Want to Be a Whipping Boy? Then Take the Licks Proudly.
ElectricFetus said:
And don't get me start again on the corpse verse fetus argument, most of the pro-choicer on this thread so a far have vehemently refused to provide rational logical argument on why a corpse has more rights then a fetus and instead simply attack me, my character and call me a sexist, stupid, child, pro-lifer. I dare say that they are the pro-lifers, or at least act like pro-lifers.
The reason people are disgusted with your behavior is that you're not really giving any attention to what people are actually saying.
Or else the law is simply an irrational notion.
After all, I
did propose:
That we have laws pertaining to how the dead are treated, and this whole case tramples that? Irrational?
The disposition of corpses is generally established. The specific disposition of corpses is generally left to those who think about it before they become a corpse.
The fetus is a fetus.
At eight centimeters long and all of forty grams, it is what it is. Looks kind of like the
plastic fetus dolls they hand out to children. (Really, the plastic fetus dolls given to children by North Dakota Right to Life have
nothing to do with abortion. After all, the E.D. of NDRL says so.)
We come again to the equal protection issue. Every woman capable of childbearing will need to be tested when she dies to see if her corpse needs to be mangled in an extraordinary effort to save the fetus ... embryo ... zygote ... blastocyst ....
That would be a
practical reason why the fetus does not trump the corpse. Would you charge an emergency responder with negligent homicide for passing over the visibly dead in order to attend to the visibly alive, inadvertently leaving a blastocyst to die?
That's an implication of the fetus trumping the corpse. And it's actually a question that would not have come up save for John Peter Smith Hospital's mangling of the law for the sake of politics.
And yet here you are, ranting:
"And don't get me start again on the corpse verse fetus argument, most of the pro-choicer on this thread so a far have vehemently refused to provide rational logical argument on why a corpse has more rights then a fetus and instead simply attack me, my character and call me a sexist, stupid, child, pro-lifer."
You know, if you're going to complain that there are no rational, logical arguments on the corpse-fetus distraction you have invested so much in, at least take a swing at the arguments provided.
What was the purpose of this forum "Intelligent community discussion"
Do you remember when the site changed ownership, and the browser title motto disappeared? Yeah, it was right about then we started compromising our already overbroad notion of what constitutes intelligent discussion. And no, it wasn't just for traffic. Rather, it was to be (
ahem!) "fair".
You see, if we still aimed to be the Intelligent Community, we would not have permitted these people to go on without any rational argument for
years.
Think about that for a minute. Think about how many people
wouldn't be here. Sure, I'm probably fine with that in the sense that the conversation would get better, but how, exactly, would we separate the circumstantial result from the appearance of suppression?
It's not that I want to silence the anti-abortion crowd. I would just, very desperately, appreciate it if they would start making sense. If they cannot, because the constraints of the issue as they have constructed it rules out any logical argument (aesthetics and sentiment are not logic), then the issue is pretty much settled except for the question of whether or not they can ever cope with reality.
It just does not answer my question though on which has more ethical rights: a corpse or a fetus, nor does the behavior of the pro-lifers in that case.
It's a bogus juxtaposition, beacuse your question ignores the laws pertaining to the disposition of the dead, and also the fact that a fetus is only a person according to an unsupported aesthetic appeal.
What's the point of writing a last will and testament if a "corpse has no rights"?
What's the point of laws against necrophilia? That it's "icky"? I mean, sure, you don't want to think of some meth addict breaking into the morgue and making a POV of your dead grandmother deep-throating him, but you've already made the point that it doesn't really matter.
What I'm getting at, and what you're ignoring, is that some of our ethics are bound by law. No, seriously, should we change the disposition of corpses? That's fine with me, as long as it doesn't create a public health hazard, or stink up the neighborhood, or whatever.
In fact, let's collect some venture capital and see if we can manufacture custom zombies. I mean, you know, they're dead. Let's see what we can do, and how much money we can make. After all, abuse of corpses in the name of knowledge also helped bring us that legendary, misunderstood character of Frankenstein's monster. (No, really. That and a stopover with Percy and Claire on their way home from a vacation, quite literally at the home of Dr. and Mrs. Frankenstein. But, yes, it's true that Mary Wollstonecroft Shelley did, in her youth, witness the adults around her trying to revive corpses with electricity.)
Except we do already have laws in place about how corpses are to be treated and disposed.
Get rid of them? Why not? That's actually fine with me.
Look, I'm trying to be understanding, here. To reduce the question to pure abstraction is an exercise in futility, because we are never going to have a circumstantial bright line of demarcation.
This is the basic juxtaposition:
Laws and Customs Regarding the Dead and
A Fetus Has No Rights.
The only reason you could consider that a refusal to offer a rational argument is if
you simply don't want to deal with it.
You see beside devils advocate I try to ask questions to test ethics, wether I'm for or against or honestly don't know ...
Uh-huh.
"Can a deaf child sue his mother for making him deaf intentionally en utero?" what would be the ethical implications of "yes" or of "no"?
Well that's a hell of a charge. Intentionally? I'm going to wait until I see the sleazy ads on television from law firms like Sokolove, begging for clients.
Meanwhile, I'll go with sure, right about the same time obese people start suing their parents for having children. And maybe I can sue my parents for bringing me to life in order to compensate for the racism I experienced as a child. I mean, really, what are people of Asian descent doing having children in a white-dominated country that has gone to war in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, that last with some side trips to massacre Laotians. Oh, wait. I'm adopted. Well, I demand equal protection, so all of the sealed adoption records have to be opened to the public so people can figure out who to sue.
I don't know, am I being ridiculous, yet? I hope so. Because you still owe me serious answers on those ethical conundra. (Actually, you don't, because I really don't want to spend the time and posts refusing to answer your response while complaining that you haven't posted one. I mean, obviously you don't get that one, yet, so what would throwing it in your face accomplish?)
Is it so wrong to point out for example that if we say abortion should be allowed for cases of rape, that we are implying abortions can be made illegal for cases of non-rape, that we must focus on disproving the personhood of the fetus first and foremost? No that stupid you claim, how is it?
As I have noted, there are existential, ontological, and medical differences between the fetus
in utero and the person standing on their own two feet, especially as there's really no way I would fit back up in there even if I knew who she was. But, hey, if she's dead already, I can crawl back up there anyway, and why should anyone stop me?
In light of the observable differences, fetal personhood—which is also a relatively recent innovation—is the extraordinary assertion. Fetal personhood is the
new addition, and must justify itself. Furthermore, even if you insist that the obligation is to prove the negative,
there needs to be an affirmative assertion to address. How it is that you have gone this many posts without figuring that out is, well, okay, I have no idea. It's absolutely silly.
How can we talk about the humanity of women to people that think this is a issue of mass genocide?
Ordinarily, I would say we
don't. Except for the nasty little fact that these people have enough political power to denigrate the human condition of the women I know. Even if I didn't have a daughter, that's enough to keep me engaged.
Because of that political reality, we
must engage this crowd.
How to talk to them? A fine question, because as I've noted, well, okay, aside from your odd digressions into pissing on corpses and such, what we've seen in this thread generally, and your posts specifically, is enactment of the problem. The only way to communicate with them is to agree with them and give them everything they want. Well, okay, actually it's not. You see what happened with this thread.
I mean, sure, concede the point at the outset and ask, "What next?" It should be expected that fourteen months later we're still arguing over what was conceded at the outset to such extremity that we're now on about corpses.
No, really.
Fourteen months. Go back and check the dates:
November 1, 2012. As I said then:
None of the anti-abortion advocates can explain what happens to a woman's status as a human being during pregnancy.
Perhaps the problem is in our laws.
So, of course it's ironic that your ethical inquiries deal with things like laws in the most convenient way possible, ignoring them.
Of course, I also closed that post as straightforward as possible:
Is this an ethical compromise, in their outlooks? Is it just? Or is this whole "personhood" thing really just about putting women back in their places?
The determined distraction from the topic proposition is more than simply suggestive. It is indicative, and I would say about what I expect, except the dimensions are actually of greater magnitude than even I had anticipated. No, really. I actually would not have guessed that fourteen months later people would still flee screaming from the proposition of a woman's humanity.
Put your self in their shoes: if the opposing side was arguing that murdering infants and children should be legal because if not women rights are restricted, would you not think they are insane if not even evil?
Are you trying to play out the misogyny, or is that a sincere question? Once upon a time, and it honestly doesn't seem like that long ago, that I would have said I know you already know the difference.
So let me answer you this way:
There is a difference between infants and children to the one, and a fetus to the other. If they cannot tell the difference, they need psychiatric assistance.
What? Am I wrong? Or are they actually incapable of putting up an objective, affirmative argument for fetal personhood because they literally can't tell the difference between a zygote—
—and Bela Lugosi:
If one's belief that people are murdering children for the sake of women's rights is not based in reality,
then that person is delusional.
Maybe at one point they were merely stubborn. But for all we keep hearing about anything but a woman's human rights, neither are we hearing that obective, rational,
affirmative assertion of personhood.
In truth, I don't think they have one.
Therefor we must prove that a fetus is not a child, infant, baby first and foremost ...
Tell me again how proving negative conditions isn't a fallacy.
Fetal personhood is the new proposition. The proponents need to establish whence it comes and how it works before we can address the point. That is, in order for others to prove or disprove their proposition, there must first be a proposition to consider.
As it is, the answer is simple enough:
A fetus is a child according to subjective emotions, with no existential, ontological, or medical data needed to back it up.
The difference between the umbilical cord and the navel is generally sufficient to establish the existential difference. The medical data tells us all sorts of things about what happens to the zygote, blastocyst, embryo, or fetus if its connection to the host is severed. Most people can tell the difference between sucking blood through your navel and
eating. Between floating in a fluid sac inside another person's body and
walking. Anyone who wants to assert parity between those two conditions is going to have to explain how that works. And
no, aesthetics and emotions are not a sufficient explanation.
... so what if they aren't going to listen to us, they certainly are not going to listen to us if we just keep calling them sexist and misogynist, they will retort by calling us murderers.
See, are you trying to be sincere there, or still playing the fool? Or have you lost track of which you we're dealing with?
The thing is that you have the chronology exactly backwards.
The growing perception of misogyny is considerably younger than the murder accusations; indeed, the main reasons it arises are the coincidence of membership in diverse but associated factions—it is not a coincidence that the guy who wrongly said a raped woman's body has a way of shutting down a pregnancy, the guy who said being raped to pregnancy is a gift from God, the guy who thinks his domestic violence conviction will help him at the ballot box, and the guy who doesn't understand how any jury anywhere could convict a man of raping his wife are all in the same political organization. The resurgence of these ideas is unsettling, to say the least. But the accusations of misogyny evolved out of the constant repetition of futility; there is no discussing these issues rationally with these people.
Remember back when we had that little digression about misogyny and if men could be pregnant, and it carried on a while, and was even a reasonably interesting digression.
Do you remember the anti-abortion summary?
"So...let me see if I have this straight. Because men cannot get pregnant women should have unimpeded choice regardless of any consideration of personhood?" —Syne
After a while—oh, I don't know, say a quarter of a century or so, and probably considerably less, so we should ask around—that kind of repeated disrespect has its effects. And, indeed, the lack of social skills among the anti-abortion crowd
seems pathological.
And in the end, there is the inevitable problem of giving over to bullies. The perception of misogyny is the result of behavioral observations. And, really, if you think, "I'm not a misogynist, I just happen to support a policy that would harm women because I think it's the right thing to do", isn't a misogynistic stance, you need professional help. If you think, "I'm not a misogynist, but I'm going to ignore everything you say so that I can enact a policy that would harm women because the right thing to do is for women to submit to my aesthetics", isn't misogynistic, you need professional help.
And, it is observable. Fourteen months, thirty-four pages, 675 responses, and we are
still arguing the issue that was
conceded at the outset.
So try that formulation again: "I'm not a misogynist, but if you suggest a woman has human rights, I'm going to change the subject."
Giving over to bullies:
Why can't bigots be proud?
I mean, that's the thing. The bigots know they're doing something wrong, else they would not complain that accurate descriptions of their behavior are insulting.
So in addition to getting the chronology backwards, you're also recommending that people let observably misogynistic behavior go unchecked because to call it by its name would make misogynists sad.
So let's try
that formulation: "I'm not a misogynist, but I think it's impolite to call observable misogyny by its name because it's not polite to the misogynists."
We did not win Roe verse Wade by screaming "sexist" over and over again we won with with rational, logical arguments!
And at that point, you can simply go screw.
You're right. Women
won over
forty years ago.
And as society's views of women have changed, as women themselves have changed, as medicine and motherhood and economy and everything else has changed, you know what hasn't changed at all? The anti-abortion argument.
People have spent forty years trying to answer these questions for the anti-abortion crowd. And they started learning some time ago that the only point of answering the question at all is for the public relations war; after all, the anti-abortion crowd
isn't listening.
Take a look in the states, sir. Right now things are so dire that the
courts have to be the last bastion of rational argument. They lose in court, and then turn around and pass another one of their laws.
They're not listening. They're following a delusional concept. Quite technically, they have no place in the abortion discussion
because they're not competent.
Or is
that observation unkind?
Okay, let's try it a different way. Fill in the blank:
Following a delusion in order to demand that public policy hurt the majority of the species is a good thing because _____.
And if they want to get rid of the delusion talk, they can start with a rational, affirmative argument for fetal personhood.
In the meantime, stop appealing for kindness to the cruel.
No, seriously. We
know they don't like being called misogynists. Just like the homophobes don't like being called homophobes. But do you know what's the same about those two bigotries? The same thing they have in common with every such bigotry:
They want to behave poorly, but are offended by accurate descriptions of their behavior.
This is not the sort of issue in which little white lies will help.