posted
Very poignant, multilayered article in the most recent Atlantic that is, in some ways, about abortion, and in other ways is about desire.
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posted
I read it. It made me very uncomfortable. The six paragraphs she tosses off to make it "balanced" consist mostly of trying not to think about living being with fingers and hands and hiccups that gets crushed and flushed in the abortions.
ETA: The only mention of adoption is to quote the women who say they would a thousand times rather have an abortion than give up their kid. No mention of other mothers who, you know, choose to let someone who desperately wants a child to raise the child instead of ending all hope of life.
I thought the article was terribly slanted. It's a propoganda piece, not a dispassionate or balanced examiniation. That's fine if that's what it was meant to be, but it has all the credibility of an e-mail forward.
posted
I did not find it slanted, as it goes into some detail into the humanness of the unborn, how there are other options.
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posted
We'll have to disagree about that. I think the other side was given some lip service, but there was no doubt where all the sympathy lay.
Three paragraphs about, you know, the living being that she spends the rest of the article lamenting how difficult it used to be to get rid of.
quote:In it is much more than I want to know about the tiny creature whose destruction we have legalized:
so...back to covering her eyes and singing lalalalala and thinking about the poor girls who want love SO MUCH that they give into the lecherous men who just want sex but that they aren't ready to attach themselves emotionally to because that would mean leaving their mothers.
I get all of that, and I understand there is a lot of heartbreak all the way around, but none of the pains of growing up and having an adult love life justify ending the life of the being who has "a beating heart, a human face, functioning kidneys, two waving hands that seem not too far away from being able to grasp and shake a rattle."
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posted
I think the books are clearly one-sided, but, then, they have to be. The other person involved in each story in the first book is dead, and the other person involved in each story in the second book is untraceable due to anonymous adoption. Their sides can't be told at all.
A corollary book to the second could be written, of course. Maybe call it "The Ones Who Weren't Killed."
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: We'll have to disagree about that.
Yep.
quote: I think the other side was given some lip service, but there was no doubt where all the sympathy lay.
Three paragraphs about, you know, the living being that she spends the rest of the article lamenting how difficult it used to be to get rid of.
quote:In it is much more than I want to know about the tiny creature whose destruction we have legalized:
so...back to covering her eyes and singing lalalalala and thinking about the poor girls who want love SO MUCH that they give into the lecherous men who just want sex but that they aren't ready to attach themselves emotionally to because that would mean leaving their mothers.
I get all of that, and I understand there is a lot of heartbreak all the way around, but none of the pains of growing up and having an adult love life justify ending the life of the being who has "a beating heart, a human face, functioning kidneys, two waving hands that seem not too far away from being able to grasp and shake a rattle."
She actually says something along those lines, you know.
quote: All they are asking, in a societal climate in which out-of-wedlock pregnancy is without stigma, is that pregnant women give the tiny bodies growing inside of them a few months, until the little creatures are large enough to be on their way, to loving homes.
*shakes head*
I just do not see how this article is slanted.
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posted
I thought it was a moving piece. I did not think it covered everything or was meant to cover everything.
It did not, for example, talk about the fathers - whether they loved the women, were just driven by a need for sex, whatever. I think that men, like women, have deeper reasons for wanting to have sex with someone than just physical urges.
But, given the scope of the article, I thought it was a good piece.
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posted
It can be well-written and moving and still be slanted.
The last paragraph is about how adding a shag carpet to an abortion clinic finally allowed abortions to be performed humanely. There is no way to have that sentence be the final clincher and still consider it a human being killed. The three paragraphs she spends on the point of view of the being being killed ends with saying she is torn in two directions, but the rest of the article makes it very clear where she landed and where her sympathies lie.
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posted
Stormy, do you read that article and have any doubt at all that she is in favor of legal abortion done in cozy atmosphere? In all the horror stories of possible deaths from illegal abortions, does she ever mention that actually there is ALWAYS a death from illegal abortions, but that sometimes there were two?
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posted
I read the thread before reading the article, although kat's lastest post about the carpet wasn't here yet. And I was having a hard time seeing how it was slanted, until the last paragraph waxing rhapsodasical about the womanliness of blue shag carpet and how it somehow put an end to "the river of blood." That idea is just weird.
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posted
I think you want her to say point-blank that abortion is the taking of a human life. The problem with this is that this is de facto the pro-life point of view. To say this would not be balanced.
The other side of coin that I think you do not see is that she doesn't say straight out that it's *not* human, either. What is a good word, a good way, to describe the unborn that neither describes them as human or not-human? It's a hard line to walk. Calling the unborn 'creature' as she does, is a little bit jarring, but really, I don't know that there's a better word. Even while I'm writing 'unborn', for instance, I'm thinking that tilts too much towards the 'pro-life' side....
I think she does a good balancing act by pointing out that the humanity of the unborn inside the womb. Without actually calling it a human, her conclusion is that there's really no need for an abortion these days. Why not wait?
I don't see that, at all, she's arguing for abortion.
On the other hand, I don't disagree that she's not arguing to make abortion illegal.
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quote:In all the horror stories of possible deaths from illegal abortions, does she ever mention that actually there is ALWAYS a death from illegal abortions, but that sometimes there were two?
Would a pro-choice person agree with this? It seems to me to be a statement of the pro-life position elevated to fact. I don't see how this would make it balanced.
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posted
Stormy: Maybe it isn't possible to write an article about an abortion with an opinion in it and have it not be slanted. Since all writing - especially the personal reviews the Atlantic likes - contains an opinion, maybe it is inevitable that it be slanted.
In that case, this article can be put in the "well-written, non-rabid, pro-legal-abortion" file.
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posted
I'm now professionally obligated to keep my mouth shut about stuff like this, but I will say that I think there are two separate but related ideas in this article and that debate on this subject sometimes confuses them.
First there is the issue of abortion, whether it should be legalized, whether it's right or wrong. Part of that is understanding just what effect the legalization of abortion had on American society.
Second is society's conception (no pun intended) of a woman's sexuality. This is the root of the attitude toward unmarried pregnant women, and something that probably resulted in a higher number of dangerous abortions during the time abortion was illegal.
I would say the legalization of abortion was one consequence of changing attitudes in society that gave women greater sexual freedom and removed social stigma. How much the legalization of abortion enhanced that cause is another thing entirely. But I think the article was definitely mixing the two together - those heartbreaking stories happened because of the way society reacted to unmarried pregnant women. The blood came from the fact that one way of ending the pregnancy was illegal.
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quote:In all the horror stories of possible deaths from illegal abortions, does she ever mention that actually there is ALWAYS a death from illegal abortions, but that sometimes there were two?
Would a pro-choice person agree with this? It seems to me to be a statement of the pro-life position elevated to fact. I don't see how this would make it balanced.
*raises hand* I'm politically pro-choice, and I agree with that statement whole-heartedly.
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quote: In that case, this article can be put in the "well-written, non-rabid, pro-legal-abortion" file.
I just want to point out that there *is*, I believe, a not insignificant difference between being 'pro-legal-abortion' and 'pro-access to legal abortion'. I would put her in the second camp.
I also think Kasie's point is important.
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posted
I'm not necessarily sure that I agree with her assessment of its place in the article, though. That is, I don't think the article was confused on it.
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To clarify, I mostly meant that debate here seemed to be conflating the two issues, not necessarily the article.
I do think that the article, in some points, implied that legalized abortion made everything better (i.e. the blue carpet in the abortion clinic). I think *that* confuses the two issues, because really a combination of two things - non-stigmatized out-of-wedlock pregnancy AND legalized abortion - helped women like those in the books.
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posted
Although, upon further consideration, the blue carpet could be understood as the intersection of the two, the carpet representing the new conception of female sexuality.
I haven't decided.
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posted
I think it was meant as a contrast to the river of blood resulting from the illegal abortions presented in the rest of the article:
"It helped women to know that abortions didn’t have to be bloody and butchery. Certainly, you wouldn’t put that kind of rug on the floor if it was going to be ruined.
It was a very womanly thing to do—to set your heart on a shag carpet, to trick someone into buying it for you, to rely on the fact that once it was installed, everyone would love it and forgive you. And it was womanly because of the way a simple bit of decoration could send a powerful and audacious message that only other women would be able to interpret. A river of blood runs through The Choices We Made, and it runs throughout the history of womankind. That river stops, more or less, with the installation of that shag carpet. The carpet, and the women who found the money to pay for it, along with all the women and men who made possible a context in which an abortion could be performed legally, safely, and even humanely—together they say: Enough."
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posted
A lot of this changes depending on whether or not Katie meant 'human' or 'humane', and on whether Storm thought that she meant 'human' or 'humane'. Those qualifiers in mind...
Abortion cannot possibly be humane if the aborted fetus (and 'creature' has its own subjective baggage as well) was actually a human being. Some people may call lethal injection a humane method of execution, but it cannot possibly be a humane thing to do to someone who has done no wrong.
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quote:As storm says, if you grant that it is a person, then you are speaking the pro-life line, and have unbalanced anything else you might say on the other side.
That's not entirely true - witness Olivet.
Further, if you say that abortion is humane (or "safe" for that matter), you are definitely speaking an anti-pro-life line and have unbalanced anything else you might say on the other side.
quote:And thats the central contention of the abortion debate. Is it a person? is it not?
But Paul, I seem to recall that you have said that even if the unborn child is alive and human, abortion should still be legal. Even if my recollection concerning you specifically is inaccurate, I know others have said that here.
I agree with Kat - the sop to the other side is their for rhetorical effect, and the blue carpet paragraph - plus the "I don't want to know what it is we're killing" - is what makes this crystal clear. It's legal abortion that stops her "river of blood" - a contention that can only by made by denying the humanity of the child and therefore the blood being shed in far greater numbers now.
I don't expect a pro-choice person writing an article like this to be "balanced." But an article whose conclusion absolutely depends on the premise that abortion is safe and humane and doesn't come with its own river of blood is not balanced, and accuracy demands that it not be called balanced.
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posted
I shall have to re-read -- I totally didn't get "I don't want to know what it is we're killing" out of that section. Quite the opposite.
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posted
This is the sentence I'm referring to specifically:
quote:In it is much more than I want to know about the tiny creature whose destruction we have legalized: a beating heart, a human face, functioning kidneys, two waving hands that seem not too far away from being able to grasp and shake a rattle.
It is this that creates the sympathy she speaks of. But this suggests that she doesn't want the sympathy to exist, because she doesn't want the knowledge that created it.
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posted
Dagonee- Did olivet say that a person is killed with each abortion? Its not what I'm reading. And if its not what she said, then what she said and what I said are different things.
Laws against the inhumane treatment of animals do not prevent us from killing animals. They prevent us from torturing them. Death can be, and often is, more or less humane.
I don't think its impossible for a pro-choicer to concede that a death comes with every abortion. I think most do. But the very fact of a death doesn't make it inhumane, necessarily.
"But Paul, I seem to recall that you have said that even if the unborn child is alive and human, abortion should still be legal. Even if my recollection concerning you specifically is inaccurate, I know others have said that here."
Depending on how you mean human, then you are remembering incorrectly. I agree that an embroy or fetus is genetically human. Thats biological fact. I don't think anyone disputes that. I don't agree its a person deserving of as much legal protection as a infant, child, or adult.
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quote:Did olivet say that a person is killed with each abortion? Its not what I'm reading.
She said she agrees with this statement wholeheartedly: "there is ALWAYS a death from illegal abortions, but that sometimes there were two."
Unless she's agreeing that the article doesn't say what Kat wanted it to say, but that wouldn't make sense in the context of Squick's question.
Olivet, can you clarify? Are you saying that you agree whole-heartedly with "there is ALWAYS a death from illegal abortions, but that sometimes there were two"?
quote:Laws against the inhumane treatment of animals do not prevent us from killing animals. They prevent us from torturing them. Death can be, and often is, more or less humane.
I don't think its impossible for a pro-choicer to concede that a death comes with every abortion. I think most do. But the very fact of a death doesn't make it inhumane, necessarily.
I disagree with your definition of humane if it allows intentional killing of a human being with no finding of danger or culpability.
Regardless, it's clear abortion is not safe for at least one entity involved.
quote:I don't agree its a person deserving of as much legal protection as a infant, child, or adult.
My statement was an if statement, so what you currently believe doesn't speak to it. Thank you for clarifying, and I'm sorry I recalled incorrectly.
I do know others have said that legal abortion is constitutionally required even if an unborn child were considered a person morally or legally, so it's clear it's not dispositive for all people on each side. It's the very purpose of the violinist analogy that has been presented here recently - it's a very active thread in a certain strain of pro-choice philosophical and legal justification.
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posted
To clarify, I don't read Olivet as saying a person dies during abortion. I read her as saying a death occurs. A death occuring, and a person dying, are different things.
"I disagree with your definition of humane"
Thats nice. The vast majority of english speakers don't disagree with me. Go look around at some of the organizations that seek to legislate humane treatment of animals, or humane treatment laws. By far the majority of them use humane in such a way that it is not incompatible with humans killing animals. In fact, most of them are asking that we be humane in how we kill.
"I disagree with your definition of humane if it allows intentional killing of a human being with no finding of danger or culpability."
I don't see human beings here. I see biological humans. but that "being" implies quite a bit more then being of the genetic material of homo sapiens.
"I do know others have said that legal abortion is constitutionally required even if an unborn child were considered a person morally or legally,"
I'd be interested to hear from any of those people, because I don't think I've seen this argument before. Until I do, I'm going to tend not to believe you, since as far as I can tell this would be a contradictory and illogical, as well as deeply immoral and illegal, position to take.
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quote:Originally posted by Paul Goldner: "I do know others have said that legal abortion is constitutionally required even if an unborn child were considered a person morally or legally,"
I'd be interested to hear from any of those people, because I don't think I've seen this argument before...
I remember that thread...been busy playing Oblivion's expansion
I don't know about constitutionally "required".
However, I would be up for arguing that even if an unborn child were considered a person morally, that certain kinds of abortion would still be defensible until the fetus reached a stage where it could live on its own. As Dagonee pointed out, it does go back to the violinist thought experiment.
I would further add that there is one of your four assertions about such a stance that would not really be up for debate. It in fact would not be an illegal stance, in certain countries including Canada.
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posted
<snip everything I wrote because you're not worth the effort after reading this>
quote:Until I do, I'm going to tend not to believe you, since as far as I can tell this would be a contradictory and illogical, as well as deeply immoral and illegal, position to take.
quote:Granting for the sake of argument that the fetus has a right to life, Thomson uses thought experiments to argue for the moral permissibility of induced abortion. Her argument has many critics on both sides of the abortion debate,[1] yet continues to receive defense.[2] Thomson's imaginative examples and controversial conclusions have made A Defense of Abortion perhaps "the most widely reprinted essay in all of contemporary philosophy".
...
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but in nine months] he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.[4]
Thomson takes it that you may now permissibly unplug yourself from the violinist even though this will cause his death: the right to life, Thomson says, does not entail the right to use another person's body, and so by unplugging the violinist you do not violate his right to life but merely deprive him of something—the use of your body—to which he has no right. "[I]f you do allow him to go on using your kidneys, this is a kindness on your part, and not something he can claim from you as his due."[5]
For the same reason, Thomson says, abortion does not violate the fetus's right to life but merely deprives the fetus of something—the use of the pregnant woman's body—to which it has no right. Thus, it is not that by terminating her pregnancy a woman violates her moral obligations, but rather that a woman who carries the fetus to term is a 'Good Samaritan' who goes beyond her obligations.
Note that the life being compared is undoubtedly a human being - a grown man.
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posted
Just as another datapoint, I would also suggest that such people would not actually be quite as rare as you (Paul) suggest:
quote: Abortion in Canada is not limited by law. While some non-legal obstacles exist, Canada is one of only a few nations with no legal restrictions on abortion, and access there is still among the most liberal in the world.
Polls continue to show that a majority of Canadians believe abortion should remain legal in some circumstances (see Opinion polls, below). Over 110,000 abortions are performed in Canada every year. 90% of abortions are performed in the first trimester, with just 2 to 3% performed after 16 weeks. ... Although the issue of abortion rights has popped up from time to time in Federal elections as a wedge issue, the issue is consistently rated as a low priority for most Canadians. The Christian Heritage Party of Canada claims to be Canada's only stated pro-life federal political party, but has never had a member elected to parliament. ... In a poll conducted by the National Post in November 2002, 78% of respondents answered "yes" to the question: "Should women have complete freedom on their decision to have an abortion?". ... * In an October 2005 Environics poll, commissioned by Life Canada, when asked "at what point in human development should the law protect human life," 30% of respondents said "From conception on," 19% said "After three months of pregnancy," 11% said "After six months of pregnancy," and 33% said "From the point of birth."
I think almost everyone would agree that the fetus develops into a "person" some arbitrary time before birth. Yet there are still 33% who only favour legal protection from the point of birth. I submit that the discrepancy lies at least partially, in that there are a fair proportion of that 33% that feels that abortion before birth "may" abort a person and "may" be immoral, but yet do not favour laws enforcing that belief.
Edit to add: I picked the polls by the National Post and Life Canada partially out of amusement, partially to avoid the charge that I'm giving biased data. Life Canada is a Christian pro-life group. The National Post is probably Canada's most (notable) conservative newspaper.
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quote:In it is much more than I want to know about the tiny creature whose destruction we have legalized: a beating heart, a human face, functioning kidneys, two waving hands that seem not too far away from being able to grasp and shake a rattle.
I think Kasie's right, and it's my impression that she's exploring her own ambivalence in the essay; she's torn between the sonogram on the one hand and the sink of bloody towels on the other. Firstly, she expresses her sympathy for the girls (and I use the term purposefully, because Flanagan does) who, because of their pain and isolation and fear find sex "a small price to pay" to avoid being lonely, without thinking through the consequences. We can say, well, they should think about the consequences. But loneliness and fear and the immaturity of being a teenager means that this doesn't always happen.
It's clear to me that the above passage in context is the other side of the war going on in her head; she didn't want to know about the sonogram because it forced her to rethink her own assumptions, and she words the passage the way she does to illustrate the difficulty this posed for her. It's a rhetorical device; she's not being literal, and further, I think it's a rhetorical device that indicates she's aware of the potential gravity of supporting legal abortion. Clearly she _does_ know about the heart, the face, the hands; as she says, her sympathy for abortion's opponents rises by the day.
Now, clearly, the sample Flanagan is talking about comes from the books she's reviewing; so it's hard to say what she thinks about abortion absent the mitigating circumstances of the insecurities of youth. Her conclusion makes clear that she still supports legal abortion. However, the above passage demonstrates to me that she's at least pondered the ramifications of it. Her position is a thoughtful one, which I appreciate.
If we believe abortion is murder, then it's a very simple choice. The problem is that not everybody does believe it, so a wavering position like Flanagan's is to me quite understandable.
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posted
How evil is it, I wonder, to abort a baby, when compared to the murder of adults, even broken ones, for crimes they commit?
Which, I wonder, is worse?
How evil is it to support a war and the death of thousands and maybe millions of adults, children, babies, old people, everyone, and the destruction of the means for survival for many, and the hatred which things cause, when compared to the killing of an incomplete human being who is not yet any more conscious than my arm?
If killing human life is a sin, is amputating an arm an equal sin, as it kills billions of human cells? Why is that not equal to the thousands and sometimes millions of an incomplete human being?
The form of the cells? The purpose of the cells? The things they will develop into or not develop into?
Is it equal, more or less than killing an older human, a baby already out in the world, unconnected to its mother, still helpless and unable to live on its own?
Is killing that clump of cells equal to killing the clump of cells which is its parent?
Is the evil done to a young (or older) woman in response to illegal abortions equal to the abortion itself?
Is the natural abortion, miscarriage, equal?
Is the damage to a woman's life in the modern day, the evil of their suffering, equal?
Are the answers to these things always the case? Why? Why not?
Is it not evil to force a woman to do a thing which could result in her death, which could have any number of consequences, regardless of the cause of that event, just because the thing she wishes to do may not be moral itself?
Is the dignity of a human worth more than the life of one in and of itself?
Are we all evil, for using more than our share of resources, thus helping allow people in othe rlands to die when they would not otherwise?
-----
In the end, I'll try to be mroe clear because I'm quite tired:
Whose life is worth more? The life of a fully formed human being, or the life of an incomplete one, still nto an individual really anymore than my arm is an individual?
Is the one worth more than the other? Either way, in this particular thing, yuo must choose.
I choose the human being, not the clump of cells that will become one. To do otherwise would be evil to the human that exists. And while it would be evil to the one that does not yet exist as a human, but is merely potentially a human... the sin against a full human is worth more. To say that a clump of cells that could evenutally become human is worth more than the human that already exists is something that makes me wary of being a human being.
A human being is right there, already! One that may make an error, may do something that is not, strictly, right. But the other? Human, yes, no less so than my arm, and with more potential than my arm. But is not more than my arm, and in some ways less than my arm, until a time much later.
But at what cost to the human already existing? Shall we abandon that one, when the process is so damn problematic and intertwined with that human?
My arm cell can be used to clone a new human being, fully formed from that single cell and no other.
Should amputating my arm then be a sin, for those cells which COULD become a human being are now unable to?
posted
I don't. I think all the moral equivocating gets out of hand in much the same way animal activism gets out of hand. Yes, killing is wrong, but a very high percentage of females who become sexually active, whether after marriage or whatever, have at some point naturally aborted. Innocent lives are taken every day (especially these days) in events completely unrelated to abortion, and some of those events are championed by the very groups (not individuals, so don't begin to try making it personal) who cry out about the evil of abortion. Also, why do the people who die have to be innocent before we view taking their lives without giving them a choice as evil?
Naturally, it is a sliding scale of considering something reprehensible, and that slide is different for each person. That doesn't make the act of abortion any more right (though I believe there are circumstances where it is necessary), but the very second post in this thread was an emotional appeal veiled in an assertion of logic where there was none, and the discussion just went downhill from there.
This has been the most significant part of a post so far.
quote:We can say, well, they should think about the consequences. But loneliness and fear and the immaturity of being a teenager means that this doesn't always happen.
I would go so far as to correct that from 'teenager' to 'person', and 'immaturity' to 'insecurity'. If a real and genuine discussion about the subject of abortion is going to take place, it needs to leave the realm of emotional appeals and images of dying infants and enter the realm of why do we foster a culture of unconsidered consequences, and what can be done to repair that while still staying within the context of a free and democratic society? If that isn't the focus, the discussion quickly becomes one side calling the other murderers, and the other side calling the first behavioral fascists. Neither is productive, and both are inevitable. Or do we need eight pages before it wears everyone out again?
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quote:why do we foster a culture of unconsidered consequences, and what can be done to repair that while still staying within the context of a free and democratic society
This is a good discussion to have. It is not, however, the only or the most important discussion to have.
Further, the context of a free and democratic society demands that the dying infants be taken into account. When the law fails to protect helpless victims, there is a gap in the free and democratic nature of our society.
quote:the very second post in this thread was an emotional appeal veiled in an assertion of logic where there was none, and the discussion just went downhill from there.
The article itself is an emotional appeal veiled in an assertion of balance. Or are emotional appeals and images of dying women somehow better?
There is a reason I made the first post in this thread that I did: many of the "victims" of anti-abortion laws are still around to tell their stories and make emotional appeals. It's a dichotomy that I thought important to get on the table. And it underscores the inherent imbalance instilled into the discussion when one side insists on precluding the actual issue from discussion. If we can't talk about dead children, including whether there are any or not that result from abortion, then we're not talking about abortion.
*****
By the way, Storm, if you ever feel like explaining that brick wall comment, I'd appreciate it.
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quote:Yes, killing is wrong, but a very high percentage of females who become sexually active, whether after marriage or whatever, have at some point naturally aborted.
I've heard this point made before, and I've never understood why it was relavent. It's equivalent to saying that people die of natural causes every day, so what's the big deal if we choose to kill some?
quote:why do we foster a culture of unconsidered consequences, and what can be done to repair that while still staying within the context of a free and democratic society?
I agree, this is a good discussion to have. I'm not sure we can continue to do everything in our power to take away negative consequences to behaviors, while simultaneously encouraging people to "consider the consequences". Adultery is no longer a crime; divorce is nobody's fault; unwed pregnancy is no longer much of a stigma; abortion is an acceptable answer to an unwanted pregnancy - we have all kinds of safeguards in place to protect us from the consequences of our decisions, and yet we expect people to "consider the consequences ... but just in case you don't, we can make them go away."
Posts: 1522 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote: By the way, Storm, if you ever feel like explaining that brick wall comment, I'd appreciate it.
I can't think of a way to elaborate on it that will be productive, but I kind of think I owe you at least some elaboration. Suffice to say that I quite often find it frustrating to engage you in dialogue on 'serious' topics. As I've mentioned before, though, I'm sure I play a large part in this. I do note that other people have made comments to the same effect in passing.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
By the way, let me stress that I am in no way shape or form am saying that I am better than you. Bob only knows that I have my own issues when engaging in dialogue with people.
I also want to point out that I often enjoying talking to you. These times, though, normally are not the times where we have a difference of opinion.
And, please, for the rest of the forum, don't turn this into a popularity contest. I know most of y'all get along with Dagonee and he's well liked.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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quote:Suffice to say that I quite often find it frustrating to engage you in dialogue on 'serious' topics.
It doesn't suffice, actually, because in the post in question made a specific allegation about me, not a declaration that you find something frustrating. What is most perplexing is that I directly addressed what you said, demonstrating that I had read and processed it. Unless you are using "talking to a brick wall" in a way in which I am utterly unfamiliar, I can't even tell what you meant by that post.
quote:Originally posted by dkw:
quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: The article itself is an emotional appeal veiled in an assertion of balance.
Did the article itself ever assert or claim "balance"?
I posted after performing only half an intended edit to my original draft. I meant to say, "The article itself is an emotional appeal that seems to be perceived by some as balanced."
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:In all the horror stories of possible deaths from illegal abortions, does she ever mention that actually there is ALWAYS a death from illegal abortions, but that sometimes there were two?
Would a pro-choice person agree with this? It seems to me to be a statement of the pro-life position elevated to fact. I don't see how this would make it balanced.
*raises hand* I'm politically pro-choice, and I agree with that statement whole-heartedly.
Cheerfully ammended to: Would most pro-choice people agree with this?
I don't think it changes the point any.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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