Mainly my nocturnal slacker nature. For anarchists, a lot of them were remarkably staid and uptight in their ways. The ones who were less so (and actually hung out with me) were, as I described, very much in my corner.
Oh, and I asked one time (in nearly three months living there) to use the TV to watch the U.S. Open men’s final. The noive! :rolleyes:
Nothing you have posted in any way demonstrates that the criticisms here of your position on this bill are in any way ignorant or dishonest.
In particular, you and your quoted source appear to be misunderstanding or misrepresenting a fundamental point:
A non-viable fetus that briefly survives induced delivery during a crisis pregnancy termination is NOT analogous to “similarly situated babies who are born under any other circumstance”, and refraining from temporarily resuscitating such a fetus is NOT “denying proper care”.
Criminalizing doctors’ and patients’ informed individual choices about how to care for such non-viable fetuses during their brief existence outside the womb is NOT protecting “babies born alive”. Republicans are, as usual, lying when they claim that Democrats’ insistence on letting pregnant women and doctors make these difficult choices without draconic state interference means that Democrats support killing babies. And you are, as usual, credulously falling for their PR spin when you panic about Democratic legislators sticking up for proper medical procedure in this situation.
Your tendency to prioritize unthinking ideological loyalties over specific facts and principles is one of the characteristics that makes you so bad at informed debate. The fact that Michael Wear, the author of your linked article and an anti-abortion Democrat, worked in the Obama administration’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships doesn’t automatically mean he is someone we should agree with on the issue of abortion. But you somehow imagine that because he’s a Democrat and an Obama supporter, quoting him about his (disingenuously slanted) support for this bill should persuade us that he must be right.
You know, SlackerInc, if you would just come right out and state that you’re ethically opposed to abortion rights and you don’t think Democrats should vote for measures that protect or expand abortion rights, I’d have much more respect for your position. But your smarmy concern-trolling attitude of “oh noes, the Democrats are hurting themselves politically by not supporting Republican undermining of abortion rights and thereby endorsing the Republican message that DEMOCRATS ARE BABY KILLERS, I SAID DEMOCRATS ARE BABY KILLERS!!” is contemptible.
Thanks for that; although, unlike a consumer of conspiracy salads here, I would like at least a bit of advise on the grammar. As I pointed before, I accept my shortcomings as an ESL, but no such luck can be expected about SlackerInc admitting that he is being misled on many issues by “mainstream media”
I still find how disingenuous he was about how he found about Lomborg, the lukewarm climate change misleader.
We got so far as the Slacker reporting that he saw Lomborg “interviewed in the mainstream media” so he thought he was legit, problem is that most serious media, scientists and even economist peers of Lomborg, report that he is a hack.
The teachable moment here is that in recent years Lomborg appears mostly in Fox news, the WSJ and other** right wing** media sources and he was even invited by some in the “intellectual dark web” podcasts, increasing the range of a big misleader in the subject of climate change.
LMAO!! Well played. How did you make the laughing emoji, BTW? I don’t see it as a choice, and when I have tried in the past to use emojis from my phone, they don’t come through after I click “post”.
You’re still not getting it. I don’t give a shit if the proper procedure according to experts in the field is X, Y, or Z. There are SO many issues in public policy where that is the case, yet the public is overwhelmingly against following the expert course of advice. If we just follow the experts in those cases, heedless of the politics, we soon lose our chance to have any influence over policy at all. It’s strange how hard this is to grasp for so many people.
Not to mention that presumably you would support reducing the number of doctors to sign off on late term abortion for similar reasons. Yet in France, which consistently gets extremely high marks for their health care system, two doctors must sign off on any abortion past twelve weeks. (If I had my 'druthers, I’d have us take on the French policies via constitutional amendment and leave the question permanently settled.)
I mean,do you think Schumer decried this bill as “the worst kind of Washington politics” because the GOP was making a move that would backfire on them? Do you think he is sitting back and gloating at how well Democrats won this PR war? :dubious:
Maybe it’s the worst kind of Washington politics because it seeks to make political hay from from the pain of those who have to make this kind of decision in the first place. Yeah, sorry your child was born technically alive but with a completely absent brain stem, but in order to score political points we need to make your pain a big damn deal and magnify the suffering of you and yours!
Yep, and I have to add that the concern trolling needs to have more than one poll to tell us if most people swallowed the Republican trash or that this issue means defeat for the Democrats, as the generic polling shows, not much has changed since February 26, according to Harris interactive who is one of the few that has bothered to keep going with the generic ballot polling.
The latest poll showed that a congressional Democrat gets about 42% vs a Republican with 36%. That 5 or 6 point difference has been very constant ever since the Abortion vote and for the recent past.
Best case for Democrats here is that they weather the storm and it doesn’t hurt much. But if you think this is actually what winning the news cycle or the messaging war looks like, you’ve got another thing coming.
As noted already, it has not even been a blip in the general support for the Democrats, and as the article, that it is full of the unsupported opinion of anti abortion proponents, the recent reality can not be denied: “In 2018, voters overwhelmingly rejected attacks on health care and reproductive rights — we need only look at the U.S. House of Representatives for proof,” said Planned Parenthood President Leana Wen.
:rolleyes: Every special interest lobby thinks elections are won/lost because the party did/didn’t support their line. The Sierra Club presumably thinks the election is proof that environmental issues are what really matters; BLM thinks it’s police shootings; etc. We can’t know for sure what engineered the election results, but it being abortion rights is a dubious claim. Looks to me like it was mainly the Trump administration being a treasonous dumpster fire that House Republicans refused to lift a finger to try to put out. Maybe aided by the attacks on Obamacare and particularly pre-existing conditions.
This kind of claim is also made even murkier by the fact that Republican candidates got way more votes than they did in 2014 when they had a great night. It’s just that Democrats got way, way more votes than they did in 2014. So it doesn’t really fit a narrative of all these voters leaving the GOP to join the Democratic side.
Your admission that you “don’t give a shit” about what knowledgeable medical experts recommend regarding this policy is not exactly inspiring confidence in your judgement about what policy legislators ought to be supporting.
Well, the solution in that case is to help educate the public about the facts of the issues. Otherwise, you just continue to get crappy public policy because you’re just following ill-informed popular preferences.
This is how we got so deep in the shit on policy regarding climate change, for example: Malicious manipulators encouraged the public to believe a bunch of bullshit on the issue, and not enough people spoke out against the bullshit or stood up for effective policy. Craven acquiescence and deference to the malicious manipulators didn’t achieve anything of substance for Democrats on the issue of climate change, and it’s not going to achieve anything of substance for Democrats on the issue of abortion rights.
Why on earth would you presume that? I’m not at all against doctors following proper medical procedures, and I certainly don’t think that abortions should be entirely unregulated.
No, the best case for Democrats here is that their supporters get energized to push back against the Republicans’ malicious manipulation, educate some of their fellow voters (instead of just “not giving a shit”) about the realities of third-trimester abortions and the necessity for doctors and patients to make decisions about them without ignorant legislators trying to railroad them into stupid one-size-fits-all procedural requirements, and expose the manipulative Republican lies on the subject.
Are you going to be doing any of that stuff to support the Democrats whose political success you claim to care so much about? Or are you just going to go on splattering your concern-trolling all over the internet, scolding Democrats for making a principled decision because it might make them vulnerable to Republicans’ malicious manipulative slanders that you can’t even be arsed to contradict?
The more you post on this subject, SlackerInc, the more you seem like you’re actually ideologically in favor of draconian restrictions on third-trimester abortion and actually want the Republicans to successfully bully Democrats into endorsing them. And you pretend that what you’re concerned about is the “political optics” for the Democrats because you fondly imagine that will make you more successful as a political “influencer” on a left-leaning messageboard.
If you think your roundly mocked performance is actually what being a canny political “influencer” on the internet looks like, you’ve really got another think coming.
Good thing that I added a conditional there, I did not look only for the recent past but noticed that even recently there has not been an erosion of the general support for the Democrats in Congress.
Making that sort of “hard decision” about other people’s pain gives a certain type of person a sort of no-cost catharsis boner. “It pains me so badly to declare that you’ll have to suffer for the greater good. Poor child”.
So your position is that you should promote whatever position has the most public support, regardless of its advisability, and that ignoring experts on policy issues is the best course of action if it’ll get votes?
No, but thanks for entering the strawman sweepstakes. :rolleyes:
My position is that you don’t take inflexible stands on principle when public opinion is 3 to 1 against you, when what’s at stake is a relatively rare corner case that even at worst isn’t leaving kids hungry and homeless (or in cages at the border), which potentially happens on a massive scale if we let Republicans lure us into a political trap.
Again, we can win in the short term even without being terribly canny, but the risk is like what happened after Watergate. One or two good cycles and then our advantage was frittered away.
Oh yeah, great. Nice short term project. Maybe you can bear fruit with it in a few decades, if you haven’t ceded control of education to Betsy DeVos and her ilk for so long by then that it’s a hopeless cause.
You’re damn right I ideologically support what you call “draconian restrictions on third-trimester abortion”. As do an overwhelming majority of Americans, including a large chunk of Democrats. That’s precisely what helps me see clearly how bad the optics are here.
In your “expert” opinion, what are the common reasons for late-term abortions, and how would the recently failed-to-launch stupidity in the Senate fix that?
Exactly which draconian restrictions on third-trimester abortion to you support? Are you actually in favor of the measures proposed in the failed Republican bill, and your professed concern about Democrats being hurt politically by opposing it was just a smokescreen for your attempt to push Democrats into going along with it, because those measures are actually what you want to see enacted?
If so, then why don’t you have the guts to just come right out and declare “In my opinion, this bill is morally and medically correct in the restrictions it proposes concerning third-trimester abortions and it ought to be enacted”, instead of sanctimoniously pretending that you don’t care what the right policy choice is but you’re just soooo sooo concerned that the Democrats might possibly lose votes over it?