Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
NOTE: use Perl; is on undef hiatus. You can read content, but you can't post it. More info will be forthcoming forthcomingly.

All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Official sig discussion thread 6 Comments More | Login | Reply /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More | Login | Reply
Loading... please wait.
  • Did you know that the display of sigs can be disabled ?

    I'd be happy to discuss this, and I even understand the words "litmus test", but, being unfamiliar with the US political system, I don't know what a court nominee actually is and what role he has in voting or amending laws.

    Besides this, I've already explained my opinion somewhere : a law is not necessarily a bad law even if it's morally wrong or repelling. It's a bad law when it fails to help citizens. The point is : does abortion help citizens ? If so,

    • I don't want abortion to be made illegal, because this won't prevent efficiently illegal abortions -- this will only make them more dangerous.

      If we are to say that abortion is the taking of an innocent human life (that is, the subjugation of one human's rights by another), how is this different from, "I don't want slavery to be made illegal, because this won't prevent efficiently illegal enslavements -- this will only make them more dangerous"? Or s/abortion/$insert_crime_here/?

      I am not asking anyone to
      • > the abortion issue, like the slavery issue, will
        > never, ever, go away until abortion is illegal.

        or maybe when birth control is so easy and perfect that nobody ever has children unless they want them. It would also be nice if all new parents had at least as much preparation as we require of new drivers or gun owners.

        -matt

        • No, it won't go away in that case. As I already said, the very notion that it is *legal* to abort my child, with whom I am communicating, with whom I am playing, is an affront to humanity. Whether or not anyone is being aborted, if it is legal to abort that life, that means that we are devaluing that life, and it is not acceptable.

          It would be great if there were no unwanted pregnancies. But it wouldn't make the problem go away, because these principles, how we define life and humanity, how we codify the
          • I'm with pudge there. A society might allow slavery and have no slaves -- this doesn't solve the problem that slavery is still legal in it. The problem is how we define life and humanity. Three centuries ago, black people were not, to most occidentals, humans, and thus slavery was morally acceptable for them. Now that child mortality is very low, our society learned to view humans in little children, but this doesn't extend to foetuses, not for everyone at least, mainly because a foetus is not an independent organism. Foetuses are a scary subject, and abortion only one side of it. I expect more and more related problems to appear in the next few centuries as medical knowledge progresses. No doubt our definition of life and humanity will evolve, in one sense or another.
Stories, comments, journals, and other submissions on use Perl; are Copyright 1998-2006, their respective owners.