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Re: Trump is a sick SOB! even sicker!

By: Cactus Flower in ALEA | Recommend this post (0)
Mon, 19 Feb 18 6:04 PM | 26 view(s)
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Msg. 23837 of 54959
(This msg. is a reply to 23836 by Cactus Flower)

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One other point.

I don't find myself saying one day I believe in freedom and the next saying I believe in telling folks what to do with their bodies.

I always say the same things. My freedom extends only as far as it does little or no harm to others and to the environment.

I set my abortion clock by the same method.

I want to avoid damage to the glob of organic material, but I don't think it is a baby until it is sentient.

I want to avoid damage to clo, who wants to make her own decisions.

So my freedom extends as far as it does the least damage to others, given the reality of competing interests.

You don't really believe in freedom. You believe in freedom when it suits you and compulsion when it suits you. The same is true of when you want taxes for defence but not for the protection of the vulnerable.

And these are issues of failed principle which you cannot resolve because your positions are always absolute. They are what suits you depending upon the subject of the discussion.

Once you recognise competing constraints and differing interests, everything changes.




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The above is a reply to the following message:
Re: Trump is a sick SOB! even sicker!
By: Cactus Flower
in ALEA
Mon, 19 Feb 18 3:40 PM
Msg. 23836 of 54959

I know you have said that it is your belief that conception is the only valid place along the timeline.

But other people have their own valid places.

The thing I have been trying to say to you and clo is that these placements aren't a science. They are what you decide based on things that are important to you. Different things are important to different people.

clo says it's her glob of organic tissue to do with as she pleases until the glob becomes sentient. At some point sentience is replaced by viable independence. At the end of 9 months, a baby gets delivered.

When the name "baby" gets used along that timeline is also part of the argument. I err on a more cautious timeline than clo's but within your "murderer" category. I think 13 weeks is long enough for someone to pee on a strip and make a choice. Maybe 10 weeks is enough. Science has made the available choices better if by better we are arguing about the potential for suffering.

This isn't one of those issues which folks should get irate about. I see both sides as sincere and animated by virtuous ideals.

For the moment, individualist privacy rights prevail. Apparently many women wish to exercise those rights and think that right is no one's but their own.

But there are costs in that position, just as there are in the collectivist right-to-life position you hold. You wish to compel women to do as you wish. But you hope to protect the lives of the foetuses in so doing, whose rights you impute into a woman's womb. Those rights are already imposed with increasing force during a pregnancy.

For myself, I think graduating rights in this way is the best available model at the moment.

The good news is that under all conditions, you control your own body and can decide if you wish to carry a pregnancy to term.

Either way, it turns out that the argument about 3% of PP's costs going to abortion remains in place. So the idea of damaging its beneficial services to women - and apparently no one disagrees that they consume 97% of its budget - over the remaining 3% of the costs of its legal medical services is still ridiculous and vindictive.

Methinks the abortion argument also conceals a puritan argument about lifestyle and the wickedness of sex outside of wedlock. Count me an Epicurean on that score.


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