cforrester

Can you explain exactly what you were trying to accomplish with this comment? Government noninterference in access to abortion services provided by licensed medical practitioners meets my definition of social progress. If you feel the need to distill that down to "abortion is progress," I'm comfortable with that. Abortion is progress because it means that women have access to abortion that is less obstructed by non-medical interference.

This shot across the bow certainly is a good reminder for advocates of abortion access rights not to become complacent, as progress can be undone. I'm hopeful that it can act as a catalyst for advocates in the region. Extremist actions like this often create new advocates, as well as drawing external attention. There are already groups mobilizing from without and within to help Texan women who want or need an abortion, and conversely, groups hoping to take advantage of this law to target those women for what I would consider to be legal harassment. It seems like more of a gamble than you might be thinking.

> The real problem those on the left have with this law is that it is a major advance against abortion, pure and simple.

I haven't seen anyone deny that the main issue is unreasonable restrictions on access to abortion. It's certainly valid to discuss the recklessness of the law's coercive mechanisms and their broader, negative side effects on unrelated groups.

I don't understand business as well as I would like to, but I wonder if these companies are sensing how much trouble they'll have keeping drivers if they can become collateral damage in social oppression. I'm not used to seeing these taxi companies offer potentially a fortune's worth of services to any of their drivers, but this law is unusually reckless, even by (de facto) abortion ban standards.

It's not the burning that directly leads to something better. It's more like a natural consequence caused by failing to adequately address people's need for something better; people who feel powerless in their quest for justice will treasure morsels of that justice whereever they can get it, such as direct attacks on the public institutions suppressing them.

The good that can come from it is motivation: it's more clear than ever that gradual reform is not occurring, and something has to change at a fundamental level. Enabling people to get justice civilly will sharply reduce the number of people resorting to incivility.

In most of the cases I've seen of police misconduct, a brief clip of the actual offending act is all that is necessary to establish that misconduct, making them valuable documentation for any court case. Edited footage between the beginning and end of the clip is easily detected.

Taking an egregious example of the murder of George Floyd, there is no context that could have preceded the footage of his murder that would have justified kneeling on a man's neck for over 9 minutes. It also would have been trivial to detect if someone had extended the video to make it appear that he knelt longer than he did.

What are some examples of situations where you imagine that footage taken by a regular citizen could be edited to make an officer's reasonable actions look like police brutality or other major forms of police misconduct?

I can't speak to the actual legality, but I strongly feel that a less-dysfunctional system would account for the intent of the officer. It is undeniably an attempt to suppress widespread dissemination of video documentation of their actions, by taking advantage of a known flaw in the technology most commonly used to do so. At the very least, this should be a fireable offence on the first infraction, akin to tampering with their body camera.

Here's hoping this backfires on a lot of them. Environmental integrity is not theirs to sell out from under the rest of us.

Personally, I think it's important to encourage corporations to take human rights into greater consideration. Complex as the issue is, it still results in Apple enriching itself and a nation which could reasonably be considered an apartheid state, by doing business there. In my view, that gives them at least some responsibility to speak out against human rights violations by states hosting economies in which they participate, if not to stop doing business there entirely...

> And when you observe that mask mandating states don’t do significantly better than mask-free states, then a curious mind rightfully starts pondering.

If this is true, which I haven't confirmed, wouldn't that say more about the effectiveness of political policy rather than about masks themselves? When we have seen throughout the pandemic that healthcare workers have a dramatically lower rate of infection compared to the general population, despite having more direct contact with infected populations, it is clear to the that proper precautions including protective equipment (principally masks, for a respiratory disease) can impede COVID transmission heavily. With that being the case, the question becomes: has mask policy been effective in getting enough people to wear masks properly and consistently, in states where it is mandated?

You said it yourself, switching would be a complication, and manufacturers are happy to maximize that complication as much as possible. I consider it unethical to impose artificial hurdles to switching upon consumers, especially when they most likely aren't familiar with vendor lock-in.

iMessage is a good example for me. It replaces a federated, universally-compatible service with a centralized service that works only on Apple devices. The upgraded features are nice enough to be alluring, and now a significant portion of American smartphone users feel compelled to remain with Apple so that they don't experience any difficulties communicating. This is a sticking point for me in particular; I used to be a heavy user of multi-protocol messengers like Trillian, during the time when multiple providers offered mutually incompatible messaging services.

> It’s tough because Google and others are huge, they buy out competitors, it’s not anything like the restaurant market.

Not just that, they go to great effort to lock you into their ecosystem so that the difficulty of changing becomes a big part of the calculation.

If I had to make a comparison, instead of a restaurant, I'd suggest a company town. When you buy a Company X phone, you're moving to Xville, where everything is sold with predatory prices and low variety by the company store.

Thank you for taking the time, I understand the concept you're explaining, it just sounds implausible. At the end of the day, they're still fantasizing about children, they've just found a way to believe that they're doing it in a way that is not mentally deleterious. I'll keep reading, but it's going to take something extraordinary to convince me that the link between sexual excitement and the qualities that make up the concept of a child is something that manifests in people who aren't paedophiles.

I'm saying that violent media is fine for general consumption because the typical consumer is not prone to acts of violence, and the fantasy they are engaging in is temporary. The same is not true of child sexual abuse, where the typical consumer does have a mental illness that compels them to sexualize children.

I'll do some more reading, but I find the concept extremely implausible. If the fictional child did not represent a child in their mind, there would be no need to seek out media featuring children. The 2D/3D attraction hypothesis you've presented would exist aside their paedophilia.