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We see things which have essences which are distinct from their existences all around us.
Maybe some of these fool legislators think they can ban cancer treatment for pregnant women, but I doubt anything so ridiculous would hold water when challenged in court
The armed rebellion fantasy isn't well addressed by the gun grabbers though. It's like there's not even any attempt at persuasion. It's just called crazy talk. "You could never win." The Taliban just did. "It could never happen." Democrats just told us what a crazy megalomaniac Trump was and how he tried to illegally and violently hold onto power. "Trust your government." Democrats don't even make that argument. They can't even use math because the numbers are far more weighted against mass murder by governments being much more dangerous, millions dead instead of tens of thousands. Foreign countries can't even be pointed at because for every Iceland there is a Mexico. All we hear is Nike, "Just do it."
The other part of that mentality is that having a highly armed citizenry makes a Hitlerian or Stalinist type pogrom very unlikely. You have it because you might need it. But there is only a very miniscule chance you'll ever need it precisely because you have it. And so if you don't have it, your odds of needing it just went way, way up and then of course you're not going to have it when you do need it. That's the mindset you're dealing with. The tens of thousands dying of gun violence every year may be saving tens or hundreds of millions down the road because there is no violence more deadly than that which comes from a government.
Yeah I agree with you about the very wealthy and apologize for not putting in the asterisk referring to the fine print that stipulated this evening of wealth inequality doesn't apply so much to the very wealthy as it does to the mid-range wealthy, the hard working normal Americans who have a few hundred thousand to a little over a million saved up for their retirements. The billionaires aren't going to notice this inflation at all. It's not even going to be a rounding error as far as having any impact on their lifestyle or quality of life. But for the millionaire next door, or the retired teacher or cop or engineer who can live comfortably but not extravagantly, who can afford a vacation or two every year and a nice house and have enough left over to put their grandkids through college and eat out a few times a week, it's likely they are going to have to make some cutbacks. I'm not celebrating it at all. This looks like it's going to be painful. Entirely predictable based on our government's policies, and it's going to hurt those mid range comfortable people quite a bit as they see the value of the dollars they worked so hard for, scrimped and saved to hold onto, fall in purchasing power with very high inflation.
We all agree that's an irrelevant digression, right?
What kind of bombs? What delivery method? What yield? You could be talking about anything from a firecracker to a nuclear bomb. Rocket system? Dropped off a plane? Mobile launch truck?
It also depends on how one defines militia. For instance if a group of concerned citizens (i.e. a militia) takes up arms to fight off a landed invasion in their state from overseas, I guess in a manner of speaking you don't want to make it illegal to do that. Practically speaking you can't make it illegal because in the very circumstance where such a defense is needed I imagine it already means the military is at its limit in terms of how much it's doing already. But if by militia one means "private military force" in the sense of taking positive action against enemies of the U.S., then I'm pretty sure it would be pretty easy to ban a militia group from, for example, going to war with a foreign country on their soil 'in defense of America'. It has become commonly accepted political doctrine at this point that 'defense of America' absolutely includes invading foreign countries, but a militia would certainly not enjoy the privilege of being able to defend America in this fashion on their own accord.
I deliberately left out that exception because it does have more merit, but I will posit that there is still an inherent distinction. We don't let people kill their two year old and harvest their liver to save their life.
The AR happens to be one of the most popular semi-auto rifles, but "banning ARs" wouldn't do anything. Banning semi-automatic rifles would first need a clear definition of what semi-automatic means, and I've never seen anyone knowledgeable actually attempt to do this.
Gender roles vs "no gender roles" (as WS put it)? No, the concept of 'no gender roles' aka everyone does the same things is an innovation essentially borne of tech and industrial innovation. That was never part of the issue about abortion.
The fact that participation in the public sphere seems to find itself at home with the pro-choice side is a powerful factor, and one the pro-life side does not seem to take seriously.
If by gender issues you mean the underlying realities (whatever they are) then obviously these go back to the Neanderthals and before. But I meant the public conceptualization of the alphabet soup gender spectrum, which absolutely did not exist in the 60's. And I'm being generous putting the timeframe in that era because realistically the conceptualization of abortion and its morally relevant features goes back way before the 1960's, and in fact was a serious issue of contention going back millennia. So yes, the idea that people's abortion beliefs are some sort of symptom of their beliefs about gender is patently preposterous. Many of the Christian beliefs about abortion go back right to the time of Christ, although obviously the medical detailing has improved. Life at conception vs life a few weeks later is an issue that was not as firm back then as it is now, for fairly obvious reasons, but the general principle of a fetus being a fully fledged human pre-birth is very, very old in Judeo-Christian thought. So yeah, CRT has zero conception of actual history.QuoteYou underestimate people's ability to adopt beliefs based on personal convenience. If the patriarchy still existed, there would absolutely be consensus that life begins in very late pregnancy at the earliest and possibly not until birth (which some people still believe). That pregnancy would interfere with men's ability to participate in the public sphere would be an acceptable justification for abortion because otherwise it would undermine the entire argument that the public sphere is the domain of men and women are properly constrained to the private sphere (which they may stronger influence but still don't dominate).
I know this wasn't directed at me, but...the times when the so-called patriarchy was at its strongest was the time most vehemently of the position that abortion was unacceptable. It's only been since the contraceptive revolution, women in the workforce, free love, and other such social/technological developments that there is strong pressure to consider a fetus a non-person. So if anything it was the anti-patriarchy movement taking the position you're indicating above. Note that the original anti-abortion position was taken by the early Christians, for instance, as a repudiation of various common practices which included abortion, exposing unwanted infants, and use of contraceptive potions. It was not a position taken from a position of power but rather one challenging the power elite in the attempt to defend the defenseless, among other theological motives. But the common thread of these motives was the maximum fostering and encouragement of life. Note that these positions can't really be divorced by other ways in which the early Christians differed from their pagan counterparts, for instance in not wanting to watch gladiators be eaten by lions. So back then the 'pro-life' position really meant that. Obviously once a minority position becomes the majority position in an eventual empire it's easy to think that these beliefs are designed to perpetuate some kind of oppressive anti-woman power structure, but again that's CRT-type thinking going all wrong. The actual beliefs predate all that, and the current moral positions on the topic are largely traceable back to those, obviously with more medical details being added. The fact that it's possible to take an old moral position and be a jerk is nothing new. Obviously some pro-life people are jerks and hypocrites, just as people in any camp can be. But the current pro-life position is not some brew concocted to bring back the good old days; it's a very old position.
Sounds to me like a typical position borne of the CRT training program: break down any disagreement into an innate power struggle and define the problem as merely being a disparity in power. So no, I don't think the way people think about gender has the slightest bit of relevance for almost anyone on either side of the abortion debate. It certainly has zero relevance to pro-lifers, and for pro-choicers, while many are obviously in the gender studies camp, their rationale are not based on their definition of gender. The gender issue came far after the abortion issue was already formed into its current divide. Once again this is CRT having no knowledge of history.
So back to the connection between abortion and gender. Supposedly, if men were the ones to become pregnant, the argument is that the same people who believe that life begins at conception and becomes more and more deserving of human rights as a sentient being the older he or she gets, they wouldn't believe any of that if men became pregnant instead of women. That argument doesn't hold up well to scrutiny.
Yeah, what I'm arguing is that it's not the particulars of the belief that matter, but the particularities of the individual's life. Someone who is miserable may well find their way to some bad beliefs, but those beliefs are not the cause but rather a symptom.
