30% jokes, 30% attempts at academic discussions, 40% spewing my opinions uninvited to find out what might be missing from my perspective.

I’ll usually reiterate this in my posts, but I never give legal advice online. I can describe how the law generally tends to be, analyze a public case from an academic perspective, and explain how courts normally treat an issue. But hell no am I even going to try to apply the law to your specific situation.

  • 0 Posts
  • 49 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • 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?



  • (TOS spoiler for one episode)

    Just in case any lurkers are still wondering: I think - but don’t remember 100% - the guy everyone’s calling Kevin was some random crew member in TOS who took over the ship’s control room and started trolling the ship’s PA system, until the main characters managed to break into the room and subdue him.

    The episode gave him an unreasonably long monologue with the PA system, during which he sang an entire song (“I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen”). It’s also a little weird that this one crew member can take over the entire ship even though he’s some average joe who we don’t really see again.

    No idea where the memes about him started though.


  • First of all, nice bait, looks delicious, think I’ll chow down.

    I think this because I’ve spent over a decade of my life trying to understand where people come from and getting nowhere with helping them.

    This mindset sounds closer to the problem than to the solution. Do you truly believe that the best way to interact with an extremist is to blindly judge them, then assume that they will question their entire worldview because one person, who has made no good faith effort to understand them, decides to call them names?

    Many extremists, though perhaps not most, feel the way they do because they honestly believe they are doing the right thing. They listen to the lived experiences of people they trust and discount the words of people they do not. The blind judgment of others only ‘proves’ to them that it’s all one big conspiracy, everyone else are sheep, and that they are the only ones who can think for themselves.


  • 🎶 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.








  • Advice against phishing emails can be reduced to, “1: Never click on a link, call a phone number, download an attachment, or follow instructions you found in an email unless you were already expecting this exact email from this exact sender. 2: If you really want to do those things, search up the organization’s website directly and use the contact info they provide there instead.”

    imo it’s the ad-hungry articles stretching everything into 10+ pages that’s making advice so inaccessible to people. Super annoying because it dilutes the real, simple message that’s already there, it’s just locked behind an adwall.


  • I would really really recommend not underestimating the importance of medical treatment. It took me 4 tries to find the right medication (turns out an NDRI, not an SSRI, did the trick) to discover that actually, “normal” people are basically happy by default?? Like instead of it being this elusive reward that I had to work hard for, it’s like I can consciously hold on to my positive emotions and let go of the negative ones. Also, basic tasks that were endless nightmares before (laundry, cooking, phone calls) are now stress-free and even kind of satisfying?

    I had the right tools before, like supportive friends, enough education about radical acceptance and coping skills, and a physically healthy routine, but it didn’t seem to help. And that makes sense now because it turns out, it barely matters how much happy chemicals your brain makes if it’s going to immediately throw them away. Not trying to tell you what to do (am neither a doctor nor a therapist) but I’m wondering if that’s what’s going on with you too.





  • catreadingabook@kbin.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlToxic
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.