partners. The website is a better example of what to do. Is that the wrong link? That article is talking about something else entirely: it is suggesting that career scientists should be talking directly to the public without anyone massaging the message. At that time, people were frustrated about the CDC not being transparent enough, which is the opposite of this problem. This is actually such a comical thing to read right now, because literally the entire problem we're discussing is that the CDC failed to take politics into account when making a statement, and that article goes on at length about how it's bad that the CDC is taking politics into account.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2022 14:16
|
|
|
Gumball Gumption posted:They're still not saying the truth either. Describing those at risk as people with multiple sex partners is more accurate. That's not more accurate than "men who have sex with men." That encompasses a huge population that is not presently at high risk (but may be in the future) and leaves out a population that presently is at high risk (men who aren't particularly selective about their partner's sexual habits). Mendrian posted:To be clear, the issue is the homophobes, not the messaging, but we're talking about a discrete event in which a single afternoon rewriting the speech can have a tangible affect on real people where as 'dealing' with our homophobia is not really in the scope of a 45 minute job for a speech writer at the CDC. It wasn't a speech. Nobody wrote it. It was an off-the-cuff statement during an interview.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2022 17:26
|
|
|
A big flaming stink posted:https://twitter.com/EnemyInAState/status/1553536762319966208?t=g7yHSSE0NJpdxztyfP1iEA&s=19 Absolutely. And that is why the CDC has been broadly trying to avoid doing that in their messaging -- and why Walensky's particular soundbite-generating gently caress-up was a gently caress-up. Nearly every article on this for the past month has included something like this: quote:The virus spreads through prolonged and close skin-to-skin contact as well as sharing bedding, towels and clothing. In Europe and North America, it has spread primarily among men who have sex with men, though health officials emphasize that the virus can infect anyone.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2022 17:38
|
|
|
Ciprian Maricon posted:Even in your quote the CDC continues to say " In Europe and North America, it has spread primarily among men who have sex with men" where they just could have stopped at describing how it is passed. The CDC is just catastrophically dumb about this. First, you deliberately lopped off the CDC clarification. Second, even if that were the press release, that's the problem, something like that needs to be said to prevent people from catching the drat thing, because saying nothing means it'll just silently ravage the community. I'm not a public health expert. Maybe you don't do it through AP news articles, but I'd really like to see an alternative expert opinion about what could be done.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2022 18:12
|
|
|
Jaxyon posted:A few hours late, but I was probed and I want to be clear I wasn't calling people nazis. How very interesting that this sentence has precisely 88 characters. Jaxyon posted:People decide that the dog whistles they are aware of are the real ones, and the ones that other people get triggered by aren't valid and "jumping at shadows". It's perfectly valid to look sideways at a post with an obscure "88" reference, even if it turns out to be nothing. It is necessary for me to respond with more than just a pithy shitpost, but I thank you for accidentally providing such a phenomenal example. Nobody has an issue understanding the concept that white supremacists use plausibly deniable dogwhistles. A problem arises when anyone else starts whipping out nonsense numerology that allows you to turn anything into a dogwhistle provided you assume infinite levels of bad faith, and that's precisely what launched this whole conversation; and as was pointed out before, chuds turned this into an entire game to make fun of people willing to go conspiratorial.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 12, 2022 18:11
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 20:31 |
|
|
silence_kit posted:I'm saying that opposing the ruling seems contrary to anti-authoritarian left-wing ideology. No, not in any way. How would it? (and regardless, under left-wing ideologies, private entities could not have ownership of public squares, so...)
|
|
#
¿
Sep 18, 2022 16:12
|
|