I think women should maybe leave these places if they can. I wouldn’t even let a man think about having kids with me if I were a woman in any of those shit states.
These laws are targeted towards poor women who can't fight back. This one is making the news because she's suing. I guarantee that if an attorney hasn't taken up the fight, you'd never hear about it.
In some ways the opposite. When I left my shit tier flyover village I had nothing. Nothing was connecting me back home and there was no backup plan. It would be a lot more difficult for me to move now given all the roots I have put down.
What we think we control ends up controlling us. That mortgage that was supposed to make us free of landlords, that house we can't sell, that car that we struggle to find parking for, that career we worked so hard on building. I am not advocating giving anything up I am pointing out you have absolute freedom when you have nothing to lose and can't stay where you are.
If you are poor, wouldn’t it make more sense to be poor somewhere else? Starting over when you never had much would be my top priority rather than stay in these places.
With what money? You can't just travel across the country for free lol. Getting to another state alone is a good chunk of money for gas a lot of the time. Then what? Sleep in their car? Alone? In a place completely bereft of any kind of support or familiarity?
Yeah, you just don't get it and I don't know how to explain how difficult it would be to do that alone with nothing. I don't know if it's something that can be explained to someone that hasn't struggled.
I’m literally speaking from experience. And I also don’t own a car because it’s a money sink. I left everything behind I couldn’t fit in a box and moved across my country because I figured if I was going to struggle anyway, it may as well be where the grass is green. And while I have left all my family support behind, I have actual social support. There is so much more to where you live than what you have.
Are you a dude? I'm not asking this to be argumentative I just need you to understand that it is extremely different when you have to worry about if you'll be molested or worse when you sleep. I'm not saying it isn't hard for men to strike out on their own at all. I'm also absolutely not saying that men don't also get assaulted. I promise, I know it can be so difficult for anyone. Women have so many additional hurdles on top of that. I was homeless at 17 and the amount of people that "helped me out" but then expected sexual favors in return was fucking gross. No Kevin, you don't get a blow job because you brought me some stale ass donuts from your convenience store job ffs 🙄
I've been there too and the fact that men can just sleep on a bus stop, out in the open, in relative safety automatically gives them a privilege we simply don't have. Women's shelters can be great if you can find one with space. Even then some of them are grossly religious and as stifling as the situations these women want to escape from. A woman got kicked out of one of the shelters I stayed in because she had condoms in her dresser drawer. I guessing men don't get kicked out of anywhere because someone found out that they might be having sex.
Minorities and vulnerable populations are in the best position to not be brainwashed. And if they leave those states hopefully they can go to a state that respects them as humans
Minorities in these places are typically facing poverty levels that most people in the US can't imagine. How are they supposed to move when they can barely afford rent? As for the other women, the white women in these places genuinely don't believe that these laws will affect them. There is this sense that they think that their adjacency to white men will prevent them from being treated the same as others, that somehow it will make them immune. They are getting a massive wakeup call that white men in power only care about other white men. It's a tale as old as time. White women are and have always been our barrer to equality. Once things get bad enough for them they will jump on the side of minorities and equality again. They just don't usually view themselves as one of us, they always think that this time will be different.
Yeah… I know. I just hope their lives can change for the better and they can exit these places. I just want people to have equal rights and be happy. It’s apparently asking a lot of religious old people, but fuck them
Whether we like it or not, it's going to take widespread class solidarity and a generation of grassroots activism to undo this shit. The politically active will never give a shit about the politically inactive until they're outnumbered. It sucks that people just trying to make ends meet have to start becoming grassroots activists on top of their already demanding jobs and lives, but rights were never freely given to the disenfranchised. They were taken.
reminds me of an old sam kinison bit regarding people who live in deserts and then suffer droughts. but agreed... those most in need of relocation are least capable.
The true detriment is a two party system. You are like a dog being thrown scraps by whichever party you vote for, and things are only getting worse while people continue to pick one side or the other and don't overthrow the entire system they keep supporting.
No, the true detriment is civic illiteracy and widespread apathy. If people voted in droves and stayed engaged in the decisions that affect their lives, the institutional power of political parties would be nullified. The parties are powerful specifically because most people don't give a shit. There's a vacuum, and the party apparatus fills it.
Perhaps it's different in other places, but in my experience people do give a lot of shits. The system is just built against us in such a way that it's almost impossible to either have any hope of changing anything or see any changes that do happen. A huge cause of that disparity is the party system with it's incessant bickering and corrupt propaganda.
Fifty-four percent of eligible voters sat out the 2022 midterms where Republicans took control of the House. Thirty-four percent sat out in 2020. Half of the country either doesn't give a shit about the problems that could be fixed through active political engagement, or they don't give a shit about active political engagement. Both forms of apathy lead to the same conclusion.
A significant portion of that apathy is driven by people who look at these numbers and somehow still come away with "it's rigged@!!" as a conclusion. And that goes for both sides of the political spectrum. If the other 80 million people showed up to participate both during elections and afterwards while local, state, and federal decisions are being made (like, for example, at city council meetings), then the shockwaves that would send through the system would register on the Richter scale
People who think like you are part of the reason 80 million people sit on the sidelines and complain when shit doesn't go their way. You know how Republicans completely changed the course of history in 2010? By showing up in numbers. You know how women changed the course of history in the early 20th century? By showing up in numbers. You know how black Americans changed the course of history in the 1960s? By showing up in numbers.
Nobody is going to do a damn thing for you if you sit on your ass and complain that change is impossible.
Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter are pretty recent examples of where "showing up in numbers" just wasn't enough. The system is rigged and blaming victims isn't getting us anywhere. Anecdotally throughout my life, I have seen uncountable numbers of people come to work/school/etc. with an "I voted" sticker, and my conspiracy theory is that the numbers are meaningless and the people who rigged the system already decide who is winning before the first vote is cast, unless they abandon the plan because their polling shows an absolute landslide that would reveal their fuckery.
Occupy Wall Street lasted 59 days, and BLM lasted 1 year in total, while most of the protests lasted little more than 5 months. Women's suffrage groups started their organized resistance in the 1840s, roughly eighty years before they earned the right to vote, with significant violence erupting at their events in the 1850s and organizations forming at a rapid clip in the decades after the Civil War. Many women's suffrage activists died of old age before they saw significant progress.
Civil Rights era activists campaigned in the streets for fourteen years. Hundreds were killed, thousands were injured, and tens of thousands were imprisoned. Cops sprayed peaceful protesters with fire hoses and had police dogs rip the flesh from their bodies. But still they showed up, they marched, and they fought as a group.
What you're describing are part time slacktivists who showed up until it got uncomfortable and they got bored, at which time they let their apathy take back over and buried their noses in their cell phones. What you're talking about is a bunch of virtue signaling, and it amounted to nothing precisely because there was no class solidarity or significant grassroots organization.
And fuck off with your "it's rigged and votes are counted by the lizard people Illuminati" nonsense. You sound like a Proud Boy wannabe, and you're eroding the faith people have in their own nation. Shame on you.
No true Scotsman and Godwin's law, nice. Anyways, BLM is an obvious continuation of the civil rights movement, and calling them "slacktivists" is derisive and reductionist.
Protesting until you die of old age is not what it used to be. The surveillance of the modern world makes protestors into easy targets if they ever become a true threat. The powers that be have learned plenty from the civil rights era.
Nobody should have faith in any nation to erode in the first place. Every single one has fucked over their neighbors and their own populations to further the ambitions of the rich and powerful. Look to the erosion of antitrust and privacy laws to see where we are headed. Look at how SOPA and other protests have gone. You seriously think nobody knows how to protest anymore, and it's just a generational failing? Despite the obvious ways the oppressors have adapted to the modern world?
BLM is an obvious continuation of the civil rights movement
1 year. They organized for one year and then went home. The rest of the country completely fucking forgot about whatever it was they were asking for about 5 months in. If they're the new generation of the Civil Rights Movement, then they're inept crybabies who don't actually know anything about what Civil Rights leaders went through, were imprisoned for, and died for, before they came along.
Protesting until you die of old age is not what it used to be. The surveillance of the modern world makes protestors into easy targets if they ever become a true threat. The powers that be have learned plenty from the civil rights era.
Excuses. Either you give a shit enough to put up a fight, or you don't for [insert reason here].
Nobody should have faith in any nation to erode in the first place. Every single one has fucked over their neighbors and their own populations to further the ambitions of the rich and powerful.
Or....they've succumbed to outrage du jour and voted to put representatives in office who only care about what keeps the outrage going. If the average citizen is dumb enough to turn politics off in favor of the Real Housewives of [insert stupid place] then they deserve the elected representatives they keep sending to office over and over and over again.
Look to the erosion of antitrust and privacy laws to see where we are headed. Look at how SOPA and other protests have gone. You seriously think nobody knows how to protest anymore, and it’s just a generational failing? Despite the obvious ways the oppressors have adapted to the modern world?
I absolutely do think our generation has lost its grip on what it means to a) have nothing to lose, and b) put up a fight. People are comfortable, fat, and lazy, and they find more solace in their smartphones than they do in talking to their neighbors and organizing groups of powerful citizens. Know why Moms for Liberty gets so much awful shit done? Because they're organized and motivated. It's crazy how lunatic conservatives somehow find a way to stay plugged in and show up at every local school board meeting even when it's just to cause drama, and the rest of the community who has a sincere stake in the outcomes of its decisions can't do more than complain that they have to pick the kids up at soccer practice or can't miss their yoga class. MLK Jr. wrote "Letters from a Birmingham Jail"....from a jail cell.
You want something? GO FUCKING GET IT AND STOP COMPLAINING. Nobody is going to give you what you don't take.
I'm not really interested in arguing this kind of stuff and I don't disagree with you that a lack of voter engagement is a problem. But, I would encourage you to try and understand exactly why it seems like people don't give a shit about the state of politics.
I'd be willing to bet that it's not actually a lack of giving a shit, just a feeling that our time is better spent on other things in life. Those 80 million people "sitting on the sidelines" aren't complaining for the fun of it, they are busy trying to live their lives and deal with their own problems. People feel like the system is rigged, not because of some ambiguous statistics, but because every time they try to work with the system they get shit on and forgotten. How can it not feel rigged when the majority of the country votes for one president and gets a different one instead? Or how about when states, without ever asking its citizens, take away a persons right to choose what happens to their own body? How is a system with an archaic electoral college, gerrymandering, corrupt politicians, and a parties that only represents the top 1% not a rigged system?
It's not that we don't know that showing up in numbers is a good way to enact change, nor are we just sitting on our collective asses complaining and expecting things will just magically change. We just aren't holding out hope that enough numbers will show up to make a dent in our lifetimes, or that the changes will even be ones that benefit us.
Please show me where I said to do nothing. Why don't you try imagining new ways of improving things rather than repeating the mistakes of the past? Of the revolutions in the 18th-20th centuries, I think only the American revolution accomplished anything close to what it was intending. And that's because it didn't destroy all the existing institutions while in the process of implementing new ones.
(Not that I agree with what the American revolution was intending, but we did get mostly what they set out to do without thousands of poor civilians starving to death in the process.)
Our institutions are not the problem, our policies are the problem. I want to see a transition to UBI, but a dramatic overhaul that dismantled WIC and SNAP before we got UBI in place would be an unmitigated disaster for the very people we were intending to help.
It's not the reform that I'm skeptical of. It's the lust for revolutionary destruction as a path to reform that I'm skeptical of. It's emotionally satisfying without regard to its actual efficacy in accomplishing the proposed reforms. Because history does not show us evidence that this works out well in the short nor the long run.
I'm proposing a revolution entirely led by the people, as that is the only true kind of revolution. The people who would then rule themselves with no intermediaries. Real grassroots organisation.
By starving millions of them? Because that's exactly what transpired during most of those revolutions. And the long term outcomes have not turned out to be better for poor people than the American revolution was. Show me the ideal communist state that resulted.
Well they solved starvation by dramatically increasing it and then replaced old systems with new ones that have all those same old problems. So consider me unconvinced. I think we need to find a new way to change these systems that's more resilient for the future
We could move if we wanted to. We aren't, at least right now, because we'd leave behind our entire social network. Even if we moved where we know people, they wouldn't help as much with our two young children. I know and understand and accept that. They don't have to help with our kids, but we'd lose the people who can. We'd lose our kids friends and the network we are building in the neighborhood, which of course can be rebuilt, but that's also a consideration. I'd probably only see my sister once a year if that because she can't leave the state due to a custody agreement. Funds would also be an issue.
I also worry about too many democratic people leaving and making the state more red as a result and leaving behind those who can't move, like my sister and her kids, who will suffer as a result of increasingly authoritarian laws. Some regressive politicians have outright said that it's their goal to make it miserable for democratic and liberal people to force them to move, make the state redder, and thereby gain even more power.
Most Americans can't afford a $500 emergency. Transplanting to a new state is off the table for a lot of people, especially women. If you have enough money to move, you probably also have enough money to take a weekend trip to get an abortion in a neighboring state.
Unless these things in the US seriously changes, I will never step foot there. I used to want to see all of the beautiful landscapes, animals, and buildings. I really did. Now, not so much.
If I have a medical emergency, I don't want to be somewhere where they'll delay necessary life saving treatment to first check if there might be a fetus.
Nope. Tbh, that also kind of sounds very similar to the things that they get angry at other countries for doing to women.