Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
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User ID: 290
Not directly, but usually parents go through suffering of their own when something bad happens to their children.
That's not the same thing.
And we give it to parents because we expect them to make the decision the child would have, if they were mature.
But often they don't make the same decision their child would have if mature. Many parents attempt to override their child's decisions even after their child is mature.
So in a case like this, if the parents managed to convince the child that this treatment will help, would you say the state has no right to intervene?
No, I think that clears the higher bar.
On the other hand, if a child, upon finding out that meat is made out of dead animals, desires to adopt a plant-only diet, and their parents approve, I would not override their decision, even though many non-Adventist-influenced experts doubt that it is wise.
personally I'd say they have that authority by default, and you need a strong positive argument if you want to take it away.
They said the same thing about kings once....
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all ... are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights ... that to secure these rights, governments are instituted ... that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it....
As above, so below.
libertarian utopia where parents decide for themselves
But they aren't deciding for themselves! They are deciding for another person! In the purest form of libertarianism, the child would decide everything for themselves.
I am not advocating for pure libertarianism, but that is what I mean by 'your children aren't your property.' The base state isn't parents having absolute power over their children, it's them having no authority whatsoever. All power accorded to parents is a creation of society.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
5d ago
Generally we allow people to refuse treatment, even if that will have negative consequences for them.
When an adult refuses medical care for themselves, the negative consequences fall on the person making the decision. When an adult refuses medical care for a child, the adult does not experience those consequences.
We also generally recognize children lack the maturity to make long-term decisions, so we grant the power to make medical decisions about them to their parents (or whoever has custody of them).
And there are many examples of that going wrong, usually from parents who think of their children as their property and refuse to distinguish between 'my child's long-term interest/coherent extrapolated volition' and 'my personal preferences/non-universal ideology'.
Even with adults, if someone is unconscious, it's their next of kin that generally make medical decisions for them, not the doctors. None of that implies owning another person as property.
Because the next of kin is expected to make the decision based on 'what the patient would decide if conscious' and not 'what the next of kin wants'.
Also how consistent are you with "rightness" overruling parental authority[?] If the evidence for pediatric transgender care is determined to be very poor, are you ok with a blanket ban on transgender care, even if the child, parents, and a bunch [of] their doctor[s] agree that it's right?
- Overruling parents in the case of 'parents and child agree; we think both are wrong' should be a higher bar to clear than 'parents disagree with child; we think child is right and parents are wrong.'
- The case for giving any authority to parents rests on the assumption that they are usually right, for a value of 'right' that can be falsified, i. e. not defined as right a priori by dint of their status as parents. In cases where parents are often wrong, I believe society currently gives them too much unchallenged authority, and there need to be more checks and balances.
- What do you mean by 'the evidence for paediatric transgender care is determined to be very poor'? A literal reading would be 'the evidence seems to support it, but we have low confidence in that assertion.' akin to the evidence for ivermectin vs. COVID-19, or aducanumab vs. Alzheimer's disease. In that case, where we cannot predict long-term effects, we should do what results in the least immediate suffering. If you meant 'the evidence shows with strong confidence that it is harmful', akin to the evidence regarding 31 g of aspirin vs. the 1918 influenza, then I could be convinced to support a moratorium until experiments on adults show that they have found a less harmful method of changing genders.
- 'Blocking transgender care that is desired by a minor patient and approved by both parents and doctors' is not the mirror image of 'allowing transgender care that is desired by a minor patient and approved by doctors but opposed by the patient's parents'; the mirror image of that is 'blocking transgender care that is desired by the parent(s) but opposed by the patient and the doctors.' e. g. the often raised spectre of the blue-hair-and-pronouns parent attempting to transition their cisgender child in order to gain the status of 'ally to the trans community'. (I am not sure whether this has ever happened, but it would certainly justify overruling the parent's wishes, even in a society in which gender transition is instant, perfect, side-effect-free, and reversible.)
The groomer most likely believes that having sex with the child is mutually beneficial and while it serves his own interests, also serves the best interests of the child.
But he/she is wrong.
There is no royal road to geometry, and there is no substitute to actually deciding who is right and who is wrong in each individual case.
(Sometimes, we can establish heuristics where >99.999% of cases following a given pattern have a common answer; e. g. "Anyone advocating for paedophilia is wrong." However, the heuristic "If a parent disagrees with their child, the parent is right and the child is wrong." does not reach anywhere near five nines.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
5d ago
on what grounds you wish to overrule parental authority
On the grounds that a child or adolescent is not the property of their parents, because they are a human being, and a human being cannot be the property of another human being (Grant v. Lee, 1865).
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
6d ago
we should not let these kind of doctors make decisions about children, that go against the wishes of parents.
What if the parents are wrong?
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
6d ago
It is impossible for a [natal-anatomical] man to give birth.
Impossible with today's medical technology. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
6d ago
I'm just saying that 'we shouldn't try to change this because it's natural' proves too much.
The category is 'we want P, nature imposes ¬P, we figure out how to change ¬P to P.'.
When we make distinctions between 'nature wants half of our children to die, we want it to be rare for a parent to bury a child' and 'nature wants breast-feeding to be exclusive to women, we want men to have the option', we are merely haggling over the price.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
6d ago
following the norms of nature
Would these be the same 'norms of nature' that killed 40-50% of all pre-20th century children before their fifth birthday?
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
6d ago
putting penises in women only spaces ... is about the most unpopular policy....
What if one frames it as "Outside the bedroom or the doctor's office, other peoples' genitals are none of your business, and should not be taken as an input to whether $PERSON is allowed to $VERB_PHRASE."?
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
8d ago
Or they could park further away than their occupants are willing/able to walk....
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
11d ago
They gave it to Henry bloody Kissinger of all people!
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
12d ago
Trump may have the freedom to actually apply pressure to Putin in a way that the Biden alliance has steadfastly refused to do out of fear of escalation.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
12d ago
Didn't the Rightful Caliph say something on that matter?
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
12d ago
Except that there were no such shootings. It literally never happened, and to my knowledge no one actually pointed a gun at anyone working for FEMA. The idea that they were worried about getting shot is a just-so story.
They may not have known that at the time. Something not existing in the territory does not mean it isn't marked on the map.
Second, it is part of the job. The job of a FEMA agent is to get people aid, and “I’m scared” is no more valid for FEMA than it is for the local cops. You don’t get to join a first responders agency and then be too scared to respond. Especially if you’re doing checks on the safety of Americans in a hurricane situation.
A valid point. If the safety concerns were the issue, they should have directed "If a house has a Trump sign, bring backup just in case."
Osama Bin Laden specifically ordered AQ forces to never assassinate Biden, because he was incompetent and a net negative if left in [charge].
Source?
(Inch-resting if true, given that the Allies avoided bringing Hitler to room temperature for the same reason. Considering some of the comparisons going around, I increasingly wonder if the universe is deliberately yanking our collective chains....)
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
13d ago
Ok, well I'm pretty sure that if ask people to pair up objects of the same color, they'll also do that regardless of their language or culture.
Except for the Chinese combining 青 with 青, or the Russians separating синий from голубой....
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
16d ago
The left != people who have Read The Sequences.
I was referring to them as separate groups, but will edit for clarity.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
16d ago
· Edited 16d ago
EDITED FOR CLARITY.
I don't think anyone claims that 'men can be women' per se.
The left just happens to disagree with your assertion that 'anyone born with male parts is and will always be a man.' This is not saying 'men can be women' so much as 'you are wrong about who is a man and who is a woman.' The standard view on the left, as I understand it, is that if John Doe comes out as a transwoman (changing her name to Jane Doe), then Jane Doe was always a woman, and our (and her) previous belief that she was a man was an error of fact, and mutatis mutandis for transmen.
People who have Read The Sequences, on the other hand, hold that 'man' and 'woman' are an inaccurate map of a more complicated territory, and their definitions depend on which hidden inference one is asking about.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
16d ago
But did the intelligence really come from clairvoyants, or was that a cover to distract the enemy from trying to find which one of them was selling secrets to the Americans? I vaguely recall that the British laundered some of the ENIGMA decryptions via this method....
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
16d ago
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
17d ago
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
20d ago
That won't work forever.
It doesn't have to work forever, just until we can get nuclear plants built and direct CO2 extraction running.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
20d ago
total command of people's lives
benefits the community because people are being useful, and excludes people who are not
These are both downstream of treating the individual human person as a means to an end, rather than an end in themself.
Government programs are always both overbroad and underinclusive.
But they don't have to be.
There will always be some portion of rich people who can by some loophole get food stamps, and some portion of genuinely hungry people who cannot.
The cost of the former is minuscule compared to other government inefficiencies and thus does not excuse the latter. If there are 11 applicants, 1 of whom needs x assistance to live and 10 amoral liars, and you cannot distinguish between them, or if the cost of doing so exceeds 10x, the morally correct action is to give assistance to all of them, even if it means Uncle Pennybags won't be able to afford a new yacht this year.
(If you can distinguish between them at a cost <10x, but Uncle Pennybags, instead of spending x on assistance and 5x or 2x or 0.25x on investigating fraud, would rather terminate the program, keep the 6x or 3x or 1.25x for his yacht fund, and let the one needy person starve to decrease the surplus population, we take him aside and explain what happened at Big Swamp Village.)
So consider the government program of marriage. Why does it exist? To simplify family formation because the government has an interest in the future children of the country.
Then extend it only to couples who, supported by oath or affirmation, declare that they either
- to the best of their knowledge, are mutually fertile (opposite reproductive organs, not sterilised, no known insurmountable infertility) and intend to bear children,
or
- intend to adopt children
and otherwise leave gender out of it.
(I don't recall where I read this, but supposedly there was at least one tribe which explicitly had something akin to your attitude towards marriage; the marriage would only be finalised once the bride was pregnant and would sunset when their youngest child reached adulthood. If they didn't have or intend to have children, what they did behind closed doors would be of no concern to anyone else, regardless of gender. I'm not sure whether two people adopting children would have been considered eligible, but they probably would be if they had kept their system into the modern day, again regardless of gender.)
Why should we allow American descendants of slaves to remain in the US, while not admitting all SSAs who want to come?
I believe, if not in 'open borders' sensu strictu, at least that the borders should be more open than they currently are. Thus I don't find this a convincing example.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
21d ago
· Edited 21d ago
Out of context religious doctrine just makes you sound stupid.
Exactly what context could that passage possibly have that would change its meaning to something other than "Don't treat human beings as disposable for the Greater Good just because you're not doing it to very many of them."‽
Proudly misunderstanding the failure mode of communism and fascism
What have I misunderstood? One thing that those regimes had in common prior to the piles of skulls was that they were based on ideologies which held that the community is the moral patient and human beings only matter as far as they are useful to it, rather than human beings being moral patients and the community existing for their benefit.
Is there some other thing they have in common with each other and not with liberalism?
We are talking about a specific arrangement where the state provides benefits to a sort of arrangement. Including and excluding different types of people is often necessary to preserve resources. There is no reason to extend marriage benefits to M-M or F-F relationships because they don't function similarly to M-F relationships.
Exactly how do they not function similarly?
Is there some relevant characteristic which is true of 100.000% of opposite-sex relationships but 0.000% of same-sex relationships? Then there is no reason not to judge directly on that.
Is it some men-from-Mars-women-from-Venus stereotype that applies to ~90-95% of opposite-sex couples and only 5-10% of same-sex couples? Then it is an injustice to the 5-10% who do not fit the stereotype to judge based on the gender parity of the couple rather than directly on the relevant matter.
Is it some third thing? Then please explain it, because I can't imagine anything that would fit.
"No one will ever win the battle of the sexes, because there's too much fraternising with the enemy."
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