Lubbock, Texas, is the latest county to pass a law to persecute people who help others get an abortion.

This law employs a dodge designed to nullify the applicability of constitutional rights: instead of prosecuting whoever committed an "offense", it authorizes various people to sue that person as if they had been somehow harmed by per, in the absence of any actual harm to them. This amounts to a kind of private persecution.

In effect, the dodge creates a notional pretend "harm" which anyone (even strangers) can then sue for.

If this dodge is allowed to stand, it would put all constitutional rights in danger, because it would allow governments to declare exceptions to them at will. If we want the idea of constitutional rights to mean anything, we must make this dodge invalid in general.

*Here’s what happens [in the US] when a for-profit company takes over your local emergency room.* The author is a doctor who worked in an ER that was taken over.

All emergency medicine should be run by the state — for-profit companies should not be allowed in that field.

As the Tories have demonstrated, it is not guaranteed that a government will keep medicine working well. Especially if it is a government of Tories (plutocratists) that seek to destroy the public system and replace it with a privatize system that is as horrible as the US privatize medicine system.

But we also know that government scan do this job well, for decades. Whereas we can be absolutely certain that for-profit companies will ruin it.

*Young Europeans more likely to quit driving and have fewer children to save planet. Exclusive: Poll shows young people willing to make big lifestyle changes but balk at smaller gestures.*

* Gaza’s already rudimentary water network has been obliterated, with 2.2 million residents trying to get by on three litres a day.*

Israel has imposed shortages of water on Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank. The shortages in the West Bank did not endanger human health and life directly but they denied Palestinians the possibility of farming.

Governor DeMentis is trying to forcibly eliminate chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine in Florida's state universities. That is unconstitutional, but DeMentis has no respect for the US Constitution.

I might very well disagree with those groups about what outcome would constitute justice in Palestine. I advocate the two-states solution, with one of those two states being a democratic Israel. This would require Israel to return much of the land it has seized or annexed.

Perhaps those student groups advocate something else that I would disagree with.

Whatever it is, they have the right to advocate it, whether DeMentis likes it or not, and whether I like it not.