It would seem that rampant deracination is indeed a very serious problem in today’s America!
I certainly hope Nezz will hang around long enough to tell us about the nature and consequences of this problem, in exacting detail. What does all this deracination mean for the future, Nezz? I’m scared, Nezz - tell me it will be alright!
If abortion is murder, then are the 1.2 million American women who have abortions each year sociopaths?
I work at Planned Parenthood. I know more about the ins and outs of abortion (for someone who’s never had one, at least) than most people, and have absolutely no qualms about abortion. When I was in third grade, my friend told me that “abortion is murder,” but I had no idea what she was talking about. When I asked my mom, she explained and said “Women like us would never have an abortion…” But it turns out it’s not true. I have relatives who (barely) survived illegal abortions. And I know that if I were pregnant at this point in my life, I would have an abortion without thinking twice about it.
But I suppose that makes me a sociopath in the eyes of some.
Today, incidentally, is the day I get harrassed on my way into work. They tell me I have blood on my hands and that if I had some self respect, I’d get a real job.
The only thing that bothers me about abortion is the fact that it is nearly completely preventable. Contraceptive technology isn’t perfect, but there are methods that are extremely reliable. In a world of Implanon and IUDs, I can’t believe that women still take the pill every day. The most common outpatient surgery in America is one that no woman should ever have to have.
The scientific facts aren’t actually all that important to this debate, excepting the ones that people can connect with on an emotional level.
At the end of the day, we need a rule for what is a human being and what isn’t a human being. A key criteria in selecting this rule is that it must be understandable, both intellectually and emotionally, by everyday ordinary people.
Right, but biology isn’t philosophy. If we only accepted truths that could be demonstrated with syllogisms, we’d still all be talking about whether or not all swans are white. Reasonable inferences are fine so long as they’re treated as provisional claims and not, y’know, capital-t Truth.
First Rimbo, now Nezz; which conservative blog is this deracination stuff coming from?
I was wondering that as well. It wasn’t Cleve’s, I would know that! A Google search only turned up dictionary definitions and fairly academic uses, not related to American domestic policy.
I thought that The Deracinator was a new Batman villain.
First off, it’s only affirming the consequent if you’re trying to demonstrate causation, not correlation. Not the case here by any interpretation. This would actually be begging the question (the actual logical fallacy, not what people typically mean when they say begging the question) or circular reasoning, and those doesn’t apply to statistical observations, which demonstrate a probable correlation, not absolute certainty within a theoretical contruct. Congratulations, you’ve noticed that there’s a difference between 99.9% and 100%.
Second, if you’re going to lecture on logical fallacies, go look up
The only evidence I have ever seen cited
appeal to ignorance and
this remarkable claim
confirmation bias, you fucking dullard (OMG POISONING THE WELL LOLOLOLOL).
I will change my mind any day now! … I don’t bloody expect.
Yeah, this thread has basically been your pulpit to declare the complete lack of substance behind your opinions. Do you have any beliefs that you can make a case for based on something other than the irrefutable but circular fact of your own conviction?
Minority communities, generalizing, have less access to information about contraception due to inadequate education on the subject, due to a combination of factors: poor schools in poor neighborhoods (because they are funded by city taxes), limited access to commercial contraception (due to its cost and availability – ever tried to go shopping in a ghetto?), limited access to contraception through healthcare (uninsured, or can’t afford copayments, or insurance sucks), limited ability to support a baby (poverty, bad housing, difficult environment in which to raise a child), and sometimes a language barrier aggravating all of these problems. The short version: poverty is race warfare, and abortion helps the (disportionately nonwhite) underclass cope.
Abortion is NOT keeping minorities from becoming majorities; minorities ARE becoming majorities. California is more than a third Latino, and climbing. White Europeans in California are a plurality, not a majority, and even in the United States at large, they only make up a falling two-thirds of the population. (Look for the “white non-Hispanic” line, not the “white” line. Due to some ancient race politics, Latinos self-identify in the Census as white AND Hispanic.) Historically and today, much of the population growth in this country comes from immigration. If you tracked the ethnic groups that hysterical pinheads were worried about back in the day, you’d see alarming rises in the Irish population, the Eastern European population, and the Italian population, and a corresponding drop in Anglo-Saxon and Western European proportional dominance. Racial demographics are fluctuation along the lines they always have been.
Yeah, because anti-abortion activists are so goddamned concerned with women’s rights.
Are you familiar enough with ANYTHING to make an informed comment?
There’s a concept in law… “proximate cause.” Something is the proximate cause of something else if the first thing causes the second thing directly. But it is not adequate to say that “but for the first thing, the second thing wouldn’t have happened,” because not every contributing factor can be held legally responsible for some eventual outcome far down the line. If I run you over in my car, your injuries are caused by me. But when I use my car to run you over, you can’t sue Ben Franklin and the Wright brothers for inventing cars. The invention of cars was necessary for automotive accidents to start occurring, but it isn’t the proximate cause of a specific accident.
If “if it were not for those first 100 cells we wouldn’t be,” then what argument can be made against “if it were not for the gametes we wouldn’t be”? It’s just as true – eggs and sperm are necessary to reproduction, and every human being – for that matter, the great majority of life – required an egg and a sperm. Without the sperm, or without the egg, any given person would not exist. Of course, astronomical numbers of sperm die constantly. And every period a woman has is a dead egg. But these things are too far removed from the eventual outcome of a new human being born for them to be considered the “cause” in a reasonable sense of human life.
The real reasons a baby is born don’t lie in cellular biology. Babies are the result of human choice and human circumstances, and for all of human history and prehistory, those factors have mediated whether babies are born and whether babies survive. Sodomy. Miscarriage. Induced miscarriage. Stillbirth. Exposure. Starvation. Most human sexual behavior is for intimacy and pleasure, not reproduction, and accidents happen, but those 100 cells have never mattered, no blastocyst or embryo has ever mattered, not even a third-trimester fetus capable of surviving outside the womb has mattered compared to whether someone is willing and able to care for a baby.
A rational view can be supported by argument from facts.
Are the bacteria in your gut protected by law from harm? Are powerful antibiotics murder? In your fucking STOMACH, full of powerful acid, we thought life couldn’t exist but life found a way. So what? Mold is life, but you don’t need a permit for bleach. The idea that implantation in the uterine wall is a conscious act is fucking mind-boggling. It’s a chemical reaction, nothing more. What else do you anthropomorphize? Do you think your red blood cells hurry through your veins worrying that they’ll be late for reoxygenation? Do your daughter cells say goodbye to each other when they divide?
Could you demonstrate how to change people’s minds? Do it on me. Go.
Once upon a time this chair was a consignment of lumber. It’s total baloney to suggest that a pile of lumber on the chair assembly line isn’t a chair. Of course it’s a fucking chair. We don’t make fucking tables at the fucking chair factory!
Why don’t you go wake up a fetus, preferably one from the first trimester, because that’s when 90% of abortions happen, and ask it what it thinks about this. Then, just as a control, try it with a sleeping person. You may be surprised at what you find!
That a human being experiences periods in which conscious thought is absent has nothing to do with whether a given prospective mother is willing to raise a child.
BIRTH, Adam. BIRTH.
Which is why it’s better to determine in advance whether you’re ready for that, and take the appropriate measures if you’re not.
No. I’d want to be euthanized. After such severe loss of cognitive function, I’m effectively dead. I don’t think my family could afford the medical expenses anyway.
Before conception?
A more perfect union requires a more complete deracination.
And you know what? FUCK my heritage. And fuck yours. Our ancestors were no better than any other human beings. They had no unique contact with knowledge or truth. They were made out of meat. Heritage is the shackle that binds us to the mistakes of the past. This atavistic fucking ancestor worship – ancestor-as-race-template – bears no good fruit. It is the path to crueller societies and more conflicted people, torn between reality and the white noise of tradition. There is no reason not to consider new ways to live. There’s sure as hell room for improvement on the Sharia of the West.
BIRTH. BEE AYE ARR TEE AITCH. Do I need to fucking DANCE it for you? In the past, infanticide has been part of family planning, but in the United States, where it’s possible to provide the general public with easy access to sex education, contraception, and abortion, infanticide should not be necessary. So if these things are indeed provided, birth is a reasonable and indisputable place to draw the line. The umbilical cord is severed, and the baby becomes – for the first time – an independent stage of human development.
I wish there was a better support network for all this stuff. I wish sex education made no concessions to ignorance. I wish contraception and abortion were more available, and I wish adoption agencies could place more of the kids they process, and I wish wards of the state were better off, and most of all I wish the War on Poverty would get fought already, because poverty has negative effects far beyond the reproductive. But all that’s just wishin’. Given conditions as they are in America, birth is a reasonable compromise. After birth, it’s too late to do anything except give the baby up for adoption. Or raise it, obviously.
There is no clearer dividing line than birth. We reckon age from birth. Birth is our dominant metaphor for creation. Really, birth has been the answer all along.
If I’d written that, your retort would have made a lot more sense.
What constitutes a viable preemie gets pushed back year after year. It’s not inconceivable that, at some point in the future, a human could spend its prenatal development totally outside of a womb. So much for birth.
FWIW I’m not ‘pro-life’ or ‘pro-choice’, as I’ll never have to make those decisions for myself and I’m not entitled to make those decisions for others (which probably makes me pro-choice.) I just think that the pro-choice attempt to define criteria of ‘humanness’ that prenatal humans inevitably fail to meet is as irrational as the pro-life reasoning from ‘ensoulment’ to give a fetus protected status.
Lh’owon offered “sentience, consciousness or even individual identity”, which disappears when you sleep. Yes, you regain it in a span of nine hours. The odds are pretty good that a prenatal human will also gain those features after a span of nine months.
Absent birth, you offer “indepedent stage of human development”. Does this invalidate people on mechanical breathing apparatus, implanted defibrillators or pacemakers, or those fed through a tube? Absent those interventions ‘development’ would cease, those individuals would die. Have they suddenly become less human? Should they be euthanized? (btw you can post a pdf of your do-not-resuscitate order)
I agree with pretty much everything you said but it that hasn’t in any fashion reduced my wish to grab a popcorn and soda and spend an enjoyable 2 hours watching you cry while someone punches you repeatedly in the nads.
I didn’t say shit about the capability of a fetus, hypothetically, to survive outside the womb with or without medical assistance should people happen to take it out for whatever the fuck reason. I spoke of the actuality of birth – live removal from the womb. Even more specifically, I cited the cutting of the umbilical cord.
Depends on their wishes and whether they have suffered brain-death. Euthanasia should always be an option for the individual. Where the individual cannot render a decision, it falls to the family or a designated proxy. The life of a fetus, similarly, is in the hands of the mother.
The examples you cite – of people who need mechanical support as a result of illness, injury, or infirmity – are fundamentally different from the situation of the fetus. A fetus is in a larval state, like an unhatched chicken. All fetuses share characteristics of limited survivability, and all fetuses will need guardians of some kind to raise them. By contrast, people who acquire conditions necessitating life support do not necessarily represent either that kind of vulnerability or that kind of commitment. If an adult sustains a traumatic injury and spends a few months recovering on a respirator, there’s really no useful comparison to gestation there.
I haven’t bothered with formalizing my terminal illness/death wishes because I don’t have any reason to believe either is likely to happen soon. I’ll do it when I get around to writing a will and have the money to spend on lawyers and notaries and shit. It’s worth doing properly and worthless doing improperly.
So what, pray tell, is the rational answer? Whoa, but before we get to that, why do you think that an attempt to adapt human behavior (abortion) to human circumstances (not every child is wanted YEAH SUCK IT LIFERS) is no more rational than a bunch of glossolalia about SOULS?
Edit: Kraaze: I’m here to entertain! I still support a woman’s right to abortions for the sake of art, by the way.
Because I was speaking in the context of the modern USA, which means that the sovereign is no more than the people (in theory), similar to the governments of most of the first world (various parliamentary variations, etc). If we were speaking in the context of many other common forms of government: strict monarchies, dictatorships, etc. then you would have a point. In any case, the fact that a human institution can do something does not presuppose divine agreement with the action taken, and if I need to give an example of this then I give up.
I don’t agree that these other mentions of harm would be redundant. The passage is addressing an issue where two people are fighting (penalties for which would be addressed elsewhere), and one of them causes an unusual form of damage on a non-engaged third party (the pregnant woman).
I think you bring up a good questions, and here’s why I believe it is called out like this. Looking at the surrounding context, we have all kinds of penalties for damage. The nearest would perhaps be the next verses 26-27. If you hit your slave and take out an eye or tooth, you let them go free as compensation. You don’t lose an eye or tooth of your own as is declared the above passage. This again suggests that the taking of your own eye (certainly a stronger penalty than letting a slave go free) must be occuring to someone more “valuable” than a slave: the pregnant woman. Furthermore, the extent of the various injuries mentinoed seem unlikely to occur to a fetus that is simply “born early” but is still a living human being as you suggest: burn for burn? bruise for bruise? tooth for tooth? How do you burn the fetus by “striking” the mother?
In addition, if we want to talk about interpretative authority and tradition, I yield to other threads in the past which have mentioned historical Jewish interpretation of these passages to mean that abortions were not taking a human life.
The law is pretty comprehensive, disussing even minor things like the proper washing of dishes and cleaning the walls of houses. To say that God’s silence on thousands of deaths of His chosen people (per month!) is weak because of a snappy appeal to formal logic is what seems weak to me. In any case, this is a part of the whole argument, not the basis of it.
I agree with you when it comes to points such as the masc/fem of regular nouns, but pronouns are a special case. For instance, in this sentence: “I gave TomChick and fire big juicy kisses, but she didn’t like it”, the gender of the demonstrative pronoun “she” is important, so that we know who it is in reference to (TomChick loves him some big juicy kisses, hubba hubba).
I’m not trying to draw conclusions about who hates women because they use feminine verb declensions or that all Spanish dogs are male because el perro is a masculine noun or something ridiculous, which would be an unjistified overextension of meaning and totally wrong (IOW: I agree with you). Rather, I am specifically examining the noun to which a pronoun points, and in this case the gender of the words is important.
Let me be more specific. Surely you agree that Christ existed (as God) before He was incarnated in Bethlehem. He was already a “He”. Then why did the angel talking to Mary in this passage (Mt 1:18-21) refer to the fetus as “that which” instead of “He whom”, or on a similar grammatical note, why did the angel say that Elizabeth “was going to have” a child instead of “has a child” in Luke 1:36 if the fetus was already a human in God’s eyes?
I believe it is productive as, I would suspect, any Christian who claimed to believe in the Bible as the inspired, infallible Word of God. I agree that many passages are poetic in nature and so generally aren’t to be taken literally, but the overriding message is clear. Job and Solomon (in Ecclesiastes) repeatedly refer to the span of life as going from birth, not conception, to death.
The appeal to Hebrew poetic form actually strengthens the case, eg. Ps 22:10, 58:3, 71:6, where the various psalmists begin the praise or calling of God from birth, which is paralleled in the Hebrew poetic form to the term “from the womb”. I agree that the English word “from” is unclear, but looking at the other phrase “from birth” removes any question, poetically.
And “before I formed you in the womb” does not disconfirm my belief. God knew me, you, and everything else trillions and trillions of years ago. That’s “before” the womb.
edit: or as U-Mac also said.
I find it remarkable how many Christians believe that one can study the details of the inspired Word of God too much, as if somehow God kept these documents together for 2500-3000 years so we could glance over our preferred (that is, confirming our pre-conceived notions) English translation and understand the deep things of He in whom we claim to place complete faith.
Again, this is only one piece of the whole. If the Mosaic Law didn’t consider it manslaughter or murder, why should I now? If Adam wasn’t considered a human until after his body was formed, why should I now? If the many inspired Biblical poets equated the beginning of life with birth, why should I differ? If the Bible counted a person’s years from birth to death (not from when “X lay with his wife Y and conceived”), why should I differ?
If abortion isn’t manslaughter or murder, that is the taking of an innocent human life by another, what is it?
And let me be clear again: I am personally against abortion, but I don’t believe it’s a living person and thus I don’t believe it should be legislated by government as is murder or manslaughter.
No, it absolutely makes you pro-choice, as you used the word “decisions.” But we don’t restrict the debate over abortion to women of child-bearing age or younger because we use laws to define the moral expectations of a member of our society, and as such we all get a say.
I am a pro-life and choice guy.
I am pro-life in thinking that abortion is wrong and should never be an option (unless circumstances are grave)
And pro-choice in the fact that limiting choice on this issue is impossible.
Abortion is a grey area, and putting hard and fast black and white laws on a grey area topic doesn’t work…
I am against having abortions, but pro-choice politically.
I don’t get it.
At least it’s somewhat more thought out than
I don’t like abortion because it’s icky.
Maybe if I put a question to you you might see my point of view.
Given today’s Pro-Choice arguments, tell me why a 15 year old Girl can’t go into and plan with a doctor for an assisted suicide? And explain it with the understanding that we believe that a Fetus is just as human as that 15 year old girl.