30% jokes, 30% attempts at academic discussions, 40% spewing my opinions uninvited to find out what might be missing from my perspective.

I’ll usually reiterate this in my posts, but I never give legal advice online. I can describe how the law generally tends to be, analyze a public case from an academic perspective, and explain how courts normally treat an issue. But hell no am I even going to try to apply the law to your specific situation.

  • 0 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • I’m against forced birth, but have to point out that there is the argument, whether realistic or not, that the parent can always give the baby to the foster care system once it’s born, so their obligation would be limited to 9 months total.

    Personally what I take issue with is the inconsistency of forced-birth laws in the absence of comparable forced-labor laws. In a world of ideal policy, maybe we as a society might agree that a person should be obligated to sacrifice their time and health for the sake of preserving or creating human life. But then it shouldn’t be applied only to adult women who had consensual sex. Why shouldn’t non-pregnant people be forced to tend a farm for 9 months to produce food for those who are starving, or to spend 9 months working 80-hour weeks at an emergency call center with no pay?

    I suspect the answer is that the rights themselves are not the issue here, but rather the motivation to punish women who have consensual sex.


  • In the academic sense of the term, negative rights include the right to not have things done to you (e.g., to not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law).

    Positive rights include the right for you to do something, generally as against others (e.g., the right to have food, healthcare, or education be provided to you by other people).

    I’m not sure it is useful to try to categorize abortion rights, for similar reasons why it would be difficult to categorize the right to try and grab the only parachute on a crashing plane. Even if it causes injury or death to others, our general tendency is to treat positive acts of genuine self-preservation as a negative right, if only in the sense that we would never enforce a rule that prohibits the person from trying.

    A funky brain teaser on the topic might be whose right of life prevails when a perfectly healthy person turns out to be the only match for 5 patients with failing organs, one needing a new heart, another needing a new intact liver, etc., who are each about to die if we don’t kill the healthy person and harvest their organs for transplant. And would the answer change if this wouldn’t kill the healthy person, but severely decrease their quality of life - such as involuntarily taking one of their lungs and one of their kidneys?



  • First of all, nice bait, looks delicious, think I’ll chow down.

    I think this because I’ve spent over a decade of my life trying to understand where people come from and getting nowhere with helping them.

    This mindset sounds closer to the problem than to the solution. Do you truly believe that the best way to interact with an extremist is to blindly judge them, then assume that they will question their entire worldview because one person, who has made no good faith effort to understand them, decides to call them names?

    Many extremists, though perhaps not most, feel the way they do because they honestly believe they are doing the right thing. They listen to the lived experiences of people they trust and discount the words of people they do not. The blind judgment of others only ‘proves’ to them that it’s all one big conspiracy, everyone else are sheep, and that they are the only ones who can think for themselves.


  • 🎶 oh, I can so just sit here and cry 🎶

    but fr what worked well for me was blocking, deleting, getting rid of (or stuffing into a rarely used closet) anything that reminded me of them, then distracting myself 24/7 long enough to later process my emotions with a little bit of distance from the event itself - not to block out the feelings but to just avoid ruminating on them.

    Mostly the point was buying time to provide my monkey brain with hard proof that I can survive without that person, that way it stops shooting me up with the Bad Chemicals every time I think of them.






  • Advice against phishing emails can be reduced to, “1: Never click on a link, call a phone number, download an attachment, or follow instructions you found in an email unless you were already expecting this exact email from this exact sender. 2: If you really want to do those things, search up the organization’s website directly and use the contact info they provide there instead.”

    imo it’s the ad-hungry articles stretching everything into 10+ pages that’s making advice so inaccessible to people. Super annoying because it dilutes the real, simple message that’s already there, it’s just locked behind an adwall.




  • Completely speculating btw:

    Separate complaints are generally addressed separately, even within the same suit. It’s unlikely one could have “tanked” the other.

    I briefly looked over the original federal complaint vs desantis and the original state law countersuit vs the oversight district. The complaints in the other suit do point to different laws.

    Since we all know these cases are going to get appealed no matter what, it’s entirely possible Disney could be trying to entice the Supreme Court into taking on the federal case down the line by whittling it down to just one issue (free speech).

    Single issue cases revolving around constitutional arguments are like crack to the Supreme Court, they love to take these so that they can announce new rules or reasoning before applying it to the case, which they get to do when “”“interpreting”“” the Constitution.

    Disney might suspect that the current Justices are drooling at the possibility of ruling expansively in favor of free speech.


  • It isn’t commercial labor when an adult does their own chores (I think), as it’s more related to the people in a household maintaining their own home. It likely wouldn’t be labor for a child for the same reasons, though I’m not sure.

    But it could start to look like labor when it’s something that produces commercial value, for example, it’s more like a ‘chore’ to water the vegetable garden in the backyard, but it’s more like ‘labor’ to tend to 20 acres of farmland.

    Excessive chores, though, could be prevented under child abuse law rather than child labor law, depending on how it’s enforced. Doing all the household work voluntarily for no reason other than it’s fun? Almost certainly legal. No video games until you clean the dishes? Probably legal. No food until you sweep, mop, dust, and shine every surface in the house? Probably abuse.


  • Without taking a stance myself - I doubt anyone disagrees with the principle, but rather on the implementation. How do we know who’s responsible enough; can we write a law that accounts for:

    • A 50-year-old woman who committed robbery in a moment of desperation as a 16-year-old and has since shown remorse, attended therapy, and held a stable job,

    • A 40-year-old businessman who’s never been convicted of anything, seemed okay when he saw a therapist once last year, but privately he gets into vicious screaming matches with his wife and has really inappropriate temper tantrums when he’s drunk, and

    • A 21-year-old college graduate who seems smart and stable enough, but their social media page is full of harsh criticisms of the government, projections of what would happen if various officials were theoretically assassinated, and more than a few references to “hoping for another civil war”?

    While balancing that with the idea that the government isn’t supposed to protect something as a “right” while also preemptively taking that right away from people they think might be dangerous, if they can’t point to highly credible evidence. (Otherwise, it becomes possible to arrest people for ‘thought crimes.’)

    Idk the solution personally. Seems impossible to balance unless gun access legally becomes a privilege to qualify for, rather than a right to be restricted from. But that would put the power into states’ hands, and then states would have the power to decide that no one can have guns except the police.






  • Umm the actual court order the article refers to is super generous to the plaintiffs lol. Whoever’s representing them made such basic mistakes that I’m not even sure how they passed the bar exam:

    The Plaintiffs’ first cause of action lists–in a single paragraph that spans four pages–fifty
    different state (and DC) consumer-protection statutes.

    (This is a no-no in every federal court in every state.)

    In either event, the Plaintiffs concede that they’ve failed to meet the requirements of Mississippi and Ohio law–even as they ask us not to dismiss those claims.

    (Wtf? lol)

    we agree with Burger King that a reasonable person wouldn’t have interpreted Burger King’s TV and online ads as binding offers.

    (This is well-settled law and taught to most first-year law students.)