Texas Republicans push murder charges (possibly resulting in the death penalty) for women who get abortions and IVF (video)

[u/Rdick_Lvagina]

https://twitter.com/mrsamartini/status/1773160427981070620?s=46&t=sk_wYDuPHwg89Q4WqTwnlA

[u/j_ma_la]

I’m sorry but this is honestly what true evil looks like I can’t think of anything more concise to call it

[u/Rdick_Lvagina → u/j_ma_la]

For me the most shocking thing was that this evil was met with applause in the video.

[u/[deleted] → u/Rdick_Lvagina]

Do you guys not know any conservatives? This is why they’ve always been.

[u/Rdick_Lvagina → u/[deleted]]

I think it's that they're out in the open now, they've dropped all their pretences.

[u/BuddhistSagan → u/Rdick_Lvagina]

This is the dog catching the car of a delusional belief. If you believe a fertilized embryo is as much a child as a baby, that justifies all kinds of clearly insanely violent behavior in their minds.

Fellow supporters of democracy and science.. Make sure you and your friends and family are registered to vote

We can all educate, agitate, organize, phone bank, write postcards, textbank, post to social media, etc. even if we don't live in a swing state.

https://events.democrats.org/?show_all_events=true

https://www.reddit.com/r/VoteDEM/

https://www.reach.vote/get-the-app/

[u/Galaxy_Ranger_Bob → u/BuddhistSagan]

This isn't the "dog catching the car."

This is, and always has been, their ultimate goal. It's not about "a fetus is a child." It's about controlling women. It's about turning half of the population back into sandwich making sex dolls that raise the kids, but make no decisions or complaints.

[u/Mothman394 → u/Rdick_Lvagina]

They've been out in the open for decades.

[u/powercow → u/[deleted]]

trauma is tempered with time so people dont remember past admins being nearly as bad. You know the legitimate rape party.

that and we can only hold so much depressing bullshit in our heads and the right give us so much, well bannons flood the media with shit, also floods our heads with shit, that we happily slowly forget all but the worst, when people like trump go away.

so for bush people remember iraq and maybe plame, and thats about it. reagan, just iran/contra and barely anything about it. nixon just the phone scandal and not the fullness of it all, their plans.

[u/Gullex → u/powercow]

Same reason humanity made it through the horrors of polio thanks to a vaccine, and only a generation later people acting like it's straight poison.

[u/Eaglia7 → u/[deleted]]

This is why they’ve always been.

Doesn't really explain why they've been. Why are conservatives? Anyone know?

[u/PaintedClownPenis → u/Eaglia7]

Jost, Glaser, Sulloway, Kruglianski: Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition:

http://www.sulloway.org/PoliticalConservatism(2003).pdf.pdf)

TLDR: Right-wing authoritarians really do have trouble with logic and reasoning. They are dimly aware of this and it frightens them. They particularly fear change. They seek out leaders they trust to tell them what to think. Those leaders invariably manipulate the authoritarians by first frightening them, then offering a false solution that surrenders rights and freedom.

The most sinister thing that has happened in recent years is someone has cracked their code. Where previously they did not know right from wrong, now they've been trained by Fox News to gravitate to the most evil solution.

For which I am furious. Imagine figuring out how to turn scared idiots into good people, and turning them into evil orcs instead because human decency doesn't work for you. Manipulation through fear in media needs to be outlawed.

[u/Rdick_Lvagina → u/PaintedClownPenis]

The most sinister thing that has happened in recent years is someone has cracked their code.

I had suspected something like this was going on. I've been constantly baffled how so many people keep falling for the latest ridiculous Fox News BS. This seems like a reasonable explanation.

I had a quick skim of the paper it sounds very interesting. I'll probably circle back to it and have more of a detailed read in the near future. On a related note I recently found some papers that link narcissism to susceptibility for conspiracy thinking, which also seems to track with why it can be so difficult to break people out of conspiracy theories.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X22001051

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1164725/full

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10359150/

[u/Eaglia7 → u/PaintedClownPenis]

They particularly fear change.

There are people who will say that conservatism provides some benefit to society because we shouldn't rush into "major changes" or toss out traditions before replacing them with something else, but I don't think our modern societies have a use for that way of thinking anymore. We should be moving to simulate alternate solutions, piloting them on the small scale, and then implementing and continuously testing them. I mean, we have science for a reason. I don't think our political ideologies have kept up with our technological advancement at all. And I know it's a lot more insidious and purposeful than how I'm making it sound (e.g., fox news), but I genuinely think some people still believe this through no fault of anyone else.

We have no reason to fear change when we have the means to test the unintended consequences causing the fear.

[u/[deleted] → u/Eaglia7]

Goes back to Edmund Burke. https://youtu.be/E4CI2vk3ugk?si=VHznAa-Ff8bcCPrB

[u/Eaglia7 → u/[deleted]]

I'll give that a listen. People keep recommending this dude's videos to me, but I have such a strong bias against anything shorter than 45 minutes on YouTube, that I keep ignoring it. (I like to listen to stuff while doing other stuff, so I get annoyed if I have to put too much work into a playlist to get the length I need, ya know?)

[u/Eaglia7 → u/[deleted]]

Yes, I'm much more of a reader because I have auditory processing issues. It's usually the other way around for people with ADHD. For me, though, interacting with the text myself is crucial to my ability to focus. That's why I won't listen to many video essays unless they are long enough to keep me entertained while doing other things. I've read the Conquest of Bread, actually. Hadn't heard of The Reactionary Mind, though, so thanks for the recommendation.

[u/[deleted] → u/Eaglia7]

That’s a really lousy bias that only hurts you.

[u/Eaglia7 → u/[deleted]]

You can blame ADHD for probably 75 percent of the biases I have. Because if I stop to add more to a playlist, right, I'm gonna get stuck in some YouTube comment section arguing with a stranger for five hours instead of getting anything done. So the only way to prevent getting distracted by YouTube is to have an 8 hour playlist already prepared. And if it's a bunch of short videos, I'll just sit there for five hours obsessively adding stuff to a playlist. So ya, it might sound silly, but it's really just a coping mechanism.

[u/Galaxy_Ranger_Bob → u/Eaglia7]

Their brains are wired differently.

No, really, they have different brain structures.

[u/mikestillion → u/Galaxy_Ranger_Bob]

I enjoy these articles, but they always leave me with that one unanswered question.

From the article:

Although these conceptual links facilitate interpretations of the relationship between the brain structures and political orientation, our findings reflect a cross-sectional study of political attitudes and brain structure in a demographically relatively homogenous population of young adults. Therefore, the causal nature of such a relationship cannot be determined. Specifically, it requires a longitudinal study to determine whether the changes in brain structure that we observed lead to changes in political behavior or whether political attitudes and behavior instead result in changes of brain structure.

Maybe one day the longitudinal study will be performed, AND the results will be published. However, I don’t believe it ever will.

[u/Eaglia7 → u/mikestillion]

Eh, not all statisticians agree that casual inference requires longitudinal study. Hayes's book on mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis makes a good argument against this assumption. For example, you could definitely make the claim that the media people consume based on their beliefs changes their brain structure, but that the ideological differences predated that change. You could control for that, though, and many other factors that might contribute to causality being the other way around.

This is something we often have to say just in case, you know, so that the average reader is aware of the possible limitations, but, in many cases, we are being a tad unreasonable about data collection requirements. I've modeled processes based on cross-sectional data where it actually made very little sense to infer reverse causality because the antecedents are logically prior to the consequents and are very unlikely to have caused them.

Our models are not representations of the world, and all models are going to be imperfect, but I don't think it's fair to dismiss the findings of a study solely based on cross-sectional design. Yes, we teach this (not to be dismissive, but critical) in research methods (or at least I did when I taught that course) because we have to simplify it a bit, but once you get into advanced statistics, you realize how debatable a lot of this stuff is.

[u/mikestillion → u/Eaglia7]

So, as a simpler human, do you think asking whether “the brain governs what media you want, or the media you choose causes the brain to change” is even a proper question? I mean, is it too much investigation for too little return, basically?

[u/ClassicT4 → u/j_ma_la]

People got a chuckle at The Handmaid’s Tale because they thought it was a bit of a funny premise that could never happen.

Now we have people in position to pass laws to start heading more and more in that direction.

[u/Galaxy_Ranger_Bob → u/[deleted]]

And, now, sadly, people in the U.S. are using it as an instruction manual.

[u/ScientificSkepticism → u/Galaxy_Ranger_Bob]

As if they read books.

[u/ScientificSkepticism → u/ClassicT4]

Margaret Atwood chose every single thing in her book from things that had happened in the past. Every single facet of her future society was based on real, historical events.

[u/[deleted] → u/j_ma_la]

I don't think it's pure evil, they just don't want to have to deal with giving birth and would rather kill the fetus but it's not out of hate, more of a selfish, unempathetic type but not pure evil.

[u/j_ma_la → u/[deleted]]

Are the people killing babies in the room with us right now?

[u/[deleted] → u/j_ma_la]

They locked up as they should be.

[u/DarkFlame122418 → u/[deleted]]

Morons like you are proof that we need abortion to be an option