I can’t believe that Tom Tomorrow is helping the Republicans.
Don’t do this, conservatives. We are afraid. Please please don’t. Please.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I can’t believe that Tom Tomorrow is helping the Republicans.
Don’t do this, conservatives. We are afraid. Please please don’t. Please.
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The Democrats need to go overboard when messaging on this topic. They need to communicate the messages in different levels of comprehension. Bumper sticker mentality for Republican areas and then next level messaging for everybody else.
It’s exactly what the conservatives are doing. If they ban contraception, they’ll put an end to recreational sex even among couples in committed relationships.
Next up on their agenda: banning alcohol. It almost worked once, maybe it’ll work this time.
Why not?
It is straight out of their instruction manual, Orwell’s 1984.
Robro:
Nah. It will just mean less penis-in-vagina type of sex, more of the other stuff.
Meanwhile back here in Realityland, a planet that is rapidly losing population, the GOP christofascist agenda was already tried in Ceausescu’s Romania.
Ceausescu decided he needed more Romanians so he outlawed abortion and birth control. The penalties for both were severe.
The birth rate went up. And then it quickly went right back down as people found ways around the Zygote police.
It didn’t work.
It did however produce hundreds of thousands of Romanian orphans that the state was unable to care for, a humanitarian atrocity and crime against humanity.
These children grew up with serious neglect and maltreatment and many ended up with hepatitis B and C and HIV from medical malpractice.
I once tried to find out the ultimate fate of these children.
There is almost no hard information to answer that question.
I’m almost sure many or most of them died one way or another and the state of Romania has no interest whatsoever in documenting that fate.
No pictures so it didn’t happen.
Prohibition never works when the vast majority of the population wants something. We’ve seen it with alcohol and Cannabis already.
It doesn’t matter whether people want sex, it’s whether they’re willing to vote for someone who wants to protect their ability to have sex.
Since we have the Republicans on the one hand and a party led by a lifelong Catholic who spent more than 30 years in Congress trying to eliminate abortion and only goes against the Vatican when the Vatican is asking to stop being jackbooted authoritarians (as in Gaza), that first sentence of mine really ends with “whether they’re willing to vote third party”, because the Democrats sure as hell aren’t going to take a stand on this or any other issue.
John Morales @ #4 — Surely you know that will be forbidden sex. Too gay. And don’t kid yourself they can’t find out. They’ll have ways.
Ah, the singular Vicar trying as always to make sure that Trump is the next President.
AKA throwing one’s vote away. There is zero chance that a third party will win. Zero.
I’ve explained this to you over and over for a decade by now, but you are a stubborn mule who doesn’t care to drink. And I don’t even live there.
So obvious!
To avoid another Trump presidency, Biden will need more votes than Trump at the end of the vote-counting (and also more votes by the actual voters, who are not the people), and each vote not for Biden is effectively one more for Trump because it’s one fewer than Biden would otherwise have got.
Seems pretty silly to go to the trouble of voting only to throw one’s vote away; might as well just not bother and let other people make the decision, the result will be identical.
Robro, sure, but also I surely know it happens; the more strict the regulation and enforcement and the consequences of pregnancy and the availability of contraception, the more that PIV takes a back seat. Doesn’t mean there isn’t a load of nookie; most teenagers have rampant hormonal urges, and most are straight(ish). Don’t you remember how it was?
Point being, there may be less PIV sessions, but then there will be more of the other nookie.
The rationale is easy if one is taught that the only real sex is PIV and it’s all about reproduction; the rest therefore is, um, just a type of massage and has no risk of pregnancy. So, not really sex.
Here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5913747/
If the biggest difference between liberals and conservatives is that one failed to codify Roe and the other overturned it, each of them after many decades of making a lot of angry noise . . . then please find a third party to vote for.
Daddy’s a drunk and mommy’s a codependent enabler. I don’t care how much you’re used to it. It should not be “normal.” Leave home. Get out now.
I refer you to my #8, Drew.
What you really mean is then ‘please find a third party upon which to waste your vote’, which is silly, since in the USA there is no compulsory voting, so you don’t need to bother to actually vote in order to not prevent Trump from becoming president.
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Two things the USA desperately needs:
1) Compulsory voting, so that special interest groups (e.g. Evangelicals) can’t just motivate people to turn up and vote and skew the result towards a (very) minority opinion; and
2) Ranked choice voting, so that one can actually vote for a third (or fourth or whatever) party for proportional representation.
But then, everything is set in stone de facto, though of course de jure everything is changeable and amendable.
Like the Constitution, obviously it can be amended when it clearly has become unfit for purpose, no?
(Heh. I do like my funnies)
Don’t throw me in the briar patch!
John Morales #11
100%
I live in Australia.
Compulsory voting.
Preferential voting.
Independant electoral commission.
3rd and 4th parties thrive and prevent extremes moderately well.
John @11: Drew and the Vicar are accelerationists. To them, as with all ideologues, there is no such thing as a “lesser evil”. They don’t give a damn about the damage to real people if Trump wins. Odds are they would fare better than most in a Trumpian hellscape (I’m guessing they’re white, hetero cis men who are reasonably well-off, but they are of course free to correct me on that), which makes their ideological “purity” a fucking joke.
[Rob, I can’t dispute you there. Nagging negging is their schtick]
DanDare, hard to get through to USAnians, who have the best system in the world, or maybe even did back in C18.
In the USA, extremes prevent moderates and 3rd and 4th parties extremely well.
That lack of ranked representation has led to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_polarization_in_the_United_States
When the rule becomes ‘on any given issue, if you’re not for us you’re against us’, it’s clear it ain’t working.
That’s not what the political process is supposedly about.
And when a good chunk of the population actually chooses to be either poorly informed or even misinformed about the realities at hand due to rampant ideology, then whatever democratic processes exist become poorly functional.
One of the biggest strengths (and one of the biggest weaknesses) of democracy is that it’s one system that can decide to abolish itself and in the process allow a peaceful death, a transition without violence.
(Thus, Russia and Hungary and Turkey etc. Hopefully, not the USA)
@John Morales, DanDare:
Canada sadly has neither compulsory voting nor ranked voting, though there have been attempts at setting up the latter have happened a few times, with them all being shot down each time due to combinations of the people who actually win elections not wanting to dilute things too much and the fact that none of the proposals that actually got to referendum stages have actually been communicated well.
In many ways it doesn’t help that Canadian voting is, unlike the U.S., extremely simple for anything other than municipal elections, as there is literally only one position to vote for in stamdard federal or provincial elections. This means that any changes are going to make things more complicated and cause complaints.
Canada does, at least, have an independent electoral commission drawing all the districts. Being associated with any running political party is a disqualification for working for Elections Canada. These are mostly people who take their non-partisanship very seriously.
Canada also has five parties in the House of Commons. Granted, one of those is unusual in that it is a purely regional party and thus gets more seats than it should by population just as a result of its focus, but there are still three major fully national parties (along with a fourth that gets one or two seats total, and a fifth which thankfully has yet to manage to get any seats but which has been helping drag our more mainstream right-wing party further towards the extremes as the mainstream party tries to recapture the extremist vote to avoid losing all hope of getting power).
I found it hard to believe that even the Heritage Foundation would support the policy in that cartoon. So I had to look it up. By golly, they said it explicitly in at least one tweet. Under Trump, the crazies are getting crazier, or at least becoming more comfortable in exposing their craziness.
raven@5–
I don’t know if that was meant ironically, but the planet is not rapidly losing population. It is currently growing at just under 1% per year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#/media/File:World_Population_Prospects.svg
On current projections, the global population will level out at 10.5 billion in 2080-2090, then slowly reduce from there. Even with the most dramatic modelled population drop (where the reproduction rate drops by 0.5 children per adult), the world will still end the 21st century with a higher population than any time during the 20th century.
What next, will they come after our orgasm, too? Oh, probably not, since only men have those.
Better to be a accelerationist than a fucking liberal.
Damn: https://youtu.be/33p-8QHZpzY?si=BU_HfbZzq3esWQc3
Akira, you really want more of what you’re getting, so that a radical transition can occur?
I think it’s just more of your despairing nihilism. You don’t like it now, you’ll not like it if it intensifies.
“Accelerationism is a range of revolutionary and reactionary ideas in left-wing and right-wing ideologies that call for the drastic intensification of capitalist growth, technological change, infrastructure sabotage and other processes of social change to destabilize existing systems and create radical social transformations, otherwise referred to as “acceleration”.”
(Wikipedia)
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Got a perfect third party for such as they and you: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/leopards-eating-peoples-faces-party
Incels (involuntary celebates) will have lots of company.
@drew #10,
The three most popular third-party presidential candidates in the last hundred years were George Wallace, Ross Perot, and (a very distant third) Gary Johnson. Which of those men would lead a progressive revolution? (Ralph Nader was the fourth, and we know how helpful that was.) Johnson is at least pro-choice but I don’t think he’d go to the mat for it.
It makes sense to vote for third-party candidates in local elections, if they have half a chance of winning. But third-party candidates with any pull at the national level (or even in most non-tiny states) tend to be even more invested in the existing systems of power than the Democratic candidates. They have to be, to have the clout to run an effective campaign without a major party behind them.
The only issue that matters is climate change … the one that very, very, clearly splits liberals from conservatives.