The Nehor Posted August 13, 2021 Posted August 13, 2021 48 minutes ago, OGHoosier said: The answer to dystopia is counter-dystopia. I will take what I can get at this point.
bluebell Posted August 13, 2021 Posted August 13, 2021 11 hours ago, The Nehor said: I will take what I can get at this point. A pandemic that kills off the elderly and unfit could just be the counter-dystopian you're looking for then.
The Nehor Posted August 13, 2021 Posted August 13, 2021 3 hours ago, bluebell said: A pandemic that kills off the elderly and unfit could just be the counter-dystopian you're looking for then. So far I haven’t enjoyed it. I have enjoyed it even less as it seems to be ignoring those restrictions and going after younger people. I like it even less as some people seem to have pledged allegiance to the virus and are doing everything to ensure is spreads as far and fast as possible. 1
mgy401 Posted August 15, 2021 Posted August 15, 2021 (edited) On 8/12/2021 at 7:09 PM, The Nehor said: [1]Your statistics are true as long as you factor in only legal abortions. Of course it went up but it replaced a LOT of illegal ones that were getting people serious injuries or dead. [2]I don’t see abortion as comparable to lynching. Neither does the church. [3]I can’t draw a line between a 16 year old girl seeking out an abortion because she is afraid her parents may hurt or kill her and compare that to a 40 year old who doesn’t want a vaccine because people on the internet says it has tracking chips in it and makes you sterile and might be the Mark of the Beast. I have compassion for the former and disgust for the latter. [4]There also aren’t any general vaccination mandates on the state or federal level. Employers are requiring them which is their right and federal and state agencies and those who work for them are requiring them and that is their right. Anyone who is afraid of the short-term impact of getting vaccinated is just a wimp (absent something that would make it legitimately dangerous to get vaccinated). Yeah, it sucks. I got some of that. It wasn’t fun. I just curled up and endured. Get over it. I also don’t like needles. All it will cost you to refuse is possibly your job and maybe access to some of society. It is a tradeoff. [5]It is also an apples to oranges comparison. Virtually no one plans to get an abortion. I doubt there are many people who decide to have sex based on abortion availability. People do decide to get vaccines based on what it will give them access to (jobs, restaurants, whatever). The desire to escape pregnancy in some circumstances is almost primal. Not getting a vaccine is nothing like that. Threaten a job and most will capitulate. The pressure can work. I don’t think it works with abortion. 1. So far as I know, the statistics don’t differentiate between legal and illegal abortions. I’m not aware that any such statistics on the prevalence of illegal abortions on the 20th century even exist—I’d be grateful if you are aware of any you could point me to (in most discussions of this nature, the folks alluding to “statistical evidence” of botched abortions ultimately can only point to their having seen Dirty Dancing as teenagers). 2. The Church compares abortion to killing. Some killing, like some abortion, is justifiable. Lynching does not fall under that rubric. Nor does elective abortion. 3. These are statistically outlier cases, as I suspect you know. IIRC well over 90% of abortions have nothing to do with rape, incest, or threats to the life/health of mother (whether medical or domestic violence-related). The vast majority of the abortions in this country are nothing more or less than post hoc birth control. Abortion kills 100% of the children exposed to it. COVID kills 2% of the people who get it, if they get it at all. People who insist on government action against antivaxxers/anti-maskers but demand that abortion be substantially unlimited, aren’t really acting out of a consistent concern about saving lives. They’re just indicating that they themselves have made an individual value judgment: that a person’s right to consequence-free sex is more important than a person’s right to leave their home, or to wear what they want when they want, or to to be free of the unpleasant side effects of an enforced medical procedure they themselves deem unnecessary. If you doubt that, then I’d invite you to ask yourself two questions: a) how would the vaccine-enforcers of today have reacted, during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, to a Reagan administration admonition to “Everyone just keep your dadgummed pants on, and this virus will go away!”? b) Would the COVID vaccine ever have been approved if the only known side effect was that a certain percentage of recipients thereafter suffered an inability to reach sexual climax? 4. Agreed. But I read the thrust of this thread is less about the moral character of those who oppose vaccination, and more about the ramifications of policy that requires vaccination (or masking, or other measures). 5. Again, where is your statistical evidence saying that elective abortion rates remain the same regardless of elective abortion legality? Particularly when I’ve shown evidence that abortion rates exploded after 1970 when the first state began legalizing it? The statistics I’ve cited from the 1970s seem to indicate pretty strongly that the lifting of abortion restrictions directly correlated with an explosion in both the rate and the absolute number of abortions actually performed. Naturally they didn’t prevent *all* abortions, just as criminalizing any other behavior (murder, rape, double-parking) doesn’t eliminate *all* instances of that behavior. But legal restrictions do lead substantial numbers of people who would otherwise do a thing, to choose not to do it. And as for the antivaxxers: Yes, I’d agree that bringing pressure to bear against them would yield a number of them to change their behaviors. But as with abortion (or any other activity that is or has at some point been criminalized), there will be holdouts. The desire not to be pregnant may be primal, but the desire not to die is also primal; and a lot of these antivaxxers have a (misdirected, I think) absolutely sincere terror that the vaccine is capable of killing them. And forging the kinds of vaccine cards they’ve been issuing is ridiculously easy. Edited August 15, 2021 by mgy401
The Nehor Posted August 15, 2021 Posted August 15, 2021 43 minutes ago, mgy401 said: 1. So far as I know, the statistics don’t differentiate between legal and illegal abortions. I’m not aware that any such statistics on the prevalence of illegal abortions on the 20th century even exist—I’d be grateful if you are aware of any you could point me to (in most discussions of this nature, the folks alluding to “statistical evidence” of botched abortions ultimately can only point to their having seen Dirty Dancing as teenagers). 2. The Church compares abortion to killing. Some killing, like some abortion, is justifiable. Lynching does not fall under that rubric. Nor does elective abortion. 3. These are statistically outlier cases, as I suspect you know. IIRC well over 90% of abortions have nothing to do with rape, incest, or threats to the life/health of mother (whether medical or domestic violence-related). The vast majority of the abortions in this country are nothing more or less than post hoc birth control. 1. The number of illegal abortions is an estimate. Most estimates only include those that were done surgically. The use of other techniques by consuming things or doing things were prevalent and many of them were designed to induce a miscarriage which can be seen as abortion. 2. Sort of, the quote used is that the D&C forbids killing or things like killing with abortion falling under this not quite killing but kind of like killing area. 3. The exceptions are pretty rare. Rape is the most common of the three and it is a small percentage. 43 minutes ago, mgy401 said: Abortion kills 100% of the children exposed to it. COVID kills 2% of the people who get it, if they get it at all. People who insist on government action against antivaxxers/anti-maskers but demand that abortion be substantially unlimited, aren’t really acting out of a consistent concern about saving lives. They’re just indicating that they themselves have made an individual value judgment: that a person’s right to consequence-free sex is more important than a person’s right to leave their home, or to wear what they want when they want, or to to be free of the unpleasant side effects of an enforced medical procedure they themselves deem unnecessary. If you doubt that, then I’d invite you to ask yourself two questions: The difference of course is that abortion is voluntarily inflicted. Covid is not. Abortion is not contagious. Flouting pandemic restrictions risks giving other people the disease. Having sex does not make other people have abortions. The two are not comparable. 43 minutes ago, mgy401 said: a) how would the vaccine-enforcers of today have reacted, during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, to a Reagan administration admonition to “Everyone just keep your dadgummed pants on, and this virus will go away!”? Again though, outside of rape you can’t accidentally catch HIV because someone is not wearing a condom while they walk past you in the street. The Reagan administration treated HIV as a joke. Look at the quotes. They didn’t care. After all, it was only killing homosexuals. 43 minutes ago, mgy401 said: b) Would the COVID vaccine ever have been approved if the only known side effect was that a certain percentage of recipients thereafter suffered an inability to reach sexual climax? No idea, but I doubt it. It didn’t work the other way. Some men who survive Covid have long lasting ED. I thought that would rush people to get the vaccine. I was wrong. 4. Not worried. 5. I said that legalized abortion and easy access to birth control consistently seems to lower elective abortions. When it was first legalized there was an explosion as illegal approaches were discarded but as birth control because more widely acceptable the rate fell and kept falling and there is no indication that is going to stop. If Roe v. Wade is overturned next year (case is heading that way now) we may get some interesting new comparative data.
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