ViperMan

People are known by their actions, not their thoughts. Your desire to control what is in someone else's head is tyrannical. Yes, it does actually. Being handicapped is an immutable trait - only handicapped people are allowed to park in handicapped spaces. See, there are rules and laws that apply to certain subsets of people based on certain characteristics. Marriage, like it or not, was crafted to support relationships between men and women (i.e. child rearers) for the express purpose of providing economic benefits for those people who had children so their bank accounts wouldn't be broken and their families left destitute if someone happened to die. And to address your statement re the thought police: "some thoughts are actually so fucked that they should not be allowed." Let's just say I rest my case. Your comparison is invalid. To address this, you need to come up with an a priori reason why some people should be enslaved but not others. I don't think you or I or anyone else could ever make that convincing argument. I have provided a reason why marriage was previously defined as such - why society defined it as such - but no such reason has been provided as to why it should be extended to a separate class of relationships for which it was never designed. That's the point. Handicapped laws apply to handicapped people. Marriage laws apply to men and women - or so they did. Having that position isn't necessarily bigoted, though it certainly can be depending, even though you would have us believe it is.

100% this is an oil / natural gas war.

Dude you left off the active clause of @brabus point - which was that people he knows can disagree with something but not be actively working to disabuse anyone of their rights. Lurking behind your post is the thought police. Because you don't believe what I believe, you are an immoral person. I am the only one who gets to determine what is true. Of course we all agree that discriminating against people based on their immutable characteristics is bad. The disagreement in this case is that benefits which society historically conferred (effectively) only on mothers and fathers shouldn't be extended to cover anyone else who decides they want them. It's not even a moral position in my case - it's a legal/financial one.

This conception of other people is not fully "covering." i.e. there are other reasons to oppose gay marriage besides bigotry. But such is nuance, which is not popular these days. The thing about marriage is that it has been around since before time. Marriage between a man and a woman was always a thing, and it was enacted for reasons - to ensure children were cared for by those who made them. This tradition cuts across cultures, societies, epochs, civilizations, etc. It just so happens that in our modern conception of a state, we have elected to legally "codify" marriage, and confer social and economic benefits to those who get married, but that is secondary to the innate fact that it has historically been only understood to be that relationship between a man and a woman. Numerous religious traditions have their reasons for teaching whatever they want to teach about religion. I don't subscribe to any of it. I just think that redefining marriage in order to conform to the "due process" and/or "equal protection" clauses of our constitution was done on dubious grounds and is blinkered to historical tradition. IMO, the correct way to approach it would have been to define something called "civil unionship" and then let that legal umbrella cover everything from "marriage" between straights to "marriage" between gays. Then, let the different churches sort it all out how they best saw fit. All the legal benefits would accrue and people could keep their bigotry where it belonged: within their own backyards. Don't get me wrong: people should generally be allowed to do what they want, but in this case we chose the culture war path and decided to allow everyone to park in the handicapped spot; in effect, nullifying the very reason why it exists in the first place.

Bill Barr has quite a good take on the whole Trump phenomenon and the end of his presidency. I didn't know what a statesmen he was. https://www.hoover.org/research/more-one-damn-thing-bill-barr

That is some level 9 satire, bro. If it's not, well, let's just say everyone is less well off than before all this inflation hit (https://www.axios.com/2022/06/15/what-workers-really-want-raises-that-beat-inflation). People are spending more money because prices are higher and they have to. Wages are not keeping pace with price inflation (https://news.wttw.com/2022/06/08/inflation-overpowers-city-minimum-wage-hike). Also, logic that says "because we're full, it's all good" ignores all the scheduling optimization that goes into creating an airline schedule. Remember, all seven major US airlines have reduced their flying this summer. The reason is immaterial. Delta could fly one line per day, and every single seat would be filled. That has nothing to do with the prevailing economic undercurrent.

Gas has always been more expensive in Europe. European nations are not, and have never been, energy independent - we have been. The US has all the energy we need within our own borders, and we have historically been a net exporter of energy. We purchase from others for good strategic and other economic reasons. ALL of the Trump stimulus was bi-partisan, and ALL of the shut down happened under Trump. COVID was under control when Biden took the reigns. Biden's stimulus was fully partisan and had zero support from the right - it was a democrat giveaway. Here is an economist credibly arguing that inflation is about double what it would be, save for Biden's extra stimulus: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-inflation-economy-what-you-need-to-know/id1570872415?i=1000558019343 Agreed, but our current economic conundrum is not solely due to the COVID crisis. There were other mistakes dating all the way back in 2008 (i.e. not allowing a full crash to happen). Latent effects from that event have still not fully cleared the system, and someday they must, lest we continue hurtling down the economic black hole we're staring into. Banks had (and have) stopped foreclosing on properties that defaulted during the 2008 recession. What is the net effect of this??? Spoiler alert: inflation. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-bubble-era-home-mortgages-are-a-disaster-waiting-to-happen-2019-02-25?mod=article_inline "In 2012, just 2% of all these delinquent borrowers had not paid for more than five years. Two years later that number had skyrocketed to 21%. Why? Mortgage servicers around the country had discontinued foreclosing on millions of delinquent properties. Homeowners got wind of this and realized they could probably stop making payments without any consequences whatsoever. So they did." https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-ghost-of-the-housing-bubble-still-haunts-the-home-mortgage-market-2020-01-15 "By mid-2010, mortgage servicers around the nation had a strategy of supporting housing markets by not placing expensive foreclosed properties on the active market. They had also begun to take the next step of cutting back on foreclosing long-term delinquent properties." "As I have reiterated many times, mortgage servicers have consistently maintained this strategy of not foreclosing on jumbo mortgages. What seems crystal clear is that the vast majority of long-term delinquent jumbo mortgages have not been foreclosed and are still outstanding. Many jumbo borrowers have not paid for years. As a result, the jumbo-mortgage market now is a ticking time bomb."

Could be a good path, depending. No opinion on that. If I wasn't already where I was and I wanted to fly "Air Force", given my personal goals, it may have appealed to me. Yes, the Air Force will shit on you, but, in the end, you'll learn to love it.

Don't take my word for it. It's Harvard macro-economist Greg Mankiw who says that money is a medium of exchange. Also, logic. Logic says it's a medium of exchange. People can become indebted to one another, of course, but the primary function of money is not to become indebted to one another. It's to facilitate transaction. Also, it's cool for the government to run a debt. I didn't say the government needed to run a surplus. I said there are real limits on how much currency can be printed. That's what I said. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salary#First_paid_salary Salaries were first paid as a means of exchange for labor and work - a medium, dating back to perhaps 10,000 BC. "...widely circulating but erroneous belief that banks create money out of nothing..." https://voxeu.org/article/banks-do-not-create-money-out-thin-air Private banks do not get to create money. They can issue loans, but the amount of loans they are able to initiate have real limits. Do you honestly think my local Wells Fargo branch can loan out $50 trillion dollars? Why or why not? How about infinity dollars? Can they loan out infinity dollars? To themselves? It seems like you might be getting wrapped up around technicalities about how money works in our modern day system. It's complicated, sure. M2, etc, are all esoteric concepts to lay people - which is your audience on this message board. Anyway, I have a feeling this thread will be hard to keep on the rails.

Welcome @Random Guy. Might want to collapse some of these posts as it will likely generate a more coherent response. First and foremost, money is a medium. That is, it is anything that will mediate a transaction between parties. Money is what money does. You posted a lot of references. Likely none of which (honestly) will be viewed or fully read by the crowd writ large. What is "the theory" that you purport is false? It would help us all if you would just clearly state it and then people can fire away. I'm certain this is true from a technical vantage, but any nation that issues currency most certainly has real limits on how much currency can be initiated. Just ask Zimbabwe. "89.7 sextillion percent year-on year..." The United States occupies a highly privileged position because we happen to be the world's current reserve currency, emphasis on current. From the book Exorbitant Privilege: Even more critical: We get to click 'print' and get an equivalent amount of goods and services. This is enormously important to our status in the world. No one else gets to do that. Consider the implications of that and you'll begin to see the liability we are building in terms of our real contribution to the world, and support we can provide for ourselves, if that status is lost. If you are interested in the answer, I recommend the book The Coming Generational Storm. It gets to the core of your question, "why does the government need to balance its checkbook like an individual?" In short, the answer is that on the scale of your concern, an individual is like a generation. The concept of inter-generational accounting is introduced to help capture and illuminate those concerns. Along the way, I also learned quite a bit about concepts such as imputed income, along with other interesting facts. Such as how in different circumstances, a lesser-earning spouse is actually paying a 100% marginal tax rate on their earnings due to their rights spouses have to each other's social security benefits. Stuff few people know, but if they did, there would be plenty who would be justified in leaving the workforce altogether. An important topic, to be sure.

Absolute fire 🤣

Fair enough. That seems both extreme and clownish, but fair enough. Either way, I'm not the one who is drawing an arbitrary line, you are. I fully accept "early" "elective" abortion because I realize life is messy and people eff up and want an "undo" button. I think that's pretty fucking ugly, but I accept it. That is a pro-"choice" and pro-"woman" position - whatever the hell that means. Hence, I am not asserting control over women's bodies at the moment of conception, though that also seems to be a favored fallback of the left. Anyway, there are two distinct arguments being made here. The first is when a unique human life exists - that happens at conception, and is scientifically unambiguous. The second, is a value-based argument about when a "human life" exists. You're conflating the scientific argument with the political one. And likening cancer to a human really is a pretty weak tangent. It sounds like something a middling 8th grader would write in a C- position essay, but I digress. Here is your arbitrary line. Upon what basis are you considering these (15w vs 20w / 20w vs 15w) qualitatively different? I would like to hear it articulated. Can you even tell which is which? Personally, I can't draw a scientific distinction, and neither can anyone else, frankly. As one steps backwards through this continuum towards conception, it's not possible to draw a clean line until you get all the way back to the discrete event itself. That is all scientific. It has nothing at all to do with your value-based judgements. On the value side of the argument, personally I would have a hard time hearing an argument as to why these fetuses should be valued differently, but that is at least the proper arena for the argument, and people are free to make value-based judgements and advocate for them within those boundaries. They are not free to make scientific distinctions. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that it seems to me that people who are pro-abortion really NEED there to be some sort of scientific distinction present in order to be able to morally justify their position. That's why I think there is so much focus on the use of the term fetus, zygote, the idea of consciousness, the ridiculous red herring of cancer having it's own DNA, etc. As long as you can name it something different, it is something different, right? That which we call a rose... The impossibility of drawing a clear scientific difference between a 15-week-old fetus, 9-week-old fetus, and a 20-week-old fetus does not give you the argument, and it's really not even a point. You know as well as I do that having eyeballs or not having eyeballs isn't what endows you with your humanity. See the above. I don't believe any of that, so let me state it clearly for you: I think elective abortion on demand up to the moment of birth, which is what constitutes abortion rights activists' and the "Left's" position (along with a large majority of democrats) in this country, is an unacceptable moral problem and it needs to be resisted and ultimately outlawed. Roe v Wade was wrongly decided and needs to be overturned, if for no other reason than to re-establish the supreme court's legal credibility. The event called "birth" holds no special status in determining whether or not a human being is present. A "human" is present at some point between conception and birth. I am fine with medical "abortions" in all circumstances wherein the mother's life is at stake. That said, the term abortion is misused in these cases and using the word only muddles the water. It's the left intentionally overloading a term in order to get the camel's nose into the tent. A fundamental part of the confusion surrounding this issue boils down to word games being played by the pro-abortion side.

Hey Socrates. No one is confused about what life is or if sperm are alive - it's not arbitrary. A sperm is not a human. An egg is not a human. Both are living. Sexually dimorphic species genetic material needs to come together in order to form a unique organism. The line of what constitutes a human is clear and is completely and totally unambiguous. The fact that a zygote doesn't have full human form at all stages of development is not a point in your column of the argument, though it is the fundamental tenet of what all pro-abortion advocates rest their argument upon. The argument is about when elective abortion should be allowed and when it should be disallowed. That's where the disagreement lies. Everything else is an attempt to muddle the other sides' argument.

No. Framing something like this from such a one-sided perspective (i.e. money is debt) doesn't illuminate very much. You may as well re-write your whole post from the perspective that money is credit - it would be as valid and would make about the same amount of sense. Yeah, a post like this in the Russia/Ukraine discussion board is gyro-tumbling, but is seems you knew that??? Make a new thread if you want to discuss monetary theory.

LOL the broads wearing masks on a zoom call.🤣

So, "manchester"? Or not?

Update: No new opinions are circulating within the Supreme Court. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/11/alito-abortion-draft-opinion-roe-00031648?utm_source=pocket-newtab

I've seen so many people here make the claim that the right is attempting to outlaw all abortion - in this thread, I've yet to see anyone make that argument, though there have been plenty of straw men who have had the absolute shit beat out of them. In fact, most folks who come from the right seem to be saying that there are limited circumstances under which they agree abortion should be legal, so I really don't see the hyper focus on this extreme case (i.e. IUDs = abortion = 8-mos-pregnant abortion) as anything but an attempt to muddy the water, create overlap where there is none, and avoid the conversation. Perhaps it would be best (for the country) if the conversation would distinguish between "medical" abortions and "elective" abortions. Most of us here (I think) tend to agree on what would be considered "medical" abortions. Really, circumstances make them both categorically and morally different - in the same way killing someone in combat is morally different from murder - and this is the point that I think gets lost in all the back and forth. On the left, abortion is sometimes a difficult "choice" - which it certainly is in cases of rape, incest, last night's one night stand, etc. On the right, a normal pregnancy at 8 months, which somehow becomes inconvenient, is most certainly not a choice. Is either of those positions a misrepresentation? There is a qualitative difference between a single celled human and one which has taken on a human form, heart beat, nervous system, has begun dreaming, etc. All fair people recognize this, even if they can't provide a mathematical proof. Obviously life is a continuum, and it is difficult (probably impossible) to draw clean lines anywhere. The democrats currently in office support elective abortion, in all cases, up to birth. It is their platform. That's a moral problem in our country, and also happens to be wholly unrelated to the state of "tax payer funded paid maternity leave" for mothers. That's where the thrust of the opposition lies - not on disallowing plan B, but on stopping the governor of VA along with other radical organizations who have co-opted previously laudable movements from enacting radical policy positions in order to assert status or maintain grasp of expired political power.

For those of you who care to hear an analysis of the actual court case that led to our current state, as well as an unpacking of the draft decision, this quick podcast does a good job covering some decent ground quickly and to the point. The two gentlemen are highly regarded law professors. It's focus is on the legal case in and of itself - it generally steers clear of the political issues that surround the case. I even learned some history I didn't know before. It's from a conservative bent, so be forewarned. https://www.hoover.org/research/law-talk-leak-heard-round-world

Yep, I'm tracking the conversation, thanks. The point is that there are other court cases that govern rights regarding birth control et al, so the argument that all these other derivative rights from the 14th amendment (i.e. non-enumerated rights) will instantly disappear because Roe v Wade is overturned is a void argument. It's pearl clutching.

This is simply not factual. Birth control has a long history of legality in the country prior to 1973 - it has nothing at all to do with Roe v. Wade. There is long-standing supreme court precedent ruling that birth control can't be restricted. The FDA has had approved birth control pills since 1960.

Abortion is currently the law of the land, and you're confused as to why laws protecting human beings don't apply to the unborn...who are currently allowed to be aborted??? You see the problem with that argument, right? 🤔 The example makes no sense. Pooter is equating a natural death with an intentional one. They are categorically different. If your argument is that *if* Roe is overturned, *then* those things will need to happen for consistencies sake, then that is a different argument, but I've yet to hear that articulated. Ok, you're arguing in good faith, but you felt the need to draft a false equivalency between abortion and miscarriage??? Yeah, I'm confused. If that's your point, I just don't understand the need to do that. But whatever. Either way, it's a weak argument. Not all deaths are investigated as homicide. Even the majority of deaths are not investigated as homicide. And don't you think that if your concern became a real problem, our legislators could simply enact a law that says the presumption is that miscarriages are resultant from natural causes? It's just not the big issue you're making it out to be. Finally, yes, you're right about the state-by-state murder issue. The "state's issue" trope is inconsistent. Abortion will need to be regulated at the federal level.

I'm having a hard time determining if you're arguing in good faith. Are you serious? Are you honestly confused about the qualitative differences between an abortion and a miscarriage? One is a natural event that will occur from time to time no matter what humanity does. The other requires an intentional intervention by an individual. How are you confused about this or how/why are you equating these two categorically different things? Why they're not focused on it is the same reason anti-death penalty folks are not trying to stop all death. "Oh, you're anti-death penalty? Then why aren't you out there trying to develop technology that will extend life indefinitely. How 'bout some consistency bruh."

Well excuse me! Your argument would be easier to parse if you hadn't attempted to smuggle your point through via a screen play. It was hard to pick through all the actual, literal irrelevant detail in order to figure out what you were communicating. I think your second post boils down to "a zygote needs to be either a full human being or nothing, in the eyes of the law., lest we be inconsistent." Is that basically right? If so, I think you're hitting on the crux of the issue for most people. I get the "absurdity" of calling a zygote a "human being," I really do. That said, if the political parties in this country make me pick between two extremes and either call a zygote a human being or a 9-mo old baby still in the womb a "clump of cells" or a a "parasite" or a "choice," I'm going with option A, because even though it's "absurd," it's less absurd than all the rest.

Dude, you just shat out a wall of irrelevant text. Your argument boils down to this: because some bad things might happen in the future to a child, that is my post hoc justification for allowing abortion in order to prevent a bunch of bad things from taking place. In short, your argument is specious, hypothetical, post hoc bull shit.