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.

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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • 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?



  • 🎶 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.




  • I would really really recommend not underestimating the importance of medical treatment. It took me 4 tries to find the right medication (turns out an NDRI, not an SSRI, did the trick) to discover that actually, “normal” people are basically happy by default?? Like instead of it being this elusive reward that I had to work hard for, it’s like I can consciously hold on to my positive emotions and let go of the negative ones. Also, basic tasks that were endless nightmares before (laundry, cooking, phone calls) are now stress-free and even kind of satisfying?

    I had the right tools before, like supportive friends, enough education about radical acceptance and coping skills, and a physically healthy routine, but it didn’t seem to help. And that makes sense now because it turns out, it barely matters how much happy chemicals your brain makes if it’s going to immediately throw them away. Not trying to tell you what to do (am neither a doctor nor a therapist) but I’m wondering if that’s what’s going on with you too.



  • catreadingabook@kbin.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlToxic
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    1 year ago

    As with most social media, I think the voting system makes it worse. There is always an element of “playing to the audience,” in that the easiest way to get validation (votes, boosts, replies) is to make sure everyone thinks you’re morally or intellectually superior over the person you’re talking to, whereas an actual normal conversation would be focused on the exchange of new ideas and perspectives.

    Stronger moderation could help, and filtering the less civil communities could help, but I suspect it’s just a natural consequence of having a built-in validation system that applies to every post and comment everywhere. As engagement in the fediverse grows overall, I could see it getting worse mainly because of more ‘vote-seeking’ behavior.


  • 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.








  • When a console game finally releases a PC port and the title screen still says “Press Start,” you know the keys are going to be completely unhinged like, “I” to open your inventory. “C” is yes, and “V” is no, except in the escape menu, where “Enter” is yes and “Backspace” is extra-yes. Left-click to either attack or walk forward, depending on how your character is feeling.