LearnedHand
LearnedHand's JournalI wonder (a somewhat terrifying thought)
I was just reading the long essay "Trump's brain is not okay," and I had this thought (admittedly a little on the conspiracy theory side): What if the idea is not just to get Trump in office so he can be president again and crime his crimes and fulfill their autocracy wish list? What if the idea is to get a DEMENTED Trump in office so they can 25th amendment him and install a "sane" dictator who will fully implement project 2025? Not sure who "they" are, hence the whiff of conspiracy theory. But it means the Veep choice might be interesting.
"Standing There," The Creatures
?si=4O2AaYhTKf--ELa4Anyone watching "Constellation" on AppleTV?
It's quite good. It reminds me a little of "The Signal," which others here mentioned. Noomi Rapace plays the main character (she was Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish 'Girl With the Dragon Tattoo'). A fairly scary Jonathan Banks is also in it. This is a dark psychological thriller as much as a series about space.
Three Body Problem 5th episode ** POSSIBLE SPOILERS **
Oh. My. God. Just saw this last night, and I am haunted. Some reviews are comparing it to the Red Wedding. I couldn't look away.
Merrick Garland is passionately defending us!
From ... shitty green bubbles on iPhone-to-Android texting?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/apples-green-bubbles-targeted-by-doj-in-lawsuit-over-iphone-monopoly/
"As any iPhone user who has ever seen a green text message, or received a tiny, grainy video can attest, Apple's anticompetitive conduct also includes making it more difficult for iPhone users to message with users of non-Apple products," Garland said while announcing the suit that alleges Apple illegally monopolized the smartphone market.
And so, SO much more "outrage."
Internet providers have left rural Americans behind. One county is fighting back
Congress is spending $65bn to connect the rural US to the world. Orangeburg, South Carolina, knows the stakes better than anywhere (The Guardian)It’s an hour south of Columbia. It’s an hour and 15 minutes north of Charleston. It’s an hour and a half away from Augusta. It’s just country enough to be out of the way but tantalizingly close to somewhere.
But distance in the digital age isn’t measured in miles. It’s measured in latency and bandwidth. With enough broadband speed, anywhere is close to everywhere. By that metric, Orangeburg county may as well be in the middle of a desert.
Like hundreds of rural counties across the US, Orangeburg is ignored by commercial broadband service providers who think it’s not profitable to lay fiber optic lines in the area.
I REALLY hope someone tackles the issue of the monopoly providers successfully lobbying against community broadband.
Has anyone watched Amazon Prime without paying the fee to go ad free?
I haven’t yet and wondered how intrusive the ads are.
"Republicans knew women would die. They planned for it." Jessica Valentini to Senate Dems
Good morning. My name is Jessica Valenti, and since Roe was overturned, I’ve been documenting the harms caused by abortion bans in a newsletter called Abortion, Every Day.
I cover everything from legislation and court battles to anti-abortion strategy and language, but the topic I find myself writing about the most, I’m sorry to say, is suffering.
SNIP
And while I could share stories that would shock and sicken you in the way I’m shocked and sickened every single day, I wanted to use my time here to stress that this incredible suffering—this cruelty that treats American women as less than human—is all by design.
Despite Republican assurances that cases like Dr. Dennard’s are the result of legislative growing pains, or doctors simply not understanding the law—despite claims that their bans just need to be “tweaked” or “clarified”—I want to make clear that all of this pain and suffering was not just expected. It was planned for.
Anti-abortion lawmakers and activists would have voters believe that they had no idea this is what post-Roe America would look like.
But they had 50 years to plan for this moment, and they made that plan carefully, strategically and callously.
More, well worth reading.
State Abortion Bans: Pregnancy as a New Form of Coverture
This longish essay from the Virginia Law Review outlines how I believe Dems should frame the anti-abortion madness: A new form of merging the woman and the fetus into one being, the fetus, in the same way old laws merged the woman and the man into one being, the man. It's brilliant and readable. I think we have to focus on women being treated unequally under the law, and this presents a good legal framework for approaching it.
In June, when the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization holding that there was no constitutional right to an abortion, the Court was hasty to disavow any likely political consequences. “We do not pretend to know,” wrote Justice Alito, “how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey.”1
Well, now we know. The evisceration of the constitutional right to reproductive self-determination has ignited an arms race in conservative states to see which can erect the most intransigent, punitive, and absolute bans against abortion. Seemingly overnight, laws criminalizing abortion were unveiled in nearly half the states, some banning abortion from the moment of conception, some threatening providers with prison sentences of up to ninety-nine years, many eschewing exceptions for cases of rape or incest.2
One of the most striking things about these laws is their single-minded focus on the protection of fetal life to the exclusion of all other considerations. But life has never been an absolute value in our legal tradition. The common law doctrines foundational to American law would ordinarily allow women to terminate their pregnancies, as Anita Bernstein has pointed out.3 Whether looking at tort principles or criminal law principles, an individual has always been found to have the right of self-defense, the right to enjoy his castle, and the right to exclude others. Nor is there any principle that requires help or favors to another, even if the benefit would be great and the inconvenience minimal.
Some commentators, Bernstein included, have suggested that this reluctance to conceive of pregnant women as having the ordinary common law rights accorded to people in general suggests that women4 are treated as second-class citizens. This Essay argues that the disadvantage is more specific than that—that these laws impose a burden on the twin facts of being female and pregnant. The condition of pregnancy thus becomes a disability imposed by law on a particular stage of a woman’s life. In this way, what these restrictions resemble most is the common law doctrine of coverture.
SNIP
https://virginialawreview.org/articles/state-abortion-bans-pregnancy-as-a-new-form-of-coverture/
How do you consume "television"?
I read an article today about how subscription television is bleeding out subscribers and is no longer the dominant model. I got wondering how DU folks get their TV. (I’m streaming only with zero consumption of live broadcast-type TV. Have been since the aughts.)
NOTE: This poll isn’t asking how much TV you watch, just how you watch it. I don’t watch much at all, but when I do, it’s streaming.
Defining some terms as I use them here:
Streaming: Use streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, library apps such as Kanopy or Hoopla, etc. to watch films or TV shows over the internet, on demand (no set schedule, mostly). You could be watching content from these services via a Roku, FireStick, AppleTV, or simply on a computer or internet-connected television.
Live TV addon: View live broadcast events and shows (local news or spores, e.g.) at scheduled times over the internet via your streaming service. Examples are Hulu +Live and YouTube TV.
Traditional reception: Use a digital antenna to watch locally broadcast TV channels without cost or subscription. This is the way we watched TV before the invention of cable TV.
Added definition
Television: Programming, not the device. You could watch “television” programming on your phone or computer, or a game console.
Profile Information
Member since: 2003 before July 6thNumber of posts: 3,387
