If someone has real insights on how to converse across ideological lines, I might be interested. But McWhorter’s method – setting aside the very real harm people are trying to inflict – is a dishonest non-starter. If the price for talking to someone is to ignore them putting shackles around my friends, then talking to them is a waste of time.
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It’s all well and good to be laying out the desire for a kinder, warmer, friendlier world where people just sit down and discuss their differences and come to agreement on compromise, but this isn’t the time for that discussion, as has been well laid out above.
For that to happen: both sides have to be talking in good faith.
Both sides have to agree that they may have to compromise or change their position, and be able to do that.
And it can’t be in the context that one side is currently in the process of stripping human rights from the other side, who are real actual people with real actual lives at stake right now.
The forced-birthers are not arguing in good faith, and they never have been. They have been in a superposition of being very honest in stating what they want all along, and lying like rugs the whole time that they weren’t actually going to do it… until they could. There has never been any good faith, because
The forced-birthers aren’t going to compromise. They will not stop at stopping abortions after some date, they will not allow protections for rape or incest or the imminent inevitable death of the mother, they will extend their misogynistic fetish to outlawing Plan B, and the Pill, and IUDs, and condoms. And we know this because they’re telling us that they’re going to do it, now that they’re certain that they’re going to get away with it.
And everyone else isn’t going to compromise, because they’re human fucking rights and the point is that they’re non-negotiable.
And sure, some of them don’t believe themselves to be “bad people”. But they are. Some of them really and honestly think they’re doing this for the good of women everywhere. But they’re wrong. At best, they’re wrong. At worst, they are the sort of person who really does think that the problem is that women have too many rights, and need to be put back in the kitchen for their own good.
And the ones who are pushing this whole cart, and saying they’re the good guys? They’re not just wrong, they’re lying, and they know it. It was never about anyone’s “good”, it was about treating women like things.
You can’t negotiate with that.
But if you want to try, go nuts. Just, you know, don’t tell women that they should be sitting down and making nice with people who think they’re wombs with legs.
You want those talks to happen, here’s a better analogy: treat it like the negotiations between Ukraine and Russia: you go and talk all you want. Just do it way over there where you won’t get in the way of the soldiers who are fighting for their lives, and the lives of their neighbors.
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Fascinating POV, coming from someone who is not directly imperiled by the attacks on abortion.
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They’re bubbled. They’re good to their own, and oppress “the other.” They lack empathy for those unlike them. Every day, they can feel good about themselves and convince themselves (and others) that they’re good people because they’re surrounded with people like themselves and are not challenged to expand their views. Every little act of oppression can be waved away because “it was just a slip, and I’m so good all the time. I’m a good person.” But the pattern gives away the bias.
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no treatment that wasn’t explicitly written into the fourteenth amendment. i am pretty sure that that’s exactly the argument alito is trying to use 
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yeah, i wonder. it’s kind of playing their game to distill human beings down into good and bad people. the whole christian schtick
my thoughts here are all off topic i think, but there’s no real need for the dichotomy
yeah, this.
they absolve themselves of responsibility by saying, well im a good person. whatever i do is good, or excusable. those other people are bad, whatever they do is bad, and inexcusable. ( i mean, it’s literally impossible that at least some of them haven’t had abortions )
but all that matters for society is their actions, and like everyone is saying, their actions on human rights are horrific. it doesn’t have to mean they’re terrible people, they just have to stop.
i think the space for their societal redemption - if it exists - is there in-between who a person is and what a person does
most of them won’t ever see that space, or make that change in thinking, and so - right now - all that matters is the question of policy and power. that’s the fight they’re insistent on having.
they can change their actions at any time. i think (?) most people would welcome them back into mainstream society. also though, no one can stake their own lives and future waiting on them to come around
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The part that scares the crap out of me is that so many of the American evangelicals seem to be of the belief that whatever they do (or anyone who meets their criteria for being a “Christian” does) is excusable because of course salvation cannot be achieved or thrown away by actions.
So long as you meet whatever fucked up criteria they come up with for obtaining God’s grace - you’re golden.
Hence you have Roger Stone who happily admits to having been a real bad boy “in the past”, now wandering around claiming to be born again and everything is AOK.
That’s how you get preachers crying in front of their megachurch audiences about how they were sinful and fucked rent boys and snorted coke or Alex Jones claiming to have paid for abortions (or not depending on which version of his life story he’s spinning that day) while also claiming that now the Lord has blessed them with his grace, they’re all good now (and can we have lots of your money please).
But at the same time, they still think that actions do affect your (as in “other people’s”) state of grace somehow.
So it rolls around to if I’m a ‘good Christian’, I have to pester the authorities to make everyone else act as if they are ‘good Christians’.
Once you’ve decided that something is a sin and that your personal salvation and that of everyone on the planet depends on you stopping that sin, there is no room for nuanced discussion.
And once you’ve gone the extra step to everyone who disagrees with me about that is a Satanist pedophile childeater in league with “globalists” shooting Jewish space lasers from their Martian bases to mindcontrol everyone, we’re not even living in the same reality anymore.
And if you haven’t yet taken that step but are prepared to work with and welcome into your party those who have, then you are just as guilty of everything that follows.
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Since you haven’t directly replied to anyone but the moderator in this topic, I’m left with no choice but to conclude that you’re having difficulty with the basic concept of a conversation.
I will now take action on that conclusion using the tools provided by Discourse.
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By which they mean they said some words which they believes makes them a good person. Not that they acted in accordance with the golden rule. Or they believe their good because they are financially successful, so they believe their “god” is favoring them. It’s not about them actually examining their behavior in the world or their treatment of others. It’s about them saying some magic words about Jesus, and them believing that is enough to be “good.”
They believe it’s justified if they are punishing people who hurt their “god”.
Yep. It’s how they can still support Trump, because they believe that actions don’t matter.
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Yeah, I didn’t post that well. But it’s one way that “good people do bad things,” which I felt was relevant to the OP
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I wonder. My impression has been that actions do matter to them, and one they think is important is hurting the right people, as it has been so concisely put. This is still a world where it’s cool to casually murder some Philistines from time to time, just for being Philistines. And there are a lot of Philistines out there…as was recently posted in another thread:
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Worth a read
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Oh, OTHER people’s actions matter. Their actions can be cruel and hurtful, even up to genocidal, as long as they have said the magic words about supply-side Jesus, and are “saved” and empowered by their “god” to hurt non-believers.
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So I’ve been puzzling about how this could apply and I think its really a variant of white panic, but not actually white panic.
If this was just a racial thing, the last thing you’d want is to force women, especially women of color, to have more kids.
It’s a Christian thing. They’ll ban abortions and contraception but they’ll set up safe haven laws so that makes it ok for mothers to essentially abandon their unwanted kids without fear of persecution, those kids will be adopted by good Christian families, and home schooled to avoid the taint of liberal public schools, and they will create generations of good conservative Christian kids who become conservative Christian adults.
It doesn’t matter what color the babies are. This whole thing may be a Hail Mary play to save American Christianity and the Republican party at the same time.
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It’s also about changing demographics of the American population. At some point non-white, non-European people will be a majority of the population here and for some folks that is unacceptable.
Oh, it’s racist; you’re just not going back far enough in history. Think chattel slavery far back. You need an underclass to do the menial work. If minorities can use family planning, they can become educated and replace whites in the social order.
It’s disgusting and based on eugenics, while also full of weird insecurities. 
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I don’t mean to imply that there cant be racist elements working for racist reasons. Or maybe it is racist, and they’re only interested in adopting the kids with the racial background that they want, and society will have to deal with the rest.
And frankly, the idea of making the population dramatically increase at this point is completely insane.
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FFS. It’s literally a white supremacist conspiracy theory. It literally came out of the minds of white supremacist and was spread by white supremacists.
It’s ENTIRELY RACIST. Just like saying George Soros is controlling the democratic party is anti-semitic or that women should not be a part of public life is misogynistic or that gay people should stay in the closet is homophobic, or that trans people aren’t the gender they know themselves to be is transphobic, or like Islam isn’t a real religion is Islamophobic.
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