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The so-called "Anti weaponization fund" has been defeated due to public and internal backlash.
It was so unpopular that even Republican senators were furious and yelling at Blanche over it. According to Ted Cruz
But why did it die?
Republicans are willing to bow their heads to Trump on most things, but the same way defund the police was unpopular (because people like the police), senators really like the capitol police and don't approve of rewarding the cop beaters with money. Trump got away with the pardons, but actively awarding attacking the cops who protect them is a step too far from many.
It was also just really unpopular among voters. Just like the senators, voters don't approve of giving money to cop beaters. Not even many republican ones are supportive of that just because they did it in Trump's name. Of course it's also quite likely that many interpreted the question as a fund for victims of Trump's weaponization, such as James Comey whose lead prosecutor just stepped down or Jerome Powell but not all probably did.
As my own senator put it
Senators also felt that the deal was too blatantly corrupt and hard for them to defend with a straight face.
Either way, they've dropped it now and the fund is dead in the water. Interesting showcase of how many republican congressman haven't completely neutered themselves for the executive yet, they just mostly argue behind closed doors.
The Trump administration didn't do the Republican Party in general many favors by making it so easy for people to describe this initiative as a slush fund for Trump supporters, even if the idea of stopping government institution weaponization against Republicans is in principle good for Republicans. I think the optics of trying to do these things could have been handled much more subtly, especially when Republican leaders are already uneasy about the midterms.
Not while Trump is in the White House.
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One of the protestors mentioned on X they can still just sue the government and have them settle regardless of if the money comes from a specific fund or not. So may not matter much in the end. Just another example of GOP congresspeople trying to pretend keeping the moral high ground matters at all compared to simply wielding your power for your allies and against your foes.
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Disappointed they backed down on this. Political slush funds are very powerful. Being able to reward friends is powerful. Dems ran this playbook for years and the dominated institutions. Having more money for bribes might get more gop working in the beauracracy now if you have money give them a check later.
GOP have been soundless since Iraq
At least they did something - it was terrible and dumb but by golly they did it
Giving money to supporters who were politically lynched by their political opposition? Step too far!
If Trump were 15% more competent …
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As an aside, I do appreciate that you bring a different viewpoint into TheMotte. Anyway, this slush fund is corruption, just because the other side does it doesn't mean it's ok that your side does it too. I do recognize that for a lot of people here it's a feeling of "look what you made me do" or "you made me do this", or maybe a bit of accelerationist, who knows, but the whole point is the ability to curb the extremes and either appeal or force each other to be better without violence and resentment. Anyway, I still feel the slush fund is small, I am more outraged about all the stock trading Trump does.
Yeah, it's always just an excuse for their own hypocrisy. One way you can tell that's the case is that "both sides!" use the same logic. It's like Scott's piece cautioning bias arguments https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments/
It doesn't make sense that the pro Israel and pro Palestine side both felt the documentary was biased against them, so it's explained better by their own personality and victim complexes.
In the same way, it doesn't make sense that pro right and pro left sides both give the excuse that "the other one started it and we're just being equal", so it is explained better by their own personality and victim complex.
Hell just look at some of the conversations I've had here already. The standard of evidence for many motte users that cops unfairly assaulted a protestor on Jan 6th is apparently "this guy on X said so". Meanwhile cases, like a guy who shot a black man and was charged with manslaughter that have gone to trial, been convicted at trial and had the conviction upheld as illegal isn't enough if it's something they don't like. They're either shifting goalposts or have a standard of evidence that is completely alien to me.
This also of course goes into the classic partisan issue of thinking everyone is as partisan as them. The average American taxpayer, the victim of corruption from either party, is not some diehard progressive or die hard conservative. It's stealing candy from a baby and saying "but John stole candy too" as an excuse.
You are lying.
Let's go through the "many motte users" who made claims of unfair J6 assault while referencing X:
... I was planning to go through the other users one by one, but I actually can't find any others. Could it be that you took a single Motte user who linked to a photo on X, lied about what they said, and then used this as a basis for "many motte users"?
It's entirely possible I've missed a bunch of other comments. If you can link me to them, I'll be happy to review them to check if you're honestly representing them, or just lying about them too.
There is an incredibly easy way to see it, TheMotte like similar sites has a mechanism built in! His comment has 6 upvotes at this time meaning at least 5 others are in general agreement. Probably more considering some users might have down voted so it might be +10vs-5 or whatever I wouldn't know.
Does (at least) 6 people count as "many" for you? I can change it to "several" if you disagree what constitutes many.
So... you're not contesting that you lied about what he said?
Or are you hoping that, if you don't address that point, people won't notice?
To check I've got my facts straight: one Motte user links to a photo that they think shows unfair assault of a J6er. Six people upvote this. You choose to lie and represent this as:
This is called lying.
I am doing exactly that? I explained to you where the many people come from. I was wrong however about it being at least 6 users, someone informed me how to see the upvote numbers and it's at +8/-1 now so it was probably +7/-1 before and someone has added on since my original check of 6.
Your facts are straight, at the time at least six people (turns out seven but I didn't know I could check the ratio then) had upvoted the comment saying
And the only external evidence provided was a post on X, which also provided no evidence whatsoever that a protested was charged for bruising the officers knuckles. There was a video that maybe the X user believed was of police brutality, but nothing whatsoever was provided of what charges were or were not brought up of the guy.
Now could it be "Well people just upvote anything!"? No, because my comment was down voted where I said the tweet was a still image (I didn't see the video underneath but again it doesn't evidence the claim about charges were brought for what reasons), did a quick double check if there was any other corroborating evidence for the claims (I could not find any nor could the chatbots) and asked
So it's not that people are just upvoting anything. What is it then? A form of endorsement. Which would mean that +7 people endorsed "Here's an X user making a claim without any external proof" as a fine evidentiary standard.
In fact you followed up and also didn't find any external affirmative evidence that the X users claims were real! https://www.themotte.org/post/3781/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/449800?context=8#context
You literally went to double check and ChatGPT said it doesn't have any knowledge of that case.
As I said "Random X user just claims it" is F tier evidence in my world. I gave particular examples of evidence I would consider as quality like a Fox News article or court documents.
So to clarify There has been no even semi decent evidence provided that a protestor was charged for blocking his face from police fists and thus causing the knuckles to be bruised. The only evidence, extremely low quality f tier evidence, provided is a guy on X claims it happened without anything else attached. And yet this evidentiary standard was endorsed by at least 7 people.
@UwU -- this is a perfect example of magicalkittycat just openly fucking with people.
Dude, I asked you: "So... you're not contesting that you lied about what he said?"
The "many people" part is not part of that. You know this. Why do you deliberately conflate everything? Do you think people reading your comment are stupid, or are you just so used to lying that it doesn't even register as lying any more?
You lied about the contents of his comment. Then I asked you about it. This attempt to deflect onto "b-but I'm addressing that!" while talking about something completely different is exactly the bullshit you pulled when we were discussing Nowak.
You are lying, again. As I said in my comment, multiple times, the evidence was a photo. Not verbal evidence. Not someone on X "saying" something. A goddam photograph of a situation. You can disagree with his take on the photo; I'm not even endorsing his take. But pretending that the photo doesn't exist is a fucking lie.
Yeah, not actually relevant to you lying about what other Motte users said, though, is it?
Oh, go fuck yourself, you liar.
Mods, I'll happily eat a ban for this; sorry, but the gaslighting from magicalkittycat is getting ridiculous.
As anyone who cares to actually follow your link will see, I was explicitly pointing out your stupid, inconsistent use of ChatGPT. I've done this multiple times, and each time you deliberately misrepresent what I'm doing.
I wasn't looking for external affirmative evidence. I was proving that your position of using ChatGPT as a neutral, impartial arbiter is obviously insane and wrong. I look forward to explaining this to you another fifteen billion times, as you don't seem to be interested in ever actually listening to what other people explain to you.
You are lying.
"The only evidence, extremely low quality f tier evidence, provided is a guy on X claims it happened"
Again, for the infinity billionth time: there is a link to a photo. I'm not claiming it's good evidence; I really don't give a shit about the object-level claim. I give a shit that you are repeatedly lying on the Motte.
Like, you are just objectively, repeatedly, incontestably saying untrue things. Then, when challenged, you switch to an entirely different thing, smugly conflate the two, and act like that's what you were saying all along. It's absolutely pathetic.
One day ban, cool off and please refrain from this sort of outburst in the future.
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I did contest what he said!
I said that I can not find any even semi decent evidence the claims of the X user he cites as his argument are real.
How about instead of having a meta conversation, we have the actual conversation where someone finally provides semi decent evidence for their claims a guy was charged for bruising and officers fists while blocking beyond "guy on X said so".
It all seems like a way to dodge that maybe said evidence might not actually exist. I couldn't find any! You double checked and didn't find it. So where is it?
Where in the photo does it back the claim the guy was charged for injuring an officer while defending himself? Seriously, go look at the photo and tell me how I can glean "This guy was later charged for blocking punches".
There isn't any way. It does not back up the claims at all.
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If you hover your cursor over the score, you can see the upvote and downvote counts. (Allegedly, Reddit used to have this feature many years ago, but removed it.)
Oh thank you very much.
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Well, you can only cut 'em off once, and these senators already gelded themselves long ago to remain in the good graces of the left. Not that interesting at all. And "cop beaters" sound an awful lot like Chinese Robbers. And honestly after all the NGO networks came to light, I'm mostly indifferent towards graft if it's going to my political allies or fellow travellers. The money likely will be stolen, it's just a question of whose side is strengthened by the theft.
If you will allow me a meta-question -- what was your intention with this post? Heavily spun partisan pro-MAGA screeds are boring to read, but so is this triumphalist leftist sneering. "Good to see at least some republicans aren't total CUCKS who want to steal TAXPAYER MONEY and give it to COP BEATERS" is a Twitter tier opinion. I guess you will get a bunch of >(you)s but that sort of violates the spirit of this place. Why not post some substantive analysis about why you think these Republicans still aren't fully sold on MAGA?
I don't think you understand how Chinese robbers fallacy works.
The fallacy is "some Chinese people are robbers = Chinese are robbers". Not "most Chinese people haven't done robbery = this specific chinese person who just robbed a store should be let off".
The average Jan 6th attendee did not commit any crimes, including violence against the police. The specific ones who did, the ones charged and convicted of crimes, did do crimes.
I did! The Republican senators stood up to this because they don't want to award money specifically to cop beaters (amid other criminals) who would have the "victimization claim" available to them and they don't feel like they can defend what appears to be blatant corruption. You think it's a Twitter tier opinion, I think you gave a Twitter tier response of not reading.
"Some Jan 6 Electoral Justice Protestors tussled with cops = we can round all Jan 6 protestors off to 'cop beaters'"
Looks like I understand it just fine.
What do you base this on? Taking politicians' sound bites at face value? Do you also believe congressmen when they say that the American Freedom Panopticon Surveillance Bill is meant to "keep our children safe?"
Anyway, I'm still curious to know what sort of discussion you hoped to start with your OP.
"Tussled with cops" is a brilliant way to try to lighten it. The people who attacked cops are cop beaters. Whether it's described as "tussling" or not, that behavior is wrong.
But that's not what happened! The problem isn't with the general jan 6th protestor, but the ones who committed a crime. Considering that Republican senators also seemed to interpret the fund as including the specific criminals who did crime, it at the very least was unclear even if it wasn't the intention.
Sure senators like Cruz or Tillis or Fitzpatrick could be lying about their objections here. But why? What do you suppose the real objections is then? That's a whole lot of Republicans who were apparently mad about it so it wouldn't make sense to just be "Tillis and Cruz hate all Jan 6thers in a way others don't" (Unless that was made up too I suppose).
It's already started a good discussion. What do you think the real reason is for Republican senator backlash then if it's not about crime or the appearance of corruption? Or if it wasn't from internal backlash, why do you think it was dropped?
I think most of the prosecutions were over the top. If you have cops threatening you, it’s not unusual for you to fight back. It was a completely chaotic situation where people who had never been in a situation where the cops are trying to stop them and wielding batons. Most of the protestors were older Americans who had up to that point only gotten a couple of speeding tickets. They were not hardened criminals who went in trying to beat up cops for no reason. They went in believing they were protesting the election of 2020 being stolen, they perhaps intended to chant in the halls of congress or something. Trying to treat such people as if they went in intending to beat up cops and harm members of Congress ignores the reasons they had and the character of those people.
I’m not completely on board with a fund, but these were not hardened criminals and talking about this as if the fifty year old small business owner was exactly like a gang member looking to shoot a cop is ridiculous.
Unusual? Yes, people attacking cops (especially in the way you can see on video, beating them while they're on the ground with metal rods and other weapons) is actually pretty rare.
But even if it was not that unusual its still illegal to beat up a bunch on cops. They were tried and convicted under a jury of their peers. A pardon does not change that they were found guilty, it is an act of clemency over the punishment itself.
If you want to take it a "it's normal to take a giant rod and slam it down on a cop while they've been knocked down on the floor" approach feel free to do so, most Americans do not agree.
What about cops attacking nonviolent protestors on video, and then charging those protestors for the temerity of bruising the officer's knuckles.
That's just a still image, which also doesn't show what happened before then.
Most "police brutality" cases are out of context and don't show the police are responding to aggression.
Also checked to see if it was true at all
I asked
And for
And
Do you happen to have the charges against him where what they outline is that he blocked his face and that's what was the assault?
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I mean that honestly intent actually matters and nobody im aware of in this crowd had a substantial criminal record, nor at the time that they entered the Capitol did they intend to go around beating up cops. There is evidence of this, the most famous and obvious being the rather famous images of these same people respecting the ropes around the rotunda in the Capitol. But also the number of people who showed up in cosplay outfits and so on.
Had the cops simply used normal techniques of crowd control, I don’t think the people who would not cross a rope barrier are suddenly going to beat up cops. They started beating up cops once the cops broke out the mace.
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Many senators are still very media sensitive. J6 carries undue weight in DC because of the media, the culture (95%+ of their neighbors will be Democrats), and other factors. The reality is that this is a tiny slush fund by Obama standards; has a very legitimate purpose outside of J6 defendants (for instance, reimbursing conservative media outlets for legal fees from when Biden forced social media companies to de-platform them); and certainly wont be the last such fund if ever a Democrat is President. The fact that this isn't legislation gives the game away that this is just Washington Generals behavior.
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It is basically political suicide for Republicans to come out against this without getting meaningful legislation banning it. Obama and Biden did the same thing dozens of times, for totals far higher than the current fund, for more spurious reasons. Unilateral disarmament is never a good idea.
The main difference for Obama and Biden era sue and settle, was that that the people footing the bill for the slush funds were private companies, or where there were large payouts from the taxpayers, congress voted and approved it.
The Trump situation is the current president suing the government he now controls in his capacity as a private citizen for a wrong done to him while he was previously president, by people who he was theoretically in charge of. The money is coming from the taxpayers, and the slush fund is being administered by the federal government. There's lots of ways this could have the whiff of corruption on a different order than the Obama and Biden era precedents.
There's lots of things Trump could have done differently:
Apparently it can't happen without Congress approving it, so it is not in fact the government that Trump controls.
Luckily, we live in a constitutional republic, so occasionally there are checks and balances on abuses of power by one of the three branches of government.
Doesn't mean that Trump isn't in charge of the executive branch. Just means that he doesn't get act like he's an absolute monarch who can do whatever he wants.
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It is becoming clear that the "Republicans" aren't really a solid entity; there's the Uniparty and there's the MAGA party. The Uniparty includes all the Democrats (including the DSA and Bernie) and the remaining old-guard Republicans.
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Your post confuses me. Which happens a lot in the bubbles of the internet. I don't really know what is going on cuz I barely follow anything closely enough.
My understanding is that this lawsuit was in part about the IRS targeting politically conservative groups. Which they were shown to have been doing back in the obama administration.
Why the stuff about cop beaters? I suppose that is in reference to people attacking cops during the Jan 6th thing. But I wasn't aware of many organizations that claim credit for that surviving until the modern day. I admit to not knowing the status of the proud boys. Though the FBI and CIA are still around and their funding is not linked to this, so that also doesn't make sense to me.
I think there is a very difficult political problem being pointed at here. Trump's involvement just muddies it all.
Government controlled by Party A has done things to wrong Party B. The judiciary is supposed to be an independent entity that steps in and arbitrates these disputes.
What exactly is supposed to happen if Party B does not realize they have been intentionally wronged until they control the government?
If they sue the government its just Party B suing the government they control. Of course they win. That is what happened in this case.
Options:
A. Nothing happens. B. Punish rule breakers. C. Reward victims.
I am heavily in favor of option B, but no one in power is in favor of that option. The people in power in party A that carried out the harm have a set of preferences like A > C > B. The people in party B that have been wronged have a set of preferences that generally looks like C > B > A.
Rewarding the victims is a good compromise option. Because the people that suffer are taxpayers, and who gives a shit about taxpayers? Republican politicians is apparently a fair answer for any who opposed this payout. Had the roles been reversed would democrats have done the same? I'm sure we will find out. (if we haven't already from some buried issue or court case that has been ignored for a few decades)
The problem with this statement of the case, is that Trump was president when the IRS leak of his tax documents happened. And he's president now.
What Trump could have done is ask the case to be held in abeyance, which would freeze the clock on the case and wait for the case to be resolved until after his presidency finished up. That would have been the usual "avoiding corruption, or the appearance of corruption" version of Trump bringing the complaint that created the massive settlement fund.
This just results in the case being dropped. Why would you think this would work?
Why do you think it would not work?
The guy who actually leaked Trump's taxes got fired and sentenced to 5 years in federal prison. It's not like Trump never gets fair court proceedings.
Heck, he's won a fair few cases in the Supreme Court during this presidency. I actually believe that if Trump had held the case in abeyance, he would have gotten a just outcome from genuinely adversarial proceedings, whatever that might have looked like.
The decade-plus of two Democratic Presidential Administrations and their politically appointed Justice Departments coordinating and executing security state abuses and lawfare against Trump, rather than curtailing it or holding the people doing so to account?
You do not need to 'never' get fair court proceedings for the court proceedings you do get to be far more unfair to fair, particularly when lawfare strategies use the process as the punishment.
And for their conduct, major establishment Democrat politicians have publicly and repeatedly advocated packing the courts, with greater party establishment support each election cycle.
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The whole reason this could happen is that despite being president, he didn't control the government.
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It's unclear who and what will benefit from the fund. Idk if the ambiguity and shadow is intentional or not, but many Republican senators such as Tillis seem to believe that it will be going to Jan 6thers among others, including the specific criminal ones.
Well do I have good news for you then. The Biden admin prosecuted Charles E Little John (the leaker of Trump's tax records) and secured a felony conviction against him. He wasn't let off lightly either, he got the maximum penalty.
Well in this specific scenario, we don't even have to ask then! The government under the Biden admin won the case and secured the conviction against the leaker.
I don't think this is a great example, because Charles E Little John harmed members of both parties, and the stated reasoning for his conviction is not because he leaked Trump's tax records, but because he leaked the tax records of thousands.
If a member of government controlled by party A does something that harms both members of Party A and Party B (which includes many of the wealthiest members of both parties), then party A convicting that person to me doesn't seem the same as party A convicting someone that did an action that mostly harms members of party B with little harm to members of party A.
If Charles had only leaked Trump's record, would he have received the maximum penalty? Would he have even been prosecuted during the Biden era? Would he have been pardoned by Biden if he did face any penalty?
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Good to know faith in political system increased
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The general impression (however incorrect in this case) was that it would go in substantial part to Trump personally. Even GOP voters know that it’s precisely Trump who paints himself as an immensely rich and successful billionaire, so this is giving some very rich guy a lot more taxpayer money, which is hard for politicians to justify.
More generally, every government rewards its supporters, and there are far more under the table ways to do it than this kind of fund. Trump has already done so much of it through the crypto companies, expediting approvals for various Trump tech aligned businesses, endorsing or engaging in partnerships with startups that have his sons on the board etc. If he wants to reward his supporters, this is the way to do it.
The main strategic issue for the right isn’t making it more profitable to be on the right, it’s on making it more personally challenging to be on the left. He needs to much more aggressively steal from and prosecute and expropriate violent leftist activists, make their life hell the way the left did to the right in power. This has far better long term utility. Put people on no fly lists, have banks close their accounts, stop renewing passports and drivers’ licenses.
The Trump admin has been trying to do this, they're not even subtle. James Comey is the most blatant and unarguable example.
Ironically this exact argument is exactly what FIRE, the free speech organization that became famous when it fighting against progressive universities, warns of.
This is to them, a door that hasn't been opened yet that Trump is opening now and if you want to see what weaponization against conservatives could really look like, then just wait.
Hopefully we don't get 2028 Dem who is that vengeful and abusive, I would like for us to start shutting doors instead of continually opening new ones. But I will at least be glad to point out these "it's ok to do what you want against your enemies" arguments to people who seem to suddenly change their mind in three years.
Thankfully the Trump admin will fail here. And so will the 2028 vengeful Dem. But what a shame that everyone just wants to keep opening doors anyway, eventually we'll cross a threshold where society breaks down.
FIRE is among the many, many, many organizations who lost their way and don't support what they say on the tin. Look at their tagline for that very article:
Do they think I'm an idiot? Do they think I haven't been paying attention? Did they forget the world they themselves have lived through?
I don't need to wait, because I've seen it for well over a decade at this point. I know exactly what it looks like when Democrats want to censor political opponents, and it looks like massive coordinated deplatforming from every institution or large conglomerate in the world.
What the fuck is FIRE thinking publishing this kind of dreck? They ought to know better, but then again, see my first sentence.
Can you give a single example where FIRE took the pro censorship side?
They're a free speech organization in favor of free speech and they know one way that you convince people to support free speech is to get them to consider "what if it happens to me?". Would you want to have the government claim you threatened the next president for saying 86 48?
Here is an example of them aligning with Democratic interests to facilitate homelessness.
Just like the when the Sierra Club starts talking about immigration rights instead of saying that immigrants to the US are bad for the environment, when FIRE starts talking about homelessness I recognize it as Conquest's Second Law.
They lost their way on free speech by standing up for free speech?
Cause that's what they're doing
They're the free speech org, of course they're against government ordinance that suppresses unliked or unwanted speech.
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Wait since when? It sounds like you are just pissy that they have principles. Meaning they defend free speech even when its a conservative in the executive.
Their archive has a ton of recent cases that do not cleave to a left vs right dichotomy but instead a free speech principled stance. https://www.fire.org/cases
Greg Lukiaoff the CEO has talked about this before and calls it "hypocrisy projection"
https://x.com/glukianoff/status/1784609444124316135
You see this constantly in replies to FIRE lawyers, people who have no idea what they are will go "You didn't say anything about X or Y" when no, FIRE definitely did do that. It's constant from all political directions.
People just fling out accusations of hypocrisy at them to cover up for their own hypocrisy.
Being a principled person is a fun life cause you'll have people telling you're biased and unfair in every direction you can imagine and there's just no convincing them. They don't want to be convinced, you can lead the horse to a river, dunk their head in and make them drink it and they'll spit it out!
Lmao if you keep agreeing with me and I with you, someone might call me your sockpuppet. Brb gotta go touch grass with my real life obligations.
But yes, very intuitive to what behavior is happening here.
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You're actually correct on this one; that's some good theory of mind.
On this page, you have a bunch of people repeatedly asking you for evidence your positions; you consistently obfuscate, deflect, and pretend to misunderstand what they're saying.
I understand that it's flattering to cast yourself as a principled person, and anyone disagreeing with you is just terminally stupid.
Thing is, it's not actually true.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it would be great for accusers of MKC to post receipts along with their accusations. Right now it just seems like people are ganging up on him for no good reason.
Well, this did happen just yesterday and today in the thread you're talking in right now. Pick your poison of long "Fetch more comments" threads involving the person you just replied to. Or go to the profile in question and search "Bottom" for low-lights.
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If magicalkittycat doesn't have to post receipts for claiming to be principled, or casting other members of this forum as stupid illiterate horses, then it's a pretty asymmetric demand that I have to post receipts to push back on that. (Also, "for no good reason"? You can literally see a reason in the comment I'm replying to! Anyone who goes "I'm great and principled; other people on this forum are stupid" is opening the door to being told: "no".)
Very charitable, thanks.
One reason that thread is so long is because I (and others like FtttG) spent a ton of time not being vague! We specifically repeatedly explained how mkc was being dishonest. If we'd been vague, it would've been a much shorter thread!
So, we explain the dishonesty in detail => thread becomes long => you say "thread is long, you are vague". Doesn't really seem fair.
But I do get where you're coming from, so I'll explain some specific points of dishonesty in that thread. This isn't a complete accounting, it's just off the top of my head:
Another problem with your policy of "I need specific individual instances of bad faith; I won't read a long thread" is that it allows posters like mkc to fly under the radar. If you're looking for a threshold of (say) 60% bad faith in an individual comment, and someone is consistently operating at 55% bad faith, then any one individual comment isn't going to set off your alarms. But the cumulative effect of 55% bad faith is much worse than a single 60% bad faith comment!
(EDIT: here is a clear example of mkc posting in bad faith. He got ChatGPT to say "this photo's caption is untrue". I got ChatGPT to say "I can't verify whether this photo's caption is true or false". mkc's response to this contradiction: "this supports me, I am right!" This isn't good faith; this isn't anything. This is purely him throwing whatever words he can at an argument, without regard for truth or consistency.)
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Actually pretty easy way to to check it, let's call it the Mr Rogers test.
If Mark tells you that John is a thief, you might be more cautious of John's behavior. If Mark then follows up with "Mr Rogers is a thief", then you know Mark's head isn't screwed on right, he just claims people are thieves if he doesn't like them for whatever reason and his claims about John hold little weight. Mr Rogers after all was famously a very nice guy and no credible accusations have ever been made that he stole from others, so Mark just claiming lowers Mark's own reputation.
So let's look at things that are very principled to use as our baseline to see if people's accusations have any weight here.
FIRE is extremely principled, probably one of the most principled organizations out there. So someone who makes claims against FIRE loses any weight they have in other accusations. The comment currently making claims against FIRE is at +14, so at the very least 14 people here throw out frivolous accusations just because they don't like when principled beliefs are against them.
Well maybe these are not the same people interacting with me, but there's not that many people on the site so there's a pretty good chance that several of them are. I don't give them any weight because they've already lost it by failing the Mr Rogers test.
And it's not just FIRE either. I learned recently that Trace Woodgrains was effectively bullied out of this site roughly a year ago, someone had linked his profile in response to me talking a view of his. Woodgrains is someone I've seen to be respectable and honest and he's constantly been willing to speak up against both left wing and right wing views he disagrees with. He's quite respected in the rationalist aligned community. Taking such major issues with him that he is effectively hounded off is a failure of the Mr Rogers test.
That's to be expected, it's the default of the internet really. Even people I disagree with substantially (but respect as principled in their beliefs) have it happen constantly. Micheal Tracey is experiencing that treatment right now. I think he's wrong about Epstein and his many other denials of public officials accused of abuse, but he is very consistent in holding this stance. Elliot Hamilton (among many other X users) falsely accusing Tracey of being a partisan hypocrite have lost any weight I might have given their accusations. If I ever had Elliot Hamilton say I'm being partisan, I know I can dismiss that because he just says it if he doesn't like what you say.
Edit: Actually here Trace Woodgrains speaks out another big of the issue that's still ongoing https://www.themotte.org/post/1018/smallscale-question-sunday-for-may-26/217142?context=8#context
Is it the case that there just isn't left or centrist rationalists capable of discussion here? Highly unlikely, Woodgrains himself is a good example of that. He's also a good example of what really happens, the community here is generally hostile in pursuit of the implicit purpose. Many users simply don't want to hear the arguments they disagree with, so the people who have arguments they dislike get burnt out from the hostility.
So Mr Rogers test, I'm not gonna put much weight into hounding from a site and people that also hounded out Woodgrains.
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”Goal posts were packed up and moved to Sudan” is one of those lines you wish you’d remember to use the next time it’d be appropriate.
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I didn't see this one in there.
So your stance is words are worth more than actions?
What about this one, this one, this one
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Thinking about the Obama administration: malicious tax audits of non-profits, Operation Choke Point debanking conspiracy and Citizens United outright censorship. So yeah I don't have to imagine very hard.
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That article is a reprint and kept the tagline from the original. Lukianoff himself at least remains aware, though whether he still controls FIRE or it was skinsuited out from under him I don't know.
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What are we talking about? This is James Comey, he did all this to Trump first. High-profile supporters of the President have already been through being put on the no-fly list, or had their clearances threatened or pulled, or had bullshit process investigations launched against them. Comey pioneered a lot of it! They spied on Trump's campaign! And the people who did it, like Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, got sue-and-settle sweetheart deals from FBI because oh the public controversy has hurt their reputations they deserve millions of dollars in reparations.
Comey even had to break laws to do it. He had to lie and cheat. They simply cannot get him because Washington refuses to allow it.
Everything you are decrying already happened! That barn left the door, the horse is wide open. If you want to complain about weaponization of the federal government for political views let's start with Michael Flynn. You can go first.
Imagine the following alternate timeline: Crossfire Hurricane is a public investigation that plays a prominent role in the news cycle for the entire summer of 2016, culminating in Comey's announcement a few weeks before the election that he is considering recommending charges. Trump loses the election. Meanwhile, the FBI has quietly been conducting an investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server and it only becomes public knowledge after a leak is published in the Weekly Standard on Halloween. Trump loses the election, and some on the right speculate that the FBI investigation played a major role in the loss. Would you consider Comey a Republican stooge in that scenario?
This is not antipodal to my position, which is not "Comey is a Democratic stooge".
Moreover it's completely different from what actually happened. Crossfire Hurricane was based on an underlying charge everybody involved knew was bogus. (Hillary did process classified emails on private computer servers.) Comey stonewalled the investigation and appointed friendlies to Hillary to its top positions. His boss, Loretta Lynch, famously crossed paths on the tarmac with Hillary and Bill to warn them about the investigation. The FBI closed the investigation and was only forced to reopen it when Republican senators found new evidence and submitted it to the FBI, forcing their hands. Finally, Comey famously gave a speech recommending that Hillary not be charged. At every point in fact he acted to minimize the damage to Hillary. (Or to maximize his own leverage and political power, which is not incompatible with etc.)
The opposite world James Comey hypothetical looks something like this:
A large and public investigation is opened into Hillary Clinton murdering and eating a child. James Comey privately assures President Clinton that he knows these allegations are not true, then tells Congressmen and Fox News that raping babies is a serious crime and the dignity of the Republic requires taking this seriously. He gets fired, but not until after the investigation gets launched and consumes two years of Hillary's Presidency. It ultimately concludes in a report that, although there is no proof that Hillary murdered or ate any children, she refused to cooperate with the investigation and so we can't be so sure that she's innocent. And we know that there are Chinese school exchange programs in New York and Washington DC and Hillary met with the Chinese schoolkids and the Chinese won't tell us what they know. Hillary is eventually impeached for threatening the Prime Minister, but during the proceedings everybody just debates whether President Clinton ate those babies or not. Hillary wins and it gradually comes out that James Comey and all his subordinates knew the entire time that everything about eating babies was totally made up and came straight from the Trump campaign via the Bolivian government. Oops!
Now Hillary tries to have James Comey prosecuted, but, you can't do that, you can't weaponize the Justice Department like that! Democrats will really regret politicizing the government to prosecute their enemies, which is something Republicans have never done before. We can't even really say that James Comey is a Trump guy. After all, during the 2016 Campaign, there was a large public investigation into how Trump shot and Killed someone on Fifth Avenue, something nobody denies he did. It's well known how James Comey undermined the Trump campaign by giving a big speech saying that what Trump did was a crime sure but not a big deal. Besides, James Comey is a registered Democrat, he was appointed by Democrats who hate Hillary, so for him to be doing all this it must be out of a deep devotion to duty. (Maybe Hillary and Bill got a divorce.) He investigated both sides. He's non-partisan. There's just no other explanation except that Hillary is a vengeful witch who is politicizing the government and destroying America.
I like to imagine that Hilldawg Democrats are really incensed about "Hillary Derangement Syndrome" and that Republicans, who just elected Timothy McVeigh to Congress, are complaining about how the Democrats have all become like Hitler and it was much better when Obama was around.
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I don't want to see any politicians rewarding their supporters, but I guess I might as well wish to hold back the tides.
I'm particularly reminded of USAID disbursements to progressive NGO's worldwide, and also welfare allocations to client groups in Minnesota.
Yes. Basically this sort of weaponisation needs to be turned on their original developers. Only then you can you reach detente through MAD. There are some hardcore conflict theorists that think this will never happen and that the end goal is the destruction of the political opposition. Things have been pretty bad, but I'm surprised at how far this is all going.
Regarding this point, I have always been under the impression that NGO's that try to help people in foreign countries receive education, medicine, and emergency aid are progressive in nature. Assuming part of the president's policy is to make the world outside the US a better place by providing foreign aid, it thus follows that most of that money would go to progressive groups. Because by and the majority of charities today lean left.
Is that wrong? Are there solid charities out there which are either apolitical or lean conservative which provide foreign aid, but were neglected by USAID in favor of some kind of nepotism?
The obvious place to look would be religious charities, wouldn't it?
Many denominations have been captured by progressiveness.
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The ostensible realpolitik argument was that by dispersing charity to foreign nations, the US was gaining soft power and influence. It just so happened that there were links between the Democrat party and the people running and working in the NGOs receiving the money to distribute (and fund the required salaries and overheads for the organisations themselves). This was often obfuscated by layers of organisations and sometimes lead to the money being spent on things that were incredibly dubious (eg $2M for sex change surgeries in Guatemala; $47K for a "transgender opera" in Colombia; $75K for a drag show workshop in Ecuador.)
I need to be fair and say I haven't really gone digging for a USAID spending breakdown by left and right wing causes. I guess in some ways 'free welfare' type spending is by definition left wing.
Realpolitik is not the only argument for foreign aid though. There is also the progressive view that those who own a lot should use their possessions to help those who have less. Since the US is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, she has a duty to help poorer nations prosper. If that is the motivation for program, it seems natural that the charities used would mostly share a similar world view.
I think this kind of altruism is a way more common justification among leftist voters than realpolitik. The latter is really just a way to clown on Trump. They want to donate because they believe it is the right thing to do, and would do so even if the benefit to their home country is basically null. Unfortunately, this is easily weaponized by activists. "One dollar is nothing to you, but give it to a family in Africa, and it buys all of them enough water for the entire day". You also see this to a fairly extreme extent in immigration discourse in Europe, where many on the left are more concerned about doing the "right thing" by admitting refugees and immigrants, than they are about the effect this has on their culture and economy.
Why not both? Gaining a good reputation for doing good things is the system working as intended. There's also downstream effects. The benefit of disease control activities in Africa is lower risk of eventually spreading to Americans. Alleviating poverty helps prevent anti-American terrorists from gaining power.
Has a nation-state ever started a war or funded terrorism against another nation-state simply because the richer state was richer and refused to provide charity to the poorer state?
Perhaps client states or vassal-like relationships could work this way, but they involve political subservience in exchange for material resources.
Alleviating poverty does not prevent anti-Americanism, it just alleviates poverty and creates a culture of dependency.
Simply because? No, unless you're counting warlords who want more stuff. But gangs and terrorists find poor places fertile breeding ground. If you have nothing, what are you supposed to do about them? And it's easier for the cartel to recruit a poor kid from the street than a middle class child. Life is all about contributing factors.
It does though? Are you going to tell me you aren't nicer to someone who gives you stuff? It's no magic bullet, but it helps. That what soft power is - influence.
And again I will point out the value of preventing disease outbreaks.
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Correct; USAID was a slush fund that provided cushy jobs to loyal progressive partisans as a reward for their agitation on behalf of progressive and/or Democratic Party causes, or in opposition to right-wing and/or Republican Party causes. If any of the money USAID spent managed to make life better for the poor and downtrodden in other countries, that made the US look better, then all the better, but that was not to primary driver of the program.
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There are very many (christian) religious charities operating in all developing countries, most of which obviously lean conservative (btw, USAID is still working with plenty of them to this day). For the most part, these are centered around providing the basics: Alleviating poverty, providing fundamental education, giving out medicine, etc. However, they are often accused of just wanting to abuse this status to spread their religion. Some of them even openly do so. In the past, the christian western countries would frequently overwhelmingly fund these charities, citing the same arguments as you do: They are the primary charities operating in these places. You should see how this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: If they get funded but the others don't, they'll necessarily be the primary ones. That's how it works.
We have a very similar situation now; Imo arguably worse in some ways, but YMMV. Plenty of progressive NGOs are very blatant about spreading specifically their particular worldview. Usually in addition to basic aid, sometimes even without that fig leaf, but they'll often get funding anyway. And if you try looking into what they are actually doing on-the-ground, it's not only often exceptionally difficult to even find out where all that money is even going, but in the few cases where you can find something, they'll usually even exceed their claimed mandate substantially.
At least from my vantage point, we have successfully pushed these religious charities to tone down their missionary purposes and concentrate on the aid part if they want to get our funding. I'd like for the same to happen to progressive charities.
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WorldVision is an explicitly Christian aid organisation with a generally good reputation and which I haven't seen accused of being skinsuited by leftists. (Christian Aid and CAFOD in the UK have, I think, been thoroughly skinsuited)
Numerous religious denominations, some of them conservative-aligned, run overseas missions which combine proselytisation with aid work, although I am not familiar with specific examples.
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Sexual Objectification
There is something that bothers me about watching progressive/feminist content on youtube, especially regarding the topic of objectification, and its particularly emphasized in this video, as follows:
To rehash for someone not familiar, objectification is defined as: the act of treating a person as an object, a commodity, or a tool, rather than as a whole human being with their own agency, feelings, and rights. The most common form, (sexual) occurs when a person is reduced to a mere object of sexual desire. It often involves judging someone solely based on their physical attributes or breaking their body into separate, "consumable" parts (e.g., focusing only on legs or a torso).
The main issue here is that this idea, at least on the surface is that it seems to be fundamentally in conflict with the the sexual revolution and sex positivity of many previous & current progressive movements. Pornography, prostitution, and strip clubs all fit the objectification bill quite neatly, and the data seems to support the authors argument that "sexual objectification" leads to or plays some role in many of these harms:
I struggle to see how these individuals may square this perspective that sex work is valid, despite fitting the bill of objectification. Perhaps there is something I'm missing?
I suspect this stems from a pre-existing contradiction in certain predatory strains of male sexuality/sexual behavior (note, emphatically not all all male sexuality! Normal gents who want to honorably date a nice smart girl, enjoy common interests and glance appreciatively at her ass from time to time, not describing you).
The contradiction: Among certain predators, on the one hand, you get the objectifying impulse that says "this girl only exists in relation to my sexual desire, the only important parts of her are the physical parts that make me hard or that I envision fucking."
On the other hand, you get the aggression and post-coital disgust impulse that underlies the whole body-count discourse: My erection is so meaningful that being able to fuck this collection of holes and bulges is the most important thing in the world. But once I cum, these parts are disgusting, destroyed, degraded, and the body/mind attached to them should be cast out of my sight.
In its most extreme cases, this is the standard serial-killer's repeated torture, rape then kill/discard scenario. For prostitution and porn, it comes out in aggressive disgust/rejection impulses to prostitutes and female performers. Today, that's the folks who thought Riley Reid shouldn't be able to get married to a cool, successful athlete because all the penis contact made her gross. Historically, it was the consensus that once a woman had been traumatized or desperate enough to have sex with men for money, or let a man take pictures of her body for cash, she (but NOT he) should be expelled from normal society and untouchable by anyone but criminals, with no valid life course but exile, increasing degradation, then suicide.
So some feminists respond by saying, OK, objectification is bad, but even worse is the destructive disgust impulse after. So emphasize that women retain human value and agency even after being fucked over, establish that they are reasoning people who responded to the circumstances they were in, and that could include conditional compliance with predators wanting to reduce them to a collection of body parts.
And some feminists respond to the upstream objectification impulse by saying, nope, we need a system where women aren't reduced to a collection of body parts, period.
It's basically the Danegeld or Poland 1939 question: compromise with clear terms, or open resistance? But those are two different strategic approaches to a common problem, not really internally contradictory.
I feel like your depiction of historical prostitution is a little exaggerated. Obviously there's a whole category of high ranking courtesans who could do pretty well even without being actual wives of their clients. But even regular prostitutes were sometimes able to retire into respectability.
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Imagine you're at an evening social event. It's comprised of men and women around your age. GigaChad is there as well. At some point, one of the women starts complaining about objectification and the male gaze. In the midst of her spiel, GigaChad (who was talking to another woman) turns to her and says with a smirk, "you don't need to worry, no one is objectifying you."
Do you think the woman would be pleased or upset by this comment? What does your answer tell you about the underlying true nature of complaints about objectification?
Is "people will happily debase themselves for someone they have the hots for" a compelling argument that debasement is actually good?
On the flip side, the stereotypical 45 year old overweight Karen wife implicitly offers the deal that if you shower her with gifts and expensive dates she will not nag you quite as much for a week and you might even get to have sex. The MRA-adjacent sphere is quick to point out that it is unfair to men that society basically approves of this arrangement where they have to dump their paycheck in return for basic human decency/being treated like they have any worth at all. Yet, male simps will happily dump their paycheck for a mention by a titty streamer, a smidgen of attention from a hot classmate, or a 60-second handshake with a J-pop idol. Does their existence invalidate the MRA complaint?
(Also, your fantasy scenario is implausible mostly because the GigaChad as imagined by male incels and female 50 Shades readers, who is so hot that he can make stranger women drop their panties with a wink and drop creepy porno pickup lines and be universally liked for it, does not actually exist, any more than the mythical GigaStacy who can be like "you will buy me that diamond necklace, right" to a random man does. In both cases the outside onlooker confuses instances of dominance over a self-selected followership for a universal power.)
Clavicular might not be quite capable of doing this but Roy's standard is somewhat lower. For example, Clavicular was talking with some girl that wanted to be exclusive with him and he went 'lol no, I'm gonna fuck other women' and she instantly folds:
https://x.com/permabulla/status/2045527650098171927
That seems pretty analogous to what roy was saying?
Gigachads and gigastacies might be very rare but are not wholly imaginary.
If the standard is just "one guy somewhere has said something that is generally considered bad to a woman and she was okay with it", then surely the instances of whipped husbands and wallet-cattle men should count too (and say the same thing about the "underlying true nature of complaints about" men being used as paypigs).
In fact, if that's the standard, a lot more things meet it. For example, the existence of 80 hour workweek hot-desking, hot-bedding startup drones in SF exposes the underlying true nature of complaints about workplace exploitation and work/life balance: you don't actually want reasonable working conditions, you are just waiting for a hot GigaChad industry like SV startups to give you the tingles!
But you said that Roy's scenario was a fantasy? Can Clavicular make arbitrary women have sex with him on demand? Probably not. Does he slay mad puss? Yes. Would he be capable of this if he hadn't looksmaxxed, famemaxxed? No.
SV startups often give equity that can be worth a lot of money, they are different from Walmart or McDonalds. The tingles are a real thing in both cases. People worked for Elon Musk very hard even when they could've been lazy and useless at Lockheed because he gave them the tingles.
It was a fantasy insofar as he described it as a generic party with a generic GigaChad in attendance, not a party which was attended by people who were specifically personal fans of GigaChad. If the story is just "there exists a guy who has some girl fans he can objectify and they enjoy it", that's not saying much of interest about the "underlying true nature of complaints about objectification" at all.
There exist cannibals who someone wanting to be eaten throwing themselves at them, but this does not make a case for your neighbourhood involuntarily-merely-wannabe cannibal that all the people who want to lock him up if he voices his desires are being hypocrites who are just waiting for a chad like Meiwes to come along. He could make a case that it is some kind of cosmic injustice that Meiwes found his willing meal but he has nobody, just like Roy could make a case that it is unjust that Clavicular has an army of hoes and he doesn't, but this does nothing at all to lower the legitimacy of complaints of those who just don't want to be eaten, or don't want to be objectified, or don't want to work 80 hour weeks, at all.
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Even if we take this figure seriously, what fraction of retail workers experience economic violence on the job at some point? "Sexual violence" is defined broadly - if we defined "economic violence" equally broadly then it wouldn't need to be a robbery - a shoplifter pushing past a security guard would qualify.
Honestly, why shouldn't we define "economic violence" that way?
Stealing sexual value is to women like stealing economic value is to men (for control over that is what that sex uses to impress the other), so a regime that treated men and women equally should logically treat both just as seriously.
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Note that in the original form, the principle was that 'If a gun is shown on stage, it must be fired later in the story.' Live-theatre productions usually do not have as elaborate set decoration as film or television.
But was it portrayed as actually happening within the storyline, or was it a dream or hallucination? (I haven't seen the show.)
The checkov’s gun thing is still a part of storytelling. The general idea is to avoid telling people about things in a story that seem important but actually are completely irrelevant to the story. So I can’t tell you that “oh, by the way, Batman has a Time Machine,” then never ever mention it again.
Sure, but the specific phrasing of "if it's shown on screen, it must be used" is false for TV and movies. We don't expect that if a movie set has a bed in the background, the character will be shown sleeping at some point. Whereas in theater it probably is the case that if a bed is part of the set, it'll be used. The two media just have very different expectations for what is a normal level of background detail on the set versus a deliberate inclusion.
I mean if you insist on the very narrow definition of chechov’s gun. On the other hand there are lots of TV shows or movies that would be ruined by forms of the gun. One huge one is the abilities of characters and technology in science fiction and fantasy. Once I establish that Spock can do the mind meld and read a guy’s mind, the audience tends to question why that isn’t happening when this would be the obvious solution to the need to find out something that the characters need to know and the bad guy does know.
I think the rule is better stated as “don’t bring up a potential solution to the problem and then ignore it.” I tend to like Sanderson framing of the issue which is that ideally, your characters should try everything that the audience would think would work and have it fail. The gun would ignore that rule, because you have characters fighting and the gun is right there so the audience is thinking “why not just shoot the guy with the gun that’s sitting right there”
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There's some conflict between 'only mention that which is important' and 'create a realistic world'. Screenplay tends to be heavier on the former, but the underlying principles show up to a lesser extent in written form and even fairly expansive worlds. An RPG sourcebook is expected to be filled with piles of random junk... and it's also random junk that you should be able to use in a scene.
On the flip side, going too extreme towards minimalism or functionalism risks making the puppeteer's strings too obvious. Minor details and background characters that are inexplicable are a good way to make the world seem larger than your main characters.
At least from a google search, it's a daydream that's supposed to parallel the character's growing and destructive popularity as both an onlyfans and right-wing influence. Because subtly is for cowards.
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The movie/TV equivalent is having a shot that draws attention to the gun. But Chekhov's gun is more suited to very tight productions (visual equivalents of short stories or novellas rather than novels); something like a movie or especially a TV series will have many things which are not directly relevant to plot but go to characterization or setting. For instance a movie has a barfight, the barfight itself may be completely unimportant other than to demonstrate it's the kind of place where barfights occur. And certain genres rely in misdirecting the audience and will deliberately focus on unimportant-to-plot details to do so.
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The basic core principles of feminism are (1) more goodies (money, power, status, etc.) for women; (2) punishment and humiliation for men. Of course feminists don't like to acknowledge this to themselves or others, so instead they rely on a smorgasbord of more reasonable sounding principles such as:
(1) Women are the same as men and must be treated equally;
(2) Women are different from men and must be treated differently;
(3) Objectification of people is harmful and must be avoided; and
(4) Women are autonomous adults who should have the freedom to make their own choices in life;
(5) Women have been brainwashed by the "patriarchy" into making poor choices;
and so on.
Obviously these principles are not consistent with each other; feminists just use whatever is most convenient in the moment. If someone points out the contradiction, that person is ignored or silenced with accusations of "misogyny" or whatever.
So yeah, you are not the first person to ask "what if a woman objectifies herself"? But the reality is that feminists do not sincerely care about objectification. If objectification is perceived as beneficial (for example Taylor Swift doing a concert while wearing a slutty outfit and getting paid a million dollars), they are fine with it.
I think it's also worth noting that this idea -- that nudity should serve a purpose -- is far more flexible than it seems on its surface. For example, consider the sexy naked woman who makes an appearance in The Shining. One could certainly argue that her nudity advances the plot, since it helps to demonstrate Jack Torrance's sexual excitement and the seeming attempt to seduce him. On the other hand, one could argue that basically the same thing could have been accomplished without nudity, for example by implying that the woman is naked without actually showing it. Or by putting her in a seductive dress.
It seems to me that you can pretty much always argue it one way or another. And for feminists, it will almost certainly come down to the following: If feminists don't like it, then it doesn't serve any purpose. If feminists do like it, then it does serve a purpose.
I disagree that these principles are contradictory. They all express problems with a certain part of reality. It can be that women are not treated the same (or at least historically weren't) in certain areas where they should be, and yet it remains true that women are different from men and treating the sexes differently is better in other areas. It is also true that women (and men, too, of course) made choices in a restricted space of a certain unnecessarily gendered way of looking at the world, which it is good that we are overcoming or in many ways have already overcome; yet at the same time, both sexes should be seen as autonomous individuals. I don't see a contradiction, just a nuanced take.
And yet by some strange coincidence, these "principles" are applied so as to reach the conclusions which are convenient and advantageous for women.
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Stop saying "women" when you mean "feminists". (Incidentally, advice which most people should think about most of the time.) Feminism isn't a pure grift - individual feminists genuinely want other feminists to get more gibmedats and not just themselves - but the point isn't to uplift women as a whole, it's to subsidise a particular female life script (see Obama's notorious Life of Julia ad, but the critical point is that women who seek to have children in actually-committed relationships with men are SOL) with the goal of changing female behaviour such that a large enough pool of able women pursue meritocratic competition that they can achieve a 50-50 power elite by affirmative action without promoting obvious numpties.
I'll stop when self-proclaimed conservative women in positions of political power don't consistently fall back on feminist rhetoric the moment they feel cornered for their own actions.
As long as our conservative female defence minister here in Austria proudly asserts that mandatory military service should remain an exclusive male burden and that women can't be expected to share this obligation because "they still suffer from systemic injustice in other domains such as a housework or the gender pay gap" (her actual reasoning), I will continue to assume that feminism is mainly a in-group cudgel for women to wield against men and society for virtually any reason that they see fit in helping them get ahead.
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I'm not sure what you mean by the word "grift." To me, if a group of allied people work in informal concert to grab resources, it's still potentially what I would call a "grift."
In any event, I don't see much point in distinguishing between "women" and "feminists." If a traditional stay-at-home non-feminist wife is having a dispute with her husband (for example suppose they are getting divorced as a result of her infidelity and the woman stands to get very little alimony) I'm pretty confident most feminists would NOT say "Well that's what you get for being a stay-at-home-wife and cheating on your husband. You should have been a good feminist, gotten a marketable degree, and stayed in the workforce." Rather, they would strongly support the woman.
The thing is, most women have strong in-group bias. And that's all feminism really is -- partisan support of women, right or wrong.
To be sure, women's interests are not all perfectly aligned. What is good for a upper middle class secular careerist woman in the West is not necessarily what is good for other women in the world. And this tension surely informs the goals of feminists. Especially given that Western feminists are part of a larger coalition with some very non-feminist members.
Nevertheless, "more goodies (money, power, status, etc.) for women" is a reasonable approximation of the core goals of feminism.
I would say an activist movement is a grift if the primary goal is to transfer other people's money to the activists and their immediate social network, but not a grift if the goal is to transfer money to the group the activists claim to be speaking for. The organised BLM movement, for example, turns out to be a grift on this definition - they raised a lot of donations and mostly kept the money. The traditional Black urban political machines are not pure grifts on this model - although they take a lot off the top, they spend more taxpayer money on their constituents than they do on themselves.
Well you are free to define the word "grift" any way you like for purposes of discussion. Regardless, feminism is what it is: An ideology of avarice and hate which pretends to be about equality and basic rights. Grift or not.
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Female sexuality is NOT suppose to make logical sense. So it’s the female ID but blown up at macro societal movement scale. The early Game pioneers like that odd Magic guy but also the NYT writer guy who wrote the book The Game had a word for it: Shit Test. So I googled that word and found a definition for it that I think works:
“What Are “Shit Tests,” Really? The term “shit test” isn’t about malicious manipulation. It’s a shorthand for the subtle challenges, disagreements, or uncomfortable situations a woman might introduce into a conversation or interaction. These aren’t always obvious, and they’re rarely intended as deliberate attacks. Instead, they’re often subconscious filters, designed to quickly assess your emotional stability, confidence, integrity, and self-respect , qualities that suggest you’d be a reliable and supportive long-term partner.“
I guess I should cite but no reason to click thru: https://medium.com/@therealdating/decoding-shit-tests-in-dating-a-guide-to-confidence-and-connection-bf3a41ee45c5
So the whole you can’t objectify thing/me is sort of just a giant shit test at a societal level. My gut says any female spouting don’t objective women or me is actually just shit testing. And providing you are the right guy really wants you to have uncontrollable sexual desire for her.
One girl who I sort of loved I remember one day I was walking her home I think after dinner. I think some form of can I come I asked a few times and she said No. 15 minutes after I left I get a text why didn’t you come up. Guess I played it wrong and misread the situation.
Female sexuality should not be looked at thru a rationalist brain. It has its own games it plays.
"Objectification" is a broad term. Certain acts that we could label as "objectification" are benign or even desired, others less so. For example, a woman's body being appreciated by a desirable man, most commonly a partner, is an example of the former - note that this is almost always in a context of the two people knowing each other; so the objectification isn't really absolute. In the moment, the focus could be on the woman's body and sexual desirability; but overall this situation is only desired by the woman because it is in the context of being seen as an individual, not just a body. On the contrary, a set of female boobs plastered on a product, a gratuitous scene in a movie, or porn, are different in that they lack the underlying layer of intimacy of knowing a woman as a person, and appreciating her for more than just her body.
I think this would still be selling short female desire for objectification though it’s clearly on a spectrum. Some of female desire for objectification being in a relationship may even be limited by social and religion conventions and perhaps more universal. Aella is an example and since she’s basically in the canon of rationalists communities can be used as an example. She clearly expresses rape fantasies. I think rape fantasies are an example of female sexuality of a desire to be exposed to uncontrollable male lusts and objectification. In pop culture 50 Shades of Grey would be the leading brand.
On political don’t objectify movements I think the conventional view is it’s a bunch of fat tatted up liberals that men don’t desire. Who desperately desire to be objectified but created this form of feminisms that it’s bad since they can’t get it. The giant societal wide shit test by females I am proposing is probably a secondary mechanism.
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For her. As a total package, personality and mind as well as body. Not "that's an amazing giant set of honkers right there, but if an even better, bigger, set of honkers came along I'd go for them (too bad the honkers, which are the only things I'm interested in, have to come attached to some stupid broad but oh well)".
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Why not? It's just the mirror image of stuff men do that women haven't correctly communicated when to and not to do, like that whole "take them seriously but not literally, also ignore half the things she says because that's how the emotional spam filter works [and the 'attractive self-respect' thing comes from the 'doesn't respond to every emotional outburst about X']" thing.
It's not a direct counterpart, but men and women are different and start from initial conditions (inherent scarcity, etc.), so it's going to be expressed differently. Men (especially straight ones- it gets complicated when they're not) don't really have the circuitry to appreciate why you'd want a Cluster B werewolf billionaire, so it's difficult to know when to act like one (re: PUA, which as I understand it sums up to 'treat them like they're in a porno'; women will do the same thing to men sometimes, but less often because it's [socially] costlier for women to do that).
I don't know what pornography you're watching, but as I understand it, it's closer to "women sense desperation, here's how you can signal your interest in sexual congress while simultaneously implying she's not a big deal to you".
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Yes, Gen Z video essay women and Boomer hippie free sex women disagree about a decent number of things. I'm unfamiliar with that specific Youtuber, the clip you linked to makes it sound like she's mildly disapproving of the female social media influencers who wield their sexuality to perform both trad wife and Only Fans.
Edit: looking at her Youtube thumbnails, she probably has mixed feelings about her own desire to generate more clicks by wearing extremely low cut blouses, but then in the actual video she's hiding behind a large microphone. She wants to be a serious writer and book reviewer who isn't just liked for her looks, but also to get some attention based of of her looks, because it's a savage competitive market out there. This isn't fair, for sure, but performance and storytelling in general aren't, especially among young women.
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If you don't bite the bullet and become sex-negative (many do) you can make the same argument left-wingers make for decriminalizing drugs: sex work being work doesn't make it unpleasant (plenty of work is), it just means it should be brought out of the shadows to better protect those very vulnerable women and given the protections of any hazardous job since those women are gonna do it anyway (apply the left wing skepticism, arguably selective, of prohibition here)
Millionaire actresses don't have to strip every four minutes on Euphoria unless
perv"visionary" directors like Sam Levinson want to make a point.This isnt exactly a slam dunk argument, though? Bringing it into the light arguably legitimizes the industry and the harms it brings.
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There are sex negative feminists who largely agree with you here. They tend to be anti-porn and anti-sex work.
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That's one hell of an error bar, so the research is garbage.
Repeat after me: progressives are not liberals. I get that it's very confusing, especially if you're in certain bubbles that made much hay claiming they were the same (because in large degree the marriage of convenience between the two was still running at the time). The difference is that liberals actually like sex and aren't turbo-butthurt about its existence, while progressives are existentially threatened by anyone else but them controlling sex and sexual expression (because it is all the value they offer- that's part of why they're so attached to education as an alternate path). Needless to say this is mostly a thing with female progressives; the men might parrot it but they don't truly understand it (the ones that do tend to be traditionalists, which is just progressivism with the opposite gender valence).
The clue is that progressives tend to believe it should be legal to sell sex, but illegal to buy it, which takes the price of sex up to infinity. Any sex (or sexual expression) that occurs must be maximally monetized, or it's offering an alternative to that monopoly.
This is why progressives get extremely angry about older men dating younger women: the
mottecope is "she's being taken advantage of", thebaileytruth is "she's getting more money for the sex than I ever would, which drives the price I can get for my sex down".When women say the existence of something "devalues sex", they're being literal because it actually does.
So it's not the sexual objectification they're objecting to, it's getting around the fee they feel is due. Sexual labor (which for women is "being observed while sexually desirable") without pay. Progressives don't like sex work because it makes that fee legible, which is a threat; its legality is generally a compromise they struck with the liberals in the original anti-traditionalist compact. They do reserve the right to play at sexual labor, though, which is how they justify to themselves having made that deal, and is also why they don't really have much problem with non-straight sex (it's orthogonal to the market).
Which is why it's also important to identify what kind of feminist you're dealing with- some are just happy not to be under traditionalism (and will deploy patriarchy and equality arguments to that end- that's who they originally came from, and still have some truth to them), while others are trying to impose a matriarchy instead (and generally using the descriptive liberal arguments as prescriptive weapons).
Score one for AI. Claude traced it to here, and said it was a range of results across different studies (with different methodologies and populations), not error bars for a single measure. I retraced the source and read the abstract, but I honestly didn't gain anything that the AI didn't hand to me already.
As an aside, I've stopped listening to the news in my car because I can't fact-check them while I'm driving, but it's easy to do on the web.
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Does the author believe that female nudity and violence on screen can serve an artistic purpose? Also, can that purpose not be a feminist one? Because if the answer to those is no, as it probably is, there is scarcely a point in discussing this.
Also, isn't visually expressing sexual desire for the simple sake of showcasing how powerful, seductive and all-encompassing desire can be an artistic purpose in it's own right? We all feel it, we're all extremely affected by it, so shouldn't it naturally take up a prominent space in our artistic expressions even if it doesn't serve to advance a larger narrative or make a political statement?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xpef-FKYAf4
The opening scene of Godard's Contempt is literally Birgitte Bardot being reduced to her physical attributes, as Belmondo praises and declares his love for each of her individual body parts separately. But this "objectification" is so obviously an act of devotion - after all, how could you truly love a romantic partner without also loving their waist, their hands, their ankles, their genitals?
You could fully cut this scene from the movie, and the narrative would be unchanged. It exists entirely to showcase physical desire of an exceptionally beautiful woman. And it's absolutely wonderful.
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The standard feminist answer is that women objectifying themselves is empowering, but men objectifying women is degrading to the women. Of course, there are plenty of issues you can raise with this, but the standard feminist way of dealing with it is not to think about it too hard and to shame others who do - which, to be fair, is the standard way of dealing with most/all ideologies' thorny points.
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Perhaps my male brain is too compromised to process this, but I've never really understood why sexualising someone is an act of "objectification".
The Cambridge dictionary defines objectification as: "treating people like tools or toys, as if they had no feelings, opinions, or rights of their own"
To sexualise someone means to explicitly render someone as the target of sexual desire - putting an actress in a short skirt allows us to see more skin, which allows us to muse about what she would like naked, which we imagine we would be privy to in a fantasy scenario where we have sex with said actress. It has very little to do with denying someone's opinions or rights, but rather honing in on one specific part of their human existence, i.e. their potential as a sexual mate. Am I objectifying a waiter when I only consider him as someone who brings my drinks and my check when Im a customer at a café? Would I be morally wrong to be weirded out if said waiter suddenly started talking about his personal issues and opinions and I told him I really only want him to serve me my order and nothing else? According to the Cambridge dictionary, I would be "objectifying" him in that instance, which sounds blatantly absurd.
But most importantly - being the receiver of sexual desire is a foundationally humanising experience! People want to have sex with other people, not with objects - that's why most sex toys are shaped to resemble human genitalia or body parts. That's why high-end sex dolls are painstakingly manufactured to appear as human as possible. To want to have sex with someone is one of the bedrock human drives that will forever separate us from machines - and thus likewise, being the receiver of sexual desire equally represents a bedrock of the human condition, limited nigh-exclusively to humans (a fringe amount of people are sexual deviants who want to fuck toasters or animals, but they're irrelevant to the larger topic).
The issue seems to emerge from the fact that alot of people, notably feminist academics, endow words with moral weight they simply do not possess - since they consider most forms of sexual attention as bad, it MUST be described by a strictly pejorative term that also conveniently opens up the act to monumentally larger implications - suddendly, lusting after someone also must imply you want to treat them "like they have no rights of their own", i.e. perceive them as essentially unworthy of human dignity. This is such a massive jump from wanting to fuck someone that it feels essentially alien to how anyone actually experiences sexual desire. When I looked at Jennifer Lawrence's leaked nudes as a teen, that last thing I was thinking of was restricting her rights and opinions - I was thinking about how amazing it would feel to have sex with her and literally nothing else.
Of course, there's an obvious subtle truth hiding behind all this: the profile of the person doing the sexualisation is exponentially more significant than the sexualisation itself in evaluating if its "objectifying" or not. As a man, being told by an attractive woman that she only wants me for sex and nothing else is a mostly extremely rewarding experience that has given me lasting boosts in self-esteem. Similarly, a fat ugly girl hitting on me and drunkenly attempting to create a hookup situation with me left me feeling disgusted.
Objectification as a term only really makes sense if it leads you to dismiss the person's agency in a context where said agency is relevant - i.e., interrupting a woman speaking to tell her to take her top off, which would imply you aren't interested in her humanity beyond her sexual potential.
A glance at the roots and political development behind the term should immediately make it obvious that we are dealing with an ideological concept, not a neutral descriptor:
How the FUCK does treating someone depending on their human body render the person an "object"? Humans ARE bodies, first and foremost. HOW you treat the body is what matters.
So virtually any transactional relationship is an act of objectification - seems somewhat insane to simultaneously insist that the term describes an objectively negative quality when it also applies to me working a job or asking my roommate to get groceries for me. Either objectification is wholesale bad, in which case it's definition needs to be reworked from the ground up, or objectification describes an inevitable social process with no inherent moral weight, in which case feminists have to stop using it as a buzzword for negative behaviour.
A lot of 'objectification' discourse is just a political weapon -- as you say, ideologues uncomfortable with sexual desire who turn to any argument against it -- or the Dworkin-style criticism of industries that doesn't meaningfully discuss or respond to specific acts or creations.
Unfortunately, the Dworkin/MacKinnon-style one is what's present here, and in a lot of youtube content dating back to Sarkeesian, so that doesn't help. Because it's supposed to be a criticism of broad structures rather than specific acts, it's largely not interested in specific acts... and coincidentally is largely unfalsifiable, up to and including handwaves when confronted with increasingly broad spectrums of pornography that either don't fit its model definition (femdom, gay porn) or do fit its model definition but don't actually objectify (women's erotica, woman-to-consumer sales, the growth of parasocial porn). The waiter counterexample just gets a 'mu' here: it's just not a relevant question to their framework.
But there is a meaningful steelman (and not some recent or made-up one) that's worth keeping in mind if you every write smut or romance (or even 'normal' stories that feature romance).
There is a difference between treating people like tools or toys, and sexualizing them or making them targets of sexual desire. It's the line between a character that's sexy, and a fleshlight with a smil. You can treat a tool well, or a person poorly, just as being a target of desire can be humanizing or not depending on framework, norms, and reciprocity of interest.
For an extreme (and het) example, look at het free-use style BDSM.You can play into the same kink by literally stuffing a woman into a hole in a wall and treating her like a sex toy for a parade of men to use, or you can tie her down to a breeding stand and then make a game out of getting an orgasm (or too many orgasms) out of her or tease her so long that she's begging for more stimulation. Hell, a lot of straight guys find the latter option hotter (or the former a little gay). There's no difference in agency between these two implementations: they can and often do have near-identical framing stories, and it's even easier to make the 'I'm a sex toy' version more clear about its consent. But the former is about the men's pleasure and the women's appearance, while the latter centers the woman's feelings and desire.
In writing, erotica or pornography with more of a story, that can be more varied. A lot of less experienced writers will try to make sex scenes so low-friction that the sub does nothing but sit there, look sexy, and maybe squeeze a little. But there's a lot of mileage in highlighting the sort of pinch points that show up in real sex. Overstimulation and 'forced' orgasms are kinks of their own for a reason. A sub finding a position uncomfortable and wanting to swap, or needing a different tempo or some time to adjust to the big dick in them, or wanting more foreplay before penetration, can be a great pacing tool. Someone using a safe word because they can't physically bend that way is a perfect tool to make clear that they are comfortable with or at least enjoying everything else, or act as a scene break. These inevitably inject questions about who can make what call and how those desires are negotiated, even if the writer ultimately wants to just to treat them as one-liners.
Now, I'll make the separate argument that objectification isn't always bad. The counterargument to objectifying a waiter ultimately ends up asking a lot of emotional labor from someone who, in reality, just wants you to leave a tip and get out of here so the table's clear. In sex, a significant portion of women (... and some men) like smut that objectifies the character they're projecting themselves into, because of that objectification. It gives them a vehicle to see their desires instantiated, without having to replace an existing character's conflicting desires and feelings, or require that projection to vocalize and admit their own desires. That's a particularly big deal for people who've been raised to stigmatize or hide overt expressions of their sexuality: denying the interior experience of 'their' character may be the only way they can really come to grips with it.
The steelman of the feminist argument is that objectification can be dangerous, even for the people who get the most out of it. Some men like the woman-as-sex-toy framework because it does make it easier to think about sex as solely about 'their' own pleasure, up to and including at the expense of what their partners want or what their partners are comfortable doing. Some women who need objectification as a way to bypass their shame do so to their own detriment, either ignoring or refusing to use environments where they could admit to their desires safely, or by internalizing the self-abnegate to destructive ends.
I don't buy that as a common concern, but I don't think it's a non-existent failure mode, either. The academic research is bad, since it's mostly revolving around priming effects with little pre-registered study and even fewer direct replication, and a lot of signal only shows up if you divide 'violent' (mainstream) porn from general porn, which doesn't encourage about direction-of-causation or salami-slicing-reasons. Still, unless it's entirely fraudulent, there's some level of signal, and if so the pro-sex side's larger population-scale data is partly recognizing other variables.
Your own example of leaked nudes is a central version: you weren't restricting her rights or opinions, but you weren't recognizing them as matters to care about either. That's why the objectification theory uses that word, not just to smuggle emotional loading from the Dworkin version: you don't deny the rights or opinions of tissue paper, after all, but you still treat it as an object. I'd guess that she didn't want her nudes to be present everywhere on the internet, and legally she might have had a cause of action against the leakers and redistributors.
((caveat: I don't follow celebrities, so if she's separately a well-known exhibitionist, objection withdrawn.))
You've said alot of interesting things that I largely agree with, so I just want to hone in on one element I take issue with :
I disagree - in this specific scenario, my teenage self fantasising about having sex with a famous actress is not imagining fucking a lifeless ragdoll that just happens to look identical to Jennifer Lawrence. The fantasy obviously involves her being enthusiastic, willing, and desiring me during the encounter, which pretty explicitly means that her "opinions" or "rights" are comfortably sublimated in an affirmative manner into the fantasy itself. Furthermore, if I mention Jennifer Lawrence and not one of the million random porn stars or e-whores you can see naked on the internet, it's because wanting to fuck Jennifer Lawrence is bound to her personality, status, etc. making her more desirable than other women, which means that her physical attributes are only a minor part of the overall attraction.
This is true but it's a detail relative to the specific example I chose - I could just as easily have mentioned Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean, in which case the non-consent angle vanishes.
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Mostly unrelated but the recent Twitter discourse on CNC orgies has been funny. Especially Aella indicating that it's hard to ensure less attractive women attract sufficient rapists
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"Objectification" is, like "Male Gaze", originally a serious philosophical concept (in this case, from Hegel, who uses the term to refer to making something real, so for instance "shelter" is objectified into "houses") which was picked up by American scholar-activists in "Studies" fields who saw it and thought hey that's a cool term, it sounds bad, let's redefine it as Bad Thing my outgroup does. Funnily enough the Hegel term is closer to how men and women actually interact, and you could easily make a full feminist theory out of it, but that's hard and academics are lazy.
So what happens if the catcaller is black?
We know what happens
It disappeared faster than Kony 2012 once people started criticizing.
Oh, that's just copy of Sofie Peeters Femme de la Rue from 2012.
It's funny how the scenario plays out virtually identically across the Atlantic ocean. A feminist woman walks around a large city, in an attempt to draw attention to the problem of street harassment. People Notice™ that the harassers are virtually exclusively of non-European extraction, which is exactly the thing they weren't supposed to notice: they were supposed to accuse men-in-general, not the men who have culturally enriched all major cities in Europe.
A similar phenomenon is the subway shirt. I would almost feel bad for these women if they weren't the ones voting for this.
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You get mad at some vaguely proximate white guy.
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You're overthinking it.
Women want (hot) men to think they are hot. Unfortunately:
Women become less hot with age.
There's always a hotter woman.
Women are aware of these facts, and these cause insecurity. Men who go to the movies to ogle Sydney Sweeney's huge rack trigger both older women and women who suspect Sweeney is hotter than them because it directly competes with them for sexual attention from those men (some of whom are hot). In contrast, I've never heard of a woman in a relationship with a man she finds attractive complaining about her man "objectifying" her. It really is that simple.
You don't even have to go that far. The vlogger linked in the OP is rather flat chested, and still sometimes wears very deep cut blouses anyway, clearly visible in her thumbnails. She does not enjoy watching more voluptuous women looking sexy. Men also complain about media that flaunts being for someone with opposing preferences when they didn't think it would be going in. She seems to feel that way about Euphoria.
You and I may have different standards for "very deep cut".
I think this is basically what I said.
I'm not sure what you mean by this (I don't know anything about Euphoria).
I was basically agreeing, but for that clip you don't even have to go into aging at all.
I don't know anything about Euphoria either, but it sounds like she thought she would like it, thought it would be female gaze compatible, but then it wasn't. Like, I tried watching Outlander, enjoyed the love interest, enjoyed the costumes, but did not enjoy the rape and torture. So I stopped watching, but if I were a media vlogger, I would have stopped watching and also complained about the rape and torture on the way out.
Edit: looking at the trailer, it does look like the initial pitch to viewers is a lesbian romance between Zendaya and a flat chested blond girl, and them doing drugs together. It does look kind of like it might be a gender reversed version of what they were ineptly doing with Star Wars. "But what if we could reel in more young men with BOOBS though?"
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I largely agree with your analysis, and I think it's worth adding that there is a certain irony here. Ultimately, the feminist concept of "objectification" is based on the idea that male desires are illegitimate or unimportant. From the feminist perspective, men are just supposed to serve women without asking for or expecting anything in return. Without having their own independent and legitimate desires.
In other words, the concept of "objectification" is itself rather objectifying.
In any event, "objectification" is like any other feminist concept in that it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The actual core principles of feminism are (1) more goodies (money, power, status, etc.) for women; and (2) punishment and humiliation for men. Of course, feminists don't like to admit to themselves or others that there's is an ideology of naked selfishness and hate. So they come up with concepts like "objectification" to act as philosophical fig leaves.
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This is a standard case of society having a different set of standards for men and women. Women are liberated beings and can have sex with who they want. Men are dangerous predators until proven otherwise, and must keep their desires in check.
Because women are free, liberated individuals who can choose to use their bodies however they please, sex work is a valid occupation that should not be shamed.
Because men are dangerous and predatory, any man who uses sex workers is the worst kind of person who sees women as merely objects with no agency or value besides the hole between their legs.
Thus, being a sex worker is perfectly valid, although dangerous. Buying the services of a sex worker is one of the worst thing a man can do.
In discussion of Graham Platner today on Breaking Points, Platner is given kudos for claiming he was a bad boyfriend in the past, but that the current accusations against him and nebulous and thin gruel. Points to them for not falling back on Believe All Women (even if because the worst complaint against him is from a Republican who dated him, so it's thought to be motivated), but it occurred to me how unlikely it would ever to for a woman to feel the need to 'fess up to being "a bad girlfriend" and atoning for it, for a political career. It'd be like, "Psh, yea I was a BRAT, and anyway who said I was a bad girlfriend? Probably some douchebag who thought he was owed sex."
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Is this not just an instance of Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism?
In this case, by problematizing the appreciation of the women currently considered hotter than her as "objectification".
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obligatory PhD comics.
At the risk of sounding like a hippie commie, objectification is the default mode to relate to trade partners. The relationship of an Amazon shareholder and a worker in a fulfillment center or software programmer is one of 100% objectification. The shareholder does not know or care if the worker is putting in the hours to pay for college for his kid or to finance a substance habit. The only thing he cares about is that the fulfillment of the orders happens in a cost-effective way. Humans are only employed because robots and LLMs are not cost-effective ways to replace them (yet).
Nor do I think that this is bad, or would be different in some commie utopia. The ideal would be that humans use each other as tools in ways which incidentally also improves the situation of the used person. But this is merely a question of trade balance. I do not want my coffee to be produced by someone whom I can appreciate as a person with agency and feelings, perhaps deciding that today I will buy coffee beans from that farmer because I sympathize with his backstory or whatever. I only care about the general stuff in aggregate, that he is not enslaved and not overly exploited. Otherwise, my caring takes the form of pieces of paper with pictures of presidents on it, and I do not expect him to care about my specific situation, why I feel the need to caffeinate etc. As long as I care about his well-being in the abstract that I don't want him exploited, and he cares about mine enough that he does not want me to drink coffee with a lot of mercury in it, objectifying the other as a source of labor or funds seems perfectly fine.
Nor do I think that the objectification in sex work is one sided. If the guy sees the sex worker as a collection of tits and holes, it seems likewise reasonable to assume that the sex worker will see the john as a wallet with a cock attached to it.
When I walk through the city, I tend to model other people as bounding boxes for collision avoidance. Does this make me more or less evil than a guy who instead models the people around him as a collection of sex organs?
I do not have a bigger point to make (I am not into super-transactional sex, personally), but I find it dishonest to pretend that objectification is bad when it is the default way we relate to other people in any polity larger than Dunbar's number. "The cashier scanned my food" is as much as an objectification as "the big-chested blonde walked by my table".
That comic could very well have the brain on a stick in both panels as none of the descriptors in the first are usually associated with anything other than the brain. Also, "hopes, dreams, and aspirations" are basically synonyms.
There is a point to be made that delving into the hypertransactional abyss in defining relationships wraps back around into meaningful compassionate connections when all factors are considered (e.g. A shareholder doesn't want Amazon to have a bad reputation, and a shareholder has a long-term perspective that would not encourage short-sighted "cost-savings")
Usually the zero-sum punchline of the "Sexual Empowerment" of women is the belittlement of male sexuality.
Let's take the Sexual Empowerment perspective and apply it to Male sexuality:
"Attraction to a woman's appearance regardless of her innerworkings is an undescriminating love of bodily-form akin to the unconditional love of Christ. Men love beautiful form regardless of what dwells within, opening themselves to become romantically-entangled with anytype of woman who attracts him in appearance."
And now for parody :
"It is a man's right to goon to anyone he wishes: Laws against public masturbation are a sexist anachronism meant to shame and restrict him while making women feel comfortable. The freedom of men is far more important than the comfort of women"
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An influencer couple announced that they aborted their pregnancy because the fetus had Down syndrome. This upset a lot of people including some fine congressmen.
However, it's actually very common. Screening for genetic disorders is generally performed between 10 and 20 weeks, giving plenty of time for a reasonably early choice. "As a result of these elective terminations in the U.S., there was a 37% reduction in the numbers of babies with Down syndrome born in 2018. This means that in recent years there were 37% fewer babies with Down syndrome than could have been born". In Iceland, almost all such diagnosed pregnancies are aborted after testing.
People with Down syndrome are clearly generally capable of living "happy" lives. They have the equivalent intelligence of an 8 to 9 year old. Most 8 to 9 year olds seem happy enough to me, and it would not be a horrible curse to live decades in such a condition. Perhaps we might ask if such a life is fulfilling, but a young child can't comprehend what that means; as well ask your dog if he's fulfilled by sniffing butts and digging holes.
For the caretakers of course, life may not be so rosy. Taking care of a small child indefinitely, knowing all of the joys and sorrows of adulthood that they will never experience, does not sound fulfilling, to say nothing of the physical and monetary toll. It's therefore unsurprising that most parents choose not to condemn themselves to such a future.
God in His infinite wisdom creates babies with far worse afflictions. Most people would agree that it is ethical, perhaps mandatory, to abort nonviable children who will live only hours in agonizing pain after birth. Down syndrome, as a patently survivable condition, lies on the edge of this boundary.
This is a pretty interesting debate as it demonstrates a real fracture point between the "alt-right" NRx folk (such that still exist) and the "trads" who might otherwise be allies of convenience. We can joke about 13/52 and find common ground on e.g., the execution of rapists, murderers, and child molesters; plausibly agree on the utility of racial profiling, nativism and remigration, and broadly reject blank slatism in all its forms -- but god forbid (and, I suppose, God forbids) we proactively prune a few fetuses with extra chromosomes.
The religious right will, of course, construct their Jenga tower of cope re: why their ideology doesn't immediately collapse back down into leftist slave morality, but ultimately, they protect them because they are pitiful, and that is indistinguishable from progressivism. I have no faith that these "allies" would be willing to bar the gates and sink the ships in a Camp of the Saints-style dystopia; it's all just LARP.
Isn't this just generic "boo outgroup"?
It seems to me that the religious right take a very consistent position on this - it is wrong to kill an innocent person. If the alt-right carve out exceptions, like it's okay to kill pre-natal people, or it's okay to kill people with genetic disorders, or even (implicitly?) it's okay to kill people who are genetically inferior in some other sense, well, they're the ones who would seem to need to justify the inconsistency.
The true religious right, the socially conservative right, has a principle. Do not commit murder. They have stated that principle openly for a long time. For the small, historically new or young group of weirdos constituting the alt-right, or neoreaction, to accuse the conservative right of 'LARP' or of being 'leftists' is surely absurd.
If anything I think the religious right could more plausibly argue that it's the alt-right, as you describe them, who are pseudo-leftists. If you're going to accuse the religious right of being 'leftists' because they're anti-eugenics, I think they're just as much at liberty to say that you're leftist because you're pro-eugenics, and eugenics was obviously a progressive movement going all the way back to the late 19th century.
Not only are the religious right anti-eugenics their fully generalizable bible inspired tabula rasa views can be used to achieve any ammount of internationalist third worldist leftie bullshit, re immigration, anti-nationalism, justifying cuckoldry etc, endless funding for random third world countries. "The sanctity of life" or moral worth of some random dude's divine soul does not suddenly vanish because they live in africa or mexico.
I'm not sure what point you're making or what this has to do with anything under the sun?
You may well think that the religious right are incorrect, but what you've just said hardly seems to follow from their beliefs. If nothing else, it is demonstrably the case that the religious right do not support endless foreign aid or anti-nationalism. On the contrary, support for high levels of foreign aid or anti-nationalist feeling appear to correlate positively with secularism or irreligion.
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Do the alt-right agree that "pre-natal people" are a thing, to begin with? The maximalist pro-abortion position does not seem any less consistent to me (as someone who holds it): something that does not have a record of autonomous human experience does not count as a "person", and if anything is wrong with killing it, it's not in the same category as what is wrong with killing people. (I can see an argument for not pulling the plug on the braindead from the perspective of "surviving relatives have sentimental attachment to the body" only.)
(Incidentally, I've been wondering, is there a literalist Biblical case in Christianity for the personhood of fetuses, or is this something that has been coloured in retroactively by modern analysis/apologetics "through a Christian lens"?)
I think there's a great case to be made that Christianity and Leftism are closely related, which only rubs people the wrong way because in the US the majority of those who identify with the respective movements have evolved to be mutually disgusted tribal archenemies. It seems kind of like what happens when you point out to modern Greeks all the ways in which their culture, genetics and language have been influenced by the Turks.
Alt-righters, whose LARP of choice more often than not is some sort of BAP-style Classical elitism, seem to be one group that definitively has the right to call Christians "left-wing", because the thing they are LARPing in doing so (Classical Antiquity) was overturned by Christianity with a memetic package that through a modern lens very much parses as such.
Once you're committed to believing in a category "human person, thus it's wrong to kill them," the difficulty lies not in finding reasons to exclude somebody from the category, but in finding a consistent reason why anybody deserves inclusion.
For instance, let's say that a very wealthy and powerful person, perhaps Hillary Clinton, pities some alt-righters and is pretty sure their lives aren't worth living by comparison with her much more comfortable and fulfilled existence. She finds that their deplorable presence is a constant political burden that makes her life dramatically worse. One might even say it ruins her life, given that she has been forced to spend her entire life fighting their plans!
Hillary Clinton is certainly more able to fund a skilled hitman to take out BAP, or you, than the reverse. Yet you say it would be immoral because you and he have "autonomous human experience"? In what sense are you fully "autonomous," living in a nation where she pays much higher taxes? And even if you/he are, how could you explain to Hillary (non-theistically) that your autonomous experience means it's wrong of her to kill you, even if you're ruining her life?
The difference between fetuses and adults is not that fetuses have lives less worth living, it is that they are very different looking organisms and it’s not at all obvious to people that don’t believe in souls being delivered at the moment that the sperm burrows into the egg that fetuses are people. That’s the thing you need to engage with. Some people might be arguing that it is permissible to “put people out of their misery” if they have lives which don’t seem worth living, but this is a much more fringe position than people who just think fetuses are not people.
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There isn't but there is a long history all the way back to the 2nd? 3rd? century of christians opposing abortion. Some people speculate that it was because they were accused of eating children or something like that.
I suspect that in the early Christian imagination, abortion was considered basically a form of infanticide. We know that early Christians were known to do things like rescue exposed infants and raise them, and that seems a similar category. Thus my citation of the Didache above: "you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born".
It is probably worth emphasising that in valuing the lives of children so much, early Christians were themselves being counter-cultural and odd - we've lost this today, but Jesus' comments about children (bring the little children unto me etc.) are shocking in their original context because they were made at a time when children were viewed as significantly more disposable than today.
If you lived in a society with a childhood mortality rate around 50% you're naturally going to have a different view of the death of children than a society where it's 0.01%
Christians adopted their views about children when infant mortality was still around 50%.
The idea that "save every child" is something that might actually be achieved, rather than an expression of heroic virtue in the face of impossible odds, is something you start to see in the 19th century.
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The assumption that alt-right morality has to automatically align to conservative Christian morality also feels like a misnomer. I'm sure there's a correlation but it's hardly a precondition.
Right, but it seemed like @OliveTapenade was partially coming at this from a "who are these newcomers to lecture us, the original Right, about what is Right" angle. (This kind of mirrors the "tankie left" vs. "mental health left" (I still think "Ctrl-Left" is a great coinage) divide, though in the US the latter has comprehensively won while the Alt-Right is at most a strong minority within the Right)
Are the Tankie left that mutually exclusive from the mental health left? Though I guess the Left is a lot better at purging heresy on issues like Trans and mental health stuff as a matter of course.
I'd also say there's an element of the environmentalist left where I've seen Green Parties formed across the West purging their founders for doing hecking sexisms or phobias
Tankie left will selectively use the language of the Mental Health Left when it suits them, to cover or to pander.
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No, but if they believe that the infant in the womb is not a person, such that it can be terminated at any point without guilt, that's something they have in common with leftists, not with conservatives.
The Didache says, in so many words, "you shall not murder a child by abortion" (Roberts-Donaldson). Is that what you're asking for?
The specific biblical proof-texts include things like Jeremiah 1:5 ("before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you"), but these are more quibble-able, if you're so inclined. Footnote 5 here mentions some of the others.
Augustine, describing sin, writes in On Marriage and Concupiscence, that cruelty and lustfulness, "resorts to such extravagant methods as to use poisonous drugs to secure barrenness; or else, if unsuccessful in this, to destroy the conceived seed by some means previous to birth, preferring that its offspring should rather perish than receive vitality; or if it was advancing to life within the womb, should be slain before it was born." This is about a plain a condemnation of abortion as I can imagine.
To personhood specifically, in City of God XXII.12-13, Augustine considers whether aborted infants will be included in the Resurrection, and he considers the question again in Enchiridion 85-6. Here he interestingly admits to ignorance:
I take Augustine here as saying, "A late-term infant in the womb is clearly alive, such that killing him or her is murder. I do not know at what moment in the womb the infant begins to live. That question is currently beyond scientific understanding."
Today many Christians would presumably add, "Today, we have greater scientific understanding, and therefore do know what Augustine did not, which is that life begins at conception."
Augustine always frames this in terms of 'life', but the logic seems applicable to personhood, to me? He does not use the exact moral vocabulary that modern thinkers do, but I think the direction of his thought is pretty clear.
I take it as an answer in line with what @aaa said below, which is something like "it's not in the Bible, but clearly something that was believed by early (more Western than the founders?) Christians within 200-300 years of founding". Except for the longer excerpt from Augustine, though, the arguments don't really seem to obviously be implying an outright "personhood"/complete equivalence of fetuses to central examples of "persons" angle, instead going for general pro-natalism (most obviously in the "poisonous drugs to secure barrenness" text: it's associating abortion with contraception which involves no "conceived seed" at all, and the "conceived seed" vocabulary + implication that it has not yet "received vitality" also sounds like it considers the fetus less than human).
At least without context, Jeremiah 1:5 sounds like it's more about God knowing the future. If you want to read meaning into the phrasing in "formed you in the womb", it only seems to suggest that "you" were formed at some point while being in the womb (so between the point where the fertilised egg leaves the tube and birth).
Sorry, but this seems like what Scott called "Eulering" to me. Defining life, for moral purposes, is not the magisterium of science to begin with.
The Didache is from the first century. If there was nothing critical of abortion in early Christianity, that part was added in very early indeed. I think it's just plausible that early Christians considered it too obvious to require mentioning that abortion is a form of murder - you might compare the way that, for instance, early Christian writings on suicide are similar. As far as I can tell it was just considered obvious that suicide falls under the heading of murder.
Regarding life, I grant that there is room to quibble, but insofar as it is scientifically true that conception is the first moment at which a unique, genetically distinct, new organism comes into being, I think it's reasonable for a modern Christian to consider that morally relevant.
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But that would be a very motivated reading. ‘Life’ is either a chemical process that has continued unmolested for 200 million years, living gamete to pluripotent cell to living gamete, or else is something that sperm and eggs don’t have but late term infants do.
“Life begins at conception”, is a convention, and “life is something that slowly accumulates as a foetus develops”, is also a convention. You cannot choose between them scientifically.
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On average, I don’t think trads are that down for joking about 13/52. Nor do I think they’re pro-racial profiling. And not only do modern trads not reject blank slatism, they’re broadly pro-blank slatism (except for “too obvious” cases like Down syndrome).
Agreed that trads wouldn’t have it in them to bar any gates or sink any ships in a Camp of the Saints-type situation. They’d rather lose gracefully than risk being mean to Vulnerable Groups. They may even bend the knee and metaphorically or literally wash the feet of migrants upon arrival. This wouldn’t expose them as LARPers, though, as they’ve been consistent in being progressives driving the speed limit all along.
I don't think this analysis really checks out; "trads" and "conservatives" are not the same group, and the latter are the ones it's reasonable to pose as "progressives driving the speed limit". Best I can tell, trads are generally opposed to racism, but pretty good at noticing when people are fucking with them with false accusations of racism, except in cases that are especially dimwitted and easy for progressives to peel off by any number of tactics. Some of their number predictably die in overseas mission trips or doing other charity work, so they do have to have some "suicidal empathy". However, it's often said that progressives support policies that let dangerous criminals into the country, but wouldn't personally invite them into their homes; I think trads are basically exactly the converse. They aren't generally Amish-style absolute pacifists, and it's pretty easy to whip them up into a nationalist fervor by posing things as a cultural and religious war.
"Trads," as used to describe the religious right as @meduka was doing, are generally considered a subset of conservatives. And while they may not drive at the exact same speed or always on the same roads as other conservatives, I still contend they're progressives driving the speed limit. This can be seen in instances like you mentioned, suicidal empathy or pathological altruism in overseas mission trips or other charity work at considerable personal time and expense, up to and including death.
This type of Noticing may be present among Online RETVRN types (who would likely fall under "'alt-right' NRx folk" or a spiritual offshoot thereof), but generally absent from the religious right. It wasn't the Online RETVRN types who were bending the knee to wash black people's feet during BLM. The knees of the modern religious right bend easily, as was the case with gay marriage.
I don't think trads oppose policies that let dangerous criminals into the country, insofar a disproportionate amount of dangerous criminals are the byproduct of letting in migrants from the Global South, and being kind and welcoming to migrants (regardless of their ethnic or regional origins) are part of being a good Christian/Catholic. For example, the two most recent popes are/were oft-quoted in simping for migrants/illegal immigrants.
I've seen/heard relatively little pushback from TradCaths in discussions about the popes' water-carrying for migrants/illegal immigrants, although TradCaths should supposedly be quite down for criticizing the pope for being too ${CurrentYear}. In contrast, I've seen/heard much more spirited participation from TradCaths in discussions about abortion or transsexuality. Stronger opinions in discussions about the popes' water-carrying for migrants/illegal immigrants instead come from the "'alt-right' NRx"-types and progressives, the former lulzing and/or seething ("with Christ-cuck allies like these, who needs enemies?") and the latter dabbing/gloating ("see? Even your pap-daddy in the Vatican says that no human is illegal").
TradCaths are willing to criticise the Pope for deviating from Catholicism. They aren't willing to criticise the Pope for deviating from secular conservatism. The idea that the Christian thing to do can be determined by considering secular conservative political theory is pretty much exclusive to American evangelicals.
Christianity is a universalising religion. You are going to struggle to get a Christian to endorse "Now the Good Samaritan has come to the attention of the authorities, time to deport him back to Samaria, ideally after a few weeks in a deliberately squalid prison camp to deter imitators" or "Actually it would have saved the Roman Empire a lot of trouble if the authorities in Roman Egypt had shipped the Holy Family back to King Herod" - even though the latter is probably correct. You can find Biblical prooftexts for "Rulers should do the politically prudent thing, not the WWJD thing" to go along with the usual secular arguments that immigration restriction is prudent. But immigration restriction isn't Christian doctrine. My understanding of modern Catholic teaching is that the only secular political questions which are a matter of doctrine are right-to-life issues.
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I agree the NRx (or whatever label you want to slap on it) and Christianity are very much opposed and its a weird quirk of American politics that anybody would think otherwise.
Your framing of the issue is rather bizarre however. The way you talk about it, one would almost think that empathy and helping the poor and the vulnerable is some sort of leftist and progressive invention. In reality of course, Christianity has promoted these things since its inception more than 1500 years before anything that can be meaningfully called 'leftism' or 'progressivism' ever enters the scene. It would be more accurate in my opinion to state something like leftism took a Christian virtue and isolated it from the rest of the Christian worldview and rather predictably ended up in a rather unbalanced and silly place. Recognizing this silliness in the leftist project, the alt-right/NRx/whatever simply completed the process of the secularist revolution and threw out the last remaining bit of the moral order of Christendom.
One angle I hear is that Christianity and progressivism are of single, unified lineage, and we've got to RETVRN to the prelapsarian world of blood and suffering.
Louise Perry thinks we already have.
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It depends. Usually in the Christian form of charity, there was an expectation of the person joining and becoming a Christian, and often The priest would require that the recipient generally improve their behaviors if they are the cause of the problem. If they had no job they were expected to do at least some work. It wasn’t a modern free check where a person could demand gibs despite not being a member of the community or contributing in any way whatsoever.
That is because Christian Charity is not utilitarian, but based on Christian virtue ethics. Even people like Saint Ambrose with radical view on wealth accented the impact of lack of charity on the salvation of the giver, not only on earthly comfort of the one receiving such charity. It also flows into Thomas Aquinas hierarchy of need, where only extreme necessity requires immediate action, and even then in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity - meaning you are responsible for ever expanding circle that however starts with you. So in that sense a heathy beggar who is hungry because he is lazy, is failing in his responsibility and in fact steals from truly needy. Enabling his behavior is at best lack of prudence, and at worst you become complicit, as you trap them in their sins.
It is one of pet peeves of mine - when modern Christian Churches entangle themselves in social policies and preach about human rights or inequalities or even utilitarian systems such as Effective Altruism often calling it as strategic choice. This is secular vocabulary is alien to core social teaching. E.g. talking about American poor is absolutely stupid, they are basically yesteryear millionaires with access to everything they may need materially.
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Also a funny take on Twitter when some people came out as pro-choice except for in this case since 'this is eugenics'. The position that a person should be entitled to abort their children for any reason unless the child is maximally inconvenient for them is pretty amusing.
People should be able to abort for any reason except sex selection is a pretty standard lefty viewpoint.
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I was hoping someone had already posted about this so I can ride on it. Let's say they did have the downer, what would happen?
Let's now talk for a second about suicidal empathy. I think suicidal empathy is just christianity + technology. For example, Jesus says "love your neighbor", this works fine in his time because "your neighbor" is literally your neighbor and it's probably societally adaptive. Better to help someone when they are down on their luck, it's probably temporary, it probably helps the whole village not to let them die for a temporary thing. The upside is probably worth the downside of helping irredemable people some of the time.
Your neighbor now is everyone who lives in a 10000ft radius of the earth surface. You can easily know how they are doing no matter where they are, you can go there within a day or two at a (relatively) irrisory price and you can also make them come to you at the same low price. The somalian sitting of the coast of lybia in a repurposed fishing boat? Your neighbor. The same somalian living in your country definitely your neighbor. His family? Your family's neighbor. Kicking them out as illegals? Definitely not helping them.
And that's how the Catholic Church pushed for regularizing half a million immigrants to spain this year.
This and the downer's story are actually the same category of error. Had the downer been born in the Christian Dark Ages the downer would have died of some retarded accident within 10 years and if not he would have been given the, relatively cheap, life of the beast of burden, not the simulacron of life of an intellectual that we try to give them now.
Euthanasia is also in the same category. Not killing the sick is a good idea because sometimes they get better and otherwise it's like, an extra two weeks. Not so much when we can keep them alive for 60 more years without much effort. Christianity + technology = suicidal empathy.
What's the solution to suicidal empathy? More cruelty, we need to start liking cruelty. The problem is that nobody is willing to do it, you have to trick people by saying "you're not helping them IT'S AN INVASION!!!!1!!!!!!1!!!11!!11!!!!". But it only goes so far. The downer would basically be happy we have to give as much as we can to the downer.
In the time of Christ and the early Church, the key neighbors in question were the Romans who tried and failed across the next >350 years to torture, rape and murder Christianity out of existence. It wasn't be nice to your immediate neighbors, everybody does that, it was show love to the men leading you to the pyre. If purely for reasons of history and epistemic hygiene, should your primary understanding of Christianity have come from American Scripturalists and the modern atheism they spawned, you are lacking 1800 years of empirical record.
In the US, which means far more in Europe, 83% of employees of such charities are either atheists, members other religions, or cultural Catholics excommunicated latae sententiae. This is irrelevant, though, because none of these charities could operate without the prevailing interest of their governments in overseeing demographic replacement. There is the point that the government gives charities large amounts of money and the charities give it back to favored politicians, but the charity industry is the domain of leftists and there are expressly nonreligious charities doing the same work. Regardless of that, it is, also, not as though charities are the bottleneck. Demographic replacement is top-down, charities, any charity, may influence where foreigners are finally placed once in a country and the privileges they enjoy, but those foreigners would be in the country regardless, because that's what power wants. Everything else is set dressing.
"We need more cruelty." How do you think we got here? It wasn't a superabundance of love. In cruelty we destroyed the structures that could support such people and standing in the wreckage we say now tear them apart in the womb.
"far more in Europe"? Is there a missing word there? I don't understand. Also your link doesn't look to me like it's supporting your assertion. It says "The study of campaign contributions from 2018 through February of this year showed that 83% went to Democratic candidates or political-action committees" the 83% is donating to a party, it doesn't say anything about their religious affiliation. I also followed the link at the top and searched for "atheist" and found no hits.
I could have clearly worded that better. Europe is more progressive than the US, so if we look at a field, such as NGOs in the US, and we find it dominated by progressives, then we should expect an even greater degree of progressive control of charities in Europe. But that's an issue, one of two here I've produced. The first is I am just assuming the European NGO employees are more progressive, and the second is the data references a study of American Catholic charity employees who donated to political causes. I didn't look further to check what percentage of employees donate, so 83% must be wrong, and really it's that 83% of those politically-active donate to leftist causes in the US. Helping women get abortions, which includes donating to and voting for pro-abortion politicians, also incurs automatic excommunication.
So in the studied Catholic NGOs, 83% of their politically active employees are either:
Atheists / Non-religious
Members of other faiths
Catholics who have excommunicated themselves
This isn't an argument about those non-practicing Catholics not being Catholic. They are still Catholic, and they are taught they will be judged more harshly for what they know. This is an argument against aspersing teachings because of the behaviors of people who do not follow those teachings. Is this a useful distinction? POSIWID and all? I think in some things it might not be useful, but here it is useful because it's the governments that are doing this, and they don't need charities to help.
This is a very fantastic interpretation of both canon law and of that statistic. Just to be clear, not even pro-abortion politicians are excommunicated.
I also looked more to that article, and it's sources and I'm starting to have doubts.
Almost a full third of all donations come from a single person, Wayne Paglieri, about whom they have this to say:
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Religiosity is higher in US than Europe, so absent other considerations, if most US employees are essentially atheist or Non-Judgemental Therapeutic Deity then in Europe it will be more so.
Not quite sure that checks out - religion is more controversial in US than in Europe precisely because religiosity is higher, and South Europe is more Catholic.
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There are verses that call for cooperation with and forgiveness of state authorities, though they may be oppressive.
But, in the time of Jesus or at least the writing of the Gospels, it's just as if not more likely that it meant Jews, actual neighbors who persecuted Christians who tried to stay in the same communities. Paul admits he tried to destroy the Church and he likely wasn't the only one. It's dubious if the Romans recognized it as anything other than a cult led by a rabble rouser.
I don't think you're wrong about the Jews as primary antagonists, at least up to the destruction of the Second Temple. Still, by 70 AD, Peter and Paul had been martyred by Rome. We also see a certain prototype in the Passion account. Jesus asks forgiveness for the Roman soldiers, and now in the nearly 2000 years of martyrs since, where we have their last words, we at least very often read of them forgiving and asking forgiveness for their murderers.
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Jews in the Bar Kochba Rebellion killed many Christians that refused to join them in the revolt against the Romans.
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The first historical pagan reference to Christianity is from ~112 CE by Pliny the Younger, governor of northern Turkey, asking the Emperor his advice on dealing with recalcitrant Christians. Suetonius also mentions Jewish riots in Rome during the reign of Claudius instigated by a man named "Chrestus" (possibly Christ), which resulted in their expulsion. Tacitus famously describes how Nero fed Christians to the lions after burning Rome.
The Roman problem with Christians was that they refused to participate in local and state cultic sacrifices, which was the kind of thing that brought disasters and plagues and general suffering from the gods. Unlike Judaism, Christianity was also obviously a new religion, so it didn't get any respect for being ancient. Also, the Romans thought they were getting up to weird stuff in their private sessions, like having giant orgies and eating babies.
Rome didn't really have a formal criminal system. The governor was basically allowed to do whatever he wanted in the name of keeping the peace. So Christianity was rarely "illegal", but they caused general disturbances and that led to persecution.
Technically true because Josephus doesn't call it Christianity, but Josephus writes about Jesus in around 93AD, saying that he was hailed as the Messiah and that he was executed by Pilate. This implies the existence of a group of people doing the hailing - i.e. Christians.
Josephus wasn't a pagan. The flavian testimony is useful for confirming that Jesus was a real person and Pilate killed him. It doesn't tell us much about how Roman authorities viewed Christians though, which mostly appears to be as a minor annoyance.
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The testimonium flavianum is a forgery: because a jew wouldn't have written that, because the paragraphs before and after flow better together without it in the middle, because Origen didn't know about it when, if it did exist at the time, he would have and because all surviving copies of the antiquities with it go through Eusebius who is coincidentally also the first one to use it.
I know there are recent attempts to rescue it but they are bullshit.
It's generally considered to be partially accurate with Christian interpolations ("He was the Christ", etc). Origen mentions, at least, the passage about James the brother of Jesus. Josephus's original passage on Jesus, with the theology stripped out, would not have been useful for apologetics, so it's unsurprising that no one mentioned it for a while.
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Notice in this story that he didn't already know what to do and, iirc, was basically told by Trajan to not go looking for problems just handle them when they came up.
But you're right. I was thinking that the systematic persecutions came much later under Diocletian which long postdates the Gospel's likely dates (and that at the time of their writing the Romans were just hostile towards Jews in general and had no reason to pick apart their endless ideological debates*), which is true. But forgot about Nero's opportunistic behavior. That shows they were at least known and/or distrusted by pagans as well.
* Which explains some of their conciliatory gestures.
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The most famous example Jesus used was a Samaritan, who were the Jews' outgroup.
Yeah some people here have a deranged understanding of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The 'neighbor' is a member of the hated outgroup, and not respected members of the ingroup.
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Bloody hell. I work in a service that deals with children with additional needs, and I can tell you about at least one family that had a Down's Syndrome child, then the second pregnancy was normal. Today I read the obituary of a woman in my county who had fourteen children and a normal life (not on welfare, not lower class, lower middle to middle class lifestyle).
So people, unless they're your special bubble of "oh no, unless we can afford at least 200k per year to raise little Timkins until he hits the age of ten and then we need even more money, we cannot possibly have a child" can and do manage to have children. "My child is disabled" is not a reason for not having kids.
Stop trying to justify "I think these pregnancies should be aborted for eugenic reasons" with "having these kids stops people having normal babies", because it doesn't.
Very nice set of anecdotes.
The eugenic solution would be to not have any other child after the first downer. Downers rarely reproduce so there is little risk there but there could be a genetic component (although it seems that it is rare) and that would be a reason to avoid healthy carriers.
Gosh, "downer", such an edgelord!
Mind you, I'm the fool for responding to the "haw haw I'm fourteen and think I'm so smart pranking the adults" bait, so congratulations you.
If we're edgelording, I prefer "Mong". It's the term that was used in British school playgrounds when I was in school, though as with all such terms more for people who acted like they had Downs than for people who actually did.
Yes, if we must descend to name-calling, let us at least use the time-honoured insults! No need to reinvent the wheel with "downer" (can't you just hear the chortling about the ever-so-witty pun involved, because they're a downer in the slang sense too, don't you get it?)
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Downs is a trisomy, not a mutation, so there are no healthy carriers in the sense that there are for e.g. haemophilia or cystic fibrosis.
(There are genes which somewhat increase the odds of a Downs baby, but the effect is small compared to maternal age).
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Down's syndrome is a chromosomal abnormality that is nearly always [i]de novo[/i]. Male Down's syndrome sufferers are nearly always sterile; females are not always sterile and if they have a child they are very likely to have a Downs child. So strictly genetically, having a Down's syndrome boy is isogenic, having a Down's syndrome girl is dysgenic, and having another non-Downs child is no different than if the first Downs syndrome child didn't happen. But going a little wider, you're likely to have fewer children after a Down's child because of the massive amount of resources the Down's child takes up, so if you've got good genes, having the Down's child is dysgenic for that reason.
FYI you put text in italics by putting an * on
eithereach side.each
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There's the wrinkle that choosing to have a severely disabled child also imposes a burden on their siblings, particularly after you're dead. Some parents explicitly think of this as their lifelong care plan; others just implicitly let this happen. Impressively, somehow making "I'll let society deal with it" seem relatively responsible.
We're all getting better and better every day, society is more humane, AI will make us all rich post-scarcity, we can colonise the galaxy and be little gods of our own worlds - and yet somehow putting any of that wealth into services for more humane living for all people is impossible.
You see why I'm so sceptical of all the dreams and wishes around transhumanism and the rest of it? We're gonna live forever - but we can't manage to cobble together some system of support for the most vulnerable among us, no that would be too much of an imposition on society.
There are enormous systems of support that are essentially unprecedented in human history. Spazzing wildly any time someone is somewhat skeptical of a particular system providing utility commensurate with it's costs is why a lot of countries are in a fiscal mess on health and disability spending.
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I am reminded of this man born to a family with dwarfism. Both his biological parents and siblings have it, but he was a normal, healthy child and grew to be 6ft tall, and according to a DNA test he took, his future kids will probably be normal as well. But growing up as the youngest child in a family environment like that wouldn't have been easy. You'll have to accept early on you'll have a shorter childhood and grow up quickly, because parenting a child with special care needs is extremely stressful, requires heaps of attention, and more often than not results in the breakdown of relationships.
Bro is living out Tiptoes IRL.
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Yeah but on the other hand having a young child is already super stressful and resource-intensive, much less having a developmentally-disabled one who requires far greater investment of resources and effort. You'd have to be crazy to expect that there isn't atleast one couple that's being nudged from Yes to No on having a second child if they've gotta deal with a first disabled child. You're also more likely to have to opt into a cesarean or early birth with some conditions for the child and that increases the trauma of delivery/chances of complications that render carrying further children unsafe.
I do agree with one level (especially with larger families frequently hitting a point of economies of scale as sheer numbers means the labor associated actually diffuses especially with siblings reaching sufficient age to help out) that people are capable of having large families
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It’s not eugenic reasons. If a woman aborts a fetus with down syndrome because she calculates that it will ruin her life, this may be a eugenic act but it certainly isn’t done for “eugenic reasons”, any more so than a violent thug killing someone with some condition is doing it for “eugenic reasons” instead of unrelated ones.
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I note that as much as this interpretation might have been the result (unclear), this is pretty verifiably not the intention on display in the New Testament, much to the embarrassment of many a heatmap-pushing X user treating it as at least an open question.
I'm not talking about intent I'm talking about what was practically possible. The intent, who knows for sure, but probably you are right.
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In addition the state funding starts instantaneously. There's huge subsidies for disabled children and their medical even though they also financially wreck the parents.
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I would argue the opposite. Samaritans were reviled by ancient Jews. The Parable of the Good Samaritan was a subversive understanding of who is good and who is bad. A Jewish priest and a Levite are upstanding respected members of their community. Then in the parable a hated Samaritan is named as the neighbor. The guy talking to Jesus won't even say the term 'Samaritan'; he instead in a roundabout way admits Jesus's point by saying he who showed mercy.
I am very much not ideologically aligned with the Catholic Church, but they may well be following a common understanding of Jesus's message. Consequences be damned as you correctly point out.
It's not just a common understanding if Jesus' message, it's an obviously correct one.
The historical Jesus was, whether he was God the Son or not, an apocalyptic preacher who at the least didn't correct his followers' belief that the Second Coming and Last Judgement would happen during their lifetimes. Jesus' teaching on politically-sensitive topics is a combination of heroic personal virtue on one hand and political quietism/obedience to secular authority on the other - he is teaching in a context where the Roman Empire is what it is and rebelling against it is obviously stupid (which did not prevent the Jews rebelling, or suffering the consequences). And with that background, "regardless of what ICE is or is not doing, you, personally, should show love for the illegal immigrants as a display of self-sacrificing personal piety" makes perfect sense.
The Gospel simply isn't trying to be a source of secular wisdom for princes (or democratic citizens) - hence the consistent attempts by Christian political theorists to find Christian political wisdom in the Old Testament and needing a way round the fact that Solomon definitely was not Christian and was subject to ritual laws that we are not because they have been fulfilled in Christ. But most Christian political movements get their secular politics from secular sources.
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I remain frustrated that so much of the abortion debate ignores adoption as a possibility. It's so ignored that OP might think it's an unrelated point, but without addressing adoption, statements like...
are a red herring to me, at least for the USA.
(In all 50 states (and possibly in most non-USAmerican countries as well -IDK), there are Safe Haven laws allowing no-penalty surrender of newborns.)
I want to say this with no offense to OP, because what I'm complaining about is so common.
Adoption would be a realistic solution if there wasn't an oversupply and under demand for adoptable foster kids as is. And considering these severely disabled children that require constant dedication for the rest of their lifetime would be far less wanted than even the typical foster child.
I know I'm being analytical about an emotional situation in saying this, but, for the parents, which was the focus of the original sentence, adoption is a complete solution.
If we're going to move the discussion to a solution for society in general, I'd say that even if the high demand for infants pointed out down thread doesn't apply to Down Syndrome infants, charity or something charity-adjacent (like foster care) has always been the best solution we have.
AFAIK Down Syndrome pregnancies have higher risks of complications that can impact the mother than typical pregnancies so it's not like it's purely a matter of 'assuming the infant is instantaneously adopted then it has no welfare impacts on the birthing mother'. There's still substantive risks and costs.
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Foster care parents are reimbursed by the government for the costs of childcare, with a much higher rate for a child with Down syndrome. So it’s not charity from the perspective of taxpayer James, age 30, who is forced to further pony up on the margin if a couple decides to try to have their Downie baby adopted instead having aborted him or her earlier.
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There is excess demand for adoptable infants (though I doubt there is for downy ones).
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There's an oversupply of adoptable foster kids, but an undersupply of adoptable babies. Most people who want to adopt want a baby.
Yeah, lots of people want an infant, very few want a Down's syndrome infant.
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What I've heard from couples trying to adopt kids 5 - 12 is that the state's priority is to reunite them with relatives, and even if they've been with a new family for a year, if they find someone in another state who's related and take them in, or their older sibling reaches the age of majority, the state will move them and place them there instead.
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Depends what your threshold for 'adoptable' is. The internet tells me there are 36 couples for every child available for adoption so evidently the market must be clearing at a pretty low 'price'. I assume downs kids would be in less demand, but with 36 couples per child, beggars can't be choosers.
36 couples who have qualified and passed the associated screening? Like it wouldn't shock me if there was a CRM with 36 expressions of interest for a healthy infant adoption but my understanding of adoption is that it's a long and messy process
I find the rules about adoption of both children and pets insane. Anyone is free to fuck themselves a child or buy a puppy with no screening at all, but adoption? No, that's different, you'll have to jump through more hoops than a circus poodle just to get a chance to adopt. The only barrier to clear should be "is your house than a state orphanage/a cage in a shelter?", which isn't exactly high.
How big are the barriers to pet adoption? I know I had one of a couple childhood dogs that was adopted and it didn't seem like my parents had to comply with any notably more arduous process?
Where I live, the Humane Society requires a screening questionnaire and $200 for adult dog (extra $50 for a puppy). Other pet adoptions are similar. I know a bunch of people who got their dogs with reduced or waived fee because someone was doing a charity promotion to subsidize adoption.
Most of the animals in the rescue system are fostered out. Only the most un-fosterable get kept in the shelter. When we went to pick a dog, they offered us binders full of dogs to peruse. We asked to see the dogs they have on premises, and got a tour of the solitary-confinement cages with giant snarling beasts throwing themselves at the plexiglass.
The Humane Society used to put down un-adoptable animals. They stopped doing that around the turn of this century. Some people who had to get rid of their dog would release it rather that give it to a rescue shelter, figuring that at least this way the dog had a chance at life. The Humane Society's goal is to reduce strays, especially the dangerous kind. Housing some unruly monsters is worth the price of having a reputation of never killing the animal except in medical need.
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The process may well be long and messy, but a ratio of 36 couples to one child is not a shortage of parents or an oversupply of kids.
Even overseas adoption has dropped to almost nothing.
Overseas adoption dropped because the countries the infants were coming from made it much more difficult.
What are the advantages of that for a small, poor country? Like I get why a China or a South Korea stopped offering so many as they got relatively rich and birthrates dropped but what's the issue for a poor African nation in releasing adoptees? Probably score some tourism and remittances in the fullness of time and it's less a mouth to feed in the short term?
Many African countries have also improved economically.
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People also underplaying just how expensive this is for the state since a lot of the costs are covered by subsidies. From what I can see out of pocket for a Down Syndrome child's care is generally 100k+ a year and that's tip of a far larger iceberg of tax money being deleted.
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This question hits differently having just returned from a date with a woman who would be well into her mid-30s at motherhood on any reasonable projected timescale. I’m pretty sure it’s not even legal to abort downies in Texas. I can’t imagine traveling hundreds of miles for the sole purpose of killing my own child. The thought has me physically sick. I also wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life babysitting my infertile dead-end offspring.
I honestly have to laugh out loud at all the posts on here about "but the potential mother would be at least thirty-two years old!" because the bigger risk is "the potential mother has spent twenty years on artificial contraception trying to avoid pregnancy, you really think that has no effect on the body when you decide 'okay ready for baby now'?" and gosh, how did all the women in our grandmothers' time manage to have large families up to their forties, what magic was in the air or the water that enabled women who did hard physical work all their lives to have living kids and yet educated, healthy, women in their early thirties are some kind of unique case where the risk of infertility or developmental issues would be paramount?
Yes, the risk goes up with maternal age, but it's not the sole cause. As I said, I know of one family that had a Down's child and the second pregnancy was normal. If the risk is "all pregnancies will be abnormal", that is not so. Indeed, being younger is not a guarantee of not having problems:
So it's the inconvenience rather than the killing that upsets your stomach? If you could do it by a discreet journey across town, it would be okey-dokey?
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In that case, it would be a mercy kill, no? Fate (or genetics) has already decided their odds of having a normal life. So many core human experiences might become unavailable to them because of their condition. I'd definitely travel hundreds of miles to end it before they develop awareness. The earlier, the better. Yes, I would hate myself for it but I can't make them live a half-life.
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I think its just trying to pick the least bad choice. I hate that choices like that exist and I understand I'd be a horrible person unless I enslaved myself to raise a child with Downs. Downs on a screening or similar is probably one of the few things I'd ok early abortion for.
"Enslaved"? Wow.
And here you all are wondering about why oh why are fertility rates cratering? Hint: maybe having been conditioned to think having kids (even ordinary, non-disabled kids) is slavery might be part of it?
Nobody said that. But yes, you’re bound morally and legally to raise your child. With an ordinary child you are rewarded by watching it become a full adult with all the faculties and majesty of Man (plus hopefully certain more pragmatic things like elderly care).
Looking at it from the outside, the labour of raising a developmentally disabled child is far higher and the rewards far lower. It’s no wonder people balk.
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In America at least, standards for what constitutes abuse or neglect are indeed quite high, such that it could feel like enslavement if the relationship doesn't eventually become reciprocal.
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It is at least indentured servitude, at least nowadays. But with a profoundly disabled child the indenture is for life.
Sounds like slavery to me.
Yes.
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For those who are abundantly pro-life I'm curious how they feel about screening semen or eggs for potential down syndrome or other major issues. Sure it's prior to fertilization but it's still life on some level
For Catholics, at least, I don't think the issue would be with killing the sperm or unfertilized egg (not people or even potential people). But Catholicism would not be down with the impulse to treat another person as a consumer good whose worthiness for existence depends on someone else's private standards or tastes.
Not permissible
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How are they not potential people? What about with IVF where multiple viable eggs are fertilized and some are potentially discarded since there's no reasonable pathway to incubating them all
I think pro-life people are typically opposed to IVF exactly because of the reason you point out.
Are they against frequent miscarriagers getting pregnant? Not that I really expect a hard-and-fast answer and pulling numbers out of my ass but if if Couple A really wants a child and they've got alternatives of IVF (10 eggs fertilized, 1 healthy child delivered) and 10 years of trying with a very high miscarriage rate (20 eggs fertilized, none making it to term) which is more moral?
They say that the miscarriages are God's responsibility, whereas the IVF fetuses are the parents' and doctors' responsibility, which is different. It isn't necessarily wrong for God to allow smallpox, but if you go and re-release it, you will be doing wrong.
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This isn't directly related, but - I'm always vaguely amused by this sort of language.
Of course, the Internet has done more to "have people with intellectual disability publicly visible" than this variety of activist ever will - and people's reactions haven't been positive, to say the least. Nor are the activists uncounted, or even uncommon, among that howling crowd.
And of course, they'll say "mental illness doesn't do that!" But they'd still very much like a ... let's say, "more permanent solution."
One can't imagine them ever being happy getting what they're asking for.
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The minority who sees abortion as murder would disagree, I think, as they are also very anti-MAID as a general rule.
Personally, I see a fetus as replaceable and thus am happy to leave the choice with the pregnant woman. Typically, a couple which became pregnant by choice and aborted for medical reasons will simply try again. So another way to phrase this would be to say that the people in Iceland are replacing Down syndrome babies with healthy babies. This is the closest we will get to a cure of trisomia 21 this side of the singularity.
I think this was a point of contention over at ACX at some time, where (IIRC) Scott was basically saying that schizophrenia can be 'cured' through genetic testing. I tend to agree. Sure, if my parents had access to genetic testing, they might have decided to pick a fetus which less prone to depression than I am -- and I am fine with that, because back then I did not have interests of my own.
Also, the people getting upset about medical abortions could probably easily prevent them by pledging to adopt and raise Down children.
I feel like this is all a sliding scale, though. Downs is the perfect point for debate since it's common enough, visible enough and you can easily say that people with it are capable of living happy lives (albeit at massive cost to the state and those around them). If it's some severe abnormality where the organs are on the outside of the body and the chances of making it 24 hours outside of the window is 0% and the risks of the mother carrying the baby to term are immense that's a completely different conversation. I've got 2 kids and I'd abort a potential future severely disabled fetus despite generally being pro-life (or seeing it as a very weighty decision that shouldn't be made frivolously)
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Probably not, since from the point of view of a woman who wants children, but not this child, the recovery is much shorter for abortion than giving birth full term, and it's more common amongst older mothers, who have less time to lose.
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I imagine that pre ~1960s, if you had a kid with Down Syndrome you weren’t expected to go out of your way to treat him “well”. They wouldn’t have to be dragged to school and their misbehavior was punished with corporal punishment (as it was for normal kids, too). If he fell in a river and drowned or something, it wasn’t a big deal. But modern parents feel compelled to do special things for them, and feel it’s wrong to supply a painful punishment for annoying behaviors even if this may be the only way they can learn. So the burden has increased considerably. If your Down syndrome child gets into an accident because he was left unattended, the parents are blamed, but 100 years ago no one would have cared.
When I was in primary school, there was a boy in my class with Down's syndrome, and he had a dedicated special needs assistant. Even at the time I didn't quite understand why he was there. No one had any real expectation of him being able to learn the material, and if the goal was for him to get socialised or feel included, I'm sceptical of whether it's even possible for a person with Down's syndrome to have any kind of meaningful friendship with a person without.
I knew two kids with Down's syndrome going up. One was as you described, the other was basically a normal kid who looked and talked funny. There's a wide range of ability and some are plenty within the range of normal.
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I believe about half of Down Syndrome children are born with severe heart defects and tend to generally be more fragile. When childhood mortality was already very high as a baseline I can't imagine that many got through (plus also younger parents likely meant the incidence rate lower than today)
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For whatever reason, my gut feeling of my friends is that the ones who are most vocal about being pro-abortion are also the most vocal about being anti-screening. It seems like "abortions are no problem, unless you're doing so because the future child would have a disability". I guess it's reconcilable as being against dehumanizing people with disabilities?
That's interesting, and exactly opposite my intuitions. I think that abortion in general is wrong, but that abortion for a life long disability is much more relatable and grey than abortion because the mother doesn't want to give birth to it (assuming the pregnancy and mother are generally healthy and normal).
Most sane people think this. The thread is overindexing on social media disability activists, most of whom are mentally ill themselves.
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Where does that gut feeling come from? As far as hypocrisies go, this isn't one I have ever seen in actual people. My friend group is uniformly pro-abortion, and every couple who has had kids screened them beforehand and likely would have aborted if anything came up. Not doing that would have raised eyebrows and been seen as irresponsible.
I suspect they're a pair of stances that only coexist in kids who are overexposed to lunatics on social media.
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Or more generally, reconcilable with believing that the Lives of those who belong to lifetime economically negative value-add groups Matter More.
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Yeah there were a bunch of people on twitter pushing the 'Abortion for any reason is fine, unless it's disability at which point you are committing a hecking eugenics' which creates this funny moral situation where you can supposedly abort out of mere potential inconvenience but also the like maximally inconvenient child cannot be aborted.
A similar phenomenon occurs when people who are very pro-abortion for women’s Fun and Freedom reasons get big mad at those who are pro-abortion for reasons relating to the ethnic and socioeconomic composition of abortion-getters.
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I can understand where theyre coming from, but it almost makes it into some kind of insane game show: "Okay, you're here for the screening? I'll just need you to sign here to acknowledge that at any point prior to seeing the results, you can abort no problems/no judgement, but once you see the results, if they have any negstive attributes, any abortion becomes morally unjustifiable - although if the screening says they'll be perfect. You can still abort at will. So keep the folder sealed until you're 100% sure you either want the child or are willing to be branded a Nazi to get rid of it!"
For an IVF situation, one could set-up a Monty Hall-type problem. A couple has ten files in front of them (or n files for however many they fertilized), each corresponding to screening results of the embryo they’ll have to implant.
The couple picks a file, say #1. Their doctor opens up a different file, it’s a Downie. Does the couple decide to stay with #1 or choose a different file?
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What frustrates me is not that women abort foetuses who will inevitably develop Down's syndrome. That's a defensible decision.
What frustrates me is that women will do this, then turn around and say that eugenics is Nazi ideology.
The frustration is not with the individual sentiment, but the communal one. Eugenics was not a left or right position, among the most committed eugenicists were as everyone knows moderate Swedish social democrats. What is taboo is the idea that one can improve human stock societally.
I'd argue the reason why this is a taboo is that it necessarily entails external limitations on female sexual choice.
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It's just progressives. They have to violently flinch from the E-word because if they don't then the technocratic element of their ideology inevitably flows into "LMAO we are so obviously the baddies" territory. Many progressives were very pro-eugenics pre-WW2, to the point where some of their organization leaders openly bragged in the 30's about how wonderful it was that a European nation had a strong leader who was taking their obviously correct ideas seriously.
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I think most people are not intelligent enough to and/or do not have the will to see how coherently their various opinions fit together into a larger picture, including second-order effects. The average person who supports people being able to abort Down's syndrome fetuses yet views eugenics as fundamentally wrong is a person who simply does not make the connection that those two things are related in any important way. It's not that they realize the two things are related but have a logical reason to support the abortion but not other kinds of eugenics. It's that they don't realize the two things are related to begin with.
Why do they not realize it? Because they are not in an information environment where they are regularly exposed to the idea that the two things are related. And, lacking the spark to figure it out on their own, they continue to not realize it.
There's an easy way to resolve this if one takes the term eugenics to carry an implicit meaning of an external authority or pressure on the parents.
Which given the definition of eugenics you can often find has something like this in it.
It does seem like a valid interpretation that it's an external force doing it for their Greater Cause as opposed to the parents own decision regarding what QOL they are willing to accept in raising a child.
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Eugenics is broadly popular unless:
Think about attitudes to choice of donor gametes in the IVF industry.
Personally, I get the impression that the culture war in the Anglosphere is becoming hot enough that quite a lot of people would support forced sterilisation of the (Red)/(Blue) Tribe (delete as necessary). I likewise think certain categories of criminal are so stigmatised (e.g. child rapists) that forcibly sterilising them would enjoy broad bi-partisan support.
In the UK, the number of people who want the culture war to go hot is indistinguishable from zero. In America day-of-the-rope poasters exist, and Musk amplifies their social media posts so they look more visible than they are, but my impression is that the actual numbers are Lizardmen-tier - and I am not even sure if they actually mean it rather than shitposting.
They might not want it, but they seem to find it likely, which might be the better description of the Boogaloos in America as well.
If nobody wants it, it won't happen.
I'm not sure why randos are telling opinion pollsters that they expect a civil war in the next 10 years, but "they have carefully thought about the issue and made a considered judgement call, such that the wisdom of crowds applies" is not a credible answer.
The people who aren't posting but rather engaging in violence want it.
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War and violent conflict in general has this nasty property that not only it can happen with only very few wanting it, it can even happen when nobody wants it, but enough feel sufficiently threatened.
Also, a quick check of history shows that indeed a suspiciously large number of first strikers likes to claim that no, they totally didn't want to do this, the other side just forced their hand. Maybe they're right, maybe they're lying, maybe they're wrong on the "forced" part but were right that the other side really was looking to do the same or some other possibility.
Either way, the situation can deteriorate in some bad ways that don't translate neatly to "people just wanted it to happen". That said, I think that as long as most people get to live a broadly comfortable & safe life, nothing much will happen.
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Eugenics as a whole necessarily entails external limits put upon female sexual choice by a state authority which is a notion that is extremely off-putting to modern women. I'm assuming this is the most likely explanation.
State authorities already place external limits on female sexual choice (e.g. a female high school teacher raping one of her male students is just as illegal as the opposite pairing).
Ah, but the only reason they do that is to protect female class interests when the law has to be symmetric for some reason (women want it to be illegal to fuck young women more than they want the right to fuck young men [which affects a rounding error number of women, and the women who do engage in this are the pick-me-est of pick-mes so they're also hated by women in general]).
Eugenics is different, since the median woman assumes it'll affect who the median woman has babies with.
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You sure about that? I know the law sets equal boundaries, but I have my doubts about the legal system doing the same.
Teachers caught doing this are prosecuted. South Park nice jokes aside, this is taken seriously by courts and law enforcement.
Do they get equivalent punishment?
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Do the police pursue it with equal zeal? Do the prosecutors put as much effort into getting the same punishments? Do judges and juries treat them equally? I'll grant that there are external limits on their choice, but that's a far cry from being just as illegal (unless you treat illegality as a binary, in which case it's just as illegal as walking with ice cream in your back pocket or whatever zany oldtimes law you can find).
Consider Nick Olivas: At 14, he unknowingly fathered a child with a 20-year-old woman. Later, he was pursued for child support and the mother was never charged with any crime. Hermesmann of Hermesmann v. Seyer "contributed to a child's misconduct" when a 13-year-old got her pregnant. There are a few more in this pdf, but I think the pattern is established well enough: Women who commit statutory rape against boys are not consistently prosecuted, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence.
Let's imagine the opposite situation, accounting for biological reality. A girl in her early teens becomes pregnant, gives birth, and gives up the child. Later, the (significantly older) father claims paternity, which is confirmed. The state shrugs its shoulders, gives him the child, and goes on with its day.
That's even less of a legal burden than the real cases have, and yet it feels pants shittingly insane. It would never happen in a million years. If you could find something one tenth as crazy, I'd consider it a significant blow against my stance. Can you?
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This is needlessly limiting criterion, almost example noncentral fallacy. Eugenics is not only a government policy, it is also an ideology and a social movement. Eugenicists are interested in outcome of improving DNA of the population, the means to do that can vary. There were rabidly antistatist eugenicist of old, such as radical libertarian Herbert Spencer. They had more in common with modern technocratic approach of "nudges" - moral stigma, social engineering, subtle subsidies or penalties or outright propaganda in lieu of brute coercion.
My personal theory is, that the whole identification of eugenics with fascists and statists was just a standard Progressive PR campaign to clear the stain and declare post-hoc victory of always being on the right side of the history. But underlying impulse and logic is still there. They are defacto eugenicists, they just don't want to be identified with Nazis.
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I don't think that's true. There are plenty of non-coercive policy options for promoting eugenic pairings. For example, education programs, or cash payouts for children born to couples meeting certain criteria. Back when eugenics was a popular progressive cause, a lot of eugenics societies focused their efforts in this direction, and just trying to establish societal norms that were conducive to eugenic outcomes.
That doesn't matter, though, because nearly all of them ultimately lead back to the "male oppressors incentivizing -> suggesting -> forcing me to
do my jobdo the thing that requires I be dependent on a man" thing.The only policy that will work is to valorize and protect those who do their job, but you can only have that in societies that are allowed to accept their own right to rule. (Which is why women reflexively oppose any social movement that suggests this; after all, according to the stereotype, all social turmoil ever comes from the cardinal sin of ever permitting a man to think he can do something right.)
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Yes, one must acknowledge the Downs sufferer as, in most cases, very happy. Often happier than people with the correct number of chromosomes. The death cannot be justified on any QALY-adjacent basis for the dying party, even if it possibly can on the surviving one (but not necessarily).
The death should be understood as a social consequence of the fact that It is considered unacceptable to abandon your child to the state unless you are dead, dying, or totally incapable of looking after it. Severe illness or the fact that looking after them would make a comfortable, low stress life very difficult or impossible is not considered an acceptable reason. Families that don’t care about abortion would be scandalized by a mother deciding she just doesn’t want to deal with the stress and giving a baby up.
And I think that’s the counterargument to @HereAndGone’s point. Mothers’ domestic labor, time spent on child-related work and interaction has gone up even after the automation of a lot of time consuming domestic work. Mothers are expected to provide a holistic level of total life management, love, care, education, training and self-actualization to their kids that their grandmothers and great grandmothers never were. You are a bad mother if you mother the way mothers did for thousands of years.
In this new world of ever higher expectations, of total commitment, raising any child means something very different to what it was sixty years ago. It isn’t chill. It takes all of your time. You’re not occasionally checking in on the kids playing by themselves while gossiping with your friends in the afternoon. You’re alone, or maybe working, and then you’re micromanaging their lives. Adding a severely disabled child for whom you will have to do this for the rest of your life rather than for 18 years makes for an even worse proposition.
I see some truth here, but literally all US states have some degree of Baby Moses law for newborns: we literally have adopted "no questions asked 90 day returns" in some jurisdictions, although I can't speak to how often those are actually used in practice (quick searches suggests low hundreds of cases annually).
She said social consequences, not legal.
Agreed - it would be less scandalising for a middle-class woman in most places to have an illegal abortion than to use a Baby Moses law.
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Down Syndrome's kind of a funny spot in terms of aborting disability since they generally land in a spot of sufficient mental and physical development to be 'happy', though I feel like people are also not comprehending how much public investment goes into keeping a down syndrome person alive. IIRC they generally need several open-heart natal surgeries plus lifetime care.
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Maybe aborting your downs-y fetus is something you should do in private. This is intentionally trying to court controversy.
They already made a video announcing the pregnancy, so they couldn't just pretend that nothing happened.
Yeah, you just don't mention it again and everyone assumes it was a miscarriage and you don't want to discuss it. But yes, Influencers are obnoxious, I know.
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Just heavily imply it was a spontaneous miscarriage. Nobody is going to pry much deeper
Since they were already oversharers in the first place, I see it as a good thing, to the extent them being transparent about yeeting their Downed fetus nudges such an action further within the Overton window and encourages others to do the same.
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It is preferrable not to lie
Society prefers polite fictions about abortion, miscarriages and SIDS over the alternative
That's an accurate description. Doesn't mean it's the right choice.
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What is the scoop on SIDS? I heard some echoes from conspiritard circles that it's a euphemism for women killing their babies (by accident or not), but I don't have a high degree of faith in the source here, and I'm not an expert on baby health.
Conspiracy? I’ve always been under the impression it was an open secret, that SIDS was mostly a face-saving coverall.
A) To let presumably grieving parents (especially mothers) save face and/or avoid blaming themselves for the infant’s death. Plus, not many people want to be a big meanie and ask too many difficult questions to a parent (especially a mother) who just lost a baby, even if it might be more like “lost” in many cases.
B) To let the poor and BIPOC save face. Like @wqnm and @burkeboi mentioned, SIDS occurs most frequently among the demographics you most expect, and without SIDS as an alibi we’d be outing such parents (especially [single] mothers) as careless, impulsive, neglectful, and/or malicious, and we can’t have that.
SIDS is a tragedy that can strike any mother of an infant at any time. If It Just So Happens that SIDS occurs more frequently among mothers from underserved and minority communities, that only means we need to provide such communities with more support and resources (i.e., taxpayer gibs).
Not according to the demographic most likely to take it seriously (which conversely Just So Happens to be the demographic that suffers from SIDS the least frequently), who are likely to try and spend resources preventing it.
Beyond very obvious depraved-heart stuff like "gave birth in a bathroom and left the baby in the toilet" I think it's good such questions not be asked. If they were, we'd only be prosecuting it if the mother was white, as a natural extension of who over-zealous CPS reporting is most likely to affect now.
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According to baby care classes I took: they think it is largely accidental suffocation. Like falling asleep holding your baby and then shifting your weight so the baby's face ends up pressed against you. They lack the strength to reposition themselves.
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I'm friends with an EMT, this is correct. It's most commonly things like tired new parents co-sleeping with newborns and accidentally smothering them, etc. Newborn babies are super fragile, and it's not always prosecution-level negligence that kills them. As burkeboi mentions below, it's especially common amongst certain demographics you would expect.
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I was reading the book Expecting Better from Oster since I'm having a kid soon, and she gave a stat where something like 80% or so of SIDS deaths come from smoking households in the UK. Those households are like 10-15% of the total households. That's not to say smoking is the big killer, although it is pretty bad for fetuses and new babies, but a family that is likely to smoke around their kid is likely to ignore other best practices as well.
From that, and other things I've read, it seems that SIDS is highly correlated with parents who do tons of things wrong, rather than just one thing or another. The "conspiracy" take is that a lot of public health messaging, to make the underclass and/or specific minorities look less bad, overemphasizes that 'this could happen to anyone' rather than pointing to most SIDS happening from parents being really negligent on many axes rather than Sally the Secretary having a drink every now and then.
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I think that as a practical matter, they could. If a few months later the woman was not visibly pregnant, very few people would ask what happened. And if someone did ask, the response "it didn't work out" would generally be accepted.
Yeah. Miscarriages happen and there's a layer of social propriety around this matter where people aren't going to pry.
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Agreed on this, and that aborting the fetus is the right thing to do. But expecting such restraint from an influencer is about as reasonable as expecting couth from Trump; the obnoxiousness is just the nature of the beast.
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Maybe the early stages of pregnancy should be something you do in private. I always thought that you weren't supposed to tell anyone until 3 months in at a minimum; plenty of things, even besides Downs, can go wrong early on.
Yeah. 14 weeks has been received wisdom in my experience, since I believe about 95% of miscarriages occur by that point and it's usually about the point of the first ultrasound.
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Yeah. But, well, Influencers.
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It's sad that the uproar created has raised doubts in my mind that anything about this story is real.
Influencers are largely seizing on the same stories that used to be on network TV (Paul brothers and clavicular reinventing pro wrestling from first principles, romantic and gay drama, etc). Abortion as the big controversial topical episode plot has been a soap opera staple since, what, dirty dancing or law and order?
I think it's been a soap opera staple all the way back to Roe in the US and the 1967 Abortion Act in the UK. But the first time the abortion actually happened in a British soap was surprisingly late - before Emmerdale in 2020 all abortion plotlines ended with the mother keeping the baby, or the issue being defused by a miscarriage.
I'm using Soap Opera inexactitly, there were abortion plotlines on network dramas like Tales of the City much earlier than Roe.
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I feel like for lightweight entertainment it's pretty hard to approach the topic through anything other than 'gee it's nice to have the right but babies are cute'. You're gonna struggle to have somebody having a totally frivolous abortion without being accused of conservative signalling. Rape/incest hard to broach without turning off the light audience
Typically in old melodrama, which is light on intellectual depth if not on topic, the uniting factor was the evil back alley abortionist. This was the skeleton key to the story, the poor innocent girl who got into trouble was understandable, but look at the results! Dirty Dancing is a good reference point here. The net result can be either pro or anti abortion: either we need to legalize it to make it safe, or we need to keep girls chaste so they don't end up here.
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It's interesting to see how this attitude differs between Europe and the US. Most of Europe generally has more restrictive abortion laws than the US, even after Roe v Wade was overturned. The Netherlands has a two-trimester limit on elective abortions, and this is the most liberal in the EU (tied with the UK, but it is not in the EU anymore). Some places, like Poland and Malta, ban elective abortions entirely, on religious grounds.
But medical abortions, including if the child has Down's Syndrome, are always allowed. If your child has Down's Syndrome, that's a valid reason for abortion, and pretty much nobody would say otherwise, including conservatives.
Abortion of sufficiently disabled fetuses (up to and including completely nonviable ones such as anencephaly) are where the views of pro-life Christian conservatives diverge from normie social conservatism in a way which has driven some of the nastiest post-Dobbs rows. Christian conservatives support a reasonably broad physical health of the mother exception and want it to work for the small number of women who need it - the reason why it doesn't in some red states is incompetence rather than malice. But Christian conservatives, for reasons which are good and sufficient if you accept their view of Christian morality, want no exceptions whatsoever for fetal illness, and the post-Dobbs abortion bans don't include them.
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Personal subject for me, my next oldest brother has Downs. He's a great guy, extremely high functioning, but he is limited in his life options, and he knows it. He wants the same things most guys want, a family, which he can't have. He's been an immense amount of work for my parents, who have been very supportive of him and his relative independence. He was a fair bit of work for me when we were children, as well as being a source of conflict between me and kids looking to pick on the tard. Not a bit of which do I begrudge him, he's absolutely worth it.
But in the larger sense, this option is not a reasonable one for many parents and I don't fault anyone who doesn't have that drive and faith for that sort of thing. I don't have any fundamental moral compunction with soft eugenics at the individual level. Pro-lifers are framing the debate correctly, but they have the wrong answer. I'll bite the bullet, the correct number of dead (proto)infants isn't zero. Death is not the worst of outcomes. Obviously there will be disagreement over what counts as worse.
I love my brother, and my life is better, and I am a better person for having him. But I'm not going to moralfag about the real costs of that and people who don't want that for themselves or their retard-to-be kid. Those are the sort of life and death choices we have to make about family. When is it time to pull the plug on Grandma? How big a retard do we think we can raise? Nothing the law or the priests or the redditors say is going to remove the responsibility for these choices.
Ultimately, the abortion issue is, like most hot-button political things, just a way to moralfag over who is killing kids, raping kids, shooting kids etc. etc. Meanwhile, basically everyone is on the same page in practical terms. 80%+ of the electorate, including supermajorities of both parties are fine with restricting late-term or partial-birth abortion, but want it legal up to some point and for emergencies, etc. In practical terms, this is the reality in most states. There is no political conflict underneath that except the most extreme five percent on each side trying to either make all abortion illegal or legal after actual live birth.
Yes, there is legitimacy in thinking about the issues as a moral exercise in where exactly we draw the lines for questions like this, of life and death. But the politics of it is just pure bullshit. The underlying problem is not one with a simple answer, but our current system is far from outrageous.
Could you unpack that? My tentative reading is that you agree that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being but that you also hold utilitarian principles which allow that sort of thing.
Of course most pro-lifers are not utilitarians, and I'm no exception. I also have a relative with Down syndrome, though not so close a relative as your brother. He is blessed with excellent parents. But if they had killed him in utero they would be no less guilty of his blood than if they killed him today.
People think they can find pragmatic, utilitarian compromises with reasonable stopping points. But over the generations things don't work out that way. Rare abortions in difficult cases became abortion on demand, which greased the slope for doctor-assisted suicide, and the Netherlands and Canada are showing us how that goes.
There's now a whole social media genre of posts acknowledging that the socons were right and slopes were in fact slippery. People had believed that they would handle this or that loosening of the moral law responsibly because their culture took the issues seriously. But the culture only took the issues seriously because of its residual Christian understanding of the moral law, which that loosening eroded.
To the Christian this sounds a lot like the situation in Romans 1, where men denied God despite their knowledge and he gave them over to their sinful desires. But, Christian or not, experience shows that utilitarian principles won't hold you on the middle of the slope.
Good?
How can you argue from Christianity and also argue the fetus is innocent? It has as much expected original sin as you do.
How do you believe in the hereafter and still attach so much sentimentality to the body here and now?
There are many examples in the Bible of God commanding people to kill. Murder is a particular type of killing that doesn't seem to apply to voluntary euthanasia or abortion of people who would not want to live anyway.
Original Sin isn't a universal Christian belief.
... what? Then what's the point of Jesus if there's no original sin? I admit to not having kept up with my theological studies lately, but why do those other Christians believe Jesus died if not "for our sins"? Is it just "the sins committed while alive, so therefore in theory a perfectly virtuous person would not need Jesus"?
Yes, but no one is perfectly virtuous.
I was raised in the LDS religion, and in this theology infants explicitly need no redemption.
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I'm Mormon, and we believe that Adam's fall caused all his descendants to be of a fallen nature, but that we are not morally culpable for his sin.
The Methodists have a similar belief, as do many other Protestant denominations:
"Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk), but it is the corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam, whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and of his own nature inclined to evil, and that continually." - Article VII in the Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church
You'll find similar wording used by the Anglicans and other denominations.
Nice to bump into a coreligionist on this forum🫡
Eh, I'm probably not the best at representing our faith on here but I try
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Read St Athenasius "On the Incarnation" if you're interested. "God became man by nature that man might become god by grace"
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As other said, there is vast difference between Christian denominations, some such as Calvinists/Reformed are more harsh, that may be why you think that. Other such as Catholic Church explains original sin as state of depravity from grace, they inherited the broken nature of humanity from Adam and Eve. It is the whole basis for Christology as second Adam who provided humanity a path to reconciliation. In a sense using the word sin in Original Sin is in a different sense, for instance Orthodox Christians choose different name such as Ancestral Condition. Which by the way is also consistent with Catholic Dogma, there is just a little bit different way of thinking about it.
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Original sin perhaps, but not actual sin. In any case, the child is obviously innocent of any offence that would justify his death at human hands.
There is a sense in which it's worth weighing temporal things against eternal ones. But, ironically given the question, Christians usually apply that principle to endure the suffering such killings are meant to avoid. Death in this fallen world is sometimes a divine mercy, but there are only a few situations where men are entitled to deal it out.
I don't know if I've managed to get at the underlying disagreement here. It's not a matter of weighing utilons.
Agreed. I am not a pacifist.
Why not?
(As an aside, the discussion started with the abortion of a Down syndrome child, and Down's patients usually do not want to die. But the principle is worth discussing anyway.)
Calvinists argue otherwise. While I am not a Calvinist, scientifically, I think many people are predetermined to sin. And that you can predict this pretty easily. So, children who have not acted yet aren't innocent. We can already know that some of them are sinners.
I think you have to be completely anti-killing under all circumstances to seriously be against voluntary euthanasia. It's weird to think someone attacking you deserves to be killed and that this is okay with God but someone asking to be killed who has a terminal disease suddenly can't be killed. Even more egregious is believing that groups of humans have the right to murder but not individuals. Most so-called Christians hold the latter view and it's just State worship so if the State says euthanasia is legal they have no basis for disagreeing.
Use logic not vibes.
"Actual sin" is a theological term to describe sin one has committed personally in contrast to original sin. It doesn't imply that original sin isn't real. I just mean that no human being has just cause to execute someone for original sin.
If there is a logic to your objections of inconsistency, it relies on an unstated premise I can't quite get at. Maybe you're working from the basis that killing a human being is an offense only against him, whereas in the Christian view it is a sin against God also.
As for the state, God has delegated to the state some authority for capital punishment. Within those parameters, it has some wiggle room. But it's not carte blanche.
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I don't think most people consider it "good" that veterans suffering from PTSD or homeless people are being offered euthanasia rather than mental health assistance or accomodation respectively, nor that their organs are being harvested for the benefit of wealthier Canadians.
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I have been a net payer to my country's healthcare system for over a decade now. Barring something catastrophic, I expect this state of affairs to continue for the next two decades.
What I am not looking forward to is to be nudged to kill myself the moment I cross the threshold of unprofitability. See, with the system strained under the weight of infinity imported thirdworlders, they just won't be able to just spend money willy-nilly on good ol' white-presenting me.
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Innocent under the laws of man. As I understand it, nowhere in Christianity does it say "your neighbor (like yourself, and all people) has original sin, and therefore you should punish them".
It was not innocent under many laws of man. The fetus is outlawed like a rogue fugitive under the laws of man in the particular time and place where it was, so it was not innocent.
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What do you think is happening there
Many Canadians are being proactively offered euthanasia for conditions which could not in any way be considered life-threatening (like "PTSD" or "being homeless").
"Sophia" wasn't seeking MAID because she was homeless - it isn't even clear that she was homeless at the point she started the process. She was seeking MAID because she had a squirrelly illness which she (almost certainly wrongly) believed was caused by sensitivities to large numbers of common household chemicals, and the authorities refused to give her a chemical-free home.
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People think they can enforce their bright-line morality, but it won't work. You can denounce the "blood guilt" of others, but we all kill to live. We all kill those we love, and some of us kill quite a bit more than that. It works at the other end for assisted suicide too. Taken to the logical conclusion, we must all bankrupt ourselves every generation to eke even a single moment of continued brain activity because every nanosecond of life is so precious as to dwarf the world economy. Compromises with reality will be made, and if your morality can't handle reality, then it's not much use to anyone.
The slopes both ways are always slick.
I see no circumstances under which the principle "Don't murder innocents" must be compromised in order to live. Unless you're trying to make some weird point about how supporting some policy or other will cause X deaths or destroy Y QALYs or something like that, I really have no idea what you're trying to say here.
Situations with the allocation of limited resources or in which a potential pregnancy is overwhelmingly likely going to be non-viable and/or life-threatening for the mother
I don't support abortion in either case, and there are plenty of other people (mostly other Christians) who don't either. If the baby has actually already died in the womb (as opposed to a doctor saying they're unlikely to survive), I'm not aware of any groups that oppose removal of the baby.
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When your next relative is terminal in the hospital, I want you to spend every single dime you can beg, borrow or steal in a fruitless attempt to extend their life until you have zero possessions left. You wouldn't want to murder an innocent, would you? You wouldn't put your personal belongings and finances above a human life would you?
There's millions of scenarios, mercy killings, long-term comas, brain death. Your buddy falls while climbing and you have to cut the rope so you both don't die. Your buddy sustains third-degree burns over 90% of his body and will surely die in extreme agony within days. Best let him scream, you wouldn't want to murder an innocent! Your grandfather is trying to starve himself to death because he's taking way too long to die, so you hold him down and force-feed his withered form so you can be a heckin decent human bean. Wouldn't want a murder on your conscience!
This "hurr durr gotcha murder" is ridiculous and childish. The sort of thing people think right up until they actually have to make one of these calls for themselves.
On average, we will all, by your lights, murder most of our families until we in turn are murdered by them. Is this a useful way to think morally about life and family?
You seem to have a very strange, non-standard definition of murder here.
Choosing not to actively prolong someone else's life is different than choosing to intentionally end a life. Your hypothetical situation here would not be murder.
Wait, did he already fall, or am I cutting it to cause him to fall? Your scenario here is very confusing. The specifics of the scenario drastically change whether or not it would be murder.
I fully support letting doctors give him the best morphine available to numb the pain until his death. But still no murder required.
Not choosing to force someone to continue living != murder. This really isn't all that complicated. Your definitions of murder are, frankly put, real fuckin' weird.
Although euthanasia opponents consider something like the Liverpool Care Pathway to constitute euthanasia. So they draw the distinction between "actively prolong" and "intentionally end a life" somewhere other than where most medics would draw it. In particular, Christian euthanasia opponents consider withdrawing artificial feeding and hydration from a patient who can't eat and drink for themselves to be murder rather than "choosing not to actively prolong" - hence the Terri Schiavo case and numerous other less famous cases.
Once again, that depends greatly on which subset of Christianity you're referring to.
The pope himself did weigh in on the Terri Schaivo case, and practicing Catholics generally seem to feel that removing the feeding tube etc., though I don't know if this would be formally accepted doctrine of the RCC.
The opinions of other Christian denominations were much more varied: https://www.clinician.com/articles/87240-religious-views-of-schiavo-case-vary
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Two people I heard from in person, off the internet:
Having a baby with Down's syndrome is probably fine, and it's a sin to kill it. But there are situations that medical science allowed and which it perpetuates, which are basically black holes of suffering, and which society should not subsidize.
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Almost none of your examples actually work. Most of them get intentionality the wrong way 'round. There is obviously a huge conceptual chasm between an affirmative requirement to take extreme measures to save a life and a far more minimal requirement that one not murder. Perhaps you're just confused about what 'murder' is? Or maybe about what "in order to live" means?
This is the only one that actually gets there. It's actually my favorite example. You can dial it up/down very well to push at people's intuitions. On one extreme is where you're actually going to die if you don't cut the rope. You can dial this down to just some risk of dying. You can dial it down further to just some risk of harm (maybe it's cutting off circulation to your foot, and you might lose your foot.... or maybe it's just threatening to give you rope burn; are you justified in cutting the rope then?). This is a good example that poses some tough questions, but yeah, almost none of your other examples work at all.
The burns example where your buddy is in horrible pain and bound to die soon is another one that works. You can play with it by having him be actively begging for death or just screaming wordlessly.
It’s also not clear to me that action vs inaction is a super bright line. I would certainly consider someone a murderer who stared down passively as someone else slowly lost their grip on the top of a cliff when the watcher could have reached down to save them at any point.
Oh? But what if the cliff is unstable and the potential rescuer is maybe not strong enough to lift the other person? Say, a 100 pound woman and a 300 pound man hanging off the cliff?
Or even if the situation is reversed, but the man has a fear of heights. And so on. Inaction as murder or even hostile intent is a hard sell.
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It doesn't meet the criteria stated above:
That may not be the only category in which some folks think something is acceptable, but it is the criteria stated that I'm comparing to for purposes of this sub-thread.
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