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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2024

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  • In my opinion, gift cards are good gifts when the giver has some idea of what they want to give, but not enough information to make a proper purchase. For example:

    • for an “event” (eg skydiving, a meal at a fancy restaurant, canoeing trip, etc) where the gifter doesn’t know dates when the recipient is free.
    • for a specific product which the giver knows fairly little, and the receiver has strong opinions on (eg. Money to spend on PC parts without making any product decisions for them)
    • for an item of a “set”, where the gifter doesn’t know for sure which items are already owned (eg. A board game expansion, a collectible Lego set, a book from a series)

    However i do think that often gift cards are used as excuses to be lazy.



  • Of course some qualifications must be met to qualify for a specific term, that’s exactly what definitions are. You yourself are presupposing your own qualifications (“having all genetic instructions”) which you are thrusting upon everyone and assuming it must be the one true definition. But your definition is also deeply flawed. If I have some stem cells harvested from my bone marrow, are those stem cells also a human? If I let those cells die, am I killing someone?

    Or to take a step further into hypotheticals, if I store an egg and a sperm separately in a device built to automatically mix them together in a year from now, is this device now a human? Because it matches your definition of containing all genetic instructions, and if left alone then it would eventually produce a fertiliser egg, which you claim is already a human.

    A human individual is an incredibly intricate thing, and to try reduce its definition to something as mundane as “contains human genetic information” is the actual mental gymnastics here.

    If it wasn’t a human then an abortion wouldn’t be necessary because a dog, bird or fish embryo would die immediately.

    This is blatant false equivalence. Trying to claim that if the embryo is not of some other animal, then it must be a human, as in an individual life. It is obviously a “human embryo” but that does not necessarily mean it is “a human”, just like a “human fingernail” is different from a “chimp fingernail” and yet is still not “a human”

    We are talking about people who have sex and don’t want to deal with the outcome.

    This is honestly a frighteningly cruel outlook. If a rock climber has a fall and is dangling with a broken arm from his rope, should we just leave him there to deal with it himself, since it was his choice to take the risk of climbing? Of course not! Despite his own actions causing his predicament, we as a society still provide care where we can. Hospitals tend to the wounds of idiots who play with fireworks, governments (in many countries) provide care to homeless people who lost all their money gambling. Just because a couple takes a risk which goes badly, does not justify revoking their access to care.

    Again, this whole debate comes down to a definition of when a fertilised egg becomes a live human. And if you want to have any actual impact in this debate, then you are going to have to do better than pre-assuming some definition and dismissing anyone who disagrees with it.


  • There can also be devastating psychological fallout from not getting an abortion, which would be why many people believe it should be a choice that the people involved get to make about themselves, rather than forcing it on them.

    About the rest of your argument, it hinges entirely on a detail that it doesn’t mention: when does an egg become a human? If sex caused literal newborns to be delivered by storks the next day, of course no one would be arguing to kill the child, even if that was by far the most “convenient”. However in reality there is a transition from a mere collection of cells no more special than any other collection of cells in the body (besides their potential for further development), all the way to a fully developed baby. The egg and sperm cells alone are clearly not human, while a baby clearly is. So then where along this gradual process can we first say that it is a human?

    And this is the real crux of the debate. There is no point convincing people that it’s bad to kill their unborn baby via abortion, because they don’t believe there is a baby to kill at all yet, but rather a collection of cells which will eventually form a baby. By removing these cells, you stop any potential for a baby to be formed, just like wearing a condom stops the potential for a baby to be eventually formed, by keeping the egg and sperm separate.















  • But then why spend so much money on a phone? I also don’t care about the specs of my phone, but this means I usually buy some $100 phone that gets the job done for a couple years.

    I genuinely don’t see a reason why someone would buy an iPhone besides as a fashion accessory/ status symbol