Save My Family
Sean Hackbarth comments on Chip's comment about post-abortion regret.#
I guess 'tis better to kill the innocent than grant them any chance at a good life.
Did he neglect to read further down?
When their abortion is looked at emotionally rather than rationally, they feel regrets and guilt. A rational person knows that a fetus is not a baby. A fetus is somewhere between a fertilized egg and a full-term pregnancy, but it is not a baby. A rational person knows that there is no evidence so support the idea that a big-daddy God cares whether a person has an abortion or not, any more than a God cares what you ate for breakfast.
The fact is that many people who don't care for themselves want to believe that somebody else cares for them. The bigger and more important that other person or God is, the more important they can feel. If God cares about me and "my baby" then I must be very important and "my baby" must be very important.
The only things that are important in life are things that are real. Things that do not exist cannot be known and cannot have value. Why care about things that don't exist? They aren't there.
Julie Leung: "I feel that writing a blog is stating that I want to be quoted." I am happy to oblige.#
dowingba quotes PS2.IGN.COM:#
Bachelor Number Two was told that he could choose one of two prizes: either an expenses-paid date with lovely young Jordan, or a PlayStation 2.
He took the PlayStation. The men in the audience cheered.
I was there.
Somewhere in that picture, one of those little splotches is me.
I can't even begin to describe what an amazing feeling it is to be standing in a crowd of over a million people who all believe and are fighting for the same thing. I've been so burnt out on activism this year, just because it's so hard to try and start The Revolution by yourself. Me and two other people were just not enough, and trying to overcome apathy is one of the hardest things I've ever encountered in my life.
So it was, to say the least, refreshing to be surrounded by fighters at all, let alone 1,149,999 of them. The biggest rally in Washington ever. And I was a part of that.
Kudos!
I imagine that Erin Judge would have liked to have been there:
Abortion kicks ass, plain and simple. It totally rules. There should be no whispering of that fact.
The Agitator writes about his particular problems with abortion:#
I realize that the quickest way end an abortion debate is to invoke slavery and/or the Holocaust, but here I think the slavery metaphor is apt (actually, the quickest way to end an abortion debate is...to actually have an abortion debate. But we're already there.).
If Brooke's claim that those without a personal stake in the issue have no room in the public debate is true, then couldn't we say the same thing about non-slaveholding abolitionists?
After all, they were neither slaves nor slaveowners. Just as pro-choicers say the decision to have an abortion is between the woman, her body, and her doctor, so too could slaveowners say the slavery question was between a man and his property, his slaves. Why should it be of any concern to someone who is neither?
And just as the pro-choice crowd today says a fetus doesn't retain the set of rights a full-fledged person does, slavery factions said the same things about slaves,didn't they?
[...]
And isn't this what the pro-life folks say about the fetus? That it's human? I'm not sure that asserting your own belief that a fetus isn't human gives you carte blanche to then say no man has any right to speak out about abortion. You're accepting as a premise a point that's still in contention.
There has been something that I've often thought of but have not really tested out if it would fly with anyone. I write the broad strokes here.
First of all, whether a fetus is or is not a human is irrelevant for this discussion, because it will be at some point. Secondly, many seem to think abortion is okay because a woman may die or may not want the baby that will be eventually produced. Other people think that to abort this fetus is to commit murder and deny a chance at life to a "innocent baby."
These are my assumptions.
Suppose person A would like to have an abortion and person L would prefer them not to. What if person L agrees to pay all hospital fees and other expenses related to a pregnancy, as well as become the legal guardian and financial protector of person A's baby if it is born--and if person A is harmed in anyway during pregnancy (including dying during childbirth,) person L will be prosecuted as if they committed the injury. Suppose government policy was that person L could force person A to carry their baby to term in exchange for agreeing to these conditions, but if no person like person L was present, then person A could have an abortion.
Note, that I abstain from stating my opinion with regards to this solution, but I am curious to what the objections are.
An obvious objection from a libertarian point of view is that no one should force anyone to do anything, but if fetuses were considered to be sufficiently alive then this would be akin to a police officer preventing one person from killing another. (And obviously this issue about fetuses as living beings is very disputable.)
Matt May is filthy hippy vegan who doesn't eat meat!#
I should explain, in terms as pleasant as possible, how this is not just an oversensitive veggie thing. I have been allergic to poultry since birth. I think I can best explain the symptoms as being like food poisoning: my stomach turns into a rock, and my body attempts to remove the toxic substance with extreme prejudice and no saving throw. I also get nice little side effects like hives on my chest and itching on the roof of my mouth. I'm pretty sure that the condition isn't fatal, but that's a theory that you only get to test with meaningful data once.
:)
Surana answers the question, "Why do they hate us?" with the answer, "Because everyone hates everyone."#
Anthony Shadid, Pulitzer Prize winner for international reporting from the Washington Post, was interviewed on NPR today. Towards the end of the interview he told a quick story from Iraq. He and another Post reporter were following American soldiers as they went to do some good deeds at an orphanage. The other reporter went inside with the Americans, but Shadid hung back and interviewed some young Iraqi guys outside. Asked about the soldiers, these guys honestly believed that the Americans had come to molest the children at the orphanage.
After 9/11 I read everything I could to understand why the Arab world hates the West, particularly America. All these articles concocted rational explanations for their anger, but nothing explained their intense homicidal rage. This story illustrates the real source of their suspicions: they honestly believe we are immoral, duplicitous, evil heathens. This is not entirely outrageous. Their media has presented us in an awful light for decades, their leaders blame us for their failures, and their religious leaders demonize us. If you are a lower-class Arab who hears this for decades, you will believe that Americans are monsters. Of course, the educated Arabs know we aren't that bad, but even they can't escape the echo chamber of rumors swirling around them.
John Palfrey speculates on law resources on the Internet.#
Some of the original legal websites -- Nolo (mostly tries to sell you books and software, with some helpful FAQs on big topics), findlaw (run by some very clever people, provides a lot of links to a lot of places, and has some good cases uploaded), and gigalaw (great, original content on Internet law and related matters, with some useful primers on commonly-discussed but poorly understood topics like copyright) -- each provide some very helpful information on specific topics and have gotten a lot more useful over the past few years. A small company in Massachusetts called LeapLaw, founded by a senior paralegal at a big law firm and whose system I've had a chance to look at recently, is on just this track: focused on providing targeted information to a transactional lawyer or paralegal who turns to the Net looking for a specific question answered or form provided. My guess is that the service that succeeds in addressing this need will end up being a paid subscription model, rather than a free service supported by advertising, but I might be wrong (given the resurgence of the ad model and the recent results of Yahoo! and what we all presume about the profitability of the still-privately-held-but-not-for-long google). I'd guess that there are many others working on it, given that anyone who has searched for good legal information online usually ends up wasting loads of time and coming up with forms or advice that's off-the-mark or out-of-date. Maybe it'll be a weblog that succeeds. (Anybody else have favorites on this front?)
Ask links to an awesome Ikea commercial. (Note, he provides a local mirror of the video.)#
Snippy responds to something I wrote about taxes and welfare.#
My argument was not a general argument but one based on a specific comment by someone else, that taxes and welfare could be good for the economy. My argument drew on the general argument I would make--that it is robbery.
I quote her comment, title Why I stole your dollar, and what's in it for you, in its entirety, because of its length:
I stole your dollar. Here's what's in it for you: I stole your dollar so I could get a free school lunch. It was my only meal that day. I also used part of it for my public school education, which enabled me to get a decent job (I'm a legal secretary), and eventually to buy a house. I pay income taxes and property taxes now myself, just so you know. I survived childhood and became a productive member of society because I stole your dollar, and a whole bunch of other people's dollars.
This in no way addresses the dollars my mother stole, or any other adult. But as the child who stole your dollar, I have no regrets. It wasn't my choice, but I'm still glad it happened. Not every dollar stolen results in a lifelong dependent.
You will notice that she does not actually say what I got out of it. Perhaps she presume that I would get something out of "helping" her get out of poverty?
I reject this for three short reasons:
- You cannot do volunteer work for people involuntarily. You would not say that I should be happy when my house is broken into a ransacked because there is a happy thief somewhere? (Well, maybe you would, but I found be horrified with you.)
- Taxes and Welfare are not necessary for this end anyway. If the government did not rob me annually, then I would donate more of my money to causes I support. (I am oppose to robbery, not helping people.)
- Snippy seems to suggest that because she did not just rob from me and because she allows herself to robbed from now, it is all okay. This is reminiscent of Joseph Stalin's "One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic."
Reading the comments to the post is very interesting as well.
For example, trinker seems to understanding (at least unconsciously) why government charity is not as effect as private charity:
(As if all those dollars that people try to hide from Uncle Sam all went to charity! Hrrgh.)
Mary Kay Kare thinks that this is actually a compelling argument:
There are altogether too many people who need to read something like this. Thank you for writing it. I only wish there were some way to get it wider distribution.
Chai Tea Latte links to Three Women Who Launched A Movement from the Cato Institute. It is a special about three women with a lot of influence over libertarianism.#
From the intro page:
aterson, Lane, and Rand began to do just that. Each was an original thinker in her own right. But each also made a mark as a great popularizer of liberal ideas. A few beleaguered liberal economists had argued, with great force, that no planned economy could match the productive efficiency of a capitalist system. Yet these economic arguments, despite their technical force, were unable to match the power of the utopian socialist vision to capture the popular imagination. These three -- Lane and Paterson almost entirely bereft of formal education, Rand writing fiction in an adopted tongue -- did just that. The sweeping histories of Lane and Paterson chronicled humanity's ascent from barbarism to civilization in a way that uncovered the necessary links between civil liberties, stable property rights, and material progress. Even more successful was Rand's allegorical tale of a brash and brilliant young architect struggling to maintain the integrity of his work in a profession where his independence of mind is despised and resented. Above all a romantic epic, The Fountainhead also served up a blistering satire of the day's intellectual fads and hinted at the Objectivist philosophy of rational self-interest that she would develop in greater detail in her Atlas Shrugged.
From the page on Paterson's The God of the Machine:
With that distinction in mind, Paterson considers antitrust law, and concludes that, far from preserving the competition associated with contract society, it tends to resurrect the society of status. In his 1970 book Power and Market, the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard called her treatment here "[o]ne of the few cogent discussions of the antitrust principle in recent years." After exposing several infamous "monopolies" as either chimerical or the product of government privilege, Paterson turns her attention to the putative remedy for monopoly. Laws banning practices "in restraint of trade," she argues, are meaningless: nobody can know in advance precisely what they forbid. Producers who charge more than their competitors, Paterson observes, can be accused of price gouging. Those who charge less are guilty of predatory pricing and unfair competition. Those who charge precisely the same must surely be engaged in price fixing. Any of these accusations might therefore be leveled against a firm by a competitor, making "status," or political power, crucially important to commerce. According to Paterson, the malleability of the notion of "anticompetitive" practices means that in effect, firms will seek prior approval before innovating, merging, or splitting and selling off subsidiaries. The effect, ironically, is to inhibit competition.