Showing posts with label Abortion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abortion. Show all posts

Monday, June 27, 2022

27: Abortion, Ukraine, Arlan Hamilton

Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith: We’ve Seen What Will Happen Next to America’s Women We both lived in an America where abortion was illegal. A nation in which infections and other complications destroyed lives. A nation in which unplanned pregnancies derailed careers and livelihoods. A nation in which some women took their own lives rather than continue pregnancies they could not bear. ........ increasing access to abortion medication, providing federal resources for individuals seeking abortion care in other states and using federal property and resources to protect people seeking abortion services locally. ......... In order to fix the damage Republicans have done to our system in their efforts to control women’s lives, we need broad democracy reform: changing the composition of the courts, reforming Senate rules like the filibuster, and even fixing the outdated Electoral College that allowed presidential candidates who lost the popular vote to take office and nominate five of the justices who agreed to end the right to an abortion......... Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And more Americans describe themselves as pro-choice today than at any other point in the last 25 years. ....... Ask every Senate candidate to commit to reforming the filibuster rules, so that the chamber can pass federal legislation protecting the right to reproductive freedom. If voters help us maintain our control of the House and expand our majority in the Senate by at least two votes this November, we can make Roe the law all across the country as soon as January...... The two of us lived in an America without Roe, and we are not going back. Not now. Not ever.

What Comes after Roe? how we can make our country more welcoming to children and more supportive of families, an essential task if we want to make abortion both illegal and unthinkable, if we want to end abortion in a sustainable way. .......... abolition of abortion through both law and culture, a world where abortion is both illegal and inconceivable. ........ Pro-lifers can hold a range of views on, for example, paid family leave or child tax credits. We should debate these policies on the merits and keep in mind that ending abortion will require a “both/and” approach in many areas, not an “either/or.” We need plans for shifting our laws and our culture, efforts to care for babies and mothers, work from state and federal governments — and all of these efforts should aim at ending the supply of abortion and the demand for it.

Leaving Wish Lists at the Door, Senators Found Consensus on Guns The bipartisan gun safety legislation that cleared Congress on Friday was the product of weeks of fraught negotiations that started with both sides acknowledging what had to stay off the table. ....... Instead of a wish list, he came with a blacklist. ........ sending Mr. Murphy to the floor to beg his colleagues to end a vicious, decades-long cycle of inaction on gun safety and finally do something. .......... Now, sitting with his fellow Democrat, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and two conservative Republicans, Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, to try to hammer out a compromise, he did not even bother mentioning the sweeping gun control measures he and his party had long demanded. .......... the first substantial step in nearly three decades to toughen gun laws. ........ The National Rifle Association was deeply involved in drafting the bill, although the gun rights group ultimately opposed it, as was Everytown, the nation’s leading gun safety group. Their improbable pairing mirrored the unlikely bipartisan coalition of senators that forged the compromise, beginning not with lofty hopes of a historic deal, but by checking their respective priorities at the door. ......... “There’s a couple of ways to do things around here: One is if you want a result; the other is if you just want to make a political statement,” Mr. Cornyn said this week. He added, “I think the Democrats wanted to get a result and we wanted to get a result, so this is what we came up with.” ......... Then Mr. Murphy texted Ms. Sinema after seeing her quoted saying she wanted to talk with Democrats and Republicans to see if there was anything Congress could do to protect frightened children nationwide. ........ “Are you serious?” he typed out on his phone. Ms. Sinema responded that she was. .......... Republicans made sure the N.R.A. was involved, knowing that while the group was unlikely to back any compromise, its vocal opposition could quickly kill any hope of a deal. ...... Mr. Murphy and Ms. Sinema were simultaneously meeting with a broader group of senators in both parties, cobbling together eight other centrists and veterans of past failed efforts at gun safety deals. None of the Republicans was facing re-election, giving the group more political latitude to act without fear of retribution from voters in November’s midterm elections. .......... Senators wrestled with an array of sticking points, sometimes over Thai food or wine Ms. Sinema brought from a Texas-born winemaker. ....... A week earlier, he and Mr. McConnell had commissioned a poll of 1,000 gun-owning households across the country and found that most supported the key elements of the emerging bill. A solid majority backed increasing federal funding for states to maintain or implement red flag laws, and more than 80 percent supported closing the boyfriend loophole and allowing law enforcement to have more time to examine juvenile and mental health records.

Decades Ago, Alito Laid Out Methodical Strategy to Eventually Overrule Roe A slow-burning hostility to constitutional abortion rights runs through the career of the author of the Supreme Court opinion overturning them......... how he slowly and patiently sought to chip away at abortion rights throughout his career before demolishing them in the majority opinion on Friday. ......... “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Justice Alito wrote. “Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.” ........... Even “abortion supporters have found it hard to defend Roe’s reasoning,” he wrote. “One prominent constitutional scholar wrote that he ‘would vote for a statute very much like the one the Court end[ed] up drafting’ if he were ‘a legislator,’ but his assessment of Roe was memorable and brutal: Roe was ‘not constitutional law’ at all and gave ‘almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.’” ........... In a memo on the cases, Mr. Alito displayed not only tactical acumen but personal passion, taking umbrage with a judge’s objection that forcing women to listen to details about fetal development before their abortions would cause “emotional distress, anxiety, guilt and in some cases increased physical pain.” ........ Good, he wrote: Such results “are part of the responsibility of moral choice.” ........ “I personally believe very strongly,” he wrote in an application, that “the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.” ........... But in 2016 and 2020, just as in 1985, a new frontal attack on abortion rights would have failed. With Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg still on the bench, there were not five votes to overturn Roe. This year, there was no longer need for a restrained, slower-burning approach. ......... “Abortion presents a profound moral question,” Justice Alito wrote. “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each state from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

In Unusually Political Speech, Alito Says Liberals Pose Threat to Liberties The conservative justice’s pointed remarks, which he made in a speech to the Federalist Society, reflected thoughts he has expressed in his opinions. ........ Legal experts said there were few clear lines governing what justices may say off the bench.Credit... ....... that liberals posed a growing threat to religious liberty and free speech. ........ While Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has tried to signal that the Supreme Court is apolitical, Justice Alito’s comments sent a different message. ....... “Justice Alito’s speech Thursday was more befitting a Trump rally than a legal society” ........ Mr. Trump has repeatedly credited the Federalist Society with helping draw up his lists of potential nominees to the Supreme Court. All three of his appointees — Justices Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh — appeared on those lists. ......... Public appearances by justices before friendly audiences are commonplace, and several of the court’s more liberal justices have appeared before the American Constitution Society, a liberal group. But the comments they make on such occasions are generally anodyne. ......... Justice Alito’s comments were more pointed, and they were consistent with his sense that his views have not been given the respect they deserve. He felt bruised by some of the questions at his confirmation hearings in 2006 .......... He was not pleased when President Barack Obama criticized the court’s Citizens United campaign finance decision at the State of the Union address in 2010 with six justices present. Mr. Obama said the decision had “reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.” ......... Justice Alito responded by mouthing the words “not true.” He has not attended another State of the Union address. ......... “I am not diminishing the severity of the virus’s threat to public health,” he said. “All that I’m saying is this, and I think that it is an indisputable statement of fact: We have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive and prolonged as those experienced for most of 2020.” ......... The state treated houses of worship less favorably than it did casinos, he said. Casinos were limited to 50 percent of their fire-code capacities, while houses of worship were subject to a flat 50-person limit. .......... The Nevada decision was based in part on a 1905 Supreme Court decision concerning an outbreak of smallpox in Cambridge, Mass., the home of Harvard University. “Now I’m all in favor of preventing dangerous things from issuing out of Cambridge and infecting the rest of the country and the world,” said Justice Alito, who attended Princeton and Yale Law School. “It would be good if what originates in Cambridge stayed in Cambridge.” ............ “Tolerance for opposing views is now in short supply at many law schools and in the broader academic community,” he said. ......... “You can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman,” Justice Alito said. “Until very recently that’s what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now it’s considered bigotry.”

Arlan Hamilton Went From Homeless to Running $20 Million in VC Funds. Here's How She Did It Arlan Hamilton was homeless and sleeping on the floor of the San Francisco Airport in 2015, when an investor wrote the first check that set her on the way to becoming a venture capitalist. ......... Hamilton, then 34, hadn’t attended college and had been working in the music industry. But she read about venture capital and decided that she needed to break into the elite and largely white and male corps of investors funding startup companies. ............ Now, six-and-a-half years later, Hamilton’s VC firm, Backstage Capital, has invested about $20 million in nearly 200 companies, and is in the process of raising a new $30 million investment fund. Backstage has focused on underrepresented founders, including women, people of color, and LGBTQ entrepreneurs. ......... Companies with only women founders received just 2% of venture capital funds invested last year, according to PitchBook. Investments in Black and Latinx female founders represented just 0.64% of VC investment since 2018 ........... “I want to share this journey,

not because I think I’m exceptional, but because, like many people, I have been exceptionally underestimated”

............ To help finance her firm’s operations and open up access to returns from venture capital investments, Hamilton last year raised about $5 million using a new crowdfunding model. ......... I didn’t know what a venture capitalist was in 2010. .......... I didn’t have much money and I didn’t have any connections in that world, but I knew it was for me. .......... 90%-plus of all venture funding and angel funding goes to white men in a country where they make up one-third of the population. That caught me off guard as a gay Black woman in the South with no connections. I thought, ‘That doesn’t seem like that’s going to end well, if that stays the same. ......... I taught myself how to raise money for a fund by diving into any book I could get my hands on and any interview I could get my hands on. I started making phone calls, sending emails in the dozens at a time and little by little started making breadcrumbs and finding my way. And then, you know, an overnight five years later I got a check for $25,000 that would kick off my investing career. ......... 6,500 people invested approximately $5 million over an eight-day period in Q1 of 2021 to now become partial owners of Backstage Management Co., which shares in any upside that we have as a fund across any investment we’ve ever made in the past and will ever make in the future, as long as they hold that stock. .......... when it comes to institutional investors and corporate investors who are throwing money at one company at a time, in some cases that fail, in my opinion it’s insulting that we have to scrape for so little. .......... we’ve only raised $6 million of our $30 million raise. And there are white men who use our thesis and get $200 million, $300 million to start a new fund because they worked at Facebook for two years. But they haven’t done the work that we’ve done for the past decade, I’ve done for the past decade and our team has done for the past six, seven years. ............ So Microsoft, with Satya Nadella at the helm, they invested in our accelerator four years ago. We didn’t have a relationship with them post-George Floyd. .......... with Bank of America, every single person I talked to was Black, who had the decision making ability. On PayPal, nobody was Black and they passed. JP Morgan, Black person was going to say, yes, white person said no. I just recognize patterns. ............. One is the lottery is really risky, but this country has no problem letting Black and brown people spend half their paycheck on the lottery in certain states, casinos, et cetera. ........... My activism is in being successful, wealthy, and also opening up access for others who look like me to do the same. .......... There are people who will chain themselves outside of government buildings, or so they don’t knock down this building, don’t do this pipeline. They’re risking life and limb. They’re risking reputation. They’re risking livelihood because they believe in something so strongly. That is what I’m doing by being so brazen in public, and being so non-humble in public. And also I’m being called a key maker, not a gatekeeper. So I’m throwing open the gates for others to follow me and in doing so I risk life and limb, reputation, livelihood every single day, because I want it to change something in the future, whether I see it or not. I want it to effect change. ........... I will be one of the richest Black women in America, probably in the echelons of Oprah and Beyonce and Rihanna and Serena and all them.




Backstage reflects after reaching 200th investment “Meaning that in 2014 and ’15, when I was telling anyone who would listen that I would invest in 100 companies by 2020, I never imagined we’d be at 200,” she told Green Room. “It was my moonshot idea. One hundred was my moonshot idea. It also signifies and reconfirms what I knew a decade ago, which is that women, people of color, LGBTQ+ founders and others who are underestimated are simply that, are underestimated. And we’re always here. We were always building and innovating and being simply overlooked. So, this means a lot for the ecosystem.” .........

the brilliant underestimated founders building companies.

........ “They believed in us and the market for digital nomads before a lot of other people did,” Carriman said. “And here we are today. The entire world is now working remote. And as a result, the work from anywhere digital nomad lifestyle has gone mainstream and is expanding.” ........ Moving forward, Backstage also plans to focus more on follow-on investments rather than first-time investments in startups. What hasn’t changed, however, is Hamilton’s gut instinct that she continues to use to this day ........ “Somewhere around 60 investments,” Hamilton said, “I stopped trying to predict the future and figured out that trusting my instinct and trusting the founders and where they would lead me was the best strategy.”


How Backstage Capital is creating the next generation of venture capitalists

Venture capital is still mostly pale, male and stale.

......... The idea is to invest in “the future of firsts” by investing in first-time founders, first-generation individuals and early stage startup ideas with an emphasis on underrepresented founders. ........ The pilot program taught 21 apprentices how to evaluate potential deals, identify trends, build a fund from scratch and more. Apprentices also made deal recommendations to the Backstage Capital investment team. ......... Deal warehousing entails investing in a handful of companies before forming a fund to show traction to potential investors. ......... “What’s ‘fun’ for emerging managers is it’s this catch 22 that if you don’t have money, you can’t invest in anyone,” Heyman said. “And if you can’t invest in anyone, you can’t show traction.” ........ Part of achieving those goals entails raising $50,000 through a regulatory crowdfunding campaign. Johnson said he was inspired by Backstage’s Reg CF campaign where the firm raised $4.7 million in one week.


Backstage Capital receives $1M investment from Comcast Backstage has been investing in underestimated founders since 2015. Since then, the firm has built one of the largest portfolios of underrepresented founders in venture capital by investing in nearly 200 startups to date. ......... Backstage Capital made its first investment in Career Karma back in 2018 with a $25K check from a $1.25 million fund. Its latest raise, which Backstage participated in, returned two-thirds of Backstage Capital’s fund. ........... As Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton previously said, the exits from Backstage Capital’s portfolio companies “will be like popcorn, with an exit here, then a few weeks later, there, etc.”

“There are Black people in the future.” It’s time to invest in them. Julia Collins, founder and CEO at Planet FWD, says the lack of equitable access to capital for Black founders is “connected to the core of what’s broken in our country.” ......... the data that diversity is good for business and key to maximizing returns has been out for years. Still, in the first half of 2021, Black founders in the U.S. raised just 1.2% of all venture dollars raised by U.S. startups ........

the lack of funding that goes to Black founders is deeply connected to white supremacy, structural injustice and systematic marginalization.

......... The reason why [access to capital] is such a sticky problem is because it’s connected to the core of what’s broken in our country.” .......... “I would argue access to capital is the only issue that Black founders have to deal with,” Brackeen said. “The real problem is even with the right traction, they can’t get the capital they need. So you get into this truly mathematical conundrum where the better the startup does, the more cash it needs and the less cash that is available, the riskier the business becomes. There’s nothing more dangerous than scaling without the money you need. It can all come crashing down quite quickly.” ............ Part of what led Brackeen to start Lightship Capital was to be the investor he never had. ....... “Arlan, though she tries, can’t fund every single Black company ever,” Brackeen said. “She’s like carrying America on her back. So yeah, there’s got to be more and I wanted to be part of that solution.” .......... LPs are the ones that provide the capital necessary for funds to invest in startups. Typically, LPs are institutional investors, such as pension funds, family offices, college endowments and trusts. ...... That theory aligns with anecdotes of Black firm managers who receive early-stage meetings with investors, but fail to receive the necessary funding. ......... “LPs have created this wild Hunger Games scenario where they’re asking all of us to beat each other to the death. And they won’t adjust for stage.” ......... Andreessen Horowitz, with $12 billion in assets under management at the time, announced an initial $2.2 million to go into its Talent x Opportunity initiative. Array VC, which recently closed a $56.1 million fund, set aside $1 million for racially diverse founders in 2020. And, SoftBank, which operates the $100 billion Vision Fund, set aside $100 million to go toward Black, Latinx and Native American founders............ Increasing access to capital for Black founders is as easy as making the hire and sending the wire .... and as hard as changing the entire fabric of our society ........... And, as we’ve seen throughout the entire existence of America, racial equity across any facet, whether that’s housing, education, employment and so on, is hard to achieve. ....... “If we could just get our fair share based on population of venture capital, you would see the most prosperous country in the world” ....... Black people are “keenly aware of all the ways the system doesn’t work.” ........ she recognizes the system doesn’t work for her and has no allegiance to it


Venture capital is a black box. Backstage Capital’s Christie Pitts wants to make it more transparent.

how pale, male and stale the venture capital world is

......... Given that women hold the majority of spending power in the U.S. and that people of color will soon make up the majority in the U.S., Pitts assumed those folks would receive a large share of the venture capital funding that goes to startups. ......... I rarely have an opportunity to research the company ahead of a meeting.




Yelp CEO: Hybrid is the 'worst'



Anatomy of a Product Placement As consumers skip ads and streaming content balloons, brands aim to be everywhere all at once. ....... When Larry David casually opens the door in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” those shelves need to be full of food and drink, and each one of those items is likely to have a brand: Perrier sparkling water, Pacific chicken broth, Clover cottage cheese. Maybe there will even be a box of Cheerios on top of it, as in a recent episode of “Euphoria.” The fridge itself will have a brand, too, of course. All of this must usually be negotiated through carefully considered placements that give these products their 15 seconds (or less) of fame. ............. The first documented example was in 1896, when the Lumière brothers, often credited as the earliest filmmakers, agreed to feature soap in their film “Washing Day in Switzerland.” .........

the rise of streaming has led to an explosion in product placement.

......... Product placement is now a $23 billion industry, up by an estimated 14 percent since 2020. .......... (Hollywood Branded even has a warehouse full of discontinued BlackBerry cellphones, handpicked PassionRoses, minimalist eero Wi-Fi routers, and all manner of things they can ship to sets on a moment’s notice.) ....... “Say you have a Montblanc pen, you automatically think, That character has a pen worth hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.” ....... “If you have a female whiskey drinker, you know she’ll be a badass character,” said Erin Schmidt, chief product placement officer at BEN, another agency that helps to coordinate product placement. “You don’t need to write more script in there because the brand gives you that contextual element.” ........... A car company might lend an expensive car to a set in exchange for an appearance in the show, or S’well water might mail a case of bottles to propmasters for consideration. (With cars, Schmidt said, there’s often another kind of trade-off: A company might agree to give a certain number that can be destroyed in an action scene, in exchange for being featured in another scene.) There are paid placements, too, but particularly with large streaming companies like Netflix and HBO, it’s more frequently a matter of finagling loan-and-trade agreements to reduce production budgets. ......... “If James Bond were shown drinking only milk, or getting in a Ford Fiesta and not an Aston Martin, viewers would feel that crossed some kind of line” ....... “In every scene, there was an in-place money agreement. There was a kitchen appliance that was in a third of the movie for over $1 million — literally written into the story.” .......... Surveys showed that layering visual and verbal references worked best for Zillow. “Now Zillow as a verb has become a part of the cultural norm,” Schmidt said. .......... when a character on “And Just Like That” had a heart attack while riding a Peloton — causing the real-life brand’s stock to plunge. ......... Certain items can take on almost talismanic importance, like the BlackBerry that Kevin Spacey’s character used in the Netflix series “House of Cards.” ........ verbal mentions, inserted in the script, worked well for Zillow. “We found really fun ways to integrate it verbally, like, ‘I Zillowed his house and it’s only worth x,” Schmidt said. “Saying ‘I’m going to Zillow that house’ became a part of the cultural norm.” .............. At an industry conference in May, Amazon announced that it would be experimenting with a beta version of “virtual product placement,” which the company is testing in shows like “Reacher,” “Jack Ryan,” and the “Bosch” franchise. “It creates the ability to film your series without thinking about all that is required with traditional placements during production” ........... “I think the bigger context is that product placement acclimatizes viewers to the inevitability of capitalist exchange,” Deery, the professor, said. “It normalizes the idea that there is a commercial motive behind almost everything we experience in our increasingly mediatized and branded experience.” .......... this is “its own kind of realism” in a world where brands do reign supreme ........ “Everything is a brand,” Jones said. “You product place roses, almonds. You can do roofing, shingles.” And, of course, the refrigerator. “Refrigerators are full of real products, and you want that to be realistic,” she added. “Unless it’s full of Tupperware. But Tupperware is a brand, too.”


Friday, June 24, 2022

Roe V. Wade

Saturday, June 11, 2022

11: Abortion, Jack Dorsey, Ukraine

Sex, Abortion and Feminism, as Seen From the Right The socially conservative legal scholar Erika Bachiochi argues that abortion rights have stalled women’s progress toward equality. ........ For years, social conservatives provided the G.O.P. its votes and its shock troops. But the economic conservatives got all the policy. Republicans would win by mobilizing evangelicals and then use that power to pass corporate tax cuts............ an inflection point. The multidecade effort to stack the Supreme Court with hardcore social conservatives is paying off. Roe looks like it’s going to be overturned. ......... that Republican politicians of recent years put markets first and families and churches and communities last. And the result has been social disintegration and cultural chaos. .......... If Roe is indeed overturned, the Republican Party in general and social conservatives in particular are going to be the dogs that caught the car. .......... Most Americans don’t want abortion banned. ......... Erika Bachiochi.......... in her 2021 book “The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision,” she tries to build a structure, a philosophical structure, going back to older thinkers, for a socially conservative feminism, one that embraces women’s gains in professional and civic life but holds that abortion and technological forms of contraception and the sexual revolution were devastating for women’s well-being and the cultivation of virtue and duty. ........... Her view is that abortion and contraception — and you’ll hear this — really serve the needs of capital at the expense of families. And with Roe gone, Bachiochi believes that a truly pro-family conservatism and even country can flourish. ......... I tell the story of the cause of women’s rights through the lens of sexual and reproductive asymmetry. I think for a long time in the 1980s — and then still you hear this in different circles, that the real question of feminism is, are women and men the same, or are women and men different? ......... the question of sexual and reproductive asymmetry, the fact that men and women engage in the same sexual act in heterosexual sex but that women can get pregnant and men cannot, is really the one that all feminists are responding to in their different kind of ways. ........ And so we tend to, I think, see the modern day women’s movement really capitulate to a market logic, where equality is seen in market terms, a market equality, where instead of this women as caregivers and men as breadwinners, both men and women are valued only as breadwinners. .......... work of care they do in the home, has not been valued in the market and by our public institutions. And that has been especially, I think, difficult for poor women. .........

a profound problem in our society is that we don’t value care work

......... you’re drawing a fairly deep connection between the rise of contraception, abortion rights, and Roe particularly, the change in our sexual culture, the rise of single parenthood to that devaluing or lack of valuing of care work. ......... contraception and abortion create this dominance of market logic, this devaluing of the family and — I think you’re making this claim — lead women to be worse off. ........... casual sex culture has become sort of the default. And I think that tends to be better for a male sexuality. .......... it’s not to say that there aren’t alpha women who like sex on the first date or the first meeting. But all sorts of data shows us that women tend to prefer sex and actually enjoy sex much more in commitment. ........... The abortion-backed contraceptive revolution has allowed men especially to basically — gives them more reason to walk away from unexpected pregnancy. ........... that’s led to a feminization of poverty. ........... sexual economics ............

single motherhood is the single greatest predictor of poverty in our country

.......... we can point to all sorts of ways in which our current economy and economic transitions have harmed men and made them incapable of being there ............ disconnecting and decoupling sex from marriage and marriage from childbearing is pretty devastating for the poor. ............. the way sex, as thought about today, is very much self-expression, is very much pleasure in mind. And I think, again, there are pretty dangerous asymmetries for women there. Because when you decouple sex from marriage and from childbearing and pleasure is left to be the only marker, that it tends to be far better for men. .......... as it turns out, for women, sex is far more pleasurable in commitment. And why in commitment? Because for sex to be pleasurable for women, there needs to be kind of a vulnerability, where a woman is relaxed enough to enjoy sex. ......... some data about the real orgasm gap that you see in the casual sex culture today ........ a real marker of the decline of good sex, both in the sense of pleasurable sex but also what she calls good or ethical sex, which I think that there’s more sex within marriage, and I think women enjoy sex better in marriage when they can be more vulnerable. .......... freeing women to have sex just like men, which is basically what the pill and abortion do, I think also hasn’t been good for women .......... men have blasts of testosterone beating through them in a way that’s different from — it’s distinguished from women. And that does tend to lend to greater sexual desire and sexual aggression, especially sex that is quicker and easier, quicker release. It’s a different kind of sex than women want. ........ you see in the sexual economic work — that the pill kind of inspires this change in sexual behavior so that there’s more sexual risk-taking both inside and outside of marriage. .......... how the early American women’s rights advocates thought about this, because I think many people now know that they were opposed to abortion. ...........

they really were worried about these threats of undisciplined male sexual desire.

.......... you can bring, I think, women down to men’s standards, which is freewheeling quick sex. Or you can bring men up to women’s standards, which is actually what these women were hoping for ........ it sounds a lot like our desire not to have forced motherhood, which is a real kind of pro-choice slogan. ......... there should be abstinence during the fertile period. ........ You see all sorts of young women, actually — I hear they’re on TikTok being angry about contraception and really being interested, more interested in natural fertility regulation. ........ We want organic food. We want to take care of our bodies in all sorts of ways. And yet here we are consuming vast quantities of hormones to regulate our cycles. ............ it demands abstinence of men during certain times, that it is getting them to be more aware in their bodies just as women are every month because of menses of really the connection between sex and potential parenthood. ......... there are all sorts of signs of fertility that a woman’s body, I guess you could say, emits, things like cervical fluid, rises and falls in temperature, that indicate to the woman how fertile she is and when she could get pregnant. .......... one version is we should have the sexual ideal that is more restrained, more disciplined, more held back than what we currently have. But law — and a lot of this book is about law, and a lot of your advocacy is about law. Law is very much about what happens when things go wrong, when you have sex and maybe you wish you hadn’t, or the form of contraception you were using fails. ......... my understanding of the data is that about a quarter of people who try natural contraception of the kind you’re describing will get pregnant in the first year. ........ the best methods rival the birth control pill, are 1 percent — I mean, the birth control pill also requires a certain discipline, that you take it every day. .......... generally easy access to abortion actually tends to disincentivize contraceptive use. ....... the typical abortion patient. And it found that they have children. They’re poor. They’re unmarried. They’re in their late 20s. They have some college education. And they’re very early in pregnancy. That’s the modal person who gets an abortion. ........... I don’t know that women today, with the state of how women think in terms of that they owe men sex at having a beer, a cup of coffee, or something — that the cost of sex is so low right now that I’m not sure that I can convince women that it would be so much better for them, for their relationships, for their enjoyment of sex to go out and learn natural fertility regulation. ..........

natural fertility regulation is better for women than contraception

.......... this has been bad for women, for their emotions, for all sorts of things. ........ it takes the attention off the real structural problems in the lives of the poor, whether it’s substandard health conditions, whether it’s poor housing, whether it’s neglectful or absent fathers or the fact that their fathers can’t get work and so can’t pay child support. .......... we’re putting poor women in a situation where the best we can get, the richest country in the history of the world, is to offer them the means to have abortions. .......... these choice-based arguments basically strengthen the kind of impulse of our very libertarian culture and politics to leave women with the consequences of the bargain, basically, the consequences of her having gotten pregnant. ........... the way in which we treat pregnant women in the workplace culture, massive pregnancy discrimination still, the kind of workplace conditions that especially poor women have, where they have to return to work. Many women have to return to work within like two weeks or less of giving birth. ......... you have employers, corporations, you have states talking about the corporate case for reproductive health — is that it’s a far cheaper option than accommodations for pregnancy, accommodations for caregiving. And so when they’re thinking about the bottom line, this is the way they’re going to go. ........... neither the red states or the blue states are doing a good job at this ........ because it’s much harder to have a child than walk into an abortion clinic, it becomes an easier choice for that person, one which potentially a woman then suffers regrets from. ........... have abortion restrictions and have these pro-family policies. ............ that’s the work of the pro-life movement going forward. ........ many people end up regretting abortion ....... five years on, 99% of women, 99% who had the abortion said it was the right decision for them. And they were better off on a range of other health and economic outcomes. ......... for those women who were actually denied an abortion, only one week after seeking an abortion but then being denied it, 35 percent of those women no longer wished they could have aborted. .......... the child — well, they don’t call the child — the fetus is like a trespasser on their property of their body, the self-ownership of their body, again, in a very Lockean way — and they then have this right to dispel anyone who comes through it in kind of an absolute property right ........... the child, who is a human being and is really utterly dependent on his or her mother at that time for those nine months, is the most vulnerable and the most dependent. ..........

I don’t understand why it is that we could not think that there are two human beings here.

.......... a fetus at 10 weeks is different than someone at 30 weeks and doesn’t think there’s any easy way to draw the line .......... the choices people actually have to make are agonizing, and they agonize over them. And we should trust often that they know better than we do. .......... there are many women who have difficult or dangerous pregnancies. Most don’t. Most pregnancies aren’t dangerous and are natural experiences of bringing human life into the world. ........ The child who is conceived in rape has the same equal dignity, and therefore, the same sort of duties of care are owed. ........ abortion is actually kind of a second violent act against the pregnant woman. ......... somewhat unresolvable moral and philosophical and religious intuitions. ............ abortion has led to a feminization of poverty .......... marriage and having children inside a marriage has become a very important and profound class marker .......... a child’s life is taken in an abortion and that we actually owe duties to that child, that it helps reset thinking about sex itself, that I think it ought to help us take sex more seriously. .......... And that itself may empower women — I hope it would empower women — to kind of take their place again as gatekeepers of sex. And that is to expect more from men when they engage in sex, to expect commitment. Because if they do wait, if they are able to put off men and to expect more from them, to expect a greater maturity, to expect them to hold down a job, to expect them to get off their computers and get off porn and all sorts of things, that I think there could be a real maturation of men that is required. ............... and then, as the economists say, raise the cost of sex. ....... How opioids have been treated versus how crack was treated is very, very, very telling. .......... European countries have lower marriage rates than we do. And there is a lot of evidence, I think, at this point that pretty unchecked capitalism and a lot of inequality is a real driver of family breakdown in poor communities. ........... massive incarceration is a massive problem because of the way in which it pulls fathers away from their children. To me, it seems like it’s not just the poor who need self-discipline. It’s all of us who need self-discipline. ........... our equal human capacity for moral development. .......... there’s this kind of new antinatalism, this new people deciding ex ante that they never want to become parents. .......... for eons and eons, what human beings have seen is that becoming a mother or father really develops the person, requires a great movement away from the focus on self toward another .......... the kind of quest for autonomy tends to leaves people really empty, tends to leave people literally alone.

We have a loneliness epidemic.

the family is not parasitic on the market. The market is parasitic on the family. .......... policies that prioritize what she said was the family claim over the social claim. .......... now that you mentioned I was a Bernie supporter. But I was studying sociology, women’s studies, and then moved toward political theory in college. ............ a responsive community must act to smooth the path for parents so that the joys of family life might be more easily felt and its burdens more fairly borne. ......... the caring for children and the work of the home is something that all of society benefits from. ............ the idea of spreading costs of child rearing more fully across societies is, I think, a just kind of thing. And so thinking of the market as something that serves families and not just that families serve the market I think is a good way to think about it. .......... workplace flexibility is a really, really important one and predictable scheduling. ........ upper echelons of workers have this knit into their work and that those who are low-wage workers really — it’s the just-in-time scheduling, where they’re given their schedules barely a week ahead of time and have all sorts of difficult childcare predicaments ............. there should really just be a lot more workplace flexibility just as a humane kind of standard. ......... parents really should not be economically disadvantaged by raising children. .......... a man on the moon with government priorities. Why aren’t we prioritizing the really important work that takes place in the home? And so those are some of the basic things that I would say. .......... my time as a women’s studies student at Middlebury College




Jack Dorsey announces ‘Web 5’, a new platform built on Bitcoin blockchain Web5 is developed by The Block Head (TBH), one of the Bitcoin business units at Dorsey’s Block (formerly Square). ....... Web5 is developed by The Block Head (TBH), one of the Bitcoin business units at Dorsey’s Block (formerly Square). The platform brings decentralized identity and data storage to applications. “It lets developers focus on creating delightful user experiences while returning ownership of data and identity to individuals,” according to the company. ........ To the Twitter co-founder, Web 3 isn’t truly “decentralized” or owned by its users, but instead by various venture capitalists and limited partners ........ this web platform is built to provide two core use cases: individuals will have the ability to “own their data”, and they will be able to “control their identity”. These use cases will be supported by wallets, decentralized web nodes (DWNS), and decentralized web apps (DWAS). .......... “there are no tokens to invest in with web5.”