I did not realise how close the election was. That will teach me to stop paying attention!
As I used to say as a kid in Queensland (when it still had a famously gerrymandered electoral map and dead people tended to rise from the grave and vote): "vote early, vote often, 'Muricans".
To paraphrase the opening lines of Lincoln's House Divided speech, "A divided house cannot stand, half slave and half free"...and here we are, a divided country, both sides against the core principles of the other. The left still reveres slavery and the right reveres freedom. We are headed for a fall, whether 2022, 2024 or sometime after, it is bound to happen.
"The predictable consequences of these narratives—particularly the desperation of little girls to transition and the more intense driving of white women into tribes where there’s at least some chance that someone will eventually not hate or blame them for every problem—will intensify."
So interesting, I watched the Taylor Swift documentary over the weekend and was struck that a person so amazingly talented and successful also cared so much what people thought of her. Also ironic b/c women have had more options and power now than any other time in history (see https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-boys-feminism-left-behind)
I don't know anything about Taylor Swift, but it's not ironic because women are human. Everyone cares what other people think to some degree. The sex that is primarily responsible for childcare and simultaneously more physically vulnerable doesn't have the luxury of not caring *at all* what other people think. (I've re-read this twice; it sounds harsher than I intend it to. Limits of the internet.)
Actually Holly, you can tell me something (and this is more germane to your piece), do Americans have a party-political advertising blackout in the 24 or 48 hours before an election? Many countries do, but it isn't universal, and sometimes it's only for major elections (ie, the equivalent of your presidential elections).
The UK and Australia are both strict on restricting electoral commentary of any sort (not just advertising) on polling day itself (hence all the feel-good stories about "dogs at polling stations" and "democracy sausages"), but up until the day before, it's pretty much a free-for-all.
"If the data wasn’t collected and analyzed by me or by someone I personally know to be mathematically sophisticated and intellectually honest, I don’t trust it."
This line so perfectly and concisely describes my feelings about statistics and science in the media. Thank you for putting it to words so well!
This was very interesting. I am not a "math" person and never thought of social issues through a math lense. You explain it very well. Please write another article after the election. Polls never seem to be accurate and I always wondered why? You explain the mental process of women in 3D. Usually when I hear "suburban women", they make it seem like women have a "hive mind" or function as a giant amoeba. Now, I understand what "suburban women" actually means. Thanks!
Having had an abortion, counseled at least one other through use of a morning after pill and comforted a sister and sister in law after disclosure of the shared experiential history…… i don’t believe there will ever be no option than to deliver a child of rape. I do believe there are a plethora of choices that can be exercised long before 15 weeks and that is a reasonable limit. I live in a state where safe, legal and rare will continue. I can agree to disagree. I am a white woman. I will vote red for the economy for public safety and for the protection of women in lockerooms, restrooms and sports
Minors in some states are no longer able to abort after rape. AL has no rape exception. Minors found to be pregnant who are immediately taken into state custody are without hope in AL and states with similar laws. Adult women are no longer able to abort if they lack the financial means to leave the state. AL's law is especially pernicious, since the woman has to be in danger of *imminent* death, and I personally know of one woman whose son died in utero and she wasn't allowed to do anything but walk around carrying a dead baby, waiting to become septic, because of the law. So the perennial American pendulum swing to extremes is doing what it does, and women in red states are officially incubators for the state in many cases.
15 weeks with exceptions for rape, maternal or fetal health disasters, or minors (young girls from certain types of families may not be able to find out they're pregnant, access judicial bypass or whatever else they need to do, and also locate a physician in 15 weeks) is fine with me.
I envy you your faith that the Republicans are anything more than the painted-red shade of the corporate uniparty. I would be much less depressed if I were capable of such faith.
Thanks for reading! My thoughts on the Republican party are shaped by having grown up in Alabama among members of the actual religious right and having been used by them and exposed to their political plans. I think it's....I want to say "sweet" or "cute" because I *mean* it, but they sound snarky in a way that I don't intend, so I don't know what the right words are, that anyone thinks the conservatives and Republicans are fundamentally different. They will absolutely take control of your life given the chance, just in different areas. I saw that post -- the idea that conservatives value their children is naive at best. Head to the sermonaudio archive and listen to all the ways they teach parents to hurt their kids without CPS getting wind of it. Look up the video that the teenage daughter of that family court judge caught, of her father beating her with a belt, and read the comments from conservatives snickering that in their house, that's just a warm-up.
And like I said, I don't expect other people to understand the plight of raped middle schoolers. That's why Christians send me email and really and truly cannot understand that their desired abortion policy results in pedophiles choosing the mothers of their babies and the government enforcing his choice and requiring those girls to fulfill the pedophile's chosen role for them.
All that to say -- you don't have to justify voting for the red team as some pro-woman thing. You don't have to convince yourself that they're the ones who are actually on your side, or your family's side. They're not. They're on their own side, like all politicians.
We're at a point in our culture where the results of their being on their own side will work out more favorably for you than the blue team being on their own side will, which is literally all the justification you need. You really can just vote for them because you want to.
I am not a Republican nor will I become one, but your horrible experience with religion represents a very small part of the right. I live in South Carolina and almost all of my neighbors go to church. The vast, vast majority are pro-choice within the first 6-12 weeks, don't care very much if you are religious or not, and don't care if you are gay even if they oppose people making their churches perform gay marriage. There are a few fundamentalist nutjobs but they are despised and ridiculed by about 95% of other church goers. We are not religious and neither myself nor my children have had any blow back for being public about that.
I understand your experience is valid and real, but also consider that the demons you are fighting against are few in actual number. As for access to abortion, Emily Burns puts it well here: "Likewise, they will hope that their female base will forget that rather than living in 1972, with limited access to contraception, we live in 2022, where contraception that is more than 99% effective is inexpensive and widely available, even if paying out of pocket; that this contraception, includes abortion pills, which can be accessed anywhere in the country by mail up to 10 weeks of gestation. They want you to forget about the interstate commerce clause which would make hindering this nearly impossible—even, or especially, with a conservative court. "
I understand what she's saying. I also understand that literally none of it applies to ten-year-olds being raped by their stepfathers. My childhood problem wasn't that I was too incompetent to access contraception, nor is that the problem of the little girls who will be required by the state of Alabama or Oklahoma to have their pedophile rapists' children this year.
What part of the Bible do they cite to justify their belief that life starts at 12 weeks and not conception? That's a new one on me.
What you are discussing there is child abuse. Seriously. CPS should take the child and the pregnancy will be terminated. These religious cults are breaking the law and the people protecting abusers should go to jail and both D and R will support that.
That case that came up recently was an abuser mother who allowed her abuser boyfriend to rape her daughter and tried to get her an abortion in another state to avoid detection. Local child protective services said she could have gotten an abortion in her own red state due to the risk the pregnancy would cause her. This idea that there will be widespread occurances of 10 year olds being forced to have babies if Repubicans win elections isn't realistic, and it's really a case of child abuse rather than abortion although even red states will allow abortion in the case of minors because it falls under "threat the the health of the mother".
I really envy you your faith that the red states will ever do this. They sent a 26 year old woman home with her dead son inside her to wait to become septic six weeks ago; I called in some favors from old friends to try to get her some mental health help while she waited. I could go on and on, but this is just wasting time. I do not care who you vote for. I'm just not going to pretend that the Republicans or conservatives are an answer to any problems. Not even one problem. There are no solutions, only trade-offs, and I will not pretend that the red team is a solution to anything, and certainly not to any problem involving the health or welfare of little girls who are being sexually abused. And yes, this is in fact a huge point -- abortion is often something that belongs in a conversation about child abuse. The two are related. To say i'm discussing child abuse, not abortion, is like me saying to you that you're discussing getting wet while standing outside, while I'm talking about rain. It is literally the same conversation, from many angles. People who do not want to have children who have chlidren anyway because they cannot access abortion have children whose lives often look like mine. It has taken hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to get me semi-functional. THIS IS THE SAME CONVERSATION.
Regarding "few in number" -- there are many more of these monsters than there are children on puberty blockers, so I do not find "few in number" to be a reasonable standard for not caring about things. Anti-wokes, myself included, literally never shut up about that situation.
I would just like to take this moment to thank white women for the election results we've seen today. We couldn't have done it without them, and I'd like to thank them for their contributions this year.
I wish it had taken some kind of insight to do so. It didn't. It really is as predictable as the sunrise.
I did not realise how close the election was. That will teach me to stop paying attention!
As I used to say as a kid in Queensland (when it still had a famously gerrymandered electoral map and dead people tended to rise from the grave and vote): "vote early, vote often, 'Muricans".
Not paying attention to American elections should be studied. I bet it's a marker of extremely high intelligence, sanity, mental health, etc.
I avoid paying attention to America to the greatest extent possible. I recognise this is not an option for Americans, however.
To paraphrase the opening lines of Lincoln's House Divided speech, "A divided house cannot stand, half slave and half free"...and here we are, a divided country, both sides against the core principles of the other. The left still reveres slavery and the right reveres freedom. We are headed for a fall, whether 2022, 2024 or sometime after, it is bound to happen.
"The predictable consequences of these narratives—particularly the desperation of little girls to transition and the more intense driving of white women into tribes where there’s at least some chance that someone will eventually not hate or blame them for every problem—will intensify."
So interesting, I watched the Taylor Swift documentary over the weekend and was struck that a person so amazingly talented and successful also cared so much what people thought of her. Also ironic b/c women have had more options and power now than any other time in history (see https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-boys-feminism-left-behind)
I don't know anything about Taylor Swift, but it's not ironic because women are human. Everyone cares what other people think to some degree. The sex that is primarily responsible for childcare and simultaneously more physically vulnerable doesn't have the luxury of not caring *at all* what other people think. (I've re-read this twice; it sounds harsher than I intend it to. Limits of the internet.)
No worries! Thanks Holly :)
Actually Holly, you can tell me something (and this is more germane to your piece), do Americans have a party-political advertising blackout in the 24 or 48 hours before an election? Many countries do, but it isn't universal, and sometimes it's only for major elections (ie, the equivalent of your presidential elections).
I don't think so. I've lived in three states (Alabama, Mississippi, and Vermont) and I've not experienced that in any of these places.
The UK and Australia are both strict on restricting electoral commentary of any sort (not just advertising) on polling day itself (hence all the feel-good stories about "dogs at polling stations" and "democracy sausages"), but up until the day before, it's pretty much a free-for-all.
There are rules about election activity within X feet of polling places in most jurisdictions. That's about it, as far as I know.
Same in the UK & Oz.
"If the data wasn’t collected and analyzed by me or by someone I personally know to be mathematically sophisticated and intellectually honest, I don’t trust it."
This line so perfectly and concisely describes my feelings about statistics and science in the media. Thank you for putting it to words so well!
This was very interesting. I am not a "math" person and never thought of social issues through a math lense. You explain it very well. Please write another article after the election. Polls never seem to be accurate and I always wondered why? You explain the mental process of women in 3D. Usually when I hear "suburban women", they make it seem like women have a "hive mind" or function as a giant amoeba. Now, I understand what "suburban women" actually means. Thanks!
Having had an abortion, counseled at least one other through use of a morning after pill and comforted a sister and sister in law after disclosure of the shared experiential history…… i don’t believe there will ever be no option than to deliver a child of rape. I do believe there are a plethora of choices that can be exercised long before 15 weeks and that is a reasonable limit. I live in a state where safe, legal and rare will continue. I can agree to disagree. I am a white woman. I will vote red for the economy for public safety and for the protection of women in lockerooms, restrooms and sports
Minors in some states are no longer able to abort after rape. AL has no rape exception. Minors found to be pregnant who are immediately taken into state custody are without hope in AL and states with similar laws. Adult women are no longer able to abort if they lack the financial means to leave the state. AL's law is especially pernicious, since the woman has to be in danger of *imminent* death, and I personally know of one woman whose son died in utero and she wasn't allowed to do anything but walk around carrying a dead baby, waiting to become septic, because of the law. So the perennial American pendulum swing to extremes is doing what it does, and women in red states are officially incubators for the state in many cases.
15 weeks with exceptions for rape, maternal or fetal health disasters, or minors (young girls from certain types of families may not be able to find out they're pregnant, access judicial bypass or whatever else they need to do, and also locate a physician in 15 weeks) is fine with me.
I envy you your faith that the Republicans are anything more than the painted-red shade of the corporate uniparty. I would be much less depressed if I were capable of such faith.
I'm not really sure how to respond to this write up but I will leave this here with you as I feel it sums up my thoughts and the thoughts of many other women very succinctly about this election. https://emilyburns.substack.com/p/with-whom-does-emily-oster-want-an?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email. Again, thanks for writing. Always enjoy a new post in my inbox. :)
Thanks for reading! My thoughts on the Republican party are shaped by having grown up in Alabama among members of the actual religious right and having been used by them and exposed to their political plans. I think it's....I want to say "sweet" or "cute" because I *mean* it, but they sound snarky in a way that I don't intend, so I don't know what the right words are, that anyone thinks the conservatives and Republicans are fundamentally different. They will absolutely take control of your life given the chance, just in different areas. I saw that post -- the idea that conservatives value their children is naive at best. Head to the sermonaudio archive and listen to all the ways they teach parents to hurt their kids without CPS getting wind of it. Look up the video that the teenage daughter of that family court judge caught, of her father beating her with a belt, and read the comments from conservatives snickering that in their house, that's just a warm-up.
And like I said, I don't expect other people to understand the plight of raped middle schoolers. That's why Christians send me email and really and truly cannot understand that their desired abortion policy results in pedophiles choosing the mothers of their babies and the government enforcing his choice and requiring those girls to fulfill the pedophile's chosen role for them.
All that to say -- you don't have to justify voting for the red team as some pro-woman thing. You don't have to convince yourself that they're the ones who are actually on your side, or your family's side. They're not. They're on their own side, like all politicians.
We're at a point in our culture where the results of their being on their own side will work out more favorably for you than the blue team being on their own side will, which is literally all the justification you need. You really can just vote for them because you want to.
Thanks for reading!
I am not a Republican nor will I become one, but your horrible experience with religion represents a very small part of the right. I live in South Carolina and almost all of my neighbors go to church. The vast, vast majority are pro-choice within the first 6-12 weeks, don't care very much if you are religious or not, and don't care if you are gay even if they oppose people making their churches perform gay marriage. There are a few fundamentalist nutjobs but they are despised and ridiculed by about 95% of other church goers. We are not religious and neither myself nor my children have had any blow back for being public about that.
I understand your experience is valid and real, but also consider that the demons you are fighting against are few in actual number. As for access to abortion, Emily Burns puts it well here: "Likewise, they will hope that their female base will forget that rather than living in 1972, with limited access to contraception, we live in 2022, where contraception that is more than 99% effective is inexpensive and widely available, even if paying out of pocket; that this contraception, includes abortion pills, which can be accessed anywhere in the country by mail up to 10 weeks of gestation. They want you to forget about the interstate commerce clause which would make hindering this nearly impossible—even, or especially, with a conservative court. "
I understand what she's saying. I also understand that literally none of it applies to ten-year-olds being raped by their stepfathers. My childhood problem wasn't that I was too incompetent to access contraception, nor is that the problem of the little girls who will be required by the state of Alabama or Oklahoma to have their pedophile rapists' children this year.
What part of the Bible do they cite to justify their belief that life starts at 12 weeks and not conception? That's a new one on me.
What you are discussing there is child abuse. Seriously. CPS should take the child and the pregnancy will be terminated. These religious cults are breaking the law and the people protecting abusers should go to jail and both D and R will support that.
That case that came up recently was an abuser mother who allowed her abuser boyfriend to rape her daughter and tried to get her an abortion in another state to avoid detection. Local child protective services said she could have gotten an abortion in her own red state due to the risk the pregnancy would cause her. This idea that there will be widespread occurances of 10 year olds being forced to have babies if Repubicans win elections isn't realistic, and it's really a case of child abuse rather than abortion although even red states will allow abortion in the case of minors because it falls under "threat the the health of the mother".
I really envy you your faith that the red states will ever do this. They sent a 26 year old woman home with her dead son inside her to wait to become septic six weeks ago; I called in some favors from old friends to try to get her some mental health help while she waited. I could go on and on, but this is just wasting time. I do not care who you vote for. I'm just not going to pretend that the Republicans or conservatives are an answer to any problems. Not even one problem. There are no solutions, only trade-offs, and I will not pretend that the red team is a solution to anything, and certainly not to any problem involving the health or welfare of little girls who are being sexually abused. And yes, this is in fact a huge point -- abortion is often something that belongs in a conversation about child abuse. The two are related. To say i'm discussing child abuse, not abortion, is like me saying to you that you're discussing getting wet while standing outside, while I'm talking about rain. It is literally the same conversation, from many angles. People who do not want to have children who have chlidren anyway because they cannot access abortion have children whose lives often look like mine. It has taken hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to get me semi-functional. THIS IS THE SAME CONVERSATION.
Regarding "few in number" -- there are many more of these monsters than there are children on puberty blockers, so I do not find "few in number" to be a reasonable standard for not caring about things. Anti-wokes, myself included, literally never shut up about that situation.
I would just like to take this moment to thank white women for the election results we've seen today. We couldn't have done it without them, and I'd like to thank them for their contributions this year.