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CROWS EVERYWHERE posted:Auspol superstar ScreamingLlama likes whisper porn aka ASMR and also the Democrats. If no one else got the thread up, I was gonna inflict an Undertale-themed thread on you all. I couldn't get it ready in time, but this was gonna be the pic for the Democrats: 
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Oct 1, 2015 05:27
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 16:34 |
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Migishu posted:They live off the American system of "We'll make it as complicated as possible so you people'll have to buy tax software, therefore making our anti-tax reform lobbyists that we receive millions from every year happy" Even though I was a kid who grew up always reading the game box and playing rules lawyer, and now as an adult I work with spreadsheets every day, US taxes still make my brain shut off and make me want to curl up into an anxious fetal position and cry. There's no need or excuse to have such a complicated system that transparently rewards people rich enough to invest in professional min-maxers. Although I hate the idea of a flat tax because it's so regressive, I have a great deal of sympathy for Americans who embrace the idea out of baffled desperation.
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Oct 12, 2015 22:18
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Gilgamesh_Novem posted:I did change my first name and my father chose it for me. It has a very similar meaning to my East Asian name ,and I am sick of people telling me how to properly pronounce my own name. My husband likes to retell the story of when he went to his mother's workplace for something, and the confused receptionist couldn't work out who he was there to see. Until it suddenly clicked and they pronounced the Indian name with a lot more stress on a different syllable: "Oh, you mean SO-and-so!" Good thing they cleared that up 
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Oct 23, 2015 03:48
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starkebn posted:reductionist bullshit What's bullshit about it? If you aren't arguing that the fetus' right to not be aborted begins at conception, you've already accepted that the fetus' mere existence isn't enough yet to give it absolute rights to be protected. As far as the moral side of the argument goes, birth makes sense to me too as the natural place to draw the line. For better or worse, that's the point the fetus has unmistakably become separate from your own body. Well. Not YOUR own body. Cause I'm assuming you're male.
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Oct 23, 2015 04:04
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open24hours posted:Both of those arguments rely on an abritrary decision to grant rights to a foetus/baby at some point. There's no objective transition from non-human to human. Yeah, the transition from a little lump of cells to a human being with the capacity for any self-awareness is very murky. Until we get a much greater understanding of the nature of consciousness though, I think it's pretty silly to pretend like we're going to find some special optimal point of development within the span of the first 9 months of human existence that is the true and right time to forbid abortion. Especially compared to the time of delivery, which is unmistakable. If we can't even determine this, why go to such great efforts to reduce the rights of someone we know is a living and conscious and aware adult just to feel more hypothetically morally right about the treatment of a potential future person that hasn't even been born yet? (A future person, who, by the way, is far less likely to have a good life if they're born to someone who doesn't want them) Why not make the cutoff at the most clear point? Keep in mind that even if we allow abortions up to the very last minute, most pregnant women will not want to get themselves into a position where they need to use that right, anyway. No matter when you believe it's morally okay to have an abortion, it's always easier medically to go earlier rather than later.
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Oct 23, 2015 04:40
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Hey Amethyst, I get what you're trying to say but let me ask you this - and hell, anyone else who's trying to say you need to draw the line somewhere other than birth. What are you trying to actually achieve by finding the best place to draw this line? What is the benefit you are trying to reap by working through this moral dilemma? If, through weighing all your different opinions on brain waves and human consciousness and so on, you personally conclude that it's best to not ever abort after X days, having the law say it's legally okay to abort at X+30 days, or X+60 days, means that possibly some fetuses will have to endure 1-60 days of some kind of existence that you believe is significant enough that they shouldn't be allowed to experience it if they're just going to die. By legally keeping the line at an earlier point to prevent this, you are deciding that the moral good of not making an adult woman go through a pregnancy she doesn't want is less than the moral good of not letting this fetus experience 1-60 ish doomed days of the earliest possible life, as you define it. Is that correct? If it's not, what exactly ARE you trying to accomplish?
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Oct 23, 2015 05:03
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Amethyst posted:If there are cases where fetuses will suffer as a result of where we place the line then that should be taken into account as a part of the argument and ideally, it is exactly the kind of thing that should be minimised or eliminated in drawing that line. Of course that is unlikely to happen, the law is the blunt ugly instrument that churns at the ragged edges of our lives, however the body politic is a huge messy schizophrenic cacophany that demands to be pleased, somehow. I can understand where that 40% ideas are coming from, and it should be a well-intentioned place, but it drives me up the wall that I can't think of any other issue affecting actual adults that ever inspires this much navel-gazing handwringing and moral agonizing. Anyone who gets this genuinely worried about possibly doing that slightly wrong to a being that can barely even tell it exists, if it even can at all, they wouldn't be able to bear to exist in this world themselves if they brought even a fraction of that concern and empathy to what we do and legislate for full grown-rear end adults every day. In the meantime, they're happy to disregard the indisputable suffering of someone like that woman in the article who knows she will not be able to handle giving birth to another child.
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Oct 23, 2015 05:23
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Unimpressed posted:I'm not sure I get your reasoning. Say I believe that after 34 weeks, a foetus has achieved enough life viability that it has now crossed a line into being a baby (I don't, it's way more complicated than this, but for argument's sake). Then I think that after that point, it can't be automatically OK for a woman to terminate that pregnancy on a whim (again, for the sake of the annoying people, I don't believe there are many women at all who terminate on a whim). This isn't about 1-60 days of "life" this is about a whole life that is prevented if abortion is allowed in that circumstance. I think that past that point, there should be different considerations than before that point. But what really is the difference between the 8 weeks and 38 weeks fetus if it's not about the 30 weeks in between? Why else does it become no longer okay? The woman in your hypothetical scenario hasn't had her intentions for abortion change one bit. The future life of that person is just as 100% prevented at 8 weeks as it would be at 38 weeks. The only difference here is that at 38 weeks, you now believe it is more of a person than a mole. It has had enough of those "1-60 days of life" now, that you consider it a person now who doesn't deserve to die.
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Oct 23, 2015 05:30
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Amethyst posted:It certainly is frustrating but I think making the effort to understand their genuine moral outrage is better for all of us in the long term than reducing them to a cartoon. I don't think it's fair to characterize it as "navel gazing handwringing", for instance. The equivalent rhetoric from the other side is "shrill selfishness". It's a really weird place for me lately since I had my own kid, actually. I definitely wanted this kid and would have been heartbroken if anything happened to her as early as one day. I have become a lot like the stereotypical emotional "think of the children!!!" stereotype, feeling so much more sad at any article about something bad happening to a child. I look at her all happy and healthy and feel sad that there's other kids out there who deserve just as much to be as happy as her, but aren't getting it, even if their parents want and love them just as much. I wonder more than ever how could anyone accept treating an innocent kid so badly in detention? Or that it's fine for them to grow up without good healthcare or a financially stable household? Especially any politician who has a kid themselves. I care a lot about the future lives of these kids I've never even met, once they're out of the womb and brought into this unfair existence. So you'd think I should be on the same page with people wanting to prevent harm to even unborn kids. Except no. Even people who do want kids can still be lovely parents. So I don't think anyone who doesn't want their kid should ever have to have it. I think parenting should not be encouraged at all, so people don't just stumble into it thinking it's expected of them for them to be normal humans. And all too often, the same people on the religious spectrum of caring about stopping abortion throw all that empathy out the window when it comes to an adult suffering, or even a poor or minority child suffering. It makes me wonder if it's not really empathy after all. Like only a non-existent being is truly pure enough for them to deign to care about. So if someone wants me to have more empathy for that fetus but rolls their eyes and gives excuses when you bring up Nauru, their beliefs can get stuffed.
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Oct 23, 2015 05:46
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Unimpressed posted:The 30 weeks isn't the difference, it enables the difference to be created. At 8 weeks, it is a potential life, at 38 weeks it is (almost) a life. Making the potential for life be the important factor means you can't even use contraception. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm trying to get at here. Mourning the loss of a potential life gets clearly absurd when you consider that some eggs don't even stick to the uterine lining. But maybe that doesn't count cause that one never had any potential. Let's take a very healthy woman at the height of fertility, who would have an effortless pregnancy with no health issues whatsoever. Without the intervention of abortion, assume this fetus would definitely develop and be born as a completely healthy baby. So that biological potential is there even from the moment of conception. But most people wouldn't have any issue with a very early abortion that cuts off this potential. If this healthy woman definitely does not want to have a baby yet though, that potential of whether the baby will actually be born starts at zero, and remains at zero even if there was some drama that meant she couldn't arrange an abortion until she hit 38 weeks. Or maybe she started out wanting the baby, but then some traumatic unexpected event happened that convinced her she no longer wanted it. Like say, domestic violence, or developing suicidal thoughts, or something similarly dramatic. If this same event had happened a bit earlier, you wouldn't have the same objection then that you do now. The woman's intentions are the same. The biological status of the developing fetus is not the same. I don't see what other factor it is you're relying on to say now it is no longer okay.
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Oct 23, 2015 05:58
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Tirade posted:Future potential is only one measure though! Another valid measure could be capacity for the fetus to feel pain - a fetus aborted at 38 weeks would probably suffer almost as much as a baby killed shortly after birth, while anything aborted at 8 weeks would have about as much capacity for sensation as a mosquito. A fetus in between these two points moves along the capacity for pain spectrum from mosquito-like to baby-like. That part about capacity to feel pain is a good point. It's a lot more quantifiable too than a lot of the more philosophical or religious arguments that could be thrown around. I'd find a lot of merit in a position that said it's okay to abort late but only if the procedure prevents the fetus from feeling pain. That shows a more realistic level of concern for things that are actually happening (avoiding pain in the fetus while also wanting to allow for avoiding a horrible future life for both mother and child), versus hypothetical concern for the horror of stopping a potential human life even when it can't yet feel pain.
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Oct 23, 2015 06:08
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Unimpressed posted:Honestly, I don't really know. You're right, if you absolutely know for sure that the 8 week old foetus will develop into the 38 week old unborn baby than they are morally equivalent. But even though it doesn't make sense, I do feel differently about it. An 8 week old baby is very different in an ultrasound to a 34 week old, so maybe it's an emotional part that isn't logical but they are very different. Also, my objection isn't absolute. If the woman's life is at stake, I'm OK with an abortion at any stage, and there are many other circumstances where it would feel OK to me at late stages too, though 38 weeks is really really difficult for me. Yeah, it does. I can totally understand feeling like it's already a baby even when it hasn't been born yet. I just thought it was frustrating seeing so much effort going back and forth over trying to define this acceptable range when it's so murky, and hardly anyone who's ever argued about it is even going to have anywhere near the scientific knowledge required to make the kind of judgement they're actually trying to make. So I think the mother's intention is a more important factor. If you really want a kid, you might feel very hurt and disappointed by a miscarriage even if it's far too early for the fetus to have even felt anything, regardless of where that point might be. I like Tirade's point though about the potential for pain, since that's a point that's entirely fair to make even if you think it's still an overall better choice for the woman to be allowed to abort.
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Oct 23, 2015 06:19
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katlington posted:It's wrong. There's no proof that a fetus can feel pain at all. I'd imagine that a very late-stage one could be capable of it? That's more the point I was looking for with the mention of a scientific issue. The point a non-human becomes a human is vague philosophical talk, but any point before they even have functioning nerve endings, for instance, is clearly safe when it comes to worrying about whatever suffering they could possibly experience.
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Oct 23, 2015 06:36
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 16:34 |
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Amethyst posted:loving gold! This is only the 20th variation on this joke this thread has seen so far. But this one had the mafia hammer!
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Oct 23, 2015 07:01
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