Ok, so I’m starting a pit thread for this one, because it is so O/T from the trainwreck that is this thread, and I think his ridiculous comments will reach a wider audience this way.
In the thread quoted, I posted this link: Margaret Sanger in order to help educate Roland about the misinformation he’s hearing, but it occured to me that he likely won’t care.
So what am I pitting? It pisses me off that Roland would compare a birth control activist to Nazi’s policy of Eugenics. It really fucks me off that he would compare abortion to the Holocaust. What I want to know is, how does this radical and inflexible view point help the argument in any way?
And while we’re at it, maybe some rational pro-life folks can chime in and reassure us pro-choicers that a rational dialogue is possible and you don’t on a whole think we’re commiting mass genocide by providing safe and legal abortion. Roland’s view cannot be a common viewpoint, can it? I’ve never heard anything like this before.
Rebekkah, it’s okay for Roland to cheat his way through school, and most likely endanger the lives of thousands of patients during his career as a result, because YOU’RE A BABY-KILLER!!
Come on, dear, it’s Roland. He’s a fucking moron. I mean, look at the questions he posts - he’s either quite dim or simply incapable of filtering anything that comes out of his mouth (or off of his fingertips, rather). He’s got a cruel wife to whom he is also cruel, and his home life sounds absolutely intolerable. He appears to be well into adulthood but still hasn’t begun his career. He seems to think all these things make him a nonconformist or a rebel or something like that.
The dude’s just absolutely pathetic. Most of the stuff he posts is just for attention anyway; I’m sure this falls into that category. Don’t get yourself upset over what he says; consider the source.
Ok, maybe this is my stumbling block. I cannot see a fetus as an equivelent to a human life. But pretend I did. I still can’t imagine equating an abortion to the Holocaust. It is ridiculous to me.
In this case, Roland is partially correct. Margaret Sanger was a supporter of eugenics.* He errs in equating Sanger’s eugenics to the Nazi’s eugenics, however.
See Chesler’s Woman of Valor for a hard-nosed look at Margaret Sanger. Chesler sees Sanger as a great heroine, but doesn’t shy away from discussing her myriad of faults and hypocrisies.
He’s not equating an abortion to the Holocaust. He’s equating all the abortions that have happened to the Holocaust. So, what he’s saying, then, is that, since Roe v. Wade, the government has allowed and endorsed the deaths of X people by saying that they’re not really human and don’t have rights, even sometimes subsidizing the practice, where X are all the abortions that have occurred since Roe v. Wade.
I think the comparison isn’t really a good one, and I don’t think I’d make it, but Brutus is right…it’s a damn harsh thing.
Ditto. Roland is pretty much the anti-Doper on every conceivable scale of measurement. Pretend he isn’t here and your SDMB experience will be much more pleasant.
We could have the Permanent Revolving Roland Deschain Pit Thread. Every now and then just lop off and archive the first couple of hundred posts and change the title to reflect where the conversation has gotten.
OK, before I say this, let me say that I favor universal abortion on demand, for any reason including birth control.
But if you were one of those people (not me) who believe fetuses are human lives, and then go on to count the number of abortions that have been performed since 1970, that’s something like tens of millions of human being killed. It shouldn’t be so ridiculous to see how some people call that a holocaust.
I’m glad the law protects us from people like those, of course, but I think their logic is internally consistent. It is good to understand why they think the way they do. If I thought I were in the middle of some kind of Holocaust, you can be assured I’d go around blowing up buildings too or at least providing cover for those who did. We’re living in a nation where potentially half of us currently feel that way about abortion.
Or to anyone with some knowledge of history, seeing that abortion rights did not exist under Nazism (unless one is referring to forced abortion for “defective” races; abortion for a healthy Aryan female would have been regarded as treason).
His professed attitude is not freakishly rare, sorry to say.
Yeah, if I thought a fetus was a human being and abortion was murder, I’d probably think that abortion in general was akin to the Holocaust. Worse if there’s been more abortions than people killed in the Holocaust.
First of all, I agree that if one truly believes a fetus to be a human being, one would not only be horrified by abortion, but would be morally obligated to protest against it.
That said, it’s really not at all comparable to The Holocaust. Why? Because no one is trying to systematically commit wipe an entire culture, including every man woman and child, from the earth. Killing lots of people indiscriminately is bad, but (most people would agree) it’s not as bad as deliberately trying to wipe out an entire population.
I think that comparing abortion to the holocaust is just as dumb as when PETA types use words like “genocide” and “murder” to apply to chickens and cows. And it’s the exact same logic too. If I think that a chicken is a “person” then it follows that I will percive Colonel Sanders as a mass murderer. Internally my logic would be sound. It wouldn’t make me any less of a nutter, though and the same applies to fantasies that blastocysts are children.
You are all going to be sorry when Roland wins millions in the lottery and has nothing but money and time to start public campaigns against these issues.
Since Roland is opposed to abortion, I find his objections to Margaret Sanger a little contradictory. With all of her faults, her greatest contribution was to promote the prevention of unwanted pregnancies. I think that she can be credited with actually preventing many backstreet abortions. But then consistency and coherence are not RD’s strong points.
If he really carried for children as he pretends to, he would shut down his computer and nurture the four year old child who tugs at his arm. A decent father would not post private and personal information about the child’s mother when the mother has asked him not to either.
His arguments about doing just fine on his psychological testing in the navy are bogus. Anyone who is doing so well in nursing (as he claims) should know that psychological tests don’t come with a lifetime guarantee.
He reminds me very much of someone else who has posted here with frequent misspellings and false claims that don’t hold up to scrutiny.