phosphorus2
No bio...
User ID: 3264
phosphorus2
2d ago
Why are Moroccans flooding into Spanish Ceuta?
Is it because the Spain:
- makes it hard to remove them
- gives them all citizenship and money
- is generally a much nicer place than Morocco
OR
Is it because:
- a bunch of random jews post things on twitter
- jews in 711 betrayed Toledo to invading Arabs
Jeez, I don't know!
phosphorus2
11d ago
We should make our atmosphere 100% CO2 to maximize life, what could go wrong?
phosphorus2
18d ago
I don't think that's remotely comparable. You are talking about an employment contract, the fact that you think this can be placed in the same category as motherhood is already morally repugnant to me.
I know its not remotely comparable, that's why I said lumping them all together as "selling people" was obtuse. Selling slaves and surrogacy for money and MLB trades can all be described as "selling people", that those things are not (morally) comparable is my point. Because these "selling people" scenarios have wildly different moral valences "It's morally wrong to sell people" obviously has a little bit of nuance to it.
But even if you think consent is the only valid moral factor, these contracts were entered into voluntarily, and the player / worker can refuse to be "sold".
First thing is that's not even true, a MLB player can be sold against his will to another team. It happens all the time, and it not possible for him to refuse.
Second is that in both the particular surrogacy in question and the practice at large are also contracts entered into voluntarily. If you are going to argue that the baby gets a say - no, it doesn't. Does a baby get a say on if it is adopted? No. Has any baby ever had a say as to if or when or how they are born? No. Its never been the case, so why is it here?
"Selling people" is understood to be bad for reasons like the people being sold don't have a say in the matter
Like the children...
Ok this one by me was maybe not precise, but I have a feeling you get the gist of what I am saying. I am referring to something like Kunta Kinte being shipped off to the deep south against his will, people generally think that is mean and bad. Given that no newborn child at any point in history has ever had a say in any matter I hoped that you realized that I was referring to something like Kunta instead of something unremarkable and due to the inherent nature of newborns.
they have less rights than others
like the children...
I am going to assume you weren't talking about the fact that children and adults have different rights because that's not remarkable or the point of contention here.
What right does a non surrogate child have that a surrogate child does not? The right to a mother? Baby has a mother. How could it be born if it didn't have a mother? That it is adopted by two gay men, one being the father, does not strike the mother from existence.
there is typically violence or coercion involved.
the only reason it doesn't is that the child is too weak to put up any kind of violent resistance.
Really? I don't believe you. You couldn't possibly know this, its not falsifiable, did a baby tell you this? No, you just made it up.
Also the mothers' material situation is often taken advantage of, which may be on the softer side of coercion, but it still plausibly fits in the same category.
- The woman in question is not the babies mother. The egg was not hers, it was a donor's.
- The woman in question was not coerced or pressured into surrogacy, per the article in Canada surrogates are not allowed to be paid anything beyond costs for their surrogacy.
- You are making a fully general argument here - anyone can be coerced about anything, you can argue against anything by saying that "oh someone's martial situation could be taken advantage of here so its coercive"
They absolutely do. Slavery is not considered abhorrent because the masters always and everywhere mistreat their slaves, in fact "but we always treat aware slaves with kindness" was a staple pro-slavery argument back in the day, and it was rejected because treating people as ownable and sellable was considered immoral. That argument applies to surrogacy 1:1.
The surrogate was not any given money for the kid. Per the article she was not even given money for the costs she incurred.
The parents don't own the kid beyond the extent every parent or guardian "owns" their kid. One of them is the actual father! Its his kid!
If that argument applies to surrogacy 1:1 then why doesn't it here?
phosphorus2
18d ago
The main point I can take away from this is that all of the Christian right that warned about various slippery slopes have been validated over, and over, and over again. The slippery slope is technically a fallacy, yes. But Christians repeatedly pointed out "There is no limiting principle here, and the arguments you nake to support degenerate behavior X are just as applicable to degenerate behaviors Y and Z and there is nothing except public sentiment (and not even that if a judge somewhere says otherwise) preventing the awful things we're talking about from becoming reality."
You can get an abortion at any gestational age in Canada for any reason. Google tells me that really the only restrictions are resources, that you might not be able to get an abortion past 24 weeks due to lack of facilities. Not due to gatekeeping. There is already no limiting principle on abortion, you are already at the bottom of the hill, that is the case regardless of surrogacy.
Recognizing where on the hill we are starting at, how can we additionally fall down with the introduction of surrogacy? If the contention is that we will slip down into allowing donors to compel the pregnant woman into abortion for arbitrary reasons this doesn't really seem like a good example of that, they were not able to do that. The limiting principle against that is that the woman gets to choose, and that is what is backed up by Canadian law. And if the woman always gets to choose, what on top of that are the surrogates? Like it seems to me your issue should mostly be with Canada's elective abortion rules and not with the surrogates who were not able to pressure the mom into an abortion.
Long story short, the baby had a minor heart defect (the article doesn't specify what) and a cleft palate, and the adoptive men wish their now two year old child had been murdered and are suing the birth mother for failing to do so (there are also claims that she failed to keep them informed in a timely manner about these issues).
The National Post article linked in the NYP piece starts out with:
"A Canadian couple is suing the surrogate mother who carried their son, two years after she refused their request to abort the fetus because of a cleft lip and possible genetic abnormalities."
If the possible genetic abnormalities indicated to the parents were something like down syndrome or "your kid might be a vegetable" to me that has a lot different moral valence than "our kid has cleft lip, abort him". It is not clear from either article what the potential genetic issue was, but from the following we can see the parents changed their mind when they learned the baby was generally healthy beyond the lip:
"The parents agreed to proceed with the pregnancy after doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital said the baby was generally healthy and had no major problems beyond the cleft lip."
If your objection is to abortion in general then the above will not allay you, but to me aborting a child halfway through pregnancy because of serious health issues is much more understandable than doing the same for a cosmetic defect.
phosphorus2
18d ago
"It's morally wrong to sell people" doesn't sound so difficult.
Is it morally wrong for MLB teams to sell and/or trade players too each other? Is it morally wrong for a temp agency to sell their workers to a factory?
Calling surrogacy "selling people" is technically correct, but obtuse. "Selling people" is understood to be bad for reasons like the people being sold don't have a say in the matter, they have less rights than others, there is typically violence or coercion involved. Its evocative of slavery or sex trafficking. The bad things that are inherent or understood to be inherent in slavery / trafficking don't really apply to surrogacy. Yeah there are surrogacy horror stories like in OP, but the modal surrogacy case by far doesn't look like OP and there is not reason it should.
phosphorus2
23d ago
Here are some relevant definitions via Google:
Gender Identity: A person’s deeply felt, internal sense of being male, female, or something entirely different (such as non-binary, genderqueer, or agender)
Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, expressions, and norms that a culture associates with being a man or a woman. While often conflated with biological sex, it is distinct; sex is assigned at birth based on biology, whereas gender encompasses an individual's internal identity and societal presentation.
You hear this argument:
"who are you to say someone isn't the gender he says he is? No one would know better than the person himself."
so much because, by those definitions, that is what gender / gender identity is. If you accept those definitions then its not even an argument, its an extension of the definition. You cannot by those definitions have any input on that person's gender / gender identity as it is solely that own person's feeling.
Is having skin in the game a reason to trust your self-read more, or less?
If this was any other form of identity then maybe, but again it comes down to the premises accepted. If you accept the definitions the conclusion is foregone, it is smuggled in.
As with everything trans related you will get a much clearer picture by questioning the premises and definitions set forth by the troons than by arguing within them. Don't argue within a frame that is incoherent and solely made up to bamboozle you, reject the premises.
phosphorus2
23d ago
Marshall's failure to get behind the KMT and defeat the CCP really could be the greatest blunder in American history
Its fun to speculate on but I'm not sure that a having a counterfactual KMT led China would have turned out any better for the US. Probably, but a rivalry seems somewhat overdetermined. China is big, the US is big, there is bound to be at least tension.
KMT was pretty extreme in its own right. They considered themselves a revolutionary party, they had the same "century of humiliation" resentments against the West, they were ran by a warlord. Chiang Kaishek does not exactly strike me as a liberal democracy enjoyer:
In 1948, the Kuomintang again attacked the merchants of Shanghai, Chiang Kaishek sent his son Chiang Ching-kuo to restore economic order. Ching-kuo copied Soviet methods, which he learned during his stay there, to start a social revolution by attacking middle class merchants. He also enforced low prices on all goods to raise support from the Proletariat.
China really shot itself in the foot with the Mao led CCP. If that huge China takeoff happens in 1980 or 70 or 60 instead of 1990, where do you think China would be today? If they had the same GDP per capita as Taiwan does now their GDP would be 2x the US. Think of the consternation caused by Japan Inc. in the 80s, and that was with about as close of an ally as you can get. Yes Tawian / US are close now, but that is a vassal / big bro relationship, not peer/peer.
phosphorus2
25d ago
My argument was reasonable.
Plenty of arguments are reasonable regardless of them being deep or thorough or correct.
phosphorus2
26d ago
What makes you think I didn’t read the article?
You draw conclusions that are not supported by the article.
E.g.:
In interviews, staffers have also raised doubts about Reade’s claim that she was asked to serve drinks at a fundraiser, an incident she said she included in an official complaint of sexual harassment submitted while she worked in the office. But more than 50 former staffers said they didn’t remember ever attending a fundraiser for Biden in Washington, D.C., when they were on his Senate staff. And some recalled an office policy banning most of Biden’s Senate staff from doing campaign work.
This does not support the position there was no complaint, but I almost don't blame you because they wrote it very bad. But I still blame you because even if these were more solid they would point to Tara's claim being not credible, not that it didn't exist at all.
Like they interview 74 staffers, and close to a third of them remember Biden attending fundraisers in DC, which would corroborate Tara's allegation. This is also an example of a problem with interviewing so many people who never met Tara. What use is it asking a Biden staffer from 2016 if Biden had ever fundraised in D.C.? They lump in a bunch of useless data points in with people who were there. Like if the third of staffers who had attended a D.C. fundraiser worked in the 90s with Tara that is obviously a much stronger piece indication than if that third worked with Biden under Obama.
They also apparently had a policy that allowed at least some Senate staff to do campaign work (most is not all), also somewhat corroborating Tara's allegation.
The text in your hyperlink which I am quoting above does not support the conclusion that there was no complaint, it supports the conclusion that her complaint is not credible. Likewise with your second link now quoted below:
I remember talking about him wanting me to serve drinks because he liked my legs and thought I was pretty
This is just an accusation. You should have highlighted this part:
Reade says she doesn’t have a copy of the report, and Biden said Friday that he is not aware that any complaint against him exists. He asked the Senate and the National Archives to search their records to try to locate a complaint from Reade.
This supports the conclusion that there was no complaint because no one actually has the complaint.
phosphorus2
27d ago
What constitutes a “serious investigation” in your book?
Do talk to the people who were actually there and worked with her, like Ben Savage in the article.
Do try and corroborate or disprove. Like what happened to Tara's contemporaneous sexual harassment complaint? That to me seems like a great way to evaluate her credibility, but they mention it but dont really come back to it.
Do not talk to dozens of people who were not there and stand to benefit very very much ideologicaly and professionally if their boss is not a rapist.
Do not involve a psychologist of violence
They interviewed a bunch of people who were there,
No, they interviewed a bunch of biden staffers, the overwhelming majority of which did not remember her and were not there. I know this becauase I read the article, you do not know this because you did not.
I dont find tara's rape credible. But asking a group of people (with a huge vested interest in joe biden not being rapey) "is joe biden a rapist" is not convincing.
phosphorus2
27d ago
Asking a bunch of people who worked or work for Biden if they thought he was a rapist while he is running for president is not a deep or serious investigation.
Also that is not what the article even concluded, the article just ends. They just interviewed a bunch of staffers and a few psychologists, each gave their piece. Where was the conclusion? It ends with a paragraph that suggests biden was too touchy.
phosphorus2
27d ago
If Congress wants to pass no laws then that is their right, and that is by design. Consensus is needed to pass laws, and if the consensus isn't there then the laws should not be passed. Those are the rules. If it creates a total mess then yeah that sucks, but the courts have no rights to step in and write their own. Especially since they draw their own legitimacy as being the referees of the law and not players.
I am sure there is much scheming on the parts of Morocco and Belarus, I don't think that's really contested by anyone. So I don't really get what point you're trying to make.
More options
Context Copy link