DL Open Thread Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2023
Governments around the world like to pretend they’re doing something about global warming, but for all the talk about renewables, 80% of the world’s energy is still derived from fossil fuels. Lots of petroleum-producing countries, and oil industry in this one, want to keep it that way. Their latest victory came at the UN’s COP28 conference, where a new draft of their core agreement has dropped language calling for the phase-out of fossil fuels. It doesn’t really matter – lofty statements from confabs of poobahs haven’t done jack squat to solve the problem so far, and that wouldn’t change no matter what the language said – but it shows that these leeching motherfuckers aren’t willing to let opponents have even moral victories.
A Texas woman who tried to get a court’s permission to abort her malformed fetus left the state for the procedure shortly before the state Supreme Court ruled that doctors, not courts, must make medical decisions. Left unsaid: The courts will prosecute any doctor who might perform it, and the courts will not clarify the vague language of the law. This is by design – if any abortion might be illegal, none will be performed. Now we wait to see if adulterous piece of shit AG Ken Paxton will try to prosecute her.
As is happens, the GOP is sick motherfuckers all the way down. SCOTUS surprisingly passed on the opportunity to strike down laws making gay conversion therapy illegal, which prompted a whining minority opinion from serial vacation-taker Clarence Thomas, who insists letting therapists torture gay teens constitutes free speech. And those teens are then free to try suicide at double the rate of other teens. Freedom, baby!
Defenders of Israel’s assault in Gaza have a lot to answer for. Haaretz, the liberal Israeli newspaper, found that more than 60% of the casualties in Gaza were civilians, the highest rate of civilian deaths in any conflict of the past two centuries. “Never again” must mean something different in Hebrew.
Here’s a story with an important lesson: Don’t listen to the whiners. When Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney proposed a soda tax, people cried and moaned as if water were being rationed. Guess what? It’s six years later, and in the city’s just-concluded mayoral race nobody even mentioned it, perhaps because it’s brought in $480 million since its passage. The same thing would have happened with a gasoline tax if our political class had grown the balls to enact one.
The floor’s yours.
OK, the XPN Countdown of Greatest Songs By Women is almost over.
It’s mostly been wonderful. Even when I don’t like certain songs or certain genres, I understand why they made it.
The one exception?: Tori Amos. I can’t stand any of her songs, and I don’t understand what the fuss is about.
Can someone who can at least tolerate her explain why?
All about the passion.
The website has a page with statistics, including a breakdown of the list by decade. The most heavily represented, by a wide margin, is the 1990s.
I think the 1990’s was when female artists came closer to equal prominence with men. You may recall that, back in the 1980’s, XPN had a women’s music hour on Fridays. One. Hour.
our pols didnt want a gas tax, they just wanted to sound like they wanted one. if they had instituted a gradually increasing tax we would be there today. but its more fun to throw out a big number and seem very progressive instead of you know actually doing something
El Som – Agree with you about Tori Amos. And yet she’s there but the Roches are not. I believe we’re both part of that unrepresented Roches constituency Alby mentioned. I’ve been listening to the Roches’ Christmas album to compensate. Odd but very good.
I had a friend who had to leave the room as soon as i started to play that record. She was not part of the constituency, but she probably liked Tori Amos.
She was a friend of the late lamented Scarlet Woman, who, I believe, would have stayed in the room.
I’ve been preparing my end-of-year “The Good, The Bad, The Ridiculous” list. So far, I’ve made it through April as I start from January and go through all our posts. It takes some time.
Every time I see one of Scarlet Woman’s comments, it makes me feel so sad. Man, I really miss her.
Not for nothing, but the sweetened beverage tax is unquestionably a regressive tax on the poor and working class. Anyone that had means and lived in philly was already driving out to delco to do their shopping.
I’ve had some business with Rebuild Philly (which is funded by the tax) and it is such a waste of money. Endless Zoom meetings where expensive architects talk in circles.
Gas taxes are the same way. The wealthy can buy teslas or afford to live in the safe quarters of the cities while still sending g their kids to good schools. Basic things like making all transit free would go a lot further to uplift communities that are suffering
People – especially the poor – shouldn’t be drinking soda in the first place. Empty calories, bad for your health.
Same with gasoline. The idea of taxing it is to force people to use less of it.
By your logic, we should tax almost nothing. Sorry, non-starter.
Screen capped and added to the “alby is a privileged douche” file.
What a well-reasoned argument.
OK, Kevis Greene. You’re officially on Troll Watch.
One warning only.
No, he’s OK. Just come up with something other than ad hominem attacks.
Sorry, Kevis, I’m not here to impress you with my empathy for the poor. As public policy we should seek to mitigate harmful behaviors, and sugar is, like alcohol and tobacco, a harmful and addictive substance.
Now make the case for why we shouldn’t discourage its consumption – especially among the poor who, because they often live in food deserts, struggle to get good nutrition in the first place. Soda contributes significantly to the national obesity problem.
Yes, I’m privileged. That doesn’t make taxing soda (ideally we would tax all sugar) a bad idea, and you haven’t made any case at all why it is.
My apologies for the lack of decorum, but I think it’s a pretty bold move to lecture poor and working people about nutritional choices given the all of the systemic inequities. Philadelphia remains one of the poorest big cities in America and food deserts are one of my personal bugaboos
I understand the systemic inequities. Soda doesn’t solve them.
It’s bad for you and given that we’re talking about people who have to watch their spending, why would you die on the hill of letting them drink cheaper soda?
Soda, tobacco, and alcohol taxes are all examples of sin taxes. There is a lot of double speak surrounding these fees; people proposing them tout the health benefits but deep down they are neither interested nor invested in changing behaviors. When a government generates nearly half a billion in revue on soda, there is no financial interest in decreasing soda consumption.
There are better solutions for governments truly invested in citizen health. Start with eliminating food desperate by providing financial backing to grocery stores in underserved neighborhoods. Giving people better alternatives is far more effective than punishing them for their existing material and social conditions
You think the increases in tobacco taxes haven’t cut tobacco consumption? I disagree. There’s a clear link.
Alcohol is not taxed heavily enough to cover the damage it causes, but that’s not a good reason for failing to tax it. (Experience shows that an outright ban creates a black market.) There’s a strong alcohol lobby at both state and federal levels working against heavier alcohol taxes, but a significant portion of our emergency services are devoted to cleaning up alcohol’s messes.
I don’t consider it “punishment” to use one of government’s limited tools to dissuade consumption of harmful substances. That would suggest soda is some sort of reward. And you would probably agree that there are lots of other things government could do to better alleviate poverty than forego sin taxes.
I don’t object to your solution, but it requires spending more money. What if we raised it through a sugar tax?
Effective public health campaigns have done much more than taxes to decrease tobacco consumption. And for those that have “quit”conventional cigarettes, there is an upswing in vaping and alternative substance abuse.
If only the world were so black and white! Impoverished people are conditioned by market forces and caloric needs. They have been habituated to buy and become addicted to unhealthy food. To leverage an additional fee that disproportionally burdens them, while not providing sufficent addiction/nutritional management resources and healthy alternatives, is a cruel inequity. Forgo the sin taxes and leverage wealth taxes! Create progressive taxes for multi vehicle and home ownership and siphon money from private schools.
Yeah, we’re gonna have to agree to disagree. I don’t agree with a worldview in which individuals have no agency.
You believe in the ability of persuasion – advertising, public health campaigns (heh! prove it) – but not cold, hard cash. My experience differs, and research backs it up: Every 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes reduces consumption by about four percent among adults and about seven percent among youth. Source: American Lung Association.
And I’m the one in a black and white world?
The ALA study does not fully consider the lateral shift from cigarettes to vapes, and we know that teen vape use (especially) is under reported.
Just so it’s clear, your conception of “personal agency” is really a nice way to reframe a bootstraps mentality that right wingers and the wealthy love to force upon poor and working people. Your mind may not have been changed, but I think this discussion is ample evidence to others that you lack the lived experience and humility to comment on conditions affecting poor and working class people
I don’t deny any of the stuff you cite. But you deny what I do. What does not drinking sugar water have to do with pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps?
I think everyone can see who has the intellectual blind spots here. And frankly, I have no interest in espousing policies because they make you think I have empathy for the poor. I espouse them because I think they serve the public good. You, on the other hand, want to succor the poor with alcohol, tobacco and soda.
The discussion isn’t about poor people. It’s about a soda tax. You have no evidence to support any of your claims, but you have a moral high horse you like to ride.
If you don’t like it here, you can ride it somewhere else.