“It’s horrible for everybody. Yeah, I lost my son, it’s harder on our family, but I don’t want the rest of her life ruined too. It isn’t going to make me feel any better,” he said.
As hard as it is to say something like that… we need more people like this.
That’s fine, but she still made a conscious decision to do it. If she was one year older, would that make any kind of difference?
And let me be clear: mental illness can make some behaviors more understandable, but not murder– if the blame is put solely on mental illness, all that does is put more stigma on it. Not every shitty decision people make is because of “mental illness”.
I’m not sure you know what the word “reactionary” means if you think that my comments and opinions were “reactionary”.
The family can grieve, and my opinion has no bearing on the outcome of whatever happens. My point was, in the end, no matter what the reason, there needs to be consequences for someone who killed people, regardless of what the grieving parties think. I don’t think that’s particularly radical.
It’s a sad and awful situation al around. I can see why those poor families just want to move on.
Why only murder? Why not rape or assault or abuse or any number of different crimes deeply mentally ill people commit on the regular that ruin lives far more deeply than the death of a loved one?
Did they not know how stupid or mentally ill she is?
Just want to shout out here as an anxious and depressed person, the vast majority of the mentally ill are not psychopathic murderers. Mental health absolutely pays a role in decision making, but except for super extremely rare cases, it doesn’t turn someone into a murderer.
I don’t think he’s saying she shouldn’t be accountable and face consequences. He’s said he didn’t want her to spend life in jail. That’s going to be pretty radical for a lot of folks.
Some people are going to think that life in prison or the death penalty should be the minimum consequence. Others are going to think that even a monster like this can repent, change and (unlike her victims) be allowed to live free eventually.
That’s fair, and I get it. To me, that’s absolutely radical, especially if it was my child who was harmed.
I personally have just learned from experience that people who get off easy are likely to continue on the path of destructive behavior.
I’m not necessarily calling for her death or anything… but the punishment needs to fit the crime. Two lives are permanently gone from this world because of the careless and stupid choices she made.
I would agree, but I’d argue that that’s because our current system doesn’t actually rehabilitate people, and solely exists to punish people. Which solves practically nothing.
For me, it’s not about whether or not she can change and repent. I’m all for prison reforms that make prison safe and offer inmates opportunities for growth and self-improvement while they serve their sentences, but I think punishments need to fit crimes and this girl intentionally killed two other people. I think a sentence of 15 years to life is actually a bit lenient (I’m used to 25 years to life being the standard for premeditated murder). I don’t think she should mandatorily have to spend her entire life in prison, but I also don’t think she should get to enjoy even fraction of the life she robbed those two boys of. Ideally, with good behavior, I’d like to see her get out at 45-50 years of age. She would still have a few decades left, but the prime of her life would be gone—no career, no kids. That seems fair to me.
And yet on the same turn, if the father was calling for the death penalty or even a lengthy prison sentence, you all would be admonishing the fact that he even got a say and stating this is why justice systems shouldn’t be about satisfying the victim at all.
The hypocrisy is really blatant and self-serving. Should people be punished for their crimes or not? If yes, then you need to support predetermined sentences for crimes that apply equally across all cases, including this one. If no, then you don’t really believe in justice or government, but something much more insidious.
I have, on Reddit, many a time. They often do it to oppose the death penalty or opposing punishing anyone for crimes. It’s cheap enabling and apologia for all kinds of horrific shit wrapped in a neat little package.
People change. They get better. The guy who shot Reagan got better, and they let him out. Now he writes love songs and posts them on YouTube, and sells his paintings on eBay.
I agree that there should be time served, and a significant amount of it. I’m okay with 15 years. This person needs to be set aside from society while we determine if we can help them and, if we can, to do it.
I’d like to know how we arrived at 15 years, though. Would 10 not be enough? If the court had suggested 20 I don’t think either of us would have said “But surely it can be done in 15.” It feels right but it looks kinda arbitrary and that’s interesting to me.
Oh it’s completely arbitrary. The only way I can think of making it non arbitrary would be a very long study to see how long was necessary for people to genuinely rehabilitate, but even then, it would be based on their own arbitrary sentences.
Means there’s a chance they get out on parole at 15 years. So they may end up with a life sentence if not approved, but regardless, she is serving 15 years.
On the other hand, 17+15 is 32. Think of all of the things you do to get your life started between 17 and 32 and where you’d be if you’d waited to do the stuff you did at 17 until you were 32. That’s a whole lot of life and life experience there.
I witnessed this in a case. Young driver wasn’t paying attention and crossed the line, struck head on and killed an elderly woman on her way to chemotherapy, no joke.
On the recommendation and impassioned pleas of the victim’s family, the defendant plead a manslaughter charge down to a $75 fine for failure to maintain lane or some such infraction. I don’t remember all the facts but was struck by the forward thinking and empathy. The young driver was truly remorseful, part of the pleas were that he had suffered enough, that the memory of what he had done was punishment enough.
Chill out and stop jumping on people for something they never said.
All they commented was that it wasn’t the same situation. That’s a pretty normal thing to do when someone says “oh yeah I remember that happening in this one instance”. They didn’t go after the person or bite their head off or even express aggression.
Ironically, you’re the one jumping on someone for what they didn’t say and perceived aggression that isn’t there.
What a cool system where a judge openly breaks the law for the man whok appointed her and supreme court justices openly take bribes, and there are no consequences for either.
A friend was an escort for a while and she’s one of the most loving and caring people I know. I would trust her with everything, especially relationship advice.
If that’s available, good. What if that person was a prostitute to finance the education? I wouldn’t exclude them because they had one career step you might find immoral.
I would have them checked by a therapist to make sure there is no history of trauma or abuse that hasn't been resolved which could then be passed onto the kids as hilariously unhealthy expectations or more specifically "rules for how things are with guys".
I would also make sure they aren't currently a prostitute. Not exactly an example you want to set for a bunch of kids.
The former president of the United States is a convicted rapist who bragged about his dick size and paid a porn star thousands of dollars to have sex with him. That’s an example I wouldn’t want set for a bunch of kids, but it appears that’s just fine. An underpaid public servant working a side gig to make ends meet though…
Nah, I don’t want Donald Trump to be a teacher. Not because he’s had sex with porn stars, but because he appears to be illiterate, lacks empathy, and would probably die on the spot if some seventh graders made fun of his shitty toupee.
Just admit you hate women already lol. Be honest with yourself.
They didn’t say that she was unqualified. They said eww yuck an escort. They clearly have the same bias as you do, but that doesn’t mean they made an intelligent hiring and firing decision.
I don’t think we should teach that sex is wrong or bad, but yeah, she probably is experienced in what can go wrong and can talk from more experience than most of us.
It’s an imperfect comparison because sex workers sell their body and take on risks that way. Drug dealers sell a product and aren’t necessarily endangering themselves in the same way.
Nah, I’d argue that you’re both partially correct.
The romanticized ideal of starting a family/marriage on the basis of “true love” has been around forever.
Reality has been more of a mixed bag throughout large patches of human history. Accidental pregnancies, dynastic politics and plain economical necessities were probably foundations for many more marriages than actual love.
(There’s also that whole can of worms of whether “True Love at First Sight™” even is a good foundation for marriage, but that’s neither here nor there.)
A woman who has sex for work would be very concerned about doing so safely. She is likely going to know about STDs and pregnancies as well as how to prevent them and how to deal with them if/when they come up.
She has experience in setting expectations, limits, and breaking off sex when she needs to.
She is going to have more experience with the human body, what’s “normal” physically, what warning signs are for various STDs.
She’ll likely be the least judgemental person for someone to talk to when it comes to sex and sexual relationships.
I never said they don’t have extremely high rates of being sexually assaulted - you did and then you proceeded to argue against yourself.
If you read the document you linked though, you’d see that it actually supports the decriminalisation of sex work because this would reduce the amount of violence experienced by sex workers.
It also says that the proportion of men who are violent against sex workers is quite small and those men are serial offenders.
Again, stop listening to conservatives on this and actually read the documents instead of trying to find things to support your own point of view.
It supports my whole point. The world of sex work is filled with abuse and all sorts of nefarious stuff going on. You don't want someone involved in it teaching kids anything about sex.
Doesn't matter if it's a small fraction of offenders, because those small fraction of offenders still affect the majority of sex workers.
Yea, the world of sex work is filled with abuse. Because it is illegal. Because when I had to do sex work, because I am transsexual and was unable to pass at the time, because I had gotten fired from my minimum wage job for daring to present as the gender I am, I had zero protections. Because sex work is illegal, if someone chose to not pay me after the fact there was nothing I could do.
“Hey cops, this guy decided to shove a knife in my cunt when I was fucking him for grocery money, can you fix that please?”
I know it doesn’t mean much, but I’m so sorry you were made to experience that. It’s inexcusable, and you should have had support from society for that. I wish I could hug you, and I sincerely hope you’re in a better place now.
Sex-as-industry is a deeply fucked up field that is almost guaranteed to build resentment and unhealthy associations with sex.
It’s literally not. In fact, some people who do sex work develop an almost therapeutic relationship with their clients, since the intimate environment promotes emotional sharing.
It’s literally one of the oldest professions of human society, and the stigma against it is entirely rooted in puritanical religious attitudes, which have been proven to be antithetical to healthy relationships, if not actively promoting abuse.
They are experts in the industry and it’s not a justification. If it was your justification I’ll just let your next doctor know that you don’t want a lecture by an expert in the field but someone else entirely. I’ll just grab today’s horoscope. Holdup.
“No officer, you don’t understand! I offered her a large grant for her to do research. Not research for me, it’s for the high schoolers! How else are they supposed to learn proper technique? Jail? For what? Providing a proper education?!”
Donofrio repeatedly knocked, banged and kicked on the front door “while manipulating the door handle” while trying to enter the home.
Donofrio broke a glass window on the front door “and reached inside to manipulate the doorknob”
Yeah, that’s more than just trying to walk into the wrong house when you’re blackout drunk, so I can see why they would consider it justified. But that’s the word of the police, so we’ll see if a different story comes out later.
No, they have physical evidence, audio evidence which probably means camera or video doorbell and the kid died on the front porch of someone else’s house. Seems like the story told itself. The simple explanation is he tried breaking into the wrong house thinking it was his own.
Not saying he deserved to die over his mistake, it’s tragic and sad that the situation occurred.
Editing to add this from the article:
“evidence gathered at the scene, review of surveillance video that captures moments before the shooting, audio evidence, and witness statements.”
What would the other side of the story be? That he was breaking into his own house, but that the gun was fired from someone that had already broken into his own house and was wrongfully residing there? The facts are pretty basic here.
You are reading as though it is undisputed facts. One reason it is undisputed is because the victim is dead. For one it would be nice to see how likely it was he actually broke glass or reached inside. Was it clear video from a camera at the door? Or some grainy footage from a neighbor across the street? It doesn’t say.
Not in my state. No deadly threat, no clear intent to commit a felony. Breaking in is not enough for precisely this reason: the person entering may have a mistaken claim of right.
Only if done with criminal intent. You know, you’re allowed to break into your own house.
If you think it’s your house and it’s not, your mistaken claim of right negates the intent. You might assume your lock broke or something and your only intent is to get inside and take your drunk ass to sleep.
This is scenario where you wake up and find a trespasser asleep on your couch, you can’t just murder them, even if you can see evidence that they broke the window to get in.
There is no duty to retreat in the home, but deadly force is still only authorized to counter deadly force.
In places authorizing deadly force to repel a felonious entry, the intent to commit crimes once inside supplies the justification for force. You cannot know the intention from the mere fact that they are breaking in. That’s why you can’t blindly fire through the door at someone trying to break your door in.
If the person ignores commands to stop, ignores warnings, threatens you, says something like “this is a robbery,” or has a weapon, that’s a different story; there, it’s reasonable to infer their criminal intent.
What you’re saying flies in the face of mens rea. The person who’s state of mind is examined here is the homeowner. If they perceive their life is in danger they’re allowed to use force. In your state there may be a duty to retreat but even there there are exigent circumstances.
Good luck convincing a jury this guy knew the person who had just smashed his window and was trying to unlock the door from the outside wasn’t quite literally breaking and entering.
Nope. I’ve stated the rule correctly. Again, breaking and entering without more is insufficient justification for deadly force. Castle doctrine is inapplicable to mere breaking and entering. There has be something else, warnings or commands to stop that get ignored, something.
In my examples the homeowner has no basis to conclude that there is any threat.
The test is both subjective and objective. Otherwise, insane people could murder anyone that knocked on their door and claim they were in fear for their life.
By the way, there is no jury instruction on self-defense unless there’s an offer of proof that the homeowner knew of facts upon which a reasonable person could conclude that deadly force was authorized. Someone breaking your window, without more, is not a threat of deadly force against you, even if you are incredibly fragile and emotional.
What if this guy throws an empty beer bottle through the window and it strikes an occupant or uses the wood splitting axe on the front lawn to smash the door frame? Does the nature of the entry matter at all? Not trying to argue with you, just trying to understand. I had a similar conversation down this line of thought with a friend who is a cop in a state without castle. I left that conversation somewhat bewildered by how much an intruder can get away with in proximity to my person before I am legally able to use or even brandish a weapon on them.
Beer bottle, no. No deadly threat. Person is still outside.
If they have an axe in their hand they have a weapon, you can infer their intent to do crimes once inside. No question as to reasonableness of fear for safety. I’d still warn a bunch of times and command them to stop, and I’d only shoot if it was clear they were coming inside.
The thing to remember is that it’s all evaluated from the standpoint of self defense of your person, not property. Deadly force is never authorized to protect mere property.
I guess where I have the hardest part with this is around the “infer” — I personally feel it’s a bit too much to ask an occupant to attempt to read an unfolding situation clearly, accurately, and quickly enough when things are going down in real-time. “Someone is forcing entry into my dwelling, but do they intend to harm me or simply watch Netflix with me?”
I guess I just disagree with the law, but then again my mind always goes to the most unsettling scenarios and probably not those that are statistically most likely. For instance, when you wrote elsewhere about waking up and finding an intruder in your home asleep on your couch, my mind immediately went to: “Ok, but what if I wake up and find an intruder fully alert, not touching anything, but standing in the doorway of my daughter’s bedroom and staring at her as she sleeps?” The amount of time and the element of surprise that I would lose to correctly deduce this person’s intentions (assuming they wouldn’t try to deceive me, which is a whole ‘nother rabbit hole) could mean the difference between life and death/injury, given how easy and quick it is to kill someone with a concealed weapon. And though I suppose the same could be said of anywhere outside my home, too, I have to believe that I am statistically in more danger from someone who has forced entry into my home than someone just passing by me at the supermarket.
By the way, I fully recognize that what you’re saying is the correct interpretation of the law and tracks with what my LEO friend told me. I just don’t like, haha!
Thank you for recognizing. It sounds complicated but it’s really not, and I think you do like it, without fully realizing it.
To your point, you can jump to reasonable conclusions without having to be a mind reader.
On finding an alert intruder, you give clear commands. Should be able to be pretty sure of their intent pretty quickly after that.
Sometimes, there’s nothing you can do, and you get murdered in your sleep, very rare though. One thought there is to outsource the job of issuing commands and waking you up to a burglary alarm. If you wake up to a stranger who is not warded off by a blaring alarm, that tells you a lot about what they’re doing.
If I roll out of bed to the sounds of someone banging on my door, trying my doorknob, then breaking a window to get in - I’m probably going to believe that shots will start flying through the door in my direction if I confront them at that point, and/or that they intend to harm me or my family, not that they will politely go away if I ask them to, especially in the fog of having just awakened.
I’m not a gun owner, but if I had one, I doubt I’d consider a warning in that case. Without the escalation to smashing my window I’m likely to handle it differently.
Same thing happens in the middle of the day while I’m wide awake, maybe I interpret it differently. Maybe.
I agree that deadly force isn’t appropriate to protect property. I don’t agree that protecting property is what was likely going through this person’s head.
I feel bad for the owner who had to make a split second decision on what to do.
Because not much difference between rowdy drunk kid and a mentally deranged person. And making the wrong choice could mean your whole family is in danger.
Would you have possibly tried, I dunno, yelling first? Seems like if you’re already armed there wouldn’t be much danger in say “WHAT THE FUCK ARE DOING?”. It says nowhere in this story they actually tried stopping him, just that they phoned the cops, window broke, they shot him.
It also doesn’t say if they didn’t. We have no reason to believe that they didn’t yell at him.
But yeah, if someone pounds on my door at 2am, then tries to force the door open, then smashes my window to try and unlock the door, I’m not waiting til they get inside to see if they are peaceful.
Not risking my life or the lives of my wife and kids on wishful thinking. It’s a tragedy that the guy lost his life, it really is. But he didn’t exactly leave a lot of wiggle room for the homeowners in the house he was invading.
That’s what I’m thinking. Call the police first?! That’s a normal response. Not reach for a gun and shoot the person to death. And the student didn’t get inside. I thought an intruder who could be killed was someone who made it inside. So anyone outside the door is fair game, even if they’re knocking and banging?
A female resident called 911 as Donofrio kicked the door, while a male resident went to retrieve a firearm elsewhere in the home
They literally did that.
Donofrio broke a glass window on the front door “and reached inside to manipulate the doorknob,” at which point the male resident fired the shot through the broken window
Breaking a window and then attempting to open the door is enough to justify killing in self defense under local laws, even if the intruder has not entered the building yet.
The article is specifically written to have a headline that implies someone got away with murder, to get traffic. The point of articles like this is to profit, not to inform.
Man shot while breaking and entering, is a much less profitable headline.
Before you get to the point of destroying your own property, you should have already double checked which unit you’re at, whether a family member has a spare key, or whether someone you know can let you stay the night so you can call a locksmith in the morning. It’s entirely reasonable for someone inside to think that it’s an attempted break-in, so even if the guy just made a really bad choice that ended in tragedy, I don’t blame the shooter for thinking it was a robbery, and not wanting to risk the supposed robber having a weapon. It’s not an easy choice to make in that situation.
When I was in college I had this happen multiple times. In different apartments but they all looked similar.
Even had one dude peeing on the floor in my bathroom because I roommate was next door and didn’t lock the door. Dude was in the right apartment number, just off one building.
Even had a couple get aggressive and try to fight me.
Still, never shot anyone over it (and I was and am a gun owner. )
Don’t you think it might’ve been different if it was your own home (instead of a rented dorm/apartment), and instead of roommates you had a wife and possibly other family members in the home?
But at the same time, at least in my college town, the houses on and around campus, certainly within 2 miles, were generally
Quite often used as rentals for college kids, VERY few families actually lived there, in fact i never remember seeing families in them.
Working class adults were more or less segregated further off campus, largely due to the riffraff.
So yes, it would be a bit different now as I do not live near a college campus. But if i did, and it was often that there were drunk college kids, the witching out after the bars let out would usually be times when ruckus was occuring. So situationally, i would be much less likely to use a gun in a case like that. I would likely have it on me while I assessed the situation but much less likely to use it.
Thats just me though. And FWIW i did live in houses off campus in my later years, and much of the same bullshit would occur. Maybe it was just a different time. I was not much of a partier, and took some hard sciences so often I was leaving the library when the drunks let out. And some of the shit they would pull…Lets just say I would never live near other college kids again.
RealPage is one of the great unrecognized villains of the modern age.
Fun story, a few years back I caught my landlord overbilling me on utilities. I said hey I did the math and you owe me back $X and I'm not paying any more utilities until that amount I'd been overpaying has been used up. My landlord used Realpage for billing, and Realpage said no that's not how it works, we'll get it corrected but you need to keep paying what's in the system or you'll be delinquent. I said go fuck yourself, I have no reason to trust that you and the landlord will adjust it accurately if I give you more money, I'm not obligated to wait until your system figures it out, your system is your problem, not mine. I plan to pay amounts I actually owe and not amounts I don't. They said you really have to. I said hey check it out I think I don't, let's see which one of us is right.
We went back and forth about it for quite some time, including me telling my bank not to accept withdrawals from RealPage (since they started charging me even with emails expressly explaining that they were not authorized to), which made them even more irritated at me and charging me extra fees. I said dude I am more than happy to explain this all to a judge if you want to go that route. They said you really have to pay though, we've worked out the overbill and corrected it but you still have late and returned-payment fees. I said we went over this, go fuck yourself, did I stutter.
When I moved out my landlord tried to not give me back my security deposit until RealPage was happy with my utilities balance. I waited 31 days and then sent them a formal notice that if they didn't return my security deposit I was within my rights to take them to court and get paid triple and planned to do so in 7 days. They said it had all been a big misunderstanding and was there really a need for all this and gave me back my security deposit.
Just talking about it now again makes me amped-up and irritated.
I mean I'm glad it worked out right in the end. At the time I was just pissed, though.
Also, holy shit, I went back to look up some of the saga in my old emails, and there were definitely parts that were entertaining that I'd totally forgotten about. If you liked reading the summary check this out -- this is a short excerpt from one of some very long email exchanges I had about the whole thing:
Hey, I just logged in to look at sending a check for this month and I still see a balance for last month. Did you decide not to cash my check?
I'm not paying additional fees. I'm fine paying for my utilities. Charging me a late fee when I had a credit, that you didn't decide to apply until after the bill was due, is ridiculous. Charging me a fee to store my credit card, when you're refusing to un-store my credit card when I ask you to, is ridiculous. Again my bank's take on it when I talked to them about it was that it "sounds illegal." I'm sorta shocked that people put up with this + do business with you. Anyway let me know - just like last month, I'm fine sending you a check for what I actually owe you.
We have not received a check for your previous balance at this time. Once your check has been applied to the previous balance, you will receive an email notification. Until then, the full balance is still due on your account.
Okay, sure. I just sent via certified mail a check for $248.93. That represents:
$299.96, the amount currently on my account according to you for the past 2 months.
-$4 for the card storage fee from this bill (again, please stop storing my card; your system will not allow me to remove it)
-$4 for the card storage fee from March's invoice
-$8.11 for late fee from March's invoice
-$5.08 for late fee from February's invoice
-$4.84 for late fee from January's invoice
-$25 for returned item fee from January's invoice (I told you not to bill me, because I didn't owe you money - I'm happy that you eventually applied my credit to this balance instead of trying to collect more without authorization, but me putting a stop on you trying to bill me without authorization for money I don't owe you is 100% legitimate)
So in total $248.93. If there's anything above you feel like is justified let me know ... if (management agency) tries to take collection action against me for any of the nonsense above I plan to defend myself. I'm happy paying utilities and will not be paying random additional amounts of money. Hopefully that seems reasonable but whether or not it's acceptable to you, it's what I'll be doing. IDK why you guys do business this way, but best of luck with it I guess.
So the check, I sent to this address:
(photo)
Like this:
(photo)
The post office said they couldn't find your address. The best they could find was this (and I swear this is what they showed me, I'm not being funny):
(photo - their address is on Ritchie Road, but the post office I swear to God corrected it to "Bitchie Road")
So, that's where I sent it, certified mail. They said expected delivery is May 25th.
Again, best of luck.
There's more, including me threatening to charge them a late fee for the time when they owed me money and weren't willing to credit it back to me, but that's as much as I had time to dig back up right now.
When I stopped the payment with my bank in January, their system refused to let me use ACH payments anymore, and said I had to put in a credit card number in order to even log in and see my balance and history. Okay, sure. I put in a credit card number for a cash card that didn't have any money on it.
Then, their system said that I couldn't remove my credit card number from their system without putting in some other payment method (which had to be another credit card). But, in order to have a card number stored in their system (which I couldn't remove), I had to pay a $4 per month credit card storage fee.
This was when I started just mailing them checks and researching lawyers in Texas so I could take them to small claims court. I also sent the whole thing with documentation to the FTC explaining it as succinctly as I could.
Every credit card number is engraved on a golden plate which is stored in a special nuclear war-proof bunker and guarded by men with automatic weapons and combat armor.
No it wasn’t. He shoulda taken them to court sued and gotten on record this company acts this way so we hav precedent for this situation. In this story. No one wins. Company didn’t keep their security deposit and the renters time was wasted completely. No one won lol
Here in Brazil it’s much simpler because when you rent a place, basic services like electricity and water are transferred to you. So you get the bills, not your landlord.
And services like internet, you hire your own instead of using the ISP hired by your landlord.
USA landlords own the building so they get to say who your provider is and they will sometimes partner with a specific ISP and that is the only one you are allowed to use.
EDIT: OK so clearly some landlord are dicks and are telling people whom they have to use. I can see it if it’s included in the rent, but if not, I do not see how they could force someone. I am also not a lawyer and cannot speak the the legality of said practices. I have lived in a lot of apartments in a lot of places. Internet and electric have never been included in the rent,and I have never been told which provider I was required to use.
It’s highly dependent on state and municipality but it actually is. I was shocked when I moved to San Diego and about half of all managed buildings we talked to had a single partner isp/cable provider. While it is technically in your rights to force them to let you install a dish because of federal laws, nothing requires them to let a different cable or internet provider run physical cable up their skyscraper so they all cut deals with just one for a kickback. We had to give up on a building we really liked because the only provider was still DSL
Okayyyyy, I’m sorry you believed what they told you,and maybe California has some crazy laws I’m not familiar with, but in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Alaska at least, renters can choose from whatever electric or internet providers are available in the area.
I actually just looked into it and it was 100% legal for landlords to do this until a new FCC rule kicked in in 2022. Your lived experience is not the same as actual laws. You are technically correct but only since 2022. Given I moved to this city in 2020, we can both be correct. Isn’t that neat? It’s likely the other commenter in the thread also had this experience before 2022.
It is. Looked at an apartment yesterday who only provides Comcast as an ISP option and includes it mandatorily with rent payments. But sure be confidently incorrect
I’ve heard of just about any utility being included in rent and I’ve personally experienced a few of them being. Also it’s pretty easy if you own a large apartment building to have a say-so over who installs shit in your building. It’s all highly specific on the local context and how much of a greedy asshole the building owners are
It isn’t consistent in the US. Some landlords or properties include utilities in the price of rent, some don’t. Some only include things like trash/water/sewer and it’s up to you to source an electric/gas/internet provider.
That's usually the US system, but occasionally not. Like a lot of things, there's no consistency; it's just kind of a big freedom free-for-all for better or for worse.
This is pretty similar to how it is in the US at over 90% of the places I’ve ever rented. But since we’re the world leader in enshittification, this kind of scumbag bullshit has been on the rise over the last few years.
They always say this after they try to get away with bullshit.
They, in this case, could refer to banks, other corporations, your boss, politicians, police officers, etc. Anyone in a position of authority will inevitably be tempted to abuse that authority, or at the very least assume that their understanding of the situation is superior to the understanding of those over whom They wield that power. When conflict arises, if you’re correct regarding your rights, finances, etc., it’s “just a big misunderstanding, and can’t we all just get along?” But when They have the legal upper hand in a disagreement, They will fuck you with an iron bar and convince anyone watching that you are a deadbeat trying to pull one over on the rest of your fellow proletariats.
And meanwhile, guess who is constantly buying political influence to ensure they never lose the legal upper hand again?
The pandemic made me give up on working for other people, what I consider appropriate accommodation wasn’t in line and being told to put myself in danger as if it was a normal job requirement I signed up for made it real clear how valued workers are.
That being said. The first two things a person should buy once striking out on their own are a lawyer and an accountant. Those two peeps know how the world REALLY works. Youre not going to build stability from a shaky foundation, that’s just basic cause and effect y’know.
And having a lawyer on retainer is one of the best feelings in the world. It’s fuck you money, but you only need enough $ to pay your guy, not a warehouse of pandemic pine
I’m assuming it’s a trade, not many occupations put you in actual danger but are also ones you can strike out on your own. But I’ll admit my knowledge is limited.
Not a landlord, but I had a similar excuse thrown at me by a dealership. Towed my car an hour for a recall to a college town because everywhere else was booked for a while. They did close to $1000 of unauthorized work and then threw a fit when I told them I would not be paying for it unless they could show me a signed document where I agreed. When they realized I wasn’t a broke college kid after I threatened legal action and to report my car stolen if they were not willing to give it back, I got the “this was a misunderstanding, it never should have went this far” from the owner who had just called me a liar 10minutes prior. Such obvious BS
That is incredible you were able to advocate for yourself that way.
It’s exhausting to have to fight like that for a fair shake. It makes me sad because I know how much energy and focus that takes.
Even if the victims can recoup some money, settlements almost never pay out commensurate with what was financially lost. What’s more is that company and the landlords who utilize it will never be able to repay the people whose effort, happiness, and opportunity they stole.
Yeah it was like my own little holy war. It went on for quite a while. Honestly it's partly that I just like being a pain in the ass and being hostile to people, and this was a golden opportunity where it was warranted.
Think about if all the vitriol that goes into internet political arguments could instead be turned outwards at the people who run the fucked up system. It was a brief moment where that energy was channeled in a productive direction and towards the source of the problem.
Fuck yea man. I don’t understand how people can work for sleezebag companies. I know a lot of us have to work, I get it, but I worked phones (retention, the worst) for a credit card company for a bit and I was able to do it on the up, and be legitimately helpful for customers, all while I refused to upsell anything that they didn’t want.
I’d get “talked to” about it but I never cared. What’s a better experience for the customer? fuck your monthly metrics, the idea is to RETAIN customers, right? Well that starts by not fucking them off so you can make a bonus.
I never got a bonus, and I never cared. I’m of the mind that the product should sell itself, otherwise it’s not ready for market. If it’s not filling a need then it’s a waste of time and frankly, a companies resources. People generally don’t forgive corporations, nor should they. It still offends me that if sales weren’t what they were expecting it’s somehow the people at the bottoms fault, especially when the people writing the shit don’t have any need for the product. I won’t be moved from this rock. If my sales aren’t to your specs, take that back to legal and your ideas guys and tell them to try harder. Weak links can be found in more than one place.
Fwiw, I left the company, they didn’t let me go. To this day I refuse to carry debt or even own credit cards tho. Nope, doesn’t sit well with me. On the same vein tho, I measure how successful I am by how little I need and how little I spend, not how much I earn. This monopolization of everything has turned me staunchly anti-consumer (in the sense of consumption in general, not heil corporate/anti-customer. Right to repair 100%, revoke charters of those that bad faith skirt the intention). I both rue the reactionary in me, even if came from biological imperative, and fucking LOVE where Ive landed at the same time.
All you need to do in this world to win is kill your internal sense of justice but that’s a price too high. Team Rawls for life.
I don’t understand how people can work for sleezebag companies.
This is part one.
To this day I refuse to carry debt or even own credit cards tho.
I think this is part two.
It’s awesome that you do this, but if you can afford to avoid debt entirely you are probably somewhat priviledged compared to some. A lot of people in the US are working off student debts for degrees that didn’t quite deliver the jobs they were expecting. Or just were dealt a bad hand to begin with.
No man. In no way. I chop my firewood everyday. I have to rebuild everything I own. Everything. If it breaks, my life is learning whatever it is until it’s fixed. Case in point, my automatic transmission went out. I had to learn that and rebuild that. I am not a novice with a wrench, but that’s entirely because this is the life I’ve always had to live. I don’t not recommend it, I wouldn’t put my work load onto someone else and call that a rational thought.
July 5th we lost everything we own to fire. From our neighbors fireworks, we didn’t have any. Insurance told us to kick rocks. Starting over. Completely. Again.
No man. I’m not privileged. I got more help from my neighbors than my family, not to begrudge them, they’re all spread too thin too. I paid off my student loans in the mid aughties thankfully. I got the worst of the bunch, 3/4 of a degree, 4 years of debt and no degree. Thanks life. I took a vacation, once. I’ve been working full time since I was 15, almost 30 years now. I can’t afford dental care that I need and I don’t know what to do about that really, but I can tell, if it involves filling out 59 pages of bullshit that all says the same thing and spreading that nonsense around 5 agency, I’ll die from an abscess tooth first. The hoops required for help are indignant, and frankly, everyday the world makes a worse case for sticking around.
The only privilege I would say I have is I measure my success by what I don’t buy, which is the biggest middle finger I can give our society, as I teach others how to do the same. I’d go 128days on my dominant arm if that would put me at the negotiating table of an American General Strike. You couldn’t talk me out of it, in fact.
The only silver lining is that if I could not be me, then I would only want to be Diogenes.
I still think it’s you. A lot of foreign actors want the U.S. system to collapse. Maybe you’re not, but your earlier comment sure sounded like it. People are downvoting me bcz they misunderstood what my comment was directed at. I actually agree with the sentiment, but ignoring all of our laws outright is a good way to have no government at all.
Doesn’t it make you feel like the law is less important when all these rich cunts are breaking laws left and right, that would send you to jail real fast, and no one seems to do anything about it?
God it feels good knowing we can actually say the solution to the world’s ills out loud here. You’d get banned from Reddit and YouTube for saying the people ruining our planet need to stub their toes.
Feel free to say #eattherich rhetoric all you want there. I don’t put up with .world’s blatantly obvious corporate shill shit.
EDIT: From the modlog, here’s the deleted comment.
If by breaking laws you mean setting the financial district on fire with executives still in those soulless highrise pieces of shit than yes, it kinda does. Imagine the world without what we are told to call “elite”.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !benjamingetthemusket
You wouldn’t download a car, a House, two beautiful women or their chi…you know a highrise I mean. You wouldn’t download a highrise or a jet plane or two really hot babes. right?
I don’t know, have you guys developed the quantum teleportation reflux trackrowave transmission elometer yet? Cuz you’re gonna need at least three of those in a bisiouscope to download anything of value really. And if you’re looking at porn, dude, zoom out until the entire body is in view. It’s a warning you must heed. Otherwise you better figure out how to get rid of body parts if you know what I mean.
I once mentioned to my father that most people are likely felons without realizing it because everyone will have violated a whole slew of laws they are unaware of or that are obscure/unenforced. He, being a conservative, became angry with me.
I can probably come up with a dozen felonies and goodness knows how many misdemeanors I’ve committed in my life, and I’m definitely not a menace to society.
Exactly. The worst thing that most people do as far as common laws are concerned is speeding.
The real bad things that happen that are rarely enforced is spousal and child abuse, religious abuse, abuse from certain authorities, etc. These destroy lives.
Empty political promises are one thing and par for the course. Literally getting away with high treason on several documented accounts and still being able to run for president is another.
My first thought was “wait until they hear about Shakespeare”. Literally every role filled by men, sometimes with the script explicitly calling for a man to play a female in full attire.
I’d also hate to see what policies they’ll enact for their chorale program when performing historical hymns, where soprano parts specifically called for a male eunuch (castrato) to sing since females were not allowed to attend church services including choirs.
In my younger years I would have been absolutely vilified by these people. I’m probably vilified now, but I would’ve been then too. In all seriousness though, I cannot believe how far backwards we’ve gone in all this. I recognize that these thoughts and feelings have existed since before I was a kid but at least back then people seemed to have the decency to mind their own.
But to attack theatre of all things with this gender bullshit is attacking theatre itself. Crossdressing in theatre has existed for as long as theatre has existed. Cross-singing has existed for as long as singing has existed. If they’re not teaching that stuff in their performing arts programs, they are denying young adults a quality education of the performing arts.
Trying to remember. Was it Taming of the Shrew where he mind fucks the audience with a male actor playing a male servant pretending to be a guy’s wife in drag?
We’ve turned into a nation of cowards. Just completely craven people who shoot first and ask questions later because the news has made them terrified that they’ll be murdered in their beds, despite violent crime being historically low, comparatively speaking.
Having mingled with the gun community for some time, there are a lot of level-headed people among gun owners but there are also a worrying amount of terminally fearful people with violent ideation. Many are likely one bad life event, one half-cocked response to an uncertain situation from being a mugshot on a news story like this prick.
Having mingled with the gun community for some time, there are a lot of level-headed people among gun owners
This is why US has so much gun violence. Like rabid dog owners assuring you theyre safe. You just havent seen them when theyre not level headed, we’re all emotional apes.
Yep. Even the “responsible” gun owners I know radiate the “I want you to know I’m dangerous” energy when they tell you how prepared they are, “just in case something happens that requires a gun”
There are other quieter owners you never really hear about though. My brother never really talks about it, doesn’t chime in to water cooler “what are you shooting” kinds of talks, and basically just keeps them in the gun safe except for his ~2x a year gun range trips to make sure he stays competent.
He treats them like his garage full of dangerous power tools. Not a toy, but good to have in your back pocket should there be a need for that particular tool some day.
He treats them like his garage full of dangerous power tools. Not a toy, but good to have in your back pocket should there be a need for that particular tool some day.
A significantly unfortunate number of gun owners treat them like fashion accessories. To be displayed, accessorized, collected, and carelessly treated.
Yeah. I have friends that won’t even let their kids walk a quarter mile to school, in one of the safest communities in the entire state. It’s insane. The media has put the fear of “but what if…” into so many people.
You’ve got better odds winning the lottery than what these people are afraid of. Be smart, be savvy, be aware of your surroundings and watch out for the oblivions as you go about your business. But there’s no need to be afraid of everything around you.
You’ve got better odds winning the lottery than what these people are afraid of. Be smart, be savvy, be aware of your surroundings and watch out for the oblivions as you go about your business. But there’s no need to be afraid of everything around you.
Awareness prevents the vast majority of dangerous situations. Carrying is actually more likely to escalate situations into being dangerous than not. even a basic situational awareness will keep you far safer than a fire arm ever will.
In that situation I’m concerned about other drivers, and also the child not paying attention while staring at their phone. I have seen sooo many teens just step off the curb and walk across the street without even looking up from their phone. Stranger Danger would have nothing to do with it.
There needs to be a better balance between the latch key kid independence/responsibility and the absolute lack of trust in your kids and your community to just not be child kidnapping murderers???
Fixing transport infrastructure would have the most impact. Narrower roads with fewer lanes and more complexity, 20mph/30kmph speed limits, better designed pedestrian crossings, and separated bike and pedestrian infrastructure. And requiring the vehicles themselves to be designed such that they are not just safe for the occupants, but safe for other vehicles and people too (which means lower hood heights and lower weight).
And in general, providing viable alternatives to driving so there are less vehicles on the road, making it safer to walk and bike.
but safe for other vehicles and people too (which means lower hood heights and lower weight).
Small note on this, but better crash compatibility and an upper weight limit might also increase the relative safety of bicycles, motorcycles, and even potentially some larger local wildlife, on top of just increasing safety for pedestrians and people driving relatively smaller cars, like sedans.
The whole way our society is built is not around pedestrian safety or teaching it to children.
My daughter is growing up in a subdivision with low traffic and no sidewalks and I have to regularly remind her to look both ways when crossing the streets when we’re elsewhere because it’s just not something she has to do all the time.
There’s room for sidewalks, they just didn’t build them. If there were sidewalks, it would be far easier for her to remember to do it every time.
I agree that people shouldn’t be afraid of this stuff, but I think you underestimate the odds of winning the lottery and your chances of being murdered.
Around 32,000 homicides/year in the US. 333,000,000 people, so about 1 in 100,000.
the distribution is different though, if you buy a powerball ticket you have the same odds as everyone else who bought one assuming the numbers are equally distributed and truly random
the difference between living in Biden’s suburban neighborhood in Delaware vs west Philly or Baltimore is huge
Sure, but nowhere is the chance of winning the lottery greater than the chance of getting murdered. Even Singapore, which has the lowest homicide rate, is around 1 in 1,000,000.
I suppose if you classified getting a playback prize on a scratch off as a lottery win, but I doubt most people count that.
The “I feared for my life” rhetoric is just an excuse to shoot people, borrowed from police when they wanted to shoot people. You don’t have to politely believe them just because they said it.
The NRA fear paranoia narrative has permeated our society. Add to that those who feel inferior so they carry a gun to feel powerful. Now add the hate farming by Russian trolls and right wing media, (the two are the same, with different names)
How often I witness roadrage/aggressive drivers makes the mass gunownership in this country kind of terrifying. I’ve seen a truck try to push another car off the road for getting off a left hand exit. I can only assume the truck driver was mad at the car for “being in the way.” The power tripping and entitlement to being aggressive towards others combined with your list of problematic cultural phenomenon and guns is horrifying.
You’re right that the vast majority are cowards, but you also have psychos who jerk off to a fantasy of shooting someone. There are all kinds of crazies out there just looking for a reason, and they’re getting crazier in their psycho echo chambers.
Everything is a threat. Thank you Faux News and the rest.
Different color skin - threat
Gay - threat
Trans - threat
Environmental rules - threat
Immigration - thread
Vegetarian - threat
Equality - threat
Atheism - threat
Non-western religion - threat
Woke - threat
Electric cars - threat
The list is endless. Everything is a threat to them. Their pocketbooks, their marriage, their jobs, their theism, their TV, their guns…
An endless barrage of threats that they are constantly reminded of.
What can they do against all these threats? Elect a Strong Man that will crack skulls, He Has All The Answers. But those pesky libs keep getting in the way, so you gotta take matters into your own hands. Thank god and the good ol’ USA you can have a personal arsenal at arm’s reach to instantly panic-fire at that dark-skinned person pulling into your driveway who wants to steal your TV.
I’ve talked about in in several other posts regarding gun control.
The rampant media sowing fear is poison. It’s the culture that’s being fostered that’s more dangerous than the guns. “Fuck around and find out” and “come try and take them” keeps reinforcing that guns are a totally normal thing to use to solve problems.
Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, loves talking about his creepy spy app he and his son have on their phone that alerts the other if they visit naughty sites. So the writers of this proposal and all that vote for it would be happy to put the same program on their devices and computers, right? And tie that straight to a public feed we can all see? Great Great.
I don’t have a problem with their abstaining from porn, having personal feelings about its value or morality, or even using each other to remain accountable. I do think it’s a little dumb to put spyware on your device intentionally and to share with your child when you accidentally fall to temptation exactly what sort of smut you enjoyed. But that’s all them. Not my problem.
As you said the problem is when you’re legislating to restrict others from something you have a personal issue with, particularly when that thing is completely personal. So if they’re going to butt their way into the personal habits or desires of the general public, surely they have no problem sharing their own habits and desires with the public in return. And, in real time. I want to see what senators are jerking it to on their potty break during session.
Aside from it being creepy as hell to do that with your son (who probably didn’t have a say in the matter) this is a massive national security risk. Spyware on a Congress member’s phone? Not a great idea.
The craziest thing about the Hillary Clinton private email server was not that she had it, but that her predecessors also used private email for government stuff as Secretary of State. Not a one-off, but the norm. Absolutely nuts.
“Sir, you have a federal government IT department. Which federal agency do you want to tell your family if you watch porn? Don’t worry they already monitor your personal devices too.”
I don’t have a problem between 2 consenting adults but monitoring a parent is creepy and weird. It’s likely a case of him trying to set an example and prove he too is compliant, to his son, but it’s just weird.
And, as we learned from that same documentary, it’s pretty easy to get around it. If that homeschooled sicko Josh can figure out how to partition his devices, I’m guessing plenty of others have figured it out, too.
I wonder if being found incompetent to stand trail would have any effect on what he did as president. Like would they just invalidate anything he signed?
Not only that, but he was definitely informed. White House counsel and other informed professionals were privy to a bunch of meetings where people were talking about these ideas, and they shared their opinions and sometimes got in shouting matches or resigned.
I think Trump’s brain genuinely cannot process the concepts of “right” and “wrong” as distinct from whatever he feels like doing, and so you could say: Yes, people whose job it is to be informed experts told him very clearly that these things were illegal, but his brain is so rotten and single-minded that he couldn’t absorb that their advice might be objectively true, any more than a dog can understand a “keep off the grass” sign.
Fortunately I think the chance of his lawyers advancing that as a defense is pretty remote.
Yeah. It’s just not a logical frame of mind. If you tried to stop me in the moment, you’re the enemy and you must be destroyed, how dare you, I feel angry, fuck you. If I did it and later it turned out it was wrong, you should have stopped me, how dare you, it’s not my fault, it’s your fault, I feel angry, fuck you.
Data from Brownsville ISD seen by The Observer showed its officers made 3,102 student arrests between May 2021 and Nov. 2023. Nearly 60% of those were on felony charges and 76 of those kids were in elementary school.
High-speed school-to-prison pipeline. Because inmates=free labour and prisons are for-profit. Gotta get 'em kidz institutionalized as early as possible!
I suspect that being born from the wrong vagina is a crime for those people.
It just explains so many things: from their criminalization of abortion whilst taking State support away from poor single mothers to emprisioning kids who don’t have a mommy and daddy with the right connections or who can afford the kind of lawyer who would extract a massive compensations from everybody involved in putting a kid in prision like this.
I am pretty sure that body autonomy and a women being able to make her own choices about when to start a family are why we support a woman’s right to choose.
There is a multitude of reasons why people support abortion. One of the common arguments is that it is better to not exist than to be born poor or to parents that don’t want you (I.e literally the “born to the wrong vagina” argument). This is a widely supported belief and I would say that around 20 percent of pro-choice people I’ve debated (out of hundreds) use it as their primary argument.
Asserting that there is a single reason why people hold a position is absurd.
FYI bodily autonomy arguments have largely been abandoned in academic ethics, because there is just no existing right to bodily autonomy that is sufficiently strong, and we have no basis for arguing that there should be.
Maybe that’s just because it makes sense to not want a massive amount of expenses in a life where they may have trouble taking care of themselves already.
You really act like it’s a bad thing to not have children if you can’t financially take care of them.
And none of these have to do with targeted killing of human organisms based solely on the circumstances of their conception?
You don’t get to play “the conservatives want to kill and imprison poor children” card, when pro-choice liberals celebrate the exact same thing (not pro-life ones like me).
“You really act like it’s a bad thing to not have children if you can’t financially take care of them”
This argument falls in the same category of logic error that the “abortion is good because it prevents children from being poor” that I am refuting.
The fact that it is bad for people to be poor, does not follow that they should therefore be deprived of existence, because existence is not the cause of suffering but the poverty. When someone says “I wish I wasn’t poor”, they are NOT saying “I wish I didn’t exist” because they could easily make that happen. They are wishing that they had less hardship.
Likewise your argument is also a failure at descriptivism. Not having children for financial reasons, is not immoral. Abortion is not just “not having children”, it is an active deprivation of all future experiences of an existing human organism. That’s why it’s immoral. (And yes trying to argue that fetuses aren’t people is insufficient since one can argue from idealized persons {e.g we don’t kill mentally ill suicidal people because an idealized person wouldn’t want to die, in other words the immediate condition of the human is gladly ignored), or cases of temporary loss of personhood (regardless of how you define it) which would permit killing many if not all adults.
Pretty sure I can rigorously prove that you accept moral principles, empirical facts and a logical system that determines that abortion is infact immoral, you simply never bothered to analyze it.
“Now stay out of other people’s lives”
Can you imagine what a horrible (dare I say immoral?) world you would have if immoral actions could not be restricted? Next time someone wrongs you remember that you are the real perpetrator for expecting them to follow your conception of morality.
Not the original poster, but I would enjoy seeing you rigorously prove that pro-choice views are incoherent. My views:
All human beings should have a right to bodily autonomy. This includes the right to deny the use of their body to anyone, even if the person who is using their body is doing so in order to survive, and even if they’ve previously permitted that person to use their body. If the use can be ended without killing either party, that should be preferred, but if not, then the person being used should still be able to withdraw access.
The real world is messy, obviously, so we have some ambiguity, but in general, this is the guideline.
Easy, define a form of bodily autonomy that permits forcing conscious action upon an individual (this is the basis for many laws^1^ ), but not prohibiting the individual from engaging in an action to override an already occurring unconscious process.
This is necessary because the former is the description of what many morally accepted laws already do, and the latter is a description of what prohibiting abortion is.
In other words this is the exact definition that we need to show is correct to justify abortion on the grounds of bodily control.
Except we can’t, and it’s obvious why. Saying “you must do X” is clearly stronger than saying “you cannot stop Y from continuing to happen”. So we already accept a greater violation of bodily autonomy as good, and the abortion defence is actually contradictory.
We can resolve this by rejecting one of the premises. So which one do you want to reject? The one that is the basis for societal rules, or the one that allows killing humans?
As I already pointed out the bodily autonomy argument is essentially completely rejected in ethics, it’s only popular because of Thompson’s deeply flawed and overly simplistic paper (primarily because it already assumes that such a form of bodily autonomy already exists).
Consider the fact that if you are in a circumstance were someone else depended on minimal effort from you for survival, saying you did not want to provide it is not a legal defence. You can’t just let your child drown in a 2ft pool, and claim that your right to bodily autonomy allows you to withold conscious support. You intuitively know that it is immoral simply to withhold life-saving actions, and so does everyone else in society. The only reason why fetuses have an exception is that they don’t appear human, despite satisfying all the necessary conditions. It is simply psychologically easier, much like how it’s psychologically easier to kill strangers who look differently to you than your friends or relatives.
This is an incorrect phrasing of the situation. The actual question is what moral principles do we already accept? Which ones are more fundamental than others. Instead you are literally affirming the consequent by presupposing that bodily autonomy is morally relevant.(Otherwise,if that’s not what you are doing,your phraseology is just bizarre)
Laws force people to use their body regardless of how they feel about it. We agree that it is moral.
Prohibiting abortion is denying the ability to perform an action. We assert that this is immoral.
However, forcing an action is stronger than denying an action. So which premise is wrong? Is it the one that leads societal rules unenforceable, or the one that makes a quarter of the population temporarily unhappy?
There is also the extrinsic teleological argument that pregnancy isn’t a violation anymore than your pancreas producing insulin. A belief can be irrational if it contradicts a biological function.
“Would a fertilised egg be human”
As long as it is a separate entity that is living and functional with a probability of future conscious experience. Note, that I don’t make the unique DNA distinction because that would render killing clones permissible.
Now unlike some people I don’t think that all abortion is immoral, just one’s where we have a reasonable expectation of future human experience so long as we do not take action to reduce this expectation. Like how rendering someone brain-dead so you can kill them is just a more elaborate active killing , something like drinking alcohol to render your fetus brain dead is also active killing.
Because denying an action is simply requiring that the existing circumstance continue, while forcing an action is to require that the person engage in a conscious action (to specify, it’s a stronger control over someone else’s body).
“Do you consider a fertilised egg to have the same moral weight as a person”
I already answered this more generally, fertilisation is not the revelant part it is that it is a distinct organism with a reasonable expectation of future conscious experience. Many fertilised eggs do meet this standard, but not all. Likewise fertilised eggs are not the only things that meet this standard. Things like pluripotent stem cells that are being created to form fetuses, also meet this standard.
(I strongly suspect that you are fishing for a specific response, which you find absurd despite ultimately accepting all the premises.)
I strongly suspect that you are fishing for a specific response, which you find absurd despite ultimately accepting all the premises.
I’m not. I thought you were pretty clear, but I wanted to check. I’m sort of exploring what you believe, rather than fishing for anything in particular.
So, in your view, if a building were burning, and inside was an artificial womb of some sort with twenty viable eggs that will eventually become people, then would there be a moral duty to save them over one five-year-old child?
presupposing that bodily autonomy is morally relevant
The “burning IVF clinic” is a poor instance of analogous reasoning. The reasons why one would save a 5-year old, are not fundamental moral principles but purely psychological. One would save friends or attractive people first as well, this does not grant them greater moral value.
Even if we don’t consider it to be purely emotional preference, the “triage” rebuttal can hold as well. I.e the fact that we choose a 5-year old is that their value is more immediately apparent, even if we have no reason to believe them to be more morally valuable.
“You don’t believe that it isn’t”
The problem here is that if you want to show that something is true, you can’t rely on premises being true that require the conclusion to be true. It just becomes a useless tautology that provided no additional information.
The reasons why one would save a 5-year old, are not fundamental moral principles but purely psychological
How do you identify when a moral rule is a fundamental principle versus a psychological preference?
…even if we have no reason to believe them [the five year old] to be more morally valuable [than the eggs].
In your view, is someone who saves twenty viable eggs over a five year old a more moral person than someone who does the reverse? (in some sort of ideal sense, regardless of whether anyone would do this or not)
The problem here is that if you want to show that something is true, you can’t rely on premises being true that require the conclusion to be true…
I don’t think that I’m engaging in any circular reasoning. I’m not trying to argue that bodily autonomy is good- I’m making the base assumption that bodily autonomy is good and should be treated as a fundamental moral principle because it makes sense of a lot of moral intuitions that I have. That’s not any more circular or arbitrary than any other moral principle.
EDIT: Also, I appreciate you getting back to me, and in case we don’t talk again until after the holidays, Merry Christmas!
Right, which is the problem… When you are trying to establish if something exists you don’t assume that it’s already true.
You have actually presented zero argument that bodily autonomy is a right, so we really have no basis for assuming it is. Even if you try to make personal rights arguments this can be refuted as a failed descriptivist argument. Are medical decisions being left to the individual due to a inherent right to bodily control, or the fact that people who are directly affected by a decision chose better outcomes? The bodily autonomy argument does not account for why we think it is good to deny people the ability to make poor medical decisions (i.e children, the mentally handicapped, ignorant people, or in the case of prescriptions anyone without sufficient knowledge). The latter argument does.
“A more moral person”
I think I already answered the question. Both individuals are acting morally by saving others, although saving more people is a better outcome.
“How do you determine when it’s a moral principle and a psychological preference”
This is a difficult question. Some cases are apparently obvious, like saving attractive people. In general the problem is searching for the answer that best satisfies our intuitions about morality and reasoning. The primary argument for when a feeling is insufficient, is if the basis for it is too complex. The purpose of a moral system is to provide a set of rules and methodology to determine if an action is morally good or not (otherwise we would just rely on spontaneous feelings, with all the problems of individualistic moral relativism), it does not make sense to rely on feelings about a morally complex action to override a more fundamental principle. At some point you have to say that your feelings about something are not morally relevant.
“Why does a potential human being have a right to life that is equal to an existing life”
And just like that…the personhood argument. Remember what I said about every abortion argument boiling down to denying (or affirming) the moral value of a fetus?
Of course if I’m going to be rude, I’ll take your statement literally and point out that fetuses are categorically both humans AND existing life so your attempt at distinction fails.
Now what you probably mean is “why does an undeveloped human have the same right to life as a fully grown human”. It comes from a descriptivist argument of the wrongness of killing. If it is not permissible to kill adult people on the basis of future conscious experience, then this also applies to fetuses because they too have future conscious experiences.
Now the problem is showing that future conscious experience is the core reason for the wrongness of killing. It’s descriptively very powerful, it accounts for the permissibility of letting brain-dead individuals die (or even actively killing them), the impermissibility of killing temporarily unconscious persons, and the impermissibility of active killing of temporarily suicidal persons (the later problem is also fatal to Boonin’s cortical organisation argument, as it is not the current desires of an individual that we have a moral imperative to satisfy but rather an idealised person with desires considered rational. Boonin’s argument relies on fetuses not having desires to continue living, but this is simply special pleading; a person lacking desires would not permit them to be killed anyway because of the aforementioned idealised rational desires).
Now we have a moral principle that accounts for all of these clearly immoral acts. When we apply it to abortion, we find that it is also not permitted. So do we reject this principle in favor of all the other principles that allow abortion along with the other active killing that we agree is immoral?
Or do we consider that abortion is a complex decision that is clouded by personal preference, desire for convenience, and ignoring empirical facts in favor of prima facie evaluation? (i.e fetuses don’t look or act human, therefore they must not be, contrary to all deeper evaluation).
In other words, it seems highly plausible that our superficial feelings about abortion are NOT morally relevant, and the moral principle that does correctly describe the morality of other active killing is also correctly describing the morality of abortion as well.
Note that it is not necessary for the right to life of a fetus to be equal to an adults to make abortion immoral. It simply has to be sufficiently strong enough to prohibit in convenience cases. Just like how dogs don’t have to have the same moral value as humans to prohibit killing them for fun, it just needs to be sufficiently high to outweigh any moral value of the fun.
“Where do rights come from, in your view?”
I already addressed this when talking about determining moral principles. They come from our intuitions about what is wrong and what is logical reasoning.
I’m not making the argument that you think I’m making.
Bodily autonomy as a fundamental right
Bodily autonomy is a fundamental moral principle because it makes sense of my moral intuitions. I intuit that it’s wrong to rape. It can’t be because of the physical harm, because it’s still intuitively wrong to rape someone if you drug them and are gentle. It can’t be because of the mental harm, because it’s still intuitively wrong to rape them if they’re unconscious and will never know. Murder is wrong and remains wrong even if it causes no pain, even if the murdered person is unaware that they are being murdered. In both of these cases, you’re using someone else’s body without their consent.
This principle, that people should be able to control who can use or modify their body, and for what, is an assumption in the same way that you’ve described other fundamental moral principles- because it makes sense of our intuitions. Once we derive the principle from our intuitions, we can use it to clarify edge cases. To take one example- assisted suicide. Is it wrong? Bodily autonomy says no. If someone asks you to kill them and they sincerely want to die, then it’s not wrong. This is borne out when we compare what the principle says to what we see in society: while there are any number of (valid) concerns involving coercion, informed consent, and mental health, there are also hundreds of stories and legends about human beings helping each other to die. That it happens is tragic, but the act itself is intuitively morally permissible.
To me, the idea that bodily autonomy is a fundamental moral principle seems fairly obvious, and I think it’s obvious to most people when not discussing abortion. If someone is using your body without your consent, you feel morally justified in rejecting them.
My view on abortion
As I said at the start, I’m not making the argument that you think that I’m making. I don’t intuitively consider a fertilized egg to be a person, but I do intuitively consider a five-year-old to be a person. I’m not sure where you would draw a line to divide non-person from person and so I don’t: I assume that everything from conception onward counts as a person because it seems good to err on the side of granting person-hood when in doubt.
I still support abortion until viability.
We have two people, one of whom is using the other in order to survive. My fundamental moral principle of bodily autonomy says that the person being used can withdraw their consent and reject the use of their body. But, in this case, the user will die if they are rejected. Does the principle still hold? Does one person’s right to life trump another person’s bodily autonomy? If I concoct alternative scenarios in which the same rights are at odds, my intuitions seem to come down on the side of bodily autonomy.
Some scenarios
The scenarios
Imagine that two people are drowning in the ocean and one can’t swim. The non-swimmer clings to the swimmer, who is able to support them both but with an increased risk of drowning. The swimmer finally shrugs off the non-swimmer and the non-swimmer drowns.
I intuitively feel that a virtuous person would have struggled on and done their best to save the non-swimmer. That would be the heroic thing to do. Refusing to support the non-swimmer, however, is morally permissible. This scenario isn’t as good an analogy as it could be, because there’s no direct bodily violation, but two agents relying on each other to act in particular ways. Lets see if we can find something more directly applicable.
Imagine that one person agrees to have their body surgically connected to another in such a way that their organs will do the work of keeping both people alive. The supporting person finally requests that they be separated again, killing the supported person.
Much as in the previous scenario, I can feel both that the virtuous thing to do would be to soldier on and that it’s morally permissible to make the decision to leave the supported person to die- in fact, I feel that it’s more morally permissible than in the last scenario. Crucially, in this scenario, one is actually violating the body of the other, rather than relying on them to act in a particular way. What happens if we go the other way?
Imagine that one person is sitting by a pond when they suddenly realize that another person is drowning. They decide that, for whatever reason, they will not act to save the person’s life.
I feel that a virtuous person would act to save the drowning person, obviously. My moral intuitions about what should and shouldn’t be permissible are torn, in this case. In general, they still grudgingly come down on the side of the person failing to act, but there are caveats and special cases. Looking at the law as a proxy for what society feels on the subject, I see that they mostly agree with me.
My conclusion
In each of these scenarios, one person is refusing to allow their body to be used by another when the life of the other is on the line. In each scenario, my intuitions come down on the side of the person doing the refusing- strongly, when the use is direct and invasive, weakly when it involves independent behavior and action. So bodily autonomy seems to hold as a fundamental principle.
Application To abortion
During a pregnancy, we have two people, one of whom is using the other in order to survive. The mother decides that she no longer wishes to allow the use of her body, and gets an abortion. Much as in the previous examples, I may consider it virtuous to carry the child to term, but I can’t deny that she should have the fundamental right to reject the non-consensual use of her body.
At this point, I think it should be clear why I think this.
Abortion, of course, is more than just denying someone the use of your body- it involves killing the fetus as well. If the fetus can’t survive on it’s own in the world, then arguing about this is, to me, moral hair-splitting. Person or not, killed by a doctor or killed by exposure, the fetus is still dead. Where I deviate from the standard liberal position on abortion is when the fetus can survive on it’s own. At that point (and granted, that “point” is more of a gray area), both the mother’s right to bodily autonomy and the fetus’ right to life can be upheld and it now matters whether the fetus counts as a person.
My rule of thumb, as I said earlier, is to err on the side of person-hood when in doubt and so I think that post-viability abortions are not morally permissible.
I’ve assumed throughout, that a fertilized egg has the same sort of moral weight as a child or an adult human being, for simplicity. I don’t actually believe this, however. You apparently do. Why? Because an egg has a “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience”? Pluripotent stem cells, as you said, also meet this standard. If that’s the case, so do skin cells, with the appropriate technology. Fertilized eggs, as you also said, don’t always meet this standard- I assume because 40% of fertilized eggs fail to implant. So if the only rule you have for what “counts” (has the moral weight of a person) is that it has a “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience”, and you’re specifically excluding eggs that are fertilized but don’t implant, and including stem cells that we have artificially coaxed into fertilization, then why is an aborted egg considered a violation of your morality, but stem cells thrown in the trash aren’t?
There’s no dividing line between one and the other, except the word “reasonable” in your “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience” definition. By which you mean “reasonable to me”. A fertilized egg has a “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience” to you, right up until it fails to implant- and then it doesn’t anymore. A fertilized egg that implants has a “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience” right up until an abortion- and then it’s murder.
The only differentiator here is your opinion.
You claim that rescuing fertilized eggs from a burning IVF clinic is morally equal to rescuing children from the same burning building, but when I imagine a world in which everyone acts on this claim, it’s absurd. You yourself wouldn’t behave in the way you’re describing, but would leave the eggs to burn in order to rescue a single child- no matter how many eggs there were. You claim, further, that this is because there is a difference between the psychological weight we place on people that look like us (children), and not on people who don’t (fertilized eggs), but when asked how one might go about differentiating between a psychological impulse and a “true” moral intuition, your answer is that an intuition isn’t a moral intuition “if the basis for it is too complex”, which feels a lot like saying “you’ll know it when you see it.”
You don’t consider bodily autonomy to be a fundamental right, despite it’s simplicity, despite probably sharing the same moral intuitions that I do in many of the scenarios that I’ve discussed above. If someone were surgically connected to you, should you be able to say “no”, whether it would kill them or not, whether it’s the heroic thing to do or not? If you were drowning, and someone were using you as a life preserver, should you have the right to push them away, whether or not they would drown, whether or not it would haunt you afterward?
You fail to see that your dismissal of bodily autonomy, when taken to it’s conclusion, leads to even more absurdity. If you don’t have the fundamental right to reject someone’s use of your body, what gives you the right to deny society access to your organs? If it would save dozens of living, breathing people, and you have no right to deny the use of your body, what fundamental principle do you invoke to avoid getting used for parts? A vague claim that “forcing an action is stronger than denying an action”?
Without a fundamental principle of bodily autonomy, you’re forced to patch together ad-hoc and weak explanations like this in which you weigh different “types” of actions, try to estimate harm, or appeal to societal consequences in order to justify your right to deny other people the organs they need to survive.
The only conclusion that I can draw from this discussion is that you started with the belief that life begins at conception and should be preserved at all costs, likely for religious or social reasons, and are working backward in order to justify those beliefs.
Thanks for the conversation
It’s been interesting.
I’ve learned a lot about what you believe and why you believe it, and it’s given me the opportunity to clarify and refine some of the things that I believe. I think that, regardless of whatever credentials you do or don’t have on this topic in real life, your views are contradictory and confusing- but I appreciate your willingness to put them out there for discussion. I think that I’ve gotten all the use out of the discussion that I can, however, so I’m going to end it here.
I imagine that you’ll want to do a closing rebuttal sort of thing. I won’t be replying to whatever you have to say, so, if you celebrate-
That’s often what happens when you fabricate positions. For asking so many questions, you really had no problem jumping to conclusions when it suited you.
My reason for saying that not all fertilised eggs have moral relevance, was NOT based on implantation, it was based on the very same criteria that pluripotent stem cells could have moral relevance. This is only tangentially related to the really egregious lie…
“Then why is your aborted egg immoral but discarded stem cells aren’t”
It isn’t. I already said that pluripotent stem cells ordered towards development of a grow person are morally relevant. You are flat out lying here.
I was even the person who brought this up explicitly to point out that the fixation on fertilised eggs by you (and most lay philosophers especially the pro-life ones) was flawed. Do you even remember what I said about it? I brought it up to account for a very specific edge case that I think the fertilised eggs argument fails on. I don’t think you remember or even understand what I said.
“By which you mean reasonable to me”
No, I mean reasonable as in very likely to. I would say over 50 percent provided we do not intervene in lowering it, but arguing over the specifics of the amount is not a debate I was interested in getting into, and you are clearly unequipped to do so.
“IVF clinic … I imagine a world”
Again, nobody cares what YOU imagine.
“You would also save the baby”
This is indeterminate, you can’t actually know what my actions would be.
I already gave an argument about why one’s actions in this circumstance would not be morally relevant, and you just ignored it without any reasoning besides “I think it would be crazy!”
And yet again, this argument is presupposing that the baby is morally relevant but the embryos are not.
“Bodily autonomy…despite it’s simplicity”
So you have no idea how moral systems are constructed.
The simplicity of a moral principle is not relevant. Saying “killing is good” is a very simple moral principle, that does not make it a strong or good principle.
The importance of complexity is in situations where we derive a moral principle. Not the actual complexity of the moral principle
We derive moral principles from simple situations to evaluate more complex situations.
All of these arguments that you insist are only solved by a right to bodily autonomy, are better accounted for by minimisation of harm. You seem to try to reject it as “trying to estimate harm” or “societal consequences” but you give no reason as to why these should be rejected. I gave a very good reason why bodily autonomy should be rejected as a description (because it fails to account for many circumstances, and better descriptions already exist for the circumstances it does account for) and you have flat out refused to rebut it.
FYI, the fact that it can be hard to estimate risk of total harm, does not mean that it is not the basis because there are obvious cases that are permitted with minimum risk and prohibited with high risk. In other words your arbitrary rejection likely relies on the continuum fallacy, but that is indeterminate because you never elaborated on why.
“The only conclusion…for religious or social reasons”
Yet again fabricating nonsense to make an argument (in this case poisoning the well).
For your information my pro-life position is relatively recent (probably about the past year) and comes from trying to reason about my positions and actions more formally (since I already studied formal logic as part of my coursework). I used to be pro-choice and over time I realized that it involved carving out exceptions that we have no basis for (aka special pleading). I would also like to add as a centre-left atheist, I do not in anyway benefit socially or religiously from my positions. Infact I’m largely equally enemies with my political and religious compatriots based on their reasoning for positions even if I agree with the conclusion.
While I think your argumentation is better than most people, you fundamentally didn’t understand many topics and arbitrarily rejected arguments without ever addressing the basis for them. All in all, it was a complete waste of a conversation/debate, but hopefully some other people will benefit from it.
You actively avoided making concrete arguments, instead fishing for a specific response exactly like I accused you of. I’ve debated literally hundreds of people who think exactly like you, I know all your arguments it’s extremely mundane. Like I already pointed out you willfully ignore any actual criticism.
You 100 percent are making the arguments I said you were, you simply are ignoring my criticisms of them because it’s inconvenient for you.
You blanketly assert that because rape is wrong therefore bodily autonomy is sufficiently strong to permit active killing? How does this follow? Do you not realise the radical distinctions between the circumstances?
“A virtuous person should act (to save a drowning person”
Why? If it is not morally good and there is no obligation to do good, then on what basis do you assert that it is virtuous? This is you attempting to reject a conclusion because it disagrees with permitting abortion via bodily autonomy.
“I intuitively consider a 5-year old to be a person”
Why? As I already pointed out intuition isn’t just a mere feeling, it involves a great deal of logical evaluation to determine which feelings are more valid than others. I spent a fair amount of time on this so for you to just reject it as “hurr-durr my intuitions tell me” is pretty insulting but expected from an uneducated person.
FYI, nobody cares about your intuitions, we care about human intuitions. If you are some weird serial killer nobody is appealing to your specific reasoning but general human reasoning.
“Using laws as proxy” Awfully convenient that you chose laws that concern a duty to rescue and not guardianship. If there is a contradiction in laws (as there often is) should we really be citing them to construct a non-contradictory moral system?
“My rule of thumb as I said earlier”
Where? You never said this, infact you have been deliberately cagey about not making any claims that I had to deduce your arguments from the questions you asked.
It’s super dishonest of you probe for questions, while trying to hide your beliefs (poorly) and then ignore all the criticisms and rebuttals to popular arguments simply because you’re going to spam them at me and then refuse to listen to further refutations.
I already showed that there wasn’t if you actually read anything
First, I haven’t found any place where you did this. Second, if you did show that “no existing right to bodily autonomy [is] sufficiently strong”, I think you probably need to also show why the law isn’t in the wrong, rather the moral beliefs of the people in this thread.
Nobody seriously contested it.
I mean, people are. It’s a conversation that’s still happening.
…that has been largely abandoned in ethics.
Gonna need a citation on that one, boss.
Anyone else that comes along can follow along in the main conversation with @jasory and myself over here.
“Show why the law isn’t in the wrong, rather than the moral beliefs of the people in the thread”
What law? There is no law in discussion here, and an action being immoral does not necessarily entail that a law must exist to prohibit it. (I’ve already pointed this out, so the fact that you completely ignored it is just laziness)
“the moral beliefs…”
Because it results in a contradiction with their other beliefs. Essentially nobody will ever claim that a contradictory moral system is good, OR that denying a third party the ability to override bodily control in the interest of others (and often that very person, e.g most people think self-harm is wrong) is good. If neither of these are true then a sufficiently strong bodily autonomy cannot be true either.
“It’s a conversation that is still happening”
But there are no actual rebuttals. In fact all you did is go back and assert that bodily autonomy actually is relevant, without even addressing the initial refutation.
This is how every single debate about bodily autonomy goes (or really any bad argument). The person will either reject all criticism without any reasoning, or concede all the arguments and play a pseudo Motte-and-Bailey where they continuously switch between arguments they have already conceded were false. Both are simply instances of a person clinging to a belief that contradicts other beliefs they hold, simply because they think it justifies a result they like.
“Gonna need a citation on that”
Wikipedia says that Judith Thompson is credited with changing the view of abortion to a question of autonomy in the public space. What it does not say is that it changed the view of abortion in ethics. (It didn’t, it was basically a phase that was pretty quickly moved on from. I also edit Wikipedia so I would have put in it if it did)
Now this is not argument of Wikipedia’s infallibility, but it’s absence does show that we have no reason to believe that the public’s perception of abortion is the same as academic ethics.
So with just this absence of evidence, it is reasonable (but not proven) to say that bodily autonomy is abandoned when it comes to abortion. It is also reasonable to say the converse.
If you actually search academic literature, for as famous as the bodily autonomy argument is it has surprisingly few defences, even pro-choice/pro-abortion (yes they exist in philosophy) ethicists have criticised it. In fact Boonin is probably the most notable defender of it, but even he concedes that it’s not very good, discarding it in favor of a “cortical organisation” argument (which I in turn think is an arbitrary selection of a stage of human development that itself doesn’t grant personhood any more than being a human organism).
And again the absence of defences, and presence of criticisms makes it more reasonable to think that it is not well accepted.
As for an actual citation, meta-philosophy isn’t that popular of a field and you just have to be familiar with the topic to know what I’m referring to. As someone who does research, I can tell you a huge amount of information you want or need isn’t neatly collected and more often than not doesn’t exist. It could be that there is a vast swath of pro-choice ethicists who use bodily autonomy arguments, which are awfully silent and don’t write papers. But based on the evidence it seems like bodily autonomy is truly not a popular argument outside of motivated reasoning by lay persons.
Absolutely Parents who do not want to have a baby should not be forced to carry one to term. It ain’t some angel that came down and inhabited the womb that should be laminted as lost.
But it’s a human, and we don’t find engaging in active killing of humans permissible do we?
I also love that as a pretty open atheist, PC will constantly try to insinuate a religious motivation (even though most PL religious people don’t use the ensoulment argument either).
I said a popular defence, not the only defence. Go to the abortiondebate or pro-choice subreddits and count how many people say that abortion is good on the basis of eliminating unwanted children.
Even better make a post asking if abortion is morally good (not just permissible, good) if the child would be born poor or the parents don’t want them. You will receive an overwhelmingly positive response, and you know it.
People would at most say that of an embrio, not a child.
Unlike what the “every sperm is sacred” crowd thinks against all scientific evidence, a ball of cells with no brain activity is as much a child as a piece of human intestine, a toe or the cells flaking of your skin every minute of the day are: they’re all mindless bundles of cells which happen to have human DNA - organic things, not persons.
The non-morons who support abortion actually set a time limit on how late in the pregnancy it is legal to do an abortion exactly because having thought about it, they’re aware that a viable embrio will eventually transit from mindless bundle of cells with human DNA into person (though you need to be seriously undereducated to call a fetus at even that stage a “child”) and morality dictates that once it’s a person their life is sacred.
This is why in most civilized countries abortion is allowed up to 12 weeks: because before that tne embrio has no brain at all and is as much a person as a human toe or kidney, but once it does have some brain activity, whilst we don’t really know if and how much of a person that early in gestation it is, we chose to consider it as person just to be on the safe side hence with the right to live.
Only the ultra-simpleton crowd would think that the ball of indiferentiated human cells the size of a pea which is the embrio earlier in gestation is a child.
PS: The funny bit is that the people you’re criticizing have the same moral posture with regards to children as you do, the only difference being that they’re informed enough and have thought about it enough to know that an early gestation embrio is nowhere near the same as a child hence it makes no sense for the rights of the woman that carries said embrio to be suspended in favour of that mindless ball of cells.
The arguments of the anti-abort crowd really just boil down to “Because I’m too ignorant to understand that which has been known for over a century, other people must be thrown in jail”
This is ontologically and empirically false. I don’t really have time for debunking this incredibly self-masturbatory screed, but holy shit you have no idea about categorisation of beings or an arguments about the wrongness of killing. (You’re not exactly talking to someone as mentally deficient as you).
The cortical organisation argument is simply cherry-picking a worse instance that satisfies the criteria of possibility of human experience. The fact that it is already a human organism is sufficient, especially since cortical organisation doesn’t grant consciousness and even if it did by definition it would fail to describe the wrongness of killing temporarily unconscious humans.
You clearly don’t even understand the meaning of the words you’re parroting there, to the point that you ended up making the case for even later than 12 weeks abortion.
It really is a case of your own ignorance justifying that others must go to jail.
Well of course, the 12-week limit is pure horseshit. Literally nobody in ethics makes this argument it’s merely invented by supremely ignorant lay persons to pander to both sides.
You only feel that it is an argument for later abortion, because you are affirming the consequent (a laughably stupid logic error to make) by assuming that abortion is already permissible.
Either killing humans is permissible period or it’s not. Dependency and development arguments fail to provide exceptions that don’t also apply to adults.
Your argument works by creating your very own definition of what it is to be “a human” to then say “you can’t kill a human”.
Redefining the meaning of the words used and then claiming that you’re right because there exists widelly accepted moral rules which use those words - but not as you defined it to be - isn’t actual logic, it’s wordplay.
The foundation of all your arguments on this is a “trust me” definition of “a human”, provided as an unchallangeable, undetailed and unsubstantiated axion - change that definition to, for example, “a human is somebody born from a woman” and that entire argumentative structure of yours collapses since in that alternative definition until the moment of birth a fetus is a thing, not “a human”.
So you pointedly bypass the actual hard part that matters the most and were the main disagreement is - the whole “when do human cells stop being just cells that happen to have human DNA and become ‘a human’” - with an “it is as I say” definition on top of which you made your entire case. That’s like going “assume the sun is purple” to make the case for painting the walls of a house with a specific color.
All this would be an absolutelly fine and entertaining intellectual game, if you weren’t defending that people should go to Jail when they do not obbey the boundaries derived from your definition of “a human” and treat as “not a human” that which you chose to define as “a human”, which is the logic of the madman.
Human is very well defined biological definition, objects within the human set are classified according to material properties that are empirically observable, you are falsely equating it with the philosophical concept of personhood.
“Change that definition…”
Changing the symbol used to represent an object with the same properties as a fetus, does absolutely nothing to the reasoning. Because we are not reasoning about the symbol represented by the string “human”, we are reasoning about objects with shared properties (well you aren’t, actual philosophers are). Some of those objects have moral value based on these properties, therefore all objects that have these properties also have moral value. What we call it doesn’t matter. It seems so ironic that you whine about wordplay, when you literally confused yourself over it.
My argument is that relying on personhood (which you didn’t you hilariously relied on bodily autonomy), is still insufficient because personhood membership does not account for wrongness of killing. Remember our moral principle of who is allowed to be killed is derived from determining what categories we already fundamentally accept are permissible to kill. This is called analytic descriptivism, and you are trying to use it too, you are just completely incompetent. I did not rigorously prove it to be insufficient, because you never actually made the argument, you simply dropped the bodily autonomy argument like everyone does (unless of course you want to accept the premises, and reasoning and deny the conclusion like your intellectual peers in Bedlam).
“If you weren’t defending that people go to jail”
Arguing that an action is immoral, is not the same as arguing that it must be punished. You need a separate argument that immoral actions should be punished or deterred in someway. This is simply a fabrication on your part. In fact if you are such an intelligent logician, can you tell me what logical error you are making here? (Hint: it starts with “affirming”, to help you find it since you clearly have no idea).
There is a very large body of philosophical work on this subject, everything you have been arguing is pop philosophy that has been rejected as false for decades to even centuries.
If you were even remotely educated on this topic you would realize that you are intellectually equivalent to a flat-earther. There are so many comical errors I can’t address them all.
This discussion however is hilarious to me, next time instead of jerking yourself off over word salad consider that the person you are trying to refute is possibly very knowledgeable on the subject (and possibly has an academic background in it :) ).
I was talking about “A human” not “human” - very different things and the former is definitely not “very well biological definition” (I assume you meant “defined” rather than “definition”).
Did you think the quotes were decorative rather than delimitative?
What follows is then mainly bollocks and projecting your misintepretation of my point as somehow a set of inherent personal flaws of mine, always enternaining but not actually making an argument.
You’ve spent the last several posts saying things like “you do not kill a human” and “it’s the same as an unconscious human and you do not kill an uncoscious human” to justify your case but all of the sudden you’re saying you haven’t relied on the meaning of “a human” which you is inconsistent with the very things you wrote.
Then you delegate the definition of “a human” - aka personhood - to some vague unnamed “philosophers” whilst still failing to provide it and justify it.
Then you restated the same “you don’t kill a human” argument this time around using “the wrongness of killing” unless it’s “in a category we already fundamentally accept are permissible to kill”, whilst still failing to provide a well defined and justified definition for the threshold between “not a human” and “a human” or, in your knew argumentative structure, being a member of a “category we already fundamentally accept are permissible to kill” to not a member. Worse “a category we already fundamentally accept are permissible to kill” is an even more ill defined, vaguer definition that “a human” (starting by who is that “we” that “fundamentally accepts” all those categories and their boundary definitions) - again you’re delegating to unamed individuals rather than providing a definition and you even massivelly expanded size of the problem space.
(On the upside, I suppose bring in the very definition of “alive” into the argument will trully fire up on both sides veritable legions of virologists)
–
HOWEVER:
I do agree that if as you now say, you’re not talking about forcing your moral on others via lawmaking and your take on this is purelly a moral one, then absolutelly whatever ill defined threshold you have in your mind is right for you and absolutellly you’re entitled to try and convince others of that - it is indeed a moral choice to believe that, for example, “a human is formed at the time of conception” and from there derive that, morally, what by that definition is a human developing inside a womb is always entitled to the same protections as a human after having been born.
As long as it’s about one’s moral guidance in one’s personal choices, it’s all valid and boundary conditions need not be well defined or justified because “I’ll know what’s right and what’s wrong when I see it” thresholds are good enough for personal moral.
The thing is, you’ve made your case in a post about legal consequences for somebody from anti-abortion law, hence it is implied that your post is justifying the Law (and if it was not your intention to do so, it would’ve been easy to make that clear) and that’s entirelly different because by that point you’re not making a case for “this is a moral point of view people should have” (and hence you try to reason people into sharing it) but instead it it’s “this is a moral point of view people should behave according to or be harmed if they do not” (quite literally by being deprived of their freedom if they don’t) and that’s were all the need for clearly defined and justified thresholds arises because in forcing pthers to comply you have two entities with two sets of rights - since the pregnant women is a human, with the right to freedom - and from the definition of when does a piece of organic mater becomes a human also arises the point were some of the rights of the pregnant woman will be denied in favour of the other human: for the purpose of limiting the rights of a human - the pregnant woman - an ill defined threshold of the “I’ll know it when I see it” is just an arbitrary threshold to deny that person’s rights.
(From the first comment of yours I replied to, I got the impression you totally missed this: the so-called “pro abortion” posture is not in favour of “poor single women having abortions”, it’s in favour of “poor single women having the choice to have an abortion” - it’s not at all about “people should have abortions”, it’s about people not being forced either way. This is why you often see that position named “pro choice” rather than “pro abortion” - it’s not in favour of abortion, rather it’s against limiting a woman’s choice on that subject.
If indeed there are people out that think “poor single women should have abortions” I’m on the same side as you - I don’t think they should: what I do think is that the option to chose to do so or not should be theirs and they should not be punished either way for their choice)
Personally, if indeed your point is a purelly personal moral one were you do not desire that others are forced to comply with your moral then yeah, it’s absolutelly valid and needs not even have well defined boundaries between acceptable and not acceptable and I see no harm in tryng to convince individuals to share that moral point of view and act accordingly in their own personal choices.
Literally there’s an aspect of Evangelicalism and the “Prosperity Gospel” that portrays poor people as inherently sinful and evil, and it’s not just limited to those aspects of Christianity:
I’ve run audio for maybe a dozen Prosperity gospel events over the course of my career… Those people are some of the scummiest people I’ve ever met in rl. The “preachers” usually have a group of thugs acting as security that will run interference for anyone that questions what they’re preaching. I’ve seen people get literally dragged out and then heard, after the fact, that the “security” team “taught them a lesson”. The crowd was shocked that someone was aggressively dragged out at “church” until the preacher spun the victim as someone with the devil in them, then everyone would be nodding their heads with a panicked look like “are we ok with this?.. I guess…”. Fucking surreal. Also, these people would try to dodge as many bills as they could. On several of the ones I did, the “church” stiffed the AV company I was working for on a $30k+ production.
Yeah I am actually really curious how they explain that, if anyone has a genuine answer.
There is so much talk in the Bible about riches and wealth and being rewarded for being a good Christian but my memory serves that it’s referencing the holy spirit or rather the relationship with God is rewarding in and of itself and that the riches and all that is in the afterlife.
And every time I recall it talking about wealth on earth it is vilified and you’re supposed to give it away. And of course there this famous quote
And Jesus said unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, It is hard for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. Matthew 19:23-26
Anyway yeah I’m curious how people can teach this aspect of the Bible with such a contradicting incorrect interpretation. I argue that it’s a contradicting book in itself all the time but wealth is not one I recall. We have hated the wealthy for millenia lol
This was what they found in other schools too. One specific location ( I can’t remember where) the dads formed a group to a) keep kids peaceful and b) because they were being sent to jail for schoolyard bs. It was a largely black school. If you want to look it up with the sad details my brain is providing. Sry
Yep. Also noticed that the principal that called the police and the DA refusing to drop the case have the same last name. Garza isn’t that rare of a last name, but it’s not exactly “Smith”, either. I’d bet good money those fuckers are related to each other.
I’m just saying… you never had a kid in class that was years older then everyone else, not doing shit, disrupting class all the time, getting violent and ending up in jail for attempt murder just after leaving school? I had. I wish there was a way to get him out of school earlier. I would be a better environment for everyone. But there wasn’t so they had to deal with him till he was 18 yo. Then on the other hand if you let teachers kick kids out they will get lazy and start locking up children for anything like in Texas.
Weird, in my case it was only in elementary school. High school was not mandatory so the disruptive kids simply didn’t go there.
Edit: Oh, just realized that you probably also have middle school. I didn’t. It was the same school from age 7 to 15. Education was mandatory till 18 or 16 yo so the school was stuck with all the stupid kids till then.
Ahhhh right, simple mistake to make. Middle school kids definitely deserve solitary confinement. Fucking what??
I hope that maybe you’re just ignorant to what “solitary confinement” means, but even then, you’re talking about locking children away in fucking prison for misbehaving in 6th grade art class. Get a grip.
Jesus, who’s talking about solitary confinement? Not even the original comment mentioned it. I definitely didn’t. Relax. It’s a shitty situation but getting angry about things you imagined is not going to save anyone.
The original article is about putting a child into solitary confinement. You don’t even need to read the article. But keep moving those goalposts…
Is it really that much harder to just admit you were wrong (or literally just take the L and not respond at all) than doubling down on something so easily disproven?
Do you know what solitary confinement is? It’s putting someone in a cell, likely without furniture, for lengthy periods of time (discounting an hour of exercise by themselves). The light never turns off. There is absolutely no stimulation whatsoever allowed. Other prisoners yell through the air ducts in the hopes that someone will yell back.
That environment is torture for an adult. This is a 10-year-old child.
You realise it is morally permissible to provide a more general argument.
Which is a better comment, “steak tastes better with barbecue sauce” OR “I don’t like steak, but it tastes better with barbecue sauce”? Doesn’t the former suggest a preference of eating steak?
You mean the conversation where I already told you I was staying on topic? I’m pretty sure I can keep track of it quite well. And, again, if you don’t want to stay on the topic about the poor boy who was put in solitary, find someone else to talk to about whatever it is you would like to talk about instead.
If you’re trying to be funny, you’ve taken it too far. You should be yeeted into a Texas prison where you claim immature assholes belong, because this situation isn’t a fucking joke.
Also Epstein 100% killed himself, and unsealing this info won’t tell you anything meaningful, because predators who hide among the rich don’t fucking tell every person they meet that they’re a predator.
Conspiracy theories are never a good look on anyone.
It doesn’t matter if you’re being truthful. If you’re being a smug dickhead and talking down to people to feed your sense of superiority, I will downvote.
There are enough of those in the fediverse as it is, we don’t need any more incentives.
He totally committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Twice.
This, but unironically. That’s why his wife corroborates it.
Here’s a clue to avoiding conspiracy theories: if it is something you really want to be true because it feels right, it probably isn’t true and is instead spread around by other people with that same feeling.
Most conspiracy theories are bullshit, no doubt. But not all of them are, and it’s pretty hard to judge which might be true by the claims alone, because by nature they are pretty fantastical.
In 1974 before the Church Committee revealed it, you’d have dismissed anyone telling you about MKUltra and I wouldn’t blame you.
But it really did happen.
Did Epstein kill himself? Probably? But the circumstances are definitely eyebrow raising…
But the circumstances are definitely eyebrow raising…
This is pretty much how all conspiracy theories thrive: take something suspicious, put a story into the holes in between the facts we know that confirms what we want to believe is true, and then ignore or ridiculously explain away any evidence that contradicts the hypothesis.
The video being lost around the original attempt is rather suspect, but him finding something to hang himself with again… He should have been in a paper gown in a padded room. We have tons and tons of suicidal people in asylums and jail that are not given an opportunity to hang themselves.
Someone as high profile as him and with a cell mate?
I’m not saying he 100% didn’t kill himself, but It sure as hell looks like somebody went through a lot of trouble to provide him opportunity.
The hidden people on the list that makes this list so inconsequential are the same exact people with the type of reach it would need to make sure he didn’t start naming names.
Yeah, no need to answer anything I point out just put your hands over your ears and tell me I’m QANON and full of shit that’ll really make your point and help your position here.
Come to think of it maybe there’s a reason you’re getting all the down votes…
And yet your take here has nothing to do with the reality of Epstein’s crimes nor his suicide. It has nothing to do with the actual suicides passed off as conspiracies.
Hopping into this conversation to say: that person is right; I’m not downvoting you because “rich people bad”. I’m downvoting you because you aren’t engaging in this discussion to share ideas and understand the other person. Your approach in this discussion is very much one of shutting down thinking that opposes yours. That doesn’t get a dialog going; it ends it. You can do with that as you like, but I thought I’d speak up for myself so you don’t mischaracterize my downvote.
“Conspiracy theories” have ironically enough become weaponized as a thought terminating cliche. Am I supposed to not wonder what about his guards and what they were doing, or the camera feeds, or the people getting paid six figures to handle his case, or the dozens of other loose ends?
There are enormous efforts being taken to gaslight people out of their curiosity about this case.
There are people who collect and document the information from the Epsteins of the world for blackmail. It was how Hoover built the FBI. I am not claiming that Epstein was murdered, but anyone who tries to cash in on the information that Epstein had, would have information that destroys lives. Desperate people do act desperately. I would guess that little ‘conspiracies’ abound, as people try to not be outed; using non-disclosure agreements, for example.
I agree with you on the papers (been following that story since it broke), and I’ll agree that I probably would’ve offed myself in his position as well, but there were some pretty unprobable shit happening around his death unless I’ve been misled hard. I mean the guy was on suicide watch, wasn’t he? It’s at the very least suspect as hell that it happened like it did.
Fair enough, I didn’t know he was taken off suicide watch. Makes one wonder why, though. It’s not like his circumstances changed.
But we’ll likely never know anyway, so I don’t quite understand why you’re getting so much flack for shit that is ultimately academic at this point. Don’t get me wrong, as I think his victims deserve to know as much as possible, but at this point we’re getting into Jimmy Hoffa territory with this shit.
Epstein 0% killed himself. See? I can assert things with no evidence as well. The whole thing reeks from start to finish and I have no idea how anyone can be completely confident in what happened either way.
What can he do about it? We live in a free market society. All he can do is keep talking about it and hope the people get the message. Rebellion will start at the consumer level and go up, not the other way around. Main problem is the millions of people that rely on Fox for their news.
He issued an executive order in 2021 to do just that, among many other things to promote competition. There has definitely been an uptick in antitrust cases since then, and inflation has also decreased significantly.
Except the unfortunate part is that it is always increasing, it’s just a derivative, rate of change. But the massive boost from months of heavy inflation is now here permanently, so we’re adding 2-3% on TOP of the already-inflated costs. But that’s not telling the full story, it is the value of the US dollar going down primarily. Buying power is lower by definition, but because of that, everyone on the bottom end is getting squeezed beyond anything they are ready for and it’s going to eventually cause civil unrest on a larger scale.
Then the original comment should have been pedantic about the fact that they’re clearly talking about the rate of inflation even though they referred to it simply as “inflation”. The rest of us got that.
How would you like the President of the United States to do that? Do you think the President is a dictator that can just unilaterally pass sweeping legislation? How do you think the public would react if the President had the power to directly determine the prices of goods? How do you think that would go in general?
Do you think Biden makes the laws? Did you fail civics class? I said nothing about enacting laws making what these companies are doing illegal, I only said Biden can’t do much about it.
Also, you don’t just say, “let’s make a law about X”, and a 3,000 page bill just appears in front of you. That shit takes TONS of work. Biden can’t just materialize a workable plan that both parties (in this political climate? lol) will ever agree on.
That just isn’t how this country works. If you want this to change, Congress has to change it.
I love how “political capital” is the neolibs go-to excuse for why the working class can’t be helped. Yet there’s a never ending amount of “political capital” I help giant corporations make more money. Fucking tools
What? Do you think I like that political capital is a thing? It’s fucking gross. I am just acknowledging reality. What do you think the President actually does in the US?
Like, do you even realize that you’re advocating for authoritarianism? Or is it OK, as long as it’s the person doing the things you want? And we all know situations like that are super sustainable…
Do you know basic US Civics, or…? Biden has the bully pulpit (basically what he’s doing here), and that’s pretty much it. He can issue executive orders (and has in the past about this), but those are often complete bullshit that’s unenforceable, and will be removed by the next person in the office.
Take a look at Trump rolling back Obama’s EPA purview over waterways in the US for a recent example that has left over 60% of our nation’s waterways now unprotected.
It will be harder to pass new laws in the current Congress, but he still has control over the executive branch. Hopefully some existing laws could be used.
I mean, you wouldn’t want the politicians to lose their legal bribes generous donations over acting in our interests instead of the corporations, would you?
Will someone please think of the rich folks pockets?
It’s because I said bad things about Biden, even though I was talking about politicians as a whole. But you can’t say bad things about Biden or be any kind of critical about the current administration without getting trashed on here.
that was basically it. short of siccing the irs on them there’s not a lot the executive branch can do about it… of course that’d kill the golden goose named “campaign contributions”, so it wont happen
People are kept in prison without a conviction, for not affording bail. Owing a thousand times the lifetime earnings of other people should at the very least mean all your accounts and holdings are frozen, and you can’t spend anything without getting independent approval every time.
The settlement payout is on hold pending his bankruptcy case is why they haven't done something like this. However, lawyers for the families are in fact trying to have his assets placed in a trust or have the bankruptcy case cancelled outright because of his spending. By design it's a slow, complicated process where Jones has lots of legal (and illegal) avenues to delay paying. Fortunately Jones is so stupid and outlandish that he's likely hurting his own case so I wouldn't be surprised if a judge slaps him with more severe sanctions.
If it had been a criminal defamation case, then it would be criminally enforcable… but all this really means is “a judge ruled you need to pay” and if you don’t pay, then you could sue them again for not paying, and it just goes in a loop over and over again. I have a friend whose family has been in a loop like this in civil court over a bad real estate venture for decades with someone who simply ignores the rulings.
It hangs over the head of the person who did it, but in the end it’s mostly just a “it’s on your permanent record” kind of stain which can stop people from working with you and damage your personal life, but it’s not like the kind of people who would work with Alex Jones don’t know who they’re working with.
It’s a lot harder with rich people, they typically aren’t reimbursed by traditional means, and they can afford to hire people to obscure your assets with your businesses or trust assets.
What do you think banks do if you don’t pay your loans?
They typically take what you put up as collateral, this is why banks typically require some sort of collateral even if the person is wealthy.
Do you have any sources for that claim? There really isn’t a reason for a bank to lend a significant amount of money via an unsecured loan. Even people like musk and bezos have to levy their stock to secure large loans.
Are you asking for internal bank documents about specific loan defaults over a certain amount? No one is going to share that with you, but yes a bank will definitely loan amounts over $50K with no collateral. It’s usually called a “credit card” or just a large line of credit.
Are you asking for internal bank documents about specific loan defaults over a certain amount?
I mean like any evidence? A report about a rise in defaults on unsecured loans, examples of people being given huge unsecured loans, the information that has led you to believe in your own claim?
It’s usually called a “credit card” or just a large line of credit.
Again, having a credit limit on a single card exceeding 50k is extremely rare even for the wealthy, the same goes for personal lines of credit. I think at this point you’re just being pedantic. The vast majority of large loans are secured via collateral. With the reason being that it can be exceedingly difficult to recoup your investment in civil court.
Seems to me that failing to pay a proper court ordered civil case should be a crime, at least in the case where you’re just ignoring the court order, not where you can’t actually pay.
Just a word of caution: Non-peer reviewed, non-replicated, rushed-looking preprint, on a topic with a long history of controversy and retractions. So don’t get too excited yet.
In physics, however, using Latex is absolutely the norm, and on the arxiv it’s also absolutely the norm. That they aren’t using it shows at the very least that they’re out of touch with academic practice. I mean, if their extraordinary claim is true it would be one of the most significant discoveries of the century and pretty much a guaranteed Nobel prize. Therefore you might think they would put at least some amount of effort into presenting their results, such as producing nice looking plots, and, well, using Latex like a normal working physicist. The fact that they don’t doesn’t mean that they’re wrong, but it doesn’t exactly increase their credibility either.
PS: I also just noticed that one of their equations (p. 9 in 2307.12008) literally contains the expression “F(00l)”. Again, maybe they’re just oblivious and didn’t realize that could look like they’re calling us fools, but the extraordinary claims together with the rather unorthodox and low-effort presentation make me very skeptical.
This is fair enough…but still seems odd to judge paper solely based on text editor choice…judging paper based on clear errors in presented information is fair game.
Hi. I hold 3 degrees in engineering. 100% of what you said is wrong.
Latex is the norm in any engineering publication I’ve ever been involved with, be it as author, reviewer, or editor. The ones that do take word do so reluctantly and only in a way they can readily convert to latex later.
Judging a quality of a word based on how a paper looks is perfectly valid. I’m disinclined to trust research by people not willing to put in the minuscule effort of typesetting a paper. What else did they cut corners on?
I would also like to know. Apparently there were some proofreading errors etc. Someone in reddit explained that rushing the publish might be explained by wanting to stake the claim and get the ball rolling on reproducing the results as fast as possible.
Honestly as someone who is also in research, that is pretty understandable. Preprint papers are all subject to peer review and editing after the fact, but are a good opportunity to stake your claim on a big discovery before someone else can. Preprints are inherently not final versions and I guarantee that the mistakes will be caught before publication.
As someone that no longer has access to university library’s journal subscriptions, I very much support publishing these in a openly accessible manner.
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