South Dakota lawmaker blocks workplace protection for pregnant workers: "It's not prison. You can quit."

False dilemma fallacy. You’re presenting it as an either/or option while continuing to ignore the third that others have brought up. Also, you are deliberately ignoring my point that the choice of terminating employment has repercussions that can only be seen as coercive in the absence of a welfare system that can support people who are between periods of employment.

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That’s because he’s a massively tedious Randroid.

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The repercussions of quitting employment are obvious and should be weighed carefully by those who are contemplating such a thing.

Or, and here’s the tough part that WILL BLOW YOUR MIND: that woman could go and protest this stupid ass lack of accomodation to her elected representative, who would then write and pass legislation to mitigate the initial problem. Amazing, right?

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You’re using the word “choice” with regard to a woman being pregnant in South Dakota.

How many of those women are, in fact, pregnant by choice? Almost certainly it is not 100%.

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Or, in other words, “Choose between being required to do painful, medically-dangerous-to-the-fetus work, or be unemployed.”

I think we’re done here.

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Here we go advocating the use of force again.

(http://www2.needham.k12.ma.us/nhs/cur/Baker_00/2002_p7/ak_p7/childlabor.html)

Yes, it’s all just the employee’s choice. Take the case of these urchins here… why, the government shouldn’t have gotten involved at all to prevent employers from taking advantage of children in poor families. That mean, nasty government, using the threat of violence to enforce the rights of the workers, ruined everything! Those kids could have just quit and gone off to starve to death at any time!

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The repercussions of not breathing are obvious and should be weighed carefully by those who are contemplating such a thing.

The repercussions of cleaving one’s head from one’s body are obvious and should be weighed carefully by those who are contemplating such a thing.

The repercussions of drinking hydraulic fluid are obvious and should be weighed carefully by those who are contemplating such a thing.

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I respectfully suggest you are reading too much into those posts.
Years ago I shared a house for six months with a classical scholar who was something of an authority on Aristophanes. I thought I knew a bit about Aristophanes; it turned out I didn’t understand anything at all. What I did learn from her was that a lot of our understanding of the classical Greek world is based on a largely imaginary model constructed by Renaissance academics, developed further by the Enlightenment and finally given a twist by German and English academics. The result is that it is very unsafe to adduce any Greek author in the support of almost any view because what they understood by what they said is probably quite different from what we understand, and our understanding is largely the product of our culture. If a performance of, say, The Wasps, was put on by Zulus within their cultural understanding, it would be most likely closer to Aristophanes’s intentions than one put on by a student drama society.
Aristotle and Plato are writing for an aristocratic society. Socrates’s interlocutors are all aristocrats. Aristocracy meant something different then from what it does now. The point I started off making was that, relevant to what this thread is about, Aristotle would not have been interested in the employment rights of low-status people regardless of how we define slavery, helotry etc.; in Marxist terms his remarks on culture and friendship to a degree must relate to class solidarity. If he did not have to in your words, “protect his stuff from huddling hordes of unwashed people who thought their lives mattered”, it was because he had people to do it for him. He was tutor to the son of Philip of Macedon, after all, and he was backed up by armed men.
I’m sorry if my manner of disagreeing with you offended you but it wasn’t intended to.

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But that would be removing @ShawnCathcart’s right to take unrestricted profits from the labour of others. ‘Work for me in unhealthy conditions for poverty wages or starve’ isn’t coercion at all!

/s

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Why do you keep equating these two things?

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Protesting is “the use of force”? WTF are you talking about?

The repercussions of advocating are obvious and should be weighed carefully by those who are contemplating such a thing.

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To misquote Thomas More, “Where will the bad employer hide when all the laws are beaten flat?”

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Obligatory:

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Those wimmin folk have some nerve getting pregnant, right?

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Because they believe in the land of Take-What-You-Want, not the land of Do-As-You-Please.

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Lemme guess, you’re a Libertarian?

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Why do Libertarian douches think that any laws, ultimately, come down to some stereotype of a man from the government with a gun pointed at them making them do something they don’t like? Do you folks have no sense of community or responsibility to others? “I’ve got mine, Jack.”

So, y’all wanna quit using our electricity, roads, police services, fire departments, banks, etc. that are all wrapped in a complex network of laws and go full outlaw with a gun? I’d be all for it.

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You proposed that the pregnant worker should approach her elected representative to advocate a solution to her problem. The representative will the use the only solution available to the government, he, with enough votes will pass a law to ensure that employers will now change working conditions to suit pregnant workers. How will the government then enforce this law? The law will be enforced as all other laws are enforced, at the point of a gun. If an employer does not comply with the new law he will face fines, imprisonment, or if he physically resists, death. The government has no other way to enforce laws.