badlatitude
Soros-backed
- 33,542
- 7,225
I suppose there is a race now between guns and knives in Texas.
Texas
- Thread starter Ishmael
- Start date
spankoka
Super Anarchist
Still; there are places I'd like to visit in Texas. The Alamo, Rothko Chapel, etc. Austin seems to have some great live music, and great sailing.
d'ranger
Super Anarchist
- 30,223
- 5,197
There are a lot of great people and things to do in Texas although I don't recommend coming in the summer unless you really enjoy being hot. Sweaty hot. It helps a lot if you are white btw.
edit: if you wind up in the Houston area drinks are on me.
edit: if you wind up in the Houston area drinks are on me.
Last edited:
jerseyguy
Super Anarchist
Been to The Alamo. Meh.
Although it’s been more than a few years Boudros’’ on the Riverwalk was a fine eating establishment.
When my son lived in Dallas his thought was that Austin was one of the few places where a Northern raised and educated person could be comfortable
SloopJonB
Super Anarchist
Fuck'em - if they are stupid enough to vote those assholes in then they deserve all the bad things that will happen to them.
Opinion: End of Texas' open beaches might be near
If SB 434 passes, don’t be surprised if you show up at your favorite beach spot and you’re confronted with a fenced off beach or no trespassing signs.news.yahoo.com
Blue Crab
benthivore
Austin in the 70s was wonderful. Lotta big names were day drinkers aka regular folk. The rest of us were called slackers, and correctly so.
- Thread starter
- #107
A Texas man whose ex-wife terminated her pregnancy is suing three women who assisted her under the state’s wrongful death statute, the first such case brought since the state’s near-total ban on abortion last summer.
Marcus Silva is represented by Jonathan Mitchell, the former solicitor general of Texas and architect of the state’s prohibition on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, and state Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park. The lawsuit is filed in state court in Galveston County, where Silva lives.
Silva alleges that his now ex-wife learned she was pregnant in July 2022, the month after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and conspired with two friends to illegally obtain abortion-inducing medication and terminate the pregnancy.
The friends texted with the woman, sending her information about Aid Access, an international group that provides abortion-inducing medication through the mail, the lawsuit alleges. Text messages show they instead found a way to acquire the medication in Houston, where the two women lived.
A third woman delivered the medication, the lawsuit alleges, and text messages indicate that the wife self-managed an abortion at home.
The defendants could not immediately be reached for comment. Silva and his wife divorced in February and have two daughters, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit relies heavily on screenshots from a group chat the ex-wife had with two friends seemingly seeking to help her terminate her pregnancy. Her friends expressed concern that Silva, her soon to be ex-husband, would “snake his way into your head.”
ADVERTISEMENT
“I know either way he will use it against me,” the pregnant woman said, according to text messages attached to the complaint. “If I told him before, which I’m not, he would use it as [a way to] try to stay with me. And after the fact, I know he will try to act like he has some right to the decision.”
“Delete all conversations from today,” one of the women later told her. “You don’t want him looking through it.”
The lawsuit alleges that assisting a self-managed abortion qualifies as murder under state law, which would allow Silva to sue under the wrongful death statute. The women have not been criminally charged. Mitchell and Cain intend to also name the manufacturer of the abortion pill as a defendant, once it is identified.
“Anyone involved in distributing or manufacturing abortion pills will be sued into oblivion,” Cain said in a statement.
Texas’ abortion laws specifically exempt the pregnant person from prosecution; the ex-wife is not named as a defendant.
Silva is asking a Galveston judge to award him more than $1 million in damages and an injunction stopping the defendants from distributing abortion pills in Texas.
www.rawstory.com
Marcus Silva is represented by Jonathan Mitchell, the former solicitor general of Texas and architect of the state’s prohibition on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, and state Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park. The lawsuit is filed in state court in Galveston County, where Silva lives.
Silva alleges that his now ex-wife learned she was pregnant in July 2022, the month after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and conspired with two friends to illegally obtain abortion-inducing medication and terminate the pregnancy.
The friends texted with the woman, sending her information about Aid Access, an international group that provides abortion-inducing medication through the mail, the lawsuit alleges. Text messages show they instead found a way to acquire the medication in Houston, where the two women lived.
A third woman delivered the medication, the lawsuit alleges, and text messages indicate that the wife self-managed an abortion at home.
The defendants could not immediately be reached for comment. Silva and his wife divorced in February and have two daughters, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit relies heavily on screenshots from a group chat the ex-wife had with two friends seemingly seeking to help her terminate her pregnancy. Her friends expressed concern that Silva, her soon to be ex-husband, would “snake his way into your head.”
ADVERTISEMENT
“I know either way he will use it against me,” the pregnant woman said, according to text messages attached to the complaint. “If I told him before, which I’m not, he would use it as [a way to] try to stay with me. And after the fact, I know he will try to act like he has some right to the decision.”
“Delete all conversations from today,” one of the women later told her. “You don’t want him looking through it.”
The lawsuit alleges that assisting a self-managed abortion qualifies as murder under state law, which would allow Silva to sue under the wrongful death statute. The women have not been criminally charged. Mitchell and Cain intend to also name the manufacturer of the abortion pill as a defendant, once it is identified.
“Anyone involved in distributing or manufacturing abortion pills will be sued into oblivion,” Cain said in a statement.
Texas’ abortion laws specifically exempt the pregnant person from prosecution; the ex-wife is not named as a defendant.
Silva is asking a Galveston judge to award him more than $1 million in damages and an injunction stopping the defendants from distributing abortion pills in Texas.
Three Texas women sued for wrongful death after allegedly helping friend obtain abortion medication
A Texas man whose ex-wife terminated her pregnancy is suing three women who assisted her under the state’s wrongful death statute, the first such case brought since the state’s near-total ban on abortion last summer.Marcus Silva is represented by Jonathan Mitchell, the former solicitor general...
www.rawstory.com
Abortion Opponents Want to Make Women Afraid to Get Help From Their Friends
The month after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a mother of two in Texas who had filed for divorce from her husband discovered she was pregnant. Determined not to have another child and worried that her husband would try to use the pregnancy to make her stay with him, she did what many of us would do and turned to two friends for help.
In text messages that are now part of a chilling lawsuit, her friends responded with warmth and solidarity. One told her about Aid Access, an organization based in Vienna that ships abortion pills to people in places where abortion is banned. Then the same friend texted that she had found someone nearby who could supply the medication. She and another friend both offered to let the woman go through the abortion at their homes. “Mistakes happen,” the second friend texted. “You can’t spiral. Hopefully this is the slap in the body that you need to remove yourself from him.”
Now the ex-husband, Marcus Silva, is getting his revenge. Last week, he filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against his ex-wife’s two friends and the woman who allegedly provided the abortion pills his ex-wife took, seeking a million dollars from each of them. (Because the suit seems likely to send abuse their way, I’m not including the women’s names.)
Silva’s case appears to have the backing of the anti-abortion movement, since he’s being represented by Jonathan F. Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general who devised Texas’ abortion bounty law, which gives private citizens the power to sue others for “conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.” His legal team also includes Briscoe Cain, a prominent abortion opponent in the Texas House, and three members of the Thomas More Society, a right-wing Catholic legal organization. “Assisting a self-managed abortion in Texas,” says the lawsuit, is “an act of murder.”
This case has several harrowing implications. First, it makes particularly vivid the way abortion prohibitions give men control over women. In the text messages reproduced in the lawsuit, Silva’s ex-wife wrote, of her pregnancy, that she knew Silva would “use it against me” and “try to act like he has some right to the decision.” Given that he is now suing her friends, she seems to have understood him well. What she might not have understood is how much political power he’d be able to muster on behalf of his patriarchal prerogatives.
According to Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University, it’s significant that the lawsuit wasn’t filed under Mitchell’s abortion bounty law. Instead, it’s a wrongful-death case, which Murray sees as a bid to win judicial recognition of fetal personhood in Texas law.
“Texas may prohibit abortion, but not on the grounds that it is a species of homicide — that is, the killing of a person,” she said. Texas lawmakers have, in the past, introduced legislation classifying abortion as homicide, which would make either having an abortion or performing one punishable by the death penalty, but the bills have never succeeded. If the idea of fetal personhood is normalized in the law through wrongful-death cases like Silva’s, applying murder statutes to abortion becomes easier to imagine. “Jonathan Mitchell is playing five-dimensional chess with this,” Murray said.
It’s hard to say whether the lawsuit has a chance, since that will depend on which judge hears it. Joanna Grossman, a visiting law professor at Stanford, found the filing absurd, saying, “It’s not written in a way to convince anybody about a serious legal argument.” But far-right judges don’t necessarily need serious legal arguments. After all, in another Texas lawsuit, we’re waiting to see whether a federal judge appointed by Donald Trump takes the unprecedented step of revoking F.D.A. approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. There are lots of judges, said Grossman, “just doing the bidding of the anti-abortion movement.”
Whatever happens legally, the message to women in states with abortion bans is unmistakable: You’re on your own. “No one is going to follow whether this ex-husband collects damages for this abortion,” said Grossman. They’re just going to see the news that the women accused of helping Silva’s ex-wife were publicly humiliated and put in grave financial jeopardy, and they’re going to think twice about confiding in their friends about an unwanted pregnancy.
“Mitchell’s trying to get at the whole information network, so that people really, truly are isolated emotionally and can’t trust anybody,” said Grossman.
The lawsuit includes a photograph of Silva’s ex-wife and her friends dressed up like characters from “The Handmaid’s Tale” for Halloween last year. It’s presented as evidence that they “celebrated the murder,” but I suspect it was included to make them identifiable and punish them for their cheekiness.
It turns out the women’s in-joke was more on the nose than they could have realized. In the novel, women aren’t allowed to communicate with one another except in pious stock phrases, and it takes months for the protagonist to realize that her seemingly meek shopping partner, Ofglen, is a rebel. “Don’t say a word,” Ofglen warns. “In any way.”
The month after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a mother of two in Texas who had filed for divorce from her husband discovered she was pregnant. Determined not to have another child and worried that her husband would try to use the pregnancy to make her stay with him, she did what many of us would do and turned to two friends for help.
In text messages that are now part of a chilling lawsuit, her friends responded with warmth and solidarity. One told her about Aid Access, an organization based in Vienna that ships abortion pills to people in places where abortion is banned. Then the same friend texted that she had found someone nearby who could supply the medication. She and another friend both offered to let the woman go through the abortion at their homes. “Mistakes happen,” the second friend texted. “You can’t spiral. Hopefully this is the slap in the body that you need to remove yourself from him.”
Now the ex-husband, Marcus Silva, is getting his revenge. Last week, he filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against his ex-wife’s two friends and the woman who allegedly provided the abortion pills his ex-wife took, seeking a million dollars from each of them. (Because the suit seems likely to send abuse their way, I’m not including the women’s names.)
Silva’s case appears to have the backing of the anti-abortion movement, since he’s being represented by Jonathan F. Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general who devised Texas’ abortion bounty law, which gives private citizens the power to sue others for “conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.” His legal team also includes Briscoe Cain, a prominent abortion opponent in the Texas House, and three members of the Thomas More Society, a right-wing Catholic legal organization. “Assisting a self-managed abortion in Texas,” says the lawsuit, is “an act of murder.”
This case has several harrowing implications. First, it makes particularly vivid the way abortion prohibitions give men control over women. In the text messages reproduced in the lawsuit, Silva’s ex-wife wrote, of her pregnancy, that she knew Silva would “use it against me” and “try to act like he has some right to the decision.” Given that he is now suing her friends, she seems to have understood him well. What she might not have understood is how much political power he’d be able to muster on behalf of his patriarchal prerogatives.
According to Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University, it’s significant that the lawsuit wasn’t filed under Mitchell’s abortion bounty law. Instead, it’s a wrongful-death case, which Murray sees as a bid to win judicial recognition of fetal personhood in Texas law.
“Texas may prohibit abortion, but not on the grounds that it is a species of homicide — that is, the killing of a person,” she said. Texas lawmakers have, in the past, introduced legislation classifying abortion as homicide, which would make either having an abortion or performing one punishable by the death penalty, but the bills have never succeeded. If the idea of fetal personhood is normalized in the law through wrongful-death cases like Silva’s, applying murder statutes to abortion becomes easier to imagine. “Jonathan Mitchell is playing five-dimensional chess with this,” Murray said.
It’s hard to say whether the lawsuit has a chance, since that will depend on which judge hears it. Joanna Grossman, a visiting law professor at Stanford, found the filing absurd, saying, “It’s not written in a way to convince anybody about a serious legal argument.” But far-right judges don’t necessarily need serious legal arguments. After all, in another Texas lawsuit, we’re waiting to see whether a federal judge appointed by Donald Trump takes the unprecedented step of revoking F.D.A. approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. There are lots of judges, said Grossman, “just doing the bidding of the anti-abortion movement.”
Whatever happens legally, the message to women in states with abortion bans is unmistakable: You’re on your own. “No one is going to follow whether this ex-husband collects damages for this abortion,” said Grossman. They’re just going to see the news that the women accused of helping Silva’s ex-wife were publicly humiliated and put in grave financial jeopardy, and they’re going to think twice about confiding in their friends about an unwanted pregnancy.
“Mitchell’s trying to get at the whole information network, so that people really, truly are isolated emotionally and can’t trust anybody,” said Grossman.
The lawsuit includes a photograph of Silva’s ex-wife and her friends dressed up like characters from “The Handmaid’s Tale” for Halloween last year. It’s presented as evidence that they “celebrated the murder,” but I suspect it was included to make them identifiable and punish them for their cheekiness.
It turns out the women’s in-joke was more on the nose than they could have realized. In the novel, women aren’t allowed to communicate with one another except in pious stock phrases, and it takes months for the protagonist to realize that her seemingly meek shopping partner, Ofglen, is a rebel. “Don’t say a word,” Ofglen warns. “In any way.”
SloopJonB
Super Anarchist
Worked very well for the Stasi.
Bus Driver
Bacon Quality Control Specialist
Will Gov. Abbott complain?
U.S. flies migrants caught at Canada border to Texas in deterrence effort
SloopJonB
Super Anarchist
That'll teach them.
- Thread starter
- #114
They are playing a very dangerous game. Companies are already leaving Texas, and others with branch offices are taking the state off their lists. The Republicans seem to want to make the entire state poor and ignorant. And, of course, under their benighted control.
veni vidi vici
Omne quod audimus est opinio, non res. Omnia videm
- 9,075
- 2,156
Bus Driver
Bacon Quality Control Specialist
Engineers tend to be pretty smart.
Used to be smart engineers flocked to Texas. NASA and erl.
- Thread starter
- #119
The American Taliban certainly fucked that up.
Bus Driver
Bacon Quality Control Specialist
Can't imagine that loosening the laws regarding guns had anything to do with this wild west shit.
It'll be interesting to see if they can identify a weapon the shooter claims the thief had.
Truck theft suspect fatally shot by owner who tracked him using AirTag, police say
It'll be interesting to see if they can identify a weapon the shooter claims the thief had.
