This is something I’ve thought about for a long while. As a socially awkward kid, I read the stories of King Arthur. One of the stories about one of his knights (can’t remember which) the knight is given an enchanted item that charms everyone he speaks to and makes them like him. This immediately captured my fascination as a socially inept kid, but the more I thought about it, it would be living hell.

You would never EVER believe anyone genuinely enjoyed your company again, constantly wondering if it was the enchantment. Even if you removed the item and found someone who liked you natrually without it, normal appreciation or regard would NEVER come close to the enchanted one, and it would now FEEL like they disliked you. It would poison your entire life

I mean, we need scale on the luck too. What is a normal amount of luck. Is +100 luck 200% your normal luck? If so that might kind of suck. If it’s normally ranked out of 10, +100 is worldbreaking shit

You are assuming that they think rationally

Santa has always worked on tips, that’s what the cookies and milk are for

Yeah I haven’t tried the mods either and I kinda suck at the game but I’ve always felt like it has a low cost to entry, which is why it feels chill to me. A lot of death anxiety in games is due to time investment and, frankly, like BOTW, fear of long loading screens more than any in game punishment.

Ftl has such a satisfying and similar gameplay loop and allows so much pausing that it doesn’t really feel stressful for me. I still hate dying and do it a lot in the game, but I can play ftl with a sort of soft mental focus that many other games don’t allow me to do

FTL, Stardew valley, No mans sky, Minecraft, Old rpgs like Chrono Trigger

I don’t really have a counter argument that I would like to make, because it’s not and never was my goal to convince you that your opinion was wrong I only intended to critique the way it was made.

However, I am curious where you would personally draw the line on a human infant becoming sentient. This not intended as a trap or an argument- as a conflicted person, your certainty is interesting.

Now I want a fiber optic keyboard cleaning brush

Imagine being able to talk to oysters only to find out that oysters can’t talk back

Somehow I doubt oysters have anything interesting to say

Frankly it annoyed me. Some things should be sacred

Because as I read this, you are setting up the argument to be:

Pro choice believes in protecting individual autonomy, as opposed to Pro life, which believes in telling people what to do, because of insert any number of reasons here

This is pretty true of a lot of the pro life apologists and political campaigners, but I feel is a pretty ineffectual argument against the people who truely believe this as an ideology.

The people that truely believe in pro life genuinely don’t see a difference in values about protecting individual autonomy- they believe that’s what they are doing by banning both murder and abortion (something that they don’t differentiate between)

Plenty of these would agree with you that this execution was in fact a murder.

Except tumors don’t have the potential to grow into sentient animals, so those are pretty different things too. Also, where are you getting this definition from? I study biology for a living and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t consider the term “human being” to include the whole life cycle of the organism.

Frankly, I think a lot of the issue lies with where you decide the value of a life comes from.

Species? Speciesism is kinda fucking the world right now as we make tons of species go extinct to make room for humans above all things.

The sum of a being’s autonomy or it’s life experiences? Kinda ableist/ leads to saying children have less intrinsic value than the elderly (which is not exactly a common viewpoint)

It’s potential for life? That would mean we should value fetuses above all other life

Sky Daddy said so? …doesn’t really need any criticism as it’s so inherently problematic

My personal feelings are almost entirely mixed and agnostic on this subject, so I’m trying to keep them out of this discussion, but my point here is I don’t think you are seeing double enough to realize how easily a different perspective changes the whole argument into a “righteous” one.

The people you are arguing with ABSOLUTELY have hypocritical stances, but we should focus on attacking those, not straw man arguments that don’t take into account that they have ENTIRELY alternate world views, that are frankly, not simply as dismissable as saying “well, WE define it differently”

Not the same one, he just used that username

Disregarding my personal views on this subject, this is a straw man argument.

You have very noticably left out that pro-lifers view the fetus as one of these individuals you say the Pro-choice regard so highly. The Pro life argument is that it should be systemically illegal to end the life of what they view as innocent individuals.

Which… yes, is kind of similar to the general take on this article, regardless of your views on the individuality of fetuses