TitanTiger

He came to Auburn because he decided based on his heart rather than his head. Our offense line was crap and Gus's game plans were just as bad. Then he got delivered into the shitshow that was Mr. Potato Head and rightly decided to make a business move rather than watch Harsin relegate him to an NFL free agent signee at best. He got placed with a team that had actual weapons and protection on offense and a coherent philosophy, worked on his mistakes and got better in 2 years' time. NFL scouts aren't dumb. They know the difference in a Pac-12 defense vs what Bo faced in the SEC. But they also know facing an SEC defense with one arm tied behind your back while forced to wear a blindfold isn't something you can hang around the QBs neck either. I'm very happy for Bo.

No, your point contradicts itself. The second one person has the right to kill another, the person initiating the killing has more rights. And while "bodily autonomy" is certainly an important right, rights don't really get more important than the right not to be killed by someone else when you've done nothing to deserve it. We assume the right of the innocent not to be killed. This doesn't need to be established. It's a basic bedrock tenet of human dignity. Someone who is kidnapping you is not innocent and is an active threat to you. Considering what we know of people that kidnap others, there's a high likelihood that they will injure or kill you. Killing them to escape this situation is not analogous to anything we're discussing. It's not "extra rights." It's a hierarchy of existing rights. Some rights are of higher importance than others. The right of the innocent not to be killed outranks the right basically all other rights. It's a pluperfect of example of a first order right.

Perhaps nothing. But that's my point - pregnancy is a unique circumstance that isn't analogous to any of these other examples such as organ transplants. A mother can relinquish the child - via Safe Haven drop-off locations (no questions asked), giving the child up for adoption, etc if they don't want to be a mother or feel unable to properly care for the child. What they don't get to do is give up their obligations to the child by shooting them in the head, leaving them in the woods for wild animals to take, or letting them starve to death. As I said, pregnancy is different. Consenting to sex - the one human activity on earth we all know and understand is how one gets pregnant - is consenting to the possibility of pregnancy. And as we've already established, the legal ability to give a child up for adoption is not the same thing as the legal ability to kill it. I get that this is an interesting side note and we can have another thread about the edge cases and abortion, but let's stick to the subject we've started on. I realize we will all die some day. But the only reason the organ transplant recipient is in this discussion is because they have a terminal condition other than "just living." A part of their body has ceased to function normally and without intervention they will die. It wasn't a question of who is more valuable. It's just to point out that there is nothing medically/physically wrong with the child in this scenario other than a third party doesn't want them. And that one is a passive non-act toward a stranger who the potential donor has no obligations to while the other is a hostile active move to kill a healthy individual. It's still an intentional act to kill another human being, which differentiates it from any of your transplant scenarios. We have all sort of legal precedent for a person being liable and responsible for actions they take that can predictably lead to certain outcomes. Even if they didn't originally intend for a certain bad end result, they are still responsible and legally liable for it because it was a foreseeable and reasonable possibility. It's not a non-starter to say the same of choosing to engage in sex knowing that making babies is one of the primary functions of sex in the first place. Perhaps there aren't any others, but that's the entire point - pregnancy is a completely different animal.

Sorry, we had both our kids home from college over the last week and one of them was dealing with some health issues, so I haven't been as active. That said, there are a few differences I can think of. First, the dying person on the organ transplant list is a stranger to the person who is a match. We don’t have any (legal) obligations towards strangers, especially to perform actions that go above and beyond ordinary courtesy and kindness. However, a child who is growing inside a woman’s uterus is not a stranger. It is the mother's own son or daughter. The analogy fails because it assumes that a woman has no more obligation to her own child than she does to a random stranger. Parents have obligations to their own children that they don’t have towards total strangers and the government demands and enforces these obligations. Second, an organ transplant involves an unnatural use of body parts, whereas pregnancy involves the natural use of them. A kidney inside your own body is designed to be used for your body. It was not made to be surgically removed and placed into another person’s body. That’s an artificial or unnatural use (and the ongoing doses of immunosuppressant drugs kinda points to this being true), even as good of an end result that the transplant is. This is not the case with being pregnant. When the mother is pregnant, the child growing inside her is in exactly the place where human beings are designed to gestate: a woman's uterus. That organ is the natural and proper organ to gestate another human being. There is nothing unnatural about it. It’s designed to provide physiological support for another human body, unlike your kidney, which is designed to provide physiological support for your body. Third, in the organ transplant situation, the potential donor has not done anything that places the burden of a stranger’s health in their hands. They has nothing to do with the health crisis this stranger is in. It's a burden that has been imposed on them against their will. That’s not the case with a pregnancy (or at least 99% of them - see below). When a woman becomes pregnant, it is because she has voluntarily engaged in the very act known to cause pregnancy: sex. When you consent to sex, you consent to the possibility of getting pregnant. Obviously rape would be different, but that’s a different discussion altogether and only accounts for less than half a percent of all abortions (according to Planned Parenthood’s own data). And finally, the organ transplant situation involves refusing to donate body parts to a stranger who has a terminal illness, while abortion is an intentional killing of a woman’s own healthy child. In other words, the former involves passively allowing someone who is terminal to die while the latter (abortion) involves the intentional and physical act of killing through chemical means or physical dismemberment of a healthy, non-terminal, human being. Put another way, though I may have right to refuse to donate my kidney to a dying patient, that doesn’t mean I have the right to shoot them in the head instead. Allowing someone to die is not morally equivalent to intentional killing. I think all for the reasons above are good enough to point out important differences, though for me personal, #3 and #4 are the strongest ones making that point.

An abortion isn’t analogous to that.

To posit that bodily autonomy means that one human being gets to kill another human being for it is to posit that they aren't equal either. There are hierarchies of rights. And the right for an innocent person not to be killed is paramount among them. You're elevating your concept of bodily autonomy above everything.

bull****. You argued about parental duties. I simply pointed out that these parental duties begin long before the child is born. passing through a birth canal is not what initiates them. Actually, I would say that we don’t disagree so much on when but on how. A woman can decide very early on she has no intention of being this child’s mother. She can begin the process of having someone adopt her child upon birth right then. But you can’t decide not to feed the baby because it is a human person that is dependent upon you and/or others to live. It is the right not to be killed that trumps all others. And as I said, even outside of the womb, a mother is giving up bodily autonomy. So evidently there are cases where your bodily autonomy is not a greater right than the right for the child not to be killed through your direct action or neglect. Bodily autonomy is not an absolute right.

Well at least that’s one thing. Unless you give a child up for adoption via Safe Haven or otherwise, you give up your bodily autonomy (as well as other kinds of autonomy) whether the child is in the womb or out of it. You do not get to avoid these responsibilities in either situation and cause the death of another human being as a result. The problem isn’t the idea the problem is that you aren’t actually arguing with consistency that both humans have equal rights. I’m glad, but the point is that we have parental duties to children even before they are born, not just after. You really aren’t and no I’m not.

I'm quite familiar. Perhaps you're not familiar with adoption laws. Mothers are allowed legally to give up a child they don't want or don't feel able to keep for adoption. Parental duties start before the child is born. It's one of the reasons a father who assaults the mother while the child is in the womb and causes a miscarriage is subject to criminal penalties, up to and including murder. It's why if a mother causes harm to her unborn child by abusing illegal drugs, she is also liable for criminal penalties. All these duties don't magically come into play because a head pokes out the opening of a vagina.

I'm really not. You're forcing me to use my body (that bottle ain't gonna levitate at the baby's mouth, much less mix itself), my time, my energy, and my money to keep another human being alive under threat of law.

Ok, so I can just sit a can of powdered formula next to them and I'm done? Or are you going to make me mix it with water, put it in a bottle and hold the damn thing for them too? I'm not presuming. I'm calling what you claim to be your position illogical.

That's quite the linguistic gymnast routine there. If that logic is true, why do we prosecute parents for allowing a baby to starve to death? Isn't the infant free to live their life without the mom or dad having to be responsible for feeding them? Look, if your position is simply that the mother's rights are more important, just say that. At least that's an honest take even if I disagree with it. But this other thing is nonsense.

The second you give one human being the power to kill another innocent human being, you've firmly committed to a paradigm where mother and child do not have perfectly equal rights.

I believe you're right. You saw that whole transformation in real time.

Ha! At some point I just decided that it was impossible to sign up for the whole slate of policy positions from either party and I was just going to stop trying. Sometimes Democrats/progressives have the better take on an issue, sometimes conservatives/Republicans do, and other times some position that borrows from both is best. I also find it impossible to sign on to either party's positions on every issue and follow Jesus. And that's what I'm striving to filter my politics through now.

I don't think I'd make many mid-2000s Republicans happy either. I'm in favor of universal health care, paid parental leave, and closing of tax loopholes that allow millionaires and billionaires to be taxed at lower rates than people who are primarily paid through salary/hourly wages. I'm in favor of incentivizing businesses as well as colleges and universities to have on-site child care or helping people be able to finish their education even if they get pregnant and have children. In short, I'm pretty economically flexible if I think it's a worthwhile investment in people, furthers a culture of life and such. I'm also in favor of more restrictions on high powered, rapid-fire rifles such as AR-15s, red flag laws and other restrictions. I think that undocumented immigrants who have been here for several years with gainful employment and no felonies should be given a path to citizenship even as I think we need to get a handle on the southern border and know/document every single person who comes through. If I thought about it long enough, I could come up with some more examples. I want an alternative to the GOP - yes, as presently constituted. But I'm not clamoring for a return to the GWB years either. I ended up opposing the Iraq War and our rationale for going in there in the first place.

I'm using the label because that's what Democrats have moved to in lieu of "liberal" which was pretty successfully associated with things like being weak on crime, big government, wacko on social issues, and so on. I'd also argue that they moved to "progressive" because they've become fundamentally illiberal the last decade or so, but that's neither here nor there. My assertion is that while some of Trump's increasing of the deficit could be explained (by many) in terms of tax cuts that did benefit a lot of middle class people and spending that had to happen for a once in a century pandemic that cratered the economy, Biden is spending at very high rates even without the pandemic as an excuse. Is it your honest opinion that Biden is governing as a moderate? Or is he governing moderate on some things and more as a progressive on others? How much of the moderate side is due to being held back by a Republican Senate? Do you think he'd show similar restraint if the Dems took the WH, House and Senate this fall? Ok, I'll moderate the comment to "too much embrace of the trans ideology and messaging." Not "full-on." He's not as batshit crazy and radical as trans activists, though that's about one of the highest bars to clear in existence.

I think it's more than a messaging problem. I think it's a governance problem. When you have the L.A. Times cheering on the president for governing as a progressive I think it's pretty telling. They don't see it as a bug or an anomaly, but a feature. And it's a feature that gives people who might not usually or at least automatically support a Democrat in elections pause. I don't think he's actually behaved as moderate as his persona would have led me to believe. The Republicans sold out to their crazies a while back. The Democrats don't have to. Frankly, they barely have to listen to them at all given the shift by the GOP. I wish they'd do so more obviously.

You're right. The Democrats have made ample and obvious efforts to position themselves in the political center to center-left and relegate the Republicrazies to irrelevance for the foreseeable future. All the concerns about handing over the entire Federal government to Democratic control are unfounded. I guess it's just all in their heads.

My guess is that they would write off much of the spending under Trump as being related to the COVID-induced economic nosedive we were in. But again, you seem to be intent on making this a simple binary choice between Biden and Trump, in isolation from all other considerations or worries. That's not how those decisions are made by people who aren't an auto-vote for one party or the other.

The price tags for them are concerning even if the aims are laudable. $4.5 trillion in additional spending over the already record spending levels we're currently at, at a time where tons of gov't spending over the last several years has helped create the inflation situation we're in. That's going to unnerve fiscal conservatives if you can't explain how you're paying for that instead of adding it to the credit card.

Yes, Biden is governing as a progressive. But that shouldn’t surprise you By Doyle McManus Washington Columnist May 16, 2021 4 AM PT Then-presidential candidate Joe Biden campaigning near Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second home in Warm Springs, Ga., in October 2020. (Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images) President Biden’s Republican critics charge that he has foisted a “bait and switch” on voters — that he campaigned as a moderate but veered abruptly to the left after he arrived at the White House. “The bait was he was going to govern as bipartisan, but the switch is he’s governed as a socialist,” House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield complained last month. “He talks like a moderate but is governing to satisfy the far left,” Senate Republican chief Mitch McConnell of Kentucky chimed in. They’re right on one count: Biden is pushing an ambitious progressive program while making it sound, well, moderate. But their charge of false advertising is bogus. Biden never concealed his big-government goals; they were all in plain sight in his platform. It’s still on the campaign website for anyone who wants to check. Candidate Biden called for more than $4 trillion in new federal spending, beginning with an immediate stimulus to help the economy recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. It included massive proposals to combat climate change, rebuild infrastructure, reduce poverty, subsidize child care and provide universal pre-K education. Sound familiar? All those planks resurfaced in Biden’s proposals this year: his $1.9-trillion COVID-19 relief bill, his $2-trillion-plus jobs plan and his $1.8-trillion family-policy plan. To be fair, McCarthy and McConnell may have been too busy to read up on their opponent’s long and detailed program. Their party saved time by not having a platform at all. But surely they noticed when former President Obama released a video last year praising Biden for “the most progressive platform of any major party nominee in history.” Or when Biden, in his last big campaign speech, compared his program to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and prom-ised a pandemic plan, a healthcare plan, a climate plan and an economic plan “to give working people a fair shot again.” “None of this should have come as a surprise,” Greg Schultz, Biden’s campaign manager during last year’s primary season, told me. “My only surprise is that people weren’t listening.” McCarthy and McConnell weren’t the only ones who underestimated Biden’s commitments. Plenty of progressives didn’t quite believe it, either. After all, during the primaries Biden had presented himself as a moderate, pragmatic alternative to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Biden’s Democratic rivals chastised him for centrist positions he took decades ago: his 1970s opposition to mandatory busing to desegregate schools, his 1994 vote for then-President Clinton’s punitive crime bill. Those ancient controversies made him sound like an out-of-touch relic. But they were forgetting one of Biden’s most striking features: his adaptability. He is — as critics used to say about FDR — something of a political chameleon. Over 51 years in politics, Biden has always positioned himself at his party’s center — which has required a steady evolution toward the left. The Biden of 2008 who ran as Obama’s running mate was more progressive than the Biden of 1994 who voted for Clinton’s crime bill. The Biden of 2012 who declared himself a fan of same-sex marriage was more progressive than the Biden of 2008. When he pondered entering the 2016 presidential race, he intended to run to Hillary Clinton’s left and Bernie Sanders’ right — a classic Biden gambit to seek his party’s center point. “Biden for President was going to go big,” Biden wrote of the plans for that never-launched campaign in his 2017 memoir. “A $15 minimum wage. Free tuition at our public colleges and universities. Real job training. On-site affordable child care. Equal pay for women. Strengthening the Affordable Care Act. A job creation program built on investing in and modernizing our roads and bridges…. We needed what I called an American Renewal Project.” Sound familiar? By the time Biden ran in 2020, two things happened to push him even further. One was the COVID-19 pandemic, which made it clear to both parties that big spending would be needed to rescue the economy. After Republican leaders, including then-President Trump, approved more than $3.8 trillion in COVID relief last year, GOP complaints about big-money requests from the new president sounded hollow. The second was Democrats’ unexpected capture of 50 seats in the Senate, which meant the new president could pass much of his program without Republican votes. Yes, Biden had promised to seek bipartisan compromises — but now he no longer had to worry about obstructionist Republicans whose only goal was to stop his program in its tracks. And that — not spurious charges of a “bait and switch” on policy — is probably what makes Mitch McConnell so grouchy.

Did you read any of the links I posted, because I don't think the articles I posted were speaking in generalities. For instance, the level of government spending is going to concern centrists - especially those who are in the "fiscal conservative/socially liberal or at least libertarian" camp. And then his full-on embrace of trans cult is going to worry the "fiscal moderate/socially conservative" centrists. I'm not sure what specifics you're asking for here that aren't provided in what I posted. Finally, again, it's not a binary choice. The POTUS doesn't operate in isolation. A lot of different calculus is being looked at. If they distrust the direction of the Democratic Party overall, then they're going to be wary of handing both the Presidency and Congress over to them. If they feel confident the GOP will at least hold one house of Congress, they might vote for Biden (or withhold a vote for Trump) because it will check the progressives. But if they think the Dems are poised to take both houses, maybe it tilts a bit the other way and a vote for Trump is their only way to keep the Dems in check.

I'd say it's several initiatives actually, but I think the transgender craziness carries a lot of weight compared to say, one's stance on tax policy. For many, it flat out renders a person's judgment untrustworthy and I can't say I blame them. And it appears even the progressives seem to think he's governing as a progressive: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-05-16/joe-bidens-governing-as-a-progressive-thats-a-surprise-only-if-you-werent-paying-attention https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/05/joe-biden-left-president-radical-domestic-plans-west-wing So do others, especially if he's given the opportunity by a Democratically controlled Congress: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/01/30/bidenomics-is-an-unfinished-revolution-what-would-four-more-years-mean People don't think about Biden in isolation either. They consider whether to support him or other Democrats, depending on the specifics in their House and Senate races based on what they think may happen if the restraints come off. And I imagine more than a few are concerned that he's slipping mentally (whether it's actually true or not) and that he's being steered behind the scenes. I don't think you can honestly say great efforts have been made by the Democrats to occupy that middle territory and win over disaffected Republicans. They seem to just be trying to hold ground and hope Trump and people like MTG are just repellant enough to help them eke out the win in November for the WH. I think they could do way better if they were willing to. This country is primed to move off this razor thin national split between the parties but neither of them (the GOP especially) seems to care to take it.

And let me add... When you're trying to win over people who normally don't vote for you but might be persuaded to, you actually have to do more than just stay put. You have to make it more obvious that you're reasonable, that you aren't pulling a bait and switch where you avoid answering questions about hot button issues to get votes then go on voting in typical ways that are too accommodating of your far end after the election. I don't think the Democrats have done a very good job or making it clear that they are the party that extends to the center and, at least in some ways or to a degree, just beyond it. The GOP has completely abdicated the space and seems to be doing their damndest to alienate even their center-right flank. But I don't see the Dems making it clear they want to truly represent either.