Total topics: 4
Legal Argument
(1) Murder is the taking of an innocent person’s life.
(2) According to the law, a pregnancy is not recognized as a person.
(3) Therefore, abortion is not murder.
Premise 2 is arbitrary. What if the law is wrong? Then, the conclusion must also be wrong.
If everyone wants a good argument with this reasoning, then debaters should agree on a specific definition of personhood that the law can recognize.
The law argument is circular reasoning and irrelevant until the debaters agree on a logical definition of personhood.
Personhood Argument
It's easier said than done to come up with a good concept of personhood. Finding a coherent concept of personhood is a philosophical exercise and a rabbit hole.
Some people think viability is the answer, which I’m unconvinced about.
Many premature births require medical assistance to survive. Requiring medical assistance isn’t the typical idea of viability, which one thinks.
A healthy, full-term baby fits this ideal concept of viability since it can survive without medical assistance. However, most people couldn’t agree with this extreme case of viability since many consider abortion in the third-trimester murder.
However, medical viability depends on the capabilities of advanced medical care, which once didn’t exist and could improve in the future.
The fetus/embryo/(input early stage) is a clump of cells and not a human being
Many people think that a pregnancy is a group of cells that is no more a human being than a foot or hand. However, the pregnancy at conception is a human organism and continues to be the same human organism when it dies. On the other hand, a clump of cells does not constitute a human organism and can’t grow into one.
Therefore, it seems reasonable to say that pregnancy is a human being at the initial stage of their life and continues to be for their existence.
I have tackled what I perceive as implausible arguments for abortion. These are some sources for arguments against abortion that have influenced me.
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Politics
Here some of my rambling thoughts.
An introduction. The austrian business cycle theory, besides what the name might suggest, is a theory related to all business cycles and not those particular only to Austria. Its name originates from Austrian School of Economics. The pioneers of the school were F.A. Hayek, Mises and Rothbard. The ideas pushed by the Austrian School of economics are mutually exclusive with Keynesians economics and differ with Milton Friedman. That's a brief history and more can be found on the internet.
The theory explains the boom of a business cycle is the result of the expansion of bank credit, which is created by the federal reserve through quantitative easing. Artificially low interest rates cause entrepreneurs to malinvest. These malinvestments realize later as unprofitable because there was never enough savings to sustain them. Malinvestments also cause inflation in prices of physical capital, capital machines, intermediate goods and final consumer goods. Eventually, the inflation from the malinvestments runs high enough that the federal reserve raises interest rates. That is the end of boom period. Then the bust occurs. Easy money in the boom elevated asset prices and incomes. This comes crashing down with the rise in interest rates. An increase in interest rates lowers the prices for many assets types and it also makes business ventures unaffordable and unprofitable. The bust ends after the malinvestments emerge as bankruptcies and prices of various asset types bottom out.
End of Part 1)
Part 1) Background information
I might add more later of my thoughts while I thought through the theory, instead of merely background.
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Economics
A study from Institute For Family Studies suggests main cause of involuntary celibacy is a decline in marriage.
This hard-core incel group is indeed growing as a share of the male population. The NSFG’s sample size, over 1,000 never-married men between the ages of 22 and 35 with sufficient questionnaire completion to estimate sexual behavior and reasons for virginity if they have not had sex, is large enough to be decently confident of these results.
But the 68% increase from 2002 to 2015 in the incel share of the male, never-married, 22-35-year-old population is mostly due to a decline in marriage, not never-married men having less sex. Rising involuntary virginity among never-marrieds accounts for around 27 percentage points of the increase, with the other 41 percentage points coming from a declining married share of the population. It may also be that some of these “incels” are males who were formerly, or would formerly have been, religious, and while they no longer abstain for religious reasons, nonetheless they may continue to hold some degree of religious norms regarding “high standards” for a first sexual encounter.
In other words, incels are right to see themselves as part of a novel and fairly extreme change in our society’s sexual behavior, with a growing share of sexless young men. But the big change isn’t a growing share of alpha males hoarding all the sex, nor women suddenly becoming far more choosey amid rising promiscuity; rather, it’s just that marriage is being delayed, which means that rates of marriage-status-controlled celibacy that aren’t historically extremely unusual result in very unusual rates of total population-wide sexlessness.
A few reasons for declines in marriage.
- decline in religiosity among people
- divorce rates and financial risk
- decline in economic opportunities
Rise in sexless men caused from people delaying marriage and people going to school
But whatever the direct effect of education on never-married men, the primary cause of the rise in sexlessness is simply the increasing delay of marriage. The delay in marriage has numerous causes, of course, but probably the most powerful driver of marital timing also relates to education. Men and women are much less likely to get married while attending school, and across times and countries, an increase in the years of schooling is associated with later age of marriage, though more-educated people do tend to get married eventually. Thus, as more and more schooling becomes necessary for a good middle-class job, marriage gets pushed later and later, leaving more young people (men and women!) companionless and lonely.
In general, people have obfuscated the term involuntary celibate with misogynist. While there is an overlap, they do not mean the same thing.
Societal factors drive involuntary celibacy. It not just a bunch of men that have hateful preconceptions of women.
This thread is probably banal to most you and doesn't apply.
Frankly, I don't have time to respond to people's comments, but I would enjoy to listen to what you have to say on the topic.
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Society
Good or Bad thing?
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Politics