Ah yes, you have one ‘health board’ that was conspicuously taken over by TERF ideologues, which then started spouting junk science and ignoring the actual medical professionals. That totally trumps all the reputable medical orgs.

So you’re just making stuff up to get angry about. Big studies show de-transition rates are drastically below rates of regret for most common surgeries, including medically-necessary knee surgery, and cosmetic breast augmentation (which teenage cis girls get, and regret, all the time).

Many de-transtioners are just bullied out of medical care by people like yourself, only to re-transition later. The most common reasons cited for detransition were pressure from a parent (36%), transitioning was too hard (33%), too much harassment or discrimination (31%), and trouble getting a job (29%).

Supporting trans kids is mostly just about clothes/name/pronouns, and the only thing they’re offered is puberty blockers, which were used safely in cisgender children with precocious puberty for decades before people like you started distorting the facts.

You’re just another bigot spreading medical misinformation in a bad-faith attempt to block medical care for a stigmatized minority group, and you should feel bad about it. Shame.

Wow, so It’s almost as if expecting unregulated capitalism to solve this problem is not working? How could that be?

Oh well, I guess we just need to ignore the problem until it gets better.

You know what? I do.

Lol, I’m not hoarding anything, just trying to get you to actually think critically about the problems inherent in your approach. And yep, I’m being smug, because you refuse to think seriously about your responses, while getting all huffy because someone dared to point out how unworkable the easy answers are. But calling me names totally strengthens your position though, good job there.

You keep mentioning ‘total revolution’ as the obvious solution, and I would like you to think about why that is. I think we need big structural changes if we want to claw back anything approximating a democracy. You keep saying I won’t give you a solution, and it’s baffling to me that you can’t get there on your own, but if you need spoon-feeding, imo one of the most fundamental things we need do is go back to taxing the wealthy fairly, in order to pay for social services. gasp

It’s just boggling to me that you apparently can’t even begin to see taxes as something that would help the poor, rather than hurt them, a perspective I’d suspect you’ve picked up from our deeply biased news media. Turns out, instead of making the poor sell their plasma, we should actually be making billionaires sell their yachts and vacation homes.

👍 Do you feel better?

Hey man, call me an asshole if it makes you feel better, I’m just pointing out the problems as I see them, and the giant gaping holes in your suggestions. Widespread political corruption isn’t something we can safely ignore. The public can’t crowdfund journalism in a sustainable way, unless they get a substantial increase in disposable wealth.

That’s the world as it currently exists.

One Koch donation is worth more than the locals can ever give to local journalism, and most local outlets are just Sinclair Broadcast Group in a rubber mask anyway. But sure, be angry that you can’t fix it by parroting a facile solution, that really helps us get there.

In response to your edit:
You’re so close to getting it omg. Keep trying. It’s almost like this is a problem that’s been considered before, and had a solution. How could we ensure a public service is publicly funded? Should our poorest even be selling their plasma to pay taxes? That almost sounds like a whole other problem… If only we had a way to regulate these things. But of course, we can only consider solutions within a capitalist model, cuz 'merica, so obviously there’s no solution.

Because you’re obviously struggling, what I’m saying that objective & effective journalism is vital to informed decision-making in a democracy, and we’re not getting it because journalism in the US is run as a business¸ which imo will always end with media focusing exclusively on whatever makes them the most money, irrespective of the truth. If we want real journalism we need to view it, and fund it, as a public service. The problem is systemic, and our news media will continue to fail us until the system is rectified.

Oh I’m sorry, after re-reading it looks like you actually said we should fight for better journalism by skipping breakfast, or selling our plasma, and giving the money we save to the conglomerates providing our local news. Totally makes sense.

Ah yes, clearly we should simply accept that corruption is endemic, unavoidable really, and expect our press to ignore it.

Tale as old as time, I’m sure it’ll work out fine.

They have more important things to focus on anyway! Like Hunter Biden’s laptop.

And of course, Journalism’s collapsing payment model is entirely the public’s fault. Just give them more money you lazy bums!

The real question is where tf were the journalists while Santos was running his campaign on these false claims?

Too busy playing horse race? Frantically trying to find something newsworthy about Hunter Biden’s laptop? Credulously glorifying some billionaire’s childish misconceptions?

Guess we’ll never know.

Shopping for the right judge.

If you’re supporting the side indiscriminately starving millions, you need to take a very long look in the mirror. This fight is villains vs villains, and civilians are taking the brunt of the brutality from both sides.

Removed by mod

Unfortunately, in “BPA Free” plastic, BPA has usually been replaced with very similar chemicals, which probably cause the same problems.

He’s always the one giving a ‘bipartisan’ veneer to these awful bills. Here’s one trying to end encryption, which he co-sponsored with Lindsey Graham

Oops, you’re absolutely right about the attribution, the quote I posted above is from an earlier letter, I had too many open at once.

Unfortunately, the provision you mention is essentially a bad-faith attempt to skirt the first amendment objections, while leveraging the imposed ‘duty of care’ to allow State AGs to censor with impunity. From p.6 of the more recent letter:

KOSA will enable politically motivated actors to purge the Internet of speech that they dislike under the guise of “protecting minors.” Section 11(b) permits state attorneys general to bring enforcement actions whenever they believe that a resident of their state has been adversely affected by an alleged violation of KOSA. The inevitable abuse is entirely predictable. Consider two possibilities. First, in the aftermath of the May 14, 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo, New York Attorney General Letitia James issued a report blaming social media platforms for hosting the hateful speech that radicalized the shooter and calling for increased civil liability.27 Under KOSA’s duty of care, James could file suit 28 alleging failure to mitigate or prevent “physical violence” that might affect a minor user to pressure platforms into removing any speech deemed “hateful.”

Second, some have already admitted that KOSA will be 29 used to censor LGBTQ content, especially that which relates to gender-affirming care. Armed with cherry-picked and selectively interpreted studies associating trans content with “anxiety, depression . . . and suicidal behavior,” 30 an ambitious attorney general will claim that “evidence-informed medical information” requires that platforms prohibit minors from viewing such content under KOSA’s duty of care. A state attorney general need not win a lawsuit—or even file one at all—to effectuate censorship. They need only initiate a burdensome investigation to pressure platforms to take down or restrict access to disfavored content.(31)

Would it be impossible to create separation between sites used by older teens and adults?

Obviously it’s not impossible, it just requires sites to obtain a verifiable proof of age, i.e., a government ID.

A lot of pathological optimism in this thread, and it might not impact you (at first), but the document you’re quoting explains why a lot of people are concerned:

KOSA would require online services to “prevent” a set of harms to minors, which is effectively an instruction to employ broad content filtering to limit minors’ access to certain online content. Content filtering is notoriously imprecise; filtering used by schools and libraries in response to the Children’s Internet Protection Act has curtailed access to critical information such as sex education or resources for LGBTQ+ youth. Online services would face substantial pressure to over-moderate, including from state Attorneys General seeking to make political points about what kind of information is appropriate for young people. At a time when books with LGBTQ+ themes are being banned from school libraries and people providing healthcare to trans children are being falsely accused of “grooming,” KOSA would cut off another vital avenue of access to information for vulnerable youth.

Neat how you blithely ignore that aside from Blumenthal, a 75 year-old who has been trying to eliminate the open internet for ages, the other author is Marsha Blackburn, a racist tea party republican who kept asking for Obama’s birth certificate and doesn’t believe in climate change… yep no issues there.

JFC, the tech companies, especially Google and Meta, would love to have a government ID for all their users, they don’t make their money on content, they make their money selling advertising, and tracking their users across the internet is a big part of that.

If you’re this lost in the woods, and refuse to believe the overwhelming consensus of legal experts regarding the consequences of this legislation, or even the GOP’s open admission of their intent to misuse the bill, then yes, I guess there’s no getting through to you. Good luck with those critical thinking skills.

Do you think that’s safe to say? Here’s what some of the experts say about the rewrite. Spoiler alert: the problems were not addressed.

It’s really hard to take you seriously when you’re very optimistic about the bill’s authors, but very doubtful about all the first amendment lawyers explaining the legal consequences of the bill.