Can we not make “legally murder an unborn child” a thing? First off, it’s definitionally incorrect because murder is illegal. Second, it’s really unnecessarily inflammatory.
[/moderating]*
Altho I appreciate the sentiment, this was posted in Elections. The GOP does want to make abortion into a crime, in some cases equivalent to the “murder of a unborn child”.
It is totally inflammatory, agreed, but not * unnecessarily*_ it shows the political viewpoints of a poster in the correct forum for such.
Do people really see that statement as “inflammatory”. I’m about as pro-choice as you can get, and it doesn’t bother me if the other side wants to use that language. It is, after all, what they believe.
It’s an inflammatory turd dropped into a thread that really wasn’t about abortion at all, simply for the poster to annoy his political opponents. I’m not sure it reaches the stage of violating the “don’t be a jerk” rule, but a little admonishment to “don’t be so juvenile” doesn’t hurt anyone.
ETA: especially AFTER a mod note to another poster to stop an attack on other posters, in which the phrase “I want to end the mass murder of babies” was used.
The “legally murder an unborn child” was in response to this -
So it is on-topic AFAICT.
The notion that it is "definitionally incorrect is, I think, invalid. ‘Murder’ is both a legal, and a moral concept. “Legally murder” makes it pretty clear that doorhinge was talking about the moral aspect.
As far as “unnecessarily inflammatory”, I trust I don’t need to produce cites for all the times that the police/George W. Bush/Hillary Clinton/practically anyone has been accused of murder.
A few things:
[ul]
[li]I think abortion itself could be on topic in that thread - I made no statement about a hijack or lack thereof. I saw it as a riff on the comment in post #50:“I want to end the mass murder of babies”.[/li][li]There may be a moral concept of murder, but that is not the most common definition. I’m not persuaded by context that the moral aspect was being introduced. Based on that interpretation[/li][li]Many people accuse or imply public figures are murderers, or all kinds of terrible people. That is a wholly different thing when directed the sentiment at a poster on this board. An accusation wasn’t made, though the comment was directed specifically at a poster on this board.[/li][/ul]
I acknowledge your feedback.
I see a few different reasons for giving mod notes. One of them is to provide in-thread guidance as an effort to steer threads away from turning into unproductive sniping. In this case I felt that the comment in the context it was written had the potential to do this and wanted to head off that potential outcome.
