We do have those here in France (well, for murder at least) so I was trying to take a look at Indian law and then I remembered I can’t read

Nuremberg pretty conclusively established that the one true war crime is losing.

I am deeply amused by this little battle. (The location is a few blocks from the house where I grew up, though golly gee whiz it’s gentrified since I was a kid…)

http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/03/06/25006645/this-amazing-sign-just-appeared-on-the-fence-surrounding-the-capitol-hill-light-rail-station

What, are you disputing the guilt of the convicted in those trials?

How many people on the allied side were convicted?

That’s an example of realpolitik, not kangaroo courts.

…I knew…

And I here thought it was *my* sarcasm-detector that was broken…

…Also, I can tell that four people have done this, so yay, but I’m just going to keep leaving it here. http://tab.gladly.io/?r=11141785

I don’t think anybody knew that your Alison-hating persona was ironic until this post. This information casts a lot of your previous comments in a new light, but it’s not surprising that people found them abrasive when they thought you were serious, is it? I completely understand why you’re hurt by people upvoting a post that’s meanspirited toward you, but I think you will see their opinions about you shift dramatically if you make it more obvious when you’re being ironic.

That’s fair. I shouldn’t speak for everyone. Better indicators of irony might not always be enough to shift the opinions of people with whom Clem has had adversarial interactions. They have said some unkind things to me as well, and I’m still not sure how many of those were secretly satirical.

Yes, there’s a pretty big difference between “I have a persona” and “I have an aggressive persona which you should know better than to take seriously and if something I say bothers you, that’s your problem, not mine.”

I don’t believe you. You are either bullshitting now in order to keep your troll-plates spinning, or the least successful practitioner of irony I’ve ever seen.

This is great to know!

What I’ve been doing is, if you click on their username it takes you to their profile, and block is an option if you click on the “…” link. I had no idea about the dropdown directly from a post 🙂

Also Trump.

I think it’s pretty clear that this is a mischaracterization, but I interpreted this as “Clem used something obviously wrong because it’s funny.”

I’m gonna be completely honest with you here, I don’t think your satire is being read as such by anyone. I’ve seen you argue your points very passionately in a way that doesn’t suggest to me that you are being disingenuous. Perhaps if you are playing ‘devil’s advocate’ it would be helpful to preface your comment with some kind of indicator because it isn’t reading as such. Right now it’s just coming off like you’re saying something inflammatory then hiding behind a wall of comedy when you get called out on it.

Seconded – The first few posts were like “uhm…” but I soon realized that Clem and I share a bit of an evil sense of humor and a difficulty with taking anything too seriously or with proper respect.

But yeah, I get why some / many folks read it otherwise.

Given the structure of Clem’s nickname, I’m wondering if they’re French. This isn’t just idle speculation–French satire is very much built around the notion of being an ultra-extreme version of what you’re mocking, and holding to the satirical pose at all costs. (This became an issue after the terror attacks on Charlie Hebdo, when after the initial wave of sympathy, people began looking at some of the covers of the magazine, and not realizing that yes, they were satire. Without that context, they come across as amazingly racist and Islamophobic.) A key part is to play it ‘straight’–you never deliberately highlight the absurdities and hypocrisy of your pretended positions, instead letting others realize it, and then realize how horrible the views you’re satirizing must be.

You see this very rarely in English-language satire, especially taken to that extreme. The closest in modern times would be the Colbert Report, which deliberately undercut the satire by being patently ridiculous (instead of just playing awful views straight). The only other English-satire model I can think of of that nature would be, of course, Swift’s A Modest Proposal. And it didn’t work as well in English as it would’ve in France, historically–at the time, far too many people thought the suggestion that the Irish poor should be selling their children as foodstock for the English aristocracy was dead serious.

The problem is that now we know you’re attempting to be subtly ironic and wrong-foot the rest of the discussion with tongue-in-cheek satire, we can’t tell when you’re actually employing that tactic and when you’re trying to be serious.

Like many others on these boards I was entirely unaware that you were maintaining a satirical persona and position throughout. Some few of your posts read as satire to me, but only the odd one every so often; not enough by any stretch to have led me to intuit from them that your entire presented position was a false one! And certainly not one meant for amusement as opposed to, say, attempting to troll. The limitations of text-based communication combined with a completely deadpan delivery that doesn’t appear to differ much from your legitimate points. Especially for those of us who came to the comments section later (and around the time of several large blowout arguments!). Even now it’s impossible for me to tell, for example, whether your original post was the satirical version, or whether the phrase “I actually genuinely like and relate to her” is actually the backhanded joke, after all. Your sincere commentaries are just too similar.

Yeah. that just makes my opinion of them go *down*.

“Haha I was just joking all along” is the standard cop-out of people who enjoy upsetting others but can’t cope with the response. If they didn’t mean it, they were still not doing it as parody, they were doing it in order to upset people.

I would respect “they really meant it”a lot more than “they just wanted to yank people’s chains”.

Note that they say this *now*, when people are sick of their nonsense and *they* are getting the nasty effects, rather than before when they were causing pain to others and knew it.

(Also: Colbert’s type of humor, when it’s good, punches up not down; and people know it is intentional humor. Also, it’s funny, which Clem has never been.)

yep, it’s an inexcusable jerk move.

There’s been a couple of extremists who have killed doctors who preform abortions. I would call them murderers.

I preface this with: This is NOT my own personal belief.

I agree with Freemage’s first paragraph wholehearted. I’d imagine that “committing an actual murder makes things better” by that one murder, according to their belief system, then presumably preventing many more murder. If that take that doctor’s life, then that doctor can no longer end the lives of unborn babies, therefore their murder is “justified” as the ends justify the means.

What I find unfortunate is how closely this parallels several arguments I’ve seen repeatedly supporting Alison’s actions with Max: I.e. a smaller offense now for a much greater good later, makes the initial offense acceptable in certain ways. Similarly, the initial offense of the “victim” (wouldn’t save lives/killing babies/being generally bad people) seem to morally justify vigilante violence against them in the eyes of some.

Obviously it’s not a perfect parallel, but I find both consistent with the consequentialist viewpoint, just applied to different core beliefs and values.

I – what’s the opposite of preface? – this with: These are my overall impressions from reading the comment extensively over the past months. I obviously don’t hold strongly to a consequentialist viewpoint, but try my best to understand how others find it important/useful.

I appreciate that you mentioned “vast majority,” implicitly acknowledging the existence of exceptions. I just felt compelled to share an anecdotal evidence of one such exception: my mother.

I know she had had an abortion earlier in life, a brother or sister I never met, but I only learned of it much later, when she had mentioned she felt guilty of murder. I was pretty young, but she mentioned that she’d gotten pregnant when my parents marriage was rocky, and she felt it was a bad time to have a child. I still have no idea if my father ever knew, and now that she’s passed, I don’t have the heart to ask and risk that he hadn’t.

Anyway, she said she’d already begun to regret it significantly sometime later. But it got particularly rough when she went through some significant value/belief changes later, when she came to believe that life began at conception, which meant she had ended her child’s life. As a result, when she ended up conceiving unexpectedly, later in life, while chronically ill (with a disease whose treatment was supposed to make conception impossible).

Despite all the doctor’s insistence on having an abortion to save her own life, that – between her age and her illness, the baby wouldn’t never survive anyway – she refused, and chose instead to move forward with having what would be her son. She did manage to give birth – 8 weeks early – to a healthy tiny baby baby…who will graduate high school this spring.

She passed, 5 months later, due to complications of the disease that had been accelerated by the stresses of pregnancy on her body. My brother never knew his wonderful, loving, and actually otherwise pretty liberal (for the 90s) mother, and my father and I lost her far too soon. Neither my brother nor I had/will have our mother for our high school graduation, marriage, birth of children. I love my brother dearly. I loved my mother dearly. They’ve each, at various times, been my best friend. The thought of having had to choose between the two… But my mother essentially made that choice for us, and I honor that choice.

Had she aborted, I believe it would’ve been under an expectation of self-defense: every medical professional told her trying to carry the pregnancy to full term would kill her…and in some ways, it did. She would have had a prognosis of another 5 years, on average, for her progress, assuming no new opportunities for treatment. Since my brother has lived 17 so far and may well live a longer life, was it a “beneficial trade” for the “greater good”? If my brother had died at one (when he nearly died), would it been better to abort? If he died at 5, would it be a toss up? If he had died at birth, would she have been wrong?

I don’t know. I just don’t know…which is my difficulty with consequentialism, as mentioned in my post above. Even when I feel most secure in my predictions of consequences, things can ultimately change.

I personally consider myself Pro-Choice, Pro-Life. I haven’t had to face the situation myself, so I admittedly can’t know how I would respond in the same situation; but I currently feel I’d be against abortion except in those extreme cases others have mentioned: rape, threat of life, etc. Although I feel some…uncertainty about the rape exception, even speaking as someone who was sexually assaulted at gunpoint, and mentally acknowledged the reality that I might have to face that very choice, since I didn’t know how far things would go. I certainly would’ve held nothing against my mother if she’d chosen to abort in the case of my brother.

And yet, I believe that’s ultimately the choice each woman has to face. Not just in those extreme cases, but in every case. I think we ultimately have to answer to our own values, philosophies, and personal belief systems. I can disagree with someone, believing their action to be wrong, but also support their right to make a wrong decision/action. I’m whole-heartedly against those who use violence against clinic or individuals, or hateful methods. But I also belief in providing people with plenty of information, and time to try to consider how they may feel about their decisions in the future.

I’ve already said waaay too much, and need to head to a meeting. I suppose TL:DR – While some (maybe most?) are definitely about the sex thing, some have truly sincerely held beliefs, and aren’t violent about it. Hopefully we don’t vilify them with the rest.

The linked article is interesting, but I find the notion that we can never evaluate the motivations of others to be facile, at best. It can be difficult to do from a single instance, but when you get a broader assessment of their actions and claimed motivations, and the actual consequences of those actions, it eventually leads you to a place where you can say that they are either liars or fools, because their actions will never get where they claim they want to go, and such is apparent on the face of it.

And I reject utterly the citation of Natural Law, which is entirely built around the preservation of the status quo, for the sake of the empowered against the oppressed.

There’s a difference between choosing to not pursue every avenue that advances your agenda (not pushing for wide-scale starfish rescue infrastructure), choosing to pursue a least-harm compromise course (vegans accepting that plant farming kills small animals, but still causes far less animal suffering than industrial livestock farming), and actively working against your stated purpose (opposing open contraception access when you claim to oppose abortion). The latter is, at best, willful blindness, typically the result of deferring the hard part of thinking it through to someone else (the ‘fool’ portion of my earlier ‘liar or fool’ statement).

And I can absolutely demonstrate that the GOP hierarchy does not actually want to ‘solve’ the abortion issue by reducing the desire for abortions:

In the 90s, there was a push for a ‘partial birth abortion ban’. Never mind that the term doesn’t actually have a medical meaning, or that it was being pushed with a lot of the lies that typically surround the anti-abortion movement; it was popular in the polls, and Bill Clinton signaled that he would sign an acceptable bill.

Now, the bill had language in it that created an exception for “the physical health of the mother”. Clinton wanted to eliminate “physical”–thereby allowing late-term abortions in the case of severe psychological damage. The GOP-controlled Congress refused to make that particular concession. Clinton vetoed the bill, Congress refused to pass an amended version, and the bill died. At the time, the GOP claimed that including mental health issues would make the ban too easy to bypass.

Now, it’s worth remembering that the GOP pushes for ‘waiting periods’ before an abortion, ostensibly on the principle that forcing a woman to think about what she’s about to do will let her reconsider (as opposed to just being a hurdle she’s put through to punish her). But if waiting periods do that, then so would any delay–especially a delay that forces a woman to make an appointment and talk to a mental health specialist about her decision. So if we accept the GOP position on waiting periods as sincere, then it’s inescapable that they deliberately refused to pass a law that would have, by their beliefs, reduced the number of abortions, because it wouldn’t have been by enough.

Okay, so fine–maybe they felt they needed to hold out for long enough to actually be able to push through the full bill. Except…

Once George W. Bush was elected, every GOP congresscritter suddenly developed a laser-accurate case of amnesia that kept them from even discussing the possibility of an anti-abortion bill. They had a stronger hold on Congress, and the White House, at that point. But inexplicably (not really), they opted to not even mention abortion–certainly nothing about ‘partial birth abortion’.

Now, the leftist position is consistent–the fetus is not a person and therefore deserves no rights that would surpass the will of the mother. But the GOP’s position is that the fetus is a legal and moral ‘person’. They literally ignored the deaths of however many thousands of such persons, because they don’t actually give a damn.

And the rubes keep voting for them.