Right to LifeBoard

Lagrodia wrote:

https://www.politicalcompass.org/yourpoliticalcompass?ec=-5.63&soc=-2.46

You think that’s bad? I’ve gone about 13 points to the left since 2017.

But those questions are just nonsense, and almost entirely attitude as opposed to policy. They’re so nebulous it’s almost impossible to strongly agree or disagree with anything. I’m not sure I’m that far to the left in reality, but I share with leftists a suspicion of capitalism.

Wowsers, that's a swing.

I completely agree though, you've got this nice range from 'badly worded' to 'manipulatively worded' to 'confusingly worded' to 'why the heck is this even a question?'

Literally the first question "If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations." What is that even supposed to mean? Who defines 'humanity'? Why do we assume that something that benefits corporations must automatically harm humanity? Which then of course leads into "What’s good for the most successful corporations is always, ultimately, good for all of us." which doesn't just go for a universal but doubles up on it, not "what's good for the most successful corporations is usually good for most people" or "usually good for society", but it must 'always' be good for 'all of us', and if there's a single example otherwise I suppose you have to say 'disagree', even if you're a hardcore capitalist. (Or you can disagree because you're capitalist, say that corporations want handouts or anti-competitive regulation, and thus by opposing government spending and regulation be considered left-wing economically.) It then ends up not even being internally consistent, because if you agree with that question, you can't even answer the first one because you think that the interests of corporations and serving humanity are one and you can't choose agree or disagree.

The compass as a concept is a good one and fun to play with, but the test itself is just bad.

Have we any formal system set up for map requests that I'm not aware of, or just posting here in the RMB?

If the latter, I'd like to re-up Roborian's claim on Australia/Tasmania.

Slavic lechia wrote:

I am outraged! Full name of our church is The Orthodox Catholic Church of The East! Saying that orthodox are not catholic is a lie!

PS. It was half-joke, so don't take that seriously xD

PS. For our protestant friends and non-christian friends: The joke is that catholics call themselves orthodox, if they are conservative and orthodox call themselves catholic when they are well aware of history of the church. It's a silly joke of very religious apostolic christians...

Hi guys, I've returned from a rather long hiatus. Is Lechia Orthodox now? What's going on?

Roborian wrote:

I think the underlined is our fundamental disagreement. In the hypothetical example in court, you're obviously not going free if the government is refusing your conduct to be protected by right, but that action does not change the fact that the right has been violated. The government locking you up is showing that they are just violating your rights, not that you never had them, enforcement does not change that fundamental status, only the practical question of whether or not you're being tossed in prison.

But it just doesn't make sense to define the law as something that does not even get enforced. Who is to say what is the law if courts and the governments do not get to define it? What is the point of jurisprudence? The one who seems to have a quantum notion of the law is you, since by your standards we will never know, and perhaps can never know, what the law really is, since it exists in a purely theoretical plane.

Roborian wrote:

This conclusion of yours seems to be agreeing with my point-the case holds that the shop becomes a state actor, not a private one.

But it is a private entity which is acting as an extension of the state.

Roborian wrote:

Have we any formal system set up for map requests that I'm not aware of, or just posting here in the RMB?

If the latter, I'd like to re-up Roborian's claim on Australia/Tasmania.

Since I have not been officially endorsed by the administration to take SL's place as official cartographer, it is just unofficial for now. I don't really mind who claims what, or in what manner they claim it, though I would probably draw the line at multiple irl countries (maybe make an exception for Imperii Ecclesia, who I'm sure might want the HRE territories). I don't know about any former claims before my time in RtL, but I will put you down for Australia.

Aawia wrote:

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Could lead to some good debate. I'm in two minds, on one hand I agree fathers aren't respected as part of the process outside of the night of conception. But, at the same time I worry this would incentivize women to abort if the father isn't on board. Once the man has engaged in making a baby, no matter how many precautions are taken to avoid it, is he risking the financial burden of a child? I believe he is. It shouldn't be assumed that just because precautions were taken you can wash your hands of the side affects in this instance. Yet, I am not unsympathetic to the view that a mother can choose whether or not to be a mother but a father cannot choose whether or not to be a father in the same way, rather the mother chooses that for him as well. The difference being the mother is the one who carries the baby and takes the risk of child birth. Ultimately, I suppose I believe it should just be seen as a risk inherent to reproductive acts. If you risk even less than a 1% chance to be tied to a woman you can't stand for years via payments and/or parental responsibilities because you wanted a night of fun well, play stupid games win stupid prizes.

Roborian wrote:

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My answer is basically both a strong yes and a strong no at the same time. On the basic ethical question of it-absolutely. The decision to have the baby absolutely was his to make, and he made it when he helped to create the baby. A mother having access to abortion does not change his involvement, it just provides a 'veto', essentially. Saying otherwise seems to me akin to questioning whether Congress is responsible for laws the President signs because he has the ability not to sign them, obviously they are, that responsibility came when they chose to engage in their part of the process. The only exception would be if the father had been raped, you can still get into different ethical question of responsibility to your offspring in that scenario, but at the least they cannot be held as having agreed upon consultation.

The other half of it, though I've had my opinions move around a bit on this, is that I don't really believe in mandatory child support for unwed parents. Essentially, there has been no contract, and without it, one forfeits the right to compensation. If one wants that kind of guaranteed support, then one can obtain it with a ring. It is an independent decision to procreate without that binding union, and you can make no claims that another is obligated to you if you failed to get that obligation confirmed in the institution designated to enforce it.

As in the first half, that obviously does not apply in the case of rape, but for the vast majority of consensual copulatings, one is responsible for one's own decisions, not those of others, whether that means the decision of the man to have the child regardless of whether the woman chooses an abortion, or the decision of the woman to remain unmarried regardless of whether the man chooses to leave.

Phydios wrote:

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Yes, the father should be required to pay child support, except in extenuating circumstances. Most sex is consensual, and if it leads to conception, you are responsible for that child. It would not be fair, by any definition, to make the mother responsible for the child but let the father off the hook. Fathers running away from their responsibility is already common enough.

The problems of courts often being biased against fathers and fathers being left out of abortion discussions are separate issues, and you don't address one injustice by introducing another.

The injustice here is not about the woman, it's about the man. A woman gets a right to "choose" post-conception whether to give birth to and support a baby financially, but a father does not get any choice after conception. He's a slave to the choice of the would-be mother. If giving birth is such an oppressive institution for a woman, why shouldn't men be liberated too? If the choice to have a baby is no longer considered one that requires any responsibility whatsoever, to the extent it is relegated as a private matter between a woman and her doctor, then why shouldn't the choice to pay financial support similarly be a private matter between a man and his accountant?

La france bonapartiste wrote:

But it just doesn't make sense to define the law as something that does not even get enforced. Who is to say what is the law if courts and the governments do not get to define it? What is the point of jurisprudence? The one who seems to have a quantum notion of the law is you, since by your standards we will never know, and perhaps can never know, what the law really is, since it exists in a purely theoretical plane.

Not the law-rights, there's a definite difference there. Laws are defined by government and the courts, rights are indeed a philosophical construct.

La france bonapartiste wrote:

But it is a private entity which is acting as an extension of the state.

It would boil down then to what one considers the intermixing of private and government to be, which is likely to be more subjective terminology than anything. The Court labels it as not 'purely private', and 'interdependent', which you could call governmental for no longer being fully private, or you could assign some other term for the mixed state. It does not matter a great deal practically in either case, the end result in both is that purely private institutions are not bound by the amendment, only state-mixed ones.

La france bonapartiste wrote:

I just don't see the point in going to a dry well looking for water. Repeating the same action multiple times, expecting different results, is the definition of insanity, as Albert Einstein said.

The real definition of insanity is people attributing that quote to Albert Einstein over and over and expecting that this time there will actually be any evidence that he said it.

La france bonapartiste wrote:

The Earth is complex in itself. And you can understand it based on the forces which it exerts upon you. The same principle is what ties us to God.

Complex in a very different (and much lesser) way-it remains an inanimate object that can exert no force but a physical one, which is vastly more limited than a being with agency.

La france bonapartiste wrote:

Correct. I am tethered to Him and therefore am always moored in the harbor of His Power.

This seems at odds not just really with human capriciousness, but human choice. Are you of the mind that one is incapable of ever turning away from God after approaching Him?

La france bonapartiste wrote:

Since I have not been officially endorsed by the administration to take SL's place as official cartographer, it is just unofficial for now. I don't really mind who claims what, or in what manner they claim it, though I would probably draw the line at multiple irl countries (maybe make an exception for Imperii Ecclesia, who I'm sure might want the HRE territories). I don't know about any former claims before my time in RtL, but I will put you down for Australia.

Sounds good. If we do manage to get this formalized, I would recommend a vote on whether we want to use a real-world map or a custom/generated one. I have a feeling that the real-world option would win, but I figure it's worth an ask if most people think otherwise.

Roborian wrote:

'Does not get any choice after conception', i.e., 'does not get any extra choice after he already made his choice.' He has himself chosen to be a 'slave to the choice of the would-be mother', that's a situation he entered into of his own free will. It is not as if the woman has the ability to choose to have a baby purely solo, without his input, she just gets to decide whether to keep the baby he already chose to have-he has locked in his decision.

As I said, I do not ultimately believe that child support should be legally mandated when the parents are not married (even if the man ought to buck up and make things right), but I do still wholly reject the argument that the legality of abortion gives him an ethical basis to cut ties and run. The woman has a veto over his decision, but that only comes after he made that decision himself.

You act like women don't get a choice in conception either. They get that "extra choice" you mention, but men are forced to stake their entire future on whatever she decides on a whim, while they get no input whatever. It's sexist and discriminatory. If women get to choose what to do without input from the father, then it stands to reason that men should be able to cut and run. And I truly hope that that's the next step after women get added to the draft.

Roborian wrote:

Not the law-rights, there's a definite difference there. Laws are defined by government and the courts, rights are indeed a philosophical construct.

I don't know about you, but I've been talking about the law this entire time. I said "that's how the law works in real life" and you've been going "nuh-uh!" over and over. So if we've actually been talking about Natural Rights or some Lockean metaphysics this entire time, that's news to me.

Roborian wrote:

The real definition of insanity is people attributing that quote to Albert Einstein over and over and expecting that this time there will actually be any evidence that he said it.

Putting aside how absurdly narrow such a definition of insanity would be, there's no evidence he didn't say it either. Most quotes are at best attributions and nothing more.

Roborian wrote:

Complex in a very different (and much lesser) way-it remains an inanimate object that can exert no force but a physical one, which is vastly more limited than a being with agency.

Agency is a matter of perspective. We are all bound within the limitations of Nature.

Roborian wrote:

This seems at odds not just really with human capriciousness, but human choice. Are you of the mind that one is incapable of ever turning away from God after approaching Him?

Did I say that?

La france bonapartiste wrote:

I don't know about you, but I've been talking about the law this entire time. I said "that's how the law works in real life" and you've been going "nuh-uh!" over and over. So if we've actually been talking about Natural Rights or some Lockean metaphysics this entire time, that's news to me.

Seriously man?

You talking about "Rights" A bunch of times because that's literally what we've been talking about

La france bonapartiste wrote:

Then you misunderstand the purpose and function of EOs; they cannot confer new rights or alter them. His EO would have simply instructed the government to follow a different interpretation from what they had been using.

La france bonapartiste wrote:

He cannot alter rights by changing an interpretation. There is no right there. This is like me making an EO on abortion saying "the official position of the government is that there is no right to abortion" and then you saying that I'm taking away that right. If the right does not exist, its status cannot be altered.

La france bonapartiste wrote:

If you say "I have a right to smoke dope" and a police officer comes up and tells you that you do not, is that "taking your rights away"? Are they "altering" your rights? No. It's your interpretation of rights that makes no sense. The executive, administrative, judicial, and legislative branches all make "changes" to rights without actually taking or depriving you of your actual rights in a legal sense.

La france bonapartiste wrote:

But like I said, that's literally what happens. People update their cases all the time when SCOTUS finds a new right or alters its jurisprudence in some way. The Constitution remains exactly the same, but your "rights" shift dramatically over the course of a decade. It's schizophrenic. I don't like it anymore than you do, but that's how it works in the real world. If Roe v. Wade were overturned, that would be a right that never existed before being "taken away" as you say; but for most of us, such a right never existed in the first place.

La france bonapartiste wrote:

If we are ever going to have a constructive conversation, you need to read my words less literally and be able to see where I'm coming from on multiple levels. A right =/= right, by necessity. I as a police officer (hypothetically mind you) can deprive you of liberty without any due process, even though the Constitution literally says that no one can "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" (5th Amend.). And the courts are okay with that--why? Because they've interpreted that your right to due process is not encompassing of the first 24 hours you are held by police. That's insane! The capacity for abuse in that 24 hours is huuuuge, but the courts don't care. In Louisiana, a man was given a life sentence in 1996 for trying to steal gardening clippers. The Constitution does not permit cruel and unusual punishments, which is a legal term of art most people believe prohibits disproportionate sentencing. Yet the highest court in that state thought that was perfectly reasonable. You and I can sit here and agree philosophically on what certain rights exist or mean, but the way that works out in practice is radically different, and I think you know that. So I don't understand the intellectual dishonesty in telling me I don't know what I'm talking about, when I say that a right that exists in a philosophical vaccuum has no meaning under the color of law. Under your definition of rights, people are legally "deprived" of their rights every day. Legally. Not in any way that the courts find offensive to ordered liberty, but deprived in the only meaningful sense, from the perspective of the person who is meant to enjoy the protections of that right. If I had the time, I could bring you hundreds, if not thousands, of cases where this happens under the government's rubber stamp every single day. But I won't, because again, despite all your protestations, I'm fairly confident you and I are on the same page, you just want, it seems to me, to maintain your grip on the course of the discussion and keep it in a ball court in which your point of view is more persuasive. But what I'm talking about is real, not some philosopher's dream.

So when you tell me that Trump can't deny citizenship to the immediate descendants of illegal immigrants because it would deprive them of a "right" they are currently enjoying, and that I'm completely out of order for suggesting otherwise, when the government strips people of their "rights" by changing interpretations of the Constitution all the time, it's preposterous.

And I don't even know how to take the claim that it's news to you if we've been talking about natural rights when I'm literally explicitly referencing natural rights while quoting the Declaration of Independence.

Natural Rights

Roborian wrote:

You're not really doing even that, you're advancing a specific theory of rights that does not match up with the traditional American understanding. The entire concept of natural rights, which the Founders and founding documents clearly largely supported, is that rights are not defined by a government, they exist outside of them, and are only recognized. 'The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed' or 'the right of the people to be secure...against unreasonable searches and seizures', etc. do not speak of granting rights, but preventing government from stepping on those that already exist. Or just take the obvious from the Declaration of Independence: 'endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights'

You're going the complete opposite way, completely at odds with all of that. If a right's existence is determined by whim of the government, then a right literally cannot be infringed upon, with every such infringement self-justifying with "Oh, you never had that right in the first place, actually." That doesn't fly. The Declaration of Independence would not have written of the King's invasions on the rights of the people if they conceded to him the authority to determine what rights were and were not. There cannot be a long train of abuses if said abuses are self-justified by being redefined as permissible simply by happening.

Your definition is not only irrelevant from a practical perspective, it flies in the face of the basic foundational principles of rights that America literally started from.

La france bonapartiste wrote:

Putting aside how absurdly narrow such a definition of insanity would be, there's no evidence he didn't say it either. Most quotes are at best attributions and nothing more.

Beyond that being obviously a joke, 'there's no evidence he didn't say it either' is a silly defense. Most quotes for at least the last couple centuries can actually be cited rather than being something someone on the internet made up and slapped a famous person's name on, after all, as Abraham Lincoln said, you can't trust everything you read on the Internet.

La france bonapartiste wrote:

Agency is a matter of perspective. We are all bound within the limitations of Nature.

Unless you're literally going to sit here and claim that God has less agency than a rock, this statement is meaningless.

La france bonapartiste wrote:

Did I say that?

You certainly seem to in confirming that your feelings towards Him are 'perfectly unchanging such that you never need to reevaluate and are never off-course', hence my asking the question.

La france bonapartiste wrote:

You act like women don't get a choice in conception either. They get that "extra choice" you mention, but men are forced to stake their entire future on whatever she decides on a whim, while they get no input whatever. It's sexist and discriminatory. If women get to choose what to do without input from the father, then it stands to reason that men should be able to cut and run. And I truly hope that that's the next step after women get added to the draft.

No, they're not forced to take their entire future on what she decides on a whim, they're forced to stake their entire future on what they decided. Unless we're talking about rape, she wasn't the one that decided to have sex with her-that was the dude. Her only choices are to either annul his (their) choice, or let it stand, she makes no decision for him whatsoever.

If you agree to sign a contract with someone, and that someone has the ability to back out of it, that does nothing to change your own free-will involvement in the first place. Your signature is on that contract, and your genetic signature is on the child-you chose to make that decision, and now you have to live with it.

Roborian wrote:

Easy mate, no one's trying to take your ball from you, I'm just offering a suggestion in case we have people here who are interested in using a non-real world map, finding that out would be the point of a vote. There are generators online that can spit out a random map for you, but all I'm doing here is putting that option forward.

From my experience, most random map generators cannot be edited after-the-fact. If we lose countries from the region, or gain them, it may necessitate completely remaking the map each "generation"; that's why I wanted something similar to Slavic lechia's map, which allows you to fill in the colors province-by-province. More stylized or textured maps make it harder to edit. If I am going to be the cartographer, which everyone is welcome to oppose, that is something I cannot do.