This song https://youtu.be/JdmGO-GvHyo was released in 1968, five years before the Roe v. Wade ruling. If you are under fifty you have no memory of the zeitgeist when that song had meaning that you may not be able to completely grasp. If you "got a girl in trouble" the choices were, "do the right thing" and marry her, or if that was deem…
This song https://youtu.be/JdmGO-GvHyo was released in 1968, five years before the Roe v. Wade ruling. If you are under fifty you have no memory of the zeitgeist when that song had meaning that you may not be able to completely grasp. If you "got a girl in trouble" the choices were, "do the right thing" and marry her, or if that was deemed to be not the right thing (it often wasn't) she went away for a while to stay with Aunt Sally where she had the child that was put up for adoption (never spoken of). I had a girlfriend who told me she would never marry a guy who knocked her up because she never wanted to hear the words during a heated argument, "I wouldn't have married you except for that little bastard." Or you could be the person in the song.
That was just the world of teen pregnancy. Adults also had/have reasons to not bring another child into the world. Listen to the song (really listen) and try to let those times sink in. How do you think that people have never known a time when safe abortion was not an option are going to deal with a return of those times? Will cities burn during another summer of peaceful protests?
I'm not part of the "it's men trying to control women's bodies" thinking crowd. There are truly people who are opposed to abortion as a matter of conscience. I'm of the "it's none of my f'ing business," or the government's way of thinking. I'll spare you the list of evil shit (yes, I'm getting worked up) that the government has been involved in pertaining to "medicine." A paragon of virtue.
I've got a friend, an evangelical (not dissing religions) who is very outspoken in his opposition to abortion. In the Navy he served on a nuclear submarine with a mission to annihilate cities with millions of people, including pregnant women, if his government commanded it. We humans are a mass of contradictions, all in good faith. But then we are also a bunch of assholes seeking to give government the power to do *to* the political opposition and then become horrified when the opposition gets that power. I'll stop my government has too much power rant before I go anarchist.
I don't trust our government any more than you do but it stands as our only protection from the corporations and the financiers.
Without government we would be living in corporate barracks working 18 hour days in exchange for calories alone, getting smaller every generation because smaller people can subsist on smaller amounts of crop residue and pink slime. We would be sent outside the gates to starve at the first sign of weakness or by age forty.
This is the world that the free market party aspires to.
A job at a dormitory sock factory was a step up from stepping barefoot on water buffalo shit in a rice paddy. One person's sweat shop is another's opportunity. Are you looking down or up? An Italian factory in Thailand where they could sell their socks cheaper in Italy with a side effect of adding to the Thai economy.
My first trip to China was Shanghai in the 90s. I was there to provide training and support for a commercial airline avionics maintenance shop. The building was not airconditioned. There was a glass greenhouse looking thing in the middle of a big room that was for the equipment. People came to work on bycicles or what looked like military trucks. The main street was four lanes, two each way, and on the weekend, they put up barriers to extend the sidewalk to the outside lanes for vehicles.
My last trip was to Xi'An to train and support a joint venture flight controls shop. A very different China. They had decided to transition from export only factories to a local consumption one which meant they had to pay people enough to buy the products. I went into a store with a seven-story escalator. The 7th story was a food court full of sit down real non-junk restaurants. Cars everywhere which made it a bit like Bangkok or Tokyo; faster to leave the car at home and take public transportation. A huge thriving economy. Capitalism at work.
Where it didn't serve America well was that we moved manufacturing out of the US. We went from a manufacturing giant, as far as jobs went for the semi-skilled, to a service industry. If your service takes skill and knowledge, finance or tech, you can make money though software can be outsourced globally too. That leaves the "Why did I have to learn math in school? I never use Algebra." crowd doing minimum wage jobs that were once upon a time my high school part time job. 𝗣𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗻'𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗺 𝗶𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗻𝗼 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹. The living wage factory jobs are largely gone and any service job that can be done over the internet is in competition with lower wage workers overseas.
Government doesn't protect anyone from that. Government does support crony capitalism where the ultimate insider traders (Congress) pass laws and regulations that determine who the winners and losers will be and buy the right stock early.
My big complaint with government is its claimed monopoly on the use of deadly force and the ability to incarcerate. Big business can't get away with sending men with guns to take you away or kill you.
How does that relate to the abortion issue? What do we do with all these people who cannot sustain themselves because they offer nothing to society? We don't just need to shrink the population for Mother Earth, but we outgrew capitalism as it serves the masses. I'm aware that that sounds a bit elitist but find the lie.
BTW elitism doesn't faze me. I can't help but be elitist about some things, like music. I find some widely accepted ideas like "common sense" to be offensive af; the only acknowledgement I can bring myself to make of the idea is at the level of "don't hold your hand in a fire."
BTW ...
"If you don't pay your taxes, men with guns will show up at your house, initiate force and put you in jail."
"This is not initiation of force. It is enforcement of contract, in this case an explicit social contract. Many libertarians make a big deal of "men with guns" enforcing laws, yet try to overlook the fact that "men with guns" are the basis of enforcement of any complete social system. Even if libertarians reduced all law to "don't commit fraud or initiate force", they would still enforce with guns."
Back in the early 80s my wife has a job sewing blue jeans for Levi Strauss. It was far and away the best paying job around for an industrial seamstress. $8/hr ($22.51 in 2022 dollars) where the minimum wage was $3.25/hr. Someone started an effort to unionize. I have no idea how much that mattered in the decision to shut down all the US plants and move them offshore, but that's what happened.
I had just taken a new expat job (a bit of irony) and we were moving away. She would have been quitting anyway but timing is everything. They gave her a generous eight-week payout when they shut it down. Back in the union busting days you point to if you demanded more than an employer could pay and stay in business they couldn't move offshore. I guess losing the best job you could find was better than facing the Pinkertons. Not an excuse for sending in the vigilantes.
I'll get this out of the way up front. I had read the Lord of the Rings trilogy five times before the publication of The Silmarillion. Reading it answered some enigmatic questions and I read it one more time. Thanks for the link, I'll probably investigate it for reasons other than your purpose in posting it.
I assume, correct me if I'm wrong, that the point is that the Supreme Court is the one ring and should be casts into the fire of the mount of doom. I can understand your thought when it is packed by people with ideological agendas given my small l libertarian view that governments of all kinds have too much power given their tendency to abuse that power.
No, my point was what Galadriel says about the Second Kindred, the Men: "above all else, desire power."
That is so true.
In my ideal world there would be an absolute ruler of unimpeachable benevolence who would never succumb to the desire for power or the enjoyment of cruelty, This is of course impossible. But we could get so many problems fixed.
There's the rub. We are both realists; wish in one hand and crap in the other and we know which hand fills faster. Conflict over power is always claimed to be good vs. evil, but it turns out to be us vs. them where good guys is not an absolute.
I think that the best that we can do is limit the power that those in power enjoy.
This song https://youtu.be/JdmGO-GvHyo was released in 1968, five years before the Roe v. Wade ruling. If you are under fifty you have no memory of the zeitgeist when that song had meaning that you may not be able to completely grasp. If you "got a girl in trouble" the choices were, "do the right thing" and marry her, or if that was deemed to be not the right thing (it often wasn't) she went away for a while to stay with Aunt Sally where she had the child that was put up for adoption (never spoken of). I had a girlfriend who told me she would never marry a guy who knocked her up because she never wanted to hear the words during a heated argument, "I wouldn't have married you except for that little bastard." Or you could be the person in the song.
That was just the world of teen pregnancy. Adults also had/have reasons to not bring another child into the world. Listen to the song (really listen) and try to let those times sink in. How do you think that people have never known a time when safe abortion was not an option are going to deal with a return of those times? Will cities burn during another summer of peaceful protests?
I'm not part of the "it's men trying to control women's bodies" thinking crowd. There are truly people who are opposed to abortion as a matter of conscience. I'm of the "it's none of my f'ing business," or the government's way of thinking. I'll spare you the list of evil shit (yes, I'm getting worked up) that the government has been involved in pertaining to "medicine." A paragon of virtue.
I've got a friend, an evangelical (not dissing religions) who is very outspoken in his opposition to abortion. In the Navy he served on a nuclear submarine with a mission to annihilate cities with millions of people, including pregnant women, if his government commanded it. We humans are a mass of contradictions, all in good faith. But then we are also a bunch of assholes seeking to give government the power to do *to* the political opposition and then become horrified when the opposition gets that power. I'll stop my government has too much power rant before I go anarchist.
I don't trust our government any more than you do but it stands as our only protection from the corporations and the financiers.
Without government we would be living in corporate barracks working 18 hour days in exchange for calories alone, getting smaller every generation because smaller people can subsist on smaller amounts of crop residue and pink slime. We would be sent outside the gates to starve at the first sign of weakness or by age forty.
This is the world that the free market party aspires to.
Do you doubt this?
Some observations counter to that idea.
A job at a dormitory sock factory was a step up from stepping barefoot on water buffalo shit in a rice paddy. One person's sweat shop is another's opportunity. Are you looking down or up? An Italian factory in Thailand where they could sell their socks cheaper in Italy with a side effect of adding to the Thai economy.
My first trip to China was Shanghai in the 90s. I was there to provide training and support for a commercial airline avionics maintenance shop. The building was not airconditioned. There was a glass greenhouse looking thing in the middle of a big room that was for the equipment. People came to work on bycicles or what looked like military trucks. The main street was four lanes, two each way, and on the weekend, they put up barriers to extend the sidewalk to the outside lanes for vehicles.
My last trip was to Xi'An to train and support a joint venture flight controls shop. A very different China. They had decided to transition from export only factories to a local consumption one which meant they had to pay people enough to buy the products. I went into a store with a seven-story escalator. The 7th story was a food court full of sit down real non-junk restaurants. Cars everywhere which made it a bit like Bangkok or Tokyo; faster to leave the car at home and take public transportation. A huge thriving economy. Capitalism at work.
Where it didn't serve America well was that we moved manufacturing out of the US. We went from a manufacturing giant, as far as jobs went for the semi-skilled, to a service industry. If your service takes skill and knowledge, finance or tech, you can make money though software can be outsourced globally too. That leaves the "Why did I have to learn math in school? I never use Algebra." crowd doing minimum wage jobs that were once upon a time my high school part time job. 𝗣𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗻'𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗺 𝗶𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗻𝗼 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹. The living wage factory jobs are largely gone and any service job that can be done over the internet is in competition with lower wage workers overseas.
Government doesn't protect anyone from that. Government does support crony capitalism where the ultimate insider traders (Congress) pass laws and regulations that determine who the winners and losers will be and buy the right stock early.
My big complaint with government is its claimed monopoly on the use of deadly force and the ability to incarcerate. Big business can't get away with sending men with guns to take you away or kill you.
How does that relate to the abortion issue? What do we do with all these people who cannot sustain themselves because they offer nothing to society? We don't just need to shrink the population for Mother Earth, but we outgrew capitalism as it serves the masses. I'm aware that that sounds a bit elitist but find the lie.
Google Pinkertons, 1892
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_the_United_States
BTW elitism doesn't faze me. I can't help but be elitist about some things, like music. I find some widely accepted ideas like "common sense" to be offensive af; the only acknowledgement I can bring myself to make of the idea is at the level of "don't hold your hand in a fire."
BTW ...
"If you don't pay your taxes, men with guns will show up at your house, initiate force and put you in jail."
"This is not initiation of force. It is enforcement of contract, in this case an explicit social contract. Many libertarians make a big deal of "men with guns" enforcing laws, yet try to overlook the fact that "men with guns" are the basis of enforcement of any complete social system. Even if libertarians reduced all law to "don't commit fraud or initiate force", they would still enforce with guns."
https://theworld.com/~mhuben/faq.html#initiate
I'm aware of that history.
Back in the early 80s my wife has a job sewing blue jeans for Levi Strauss. It was far and away the best paying job around for an industrial seamstress. $8/hr ($22.51 in 2022 dollars) where the minimum wage was $3.25/hr. Someone started an effort to unionize. I have no idea how much that mattered in the decision to shut down all the US plants and move them offshore, but that's what happened.
I had just taken a new expat job (a bit of irony) and we were moving away. She would have been quitting anyway but timing is everything. They gave her a generous eight-week payout when they shut it down. Back in the union busting days you point to if you demanded more than an employer could pay and stay in business they couldn't move offshore. I guess losing the best job you could find was better than facing the Pinkertons. Not an excuse for sending in the vigilantes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjJvOm94W5U&start=60&end=70
I'll get this out of the way up front. I had read the Lord of the Rings trilogy five times before the publication of The Silmarillion. Reading it answered some enigmatic questions and I read it one more time. Thanks for the link, I'll probably investigate it for reasons other than your purpose in posting it.
I assume, correct me if I'm wrong, that the point is that the Supreme Court is the one ring and should be casts into the fire of the mount of doom. I can understand your thought when it is packed by people with ideological agendas given my small l libertarian view that governments of all kinds have too much power given their tendency to abuse that power.
No, my point was what Galadriel says about the Second Kindred, the Men: "above all else, desire power."
That is so true.
In my ideal world there would be an absolute ruler of unimpeachable benevolence who would never succumb to the desire for power or the enjoyment of cruelty, This is of course impossible. But we could get so many problems fixed.
'𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦"
There's the rub. We are both realists; wish in one hand and crap in the other and we know which hand fills faster. Conflict over power is always claimed to be good vs. evil, but it turns out to be us vs. them where good guys is not an absolute.
I think that the best that we can do is limit the power that those in power enjoy.
My vote for benevolent dictator goes to Lord Vetinari of Ankh Morpork.