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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
On April 26 2017 06:51 Nevuk wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2017 06:40 LegalLord wrote: Any particular reason it's always the ninth? Do people just raise the case in the most sympathetic district or does no one else think that stopping Trump's policies is justified? It is probably a combination of the former and the fact that the ninth is the largest district by a massive margin.
I'm sure its relation to the number of circles of Hell is coincidental.
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On April 26 2017 04:45 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2017 02:19 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 02:14 Acrofales wrote:On April 26 2017 01:50 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:47 Acrofales wrote:On April 26 2017 01:46 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:38 IgnE wrote:On April 26 2017 01:30 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:27 IgnE wrote:On April 26 2017 01:21 Leporello wrote: [quote]
Yes. Human brain-functions.
I'm generally pro-choice, but I can't quite the understand the detachment in saying that a late-term fetus has no bodily rights. Shortly before birth, it's just a baby in the womb.
A cesarean operation, for example, doesn't endow the baby with sentience. It's just opening up the womb and removing the baby that exists. You can't say it's removing a parasite.
Parasitic=/=parasite. A late-term fetus is parasitic, absolutely. But it is not, factually speaking, a parasite.
Denying the sentience of a late-term fetus doesn't do pro-choicers any credit. This is exactly the type of middle-ground that both sides need to move towards, and where we should rely heavily on clinical metrics. By which I don't mean calling it a parasite. I love House MD as much as anybody, but it's a bit sensationalist, imo. so do you eat pork? do you think a post-birth baby has more or less "human-like" brain functions than an adult pig? do you eat octopus? I was a vegetarian for many years. But, uh, what? We're talking about human babies. Not pigs. I'm genuinely not sure what this comparison is supposed to prove. But, yes, I do think a human baby is more human than an adult pig... Wow. A late-term fetus has sentience. It is human sentience. Abstract, and in many ways, lesser. But still human. This is going right off the deep-end. Again, denying the human-nature of late-term fetuses is really just fuel for the fire, and nothing more. so you are talking about soul-stuff here. "human-nature?" ousia? what makes it human? dna? a blastocyst is also human? are you telling me ANY level of consciousness in combination with human dna is privileged with all the rights of a human person? do you not see how that is just essentialist soul-stuff? No, I am talking about consciousness. I don't believe in the "soul". Argue fairly, if you want to falsely categorize me to this extent then I'll just move on. If you really want to have this discussion, define consciousness. Also define human consciousness. No. I am asking people to consider the consciousness of a late-term fetus. The deflections... Jesus Christ. I'm not defining, in absolute terms, what is consciousness, which is scientifically impossible, currently (which is why the mirror test is BS). I'm just asking "does a late-term fetus have a consciousness?" We do know consciousness exists, obviously. And we can detect it, often through common-sense means, but also from brain-waves. EEG. The struggles to avoid answering the question simply is kind of... I am disappointed. I'll take a break. Because, I'm a little flustered at the inane deflections. If your guys' answer to people's concerns towards late-term abortions is to compare human-babies to pigs, or declare them simply "not human", then this discourse is permanently fucked. You're the ones drawing a line that shouldn't exist and can't be defined -- or should I say, is already clearly defined. If we can't accept that new-born babies are human, anatomically, biologically, common-sense, human, with a sentience that is human, then we've gone off the deep-end. You're the one who brought up consciousness and human consciousness as if they were categorically different. And then when someone said "well, that's basically a soul" got all upset. Either define the difference between "mere" consciousness and human consciousness or accept that pigs are people too. Albeit rather diminished people who walk around on 4 hoofs and habitually get turned into bacon. Hmmmm. Bacon. No. I don't have to define the consciousness itself, all I have to do is define the being that possesses said consciousness. And, for starters, it's not a pig. You guys are creating arbitrary goalposts that science can't define. And yet, what I'm continually asking us is to consider what science can define. And the difference in biology between a late-term fetus and a newborn is...? Not much. The biological differences are much greater during the middle-stages of pregnancy. Somewhere in there are developmental stages that we should consider, clinically. And the reason we should do so is not just create a more "humane" law, but to cool the discourse. One side wants to say, "all life is sacred", and the other seems to reject any notion that humanity exists at all, at least not until the person is walking and talking. LOL, I've honestly just been looking for middle-ground. LOL. It's so bad. Sorry, but if you want to be able to use words in a meaningful way, you need to be able to define what they mean. I am pretty sure that a large amount of disagreements could be resolved simply by people taking the effort to actually define what they mean when they say words, as opposed to saying "Well it is obvious!". If it is obvious, it shouldn't be hard to put it into words. If you can't put it into words, then it isn't obvious. And if your definition of "consciousness" is simply "Something that has something to do with the and, which a human has, but a pig does not", you are gonna run into tons of problems, because that is a shitty definition.Maybe it is just me coming from a maths background, but seriously, it is exhausting to talk to people who are unwilling to define the concepts they use, and then get angry that not everyone has the same view of that concept as they do. I am not even sure if i disagree with what you want to say, because it is very unclear what you actually want to say. You got lost in a semantic argument because you are using poorly defined terms. Discussions become way better, and are far less filled with semantics arguments if the words you use to describe stuff are well defined and clear. I don't think people honestly disagree with the end result you seem to be hinting at, namely that you probably shouldn't abort 8th month pregnancies, and that the point in time until which it is probably ok is somewhere in the middle of the pregnancy. Afaik most countries use something like 12 weeks, unless there are special circumstances.
Except that is not how I defined consciousness. It is much more how other's itt decided to define consciousness. And that is/was a completely unnecessary obscurity.
Consciousness is a scientifically obscure area, yes. But it is still, nonetheless, something that we know exists, and is rather crucial to defining life. Something with a consciousness can experience suffering.
I suppose it bothers some to admit that a late-term fetus would experience suffering, but... they do. That is certain -- it is a certainty you can ask any woman who's ever carried a pregnancy to term. The fetus makes its suffering and impatience quite known to the mother throughout the later-stages of pregnancy. Which is why most mothers at this stage surely don't even refer to it as a fetus, but as a baby. "My baby kicked."
Perhaps I should have said "brain activity". But I get the feeling it would not have helped at all, and people would have still questioned whether it exists or is human for the same reasons. Do you think it would've made a difference? Consciousness, not being scientifically understood to fucking absolution, doesn't mean it should be banned from discussion in any serious matter. We do know what it means in laymans's terms.
Right? Or are you saying otherwise?
I mean, are you saying I need to provide the dictionary-definition of the word? Oh, yeah, no double-standard being raised here! Sorry, I'd like to give people more credit than that. And that actually is what you're saying. I need to define words... Really?
Instead of simply acknowledging consciousness, simply as we know it exists, people decided to, imo, cop-out of the question by simply ignoring the fact that consciousness does exist, and instead focused on forcing an impossibly precise definition to something that is not wholly material. Which, for fuck's sake, is not akin to calling it a "soul", as one was eager to put in my mouth, but rather as a process.
And what's the point of that? To declare that a fetus doesn't have consciousness? No, they didn't even really argue that to any extent, and it's the only point that actually matters. Apparently they do agree via omission, that fetuses do have consciousnesses. But instead, I'm asked to question the consciousness as being human...? And that saddens me.
I think it's just nonsense. It's a consciousness, it kicks and moves on its own terms, and it belongs to a developing human. It is that simple. Or it should have been. And I take ZERO fault for people complicating it. The deflection and pack-mentality has been quite strong in this discussion.
And, yes, I know I'm arguing with people that mostly agree with me in regards to the law itself. But this desire to dehumanize what is human, to such extent, as if it's just as likely a pig or a parasite in the womb, is partly what makes discourse on the subject impossible, from both sides. And that is my concern, more than the law itself.
And I'm not so sure we do agree on what the law should be, sadly. Late-term abortions are currently just next to illegal, but I get the feeling Kwark and others would just as happily allow all of them, and I think it's obvious that I would not be comfortable with that.
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The Republican Lawmaker Who Secretly Created Reddit’s Women-Hating ‘Red Pill’ A web of secret online identities connects the creator of the misogynistic Red Pill forum to a New Hampshire state representative.
Last November, voters in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region re-elected to the state house of representatives a man who appears to be one of the secret architects of the internet’s misogynistic “Manosphere.” The homegrown son of a preacher, 31-year-old Robert Fisher is a Republican who represents New Hampshire’s Belknap County District 9. In addition to his legislative duties, Fisher owns a local computer-repair franchise, and in his spare time, seems to have created the web’s most popular online destination for pickup artistry and men’s rights activists, The Red Pill, according an investigation by the Daily Beast. An investigation into Fisher’s online aliases found a trail of posts linking the lawmaker to the username Pk_atheist, the creator of The Red Pill—an online Reddit community of nearly 200,000 subscribers that promotes itself as a “discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men.” A post by Pk_atheist in the early days of the forum advertises the author’s blog, Dating American, a blog that immediately precipitated the establishment of The Red Pill in 2012 and which was “dedicated to the woes of dating in the American culture.” On the “about the author” section of Dating American, the author, who calls himself “Desmond,” promotes two other blogs he’s “authored”: Existential Vortex and Explain God. Performing a search of the unique URL for Existential Vortex led to a comment on an ex-Christian message board again advertising the blog, existentialvortex.blogspot.com. This post, written under the alias “Interested,” provided the keystone that connected Pk_atheist and Robert Fisher. First, the post revealed the user was the author of Existential Vortex (and thus, Dating American). Second, in the user’s bio, he stated his band—The Five Nines—had a new album out. Robert Fisher is the sole member of his band, The Five Nines.
Though he once cautioned another user to “invest in a decent throwaway” account, Fisher apparently failed to heed his own advice. Fisher’s many online identities spin a large but weak web. Following its thread leads to one identity after another, dating back to high school, when Fisher, a programmer, created a message board used by his friends as a social platform. The website’s name, “Fredrickville,” appears over and over, and provides more links between him and The Red Pill—Fisher’s personal email account uses the name, the same email addresss used to register The Red Pill’s backup landing page, should it ever get taken down. In addition, Fisher’s customized Facebook URL, revealed in a comment on Fredrickville.com, uses the name Facebook.com/Fredrickville. That personalized link formerly led to Fisher’s personal Facebook page, which has recently been deleted. Fisher’s customized URL for his band’s SoundCloud also uses the name. The Reddit alias Panderific also appears to belong to Fisher. A post by Panderific in 2012 advertising his blog Explain God—a blog by the same author as Existential Vortex—revealed an additional trove of thousands of Panderific’s comments. In one, from March 2012, he disclosed that he was running for office in New Hampshire, and promoted his candidate website—which was Robert Fisher’s own site, electfisher.org. It’s possible that now, four-and-a-half years after Red Pill’s founding, Fisher may regret his creation. When reached for comment by phone, Fisher denied participation in the Red Pill forum, claiming not to know what The Red Pill was. Though he did say he had heard of the men’s rights movement, he said he hadn’t heard of PUA. “What is a pickup artist?” he asked. Within hours of contacting Rep. Fisher, and after delivering by email a summary of his apparent connections to The Red Pill kingpin, his two primary Reddit usernames had been wiped, and four blogs connected to him were deleted or made private. He has not returned additional requests for comment. Online, Fisher describes himself as an “attractive businessman” who owns a “small empire.” According to his Facebook, he is the COO of Same Day Computer, which operates two locations in New Hampshire. He was also the sole member of his indie-electronic band, The Five Nines, which may or may not still be active. (Fisher’s last upload on his SoundCloud was in August 2012—but as recently as this year, Fisher’s Facebook page still included this role in his bio.) Fisher purchased the computer-repair franchise from its founder, failed New Hampshire state senate candidate Joshua Youssef, who, according to the Concord Monitor, violated state election law by publishing a deceptive blog to “make it appear that his ex-wife’s attorney had endorsed his candidacy.” Youssef, himself active in the men’s rights movement, launched a prolonged tirade against the “feminist judicial tyranny” via the New Hampshire House’s unique Redress of Grievances Committee in response to an acrimonious divorce and child-custody battle, wherein a judge in family court temporarily stripped him of visitation rights. Youssef also sat on Donald Trump’s New Hampshire leadership team. Recently, he appeared on a CNN voter panel in defense of President Trump’s claims that millions of people cast illegal votes—Youssef claimed he’d witnessed rampant voter fraud.
On Reddit’s Men’s Rights forum, where Youssef described “the corruption, greed, lies, and abject depravity of the feminist system…” that had supposedly affected his child-custody case, Fisher appeared sympathetic to Youssef’s plight. Under the username RobertFisherForNH, in March 2013, Fisher chimed in on behalf of his friend and colleague and his ordeal and blasted the courts for being unfair to Youssef. Youssef and Fisher aren’t the only New Hampshire politicos to have espoused anti-feminist beliefs. In 2015, New Hampshire State Rep. Al Baldasaro, a Republican, publicly mocked the breasts of fellow female lawmakers in the name of protecting “family values.” The comment stemmed from disagreement over a bill authored solely by male lawmakers that would have made it illegal for women to purposefully expose their areolas in public for breastfeeding or other purposes. And yet Fisher’s past comments on a host of Reddit forums are arguably far more disturbing than what his colleagues have said in public. He blasted women for their “sub-par intelligence.” He said that women’s personalities are “lackluster and boring, serving little purpose in day to day life.” And Fisher once commented, “It is literally the [female] body that makes enduring these things worth it.” In a state with one representative to every 3,200 people, many of Fisher’s female constituents are likely to know him personally—whether or not they know what he’d once posted about women online. And those comments were just the start. In 2016, Fisher, who has since stepped down from his role as lead moderator of The Red Pill, praised the success of the community. Under the alias Pk_atheist, he wrote, “It’s very impressive to see how things have grown.” Explaining that though he had become only a sporadic contributor, Fisher stated in another thread that he still keeps in contact with members of the community “IRL.” Summoned by the question “Whatever happened to our founder pk_atheist?” in October 2016, Fisher stated, in his last comment ever on the forum, “I’m not dead. I pop in occasionally.” TAKING THE RED PILL When The Red Pill was established in October 2012, Fisher was mere weeks away from losing his first campaign (in which he ran as a Democrat). By the time he finally won a seat in the New Hampshire House in November 2014, the Red Pill community had grown from fewer than 500 readers to 83,000. Today, though Fisher is now only an intermittent contributor, the community has grown to more than 195,000 dedicated subscribers, and likely many more readers. The Red Pill borrows its name from a scene in “The Matrix” in which Morpheus offers Neo a choice between two realities: “You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill… and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” In manosphere-speak, the rabbit hole is feminism, which the red pill reveals to be a War on Men. In this reality, the “feminine imperative” reigns; masculinity is its victim. As a result of this power struggle, old gender dynamics formerly seen as mutually beneficial, such as marriage, have all but disappeared, but female expectations of a pedestalled life unfairly remain. A common refrain among men’s rights activists is “take the pussy off the pedestal.” The Red Pill guides men as they become accustomed to this new “reality.” It advocates self-improvement: the importance of diet, exercise, and constant learning. But this community also subscribes to the beliefs that women lack both intelligence and substance, are programed to cheat on their partners, and expire after the age of 30. Its darkest sections are heavy with rape denial and apologia. Of several notorious “red pillers” who frequent the forum is Milo Yiannopoulos, who did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) last year. Yiannopoulous recently resigned from his post as senior editor at Breibart News following comments he made that were interpreted on both sides of the political aisle as condoning pedophilia and child molestation. (On Facebook, Yiannopoulous contended that his comments were selectively edited and taken out of context. Later, in a news conference announcing his resignation, Yiannopoulous stated that some of his comments were “simply wrong.”) A frequent reader of r/TheRedPill, Yiannopolous is popular among subscribers, which is not surprising: His brand resonates with the community that also blames feminism for subjugating men into second-class citizens. Yiannopoulos, a gay man who in his AMA described transgender people as having a “brain disease,” says today’s feminist-driven society pays no heed to “laws that men’s rights advocates are complaining about.” Indeed, men’s rights activists often do complain of the “injustices” they face: for instance, child support and alimony laws that they say women abuse. Red Pillers call this “divorce rape:” trapping men into marriage, sometimes by a pregnancy originally calculated for such an exploitation, followed by a divorce in which women reap cash prizes. In a post from 2012, Fisher explained that the con “…is why feminism pushes to increase alimony and child support. In the USA where feminism is completely unchecked, women can meet another man and profit from having two providers instead of one. Alimony and child support will ensure her lifestyle isn’t the one that suffers. The only risk a woman has for leaving her husband is if she’s too old and ugly to hook another guy. But even then, the amount of money she can get from her ex-husband is almost criminal.” On The Red Pill, Fisher commonly expressed disappointment that the institutions of marriage and religion were destroyed by women’s equality. He maintained that as a result of financial independence, women were no longer compelled to remain faithful and as a result, men needed to protectively adapt their sexual strategy. “Marriage, and yes, female oppression, slut shaming, religion, these were all a means to control hypergamy [infidelity]. Marriages might be considered loveless, and women might have been unhappy, but for men it meant marriages that lasted, commitments that continued, and protection against the fickle whims of females,” Fisher wrote on The Red Pill in November 2012. “To give women autonomy is to take away the very thing that made marriage a realistic institution… what I dislike is the general attitude that somehow we owe [women] something for sex… Women enjoy the autonomy that feminism has afforded them… But don’t expect the relics from back in the day to continue to benefit you without the sacrifices you were making,” Fisher wrote on his blog Dating American, in 2012—just weeks before establishing The Red Pill. Though ideas like this existed prior to The Red Pill’s creation, Fisher’s platform provided a crucial congregating place for this new brand of seduction, which marries men’s rights and sexual strategy, and which gave the ideology a platform on which to flourish. According to The Red Pill, among the most egregious contradictions of feminism is the audacity of feminists to seek equality, but then take no responsibility for it. “Understand that in the old days, women were not brought up the way they are today. Before feminism, there was less freedom, and therefore it was not necessary to teach women consequence. Consequence was strictly a man’s game. Feminism took the lid off pandora’s box, but the mothers, and the daughters of those mothers never internalized, learned, or passed down the concept of responsibility for their freedoms, only the freedom itself.” Fisher wrote in 2013. In addition to anti-feminist screeds, The Red Pill teaches “sexual strategy.” This includes how to “spin plates,” or balance sleeping with several women at once; how to respond to women’s “shit-tests,” a social device used to determine a suitor’s “fitness”; and how to practice “negging,” a game tactic involving a backhanded compliment calculated to undermine confidence and make a woman more vulnerable to advances. Red Pillers practice “dread game,” or intentionally instilling “dread” in a partner that you have other options, and various other techniques. Of gaming women, Fisher said, “[Women have] absolutely done this to themselves. I feel zero regret or shame pumping and dumping.” By May 2014, Fisher, then running for state representative, had apparently mastered the art of “spinning plates.” He bragged: “I spin a soft harem.” As opposed to a harem, a “soft harem” means the women are mostly unaware of each other, though they are sometimes strategically given hints about the availability of other women. Yet even as he bragged about his conquests, Fisher also groused bitterly about dating hurdles. “Dude, I’m attractive and a business man. I own a small empire. I’m also running for political office, and I’m incredibly outgoing… And this site [OkCupid] files me in next to millions of other guys. Obviously I’m going to have more luck IRL,” Fisher wrote to another user in 2012. Elsewhere, he wondered why listing his accomplishments on dates, including his status as a candidate and “high level exec,” was apparently a turnoff to women, despite it being characteristically alpha. On a forum subtitled “Contemplative Dominance for the Modern Man,” under the username FredFredrickson, Fisher complained in 2012, “I cannot be honest about my accomplishments or ambitions without ridicule. I am running for a state political position, I’m a high level exec in a franchising company, and I own two business locations in state. I found that stating it simply… nets me negativity on dates if I’m honest.” Fisher seemed obsessed with the negative effects feminism was having on his dating experience. He documented his complaints on dating, men’s rights, and seduction forums, including one specifically dedicated to OkCupid. He complained that girls were ghosting on him and standing him up. He aired grievances about the character of women: They were uninteresting, immature, unintelligent, lacked depth, and were entitled. He bemoaned that dating was easier for women. He felt it was unjust that women get a free ride, believing “a pair of boobs grants [them] equal footing with somebody bringing intelligence or a personality.” Over time, Fisher’s writing became increasingly hostile. He decided that existing seduction and pickup forums were overly “feminized,” complaining about “white knights” and their misdirected admonitions about “creepy” behavior (which he believed works as a dating strategy). It was this plight of navigating a post-feminist sexual marketplace, one where “the entirety of the male experience [is] wrought with rejection and ego-destroying experiences,” that led Fisher to establish The Red Pill. That, and a soul-crushing breakup. Fisher’s pseudonym on The Red Pill, Pk_atheist, was meaningful. “Pk,” which stands for “preacher’s kid,” and “atheist” signified an existential crisis of identity Fisher underwent upon losing his faith—a journey that began in 2008. In the aftermath, he philosophized extensively about religion and morality on his two blogs Explain God and Existential Vortex. In 2011, he took to Fredrickville—posting a revealing tell-all. Aside a photo of himself on a beach, Fisher wrote about how his existential crisis plunged him into a depression, worsened by a difficult breakup. “I felt so damaged that indeed I saw the public as the enemy. I did what a good engineer does. I identified the system, and started building rules to encounter various forms of damage that may occur in the future,” Fisher wrote. “But the damage I wanted to avoid was emotional hurt towards me. I had never known so much pain from somebody so close to me; I wanted to avoid that like it was death itself.” RAPE AND THE RED PILL Part of the pain inflicted on him by one of his exes, or so Fisher claimed: the alleged threat of a rape accusation against him. Fisher claimed online that during a bitter breakup, an ex-girlfriend threatened to accuse him of rape. “She didn’t follow through, thank god,” Fisher, under the alias Pk_atheist, wrote in 2012. Whether or not the threat actually occurred, Fisher’s posts reveal an ongoing paranoia over being accused of date rape. In his original ‘Welcome to the Red Pill’ post in October 2012, Fisher warned that in today’s feminist world, “A guy can approach a woman, be assertive, and if she’s attracted, there’s a hookup. Yet, if he’s not attractive, this EXACT behavior is “creepy”… If you’re unattractive, feminism tells us, you’re likely a rapist… men are tip-toeing to make sure they don’t accidentally become rapists themselves.” Four years after its founding, “rape hysteria,” remains a central topic of discussion on the forum. On r/TheRedPill, Pk_atheist admitted in December 2012 to supposedly video-taping sexual encounters with women in order to protect against false rape allegations. Men, Fisher said, should always take action to protect themselves against a past partner accusing them of rape. Online, Fisher advised another user to be careful not to offend prior flings whom he’d ghosted. Insulting a woman, he maintained, was likely to set off a deluge of sudden false accusations. “…If she feels insulted, your incidence of false rape accusations or pregnancy scares go waaaaaaaaay up,” he counseled. Fisher said he was not paranoid, but rather “statistically I’m overdue for a false rape allegation.” “You can’t have sex with this many women without getting one,” he argued. In 2008, writing under the username FredFredrickson, Fisher posited that the notion that “rape is bad” was not an absolute truth. He wrote, “I’m going to say it—Rape isn’t an absolute bad, because the rapist I think probably likes it a lot. I think he’d say it’s quite good, really.” Though he stated he “doesn’t advocate breaking the law,” Fisher said online in 2012 that a 40-year-old man asking to see the breasts of a 15-year-old wasn’t creepy. Instead, he said it was “evolutionarily advantageous and perfectly natural.” Besides, Fisher argued, historically, statutory rape and age of consent laws gave the sexes unequal treatment in that only females were given protection under such laws. He noted that these laws were intended to protect “teenage girls” from having their virginity stolen. Indeed, age of consent laws were originally intended to preserve virginity—a “commodity” at the time—however, in Colonial America, where statutory rape was considered a property crime, the age of consent was generally 10 or 12. In 2013, when a video leaked showing former Steubenville High School athlete Michael Nodianos relentlessly making fun of the rape of an unconscious student, whose assault was shared on social media, for over 12 minutes—“She is so raped. Her puss is about as dry as the sun right now,”—Fisher commented, “So a bunch of guys made rape jokes… lacking class for sure, but.. not wtf nor news worthy.” Fisher reflected: “Does freedom of speech no longer apply in this scenario?” Fisher’s blasé comments regarding rape are typical of The Red Pill. Here, posters regularly argue that men are often the true victims, by way of what they refer to as the feminist-fueled lie of rape culture—a lie that amounts, some users say, to a vicious attack on white men, in particular (though Fisher himself never made this claim). Men, Fisher said in 2012, have “zero” protection against false-rape accusations in today’s society. Fisher claimed in 2012 that he took measures to protect himself. “I should feel free to have consensual sex with whomever I please without the worry of a false accusation costing me my job and jail time,” he determined. In service of this freedom, Fishers claimed he installed a video recorder in his room. “There is literally no legal protection I can think of that could eliminate the risk of a previous sexual partner of mine falsely accusing me of rape, no matter what the circumstances. I now have a video recorder in my room,” he posted. In another of the forum’s numerous discussions about false rape allegations, Fisher advised that by posting a sign above your bedroom door stating the premises were under surveillance and, “By entering, you consent to being video and audio taped,” men could shield themselves from prosecution under privacy laws. However, Fisher cited no authority suggesting such a waiver would be legally effective. Fisher also suggested adding an extra layer of protection by inquiring via text to affirm the woman had a good time, and asking if she got home safely after a sexual encounter. “Make sure she responds positively, or ask a few more questions until you have positive confirmation. Can be crucial in regret-rape-accusations,” he advised in 2013. “Regret-rape” accusations refer to the theory that women, to alleviate feelings of guilt, shame or promiscuity, accuse men of rape to detach themselves from responsibility. Men’s rights activists refer to this as an “anti-slut defense,” and have an acronym for it, ASD. As a candidate for state representative, Fisher proposed bringing concerns about the supposed plague of false rape accusations into the statehouse. Hosting a forum on Reddit under the username RobertFisherforNH, Fisher sought ideas to prevent “innocent people [from] receiving jail time.” He argued that because in rape cases “police err on the side of caution,” and show a high level of support for victims, the system was “susceptible to abuse” by women. Among Red Pillers, the notion that women commonly abuse the judicial system for means of retaliation, or “cry rape” for attention, is viewed as a matter-of-fact element of the feminist “agenda.” According to an analysis of Justice Department data by the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), 46 out of 100 rapes are reported to police, nine are prosecuted, and three of those accused serve jail time. At his request, Fisher serves on no committees in the New Hampshire House. Out of the 114 record votes so far during the 2017 session, Fisher has cast votes in half. In the past, Fisher insisted the Red Pill forum is misunderstood: “Unfortunately to the outsider, it just looks like misogyny,” he wrote in 2012, “or like we’re just bitter.” Whether Representative Fisher still holds that view—or any of the others contained in his online posts—remains unknown.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/25/the-republican-lawmaker-who-secretly-created-reddit-s-women-hating-red-pill.html
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On April 26 2017 11:01 Nevuk wrote:Show nested quote +The Republican Lawmaker Who Secretly Created Reddit’s Women-Hating ‘Red Pill’ A web of secret online identities connects the creator of the misogynistic Red Pill forum to a New Hampshire state representative.
Last November, voters in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region re-elected to the state house of representatives a man who appears to be one of the secret architects of the internet’s misogynistic “Manosphere.” The homegrown son of a preacher, 31-year-old Robert Fisher is a Republican who represents New Hampshire’s Belknap County District 9. In addition to his legislative duties, Fisher owns a local computer-repair franchise, and in his spare time, seems to have created the web’s most popular online destination for pickup artistry and men’s rights activists, The Red Pill, according an investigation by the Daily Beast. An investigation into Fisher’s online aliases found a trail of posts linking the lawmaker to the username Pk_atheist, the creator of The Red Pill—an online Reddit community of nearly 200,000 subscribers that promotes itself as a “discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men.” A post by Pk_atheist in the early days of the forum advertises the author’s blog, Dating American, a blog that immediately precipitated the establishment of The Red Pill in 2012 and which was “dedicated to the woes of dating in the American culture.” On the “about the author” section of Dating American, the author, who calls himself “Desmond,” promotes two other blogs he’s “authored”: Existential Vortex and Explain God. Performing a search of the unique URL for Existential Vortex led to a comment on an ex-Christian message board again advertising the blog, existentialvortex.blogspot.com. This post, written under the alias “Interested,” provided the keystone that connected Pk_atheist and Robert Fisher. First, the post revealed the user was the author of Existential Vortex (and thus, Dating American). Second, in the user’s bio, he stated his band—The Five Nines—had a new album out. Robert Fisher is the sole member of his band, The Five Nines.
Though he once cautioned another user to “invest in a decent throwaway” account, Fisher apparently failed to heed his own advice. Fisher’s many online identities spin a large but weak web. Following its thread leads to one identity after another, dating back to high school, when Fisher, a programmer, created a message board used by his friends as a social platform. The website’s name, “Fredrickville,” appears over and over, and provides more links between him and The Red Pill—Fisher’s personal email account uses the name, the same email addresss used to register The Red Pill’s backup landing page, should it ever get taken down. In addition, Fisher’s customized Facebook URL, revealed in a comment on Fredrickville.com, uses the name Facebook.com/Fredrickville. That personalized link formerly led to Fisher’s personal Facebook page, which has recently been deleted. Fisher’s customized URL for his band’s SoundCloud also uses the name. The Reddit alias Panderific also appears to belong to Fisher. A post by Panderific in 2012 advertising his blog Explain God—a blog by the same author as Existential Vortex—revealed an additional trove of thousands of Panderific’s comments. In one, from March 2012, he disclosed that he was running for office in New Hampshire, and promoted his candidate website—which was Robert Fisher’s own site, electfisher.org. It’s possible that now, four-and-a-half years after Red Pill’s founding, Fisher may regret his creation. When reached for comment by phone, Fisher denied participation in the Red Pill forum, claiming not to know what The Red Pill was. Though he did say he had heard of the men’s rights movement, he said he hadn’t heard of PUA. “What is a pickup artist?” he asked. Within hours of contacting Rep. Fisher, and after delivering by email a summary of his apparent connections to The Red Pill kingpin, his two primary Reddit usernames had been wiped, and four blogs connected to him were deleted or made private. He has not returned additional requests for comment. Online, Fisher describes himself as an “attractive businessman” who owns a “small empire.” According to his Facebook, he is the COO of Same Day Computer, which operates two locations in New Hampshire. He was also the sole member of his indie-electronic band, The Five Nines, which may or may not still be active. (Fisher’s last upload on his SoundCloud was in August 2012—but as recently as this year, Fisher’s Facebook page still included this role in his bio.) Fisher purchased the computer-repair franchise from its founder, failed New Hampshire state senate candidate Joshua Youssef, who, according to the Concord Monitor, violated state election law by publishing a deceptive blog to “make it appear that his ex-wife’s attorney had endorsed his candidacy.” Youssef, himself active in the men’s rights movement, launched a prolonged tirade against the “feminist judicial tyranny” via the New Hampshire House’s unique Redress of Grievances Committee in response to an acrimonious divorce and child-custody battle, wherein a judge in family court temporarily stripped him of visitation rights. Youssef also sat on Donald Trump’s New Hampshire leadership team. Recently, he appeared on a CNN voter panel in defense of President Trump’s claims that millions of people cast illegal votes—Youssef claimed he’d witnessed rampant voter fraud.
On Reddit’s Men’s Rights forum, where Youssef described “the corruption, greed, lies, and abject depravity of the feminist system…” that had supposedly affected his child-custody case, Fisher appeared sympathetic to Youssef’s plight. Under the username RobertFisherForNH, in March 2013, Fisher chimed in on behalf of his friend and colleague and his ordeal and blasted the courts for being unfair to Youssef. Youssef and Fisher aren’t the only New Hampshire politicos to have espoused anti-feminist beliefs. In 2015, New Hampshire State Rep. Al Baldasaro, a Republican, publicly mocked the breasts of fellow female lawmakers in the name of protecting “family values.” The comment stemmed from disagreement over a bill authored solely by male lawmakers that would have made it illegal for women to purposefully expose their areolas in public for breastfeeding or other purposes. And yet Fisher’s past comments on a host of Reddit forums are arguably far more disturbing than what his colleagues have said in public. He blasted women for their “sub-par intelligence.” He said that women’s personalities are “lackluster and boring, serving little purpose in day to day life.” And Fisher once commented, “It is literally the [female] body that makes enduring these things worth it.” In a state with one representative to every 3,200 people, many of Fisher’s female constituents are likely to know him personally—whether or not they know what he’d once posted about women online. And those comments were just the start. In 2016, Fisher, who has since stepped down from his role as lead moderator of The Red Pill, praised the success of the community. Under the alias Pk_atheist, he wrote, “It’s very impressive to see how things have grown.” Explaining that though he had become only a sporadic contributor, Fisher stated in another thread that he still keeps in contact with members of the community “IRL.” Summoned by the question “Whatever happened to our founder pk_atheist?” in October 2016, Fisher stated, in his last comment ever on the forum, “I’m not dead. I pop in occasionally.” TAKING THE RED PILL When The Red Pill was established in October 2012, Fisher was mere weeks away from losing his first campaign (in which he ran as a Democrat). By the time he finally won a seat in the New Hampshire House in November 2014, the Red Pill community had grown from fewer than 500 readers to 83,000. Today, though Fisher is now only an intermittent contributor, the community has grown to more than 195,000 dedicated subscribers, and likely many more readers. The Red Pill borrows its name from a scene in “The Matrix” in which Morpheus offers Neo a choice between two realities: “You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill… and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” In manosphere-speak, the rabbit hole is feminism, which the red pill reveals to be a War on Men. In this reality, the “feminine imperative” reigns; masculinity is its victim. As a result of this power struggle, old gender dynamics formerly seen as mutually beneficial, such as marriage, have all but disappeared, but female expectations of a pedestalled life unfairly remain. A common refrain among men’s rights activists is “take the pussy off the pedestal.” The Red Pill guides men as they become accustomed to this new “reality.” It advocates self-improvement: the importance of diet, exercise, and constant learning. But this community also subscribes to the beliefs that women lack both intelligence and substance, are programed to cheat on their partners, and expire after the age of 30. Its darkest sections are heavy with rape denial and apologia. Of several notorious “red pillers” who frequent the forum is Milo Yiannopoulos, who did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) last year. Yiannopoulous recently resigned from his post as senior editor at Breibart News following comments he made that were interpreted on both sides of the political aisle as condoning pedophilia and child molestation. (On Facebook, Yiannopoulous contended that his comments were selectively edited and taken out of context. Later, in a news conference announcing his resignation, Yiannopoulous stated that some of his comments were “simply wrong.”) A frequent reader of r/TheRedPill, Yiannopolous is popular among subscribers, which is not surprising: His brand resonates with the community that also blames feminism for subjugating men into second-class citizens. Yiannopoulos, a gay man who in his AMA described transgender people as having a “brain disease,” says today’s feminist-driven society pays no heed to “laws that men’s rights advocates are complaining about.” Indeed, men’s rights activists often do complain of the “injustices” they face: for instance, child support and alimony laws that they say women abuse. Red Pillers call this “divorce rape:” trapping men into marriage, sometimes by a pregnancy originally calculated for such an exploitation, followed by a divorce in which women reap cash prizes. In a post from 2012, Fisher explained that the con “…is why feminism pushes to increase alimony and child support. In the USA where feminism is completely unchecked, women can meet another man and profit from having two providers instead of one. Alimony and child support will ensure her lifestyle isn’t the one that suffers. The only risk a woman has for leaving her husband is if she’s too old and ugly to hook another guy. But even then, the amount of money she can get from her ex-husband is almost criminal.” On The Red Pill, Fisher commonly expressed disappointment that the institutions of marriage and religion were destroyed by women’s equality. He maintained that as a result of financial independence, women were no longer compelled to remain faithful and as a result, men needed to protectively adapt their sexual strategy. “Marriage, and yes, female oppression, slut shaming, religion, these were all a means to control hypergamy [infidelity]. Marriages might be considered loveless, and women might have been unhappy, but for men it meant marriages that lasted, commitments that continued, and protection against the fickle whims of females,” Fisher wrote on The Red Pill in November 2012. “To give women autonomy is to take away the very thing that made marriage a realistic institution… what I dislike is the general attitude that somehow we owe [women] something for sex… Women enjoy the autonomy that feminism has afforded them… But don’t expect the relics from back in the day to continue to benefit you without the sacrifices you were making,” Fisher wrote on his blog Dating American, in 2012—just weeks before establishing The Red Pill. Though ideas like this existed prior to The Red Pill’s creation, Fisher’s platform provided a crucial congregating place for this new brand of seduction, which marries men’s rights and sexual strategy, and which gave the ideology a platform on which to flourish. According to The Red Pill, among the most egregious contradictions of feminism is the audacity of feminists to seek equality, but then take no responsibility for it. “Understand that in the old days, women were not brought up the way they are today. Before feminism, there was less freedom, and therefore it was not necessary to teach women consequence. Consequence was strictly a man’s game. Feminism took the lid off pandora’s box, but the mothers, and the daughters of those mothers never internalized, learned, or passed down the concept of responsibility for their freedoms, only the freedom itself.” Fisher wrote in 2013. In addition to anti-feminist screeds, The Red Pill teaches “sexual strategy.” This includes how to “spin plates,” or balance sleeping with several women at once; how to respond to women’s “shit-tests,” a social device used to determine a suitor’s “fitness”; and how to practice “negging,” a game tactic involving a backhanded compliment calculated to undermine confidence and make a woman more vulnerable to advances. Red Pillers practice “dread game,” or intentionally instilling “dread” in a partner that you have other options, and various other techniques. Of gaming women, Fisher said, “[Women have] absolutely done this to themselves. I feel zero regret or shame pumping and dumping.” By May 2014, Fisher, then running for state representative, had apparently mastered the art of “spinning plates.” He bragged: “I spin a soft harem.” As opposed to a harem, a “soft harem” means the women are mostly unaware of each other, though they are sometimes strategically given hints about the availability of other women. Yet even as he bragged about his conquests, Fisher also groused bitterly about dating hurdles. “Dude, I’m attractive and a business man. I own a small empire. I’m also running for political office, and I’m incredibly outgoing… And this site [OkCupid] files me in next to millions of other guys. Obviously I’m going to have more luck IRL,” Fisher wrote to another user in 2012. Elsewhere, he wondered why listing his accomplishments on dates, including his status as a candidate and “high level exec,” was apparently a turnoff to women, despite it being characteristically alpha. On a forum subtitled “Contemplative Dominance for the Modern Man,” under the username FredFredrickson, Fisher complained in 2012, “I cannot be honest about my accomplishments or ambitions without ridicule. I am running for a state political position, I’m a high level exec in a franchising company, and I own two business locations in state. I found that stating it simply… nets me negativity on dates if I’m honest.” Fisher seemed obsessed with the negative effects feminism was having on his dating experience. He documented his complaints on dating, men’s rights, and seduction forums, including one specifically dedicated to OkCupid. He complained that girls were ghosting on him and standing him up. He aired grievances about the character of women: They were uninteresting, immature, unintelligent, lacked depth, and were entitled. He bemoaned that dating was easier for women. He felt it was unjust that women get a free ride, believing “a pair of boobs grants [them] equal footing with somebody bringing intelligence or a personality.” Over time, Fisher’s writing became increasingly hostile. He decided that existing seduction and pickup forums were overly “feminized,” complaining about “white knights” and their misdirected admonitions about “creepy” behavior (which he believed works as a dating strategy). It was this plight of navigating a post-feminist sexual marketplace, one where “the entirety of the male experience [is] wrought with rejection and ego-destroying experiences,” that led Fisher to establish The Red Pill. That, and a soul-crushing breakup. Fisher’s pseudonym on The Red Pill, Pk_atheist, was meaningful. “Pk,” which stands for “preacher’s kid,” and “atheist” signified an existential crisis of identity Fisher underwent upon losing his faith—a journey that began in 2008. In the aftermath, he philosophized extensively about religion and morality on his two blogs Explain God and Existential Vortex. In 2011, he took to Fredrickville—posting a revealing tell-all. Aside a photo of himself on a beach, Fisher wrote about how his existential crisis plunged him into a depression, worsened by a difficult breakup. “I felt so damaged that indeed I saw the public as the enemy. I did what a good engineer does. I identified the system, and started building rules to encounter various forms of damage that may occur in the future,” Fisher wrote. “But the damage I wanted to avoid was emotional hurt towards me. I had never known so much pain from somebody so close to me; I wanted to avoid that like it was death itself.” RAPE AND THE RED PILL Part of the pain inflicted on him by one of his exes, or so Fisher claimed: the alleged threat of a rape accusation against him. Fisher claimed online that during a bitter breakup, an ex-girlfriend threatened to accuse him of rape. “She didn’t follow through, thank god,” Fisher, under the alias Pk_atheist, wrote in 2012. Whether or not the threat actually occurred, Fisher’s posts reveal an ongoing paranoia over being accused of date rape. In his original ‘Welcome to the Red Pill’ post in October 2012, Fisher warned that in today’s feminist world, “A guy can approach a woman, be assertive, and if she’s attracted, there’s a hookup. Yet, if he’s not attractive, this EXACT behavior is “creepy”… If you’re unattractive, feminism tells us, you’re likely a rapist… men are tip-toeing to make sure they don’t accidentally become rapists themselves.” Four years after its founding, “rape hysteria,” remains a central topic of discussion on the forum. On r/TheRedPill, Pk_atheist admitted in December 2012 to supposedly video-taping sexual encounters with women in order to protect against false rape allegations. Men, Fisher said, should always take action to protect themselves against a past partner accusing them of rape. Online, Fisher advised another user to be careful not to offend prior flings whom he’d ghosted. Insulting a woman, he maintained, was likely to set off a deluge of sudden false accusations. “…If she feels insulted, your incidence of false rape accusations or pregnancy scares go waaaaaaaaay up,” he counseled. Fisher said he was not paranoid, but rather “statistically I’m overdue for a false rape allegation.” “You can’t have sex with this many women without getting one,” he argued. In 2008, writing under the username FredFredrickson, Fisher posited that the notion that “rape is bad” was not an absolute truth. He wrote, “I’m going to say it—Rape isn’t an absolute bad, because the rapist I think probably likes it a lot. I think he’d say it’s quite good, really.” Though he stated he “doesn’t advocate breaking the law,” Fisher said online in 2012 that a 40-year-old man asking to see the breasts of a 15-year-old wasn’t creepy. Instead, he said it was “evolutionarily advantageous and perfectly natural.” Besides, Fisher argued, historically, statutory rape and age of consent laws gave the sexes unequal treatment in that only females were given protection under such laws. He noted that these laws were intended to protect “teenage girls” from having their virginity stolen. Indeed, age of consent laws were originally intended to preserve virginity—a “commodity” at the time—however, in Colonial America, where statutory rape was considered a property crime, the age of consent was generally 10 or 12. In 2013, when a video leaked showing former Steubenville High School athlete Michael Nodianos relentlessly making fun of the rape of an unconscious student, whose assault was shared on social media, for over 12 minutes—“She is so raped. Her puss is about as dry as the sun right now,”—Fisher commented, “So a bunch of guys made rape jokes… lacking class for sure, but.. not wtf nor news worthy.” Fisher reflected: “Does freedom of speech no longer apply in this scenario?” Fisher’s blasé comments regarding rape are typical of The Red Pill. Here, posters regularly argue that men are often the true victims, by way of what they refer to as the feminist-fueled lie of rape culture—a lie that amounts, some users say, to a vicious attack on white men, in particular (though Fisher himself never made this claim). Men, Fisher said in 2012, have “zero” protection against false-rape accusations in today’s society. Fisher claimed in 2012 that he took measures to protect himself. “I should feel free to have consensual sex with whomever I please without the worry of a false accusation costing me my job and jail time,” he determined. In service of this freedom, Fishers claimed he installed a video recorder in his room. “There is literally no legal protection I can think of that could eliminate the risk of a previous sexual partner of mine falsely accusing me of rape, no matter what the circumstances. I now have a video recorder in my room,” he posted. In another of the forum’s numerous discussions about false rape allegations, Fisher advised that by posting a sign above your bedroom door stating the premises were under surveillance and, “By entering, you consent to being video and audio taped,” men could shield themselves from prosecution under privacy laws. However, Fisher cited no authority suggesting such a waiver would be legally effective. Fisher also suggested adding an extra layer of protection by inquiring via text to affirm the woman had a good time, and asking if she got home safely after a sexual encounter. “Make sure she responds positively, or ask a few more questions until you have positive confirmation. Can be crucial in regret-rape-accusations,” he advised in 2013. “Regret-rape” accusations refer to the theory that women, to alleviate feelings of guilt, shame or promiscuity, accuse men of rape to detach themselves from responsibility. Men’s rights activists refer to this as an “anti-slut defense,” and have an acronym for it, ASD. As a candidate for state representative, Fisher proposed bringing concerns about the supposed plague of false rape accusations into the statehouse. Hosting a forum on Reddit under the username RobertFisherforNH, Fisher sought ideas to prevent “innocent people [from] receiving jail time.” He argued that because in rape cases “police err on the side of caution,” and show a high level of support for victims, the system was “susceptible to abuse” by women. Among Red Pillers, the notion that women commonly abuse the judicial system for means of retaliation, or “cry rape” for attention, is viewed as a matter-of-fact element of the feminist “agenda.” According to an analysis of Justice Department data by the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), 46 out of 100 rapes are reported to police, nine are prosecuted, and three of those accused serve jail time. At his request, Fisher serves on no committees in the New Hampshire House. Out of the 114 record votes so far during the 2017 session, Fisher has cast votes in half. In the past, Fisher insisted the Red Pill forum is misunderstood: “Unfortunately to the outsider, it just looks like misogyny,” he wrote in 2012, “or like we’re just bitter.” Whether Representative Fisher still holds that view—or any of the others contained in his online posts—remains unknown.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/25/the-republican-lawmaker-who-secretly-created-reddit-s-women-hating-red-pill.html
So I've been thinking about it for a while.
Would it be worthwhile to use a summary for any article which is awfully long to quote? It doesn't make sense to read it.
Using this: http://smmry.com/
the massive block of text above in the default of 7 sentences is:
The Republican Lawmaker Who Secretly Created Reddit's Women-Hating 'Red Pill'
The homegrown son of a preacher, 31-year-old Robert Fisher is a Republican who represents New Hampshire's Belknap County District 9.
In addition to his legislative duties, Fisher owns a local computer-repair franchise, and in his spare time, seems to have created the web's most popular online destination for pickup artistry and men's rights activists, The Red Pill, according an investigation by the Daily Beast.
Following its thread leads to one identity after another, dating back to high school, when Fisher, a programmer, created a message board used by his friends as a social platform.
Within hours of contacting Rep. Fisher, and after delivering by email a summary of his apparent connections to The Red Pill kingpin, his two primary Reddit usernames had been wiped, and four blogs connected to him were deleted or made private.
On The Red Pill, Fisher commonly expressed disappointment that the institutions of marriage and religion were destroyed by women's equality.
"To give women autonomy is to take away the very thing that made marriage a realistic institution what I dislike is the general attitude that somehow we owe [women] something for sex Women enjoy the autonomy that feminism has afforded them But don't expect the relics from back in the day to continue to benefit you without the sacrifices you were making," Fisher wrote on his blog Dating American, in 2012-just weeks before establishing The Red Pill.
In the past, Fisher insisted the Red Pill forum is misunderstood: "Unfortunately to the outsider, it just looks like misogyny," he wrote in 2012, "Or like we're just bitter." Whether Representative Fisher still holds that view-or any of the others contained in his online posts-remains unknown.
It's missing a lot of info, but does an admirable job of catching most of the main points. Do link to the source, if anyone wants to read the whole thing, but the summary is good enough to discuss.
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On April 26 2017 08:56 Leporello wrote: I mean, are you saying I need to provide the dictionary-definition of the word? Oh, yeah, no double-standard being raised here! Sorry, I'd like to give people more credit than that. And that actually is what you're saying. I need to define words... Really?
You were asked for YOUR definition.
For example, to prevent you typing out another 500 words with very little meaning, here is my definition:
Consciousness: The ability to perceive and react to one's environment, including self awareness.
I typically ignore bad comments, but you clearly put a lot of effort into that bad post. Be concrete.
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Oh shit. I hope this ruins that guy's political career, but these days I'm not sure it will.
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On April 26 2017 08:56 Leporello wrote:+ Show Spoiler ++ Show Spoiler +On April 26 2017 04:45 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2017 02:19 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 02:14 Acrofales wrote:On April 26 2017 01:50 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:47 Acrofales wrote:On April 26 2017 01:46 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:38 IgnE wrote:On April 26 2017 01:30 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:27 IgnE wrote:On April 26 2017 01:21 Leporello wrote: [quote]
Yes. Human brain-functions.
I'm generally pro-choice, but I can't quite the understand the detachment in saying that a late-term fetus has no bodily rights. Shortly before birth, it's just a baby in the womb.
A cesarean operation, for example, doesn't endow the baby with sentience. It's just opening up the womb and removing the baby that exists. You can't say it's removing a parasite.
Parasitic=/=parasite. A late-term fetus is parasitic, absolutely. But it is not, factually speaking, a parasite.
Denying the sentience of a late-term fetus doesn't do pro-choicers any credit. This is exactly the type of middle-ground that both sides need to move towards, and where we should rely heavily on clinical metrics. By which I don't mean calling it a parasite. I love House MD as much as anybody, but it's a bit sensationalist, imo. so do you eat pork? do you think a post-birth baby has more or less "human-like" brain functions than an adult pig? do you eat octopus? I was a vegetarian for many years. But, uh, what? We're talking about human babies. Not pigs. I'm genuinely not sure what this comparison is supposed to prove. But, yes, I do think a human baby is more human than an adult pig... Wow. A late-term fetus has sentience. It is human sentience. Abstract, and in many ways, lesser. But still human. This is going right off the deep-end. Again, denying the human-nature of late-term fetuses is really just fuel for the fire, and nothing more. so you are talking about soul-stuff here. "human-nature?" ousia? what makes it human? dna? a blastocyst is also human? are you telling me ANY level of consciousness in combination with human dna is privileged with all the rights of a human person? do you not see how that is just essentialist soul-stuff? No, I am talking about consciousness. I don't believe in the "soul". Argue fairly, if you want to falsely categorize me to this extent then I'll just move on. If you really want to have this discussion, define consciousness. Also define human consciousness. No. I am asking people to consider the consciousness of a late-term fetus. The deflections... Jesus Christ. I'm not defining, in absolute terms, what is consciousness, which is scientifically impossible, currently (which is why the mirror test is BS). I'm just asking "does a late-term fetus have a consciousness?" We do know consciousness exists, obviously. And we can detect it, often through common-sense means, but also from brain-waves. EEG. The struggles to avoid answering the question simply is kind of... I am disappointed. I'll take a break. Because, I'm a little flustered at the inane deflections. If your guys' answer to people's concerns towards late-term abortions is to compare human-babies to pigs, or declare them simply "not human", then this discourse is permanently fucked. You're the ones drawing a line that shouldn't exist and can't be defined -- or should I say, is already clearly defined. If we can't accept that new-born babies are human, anatomically, biologically, common-sense, human, with a sentience that is human, then we've gone off the deep-end. You're the one who brought up consciousness and human consciousness as if they were categorically different. And then when someone said "well, that's basically a soul" got all upset. Either define the difference between "mere" consciousness and human consciousness or accept that pigs are people too. Albeit rather diminished people who walk around on 4 hoofs and habitually get turned into bacon. Hmmmm. Bacon. No. I don't have to define the consciousness itself, all I have to do is define the being that possesses said consciousness. And, for starters, it's not a pig. You guys are creating arbitrary goalposts that science can't define. And yet, what I'm continually asking us is to consider what science can define. And the difference in biology between a late-term fetus and a newborn is...? Not much. The biological differences are much greater during the middle-stages of pregnancy. Somewhere in there are developmental stages that we should consider, clinically. And the reason we should do so is not just create a more "humane" law, but to cool the discourse. One side wants to say, "all life is sacred", and the other seems to reject any notion that humanity exists at all, at least not until the person is walking and talking. LOL, I've honestly just been looking for middle-ground. LOL. It's so bad. Sorry, but if you want to be able to use words in a meaningful way, you need to be able to define what they mean. I am pretty sure that a large amount of disagreements could be resolved simply by people taking the effort to actually define what they mean when they say words, as opposed to saying "Well it is obvious!". If it is obvious, it shouldn't be hard to put it into words. If you can't put it into words, then it isn't obvious. And if your definition of "consciousness" is simply "Something that has something to do with the and, which a human has, but a pig does not", you are gonna run into tons of problems, because that is a shitty definition.Maybe it is just me coming from a maths background, but seriously, it is exhausting to talk to people who are unwilling to define the concepts they use, and then get angry that not everyone has the same view of that concept as they do. I am not even sure if i disagree with what you want to say, because it is very unclear what you actually want to say. You got lost in a semantic argument because you are using poorly defined terms. Discussions become way better, and are far less filled with semantics arguments if the words you use to describe stuff are well defined and clear. I don't think people honestly disagree with the end result you seem to be hinting at, namely that you probably shouldn't abort 8th month pregnancies, and that the point in time until which it is probably ok is somewhere in the middle of the pregnancy. Afaik most countries use something like 12 weeks, unless there are special circumstances. Except that is not how I defined consciousness. It is much more how other's itt decided to define consciousness. And that is/was a completely unnecessary obscurity. Consciousness is a scientifically obscure area, yes. But it is still, nonetheless, something that we know exists, and is rather crucial to defining life. Something with a consciousness can experience suffering. I suppose it bothers some to admit that a late-term fetus would experience suffering, but... they do. That is certain -- it is a certainty you can ask any woman who's ever carried a pregnancy to term. The fetus makes its suffering and impatience quite known to the mother throughout the later-stages of pregnancy. Which is why most mothers at this stage surely don't even refer to it as a fetus, but as a baby. "My baby kicked." Perhaps I should have said "brain activity". But I get the feeling it would not have helped at all, and people would have still questioned whether it exists or is human for the same reasons. Do you think it would've made a difference? Consciousness, not being scientifically understood to fucking absolution, doesn't mean it should be banned from discussion in any serious matter. We do know what it means in laymans's terms. Right? Or are you saying otherwise? I mean, are you saying I need to provide the dictionary-definition of the word? Oh, yeah, no double-standard being raised here! Sorry, I'd like to give people more credit than that. And that actually is what you're saying. I need to define words... Really? Instead of simply acknowledging consciousness, simply as we know it exists, people decided to, imo, cop-out of the question by simply ignoring the fact that consciousness does exist, and instead focused on forcing an impossibly precise definition to something that is not wholly material. Which, for fuck's sake, is not akin to calling it a "soul", as one was eager to put in my mouth, but rather as a process. And what's the point of that? To declare that a fetus doesn't have consciousness? No, they didn't even really argue that to any extent, and it's the only point that actually matters. Apparently they do agree via omission, that fetuses do have consciousnesses. But instead, I'm asked to question the consciousness as being human...? And that saddens me. I think it's just nonsense. It's a consciousness, it kicks and moves on its own terms, and it belongs to a developing human. It is that simple. Or it should have been. And I take ZERO fault for people complicating it. The deflection and pack-mentality has been quite strong in this discussion. And, yes, I know I'm arguing with people that mostly agree with me in regards to the law itself. But this desire to dehumanize what is human, to such extent, as if it's just as likely a pig or a parasite in the womb, is partly what makes discourse on the subject impossible, from both sides. And that is my concern, more than the law itself. And I'm not so sure we do agree on what the law should be, sadly. Late-term abortions are currently just next to illegal, but I get the feeling Kwark and others would just as happily allow all of them, and I think it's obvious that I would not be comfortable with that.
Yo . . . wtf? I want to believe you are smarter than this. I don't even know how to respond.
You know that no one is arguing with you about whether at some point a fetus/baby develops consciousness right?
Right?
The discussion is about the nature of consciousness and your invocation of soul-stuff by appealing to a human eidos/ousia to differentiate a fetus's consciousness from a pig's consciousness. Or do you think that babies experience the world like you do?
Read your bolded bits again when you aren't drunk and tell me that you don't see soul-talk embedded in there.
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I was prompted to read something about the Mello controversy. The article is pretty savage towards the DNC, it details Mello as a mostly exemplary red-state progressive with personal pro-life views. It says that he didn't vote for a bill which mandated that women should have ultrasounds before abortion, this was misinformation spread by the DNC. Instead he voted for a bill which gave women the choice to have an ultrasound, which is far less malicious. For the last several years he voted 100% with Planned Parenthood.
So basically the DNC threw him under the bus because they didn't bother to check their facts and now lost the opportunity to have a Democrat as the mayor of the largest city in a deep red state.
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People in this thread were comparing the law to other nonsensical requirements before abortions, calling it an unnecessary barrier, etc
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On April 26 2017 14:51 Grumbels wrote:( source) I was prompted to read something about the Mello controversy. The article is pretty savage towards the DNC, it details Mello as a mostly exemplary red-state progressive with personal pro-life views. It says that he didn't vote for a bill which mandated that women should have ultrasounds before abortion, this was misinformation spread by the DNC. Instead he voted for a bill which gave women the choice to have an ultrasound, which is far less malicious. For the last several years he voted 100% with Planned Parenthood. So basically the DNC threw him under the bus because they didn't bother to check their facts and now lost the opportunity to have a Democrat as the mayor of the largest city in a deep red state. Yes, the DNC acted like complete idiots in this case and I'm struggling to understand why. On the one hand it's not particularly consequential, but multiply this by a thousand and it's no wonder why the party is getting slaughtered in essentially all non-safe local elections.
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On April 26 2017 14:59 a_flayer wrote: People in this thread were comparing the law to other nonsensical requirements before abortions, calling it an unnecessary barrier, etc Well, I remember there being confusion in this thread about whether this bill was mandating ultrasounds or requiring doctors to inform about offering ultrasounds, and this confusion probably comes from misinformation which originated from the WSJ and acted upon by the DNC&Co.
I think offering ultrasounds can be still be construed as part of a wider strategy to create obstacles, and that's I why don't necessarily think this is a completely harmless idea. afaik it forces doctors to inform patients about a procedure the doctor might not think is in the patient's best interest. But certainly it's not as bad as mandating ultrasounds, and for a pro-life politician in Nebraska it's positively benign. I mean, what else do people expect? For Mello to walk around with banners that state: THE FETUS IS A PARASITE, and have a completely perfect voting record on every issue?
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On April 26 2017 14:59 a_flayer wrote: People in this thread were comparing the law to other nonsensical requirements before abortions, calling it an unnecessary barrier, etc Again - no one ever answered my question the first time around - what precedent is there for government mandated medical processes?
Let's say, for example, 2 years down the road ultrasounds are obsolete or found harmful. Medical board or doctors can no longer make this call now, because the government ruled they have to offer them?
Or, considering that medical procedures in the US are not covered by public programs, how is this not government mandated advertising?
Plenty of questions about why the government should be allowed to get involved in medical rules, but people just want to make this the same abortion debate.
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On April 26 2017 11:25 Lmui wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2017 11:01 Nevuk wrote:The Republican Lawmaker Who Secretly Created Reddit’s Women-Hating ‘Red Pill’ A web of secret online identities connects the creator of the misogynistic Red Pill forum to a New Hampshire state representative.
Last November, voters in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region re-elected to the state house of representatives a man who appears to be one of the secret architects of the internet’s misogynistic “Manosphere.” The homegrown son of a preacher, 31-year-old Robert Fisher is a Republican who represents New Hampshire’s Belknap County District 9. In addition to his legislative duties, Fisher owns a local computer-repair franchise, and in his spare time, seems to have created the web’s most popular online destination for pickup artistry and men’s rights activists, The Red Pill, according an investigation by the Daily Beast. An investigation into Fisher’s online aliases found a trail of posts linking the lawmaker to the username Pk_atheist, the creator of The Red Pill—an online Reddit community of nearly 200,000 subscribers that promotes itself as a “discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men.” A post by Pk_atheist in the early days of the forum advertises the author’s blog, Dating American, a blog that immediately precipitated the establishment of The Red Pill in 2012 and which was “dedicated to the woes of dating in the American culture.” On the “about the author” section of Dating American, the author, who calls himself “Desmond,” promotes two other blogs he’s “authored”: Existential Vortex and Explain God. Performing a search of the unique URL for Existential Vortex led to a comment on an ex-Christian message board again advertising the blog, existentialvortex.blogspot.com. This post, written under the alias “Interested,” provided the keystone that connected Pk_atheist and Robert Fisher. First, the post revealed the user was the author of Existential Vortex (and thus, Dating American). Second, in the user’s bio, he stated his band—The Five Nines—had a new album out. Robert Fisher is the sole member of his band, The Five Nines.
Though he once cautioned another user to “invest in a decent throwaway” account, Fisher apparently failed to heed his own advice. Fisher’s many online identities spin a large but weak web. Following its thread leads to one identity after another, dating back to high school, when Fisher, a programmer, created a message board used by his friends as a social platform. The website’s name, “Fredrickville,” appears over and over, and provides more links between him and The Red Pill—Fisher’s personal email account uses the name, the same email addresss used to register The Red Pill’s backup landing page, should it ever get taken down. In addition, Fisher’s customized Facebook URL, revealed in a comment on Fredrickville.com, uses the name Facebook.com/Fredrickville. That personalized link formerly led to Fisher’s personal Facebook page, which has recently been deleted. Fisher’s customized URL for his band’s SoundCloud also uses the name. The Reddit alias Panderific also appears to belong to Fisher. A post by Panderific in 2012 advertising his blog Explain God—a blog by the same author as Existential Vortex—revealed an additional trove of thousands of Panderific’s comments. In one, from March 2012, he disclosed that he was running for office in New Hampshire, and promoted his candidate website—which was Robert Fisher’s own site, electfisher.org. It’s possible that now, four-and-a-half years after Red Pill’s founding, Fisher may regret his creation. When reached for comment by phone, Fisher denied participation in the Red Pill forum, claiming not to know what The Red Pill was. Though he did say he had heard of the men’s rights movement, he said he hadn’t heard of PUA. “What is a pickup artist?” he asked. Within hours of contacting Rep. Fisher, and after delivering by email a summary of his apparent connections to The Red Pill kingpin, his two primary Reddit usernames had been wiped, and four blogs connected to him were deleted or made private. He has not returned additional requests for comment. Online, Fisher describes himself as an “attractive businessman” who owns a “small empire.” According to his Facebook, he is the COO of Same Day Computer, which operates two locations in New Hampshire. He was also the sole member of his indie-electronic band, The Five Nines, which may or may not still be active. (Fisher’s last upload on his SoundCloud was in August 2012—but as recently as this year, Fisher’s Facebook page still included this role in his bio.) Fisher purchased the computer-repair franchise from its founder, failed New Hampshire state senate candidate Joshua Youssef, who, according to the Concord Monitor, violated state election law by publishing a deceptive blog to “make it appear that his ex-wife’s attorney had endorsed his candidacy.” Youssef, himself active in the men’s rights movement, launched a prolonged tirade against the “feminist judicial tyranny” via the New Hampshire House’s unique Redress of Grievances Committee in response to an acrimonious divorce and child-custody battle, wherein a judge in family court temporarily stripped him of visitation rights. Youssef also sat on Donald Trump’s New Hampshire leadership team. Recently, he appeared on a CNN voter panel in defense of President Trump’s claims that millions of people cast illegal votes—Youssef claimed he’d witnessed rampant voter fraud.
On Reddit’s Men’s Rights forum, where Youssef described “the corruption, greed, lies, and abject depravity of the feminist system…” that had supposedly affected his child-custody case, Fisher appeared sympathetic to Youssef’s plight. Under the username RobertFisherForNH, in March 2013, Fisher chimed in on behalf of his friend and colleague and his ordeal and blasted the courts for being unfair to Youssef. Youssef and Fisher aren’t the only New Hampshire politicos to have espoused anti-feminist beliefs. In 2015, New Hampshire State Rep. Al Baldasaro, a Republican, publicly mocked the breasts of fellow female lawmakers in the name of protecting “family values.” The comment stemmed from disagreement over a bill authored solely by male lawmakers that would have made it illegal for women to purposefully expose their areolas in public for breastfeeding or other purposes. And yet Fisher’s past comments on a host of Reddit forums are arguably far more disturbing than what his colleagues have said in public. He blasted women for their “sub-par intelligence.” He said that women’s personalities are “lackluster and boring, serving little purpose in day to day life.” And Fisher once commented, “It is literally the [female] body that makes enduring these things worth it.” In a state with one representative to every 3,200 people, many of Fisher’s female constituents are likely to know him personally—whether or not they know what he’d once posted about women online. And those comments were just the start. In 2016, Fisher, who has since stepped down from his role as lead moderator of The Red Pill, praised the success of the community. Under the alias Pk_atheist, he wrote, “It’s very impressive to see how things have grown.” Explaining that though he had become only a sporadic contributor, Fisher stated in another thread that he still keeps in contact with members of the community “IRL.” Summoned by the question “Whatever happened to our founder pk_atheist?” in October 2016, Fisher stated, in his last comment ever on the forum, “I’m not dead. I pop in occasionally.” TAKING THE RED PILL When The Red Pill was established in October 2012, Fisher was mere weeks away from losing his first campaign (in which he ran as a Democrat). By the time he finally won a seat in the New Hampshire House in November 2014, the Red Pill community had grown from fewer than 500 readers to 83,000. Today, though Fisher is now only an intermittent contributor, the community has grown to more than 195,000 dedicated subscribers, and likely many more readers. The Red Pill borrows its name from a scene in “The Matrix” in which Morpheus offers Neo a choice between two realities: “You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill… and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” In manosphere-speak, the rabbit hole is feminism, which the red pill reveals to be a War on Men. In this reality, the “feminine imperative” reigns; masculinity is its victim. As a result of this power struggle, old gender dynamics formerly seen as mutually beneficial, such as marriage, have all but disappeared, but female expectations of a pedestalled life unfairly remain. A common refrain among men’s rights activists is “take the pussy off the pedestal.” The Red Pill guides men as they become accustomed to this new “reality.” It advocates self-improvement: the importance of diet, exercise, and constant learning. But this community also subscribes to the beliefs that women lack both intelligence and substance, are programed to cheat on their partners, and expire after the age of 30. Its darkest sections are heavy with rape denial and apologia. Of several notorious “red pillers” who frequent the forum is Milo Yiannopoulos, who did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) last year. Yiannopoulous recently resigned from his post as senior editor at Breibart News following comments he made that were interpreted on both sides of the political aisle as condoning pedophilia and child molestation. (On Facebook, Yiannopoulous contended that his comments were selectively edited and taken out of context. Later, in a news conference announcing his resignation, Yiannopoulous stated that some of his comments were “simply wrong.”) A frequent reader of r/TheRedPill, Yiannopolous is popular among subscribers, which is not surprising: His brand resonates with the community that also blames feminism for subjugating men into second-class citizens. Yiannopoulos, a gay man who in his AMA described transgender people as having a “brain disease,” says today’s feminist-driven society pays no heed to “laws that men’s rights advocates are complaining about.” Indeed, men’s rights activists often do complain of the “injustices” they face: for instance, child support and alimony laws that they say women abuse. Red Pillers call this “divorce rape:” trapping men into marriage, sometimes by a pregnancy originally calculated for such an exploitation, followed by a divorce in which women reap cash prizes. In a post from 2012, Fisher explained that the con “…is why feminism pushes to increase alimony and child support. In the USA where feminism is completely unchecked, women can meet another man and profit from having two providers instead of one. Alimony and child support will ensure her lifestyle isn’t the one that suffers. The only risk a woman has for leaving her husband is if she’s too old and ugly to hook another guy. But even then, the amount of money she can get from her ex-husband is almost criminal.” On The Red Pill, Fisher commonly expressed disappointment that the institutions of marriage and religion were destroyed by women’s equality. He maintained that as a result of financial independence, women were no longer compelled to remain faithful and as a result, men needed to protectively adapt their sexual strategy. “Marriage, and yes, female oppression, slut shaming, religion, these were all a means to control hypergamy [infidelity]. Marriages might be considered loveless, and women might have been unhappy, but for men it meant marriages that lasted, commitments that continued, and protection against the fickle whims of females,” Fisher wrote on The Red Pill in November 2012. “To give women autonomy is to take away the very thing that made marriage a realistic institution… what I dislike is the general attitude that somehow we owe [women] something for sex… Women enjoy the autonomy that feminism has afforded them… But don’t expect the relics from back in the day to continue to benefit you without the sacrifices you were making,” Fisher wrote on his blog Dating American, in 2012—just weeks before establishing The Red Pill. Though ideas like this existed prior to The Red Pill’s creation, Fisher’s platform provided a crucial congregating place for this new brand of seduction, which marries men’s rights and sexual strategy, and which gave the ideology a platform on which to flourish. According to The Red Pill, among the most egregious contradictions of feminism is the audacity of feminists to seek equality, but then take no responsibility for it. “Understand that in the old days, women were not brought up the way they are today. Before feminism, there was less freedom, and therefore it was not necessary to teach women consequence. Consequence was strictly a man’s game. Feminism took the lid off pandora’s box, but the mothers, and the daughters of those mothers never internalized, learned, or passed down the concept of responsibility for their freedoms, only the freedom itself.” Fisher wrote in 2013. In addition to anti-feminist screeds, The Red Pill teaches “sexual strategy.” This includes how to “spin plates,” or balance sleeping with several women at once; how to respond to women’s “shit-tests,” a social device used to determine a suitor’s “fitness”; and how to practice “negging,” a game tactic involving a backhanded compliment calculated to undermine confidence and make a woman more vulnerable to advances. Red Pillers practice “dread game,” or intentionally instilling “dread” in a partner that you have other options, and various other techniques. Of gaming women, Fisher said, “[Women have] absolutely done this to themselves. I feel zero regret or shame pumping and dumping.” By May 2014, Fisher, then running for state representative, had apparently mastered the art of “spinning plates.” He bragged: “I spin a soft harem.” As opposed to a harem, a “soft harem” means the women are mostly unaware of each other, though they are sometimes strategically given hints about the availability of other women. Yet even as he bragged about his conquests, Fisher also groused bitterly about dating hurdles. “Dude, I’m attractive and a business man. I own a small empire. I’m also running for political office, and I’m incredibly outgoing… And this site [OkCupid] files me in next to millions of other guys. Obviously I’m going to have more luck IRL,” Fisher wrote to another user in 2012. Elsewhere, he wondered why listing his accomplishments on dates, including his status as a candidate and “high level exec,” was apparently a turnoff to women, despite it being characteristically alpha. On a forum subtitled “Contemplative Dominance for the Modern Man,” under the username FredFredrickson, Fisher complained in 2012, “I cannot be honest about my accomplishments or ambitions without ridicule. I am running for a state political position, I’m a high level exec in a franchising company, and I own two business locations in state. I found that stating it simply… nets me negativity on dates if I’m honest.” Fisher seemed obsessed with the negative effects feminism was having on his dating experience. He documented his complaints on dating, men’s rights, and seduction forums, including one specifically dedicated to OkCupid. He complained that girls were ghosting on him and standing him up. He aired grievances about the character of women: They were uninteresting, immature, unintelligent, lacked depth, and were entitled. He bemoaned that dating was easier for women. He felt it was unjust that women get a free ride, believing “a pair of boobs grants [them] equal footing with somebody bringing intelligence or a personality.” Over time, Fisher’s writing became increasingly hostile. He decided that existing seduction and pickup forums were overly “feminized,” complaining about “white knights” and their misdirected admonitions about “creepy” behavior (which he believed works as a dating strategy). It was this plight of navigating a post-feminist sexual marketplace, one where “the entirety of the male experience [is] wrought with rejection and ego-destroying experiences,” that led Fisher to establish The Red Pill. That, and a soul-crushing breakup. Fisher’s pseudonym on The Red Pill, Pk_atheist, was meaningful. “Pk,” which stands for “preacher’s kid,” and “atheist” signified an existential crisis of identity Fisher underwent upon losing his faith—a journey that began in 2008. In the aftermath, he philosophized extensively about religion and morality on his two blogs Explain God and Existential Vortex. In 2011, he took to Fredrickville—posting a revealing tell-all. Aside a photo of himself on a beach, Fisher wrote about how his existential crisis plunged him into a depression, worsened by a difficult breakup. “I felt so damaged that indeed I saw the public as the enemy. I did what a good engineer does. I identified the system, and started building rules to encounter various forms of damage that may occur in the future,” Fisher wrote. “But the damage I wanted to avoid was emotional hurt towards me. I had never known so much pain from somebody so close to me; I wanted to avoid that like it was death itself.” RAPE AND THE RED PILL Part of the pain inflicted on him by one of his exes, or so Fisher claimed: the alleged threat of a rape accusation against him. Fisher claimed online that during a bitter breakup, an ex-girlfriend threatened to accuse him of rape. “She didn’t follow through, thank god,” Fisher, under the alias Pk_atheist, wrote in 2012. Whether or not the threat actually occurred, Fisher’s posts reveal an ongoing paranoia over being accused of date rape. In his original ‘Welcome to the Red Pill’ post in October 2012, Fisher warned that in today’s feminist world, “A guy can approach a woman, be assertive, and if she’s attracted, there’s a hookup. Yet, if he’s not attractive, this EXACT behavior is “creepy”… If you’re unattractive, feminism tells us, you’re likely a rapist… men are tip-toeing to make sure they don’t accidentally become rapists themselves.” Four years after its founding, “rape hysteria,” remains a central topic of discussion on the forum. On r/TheRedPill, Pk_atheist admitted in December 2012 to supposedly video-taping sexual encounters with women in order to protect against false rape allegations. Men, Fisher said, should always take action to protect themselves against a past partner accusing them of rape. Online, Fisher advised another user to be careful not to offend prior flings whom he’d ghosted. Insulting a woman, he maintained, was likely to set off a deluge of sudden false accusations. “…If she feels insulted, your incidence of false rape accusations or pregnancy scares go waaaaaaaaay up,” he counseled. Fisher said he was not paranoid, but rather “statistically I’m overdue for a false rape allegation.” “You can’t have sex with this many women without getting one,” he argued. In 2008, writing under the username FredFredrickson, Fisher posited that the notion that “rape is bad” was not an absolute truth. He wrote, “I’m going to say it—Rape isn’t an absolute bad, because the rapist I think probably likes it a lot. I think he’d say it’s quite good, really.” Though he stated he “doesn’t advocate breaking the law,” Fisher said online in 2012 that a 40-year-old man asking to see the breasts of a 15-year-old wasn’t creepy. Instead, he said it was “evolutionarily advantageous and perfectly natural.” Besides, Fisher argued, historically, statutory rape and age of consent laws gave the sexes unequal treatment in that only females were given protection under such laws. He noted that these laws were intended to protect “teenage girls” from having their virginity stolen. Indeed, age of consent laws were originally intended to preserve virginity—a “commodity” at the time—however, in Colonial America, where statutory rape was considered a property crime, the age of consent was generally 10 or 12. In 2013, when a video leaked showing former Steubenville High School athlete Michael Nodianos relentlessly making fun of the rape of an unconscious student, whose assault was shared on social media, for over 12 minutes—“She is so raped. Her puss is about as dry as the sun right now,”—Fisher commented, “So a bunch of guys made rape jokes… lacking class for sure, but.. not wtf nor news worthy.” Fisher reflected: “Does freedom of speech no longer apply in this scenario?” Fisher’s blasé comments regarding rape are typical of The Red Pill. Here, posters regularly argue that men are often the true victims, by way of what they refer to as the feminist-fueled lie of rape culture—a lie that amounts, some users say, to a vicious attack on white men, in particular (though Fisher himself never made this claim). Men, Fisher said in 2012, have “zero” protection against false-rape accusations in today’s society. Fisher claimed in 2012 that he took measures to protect himself. “I should feel free to have consensual sex with whomever I please without the worry of a false accusation costing me my job and jail time,” he determined. In service of this freedom, Fishers claimed he installed a video recorder in his room. “There is literally no legal protection I can think of that could eliminate the risk of a previous sexual partner of mine falsely accusing me of rape, no matter what the circumstances. I now have a video recorder in my room,” he posted. In another of the forum’s numerous discussions about false rape allegations, Fisher advised that by posting a sign above your bedroom door stating the premises were under surveillance and, “By entering, you consent to being video and audio taped,” men could shield themselves from prosecution under privacy laws. However, Fisher cited no authority suggesting such a waiver would be legally effective. Fisher also suggested adding an extra layer of protection by inquiring via text to affirm the woman had a good time, and asking if she got home safely after a sexual encounter. “Make sure she responds positively, or ask a few more questions until you have positive confirmation. Can be crucial in regret-rape-accusations,” he advised in 2013. “Regret-rape” accusations refer to the theory that women, to alleviate feelings of guilt, shame or promiscuity, accuse men of rape to detach themselves from responsibility. Men’s rights activists refer to this as an “anti-slut defense,” and have an acronym for it, ASD. As a candidate for state representative, Fisher proposed bringing concerns about the supposed plague of false rape accusations into the statehouse. Hosting a forum on Reddit under the username RobertFisherforNH, Fisher sought ideas to prevent “innocent people [from] receiving jail time.” He argued that because in rape cases “police err on the side of caution,” and show a high level of support for victims, the system was “susceptible to abuse” by women. Among Red Pillers, the notion that women commonly abuse the judicial system for means of retaliation, or “cry rape” for attention, is viewed as a matter-of-fact element of the feminist “agenda.” According to an analysis of Justice Department data by the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), 46 out of 100 rapes are reported to police, nine are prosecuted, and three of those accused serve jail time. At his request, Fisher serves on no committees in the New Hampshire House. Out of the 114 record votes so far during the 2017 session, Fisher has cast votes in half. In the past, Fisher insisted the Red Pill forum is misunderstood: “Unfortunately to the outsider, it just looks like misogyny,” he wrote in 2012, “or like we’re just bitter.” Whether Representative Fisher still holds that view—or any of the others contained in his online posts—remains unknown.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/25/the-republican-lawmaker-who-secretly-created-reddit-s-women-hating-red-pill.html So I've been thinking about it for a while. Would it be worthwhile to use a summary for any article which is awfully long to quote? It doesn't make sense to read it. Using this: http://smmry.com/the massive block of text above in the default of 7 sentences is: Show nested quote + The Republican Lawmaker Who Secretly Created Reddit's Women-Hating 'Red Pill'
The homegrown son of a preacher, 31-year-old Robert Fisher is a Republican who represents New Hampshire's Belknap County District 9.
In addition to his legislative duties, Fisher owns a local computer-repair franchise, and in his spare time, seems to have created the web's most popular online destination for pickup artistry and men's rights activists, The Red Pill, according an investigation by the Daily Beast.
Following its thread leads to one identity after another, dating back to high school, when Fisher, a programmer, created a message board used by his friends as a social platform.
Within hours of contacting Rep. Fisher, and after delivering by email a summary of his apparent connections to The Red Pill kingpin, his two primary Reddit usernames had been wiped, and four blogs connected to him were deleted or made private.
On The Red Pill, Fisher commonly expressed disappointment that the institutions of marriage and religion were destroyed by women's equality.
"To give women autonomy is to take away the very thing that made marriage a realistic institution what I dislike is the general attitude that somehow we owe [women] something for sex Women enjoy the autonomy that feminism has afforded them But don't expect the relics from back in the day to continue to benefit you without the sacrifices you were making," Fisher wrote on his blog Dating American, in 2012-just weeks before establishing The Red Pill.
In the past, Fisher insisted the Red Pill forum is misunderstood: "Unfortunately to the outsider, it just looks like misogyny," he wrote in 2012, "Or like we're just bitter." Whether Representative Fisher still holds that view-or any of the others contained in his online posts-remains unknown.
It's missing a lot of info, but does an admirable job of catching most of the main points. Do link to the source, if anyone wants to read the whole thing, but the summary is good enough to discuss. https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/67hoy5/the_republican_lawmaker_who_secretly_created/dgqlea4/ this has most of the juicy bits.
Haha, that person is everything wrong with the "manosphere".
Also:
Fisher said online that a 40-year-old man asking to see the breasts of a 15-year-old wasn’t creepy. Instead, he said it was “evolutionarily advantageous and perfectly natural.”
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I don't understand why he would even try to cover his tracks and be so secretive about it when TRP is just nothing more than a honest version of the typical republican opinions on the topics, isn't it?
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On April 26 2017 14:35 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2017 08:56 Leporello wrote:+ Show Spoiler ++ Show Spoiler +On April 26 2017 04:45 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2017 02:19 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 02:14 Acrofales wrote:On April 26 2017 01:50 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:47 Acrofales wrote:On April 26 2017 01:46 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:38 IgnE wrote:On April 26 2017 01:30 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:27 IgnE wrote:On April 26 2017 01:21 Leporello wrote: [quote]
Yes. Human brain-functions.
I'm generally pro-choice, but I can't quite the understand the detachment in saying that a late-term fetus has no bodily rights. Shortly before birth, it's just a baby in the womb.
A cesarean operation, for example, doesn't endow the baby with sentience. It's just opening up the womb and removing the baby that exists. You can't say it's removing a parasite.
Parasitic=/=parasite. A late-term fetus is parasitic, absolutely. But it is not, factually speaking, a parasite.
Denying the sentience of a late-term fetus doesn't do pro-choicers any credit. This is exactly the type of middle-ground that both sides need to move towards, and where we should rely heavily on clinical metrics. By which I don't mean calling it a parasite. I love House MD as much as anybody, but it's a bit sensationalist, imo. so do you eat pork? do you think a post-birth baby has more or less "human-like" brain functions than an adult pig? do you eat octopus? I was a vegetarian for many years. But, uh, what? We're talking about human babies. Not pigs. I'm genuinely not sure what this comparison is supposed to prove. But, yes, I do think a human baby is more human than an adult pig... Wow. A late-term fetus has sentience. It is human sentience. Abstract, and in many ways, lesser. But still human. This is going right off the deep-end. Again, denying the human-nature of late-term fetuses is really just fuel for the fire, and nothing more. so you are talking about soul-stuff here. "human-nature?" ousia? what makes it human? dna? a blastocyst is also human? are you telling me ANY level of consciousness in combination with human dna is privileged with all the rights of a human person? do you not see how that is just essentialist soul-stuff? No, I am talking about consciousness. I don't believe in the "soul". Argue fairly, if you want to falsely categorize me to this extent then I'll just move on. If you really want to have this discussion, define consciousness. Also define human consciousness. No. I am asking people to consider the consciousness of a late-term fetus. The deflections... Jesus Christ. I'm not defining, in absolute terms, what is consciousness, which is scientifically impossible, currently (which is why the mirror test is BS). I'm just asking "does a late-term fetus have a consciousness?" We do know consciousness exists, obviously. And we can detect it, often through common-sense means, but also from brain-waves. EEG. The struggles to avoid answering the question simply is kind of... I am disappointed. I'll take a break. Because, I'm a little flustered at the inane deflections. If your guys' answer to people's concerns towards late-term abortions is to compare human-babies to pigs, or declare them simply "not human", then this discourse is permanently fucked. You're the ones drawing a line that shouldn't exist and can't be defined -- or should I say, is already clearly defined. If we can't accept that new-born babies are human, anatomically, biologically, common-sense, human, with a sentience that is human, then we've gone off the deep-end. You're the one who brought up consciousness and human consciousness as if they were categorically different. And then when someone said "well, that's basically a soul" got all upset. Either define the difference between "mere" consciousness and human consciousness or accept that pigs are people too. Albeit rather diminished people who walk around on 4 hoofs and habitually get turned into bacon. Hmmmm. Bacon. No. I don't have to define the consciousness itself, all I have to do is define the being that possesses said consciousness. And, for starters, it's not a pig. You guys are creating arbitrary goalposts that science can't define. And yet, what I'm continually asking us is to consider what science can define. And the difference in biology between a late-term fetus and a newborn is...? Not much. The biological differences are much greater during the middle-stages of pregnancy. Somewhere in there are developmental stages that we should consider, clinically. And the reason we should do so is not just create a more "humane" law, but to cool the discourse. One side wants to say, "all life is sacred", and the other seems to reject any notion that humanity exists at all, at least not until the person is walking and talking. LOL, I've honestly just been looking for middle-ground. LOL. It's so bad. Sorry, but if you want to be able to use words in a meaningful way, you need to be able to define what they mean. I am pretty sure that a large amount of disagreements could be resolved simply by people taking the effort to actually define what they mean when they say words, as opposed to saying "Well it is obvious!". If it is obvious, it shouldn't be hard to put it into words. If you can't put it into words, then it isn't obvious. And if your definition of "consciousness" is simply "Something that has something to do with the and, which a human has, but a pig does not", you are gonna run into tons of problems, because that is a shitty definition.Maybe it is just me coming from a maths background, but seriously, it is exhausting to talk to people who are unwilling to define the concepts they use, and then get angry that not everyone has the same view of that concept as they do. I am not even sure if i disagree with what you want to say, because it is very unclear what you actually want to say. You got lost in a semantic argument because you are using poorly defined terms. Discussions become way better, and are far less filled with semantics arguments if the words you use to describe stuff are well defined and clear. I don't think people honestly disagree with the end result you seem to be hinting at, namely that you probably shouldn't abort 8th month pregnancies, and that the point in time until which it is probably ok is somewhere in the middle of the pregnancy. Afaik most countries use something like 12 weeks, unless there are special circumstances. Except that is not how I defined consciousness. It is much more how other's itt decided to define consciousness. And that is/was a completely unnecessary obscurity. Consciousness is a scientifically obscure area, yes. But it is still, nonetheless, something that we know exists, and is rather crucial to defining life. Something with a consciousness can experience suffering. I suppose it bothers some to admit that a late-term fetus would experience suffering, but... they do. That is certain -- it is a certainty you can ask any woman who's ever carried a pregnancy to term. The fetus makes its suffering and impatience quite known to the mother throughout the later-stages of pregnancy. Which is why most mothers at this stage surely don't even refer to it as a fetus, but as a baby. "My baby kicked." Perhaps I should have said "brain activity". But I get the feeling it would not have helped at all, and people would have still questioned whether it exists or is human for the same reasons. Do you think it would've made a difference? Consciousness, not being scientifically understood to fucking absolution, doesn't mean it should be banned from discussion in any serious matter. We do know what it means in laymans's terms. Right? Or are you saying otherwise? I mean, are you saying I need to provide the dictionary-definition of the word? Oh, yeah, no double-standard being raised here! Sorry, I'd like to give people more credit than that. And that actually is what you're saying. I need to define words... Really? Instead of simply acknowledging consciousness, simply as we know it exists, people decided to, imo, cop-out of the question by simply ignoring the fact that consciousness does exist, and instead focused on forcing an impossibly precise definition to something that is not wholly material. Which, for fuck's sake, is not akin to calling it a "soul", as one was eager to put in my mouth, but rather as a process. And what's the point of that? To declare that a fetus doesn't have consciousness? No, they didn't even really argue that to any extent, and it's the only point that actually matters. Apparently they do agree via omission, that fetuses do have consciousnesses. But instead, I'm asked to question the consciousness as being human...? And that saddens me. I think it's just nonsense. It's a consciousness, it kicks and moves on its own terms, and it belongs to a developing human. It is that simple. Or it should have been. And I take ZERO fault for people complicating it. The deflection and pack-mentality has been quite strong in this discussion. And, yes, I know I'm arguing with people that mostly agree with me in regards to the law itself. But this desire to dehumanize what is human, to such extent, as if it's just as likely a pig or a parasite in the womb, is partly what makes discourse on the subject impossible, from both sides. And that is my concern, more than the law itself. And I'm not so sure we do agree on what the law should be, sadly. Late-term abortions are currently just next to illegal, but I get the feeling Kwark and others would just as happily allow all of them, and I think it's obvious that I would not be comfortable with that. Yo . . . wtf? I want to believe you are smarter than this. I don't even know how to respond. You know that no one is arguing with you about whether at some point a fetus/baby develops consciousness right? Right? The discussion is about the nature of consciousness and your invocation of soul-stuff by appealing to a human eidos/ousia to differentiate a fetus's consciousness from a pig's consciousness. Or do you think that babies experience the world like you do? Read your bolded bits again when you aren't drunk and tell me that you don't see soul-talk embedded in there.
The problem with the consciousness/personhood criterion is that the "pro-choice" side arbitrarily chooses the time human develops the brain substrate necessary for developing consciousness/personhood as the threshold beyond which abortion should not be permissible (with some exceptions). Neither a late-term fetus nor a newborn baby has consciousness comparable with adult humans. A baby doesn't develop a personality until well after birth either.
This leads to all sorts of problems. E.g., should we give late-term fetuses/newborns the same rights we give to dogs/pigs? Or perhaps their potential to develop more advanced consciousness and eventual personality gives them a special status? Why is having the brain substrate necessary for developing consciousness/personhood, i.e. the potential to achieve personhood, used as the threshold, and not, e.g., the potential to develop such a brain substrate?
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On April 26 2017 16:57 maybenexttime wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2017 14:35 IgnE wrote:On April 26 2017 08:56 Leporello wrote:+ Show Spoiler ++ Show Spoiler +On April 26 2017 04:45 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2017 02:19 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 02:14 Acrofales wrote:On April 26 2017 01:50 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:47 Acrofales wrote:On April 26 2017 01:46 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:38 IgnE wrote:On April 26 2017 01:30 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:27 IgnE wrote:On April 26 2017 01:21 Leporello wrote: [quote]
Yes. Human brain-functions.
I'm generally pro-choice, but I can't quite the understand the detachment in saying that a late-term fetus has no bodily rights. Shortly before birth, it's just a baby in the womb.
A cesarean operation, for example, doesn't endow the baby with sentience. It's just opening up the womb and removing the baby that exists. You can't say it's removing a parasite.
Parasitic=/=parasite. A late-term fetus is parasitic, absolutely. But it is not, factually speaking, a parasite.
Denying the sentience of a late-term fetus doesn't do pro-choicers any credit. This is exactly the type of middle-ground that both sides need to move towards, and where we should rely heavily on clinical metrics. By which I don't mean calling it a parasite. I love House MD as much as anybody, but it's a bit sensationalist, imo. so do you eat pork? do you think a post-birth baby has more or less "human-like" brain functions than an adult pig? do you eat octopus? I was a vegetarian for many years. But, uh, what? We're talking about human babies. Not pigs. I'm genuinely not sure what this comparison is supposed to prove. But, yes, I do think a human baby is more human than an adult pig... Wow. A late-term fetus has sentience. It is human sentience. Abstract, and in many ways, lesser. But still human. This is going right off the deep-end. Again, denying the human-nature of late-term fetuses is really just fuel for the fire, and nothing more. so you are talking about soul-stuff here. "human-nature?" ousia? what makes it human? dna? a blastocyst is also human? are you telling me ANY level of consciousness in combination with human dna is privileged with all the rights of a human person? do you not see how that is just essentialist soul-stuff? No, I am talking about consciousness. I don't believe in the "soul". Argue fairly, if you want to falsely categorize me to this extent then I'll just move on. If you really want to have this discussion, define consciousness. Also define human consciousness. No. I am asking people to consider the consciousness of a late-term fetus. The deflections... Jesus Christ. I'm not defining, in absolute terms, what is consciousness, which is scientifically impossible, currently (which is why the mirror test is BS). I'm just asking "does a late-term fetus have a consciousness?" We do know consciousness exists, obviously. And we can detect it, often through common-sense means, but also from brain-waves. EEG. The struggles to avoid answering the question simply is kind of... I am disappointed. I'll take a break. Because, I'm a little flustered at the inane deflections. If your guys' answer to people's concerns towards late-term abortions is to compare human-babies to pigs, or declare them simply "not human", then this discourse is permanently fucked. You're the ones drawing a line that shouldn't exist and can't be defined -- or should I say, is already clearly defined. If we can't accept that new-born babies are human, anatomically, biologically, common-sense, human, with a sentience that is human, then we've gone off the deep-end. You're the one who brought up consciousness and human consciousness as if they were categorically different. And then when someone said "well, that's basically a soul" got all upset. Either define the difference between "mere" consciousness and human consciousness or accept that pigs are people too. Albeit rather diminished people who walk around on 4 hoofs and habitually get turned into bacon. Hmmmm. Bacon. No. I don't have to define the consciousness itself, all I have to do is define the being that possesses said consciousness. And, for starters, it's not a pig. You guys are creating arbitrary goalposts that science can't define. And yet, what I'm continually asking us is to consider what science can define. And the difference in biology between a late-term fetus and a newborn is...? Not much. The biological differences are much greater during the middle-stages of pregnancy. Somewhere in there are developmental stages that we should consider, clinically. And the reason we should do so is not just create a more "humane" law, but to cool the discourse. One side wants to say, "all life is sacred", and the other seems to reject any notion that humanity exists at all, at least not until the person is walking and talking. LOL, I've honestly just been looking for middle-ground. LOL. It's so bad. Sorry, but if you want to be able to use words in a meaningful way, you need to be able to define what they mean. I am pretty sure that a large amount of disagreements could be resolved simply by people taking the effort to actually define what they mean when they say words, as opposed to saying "Well it is obvious!". If it is obvious, it shouldn't be hard to put it into words. If you can't put it into words, then it isn't obvious. And if your definition of "consciousness" is simply "Something that has something to do with the and, which a human has, but a pig does not", you are gonna run into tons of problems, because that is a shitty definition.Maybe it is just me coming from a maths background, but seriously, it is exhausting to talk to people who are unwilling to define the concepts they use, and then get angry that not everyone has the same view of that concept as they do. I am not even sure if i disagree with what you want to say, because it is very unclear what you actually want to say. You got lost in a semantic argument because you are using poorly defined terms. Discussions become way better, and are far less filled with semantics arguments if the words you use to describe stuff are well defined and clear. I don't think people honestly disagree with the end result you seem to be hinting at, namely that you probably shouldn't abort 8th month pregnancies, and that the point in time until which it is probably ok is somewhere in the middle of the pregnancy. Afaik most countries use something like 12 weeks, unless there are special circumstances. Except that is not how I defined consciousness. It is much more how other's itt decided to define consciousness. And that is/was a completely unnecessary obscurity. Consciousness is a scientifically obscure area, yes. But it is still, nonetheless, something that we know exists, and is rather crucial to defining life. Something with a consciousness can experience suffering. I suppose it bothers some to admit that a late-term fetus would experience suffering, but... they do. That is certain -- it is a certainty you can ask any woman who's ever carried a pregnancy to term. The fetus makes its suffering and impatience quite known to the mother throughout the later-stages of pregnancy. Which is why most mothers at this stage surely don't even refer to it as a fetus, but as a baby. "My baby kicked." Perhaps I should have said "brain activity". But I get the feeling it would not have helped at all, and people would have still questioned whether it exists or is human for the same reasons. Do you think it would've made a difference? Consciousness, not being scientifically understood to fucking absolution, doesn't mean it should be banned from discussion in any serious matter. We do know what it means in laymans's terms. Right? Or are you saying otherwise? I mean, are you saying I need to provide the dictionary-definition of the word? Oh, yeah, no double-standard being raised here! Sorry, I'd like to give people more credit than that. And that actually is what you're saying. I need to define words... Really? Instead of simply acknowledging consciousness, simply as we know it exists, people decided to, imo, cop-out of the question by simply ignoring the fact that consciousness does exist, and instead focused on forcing an impossibly precise definition to something that is not wholly material. Which, for fuck's sake, is not akin to calling it a "soul", as one was eager to put in my mouth, but rather as a process. And what's the point of that? To declare that a fetus doesn't have consciousness? No, they didn't even really argue that to any extent, and it's the only point that actually matters. Apparently they do agree via omission, that fetuses do have consciousnesses. But instead, I'm asked to question the consciousness as being human...? And that saddens me. I think it's just nonsense. It's a consciousness, it kicks and moves on its own terms, and it belongs to a developing human. It is that simple. Or it should have been. And I take ZERO fault for people complicating it. The deflection and pack-mentality has been quite strong in this discussion. And, yes, I know I'm arguing with people that mostly agree with me in regards to the law itself. But this desire to dehumanize what is human, to such extent, as if it's just as likely a pig or a parasite in the womb, is partly what makes discourse on the subject impossible, from both sides. And that is my concern, more than the law itself. And I'm not so sure we do agree on what the law should be, sadly. Late-term abortions are currently just next to illegal, but I get the feeling Kwark and others would just as happily allow all of them, and I think it's obvious that I would not be comfortable with that. Yo . . . wtf? I want to believe you are smarter than this. I don't even know how to respond. You know that no one is arguing with you about whether at some point a fetus/baby develops consciousness right? Right? The discussion is about the nature of consciousness and your invocation of soul-stuff by appealing to a human eidos/ousia to differentiate a fetus's consciousness from a pig's consciousness. Or do you think that babies experience the world like you do? Read your bolded bits again when you aren't drunk and tell me that you don't see soul-talk embedded in there. The problem with the consciousness/personhood criterion is that the "pro-choice" side arbitrarily chooses the time human develops the brain substrate necessary for developing consciousness/personhood as the threshold beyond which abortion should not be permissible (with some exceptions). Neither a late-term fetus nor a newborn baby has consciousness comparable with adult humans. A baby doesn't develop a personality until well after birth either. This leads to all sorts of problems. E.g., should we give late-term fetuses/newborns the same rights we give to dogs/pigs? Or perhaps their potential to develop more advanced consciousness and eventual personality gives them a special status? Why is having the brain substrate necessary for developing consciousness/personhood, i.e. the potential to achieve personhood, used as the threshold, and not, e.g., the potential to develop such a brain substrate? Insofar as I can see, IgnE is pro-choice. I definitely am. I have no idea about leporello, and pretty sure both IgnE and I got dragged into the consciousness argument because of shoddy philosophy, not because it's integral to the argument, because if adult-human level consciousness is a requirement for something to be treated as a person, we are kinda fucked. Mentally disabled, including Altzheimer patients, and babies (probably children in general until the age of 6 or so) would suddenly lose their status as people. If instead we expand it to anything at a newborn level of consciousness gets personhood rights, farmers, hunters and pet owners everywhere are (probably) fucked. I say probably, because we'd first have to establish how to measure consciousness in animals that don't have language, including newborns.
Neither are useful approaches. So let's leave consciousness out of it? He'll, I'm quite okay with conceding a fetus is a person from conception (even though I don't actually think it is). A mother still has the right to abort her pregnancy. Just as we all have the right to unplug the violinist from our kidneys.
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On April 26 2017 17:40 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2017 16:57 maybenexttime wrote:On April 26 2017 14:35 IgnE wrote:On April 26 2017 08:56 Leporello wrote:+ Show Spoiler ++ Show Spoiler +On April 26 2017 04:45 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2017 02:19 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 02:14 Acrofales wrote:On April 26 2017 01:50 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:47 Acrofales wrote:On April 26 2017 01:46 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:38 IgnE wrote:On April 26 2017 01:30 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:27 IgnE wrote:On April 26 2017 01:21 Leporello wrote: [quote]
Yes. Human brain-functions.
I'm generally pro-choice, but I can't quite the understand the detachment in saying that a late-term fetus has no bodily rights. Shortly before birth, it's just a baby in the womb.
A cesarean operation, for example, doesn't endow the baby with sentience. It's just opening up the womb and removing the baby that exists. You can't say it's removing a parasite.
Parasitic=/=parasite. A late-term fetus is parasitic, absolutely. But it is not, factually speaking, a parasite.
Denying the sentience of a late-term fetus doesn't do pro-choicers any credit. This is exactly the type of middle-ground that both sides need to move towards, and where we should rely heavily on clinical metrics. By which I don't mean calling it a parasite. I love House MD as much as anybody, but it's a bit sensationalist, imo. so do you eat pork? do you think a post-birth baby has more or less "human-like" brain functions than an adult pig? do you eat octopus? I was a vegetarian for many years. But, uh, what? We're talking about human babies. Not pigs. I'm genuinely not sure what this comparison is supposed to prove. But, yes, I do think a human baby is more human than an adult pig... Wow. A late-term fetus has sentience. It is human sentience. Abstract, and in many ways, lesser. But still human. This is going right off the deep-end. Again, denying the human-nature of late-term fetuses is really just fuel for the fire, and nothing more. so you are talking about soul-stuff here. "human-nature?" ousia? what makes it human? dna? a blastocyst is also human? are you telling me ANY level of consciousness in combination with human dna is privileged with all the rights of a human person? do you not see how that is just essentialist soul-stuff? No, I am talking about consciousness. I don't believe in the "soul". Argue fairly, if you want to falsely categorize me to this extent then I'll just move on. If you really want to have this discussion, define consciousness. Also define human consciousness. No. I am asking people to consider the consciousness of a late-term fetus. The deflections... Jesus Christ. I'm not defining, in absolute terms, what is consciousness, which is scientifically impossible, currently (which is why the mirror test is BS). I'm just asking "does a late-term fetus have a consciousness?" We do know consciousness exists, obviously. And we can detect it, often through common-sense means, but also from brain-waves. EEG. The struggles to avoid answering the question simply is kind of... I am disappointed. I'll take a break. Because, I'm a little flustered at the inane deflections. If your guys' answer to people's concerns towards late-term abortions is to compare human-babies to pigs, or declare them simply "not human", then this discourse is permanently fucked. You're the ones drawing a line that shouldn't exist and can't be defined -- or should I say, is already clearly defined. If we can't accept that new-born babies are human, anatomically, biologically, common-sense, human, with a sentience that is human, then we've gone off the deep-end. You're the one who brought up consciousness and human consciousness as if they were categorically different. And then when someone said "well, that's basically a soul" got all upset. Either define the difference between "mere" consciousness and human consciousness or accept that pigs are people too. Albeit rather diminished people who walk around on 4 hoofs and habitually get turned into bacon. Hmmmm. Bacon. No. I don't have to define the consciousness itself, all I have to do is define the being that possesses said consciousness. And, for starters, it's not a pig. You guys are creating arbitrary goalposts that science can't define. And yet, what I'm continually asking us is to consider what science can define. And the difference in biology between a late-term fetus and a newborn is...? Not much. The biological differences are much greater during the middle-stages of pregnancy. Somewhere in there are developmental stages that we should consider, clinically. And the reason we should do so is not just create a more "humane" law, but to cool the discourse. One side wants to say, "all life is sacred", and the other seems to reject any notion that humanity exists at all, at least not until the person is walking and talking. LOL, I've honestly just been looking for middle-ground. LOL. It's so bad. Sorry, but if you want to be able to use words in a meaningful way, you need to be able to define what they mean. I am pretty sure that a large amount of disagreements could be resolved simply by people taking the effort to actually define what they mean when they say words, as opposed to saying "Well it is obvious!". If it is obvious, it shouldn't be hard to put it into words. If you can't put it into words, then it isn't obvious. And if your definition of "consciousness" is simply "Something that has something to do with the and, which a human has, but a pig does not", you are gonna run into tons of problems, because that is a shitty definition.Maybe it is just me coming from a maths background, but seriously, it is exhausting to talk to people who are unwilling to define the concepts they use, and then get angry that not everyone has the same view of that concept as they do. I am not even sure if i disagree with what you want to say, because it is very unclear what you actually want to say. You got lost in a semantic argument because you are using poorly defined terms. Discussions become way better, and are far less filled with semantics arguments if the words you use to describe stuff are well defined and clear. I don't think people honestly disagree with the end result you seem to be hinting at, namely that you probably shouldn't abort 8th month pregnancies, and that the point in time until which it is probably ok is somewhere in the middle of the pregnancy. Afaik most countries use something like 12 weeks, unless there are special circumstances. Except that is not how I defined consciousness. It is much more how other's itt decided to define consciousness. And that is/was a completely unnecessary obscurity. Consciousness is a scientifically obscure area, yes. But it is still, nonetheless, something that we know exists, and is rather crucial to defining life. Something with a consciousness can experience suffering. I suppose it bothers some to admit that a late-term fetus would experience suffering, but... they do. That is certain -- it is a certainty you can ask any woman who's ever carried a pregnancy to term. The fetus makes its suffering and impatience quite known to the mother throughout the later-stages of pregnancy. Which is why most mothers at this stage surely don't even refer to it as a fetus, but as a baby. "My baby kicked." Perhaps I should have said "brain activity". But I get the feeling it would not have helped at all, and people would have still questioned whether it exists or is human for the same reasons. Do you think it would've made a difference? Consciousness, not being scientifically understood to fucking absolution, doesn't mean it should be banned from discussion in any serious matter. We do know what it means in laymans's terms. Right? Or are you saying otherwise? I mean, are you saying I need to provide the dictionary-definition of the word? Oh, yeah, no double-standard being raised here! Sorry, I'd like to give people more credit than that. And that actually is what you're saying. I need to define words... Really? Instead of simply acknowledging consciousness, simply as we know it exists, people decided to, imo, cop-out of the question by simply ignoring the fact that consciousness does exist, and instead focused on forcing an impossibly precise definition to something that is not wholly material. Which, for fuck's sake, is not akin to calling it a "soul", as one was eager to put in my mouth, but rather as a process. And what's the point of that? To declare that a fetus doesn't have consciousness? No, they didn't even really argue that to any extent, and it's the only point that actually matters. Apparently they do agree via omission, that fetuses do have consciousnesses. But instead, I'm asked to question the consciousness as being human...? And that saddens me. I think it's just nonsense. It's a consciousness, it kicks and moves on its own terms, and it belongs to a developing human. It is that simple. Or it should have been. And I take ZERO fault for people complicating it. The deflection and pack-mentality has been quite strong in this discussion. And, yes, I know I'm arguing with people that mostly agree with me in regards to the law itself. But this desire to dehumanize what is human, to such extent, as if it's just as likely a pig or a parasite in the womb, is partly what makes discourse on the subject impossible, from both sides. And that is my concern, more than the law itself. And I'm not so sure we do agree on what the law should be, sadly. Late-term abortions are currently just next to illegal, but I get the feeling Kwark and others would just as happily allow all of them, and I think it's obvious that I would not be comfortable with that. Yo . . . wtf? I want to believe you are smarter than this. I don't even know how to respond. You know that no one is arguing with you about whether at some point a fetus/baby develops consciousness right? Right? The discussion is about the nature of consciousness and your invocation of soul-stuff by appealing to a human eidos/ousia to differentiate a fetus's consciousness from a pig's consciousness. Or do you think that babies experience the world like you do? Read your bolded bits again when you aren't drunk and tell me that you don't see soul-talk embedded in there. The problem with the consciousness/personhood criterion is that the "pro-choice" side arbitrarily chooses the time human develops the brain substrate necessary for developing consciousness/personhood as the threshold beyond which abortion should not be permissible (with some exceptions). Neither a late-term fetus nor a newborn baby has consciousness comparable with adult humans. A baby doesn't develop a personality until well after birth either. This leads to all sorts of problems. E.g., should we give late-term fetuses/newborns the same rights we give to dogs/pigs? Or perhaps their potential to develop more advanced consciousness and eventual personality gives them a special status? Why is having the brain substrate necessary for developing consciousness/personhood, i.e. the potential to achieve personhood, used as the threshold, and not, e.g., the potential to develop such a brain substrate? Insofar as I can see, IgnE is pro-choice. I definitely am. I have no idea about leporello, and pretty sure both IgnE and I got dragged into the consciousness argument because of shoddy philosophy, not because it's integral to the argument, because if adult-human level consciousness is a requirement for something to be treated as a person, we are kinda fucked. Mentally disabled, including Altzheimer patients, and babies (probably children in general until the age of 6 or so) would suddenly lose their status as people. If instead we expand it to anything at a newborn level of consciousness gets personhood rights, farmers, hunters and pet owners everywhere are (probably) fucked. I say probably, because we'd first have to establish how to measure consciousness in animals that don't have language, including newborns. Neither are useful approaches. So let's leave consciousness out of it? He'll, I'm quite okay with conceding a fetus is a person from conception (even though I don't actually think it is). A mother still has the right to abort her pregnancy. Just as we all have the right to unplug the violinist from our kidneys.
According to your point of view late-term abortions would be permissible because whether the child survives is irrelevant. She could "unplug" the child in a way that allows it to survive, but she would not be obliged to. Not to mention the fact that if you were to concede that a fetus is a person, abortion would have to be considered murder, especially the way it is done in practice.
Since you do not concede that, you have to determine when one gains the status of a person and justify why at that particular time.
Either way, she can exert her right to bodily autonomy as far as it does not infringe on the fetus's bodily autonomy. The violinist problem is a bad analogy. It doesn't account for the fact that in the case of a pregnancy there is a causal relationship. The mother put the fetus in this position. The fetus didn't just magically appear in her body. By taking a certain course of action, she forfeited some of her liberty.
What you are saying is that she can take that particular course of action (have sex) without (potentially) having her liberty limited as a consequence. To use KwarK's earlier example, what you are saying is equal to saying that neglecting to surrender your child to the state does not necessarily mean that you automatically assume responsibility. You can just let it die because your liberty takes precedence regardless of your actions.
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On April 26 2017 18:13 maybenexttime wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2017 17:40 Acrofales wrote:On April 26 2017 16:57 maybenexttime wrote:On April 26 2017 14:35 IgnE wrote:On April 26 2017 08:56 Leporello wrote:+ Show Spoiler ++ Show Spoiler +On April 26 2017 04:45 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2017 02:19 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 02:14 Acrofales wrote:On April 26 2017 01:50 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:47 Acrofales wrote:On April 26 2017 01:46 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:38 IgnE wrote:On April 26 2017 01:30 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:27 IgnE wrote:On April 26 2017 01:21 Leporello wrote: [quote]
Yes. Human brain-functions.
I'm generally pro-choice, but I can't quite the understand the detachment in saying that a late-term fetus has no bodily rights. Shortly before birth, it's just a baby in the womb.
A cesarean operation, for example, doesn't endow the baby with sentience. It's just opening up the womb and removing the baby that exists. You can't say it's removing a parasite.
Parasitic=/=parasite. A late-term fetus is parasitic, absolutely. But it is not, factually speaking, a parasite.
Denying the sentience of a late-term fetus doesn't do pro-choicers any credit. This is exactly the type of middle-ground that both sides need to move towards, and where we should rely heavily on clinical metrics. By which I don't mean calling it a parasite. I love House MD as much as anybody, but it's a bit sensationalist, imo. so do you eat pork? do you think a post-birth baby has more or less "human-like" brain functions than an adult pig? do you eat octopus? I was a vegetarian for many years. But, uh, what? We're talking about human babies. Not pigs. I'm genuinely not sure what this comparison is supposed to prove. But, yes, I do think a human baby is more human than an adult pig... Wow. A late-term fetus has sentience. It is human sentience. Abstract, and in many ways, lesser. But still human. This is going right off the deep-end. Again, denying the human-nature of late-term fetuses is really just fuel for the fire, and nothing more. so you are talking about soul-stuff here. "human-nature?" ousia? what makes it human? dna? a blastocyst is also human? are you telling me ANY level of consciousness in combination with human dna is privileged with all the rights of a human person? do you not see how that is just essentialist soul-stuff? No, I am talking about consciousness. I don't believe in the "soul". Argue fairly, if you want to falsely categorize me to this extent then I'll just move on. If you really want to have this discussion, define consciousness. Also define human consciousness. No. I am asking people to consider the consciousness of a late-term fetus. The deflections... Jesus Christ. I'm not defining, in absolute terms, what is consciousness, which is scientifically impossible, currently (which is why the mirror test is BS). I'm just asking "does a late-term fetus have a consciousness?" We do know consciousness exists, obviously. And we can detect it, often through common-sense means, but also from brain-waves. EEG. The struggles to avoid answering the question simply is kind of... I am disappointed. I'll take a break. Because, I'm a little flustered at the inane deflections. If your guys' answer to people's concerns towards late-term abortions is to compare human-babies to pigs, or declare them simply "not human", then this discourse is permanently fucked. You're the ones drawing a line that shouldn't exist and can't be defined -- or should I say, is already clearly defined. If we can't accept that new-born babies are human, anatomically, biologically, common-sense, human, with a sentience that is human, then we've gone off the deep-end. You're the one who brought up consciousness and human consciousness as if they were categorically different. And then when someone said "well, that's basically a soul" got all upset. Either define the difference between "mere" consciousness and human consciousness or accept that pigs are people too. Albeit rather diminished people who walk around on 4 hoofs and habitually get turned into bacon. Hmmmm. Bacon. No. I don't have to define the consciousness itself, all I have to do is define the being that possesses said consciousness. And, for starters, it's not a pig. You guys are creating arbitrary goalposts that science can't define. And yet, what I'm continually asking us is to consider what science can define. And the difference in biology between a late-term fetus and a newborn is...? Not much. The biological differences are much greater during the middle-stages of pregnancy. Somewhere in there are developmental stages that we should consider, clinically. And the reason we should do so is not just create a more "humane" law, but to cool the discourse. One side wants to say, "all life is sacred", and the other seems to reject any notion that humanity exists at all, at least not until the person is walking and talking. LOL, I've honestly just been looking for middle-ground. LOL. It's so bad. Sorry, but if you want to be able to use words in a meaningful way, you need to be able to define what they mean. I am pretty sure that a large amount of disagreements could be resolved simply by people taking the effort to actually define what they mean when they say words, as opposed to saying "Well it is obvious!". If it is obvious, it shouldn't be hard to put it into words. If you can't put it into words, then it isn't obvious. And if your definition of "consciousness" is simply "Something that has something to do with the and, which a human has, but a pig does not", you are gonna run into tons of problems, because that is a shitty definition.Maybe it is just me coming from a maths background, but seriously, it is exhausting to talk to people who are unwilling to define the concepts they use, and then get angry that not everyone has the same view of that concept as they do. I am not even sure if i disagree with what you want to say, because it is very unclear what you actually want to say. You got lost in a semantic argument because you are using poorly defined terms. Discussions become way better, and are far less filled with semantics arguments if the words you use to describe stuff are well defined and clear. I don't think people honestly disagree with the end result you seem to be hinting at, namely that you probably shouldn't abort 8th month pregnancies, and that the point in time until which it is probably ok is somewhere in the middle of the pregnancy. Afaik most countries use something like 12 weeks, unless there are special circumstances. Except that is not how I defined consciousness. It is much more how other's itt decided to define consciousness. And that is/was a completely unnecessary obscurity. Consciousness is a scientifically obscure area, yes. But it is still, nonetheless, something that we know exists, and is rather crucial to defining life. Something with a consciousness can experience suffering. I suppose it bothers some to admit that a late-term fetus would experience suffering, but... they do. That is certain -- it is a certainty you can ask any woman who's ever carried a pregnancy to term. The fetus makes its suffering and impatience quite known to the mother throughout the later-stages of pregnancy. Which is why most mothers at this stage surely don't even refer to it as a fetus, but as a baby. "My baby kicked." Perhaps I should have said "brain activity". But I get the feeling it would not have helped at all, and people would have still questioned whether it exists or is human for the same reasons. Do you think it would've made a difference? Consciousness, not being scientifically understood to fucking absolution, doesn't mean it should be banned from discussion in any serious matter. We do know what it means in laymans's terms. Right? Or are you saying otherwise? I mean, are you saying I need to provide the dictionary-definition of the word? Oh, yeah, no double-standard being raised here! Sorry, I'd like to give people more credit than that. And that actually is what you're saying. I need to define words... Really? Instead of simply acknowledging consciousness, simply as we know it exists, people decided to, imo, cop-out of the question by simply ignoring the fact that consciousness does exist, and instead focused on forcing an impossibly precise definition to something that is not wholly material. Which, for fuck's sake, is not akin to calling it a "soul", as one was eager to put in my mouth, but rather as a process. And what's the point of that? To declare that a fetus doesn't have consciousness? No, they didn't even really argue that to any extent, and it's the only point that actually matters. Apparently they do agree via omission, that fetuses do have consciousnesses. But instead, I'm asked to question the consciousness as being human...? And that saddens me. I think it's just nonsense. It's a consciousness, it kicks and moves on its own terms, and it belongs to a developing human. It is that simple. Or it should have been. And I take ZERO fault for people complicating it. The deflection and pack-mentality has been quite strong in this discussion. And, yes, I know I'm arguing with people that mostly agree with me in regards to the law itself. But this desire to dehumanize what is human, to such extent, as if it's just as likely a pig or a parasite in the womb, is partly what makes discourse on the subject impossible, from both sides. And that is my concern, more than the law itself. And I'm not so sure we do agree on what the law should be, sadly. Late-term abortions are currently just next to illegal, but I get the feeling Kwark and others would just as happily allow all of them, and I think it's obvious that I would not be comfortable with that. Yo . . . wtf? I want to believe you are smarter than this. I don't even know how to respond. You know that no one is arguing with you about whether at some point a fetus/baby develops consciousness right? Right? The discussion is about the nature of consciousness and your invocation of soul-stuff by appealing to a human eidos/ousia to differentiate a fetus's consciousness from a pig's consciousness. Or do you think that babies experience the world like you do? Read your bolded bits again when you aren't drunk and tell me that you don't see soul-talk embedded in there. The problem with the consciousness/personhood criterion is that the "pro-choice" side arbitrarily chooses the time human develops the brain substrate necessary for developing consciousness/personhood as the threshold beyond which abortion should not be permissible (with some exceptions). Neither a late-term fetus nor a newborn baby has consciousness comparable with adult humans. A baby doesn't develop a personality until well after birth either. This leads to all sorts of problems. E.g., should we give late-term fetuses/newborns the same rights we give to dogs/pigs? Or perhaps their potential to develop more advanced consciousness and eventual personality gives them a special status? Why is having the brain substrate necessary for developing consciousness/personhood, i.e. the potential to achieve personhood, used as the threshold, and not, e.g., the potential to develop such a brain substrate? Insofar as I can see, IgnE is pro-choice. I definitely am. I have no idea about leporello, and pretty sure both IgnE and I got dragged into the consciousness argument because of shoddy philosophy, not because it's integral to the argument, because if adult-human level consciousness is a requirement for something to be treated as a person, we are kinda fucked. Mentally disabled, including Altzheimer patients, and babies (probably children in general until the age of 6 or so) would suddenly lose their status as people. If instead we expand it to anything at a newborn level of consciousness gets personhood rights, farmers, hunters and pet owners everywhere are (probably) fucked. I say probably, because we'd first have to establish how to measure consciousness in animals that don't have language, including newborns. Neither are useful approaches. So let's leave consciousness out of it? He'll, I'm quite okay with conceding a fetus is a person from conception (even though I don't actually think it is). A mother still has the right to abort her pregnancy. Just as we all have the right to unplug the violinist from our kidneys. According to your point of view late-term abortions would be permissible because whether the child survives is irrelevant. She could "unplug" the child in a way that allows it to survive, but she would not be obliged to. Not to mention the fact that if you were to concede that a fetus is a person, abortion would have to be considered murder, especially the way it is done in practice. Since you do not concede that, you have to determine when one gains the status of a person and justify why at that particular time. Either way, she can exert her right to bodily autonomy as far as it does not infringe on the fetus's bodily autonomy. The violinist problem is a bad analogy. It doesn't account for the fact that in the case of a pregnancy there is a causal relationship. The mother put the fetus in this position. The fetus didn't just magically appear in her body. By taking a certain course of action, she forfeited some of her liberty. What you are saying is that she can take that particular course of action (have sex) without (potentially) having her liberty limited as a consequence. To use KwarK's earlier example, what you are saying is equal to saying that neglecting to surrender your child to the state does not necessarily mean that you automatically assume responsibility. You can just let it die because your liberty takes precedence regardless of your actions.
Firstly, lets make it clear that I don't hold the right to live as a sacrosanct right that supercedes all others. Right to live is definitely a very very very important right, but that doesn't mean it supercedes all others in all situations. Bodily autonomy is also a very very very important right, and clearly the fetus' right to live and the mother's right to bodily autonomy are in conflict here. The cause of that conflict is kind of irrelevant. The violinist case can very easily be extended with you signing a contract that says you get 1 free orgasm, and in return, there is a 1 in a million chance that this will happen to you. Do you have the right to unplug the violinist?
I'm not arguing that having an abortion is not a shitty thing to do. I'm arguing that everybody (or rather, every woman) has the right to choose to have an abortion.
And yes, late-term abortions are just as acceptable as early-term abortions. What happens to the fetus after it is out of the body is no longer the concern of the mother. My preferred solution is that the state does its best to keep the fetus alive and finds a nice adoptive home for it. However, with the status of foster care in the USA, it might actually be preferrable to let these fetuses die than to expend significant resources on keeping them alive just to have its life fucked up by rotating through foster homes. But that is another discussion entirely.
Murder is a legal term and it is defined the way we want it to be. We can define abortion as murder. We can also define abortion as not-murder. Just as there are other actions resulting in someone ending up dead that are not murder.
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On April 26 2017 19:30 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2017 18:13 maybenexttime wrote:On April 26 2017 17:40 Acrofales wrote:On April 26 2017 16:57 maybenexttime wrote:On April 26 2017 14:35 IgnE wrote:On April 26 2017 08:56 Leporello wrote:+ Show Spoiler ++ Show Spoiler +On April 26 2017 04:45 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2017 02:19 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 02:14 Acrofales wrote:On April 26 2017 01:50 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:47 Acrofales wrote:On April 26 2017 01:46 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:38 IgnE wrote:On April 26 2017 01:30 Leporello wrote:On April 26 2017 01:27 IgnE wrote:On April 26 2017 01:21 Leporello wrote: [quote]
Yes. Human brain-functions.
I'm generally pro-choice, but I can't quite the understand the detachment in saying that a late-term fetus has no bodily rights. Shortly before birth, it's just a baby in the womb.
A cesarean operation, for example, doesn't endow the baby with sentience. It's just opening up the womb and removing the baby that exists. You can't say it's removing a parasite.
Parasitic=/=parasite. A late-term fetus is parasitic, absolutely. But it is not, factually speaking, a parasite.
Denying the sentience of a late-term fetus doesn't do pro-choicers any credit. This is exactly the type of middle-ground that both sides need to move towards, and where we should rely heavily on clinical metrics. By which I don't mean calling it a parasite. I love House MD as much as anybody, but it's a bit sensationalist, imo. so do you eat pork? do you think a post-birth baby has more or less "human-like" brain functions than an adult pig? do you eat octopus? I was a vegetarian for many years. But, uh, what? We're talking about human babies. Not pigs. I'm genuinely not sure what this comparison is supposed to prove. But, yes, I do think a human baby is more human than an adult pig... Wow. A late-term fetus has sentience. It is human sentience. Abstract, and in many ways, lesser. But still human. This is going right off the deep-end. Again, denying the human-nature of late-term fetuses is really just fuel for the fire, and nothing more. so you are talking about soul-stuff here. "human-nature?" ousia? what makes it human? dna? a blastocyst is also human? are you telling me ANY level of consciousness in combination with human dna is privileged with all the rights of a human person? do you not see how that is just essentialist soul-stuff? No, I am talking about consciousness. I don't believe in the "soul". Argue fairly, if you want to falsely categorize me to this extent then I'll just move on. If you really want to have this discussion, define consciousness. Also define human consciousness. No. I am asking people to consider the consciousness of a late-term fetus. The deflections... Jesus Christ. I'm not defining, in absolute terms, what is consciousness, which is scientifically impossible, currently (which is why the mirror test is BS). I'm just asking "does a late-term fetus have a consciousness?" We do know consciousness exists, obviously. And we can detect it, often through common-sense means, but also from brain-waves. EEG. The struggles to avoid answering the question simply is kind of... I am disappointed. I'll take a break. Because, I'm a little flustered at the inane deflections. If your guys' answer to people's concerns towards late-term abortions is to compare human-babies to pigs, or declare them simply "not human", then this discourse is permanently fucked. You're the ones drawing a line that shouldn't exist and can't be defined -- or should I say, is already clearly defined. If we can't accept that new-born babies are human, anatomically, biologically, common-sense, human, with a sentience that is human, then we've gone off the deep-end. You're the one who brought up consciousness and human consciousness as if they were categorically different. And then when someone said "well, that's basically a soul" got all upset. Either define the difference between "mere" consciousness and human consciousness or accept that pigs are people too. Albeit rather diminished people who walk around on 4 hoofs and habitually get turned into bacon. Hmmmm. Bacon. No. I don't have to define the consciousness itself, all I have to do is define the being that possesses said consciousness. And, for starters, it's not a pig. You guys are creating arbitrary goalposts that science can't define. And yet, what I'm continually asking us is to consider what science can define. And the difference in biology between a late-term fetus and a newborn is...? Not much. The biological differences are much greater during the middle-stages of pregnancy. Somewhere in there are developmental stages that we should consider, clinically. And the reason we should do so is not just create a more "humane" law, but to cool the discourse. One side wants to say, "all life is sacred", and the other seems to reject any notion that humanity exists at all, at least not until the person is walking and talking. LOL, I've honestly just been looking for middle-ground. LOL. It's so bad. Sorry, but if you want to be able to use words in a meaningful way, you need to be able to define what they mean. I am pretty sure that a large amount of disagreements could be resolved simply by people taking the effort to actually define what they mean when they say words, as opposed to saying "Well it is obvious!". If it is obvious, it shouldn't be hard to put it into words. If you can't put it into words, then it isn't obvious. And if your definition of "consciousness" is simply "Something that has something to do with the and, which a human has, but a pig does not", you are gonna run into tons of problems, because that is a shitty definition.Maybe it is just me coming from a maths background, but seriously, it is exhausting to talk to people who are unwilling to define the concepts they use, and then get angry that not everyone has the same view of that concept as they do. I am not even sure if i disagree with what you want to say, because it is very unclear what you actually want to say. You got lost in a semantic argument because you are using poorly defined terms. Discussions become way better, and are far less filled with semantics arguments if the words you use to describe stuff are well defined and clear. I don't think people honestly disagree with the end result you seem to be hinting at, namely that you probably shouldn't abort 8th month pregnancies, and that the point in time until which it is probably ok is somewhere in the middle of the pregnancy. Afaik most countries use something like 12 weeks, unless there are special circumstances. Except that is not how I defined consciousness. It is much more how other's itt decided to define consciousness. And that is/was a completely unnecessary obscurity. Consciousness is a scientifically obscure area, yes. But it is still, nonetheless, something that we know exists, and is rather crucial to defining life. Something with a consciousness can experience suffering. I suppose it bothers some to admit that a late-term fetus would experience suffering, but... they do. That is certain -- it is a certainty you can ask any woman who's ever carried a pregnancy to term. The fetus makes its suffering and impatience quite known to the mother throughout the later-stages of pregnancy. Which is why most mothers at this stage surely don't even refer to it as a fetus, but as a baby. "My baby kicked." Perhaps I should have said "brain activity". But I get the feeling it would not have helped at all, and people would have still questioned whether it exists or is human for the same reasons. Do you think it would've made a difference? Consciousness, not being scientifically understood to fucking absolution, doesn't mean it should be banned from discussion in any serious matter. We do know what it means in laymans's terms. Right? Or are you saying otherwise? I mean, are you saying I need to provide the dictionary-definition of the word? Oh, yeah, no double-standard being raised here! Sorry, I'd like to give people more credit than that. And that actually is what you're saying. I need to define words... Really? Instead of simply acknowledging consciousness, simply as we know it exists, people decided to, imo, cop-out of the question by simply ignoring the fact that consciousness does exist, and instead focused on forcing an impossibly precise definition to something that is not wholly material. Which, for fuck's sake, is not akin to calling it a "soul", as one was eager to put in my mouth, but rather as a process. And what's the point of that? To declare that a fetus doesn't have consciousness? No, they didn't even really argue that to any extent, and it's the only point that actually matters. Apparently they do agree via omission, that fetuses do have consciousnesses. But instead, I'm asked to question the consciousness as being human...? And that saddens me. I think it's just nonsense. It's a consciousness, it kicks and moves on its own terms, and it belongs to a developing human. It is that simple. Or it should have been. And I take ZERO fault for people complicating it. The deflection and pack-mentality has been quite strong in this discussion. And, yes, I know I'm arguing with people that mostly agree with me in regards to the law itself. But this desire to dehumanize what is human, to such extent, as if it's just as likely a pig or a parasite in the womb, is partly what makes discourse on the subject impossible, from both sides. And that is my concern, more than the law itself. And I'm not so sure we do agree on what the law should be, sadly. Late-term abortions are currently just next to illegal, but I get the feeling Kwark and others would just as happily allow all of them, and I think it's obvious that I would not be comfortable with that. Yo . . . wtf? I want to believe you are smarter than this. I don't even know how to respond. You know that no one is arguing with you about whether at some point a fetus/baby develops consciousness right? Right? The discussion is about the nature of consciousness and your invocation of soul-stuff by appealing to a human eidos/ousia to differentiate a fetus's consciousness from a pig's consciousness. Or do you think that babies experience the world like you do? Read your bolded bits again when you aren't drunk and tell me that you don't see soul-talk embedded in there. The problem with the consciousness/personhood criterion is that the "pro-choice" side arbitrarily chooses the time human develops the brain substrate necessary for developing consciousness/personhood as the threshold beyond which abortion should not be permissible (with some exceptions). Neither a late-term fetus nor a newborn baby has consciousness comparable with adult humans. A baby doesn't develop a personality until well after birth either. This leads to all sorts of problems. E.g., should we give late-term fetuses/newborns the same rights we give to dogs/pigs? Or perhaps their potential to develop more advanced consciousness and eventual personality gives them a special status? Why is having the brain substrate necessary for developing consciousness/personhood, i.e. the potential to achieve personhood, used as the threshold, and not, e.g., the potential to develop such a brain substrate? Insofar as I can see, IgnE is pro-choice. I definitely am. I have no idea about leporello, and pretty sure both IgnE and I got dragged into the consciousness argument because of shoddy philosophy, not because it's integral to the argument, because if adult-human level consciousness is a requirement for something to be treated as a person, we are kinda fucked. Mentally disabled, including Altzheimer patients, and babies (probably children in general until the age of 6 or so) would suddenly lose their status as people. If instead we expand it to anything at a newborn level of consciousness gets personhood rights, farmers, hunters and pet owners everywhere are (probably) fucked. I say probably, because we'd first have to establish how to measure consciousness in animals that don't have language, including newborns. Neither are useful approaches. So let's leave consciousness out of it? He'll, I'm quite okay with conceding a fetus is a person from conception (even though I don't actually think it is). A mother still has the right to abort her pregnancy. Just as we all have the right to unplug the violinist from our kidneys. According to your point of view late-term abortions would be permissible because whether the child survives is irrelevant. She could "unplug" the child in a way that allows it to survive, but she would not be obliged to. Not to mention the fact that if you were to concede that a fetus is a person, abortion would have to be considered murder, especially the way it is done in practice. Since you do not concede that, you have to determine when one gains the status of a person and justify why at that particular time. Either way, she can exert her right to bodily autonomy as far as it does not infringe on the fetus's bodily autonomy. The violinist problem is a bad analogy. It doesn't account for the fact that in the case of a pregnancy there is a causal relationship. The mother put the fetus in this position. The fetus didn't just magically appear in her body. By taking a certain course of action, she forfeited some of her liberty. What you are saying is that she can take that particular course of action (have sex) without (potentially) having her liberty limited as a consequence. To use KwarK's earlier example, what you are saying is equal to saying that neglecting to surrender your child to the state does not necessarily mean that you automatically assume responsibility. You can just let it die because your liberty takes precedence regardless of your actions. Firstly, lets make it clear that I don't hold the right to live as a sacrosanct right that supercedes all others. Right to live is definitely a very very very important right, but that doesn't mean it supercedes all others in all situations. Bodily autonomy is also a very very very important right, and clearly the fetus' right to live and the mother's right to bodily autonomy are in conflict here. The cause of that conflict is kind of irrelevant.
I'm not saying that it supersedes all others regardless of the circumstances. I am saying that if there is a conflict and agency on one side, then the side responsible for creating the situation automatically forfeits some of their liberty.
The cause of that conflict is not irrelevant. On the contrary, it is crucial. Let's consider self-defense, for example. If you attack me and there's a risk of my getting killed, I can kill you in self-defense. Your action automatically leads you to forfeit some of your liberty. Do you disagree?
The violinist case can very easily be extended with you signing a contract that says you get 1 free orgasm, and in return, there is a 1 in a million chance that this will happen to you. Do you have the right to unplug the violinist?
I highly doubt that the chance is that small. I'd wager that most unwanted pregnancies are due to not using contraceptives or not doing so properly, which significantly increases the odds.
But, yes, in that case it would mean that by signing that contract I would forfeit my liberty in that regard. In my opinion, personal responsibility for one's actions is more important than one's right to having pleasure in life...
I'm not arguing that having an abortion is not a shitty thing to do. I'm arguing that everybody (or rather, every woman) has the right to choose to have an abortion.
And yes, late-term abortions are just as acceptable as early-term abortions. What happens to the fetus after it is out of the body is no longer the concern of the mother. My preferred solution is that the state does its best to keep the fetus alive and finds a nice adoptive home for it. However, with the status of foster care in the USA, it might actually be preferrable to let these fetuses die than to expend significant resources on keeping them alive just to have its life fucked up by rotating through foster homes. But that is another discussion entirely.
Let's make this clear. You're arguing that the mother can choose to kill her offspring at any point during the pregnancy, is that correct? Because there is a significant difference between letting the fetus die and killing it. Out of convenience, abortions mean the latter.
Based on what does the mother's right to bodily autonomy supersede the fetus's right to bodily autonomy/life? At best, you have an impasse. You have to either give an argument supporting the mother's right over the fetus's or show that their statuses are somehow not equal, which is how we get back to the topic of personhood.
Murder is a legal term and it is defined the way we want it to be. We can define abortion as murder. We can also define abortion as not-murder. Just as there are other actions resulting in someone ending up dead that are not murder.
No, murder is universally defined as intentional killing of a being possessing the trait of personhood. Abortion is intentional. It is killing. What we have to determine, is whether the object of abortion is a person.
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