I trust my body to tell me that something’s wrong. If my butt is giving me warning signs, I darn well better listen.

Born Twice. It’s the autobiography of a Green Beret fighting in the US military’s most highly-decorated unit of all time, MACV-SOG. He read the audiobook himself, so if you go that route, it has a “Grandpa telling you stories” vibe to it, except that you’re an adult now and he doesn’t have to hold anything back anymore.

I nuke Moscow. Can’t fall out a window if there are no windows!

That’s what I was thinking too. I wonder if the thumbnail activated the same part of my brain that’s trained to detect snakes in the grass.

A lot of people simply don’t because they can’t. It’s absurdly expensive because the system isn’t designed for people to pay for it out of pocket. If someone doesn’t have insurance, they’ll either beg the hospital for mercy or ignore the medical debt because it doesn’t count against your credit score. Even if they do have insurance, it often doesn’t cover a portion of the cost, the insurance is extremely expensive, or both. The people with quality insurance through their employer have it good, but the system expects everyone to have that privilege.

The discussion here is founded upon the assumption that a fetus is a person. The OP’s argument is that if that’s true, then self defense laws apply and the woman should be able to defend herself from the fetus by whatever means necessary to prevent harm. But the fetus can’t choose to do anything, so killing it in self defense would only make sense if you could also kill the five year old who was thrown at its mother.

The entire argument here is that if we consider a fetus a person, then we should apply self-defense laws to pregnancies. I’m pointing out why “self defense” against a person who has done literally nothing is ridiculous. I was writing my previous posts under the assumption that a fetus is a person, the same as in the original post.

But I also believe that there’s no point in drawing arbitrary lines in the sand where a human organism/being/whatever you’d like to call it becomes a person. The minute you do that, it opens the door to whoever is writing the rules this week to decide things like “humans who are in a coma aren’t people anymore” or “humans without a certain level of intellectual ability aren’t people.” That isn’t a level of authority that I would entrust to any mortal human being. Would you?

Organs are components of an organism that support its life functions. A fetus is not a component of an organism, but is an organism unto itself. If it were an organ, then it would be something a woman is born with and develops naturally as she grows. Women are born with egg cells, true, but they don’t become fetuses until they are fertilized and undergo a degree of development.

So if a five-year-old can’t be held responsible and killed for hitting its mother by being thrown at her, because it was the dad who threw it, then how can a fetus be held responsible and killed for existing and causing harm to the mother, even though it never chose to exist at all and was conceived by another person?

In that case, the child thrown at its mother is guilty of assault because it harmed her by colliding with her. The child would be subject to self-defense rules and could rightly have been shot out of the air like a clay pigeon.

Right, I agree. And so, would you say that a fetus, which did not choose to be conceived or sustained in any way in the mother, should be held responsible for any harm (however you define that) that comes to the mother as a result of the pregnancy? If so, then you should also hold the child responsible because it struck and harmed its mother, even though it didn’t do so by choice.

What exactly is the fallacy here? The point is that if the child has done nothing of its own choice to harm its mother, then the fetus cannot be held responsible either.

That doesn’t answer the question. Should a five-year-old be held responsible if their dad throws them at their mom?

Would you be okay with charging a 5-year-old child with assault if a dad threw the kid at his mom without the kid wanting that? The kid didn’t choose to be thrown at his mom, but collided with her regardless. Similarly, the fetus didn’t choose to be conceived, but exists nonetheless.

It isn’t just that she was religious; according to her family, she had schizophrenia. https://www.sj-r.com/story/news/crime/2024/07/26/crump-sonya-massey-needed-a-helping-hand-not-a-bullet-to-the-face/74551662007/

I don’t know what she was thinking at the time, but it must have been horrifying. As someone with sz, it makes me wonder what lengths people will go to put me down should they see the need.

How would that happen? It’s obvious he was shot at. Others in the crowd got killed/injured as a result of the gunfire. This just seems like standard procedure.

• Short term interest: this is just human nature. All economic models work around human nature and desires. People desire short-term gains in pretty much any endeavor. If this was a communist society, they’d still rush to get this thing out as fast as possible so they could meet state quotas/meet whatever other incentive is being offered to finish the job. The problem comes not from the motivations, but how they respond to it. Rushing deadlines and ignoring the need for testing and quality code is a universal human constant.
• Commercial focus: we have a much better idea of how much an endeavor, product, service, etc. will cost under capitalism because we have a decentralized and automatic way to calculate its value in the form of prices. Miscalculations - or simple human errors, like pushing bad code by accident - happen though, and hopefully this company has learned that prioritizing pushing something out can risk losing them money vs. testing it and coming out with a quality product.
• Antagonist interests: this is another question of short-term vs. long-term interests. Say you have a factory. If you crank up the machines to double speed, you’re potentially doubling your production, right? It isn’t that simple, actually. You can end up with a lot more workplace accidents that way, which will destroy your productivity extremely quickly. Same deal here. This will, hopefully, be a lesson learned by the industry in not pushing garbage code. M$ can’t serve ads to people who can’t boot their PCs, and will instead lose boatloads of money suddenly having to fulfill tech support contracts because of their screw-up, for example. Crowdstrike is going to have its competitors look a lot more appealing from here on out because they’ve been exposed as fools. (If they have no competitors - IT people, this is your sign!) Mistakes will happen until the end of time, of course, but that doesn’t mean fat-fingering the keyboard is a fault of the Western economic system.

Capitalism is, in essence, the ability for people to exchange their goods freely. It isn’t dependent on corporations or some weird hierarchy of managers and workers. Those are facts of living in this system, but it isn’t a direct consequence of “capitalism.” If everyone worked only for themselves and produced something to bring to the exchange, that would still be capitalism.

What does an economic system have to do with bad IT decisions?

You would think, though, that it would be a “get some guys with guns onto that roof before he comes back” sign. 20 minutes is plenty of time to get at least some guys with pistols/their own AR-15s over there to secure the area. Also, simply having the right to own and carry weapons doesn’t give you the right to point them at people intentionally, much less set up a sniper’s nest on a divisive public figure. If a random guy in the crowd started pointing his pistol at Trump, then I’m fairly certain that would give Secret Service the right to at least tackle the guy or tase him, not to mention all the other people who would rush to control him.

I would think that if Trump was going to remove his own term limits so he could be President for Life and then start murdering his political rivals, it would have been in his first term when he had the House, Senate, and Supreme Court locked down. As it stands, he’s only going to be in power for another four years, worst-case scenario. It would take a constitutional amendment to change that (which is a big part of why he isn’t President for Life). I’m not going to sit here and say when it’s okay to start killing politicians, other than that we aren’t there yet.

I’d like to ask you a question as well: if Trump died, what do you think would have happened? Do you think that 100% of the gun-toting pro-Trump militias throughout the country would have laid down their arms and admitted defeat? Do you think that the political faction that is, on average, more likely to own and use guns than the left, would have said “well that sucks I guess”? Do you think that Democrats across the country would be safe? Or do you think it would be a Shot Heard Cross the Coasts that would have started a free-for-all of political violence that the country hasn’t seen in decades - perhaps centuries?

While I do think that the right of the people to govern themselves has certain implications I won’t get into here, it also means we have legislative options on the table. You have freedom of speech, which is why we can ask questions like yours and mine. We have the right to assemble, form parties, and elect officials. Let’s use those rights while the government hasn’t decided to destroy them yet; and if they ever do, let’s take the discussion to a more anonymous forum like on Tor or I2P.

I lost count of how many specific part numbers of defective Apple products he rattled off with the same design flaw, but that was a stunning display. Just exposed that they know these things are problems and just don’t care, because people will keep buying their products.