You amuse me with what you project onto what I've said and how I've said it, if you think this is me taking any offense. Are you familiar with what the word "chastise" even means, perchance?
Regardless, you do seem to take great pride in refusing to engage in good faith, so I'll leave you to...whatever it is your type does at this stage.
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.
It genuinely saddens me that you look at this minute expenditure of my time and effort and see it as some great artifice made purely for self-aggrandizement. It is not. I am legitimately trying to communicate, and this is how I normally do it.
I know most folks nowadays seem to think writing more than three or four sentences is some herculean effort worthy of song, but understand that this is not so.
Understand also that what you try to dismiss as semantics the the core of philosophy, and philosophy is the crux of what we are debating here.
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.
I agree completely, that would have made for an infinitely better argument, and one which wouldn't do more damage to his credibility then to hers.
Besides, I always have my doubts about whether or not people have the courage of their convictions when it comes to contentious topics like that; it's one of the reasons I hate the whole "clump of cells" argument. That's true in the zygote division stage, sure, but by the time a.pregnancy is detectable, you're way, way past that.
You need to be willing to say "I want this fetus destroyed". Lying to yourself is reprehensible.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
Nah. Not even remotely true.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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'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.
This is an old joke, actually, along with the explanation for the joke.
I'm impressed the LLM was able to match something so stupidly obscure. I think I last heard this joke twenty or so years ago.
Sure, I'll be that guy.
Moral relativism is absolutely real. This is because, to quote one of my favorite authors, if you grind down reality to the finest powder and filter it through the finest sieve, you will find not one molecule of justice and not one atom of mercy. These things aren't real, in the tangible sense. We made them up, and we're the only beings in this solar system that engage with them. Nature is red in tooth and claw, and horrific ways to die are the norm, not the exception.
We simply do not, and cannot, have a real, tangible, objective measure of "moral" or "immoral". Every single attempt to identify one always boils down to either emotional appeals with a dash of "I'll know it when I see it" in the secular spheres or "my holy book says so" proscriptions in the religious spheres.
That being said, just because something isn't tangible and real doesn't mean we don't engage with it. Math isn't real either; it's a way to identify patterns in nature using an entirely artificial method of symbology, and make predictions using that symbology.
Ergo, moral concerns and judgements still will, and more or less must, happen, given mankind's unique ability of all animals to engage with metaphysical concepts and thinking. Note I use "metaphysical" to mean "beyond physical", such as math or future planning, and not to mean "supernatural" or "theological" or such.
With terms defined, let's hop back to moral relativism. Moral relativism is the understanding that, given there is no objective morality, we can't expect every person to make the same moral judgements for a given scenario. We must instead understand that other people make their judgements through their own understanding of morality, the same as we (in the sense of you or I) do, and while geographically and culturally similar groups often have similar moral mores, those separated by time, distance, or significant cultural institutions will generally not.
We must, keeping these things in mind, now understand that, from the perspective of the average sandperson goatfucker, they are not only not doing anything wrong, they are quite often doing what is good and moral. Their culture and morals allow, and in some ways require, them to act the way they do. They are not knowingly acting in a way we would define as evil; they act with the full support of both their conscience and their institutions.
That is, in it's entirety, the concept of moral relativism.
Please note that this DOES NOT MEAN you cannot make moral judgements. You absolutely can, and should; the others certainly will. You must simply understand that others are not acting AGAINST YOUR morality, but rather IN FAVOR of THEIR morality.
You can recognize that morality is relative and still absolutely desire to wipe certain moralities (as well as their underlying institutions and cultures) off the face of the globe because what they consider good, right, and proper, you consider bad, evil, and immoral.
The german translation is still garbage, though.
Yeah, it's super cool and doesn't afraid of nothing, like the super scary no-no word "slave", but for fucks sake, everything BUT the word slave is wrong.
Translation isn't supposed to be about changing shit. It's supposed to be about taking data in language format A and converting it to language format B with minimal loss of data (ideally zero, but that's not always possible).
This is 75-25 noise to signal ratio.
And before any chucklefuck gets the "hurr durr what about things that have no direct translation" like the oft-quoted "the moon is beautiful tonight" thing, fuck off. Add a TL note or something; sometimes your conversion has a plugin dependency, tell the users to install the fucking plugin and load the library.
God fucking forbid people should learn something new or be exposed to a foreign culture. Fuck.
Your mind IS your body, mate. Lose a chunk of your brain, lose a chunk of your mind. Alter a chunk of your body, alter a chunk of your mind.
You cannot separate the two. There's no magic "soul" or what have you that makes up your mind, distinct from your body. You're just an emergent function of the meatware in your skull.
You need to put the jesus juice down, mate.
There are no such things as demons. It's just humans. It's always been just humans. We're capable of both the whitest kindness and blackest cruelty.
These are just people. Sick people whose worst excesses are being amplified and supported by legions of brain-dead NPCs and sycophants.
We should be working to destroy the apparatus that enables and encourages this behavior, instead of blindly lashing out at the questing tendrils that'll regrow in moments.
Considering that absolute, near-impossibility of a decapitation during regular delivery and the stunningly unlikely chance of something like that accidentally occurring during a c-section, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say "reserve judgement, we don't have the full story yet", gentlemen. For all we know, the child was non-viable and/or already dead when the delivery was first attempted, and a delivery-by-parts was the least bad option once they began the c-section and got a clear look inside the mother.
Seriously.
Especially considering the parents are suing for:
the "tremendous mental and physical anguish and trauma" experienced by Ross, who was awake while the doctor was attempting to remove the baby.
Because you generally don't put a mother and infant under general anesthesia, lady; it's fucking dangerous.
also seeking to recover damages for the full value of the baby's life, including loss of earnings and loss of enjoyment of life.
AKA the gibsiest of "gibs me dat" bullshit. Baby dies, either during or before delivery, and you're suing for 'loss of earnings'? Fuck you and your gods-be-damned ambulance chasing lawyers.
The hospital and nurses working together
Please. That shit never happens when things are going well, let alone in whatever the fuck this is.
The hospital is complicit in "ass covering bullshit"; the nurses named in the suit are, at worst, incompetent, and at best, more or less uninvolved.
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.