The answer to the question in the title is contained in the title.
For a number of reasons, we seem to have reached the point where hyperbolic, emotional statements get attention and calm, rational discussion is ignored.
A world where everyone is trying to position themselves as the persecuted, besieged voice of reason defending simple truth against irrational attractors, does not leave much room for common ground.
It's interesting to note that the author does seem to have had anyone accuse him of being "traitorous" for trying to understand. He just asserts this strawman to paint those who might disagree as unreasonable and then bemoans his asserted lack of common ground.
I wish I could say this is an online phenomenon, and it's obviously much worse online, but it clearly has leaked into the offline world.
>It's interesting to note that the author does seem to have had anyone accuse him of being "traitorous" for trying to understand. He just asserts this strawman to paint those who might disagree as unreasonable and then bemoans his asserted lack of common ground.
Are you saying the author lacks credibility because they themselves do not show evidence of it happening to them? I'm confused, because the first and second sentences in your reply appears to acknowledge/agree with the author's conclusion. If you believe the author's complaint is legitimate, why claim they're making a strawman?
I'm not the person you're replying to but i believe that their point was that it is happening and this headline is an example of such behavior.
We seem to often portrait ourself to be in a completely irrational victims position (like the headline) which usually doesn't exist. this makes finding the common ground for a discussion challenging.
The underlying issue is that online political or social discourse isn't so much as discourse as much as the virtual form of people trying to fit in socially - people use political/social issues to signal what kind of person they are (or more accurately, what kind of person they want everyone else to think they are), in order to feel like they are part of a community.
Once you understand the online social media through this lens, everything is easily explained, from how people converse and decide to ostracize people who don't agree right from the get go, to how websites are designed to drive user engagement.
On top of that, and related: almost no conversations are private or intimate. Conversations have a vast potential audience. So people are less concerned with communicating their point or changing the mind of the person to whom they're speaking; instead, the goal is often to impress points on the implicit audience. That leads to a sort of competition for 'audience' mindshare, where conceding a point or acknowledging complexity feels like giving ground to the other side.
In other words, it's not just about tribalism and a sense of belonging, it's also about lobbying for the positions and attitudes you hold and pushing out those you disagree with. You don't actually care much about the specific person you're talking to: you're performing for an audience.
I don't think so. I'm not particularly interested in 'status', but I do want to propagate my opinions. When I'm replying to a comment online--like this one--I'm not really thinking of changing your opinion. I'm thinking how other people are going to read our comments, and what opinions they're coming away with. I don't care what they think of me, or of you, but I care what ideas propagate. Unfortunately, that undermines our conversation.
> where hyperbolic, emotional statements get attention and calm, rational discussion is ignored.
Rational and nuanced discussion requires patience, tolerance, energy, and a big heart to sometimes acknowledge that one is wrong. It's just so much easier to be angry, to be righteous, and to destroy the "enemies".
Rational and nuanced discussion requires all of those items from both sides. The problem is that as such it devolves to a prisoners dilemma, so it is impossible for one to be invested into the mutually beneficial tactic of rational and nuanced discussion without opening oneself to being exploited by someone using game theory.
That's probably why rational and open discussion works best with people you know and trust and not necessarily with random people on the internet - at least when the stakes are high.
Yes, exactly. The title is encouraging hating people by accusing them of encouraging hating people. It does this in the usual way - by implying that a small group is representative of a large group.
I think in general, hating people comes not from thinking they are doing something wrong, but from thinking they have some sort of bad intentionality behind their 'wrong' actions. That is where words like 'traitorous' come in, it implies bad intentions. However, the opinion piece doesn't impose any bad intentions behind the behavior he is critizing. He is just making the case that it is wrong.
It is a very different thing, and not at all comparable.
Civility and decorum are what is missing today. And if it was taught in our schools today, and valued in society at large, maybe it we could still have debates like this.
> Civility and decorum ... taught in our schools today
"Education" means "leading", think "as if hand in hand, in time": it is a matter (in this case) of transmission through /example/ - not of passing information. Then, you can bring awareness to it: and awareness raising passes through showing that one way is higher and the other is low.
You must live that example.
The rarer the example, the greater the evidence of a social crisis. Some noticed, the crisis in higher culture is surely a damage, but it is that in the common culture of pyramidal society (the brother, the teacher etc.) that is mining the texture.
> maybe... we could still have debates like this
Some people are getting warier, as if in the terms legendarily attributed to Mark Twain: "Don’t argue with a fool, or the listener will say there is a pair of you". To debate, you need adequate interlocutors - if Umberto Eco imagined discussing with a six years old (a "new modern possibility"), he wanted the different credentials to be patent.
But actually, the matter has never been that simple. I have recently seen the initial part of the "Gore Vidal vs William Buckley" movie, Best of Enemies (Gordon; Neville, 2015) and I found the first debate immediately embarrassing.
It was "mud wrestling in a suit" - a pretense of civilization revealing very low urges in action; large investments in refinements spent to trick the surface. I could analyze, and I could have already written a short essay from reading your question to submitting the post, but insistence on the low unfortunately also promotes it.
True - and it's complicated by the popularity of pointing to other people's rationality and claiming it as your own in an attack on or exaggeration of the opinions and behaviors of others. Look at all the people in the comments who ostensibly want this, and yet are behaving exactly like all the people supposedly being contrasted with the example in the video. It's not "rationality is missing from politics" to most people, it's "rationality is missing from my political enemies".
Yes, "civility and decorum" are the solution to the refusal of an entire political party to accept the results of an election and their supporters violently storming the capitol.
Civility is the only solution, because behavior like that is not partisan. It's what happens when civility is removed from politics.
Lest you think there is something uniquely "evil" about Republicans, here's a bit of recent (but overlooked) history from the Washington Post: "Democrats were for occupying capitols before they were against it"
> 10 years ago, Democrats embraced the left-wing mob that occupied the state Capitol in Madison. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) praised the occupiers for an “impressive show of democracy in action” and tweeted as they assaulted the Capitol that she continued “to stand in solidarity” with the union activists.
Some highlights from the article:
> The small contingent of capitol police was quickly overwhelmed. Protesters ripped the hinges of an antique oak door at the State Street entrance and streamed inside.
> The police retreated in the face of the horde, giving up the first floor, then the second, [as protestors] began searching for the Republican senators who had dared to defy the will of the unions.”
> police sneaked them out through an underground tunnel to a government building across the street. But a Democratic representative posted on social media that the Republican senators were escaping through the tunnels, so when the senators came up into the lobby, the mob was there waiting for them.
> The senators hid under a stairwell, out of view, while the police ordered a city bus to pull up in front of the building. Officers then formed a human wall on the sidewalk, parting the sea of protesters and creating a pathway for the senators to reach the bus.” Once the senators were on board, “the mob on the street began punching the windows and shaking the vehicle. … The police told the senators and staff inside to keep their heads down in case a window shattered.”
> Thankfully, no one was killed. But during the course of the occupation, Walker received a steady stream of death threats against him and his wife, including one that promised to “gut her like a deer” and one threatening to kill his sons. Police found dozens of .22-caliber bullets scattered across the Capitol grounds. The occupiers drew chalk outlines of fake dead bodies etched with Walker’s name on the floor, and carried signs that read “Death to tyrants,” “The only good Republican is a dead Republican” and one with picture of him in crosshairs with the words, “Don’t retreat, Reload.”
That's what got us Joe Biden, who mostly has the same policies as Donald Trump, is a democrat who has always been a lot like a pretty conservative republican, but says nice things and only sniffs girls' hair instead of grabbing by the _____. Downvote for that if you like but the lesser of two appalling characters is still appalling.
What's missing is a deeper understanding of issues, a willingness to understand not the other side but all sides of an issue, and a recognition that meeting in the middle is deciding not to decide. We need brains, backbones, and a willingness to avoid partisanship.
How appalling does the representative of a political party have to be to be able to call them appalling and also espouse "a willingness to understand" in politics in the same breath without necessarily being hypocritical? That sounds sarcastic, but it's absolutely a real, pragmatic question (with no concrete answer, really).
That's intentionally equating completely different things just to manufacture "hypocrisy." Harm to others with political inclinations. But you knew that, right?
That is interesting, an image search for "young bernie sanders" does bring up a distinctly different looking face. (one compares him to Jemaine Clement)
Thank you for point this out.
But, it still is an example of civil discourse. Another is Friedman arguing (civil, but a little more tense) with a young Michael Moore. (they do talk past each other a little)
Almost every serious non-partisan legal scholar agrees that Roe v. Wade is on tenuous legal footing. It's purely a logical argument, and it doesn't follow very well from the Constitution. We have a very simple mechanism to rectify this: amend the Constitution. But that ship has long sailed, and the problem now is stare decisis†, which complicates things further. So there's a very real justification for keeping Roe in spite of its shortcomings. But that's neither here nor there.
The issue isn't that people don't understand arguments, it's that they misrepresent them. A rational, reasoned, mature, back-and-forth debate on abortion won't get you views and clicks, so of course no one does it. Panem et circenses.
The fundamental problem, which isn't going to get addressed short of the country falling apart, most likely, is that our particular system of government is a bit shit, and keeps getting worse the better everyone gets at gaming it.
Its very shittiness is why we can't realistically fix it. We've been relying on courts really stretching reasoning on the constitution to its breaking point, just to be able to have a mostly-modern state & economy, in terms of function and outcomes, and it's been like that for most of a century. Maybe it would've been better if the courts hadn't done that and had instead forced us to a crisis point much sooner, so we'd have to actually fix our governmental system, but who knows what suffering that might have caused.
Concerted attempts to change the course of the courts might finally bring us that crisis, though. We'll see. If they're maximally successful, I think it'll have to, because the US is gonna go downhill fast if kinda-shaky 20th century rulings supporting broadened federal power are wiped out en masse.
> our particular system of government is a bit shit, and keeps getting worse the better everyone gets at gaming it.
I agree that a "Union of States," being profoundly anti-federalist, is a pretty shit way of running a homogeneous world power with a shared language, shared culture, and (for the most part) shared ideals.
The US fundamentally changed after the Civil War (which was probably the breaking point of anti-federalism) but unfortunately the Constitution didn't change along with it.
I think the intersection of culture and ideals between different regions in the US is too small to merit a description of the country as homogenous. And that intersection is becoming increasingly smaller with the collapse of mass media and the balkanization of media preferences (news and entertainment).
We have a shared cultural history, but we can't even come close to a consensus on its interpretation.
The US is more akin to the EU than it is to a normal country. I don't think that is necessarily good or bad, it just is. But I don't know if I understand your bit about shared culture, language, and ideas... Would that imply that we should share a govt with the UK and Australia? Or if oceans are the breaking point, at least Canada?
We do have a simple method, in amending the Constitution, but that’s been incredibly difficult to do for pretty much the entire history of the United States. For an issue like this one, it’s basically impossible.
The true simple solution would have been to codify the right to an abortion in federal law, as candidate Obama promised to do but President Obama failed to even attempt. Recently I’ve been introduced to the hypothetical that maybe the Democrats didn’t really want to do that because fear mongering about Republicans overturning Roe was such an effective fundraising tool. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case.
Your hypothetical doesn't make much sense to me because it assumes Obama had more power than he did- Obama wasn't elected king of America.
You need 60 votes in the senate to pass anything unless you eliminate the filibuster (the so called nuclear option). Obama had 60 Democrats exactly which means if even a single Democrat was willing to vote against a federal right to abortion law Obama couldn't have done it.
Democrats controlled the House and Senate from 2009 to 2011. They could have passed it then without even needing to eliminate the filibuster. But they didn’t even try.
First, they only had 59% of the House, not enough to overcome filibuster.
Second, they did have 60% in the Senate, but only for a few months in 2009, and it's not obvious that it was an "overcome filibuster on federal abortion laws" 60%. 2009 was the year Al Franken won a Senate seat in Minnesota after a recount and a Minnesota Supreme Court case, so he wasn't seated until late April. A couple of months later, Ted Kennedy died and was replaced by an interim appointee; Scott Brown, a Republican, won the special election to replace him that winter. They also had Arlen Specter - a Republican - caucusing with them to make that 60. He was a "pro-choice but personally opposed" legislator and may not have voted with the Democrats on this issue.
So yeah, they didn't try. But I think it's very likely they didn't try because they felt strongly that they would not be successful.
They had 60 Senate seats but not 60 votes. For every vote you still need 60 votes to prevent a filibuster regardless of whether your party has the majority of seats. This is why the public option (and single payer) was killed in the ACA. They didn't have the 60 votes to override a filibuster (Lieberman was, I believe, the main holdout)
An amendment seems ideal, but wouldn't a regular federal law also get the job done? They could even strengthen it like the Federal Reserve Act: "The right to amend, alter, or repeal this Act is hereby expressly reserved."
Abortion tends to be single state centric, meaning the person getting the abortion and the abortion clinic are in the same state. Because of this, the federal government couldn't pass a law that only affects intrastate commerce.
At least that's my understanding of it.
FWIW, qualified immunity was also an immunity created from whole cloth by the Supreme Court. Apparently interpreting new "laws" like this was popular from the court in the 1960s and 1970s. Much of today's police brutality and lack of accountability stems from this decision.
The federal government can always withhold funding to states that don't implement their laws the way they want them too (which is how the federal drinking age is enforced... states that were to set it to less than 21 don't get funding for freeways/roads/etc)
I think that oversells it. The current interpretation of the commerce clause is not particularly controversial in contemporary American politics (both dominant political parties are "big Federal government" parties; they just disagree on how to apply the USG's heft.)
> Abortion tends to be single state centric, meaning the person getting the abortion and the abortion clinic are in the same state. Because of this, the federal government couldn't pass a law that only affects intrastate commerce.
It's not this straightforward. One of the initial challenges to the 1964 CRA was that intrastate racial discrimination fell outside of the purview of the Federal government; SCOTUS has consistently determined that state acts may not restrict rights where interstate activity is likely (e.g. motor lodges, economic activities near state borders, etc.).
On net, I think the 9th Amendment provides perfectly sufficient cover for a right to abortion, and that it would be reasonable to interpret the nonenumeration clause in a similar manner to the commerce clause (i.e., permitting federal law where required to protect rights that individual states might wish to infringe). But that's a parallel justification.
> The current interpretation of the commerce clause is not particularly controversial in contemporary American politics (both dominant political parties are "big Federal government" parties; they just disagree on how to apply the USG's heft.)
It's not controversial to the layer of government to which derives power from it, certainly. I think politicians in states have issues with it when it's convenient.
>I think the 9th Amendment provides perfectly sufficient cover for a right to abortion, and that it would be reasonable to interpret the nonenumeration clause in a similar manner to the commerce clause (i.e., permitting federal law where required to protect rights that individual states might wish to infringe). But that's a parallel justification.
I think it will until states start banning abortion, which is their right (assuming Roe is overturned). I don't think the federal government will have power to override the decision of the states. It would be nice to see a strong interpretation for the 9th amendment come into action though. It might finally end moral crusades like the drug war.
> The federal government derives much of it's power over the states using a controversial interpretation of the commerce clause
Given that expansive interpretations of the commerce clause seems to be the status quo, doesn't that suggest that a federal abortion law is possible? It should be easy for lawyers and politicians to find some tortured meaning of interstate commerce that includes a woman getting an abortion in her own state. They seem to do this sort of thing all the time.
Most of the time they just bribe the states. That's how the drinking age moving from 18 to 21 occurred. The federal government offered highway fund money (or threatened to remove it) if states increased the drinking age from 18 to 21.
A lot of state governors refused to take Medicare funding for the ACA and it was a very unpopular move. I think it's mainly the conservative politicians that don't like it because they have to put it in their budget. Conservative citizens, by and large, particularly older ones like it, but it's part of the conservative "package." Social security is along the same lines. As soon as a conservative politician starts talking about cutting social security, his or her days are numbered.
Which is absolute hogwash and FDR's most unfortunate mistake. It lead us to the war on drugs and a barrage of unconstitutional gun laws that should have all been outside the feds' perview.
A very broad application of the commerce clause isn't that controversial, it's also pretty obvious/logical since basically everything effects interstate commerce
> Almost every serious non-partisan legal scholar agrees that Roe v. Wade is on tenuous legal footing.
Citation needed. Also, would love to see how you are defining "serious non-partisan legal scholar." Seems like a whole bunch of adjectives you can use to disregard someone. As it stands, you can literally be talking about one person and be telling the truth depending on how you define those words.
Did she say the reasoning was wrong, or merely that it wasn't ideal? As far as I know, she took umbrage with Roe v Wade being physician focused rather than woman focused. In other words, that the provides for a physicians right to perform abortions more than it does a woman's right to receive abortions.
> She also argued for a different legal rationale, one based on equal rights for women rather than privacy. Laws banning abortion had been written by men and were enforced by men, but their burden fell entirely on women.
RBG was a brilliant legal mind and invoking the Equal Protection Clause (which is what she argued for) would have been orders of magnitude more robust than invoking some vague "right to privacy" that's barely in the Constitution to begin with.
That is plainly untrue. Tons of legal scholars think the logic is extremely sound. The shortcoming with Roe is that due to a combination of bad luck and not willing to be as ruthless as Republicans on supreme court appointments. The arguments are irrelevant this is about power and supreme court appointments not logic.
I do not know what I expected when I clicked on the comments section. I think the author makes some really good points about human psychology & game theory, and the fact that people are immediately riled up by his statements only serves to prove him right.
You can only understand people when you're clear-headed, i.e. your "rational you" is the one in control. With these issues, people have either natural or nurtured emotional ties. To such an extent that the topic itself shuts of their rationality, and they revert back to blanket statements ("I can't argue with you because you believe X", or just plain profanities). Mix this in with tribality, and you've got a good recipe for no ability to reconcile two different opinions.
There's also the fact that people generally don't want to reconcile. When it comes to charged topics, it is a bare-faced lie to want reconciliation. What each side wants is the other side to relent. I think the term "culture war" is actually pretty accurate, there's no interchange of ideas. It's just seeing who can shout the other into submission.
Yeah it's disappointing that the comments are so dominated by his example rather than his greater point. Especially so for people outside the USA for whom Roe v Wade is irrelevant but tribalism isn't.
It's worth considering that this problem isn't necessarily symmetrical around the centre of the political axis. There have been experiments done on this that show conservatives understand the left far better than the other way around. They come up with a large set of "How much do you agree with on a scale of 1-10" type questions on political topics. Then they recruit people from across the political spectrum (self rated) and split them into four groups. Two groups are asked to fill out the survey in the usual way, directly about their own opinions. The other two are asked to answer the survey as they imagine someone from the other side would answer. Then the answers are lined up to see how good each group was at predicting the answers of the other. The results are always the same: conservatives can play 'pretend leftie' much better than the other way around.
I'm always quite suspicious of social science these days but the methodology in this type of experiment seems simple enough that there can't be much hiding in it, except maybe, the exact nature of the questions used. This experiment has been replicated however.
This provides empirical support for what has probably been the real world experience of many of us, that people on the right are much more willing to interact with and be exposed to left wing views than the reverse. Example: I've encountered people in the past who threw tantrums at work because they discovered that someone else was reading right wing news websites (in their own time). The idea of a conservative person going to HR and filing complaints about other employees because they read the Guardian is laughable, and it's not because the Guardian is somehow better or more moral than other newspapers (very much not so). People on the left are just drastically more afraid than normal people of exposure to non-left wing thought, and this problem gets worse the further left you go. This is also why communist countries always rely heavily on censorship and speech control.
Unfortunately the experiments can't illuminate why this effect exists, only proving that it does. The rest is in the realm of speculation. They do leave one clue though: the left wing participants usually fail to predict right wing responses because they're picking answers much more extreme than those people actually hold.
The author has nobody but himself to blame, since he sabotaged the reception of his own article with an inflammatory headline that assumes a false (or at least contentious) premise.
>The Constitution doesn’t mention abortion. But what about privacy? Well, it doesn’t mention privacy either.
That's not true - the 4th amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure. The search part prevents the police from reading your mail or wiretapping your phones without a warrant (which declares the search reasonable), except illegally.
Well yes, but as much as I am a proponent of both the right to privacy and abortion, the latter doesn't really follow from the former. Just because one has a right to privacy, it doesn't follow that everything done in private is legal. Nor is abortion necessarily private - one could declare one is going to have one, or one could be visibly pregnant and then get an abortion. It would be a bizarre law if abortion was legal only so long as you don't tell anyone about it.
>Just because one has a right to privacy, it doesn't follow that everything done in private is legal.
No one, anywhere, has ever argued that the right to privacy means everything done in private is legal. That is not even remotely close to what the debate is about.
You have constructed an impressively bad strawman.
Right, so some things done in private are prohibited, and others are not prohibited. So a right to privacy does not inform us whatsoever as to whether it is prohibited or not prohibited to do a thing.
In all other contexts I know of, the 4th amendment does not grant anyone rights to do things that would otherwise be illegal. It sets careful restrictions on the governments ability to investigate. In other words, the government is prohibited from doing things we consider to be a burden upon people whom the government lacks sufficient reason to suspect. However, given a sufficient reason to suspect them of a crime the government can then fulfill due process and continue in it's investigations of those suspected crimes.
So lets by very precise here. Lets take some action a person might engage in, lets call it 'throwing strings', which is just made up nonsense. To be informative here, we will say that the constitution does not have anything to say regarding throwing strings, and that state or local governments can outlaw it as they see fit. However, in the existence of a right to privacy the act of throwing strings becomes a right under the constitution.
How can a right to unreasonable search and seizure (or however other way privacy is derived) possibly create a right to openly and notoriously throw strings?
So I'm in a meeting and I've reloaded this comment a few times, and I see the moderation going up and down? If you down-vote this, please hit respond and let me know why, this is a good faith comment in the spirit of this thread trying to understand the issue better, or ideally have an expert in the law reply? I don't know why someone would down-vote it apart from seeing it as threatening to even be open to trying to discuss this issue?
No, it is not. Lawrence v. Texas was accepted by SCOTUS for privacy purposes only to examine this extremely narrow question:
“2. Whether Petitioners’ criminal convictions for adult consensual sexual intimacy in the home violate their vital interests in liberty and privacy protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?"
To spell it out: "adult consensual sexual activity" is not even remotely close to "everything".
You're also wrong on abortion. Directly from Roe v. Wade:
"The privacy right involved, therefore, cannot be said to be absolute. In fact, it is not clear to us that the claim asserted by some amici that one has an unlimited right to do with one's body as one pleases bears a close relationship to the right of privacy previously articulated in the Court's decisions. The Court has refused to recognize an unlimited right of this kind in the past."
"We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation."
Can you tell me where you got the idea that "it's quite similar to the current reason abortion is legal"?
None of these are arguing everything done in private should be legal. Even the most extreme argument (not accepted by SCOTUS) is that things you do to your own body are protected.
But if you do something (say, fraud), in private, no one is arguing you should have a right to privacy.
Could you help me understand how the purported strawman diverges from the actual legal argumentation? It sounds like the article is making the case that this equivocation is eerily close to the actual jurisprudential reason.
Sure. Have you read Roe v. Wade. Where do you get the idea that it's eerily close? Can you quote the specific words from that decision?
Here are some that are at odds with what you are saying:
"The privacy right involved, therefore, cannot be said to be absolute. In fact, it is not clear to us that the claim asserted by some amici that one has an unlimited right to do with one's body as one pleases bears a close relationship to the right of privacy previously articulated in the Court's decisions. The Court has refused to recognize an unlimited right of this kind in the past."
"We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation."
That doesn’t help. It just asserts that “oh no, it’s obviously not unlimited” but not how or why, in line with the core arguments used.
Did you read the article? Its whole point is that Roe is a dubious application of privacy, even if you support the ruling’s conclusion.
I assumed from your confident tone, and insistence that the parent comment was a strawman, that you would be able to shed more light on this topic. At least, that’s where I would be if I used that tone.
Their reasoning in Roe is pretty detailed and they do not come anywhere close to saying that the right to privacy legalizes everything done in private. Have you read Roe v Wade?
Let's look at fraud. Who do you think is arguing that fraud is illegal if done in private. Can you link me to any example anywhere on any medium?
Which part of the article do you think is relevant here? I have read many books by actual constitutional law scholars on these cases. I don't understand what you think I'm supposed to see in a 1,000 word blog post by a random non lawyer that doesn't know anything in particular about constitutional law.
>I assumed from your confident tone, and insistence that the parent comment was a strawman, that you would be able to shed more light on this topic.
I'm not just insisting it's a strawman. It is a straw man. Can you link me to any argument made by anyone ever on any medium that is even remotely close to what he is saying? (that everything done in private, say, fraud, murder, arson, etc.) should be legal?
> I'm not just insisting it's a strawman. It is a straw man.
It wasn't a strawman (I do not claim anyone argued everything in private is legal), it was reductio as absurdum - taking the privacy argument to its logical limit. If a right to privacy makes abortion legal because it is private, why does this apply only to abortion? Actually, only to a subset of abortion, since "this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation".
You quoted the court saying this is "not unlimited" and about "personal privacy" (distinguished from 'general' privacy?). How does any of this follow from "security against unreasonable search"? Or do I misunderstand, and they derived this right from some other amendment or combination of amendments?
The reasoning, so far as I understand it, is tortured at best, so I'd be grateful if you could clarify the court's logic for me.
> one could be visibly pregnant and then get an abortion.
People don't talk about it a lot, but the miscarraige rate is something like 10-20%. You probably know at least a handful of women who've experienced one. It's fallacious to conclude somebody had an abortion because they're no longer pregnant but don't have a baby.
I'm addressing the suggestion that an abortion isn't private when other people observe that a woman is no longer pregnant.
> Nor is abortion necessarily private [...] or one could be visibly pregnant and then get an abortion.
You wouldn't know that person had an abortion unless they told you. But then you might as well simply say "An abortion isn't private if the woman tells everyone she had one", which is the same as "one could declare one is going to have one" so I think that's not what was meant.
While it’s not a huge jump from the 4th amendment to a generalized right to privacy, you’re wrong when you say it’s not true, the fourth amendment does not actually say anything about privacy, it is at most implied.
The fourth amendment, much like the third, was passed in response to an explicit practice that occurred during the pre revolutionary period, and sought to remedy it.
Privacy is about maintaining an inviolable personal space, and the fourth amendment is very explicitly about limiting state violation of the individual person, their property, papers, or effects.
Papers in particular is important because it is quite literally in reference to information. To this day information has to be acquired legally in order for it to be admissable in court.
My non-lawyerly opinion believes that both the first amendment and the fourth amendment when taken together provide a decent foundation to a generalized right to privacy.
Specifically when you look at all of the cases over time defining actions as speech.
I am totally on board with there being a right to privacy, I was only responding to the facts within the thread.
It’s a very straightforward jump from the text of the fourth amendment to a right to privacy, but at the end of the day, the amendment itself does not actually say there is a right to privacy.
I don't think factual inaccuracies should get a free pass under the principle of assuming good faith, because the principle of assuming good faith only applies to how ambiguous claims should be construed. There is no way to construe "the constitution does not mention privacy" as a correct statement.
“The constitution does not explicitly use the term privacy but does refer to related concepts from which one can infer some logic about what kinds of privacy are protected vs not”
is a reasonable interpretation in context … and coincidentally, exactly what the author is arguing, once you get beyond the quoted part.
I think this whole subthread is being too hard on a snippet.
The five axioms of Euclidean geometry don’t mention triangles and yet they are a big part of geometry. The five axioms of Euclidean geometry give rise to a vast collection of consequences. The U.S. Constitution is considerably more complex than the 5 axioms of geometry so one should not be surprised that concepts will arise as logical consequences that are not specifically mentioned in the document. This is especially so since the Constitution was not written with mathematical precision.
This blog post touches on a topic with far-reaching consequences that I think a lot of people are missing because they are focusing only on the question of abortion, and that is PRIVACY. In a nutshell, Roe makes abortion legal by guaranteeing the privacy of a woman to make that decision with her doctor. If Roe is overturned then it's this assumption of privacy which will have been vacated... and once it is I suspect there will be policy and legislation to exploit the court's striking down of privacy in a way that will be more Orwellian than we can currently imagine.
Let me rephrase: if the above argument were valid, then wouldn't it have to be the case that anything that can be done in private would have to be legal?
The timing is notable, coming on the heels of an emphatic conservative critique of compelled vaccination. For the first time in memory the right side of the aisle has been arguing for bodily autonomy and the left for the state's right to compel people to accept medical treatment over objection (or even an extended form of home-confinement). It's the first time in memory I have some hope the different sides of the debate might see common ground.
Even in the military the compulsion was the prospect of dishonorable discharge. Where I live both government employees and private employees have been fired for not complying with vaccination mandates, and again the issue is political alignment not whether people are being jabbed without consent.
@novemberWhiskey, I'm here to tell you I connected with someone who harbors strong feelings about Roe specifically with respect to the vaccination issue. You may disagree, but the relevancy is not 'false'.
So, just to make sure I understand you correctly, you wouldn't consider it a violation of bodily autonomy if the state governments simply put in place legislation that effectively forced people out of a job if they wanted an abortion?
Like, if they ruled tomorrow that abortion until birth is legal, but the mother and father must spend a week attending 8 hours of daily counseling before being allowed to abort and then must spend a month after to mentally recover (thus effectively making them unable to work for that period), wouldn't you consider that to be effectively the same as banning abortion?
I would consider it to be equivalent, as making something unreasonably difficult to do is effectively the same as a ban, particularly for more economically vulnerable people, after all, even if abortion were banned in the entire US, for the rich it just means taking time off to go to another country and having a 'miscarriage' before coming back, while for the poor it means resorting to more dangerous methods.
That would violate their human rights. Article 26 UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
> Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
I know USA hasn't ratified these so USA doesn't think this is a right, but most of the world do. It is fine to force people to get vaccinated, but it isn't fine to deny human rights to those who don't get vaccinated. The reason is obviously that they want to force everyone to get vaccinated, but they can't so instead they just deny human rights to those who don't get vaccinated. Why do it in such a roundabout way, when the constitution obviously didn't intend for the federation to make such laws?
So you're confined to your home if you don't comply which seems equivalent to covid policies, which was the point of the discussion, no? Nobody's been physically forced to get vaccinated, just excluded from public life. That seems to have plenty of precedent.
Home confinement? Oh please. You could go wherever you wanted outside, you could visit homes of friends or family, go shopping ... even in NYC (which had amongst the strictest regulation) you only needed to show proof of vaccination for indoor dining, fitness and entertainment venues.
Morality and law both work like mathematics. This means that my beliefs are constructed, and once I have a construction, the only in bounds way to convince me to change my mind about them is to show me that my beliefs are inconsistent. Moreover, understanding someone who has already demonstrated an inconsistent belief system is easy. They believe X because they believe something and its negation, and at least one of those implies X. Trying to unravel exactly how they have managed to go from an inconsistency to whatever thing they want to believe isn't really that interesting or important. The point is that their entire moral philosophy is broken and is exclusively used to justify whatever they want. This is why you have things like the prosperity doctrine.
Calling inconsistent beliefs a sign that they justify whatever they want is overly harsh. Rather, it has been shown [1] that people come to their beliefs by intuition, and rationalize them post-hoc. Just because a belief is intuitive and not constructed from moral axioms (meaning their beliefs appear inconsistent by their stated rationalization) does not mean it is arbitrary ("whatever they want").
This does not contradict anything that I said. It's not harsh to refer to the argument as being worthless in this case. It might as well not exist. One can be well served by a belief system that justifies nothing, or a belief system that is full of contradictions, but listening to them rationalize it isn't going to help me understand any better than it helped them (which was not at all).
By want I mean want. I wasn't assigning moral judgments at this point because that would have been circular. I said "whatever they want" in order to distinguish it from an unqualified "whatever". The prosperity doctrine stuff was a motivated example, but not meant to be representative.
"Want" is highly ambiguous. For example, a lawyer that believes everyone has a right to a competent legal defense may find a client personally abhorrent, but take their case anyway out of a sense of duty. It is highly misleading to describe this as the lawyer "doing whatever they want", even if that is technically true by some definition of "want", and even if the lawyer's rationalization of this is found to be internally inconsistent, or inconsistent with some other aspect of their behavior.
I am aware that it is highly ambiguous, that is why I chose it. People who believe whatever they want are more of a problem than people who believe whatever. People who believe whatever they want can be manipulated by people who know what they want.
I do not know ethics, nor any branch of philosophy (as my below comments show, the issue I could discuss was the "law" part). However, what I have never understood is how does the a priori science of ethics map onto real life, where morality is borne out of emotions and instinctual human social conditioning. I think it's rather obvious from observing young humans that they do not discover ethics from first principles, but some form of it is practically branded into their brain. They will recognize when somebody gets more than their fair share, and will become mad at this, for example. This is very different from mathematics in my mind.
That was an invitation for you to comment, not to be rude :P
> What you're talking about has nothing to do with what philosophers do, which is talk about how things ought to be.
How is that of any use? It's not like people are going to drop what they're doing and change their morals because ethics professors said so. That would be ridiculous.
> Your metaethical position is just one among very many and there are arguments for and against it and all the others. It's not special.
> That was an invitation for you to comment, not to be rude :)
I'm sorry, deleted my original comment. I totally misread you.
> How is that of any use? It's not like people are going to drop what they're doing and change their morals because ethics professors said so. That would be ridiculous.
Yeah, that's a question a lot of people have, but it does happen. People do read Aristotle and change their mind. People go to them with questions and they influence other academics. Overall, I'd say it's mostly not very successful and they're mostly ignored...
> You can say that against anything, really.
I meant to emphasize argumentation here, but also the lack of consensus. There's consensus in many fields, even in on many issues in philosophy.
No it’s not. There are two major schools of ethics, deontology and utilitarianism. The later is about maximizing happiness and doesn’t believe that people have unalienable rights. So we can’t agree on the concept of rights at all never mind an enumerated list.
Sorry, seems like you're either in over your head here or misunderstood what I said. Both deontology, utilitarianism and all other major schools of ethics* are justified a priori. This is common, introductory, knowledge in philosophy. Virtually nobody considers ethics an empirical science. That being said, descriptive and experimental ethics have made tiny inroads very recently.
* It doesn't really work like that today anyway; it's a decision tree of "schools."
I think you're conflating the philosophy of mathematics with describing the entirety of philosophy (or even just morality) using mathematics.
I cannot claim to understand philosophy but I can claim to understand law, and it is _not_ like mathematics. Human discretion is paramount to the system, and laws are written in such a way that humans reinterpret them afterwards, as influenced by their own cultural and social bias. How is this like mathematics? Do you need a jury to decide if a theorem is true?
I have met many engineers who treat law as if it is supposed to be exact and mathematical. They become very annoyed when it does not conform to this view, or when laws aren't written in an even more detailed, step-by-step breakdown. That is not how it works. There's a reason there's discretion in the system, if you try to regulate something as inherently chaotic as human behaviour with inflexible rules, you get crypto.
I missed the reference to "law" in the parent comment. I won't attempt to tackle that except to say, we humans are machines as well, and just because we are hard to predict doesn't mean we don't generally behave according to some rules. Our laws are generally informed by the cultures the judges grew up in, for example, so any court rulings will be mostly a result of that and the ethics set down by the prevailing morals. We probably won't see any "private property no longer exists" rulings coming out of the courts anytime soon.
To add to this, _everyone_ has some kind of inconsistent belief system. It's fairly simple to determine this, when people get defensive it's almost certainly based on something incongruous between their beliefs and actions, or possibly broaches a belief they hold to be true, but are unable to demonstrate why it's true. Therefore causing defensive behavior when challenged.
I.E., very few people get upset if you say "the sky is not blue", as this is non-threatening to their beliefs and they can verify the truth themselves.
But state "your political position X is based on this specific false premise of Y", if someone holds this position strongly but cannot justify it will often trigger an emotional and often irrational defense.
> To add to this, _everyone_ has some kind of inconsistent belief system. It's fairly simple to determine this, when people get defensive it's almost certainly based on something incongruous between their beliefs and actions, or possibly broaches a belief they hold to be true, but are unable to demonstrate why it's true. Therefore causing defensive behavior when challenged.
This is silly folk psychology. There are many reasons people get upset when people contradict them, raging from respect issues to believing that such contradictions are actual mortal dangers. People get quite upset when you disagree with their belief that all people have a right to life and counter with the proposition that the group they belong to should be exterminated, for example. It has nothing to do with their alleged inability to debate you. It's that you've indicate you're a threat to their life. People get quite upset when you strawman them or condescend or patronize in your response. There's a whole rainbow of reasons to get upset and very few of them are about some inability to debate you.
This applies to only the topic of discussion you are having with that person (ie, a singular event in time) therefore it's _one_ idea with inconsistency.
I know this is a subtle distinction, but it was my actual point.
I have done tests the past few years where I analyzed what went wrong where some form of disagreement has occurred, either personally or professional. Either I was defensive or the other person was.
During the defensive act (usually an expression of anger or less often hurt) the single event turned out almost always to be because one of the people in the discussion held a belief that was found on something unsupportable/ unsubstantiated in the context of the discussion, and the opposing view brought this to light.
The defensive person (often times myself) backed their position (action) based on their beliefs, but was confronted with contradictory information. (ie, they could simply not "defend" their position in light of the other information.)
Keep in mind, the truth of a situation was often irrelevant as I found my self defensive even I only _thought_ I was being shown to be wrong (ie, my actions didn't support by beliefs at the time, but later proved otherwise), and I found this with other people as well.
Again, this is only my immediate surroundings and tests I have run. The reason I know the other side is that in nearly every instance I followed up with the other person to find out what happened, what went wrong for the very purpose of understanding what caused the defensive behavior.
Consider running a test...
Next time you run into a situation where something goes wrong, someone gets defensive (easiest to analyze yourself, because you have all the evidence available) compare what you/they said/did with what they actually believe about the event.
I've frequently worked out great personal issues with people doing this, but sometimes people get more upset and simply do not want to bring something up that is a contradiction for themselves.
A simple example of this idea is politics, when someone expresses a belief like "all life is sacred", and then they are asked about person's life they detest, when pressed on the matter, they will get defensive. Their actions (words they express) are incongruous with their beliefs are what caused their reaction.
Another example is unprofessional behavior, when someone shouts at another person in a meeting, and you point out their actions, they will often state "I wasn't shouting" immediately, or raise some other similar defense.
Challenge anyone with evidence that contradicts them on any belief they hold, and if they can't defend against your proofs, almost everyone gets defensive, as if you are attacking _them_. (some people need to value the belief highly, otherwise they won't even discuss it with you) I have yet to meet a person that I have not seen this behavior in under these circumstances. (I bring up contradictory info a lot as part of my work and personal life) Maybe psychopaths or sociopaths?
> I have done tests the past few years where I analyzed what went wrong where some form of disagreement has occurred, either personally or professional. Either I was defensive or the other person was.
Whatever dude :) That's just anecdotal. My counterexamples prove you wrong. What you said was false :P
In my experience, the reason people get mad when questioned like that isn't because they're unable to justify it. It's usually because you're insensitively pestering them to describe their opinions in careful detail when that's not a conversation they're interested in having at that time.
Kind of like how when someone's complaining to you about a problem and they get angry when you keep pestering them with solutions, because they aren't looking for a solution and just want someone to vent to.
No, thats a pretty bad way of thinking about things.
A person can be 99% correct on the issue, and you coming in, and find a single, tiny, irrelevant flaw or absurd edge case does not overrule the 99% correctness of the original position.
Instead of that, it is perfectly possible to compare and differentiate between people who are mostly right, and people who are very wrong on most of it.
Sure, I refer you to the entire Western canon of ethics because that's 99% of what it consists of. If you want a simple math example, we replaced Euclid's axioms of geometry with Hilber's axioms of geometry and others. Look into why. Then there's the fact that axioms and premises that make empirical statements which can be falsified. Those get thrown out all the time.
We didn't replace Euclid's axioms. I'm sorry that you think so, because it is a common misconception that mathematics "believes in a set of axioms". The euclidean axioms are a foundation for the logical system of euclidean geometry. Eucliden geometry is not only unchanged, but is actually a system which has been proven to be consistent and decideable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_axioms. This makes it rather uninteresting, which is why we now study a different system.
Empiricism, likewise, is an axiom that goes. That which I observe exists, and then if you would like to keep that axiom, you're going to have to throw away anything else that is shown to be inconsistent as a result. Which is in bounds.
I think you misunderstood what I said and may have demonstrated a little ignorance at the same time. Hilbert's axioms are axioms for Euclidean geometry, like Tarski's and Birkhoff's.
> That which I observe exists
This isn't even close to what empiricism is. You named a (very poor) ontological principle. Empiricism is a set of epistemological principles.
First point: this is why I wrote the logical system of Euclidean geometry. Propositions in that language, and the proofs therein, have not changed.
Second point: That is most definitely what empiricism is. Moreover, I have just given you a set of epistemological beliefs. It's a set with a single element, and it in fact characterizes empiricism. I don't know what else to tell you.
> First point: this is why I wrote the logical system of Euclidean geometry. Propositions in that language, and the proofs therein, have not changed.
The point was that the axioms we used changed. Read further back up the thread. You're off track.
> Second point: That is most definitely what empiricism is. Moreover, I have just given you a set of epistemological beliefs. It's a set with a single element, and it in fact characterizes empiricism. I don't know what else to tell you.
No, please take an introduction to philosophy. Empericism is an epistemology, it has nothing to do with what exists which is an ontology. Ffs open Wikipedia or something. This is embarrassing Dunning-Kruger effect here.
A simple example is the axiom "private property exists and should be enforced with the law". There are societies without private property, and they are very different from the ones that do have it.
I tshould have been clearer about what I mean by the law. I'm treating the laws themselves as immutable, and referring to the process of their interpretation. Ie, the judgment that happens in a courtroom. Which laws should exist depends on moral arguments though. So the point does essentially stand.
The fact that people act out of mostly inscrutable, heuristic biological interest as a form of moral empiricism, does in fact count as out of bounds. I'm allowed to have a moral system that compels me not to reproduce, for instance. It's just not terribly likely (although not impossible) to be an effective reproductive strategy.
If you want to have a completely unrelated discussion about this, I'm more than willing, but I think you should probably refine the proposition "Private property exists".
However, I would argue moral philosophy is inherently built on unprovable axioms. The criticism "used to justify whatever they want" is actually a necessary feature to morality, because the whole point of morals is that not everyone shares your morals. If they were shared by everyone, they would just be objective truths.
At the bottom of the intersection between moral philosophy and politics is a firm foundation: "Most of us believe X and it doesn't matter if you disagree because we're willing to use force if you don't comply."
Nobody wrings their hands that a murderer doesn't share the unprovable moral axioms of those who oppose murder. If a somebody refuses to comply with the anti-murder laws, then force is is used to stop him. Problem solved, no need to consult the philosophers.
That's more the realm of law. Morals can exist outside of force, it's just that communities tend to form around common morals, and if you go against the moral grain you will be sowing dissonance in your area, possibly to the point where you'd want to move out (i.e. too alienated).
I would argue a great many locales in the USA are full of moral dissonance, and this is one of the major things holding us back from having strong communities.
different starting points can yield different results without producing a fundamental problem. It's like the score in a video game. But it is bad if a starting point can yield any result, or a result and its negation, at that point you provably might as well believe anything.
The score in a video game is like the sum of edge costs in a path within a graph. A "morality" is the entirety of the graph, the whole system. So it's apples to oranges.
> the only in bounds way to convince me to change my mind about them is to show me that my beliefs are inconsistent
Have you not examined your beliefs at all? No 100% consistent belief system has even been invented, because the different principles that allow advanced society to exist conflict with each other - duty to the collective, freedom, equality, etc.
Should the tolerant, tolerate people who are Nazis?
Should people be forced to serve in the army against their will to defent freedom?
Should you have the freedom to choose the more expensive lawyer, and if so should the law apply equally to the rich and the poor?
It's trivially easy to create a consistent belief system. Simply have no beliefs. The mutually exclusive properties are consistency and completeness (although these can be mutually satisfied in certain limited circumstances not likely to be relevant here).
You can have no belief at all about abortion. In that case, you are free to choose one as an axiom, although you are also free to not choose. If you choose a belief about abortion as an axiom and the result is that you end up believing both a thing and its negation, then you will need to abandon one of the necessary premises for that construction.
> Given this disagreement, it’s not entirely obvious to me that we should resolve it through the Supreme Court rather than having people debate with each other and vote for legislators who will pass laws that reflect their views.
This misunderstands the role of a Constitution. One of the central points of a Constitution is to mark certain things off-limits to democracy. People cannot debate with each other and vote for legislators who will pass laws that are forbidden by the constitution. It doesn't matter how many of them want to, or how solid the argument is. The Constitution says "nope, don't care, you cannot do that".
Even if every single voter in a state wanted to prevent anyone from ever saying "Turtles Suck!", the state cannot pass such a law. Even if there is vigorous disagreement over whether or not people should be allowed to say "Turtles Suck!", the Constitution says "don't care. You cannot pass a law prohibiting this."
So in the case discussed at the top of the article, the core question is whether the Constitution allows states to pass laws that ban abortion.
Roe said that the Constitution does not allow them to do so, because <reasons> (not meant sarcastically, just not worth enumerating them here).
As long as the Constitution is understood in that way, it makes no difference how much debate and disagreement there is about such laws: the Constitution says "you cannot pass laws that function in this way."
Now, of course, currently SCOTUS appears to be ready to present a different understanding of the Constitution in which it does not prevent states from passing laws that ban abortion (or otherwise restrict it). That makes no difference to the central point: if the Constitution is understood to prevent legislation that restricts behavior, the level of disagreement in society about that behavior is of no legal consequence.
> One of the central points of a Constitution is to mark certain things off-limits to democracy.
This only applied to federal portion of "democracy" until the 14th amendment which added restricting the states re Bill of Rights. 14th wasn't adopted until 1868. I don't think it's that central.
> The Due Process Clause prohibits state and local governments from depriving persons of life, liberty, or property without a fair procedure. The Supreme Court has ruled this clause makes most of the Bill of Rights as applicable to the states as it is to the federal government, as well as to recognize substantive and procedural requirements that state laws must satisfy. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
The Constitution is primarily about limiting the powers of the Federal government vis a vis State government, and then both vs people. As outlined by the 10th amendment.
> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The government can't pass laws against "Turtles Suck!" because that power is not granted them. It is reserved to The People. This is why "people" like youtube and twitter and cancel culture are free to censor and ban.
> > The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
> The government can't pass laws against "Turtles Suck!" because that power is not granted them.
I find this way of explaining things somewhat disingenuous. Very few powers are delegated to the federal government, but all of those that are are (because of the limitations of language) sufficiently ambiguous that they can interpreted as allowing all manner of legislation and regulation.
> > One of the central points of a Constitution is to mark certain things off-limits to democracy.
> This only applied to federal portion of "democracy" until the 14th amendment which added restricting the states re Bill of Rights. 14th wasn't adopted until 1868. I don't think it's that central.
(1) you're suggesting that before the 14th amendment, a state could pass a "law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." ? That seems preposterous.
(2) It seems generally accepted that the supremacy clause of Article VI of the constitution is the basis for the US Constitution covering state law.
(3) we live in 2022, and the US Consitution is as-it-is-today. The fact that something may have been added via an amendment (though above I dispute this) doesn't make it more or less "central".
> (1) you're suggesting that before the 14th amendment, a state could pass a "law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." ? That seems preposterous.
> Beginning with Gitlow v. New York (1925), the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to states—a process known as incorporation—through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
(Fun facts: "Gitlow was the first major First Amendment case that the American Civil Liberties Union argued before the Supreme Court." Also, although Freedom of speech was incorporated in this case, Gitlow's conviction was nonetheless upheld.)
You're welcome to read more about it yourself at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R... . Therein, you'll find references to fun cases like Barron v. Baltimore (1833), finding "State governments are not bound by the Bill of Rights" before the 14th amendment, and United States v. Cruikshank (1876), finding "The right of assembly under the First Amendment and the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment are only applicable to the federal government, not the states" even after the 14th amendment.
You may also find Article III of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1780) interesting:
> As the happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality; and as these cannot be generally diffused through a community, but by the institution of the public worship of God, and of public instructions in piety, religion and morality: Therefore, to promote their happiness and to secure the good order and preservation of their government, the people of this commonwealth have a right to invest their legislature with power to authorize and require, and the legislature shall, from time to time, authorize and require, the several towns, parishes, precincts, and other bodies politic, or religious societies, to make suitable provision, at their own expense, for the institution of the public worship of God, and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality, in all cases where such provision shall not be made voluntarily.
When do you think Massachusetts stopped taxpayer funding of churches?
> This only applied to federal portion of "democracy" until the 14th amendment
Just occured to me ... this just isn't the case for state constitutions. They serve the precise same role: marking out what is off-limits to "regular" democratic processes. To the extent that state and federal constitutions do not agree, there's some space for conflict and litigation there (or at least, there was), but the principle of A constitution (vs. "The Constitution") remains the same.
If Congress could get an amendment passed to the effect of "Abortion is a right", then the issue of how SCOTUS interprets the privacy argument becomes moot.
The likelihood of any amendment passing on any matter whatsoever seems about as close to zero as anything in the US political landscape. It's even smaller for one regarding abortion.
There's a bunch of people saying that it isn't traitorous to understand your opponent, but boy do people make you feel like it is. People like their strawmen because it reinforces the collective groupthink of their tribe, and anything that possibly humanizes the opponent also weakens the argument that your side is objectively correct. If you're interested in finding the truth then understanding your opponent is a critical step in finding the truth, but if you're interested in belonging to your tribe then understanding your opponent is anathema. Don't forget, you are not immune to propaganda, and you are not immune to tribalism, even if you know that you are not immune to either.
My solution to fostering cooperation is to switch to a voting system other than first past the post, so that political parties can be elected that are too small to have a majority on their own and must cooperate to govern, but that's just my opinion and I'm not sure it'll work at this point
It should be something more like: “how has general discourse become so polluted and toxified in its perceptions for it to appear that the following statement yields any factuality” …
I guess that doesn’t quite have the same ring to it though.
Become? I think one could argue it's less so than ever. Remember blasphemy and the inquisition? Do you think people were more tolerant prior to the 20th century, what about in the 1950s? I think until recently responses were pretty violent in some cases and could lead to quite some consequences. I don't really know, but I think it's worth considering.
Should read up a bit more on what the "reaction" to blasphemy was back in the day (at least some of the days, some of the places anyway). Tell you what, it wasn't people calling you an idiot on the internet.
I believe the charitable interpretation of "the reaction is the same" is "the reaction is the same for the time period." Comparing reactions modern reactions to blasphemy to "back in the day" reactions is an uncharitable interpretation.
Titles like this drive me nuts. Trying to start a conversation with a question that assumes a false premise reminds me of the way threads on 4chan are started. I get that headlines are supposed to be attention grabby, but using annoyance to attract attention is insufferably obnoxious.
see also: 'When are you going to stop beating your wife?'
It has often come across that way online (Twitter or forum threads). Anyone explaining (even if they say it is to help explain, not to agree with) or trying to understand the opposing sides perspective is almost the same as espousing it, and espousing it is worth brigading someone or attacking them.
It’s a ‘group purity’/‘rank discipline’ thing humans do when they feel threatened.
You’ll see plenty of folks now going after anyone claiming they are ‘apolitical’ or moderate/not on a side.
It results in folks having to pick sides publicly, but often the folks who agree with the opposition being silenced and often just voting the way they feel in quieter ways, while pretending to go along. de-facto boycotts (with no explanations), voting certain ways (Trump, whatever) without telling anyone they did it, etc.
the only people willing to stand up and espouse it publicly are those that feel they can profit off those unwilling to say it themselves or for whom due to mental defect or wealth or whatever they feel invulnerable to backlash.
I’ve personally seen groups in person do the same, but it takes somewhat extreme circumstances or toxic cultures.
I think it’s a reflex that comes out of the us vs them and ideological splintering inherent from a culture war. Which is what is happening in the US.
Broadly, it’s rural vs urban values colliding, and rural communities feeling the effects of severe brain drain and decreasing populations and wealth.
With the large shift of folks from the cities to more remote areas from Covid +
Remote work, I expect it won’t go as well longer term either as a lot of the echo chamber online seems to think. There will be mixing, but people tend to get more conservative after awhile in those areas too.
Just like the 70’s with free love and hippies transitioned into the 80’s being about money money and more conservative politics, times are a changing.
It's almost as if an entire platform is built on making sure the arguments are misconstrued and using buzz phrases like "science believer" and "anti-vaxer". It completely destroys what actual argument exists because it's using targeted language.
It's subversive and a direct influence on how politics are taken. You can be against unnecessary medication and be called an anti-vaxer. You can doubt a scientific conclusion without being anti-science.
You just cannot defend yourself against these accusations because they're triggers which purposely end discussions. These phrases are directly linked to terms which are generally universally agreed upon to be good natured. "Safe", "experts", "effective", "empathetic".
It's an attack on the language so that discourse is controlled and effectively one sided.
It's beneficial to the political class that wedge issues not get resolved. It keeps the populace arguing with each other rather than arguing with the state. It's also beneficial to news organizations. How much total ad revenue do you think has been earned across all political outlets since Roe v Wade was decided? I couldn't even guess, but I assume the issue has earned in the 10s if not 100s of millions in ad revenue over the last 49 or so years.
You understood the point though. Abortion is a third rail political topic so for most unenlightened people on either side of the issue, there is no middle ground.
The extreme positions are "a four-cell zygote should be protected from abortion", and "a baby being born may be aborted". Most citizens are in the middle ground.
Suppose that an omniscient moral Oracle decided to reveal that the correct point before which abortions should be allowed was indeed somewhere strictly between the two bookends you mention. (Let's say that a super-majority of the public are indeed somewhere in this "middle ground", and, in a secular democracy, that's as close to an omniscient moral Oracle as you might be able to find).
Now suppose that you are asked to decide where exactly that line is, taking into account this knowledge from the Oracle. But, imagine that at some point in the future, the Oracle might reveal where the line should have been drawn, and if your guess is a higher number than the Oracle's, then you are retrospectively guilty of manslaughter of all the zygotes/babies that were aborted at an age between your number and the Oracle's.
I suspect that in this hypothetical scenario, you would pick "a five-cell zygote should be protected from abortion" as the line.
Sure. Guilty of the deaths of the women who received unnecessarily dangerous and illegal abortions, guilty of the deaths in childbirth of women who otherwise would have had abortions, and guilty of something like (but less severe than) slavery for the women who had to gestate children which they didn't want to.
Someone could probably run the numbers and work out where the line should be drawn to balance out the costs of over- and under-estimating, given a uniform random distribution for where the Oracle's line could be.
I'm pro-choice, but from what I can tell, the pro-choicers who are eager to post about it on the Internet have no clue whatsoever about the actual positions of the people they're arguing against. They're also weirdly-big fans of very weak pro-choice arguments. It's really frustrating. Attempts to explain the other side, or to knock down bad arguments from "my" side so better ones can replace them, are indeed often met with unpleasantness.
I (100% pro-choice) think they just get bored with hammering on the bodily autonomy aspect, so they start making posts about what the bible "really" says about abortion and other weak, as you say, arguments. I really think they get tired of saying the same thing over and over, even though it's important. I know I do.
Perhaps "ignoring" means refusing to entertain it even for the sake of argument.
Bodily autonomy is probably a weak argument, because it assumes that the fetus isn't a living human being deserving of the same protections against slaughter that you and I enjoy.
If it is, bodily autonomy doesn't justify murder.
If it's not, then protecting it from abortion is absurd.
In neither case though, is bodily autonomy a compelling argument.
Disagree. You can turn up the personhood all the way and still, in a scenario where a child was dying and needed a kidney and their parent was the only available match, the parent could not be legally forced to donate it. Why? They own their body and can't be forced to put themselves through bodily harm to help someone else.
You seem to be saying that "personhood" should be the deciding factor of abortion rights, but "personhood" is never going to be resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Bodily autonomy can and should be.
I’m not sure the kidney analogy holds. Kidney donation refusal seems like an act of omission; whereas the active steps to abort a fetus are acts of commission. These are too distinct in ethical discussions.
Bodily autonomy is usually clear in most instances, but it might be overridden by personhood, so it doesn’t help resolve the debate to everybody’s satisfaction.
Great job. Now take it the other extreme: is it okay to kill a baby that had already been born, but was still attached by the umbilical cord? It’s still, technically, part of the mother’s body at that point.
So there’s someone to free at all? Then there is an issue of personhood here that you’re ignoring when it is inconvenient. Maybe for you bodily autonomy is more important than the personhood of a developing baby. But that IS a moral determination, a choice of your value system, and it is entirely reasonable for others to disagree on moral terms, making this hardly a clear cut issue.
Ok, I agree there, folks will always be at odds re:personhood and the morality of terminating a pregnancy. That's why I don't even bother with "it's a clump of cells" anymore regardless of my beliefs - it's a moot point in the face of our own rights over our own bodies. Codifying one "person"s rights as more important than another is wrong. Using the law to force anyone to suffer bodily harm for the sake of anyone else, even in a case of life or death, is wrong.
My thing with the hypothetical kid needing a kidney wasn't that a parent refusing to donate would be a good person, it was that by principle of law it would be immoral to force them to do it. That was taking the "pro-life" perspective all the way to "it's a whole-ass person" and showing that the concept of bodily autonomy still protects the parent, even if you don't agree with what they do. I don't mind if you think I'm a monster for getting an abortion, I just want to ensure that that choice is there for those who want or need it.
I get that it's a really intense issue for a lot of people, but all I wish is that folks didn't feel like whether someone else carries their pregnancy to term is a criticism of what they've done or want to do. It's truly not. I know for myself I have a list a mile long of reasons I would never carry or raise a child; some are personal and some aren't, but I am still happy when my loved ones welcome a new member into their family.
I’m interested to know if there’s a term for this phenomenon. I too find myself frequently engaging “against” my own side, out of a sincere desire to strengthen it and a sensitivity to how its weaker arguments reflect poorly on me.
I used to be pro-choice. I think a lot of women (and men) are because of the fear they might be in a position of needing an abortion themselves, or other abstract/potential concerns. Framed as a right to body autonomy, pro-choice seemed the obvious position of any feminist, and how could you possibly believe otherwise?
Then I was in the position of having to make the decision myself. Now, years removed, I still don't feel comfortable posting details online, even under a pseudonym. But suffice to say my partner and I were in a position of having to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy that we had really wanted, due to unexpected medical news. Suddenly all those clever pro-choice arguments seemed hollow, now that we were in the position of making the decision ourselves. This was a real thing. She had a heartbeat. We watched her move and react on the ultrasound. We had, for weeks, imbued our hopes and dreams into this unborn child. We could terminate, but it'd be our call. We'd be pulling the trigger. In that moment I finally understood and emotionally connected with the pro-life position and "abortion is murder!" slogans.
Now I recognize it is a much more complex, multi-faceted issue than I ever previously thought. Every now and then I look and my daughter and think: I almost killed you. How could I have possibly done that? I get the arguments on both sides of the issue, and I don't think that there is any simple solution. It now frustrates me to no end to see people being very loud and very vocal about what are essentially straw man versions of the opposing side's arguments, and vilifying anyone who thinks differently or has lived a different experience. Whatever happened to civil society?
I understand you have strong feelings about whether you wanted an abortion, and that's totally understandable and I'm glad you are happy with the choice you made. But that's not at odds whatsoever with referring to yourself as "pro-choice". (Most folks that get abortions already have kids, so it's not like everyone has to pick "abortion" or "no abortion" for life.) I had an abortion back in the aughts, and never once regretted it, but that doesn't mean I think it was the right choice for you or anyone else that decided to continue their pregnancy. I'm glad we had the choice.
I believe the society ought to be involved in the decision to intentionally kill a person, whether we are talking about capital punishment, euthanasia, homicide, or abortion. This is the social contract we live on: the state takes the role of defending the defenseless.
Note that I am not saying that abortion should be illegal or unavailable. We still put serial killers to death, pull the plug with advance directives, allow for self defense, and we ought too allow abortions when the fetus hasn’t cross the threshold into being a human being (which is when?!?) or in carved out exemptions like rape, incest, life of the mother, etc. As far as I’m aware this is a rather centrist position.
The point of my story of my lived experience is that it made me realize the mainstream “pro-life” position is not trying to attack the autonomy of the woman (which is a straw man caricature of their view) but to be the defender of the baby, of which they feel needs but is lacking equal protection under the law.
That didn’t make me pro-life, and I don’t think I said I was. I said it is complicated and nuanced, and I can see the arguments made in good faith on both sides. It is easy to attack a straw man. It is much harder to reconcile with the steel-manned belief of the other side and not walk away without some certainty shaken. I still feel women deserve to have a right to an abortion when needed, but it is also not an unconditional right: society is allowed some say in determining rules and guidelines, just like other medical practices which affect the life of another are regulated. This isn’t a defiance of your bodily autonomy as a woman; it’s recognition that the child growing inside you is (after some point) a distinct human being with its own right to bodily autonomy. “Your right to swing your fist ends at my face” and all that.
One thing I’ve come to realize over the years - words are rarely about what they seem on the surface or their contents, but almost always:
1) trying to convince or manipulate someone else or themselves to their benefit, either to agree with them (which feels good), or do something they want (which feels good)
2) self awareness, especially on self mental health, is in extremely short supply.
Same here. I find it very annoying that on most major issues, the sides argue at right angles to one another. They say the other side is wrong without saying what they believe is wrong. Anti-abortion activists don't address the issue of bodily autonomy and pro-abortion activists don't address the issue of the definition of personhood. If you're like me and settled on strictly-consistent stances on the topic you find yourself with some extraordinarily unpopular opinions, to both sides.
If we were debating at what term we should allow abortions until then I think there is room for discussion. But the extreme position of "no abortions at all at any term" I'm simply uninterested in discussion. It's not that I don't understand their thinking. I simply do not agree and thus do not care to discuss or debate it.
Here is the thing, the majority of people who actually reason and think about these topics have heard the same arguments now for 20 years or more. There is nothing new being said, there is no movement on the position of people on either side, and thus there is no more discussion. All you see is propaganda, which I don't care to engage with. So I vote and donate so that "my side" wins and that's that.
I think a sizeable percentage of pro-lifers have not heard a coherent argument for Evictionism and have never worked their way through the violinist example. I’m not saying it will change their deeply held ideological beliefs but I highly doubt anyone has heard all arguments under the sun on this issue. I agree there is too much low-grade propaganda and a lack of good debate that makes it tempting to check out of the discourse entirely. I think we need to learn how to improve the discourse though as democracy ceases to function if people check out of nearly every issue and turn almost everything tribal.
Well see that's the thing. What makes killing a human murder? I'm of the opinion that the human mind is what makes a human more valuable than a lower animal. Killing a cloned body with no cerebrum wouldn't be murder. I'm forced to concede, however, that that belief doesn't give me a reason that newborns should be more protected than fetuses as it takes months for infants to begin demonstrating consciousness and memory. If consciousness isn't the dividing line, then what is? You could say the ability to sustain life on one's own is the dividing line, but then that line is always moving. A one year old infant will die without care. A thousand years ago a six month old fetus would almost certainly die shortly after birth, but today the survival rate is nearly 100%. With today's technology a 24 week fetus has between a 60 and 70 percent chance of survival. Is killing a 24 week fetus murder? If murder is contingent on its ability to survive with modern technology, what happens as technology pushes that age smaller and smaller?
Adopting a Least Convenient Possible World principle makes the questions even harder. If you could push a button to have a Star Trek style transporter instantly and painlessly teleport the fetus into an artificial womb, should you still be allowed to kill it instead?
I think "What makes killing a human murder" is the wrong path to go down when it comes to arguments for/against abortion. It's so politically charged and yet impossible to clearly discuss in any significant detail, thus the situation we find ourselves in.
I think it's better to just accept that abortion is prematurely terminating a life and thus the primary consideration should be the cost the parents and/or society can pay. Can society afford the cost of raising unwanted children and of the cycle of abuse that often comes along? and similarly, can society afford the cost of the lifestyle that makes people choose abortion to focus on other things? These things are much easier to discuss. As a 'bonus' this framework also handles the justification for countries which have legal abortion except with restrictions like barring abortions after sex determination.
There seems to be a large agreement that abortion within the first trimester is acceptable, so I think that while it's terrible that it has to happen, society on average currently puts the line between the first and second trimesters for where the costs of both sides balance out, such that even if the fetus could be teleported into an artificial womb, an unconditional abortion should be acceptable. I think the artificial womb point only works if it also somehow erases society's burden of raising the child.
I used to think that "abortion is rarely a happy decision but is still sometimes necessary" was the consensus position so it was pretty odd to me when I first became aware of the state of debate over it in the US.
> I think "What makes killing a human murder" is the wrong path to go down when it comes to arguments for/against abortion.
I guess since this is your opinion I can't say it's wrong, but I can strongly suggest that this opinion is wrong. Is abortion the killing of a child? If it is not then why does a state like California have laws written about double homicide that say:
> defines murder as the unlawful killing of a human being or a fetus with malice aforethought. [0]
If we already have laws like this in a state as liberal as California, then clearly the argument that an abortion is murder is reasonable.
Put another way, would you tell a mother grieving for her miscarriage that she didn't actually lose a child? She just lost a fetus after all, so it's not like there's much to grieve about.
Or would you say that a woman that had her unborn baby killed while having some sort of altercation or accident isn't entitled to prosecute the perpetrator? If she has the right to pursue legal action against somebody, then there is clearly some sort of "precedent" about an unborn child having rights. This is an argument that can and should be explored further instead of dismissed since it's a "touchy subject". The law is full of hard truths, and it's our responsibility to explore these to make sure we're not carrying out injustice.
These were already discussed, already ruled on, and already decided. Just because you don't like where society landed doesn't mean "we haven't explored it" and it doesn't mean that your wishes are some sort of "hard truth."
These sorts of inconsistencies in the law can easily be sorted out. If the fetus is not a human with rights yet then if another person terminates it (against the mothers wishes) then you've clearly harmed the mother. This is literally the same argument for abortion, under some development threshold of X months, its called healthcare.
As I said, this same discussion has happened for the last 20 years. I'm never going to be swayed to your side on this. Maybe this is all novel for you. But nothing you said is new to me and I just don't care to debate it or discuss it. I completely understand you point of view, but I disagree and will continue to disagree and fight for women's health and rights.
By saying that it's the wrong path, I'm not trying to deny that it's a human (or at least a potential human) being killed, what I'm saying is that asking that question isn't too relevant to the issue.
I think that California treats killing a pregnant woman as double homicide to make it a harsher punishment rather than the other way around.
>Put another way, would you tell a mother grieving for her miscarriage that she didn't actually lose a child? She just lost a fetus after all, so it's not like there's much to grieve about.
I think it's slightly ironic you would suggest this, because my position is based on the belief that abortions are often just as emotionally difficult for parents as miscarriages. In which case it's equally insensitive to tell a woman who just had to abort a child from rape (or alternatively, due to a life threatening condition) that she is a murderer.
To further clarify my position, we can look at the two answers to the question "Is it murder to kill a fetus?":
1. It is murder. In this case, the surface level position would be that abortion should be illegal. But then we get to details and usually people are fine with allowing it in certain cases. Thus making murder acceptable in specific circumstances, making abortion about which circumstances are acceptable.
2. It isn't murder. In this case, the surface level position would be that abortion should be legal. But then we run into the examples you presented. Thus once again making abortion about which circumstances are unacceptable.
So in the end, as far as abortion is concerned, it does not matter if it is or is not murder, because the specific issue to be figured out is which circumstances are acceptable/unacceptable in a practical way (rather than the unrealistic ideological proposals that usually fly around due to the simple answers to "Is it murder to kill a fetus?" both being very extreme).
When I re-read your comment a second time I can see what your intent was a lot better. In this case it looks like we do agree and you raise a lot of good points. I do wonder whether we need to ask the question whether the cost is on society for raising the child though. Why can't we promote safe sex more? And if two consenting adults decide to not use condoms or any other birth control, should the impetus be on them instead of society in general (condom failures and other birth control mishaps aside)? But that's a separate argument and not part of what we were talking about here.
I think reading through a lot of these other comments definitely got to me, and put me in a negative emotional state by the time I got to your comment. But after a couple hours, and re-reading your comments it seems like you're taking a well balanced approach, and I think that I could learn a thing or two from that :)
I'm certainly in favor of promoting more safe sex (I would go as far as to say that this should be an important part of any abortion legalization policy) and I generally do agree that consenting adults should be responsible if they don't use protection. But the issue to me is that often it ends up also punishing the child, and while aborting the child is also a punishment for the child, I think it's the more acceptable solution since I don't really see a societal and cultural push (especially from the people generally pushing for an abortion ban) for alternative solutions for raising children not wanted by their parents.
After all, no matter how much we teach safe sex, some people will still make mistakes and often pro-lifers treat having to raise the child as a fitting punishment for the parents, which obviously isn't all that respectful of the child's life either.
And yes, I can understand getting into that mindset, which is why I generally avoid these discussions (on reddit for example) :)
It gets pretty frustrating to see people emotionally arguing for extreme positions without attempting to at least understand the other position's emotions.
And nazis literally invented rockets science that allowed us to explore solar system. So whats Your point? Because clearly you are not seeing that people are not rational but rather rationalizing. Which sometimes leads them to invent useful things like empiricism, and other times things that are not so useful (ideologies, religions etc)
You know followers of <insert any random thing> invented <any random thing>, right?
There's no dots to connect between one thing and the other. Someone can be a hardcore Catholic and invent an abortion device or an atheist could come up with a fancy new way of manufacturing crosses. Their stance on religion is irrelevant.
In this case, there are lots of dots. There are a disproportionate amount of Catholic priests represented within the scientific sphere, including the vast majority of famous ones.
Can you post some examples? I know the anti-choice crowd has a history of assassination, arson, bombings, death threats, kidnappings, harassment/stalking, and vandalism...
Yeah I found that first article right away: It's really all that exists. The second article is just speculation (nothing actually happened).
There's nothing violent coming from the Left (vandalism isn't violence). There may be violence coming (per the second article) but as yet, the Right (conservatives) still have a monopoly on it. I stand by what I said.
In short, based on the evidence: Anyone claiming "violence from the Left" is just making things up.
First of all: What a terribly-made PDF... It's so compressed I can't even read the text at the top.
Secondly, it's just from an awful source: The Family Research Council (FRC) is designated as a hate group (for good reason!) by the Southern Poverty Law Center:
Even after all that it has yet another problem: It uses loaded terms like, "unborn children" to cover the entire gamut of zygote, embryo, fetus, etc. Is it really that impossible for the anti-choice movement to make a reasoned argument? To cite legitimate science? To present a clear (readable, haha) basis for this position that doesn't involve religion or tradition?
The problem is the OP's claim of "legal extremism" is (apparently) founded in the Family Research Council's definition of "extreme" which is... Extreme. It'd be like a Confederate citing the reason for the Civil War as the North's "extreme" laws regarding slavery.
This argument works both ways: Believing that the FRC is a hate group just because the SPLC says so is like believing the Union is a hate group just because the Confederacy says so.
I wasn't aware that unborn children was a loaded term... It seems to me that they may be using that term to refer to "the entire gamut of zygote, embryo, fetus, etc.". I know, it's crazy we wrap up ideas like this into a pithy little phrase. It's almost as if the English language has short phrases that are useful to discuss things at a broader level. Crazy right?
> Is it really that impossible for the anti-choice movement to make a reasoned argument?
Well what is a reasoned argument? Google says that reason is "a cause, explanation, or justification for an action or event.". So it seems to me that if somebody offers any explanation, that fulfills a reasoned argument. But perhaps you mean well-reasoned. And that is a subjective argument contingent on what you mean by well.
> To cite legitimate science?
Yes you can argue pro life and cite legitimate science [1]. But like this article says, you'll probably pull out your prejudice and immediately dismiss any scientific evidence that supports pro life. In addition to that, science is funded by people with agendas. Like the article also says:
>> As often as not, scientists dive into the debate, taking funding from pro-life or pro-choice organizations or openly advancing an ideological position. This, too, has consequences: It casts doubt on the validity and integrity of any researcher in bioethics-related fields. “Anybody with money can get a scientist to say what they want them to say,” Largent says. “That’s not because scientists are whores. It’s because the world is a really complex place, and there are ways that you can craft a scientific investigation to lend credence to one side or another.”
So claiming illegitimate science is just a No True Scotsman's fallacy. A true scientist would never come to a pro life conclusion, therefore you must be a false scientist.
> that doesn't involve religion or tradition?
An atheist's point of view seems like it would not involve either religion or tradition [0].
I read those two articles: The first one is along the lines of, "I'm here! I exist!" and doesn't make any arguments at all. The second one is much more interesting! However, it isn't making any case at all one way or the other.
Though I will say this: The Atlantic article does a pretty good job summing up the stance of the pro-life scientists:
> “There had been, a long time ago, this mantra from our friends on the other side of this issue that, while a little one is developing in its mother’s womb, it’s not a baby,” she says. “It’s really hard to make that argument when you see and hear a heartbeat and watch little hands moving around.”
If the entire basis of their argument is, "this is a baby!" then it's not going to win over very many pro-choice folks because they know it's a baby. It's a developing human life. Absolutely! But then again: So what? Why is that special? It certainly hasn't been born yet. It can't even feel pain until about 29-30 weeks.
Sooner or later we'll have completely artificial wombs and when that day comes the folks (or AIs) operating them will probably regularly discard fetuses that aren't growing how they'd like. They'll also probably have machines that can produce (or manufacture!) eggs and sperm with whatever genetics are desired. At that point a fertilized egg will be viable the moment it's fertilized. Does that mean we have to give it a social security number and treat it like it's complete human? Absolutely not!
Being anti-choice doesn't have a basis in science or reason: It's a moral position. That's what's wrong with debate from that side: They pretend it's not and it comes off as super disingenuous. You can make a well-reasoned, logical argument from that premise of, "here's why we think it's morally wrong" but that's never where it goes. It's always about heartbeats or sucking of thumbs or whatever a developing human can do at various stages.
Personally I use it because it’s descriptive. Hard lines being drawn, people unwilling to even talk with others based on ideological labels, economic sanctions against ‘offenders’, propaganda clearly targeted at specific identifiable groups used to raise funds and attack the ‘other’ side, fear and loathing/us vs them.
I have an aunt who for economic reasons moved to what she called ‘Trump country’, and she legitimately feared for her life. She got death threats on Facebook when she tried to argue with some of her neighbors on ideological lines. She fell and hurt herself really badly, and everyone pitched in and has been helping her recover though.
I haven’t seen it used much anywhere else with any regularity, but I have no interest in following any propaganda outlets anywhere and gave up regularly reading any news 6 months or so ago.
> Hard lines being drawn, people unwilling to even talk with others based on ideological labels, economic sanctions against ‘offenders’, propaganda clearly targeted at specific identifiable groups used to raise funds and attack the ‘other’ side, fear and loathing/us vs them.
You're describing today's conservatives. Liberals seem to be always willing to entertain the discussion of basically anything. It's sort of a core tenet of liberalism... Open discussion and debate.
Where liberals shut discussions down is when they ask for evidence or at least sound reasoning and aren't presented with anything. That's the logical point where you can't really discuss something anymore.
I've seen conservatives get extremely frustrated that liberals won't entertain their religious myths or traditions as justification for any given policy. "They just don't listen!" No, the conservative just revealed that the entire basis for whatever they believe in isn't founded in reality. No amount of arguing is going to sway them so there's no point in discussing it anymore... "Agree to disagree" is about as far as you can go.
Clearly you’ve never tried to talk to someone on the liberal side about if what they want will actually work or produce an outcome that is desirable for the rest of the population! Hah.
SF is a prime example of when someone can use reason and argument and ‘helping others’ to convince people to do things that just don’t actually work.
Conservatives definitely have a bent that most intellectuals and folks in tech find offensive, and for reasons that are often due to fundamental differences in worldview and environment.
But a lot of the rational arguments for things going on right now, for those who have actual experience in the real world, are bullshit if you start challenging the assumptions. But that is hard, be will get you nailed. And frankly, no one like that is going to try to do that right now because it isn’t even about rationality. It’s a different set of beliefs and feelings with attached justifications.
But, any sizable group of people randomly selected will have similar differences. The reason we have social rules, is people have found over time when to talk and not talk about certain topics ,because for a society to function, we need to agree to some common ground and not actively antagonize each other over these fundamental differences.
Because you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into, and very, very few people have actually reasoned themselves into much of anything.
No amount of talking is likely to change anyones mind about these things.
For instance, I believe that the best way to resolve a problem is to talk openly about it, directly discuss the range of impacts this problem will have, discuss our own capabilities and successes/failures in resolving the problem openly, and then prioritize it against other open problems and likely risks.
That makes me great for engineering leadership it turns out. Near as I can tell, also emergency response.
It apparently makes me absolutely terrifying to a decent swath of the population, especially when they are screwing up and don’t know how to stop.
So I’ve learned that I need to not do this to certain people if I want them to not run away screaming. It also means I’ve learned some people are useful to partner with and some people are radioactive bad to do so with.
And in a society, especially a country so diverse and over such an area, that means picking which fights to have, and dialing back the rhetoric, but that requires both sides to do that.
If one side won’t, then it is a war. No one can maintain sensible boundaries with appeasement - which is fundamentally different than compromise.
>Liberals seem to be always willing to entertain the discussion of basically anything. It's sort of a core tenet of liberalism... Open discussion and debate.
I'm not sure that is true anymore. Liberals have extremist wings (like Antifa) just like conservatives do. People making liberal arguments now spew the same venom that only conservative groups did 10 years ago. At least in my experience.
I think part of the problem is the news likes to take extreme examples of anything and present it as the norm. I have discussions over policy with people all the time and they are quite enlightening.
> Liberals have extremist wings (like Antifa) just like conservatives do.
OK where's the anti-fascist extremism here in the US (which is the relevant region of this discussion) that's shutting down discussions?
If you look at Wikipedia's extensive (but non-exhaustive) page about Terrorism in the United States there's just a single entry for an Antifa activist:
* Anti-abortion violence
* Antisemitism
* Right-wing and anti-government extremism
* White nationalism and white supremacy
There's other topics covered as well but I chose those because they seem to be most aligned with today's conservatives. There's not really, "both sides" here. Today's conservatives (aka "the right") seem to have a monopoly on violence as well as "shutting down discussion" of various topics...
I said extremist wings, not terrorist. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you are defending left wing extremism by pointing out that there is more right wing extremism. I don't dispute that there is more right wing extremism, but you seem to be ignoring left wing extremism. I'm of the opinion that extremism and violence for any cause is unjust.
>There's not really, "both sides" here. Today's conservatives (aka "the right") seem to have a monopoly on violence as well as "shutting down discussion"
Only if you completely ignore the actions of one side. There were quite a few left wing extremist actions in 2020 during the BLM/police brutality protests, including rioting, arson, and CHAZ. You might believe in what they are fighting for (as do I) but I certainly don't condone some of the tactics employed.
>Today's conservatives (aka "the right") seem to have a monopoly on violence as well as "shutting down discussion" of various topics...
As I pointed out, they certainly don't have a monopoly on violence, unless you are intentionally ignoring it. You might want to check your biases and understand that extremism on either side stands to destabilize our civilization and push us into barbarism. You shouldn't excuse or ignore either.
On the whole, I think you’re right. It is important however to recognize that it is not what the relevant demographics see.
Similar to the older and more rural generation in Russia, what they see on all the media they know is cherry picked examples of the craziest most outlandish behavior they are told is ‘the others’, and which shows things that they often had to turn down or wish they could do, but sacrificed to make something that ‘worked’ in their environment.
And because they can’t know something they are not exposed to or shown, and it is a convenient tool by politicians to stoke up anger, resentment, etc. and these areas are quite poor and have lost most of their young people but still have economic and voting power….
On the liberal side, it’s getting more strident as conservatives have been getting some of what they want, and the media and feed algorithms are more than happy to play the same outlandish examples of ‘the others’ and tell them how at risk everything is (which is not false many times!), which just goes to more extremism.
The conservative base has in been more violent in large part I think because they’ll fall back on what traditionally works instead of trying to reason with folks to get what they want. Especially if it sounds terrible.
Personally, I’m a realist and try to look beyond whatever someone claims to want or be able to deliver to the long term track record it has of success, and what the trade offs are. Because there are always trade offs.
Having babies and giving birth sucks for instance, and doing a decent job as a parent requires long term sacrifice, physical and earnings, and a huge amount of time and energy spent towards stuff that is incredibly valuable and necessary in the long term for everyone but is also often incredibly unpleasant in the short term. For instance, Thu and Fri last week I spent mopping up projectile vomit and scrubbing diarrhea out of the carpet because my youngest got sick from daycare.
Having fun instead sounds way better!
A society without children however is dead in a generation or two. And someone has to do the work.
If someone won’t do what you want because it sucks for them, what would the person trying to make it happen do? Especially someone without a lot of resources? Well, they make it so they don’t have a choice to do it, if they can.
Even if that means banning all the fun things you’d otherwise be doing.
The cities don’t understand, because the cities have too many people. The rural areas understand, because everyone who could left for the city.
Antifa[1] generally aren't Liberals, except in the overly-broad definition where anyone who opposed fascism is antifa. American Antifa is based on the German Antifa, which is explicitly leftist and anticapitalist, and the majority of self-identified American Antifa are the same.
GP is talking about political Liberalism[2], of which open discussion is a core tenet. US politics has muddied the term "liberalism" to be essentially meaningless, but as far as words have actual meanings, GP is correct.
(The word you're looking for might be "progressives", if you're trying to describe "people left of what the US calls conservatives")
>GP is talking about political Liberalism[2], of which open discussion is a core tenet.
It's really not though. Here are some issues off the top of my head that many modern liberals, at least on the internet, have no desire to honestly discuss. By discuss I mean listen and consider and understand the other side's opinion in good faith:
- Abortion
- Effectiveness of gun control
- Maybe Trump wasn't a Russian asset
- Transexual rights v. women's rights
- Drug Policy
- Benefits of free market capitalism
Most don't even understand the actual counter arguments and just understand the counter arguments as other liberals explain it to them. It seems both sides are in their corners and just shouting past each other. This is the polarization every is talking about.
I think liberals see conservatives as a caricature of that conservatives actually are and vice versa. It reminds me of the same propaganda/caricatures that the US used during WWII to try to make the Japanese and German armies look foolish and weak.
>By discuss I mean listen and consider and understand the other side's opinion in good faith
Based on everything I've seen on the internet, that's a definition that sets the bar so high it's almost comical. Especially when it comes to "culture war" topics like you've listed. Very, very few individuals are willing to actually try to understand what their opponents believe, on either side of the issue, and the exceptions are truly exceptional.
That being said, the Liberal concept of "open discussion" doesn't require anyone to actually understand their opponents'' positions. In fact, it implicitly discourages it. That's because the purpose of open debate, according to Liberal ideal, is to allow "everyone's voice to be heard" in the "marketplace of ideas" so that "the best ideas will naturally float to the top". If one really believes that their idea is the best, they have a vested internet in making sure it is heard loudly and frequently in that market. You're correct that this has led to polarization, because that is precisely a failure mode of these Liberal ideals.
A couple of side notes:
- "Liberal" isn't a synonym for "Democrat", nor is it a strict antonym of "conservative". A lot of the Republican platform is and has been Liberalism/neoliberalism (though this has lessened in the past few decades, especially in the post-Trump era). Indeed, lots of (pre-Trump) Republicans are Liberals/neoliberals, though many would be offended to be called that due to the aforementioned American muddying of the term. (Don't ask me to define the distinction between classical- and neo- liberalism, though, it never had a fully accepted distinction)
- "Transexual" hasn't been the preferred term for over a decade. That and the fact that you listed it in opposition to "women's rights" makes me think that you aren't actually coming to these discussions to "understand the other side's opinion in good faith", on that idea or others, and that might be affecting your perception of what these "liberals on the internet" are willing to do.
>(Don't ask me to define the distinction between classical- and neo- liberalism, though, it never had a fully accepted distinction)
Neoliberalism is an economic policy favored by both parties, it's not a socialistic policy. It leans towards unfettered capitalism. This philosophy is why we have things like outsourcing, globalization and NAFTA, things that significantly disadvantage the American worker. I didn't understand it for a while myself.
>"Liberal" isn't a synonym for "Democrat", nor is it a strict antonym of "conservative".
Yes, as I understand it, liberalism is change, conservatism is status quo. Personally I'm liberal on some policies and conservative on others. To me conservative could simply mean, "I haven't heard a good plan yet, I'll wait until I hear one." On the topics I'm conservative on, I could be persuaded to change if a plan was actually presented, rather than a vague concept (like universal healthcare, UBI, student loan debt forgiveness, etc). The only candidate in recent memory who ever discussed and laid out a plan was Bernie, and I thought it was good, well thought one one that I could support. The only issue is it would have to be a gradual implementation as to not upturn the economy. Unfortunately our current implementation of quasi-universal healthcare seems to be benefit the medical and insurance industry far more than the citizenry, though there are good things about it for the citizenry as well.
>"Transexual" hasn't been the preferred term for over a decade. That and the fact that you listed it in opposition to "women's rights" makes me think that you aren't actually coming to these discussions to "understand the other side's opinion in good faith"
I don't keep up on the latest trends of vernacular, they change like the tides. I'm also older, so people tend to stick with the terms they learn. (i.e. Blacks, vs African Americans, vs Colored People (bad) vs People of Color (good?!), and other labels that go back even further). Out of curiosity, what is the current preferred nomenclature for what used to be "transexual?" Also, who decides? Isn't that what the T in LGBTQ stands for? You should let them know they need change their acronym.
FWIW, just because your circle of people want to call potato chips "crisps," doesn't mean you should expect everyone to immediately switch, or even know you've decided to describe something differently. You certainly shouldn't assume they aren't coming in good faith because they don't keep up with your group's trends, that seems fairly egocentric. An example of this would be, "You called Pluto a planet, therefore you aren't arguing in good faith about science." Seems a strange conclusion when put in a different perspective. Instead of discussing the topic, you shut down the conversation because I used a term that was common only 10 years ago. That somewhat proved my original point, though I don't believe that was your intention.
Anyway, I seemed to have gotten side tracked in the long and rambling post. I think my original point was liberals have extremists too, and liberals aren't as open to discussion as they used to be and are quick to find reason to shut down discussion (like not using the current, possibly obscure nomenclature). Extremism isn't a political condition, it's a human condition and should be shunned regardless of political goal.
>I don't keep up on the latest trends of vernacular [..] Out of curiosity, what is the current preferred nomenclature for what used to be "transexual"?
The preferred term is "transgender", or just "trans (people)". Which might not seem like a huge distinction, but most of the people you'd be having a discussion consider "transexual" to be at least mildly offensive, due to various implications that aren't important to go over here. The point is that very few people use it except for much older trans people, aside from much older trans people who you likely won't find on the internet much.
There's nothing inherently wrong with using the antiquated term - the euphemism tread is a real phenomenon, as you pointed out. But using a term that almost no one on the other side uses (and claiming no knowledge) is an indication that you haven't actually put in much effort at all in listening to and understanding the other side. Especially when your defense amounts to "I haven't checked for 10 years". When your specific criticism of liberals is that they don't "listen and consider and understand", if you and the peoples' arguments you view don't even spend enough time looking at the opposing viewpoints to be aware of which terms they'd generally prefer not to be referred to by, I would hope you can see why the people opposing them wouldn't be motivated to do the same.
I didn't say these "shut down the conversation" (in fact, I think I spent enough words elaborating on everything else that that is a particularly unfair and non-understanding accusation), but rather to illustrate the reasons why you're saying the polarization you do.
That being said, I am shutting down the conversation here, since I don't want to get into another HN comments flame war, and I've already pushed that line an unwise amount. You're welcome to reply further and get in the last word, if you'd like.
If you're interested in continuing this topic, I'd urge you to read Scott Alexander's blog posts on Steelmanning and the culture war, as he has much smarter and more articulate things to say about it than I do. I linked one of them elsewhere in this thread, I think it's the most relevant:
>The preferred term is "transgender", or just "trans (people)".
Yes, now that you said it, I remember.
>But using a term that almost no one on the other side uses (and claiming no knowledge) is an indication that you haven't actually put in much effort at all in listening to and understanding the other side.
It's not the other side to me, I'm all for equal civil rights of all people. I'm vehemently against violence or bullying against other people and believe people should be given the benefit of the doubt and judged by the actions of their character. My only concern with any aspect of the trans movement is people born as males and aging past puberty competing with females in female sports. I don't think it's fair to females, they are just too strong biologically. Females have been fighting for rights for over a century now and this particular aspect seriously encroaches on that. We have men's and women's sports for a reason. It can also be extremely dangerous in contact sports.
I'm sure I got some of the nomenclature wrong, but you get the idea.
>That being said, I am shutting down the conversation here, since I don't want to get into another HN comments flame war, and I've already pushed that line an unwise amount. You're welcome to reply further and get in the last word, if you'd like.
I understand, I was about to do the same. Thanks for the decency in our discussion, I learned some stuff.
That's your own characterization, and not universal. I've personally seen the term more often in non-conservative forums and circles. Not that it matters to your point, which I get and agree with.
They probably meant historically. If I remember correctly it was coined as a part of a wider strategy decades ago. Of course, it is a catchy term and is being used widely now.
Similarly the term political correctness was initially a term used in jest by the left I think.
Regarding this phenomenon, it may be that you don't see that term in conservative forums because they don't want to use it, whether because it telegraphs their intent or they don't want to use the same words as liberals (this increasingly drastic polarization of language is a key point of Lingua Tertii Imperii... A book I started reading before 2015 and had to quit reading because frankly it bothered me how much it started to resemble current times in the US). So its absence isn't altogether surprising.
In my experience, it tends to be used more often by left-wing critics accusing conservatives of engaging in a culture war. The conservative advances a position, and the left-wing person responds that the position is chosen not on its merits but to further the aims of a culture war. It's a way of not having to respond to the substance of a position.
Then again, I suppose I have an availability bias. I only see the term used by people I'm paying attention to.
The term originated in the German "Kulturkampf", which was between the Imperial German state of the 1870s and the Catholic Church. In the US, it was introduced twice, neither time by conservatives.
Wedge issues tend to elicit emotional replies. The algorithms that are used to maximize profit tend toward showing the most emotional replies first. This positive feedback loop rapidly leads to a bifurcation of the audience into opposing camps, while drowning out more rational discourse.
The title article and all of the responses here don't capture the argument that if abortion is illegal that means that it still happens, but young women will die (and the poor young women who can't be quietly flown to another jurisdiction where it is legal).
And I think the bigger problem is that we allow people to have nonsense opinions in polite society. The idea that human life begins at conception and that undifferentiated cells are human life worth more than the life of the mother is just garbage. That isn't really defensible. And that isn't my problem and I'm not going to be particularly apologetic about it and I don't need to see eye to eye with anyone else. They constructed this ridiculous argument that I can never in a million years agree with and so I won't. I literally can't compromise with that position, and it is a position that I would argue is crafted deliberately to avoid compromise. Ain't my problem. And if you're going to argue that it should be my problem and that I don't get how we need civility and tolerance I think you're the bigger problem.
Keep punching the wrong direction though.
And where's the outrage over the anti-abortion activists painting their opposition as supporting abortion uncritically into the third trimester? There's nobody reasonable out there who believes that. Yet you'll find people who find abortion troubling and want it done quickly and can't agree with it being in the third trimester except to save the life of the mother who consider themselves to be against abortion. They're actually pro-abortion/pro-choice because that's the way everyone thinks. Make it quick and easy and get it done in the first trimester ASAP (and use contraception so ideally it never gets there and stop using the rhythm method or pulling out because that's how you wind up needing abortions, and use the morning after pill in the case of contraceptive failure or rape). Most pro-abortion/choice people already ARE at the compromise point between the two extreme endpoints of the possible debate.
People don't want to understand. Earnestly listening means you might change your mind. There is nothing to be gained "strategically" by listening. Claiming to want open discourse and free discussion is a tactic promoted by those who would lose any popular poll or vote. Further, most people don't hold their opinions because they've thought things through. They are told "good people believe A," and they want to be seen as (and think of them self as) a good person, so they espouse A.
It's one thing to wish people were more rational and less tribal. But to really not understand human nature after the last decade? The author is either naive beyond absurdity or feigning ignorance as a different form of virtue signaling.
Something can't be traitorous with respect to the intellectual discourse of a given topic, but to a group.
Group consensus is not about intellectual correctness, obviously. Groups are about evolution, as is belonging to them and seeking just that. We collectively subscribe to them because that's the emerged mechanism by which we modulate decision making where the direct representation of individual takes is not feasible. Individual takes matter not when the subject at hand isn't actually about the subject, but about winning at life.
> When we get so excited about culture war, maybe policy is irrelevant and we’re really just talking about what team we’re on. When you and I talk about how stupid and evil and bad the other side is, we’re demonstrating that we’ve burned our bridges and we’re totally committed to our current tribe.
As a person with close friends and family members on opposite sides of the culture war, this is the explanation that resonates most to me.
> Is this a ridiculous opinion? I don’t think so. But I can see why someone might disagree with it. For one, what’s the “privacy” thing?
Maybe I misunderstand the court's rationale, but it seems really flimsy to hang abortion on "privacy" in this way.
> We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.
Whatever your thoughts on abortion, this seems poorly reasoned. Legalizing abortion implies asserting that life begins after some date. If first trimester abortions are legal, then it seems to imply that the law views human life (and thus human rights) as beginning sometime after the first trimester.
Yes, that's implied because we're talking about abortion in humans.
> With that out of the way we must now talk about, "what makes human life special?" and "at what point does it become special?"
Ugh, I'd rather not. There's no good reason to dive into this, and it always ends in ugly eugenics territory. E.g., "Just hear me out, what if the mentally disabled aren't really people?". I'd prefer to keep a wide berth around that--the great thing about human rights is that (apart from the abortion issue) every human gets them.
Instinctual human behaviour. We're programmed to divide into groups of us or them. Being part of a group leads to benefits from that group, but, freeloaders could just profess loyalty, get the benefits and move on. So we have an instinct to fight freeloaders by having genuine members of the group make a difficult to fake concession or sacrifice of some kind. Which could be something like genital mutilation, or, maintaining a clearly irrational belief at all times for your entire life, or, at all times treating the others like inhuman scum and having 0 tolerance for any of their ideas, or usually, a combination of such things.
The logical construction of this piece is poorly formulated.
The title is “why does x happen”.
The content is:
I believe foo.
Evidence behind why author believes foo.
Here is an arbitrary list of 6 behavioral responses to foo: [a b c d e x].
X happens which is a bad thing.
There is no critical analysis or evidence substantiating the 6 responses, nor how/why response x happens. In other words, there’s no intellectual rigor behind the title’s claim, nor do I have any inclination to believe the author’s claim as true after reading it.
(Context: The article uses abortion as its central -- and only -- example.)
>Why is it traitorous to understand the people you disagree with?
It's not. Many people[1] spend a great deal of time studying the rhetoric and activities of people who oppose abortion. They have studied them far more than you.
>For better or for worse, the vast majority of people I know favor Roe v. Wade. Still, I think I understand the view of people on the other side.
You give two possible reasons for opposing Roe v. Wade, one of which rejects the legal argument as fundamentally arbitrary, and one of which is based on the idea that a human life, with all the rights and dignities that it is entitled to, begins at conception.
This falls into a common trap, which is treating "culture war" disputes as being fundamentally about abstract philosophical debates. This ignores the important parts of the dispute, which concern women's sexuality and the role of (conservative, patriarchal) religion in public affairs. It also ignores the mountains of bad faith and hypocrisy in the anti-abortion movement, including but not limited to a lack of interest in "saving" IVF embryos, bizarre ignorance of the female reproductive system, a refusal to acknowledge the circumstances under which people have late-term abortions, active opposition to medically-accurate sex education and easier access to contraceptives, and a lack of concern for what happens to babies after they're born.
>As far as I can tell, my object-level views on “when abortion should be legal” are close to the median in my (leftist-dominated) corner of the universe. Yet, except with close friends, I’d be scared to say what I think above.
Scared of what, exactly? When you publicly make bad arguments, you should expect public criticism.
The only reason I can see that someone would get mad at you is that you are treating abortion rights as a bloodless, impersonal affair. This is a very practical issue with very real, very serious consequences for the women involved. Most women do not want to engage in an abstract debate about whether they should be forced to carry a dead fetus to term[2].
If you want to discuss how all this relates to jurisprudence and philosophy, you can certainly do that. It's not wrong, and you're not wrong for wanting to ask questions and start discussions on those subjects. But it's important to be clear that such discussions are (almost) totally separate from the practical questions of how overturning Roe v. Wade will actually affect American women. Conflating the two buries the practical questions, and only benefits people who would prefer that the practical questions are ignored.
[1] The Slacktivist blog is a good place to start. Search for articles about abortion. Those articles will have many links to other people examining anti-abortion views. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/
I really like this as a response to OP. Thanks for taking the time.
OP laments that people who are bodily affected by these abortion rules aren't willing to have an abstract debate about the constitutional definition of privacy. Of course constitutional lawyers can construct plausible arguments that move privacy protections around. The debate can be imagined, even constructed, but it's irrelevant to the actual power struggle that's playing itself out.
The move by the court was a political one. The angles have been worked by a donor class and a compliant Senate for a decade and more. The consequences of this ruling will be unpopular and will result in needless suffering and (obviously) lawbreaking. "Fuck that noise" is a perfectly legitimate response, under the circumstances.
The fact that most commenters here can't see what's going on --- as opposed to the "logical" thing they wish were going on --- is one of the major blind spots of this discussion board.
> the role of (conservative, patriarchal) religion in public affairs. It also ignores the mountains of bad faith
Thank you for summarising exactly what I was thinking - the justifications people will give publically are not the same as justifications people discuss in private.
This is most obvious in a debate about climate change, where no-one ever says 'I (errorneously) think it will not affect me personally, I don't want to pay for fixing the problem, and I don't care about poor farmers in bangladesh dying'.
Instead it will be some more socially acceptable line of argument, about science not being settled, technolgy not being there yet, or whatever.
Or in immigration - noone ever says: 'they are bringin in culture I am uncomfotable with', instead they will argue about economy or crime, which is more 'socially acceptable' line of argument.
People certainly do believe these things and I don’t know if it’s even something they can be “logically” wrong about. Where they are factually wrong is that they think they’re traditional but these are fully modern ideas.
The actual Jewish tradition is against several of those; the actual Christian tradition may be for them, but the idea that you should actually read the Bible, know what an official position is, or do anything yourself outside of talking to a priest is a modern invention of Protestantism. And Protestants weren’t against abortion until recently, because they defined themselves as against Catholicism.
If they believe all three of these things, as well as the unsaid and equally necessary fourth that it is the government's job to enforce them regardless of the will of the people, then they must also believe -
It is the government's job to ensure -everyone- receives necessary care. That means, minimally, food, shelter, healthcare, regardless of your work situation, age, (dis)ability, etc.
Life > personal autonomy, so organ donation is not optional, nor is blood donation. If your kidney is a match for someone who needs one, you're forced to donate, that sort of thing. And expect monthly trips to the blood donation van.
Etc.
Anything else and these are logically inconsistent.
It’s fairly common to believe you shouldn’t kill people but have no responsibility to keep them alive.
Actually, believing they’re the same thing is more like EA utilitarianism, isn’t it? Almost noone has that philosophy and most would find it repulsive.
>> It’s fairly common to believe you shouldn’t kill people but have no responsibility to keep them alive.
Which is why Roe v. Wade's recognition of abortion being protected until a fetus is considered viable.
But, that call out is worth also enumerating - a logically consistent position with that would be that it's legally acceptable to remove someone from life support. Potentially regardless of their wishes, depending on the level of nuance.
I'm pretty much anti-abortion myself, but draw the line at your point. So, I'm practically pro-choice.
> it is the government's job to enforce
Which is where I say we stop on the whole abortion thing. So, I'm an anti-abortion pro-choicer? Kinda weird I suppose. Falling between two camps isn't popular these days.
Maybe? A lot of the Christian people I know and like fall in between. Regardless of their personal views, they look at the idea of legislating morality as counter to the basis of their religion, and then also the moral fiber of the current GOP, and go "nope", and either abstain from voting, vote third party, or vote Democrat (potentially while holding their nose).
I've yet to meet the hardliner who wants to ban abortion, but then also is sufficiently pro-welfare to really show they care about life, let alone finding a logically consistent path through all the other knock on effects. Carlin had it right; they tend to be pro-birth, not pro-life.
> Christian people [...] look at the idea of legislating morality as counter to the basis of their religion
Isn't reforming pagan Rome essentially the foundational act of the Christian religion? Christ critiqued the system and was tortured to death for it. Followers of Christ continued to critiqued the system and many more were tortured to death for it. The strength of their conviction in the face of death inspired more followers, as did the evident injustice of the Roman system. Before long, they had enough mindshare to enact reform.
Keeping religion out of politics seems like an American value, not a Christian value.
Not really, no. The entire New Testament takes place during a time Christianity was a weird sect of Judaism, and at best ignored by Rome (persecution was by Jewish authorities). Not sure what the 'foundational act' of Christianity would be, maybe Jesus' death and resurrection, maybe something in the Book of Acts (badum-tsh, but like, Pentecost), but it wasn't caring about Roman governance.
Christ didn't critique Rome. He didn't really have words for Rome at all, beyond "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's". The threat he embodied to 'the system' was specifically the Judaic priesthood who didn't view him as the Messiah. Well, arguably he embodied a broader threat to Rome, in that as you say, living in ways counter to Rome (and 'the world' at large) it challenged institutional assumptions and gave way to reform, but that wasn't a threat Rome really recognized, and, key to your point I think, was not trying to affect Roman law, nor lead to it even amongst those who were citizens of Rome.
Other than the aforementioned "give to Caesar what is Caesar's", which certainly doesn't seem to challenge Rome, or indicate any political stance beyond "pay your taxes", can you come up with any time Jesus even -acknowledged- Rome? He didn't even disobey Roman law; both Pilate and Herod Antipas acknowledged they could find "no guilt in him". It was a Jewish affair.
Even Paul didn't seem particular interested in Rome. He was a citizen of Rome, afforded rights, which he availed himself of when it came to who could judge him, but which he never talks about using to vote (despite as a citizen of Rome having that right, at least for local leaders). He doesn't instruct citizens to vote, let alone how they should vote, nor does he instruct them to be active in civics. He does give instruction for how to engage with civic leaders - pray for them, and obey the law.
That hardly paints a picture of getting religion into politics.
More to the point though, what I was referencing was specifically Jesus' and Paul's statements regarding the law. Namely, that all the law could do is condemn. It's part of a broader understanding that one aspect of the Old Testament is that it serves as a demonstration that even God's chosen people are unable to live up to the law; people can't be good enough. Everyone who lived under the law was condemned by the law. That trying to legislate morality just serves to punish people for being immoral. That something different is needed to actually make people righteous (Christ, sanctification through grace, etc etc). It is ironic, then, how many Christians end up deciding that what this culture really needs is more law, morality via legislation, rather than trying to affect the culture by, well, living counter culturally, loving those who persecute you, etc.
If the Christian voting bloc collectively shrugged its shoulders at abortion as a law, while at the same time showing up at abortion centers to love and support those who were there, ensuring their needs as potential mothers, as well as any needs from having an abortion (which is oftentimes still traumatic) were met, voting not to punish and condemn ("you got raped at 14? Too bad; you get to be a single teenage mother now. Have a good life") but instead to enable (mandatory paid maternity leave, welfare programs to ensure children would be taken care of, healthcare coverage, etc, so that having a child wasn't an economic burden), it would likely lead to a much better reception to their message than the current most highly visible tact of political partisanship.
> So, I'm an anti-abortion pro-choicer? Kinda weird I suppose. Falling between two camps isn't popular these days.
That’s what “pro-choice” means. They’re not “pro-abortion”, at least officially.
US liberals are good at avoiding abortions ahead of time because they have less premarital sex. The conservative no-sex messaging doesn’t work as well because it relies on telling teens that abstinence is the cool minority thing to do, but once you convert the whole school, it’s hard to believe that.
I think you make fair points, but I would guess here that the reality is not less pre-marital sex. It's probably more, it's just sex with birth control.
Yes, it depends on the age group. Like Japan, young Americans are just having way less sex at all now. Possibly because of housing issues + increased personal space and parental tracking + better entertainment.
Protestants aren't pretty fractured but a number of groups even fairly conservative ones(like southern Baptist convention) didn't care or were pro choice.
You're using the past tense, but even today they're fractured. 24% of white evangelical protestants are pro-choice; 60% of white (not evangelical) protestants are pro choice, and 66% of black protestants are pro-choice.
If we narrow consideration to just white evangelical protestants, a 24% / 74% split is clearly a strong trend against abortion. Even so, 1 in 4 is by no means rare.
I meant more that there are many different denominations that claim to be Protestant, many taking different opinions on abortion. Not that opinion among lay protestants is not 100% which I agree with
> The actual Jewish tradition is against several of those
I think that Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, would have something to say[0] about that:
“The law, moreover, enjoins us to bring up all our offspring and forbids women to cause abortion of what is begotten, or to destroy it afterward; and if any woman appears to have so done, she will be a murderer of her child, by destroying a living creature, and diminishing humankind,” (Josephus, Against Apion Book 2, Chapter 25, Section 202).
> And Protestants weren’t against abortion until recently, because they defined themselves as against Catholicism.
That's like saying that Protestants didn't believe in God until recently, because they defined themselves as against Catholics who are theists. Do you have any example of historic Protestant teaching that approved of abortion?
“On the authority of Rabbi Ishmael, it was said: [A murderer is executed] even for the murder of an embryo. What is Rabbi Ishmael’s reason? Because it is written, ‘Whosoever sheddeth the blood of man within a man, his blood shall be shed.’ What is a man within a man? An embryo in his mother’s womb,” (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 57b).
> is 68 historic?
I wasn't aware of Waltke's position, which is cited by that CNN article, but I don't think it represents the consensus of Christian scholars at the time, and in any case, he later (in 1976) reversed his position, concluding: "The fetus is human and therefore to be accorded the same protection to life granted every other human being."
While some more traditional Jews dislike legal abortion for cases that don't relate to health/mental health and are after 40 days Jewish law is pretty clear that a fetus is not alive/a person with rights until it born and that abortion is not murder.
The phrase "your rapist's baby" is linguistically a bit like "the time traveler's wife": The wife is not a person; she is chattel belonging to the (male) time traveler. Likewise with this hypothetical baby: It has no identity of its own.
That we believe we can justly inflict capital punishment on a rapist's child is also interesting.
You know, there was once another Supreme Court case where individual rights (namely, property rights) came into conflict with (controversial) claims of personhood: Dred Scott.
You could say I'm trolling here, because the truth is I do not vote on the basis of abortion issues, and, when push comes to shove, I would tend to allow it. So I am not, politically, quite the person you might think I am.
Nevertheless, it does make me extremely, morally, uncomfortable; it's something I wouldn't want to be mixed up in; and I can absolutely understand the philosophical arguments against it. Which is why I am able to make analogies like those above.
If you stop and think about it, Republicans' opposition to abortion, perversely, demonstrates that at least in some areas they have moral principles (though you might disagree with them) -- that they do what they believe is right, even when it's not in their interest. Because the people most disproportionately impacted by restrictive abortion rules are women of color. If Republicans were ruthless consequentialists, this is exactly the person whose abortion rights they would not want to restrict. So in a perverse way it tells me that (some of them) actually believe something.
> the people most disproportionately impacted by restrictive abortion rules are women of color. If Republicans were ruthless consequentialists, this is exactly the person whose abortion rights they would not want to restrict.
Maybe! Or, maybe:
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." ~ Frank Wilhoit
...some political philosophies are strongly hierarchical and see a benefit in having a numerous and economically precarious out-group.
"It's hard to understand the most extreme position I can think up, which is held by such a small number of people that it's not even really worth discussing."
Show me a law on the books in any state that would outlaw abortion in the case of rape. Obviously it would be a "trigger law" since states can't actually have such a law right now, but no such law exists as far as I'm aware.
Unless you can do that, it's not fair to claim that those extremists are succeeding in pushing anything.
Edit: I'm not going to individually address all of the dishonest rhetoric from the articles in the replies. The states have laws allowing abortion up to a certain number of weeks, and then after that don't make exceptions. I was referring to outright bans.
'In the past few years, though, the anti-abortion movement has moved in a different direction. In 2019, Alabama legislators passed an abortion ban that lacked rape and incest exceptions. Nine other states—Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas—have passed similar laws. Courts blocked all the laws but Texas’s; if Roe is overturned, it will be a felony for any Texas doctor to perform an abortion for a woman who was raped or impregnated by a family member. In March, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey signed an early-abortion ban without rape or incest exemptions.'
“The Human Life Protection Act "defines all unborn children as persons". It bans abortions AT ANY STAGE OF A PREGNANCY. The law provides for exceptions in cases where a fetus has a lethal anomaly (a medical condition that would cause the fetus to be stillborn or to die shortly following birth), or in cases where a pregnancy would "present serious health risk" to the woman. The law also allows abortions to be performed "upon confirmation from a psychiatrist" that a pregnant woman diagnosed with a "serious mental illness" might otherwise take an action that would lead to her own death or to the death of the fetus. The law does not ban procedures to end ectopic pregnancies or procedures in which a dead fetus is removed from the uterus. IT DOES NOT INCLUDE AN EXCEPTION IN CASES OF RAPE OR INCEST.”
Here is another example, from Texas:
“Senate Bill 8, ushered through the Republican-dominated Texas legislature and signed into law by the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, in May, bars abortion once embryonic cardiac activity is detected, which is around six weeks, and offers NO EXCEPTIONS FOR RAPE OR INCEST. Texas is the first state to ban abortion this early in pregnancy since Roe v Wade, and last-minute efforts to halt it through an appeal to the US supreme court by Tuesday did not succeed.”
Your edit is totally moving the goalposts. Do you realize many women won't even know they're pregnant until after the six weeks? By which point it will be much too late to get a legal abortion.
Probably 8 or 10 states are ready to push extreme abortion laws. DeSantis has one on his desk ready to sign as soon as RvW is overturned (probably this week).
If one honestly believes that abortion is murder, then the murder of an innocent person could not really be justified by a horrible crime between two other people.
Not to mention it's awfully presumptive to apply it to people facing the issue. I.e., invariably its those who are pro-rights who are told to understand the other side; why? If you can't get pregnant, your opinion on abortion -necessarily- is secondary to those who can, and it's they who need to seek to understand (and, I would argue, that in the same way that "wisdom is knowing you know nothing", sufficient understanding means realizing you can't fully understand because it doesn't directly effect you; that doesn't mean you can't have an opinion, but it does mean you shouldn't be trying to enforce it upon those actually effected by it).
It's also hard to understand why a fetus is to be protected but homeless children and people shouldn't be sheltered or fed, wars shouldn't be protested and education shouldn't be funded, but here we are. Political tools are used as wedge issues, not as logical thinking points.
"Not in my back yard" is a wonderful summation of this. While many upper class liberals support more homeless shelters, they don't want one in their neighborhood. While many neoconservatives support a ban on abortions, they wouldn't want low income, single mother housing placement shelters in their neighborhoods, with job training.
This argument falls down when talking about sending American troops to any situation, however. Not sending troops in would be a passive lack of support. Sending in troops would be the active killing, on a national level.
If pro lifers are assuming that a fetus is indeed a living human being, then it follows that the child is completely innocent and its survival is completely dependent on the mother.
A soldier signing up for the army knows very well what he is up against..
And yet here is Governor Ducy arguing for an arguably mentally incompetent man to be put to death for the murder of an innocent child. While, yes, the crime is egregious, and he should never be set free from his cell... Do you think that it is, indeed "pro-life" to argue, as quite a few do, to argue for the death penalty as a form of punishment (I won't say many - this truly does split the movement. Catholics especially - Ducy is a poor representative, but Republican politicians are overwhelmingly pro death penalty, anti abortion). A strong case can be made that the people who are executed suffer from severe mental illness and are not capable of telling right from wrong in any true form. Sociopaths who lack the education or means to make it to Wall Street, as it were.
Just so you know, I'm not trying to be argumentative to be argumentative. You guys being very polite and I enjoy these conversations =) If you get sick of it, just stop responding, no hard feelings =)
This suggests there is a simple solution for the abortion debate that will satisfy the (claimed) intentions of both side: Abortion should remain legal until there are zero unadopted children in the foster care system (for more than a year), and the outcomes for children who have been adopted are at least as good as those raised by their natural parents.
Clever idea, but a bad idea. What you propose would create an incentive for pro-choice activists to create red-tape in the adoption system, to ensure an adequate number of orphans remain unadopted. Furthermore, it would incentivize pro-life activists to adopt as many children as they can for all the wrong reasons.
So I think the poster was being facetious, but I'll point out neither of those incentives would hold.
First, I've yet to meet a pro-choice person who didn't actually, you know, want the best outcomes for kids. They don't actually hate children, and there are other reasons to champion choice than "well, if they're born no one will adopt them" (despite what op says, pro-choice people don't ever list "no one will adopt them" as a reason to get an abortion. That whole line of reasoning is only a strawman presented by anti-abortion proponents. As you'll note even with this thread). Not to mention that if we got to "kid zero" with abortion at its current levels, it doesn't mean we'd stay at "kid zero" if you banned it.
Second, op -did- say with the same quality of outcomes for adopted kids as raised by natural parents. If pro-life activists can adopt as many children as they can, for all the wrong reasons, and still lead to equivalent outcomes...I really don't see the problem.
Have you considered that it isn't necessarily the baby that a person might not want and instead that being pregnant might be what they're seeking to avoid?
Sure, Roe v. Wade might or might not be a great legal decision. However, if it is not, why are conservative state governments racing to introduce new laws to ban abortion, punish anyone who helps someone have an abortion, and ban forms of contraception. Further, why is no one discussing other, similar decisions? Sure, Griswold is part and parcel the argument over Roe v. Wade, and Loving is verboten while Clarence Thomas is on the court, but there have been many other decisions based on the "specious" right to privacy. Why are none of them being picked apart with the same sharp instruments as Roe?
The answer is that "it's a poor constitutional decision" is a red herring. "When does life begin" is even irrelevant. If you want to understand the people you disagree with (and, yes, I think that is a very good idea), and you disagree with American conservatives, you need to understand that they do not like the way society has changed since 1960---some much further back than that---and many are willing to do or say anything in order to roll back those changes. (And yes, I mean that. The American left has a lot of idiocy, but the vast majority of bad faith arguments, including that Christianity and conservatism are oppressed minorities, come from the right. (https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2020-07/Good_Faith...))
While you're discussing the legal niceties of Roe v. Wade, keep in mind that it, abortion, and sexuality in general are just the edge of the wedge; there are many other policies on the list that even you might be attached to.
It would only be traitorous to understand the people you disagree with if your current mental framework is so fragile and irrational as to be consistently dismantled by your opposition's arguments.
If you understand the people you disagree with, you might find yourself changing your mind and agreeing with them, if only on one or two points. This is how I went from being a half-assed Randroid to a half-assed libertarian socialist. I wasn't willing to take Ayn Rand's word about socialism and anarchism as gospel -- or that of her anointed prophet Leonard Peikoff.
As for Roe v. Wade, I think the problem with reading the 14th Amendment as protecting a right to privacy is that the 14th isn't enough. We should be invoking the 9th Amendment as well, which explicitly covers unenumerated rights.
> The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
This amendment exists specifically to counter the sort of mindset that thinks that rights come from God or the government, and that the Constitution wasn't written to enumerate and thus limit the powers of the Federal government.
> So, here’s a timeline: The 14th amendment was passed in 1868. For 135 years, it was perfectly consistent with that amendment for states to put people in jail for having the wrong kind of sex. Then, one day, it wasn’t anymore.
This is wrong. When precedent is overturned, it's because the law struck down was never consistent with the amendment(s) at issue.
Segregation was not perfectly consistent with the 14th Amendment prior to Brown v. Board, it was never consistent with it, from the time of its passage. The court upheld it in Plessy v. Ferguson not because it was okay then and the 'living document' subsequently changed and it became not-okay, but because the court made a glaringly wrong decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.
> Segregation was not perfectly consistent with the 14th Amendment prior to Brown v. Board, it was never consistent with it, from the time of its passage.
So if a future court overturns Brown v. Board, then it means that segregation is consistent again (and always has been)? How is this not exactly the kind of capriciousness that TFA is illustrating?
> The question before the court in Roe v. Wade was not “Would the world be better if abortion were legal?” The question was, “Does the US Constitution prohibit states from making abortion illegal?”
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem that gives way to much credit to the court. The question isn't about legality or the constitution it's about politics and power. The conservative legal movement has spent decades working to take away the right of women to choose. They've been explicit about this. McConnell stacked the court by refusing to even hear from Garland then jamming in Barrett at the last moment. The reason Roe vs Wade is being overturned isn't because it is flawed but because they finally got not just a conservative majority but an extremely conservative supreme court majority
A lot of people claimed they didn't really mean it when they said they wanted to ban abortion and that they were just taking advantage of socially conservatives for the votes but when the politicians/judge politicans are themselves socially conservative why would you think they don't believe in it? And now we have the unsurprising result.
I wish we wouldn't dress it up in irrelevant theoretical conversations about what the constitution says
I was curious if people will get even madder if the US passes a law to enforce maximum number of weeks post-fertilization. There are only fewer than 10(?) countries, after all, that do not have such time limit. Most of the European countries do.
Yes. Pro-choice people have testified to Congress that there is a qualitative difference between 3” of vaginal depth. Stick a pair of scissors through the brain after the head is out of those 3”, then it’s murder. Stick them up to those 3” inches, then it’s an abortion.
This question and questions adjacent to it get explored a lot more thoroughly in many of Scott Alexander's essays/blog posts, particularly in the (from 2014, but still mostly relevant) "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup"
It's easy to rationalize bad things if you spend too much effort trying to understand them. After all, even Hitler thought he was doing good for the world. Yes we all need to understand each other, to a point. Beyond that point, you need to fight for what's right.
A little testimony to how the society is doing is the fact that, I actually genuinely expected the article to try to make the case for the title, before I continued reading. :D
> Are you saying a parent should be able to kill a 12 year old?
Yes, that is the correct reading.
Note: This is an extreme statement to prompt discussion, not a deeply held belief that everyone must share. It's not that I don't feel this way; but i feel more strongly that this is a question that shows the limits of what the state can do.
" but i feel more strongly that this is a question that shows the limits of what the state can do"
No, it just shows how extreme your property thinking is. A child is the property of their parents and they should be able to do with it, what they want?
Even kill them, as it is their property?
Nope. Those times have passed.
And even in savage times, where this might have been more common, there was certainly social backslash, too.
Not all property is legal to be sold (see: drug possession vs distribution). Thus, it being illegal to sell children does not imply they are not property.
Not what i meant, but interesting thought: the parent of a pregnant child should be able to force the child to have an abortion? Seems about as justifiable as circumcision by parental choice, doesn't it?
There's another tactic that you could list under the "strategic model" so that it becomes like the "outlier model": misrepresent how many people actually hold the opposing view. For example, with abortion, by the way it's presented on social media, you would think it's a men vs women topic. But as recently as 2019[0], of pro-lifers, women were the majority. And pro-lifers are nearly half of the population.
But if you were to gauge the sizes of the groups based on MSM and social media, you would think pro-lifers were much smaller of a group, and dominated by men. This is a strategy to convert the other side into the "outlier model" so that it is justified to not make any attempt to hear them. This strategy appears to be super effective... of amplifying some causes and downplaying other causes, so much so, that it should have its own category in the models section.
Controlling content through lies and censorship are crude methods of population control. By selectively amplifying some truths and suppressing others, you can create context.
For a number of reasons, we seem to have reached the point where hyperbolic, emotional statements get attention and calm, rational discussion is ignored.
A world where everyone is trying to position themselves as the persecuted, besieged voice of reason defending simple truth against irrational attractors, does not leave much room for common ground.
It's interesting to note that the author does seem to have had anyone accuse him of being "traitorous" for trying to understand. He just asserts this strawman to paint those who might disagree as unreasonable and then bemoans his asserted lack of common ground.
I wish I could say this is an online phenomenon, and it's obviously much worse online, but it clearly has leaked into the offline world.