No, COVID is very low in the US - just as in the early days when there was little testing available, you can track what the disease is doing by looking at hospital admissions data.

I did mention people who are particularly vulnerable, and if that includes you then the rest of what I said doesn’t apply to you. I find it’s more efficient to talk about the likely case and mention the exception in a single message than to first ask “are you immunocompromised” and then reply separately.

I dunno about the MAGAs, but I think at this point, with COVID very low in the USA, most people are wearing masks because it sends a signal about where they stand on COVID, not for their own protection. Obviously there are some people who are particularly vulnerable, who can’t have the vaccine for example, for whom mask-wearing will remain important forever (and would likely have been beneficial before the pandemic) but I don’t believe that’s the majority.

The reason is that mask wearing in my home country went down to zero after most people were vaccinated and the virus became uncommon. But here mask-wearing was never politicised, so without an anti-mask group to oppose it never became a symbol for those who did wear them.

Yeah this is something that has got way worse over time. It used to be that most forums would default to “no politics” and then there were discussion areas set aside for that. And now if you criticise someone for bringing politics into something where it doesn’t belong, you will get angry responses declaring that you’re burying your head in the sand. No, I just don’t want lowest-hanging-fruit political comments on every cat picture.

JAQing off and Whataboutism are not those things.

Yeah, but if you go in saying that this is the inevitable result of having conservatives discuss politics here, I am suspicious that your threshold for those terms is waaayy lower than mine.

The person I replied to originally wasn’t talking about trolling or toxic behaviour, they were talking about conservative viewpoints (likening them to cannibalism, I might add) so, if you want to chip in that trolling isn’t welcome then I’ll certainly agree with that, but there’s a reason I’m not really talking about that.

It used to be, in the early days of mass social media (and it was widespread on forums)

Moderation isn’t easy but it also needn’t be fraught - set standards of civility (strict or loose) and basic rules about hate speech, and let people take themselves out of discussions that are within the rules that they nevertheless don’t like.

It works a lot better in small communities where you talk to the same people - you can ignore people you don’t like and not have the same conversation over and over.

Yeah, I am on… two forums. I think the issue is that it’s not where the people are any more.

I actually think the problem with voting is that the way it’s used to promote threads instead of doing it on a time basis. It’s part of a way of engaging with a site which punishes long-running conversations.

The fact that you characterise natural ways of engaging in a discussion negatively doesn’t mean it’s not genuine, and it doesn’t mean you’re forced to look at it if it’s available.

NOTHING is stopping a conservative from coming here and making cogent, factual arguments, aside from their own fragility.

The structure of vote-based social media makes it difficult, and the people who, rather than remove themselves from places where arguments happen, shout down the people having the arguments, stops this from happening.

You’d be right to point out that conservative-majority spaces are just as, if not more guilty of this, but that doesn’t make it less true.

The conservatives who “can’t” post to Lemmy are the ones who don’t know how to have an actual conversation and get banned.

That’s true but it’s not the only thing that’s going on.

1. I don’t think reviewing tests which indicate an ectopic pregnancy and writing that a patient has an ectopic pregnancy, that an ectopic pregnancy is a medical emergency, and than an abortion is therefore medically necessary, takes an afternoon. Doctors are busy, and this does take time, so this is a possible - even plausible reason for her to have thought they were dithering, but I also think that medical staff are usually communicative about what’s going on.
2. Certainly they are not, but I think in the period before the doctors go and talk to the lawyers there is ample room for confusion caused by public perception.

It’s probably an issue with vote-based discussions full stop. Post something funny and it’ll get votes because of the laughs; post something everyone in your echo-chamber agrees with and it’ll get votes because it’s right-on.

Maybe I just want to go back to forums.

You don’t have to subscribe to political communities if you don’t want to see political discussion. But the dearth of genuine political discussion here is a problem for the people who do want it, that can’t be fixed by individual action.

In the Florida law, yes, if it’s beyond the (impractically low) gestational age threshold.

This is not that surprising given the position of pro-lifers who think that life begins at conception. The UK just progressed an assisted-dying bill which would legalise the ending of the lives of terminally ill people; even with their consent, two written opinions are needed (in the bill, which is not yet law) to do this.

But yes, it’s a lot of hurdles for something that should in general just be available as a medical procedure.

This casts all people who vote for conservative parties as sheep who will blindly agree with whatever their leader says on a given day. For some that’s true, but most people recognise that unexplained U-turns are a sign of bullshit.

An amnesiac media laser-focused on the 24h news cycle lets the cult develop by not reminding people of what they believed the day before yesterday. Most people don’t like being confronted with this even if they can explain it away, and more focus on it would be an improvement.

And you know that how, exactly?

Florida law allows abortion in the case of ectopic pregnancy or other situations where the mother’s life is in danger. If the events she’s presented are true it’s hard to think other than that the hospital staff were not clear on the law, and no doubt public discourse (which naturally centres around the strictest laws) has had an effect on that.

But it’s also possible that the “reluctance” was just a delay during which her doctors were getting the necessary two written opinions that it was necessary.

You’ve got to wonder about a system which allows a chorus of people saying it would be terrible to become involved in a war in the middle east to do a complete 180. Why aren’t their own words being quoted (by congress, by news) back to them?