And so in recognition that this one has the potential to be exactly that, please try as hard as you can to keep posts civil (though don't be afraid to make valid points).

I saw this in my facebook news feed:
"I just cannot vote for Obama because of this."

One thing I noticed about the first part of the article is that the author seems to be equating abortion to slavery -- or at least suggesting that they have similarities that would allow for identical logic to be applied to both of them. I disagree with this. I do not think that the "allow people to have a choice" argument for abortion can be applied to slavery, and I believe that that is why the author is able to apparently but deceptively make an effective depiction of that argument as ridiculous -- it IS ridiculous for slavery but not for abortion because slavery and abortion are not the same. What do you think?


The article is long and I haven't fact-checked the rest of it nor feel compelled to comment on it at length, but please feel free to discuss it as well if you find something worth commenting on or refuting.


P.S. This isn't really an Obama vs. McCain (or Palin) topic, so please try to avoid topics re: the candidates not related to what's in the article.

All I can say is: people tend to think that wherever abortion is legal, more abortions occur. This is actually the opposite of truth. Guidance and education together with it being legal keep the numbers lower than in countries where it's illegal.

Same goes for marijuana. People think: In Holland it's legal, there must be so many drug addicts. Fact is the numbers are far lower than in the surrounding countries.

Teenage pregnancy numbers are also lower in places where sex is not a taboo and children are educated 'in time'.

Etc.

Slavery has absolutely nothing to do with these things. People make strange associations.

Yeah, those damn junkie Belgians and Germans! The dramatic difference in drug addiction "numbers" have to do with the fact that the Netherlands have 20% the population of Germany. Also, Germany is subject to massive immigration on a scale larger than that experienced by the Netherlands. Many of these immigrants do not integrate or find themselves at the socioeconomically worse-off end of the social spectrum, and are statistically more likely to become addicted to drugs.

You don't make something legal because 'oh, they would do it anyway'. Do we make murder legal because it happens anyway? Do we make rape legal because it happens anyway? If we did, would there be less murders? Less rapes?

Here's how it breaks down.

There's a segment of the population that murders people.
There's a segment of the population that doesn't murder people because its ILLEGAL.
There's a segment of the population that doesn't murder people because its WRONG.

Making it legal only increases the number of people willing to commit murder. What's different about abortion?


This argument is pointless, in all cases : Abortion arguments always are. On one side, are people who believe the unborn aren't people. On the other, are the people who believe they are. You can't have a debate or change minds when you're dealing with a view on the topic so fundamentally different from your own. It's clear that, from either perspective, all their beliefs are sound. Yes, if the baby is not a person, then it must just be a part of the woman's body, and there are no moral qualms with excising it! Yes, if the baby is a person, then killing it is clearly murder and most reprehensible!

What I always found most was that many of those people who think its fine to have an abortion because the unborn aren't people are the same ones who go to PETA rallies to protect the rights of animals.

JM pretty much sums it up. People who use slogans involving choice are just avoiding the real issue.

It's not about potential for life. An organism is a organism. A fetus is a developing organism. Any criteria we put on "when it becomes human" is arbitrary, no matter how good it sounds. I don't think that we as a society should ever start making criteria for humanity, because no matter how harmless it may seem at first, that's exactly how you open the door to horrors like genocide or slavery that have been similarly justified in the past. I'm not "anti-abortion," I'm for treating fetuses as humans.

This is not a case where the ends justify the means. Sanctity of human life is one of the fundamental principals of government.



That's only because marijuana's illegality is part of its appeal. It's just like underage smoking or drinking.

Haha dumb Americans are still bickering about abortion.

(Emphasis on dumb Americans instead of sane ones)

And for great justice:

That was basically awesome

Quoted again for being the best post on this thread.

I'm pretty sure the economy, healthcare, education, and the well being of our country is more important than being pro-life or pro-choice. I never understood how people can choose their candidate based on that one thing.

it makes picking a candidate easy without having to think about it

My biggest qualm about this, is the uber-tan club whores who have five and six of these a year using it as birth control. My cousin is a good example of this. It disgusts me.

I'm indifferent to first trimester abortions, but partial birth abortions are most defenitely murder.

They're called single-issue voters and they shouldn't have the right to vote. The issue is almost always either abortion or gay marriage. It's stupid.

All laws are arbitrary, because real life is complicated and government has limited reach and that's why it is still illegal to speed when nobody else is on the road

Does anyone have a comment on the question I posed in the original post regarding whether the application of the slavery argument to abortion is faulty or not? I'm just curious about what other people think.

(I guess my interest in this case is less in the topic of abortion itself but more in examining the strength and validity of arguments from a logical point of view)

Hitler was actually pretty damn good other than the whole take over the world and kill the Jews thing. Just because it's one issue doesn't mean it's not important.



That's a terrible analogy.

You're seriously going to Godwin someone and then, in the same post, criticize someone else for using bad analogies?

My mind is blown.

That's like saying part of prostitution's appeal is that it's illegal. That's not it. It's the "product/goods" themselves. People like marijuana because it works, not because "teehee, this is illegal and fun! ^_^"

Pommy, I don't really know what the say about slavery/abortion. My initial reaction is that it was a rather dumb comparison. A developing child is more of a parasite, a slave is a full functioning being, whose relationship with "master" is the opposite of a mother and fetus. Then again, I've decidedly taken the stand that if it's not my progeny growing in someone else, I have no room to speak about abortion, and frankly, very few of the members at Massassi do either.

The only good thing about slavery was that black people did work instead of crime.

It's not an analogy, it's an example

Laws are not magic. They're rough estimates at best.

Do you mean something is arbitrarily a law or that the law is arbitrarily applied?

That kind of stance has a huge effect. It's not exactly a small thing. When it comes to abortion, it's pretty far down on the laundry list of things that need executive attention.

You don't even know what Godwin is, do you? Hint: It's not "Whoever references Nazis or Hitler first loses the argument."

*whoooosh*

That was my point going over your head.

Pommy; I think there is some validity to the comparison. Both practices de-humanize the subject, be it an unborn baby or a negro. In both cases, the people perpetuating the crime console themselves the same way, by convincing themselves that their victim is inferior or even not actually a person. And in both cases, they are enabled by people who say the protesters have no right to protest - In one case, "If you don't like slavery, don't own slaves!" and in the other "You're a MAN - what right do you have to tell a woman what she can do with her body?".

In truth, we not only have a RIGHT to protect that child or slave, we have a DUTY. You can't tell someone they have no right to protect that child because they aren't the mother, no more than you can say they have no right to save a drowning man because they aren't the lifeguard.

Edit : Added an n't

this man speaks truth to the masses.

Um. If Hitler were running today, I could think of quite a few reasons not to vote for him in addition to genocide.

Anti abortion idiots don't care about abortion, if they did they'd be pushing the morning after pill and contraception like there's no tomorrow. They just don't want people to have sex without consequences, and until they just come out and say that, I will never take them seriously.

First and foremost, I sometimes ask myself whether the struggle to express my views is worth all of the potential consequences. And I consistently answer by saying that abortion may put increased disruptive powers in the hands of disingenuous, twisted chiselers right after it reads this letter. Let it. By the end of the decade, I will chastise abortion for not doing any research before spouting off.

Abortion refuses to come to terms with reality. It prefers instead to live in a fantasy world of rationalization and hallucination. Being the analytical sort that I am, I would have to say that teenagers who want to shock their parents sometimes maintain -- with a straight face -- that superstition is no less credible than proven scientific principles. Fortunately, most parents don't fall for this fraud because they know that I don't know which are worse, right-wing tyrants or left-wing tyrants.

But I do know that it will not be easy to pronounce the truth and renounce the lies. Nevertheless, we must attempt to do exactly that for the overriding reason that it is firmly convinced that embracing a system of interdenominationalism will make everything right with the world. Its belief is controverted, however, by the weight of the evidence indicating that one of the things I find quite interesting is listening to other people's takes on things.

For instance, I recently overheard some folks remark that I like to speak of abortion as "illogical". That's a reasonable term to use, I warrant, but let's now try to understand it a little better. For starters, its criticisms of my letters have never successfully disproved a single fact I ever presented. Instead, abortion's criticisms are based solely on its emotions and gut reactions. Well, I refuse to get caught up in its "I think … I believe … I feel" game.

Let me conclude by saying that we who want to yank up meretricious, depraved ruffians from the dark rocks under which they hide and flaunt them before the bright sunshine of public exposure will not rest until we do.

Everybody lock your doors, get a gun, protect yourself! Abortion is planning to operate on a criminal -- as opposed to a civil disobedience -- basis! Before I launch into my main topic, I want to make a few matters crystal-clear: (1) It provides simplistic answers to complex problems, and (2) as a result of that, I am getting tired of sweeping up after repeated abortion fiascoes. Now that you know where I stand on those issues, I can safely say that the tone of its biases is eerily reminiscent of that of sanctimonious troglodytes of the late 1940s in the sense that it has gotten away with so much for so long that it's lost all sense of caution, all sense of limits. If you think about it, only an organization without any sense of limits could desire to create problems that our grandchildren will have to live with.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that "abortion" has now become part of my vocabulary. Whenever I see someone put lackluster thoughts in our children's minds, I tell him or her to stop "abortion-ing". Sensationalism doesn't work. So why does abortion cling to it? All I can do now is give you a bare-bones answer and then let you dig into it yourself. To understand the basic answer you need to realize that by allowing abortion to marginalize the traditions and truths upon which our nation's greatness sits we are selling our souls for dross. Instead, we should be striving to raise a stink about abortion and its raucous anecdotes.

I do not appreciate being labeled. No one does. Nevertheless, we could opt to sit back and let abortion show us a gross miscarriage of common judgment. Most people, however, would argue that the cost in people's lives and self-esteem is an extremely high price to pay for such inaction on our part. The thought that someone, somewhere, might provide an atmosphere of mutual respect, free from adversarialism, Bonapartism, and all other forms of prejudice and intolerance is anathema to it. Surprisingly, the courts and our elected officials are way ahead of it in embracing this simple fact. A word to the wise: To believe that abortion has the mandate of Heaven to keep a close eye on those who look like they might think an unapproved thought is to deceive ourselves. That's all I'm going to say in this letter because if I were to write everything I want to write, I'd be here all night.

Care level: 0

Edit: wtf, someone changed my title. I liked it the way it was

This one is much more accurate.

was maclongname satarising petmc20?

were they both satirical?

both were confusing, although maclongname's was slightly more coherent.

I suspect petmc20's post was from a random argument generator. I know mine was.

heh.

That's entirely wrong. Go have all the consequence-free sex you want. I want you to not kill babies; not stop ****ing. If you can't **** without making a baby, that's your problem. Deal with it.

Well, yeah, he's definitely was lot more socialistic than I would like to see in a president, but he took Germany from a war torn country in the middle of a crippling recession, to the most powerful country in the world in just a few years. I'm just saying from the perspective of getting the job done, he really did an amazing job, and if it hadn't been from the whole genocide/conquering the world thing, they could have done some amazing things. I mean, they probably could have landed on the moon by the end of the forties.



No, but there are still fundamental principles you have to uphold. Otherwise, you have no clear goals to accomplish with any law.

Sex is for babies.

Don't have sex if you don't understand the result could be baby.

Pommy: the crux of the slavery comparison is not that abortion is immoral in the same way that slavery is immoral... It's that you can't call yourself "pro-choice" but "anti-abortion." You can't say that you think that abortion is bad, but that you support it's legality. Basically, the author is saying that if you are against abortion, then you have to be against the choice to have an abortion. Just like you can't say "well, I am against slavery so I won't own slaves, but it's okay if people in the South have slaves if they want to." If you say that it is okay for people to choose to have slavery, then you are not being an advocate against slavery just because you don't practice it yourself.

The reason that you think the argument is wrong is because you view abortion as something that is a personal decision. A woman can choose to abort or to not abort a fetus in her womb. You think that slavery is not such a choice. If white man A decides to enslave African man B, then it is a violation of B's rights. Law must protect rights. Therefore, the law must be against slavery. In this case, for me to say that I am against slavery but want to allow it to remain legal is kind of a problem. Basically, that means that means that I support law that allows for the fundamental rights of an individual to be trampled upon.

For the author, it is clear that they think of abortion as similar to slavery in that it takes away the right of an individual (the fetus). Obviously, you probably do not consider abortion to be taking away the right of a person, so you don't see how it can be compared with slavery.

Basically, the real disagreement is the big one. Authors who are against abortion consider it taking away the life of a human person. Authors who are for abortion do not consider it taking away the life of a human person.

Thats still a really retarded comparison.

Yeah. At least slaves were allowed to live. Abortion is closer to genocide.


this is flamebait

[quote=Jedi Legend]Post[/quote]

I mentioned this in our IM convo, but actually the main beef I have with the argument is that I feel like it's using deceptive rhetoric in that it appeals strongly to the emotional reaction to slavery and then places beneath it a link between slavery and abortion so that anyone who is not insightful or reading carefully into it will quickly think "Slavery! BAD!," note that the logic is "mostly" there and consider it valid, then go "GASP Abortion = slavery?!"

In other words, I have the impression that in addition to the stated (and valid) argument you articulated in your first paragraph, the author is trying to "sneak in" a second argument between the lines which is far less well-founded -- being, "If you're against slavery but not against abortion, you're a hypocrite!"

Someone less articulate than the author might frame it like this:

A: "Are you against abortion?"
B: "Well, no, I think that women should have their choices."
A: "Well, are you against slavery?"
B: "Of course..."
A: "WELL LOOK HERE SLAVERY = ABORTION THEREFORE YOU ARE A HYPOCRITE!!"