If you believe the world is flat, you would likewise attempt to separate teaching physics from less potentially challenging subjects. I don’t believe that makes physics not part of education.
Just because you (or Texas) thinks abortion should be illegal, doesn’t miraculously make the information not part of knowledge other people believe is educational.
> Just because you (or Texas) thinks abortion should be illegal, doesn’t miraculously make the information not part of knowledge other people believe is educational
There is a vast difference between receiving (A) medical information, and (B) booking an appointment, going to a medical provider, paying/providing insurance information, obtaining/giving consent, getting anesthesia, receiving a medical procedure, and then aftercare.
Just like I don't believe that commodity medical insurance should be paying for cosmetic plastic procedures not incurred as part of part of medical aftercare for a previous injury/accident/illness. If you decide you want to have lip filler to increase the fullness of your lips, and breast implants for cosmetic reasons purely, perhaps with a full facelift, then pay for it on your own.
"Online education" is referring here to any organization hosting a website that provides education about abortion. It's not referring to the public school system, which as far as I know, does not host web sites with abortion resources.
The Supreme Court will rule that such an interpretation of this law is a violation of the first or sixth amendments. There is no other reasonable interpretation
There are a number of people who are "originalists" on the court. People who believe that they have a special understanding of the founders. A belief that they, at a minimum, channel the ideals through some kind of unknowable means.
To me, this is a combination of religious belief in some kind of righteousness of the founders, which is easily challengeable. Or it is some kind of belief that a person's internal thought process matches that of these mythical founders. I don't know the series of beliefs that is necessary for someone to hold the belief that they have this insight that other members of the court don't, but I assure you that the process that gets you to this belief is almost certainly emotional, not logical. It is not possible to read the mind of someone 200 years past, or how they would respond to modern society and scientific understanding. I do assure you that the belief that thinking one has the power to make that guess accurately is false.
How many people on the bench hold this set of religious beliefs? And if one holds this set of beliefs, then do the amendments to the constitution that follow retain validity? Do they then have the ability to discern the mental patterns of the people who wrote those amendments too?
With this and the shadow dockets, I strongly believe that the sense of validity of the courts will soon falter, and the societal costs will be great.
I think that many rights encoded in the amendments will soon be gutted.
>There are a number of people who are "originalists" on the court. People who believe that they have a special understanding of the founders. A belief that they, at a minimum, channel the ideals through some kind of unknowable means.
>How many people on the bench hold this set of religious beliefs?
This seems to be a very uncharitable take on what originalism means. You're basically saying the people believe in the paranormal and derive their rulings based on a séance. The first sentence on wikipedia provides a far less biased view.
>originalism is a concept regarding the interpretation of the Constitution that asserts that all statements in the constitution must be interpreted based on the original understanding "at the time it was adopted"
> This seems to be a very uncharitable take on what originalism means. You're basically saying the people believe in the paranormal and derive their rulings based on a séance. The first sentence on wikipedia provides a far less biased view.
That much more charitable understanding gets thrown out the window when originalists are confronted with things that override their dogma and stretch them to come up with new legal interpretations to suit their desired moral outcome.
Just because they set aside originalism when an outcome seems to offend their personal views more than they like, doesn't mean they think they have some special spiritual link to the founders.
What you call an originalist, is what I call a legal historian/linguist.
The judiciary is not there to write law. Only to interpret what is written. An Originalist would do research on the era any piece of legislation, statute, or case law was decided to ensure that the meaning and intent of it through the lense of that time period is still honored.
Without doing that, it's virtually guaranteed that within a few centuries, your language will have drifted so far away from the original intent or way of life rendered by the text would become meaningless.
Think of it like getting the source code for a program that references external libraries. You can't run it now, because things have changed, among them, society's API's and symbols have as well.
An Originalist is someone that goes back and attempts to reconstruct the "societal runtime" of that time to ensure we're not applying the statute in a way that may make sense from a modern point of view, but runs completely counter to the intent and spirit in which the law was actually made.
It makes complete sense once you've been handed code that you can't find the source to the dependencies of and have to figure out a way to get it to work.
Actually what you are describing is closer to original intent which is NOT what most originalists justice use, as they are more oriented towards original meaning.
And both case suffer from the same thing described above: is there even a single original meaning/intent? Can we unambiguously understand it today? Can it be applied to today's context?
If we take your code example, what if you inherit a codebase that used some specific networks calls that do not exist anymore and that predate https. Would you reimplement it in exact the same way and skip the whole authentication, at risk of having something extremely limited? Would you have it accept https connections? But how would you know if the original authors would be ok with a security layer that depends on central certificates? Sure you could say "the dependency is immutable, it will do no less or more than what was possible in the original context it was created, anything else needs a need dependency" and then suddenly you end up with a second amendment that only concerns 18th century weapons.
Seeing as the Second Amendment always comes up in this vein of discussion, let's look into that, and the scourge of Firearm's enthusiasts everywhere, the NFA.
An Originalist looks at the Second Amendment, and sees a hard line in the sand. The right to bear arms will not be infringed is the active predicate, the necessity of a militia to the security of the State being a justification for the prohibition of the infringement of rights by the Federal Government. That's where the conversation starts.
Now, you've got a word with a hell of a lot of wiggle room there, depending on how you look at it. Infringe. Is it infringement if you just have to fill out a sheet of paper, and pay a tax, but still get the weapon? Enter the NFA.
Around the time of the NFA, gangs were experiencing a heyday, robbing the mail, the bank, ventilating each other... Something must be done, says the activist. The Originalist says, what do you propose? To restrict the technology meets the definition of infringement. The Activist says, let's tax it, and create paper trail, and make it a serious offense to not go through proper channels. In the end, everyone gets what they want. The Originalist is happy, the Second Amendment is upheld in spirit (I can still get a machine gun, I just pay a fee and it gets a number), even if with a bit of paperwork, the Activist got their enforcement mechanism to disincentivize uncontrolled machine gun propagation, or propagation of "only gangsters use that" weapons. Cool.
What you describe is Heller, if I recall correctly, and that bloody Amendment in 1986 that actually does extend to infringement in my estimation, because it straight up criminalizes and locks away part of the right to bear arms behind not only a poll tax, but the relinquishing of the right to privacy by FFL's based on enforcement methods by Law Enforcement, and the closing of the machine gun registry by revocation of Congressional authorization to the Executive to spend money maintaining it, meaning people can no longer legally bear arms that even by Heller's tortured definition, would be used by a militia.
The problem is that the Activist feels justified doing that because the Originalist already agreed that some paperwork getting added to the process was okay. The Originalist is about to lose it, because this Activist is not navigating the transitive dependency to realize that in extending precedent via tortured case law (Heller), implementing a poll tax (NFA +1986 amendment closing the registry) which the activist bends over backwards to accommodate under the Federal Government's auspice of "regulating interstate commerce (of firearms)", that due to other case law precedent where Federal regulatory jurisdiction was crowbarred into intrastate grain sales due to "intrastate sales effecting the interstate Market", taken as a whole, infringes the spirit of the 2nd Amendment, and the NFA, and needs serious attention from the Legislature to untangle the entire mess, which unfortunately, no one has the stomach for.
So the courts keep doing local Band-Aids and hacks consistent with the legal "principle of least harm (minimize the side-effects of new precedent), which only makes the situation worse, and creates new tangles and uncertainty.
Throw in the fickle nature of Administrative law changes by the Executive, and most reasonable people who the law was never originally intended to keep weapons out of the hands of will never bother to open the can of worms because of the regulatory morass it's become.
And that is why the Originalist is your friend, and the activist is frowned upon, and tolerated as a necessary release valve for societal change in the face of a defective or otherwise occupied legislature. Justices going nuts with interpreting things without doing their homework results in legal realities completely contradicting the intent of the original legislatures in making particular laws because a future generations felt like taking a ...
Houston underwent the greatest ethnic transformation of any major U.S. city in my lifetime. 1 out of 4 Houstonians is now foreign-born, and a lot of people have moved to Houston from the northern U.S. in the last decade. Austin has voted differently from a lot of Texas long before any SV influx, and they may help diversify voting in the state but not nearly as much as changes in other parts of Texas.
I tell people from outside Texas that Houston is the most diverse city in the US and they act like I'm shamelessly lying. With all the stuff there is about Texas government and politics to criticize, it's a very unique part of the country under significant tensions pulling the place and people in multiple contradictory directions.
It used to frustrate me but now it just makes me laugh when I see people talk about Dallas, Houston like they aren't two of the more diverse and largest metros in the country.
Yet when my Indian friends were getting a housing tour in Dallas, they were told how diverse the area is: they have Protestant, Baptist, and Catholic Churches in this neighborhood!
That didn’t impress them much (in fact it did the opposite) and they stayed in SF.
It certainly depends on the area. I'm within about 2 miles of a Buddhist template and multiple mosques. There are another sixty churches in the same area, but it is what it is.
In practice it really isn’t. The city sprawls endlessly with no mass transit, so you end up staying in your corner of the greater Houston area all the time, which is 90% suburbs with no walkability. Urban Houston is more diverse yes, but once you get beyond 610 you lose all city benefits and all the neighborhoods are homogeneous and monocultural. Houston is ok. Greater Houston is a terrible place. Great food though.
Now if the blue cities in Texas can just somehow get rid of the conservative-rigged gerrymandering that gives the red rural areas such disproportionate power in state government.
I’m not sure ethnic change translates into progressive social policies. Latino immigrants tend to be socially conservative. (This is why Republicans hyperventilating about immigrants changing the political landscape should calm themselves down and Democrats shouldn’t take anything for granted.)
SV immigrants probably a lot more socially progressive.
I’ll give you that, but more languages are spoken in Houston than in NYC or LA, so even though the Hispanic population is in the majority, there are a lot of other kinds of people as well. And in the past election, Biden received twice as many votes from Houston as he did from Austin due to the fact that for all its fame Austin is a much smaller city.
Unfortunately, I find it necessary to help elucidate some moral issues that recent legal developments in one state of the Union have brought to light.
Such a God is correctly assessed as hostile to the patrons of Earth.
Such a creation myth involving seven (7) days to create Heaven, Hell Lite, and Hell (Heaven, Earth, and Hell) is what we must interpret.
At issue is whether the singular, supernatural God in Heaven is Benevolent (Good) and Omnipotent (All-knowing). Why would a loving God create Heaven without suffering on the first day, and then create Earth etc. with suffering on the succeeding days? Why not create Heaven for all? Why send infants into a life of suffering on Earth (Hell Lite) when they could be sent directly to Heaven with no suffering?
Ergo, God's plan is to force babies to suffer on Earth for awhile; but if they die sinless, then they go to Heaven where parents aren't needed. Ergo, Heaven is full of parentless dead babies.
You've made asses of yourselfs in trying to manipulate others into your golden candlestick tax districts, where the whole congregation does not have healthcare.
God created a world in need of healthcare, and isn't getting healthcare to it.
Ergo, because God created a world of suffering for us - and babies - god is not Friendly.
And if god is not friendly, god is a very poor basis for our morality, and for our legal system.
Case in point: did god ask for Mary's (or even Joseph's) consent?
A benevolent god would design in required consent.
In the Christian bible, furthermore, god tells them to kill even the enemies' women and unborn children. Ergo, god does not value the sanctity of infants' lives over other concerns.
What is "Original Sin" if not a suggestion that we should choose very wisely?
And when they rolled that [silver] rock from the tomb, behold what did they find? No dead baby; for the dead baby of god was in heaven, gentlemen. Sinless dead babies all go to heaven, gentlemen.
I think we can all agree that preventing unintended pregnancy is a worthwhile objective; though we have very differing views on whether abstinence-based education works. States with higher rates of religiosity (by church attendance) have higher rates of teen pregnancy: there is a somewhat strong positive correlation.
A standing prayer request: Pray that we might get healthcare to our congregation.
> Baiae: an ancient Roman city lost to the same volcanoes that entombed Pompeii. But unlike Pompeii, Baiae sits under water, in the Bay of Naples. Nearly 2,000 years ago, the city was an escape for Rome’s rich and powerful elite, a place where they were free of the social restrictions of Roman society. But then the city sank into the ocean, to be forgotten in the annals of history. Now, a team of archaeologists is mapping the underwater ruins and piecing together what life was like in this playground for the rich. What made Baiae such a special place? And what happened to it?
Better if they migrate to rural Texas. We’re all cracked, packed and stacked here in Austin and other metropolitan areas since Tom de Lay and the rest of the Republicans redistricted back in 2003.
Shouldn't we build an app to make that easier? The data is public, just focus on the districts where the voting was closest and connect that to Zillow or something similar. You can't guarantee results, of course, but we can point people in the right direction to change the state.
I don't think so. Folks shouldn't sacrifice quality of life (moving to rural areas versus areas they might desire more) to tip the state faster than it will already tip. It's just a matter of time, governed by the birth, immigration (domestic and foreign), and death rate.
It's just a matter of time (I don't say that lightly, I have made my donations to support relief efforts from recent policy decisions).
The website can't force anyone to make the move, but can help with deciding where to move to in order to improve quality of life for everyone in the state.
It's also a solid investment to purchase real estate in a place you know quality of life will improve.
Sort by counties in descending order closest to ~50% blue for targeting relocation suggestions, turning counties that flip solid blue. Best bang for your buck imho. Probably cheaper housing too, close enough to urban cores for hybrid remote, far enough out to be affordable. A couple days worth of CRUD/GIS/data science work if I had to hazard a guess.
These regressive voters are mostly concentrated in suburban environments. It's not a huge ordeal for most people to live in suburban Austin or Dallas or San Antonio or etc.
> Folks shouldn't sacrifice quality of life (moving to rural areas versus areas they might desire more) to tip the state faster than it will already tip
Personally, I don't think "quality of life" is the word that should be used to distinctualize rural and urban living. I've lived in both and had a quality life in both, each came with their tradeoffs and sharp costs I had to manage.
Is deliberately facilitating demographic change for political purposes an ethical use of technology? I imagine there would be some moral outrage if the people of the pivot districts learned that SV types (who may well not even live in Texas) were collaborating to enact political change by targeted migration. Is this not basically political colonization?
Political districts in the US are already designed to favor specific parties and incumbents, the playing field is already not neutral.
This seems like little more than playing by the established rules of the game, which favors targeted demographics and swing districts over the broad populace.
The question is not whether the playing field is neutral or not through the actions of others, but whether "we" (tech) should undertake to change that playing field further. What right do "we" have to interfere in other peoples' lives from afar?
The point of a federal system is to let a minority form the majority in a particular place and live under policies they want. Why should they accept the outcome of democracy and open borders if we chase them around the map and prevent that everywhere?
I am not saying I want to live under this absurd law, but I suppose people do and they are not going to just disappear.
Since the president is not elected by direct vote, the decisions in some states carry much greater impact and influence than others. A tool like this would help make the result more reflective of the desired outcomes for the larger population.
And you are not interfering from afar - people need to move in order to vote. We can only guide these people, however, and help them find the places they can make the difference they want to make.
We have the same rights as anyone in a civil society to try to effect political change in our favor, within the bounds of the law.
All that's being suggested here is that if people move from SV, or wherever, to Texas that they vote their conscience, and where they could reside so that vote could be the most effective. It isn't interference, it's participation.
Since I’m neither a US resident nor a citizen, I already did my part with the foreign interference in elections by lifting the idea. It’s up to my American friends to run with it.
The Free State Project did this to the town of Grafton, New Hampshire, invading to turn it into the country's first libertarian majority city so they could take over the government. And yeah, the locals were not too happy about it. One of the reasons they chose Grafton is there were no zoning laws, so they could move in quickly without having to build housing, which meant many of them were living in the woods, and since they had no experience doing that and kept leaving food out, the town became overrun with bears.
Austin has dozens of elected officials below the state level. Voting is never futile. Vote even if you don't think you'll win because that's what motivates other people to vote, and it's the only thing you can do to delay having to actually fight an authoritarian regime.
Why is particularized injury needed for standing to sue in a civil environmental case, but not under this abortion law? Is that just a federal rule? If you did have to show that you were harmed by a particular act of the defendant it would greatly limit the scope of such laws.
This is the part that baffles me the most about the law. As far as I know, if two people are harmed by your action they can each sue you independently. What's to stop a lawyer from finding an already-settled lawsuit, reproducing the evidence from public record, and trying it again?
I believe that's for criminal offenses, which this Texas legislation does not contain. I am not a lawyer, just what I read from actual lawyers. Qui tam lawsuits allow a private citizen to bring suit on behalf of the government but I don't believe this legislation qualifies under those standards.
I think it's unfair that they use the term "anti-choice" for the people typically known as "pro-life". "Anti-choice" can equally well apply to people who are "anti-life".
You're going to have to clarify, because right now it seems like you're suggesting that "anti-life" folks position is "force abortion even if the person doesn't want it" and I don't believe that is the case. Or do you mean something else?
Is there anyone who really calls themselves "anti-life"? I think such a label would have to have the meaning you suggest, if it were consistent with the others.
I’m not sure I follow, are you saying that there is a ‘anti-life’ group that believes women should be required to have state required abortions? I’m not being saracastic; I would like you to elaborate on the ‘anti-life / anti-choice’ group.
I'm being facetious, but with a purpose. I think all the labels people use here are spin. I want to underline the absurdity, by making the pedantic point that banning abortions isn't the only way to take away someone's choice.
Everyone likes life, and everyone likes having choices. It's disingenuous to assert that that's what the debate is about.
I think there is a debate of when ‘life’ happens. And that more or less everyone is against removing life that has already happened (directly, not in an underfunding school nutrition and living wages sorta way). So the side that believes life happens at conception is literally removing choice from those that believe it happens at birth.
Ironically, many advocates of life at conception also are against sexual education and universal birth control, or in favor of promoting that abstaining from sexual relations should be the solution. This context makes it more about governing how women make choice regarding their bodies (in sexual manners and in conception manners) and largely insult men from those same consequences.
Please note that the law makes not allowance for incest or rape- so if one was a victim of these crimes, they would still be required to carry and deliver the child. A child in the case of incest that is likely to be genetically mutated such to lead to a life of suffering (for the child and those caring for them).
I wouldn't disagree with any of that, and I hope I didn't imply that I would. You correctly mention that people who oppose abortion often also oppose allowing some different choices, if this is what's commonly understood by the term "pro-choice" then I was mistaken and find the terminology confusing.
Life starts before conception. "Life" isn't a good standard. Mold growing on bread is alive. We end life all the time, eg by cutting your lawn. What you're looking for is sentience or something like that.
Anti-natalists are against childbearing, but I'm not sure if they ever argue for forced abortions. They might actively encourage abortions whereas many pro-choice advocates would want to reduce abortions while keeping them available.
I mean it’s pretty much always a mistake to use your political opponent’s framing. It’s a variant of accepting the premise of the question.
I would absolutely expect someone who is pro-life to describe people who oppose them as anti-life. That’s their chosen framing of the issue. Pro-life sounds good — who could be anti life?
Same with pro-choice — who could be anti-choice?
It’s the reason why you don’t see people using the term “race realists” and just calling them racists.
I know people that worked at the pregnancy centers that get mocked. Those workers will often stay in contact with them well after the child is is born.
Serious pro-lifers will dedicate their lives to it, they care about the babies more than you can know.
This particular center was located in a Hispanic community, the church full of working-class people would give away hours and hours of their time and money to help all of them.
And if that information is hosted in another state? Or even another country?
The only possible way this could apply or make sense is if all your abortion resources are hosted on servers in Texas, they all get taken down by the state, and then the state institutes China/Korea style IP bans to prevent you from visiting any other possible abortion info site.
Which, considering Texas' entire legislation combined probably wouldn't be able to figure out how to write a Hello World program, I don't see happening.
It’s not only not limited to Texas, you can be sued if your acts aided or abetted an abortion IN Texas. It’s also retroactive, so if you can show that someone used a website at any point to help them get an abortion, you have at least the nominal structure to sue. If you win, you win your legal costs plus 10k. If you lose, the defendant can’t sue you back to recover the legal costs.
Can state law like this affect someone who doesn't live in that state? If there are bounties for people, can someone from Texas sue me as an Oregonian if my blog says something positive about abortion? Would I need to avoid traveling to Texas to avoid prosecution?
Apparently, anybody in the country can take advantage of this bounty. I really wonder how Texans are going to feel when some big new york lawfirm is lining their pockets with Texan taxpayer dollars.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadI support the EFF broadly, but I don't see why the Educational Establishment should be in the abortion business.
Teenagers have sex, regardless of how much religious fundamentalists wish they wouldn't.
You are conflating the education business around health decisions, with the abortion business. The two are not the same.
Just because you (or Texas) thinks abortion should be illegal, doesn’t miraculously make the information not part of knowledge other people believe is educational.
There is a vast difference between receiving (A) medical information, and (B) booking an appointment, going to a medical provider, paying/providing insurance information, obtaining/giving consent, getting anesthesia, receiving a medical procedure, and then aftercare.
Just like I don't believe that commodity medical insurance should be paying for cosmetic plastic procedures not incurred as part of part of medical aftercare for a previous injury/accident/illness. If you decide you want to have lip filler to increase the fullness of your lips, and breast implants for cosmetic reasons purely, perhaps with a full facelift, then pay for it on your own.
To me, this is a combination of religious belief in some kind of righteousness of the founders, which is easily challengeable. Or it is some kind of belief that a person's internal thought process matches that of these mythical founders. I don't know the series of beliefs that is necessary for someone to hold the belief that they have this insight that other members of the court don't, but I assure you that the process that gets you to this belief is almost certainly emotional, not logical. It is not possible to read the mind of someone 200 years past, or how they would respond to modern society and scientific understanding. I do assure you that the belief that thinking one has the power to make that guess accurately is false.
How many people on the bench hold this set of religious beliefs? And if one holds this set of beliefs, then do the amendments to the constitution that follow retain validity? Do they then have the ability to discern the mental patterns of the people who wrote those amendments too?
With this and the shadow dockets, I strongly believe that the sense of validity of the courts will soon falter, and the societal costs will be great.
I think that many rights encoded in the amendments will soon be gutted.
>How many people on the bench hold this set of religious beliefs?
This seems to be a very uncharitable take on what originalism means. You're basically saying the people believe in the paranormal and derive their rulings based on a séance. The first sentence on wikipedia provides a far less biased view.
>originalism is a concept regarding the interpretation of the Constitution that asserts that all statements in the constitution must be interpreted based on the original understanding "at the time it was adopted"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism
That much more charitable understanding gets thrown out the window when originalists are confronted with things that override their dogma and stretch them to come up with new legal interpretations to suit their desired moral outcome.
The judiciary is not there to write law. Only to interpret what is written. An Originalist would do research on the era any piece of legislation, statute, or case law was decided to ensure that the meaning and intent of it through the lense of that time period is still honored.
Without doing that, it's virtually guaranteed that within a few centuries, your language will have drifted so far away from the original intent or way of life rendered by the text would become meaningless.
Think of it like getting the source code for a program that references external libraries. You can't run it now, because things have changed, among them, society's API's and symbols have as well.
An Originalist is someone that goes back and attempts to reconstruct the "societal runtime" of that time to ensure we're not applying the statute in a way that may make sense from a modern point of view, but runs completely counter to the intent and spirit in which the law was actually made.
It makes complete sense once you've been handed code that you can't find the source to the dependencies of and have to figure out a way to get it to work.
And both case suffer from the same thing described above: is there even a single original meaning/intent? Can we unambiguously understand it today? Can it be applied to today's context?
If we take your code example, what if you inherit a codebase that used some specific networks calls that do not exist anymore and that predate https. Would you reimplement it in exact the same way and skip the whole authentication, at risk of having something extremely limited? Would you have it accept https connections? But how would you know if the original authors would be ok with a security layer that depends on central certificates? Sure you could say "the dependency is immutable, it will do no less or more than what was possible in the original context it was created, anything else needs a need dependency" and then suddenly you end up with a second amendment that only concerns 18th century weapons.
An Originalist looks at the Second Amendment, and sees a hard line in the sand. The right to bear arms will not be infringed is the active predicate, the necessity of a militia to the security of the State being a justification for the prohibition of the infringement of rights by the Federal Government. That's where the conversation starts.
Now, you've got a word with a hell of a lot of wiggle room there, depending on how you look at it. Infringe. Is it infringement if you just have to fill out a sheet of paper, and pay a tax, but still get the weapon? Enter the NFA.
Around the time of the NFA, gangs were experiencing a heyday, robbing the mail, the bank, ventilating each other... Something must be done, says the activist. The Originalist says, what do you propose? To restrict the technology meets the definition of infringement. The Activist says, let's tax it, and create paper trail, and make it a serious offense to not go through proper channels. In the end, everyone gets what they want. The Originalist is happy, the Second Amendment is upheld in spirit (I can still get a machine gun, I just pay a fee and it gets a number), even if with a bit of paperwork, the Activist got their enforcement mechanism to disincentivize uncontrolled machine gun propagation, or propagation of "only gangsters use that" weapons. Cool.
What you describe is Heller, if I recall correctly, and that bloody Amendment in 1986 that actually does extend to infringement in my estimation, because it straight up criminalizes and locks away part of the right to bear arms behind not only a poll tax, but the relinquishing of the right to privacy by FFL's based on enforcement methods by Law Enforcement, and the closing of the machine gun registry by revocation of Congressional authorization to the Executive to spend money maintaining it, meaning people can no longer legally bear arms that even by Heller's tortured definition, would be used by a militia.
The problem is that the Activist feels justified doing that because the Originalist already agreed that some paperwork getting added to the process was okay. The Originalist is about to lose it, because this Activist is not navigating the transitive dependency to realize that in extending precedent via tortured case law (Heller), implementing a poll tax (NFA +1986 amendment closing the registry) which the activist bends over backwards to accommodate under the Federal Government's auspice of "regulating interstate commerce (of firearms)", that due to other case law precedent where Federal regulatory jurisdiction was crowbarred into intrastate grain sales due to "intrastate sales effecting the interstate Market", taken as a whole, infringes the spirit of the 2nd Amendment, and the NFA, and needs serious attention from the Legislature to untangle the entire mess, which unfortunately, no one has the stomach for.
So the courts keep doing local Band-Aids and hacks consistent with the legal "principle of least harm (minimize the side-effects of new precedent), which only makes the situation worse, and creates new tangles and uncertainty.
Throw in the fickle nature of Administrative law changes by the Executive, and most reasonable people who the law was never originally intended to keep weapons out of the hands of will never bother to open the can of worms because of the regulatory morass it's become.
And that is why the Originalist is your friend, and the activist is frowned upon, and tolerated as a necessary release valve for societal change in the face of a defective or otherwise occupied legislature. Justices going nuts with interpreting things without doing their homework results in legal realities completely contradicting the intent of the original legislatures in making particular laws because a future generations felt like taking a ...
That didn’t impress them much (in fact it did the opposite) and they stayed in SF.
Me: Are you Vietnamese by any chance?
Her: No, I'm from Kazakhstan.
Me: That's so interesting; I didn't know we had Kazakhs here in Houston.
Her: Yes, there's about 5,000 of us.
I was gobsmacked, as our Brit friends might say.
SV immigrants probably a lot more socially progressive.
This was a big shift toward Republicans in 2020, but it still didn't make Latinos majority Republican.
There are trends that work for and against both parties right now, too, so 2022 is anyone's guess, but they'll still likely vote majority Democrat.
1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/racist-latino-vote-accel...
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/05/latinos-a...
I live in downtown Austin. My congressman is Chip Roy, an ultra-right-wing MAGA nonsense spewing idiot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%27s_21st_congressional_d...
Such a God is correctly assessed as hostile to the patrons of Earth.
Such a creation myth involving seven (7) days to create Heaven, Hell Lite, and Hell (Heaven, Earth, and Hell) is what we must interpret.
At issue is whether the singular, supernatural God in Heaven is Benevolent (Good) and Omnipotent (All-knowing). Why would a loving God create Heaven without suffering on the first day, and then create Earth etc. with suffering on the succeeding days? Why not create Heaven for all? Why send infants into a life of suffering on Earth (Hell Lite) when they could be sent directly to Heaven with no suffering?
Ergo, God's plan is to force babies to suffer on Earth for awhile; but if they die sinless, then they go to Heaven where parents aren't needed. Ergo, Heaven is full of parentless dead babies.
You've made asses of yourselfs in trying to manipulate others into your golden candlestick tax districts, where the whole congregation does not have healthcare.
God created a world in need of healthcare, and isn't getting healthcare to it.
Ergo, because God created a world of suffering for us - and babies - god is not Friendly. And if god is not friendly, god is a very poor basis for our morality, and for our legal system.
Case in point: did god ask for Mary's (or even Joseph's) consent?
A benevolent god would design in required consent.
In the Christian bible, furthermore, god tells them to kill even the enemies' women and unborn children. Ergo, god does not value the sanctity of infants' lives over other concerns.
For citations of scripture, see e.g. Freedom from Religion Foundation > What Does the Bible Really Say About Abortion? https://ffrf.org/component/k2/item/25602-abortion-rights
A very poor basis for morality and law, indeed.
What is "Original Sin" if not a suggestion that we should choose very wisely?
And when they rolled that [silver] rock from the tomb, behold what did they find? No dead baby; for the dead baby of god was in heaven, gentlemen. Sinless dead babies all go to heaven, gentlemen.
I think we can all agree that preventing unintended pregnancy is a worthwhile objective; though we have very differing views on whether abstinence-based education works. States with higher rates of religiosity (by church attendance) have higher rates of teen pregnancy: there is a somewhat strong positive correlation.
A standing prayer request: Pray that we might get healthcare to our congregation.
Roman society context on this one:
Vestal virgins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestal_Virgin
Baiae: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baiae
https://pbsinternational.org/programs/underwater-pompeii/ :
> Baiae: an ancient Roman city lost to the same volcanoes that entombed Pompeii. But unlike Pompeii, Baiae sits under water, in the Bay of Naples. Nearly 2,000 years ago, the city was an escape for Rome’s rich and powerful elite, a place where they were free of the social restrictions of Roman society. But then the city sank into the ocean, to be forgotten in the annals of history. Now, a team of archaeologists is mapping the underwater ruins and piecing together what life was like in this playground for the rich. What made Baiae such a special place? And what happened to it?
Woe! Woe unto the obviously promiscuous.
Bespoke: moving to Milam or Scurry County to improve Texas politics
It's just a matter of time (I don't say that lightly, I have made my donations to support relief efforts from recent policy decisions).
It's also a solid investment to purchase real estate in a place you know quality of life will improve.
Sort by counties in descending order closest to ~50% blue for targeting relocation suggestions, turning counties that flip solid blue. Best bang for your buck imho. Probably cheaper housing too, close enough to urban cores for hybrid remote, far enough out to be affordable. A couple days worth of CRUD/GIS/data science work if I had to hazard a guess.
Personally, I don't think "quality of life" is the word that should be used to distinctualize rural and urban living. I've lived in both and had a quality life in both, each came with their tradeoffs and sharp costs I had to manage.
This seems like little more than playing by the established rules of the game, which favors targeted demographics and swing districts over the broad populace.
I am not saying I want to live under this absurd law, but I suppose people do and they are not going to just disappear.
Because that's how the democracy works, and if they accept it when it works in their favor (as it's designed to,) they can accept when it doesn't.
It isn't illegal to be a liberal and live in Texas and vote, as much as other Texans might wish it were.
And you are not interfering from afar - people need to move in order to vote. We can only guide these people, however, and help them find the places they can make the difference they want to make.
All that's being suggested here is that if people move from SV, or wherever, to Texas that they vote their conscience, and where they could reside so that vote could be the most effective. It isn't interference, it's participation.
If you do, keep me posted. ;-)
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...
https://ballotpedia.org/Texas_election_results,_2020
Presidential margin was 631,221 votes.
Texas House balance is 83/67. Majority is 150/2 + 1 = 76 seats. Minority needs a gain of 9.
https://ballotpedia.org/Texas_House_of_Representatives_elect...
Texas Senate is 13/18, majority is |31/2| + 1 = 16 seats. Minority needs a gain of 3.
https://ballotpedia.org/Texas_State_Senate_elections,_2020
Unfortunately, Ballotpedia doesn't give vote counts / majority per race.
https://electionlab.mit.edu/data
Interesting, that.
That describes most of the country, really -- not just Texas. But elections are decided by people, not land.
Which the party of states' rights will happily run over.
Republican-controlled state legislatures have no issue with overturning local government legislature to impose their agenda.
If everyone in Texas voted, it might have avoided this situation. You vote when it's hopeless until it isn't anymore.
It would be a shame if the bad parts of California followed them.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/standing
(This is supposed to be clearly tongue-in-cheek.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
Everyone likes life, and everyone likes having choices. It's disingenuous to assert that that's what the debate is about.
Ironically, many advocates of life at conception also are against sexual education and universal birth control, or in favor of promoting that abstaining from sexual relations should be the solution. This context makes it more about governing how women make choice regarding their bodies (in sexual manners and in conception manners) and largely insult men from those same consequences.
Please note that the law makes not allowance for incest or rape- so if one was a victim of these crimes, they would still be required to carry and deliver the child. A child in the case of incest that is likely to be genetically mutated such to lead to a life of suffering (for the child and those caring for them).
I would absolutely expect someone who is pro-life to describe people who oppose them as anti-life. That’s their chosen framing of the issue. Pro-life sounds good — who could be anti life?
Same with pro-choice — who could be anti-choice?
It’s the reason why you don’t see people using the term “race realists” and just calling them racists.
Serious pro-lifers will dedicate their lives to it, they care about the babies more than you can know.
This particular center was located in a Hispanic community, the church full of working-class people would give away hours and hours of their time and money to help all of them.
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/vol-23-no-1-hyperbole-01557...
It also punishes “aiding or abetting” abortion.
It’s very easy to see how online education about abortion aids abortion.
The only possible way this could apply or make sense is if all your abortion resources are hosted on servers in Texas, they all get taken down by the state, and then the state institutes China/Korea style IP bans to prevent you from visiting any other possible abortion info site.
Which, considering Texas' entire legislation combined probably wouldn't be able to figure out how to write a Hello World program, I don't see happening.
The EFF is a liberal shell. They cheered when Trump's social media accounts were muffled. Now they are against the Texas abortion law.
It looks a lot like EFF really isn't about EF, is it?