Abortion

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by OntheWindowStand

On average men have a iq score 5 points higher

No, there have been MANY studies showing equivalence.

they have more brain tissue

And whales have more brain tissue than humans. Except at extremes, like microcephaly and macrocephaly, this does not correlate very well with intelligence.

they score higher on SATs

One major statistical reason for lower performance (specifically in math) is that many more women take the SATs than men and thus there will be statistical regression to the mean with larger sample sizes.

But numerous other studies, including meta-analyses, have failed to show any significant difference between the genders when tested by more controlled methods than the SATs.

One billion women or illiterate while only 200 million men

Have you ever travelled in developing countries? The fact that women are not allowed anything beyond primary education in most of the developing world has a lot to do with this, and that because of income disparities and need for labor families will choose to send boys and not girls to school. This is one of the great social tragedies in the world, that so many girls are deprived education.

more Nobel prize winners are men

Because the Nobel Prize was established in roughly ~1900, and for most of the intervening century women had far less access to higher education let alone the research and leadership positions that are recognized by the prize

Schools favor women

what does that mean?

There are innumerable studies that do not demonstrate a difference between males and females on intelligence testing. And anecdotally I've been affiliated with several highly prestigious institutions of higher learning and I've worked with many world famous women who are leaders in academic medicine and medical research. The fact that they are outnumbered has only to do with access, not with intelligence.

Here are some topic reviews for you:

Think Again: Men and Women Share Cognitive Skills

The difference myth - The Boston Globe

[OntheWindowStand]

Originally Posted by Aedes

No, there have been MANY studies showing equivalence.

And whales have more brain tissue than humans. Except at extremes, like microcephaly and macrocephaly, this does not correlate very well with intelligence.

On math they do, but girls generally outperform boys on verbal measures including testing methods outside of the SATs.

Have you ever travelled in developing countries? The fact that women are not allowed anything beyond primary education in most of the developing world has a lot to do with this, and that because of income disparities and need for labor families will choose to send boys and not girls to school. This is one of the great social tragedies in the world, that so many girls are deprived education.

Because the Nobel Prize was established in roughly ~1900, and for most of the intervening century women had far less access to higher education let alone the research and leadership positions that are recognized by the prize

what does that mean?

There are innumerable studies that do not demonstrate a difference between males and females on intelligence testing. And anecdotally I've been affiliated with several highly prestigious institutions of higher learning and I've worked with many world famous women who are leaders in academic medicine and medical research. The fact that they are outnumbered has only to do with access, not with intelligence.

Here are some topic reviews for you:

The difference myth - The Boston Globe

On the second point its proportionally larger directly correlation with more neurons should have cleared that up.

Have you heard of feminist? It is a organization of women who distort info and want more rights for women than for men any reputable source will show higher scores for men on average on IQ and SAT take that with a grain of salt if you want... I cited who performed the study

EDIT- I went and read that link and it admits that men score higher in SAT and IQ test all it does it say that men have better spatial and Women vocabulary which is true but it doesn't even out hence men have 5 points higher on average

[Pythagorean]

Originally Posted by Aedes

A system that depends on imperfect people using imperfect evidence and poorly defined criteria is a grossly imperfect system.

My point is that you are not dealing with reality when you talk of a system. The imperfection of people or the human being is more clearly reflected in the act of murder - that is cold blooded, first degree homocide. You are placing the emphasis upon the victim or the system's response, you are blaming the victim for his own violent and innocent death, you are blaming the system for its imperfect response when the heart of the problem lies at the feet of the perpetrator of violence.

It's not an abstraction if you look at statistics that show that for the exact same crime in the exact same jurisdiction blacks are FAR more likely to be given the death penalty than whites. It's not an abstraction if people on death row are not allowed to challenge their conviction using DNA evidence.

You talk about statistics. But if other statistics are to show us that certain pathologies are more prevalent within certain communities then it is encumbent upon the community itself to live up to the responsibility of dealing with those pathologies. Furthermore you are playing the race card here. I would ask you, how has blaming the system all these many years (since the 60's) helped the situation?

The black individual may successfully blame the system for his situation but does that help ameliorate the pathologies within the community? Does it reduce the instances of crime perpetrated upon the innocent by members of that community at all? The answer is no. Blaming the system doesn't do anything to reduce the level of crime. Having democracy doesn't just mean you get to blame whitey or the system, having democracy also means that it is you and your community who must be responsible for the levels of criminal behaviour. You can blame whitey, you can blame history, you can hate America, you can elect Obama, and you can even obtain race reparations for every black man in the country but how is any of that going to alleviate the social pathologies?

There are federal rules against the kind of racism that you are alleging and there are serious penalties for those who are caught doing what you are alleging. It is up to you as a citizen to bring the charges before a judge, the law is plain and there are powerful special interest groups who work on behalf of minorities in this country who are plenty capable of rectifying the kind of racism that you allege is occurring. But this is America and you need more than vague statistics in order to bring federal charges against people. But anyone can file civil rights complaints in America, and that's a fact that is not in dispute but strangely you act as if this is not the case.

As far as death row inmates not being allowed to enter certain facts into evidence, the country is not run by aliens from another planet. The country is basically a democracy, which means that black and white men and women help to formulate the laws and regulations regarding such matters. You are free to post your views on public forums and you are free to petition the congress of the United States. You can start a letter writing campaign from your very home. You can even run for congress and since the process is essentially run by the people you can certainly change the laws. Your duty as a citizen isn't to blame the permanent imperfections of human nature and denounce the system, especially since that will not be effective; your duty is to encourage each to his responsibility within a free society. Blaming "the system" begins to sound more and more like a conspiracy to obtain extra-judicial powers in the pursuit of non-democratic, ideological goals.

Ask Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

And wthout the act of treason there would be no sense in having a death penalty for treason.

Vitiating their visceral urge for retribution is compassionate? Nothing will restore a loss like that, and in fact indulging it seems to completely miss the point of what compassion is.

It is not a lynching that we are discussing. It is a democratically established policy of lethal penalty for the act of murder. How else are we to decide the penalty for murder? Are we to allow a dictator to decide for the community or are we to allow the community to decide for itself? What exactly are you advocating here? My compassion remains with the innocent and not with murderers.

--It seems that you basically want peace. But I can't advocate usurping freedom in the name of a peace that is thereby unobtainable so that we end up with neither freedom or peace.

[Sidus]

Originally Posted by Aedes

At least according to the moral schema of those who share your values. But since when are they universalizable?

I have no problem with life in prison without parole, because there is recourse for an innocent person to reclaim some of his life. And again, there is no evidence that capital punishment is an actual deterrent to murder. You think Texas and Florida and Virginia have fewer murders per capita than states without the death penalty?[/color]

If capital punishment was uniform across the US and criminals knew they would certainly get the death penalty murders would decrease. There was a time when men raped girls without murdering them, once the death penalty was removed from most states rapist almost always kill their victims so they will not be identified. The penalty for both rape and murder are pretty much equal, so why not improve your chances of getting caught.


Life and human behavior are both predictably inconsistent. That's why someone with a shred of compassion would find it ridiculous to endorse a government sponsored policy of executing people in a grossly imperfect system under the ideal of "justice".

Someone with a shred of compassion would find it ridiculous to allow a women to murder her unborn simply because she wanted to.

The difference here is that in the case of abortion it's the individual who gets to decide what she wants for her own body. In the case of execution it's pro-execution "activist judges" that get to decide without any concern for the imperfections of their own system. Ironic how my protest here sounds a great deal like conservative language.

Actually the difference is that the "activist women" get to decide without any concern for the life of their innocent unborn. What kind of society refuses to protect its innocent? The individual is not merely deciding what she wants for her own body, that decision has already been made. She is deciding what she wants to do with her unborn child, a seperate life from her own.

[Aedes]

And thus we've expressed the two sides of this debate. The argument about the innocence of a fetus is well understood. I'm a new father, and our baby was very much wanted and loved long before he was born. So I greatly appreciate that point. But I'm also a consequentialist and I'm not brazen enough to presume that my values on this matter should legally bind other adults, and I have sufficient respect for the autonomy of women that I would fear a society in which self-righteous moralizing men think they can really make decisions on womens' behalf in a way that women think fair.

Pyth, I've read your thread a few times and I am having great difficulty understanding the point you're trying to make. Sure, we have punishments because there are crimes. That's a statement that's too obvious to bother making, and yet you seem to make it repeatedly. But that's not the issue. The issue is whether society should condone a method of determining guilt and punishment that is applied in such an arbitrary way that race becomes an independent risk factor for execution. It should not. If all else being equal race is an independent (and strong) risk factor for execution, then we need to do some serious soul searching as a society.

As for OnTheWindowStand's comment about feminism, which is a heterogeneous collection of vastly different political and social views, and patently NOT an "organization", why don't you take the time to look at the primary literature instead of trawling Google?

Just in the last 18 months alone the following studies have been published that show either equivalence between genders or superiority of women using a variety of intelligence testing methods -- and the one study that looked at mathematical aptitude did not identify any difference between genders. There wasn't a single solitary study that showed superiority among men. And there are HUNDREDS of studies if you go back years, I just didn't have time to pull them all.

Appl Neuropsychol. 2008;15(2):117-22

Lang Speech Hear Serv Sch. 2007 Oct;38(4):309-14.

Br J Psychol. 2007 Aug;98(Pt 3):467-83

Neuropsychologia. 2007 Sep 20;45(12):2744-54. Epub 2007 Apr 19

Child Neuropsychol. 2007 Jan;13(1):18-45

J Biosoc Sci. 2007 Sep;39(5):789-93. Epub 2007 Mar 2

[Sidus]

Originally Posted by midas77

I think you are talking in circles. Society is not there for morality. Morality seeks to benefit society, not the other way around. Besides the morality you sponsor is a male morality. I think it is wrong to funish the female when they are forced into abortion for the reason that a male abandoned her. We must understand that pregnancy is a difficult time for the female. Why is it that its the female that deserves to be funished when its always takes two to tango.

Personally I will never allowed my unborn child to be aborted or any of the unborn child of my extended family. If anyone tries to force an individual for a sacrifice, society must shoulder the expenses. But I will now shoulder people's idiotic mistakes. Will you?

And you think I'm talking in circles. Morality has no gender. The (strange) idea of pregnancy being difficult and punishing females has nothing to do with this.

Sex holds different consequences for women than it does for men. This is just a fact that egalitarians do not want to face. Abortion on demand is only one of the outrageous consequences of egalitarianism. A society can and should only provide political and legal equality. When it tries to level the playing field by providing economic and social conditions that will make everyone the same it becomes unjust.

If you are worried about shouldering the expense for people's idiotic mistakes, your worries are long overdue. If you are a responsible member of society you have been shouldering that responsiblity all your life.

Equality, is the ideal that citizens should be treated differently only if there is some relevant difference between them. This implies two things:
One it is wrong to treat people differently if in the relevant respects they are alike. Slavery was wrong because, in the relevant respect of humanity, slaves were no different from those who were free. Second, it is right to treat people differently if there are relevant differences between them. Remember Jefferson "all Men are created equal...endowed...with inalienable rights...among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

The important thing here is "pursuit of happiness", and NOT to happiness itself. Politics and law should protect the opportunity to pursue happiness, but it is up to the individuals as to what they do with that opportunity. Thus, citizens will always be unequal since there is so much variation between personal qualities and preferences, just as women and men will always be biologically different. But egalitarians can not except this.

Egalitarians will try to level the playing field economically by taking from the productive and giving to the non-productive. Socially, they will do this by giving women the power over the life or death of their unborn in an attempt to make them as sexually unfettered as men.

The truth is that egalitarians regard the elementary requirements of justice as irrelevant. They favor penalizing people who make good use of their liberty and opportunity to pursue happiness and make it a policy to reward the misuse of liberty and opportunities. And they do this while self-righteously claiming that proceeding any other way is immoral. When they can not face up to their own actions, they simply change the meaning of those actions. That is, when told abortion is destroying a life they say a fetus is not a life.

[Sidus]

Originally Posted by Aedes

And thus we've expressed the two sides of this debate. The argument about the innocence of a fetus is well understood. I'm a new father, and our baby was very much wanted and loved long before he was born. So I greatly appreciate that point. But I'm also a consequentialist and I'm not brazen enough to presume that my values on this matter should legally bind other adults, and I have sufficient respect for the autonomy of women that I would fear a society in which self-righteous moralizing men think they can really make decisions on womens' behalf in a way that women think fair.

Oh, I think I get it now. You have your own values, and you believe in the innocence of the unborn, yet you also believe that others can believe differently. You would not want to impose your very special all–your-own values on someone else who has entirely different values. Because how do you know your values are right for them. So, anything goes.

Who are you then, to tell others that they should not discriminate against blacks, or have slaves, or murder anyone who gets in their way? Because to do so, would be to declare that God or nature has marked some actions as “moral” or “good” and others as “immoral” or “bad”. Since, in your world, people get to decide for themselves what is moral or good then my own notion that there is something within us ---a conscience---that tells us that to be a human being is to recognize that everything is not permitted; and that my own happiness---indeed my own freedom---depends upon living within the bounds prescribed either by God or the moral law is just unsophisticated nonsense.

The lesson I am to learn from you is that all moral judgments are value judgments, and that none can be proved to be either right or wrong. There is no “reason” to obey the law, to show kindness or compassion, other than to avoid jail in the first instance and to make friends in the second---or perhaps to feel self-righteous.

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by Sidus

Oh, I think I get it now. You have your own values, and you believe in the innocence of the unborn, yet you also believe that others can believe differently. You would not want to impose your very special all–your-own values on someone else who has entirely different values. Because how do you know your values are right for them.

Correct.

So, anything goes.

No, not anything. I believe in a society in which people can self actualize, in which self-determination isn't constrained by prejudices and violence. And while I deeply value life, I do NOT feel that society as a whole has the right to determine the social or moral value of all unborn fetuses -- I think that rests with the parents and especially the mother.

Since, in your world...

you're going way off the deep end here, I don't find much to identify with in your little caricature

[Ruthless Logic]

Originally Posted by Sidus
Oh, I think I get it now. You have your own values, and you believe in the innocence of the unborn, yet you also believe that others can believe differently. You would not want to impose your very special all–your-own values on someone else who has entirely different values. Because how do you know your values are right for them.

Correct.

It is hard to imagine being subjected to the cognitive duality of espousing personal affirmations, while providing the latitude that reflects the utter contemptuous hypocrisy of contradiction. Lets take a moment to examine this careless idealistic endeavor.

The classic liberal argument suggests that Life is not black or white, but more reflective of grey shading. Yes indeed, the processes of conducting life on this planet can be quite challenging given the multitude of dynamic variables that reign control. But upon close examination, the shades of grey are generated during the consideration process related to the given topic under discussion. The inherent constraint of the decision making process is the finality of the arrived conclusion of consensus when adopting the all in compassing mandate of implementing Public Policy (i.e. gun laws, abortion restrictions), which finally leads us to the inescapable commitment of black or white.

For some individuals (liberals), the finality of inescapable personal commitment must generate a similar anxiety attack, such as claustrophobia. Wow, that is a good analogy, the feeling of being boxed in physicologically (personal commitment), as well as physically (abortion restrictions).

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by Ruthless Logic

It is hard to imagine being subjected to the cognitive duality of espousing personal affirmations, while providing the latitude that reflects the utter contemptuous hypocrisy of contradiction. Lets take a moment to examine this careless idealistic endeavor.

Amazing how little can be communicated with so many extraneous and uneconomical syllables. Would you like to take this phrase by phrase?

1. "It is hard to imagine" -- no, it's not. You're so, shall we say, self-assured, that you seem to see this in everyone you converse with. Furthermore, unless you think of humans as robotic automotons, then you have to expect to see what you perceive as conflict and contradiction among those with whom you disagree. And with a bit of reflection you'd probably see it in yourself.

2. "being subjected to" -- that appears to be a statement of pity for those sorry souls in which you see this condition. If one is reflective and authentic, however, then it is not a matter of being subjected to something -- it's a well-thought-out point of view.

3. "cognitive duality" -- cognition is a plurality, not merely a duality.

4. "espousing personal" -- that's what a debate constitutes, is it not? Or are you representing someone else with your opinions?

5. "affirmations" -- philosophical opinions are not synonymous with affirmations, as I'm sure you know.

6. "while providing the latitude" -- as I said, cognition is a plurality -- and in terms of moral and political constancy or lack thereof, it's specifically latitude that allows one to relate one moral opinion to another without being obdurate and, frankly, simple.

7. "that reflects the utter contemptuous" -- personal judgements, absent some objective or collectively accepted measure, are neither analytical nor logical, I'm afraid to say. Beside, "contemptuous" is a word synonymous with hateful or loathesome -- wouldn't you reserve such judgements for things that actually have a bit more meaning?

8. "hypocrisy of contradiction" -- that is redundant, and besides I think you mean "self-contradictory". I am contradicting you and you are contradicting me, that's not problematic. But to be self-contradictory is hypocritical, and to be hypocritical is to be self-contradictory. So if you had to pay a dime for every letter you typed, would you really have needed both?

the shades of grey are generated during the consideration process related to the given topic under discussion

And the shades of gray are also generated by the multiplicity of opinions on a subjective matter, like morality. That's how we can differentially regard what constitutes "justice" for a specific transgression.

The inherent constraint of the decision making process is the finality of the arrived conclusion of consensus when adopting the all in compassing mandate of implementing Public Policy

Not so fast -- laws are different than morals, because laws are the intrinsic result of compromise among different lawmakers (and those who influence them). Laws themselves represent a mean between extremes. That's why most laws do not represent extremist views.

(i.e. gun laws, abortion restrictions), which finally leads us to the inescapable commitment of black or white.

If the laws were so black and white then we wouldn't have appellate courts. And besides, the particulars of a given crime and the evidence to support a prosecution are not black and white either, which means that a given law can never be executed in a black and white manner -- only case-by-case.

Wow, that is a good analogy, the feeling of being boxed in physicologically, as well as physically.

That is true for anyone who is narrow-minded. But we're all open minded here -- the word "physicological" means "logic illustrated by physics", which is clearly not what you meant, but we all know what you were attempting to say.