A Request Directed to Sciforums' "Atheists"

Hay... no need for explinations... people can unintentionally mess up like that :shrug:

 

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OK, I was going to walk on this one, but it requires comment:

I'm sorry to hear about your experience, Bells, but it doesn't mean that your position is correct. You may be subject to biases from that experience; that's why we don't personalise argumentative points.

Did I use 'but' right there? Please let me know if it exceeds the bounds of acceptability.

All of them? And what does that mean WRT the question? What are the reasons they select? There was a list, as I recall, and they weren't uniformly compelling. Such decisions may have a heterogenous base, of course, but it doesn't seem that it's uniformly appropriate.

Factually speaking, that is wrong. They retain their rights. They are subject to mitigations, mind, but they do maintain them. Let's consider the other side: when personhood is assigned to the unborn, do they retain their rights?

That is a LIE, and you know it. I do see comments that the life of the child is irrelevant, and your position indicates that you in effect support this stance; this is doubly likely since you constantly attempt to portray this issue so that those proposing more a more reasonable position are woman-haters, right-wingers or radical pro-choicers. I would suggest that you should be ashamed of your duplicitous conduct on the site, except that I doubt this would be taken up.

Oh, you do? Well let me just write the newspaper. Let me get my very newest quill here: I’ll pull it out of a turkey’s ass and try to decide if the bird knows what pain is. I mean, maybe it likes me harming it, but is just playing hard to get. Maybe it has some concept of diminishing interest in the utilitarian model of natural resources usage and doesn't want me to get disillusioned so that I won't pay up my Ducks Unlimited fees to protect wetland habitat. Sure, I'm not a DL member and turkeys are drier upland birds anyway, but maybe it doesn't have access to my mailing list.

Let’s cut right to the point for our neighbour: and you think an open DF policy is the very best way to rectify that?

For who? You forget that those supporting third-term restrictions also evaluate a second life in this equation. I don’t even go so far as third term, but I understand their point. Who is asking that organisational problems, as described above, are ethical or fair? You are attempting surgery with a shotgun here, and you have dismissed the other possible ethical problems. That is an error.

And that is bullshit, and Kitta has argued no such things, and you are in no position to make such a denunciation given what you’ve said in this thread.

 

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What confuses me about Bells story there... What the hell does it have to do with abortion?
Yes the pics poor care she received is a problem and must be addressed... But honestly it has no impact on the debate at hand, so I am going to call it out for what it is... An appeal to emotion fallacy.

 

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Does that render the sensation any less valid?
By that logic the people who claim circumcision is harmful to the child would be wrong as the kids psyche simply wouldn't be established enough to know the pain is bad.

 

Aesthetics

I would suggest that incoherent evasion leaves the dry-foot notion pretty much where it's always been: A bright line principle derived from observable facts.

Any line one wishes to draw on abortion access before that time must eventually get around to resolving this conflict of one "person" asserting rights within and over another person's body. That's the point of it. All of this come-lately fake indignance arises on the heels of a fifteen-month discussion in which the policy advocates refused to address the question.

So pitch as much of a fit about what monstrous and evil things you want. And when you're ready to have an intelligent discussion, let me know.

And reality doesn't change on your say-so, Geoff.

It's true, though, that I can imagine setting an abstract limit at viability, but that outcome is truly monstrous, escalating infant mortality exponentially and trading abortion for major invasive surgery. Those anti-abortion advocates who balked at the last compromise offer would rightly pitch a fit about this alternative; and so would abortion access advocates.

But, as I said nineteen months ago:

"Personhood" has a certain political aesthetic, to be certain, that many find attractive. But it also carries tremendous juristic implications.

It is my opinion that if those implications are absurd and extreme, then so is life at conception "personhood".​

And as long as anti-abortion movement doesn't want to answer the functional questions, it's nothing more than a bunch of people screaming for the curtailment of women's humanity in order to accommodate their own aesthetics.

 

This sounds like an argument along the lines of "unless the pain they feel is the same as the pain that I feel, it's not really pain." Such arguments are made to (for example) justify cruelty to animals - since the pain they feel must be different it is not true pain, and avoiding such sensations are not important.

A six month old baby might react to pain according to the appropriate reflexes, implying nothing about the registration of pain at a cognitive level. After all, we can't ask them. However, using such a rationale for intentionally causing pain to a six month old baby would tend to be seen (rightfully) as immoral and heinous.

 

Why would the argument that pain might be "just sensory input with no 'value' attached to it" be valid for some organisms but not others?

No, a strawman argument is a false argument substituted for the original argument. The above is an analogy, a comparison to an explicitly stated similar case.

 

"Which do you hate more, Geoff: logic or women?"

I wouldn't say that your defense of DF is necessarily incoherent, Tiassa. It's empty, since it's based on an arbitrary stance where the fetus is a person so long as we can just see it. I assume you don't like that description, but it's hard to give your argument more than that when you just ignore my counter and go back to repeating the same old shtick.

And this emptiness is underscored below:

First, I don't know why you keep citing this other thread. Is there a point here? I've addressed your question a couple times now. I didn't contribute to that other discussion and I don't think I even visited the thread; I think you have access to a number of sekrit mod tools here, and I suspect you might be able to tell that. I don't know if you'd be completely honest about the results of such an investigation, but that's just an inherent risk of the process.

As for the factual elements of the above, I give you credit for being obliquely honest in your evaluation of the conflict of one person asserting rights over the body of another person being carried within her: you treat it as a null. That's one of the reasons even the offhand suggestion of a biologically-based limit terrifies you so - it would block DF. I guess we could get into allegories and parallels, but I'm sort of reluctant to bother when you go to the point of sneaking off to set up a different thread explicitly about the very comments you refuse to simply answer.

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It's as though you've built a strange pedestal under those comments, circling around them and inviting others to observe them and, of course, disapprove. That's a strange juxtaposition, isn't it? Wouldn't it be so much simpler to just have an honest discussion? Let me know.

Well it requires intelligent responses; you know, where both sides have to read and interpret the others' arguments. So far, that's been one way: from me to you. At this point, I'll need some kind of show of good faith on your part.

Well, don't blame me for you screwing your own argument, Tiassa. Your insistence on the satisfaction of the "conflict of one "person" asserting rights within and over another person's body" is predicated on usage. Your gripe is that the fetus is asserting rights over the mother. Okay, can I conversely assert that the mother is asserting rights over the fetus? Not in your view. You don't see the fetus as a person, because you're promoting DF. Your counter must then be that without the fetus the mother would be fine, but that without the mother, the fetus would be dead. Ergo, it's a dependent association, this fetus you can't see in the body of a mother you can see. That dependency only changes with birth.

But of course, after 27 weeks the fetus can survive without the mother, and thus the dependency changes. The fetus has technical emancipation. This appears to be the only basis for an 'assertion of rights' argument that wouldn't apply to the fetus also; and at putative emancipation, that argument then fails also. It's another falsified step of a series of fall-back positions. Your fuzzy 'bright line' makes use of a related inference: namely that the fetus is separate from the mother. This is a pretty myopic benchmark, of course, because as we've already discussed, technical emancipation is possible far earlier. DF only makes sense as a point of liberation. Unfortunately, that's been pre-empted long before actual birth. Your 'bright line' then devolves to "I can see the baby, so it's a baby". You're a bright fellow, Tiassa. This didn't occur to you before?

Or maybe your central bitch is that it's an unredeemed rental arrangement. Those can be tricky, sure.

And then you end off with the more typical shrieking about how people who don't support DF - or who maybe won't shut up about their lack of support - are just doing it because they hate women/want them shut up, etc etc, blah blah. You know, already-disabused assertions make the Baby Jesus cry.

But maybe not until he has dry feet.

 

Bit of a loaded one. But, given those choices, I'd have to say Geoff...

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Predictability and Poseur Morality

Predictable:

It's true, though, that I can imagine setting an abstract limit at viability, but that outcome is truly monstrous, escalating infant mortality exponentially and trading abortion for major invasive surgery. Those anti-abortion advocates who balked at the last compromise offer would rightly pitch a fit about this alternative; and so would abortion access advocates.​

Yeah, I saw that one coming, Geoff.

Actually, you have it backwards. The dryfoot standard is recognition of an objective, observable existential change.

As to whether or not you can "conversely assert that the mother is asserting rights over the fetus"? Well, see, that's the thing; the fetus exists inside her body.

This is something I've been over before: Your converse assertion depends on an ontological presupposition of recent vintage. As I noted nineteen months ago, rather than the ontological shaping the legal, LACP is a case of the legal asserting the ontological.

Rhetorically, LACP is an extraordinary assertion, for which we cannot even begin considering extraordinary proof, as we have yet to get to any mundane proof.

Which brings us back to one of your silly complaints:

Because it's the thread you're trying to revive; the thread from which this branch of this thread stems. In other words, it is the context from which you fashion your poseur moral outrage.

Your moral condemnation of the dry-foot standard does nothing to justify an earlier prohibition. Of course, your moral condemnation is constructed of misrepresentations, and thus doesn't really aim to justify anything except your own poor behavior.

Try a rational argument, Geoff.

 

I still have not seen a rational argument for why the child doesn't deserve a fair shake at life do long as continuing the pregnancy doesn't endanger the mother...

As far as feeling pain goes... If we are going to require a cognizant emotional response to stimulus in order to label it as pain, then you could argue that the fetus cannot feel pain... But last I checked the pain response was an instinctive one. Last I checked a child who places their hand on a hot stove will pull their hand away even if they have never made the association of hot burner = bad. Is that not a pain response?

 

Jesus Christ, will you guys just quit already? It's obvious neither of you have any business representing us as site leaders or, god forbid, moderators, so for once, do the respectable thing and resign.

I'm sick of the moderators being the worst-behaved people on this forum. Enough already.

 

At present, it seems a brain-dead patient has more rights than a healthy fetus... odd since one is likely never going to recover while the other has magnitudes of potential... but perhaps this brings an interesting point up - how do we wish to define physical pain?