I would want to qualify this a bit to expand, but in short - I would like to see only content that generates discussion or educates the audience. Memes and screen caps of article headlines (I never knew this was a thing on reddit) fail to educate, so I don't see that having a home here.
Content may be:
Direct url to reliable or reputable source of journalism (as determined by Media Bias Charts from watchdog organizations). Post title must match article title. Poster must include lead or nut graf in body of post text. Poster may communicate their interpretation or editorialization of the news item in the first comment.
Direct link to a YouTube video from responsible content creators - no podcasts but yes interviews with direct people of interest from trusted media sources and journalists, even if this content is editorial in nature. Editorial content (for both videos and articles) should be clearly marked EDITORIAL: [original title of linked content]
OC threads seeking community engagement and debate (ex: DISCUSSION: How have anti-trans laws impacted you or people you know directly?) - the community space for these may be an "enter at your own risk" because I don't want to get caught in the quagmire of who has a shitty opinion versus who is a shitty person. For threads like this, I think the most moderation we should be doing should be removing/banning spammers and bots. If users want to feed the trolls in these spaces, then I won't challenge how you like to spend your weekend.
A bad hot take is different than trolling activity. What I've seen the most of is an ineffective version of the Motte and Bailey fallacy. What I've seen is summarized as:
Troll: Very strong rage bait content/comment
Community user: Reasonably pissed response that this position is horseshit
Troll: Calls for civility even though they originally were like, proposing to genocide trans people, which is inhumane
This isn't a situation to foster. Let this kind of scum in and then they bring friends. Like roaches.
Not trying to split hairs with you, but we are talking about the same paragraph with different terms.
Lede: A clash at city hall today resulted in a rushed vote called during a late night session today, drawing criticisms from civil rights advocates.
Nut graf: Proposition HB (number) had been backed by state legislators from almost exclusively one political party. The bill would impact certain people in this specific way. About 150 protestors packed the gallery and spilled out into the foyer as the leader of the bill's opposition in the state house, state rep So-and-so from the name of county district, lead a 15 hour filibuster that was interrupted prematurely by the lieutenant governor calling a vote on the bill just before the special session ended.
This is an excellent question and is really up to us as a community to establish. The thought had occurred to me that there's room in our magazine for:
politics news that is not US-based
threads that are discussion only about political events
responding to something clearly editorial (thinking here if a really cogent YouTuber has a video essay about political matters that isn't rage bait)
It's just a matter of community members saying what kind of content they want here and us establishing Badges (we can do that as mods, kind of like post flair).
I'll piggy back on your response here to add in that I would prefer that posters copy and paste the nut graf of the news story into the body of the post.
"Nut graf" is a journalism term for the paragraph that clearly delineates what the article is about. It's what makes the piece newsworthy. "The paragraph that explains the story in a nutshell." The nut graf usually appears in the first three grafs of any current events piece.
I think if this is included in the body text (willing to invite more than just this paragraph, but bare minimum this graf), then readers can determine if the larger piece is worth their time to read or important.
This one will be challenging, but we will consider it. Thanks for weighing in though. Even if this doesn't become a direct rule, it at least points to the kind of community we want to co-create.
To start, I would like to link this graphic to the community guidelines to illustrate where the cutoff is between heated debate and inappropriate bickering.
Here are my concerns about this bill, regardless of some common sense aspects of it
After Roe v Wade was overturned, there were a series of news articles this past year about what the next play for conservatives would be to further erode women's right, now that a woman's autonomy over her own reproductive choices was no longer enshrined. A lot of writers started pointing to quieter movements in states like Texas and Florida to abolish "no fault" divorces.
Remember a few months ago when Steven Crowder was pissing and moaning about how his wife initiated their divorce and the thing that seemed to really miff him the most was how "apparently in the state of Texas, she can do that"? The issue as far as he is articulating it isn't necessarily the stress of a divorce but that he couldn't exert control over the situation or over her - she had the legal right to dissolve their marriage all of her own volition. That is unacceptable to men who will always want control over women. The fact that conservatives want to come after this legal autonomy after already "winning" the war on women's bodily autonomy shouldn't be glossed over.
No-fault divorce is an alternative to fault divorces. For states that permit no-fault divorce, people can still cite a fault. A no-fault divorce means that either party can initiate divorce proceedings without having to cite fault of the other spouse, usually physical abuse, infidelity, or inability to bear children.
However throughout the '50s, '60s, and '70s, if you were a woman being abused or raped by your spouse, it was exceptionally difficult to prove that abuse or to gain sympathy over that abuse in order to follow through with a fault divorce. And if your husband isn't cheating on you and you have children, you can't cite the other typical reasons for divorce. So a lot of women were trapped in domestic violence for hundreds of years in America because of these divorce laws.
Only in the late '60s, when California enacted a no-fault divorce law in 1969, did women's rights around this matter advance. This is why divorce "skyrocketed" in the 1970s. I want to be clear that I believe that no-fault divorce should power all genders of spouses, but relating to the Women's Empowerment movement of the 1970s, this was absolutely key to women starting to rebuild their lives away from being daddy's little girl who was transferred like property to becoming Mrs. John Smith. This is one of a few key moments in American history that allowed women the opportunities to eventually become CEOs, Supreme Court Justices, congresspeople, and homemakers.
Though people tend to focus heavily on divorce rates as a metric of failure of a relationship (or failure of "family values"), the reality is that women in today's era are technically better positioned to willingly enter into marriage knowing there are legal mechanisms in place should that marriage turn sour. If women understood that by entering into a marriage, there would be an almost impossible chance to escape it if something arose, then I think we will see many more educated women never accepting marriage at all for themselves. Educated women were already less likely to marry as young as uneducated women. The most vulnerable population affected are uneducated women who marry young to conservative spouses and are manipulated into (or socialized into valuing) being homemakers.
Hence even though there are common sense elements in this legislation coming out of Florida, there are very real harms that will come out of this 20 years from now that impact conservative women getting married in 2024. I also worry about the larger "give them an inch, and they invade Poland" posture of the Republican party as this alimony law could eventually lead to an erosion of no-fault divorce laws, as well.
This same article was posted on another magazine, so I'm reposting my comments from that thread here in response to comments left by @Retix@cassetti and @amberprince
Please know that the Venn diagram between me and DeSantis is razor thin, and the only thing (I think) we have in common is that we are carbon-based life forms. I also see some common sense items in what was described in the article, but I have my larger misgivings, which I'll explain much further below.
Why alimony is important and necessary
Here's why alimony is important for the rest of an ex-spouse's life. I want to be clear that I believe a spouse of any gender should have access to alimony, but the most traditional situation is a woman who forfeited having a career outside of the home to be a mother and homemaker, while a man furthered his career for - let's just say - a long enough time that once the divorce occurs, it's too late for the woman to reasonably start a career and expect to rise to the same level the man is at in his career at time of divorce. Let's use an arbitrary number like 20 years for my example. Let's assume these two people met and married no later than 25 years old for the sake of my example, as well. Alimony is not relevant for couples married for very short periods (less than 5 years), nor is it relevant if both spouses worked full-time jobs.
So in my example here, both people are about 40-45 years old. Retirement age is going to vary by industry, but roughly let's say 65 years old. By this point, the man has paid into either a 401k, pension, a Roth IRA, or some other retirement financial tool for 20+ years as well as a federal retirement program, usually Social Security. One of the stipulations of paying into these financial tools is that you have to have a job in which you're submitting W-2/I-9 documentation. A stipulation of receiving the money you paid into Social Security in specific, is that you have to make enough dollar-amount SS contributions that amount to a little more than 10 years of working a W-2/I-9 kind of job/career. And to boot, the amount of SS you get paid after retiring is based on your highest earning 35 years of your lifetime of work.
So when a woman has skipped college, not worked outside the home, hasn't gained job skills, etc. etc. for 20 years, she is now coming back to the job market with zero tools and equipment to get into a career (though obviously could enter the workforce through a paycheck-to-paycheck poverty wages kind of job), has no Social Security credits for a retirement that is just about as far away for her as it is for her ex-spouse, and has no savings or other financial resources because she was a homemaker and didn't earn money as her compensation for her labor. She is also now going into new situations at a time in life in which we have all lost neuroplasticity and may find it difficult to learn new things or go back to college. And we should also be realistic about the subtle/legal ways in which older people are discriminated against in the hiring process.
This is why alimony exists. It helps to make up for the opportunity-cost in an adult's older career years and for lack of retirement security. When the members of the First Wives Association and other ex-spouses seek lifetime alimony, it's because they either will never have access to their own Social Security benefits, or will have access to extremely scant benefits whenever they do retire.
I have sent a DM to @ernest to ask we be added to the mod team here. I checked out all of your profiles and it's clear that you all make positive contributions to a variety of communities with both engaging comments and thread submissions based on reputation scores. It's also clear that none of us are political die-hards and we are multi-faceted users. If @ernest is open to it and we establish the mod team, we can coordinate between ourselves later. I'll DM each of you with that info when it's time to cross that bridge.
@Grumps If we move up as mods, can you be a very dedicated community member and report bad faith commenters and rage-bait threads whenever you see them? And help communicate in other threads in !politics that we will be responsive to new reports made to the moderators?
I used to live in a house with a lot of drifters. There was a young woman (24 years old) that I roomed with who, when she would go out for the day and I would say, "Have a great day!" she would snarl back, "Don't tell me what to do!"
I see a lot of alignment in your threads and comments with the things I care about, so please hear this feedback as coming from someone siding with you.
You may want to start using phrases like "darker complexions" instead of "coloured skin," the latter phrase referencing an outdated term of "coloreds" or "colored people" for what we now would call "people of color."
