SamTheSlob

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
eirian
eirian

the whole twitter users vs tumblr users thing reminds me of this

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because ive been on this site long enough to remember when the twitter ppl Were tumblr ppl. they just jumped ship after changes were made (such as the porn ban)

i think we should let them come back. if we dont like them we can just block them, who cares. but imo if we let them come back it'll be good for tumblr's user count and activity rate. maybe itll be good for us in the end. just think about it

disappearedsock
callese

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decolonize-the-left

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🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃

skyvoice

you know what. i am physically sick as hell this week so i'll bite. i read the original slate article, which is free to read so i don't know why OP chose to screenshot instead of let people draw their own conclusions. i agree with MANY of the writer's points on the need for comprehensive criminal justice reform, but i also care a lot about numbers and stats and increasingly, this bullshit "democrats are the same as republicans" messaging is straight-up delivered using propaganda tactics

this is going to be an incredibly long post and i had to use GOOGLE SLIDES and GOOGLE SHEETS which i hate so so much so in the words of twitter kpop stans please don't let this flop

let's look at the numbers, claim by claim

claim #1: "the number of people held in ICE detention has increased by 70 percent since Biden took office"

  • if you click through 3 link layers from the slate you land at cbs as the source for this which tells you that mainstream media is certainly not immune to playing with stats to make the democrats look bad
  • fortunately ICE detention stats are easily publicly available thanks to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which does the lord's work of crawling through federal agency publications and submitting tedious FOIA requests to collate useful data
  • here is the data -- not only was cbs not wrong about the total number of detainees at the time of publication (25k in aug 2021), but the increase from when biden was inaugurated is actually 90%, not 70%. look:
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  • well holy shit!!! that's terrible. biden is the worst and he hates immigration reform and the democrats are no different from trump, right?
  • but if you zoom out
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  • actually, Jan/Feb 2021 was at the absolute low for detainees, after a full year of covid restrictions slowing down or minimizing gov't operations of all kinds AND reducing border volume
  • and if you actually want to compare the biden admin to the trump admin?
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  • relative to Aug of 2019, after 18 months the biden admin has reached a 56% decrease in the number of detainees. even if you look at only the month before COVID lockdowns really hit, it's still nearly a 40% decrease
  • and to put the total numbers in perspective, at NO point before COVID did the trump admin have fewer than 30k people in ICE detention. most of the time it was well above 40k, or about 2x more than under biden
  • that's not to say that immigration reform isn't still needed, but it IS to say that myopically comparing current-state to january 2021, aka one of the WEIRDEST months statistically on record ever, is going to give you crap perspective

claim #2: "the federal prison population has grown for the first time in a decade"

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  • (note i've only included data from 2005 onward so it's easier to actually see what's going on in the last 10 years. for those who like math, these are CAGRs calculated over each presidential term)
  • but there it is -- decline in populations accelerated under trump. surely both parties same. surely democrats actually worse than republicans
  • but wait, what's that?
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  • that can't be ...
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  • SPIDERS GEORG????
  • WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE
  • ARE YOU SAYING THAT ... THERE IS AN OUTLIER?
  • THAT SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN COUNTED?
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  • now that assumes trump wasn't successful at slowing down the momentum from the obama years
  • this is what it might have looked like had we perhaps ended up with a second trump term:
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  • again this isn't to say that biden is pure and perfect on criminal justice, even if there were some agreed-upon definition of what pure and perfect legislative or policy priorities would look like
  • it's to put the context back into place around the data
  • are the democrats and republicans actually the same or are we being fed a diet of pruned stats and catchphrases to make us simultaneously angry and disempowered

last claim: "federal covid relief funds are being used to pad local police budgets"

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SO all of that to say

  • we don't stop pushing for immigration or criminal justice reform
  • or any other reform that is sorely needed
  • but using data in incredibly selective ways, out of context, to promote a narrative that somehow democrats are the same or even worse than republicans
  • ESPECIALLY the republicans of today
  • is literally propaganda
  • propaganda by definition uses kernels of truth and then presents it in a biased way to attempt to push a narrative
  • pretending that the democrats are exactly the same as the republicans is propaganda, and i'm like 80% sure it's right-wing propaganda designed to discourage left-wing turnout that has somehow been accepted by an online population that doesn't understand statistics
  • so like
  • understand statistics
  • do a bit of research
  • draw conclusions that you can back up
  • and for fuck's sake, vote
youaresogoingtohell

Some time has passed. Have your views changed, at all?

skyvoice

i think this question is for me so i will try to answer briefly, though lmk if it was intended for op lmao

also i'll answer on the assumption it was asked in good faith:

do i still think that democrats and republicans are not the same? yes; i don't have the time today to refresh charts etc., but a very quick glance at the same sources i used the first time around looks like the numbers have remained more or less stable. happy to take correction here if anyone has more time to delve

  • importantly, we are also already seeing the impact of elected democrats at both national and state / local levels. there are many many many sources covering what has been done federally (or attempted in the face of GOP obstructionism) both from mainstream news sources (think NPR, Hill, WaPo, the recently-deservedly-maligned NYT, etc.) and on tumblr itself, so i won't do the google work here
  • at the state level, states that put democrats in power during the midterms are already seeing legislation and orders being put in place for abortion rights and LGBTQ+ protections -- something visible on any map showing where "safe(ish)" states are
  • in michigan alone where dems won a trifecta for the first time in decades we've repealed anti-union legislation, enacted increased background checks for gun purchases, repealed the draconian 1931 abortion law set to take effect post-Roe, and passed protections for sexual orientation and gender identity
  • so much for democrats being the same or worse than republicans

on immigration specifically, do i think reform is still needed? yes; in particular i do think there should be close scrutiny of how the numbers trend as the biden admin continues to announce and enact its proposed policies if the PHE does indeed expire in may

  • with that said, i think any truly focused analysis should consider the context of those numbers as well -- the quick-and-dirty i did looked only at raw numbers, not conditions of detention, enforcement approach, targeted or prioritized nationalities, and many other factors that provide a better picture of what is actually happening at the southern US border

on criminal justice specifically, do i think reform is still needed? yes; and importantly here it's worth keeping track of what the dem white house and dem congresspeople are trying to do vs what is able to happen (e.g. George Floyd Act)

  • i won't get into a long screed here on the need for tumblr and voters broadly to understand how laws get passed (or don't get passed bc they get stuck eternally in committee) but even pre-midterms we had valuable laws trapped in congressional deadlock. midterm losses weren't nearly as bad as they could have been, but it's still a tighter margin with a deeply-intractable set of republicans -- whose inaction should be emphasized and considered when it comes time to vote
  • it's also worth noting that the comparison here is between a party that on average acknowledges racial disparity in policing even if they don't always agree on the approach / align with the leftmost demands on how to address the problem vs a party that on average openly courts cop unions, openly calls protestors rioters and terrorists, frequently denies that racial disparities even exist, and proudly yells "blue lives matter"
  • like yeah, the bar is in the ground. but do we want to be in the ground with it or actually trying to get some lift-off?
  • comparison also applies to immigration point above tbh i am just disorganized today and didn't write it there

do i still think dems-and-repubs-are-the-same reeks of voter-suppression propaganda? yes, and even more so when the evidence continues to pile up that dem legislatures and leaders at every level are making real progress on issues that we all purport to care about. who benefits when certain types of voters feel like their vote doesn't matter? the people who want to disenfranchise them!

do i still think it's important to contextualize data and question sources and stats? yes!!!!!!!!!! yes!!!! and i know it's not easy and it's time-consuming, but again: who benefits when we don't approach information with a critical mind? not us!

  • this doesn't mean we (collectively, as voters, as well as specifically voters on the left) are always going to agree -- but the more we can approach disagreements using the same set of facts, the more we can have a meaningful debate on what can actually be done instead of what is even reality

do i still think it's important to vote? yes yes yes yes yes yes yes

  • again i won't get into what could be a long screed here, but we are already seeing what can happen when we get left-leaning politicians into office
  • i specify left-leaning as opposed to any specific set of political beliefs because i know there is no such thing as a perfect politician, even putting aside the fact that nobody would be able to agree on what a perfect politician would believe or do
  • but incremental progress is still progress -- and voting is as much a form of feedback for legislators as it is a demand, which is to say if you have a democrat who has done things you like? reward them by voting for them again! have they missed some things? call up their office and say "as someone who voted for [x], i'm disappointed by [y]" -- it's MUCH more effective than complaining as a non-voter
  • our current political context is also particularly important here -- there are times when it's valuable to have a slimmer margin to keep both parties on their toes. right now however one party is doing everything it can to leap off the deep end and it's more valuable to deliver some security to the party that isn't so it doesn't feel as much of a need to tread carefully and court the mid-right and can take firmer leftward stances
  • in other words we have got to stop thinking of politicians as individuals acting on individual preferences. they get elected to represent a set of priorities indicated by voters -- but if a portion of those voters doesn't show up, how are they supposed to prioritize or even know about those people's issues? vibes????
  • look, for all the many foibles of the US system, it remains a fact that the right to vote is one of the most powerful tools a citizenry can have
  • you actually get to show up and tell your government -- local, state, federal -- whether you're pissed off. and they have to hear it!
  • there is a reason status quo groups want to prevent more people from voting -- because it's powerful and they know it! why let them take that power from us?

am i still going to abuse bullet points? yeah

  • i'm not sorry about it
  • i've made so many slide decks in my life
  • i've earned this
  • i am sorry i made this post even longer though. sorry to anyone who has 'keep reading' turned off
flakeblood
hssanya


Did you know that after they switched to blind auditions, major symphony orchestras hired women between 30% to 55% more? Before bringing in “blind auditions” with a screen to conceal the the candidate, women in the top 5 major orchestras made up less than 5% of the musicians performing.

shwetanarayan

so I believe it was actually more complicated than that, in interesting ways. Because at first, when they did blind auditions, they were STILL hiring more men.

…Then they put down a carpet, so that high heels didn’t clack on the floor,  and BOOM women were suddenly getting hired.

The testers didn’t even know that’s what they were picking up on, which just goes to show how tiny of a cue it takes for misogyny to kick in.

isaacsapphire

The case of blind auditions for orchestras and how it dramatically changed the gender makeup of orchestras is a very illuminating example of gender bias, and an interesting possible way of countering it.

madscientistmerle

You can be sexist without knowing it. You can be racist without knowing it. This is not a moral failing; it is a moral imperative to remember that you are fallible, and take steps to limit the damage your squishy ape brain’s foibles can cause.