When you debate with your mind both parties hear new ideas and and everybody gets SMARTER. Sometimes one party hears a better argument they hadn’t considered and they concede, but concede knowing their smarter, wiser and better for it. The person that gives the winning argument feels more confident in their understanding of the topic and is also empowered. Everybody wins.
When debating from the heart the people are PERSONALLY invested in it. If they concede their HEART was untrue and they are a broken person. The person arguing against them has an untrue heart in their eyes. Tempers often flare, feelings get hurt and the person who loses (or storms off) is heartbroken, and the “Winner”, having an empathic heart should feel a bit of guilt for hurting another person’s feelings.
I think he's spot on for that.
A good rule of thumb can be: Is the person you're arguing with capable of admitting that you might be right? Or is the issue at hand one that makes up a dear part of their cosmology, one where disagreement it is a sign of illness or deviancy?
For example, I just witnessed an abortion argument/rant and most everyone was arguing from emotion. Actually since this was about abortion it was textbook Lakoff.
It became a weird echo chamber as they didn't really have a pro-lifer to argue with (not for long anyway). But they demanded to know: How they could think that way? So I told 'em. I mean, the pro-life position isn't hard to grok. Very basic definition on personhood and thus murder.
Hell I didn’t even have a political dog in that fight, as I ain’t voting for Romney or Obama. And this from Penn Jillette is pretty close to my line of thinking on abortion. Which probably made things worse in their eyes. As I wasn't a "fanatic" and wasn't even arguing my own position.
Then they got angry and left. Because, well, they wanted an argument with "the enemy" not an explanation as to why the enemy thought the way they did. No, the enemy has to be a bunch of adulteress-stoning theocrats or baby-killin' monsters.
So, it came down to just me and some other guy having a rather nice chat about new developments in contraceptives. Like the male birth control pill and which barrier methods are better.
The whole thing was like a bunch of Austrian-School Economists getting mad because someone from the Stockholm-School is explaining the ideas behind the German Historical School to them. The Swed doesn't have a dog in the fight! He's just telling you why the Germans thought the way they did!
2 comments:
Great expansion on my point.
I think the anti-rights people get pissed at us because we're not a bunch of violent anarchists, and when we say "I hope I never have to pull my gun to defend my life" we mean it.
Of course they also don't grasp the concept of owning and carrying guns but NOT wanting to use it. They can understand owning fire extinguishers, and buying a car with air bags galore, but they don't WANT to understand gun owners. Its better for them to see us WANTING to shoot people, dreaming and desiring to shoot people.
You've read my views on abortion, and I'm glad to hear Penn say a similar thing. I think Pro-Life is VERY libertarian, when you recognize the growing fetus as either a person of a soon-to-be person, and acknowledge that they have rights too.
Of course like all prohibition I'm more concerned about unintended consequences than the life of something that may never survive (as so many pregnancies self-terminate), as we can never BAN abortion just like we can never ban guns or drugs.
It just means we'll ban GOOD SAFE abortion, so while I'm concerned about the life of the baby, I know a ban will kill more healthy mothers then it will kill viable babies, and I can't stand for that, as immoral as it may be.
Weer'd,
I get your fear that banning all abortion would invariably end up killing women who get illegal and unsafe abortions. You also assert that an abortion ban would kill more women than it will kill viable fetuses.
A. For that to be true, abortion rates would have to skyrocket, because even under the most backalley procedure known, you're not going to lose ALL the mothers. Most abortions are not carried out to preserve the life of the mother or eliminate non-viable fetuses. (Nor would the logical and consistant application of the pro-life position ban abortions where the life of the mother is concerned -- in a case where we can only choose to save one life, the mother can choose to save her own; since the only life that can result from the preganancy is the mother's, eliminating a nonviable fetus is ethically the same as a post-miscarriage D&C, and as such is often safer for her than carrying a nonviable fetus to term). These are, however, rare cases, and exceptions to preserve them would be consistant (even mandatory) with SCOTUS rulings, even if there was a national consensus that fetuses are persons with rights.
The overwhelming majority of abortions performed in the United States are elective because the mother does not want the child, usually for economic reasons.
2. If there was a national consensus that fetuses are persons with rights, how does the rate of women dying while trying to commit homicide bother you? Seriously -- if abortion were illegal because we legally accept that fetuses at that particular stage of development are people and have a civil right not to be arbitrarily killed, how is the risk to the mother any different than the risk to a parent who is trying to murder their toddlers?
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