261

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Bye Bye Abortion

« on: May 10, 2022, 01:58:55 AM »

I don't know why you're even bothering to ask. Of course his answers are no to the first category and yes to the second. Rushy is deliberately arguing from the most extreme position he can. You're not actually having a heart-to-heart discussion with him.

262

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Bye Bye Abortion

« on: May 09, 2022, 02:17:20 PM »

https://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-are-wasting-no-time-pushing-dystopian-post-roe-v-wade-laws

This is the future Republicans are envisioning for us. Ordinarily, it would be political suicide to push an incredibly unpopular agenda like this so aggressively, but Republicans will find a way to cling to power, and probably even expand it.

Also, whenever anyone pro-choice "just admits" or "just owns" that, yes, they totally support killing babies, the discussion immediately turns into "Aha! They admit it! How old does a child have to be before their parents lose the right to murder them at will, you sicko? Three? Four?" It's not a good-faith debate tactic. The distinction between terminating a pregnancy and killing a baby is there to establish scope. It's not simply something that pro-choice people frantically tell themselves to soothe their consciences.

263

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Bye Bye Abortion

« on: May 07, 2022, 01:34:22 AM »

Yes, I'm sure that'll stop the GOP from passing the federal abortion ban they're already working on:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/02/abortion-ban-roe-supreme-court-mississippi/

264

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Bye Bye Abortion

« on: May 07, 2022, 12:33:53 AM »

This has nothing to do with stimulating birth rates. Republicans want to turn back the clock and remove all of the important rights relating to privacy and sexual freedom that courts have recognized over the past several decades. Removing the right to an abortion isn't a means to an end of having more babies, it is the end of simply removing the right to have an abortion. The same goes for their upcoming plans to remove protections for LGBT rights and contraceptive use. Their ideal society is one where LGBT people hide in the closet and sex is only something that happens between married people when they want to have a baby. It's hard to imagine many people being onboard for such a future, but that doesn't matter, because, you know, minority rule.

265

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Just Watched

« on: May 06, 2022, 04:28:21 AM »

Tell me more.

266

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Bye Bye Abortion

« on: May 03, 2022, 03:16:22 PM »

Obergefell will be next to be overturned, then Lawrence, then Griswold. We're racing back to the past. The majority of Americans support these rights and don't want to see them rolled back, but I don't expect it'll make a difference in any upcoming elections. Republicans have perfected the art of minority rule, and they're simply better at politics than Democrats.

267

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Superhero Movies & Comics General

« on: April 22, 2022, 03:15:44 AM »

04/11: Tangentially related to capeshit:

https://gizmodo.com/jurassic-world-dominion-colin-trevorrow-giga-dinosaur-1848773708

I'm not sure if I can ever forgive Spielberg and Brad Bird for unleashing Colin Trevorrow on the world. Of all the bad directors out there who owe their careers almost entirely to their privilege and connections rather than to any real merit of their own, Trevorrow is probably the worst.

...

In other news, Ezra Miller has apparently lost their mind:

https://www.avclub.com/the-flash-ezra-miller-arrested-second-degree-assault-1848818555

Who knows what this will mean for the upcoming Flash movie?

268

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: April 21, 2022, 03:14:06 PM »

Piers Morgan is a piece of shit. I'm not surprised that his show would deceptively edit an interview with anyone, and I feel no compunction to defend him or take responsibility for him just because the interview was with Trump.

269

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: President Joe Biden

« on: April 17, 2022, 04:06:17 AM »

I still can't get over the "Tyler Durden" byline. It really tells us everything we need to know about the maturity and outlook of the author. Why would you ever trust news and analysis coming from someone who's publicly advertising that he's still in the teenage edgelord phase of his life?

270

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: GOP are petulant crybabies

« on: April 09, 2022, 12:25:43 AM »

Right. Anyway, white men should be barred from the SC forever, discuss.

271

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: GOP are petulant crybabies

« on: April 08, 2022, 10:40:01 PM »

You flatter me, but my views unfortunately seem to have no bearing on how the Democrats run themselves or their approach to future elections. I question how much they could even be considered "my side" at this point. They're preferable to Republicans, but at a certain point their favored brand of quiet don't-rock-the-boat centrism becomes indistinguishable from conservatism. junker tried to warn me.

272

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: GOP are petulant crybabies

« on: April 08, 2022, 09:07:57 PM »

The outcome does remain the same, yes. Republicans will fight dirty and act in bad faith regardless of what Democrats do or don't do, and the sooner Democrats realize that, the better off they'll be. The same thing applies to the media and their desperate efforts to both-sides what's going on. I'm not happy about the state of politics in this country, but it's the reality.

273

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: GOP are petulant crybabies

« on: April 08, 2022, 08:07:59 PM »

Democrats should expand the court to punish Republicans for their sleazy partisanship over Barrett, just saying.

Yes, that would go about as well as the last time they successfully compromised SCOTUS. It would be fun to watch, if nothing else!

Okay, so presumably you're referring to the thing about the nuclear option that was discussed in the Trump thread after Ginsburg died. First, Democrats did not use the nuclear option to remove the 60-vote requirement for Supreme Court nominees, Republicans did. Democrats had previously used the nuclear option to remove the 60-vote requirement for confirming Cabinet posts and federal judges. But to put it as simply as possible, that doesn't matter. Democrats removing the 60-vote requirement for confirming Cabinet posts was in no way a requirement or a necessary first step for removing the 60-vote requirement for SC justices. As the article I linked discusses, Republicans were ready to use the nuclear option over the SC back in the Bush years, long before the Democrats ever did anything comparable, and it's ludicrous to think that they, having grown far more determined and unscrupulous in recent years, would have hesitated to be the first to use the nuclear option nowadays. And more importantly, nobody was criticizing Barrett's nomination for not requiring 60 votes to be confirmed. They were criticizing it for being shoved through in the last few weeks of a Republican presidency when Republicans had just a few years previously refused to allow a Democratic president to nominate someone in the last several months of their presidency. This only happened a couple of years ago, and it's easy to check what people were actually saying. This tit-for-tat, Democrats-should-blame-themselves narrative simply is not an accurate reflection of what really happened.

Biden specifying it must be a black woman means her other qualities are merely coincidence.

What a strange thing to say. That doesn't logically follow at all.

As Saddam explained earlier, the court isn't one of merit, so I suppose her qualifications shouldn't matter to anyone anyway.

I said it's not purely based on merit, which is absolutely true. If ideology and youth can and should be taken into account, then why not race and gender?

274

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: GOP are petulant crybabies

« on: April 08, 2022, 05:30:08 PM »

If a person campaigns on nominating only a white man to the Supreme Court, would you have a problem with that?

Yes, because promising to exclude minority groups is very different to promising to include minority groups. Majority groups and minority groups are not equivalent, and substituting one in place of the other just isn't an effective comparison.

Well, there isn't a limit to how many justices SCOTUS has...

Democrats should expand the court to punish Republicans for their sleazy partisanship over Barrett, just saying.

275

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: GOP are petulant crybabies

« on: April 08, 2022, 03:47:27 AM »

The Supreme Court is not and has never been a purely merit-based court comprised of the nine best-qualified jurists in the country. Choosing its members has always been a political process that by design has to meet with the approval of the Senate, and there are a number of factors beyond their experience and skill as a judge that are always taken into consideration. For example, there's ideology. Are conservatives wrong to always appoint conservative justices, or liberals wrong to always appoint liberal justices? There's also age, which is a particularly interesting one, because while there's no inherent conflict between searching for a qualified candidate and searching for one who happens to be of a certain race or gender, searching for an especially young candidate does have a tendency to rule out well-qualified ones. That's arguably what happened with Amy Coney Barrett; the Federalist Society (I won't bother pretending Trump had any input on the selection process outside of his final approval) almost certainly chose her mainly because they wanted someone young who could stay on the court for decades, which naturally led to the criticism that she wasn't qualified or experienced enough. Is deliberately choosing a black, female, and well-qualified candidate really so much worse than deliberately choosing a young, not-so-well-qualified candidate?

Something similar applies with the VP, which is nowadays more of a symbolic position than anything else (nobody thinks it's very likely that the president will die or resign, after all), and is typically chosen to appeal to voters as providing something that the presidential candidate lacks. Of course Harris being a woman and a person of color was key to her being picked as Biden's VP. I don't think that's inherently worse than, say, Mike Pence being picked as Trump's VP to cater to the religious right, who might otherwise have been scared off by Trump's sleaziness and long history of womanizing. Republicans and their identity politics, am I right?

276

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: President Joe Biden

« on: April 06, 2022, 04:16:47 AM »

snip

Showing me even more evidence of the media weakly capitulating to bad-faith right-wing complaints about their supposed liberal bias in a futile attempt to stop the criticism is hardly going to change my position. If you want me to go into specifics, though, then I'll be clear - none of this supposed vindication means that the media were wrong to treat this story as cautiously as they did. Known liars presented very sketchy sources who told an implausible story to a newspaper of dubious reliability - and all these people refused to share any of the evidence with any media outlets that they didn't feel were conservative enough. The media were not wrong to not blindly parrot the NYP's story; yes, even if it turns out that the story was largely true. You can't just boil it down to "The story was true; therefore repeating it was good and not repeating it was bad." That's simply not how it works, and Trump's team and the NYP have nobody to blame but themselves for their suspicious story being received with suspicion.

Also, the NYP's attempt to conflate this specific story with general news of Hunter being a failson who trades on his father's name, as indicated by "Where once The New York Post stood alone in reporting the skeezy details of the many millions the first son gained by selling his family name overseas," is absurd. Most people could intuit that Hunter was a loser who used his last name to get high-paying jobs back when Trump first tried to smear Biden as corrupt over the whole Burisma thing, long before the laptop or the investigation into his taxes became a story. There's a world of difference between Hunter being a self-serving failson and Hunter and his father being partners in an international corruption scheme, and it's perfectly reasonable to accept the former while questioning the latter.

277

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: LGBT School Teachers

« on: April 05, 2022, 03:04:25 PM »

Being gay is sexual. Being straight is...not sexual.

278

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: President Joe Biden

« on: April 05, 2022, 02:35:42 AM »

The article Tom linked is an excellent example of the mainstream media weakly capitulating to unreasonable demands and claims from conservatives in a desperate attempt to convince them that they're not unfairly biased in favor of liberals. It'll never work. No matter how far to the right the media lurches, conservatives will never stop insisting that the media is unfairly biased in favor of liberals, because they're not saying that because it's what they actually believe - they're saying it because it's an excellent tactic to continually push the media further and further to the right, as well as a way to spread doubt in their followers' minds whenever the media report on news they don't like. Why would they ever abandon a winning strategy like that? The media are basically trying to referee a soccer game in which one side has given up trying to kick the ball and instead just picked it up and started running away with it. They simply can't accept that one side is now operating entirely in bad faith and should therefore be treated as such.

279

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: LGBT School Teachers

« on: April 04, 2022, 03:14:42 AM »

It's interesting how that second article mentions a hard divorce as an example of something that's too personal to share - not just a divorce, but a hard divorce. Does that mean that teachers can mention that they're divorced? It must, right? Otherwise, the article would have just used divorce as an example, not specifically a hard divorce. So if divorce can be shared, then logically marital status in general can be shared, as it would be pretty silly for one type of marital status to be appropriate but not others. And if marital status can be shared, doesn't that mean that the gender of the spouse will logically be shared? Technically, I guess the article could be recommending that teachers refer to their spouses in entirely gender-neutral terms. But I really, really doubt it. It seems far more likely to me that the article is really just talking about LGBT people when it recommends not sharing their sexual orientation, which plays into the double standard that's at the heart of this subject: the idea that being straight is nice, normal, and uncontroversial, while being gay or trans is inherently sexual, inherently outré, and inherently inappropriate for children.

280

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: President Joe Biden

« on: April 03, 2022, 10:02:34 PM »

The WSJ's opinion piece (link is to another website to avoid their paywall) is not a sincere plea made in good faith by an objective observer; it's a sarcastic piece of vitriol from a notoriously right-wing editorial board. The author is dramatically exaggerating the incoherence of the cited snippets from Biden's statements. It's clear what he's saying in both instances, and to interpret them as Biden possibly threatening to use chemical weapons is just willful stupidity.

The same thing applies to the Jill Biden comment that started this whole dumb discussion. Obviously Biden was referring to himself being the VP, not his wife. It was a minor, easy mistake to make that in no way obscured the meaning of what he was saying. All conservatives are doing by playing dumb in response to every verbal stumble from Biden is making themselves look dumb.