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Jul 1, 2022·edited Jul 1, 2022

“We just need to know what the woman thinks.”

This is an anti-libertarian view if one believes the baby is alive. Indeed, it is as un-libertarian as possible.

Appealing vaguely to libertarianism is unsatisfying in this debate as it still hinges entirely on the proposition you hope to avoid

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I side with Arnold's view on transitioning. I learned a man I worked with for a number of years became a woman. The man is dead. The woman is a new person. If I met the woman I would approach with the notion that the man I knew no longer exists. For why else would the person have destroyed that man?

Christianity has the idea of being born again. Spiritual renewal can change a person. It can "kill" a person's old attitudes and habits. But the person is changed, not destroyed. Transitioning seems to be a means of obliterating a person's old identity. It doesn't improve but rather replaces.

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On the transgender craze: it is exactly that, a social pathology running wild. It is no different in kind than someone thinking they are a squirrel or a rabbit. The only difference is that essentially no one would countenance medical procedures that attempt to turn one into a squirrel or a rabbit. We apparently no longer tell crazy people they are crazy.

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The murder clearance rate (solved cases) in America is around 50%. In high crime cities its lower.

This is a scandal and should be remedied, but I don't see how one would respond that the difficulty with enforcing anti-murder laws should mean we should legalize murder.

Look, these libertarian-ish arguments for maximalist infanticide just don't hold. Safe, legal, rare proved completely untenable. Once you legalized infanticide, people literally started worshipping it. I would look around you at the kind of people who share your position of on demand abortion at nine months and what else they believe. What do they value. How do they live. I think you'd find that they are your opposite in almost every respect. You can't make sacrifices to Moloch without it seeping into every aspect of your being.

The nitty gritty of enforcement is the least important aspect of this. It will work itself out in time. The real question is what type of society we have.

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While I disagree with Freddie, I support his voice because his writing seems so honest and often right on point:

"Look I’m one of those pro-choice absolutists you hear about, and (not but) I also think we need to be strategic and sensible with how we fight to protect abortion rights. "

I don't recall reading such a clear "and (not but) I also think ... " phrase. He's an absolutist in principle AND he wants Democrats to be sensible. I, too, wish Dems were sensible, but they increasingly are, instead, ever more hysterically emotional - stereotypically more feminine*.

Freddie's fighting for abortion, which I oppose. While I was a Libertarian (running for office, twice), I thought of abortion as "the murder of a parasite". It IS murder, abortion is killing a live human fetus with unique DNA, which DNA was first combined at conception, combining the half from the father with the half+ from the mother. (Mitochondrial DNA is all from the mother - all only slight mutations from the first "Eve".) [Over 500 comments there - I seldom read any anymore]

But a fetus is not a parasite, it is the normal, pre-born stage of human development. With a conception that occurred because of sex. SEX. Let's talk about sex. (We should be making love ...)

The abortion debate is deliberately sterile when sex is not part of the debate. The main choice women have is the Yes or No to having sex. When they choose yes to sex, they chose to risk getting pregnant. Like all drivers always risk death while driving a car - but pregnancy is far more common, since sex is even more pleasurable than fast, reckless driving, tho that's exciting, too.

The Dems don't want to talk about sex because they pretty much favor all forms of consensual sex, and increasingly all forms of pleasure. Both libertine-ish and libertarian-ish.

The Reps don't want to talk about it because it makes them seem such pleasure kill-joys, and being responsible about choosing to have sex or not hasn't been a big vote winner.

The Christians don't want to talk about it because ... of privacy! They mostly think sex should be a private matter that happens only in marriages between men and women, and behind closed doors. They want LOTS of it - inside of marriage, with lots of kids, and without talking about it.

Society needs to affirm women's empowered decision to say "No" to sex, but also add that it's also their responsibility, since they, and not men, can get pregnant. This "unfair" but real fact is a strong basis for lots of feminism, yet also contradicts the false idea that men and women are equal. If one group of folk can get pregnant, but the other group can't, they are not equal. But they can be, sort of, equal under the law.

*In the Meyers Briggs Type Indicator, one axis is whether decisions are more driven by T-thinking or F-feeling. This is especially important for those who are N-iNtuitive abstract folk.

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“ Unless almost everyone is willing to insist that from the moment of conception abortion is murder, a total ban on abortions is unenforceable.”

In our system of extensive and required medical licensing, heath professionals have a lot to lose by disobeying legal medical rules. In our culture where the population of academically successful people are the source population of highly conformist people who have limited speech on college campuses and doctors and nurses. Highly conformist and risk averse people seem likely to react to a big risk of medical license loss, fines, and jail by conforming. So I could see these policies being successful at reducing abortions without convincing almost everyone that abortion is murder.

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> Unless almost everyone is willing to insist that from the moment of conception abortion is murder, a total ban on abortions is unenforceable. And if we cannot agree that all abortions should be banned unconditionally, the question becomes who gets to decide. I believe that the only viable approach is the libertarian one: the state should stay out of it. Preach against abortion all you want, but in the end leave the decision to the woman.

I agree that those who wish to seek a compromising solution have a philosophical conundrum in determining what the legal threshold should be, but philosophical consistency has never been much of a barrier to politics. There is plenty of agreement across the developed world that *at the very least* late term abortions should be prohibited. Your proposed solution would make this a far more politically divisive issue than it already is.

> We just need to know what the woman thinks.

Really the most important question is whether the unborn child is a person that possesses any rights. Unwillingness to address this question is not libertarian.

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founding

Arnold - you continue to sound like a bitcoin maximalist. The most passionate believers in bitcoin also believe that 99% of the “tokens” traded on exchanges are scams. The remaining 1% fall into 2 categories:

1. Bitcoin - built on the blockchain, the only truly decentralized monetary system in history that has optimized farthest along the spectrum for the five key attributes of money - recognizability, durability, scarcity, divisibility & portability.

2. Unregistered securities. Like Ethereum, these are blockchain software applications may serve some useful function as a new way to solve certain problems, but they are inherently centralizing (as you have mentioned makes perfect sense) and there is not a clear reason why they need to have their own currency attached to them.

Two very positive side effects to the current bear market in “crypto” are that a lot of the scams will be flushed out of the system & that in this un-backstopped market, you can actually measure the weakness/risk inherent in the larger financial system. All the shenanigans happening in “crypto” look to me like indications of what is also happening in traditional finance (hedge funds, PE, sovereign wealth funds, large investment banks) but we can’t see. This is the one market that is apparently taking the punishment for bad decisions like overleveraging on shaky “assets”. If the traditional financial markets have even 30% of the behavior we are seeing in “crypto” - watch out.

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Jul 2, 2022·edited Jul 2, 2022

I don't agree with Mr. Kling's "libertarian" solution to the abortion conundrum. Too many other people besides the woman depend on that baby in the womb.

I think the emotion driving the "pro-choice" movement is mostly envy. I defend that position in a post on my blog: https://trotskyschildren.blogspot.com/2022/05/its-not-just-about-abortion.html

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I don't really know what you mean here. What happens if Congress re-passes am assault weapon ban? Or requires a background check that the purchaser of a firearm in not a felon or under court restraining order and that ownership of a gun must be maintained so if it is used in a crime there is some chance of tracing it's provenance. Stuff like that? How will prospective gun owners disregard that kind of law.

Other parts of your reply seem to indicate that you do not think there would be large benefits in numbers of violent crimes prevented by these kinds of laws. I think I agree, but I also see the the costs are very low. Many gun owners going through more red tape to prevent even a few Uvalde type shootings seems well worth it. I'll bet that requiring drivers' licenses does not reduce automobile fatalities very much, either, but its still worthwhile. I'm just an unreconstructed neo-liberal that want to apply cost benefit analysis to policy issues.

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Nick Weaver is mostly correct. The crypto industry mainly exists as a speculative, pump & dump operation. Most of the "problems" crypto aims to solve are only problems for crooks and anarchists. The improvements offered by crypto, such as a public ledger, have real vulnerabilities.

Yet crypto does serve those who are unjustly blocked from corporate and government sponsored financial centers. I'm all for government facing competition from private currencies. And better for the private sector to figure out something doesn't work than for the government to commit to a bad idea and stick with it too long.

As for crypto speculation, people make and lose money gambling on all sorts of things. Crypto is just another thing for people to bet on. A crypto lottery could be the best idea yet.

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> I think of transitioning as akin to committing suicide. Both transitioning and suicide tend to cause deep pain in those around you. You are at the point where you don’t mind inflicting that pain, and maybe deep down you want them to feel pain.

I agree. Most trans people I know would definitely fit into this camp. Curiously there is one trans person I know where this does not appear to be the case, but I think their life situation was probably sufficiently out of the norm anyway.

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“Life begins at conception” is a religious concept with no basis in observable or scientific reality. The statement implies that the egg and sperm weren’t already alive. That isn’t true. Life continues and evolves. The religious believers obviously made up this concept recently: in biblical times they had no idea of reproduction before “quickening”, but had connected it with sex, with sperm being the seed, which is alive. Though an understanding of basic biology is not a prerequisite for religious fervency, zealots claim that a blastocyst or other early life stage is a “new” life with a different DNA mix, but cancer is also a "new life" with different DNA. Would they choose to protect the evolving cancer from being aborted chemically or surgically? After all, both are different living tissues within the larger tissue of the woman's body.

By using law to ban abortion, religious believers forcibly compel others to march in lockstep with their version of their God’s recently updated commands. They have no “right" to force others to comply with their beliefs. After all, these beliefs based on the notion that God has imbued this foreign tissue with a soul — which, if he’s so omnipotent, one would think he could simply recycle the precious soul from where it is not wanted into the body of a woman yearns to be pregnant. The draconian prioritizing of clumps of tissue over the bodies within whom the tissue happens to be growing is not a view which is shared by all or even by a vast majority in the country.

The value of the wall between church and state, so wisely recognized by America’s Founding Fathers, was intended to protect Americans from just such an imposition of specific religious values upon those who do not share them.

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I'm not aware of any brutal and bizarre history of enforcing registering of gun ownership, background checks before purchase, and restrictions on carrying guns in public or an outright ban on owning assault weapons. "Right" and "wrong" are seldom a good basis for legislation; "more" and "less" are.

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Dorn “persistent” “excess” “principally” “likely” “profligacy” There is enough there to be just about bullet proof. 😊

I think Dorn is wrong about current US inflation, starting with the fact that is not “persistent” (it has only been above target for about a year and current TIPS expectations are that it is just about back on target) and the monetary policies that have resulted in inflation have not been the result of the Fed wishing to accommodate deficits but rather just mis-calculations.

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On abortion: I agree mostly with Kling on this one. I don't think there is any real support for abortion after the 1st trimester, and I don't think there is any real support for total bans. We will eventually end up with abortion being legal in almost all the states up to about 13-16 weeks gestation, illegal after that point except in extreme cases. I do think you will likely see the late stage abortion continued to be performed on citizens of states that banned them, but I don't think it will be underground- they will simply go to Massachusetts, New York, or the Pacific coast- it will become a growth business in those states.

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