A woman says that the black lieutenant governor of Virginia raped her
And unlike the accusations against Kavanaugh, in this case there’s a friend who says that the alleged rape victim told her about it the day after it happened.
A college friend of Ms. Watson’s, Kaneedreck Adams, said in an interview Friday that Ms. Watson told her she was raped the day after she said it happened, and named Mr. Fairfax as her assailant.
Ms. Adams said that she went to visit Ms. Watson at her apartment and that “she was upset, she was kind of crying quietly and she said that she had been raped” by Mr. Fairfax.
Supreme Court’s recent abortion decision
The Supreme Court has previously held that women have a right to an abortion before fetal “viability” and that the states can’t place an “undue burden” on that right.
Now we all know that the real purpose of the Louisiana law is to create so many bureaucratic requirements for abortion doctors that the practical effect is that women can’t obtain abortions.
Chief Justice Roberts has shown that he’s going to uphold stare decisis on the abortion issue, and he’s not going to let anti-abortion Republicans get away with legislative bullshit like the Louisiana law.
Greece and out-of-wedlock births
Greece has the lowest rate of out-of-wedlock births in the EU. 9.4% in 2016.
Greece has least gender equality in the EU.
Once again, we see that out-of-wedlock births are highly correlated with gender equality.
Religion-wise, Greece is heavily into Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
In Japan, out-of-wedlock births extremely rare
In Japan, out-of-wedlock births are 2% of all births. Holy ***! That’s amazing. How did Japan manage to totally buck global trends?
It’s not because of Christianity or any other religion. The majority of Japanese are atheists and only 2% are Christian.
And it’s not abortion. Theoretically, abortion on demand is illegal in Japan, but according to Wikipedia, “exceptions to the law are broad enough that it is widely accepted and practiced.” So Japan and Iceland have pretty similar access to abortion, but a vastly different out-of-wedlock birth rate.
There are two reasons:
(1) Japan has extremely low gender equality. Ranked 110 out of 144 nations. Gender equality leads to the end of marriage as we know it because the empirical evidence shows that when women don’t need men, they don’t get married.
(2) In Japan, they still believe in stigmatizing people for bad behavior. This NY Times article is pretty old, but the point is that relative to America and Europe, Japan is very different.
Why has Japan not had a surge in single mothers? For a start, it may be that Japanese teen-agers are less active sexually than young people abroad. Moreover, abortions are easily available — and common — for those who become pregnant.
But the most important factor is social pressure. Single mothers face economic and social discrimination. In Japan, having a baby without being married is still a humiliation.
In the United States, the Christian Right has been contributing to the increase in out-of-wedlock births, because they have been promoting the de-stigmatization of single-motherhood so that unmarried pregnant women won’t get abortions. (Probably, the de-stigmatization of single motherhood leads to more premarital sex without birth control because the consequences of pregnancy are not feared as much, which then leads to more unplanned pregnancies which then, ironically, leads to more abortions rather than fewer abortions.)
The end of marriage
In Iceland, in 2017, 71.2% of children were born to unwed mothers.
It’s no coincidence that Iceland ranks first in gender equality, plus Iceland has generous social benefits. When men are longer necessary (from the perspective of supporting women’s children), we see that the practice of marriage comes to an end.
The destruction of traditional family values is not caused by liberal abortion laws. Iceland’s abortion laws are actually ranked as more strict than most other developed countries. Technically, abortion on demand is not legal in Iceland as it is in the United States.
Nor is destruction of family values caused by non-whites. Iceland is one of the world’s whitest countries.
In the United States, in 2016, only 28.5% of white births were to unwed mothers. (And 12% for Asians, 52.6% for Hispanics, 69.8% for blacks.)
Blackfacegate gets worse!
Even I’ve never dressed up in blackface, and I’m a “racist” according to SJW types. But for some weird reason, it was a thing for all these liberal Democrats in Virginia.
Abortion at SOTU
To defend the dignity of every person, I am asking the Congress to pass legislation to prohibit the late-term abortion of children who can feel pain in the mother’s womb.
As I’ve pointed out before, it’s bullshit that anti-abortion people believe that abortion should be left up to the states. That’s only something they say when they are talking about the Supreme Court. In fact, we see it’s exactly the opposite, anti-abortion people are outraged that one state chooses to have a more liberal abortion policy than most other states. They really don’t want to leave the issue up to the states.
Trump made a mistake putting this into his speech. Trump should try to de-escalate abortion as a political issue. As I’ve previously pointed out, the majority of adults in key swing states ae pro-choice. Also, abortion is beneficial for society Those who insist otherwise are falling for the just world fallacy. Someone has been giving him bad advice.
Whenever I point out the benefits of abortion in reducing the birthrate of the poorest and thus most-crime-prone Americans, they go crazy and refuse to believe it. They insist on believing that every woman who has an abortion is like Juno, a young white girl from a middle-class or better family. Juno is a fictional movie! The reality is that the typical woman who has an abortion is a poor unmarried black or Hispanic woman who already has children. The last people you want to have more children. There is no better government money spent than the money spent on providing free abortions and free birth control for poor people. Every dollar spent on abortion and birth control for poor women saves at least ten dollars, if not a hundred dollars, on welfare, education, and law enforcement for the children those poor women would otherwise have had.
Pro-choice is pro-working-class white.
I’m in favor of the Schumer Sanders plan
Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders propose restricting stock buybacks. I agree with this policy! But not for the reasons they say.
The reason that a corporation exists is to make profits for its shareholders. Why would anyone buy stock if the companies will use all their profits to pay higher wages to its workers? Our entire financial system would collapse! So I ignore the socialist nonsense in the op-ed.
However, the correct way for companies to pay profits to their shareholders is by issuing dividends and not by buying back stock. Corporations like stock buybacks because they are a tax loophole that allows the return of profits to shareholders without a dividend tax, and they create the illusion of steadily increasing earnings-per-share. Wall Street loves buybacks because they make money on the buying and selling of securities.
So I’m all in favor of ending stock buybacks. I hate tax loopholes, and I hate the value-transference Wall Street scum. No to stock buybacks, but yes to dividends!
The “gay germ” theory sounds pretty ludicrous to me
If gayness is caused by a germ, then there’d be places where everyone was gay because the germ was widespread in that geographic area, and we’ve never seen anything like that. Furthermore, while there is a huge amount of evidence that personality is genetic, there’s not much evidence of “germs” changing people’s personality.
Gayness as a genetic disorder is more than valid to explain gayness without bringing in germs. Genetic disorders can be widespread. 1 in 12 blacks are carriers for Sickle Cell Anemia, and 1 in 27 Ashkenazi Jews are carriers for Tay Sachs.
My assumptions are: (1) gayness is a more complicated genetic trait than eye color; (2) it’s partially influenced by environment; (3) the gay genes provide some other benefit to make up for the obvious problem that a man who can’t get it up for a women won’t have any offspring.
Furthermore, #3 is not entirely true. In a society which viewed gayness to be abhorrent and that strongly urged men and women to get married, many gay men would indeed get married and have children (while imagining having sex with some man while they did the deed with their wife).
Gay men seem to be much better at singing and dancing and wearing dapper clothes compared to straight men, so they would have an advantage in demonstrating higher value and ironically be better at attracting women than non-gay men. “All the good men are gay” is a commonly heard refrain and there might actually be truth in it.
Perhaps bisexual (partially gay) men are more promiscuous and have stronger sex drives than completely non-gay men, and thus they impregnated more women?
Yes, I think there’s adequate evidence that some gay genes provide a reproductive benefit, thus making up for the problem that having too many gay genes is maladaptive, but not so maladaptive in the past when gayness was deep in the closet.
My theory is that now that gay and bisexual men are encouraged to have relationships with men instead of women, their genes will be culled from the population, and there will be far fewer gay genes in the human population in the future. Which may actually be a bad thing if gay genes are associated with creativity in the arts.
RBG, I told you so
The Washington Post reports that RBG attended a musical production last night.
After moron right-wingers convinced themselves that Hillary Clinton was going to die any moment from some mysterious disease, and that turned out to be false, I recalled an episode of Star Trek. Scotty is left in charge of the Enterprise while Kirk and Spock are down on the planet, and the Klingons lure him away with a fake distress call. And then, just as Scotty is about to return to the planet, they receive yet another distress call. And that’s when Scotty says, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me!” So the lesson to learn is to totally ignore any unverifiable reports on right-wing message boards about a liberal Democrat’s health.
These morons on the right are as bad as the morons on the left, and it’s almost enough to make me give up on politics blogging.
Lion of the Blogosphere 