Did @Martin_Hyde correctly describe your position?
Absolutely. This statement should be plastered all over the country.
Puzzlegal,
In essence, yes.
I picked Florida because of the Orwellian nature of the DeSantis administration. and the Looney Tunes Emperor down in Mar-a-Largo.
Years ago, you had example situations with gambling in Hot Springs Arkansas, divorce in Reno, prostitution in Vegas, and the goofy liquor laws in the Bible belt. Sin is always good for market differentiation.
I am wrong because nothing ever happens the way you predict, but it will happen. All markets get served.
I work in conflict zones on projects that attempt to end civil armed conflict and build consensus and shared identity among people of differing ethnic/religious identity. Among the places I have worked are Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Aceh Indonesia, Kosovo, and Serbia.
What they all have in common is that there is an aggressive group intent on getting power and not giving a lot of thought to who gets hurt, or what long term damage is done to their nation. Often, they do not understand the underpinnings of their own nation and so they recklessly disrupt social norms. Their first goals are to establish an identity, which requires establishing an other. It is also important that their own identity is based on some moral high ground, often their god is on their side and the others are weak, sneaky and evil. They find pressure points and they squeeze, they also create new friction points and use the media they control to sell this new pressure point.
There often is a swath in the middle who are dismissive of the threat and insist that it is not as bad as people say. They often point to some incident from their youth and say we survived x, so we’ll be fine now.
That is what is happening now. It is happening. Now. Clarence Thomas’ wife is openly corrupt, selling access to her husband, she was an active participant in the attempted coup on January 6. The Supreme Court dismantled civil rights era protections for black Americans to have access to the ballot box and the GOP immediately began suppressing black votes.
It is happening now.
I recall seeing a group in Afghanistan (I think, might have been Pakistan or Iran) who were attacking young girls who were trying to go to school (physically attacking them). The shocking thing is almost all of the attackers were older women. You’d think they’d support other women, their daughters. Nope. They were furious that these girls dared for something better.
It was more than, “I survived x” so you can too. It looked a lot like envy (although I would bet none of them would say so).
People suck.
In reading this conversation on Roe v. Wade, I’m under the impression that some of you are thinking, “the rollback of this right is a horrible thing, but not one that affects me.
I want to tell you that it does.
There are rights that you use every day, big bold rights that are your swords and shields against an unjust world. The right not to be discriminated against at work, the right to marry who you love.
But not all rights are like that. Some rights, like the right to safe and legal abortion, usually just sit quietly in the corner, gathering dust. You hardly ever think about them. But even then, they’re there.
If everything in your life comes crashing down all at once, if your husband leaves you and you lose your job and are diagnosed with major depression on the day you find out you are pregnant with a special needs child, that right is there.
That right is there in case your mentally ill teenager gets pregnant by her adult boyfriend. That right is there in case your 18 year old honor student becomes pregnant by rape right before she’s scheduled to start at Harvard Law.
Or maybe you’re pregnant with a child you very much want, but you fall down the stairs and have a miscarriage. That right sitting in the corner will keep your heartbreak from being compounded by a public investigation and prosecution.
Or suppose you aren’t even sexually active, but you need a drug or procedure that’s associated with abortion. That right in the corner keeps your medical decisions between you and your doctor, and it assures that your doctor won’t be intimidated out of giving you the medical care you need.
Abortion is a right we don’t like to think about, because we don’t like to think about the horrible stuff that gets thrown at us when life goes incredibly wrong. We don’t like to think about those difficult decisions no one wants to make. We want to say, that dusty old right is just sitting in the corner, doing nothing. What do I care if it gets thrown out? I’m not going to need it, and frankly, it’s kind of ugly.
Just remember that you might need it someday.
< Deleted by poster >
Yeah, older women in Afghanistan often support their own repression, similarly, some of the most vigorous promotes of female genital mutilation in communities that practice it are older women who had it done to them.
In America Kent State is the “we survived x moment.” White boomers often point to it as the reason our current collapse is not happening.
The right to exercise authority commensurate with personal responsibility
I heard a phrase used the other day in reference to this proposed SCOTUS decision, that it creates government-mandated pregnancy.
It’s a term I intend to use often. Because that’s exactly what it is.
Excellent post, @Ann_Hedonia.
Interesting post–and at least to my mind these people are often the key element, not the extremists. The Taliban had maybe 75,000 fighters at its peak as the Afghan government fell, it likely actually had less than that in the field. Afghanistan is a country of almost 40 million–the Taliban simply were not big enough to take over Afghanistan if people had been willing to stand up and say no. Ukraine is proving this right now–Ukraine is much smaller than Russia and had a much smaller military, but a lot of Ukrainians simply said “no, we aren’t going to give up our country without a fight.” Russia was perceived to have perhaps the 2nd most powerful military in the world, and that has not mattered.
In Nazi Germany, the core true believers, who actually understood Mein Kampf and fully supported everything in it, were never a majority of the population. But the large swathe of Germans who were “mostly fine” with Nazism and Hitler and liked what they perceived as the benefits, and simply didn’t mind much the negatives, were far more important to Hitler being able to attain power than were the guys who were willing to join the SA during the Weimar years and engage in illegal political violence.
There is also a reason MLK has a famous letter in which he basically blames middle of the road White Christians for being deliberately obtuse about Jim Crow and discrimination against blacks, and ignore the reality that that system was a major violation of many Christian values these people claimed to live by. He understood that this soft middle had to care to some degree or he was going to be pissing into the wind.
Excellent and thoughtful post, @Ann_Hedonia.
That tossed word salad makes exactly zero sense as a response to Ann_Hedonia’s post.
Agreed.
It makes exactly zero sense on its own, as well.
I started working in Afghanistan a few weeks after 9/11 and was managing a project there when it all collapsed. I’ve lived there, but I left in January of 2020 and with COVID, couldn’t get back in.
Over my 20 years working there, I saw a young professional class emerge who had no real memory of the Taliban. A lot of them had lived overseas because they’re parents had fled and they came back. The were completely at ease in the modern western world, some drank, they went out on dates, they texted. The Taliban threat was not real to them.
When it all collapsed, I knew Afghans who had a chance to get out, but hesitated and now my inbox is full of former colleagues desperate to get out. When you’re comfortable, it’s easy to underestimate the ferocity of fanatics until it is too late.
We do care! Since I have access to the article, if it’s not considered too tangential to the thread topic of the draft SC opinion, I’ll outline with a few fair-use quotes and you can fill in the missing expos if you want:
Perhaps so, however, responsibility can only exist with commensurate authority. So, personal responsibility requires authority over ones person.
I believe that is relevant to the post.
An astute observation that should give pause to every thoughtful citizen. The unthinkable happened in November, 2016 when a dangerously unqualified demagogue was elected to the Presidency. The unthinkable happened on January 6, 2021. And now unthinkable consequences may be coming down from the highest court in the land, now controlled by the most extreme of right-wing fanatics.
If you mean that women should have a right to autonomy over their own bodies, that seems a self-evident right that doesn’t require philosophical justification. I will note that many of the fanatical wingnuts that want to deprive women of reproductive rights by force of law are the same ones who oppose COVID vaccinations on the grounds of bodily autonomy. These people are not just irredeemable morons, but shameless hypocrites.
In between the two unthinkable scenes you mentioned, there was four years of a steady stream of unthinkables: the president praising Nazis and condemning NATO; wanting US troops to shoot protesters, rejecting basic disease controls during a deadly pandemic and on and on.
It is happening now.