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.
Just a correction here, Arthur says the whole thing almost bothers him to vote (in favour of the feminists). He pokes fun at the absurdity of the event, but still for some bizarre reason favours the feminists. Just like for some bizarre reason he becomes extremely surly with a former slave owner, because for some equally bizarre reason -- despite being back in late 19th century -- he believes in racial equality?
Friend, I think you sort of missed the forest for the trees, here.
Remember that Arthur has spent his entire life as an outlaw with a heart of...say, tarnished silver. His big concerns, at the stage of his life where the story takes place, are the disappearance of a place in the world for him and his family (the gang), the massive expansion of the power of the federal government, and his fears of losing his freedom and being locked away.
He thinks women voting is weird, but he ends up tacitly supporting those specific women because he ends up convinced they are trying to get their own "freedom". He gets angry at the former slave owner not because "muh negro rights", but because the man's entire fortune was based around robbing people of their freedom, and because the man is trapped in this rose-tinted vision of the past. He feels both disgust and pity for the man, but it's never because "muh racismus"; it's always because "slavery in general bad", which I don't think is a hot take.
Such as constantly praising Sadie as the "bravest" of them all (and for some other bizarre reason, Sadie -- who was once a housewife -- somehow takes over the gang while the main leaders are trapped on an island).
Yeah, Sadie is...weird. On the one hand, her story comes off, at surface level, as very "yas kween slay" girl power fuck-nuggetry.
On the other hand, however, if you take the time to engage with the gang in between story missions and watch the (I think literal) hundreds of small storylets and interactions that play out in the camp, you actually see her go from near catatonic rape victim to asking for a gun and training on how to use it, to being one of the regular gun hands and guards for the camp, to slowly edging away form the gang as things start to fall apart later on.
It's absolutely the game's fault that this shit appears to come out of left field; if you don't watch Sadie's story play out, her sudden shifts seem like they're pulled out of someone's ass. But they do justify her involvement, and they never have her do the usual "small woman defeats big, burly men using spin kicks" bullshit you generally see in "girl power" moments. She just has her own heroic adventures and gains her own levels, all without Arthur's direct involvement.
Especially after the 20% story mark or whatnot where almost everything out of everybody's mouth regarding Whites is disparaging.
I've got a 100% save file at this point; can you give me a point in the main plot about this? Because, outside of one or two interactions with Lenny early on, I cannot for the life of me recall any "DAE hate da hwites?" bullshit. And I've been through the game thrice to see the differences in character interactions between max, mid, and min honor.
My fucking god, you actually got me to sign in to respond to this. That's some SSS-grade shitfaggotry.
Anyway:
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Out of a 100+ hour game, this is a tiny sidequest that is over in about five minutes.
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The whole time you're driving the suffragette wagon, Arthur is poking fun at how absurd the whole notion is when people have real problems out in the west.
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Some NPC townies ALSO take offense to the rally, and shout it down. You can choose to pick a fight with them, or to just leave.
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It's never fucking brought up again, because it's just some stupid shit you did for money in chapter 3 while trying to lie low in a new town.
Oh, and just for fun...
Ex) You can meet an actual feminist protestor in St. Denis. You can agree with her, laugh her off, or insult her. You can beat her up, with fists, melee weapons, or your firearm. You can shoot her. You can set her on fire. You can blow her up. You can drag her behind your horse until she dies. You can tie her up and drop her on train tracks. You can even tie her up and toss her to the gators in the surrounding swamps, who will actually eat her.
So, on whatever turbo fucking retard scale of glue huffing crayon munching you operate your one-track "hurr durr all wxmxn are SATAN" withered bean of a mind on, the game doesn't have a fucking feminist, "pro-women" agenda.
If it was a hot girl like from dead or alive getting it with a german shepard
So, classic Studio FOW?
Eh. I mean, burn it all day, but don't fuckin' hold it while you're burning it.
Don't want to huff burning paint fumes, after all. Light it, toss it, and laugh from a few feet away, upwind.
Dom, are you seriously enforcing preddit bullshit speech restrictions here? You can't be serious.
The key difference is that I don't make any claims to holding any sort of universal truth about reality or the human condition.
Those suffering from a severe case of religiosity do.
To insist that your viewpoint, which only exists from your geographic and economic place of birth and style of upbringing, is the definition of right and proper, true and correct, is utter retardation.
But, please, go back to wallowing in your superior beliefs and laughing at "midwit statements" that you don't actually comprehend.
The, for lack of a better term, constant vocal christ-faggotry is the most cringe part of this board. You lot would be just as zealous in muhammed-buggery or jewery if you were simply born to different parents, but you're too blind to see the sheer absurdity of your positions.
I wish the fucking leftists could leave well enough alone, so we wouldn't all be shoved into this hole together, but here we are.
Yes, people wasting entire lifetimes arguing over their favorite version of their favorite work of fiction is proof of the validity of that fiction.
By that logic, star wars is a real tradition, and jedi is a legitimate religious occupation.
Mate, you can't simply wave away criticisms of your make-believe ideology by tacking on more arbitrary rules based around unfalsifiable "trust me bro" concepts.
You are not a body with a soul, you are a personality matrix that exists as an emergent function of a highly complex and specialized biological neural network. You are software emulated on meatware, supported by a complex mobile life-support and environment manipulation meat suit. You don't even sense reality; rather, you imagine what reality looks like through the feedback mechanisms of EM-sensory organs throughout your body.
There is nothing magic or supernatural about you, or any mobile matter configuration we classify as "living".
To be fair, you guys do this to yourselves.
Your entire religious faiths are founded on the idea that your "real" self is stored in some intangible, invisible, undetectable information-entity container you call a "soul", and that the human body is just a vessel for said soul.
By your own base principles, there is no reason there couldn't be an oopsie at some point in creation or development.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you're going to make shit up, you can't get mad when other people join in on the game of calvinball and make up more shit to tack onto your shit.
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.