This whole thing started because of the line, “It’s not all men, but it’s always a man.” I’ve given a number of circumstances where it’s definitively not a man, so is it always a man or not?

And I’d say his defense isn’t the defense he thinks it is. So now what?

Let’s say we could remove a fetus at conception and bring it to term, and it would be able to develop happily and healthily? Are abortions still okay? If so, being able to survive outside the host isn’t changing your stance, just your reasons. If not, then where does the obligation end? Who’s raising this child? Most abortions aren’t removed because the mother feels like she has a parasite, so what are we doing about those reasons? And why do you think those reasons only start once the fetus is viable?

Oh look, a stranger on the internet thinks he knows me!

I’ve been posing here for close to 2 years. Feel free to find one comment where I’ve said someone should not have access to abortions under any circumstances. I think having an abortion is a terrible choice, and the vast majority of people who choose to do so are putting in more thought and emotion than they do in choosing what to wear that day, and contraceptives are a better option if it is an option, but the person having an abortion and their care provider know far more about their circumstances than I do, and they’re in a far better position to make that choice than I am, and I’d rather they be able to have one in a proper facility than some sketchy place or means hidden from the authorities.

And just about none of us can survive alone. Even those who can were trained by others, all the way back to the start. If your threshold is needing someone else to help, where do you draw the line? Conception? 13 weeks? 27 weeks? Birth? Physical disability? Intellectual disability? Anencaphaly? Old age? When do people stop or start being people? What’s your cutoff line? Why?

If you’d gone with, say, the person no longer being obligated to care for the fetus, I would have kept scrolling. Perhaps you were implying that with your magical cutoff, but that cutoff changes all the time. This article puts the survival rate at 26 weeks at 89%, and the term extreme preterm refers to those born at less than 28 weeks. So why not 26 weeks? Why not 28?

My conclusion on your stance, with as much support as you had for your conclusion about mine, is that you picked a point that you feel comfortable with, where the easy answer lies. “Oh, this is when it could survive outside the mother, so she has options other than abortion at that point, so that’s where I’ll stop allowing it. I certainly won’t look at consciousness because then I might have to say it’s okay to kill people for the sake of convenience.” This smacks of the idea that hospitals will allow morphine administration to the point of relieving pain in terminal patients. Sure that might be higher than a fatal overdose in a healthy patient, but we didn’t assist in their death, we just helped with the pain. For the record, I’m perfectly fine with that if the patient wants it, I just don’t need to lie to myself and say the morphine isn’t making them die sooner than they would without it.

Edit: I swear I saw you say 27 weeks. The point still stands.

You can try as much as you like to excuse women from responsibility for killing their partners, but the fact of the matter is, women can be just as ruthless as men, just usually in different ways.

Maternal infanticide is still a thing, and a “pediatric study of mothers in the general population found that 70% of mothers with colicky infants experienced explicit aggressive thoughts toward their infants, and over a quarter (26%) of them had infanticidal thoughts during colic episodes”. So, 26% of these kind and loving creatures thought of killing their own child because they cried a lot.

There is a gender disparity, and a much greater difference in expression, but if you want to deal with the root causes of violence, you will have to look beyond gender.

And no, I don’t have a pile of these saved up. I’m just willing to accept that people are people, regardless of gender or a myriad of other demographics, unless a clear link is shown between the demographic and the behavior being examined. The trend towards being shitty has far greater factors than gender.

So how are burrowing animals doing? I’ve seen pretty pictures of deer and trees, how are the rabbits and foxes? What are their lifespans compared to those in other regions?

Just because the animals don’t look like cutscenes from The 100 doesn’t mean their life is idyllic, or even better than elsewhere. And all those animals are eating food grown in irradiated ground. Now, whether that’s better or worse than microplastics and fossil fuel waste and leakage is another interesting question.

Earth is the host.

We all need something external to survive. I’m pro-choice, but this is a broken argument. It does segue nicely into a discussion about socialism and communism, though.

It also caused a bunch of Russian soldiers to get sick because they dug holes in the ground. It isn’t a nuclear paradise, and I’m not interested in Chernobyl-grown food, but it isn’t a complete wasteland, either.

Atomic transmutation is never easy, and the only thing that really scales is a nuclear reactor. And not just any nuclear reactor will do - breeder reactors are the only ones that make it in any quantity. If you want to make this using a cyclotron or with centrifuges, a lot of the diagnoses and treatments we take for granted today will be almost completely inaccessible and only available to the very wealthy.

If you want to find out what the average person thinks, polls from 1000 to 5000 people work. If you want to educate the average person or get the opinions of already-educated people, those are different tasks.

I generally agree, given that geothermal and solar keep getting cheaper, and now cost less than nuclear or are at least competitive, but nuclear plants do more than just provide energy. Where do you think medical isotopes come from?

So the boycott was pointless, as indicated. I also saw people saying they were going to boycott InBev, and they clearly had an impact for some period of time, along with the Bud Light boycotters, yet here we are. Also, you mentioned InBev, not Bud Light.

InBev stock is up 1.6% over the last year. If you’d bought stocks this January, you would have made about 30% profit.

This is pretty much me. Used RIF, when it stopped working, I stopped going there regularly. Took a couple weeks to completely kick the habit, and a year of occasional use via search engines, never even bothering to log in. Now I almost never go there. I’ll head there as a last resort if a search engine can’t find me a useful alternative for what I’m looking for.

I enjoyed this comment thread enough for the joke to be worth it imo.

First, I love how you got upvotes for saying, “I didn’t bother even trying to find any evidence before posting.” But that’s not on you.

Second, murders are usually followed up on in the developed world, at least to some degree.

Here’s a BBC article. 20% in the UK (I found other regions with higher amounts, but I’m okay with this one). Note also that we are talking about something that is incredibly unlikely. 30,000 deaths worldwide per year of women in relationships by their partners. Assuming half of adult women worldwide are in relationships and noting there are about 6 billion adults gives 1.5 billion women in relationships. Note that the country with the highest rate of singles for both sexes is at 25%, so this is pretty conservative. That is a 2 in a million chance per year. Assuming women are in relationships for 60 years because, why not, puts your risk at 120 in a million of being killed by a partner over your lifetime. That is about 1.2 in 10,000, which is about 10 times as likely as dying from general anesthetic.

So now that we’ve determined that 1.2 in 10,000 men are killing their partners, and I will happily acknowledge that domestic violence is much more prevalent as long as you acknowledge that depending on region, 40% of victims of spousal violence are men (279000÷(432000+279000)), why would we waste our time targeting men for awareness of spousal violence when most men aren’t doing it and a significant part of the people who are doing it aren’t men?

So we have a problem that is done by a tiny minority of one demographic, and a third as many of the population that aren’t part of that demographic, yet you insist that demographic is the key factor in the problem at hand, and I’m supposed to believe I, who haven’t committed this act, am a part of the problem.

If you want to keep believing that the core issue is that men (or generally people with high testosterone) tend to be more violent, is the key issue, and not that there are people of either gender who wish to treat others as objects and believe their feelings are more important than other people’s well-being, well, who am I to stop you? But you might find it easier to teach people that other people have agency and as many rights as them than you will trying to teach men that being a man is a problem. And you might reach 33% more people at risk of engaging in spousal violence than if you just look at men.

As for the whataboutism, I’m speaking of spousal violence, in which you and the person in the article seem to believe only happens in one direction in any significant amount.

While studiously ignoring 25% of the problem. Gotcha.

Well, I guess if only one in four of these “always men” are women, that doesn’t count.

That’s a very hyperbolic statement, and studies suggest about a quarter of spousal murders are committed by women. Closer to 3 in 8 in America.

He’s talking about the hardware and you’re talking about the software.