Woman uploads abortion video - goes viral

Muise... wrote: »

went over your head, did it?

Seems you are trying desperately hard to pull the wool over everybody's eyes here but you're failing, and miserably so..

You know well the word was being used with it's STRICT dictionary definition in mind. Users actually cut and pasted from Webster's Dictionary in attempt to back up their use of the word and to show how it was an apt one. Then just as the use of the word was being shown to be wholly inaccurate, not to mention grossly inappropriate, you come along with the following doozy:

Muise... wrote: »

..that's the trouble with fundamentalists: they do not understand metaphor.

In short Muise: the word was not being used as a metaphor and your sneering attempt at backing tracking failed.

blacklilly wrote: »

Can you show me some of these false scientific facts you speak of?

Fair enough, I suppose I can just catch a later bus home.

Earlier in this thread we had people arguing that an embryo is a separate, distinct life because it has unique DNA. This encounters a lot of problems; Different DNA does not confer personhood. If it did, there are a significant number of your own cells containing DNA that is different from the majority. Just a little different, I'll grant you, not quite as much as the 50% or so an embryo didn't inherit from the woman, but different nonetheless. Identical twins have "the same" DNA, so by such logic you can argue that they're just the one person. If you've ever met any identical twins, or hell, even just watched a video of some, you can see that while they look very similar, they do somehow manage to be completely separate individuals with distinct personalities. Humans need to kinda develop a brain before they have anything to be human with. So no, for about a dozen weeks after conception, there's nothing that could be described as a person in there at all. It gets a bit fuzzier after that, but meh, that's not my point.

That should be more than enough to show that the original argument is, not to put too fine a point on it, a pile of rancid toss. If you want, you can add in the fact that a fully grown human contains about a thousand times more bacterial and viral DNA than human DNA. "Human" is starting to become a very blurry term as we discover more about how our bodies work. Do a google search for "brain gut axis" or "psychobiotics" if you're interested in seeing more about what really makes up a human being.


Another popular one is the "it are a fact that life begins at conception" meme. I don't think it came up in this thread yet, which is a pleasant surprise, but if it goes on long enough, it will, kind of like a Godwin's Law but for anti-choice folks instead of Nazis. It tends to ignore the fact that gametes are very much alive before they fuse. I find it very amusing when such people argue that gametes don't count because they can't live outside a human body while arguing that fused gametes are different for exactly the same reason. They usually revert to "but they only contain half of the parent's DNA!", which is interesting when this different DNA is magically different to the different DNA of a zygote. They might try falling back on "It's not the right number of chromosomes", which leads to awkward back pedaling when this logic forces them to admit they don't consider people with Down's Syndrome to be human. Neither of the above examples are consistent enough to use as an argument while keeping a straight face.


At this point I would like to express mild irritation that because I'm still here typing this post, my supervisor managed to offload a whole load of metagenomic work from someone else's PhD on to me. And I have to catch a late bus. So thanks for that. I won't hold it against you if you end up gaining a better understanding of why arguments using barely-understood science are just bad for everyone.

This is laughable. Two people arguing with me and yet both disagreeing with each other.

seenitall wrote: »

Excuse me? I must have missed that part? I presented a dictionary definition..

I know, but Muise says the word was just used as a metaphor and we're all just stupid fundamentalists for not realising that :pac:

to which someone else presented a wikipedia one.

Yes, here it is again:

Parasitism is a non-mutual symbiotic relationship between species, where one species, the parasite, benefits at the expense of the other, the host.

seenitall wrote: »

Wholly inaccurate my foot. Back to the drawing board for you it is.

Have a read of this:

Why Babies Aren't Actually Parasites

ProfessorPlum wrote: »

We'll, that's not quite right either. Abortion can also be spontaneous, if you want to get technical.

Most abortions are.