Is that true? Everyone had condemned it already? Had Pelosi or any Democrat already condemned it BEFORE the reporter forced her to discuss it? I’m not so sure about that.
Are you “the other side” we are supposed to listen to and reason with?
I feel like you’re making Drum_God’s point. If you ban abortion, you don’t actually eliminate it - what you wind up with instead is instead of isolated cases of completely unethical doctors performing them, you get an army of them operating completely out of the public eye, or worse, pregnant women take it upon themselves to terminate their pregnancies through much worse means.
One thing that runs through the entirety of the religious/conservative “Ban it so it stops!” group is a rejection of the idea that banning things sometimes not only doesn’t stop it, but also has worse effects. Or perhaps more precisely they consider that the reaction to the bad effects is never to rescind the ineffective ban (because that would be an endorsement!) and instead rely on ever-more-draconian tactics to crush the sinners, who have rendered themselves worthy of inhuman treatment (read: damnation) due to their sin.
Yes it’s completely whacky and unreasonable of me to wonder why Democrats have such a hard time condemning a “doctor” that cuts the spin of alive babies after birth. I’m the weirdo.
I’m just confused why you seem to think this has something to do with the abortion debate in general. I don’t gather that’s a typical approach.
Also, I should note that I personally haven’t condemned it. There’s lots of things I haven’t condemned. There’s only such time in the day and not every weird thing deserves note.
Look at the Washington Post link posted above. Pelosi was asked “what is the moral difference between what Dr. Gosnell did to a baby born alive at 23 weeks and aborting her moments before her birth?”
If a Democrat refuses to condemn Gosnell then I think we know their answer to that question. As someone who is a pro-life person why would I vote for someone like that? There’s no way to find common ground with someone that extreme.
It would even be more wacky to believe that if anyone capitulated on this you would have no more objections up your sleeve. Take your hoop elsewhere-nobody here is going to jump through it.
I don’t know anything about Gosnell and don’t even have the interest level necessary to read a link and learn about him. Objectively speaking I don’t even know enough to condemn him - he may have had hella good reasons for doing whatever he did, for all I know or care.
But the answer to somebody honestly asking that question is probably somewhere between “the approach taken” and “the law has to draw a line somewhere, and ‘no abortions ever’ is just as groundless.” Regarding the approach taken approach (heh), I think we all agree that sometimes pets need to be put down. I think we also agree that it’s not appropriate to ‘put the pets down’ by slowly running them over with a steamroller from the tail up. Is the problem with the example given the approach that was taken?
As for the second issue…that’s kind of a different thread. But this business with whatsisname sounds like it’s grounded in the first issue, which is disingenuous bullshit.
A lot of Christianity is predicated on “The perfect should be the enemy of the good” - in the sense that compromise is not allowed and one must strive for perfection. Sexuality is perhaps the most common battleground for this issue, simply because it’s a very strong and deep-rooted instinct no matter how religious you are. There are many Christians who argue that not only is premarital sex not allowed, but neither is masturbation - indeed, no orgasms allowed at all, save for nocturnal emissions (that’s allowed because it’s ‘involuntary.’) If you point out to them that it’s almost impossible to expect someone to go their entire life with no orgasms all the way up until marriage - if they even marry at all - their response is to double down all the harder, “Not allowed means not allowed!”
Wow…
And they are welcome to do that. Just as Jewish dietary law says no bacon, even on a cheeseburger.
It is when they force their views on others that we have a problem here.
My Wife despises Trump as I do. But she hopes ‘left/right’ will somehow come together. It would be great if we could find a middle ground. But I very much doubt it can happen. Neither my Wife or I are racist anti-intellectuals, and want hope and promise for every one. So the opposite of Trump and the GOP.
To people who believe that the Bible is the Word of God, there is no better argument than ‘the Bible says.’
You may or may not get anywhere with them by discussing what the Bible actually does and doesn’t say. But you’re not going to get anywhere with them by telling them that ‘the Bible says’ is not a good argument.
Part of the problem is often this actual disagreement about what is and what is not evidence. ‘The Bible says’ isn’t evidence at all to me, and presumably not to you. But it is to a lot of people.
This thread is a perfect example of people in an echo chamber trying to understand the ‘others’ that aren’t inside the same chamber. It’s doomed to fail.
There are million reasons to be on ‘the right’ - or the left. There are many lenses through which you can gain different insights into the other side.
Let’s take just one - the rural/urban divide. Rural people tend to be much more self-sufficient. They also tend to be part of extended families in the same area, and derive much of their social safety net through family and community. They live in a community of known people, where self-regulation through reputation works well. They grow up with guns as tools and sources of fun and food. They solve their own problems, and their neighbours help them when emergencies happen and they do the same for their neighbours.
To rural people, governments often only show up when they want something or want to restrict what the rural people do, such as taking their guns or imposing new taxes or demanding environmental inspections or stopping development or whatever.
Of course this is a bit of an illusion, since rural people get lots of tax breaks and subsidies in many states. But in general rural people feel like they are more self-sufficient and their lives revolve around family, neighbours, and church. Big government not wanted or necessary.
The ethos of rural life is that hard work sustains you, that you are responsible for caring for yourself and your family. Being part of a local community means you have strong pressure to conform to the community’s values. Those values invariably mean not leaning on others unnecessarily, being fair in your dealings, etc. There is a lot of self-regulation as a result, and less of a need for government. There is much more focus on self discipline and hard work as a path to the good life.
As a result of this focus on family, community and individual discipline, I think rural conservatives often make the mistake of thinking ‘family values’ work at a societal level. For example, they are opposed to welfare because they think welfare makes you lazy, and laziness is a bad character trait. They think of the bum in the farm down the road always asking for others’ help in a crisis, but who doesn’t maintain their farm well and is never around when others need help. They understand that constantly helping someone who won’t help themselves just enables them to continue bad behavior. So they personalize government policy as if it were community policy. They live in their own bubble.
Urban people are forced to interact with strangers constantly as a condition of life in the city. They are often without a familial safety net, and things like losing a job or having the rent go up can be disastrous. To them, It’s a world which requires heavy government safety nets, and they place high value on tolerance of others not like themselves, because that’s a virtue in a cosmopolitan world. When everyone is a stranger, reputation matters less and the feeling that you need government regulation to protect you from the rapaciousness of others is stronger.
This is just one of the many cultural and social factors that divide people into liberal and conservative factions.
For me, the fundamental difference still comes back to Locke vs Rousseau, and the nature of man. Are we born as free individuals, or are we born as part of a mass of humanity with obligations to the collective? Am I free to seek my own ends, follow my own conscience, and life my own life, or am I required to sacrifice my freedom and be told what I must do in order to exist in society?
I believe the former. I believe everyone is born free, and that the proper form of government will recognize those basic freedoms and will not intrude upon them so long as I do the same for others. The proper form of government is one in which individuals are given a maximal zone of freedom and privacy to the extent that it is compatible with the freedom of others.
Fundamental to individual freedom is the acceptance of property rights. If I have no right to my own property, I am not free as someone can always starve me or kick me out into the elements if I don’t comply with their wishes. And property rights include my right to dispose of my property as I see fit upon my death. In fact, one of the primary motivators for living a relatively frugal, hardworking life is so I can leave something for my kid and he won’t have to struggle like I did. Take that away from me through the abolition of inheritance, and you have taken away one of the fundamental freedoms that make living a productive life worthwhile
That gets us to a ‘base’ philosophy that closely matches the U.S. Declaration of Independence - that all people are born free, that they are imbued with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (following your own goals, and not those imposed by others). What those people choose to do with their lives is no business of yours unless they impinge on your own basic freedoms.
For people like me, being told that I have to be ‘anti-racist’ and subvert my own goals to someone else’s for fear of being labeled a ‘racist’ and kicked out of decent society is a perfect example of the kind of collectivist thinking that is anathema to me. Being told that I was born with collective guilt because of my skin colour is abhorrent and immoral in my opinion.
Class warfare is alien to me. I don’t hate people based on how much money they do or don’t make. I don’t care if your wealth is inherited or if you earned it. What you have is irrelevant to me, unless you stole it, extorted it, or have it because government carved out a special place for you.
I like billionaires, because a healthy economy needs sources of experimentation and investment free from the requirements of politics. Billionaires provide ‘diversity’, or in complex systems theory they enable ‘Levy Flight’, which is critical to discovery and innovation. I like capitalism, because it allows free people to organize and trade with each other without coercion. I like capitalism because money is an abstraction that subverts racism and other forms of discrimination. Do you know whether the last product you bought was made by Jews or Muslims? Black people or white people? Probably not. And you shouldn’t care, and don’t have to care to take part in the market. Capitalism allows people to work for their mutual benefit while politics puts the same people at each other’s throats.
I have never understood financial envy. In a capitalist system, you get richer when you provide more value. Elon Musk isn’t rich because he screwed anyone over, nor is he rich because he took money from poor people. Musk is rich because he has provided millions of people with electric cars, satellite communications, internet fee processing, and other services. Every time his rockets send a crew to the ISS he saves taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. He made everyone else richer as he earned more. Why should I possibly hate him for what he has, or think that his money needs to be taken from him for the common good? I hope he becomes a trillionaire, because the only way that will happen is if he makes everyone else even richer.
Capitalism is not a zero-sum game. Fundamental to the entire concept is that when two free people engage in trade, they only do so because both perceive themselves better off for having done so.
This doesn’t mean capitalism isn’t without its faults, or that regulation is unnecessary. Markets fail due to monopoly, asymmetric information, inability to collect externalities, etc. A sophisticated libertarianism recognizes that it can be impossible for the market to price diffuse damages like air pollution or global warming, and therefore government has a role in regulating it when failures happen.
Likewise, the need for large cities concentrating people means that the old familial safety nets can’t work, and we need government safety nets. We can debate their size and cost.
I emphatically do NOT believe that governments can centrally plan society or the economy. I’ve spent most of my professional life studying complexity and information theory, and everything we have learned about those fields in the past 50 years indicates that central planning does not and can not work.
Society is a complex adaptive system. The economy is a complex adaptive system. Such systems are emergent, sensitive to initial conditions, non-linear, and subject to constant shocks both positive and negative. They are dominated by ‘unknown unknowns’. Attempts to ‘make them better’ by imposing top-down control always leads to unintended consequences and failure. This is why economists have utterly failed at predicting the economy more than a few months into the future. And an economy that cannot be predicted cannot be planned or controlled. Central planners do not have the information to make decisions, because 80% of the information that makes a complex system work is locked up at the lowest levels where the most independent agents are.
For me, both scientific theory and morality are on the side of classical liberalism - free speech is critical to information flow, free movement of prices is critical to transmit information about supply and demand, and self-organization and emergence are much better ways for a society to function than an attempt by a handful of smart people at the top attempting to direct things. For that to work, people need to be maximally free to make their own choices.
Hey, look at that - a long-winded defense of conservatism that doesn’t involve abortion, misogyny, xenophobia or racism. Because those are the lenses through which the left sees the world - not mine.
I’m not interested in getting anywhere with them. I’m interested in keeping whatever they say “the Bible says” from having any influence over public policy. In the example we’ve been discussing, their interpretation of and belief in the Bible should not have any influence over public policy regarding teens and birth control. If they want to influence those policies, they need to present evidence that does not rely on their beliefs.
OK. I thought that’s what this thread was about.
I agree with that; except that I think it would help in accomplishing that if we could get somewhere with them.
There are in fact religious people, including religious Christians, who agree that general public policy shouldn’t be based on religious beliefs unless there’s also secular reason for it. So it seems to me an entirely possible goal to get more (though I’m sure not all) religious people to agree on it; but, again, that requires getting somewhere with them.
You’re right – I forgot. This business gets my dander up (if you hadn’t noticed).
I don’t want it to sound as if I’m against religious people. In fact, some of the people I know who are the most committed to social justice are motivated by devout religious beliefs. But they also bring plenty of secular reasoning to the table.
As for the abortion argument, both sides have a point, and the answer is ‘fuzzy’ and not resolvable.
Is a fertilized egg a human with legal rights? All except the most fundamental anti-abortion activists will say ‘no’.
Is a child just birthed a human with legal rights? All except the most radical pro-abortion supporters would say ‘yes’.
Somewhere in between those two extremes a legal human with rights exists. But you can’t point to any single moment that makes sense, because the transition is fuzzy.
As an example of fuzziness, consider an apple. Take a bite out of it. Is it still an apple? Sure, it’s an apple with a bite taken out of it. But keep taking bites, and at some point you have to recognize that the thing is not so much an apple any more as an apple core. But there was no single bite that made it change states. It’s a ‘fuzzy transition’.
That’s the problem with the abortion debate. Almost everyone agrees that partial birth abortion is wrong unless needed to save the life of the mother. Almost no one thinks that the ‘morning after pill’ is murder. The problem is in the large fuzzy middle, which makes it an intractable problem. I can respect people who come down on the first trimester as the limit, or viability out of the womb being the limit, or the start of complex brain functions being the limit.
For myself, since I don’t pretend to know where the limit is, I default to the rights of the mother to decide. But I also think it’s the moral responsibility of someone who is pregnant and is considering an abortion to get it as soon as possible, and not take their time to decide until the baby is almost at term.
Good question. This time around I voted for Trump and I know what sort of arguments I find persuasive. For example climate change is a big one that many on the right like to downplay and why is that? I think in part it’s due to language and what the proposed solutions means in terms of relative national power and changes to standards and/or costs of living. Others are part of the religious right and I’m not sure how you exactly reason with a religious fundamentalist whose core beliefs are anti-science and anti scientific evidence.
Where I personally have an issue with climate change, as an example, is that it’s presented as humans are responsible for all of it when it fact humans are responsible for some of it but it’s incalculable to what degree we are. Climate and weather are chaotic and inputs don’t have linear correlations to outputs. So asking folks to voluntarily cede power and wealth to other nations in order to mitigate an unknown and unknowable difference in climate change is a relatively hard sell.
Now with regards to alternate facts being the predominant difference between the voters and the parties I don’t think that’s so. I look at the political space as multi-dimensional and some of the clusters are for whatever reason ignored and we map stuff onto a very simplistic and misleading one dimensional space. So seeing the other side is actually recognizing that there are dozens or more factors, some perhaps hardwired, that lead to preference for one candidate or set of policies over another. Even liking the same things but at different relative weights can lead to different decisions.