Sure, but most Progressives aren’t Utopian extremists who’ll throw you in a reeducation camp, and most Liberals aren’t Ayn Randian Libertarians. I don’t think illiberal progressives have been as influential as they are today until quite recently. It’s not surprising that more liberal progressives were allied to the more progressive liberals.
Which is why I’m not a libertarian. I’m not outcome agnostic. I think there are significant externalities that aren’t accounted for by market forces, and it’s absolutely the role of the government to nudge things towards more desirable outcomes.
Not as in central planning, but as in nudging incentives here and there.
I agree that progressives and liberals are different groups with different goals. I don’t agree that it’s all that strange that liberals and progressives who hold liberal values are aligned; the fact that illiberal progressives and liberals are both Democrats is down to the fact that until pretty recently, illiberal progressives were extremely niche.
Because losing to someone who has an inherent physical advantage is how sports work? If trans women’s advantage isn’t so extreme that it fundamentally breaks the game, then how is that different from any other woman who got traits in the genetic lottery that make them superior at sport?
Because none of the reporting I’d seen on the subject included that context? That’s why I asked you if I was understanding his position correctly.
I don’t think step two is necessary. Republicans just need to assert it, and if its sufficiently motivational to their base, their base will turn out. How Democrats respond is almost completely irrelevant - the response will never reach the Republican base, except when heavily filtered by right wing media.
Which ties into this bit:
Courts have also found that gender-affirming care, including some surgeries, fall under the “reasonably adequate” standard, and are required to be offered to inmates. Harris expressed support for the law, which was mostly about hormone access, and the right spun it as free vaginoplasties for anyone who asks. Harris clarified this on Fox news and it didn’t matter - she got pilloried by the right wing media for supporting “sex changes for prisoners.”
What do you call Indians and Pakistanis (and Bangladeshis) if not Asian?
But this isn’t helping the Democrats improve their messaging. IMO it’s mostly their policies that need changing, but part of that is what they are doing at state and local level, which the national party doesn’t directly control. Maybe they should focus on persuading the Dems running cities to govern more sensibly, in order to improve their brand?
Because the specific cause of the advantage in this case is based on sex, the very characteristic by which we segregate sports.
Imagine a scenario where a sport that’s segregated by weight classes has an athlete 50 lbs too heavy mistakenly compete in the wrong weight class. (Keeping it an honest mistake so this happens through no one’s fault) At the end of the competition, the error is discovered. The athlete’s bouts are declared void. “But wait!” Says the athlete. “Why should advantages that stem from my weight disqualify me, but advantages that stem from Joe’s reach due to his longer arms be just fine? My bouts should stand!”.
I think the athlete would be in the wrong here, because the sport they participated in is segregated by weight class; so advantages that stem from weight are different in kind in this context from advantages that stem from other sources.
In the case of trans athletes, we segregate most sports by sex because of the overwhelming advantage that being born male gives you in athletic competitions. So advantages that stem from being AMAB are different in kind, when it comes to fairness, than advantages that stem from random other characteristics.
That’s also why even a cis woman who was born with elevated testosterone levels or other conditions may not be able to fairly compete with other cis women.
Yeah, as I’ve been saying since the first episode released, most of the reporting on it has been nonsense written by people who clearly didn’t actually listen to the podcast, or at least, to more than isolated clips. Anyone who played Telephone as a kid should be able to tell you why that’s a bad idea.
Got a link to this? I’ve never seen Harris walk back the enthusiastic support from the ads, where she specifically says “surgery, every transgender prisoner would have access”.
Here’s what Politifact has to say about the same claim coming up at the debate, which it rated “mostly true”:
This is pretty clearly about a heck of a lot more than hormones. And, it seems to me, that on that questionnaire she pretty clearly indicated support for care far beyond what the courts ruled “reasonably adequate”.
You’re saying that on a Fox News interview she clarified that she would not support the government paying for prisoners to get gender reassignment surgery? Because Politifact mentions her Fox News interview:
That doesn’t sound like a disavowal or clarification of an earlier position to me. Does it sound that way to you?
That’s one of the things Newsom touched on. He brought it up a couple of times, most notably when talking about how he’s been pushing the mayor of LA and other cities to expedite the permitting process for rebuilding after the fire. (There are homes from the Woolsey Fire in 2018 that haven’t been rebuilt yet because they are stuck in red tape hell…)
Fair enough, my bad. Do you want to respond to my other point?
Do you disagree that she clearly implies she went beyond what is “medically necessary” and required of her by law, and was bragging about it at the time?
Interesting. I don’t think her meaning is particularly obscure, but I can respect your opinion.
That said, I strongly disagree with your position that it didn’t matter what she said because Republicans lie. Somehow, if Newsom was running for president and Republicans accused him of supporting gender reassignment surgeries for prisoners, he would clearly and unequivocally proclaim otherwise. Kamala didn’t do so, because she was afraid that people would take literally anything short of the maximalist position as her “throwing trans people under the bus”.
Even Republicans would have a hard time twisting things if rather than playing silly games “well there’s a law and Trump followed it too”, Kamala flat out said “I do not support the government paying for any elective surgeries for prisoners”. But she (rightly, perhaps) feared being crucified for a statement like that - even though the majority of her base would agree with it.
Note again: There have been “around 50” trans surgeries done in California prisons since 2017, and precisely 0 done in the federal system. Democrats are great at staking out maximalist positions on needlessly controversial issues in order to alienate as many voters as possible, and they are also so cartoonishly incompetent at nuts-and-bolts management of government that they cannot deliver on anything they promise to do. The tandem of the two is what really hurts the perception of the brand at election time.
Republicans online were blaming Newsom for the fires, which kinda outweighs any commitment to rebuilding efforts. However, those aren’t the people he’s trying to appeal to, and with four years instead of four months he has a much better chance at moderating his image than Kamala. If he can persuade them to slash red tape for rebuilding, he needs to work on making them allow new buildings next.
Surely that can’t be correct? California’s just one state, it has, what, half the population of the UK? How can there be so many trans prisoners as to need 50 surgeries?
Can you cite the “around 50” done in California prisons since 2017? It could be accurate, because I can find a source for 20 done between 2017 and 2022 … but having an actual cite is better.
According to the nonprofit news organization CalMatters (LINK), 20 California inmates in state custody received gender-affirming surgeries from 2017 to 2022.
EDIT: More information about the two in the federal prison system including an interview with one of the two who has spoken publicly about the matter, Cristina Iglesias. The article is from this past Tuesday, so the information should be current.
From trans athletes to gender surgeries in prisons. Again, we’re letting culture-war bullshit sidetrack the conversation. I almost want mods to step in, but honestly, I think this dynamic is the best exemplification possible of the difficulties for Democrats to stay on-message. Every time they try, they’ll get accused of being liars and hypocrites for talking about big issues instead of things that should be outside their wheelhouse.
So, gender-affirming surgeries in prisons: “I see no reason why politicians should interfere with a medical decision. The prison system has doctors, and doctors have professional guidelines from professional associations. I trust these professionals to make decisions in alignment with professional guidelines. The reason I trust them to do so is because we have much bigger issues that affect hundreds of millions of Americans, not issues that affect fewer than a hundred Americans. Can we talk about those big issues?”
How to identify and call out Trump and Musk’s fascist tactics
Demagogues need bogeymen and scapegoats to stir up fear and loathing among their followers. These are powerful “gut” emotions that override higher thinking and allow for easy bucketing of people into good and bad sides.
…
Now here’s the depressing part: We haven’t learned our lesson. Trump keeps putting up bogeymen, but we keep responding not with an emphatic why , but rather disputing his wild claims or even arguing that we are tougher on the bogeymen.
Trump’s newest targets are trans people, and in particular transgender athletes in female sports. As the election grew near, he spent a lot of political capital stoking fears and getting voters to despise this very small subsection of an already small minority within an already marginalized community.
But instead of our first question being “Why is Trump coming after trans people?” we found ourselves debating whether Trump was right or wrong about it. And we’re still in that sandtrap of his making.
The problem, of course, is that once you do this, you’ve already lost. You are now on Trump’s turf, spending time arguing the merits of his claims, which only serves to elevate the “problem” in the public eye. Suddenly it feels like trans people are in every locker room and trans women in every public bathroom.
…
The right way to answer unfair attacks, and the obvious use of edge cases like trans athletes to distort the picture, is not to agree with the attackers. When demagogues put up bogeymen (e.g., trans people, migrants, Muslims) to frighten and divide people, the first thing out of any leader’s mouth should be to call them out.
The response goes something like this:
You know, I see right through you, and so do the American people. You’re targeting a group of people who are already bullied and misunderstood. You want to scare everyone into overreacting, to tap into that fear and fuel your own political ambitions. It’s cynical, it’s bullying, and it’s frankly disgusting.
And when you’re done attacking one group, you’ll move on to the next, because that’s how fearmongers like you operate. But I won’t be a part of that, just so you can make new headlines and edit clips for political ads. You want to demonize others instead of talking about things that actually matter and affect the lives of voters and their families. You do this because you don’t actually have any answers, just more division and fear.
Just so we are clear. When you say “I don’t care about this, let’s stop talking about it and move on” - does that mean you are conceding those points in full?
Ie, you “don’t care” and if it is decided to ban all trans athletes and gender reassignment surgeries in prison, but we move on to talking about Social Security, you’re cool with that?
Or you “don’t care” as in, as long as you get what you want?
Because if it’s the former, you’re going to have to convince other posters on “your side” of these questions to drop the issue, and I don’t think that, say, Boudicca, would really appreciate that.
And if it’s the latter, then once again, you can’t unilaterally decide “this conversation is over and we are doing what the status quo is and moving on - and oh, what a coincidence, that’s my preferred outcome! Oopsie, stop talking about it”.
You can claim that this is a manufactured issue until you’re blue in the face, just like you can repeat that Biden actually did a great job fighting inflation, look how much worse it is in Europe. But you cannot change people’s minds by telling them “no, you actually don’t feel that way”.
You want to talk about a more impactful issue, and one where Democrats have the exact same messaging issues? We can talk about the border. Democrats actually had a good policy - properly fund immigration courts so we can process all the asylum seekers and (GASP!) deport the ones who don’t qualify. But Democrats were too chicken shit to say so out loud, because apparently having a functional asylum system means you are once again throwing vulnerable people under the bus.
How’d that work out for us? Oh yeah, we did terrible with Hispanics. How did we react? Why, finger wag at them, of course: “how dare you enter our country and then pull up the ladder behind you!”.
I’m sorry, is this guy stupid? Was he born in 2023? What the fuck is he talking about?
This isn’t a new Boogeyman; it isn’t a niche issue Republicans suddenly pulled out of nowhere; it’s something a lot of people have been talking about for a long time now.