Thank you.

Public polling is showing that Harris would get a big boost in voter support if she and Biden went for a weapons embargo.

Source?

edit: It’s absolutely amazing to me what y’all will downvote.

I hear you. Didn’t mean for that to come across as an attack on you.

Lemmy is such a fickle place. Just a few days ago people were clamoring for Democrats to make a purely performative abortion vote that would be doomed to fail, merely because it would send an important signal to voters. Now people are skeptical that performative signal votes are sincere because they won’t go anywhere. Not saying you, specifically, but the whiplash is really frustrating.

Second, sure, it’s a low risk bill because they know it won’t go anywhere, but damn isn’t it good news that somebody is putting their money where their mouth is? Maybe we just need to primary in more Dems who will sign on and help push it through?

https://rankthevote.us/raskin-beyer-welch-bill-would-bring-ranked-choice-voting-to-congressional-elections/

Just wanted to direct folks to !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world, which is a brand new community for exactly these kinds of discussions. Cheers!

Just wanted to direct folks to !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world, which is a brand new community for exactly these kinds of discussions. Cheers folks!

The recent NCAA conference kerfuffle proves money was only part of the problem, though. While there certainly have been declines in state support and endowment revenue, they’ve also spent decades prioritizing things like sports, facilities, and coaches over research and academic programs. And we can’t even justify it by claiming that Universities need to prioritize revenue-generating entities to support non-revenue generating entities, because sports lose a stupid amount of money each year. They’ve lost track of what Universities are supposed to be doing, which is education, and they’re doing it in a way that keeps them trapped in a financial doom loop.

I’m not sure you’ll get that from any instance that allows politics, to be perfectly honest, as politics will tend to swamp all other discussion because it generates more traffic and discussion. I’ve spent time on microskiff.com (a boating forum), which is intensely right-wing, and it got so toxic they had to ban political discussion altogether. They have an open feud with The Hull Truth (another boating forum) which leans more left and attracts more voices who challenge conservatives. /r/Hunting was kinda conservative and generally policed itself, but that’s because the mod team nuked anything that went off the rails.

Conservative-friendly spaces usually stay functional one of two ways: either they create a conservatives-only safe space or they refuse to let conservatives be overtly conservative. As someone who was a Reddit moderator for over a decade, you’re kinda driving at the major gripe conservatives have with the open internet. They tend not to get a warm welcome not because they’re conservative, but because when they flock together they tend to get disruptive and toxic very quickly. So then the warnings, removals, and bans come out, and the toxic crowd crows about being “censored”, and the toxicity/pushback ramps up in an endless loop. It’s the same song and dance everywhere they go, unfortunately. The conservative-sphere is just too infested with toxic conservatives for non-toxic conservatives find breathing room.

Additionally, Lemmy the platform has a steep learning curve which limits it to a more tech-savvy audience, and these kinds of forums naturally attract more left-leaning users, so I don’t think Lemmy is the place you’re going to find much conservative traffic in the first place.

Yep. Page 30 in the referenced study.

Yes, but the lede is why. They don’t really get to anything resembling a resolution until something like 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through the article. Even now I’m still unsure whether the 500k excess deaths were rabies infections or due to tainted water. They never got around to providing much clarity on that front. The paper only goes so far as to say a) more rabies vaccines were sold, b) people saw more dogs, c) fecal counts in water went up, and d) DO in water went down. But that comes with two huge caveats:

1. Feral dog data were collected after the ban and “do not allow us to reject that feral dog populations were already higher in the high-vulture suitability districts even before the collapse of vulture populations.”

2. Fecal coliform also has human origins. And the uptick in fecal counts (along with the decline in DO) was in areas where more people live.

Correlation between excess human deaths and vulture decline wasn’t actually teased out into any kind of causation, and the best they could do was link death upticks with spatially isolated poisoning nodes. Urban areas had a more pronounced effect, but urban areas have a lot of other factors that can cause death, and none of those factors were controlled for, or really even mentioned in section 6.2 or the conclusion. Overall the paper is crappy because the study is quite poor, so I guess the author did the best they could with a study that tried to do far too much with far too little data.

Blech. The opening to the article isn’t any better, and they clearly buried the lede to keep you scrolling. Here’s the gist:

1. Vultures eat cattle carcasses.

2. Anti-inflammatory cattle medicine Diclofenac is toxic to birds.

3. Price of Diclofenac falls in 1994, becomes widely used.

4. 95% of vultures in India die over 1990s and 2000s.

5. Diclofenac banned in 2006.

6. Rotting livestock carcasses, no longer picked to the bones by vultures, polluted waterways and fed an increase in feral dogs and rabies.

7. Districts with no vultures saw uptick in human deaths. Districts with vultures saw no uptick. About 500,000 excess deaths across India.

What a fucking terrible article.

cAnCeL CuLtUrE11!!! fReEzE pEaCh!!!@

Oh I didn’t even think about that. Yeah lock climate and direct to climatechange, since it has more subscribers.

Lol, yep. Oh you spray lots of stuff that’s designed to kill bugs? I think it might be killing lots of bugs!

Part of your anger seems to stem from me saying that this whole thing isn’t moving forward fast enough and somehow you think that’s a critique of your personal work. I assure you that wasn’t my goal. But you have to admit that we are, globally, not moving fast enough.

No, the part that bothers me is you’re completely ignoring the point I’ve made multiple times, namely that this protest is counterproductive and doesn’t actually do anything to change the situation. It just pisses people off. It doesn’t promote climate action or change the amount that people care about it or want to do something about it.

The connection to the fight for racial equality is interesting but I’m not sure how well this applies. How do you suppose you can do anything equivalently “not accepting the rules we want to protest” in the context of climate change? Because before there was a big movement there were just a few people breaking the unfair rules. Which where likely talked similarly about as you are talking about these activists right now.

With the exception of the first, none of those sentences form a complete thought, and I honestly have no idea what you’re trying to say or if there’s a question buried in there somewhere.

some forms of activism that I deem valuable would have detrimental effects on the other form of activism if done under the same name.

WHY?

This is so far beyond the point of the article I’m just not sure why you keep falling back on this singular argument. Why is that relevant? This thread started because I said the people currently sitting in prison are being lazy because they painted a rock rather than doing something productive. You’ve now latched onto some weird scenario where they can do multiple kinds of protesting but can’t do it in one organization and have to form or join splinter groups to do multiple kinds of organizing? It like you’ve convinced yourself that what JSO is doing is fine because its members are doing something else less disruptive in another group, which is so disconnected and irrelevant as to be utterly meaningless. Not to mention it’s a thing which (as far as I can tell) is entirely made up on the spot!

So again, why is one detrimental to the other? So far you’ve only said it’s confusing, but you haven’t said why it’s confusing, and you also skipped over the part where painting a rock to protest oil is also confusing.

And I’m saying one does and one does not. You’ve yet to actually demonstrate that these protests have any value or have ever moved the needle in the right direction.

Well would you look at that, meaningful progress in Hawaii and Montana that didn’t involve damaging priceless historical artifacts. Who knew!

You are still arguing from the perspective that activism needs to please people or else it’s “embarrassing” or “shameful”. I do agree that there is activism that displeases people, I think that is still valuable and nothing to be ashamed of.

No, I’m very clearly saying these are “more likely to cause friction and disagreement than sympathy for a cause.” For some reason you have committed to this weird hypothetical where the people currently sitting in jail have some other secondary organization they use for grassroots organization, which was a stretch when you first brought it up. I’m only speculating that you made that situation up because deep down you understand the need to disassociate yourself from these protests, and it’s increasingly clear to me that you see their value in some kind of shell game strategy, where no one knows who’s pulling the strings. But again, you made that up, not me.

But I can acknowledge that there are people that do not see that as something that should be supported. Different forms of activism have different target groups and different wanted effects. It’s just a rational thing to address different target groups and produce different effects under different names.

And water is wet. I’m saying that these protests are stupid and counterproductive. You’re now veering off into platitudes that don’t actually contribute anything to the conversation.

I want the issue front and center in the public discussion. You and I are both aware that people aren’t 100% of the time participating in the public discussion but spend time doing their own thing. Which is partially influenced by what is happening in the public discussion. If climate change is a topic, even if just tangential, that still helps influence people to think about it in the times they spend outside of the public discussion.

And what you still haven’t grasped is that climate change is not a problem because people don’t know about it. This isn’t some kind of pink ribbon campaign where we’re bringing attention to an issue that’s too often ignored as nonexistent. Climate change is front and center, it’s all encompassing, and it’s deeply imbedded with the way that our entire global economy operates. The reason we can’t deal with climate change isn’t awareness, it’s capacity and political will. If you bring up that I’m not eating enough fruit, and I tell you that I can’t afford to buy fruit on my current salary, then pelting me in the face with oranges isn’t going to get me to eat more fruit. It’s just going to piss me off.

Painting Stonehenge or pouring soup on a priceless piece of art isn’t doing anything to shine light on bad actors, or to challenge us to think about the problem differently, or to provide more information, or anything else like that. It’s just blind rage. The people who weren’t allowed to sit in whites-only cafes didn’t protest by dumping piles of trash in the street, they protested by sitting in the whites-only cafe and refusing to move. They didn’t protest having to sit in the back of the bus by painting the walls of the town hall. They protested by sitting in the front of the bus and refusing to move. They protested as throngs of people in the streets and marching across the country. This is two spoiled little shits spraying paint because they want to be the center of attention, and per your very words because they don’t want us to be able to do anything except focus on them. This kind of protest is absolutely, unequivocally ridiculous.

Again I want to thank you for your work, we need people like you. But I don’t think that’s all we need. It has become apparent that just silently working on this at the grassroots level hasn’t shown the necessary progress. So people have decided to express their opinion in more loud and disturbing manners.

No offense, but you can take a hike. There is so much actual, tangible work that happens behind the scenes that I’m actually stunned you’d say something so flatly asinine. We are making progress, and we’re doing it within existing governmental systems. We’re doing it with marketing campaigns. We’re doing it with land acquisition. We’re doing it by working with these organizations, and these organizations, and these organizations, and these organizations.

Which really just reiterates that it’s not awareness that’s the problem. It’s capacity. And painting a rock is like taking a shit in the middle of the street to protest climate change. Like, what the actual hell are you expecting to come from painting Stonehenge? And you’re trying to tell me that hundreds of thousands of people working tirelessly day in and day out to solve this issue isn’t enough, but a bunch of spoiled brats painting rocks is going to make a difference? Give me a fucking break.

Again, this protest isn’t about sympathy. I don’t think anyone is having the illusion that a majority would be happy about this kind of protest. But I think “no one gives a shit” is pretty evidently a lie. People very demonstrably give a shit about Stonehenge being orange for a little while.

I have no idea why you keep trying to twist my words. I’m saying that by doing this the only people who are going to sympathize with the cause the protestors are trying to highlight are the people who were already sympathetic with the cause the protestors are trying to highlight. And what I’m saying to you is that you’re not convincing anyone who’s not already convinced. In fact, you’re probably pissing some of your allies off in the process, so it’s quite literally counterproductive to do stupid shit like this. It hurts more than it helps.

So again, don’t come back with that same platitude that protests have to be inconvenient to be effective. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be. I’m simply saying that this is a stupid form of protest that does more harm than good and likely alienates some of your potential allies while converting and convincing absolutely NO ONE.

*your