phosphorus2
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User ID: 3264
phosphorus2
17hr ago
The main point I can take away from this is that all of the Christian right that warned about various slippery slopes have been validated over, and over, and over again. The slippery slope is technically a fallacy, yes. But Christians repeatedly pointed out "There is no limiting principle here, and the arguments you nake to support degenerate behavior X are just as applicable to degenerate behaviors Y and Z and there is nothing except public sentiment (and not even that if a judge somewhere says otherwise) preventing the awful things we're talking about from becoming reality."
You can get an abortion at any gestational age in Canada for any reason. Google tells me that really the only restrictions are resources, that you might not be able to get an abortion past 24 weeks due to lack of facilities. Not due to gatekeeping. There is already no limiting principle on abortion, you are already at the bottom of the hill, that is the case regardless of surrogacy.
Recognizing where on the hill we are starting at, how can we additionally fall down with the introduction of surrogacy? If the contention is that we will slip down into allowing donors to compel the pregnant woman into abortion for arbitrary reasons this doesn't really seem like a good example of that, they were not able to do that. The limiting principle against that is that the woman gets to choose, and that is what is backed up by Canadian law. And if the woman always gets to choose, what on top of that are the surrogates? Like it seems to me your issue should mostly be with Canada's elective abortion rules and not with the surrogates who were not able to pressure the mom into an abortion.
Long story short, the baby had a minor heart defect (the article doesn't specify what) and a cleft palate, and the adoptive men wish their now two year old child had been murdered and are suing the birth mother for failing to do so (there are also claims that she failed to keep them informed in a timely manner about these issues).
The National Post article linked in the NYP piece starts out with:
"A Canadian couple is suing the surrogate mother who carried their son, two years after she refused their request to abort the fetus because of a cleft lip and possible genetic abnormalities."
If the possible genetic abnormalities indicated to the parents were something like down syndrome or "your kid might be a vegetable" to me that has a lot different moral valence than "our kid has cleft lip, abort him". It is not clear from either article what the potential genetic issue was, but from the following we can see the parents changed their mind when they learned the baby was generally healthy beyond the lip:
"The parents agreed to proceed with the pregnancy after doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital said the baby was generally healthy and had no major problems beyond the cleft lip."
If your objection is to abortion in general then the above will not allay you, but to me aborting a child halfway through pregnancy because of serious health issues is much more understandable than doing the same for a cosmetic defect.
phosphorus2
19hr ago
"It's morally wrong to sell people" doesn't sound so difficult.
Is it morally wrong for MLB teams to sell and/or trade players too each other? Is it morally wrong for a temp agency to sell their workers to a factory?
Calling surrogacy "selling people" is technically correct, but obtuse. "Selling people" is understood to be bad for reasons like the people being sold don't have a say in the matter, they have less rights than others, there is typically violence or coercion involved. Its evocative of slavery or sex trafficking. The bad things that are inherent or understood to be inherent in slavery / trafficking don't really apply to surrogacy. Yeah there are surrogacy horror stories like in OP, but the modal surrogacy case by far doesn't look like OP and there is not reason it should.
phosphorus2
5d ago
Here are some relevant definitions via Google:
Gender Identity: A person’s deeply felt, internal sense of being male, female, or something entirely different (such as non-binary, genderqueer, or agender)
Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, expressions, and norms that a culture associates with being a man or a woman. While often conflated with biological sex, it is distinct; sex is assigned at birth based on biology, whereas gender encompasses an individual's internal identity and societal presentation.
You hear this argument:
"who are you to say someone isn't the gender he says he is? No one would know better than the person himself."
so much because, by those definitions, that is what gender / gender identity is. If you accept those definitions then its not even an argument, its an extension of the definition. You cannot by those definitions have any input on that person's gender / gender identity as it is solely that own person's feeling.
Is having skin in the game a reason to trust your self-read more, or less?
If this was any other form of identity then maybe, but again it comes down to the premises accepted. If you accept the definitions the conclusion is foregone, it is smuggled in.
As with everything trans related you will get a much clearer picture by questioning the premises and definitions set forth by the troons than by arguing within them. Don't argue within a frame that is incoherent and solely made up to bamboozle you, reject the premises.
phosphorus2
5d ago
Marshall's failure to get behind the KMT and defeat the CCP really could be the greatest blunder in American history
Its fun to speculate on but I'm not sure that a having a counterfactual KMT led China would have turned out any better for the US. Probably, but a rivalry seems somewhat overdetermined. China is big, the US is big, there is bound to be at least tension.
KMT was pretty extreme in its own right. They considered themselves a revolutionary party, they had the same "century of humiliation" resentments against the West, they were ran by a warlord. Chiang Kaishek does not exactly strike me as a liberal democracy enjoyer:
In 1948, the Kuomintang again attacked the merchants of Shanghai, Chiang Kaishek sent his son Chiang Ching-kuo to restore economic order. Ching-kuo copied Soviet methods, which he learned during his stay there, to start a social revolution by attacking middle class merchants. He also enforced low prices on all goods to raise support from the Proletariat.
China really shot itself in the foot with the Mao led CCP. If that huge China takeoff happens in 1980 or 70 or 60 instead of 1990, where do you think China would be today? If they had the same GDP per capita as Taiwan does now their GDP would be 2x the US. Think of the consternation caused by Japan Inc. in the 80s, and that was with about as close of an ally as you can get. Yes Tawian / US are close now, but that is a vassal / big bro relationship, not peer/peer.
phosphorus2
7d ago
My argument was reasonable.
Plenty of arguments are reasonable regardless of them being deep or thorough or correct.
phosphorus2
8d ago
What makes you think I didn’t read the article?
You draw conclusions that are not supported by the article.
E.g.:
In interviews, staffers have also raised doubts about Reade’s claim that she was asked to serve drinks at a fundraiser, an incident she said she included in an official complaint of sexual harassment submitted while she worked in the office. But more than 50 former staffers said they didn’t remember ever attending a fundraiser for Biden in Washington, D.C., when they were on his Senate staff. And some recalled an office policy banning most of Biden’s Senate staff from doing campaign work.
This does not support the position there was no complaint, but I almost don't blame you because they wrote it very bad. But I still blame you because even if these were more solid they would point to Tara's claim being not credible, not that it didn't exist at all.
Like they interview 74 staffers, and close to a third of them remember Biden attending fundraisers in DC, which would corroborate Tara's allegation. This is also an example of a problem with interviewing so many people who never met Tara. What use is it asking a Biden staffer from 2016 if Biden had ever fundraised in D.C.? They lump in a bunch of useless data points in with people who were there. Like if the third of staffers who had attended a D.C. fundraiser worked in the 90s with Tara that is obviously a much stronger piece indication than if that third worked with Biden under Obama.
They also apparently had a policy that allowed at least some Senate staff to do campaign work (most is not all), also somewhat corroborating Tara's allegation.
The text in your hyperlink which I am quoting above does not support the conclusion that there was no complaint, it supports the conclusion that her complaint is not credible. Likewise with your second link now quoted below:
I remember talking about him wanting me to serve drinks because he liked my legs and thought I was pretty
This is just an accusation. You should have highlighted this part:
Reade says she doesn’t have a copy of the report, and Biden said Friday that he is not aware that any complaint against him exists. He asked the Senate and the National Archives to search their records to try to locate a complaint from Reade.
This supports the conclusion that there was no complaint because no one actually has the complaint.
phosphorus2
9d ago
What constitutes a “serious investigation” in your book?
Do talk to the people who were actually there and worked with her, like Ben Savage in the article.
Do try and corroborate or disprove. Like what happened to Tara's contemporaneous sexual harassment complaint? That to me seems like a great way to evaluate her credibility, but they mention it but dont really come back to it.
Do not talk to dozens of people who were not there and stand to benefit very very much ideologicaly and professionally if their boss is not a rapist.
Do not involve a psychologist of violence
They interviewed a bunch of people who were there,
No, they interviewed a bunch of biden staffers, the overwhelming majority of which did not remember her and were not there. I know this becauase I read the article, you do not know this because you did not.
I dont find tara's rape credible. But asking a group of people (with a huge vested interest in joe biden not being rapey) "is joe biden a rapist" is not convincing.
phosphorus2
9d ago
Asking a bunch of people who worked or work for Biden if they thought he was a rapist while he is running for president is not a deep or serious investigation.
Also that is not what the article even concluded, the article just ends. They just interviewed a bunch of staffers and a few psychologists, each gave their piece. Where was the conclusion? It ends with a paragraph that suggests biden was too touchy.
phosphorus2
9d ago
If Congress wants to pass no laws then that is their right, and that is by design. Consensus is needed to pass laws, and if the consensus isn't there then the laws should not be passed. Those are the rules. If it creates a total mess then yeah that sucks, but the courts have no rights to step in and write their own. Especially since they draw their own legitimacy as being the referees of the law and not players.
phosphorus2
15d ago
It is not literally the fourth reich but you would be embarking on the path that led to the third reich, which happened not because of some freak moral failing of the german people, but because making laws that explicitly treat differently people based on their ethnicity, with the goal of getting rid of the unwanted ones, is inherently a morally treacherous path.
In 2013 the Dominican Republic stripped birthright citizenship from every Haitian born in the country. Their stated goals were to get rid of an unwanted people, and those people were not wanted explicitly due to their ethnicity. They applied it retroactively, all the way back to 1929. They stripped citizenship from people who had only ever known the DR solely because of their ethnicity. Since then they have deported hundreds of thousands of Haitians.
None of the things you say will happen in Sweden happened in the DR. They did not genocide. They did not turn into the fourth reich. Doing this was not some impossible pedestrian dodging task.
phosphorus2
15d ago
It is clear that in the aftermath of Obergefell both the left and right wings of American politics have decided to use the courts as their primary means of advancing their "big issues" rather than Congress, or god forbid, actually persuading the public.
If the courts didn't want to be used as a backdoor to legislation by tenuous legal mechanism then the courts should not have seized the power of the legislature by backdooring legislation by tenuous legal mechanisms.
phosphorus2
15d ago
So tell me, is Sweden deporting Swedish citizens (naturalized or children of naturalized) of non-swede ethnicity, or are they revoking residency status of non-citizens?
No I am not going to tell you because I don't really care what they decide on.
But. If they do decide to deport a bunch of them, they can do that without killing them all and/or bringing about the fourth reich.
phosphorus2
15d ago
This is what I said:
plenty of countries have done mass deportations without turning into genocidal states.
Examples that support my claim are Operation Wetback in the 50s, as well as whatever DJT is doing today.
This is what you asked:
What's an example, meeting your criteria of (a) the target countries don't take the people in voluntary and (b) no military force is involved?
You have added your own qualifiers of (a) and (b) to my position. These are not my words, these are your words. You should know this, you wrote them. I did not write them. I just quote them. I am not going to give you examples of a position you have foisted upon me.
If I had said this then you would have a point:
plenty of countries have done mass deportations to target countries that don't take the people in voluntary and without using military force and / or turning into genocidal states.
But I did not say this above. I only said this here.
(a) is difficult to give an example of because it is rare to have a country that doesn't accept its own. Which is why I did not say this in my original claim.
phosphorus2
16d ago
The deportation force must not genocide people and successfully deport a large ratio of foreigners, (since the policy is remigration) many with deep ties to their community. Inevitably they will resist. Inevitably many natives will join their resistance. Inevitably, news will spotlight some especially cruel deportations, and local economies will suffer, increasing resistance. Deportation is very invasive: it's effectively kidnapping from heavily-guarded areas, here large communities of mostly citizens. All this means mass remigration can only be accomplished by a powerful, nonlocal force that is brutal towards citizens.
Ok so Sweden already deports people without doing all of this right now. So personally I don't think Sweden will turn into Nazi Germany, I think the more likely thing to happen is that Sweden just does more of whatever they are doing now.
making LLMs more diverse,
This is genuinely the most retarded thing I have ever read on this website
I don't understand why people here trivialize this.
Its because you have this post talking about Sweden and Somalia and migration and Nazis, and then at the end I read your solution was to get diverse LLMs. What the fuck are you talking about?
phosphorus2
16d ago
What's an example, meeting your criteria of (a) the target countries don't take the people in voluntary and (b) no military force is involved?
My position is that you can do mass deportations (remigrations) without genociding people.
This is in opposition to OP who I quoted there and now here: "infrastructure (military tactics) to effectively implement remigration is dangerous for your own sake."
There is no reason that, domestically, you cannot build and use deportation infrastructure that deports people without murdering them. Suggesting otherwise, like you, is insane and totally baseless.
More specifically, how do you imagine this happening for Somalis in Sweden? Somalia doesn't even have a functioning government that deserves the name, let alone one that would willingly accept and provide the infrastructure to take in millions of highly reluctant coethnics that they often won't even have a language in common with. There's no obvious route that doesn't look like the Swedish military filling up a concentration camp, sending a fleet of prison ships to the Horn of Africa, conquering a beachhead and forced-marching boatloads of people onto it at gunpoint (probably also with a temporary holding camp/fortification at the target site, so the first 500k can't interfere with unloading the second 500k).
So a few things
- Google says there are 80k somalis in sweden. Not a million
- Somalia does not have a functioning government. Just send them on boats or planes. They can't actually do anything to stop it.
- Literally just put them on a plane
- You are hysterical. Like what are you even saying here?
"There's no obvious route that doesn't look like the Swedish military filling up a concentration camp"
ummmm if you really really had to put them in a camp, just put them in a camp and then DON'T MURDER THEM. If you really had to do all the insane things in your fantasy, just do them and DON'T KILL THEM. How are you so mind raped that you immediately go to quadroon Ann Frank hiding in a sauna to dodge deportation flotillas instead of just like not murdering people? Huh?
Then you get all the problems with rounding up the people you want to send off at home, deciding what to do with the third-generation Somalis, half-Somalis and quarter-Somalis, Somalis being hidden by and protected by sympathetic Swedes, possible Somalis who swear they are Ethiopian, et cetera et cetera. You can't just slow-walk it either, because your flotilla that is parked off of Somalia is draining the budget more than the welfare payments did. Soon you find that between the ballooning military operation and the home front, you have to take a lot of inspiration from everyone's favourite continentals in the late 1930s.
Look I don't really care what criteria the swedes end up on. Reasonable minds can disagree on the appropriate percentages to achieve desomalianification. But you can do that without killing them. You can just give them a plane ticket and be done with it. You have concocted this this scenario with beachheads and expeditionary forces and a million somalis being carted off at gunpoint... why? Why would that happen? Its Somalia. They don't have a functional government. They don't have a navy. They don't have an air force. They don't control their borders. They don't control their own territory.
Maybe just bribe them? Send them to Rwanda instead? Do some negotiations with them to change their mind? Tell them Sweden will recognize Somalialand? Literally anything else than what you said? You can deport people without murdering them! The US deports orders of magnitudes more than Sweden, (mostly) murder free!
But remigration isn't a solution. First, because I can't imagine how to do it remotely ethically. Comparing anything right-wing to Nazism is an overused cliche, but it fits here: AFAIK Nazis initially planned to just deport the Jews somewhere (Madagascar), but ended up brutally overworking and exterminating them, because their end goal was to get rid of them and that was easiest. How would you get rid of immigrants if Somalia etc. won't accept them? What if it's too expensive? What if it's dangerous for them? What about women and children?
You not being able imagine deporting people without immediately genociding them like the Nazis is a very silly argument. First because it is credible to no one that you can't imagine it (did you try at all? try harder!), and second because all they would have to do is just not genocide people. Very easy, they're already doing that. And there is zero indication that they are going to stop doing that, they already deport people without murdering them. What evidence is there that they will start? None. Its ridiculous.
These are difficult questions not only morally, but the infrastructure (military tactics) to effectively implement remigration is dangerous for your own sake. It risks broadening persecution, creating a fascist state, an ugly monoculture...the exact failure it seeks to prevent.
You clearly just believe that remigration = fascism, by definition, that is the logic chain you have laid out. So just say that. Its honest.
Why would you assume this would involve military tactics? What evidence is there that remigrations are inherently dangerous, plenty of countries have done mass deportations without turning into genocidal states. Huge claims with zero evidence.
So another point of discussion is why Örebro decided to focus on this as their stand-out policy. Is it just marketing and they plan to implement something much more moderate (I realize I'm bad at marketing, but I'm skeptical this would work for a generally leftist party). Is it a radical idea to appeal to the working class? Is it only the media that's focusing on this policy, and Örebro themselves consider it a less important part of the agenda compared to the socialist policies? (Probably all of the above, especially the third.)
Is it really that hard to take them at their own word? Why do you not? Why should we not?
A real solution must be broader than immigration. Fixing the other issues: making LLMs more diverse,
This is genuinely the most retarded thing I have ever read on this website
phosphorus2
20d ago
I think that my statement is at least technically true, because "it is harder to sex id clothed persons than nude persons" should hardly be controversial.
a "technically true" statement that has no bearing on reality has no value
phosphorus2
22d ago
I mentioned people unhappy with their surgeries and if you'd bothered to click on the link you'd've seen the thread titled "Unhappy with my results" right there on the front page (it was there yesterday, it's a bit more hidden now; instead there's one titled "Really disheartened." now).
Cherry-picking negative examples from your reddit cherry-pick
phosphorus2
22d ago
I've seen the images they've seen, the collages, the screenshots, the threads, that gave them that opinion on SRS. It's not neutral, unbiased coverage.
Lol
So are you saying that if that had been the demand
No I said that was never the demand, and I asked you not to lie to us that it was the demand, and now I am telling you that when you argue with someone and try to make a point to them by telling them something that both of you know is not true they are only going to change their mind about your credibility.
phosphorus2
22d ago
If transition means having your dick cut off and turned into an open wound that needs to be constantly dilated, however... I'm not sure I can believe that that really helps anybody.
You've been fed cherry-picked information about sex reassignment surgery. Many people are, in fact, happy about their surgeries. See /r/Transgender_Surgeries.
That's not cherry-picked information. That is one of the medical interventions in question. That is an actual trans medical intervention, and that is what happens in that surgery. The penis is removed. You are left with an hole that needs to be constantly dilated. You don't get to just waive your hands and say the magic words "cherry-picking" to dismiss arguments you don't like.
You pointing us to to reddit . com for a bunch of people happy with that same surgery is an actual example of cherry-picking.
"Some people prefer to be referred to as a gender different from the one they were born with."
It was never just this, don't lie to us.
phosphorus2
22d ago
In most human societies, it is not as easy to identify the sex of another person.
impossible to have a conversation with someone who asserts such transparently false things
phosphorus2
27d ago
The police in the UK have a very bad track record of caring of what happens to the UK's poor and vulnerable. This is more about class than anything else.
If it was a class issue where are the white british rape gangs? Why are they all pakistanis? Why are the victims all white?
Here is a quote directly telling you that the police covered this up because they were worried about race relations:
Does this seem like a class issue to you? Do you think that a white taxi driver would have raped this girl?
Its a class issue that when a pakistani calls up his pakistani friends and with the promise of gang raping a british child his pakistani friends don't immediately report him to the police?
Its a class issue certain not white demographics commit rape at rates orders of magnitudes higher than the native brit population?
As a comparison there's the case of Fred West and his wife Rose West.
Did Fred West call up all his friends to join in? Did a bunch of Fred West's friends join in when offered? Do you think that the typical lower class brit would join in on gang raping a child if offered the chance? Did the police cover up Fred West's crimes because they were scared of race riots?
phosphorus2
29d ago
Anthropic doesn't want their tech to be used to spy on Americans. Your solution is that Anthropic should move to the UK, which not 2 weeks ago announced that they will be requiring tech companies, under threat of prison, to scan anything and everything on every single persons phone.
Open arms, but check your back for a stiletto.
phosphorus2
30d ago
we can intercept most of their missiles and rockets at any time
Is that why you kept your ships at a decent distance?
What are you implying, that the American ships were chicken?
First thing is that it is not entirely clear that America actually can intercept most of Iran's missiles and rockets. I'm sure the intercept rate for something like a Shahed drone is close to 100%, but it is certainly much less for their more advanced ballistic missiles.
Second thing is that it doesn't matter if America can intercept most of Iran's missiles and rockets. You need to intercept all of them, a single miss can be billions in damage. 99% isn't going to open the straight. 99% is not going to protect your $10 billion aircraft carrier. 99% gets your THAAD destroyed. See below link.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2l2yl7r8r2o
Are you saying that America lacked the technical capacity to bomb Iran, or that America lacked the political will to deal with the fallout.
He is saying that it is not clear how doing this accomplishes America's objectives. If our objectives were something like:
- stop Iran nuclear program for good
- stop Iran missile production for good
- open Hormuz for good
Blowing all the bridges and power plants in probably stops 1, but it's not clear how it does long term. It probably mostly stops 2, but I don't think it stops it totally, and Iran having 1% the production they do now is still very dangerous and doesn't get you where you need to be. And it doesn't stop 3 at all. So unless you think we can bomb them into agreement with America it doesn't really matter if we can blow the bridges.
I know its not remotely comparable, that's why I said lumping them all together as "selling people" was obtuse. Selling slaves and surrogacy for money and MLB trades can all be described as "selling people", that those things are not (morally) comparable is my point. Because these "selling people" scenarios have wildly different moral valences "It's morally wrong to sell people" obviously has a little bit of nuance to it.
First thing is that's not even true, a MLB player can be sold against his will to another team. It happens all the time, and it not possible for him to refuse.
Second is that in both the particular surrogacy in question and the practice at large are also contracts entered into voluntarily. If you are going to argue that the baby gets a say - no, it doesn't. Does a baby get a say on if it is adopted? No. Has any baby ever had a say as to if or when or how they are born? No. Its never been the case, so why is it here?
Ok this one by me was maybe not precise, but I have a feeling you get the gist of what I am saying. I am referring to something like Kunta Kinte being shipped off to the deep south against his will, people generally think that is mean and bad. Given that no newborn child at any point in history has ever had a say in any matter I hoped that you realized that I was referring to something like Kunta instead of something unremarkable and due to the inherent nature of newborns.
I am going to assume you weren't talking about the fact that children and adults have different rights because that's not remarkable or the point of contention here.
What right does a non surrogate child have that a surrogate child does not? The right to a mother? Baby has a mother. How could it be born if it didn't have a mother? That it is adopted by two gay men, one being the father, does not strike the mother from existence.
Really? I don't believe you. You couldn't possibly know this, its not falsifiable, did a baby tell you this? No, you just made it up.
The surrogate was not any given money for the kid. Per the article she was not even given money for the costs she incurred.
The parents don't own the kid beyond the extent every parent or guardian "owns" their kid. One of them is the actual father! Its his kid!
If that argument applies to surrogacy 1:1 then why doesn't it here?
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