kill a.i. before it kills us

Matt Cohen at Democracy Docket:

President Donald Trump and the GOP are attacking voting rights through executive orders to roll back mail-in voting and the SAVE America Act, which would impose strict ID requirements.  But to some far-right Christian influencers, that’s small potatoes.  They’re pushing for even harsher voting restrictions. Among them: revoking women’s right to vote, instituting “family voting,” and only allowing property owners the right to vote.   These ideas haven’t made it into legislation — yet. But they’re growing in popularity among far-right Christian nationalists, many of whom are motivated by a belief that women should have no role at all in public affairs.  Kai Schwemmer — an influential conservative influencer who was recently appointed as political director for the College Republicans of America — said in an online debate last year that women shouldn’t be able to vote, according to The Guardian.  “I believe they currently have the right to vote,” Schwemmer said. “But I’m in favor of probably like a family voting thing. I think that’d probably be a better way to do it.”

Family voting is a concept championed by Christian nationalists that only allows the patriarchal head of a family’s household to cast a vote on behalf of his wife and children.   Schwemmer — whose supporters describe him as a “Mormon Nick Fuentes,” the far-right streamer known for his misogyny and antisemitism — is hardly the first influential figure on the right to call for family voting. 

[...] Allowing only homeowners the right to vote is a form of voter suppression that dates back to the 1800s — but conservative activists besides Schwemmer have floated reviving the practice over the years, which would stand to disenfranchise millions of voters.  Among the most prominent may be Steve Bannon, the popular podcaster and former senior advisor to Trump. A former colleague of Bannon told the New York Times in 2016 that he “occasionally talked about the genetic superiority of some people and once mused about the desirability of limiting the vote to property owners.” Back in 2012, Ted Yoho, a former GOP congressman, said at a campaign event that only property owners should vote.  “I’ve had some radical ideas about voting, and it’s probably not a good time to tell them,” Yoho said. “But you used to have to be a property owner to vote.”

Since then, allowing only property owners to vote hasn’t come up much among GOP lawmakers, but as conservatives fervently push to restrict voting with the SAVE America Act, more right-wingers are reviving the proposal. An op-ed in the online conservative magazine The American Thinker last year advocated only allowing property owners to vote.

[...] Right-wing podcaster Steven Crowder recently posted on social media that, in addition to family voting, only people in “mandatory selective service” should be allowed to vote. Crowder also said that only people who “have at least three years of gainful employment and are currently paying taxes,” should vote, too.

We don't teach women and girls about their bodies or childbirth or pregnancy. We don't talk about the inherent risks of pregnancy or that it will probably worsen all of your chronic medical conditions as it goes on, a lot of which will never improve afterward. We don't tell people that if you have kidney disease, you might end up permanently on dialysis after a pregnancy or if you have pulmonary hypertension (a disease we don't screen for) you have a 40% chance of dying during pregnancy which is why it is an absolute contraindication to pregnancy but you wouldn't really know you have it until you're pregnant and become symptomatic in the 2nd trimester. We don't teach you that your perineum might tear so much that you have fecal incontinence for the rest of your life.

And I wanna be clear: that's by design.

If patients actually knew the risks that come with pregnancy, even pregnancies considered "low risk", humans would probably die off in a few generations.

I am not exaggerating.

I work in a field where informed consent is kind of the ONLY thing that matters at the end of the day when it comes to the treatment plans I make with patients and the procedures I perform. But my patients don't get the luxury of having informed consent before they get to me and it no longer matters if you're a horrific surgical candidate who would NEVER be offered a surgery in any other specialty due to medical comorbidities, I still have to do your c-section, that baby has to come out somehow.

I do think a lot of patients might choose things differently if they knew there's a decent chance they could end up with anal incontinence and on dialysis for life or that they code during their c-section because they had pulmonary hypertension and didn't know.

But there are people in this country and world who are really invested in ensuring women do not know the true risks of pregnancy. They REALLY don't want you to know that women over the age of 40 have a maternal mortality rate double that of black women in this country. What's more is they don't want you to be able to even choose when you get pregnant because they want to take away your most efficacious forms of birth control.

And the most insulting part?

then a woman knocked on the door and said "oh I'm so sorry he's a therapy dog he's trained to seek out people in severe distress"