As per the OP, I, too, am prochoice. (Some would characterize me as “way out there” because when it comes to the legality thereof, I regard Roe v Wade as a compromise, not “our position”; my version of “our position” would be that the right is owned by pregnant women as well as by the doctors normally performing the procedure, and that the women themselves retain the right up until the moment of birth. Come to think if it, me, or at least “folks voicing my kind of opinions”, might make someone else’s list in this thread… )
The ones that make me want to shout “you aren’t helping!”:
• The “Kleenex” argument. It isn’t a baby, it isn’t human, it isn’t alive, it’s just tissue, there’s no issue, just like blowing your nose, expel and dispose. What ethical question? Anyone see an ethical question happening here? I sure don’t!
• The “Buy Into the Other Side’s Definitions” position. Oooh, well, if it were alive and human, this would be the killing of a living human, and that would be murder, but it isn’t alive or it isn’t human yet, and I’m ready to pit my philosophical arguments against your gory photographs.
C’mon. Can you think under your own power? The RTL folks say we are killing human life. We think abortion is a pregnant woman’s prerogative. We can’t explain why without trivializing what she’s doing? It’s OK that she has this option available to her because it’s not a heavy important thing that she does when she exercises it? Grow some boobs, or some balls or whatever. We think it’s far less morally OK to make someone stay pregnant involuntariy than to kill a human life (yes) that has no conscious experience worth speaking of (if any) and which can’t live on its own, so why don’t we just say so? Not to mention that we think for society as a whole it’s spectacularly more immoral to make women the victims of sexuality by stripping them of reproductive choices. You think we’ve got the moral high ground, then fucking ACT LIKE IT.
Other areas:
I’m a schizzy libber, opposed to forced psychiatric treatment and always trying to reeducate people about how they perceive or think about those of us who have been labeled “mentally ill”.
Arguments that make me want to shout “Get your ass back to the day room and go back to drinking decaffeinated coffee!” —
• Politically Correct —Ewww, someone said “crazy”, I’m offended. Someone said “nutcase”, I’m gonna protest. I’d really rather be called “person with bipolar disorder” because that’s the term used by a person in a white coat and an MD after his name when he forces me to take medication against my will and keeps me locked up because he has the authority to say I’m a danger to myself or others. I just hate it when people say “lunatic” or “fucking nuts” or call it a “looney bin”, those people just hurt my feelings so much when they don’t use the language used by the folks who have imposed this diagnosis on me, waaaah!
• SSI / SSD Whores —The only right that matters to me, bub, is the right to get a government paycheck, so they should make it easier to get a diagnosis of whatever mental state means that you can’t be expected to do anything and therefore need to be taken care of. The definitions of what constitutes “mental illness” need to be expanded so more of us can get in on this good thing, and they need to be quicker and broader in determining us to be incompetent, incapable, and without social responsibilities. If they take away some authorities and rights, no biggie, I mean who votes anyhow? And I wasn’t trying to leave my Shelter Program for Fucked Up Adults anyhow, they got good food and I never have to work, so as long as they let me wander off grounds to get a 40 oz and maybe score some reefer or some crank, I dont care if they say we don’t have the right to leave treatment, you folks are ruining the free party, man!
The perennial Mac versus PC debates — please tell these folks to go back to playing Marathon and stay the fuck out of platform-debate threads?
• PCs drool, mmkay? Everything Apple did was right and everything IBM (old days) or Microsoft (modern era) has ever done with the PC has been copy catted from the Mac and furthermore they did it wrong. If Steve says it, it’s true. If it’s a difference between a PC and a Mac, the difference is a quality diff that intrinsically favors the Mac. Intel sucks. Intel sucks because Motorola makes better chips. Intel sucks because it’s a CISC chip. Open Firmware rocks, BIOS sucks. Intel sucks because their chips are only 32-bit chips. Intel rocks but BIOS sucks because it’s klunky and vulnerable and old-fashioned, EFI rules.
• Old Macs drool, mmkay? Everything Mac-haters said about crappy silly toy Macs was totally true yesterday but the Mac of today is a superior machine. The 68K Mac sucked, only the PowerPC Mac with Open Firmware really puts the PC in its place, if I had to choose between a Quadra and a 386 I’d go with the 386 every time. Oh yeah, MacOS 9 was a piece of shit, useless, crashy, no command line, I would totally have rather run Windows 95 anyday, but OS X is something else and so innovative and cool. The Mac platform prior to the Intel version? Useless, I tell you! I can’t see any sane reason for owning one, since an XP box would give you a better experience with more performance at a better price, but now an Intel-based Mac, well you can run XP and Vista and Slackware and MacOS X on it and MacOS X really is the cat’s miaow, you know I hardly ever boot into XP unless it’s to run an XP-only app, but I never would’ve bought one of those stupid PowerPC Macs, so slow and you could only run PowerPC operating systems on them
Religion threads: No one, either in the atheist or the theist camp, tends to be on my side in any meaningful way (except for Zoe who seems to think along the same lines). For the most part all the theistic posters and all the atheistic posters are either contributing to a counterargument I’ve got to deal with or, more often, simply concentrate on each other and ignore me.