admiralteal

Why, though? You have a solution in search of a problem here.

No deception is occuring in a legal name change. No identity is being hidden.

No one is advocating for killing babies. That’s kind of the point, though: abortion is not killing babies. If babies die after abortion, that isn’t murder. That’s just death. And whether or not the baby can survive post-abortion doesn’t factor into that, at least from a position of pure ethics.

But it’s preferable to not let the baby die. We didn’t deny it’s right to life. So if the pregnancy can be terminated without letting the baby die and without a serious adverse effect on the parent, we should do that. What’s fundamentally different after viability isn’t the morality, it’s just what is possible.

I’m pretty inarguably pro choice and I do not think we ought to ban any abortions. Yes, including late term, viable babies. The focus on viability is denying the unconditional right to life. It’s trying to negotiate about when that right emerges in order to make the arguments easier. And it’s an inherently weak strategy because it’s totally subjective. Even when the point of viability occurs is subjective.

If we want to keep babies alive, we should create incentives to prevent abortion and remove disincentives to carrying to term. In the case of a viable fetus, we should make sure the cost of giving birth is not higher than the cost of termination for someone who wants to not be pregnant anymore. But autonomy over your own body is always supreme over right to life. Always.

Not to even get into the fact that late term abortions are definitionally extremely complex , emotional, complicated situations where we definitely do not need the government imposing ridiculous catchall rules.

The legal name change is all the disclosure you need. That’s a matter of public record. No one is concealing their identity if they’re using their full government name.

The idea that some kind of subterfuge may happen without this law is plainly preposterous. You’re steelmanning it for no reason.

It might be political hay for him to be disqualified. That’s a huge problem.

It also might be a bad argument; there’s definitely SOME kind of due process requirement implied that it is hard to tell if Trump has satisfied. I think he’s an antidemocratic insurrectionist wannabee tinpot fascist, but whether that legal hurdle has been cleared is a question unanswered.

On the flip side, there’s little worse for our democracy than the law deciding not to go after Trump because he’s so politically powerful. The law says insurrectionists are disqualified. So these challenges have merit and should be allowed to play out, just as the justice department ought to investigate and prosecute and all these other things. We’re abandoning rule of law if we say that we aren’t going to prosecute for political reasons.

And the due process concern? That’s what’s going through the courts now. This may be the process due. And if it isn’t, the courts will have to tell us what the requirements are.

Too bad the outcome will probably be the SCOTUS doing their usual chickenshit nonsense and saying it’s up to the legislature to define the process so that they can protect their Very Special Boy.

Name changes by marriage are specifically exempted… because this kind of disclosure is totally unnecessary and serves no purpose.

Why? Many of the cisgendered people don’t, so why should she?

The rule is only enforced for transgender people, though, and specifically exempts some other kinds of name changes that are considered more ‘socially acceptable’ to these fuckwits.

So no, if the cisgendered people do not need to disclose, neither do the transgendered people. That’s called discrimination on the basis of sex.

Disclose previous names, please. There were full records of the legal name change. Nothing was hidden. The forms didn’t even have the fucking disclosure requirements on them because no one gives a shit about this law.

This is strictly an anti-trans rule at this point and you’re here rushing to its defense based on some law and order conservative bullshit.

Thomson does directly address the right to life of the fetus in A Defense of Abortion, the underlying essay that the violinist parable comes from (it has several other allegorical arguments aside from this one that are, in my opinion, even better but weirdly don’t get referenced much). The violinist story only really addresses rape, but the others do not require a starting act of violence to make similar arguments.

She outright grants the life-from-conception argument. And argues for why it’s just not relevant by showing a series of examples that make plain the typical person’s instinct – that autonomy over your body is supreme to the right to life of another and refusing to be charitable to a stranger is not the same as murder.

In my mind, no one has ever come close to rebuking her argument, though many have tried. The fact that both pro-life and pro-choice people continue to argue about when abortion becomes unethical is very frustrating. I wish the whole “it’s just a clump of cells” crowd would shut up because that’s utterly unpersuasive to someone who believes in life from conception. It’s just a moot point. Even if the fetus is a full human being with all relevant rights from the moment of conception, abortion is still not murder; it is permissible.

I recommend the essay, it’s not a very challenging read (compared to the greater cannon of philosophical essays, at least). It’s probably been 15+ years since I last read it and it still lives strongly in my mind.

The thing is, even an exception for the life of the mother shows that same moral inconsistency. If allowing a mother to come to harm through intervention that preserves the life of the fetus is acceptable, the other way around – allowing the fetus to come to harm through intervention that preserves the life of the parent – is just as acceptable. And it makes no difference if that preservation of life is 85 years or 15 minutes – the right to life isn’t contingent on how long your life may be.

These fake ethicists try to claim there’s a fundamental difference between performing an abortion and prohibiting an abortion, but both of these are positive actions taken by the state that engages in trading lives. If you want to argue on the morality of what a doctor or pregnancy’s choice to be part of an abortion, have at – there’s reasonably room for debate there – but there must be no intervention from the state.

I think it’s immensely charitable for a person to carry a baby to term. One of the most selfless things you can do. If you carry an unwanted pregnancy to term because you feel you owe it to this total stranger growing in you, you’re a damned saint. But our society does not mandate that kind of charity.

Philosophically, the law should not involve itself in trading on lives. I actually find this heartless abortion position more consistent than the others and appreciate the soulless honesty of it.

The fact that nearly everyone agrees there should be at least some cases where abortions are legal means pretty much everyone believes that abortion should be legal and just hasn’t fully thought out the underlying ethics.

Because it means basically no one really believes in the unconditional right to life of a fetus - if it has an unconditional right to life, it doesn’t matter if it came from rape or incest and it doesn’t matter if it’s going to die within minutes of being born and it doesn’t matter if it’s life threatens the life of its parent. None of those factors should remove the right to life.

And so since pretty much everyone agrees there should at least be exceptions for some of these situations we must conclude that there is not an inviolable right to life. We clearly think that the right to life of a fetus is just fundamentally lesser from the right to life of an independent and viable living person.

Meanwhile the right to autonomy over your own body still looks pretty unimpeachable to me. Seems to be that the state continues to have no right to forcibly modify or control your body and that it can sooner limit basic freedoms like movement and association before it violates that. The only time we seem to think it’s okay to violate body autonomy is if the person has a fetus in their uterus.

What conservatives really want is to be able to dictate the calculus. They want to be able to tell people with a uterus what to do. They want to pick and choose who is and isn’t pregnant and offer as little agency as possible to the individuals. That’s always been the most important motivation and goal to these abortion bans. They want a breeding slave class and they’re just too dishonest with themselves to admit it.

Notes are organized alphabetically in folders in Obsidian. The philosophy behind it is that it really wants you to be using links to connect notes to each other rather than hierarchies.

It wants your notes to be like Wikipedia, not a chronological notebook.

Also notable for Obsidian that it is totally free for nearly anyone who uses it (only needs to be paid for explicit commercial use with 2 or more people or if you want to use one of their superfluous datahosting options) and that their privacy policy is pretty explicit that they gather nothing.

If they ever paywall useful features, I’d definitely be off to different pastures… with full access to all my data since it’s just plaintext files.

I’d also prefer for it to be FOSS, and if the open source community ever knocks it off (preferably including compatibility with the existing plugins), I’d jump on that even if it were a bit less polished. I’m definitely one of those people who will chose a worse FOSS alternative just because it’s FOSS. But yeah, similar to you, I don’t think anything that is compatible with my needs.

Obsidian is not just an alternative, it is better.

Getting rid of all the formatting bullshit makes notetaking better. Honestly, I consider this to be the killer feature of Obsidian – no styles. No fonts. No font sizes. No weird/unpredictable line breaks or fights with bullets. No jimmying about images trying to get them in the right places. OneNote needs a plaintext mode to even hope to compete.

The linking is nice. I am very skeptical that the knowledge graph is useful, but I won’t be mad at people who like it.

Once you’re used to the mathtex syntax, it’s a fine way to do formula entry. And with the right extension, the way it handles tables is just fine.

The only thing OneNote does that Obsidian doesn’t is nested notes. I really wish Obsidian let you define an “index” note for a folder that would let you mimic the nested note feature of OneNote. And that it would let you manually re-order notes to be in whatever order you want (maybe achieved by a TOC on the index note or some such). Maybe there’s an extension that does that? OP seems to want the same functionality. I work around it by just making an “!TOC” file that sits in roots rather than relying on actual file hierarchy.

I ride a bike 95% of the time for my trips, but I have to own and maintain a car because the city I live in, which is FAR better than most in the US, still doesn’t make it possible to let me function without needing an occasional car trip. And the box hardware store near me almost never has its light truck rentals available for those occasional errands. To get to the nearest proper vehicle rental place… you guessed it, I’d have to get in a car.

I was very seriously investigating a Kei import for my needs. They’re cheap, small, easy to maintain, and insanely versatile. I arrived at doing this after researching what kinds of small, reliable trucks I might be able to find for my rare uses and ultimately gave up – all of them are roadboats these days.

Then some state bureaucrat arbitrarily declared that imported keis were somehow less safe for their drivers than motorcycles, bikes, and scooters and so cannot be registered any longer. There’s basically no vehicles for sale that I would want and find useful at this point.

I’ve honestly been looking into setting up a trailer for my bike for hauling a sheet or two of plywood. It might be my best overall option, since I can’t fit them in my ancient Honda.

All that to say: yeah, there’s no middleground anymore. There’s ONLY road yachts for people who view them as status symbols and transit vans for people who actually have work to get done, but either way too expensive for me to justify.

Rental cars are still a thing. Plus they get regularly cleaned and you aren’t responsible for their maintenance/depreciation.

If you live in a city – and if you are getting municipal water/sewer, you definitely do – there’s a car rental place close enough that will doubtless be happy to do a same-day rental.

The car rental may be expensive, but you’re comparing it to owning and maintaining that car year-round for those occasional trips. And if that car is anything bigger than a small suv, it doubtless costs more than the EV would’ve in real terms.

People also forget that rental cars exist.

For the handful of actual long-range drives a typical person needs to take in a given year, it’d almost certainly be cheaper to rent a different car rather than spend extra to get a huge-range EV. But relatively short-range EVs are basically not a thing because of how universal these range anxieties are. Not to even mention that the available rentals aren’t a great situation either, given how universal it is for people to own these long-range vehicles.

Our society is a damn prisoner’s dilemma.

The crazy thing is, outside of the US, small and cheap vehicles are the norm. Both ICE and EV.

I’m still convinced that if a major automaker brought a line like they have in the likes of China or France to the US market, they’d be hugely popular. That people WANT cheap vehicles and are willing to compromise on size to get them – that the reason vehicles are getting pushed bigger is because that compromise is not an option. I think there’s massive untapped demand for things like mini city cars and kei trucks. But the profit margins would be lower for the manufacturer, so even if it was still a profitable business model the US automakers don’t do it and exert their influence in various ugly ways to prevent it from happening (e.g., all the states that have used administrative levers to ban registration of imported keis based on total nonsense safety arguments).

No. It isn’t. This isn’t some weak state flailing about. This is a major world power, with a fair amount of material wealth and industry, actively pursuing an evil agenda for the sake of the egos of a few political personalities and fascist, right-wing domestic politics. There’s nothing to pity here.

Google requires a full reformat to 3rd party apk installs on Chromebooks. That’s heavy-handed, cumbersome, and idiotic. But it’s still
better than Apple.

It should be as easy as sudo apt-add repository, sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get install everywhere.

I’m about 6 episodes in and so far it is enjoyable, though I doubt it’ll go down in my heart as a one of the very special shows. It’s pretty heavy-handed with its kids writing, which is still TBD if it will wear me out before I get to the end. And at about 6 episodes in, it is not at all episodic. I’m hoping that eventually changes. All the best of Star Trek is mostly episodic.

Extreme disappointment that the hologram did not introduce itself with “Please state the nature of your ___ emergency.”