(((I Will Outlive)))

it’s fucking insane that a moderator had to say “there is no state where you can kill a baby after it’s born” at a presidential debate.

Should be fucking obvious---after birth, there's no pregnancy to abort.

But one half of the argument keeps insisting on the pretense that the goal is killing babies rather than ending unwanted/dangerous pregnancies, so here we are, occupying a world where that allegation makes sense to some people.

Also, while late-term abortions can happen (as in: the pregnancy is aborted at 8-9 months along) it's not happening for reasons of "just decided they didn't want to have a baby after all". It happens for reasons like "the fetus is dead or dying or has a 0% chance to survive birth and letting the pregnancy continue at this point would just cause more physical and/or mental trauma to the person carrying it". If the fetus is viable outside the womb and pregnancy needs to be ended for medical reasons, what they do is induce labor early because at that point induced labor is not significantly harder on the pregnant person's body than an abortion procedure would be, and damn near everyone who's carried a pregnancy nearly to full term has done so because they WANT to have a child.

Banning these abortions results in no more living babies but plenty more women dying of sepsis because they weren't allowed to have a dead and rotting fetus removed from their wombs, plenty more traumatized families who lost a wife and mother or had to go through an ordeal of thinking she would die as they begged a judge to allow an exemption so that the doctors can legally save her life.

Conservatism is a misogynistic death cult, and "pro-life" is nothing but gaslighting.

Antisemitism Required Reading

I get a lot of ignorant comments & tags on my posts about antisemitism, and I’ve already spent way too much time & energy engaging with them. So to preserve my sanity, I’ve made the decision not to engage too deeply with any commenters who haven’t at least read all of these in their entirety:

If you’re not Jewish, please read all of this literature before adding anything to my posts about antisemitism.

Jews, please add any books you think should be on the list!

List updated!

This is such an important and genuinely terrifying post. I could completely go off on the rise of anti-science, but for now I’ll just add: it isn’t just boomers that get deceived. This is a warning to all of us.

Pay ATTENTION to what you are being told. If you think you cannot be deceived, you leave yourself open to deception. Question, doubt, research research research. Learn about your personal biases, dig up any subconscious cognitive dissonance. Keep an eye on your mind.

It needs to be stressed that biases, not a lack of intelligence, is very much the issue here. Being aware of the need to fact check yourself is key: Intelligence won’t protect you from bad or unhealthy mental states, or keep you safe from cults of any sort. Intelligence will just make it easier for you to rationalize and attempt to justify the malformed tools you’ve taken/been given to yourself and others. You need to be wise enough to challenge yourself.

As a cult survivor, this is lethally accurate.

“save the children” is an alt-right dogwhistle and I really need y’all to accept that

Oh so the newest dog whistle we are to view is dangerous is… “Children should be protected”

…. Do yall just stop and think? Like what can justify yourself?

The idea behind protecting children is to protect society’s most vulnerable, what then motives you? Other than to out right say that children are not as vunerable as adults of certain demographics. Certain demographics that are just able and intelligent as any other. If thats the case then you truely haved warped your prespective and then have to ask yourself, is what I believe leading me to rational conclusions?

“Won’t somebody think of the children?” is a textbook example of an appeal to emotion, one of the most blatant of logical fallacies. Specifically, it’s an appeal to emotion which relies on whichever moral panic is hip, happening and groovy at the moment. In the 50s we had (among others) the Lavender Menace and the Red Scare. In the 60s we had hippies. In the 80s we had the Satanic Panic. The 90s gave us a fresh new iteration of “gays can’t be teachers.” Now we’ve got panics over the existence of trans people and critical race theory and antifacism.

“Won’t somebody think of the children” is literally the basis of the F*urteen W*rds, you pair of wet socks on a cold day.** It is the call to action which points the white supremacist and the fascist toward queers, POC and Jews, among others.

It’s not just an alt-right dog-whistle, but it IS an alt-right dog whistle, in much the same way that the existence of green apples does not disprove the existence of red ones.

If you don’t recognize and account for things like the very basic appeal to emotion fallacy, and we do, I think it’s fairly clear who is approaching things rationally here, bud, and it ain’t you.

So yeah, bud, that’s totally what is being said here. 🙄 To react the way you did is to admit it’s your emotions being spoken to, because if it was your logical brain, you’d be able to go “oh, hunh, yeah, I can totally see how people would phrase their appeals that way if they were trying to get me to disregard any sort of critical thinking and jump into action at their command, therefore, when I see such an appeal I shall have to be very careful to not go off half-cocked but to instead treat these arguments much more carefully.” If you’re not aware that yes, the alt-right uses this specific appeal to emotion in order to manipulate people, and not just them but “gender crits,” pro-censorship movements of all stripes, and Q-Anon, among others, then you’re gonna get taken in by it.

It is possible to be rationally concerned for the welfare of children without using the appeal to emotion to demonize minorities and surf from election to election on moral panics like a lot of politicians do, but that’s not what this post is talking about. This post is literally talking about the fact that the alt-right does use this tactic in order to make people abandon rational thought and do what they’re told.

Sucks that you’re so vulnerable to that logical fallacy tho, that you attack someone for reminding you that it exists and is frequently used in modern politics. Best of luck with that, there, pal.

** I ain’t spelling that out and making it even vaguely searchable on my Tumblr.

“wow, so the newest dogwhistle is (insert innocuous-sounding thing here)?” yeah its almost as if thats how dogwhistles work? theyre SUPPOSED to sound completely fine to those who dont know what’s going on to provide plausible deniability, thats the entire point