Pitting UltraVires

The BBQ Pit
781

I don’t want to get into an expansive discussion on that in the UltraVires pit thread, but I’m broadly speaking, in favor of moderate / sustained population growth of the U.S. population as stagnation and even declines in population are very bad for the country. [That is not my reason for being pro-life, I am pro-life because I think abortion is immoral.] I’m in favor of a broad gamut of programs to encourage carrying pregnancies to term, encouraging women to have kids or more kids, and making it easier for them to do so.

For too long conservatives have fallen into a trap of what I call “hyper-individualism.” I think this is a mistake, and I think it actually goes against a lot of historical conservatism, at some point a bunch of inane Randist took over the dialogue. We all have a vested interest in society’s healthy growth, and in women being able to bear children. A big part of that will also mean encouraging family formation and doing things to help families raise a few kids.

I am not an expert on such policies but I’d certainly be in favor of things like:

  • Continue bolstering the refundable child tax credit
  • Provide comprehensive government support to women during pregnancy and the first year of parenthood, look to some of the things Scandinavian countries do here and I think you find a lot of good ideas
  • Build out support for things that can ease the burden of having kids by helping with early childhood via universal Pre-K, some subsidy or government involvement in helping parents afford daycare, after school programs etc.
  • I’d also be in favor of a more robust education effort that educates people that while our career-oriented lives may not get us “settled” enough until our mid-30s to want to start having kids, human biology has not adjusted with this norm. Your prime child-bearing years as a woman start in your late teens and basically run through your mid to late 20s, if you wait until 35+ you are going to have a higher likelihood of various problems getting pregnant and carrying a pregnancy to term. I think a lot of women right now, because of how hard it is to get established for millenials etc, wait until their late 30s without fully realizing how hard it is at that age for many people.
  • Also in favor of programs to support working parents better so they can manage having a meaningful career while also having kids
  • Also in favor of programs to support families that want to go single income and have one parent be a full time childcare provider / homemaker

These shouldn’t be seen as “handouts”, but should be recognized almost as a form of infrastructure work. Our human infrastructure is important, and the lesson of modernity is that many people will have far fewer children without some government aid. Now, I don’t think we are going to get back to, nor even would desire, the early 20th century and earlier massively high birth rates, and in fact overly-high birth rates carry problems with them just as overly low birth rates.

I also am broadly in favor of liberalizing legal immigration to patch in growth deficits as well, and always have been.

782

I think the time to discuss practical alternatives to abortion (ways of making life less difficult for parents and children in poverty especially) is after abortion has been legalized. Because what seems to be the trend is the “Whole Life Movement” or something like it will say some nice words about how they think “both sides” are wrong, but then it seems like only anti-abortion, anti-choice legislation makes it into law. And then it’s “What’s with all these welfare queens having babies just to get benefits? We need to stop subsidizing these lifestyle choices. If they can’t afford to raise children, they can give them up for adoption to a better family and get a job.”

So I’ll hold off on expressing any kind of support for that kind of window dressing until there is at least something on the store shelves.

783

Cool, and thank you for the explanation of your POV.

784

I don’t want to get into an endless back and forth on this either; as you said, this is a UV pit thread. But when an otherwise thoughtful poster makes a hugely misguided comment like this, I feel obliged to respond.

First of all the first statement and the second statement appear to be in contradiction. The first statement implies to me legislative and/or judicial action to outlaw abortion. The second one advocates a much less draconian approach.

But the problem I have with the second statement is the implication that if only the pro-choice side were not so stupid and immoral, they would readily see the error of their ways. This is similar to the right’s attempt to demonize the pro-choice side by suggesting that at best, they consider abortion to be trivially inconsequential, and at worst, advocate it as a commendable activity to be encouraged.

This is of course complete bullshit. Abortion is a very sad thing, and when justifiable, is usually the least bad choice among a number of very bad options. It’s also a very personal thing, and the reasons for it can be many and varied, generally medical, emotional, or financial, and the government has absolutely no capacity and no moral standing to meddle in such private and sensitive matters, using as a pretext the fiction that a zygote is a sentient human life.

You’re entitled to that view. There is no objective moral standard to prove you wrong. Your are NOT entitled to impose that view on everyone else by force of law.

Furthermore, although there is no objective moral standard, there are however objective correlations between attitudes to abortion and attitudes to other measures of social enlightenment. Canada, for instance, has had no abortion laws whatsoever on its books since they were struck down by the Supreme Court many years ago. Does that make Canada an immoral society? I’ll point out that it correlates with also being one of the first countries to recognize gay and transgender rights and same-sex marriage, that it has a compassionate and liberal immigration policy, has long abolished the death penalty, and has a judicial system more oriented to rehabilitation than retribution. If those are all symptomatic of the kind of “immorality” that struck down abortion laws, I’d like more of it, TQVM.

785

Is UV so dumb that he would object to his own question? :smiley:

786

That’s just, like, your opinion, man.

787

Can someone find that video and post it to that thread?

Also, yes, I could definitely see UV doing that.

788

I confess to being similarly reluctant to turn this into a pro-choice/anti-abortion thread, but one might at least hope that, with this latest warning coming just on the heels of UltraVile’s flub of a flounce, he will take another go at it, and this time he’ll stick the landing. Which means this thread will be unhijackable!

789

I’m not aware of what UV’s latest flounce status is. I do know that about a month or so ago, he threatened to flounce when he got a mod note that he questioned. I and others agreed with him in that case; he got a retraction and an apology, and returned to our midst. This time he got a warning, which I think just about everyone except the behatted cephalopod thought was well justified, so his mental state regarding this board must be blacker than a coal bin on a moonless night.

790

I didn’t want to not respond, but I do think we’re getting kinda hijacky.

What I would say is there’s a lot in your post I don’t disagree with, but a few things I do. My personal views on abortion were formed in my early 20s when I abandoned Christianity. Prior to that I basically believed abortion was bad because I was a Catholic and the Church told me to think it was bad.

I went through a brief time where I basically thought there was no real wrong in it, but some study I did back then changed my mind. Since he is a far better philosopher than I, and a much better writer, I would say read Don Marquis “Why Abortion is Immoral” article from 1989: Marquis.pdf (colorado.edu) it is a fair representation of my views.

Having arrived at the conclusion abortion was immoral on secular grounds some 30+ years ago, I then fell to the legal position that it should be illegal. The constitutional position that it should not be decided by the Supreme Court, but left to the regular way we make things illegal–State legislatures. In that respect I accepted the likelihood that in many very liberal States, abortion would never likely be illegal, but I would have said we should still advocate for its illegality.

Sometime after that, maybe 20 years ago, I did more thinking and study on abortion “practicalities” beyond ethics, and while my view on its morality did not change, my view on the “wisdom and practicality” of legally prohibiting abortion did. I do not really support blanket prohibitions on abortion any longer because I think they are difficult to enforce, cause other bad ancillary harms to women and societies, cause a mess of the basic practice of medicine, and also are simply injurious to our “public order.”

I think in a strict sense, most hardcore pro-life people would actually call me pro-choice because I don’t favor blanket abortion prohibitions. But most pro-choice people would see me as pro-life. I use the term pro-life because I am genuinely against the practice of abortion and find it gravely immoral in most circumstances I wanted to add that caveat because I don’t want to ignore the genuine reality that many abortions are performed on fetuses that are non-viable, or done for genuine health risks to the woman–these abortions are not immoral, and should be seen as the sad tragedies they are–when speaking of an immoral abortion we should restrict ourselves to elective abortions that do not involve any health concerns.

791

Mod Nudge, Start a new thread guys. this isn’t even a mod note, but seriously, drop it or start a new one.

792

Wow, I didn’t realize there were two Don Marquis’s. So, the abortion guy is not the archie and mehitabel one as I first thought. Good to know.

793

Agreed, was definitely getting too far afield.

Don Marquis the famous humorist and Don Marquis the quite less famous philosopher (although his work is considered standard part of most philosophy ethics courses dealing with abortion) actually only overlapped on this earth briefly–the humorist died in 1937, the philosopher was born 1935 and is still living.

794

The pittee’s responses in the fired football coach school prayer case thread shows that he has zero understanding of the nation’s constitutional SOCAS. Really, there’s no way he’s a legitimate lawyer.

795

I thought cars were considered people now as per SCOTUS in Citroëns United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010)

796

golf clap

Stranger

797

Please be careful to let the rest of us know when you’re referring to a days old thread. I was afraid he’d come back!

798

Sorry about that. I was digging through school prayer related posts and, of course, those came up. I’ll be more careful.

799

I was wracking my brain for a similar joke involving Turbo Teen but you blew it out of the water.

800

Got a new one today. First, are we sure he is a lawyer? He goes off about a SCOTUS decision and either he didn’t read the opinion himself or he has no clue how to read an opinion. He misses key elements like, “The respondent claims this. So we explain why the respondent is wrong.” Of course I point this out there’s the condescending, “You mean XXX.” No, I mean what I wrote and XXX is referred to only obliquely in the entire discussion that you don’t understand. And he mangles what he claims and then when I go back to try to find out what part he’s referring to and say, “Hey this reference doesn’t talk about X, it talks about Y. But this part talks about X but it’s not the same reference.” he takes it that I’m arguing against his point and rebuts things I never said.

Is he cognitively OK when it come to the law?