What HAS been said is that there is NO word to describe white people in a negative way that carries the derogatory nature of n----- because of historical and current cultural connotations of power and supremacy.
i. I'm arguing in favor of racial profiling. People conclude that race is not a inherent factor for crime and racial profiling was part of the methodology to prove it. I will rather profile people and disprove racist beliefs then otherwise.
I'm not sure I understand your meaning here. Coincidentally, I read a really good blog post the other day about profiling, so here's that. The point is that it's not racist to observe through rigorous testing that (e.g.) a certain ethnic population has a higher or lower incidence of something than the general population. This ties in with your second point: it's not racist to observe that Native Americans have a higher propensity for alcoholism, or that Africans have a higher propensity for sickle-cell anemia. In fact, that sort of thing is crucial for disease-control efforts.
It's incorrect (and unethical, I think) to turn that around and assume that if a person is Native American, then that person will become an alcoholic. Or that if a person is a black American, then that person will engage in criminal activity. It's incorrect even if it's rigorously confirmed that black people have lower self-control, for example. Because the proper course of action is to correct people who have low self-control, not black people.
ii. Depends for what the data is being used for. If you're using macro data to make security policies or social policies, focusing on race is a stupid move, since you already have info that x_1 is not important. But there are other cases were "A(x_1 = Black)" could be useful. When you have imperfect data of a individual (like, you don't know his income) and you know, in that region, x_1 is correlated to the useful data, then you could use x_1 as proxy.
So it's okay to be wrong as an individual, but not as an institution? Bollocks. Individuals write and enforce policies, so there can't be any practical distinction there. Better to know (e.g.) where the bad neighborhoods are, and how to spot suspicious behavior, not to fixate on someone's skin or costume.
Take for instance my point about the post 9/11 anti-muslim racial profiling.
Skin color is almost not the issue. After all, they could be Greek, Hispanic, Indian, or a number of possibilities based on skin color alone...
It's when you add the clothes, facial hair, maybe even spoken language, etc. that the "Muslim terrorist" associations begin.
It really becomes racism, I think, when the judgment starts bleeding into "people/qualities I don't like." For example, the classification of the Irish as "negroes." Really putting the "prejudge" in "prejudice." (Anti-Muslim prejudice can be racist in the US because people stupidly think all Muslims are Arabs and vice versa. Europeans may or may not be that dumb.)
Again, racial profiling is just badly applied induction.
I don't like racism either, but I hesitate to lump racial profiling - and racism together with strong connectivity.
One might call racial profiling "soft racism," but I think you're right in that they can be two different processes. Certainly a racist will racially profile. But I think well-meaning people can racially profile without holding racist beliefs.
If we going into a probit-logit experiement too see if 'x1=black' raises someone's chances of being a criminal, we could find that it actually doesn't. Some chance of doing crime could be explained by all other variables.
Still, saying that A chance of commiting a crime is bigger if ' A's x1=black' would still be true. Because x1=black is correlated to other variables that increase he's chance of being a criminal.
Looking for blackness is a heuristic, yeah. But see, if x_i to x_j are the real causal factors behind criminal activity, it's a bad choice to focus on the population that share "x_1 = black". You miss more other criminals, and hit more innocents.
Other sorts of "profiling" aren't so problematic. Location profiling, for example: if you're moving through an area known for a high crime rate, you're fairly justified in being suspicious of anyone you see, especially ones loitering.
Does racial profiling also include cases where there is, let's say, a string of burglaries are occurring in a given neighborhood and the entire burglary crew is believed to be one color, gender and age so you pay particular attention to that color, gender and age? Because if so, I'm all for that.
Depends on what you mean by "believed." If it's belief based on evidence---say, security camera footage---then you've got some individual characteristics to work off of. Otherwise (witness says it was a bunch of black kids robbing the store) you're on shakier ground.
I think saying they just want to punish women for having sex is a little out of bounds here...
It certainly isn't fair to say that any anti-abortion position is necessarily pro-punishing-sexually-active-women---clearly a stance of banning abortions but massively ramping sex education and contraception availability would be just such a position. However, you can read and hear all sorts of statements from (e.g.) legislators who are crafting and proposing actual anti-abortion bills.
Stuff about how a woman can't actually get pregnant from a "legitimate rape." Implying, of course, that if a woman gets pregnant, she must've wanted the sex.
Stuff about how contraceptives are for ****s, or how the best form of birth control is "an asprin between the knees."
These aren't isolated. You get these sorts of statements any time someone gets questioned about some crazy personhood amendment or no-rape-exceptions abortion ban.
And unfortunately a baby born into poverty, to an abusive parent, to a single mother, to teenage parents, etc. won't have great chances of becoming the next Einstein (scientist) or Gandhi (lawyer). We should probably have a robust social safety net before calling for superbreeders.
I think it's tacitly understood that an anarchic society would be, on the whole, smaller in both size and productive capacity than the nation-states of today. Some people think that's a plus.
There are also versions of anti-statist leftism that don't go all the way to pure anarchy, and also accept the realities of markets as useful tools. They tend to object to the hierarchical capitalist model of the firm (and the state) and think every business will be a worker collective. Which, I suppose, is fair enough...
I don't think markets necessarily require currency---you can surely get a market with barter alone---but money does make things flow much more smoothly. I think you're right, though, in pointing out that markets can't function if property rights are abolished.
How is saying I'm religious and I would like society to conform more to the tenants of the religion I believe in not justifying it?
That's justifying your support of one thing or another, but not the thing itself. As a justification for the thing itself, it's basically "because I want it." Again, fine for justifying support, but you need to use different reasons to convince other people.
Nobody's saying you need to abandon your principles, it just may be that other people won't find your principles convincing when it comes to supporting stuff.
Sorry BS but that is really unfair. One of the perks of living in a democracy is that you can try and change the prevailing morality of the country you live in by exercising influence on the laws of the country. For the religious person they would like to promote a morality more in line with their religion. For the secularist it maybe a morality more in line with the views of secular humanism or their personal moral compass.
A moral code is a good impetus for trying to change the law, but it's not sufficient justification for the actual change. At that point you need to make broader appeals than just "my morality says so" or "the Bible says so."
In the case of this specific issue, there should be another reason besides religion for a 20-week abortion limit.
The point being made is that its not a "clear cut" line when that happens that applies across the board to everyone in every situation. "20 weeks" is not some clear delineation in every pregnancy were something undeniable happens to the fetus, but the law has to have a clear line.
The problem with the laws-as-proposed is that they are usually intended to be quite hard, with lots of handwringing over "what if the mother's life is in danger?"
But anyway, suppose we set a 20-week line, with the obvious exemption for medical necessity. Then I think we'd be over-legislating, since elective abortions usually happen pretty early (majority 9 weeks or less), and doctors would almost certainly not go through with elective late-term abortions (100% in the case of fetus-killing abortions) on the grounds that it would put the fetus at risk... until the point at which it stops being an "abortion" and starts being a C-section.
I think anti-abortion activists sort of realize that 20 weeks wouldn't stop many abortions, so they try things like transvaginal ultrasound requirements, highly restrictive rules for abortion clinics (with the express intent of driving them out of the state), and "heartbeat" bills. And Quixotic fetal-personhood amendment proposals.
I personally think there may be some ignorance here, but in most cases they want to give parents more say in these matters. IE they are trying to get the schools to NOT legislate morality (IE say sex is ok behavior for 12 year olds).
Um, pretty sure it doesn't say that. I'm pretty sure that comprehensive sex ed usually follows a continuum of "these are the parts of your body" to "your body is changing and you might feel a certain way" to "these changes and feelings are healthy" to (and this is by high school) "these are the consequences of acting on your feelings, don't feel pressured to do anything you don't want to do, and here's how to be safe if you so choose." Lots of "choice" language. Not telling 8-year-olds that they're actually transgender, or telling 12-year-olds to start having sex.
An ultrasound image of the fetus is perfectly pertinent to the matter. I can understand objecting to undergoing an extra procedure you didn't sign up for (even if it is just an ultrasound). But when pro-choicers start going on about how this is manipulative, I start to sense an undercurrent of willful ignorance - "How dare you try to inform me?"
Indeed, if the decision to undergo an abortion is to be undertaken rationally, as one would hope it would be, then presumably one would want the maximum amount of relevant information available before the decision point. However, I don't see what relevant information the sonogram would provide that is not readily available without a sonogram.
I think the following argument has at least some credence: if the idea of the mandatory sonogram is to inform the mother planning to abort about the rationally-quantifiable medical properties of the fetus -- that it is alive, moving, and has certain features -- then that information is readily available for free in any number of books, Web sites, brochures, et cetera without the need to perform any medical procedure at all or to bear the attendent expense. To that extent it is an unnecessary procedure.
Sometimes the response to that is to point out that all of that information is clinical and does not establish the desired emotional connection between that particular mother and her particular baby -- but that, I think, falls under the "manipulative" heading.
The most common reasons for abortion seem relatively independent of knowledge about the fetus, and again, most abortions happen within 9 weeks. It's worth noting that transvaginal ultrasound is the only such procedure that works within this interval.
limecat and Blinking Spirit pretty much already answered that. The number of people in favor of an abortion drop as the baby develops; lots of people are ok with it at 10 weeks, not a lot are ok with it at 30. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and '20' became the number.
Does it though? I think the line is de facto there even without a specific law: after a certain point the chances of a woman with a perfectly healthy fetus deciding "naaaaah" and wanting it out become vanishingly small. Moreover, a physician's code of ethics would prevent wanton killing of viable fetuses, since in that case abortion would be (more or less) elective surgery. Finally, the best way to prevent abortions is to prevent conception in the first place, through liberal availability of birth control, condoms, and sex education. Unfortunately the intersection between anti-abortion and anti-sex is pretty strong.
I believe for this discussion that's a question beg.
What, that "the right to termination of pregnancy" is, in fact, a right? Oh, maybe. I think I advanced my argument for why I believe that in a different thread... if I can find it, I'll link it.
I guess in the interim I could rephrase it as a question: given a procedure that ends a pregnancy but does not kill the baby, would that also be acceptable or is there a deeper moral problem than "murder of babies"?
Suppose that someone invented a fully artificial uterus that could carry a fetus or embryo or zygote to term. Does that make everything viable?
Well, yes; and assuming it's on par with a human uterus, I would expect most women would opt for the robo-womb simply because pregnancy and birth is really a physically taxing experience, and fraught with risk.
In such a world, "abortion" would sort of lose a lot of its meaning, since every fetus could be brought to term. Then the real debate would just be over the question of euthanasia when the fetus is fatally disabled.
From a moral perspective, it's an entirely arbitrary line that has nothing to do with the state of the fetus and everything to do with where our technology has reached. Given that, it seems to me that "viability with the aid of everything we can throw at it" is a useless metric for determining whether it's okay to end the pregnancy.
Again, I think there are two parts to an abortion. One part is removing the fetus. The other part is killing the fetus, and that part is optional. It's also worth noting that elective abortions are vanishingly rare past the "line of viability," so I don't think this changes much. Late-term abortions are almost entirely for health-based reasons.
The view that science is not adept at garnish us with morality is not actually a view on morality per se. It has more to do with what sort of issues science concerns itself with. The limits of science is very much real.
[citation needed]
There's a fuzzy line between science and philosophy. Not that science shouldn't inform philosophy, but science can't really decide morality in the same way that philosophy might be able to.
Unfortunately, this is not always true. People are suing the government over the Obamacare birth-control rule, calling Plan B an "abortifacient," along with other life-begins-at-conception stuff. There is no upper bound but zero, according to them.
Why not? Yes, science seeks to answer what is. But morality is unavoidably tied to what is. If we value some things like "life", "liberty", and "happiness" but are increasingly plagued by difficult corner cases: abortion, euthanasia, privacy, and so forth, we have to disambiguate what those words actually mean in the actual world.
And who do you think has authority over issues of what should be?
Right, but science doesn't really have the power to make normative judgments. That's the job of the philosophers... who, to be fair, ignore scientific knowledge at their peril.
Before this thread gets too far gone, can we clarify something?
"Abortion" means "termination of pregnancy"... it does not always mean "killing the fetus/baby." A woman should always have the right to terminate her pregnancy. Then, if the baby is viable, it's still her responsibility to provide for its care, unless she goes through the process of relinquishing responsibility to some other party. Note that any doctor worth a grain of ethical salt would never kill a viable fetus. All these late-term fetus-killing abortions are done on fetuses with, e.g., no brain in their skulls.
But even without that distinction, there are always going to be rare complications that render the fetus fatally disabled or dead. A woman should not be forced to wait (and really, neither should the fetus) until the fetus comes to term. It literally prolongs suffering of two beings, and that's just wrong, I think.
As someone from outside the US, I personally regard the man as on par with Vanunu. How anyone can justify dragnet scale invasions of privacy is beyond me.
"Criticizing the actions and motives of Edward Snowden" is in no sense equivalent to "justifying dragnet scale invasions of privacy." Also France (and almost certainly every other country with sufficient resources) does this sort of thing too, but notably without even the on-paper attempt to screen out domestic targets. This is all legal, so there's a harder conversation to have about the tension between privacy and security.
Hero is the wrong word, but the USA has committed a lot of horrible atrocities in the past, and without people like Snowden we might never learn about them.
I would rather that people pushed for a robust and widely-distributed system of accountability rather than settle for a piecemeal system of individual, fallible leakers. I don't want any single person making the call as to what information is worth leaking to the public. But I do want things made known.
Ecological argument: You can't eat local and be vegan at the same time.
Your point about local foods is a bit off, I think. Or rather, it works individually but not in aggregate. Brian Dunning has a fewgoodpieces about this. But you're definitely right that there is a tension there.
Moral argument: This is based on the arbitrary and completely made-up notion that somehow plants are special in their inability to suffer. There is no scientific evidence to back up the notion, period. There IS scientific evidence to back up the notion that mollusks and other brainless, spineless creatures CAN'T suffer. There's also absolutely no scientific evidence to back up the fact that a creature killed instantaneously DOES suffer.
My thoughts exactly, I just wanted to make sure I correctly understood the framing of the argument.
The sheer amount of effort you have to expend to develop a vegan diet that nets you a complete set of vitamins, EFAs, EAAS, enzymes, minerals, co-factors, and other micronutrients seems overwhelming and silly when you can get the same spread in almost any non-desert environment on Earth if you're willing to eat what grows there naturally.
Yeah, I prefer all food groups in moderation myself.
Hm. I've heard that houle is pretty close when used against whites in Hawaii. They have a pretty severe race problem over there.
Yep, that quote was from me, not ICM. So to respond...
I'm not sure I understand your meaning here. Coincidentally, I read a really good blog post the other day about profiling, so here's that. The point is that it's not racist to observe through rigorous testing that (e.g.) a certain ethnic population has a higher or lower incidence of something than the general population. This ties in with your second point: it's not racist to observe that Native Americans have a higher propensity for alcoholism, or that Africans have a higher propensity for sickle-cell anemia. In fact, that sort of thing is crucial for disease-control efforts.
It's incorrect (and unethical, I think) to turn that around and assume that if a person is Native American, then that person will become an alcoholic. Or that if a person is a black American, then that person will engage in criminal activity. It's incorrect even if it's rigorously confirmed that black people have lower self-control, for example. Because the proper course of action is to correct people who have low self-control, not black people.
Especially profiling for criminal behavior, this sort of missing the mark just incentivizes the criminals to start diversity hiring.
So it's okay to be wrong as an individual, but not as an institution? Bollocks. Individuals write and enforce policies, so there can't be any practical distinction there. Better to know (e.g.) where the bad neighborhoods are, and how to spot suspicious behavior, not to fixate on someone's skin or costume.
And if it doesn't work for institutions, why should we expect it to work any better for individuals?
It really becomes racism, I think, when the judgment starts bleeding into "people/qualities I don't like." For example, the classification of the Irish as "negroes." Really putting the "prejudge" in "prejudice." (Anti-Muslim prejudice can be racist in the US because people stupidly think all Muslims are Arabs and vice versa. Europeans may or may not be that dumb.)
One might call racial profiling "soft racism," but I think you're right in that they can be two different processes. Certainly a racist will racially profile. But I think well-meaning people can racially profile without holding racist beliefs.
Looking for blackness is a heuristic, yeah. But see, if x_i to x_j are the real causal factors behind criminal activity, it's a bad choice to focus on the population that share "x_1 = black". You miss more other criminals, and hit more innocents.
Other sorts of "profiling" aren't so problematic. Location profiling, for example: if you're moving through an area known for a high crime rate, you're fairly justified in being suspicious of anyone you see, especially ones loitering.
Depends on what you mean by "believed." If it's belief based on evidence---say, security camera footage---then you've got some individual characteristics to work off of. Otherwise (witness says it was a bunch of black kids robbing the store) you're on shakier ground.
It certainly isn't fair to say that any anti-abortion position is necessarily pro-punishing-sexually-active-women---clearly a stance of banning abortions but massively ramping sex education and contraception availability would be just such a position. However, you can read and hear all sorts of statements from (e.g.) legislators who are crafting and proposing actual anti-abortion bills.
Stuff about how a woman can't actually get pregnant from a "legitimate rape." Implying, of course, that if a woman gets pregnant, she must've wanted the sex.
Stuff about how contraceptives are for ****s, or how the best form of birth control is "an asprin between the knees."
These aren't isolated. You get these sorts of statements any time someone gets questioned about some crazy personhood amendment or no-rape-exceptions abortion ban.
There are also versions of anti-statist leftism that don't go all the way to pure anarchy, and also accept the realities of markets as useful tools. They tend to object to the hierarchical capitalist model of the firm (and the state) and think every business will be a worker collective. Which, I suppose, is fair enough...
I don't think markets necessarily require currency---you can surely get a market with barter alone---but money does make things flow much more smoothly. I think you're right, though, in pointing out that markets can't function if property rights are abolished.
That's justifying your support of one thing or another, but not the thing itself. As a justification for the thing itself, it's basically "because I want it." Again, fine for justifying support, but you need to use different reasons to convince other people.
Nobody's saying you need to abandon your principles, it just may be that other people won't find your principles convincing when it comes to supporting stuff.
A moral code is a good impetus for trying to change the law, but it's not sufficient justification for the actual change. At that point you need to make broader appeals than just "my morality says so" or "the Bible says so."
In the case of this specific issue, there should be another reason besides religion for a 20-week abortion limit.
The problem with the laws-as-proposed is that they are usually intended to be quite hard, with lots of handwringing over "what if the mother's life is in danger?"
But anyway, suppose we set a 20-week line, with the obvious exemption for medical necessity. Then I think we'd be over-legislating, since elective abortions usually happen pretty early (majority 9 weeks or less), and doctors would almost certainly not go through with elective late-term abortions (100% in the case of fetus-killing abortions) on the grounds that it would put the fetus at risk... until the point at which it stops being an "abortion" and starts being a C-section.
I think anti-abortion activists sort of realize that 20 weeks wouldn't stop many abortions, so they try things like transvaginal ultrasound requirements, highly restrictive rules for abortion clinics (with the express intent of driving them out of the state), and "heartbeat" bills. And Quixotic fetal-personhood amendment proposals.
Um, pretty sure it doesn't say that. I'm pretty sure that comprehensive sex ed usually follows a continuum of "these are the parts of your body" to "your body is changing and you might feel a certain way" to "these changes and feelings are healthy" to (and this is by high school) "these are the consequences of acting on your feelings, don't feel pressured to do anything you don't want to do, and here's how to be safe if you so choose." Lots of "choice" language. Not telling 8-year-olds that they're actually transgender, or telling 12-year-olds to start having sex.
You'd be surprised how many people are convinced otherwise.
I doubt that has a causal effect. Poor people have more kids with or without welfare. I don't think mandatory anything is the way to go either.
It's also the kind of ultrasound procedure legislators want to force women to undergo (and pay for).
The most common reasons for abortion seem relatively independent of knowledge about the fetus, and again, most abortions happen within 9 weeks. It's worth noting that transvaginal ultrasound is the only such procedure that works within this interval.
Does it though? I think the line is de facto there even without a specific law: after a certain point the chances of a woman with a perfectly healthy fetus deciding "naaaaah" and wanting it out become vanishingly small. Moreover, a physician's code of ethics would prevent wanton killing of viable fetuses, since in that case abortion would be (more or less) elective surgery. Finally, the best way to prevent abortions is to prevent conception in the first place, through liberal availability of birth control, condoms, and sex education. Unfortunately the intersection between anti-abortion and anti-sex is pretty strong.
That and most abortions happen well before 20 weeks anyway.
What, that "the right to termination of pregnancy" is, in fact, a right? Oh, maybe. I think I advanced my argument for why I believe that in a different thread... if I can find it, I'll link it.
I guess in the interim I could rephrase it as a question: given a procedure that ends a pregnancy but does not kill the baby, would that also be acceptable or is there a deeper moral problem than "murder of babies"?
Related:
Well, yes; and assuming it's on par with a human uterus, I would expect most women would opt for the robo-womb simply because pregnancy and birth is really a physically taxing experience, and fraught with risk.
In such a world, "abortion" would sort of lose a lot of its meaning, since every fetus could be brought to term. Then the real debate would just be over the question of euthanasia when the fetus is fatally disabled.
Again, I think there are two parts to an abortion. One part is removing the fetus. The other part is killing the fetus, and that part is optional. It's also worth noting that elective abortions are vanishingly rare past the "line of viability," so I don't think this changes much. Late-term abortions are almost entirely for health-based reasons.
There's a fuzzy line between science and philosophy. Not that science shouldn't inform philosophy, but science can't really decide morality in the same way that philosophy might be able to.
Unfortunately, this is not always true. People are suing the government over the Obamacare birth-control rule, calling Plan B an "abortifacient," along with other life-begins-at-conception stuff. There is no upper bound but zero, according to them.
Right, but science doesn't really have the power to make normative judgments. That's the job of the philosophers... who, to be fair, ignore scientific knowledge at their peril.
"Abortion" means "termination of pregnancy"... it does not always mean "killing the fetus/baby." A woman should always have the right to terminate her pregnancy. Then, if the baby is viable, it's still her responsibility to provide for its care, unless she goes through the process of relinquishing responsibility to some other party. Note that any doctor worth a grain of ethical salt would never kill a viable fetus. All these late-term fetus-killing abortions are done on fetuses with, e.g., no brain in their skulls.
But even without that distinction, there are always going to be rare complications that render the fetus fatally disabled or dead. A woman should not be forced to wait (and really, neither should the fetus) until the fetus comes to term. It literally prolongs suffering of two beings, and that's just wrong, I think.
"Criticizing the actions and motives of Edward Snowden" is in no sense equivalent to "justifying dragnet scale invasions of privacy." Also France (and almost certainly every other country with sufficient resources) does this sort of thing too, but notably without even the on-paper attempt to screen out domestic targets. This is all legal, so there's a harder conversation to have about the tension between privacy and security.
I would rather that people pushed for a robust and widely-distributed system of accountability rather than settle for a piecemeal system of individual, fallible leakers. I don't want any single person making the call as to what information is worth leaking to the public. But I do want things made known.
Your point about local foods is a bit off, I think. Or rather, it works individually but not in aggregate. Brian Dunning has a few good pieces about this. But you're definitely right that there is a tension there.
My thoughts exactly, I just wanted to make sure I correctly understood the framing of the argument.
Oh, sure. But all other things being equal, "I don't much like the taste" is a good reason to not eat something. If things change, they change.
Yeah, I prefer all food groups in moderation myself.