yeahiknow3 @ yeahiknow3 @lemmings.world

Posts

1

Comments

426

Joined

1 yr. ago

Volunteering is fine, paying is not. There’s consensus in the philosophical literature that commodified surrogacy is immoral.

People use their bodies for work, true. The difference when it comes to giving birth is that

1. each birth shortens a woman’s lifespan by 2 to 4 (let me know if you want links to the medical research).
2. giving birth is the most intense endocrinological process in the animal kingdom and can be psychologically scarring, especially if you need to give up your baby.
3. there’s no good reason to do it. When you hire someone to work with their body (for instance, construction) we consider the risks associated with that work and weigh them against the need for that work to get done (its utility). Is there an alternative? Is it really worth it? How much would people get hurt? What’s the possibility for exploitation? Simply put, whereas many types of physical labor have to get done and aren’t all that harmful, we tend to make illegal the ones that don’t need to get done or which are harmful. For instance, we don’t look kindly on mining for radioactive material without protective equipment. We have OSHA, we don’t allow you to be paid to chop off your own body parts for someone else’s amusement, etc.
4. it’s dangerous! In the United States donating a kidney — yes, having a kidney cut out of your body — is safer in the long (and short) term than giving birth. If we allowed surrogacy, we would have to allow organ selling, which is technically safer. That’s the death knell of civilized society. Political arguments will be, “why should we help the poor when they can sell their organs or do surrogacy.”

Regarding sex work, you’re right; it’s so profitable and ubiquitous that making it illegal creates a black market, which is one of the main sources of harm for that industry; legalizing and regulating it makes it less exploitative and dangerous. The opposite is true for surrogacy, which is neither ubiquitous nor profitable (hence the exploitation of poor foreign girls).

You’re paying some impoverished exploited person to destroy her body giving birth so you can take away her baby… in a world on the verge of resource collapse with 8 billion humans boiling alive and countless orphans, the rich have found yet another scheme to make things worse.

EDIT: medically illiterate morons in this thread arguing that giving birth should be commodified. Fuck. You.

We really need France to repay Haiti, with interest.

An uplifting story.

He is a narcissist of the highest order. Exploited kids with illegal and rigged lotteries.

Believe it or not, some college students are leftists and they usually live in cities.

Given everything we know about Bill Gates, his support of Trump would be extraordinarily unlikely.

Fucking hell.

The government is actually helpless to stop these mergers (see Lina Khan). It’s the courts, which Republicans have been packing for decades.

Yep, I quit T-Mobile and switched to Mint last month for this exact reason. My price is now 1/4 what I was paying before, and everything else is exactly the same. Should’ve done this years ago.

Weird clarification, but the iPhone has shitloads of adblock, much more so than Android. There are YouTube apps that block all video ads, for instance. iOS even has a vpn built into the OS.

To be fair, censorship on Reddit is already very very aggressive. I was banned for saying “yay” on a news thread about the death of the queen.

Anytime people blame the US government, as if it’s some abstract independently motivated entity, they need to remember that half the American citizenry wants things to be much much worse. They want a climate apocalypse, billionaire feudalism, religious nationalism, reproductive slavery, etc.

I find these posts blaming “Biden” for Israel or “Congress” for climate change utterly moronic. Dude, your parents and grandparents elected these people. They elected them in primaries for half a century straight, And they will do it again and again until there’s no living creature left on this husk of a planet. But sure, it’s some government representative that’s the problem.

Delta airlines is pro suicide.

Exactly, except it’s true of all voting, since if just 80% of people voted, the Democratic Party would actually be left wing and have a supermajority in every branch of the government.

It is the American way.

Correct, it’s a flawed democracy, for many reasons, not least of which is the over-representation of older rural voters who are religious and frankly insane (but I repeat myself). Happily they’re the ones who will die first to the climate apocalypse.

Anyway, that’s why polls showing 51% approval of any policy are politically irrelevant. Except in this case popular approval for measures limiting car usage and meat eating probably hovers in the single digits.