Keeping in mind that we'd have to see how the courts would handle this in practice... the way the law is written, the defense is "I've already paid the full value of the damages so I can't be asked to pay any more." The obvious counter to that defense is, "What was paid out ISN'T the full value of the damages. Instead of the $10,000 minimum, $30,000 is (or whatever figure one might want to assign). And if I get a jury to agree with me, I should be able to vindicate my right to a $30k bounty (or at least, to the $20k he hasn't paid yet.)" If the TX legislature wanted to be fair to defendants, they could have written the law so that the first person to sue over a particular abortion would have the sole right to pursue a claim on that abortion. The way it is now, we've already seen that two people have sued the same TX doctor over the abortion he confessed to, and literally anybody else who is not a Texas state or local government employee could still as well.
The only real question is what kind of overturning Roe might experience: the death of a thousand cuts overturning that has been going on much of the last 20 years while there were not the votes on SCOTUS to fully overturn it; a "we're throwing abortion decisions back to the states where it belongs" type ruling, or a "the unborn have a constitutional right to life and abortions after X period are unconstitutional (with possible exceptions for health of the mother, fetal abnormality, and/or rape/incest." I think since there is a 5 solid conservative vote majority, the case that is up in December is pretty likely to say "we're throwing abortion decisions back to the states." It is possible that they could go all the way to recognizing the unborn as having a constitutional right to life.
Which might have Roberts siding with the liberal wing. I think he knows he can no longer control the conservatives, no matter how much arm twisting is involved. And Breyer isn’t doing himself any favors with this song and dance about how SCOTUS is not political. Some have said if Roe is overturned Breyer might change his tune, but I wouldn’t count on it. He has a cushy job and is not at all ruthless like the Federalist Society.
There's a chance that Roberts can talk them into the notion that a 6-3 decision that "we now rule the states can have far freer rein in regulating abortion than under Roe/Casey" is better than a 5-4 decision that "we now rule that the unborn have a constitutional right to life as of X weeks that cannot be impinged with the following Y exceptions."
Florida becomes 1st state to try to mirror Texas fetal 'heartbeat' abortion law Nothing to be concerned about. Move along, folks. All is well.
In the duh's defense we do have many wonderful post-birth abortion methods. First off, COVID is our post-birth plan A. Our drivers and car accidents are plan B. Every day you see kids sent out on skateboard and bikes to play in traffic. We even have a plan F where our doctors flood the drug market with fentanyl which is sold on every street corner. The duh has post birth abortions covered. Even if you cannot get one of the common methods you can send your little blonde girls out in a van with the local boys so they can be killed and dumped somewhere. Then your family can get famous and go on the talkshow circuit making millions of dollars. You get paid for your abortions down here as long as you have a cute white blonde girl.
Post-birth is much safer for women. mmmm. no it isn't actually: childbirth is more dangerous than abortion. nevermind.
This is true considering that post-birth abortion leaves the child the chance to kill you. Sort of like the woman who left her pistol in her purse at walmart and her two year old pulled it out while it was on the counter with the purse and gun and killed her. Clearly, had she accidentally lost her child by leaving it in the car on a hot sunny day with the windows closed she would have been alive to have another one today. Really, having children is incredibly dangerous compared to abortion.
As an aside, I'd forgotten that so I took a peak. I swear Taylor Swift didn't cycle through boyfriends the way she did. O_O She seems to have dropped off online almost completely after 2013. I hope she too is okay
I'll cop to the naiveté of assuming, in those days, that most posters in a forum like this were basically role playing. I distinctly remember in the very serious preacher days being frustrated that only a few people here could be trusted to be showing their real personality (Chuck, Bulldog, Async spring to mind, not an exclusive list) and likewise, annoyed that when I came out Flashy and some others basically assumed it was some sort of trollish act (while, indeed, he - Flashy - did a complete 180 to remain the opposite number to me which just reinforced the "nothing is real" vibe I'm not really sure when it occurred to me that maybe the assholes here really were assholes.
@Nova, maybe being friends with a few of us on FB and seeing if we were consistent there to how we act here influenced discerning our true colours.
I don't know... I had similar thoughts recently, but with somewhat different conclusions. I think for me this place (and in a broader sense, "the internet", as a whole) has lost much of it's innocence, not so much because I had assumed people were just playing out some troll act but turned out to be assholes, but precisely because so much of this trollish, nihilistic, "nothing is real" act seems to have found it's way into the real world (culminating, if not starting, in Trump and how that played out). I was OK with that, more or less... when it was constrained to internet message boards, but could not imagine how influential this kind of culture would turn out to be.
For me, that kind of cynical nihilism all over Facebook is one of the appealing things about coming here. I would guess the vast majority of us are not playing any kind of character, and the fact that we've formed a community based around a loose set of shared interests and a common history -- and yet, one that we can divorce from the rest of our lives if we choose to -- means Wordforge fills a role that social media doesn't.
People were always this way. The internet just popped people's bubble by showing them more of the world they never saw. People did not just become self obsessed idiots. Tghis was their natural state. This was the way things were when I got on the internet. I was here before AOL. I remember seeing the racists on ab4d. The right wing haters were all over alf, aff, av, ahww, alt, and many other usenet forums. This was before the introduction of html and the www. even in those days places like AOL and prodigy had their own racist communities. I remember having a good laugh with my friend at American University in DC because we both saw the capitol police having to protect the white supremacists from counter protesters because only a handful of them showed up for a huge protest in the capitol. Springer did not have to fake his white supremacist guests on his show. This was all well before Stormfront was even registered as a domain name. The racism was never an act. It was never made the fuck up. Long before electricity was a major thing, racism was running the world. Prejudice was always around. I knew before grade school not to come out as trans because the world was full of people who would destroy my family and me if they knew. I knew in grade school when my mom told me what nigger meant that the word was spoken by evil racists, and not just some bad word. Welcome to the party pal, glad you took your blinders off, but we have all been here. It has not been an act, and maybe next time you hang around a bunch of white people who complain about not being able to say nigger you might want to recognize that is a dog whistle. You might realize the confederate flag rebels are rebelling against the outlaw of slavery. People who pretend they are joking about racism are promoting it. This shit never came from internet message boards. It existed long before the internet, wire communications, and even electric lighting was even a thing.
Internet trolling gets a bad reputation, but it certainly did not start with the internet. Did we forget edgelords like Jerry Springer and talk shows? This was where we got our dose of white supremacy in mainstream media back in my youth. The talk shows were all about it. How about people like Don Imus, Howard Stern, and Rush Limbaugh? They were all over when I was young, and they were bringing this stuff into the normal discussion at the time. There were dial up BBS systems dedicated to this. I was a mod on a saugerties based GLBT dial up run by the first sissy boy I ever met. BTW she was very into the sissy boy name and still is, so I refer to her as that. I knew about being edgy back then. Back in my teen years they were banning edgelords in major media. Guns and roses put faggot and nigger into One in a Million just for attention. It was one of the reasons why I disliked them at first. NWA made edgelord songs, but they broke through on it. Andrew Dice Clay was a huge edgelord icon. That was all he was. Roseanne Bar was an edgelord bitch. Then you go back further and find people like Elvis making his career on things like that. Things like protest rock all had it's edgelord troll roots. Dillon and skynard were flinging jibes at political positions in the woodstock era. Before you go downing all the internet trolls for ruining the world, you might want to realize it has always been a part of the public discourse. Do you think anyone would know who MLK was if he didn't piss people off? If they had just ignored him he would have died out, but they had to fight him. As peaceful as he was, he dneeded the fight or else he would have just been some pastor in some black church talking about peace and love. I am sure there were a number of those people, but MLK waded into the spotlight and the bigger public discourse and trolled the normal people happy to live the same old way. He promoted protest. Admittedly he did it for a great cause and with great mindfulnes, but he was edgy at the time and did not listen to others who asked him to tone it down because he was making waves and offending people.
Yes, I guess if you water down the idea of trolling far enough and don't care about tone, intensity, context or any other subtleties, than yes, everything has always been that way. If you are unsure whether you have watered down your idea of trolling enough, check whether you have included Elvis and MLK as examples. If you have, that means you have probably arrived at a slimy, semi-transparent, all-encompassing liquid by now. Well done.
It is the same tools and concepts. It is just how you use them. It is like a hammer or baseball bat. If you use them for what they were intended for they make life easier and more fun. If you use them for other purposes they are violent tools of bludgeoning. For instance. If I go over to my lazy friend's house and he is there playing his video games and does not want to go out. I want to get him to go to a protest for Black Lives Matter because he has black lives that matter to him. I do what I do to motivate him to get up and go to the protest with me to be heard. I trolled that motherfucker to the event. Now, I could do that same sort of thing to get some other person to go to a white nationalist event and hopefully get his ass arrested for being a complete dick and breaking the law. It is not watered down, it is just what trolling happens to be. Yes, trolling puts a negative spin on the idea, but my thought is mental and psychological manipulation to get people to do something for your selfish purposes should have a negative term associated with it. Otherwise we could call it being charming, persuasive, encouraging, motivating, or other positive synonyms which could be negative. That is just my view, and I have thought it through quite a bit and have no problem with you not agreeing with it. I still use it for most of my doings due to reasons and experiences of my own. So if you wish to understand me better you could make a note in your head that I am a salient exception to your normal view of trolling.
Yes, but unlike you, she's not waiting for an asteroid, she's actually building one out of blah-blah. I think she can pull it off.
