TheVat

This being a politics forum, I figure the thread here is looking at how we balance competing societal notions of legal rights rather than taking on metaphysical questions that concern theologians. For lack of supernatural devices that detect souls, I guess the law must settle on using fetal viability as the standard. AFAIK that has been determined at around 24-26 weeks. A society that provides young women with all the information they need about their bodies, strong legal protection against exploitative treatment from partners, free (or sliding scale) access to contraception, and safe prompt judgement-free access to either medicinal abortion (mifepristone) or surgical abortion when accidents happen, would be one where abortion was rare and would be done long before the latter part of pregnancy. The third trimester abortions that seem to fire up many of the appeals to emotion are already rare, under one percent. One source (American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) puts the totality of abortions after 21 weeks at around one percent. I feel like my country is returning to the dark ages.

Plus one, @zapatos. It's worth noting that disproportionate arrests and convictions for pot possession among American Blacks was a longstanding pillar of the prison labor system in the South.

No, not so much a smokescreen as a more palatable nucleus around which to crystallize. Expanding the base around de facto segregation would have been a much harder sell. The real irony, to me, is that a large number of the babies they were claiming they wanted to save were (owing to the demographics of abortion) Black or Hispanic -- those babies that conservatives were so loathe to provide any post-natal assistance to. We're pro-life, at least until you're born. After that, you're on your own, kiddo.

Laws can drive the basic human desire to relieve boredom or tension or fatigue underground, but it will always find its way out. And a drug's negatives (from dosing, or inherent distortions it induces) are so much more addressable when the drug is legal and its quality regulated and there is no legal consequence for seeking help. Drugs like acid or pot or shrooms probably have less social stigma in societies where power and productivity and a fast pace are less valued. In America, drugs that led users to more focus on expanded perception and introspection tended to be strongly interdicted, while drugs that stoked the engines of capitalism and power were practically sacraments. It's actually rather amazing that MJ legalization got as much traction as it did here. Arthritic joints in baby boomers probably helped. Also the growth of libertarian factions in American politics.

The real reasons that the Evangelicals took up the anti abortion banner and made it their hot button issue.... https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133

https://www.vice.com/en/article/akvm5b/scientists-discover-method-to-break-down-plastic-in-one-week-not-centuries If this is scalable, it could be a game-changer. Of course, we still need to get the plastic waste into recycle bins. So it would help if the enzyme also acted rapidly on human stupidity and laziness.

It's ironic, there are areas of law where having legislation be determined at the state level makes sense. But this comes down to what the definition of a living human, with legal personhood, is going to be. That's an awfully weighty issue, deciding if a metaphysical or a scientific view prevails, and not one that should change everytime you drive across a state line. There you are, young woman, in South Dakota, with an embryo that the state has applied a religious concept of personhood to, and you drive into Minnesota, and it turns into nonviable tissue which may be excised. I'm not sure many people grasp the absurdity.

Hehe. I could stand back up, but why would I want to? (If I sat on it, there would be three boobs on that chair) Magritte fan, also. I often like art that subverts itself. Or knocks my brain sideways or some way orthogonal to the received wisdom.

Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it. -- Bertolt Brecht

@Peterkin What I wouldn't give to have my tinnitus sound like the Vienna Boys Choir. Or St Martin-in-the-Fields. Mine is just crickets (in the fields). Telekinesis - using your mind to lift your hand is pedestrian. Using just your mind to lift MY hand: that would be impressive. I think the evolutionary argument against paranormal skills (as @Phi for All mentioned) is compelling. Seeing specters could go either way in terms of adaptations that enhance reproductive prospects - in cultures where that's valued, that would be a plus and you might be a VIP, a sought-after shaman or similar. OTOH, just the imagination and perceptiveness about people and what they want to hear might be sufficient to garner the prestige, so the frauds could do just as well as the truly gifted. And probably do better overall, since they wouldn't have their mental stability impacted by the presence of actual ghosts, something that could be quite disturbing.

Good question. One way to think about it is to consider the size of the body generating tidal stress on another. With Jovian moon Io, where gigantic Jupiter is generating the tidal force, the heating effect is pretty dramatic. But Earth does not cause the moon's core to heat significantly, so it seems pretty likely that the moon, smaller than Earth, would not generate enough tidal stress on Earth to heat its core. The heat in Earth's molten center is from a different source, which you may have also heard about.

Have no idea what that means. Where I live, having a six-pack is not uncommon in the libation sense. In the other meaning of well-defined abdominal muscles, it's more rare. The first usage tends to cancel the second usage.

A friend visited Istanbul and mentioned how respected and well integrated into urban life are the stray dogs. What was interesting is the friend is not a dog person, and often seems to provoke dogs to bark as he passes by, and yet he found the Istanbul dogs to be quite friendly, to the point of hanging out with him and allowing neck rubs, ear scratching, etc. I am more a dog person, and can relate to the approach tips offered by @beecee. I was taught those at a young age, and rarely had problems with dogs. I find the simplest way to codify dog etiquette is just to think of them as people. Then you ask the right questions of yourself when meeting a dog, e.g. would I want a stranger to walk up and place their hand on my head without permission? BTW there's a docu on the Istanbul dogs... https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2021/03/18/istanbul-turkey-dogs-stray-documentary/ ISTANBUL — Forget the majestic mosques and bustling bazaars. Over the centuries, one of the things that has most consistently captured the imagination of foreign travelers to Istanbul has been … the street dogs. “The dogs sleep in the streets, all over the city. … They would not move, though the Sultan himself passed by,” Mark Twain wrote in 1867. Amply documented in both 19th century lithographs and 21st century viral videos, Istanbul’s street dogs can today be found patiently waiting to cross at green lights, hitching ferry rides across the Bosporus, marching with protesters and lapping up leftovers and attention outside sidewalk cafes. Filmmaker Elizabeth Lo, whose documentary “Stray” had its U.S. streaming release earlier this month, is the latest visitor to fall under the spell of the city’s canine cohort. Lo says she was struck by “seeing dogs roaming around freely, living life on their own terms, in this very developed city,” and by the relationship she observed between them and Istanbul’s human residents. “People really see a dignity in the dogs, they see them as fellow citizens, as belonging to their streets and communities,” she says. @Moontanman Plus one for the mental image rendered by "....a ring of barking bassets circling around you is an impressive and frightening thing." Your appraisal of the solo Basset "personality" is consistent with Bassets I've encountered. Haven't met up with a pack of them. I think the palpable air of melancholy could be intense.

When people debate on why a god would do (or fail to do) certain things, I wonder if they should add Ockham's Razor to their toolkit. But kudos for the sober and serious discussion of an Onion article!

I am not quite the expert in international law, so there is no future for me telling anyone they are wrong about the legalities. But it is what I've gleaned - that EJK of heads of state, in recent decades anyway, is viewed as illegal and not a lot of flex on that. Apparently there is some flex where terrorist leaders are concerned, when they are defined as stateless. E.g. just because Pakistan harbors you, doesn't mean you have the same protection as the president of Pakistan. Even in situations where a head of state is indicted as a war criminal, they would still have to be extradited (or abducted, depending on one's allegiances) to Switzerland and stand trial. As I said before, throwing out international law and conventions, no matter how tempting, seems a path to chaos and ruin, with a world run by authoritarian warlords. I thought Phi, a couple posts above mine on the previous page, painted a plausible picture.

Yes. Plus one. There are good reasons extrajudicial killings (that is, outside of a battlefield and outside of a criminal court) violate international law. And, as your hypotheticals illustrate, one good reason is based in the Law of Unintended Consequences. Not only in terms of who fills the power void in that country, but also in the global erosion of liberal democracy, rule of law, and fair play. You may have understated the chaos and ruin that could come from an open season on heads of state. ETA - and, as @MSC noted, there is always the risk of martyrdom being conferred on the victim of the EJK. There were folks in Lousiana for many years who held the demagogue Huey Long to be a martyr and burnished his halo for decades after.

Just thinking back to April 26, 1986 today. A son was a few weeks away from being born - I recall the wife and I had a conversation about where our cheese was coming from, but no big concern given that she was scarfing only domestic cheese and downwind countries like Sweden had been pretty proactive about rejecting milk from cows who grazed inside the plume. IIRC, even UK did some bannings of grazing animals in Scotland and other northern stretches. Cesium 137 has a half life of 30 years, so more than half of what rained down in Europe has turned to barium. (probably a cleanup pun in there somewhere). Similar story with strontium 90. When you read about all the accidents and leaking containments around the world (Rocky Flats, Sellafield, Hanford, Ozersk, that salt dome in Germany whose name I can't recall, et al), it seems like Reactor 4 at Chernobyl is nowhere near the top of the list of potential nastiness. What always amazes me is the apparent ecological health in most of the Exclusion Zone, in spite of beaucoup curies in soil and trees and marshes. (sorry to not use the SI unit, but those becquerels are just so tiny that curies makes more sense when you're talking about massive releases of radionuclides) What I find jaw-dropping is places like Rocky Flats, where our DOE has signed off on having a wildlife preserve and allowing families to hike around it. And this in spite of flood events, like 2013, where leach from buried containers has come to the surface and oozed across the land.

Poor old Johnnie Ray Sounded sad upon the radio Moved a million hearts in mono Our mothers cried Sang along, who'd blame them? You've grown (You’re grown up!) So grown (So grown up!) Now I must say more than ever (Come on, Eileen...) Come On Eileen was a huge hit in the States when I was in my mid twenties.

It seems as if texting has generally decreased awareness of the uses of punctuation marks like the comma. Just one would have helped that sentence convey its intended meaning (and deprived us of a good laugh). What's funny is the title above that sentence made full use of commas.

Without getting too far into the assertions made here or elsewhere about AGW, I will say that precise definitions matter greatly if we don't want threads that decay into trollery. The phrase existential threat is a shining example of imprecision. If a conservative uses it to caricature a moderate/liberal position, they may use it to mean complete extinction event, no humans left. This, most climatologists and ecologists agree, is not likely to happen, so the conservative feels they score a point. However, if their interlocutor said existential threat and meant something more like vast social disruption, widespread crop failure and famine especially in the tropics, many deaths from wet bulb temps over 35 C in tropical regions where AC is not widely available, massive wildfires, massive coastal flooding in areas of high population density then they are speaking of threats quite real and not too distant. And quite existential for those most vulnerable by virtue of geography and lack of resources. So any discussion must determine first what such terms mean, and find common definitions. And that can only happen when politics, and wearing team jerseys, is put aside.

Why don’t atheists do well with exponents? Because they don’t believe in higher powers. "Eight something" got a belly laugh. Not usual with math jokes.

British Left Waffles on Falkland Islands There's a scene from The Meaning of Life which that one calls to mind.

Chaucer, as in not uncommon with writers, had quite a range of jobs and interests. Comptroller, courtier, diplomatic envoy, forester, philosopher, astronomer. His father was a wine merchant with a royal appointment which probably helped pave the way for his son having such an interesting life and being part of a royal court. Hanging on a wall in my home is a planisphere, which is a modern descendant of the astrolabe. I might look at it, as I read about Chaucer's instrument.

I often notice ambiguous phrasing and find it very entertaining. Headlines like... Kids make nutritious snacks Miners refuse to work after death Panda mating fails, veterinarian takes over Old school pillars are replaced by alumni ...make me wonder if some languages have a syntactical structure that makes such phrases more common. (For another thread, perhaps)

https://archive.ph/1dFjp I do. Here's a screenshot of the complete article. In the information ecology of social media, the outrageous and extreme viewpoints are the best clickbait and they prosper. At the expense of reasoning, depth, and equilibrium. And truth.