But it's not, so it's meaningless to speculate.

I pointed out why it was important to speculate.
To determine if the person is pro-life in a practical sense.
In my experience pro-lifers are not pro-life at all and refuse the pro-life option that would also satisfy the woman's desires as well.
The option to take the fetus for the women is a win for everybody...but only if you are actually pro-life.
Unless you are willing to act on your values you are not moral you are just opinionated.
So you have an opinion on what you believe someone else ought to do...not an opinion on how you should act morally.

No. You are simply assuming that rights only apply to persons and not living things more generally. I, for example, would wish to extend rights to non-human animals, but not because they're persons.

I am assuming rights do not apply because nobody exists to benefit from them.
I would say the same thing about the fetus of other animals as well.
A fetus is not an independent living thing...the mother is.
For this reason the fetus has no rights...the mother does.
The question is whether or not women ought to be able to decide for themselves whom they will procreate with.
I believe that decision is for the individual and not the state.

This is a ridiculous non-sequitur.

It is meaningless to say you are "pro-life" if you have not actively demonstrated that value in the context of this issue.
You are not pro-life in any practical sense of the word unless you have adopted a child.
It is self righteous delusion to believe otherwise.

There is no reasoning with an irrational person.

Obviously the person is not motivated to kill by the audiences reaction and the killer cannot simply pass off responsibility for the lives of others to the audience.

If the person wants to kill others that is what they will do regardless of the audience...the first murder is proof of this much.

The only reasonable thing to do...in my opinion...is ignore them and hope they get caught soon.

Unless you believe you might find some clues as to who the killer is by their interaction with audience and solve the case yourself.

I agree...they are trained "there is no such thing as a routine stop" they are trained to always have their guard up and to be ready to escalate to violence if necessary.
Is that necessary though?

But I do not think it would hurt to look at the facts of the data and ask is it always necessary to be ready to escalate to violence?
The vast majority of stops are routine after all.

Should we be training the police that they should be ready to escalate at the slightest sign of concern?

Should we be more lenient on police when they do make a mistake because of this training?

Does having a hard job make it ok for you to loose your cool and go off the handle violently?

That is the debate we should be having...we need to decide as a society if being a police officer means you are allowed to shoot first and think about it later or if we are going to hold the police to the same standard we hold citizens to.

If we decide that we should hold law enforcement officers to the same standard as citizens then we need to put better oversights in place...oversights that avoid the conflicts of interest I see in the current regulation system.

Perhaps I am not abreast of the organizations political intentions.

It was my understanding, not so long ago, that the primary political intent of the movement was promote more oversight of law enforcement...particularly surrounding cases of officers killing the unarmed.

If they have become a movement seeking only to benefit black people and are unconcerned with other races that would be a disappointing development that would be more harm than benefit because it would only serve to further divide people along racial lines.

I agree that minorities communities are responsible in some way with being part of the solution.

But I also agree that policies changes are probably in order among law enforcement.
Better training and better oversight.
I do not envy a law enforcement officer their job...it is no doubt a difficult one...but that fact should not excuse them from justice when they are in error.

There's a cultural phenonemon taking place right now, I mentioned it in my reply on PF (threads don't update properly anymore, the place is basically garbage now, so I'll probably be living here from now on :) ). Racism has been redefined to mean "systems of oppression" and this definition has been broadly applied to the west. People are advocating for the checking of white privilege and presuming thatevery racial disparity that exists is perpetuated entirely thanks to on-going systemic racist oppression by the privileged white race who reaps constant benefit from it at the expense of all minorities.. The Black Lives Matter movement is rallying around the central idea that the issue is that blacks are being specifically targeted for death by a racist police force.

I believe there is still some systemic oppression of minorities and that we should be vigilant and aware of that as a society that would wish to be considered just.
It may be tempting to reassure yourself as a society that "it's not as bad as it used to be" but if there are still blatant examples of institutional discrimination of minorities...well I believe we should seek to eliminate that if possible...again, that is if we wish to deem ourselves a just society.

I don't agree that the central message of black lives matter movement is that only blacks are being targeted. You can choose to interpret their message in that way I suppose (fox news sure does)...but I do not agree that what they seek politically falls in line with that interpretation.
What they intend to accomplish politically is more oversight in police shootings...especially involving the unarmed.
In my opinion that would be beneficial to everybody...not just blacks.

Like I said before race should be irrelevant to the real issue...which is the failure of oversight for law enforcement.

Thanks for the welcome...I was slow to migrate over here...but the other site is plagued by constant coding problems so I finally decided to embrace this new format.

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The paper mentions that it does not factor in how use of non-lethal force escalates to lethal force so there are no findings on that matter.
I believe it is relevant and I did skim over the paper and agree with its conclusion.
To quote the papers final message...

The importance of our results for racial inequality in America is unclear. It is plausible that racial differences in lower level uses of force are simply a distraction and movements such as Black Lives Matter should seek solutions within their own communities rather than changing the behaviors of police and other external forces.

Much more troubling, due to their frequency and potential impact on minority belief formation is the possibility that racial differences in police use of non-lethal force have spillovers on myriad dimensions of racial inequality. If, for instance, blacks use their lived experience with police as evidence that the world is discriminatory, then it is easy to understand why black youth invest less in human capital or black adults are more likely to believe discrimination is an important determinant of economic outcomes. Black Dignity Matters.

To address your concern about the extent to which law enforcement commits unjustified homicide without consequence...I believe it should not be happening at all...and suggesting that it only happens rarely is not the solution to the problem that it has been happening.
Granted if it was more prevalent that would be worse...but the stories in the news are no less disturbing from having only happened rarely in police interactions with society.
I also doubt that it is consoling to the families of the victims.
I for one am not comforted by the idea that "it only happens rarely so that makes it ok."

I responded to this on pf...not sure if got through as that site seems to be broken.

I pointed out that it is odd that paper finds that race may account for non-lethal violence (you are 50% more likely to have non-lethal force used on you if you are hispanic or black) but that there is no link between lethal violence and race.

This is odd to me because to my mind non-lethal violence is more likely to lead to lethal force.
For example if you are attacked by the police without provocation and defend yourself it could quickly escalate to lethal force on behalf of the police.

At any rate it is also irrelevant to the issue in my mind.
As it stands now in the media the cases shown are examples where lethal force was quite clearly unjustified and yet there are no consequences for the officers involved.
To me race is irrelevant to that issue.
It does not matter if a white unarmed man is gunned down by police or a black unarmed man.
The issue is a failure of oversight of law enforcement and the resulting injustice.

I have argued the same thing. If god exists and is reasonable then pascal's wager fails. That is to say god will understand that you had no reasonable obligation to believe in him and he will forgive you.

If god is unreasonable then pascal's wager also fails. For there is no guarantee that god will do the reasonable thing and reward people that did believe in him.

Most "pro-lifers" don't really care what it means to be human in my experience.
They just want pregnancy to be a punishment for sex.

When debating pro-lifers I always use the same hypothetical situation.

Suppose it was possible to transplant the fetus such that the woman could remove it from their body and the pro-lifer could be the one to carry it until it is time to be born. In the legal sense this would be like an adoption except with a fetus.

Invariably pro-lifers object to this, insisting that they should not be responsible for the fetus.

They insist that they did not have the sex and that they did not cause the fetus to exist so they should not be held responsible.
I disagree...they should be held responsible for their values...and they claim to value the life of the fetus...ergo they should be willing to care for it.
If you are unwilling to care for the fetus, and then the child it will become....then you are not actually pro-life you are just opinionated about what someone else ought to do.

When posed this hypothetical reveals that the main argument of pro-lifers is that they believe that if a woman has sex one of the consequences ought to be dealing with any unwanted pregnancy by carrying the pregnancy to term and giving birth to a child.
Here is where pro-choicer disagree. Pro-choicers argue that a woman should be able to decide if she wants to reproduce or not (a decision that a man does not face because he does not become pregnant). Because a fetus is not yet conscious it is not a person and there are no rights being violated by the termination of that pregnancy.

While it is not actually possible to transplant a fetus yet (maybe it is technologically possible for women but not for men) it is possible to adopt a child that has been born.
As far as I am concerned the only "pro-lifers" at this point are people who have adopted children.
If you have not adopted a child I will insist that you are not pro-life in any practical sense of what that term means.

Chance in evolution has to do with stochastic processes in molecular chemistry.

There is a comfortable majority in the scientific community that believe that the laws of the universe are deterministic. So your notion that the scientific community is "deceptive" about chance is...odd.

As to whether or not the universe is deterministic and chance simply amounts to nothing more than inaccessible information is a matter of opinion not fact. There is no conclusive proof that the universe, and evolution, is necessarily deterministic beyond all doubt.

Chance, in science, is not a "myth", it is a tool for making predictions about nature. A valuable tool that cannot be avoided at this point in scientific understanding.

The right to privacy is a basic right.

It is important that we can express ourselves without fear that the information will be used against us. Everybody values privacy. For example, if you do not value your privacy, then why not share your logon name and password with us here? If you choose not to then it is because you realize that this private information can be abused and used in ways that you do not intend. The same is true of the government: they can abuse their power to our private information and use it in ways that are not intended.

I would be inclined to agree with your point more if the government was forthright with how they gather and use information and if there is was any evidence that doing so actually prevents attacks. However there is no evidence that wide-scale information gathering aids in the prevention of terrorist attacks. By keeping the way these programs work a secret the agencies can effectively prevent oversight of their operations. That removes such operations from the sphere of democracy and increases the risk that such programs can be abused for the purpose of oppression.

It is not just the government that invades privacy. Many major internet companies cooperate both willingly and unwilling with government agencies by force of laws formed in secret courts.

It is important that the internet is not controlled by the government because ideally it should be owned by the public to promote the free exchange of ideas, even if those ideas are critical of the state agenda.

If we continue to allow the government to operate without oversight with such programs there is the risk that they will begin to censor the internet in accordance with their own agenda rather than in accordance with the will of the people and the ideals of the free exchange of ideas and information and also there is the risk that the power to access personal information without oversight will become a tool to oppress dissent of the government.

I believe it is the public that should decide what constitutes terrorist activity...not an unregulated arm of the government.