Boydstun
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Posts posted by Boydstun
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Here is my original article on the topic (which was in 1983, not 1984).
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20 hours ago, Easy Truth said:
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But the argument I have wondered about is still the issue of viability related to the rights of the adults involved. The moment one person shows up to say I will take care of the potential child, it is viable (philosophically speaking, not legally). And if a potential child is viable, does the volunteered custodian have any rights in the matter before birth?
That would be "physically speaking", rather than "philosophically speaking". Viability is purely a physical condition. That there are parties willing to support the viable fetus does not confer the status "viable". It is rather: passing the point of viability, others can take on the project of support without requiring continued pregnancy of the mother.
To your question, ET: Yes, just as the volunteered custodian (or the agencies for such possible custodians) has rights in the matter of other people's children in the community. Their right is not over the body of the pregnant woman, but over a part of her body coincident with the whole. Specifically, it is a right over what anyone, including the mother, can do with that entity once it is assessed as viable. A right against the killing of the viable fetus, delivered infant, or young child is not a right those developing little characters hold against all the adults in the community, rather, it is the right of adults in the community against anyone killing those living entities. Admittedly, the right stems from the specialness of the project of making progeny of the human species. (The community would not have a right against our family killing at birth an undesired litter of pups from our dog.)
(This way of looking at the abortion issue I have advocated [since first formulating it in 1984] was built around Rand's idea of what a right is, which partly but importantly included the point that rights are coordinating principles under which each person is left, vis-a-vis others, to their autonomous self-activity. Keeping moral obligations to others tied to potentials or actualities of the others making their own life, composed of certain sorts of projects, is also consonant with Rand's ethics. However, if one lets that idea of Rand's I mentioned above, near the end of her essay "Causality versus Duty" that the only rational obligations between people are those by promise, agreement, and contract, run everywhere; then one cannot go the way I have gone on this. With my outlook, of course, contract cannot be the only way under which governments can be legitimate. I'd like to mention, however, that while I have described all this as "my outlook", that cannot be a fully correct ascription. I have my own metaphysics now, and because of a couple of differences in its most basic part with Rand's in its most basic part, it seems likely that if I were to develop a value theory and ethical theory [partly] upon that new base it would differ from what can be drafted from Rand's.)
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Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies
From the publisher:
QuoteIn this wide-ranging collection of articles, essays, and speeches, George H. Smith analyzes atheism and its relevance to society today.The featured essay in this volume provides a full analysis of Ayn Rand's unique contribution to atheism, explaining how her objectivist metaphysics and laissez-faire economic principles rested on a purely godless worldview. Several chapters address the evolution of atheism; arguments in favor of religious toleration; the efforts of early Church fathers to discredit Roman polytheism and how these arguments can be used with equal force against later Christian descriptions of God; and a survey of the contributions to freethought made by the deists of the 18th and 19th centuries.With incisive logic and considerable wit, Smith ties atheism to reason and argues that reason itself can be a moral virtue. In one penetrating chapter, Smith salutes three Christian theorists who he believes embody the spirit of reason: Thomas Aquinas, Desiderius Erasmus, and John Locke. This is followed by a philosophical drubbing of his "least favorite Christians" - St. Paul, St. Augustine, and John Calvin. In subsequent chapters, Smith examines religion and education; addresses the 20th century fundamentalist revival; offers suggestions on how to debate atheism with religious believers; critiques "new religions," including pop therapy, est, and transactional analysis; and provides a comprehensive bibliographic essay on the literature of freethought.
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From the essay “Religious Doctrine, Not the Constitution, Drove the Dobbs Decision” by Linda Greenhouse:
QuoteAlong with the decision about the praying football coach and the one requiring Maine to subsidize parochial school tuition, Dobbs belongs under “religion.”
That assertion invites pushback, I’m well aware. But step back from today’s artificial arguments about originalism and history, and consider the powerful social movement that led consecutive Republican presidents to appoint anti-abortion justices and that then drove the abortion issue through the Supreme Court’s open door.
Is there anyone who believes that if only the Constitution had included the word “abortion,” the anti-abortion movement would have failed to gain political traction? (Although the Dobbs majority treated the absence of the A-word in the Constitution as nearly fatal to Roe all by itself, it is worth observing that the Constitution’s 7,600 words, including its 27 amendments, contain neither the word “fetus” nor “unborn.”)
No one really buys the argument that what was “egregiously wrong” with Roe v. Wade, to quote the Dobbs majority, was the court’s failure to check the right analytic boxes. It was not constitutional analysis but religious doctrine that drove the opposition to Roe. And it was the court’s unacknowledged embrace of religious doctrine that has turned American women into desperate refugees fleeing their home states in pursuit of reproductive health care that less than a month ago was theirs by right.
To be sure, the Supreme Court has not outlawed abortion. Justice Samuel Alito left that dirty work to the states: Who will rid me of this bothersome right to abortion? But during the nearly two months between the leak of his Dobbs draft on May 2 and the release of the official opinion on June 24, it became painfully obvious to all that if Roe fell, abortion would soon be illegal or all but inaccessible in about half the states. That was the point, after all.
Not only did that prospect make no difference to the Dobbs majority — the official opinion was essentially unchanged from the leaked draft except for added sections that responded to, and distorted, the dissenting opinion — but Justice Alito actually had the gall to write that “we do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision.” Polls conducted before the opinion’s release showing that upward of two-thirds of Americans wanted to retain a right to abortion offered a hint and were perhaps what led to Justice Alito’s self-righteous declaration: “We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work.”
Justice Alito took pains to present the majority’s conclusion as the product of pure legal reasoning engaged in by judges standing majestically above the fray of Americans’ “sharply conflicting views” on the “profound moral issue” of abortion, as he put it in the opinion’s first paragraph. And yet that very framing, the assumption that the moral gravity of abortion is singular and self-evident, gives away more than members of the majority, all five of whom were raised in the Catholic Church, may have intended.
The fetus is the indisputable star of the Dobbs opinion. That is not necessarily obvious at first reading: The opinion’s 79 pages are larded with lengthy and, according to knowledgeable historians, highly partial and substantially irrelevant accounts of the history of abortion’s criminalization. In all those pages, there is surprisingly little actual law. And women . . . are all but missing. It is in paragraphs scattered throughout the opinion that the fetus shines.
“None of the other decisions cited by Roe” and Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania v. Casey, the 1992 ruling that reaffirmed the right to abortion, “involved the critical moral question posed by abortion,” Justice Alito wrote. “They are therefore inapposite.” Further on, he wrote: “The dissent has much to say about the effects of pregnancy on women, the burdens of motherhood, and the difficulties faced by poor women. These are important concerns. However, the dissent evinces no similar regard for a state’s interest in protecting prenatal life.”
This was a strange criticism of the dissenting opinion, signed jointly by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. They argued vigorously for retaining the 1992 Casey decision, which in fact, in a departure from Roe, declared that the state’s interest in fetal life was present from the moment of conception. Casey authorized the states to impose waiting periods and “informed consent” requirements that the court in the years following Roe v. Wade had deemed unconstitutional.
Justice Alito knows the Casey decision very well. As a federal appeals court judge, he had been a member of the panel that upheld most of Pennsylvania’s Abortion Control Act in the case that became Casey. Then-Judge Alito, alone on the panel, wanted to uphold a provision of the state law that required a married woman to inform her husband of her plan to get an abortion. In affirming the appeals court’s decision, the Supreme Court in Casey emphasized in one of the opinion’s most vivid passages the unconstitutional burden that the spousal notice requirement placed on women: “We must not blind ourselves to the fact that the significant number of women who fear for their safety and the safety of their children are likely to be deterred from procuring an abortion as surely as if the Commonwealth had outlawed abortion in all cases.” Perhaps that aspect of the Casey decision still rankled. In any event, Justice Alito’s attack on his dissenting colleagues for ignoring the state’s interest in fetal life was seriously misguided.
Of course, from his point of view, Casey didn’t go far enough because the weight the court gave to fetal life was well below 100 percent. The Casey decision was five days shy of 30 years old when the court overturned it, along with Roe v. Wade, on June 24. Given that this was their goal from the start, the justices in the Dobbs majority really had only one job: to explain why. They didn’t, and given the remaining norms of a secular society, they couldn’t.
There is another norm, too, one that has for too long restrained the rest of us from calling out the pervasive role that religion is playing on today’s Supreme Court. In recognition that it is now well past time to challenge that norm, I’ll take my own modest step and relabel Dobbs for the religion case that it is, since nothing else explains it.
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1 hour ago, Boydstun said:
Doug, the idea that people who bring a child into the world thereby assume an obligation to provide what it needs to develop into an independent adult was invoked by Nathaniel Branden in 1962 in his answer, in The Objectivist Newsletter, to the question, What are the respective obligations of parents to children and children to parents?
Concerning the obligations of the parents, Branden took it that it is a moral responsibility to assume responsibility for one’s actions. And he took that responsibility to include bringing the child to independent adulthood. The parents brought the child into existence, like it or not, and therefore they have this responsibility. Easy Truth’s questions are very good.
Ayn Rand later (1974) drew a distinction between what she called “duty” (which is irrational and a concept to be spurned) and “obligation” (which is sane). Her distinction arises in the course of discussing Kant’s ethics as in Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Once Kant had purged motivation for acts of all factors such as context, consequences, interests, or inclinations, one can get to the purely moral element in a choice, which is from a sort of duty. Rand counters: “Who would want to be loved not from inclination, but from duty?”
In place of the concept of duty in moral reasoning, Rand would put the concept of causality, specifically human final causality. Do not act without knowing the purposes of your actions and the means needed for that end. The goal and its required means are weighed in the context of one’s other goals and values.
Rand does speak to one’s moral responsibility for causal consequences of one’s actions, more generally than N. Branden’s Q&A in the specific case of human offspring years earlier. Rand cast the rational concept of “obligation” as based on contracts, on hypothetical causal imperatives such as “If you want to live, you must eat,” and on "What do I owe my fellow man? Rationality." But near the end of her essay, she based obligation, as distinct from Kantian duty, on rational promises and agreements. Exclusively! And that would make Easy Truth’s questions exactly the right ones, thinking within that constriction of the idea of moral obligation.
I propose, however, that Rand was selling rational obligation short near the end of her essay. Following Richard Epstein’s theory of strict liability in tort law, as I do, one is legally responsible for harms one causes to another even though it was entirely accidental. Conceiving and bearing a child is not entirely accidental, of course. But I want to expose an element of Rand’s value theory that comfortably underlies the Epstein approach to liability in tort, even though his focus was on how much more sensible is his theory for that area of law than the dominant alternative theory. His idea is that if A caused harm to B, then A is required, by force of law, to do what is possible to make B whole again. Epstein never remarked, but I noticed many years ago, that this makes some sense from a moral idea. That idea is that every person is an end in themselves, and they should be left to harm only themselves, not anyone else. That is a moral principle to which Epstein’s legal principle seems to accord.
Having children, of course, is not itself bringing a harm to them. Life is good, notwithstanding life is struggle. In the case of modern humans, they not only have a life, but make a life for themselves. One of the possible important, meaningful, and joyful projects constituting their life they make for themselves is having children. Some of us choose not to undertake the project of making new human life, and we rather take on projects of making brain children. If one takes on the project of bringing about new human lives, even if it was partly accidental; by one’s own taking-on, one is under moral obligation (to one's own rationally valuing self) to muster the means the end requires or beg assistance in doing so. The end has allure for its project-taker, and it is a special allure which is the new adult life, again starting the cycle of human life* at the end of the parents’ project. This allure, of course, does not deprive the project or the decision to undertake it of moral worth. Rather, it is part of the best within us.
That last paragraph is about moral obligations to oneself in this sort of project. I should add the question of rights. For a parent or guardian to breach the moral obligation to themselves in the project by bringing harm to or neglecting the young child (such as not feeding them) is not only a failure of obligation, but an interference with the right of other adults to undertake the project with respect to this child. In cases of older children, injury of the child would be regular violation of the rights of that human person who is that child.
There seems to be some disagreement over how long in life of the offspring support is owed it by the parent. During the last couple of generations, more and more years of formal education have been aimed for before entering the workforce, and I do not know how long parents should be obligated to support that education. When I went to college, my father did not see any responsibility he had to pay for it. I could not get a student loan because my father made too much money. It would seem that lawmakers by that time thought parents were rightly obligated to pay for college education of children if they had the means. (As it worked out in my case, all of my savings from work during my lifetime to college time was spent in the first year. My mother shown in the photo had not raised me and had not been around me since I was in grade school (summer visits to her place in the country). She offered to help pay for my college education, which is how it came about that I got a start on advanced learning.) Once I did earn a college degree, I could find work only at the bottom, working behind the counter of a fast-food place and then at unskilled labor of various sorts for a number of years. In the society-thinking about going to college as part of the process of becoming employable and self-sufficient, there was a mismatch for people like me off studying Physics and Philosophy for the love of it. Economically, for a long time in my life, nothing more than high school, and not even that, was enough for making a living for myself (though not for a family).
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Grames (re your post before last): It has always been part of my position. Viability is variable in case-by-case, and the case law from the Supreme Court in the 70's rightly left the assessment of viability in the individual case to the judgment of the attending physician and excluded the law getting into the room with the doctor(s) to throw in its (its advocates') opinion on the question. There has never been a problem over the possibility of drastic movement of times at which a fetus (or sooner) is viable due to advances in medical technology. (I formulated my position in 1984, and I'm a bit surprised now that the typical times have not shifted so very much in all this time.) The assessment of viability still should remain in the judgment of the attending physician(s). I think you just did not get all the nuances of my position.
On the financial side, as you would expect, I do not approve of funding medical procedures by taxation, but by private, voluntary means.
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Doug, the idea that people who bring a child into the world thereby assume an obligation to provide what it needs to develop into an independent adult was invoked by Nathaniel Branden in 1962 in his answer, in The Objectivist Newsletter, to the question, What are the respective obligations of parents to children and children to parents?
Concerning the obligations of the parents, Branden took it that it is a moral responsibility to assume responsibility for one’s actions. And he took that responsibility to include bringing the child to independent adulthood. The parents brought the child into existence, like it or not, and therefore they have this responsibility. Easy Truth’s questions are very good.
Ayn Rand later (1974) drew a distinction between what she called “duty” (which is irrational and a concept to be spurned) and “obligation” (which is sane). Her distinction arises in the course of discussing Kant’s ethics as in Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Once Kant had purged motivation for acts of all factors such as context, consequences, interests, or inclinations, one can get to the purely moral element in a choice, which is from a sort of duty. Rand counters: “Who would want to be loved not from inclination, but from duty?”
In place of the concept of duty in moral reasoning, Rand would put the concept of causality, specifically human final causality. Do not act without knowing the purposes of your actions and the means needed for that end. The goal and its required means are weighed in the context of one’s other goals and values.
Rand does speak to one’s moral responsibility for causal consequences of one’s actions, more generally than N. Branden’s Q&A in the specific case of human offspring years earlier. Rand cast the rational concept of “obligation” as based on contracts, on hypothetical causal imperatives such as “If you want to live, you must eat,” and on "What do I owe my fellow man? Rationality." But near the end of her essay, she based obligation, as distinct from Kantian duty, on rational promises and agreements. Exclusively! And that would make Easy Truth’s questions exactly the right ones, thinking within that constriction of the idea of moral obligation.
I propose, however, that Rand was selling rational obligation short near the end of her essay. Following Richard Epstein’s theory of strict liability in tort law, as I do, one is legally responsible for harms one causes to another even though it was entirely accidental. Conceiving and bearing a child is not entirely accidental, of course. But I want to expose an element of Rand’s value theory that comfortably underlies the Epstein approach to liability in tort, even though his focus was on how much more sensible is his theory for that area of law than the dominant alternative theory. His idea is that if A caused harm to B, then A is required, by force of law, to do what is possible to make B whole again. Epstein never remarked, but I noticed many years ago, that this makes some sense from a moral idea. That idea is that every person is an end in themselves, and they should be left to harm only themselves, not anyone else. That is a moral principle to which Epstein’s legal principle seems to accord.
Having children, of course, is not itself bringing a harm to them. Life is good, notwithstanding life is struggle. In the case of modern humans, they not only have a life, but make a life for themselves. One of the possible important, meaningful, and joyful projects constituting their life they make for themselves is having children. Some of us choose not to undertake the project of making new human life, and we rather take on projects of making brain children. If one takes on the project of bringing about new human lives, even if it was partly accidental; by one’s own taking-on, one is under moral obligation (to one's own rationally valuing self) to muster the means the end requires or beg assistance in doing so. The end has allure for its project-taker, and it is a special allure which is the new adult life, again starting the cycle of human life* at the end of the parents’ project. This allure, of course, does not deprive the project or the decision to undertake it of moral worth. Rather, it is part of the best within us.
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On 7/20/2022 at 9:17 PM, Boydstun said:
Whenever the fetus has become capable of sustained survival outside the womb with or without artificial support, it is a living being worthy of adult protections and support (far beyond such worthiness of one's dog, for example). And adults willing to step up and provide that protection and support should have a right against interference with their project by other adults. . . . Rights between various adults are the whole story.
25 minutes ago, Easy Truth said:These are hard subject to discuss. Having said that, I do in fact agree, although I wish I did not.
This implies that the right of a child (outside of the womb) to exist simply means the right to not be killed/harmed rather than (unanimously) not attended to and allowed to die. Meaning if all adults want to walk away from the child, the child has no moral right to force any of them to take care of it. There is no right of the child to the actions of the parent or parental figure or custodian unless there is a contractual agreement (or declaration/demonstration by a parent) amongst the adults to take care of the child. Meaning there is no inherent "duty" to take care of a child, which sounds heinous to say like that.
Perhaps, fortunately, by nature, adults, amongst ourselves would find it unacceptable to allow the demise of a child unless it was a last resort/a dire situation.
Yes, actually, we youngsters manage those adults fine (photo below). Seriously, adults will want to protect and support the infant/child, and other adults cannot with right prevent that project. I think it is good if a lot of leeway is given to guardians as to decisions about nutrition and upbringing and education of the child, where legal sanction has been given (however conventional) to have that guardian relationship to the child. But no such legal exclusive relationship needs to entail giving the guardian also the right (against intervention by other adults) to harm or neglect the child.
(My parents with their first child.)
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~Voting for or against right to procure an abortion in fall of 2022~
Arizona: Has a ban on abortions beyond 15 weeks of pregnancy. At that point the human fetal brain is recognizable as a mammalian brain, not yet as primate, let alone, human brain. Anti-abortionists (Republicans) control both legislative chambers by only two members in each, and either can be flipped to the abortion-rights side (Democrats). Three anti-abortionists judges on the Supreme Court are up for re-election; even with their replacement, the majority will remain with the anti-abortionists. The anti-abortionist Governor and the anti-abortionist Attorney General are seats open in this election.
Georgia: Has a ban on abortions beyond 6 weeks of pregnancy. At that point, the human embryonic brain is recognizable as brain of a vertebrate, such as a fish, not yet as brain of a mammal. Some seats in the state legislature can be flipped to abortion-rights protectors, but not enough to flip either of these anti-abortionist chambers. Governor and Attorney General are up for vote in this election.
Kansas: Has legal abortions up to 22 weeks of pregnancy, which is the point at which the human fetal brain begins make changes that will bring it to the distinctively human form of primate brain. An initiative-question on the ballot this fall would amend the state bill of rights to say there is no constitutional right to abortion, opening the way for the Republican-led legislature to restrict abortion rights.
Other States in which state-directed abortion rights are being voted on this fall, at least implicitly, are:
Michigan
North Carolina
Pennsylvania
Wisconsin
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9 hours ago, Grames said:
The value judgement here is that human life and human rights are good and valuable and should be nurtured and enabled to flourish. The value judgement applies immediately after the identification has been made that a human life is involved. Making the identification depends upon the definition of the concept. Having a clear definition of the concept using other concepts (genus, differentia, essential attribute) versus using an informal ostensive definition of what it means to be an actual living human is the difference between the Objectivist position and other positions.
Whenever the fetus has become capable of sustained survival outside the womb with or without artificial support, it is a living being worthy of adult protections and support (far beyond such worthiness of one's dog, for example). And adults willing to step up and provide that protection and support should have a right against interference with their project by other adults. As to when an infant or child becomes a person, that is a gradual process.
We usually and correctly think of individual rights as belonging to (obtaining between) autonomous human persons and sourced in such personhood. In abortion rights and child rights, the question all along the way is not about rights of the little one not yet autonomous, but about rights of various adults concerning protection and support of the particular little one at all stages of development. Persons not the mother don't have a proper right to control the pregnancy until the fetus is capable of sustained life outside the womb with or without artificial support. It is only then that support-projects by persons not the mother can get underway without impressing the mother into service of their project. In other words, when does the fetus/infant become a person has always been a faulty and distracting way of looking at the rights that are actually in play over Law concerning abortion. Rights between various adults are the whole story.
- Easy Truth and tadmjones
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"While the shooter, 20-year-old Douglas Sapirman, fired 24 rounds from an AR-15-style rifle, Dicken did not hesitate to use the Glock handgun he was legally carrying. Sapirman was "neutralized" within two minutes, police said."
Within that CNN story in the link, is a story of a shooting in Colorado in which police arrived, mistook the private rescuer for shooter and fatally shot him. A thing like that happened in the small country town where my Mom lived her whole life, in southern Oklahoma near the Red River. There had been an armed robbery of the bank going on, a local man wrestled the gun away from the robber and was holding it on the robber when the police arrived from a neighboring, larger town. The police shot the good guy, but fortunately, in this case, it was only a wounded arm, and he lived.
- dream_weaver and tadmjones
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My own first gun was a 20-gauge Remington pump, somewhat like this. I think you had to be 14, maybe 16, before you could have a gun in my state in those days. I got it for Christmas. Until then I was allowed to carry my father's .22 rifle, which had been handed down to him from his father. And, of course, as boys, we had BB guns, and I got a hunting knife one birthday. Our hunting was mostly for quail in situations of close brush out in western Oklahoma. Very challenging. We also went goose hunting around the Great Salt Plains Lake in the northwestern part of the state, but no luck. The first time I got a quail, it was with the .22. We had spotted one on the ground in the brush ahead, and the men decided I should take a shot at it to stir up the covey. I got him, centered just above the breasts. In those days, none of our guns had scopes. Normally, we did not know there were quail until the covey took off all of a sudden practically beneath your feet. We learned meticulous gun safety from the beginning, the right methods for crossing a fence, never let your barrel come in the direction of another human being, and always be sure there is no shell or cartridge in the chamber when the hunt is over. (Related good advice would be that if you clean a quail for the women to make supper, you be damn sure you find and dig out every little shot. If your jaw comes down on one at the dinner table, it's going to be horrible.) We had a trap spring-device for hurling clay pigeons out at the farm of grandparents. One of our uncles had been in the Marines in Korea. When he said "pull" he did not even raise his shotgun to his shoulder, he just shot from the hip. He never missed. Eventually, Grandpa got fed up with all those pieces of clay pigeon out in the field, and that was the end of that. One uncle got a mechanical hand machine with which to load our own shotgun shells. We younger set would load shells (which was cheaper than buying them already loaded) upstairs in the farmhouse. There was nothing exact and no adult quality control, so now and then, we added a little extra powder for a little surprise.
My grandfather on my father's side had always worn a sidearm pistol like in the Western movies, up until the '20's I think, whenever he would go into town from the farm. It was a nice advance of civilization when you no longer needed to do that, for self-protection. I was speaking recently with a young man, an Objectivist, who lives at a ranch house in Mexico. In their vicinity there are shootings of people most every day. We are so much more fortunate here. He agrees.
Tad, sorry to hear you live under the puke-green skies of conspiracy theories. I do not. The sky is blue. The social conflicts are the on-and-on ignorance of many, the stupidities in collective-action situations, and incorrect values. And social conflicts, including wars, are not the greatest sources of human suffering and death anyway. Most everyone reading here today will die in bed and from a natural depletion of the body, not even from an accident.
On the spectacle mass-shootings (and other murder spectacles), I do not think they will stop in the lifetime of anyone here. More guns or less guns won't make a significant difference. The evil in some human beings is there, reliably so, animosity towards humans by losers is there, as ever, the firearms are all around and will continue to be, and the example of such hateful, sick attention-getting begun so many years ago now from the tower at the University of Texas, Austin is refreshed and refreshed.
Necro, whether anyone actually buys it all the way, the selfishness of self-defense is a logical implication of a morality whose only standard of value is unselfishness. Then too, as Rand also noted, a purer unselfishness would be to defer to the convictions of others in all things, including what are the correct moral standards.
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1 hour ago, tadmjones said:
Let's hope the DA wasn't elected with any help from Soros.
Not an insightful or informative remark. Just say No to attaching shallow, distracting-yet-boring, personage-political sentiments to just any ole post anyone makes on any topic.
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From 2000 through 2021, in the US, there were 433 shooter attacks in which one or more shooters killed or attempted to kill multiple unrelated people in a populated place. Most attacks were over before law enforcement arrived. In such cases, 113 times the attacker left the scene, 72 times the attacker committed suicide, 42 times bystanders subdued the attacker, and 22 times bystanders shot the attacker (12 of these bystanders were regular citizens, 7 were security guards, and 3 were off-duty officers). These data are from the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University, as reported in The New York Times 22 June 2022.
Yesterday, 17 July 2022, a 22 year-old man who was a passer-by armed with a handgun, courageously entered the heinous shooting episode and shot the shooter dead. Three people were killed by the attacker. This was in Greenwood, south of Indianapolis.
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3 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:
If only we had a word for that.
If only we had a concept for when the executive makes up new law for purposes of thwarting judicial branch rulings and undermining state law.
If only we had a concept for when hospitals' continuities are explicitly threatened if they don't succeed in pressuring staff MDs who may not wish to comply with the "new law."
The power of the purse has long been the channel by which the federal government puts certain constraints on schools and hospitals. In education, it was constraints of non-discrimination on the basis of race or gender. During his first term as President, Obama issued a constraint on Medicare-receiving hospitals that they have in place a written policy and actual practice of allowing same-sex life partners to visit their partner in the hospital. It was a fortunate and important order for me in practice at the time, when Walter was in the hospital, we did not have the power to marry, and the staff is heavily infiltrated with graduates of Liberty University, who are trained against human decency toward people like us. I appreciated that President Trump chose not to reverse that executive order.
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3 hours ago, DavidOdden said:
. . .
Roe was fundamentally wrong, not because it recognized the rights of women, but because it blatantly ignored the identification which Objectivism makes: rights pertain to an individual person, and a fetus (or embryo) is not a person. Blackmun overtly evaded the fundamental question, Dobbs is the consequence of such evasion.
Roe v. Wade overturn is not the result of Blackmun and defenders of women's right to elective abortions in the first trimester of a pregnancy. Atheist voters supporting prohibition of such elective abortions are not a hill of beans in comparison to certain religious voters. Religion and false metaphysics are the reason there are states now, as before Roe, prohibiting such elective abortions. The idea that the embryo or fetus need be determined as to whether or not it is a person in order to disposition the rights at issue is mistaken. All that was required, as Blackmun and some states now provide, is a mark beyond which adults not the mother may take on the project of further support of the fetus without impressing the mother into the service of their support-project. That mark is viability, that is, the stage in gestation at which the fetus has a reasonable chance of survival outside the womb with or without artificial support. Bringing up the issue of when the fetus, the infant, the young child becomes a person and a rights-bearer is a red-herring distraction, covering over behind-the-scenes doctrine of imputing a soul to living matter by God, of the real rights in contest, which are all rights between adults.
Blame for outlawing of abortion properly belongs to certain religious people, who took over Republican electoral politics back in the era of Jerry Falwell Sr. It was a long march, but they finally got their wrong metaphysics and moral ideals back up on the throne. (I have Roman Catholic friends, incidentally, who morally oppose any abortion, but who support its legality following the Blackmun/Boydstun reasoning whether governed at the federal or state level. What the Bishops proclaim in America is not always accepted by the laity. They agree with Ayn Rand, not the RC hierarchy, when she said: "God bless the inventor of the Pill!"
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The root of all Rationalism, I say, is acceptance of the primacy of possibility over existence. Truly rational possibility aims to trace potentials. Potentials and actualities are one of the divisions into which existence is exhaustively divided. –S
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The Biden administration released updated guidance on Monday, reminding doctors around the country that they’re protected by federal law if they terminate a patient’s pregnancy as part of treatment in an emergency circumstance — and threatening to fine or strip the Medicare status from hospitals that fail to do so.
This HHS guidance claims that “[w]hen a state law prohibits abortion and does not include an exception for the life of the pregnant person—or draws the exception more narrowly than the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act emergency medical condition definition—that state law is preempted.”
Which states have laws that do NOT include an exception for the life of the pregnant person?
NONE, including the state of Texas, which has nevertheless entered the empty (it looks to me) but loud fray by filing a lawsuit over the HHS guidance. From recent data, over 90% of abortions in the US have been in the first trimester. I think it not wild to suppose these are elective, not to save life of the mother. This dispute has always been principally about legality of elective abortions in the first trimester, notwithstanding all the political chaff over late-term abortions.
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Beware of axe handles. Anyone here approve of this behavior? Alas, it may well be that I'm the only one here with an axe, and I certainly do not approve of the attack on Jan. 6! Nor any of you guys making slight such behavior!
QuoteCharles Bradford Smith, 25, of Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, pleaded guilty in the District of Columbia to conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers. According to court documents, Smith and a co-defendant, Marshall Neefe, communicated with each other and others on Facebook in the weeks preceding Jan. 6. For example, on Nov. 4, 2020, a day after Election Day, Neefe wrote to Smith, “Im getting ready to storm D.C.” The two subsequently shared their intentions and plans to travel to Washington on Jan. 6. In one message to Neefe, Smith wrote, “I can’t wait for DC!,” adding, “If it’s big enough we should all just storm the buildings … Seriously … I was talking to my Dad about how easy that would be with enough people.”
Smith messaged others on social media to encourage them to come to Washington. He told a friend that he was buying axe handles and nailing American flags to them “so we can wave the flag but also have a giant beating stick just in case.” He also messaged another social media user that he had obtained a military-style knife that he planned to bring to Washington. On Jan. 6, both he and Neefe entered the Capitol grounds. They both participated in pushing a large metal sign frame – at least eight feet tall and 10 feet wide -- into a defensive line of officers attempting to prevent the crowd from further advancing on the west front plaza of the Capitol. Smith also encouraged rioters to keep forcing a door to the Capitol closed to keep law enforcement officers inside the building so that they could not respond to the riot unfolding outside. After he left Washington on Jan. 6, he messaged others on Facebook, “Well we literally chased them out into hiding. No certification lol,” referring to the members of Congress who needed to vacate their chambers during the certification process due to the violent breach of the Capitol.
Neefe, 25, of Newville, Pennsylvania, pleaded guilty on May 3, 2022, to charges of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers. He is to be sentenced on Aug. 17, 2022.
Smith was arrested on Sept. 13, 2021. He is to be sentenced on Sept. 23, 2022. He faces a statutory maximum of 20 years in prison on the conspiracy charge and an additional eight years in prison on the assault charge. Both charges also carry potential financial penalties. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.
Keep on with the the lol's, models of stupidity in more ways than one.
QuoteBrian Jackson, 47, and his brother, Adam Jackson, 42, both of Katy, Texas, are charged in the District of Columbia with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers, civil disorder, and related offenses. They were arrested in Katy, Texas, and are expected to make their initial court appearances later today in the Southern District of Texas.
According to court documents, the Jacksons were among rioters illegally on the grounds of the Capitol on Jan. 6. At approximately 5 p.m. that day, they assaulted a line of law enforcement officers outside of the tunnel area of the Lower West Terrace. Brian Jackson hurled a flagpole at officers. Adam Jackson hurled a large red or orange object at officers and then charged at the line of officers with what appeared to be a U.S. Capitol Police riot shield.
In a video on Brian Jackson’s Facebook account, a voice is heard saying, “Adam got a god-damned shield, stole it from the f---- popo.” Later, Brian Jackson “unsent” several messages that he had sent bragging about his participation in the riot and sent multiple messages asking others to delete videos and messages he had sent. Adam Jackson, meanwhile, exchanged messages with another person on Jan. 10, 2021, in which he indicated he wanted to return to Washington for the inauguration. The other person asked Adam Jackson if he brought the riot shield home with him, and Jackson responded, “No, we left them. Cost to much to ship home lol.”
Speaking of stupidity, you defenders here of the woe-is-me, poor-'lil-white-guy set, always rationalizing rioters you sympathize with by switching the topic to violence that was perpetrated in association with BLM public assemblies should notice that if a patrolman stops me for speeding, it is no defense to cry "but everyone was speeding." Break the law, get caught, pay penalty.
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Capitol Breach Investigation Resource Page
"In the 18 months since Jan. 6, 2021, more than 850 individuals have been arrested in nearly all 50 states for crimes related to the breach of the U.S. Capitol, including over 260 individuals charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement. The investigation remains ongoing. Anyone with tips can call 1-800-CALL-FBI (800-225-5324) or visit tips.fbi.gov.
A complaint is merely an allegation, and all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
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What's a Republican to do for the upcoming elections now that 3/4 of the citizens are mad as hell at them for finally succeeding at overturning Roe v. Wade and see Republicans drafting extensive bans on abortion in their state?
1. Blame the overturn on Democrat extremism.
2. Shift attention from the trimester in which 90% of US abortions occur, to the third trimester. Ignore that elective abortions under Roe in third trimester were illegal, and instead talk of Democrats slicing up the fetus.
3. Emphasize the sluttiness of women seeking an abortion.
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Continuing education in Vienna. Go there, have Sacher, and visit my cathedral, along with The Museum of Contraception and Abortion.
What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?
in Law
Posted
A right to the viable fetus, a right held by others, will not give them a right over the woman's circulatory system, another part of her body, nor any part of her body not that fetus.