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I should probably put on the hat, but I'm tired too, and I suppose I'd rather just argue with you.
No, we haven't. We refined our apparatus for retrieving and signal-boosting the most offensive possible formulation of any given argument. Now you get to be exposed to a mawkish, progressive strawman of your position. Now I get to read your performative strawman of mine. Wonderful.
Do you think those people don't exist? Aren't representative? There's no need for algorithmic refinement to make Internet Feminists sound like unrepresentative strawmen, they do just fine on their own.
Aren’t representative.
Actually, I’ll bite the bullet and say they don’t exist. Show me someone who argues for shrimp welfare and abortion in the same breath, and I’ll show you a rhetorical flourish, a pairing selected specifically for its shock value. A modest proposal, even.
But the Internet is vast, it contains multitudes, so I’ll stick with the more defensible claim. Sermons intended for the choir don’t reflect policy. As @MadMonzer noted, the vast majority of the U.S. maintains some intermediate position on abortion, one which looks an awful lot like “safe, legal, rare.” Viability is the most common limit. This reflects a moral intuition that abortion is permissible, but unsavory in direct proportion to the amount of gore. That’s more or less where the Overton window has stayed since the development of modern contraception. Neither the religious right nor the Tumblr left is happy about it; how fortunate that neither of them dominates the public square!
Ozy, maybe? Nicholas Decker. Probably Matthew Adelstein/Bentham's Bulldog.
How unfortunate that they escape containment and poison policy and common discourse!
One's a lot closer than the other, but Ralph Northam's out of office now. I guess we'll see if Spanburger resurrects that position.
I only wish everybody here poisoned the discourse as hard as shrimp guy. Look at that! Polite explanation of the two main schools of thought.
Abortion laws do not follow Tumblr. California and New York and Virginia all have third-trimester bans. The states with no time limit include Alaska and Michigan. Saying shit on the Internet is free, but when the rubber hits the road, most Americans—most American politicians—endorse the same moderate position which HereAndGone is lamenting.
Not for lack of trying, of course.
Not the same thing and I disagree with you about the politicians. But fair enough that saying shit on the internet is free.
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In every jurisdiction where the issue has been subject to democracy (mostly countries outside the US, but now including red and purple states which have had abortion referenda post-Dobbs) the voters behave a lot more sensibly than the advocates. "Abortion legal until the baby is pronounced alive by the duty paediatrician" is not an electorally serious position except in places where trolling conservatives is more important than policymaking. "Abortion banned from day one and the law actually enforced" is not an electorally serious position in post-sexual revolution societies. If it is still the case in ten years time that every non-referendum state in America is at one of those two poles, it will be because state-level democracy no longer works.
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