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sasha ↙︎↙︎↙︎ 🌹🏴 @2damntrans.bsky.social · 2h

Netanyahu, Biden, Trump... literally anyone and everyone who participated in and/or enabled this needs to stand trial at The Hague.

الكسندرا ميراي @lexialex.bsky.social · 11h

Palestinian orphans in Gaza marching with photos of their dead parents

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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 1d

Yeah I’m going to keep hammering this drum: who the armed men in the employ of the state are loyal to is consequential, they are not an undifferentiated mass, and specifics matter a lot here. Blue state govs and big city mayors need to be quietly looking through FEC records and making staff changes

rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 1d

i think this fundamentally misstates the constraint: if he uses the police to directly obstruct ICE operations, he gets hit with the Insurrection Act. if he puts the cops in a position where they have to choose which orders to follow, they will currently not pick the governor.

starch mogul @posts-cards.bsky.social · 1d

this kind of wishcasting around pritzker ignores that he hasn't once wielded the power of the state in a creative way since DHS and ICE invaded us

the rhetoric's good and he plays a governor on TV very well, but there's no evidence of a capacity for clever use of power, unfortunately

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ergopraxis @ergopraxis.bsky.social · 19h

Yeah, it seems that the logic here is just to make it impossible for trans people to have a relationship with cis people, since sex while trans is literally reframed as rape by deception (unless you either invalidate your own identity or open yourself up to violence). It's a segregation tool.

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The Bulwark @thebulwark.com · 19h

An executive who cannot be removed but whose power is fenced in is one thing. An invulnerable executive whose power has expanded to encompass nearly all of daily life begins to look like a monarch with a defined term. www.thebulwark.com/p/is-this-wh...

Is This What ‘Late-Stage Democracy’ Looks Like?

What if the Constitution *is* a suicide pact?

www.thebulwark.com

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ergopraxis @ergopraxis.bsky.social · 19h

The only reason it would be workable in practice is that there is no intention to apply it consistently --they'll just weaponise it against trans people. If they did it would suppress sexual relationships by opening prospective partners up to frivolous prosecution for mercurial reasons.

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Mike Stabile @mikestabile.bsky.social · 1d

Buried in Michigan's antiporn bill is a provision to effectively outlaw "circumvention tools," such as VPNs.

Mark my words: legislators will increasingly leverage porn panic to restrict or ban VPNs, and to limit internet privacy far beyond adult sites.

Experts raise privacy concerns over Michigan bill targeting pornography and VPNs

Rep. Josh Schriver, the bill’s sponsor, says the law is designed to target only producers and distributors of pornography, not everyday internet users.

www.wilx.com

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Isi Baehr-Breen @isibb.bsky.social · 1d

Thinking about that time I got quoted in the National Review about Bari Weiss

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Mi-Spell Slinger @michellestringer.bsky.social · 1d

To my knowledge there are zero other "deceptions" that undo consent.

You can lie about your name, your wealth, your job, your criminal history, your STDs, your marital status, your sexual history and it doesn't undo consent.

Fail to disclose being trans, and the consent is void.

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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 1d

A man gets a blowjob from a trans woman and his friends make fun of him so he goes to the police to claim she lied about being a woman. She was convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to nearly 2 years in prison because of a man's shame.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Thornaby transgender woman jailed for deception sex assault

Ciara Watkin's victim says he would not have agreed to sex had he known she was biologically male.

www.bbc.com

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ergopraxis @ergopraxis.bsky.social · 19h

(This is also how rape by deception is treated jurisprudentially by most other liberal states, but of course the backwater island monarchy is not a liberal state, it's a totalitarian state with pro forma liberal-democratic social institutions that no one at all takes seriously).

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ergopraxis @ergopraxis.bsky.social · 19h

Much better idea to simply have a very narrow conception of rape by deception, where only deception about someone's numerical identity (that they are *this* person, and not *another* person) counts as vitiating consent, for the straightforward reason that it was factually never given to that person.

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ergopraxis @ergopraxis.bsky.social · 19h

I don't think there is any way to reconcile a robust conception of consent with this extended notion of rape by deception. Either you trivialise the offence, or you erode the most fundamental aspect of free sexuality: that you get to refuse any sexual act for any reason, including for bad reasons.

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ergopraxis @ergopraxis.bsky.social · 19h

I don't need to explain how profoundly dangerous this divide and conquer strategy about grounds for withholding consent is. The corrolary of this hierarchy is that only some cases where someone has non-consensual sex count as rape: those where the reasons they withheld consent were legitimate.

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ergopraxis @ergopraxis.bsky.social · 19h

Then we can say, well, maybe you *would* have withheld consent if you knew about their mole, but this is *not* a valid ground to withhold consent in the first place, hence not knowing about it also does not vitiate your consent --because actually withholding it in those cases is illegitimate.

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ergopraxis @ergopraxis.bsky.social · 19h

And this leads us to the other, even more pernicious horn of the dilemma. We can avoid this problem while sticking to the view that undisclosed grounds for counterfactually withholding consent vitiate consent, as long as we're prepared to say that only some grounds for withholding consent are valid.

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ergopraxis @ergopraxis.bsky.social · 19h

And if you want something more malicious, more akin to the claim that people not revealing to you they're trans counts as "rape by deception", what if she forgot to tell her sexist boyfriend she's not a virgin? What if she lied about her "body count"? These may be real deal breakers for misogynists!

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ergopraxis @ergopraxis.bsky.social · 19h

This is overtly unworkable, since it would make it very easy for bad actors to frame people for a very significant offense based on trivialities. Oh, she didn't tell me that, in elementary school, she had a blue backpack. It would make prosecuting rape a complete joke if it was applied consistently.

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ergopraxis @ergopraxis.bsky.social · 19h

Consequently, these very ridiculous reasons could retroactively reframe overtly consensual acts as non-consensual *if* people have to reveal any potential grounds (which is every ground, including overtly misogynistic grounds) that different people could withhold consent, to them, before the fact.

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ergopraxis @ergopraxis.bsky.social · 19h

My point is that people can have increasingly ridiculous reasons not to consent to sex with someone, and all these reasons should be respected because what actually matters here is not *why* we agree to do something, but *that* we agree, or don't agree, to do it.

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ergopraxis @ergopraxis.bsky.social · 19h

That finding out that they used to support the tories after I have enthusiastically consented to a sex act with them, undermines the consent I have in actuality given them? What if the deal breaker is a mole that they have covered up with makeup? Or the fact that they like eating pizza with a fork?

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ergopraxis @ergopraxis.bsky.social · 19h

This is as good a reason as any to withhold consent, and if I am withholding it, then a conservative trying to overrule my judgment would be assaulting me. But does that mean that someone has to honestly disclose their political history and beliefs to me beforehands?

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ergopraxis @ergopraxis.bsky.social · 19h

then fully consensual sex can be retroactively be represented as technically coerced for exactly those arbitrary reasons. For example: I have refused to have sex with conservatives, because they viscerally disgust me. This is a legitimate, real life fact about me.

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ergopraxis @ergopraxis.bsky.social · 19h

What I mean by this is that if the existence of an undisclosed (or even positively concealed) would-be deal breaker is taken as sufficient to talk about sexual assault, and we maintain commitment to the freedom to withhold consent for any reason (as we should)

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ergopraxis @ergopraxis.bsky.social · 19h

I'm saying this because I think extending the notion of rape by deception to indistinctly cover any case where some knowledge about someone, which could counterfactually have resulted in someone else withholding consent, was concealed erodes our standards for consensual relations to be made workable

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ergopraxis @ergopraxis.bsky.social · 19h

The structure of consent is such that the reasons we may withhold or rescind it are *not* and should *not* be enumerated. We can withhold it for any reason, or even for no reason, at a whim. Otherwise we would admit cases where coerced acts count as technically consensual (the logic of marital rape)

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