thickvixen: “There is no perfect system in this world. But your response is to not have the system at all.”

If a “system” is costly, useless, and kills innocent people, then usually not having the “system” at all is a good idea.

Of course you could make an argument that the premeditated slaughter of criminals is not useless, and that it has benefits that are worth the costs, and even worth murdering innocent people. But you certainly haven’t made that argument yet.

(Incidentally, you can put the kibosh right now on any of your stock responses about auto accidents or airplane crashes or whatever the hell it is you’ll go on about next. I assume that you’re old enough to understand the difference between accidental death and premeditated intentional killing.)

Whig: Jesus said “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?”. Nurturing one’s excellence or achieving great things is only useful if it helps us to enjoy the good life.

This is a frankly weird, bizarro-world inversion of Jesus’s clear meaning in Mark 8:36. The whole point of the passage is that a life spent in the pursuit of worldly fortunes such as pleasure, power, and money could not rightly be counted as “gain” or “profit” or “advantage” if it means “losing your soul.” The idea being that there are things more valuable than all of those things, having to do with the sort of a person you are. Nowhere does Jesus suggest that you should value being the right kind of person because it pays off in yet more sex, food, money, power, etc. down the road; nor could he reasonably do so, since he’s claimed that not even the whole world (which by definition would preclude getting any more) could compensate for the loss or corruption of your soul.

Of course, you could agree or disagree with Jesus on the matter. That’s up to you. But the decision to quote him to bolster a view that is precisely the opposite of the view expressed by the quoted passage, seems a bit strained.

If they were missionaries or weren’t anti-imperialist, would you believe that they ought to be harmed after being captured?

Ghertner: This is true. However, assuming the drug had worked as advertized and turned the entire population into peace-loving non-aggressors, on what grounds could people object that they had had their rights violated?

If you’re talking about the effects of Pax in the movie, it wasn’t advertized as something that would just stop people from committing rights-violations against each other. It was supposed to have pretty radical effects on people’s personalities and dispositions. (And in fact it did; just not the effects that the central planners expected.) But people have a right to have any personalities and dispositions that they want, and coercively controlling the minds of a whole population through drugs involves a massive and systematic regime of aggression against lots and lots of innocent people.

If you’re talking about some other hypothetical drug that somehow stopped people from ever violating anyone else’s rights, and had no other effects at all, then you might have some case for claiming that it wouldn’t be aggressive, in and of itself, to make people take it. Fine, but on the other hand, most of the people you force it on wouldn’t ever violate anyone’s rights in any serious way, so there is a question of proportionality. If the amount of illegitimate force being defended against through forcibly administering the drug is at or near 0, then the amount of force that you could legitimately use in forcing the person to take it is also at or near 0. Meaning that you effectively have no right to force most people to take it anyway.

Richard:

I can’t figure out why so much resources are going to protect one Supreme Court case ….

Because women’s lives are at stake, and this is one of the fronts we have to fight on.

Richard:

I live in New Jersey. We will have abortion rights whether or not Roe v. Wade is overturned, because we’re all pro-choice here, even our Republican governors.

I’m happy for you, really, but not all of us are nearly so fortunate. If Roe v. Wade is overturned tomorrow, then abortion will certainly be recriminalized, more or less immediately, in most or all of the states in the Southeast, the interior West, and a substantial swath of the Midwest. You might say, “Look, Mississippi only has one abortion clinic in the whole state today; does it make that much difference to a woman from Tupelo or Biloxi or Sunflower County whether she has to travel to Jackson, or go out of state, to get an abortion?” But the answer is that yes, it does. Not everyone has the privilege of living in a state where reproductive rights are safe, or even near one. And not all the women in the states where abortion would likely be recriminalized have the privilege of being able to take several days off to travel to New York or New Jersey or California in order to get surgery that is already expensive.

This is setting aside the further question of federal abortion laws. Depending on the legal reasoning given in a hypothetical reversal of Roe, a blanket ban may or may not be a likely outcome; but whether it is or not you can certainly expect the Republican President and Republican Congress rumbling to pass federal procedure bans and federal laws aimed at restricting women from traveling across state lines to get abortions.

So, yeah. It’s important.

Richard:

I can’t figure out why so much resources are going to protect one Supreme Court case, and so little to changing the cultural attitudes that lead to the case in the first place.

If you don’t think that enough cultural work is being done to change people’s attitudes about abortion then why not do something about it yourself instead of fussing about how people and organizations who are already very busy with other important and closely related work aren’t doing it for you? (For example: write a letter to the editor, volunteer to become a clinic escort, tell an anti-choice family member about how you volunteered to become a clinic escort and explain why, buy books or music or films that advance the pro-choice position, etc. etc. etc.)