Political Roundtable Part XXXI

[dobrojim]

Bryan Stephenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative which issued a report titled
Lynching in America: Confronting the legacy of racial terror.
The report documents nearly 4000 lynchings of Black people in America
between 1877 and 1950.

If you google terrorist attacks in American history, lynching does not appear.

...we are only free when we lift up the truth.

This is why denial is such a dangerous coping mechanism. While it may lull
us into a temporary feeling of comfort, it means living in a lie.

from White Awake by Daniel Hill

[Zonkerbl]

Common knowledge. Prior to Roe about one woman per month died of a botched abortion, most of them black. Illegal abortions dropped from 130,000 in the 3 years prior to 17,000 in the 3 years after Roe. Total number of abortions didn't change.

https://www.guttmacher.org/perspectives50/abortion-and-after-legalization

Put another way, for every 10,000 illegal abortions you force women to have, 3 of them die. According to this study, it is the black women who find it more difficult to travel, so you are primarily condemning black women to death.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3791164/

This study does find that making it difficult to have abortions reduces abortion rates somewhat, but it's in terms of "miles from the nearest abortion provider," so it's hard to do a back of the envelope estimate of how much total abortions goes down, but reading the results of the paper, it's not much. Not zero though.

[Pointgod]

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Jesus Christ. What a bunch of lame and humourless clowns. They must have piped in that laugh track. Of course their arguments are idiotic as well.

[dckingsfan]

Poor people can't move. The forced birth movement has racism in its roots, it has been squarely aimed at punishing poor black women the entire time.

So this. For them, hope has to be their plan.

In Texas we have one of the highest maternal mortality rates. If you are poor it sky rockets. We are in no way ready for this onslaught of low income births.

Once the baby is born, it has healthcare for all of one year. Most in poverty can't afford day care - good day care has become as expensive as college. Either way, we don't have the open slots so... if you have other kids, you keep them home from school to take care of the infant.

And schools in impoverished areas aren't all that - I guess we all know that. The chances of moving to Higher Ed are slim (1 in 7 become financially successful). That of course reduces you life expectancy - and the life expectancy of your siblings.

And you will need to get whatever substandard housing you can get... good luck with that.

For the economy - the costs for kids in poverty is about ~ $1T in lost productivity and an extra 160B in healthcare costs (ER/ICU).

And lastly their is the mental health issues kindly bestowed upon women with children in poverty. Next to our wars - it is the leading cause of homelessness.

All I can say is, if you have a choice and your daughter or grand daughter will listen - get them out of those states. For the rest - there is just hope.

[Pointgod]

Poor people can't move. The forced birth movement has racism in its roots, it has been squarely aimed at punishing poor black women the entire time.

Yeah, all those racist conservatives hate blacks so much that they support a policy that will increase the birth rate of blacks. Diabolical!

The the states that are banning abortions have higher proportions of black populations. White women on a whole including the hypocrite Republicans who support forced birth generally have the means and will continue to get abortions.

Black women have the highest rates of maternal mortality and that’s only going to increase with abortion bans. This is a fact that more women will die because of these bans. Republicans are basically saying we’re fine with more women dying, we especially don’t care if it’s black women because white women, especially their wives, daughters and mistresses will continue to be able to get one.

You had a Republican Senator blatantly say that if you ignore all the black women, the maternal mortality rate in his state isn’t that bad. The roots of this policy don’t have to be cartoonishly racist to be racist. I know your counter argument will be well more black babies will be born so not racist, but that ignores the fact that they’re doing nothing to improve healthcare for both those black women and babies. Treating them as collateral damage in an ideological war instead of human beings worthy of compassion and support is pretty racist whether they want to admit it or not.

[dckingsfan]

The roots of this policy don’t have to be cartoonishly racist to be racist...

Some still don't get the difference between racism and institutional racism.

If a policy increases the maternal death rate, drops more in that class into poverty or deep poverty, increases mental health and homelessness and decreases their lifespan it is institutionally racist.

[Pointgod]

When these idiot mouth breathers like Bill Marr and Joe Rogan say that both parties have gone too far to the extreme everyone should tell them to shut the **** up and point this out to them. The Republicans are so **** extreme and detached from reality that Liz Chaney sounding like a normal person and saying things that the majority of the country agree with makes her sound like a Democrat. These are the kind of morons that are currently in Congress and running states, why does anyone believe giving them even more power won’t lead to the country completely collapsing.

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And yes Ron Desantis is just as extreme and even more dangerous than these people before anyone falls for the “oh he’s not so bad” garbage take. So yeah vote Democrats and don’t every stop voting for Democrats because this is the Republican Party now, not Chaney.

[dckingsfan]

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[Pointgod]

The roots of this policy don’t have to be cartoonishly racist to be racist...

Some still don't get the difference between racism and institutional racism.

If a policy increases the maternal death rate, drops more in that class into poverty or deep poverty, increases mental health and homelessness and decreases their lifespan it is institutionally racist.

No they 100% get but these are the word games and mental gymnastics that Conservatives play because most of them don’t want to come outright looking like monsters and admitting that they don’t care if more women and girls die.

And before anyone tries to say well Democrats have racist policies too, there’s a significant difference between unforeseen/unintended policies that have racial disparities and knowing beforehand that your policies will increase racial disparity or have more negative affects on different races and saying “**** em” and doing it anyways. That’s racist.

[dobrojim]

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^ don't forget the increase in suicide with greater availability of guns.
DyingOfWhiteness

[dckingsfan]

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^ don't forget the increase in suicide with greater availability of guns.
DyingOfWhiteness

Or the increased number of guns going to Central America driving up immigration...
Whiningaboutwhatyoucreated

[dobrojim]

I wonder how immigration today would be if instead of right wing led support of fascist states
in central and south America post-WWII, the US had supported democratic reforms in these places.

[Zonkerbl]

Well they would have been ... how do you say this... Communist? Under the USSR's influence?

[pancakes3]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-women-who-leave-anti-abortion-picket-lines-to-get-abortions?source=politics&via=rss

I guess this shouldn't make me sad either. Just another materalist knee jerk bump in the road overriden by the larger spiritualistic issue.

[Zonkerbl]

When I'm being utilitarian (slash materialistic) you'll know because I'll say "I'm putting on my economist hat now."

Everything else is unadulterated reform Judaism. To say I'm not spiritual is a slap in the face. You can have ethics and be pro choice. You can believe you are the chosen people and be against racism. Christians don't have a monopoly on spirituality. I would say quite the opposite, to the extent they believe the only reason to behave well is fear of their all loving God punishing them for eternity. That makes them the materialists, imho.

[popper]

I don't see Materialism as something that is good or bad. In metaphysics, it's a prominent area of thought and study that predates Socrates.

[montestewart]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-women-who-leave-anti-abortion-picket-lines-to-get-abortions?source=politics&via=rss

I guess this shouldn't make me sad either. Just another materalist knee jerk bump in the road overriden by the larger spiritualistic issue.

These are known as “false flag abortions”

[dobrojim]

It's all so tiresome.

Most recent book I've been reading has an interesting definition of privilege -
The opportunity to walk away.

I'm not suggesting someone who finds this tiresome should walk away but
rather think about this anecdote -

the book's author was invited to participate in an intentionally multi cultural but
small group of pastors/ministers to meet monthly for a year. The White pastor
who initiated this had become restless over the state of racial affairs in
their city (Chicago) and felt that clergy should lead the effort to demonstrate
unity across racial lines.

For the first 2 meetings the leader brought an agenda for discussion
describing issues he thought the group could address. His agenda focused
on church leadership and theology. In each of the first 2 meetings
the discussion had shifted away from those topics to issues of racial justice
such as violence and poverty. At the beginning of the 3rd meeting the leader
confessed an uncertainty as to how he should participate as he had thought
the topics of church leadership and theology should be discussed but were
being eclipsed by racial justice issues.

At outset of the third meeting the leader made the honest confession
that he felt energized when he had had discussions with other pastors
about church leadership and theology but felt drained and completely
tired after discussions on race. His comments hung in the air for a seemingly
long time until a black pastor responded in what the author described as
a perfect combination of truth and love.

The Black pastor said "If you think you're tired, imagine how I feel. You're
talking about this once a month for two hours and then you get to go back into environments
where you can stop thinking about these issues. I don't ever get the opportunity
to turn this conversation off. The livelihood of my family depends on these issues.
The livelihood of my congregation depends on these issues. I don't have the luxury
to pick and choose when I talk about this. If the Christian faith doesn't speak to these
issues in my community, then that faith would be irrelevant."

When the White pastor responded, he admitted that he'd never considered how
privileged he was to be able to come in and out of these conversations without
any real cost and acknowledged that 'tired' for him couldn't really compare to
the fatigue of talking about issues of race on a daily or even hourly basis.

This story was placed in a chapter on disorientation, a consequence of going
from blindness to sight.

[Zonkerbl]

I don't see Materialism as something that is good or bad. In metaphysics, it's a prominent area of thought and study that predates Socrates.

My advice to you would be to be careful when you talk about stuff like this without saying what you mean.

When you mysteriously drop the "spiritualism" vs "materialism" bombshell into a very sensitive discussion about, say, abortion, your interlocutors are going to jump to conclusions. Without context it sounds very, very judgy.

For example, to me materialism is code for hedonism. And if that's what you mean I find it insulting.

Spiritualism that is informed by empirical observations of the real world is still spiritualism. Like seeking answers to interesting questions, like "what is sentience? if there is no meaning to the universe, why can we perceive beauty, or love?" Those are interesting questions that I bet you, dollars over doughnuts, that candidate for anti-Christ Trump has never concerned himself with one second of his life. And there are raging atheists out there who think about these things all the time.

Adjusting your beliefs to jibe with actual, empirical observations of the universe is well executed spiritualism, not materialism.

[Zonkerbl]

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you”

- Werner Heisenberg