catreadingabook

I’m against forced birth, but have to point out that there is the argument, whether realistic or not, that the parent can always give the baby to the foster care system once it’s born, so their obligation would be limited to 9 months total.

Personally what I take issue with is the inconsistency of forced-birth laws in the absence of comparable forced-labor laws. In a world of ideal policy, maybe we as a society might agree that a person should be obligated to sacrifice their time and health for the sake of preserving or creating human life. But then it shouldn’t be applied only to adult women who had consensual sex. Why shouldn’t non-pregnant people be forced to tend a farm for 9 months to produce food for those who are starving, or to spend 9 months working 80-hour weeks at an emergency call center with no pay?

I suspect the answer is that the rights themselves are not the issue here, but rather the motivation to punish women who have consensual sex.

In the academic sense of the term, negative rights include the right to not have things done to you (e.g., to not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law).

Positive rights include the right for you to do something, generally as against others (e.g., the right to have food, healthcare, or education be provided to you by other people).

I’m not sure it is useful to try to categorize abortion rights, for similar reasons why it would be difficult to categorize the right to try and grab the only parachute on a crashing plane. Even if it causes injury or death to others, our general tendency is to treat positive acts of genuine self-preservation as a negative right, if only in the sense that we would never enforce a rule that prohibits the person from trying.

A funky brain teaser on the topic might be whose right of life prevails when a perfectly healthy person turns out to be the only match for 5 patients with failing organs, one needing a new heart, another needing a new intact liver, etc., who are each about to die if we don’t kill the healthy person and harvest their organs for transplant. And would the answer change if this wouldn’t kill the healthy person, but severely decrease their quality of life - such as involuntarily taking one of their lungs and one of their kidneys?

I’d imagine it’s the things that still kinda make it as headlines today, but don’t get much coverage anymore because everyone is used to it by now.

“By the way, this weekend’s mass shootings led to 10 deaths and 29 injuries total, a little more than last week. Parents, remember to bundle up your kids this fall semester with the latest BulletBlocker Youth Jacket, 10% off if you order today! Now back to the news you actually wanted to hear about: the former U.S. President allegedly commits even more crimes…”

(TOS spoiler for one episode)

Just in case any lurkers are still wondering: I think - but don’t remember 100% - the guy everyone’s calling Kevin was some random crew member in TOS who took over the ship’s control room and started trolling the ship’s PA system, until the main characters managed to break into the room and subdue him.

The episode gave him an unreasonably long monologue with the PA system, during which he sang an entire song (“I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen”). It’s also a little weird that this one crew member can take over the entire ship even though he’s some average joe who we don’t really see again.

No idea where the memes about him started though.

🎶 oh, I can so just sit here and cry 🎶

but fr what worked well for me was blocking, deleting, getting rid of (or stuffing into a rarely used closet) anything that reminded me of them, then distracting myself 24/7 long enough to later process my emotions with a little bit of distance from the event itself - not to block out the feelings but to just avoid ruminating on them.

Mostly the point was buying time to provide my monkey brain with hard proof that I can survive without that person, that way it stops shooting me up with the Bad Chemicals every time I think of them.

I think it has to be somewhere in between. This ‘real deal’ theory doesn’t explain the popularity of hentai, but at the same time, OnlyFans shows that some people reaaallly care about the personal element. I would bet niche kinks (especially those ‘illegal to make but legal to watch’?) will lean heavily on AI for content, but the rest will probably change based on our culture’s attitude toward AI in general.

Politicians don’t care (enough to make a meaningful change) as long as most people still vote for them.

Corporations don’t care as long as most people still buy their stuff.

Most people don’t care as long as their own personal choices won’t solve the problem.

Guess we can try again in another 60 million years or so?

I’d like to enact a new law that says you’re allowed to walk past someone even if it means invading their personal space a little bit. Like it’s ok buddy, you actually don’t need to run 359 degrees around me just because I am standing near a corner.

I’ve just finished the game on normal difficulty after about 90 hours, probably because it was a ‘blind’ playthrough so I managed to just never encounter more than the first 5 companions.

Have to say the ending was stylistically great but very WTF in terms of closure, even after the patches to extend the epilogue. It feels a lot like the Mass Effect 3 ending before they added the director’s cut. And even then, the ROs are a lil buggy in terms of contradicting your previous conversations.

Everything leading up to that was really fun though. Maybe the real treasure was the magical artifacts we stole along the way.

Most people in first world countries will probably understand ‘L’ and ‘R’ anyway. But hypothetically, the problem could probably be solved by adding another letter, the same way we know that ‘T’ is for ‘Tuesday’ and ‘Th’ is for ‘Thursday.’

It’s a parody of an ancient meme (knowyourmeme link) where in the original, the rant above is instead “That’s my world without you bro.”

Also not that it justifies the pay disparity but do people really think there is zero labor involved in management? Cause even then, it comes with a crapton of liability risk under respondeat superior. Not sure everyone wants to be personally sued for every negligent mistake their coworkers make.

Casualties… 8 crew members subpoenaed, 15 sent to mandatory arbitration. Let’s not let their sacrifices be in vain. Ready the counterclaims. Prepare to file!

Yeah I was scratching my head at this one. Cop had better have a really good reason here because otherwise, have fun getting Section 1983’d. I am not sure qualified immunity would apply against the right to peacefully assemble, unless either there was reasonably a threat of danger, or some legal authority made the assembly or its actions illegal (e.g. no one allowed on school campuses after 9pm, a citywide noise ordinance on weekdays, etc).

• am not a licensed lawyer and this is neither advice nor guaranteed correct analysis… just in case.

Advice against phishing emails can be reduced to, “1: Never click on a link, call a phone number, download an attachment, or follow instructions you found in an email unless you were already expecting this exact email from this exact sender. 2: If you really want to do those things, search up the organization’s website directly and use the contact info they provide there instead.”

imo it’s the ad-hungry articles stretching everything into 10+ pages that’s making advice so inaccessible to people. Super annoying because it dilutes the real, simple message that’s already there, it’s just locked behind an adwall.

That’s actually hilarious. The legal consequence of not thinking about anyone other than himself.

Wait, why? Not to complain, but it’s essentially law that when federal courts have jurisdiction, a civil case may be ‘removed’ from state court and into federal (district) court upon the defendant’s request – and it seems pretty clear that federal courts have jurisdiction over civil cases arising under the Constitution. I guess the court technically has discretion in some cases, but that’s pretty surprising.

Completely speculating btw:

Separate complaints are generally addressed separately, even within the same suit. It’s unlikely one could have “tanked” the other.

I briefly looked over the original federal complaint vs desantis and the original state law countersuit vs the oversight district. The complaints in the other suit do point to different laws.

Since we all know these cases are going to get appealed no matter what, it’s entirely possible Disney could be trying to entice the Supreme Court into taking on the federal case down the line by whittling it down to just one issue (free speech). Single issue cases revolving around constitutional arguments are like crack to the Supreme Court, they love to take these so that they can announce new rules or reasoning before applying it to the case (which they get to do when “”“interpreting”“” the Constitution).

Disney might suspect that the current Justices are drooling at the possibility of ruling expansively in favor of free speech.

It isn’t commercial labor when an adult does their own chores (I think), as it’s more related to the people in a household maintaining their own home. It likely wouldn’t be labor for a child for the same reasons, though I’m not sure.

But it could start to look like labor when it’s something that produces commercial value, for example, it’s more like a ‘chore’ to water the vegetable garden in the backyard, but it’s more like ‘labor’ to tend to 20 acres of farmland.

Excessive chores, though, could be prevented under child abuse law rather than child labor law, depending on how it’s enforced. Doing all the household work voluntarily for no reason other than it’s fun? Almost certainly legal. No video games until you clean the dishes? Probably legal. No food until you sweep, mop, dust, and shine every surface in the house? Probably abuse.

Without taking a stance myself - I doubt anyone disagrees with the principle, but rather on the implementation. How do we know who’s responsible enough; can we write a law that accounts for:

• A 50-year-old woman who committed robbery in a moment of desperation as a 16-year-old and has since shown remorse, attended therapy, and held a stable job,

• A 40-year-old businessman who’s never been convicted of anything, seemed okay when he saw a therapist once last year, but privately he gets into vicious screaming matches with his wife and has really inappropriate temper tantrums when he’s drunk, and

• A 21-year-old college graduate who seems smart and stable enough, but their social media page is full of harsh criticisms of the government, projections of what would happen if various officials were theoretically assassinated, and more than a few references to “hoping for another civil war”?

While balancing that with the idea that the government isn’t supposed to protect something as a “right” while also preemptively taking that right away from people they think might be dangerous, if they can’t point to highly credible evidence. (Otherwise, it becomes possible to arrest people for ‘thought crimes.’)

Idk the solution personally. Seems impossible to balance unless gun access legally becomes a privilege to qualify for, rather than a right to be restricted from. But that would put the power into states’ hands, and then states would have the power to decide that no one can have guns except the police.

?? We don’t disagree on this.