CHOULO19

So many attempted long balls.....

But then there was the cross....

Love Nathanial, but he needs to spend a bit more time on the ball, and a bit less time on his arse on the floor...

Willian should score there. We could really use not making this a lot harder than it should be.

Jeez, Kurt is all over the place...

How is Jim Jeffries funny? If he says what he says on stage in an American accent he'd probably be thrown in a mental institute.....

Yeah, because THAT is the main logical problem with what he said!!!

Fuck off.....

What is Antonio waiting for to bring Mitchy on for Pedro?

Really doesn't help that the ref is blowing on the crowd's reactions...

Jeez, Eden is not having the best game, is he?

What a great first contribution from Willian there....

Way too slow in the final third.

Only just started watching. Have we looked this disjoint all match? They look more dangerous on the break than us.

Did the government make it legal for leftists to assault people they disagree with? Until then, my focus will be on people calling for ethnic cleansing gaining a lot of power...

Sorry, I meant philosophically not scientifically. Let's start again and try to frame the debate properly. Your argument is that it is immoral to do abortions. You then used a scientific definition of human development. The problem there is that morals are not a scientific concept. They are an abstract philosophical concept. Morals don't apply to any scientifically defined stage of human development. Morals apply to members of what philosophers call the 'Moral Community' which basically includes anyone or anything that you consider to be a person (which may or may not include fertilized eggs, fetuses, animals, and even fictional characters. That brings us to the main debating point of the moral argument about abortion: How do you define personhood? Now, to group many different things under the same definition, they need to exclusively share at least a single quality that you can use to define the group by. Being part of human development, as you suggested, cannot be the definition because that's not an intrinsic quality of something but rather a random definition itself. So what does a fertilized human egg have in common with a full grown human? One theory of personhood that can group both in the same group is the genetic theory (which google tells me was formulated by John Noonan) which basically says that anything with human DNA is a person. That is very obviously flawed because it would include things that are clearly not a person like your fallen skin cells or your spit or even dead people who still have bones...etc. On the other extreme you have the cognitive theory for personhood (which again google says is by Mary An Warren) that says that a person must have consciousness, reasoning and capacity to communicate among other things (see here for a fuller explanation). That's also flawed because it rules out infants and small babies and we're all pretty sure that we can't kill those! A more popular theory is that which defines a person as something that can feel pain and pleasure. That I believe was proposed by Peter Singer (but he himself believes a person should not only have sentience but also self-awareness). That would include fetuses older than about 25 weeks. You can see why this definition would be popular. It includes animals with a central nervous system and discludes a single cell that most would not consider to be a person. Another one is the gradient theory of personhood which basically says that a fetus is less of person than an infant who is in turn less of a person than an adult human. Basically it means that abortion can be morally accepted in some cases since the mother is more of a person than the fetus. But to me that just raises more complications than definitive answers. Which brings me back to my first point that the moral debate around abortion is basically pointless, not because it's not important, but because we don't agree on the definitions. Of course the moral debate is a factor in the equation but there are more important factors in my opinion that are not, or should not be, contentious like the fact that banning abortions only bans safe abortions, the fact that a huge percentage of 'homemade' abortions where abortions are illegal harm and even kill the mother, and the fact that forcing a sixteen year old to have a child she never intended to have most means that both the mother and the baby are going to have terrible lives. To me, allowing women to have the choice when to have a child or not which raises the overall quality of life for both women and children is more important than whether or not a few cells constitute a person or not.

I don't care about individual instances and I don't claim to support every action ever committed by anyone who calls themselves antifascist. You said antifascists are the same as fascists because they resort to violence. That is a false equivalency. Your main problem with fascists shouldn't be that they use violence but that they advocate for superiority based on ethnicity, for taking away civil and human rights of people based on who they are...etc. We can have a discussion about whether or not violence can be used to oppose that (which we've been having in this thread), but we can't have a serious discussion about whether the two are identical because they clearly and demonstrably are not.

Yeah, because the main problem with fascists is that they use violence not that they want to take away the rights of entire groups of people. Stop with the false equivalency.

Of course police will always side with fascists. That's almost always true everywhere. A week before the protests at Berkley, a Milo fan shot an anti-fascist protester at one of his events and police just let him go. Obviously that didn't make headlines as much as the riots. But that shouldn't mean that people should stop resisting in whatever manner they see fit.

That's just false. Or rather scientifically meaningless. A sperm could be defined to be alive as well or an unfertilized egg.

**[citation needed] What does that even mean? What is 'human life'? Why in the world makes it more important than other things? Philosophically, and hence in theoretical ethics as well, there is absolutely nothing significant about 'human life', it's not even something that can be defined. The best arguments that can be made are about human consciousness. A fertilized egg does not have consciousness. A fertilized egg is also no different than an unfertilized one or a sperm. They're just cells that could turn into a human with consciousness. Does that mean that contraception is murder as well? Again a moral discussion about abortion is completely pointless, it's about practicality.

I'm curious, what do you think makes a good comedy tv show? Yeah, sure. You can have an opinion about the abortions in your body and women about the ones in their bodies! I never get the moral discussion about abortion. It's completely pointless because our own definitions of 'life' and what has life and what doesn't are completely baseless. For me it's completely practical. It's a proven fact that the government can't ban abortions. It can only ban safe abortions.

I never said that the state should restrict the free speech of Nazis (i'm pretty sure I actually said the opposite). I was talking about communities coming together to shut down such hate speech and deny platforms. Those are two very different things. You can't debate people who believe that some people should have less rights than others. The moment you give them a platform and debate them then you admit that their beliefs are a legitimate outcome of the 'debate'. You can easily defeat their ideas and their arguments without giving them a platform and debating them. Once you normalize such ideas, it becomes too easy to spread them in times of economic difficulties when minorities become the easy scapegoat. It's rather predictable if you study history. This is from Chomsky's "Understanding Power" from the mid 90s: And this is from 2010: “The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.” http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/noam_chomsky_has_never_seen_anything_like_this_20100419/P500 The only solution I see is to not allow such hate speech that could lead to fascism in your community by whatever means possible.

Hey @Kazadoo. Great to see you back around here. Hope all is well?

Don't disagree with much in there. Of course human and civil rights are not a constant, but they're not completely subjective either. Rights are a constant battle ground, but that is exactly why we write them into constitutions and don't give politicians who 'bang on' about them the power to unilaterally take them away. All I'm saying is that women's voting rights, for example, should not be destroyable by a vote. Also, historically, rights and freedoms are gained and defended in the democratic arenas but in the streets through protests and even riots mostly against the beliefs of the majorities and the powerful.