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My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

Ya’ll don’t have any idea how fucking brave and needed these plot lines were.

This was before Ellen came out.

This was before civil unions.

This was before Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

This was when your ass could be fired, blacklisted, and shunned with no legal protections for even being hinted at being gay.

The main fault is the use of "natural". It does not make sense to qualify any process of urbanization as natural or unnatural. The fact that cities show a spatial segregation of wealth, rent and services is the product of a history of capital accumulation and land valorization in a class-based economic system. Calling any result of this natural does the bidding of those who have an interest in manipulating land value to their favor, it is a political process created by a certain set of agents in a set of concrete conditions.

There is also not much water in the European-US city duology. European cities have historically not had exclusively rich centers "naturally". Haussmann bulldozed the tens or hundreds of thousands of homes in the city center of Paris to rebuild it according to bourgeois aesthetic and class criteria, and many European city centers maintained worker's housing districts in their centers well into the 20th century. Milan itself saw a process of post-war industrial worker suburbanization and later gentrification from the 80s onwards. Generally speaking, gentrification and touristification is an ongoing process that is revalorizing the city centers right now, and one that isn't very old in the historical perspective of the city, even just the capitalist city.

The US city is the product of the process of racial segregation on top of the capitalist urban dynamics. More specifically, the product of some specific federal and municipal policy instruments: redlining, racially selective FHA mortgage access, the Interstate Highway Act subsidizing white suburban flight, exclusionary zoning, to name a few that aimed to produce a white propertied class. Even in US urbanism there is no settled urban model. Burgess' very well known 1925 concentric zone model of the Chicago School of Human Ecology introduced the concept of the Central Business District, but it was also immediately contested. The model of the poor inner city pattern itself is mostly concentrated historically in the second half of the 20th century and in the Rust and Sun Belt cities. This is changing still, and gentrification has also hit US cities like New York, San Francisco, Washington DC or Chicago with dramatic restructurings of their centers. The capitalist city is not spatially stable.

Calling this "social engineering" is bizarre and to me sounds more like a right libertarian talking point than anything else. It perpetuates the naturalization of the political-economic urban spatial segregation but in the other way (posing the US as being anti-natural, the wrong kind of segregated), and places the blame of spatial segregation on government policy rather than the historical push for that white propertied class to remain after the 13th amendment and after the Civil Rights Act.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is spending millions to turn the chronically online into deportation agents, according to internal communications reviewed exclusively by the Washington Post.

So any americans reading this, please call your reps. You do not need to call for each individual bill, just give them a list of bills you want them to say no to, which should be:

KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act)

IODA (Interstate Obscenity Definition Act)

SCREEN act