Oh boy. I got my friend's old CRT when he was moving. Carried down 3 flights of narrow stairs, drove the hour back to my house, loaded it up the front steps, got my PS2 out of the attic, was so excited... and the PS2 doesn't work anymore.
Wow, that design is modern but brings me back to the days of application skin sites and early digital art communities back in the early 00s. Great job. I'm going to sign up.
No, the reason why Roe vs Wade is gone is because of a focused, well-funded mobilization campaign in legal interpretation, legal scholarship, and funding of judge careers in order to turn the judicial system into a tool for subverting popular progressive sentiment.
an activist tool court would have made a 3-part legislative like framework for banning abortion nationwide.
it didn't do that, it returned the question to the legislatures.
I can agree that is disruptive, and dangerous for actual individuals, because the legislature never reached consensus. I can agree that several of the justices lied in their confirmation hearings for the goal of applying logic to an abortion case. I can also agree that its a job for the legislatures.
I’m aware of the ultimate goal of the people that approached it this way - find the most compliant way to get their way - I think that way was unguarded because the democrats are barely even competing. But it is disingenuous to focus on the idea that its an odd ruling when it isn't. Its near the average of time that cases get overturned, not an improbable reality, and the reasoning wasn't a stretch of the imagination at all if you actually read it.
I don't even see how that observation needs to look like a partisan perspective. So many legal journals have pointed out how odd and shaky Roe and Casey were, for Supreme Court rulings, for decades. People just didn't want to have that conversation and now its been hoisted on them after generations.
Interesting, because the way I see it, almost the exact same thing can be said of the original roe v wade decision- the result of a focused campaign for promoting progressive sentiment.
With the recent decision, we can see where it goes back to e.g. the creation of the Federalist Society in 1982, how nearly every conservative Supreme Court nominee since Scalia has been a member (Roberts is disputed but the other 5 current justices are, as were Scalia and Bork), and how some very clever and/or very dirty procedural maneuvering resulted in the conservative majority on the Supreme Court today.
Did that happen with the Burger court that decided Roe? A quick check suggests that of the 9 justices on the Burger court, 4 were nominated by Nixon, 2 by Eisenhower, and 1 each by FDR, JFK, and LBJ. I really have no idea, I'm sure there were plenty of politics involved with all of those as well but I tend to think justices of this era were nominated more on merit than ideology.
Roe v. Wade was based on something other than the Constitution. We can tell this because the Constitution simply doesn't talk about abortion and the right to privacy used as a justification is suspiciously focused on only abortions to the exclusion of most other things. Eg, apparently it didn't extend to communication, other medical procedures more broadly (eg, topically, vaccination status), financial transactions, web browsing habits, etc. And the Supreme Court of today felt confident overturning it on the basis that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.
There also wasn't broad-based community support either, otherwise the court wouldn't have needed to step in to override the legislature.
So there must have been something happening ideologically that allowed and convinced these judges to make the decision. Whether we call that thing a 'pressure campaign' or not is political, but there was something going on.
> Roe v. Wade was based on something other than the Constitution.
No, it was not. If you read the decision, it is very clearly based on the 14th amendment:
A state criminal abortion statute of the current Texas type, that excepts from criminality only a life-saving procedure on behalf of the mother, without regard to pregnancy stage and without recognition of the other interests involved, is violative of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
— Roe, 410 U.S. at 164.
> the Constitution simply doesn't talk about abortion
It doesn't have to, and it's silly to suggest that it needs to. The 9th amendment, in particular, states this clearly.
> the right to privacy used as a justification is suspiciously focused on only abortions to the exclusion of most other things
It is not suspicious. The Court was asked to rule on the Constitutionality of Texas' abortion law. That law was focused on abortions. The Court does not decide a law is unconstitutional for a particular reason, then proactively apply that reason to every other extant law it can find. Honestly, the group upset about Roe would be frothing at the mouth were that to have happened.
> felt confident overturning it on the basis that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion
That was the Dobbs decision, yes. I don't think confidence enters into it, at least not in the way you're suggesting. There's no rubric or success criteria with a SCOTUS decision, and no accountability; justices are not worried about whether they can make a decision or not. They make the decisions they make, based on a vote of the opinions of the people on the Court at the time.
The only confidence that comes into play is where you know you have an unassailable majority and can do what you want.
> also wasn't broad-based community support either
Like there is today? The majority of people in the US today think Roe/Casey should have been left alone. That is as close to a fact as we can have, polling shows it clearly. If you think this decision is popular and what most people wanted, you're living in a bubble.
> So there must have been something happening ideologically that allowed and convinced these judges to make the decision.
Of course, but not in some shady conspiratorial way. The legal reasoning used to decide Roe was not new, it was not invented for that case, and has been applied in a variety of ways both before and since. I'm sure you know about all the sex and marriage related cases - Griswold, Obergefell, Loving v. Virginia, etc. Do you know that substantive due process was also used to protect parents' right to send their kids to private school (Pierce v. Society of Sisters)? Or teach them a foreign language (Meyer v. Nebraska)? There are plenty of other examples.
I am honestly astonished that people are trying to frame Roe as a decision made under duress, or the result of some third party manipulation. It just wasn't. There's no evidence of it. Please, convince me Richard Nixon was somehow manipulated into nominating Harry Blackmun, a very liberal jurist who wrote the majority opinion for Roe. Richard Nixon, who campaigned on law and order, and made 'conservative retrenchment in the court' part of his platform. Roe was decided 7-2! Republican presidents nominated 6 of those justices!
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I'm interested in some unbiased commentary on the Federalist Society stance on things, if such commentary exists. When I read about textualism and originalism, I come away thinking these are the Calvinists of constitutional law: the word is the word, it is true and inerrant, and the writer's intent is meaningless as they were merely a conduit for the truth. IMO this is dangerous, and we've already seen why.
> No, it was not. If you read the decision, it is very clearly based on the 14th amendment:
Yes, but as the Supreme Court has since pointed out that was a flawed and incorrect understanding of the 14th amendment. To the point where the current justices felt it reasonable to go back and overturn the decision. And it seems to be quite hard to support the original decision with quotes from the constitution, as people aren't doing that.
I mean, the key part of the text is what? "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."? If we can go from that to "abortions are a right", then we can go literally anywhere. It is logically and practically a non-sequitur, especially in context of other stuff that the government does like military drafts or interference in people's other medical choices.
Not to say I'd be unhappy if "liberty" automatically meant a total autonomy over one's own body. I think that would be a great standard! But we just came through COVID and it is obvious that isn't where the standard is.
> Like there is today? The majority of people in the US today think Roe/Casey should have been left alone. That is as close to a fact as we can have, polling shows it clearly.
It is pretty obvious the current situation is also the result of a focused campaign for promoting state control of abortion legislation. I don't think there is much controversy over that particular part of the story.
see comment by throwawayacc2 - This is essentially what I am referring to.
I'll admit it is much more nebulous than what you are referring to, but the Roe v Wade decision came from a philosophical school that fundamentally undermines the purpose of the supreme court in the first place, which is to interpret the constitution. Roe v Wade was an outlandish interpretation that wrote content into the constitution that was not there to begin with. -e.g. the decision was ideologically driven and justified, not driven by the actual text of the constitution.
No, there doesn't exist anything comparable to the infrastructure of the conservative judicial system. Wealthy progressive individuals hiding behind multiple corporations were not writing affidavits to roe v wade pretending to be multiple people. That strategy didn't exist until much later. Similarly, the decades-long funding of legal scholarship to prevent progressive legislation has no progressive comparison of equal maturity. There is no comparison to the size and influence of the Federalist Society in the funding of the careers of politically-motivated law students into politically-biased judges.
The progressive equivalent is the long march through the institutions. There absolutely was an organised “progressive” drive to increase their ideological base. And yes. The same long march is now happening from the other side. Progress is not always in the direction you like.
Long march through the institutions is a thing made up by a German student activist and has no known organizational heft beyond this. The article itself cannot name a single organization or achievement under this strategy. The Federalist Society is well-documented, in was founded in and organizes within the country we're talking about, hosts multiple conventions with close ties to conservative Supreme Court members, who have known to attend and give speeches advocating for extreme political interpretation, and who has been repeatedly reported to be the de facto gatekeeper for opportunities to judicial and legal positions under Republican government.
I don't think you can exonerate the democratic establishment who ran campaigns and funding drives on the back of protecting Roe while also doing literally nothing legislatively for nearly half a century (including periods where they controlled both legislative and executive branches).
Nothing the conservatives done was done in secret. The democratic establishment's inaction cannot be excused.
I went a step further, or maybe backward, and I have a separate computer that I connect to with AnyDesk and it has all the Adobe crap installed on it.
Also, our company credit card got replaced, and the process of updating the card and re-activating Creative Cloud took two weeks. It got canceled August 29 and only yesterday, September 14, was I able to launch Illustrator without a nag window. I hate Adobe.
And you would like these people to work in complete isolation?
Or is it okay if there are people in rural areas living near them?
And you're completely ignoring that just because someone works in agriculture they still need services like car mechanics barbers etc etc The actual number of people who work in agriculture if you include all those is considerably higher.
It is very cool that this is archived. I was the application skin admin over at deviantArt and Deskmod way back in the day (wild times, pre-Web 2.0 so everybody was just making it up as they go) but sadly none of these names ring a bell. I think Deskmod just piddled out and dA got bought and the original crew all left. I lived in the middle of nowhere so being exposed to that level of programming as well as passion for art was extremely inspiring. I even made a punk music spinoff called I Hate Music that introduced me to lifelong friends all over the world.
