New Testingstan

Herp

ncis la seems to love that rewind time gimmick

open the episode with some climax scene from the commercials

then jump to X hours earlier


it is ok if you do it sometimes

but usually i'm just like


ugh

man there will be one hundred statistical studies showing that this maintains ratings throughout the show's length, improving ad sales

NOW WE HAVE TO SEE HOW IT IS RESOLVED~!!!!!!!!!!!11

just what minority killed the pretty blonde girl
THE TENSION IS KILLING ME

ps mad props for making simon look like a total retard again

Simon Jester wrote:I'd argue the fetus thing is about mind- what distinguishes a person from an animal is the property of intelligence or sapience or whatever you want to call it. That's a huge qualitative difference between almost any human and any animal, except for a few of the most intelligent species that raise serious ethical issues about anyway.

Up until about the age of viability, a fetus just... doesn't have the wetware to be fully a 'person' to my way of thinking.

Now, you can ask "Well, what about children or adult humans who don't have intelligence? What about brain damage?"

My answer to that is that the ethical reason we should be careful about how we treat them because of the consequences. When we become cruel and dismissive towards beings that are very like us physically but lack the mental equipment to be 'people,' it coarsens us and makes us more likely to be cruel and abusive towards those who are people. Moreover, except for humans who are literally born without a brain, or whose brain basically dissolves during a coma, even a badly brain-damaged human will still be an intelligent lifeform so the category is small and, I think, not that severe a problem with the ethical model.

Shouldn't it be "potential for intelligence"?

Kids don't really get to the whole objective reasoning and higher functioning until their older. A dog is more intelligent then a new born, probably more then a three year old for that matter.

dude everything he just said was super, super dumb

i both look forward to and dread reading the rest of that pdf alyrium posted


sometimes i wonder though

what if i didn't post in these threads

would they just die?

or would someone else post stupid bullshit in my stead?

"Red Herring. Completely irrelevant to the discussion of abortion. "


alyrium flamed me for not loving knowledge in a college thread or two


but he doesn't want to talk about things for fun



now i've talked about avoiding tangents in debate strategy


but i'm posting there to discuss things, not to win


alyrium apparently wants to win


sadly for him, he's an idiot

Kids don't really get to the whole objective reasoning and higher functioning until their older. A dog is more intelligent then a new born, probably more then a three year old for that matter.

when i started taing a contemporary moral problems class for a professor/friend of mine, he said in an abortion lecture, "so, my son is a year and a half old, and he's just beginning to be more impressive than a cat. and even then, it'd have to be a pretty damn I'M A JUGGALO WOOP WOOP cat." so he'd agree with you.

i suspect simon is using intelligence in a looser sense though, one that would include dogs.

but yeah, the problem with positions like simon's is that... well, if you want to say personhood depends on your mental properties (which simon and alyrium say, and i tend to agree), you can have a "thin" conception of personhood that includes fetuses as soon as they can feel pain, which is about 24 weeks, i think. the age of viability is somewhere around the same time if you have access to good care and technology. simon seems to want to draw the line somewhere near the age of viability (though he may want it drawn later, i'm not sure). if you do draw the line in that 24-28 week area, when fetuses feel pain but pretty much have nothing else going on upstairs, you have to include all sorts of animals to be consistent. idk what the science is on which animals feel pain, but i'm pretty sure you'd have a LOT of animals in there that simon doesn't think about often (i might be wrong though, if he's a vegetarian then i give him points for consistency)

or you can have a "thick" concept of personhood that requires more sophisticated things like reasoning or a self-concept (this is where alyrium's apparent favorite philosopher, peter singer, comes down). this excludes most non-human animals, but maybe includes whales and apes (i'm not sure of the science there). it also excludes human children up to... i've heard 6 months to 2 years, though that may not be current. singer says we should err on the side of caution, but that still only gets him to six months, plus you add a lot of delicious animals that may or may not have a self-concept, such as pigs. (singer is famously a vegetarian and animal welfare crusader; idk about alyrium.) before six months, singer is forced to say that infanticide is not intrinsically wrong. though it may be wrong for other reasons, such as the effect on the child's parents, or the joy it would bring to parents who are looking to adopt, etc. singer's obvs not in favor of infanticide generally but thinks it may occasionally be morally permissible. (i'm not sure if he thinks it should ever be legal. probably in cases of genuine euthanasia, i'm guessing.)

either way you're probably going to include more of the animal kingdom and/or less of humanity than you might want to

tl;dr: if you (mostly talking to adr here) want to bother simon, ask him if he really thinks viable fetuses (at ~24 weeks, say) are persons, and if he says yes, ask him what his position says about animals. if you want to bother alyrium, ask him if he thinks human babies are persons. but obviously, don't attribute arguments or positions to simon or alyrium until they actually state them.

Metatwaddle wrote:idk what the science is on which animals feel pain, but i'm pretty sure you'd have a LOT of animals in there that simon doesn't think about often (i might be wrong though, if he's a vegetarian then i give him points for consistency)

Everything with a functioning nervous system, for starters. But even if he isn't a vegetarian, he probably doesn't think much about, say, cockroaches.

i'm reading more of that pdf alyrium posted

their graph shows a decline in 1992


the first thing that came to my mind

BILL CLINTON ROX



anywho this thing is a slow read

whoa huge decline in the 1980's too

RONALD REAGAN ROX

wait why does it go up in 1985

RONALD REAGAN SUX

JIMMY CARTER ROX


blah i should stop my simplistic stupidity here and just read on

Dooey Jo wrote:so apparently alyrium cites a single paper of statistics to show that legalised abortion by far accounts for most of the drop in crimes over a certain period

yeah i finished reading it and posted a response to teo

in a word: bullshit

holy shit these posts just put timestamps on this

i spent almost two hours on that thing

i scare myself

yall remember how i was bitching about there being too many sopa threads especially compared to other issues that matter

well there's yet another one.

Urge to troll Purple and BRonys....rising...

Purple is a strange mix of self-consciousness and obliviousness. I tried to PM him one day about his shit-posting, and it was, well... strange. I can't really describe it..

I guess he really think he is acting a role. But I fear he has become the mask. Or was he the mask all along ?


As for the bronies, go ahead. Those who can't take the heat should grow a thicker skin anyway - for their own good.

purple is an obvious tryhard tbh

Oxymoron wrote: I guess he really think he is acting a role. But I fear he has become the mask. Or was he the mask all along ?

so what are you saying here

that he is batman

Nah, not creepy enough.

Batman is also a shitposter.


(man, I think I should stop putting comic-book emphasis in my posts.

i just realised i am explaining organisational culture on the internet

i'm supposed ot get paid for this

but man every time i hear 'just change your entire business its for the best' i picture not only the training programs and face-to-face time requried to change a culture, but also how amazingly fat these people are

'just change your entire diet its for the best'

oh wait you can't because you're a compulsive eater with body image problems! WHO KNEW PEOPLE WERE NOT ROBOTS