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What Americans in a 1998 poll expected to happen by the year 2025 (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/mildlyinteresting@lemmy.world
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[–] 26 points 10 months ago (13 children)

I never would have expected in 1998 just how many of these would come to pass, how close we are on AIDs and Cancer, and that we still would not have elected a woman president

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  • [–] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    how close we are on AIDs

    I mean, technically we DO have cure right now for HIV. Only 7 (maybe 8) people have had it though because the cure is worse than the disease. These folks only got the cure because they were trying to cure something worse and curing their HIV infection was just a bonus.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah, that's what I mean. AIDs felt insurmountable as a disease when I was younger. You mean its an illness that just fucks up your immune system so bad almost everything can kill you?, but these days we have PREP and drugs that can push you into Untransmissable territory, which is a stunning achievement. It went from 'I don't know if there will ever be an answer' to 'the answer feels like it's just around the corner' in 27 years

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago

    In the years before PREP and just had the triple cocktail, I had a friend that worked in operating rooms doing liver transplants. She talked about the damage Hepatitis does to a liver (and how we simply have no way to live without a healthy liver besides transplant). She told me she'd much rather have HIV than Hepatitis.

    And to your point, now we're even have PREP. So something that was seen as a growing pandemic level death sentence is now a manageable and affordable routine. This is the wonderful power of modern medicine.

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  • [–] 12 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Not having a woman president, I blame the wife of the man that Trump blew.

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  • [–] 10 points 10 months ago

    Yeah, she really did blow it. It felt like her entry into the race convinced women I would have much preferred as candidates not to enter. A lot of people don't share my feelings about Warren in the 2020 election (mostly that her alleged betrayal is overblown, and that I thought she was the best fit as a compromise candidate between progressives and centrists), but she didn't enter in 2016 and neither did several other high profile women, I think probably because of behind the scenes pressure from Clinton's people in the DNC. Hell even Kamala Harris should have been in the primary in 2016. I don't like or think either her or Warren are good people to be clear, but they're each better than Trump or Hillary and maybe if Kamala had actually run in the 2016 primary she wouldn't have been so bad at it by the time she was up in 2024.

    Hillary's power in the party and intimidating name recognition robbed us of a term's worth of qualified candidates, many of them women, who didn't want to publically go against her.

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  • [–] 11 points 10 months ago* (7 children)

    I mean, the issue with the female president thing is that people keep pushing too hard for it. At this point we've had multiple female vice presidential candidates, multiple female presidential candidates, and a female vice president. The Dems had a big influx of female congresspeople in the last few years, and some of the most prominant GOP voices are women. While there are still non-negligible barriers to women assuming leadership roles, there are certainly fewer than there used to be, and there is no obvious reason why a woman couldnt be president. Which is essentially what a reasonable person would want - a woman should be president because there are no female specific barriers for entering the role, and then via a normal statistical distribution, eventually one will be elected.

    The problem is that the two female presidential candidates we've had have been bad candidates. They were establishment politicians running in an anti-establishment climate, where the Democratic party was hoping that the identity politics of running a female candidate would outweigh the unpopularity of the candidates themselves. And then when they inevitably lose, their boosters cry misogyny rather than recognizing that they simply ran a bad candidate.

    We can contrast the Harris and Clinton campaigns with the Obama campaign. Obama had a popular (if fluffy) message and was a legitimately charismatic and appealing candidate from outside the party establishment. His campaign was "Hope and Change", not "Look, he's black! Everyone vote for him or you're racist!" But the overemphasis on Clinton and Harris' sex was actively off-putting to voters. Everyone can implicitly tell if you are get votes from identity politics, and they don't like it.

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  • [–] 15 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    And then when they inevitably lose, their boosters cry misogyny rather than recognizing that they simply ran a bad candidate.

    That the thing - those two aren't mutually exclusive. Harris's platform was flimsy and constructed out of bullshit. But if she instead had been a white male, it's very possible trump would have lost. His platform was ALSO flimsy and constructed out of shit.

    One day we may very well achieve actual equality. But today, a woman of mixed ethnicity has more barriers to overcome than a loud rich old white man.

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago

    I don't think so, I believe Biden is the real reason Harris lost. She had too much ground to make up for Biden's stubbornness to realize he was a weak candidate. Trump's entire strategy was based on how weak Biden was and the party turning against him in the 11th hour only reinforced Trump's claims. Kamala was doomed from the start, I believe she could have won if she had taken the lead from the start of the race. She wouldn't have been my first or even my second but I still think she could have won if Trump didn't have a head start and Dems taking so long to pull their heads out of their asses.

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago

    if she instead had been a white male

    I feel like the most obvious counterfactual here would be if Biden had kept his faculties and run for a second term - an establishment politician running for business as usual. And I don't think he would have won. His presidency had left people disillusioned with him and seeking something new, and more of the same - regardless of the wrapper - was going to lose. Not to say that a woman of color doesn't face more barriers than a white man - but I don't think those barriers were the determining factor in Harris' loss.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (1 child)

    But if she instead had been a white male, it's very possible trump would have lost.

    You mean a white male like Biden who was in the race before her but dropped out because he was doing so badly?

    I always find this argument weird because the people making it typically argue that "America is too sexist to elect a woman" but then go on to infantalize women by claiming that they don't win because they're women. It's never about their campaign, their choices, or their performance like you would talk about if a man had lost. They're always boiled down to one thing and that thing is a "helpless woman."

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    Admittedly, I hang out with good people not shit-heads, but I don't know anyone who'd hesitate to vote for a woman because she's a woman. Give us someone worth voting for, and you'll have our votes.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

    I wouldn't say people are pushing too hard for it, or that people are saying look she's a women vote for her or you're sexist. At least, I don't think that was really the pitch before the election. 'Its her turn' was a blunder but at least the pitch I got from the campaign was largely 'Do you want Trump answering the warroom in the middle of the night or seasoned diplomat Hillary' with a side of 'Obama's recovery was great, just look at the stocks'. I do agree about the two primary winners we have had though, they were not it. To avoid repeating myself too much here since I went into it in another comment, I think Hillary's outsized party influence also fucked us by not giving us as full a complement of primary challengers as we should have had, and odds are one or more of them would be a woman who doesn't have to dig herself out of decades of Washington insider dislike

    Edit: typos and styling

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