I just hope the big platforms (Meta's mostly) either cut off Texas entirely or corral them to a separate Texas-only instance where they can't see others posts and nobody can see them.
If all platforms start catering to the lowest common denominator, everything will be banned.
Should platforms start banning material that's not allowed in, let's say Saudi Arabia? Or Iran? In Finland "disturbing religious peace" (basically blasphemy) is illegal, should that be censored on tech platforms if we say so?
IMO it's just easier to pull out of said country/state/region altogether or if they bring enough business you create a separate sandbox just for them (Like Google.cn used to be).
Just the threat of being cut off from just Youtube, Facebook and Instagram _will_ make Texas politicians back off really fucking fast. There are very very few voters who don't use Alphabet and Meta services daily.
Other commenters have the right of the response here. If every platform has hundreds of nations & many thousands of provinces (states in the US) that can make arbitrary rules, the internet loses the magic of being an online place where human spirit can congregate & connect.
The internet has been at the fore for a while as a deeply Western-democratic free speech agent, a way to let people share & find out, to support many view. The authoritarian impulse to control & dictate, the view of the party, the small.minded, the dictatorial ought have no extra sway or swagger here.
This hearkens back directly to JP Barlow's Declaration of Independence Of Cyberspace. Which speaks to the freedom. From shitty tyrannies of the mind & spaces, large & small. Which is almost certainly among the top 10 things most submitted to HN. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Declaration+of+independence+of+cyb...
It's a pity this submission is flagged. This is such at the heart of the online experience, and the threats against it.
The alternative is to cater to the lowest common denominator, meaning that the platforms would restrict everyone, regardless of whether or not they live in Texas.
the logical extension of that line of thinking is to divide into 2 nations, red & blue. personally I believe Huge gigantic nations are not very well suited to implement democracy. the problem is this needs to happen for all huge nations (i.e.. china & russia) otherwise you are concentrating too much power.
I believe you’re saying “I would be happier if I didn’t have information about other people’s opinions and lives.” That’s pretty easy to achieve. However, I don’t at all believe that is consistent with the original proposal.
Have any tech companies already been moving away from Texas and other areas where some politicians are going "anti-tech"? (Closing offices, targeting layoffs, canceling expansion plans, etc.)
Also, is anything known about whether driving away tech immigrants (with their maybe more Californian values) is an intention of some politicians there?
The intent we knew is dying and once gone will never come back. I’d go as far to say as it’s already basically done.
There is just too much interference with its functioning, combine this with the dangers of autonomous AI systems hacking infra, growing government weariness over recent leaks and the growing ease of spreading lies, I can’t see how it can continue.
This is absolutely crazy, but here’s the thing. Because the internet is becoming so centralised and new surveillance tech has emerged, this type of censorship just seems more and more possible. More possible than anytime in history.
Multiple States have already passed laws requiring everyone to upload their government papers (drivers license or passport, etc) to use social media. Things seem to be changing, that's for sure -- and fast.
ahem name them as I very sure that freedom of speech via Constitution trumps weird reactionary without facts blithering.
In fact no US State has passed laws that will withstand review under the US Constitution restricting use of interstate commerce as its not a State power under the US Constitution but a US Congress power.
Yes, hard to believe but using any internet service is Interstate Commerce only under US Congress power not state power.
I've discussed this before[0], dragonwriter has a good response explaining that this law is not automatically illegal just because it affects interstate commerce. I do hope you're right though, and that these laws are ruled unconstitutional. The Utah law is planned to take effect in early 2024. In addition to Utah, Arkansas has or will soon pass a very similar law. Then there is this article talking about Texas trying to regulate the internet by themselves.
I imagine a world someday where browsers no longer exist. Everything is just an app that you download and the internet is infrastructure for pushing data around to apps from content servers. Some people probably live in this world already, I know several people who spend little, if any, time looking through websites or forums.
There would be no reason to have websites, because it would all just be AI garbage that has been SEOed to hell. No reason to search the web because you just ask an AI on your phone for an answer.
It’s over. Perhaps some community of people will still build traditional websites, but it honestly just feels like they’re LARPing. There’s no reason to build a website over any other piece of content like a video, or images, or a game, or a story.
It is an now , with the AI arms race heating up, there is true incentive to keep as much data in walled gardens as possible so you have more training data than the next guy.
Trying to connect banning abortion to “fascism” is a weird angle. Abortion was illegal in the principal allied countries that defeated Nazi Germany: the U.S., U.K., and Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had legalized abortion in the 1920s, but banned it again in time to fight and defeat the Nazis.
That is a really poorly thought out argument. Taking away existing rights and suppressing any discussion or dissemination of information that doesn’t align with the ruling party’s beliefs doesn’t strike you as fascist in its approach?
Regulating a medical procedure and suppressing online sources of information about illegal procedures may conflict with certain libertarian beliefs, but it’s not “fascist.” By your reasoning, it’s “fascist” for Germany to take away people’s right of free association by banning Nazi parties, and to suppress discussion of Nazism. But nobody thinks that.
The crux of your disagreement with what Texas is doing isn’t about the methods. It’s about your substantive disagreement regarding the morality of killing a human fetus.
Again a weak argument, your previous one was so bad you had to delete it and come up with a new bad analogy?
This is not regulating a medical procedure, it is inserting politics into a medical decision. It has nothing to do with medicine. It is forcing your beliefs on other people. There are valid reasons to regulate abortion, this is obviously not one at all, it will just result in worse health outcomes. And blocking any discussion of what is a legal and scientific procedure in other states is text-book fascist and as un-American as it can get.
Texas has chosen to ban a medical procedure that kills a human fetus after a certain stage of development. It has done so based on moral judgments about when killing a human fetus should be permitted, and when it should be prohibited.
Virtually every liberal democracy does the same thing. They just pick a different developmental milestone. There is no scientific reason why Denmark or Germany’s 12-week ban is more justifiable than Texas’s 12-week ban. And those countries insert moral judgments into regulation of other medical procedures, everything from euthanasia to female circumcision.
Your regurgitation of libertarian talking points misses the mark. Virtually every liberal democracy recognizes that society can make judgments about what's right and wrong, and regulate individual conduct based on those judgments. (And outside the U.S., most liberal democracies recognize the right of the government to suppress information that society deems harmful.) None of that is "fascist."
> There is no scientific reason why Denmark or Germany’s 12-week ban [permitted if mother's life or health in danger or for other reasons, per Wikipedia] is more justifiable than Texas’s 12-week ban.
It's not a purely-scientific question. Blackmun got it approximately right in Roe v. Wade.
Right, it’s not a purely scientific question. It’s impossible to extricate moral judgments from the question. Which is why Texas drawing the line at 6 weeks isn’t “fascist.”
Blackmun was a libertarian who snuck onto the court during the bad old days when the GOP failed to vet their judicial appointments. As professor Ely wrote: Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” Roe was uniquely indefensible, having no basis in constitutional text, long-standing tradition, original intent, international consensus, or public opinion either then or now. Half a century after Roe was authored, most people even in liberal democracies still think you shouldn’t be able to kill a fetus with a face absent risks to the mother’s health.
And abortion was criminalized for “Aryan” women in Nazi Germany and the countries it occupied, not just for the providers, but the women themselves, many of whom had been raped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Germany
And at the same time, they forced many women to have abortions.
The big difference between pro-choicers and forced-birthers is that both of those things are offensive to us. The latter is a bigger horror to me, personally, but think for a minute about a young Dutch woman forced to carry the baby of the occupying soldier she wouldn’t dare have said no to - and how she and that baby would have been treated by her village for years after.
> The big difference between pro-choicers and forced-birthers is that both of those things are offensive to us
The vast majority of liberal democracies are “forced birth” by your standard. Virtually none embrace a “rights”-based approach to abortion. Denmark will force women to give birth after the fetus has a face. Abortion is still technically illegal in the UK and Germany, though there is a defense under certain circumstances in the UK and it’s decriminalized in Germany.
In practice abortion isn’t about whether the state can force a woman to give birth. Almost every country recognizes that it can. In practice it’s about legislative compromise, and moral judgments as to stages of fetal development.
What’s not “intelligent” is reducing everything to a scale of libertarianism versus “fascism.” Countries have more or less restrictions on abortion not because they are more or less “fascist,” but because they place more or less emphasis on reproduction as a fundamental social good. So abortion is heavily restricted in places that are objectively left wing, such as Palestine. While it’s widely embraced in authoritarian regimes like China. That’s why abortion was both made legal shortly after the communist revolution in Russia, but made illegal again when the country became worried about population on the eve of World War II.
Even the most liberal social democracies in the world today ban abortion well before birth. Is that a mark of “fascism?” Both Denmark and Texas, after all, recognize the prerogative of the state to require a woman to carry a pregnancy to term. They simply have a different set of exceptions for when they will exercise that power.
Palestinian nationalism, and Arab nationalism more generally, is closely linked to socialism. Arafat was a socialist. Both of the largest PLO parties historically, Fatah and Popular Front, are socialist or social-Democratic parties.
The right is, in some cases, pushing for censorship which is very much opposed to the general definition of "the right" which focuses on individual rights and freedoms.
The left's strong support for pro-choice is also a contradiction though. The left is generally defined as focusing on the collective, often leading towards larger government oversight and censorship to further a goal of protecting a certain marginalized group or furthering societal progress. Pro-choice is by definition a stance upholding an individual's rights, a view that really fits better on the right.
The abortion debate has always been a really interesting outlier to me. Both sides seem to argue very similar points that individual freedom matters. The debate really is just about which individual is of concern, the pregnant mother or the unborn child.
please stop using the phrase unborn child. We don’t call eggs unborn chickens. This whole pro life concept is bull$h!t.By that definition, every miscarriage should have a funeral and proper burial of the remains - and whatever went down a drain should be recovered with the help of law enforcement and first responders. And why stop there? Every spermatozoa is a potential life!
When my wife was pregnant with our son, both of us absolutely saw him as our "unborn child". I used to lie next to her and sing to him inside her belly, and she told me she could feel him move in response. Same thing when she was pregnant with our daughter. I find your idea that there's something wrong with using the phrase "unborn child" really bizarre.
> By that definition, every miscarriage should have a funeral and proper burial of the remains - and whatever went down a drain should be recovered with the help of law enforcement and first responders.
My wife miscarried several times. Every time was upsetting for both of us, although (quite understandably) significantly more so for her. I know a number of other couples (both friends and family) who have had similar experiences. The way you talk about that issue evinces a lack of empathy for other people's traumas
Having experienced a miscarriage personally, I can tell you it is not the same as losing a child. On the other hand, being a parent, I firmly believe that if my child needed to terminate a pregnancy, it is nobody’s business. If your child needed to get it done, would you seek my permission? The way I see it, you lack empathy for women’s issues
> Having experienced a miscarriage personally, I can tell you it is not the same as losing a child
If by that you mean that stillbirth and postnatal death are worse than miscarriage, obviously yes. As to what counts as "losing a child", that's partly semantics and partly a matter of how the mother/parents perceive and feel about the situation, which is going to differ from person to person.
> On the other hand, being a parent, I firmly believe that if my child needed to terminate a pregnancy, it is nobody’s business. If your child needed to get it done, would you seek my permission? The way I see it, you lack empathy for women’s issues
I never said anything in my comment about stopping anyone from getting an abortion. You are reading something into my comment I never said, and then accusing me of lacking empathy based on nothing more than your own faulty assumptions.
You can draw a line wherever you want with regards to terminology you prefer. Calling a fertilized egg an unhatched chicken would be totally reasonable in my opinion, though an unfertilized egg meant for cooking isn't a chicken at all.
I'm sure there are some people who have a ceremony or funeral after a miscarriage, why is that a problem? Going through a miscarriage is extremely traumatic, especially later in the pregnancy. Who the hell are you to say how someone can and can't grieve?
I'm honestly not sure why the term unborn child is so triggering to some. That wasn't my intention or on my radar at all.
I don't have a strong opinion on the abortion debate beyond my general view that individuals can make their own decisions. I simply don't know why referring to something like a 7 month old fetus as an unborn child would be so appalling, especially if the fetus is at a level of development that it could potentially survive outside the womb with special care.
That's not really correct. "Conservatism" is a three-legged stool. It includes social conservatives, libertarians, and big business. Social conservatives have never been big on "individual rights and freedoms." They are on board with that insofar as there is a tradition in America of certain rights and freedoms, but they are not motivated by those things as ends for their own sake. To social conservatives, abortion really has nothing to do with "rights" and "freedoms," but about religion and the natural order, both of which assign a central role to reproduction and child rearing.
I actually purposely stayed away from the terms progressive, liberal, and conservative sticking instead to left/right. The American take on liberal and conservative really is pretty different from how the many other countries and cultures use those terms.
The two parties do line up well enough with the basic definition of left/right, at least if you squint a bit. We don't actually have a conservative party worth writing home about at all - both Democrats and Republicans are liberal and tend to debate the details.
Case in point, both parties want government to impose laws protecting someone's rights when it comes to abortion, they simply disagree on who's rights need protecting.
Conservativism is about maintaining and perpetuating hierarchies in society and fighting hard against anything that might change the hierarchy. Different conservative groups differ on who should be at the bottom of the hierarchy.
In the USA, we have
1. Social conservatives - anyone who isn't white, heterosexual, Christian should be at the bottom hierarchy. Tucker Carlson informs them who they should focus on at the present moment. For now it is trans people. It was Mexicans and Muslims very recently and immigrants are a perennial favorite.
2. Libertarians - We already have people at the bottom of the hierarchy. Let's just keep them there by disallowing government support and subjecting them to monopolies and arcane private contracts. They are also highly supportive of bombing nations perceived to be lower in the hierarchy.
3. Big business - doesn't care who is at the bottom as long as they are guaranteed exclusive reign at the top.
Obviously, hierarchies are difficult to maintain in a democracy as the majority of the people are at the bottom of the hierarchy. This problem is solved by obfuscation and propaganda. Group 3 uses Group 2(rayiner et al) to construct messaging and propaganda to convince Group 1 to vote against their own interests. In fact, the US Democratic party is also center right and operates in a similar, but less blatant fashion. This can be seen from how Bernie Sanders was shut out of the party nominations even if it meant losing the 2016 elections.
You’re correct that conservatism seeks to preserve natural hierarchies. It arises from a worldview that says that things are the way they are for reasons, and that efforts to reshape the world according to human machinations are susceptible to failure. “Keeping people at the bottom” is often a side-effect of that worldview, insofar as conservatives are naturally distrustful of large scale efforts at social change.
> 1. Social conservatives - anyone who isn't white, heterosexual, Christian
Social conservatism is where “black and brown people” have the most in common with white republicans: https://news.gallup.com/poll/112807/blacks-conservative-repu.... By contrast, social liberalism was invented by white people. It arises out of the intense individualism that’s unique to white European societies.
That’s why the GOP had its best performance in decades among minorities in 2022, despite underperforming expectations among white people. Social liberalism—specifically abortion—didn’t motivate minority voters in the same way as it did white voters. That’s why DeSantis and Youngkin straight up won Hispanics in states Obama won twice, by focusing on cultural issues. That’s why, back in 2000, Muslims got George W. Bush elected: https://www.cair.com/cair_in_the_news/survey-shows-bush-supp... (“In key states like Florida, where Mr. Bush defeated Democrat Al Gore by just 537 votes, CAIR says Muslims in that state preferred the president over his opponent by 64-thousand votes.”). Luckily for liberals, it’s very difficult to get different groups of conservatives to trust each other.
I’m frankly offended at the insinuation that I’m a libertarian! I’m a typical “brown” American—I voted for Biden but tell my kids they can’t have tattoos like the white people.
> Social conservatism is where “black and brown people” have the most in common with white republicans:
Sure conservative blacks and browns, just like the whites can be compelled to vote against their own interests by group 2 and group 3.
> in 2000, Muslims got George W. Bush elected
Your ability to fish for random bits of data to reinforce whatever point you are making is exceptional.
> I’m frankly offended at the insinuation that I’m a libertarian!
I honestly don't care about getting your political category right, but now that I recall - you are a social conservative of the Clayton Bigsby variety.
Anyway, thanks for acknowledging that conservatism is inherently anti democratic.
> As to your point about self interest: I came to Reagan’s america—a country where poor kids “who look like me” have almost three times the economic mobility of poor white kids. “People who look like me” live longer than white people, are less likely to get shot or incarcerated than white people, etc.
Could you share the data showing this, or at least the point in time did the data reflect this? I'm not sure if you're referring to currently, or to Reagans times. I'd love to check it out for myself, as most of the data I've seen seems to point to the other direction. Always happy to learn more!
Regarding income mobility, see Figure III of this study by Chetty: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. Figure III shows child income on the Y axis versus parent income in the X axis. Compare the green line (Asians) to the blue line (whites).
Although most Asians came here in the 20th century, this pattern holds historically: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22748 (“Asians achieved extraordinary upward mobility relative to blacks and whites for every cohort born in California since 1920. This mobility stemmed primarily from gains in earnings conditional on education, rather than unusual educational mobility.”). This paper shows that the upward mobility was shown “conditional on education”—I.e. even when comparing similarly educated people.
On the other statistics. Incarceration: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/ji19.pdf (Table 2). In local jails, Asians are incarcerated at a rate of 25 per 100,000 versus 184 per 100,000 for whites.
Asian Americans have an average life expectancy of 86.3, versus 78.5 for whites: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4567918. The Asian-white gap is double the white-black gap. This is true even though Asians are slightly more likely to be uninsured than white Americans. The life expectancy for Asian Americans is 2 years longer than Japan, and a year and a half longer than Singapore.
There is no “bamboo ceiling.” Asians hold 4.6% of Fortune 500 board seats: https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/.... That’s probably overrepresentation if you consider that Asians skew almost 8 years younger than whites and older Asians often aren’t English fluent/lack prestigious American degrees/etc.
In my opinion, the progressive Asian trend of jumping on the racial liberalism train is a profoundly bad idea. It’s not in our self interest for white people to start becoming race conscious.
Nobody cares about or loved drag shows. They care about the first amendment. Don't flip right wing drag-show-hatred to liberal love of drag shows. You are lying and you know it.
> pathologically individualistic
The ones who refuse vaccinations in the middle of the deadliest pandemic in a 100 years, NOT!
>> you are a social conservative of the Clayton Bigsby variety.
> I’m a social conservative of the “typical Bangladeshi” variety
Of course black/brown conservatives are not all the same.
This has been a frog trapped in a long heating pot situation.
Winning at any cost. That's the disease. The powerful people at the top see democracy as a game to be won, not a nation to help. It's been like this for a long time.
The Newt Gringich gang in congress, with the Hastert Rule, to never even allow considering or talking about an idea unless you already know you'll have a big win: that's a major hinge here. That was a new temperament for our highest bodies, a twist.
And having gobshite terror-mongering low-brow Fox News, brain-scrambling your population. Telling them to live in fear of what's happening, to be afraid afraid afraid. And now it's not even baiting enough. The hunger for red meat grew, the mania worked & spread, and even more extreme providers of outrage & programming have emerged.
Whats happening now traces back back back, is a consequence of how one side has long conducted themselves & how they go about the mission. They know they will never win a popular anything in America ever again. The conservatives are roundly outvoted & outnumbered. The demographics as we age will continue to worsen thensituation. Polarizing & being detached, wrapping madness around yourself like a warm blanket, is the only seeming tactic for dealing with the disonnance of being ever less popular, perceived as ever worse and ever worse.
These positions aren't necessarily inconsistent. Many conservatives believe that abortion is murder, which is a moral position. The moral harm of carrying out an abortion is not something that can be decided by evidence. Many conservatives also believe that vaccination is a good bit more dangerous that you or I probably do, and that Covid is a bit less dangerous that you or I do. If you carry this basket of beliefs, there's no contradiction in their position.
People lost a lot of trust in our institutions, due to some misinformation put out early on during Covid, and I can't really blame them. Trust is hard to gain and easy to lose, and the folks that should have been being honest screwed up. Most people don't have enough of a scientific mind, or enough of the time and energy to find reputable sources of information on important topics. Even folks on the pro-vax mandate, pro-mask mandate side. Many just got lucky in that "their side" happened to be closer to the truth in this case.
And it's very hard to argue on topics like abortion, because people typically pick the most rare and egregious examples that support their side. Liberal folks will point out scenarios where anti-abortion laws lead to abused teenagers being forced to carry a fetus to term, while conservatives will point out scenarios where an abuser can pressure a girl to get an abortion in order to cover up the abuse, or a woman doesn't use birth control and just goes and gets abortion after abortion, when we should really consider it a last resort.
And the crux of it, whether it's morally worse to terminate a pregnancy or force a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, is something that you can only convince someone to change their mind on with evidence if they are pretty close to on the fence already.
I've had a lot of discussions with family members that disagree with me on both of these issues. If you try hard not to get angry or sarcastic, to stay calm and curious (or at least put on a really good act), to ignore the talking points and not push back instantly on everything that sounds incorrect or stupid to you, you can learn a lot about why people believe what they do. And sometimes they do make good points. And if people feel like you're listening, they're more open to listening to you.
There is no hypocrisy, just a different set of values. It's entirely consistent to believe that adults should be able to say what they want in public, but that the government should carefully curate the messages delivered to children in taxpayer-funded schools with the imprimatur of government authority.
And "autonomy" and "self determination" have never been important conservative principles. Conservatives generally believe in social roles and carrying them out, which includes the moral obligation to have and raise children as an essential part of the functioning of society. Opposition to abortion isn't some newfangled thing in conservative circles!
The anti-vax stuff invoked some of the libertarian sentiment that's in the water in America, but is best seen as an expression of conservative realism. Disease is a natural part of life; we can't drop everything and hide just because of a disease that's fairly low risk to most people.
Reductive. Notably, at the beginning of the pandemic, the motivation for "dropping everything and hiding" was to avoid overwhelming hospitals in the early phases of the pandemic --- which is something that did in fact happen, and impacted care (and cost lives) of people who weren't especially susceptible to COVID. Certain conservatives may have had the better argument later in the pandemic, but it's fallacious to retcon that all the way back into spring 2020.
Consider “freedom” to be right-wing shorthand for “license for well-off straight-seeming white men who can say the right words about Jesus to do as they please,” and that cognitive dissonance will be eased.
I grew up Southern Baptist in semi-rural Texas. People wondered why I didn’t date in high school… my focus was on GTFO Central Texas.
At the time, I silently fumed about my younger brother being allowed to stay out later than I had at the same age, despite my excellent grades and good behavior and his troublemaking and scraping by in school, but now I kind of appreciate it: the virtue my parents were protecting was inextricably linked to my freedom.
Bodily autonomy is a contradiction to abortion rights. Control over one's body logically implies not allowing a second body formation. The autonomy of the child overrides access to abortion since now in pregnancy, there are 2 bodies.
Similarly, access to expensive and elective medical services is a privilege, not a right.
> Bodily autonomy is a contradiction to abortion rights. Control over one's body logically implies not allowing a second body formation.
There's a glaring logical error here: Control over one's body does not logically imply not allowing a second body formation, only that it requires consent.
> The autonomy of the child overrides access to abortion since now in pregnancy, there are 2 bodies.
But this sentence is in opposition to bodily autonomy. How does the autonomy of the fetus affect the autonomy of the person carrying them? The fetus is free to do what it wants, just as the woman is.
> Similarly, access to expensive and elective medical services is a privilege, not a right.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a "right" is. It's not just something that you're guaranteed to get, but can also be something that nobody is allowed to ban you from. The second amendment doesn't mean that you can just waltz into a gun store and take what you want, does it?
They're just getting in on the game. The EU does it, various European countries do it, as well as India and others. About the only ones who don't get the special treatment are China and Iran.
So now US states are doing it. What do you expect? I should be able to run a website and if you don't want your people to see it, put up your great firewall or get fucked. But we decided to take a different path, where countries can charge companies and people for violating their laws when they've never set foot there and creators have to geoblock. And plenty deriding this move applauded it when it was their ideologies being protected.To those people: help us free the internet again or go cry in a corner about it. This is your fault.
However I am anti-abortion. I used to be pro abortion, I was a hardcore liberal just a few years ago, before covid (still not a Trump supporter, just rabidly apolitical now). And considering what the federal government has been doing censoring the right via tech platforms when it goes against their narratives.. aw shucks I can't get behind censorship.
You can't be "rabidly apolitical" and be anti-abortion and claim the government has been "censoring the right via tech platforms when it goes against their narratives," both of which are explicitly right-wing political positions.
> Politics (from Greek: Πολιτικά, politiká, 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals […]
I think you’re (plural) using and understanding the word “politics” in slightly different ways. As long as you believe that others should follow the rules you follow, it’s politics*. Even if your decision is motivated by religion, it’s still political in practice.
Nothing wrong with that. Nowadays saying that something or someone is political is automatically understood as an expression of identity/belonging, or placing someone or one at o other side of sort of a spectrum. But that’s not what the term politics means.
* gross oversimplification, I know, just trying to keep it brief
You are free to deny medical care for yourself based on your religious views (e.g. not accepting blood), but your religion means nothing when it comes to other people’s freedoms.
Or what, you shouldn’t be eating pigs because I’m Muslim or what?
> You are free to deny medical care for yourself based on your religious views (e.g. not accepting blood), but your religion means nothing when it comes to other people’s freedoms
Religion is not really relevant here. If the fetus is a person then aborting them is denying other people's freedom.
The question of when along the path of human development one becomes a person is not inherently a religious question.
I know many atheists for example who are fine with banning abortions of healthy fetuses that are moments away from birth unless there is something about the birth that would put the mother at unusual risk. That's because they can't find a way to count a newborn baby as a person but exclude a soon to be born fetus because nothing changes between those two times in the things that they consider relevant for determining personhood.
> the fetus is a person then aborting them is denying other people's freedom.
Even if it is a person, you completely fail to take into account the mother as a living human being.
Should we save someone in need of a kidney by forcing someone else to give up one of theirs? Not even another person’s life worth more than forcing away the freedom to bodily autonomy - and pregnancy does take an insanely huge toll on the women’s body, so she should be the only arbiter in deciding what she does with it. And “she chose to have sex” is not a valid argument, it is basic human need, and even with protection it is not 100% safe, shit happens.
Of course no sane person talks about aborting in like the 8th months or so, but early enough it is absolutely not a huge deal, especially that not doing so would just break two people - a mother that didn’t want to become one, and an unloved child.. who does it benefit?
> Even if it is a person, you completely fail to take into account the mother as a living human being
The point is that if the fetus has reached personhood stage then it becomes a matter of dealing with a conflict of freedoms between two people. Too often both sides in abortion debates fail to realize this.
> Of course no sane person talks about aborting in like the 8th months or so
Ahh, but note that all your bodily autonomy arguments apply just as well at 8 months as they do at 3 months, maybe even more so as the fetus is having a bigger impact on the woman's body at that point.
>Even if it is a person, you completely fail to take into account the mother as a living human being.
Last I checked the mother chose to engage in an activity she knew could result in a baby. Not sure why she is obviated from the need for personal responsibility for her decisions. Nor how you justify that kind of callous avoidance of personal responsibility; causing the death of another?
The use of the term "anti-abortion" is misleading in the age of US abortion restrictions. Preserving bodily autonomy is still pro-choice regardless of whether or not you personally would like one.
You got me curious, how is antiabortion misleading?
I've always actually disliked the term "pro-life" as it felt misleading to me when the debate is over abortion rights specifically and not life as a whole
The debate is about the right to get an abortion, not personal preference. The opposition believes there should be no right for anyone. In a context where you're discussing politics and not medical history, the presumption is that "anti-abortion" describes the political position. This is analogous to the difference between "anti-gay" and "straight".
That's an interesting take on it that I hadn't heard clearly laid out before, thanks!
That makes a lot of sense with regards to anti-abortion being a personal preference rather a stance on what others should do. I can't quite wrap my head around how "pro-choice" doesn't also fall into the trap of being a statement of personal preference, but that probably gets too nitpicky about symantics to be important
With that I wholeheartedly agree. I've never had a strong opinion on abortion laws because I'll never personally have to make that choice.
I strongly support everyone's right to choose though. Ironically that landed me on the other side of the fence during Covid from most that are pro-choice with regards to abortions but very much against the right to make other medical choices.
> And the fact that tech platforms censor the right is a fact, it may be a right wing talking point but that doesn't negate it being factual just because it displeases some people on the left when they hear it.
You're not wrong, but the issue is way overblown. The far left is censored just as much or more as the far right, but have much less mainstream political support in the strongly anti-socialist US. Censorship and free speech are the issue far more than political persecution of one side or another. Allowing the debate to be turned into a neolib vs neocon political battle rather than a matter of fundamental rights and Constitutional law is a mistake.
The difference is the "far-left" by your definition is a few edgy online people making up less than 1% of the population while the "far-right" by your definition have their own established political party and makes up some 30% of the population.
If you're talking about a group of people that makes up 30% of the country and a majority of one side of our two party system, I believe they'd just be "the right" not the far right.
I didn't give a definition of either, so I don't know where you're getting any of that from, but you're wrong in any case. Not all, or even a majority, of republicans are far right. Endorsing conservative social policies, libertarianism, or being religious are not at all equivalent to being a fascist, a bigot, or a racial nationalist.
I'm getting the definitions from people who get banned on the big social media sites mapped to the left-right spectrum. Bans on left aligned people tend to be the edgy lefties while bans on right aligned people tend to be a lot of just to the right of center type people.
The Twitter Files could help out here. Plenty of examples in there of tech censoring topics and individuals that largely fell into what most people would consider "the right" during our pandemic response.
"The right" is generally defined as policital views focusing on individual rights. Tech platforms were blatantly censoring discussion that they believed could lead to vaccine hesitancy and individuals making their own decision. They censored topics related to alternative treatments and palliative care. The motivation was clearly to push individuals to go along with the recommendations from government authorities at the expense of individual rights, freedoms, and choice.
We know that "The Twitter Files" were a completely one-sided effort to only release information on one political side. Hell, we even have evidence of the Trump White House asking Twitter to take down posts that make fun of Trump. The partisan nature of the release should not just put it into question, but (in my opinion) serves as direct evidence that the right is treated preferentially. If there really was a preference for the left, they would have shown just how few requests the right made, and just how few leftists were banned. But all of this information is kept secret, and it's kept this way for a reason.
To the original question of proof, it sounds like we agree that there is indeed proof that tech platforms were censoring the right.
I purposely left the question open with regards to the left being censored. I expect it does happen and examples could be found - I simply don't have proof handy, possibly because as you said the Twitter Files seem to have been one side.
The absence of evidence shoeing censorship of the left has no bearing on whether there is evidence that the right was being censored.
> To the original question of proof, it sounds like we agree that there is indeed proof that tech platforms were censoring the right.
No, we do not agree. A lot of what the right calls "censoring" is nothing more than "making the platform a space normal people want to participate in". By their conflation of very normal practices (e.g. banning people for racist language, or purposeful misgendering) with censorship I've stopped giving them any benefit of the doubt.
You're free to show scientific assessments of censorship of the right, but until then it's nothing more than the usual propaganda for me.
> making the platform a space normal people want to participate in
How are you defining normal here?
Discussion of vaccine efficacy, test validity during vaccine trials, alternative medical treatments, and even the basic fundamental purpose of informed consent were all being censored. Those topics broadly fit on the right in general, with a focus on individual freedom, and aren't specific to the far right.
Are you arguing that topics relate to a general opinion of individual vs collective views, broadly held by roughly half our population, aren't normal and should be isolated and silenced?
Are you further arguing that its right for minority views to be thrown out, silenced, and those individuals stripped of their right to free speech? If so, where is that line drawn when compared to other political battles fought by the left to protect and shine a light on opinions of other minority groups?
I'm not interested in arguing the specifics, I've done so before. You're free to bring up scientific evidence for the claim of censorship. Until then I'll treat it as I try to treat pretty much anything "commonly known" - as hearsay.
Evidence for censorship is never going to fit into a scientific context, especially when you're actually concerned with intent rather than statistical significance or similar data.
You asked for proof and there's plenty out there. Claiming now that the proof doesn't count because it doesn't also prove the negative is asinine. Had you asked for proof that only one side was being censored that'd be a whole different question but you simply asked for proof that the right was being censored.
> Evidence for censorship is never going to fit into a scientific context, especially when you're actually concerned with intent rather than statistical significance or similar data.
Generally speaking, if you can't provide scientific evidence for something, it's not worth thinking about. Even if I were to agree that censorship will not be scientifically studied by scientists (which I do not) any individual could still try to follow the scientific method to gather evidence of such censorship. I have not seen such evidence, and every time I've previously tried to follow "plenty of evidence out there" it has not convinced me.
Ask yourself: why not follow the scientific method, publish clear data etc.? I think this is not done because it would show that such censorship doesn't exist beyond what is usually expected of social media. If you have a different reason (or even data?) feel free to show it!
Video of a person commuting a crime is evidence but not scientific as it never followed the scientific method. Should it be thrown out and not considered since it isn't scientific?
Sorry, but what exactly are you trying to do? Are we in a hearing, looking at legal standards of evidence?
I've told you my terms, and you're not going to convince me to move off my standards. Either engage on those terms, or please just save both of us the time and don't engage.
I used to be pro abortion as well. I’m now anti abortion because the science has proven at this point beyond a shadow of a doubt that at conception there is a distinct, DNA-unique human being present. Call it what you want to make yourself feel better if you must, but at the end of the day you’re deciding to kill another human life by choosing abortion.
Call it what you will, but it's unable to survive until birth, so its not really alive is it?
Do we consider ejaculation murder too? They survive on their own, and can navigate their way to an egg... clearly they are from a human, living, and independent:)
Then why is there no large-scale moral outcry over IVF? The process creates and discards a number of fertilized eggs, each of which has unique DNA. Isn't that the much more pressing issue, both considering the procedure is never medically necessary for survival of the woman, and considering that the embryos are created in the knowledge only few will develop into a full human?
Not sure how you define large scale but there are religions who do have a moral objection or at least rules around Ivf. As an example for Catholics each embryo must be treated as sacred and respected as human life. If you have extra embryos you must do everything possible to respect that life (ie transfer the embryos to someone in need and/or keep in cryo until that can happen). These rules aren’t typically known because ivf is a small minority of people that actually go through the process.
Sure there are religions, but I'm asking about the political movement. Are there strides from any parties attempting to ban abortion to also ban IVF?
The reason I'm asking is pretty simple - I believe that many, many people are simply "for births", and politicians capitalize on that. They won't go against IVF since it leads to more births, but they go against abortions because they lead to fewer. Do you have any evidence going against this?
Censorship is inevitable to maintaining the power structure, the question is who controls the censorship and whether the approach taken to censorship makes the people strong or weak.
