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hawkbitalpha · 3 years ago

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[REPOST, 2022] - "Roe, Roe, Roe-ing my boat, gently into this stream"

(This was originally posted to my WordPress blog "Thoughts of the Free" in May 2022.)

Oh, joy. Here we go again.

Yep, it’s the internet’s laziest political commentator here, back after several months of silence to talk about one of his least favorite topics: abortion! Yay! In case you haven’t heard, this just happened, meaning abortion is now no longer protected here in the States under federal law. Not a huge surprise, but still a very facepalm-inducing moment for this country nonetheless. So, rather than sit around and debate every single person who’d like to argue with me on this subject, I figured I’d get in front of this whole thing, and preemptively put my logical scalpel to work here and now.

Before we proceed, let me make one thing absolutely clear right off the bat: if your go-to arguments against abortion are along the lines of “it’s murder!”, “it’s irresponsible adulting!”, “it’s against God!”, or more, do not even bother trying to respond to this post. Not only is this branch of reasoning weak (for reasons that I’ll dig into as we go forward), but the fact is that moral arguments in general do not stand up to scrutiny at all on this topic. I am also not about to grind to a halt here to argue about some unproductive conceptual nonsense like “when does life begin? 12 weeks?!” or “but what about edge cases like rape?!”, because these are where the point goes to die a slow and painful death. Got it? Okay, good. Let’s move.

Let’s really get started in a place you probably won’t expect: the Bible. If you’re one of the folks who follows it, I implore you to open yours to Numbers 5:11, read onward from there, and take note of what that section describes. What you’ll find there is a very detailed commandment, from God himself to his priests, for abortions to be induced on wives who cheat on their husbands. This also isn’t even to speak of numerous other moments, such as Exodus 12:19, where God himself goes a step above abortions and personally kills unspecified masses of born children, demonstrating multiple times over that the lives of both the unborn and children aren’t quite as sacred as claimed in this religion. To attempt to handwave this fact away in support of the Christian anti-abortion case by claiming “it’s okay when God does it” is to engage in a hilariously meta kind of moral relativism that conservatives would not accept in any other context, so please, don’t try this response either.

As an aside: the problem with going to church and listening to sermons about the Bible is that you rarely ever learn anything truly new from them. You just skip around at random and hear a lecture about some part that gets worked into a generic message about the positives of being faithful. If you’re a Christian, professing faith in the Bible, and you haven’t heard of these parts before, you should ask yourself why that is.

But you didn’t come here to listen to this, right? Nah, what does the atheist brony know about the faith?! We want some real meaty bits to take in on this subject, dammit! Argument bits so meaty that they make you feel like you’re choking to death on a 72oz. steak of RAW TRUTH, with a side of BUTTERED FACTS AND LOGIC! AHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAA– [coughs uncontrollably]

Uh… Sorry. Moving on.

See, the religious part is only one part of this. When it comes to moral arguments, I hold the true centrist position when it comes to abortion: I do not care. I’m of the belief that I would never personally have an abortion (and would prefer my partners also not), but that if other people do want to have them, that’s their right, and not something for me to concerned with. Since this is a “moral gray zone” issue, and I have no desire to play to moral arguments on the subject of abortion anyway, ethics is what really needs to be talked about here.

An anti-abortion moral argument would state that a fetus is a person, and has the right to be kept alive through to birth as such. Now, this alone doesn’t hold up when you think about it for a minute. Picture, for a moment, a situation where someone is standing over a cliff, holding a 3-months-developed live fetus in one hand (we’re assuming it’s still, you know, alive in this hypothetical), and a 3-year-old named Billy in the other. This hypothetical person tells you to pick which one of the two they drop. I’m reasonably certain that everyone, in this scenario, would choose to save Billy. If a fetus were really a person, that would be closer to a 50/50 split.

BUT… Let’s go even further. For the sake of the argument, let’s say that, yes, fetuses are people, and they have full personhood. In that case, the best way to test the anti-abortion position is to think of a similar situation involving a grown person. How ’bout it?

The scene: I, an absolute moron, have just hopped in my car and gone driving up Highway 61 at half past midnight, after downing way too many liters of whiskey. I get my deeply drunk self to the Huey Long Bridge, drive up the wrong entry ramp, and promptly slam head-on into a fellow driver, surviving with only moderate injuries. A several-hours-long coma and a quick airlift to a Baton Rouge hospital later, I wake up to find that the person I played a game of automotive jousting with is barely clinging to life. They’re only able to do so because, while I was unconscious, the doctors discovered that we share a blood type, and decided to start transfusing my blood into them without my consent. If I tell them to stop pumping my blood into the victim of this crash, they’re guaranteed to die.

In this hypothetical scenario, I’m the one who’s entirely at fault for this ordeal. There’s no question as to how we got here. The question is: should the state (or even just the hospital) have the power to force me to keep this person alive against my will, using my bodily resources? I would say the answer is no, but I invite you to ask this question for yourself. When you do so, remember that this is a hypothetical where we assume the other party is a fully-grown adult; trying to apply this logic of personhood to afetus will take this argument into some very, very absurd philosophical territory.

With the religious, moral, and ethical arguments against abortion not standing up to scrutiny… well, what are we really left with?

We already know what the myriad negative effects are of denying abortions to pregnant women. It’s not irresponsible adult behavior to not have a child when you likely can’t afford to raise one, for reasons that should be fairly self-evident. Nor is it reasonable to demand that every prospective abortion-seeking mom instead bear the kid and put them up for adoption, not the least of the reasons being that dumping a millionnew children would cause our already-overburdened foster care system to collapse, especially without a sudden surge in adoptive parent candidates to accompany it. (EDIT FROM FUTURE HAWK: Now that I think about it... don'tcha think that it would help on that front to stop arbitrarily outlawing queer couples' ability to adopt? We already know that the kid would be as fine in that company as they would be with a straight couple.)

In short… there’s no big socioeconomic benefits to banning abortions either. So, really: what reason is there?

Like I said earlier, I want all of you, anti-abortion people who may be reading, to take some time out and ask yourselves: why do I believe this? Was this knee-jerk hatred for pregnancy termination a position you arrived at through some process of critical thinking, with all of the above factors in mind, or something you’ve been told to believe by the people you listen to? Be it the biblical literalist pastors who can only claim the Bible opposes abortion by engaging in some very tenuous interpretation, a political apparatus that found an easy issue to get you sloganeering about as a distraction, or anything else: what was it? Most of all: can you arrive at your current position after asking yourself all of the questions posed here?

Well, I hope you at least have an interesting answer. Maybe that’ll keep me from wanting to measure my ruler every time this subject comes up. See y’all later.

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hawkbitalpha · 3 years ago

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[REPOST, 2021] - "Kyle Rittenhouse as a symptom, not a cause"

(This was originally posted to my WordPress blog "Thoughts of the Free" in November 2021.)

Alright, overly long Steam break over. Let’s get the ball rolling on this blog.

Ever since I first heard the Kyle Rittenhouse trial was underway, I’ve been going out of my way to laboriously avoid any of the discourse surrounding it. That includes the fact that I also haven’t watched the trial at all. Now, why is this? Because, right after the Rittenhouse case first hit the news, I looked into the details of the killings, and figured that he had a strong enough case for self-defense to get off from at least those charges – I knew the outcome of this trial would, more or less, be a foregone conclusion. He ended up getting off on all of them, of course, but my overall take on him remains unchanged. This is for one simple reason:

The legal part of this case is a discussion I find to be extremely uninteresting. Whether Rittenhouse was too young to legally own a gun, broke state crossing laws, or met the legal threshold for self-defense, I don’t care. So, for everyone on both sides of the discourse who apparently went to law school and passed the bar exam in the last year since his killings, save your opinions about the court case for someone who actually gives a damn. (I will just stonewall you if you try to go there anyway.)

No, folks, the ideological part of this discourse is what really clicks with me. What happens to one Kyle Rittenhouse is effectively irrelevant to me, but since he’s the center of attention, let’s use him as the symbol of a larger issue, and dig in.

To start off, let’s get one very clear, but often-ignored fact out of the way: 93% of the BLM protests, by all measurements, have been peaceful. The fact that this known statistic has been out there for more than a year now, while the “common knowledge” of the right-wing mythology remains that “BLM and Antifa” are “burning American cities to the ground” as we speak, is a testament to how detached from reality one already has to be to think traveling to another city to “defend property” with armed force is a solid idea. There has never been a mass protest movement in the entire history of the world that didn’t involve some degree of violence (see: the 60s Civil Rights Movement and the many race riots associated with it, a la the “long, hot summer” of 1967; or, for analogues to Antifa: the Black Panthers or Deacons for Defense & Justice), meaning that anyone willing to give justification to armed opposition to BLM will also have to explain why they would justify brandishing guns against those civil rights protesters of days past. If you actually do want to be the one to defend the anti-protest actions of both Kyle Rittenhouse and the Klan in the same argument, though, be my guest.

Anyway, let’s keep riding this train of thought. What have we heard from Kyle Rittenhouse’s fans ever since he had his episode in Kenosha? That the people he killed deserved to die anyway, that “angels guided his bullets” (yes, that’s an actual quote from The Hake Report), that he’s a precious boy who deserves to be shielded from the media, that this case is so clear-cut that it shouldn’t even have gone to trial (that’s not how the legal system works), and so on. In more blunt words, for putting himself in a position to harm members of the political group that they don’t like, the American right-wing is celebrating this kid as a national hero, just as they have before with, among others, convicted killer Derek Chauvin (who, might I remind everyone at home, was so unambiguously in the wrong that he was a cop who managed to be convicted of murder) and the many rioters who attempted to overthrow the government at the Capitol at the start of this year.

Now, really, tell it to me straight: what does this all-consuming bloodlust say about the state of affairs of the Republican Party and company? Because I can tell you the message it broadcasts to me.

The common mantra about political discussions is that it’s alright to have disagreements of opinions as long as you both agree on what’s true, but here, we face another problem entirely: the American right-wing disagrees with the facts, andreality itself.What’s true, let alone what’s a correct belief, is only secondary to crushing what the divisive media has told them is their opposition (“owning the libs”, as it were in internet parlance), even if they have to spin a narrative to create the opposition themselves. So, naturally, if you take it all the way and kill your political opponents, who cares, as long as you’re convinced that you’ve just done good in the process?

The easiest way to get more Kyle Rittenhouses is to stay locked in this perpetual cycle of consuming rage piece after rage piece. For years, my dad would tell me to never listen to the media, because they’re out to divide us… and yet, he lets them do it. So many people, just like him, say they believe in looking beyond the media to the truth, only to gladly let their favorite TV host, online/alt media personality, Facebook influencer, or what-have-you get them stuck in a confirmation bias-laden, one-sided information silo.

So, to bring this meandering piece to a close, I want to ask a direct question to Kyle Rittenhouse’s fans: why, exactly, are you defending him? Is it on your own initiative, or is it because you’ve been told by your favorite source of confirmation that it’s the righteous thing to do? Once you’ve answered, I want you to ask yourself the same question about any other topic you may be focused on at the moment. Vaccines/COVID might be a good one to start. Be honest with yourself when you do.

This message goes for everyone reading as well. When you find yourself making a point, try to ask yourself the big question: “How did I learn this?” I know from experience that it can be hard to apply this rule to yourself on a regular basis, but trust me, it’ll make for a much healthier participation in politics, a field that’s already diseased enough as it is, both figuratively and literally.

…Oof, it’s now 2:25AM. I think that’s my cue to end this here. That’s all from me here.

PS: If you think Rittenhouse and his family are going to be able to launch an entire legal counter-campaign against the media for “slander”, I advise you to look into how hard it is to actually prove slander under the law.

PPS: Rittenhouse’s verdict wasn’t the only one that came out today. A disgraced Kansas City cop wasalso convicted todayfor the blatantly-unjust 2019 killing of Cameron Lamb. Just a little positive news on which to end this post of exasperation.

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hawkbitalpha · 3 years ago

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[REPOST, 2018] - "An open letter to the defender of anti-gay rights"

(This was originally posted to my blog on The Spongebob Community on September 29, 2018, following a series of arguments with The DS Guy on both Twitter and Discord regarding the Masterpiece Cakeshop court case.)

You just couldn’t leave it alone, could you?

Now outside of the live format, I have a much more in-depth response.

If your argument is that "the government shouldn’t be the thing to protect you from shit", the whole point of having laws is to protect you from shit. That’s partially the reason why assault, rape, and murder are illegal. Now, I’m not comparing this case to those things, but guess what?

It’s not an argument to bring up "government" as a pejorative. Or rather, in your case, it’s not an argument to constantly repeat the mantra "the government points a gun at your head". That’s what you think it is. You think that you can just say "THE GOVERNMENT! THEY POINT A GUN AT YOUR HEAD!", and then say "yep, that’s it! Obviously, whatever side the government is on is incorrect and tyrannical! Case closed, discussion over!" What I also find funny is that, in the context of making this broader argument about how the government should stay out, you admit that the government passed the Civil Rights Act to combat Jim Crow laws in the South. Yeah, that’s the point, isn’t it?

The question of "should someone be able to deny a black person a cake, or anything, just because they’re black?" formed the crux of the debate about the Southern position in the days of segregation, and in the days of Jim Crow. Their justification was "no, it’s our freedom to deny people for any reason we want, and if someone is black, we don’t have to serve their kind!" I would ask how this situation is any different. Your response, as of now, is that they were only specifically talking about race in this era.

Which, no, they weren’t. But let’s just say they were, for the sake of your argument. Guess what? There’s still no way for you to argue your way around the principle of that. The principle of what they were discussing in the era of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts is the same principle that applies today, when it comes to gay people. That, of course is "should you be able to deny people service for arbitrary characteristics that they’re powerless to change?" If I were to randomly decide that I don’t serve people with blue eyes, people would look at me, thinking that that’s the dumbest thing they’ve ever heard in their life. "That person can’t help it. Why would you discriminate on such a silly basis? That makes no sense."

The thing, Chris, is that nobody’s saying that, if, for example, someone comes into a store and starts knocking over shelves, you should be forced to serve the asshole who’s causing havoc. You’re well within your rights to kick that person out. Their destruction of store shelves is not an arbitrary characteristic that they can’t change. You can kick them out for that. The real crux of the issue is "should you be able to deny service to somebody for arbitrary characteristics that they can’t change?", and the government decided "no, you can’t." That’s what a protected class is!

Then, the fact that you had to bring up "should a non-Christian baker be forced to bake a cake with a Christian message" shows how you don’t understand the issue by any stretch of the imagination. Your choice of religion is not something you’re born with. Your choice of religion is not an arbitrary characteristic that you’re powerless to change. You choose what your faith is. If someone from the Taliban decided to come in your store, you’re well within your rights to refuse them as well. But if someone with blue eyes, brown skin, an attraction to the same sex came in, that’s not something they can change or help. Therefore, they’re a protected class, and they should be protected by law, and yes, the person should have to serve them.

It’s such a sloppy dodge to say "well, at the time of the Civil Rights Act, they were just specifically talking about race." First of all, they weren’t, and second, even if they were, the principle of that case still stands. If you admit that the principle of "you should serve somebody if they have an arbitrary characteristic that they can’t change" applies for black people, why wouldn’t that be the case for gay people as well?

By the way, for someone who claims to be so against identity politics, do you know who actually is playing identity politics in this case? Whoever would reject service to a gay person. That’s them playing identity politics. That’s them saying "I don’t like gay people, so I’ll single you out because of your identity." You’re siding with the people who play identity politics. You know who’s not? The gay people who want to be served, simply saying "treat me like you treat everyone else." That’s what they’re asking for. So, you’re playing identity politics if you side with the people who reject service based on identity.

Whether you like it or not, you have to understand what a protected class is. You have to understand that your bringing up of "the non-Christian baker vs. the Christian" in this context is ridiculous. Being of a certain faith is not an arbitrary characteristic you can’t change. Being black, white, or gay, all arbitrary characteristics you can’t change, whether you want to accept that fact or not.

To really show how backwards this "it’s freedom to deny service to people based on arbitrary characteristics" ideology is, all you have to do is imagine just a slightly-extreme scenario to realize what your true beliefs are on this issue. Back in the day, if a black family had a car breakdown in a predominantly-white area of Mississippi, imagine if they walked for 4 miles in 95-degree heat to a gas station, only to have the gas station employees tell them "we don’t serve your kind." Then they try to go to the diner next door, and the diner does the same. They can’t get food, a drink, gas, it’s 95 degrees outside, and no one will help them.

So, guess what? If you’re sticking by your principles on this issue (which, I’m quite convinced that you don’t have real principles by this point), you’d say "#FREEDOM! They have the freedom to deny those people." I would guess that most people, even most conservatives, given the facts of that situation, would say "you know what? You should have to serve them in that situation." That’s all anyone is saying. When it comes to gays? Exact same philosophy.

You shouldn’t be legally allowed to reject service based on arbitrary characteristics is the driving point here. That’s why we have protected classes, for people who’ve been historically discriminated against. Beyond that, the principle of "you shouldn’t be legally allowed to reject service based on arbitrary characteristics" is what matters, and that’s the correct principle, at least to people who actually care about living in a modern civilization.

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