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Comment by glutamate | Hacker News Reader

I'm here to remind you of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Heartbeat_Act

I suppose people weigh the pros and cons and make a choice.

I wonder how much legislation like Texas puts out reduces demand for relocating to Texas (or I suppose increases if there are actually people into that)?

But I don’t suspect that this legislation would really affect whether companies change headquarters or do business.

I mean, companies have locations in UAE and other countries that have way more bizarre laws (eg, homosexuality is illegal, etc).

How does this comment help the conversation? How does it enlighten anyone?

I wouldn't want an abortion ban where I live, but the above question really looks like low-effort political utterance to me.

Believe it or not, there are some people in the tech community who actually think this is a good thing.

Some even believe that there are only two genders!

> Some even believe that there are only two genders!

i.e. almost everyone a few years ago. Worldwide, most people still don't think there can be more than two sexes.

Sex and gender are different, though. Sexologist John Money came up with the idea of using the then purely grammatical term 'gender' to describe how people presented themselves.

So originally people's gender expression was more or less just advertising their sex roles for mating. Now it's more of a lifestyle/aesthetic thing with huge amounts of variation that aren't really anchored to biological sex in any meaningful way except insofar as they adopt the aesthetics of one of the biological sexes.

Indeed; people in the tech community often think of themselves as somehow especially rational, and sometimes as hyper-logical with reduced biases, but that's just the tech community's particular self-delusion. The tech community contains the full spectrum just like every other.

Do the rational tech people believe the science of gametes or do they put their faith in a different belief on how gender works?

This argument relies entirely on the (almost always intentional) misunderstanding that sex is the same as gender or its social expression.

They differentiate between biological sex (which is also more complex when considered in full) from gender. It's quite simple really.

There aren't any rational tech people; just tech people who believe they are free of bias.

The rational answers to both these questions is to accept we don't know (whether a fetus has a soul or how many genders) and stop trying to force whatever unproven answer we personally prefer onto everyone else. If you don't believe in abortion, don't get one. If you think there are 2 genders, pick from those. But don't act like you have some concrete proof you're right when you don't...

That falls apart when: 1. You believe abortion is the act of taking someone else's life. 2. You try to dictate other people's speech to acknowledge there are more than 2 genders when the person you are telling doesn't believe it.

Seems weird that you would frame it in a 1 sided way.

Who cares what you believe? Scientific fact/consensus says you're wrong.

>From Wikipedia, “(The act) is the first of its kind to rely on enforcement by private individuals through civil lawsuits, rather than by the government through criminal or civil enforcement.”

Wow, it looks like the legislation is not as bad as the media and others make it out to be. In fact it looks like an incredible step in the right direction — enforcement from society rather than the government. I imagine that means much more leeway compared to enforcement via the criminal court system.

You might want to think a bit more carefully about what that means: it’s establishing private bounty hunters who need very little evidence to use the legal system to hurt you – for example, they can require you to show up in person in a court hundreds of miles away from where you live – and who can see a substantial financial upside but are insulated from losses if they lose the case. Courts are prohibited from using a successful defense to block a repeat filing, allowing venue shopping to target the same person.

Think about what this means: someone leaves an abusive relationship, and the abuser can use this to target everyone who helps her alleging that they intended to help with an illegal abortion and they have to prove they did not, with no way to recover damages even if they do successfully defend themselves.

This is most of the things “tort reform” conservatives have railed against for years before deciding it was good for women but not corporations. They would go absolutely nuts if someone passed a law allowing you to sue someone claiming that they intended to use their gun to commit a crime.

Yikes, that actually sounds pretty bad too. So… deregulation is the best regulation, like in most other cases?

Yes, I for one long for the days when rich people can do whatever they want and let the rest of us deal with the downsides.

That is what deregulation proponents are calling and it’s why the promote binary thinking rather than pushing for nuanced regulation — kind of like how you know the proponents of that hill don’t care about preventing abortions because if they did they wouldn’t block real sex education and contraception would be universally available.

Seems like you are promoting vigilantism? This doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

After further consideration, I agree. Deregulation is the best regulation.

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