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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • My view on the matter is that access to abortions falls under the umbrella of the right of bodily autonomy; specifically, protection from being medically exploited. Which by your phraseology would make it a “negative right”.

    My go-to comparison is, perhaps oddly, bone marrow donation. Someone with bone cancer is likely doomed to die a horrible death, unless they can find a compatible donor who will consent to share marrow with them. For any given recipient, only a few people at best will be a viable match. Maybe only one. But that person has the absolute right to refuse. You cannot be forced to use your body for the health of another person without your consent.

    Some people would say, that’s not comparable to pregnancy, and that having sex/getting pregnant is in itself, somehow, initial consent. But, at least here in Canada, they stress heavily that you can withdraw consent at any point during the procedure. They also explicitly let you know that, at a certain point in the procedure, the recipient’s bone marrow will have been irradiated, and that if the donor backs out at that point, the recipient will die, but that they’re still allowed to do so. The right to bodily autonomy means any ongoing use of one’s body requires their continued consent, even with a living, breathing human person on the scales. Morally is certainly another question, but the diagram of law and morality is not a perfect circle.

    If I’m protected from being the life support of any person, surely that covers an unfinished fetus.


  • Everyone else has already covered webrings and directories, but there’s a couple things missing imo. Or maybe I just came in too late.

    Back in, I want to say 2003 or so, I discovered this absolutely incredible browser extension called StumbleUpon. It was like a crowdsourced version of those contemporary curated link pages; you gave it a list of topics you were into (ranging from vague things like “art” down to really specific things like "), and when you pushed the “Stumble” button it added to your browser, it took you to a random website that matched one of your chosen categories. In turn, when you found a website that wasn’t in the database, you could add it by checking off what category/ies it fit into. I spent hours a day hitting that button and being taken to random new content, and quickly became the clever one in my friend group by finding all the best “cheezburgers” and “demotivationals” and “image macros” lol. Hell, I’d still be using it now, if they hadn’t shut down like five years back.

    And let’s not forget Geocities neighbourhoods! Every GeoCities site was a “house” in a metaphorical “city” and at the bottom of their page, you could move between "house numbers’ to visit their “neighbours”. So if you found a good site, but got bored, you might check out who’s nearby. Cities were loosely themed, but didn’t enforce topics of any kind, so you might go from a Sailor Moon fansite to a college student’s tutoring homepage to a shrine to a dead loved one. You always found fascinatiing stuff eventually.



  • Consensus is a kind of testing for truth, but truth itself. Hopefully, people will believe true things in aggregate, but sometimes your peers will agree on an untruth.

    A philosopher would say that there is no truth, or at least we can’t be sure we know it. After all, what is “truth” when everything you perceive might not even exist?

    An educator would say there are some things we can know for ourselves, like what “too hot” feels like or what “tasty food” is, some things we have to rely on experts for, like “how far away stars are” or “what the earth is made of”, and some things that aren’t objective at all and so can’t be known, like “who deserves this” or “what is immoral”. These are all kinds of truth.