WoodScientist

I figured that was implied. :D

The problem is that "you do you" is an ineffective counter when the other side has decided to actively exterminate a minority group. "You do you" is fine in normal times, when there isn't an actively malevolent political movement bent on the destruction of a minority group.

This conflict is entirely at the feet of right wingers. Trans people have never been well understood or popular. But up until 2016 or so, we were mostly an afterthought. And honestly, that's fine. What the trans community really wants more than anything is to just be left the hell alone. But Republicans lost the fight on gay rights, and they needed another out group to target. So they moved on to trans people.

The conversation mostly works like this;

Conservatives: trans people are demons and we should exterminate them like animals

Liberals: umm, maybe that's not a good idea. How about we just let everyone live the way they want and not bother them?

Conservatives: why do liberals care so much about trans people??? Why do they never stop talking about trans people?!

Conservatives like to say liberals are obsessed with gender politics, but that focus is ENTIRELY THE FAULT OF CONSERVATIVES. And liberals don't have some general like of trans people. It's simply part of core liberal philosophy that you don't sit idly by while minority groups are attacked.

But again, if you actually want to stand up for someone's rights, you need to actually be able to rhetorically defend them. Consider this:

Conservative: TRANS PEOPLE ARE MUTILATING CHILDREN'S GENITALS

Liberal: I think everyone should live and let live. Let's just have tolerance.

Do you see how weak, ineffective, and utterly useless that is? When someone spouts a bigoted or racist line against a minority group, you can't just sit back, say "I accept all viewpoints," and do nothing. If you actually care about protect people's rights, you need to be able to actually defend them.

The problem with milquetoast centrist "live and let live" is that it's very, very easy to paint extremely damaging revocations of civil rights as simple "common sense" policies. For example, I described why it's a really, really bad idea to force trans people to use the restroom that corresponds to their birth sex. But a Republicans will say, "I don't oppose trans people, I just think we need some common sense rules to protect everyone." And if Democrat isn't actually willing to protect the rights of trans people, they'll end up going along with it as it seems neutral on its face.

Or, for another example. Consider "separate but equal." If you didn't know anything about Jim Crow and how utterly laughable the idea of separate but equal was, it seems fine on its face. And if opponents to segregation just took a "you do you" philosophy, they never would have stood up against Jim Crow. They would have just said, "ok, black people. You go do your thing, separate but equal, but I don't want to have to listen to all this identity politics. I'm sick of this woke shit."

And remaining silent about issues of race, gender, and origin that Republicans keep introducing does not make them go away. It guarantees that all voters hear is the hate peddling of the opposition.

There should be a hundred Democratic House members on the House floor defending McBride. There should be female Democratic House members complaining left and right about how they find it weird that Republicans are requiring them to share bathrooms with men.

The problem Democrats have on trans issues is that most Democratic leaders don't really seem to believe in the validity of trans people. They'll make vague platitudes about supporting rights. But it's all very much a "you do you" type of thing. They don't actually support or affirm trans identities. You don't see many Democratic lawmakers out there saying, "trans men are men. Trans women are women" and actually meaning it.

These things are quite explainable, and quite defendable, if you're actually willing to do it. For example, trans women don't "force" themselves into women's bathrooms. Do you know how most trans women decide it's time to switch from the men's to women's restrooms? They don't just one day announce they're trans and start using the opposite facilities. Almost all trans women start their transition. Once they're far enough along on their HRT and change in presentation, they inevitably start getting weird looks and harassment in the men's restroom. Cis men start reading us as women, and we start getting harassment for being in the men's room. That is when most of us switch over to the women's room. And it works the opposite for trans guys. 99% of trans people work on the rule of, "use whatever restroom causes the least disruption."

That's how you can fight bathroom bans in a way anyone can understand. Trans people don't form their beliefs and practices out of nowhere. It's all quite logical and reasonable. But you have to actually be willing to defend people.

But that is not what Democrats do. They don't defend trans people, they tolerate them. Democrats can't give good, well-reasons responses to defend trans people, as they prefer to live forever on the fence. Yes, when it is politically popular, they're willing to speak up for us in terms of vague discussions of universal rights. But when the other side starts demonizing trans people, because Democrats have never taken trans issues truly seriously, they don't know how to properly respond.

And they're fools for doing so. This kind of obsession and policing of gender ends only one place - with everyone forced back in the closet. And for cis women, that ultimately means being forced back into your traditional gender role, where the gender police think you belong - pregnant, barefoot, and in the kitchen.

In US introductory psychology courses, one common assignment is to deliberately violate some unwritten social norm. Something that is never stated anywhere, but we all just customarily follow. My favorite example is, while visiting a friend's house, ask if you can use their bathroom. When they say yes, go to their bathroom and take a bath.

You missed the point. My point is that even if you buy stock on 100% equity, 0 margin trading, you still are investing on margin. You are investing on margin because those company stocks you are buying themselves used these leverage techniques in their own operations.

Maybe he'll just speedrun it and drops all pretense. Maybe the January 20th schedule goes like this:

12 PM: swearing in

2 PM: signing of first executive orders

4 PM: coronation. He's literally declared himself, by executive order, absolute monarch "King Trump." He has a gaudy royal coronation, crown, golden scepter, gilded throne and all. Some Catholic bishop performs the ceremony.

8 PM: First Royal Address. The Oval Office has been reconfigured to be a gilded and bejeweled throne room.

I imagine something like this.

Watch Trump forgive 10x the student loans Biden did, and SCOTUS ok it because "reasons."

At least then we would know where we are, and we can start acting accordingly. One cannot play well without seeing the true state of the board.

Oz co-wrote a Forbes piece in June 2020 with former Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson endorsing a “Medicare Advantage for All” system that called for eliminating employer-provided insurance and Affordable Care Act coverage and putting “every American who is not on Medicaid” into Medicare Advantage, which uses private plans to cover enrollees. They proposed to fund it with a 20% payroll tax split between employers and workers.

I mean, if they actually did this, this would be great. Which is actually why I'm skeptical of it ever happening.

Still, our political system is really weird right now. We're fundamentally in an era of political realignment. The old coalitions have failed, and new ones are sorting themselves out. The Republican Party of today isn't the Republican Party of 30 years ago. Who would have predicted Republicans becoming the champions of ending free trade? Free trade helps corporate profits; Republicans were the original proponents of post-Reagan free trade agreements like NAFTA. And Republicans won on the issue so thoroughly that Democrats as well fully embraced it. After a few decades, Republicans now realized that neither side was opposing free trade, and thus there was a huge political opening. Despite corporate interests, Trump was able to lead the party to be against free trade.

Political parties ultimately seek power above all else. And Democrats have largely ceded the ground on transformational Social policy. If Democrats aren't going to produce serious medical reform plans, there is now a huge pool of voters out there who want bold change, but currently have no one to vote for. It's a huge political opportunity that Republicans could seize.

Of course, the big objection people would have to this is, but what about corporate influence? True, I don't see Trump becoming a trust-busting Theodore Roosevelt any time soon. But this kind of reform is actually the kind of thing that corporations might welcome. But imagine a plan like this passes. Now businesses don't have to worry about healthcare. They simply pay a flat tax, and that covers everyone's healthcare costs. They don't have to worry about costs rising unpredictably every year. They don't have to fight insurers over coverage. They don't have to hire more HR employees to manage enrollment. Nope, just pay a flat payroll tax, and you're done. The number you deduct from your employees' pay stub jumps up, but that's about it. They have to pay their share of the payroll tax. But the amount they will pay in tax is likely far less than what they are currently paying for insurance. Companies stand to profit from this.

Employers who don't offer healthcare to their employees would stand to lose, but every other company would benefit immensely from a federal health insurance program. Hell, Trump himself has probably personally battled with the inanity of dealing with health insurance plans as business owner. As long as the corporations or wealthy aren't being taxed to pay for it, there may not actually be much corporate opposition to this plan. The healthcare industry gave more money to Kamala than to Trump. There are different kinds of corporate interests, and they do not always align. And for many corporate sectors, offloading the burden of healthcare to the government, in exchange for a flat payroll tax, could be quite tempting.

I don't know if something like this will really happen, I'm probably just being optimistic. But perhaps, if we're lucky, the sheer strangeness of the moment might allow for political options that would previously be unthinkable. If Trump actually wanted to have as his legacy some serious change to the healthcare system...this would be the way to do it. It's something that would genuinely improve the system, but done in a way that doesn't fall hard on the wealthy, and would be at least neutral in its overall affect on corporations. It's the kind of thing that might actually get through Congress, pushed through on a strange coalition of ride-or-die MAGA Congress people and progressive Democrats. Sanders hand-in-hand with MTG, somehow finding a way to work for the betterment of all.

Back in reality, however, my more pessimistic side thinks they would insist on adding bullshit to it that would make it an abomination. This plan would effectively kill the private insurance market. Private insurers would still exist, but they would all operate through Medicare Advantage. The entire population, outside of those already on Medicare or Medicaid, would be enrolled in a Medicare Advantage Plan. The only plans that existed outside of this would be boutique luxury supplement plans (plans that offer services on top of what Medicare provides.) But it would effectively kill the market for purely private basic insurance.

They would probably start adding culture war requirements to these new Medicare Advantage plans. Expect plans to be prohibited from covering abortion, contraception, gender-affirming care, etc. Which would mean that no insurance plan would be able to cover these things. Hopefully that kind of crap would have to be left on the cutting room floor as the bill worked its way through. But it's the kind of thing I would be wary of.

The machine totals and physical counts do not match. In this case, you are also admitting that our elections are not safe and secure.

If our elections aren't safe and secure, if they have been hacked, we are already IN a civil war. Sticking our heads in the sand and denying reality doesn't do anyone any good.

Or more precisely, we're not actually in a civil war. But what you are saying then is that we simply must surrender to dictatorship. Because if a group is willing to use election fraud to gain power, they'll be willing to use election fraud to stay in power. And if you're worried about protest/dissent/violence/civil war now, just imagine what level of disorder and violence will be required to eventually dislodge an autocratic government once they're fully established in power.

Exactly. The nice thing about this is that recounting is actually a lot easier in this case than a regular recount. You don't need to recount the whole state. You're just trying to determine if there was some massive swing. A few randomly selected precincts would be more than sufficient.

Yeah, its seems we should be doing verification checks regardless. Kamala ran a billion dollar campaign. And they can't scrape up the cash to pay for hand recounts in a few precincts? You don't have to recount a whole state. Just randomly select precincts and see if the vote totals between the hand counts and the computer tabulators are wildly different. With a recount on a close election, it's expensive, as you literally need to recount every single ballot. Here all you're trying to do is to make sure the vote tabulators aren't rigged in some way. So you just need to compare the paper ballots to the tabulator counts.