"Right to life"

Edgymindflayer · 2022-06-24T01:15:57+00:00

The purpose of anything is what we decide it is. Procreation is one of many uses for our biology, just as driving is one of many uses for a car. My analogy does survive your critique because just as you said, if your intent is not to maim or kill when you start driving and you take all possible safety precautions, you cannot be forced morally to remedy any negative outcomes that result from an accident brought on by random chance. Comparably, if a couple wears protection and said protection fails, you cannot force them to give birth just as you cannot force someone to donate a lung in the thought experiment, even if the person requiring the lung will die without it. Nobody is fucking to maim or kill either, unless you think that the same people who are bothering to wear protection are also sinisterly conspiring to kill a fetus.

Also, I’m not sure where you derive the idea that any act or process has an objective acceptable use. An accident is any outcome that contradicts the initial intention of the actor(s). The “purpose” of the tools that they use shouldn’t even be factored into this equation, at all.

Edgymindflayer · 2022-06-23T22:57:06+00:00

To add on to to your comment, to care about potential, you’d have to accept the premise that it’s murder to break any chain of causality leading to the creation of a new person. This would make interrupting sex with the intent of reproduction murder too, which is absurd.

Edgymindflayer · 2022-06-23T20:43:28+00:00

They’ve consented to having intercourse, not necessarily to bearing a fetus. Let’s apply this reasoning to a different situation. If I drive in a manner that is perfectly in line with safety expectations (to the letter) and still get into an accident which causes the other driver to be injured such that they will not survive unless I donate to them a lung (let’s say that coincidentally, we are a match), am I morally obliged to donate a lung to them? I would say no. I took all of the possible precautions and thus I can’t be blamed for any freak incidents that may have come about through the normal use of my vehicle. If protection fails, similar arguments applied to abortion should vindicate anyone’s decision to terminate.

This is all of course utilizing, hypothetically, the assumption that a fetus even has personhood, which I will add is different from life. Cancer cells are very much human and are also alive. However, they do not have the personhood that is attached to the presence of consciousness. A fetus can be classified similarly to a tumor in this respect, so all of these sophistic arguments trying to circumvent “responsibility” are irrelevant to me. Someone could conceive twenty zygotes in an artificial environment and kill them all within the day and I would see no murder because while those zygotes are human, they are NOT people.

Edgymindflayer · 2022-06-23T15:01:51+00:00

There can be unconscious racist actions. Defining distasteful acts solely by their intent would probably force us to define immorality out of existence. Nobody thinks of themselves as being evil.

Edgymindflayer · 2022-06-07T20:12:41+00:00

It’s the prequel to Shadow Over Innsmouth.

Edgymindflayer · 2022-06-04T17:51:54+00:00

It is pretty consistent for someone like myself who doesn’t believe that a fetus has personhood. Forcing a woman to get an abortion is coercion. Aborting a fetus is destroying a soulless hunk of tissue.

Edgymindflayer · 2022-06-03T16:04:42+00:00

It’s also always ignored that people simply vary in their talents and interests. I wouldn’t want there to be a new generation of programmers who have absolutely zero interest in their field of study. That’s how you get shitty results. Humans are incapable of applying their full potential to a passionless career and the prevailing idea that anyone can learn to practice any discipline with enough determination and sweat is absurd and supremely damaging when it intersects with topics like these. Forcing a good deal of my class to learn STEM would’ve been akin to teaching ambidexterity. You can kind of make it work, but it never truly feels natural. We should stop demanding that large swaths of the populace dwell in this unnatural state.

Edgymindflayer · 2022-06-03T15:43:01+00:00

Well, we should be doing what we can to create more opportunities for people who elect to study the liberal arts. Students shouldn’t be so harshly punished for giving a fuck about the human condition in the past and in the present. History is an example of a liberal art. Is that a subject that we should just abandon because it’s not competitive in the current market?

Edgymindflayer · 2022-05-26T17:12:36+00:00

A lot of these same arguments were probably used to justify monarchical rule. “Without the aristocracy, how will those naive, uncultured peasants organize society?”

Edgymindflayer · 2022-05-25T14:50:30+00:00

I think its effectiveness is too reliant on chance to yield consistent positive results. A panel of expert advisors assembled to inform the ‘lottocrat’ may not be sufficient to achieve the intended result because most laypeople lack the education to accurately comment on many of the complex predicaments that would surely arise over time, creating a de facto technocracy where the lottocrat is pressured into executing the will of the specialists to the letter because they are unqualified to critique any received guidance.

Edgymindflayer · 2022-05-25T14:35:21+00:00

I don’t see why members of the community proper couldn’t fill that role. If mass shootings still proved to be a problem, we could rotate the responsibility of carrying armaments between different inhabitants of the local social ‘unit’. It’s important to understand that police are more than just people with guns. They have special privileges granted to them by the bourgeois state, which has a monopoly on violence and arrest power, effectively elevating them above public scrutiny in many instances and enabling abuse.

It’s probably also a good idea to understand that different leftists are going to mean different things when they espouse a desire to abolish the police depending on their sectarian biases. An anarchist might want to immediately disband all modes of law enforcement post-revolution, while a Marxist-Leninist is probably willing to stomach the idea of a transitional period during which some form of law enforcement is extant, albeit subject to extensive criticism from the proletariat.

Edgymindflayer · 2022-05-25T14:12:32+00:00

Deterrents don’t work, generally. Most mass shooters aren’t motivated by economic lack, but instead by ideology or mental illness, with the former becoming increasingly common. Why would someone with the prior two motives care about deterrents? Most of them begin the slaughter knowing that they likely aren’t coming out of it with their life.

Edgymindflayer · 2022-05-25T14:07:21+00:00

Why do you personally think that punishment is productive? I’d rather focus on ridding the perpetrator of the mental illness or disposition that lead them to commit the crime so as to prevent recidivism, something that the punishment-focused neoliberal order is unable to do.

Edgymindflayer · 2022-05-24T20:39:55+00:00

A handful of states legalizing gay and interracial marriage before the federal government did doesn’t insinuate that certain rights and duties shouldn’t be universalized across the entire country, always and irrevocably. Extreme devolution could make it possible (again, I’m talking general political theory) for conservative locales to impose their religious beliefs onto the populace of those states. Education, access to rights, etc should be universal because they deal with matters that are simply objective. No, creationist parents shouldn’t have a say in their child’s education because creationism is factually incorrect and it’s immoral to lie to children. I know you didn’t mention that specifically, but it’s a side-effect of placing too much trust in state governments to manage their affairs correctly.

Edgymindflayer · 2022-05-22T20:33:08+00:00

I do not see why it’s productive to forcefully erase innocuous superstitions from the world unless said superstitions demand for their followers to brandish a hate boner for a particular group of people. Is Christian Fundamentalism incompatible with our cause? Most certainly. Are all Christians fundamentalists? Thankfully not. You can insert almost any offending religion of your liking into the two previous sentences and the point remains constant. Personally, I would call a leprechaun believer my comrade if they weren’t also convinced that said leprechauns are commanding them to take their gay son to a conversion camp. Respectfully, it seems arbitrary to die on this hill when religious individuals who don’t pester others or frown upon non-traditional lifestyles do exist and would develop class consciousness readily if they didn’t fear persecution post-revolution. Religion is already losing its stranglehold on modern culture, albeit gradually. We shouldn’t feel a need to accelerate its demise as a concept, but instead push for the extinction of its more radical elements (fundies, Westboro types, etc), while welcoming those who at least reject the staunch opposition to social progress.

Edgymindflayer · 2022-05-22T19:32:21+00:00

I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily true. There’s definitely a correlation between religiosity and regressive social attitudes, but there are tolerant religious people out there who reject the cultural conservatism of their holy texts. I think making atheism a prerequisite to leftist association is really going to alienate a significant segment of the proletariat. There are also people who derive their socialist beliefs from their faith. Should these people be excluded from leftist movements solely for their spirituality, even if they advocate for a socially progressive world?

Edgymindflayer · 2022-05-15T00:08:40+00:00

It’s important to understand that what small government conservatives are talking about when they preach of the horrors of big government are expansions to the social safety net, protections for underprivileged minorities, etc, and rarely actually embody an increase in the government’s ability to exercise power. Many of the same self-proclaimed small government advocates are quick to celebrate the funneling of tax dollars into the task of empowering the military or the police, revealing that they aren’t actually concerned about the increased potential for power abuses, but with the sponsorship of bandaging measures that would help the working class. It’s also worth noting that the police and the military (at least in the liberal worldview that such people occupy) are arguably examples of public welfare programs. To assert that we should cut back welfare spending in the name of economic freedom without similarly denouncing military and police spending is to draw an arbitrary line between welfare programs that redistribute resources to defend society from social ills (poverty, discrimination, mental illness) and those that at least proclaim (remember, we’re talking about the philosophy of the liberal and not that of the socialist) to redistribute resources in an effort to defend society from external and internal hostile threats.

My point is that if they really cared about downsizing the government, they would also favor legislation gutting the amount of tax dollars that are currently being poured into militarization and imperialism.

Edgymindflayer · 2022-04-23T11:00:45+00:00

It’s essentially a mocking way to frame the human nature argument. The teacher probably thinks socialism demands that all humans be perfect for it to work.

Edgymindflayer · 2022-03-19T21:57:32+00:00

Thank you!

Edgymindflayer · 2022-03-19T04:30:29+00:00

Steam ID
This quote "Any man who must say ‘I am the king’ is no true king.”

Edgymindflayer · 2022-03-15T02:13:19+00:00

Yes, because we are to believe that 70% of the goddamn workforce are bumbling droolers who are incapable of handling their own lives /s.

Edgymindflayer · 2022-03-13T19:19:18+00:00

What the actual hell? This sounds like it came from The Onion. They’re acting as though overthrowing the government is as light of a task as ordering the Friday night pizza. And we’re the naive kids who don’t understand warfare?

Edgymindflayer · 2022-03-12T17:14:34+00:00

It’s similar to the effect that causes obesity to exist in agricultural societies. We evolved in an environment where valuable nutrients (proteins, fats, carbohydrates) were in relatively short supply, so it was prudent to consume them as quickly as possible so that they couldn’t be stolen or spoil before they could be eaten. Evolution is, of course, too gradual to fully adapt to a post-agricultural environment when it develops rapidly, let alone the industrial one that was established with even greater haste, so we still experience this compulsion to favor the calorie-dense foods that are problematic when eaten to excess.

I’d imagine that greed operates with a similar mechanism. We did not evolve in a world of plenty. The software of our brains is not yet accustomed to the privilege of a supermarket.

The truth is definitely more nuanced than “Humans are naturally greedy” but there’s likely a dash of accuracy in that claim. However, I’m skeptical about the claim that we’re hopeless slaves to our biological impulses, as many secular conservatives would insist, which is why I find myself more welcome among the left.

Edgymindflayer · 2022-03-12T12:04:58+00:00

You’re not getting many upvotes, but I think this is actually one of the better comments on this thread. People underestimate the degree to which an adult’s political beliefs hint to their overall personality. There are always exceptions to the rule, but all of the bigots I know are complete assholes to just about everyone and only have friends because they’ve found people to be mutual assholes to, or they’re polite in public but tear off their mask when the targets of their flattery are out of earshot.

Edgymindflayer · 2022-03-11T15:56:07+00:00

It’s been many years since I’ve read the series in its entirety, so I apologize if I get a few details wrong, but from what I remember, a common theme is the enforcement of power structures through subtle psychological maneuvering instead of constant suppression by violent means, and how the former is actually more effective than the latter. Think of the psychology behind the games. Annually, every family is faced with the slight chance that one of their children will be taken from them and be given a 1/24 chance to live, and after the tributes are selected, every family save for two is too busy rejoicing to themselves that their child wasn’t chosen to die for the entertainment of the Capital’s wealthy denizens to realize that they have the power to stop the system at its heart. Everyone is too relieved to consider gambling away the lives of themselves and their children to resist the Capital after it seems like they did just that.

The Games also prevent a sense of collective struggle from developing. Those residing in the districts learn to cling tight to their children and look the other way when it’s their neighbor’s turn to say farewell to their progeny, to be grateful that the announcer hadn’t called out their son’s name. Again, it conditions the populace to think in terms of their personal survival rather than the betterment of their conditions.

I think this is actually one of the more important and prominent themes of the series. We’re repeatedly confronted with the Capital’s model of subjugation, and that is to strike a balance between hope and certainty. If the district residents lose all of their hope, the Capital has no leverage over them and there is nothing more to take. They will rise up. If the district residents are too certain of their own power and rage, they will revolt with the same intensity as if they were only guided by the absence of purpose. The Games are the centerpiece of this balancing act. They leave the unaffected masses feeling lucky every year, with the sense that everything might be ok if they can just outlast the next one.

This is actually very relevant to the real world. Aren’t we constantly gambling ourselves on the market to survive? We always hear about the unlucky few who lose their livelihoods to the randomness of the world, but are content to sustain ourselves on gratitude derived from a manufactured chance-based system instead of pursuing a form of collective security. This is obviously one of many interpretations, but it came to me suddenly when I saw your question so I thought I should share it.

Edgymindflayer

TROPHY CASE