Alaska Doctor, Once the Focus of Outrage, Reflects on Past as Abortion Provider, With Questions

Written in large letters across a billboard displayed in the Alaska Right to Life booth at the 1981 State Fair in Palmer was this question: “Does your Doctor kill babies?” Underneath that question was a list of several names – including Dr. carolyn Brown.

This billboard along with things published in Alaska Right to Life’s newsletter – like calling Brown “baby-killer Brown” – were part of a libel lawsuit that would go on to reach the Alaska Supreme Court. She would lose the lawsuit, which touched on principles central to debates over free speech.

From the late 1970s to the late ’80s, Brown was a gynecologist and obstetrician in Palmer. She delivered thousands of babies, which she was known and praised for. She also performed abortions, which she was known and praised for – and vilified for. She remembers being told, “how bad it was, how evil it was that I was killing babies, and that God would get me for that and I would burn in hell and all the other stuff that people say to people.”

However, Brown herself has questions. As she reflects on her past as an abortion provider, she struggles with how to define the beginning of personhood. And she’s relieved she no longer has to decide when it’s OK to perform an abortion. But despite this uncertainty, she continues to support a right to an abortion.

 
A long interest in medicine

Brown was born in 1937 and raised in Hereford, Texas, about 50 miles southwest of Amarillo. Her parents divorced when she was around 9 and her mom left, so Brown and her brother went to live with their grandmother. She knew when she was 10 she wanted to be a doctor.

“I was working in a cotton patch and there were a whole bunch of other people working in that cotton patch and here I am this little kid with a 6-foot cotton sack that I’m pulling behind me and I decided I don’t think I want to do this all my life,” Brown said, adding that she isn’t sure why she chose to be a doctor at that time. “Maybe I’ve been to a movie. I didn’t have any books to read. My growing up and background was a little bit challenging, I will say. But I decided at that point that I really was interested in becoming a doctor.” (...)

She took all the science classes that were possible for her to take in middle and high school, and went to college at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, where she majored in chemistry and biology, and graduated magna cum laude.

When it came to deciding what medical school to go to, Brown was sure of only one thing: “Whatever I have to do, I had to get out of Texas,” she said.

She didn’t want a big medical school and she didn’t want to go too far north, “Because I was too much of a hick. And I knew that. And I was poor as Job’s turkey,” Brown said.

Growing up, Brown did not think highly of herself.

But she got into all the medical schools in Texas at the time. Still, she decided to go outside the state – to Bowman Grey School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Brown met her husband George Brown there, and the two doctors came to Alaska in 1965. They worked as public health doctors with the U.S. Public Health Service. They were based out of Anchorage, but traveled all over the state. The two then went to Hawaii where Brown did her first residency in public health and preventive medicine at the University of Hawaii. Afterward, they returned to Alaska.

Brown had a long list of jobs during that time, including working at the Anchorage Municipal Health Department. Brown was inundated with women who had a lot of health questions about women’s issues – questions Brown couldn’t always answer. So, she decided to go back to the University of Hawaii to do a second residency.

 
One of the boys

Throughout this whole time, Brown didn’t have any strong feelings about abortion. In fact, she didn’t really think about it at all during college, medical school, or her first residency. It wouldn’t come up until her second residency in obstetrics and gynecology.

It was 1975. The U.S. Supreme Court had decided on Roe v. Wade two years prior, ruling that the constitutional right to privacy includes the right to access an abortion.

The University of Hawaii wanted to teach all OB-GYN residents how to perform abortions.

“When I got there, I had a choice,” she said. “You were offered it. They suggested it. And if you didn’t want to do it, and there were some who, based on religious background, chose not to do it, then they were given other kinds of work. Grunt work, we call it.”

Brown said it was an excellent teaching program – but, as one of the first women to go through that program, she said it was also extremely misogynist. So Brown had to make a choice – was she going to be one of the boys and perform abortions, or would she go do grunt work?

She decided to be one of the boys. Even then, she still didn’t have an opinion about abortion.

“I didn’t have a decision about – What did I really think about it? I said, ‘OK,’ because I hadn’t really processed what that really meant,” Brown said.

Brown knew that she wouldn’t have an abortion. She had to ask herself: What am I doing? It weighed on her, but she didn’t have much time to dwell on it.

“Except once in a while I did think about it and I went to church. And I did all of those things that I sort of grew up doing way back in the day. But I had to come to some peace with myself,” Brown said. “But I never could decide for myself that an egg and a sperm was a person because a person is a philosophical definition. A sperm and an egg when they come together, that’s tissue up to a certain point. And then you got the whole philosophical thing is when does the soul enter the sperm and the egg? I didn’t know and I still don’t know. But I’ve struggled with that for all of these many, many years.”

During Brown’s days at the clinic, she did 10 to 14 abortions a day.

 
Setting up a practice in Palmer

When she was done with her residency in Hawaii, she, her husband George Brown and their two kids returned to Alaska in 1978. The couple started Women and Children’s Health Associates, a nonprofit that operated an obstetric-gynecologic and pediatric practice in the Mat-Su Valley. Brown’s office was based in Palmer and her husband’s pediatric office in Wasilla.

Brown had a very active OB-GYN practice. She eventually moved her office to its own building, just outside the hospital’s parking lot. She said she would work 100-hour weeks and she didn’t make payment a barrier.

“In those days, I gave stuff free. I did free C-sections, I took bear meat, I took salmon. You know, it was the old-fashioned way of doing whatever it is you had to do,” she said.

She also provided abortions. Brown saw all kinds of patients, including Medicaid recipients, and people from all over the state – like Fairbanks, the Aleutians, Kotzebue, Juneau, Utqiagvik – were referred to her.

“Literally every quadrant of the state and people would call the office or they would call whatever practitioner they knew, or from way out in the villages, they would contact the public health nurse,” Brown said. (...)

She estimates she did three to five abortions a week in the Valley Hospital, though there were peaks and dips. And she said she had a good safety record.

“I wasn’t having any bad events, any failures, any disasters. I was very, very, very conservative about what I did,” Brown said.

 
‘There goes the baby killer’

Brown and her family were part of the community. They went to the Presbyterian church. The two kids attended middle and high school in Palmer. It wasn’t a secret that Brown performed abortions. She said the board of her and George’s nonprofit was very supportive, but not everyone in the community was.

 

Throughout her time in Palmer, starting a couple months after they arrived, Brown recalled being harassed. She received hate mail and phone calls in the middle of the night. Air was let out of her tires. People against abortion rights went to her work place.

“When I would come to work, go in to make rounds, they would hiss and boo. That was still at a time when I had the little office in the hospital there. So they would come in and sit around and say whatever it is they had to say. And line up just like a march as it were,” Brown said.

She heard comments like, “There goes the baby killer. Is that the baby killer?” (...)

“Of course I had to be in charge in the operating room. I had to be in charge when a person was in labor, screaming their heads off or whatever. I got to the place where I could almost talk a woman through her delivery, just my soft voice and sitting there. And I knew that was happening and she knew that was happening. And I knew I was very good at that. But nobody knew what was going on inside. The fear of God Almighty, what if this woman dies? What if this baby dies? Oh, my God. All the horrible things that you could possibly think of, I went through them all a great deal of the time,” Brown said.

At the same time Brown was performing abortions and being called a baby killer, she was also delivering lots and lots of babies. And she was really good at it. “We never lost one,” she said.

by Lisa Phu, Alaska Beacon |  Read more:

Images: Sally Mead; Lisa Phu
[ed. What a coincidence. I was at the Alaska State Fair last week and remembered those awful Right to Life exhibits. Dr. Brown was well known and a greatly respected doctor (by most) back then, as was my father-in-law, who helped found Anchorage Hospital in the 50s, and later the Alaska Clinic, which eventually became Humana Hospital (also chief surgeon and head of the medical staff). He performed abortions, too. They were just good doctors trying to help desperate women. Glad to see this retrospective.]  

Oddly Satisfying

What’s behind our drive to collect useless items?

Mariana Conti Schwartz has one daughter, two dogs and 103 stainless steel drinking tumblers. The 40-year-old from North Carolina works from home running her family business, Big Al’s Pub & Grubberia, and likes to match her outfits to her reusable cups. Pink, purple, blue, green and grey “Stanley Quenchers” are lined up like soldiers on clear acrylic shelves across her kitchen; Conti Schwartz estimates she’s spent $5,000 (£3,900) on the lot.

Yet perhaps the most exceptional thing about her exceptional collection is that it is not exceptional at all.

Holli Silva is a 32-year-old stay-at-home mum from Arizona who owns 120 Stanley tumblers. More than 2 million people have watched a TikTok video in which Silva points to her cups, rattling off their names. “Wisteria, Orchid, Abalone, Lilac,” she begins naming her first four purple cups. A minute later, she’s reached the blues: “Iris, Pool, Aqua, Glass.”

Rainbow collections are seemingly on the rise. TikTok is home to numerous consumers who buy the same item in every possible colour – be it 50 Le Creuset cups, 1,000 Bath & Body Works hand sanitisers, 150 pairs of Crocs, 60 Starbucks tumblers or 20 Yeti cool boxes. In my head, I’ve begun calling this “one-in-every-colour capitalism” – the compulsion to buy every iteration of a product, even when new releases don’t offer a change in user experience.

How did it become normal – or at least not abnormal – to own a hundred of something you’d traditionally only need one of? While hyper-consumers are not new, social media has amplified their behaviour, allowing it to influence consumption and production.

One pervasive TikTok clip summarises these voracious appetites. “If I like it, I’ll just grab it in a different colour. If I like it, I’ll just grab it in another colour. If I like it, and they have another colour, I’ll just grab it.” This audio recording has been used to soundtrack over 36,000 videos featuring lip-gloss, corset and Prada headband collections.

It’s easy to shrug, to consider this as just a quirk of some people’s personalities. Yet one-in-every-colour consumption is a uniquely 21st-century phenomenon: to understand it is to understand capitalism and the internet. A 2022 study from academics at Mahidol University in Thailand found that the intensity with which someone uses social media is linked to negative shopping behaviours such as impulsive buying and conspicuous consumption. Teens have spoken out about the ways in which influencers drive them to consume; one girl told me in 2018 that after watching YouTube haul videos, “If I wanted something, I would stay up at night thinking about it.”

Examining this phenomenon also enables us to understand our brains and our beings, from the psychology of the “oddly satisfying” to the ways our identities can be branded.

“Some people are the ‘crazy cat lady’. I’m the ‘crazy cup lady’ now,” says Conti Schwartz.  (...)

Still, there is one thing Conti Schwartz can’t explain, and that is why simply looking at her cups makes her happy. “I could sit here for hours and not think of a reason why,” she says.

In recent years, Victoria Sepiashvili has grown to feel guilty about her hand sanitiser collection. She owns almost 1,000 bottles from Bath & Body Works – she has a similar number of lip balms, as well as a “large” Nike Roshe sneaker collection and tens of Victoria’s Secret plush dogs.

“There’s a dichotomy between having one of the biggest collections in the world and also having thoughts against materialism,” says the 18-year-old content creator from New York. “I mean, it’s really hypocritical and it’s paradoxical and ironic. But yes, as much as I loved it as a child, now I steer away from it.”

Sepiashvili started her hand sanitiser collection aged eight, after becoming “obsessed” with Instagram videos of older girls reviewing scents. “I think it was the aesthetic of it,” she explains. “It was so colourful with every colour in the spectrum – it just looked very satisfying and fun to play with as a little girl.” Sepiashvili says it became her “dream” to build her own collection and her own following.

Very quickly, hunting for new hand sanitisers became a bonding activity for Sepiashvili and her mum. In 2020, she posted a video of her collection that was watched 13.6m times. Sepiashvili’s dreams came true – today, almost 150,000 people follow her on TikTok – but success is bittersweet. As the teen grew older, she became more spiritual, developing an interest in “more esoteric metaphysical stuff”. She says it “dawned” on her that possessions don’t matter. “We only have one life and things are absolutely not significant.”A TikTok video from 2020 shows Victoria Sepiashvili’s hand sanitizer collection.

Although Sepiashvili tries to avoid posting videos about her collections today, she still feels “a lot of guilt” that her videos promoted “hoarding and maximalism and just things, things, things, things”. (...)

Why might 1,000 hand sanitisers make our stomachs turn, but few of us react with horror to hundreds of wine bottles in a cellar? This is a question that Gerda Reith wrestles with. As a professor of social sciences at the University of Glasgow and author of Addictive Consumption: Capitalism, Modernity and Excess, Reith is conscious of the role snobbery plays in our value judgements.

“There is a class aspect to this,” Reith says. “And it’s the consumption choices of poorer people that are frowned on.” Reith notes that we rarely bemoan people with bookshelves full of expensive first-edition books, even though they also don’t “need” them and their money could also be put to “better” use. Or, as Nietzsche put it in 1888: “Excess is a reproach only against those who have no right to it.”

by Amelia Tait, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Logan Cyrus

[ed. A small pleasure, so why make anyone feel guilty about it? Beanie babies, pogs, ceramic turtles, legos, t-shirts, tennis shoes, pretty rocks, anything. Leave people alone to enjoy their little sources of enjoyment.]

Bi Rongrong (Chinese, 1982), Animal in Two Dimensions: Painting IV, 2022
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Sandra Davolio, Ceramic works
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Dmitri Cavander, Hot Day, California Street (April 2008)

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Party Like It’s 1979

President Biden’s July 9 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy is a highly technical, 72-part, fine-grained memo on how to address the ways market concentration harms our lives as workers, citizens, consumers, and beyond.

To a casual reader, this may seem like a dry bit of industrial policy, but woven into the new order is a revolutionary idea that has rocked the antitrust world to its very foundations.

The Paradox of Antitrust

US antitrust law has three pillars: the Sherman Act (1890), the Clayton Act (1914), and the FTC Act (1914). Beyond their legal text, these laws have a rich context, including the transcripts of the debates that the bills’ sponsors participated in, explaining why the bills were written. They arose as a response to the industrial conglomerates of the Gilded Age, and their “robber baron” leaders, whose control over huge segments of the economy gave them a frightening amount of power.

Despite this clarity of intent, the True Purpose of Antitrust has been hotly contested in US history. For much of that history, including the seminal breakup of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in 1911, the ruling antitrust theory was “harmful dominance.” That’s the idea that companies that dominate an industry are potentially dangerous merely because they are dominant. With dominance comes the ability to impose corporate will on workers, suppliers, other industries, people who live near factories, even politicians and regulators.

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 saw the rise of a new antitrust theory, based on “consumer welfare.” Consumer welfare advocates argue that monopolies can be efficient, able to deliver better products at lower prices to consumers, and therefore the government does us all a disservice when it indiscriminately takes on monopolies.

Consumer welfare’s standard-bearer was Judge Robert Bork, who served as Solicitor General in the Nixon administration. Bork was part of the conservative Chicago School of economics, and wrote a seminal work called “The Antitrust Paradox.”

The Antitrust Paradox went beyond arguing that consumer welfare was a better way to do antitrust than harmful dominance. In his book, Bork offers a kind of secret history of American antitrust, arguing that consumer welfare had always been the intention of America’s antitrust laws, and that we’d all been misled by the text of these laws, the debates surrounding their passage, and other obvious ways of interpreting Congress’s intent.

Bork argued the true goal of antitrust was protecting us as consumers—not as citizens, or workers, or human beings. As consumers, we want better goods and lower prices. So long as a company used its market power to make better products at lower prices, Bork’s theories insisted that the government should butt out.

This is the theory that prevailed for the ensuing 40 years. It spread from economic circles to the government to the judiciary. It got a tailwind thanks to a well-funded campaign that included a hugely successful series of summer seminars attended by 40 percent of federal judges, whose rulings were measurably impacted by the program.

Morning in America

Everyone likes lower prices and better products, but all of us also have interests beyond narrow consumer issues. We live our days as parents, spouses, friends—not just as shoppers. We are workers, or small business owners. We care about our environment and about justice and equity. We want a say in how our world works.

Competition matters, but not just because it can make prices lower or products better. Competition matters because it lets us exercise self-determination. Market concentration means that choices about our culture, our built environment, our workplaces, and our climate are gathered into ever-fewer hands. Businesses with billions of users and dollars get to make unilateral decisions about our lives. The larger a business looms in our life, the more ways it can hurt us.

The idea that our governments need to regulate companies beyond the narrow confines of “consumer welfare” never died, and now, 40 years on, it’s coming roaring back.

The FTC’s new chair, Lina Khan, burst upon the antitrust scene in 2017, when, as a Yale Law student, she published Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, a devastating rebuke to Bork’s Antitrust Paradox, demonstrating how a focus on consumer welfare fails to deliver, even on its own terms. Khan is now one of the nation’s leading antitrust enforcers, along with fellow “consumer welfare” skeptics like Jonathan Kanter (now helming the Department of Justice Antitrust Division) and Tim Wu (the White House’s special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy).

Bombshells in the Fine Print

The Biden antitrust order is full of fine detail; it’s clear that the president’s advisors dug deep into competition issues with public interest groups across a wide variety of subjects. We love to nerd out on esoteric points of competition law as much as the next person, and we like a lot of what this memo says about tech and competition, but even more exciting is the big picture stuff.

When the memo charges the FTC with policing corporate concentration to prevent abuses to “consumer autonomy and consumer privacy,” that’s not just a reassurance that this administration is paying attention to some of our top priorities. It’s a bombshell, because it links antitrust to concerns beyond ensuring that prices stay low.

by Cory Doctorow, EFF |  Read more:

Image: via

Adèle Exarchopoulos: ‘Film Shoots Are Like Little Summer Love Stories’

For Adèle Exarchopoulos, her first taste of film stardom was the literal taste of Toblerone. Then 13 years old, the young Parisian had just been cast in her first film, Jane Birkin’s autobiographical directing debut Boxes, and was invited round to the icon’s home. “I went to the bathroom to wash my hands,” Exarchopoulos recalls. “And I saw for the first time in my life a claw-foot tub. With a bowl of mini Toblerones next to it. And I was like: ‘Why are you eating chocolate when you’re taking a bath? This is so cool.’ And Jane said: ‘You want to sleep over? You can take a bath and eat some chocolate.’”

She beams at the memory. We’re talking, via Zoom, days after Birkin died aged 76; Exarchopoulos remembers her fondly as “the first person who gave me a chance – really benevolent, kind and loving”. They’d seen each other again over the years, but the close-quarters shoot is what sticks in her mind: “Cinema is about living really intense stuff with people, for a certain period of time, and afterwards you all go back to your daily lives. It’s like a mini death after, suddenly no longer sharing that intimacy, but you have this kind of forever tenderness for those people. Film shoots are like little summer love stories.”

Now 29, Exarchopoulos has cycled through many such love stories, and doesn’t feel them any less deeply each time. At 19, she broke out with a stunning performance in Abdellatif Kechiche’s 2013 film Blue Is the Warmest Colour, playing a schoolgirl plunged into a volatile lesbian relationship with an older art student. In a first for the Cannes film festival, she and co-star Léa Seydoux shared the Palme d’Or with their director, while Exarchopoulos also won a César for most promising actress.

Her latest is an emotionally acute triangle: Ira Sachs’s exquisite hothouse relationship drama Passages, in which she plays Agathe, a schoolteacher who comes between polysexual film-maker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) and his long-term partner Martin (Ben Whishaw). True to form for the American writer-director, it’s a film of raw feeling and physical intimacy: Exarchopoulos and Rogowski’s onscreen affair plays out through rough-and-tumble dialogue and candid sex scenes. (The film fell foul of prudish US censors, who slapped it with a commercially restrictive NC-17 certificate; distributor Mubi opted to release it unrated instead.)

Exarchopoulos sees nothing provocative about the film, which to her portrays a very relatable form of desire. “We all go through this kind of sensual attraction where you meet someone and you already know that you will have sex with this person, which is a really strange feeling,” she says. “Maybe it won’t be so good. Maybe you will be disappointed. But you know it will happen. And that’s exciting.” (...)

Not that she was altogether blindsided on Kechiche’s film, she says; she was more unnerved by the process of unveiling the film to the world, and unprepared for the commentary it generated. “With more maturity, I now know that it was a very hard experience in the sense of the commitment that we were being asked in some of the scenes,” she says. “And it’s true that probably the controversy spoiled the project and the beauty of it, because we were making something that really belonged to us in the first place.”

For all her conflicted memories regarding the film, it’s still dear to her. “I have a lot of love for Kechiche,” she says. “And it was one of those shoots where I came out of it telling myself, OK, I couldn’t have been better. Which is really, really rare when you are an actor. It was like shooting life in a way, like you’re making a documentary about your own character.”

by Guy Lodge, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Blue is the Warmest Colour

[ed. I loved her and the movie Blue is the Warmest Colour (and not for the extended sex scenes, though they were a bonus, for sure). Depictions of the French educational system were especially interesting. See the movie (but not with the kids).]

What Can Fetish Research Tell Us About AI?

This post is about a fake answer which I think is funny, but which also has just enough truth to be worth thinking about: I think fetish research can help us understand AI and AI alignment.

II.

We try to explain AI alignment by analogy to human alignment. Evolution “created” humans. Its “goal” is for humans to spread their genes by (approximately) having as many children as possible. It couldn’t directly communicate that goal to humans - partly because it’s an abstract concept that can’t talk, and partly because for most of biological history it was working with lemurs and ape-men who couldn’t understand words anyway. Instead, it tried to give us instincts that align us with that goal. The most relevant instinct is sex: most humans want to have sex, an action that potentially results in pregnancy, childbearing, and genes being spread to the next generation. This alignment strategy succeeded well enough that humans populations remain high as of 2023.

We’ve talked before about a major failure: humans can invent contraception. Evolution’s main alignment strategy was totally unprepared for this. It made us interested in a certain type of genital friction, which was a good proxy for its goal in the ancestral environment. But once we became smarter, we got new out-of-training-distribution options available, and one of those was inventing contraception so that we could get the genital friction without the kids. This is a big part of why average-children-per-couple is declining from 8+ in eg pioneer times to ~1.5 in rich countries today, even though modern rich people have more child-rearing resources available than the pioneers.

Another major alignment failure is porn. Giving evolution a little more credit, it didn’t just make people want genital friction - if that had been the sole imperative, we would have died out as soon as someone inventing the dildo/fleshlight. People want genital friction associated with attractive people and certain emotions relating to complex relationships. But now we can take pictures of attractive people and write stories that evoke the complex emotions, while using a dildo/fleshlight/hand to provide the genital friction, and that does substitute for sex pretty well. There’s still debate over whether porn makes people less likely to go out and form real relationships, but it’s at least plausibly another factor in the rich-country fertility decline. At the very least it doesn’t scream “well-thought-out alignment strategy robust to training-vs-deployment differences”.

But these are boring examples. These are like 2015 - level alignment concerns, from back when we thought the big problem was AIs seizing control of their reward centers or something. I think we might genuinely be able to avoid problems shaped like these. Unlike evolution, which had to work with lemurs, even weak GPT-level modern AIs are able to understand language and complicated concepts; we can tell them to want children instead of using genital friction as a proxy. 2023 alignment concerns are more about failed generalization - that is, about fetishes.

III.

Evolution’s alignment problem isn’t just that humans have learned to satiate their libido in ways other than procreative sex. It’s that some humans’ libidos are fundamentally confused. For example, some men, instead of wanting to have sex with women, mostly want to spank them, or be whipped by them, or kiss their feet, or dress up in their clothes. None of these things are going to result in babies! You can’t trivially blame this on the shift from training to deployment (ie the environment of evolutionary adaptedness to the modern world) - women had feet in the ancestral environment too. This is a different kind of failure.

Here’s a simple story of fetish formation: evolution gave us genes that somehow unfold into a “sex drive” in the brain. But the genome doesn’t inherently contain concepts like “man”, “woman”, “penis”, or “vagina”. I’m not trying to make a woke point here: the genome is just a bunch of the nucleotides A, T, C, and G in various patterns, but concepts like “man” and “woman” are learned during childhood as patterns of neural connections. We assume that the nucleotides are a program telling the body to do useful things, but that has to be implemented through deterministic pathways of proteins and the brain’s neural connections are too complex to trivially influence that way (see here for more). The genome probably contains some nucleotides that are supposed to refer to the concepts “man” and “woman” once the brain gets them, but there’s are a lot of fallible proteins in between those two levels.

So the simple story of fetish formation is that the genome contains some message written in nucleotides saying “have procreative sex with adults of the opposite sex as you”, some galaxy-brained Rube Goldberg plan for translating that message into neural connections during childhood or adolescence, and sometimes the plan fails. Here are some zero-evidence just-so-story speculations for how various fetishes might form, more to give you an idea what I’m talking about than because I claim to have useful knowledge on this topic:

• Foot fetish: On the somatosensory cortex, the area representing the feet is right next to the area representing the genitalia. If the genome includes an “address” for the genitalia, plus the instructions “have sexual urges towards this”, then getting the address slightly wrong will land you in the feet.

• Spanking: From the male point of view, penetrative PIV sex involves applying force to the bottom half of a woman, at rhythmic intervals, in a way that causes her very intense emotions and makes her make moan and scream. Spanking is exactly like this, and most kids encounter spanking at a very early age and sex only after they’re much older. If the evolutionary message is something like “find the concept that looks vaguely like this, then be into it”, spanking is the first concept like that most people will find; by the time they learn about actual sex, spanking might be a trapped prior.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Never know what to expect at ACT.]

US Hegemony and Its Perils

Introduction

Since becoming the world's most powerful country after the two world wars and the Cold War, the United States has acted more boldly to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, pursue, maintain and abuse hegemony, advance subversion and infiltration, and willfully wage wars, bringing harm to the international community.

The United States has developed a hegemonic playbook to stage "color revolutions," instigate regional disputes, and even directly launch wars under the guise of promoting democracy, freedom and human rights. Clinging to the Cold War mentality, the United States has ramped up bloc politics and stoked conflict and confrontation. It has overstretched the concept of national security, abused export controls and forced unilateral sanctions upon others. It has taken a selective approach to international law and rules, utilizing or discarding them as it sees fit, and has sought to impose rules that serve its own interests in the name of upholding a "rules-based international order."

This report, by presenting the relevant facts, seeks to expose the U.S. abuse of hegemony in the political, military, economic, financial, technological and cultural fields, and to draw greater international attention to the perils of the U.S. practices to world peace and stability and the well-being of all peoples. (...)

II. Military Hegemony -- Wanton Use of Force

The history of the United States is characterized by violence and expansion. Since it gained independence in 1776, the United States has constantly sought expansion by force: it slaughtered Indians, invaded Canada, waged a war against Mexico, instigated the American-Spanish War, and annexed Hawaii. After World War II, the wars either provoked or launched by the United States included the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the War in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, the Libyan War and the Syrian War, abusing its military hegemony to pave the way for expansionist objectives. In recent years, the U.S. average annual military budget has exceeded 700 billion U.S. dollars, accounting for 40 percent of the world's total, more than the 15 countries behind it combined. The United States has about 800 overseas military bases, with 173,000 troops deployed in 159 countries.

According to the book America Invades: How We've Invaded or been Militarily Involved with almost Every Country on Earth, the United States has fought or been militarily involved with almost all the 190-odd countries recognized by the United Nations with only three exceptions. The three countries were "spared" because the United States did not find them on the map.

◆ As former U.S. President Jimmy Carter put it, the United States is undoubtedly the most warlike nation in the history of the world. According to a Tufts University report, "Introducing the Military Intervention Project: A new Dataset on U.S. Military Interventions, 1776-2019," the United States undertook nearly 400 military interventions globally between those years, 34 percent of which were in Latin America and the Caribbean, 23 percent in East Asia and the Pacific, 14 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, and 13 percent in Europe. Currently, its military intervention in the Middle East and North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa is on the rise.

Alex Lo, a South China Morning Post columnist, pointed out that the United States has rarely distinguished between diplomacy and war since its founding. It overthrew democratically elected governments in many developing countries in the 20th century and immediately replaced them with pro-American puppet regimes. Today, in Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen, the United States is repeating its old tactics of waging proxy, low-intensity, and drone wars.

◆ U.S. military hegemony has caused humanitarian tragedies. Since 2001, the wars and military operations launched by the United States in the name of fighting terrorism have claimed over 900,000 lives with some 335,000 of them civilians, injured millions and displaced tens of millions. The 2003 Iraq War resulted in some 200,000 to 250,000 civilian deaths, including over 16,000 directly killed by the U.S. military, and left more than a million homeless.

The United States has created 37 million refugees around the world. Since 2012, the number of Syrian refugees alone has increased tenfold. Between 2016 and 2019, 33,584 civilian deaths were documented in the Syrian fightings, including 3,833 killed by U.S.-led coalition bombings, half of them women and children. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) reported on 9 November 2018 that the air strikes launched by U.S. forces on Raqqa alone killed 1,600 Syrian civilians.

The two-decades-long war in Afghanistan devastated the country. A total of 47,000 Afghan civilians and 66,000 to 69,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers unrelated to the September 11 attacks were killed in U.S. military operations, and more than 10 million people were displaced. The war in Afghanistan destroyed the foundation of economic development there and plunged the Afghan people into destitution. After the "Kabul debacle" in 2021, the United States announced that it would freeze some 9.5 billion dollars in assets belonging to the Afghan central bank, a move considered as "pure looting."

In September 2022, Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu commented at a rally that the United States has waged a proxy war in Syria, turned Afghanistan into an opium field and heroin factory, thrown Pakistan into turmoil, and left Libya in incessant civil unrest. The United States does whatever it takes to rob and enslave the people of any country with underground resources. (...)

III. Economic Hegemony -- Looting and Exploitation

After World War II, the United States led efforts to set up the Bretton Woods System, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which, together with the Marshall Plan, formed the international monetary system centered around the U.S. dollar. In addition, the United States has also established institutional hegemony in the international economic and financial sector by manipulating the weighted voting systems, rules and arrangements of international organizations including "approval by 85 percent majority," and its domestic trade laws and regulations. By taking advantage of the dollar's status as the major international reserve currency, the United States is basically collecting "seigniorage" from around the world; and using its control over international organizations, it coerces other countries into serving America's political and economic strategy. (...)

◆ The hegemony of U.S. dollar is the main source of instability and uncertainty in the world economy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States abused its global financial hegemony and injected trillions of dollars into the global market, leaving other countries, especially emerging economies, to pay the price. In 2022, the Fed ended its ultra-easy monetary policy and turned to aggressive interest rate hike, causing turmoil in the international financial market and substantial depreciation of other currencies such as the Euro, many of which dropped to a 20-year low. As a result, a large number of developing countries were challenged by high inflation, currency depreciation and capital outflows. This was exactly what Nixon's secretary of the treasury John Connally once remarked, with self-satisfaction yet sharp precision, that "the dollar is our currency, but it is your problem."

by Ministry of Foreign Affairs, People's Republic of China |  Read more (pdf):

Image: U.S. Air Force, Joshua Strang, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
[ed. They have a point. See also: Every Empire Falls (Consortium News).]

Secretive Federal Agency Killing Pets With Poison Bombs

Across the American West lies an untold number of potent chemical weapons, tucked away and waiting to go off. There could be one on your favorite hiking trail, or on the loop where you walk your dog, or in the woods where your kids play. Packed with sodium cyanide, these spring-loaded devices blast clouds of poison gas five feet into the air. Once inhaled, the lethal toxins mount a multidirectional attack on your cardiovascular, pulmonary, and central nervous system. Death can come in a matter of minutes.

The weapons, known as M-44s, are placed by an under-the-radar federal agency called Wildlife Services. The agency was created to protect the livestock industry’s bottom line by killing off the competition: namely, wild predators. The so-called cyanide bombs do kill predators, but they can also kill anyone else unlucky enough to stumble upon them. And they have a hair trigger.

Wildlife Services, which falls under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is well known in conservationist circles. Most people, however, have never heard of it. For the uninitiated, a glimpse into the taxpayer-funded killing machine can be jarring.

In the past eight years, Wildlife Services killed nearly 21 million animals as part of its mission to oversee “the eradication and control” of species “injurious” to human endeavors, particularly ranching. While agents’ preferred means of killing is by air, with gunmen in helicopters and planes, M-44s were used to intentionally kill more than 88,000 animals from 2014 through 2022 — the period for which the agency has data available online. The total amounts to roughly 30 poisonings a day for much of the past decade.

M-44s are part of “a broad strategy that also uses non-lethal methods, and that is informed by ongoing wildlife biology research,” Wildlife Services spokesperson Ed Curlett said in an emailed statement to The Intercept. Curlett added that 98 percent of the agency’s poison devices are placed on private lands and “only when the private, municipal, state, or federal landowner or manager requests assistance and enters a written cooperative agreement.”

According to Wildlife Service’s data, an additional 2,200 animals were killed unintentionally over the 2014 through 2022 period, including endangered species, domestic livestock, and pets like the Mansfields’ dog.

by Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept | Read more:

Image: Brooks Fahy
[ed. I've worked with various State and Federal wildlife agencies my whole career and never heard of these guys. However, I'm not sure their objectives and methods are as sinister as this article suggests. From their FY 2022 Program Report:]

In FY 2022, APHIS encountered about 21.5 million animals causing damage, or threatening to cause damage, while responding to calls for assistance and dispersed nearly 20 million of these animals unharmed from urban, rural, and other settings. APHIS dispersed 91.4% of the animals encountered. However, nonlethal methods cannot resolve all wildlife related conflicts. Of all wildlife encountered, APHIS lethally removed 8.6%, or approximately 1.85 million, from areas where damage was occurring. Invasive species accounted for 79% (1,466,580) of the wildlife lethally removed. Additionally:

• The invasive species removed included 1,175,244 European starlings, 136,791 feral swine, and more than 11,000 brown tree snakes in Guam.
• 60,279 were native Northern pike minnow that APHIS removed to protect federally threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead in the Pacific Northwest.

In instances where lethal control was necessary, APHIS worked to donate as much animal meat as possible. In FY 2022, APHIS donated nearly 150 tons of deer, goose, and other meat—more than 1 million servings of protein for people in need—and over 20 tons of meat for animal consumption to animal rehab centers, zoos, and other facilities, making full use of this resource from wildlife damage management work.

This Can't Go On

For as long as any of us can remember, the world economy has grown a few percent per year, on average. Some years see more or less growth than other years, but growth is pretty steady overall. I'll call this the Business As Usual world.

In Business As Usual, the world is constantly changing, and the change is noticeable, but it's not overwhelming or impossible to keep up with. There is a constant stream of new opportunities and new challenges, but if you want to take a few extra years to adapt to them while you mostly do things the way you were doing them before, you can usually (personally) get away with that. In terms of day-to-day life, 2019 was pretty similar to 2018, noticeably but not hugely different from 2010, and hugely but not crazily different from 1980.

If this sounds right to you, and you're used to it, and you picture the future being like this as well, then you live in the Business As Usual headspace. When you think about the past and the future, you're probably thinking about something kind of like this:

I live in a different headspace, one with a more turbulent past and a more uncertain future. I'll call it the This Can't Go On headspace. Here's my version of the chart:

Which chart is the right one? Well, they're using exactly the same historical data - it's just that the Business As Usual chart starts in 1950, whereas This Can't Go On starts all the way back in 5000 BC. "This Can't Go On" is the whole story; "Business As Usual" is a tiny slice of it.

Growing at a few percent a year is what we're all used to. But in full historical context, growing at a few percent a year is crazy. (It's the part where the blue line goes near-vertical.)

This growth has gone on for longer than any of us can remember, but that isn't very long in the scheme of things - just a couple hundred years, out of thousands of years of human civilization. It's a huge acceleration, and it can't go on all that much longer. (I'll flesh out "it can't go on all that much longer" below.)

The first chart suggests regularity and predictability. The second suggests volatility and dramatically different possible futures.

by Holden Karnovksy, Cold Takes |  Read more:

Images: Cold Takes 

"Miracle House" in Lahaina

What Saved The ‘Miracle House’ In Lahaina? (Honolulu Civil Beat)

Image: Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2023

No App, No Entry

No app, no entry: How the digital world is failing the non tech-savvy (The Guardian)

Image: Observer Design

[ed. Took a trip last week and thought the same thing. At no point did I interact with anyone but TSA. Parking, check-in, bag tagging, ticketing, seating - all require an app or email now.]

"Whatever the word is for the opposite of heartwarming, it certainly applies to the story of Ruth and Peter Jaffe. The elderly couple from Ealing, west London, made headlines last week after being charged £110 by Ryanair for printing out their tickets at Stansted airport. (...)

The Jaffes, aged 79 and 80, said they had become confused on the Ryanair website and accidentally printed out their return tickets instead of their outbound ones to Bergerac. It was the kind of error anyone could make, although octogenarians, many of whom struggle with the tech demands of digitalisation, are far more likely to make it.

But as the company explained in a characteristically charmless justification of the charge: “We regret that these passengers ignored their email reminder and failed to check-in online.”

Alaska State Fair, 2023

Exhibits, Alaska State Fair 2023
Image: markk

How Privatization Robs Us of Our Most Precious Assets

You name it, it’s been privatized somewhere in the United States. Schools, roads, libraries, courts, prisons, and even the law itself have been outsourced to private companies by state and local governments who buy into the idea that The Private Sector is more efficient at serving the functions of government. But this is baloney, as Donald Cohen shows in The Privatization of Everything How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back(co-written with Allen Mikaelian). Cohen, the founder and executive director of In The Public Interest, joins today to take us through case studies of privatization in action, like Chicago’s disastrous deal to sell its parking meters. Cohen shows us that when we privatize, we are turning our own assets over to someone else who will sell them back to us and pocket our money. He explains why privatization is a bad deal and why public goods and services should remain in public hands. There is a right-wing effort to stigmatize public services as Big Government (calling public schools “government schools” for instance), and Cohen makes the case for why we need a pro-public culture that unashamedly demand that what belongs to the people stays in the hands of the people.

This conversation originally appeared on the Current Affairs podcast. It has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

NATHAN J. ROBINSON

It really is the privatization of everything. That is one of the key takeaways that I had from your book after going through it. You document case after case after case. People might hear about prominent cases—school privatization and so on, but you show it’s everything.

DONALD COHEN

 And there was plenty left on the cutting room floor. Currently, that’s the big issue about Medicare, Medicare Advantage, and direct contracting Medicare—we didn’t cover that at all. There are definitely things that we didn’t get to.

ROBINSON
Did you cover war and the military?

COHEN
Not really, no. That’s another big one we have to add.

ROBINSON
But this is not to say that this book is skimping. You do go through many case studies.

COHEN
There’s a book out now by Mariana Mazzucato about the consulting industry, which we don’t talk about as well, which is basically the brain outsourcing—government brains—to huge consulting firms. So, there are other things to explore.

ROBINSON
What are some of the cases of efforts to privatize, successful or not, that people might not know or realize?

COHEN
I would venture to say most, but I will give a few cases. Let me say how we define privatization. My definition is it’s about private control over public goods. Public goods, in my definition, are the things that we all need to survive, the things that we need everyone to have: health, clean air, transportation, education, all the above.

I’ll give a couple of examples because that’s the best way to get into the real issues, which our book intends to draw a through line into some larger issues that connect all the public sectors. So, parking meters in Chicago—I’ve told this story many, many times, and most people who don’t live in Chicago don’t know about it. Everyone who lives in Chicago does. In 2008, the worst of the recession, cities were bleeding red ink. The mayor at the time announced a proposal from a private consortium of Morgan Stanley from Wall Street, a sovereign wealth fund from the Middle East, and a national parking company, LAZ parking, which is basically all over the country. That consortium offered the city $1.1 billion upfront in cash in exchange for control of the city’s 36,000 parking meters for 75 years. It was announced on a Friday and the vote was on Tuesday. Now, just to put in context, 2083 is when that contract ends. So after the fact, it was analyzed and scrutinized and all that. It was a terrible deal, an unbelievably stupid way to borrow on future revenue. Everybody borrows on future revenue, that’s how we buy houses and things, but for 75 years, incredibly stupid. Prices went way up to park.

But here’s the most important thing: that for the life of the contract, if the city wants to do any one of its important jobs—transportation, land use, housing, environment, parks—and they would like to eliminate parking spots, they have to buy them back. So, if you have to buy the spots back at the future value of the spot, fundamentally, you don’t do it in many cases. In fact, there was a professor at one of the universities there that interviewed transit planners within a year or two after the deal, and found that they were unable to complete a plan to create bus rapid transit or dedicated bus lanes. If you want to create bike lanes or pedestrian laws, your hands are tied to deal with the fundamentals. So for me, what that says is that privatization is really an assault on democracy because it gives them legal contractual control over the stuff that should be ours to control. (...)

ROBINSON
Yes, and have a few more decades to go. One of the points that you make in the book is the Indiana toll road case as well, which has parallels. I think people might not think of it this way, but when you sell a public asset and take the check upfront for much less than what the thing is worth over the period of time that you are giving this company or consortium the right to collect revenue, you are essentially transferring wealth, just handing it over from the public sector to the private sector.

COHEN
Enormous amounts. So, the parking in Chicago needs to be modernized for credit cards and all that, like most cities are doing right now. That may cost some money, so they needed some cash, and they could have borrowed it. The rates to park went way up, I think eight bucks an hour or something like that. So my question would have been to them is: if the private entities think they can make money doing this, why can’t the city? Because the city has great needs—housing needs, climate needs; it has all sorts of municipal needs that would benefit the city. You’re exactly right. It’s pure extraction. (...)

COHEN
Some of them went bankrupt because they made bad choices, but then they’ve just changed the way they do the deals. But here’s what’s interesting about that. There’s going to be a lot of infrastructure money flowing, given the Inflation Reduction Act. There’s a lot of money that we need to build infrastructure. There are two things that are really important to remember: things cost money, and there’s only one place to get that money—us. Taxes, tolls, and fees. That’s it. The reason this is important is that the people who want to privatize, or do these public private partnerships, will often say, “no new taxes, more efficient.” It’s all motherhood and apple pie, but you have to take it back to that basic fact. It costs money, and there’s only one place to get it, and that’s us. So if rates are going to go up more than they need to, then someone else will get that money.

ROBINSON
Yes, there’s a wonderful story that is told. Perhaps you should give a version of what the pitch for privatization is, because it’s the same in almost every case. It’s this wonderful fantasy about how everyone is going to benefit, and we will get something for nothing.

COHEN
That’s a great question. There are a few pitches, and one is: cheaper, better, faster. The private sector is more efficient, so we can provide public services more cheaply. But let me stop on that one because we deal with this argument all the time. So they say they’re more efficient. Let’s just think about what efficiency is. Efficiency is spending or doing less and getting more—less effort for more. Well, there are two ways to be efficient. One is to do things smarter. We’ve all figured that out in our homes. But the other is to do them cheaper. So when the private sector says, “we’ll do it more efficiently,” they’re going to spend less money on something because, remember, they will take a bunch of money out.

ROBINSON
Yes, they have to make a profit.

COHEN
They’ll get profit. That goes out, and executive compensation. So, tell us exactly what you’re going to spend less money on because it’s very concrete and very real things: fewer workers, lower pay for workers, poor quality equipment, or less maintenance. It’s very concrete, and that’s absolutely what happens. So, that’s efficiency. Better? If someone’s got a better idea, we could buy that from them. But we don’t have to give it. There may be some private company that has some clever idea about how to do something. Well, let’s just buy it and we all do that. Faster? Not really. They say it all the time, but not really. So, that’s one thing: cheaper, better, faster, and more efficient. The other argument we hear a lot is that the public sector doesn’t have the money. So, they don’t have the money to build the new road. Again, we take that back to what I was saying earlier, but I’ll say it a little differently now. We have to borrow money to build a road, and you borrow money to build to buy a house. Borrowing is actually the easy part because, it turns out, you have to pay it back. And there’s only one place to get that—taxes, tolls, and fees: us. Let’s just break it down to the actual nuts and bolts truth of it. It’s all math. (...)

ROBINSON
The private sector may have some good incentives to satisfy consumer demand, but they also have a boatload of bad incentives. The profit motive creates all sorts of reasons why it would be good for you to do things that are socially toxic and harmful.

by Nathan J. Robinson and Donald Cohen, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Sea Drones

Sea drones and the counteroffensive in Crimea (Reuters)

Image: South West News Service

[ed. What's next? Tunneling drones? Maybe Elon has contingency plans for his Boring company technology.]

“Girl” Trends and the Repackaging of Womanhood

“What kind of insufferable girl are you?” my TikTok algorithm asked me the other day. The options were “femcel,” as in someone who’s pathologically unlovable because she’s a radical feminist; “coquette,” as in, someone who wears bows and listens to Lana Del Rey, or “blogger,” as in me. The original video appears to have been deleted (too insufferable, perhaps), but it stayed with me not because it was particularly insightful or laden with meaning but because it offered yet another “girl” on the internet for me to be, and maybe the only accurate one.

It’s the summer — or the year, or maybe the decade — of mostly made-up microtrends involving the word “girl.” People on TikTok and everywhere else on the internet are talking about their “girl dinners,” which amount to thrown-together plates of whatever happens to be in the fridge. They’re going on “hot girl walks” (a.k.a. walks). They’re having “feral girl summers.” They attempt to determine via viral Pinterest mood boards whether they’re “strawberry girls” or “cherry girls” or “vanilla girls” or “tomato girls” or “coconut girls” or “coastal cowgirls” or “rat girls” or “downtown girls” or “okokok girls” or “lalala girls” (don’t worry about those last two, it was part of a TikTok thing that lasted approximately five minutes). They girlboss and do girl math with their gorgeous gorgeous girlies during hot girl summer. They buy viral pink paste and powdered greens in efforts to become “clean girls” or “That Girls,” and when they fail, they become, evidently, “insufferable girls.”

Reading them all in a row, you’d be forgiven for thinking these terms are at best silly and meaningless, and at worst obnoxious and insidious. For one, a solid percentage (if not most) of the people participating in and discussing “girl” trends are women, which therefore makes it feel slightly infantilizing and icky and like, why should 30-year-olds care what type of “girl” they are? Shouldn’t we have figured ourselves out by now? You could make the argument that pathologizing the things women and girls do smells a bit too strongly of gender essentialism; you could say that labeling normal human behavior as “girl-coded” only otherizes women in an already patriarchal world. But I would argue that both miss the point, because these supposed “girl trends” aren’t really trends at all. They’re marketing campaigns.

There’s an SNL sketch from a million years ago that illustrates this phenomenon, in which the local news invents a harmful teen trend designed to frighten parents. “They call it ‘souping,’” Bill Hader-as-news-anchor tells the camera. “Teenagers are drinking expired soup cans to get high! Every teenager is doing it, and it will kill them.” (Emma Stone, who plays the teen, says, “There’s no way teenagers are doing that”; the news anchor then invents a new moral panic around teenagers called “trampolining.”) The gist is that there is something deeply wrong with Today’s Teens, something unknowable and sinister that the current generation of adults never would have imagined being part of, and if it isn’t “souping,” then surely it’s something else. To figure out what, you’ll just have to keep watching.

This is sort of what all trend journalism feels like to me these days. A single video goes viral, some people start talking about it, the media picks it up, and suddenly it’s used as fodder for the kind of lowest-common-denominator broadcast news segments where old people marvel about how foreign young people have become — and it’s not a coincidence that it’s almost always young women they’re referring to here — even though the thing they’re talking about isn’t even really happening on a scale that’s by any measure newsworthy. The result is a discourse that ends up basically amounting to “girls = wrong and/or stupid,” even when, half the time, the original video was made for people who already knew it was kind of stupid, or meant to be a joke.

Take “girl dinner,” for instance, which caused outsize controversy because it combined the concept of womanhood with eating. In May, a 28-year-old showrunner’s assistant named Olivia Maher posted a video of her dinner, a medieval peasant-inspired plate of bread, cheese, pickles, wine, and grapes that she dubbed “girl dinner.” On the term, she told the New York Times that “it feels like such a girl dinner because we do it when our boyfriends aren’t around and we don’t have to have what’s a ‘typical dinner.’” But like everything that goes viral, once it became national news, it seemed as though this was a thing young women were doing en masse, as though putting together a plate of leftovers was a novel idea that could therefore be designated as an eating disorder or otherwise problematized.

“Girl dinner” is kind of over now. The fact that I’m writing about in August it is, to use a different made-up trend from two years ago, “cheugy,” or late to the proverbial party. Soon, however, there will be another social media trend for girls, because “girls” sells.

by Rebecca Jennings, Vox | Read more:
Image: Alana Laverty, Girl Dinner via:

Seattle Center

Image: markk

Second Class Citizens

There is no way to regulate and control pregnancy without regulating and controlling people. States that have enacted abortion bans in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization have also considered the establishment of regimes for the surveillance and criminalization of anyone who dares to circumvent the state’s dictates for the acceptable use of one’s body.

This is why the war on abortion rights is properly seen as a war on bodily autonomy and why the attacks on reproductive freedom have moved hand in hand with renewed attacks on the gay, queer and transgender community. It’s all part of the same tapestry of reaction. And this reactionary impulse extends to the means of the anti-abortion political project as well as its ends.

The same lawmakers who want to rob their constituents of the right to bodily autonomy have also begun to treat democracy as an obstacle to avoid, not a process to respect. If the people stand in the way of ending abortion, then it’s the people who have to go.

We just witnessed, in fact, an attempt by anti-abortion lawmakers to do exactly that — to try to remove the public from the equation.

A majority of Ohio voters support the right to an abortion. The Ohio Legislature — gerrymandered into a seemingly perpetual Republican majority — does not. In many states, this would be the end of the story, but in Ohio, voters have the power to act directly on the state Constitution at the ballot box. With a simple majority, they can protect abortion rights from a legislature that has no interest in honoring the views of most Ohioans on this particular issue.

Eager to pursue their unpopular agenda — and uninterested in trying to persuade Ohio voters of the wisdom of their views — Republican lawmakers tried to change the rules. Last week, in what its Republican sponsors hoped would be a low-turnout election, Ohioans voted on a ballot initiative that would have raised the threshold for change to the state Constitution from a simple majority to a supermajority. They defeated the measure, clearing the path for a November vote on the future of abortion rights in the state. (...)

But as the Ohio example illustrates, the assault on bodily autonomy often includes, even rests on, an assault on other rights and privileges. In Idaho, to give another example, the No Public Funds for Abortion Act, which passed before Dobbs was decided, would punish state employees with the termination of employment, require restitution of public funds and possible prison time for counseling in favor of an abortion or referring someone to an abortion clinic. Other legislatures, such as those in Texas and South Carolina, have pushed similar restrictions on speech in pursuit of near-total abortion bans in their states.

There’s something that feels inevitable in this anti-abortion turn toward political restriction. The attack on bodily autonomy is not general. It is aimed at women. It subjects their bodies to state control and in the process degrades their citizenship. “Without the ability to decide whether and when to have children, women could not — in the way men took for granted — determine how they would live their lives, and how they would contribute to the society around them,” the dissenters in Dobbs wrote. For women to take their place as “full and equal citizens,” they “must have control over their reproductive decisions.”

In other words, the attack on bodily autonomy is an assault on both political equality and reproductive freedom. It creates a class of citizens whose status is lower than that of another group. And once you are in the business of degrading the citizenship of one group of people, it’s easy to extend that pattern of action to the citizenship of other groups. The authoritarian habits of mind that you cultivate diminishing one form of freedom may lead you to view other forms of freedom with equal contempt.

by Jamelle Bouie, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Len Saltiel, Anchorage Evening, AK

via: