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termi

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Dece1t sentience does not determine whether something is alive or not but it does determine our moral duties towards it. a lifeform of which we cannot say that it is self-conscious, of which we cannot say that it experiences pain (experience being more than the mere reflex of a nervous system) simply cannot hold the same moral status as what we would typically consider a person. asking "why is killing bad" may seem bizarre since we think of killing being bad as self-evident, but it's an important question to ask, since without asking this question we can hardly figure out why different creatures hold different moral status unless we defer to religion (and afaik you're attempting to argue why abortion is bad even if human life isnt special because of the existende of an immortal soul or whatever). if the taking of a life itself is categorically wrong then what difference does it make whether i take the life of an embryo or a cow or a bug or a plant or the president of the USA?

as far as comatose patients are concerned, i would argue they are temporarily incapacitated (assuming they are expected to be able to wake up from the coma), they have already been sentient and arguably still are, they are vastly more neurologically developed than an embryo, and aside from that i would simply grant them the right to live based on their already established wants in life and the connections others have made with these persons. they have a more explicit interest in the continuation of their lives than embryos which have yet to acquire sentience. this may not be a fully satisfying answer, and i concede that it is a moral grey zone, but to say that we cannot ever kill something/a human that has the potential to live leads into even more absurd grey zones, as already demonstrated by myzo.
 

Martin

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I don’t look at smogon for one day and this thread starts going in circles.

If you want to keep discussing abortion create a dedicated thread for it; this thread’s getting clogged.
 

Myzozoa

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I don’t look at smogon for one day and this thread starts going in circles.
heroic smogon mod saves the board from abortion discussion w good people on both sides, thank goodness those misogynists just got told by the mods not to engage, thats productive
If you want to keep discussing abortion create a dedicated thread for it; this thread’s getting clogged.
nah that thread happened a few times, and was a dumpster fire, just let it happen here

how the fuck does a thread get clogged, this is a thread intended for self-quarantine
 

GatoDelFuego

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heroic smogon mod saves the board from abortion discussion w good people on both sides, thank goodness those misogynists just got told by the mods not to engage, thats productive


nah that thread happened a few times, and was a dumpster fire, just let it happen here

how the fuck does a thread get clogged, this is a thread intended for self-quarantine
FOH, maybe I missed the memo but I don't recall anywhere in martin's post where he takes a stance on literally anything. If you think cleaning up a thread is stopping pro-choice people from speading the good word to convert misogynists everywhere then you've got a complex. You're literally invited to engage in an already existing thread
 
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Myzozoa

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FOH, maybe I missed the memo but I don't recall anywhere in martin's post where he takes a stance on literally anything. If you think cleaning up a thread is stopping pro-choice people from speading the good word to convert misogynists everywhere then you've got a complex.
'this is going in circles while i am away' meaning: don't engage, this discussion is not worthwhile or will bring u unwanted mod attention if continued, it has run it's course. thats where he took a stance

and your disingenuous response goes with his: make an abortion thread? after what happened w all the others...

why dont you wait and think and give me a real response instead of a sweeping dismissal that allows you to avoid any self examination

i will not reply further until we are on topic.

so as not to clog the thread
 

Martin

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Just to be clear, I didn’t intend to take a stance on it, but reading back i can see why it could be interpreted like that. I apologise for this.

I do think that the abortion discussion is worth having, but I’d just prefer for long extended debates (>1 page) to take place in their own threads rather than this one, which is here moreso to curb ppl posting entire threads for less contentious/more low-response current affairs stuff.

Anyway this is my last post on this. If you want to discuss this or anything else moderation-related more feel free to PM me—I wanna try to be more open to criticism than I think I’ve been in the past, so I appreciate any feedback I can get.
 
Conversation happens. I don't think anything was getting really heated or community is getting toxic. I think it's better to let okay conversation to run its course. It might be an issue if debate went through, like twenty pages, maybe, but I think stepping in to stop conversation at this point is a little premature.
 
https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/05/25/the-brexit-party-wins-the-battle-for-facebook-clicks
"However the Brexit Party fares at the ballot box, it has won the battle for clicks. It has spent no more than most of its rivals on Facebook ads in the past month. But it has got dramatically better results (see charts)."

"Polls suggested that more than 30% of voters would do so in Britain’s election to the European Parliament on May 23rd (results will be announced on May 27th). That would put Nigel Farage’s new outfit in first place, winning perhaps 30 of Britain’s 73 seats in Strasbourg."

Was not implementing brexit really a smart play?
 

Pyritie

TAMAGO
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https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/05/25/the-brexit-party-wins-the-battle-for-facebook-clicks
"However the Brexit Party fares at the ballot box, it has won the battle for clicks. It has spent no more than most of its rivals on Facebook ads in the past month. But it has got dramatically better results (see charts)."

"Polls suggested that more than 30% of voters would do so in Britain’s election to the European Parliament on May 23rd (results will be announced on May 27th). That would put Nigel Farage’s new outfit in first place, winning perhaps 30 of Britain’s 73 seats in Strasbourg."

Was not implementing brexit really a smart play?
I mean if you want to avoid starting another war in ireland, yes, among many other reasons
 

Myzozoa

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/24/us-military-new-troop-middle-east-iran-trump

worrying recent military industrial complex activities including a galaxy brain 7.5 bn dollar arms sale to saudi

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/23/heal...mW6wLa5nBPZPCKzHtU3O49M8jyRVBIoPsc8JuOJlWSzHU

and in case you missed it, doctors that inspected the ICE detention facilities found them to be out of order and unfixable:

“...no amount of effort can truly fix the problems, [Dr. Scott Allen] says, describing any attempts to improve conditions in family detention as "Band-Aid solutions" that are doomed to fail.

"Even if you could pour money and resources into properly staffing these facilities and giving them programming," Allen says, "the simple act of detaining and indefinite detention ... is irreparably harmful to children."”

...

So far, the doctors say they haven't faced professional pushback. In fact, they've been honored for taking a stand by groups like Physicians for Human Rights and the Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prizes.
But they're still aware that each time they share their story, they're taking the risk all over again.
"To some extent I'm still nervous. I think we live in a time where sort of normal decency and normal rules don't seem to apply, and people can be quite vicious," Allen says. "So I'm not cavalier about our situation. ... We try to proceed at each step cautiously while at the same time doing what we have to do."”

"
In their letter to Congress last year, the doctors detailed particularly troubling cases that they said represent systemic problems that would only get worse if family detention expands:
• Significant weight loss in children that went largely unnoticed by the facility medical staff, including a 16-month-old baby who lost nearly a third of his body weight over 10 days during a diarrheal disease but was never given IV fluids or sent to an emergency room.
• A 27-day-old baby who had a seizure from bleeding inside his skull that was missed by the facility on arrival.
• Numerous children who suffered severe finger injuries while confined in a facility that was designed as a medium-security prison for adults.
"That one really bothered me," Allen says, describing how they uncovered the pattern by combing through the charts of children who'd been taken to the emergency room."
 

Myzozoa

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...matoes-heres-why-american-food-is-hurting-you

this week on american capitalism failing wildly: as long as no one has gotten sued about it before you can have a reasonable expectation of being able to sell a carcinogenic product for several years, decades even, before the regulatory and legal system can catch up with it. finally, when they do catch up to these corporate poisoners, no agency of the legal process can accuse them of having a business model predicated on criminality.


"
The recent headlines announcing billions of dollars in damages to people who have gotten cancer after using Roundup are just the tip of a very large iceberg. There are over 1,000 lawsuits against Monsanto’s parent company, Bayer, waiting to be heard by the courts. Beyond concerns about that specific glyphosate-based weedkiller, we should be talking about the innumerable other potentially punishing chemicals in our food system.

After all, our food and our health are deeply connected. American healthcare spending has ballooned to $3.5tn a year, and yet we are sicker than most other developed countries. Meanwhile, our food system contains thousands of chemicals that have not been proven safe and many that are banned in other countries.

How did we get to this point? Unlike much of the developed world, the American regulatory system doesn’t operate on the precautionary principle. In other words, instead of potentially hazardous substances being banned from our food, as they are in, say, Europe, chemicals of concern are typically considered innocent until proven guilty. As a result, we are the guinea pigs in our own experiment. And our desire for food that is fast, cheap and abundant only compounds the speed with which we are introduced to new, untested substances."
 
Mmmmmmmmm. No. Fears about glyphosate are completely overblown. Court cases are not scientific evidence. The bar of demonstrating cause and effect is much, much lower in court cases compared to doing so in scientific studies, and there have been multitudes of court cases going strictly against scientific evidence such as silicone breast implants causing cancer (they do not).

Also, the scare around the World Health Organization's classification on glyphosate as a class 2A is wholly overblown for two reasons:
  • The classifications such as 1A and 2A define cause-and-effect relationships but make no statement on the probabilities of those relationships. Alcohol, for instance, is classified as a class 1A carcinogen and working as a hairdress is a class 2A carcinogen. Also, the 2A classification stems from having sufficient evidence to cause harm in nonhuman animals, but not enough evidence as humans. Animal studies are nearly at the bottom of the pole of scientific evidence.
  • The 2A classification for glyphosate has been suspect at best.

While this is true that healthcare costs are going up and people are leading shorter lives, I believe that the chemicals in our food is a nonissue and a red herring. The doomsday fearmongering from the article shows no understanding of dose-makes-poison concept, and there is absolutely no way of "proving" a chemical's impact on health to be completely safe. Even so, despite having studies that show glyphosate to not cause cancer to humans, people still reject it because this probability is not zero, the nirvana fallacy. This is a bad article from the Guardian with countless baseless sentimental appeals to nature (poop being the best fertilizer!? really!? no way it is) and rank chemophobia, and I expect better from them. There are actual solutions and there are some grains of truth in the article, but pursuing court cases based on appeals to emotion rather than scientific evidence and spreading fear on unspecified "toxins" and misunderstood technology because it's not "natural" (like the Guardian article just done) are not solutions.
 
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/why-the-ufo-story-is-far-more-interesting-than-you-think
The U.S. government does not know what these UFOs actually are. The report focuses on witnesses of so-called "Tic Tacs," but other shapes and sizes of UFOs have also been credibly recorded by the U.S., British, Chinese, Russian, and other governments for the past 65 years. But what are these strange things?
There is a recent increase in MSM reporting UFOs. Is a "disclosure" coming?
 

GatoDelFuego

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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/why-the-ufo-story-is-far-more-interesting-than-you-think

There is a recent increase in MSM reporting UFOs. Is a "disclosure" coming?
They are just parroting a recent report on military sightings of ufos. Note that UFO does not mean extraterrestrial, it just means not identified as a typical aircraft. Alien UFOs stories have been around for decades, yet photographic evidence has nearly vanished in the decade since the smartphone. Coincidence?

The article makes vague references to "nuclear weapons specialists testify that ufos have deactivated nuclear missiles!" (Read: there have been ufo [military ufo, meaning literally anything not identified] reports at nuclear sites. Surprise surprise. If you have a camera drone you want to use it to photograph nuclear missiles) and "mysterious hypersonic underwater objects (definitely using anti gravity devices, there is no doubt)". There is much about the world that we don't understand, including natural phenomena. Lack of explanation does not equal aliens.
 
They are just parroting a recent report on military sightings of ufos. Note that UFO does not mean extraterrestrial, it just means not identified as a typical aircraft. Alien UFOs stories have been around for decades, yet photographic evidence has nearly vanished in the decade since the smartphone. Coincidence?

The article makes vague references to "nuclear weapons specialists testify that ufos have deactivated nuclear missiles!" (Read: there have been ufo [military ufo, meaning literally anything not identified] reports at nuclear sites. Surprise surprise. If you have a camera drone you want to use it to photograph nuclear missiles) and "mysterious hypersonic underwater objects (definitely using anti gravity devices, there is no doubt)". There is much about the world that we don't understand, including natural phenomena. Lack of explanation does not equal aliens.
Yes, you're right that the reported UFOs could be not aliens. We don't know what they are. I want to note that photographing UFOs is quite difficult even in the age of smartphones. There is also a paradox of people spending more time looking down on their phones rather than looking up, and they may will miss potential UFO sightings. If the UFOs have the speculated advanced technology, then these flying objects may will attempt to prevent themselves from being photographed. I do admit that there is a bit of wishful thinking going on.

We simply don't know and that's the point.
 

Myzozoa

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is this a bad time to remind u all that the current best hope of humanity surviving climate change is a technologically advanced alien species needing our dna to safely hybridize

" It is like what I said, that the elite of the world have all seceded into outer space, and they have a country up there, and they look down and say, “What is our water doing in their rivers, and what’s our timber doing in their forests?”"

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5...lZDctmgmVjxIX9PQWW-Qw5m0XrSXTfs9Bgj-kC2oyMC1M
 
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