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The war on reproductive rights continues apace. Republicans are trying to roll back abortion rights with a potential federal ban on the abortion pill mifepristone.
While the religious aspect of the anti-abortion movement is pretty evident, new research uncovers the secret sauce: white supremacy and male supremacy. In an essay in Salon, Lehigh University political science professor Anthony DiMaggio explains his research and its conclusions. Conducting a survey of more than a thousand Americans in association with the Marcon Institute for the study of racial and social justice at Lehigh University, DiMaggio discovered that
more than a third of Trump’s followers embrace white supremacist values, and link them explicitly to their anti-abortion views. … What’s even more disturbing is the finding that an even larger number of Americans are susceptible to “men’s rights” ideology, and that such values are linked to the racialized ways that people look at abortion.
The study, among other things, looked at reactions to the following statements:
- “Sometimes a man may need to use violence if they feel it is necessary to get respect.”
- “In a marriage, women should obey their husbands.”
- “It is unnatural to identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.”
- “It is unnatural to identify as transgender.”
Disturbingly, DiMaggio notes,
Forty-one percent of respondents agreed in the Marcon survey with at least one of the four values, while 28 percent agreed with at least two or more, and 11 percent agreed with three or more. These are not insignificant numbers. These values are also tied to susceptibility to the men’s rights movement’s values and opinions regarding white supremacy and abortion.
Using statistical regression, he found that
Susceptibility to the reactionary heteronormative values that drive the men’s rights movement is a significant predictor of white nationalist-friendly views of abortion.
In short, the study found that support for the Roe v Wade-ending Dobbs ruling on the pro-Trump right isn’t just about the so-called right to life; it’s about controlling women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color. None of this is surprising, but it is good to see this analysis backed by research.
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There are 34 of those felonies, so if he’s found guilty of them all, gets the max for each one, and the judge decides the sentences are to run consecutively, that’s 136 years. Enough for them to throw away the key.
Meanwhile, I’m not noticing any advice or information I can act upon regarding the plot afoot against me. People are planning to subject me to conditions that I find intolerable, potentially for hours, and their chosen pretext isn’t even any choice or action of mine. This is obviously immoral and probably illegal. What is my recourse here? What words can I speak into which ear (or telephone number) to escape from this?
@ surplus
Yeah. Although a lot of those charges are ‘included’ or otherwise alternative offences. So I’m not sure he can be convicted of all of them. Although NY law might be different there.
But for example, there are charges of false accounting (the misdemeanours) and charges of false accounting in furtherance or concealment of another offence (the felonies). But each pair of those can arise out of the same transaction.
So for example, if the can prove a false entry it’s the first one. But if they show it was to fiddle election expenses then that could be the felony. Ober here if they fond the more serous offence then they don’t return a verdict on the lesser ‘included’ offence.
But if his defence was “I didn’t want the Mrs to find out” then it wouldn’t be the felony so just a conviction of the lesser offence.
And of course there’s the ‘totality’ principle. Some states do use consecutive sentencing; but in NY they tend to go concurrent unless the offences are separate and additional courses of conduct. Say for example an offence, and then an attempt to cover up the offence. So that could come into play; although it’s sort of taken into account anyway by having the two charges with different penalties.
Yeah, the results are not a surprise. Not all of those views necessarily go together, but there’s a shared thread of retaining hierarchies, especially of real or perceived traditions. And being unwilling to see why they’re unfair.
@Surplus – Ugh, yes. We’re supposed to have freezing rain in Montreal too. But is the city threatening to turn off people’s power preemptively to reduce pressure on the grid, or just warning that there may be power outages? The second would seem different than the first to me. Either way, not fun. I have to go to work in person tomorrow, no way around that, so I hope it’s not as bad as forecasted.
I don’t see that there’s any sort of distinction there. Either way, I am threatened with all of the following:
Now, will someone either post proof that I am deserving of all of these things or else tell me how the fuck to avoid it!
(Trick question. The former cannot possibly happen, because the Geneva Convention considers solitary confinement to be a form of torture and a violation of fundamental human rights. Ergo, no one, under any circumstances, no matter what their alleged crime, can deserve it. And I demand, on that basis, a “get out of solitary free” card, in whatever form that may actually take.)
@Surplus to Requirements: If it’s only a few hours at most, your food will probably be fine, just don’t open the freezer and barely open the fridge. Maybe temporarily turn down the fridge’s thermostat in advance if there’s any food you’re particularly concerned about. I experience power outages maybe once a year on the average, and when it’s relatively short, I haven’t had any noticeable issues with that. If you’re really paranoid about losing stuff, water’s a great insulator, you could always try putting things in a watertight container and submerging the container in water, that’s how a lot of cultures kept things cool before refrigerators.
More generally, is it fair that you are suffering from chronic physical and mental and isolation issues which make even a power outage intolerable? Of course not. Is it fair that Donald Trump lived most of his life in opulence, instead of dying young in a meth lab explosion? Some might say no. The universe does not care about “fair”. The universe is incapable of caring about anything. It also isn’t after you, or anyone, in particular. If enough good things or bad things happen to someone, it tends to snowball, regardless of any concept of fairness or deserving or justice.
That might sound like fatalism or defeatism, but you know what? The universe doesn’t understand or care about those things either. Humans can grab the universe by the throat and force it to behave more like our ideas of fairness. You have electricity at all because countless people made it possible. You have the internet for the same reason. Same for nearly everything else in your life. Note, however, I only said “more like” not “exactly like”. There’s still lifetimes to go to get to that point, and it really doesn’t help that so many people are still like “but the unworthy must suffer!” whenever we try to raise the baseline.
I know that this doesn’t help with your current situation, but you need to get it hammered in your head that it’s not about you. At all. Whether it’s a planned outage (in order to avoid a worse outage later) or a warning about a possible future outage due to weather damage, at least someone told you. That’s more than I ever get.
(Also re-read the part about food at the top if you got mad at me and forgot about it)
@Surplus – I mean the distinction would be if the power was turned off on purpose or it went off by accident because of some disruption to the system. If it’s by accident, saying “There might be power outages” is a warning, but not a threat.
And it wouldn’t be directed at you in particular because power outages affect multiple people. Think about it, if there’s freezing rain across Ontario and Quebec, and there are several downed power lines in different areas, that’s a bunch of people’s apartments and houses that go without power. It’s not specific to you and where you live.
Granted, it’s not your fault about bad weather or global warming. No more than most other people, oil execs and the like not counted here. Anyway, I’m sorry if I’m taking you too literally and you’re just being rhetorical. I don’t always get people’s humour (Kat can attest; I forget what it was, but I remember taking one of her posts way too literally and not getting the joke).
“A warning, but not a threat” presumes good faith. I don’t think these things that keep happening to me are doing so in good faith. I’ve spent a lifetime being bullied and harassed, both by so-called peers and by the so-called authority figures who are supposed to be neutral referees on the playing field, enough to know when I’m being set up to take some sort of a fall. And this smells like I’m being set up.
It’s begun, by the way. The weather here is now going haywire. There was even what looked and sounded like a lightning strike, and a damned close one. Just the one, in isolation. I don’t know how long I have before “they” pull the plug but I’m guessing not long. 🙁
@Surplus It seems to me you need not continous electricity supply but medical help.
Sigh. I try to be helpful and sympathetic to people like Surplus, those who have so many physical and mental and sometimes other issues which feed on themselves and make them feel so trapped and helpless in their situations that things getting even briefly worse feels like an absolute nightmare – my cousin’s like that, and she lived with me for awhile – but there’s only so much I can do, in part because I’ve never really been in a position to understand it. My baseline for “nightmarish catastrophe” due to my personal experience is “trapped for a week due to a volcanic ash storm, two of those days without power” and “three days with no power or heat during a blizzard”. Given that, just about any out-of-the-ordinary weather-related inconvenience seems like a mild annoyance in comparison.
I wouldn’t expect or desire anyone to experience things anywhere near that bad just to give them a sense of perspective, or worse, to “toughen them up”, because that is not at all conductive to making the world a better place, it just lowers the threshold of what is considered acceptable. But at the same time, people like Surplus do lack a sense of perspective, which does negatively impact their lives in small ways, and is an issue which is at least potentially easier to fix than “no more weather issues ever”. Which is why people have been trying to hammer that in for years – because as strangers on the internet, because there’s not much else we can do. Well, maybe buy some things Surplus desperately needs and have them delivered (and I did offer once, but was ignored) but that would be a pretty big ask, as a general thing.
@Surplus
Please don’t go down this road again. I can’t be dealing with this again. You were doing just fine before.
Well, it looks like the worst of it came down well to the east of here, in southern Quebec.
My adversary, ever the sore loser, miffed after having spent the day hoping I’d be forced to endure a prolonged outage, reached into my apartment and switched off my computer. Note: just the computer. The TV and everything else carried on. The power to the apartment wasn’t interrupted; just to the one device, and only briefly. There is no doubt it was a deliberate act of sabotage; acts of nature are not that precisely targeted.
The very fact of this bit of sore-loser kick-over-the-board-and-storm-off vandalism stands also as the proof of my suspicion that this whole affair was in bad faith from the get-go. And, as such a kick-over-the-board tantrum, it doesn’t even crack this adversary’s top ten. (The top one would be “somehow removing an entire product line from availability, worldwide, permanently” with the aim of forcing me to endure torturous leg cramps at-least-weekly — and still ending up failing at that aim. This adversary has the capabilities of a major nation-state actor, intelligence organization, or mafia, and the ambition and competence of a six-year-old schoolyard bully. I know, it’s baffling. The most logical explanation is that I’m the star of some version of The Truman Show, but with a rather more sadistic producer than the original had, though I’m willing to entertain any other explanation for events like these. Other than “it’s just bad luck”; multiple zillion-to-one-against “coincidences” equates to enemy action in my book. At least the asshole(s) also has the expected limitations, such as “inability to just magically break strong encryption”, so my internet is (apparently) unfiltered as long as I use https and my enemy is probably just a rich douche and not a Matrix-simulation-runner with the effective power of a god. Think a low-ambition, non-homicidal Joker with access to Bruce Wayne’s fortune and gadgets and that’s probably close to the mark. And since he hasn’t sent a gaggle of brownshirt goons around to smash my kneecaps, probably not a classic mafioso, or Donald Trump either. Elon Musk, perhaps.)
@Surplus
Please get help.
David and everyone, I’m sorry for derailing the discussion. I’d rather have Canadian weather than American Republicans right now.
That said, if I can vent…what the hell is this? Freezing rain, ice pellets and thunder all at once?? In April???
I lugged a bag full of craft supplies to work so I could go straight to the artisans meeting at 7 where there’d be a craft supply swap. I’m part of the committee, so I was expected to bring things, and I don’t have access to a car like a lot of the others…thus the lugging. At 5, I get a call that the meeting is cancelled because the power went out at the community centre, and I have to spread the news to the others. And then my boss figures, well, since I don’t have to leave early I may as well work late!! grrrr.
I still haven’t gotten home. I hope the 9:15 train is running.
@Surplus – Unfortunately, I don’t know what to say to help you with that; I also have paranoia as a part of anxiety, but mine is more in the vein of “This specific person is angry at/upset with me” (which most of the time turns out to be false). Or it’s the whole slippery-slope thing, where I think things like “If I don’t get food to eat now, I’m going to panic and die.” (I’m at the point where I recognize the problem is the anxiety, not necessarily the lack of immediate access to X thing – though I do try to keep food/water near me.)
So I’m not sure what to suggest in terms of mental strategies. Maybe tell your imagined opponent that you won’t let them take up so much of your thoughts? You could pretend it’s Elon Musk – tell him to fuck off and buy another Twitter or something 🙂 I know that’s easier said than done, and I know that won’t solve the physical/machine-related issues, but you deserve more peace.
@Surplus
You’re really not as important to “them” as you think you are.
Surplus
Sorry things are getting through your far too thin protective shields. Maybe try a bit of counting your blessings or gratitude exercises – I’m having a go now and then. Buuuut …
It’s a bit of a bummer when I’ve got pitiful mad, dementing daft old cows barrelling into my room at 2am with demands that I – yeah, me, the cripple who can’t get herself into or out of bed – do some undefined thing or other to help Her. Coupla days later she’s invited herself into my bathroom, and a couple of further days (which I’d used to move to the other end of the building) she marches into my new room and tries to swap my walker with hers. Great.
Funnily enough that’s been much more distressing/dismaying than the nearly a week I spent lying on the floor at home with no food or water or medication. That’s probably because I blamed myself for getting into that particular pickle. (Being fairly well out of it once I was dehydrated after 48hrs or so probly helped more than a little.)
If you can find a way to think or feel or kid yourself that you have some control of one or more aspects of the situation you might feel a bit less frayed or frazzled. Failing that, use your anxiety or worry to plan how you can better prepare for future events or incidents, similar or otherwise, little bits or whole picture overview. Whatever works.
I didn’t imagine my computer being somehow remotely turned off yesterday. And there’s no such thing as a power blackout so tiny it not only doesn’t hit an entire neighborhood or more, it doesn’t even hit an entire building, or an entire apartment, or an entire branch circuit, or even an entire single wall outlet — the WiFi router plugged into the same power bar seems to have been undisturbed.
That one single individual machine in a town of tens of thousands of people was the only thing affected proves not only that this was a human action and not an act of nature, but that I, specifically, was the target (else it would have been someone else’s machine).
I don’t think there can be much stronger proof that I am not imagining this ongoing harassment campaign.
What I’d like to know, besides “how do I stop this”, is “why me?” Why have I been singled out for this peculiar form of harassment?
And the timing strongly suggests that the storm was no accident either, but the responsible party clearly overestimated the degree to which they could precisely aim a large and chaotic system. (That someone can do that at all is itself disturbing. Sure, it doesn’t have the precision of a guided missile, but if you aimed it at the center of agricultural land in, say, Ukraine, you’d probably hit some part of their breadbasket … and with much more deniability than with a missile. That the people with their fingers on the button are sufficiently unsupervised and unprofessional that one of them would target a random Canadian guy for the evulz is also disturbing, though unsurprising in light of some of Snowden’s revelations — LOVINT, anyone? Though the potential consequences go far beyond hassling one person. Suppose they did this during the growing season, and the attack was identified as unnatural and attributed. That’s a serious diplomatic incident right there, if not a fully fledged casus belli. I keep suspecting that one day an idiot very much like this one, if not this very one, is going to accidentally set fire to the planet trying to get back at some ex or something.)
What the hell? How was this even allowed to happen? Couldn’t you move at all, to get to a phone? How did you survive that long without water?
I don’t want to “kid myself” about that or anything else. I want actual control of my situation, you know, like other people have.
Do you really think people can just create storms?
And how do you so easily jump to the conclusion that people are out to get you? Have you even checked to see if that one outlet was to blame? Or the thing plugged into it? What makes you think this mysterious evil organization have a control THAT precise over everybody’s electronics? Think about these things critically.
Ok, the horse’s bones have been reduced to powder here, but let’s put the remix on for another go around…
Surplus, I know you can write a book entitled “1001 Reasons the World is Out to Get Me Personally”, but honestly, we all go through endless fuckery in our lives. Everyone deals with all kinds of mistakes, issues, and just plain random problems in their life.
People here cite examples from their lives, but no matter how many times we talk about these things and you continually complain you are in an isolated bubble and therefore wouldn’t really know anyway, you seem unwilling to even consider the idea that you are not alone here. To pull from a common theme on this blog, you are like an incel convinced everyone else is living in a paradise of endless sex while they alone rot.
I mean, would it be helpful to you at all for one or more of us to pop on here every day and list the problems we have had that day? I’ll do that for you if you want.
Here, in no particular order with limited identifying information:
Today was a wonderful day in which I had to use a pickaxe and shovel to dig holes for two reasons: 1) The guys pouring the concrete foundation chose to ignore the part where we specifically requested they leave out the section shown on the blueprints where we needed to put in our stuff. 2) Our digging team, which was specifically hired to be there all day at our beck and call, only did half the job with the backhoe and then ran off before lunch.
As you might guess, my back and chest hurt. This is called back breaking labor for a reason. It slowly (if you are lucky) destroys your body.
We are also running out of basically half the things we need to do our job. The foreman was informed over a week ago, but of course he can’t personally order anything and took his sweet time letting the guy who can know, and that guy ordered the wrong shit because he doesn’t actually have anything to do with our department and has no fucking clue what any of this shit does or what we do with it. (Though he thinks he does and likes to tell us how to do our jobs)
I pissed off one of my coworkers who was already on edge because he has some issues going on at home and I failed to find some tools that were right in front of me in broad daylight. At least he is more level headed than some of my other coworkers and did not threaten to put me in the hospital. (For clarification I am the weakest and least capable fighter at work and most of these guys have literally beaten people up and broken other peoples’ bones, etc, etc. Threats are not a joke here.)
Some batteries we charged overnight for a specific and highly important piece of equipment we need for essentially everything we do inexplicably lost their charge halfway through the day despite always lasting more than a day for weeks.
My knee seems to be getting worse, but also in the plus column, I believe it to be simply because I have been kneeling on hard surfaces too much and has no internal damage, so there is that.
We lost another coworker who was a good hand because one of his family members died and he has mental issues to begin with. He may be crawling into a bottle as I type this.
My health issues I do not wish to discuss here appear to be getting worse as well, age and all that. I expect a bill for medical tests in the near future.
That leads us to money being an issue. I had to pull more out of savings again. That’s not good, you know, because at some point you need to put money INTO savings or you run out.
All in all, this is not a particularly unusual day. I’ve had better, but I’ve had worse. Nothing to compare with a computer not working for an hour or whatever, but still…
The key word here is “random”.
What I get (and which marks it out as intentional, on someone’s part) is systematic. Something threatens to disrupt my computer use. I avert that threat (or it just misses on its own) and an hour or so later, bam! Something else comes out of the blue to … disrupt my computer use.
I find out that a certain medication prevents those horrid cramps. When the prescription is running out, I go to get a new one and:
Not only was that clearly systematic obstruction rather than just a random, isolated obstacle encountered in my path, but it showed a clear pattern of I-make-a-move-and-then-someone-makes-a-counter-move. “The firing program was dynamic. There was a mind working against me.”
Those are two incidents (the latest and the greatest, respectively). There have been dozens more with similar patterns, though none quite as audacious as that last one described.
So believe me when I say I have good reason to believe that much of the whole world I am in appears to be manipulated in some way that is, at least at times, targeted specifically at obstructing me in particular. It feels like being in a badly-written story whose author just ramrods the plot to his intended destination by main force, even if that requires not one but multiple clumsy, ass-pull deus ex machinas in rapid succession. And I’m not the protagonist or even the villain in said discount-bin airport-bookstore novel, oh no. I am, apparently, the protagonist’s comic foil, or some similar type of character, whose earnest efforts and set-up-in-advance failings were hamfistedly shoehorned into the book, barely even connecting with the main plot, to draw a few chuckles from whatever unseen audience it was written for.
I don’t even have a guess as to who the actual protagonist might be. It’s probably not even someone I personally know. Given his inexplicable escapes from defeat over and over again despite spectacular incompetence, it’s a good bet that Donald Trump is the Big Bad, though. Probably this terrible novelist’s attempt at writing a copyright-safe ripoff of DC Comics’s Penguin supervillain. So he’ll either be on the very verge of starting World War III or space-lasering Los Angeles to dust or starting an Ebola pandemic or something and only then finally be properly defeated and chucked into Arkham Asylum … or this is a serial, and he’ll be foiled at the last second, but escape, over and over and over and over, after doing worse and worse damage each time.
<shudder>
@ Surplus
Try again. I used to work in a medical field. Every other patient has a sob story of how it took multiple doctors and weeks to get a script much like you describe. You are as convincing to me as I am apparently to you. By your logic, I may as well conclude Elon Musk and Donald Trump have teamed up to stop me and my coworkers from doing our jobs for sheer amusement value. We solve one problem only for another to arise. Move, counter move.
@Surplus
Nobody shut down your PC remotely. There was a temporary drop in voltage in your power lines, most likely widespread. This phenomenon is called a brownout, google it if you don’t believe a computer expert. Your PSU thus tripped the breaker to protect itself and your computer from damage. Or in other words, be glad it did or else that computer would be toast now. Your TV probably has a different threshold or turns itself back in immediately so you didn’t notice anything there.
You are making an elephant out of a fly. Nobody is out to get you. It’s a coincidence and all the people in your town were equally affected. Reign in the thoughts that tell you it’s all about you, because no, it isn’t. That’s the simple truth. It’s NOT a plot against you. This might sound mean, but I doubt anyone in your town govt even knows you exist, you are just one in 100, 1000, or how many people live there. Insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Even more so when viewed over the entire human population. I would strongly consider going to therapy with this, though, because this is a very unhealthy place you are in mentally.
@Surplus,
Okay, I am going to go ahead and try again. I have rewritten this several times to be as quick and as kind as possible, because it is clear that you are not well.
You need psychiatric help.
No one is out to get you. I know that you think that because things should work as their creators intend, therefore they do work as their creators intend, therefore anything going wrong was intended, but the simple fact is that humans at best make kludged-together efforts that work as best we can manage.
The crap that keeps happening to you is the same crap that keeps happening to everyone, because that is just how life works. No, you didn’t do anything to deserve it, but that doesn’t matter, because things happen that we don’t deserve all the time.
Your mind is creating patterns and connections where none exist, because the human brain evolved to find patterns and connections and sometimes goes overboard.
Please, please get help.
And please, when people try to help you, don’t attack them because their proposed solutions are not instant, complete, effortless, and free. Solutions like that don’t exist.
Really? Including one event unprecedented in a decade, a second unprecedented in their country’s entire history, and a third unprecedented in world history?
Speaking as a 30-plus-year healthcare worker, yes. Because unprecedented events happen a lot. Not constantly, but more often than you’d think. I’ve seen a metric ton of change in healthcare over the past couple of decades, and the rate of change keeps accelerating. That makes it easier for unprecedented things to happen.
The Law of Large Numbers is also an issue here. Something that only affects one in a million people will still happen to 8 people in a group the size of New York City.