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MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10m ago
The good argument is that serious attempts to enforce such a law involve criminal investigations of miscarriages to see if they were induced deliberately, and having criminal investigations of miscarriages is worse than failing to prevent the vanishingly small numbers of abortions that (a) actually happen and (b) the British public want to ban.
The other argument being widely made by feminists is that medication abortion should be available to women who have a reason for avoiding the medical system.
What is really going on is that about 20 women got abortion pills by telemedicine during the pandemic in order to illegally abort post-viability fetuses and were prosecuted for it, and this made the issue salient to the abortion-up-to-birth-for-any-reason feminists but not to WTF-don't-kill-viable-babies normies.
rae
19m ago
Everyone wants gibs. Cushy government jobs, questionable grants, corporate welfare and industry nepotism are not a gendered phenomenon.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
22m ago
I preface this by saying it is entirely devil’s advocacy, but it seems like this sort of legislation would be logically coherent under the ‘libertarian violinist’ pro-abortion argument. It’s the woman who is inconvenienced by having another person strapped to her circulatory system, so she has an excuse to get away with murder. No-one violated the NAP on the doctor, so he doesn’t have an excuse.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
25m ago
The transcript of the debate appears to support your uncharitable description. Antoniazzi:
Although abortion is available in England and Wales under conditions set by the Abortion Act 1967, the law underpinning it, which dates back to 1861—the Offences Against the Person Act—means that outside those conditions, abortion remains a criminal offence carrying a maximum life sentence. Originally passed by an all-male Parliament elected by men alone, this Victorian law is increasingly used against vulnerable women and girls. Since 2020, more than 100 women have been criminally investigated, six have faced court, and one has been sent to prison. The women affected are often acutely vulnerable. Victims of domestic abuse and violence, human trafficking and sexual exploitation; girls under the age of 18; and women who have suffered miscarriage or stillbirth, or have given birth prematurely, have faced invasive and prolonged criminal investigations that cause long-term harm.
The fact is that new clause 1 would take women out of the criminal justice system, and that is what has to happen and has to change now. There is no way that these women should be facing what they are facing.
I implore colleagues not to lose sight of the moral imperative here: namely, vulnerable women being dragged from hospital bed to police cell on suspicion of ending their own pregnancies. This is urgent. We know that multiple women are still in the system awaiting a decision, accused of breaking this law. They cannot afford to wait.
We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to put an end to this in a simple and secure manner. This is the right change at the right time, so I implore colleagues who want to protect women and abortion services to vote for new clause 1. Let us ensure that not a single desperate woman is ever again subject to traumatic criminal investigation at the worst moments of their lives.
I need to rant about timesheets. I have lost so much sleep because of them, and they have done a great job in completely destroying my self esteem.
For those of you not in the know, here's a rundown of how internal budgeting in public accounting usually works: A fixed fee is quoted on the engagement letter to the client, which is ostensibly supposed to be based on the amount of time the job took during previous years. As a public accountant you have an internal hourly rate, and when you fill out your timesheet the hours you've taken on a job get multiplied by that rate. The resulting amount is called a WIP, and that is compared against the bill to see if the job was over or under budget. The percentage of hours spent that are actually billed is called "realisation".
In theory it's just meant to be a measure of the actual amount of time it takes to perform the task so people know if they're pricing properly, and if there is out-of-scope work the additional billing will be estimated based on the extra time recorded in the timesheet. In practice? It gets used as a measure of individual efficiency and will impact judgements of employee performance - which doesn't make much sense considering that employees do not get paid overtime in public accounting but are getting punished for booking their overtime because opportunity cost. To make this even more comically sadistic, you're expected to book a specific number of hours per week, and there's also yet another metric that gets used to evaluate employees: utilisation, which is the percentage of time that you actually spent doing productive work - so you can't book a lot of your work hours to admin and get away with it. The budgets, along with the utilisation requirements, often results in there being an incentive to work huge amounts of overtime and book only the normal hours (eating hours) so both realisation and utilisation can look peachy. Often that pressure gets put on the managers and that pressure trickles down to employees.
A new employee that doesn't really play the timesheet game will end up with sizeable writeoffs on many of their prior jobs - I have a mere 1.5 years of experience in tax proper (note most tax accountants did not, in fact, study a whole lot of tax and are usually picking it all up on the job), and I can say the work that can reach you is often highly heterogenous - there's a lot of self-learning involved and a lot of time spent just doing that. In addition, you are also juggling a lot of clients and handling a good amount of client communications to the point you are expected to hound them repeatedly to respond to requests for information or to sign the tax returns you've provided them like idiot children, which means you're being split between many different tasks and you lose a lot of time because this task-switching imposes a serious mental load.
If you're confused on a technical topic you're expected to ask questions, but people are often busy enough that the answer you get is never very helpful. If you half-ass jobs due to the lack of guidance you receive, you'll receive snarky review points in your workpaper, and if you attempt to make your jobs highly technically accurate (something I did), that takes time and requires a large amount of unpaid overtime from you - but you will get penalised for it if you actually record it. Another aspect that makes this even worse is that tax and accounting software used in many firms is hilariously finicky and takes a while to sort out, which inflates actual time spent even further - but higher-ups tend to be distanced enough from such preparation that they underestimate how much time troubleshooting it actually takes. Oh also sometimes you can be within budget but underutilised through no fault of your own because the firm just does not have enough work at a certain point in the year, and be criticised for not doing enough.
In other words, timekeeping in many public accounting firms is a lose/lose/lose situation. Charge your hours and go over budget? Managers complain about blowing the budget and being inefficient. Charge your hours and come in under budget? Managers complain that your utilisation has gone to shit. Charge inaccurate hours to make sure you don't come off as inefficient or underutilised? Well the number is all fake anyway, so why track hours in the first place? Timekeeping ends up being a pointless part of the job, a metric that can be optimised for greatest manager and partner satisfaction, but provides zero actual value. You're not supposed to eat time, but you're supposed to come in under budget and if you don't you will be called in and given review points. Great. I had a complaint just yesterday that my total productive hours were higher than expected for the year and that this meant I blew budgets on jobs - which means the obvious solution is not to book any of these hours spent doing work. In my view it shouldn't matter as long as you bill enough per month - the actual billings don't change regardless of what you decide to put on the timesheet, and neither does your pay, but they treat their ridiculous metrics as Divinely Ordained Truth. Nobody will acknowledge how stupid this entire system is, and will expect you to play along.
Maybe I have a bad attitude, but I've long stopped caring about how accurate anything on my timesheet is. I think I'm going to update my resume, apply for a couple of jobs - in industry, not public - and hand in my two weeks notice as soon as I have another offer.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
27m ago
First of all: It's fun
Came here to post this. Arguing online is entertaining. I possibly spent too much time in high school debate club as a teen
rae
30m ago
What is the objective of this male general strike? What’s in it for the men, just teaching some women who making annoying videos a lesson? Why would any man who’s a productive member of society rally behind this?
Society is set up so no woman need to be entirely reliant upon a particular man.
That benefits men too! The time when the average man needed to farm the land, build a house and fix most things he owned himself is over. Men are just as reliant on the collective labour of society as women. Any blue or white collar male worker needs the police, firefighters, agricultural workers etc just as much as any woman, and can count on disability and unemployment benefits if things go poorly (maybe less so in the US, but that’s another issue).
And it’s not like women don’t do any “essential” work. The healthcare system would fall apart without the majority female nurses and staff. Childcare? Education? Who does the majority of the work when it comes to household and raising kids? Fighting over which is more “essential” is pointless.
You’re just doing the same old identity politics as the feminists you’re complaining about, just flipped.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
35m ago
Not sure. This seems like a fairly evident instance of moderating the post and not the poster. Hadad's was rule-compliant even if it was bad, whereas Chris' contained a personal attack and thus broke a rule even if it correctly identified Hadad's post as bad. Pretty much just like Amadan's modpost said. If this actually encourages Hadad (and/or others) to post more screeds and discourages Chris (and/or others) from arguing against them, then...well, that's not good either, of course, but it's by no means certain that that will even be the effect. Whereas ignoring the rules to play favorites with this or that poster just throws the foundations of the motte out of the window, which is certain to have negative consequences for everyone.
JTarrou
36m ago
If war becomes increasingly technological, as seems the trend, we can expect a re-feudalization of our politics produced by this basic military necessity. Not in our lifetime, of course, but soon. Mass politics is necessary to get masses of men into the field in an age when how many men you can put in the field determines who wins. This five hundred year cycle of "democracy" has really been the political concessions necessary to get large numbers of men into the army.
When the question is "who has the ability to call a drone strike?" The answer does include a few dozen corporations, major police forces, criminal organizations, terrorists and a cracked-out teenager from Burbank, but does not include a majority of nations. A new sort of feudal system must necessarily form as military capacity is disengaged from political organization.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
59m ago
I never seen somoeone get under your skin quite so much.
I understand the frustration, but you don't need the explicit hostility to make your point. Even if your every word was coated in pure sugar, it would be hard not to reach the same conclusion as you did.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
Is there an actual justification for this anywhere or is this just "women can do no wrong" crystallizing into law?
Lizzardspawn
1hr ago
A brilliant stratagem in the culture war - if your hand is worth playing, then is it worth overplaying and then you look like a surprised pikachu when the pendulum start swinging in the other direction.
2rafa
1hr ago
To be honest, though, everything is midwit if you’re an internet snob like you and me, Dean. Bellingcat? The ultimate midwit NAFO publication. The London/NY/Paris Review of Books? Catastrophically midwit zine read by aging socialists of the kind who use The Guardian’s dating platform and chuckle at another lame Trump nickname at dinner parties. The New Yorker? Vanity Fair? Magazines for parents of Julliard students, nought more need be said. The popular substacks or newsletters (unaffiliated or affiliated) of erstwhile online political commentators (Iglesias, Sullivan, Klein)? Soothing balm for dull, aging millennial and GenX centrists upset at a world they no longer understand. More obscure commentator figures (Yarvin, Kriss)? Slightly more verbose Twitter bait dressed up for the audience of clapping chimps paying $5 a month to chuckle gently while pretending to do their email job and thinking themselves above the worker ant masses consuming their cyber slop.
In the end, the choice is between the last few good blogs (never read the comments), the intelligent but supremely annoying autists at HN and LW (but only on topics they know something about), prediction markets, a few good bank and third party research analysts if you can get access through your company, some columnists that agree with your personal biases at major publications and this place.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
That’s one example. This is a war that the U.S. is far less clearly involved in than Ukraine and which is clearly about US policy. Global hegemony isn’t waning.
Israel is generally considered to be a US client state even more than Ukraine (which if it is a client state is a shared project of the EU and US). I am not sure if public opinion on this point is correct, but I am pretty certain the people fleeing Tehran see it that way, and would do even if it wasn't for pro-regime propaganda in Iran.
sun_the_second
1hr ago
As if governments didn't collect taxes with brutal force for less noble causes than that for millenia.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
I think this has been overtaken by events in Ukraine - also by the news about what the US was actually doing in Afghanistan. Actual drone warfare fought by people who know they are at war, hate the enemy, and want to win, is about as gentlemanly as WW1 era trench warfare.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
Nursing homes are containment areas.
Yes aging to death in there is horrible for everyone involved, but it involves fewer people and keeps the horror away from anyone who isn't professionally obliged to deal with it.
You degenerating in your home means neighbors, landlords and everyone nearby need to deal with your increasingly disagreeable behavior and appearance, if you still drive then you may also endanger other people in traffic, and even if not everyone around needs to be on their guard lest you burn the house down.
It's horrible either way, but making you die under controlled conditions is somewhat more pro-social. Except for you of course, but you aren't really part of society anymore by that point.
God, I hope I just die from lightning strike.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
The most notorious one is Pottukoira ("Potato dog"). I don't actually actively watch this shit so I can't confirm the level of drunkenness right now, but he appears to currently be in Estonia, so it is likely to be extremely high.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
· Edited 52m ago
To which I say, you aren't offering any evidence that these compromises are offered in bad faith, you're pretending to read the minds of your outgroup and ascribe the worst possible impulses to them.
I feel there's kind of a false dichotomy/definition debate going on here.
Let's talk about Newcomb's Paradox. There is and stubbornly remains some class of people who think the solution to the problem is to intend to one-box, but then to become a two-boxer after Omega has made its prediction. This solution is fatally flawed because, to misquote Minority Report, "Omega doesn't care what you intend to do. Only what you will do". If one will "become" a two-boxer before the decision is made, then one already is a two-boxer, because the definition of a two-boxer is "one who will pick both boxes", not "one who currently thinks he will pick both boxes". If I am programming Omega, and I want to make Omega as reliable as possible, I should count such people as two-boxers because they will two-box; their false consciousness of being a one-boxer, no matter how sincerely believed, is not actually relevant.
(I went looking for the exchange I had with one of these people, but I couldn't find it.)
The shape of the excluded third option should now be pretty clear. There exists a class of people who'll sincerely make a compromise, and then change their minds later. When talking about your ingroup, the natural tendency is to count these people as "good faith", because they believe what they say and you sympathise with them. When talking about your outgroup, the natural tendency is to count these people as "bad faith" because the natural context of analysing your outgroup is wanting to know whether deals will be kept or not.
Hence, under their definitions, "deals have not been kept in the past" is evidence of bad faith, because "your outgroup doesn't care what you intend to do. Only what your movement will do". It's not totally-irrefutable evidence - movements change, and not all deals are created equal - but it's relevant. Moreover, I think modelling social justice as unable to keep its bargains is actually fairly justified, because of two reasons:
-
Social justice is leaderless. Committees are bad at keeping their bargains absent specific effort, because committees tend to include people who wanted to reject the bargain, and turnover might lead to those people gaining control of the committee at some point (and "you should respect a bargain you never agreed to, because others in your movement did over your objection" is a much-tougher sell than "you should respect a bargain you agreed to"*).
-
Social justice is not very interested in keeping historical norms. "Dead old white men", and so forth. So that tough sell is even tougher.
I get that it's really awkward to respond to the claim "you can't make a believable compromise, because you will change your mind and/or others in your movement will overrule you". I sympathise. Unfortunately, that doesn't always mean it's false.
*I'm reminded of the exchange at the end of the TNG episode "The Pegasus":
PICARD: In the Treaty of Algeron the Federation specifically agreed not to develop cloaking technology.
PRESSMAN: And that treaty is the biggest mistake we ever made! It's kept us from exploiting a vital area of defence.
PICARD: That treaty has kept us in peace for sixty years, and as a Starfleet officer, you're supposed to uphold it.
It's very, very easy to be a Pressman.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
My understanding is that Mamdani's rise has basically been achieved mostly by hammering the housing issue. His policies would be unlikely to fix the issue, but that's still there.
2rafa
1hr ago
No, The Economist’s readership has a substantial number of students and juniors, plus interested normal people who like to imagine themselves as the kind of person who reads it, many of whom don’t have a lot of money. It’s largely the magazine for the back office. FT Weekend’s readership is likely wealthier, because it’s mainly older print readers of the paper who have some money (students and juniors on the app aren’t going to care to read it).
Tatler’s readership is bifurcated between that sub-group of rich Arabs and Asians (they have a big audience in Hong Kong, Singapore and the Gulf) who enjoy the Anglo aesthetic, are often involved with polo, ride, have country houses in England, that sort of thing, and the residual English upper and upper-middle classes, some of whom have money and some of whom don’t. That niche means Tatler’s ads are more targeted, although there is still plenty of Patek and Lori Piana. Bien pensant PMCs might read that awful Air Mail or even worse Monocle, which also have all the Rolex and Porsche ads.
Botond173
1hr ago
And even if you're healthy, what happens if you get Alzheimer's? You wouldn't even know it, and eventually you'd either freeze to death trying to walk to work or get in a car accident if you still drive.
As opposed to keeping to exist basically as a vegetable in the nursing home your children paid to let you in, which I suppose is much better.
Botond173
1hr ago
That’s a fair point and we need to consider the steps that need to be taken to avoid that fate.
• You need to have a happy, functioning marriage that preferably produces multiple children • Those children need to become well-adjusted working normies producing an economic surplus • Both you and at least one of the children need to organize your lives so that you live in relatively close vicinity • Your children need to be willing and able to help you with their time, effort, money etc. whether they are themselves married or not
You’ll avoid the sad fate you described when all four of those conditions are met.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2hr ago
blackmail enough American politicians (with child rape)
Are you serious?
I don't.
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