Women might be easier to see as chattel slaves
I’m tired. I can’t even work up interest in the back and forth going on now among the Supremes.
Sotomayor doing her best by reminding her colleagues they have a personal stake in not looking like pawns. Hollow laughter. Ki-i-i-i-d, I want to say, if any of them cared whether they look like fools, they would have stopped acting like clowns years ago.
And then all the yammering about viability. Of the fetus, of course. ZOMG if anyone else’s rights are at stake, anyone’s at all, ever, anywhere, so long as they might be male, anyone!, then of course the incubator has to do its job. Maybe if women had an actual price on their heads, somebody would notice that the property depreciates from the huge marathon of pregnancy and delivery?
So, forgive me while I shout.
Women are human beings who have the right to control their own bodies.
I must remind you that women are the majority of citizens in the U.S.
If women had cared enough, this would never have happened.
Women are the test case, those infamous canaries, in what the human race permits itself and what it doesn’t.
We’ve broken the U.S. legal system. Long before this case, we did that. In Morrison, in Gonzales, in innumerable access to jobs cases over two decades.
What remains for women outside of the rule of law is only the rule of force.
We have no access to that, as anyone who cares to know about sentences for women fighting back against men must know.
But every single woman I’ve known chose not to stand for all women’s rights, because it would cost them.
If their use as rented bodies costs them their lives in exchange for adulthood, so be it.
Earlynerd on December 1st, 2021 at 19:16
Oh, and lest anyone think I’m just picking on that Supreme Court majority of ‘devout’ Catholics, I give you this New York town, Kiryas Joel.
It’s ultraorthodox Jew. What could wrong? Women as cattle, men as owners, how nice.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kiryas-joel-women-driving-goldberger_n_6580568
This is today. Women not only are not allowed to drive, they are forbidden contraceptives and excluded from their male master’s religious services. They are even excluded from education.
This enclave was a direct response of a part of the American Jewish religion in the 1970’s to women almost gaining equality. It is no different from the retreat of the Catholic church back into overt, constrictive sexism.
And tell me again why any woman not part of that particular culture should spend any resource, whether it be outrage, money or votes, to protect them when men of some other equally sexist religion attacks them?
[another link here: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/nyregion/kiryas-joel-a-village-with-the-numbers-not-the-image-of-the-poorest-place.html
both and the above fall all over themselves excusing the denial of rights to women]
Earlynerd on December 1st, 2021 at 21:36
Yeah. The really amazing thing is the buy-in from the chattel whose entire (unadmitted) horizon seems to be “hey, it’s three squares a day!”
Women aren’t the only humans who do that, but it sure is hard to watch them at it, propping up the whole system along the way.
I, personally, don’t have much right to come down on anyone for it. Except for some typically atrocious treatment at work, I’ve had the luck of unusual safety from the worst of it. So it’s easy for me to say open your eyes.
Others like, I’m guessing, you, need a lot more fortitude and I admire the hell out of that.
quixote on December 2nd, 2021 at 17:44
I’m afraid my outrage from seeing the decades long revocation in my own rights and the rights of those I cared about most must look sometimes like that’s directed at you. It certainly isn’t and I apologize.
I think you stand up and speak out with more understanding of women as actual adult human beings than anyone else I’ve seen on the ‘nets since Anglachel and Reclusive Leftist.
Earlynerd on December 5th, 2021 at 00:45
(Good grief. In my head I answered your question at once, but in fact … I’m a space cadet.)
Of course I’m not offended or taking something personally when you didn’t mean it that way!
As for Reclusive Leftist, I still miss Violet Socks every time I think about her. She was wonderful. Anglachel was great too. I hope we see their like again. Soon.
quixote on December 22nd, 2021 at 20:30
Gaaa. I’ve been long overdue, like by half a decade or more, to get into the present with my php version. So the site sort of runs, the sidebar has blown up, and the comment preview no longer works. Bear with me.
quixote on December 22nd, 2021 at 21:02
Quixote, re “womxn” – it was coined to include more “gender identities”, such as “trans woman”, than “woman” or “womyn.”
https://www.shethepeople.tv/home-top-video/difference-womxn-womyn-diversity/
Branjor on January 1st, 2022 at 09:43
Thanks for the tip re the idiotic spelling. (That’s re my comment over at Skydancing, right?) I have no patience with unpronounceable word butchery. It’s just stupid. By all means, make new words. That’s what language is. But they have to be sayable. That’s also what language is.
I wonder how long it’s going to take before we emerge from this mass delusion about gender? I couldn’t believe it when it started. (I laughed because it seemed so funny people should be spouting that claptrap with straight faces.) And it’s lasted more than a decade longer than I would have believed possible. The UK is maybe showing the first stirrings of coming to their senses. We can hope.
(And they just appointed an MP who’s pro-Nordic Model to the Home Affairs committee, which is the one with the most impact on prostitution.)
quixote on January 1st, 2022 at 22:46
Right.
Branjor on January 2nd, 2022 at 17:36
This really isn’t the place to put this, but stuck in Idaho wannabe deepest Douglas County, Oregon, I hope it’s okay here?
More good news to balance the bad of the latest Covid mutation:
shttps://scitechdaily.com/covid-19-breakthrough-scientists-discover-how-the-sars-cov-2-virus-evades-our-immune-system/
If it didn’t involve suffering and death on a massive scale, the incredibly rapid fight carried on at the molecular level would be as absorbing as any championship fencing match. I can’t get over how as soon as one side gets past the other’s guard, a new defense is built against -that- a new attack against that defense is mounted, and it goes on. For humans, as a collateral good, new understanding of what we and the rest of the world are made of becomes a permanent part of shared knowlege, to (hopefully) be used in the next fight. Just like any other war.
Internet social media is the 10,000 monkeys on typewriters specifically failing to produce anything remotely Shakespearian. The cooperating human brains that have made such amazing progress against Covid look to me like the more hopeful side of humanity. The amazing success of that effort in so short a time reminds me of the sally where Trurl and Klapaucius convince opposing tyrants locked in a never-ending war against each other to join the soldiers (robots of course) within each of their armies together electronically. Instead of producing two super-warriors, the resulting giant brains realize how ridiculous war is, solve the most knotty philosopical problems and wander off together to pick daisies. Not that the amazing on-going worldwide efforts to outwit and outrun an equally determined opponent are exactly picking daisies, but sort of the same kind of benelovent use of combined human capacity.
If only sexism did not so predicatably rise to epidemic levels every time the human race comes close to making sustained progress, and drag it backwards every damn time…
(Just to segue back to the legitimate topic: women beat the pants off men in Olympic fencing in that sport’s early years. Men, the 100% representation of the Olympic committee then decreed in 1916? or so that henceforth women and men Must Fight Separately. Women won the first Olympic fencing gold in 100 years with Mariel Zagunis in sabre (that most masculine of weapons), then went on to victory after victory. Men have had their moments, but nothing to match women. Same as soccer.
It’s like arguing that water is wet, to say that all this accommodation without any context whatsoever for a sliver of a subgroup of males is in bad faith.
And that’s even without any comparison to the equally despicable vacays of whites in black American’s history: a woman just got charged under Oregon’s literally woman-excluding hate crime laws and fired from her teaching job for wearing blackface in a protest to represent Rosa Parks)
PS: preview’s gone from this site, so please forgive typos, etc.
Earlynerd on January 12th, 2022 at 02:41
(Sorry about the previews, Earlynerd. After procrastinating for years, I finally updated php and, as expected, lots of stuff broke. And, good old wordpress, no currently functioning plugin to do previews. Shriek.)
I completely agree about the hopefulness of what people can accomplish when working together. When I disappear for longish stretches it’s because all I’m reading is the science news, to take a break from marinating in stupid. It’s not just science, either. Scholars of all kinds, artist collaborations, even sports sometimes, soaked in nationalism as it is.
The achievement of coming up with a vaccine in, what was it? under two years?, from discovering the virus to vaccinating people against it is a colossal accomplishment. The Manhattan Project and landing on the Moon are just sort of side hobbies by comparison. And all based on the work of Katalin Karikó who was, if I remember right, denied tenure because who the hell would expect anything to come of putzing around with mRNA.
(Just looked it up. Not denied tenure because she already had it. She was *demoted* for not getting enough grants! I’ve never even heard of that happening to any other prof. Nothing like being a visionary female.)
quixote on January 12th, 2022 at 12:55
Previews will probably amble back one of these days. At least you had the technical chops to get your own WordPress website. I dipped one little toe in and ran screaming.
Thanks for putting up with my sententious ramblings – and all the sci fi references. There really is no one except one new librarian for 40 miles in either direction from this ghastly little town who seems to read sci-fi at all, much less Cyberiad.
Speaking of sententiousness (sententiousity?): that the person who thought that mRNA could be used in vaccines was punished, but still persisted in that discovery against so much opposition, is more proof that bigotry against any category of human being costs all of us.
Rather than throw lectures about ‘diversity’ at people, as the well-intentioned but muddled federal and state government do, I think reminding people of this fact would be more effective. Like that series of ads that were on TV before the end of the fairness doctrine: “the person who discovers the cure for cancer may not be white. Or even a man.”
I’m kind of tone deaf wrt human created art and do envy you that. But music, books and the astonishing beauty of this part of the country are great escapes. And of course, SCIENCE, with all its optimism.
Earlynerd on January 12th, 2022 at 21:34
If there -were- a preview and edit feature, I would have made that “human created *visual* art”.
But alas, there isn’t, so I couldn’t.
Earlynerd on January 12th, 2022 at 22:23