To imply that abortion is the cure for poverty or that not having access to it is the cause is indeed false and a typical liberal refusal to look at the broader systems. But to deny how much unwanted pregnancy, along with the health risks and increased mortality rate that come with it, the burden on poor communities to provide adequate care for children when they are already overworked, etc, all contribute to and worsen poverty is absurd, and just as much a failure to recognize material reality.
Liberals and even well meaning progressives will sometimes fall into the trap of pitching abortion and birth control as a part of the solution to poverty.
But access to abortion and BC does help alleviate poverty. When women are unable to choose to not have unwanted pregnancies and children, it does create a serious strain on them and their community, exacerbating poverty and everything associated with it. That isn't some idealist liberal delusion, it's very well documented reality.
Edit, adding:
I honestly think if birth control was only available for colored people then conservatives wouldn't have a problem with it. Abortion too
It's just the opposite. One of the main reasons reactionaries tend to be so anti-abortion is because forcing women to have unwanted children helps to perpetuate poverty, locking communities into a cycle of impoverishment they can't escape. Meanwhile, those who are rich and white have access to abortions whether they're illegal or not, which is by design. If a rich old gammon-chud's daughter gets pregnant and she doesn't want to keep it, he's likely to help her quietly get an abortion even as he ensures people of color never have that kind of opportunity. Wealthy white people want (and generally have) the freedom to do whatever they want while they simultaneously limiting the freedoms of poor BIPOC people, all to maintain or strengthen the white supremacist system.
There might be a few outside of here that know it, but they write essays about how George actually must have meant it to be the other way around to reassure themselves.
Wait, what's worse? For who? I'm not totally sure what you're saying here but as someone who has survived by doing sex work, who has been repeatedly sexually exploited*, and who has also been more than what I think most would just call exploited, I would not say that any of that was worse for me than being murdered on a factory farm. Can we just agree that exploitation and the objectification or commodification of sentient life is very bad and needs to be abolished?
*(Side note to make clear that sex work is not inherently exploitational either but that's a different ball of wax.)
FINALLY.
About goddamn time. Better late than never (I mean fucking obviously, I just wish it had been decades or even a century sooner).
I hope he died knowing that the empire he spent his life orchestrating atrocities for is also spiraling the drain.
🦀 
all x 1000.
Sentience is not a "low bar" and means a hell of a lot more than just responding to stimuli. Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations. It necessitates qualia. Sentience is the high bar and sapience is only a little ways further up from it. So-called "AI" is nowhere near either one.
Tankies usually are bastions of political understanding though, whether you agree with them or not. They have to be to stand up to the mountains of propaganda we're all fed that people are trained since childhood to accept as "simply how things are." Many tankies only earn that title after developing a perspective that requires spending years reading, you know, actual books, on history and theory and working to honestly understand why things are the way they are, not how they wish they were, nor simply accepting what everyone is told for the sake of reinforcing existing power structures. Hexbear is way out there, yes, since the overton window is so ridiculously far to the right, by design, that it keeps most people from ever even understanding what leftism is. Hexbear is not divorced from reality so much as it is painfully hyper-tuned in to how dire reality actually is.
I'm not a Jewish person, but the imagery that immediately and involuntarily springs into my mind when I see a burning Star of David is that of people and industrial ovens. Personally, I couldn't just decouple a symbol like that in my head from the more notorious of Nazi atrocities any more than if I were to try not to think of fascism when I see a swastika. I thought this was a common if not universal association, and that's why we never had the emoji in the first place but I guess not.
Obviously, Israel as a state should burn and no one should have to hold back from showing their disgust and rage at it, at the fascist settler colonizers that make it up, and anyone who supports it/them. But expressing that rage by specifically using the most well-known symbol for Judaism on fire would, in a small way, be going along with the Zionist agenda to associate Judaism with Zionism.
@WhyEssEff@hexbear.net I'm totally with you on this, and I'm grateful you draw a hard line at not implementing that emoji. I hope the other mods and admins do too.
Possibly, but the article does mention that it jumped significantly even from 2020/2021 during "the height of the Covid-19 pandemic," though they are probably discounting the cumulative effects of covid since everyone knows it's all over and done with since Biden defeated Covid. Damaged immune systems could make sense at least for part of it:
Of the 10 leading causes of death for infants in the U.S., mortality rates increased for two: bacterial sepsis, or infection, and maternal complications.
I was assuming it probably has mostly to do with the sudden inability to access abortion (and other reproductive healthcare as a result) for so much of the US now. Here's what the article said about it:
One question the researchers had was whether the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion access, may have played a role in the latter. But because “maternal complications” encompasses a number of things that can go wrong in pregnancy, says Ely, the data aren’t granular enough to know if any specific state policies regarding womens’ health have impacted infant mortality rates.
relevant repost:
Are liberals incapable of discussing or arguing something without resorting to childish insults?
When you don't have material reality as the basis for your arguments, (or if you tried to argue based on material reality, you know you'd lose) what else is there left but bullshit like childish insults?
I keep getting psychoanalyzed by them and being told that I’m supporting Palestine because I want to be part of a group
Pure projection. They can't fathom having firm, reasoned, and consistent principles, so they assume that you, like them, are just being performative about who you support.
view more: next ›
Dirt_Possum
joined 1 year ago
And it might be detrimental to you just as easily. There's no way to know which without being informed, but an ignorant opinion based on "values" (aka vibes and what you want to be true rather than what is true) is more likely to hurt you or others in the long run. Just as being a racist bigot who has a wrong opinion about people of color might find that holding their racist opinion is immediately beneficial to themselves if they're in a similarly bigoted community, being a bigot is ultimately harmful for reasons I would hope wouldn't need to be explained.
Yet their uninformed opinion is harmful. Gender issues are inevitably part of our world and learning about them will not only prepare children to have an understanding of them that their ignorant parent lacks and help make the world safer and more livable for everyone as a result, but if that child themselves turns out to be gender stereotype non-conforming, then learning about those issues will help them better understand themselves and potentially save them from much of the misery inflicted on them by an ignorant populous.