Friday, July 22, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



Never go wrong.

•  Got TWO free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down items here, but listen, after this I’m cutting you chiselers off, so make with the subscriptions! First there’s my thoughts on the seemingly evergreen polls showing religion taking a dive in this country, and the kind of churches that are not taking a dive because they don’t ask members to do anything Christlike – just make the pastor rich and hate liberals! Then, one about the polio case in Rockland County and how I expect America’s anti-vaxxer movement to promote his brave stand against protecting oneself from life-threatening diseases with leftist medicine.

•  Busy week and I’m tired, but I have to say I found this story pretty typical of the way conservatives think:

Shortly after the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the right to abortion in June, South Carolina state senators introduced legislation that would make it illegal to “aid, abet or conspire with someone” to obtain an abortion.

The bill aims to block more than abortion: Provisions would outlaw providing information over the internet or phone about how to obtain an abortion. It would also make it illegal to host a website or “[provide] an internet service” with information that is “reasonably likely to be used for an abortion” and directed at pregnant people in the state.

Legal scholars say the proposal is likely a harbinger of other state measures, which may restrict communication and speech as they seek to curtail abortion. The June proposal, S. 1373, is modeled off a blueprint created by the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), an antiabortion group, and designed to be replicated by lawmakers across the country.

As the fall of Roe v. Wade triggers a flood of new legislation, an adjacent battleground is emerging over the future of internet freedoms and privacy in states across the country — one, experts say, that could have a chilling impact on First Amendment-protected speech.

Conservatives like to say that reliable Democratic voter groups, such as women and black Americans, have been bamboozled into it (“the liberal plantation” etc.), but it’s pretty obvious that these folks get more out of Democratic governance than they do out of Republicans. That’s why the GOP is trying everything it can to keep black people from the polls and women from having control of their own bodies.

But Republican voters don’t get much from Republicans either. Red states have the shittiest government benefits and services, and even when Medicaid expansion makes a better shake possible for them, their rightwing overlords bat it out of their hands

We know that what Republicans give their vassals instead of a decent life – along with the traditional assurance that their black neighbors will always have it even worse -- is culture war crap like CRT and trans panic. But it’s not enough to feed them lies – the scam requires that the vassals be kept in the dark so that they never acquire the data to figure out they’ve been rooked. That’s why they continually dump on blue states and big cities – places where they could experience the benefits of liberal models (culture, education, soap and toothpaste) for themselves if they hadn’t been scared out of it by Republican disinfo.

But keeping them in ignorance requires constant vigilance. Since the Dobbs decision, blue state governments and activists have been doing outreach to help women in red states who need reproductive care. It’s a tough lift, but like the blue cities called upon to harbor immigrants kicked out by Texas shitheels, the allegedly godless liberals always seem to be coming up with the Good Samaritanism when red state “Christians” fall down on the job.

As you may have heard, some red states are trying to keep their women from even leaving the premises to visit blue states for legal abortions. The Commerce Clause may make that impossible (until the Supreme Court decides it can be waived because they say so, that’s why). 

But also, insofar as is possible, they don’t want their brood-sows to even know there’s help available among their neighbors, as this repellent legislation shows. Their further hope is that, if they can pull this off, over time their residents won’t even remember that there even exist places where the help they’re denied is offered, or if they do remember they’ll also be imprinted with the message that such places are evil and liberal and full of immigrants and bums and college professors who look down on them and that they didn’t want any of that anyway. They’d really like to force all of us to live this way, of course, but for now this will do. 

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