Supporting gender affirming care for prisoners is a sort of inevitable result of holding these two values:
I’m not clear which of those two principles you disagree with.
So it’s very easy to say “when our candidate wants to go into a debate and talk about billionaires, and the debate moderator or the opponent asks them about trans participation in sports, they will just repeat ‘that isn’t real, you’re a liar, you’re distracting people, I refuse to talk about this’ until time expires.” It doesn’t sound like a realistic plan, and I don’t think it’s actually going to happen, and I don’t know if anyone else really thinks that either, but at least it’s something you can claim to be the strategy right now.
What about every other loser issue? What happens when the question is, “do you believe that all white males are beneficiaries of structural racism,” for example? Same answer? Is your vision of a winning campaign one where the candidate repeats ‘that isn’t real, you’re a liar, you’re distracting people, I refuse to talk about this’ for an hour during every public appearance?
What about when someone goes off message? You can tell Rashida Tlaib all day long to only talk about taxing billionaires and not talk about Jews, or any number of other candidates not to talk about guns or Title IX tribunals or defunding the police or whatever their pet issues might be out of the panopoly of things that are election losers for Democrats. Do you expect them to comply? What are you going to do when they don’t?
There are degrees of compromise possible but I think they’re fundamentally at odds. The ACLU provides a clear example. There was once a time when they would defend anyone, even real-life armband-wearing Illinois Nazis. They believed that defending anyone whose rights were infringed served to strengthen those laws. The ACLU no longer does this, and it’s their internal policy not to defend white supremacists. They have a clear choice between treating everyone equally vs. deciding some groups are less worthy of protection. That’s their choice, but it’s a step away from liberalism.
The ACLU, in fact, has called for banning Abigail Shrier’s book on trans issues. They have completely abandoned free speech as a principle and only assert it when it supports their other goals, which in terms of what they are willing to expend legal resources on, are now limited to immigration-related causes and LGBTQ advocacy.
There is a good, precedent-based reason why people think that trans-related mission creep is a threat to liberal organizations such as the Democratic Party.
I agree that the fake argument you took down is bad.
So, I read this cite, looking for the bit about the ACLU coming out in favor of book banning, because that seemed unlikely. And, indeed, it turns out that’s not what happened. Here’s the relevant bit from your own cite:
So, not “the ACLU,” but one person who worked for the ACLU, who deleted their Tweet shortly after, presumably because it was in contradiction with the values the ACLU promotes.
Is that all you got?
Chase Strangio is an executive director of the ACLU and is the attorney who argues on their behalf in the Supreme Court. It’s hard to come up with a more literal example of “speaking for the ACLU” than that.
No, he isn’t. He’s not here nor is he here. What he is is co-director of one ACLU project.
Anthony Romero is the (only) current executive director of the ACLU.
“The” attorney? AFAIK, he’s argued one case there.
All of which is irrelevant, anyway, as he wasn’t speaking for the ACLU in that tweet, but on his own personal feed.
I mean, it’s not like they don’t put out their own press releases and stuff, which would literally be speaking for them. As opposed to personal tweets with no mention of the name ACLU in it…
Well, actually arguing the issue in court seems like it would be a much more literal example. Or releasing a policy paper on ACLU letterhead. Or publicly supporting a bill or politician who was trying to ban the book. Or, as MrDibble pointed out, even just Tweeting it from the ACLU’s official Twitter account. All of those seem way more literal examples of “speaking for the ACLU” than posting, and immediately deleting, a single sentence post on their personal Twitter account, and then not talking about it again for several years.
To be fair, we have a president who announces official policy by Tweet, so people may get confused and think that’s a way that actual competent non-nutjobs roll.
T’ain’t.
I already made a suggestion a while ago: stop slicing and dicing the electorate into interest groups and start talking about what you will do for Americans. All of them, with no qualification.
It is bad to say you are the party of inclusion and then have a long list of separate groups, one which excludes one of the largest demographics (white men) completely.
Some more patriotism wouldn’t go amiss, either. They should be talking about how great the US is, not implying that it’s a terrible racist country that’s built on stolen land. Need to get back to the American dream where opportunity is available to all, and everyone can improve their life - in both messaging and in policy.
ETA: Trans athletes again? You’ve got to be kidding me.
Yes, there could be an interesting conversation about messaging, maybe bringing up what David Shor noted earlier this week with Ezra Klein about the changing demographics between the parties, how people–especially younger voters–are getting what news they’re getting, and that we may have reached a point where higher turnout of infrequent voters may actually help the Republicans more.
Or we can have fifty posts on a tiny fraction of the population mostly from the same two or three people. That’s clearly a much better use of this thread.
No, because there aren’t very many trans women, and there aren’t very many top athletes, and a tiny fraction times a tinier fraction is a teeny tiniest fraction.
How does that make things more fair, though? It doesn’t mean trans women don’t have an advantage, it just means that there aren’t enough of them to win every competition; it doesn’t make it any more fair in the individual instances where someone lost a competition because their opponent was AMAB.
The line from Gavin that everyone loves quoting even though they didn’t listen to the podcast was talking about California, and the current state of the law there.
Why on Earth would we assume that this would be his position when all he has done is say that California’s current law is unfair?
In fact, while Newsom expressed his disapproval of the current California law, Kirk tried to get him to support the bill the Senate Democrats voted down, which would have done exactly what you say Newsom wants - ban all trans women from women’s sports completely - and Newsom wouldn’t do it.
So no, I see absolutely no reason to think that Newsom’s position is “no trans women in women’s sports, ever”. The only thing he expressed opposition to was California’s current policy, put into place in 2013.
The Republican party absolutely weaponized this issue in 2024.
The thing is, two things have to be true for that weaponization to work:
If Republicans said “Democrats want to let trans women play sports with girls whether or not they did anything to physically transition”, and no one had any problems with this, then Republicans couldn’t weaponize the issue.
Likewise, of Republicans said “Democrats want to let trans women play sports with girls whether or not they did anything to physically transition”, and Democrats responded “Are you crazy? Trans women should only participate in women’s sports if they transitioned to such an extent that they no longer have any advantage over cis women”, then Republicans wouldn’t be able to effectively weaponize that issue, either.
Republican weaponization or not, it is undeniably true that:
I’m certainly not arguing against that. But as linked above, between 50 and 70% of Democrats depending on the poll don’t agree with trans women participating in women’s sports with no restrictions. This isn’t about Republicans. Why is that majority position one that Democratic politicians need to be so afraid to take?
I think that if we tell people that this issue is motivated by transphobia, when most people including most Democrats feel this way, all that we will accomplish is making them not take us seriously when we talk about transphobia in the future.
Yeah, I absolutely agree. People who are deeply transphobic don’t like trans women in women’s sports.
How does that change whether or not it is fair?
The standard of care that the courts have held the states responsible for when it comes to prisoners is “reasonably adequate”, and there is plenty of case law holding that there is no right to elective or non urgent medical treatment.
I can certainly imagine specific situations where for example an issue exacerbated by dysphoria makes treatment far more urgent. But in most cases, I think it falls outside of the “reasonably adequate” standard that the courts have established.
I take it you did not like this post from our new DNC chair:
Could be worse. At least he didn’t say “Latinx”. Probably not enough to staunch the bleeding, though:
I think they’re totally orthogonal to each other.
Progressivism is about where you think we ought to end up. Liberalism is about the way we ought to operate, where ever we are going.
If you are Uber Progressive, like you really want to get to that utopian end goal, then you may be willing to violate quite a few principles to get there. What are a few rights violations at reeducation camps compared to the glorious paradise we will have once everyone thinks the right way?
If you’re Uber Liberal, you’re like an Ayn Randian Libertarian. The rules for how we ought to act are all that matter, we must just trust that when we follow the rules the best outcomes will emerge on its own.
So if you turn either ideology to 100, you don’t leave much room for the other.
But that doesn’t mean they’re incompatible per se. I think most Progressives are Liberal, in the sense that they believe that Liberal values will help achieve their progressive end goal, and likewise many liberals are progressive in the sense that they want to see society more thoroughly implement liberal ideals, spread rights to more people within society, etc.
He even left off women. I guess we’re not oppressed enough to be part of the Dem coalition anymore. WTF is AANHPI?
Whatever happened to ‘BIPOC’?
Asian American, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.
I think that’s a good synopsis, but demonstrates the problem very clearly. Which “ought” trumps the other? Unless it’s actually true in practice that the two philosophies never come in conflict (and I think the overwhelming evidence is that they come in conflict quite frequently), then at some point one must be sacrificed for the other.
Not quite. You just say that you are not optimizing for outcomes at all. Optimizing for outcomes comes with the significant side effect that you’ll never get agreement on which outcomes are better.
This seems like you agreeing with me. You can have degrees of compromise, but you can’t be both a full-throated progressive and liberal at the same time.
Ah, the ‘not otherwise specified’ group. Why do Americans lump half the world’s population into one ‘race’ anyway?
Also, if Hawaii is part of America, why are Native Hawaiians not considered Native Americans?