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The latest abortion kerfuffle is decently well in the past now, and we've had a number of good threads on it in various places. I think it's a reasonable time to ask here:
Have you changed your personal opinion or political position on abortion access at all over the course of the last year or so? If so, to what, and based on what?
A few years ago I was a pretty straightforward "legal safe and rare" bro, but the last year has really pushed me towards being anti-abortion.
Leftists seems to not just accept abortion, but celebrate it.
They do this while also taking extreme anti-natalist positions, attacking the concept of public school, attacking the concept of families, etc.
They refuse to condemn late stage abortions, or refuse to even offer an explanation for how this isn't just blatant murder.
If you dropped me into the middle of a movie which was the world we are currently living in, it wouldn't be a bad assumption to see leftists as cartoonish villain trying to collapse society. I mean seriously watch any of the congressional hearings about this. The abortion advocates won't acknowledge that murdering a living child the day before it is born is morally hazardous. It just goes so far beyond anything I could have ever imagined. The only word I can think of to describe this behavior is evil.
The RvW stuff finally just fully removed the leftists mask. No, actually they aren't just okay with murdering unborn children, but they actually celebrate it like some sort of sacrament.
So yeah: I have moved to the right on this topic.
If you are seeing people as “cartoonish villains trying to collapse society,” you are probably missing something.
Consider the leftists who think Republican policy is Literally 1984. Or who assert that corporate executives are thrilled to destroy the planet. Do you think these people have an accurate model of the world?
If not, then consider that you might also be wrong about their motives.
I don't think you understood my comment. I'm not saying that leftist are trying to collapse society, but I'm saying that they're acting like it.
Do you think it's possible that one ideology could be more long term stable than another one, or are they all perfect mirrors or one another?
False dichotomy, no?
Conservatism could be strictly more long-term stable. Perhaps conservatives are more likely to be correct on the object level, too. I still wouldn’t believe that liberals in the general sense are out to destroy society. Outside of the lunatic fringe of doomsday cults, they expect to live in it, too. That is a pretty strong incentive not to do society-destroying things. If you’d like to assert that, no, they’re poo-poo heads who don’t care about looking bad...why? Why would anyone do that?
I don’t understand your distinction between “acting like” and “trying to” destroy society.
Acting like and trying is the difference between malevolence and incompetence or apathy.
I don’t think most leftists are destroying society on purpose, I just think that they’re too lazy of horrified to think through to the conclusions of the policies that they support.
But then there are some large leftist groups who say things like that their goal is to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”, and I’m not really sure what to do other than take those groups at their word.
Or dumb, or very biased (like having a strong bias for perfection, resulting in them rejecting any solutions where they can see the flaws, which naturally selects for solutions that they cannot understand, since perfection is impossible).
Or a combination of factors, of course.
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One thing I've somewhat internalized is that if there isn't a bright-line rule that is strictly enforced regarding [practice] one can expect that said practice to expand to be far more common than one might consider reasonable.
I don't know for sure if this is an example of totalizing ideologies that can't broach compromise or if it's a natural molochian process where anything that isn't forbidden is considered permissible and every step down a given path to 'hell' makes every subsequent step easier.
I think we're starting to see it happen with Euthanasia in Canada, too.
If there's no law preventing the practice in question from becoming common, and we're no longer allowed to use social shame and other 'soft' pressures to make people reluctant to engage in the practice, and we throw out the concept of divine punishment for 'sin,' either in the current world or the afterlife... then we are resigned to accept it becoming a pure exercise in economic viability/incentives.
In short, the slippery slope is not a fallacy if you tear down all the Chesterton's fences that might have arrested one's slide down the mountain.
I decided a long time ago now that I myself wouldn't be willing to hold a gun to a woman's head to prevent her from getting an abortion, so I can't in good faith support laws that would likewise use violence to prevent women from carrying out abortions.
But there's still plenty of approaches that could keep it "Legal, safe, and rare" such as restricting the ability of doctors to perform the procedure, or impose 'time, place, and manner' restrictions so there aren't abortion clinics on every corner.
Incidentally, I might be willing to hold a gun to a Doctor's head to keep him/her from performing an abortion.
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While I would like to celebrate that you are joining the "obviously correct" side I think it is necessary to caution you about basing your political positions in what someone else says or does. If you think or thought it was a necessary evil or even a reluctant burden for abortion to be legal, safe and rare and just changed your position due to the disgust you felt with the craziest of your ingroup advocates; maybe it's better to maintain that position but condemn the crazies?.
Now with that nasty business out of the way, Welcome aboard!. Good of you to join all the correct thinking people!.
My position is in alignment with the Catholic Church. Basically: if a mothers life is being threatened, then abortion is permissible.
Those would be the legal, safe, and rare abortion im talking about. I still support those, because I don’t see the surgical removal of an ectopic pregnancy as the same as murdering an unborn child.
The reaction from me is because before, leftists were essentially saying that they needed this tool, but that they would use it responsibly. My reaction is due to learning that their “use” is industrial scale murder of children.
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