Every human being who walked the earth began that way. They are not like cysts. Abortion, infanticide, homicide…they all involve the same act: causing the death, or killing, of a human being.

The architects and propagandists of the Bush regime join your campaign. Not a great look, but good good riddance nonetheless.

I think Grisham is an idiot, but she's right. It was Clinton who insinuated Bernie supporters were basement dwellers in her leaked audio, and Trump accepted them with open arms.

Naive and dumb reduction of my position on government. You seem to miss the point entirely you’re completely inconsistent. That's a consequence of your ideological hangups.

You keep talking about me to disguise the fact you cannot speak to the issues. That you seek for some law to decide the issue suggests you want to leave it up to the government. Is that not so?

Why do I need to travel to make decisions about my body? Funny how freedom all of a sudden isn't important to you anymore.

You’re the big government, anti-freedom guy. Don’t you want the government to have all the power and make the decisions? This is one way to navigate the situation should one want to kill her child.

A lot of things work, for a while. But whether it is just or unjust, legal or illegal, wrong or right, are far more important to this particular issue.

Roe never worked politically. It has always been a seriously divisive decision. And now we know it was doomed to fail under the lightest scrutiny. If people want a political solution, it needs to be done politically, not through judicial activism.

More than 200 former Bush, McCain and Romney staffers endorse Harris

The alumni of the three Republican presidential nominees sought to reiterate their opposition to Trump's 2020 re-election in an open letter.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna168363

Tulsi Gabbard endorses Trump. Meanwhile, neocons endorse Kamala. The realignment of the parties is almost complete.

Despite all this, it's still far better than the system they have in the EU, where in some countries they are arresting people for what they post online—freedom of speech there is no longer a human right, despite what history has taught them.

If you’re right then there is an opportunity for you or some other abortionist to run on such a platform.

Regime commissars don’t like when people talk amongst themselves.

There are still plenty of places in the country where it is legal to kill a fetus. In any case, it was a shaky legal precedent, not a right. Now everyone can go about it the right way.

The freedom to vote trumps the freedom to choose…I don’t even know what that means. I was saying people can now vote for the legislation they want in their own states rather than having zero opportunity to do so.

I do not think that. Now women can vote for the policies they want. Isn’t that what you want?

I don’t think the feds should have any say in the matter. Do you?

It’s just a messaging tactic! The proposals don’t actually matter because they won’t get through Congress. Why do Harris supporters love messaging, and not substance?

Hill Dems try to tamp down backlash to Harris’ grocery price gouging pitch

But such a bill has no chance of passing Congress anytime soon, even if Democrats win the White House and Congress this November, according to six Democratic lawmakers and five Democratic aides who were granted anonymity to discuss the matter candidly. These people said Democrats in Congress have privately been telling critics that this part of the Harris plan is not viable.

Rather, they’ve argued it’s a messaging tactic — a way to show that she understands food prices remain an economic burden for many Americans and to redirect voters’ anger about inflation to corporations, in a way that progressives in particular have cheered.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/25/harris-grocery-price-gouging-backlash-00176266

Vance already showed his family off with his wife giving an amazing speech, putting to bed your little race fantasy once again. As for abortion, now people can vote for the laws they want. I know people having more power is anathema to the authoritarian, but you’ll get used to it.

Free speech also entails letting people curate and manage their own platforms, even if they resort to censorship. Though censorship is anti-philosophy, and free speech has been a common ideal from Socrates on forward, the right to set one’s own rules regarding one’s own property ought to forgive even the most egregious logophobia. Better to just let it go.

Just another supercut of the media coalescing around DNC rumors and reporting it.

RFK rips into his own party, the deep state, and endorses Trump. An important speech.

Imagine JD Vance doing this.

I suspect Europe, as the crucible of the worst ideologies, will have more of an issue than over here and much quicker. Same with what’s left of the commonwealth. But I also suspect the US isn’t far behind.

True enough. But the fracturing of these parties and the subsequent realignment is very interesting to watch. Who knows what will become of them over the next few administrations?

It’s been that way for a while. It’s the establishment vs. the outsiders. Many warmongering neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, David Frum, Michael Steele, and other Bush/McCain worshippers have fled the GOP to find their rightful place among their DNC allies. Meanwhile establishment and deep state critics like Tulsi Gabbard and RFK have seemingly fled that backstabbing cabal for the Trump camp.

Biden’s inner-circle worked to conceal his decline, according to the WaPo editorial board. But in their obsequious adulation for Biden’s wisdom in stepping down (a roundabout way of saying he was pressured to leave), they skirt past the fact that a man in decline is still the commander-in-chief of the country, in charge of the military and foreign policy, holds the nuclear codes, even while he can’t remember the name of his own Secretary of State (known to Biden as “Black man”). Who’s running the country? No one seems to care.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/20/biden-speech-dnc-2024-harris/

In other news, “One of the biggest revisions by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the United States added 818,000 fewer jobs between April 2023 and March 2024.”

This is all par for the course for the Potemkin administration, a blizzard of lies and deceit, with its vice president and second in command now taking up the mantle as its next virtual president.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/08/21/job-gains-revisions-federal-reserve/

You didn’t watch “White Dudes for Harris”? The only things missing are the white pillowcases.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/30/white-dudes-harris-fundraiser-zoom-call

Everywhere and nowhere.

Where do the whites go?

Nicely put, thank you.

I'm curious what this "structure" is, and more, what it really amounts to. I've been told of "tribal structures", "social structures", "formal structure", a "structure of relations", but I cannot translate its figurative use to its non-figurative application. There are no such "structures" or "connections" in any literal sense, since any connective tissue between human beings was removed along with the umbilical cord.

Hobbes mentions "artificial bonds", for example. "artificial chains" which are "civil laws". He describes the nature of these bonds as "weak", and given only their metaphorical reality, I'm inclined to agree. I'm wondering if "structure" as it is consistently used in this thread is one such artificial bond. You say that nations require "a formal structure to enable the kind of cohesion suggested by society", do you mean something like civil laws, and the hierarchy they necessarily impose?

Figures. It contradicts what I believe so I better stop reading it.

I think you’re right. Under those stipulations one cannot justify self-defence. But it also reveals how counterintuitive pacifism is. It is the sort of reasoning that led Gandhi to think the Jews in Nazi Germany would have been better off had they offered themselves to the murderers, or otherwise commit mass suicide.

Well, the House GOP finally released their impeachment report regarding Joe Briben and his crime family, outlining several impeachable offenses. It’s pretty damning stuff which we’ve all known about for years, but too little too late.

https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2024.08.19-Report-of-the-Impeachment-Inquiry-of-Joseph-R.-Biden-Jr.-President-of-the-United-States.pdf

I guess it depends one what kind of societies we’re talking about. A common trick is to conflate a state or nation as a society. I just don’t know how one consider such an aggregate of human beings a “society”, so I’ll stick to the simpler ones.

A natural society, to me, is kinship. It consists of people we know: family, friends, those we trade with, or otherwise deal with on a consistent basis. The activity that operates here is premised on largely social and voluntary cooperation. The hierarchies developed in such a situation, should there be any, are honed by experience and necessity, for instance the hierarchy of the family. Kinship develops naturally through association and common enterprise. Authority here is legitimate. These kinds of relationships are available to anyone, are visible everywhere, and are not just the remnants of Hunter/gatherers and savages.

An artificial society, to me, is one defined purely by dictate, for instance by law. It consists largely of people we do not know, will never know, and never have to deal with. The activity that operates here is premised on involuntary and anti-social cooperation, enforced as it is by coercion and punishment. The hierarchies developed in such a situation are contrived, imposed, and enforced, for instance the hierarchy of the state. A artificial society doesn’t develop out of association and mutual enterprise, but through conquest. Authority here is illegitimate.

That’s the only distinction between “natural” and “artificial” societies I’ve been making.

Remember that Aristotle thought the relationships between master and slave were natural. Do you?

Maybe you could give me an example of “a structure of relations”, then? Maybe a picture of one that is not “atomized individuals”? You cannot because all you have are abstractions.

I wager the association between you and your friends, should you have them, is non-hierarchical, as is much of the association between you and the others you deal with throughout your life. I wager you don’t apply hierarchies to the vast majority of the people you comes across in your “human society”. Am I wrong? Or is it hierarchies all the way down?

I know what a hierarchy is. My contention is that political and power-based ones are not natural. But you have to bring up vague associations like “human society”, which I suppose you believe is a hierarchy, to make your case.

Still, if less and less workers put money into the fund, and more and more recipients seek to benefit from it, exhaustion of the fund is inevitable. The aging population and lower birth rates make this reality an increasing concern.

Evidence? Where in history is a human society not hierarchically ordered? I mean how could we even recognise it as a "society"?

How many hierarchies have you formed?

Yes, I expect that there were people who were keen to take advantage. But the question is, could cities have supported that many people in a hunter-gather life-style? It's a complicated question and I think that a definitive answer would be hard to impossible to get. So there may well have been an element of choice. In some way, cities must have offered something that was desirable to everyone. What could it have been. Agriculture arose around the same time, so that might have had something to do with it.

I don’t know why people in a city would want to support a Hunter/gatherer lifestyle. All I’m saying is groups of people living anywhere needn’t impose a hierarchy on others.

Do you seriously think that hunter-gather bands were all sweetness and light, with everybody doing exactly what they wanted and no force or compulsion?

No I don’t think that. I haven’t even mentioned hunter/gatherers unless it was to say I wasn’t speaking about hunter/gatherers. I’m only saying if a hierarchy is unnatural, it isn’t necessary. Political hierarchies are not natural but artificial and conventional.

Yes. As cities got larger, new forms of social organization had to be developed. You could always go back to hunting and gathering. Not my choice, though.

They didn’t have to. They just wanted to. Now we have to adhere to the hierarchy or risk being punished.

I have no problem with your philosophical point of view here, but you're ignoring the practical problems I brought up.

I was addressing your point that it would “be reckless to pass it because it would exhaust the SS trust fund sooner”. How does taxing your social security benefits, in other words taking money from your benefits, replenish or otherwise reduce the exhaustion of the fund?