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 hate to talk like a law student but that’s sort of the system we already have. When a person certifies that they have read a contract (such as terms and conditions), it does actually mean something. No one would want to do business if anyone could be released from a contract just because they were lying about whether they agreed to be bound by it.

You might be able to think of it like the safety presentation that happens before takeoff on every commercial flight in the US. If you look around at that time, very few people are ever paying attention to the video or flight attendant. Why is that, if everyone is supposed to be concerned about their own safety? Maybe they think this presentation will be the same as all the others, so they can safely ignore it. Does that make it the airline’s fault if a person doesn’t know where the emergency exits are when something does happen? No, the typical intuition - and a relatively necessary assumption on the airline’s part - is that each person is responsible for knowing the information given to them in that presentation.

Similarly, it does not necessarily change much if a person has to check off multiple boxes instead of just one, or if they have to wait a few minutes before they can sign off, etc. People will tune out whatever they want to tune out, but we can’t have a workable system if that’s what absolves them of responsibility.

--That being said, US contract law does take this to some extremes that should be carved out as unacceptable exceptions to the rule. The case of Carnival Cruise Lines, Inc. v. Shute comes to mind where passengers were bound by terms printed on the back of a cruise ticket that they only received after they already paid for it.

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.’

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?)

Lmao imagine getting referred to a doctor for surgery, you look them up, and their professional webpage is like. “i wen’t 2 harverd”

Before I left, I remember it being really bad. People were abusing therapyspeak without any regard for what the terms actually mean. Like, “my bf keeps violating my boundaries by not buying me gifts,” “NTA your mom is parentifying you by asking you to clean the dishes,” “divorce your wife of 7 years because she neglects you by asking for an hour alone every day.”

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’m confused maybe. I’ve heard of gas stoves, but how does a gas oven work?

When a console game finally releases a PC port and the title screen still says “Press Start,” you know the keys are going to be completely unhinged like, “I” to open your inventory. “C” is yes, and “V” is no, except in the escape menu, where “Enter” is yes and “Backspace” is extra-yes. Left-click to either attack or walk forward, depending on how your character is feeling.

A sizable portion of the population would convince themselves that the sky is green, if that was their party’s official position.

And a sizable portion of politicians, of a certain moral character, would take the official position that the sky is green if someone paid them enough.

On an unrelated note, I wonder which party is heavily sponsored by the oil and gas industry?

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.

Sure you can!

…Just not one that pays enough for you to afford basic necessities like food and shelter.

Libs: Owned. (/s)