Linkage

A new poll from Gallup about Americans’ attitudes around transgender rights reveals a growing distaste for far-right efforts to ban gender-affirming care.

According to the poll, six in 10 U.S. adults oppose laws banning gender-affirming care for minors.

At the same time, a slim majority – 51% – of Americans think transitioning is morally wrong. Just forty-four percent call it “morally acceptable.”

The morality of transitioning – which the survey called “changing one’s gender” – falls along partisan and generational lines.

Those who consider it morally acceptable include political liberals (81%), Democrats (72%), those who don’t identify with a religion (67%), those who don’t attend religious services regularly (59%), young adults aged 18 to 29 (56%) and college graduates (53%).

Some of the people in this market segment are merely military cosplayers and keyboard warriors who want to act cool and nothing further. But there are the true militants, those who see the variety of full metal jacket, hollow-points, hydra-shoks, fluted rounds, segmented rounds, and fragmenting rounds, and hoard each for the variety of tactical situations they see coming.

Those who traverse the booths featuring body armor, night-vision optics, tactical vests, handguns, assault-style rifles, bullpups, and .50 caliber sniper rifles see all of it as essential provisions for what will transpire. Those who fervently believe the last election was stolen, and that voting from the rooftops is the only option left. Those who listen to Abbott and Trump rant about inner cities, courthouses, leftist students, and asylum seekers, and hear a target list. Those who heard “Stand back and stand by” in 2020 as orders.

It doesn’t take many. Even if only 1% of those in attendance held this worldview (which would be a considerable underestimate based on what I saw), that would mean anywhere from 500-700 of the people in attendance (whether one believes the NRA’s attendance estimate of 72,000, or a more likely 50,000). That’s 500-700 high casualty events waiting to happen.

And the folks with these beliefs would likely be underrepresented at the NRA convention, given that in many pro-gun circles the organization is seen as corrupt liberal sell-outs.

Just mind-blowing.

Let’s be blunt. The United States has become two nations occupying the same country. When pressed, or in private, many would now agree. Fewer are willing to take the next step and accept that most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.

I don’t just mean the millions of illegal immigrants. Obviously, those foreigners who have bypassed the regular process for entering our country, and probably will never assimilate to our language and culture, are—politically as well as legally—aliens. I’m really referring to the many native-born people—some of whose families have been here since the Mayflower—who may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer (if they ever were) Americans. They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.

What about those who do consider themselves Americans? By and large, I am referring to the 75 million people who voted in the last election against the senile figurehead of a party that stands for mob violence, ruthless censorship, and racial grievances, not to mention bureaucratic despotism. Regardless of Trump’s obvious flaws, preferring his re-election was not a difficult choice for these voters. In fact—leaving aside the Republican never-Trumpers and some squeamish centrists—it was not a difficult choice for either side. Both Right and Left know where they stand today… and it is not together. Not anymore.

[…]

Practically speaking, there is almost nothing left to conserve. What is actually required now is a recovery, or even a refounding, of America as it was long and originally understood but which now exists only in the hearts and minds of a minority of citizens.

This recognition that the original America is more or less gone sets the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy apart from almost everyone else on the Right. Paradoxically, the organization that has been uniquely devoted to understanding and teaching the principles of the American founding now sees with special clarity why “conserving” that legacy is a dead end. Overturning the existing post-American order, and re-establishing America’s ancient principles in practice, is a sort of counter-revolution, and the only road forward.

[…] 

America, as an identity or political movement, might need to carry on without the United States. […] In the meantime, give up on the idea that “conservatives” have anything useful to say. Accept the fact that what we need is a counter-revolution.

 

 

Grindr is full of profiles with caveats about what the user is seeking. They can be typical, harmless details (e.g., “looking for guys between 30–40,” “prefer men who like the outdoors”) but also problematic (e.g., “no fat,” “no fem,” “white only”). I initially assumed my “No Republicans” addition would be a vetting tool, letting conservative men know we’re not a match.

[…]

I’ve been told, more than once, “By shutting out all Republicans, you’re shutting out 50 percent of people.” Never mind that Republicans account for just 30 percent of the population; I typically respond that I’m not someone who shuts out of my life everyone with different political beliefs. The difference here is I’m not looking to date, say, my conservative uncle. (It’s also worth noting that the Venn diagram of men who tell me “No Republicans” is discriminatory and men who have problematic profile standards like “No one fat or over 45” is dangerously close to a circle.)

[…]

Many are also outwardly conservative and publicly homophobic, actively working against LGBTQ+ rights. The anonymity Grindr provides seems to make it easy for these men to compartmentalize—I’ve sadly heard multiple versions of “I’m not a faggot; I just like having sex with men sometimes.” These are the men that I try to have some empathy for, but frankly, they piss me off the most. […] When I relay these anecdotes, my straight friends and colleagues are always surprised, which surprises me, as there’s ample evidence—Randy McNally, Aaron Schock, Roy Cohn—of this particular form of hypocrisy.

Some high-octane anger fuel in this excellent piece:

COVID patients began raising the alarm that they weren't getting better, scientists are still racing to unravel the mystery of why a significant minority of people develop debilitating chronic symptoms while others seem to recover just fine. But if the plight of adults with long COVID remains poorly understood, the millions of children who have it worldwide are practically invisible, their suffering — and the formative years they're losing to this disease — obscured by the myths that COVID is "harmless" for kids and the pandemic is "over".

In Australia, the lack of awareness is biting in shocking ways. Too many children with long COVID are being dismissed by doctors who say there's nothing they can do to help — or worse, that their pain and fatigue is "all in their head". They're being pushed out of school by teachers who don't understand why they can't come to class or run around with their peers. Their parents have been gaslighted and blamed, too, not just by medical professionals but their closest friends and family. And experts are concerned that all this ignorance and apathy — and the unwillingness of governments to do more to curb COVID transmission — is exposing a generation of children to the same chronic illness and disability, with potentially devastating consequences.

A small Victorian milk company says supermarket giant Coles has removed its products from 65 Victorian stores in retribution for refusing to give the supermarket a bigger profit margin.

From next month, Gippsland Jersey milk will only be stocked in about 16 Victorian Coles supermarkets, leaving the business with two weeks to find a new home for thousands of litres of milk.

Sallie Jones, who started the company with dairy farmer Steve Ronalds in 2016, said the decision came as a shock.

"We've gone from being awarded Australia's best milk to then being removed off the majority of Coles shelves, which is super disappointing," she said.

This centrist Democratic strategy fits into a larger, longer-term, bipartisan alliance that views protesters as the enemy, and their tactics as a threat to the fundamental interests of our militarized, fossil-fuel-dependent society.

The repressive bipartisan playbook is partly rooted in the 2001 Patriot Act, rushed through and passed overwhelmingly on the wave of fear following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The law led to increased racial profiling, sweeps of millions of private phone records, and a vast expansion of the government’s ability to spy on ordinary citizens. Simultaneously, decommissioned military hardware from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan flowed to local police and sheriff’s departments, allowing them to deploy bayonets, riot shields, grenade launchers, sound cannons, sniper scopes, detonator robots, and tank-like Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected trucks known as MRAPs. (Some of this equipment was restricted under President Obama, then allowed again under Trump.) Hence local police and sheriff’s offices, moving in military-like formation in places like Ferguson (after the police killing of Michael Brown), Minneapolis (after the murder of George Floyd), and the Standing Rock Sioux reservation during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, confronted unarmed citizens as if they were Middle East insurgents. In other words, like the enemy.

Good grief.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.”

But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text — known in the industry as hallucinations — can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments.

Experts said that such fabrications are problematic because Whisper is being used in a slew of industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos.

More concerning, they said, is a rush by medical centers to utilize Whisper-based tools to transcribe patients’ consultations with doctors, despite OpenAI’ s warnings that the tool should not be used in “high-risk domains.”

By returning income inequality to the levels found in 1970, the United States could reduce the rate of extreme house poverty sixfold, and cut the rate of extreme rent poverty eleven-fold.

These numbers are so large that they sound magical. But that’s the thing about returning stolen money. It’s a concrete action that, as if by magic, makes people less poor. And when folks are less poor, they can better afford housing.

Sarcasm aside, my point is that the unfolding housing crisis is a catastrophe of poverty that can be solved by reducing inequality. Take money from the rich and hand it to the poor, and the housing crisis will solve itself. And let’s not call this policy ‘socialism’. Let’s call it a return to the ‘Great Society’ (the inverse of MAGA).

To be fair, boldly redistributing income is a big ask that’s unlikely to happen in the short term. Which is why anti-poverty groups are wise to lobby for the smaller ask of subsidized housing. That said, subsidizing rent is like handing food stamps to the victims of theft. It’s less bad than doing nothing. But if we want to eliminate rising rent poverty, there is a better solution. Give back to the American poor the money that was stolen from them.

As political scientist Jacob Grumbach describes, concentrated partisan power, which has built up over the past 30 years and is approaching an apex, means that the states, once hailed by Justice Louis Brandeis as laboratories of democracy, are increasingly turning into laboratories for partisan advantage. And this has stirred the latent potential for rising interstate aggression and conflict, with states governed by Republicans in particular adopting policies and practices expressly designed to impose their power and policy preferences on unwilling citizens, officials, businesses, and states beyond their borders.

To be fair, blue states have also used policy to drive national standards. For decades, conservatives have fretted that California’s emissions and environmental standards stand in for the nation, since it may be too expensive to make one product to meet California’s strict requirements and another for Nebraska’s. Yet our review of state actions in recent years suggests that red states are more determined on this front, and more effective from the perspective of achieving their objectives.

In our view, effective responses to the increasingly ambitious red-state aggression hinge on two critical objectives. The first is to win (or at least not lose) the policy battles around which these conflicts are arising, vindicating the power of blue-state voters to determine their own destinies. The second is to contain the conflicts between states sufficiently to avoid a conflagration. You could say that these objectives draw from two doctrines, one from recent legal theory and practice, and one from common negotiating strategy: constitutional hardball and deterrence.

In the face of red-state aggression, we think it’s time for blue states to embrace their governing majorities as affirmative sources of power—and began to exercise those powers more fully, more effectively, and with greater coordination.