Consequences which are already happening. Women are dying from abortion laws. Trans individuals are dying due to anti trans laws. The data is out there proving it.

It's not my imagination, it'd Donald Dump's own words:

"I will sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age. [...] I will ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female and they are assigned at birth."

"I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical-left lunatics. And I think… and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or if really necessary by the military"

“It’s so bad they should lose their license, and they should take ’60 Minutes’ off the air”

And frankly, I'm glad that I care about things that may affect people other than me. It means I'm probably not a narcissist.

What human rights people are allowed to have is a difference of opinion?? Who gets thrown in jail for being "the enemy within" is a difference of opinion? Which media outlets get closed down for airing Pumpkin Spice Palpatine's dirty laundry is a difference of opinion?

Kindly quit turning down the lights and telling us it's our imagination.

How so? When competition can merely be purchased, why wouldn't the larger company do so? Or if the competitor doesn't want to sell, the larger company can undercut them until they're forced to sell or exit the market. No government required for either tactic, and there are plenty of examples of both occurring in US history. For example, Standard Oil, which was formed when about 40 smaller companies joined forces.

Another place where monopolies take root with no state input is when there's a large barrier to entry, such as with railroads. The cost (and justifying the cost to investors) is too much for most companies to even break ground, let alone complete. For example, Bell System, which owned the copper in the ground and the equipment producer Western Electric.

Now then, of course a state can and do also raise the cost of entry for new competitors - but then we're going to be talking about a regulated market.

"In economics, a free market is an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any other external authority."

I'll even blame videogames to a certain extent. You used to have to read a lot of text to get the story of a videogame, but now it's all voiced. Games like "Sea of Stars" where it's still text based are the minority these days. And they'll probably become even more of a minority with the rise of AI narration.

For those who remember "Reading Rainbow" - it was taken off the air at the time of "no child left behind" because PBS put a emphasis on learning to read, and didn't have the budget to continue Reading Rainbow.

It's sad, but at a time when there are more books than one could ever read in a dozen lifetimes, reading has been set aside. I almost wonder if the pendulum will swing back, and humankind will become oral storytellers once again.

On the flip side, without the government to enforce a contract one party has broken, there would be no reason to ever fulfill a contract - you'd have to rely on citizen's force, and history has not shown that it's been particularly good to rely on regular citizens.

But his having different priorities than us doesn't make him a hypocrite.

Beyond enforcement, the government has no real part in the former. Except perhaps not disallowing it. But we have rights to specific parts of usage excluded from land sales all the time - water rights being a particularly gnarly one.

I think the poll results have been skewed by their reliance on cold calling people, and those cold calls probably only really hit those who are 50+. I don't believe the Republican party has anywhere near the same kind of support from those under 50.

So even if you consider the flushing of an embryo or fetus to be murder, the abortion bans have not (and likely will not) help the numbers.

It's interesting how this narrative has developed only in the past 40 years or so. At the time of Roe vs. Wade, the Catholic Church did not view a person as being alive until the first breath (a view held today by the Jewish Faith - I've heard they consider the truncated care available to women as an affront to their faith). It wasn't until around Regan that the view really started to change as stopping abortion became a mainstay of the Republican party's policies.

This incorporation into their policies and values is mostly what drove the change in view - going from "it's not a person until it's born" to "fetal personhood". Then after the Dobbs decision and in the leadup to this election, that the phrase murder started being thrown around.

Ever wonder why they're still only prosecuting for the act of abortion, not murder? It's because federal law (which trumps state law) only considers a person as someone who is born.

> they've all collectively decided not to bother trying to seem sincere to those who do not agree with them.

I'd argue that they act quite sincere, and often violently so. Raised voices is the least of what a conversation between a "abortion is murder" and "abortion is health care" tends to result in.

But, the moment you start interacting with society at large, you have to follow that society's laws. Laws which have always included things like quarantining and mandatory vaccinations to prevent the spread of infectious disease.

See, as one example, the 1920 response to the Spanish Flu epidemic.

She's a woman, belongs to a minority race, and a criminal. Yet I still believe she should have the same human rights as a white Christian man.

First, in 2020 abortion was not a crime since it is pre-Dobbs.

Second, they don't know why she miscarried. They only assumed (as you've noted).

They simply got creative in the meth charges in an effort to push the "unborn baby" narrative over a "fetus". The fact that the woman was a minority and a criminal simply made it easier.

> Is the argument that the mother has absolutely no responsibility for the well-being of the fetus?

Not really, when it results in a miscarriage. There's just too many reasons that miscarriage can happen, and no real reason to prove why to anything resembling reasonable doubt. If the child had lived to be born and shown problems with meth during pregnancy, they would have been taken from the mother and put in the foster system.