catreadingabook

I’m against forced birth, but have to point out that there is the argument, whether realistic or not, that the parent can always give the baby to the foster care system once it’s born, so their obligation would be limited to 9 months total.

Personally what I take issue with is the inconsistency of forced-birth laws in the absence of comparable forced-labor laws. In a world of ideal policy, maybe we as a society might agree that a person should be obligated to sacrifice their time and health for the sake of preserving or creating human life. But then it shouldn’t be applied only to adult women who had consensual sex. Why shouldn’t non-pregnant people be forced to tend a farm for 9 months to produce food for those who are starving, or to spend 9 months working 80-hour weeks at an emergency call center with no pay?

I suspect the answer is that the rights themselves are not the issue here, but rather the motivation to punish women who have consensual sex.

In the academic sense of the term, negative rights include the right to not have things done to you (e.g., to not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law).

Positive rights include the right for you to do something, generally as against others (e.g., the right to have food, healthcare, or education be provided to you by other people).

I’m not sure it is useful to try to categorize abortion rights, for similar reasons why it would be difficult to categorize the right to try and grab the only parachute on a crashing plane. Even if it causes injury or death to others, our general tendency is to treat positive acts of genuine self-preservation as a negative right, if only in the sense that we would never enforce a rule that prohibits the person from trying.

A funky brain teaser on the topic might be whose right of life prevails when a perfectly healthy person turns out to be the only match for 5 patients with failing organs, one needing a new heart, another needing a new intact liver, etc., who are each about to die if we don’t kill the healthy person and harvest their organs for transplant. And would the answer change if this wouldn’t kill the healthy person, but severely decrease their quality of life - such as involuntarily taking one of their lungs and one of their kidneys?

🎶 oh, I can so just sit here and cry 🎶

but fr what worked well for me was blocking, deleting, getting rid of (or stuffing into a rarely used closet) anything that reminded me of them, then distracting myself 24/7 long enough to later process my emotions with a little bit of distance from the event itself - not to block out the feelings but to just avoid ruminating on them.

Mostly the point was buying time to provide my monkey brain with hard proof that I can survive without that person, that way it stops shooting me up with the Bad Chemicals every time I think of them.

That isn’t the defining characteristic, though [ETA: under the conventional understanding of the word, at least - apologies for appearing to ask you for clarification only to then argue with you about it]. There is already a word for that and it’s called entitlement. What distinguishes an incel is the added belief that there is something wrong with people who have romantic or sexual preferences that the incel disagrees with (as long as the preference is limited to consenting adults).

Personally my main gripe is with the implication that a person, who simply wants someone with traits that the person doesn’t have him/herself, is therefore entitled in a way that puts them in the wrong. To hopefully illustrate why that’s weird: I tend to be romantically interested in those bleeding-heart optimist types even though my own philosophy is relatively pragmatic. I admire that characteristic in others but have no intention of adopting it myself. It isn’t obvious that this fact, on its own, makes me an incel, even if optimism is more rare, desirable, or difficult to maintain.

I think the discussion would be clearer if you defined what you think incel beliefs are? The typical description I know of is, “Members of my preferred gender refuse to have sex with me because there is something wrong with them, and it’s their fault that I’m lonely.” It looks like here the assumed definition is, “I’m happy being alone unless someone extremely desirable comes along,” which imo is the opposite of incel behavior.

The reason you are getting called an incel here is likely because, by characterizing the latter opinion as something wrong with “so many” women when it is merely a lack of interest in dating most men, you start to come dangerously close to expressing the former opinion yourself.

Most people in first world countries will probably understand ‘L’ and ‘R’ anyway. But hypothetically, the problem could probably be solved by adding another letter, the same way we know that ‘T’ is for ‘Tuesday’ and ‘Th’ is for ‘Thursday.’

P2W games are like, “You got 2 free skips! Let’s try using one now on this 5-minute timer.” & You know I’m waiting the full 5 minutes because after the tutorial every cooldown is like 8+ hours.

hey i know this one

As with most social media, I think the voting system makes it worse. There is always an element of “playing to the audience,” in that the easiest way to get validation (votes, boosts, replies) is to make sure everyone thinks you’re morally or intellectually superior over the person you’re talking to, whereas an actual normal conversation would be focused on the exchange of new ideas and perspectives.

Stronger moderation could help, and filtering the less civil communities could help, but I suspect it’s just a natural consequence of having a built-in validation system that applies to every post and comment everywhere. As engagement in the fediverse grows overall, I could see it getting worse mainly because of more ‘vote-seeking’ behavior.

It isn’t commercial labor when an adult does their own chores (I think), as it’s more related to the people in a household maintaining their own home. It likely wouldn’t be labor for a child for the same reasons, though I’m not sure.

But it could start to look like labor when it’s something that produces commercial value, for example, it’s more like a ‘chore’ to water the vegetable garden in the backyard, but it’s more like ‘labor’ to tend to 20 acres of farmland.

Excessive chores, though, could be prevented under child abuse law rather than child labor law, depending on how it’s enforced. Doing all the household work voluntarily for no reason other than it’s fun? Almost certainly legal. No video games until you clean the dishes? Probably legal. No food until you sweep, mop, dust, and shine every surface in the house? Probably abuse.

Lmao imagine getting referred to a doctor for surgery, you look them up, and their professional webpage is like. “i wen’t 2 harverd”

Before I left, I remember it being really bad. People were abusing therapyspeak without any regard for what the terms actually mean. Like, “my bf keeps violating my boundaries by not buying me gifts,” “NTA your mom is parentifying you by asking you to clean the dishes,” “divorce your wife of 7 years because she neglects you by asking for an hour alone every day.”

Arguably both ‘extremes’ can become an excuse for inaction, pessimists may think “why even try if it probably won’t help” while optimists may think “it’ll resolve itself / look at the bright side.” Similarly, both can be strategies for coping with disappointment. And can become a tiny bit delusional.

But at least optimists live in blissful ignorance lol. I think people underestimate an optimist’s ability to see problems as just solutions waiting to happen.

Dreams are at least somewhat influenced by your recent thoughts and experiences. For example, many studies found that people dreamed more about disease and confinement during the pandemic (here’s a medical journal article about it). You probably have a higher chance of influencing the subject of your dreams if you focus on the desired subject enough during the day.

I’m confused maybe. I’ve heard of gas stoves, but how does a gas oven work?

When a console game finally releases a PC port and the title screen still says “Press Start,” you know the keys are going to be completely unhinged like, “I” to open your inventory. “C” is yes, and “V” is no, except in the escape menu, where “Enter” is yes and “Backspace” is extra-yes. Left-click to either attack or walk forward, depending on how your character is feeling.

A sizable portion of the population would convince themselves that the sky is green, if that was their party’s official position.

And a sizable portion of politicians, of a certain moral character, would take the official position that the sky is green if someone paid them enough.

On an unrelated note, I wonder which party is heavily sponsored by the oil and gas industry?

I feel like at this point, accurately reporting the state of the world counts as ‘Democratic scaremongering.’ Climate change is making the world less habitable. The coronavirus is capable of killing you. Some people will die as a direct result of the current forced-birth laws. It’s possible to have a functioning society without racism and sexism. For some reason, these facts are all “political” and it’s not the Democrats who are contesting them.

Agreeing with priapus, no idea what OP is on about but the one here is in really poor taste. Saying generalized statements and trying to describe an entire community as if your experiences are universal, especially trying to paint the entire community in a negative light, is uneducated and weird.

It would be like saying, “I feel like men are dangerous and creepy. They seem to go out of their way to get offended when we tell them we don’t want to talk to them. Like, I’m sorry some people in the country have made them feel like they need female attention, but they’re hurting their own cause by insisting that they deserve sex all the time.”

Maybe it’s true about a subset of the group, and that’s probably the subset you will see if you are exclusively browsing hateful content all the time. But a few real life conversations with real life people will show that those statements are barely accurate at all for the majority of them.

A more appropriate way to express themselves would have been centered on their own experiences - “I feel like I have to be careful expressing my views on trans people because I see people getting offended over innocuous questions,” etc etc. Very very different tone.

It could still theoretically be that our reality is some kind of entertainment. For example, people enjoy playing The Sims. There are still active communities for the older versions even though there are newer, more engaging games out there. And more generally, some people prefer old games even though their computers have like 1000x the processing power needed to run it.

If the reality we experience is a simulation, it could be for similar motivations, the hardware would be sophisticated but still a user will run whatever they prefer on it.