This is what a “Death Panel” looks like. Odd, because the GOP spent the last decade saying single payer health care and abortion rights would lead to death panels. Turns out they just wanted to be the ones running the death panels. Flee the south! Flee red states! I know their are naysayers that want people to stay so they turn the areas blue. But my argument is those areas had their chances to get basic human compassion correct and they fail every time. They will never ever agree with the will of the people and will go back on any bill passed that protects marginalized communities. The only way they will “see the light” is if they look around their states and see no women; see no educated individuals; see no hard working youths; and see no business. Then maybe they will. It’s not your responsibility to put your own life and your families lives at risk in hopes that things will get better. They won’t! I live in Colorado, our state isn’t perfect but for fuck sakes we’re trying to make life better. I used to complain about all the out of state people moving here, but I realized the majority are political refugees fleeing areas in their own fucking country. We’d love to have you because we want to lead by example. Colorado used to be known as the “Hate State” and now is one of the most liberal and free states.
Came to Colorado from Florida. I have zero regrets. Love this place and the people.
It is so, so much better here, in so many ways.
Even in winter?
Don’t mind winter one bit. Tropical storm rain driving translates really well to snow. It’s nice having seasons. The altitude was the roughest transition tbh.
Edit: And the hiking is mind blowingly good.
Don’t flee, fill. Change the demographic. Red turns blue with better numbers.
I would agree if I believed those places were actually capable of change. I do believe some red states are looking for the change. (North Carolina, Georgia, Montana are some examples.) I have family and friends in the south and the majority of people in those areas are amazing and don’t care about all these culture wars. But those in those areas that do are willing to do violence to achieve their goals. If you are a target of those that want to do harm, I can not in good conscience advice anything other than leaving. Currently women and LGBTQ+ individuals literally are in physical and mental danger. Those areas will kill them before giving up any more power. Flee if you can, and literally fight if you can’t. I guess that’s my main point. We’ve given those areas more than 200 years to get their shit together and have nothing to show for it.
Then the change has to come from outside. Just hoping they will change on their own is lazy and defeatist. Come help us fight.
It’s not defeatist it’s not letting your abuser have control over you especially when your life or the lives of your loved ones are in immediate Danger. I want to say find a politician that is using political violence against you and use actual violence, but you don’t have to when their somewhere willing to protect and give you freedom just 10 hours away. You can create change by simply walking away as well. Not everyone needs to be a martyr, not everyone can wait years or even months for the change they need. You can impact federal laws by not giving them your body for census and taxes. Back during the Jim crow south, I can’t imagine telling someone that they should hope for change while one of their relatives hangs from a tree or tell a parent of a raped little girl that’s now pregnant they need to be the ones standing and fighting. Fighting looks different and I support those that choose to fight. But no one is the Arbiter of what that looks like.
I agree with your logic. Brain draining red states is far more effective than protesting.
Indiana went for Obama in 2012. Yes, it went for Trump the next two elections, but I’d say that shows there is room for hope in red states.
Louisiana had a dem governor and then the jungle primary screwed us over to red.
Part of the problem is that you can have a state consisting of 300 neckbeards and it will still have Senators and a Representative in Congress, and thus voting power on legislation. I don’t blame people for fleeing, but staying and making states blue will have a bigger effect on change.
Well it comes down to 2 problems though.
First and most obvious hitting that critical mass… before you hit it, everything is hell, you are stuck with BS laws, and you can’t do anything about it. Your vote is worthless.
In my town this november there was one ballot issue… in short, it was summarized as "put a million dollars towards schools, build a new school on an unused empty lot owned by the school system, build a new sports field for one of the schools). Digging deeper that would be paid for by a proporty tax that would cost… up to 100 a year for people making over 150k.
So… the whole town was plastered in “vote no” signs, when I went to the polling place a guy outside asked me to “strongly consider voting no”. I was one of the 17% that voted yes.
So that basically tells me… demographically we need an insane change for the politics of this area to be less stupid, and that’s before factoring in that not only does it involve a HUGE change to reach 51%… but realistically we need more like 65-70% to counteract the inevitable gerymandering that will happen if we ever get anywhere close. I will be staying here, and I’d be happy to encourage all my progressive friends to stay and/or move here. But when it comes down to it, I’d be shocked if there is a swing in the next 50 years, and I certainly wouldn’t encourage anyone in a group that is likely to be directly oppressed to move here.
And what’s more, if you’re going to have kids it’s not fair to raise them in that environment; to draft them into a struggle as they mature; to bequeath upon them the battle that you likely wont live to see won.
I noped myself right out of America to a proper socialised democracy and now i live the American dream rather than spend my life and my kids lives fighting for it.
No. Flee. We’ve learned through experience that turning a red state blue is a pipe dream. You cannot change from within, a state with systemic problems that doesn’t want to change.
I urge everyone in a red state that it capable- to leave ASAP.
That’s the problem though. It leaves those less capable stuck with no hope of their situation ever improving. Conservatives can be outnumbered. The easy thing is not necessarily the right thing.
That sucks for them. But things provenly haven’t gotten better or fixed under the current way of doing things.
Red states thrive on status quo.
You know that we can’t remove them from the country, right? Your way of thinking is exactly why the damned conservatives are as strong as they are. Ultimately you are giving them their best chance at taking even more political power. You should be ashamed of yourself for leaving those weaker and less capable than yourself to just be consumed by dogs. You are a coward and no better than them. One day they will be coming for you. Just know that.
Your way of thinking is exactly why the damned conservatives are as strong as they are.
No. The damned conservatives are as strong as they are because of foreign-paid propaganda, hatred of the country they claim to serve, love of donor cash, and overwhelming amoral dishonesty.
If you really want to be heard by someone who has decided they are already fighting a losing battle, may I suggest NOT demonizing their thinking as though this is anything like a fair fight.
I live in a purple city, in a red state, in an already gerrymandered district; when the most recent Republican Congressional representative didn’t win by enough of a margin – BECAUSE WE DEMS WERE OUT VOTING WITH EVERYTHING WE HAD – the state legislature got nervous and moved the lines again. Because she WON by such a small margin, not because she lost. And she only won because the lines were already dishonest.
You should be ashamed of yourself for leaving those weaker and less capable than yourself to just be consumed by dogs. You are a coward and no better than them.
Your patronizing, moralizing, psychoanalysis, and namecalling doesn’t change the new lines in my district one tiny little bit. Hope it felt good, because if that’s what I can expect from people that are supposed to be on my own side then fuck you, I need to leave sooner because YOU clearly won’t have my back.
One day they will be coming for you. Just know that.
No shit, Sherlock. We do already know that. That’s why we’re leaving.
Right… lol.
Keep doing things the same way and see how things go. Best of luck. I’m safe and sound in my blue state where things work the way they’re supposed to. And we made it here on very little by the way. We both had minimum wage jobs in Florida. We now have thriving lives in Seattle.
If I did that, I would be telling my sister “Sucks to be you. I got out.” She can’t leave because of a custody agreement. She and her children are stuck with these laws. If the number of people you are talking about leave, that will ensure things with never get better for my sister, nieces, and nephew, that the laws will get worse and worse and they will legally not be allowed to move. But according to you, I should just tell her “sucks, I got mine”.
Sooo… status quo because some people have circumstances that don’t allow them to leave? You realize that yelling at people on Internet forums to “GO VOTE!” is pointless, right? There will be no grassroots movement to unseat these cowards from our government. Period. End of story. People have been fighting corruption and overrraching fascists since the early 60’s and it’s exponentially WORSE today than it ever was.
So doing nothing for the next several decades and repeating the past because a few people might get stuck is JUST AS selfish if not moreso as demanding people stay and suffer because if all can’t be helped- NONE must not be helped.
Red states need to be abandoned. Full stop. If you can’t leave- that fucking sucks. But nothing will change if everyone stays. History has proven this time and time again.
We moved from Orlando to Seattle a while back. It’s like living in a different country.
Technically speaking you kind of do? The way the States have structured things your individual states have the same binding ability full on countries do… “Land of the Free” sounds kind of insane when you exist outside of that and see instead two countries at constant war with each other fighting over whose rules are the most binding over each of it’s citizens particularly… You can even be extradited back to a former state you lived in! That isn’t how it works for damn near every other democracy. That isn’t freedom that’s just color coded chains.
They always wanted death panels. Just death panels THEY control so libs get culled and conservatives are forced to breed regardless of ability to raise a child.
The only way they will “see the light” is if they look around their states and see no women; see no educated individuals; see no hard working youths; and see no business
I mean, they won’t “see no women”, women are nearly as likely to support forced birth as men. They don’t really care about the rest of that. They’d be quite glad to not have any opposition anymore, and be able to keep all those juicy senate seats and electoral college votes. Since they already have created an extremist Supreme Court, this would guarantee they wouldn’t lose the ability to veto or filibuster any attempt to fix it, while said Court continues to impose their views on the rest of the country.
It is absolutely monstrous that in the country where stories like this happen daily, that the politician who is most responsible for this situation is the likely next president. It makes me physically sick.
Not to mention the cold-hearted attacks on these mothers for trying to protect their own lives since they know they can’t enjoy having the pleasure of being a parent to these children.
This country, especially the southern states, don’t care about anything but themselves and controlling others.
I’m so glad the wife and I are actively trying to get out of Texas. It’s not a place I want to raise a family as there are no real family values offered here except hate and control.
Pretty sure that’s what people refer to when they say Christian values.
This entire country was founded on “fuck you got mine”
It’s even more bizarre when women vote for / agree with this shit. What woman actually wants to go through this or thinks it’s necessary?
Don’t you know? All those abortions you hear about are for evil hussies who can’t stop getting with men.
But if I have complications, I get to still have a medical procedure to terminate my pregnancy, right?
/s
Awww shit, you right. I forgot that women are all just cum sluts and men are perfect angels who do nothing wrong ever. Good wholesome folks will have access to abortions if they’re life threatening without issue, suuuuurely
It seems you might have missed their sarcasm.
… Except mine was also obviously sarcastic. Which you missed.
It’s because those women can feel power over those other women who aren’t as good as they are.
Just wait till you find out what the current president is doing.
Oh wait that’s not to white women and babies so it doesn’t matter.
For the lefty women, this is awful. For the righty women: this is what you voted for, suck it up and carry that dead baby.
Come on, be better than them. No woman deserves to suffer through this even if they voted against their own best interests.
It’s horrid, I know. To have a dead baby inside you and to suddenly find that anti-abortion lawmaker you so gleefully supported is preventing you from removing its lifeless body. Who could have known, right? Maybe if we pray?
Maybe going through that will give them the missing empathy they needed to be a decent human being
You’re not sounding especially empathetic yourself.
At this point, in 2023, we are on the verge of an authoritarian takeover. We lost RvW, next is same sex marriage, then voting rights, and boom! Back to pre 1920. So forgive me if I’m not particularly sad when leopards devour someone’s face.
You’re not describing empathy. It sounds like the person you’re responding to already knows how bad that outcome is which is why they’re against authoritarian law to begin with. You’re just more sympathetic towards people facing the consequences of their own decisions. Which is fine. But that crowd already used up all of mine over COVID. And climate change is just around the corner. Glad you still have some sympathy left to go around for leopard victims.
It’s not time to be empathetic, it’s time for you fucking Americans to get mad. To riot against your rights being stripped.
I mean… you can get mad and still be empathetic for suffering women.
Their entire platform is to lack empathy, and they voted for it.
I’m not gonna pretend to care about them, simply because they couldn’t care about anyone else.
The thing is, I don’t really care what people “deserve”, or what they “don’t deserve”. How should I know? I’ll be a dork and quote Tolkien: “Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment.”
But I do care about who’s in the pact. We have an agreement, between us, we decent people. We watch out for each other. We protect each other. Or if we can’t, when something terrible is done to somebody, at the very least, we speak out, in protest, in sympathy, in sorrow. And the people covered by this pact, as far as I’m concerned, are the people who follow it - that’s it, the sole criteria for membership, about the lowest bar possible.
I’m not going to force somebody to carry a dead fetus because they forced other people to do so, but when the cruel laws they always thought would only apply to other people suddenly apply to them, I don’t owe them my sympathy either. They aren’t in the pact.
Trying to be better is why conservatives are fucking us as much as they are.
Fuck that. Those women who voted for this fucking deserve it.
I’m with you on this. I worry that too mamy people cheer on the pain of the “other” without realizing that in doing so they become the worst of what they hate
People make bad decisions, but then some of them grow. To tell them that they deserve their pain, just because they didn’t understand what it was they were doing, is pretty fucked up
Eh. If they genuinely have a change of heart and are horrified at their previous self, we can afford to show grace. If they go right back to supporting Republicans, fuck them.
They have a change of heart but years later after they are past the age to have kids they go right back. The number of older women trying to take away the rights they enjoyed is disgusting.
100% this. I personally know women who exercised their Roe v Wade right to abortion and are now ALL IN on zero tolerance bans regardless of baby or mother health…now that they can’t get knocked up.
*fetus
** blastocyst
I appreciate the intent of your correction. For most abortions, yes, blastocyst. I’m not an expert, but I think that the body will usually safely flush out a failed blastocyst, and as the article said, many of these absolute nightmare scenarios cannot be diagnosed until well past that stage, so in this context, I think fetus is correct.
Women of America: I urge you- go on a baby boycott! Deny these scumbags children until these draconian laws are lifted.
That’s part of why the laws are so strict, so even rape victims have to carry them to term and the rapist father still gets custody rights.
And if the rapist is a rich white boy, nothing will happen to him.
That’s only an issue if the crime is proveable in court.
That’s part of why the laws are so strict, so even rape victims have to carry them to term
The people who passed the bans can’t imagine passing on their genes any other way.
Agreed, they aren’t about to do any charming or seducing.
Done! My husband isn’t the problem here but I’ve officially noped out of another kid. Good job republicans!
It’s not just men who support forced birth.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/244709/pro-choice-pro-life-2018-demographic-tables.aspx
Yeah, well. It’s not the men that are hurt by being forced to birth.
Every pregnancy is so taxing on the body, and can have a huge impact on a woman’s future health. To make women go through it against their will, or for a child that won’t live/have any quality of life is evil and vile. Sometimes, I wish their God were real, just so these fuckers can get to the pearly gates and get booted straight down to hell for all eternity.
I’m so glad I’m menopausal and not American and my husband had a vasectomy.
Seriously this is awful.
Might as well implement Sharia law in some US states. You’re not far behind the Taliban.
