I found this posted on Reddit; it makes my skin crawl.
I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Let’s start with the good news: this whole thing might be satirical, written as a warning or a joke.
The bad news? It’s far more likely a sincere proposal , written by someone who is eagerly waiting for all this to happen to in real life — and who may even put in some effort to push us down this slippery slope, hoping to bend the arc of the moral universe towards injustice. There are certainly more than a few people out there hoping that something like this will happen. Why wouldn’t one of them put it down in writing?
Regardless, we need to make sure that none of this comes to pass.
H/T — This was posted without attribution in r/NotHowGirlsWork; I was unable to track down its origin.
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The concerning thing is, whilst his enthusiasm is to be decried, the scenario he describes is far from implausible.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/23/roe-v-wade-abortion-laurence-tribe
After reading that, I need brain bleach.
I agree with David. This COULD be an attempt at satire, but it’s all too easy to believe it’s sincere.
I just watched Our Father on Netflix – about a fertility Dr who used his own sperm for 94 and counting patients. He used his own sperm even when he had the women’s partner’s sperm. All these half siblings live in the same area and worry about their own kids dating or marrying a relative because there are so many. Ugh.
It’s a documentary, not fiction.
It’s terrifying that I can’t tell if this is satire.
And I just don’t understand how someone can have such an inflated sense of importance that they actually believe that they deserve to subjugate half of the world’s population.
I prefer when people go mask off. Perhaps this is an acquiescence to cynicism against my usual optimism, but frankly, I have long stopped thinking that the kind of person who remains inveterately committed to restricting abortion even after it is pointed out to them that it doesn’t work and that all that does is harm women without actually protecting the unborn is actually acting in good faith. For many, they really are just enemies on the other side of an unbridgeable divide that can only be closed when they lose absolutely and utterly. I’d rather have this kind of frankness.
@bumblebug:
It’s terrifying that I can’t tell if this is satire.
Does it matter? Fascism has been increasingly been goose-stepping in to the strains of a laugh track. (Nor will it be long before they decide that, oh, that pesky 13th Amendment needs to go, too.)
With soaring house prices, healthcare costs, college tuition, and inflation, very few households can afford to get by on one income anymore. There’s also a worker shortage. How exactly do they think pulling women out of the workforce is going to be feasible?
But then I remember that those in favor of stripping women of personhood very much want everyone sick, uneducated, and living in Potterville. Everyone except themselves, of course.
In the late 1980s, I worked at an abortion clinic for three years, and volunteered for a year before that. Believe me, this sentiment was VERY COMMON amongst forced-birthers and other misogynists even before then. This OP may well be sincere.
While punishment of women is obviously a major goal for the people who sincerely believe this, another main motivation is they think that in this kind of society they’d definitely get a hot girlfriend and be able to tie them to miserable matrimony for life. But seeing as men have been raging about not being able to get a girlfriend for centuries, I suspect this is not true.
Yeah, it’s not satire. Even when people like this think they’re being ironic, they’re not. The Trump years proved that pretty well.
OT: 14 dead kids and one dead teacher at a Texas elementary school:
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/24/1101037902/texas-elementary-school-shooting-uvalde
But outlawing abortion is the bigger moral battle worth fighting. /s
@Redsilkphoenix
And our useless excuse of a governor has called it “incomprehensible,” even though he’s signed some of the most generous gun laws.
“Open carry” is legal in Texas, but you better not be carrying a dildo on a UT campus.
(I’m not joking.)
@Redsilk: I was a bit surprised the cops shot this gunman– then I saw his name.
Three guesses why and the first two don’t count. 🤬
If I’m ever disenfranchised due to my sex, I don’t see why I should bother taking any laws seriously. After all, I wouldn’t have any say in them, in the first place.
Texas mass shooting – and here we go again. How depraved can a human being be, to shoot elementary school children?
Years ago, I watched a documentary about the US occupation of Japan after World War 2. It talked about how the US drew up, I guess it would be called, a new Japanese constitution. A woman in the DoD worked on drafting a document laying out women’s rights. She said she was starting more or less from scratch; women had practically no rights under Japanese law. She ran into predictable opposition from Japanese men. The men said this wasn’t compatible with Japanese culture. I guess they were happy with the status quo, for obvious reasons.
This is the stated goal of the Russian Orthodox church… They are calling for the ending education of girls.
The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t a how-to guide, champ.
It’s a little on the nose, but I don’t put anything past the creeps out there.
@Dormousing_it: What was the outcome of that constitutional redrawing in Japan?
@Lisa Mullin: Seriously? The Russian Orthodox Church is now Boko Haram North?
OT: are there any Windoze experts here who might tell me what is launching “hxtsr.exe” at random times? On several occasions I’ve had my entire machine get very slow and wonky for a while — usually right after I returned from leaving it unattended — and diagnostics indicated heavy memory usage by this thing (and by Memory Compression, but I assume in service of hxtsr’s usage) that was causing other stuff to get paged out. The hxtsr process was started by a servicehost and, I suspect, by the Background Tasks Infrastructure Broker service specifically. Research indicates it to be an MSOffice/Outlook component involved in Outlook checking for new mail, or something like that — which means I do not need it, as I use a different mail client. I never set up any mail account information in Outlook on this machine so I’m not even sure why hxtsr is running or what it is doing that is consuming so much memory when it does.
I looked in Task Scheduler but none of the tasks listed in the MSOffice section run hxtsr and, remarkably, there doesn’t seem to be any way to search the whole thing for “hxtsr” either. I did check the startup items and disabled everything MSOffice-related, and have had at least one reboot since then, but that hasn’t stopped it from usurping my computer from time to time. And when it does it takes five to ten minutes before Firefox, in particular, is usable again. Firefox (and browsers in general) seem to be very sensitive to memory pressure on a system for some reason.
So: Where is the launch of hxtsr being controlled from and how can I disable it? (Short of going the cut-the-Gordian-knot approach and just deleting the binary from the disk — with who knows what side effects if the thing that launches it hasn’t been told not to try anymore. Which might be anything from silently adding failure messages in Event Viewer through annoying popup error messages all the way to BSODs. And the likelihood that the next time Windoze Update is allowed to do its thing it will ever-so-helpfully download a replacement hxtsr.exe file for me.)
@ dormousing_it & surplus
Coincidentally, I’ve been giving some thought on how to reform the Japanese parliament.
Aww.
@Surplus to Requirements:. I don’t know what the outcome was. Like I said, I saw it in a documentary about the US occupation of Japan after WW2.
It was an old documentary, because they interviewed the woman who wrote up the women’s rights stuff, who I’m sure has been dead for a long time now. She had tears in her eyes, when she described Japanese women as having next to no rights.
Alan – Excellent pun. Something only a vegan legal nerd could either make.
@ lumipuna
Not gonna lie. Been waiting for an opportunity to drop that one in ever since David updated the comments policy.