Glad to know I could do all of this with one sentence.
Not glad to see MMM's main argument is that "abortion isn't illegal everywhere."
Printable View
Glad to know I could do all of this with one sentence.
Not glad to see MMM's main argument is that "abortion isn't illegal everywhere."
Fuck you, it was my sentence that did it.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
Arguing that muder is a legal definition is certainly not pedantry. It's like saying "are we gonna play this game" when I accuse someone of perjury because they lied to me (rather than lying under oath). It would be dumb for me to accuse a liar of perjury, just like it's dumb to accuse a lawful killer of murder.
It's literally a legal definition, you can't then argue that it shouldn't be taken by its literal legal meaning because otherwise it has no meaning.
Find a better word instead of misusing other words.
Of course, you can't say "abortion is killing" because that's stating the obvious and has no moral weight behind it.
Is murder commonly used to denote concept of wrongful killing regardless of law?
Well obviously, but the problem there is morality is subjective, while law is objective.
"Abortion is murder" is a statement of fact. Better would be "I think abortion is immoral" and you don't come across as a judgemental tosspot who just uses the most powerful language one can imagine in an effort to obtain moral high ground.
You don't have to think abortion is immoral for it to be murder, ie: you don't have to think murder is immoral.Quote:
Originally Posted by OngBonga
Hey, things got a bit hairy in the most recent posts, but just wanted to point out that Banana is making some solid posts that contribute to the discussion beyond just opening doors that otherwise wouldn't have been. Banana, I hope you don't read this as patronizing, but I think it's worth pointing out, so I'm going to risk being patronizing.
I don't think the "murder has a meaning and you're misusing it" crowd is being pedantic. I think the most charitable concession that can be made here is what wuf suggested, murder is being used colloquially to mean unjustified killing regardless of legality. But even here, it's hard for me to wrap my head around someone thinking abortion is an unjustified killing and that they are ok with it. Being in support of unjustified killing must be a clear signal that the person(s) in question are less than psychologically well.
Banana, your "if a plant is alive, a fetus must also be, by the same criteria, alive." declaration is hard to find fault with, except for the fact that we now need to define what it is that is alive. Of course we find no issue, by and large, killing a plant, so why doesn't this transfer to a fetus? This leads to an interesting ontological discussion about what exactly constitutes a human.
You may say a human is a human at the moment of conception, and reasonably so, it's often the position of hardliners and appears to offer a much needed definitive boundary. But here's a thought experiment that may challenge that intuition. Say there are two fertile monkeys in a enclosure, one a male and one a female. Sooner or later there will be a baby monkey in the enclosure as well. Perhaps it's not a lock, but the odds are only ever so slightly worse than they would be had the female just been impregnated. Now, if we interfere, have we aborted a monkey?
If the government made it legal to walk up and shoot black people in the head whenever you wanted, it's still murder.
Abortion is the number one killer of black people in America.
Can always count on spoon to drag whatever discussion down to a kindergartners level.
I never said that. I can't even find what I said that you interpreted to be that.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
Abortion is very much a race-related issue in the United States, and there's no way to untie the two. Data from the Centers for Disease and Prevention (CDC) in the United States shows that 35 percent of aborted babies in the U.S. in 2013 were black, but black people only make up about 13 percent of the population.Quote:
Originally Posted by oskar
Also according to the CDC, in 2011 there were:
- 90,888 black deaths from heart disease
- 66,158 black deaths from cancer
- 12,299 accidental black deaths
- 12,771 diabetes black deaths
- 6,100 black homicides from firearms
- 4,138 black deaths from HIV
- 286,797 black deaths from all other causes combined
- 317,567 black deaths from abortion
It's de facto eugenics targeting black people. I'm all for the availability of abortions, but let's call it what it is.
For comparison, there were 76 unarmed black people killed by police from 1999 to 2014. That's about five per year. That's not even a blip on the radar to what can easily be seen as government-funded eugenics through Planned Parenthood.
The numbers don't lie, your outlandish leap to conclusions on the other hand..
It could be a concerted effort to eradicate black Americans-- or it could be an earnest effort to reduce the number of unwanted babies, which for myriad reasons (not least of which, higher rates of poverty and lower rates of marriage) happen to be black American babies at a greater rate than black American's representation in the population.
This chart is fun:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/images/data...db19_fig_6.png
@bold, I never said it was concerted but that it was de facto. For the rest, I just parroted MLK's niece since that's always fun.Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
Marriage is a yuuuuuge issue in the black community. This has been covered relatively recently in other threads. Not having a father is the number one or number two predictor of virtually every bad thing that can happen to you in life across all demographics.
Fuck yeah I am. what else is new?Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
Are you referring to me here? even if not, I'm not sure where the term "unjustified" came from. The killing is justified. A person justifies it by saying "I'm gonna kill this baby because if I don't it will de-rail my life plans, forever attach me to some awful man, doom me to a lifetime of financial hardship, or some combination of those three" That's the justification. Some people think that's inadequate. But they should mind their own fucking business.Quote:
But even here, it's hard for me to wrap my head around someone thinking abortion is an unjustified killing and that they are ok with it. Being in support of unjustified killing must be a clear signal that the person(s) in question are less than psychologically well.
Why?? None of this is relevant. Even if we accept the extreme evangelical position that life begins at the instant of conception, and a single cell constitutes a human being the moment the sperm breaches the egg.....I still say it's fine to kill that human being. If you define it as "murder", accurately or otherwise, it doesn't change my opinion. Don't want the baby??? Kill it, see if I blink.Quote:
Banana, your "if a plant is alive, a fetus must also be, by the same criteria, alive." declaration is hard to find fault with, except for the fact that we now need to define what it is that is alive. Of course we find no issue, by and large, killing a plant, so why doesn't this transfer to a fetus? This leads to an interesting ontological discussion about what exactly constitutes a human.
Abortion isn't a question of murder/non-murder. It's not a question of when life begins. It's not a question of what constitutes a human being. Those questions don't matter because the larger issue is bodily autonomy. A person could be dying right in front of you and the only thing that would save them is your kidney. you totally have the right to say "no, go ahead die fuck-face, you can't use my kidney".
Why can't a woman say the same thing about her womb?
They're wrongQuote:
You may say a human is a human at the moment of conception, and reasonably so, it's often the position of hardliners and appears to offer a much needed definitive boundary.
the only "definitive boundary" I might get behind is one that says "you can't get an abortion after X weeks". And I'll leave it to the medical community to reach a consensus on what X is. But basically, there comes a point where it becomes increasingly likely that a fetus removed from the womb could survive on it's own. Partial birth abortion is a gruesome. And by allowing the practice, I see massive potential for living breathing human beings to be murdered, outside of the womb. Rather than deal with the dicey-ness of trying to implement government regulations over late-term abortions, it seems more practical for the government to simply say "Make up your mind before X weeks, thank you".
But it's not if it is strengthening black communities. See below.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
Right, and if you want strong families (black ones included) abortions in the case of unwanted pregnancies in which the father is absent or likely to be absent would help towards this goal. If that subset of pregnancies skews black, that speaks to issues further upstream and is not an argument against abortion or its implementation.Quote:
Marriage is a yuuuuuge issue in the black community. This has been covered relatively recently in other threads. Not having a father is the number one or number two predictor of virtually every bad thing that can happen to you in life across all demographics.
Banana, I think I generally (if not completley.. it's kinda hard to tell) agree with you with regards to policy here. But I disagree that all these things don't matter. I am glad to have you with me on this, and I don't begrudge you for coming to the conclusions you have, however you have-- but just because you have come to these conclusions does not make them self evident. All of this does matter-- maybe not to you personally, but nonetheless, it does.
Sometimes I wonder if having kids makes people better people (on average). Derivative from this idea is another idea that it could be the case that a population that doesn't have enough kids causes its own devolution.Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
Oh, yeah, I like this. Not because I'm convinced, but because I love the dichotomy it sets up. Have more kids for the betterment of the whole at the expense of the proposed kids, or save the potential kids from the suffering of growing up in sufficiently sub-ideal circumstances.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
Let's just use government funding to kill off all black kids that don't come from married parents. It'll help to create more strong black families, according to the logic above.Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
You shoehorn abortion into this thread so you can turn the subject to socioeconomics. There are already 5 threads dedicated to this. This is what I take an issue with. I don't care about black people and their fetuses. I have no horse in that race.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
It will help ensure the families we do have are strong. I don't see black Americans dropping below replacement birth rates as a desirable outcome, I don't see it as undesirable. I am curious why you are so preoccupied with race here. It's not that I don't think it can be an issue, but I think you are forcing it to be one here.
If there are underlying issues that cause unwanted outcomes from an otherwise good action, the action is not to blame and the relief should be sought in addressing the underlying issues. But as oskar has so eloquently pointed out, this probably isn't the place for that, as it probably isn't even the place for this.
This is poetry.Quote:
Originally Posted by oskar
Most people don't. That's why so many of them are killed in the womb.Quote:
Originally Posted by oskar
Here's a quick recap:
I brought up abortion by saying that I think it's murder and that I'm pro-choice.Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
It continued with me ragging on MMM and others for getting pedantic over the definition of murder wrt abortion with showing how stupid it is to cling to that particular argument:
Point being that bickering over the definition of murder being tied to whether it's legal or illegal is some real autistic shit and not at all in the spirit of what's being discussed.Quote:
If the government made it legal to walk up and shoot black people in the head whenever you wanted, it's still murder.
Then oskar said the following,falling for the baitimplying that my race reference (specifically reference to black genocide) was not relevant:
And I responded with stats showing that the race tie-in was much more complicated than that because it's de facto eugenics, in the words of Reverend Dr. Alveda King, which is not very Christian-like.Quote:
Can always count on spoon to drag whatever discussion down to a kindergartners level.
As an aside, I'm against government funding of Planned Parenthood.
All of which ties back around to the importance of the nuclear family (see the discussion of fathers above) and why that's so important in the Christian mythology with metaphor and without.
There's a reason why men are in charge. It's because without men in charge, everything goes to shit. That's an important lesson from the Bible about the differences in roles between men and women and how we each have to sacrifice differently.
No but we moved on to morality in an effort to justify the use of the word "murder". You have to think abortion is immoral to think abortion is murder, otherwise you're claiming you think abortion is illegal... unless of course abortion is illegal, in which case it is murder because then it fits the definition.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
If you don't think murder is immoral, fine. But you can't pretend to think murder is legal.
No, it really doesn't. By "all of this" I assume you mean the murder/non-murder question. It doesn't matter because it's not a factor that affects policy. People who think it's murder are merely expressing an opinion. It's no more meaningful than me saying "ninja turtles are cool"Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
Abortion policy, at least presently, hinges on the question of bodily autonomy. Does the baby have a right to use a woman's uterus without the woman's permission? Bodily autonomy is something codified into law. The notion that life begins at conception is not. Debates over the former influence policy. Debates over the latter are just arguments of clashing opinions. One matters. One doesn't.
I feel like we're gonna down a rabbit-hole of "what's the definition of 'matters'?" I really don't wanna do that. I just hope it's obvious that discussions surrounding the implementing of laws "matter". Discussions about which Batman was best, who shot JR, or how to bend the definition of words don't.
Exactly $0 of the government's funding for Planned Parenthood is allowed to be used for abortion services, by law.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
My lady does marketing for Planned Parenthood in St Louis. There are multiple business entities under the umbrella of Planned Parenthood, and the wing that does ER services (including abortions) is financially distinct from all other aspects of Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood does so much more than merely abortions. They cover all kinds of sexual health needs, including checkups and classes for men.
Who'd have thunk it.
I have a brother because my mom was considering abortion, and went to Planned Parenthood and learned about all of the support services that were available to her.
Source? I'm extremely skeptical of this. If this were actually the case, it's hard to believe that national political discourse would include a controversy over the funding of planned parenthood.Quote:
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
Though if this is true, PP would be extremely well-served by taking my advice and changing the name to "Uncle Sam's Vagina Wash"
The bold is not true. Moreover, you're continuing on the "let's argue about what murder means" path that no one else is on.Quote:
Originally Posted by OngBonga
Thank you for paraphrasing all of the left's talking points on Planned Parenthood. None of them refute that Planned Parenthood is government-funded eugenics.Quote:
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
For clarity: I am not against Planned Parenthood or anything they do. I am against them receiving tax dollars.
Also, and I mean this genuinely and not a knock on you, but you may want to consider using a different phrasing than "my lady" since that sounds autistic as fuck, no offense. I just see you do it often, and I cringe every time. That's the type of small thing that can help you to make better impressions in work, social life, etc. and make your life go smoother.
To tie this back into Christianity, killing babies is wrong.
Any government funding for PP means that some of it is probably going to abortion even if the line of sight isn't direct. This is because all spending decisions are marginal and come from the same pool of possible spending decisions. The pool of resources to cover the possible spending decisions are allocated first to the spending with the greatest marginal benefit, second to those with the second greatest marginal benefit, etc..Quote:
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
If PP has a budget of $10, where funding consists of $2 from government and $8 elsewhere, without restrictions, the two funding sources are essentially merged and put to pay for the $10 of services. If the budget is deconstructed to pap smears ($5) and abortions ($5) and the law says no government funding can go to abortion, PP then pays for the pap smears with the $2 from government and $3 from elsewhere, and pays for the abortions with the remaining $5 from elsewhere. As we see, a change in the law regarding allocation didn't change the funding for abortions. If, however, the government stopped funding PP altogether, PP would have only $8 and would have to cut its spending. It would do so based on the marginal assessment characterized above. Unless abortions are valued more highly than pap smears such that PP would rather lose $2 of pap smears to keep all $5 of abortions, abortions would decline.
The only way to make it so that no taxes go to abortions is to make it so that institutions that produce abortions get $0 funding from the government. Furthermore, that means that consumers of abortions also need to get $0 funding from the government.
This also creates a hole in the market. There will be a demand for subsidization of the stuff that PP does.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
Charities are really good at fixing problems like this. Governments, not so much.
Right, because I'm the only person who realise it's actually pretty important.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
What the fuck do you mean when you say "abortion is murder"? If you're saying neither "it's immoral killing" nor "it's unlawful killing", then what are you saying? Are you all using a different meaning of the word "murder"? Perhaps it's like a bunch of fucking crows, yeah abortion is murder because it's plural.
Forigve me for not knowing what it is you're saying when you're using alternate defintions that only I seem to be unaware of.
Yup.Quote:
Originally Posted by BananaStand
Go play with your logs while the grown-ups are talking.Quote:
Originally Posted by OngBonga
Hangman time...Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
Phrase
---- ---
I just put another log on the fire. I guess I murdered it.
QQuote:
Originally Posted by OngBonga
Also, hangman is inherently racist because it's done in black ink.
Spoon, you're wrong wrt your use of murder and it's kinda sad to see you not be able to let go of this single small point. I think there are some interesting points of disagreement, but this is not one of them. The fact that you are clinging to this makes it impossible for people to believe you'll discuss any other points in good faith.
I don't really disagree about the "My lady" thing. I wouldn't have thought to mention it, but yeah, sure, it's a tad odd. But your insistence on this being an appropriate use of "murder" puts you squarely on the spectrum. "Abortion is murder" is your "My lady."
He knows he's wrong, that's why he slapped me down instead of using words effectively.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
This is a simplistic way of understanding organizational structure and accounting. It can be true, but it is not necessarily so. There is legal precedent on this. Different parts of an organization can be financially segregated to a degree to which this is a non issue.
Absolute financial segregation is a myth. I don't just mean within a legally recognized corporate organization, I mean in the absolute sense. If abortion is legal, any funding given to any entity will eventually fund abortion. As illustration, take a strip mall that holds an abortion clinic as a tenant. The other tenants rents are being suppressed due to a decrease in vacancy.
I do appreciate that you ended with an acknowledgement of how absurd your reading of the law is. A woman that gets an abortion should not be eligible for public scholarships, her children should not be admitted to public school, she should not be allowed to ride public transit, etc. Do we get to apply this logic to similar cases? The government should not be funding religious institutions, therefore it follows that a priest should be shunned in the same way as the woman whose had an abortion.
Also, when does the ban from government funding happen? Does it last for a set period of time? Her whole life? Wouldn't it make more sense for her to owe the government for all of the assistance she's received so far in life which allowed her the financial flexibility to chose abortion?
Abortion is murder. It's illegal. Do you want to move on, or do you want to keep repeating various permutations of the definition of abortion and "Aha!" over and over again?Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
I don't think that's what he was doing. I interpreted his last sentence to mean that programs like medicaid should also not cover abortion.Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
Now I know what you're thinking.....if it doesn't cover abortions, then medicaid shouldn't cover birth control pills either. Stop thinking that.
It is simply erroneous to start drawing parallels between abortion, and anything else. For whatever reason, abortion is "the big one". It's completely appropriate to treat it as something radioactive that needs to be quarantined from every other issue.
The rest of your post seems to basically claim that maintaining a road where a clinic resides effectively equals government funding of abortion. Nonsense. You're discussing abortion as if there is a slippery slope that leads to all kinds of other shit. There isn't. There is no slope, slippery or otherwise, that connects abortion to other issues.
it stands alone. This isn't my opinion either. It's the consensus of decades of public discourse on the topic. Abortion is an issue that gets special treatment. You'll find it's a lot easier to find common ground with the other side (no matter which side you're on) if you just accept this reality.
I'm happy to see that you're thinking in conceptual terms that need to be thought in. I don't have much input on this because finding an answer is unbelievably hard. In fact I don't think there is an answer.Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
Where do we draw the line? I don't know, probably where people want to draw the line. The concept I laid out regarding budgeting is pretty well modeled in economics, so I think it is reasonable to say that a law that says certain fund sources can't be used for certain things doesn't change much of the funding of those certain things since moving funds around to keep things the way they have been is pretty common. Economists have tried to study this a bit with food stamps, where the models say that making it illegal for this form of welfare to be used on alcohol and cigarettes shouldn't negatively impact consumption of such since the food stamp collectors will just move their funds around, spending less cash on food than they would otherwise since they can use stamps for food, letting them consume the same amount (sometimes more) of alcohol and cigarettes. The empirical results are mixed, as they always are in economics. I don't know any models that suggest what I described wouldn't be the case.
I wouldn't say that's absurd, but more the next step in logic to be taken even though it gets into "throw your hands up in the air" territory, where solving the problem has no easy or good answers.Quote:
I do appreciate that you ended with an acknowledgement of how absurd your reading of the law is.
Cool to note about this is that this type of problem is a good reason why it is better to restrict government intervention. This is because a democratic government has a duality of responsibilities that it cannot meet. For example, you mentioned public schools. A sufficiently intervened by government education system (which we have) means that the government has the responsibility to provide that service for all citizens. Yet, it is also the case that doing that means that those who fund it (taxpayers) are coerced into paying for things they do not want. Reducing government impact into lives and increasing the freedom of choice reduces this problem because it allows people to more effectively allocate their own resources to what they believe in.
The problem never goes away in entirety though. It's sorta like one of the premises of Loki's Wager. You can't say where the neck ends and the head begins, so you can't perfectly separate them no matter what.
I was getting at the fact that if a person is on welfare and pays for an abortion, then iterating this scenario over time, across the population, and on average, means that a portion of taxes have probably gone to abortion because some abortions were likely had only on the margin that the person can fund her budget with welfare.Quote:
Originally Posted by BananaStand
This point is true before going a step above like boost did, the infinite regression of causality, which is worth thinking about.
This is a sad side of you. Attack troll spoon is at least entertaining to watch. Defense troll spoon is just pure cringepity.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
I should correct this. The models and studies are mostly about the difference in consumption choices between using cash transfers or food stamps. The models suggest using food stamps (that can't be used on alc/cigs) instead of cash transfers (that can be used on alc/cigs) would unlikely have any impact on consumption of alc/cigs. This is because recipients of cash transfers will consume what they want evenly across their total cash, and recipients who get food stamps instead tend to move the alc/cigs consumption to their other cash and move more of their food consumption to food stamps.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
Even as regulations get more stringent, the welfare recipients who are targeted specifically to not abuse the system tend to develop clever ways of getting around the rules. One way is trading their food stamps at a discount on the black market for alc/cigs/drugs/cashQuote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
Yeah man, I think this is where your ideology gets in the way of you discussing practical matters. It's fine that you think the government ultimately does not have a right to tax (if this is even your position.. it's hard to keep track of), but that's not what you were arguing. It wouldn't even make sense to argue the subsidising of abortions point if government is not subsidizing anything.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
Let's shift your logic elsewhere for illustrative purposes. The second amendment is law, but it is very controversial. Therefore the government should not be subsidizing gun purchases. People who purchase guns should be barred from receiving any government assistance.
It's an absurd argument. You cannot find the thresholds of reason outside of a pragmatic argument, which results in "the government should not directly subsidize X"
Ideology has a way of blinding us to pragmatism.
Not that you were accusing me of being in favor of the current welfare system, but I think intuitively it makes sense and the data is coming in in support of no strings attached welfare.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
My ideology is what it is due to what is practical. I'm into what works.Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
I don't believe the government doesn't have the right to tax. I don't even know what a right is. Though I do know how the Constitution defines rights, as things that exist because of prohibition of government intervention.
What makes that absurd? That's what the people who wrote the 2nd Amendment intended in the first place. The concept of government assistance is new and was not something the United States Constitution included. That whole thing was about prohibition of government power. Welfarism came later and its origins are mostly outside of the US.Quote:
Let's shift your logic elsewhere for illustrative purposes. The second amendment is law, but it is very controversial. Therefore the government should not be subsidizing gun purchases. People who purchase guns should be barred from receiving any government assistance.
It's an absurd argument.
And yeah, gun owners shouldn't be allowed to receive welfare for the reason you described. And the same logic should be applied to everybody, which illustrates a reason why welfarism is a contradiction to constitutional principles. Though it isn't a contradiction to the socialist idea of rights. Which raises the question, which one of those actually successfully provides rights?
What data are you referring to?Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
Here's economist Bryan Caplan on universal basic income (UBI):
Quote:
Overall, the UBI probably gives even worse incentives than the status quo. Defenders of the UBI correctly point out that it might improve incentives for people who are already on welfare. Under the status quo, earning another $1 of legal income can easily reduce your welfare by a $1, implying a marginal tax rate of 100%. But under the status quo, vast populations are ineligible for most programs. Such as? You guys! If you're an able-bodied adult, aged 18-64, who doesn't have custody of any minor children, the current system doesn't give you much. Switching to a UBI would expand the familiar perverse effects of the welfare state to the entire population - including you. And if taxes rise to pay for the UBI, the population-wide disincentives are even worse.
When it comes to explaining how it is possible that UBI could benefit the country, it would need to be explained how UBI could increase incentives to produce.
It's absurd because it's not the discussion we're having. We are talking about reality, and then suddenly you start talking about libertopia without informing your fellow participants in the conversation. Making the point about abortion in isolation is misleading and impossible to map onto reality as it stands.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
WRT Originalism. It's nonsense. The signer's intended a framework that would be a robust starting place. The fact that they included paths to amendment are testament to the fact that they not only suspected it would be changed but in many cases likely hoped it would be.
Which one provides rights? Individual rights? I don't really care, that's your ideological axiom, not mine.
The most recent studies are still ongoing, but there's a pretty large one underway in Kenya at the moment. My understanding is that on the whole people have not cut back on work, but instead increased spending on improvements to their standard of living, started businesses, etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
It's nice that Caplan is offering his view based on theory, but the results, so far, aren't in support of the theory.
I was discussing a budget constraint model that includes the concept that if somebody is not legally allowed to spend on a part of the budget from a certain revenue source, the person gets past this by reorganizing which revenue sources they spend on which portions of their budget. This makes the type of law that MMM referred to toothless. This applies to both producers and consumers. That was the entirety of my point.Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
You expanded beyond this with the infinite regression of causality point. It's a good point. I responded to that in kind.
I'm not one to say I know what was intended. I know what it says and what they said. It can be the case that the framers intended government to not do welfare and also that that could be changed by others in the future.Quote:
WRT Originalism. It's nonsense. The signer's intended a framework that would be a robust starting place. The fact that they included paths to amendment are testament to the fact that they not only suspected it would be changed but in many cases likely hoped it would be.
You said you think I might have a particular belief about rights. I clarified that is not my belief. I went on to describe the concept of rights within the framework of the Constitution, and I added what is as far as I can tell the concept of rights from the majority counter perspective. I finished with a question regarding which concept is more successful at doing what it claims.Quote:
Which one provides rights? Individual rights? I don't really care, that's your ideological axiom, not mine.
I would like to see the study. In my experience, the popular press tends to interpret these things in ways the studies don't justify. From what I know so far, these studies that I have heard about for quite some time have such different parameters than what would inform us about UBI results. Regardless, I am interested in reading the actual studies.Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
Hate to do this, because you've been my biggest cheerleader as of late, but this post represents some cracked thinking.Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
I'm really not familiar with the Kenya situation. I have read some about similar programs going on in Europe. One of the major problems I see, is that the program is billed as "experimental". If you're referring to the Kenya program as "a study", then chances are it's been advertised as such. That insulates people against feeling entitled to the benefit. Rather, it is perceived as a "bonus".
So this "study" is rigged. It's artificially inflating income while not dis-incentivizing work. Once this program has been in place for a few decades, it's certainly reasonable to think that might start to fall apart. Once the benefit becomes perceives as a secure, guaranteed, entitlement, that's when the incentive to work starts to degrade.
And you can't put in a program like this for that long, and then take it back later. So the debate must absolutely occur in theory. Any real-life experiment is bull-shit....unless maybe it can show that the incentive to work lasted through say 50+ years. But there is no such data.
think about it like this....did savings fall off of a cliff after social security was enacted? Nope. People still saved. It took four generations for us to reach our current state where 1/3 of American adults can't pull together $1,000 for an emergency expense.
the program was really meant to support non-working women. They overwhelmingly lived longer than their husbands, and usually never worked a day in their life. How the fuck are they supposed to survive once they're widowed? It was enacted to start paying out after age 65, at a time when life expectancy for men was right about 65. So, now that feminism has happened, and two-income households are more common than not, you could argue that Social security is totally obsolete. But how the fuck do you stop the program now?????
How can you not infer the same result from UBI's? Rigged results early, consequences much much later, and the program becomes so entrenched, that even if it is proven to be an abject failure, you can never take it back.
One other thing to note. I mentioned that 1/3 of American adults couldn't pull together $1G on a day's notice. That's not even that bad. I recall some threads recently with some socialist libtards touting the greatness of Denmark, Shitserland and Scandanavian countries that provide citizens with tons of entitlements.
Wanna guess who is the world leader in household debt??
So I'm reading up on this Kenya experiment. It is definitely not an experiment about UBI. It's doing very different things than makes up UBI.
The short of it is that the income in UBI is entirely endogenous to the system. The Kenya thing introduces exogenous income. This experiment will tell us next to nothing about UBI
Your point about changes in expectations given time is very good. It's not one I was thinking of, but it is definitely true that UBI could cause an initial positive economic shock which would be followed up by negative economic drip. Though this is probably more useful as a way to illustrate it rather than what would actually happen. In the real world it would unlikely cause that positive shock in the first place since markets would adjust for the negative drip at the same time it would adjust for that which could cause a positive shock.Quote:
Originally Posted by BananaStand
Could you then explain how abortion is not murder instead of going into ad hominem attacks? Here's a definition:Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
Unlawful? Check. It's unlawful in plenty of places.Quote:
the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.
Premeditated? Check.
Killing? Check.
Of one human being? Check.
By another? Check.
Edit: Fixed a bracket.
C'mon man....you know betterQuote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
I'm illustrating the absurdity of endless semantics-based arguments that only have the purpose of derailing the actual conversation.Quote:
Originally Posted by BananaStand
The purpose from my pov is to amuse myself while you lot waffle on about abortion.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
Hate to do it? Why? I don't compliment or negatively critique you or anyone to gain favor-- at least not in the context of a discussion. I think you're making mostly good points and arguments and keeping it civil. That's what's needed for a good discussion that helps get at the truth.Quote:
Originally Posted by BananaStand
It's lawful in the context of the discussion. If you want to discussion abortion rights as they apply to a jurisdiction in which abortions are illegal, then you will get no push back from me for calling it murder.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
You're doing a poor job of it. In the context of the discussion your semantic nit pick does not hold up.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
I have. As for the bold, well, sorry, but you don't get to play this card when you have gone to such great lengths (or was it you being careless?) to obfuscate the difference between serious spoon and troll spoon and the insult is "you're being a troll and a shitty one at that."Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
Thank you for proving my point.Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
So getting back to what we were all talking about before you guys decided to take a big circlejerk semantics shit on the discussion:
I'm of the opinion that abortion is murder, and I am pro-choice.
Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
Do go on, we all are dying to hear how this makes any sense outside of being a cute trick for a contrarian to pull out when abortion comes up. Oh wait, we've already covered this ground, you did not produce, and yet you claim victory.
zzZzzZzz
Riveting.Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
Within the realm of Christianity and the oral traditions and other stories that were pieced together to help create its foundations, there's not really any concept of intentional contraception, at the very least of any reliable consistency. Figuring out where that would have fit if they were to have it back then is pretty interesting to think about.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
One avenue is to go the Catholicism route that dictates that contraception usage is wrong because sex should only be for procreation. Lust itself is a deadly sin, but the word "lust" in that context only means an uncontrolled desire that leads to bad judgment and doing other seemingly bad things like fucking sheep or raping people, not a regular level of desire (particularly within the context of a monogamous relationship). Then you get into how much desire is "too much" desire, which would then qualify as lust as a deadly sin, and it all gets pretty hairy and arbitrary.
I propose a different route:
A central tenet of most of the themes you see from Christian mythology is the idea of taking responsibility for yourself, even if the outcomes you encounter are affected by things outside of your control. You see this in all of the themes of sacrifice and how to sacrifice correctly. One of the greatest sacrifices you can make is of your child, and we see that in a variety of different stories.
One of the key stories of sacrifice of your child is the crucifixion, which in one way can be seen as God sacrificing his child (or Jesus sacrificing himself) for the betterment of human beings (ie: society).
I think this provides one possible archetype for abortion: You're sacrificing your child for the betterment of society as a form of taking responsibility for yourself and what you put into the world.