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?

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?

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.’

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.

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.

Unfortunate. We’re the boiling frog fable all over again.

“… over the next century,” continues the article after the catchy headline.

Not that people dying is a good thing, but I was kind of hoping they’d be people alive right now. If 1/8th of the world treated climate change like it was personally going to kill them, we might still have a chance of turning things around. (As a bonus, can oil giants really keep their execs safe from 1 in 8 highly motivated people?)

Umm the actual court order the article refers to is super generous to the plaintiffs lol. Whoever’s representing them made such basic mistakes that I’m not even sure how they passed the bar exam:

The Plaintiffs’ first cause of action lists–in a single paragraph that spans four pages–fifty
different state (and DC) consumer-protection statutes.

(This is a no-no in every federal court in every state.)

In either event, the Plaintiffs concede that they’ve failed to meet the requirements of Mississippi and Ohio law–even as they ask us not to dismiss those claims.

(Wtf? lol)

we agree with Burger King that a reasonable person wouldn’t have interpreted Burger King’s TV and online ads as binding offers.

(This is well-settled law and taught to most first-year law students.)

Dreams are at least somewhat influenced by your recent thoughts and experiences. For example, many studies found that people dreamed more about disease and confinement during the pandemic (here’s a medical journal article about it). You probably have a higher chance of influencing the subject of your dreams if you focus on the desired subject enough during the day.

I followed the link you used:

These standards generally reflect a social definition of race and ethnicity recognized in this country, and they do not conform to any biological, anthropological, or genetic criteria. . . . Persons who report themselves as Hispanic can be of any race and are identified as such in our data tables.

I thought the OP was ridiculous but apparently, if they genuinely identify with the culture then she might technically be correct.

I feel like at this point, accurately reporting the state of the world counts as ‘Democratic scaremongering.’ Climate change is making the world less habitable. The coronavirus is capable of killing you. Some people will die as a direct result of the current forced-birth laws. It’s possible to have a functioning society without racism and sexism. For some reason, these facts are all “political” and it’s not the Democrats who are contesting them.

It could still theoretically be that our reality is some kind of entertainment. For example, people enjoy playing The Sims. There are still active communities for the older versions even though there are newer, more engaging games out there. And more generally, some people prefer old games even though their computers have like 1000x the processing power needed to run it.

If the reality we experience is a simulation, it could be for similar motivations, the hardware would be sophisticated but still a user will run whatever they prefer on it.