Plasticizers. Chemicals that are added to the pile and backing material to keep it soft and flexible. They leak out over time and act similarly to estrogen in the body.
There's also a lesser concern over dust and mold since you can't mop a carpet or take it outside to clean it. A vacuum never gets everything.
You're the one who started with a childish "nuh-uh" rebuttal, would you like to try and actually make a big boy argument against "All children are precious and deserve to live"?
That you cannot see your own hypocrisy is perhaps saddest part of this exchange.
Are you familiar with the idea that those who make a claim have the burden of proof, and that claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence?
You insist that they're all precious. Fine, prove it. You insist they all deserve to live. Fine, prove it. I can argue against the former by simply pointing to a dozen children I've seen on the street this week, and argue against the latter with a simple "why do they deserve it?", which cannot be answered with anything other than " because I believe that this is so", which is an acceptable response for your personal motivations, but certainly no way to support a general statement of principle.
Burden of proof means the person making the positive statement has the burden. I'm saying we don't do something (kill off children), you're making the claim we should do it so the burden is fully on you.
I take it you're not a Christian then? Because they're all the children of God, created in His image so we all have inherent dignity. These children didn't rape or murder etc that would cause them to forfeit their lives by their own actions.
I believe being a human being gives you inherent value.
So you support endless funding of Africa because Africans will starve while popping out dozens of kids?
I don’t like abortion on principle, however America collapses in 3 generations with it banned across the board simply because we are to weak to be honest about people and “diversity”.
I support not killing defenseless children, a billion people including adults are starving- do you support endless murder in poor countries to keep populations low? Of course not.
Again that is not a rational response. If we are to take Christianity by its standards we are meant to be shepherds. That does mean culling the weak and useless if there are not enough resources to maintain everyone. Pretending otherwise is just suicide by proxy.
John 10:11 "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep."
Horrible quote pull considering Jesus was talking about him being the messiah, but if you want to play it…
John 10:26 but you do not believe because you are not of my sheep
Sounds like his disowning nonbelievers there…
Also your entire schtick is just sad. Shepherds then did not keep rabid sheep, nor did they keep sickly sheep at the expense of the rest of their flock.
You’re now pretending the Bible exists outside of all other context, what does turn the other cheek mean?
What does genesis 1:28 mean?
I never declared myself smarter than God. Blatant hubris under the guise of compassion is adorable though. Again, by your own logic you should lay down your life feeding retards who can’t feed themselves at the cost of your own children and future, that is the true Christian way according to you.
Guy, I have worked security in [Redacted]. I've seen the gangs of 30 kids roaming the streets at night burning rubbish bins, stealing ambulances and taunting dogs. The oldest of them was 11. I'm not even going to start discussing Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. let alone Failure To Thrive, or consanguineous unions.
You are making all kinds of assumptions that do not bear out in the face of reality.
It isn't fair or right that babies must pay for the sins of their parents, but I didn't make the rules.
I do not believe that black Americans would be as bad as they are without abortion. I don't believe so many of them would be murderers if they were not raised by mothers whose contempt for the sanctity of innocent life is so great that in Democrat cities like New York they kill half their children before they are even born.
Since when has passing laws against immoral behavior ever resulted in anyone growing a moral compass? They already proved that the bulk of the crime rate reduction in the 90s was from incapacitation. You have to physically prevent recidivist assholes from reoffending because they cannot be reformed, hence the mass incarceration the left endlessly whines about. The black crime rate is chiefly the result of their low IQ with societal coddling exacerbating the problem.
Since when has passing laws against immoral behavior ever resulted in anyone growing a moral compass?
The left pushes abortions for the same reason they push trans "treatments" - because it lets people cross a left-wing point of no return. If banning at-will abortion meant less abortions were carried out, there would be less women who are leftists for life because the alternative is admitting what they have done.
I think it's a zero sum error. People look at laws failing to stop all crime and decide that since the guard rails aren't stopping every lunatic from flinging themselves off the cliff, they must be a failure.
Either that, or they look at examples of overlegalization like prohibition, and decide that people rebelling against overzealous laws means that rebelling against all laws must be good.
The “everything is socioeconomic factors” lie has been debunked ad nauseam. No amount of Christianity can change that there are billions of people globally who can not survive or function in a free society because they are mentally incapable of understanding consequences.
Either or, I don't care either way, and it makes no difference in the end. Dead is dead, and a fetus isn't enough of a person to suffer more than, say, a chicken or squirrel.
I just want the biological leftovers to be used for something, even if it's just fertilizer or something like that. I can't stand waste.
I cannot wrap my head around someone saying they can't stand waste and then twiddling their thumbs over umpteen million wasted lives in this country alone. Every life has potential, even if you don't see it's worth. Furthermore, the distinction you make between what is human and personhood is quite literally a defense mechanism created to absolve yourself of any responsibility for the genocide taking place every day. Liberals use it every day to convince themselves their not hurting anyone. It is a lie from the depths of he'll meant to ease us into accepting this abomination. You may have fooled yourself, but you cannot fool the spirit. I will pray for you, and all of these casualties of "progress".
Father God, please forgive us. Please understand that while a few of us are awake to what is happening, the darkness has a deceptive grip over far too many. I pray for your redemption and for the wool to be removed from our eyes. Father please bless all of those lost in this madness and know that we did not allow this, but that it has been orchestrated against you. I pray for peace and understanding for all those who do not understand the battle taking place. In Jesus name I pray, Amen!
Listen, buddy, if you're going to descend into religiosity, then I don't think there's any point to continuing this. I'm not going to reason you anywhere, since you've not reasoned yourself into your current position in the first place, especially given how you've literally begun to virtue signal your faith here, in violation of your own holy book.
No, whatever, I'll make a good faith attempt. I disagree with your position that a every life has value and every human has potential. There is simply no evidence in support of this position, and mountains of evidence against it.
If humans were so good and full of potential, why does your own religion need to call people to mercy, kindness, charity, and etc? If humans, as a whole, had some inherent qualities and potentials to this effect, would your god need to threaten people with eternal punishment for sinning? Wouldn't people simple do these things, without being prodded and cajoled?
The fact that we consider great kindness or charity to be as rare as great skill with mathematics or engineering tells a story of a misbegotten species that, very occasionally, has some small number of people rise above their base nature.
Which is my whole point. Humans don't inherently carry value. People demonstrate value through accomplishment and achievement, in whichever arenas they strive in.
Humans carry potential, which aggregates into a baseline of value. Children and women carry more potential, which is why they get on the lifeboats first.
You're not terribly bright. It will begin to irk you at some point.
People like you are what happens when downvotes are disabled.
You haven't made a single coherent argument in this entire thread ("dead is dead"? Seriously?) but you attack everyone else for not arguing in "good faith".
If you aren't 14 years old, you need to get a job.
I think people should witness a birth. That is not a "fetus". It is person. The baby has a personality when it is born. I didn't care one way or another, then I had kids. It is scary that doctors or nurses think nothing of snuffing out a human life like that, and women having several abortions.
I'll be honest, this type of "gotcha" interrogation is both ghoulish and pointless.
For the latter, the people who already agree with you won't agree with you harder. The people who disagree with you won't suddenly change their minds. The wilfully ignorant will twist themselves into pretzels to remain willfully ignorant. It accomplishes nothing.
And for the former, this really comes off like asking a gun rights advocate what his favorite way of killing someone is. Yes, yes, I know someone is just itching to shout "guns are Constitutionally Protected and abortion isn't", but let's set that aside for a second.
Quite honestly, the goal of an abortion is a dead fetus safely extracted from the host mother. The method really doesn't matter. You still get a dead fetus, whether you use a magic pill that teleports it into the sun or an industrial vacuum to remove it by parts.
And for anyone who wants to make a moral "you're killing a person" argument, understand that, for anyone who isn't an adherent to the whole "life begins at conception" idea, a fetus isn't a person; it hasn't developed any of the characteristics that define personhood besides a shared DNA structure. And, quite frankly, calling a fetus a baby in this context is trying to emotionally manipulate people by making them imagine a full grown and birthed 9+ month old infant getting shoved into a blender, instead of the weird chicken-fish hybrid looking thing that a fetus spends the first four months resembling. This adds to the ghoulishness of the interrogation, and puts people off, circling back around to the pointless nature of it.
Abortion IS ghoulish. Abortion is straight up ending a human life at its most vulnerable. You can split hairs all you want about time and location, but there's a reason "You should have been aborted" is a horrible thing to say to someone. Guns are used for food, sport and self defense far more than they are for murder. Trying to "Gotcha" someone about the use of guns is like a vegan telling a carnivore about how brutal butchering is. Life is harsh, and sometimes you have to be harsh right back to deal with it.
People NEED to have their noses rubbed in the reality of what abortion fundamentally is, because people file it away under "Women's rights/Healthcare" and then lock it up tight to dodge the cognitive dissonance of "This is literally a mother committing infanticide to dodge the consequences of her own actions." It's Kronos devouring his children, writ large.
Confronting the process of Abortion being considered a "gotcha" is the same kind of euphemism treadmill that makes any term describing the LGBTETC become a slur over time. The thing that is being described is inherently offensive on a fundamental level, which is why we're just not supposed to think about it and accept it.
I'd like to say first, before I disagree with you, that I do appreciate that you argue in good faith and express your views properly, unlike how a lot of the gutter scum of the internet just throw an attempt at a pithy rejoinder on top of an insult, pat themselves on the back, and walk away. It's refreshing to have a discussion, instead of the usual tripe.
That said, I'd like to address your points in order. For the first point, your argument basically proves my own. You specifically label a fetus as a human life, and base your argumentation around the idea that a human life carries some inherent value, even when the organism that actually makes up that human is simply not there. Notice how you focus on "human" and I specifically keep saying "person"; the two are deeply intertwined, but not actually synonymous (which, if we ever actually make AI and/or find aliens, a lot of people are going to need to come to terms with). A fetus is an in-progress human, but it's not a person yet. It won't be a person for years, because personhood requires a brain complex enough to develop self-awareness.
You yourself land upon this with your reference to the "you should have been aborted" insult, but you wander away from the logical conclusion; the insult is not denying the human-ness of the person, but instead implying the person-ness of the person being insulted is so sub-par that it would have been better if they had never been. The insultee's human-ness, which is inherent to them, is never brought into question; only the achievements and accomplishments they have made that forms the ontological record of their person-ness is under attack. (Sorry if this bit sounds like an old man repeating himself, but there's only so many ways to say this when reinforcing the premise.)
As for abortion itself, it certainly is bloody and macabre. I doubt the mentality of anyone who disagrees with that. However, so is surgery, and yet we keep at it. Something being unpleasant does not inherently make it bad.
I also agree entirely with you that people need to understand what abortion entails. Too many people think it is, in fact, some magic pill that teleports the problem away. However, as I don't accept the "human life is inherently valuable" argumentation, I must also disagree with you on the notion that the avoidance of consequences is inherently negative. We've built our entire species' history around avoiding consequences. We invented farming, tamed animals, built machines, and raised massive edifices to avoid the consequences of being born as upstart descendents of monkeys, doomed to eat, reproduce, and die in the woods. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting a comforts level life free of consequences or suffering; it's why we're sitting in houses with AC, heating, running water, fridges full of food, and chatting across the globe using the magic boxes of nano-scale runes powered by caged lightning. You mention Kronos eating his own children as a failing, bit that's the moral of the story from Zeus' perspective, and he grew up to be a massive net negative on the local divinities. From Kronos' perspective, his only flaw was not checking that he was eating a baby instead of a stone, and that's more a moral lesson about not blindly trusting people with mission-critical tasks.
Finally, returning to my original point about it being ghoulish, the last point I want to tackle is how absurd it is to try to make a "right and proper" moral argumentation while violating every single practice of proprietary in debate. The congressman, quite frankly, did himself no favors with how he presented himself, while the activist stayed respectably professional despite it. You cannot simply ask what someone's favorite method of killing a man is (or, I mean, you generally can't - I don't know what lunatic standard the Epstein Island Enthusiast political class have developed in their little cabals) and then start going down a list, pausing after each one and saying "is it this one?", and still present yourself as the right and honorable man standing up to evil. There are standards and ways things are done, and this is quite a ways beyond them. So far beyond them that it begins even to discredit his own position to the general audience, who we both know are neither intelligent enough to understand debates nor objective enough to go by anything other than "feels" and "vibes".
A fetus is an in-progress human, but it's not a person yet. It won't be a person for years, because personhood requires a brain complex enough to develop self-awareness.
So anyone who suffers from neurological disorders that prevent them from establishing your threshold of personhood aren't actually human beings and therefore, postnatal abortions are a-okay?
You're missing the point so spectacularly, I cannot tell if you're doing it maliciously or just with great aplomb of foolishness.
Yes, having neurological conditions that prevent you from developing a functioning adult mind preclude you from being a person. No, it doesn't remove your base human-ness.
How you move from that to "let's just murder retards because they are lesser" is your cross to carry.
Define what you consider a post-natal abortion, and I'll answer you. And do define it rigorously, since I can see the "gotcha" with the colloquial definition of the term and arguments against eugenics from here.
According to your own definition, you described it as "bloody and macabre", but you also said the same of surgery and that we "keep at it". So we'll go with your definition as a means of ridding this existence of an organism that has not achieved "personhood".
Since you seem to adopt a morally relative outlook on such things, would postnatal abortions be a-okay under your threshold for an organism that doesn't meet "personhood"?
Buddy, if you disagree but refuse to put in the effort to argue in good faith, you're the redditor you accuse others of being.
Imagine, if you can, the possibility that the constant purity spirals and ideological cleansings of social media have forced us to cohabitate, and only agree on seventy five to eighty percent of things. But if you can't, see if you can find someone to change your smoke alarm batteries, at least.
I get that modern internet discourse makes strange bedfellows but you've commented a grand total of five times in the last three years, including the two comments in this thread. I suppose it makes us wonder why you chose this topic and this take specifically.
Funny story, actually. I was using a different account for ages because I'd forgotten the password to this one, and in a strange coincidence, lost the password to that one due to file corruption and found saved credentials to this one on an old device I had around the house I was getting ready to recycle.
The stupid shit that happens when you use password manager generated passwords and refuse to provide legitimate emails when signing up for websites to shoot the shit with people you don't know and don't need to know.
Though I will chastise you on trying to creep on my post history. I don't know how or when that behavior became normalized, but it's absurd that people do that. Our older conversations were between ourselves and whomever we were speaking with at the time, and not something for random lookie-loos to ogle at at arbitrary points in the future, devoid of context and ontological involvement in the discourse.
Anyway, the actual human behind the account has been around in one coat or another for ages, and I usually make the same arguments on topics. I think this one just lacks my old block list - the same people tend to say the same nonsense around here, so you end up having far fewer arguments when you actively avoid each other.
Though I will chastise you on trying to creep on my post history. I don't know how or when that behavior became normalized, but it's absurd that people do that. Our older conversations were between ourselves and whomever we were speaking with at the time, and not something for random lookie-loos to ogle at at arbitrary points in the future, devoid of context and ontological involvement in the discourse.
All I did was click on your name, bud. Not that invasive.
Finish the thought, sir. You clicked it with the intent to gleam information, and then you read through it, looking for information.
To borrow a crude euphemism, you didn't just trip over and fall onto the dick. You went looking for something you could use as ammunition, and when you failed to find something, you tried to manufacture it instead.
The offense you're taking to this is silly. I do like to get an idea of who I'm speaking to and the ideological position they're coming from, yes. I didn't bother reading any of your pseudo-intellectual redditor comments because there are enough of them in this thread to give me a good idea where you're coming from.
a fetus isn't a person; it hasn't developed any of the characteristics that define personhood besides a shared DNA structure.
A twenty-one week old fetus can survive birth - the older of the two I know about is now approaching his sixth birthday. If we were talking about the morning after pill then what you said could be relevant, but there can be no defense of late term abortion when medical science is rolling back the point of viability and exposing just who is being killed.
I can't think of a way to say this without it sounding condescending, so please understand that that's not the intended tone here.
Are you familiar with the idea of averages and statistics? Because you're making the standard leftist woman argumentation that, just because they can think of a single incident that doesn't 100% align with the statistical norm, this disproves the whole idea.
Yes, a miniscule percentage of non-viable fetuses can be artificially forced to complete the gestation cycle IF we apply the frankly astounding capabilities of modern medical science. This doesn't actually disprove anything I've said, though, and in fact supports my argumentation. They're still not viable organisms at that stage; if they were, they wouldn't need advanced NICUs and trained clinicians with specialized knowledge. And even these artificially sustained humans don't achieve personhood until many years post birth, because they STILL need to keep growing to develop the necessary brain complexity.
For early and mid-term abortions, no naturally viable human is being killed. For very late term abortions, a viable human is being killed, but no person is being killed. At worst, you've wasted the energy and resources you've spent gestating the child to that point, but the actual spark of personhood is maybe 1/5th of the way to being ignited at the time a baby is born.
but the actual spark of personhood is maybe 1/5th of the way to being ignited at the time a baby is born.
Says who? By that logic it should be legal to kill a toddler up to the point they become self-aware (I'm guessing that's the arbitrary metric you're using to denote 'personhood').
You're making this distinction between a 'human' and a 'person' that is entirely in your own head.
PK Dick wrote a short story about just that: the future society where you are only considered "human" if you can do some simple calculus. Before that? You can be "recycled" at the whim of your mother (NOT the father!), usually around age 8 or 9. He got more hate mail, back in the 60's! for that one than all the rest combined. Actual mail, eh? Someone paid money to tell him that they hate him.
Daemon Knight had a similar story. Until you turn 16? Your parents can send you "to the adoption agency" which sounds great, eh? Except the 'agency' just keeps you for 6 months, then harvests your organs. The chance of actual adoption is close to zero.
So kids in that story are amazing. They get up in the morning, cook & clean, pay close attention in school, never get in trouble!
The story is about such a boy, 14 and his parents decide to go on vacation on another planet. It's too bothersome to take him along, or even ask relatives to care for him, so they order him to go to the "adoption center". Dark!
Well, in this case, says me, because I am the ultimate arbiter of my morality, much as you are of yours.
Also, you're moving away from the debate. You've brought the question of legality into it, making the depressingly common attempt to take "legal" and "good"/"moral" together, when the two have zero bearing on one another.
And self-awareness is an intersting metric to consider, but even that paltry standard disqualifies huge swathes of people across the globe from personhood, let alone my preferred standard of self-actualization. Think about the average "doctor, lawyer, engineer" who dindu nuffin, or the average pajeet, or the average "refugees welcome" leftist. Many of them would, I think, at least be able to look in a mirror and identify the self and how the self differs from the not-self, but how many have a proper internal monologue, or the ability to imagine and rotate the apple, or even to comprehend the idea of second order effects, let alone predict them?
No, there's more to personhood then the mirror, and we tend to bet on humans since we are the sole species on this planet currently able to produce st least some members that qualify as persons, even if large numbers never make it that far.
You could, perhaps, make a solid argument in the wasted POTENTIAL of any given aborted fetus or baby, that he or she may have one day become a person and contributed to the sprecies at large, but no one ever does. It's always just "muh humans are le special" argumentation for an inherent worth that simply doesn't exist.
Also, you're moving away from the debate. You've brought the question of legality into it, making the depressingly common attempt to take "legal" and "good"/"moral" together, when the two have zero bearing on one another
Replace 'legal' with 'moral' then. Same principle applies. You're focusing on technicalities like a redditor.
And self-awareness is an intersting metric to consider, but even that paltry standard disqualifies huge swathes of people across the globe from personhood, let alone my preferred standard of self-actualization. Think about the average "doctor, lawyer, engineer" who dindu nuffin, or the average pajeet, or the average "refugees welcome" leftist. Many of them would, I think, at least be able to look in a mirror and identify the self and how the self differs from the not-self, but how many have a proper internal monologue, or the ability to imagine and rotate the apple, or even to comprehend the idea of second order effects, let alone predict them?
Again, this whole distinction of human vs. person exists entirely in your head based on what appears to be some arbitrary IQ threshold you've invented.
I would say I'm astounded at your willful dismissal of the core aspects of philosophical disagreement as "technicalities" instead of recognizing them as the critical distinctions that underpin theories of mind, but I would be lying. This type of pompous, self-aggrandizing stupidity is actually quite common and widespread.
No, the same.principle does not apply. You cannot swap out legal for moral and make the same point. Many things are legal that are not moral, and many things that are moral are illegal. Reformulate your arguments from a purely moral perspective, support your moral suppositions, and we can go from there. I've already done so for my position.
Finally, I begin to suspect that you may be taking offense here because you yourself don't meet the metric of personhood. You deny the need to differentiate between a human who doesn't know why the ceiling bird chirps or what it would be like if he hadn't had breakfast that morning and one that does, and pretend that catering to the former at the expense of the latter hasn't been an absolute, objective destructive influence on human society at large.
What is it about humans that supposedly makes them special? We're not fast, not strong, can't heal well, don't live that long, don't have sharp senses, etc. But we do have the minds that out oversized brains can generate as the fruit of many years of growth. Since it is these minds that gives humans our long-fought dominion over the Earth, by what right do those sharing our DNA but absent these minds claim themselves to be those special humans with inherent worth?
And so is the human/person divide illustrated. A human may become, through talent or effort, a person, but personhood is not solely contingent on humanity, nor is humanity the sole criterion for personhood.
This type of pompous, self-aggrandizing stupidity is actually quite common and widespread
It certainly is in this thread, in which you've typed out various walls of text focusing on semantics and technicalities that serve no purpose other than to stroke your own ego and waste time.
Some people are dumb (you may include me in this category if you wish). That doesn't deprive them of personhood.
So killing a human is OK, but killing a "person" is wrong?
Reductive nonsense; you should know that's not what I've said.
Killing a human is morally equivalent to killing any other animal, absent special considerations. Personhood is one of these special considerations; you would certainly understand how one might be more reticent to arbitrarily execute a brilliant scientist or artist then a random beggar off the street for the same crime, for example. The doer and thinker carry more value to their existence that the eater or the junkie.
What's the difference? Aren't all "persons" also humans? Or can chimps be "persons" too?
I'm not going through the whole thing again. If you don't understand by now, you can't understand at all.
No, chimps or other great apes can't be persons. They lack the minds for it.
That's the secret sauce. A mind. Not just a brain running pattern recognition subroutines built into it by millions of years of evolutionary pressure.
And a great many humans alive today have nothing more than a very complex pattern recognition engine made of meat in their skulls, so they are not persons.
You said killing a fetus is OK because it isn't a person. Therefore killing humans IS ok, because fetus are humans.
So who decides if a human is a "person" or not? The government? If the junkie on the street cleans up & writes several popular novels, is he suddenly a person? Says who? The overlap between beings with human DNA and persons is 100%. 100% of humans are persons & vice versa.
Now I'd allow that there's "persons" who aren't actually humans, they just look like humans. Based on them not having a soul. That that's an entirely different can of fish, eh? Then we get into the problem of animals having souls (they do!) & so forth.
You said killing a fetus is OK because it isn't a person. Therefore killing humans IS ok, because fetus are humans.
You're hallucinating like a bad LLM. I denied that the killing of a fetus is uniquely bad or undesirable, simply because it is human. You're the one who somehow leapt to "let's murder at random".
So who decides if a human is a "person" or not? The government? If the junkie on the street cleans up & writes several popular novels, is he suddenly a person? Says who? The overlap between beings with human DNA and persons is 100%. 100% of humans are persons & vice versa.
Primarily, says me. I decide.
And you've supported my argument here. The junkie is not a person, because he has acted like a junkie for his whole life. If he were to, somehow, find the spark inside to self-actualize and become a person, he would demonstrate the values necessary for personhood. Because he has risen above his base, mindless biology.
And you confuse the map for the territory. Just because all known persons are human, does not suggest in the slightest that humanity is a prerequisite for personhood. Arguably, there are far more non-person humans than there are person humans.
Based on them not having a soul.
Oh boy, here we go. Alright, define and describe the soul, and how having one detectably differentiates from not having one. Don't use religious references, because those are just appeals to authority.
Oh, thanks for the answer. I am free to utterly ignore anything you decide, asw is the rest of the world. Cool.
The junkie is not a person, because he has acted like a junkie for his whole life.
So when he was 9? He was not a person? At 11, 15? how about 22 the year before the junk hit, was he a non-person then too? You do see how arbitrary and therefor irrelevant your "rules" are, right?
I am the KING of not confusing the map with the terrain. It's one of my favorite things to tell to idiotic leftists. "Prerequisite"? Humans are persons and persons are humans. It's an interchangeable word. You cannot claim a human is a non-human, and you cannot arbitrarily decide who is a person or not. I mean you as an individual can, but that's also the number of people who would base their ideology on your ideas: 1.
If governments gain the power to decide who is and is not a "person" that's when the cattle-cars start filling up, ok? Killing Fields, Holodomor, Great Leap Foreword & etc.
Simple: there are things we humans do not understand. There's things we know we don't and things we don't know we don't. There's things we think we understand, but in fact are incorrect. & etc. Spooky Action At A Distance aka: Einstein's Clock in the Box mind experiment. They actually carried this out, it's there, the impossible was proven to be real.
One of those things we don't know is what makes us human. Sentience? Salience? Sapience? Not commonly found in nature, especially all 3! But we humans have them & other fancy words too.
If souls exist? Then there is an afterlife & more things we currently don't understand. If they don't exist? It's highly likely we simply cease to exist when we die. Believing that souls set us apart from (most) animals has no cost. If we're right we win, and if we're wrong we won't care because we'll cease to exist. Simple really.
Abiogenesis & the origin of the universe. God created it, on purpose. Maybe He created the Big Bang? Why not? For what reason? We don't know, we can only guess. (Yes, I'm a Deist, eh?) BUT the odds against intelligent life, or almost any life, to "accidentally exist" after only 13.4 Billion years is astronomical. Add to that: where did the BB come from?
So: Believing in God and Souls (and Evolution too, of course) is just as scientific as the current scientific theories. No religion required. All science is based on faith too, eh?
You mention DNA. Did you know that after (iirc) 5th cell division the developing fetus (or whatever it is called at that point) no longer 'borrows' DNA from the mother? It has its own, unique DNA.
How do you define who is human and what is not? By DNA of course.
BTW "full term abortions" are very real. 9 months along, they "crown" the fetus, carve its skull open & scoop out the brains. Then cut it up to extract. Hundreds, if not thousands every year.
Several Blue States have laws allowing doctors & nurses to refuse treatment of a fetus if it gets delivered accidentally during the abortion. It lays on the floor until it stops crying. That's not as common but if it never happens? Why pass laws allowing this?
I'm not sure what point you think you're making with the DNA argument. I just referenced it in terms of the general human genome; most you talk to think having human DNA makes you inherently special, and I disagree with the idea of inherent worth.
Yes, I am aware of full term abortions. Honestly, I don't know why they bother at that point; just take the baby out and shoot it or something, if you're so intent on killing it no matter what. The whole process as it stands just sounds like a massive waste of time and resources.
As far as the laws, I fully support them standing. I don't believe it is moral to compel people to provide services they do not wish to provide. Besides, give me an actual number for how often those even come into play. People who become doctors and nurses tend to have some specific mindsets about helping people and caring for them. What's the actual number of times this needs to happen?
And further, what are the circumstances? If they just need to wait for the baby to "stop crying", then you're describing a situation where a mortal wound has already been inflicted, and death is the awaited outcome. These laws would, in such circumstances, merely prevent hostile rent-seeking lawsuits demanding to know why the 80% aborted baby wasn't magically brought back to perfect health after it was discharged from the mother.
Having human DNA makes you, you know, human. A chimp has "similar" DNA but it isn't 100% the same & therefor a chimp is not a human. Or a person either.
DNA is the only thing that scientifically measures if you are a human or not. An opera singer or a person in a coma are both humans even if one of them can't move or speak. They both have human DNA. Different of course, but within the boundaries of what a human has.
As I said. Performing an abortion, the baby pops out still alive. You are allowed, in some Democrat states, to kill it even after birth. If it can cry it is fully developed, ok? "Mortal wound"? You DO know what babies do, yes? They cry.
You seem either unwilling or unable to understand that the basic quality of "being a human" is not what is dissgreed upon here. We have accepted "these fetuses and babies are human" as a foundation of our debate.
The disagreement stems from whether or not being human entitles something to inherent worth. Your camp appears to say yes, because it makes you feel good. I say no, and draw the distinction between "merely human", those who share the human genome, and "human person", those who bother share the human genome and have a mind beyond the pure meat of their biology. I posit that only the second group has value, and only because they demonstrate that value through accomplishment.
And crying is no evidence by itself of a viable baby. It is evidence of functioning vocal cords, inflating lungs, and just enough brain activity to use these two things to make noise. A severely mentally retarded adult human can cry as well, but you wouldn't say he or she is a functioning person, would you?
If you can leave a baby to lie on the floor and cry briefly before it dies, that baby has a mortal wound (perhaps from a botched brain extraction or the like). A normal, healthy baby will not die if you leave it lying on the ground for a while; it will, generally, tire itself out a d go to sleep.
You need to actually think about things before you say them.
No, in fact, a normal baby WILL die rather quickly after birth if not cared for. Starvation or hypothermia are swift killers for tiny infants. It will "go to sleep" and never wake up, eh?
So your foundation is that YOU (or any authority) get to decide who is a person or not. Based on arbitrary "rules" that can change like the wind. That's not science. Based on DNA is science.
"Value" is the ultimate arbitrary measure! Utterly unscientific. Just FYI. Just like "beauty" or "usefulness" or "scary" & etc.
No, in fact, a normal baby WILL die rather quickly after birth if not cared for. Starvation or hypothermia are swift killers for tiny infants. It will "go to sleep" and never wake up, eh?
It's always fascinating to behold when someone is so confidently wrong. Sir, you are aware that infants are not birthed starving, correct? That they inherit a store of calories from the mother? Further, are you aware that we generally don't have mothers give birth outdoors, but rather in climate-controlled indoor spaces? And that, since again infants inherit a store of calories from their mother, they don't suddenly die of exposure from a slight breeze?
Evolution made us hardier than that, if only because the weaker ones died.
So your foundation is that YOU (or any authority) get to decide who is a person or not. Based on arbitrary "rules" that can change like the wind. That's not science. Based on DNA is science.
Sir, I'm going to have to insist you put those goal posts back where you found them. We are in disagreement over morals here - show me the morals gene or the ethics protein structure, and we'll talk on that. As far as morality works, it is and has always been a metaphysical concept that exists only within the self - there is no objectively observable metric of morality like there is for anything material, and so the ultimate arbitrator of my moral code will always be me, and the ultimate arbitrator of your code will be you, and so on.
"Value" is the ultimate arbitrary measure! Utterly unscientific. Just FYI. Just like "beauty" or "usefulness" or "scary" & etc.
Didn't you just get done telling me elsewhere that you believe in objective values inherent to all humans? It's quite absurd for you, of all people, to suddenly decide you need to lean on the scientific method for support.
The "problem" is not that they die quickly or slowly, the problem is that a live-birthed child is legally allowed to be killed. That doctors & nurses are absolved from their normal duty to provide life-saving care for them. Of course they're there to kill it in the first place, but to make it legal to kill babies after they're born is... troublesome.
Not for you though, obviously.
As for science (the other reply) there is a faith element to it, as pointed out by RA Wilson & Einstein too. Did the scientist fake their results? Were results accurately recorded? Was data manipulated, poorly collected or otherwise unreliable? Were the papers peer-reviewed or "pal reviewed"? Is the research repeatable?
One doesn't DO the experiment to see if it's accurate, one depends on the word of others, yes? Not much would get done if every scientist using a theory had to reproduce the experiment / research to verify it is accurate. They believe the word of others. That's an act of faith. See: 2b2 and 3. Faith is not limited to religion alone, ok?
So why should I, or anyone here, even listen to you? You haven't demonstrated any worth that I've seen.
For that matter, why should you have the right to speak at all? Or to not be enslaved? Or to not be killed by the government and your organs auctioned to billionaires?
All of those rights derive from the (Christian) concept of inherent worth that you casually discard. You are using those rights to argue against themselves so your words are less than useless.
And for the former, this really comes off like asking a gun rights advocate what his favorite way of killing someone is. Yes, yes, I know someone is just itching to shout "guns are Constitutionally Protected and abortion isn't", but let's set that aside for a second.
Nice try. Immediately setting up a straw man to hide the initial error. Asking an abortion rights advocate about their favorite kind of abortion is like asking a gun rights advocate what their favorite kind of gun is. For your your analogy to work, the second person would have to be a "killing people advocate."
Guns can be owned and used without killing. Abortion always entails abortion.
Pro-lifers will fight tooth and nail to keep a retarded half-black fetus alive
As opposed to "women's rights" to avoid all consequences?
The sixties were a tapestry of civilizational disasters. All of which need to be ended. Welfare, abortion, civil rights, carpeted floors, and so on.
Carpeted floors? I'm curious about that one.
Plasticizers. Chemicals that are added to the pile and backing material to keep it soft and flexible. They leak out over time and act similarly to estrogen in the body.
There's also a lesser concern over dust and mold since you can't mop a carpet or take it outside to clean it. A vacuum never gets everything.
It was the latter that I was talking about. I'm pretty sure the advent of carpet created the asthma epidemic.
Yes. All children are precious and deserve to live.
Nah. Not even remotely true.
You're the exception that proves the rule.
And the best part of you ran down your mother's back.
Are we done with the childish insults, or shall we bend down and grab another handful of mud?
You're the one who started with a childish "nuh-uh" rebuttal, would you like to try and actually make a big boy argument against "All children are precious and deserve to live"?
That you cannot see your own hypocrisy is perhaps saddest part of this exchange.
Are you familiar with the idea that those who make a claim have the burden of proof, and that claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence?
You insist that they're all precious. Fine, prove it. You insist they all deserve to live. Fine, prove it. I can argue against the former by simply pointing to a dozen children I've seen on the street this week, and argue against the latter with a simple "why do they deserve it?", which cannot be answered with anything other than " because I believe that this is so", which is an acceptable response for your personal motivations, but certainly no way to support a general statement of principle.
Burden of proof means the person making the positive statement has the burden. I'm saying we don't do something (kill off children), you're making the claim we should do it so the burden is fully on you.
I take it you're not a Christian then? Because they're all the children of God, created in His image so we all have inherent dignity. These children didn't rape or murder etc that would cause them to forfeit their lives by their own actions.
I believe being a human being gives you inherent value.
somewhere else
If they're not the product of illegals where are they supposed to live?
Africa
For people whose family has lived here for hundreds of years?
Africa
So you support endless funding of Africa because Africans will starve while popping out dozens of kids?
I don’t like abortion on principle, however America collapses in 3 generations with it banned across the board simply because we are to weak to be honest about people and “diversity”.
I support not killing defenseless children, a billion people including adults are starving- do you support endless murder in poor countries to keep populations low? Of course not.
Reproduction is a weapon.
Again that is not a rational response. If we are to take Christianity by its standards we are meant to be shepherds. That does mean culling the weak and useless if there are not enough resources to maintain everyone. Pretending otherwise is just suicide by proxy.
I was parroting your irrational response...
Where in the Bible does suggest killing the weak? Because the 6th commandment seems to disagree with you and not just there:
John 10:11 "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep."
The Parable of the Lost Sheep- Jesus describes a shepherd leaving 99 sheep to find 1 lost one, carrying it home rejoicing
Jeremiah 1:5 "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart"
Psalm 139:13-14 "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb"
Matthew 25:40 "Whatever you did for one of the least of these… you did for me."
Matthew 9:13 "I desire mercy, not sacrifice."
Nothing in Christianity supports your claim, if fact your idea violates because you declare yourself smarter than God and are fixing His "mistakes"
Horrible quote pull considering Jesus was talking about him being the messiah, but if you want to play it…
John 10:26 but you do not believe because you are not of my sheep
Sounds like his disowning nonbelievers there…
Also your entire schtick is just sad. Shepherds then did not keep rabid sheep, nor did they keep sickly sheep at the expense of the rest of their flock.
You’re now pretending the Bible exists outside of all other context, what does turn the other cheek mean?
What does genesis 1:28 mean?
I never declared myself smarter than God. Blatant hubris under the guise of compassion is adorable though. Again, by your own logic you should lay down your life feeding retards who can’t feed themselves at the cost of your own children and future, that is the true Christian way according to you.
lmao, you love nigger babies.
Yes I do, why would I not love an innocent child?
Guy, I have worked security in [Redacted]. I've seen the gangs of 30 kids roaming the streets at night burning rubbish bins, stealing ambulances and taunting dogs. The oldest of them was 11. I'm not even going to start discussing Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. let alone Failure To Thrive, or consanguineous unions.
You are making all kinds of assumptions that do not bear out in the face of reality.
It isn't fair or right that babies must pay for the sins of their parents, but I didn't make the rules.
I do not believe that black Americans would be as bad as they are without abortion. I don't believe so many of them would be murderers if they were not raised by mothers whose contempt for the sanctity of innocent life is so great that in Democrat cities like New York they kill half their children before they are even born.
Since when has passing laws against immoral behavior ever resulted in anyone growing a moral compass? They already proved that the bulk of the crime rate reduction in the 90s was from incapacitation. You have to physically prevent recidivist assholes from reoffending because they cannot be reformed, hence the mass incarceration the left endlessly whines about. The black crime rate is chiefly the result of their low IQ with societal coddling exacerbating the problem.
The left pushes abortions for the same reason they push trans "treatments" - because it lets people cross a left-wing point of no return. If banning at-will abortion meant less abortions were carried out, there would be less women who are leftists for life because the alternative is admitting what they have done.
And drugs, STDs, etc. The left is selling the fantasy that they can get you to escape the consequences of your actions
The entirety of human existence. I swear people on here get more retarded every day
I think it's a zero sum error. People look at laws failing to stop all crime and decide that since the guard rails aren't stopping every lunatic from flinging themselves off the cliff, they must be a failure.
Either that, or they look at examples of overlegalization like prohibition, and decide that people rebelling against overzealous laws means that rebelling against all laws must be good.
The “everything is socioeconomic factors” lie has been debunked ad nauseam. No amount of Christianity can change that there are billions of people globally who can not survive or function in a free society because they are mentally incapable of understanding consequences.
Historically the gap was not this big in western countries
It's because they're genetically low IQ violent niggers.
No, I fight to keep the State from claiming the right to murder children.
Doesn't mean I aslo don't fight to keep niggers in their own lane.
Are you in favor of cutting up the fetus before or after they suck its brain out?
Either or, I don't care either way, and it makes no difference in the end. Dead is dead, and a fetus isn't enough of a person to suffer more than, say, a chicken or squirrel.
I just want the biological leftovers to be used for something, even if it's just fertilizer or something like that. I can't stand waste.
I cannot wrap my head around someone saying they can't stand waste and then twiddling their thumbs over umpteen million wasted lives in this country alone. Every life has potential, even if you don't see it's worth. Furthermore, the distinction you make between what is human and personhood is quite literally a defense mechanism created to absolve yourself of any responsibility for the genocide taking place every day. Liberals use it every day to convince themselves their not hurting anyone. It is a lie from the depths of he'll meant to ease us into accepting this abomination. You may have fooled yourself, but you cannot fool the spirit. I will pray for you, and all of these casualties of "progress". Father God, please forgive us. Please understand that while a few of us are awake to what is happening, the darkness has a deceptive grip over far too many. I pray for your redemption and for the wool to be removed from our eyes. Father please bless all of those lost in this madness and know that we did not allow this, but that it has been orchestrated against you. I pray for peace and understanding for all those who do not understand the battle taking place. In Jesus name I pray, Amen!
Listen, buddy, if you're going to descend into religiosity, then I don't think there's any point to continuing this. I'm not going to reason you anywhere, since you've not reasoned yourself into your current position in the first place, especially given how you've literally begun to virtue signal your faith here, in violation of your own holy book.
No, whatever, I'll make a good faith attempt. I disagree with your position that a every life has value and every human has potential. There is simply no evidence in support of this position, and mountains of evidence against it.
If humans were so good and full of potential, why does your own religion need to call people to mercy, kindness, charity, and etc? If humans, as a whole, had some inherent qualities and potentials to this effect, would your god need to threaten people with eternal punishment for sinning? Wouldn't people simple do these things, without being prodded and cajoled?
The fact that we consider great kindness or charity to be as rare as great skill with mathematics or engineering tells a story of a misbegotten species that, very occasionally, has some small number of people rise above their base nature.
Which is my whole point. Humans don't inherently carry value. People demonstrate value through accomplishment and achievement, in whichever arenas they strive in.
Humans carry potential, which aggregates into a baseline of value. Children and women carry more potential, which is why they get on the lifeboats first.
You're not terribly bright. It will begin to irk you at some point.
Attacks "religiosity".
Doesn't remotely understand the religion.
Shocker...
People like you are what happens when downvotes are disabled.
You haven't made a single coherent argument in this entire thread ("dead is dead"? Seriously?) but you attack everyone else for not arguing in "good faith".
If you aren't 14 years old, you need to get a job.
Man, this sure as shit didn't take long.
Everyone who disagrees with me is jews. It is known.
I think people should witness a birth. That is not a "fetus". It is person. The baby has a personality when it is born. I didn't care one way or another, then I had kids. It is scary that doctors or nurses think nothing of snuffing out a human life like that, and women having several abortions.
I'll be honest, this type of "gotcha" interrogation is both ghoulish and pointless.
For the latter, the people who already agree with you won't agree with you harder. The people who disagree with you won't suddenly change their minds. The wilfully ignorant will twist themselves into pretzels to remain willfully ignorant. It accomplishes nothing.
And for the former, this really comes off like asking a gun rights advocate what his favorite way of killing someone is. Yes, yes, I know someone is just itching to shout "guns are Constitutionally Protected and abortion isn't", but let's set that aside for a second.
Quite honestly, the goal of an abortion is a dead fetus safely extracted from the host mother. The method really doesn't matter. You still get a dead fetus, whether you use a magic pill that teleports it into the sun or an industrial vacuum to remove it by parts.
And for anyone who wants to make a moral "you're killing a person" argument, understand that, for anyone who isn't an adherent to the whole "life begins at conception" idea, a fetus isn't a person; it hasn't developed any of the characteristics that define personhood besides a shared DNA structure. And, quite frankly, calling a fetus a baby in this context is trying to emotionally manipulate people by making them imagine a full grown and birthed 9+ month old infant getting shoved into a blender, instead of the weird chicken-fish hybrid looking thing that a fetus spends the first four months resembling. This adds to the ghoulishness of the interrogation, and puts people off, circling back around to the pointless nature of it.
Abortion IS ghoulish. Abortion is straight up ending a human life at its most vulnerable. You can split hairs all you want about time and location, but there's a reason "You should have been aborted" is a horrible thing to say to someone. Guns are used for food, sport and self defense far more than they are for murder. Trying to "Gotcha" someone about the use of guns is like a vegan telling a carnivore about how brutal butchering is. Life is harsh, and sometimes you have to be harsh right back to deal with it.
People NEED to have their noses rubbed in the reality of what abortion fundamentally is, because people file it away under "Women's rights/Healthcare" and then lock it up tight to dodge the cognitive dissonance of "This is literally a mother committing infanticide to dodge the consequences of her own actions." It's Kronos devouring his children, writ large.
Confronting the process of Abortion being considered a "gotcha" is the same kind of euphemism treadmill that makes any term describing the LGBTETC become a slur over time. The thing that is being described is inherently offensive on a fundamental level, which is why we're just not supposed to think about it and accept it.
I'd like to say first, before I disagree with you, that I do appreciate that you argue in good faith and express your views properly, unlike how a lot of the gutter scum of the internet just throw an attempt at a pithy rejoinder on top of an insult, pat themselves on the back, and walk away. It's refreshing to have a discussion, instead of the usual tripe.
That said, I'd like to address your points in order. For the first point, your argument basically proves my own. You specifically label a fetus as a human life, and base your argumentation around the idea that a human life carries some inherent value, even when the organism that actually makes up that human is simply not there. Notice how you focus on "human" and I specifically keep saying "person"; the two are deeply intertwined, but not actually synonymous (which, if we ever actually make AI and/or find aliens, a lot of people are going to need to come to terms with). A fetus is an in-progress human, but it's not a person yet. It won't be a person for years, because personhood requires a brain complex enough to develop self-awareness.
You yourself land upon this with your reference to the "you should have been aborted" insult, but you wander away from the logical conclusion; the insult is not denying the human-ness of the person, but instead implying the person-ness of the person being insulted is so sub-par that it would have been better if they had never been. The insultee's human-ness, which is inherent to them, is never brought into question; only the achievements and accomplishments they have made that forms the ontological record of their person-ness is under attack. (Sorry if this bit sounds like an old man repeating himself, but there's only so many ways to say this when reinforcing the premise.)
As for abortion itself, it certainly is bloody and macabre. I doubt the mentality of anyone who disagrees with that. However, so is surgery, and yet we keep at it. Something being unpleasant does not inherently make it bad.
I also agree entirely with you that people need to understand what abortion entails. Too many people think it is, in fact, some magic pill that teleports the problem away. However, as I don't accept the "human life is inherently valuable" argumentation, I must also disagree with you on the notion that the avoidance of consequences is inherently negative. We've built our entire species' history around avoiding consequences. We invented farming, tamed animals, built machines, and raised massive edifices to avoid the consequences of being born as upstart descendents of monkeys, doomed to eat, reproduce, and die in the woods. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting a comforts level life free of consequences or suffering; it's why we're sitting in houses with AC, heating, running water, fridges full of food, and chatting across the globe using the magic boxes of nano-scale runes powered by caged lightning. You mention Kronos eating his own children as a failing, bit that's the moral of the story from Zeus' perspective, and he grew up to be a massive net negative on the local divinities. From Kronos' perspective, his only flaw was not checking that he was eating a baby instead of a stone, and that's more a moral lesson about not blindly trusting people with mission-critical tasks.
Finally, returning to my original point about it being ghoulish, the last point I want to tackle is how absurd it is to try to make a "right and proper" moral argumentation while violating every single practice of proprietary in debate. The congressman, quite frankly, did himself no favors with how he presented himself, while the activist stayed respectably professional despite it. You cannot simply ask what someone's favorite method of killing a man is (or, I mean, you generally can't - I don't know what lunatic standard the Epstein Island Enthusiast political class have developed in their little cabals) and then start going down a list, pausing after each one and saying "is it this one?", and still present yourself as the right and honorable man standing up to evil. There are standards and ways things are done, and this is quite a ways beyond them. So far beyond them that it begins even to discredit his own position to the general audience, who we both know are neither intelligent enough to understand debates nor objective enough to go by anything other than "feels" and "vibes".
So anyone who suffers from neurological disorders that prevent them from establishing your threshold of personhood aren't actually human beings and therefore, postnatal abortions are a-okay?
You're missing the point so spectacularly, I cannot tell if you're doing it maliciously or just with great aplomb of foolishness.
Yes, having neurological conditions that prevent you from developing a functioning adult mind preclude you from being a person. No, it doesn't remove your base human-ness.
How you move from that to "let's just murder retards because they are lesser" is your cross to carry.
Actually, I asked you if postnatal abortions are a-okay under your threshold for what is considered to be a person (or rather, lack thereof)?
Define what you consider a post-natal abortion, and I'll answer you. And do define it rigorously, since I can see the "gotcha" with the colloquial definition of the term and arguments against eugenics from here.
According to your own definition, you described it as "bloody and macabre", but you also said the same of surgery and that we "keep at it". So we'll go with your definition as a means of ridding this existence of an organism that has not achieved "personhood".
Since you seem to adopt a morally relative outlook on such things, would postnatal abortions be a-okay under your threshold for an organism that doesn't meet "personhood"?
I knew as soon as I started reading this block of text that it was going to end with a defense of abortion. Back to reddit with ye
Buddy, if you disagree but refuse to put in the effort to argue in good faith, you're the redditor you accuse others of being.
Imagine, if you can, the possibility that the constant purity spirals and ideological cleansings of social media have forced us to cohabitate, and only agree on seventy five to eighty percent of things. But if you can't, see if you can find someone to change your smoke alarm batteries, at least.
I get that modern internet discourse makes strange bedfellows but you've commented a grand total of five times in the last three years, including the two comments in this thread. I suppose it makes us wonder why you chose this topic and this take specifically.
Funny story, actually. I was using a different account for ages because I'd forgotten the password to this one, and in a strange coincidence, lost the password to that one due to file corruption and found saved credentials to this one on an old device I had around the house I was getting ready to recycle.
The stupid shit that happens when you use password manager generated passwords and refuse to provide legitimate emails when signing up for websites to shoot the shit with people you don't know and don't need to know.
Though I will chastise you on trying to creep on my post history. I don't know how or when that behavior became normalized, but it's absurd that people do that. Our older conversations were between ourselves and whomever we were speaking with at the time, and not something for random lookie-loos to ogle at at arbitrary points in the future, devoid of context and ontological involvement in the discourse.
Anyway, the actual human behind the account has been around in one coat or another for ages, and I usually make the same arguments on topics. I think this one just lacks my old block list - the same people tend to say the same nonsense around here, so you end up having far fewer arguments when you actively avoid each other.
All I did was click on your name, bud. Not that invasive.
Finish the thought, sir. You clicked it with the intent to gleam information, and then you read through it, looking for information.
To borrow a crude euphemism, you didn't just trip over and fall onto the dick. You went looking for something you could use as ammunition, and when you failed to find something, you tried to manufacture it instead.
The offense you're taking to this is silly. I do like to get an idea of who I'm speaking to and the ideological position they're coming from, yes. I didn't bother reading any of your pseudo-intellectual redditor comments because there are enough of them in this thread to give me a good idea where you're coming from.
A twenty-one week old fetus can survive birth - the older of the two I know about is now approaching his sixth birthday. If we were talking about the morning after pill then what you said could be relevant, but there can be no defense of late term abortion when medical science is rolling back the point of viability and exposing just who is being killed.
I can't think of a way to say this without it sounding condescending, so please understand that that's not the intended tone here.
Are you familiar with the idea of averages and statistics? Because you're making the standard leftist woman argumentation that, just because they can think of a single incident that doesn't 100% align with the statistical norm, this disproves the whole idea.
Yes, a miniscule percentage of non-viable fetuses can be artificially forced to complete the gestation cycle IF we apply the frankly astounding capabilities of modern medical science. This doesn't actually disprove anything I've said, though, and in fact supports my argumentation. They're still not viable organisms at that stage; if they were, they wouldn't need advanced NICUs and trained clinicians with specialized knowledge. And even these artificially sustained humans don't achieve personhood until many years post birth, because they STILL need to keep growing to develop the necessary brain complexity.
For early and mid-term abortions, no naturally viable human is being killed. For very late term abortions, a viable human is being killed, but no person is being killed. At worst, you've wasted the energy and resources you've spent gestating the child to that point, but the actual spark of personhood is maybe 1/5th of the way to being ignited at the time a baby is born.
Says who? By that logic it should be legal to kill a toddler up to the point they become self-aware (I'm guessing that's the arbitrary metric you're using to denote 'personhood').
You're making this distinction between a 'human' and a 'person' that is entirely in your own head.
PK Dick wrote a short story about just that: the future society where you are only considered "human" if you can do some simple calculus. Before that? You can be "recycled" at the whim of your mother (NOT the father!), usually around age 8 or 9. He got more hate mail, back in the 60's! for that one than all the rest combined. Actual mail, eh? Someone paid money to tell him that they hate him.
Daemon Knight had a similar story. Until you turn 16? Your parents can send you "to the adoption agency" which sounds great, eh? Except the 'agency' just keeps you for 6 months, then harvests your organs. The chance of actual adoption is close to zero.
So kids in that story are amazing. They get up in the morning, cook & clean, pay close attention in school, never get in trouble!
The story is about such a boy, 14 and his parents decide to go on vacation on another planet. It's too bothersome to take him along, or even ask relatives to care for him, so they order him to go to the "adoption center". Dark!
Lordlavalamp is the sort of person that small communities quietly dispose of in the woods. You can't have reptiles like that around people you love.
Well, in this case, says me, because I am the ultimate arbiter of my morality, much as you are of yours.
Also, you're moving away from the debate. You've brought the question of legality into it, making the depressingly common attempt to take "legal" and "good"/"moral" together, when the two have zero bearing on one another.
And self-awareness is an intersting metric to consider, but even that paltry standard disqualifies huge swathes of people across the globe from personhood, let alone my preferred standard of self-actualization. Think about the average "doctor, lawyer, engineer" who dindu nuffin, or the average pajeet, or the average "refugees welcome" leftist. Many of them would, I think, at least be able to look in a mirror and identify the self and how the self differs from the not-self, but how many have a proper internal monologue, or the ability to imagine and rotate the apple, or even to comprehend the idea of second order effects, let alone predict them?
No, there's more to personhood then the mirror, and we tend to bet on humans since we are the sole species on this planet currently able to produce st least some members that qualify as persons, even if large numbers never make it that far.
You could, perhaps, make a solid argument in the wasted POTENTIAL of any given aborted fetus or baby, that he or she may have one day become a person and contributed to the sprecies at large, but no one ever does. It's always just "muh humans are le special" argumentation for an inherent worth that simply doesn't exist.
Replace 'legal' with 'moral' then. Same principle applies. You're focusing on technicalities like a redditor.
Again, this whole distinction of human vs. person exists entirely in your head based on what appears to be some arbitrary IQ threshold you've invented.
I would say I'm astounded at your willful dismissal of the core aspects of philosophical disagreement as "technicalities" instead of recognizing them as the critical distinctions that underpin theories of mind, but I would be lying. This type of pompous, self-aggrandizing stupidity is actually quite common and widespread.
No, the same.principle does not apply. You cannot swap out legal for moral and make the same point. Many things are legal that are not moral, and many things that are moral are illegal. Reformulate your arguments from a purely moral perspective, support your moral suppositions, and we can go from there. I've already done so for my position.
Finally, I begin to suspect that you may be taking offense here because you yourself don't meet the metric of personhood. You deny the need to differentiate between a human who doesn't know why the ceiling bird chirps or what it would be like if he hadn't had breakfast that morning and one that does, and pretend that catering to the former at the expense of the latter hasn't been an absolute, objective destructive influence on human society at large.
What is it about humans that supposedly makes them special? We're not fast, not strong, can't heal well, don't live that long, don't have sharp senses, etc. But we do have the minds that out oversized brains can generate as the fruit of many years of growth. Since it is these minds that gives humans our long-fought dominion over the Earth, by what right do those sharing our DNA but absent these minds claim themselves to be those special humans with inherent worth?
And so is the human/person divide illustrated. A human may become, through talent or effort, a person, but personhood is not solely contingent on humanity, nor is humanity the sole criterion for personhood.
It certainly is in this thread, in which you've typed out various walls of text focusing on semantics and technicalities that serve no purpose other than to stroke your own ego and waste time.
Some people are dumb (you may include me in this category if you wish). That doesn't deprive them of personhood.
So killing a human is OK, but killing a "person" is wrong?
What's the difference? Aren't all "persons" also humans? Or can chimps be "persons" too?
"A person's a person no matter how small!"
Reductive nonsense; you should know that's not what I've said.
Killing a human is morally equivalent to killing any other animal, absent special considerations. Personhood is one of these special considerations; you would certainly understand how one might be more reticent to arbitrarily execute a brilliant scientist or artist then a random beggar off the street for the same crime, for example. The doer and thinker carry more value to their existence that the eater or the junkie.
I'm not going through the whole thing again. If you don't understand by now, you can't understand at all.
No, chimps or other great apes can't be persons. They lack the minds for it.
That's the secret sauce. A mind. Not just a brain running pattern recognition subroutines built into it by millions of years of evolutionary pressure.
And a great many humans alive today have nothing more than a very complex pattern recognition engine made of meat in their skulls, so they are not persons.
You said killing a fetus is OK because it isn't a person. Therefore killing humans IS ok, because fetus are humans.
So who decides if a human is a "person" or not? The government? If the junkie on the street cleans up & writes several popular novels, is he suddenly a person? Says who? The overlap between beings with human DNA and persons is 100%. 100% of humans are persons & vice versa.
Now I'd allow that there's "persons" who aren't actually humans, they just look like humans. Based on them not having a soul. That that's an entirely different can of fish, eh? Then we get into the problem of animals having souls (they do!) & so forth.
You're hallucinating like a bad LLM. I denied that the killing of a fetus is uniquely bad or undesirable, simply because it is human. You're the one who somehow leapt to "let's murder at random".
Primarily, says me. I decide.
And you've supported my argument here. The junkie is not a person, because he has acted like a junkie for his whole life. If he were to, somehow, find the spark inside to self-actualize and become a person, he would demonstrate the values necessary for personhood. Because he has risen above his base, mindless biology.
And you confuse the map for the territory. Just because all known persons are human, does not suggest in the slightest that humanity is a prerequisite for personhood. Arguably, there are far more non-person humans than there are person humans.
Oh boy, here we go. Alright, define and describe the soul, and how having one detectably differentiates from not having one. Don't use religious references, because those are just appeals to authority.
That's nice, sweetie. Now face the wall. The State has declared you Obsolete.
Speak your truth ;)
Oh, thanks for the answer. I am free to utterly ignore anything you decide, asw is the rest of the world. Cool.
So when he was 9? He was not a person? At 11, 15? how about 22 the year before the junk hit, was he a non-person then too? You do see how arbitrary and therefor irrelevant your "rules" are, right?
I am the KING of not confusing the map with the terrain. It's one of my favorite things to tell to idiotic leftists. "Prerequisite"? Humans are persons and persons are humans. It's an interchangeable word. You cannot claim a human is a non-human, and you cannot arbitrarily decide who is a person or not. I mean you as an individual can, but that's also the number of people who would base their ideology on your ideas: 1.
If governments gain the power to decide who is and is not a "person" that's when the cattle-cars start filling up, ok? Killing Fields, Holodomor, Great Leap Foreword & etc.
Simple: there are things we humans do not understand. There's things we know we don't and things we don't know we don't. There's things we think we understand, but in fact are incorrect. & etc.
Spooky Action At A Distance aka: Einstein's Clock in the Box mind experiment. They actually carried this out, it's there, the impossible was proven to be real.
One of those things we don't know is what makes us human. Sentience? Salience? Sapience? Not commonly found in nature, especially all 3! But we humans have them & other fancy words too.
If souls exist? Then there is an afterlife & more things we currently don't understand. If they don't exist? It's highly likely we simply cease to exist when we die. Believing that souls set us apart from (most) animals has no cost. If we're right we win, and if we're wrong we won't care because we'll cease to exist. Simple really.
Abiogenesis & the origin of the universe. God created it, on purpose. Maybe He created the Big Bang? Why not? For what reason? We don't know, we can only guess. (Yes, I'm a Deist, eh?) BUT the odds against intelligent life, or almost any life, to "accidentally exist" after only 13.4 Billion years is astronomical. Add to that: where did the BB come from?
So: Believing in God and Souls (and Evolution too, of course) is just as scientific as the current scientific theories. No religion required. All science is based on faith too, eh?
You're subhuman
You mention DNA. Did you know that after (iirc) 5th cell division the developing fetus (or whatever it is called at that point) no longer 'borrows' DNA from the mother? It has its own, unique DNA.
How do you define who is human and what is not? By DNA of course.
BTW "full term abortions" are very real. 9 months along, they "crown" the fetus, carve its skull open & scoop out the brains. Then cut it up to extract. Hundreds, if not thousands every year.
Several Blue States have laws allowing doctors & nurses to refuse treatment of a fetus if it gets delivered accidentally during the abortion. It lays on the floor until it stops crying. That's not as common but if it never happens? Why pass laws allowing this?
I'm not sure what point you think you're making with the DNA argument. I just referenced it in terms of the general human genome; most you talk to think having human DNA makes you inherently special, and I disagree with the idea of inherent worth.
Yes, I am aware of full term abortions. Honestly, I don't know why they bother at that point; just take the baby out and shoot it or something, if you're so intent on killing it no matter what. The whole process as it stands just sounds like a massive waste of time and resources.
As far as the laws, I fully support them standing. I don't believe it is moral to compel people to provide services they do not wish to provide. Besides, give me an actual number for how often those even come into play. People who become doctors and nurses tend to have some specific mindsets about helping people and caring for them. What's the actual number of times this needs to happen?
And further, what are the circumstances? If they just need to wait for the baby to "stop crying", then you're describing a situation where a mortal wound has already been inflicted, and death is the awaited outcome. These laws would, in such circumstances, merely prevent hostile rent-seeking lawsuits demanding to know why the 80% aborted baby wasn't magically brought back to perfect health after it was discharged from the mother.
Having human DNA makes you, you know, human. A chimp has "similar" DNA but it isn't 100% the same & therefor a chimp is not a human. Or a person either.
DNA is the only thing that scientifically measures if you are a human or not. An opera singer or a person in a coma are both humans even if one of them can't move or speak. They both have human DNA. Different of course, but within the boundaries of what a human has.
This mindset?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_Gosnell
As I said. Performing an abortion, the baby pops out still alive. You are allowed, in some Democrat states, to kill it even after birth. If it can cry it is fully developed, ok? "Mortal wound"? You DO know what babies do, yes? They cry.
You seem either unwilling or unable to understand that the basic quality of "being a human" is not what is dissgreed upon here. We have accepted "these fetuses and babies are human" as a foundation of our debate.
The disagreement stems from whether or not being human entitles something to inherent worth. Your camp appears to say yes, because it makes you feel good. I say no, and draw the distinction between "merely human", those who share the human genome, and "human person", those who bother share the human genome and have a mind beyond the pure meat of their biology. I posit that only the second group has value, and only because they demonstrate that value through accomplishment.
And crying is no evidence by itself of a viable baby. It is evidence of functioning vocal cords, inflating lungs, and just enough brain activity to use these two things to make noise. A severely mentally retarded adult human can cry as well, but you wouldn't say he or she is a functioning person, would you?
If you can leave a baby to lie on the floor and cry briefly before it dies, that baby has a mortal wound (perhaps from a botched brain extraction or the like). A normal, healthy baby will not die if you leave it lying on the ground for a while; it will, generally, tire itself out a d go to sleep.
You need to actually think about things before you say them.
No, in fact, a normal baby WILL die rather quickly after birth if not cared for. Starvation or hypothermia are swift killers for tiny infants. It will "go to sleep" and never wake up, eh?
So your foundation is that YOU (or any authority) get to decide who is a person or not. Based on arbitrary "rules" that can change like the wind. That's not science. Based on DNA is science.
"Value" is the ultimate arbitrary measure! Utterly unscientific. Just FYI. Just like "beauty" or "usefulness" or "scary" & etc.
It's always fascinating to behold when someone is so confidently wrong. Sir, you are aware that infants are not birthed starving, correct? That they inherit a store of calories from the mother? Further, are you aware that we generally don't have mothers give birth outdoors, but rather in climate-controlled indoor spaces? And that, since again infants inherit a store of calories from their mother, they don't suddenly die of exposure from a slight breeze?
Evolution made us hardier than that, if only because the weaker ones died.
Sir, I'm going to have to insist you put those goal posts back where you found them. We are in disagreement over morals here - show me the morals gene or the ethics protein structure, and we'll talk on that. As far as morality works, it is and has always been a metaphysical concept that exists only within the self - there is no objectively observable metric of morality like there is for anything material, and so the ultimate arbitrator of my moral code will always be me, and the ultimate arbitrator of your code will be you, and so on.
Didn't you just get done telling me elsewhere that you believe in objective values inherent to all humans? It's quite absurd for you, of all people, to suddenly decide you need to lean on the scientific method for support.
The "problem" is not that they die quickly or slowly, the problem is that a live-birthed child is legally allowed to be killed. That doctors & nurses are absolved from their normal duty to provide life-saving care for them. Of course they're there to kill it in the first place, but to make it legal to kill babies after they're born is... troublesome.
Not for you though, obviously.
As for science (the other reply) there is a faith element to it, as pointed out by RA Wilson & Einstein too. Did the scientist fake their results? Were results accurately recorded? Was data manipulated, poorly collected or otherwise unreliable? Were the papers peer-reviewed or "pal reviewed"? Is the research repeatable?
One doesn't DO the experiment to see if it's accurate, one depends on the word of others, yes? Not much would get done if every scientist using a theory had to reproduce the experiment / research to verify it is accurate. They believe the word of others. That's an act of faith. See: 2b2 and 3. Faith is not limited to religion alone, ok?
So why should I, or anyone here, even listen to you? You haven't demonstrated any worth that I've seen.
For that matter, why should you have the right to speak at all? Or to not be enslaved? Or to not be killed by the government and your organs auctioned to billionaires?
All of those rights derive from the (Christian) concept of inherent worth that you casually discard. You are using those rights to argue against themselves so your words are less than useless.
Nice try. Immediately setting up a straw man to hide the initial error. Asking an abortion rights advocate about their favorite kind of abortion is like asking a gun rights advocate what their favorite kind of gun is. For your your analogy to work, the second person would have to be a "killing people advocate."
Guns can be owned and used without killing. Abortion always entails abortion.