You are so right, you guys. Of course, I am generally on the opposite side of the debate from Diogenes, but I you are completely right, Excalibre, that there are no black & white answers to anything, and everyone sees these kinds of issues in a slightly different way. Statements like the one you linked to are not reasonable. What are you supposed to say if you disagree with his statement?
“Abortion does not involve another individual’s right to life.”
“Does so.”
“Does not.”
“Does so.”
“Does not.”
It’s ridiculous. The abortion debate in general actually HINGES on this question…it IS the debate, not the answer to the debate. I think you are right that Diogenes fully understands this, I suspect he is just the self-righteous type who doesn’t want to accept that he isn’t necessarily correct about everything.
As long as you manage to ignore your lying eyes you should be OK. In any event, “hate” is a very strong and poorly defined emotion w/regards to a nation. How can one hate a country? Do I hate each and every member of its population, including new born babies I have never met/seen? Or are we talking about aspects of the country’s government, foreign or trade policy, its culture or its climate? Surely if we are talking about the lattter aspects, I have no problem whatsoever with your climate as you cover enough ground to suit just about any taste in amabient temperature…
Oh, pshaw, RedFury. If someone quoted a Baltimore weather report at you, you’d explain how the humidity is directly responsible for famines in the Sudan.
I disagree with both of these, even though I certainly understand the sentiments.
GD is not that bad compared to debate in the wild and if sensible people don’t bother, they’re surrendering the stage to the immoderate, the irrational and the zealots.
I work in policy analysis at a university. With my colleagues, I get excellent, focussed debate on economic policy issues. But when you go and give a seminar to other academics, unless you’re really lucky, the discussion is shit. People want to talk about the paper they want you to have written, not the one you have.
When you get to where actual policy is decided - meetings of top bureaucrats, political advisors and experts - things get much worse. If you present a paper, nobody’s read it and most people just look at your conclusion and decide whether they like it ideologically. They ask questions to score cheap points. They misrepresent your position. They lie about data. They claim that your carefully-worked, peer-reviewed, replicable research is no match for their gut feeling. They threaten you. They take the credit for your successes and blame you for their failures. They allow themselves to hijacked by wackos and moneymen. They talk endlessly about things that don’t matter much (a meeting I was at on the reform agenda for the next decade spent 20% of its time talking about the appropriate fucking counterfactual for considering the introduction of jitneys).
And if you want to influence opinion and policy, you have to deal with them. You have to find a way to draw in those can be drawn in, to compromise with belligerent arseholes and to marginalise the wholly recalcitrant. If you don’t do this, you can be as rational and sophisticated as you like - but remain utterly irrelevant. What’s bad in that GD thread is nothing much. Sure, it’d be nice if some of it wasn’t there, but an OK debate is going on. If reasonable people aren’t prepared to soldier on in those circumstances - in what is essentially a rehearsal of real world debate - they’re kidding themselves if they think they are ever going to have any real influence.
My apology. I went back and took a look, and I misinterpreted your comment. Given the conext of the other comments, I thought you were saying something akin to “who cares abut the Iraqis as long as our soldiers are OK”, which is something that our band of hijackers would say (usually with some sort of comment about brown people).
The reason why that type of assertion bothers me is because we could very easily carpet bomb the whole country. We could easily destroy cities. But instead our policies put soldiers at great personal risk by making them go house to house and do searches and make arrests in order to minimize casualties. The fact is, our forces are in the greatest danger of their lives, and yet we still have clowns coming out of the woodwork to interject that the US and everything associated with the US is bad.
So, sorry for the misinterpretation. I read it as sarcasm, and that’s my fault.
That’s not what those “clowns” (your countrymen) are saying at all. We are saying that our forces shouldn’t be in the greatest danger of their lives and that continuing as we are is bad.
And somehow the slaughter of innocents won’t stay relegated to the hypothetical during times of carnage.
I posted that as a simplistic RESPONSE to a simplistic assertion by question by somebody else, retard. That was far from the only thing I said in that thread.
You posted plenty in that thread, but you didn’t blunder into any sort of real discussion at any point. And your post may have been in response to a short question, but that question - frankly, in contrast to JThunder’s usual style - was a rather challenging, provocative one in response to someone else’s post. As others have noted, the central issue in that debate was whether a fetus is a living person or not. You can mindlessly assert over and over that a fetus isn’t a person, but that doesn’t make what is, in reality, a complex question, any simpler.
Make whatever excuses you like. I’ve seen plenty of your posts on the board.
And you think that a “challenging, provocative response” to that question is to simply assert (sloganeer style) that a fetus has a “right to life?” What other response is possible to that other than “no it doesn’t?” Legally, that is a factual response, is it not?
Well, that isn’t what I did in that thread, so you obviously didn’t read my posts. I said that the question was too subjective and philosophical to be objectively resoved and that it was ultimately irrelevant to whether abortion should be legal.
There’s no way that the question of a fetus’ personhood is irrelevant to the abortion debate. It simply is the abortion debate. I don’t even debate it any more, because every single time it comes down to “You’re killing babies” vs “No I’m not, and therefore a woman has a right to control her body.”
If the fetus is a person (however that’s going to be defined), then abortion is murder. If it’s not, then scrape it out like a wart. And never the twain shall meet. It’s a philosophical/spiritual problem, which is why you never see any real logical arrival at a widely accepted conclusion.
If it’s irresolvable, it’s irrelevant and it’s NOT the debate, The debate is about the WOMAN’S rights, not the fetus’s. Even a full grown adult doesn’t have a right to live inside another person, so the ridiculous religious belief that a fetus is a person has never been anything but an irrelevant red herring.
You’ll have to explain why. I’m trying to point out why the imagined “personhood” of a fetus is ultimately beside the point. Sometimes it’s necessary to stretch something to a logical extreme to illustrate that point. That’s all I was doing. There’s nothing risible about that or anything else I said in that post. Calling abortion “murder” is what’s risible.
Really? Even though the woman willingly invited the person to live there? That’s lovely, extend an invitation to come by and stay a while, then kill the person when his presence becomes inconvenient.