Women's Issues

Peter Singer is little more then a professional troll. He sits in this dark chamber in his ivory tower trying come up with contrived scenarios to justify the unjustifiable. Trying to come up with counterargument just encourages the prat.

edited 28th Mar '14 3:43:12 PM by joeyjojo

So Scott Klusendorf was just taking his bait ?

These people need to be challenged occasionally not to deter them really, but to keep others from turning into more idiots.

^I guess that's a good way of looking at. But the level of discourse in today's bio ethics is pretty low. It's just people rationalising their own political ideology with varying degrees of success.

The purpose of debate is not to convince the other party; that will never happen. The purpose of debate is to convince the people watching the debate, who are still undecided where they stand on the issue.

Deciding that someone is not worth arguing with because he will never change his mind means that the only voice the undecided people will hear is his. When educated people say nothing, only ignorance can spread.

edited 29th Mar '14 8:26:52 AM by TobiasDrake

Personally, I don't agree with trying to convince anyone. To me, the goal should be to test your own viewpoints. Because trying to convince someone is how you end up prioritizing victory over accuracy.

I tend to convince audience, or at least try. It leads to people coming to me for reference. Like the other day, when a friend of mine asked me to look over a story he had to proof read, because he was unsure of how to handle what might be sexism.

(It was, if more of a result of mundane cliches on how to make a backstory traumatizing, than anything)

But that's still dangerous.

The goal in a social justice conversation is to accurately explain injustice and think of possible solutions for it. Convincing someone else has to be a secondary goal, because it's possible to convince someone of something that is wrong. This is the reason that many social justice groups, like Feminists, are wary of letting Allies have too much power, because occasionally you wind up with people who are just trying to convince people and care about the truth of what they say second. Like that one guy who admitted he was only into feminism to look smart and get laid; and unfortunately, he demonstrated just how easy it is to do it.

edited 30th Mar '14 9:47:40 AM by KingZeal

How's that different from regular ethics? (no really, that's a genuine question >.>)

Can someone explain to me how discourse is low in bioethics? Is it just people saying "so and so is bad" and " we should be cautious about so and so" and then listing a bunch of reasons why, examples including birth control, abortion, genetic modification, stem cells, etc? Someone explain this better then me

Not that I can really explain it, but I've just run into a similar problem today. It's not fun being told by your conservative "friends" that you support genocide because you're pro-choice, and when you tell them that such an argument is offensive and makes no sense, they insist that they're the same thing.

And I don't even live in the Bible belt. I live in New York, for shit's sake.

edited 30th Mar '14 2:05:06 PM by Lennik

Well, the word "genocide" is rarely used correctly. Technically, it's only genocide if an entire ethnic group is actually killed off. If there are still members of an ethnic group left alive, it's at most attempted genocide, and most so-called genocides don't even count as that. Even the Holocaust was only meant to kill off ethnic minorities inside Europe, not every member of those ethnic groups all across the world.

Basically, when someone says "genocide", they usually just mean "large scale killing of people who share a common trait", and if you accept the pro-lifers' premise that human embryoes/fetuses count as people, that description is apt.

Wrong. There is no "success requirement" for the crime of genocide. Article 2 of the 1949 Genocide Convention defines genocide as:

(emphasis added)

Even if one accepts the premise that abortion "murders" fetuses, fetuses are not a "national, ethnical, racial, or religious group".

edited 31st Mar '14 5:18:45 AM by Achaemenid

These people act like abortion is something that's only been happening since Roe vs Wade, when really it's been a thing since the dawn if man

Often even nastier; they've found old sewers in Roman cities literally full in the bones of babies - it's theorized that they were thrown there by brothels. Or at least, the males were. Brrr.

edited 31st Mar '14 5:53:27 AM by Achaemenid

Well we already know that in Rome the father could decide whether he wanted the kid or not, and then if he didn't they would just ditch it outside . So yeaeah :/

What I find amusing are the prolifers who are anti adoption and anti social welfare and most of the time birth control and sex Ed.

Okay. You don't want all these babies. But you don't want to do anything to stop them from happening. And you don't want to fix anything after they are here.

Lovely.

Anti adotpion and anti social welfare? What?

That reminds me, I read once about some organization that was responsible for making it harder to adopt internationally , because it was "robbing kids of their cultural heritage" even though having someone to raise them is a much bigger priority

About it being genocide, even if you consider unborn children to be a group, there's no intent to kill off a part of that group. Everything is on an individual basis.

In short: quit going for the flashy, button-pushing word that is "genocide", pro-life groups. Go for the term that you really should mean "mass-murder". They're not exactly the same thing, and the latter one has you covered.

If you think abortion is "murder", that is.

There was a huge movement in my state to keep women and girls off welfare. They also restricted adoptions. (I cannot adopt in my state for example thanks to these new regulations.) And of course, Arkansas is an abstinence only state.

So they want to keep people ignorant, keep people without help, and keep them saddled with children they cannot take care of and ensuring two generations of poverty and issues.

At the time of the adoption "reforms" the average age of pregnancy was 15. It was a "family values" argument saying children need to be raised by their mothers. Personally, I think it was just a way to punish women more.

Why the hell do people in Arkansas oppose adoption? Or welfare for women? Are they sexist? (Wait that may be a given since they oppose feminine welfare ) But adoption? Why? It's not just punishing the women (or girls, since they're teens) , but also the kids. Also it's funny that the average age if pregnancy is 15 . Says a lot about their sex ed programs

edited 31st Mar '14 6:56:17 AM by Xopher001

More accurately, it's probably not that they "oppose" it, but that they do very little to incentivize or support it.

Got a source on that age 15 pregnancy? Considering how little room there is below that, the vast majority of all women who's ever been pregnant would have been before the age of 15.

I think the current average is generally between 25 and 30, depending on location. Might be lower outside Europe and NA. And probably Mexico.

All due respect to Arkansas, but...it's Arkansas. It's a fringe portion of the Deep South, a former plantation state, and one of the states that defected to the Confederacy during the American Civil War.

They aren't as bad as, say, Louisiana, but it's still a place where prejudice lives and breathes.

edited 31st Mar '14 7:55:30 AM by TobiasDrake