The anti-abortion zealots are losing their minds

Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the US Supreme Court, various states have passed draconian laws to prevent abortions, and women seeking them have gone to other states where it is legal, most recently the case of Kate Cox in Texas. As a result, the anti-abortion people are advocating for ever more bizarre measures to prevent them.

A string of Texas localities have passed controversial ordinances banning so-called “abortion trafficking” – and another city may soon join their number.

Over the last several weeks, the city of Amarillo, Texas, has become embroiled in a debate over whether to pass an ordinance to block people from using the city’s roads to transport pregnant people seeking abortions in other states. The city council will meet on Tuesday to debate the measure. It is not expected to vote.

This type of ordinance has sprung up as part of a new anti-abortion tactic to undermine people’s ability to flee states with abortion bans. Since the fall of Roe v Wade, abortion foes have scrambled to find a way to cut off what they see as “abortion trafficking,” even though many experts argue that the US constitution protects the right to interstate travel.

What next? Imprisoning all pregnant women until they give birth to make absolutely sure that they cannot get an abortion?

The anti-abortion forces are fighting an unpopular war since most people favor at least some right to abortions, that it should be allowed with certain limitations. Roe v. Wade struck a tenuous balance on abortion rights that seemed to come close to where public opinion lay,. Overturning it has resulted in some people thinking that they can have a complete ban.

Moves such as this travel ban will only serve to reinforce the idea that the anti-abortion forces are unhinged extremists.

What would a criminal justice system in the absence of free will look like?

I read the new book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by neurobiologist Robert M. Sapolsky where he outlines the biological basis for why we have no free will. I will discuss the main arguments of the book in a later post but here I want to outline what he says about an objection that believers in free will often raise, and that is that if we say that all our actions are determined by our genes, history, environment, and random factors, and that we did not freely choose to do them, then people who commit crimes should not be blamed and punished. He agrees that such people should not be blamed for what is after all outside their control and that retributive and punitive punishments, that form such a large part of our criminal justice system, have no place. But that does not mean that we simply do nothing.

He sets up his argument by recalling how things have changed so dramatically over time in the way that we respond to people with illnesses like epilepsy or schizophrenia that cause them to act in ways that are dangerous to themselves and to others. (Chapter 13, pages 300-340) In the past, it used to be thought that their actions were freely chosen ones and they were punished accordingly, often in horrendous ways. Not anymore. Now we realize that they are victims of illnesses that cause them to behave in those ways, and we have changed our response accordingly. As he says: “Once, having a seizure was steeped in the perceptions of agency, autonomy, and freely choosing to join Satan’s army. Now we effortlessly accept that none of those terms make sense. And the sky hasn’t fallen. I believe that most of us would agree that the world is a better place because sufferers of this disease are not burned at the stake.” (p. 316)
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Temu: A rival to Amazon

Amazon has become a retail behemoth, driving out much of the retail competition. It did this by providing low prices for an immense array of goods and fast delivery, and with those methods managed to develop a huge customer and supplier base. The way it did that was by selling below cost and offering incentives to sellers and in the process running up huge deficits in the initial years. By those methods, it persuaded manufacturers and other retailers to sell through the site. I read about a company that sold diapers online and was doing well. Amazon tried to buy the company but when the company turned down its offer, Amazon cut the prices of its own diapers well below cost and drove the rival out of business. That kind of tactic is only possible for companies with large cash reserves or huge amounts of venture capital and other financing.

Initially, both manufacturers and consumers got a good deal. But once they all got hooked and Amazon became almost a monopoly, Amazon started squeezing them by raising prices. It is an old trick. Since manufacturers who sold through it had to guarantee that their product would not be available cheaper anywhere else, what they did was raise the price of their product everywhere outside of Amazon to be higher. Someone I know recently went looking for a part to fix his dishwasher. He found that Amazon had the lowest price but that the part at the manufacturer’s own site was a few cents more.

The Federal Trade Commission is currently suing Amazon for this and other monopoly practices.
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Sex work should be legalized and destigmatized

Kal Penn, this week’s guest host of The Daily Show, talked about the need to legalize sex work and highlighted how in Nevada they have done so with good results. Apparently Maine has also just decriminalized sex work. Let’s hope the movement spreads.

Although strippers are not sex workers, they too suffer from considerable stigma and hence are deprived of some of the protections that other workers enjoy and thus can be exploited and abused by the management of the places they work in and also by the clientele. Adam Conover, a big advocate of unions, had an interesting discussion with two strippers who unionized their place of work so that they could address these abuses.

Next step for Trump: Shrines and sainthood?

You have to hand it to serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT). He has raised the bar for snake-oil salespersons to great heights, ingeniously finding new ways to part the suckers from their money. His new pitch is a real doozy.

Despite his claims, Donald Trump’s business career has had many more failures than successes.

His record of catastrophic investments has never held Trump back, however, and now the one-term, twice-impeached, 91-time felony-charged former president has embarked on a new hustle: selling little cut-out pieces of a suit he wore during one of his arrests.
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To buy a piece of the suit, people first have to buy 47 “digital trading cards”, each featuring an illustration of Trump, through the Collect Trump Cards website. Buyers will then receive a bit of the suit, or tie, that Trump wore when he was arrested – on charges related to his attempts to overturn the election – at Fulton county jail in August 2023.

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Giuliani ordered to pay $148.1 million in damages

It looks like the jury was well and truly angered by the way Rudy Giuliani treated the two poll workers Ruby Freeman daughter Shaye Moss in Georgia and unanimously ordered him to pay them whopping damages, well above the $48 million their lawyer suggested.

Giuliani said that he will appeal but then proceeded to absurdly claim that he could still prove his claims.

Giuliani, meanwhile, doubled down on his false claims about Freeman and Moss, saying again that he had evidence they were true.

“The absurdity of the number merely underscores the absurdity of the entire proceeding where I’ve not been able to offer one piece of evidence in defense, which I have a lot,” Giuliani said in a short press gaggle, promising to appeal the result.

“So I am quite confident when this case gets before a fair tribunal it will be reversed so quickly that it will make your head spin and the absurd number that just came in will help that, actually.”

He also continued to insist that his claims about the two women were justified. “I have no doubt that my comments were made and they were supportable and they are supportable today,” he said.

He has had plenty of opportunities to provide the evidence and prove his case and still has not done so. Even his lawyer did not bring up that defense in this trial, because Giuliani had in an earlier proceeding conceded that he had defamed the two women. While his lawyer expressed some contrition on his behalf, Giuliani seems to be living in a dream world where he thinks his lies will be believed.

Giuliani refused to turn over documents as part of the case and conceded earlier this year that he made false statements about the women. Howell found him liable of defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy. The only question for the jury to decide was how much in damages Giuliani should pay.

Joseph Sibley, Giuliani’s attorney, conceded to jurors in his opening statement that his client had done something wrong by making false statements. But over the course of the week, he sought to distance Giuliani from the threats and harassment that resulted from the false statements. He also argued that the tens of millions of dollars they requested were not proportional to the harm they had suffered.

I really think Giuliani is delusional.

Giuliani the coward faces the reckoning

Rudy Giuliani’s trial is over. His lawyer did not call any witnesses for the defense. The jurors deliberated for about three hours yesterday before adjourning and will resume their work today.

Beryl Howell, the US district judge, had already found him liable for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and civil conspiracy when he publicly attacked Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Georgia election workers, accusing them of switching votes from serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) to Joe Biden. This trial was for eight members of the jury to decide how much in damages the two workers were entitled to for the hell that they went through at the hands of SSAT’s supporters because of Giuliani’s lies.

In his closing statement, the women’s lawyer Michael Gottlieb described the harrowing experiences that the two women had undergone because of Giuliani’s vicious attacks.

Attorneys for Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss are urging the panel to award the women $24 million apiece for Giuliani’s defamation against them, which they say ignited years of threats, professional and personal consequences and devastation of their mental health. Moss and Freeman are also asking for an unspecified additional amount for emotional distress, as well as a “punitive” award to deter future misconduct.
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“He has no right to offer defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob in order to overturn an election,” Gottlieb said during his closing argument. “The cost that has [been] imposed on Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, on all those he has deceived, and to the public confidence in our democracy are incalculable.”

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Undermining the model minority myth

Kal Penn, this week’s guest host on The Daily Show, did his bit to undermine the model minority myth by having a discussion on politics with a group of Indian-Americans, in which most of the men revealed themselves to be utterly smug, self-satisfied, opinionated, arrogant, and ignorant, older versions of Vivek Ramaswamy. I wish I could suggest that Penn had picked a particularly obnoxious group but my own experience with other people from the Indian subcontinent, including Sri Lankans, supports the view that of course while not everyone is like that, the negative impression that especially the older men gave is not at all uncommon.

Add ‘compassion’ to the ‘thoughts and prayers’ cop-out

Whenever there is a mass shooting, sadly so common in the US, the gun lobby and its servile politicians quickly repeat the ‘thoughts and prayers’ trope to avoid having to say anything about what might be done to stop the killings. Thanks to much ridicule, I notice that they are trying to avoid saying that and find different ways to say and do nothing. We are now seeing something similar with abortion.

Abortion has become a hot potato for Republican politicians who have long been stridently calling for the overthrow of Roe v. Wade but having achieved that goal, are now struggling to find ways to respond to the draconian anti-abortion laws passed by red states that are widely seen as political liabilities.

Take the case of Kate Cox who had to travel out of Texas in order to get an abortion that her physician had said was necessary because the fetus had a serious defect that made survival highly unlikely even for a few days after birth, and also risked the life of the mother and her ability to have more children. The Republican presidential candidates Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis were asked about whether they agreed with Texas attorney general Ken Paxton’s action that forced Cox to go out of state and they ducked the question and resorted to calling for ‘compassion’.
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Judge asks Giuliani’s lawyer: Is he mentally competent?

Rudy Giuliani, lawyer and advisor to serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), has long been behaving erratically and provided plenty of comedic fodder to late night talk show hosts. But his recent behavior in one particular case has caused the judge overseeing it to wonder whether he was in fact losing his marbles.

The case arose from the defamation suit filed by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a mother and daughter who were poll workers in Atlanta, GA whom Giuliani had publicly accused of changing votes in favor of Joe Biden, and he also threw in the gratuitous implication that they were drug users, saying that they were “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine” and that it was obvious they were “engaged in surreptitious illegal activity.” In an earlier proceeding, Giuliani conceded that the statements were false but that they were protected by the First Amendment.

But yesterday, outside the courtroom after the first day of the trial for damages, Giuliani said that he would prove that his allegations were true, which made the clearly incredulous judge ask his lawyer if Giuliani was all there, since his statements made him liable for a second defamation charge. Giuliani’s lawyer did not seem to be sure how to answer.
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