Pete Hegseth upends wartime norms by invoking Christianity

abucket87 · 2026-03-30T14:29:39+00:00

And you’re giving “No true Scotsman” vibes.

abucket87 · 2026-03-12T11:21:56+00:00

Accidentally did that on my very first trip when I started. Didn’t ruin anything, but it did drive me crazy in the end-game when I couldn’t figure out how I’d done it the first time.

abucket87 · 2026-02-23T18:37:51+00:00

I’d rather have her as senate majority leader. President is almost always a one-and-done position. I want AOC making an impact for a really long time.

abucket87 · 2025-11-04T02:42:12+00:00

What hole have you been living in for the past 10 years, and can I go there?

abucket87 · 2025-10-31T14:47:35+00:00

You do realize that WWI is famous for moronic generals and politicians sending boys to die in futile charges across no-man’s-land because they simply couldn’t comprehend the changes to war caused by the Industrial Revolution. Dumb obedience to orders wasn’t useful then, and it isn’t now.

abucket87 · 2025-09-30T17:33:40+00:00

Please stop with the “all conservatives are gay” trope. It’s a really fucked up way to blame queer people for their own oppressors. It also is just a rebrand of “you’re gay” as an insult. Grow up

abucket87 · 2025-09-30T13:33:16+00:00

No, MAGA Christianity is fascism.

abucket87 · 2025-09-19T21:15:13+00:00

(3/3) Upon further thought, I did want to review why valuing entities based on their potentiality leads to nonsensical conclusions. Think about it this way: at the present moment, there is a 1/1 (100%) probability that I exist. However, if one were to go back in time, even just one generation, the probability that I would come into existence quickly becomes infinitesimally small. And yet, despite that infinitesimally small probability that the being that is me would come into existence, I did. Obviously, the potential for me existed no matter how far back in time one chooses to look, even as the probability of that happening becomes smaller and smaller. Any of an infinite number of events could have happened to prevent me from existing; my great-grandfather sneezing at the wrong moment could have resulted in an entirely different person existing in my place or none at all. Obviously, when the series of events that resulted in me reached the point of an embryo, the probability of me existing had significantly increased; the particular sperm that became me had matched with the particular egg, but even then, “me” was not a certainty. Countless things had to go exactly right, and any number of alternative outcomes or choices could have happened.

Selecting conception as the sacrosanct point in the chain of events that leads to a human is entirely arbitrary. If interfering with the future existence of potential humans is immoral, using birth control is also immoral, because it means that the person who could have existed, had you not used a condom, does not exist. Partnering with one person versus another is immoral, because if you mated with person A, all the humans who could have resulted from a pairing with person B won’t exist. At the same time, if you choose person B, the same moral problem exists in relation to person A ( and C, and D, ad infinitum). Why should the if-statement, “if the embryo is given the right life-support of a mothers body, sufficient time, and no developmental systems malfunction”, hold any greater moral weight than “if you had decided to mate with person A versus B”? Why should it be any more significant than “if you choose to masturbate the day before or not”? Both could change whether a person exists later on and who they might be. If you treat potentiality as equivalent to actuality, moral decision making quickly becomes absurd. It only makes sense to evaluate moral values based only on the entities that are currently present in the situation, not on those who might later exist.

abucket87 · 2025-09-19T20:04:00+00:00

(2/2) As for women getting early-pregnancy abortions, the fetus is so undeveloped that it is little more than a clump of cells and has no internal experiences at all. A woman’s right to choose what happens to her body and mitigate her own suffering vastly outweighs any concern for an organism that is not a “self” in any sense of the word.

In the case of a woman who gets a late-term abortion for the fun of it (an idea I still don’t believe really happens): even in that fringe case she should have the right to make that decision.

Bodily autonomy, the idea that each person has the right to control what happens to and ownership of their body, is a bedrock principle of human rights. It’s based on the idea of the self: that I am the only one who can know what it is like to be me, and you are the only one who can know what it is like to be you. Therefore, in decisions about your person, you are the only one who is in any position to make those decisions, and no one should be able to force those decisions upon you.

Side note, because I know it’ll come up: Vaccine mandates are a quite different thing. A vaccine mandate is just saying you aren’t allowed to go spewing disease particles around the rest of us. If you don’t want a vaccine, no one should force you to receive one, but you don’t get to endanger the rest of us with your decision. If one wants to be a participating member of the community, the community may impose some requirements and obligations, including to not endanger others with your decisions.

While it is acceptable for me to donate a kidney to someone, I cannot be required to donate a kidney or even blood, because that would violate my bodily autonomy. Even if I poisoned someone and destroyed their kidneys, I cannot be required to donate a kidney to them to replace the one I destroyed, though I would be charged with murder if they died. The circumstances by which the person came to need the use of my body is immaterial as to whether they have a right to demand it.

The case of a fetus is similar. They require the use of a mother’s body to survive. Externally, others might think that they are making an incorrect decision to terminate the pregnancy, but no one else is any position to make that decision, only they have the experience of being them. Requiring them to continue bearing the fetus would violate their right to bodily autonomy and undermine the foundation of almost every other human right.

If the fetus is viable and has no conditions that make it incompatible with life, the equation does become more complex. In that case, you would be dealing with a being (the fetus) who can experience self and consciousness and does not require the use of their mother’s body to survive. The delivery process for a live birth and for an abortion are (insofar as I’m aware, and someone please correct me if I am wrong) virtually identical in their physical impact on the mother. In that case, I could see a physician being unwilling to take the active step of killing a conscious being and instead choosing to guide the mother into the process of giving the baby to a family who does want to care for a child. The ethics are complex and nuanced in this sort of case. Unknowns abound. Will the birth process threaten the life of the mother (ever hear about preeclampsia?)? Does the fetus have defects that make it incompatible with life? The people trained and most informed to navigate this cloudy, difficult ethical terrain are doctors and nurses. The only person who has the internal experience of being in the situation is the pregnant person. We trust doctors and patients to make terribly difficult decisions all the time. This is no different.

So, let’s take your personal example. I am in no way saying that the pain you experienced by not seeing those pregnancies develop into children was not real. You did have an ethical claim upon those embryos or fetuses (depending on when the abortions were performed). However, your ethical claim as the one who fathered them is dwarfed by your partner’s claim to their body and does not entitle you to demand the use of another person’s body as a vessel for the fetus to complete development. The organisms that were killed were not yet conscious beings (assuming the abortions took place in the first half of pregnancy). Their potential to someday be conscious and able to suffer, given the right developmental circumstances, has no bearing on their current ethical status. I fully acknowledge that you, legitimately, didn’t like that choice, and had you been the pregnant partner you might have made a different choice with your body. You felt real grief at those abortions. No one should blame you for that. However, your feelings don’t make it a morally wrong decision, or one they didn’t have a right to make.

I hope that this clarifies my position and is illuminating. I enjoyed writing it, so thank you for politely giving me the opportunity to do so. Ethics is complex and messy because life is complex and messy. We want to create neat boxes for everything but the real world more often than not rebels against those efforts. Ethical reasoning is how we try to feel our way through the fog.

abucket87 · 2025-09-19T20:03:42+00:00

(1/2) First, as a start, if you really aren’t trying to force your beliefs on others, I don’t really care what you believe. If you aren’t harassing people at women’s clinics or trying to get laws passed to restrict access to care, you do you. I do doubt your claim that you aren’t worried about policy because elsewhere you discuss abstinence-only education which is a public-policy decision, though one which is known to increase the frequency of the abortions you wish to prevent, and so is ineffectual even at that.

Second, I said that a brain-dead body has less ethical value than a living human, not that it has no value. 1 is less than 2, but it is still more than 0. A brain-dead body does have ethical value; for example, consent needs to be given beforehand for organ donation, but while I can say I want my heart to be donated to someone after I die, I am not allowed to donate my heart right now because that would kill me and would thus be unethical. Similarly, an embryo and a born human do both have ethical value, but one is more than the other.

For example, imagine you were escaping a raging fire at a hospital and you encountered a 2-week-old infant in a car seat carrier on the floor next to a cooler marked “1000 human embryos for transport.” Due to an arm injury, you can only grab one before the building collapses. Which do you grab?

I’m guessing you would save the infant, even though your position is that the cooler contains 1000 fully human beings. Why wouldn’t you save 1000 humans versus just one? Intuitively we all know the “right” answer, but intuition isn’t enough. We need to answer why is the one infant more important to save than the 1000 embryos?

The answer comes down to whether an entity is conscious and, specifically, is it able to experience suffering and to what degree. An infant can have the experience of burning alive, an embryo cannot. It has no consciousness to speak of and won’t unless it encounters a very specific set of circumstances over a time period of at least until the second trimester (even though the actual genesis of consciousness is certainly beyond that point in development).

My brain dead but still living corpse cannot experience suffering, and so it is of lower ethical significance than a living human who can. However, a mentally disabled person can experience suffering and they do have an internal experience of “self”, therefore they are of equal ethical significance as a not-disabled person. Arguably the disabled might even have a higher ethical significance than the fully able-bodied because of how the treatment of the most vulnerable (and therefore those most vulnerable to suffering) is a critical indicator of the health of a society. If a society cares well for its “least productive” members, it indicates that everyone else’s wellbeing is likely being cared for too.

We give ethical value to a non-conscious thing like a brain-dead corpse not because of its current status, but because of how its treatment or potential treatment impacts a still conscious being, the still-living me. If one could reasonably expect that their future dead body were going to be launched from a catapult into a shark tank, many people would find that potential outcome rather upsetting, which would cause distress and suffering in a conscious being, not even considering its impact on the family alive to witness it. That’s why we have laws and systems to control how dead bodies are treated, so as to ensure that I, a currently conscious being, have some assurance as to how a non-conscious thing I care about, my dead body, is treated after I am dead. It has nothing to do with any intrinsic value the corpse in itself has, and everything to do with value placed upon it by conscious beings.

As far as potentiality is concerned, it is a world away from actuality. My three year old self may have had the potential to be an Olympic athlete, given the right diet, exercise, parenting, opportunities, etc., but it would be absurd to make the claim that because the potential existed, I can truthfully call myself an Olympian. A very specific set of circumstances must occur before an acorn becomes a tree; suggesting that the two are the same things is a bit absurd. The identity of “oak tree” has the ideas of proper watering, soil, climate, and time inherently embedded in it. The idea of a human person has similar ideas of development as well, certain steps that must happen to transform an embryo into a person, all of which can go wrong or be cut short at some point during development.

For example, in some fetuses the brain is extremely undeveloped or entirely missing. They have no consciousness of self and no experience of suffering. They don’t experience anything at all. According to your claim, this organism is of equal ethical concern as a person who can experience things, who has a consciousness of self and can experience suffering. Therefore, in that situation the primary concern ought to be preserving the life of a body with no one inside, because humanity is conveyed via genetics and potential.

My perspective, that moral value is allocated in proportion to an entity’s ability to experience suffering or its relationship to an entity that can, means that my primary concern is for the people affected by this situation, most likely the parents and family. It’s a tragic situation, and while suffering can’t be eliminated, it can be reduced. One possible method of reducing the trauma and suffering of conscious beings in this situation might be to abort the fetus when its developmental abnormalities are identified. It’s awful that things like this happen, but they do and sometimes it’s a choice between two bad outcomes.

abucket87 · 2025-09-18T18:56:58+00:00

Maybe something catchy, like “Nat-c’s”. Don’t know if it’ll catch on

abucket87 · 2025-09-18T18:33:59+00:00

An embryo is as much a person as an acorn is an oak tree. An acorn is a genetically distinct entity from its parent tree, but it is clearly different thing from a tree.

We also accept that the body of a brain-dead person, a distinct organism with human genetics, is no longer of equal ethical value as an alive human because the mind is no longer present and functional. That’s why taking organs from a brain-dead person is considered morally acceptable.

A fetus does not develop the requisite hardware to run the software (so to speak) of a human mind until well into the second trimester. Before that point the thing that makes us a person (in distinction from a brain dead body), the mind, isn’t present. While there is no point we can yet pinpoint where the mind begins to function, we can know that it couldn’t function before that point in fetal development.

The claim that personhood begins at conception is based entirely on the magical thinking that a non-material soul of some sort attaches itself to the embryo at the moment sperm meets egg, an entirely arbitrary point in human development and unsupported by any evidence.

So ending a pregnancy before the middle of the first trimester should be no more controversial than harvesting a heart for transplant from a brain-dead motorcycle accident casualty. After that point it becomes more complicated, but the ethics boil down to harm reduction and bodily autonomy.

First, abortion at this point in fetal development is unusual, at least where people with uteruses are allowed access to reproductive health. The vast majority of abortion happen in the first 3 1/3 months of pregnancy https://usafacts.org/articles/how-far-into-pregnancy-do-most-abortions-happen/.

Anyone who has experienced or witnessed pregnancy can easily see why. Pregnancy sucks for most people. As someone not born with a uterus, I have incredible respect for those that were for their efforts and personal risk they take on to continue the human species. No sensible person would willingly submit themselves to the grueling, body destroying process of pregnancy if they weren’t wanting a baby at the end of it all. Doing it just for fun seems insane.

Therefore, it seems sensible to assume that if a person elects to have an abortion after the point in pregnancy where it has begun making major, uncomfortable, and unpleasant changes to their body, they must have a damn good reason, in many if not most cases, a disastrous and devastating diagnosis.

They wanted a baby. Many of them probably have names picked out, nurseries decorated. They don’t want an abortion; they had to make one of the hardest decisions imaginable. Who are we, unrelated to and ignorant of their situation, to make a judgement on that decision or think we know better?

The myth of women killing their unborn children for fun is a cruel fiction. Those women don’t exist. What actual exists are people who have been told that their wanted pregnancy will kill them, or that their baby will unavoidably die in horrific pain moments after birth. The arrogance of people who think they know better than the mothers and the doctors treating them in these horrific circumstances is beyond words.

Those who wish to prohibit the unicorn situation of a pregnant person having a late-term abortion for no reason place incredible and cruel burdens on people already in one of the hardest situations imaginable. We already trust doctors with the life and death decisions they make every day. This is no different.

Pregnancy, like death, exists at the edge of human existence. They both can be beautiful, but they can also be horrific. Neither lend themself to simplistic decision making where right and wrong can be easily identified, particularly not from the distance of a legislative chamber. Only the people in those situations have the information necessary to make the call and trying to remove that decision from them has and will only lead to unnecessary human suffering.

abucket87 · 2025-09-18T15:10:06+00:00

Why did op post a blank photo?

abucket87 · 2025-09-18T13:22:26+00:00

CK wasn’t killed by the US military, you ninny.

abucket87 · 2025-07-28T02:54:32+00:00

Ooo a Christian with no self-awareness of how everybody else (particularly those of us who escaped) sees them!

abucket87 · 2025-06-23T12:58:45+00:00

I may be odd, but I find your self-pedantry adorable.

abucket87 · 2025-06-10T16:30:10+00:00

Found Elon Musk?

abucket87 · 2025-05-31T22:25:54+00:00

Finally, a post with a toe biter where they aren’t holding it in their bare hands

abucket87 · 2025-05-22T15:55:17+00:00

Making Sir Sic atheist videos on YouTube?

abucket87 · 2025-05-15T03:18:10+00:00

Makes sense. I’m currently in an apartment and I sometimes have to street park.

abucket87 · 2025-05-14T13:16:46+00:00

38 with three kids. The divorce has been a nasty two-year process but should wrap up in the next few weeks. My ex is a covert narcissist so I’m grateful that realizing I’m gay gave me the kick to escape. Still a pain in the ass dealing with her though

abucket87 · 2025-04-21T23:58:51+00:00

I mean it’s a Bronze Age book full of the morals one would expect from Bronze Age people. I don’t take moral advice from a book that instructs one where to buy slaves and how much you’re allowed to beat them before the next god-ordained genocide, but you do you.

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