Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy. (Politics General)

@omeggga
If it’s real, I’m going to guess they looked up how to fake miracles. Wouldn’t be the first time.

@omeggga
Well, I can tell you that speaking in tongues is a thing. But this is just stupid. Of all things to use a prayer that is suppose to come from the soul, this is not one of them.

Been reading a lot of Canadian polls lately regarding next year’s election, and it’s kinda wild that a few years ago American liberal pundits were seeing Trudeau as a role model not just for their country, but for the West as a whole.

Now he looks to be overseeing a total electoral collapse, fueled by a Canadian Tory party that’s even more right-wing now than during the Harper years. And I’m not sure a Trump victory in the US will help him at all (it didn’t really help him in 2019 when the Liberals lost their majority).

Thinking about the Cass Report even more and I do have to wonder, what is Cass’s scientific basis for a holistic therapy in regards to gender dysphoria? What proof is there that this is a good way to handle such a diagnosis?

Anecdotes aside, why does Doctor Cass recommend this treatment over gender affirmative care/therapy?

So puberty blockers aren’t ok because it isn’t backed up by evidence but, this is?

Again I’m just a layman, and I hope some more peer review and critiques come on soon to settle all this, but there definitely does seem to at least to be some problems on the surface of this report

@SleepySteve
Maybe he can wear blackface again to win over conservative voters

Every year in Quebec on we have a comedy show for one hour leading to the new year. The latest had an incredibly relevant sketch in which Poilievre, struggling with how he’s a total joke, decides to change his glasses and finds out that simply removing them suddenly turns him into the strongman Conservatives are desperate for and makes all his gaffes appear to be masterful strokes of “Common sense” and “Owning the libs”. This wasn’t all that funny given how accurate to form it was: Conservatives really are just desperate to drop the mask and go all-in on the same bullshit Republicans have been doing.

Canada isn’t like the US, our economy hasn’t recovered nearly as well, and it’s very easy for Conservatives to just hammer on that without even having to suggest an alternative. At this point they could very likely win without even having to court the far right and gather up the vote of pure desperation from independents hoping for any change in the status quo, even if wealth inequality is close to a 100% guaranteed to get worse from a Conservative administration.

@Commune
Layman also, but Dr. Cass could be considering therapy the default option. Like if you’re sick and don’t know if any medication would work, you just default to plenty of fluids and rest. For symptoms like depression that stem from dysphoria, I guess therapy is usually assumed to be better than doing nothing at all.

@Natry
Well it’s not therapy itself I’m questioning but rather the type of therapy

Cass in her report recommends a shift from affirmative therapy, which is what current gender clinics are practicing allegedly, to “holistic therapy”, which I assume, based on her findings from the rest of the report, means a form of gender therapy where the therapist may do several tests on a patient and see whether their gender dysphoria is legit or if it may stem from other causes

Now, how a therapist can figure that out, I don’t know, and how a therapist can approach this with their patient without coming dangerous close to conversion therapy(what if a therapist tries to force their interpretation of where their dysphoria comes from onto the patient?), I also don’t know, but I really do wonder, where’s the scientific backing that this therapy is better than affirmative therapy? Is it just based off intuition?

I can think of half a dozen scenarios where this holistic therapy for gender dysphoria can go horribly awry, and while one can point out it may be paranoid of me to do so, considering Dr Cass’s report recommends a pause in puberty blockers until further research due to potential harm, it just seems a bit weird she then goes onto recommend something without much research into it at all

What do you think of reparations for redlining?

It’s important that we right the wrongs of the past.

My big concern is what exactly does she mean by “holistic therapy”? If it is indeed what you are describing, of a therapist performing tests to determine if someone is really, truly, for realsies trans, that flies dangerously close to Gender Exploratory Therapy, which is a modified form of conversion therapy to get around laws banning it. Basically GET presupposes out the gate that the patient can’t possibly be trans, and to focus all efforts on finding the “reason you think you’re trans” and resolving/removing it so you can go back to being cisgender.

The main goal is to keep actually transitioning permanently out of reach while they move the goalposts for confirming someone is “really trans.”

@Background Pony #1079
Where are my reparations for the Roman conquest of Hispania?

I just learned something fun. The Trump campaign hasn’t spent a cent on advertising in Arizona, and has not reserved any ad-buys for the general election.

The Arizona GOP is also still borderline bankrupt, and they’ve thusfar spent more money on ads for primaries than they have for the general election.

Add the recent court decision on abortion, and a likely abortion referendum, and you’ve got trouble on the horizon for the GOP there.

Biden, meanwhile, has apparently devoted a 7 figure ad buy for the state, and it’s also included in the 30 million national ad-buy for reproductive health ads.

I think reparations for redlining and other stealth Jim Crow measures aren’t unreasonable, seeing as they happened within living memory (into the 80’s and 90’s as private policy in some places).

How those reparations are distributed and the amount will need to be discussed, working closely with community leaders. Though this should be combined with the removal of hostile city planning measures of the past that would quietly enforce segregation through things like zoning, policing, and highway placement.

@Zincy
is Arizona a purple state if i remember right?

@The Smiling Pony
The thing is that redlining is still something affects people to this day

The answer is less of reparations though and more like, actually rectifying redlining

@Zincy
Sounds like overconfidence or poor budget planning.

Imagine if Biden wins Pennsylvania by 5 points, and Arizona by 3 points.

Though, because of how the electoral college works, whether he wins Pennsylvania or Arizona by 1 point or 5 points, he still gets the same number of electoral votes.

Sort of.

It’s basically Virginia in the early 2000s. Once reliably republican but has shifted purple.

It remains to be seen if it follows VA in becoming a true purple state or if 2020 and 2022 were flashes in the pan.

Incompetence is the main factor.

@Zincy
So Trump showing off his (lack of) business sense.

@Meanlucario
Trump having a lack of business sense makes so much sense. It was there all along.

It’s less direct incompetence and more Trump very openly using the Republican party as his own personal piggy bank.

I’ve been thinking about Biden’s courting of Haley voters for a while and I’m starting to think he and his team believes that turnout of Haley voters (who are very much to the semi-hard right of the average Dem voter in terms of foreign policy) will cancel out what is likely to be a 2016-level drop-off of young and non-white voters, which might be why he’s doing nothing to stop weapons transfers to Israel and why he seems all but ready for a regional war with Iran, despite the economic, political and human catastrophe that will follow.

First, that’s one hell of a gambit to make, and second, I have good reason to believe it will 100% backfire.

@Zincy
Trump should be charging Biden for all the free advertising he’s doing for Joe

Oh that’s nice. The house voted 212-212 to ALLOW spy agencies to ignore the 4th amendment and spy on Americans without a warrant. Speaker Johnson cast the tie breaking vote in favor of it.

And Trump rejected Zelenskyy’s invitation to visit Ukraine. A spokesman for his campaign office called the offer “inappropriate” because the former US president “is not commander-in-chief”.

538 did an interesting peice that noticed a pretty stunning reversal.

For decades, “infrequent” voters skewed democratic, this has lead to a pretty long history of polls overestimating democratic support when likely voting habits aren’t taken into consideration.

2020, 2022, and current polls are finding a stark change. Now, Trump and the GOP are leading in infrequent voters.

This has some interesting knockon effects.

Those polls that show Trump gaining ground amoung Hispanic amd Black voters? A majority of the gain seems to be amoung infrequent voters, with Biden leading almost 67 points over Trump amoung frequent black voters for example, which is in line with traditional democratic performance amoung that bloc.

What this will end up meaning in the long run is hard to pin down.

Best case scenario for dems is that this means Biden will ultimately do much better amoung likely voters than “all”. We would expect to see Biden start to close the gap as polls start to switch toward likely voters as the election drawers closer.

Worst case scenario for dems and best case for Republicans is that it shifts the race to a game of turnout, and Republicans are able to leverage these less frequent voters to pull off a win in the same vein that Obama did for his first election.

The truth is likely toward the middle. With the 538 crew expecting Biden’s numbers to increase, but that ground game and turnout will be a big factor.