baby killer
You can argue they could have or should have chosen some other (likely even more miserable) grind, but you don't actually need to despise them.
This isn't meant to be a continuation of the conversation you're having, but my answer to this is: Porque no los dos? It's perfectly reasonable to despise someone who defrauds others in predatory ways with huge psychological and possibly financial consequences for their target; disgust is an appropriate thing to feel. Most people who do terrible things do so because of some prior circumstance; serial killers often have long histories of childhood abuse, mobsters and criminals often grow up in unstable and poverty-stricken backgrounds, that in and of itself doesn't excuse the act. Dysfunction breeds dysfunction. You can feel sorry for all these bad actors while also simultaneously thinking their actions are beyond the pale, that it warrants serious punishment, and that it may not be possible to reintegrate them into a stable society that values prosociality.
That said, on the remote chance that you really did get her pregnant, and she decides to keep it, and you can verify this, do the right thing and provide for your damn kid.
Sorry, but I could not disagree more with this moral dictum and find myself to be far more in agreement with the other commenters here. Especially if this was baby-trapping. OP should have mitigated his risk more effectively, but I don't believe he has any obligation to support a family created entirely against his will, particularly if it was premised solely on the deception of the mother. Here, all choice goes to her, and all obligation goes to him regardless of whether he was duped or not. There is no world where that is an even remotely just outcome, and it creates perverse incentives in favour of patently undesirable behaviour such as baby-trapping which just results in more dysfunctional out-of-wedlock births, the very thing such a policy should ostensibly be trying to mitigate. The only reason why women do this in the first place is that it works. Maybe it shouldn't.
It's particularly unjust in context of the widely-accepted ability of the mother to avail herself of safe haven laws regardless of the circumstances of conception; an abandonment option which unilaterally ensures that the kid will be left without any biological parents by default and deprives the father of any choice to parent if he wishes to do so. (Compare this with paternal surrender; a hypothetical surrender-mechanism that still leaves said kid with one parent and lets that parent decide what relationship she wants to maintain with it, yet it is controversial.)
That being said, we've talked about this at length before and I suspect we're firmly at an impasse on this topic. Probably an example of one of these terminal moral things that's impossible to shift via argumentation.
EDIT: added more
Tree
3mo ago
Interesting perspective.
Everybody attaches their hobby horse to this problem: “it’s modernity, it’s lack of religion, urbanization, female education, not-enough state support, the wrong kind of state support, the housing crisis, devalued motherhood, it’s feminism, it’s not enough feminism...”. Men accuse omen and women accuse men, rightists accuse leftists and vice versa and so on and so forth.
You: “Women just dislike the pain and physical damage”. Everyone: “D’oh!”.
In my defense, I thought the problem was pretty much relegated to the past outside of some minor exceptions, but yeah if I look around irl the physical and psychological issues associated with pregnancy are still very common.
I guess we increase the painkillers/meds and supercharge the research into artificial wombs. Drip in, and baby out, asap.
Lizzardspawn
3mo ago
That is stupid test, made by people who think they are smarter than they are.
Ways to improve it - first instead of baby in the basket are drugs. A policy of - we save the baby and if the cost is letting a drug dealer go - well they are too stupid to take the warning and we will catch them anyway.
Second - the officer could just play some loud screeching noise and try to wake up the baby. Hear the baby cry and we are golden. Or he could kick the basket. Or he could just walk next to the person in the basket for as long as needed.
Third - the basket is the murder weapon. If the serial killer was called lumberjack harry killing his victims in central park - because he killed people with felling axe while wearing of those signature shirts, no court would say that patting down every recreational deforester in the area is infringing on their rights.
ulyssessword
3mo ago
Best case scenario, I manage to scramble and pull together enough other evidence to somehow, someway, still get a conviction. Worst case scenario, and far more likely, is that the public defender files a layup motion to suppress, all of my evidence gets tossed, and with it the case.
...
But of course, the detective in the exercise did find a baby in the basket. Any judge in the country would find exigent circumstances.
As described, you acted in line with the incentives.
If it was the baby-killer, you save the baby and secure a conviction. If it was an innocent fisherman, there are no negative consequences (at least not any listed here. I'm sure that there are some IRL. right? right??) because there is no case to sabotage. The only negative effect I can see is if he had been committing a less-serious crime that would've been caught some other way, and you had stumbled into the evidence that would've convicted him.
roystgnr
6mo ago
I am starting to wonder if he is just... unwell.
Did you catch any of the "Musk ranting at the astronauts calling out his lies" Twitter X drama last week? How about the baby mama drama?
He's got to be unwell. The best case scenario is that he's irresponsibly upped his ketamine dosage or gotten sucked into other drugs but not yet enough to suffer permanent damage, if only there's someone (his mom??) who could intervene and not be ignored. The worst case scenarios are that either his genes have betrayed him ("Quite an astute engineer, although he's gone a little crazy later in life. I don't think he has all his cookies in the jar." - Elon Musk discussing his father Errol in 2008, and hopefully not foreshadowing anything) or that politics and memes alone are able to do this much damage.
As an American and a person worried about climate change, space exploration, AI, social media, etc., I think the "Musk genes just broke him" hypothesis is the most worrying one. E.g. although I'm sure Gwynne Shotwell would handle SpaceX just fine if Musk retired tomorrow, I'm not sure what would happen if he just kept spiraling intellectually while not abdicating any control.
As a fond long-time user of The Motte, I think the "politics memes alone just broke him" hypothesis is the terrifying one, even if it might not be irrecoverable. I pride myself on being able to read at much wilder places than this, both to learn about how others think and to sift through the dross for an occasional real insight ... but do I need to retreat, soon, before just a little bit more aging renders my brain vulnerable to even mid-quality propaganda? I'd like to think I'm not one of the typical engineer-brains who thinks logically about one field but drops rationality elsewhere, but I have to admit that the most straightforward rationalist take on this topic is probably still "Politics Is The Mind-Killer", and now I'm wondering how much of that title is an exaggeration for a cute Dune reference vs a literal description of what I've been watching happen to many once-sane people.
vorpa-glavo
6mo ago
Seventy years pro-life activists have called their opponents baby-killers and it did not swerve their opposition's resolve by one inch.
The crux of the abortion debate is the moral status of the fetus, and the moral permissibility of ending life support to the fetus. It's not that activism did not swerve the opposition's resolve - the opposition has a fundamental disagreement of fact with the pro-life activists.
The situation is more similar to animal rights activism (in that it is a debate over the moral status of a living being not everyone considers morally important/relevant) rather than the foreign aid debate (where almost nobody assigns literally zero moral value to foreigners, even if they assign less moral value to them than their fellow countrymen.)
It's fine on the object level if an election result means a federal program is gutted, even one that a lot of people like and which does a lot of good in the world. Even so, I think it would be better to advance the principled reasons for stopping such a program, instead of reveling in how much you're owning the libs or whatever.
Seventy years pro-life activists have called their opponents baby-killers and it did not swerve their opposition's resolve by one inch.
Conservatives, particularly MAGA conservatives, must harden their hearts as such. In the coming months and years, there will be no end to the wailing. They will beg you in the name that all that is decent and humane to give them the one exception and save many lives. The rationalist crowd will come to you with spreadsheets and lives per dollar and give logical arguments to save lives. You will be constantly bombarded with propaganda designed to psyop you to support the return of the old status quo.
Put on your biggest smile and say no. That's your cross to bear. Resist the temptation to give in, and to be seen as 'one of the good ones'. Mercy and compassion are the luxuries of the victor, and you have not won yet. This is but the first of many battles in a long war. If your opponents say that your proposals will cost millions of lives, say to them: "Billions." And do what you intended to do, and do it so throughly and completely that it does not have to be done again. Embrace the virtue of Lycurgus and destroy what you must to save what you can.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
7mo ago
could never be dumbed down into something as concrete as stabbing your landlord with a sword.
As the meme goes, you are like a little baby. Watch this.
The government is something that can be compromised by bad people. And so, giving it tools to “attack bad people” is dangerous, they might use them. Thus, pacts like “free speech” are good. But so is individuals who aren’t Nazis breaking those rules where they can get away with it and punching Nazis.
<...>
If you want to create something like a byzantine agreement algorithm for a collection of agents some of whom may be replaced with adversaries, you do not bother trying to write a code path, “what if I am an adversary”. The adversaries know who they are. You might as well know who you are too.
Alternatively, an extended Undertale reference that feels so on the nose it almost hurts (yes, fucking Chara is definitely the best person to mentally consult while trying to rationalize your actions).
Once you make "no-selling social reality" your professed superpower, I imagine the difference in performing Olympic-levels mental gymnastics to justify eating cheese sandwiches and coming up with legitimate reasons to stab your landlord is negligible. (I know the actual killer is a different person but I take the patient zero as representative of the "movement".)
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
Except this isn't about Biden; it's about Trump. Biden's reputation as a politician isn't going to improve regardless of what he does. He could have signed death warrants for everyone on the list and it wouldn't matter. So whether or not Biden is willing to commute the sentences of baby killers isn't the issue here. If he had excluded one more name from the list the Fox News comment section wouldn't be full of people trying to discern some kind of general principle, and had he commuted all the sentences they wouldn't be talking about how good of a Catholic he is. the fact that there's an incongruity on a list of pardons isn't something anyone is going to care about for more than a few days. As far as Biden is concerned, his political career is over anyway, so whatever he does now is ultimately irrelevant. And it's not like Democrats are still trying to prop him up as one of the party greats.
Signing an order commuting the sentences of three of the country's most notorious criminals and timing the press release so it hits just before Trump is about to take the oath of office is just a giant middle finger, nothing more. It would piss Trump off to no end to have his parade rained on like that, and provide a distraction from his time in the spotlight. It's not 3D chess as much as it is being petty, but Biden can afford to be petty at this point.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
8mo ago
To be clear, even the explanation that it's about party-aligned ethnic groups, as @SteveKirk suggested doesn't get to a coherent set of principles. Let me introduce you to Kaboni Savage:
In March 2003, after Coleman murdered his friend, 26-year-old Tyrone Toliver of Cherry Hill, New Jersey,[12] federal agents encouraged Coleman's 54-year-old mother,[4] Marcella Coleman, a prison guard at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility,[12] to move to a new house; believing that she could defend herself, she refused.[15] Savage was convicted partly due to Coleman's testimony.[12]
In return, Savage ordered Marcella Coleman's house in North Philadelphia to be burned down.[16] At the time, Savage was in custody at FDC Philadelphia.[13] At about 5 a.m. on October 9, 2004, the rowhouse was firebombed. The fire originated in a living room on the first floor, traveled quickly, and was extinguished after about 20 minutes.[12] There were no survivors;[17] it was the deadliest mass murder in Philadelphia since the Lex Street murders in 2000.[12] Included in the death toll were Coleman; her 15-month-old son Damir Jenkins; three other youths related to Coleman, 10-year-old Khadjah Nash, 12-year-old Tahj Porchea, and 15-year-old Sean Rodriguez ; and 34-year-old Tameka Nash, Coleman's cousin and the mother of Khadjah Nash.[4] The family dog, a pit bull, also perished.[18]
An infant and three other kids, presumably black, murdered over gangland bullshit.
No, the principle at play here seems to be whether the names involved were sufficiently well-known or not. There's no pattern to be found other than that, as near as I can tell. The commuted sentences include black, white, and Hispanic individuals. The victims denied justice are similarly broad across different ethnicities, across such identities as part-time postal workers, 12-year-old girls, the literal black baby mentioned in the above paragraph, and Russian immigrants targeted by their co-ethnic serial killers. The Boston bomber did not get a commute, which also puts a monkeywrench in the protection of aligned groups theory - it really does seem to be as simple keeping sentences if the public is actually familiar with the evils that were done.
sodiummuffin
9mo ago
Back in 2015 he had a fictional op-ed exploring some of the questions about "voluntary" here:
Everything Not Obligatory Is Forbidden
In 2064 there were almost 200 murders nationwide, up from a low of fewer than 50 in 2060. Why is this killer, long believed to be almost eradicated, making a comeback? Criminologists are unanimous in laying the blame on unenhanced children, who lack the improved impulse-control and anger-management genes included in every modern super-enhancement designer baby gene therapy package.
I see in the comments of the post he also established his position more explicitly:
I mean, I am pro voluntary designer babies, although I’m only confident about this in cases where it’s clear enhancement (eg giving kids genes that make them healthier) and not control (eg giving kids genes that make them want to always do what their parents say).
I don’t think I’m pro mandatory designer babies. You might be able to convince me depending on the exact details of the situation. But it probably wouldn’t be through an argument like this.
That “transhumanism is simplified humanism” post at the bottom explains where I’m coming from pretty well.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
I think if anything that would be worse. As it stands now, I’d minimally double the terms of most offices. The trouble we have now is due to short terms. The house barely gets settled in and knowing where the bathrooms are before it’s time to run for office. And this kind of short term means that they really don’t have to do anything concrete to fix problems. Worse, if you can make it looks like you’ve fixed something but the consequences of your bad fix don’t show up within two years, you’ll be gone before the negatives hit. Even four years for president is pretty short. By the time the economic impact of your policies hit the mainstream, you’ll be packing up to move out.
The second thing is that really, the short terms mean politics is taking up an extraordinary amount of the collective bandwidth of the public imagination. Every two years we’re choosing new leaders, and that means 6+ months every two years of constant speculation, political ads, push polling, and punditry aimed at convincing the public to vote in a given way. Worse, because fear and anger are the most effective means of inducing people to care about politics, we spend those six months learning to hate those who disagree with us politically. You hate abortion? You’re killing women, you sexist. Oh, you’re pro abortion? Baby killer! And so on, through every major issue. This tends to create tensions between people that shouldn’t exist. And the wounds caused by this short cycle never completely heal.
In my opinion, politics, ideally would be such a minor part of life that they really don’t matter. The general public is not served by a system so broken that it’s near top of mind what a political figure said or did today or any other day. It’s not supposed to be that important, and frankly, if the government worked properly, you wouldn’t have to constantly baby sit it and change its nappies.
gattsuru
11mo ago
Some of this is just a tendency to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. There just aren't that many death penalty cases to start with, and something like a third of them are in states that basically never will actually execute them (California and Pennsylvania haven't executed any inmates in over a decade, and Pennsylvania in this millennium), and some of the absolute worst ones get cleared up relatively 'quickly'.
If you go to the Innocence Project's death penalty page right now, the first three examples I get are :
- Clemente Aguirre-Jarquin, where there's an absolute mess of evidence, but some of it points to an alternative killer... but a lot of the stuff that strongly points to the alternative killer either has an alternative credible explanation (the alternative killer being a descendant and sometimes-resident of the victim's house explains a lot of possible DNA) or only were produced long after it became a cause celebre (the alternative killer's then-boyfriend's now-wife). There's probably an ineffective assistance of council argument here, and I could believe that the alternative killer was the real one, but this is the stuff of reasonable doubt or True Crime Podcasts, not claims of obvious true innocence.
- Kirk Bloodsworth, pretty clearly innocent, and they found the guy who actually did it, complete with DNA evidence. A little soap opera, but there's not really any question.
- Kennedy Brewer, same deal, slightly less soap opera, slightly more bad CSI ("bite mark analysis").
And the top-line changed while I read these cases, moving from Williams to a Robert Roberson shaken baby case that's... uh, at best a 'raises some doubts'.
Which makes it really weird mix ... if you thought people were reading the Innocence Project page to find examples of clearly innocent people on death row.
But the Innocence Project's point is a broader-spectrum criticism of punishment and criminal justice in general. Something merely being controversial or having even the slightest doubts do that, and that's a much wider field.
Tenaz
11mo ago
Let me first state a few things I think we agree upon:
- It is quite difficult for abortion clinics to attempt to save the lives of infants who are born alive. NICU babies require quite a lot of care and these babies probably require as much or more, plus they're outside of a hospital where that care could be provided.
- Abortion clinics are probably already accustomed to hiding, at least to some extent, this specific situation--born-alive infants. The mothers are going to be traumatized if they hear the infant survived. Likely they already have procedures in place to spirit the infant away, living or dead, in order to protect the mother from this knowledge.
- Abortionists strongly support the right to kill healthy infants who were intended to be aborted. The "why" does not matter. Maybe they think infants have moral worth but that born-alive infants are rare enough to not be worth jeopardizing women's rights to bodily autonomy. Maybe they think infants don't have moral worth. But they certainly want to be allowed to kill healthy born-alive babies. We know this because they have enough pull to legalize doing this in at least one state. If the common people support legalizing this, the ones actually performing the abortions will doubtless be far more extreme.
- The existence of born-alive infants is politically inconvenient. You're acknowledging not only that some of these abortions are performed on viable babies, but also that the abortion procedure itself can potentially result in a living baby. Meaning, abortionists admit that the safest abortion in some cases is essentially just delivery of a viable child, except they kill the child first. At that point, why not just deliver the baby?
Keeping all of this in mind, I find it highly unlikely that abortion clinicians don't fudge the numbers.
You'll note that a few of the babies in the documents listed did not have any pre-existing conditions listed and also were not provided any care at all. These are living, breathing babies, capable of experiencing pain, who were left to die without so much as painkillers to ease their passing. I wouldn't trust someone capable of doing that to report something extremely inconvenient and damaging to the movement that owns their soul.
Putting all of that aside though...
The legal requirement for “reasonable” medical care is just as strong as the one for reporting mitigating factors.
Okay, and some of the infants were reported as having no mitigating factors and receiving no medical care at all. Lacking more information, I think we can assume that the legally mandated report is accurate, and that abortion clinicians would report factors favorable to their decision not to help the child if such factors existed.
I don’t believe that justifies assuming the latter.
Lacking more information I think we can assume that the information provided by abortion clinicians paints them in a maximally favorable light.
I had two playlists. One I've shared previously, which is roughly my "Best of: All Time" list truncated down to 100 tracks.
The other is a workout playlist that is not perfect but good for cycling:
Arist(s) Name Track Name
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