I watched the appeals hearing in Texas and wanted to scream. But i'm at work so i can't. I can't believe the country we're living in. It is beyond sick.
Ali Velshi had a good segment with Zurawski yesterday -- I like Ali, he is not averse to doing advocacy while giving news.
As Jessica points out the significance of language in abortion discourse, it occurred to me that saying something is bad for democracy may not convey the urgency to people (because democracy is a nebulous word to them). How about saying 'something' is a clear and present danger to our country -- replace 'democracy' with country. Drive home the point that your country as you know it will not remain as that with trumpists in power.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre Of Women's Rights. Use this infographic to understand the Zurawski v. State of Texas lawsuit. Who are the endangered women? Who banned abortions in Texas? Start with this StoryMap.
Pertaining to the piece on “Trad wives” No No No He** No!! These misguided women and their menfolk may be happy as clams BUT those of us in our 60 s saw what happened to our mothers or mother’s friends who were Trad Wives until the wheels came off ( alcohol in my Dad, infidelity in my husband’s dad, early death in another friend’s father) and then the women had to come up with a way to support their families with limited skills and options. We all grew up knowing we had to have a skill or career to allow us to support ourselves No matter what. Some of these ladies are in for a real eye opener when they get traded in for a newer model. Read history for goodness sakes!!!
This comment reminds me that I think my dad's inspiration to support me and my sister to be independent and have a job/career was his sister's suffering under a alcoholic husband (though she was married into a wealthy family, she pretty much lost everything). This was in India.
Yes, and the article posits that pretty much all of them are not real but are cynically making a career out of social media. Of course women have always pretended to be things men like to support themselves; it's a survival skill. But if/when it makes the men more dangerous it's a problem.
I think Cohen is wrong. Montgomery didn’t think something was suspicious. He just saw an opportunity to snoop around and hoped that he would find something he could prosecute. Montgomery isn’t just biased against Planned Parenthood. He harbors great malice against Planned Parenthood.
I’m old enough to remember when an Arizonan named Rehnquist was nominated to be Chief Justice and at his hearing was credibly charged with harassing minority voters at polling places when was still a private attorney.
I'm so goddamn sick and tired of the assholes in the anti-abortion movement and the special privileges afforded them by the government I could throw up. I've got plenty of things I'm not very happy about MY tax money going for, but there's no equivalent to the Hyde amendment to spare MY feelings.
We do SO well, politically, on this issue. I'd like to think that would help us next year. My concern is all of the 2024 voters who haven't been motivated to vote since 2020. They either don't know what's going on or it's not very important to them. I think women are more persuadable, because it should be such an obvious assault on one's autonomy. But oh the men they worry me. Some polling suggests men of color voting more like white men. I fear an election with the biggest gender gap ever, Democrats holding on with women, but a Republican landslide among men, reacting against the supposed 'weakness' in America: the economy, the border, foreign policy, crime, whatever, and doing what men always do, which is fuck stuff up. I hope this does not happen and I will not forgive my fellow Y-chromosome carriers if they sweep America into fascism this way.
Not to mention that polling is also showing weakness among the young, latinx and others. There are many wildcards like Kennedy to stir up the pot too. Too much like a calculus problem with ill defined variables.
The lying Arizona Supreme Court forced-birther is not an outlier in our fair state. We've got every variety of dissembling misogynist you can name, with dollops on top of the flavors of Christian Nationalism so popular these days. Why, there's even a Christian Nationalist on my town council. Needless to say, I'm working on flushing him out...
Nowhere near as bad, but we seem to have an abundance of pickle parks in my region. I must confess, that we do have a certified bastion of evil( insert serious 🎶) aka Hillsdale college.
I sense that might be why Democrats won the statewide races in Arizona last year? Some of the Republicans in Arizona are really bad even by Republican standards, so I'm hoping it's tarnishing the brand.
One thing Arizona did very right in 2022 is elect Democrats to most statewide offices. Ultimately to keep doing that is the only way out of the hole. But then a botched federal election next year could render a lot of state level government moot :(
Birth rates up, but more in certain groups. Can we convince Republicans that only means more brown children and thereby convert more of them to pro-choice? And how disgusting is it to even have that thought? History suggests the Christian nationalists overlap quite well with the white supremacists, but there's also suggestion that Republicans are polling better with non-college educated voters of color. If the fascists can compromise some on their racism (or at least pretend to) they can be even more dangerous. Either way I expect them to cheer this data, and it's all fucking terrifying for anyone remotely liberal, of any genetic background.
The plan was never to invest in non-white babies resulting from forced birth policies, or to let them vote. They are viewed by supremacists as a sort of renewable natural resource to exploit.
🎯Bullseye! they see them as a body, to be wage slaves, or consumers, never full citizens, just more cannon fodder for the rich to abuse. Oh, also, private prison pipeline fodder, got to keep those shareholders happy.
Yes. It just seems that undocumented immigrants serve the same purpose, and they don't seem to want them around. And if they argue it's because (in their view) they impose a cost on the state, well by that standard these other poor folk are going to too, even or especially if they have no intention of investing in them. It just seems like the exact same population. Not that they're thinking (the least bit) logically, but there's a big disconnect there.
It is an interesting disconnect. Conservatives try to punish those they fear, both women and immigrants. This is primitive emotion-based decision making, and not susceptible to logic or consistency.
"The third innermost part of the brain, the Amygdala area, is the reptilian brain. This is the oldest part of the brain and is responsible for 90% of decision making. It controls the fight or flight response and lives by its own rules. It also operates at super-fast speeds."
Yes it absolutely should be studied. And if their abortion policy does result in more poor people of color, I'm pretty certain they're going to fear and want to punish them too.
How frustrating is it though, that Donald Trump is the only Republican who has (so far) successfully told the anti-abortion movement what they need to hear, which is to go fuck themselves. I'm not saying that makes him a moderate or any less dangerous. Just that it doesn't even occur to any other Republican that they could do this, despite a large minority of Republicans being pro-choice. We need to win this election. If we don't, the ONLY check on Republicans' power will be Republicans themselves deciding that something's gone too far. And right now, even if he doesn't mean it, Donald Trump is the only Republican who seems even capable of thinking that way. And this is a guy with dozens of felony charges against him who wants to rule as a dictator. How fucked is that.
The anti-abortion crowd understands that whatever bullshit he spews from his mouth, he will enforce or declare a nationwide ban (because if he wins, he will be a dictator. He will use military force in blue states to make them comply.) He’s saying this crap for voters who don’t pay much attention to politics between presidential elections. They won’t drill down or think deeper unless they or someone they care about need an abortion between now and then. What upsets me is how the mainstream media seems happy to parrot his garbage instead of calling it yet another lie.
The mainstream media isn't willing to call a fascist revolution before it happens. So once you take that very real possibility off the table - which is a serious, probably fatal, mistake - it changes the way you analyze everything, if you're only considering situations through the confines of a normal democracy. I see it everywhere. The question is why is it unimaginable. Is it denial, or is it concern about upsetting the new masters? Both are wrong but the latter is an explicit betrayal of the nation.
Too bad, because they have been very clear and painfully detailed about what they will do to dismantle the country. It should surprise no one, because they aren’t trying to keep it secret. But talking about Project 2025 all day every day is “too niche” (to use my not-favorite trad publishing catch phrase.) What they spell out is bad enough, but I know the many other things they mean. Mainstream media is all about clicks and eyeballs now. Something like P2025 will only provide that when it’s too late and Americans are like, “What is happening?!”
Yup, exactly. People are used to having checks and balances in America. But as I say, the last time one party had this much power was the Democrats in 1965, and not coincidentally the Republicans have been plotting their revenge for 60 years, and they're now in a position to execute it. And that will become conventional wisdom too late. What do people expect, Brett Kavanaugh to stop it? By the time someone like Brett Kavanaugh is willing to say, "hey, wait a minute," they're already long past the threshold where that matters.
I wrote in another comment about people not getting the real impact of words like democracy, and so on. Start talking about losing your country as you know it to these corrupt grifters. Media can certainly play those aspects up but they won't. There won't be a revolution if trump gains power again or it will be ugly, because protests and revolution like we mean it won't happen. He already showed his hand when BLM/Floyd protests happened. Thinking that we will fight IF it happens is not a good idea.
It will be ugly. But I think it's only responsible to try to brace ourselves for what happens if we lose this election (and if it were held today, we likely would). A lot of things are going to get broken, and someone is going to have to fix them, just like Europe in the 1940s. We may want to take lessons from dissidents in places like Russia and Iran for how to survive. If they win this election, it means that they're not unpopular enough yet for the American public to turn fully against them, and the only way for that to happen may be for them to win power and misuse it (as they will). It will be ugly if Democrats win too, although I'd much rather have that problem, because a large portion of Republicans will not accept that result and have already made very thinly veiled threats of violence. There's just too much fuel out there for the fire that's coming, and unfortunately I'm not confident anyone is going to do anything to change things until the fire starts.
I agree with you. Lot of people are complacent or willfully blind if not ignorant. Smart thing to do is to elect quality people and 2016 should never have happened. Social media, especially fuckerberg's FB paved the way for this. And then lazy media with their own corrupt ways and means did not do their due diligence. I mean, can you imagine what they did to put trump in the WH and how they helped play down Jan 6? There was a very small window after Jan 6 that every R felt it went too far but there was no severe backlash from the media -- where were the big blaring headlines that something like that should never happen in a country like America and what an embarrassment it was for the country? Where was the shaming of the R party and the person most responsible for it? When that didn't materialize Rs relaxed and went back to their corrupt ways.
The main respected newspapers: the NYT and the Washington Post failed us, by harping on Hillary's comment about the deplorables, and hyping her manufactured investigation "But her E-mails" (I read them, they were boring). by the FBI, and ignoring Trumps ties to the money-laundering Russian oligarchs, and him being under investigation for that, they were so complicit and still don't call him out treating him like a normal candidate, those who do speak out are an anomalie.
“And something scary: the popularity of online ‘trad-wife’ content among conservative right-wing men who are drawn to the widespread subordination of women.”
Is it actually growing in popularity or is it bot accounts? I’m just not convinced that significant numbers are really buying it. I don’t trust social media companies much either and I think their viewership numbers are sketch.
This is probably the biggest reason I left Facebook in 2020. I quit Twitter last week. People should not get their news from social media. I’m guilty of sharing news links on my IG and Threads, but I don’t believe anything I see on social media: not the like counts; not the follower numbers; not the impressions when one pays to promote posts. I immediately block any account that trolls me.
So I don’t know how much I believe this stat. I’m sure there are plenty of men who get off on it. (I grew up with a bunch.)
The whole anti-Semitic tirade was the last straw. I never went there but thought he might tire of his new toy eventually. I’m starting to pressure the news outlets I pay to stop using tweets in articles and live feeds.
I think they fund their own troll farms, to get their numbers up, so they can get monetized through adverts on their site. Charlie Kirk from turning point usa funded bored teenagers in Arizona to troll for him during the pandemic.
Agree. FWIW has a report out about a guy in Melbourne, FL who controls multiple pro-T fb websites that has gotten a ridiculously high number of views. With the data TPUSA & the T camp have, I imagine those trolls highly target.
It would be better if you're right but then we men often fall below even the rock bottom standards for our gender so idk. The better women can do, the less they should be willing to put up with shit, which would mean in theory that if men don't shape up, there would be more pissed off 'incels' blaming everybody but themselves for not having a gf or having a gf that god forbid actually expects them to contribute something to a relationship. Idk it's one way to view the last eight years of conservatism in America.
How nervous should we be about this "until viability" in these ballot measures? Is that going to be the new battle ground? Is it just deemed to hard to not put that type of limit? Viability seems to be something as debatable as "heartbeat" for some folks...
Thank you for posting the link to the TX Supreme Court hearing.
I watched the appeals hearing in Texas and wanted to scream. But i'm at work so i can't. I can't believe the country we're living in. It is beyond sick.
Right there with you.
Ali Velshi had a good segment with Zurawski yesterday -- I like Ali, he is not averse to doing advocacy while giving news.
As Jessica points out the significance of language in abortion discourse, it occurred to me that saying something is bad for democracy may not convey the urgency to people (because democracy is a nebulous word to them). How about saying 'something' is a clear and present danger to our country -- replace 'democracy' with country. Drive home the point that your country as you know it will not remain as that with trumpists in power.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre Of Women's Rights. Use this infographic to understand the Zurawski v. State of Texas lawsuit. Who are the endangered women? Who banned abortions in Texas? Start with this StoryMap.
https://thedemlabs.org/2023/11/28/zurawski-v-texas-abortion-lawsuit-women-sue-texas/
Pertaining to the piece on “Trad wives” No No No He** No!! These misguided women and their menfolk may be happy as clams BUT those of us in our 60 s saw what happened to our mothers or mother’s friends who were Trad Wives until the wheels came off ( alcohol in my Dad, infidelity in my husband’s dad, early death in another friend’s father) and then the women had to come up with a way to support their families with limited skills and options. We all grew up knowing we had to have a skill or career to allow us to support ourselves No matter what. Some of these ladies are in for a real eye opener when they get traded in for a newer model. Read history for goodness sakes!!!
This comment reminds me that I think my dad's inspiration to support me and my sister to be independent and have a job/career was his sister's suffering under a alcoholic husband (though she was married into a wealthy family, she pretty much lost everything). This was in India.
Yes, and the article posits that pretty much all of them are not real but are cynically making a career out of social media. Of course women have always pretended to be things men like to support themselves; it's a survival skill. But if/when it makes the men more dangerous it's a problem.
I think Cohen is wrong. Montgomery didn’t think something was suspicious. He just saw an opportunity to snoop around and hoped that he would find something he could prosecute. Montgomery isn’t just biased against Planned Parenthood. He harbors great malice against Planned Parenthood.
I’m old enough to remember when an Arizonan named Rehnquist was nominated to be Chief Justice and at his hearing was credibly charged with harassing minority voters at polling places when was still a private attorney.
Yes he was a bad one. Fortunately for the country the median vote on the court during his tenure was always someone more liberal.
I'm so goddamn sick and tired of the assholes in the anti-abortion movement and the special privileges afforded them by the government I could throw up. I've got plenty of things I'm not very happy about MY tax money going for, but there's no equivalent to the Hyde amendment to spare MY feelings.
We do SO well, politically, on this issue. I'd like to think that would help us next year. My concern is all of the 2024 voters who haven't been motivated to vote since 2020. They either don't know what's going on or it's not very important to them. I think women are more persuadable, because it should be such an obvious assault on one's autonomy. But oh the men they worry me. Some polling suggests men of color voting more like white men. I fear an election with the biggest gender gap ever, Democrats holding on with women, but a Republican landslide among men, reacting against the supposed 'weakness' in America: the economy, the border, foreign policy, crime, whatever, and doing what men always do, which is fuck stuff up. I hope this does not happen and I will not forgive my fellow Y-chromosome carriers if they sweep America into fascism this way.
Not to mention that polling is also showing weakness among the young, latinx and others. There are many wildcards like Kennedy to stir up the pot too. Too much like a calculus problem with ill defined variables.
The lying Arizona Supreme Court forced-birther is not an outlier in our fair state. We've got every variety of dissembling misogynist you can name, with dollops on top of the flavors of Christian Nationalism so popular these days. Why, there's even a Christian Nationalist on my town council. Needless to say, I'm working on flushing him out...
Nowhere near as bad, but we seem to have an abundance of pickle parks in my region. I must confess, that we do have a certified bastion of evil( insert serious 🎶) aka Hillsdale college.
May you flush that effluent down to the sewer, where he belongs.
I sense that might be why Democrats won the statewide races in Arizona last year? Some of the Republicans in Arizona are really bad even by Republican standards, so I'm hoping it's tarnishing the brand.
One thing Arizona did very right in 2022 is elect Democrats to most statewide offices. Ultimately to keep doing that is the only way out of the hole. But then a botched federal election next year could render a lot of state level government moot :(
Birth rates up, but more in certain groups. Can we convince Republicans that only means more brown children and thereby convert more of them to pro-choice? And how disgusting is it to even have that thought? History suggests the Christian nationalists overlap quite well with the white supremacists, but there's also suggestion that Republicans are polling better with non-college educated voters of color. If the fascists can compromise some on their racism (or at least pretend to) they can be even more dangerous. Either way I expect them to cheer this data, and it's all fucking terrifying for anyone remotely liberal, of any genetic background.
The plan was never to invest in non-white babies resulting from forced birth policies, or to let them vote. They are viewed by supremacists as a sort of renewable natural resource to exploit.
🎯Bullseye! they see them as a body, to be wage slaves, or consumers, never full citizens, just more cannon fodder for the rich to abuse. Oh, also, private prison pipeline fodder, got to keep those shareholders happy.
Yes. It just seems that undocumented immigrants serve the same purpose, and they don't seem to want them around. And if they argue it's because (in their view) they impose a cost on the state, well by that standard these other poor folk are going to too, even or especially if they have no intention of investing in them. It just seems like the exact same population. Not that they're thinking (the least bit) logically, but there's a big disconnect there.
It is an interesting disconnect. Conservatives try to punish those they fear, both women and immigrants. This is primitive emotion-based decision making, and not susceptible to logic or consistency.
Brain studies have shown political conservatives are disproportionately fearful of immigrants: https://www.brown.edu/news/2023-02-01/political-brain
I wish that the neurobiology of misogyny in both women and men could be studied in this way. I bet the same brain areas would be involved.
Why do I think it is the lizard brain part?
"The third innermost part of the brain, the Amygdala area, is the reptilian brain. This is the oldest part of the brain and is responsible for 90% of decision making. It controls the fight or flight response and lives by its own rules. It also operates at super-fast speeds."
https://explorerresearch.com/the-reptilian-brain/#:~:text=The%20third%20innermost%20part%20of,operates%20at%20super-fast%20speeds.
Yes it absolutely should be studied. And if their abortion policy does result in more poor people of color, I'm pretty certain they're going to fear and want to punish them too.
100% truth there.
How frustrating is it though, that Donald Trump is the only Republican who has (so far) successfully told the anti-abortion movement what they need to hear, which is to go fuck themselves. I'm not saying that makes him a moderate or any less dangerous. Just that it doesn't even occur to any other Republican that they could do this, despite a large minority of Republicans being pro-choice. We need to win this election. If we don't, the ONLY check on Republicans' power will be Republicans themselves deciding that something's gone too far. And right now, even if he doesn't mean it, Donald Trump is the only Republican who seems even capable of thinking that way. And this is a guy with dozens of felony charges against him who wants to rule as a dictator. How fucked is that.
The anti-abortion crowd understands that whatever bullshit he spews from his mouth, he will enforce or declare a nationwide ban (because if he wins, he will be a dictator. He will use military force in blue states to make them comply.) He’s saying this crap for voters who don’t pay much attention to politics between presidential elections. They won’t drill down or think deeper unless they or someone they care about need an abortion between now and then. What upsets me is how the mainstream media seems happy to parrot his garbage instead of calling it yet another lie.
Their republican owners want their theocracy, chaos, or tax-cuts. at least one, maybe all of it.
The mainstream media isn't willing to call a fascist revolution before it happens. So once you take that very real possibility off the table - which is a serious, probably fatal, mistake - it changes the way you analyze everything, if you're only considering situations through the confines of a normal democracy. I see it everywhere. The question is why is it unimaginable. Is it denial, or is it concern about upsetting the new masters? Both are wrong but the latter is an explicit betrayal of the nation.
Too bad, because they have been very clear and painfully detailed about what they will do to dismantle the country. It should surprise no one, because they aren’t trying to keep it secret. But talking about Project 2025 all day every day is “too niche” (to use my not-favorite trad publishing catch phrase.) What they spell out is bad enough, but I know the many other things they mean. Mainstream media is all about clicks and eyeballs now. Something like P2025 will only provide that when it’s too late and Americans are like, “What is happening?!”
Yup, exactly. People are used to having checks and balances in America. But as I say, the last time one party had this much power was the Democrats in 1965, and not coincidentally the Republicans have been plotting their revenge for 60 years, and they're now in a position to execute it. And that will become conventional wisdom too late. What do people expect, Brett Kavanaugh to stop it? By the time someone like Brett Kavanaugh is willing to say, "hey, wait a minute," they're already long past the threshold where that matters.
I wrote in another comment about people not getting the real impact of words like democracy, and so on. Start talking about losing your country as you know it to these corrupt grifters. Media can certainly play those aspects up but they won't. There won't be a revolution if trump gains power again or it will be ugly, because protests and revolution like we mean it won't happen. He already showed his hand when BLM/Floyd protests happened. Thinking that we will fight IF it happens is not a good idea.
It will be ugly. But I think it's only responsible to try to brace ourselves for what happens if we lose this election (and if it were held today, we likely would). A lot of things are going to get broken, and someone is going to have to fix them, just like Europe in the 1940s. We may want to take lessons from dissidents in places like Russia and Iran for how to survive. If they win this election, it means that they're not unpopular enough yet for the American public to turn fully against them, and the only way for that to happen may be for them to win power and misuse it (as they will). It will be ugly if Democrats win too, although I'd much rather have that problem, because a large portion of Republicans will not accept that result and have already made very thinly veiled threats of violence. There's just too much fuel out there for the fire that's coming, and unfortunately I'm not confident anyone is going to do anything to change things until the fire starts.
I agree with you. Lot of people are complacent or willfully blind if not ignorant. Smart thing to do is to elect quality people and 2016 should never have happened. Social media, especially fuckerberg's FB paved the way for this. And then lazy media with their own corrupt ways and means did not do their due diligence. I mean, can you imagine what they did to put trump in the WH and how they helped play down Jan 6? There was a very small window after Jan 6 that every R felt it went too far but there was no severe backlash from the media -- where were the big blaring headlines that something like that should never happen in a country like America and what an embarrassment it was for the country? Where was the shaming of the R party and the person most responsible for it? When that didn't materialize Rs relaxed and went back to their corrupt ways.
The main respected newspapers: the NYT and the Washington Post failed us, by harping on Hillary's comment about the deplorables, and hyping her manufactured investigation "But her E-mails" (I read them, they were boring). by the FBI, and ignoring Trumps ties to the money-laundering Russian oligarchs, and him being under investigation for that, they were so complicit and still don't call him out treating him like a normal candidate, those who do speak out are an anomalie.
“And something scary: the popularity of online ‘trad-wife’ content among conservative right-wing men who are drawn to the widespread subordination of women.”
Is it actually growing in popularity or is it bot accounts? I’m just not convinced that significant numbers are really buying it. I don’t trust social media companies much either and I think their viewership numbers are sketch.
This is probably the biggest reason I left Facebook in 2020. I quit Twitter last week. People should not get their news from social media. I’m guilty of sharing news links on my IG and Threads, but I don’t believe anything I see on social media: not the like counts; not the follower numbers; not the impressions when one pays to promote posts. I immediately block any account that trolls me.
So I don’t know how much I believe this stat. I’m sure there are plenty of men who get off on it. (I grew up with a bunch.)
Every day I say I need to leave Twitter & I hardly look at fb, except to post happy birthday to friends/family haha.
The whole anti-Semitic tirade was the last straw. I never went there but thought he might tire of his new toy eventually. I’m starting to pressure the news outlets I pay to stop using tweets in articles and live feeds.
I think they fund their own troll farms, to get their numbers up, so they can get monetized through adverts on their site. Charlie Kirk from turning point usa funded bored teenagers in Arizona to troll for him during the pandemic.
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/09/pro-trump-student-group-building-a-secret-troll-farm-designed-to-get-around-social-media-moderation-report/
Agree. FWIW has a report out about a guy in Melbourne, FL who controls multiple pro-T fb websites that has gotten a ridiculously high number of views. With the data TPUSA & the T camp have, I imagine those trolls highly target.
It would be better if you're right but then we men often fall below even the rock bottom standards for our gender so idk. The better women can do, the less they should be willing to put up with shit, which would mean in theory that if men don't shape up, there would be more pissed off 'incels' blaming everybody but themselves for not having a gf or having a gf that god forbid actually expects them to contribute something to a relationship. Idk it's one way to view the last eight years of conservatism in America.
How nervous should we be about this "until viability" in these ballot measures? Is that going to be the new battle ground? Is it just deemed to hard to not put that type of limit? Viability seems to be something as debatable as "heartbeat" for some folks...
I was going to ask the same thing. Because the anti-abortion crowd defines viability very differently.
Right. And for some pregnancies viability may never come, even in the latest stages.
I don’t like the “viability” caveat. Many others here don’t either.
Agree. I support no restrictions whatsoever. I trust women to know what is best for them.