Salesforce offers to help staff leave Texas as abortion law takes effect | Hacker News Reader

Salesforce offers to help staff leave Texas as abortion law takes effect

theguardian.com

81 pointsgamechangr39 comments

As much as anti-abortionists will jump up and down screaming "it's murder!"; I don't think they genuinely believe that.

If you had a choice between saving the life of an actual, breathing, crying child vs a tray, filled with dishes, all together accounting for HUNDREDS of fertilized embryos the choice is obvious.

The anti-abortionist would have you believe otherwise, of course, but I think deep down in their souls they know it's true.

You should probably talk to an anti-abortionist. I assure you they do believe it's murder.

Of course they say that they believe it's murder, but do their actions line up with that? Generally, no.

It would make a lot more sense if you actually took time to understand the opinion of those people whose mind you aim to change with your thought experiments.

You can only come up with this thought experiment if you start from the assumption that a tray full of fertilized embryos is not life.

Let’s imagine that you do believe that the tray full of fertilizer embryos is life, how would you answer this thought experiment?

So, a few issues with this argument.

No one is arguing that fertilized embryos are not life, in the same sense that my cuticle clippings, hair clippings or ejaculate are life. The argument whether they are human _lives_.

Second, even if one was to believe, intellectually, that a fertilized embryo was a human life; I would STILL expect that person to choose to save the actual, breathing, thinking entity. The one that is capable of surviving independently for more that 8 seconds when not biologically linked to another organism. This is something that every human being understands on a deep, instinctual level. The type of person who would make the alternate choice is a sociopath trying to prove a point.

Finally, it would be a mistake presuppose that I fail to understand the opinion of the antiabortionist. I grew up in bible country. I was raised on this shit. I was indoctrinated into these beliefs, and it wasn't until I started examining them under a critical lens that I cast them aside.

I certainly believe in some cases it is definitely murder. In others immoral and ethically dubious. In rare, specific cases, I agree it should be available. I think the sexual revolution has destroyed society. If you are risk averse, you avoid marriage and family building. Maybe it is the lack of responsible behavior on both sides.

A comment like this implies a belief that people on mass are going through the costly, physically and emotionally painful process of getting an abortion as a form of contraception which... just isn't happening

Never seen so many dead posts on a thread before. Clearly a polite bunch.

Won't this make Texas less likely to flip blue to stop these kinds of laws?

Does Texas really need to flip blue if the country transitions away from the electoral college? The arguments being made for doing so recently have quite a bit of sense when you think about it.

Good luck actually doing it.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/12/09/how-to-get-...

Almost all of the states needed to ratify the national popular vote interstate compact have either done so or will do so soon.

It’s definitely not a done deal yet but it’s within reach.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Inters...

What states that are left are actually going to sign on?

And do you really think the current Supreme Court would let that stand? It seems unlikely to me.

Individual states are allowed to choose how to apportion their own electoral college votes.

In the pst those votes were allocated proportionally to the votes but now almost all states assign all EC votes to a single candidate.

I’m not sure what the supreme court can do here if the states change the way they want to assign votes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_compact seems like it would be at least close enough to a problem that the current Supreme Court would kill it.

Is Texas flipping blue a real thing?

Any more than lets say California flipping red?

It was before the abortion law. The trends suggested it would be a battleground state in two to four years. I won't touch on the irony of anti-imperialists colonizing Austin, TX.

The recent voting laws they passed are more of an obstacle towards TX going blue.

True. I see it all as a collective effort to maintain control. In the same vain that firing unvaccinates federal employees is a quiet ideological purge.

What do we do about this new dynamic of social corporatism? Do we not follow laws anymore and allow corporations to dictate social justice?

(Nothing to do about this specific law but corporations are increasingly taking issues, which should be left to the public voters, in their own hands… do we get to vote for CEOs?)

I don't see how any laws are being violated here. if Salesforce was somehow encouraging their employees to ignore Texas laws, then thats another thing. But that's not the case here.

Even if laws are being violated, civil disobedience is a valid response to unjust laws. I don't think there is anything wrong, or incompatible with western democracy about companies taking a principled stand against unjust laws, as a person would.

The only problem comes when a special interest hijacks a company's notion of what kind of activism is reasonable.

How is the corporation not following the law?

I imagine some (many?) SF employees in TX moved there for the job and did not expect this. SF feels at least partly responsible to these people and is offering to help.

This doesn’t seem particularly relevant here. I see folks touting that people can “vote” for companies through their wallets and that people who don’t like law of the land in an area can just leave. This is in-line with both of those views.

This move: helping employees move to a different state is actually totally OK.

The problem is the dark money and superpacks (citizens united supreme court ruling etc). This is a bipartisan problem that both Obama and Trump claimed they would fight. Obama couldn't get any traction for this, I'm unaware of anything Trump tried to do other than attacking the liberal side of this.

Biden also went out against this but it's very low on his priority list with everything going on...

In the supreme court it's pretty clear whose side is at fault. The justices that voted for the case of citizens united are all from the right side of the map. So the only way to reverse this seems to be a complete overhaul of the supreme court which seems unlikely.

Another view is that the constitution as written allows the $$$. That's bad, but the solution is to amend the constitution, not have SCOTUS ignore it.

Another view is that we tinkered to destruction by: direct election of senators and capping growth of house of representatives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com