#Anti-rape bill

[rightnewshindi]

आज पश्चिम बंगाल विधानसभा में पेश किया जाएगा रेप विरोधी बिल, भाजपा भी देगी समर्थन

West Bengal News: कोलकाता के अस्पताल में महिला डॉक्टर से रेप और हत्या की घटना के बाद सत्ताधारी टीएमसी सवालों के घेरे में है। टीएमसी के कई नेताओं के बयान भी मुश्किल खड़ी कर रहे हैं। इस बीच पूर्व सांसद कुणाल घोष रविवार को पीड़ित परिवार से मिलने पहुंचे। उन्होंने पीड़िता के पिता से पार्टी के रवैये में सुधार का भी वादा किया। घोष ने बाद में बताया कि पीड़िता के पिता ने कहा है कि वे यही चाहते हैं कि…

[thegayhimbo]

Here’s an interesting question:

If a character on a TV show has been confirmed to be a rapist by the actor who plays them, then does it really work to tell fans who hate said character that “they’re projecting” when those fans refer to the character as a rapist?

Food for thought.

[luckyladylily]

So a few months ago there was the discourse about would you rather meet a man or a bear in the woods. I didn't want to touch it while the discourse was hot and everyone dug in hard because those are not good conditions for nuance, but I waited until today, June 1st, for a specific reason.

I'm not going to take a position in the bear vs man debate because I don't think it matters. What is really being asked here is how afraid are you of men? Specifically, unexpected men who are, perhaps, strange.

People have a lot of very real fear of men that comes from a lot of very real places. Back when I was first transitioning in 2015 and 2016, I decided to start presenting as a woman in public even though I did not pass in the slightest.

I live in a red state. I knew other trans women who had been attacked by men, raped by men. I knew I was taking a risk by putting myself out there. I was the only visibly trans person in the area of campus I frequented, and people made sure I never forgot that. Most were harmless enough and the worst I got from them was curious stares. Others were more aggressive, even the occasional threat. I had to avoid public bathrooms, of course, and always be aware of my surroundings.

I know how frightening it is to be alone at night while a pair of men are following behind you and not knowing if they are just going in the same direction or if they want to start something - made all the worse for the constant low level threat I had been living under for over a year by just being visibly trans in a place where many are openly hostile to queer people. You have to remember, this was at the height of the first wave of bathroom law discussions, a lot of people were very angry about trans women in particular. My daily life was terrifying at times. I was never the subject of direct violence, but I knew trans women who had been.

I want you to keep all that in mind.

So man or bear is really the question "how afraid of men are you?", and the question that logically follows is "What if there was a strange man at night in a deserted parking lot?" or "What if you were alone in an elevator with a man?" or "What if you met a strange man in the woman's bathroom?"

My state recently passed an anti trans bathroom bill. The rhetoric they used was about protecting women and children from "strange men", aka trans women.

Conservatives hijack fear for their bigoted agenda.

When I first started presenting as a woman the campus apartment complex was designed for young families. The buildings were in a large square with playgrounds in the center, and there were often children playing. I quickly noticed that when I took my daughter out to play, often several children would immediately stop what they were doing and run back inside. It didn't take me long to confirm that the parents were so afraid of "the strange man who wears skirts" that their children were under strict instructions to literally run away as soon as they saw me.

"How afraid are you of a strange man being near your children?"

I mentioned above that I had to avoid public bathrooms. This was not because of men. It was because of women who were so afraid of random men that they might get violent or call someone like the police to be violent for them if I ever accidentally presented myself in a way that could be interpreted as threatening, when my mere presence could be seen as a threat. If I was in the library studying and I realized that it was just me and one other woman I would get up and leave because she might decide that stranger danger was happening.

Your fear is real. Your fear might even come from lived experiences. None of that prevents the fact that your fear can be violent. Women's fear of men is one of the driving forces of transmisogyny because it is so easy to hijack. And it isn't just trans women. Other trans people experience this, and other queer people too. Racial minorities, homeless people, neurodivergent people, disabled people.

When you uncritically engage with questions like man or bear, when you uncritically validate a culture of reactive fear, you are paving the way for conservatives and bigots to push their agenda. And that is why I waited until pride month. You cannot engage and contribute to the culture of reactive fear without contributing to queerphobia of all varieties. The sensationalist culture of reactive fear is a serious queer issue, and everyone just forgot that for a week as they argued over man or bear. I'm not saying that "man" is the right answer. I am saying that uncritically engaging with such obvious click bait trading on reactive fear is a problem. Everyone fucked up.

It is not a moral failing to experience fear, but it is a moral responsibility to keep a handle on that fear and know how it might harm others.

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Month - June 2024

💡Eco-friendly innovations building a better future—literally

1. Bill Gates-backed startup creates Lego-like brick that can store air pollution for centuries: 'A milestone for affordably removing carbon dioxide from the air'

The Washington Post detailed a "deceptively simple" procedure by Graphyte to store a ton of CO2 for around $100 a ton, a number long considered a milestone for affordably removing carbon dioxide from the air. Direct air capture technologies used in the United States and Iceland cost $600 to $1,200 per ton, per the Post.

2. Violent crime is down and the US murder rate is plunging, FBI statistics show

Violent crime dropped by more than 15% in the United States during the first three months of 2024, according to statistics released Monday by the FBI.

The new numbers show violent crime from January to March dropped 15.2% compared to the same period in 2023, while murders fell 26.4% and reported rapes decreased by 25.7%.

3. She thrifted this vase for $4. It turned out to be an ancient Mayan artifact

Anna Lee Dozier, paid about $4 for what she assumed was a reproduction of a Mayan vase. It turned out to be the real deal: an artifact that’s at least 1,200 years old from the ancient civilization. And now, it's headed back to its homeland.

4. U.S. Marshals Find 200 Missing Children Across the Nation During Operation We Will Find You 2

Of the 200 children found, 173 were endangered runaways, 25 were considered otherwise missing, one was a family abduction, and one was a non-family abduction. [...] 14 of the children were found outside the city where they went missing.

5. Amazon's ditching the plastic air pillows in its boxes

Amazon said the change will help it use nearly 15 billion fewer plastic pillows annually. The paper fillers are made from 100% recyclable materials and are curbside recyclable. The company began a transition away from plastic filler in October 2023 when it announced its first U.S. automated fulfillment center to eliminate plastic-delivery packaging.

6. Supreme Court rejects bid to restrict access to abortion pill

In a blow for anti-abortion advocates, the Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a challenge to the abortion pill mifepristone, meaning the commonly used drug can remain widely available. The court found unanimously that the group of anti-abortion doctors who questioned the Food and Drug Administration’s decisions making it easier to access the pill did not have legal standing to sue.  

7. Wild horses return to Kazakhstan steppes after absence of two centuries

A group of the world’s last wild horses have returned to their native Kazakhstan after an absence of about 200 years. Seven Przewalski’s horses, the only truly wild species of the animal in the world, flown to central Asian country from zoos in Europe

That's it for this month :)

This newsletter will always be free. If you liked this post you can support me with a small kofi donation here:

Buy me a coffee ❤️

Also don’t forget to share this post with your friends.

[metanarrates]

I haven't seen a lot of coverage in the news about this, but my state has just advanced legislation on a bill that would criminalize trans bathroom use in publicly owned buildings. this could mean up to 6 months in jail and up to $1000 in fees for those convicted.

most alarming aspects of this bill:

-"publicly owned buildings" include airports, schools, libraries, government offices, some hospitals, and most terrifyingly AND explicitly within the bill, domestic violence shelters and rape crisis facilities. transgender people, who are estimated to be almost 4 times more likely to be victims of violent crimes than cisgender people, could become criminalized in the very spaces they seek out to shelter from abuse.

-on that note, the bill potentially threatens federal funding of already-underfunded domestic violence and sexual assault facilities. to recieve federal grants, facilities are required to follow nondiscrimination laws. this law could place the facilities in danger of losing the grants they rely on. this is severely going to impact victims' abilities to access critically needed services.

-the bill legally defines "sex" in a way that has a lot of potential impact across state legislature. according to the bill’s text, HB 257 would legally define a female as “an individual whose biological reproductive system is of the general type that functions in a way that could produce ova,” and a male as “an individual whose biological reproductive system is of the general type that functions to fertilize the ova of a female.” this could effectively end the state's legal recognition of trans people.

-the bill demands that trans people who DO use bathrooms in publicly owned buildings must have undergone both gender reassignment surgery and have had their birth certificate changed. this has several issues, obviously, but the biggest one I want to highlight is that this opens the door to potential genital inspection by law enforcement if someone is accused of being transgender in a bathroom. in addition to any other indignities suffered by being harassed by cops when trying to use the restroom, it is completely possible for law enforcement to now demand to see whether someone's genitals are in compliance with these laws. it's an unconscionable and humiliating invasion of privacy.

-the bill requires trans students to develop a "privacy plan" with their school in order to arrange access to unisex spaces. if unisex bathrooms are unavailable, the student can be granted access to a sex-designated space “through staggered scheduling or another policy provision that provides for temporary private access.”

-the bill allows the state’s attorney general to impose a fine of up to $10,000 per day on local governments that don’t enforce the bill. in essence, any government that isn't sufficiently committed to enforcing these draconian laws may face massive fines until they have reached the attorney general's standard of enforcement.

this is one of the most unbelievably severe anti-trans laws that have ever been proposed in the united states. it would effectively ban trans people from participating in public life, harm nearly every single victim of domestic violence and sexual assault who seeks services in the state, enforce criminality on random trans people in bathrooms, and open every single person who could be potentially accused of being trans up to a wave of harassment and discrimination from both private citizens and law enforcement. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that this law would literally force me and my transfemme fiancee to flee this state.

the law's been fast tracked to an insane degree through the legislature. similarly to the anti-dei bill currently making its way through, it's only been a week since it was introduced, and it's already passed the house, and is now up for vote in the senate. if it passes both sets of votes, the only thing left in its way is the governor's decision to veto.

please share this post. make as much noise as you can. if you live in utah, please call and email your district senator as soon as possible. it doesn't matter how late you see this. the bill is up for vote this week (1/23/24 at the time of writing) and we need to do whatever we physically can to protest its passing. we've already moved past the opportunity for public comment on the bill, but a few organizations have called for a rally at the capitol steps on thursday (1/25/24) at noon. if you are in the salt lake area or are able to make it there, please consider attending. wear a mask and bring a sign. we are stronger together.

[radfemtasy]

"India has one of the lowest---"

Cut the bullshit! We all know India has higher rape cases and most of them go unreported. Every girl is raped, harassed or abused by moids like you, who confirm that India has the lowest rape cases. Do you know why most of them go unreported? It's because the victim knows the perpetrator or the perpetrator is her relative. She's scared to report to the police.

If you think India seriously has the lowest rape cases, then you're fucking wrong! Those rapists, even after 14 years of imprisonment, live freely after release from jail! You saw what happened to the rapists involved in the Bilkis Bano case? They were greeted with garlands after release! How are we lucky?!

India doesn't have a proper law of punishing the rapists. They take years to punish them. Look at Egypt! Look at the rest of the countries! They punish those culprits in a click.

So, yeah. Fuck your proportions and estimations!

Call me an anti-nationalist but I hate India more than US (I know US is shitty, but I am talking about India). Corruption, Patriarchy, shitty rules, shitty people, I'll be happy if I leave this country.

Girls who want to travel India, don't even think about it. Rape cases are so high that people pull out shitty excuses and even, boys younger than 18 years have started to harass us! Still they're not captured!

"Don't kiss in public!"

"Don't go out at night!"

"No pda!"

"Don't dress like this!"

"Don't dress like that!"

Ugh! I'm fucking done! Even if you break one of these stupid rules, you're harassed by uneducated mobs.

So, I suggest to not visit India, because women are getting raped and harassed and no one is helping; they're blaming the victim.

[xclowniex]

I just saw the dumbest fucking video of all time.

There is currently a racist anti Māori bill which had its first reading the other day in parliment.

There has been so much opposition to it as it is anti Māori.

In parliament, a Māori MP, Hana Rawhiti, who is 22, ripped up the bill and started a Haka. I cannot put into words how amazing what she did was, and the fact that another member of Te Pati Māori called David Seymour, the person who proposed the bill a cunt. The Haka was beautiful and I hate how she has been suspended from parliment because of it.

Onto the video I saw.

Someone from the US, who is not Māori nor from New Zealand and has never met or spoken to any Māori before claimed that the reason why the ripping of the bill and the haka was done, is because they were inspired by the Palestinian cause.

And this just makes me sooooo mad. Like can't Māori do these frankly impressive acts of activism for their own rights without any other group being the cause?? Like Māori history is rife with actions like this against oppression. It's not something new to Māori.

Its just the absolute ignorance of Māori history and then claiming to care about Māori history and rights. This person doesn't truly care, they just care about furthering one cause.

And initially I was unsure if this next interpretation of what he said was correct or not as not all people who support Palestine support hamas. But I checked out his other videos and he called hamas a resistance group and supports them so I think this next bit is a far understanding of his words.

Hamas raped people. Your average Palestinian is not hamas. But comparing Māori to hamas, is fucked up. You are implying that Māori are on the same level as rapists and murders. Māori already have an unfairly high incarceration rate, and now you think it's okay to compare them to rapists and murderers???? Comparing them to your average Palestinian? Fine and okay. Comparing them to hamas? Fucked up and racist.

[rolls-of-the-tongue-nicely]

Oh, anti BillDip being awaken by The book of Bill and all the BillFord inside. Playing the song "BillFord is a good ship, BillDip is problematic"

Yeah lol toxic abusive relationship with physical torture and mind rape is better, obviously 😅

Viva BillFord AND BillDip. Two horrible ships with lot of angst fuel and horror potential 🤌🤌🤌

[f1ghtsoftly]

All The Women’s News You Missed Last Week 9/16/24-9/23/24:

Hi, this newsletter is late. On Thursday, September 19th, I was the victim of a crime and needed emergency medical care. I am currently recovering with family outside the city. This is the earliest I could get out this project. I appreciate your understanding at this time.

Male Violence/Femicide: 

US: Sean 'Diddy' Combs arrest live updates: Charged with sex trafficking and racketeering 

India: West Bengal Assembly in India passes bill mandating life in prison or death penalty for rape convictions

France: Shocking rape trial highlights the systematic struggles French sexual abuse victims face

Australia: Suspect in 1977 Melbourne cold case arrested in Italy

US: Several Mark Robinson campaign staffers quit as fallout over online posts continues

Italy: Italy holds a trial into the killing of a woman that sparked debate over femicide

US: Harvey Weinstein pleads not guilty to new sexual assault charge 

UK: Harrods' ex-owner Al Fayed raped, assaulted staff over decades, lawyers say 

Reproductive Rights in the USA/Special Focus:

A dramatic rise in pregnant women dying in Texas after abortion ban 

Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable.

Federal judge temporarily blocks Tennessee’s ‘abortion trafficking’ law

‘She should be alive today’ — Harris spotlights woman’s death to blast abortion bans and Trump

Western nations were desperate for Korean babies. Now many adoptees believe they were stolen

Euphoric two years ago, US anti-abortion movement is now divided and worried as election nears

US Senate IVF bill fails after Republicans block it, despite Trump support

Transgender News/Gender Critical:

Australia: Australian woman's complaint at hostel backfires as manager fires back: 'This guest is lucky we didn't press charges on her'

Women’s Achievements: 

US: 2 Black women could make Senate history on Election Day

Sri Lanka: Sri Lanka has more women voters than men but no female presidential candidates

US: ‘Hidden Figures’ of the space race receive Congress’ highest honor at medal ceremony

MISC: 

Sweden: Sweden charges woman with genocide, crimes against humanity in Syria

Arts and Culture: 

Music Review: Katy Perry returns with the uninspired and forgettable ‘143'

Why does ‘The Babadook’ still haunt? Its director, Jennifer Kent, has some answers

JoJo was a teen sensation. At 33, she’s found her voice again

'Agatha All Along' crafts a witch coven community run by women

Demi Lovato’s ‘Child Star’ Is Now Streaming on Hulu and Disney+

As always, this is global and domestic news from a US perspective covering feminist issues and women in the news more generally. As of right now, I do not cover Women’s Sports. Published each Monday afternoon.

I am looking for better sources on women’s arts and culture outside of the English-speaking world, if you know of any-please be in touch.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day:

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita says that abortion reports aren’t medical records, and that they should be available to the public in the same way that death certificates are. While Rokita pushes for public reports, New Hampshire lawmakers are fighting over a Republican bill to collect and publish abortion data, and U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville has introduced a bill that would require the Department of Veterans Affairs to collect and provide data on the abortions performed at its facilities. Just last week, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed legislation that would have required abortion providers to ask patients invasive and detailed questions about why they were getting abortions, and provide those answers in a report to the state.   All of these moves are part of a broader strategy that weaponizes abortion data to stigmatize patients and to prosecute providers. And while most states have some kind of abortion reporting law, legislators are increasingly trying to expand the scope of the data, and use it to dismantle women’s privacy.

Rokita’s ‘advisory opinion’, for example, argues that abortion data collected by the state isn’t private medical information and that in order to prosecute abortion providers, he needs detailed reports to be public. In the past, the state has issued reports on each individual abortion. But as a result of Indiana’s ban, there are only a handful of abortions being performed in the state. As such, the Department of Health decided to release aggregate reports to protect patient confidentiality, noting that individual reports could be “reverse engineered to identify patients—especially in smaller communities.” Rokita—best known for his harassment campaign against Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the abortion provider who treated a 10-year-old rape victim—is furious over the change. He says the only way he can arrest and prosecute people is if he gets tips from third parties, presumably anti-abortion groups that scour the abortion reports for alleged wrongdoing. He wants the state to either restore public individual reports, or to allow his office to go after abortion providers without a complaint by a third party. (Meaning, he could pursue investigations against doctors and hospitals without cause.)

Most troubling, though, is his insistence that women’s private abortion information isn’t private at all. Even though individual reports could be used to identify patients, Rokita claims that the terminated pregnancy reports [TPRs] aren’t medical records, and that they “do not belong to the patient.” [...] As I flagged last month, abortion reporting is becoming more and more important to anti-choice lawmakers and groups. Project 2025 includes an entire section on abortion reporting, for example, and major anti-abortion organizations like the Charlotte Lozier Institute and Americans United for Life want to mandate more detailed reports.

[...]  As is the case with funding for crisis pregnancy centers and legislation about ‘prenatal counseling’ or ‘perinatal hospice care’, Republicans are advancing abortion reporting mandates under the guise of protecting women. And in a moment when voters are furious over abortion bans, anti-choice lawmakers and organizations very much need Americans to believe that lie. We have to make clear that state GOPs aren’t just banning abortion, but enacting any and every punitive policy that they can—especially those that strip us of our medical privacy. After all, it was less than a year ago that 19 Republican Attorneys General wanted the ability to investigate the out-of-state medical records of abortion patients. Did we really think they were going to stop there?

@jessicavalenti writes a solid column in her Abortion, Every Day blog that the GOP's agenda to erode patient privacy of those seeking abortions is a dangerous one.

[mariacallous]

Recently, Planned Parenthood released a statement on the Oct. 7th attacks and the broader conflict between Israel and Palestine. Their statement condemned Hamas’s attacks on civilians, and specifically condemned sexual assaults committed against Israeli women during the violence. They also noted how thousands of Palestinian women and children had been killed in Israel’s counteroffensive, stated the need for Palestinian women to maintain access to reproductive and maternal healthcare, and condemned both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

The social media reaction to such a balanced and empathetic statement? Furious, unrelenting anger.

The statement was quote-tweeted thousands of times by social media users outraged by the statement. Planned Parenthood was accused of spreading Israeli propaganda, ignoring Palestinian deaths and fabricating rape claims, and enabling genocide. These outraged users aren’t conservatives who always oppose Planned Parenthood—they’re progressives furious that an organization they normally support put out a statement they hated. Now there are calls to end donations and Planned Parenthood staffers are fighting with donors. Their own employees, affiliates and organizers are making public statements against them.

This outcome was predictable to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of social media dynamics. And it raises an obvious question—why release a statement at all?

Metastatic social justice

It’s actually quite common for organizations and activists to get into hot water these days by addressing areas outside their expertise. Trans activists in Vancouver loudly insisted there can be no Trans Liberation without Palestinian Liberation, which caused pushback all over Canada. Two years ago, New York City’s Pride organizations courted controversy by excluding LGBT police officers from the city’s Pride parade in the name of racial justice. There are YIMBY housing organizations taking a stand on abortion rights and climate organizations demanding a Federal Job Guarantee.

There’s a common theme here. Organizations that appear to be single-issue advocacy groups are increasingly commenting and taking stances on issues outside of their narrow focus. Activism is becoming more global in nature—if you are an activist for one cause, you’re expected to speak up about all causes now. It’s not enough to ‘stay in your lane’, you need to be protesting and advocating for all forms of social justice. Pro-choice advocacy is now part of your racial justice non-profit. Jobs packages are in your environmental bills. Your LGBT organization has a stance on ‘Defund The Police’ and your housing group has a stance on Israel/Palestine. Social justice is metastasizing.

This phenomenon has happened on the right as well—see the NRA transitioning from being a somewhat non-partisan group to essentially being an arm of the GOP—but it’s especially striking in the current progressive movement. There’s a real sense in which NYC Pride is no longer an LGBT advocacy organization, but rather an overall progressive social justice organization. That may sound like an exaggeration, but they kicked out a gay organization (the Gay Officers Action League) to accommodate another form of social justice. It’s the internal logic behind a LGBT Pride march excluding LGBT people.

This also explains the online fury at Planned Parenthood. Their statement was thoughtful and balanced, but deviated from the dominant and overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian progressive narrative. Their donors expect them to advocate not just for progressive goals in women’s health, but progressive goals everywhere.

This type of activist mission creep risks stunting the progress on the core issues that social justice advocates care about.

The downsides of missions creep

The urge towards mission creep comes from a reasonable place. If you care so deeply that you spend your free time (or your career!) as an activist for a particular issue, the odds are that you also have strong feelings on many other issues. You’re also likely to live in a bubble of activists and people who think like you, and so your conversations professionally and socially may often center around all sorts of political issues. But as an activist it’s important to remember that most people you’re trying to reach are not like you and don’t think like you.

The typical voter is over 50 and does not have a college degree. They also don’t think about politics all that much. They are far, far away from the mindset of a typical activist. And when they do have political opinions, those opinions are far more varied and haphazard than a committed political partisan would guess. I think a few minutes scrolling the twitter feed of the American Voter Bot is invaluable to understand how voters think. This bot takes real voters and profiles them in brief tweets. While some look as expected—a Democrat who supports gun control, for instance—many look like this:

Most people are a confusing mix of demographic signals, issue positions and partisan identification, and they rarely fit squarely within one political tribe. That’s the danger of turning a single-issue advocacy group into a generalized progressive messaging group—you’ll end up alienating a far wider group of potential allies than you realize.

If Issue Group X declares loud progressive positions not just on Issue X but also on gun control, abortion, Palestine, Medicare For All, trans rights, free trade and school prayer, they won’t attract a large diverse group of people who care about Issue X. They’ll end up attracting a narrow slice of progressive activists who are ideologically pristine enough to agree with them on every issue.

The ultimate result of activist mission creep is that your issue ceases to be something that people across the ideological spectrum can work together on. It becomes coded as a red tribe vs blue tribe issue, gets swallowed by the general culture war, and progress grinds to a halt as partisan warfare starts.

The most likely outcome of Planned Parenthood voicing an opinion on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is not that they make any difference at all towards that conflict. It’s that they alienate their own supporters with differing views on Israel/Palestine. They’ve undercut their own ability to make progress on reproductive care and reproductive rights for no gain.

One thing at a time

None of this is to say that individuals shouldn’t care about many issues at once—they obviously should. And general purpose ideological organizations can and should tackle many policy areas. But it’s a poor strategy for single-issue groups to try to become general purpose organizations. There are real benefits to staying in your lane.

One example of a movement that has done a reasonable job at this is the pro-housing YIMBY movement. While there are some instances of YIMBY groups straying from their purpose, for the most part they’ve done a good job staying narrowly focused, and that that focus has allowed them great success.

YIMBYism is a far more ideologically diverse movement than many people realize. There are conservative YIMBYs, neoliberal YIMBYs, Democratic YIMBYs, libertarian YIMBYs, and many left or socialist YIMBYs (although in true socialist tradition, some want to break away from the YIMBY label and create a sub-label PHIMBY). This isn’t just a feel good story about how conservatives and liberals can be friends—this has a real impact on YIMBYs getting things done. It’s part of why you see both Republican and Democratic officials at the local level working towards YIMBY solutions in different cities, and why those solutions can often pass without bitter partisan warfare. It’s why the YIMBY Act in Congress had Republican and Democratic co-sponsors. It’s why YIMBYs are scoring victories in blue states like California and red states like Montana.

This sort of thing matters. YIMBYs are a big tent and they’re getting things done. It’s hard enough to make real change happen on a single policy or a single issue. Whole movements try for years and still sometimes fail. Single-issue groups trying to address every issue at once aren’t going to succeed. The urge towards mission creep is strong, and too many groups are weakening their core strengths to address problems they can’t solve. Single-issue organizations shouldn’t burden themselves with having the answer to every question, with having a stance on every issue, and with having to be all things to all people. It’s ok not to comment. It’s ok to stay in your lane and just work on one problem. It’s ok to try to change the world just one issue at a time.

[reasonsforhope]

"Bria Peacock chose a career in medicine because the Black Georgia native saw the dire health needs in her community — including access to abortion care.

Her commitment to becoming a maternal health care provider was sparked early on when she witnessed the discrimination and judgment leveled against her older sister, who became a mother as a teen. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Peacock was already in her residency program in California, and her thoughts turned back to women like her sister.

“I knew that the people — my people, my community back home — was going to be affected in a dramatic way, because they’re in the South and because they’re Black,” she said.

But even though Peacock attended the Medical College of Georgia, she’s doing her obstetrics and gynecology residency at the University of California-San Francisco, where she has gotten comprehensive training in abortion care.

“I knew as a trainee that’s what I needed,” said Peacock, who plans to return to her home state after her residency.

Ever since the Supreme Court decision, California has worked to become a sanctuary for people from states where abortion is restricted. In doing so, it joins 14 other states, including Colorado, New Mexico, and Massachusetts. Now, it’s addressing the fraught issue of abortion training for medical residents, which most doctors believe is crucial to comprehensive OB-GYN training.

A law enacted in September [2023] makes it easier for out-of-state trainees to get up to 90 days of in-person training under the supervision of a California-licensed doctor. The law eliminated the requirement for a training license and also permitted training at programs such as Planned Parenthood that are affiliated with accredited medical schools.

“By allowing physician residents to come to California, where there are more opportunities for abortion training, and by allowing them to be reimbursed for this work, we’re sending a message that abortion care is health care and an essential part of physician training,” said Lisa Folberg, CEO of the California Academy of Family Physicians, which supported the bill.

The question of how to provide complete OB-GYN training promises to become more urgent as the effects of abortion bans on medical education becomes clear: 18 states restrict or ban abortion to the point of effectively stripping 20% of OB-GYN medical residents of the opportunity to get abortion training, according to the Ryan Residency Training Program in Abortion and Family Planning. That’s 1,354 residents this year out of 5,962 OB-GYN residents nationwide.

The restrictions in some cases aim to reach beyond state borders, spooking medical students and residents who fear hostility from anti-abortion groups and right-wing legislators...

Pamela Merritt, executive director of Medical Students for Choice, pointed to a Kansas law that requires repayment of state medical school scholarships — with 15% interest — if residents perform abortions or work in clinics that perform them, except in cases of rape, incest, or a medical emergency.

Doctors point out that abortion training is not just about ending pregnancies. Peacock recalled a patient who started hemorrhaging badly shortly after a healthy delivery. Peacock and her team at UCSF performed a dilation and curettage — a procedure commonly used to terminate pregnancy.

“If we did not have that skill set, and the patient continued to bleed, it could have been life-taking,” said Peacock, chief OB-GYN resident at UCSF...

Peacock, for her part, is adamant about returning to Georgia, where abortions are banned after six weeks. “I’m still going to provide abortions, whether that’s in Georgia or I need to fly to a different state and work in abortion clinics for a week out of the month,” she said. “It would definitely be a big part of my work.”"

-via The 19th, January 2, 2024

[proshippers-against-censorship]

I’m gonna be completely honest I’m a little baked so apologies if I make no sense

I would just like to start with I am a very big fan of dark fiction. My favorite movies are Silence of the Lambs and Midsommar. My favorite fanfiction at one time contained a violent rape scene. I have no issues with murder, torture, brainwashing, rape, or any flavor of violent/sexual depravity in my fiction, fan-created or otherwise. But the thing is, there’s a reason for it to occur within the narrative the writer is trying to tell. Characters don’t kill and die for no narrative reason, that’s just bad writing. If there is a torture scene, or a rape scene, or incest or pedophilia or whatever depraved shit you wanna put here, you can analyze that piece of fiction as a whole and deduce why the writer might’ve put it there. Media analysis. There is media to analyze. It’s a huge leap in logic to assume that the director included Buffalo Bill’s obsession with skinning women because they had fantasies about skinning women. It is also a huge leap in logic to assume that Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita because he is a pedophile. When you read the book or watch the movie and think about it critically for more than ten seconds, it becomes very evident that that isn’t true, even with an unreliable narrator like in Lolita.

However, the (fan)fiction I take issue with isn’t like that. There isn’t much to analyze when the only part being posted (or written at all) IS the rape scene, or the incest scene, or the necrophilia scene, especially when that particular author/artist exclusively posts about that one thing. Fetish content is pretty easy to spot in my opinion, and if you aren’t turned on by that particular fetish, it doesn’t provide you much in the way of storytelling. That kind of fiction was created to feed someone’s fetish, whether that’s the author’s themselves, a friend’s, or a random requester who asked them to write it. (You can also only deduce what is and is not fetish content via media analysis).

The issue isn’t that the writer had the gall to include these topics in their fiction, the issue is that someone is way too into those crimes they’re writing about and it shows. People who are also way too into violent fantasies are just as big of an issue. The comparison shouldn’t be Adult/Child PWP Oneshot Fanfic to Call of Duty, it should be Adult/Child PWP Oneshot Fanfic to that kid in the back of class scribbling in his notebook about school shootings but with different names than his real teachers and classmates. Compare Call of Duty to Lolita (example), and compare sexual fantasy fodder to violent fantasy fodder.

I think it is immoral to fantasize about harming another person. Whether that harm would be sexual in nature or not is completely irrelevant. If someone believes that having certain fantasies is morally objectionable, the fiction they create to stroke that fantasy is also morally objectionable. Obviously I can’t stop anyone from creating whatever kind of fiction they want for whatever reasons they want, even if I find them immoral. That’s censorship. But I don’t think anyone, antis or proshippers, have been taking into account the full nuance of the topic at hand.

TL;DR: You can portray acts of violent or sexual crime in your fiction with all the gorey details you want, without it feeding into a fetish or a fantasy. The fantasy is the thing I take issue with, not the fiction. This is true of both violent and sexual fantasies. Everyone oversimplifies it as “good/okay in fiction” or “bad/wrong in fiction” and that isn’t a conducive discussion to be having.

Anyway. I have the munchies, I’m gonna order a pizza now I think

-🐜👔

Fair enough.

There's still nothing wrong with finding fetish/fantasy/for-fun content gross or highly immoral.

So long as you just block the creator and move on with your day.

[eretzyisrael]

by Seth Mandel

Yesterday was the anniversary of only one thing: the mass murder and rape of Jews. The demonstrations, therefore, fell into two categories: for and against. In the “for” category was one led by a familiar face: Nerdeen Kiswani, who took a break from trying to set Jews on fire to celebrate others who set Jews on fire. “Oct. 7 was a prison break and all the atrocity propaganda that we saw that came out of it was lies,” Kiswani sermonized, an imitation Father Coughlin for the Tik Tok generation.

The one confusing part of Kiswani’s rant was that she suggested the 1,200 innocent civilians “maybe” murdered on that day were killed by Israeli helicopters, which in Kiswani’s mind should make the IDF the good guys.

But Kiswani is bound to become coherent eventually, because she’ll have lots of practice. It’s clear she sees this as her calling, and the New York Times agrees. “Ms. Kiswani bills herself as part of a bolder, new generation of Palestinian American activists who are calling for what she says earlier generations also wanted, but feared to say in public: the replacement of the state of Israel with a state called Palestine, covering all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” the paper wrote in a flattering profile of the fair Lady Genocide.

The Times is just trying to be evenhanded. While on the one hand, it writes, Kiswani calls for the destruction of Mideast Jewry from the river to the sea, on the other, “Ms. Kiswani insists she is not antisemitic.” Well, OK, if she insists, I guess we have to take her at her word, the way the world took Hitler at his word he wouldn’t invade his neighbors.

Kiswani may have started Her Struggle on campus years ago, but her very professionalized caravan of mouth-frothing human Halloween displays left that all behind a long time ago. She’s an example of what coddled campus radicals turn into.

The Nazi Youth eventually grew up, too. So what happens when this generation of lost campus Jew-baiters grows up?

Even more than that, what will it take for them to hold the public’s attention? After all, we get acclimated to circumstances pretty quickly. Tent encampments designed to bar Jews from public spaces seemed pretty shocking a year ago. But Ivy League administrators ensured that it became normalized. It’s been nearly a year since Paul Kessler, a Jewish Californian, was killed by a pro-Palestinian protester not far from Los Angeles on a street corner. People seem to have gotten over that.

The tent isn’t the point of the tentifada. The point is the violence, the normalization of second-class citizenship for Jews, the loyalty oaths, the street mobs outside Jewish-owned restaurants smashing windows. It’s the evil energy that can’t be re-corked. How will American institutions inoculate themselves against what has been released into the air? Unless you’re focused on that, you’re still fighting the last war.

[twodotsknowwhy]

With the IVF ruling in Alabama, I want you all to be very, very careful of falling into a trap here. Right now, Republicans are currently coming out and saying that they support IVF and what I'm seeing is that they are going to use it as their new "reasonable compromise" position.

Republicans spent 50 years getting Roe v Wade overturned. They are very good at playing the long game. They are practiced at making sacrifices towards the larger goal. You"ve seen them do this many times before, even if you didn't even realize it.

There have been so many times they've introduced an extremely restrictive anti-abortion bill with one glaringly evil clause that garners lots of attention. Maybe they put the cut off date at 4 weeks or they left off exemptions for rape or they put in a bizarre requirment that doctors have to re-implant ectopic pregnancies into the uterus (looking at you Ohio).

And people get upset, the media pays attention and finally, the Republicans cave, they take that little section out. Look at how reasonable they are, how willing to compromise. They aren't fascist assholes trying to take away our human rights, they're willing to listen to reason. So they pass the rest of the bill, with all of its awfulness still intact other than that one almost suspiciously awful part neatly plucked out. And they hope we don't notice.

So now, Republicans are getting in front of microphones and talking about how of course they want to protect IVF. They will make sure of it. They are so reasonable, they know how to compromise. They still want to declare embryos as human beings, but they are willing to make exceptions for rich people. They'll give us this crumb, for now, at least.

[darkeagleruins]

Marxist California Governor Gavin Newscum is Doing Everything to Assure Citizens are Raped, Injured, Killed, Unable to Defend Themselves, Signing Multiple Anti-Gun Bills into Law Ignoring the Supreme Court

On September 24th, Governor Newsom continued his crusade to erode Second Amendment rights in California by signing several anti-gun bills into law. NRA actively opposed these bills throughout the session and will continue to fight in the courts on behalf of all gun owners across the Golden State.

The following bills have now been signed into law:

Senate Bill 53 prohibits firearm possession in the home unless the firearms are stored in a firearm safety device that is approved by the Department of Justice. SB 53 ignores the U.S. Supreme Court decision in D.C v. Heller which argued that storage requirements that prevent gun owners from easily accessing their firearms are unconstitutional. SB 53 will take effect on January 1st, 2026.

Assembly Bill 1252 codifies the Office of Gun Violence Prevention created by Attorney General Bonta in 2022. While proponents claim the purpose is to conduct “research”, the Office of Gun Violence Prevention will only serve to advocate for gun control policies using tax-payer dollars. AB 1252 requires the Office of Gun Violence Prevention to work with “gun violence prevention advocates” to identify new legislation and regulations that can be passed in California and issue a report outlining these new proposed restrictions on or before July 1st, 2026.

Assembly Bill 2917 expands upon California’s existing Gun Violence Protective Order to allow the court to also consider “threats” directed towards a group or location when deciding whether to issue the order. If issued, Gun Violence Protective Orders result in a five year firearm prohibition, subject to indefinite renewals.

These so-called “red flag” orders deprive citizens of their fundamental rights and property without due process safeguards and a clear evidentiary basis. 

AB 2917 will take effect on January 1st, 2025.