I Don’t Think That Word, Metaphor Or Concept Means What You Think It Means

“Implausible” means “people talking with their dogs”.

“Irony” might be “leftybloggers that would lose debates with real dogs”.

Ipso Spotty” from Culling Snook:

If Mitch had an irony-warning meter in his head, it would have been pegged while he wrote that. But Mitch is, of course, dead to irony.

Well, to be fair (to me), “Irony” isn’t the term you’re looking for.

That’d be “non-sequitur“.

“He” (it’s a writing in a dog’s voice, but he’s not fooling anyone; dogs have better reading comprehension) was writing about yesterday’s bit about abortion; how abortion rates are falling because people (says columnist Steve Chapman) are assigning moral gravity to humans-under-construction today that they didn’t 20 years ago.

My point – well, read it yourself.

Mr. Stool:

So pro-choice supporters have to realize that there is a “moral dimension” to abortion? And then a “compromise” would be possible? Does Mitch sound like he wants to compromise, boys and girls?

Well, Bad Dog, all you had to do was ask. I think I was pretty clear about it.

Me? Personally? Hell no. If it were up to me, there’d be no compromise at all! Not on abortion, or many many many other issues.

But I’m not an absolute dictator. I am one of a couple hundred million voters.

Our society reaches compromises, though, on pretty much every issue (mostly; there’s not much call to legalize cannibalism). I liken it to tugs of war, with people pulling the rope of each issue one way or the other; some pulling hard, others not so much, still others cajoling people to pull with them or at least stop pulling for the other side.

If you want a different metaphor, you go ahead and pick it! But since society does the compromising, my goal is to pull like a mofo to try to make society’s compromise better (from my point of view).  I expect others to pull against me.  Being a conservative, I’m a match for any 20 of them, but knock yourselves out.

Well, he does wrote about “an acceptable a less vile compromise,” Spotty.

Grasshopper, does that sound like Mitch would accept half a loaf if offered to him?

No, I guess not.

With good reason – society and its attitudes aren’t a “loaf” that someone offers me, for which I should be grateful, with which I should just shut up and go along. It’s a huge organism with five million parts (in Minnesota alone), each with a mind of its own. And I’m doing my best to reach as many as possible, on the things that matter to me.

And if “Spotty” thinks society and its attitudes and the way our culture conducts its business are some kind of “loaf” handed to him by some unseen benefactor, [Joke about how DFLers are just a bunch of mindless hive creatures, like Borg slathered in patchouli and chanting mindless doggerel, deleted for civility’s sake]

Mitch sees compromise as just a step in the incremental banning of abortion until it is entirely illegal.

Bad dog! Stupid dog! Who’s gonna clean up this pile of steaming intellectual crap on the floor? Bad dog!

I see compromise as “where society as a whole is” on whatever issue you want to talk about.

And yes – my goal is to try like hell to make society as a whole realize that life begins at conception.

Because it’s not my role to compromise. My role is to affect the compromise. To respect the results of that compromise, of course – it’s called “living within the rule of law” – but to keep trying to swing that compromise via any legal, civil means.
To be fair to Spotty, though, he’s handicapped. DFLers in this state aren’t used to compromising. They’re used to having absolute control. Now that there’s someone pulling against them on some of these issues, it’s disconcerting to some of them.

Tough.

Tell you what Mitch, come back after you’re willing to concede that there is a privacy and civil liberties dimension to abortion. Then maybe we can talk.

But you go first.

OK. I’ll go first.

No! I will concede no such thing! The parents’ civil liberties and privacy do not trump the “fetus”‘s right to life, liberty and happiness any more than they do mine! The fetus is a human from the moment it’s conceived. Killing it is murder. People – individual men and women – need to take that into account before they make flippy floppy. It’s as simple as that.

And for someone else – let’s call her “Gretel Buncombe-Stipe-Purvis” – it’s equally clear-cut. Abortion is not just a right, it’s a civil sacrament, which I have an obligation to supply via my tax dollars.

Ms. Buncombe-Stipe-Purvis and I meet. We yell. We scream. And in the end, since we do need to decide and since neither of us has the power or right to coerce each other, we compromise somewhere in the middle. I retain my opinion; Ms. Buncombe-Stipe-Purvis retains hers. We continue trying to pull the issue toward our point of view. If I get bored and drop out, Ms. Buncombe-Stipe-Purvis will make abortion a civil sacrement! And if I convince someone else – say, Ann Plotnik, pro-lifer – to join the debate – we’ll outnumber Ms. Buncombe-Stipe-Purvis and the compromise will be recast, maybe a little more to the right.

You see how it works, Spot?

Oh, jeez – you pooped on the floor again, didn’t you?

33 thoughts on “I Don’t Think That Word, Metaphor Or Concept Means What You Think It Means

  1. I wonder if the Abolitionists were willing to compromise.

    I’m willing to take small steps.

  2. MofN. In some ways they did. Or at least take small preliminary steps…..prevent the spread of slavery in new states. Establish the undeground railroad. And what was the case in Minnesota? Something about not sending an escaped slave back to the south?

  3. Were they ever satisfied with their compromises?

    How would history have treated them if they were?

  4. How would history have treated them if they were?

    “Keep slavery safe, affordable and legal”.  After all, a life isn’t a life until its free, is it?

    Heck – the Constitution of the day actually recognized slavery (the lefties constantly remind us), which is more than you can say about abortion.

    (NOTE TO THE IRONY-IMPAIRED:  The above was spoken with tongue in cheek, and the tongue is soaked in acid to boot).

  5. I wonder if abolitionists were ever told to “stop trying to legislate your faith”.

  6. Mitch and Master, just to annoy the hell out of liberal types, I use those arguements to mockingly support slavery:

    Keep your laws off of my property.

    Don’t like slavery, don’t own any.

    Separation of church and state (the now wacky Quakers were early leaders in the abolition movement).

    If northerners had plantations, then slavery would be a God-given right.

    I support the civil rights of Southerners (actually heard this quote on public radio once..and this was the hourly news, not a commentary program: “Republicans generally oppose choice, while Democrats tend to support women’s civil rights”)

  7. Oh, I forgot: The fundamentalists only care of slaves when they are on the plantation. Once free, the fundies will not do anything to help the African-Americans. I doubt Quakers from Mass are going to SC to set up job training centers and subsidized housing for freed slaves.

  8. I doubt Quakers from Mass are going to SC to set up job training centers and subsidized housing for freed slaves.

    “Sherman was a social worker!”

  9. ““safe, affordable and legal”.”

    Ahem, if you are going to mock, at least mock correctly. It is Safe Legal and RARE!

    What you folks seem to forget, and it is why I struggle with this issue, is that we are dealing with TWO lives in a symbiotic relationship. At one point should the right of one trump the other. IN every example you have brought up, murder, slavery, you are talking two independent lives. Your analogy fails on that point alone. If the Mother is dieing and the only hope is to terminate the pregnancy do we let God chose and lose both lives. Come on!

    On some fronts I try to avoid this debate, because people are so stuck in the rut of their wills they won’t even consider the others point of view. Some of you have no problem bombing innocent Iraq’s and call it collateral damage, war is ugly, etc. But Like the abortion issue, won’t support programs policies and practices, generally brought up by the evil Liberals, that actually support ones desire to carry the child to term.

    I’m taking a deep breath. Like Coleen said, I thought the last thread was of a high quality, but then Mitch comes in here and TOTALLY misses Spots point. A dog who can dance circles around anyone here including the proprietor.

    Oh, what was Spot’s point, to ‘poke the monster’ and I would say he was quite successful. Good Dog, there will be a special treat in the Garage for you next time you stop by.

    Flash

  10. “If the Mother is dieing and the only hope is to terminate the pregnancy do we let God chose and lose both lives.”

    That’s a completely different issue flash, and one that I really think we could agree on, not just compromise.

    What percent of abortions are because of the impending death of the mother?

  11. won’t support programs policies and practices, generally brought up by the evil Liberals, that actually support ones desire to carry the child to term.

    40 acres and a mule for each fetus brought to term!

    (just thought I’d give that a try)

  12. If the Mother is dieing

    I specifically made an exception for that.

    Oh, what was Spot’s point,

    No, “Spot’s” point was that compromise means everyone needs to believe the same thing, on an individual level.  He’s the one that missed my point (compromise is societal, and an amalgam of everyone’s point of view, and that amalgam is changing in re abortion), although to be fair (to him), my own real dog is smarter than his fictional one, and she’d have gotten it.

    But get him into the garage, Flash. He’d probably make more sense hammered.

  13. While this might seem to be unrelated, this post reminded me of an exchange from Fawlty Towers:

    Mr. Hutchinson: (Reading rough map) Where is the Post Office?

    Basil Fawlty: It’s right there where it says “Post Office”. I’m sorry if it’s confusing.

    It also brings a phrase to mind… Mitch, you are casting pearls before swine. (Not dogs.)

  14. The programs that Flash hangs his hat on are the same ones that have set black Americans back three generations.

    Sex isn’t going to go away (I hope! heh), and kids always have and always will jump into the sack long before they are ready; BUT..

    The irrefutable fact is that the “war on poverty”, the “sexual revolution”, the “feminist movement” and any number of Democrat “contributions” have done nothing but increase the misery and waste of inumerable lives.

    Now that large portions of society have been dragged sown to the level of the lowest common denominator, Democrats are hard at work eradicating the last vestiges of that which makes us human…our inherent love of our children.

    The Party of Scrubs will not be satisfied until their crowned princes and princesses are able to look down upon a truly unwashed population that has been reduced to the level of mindless beasts…then, and only then will they lift their fluted champaign glasses and declare “our work here is done”.

    True American patriots don’t negotiate with terrorists; we crush them like cockroaches when we encounter them.

  15. ““life of the mother”

    The pro-choice crowd want that to read “social life of the mother”

  16. It happens. I know at least one woman who (claims to have) had to choose between an abortion or dying. Not an easy choice, and one that I think is legitimate.

    As opposed to, say, second-trimester contraception.

  17. Flash wrote:
    What you folks seem to forget, and it is why I struggle with this issue, is that we are dealing with TWO lives in a symbiotic relationship.
    Shouldn’t it be the responsibility of the state to see that the rights of the weaker of the two are respected?

  18. Maybe we could assign the fetus the value of 2/3 of a human. That’s worked before hasn’t it?

  19. What you folks seem to forget

    I didn’t forget it. It’s a key part of why I believe as I do. The human-under-construction isn’t just some piece of crud; it’s something that, if we get out of the way, is going to be a human someday.

  20. “Not an easy choice,”

    Obviously, but that’s not the point. The focus is often put onto possibly rare and extreme circumstances with which to spread evenly upon the topic in general.

    Send it to the States.

  21. “What you folks seem to forget…. is that we are dealing with TWO lives”

    Do you know who really forgets this? Or, at least tries very hard to forget? Or re-defines one of those lives as “tissue”, so that they can treat it like a bad appendix.

  22. I dunno. I find it a peculiar religious position to consider a blastula as having the same standing as living, breathing, well, person; I also find it a peculiar religious position to consider a [baby | fetus | whatever you want to call it ] at term to have no more rights worth protecting than an appendix. I’m perfectly comfortable with folks having peculiar religious positions and living with them, mind you — there’s members of my tribe who believe it’s sinful for me to wear clothing that’s a cotton-silk blend, after all — but I really think that folks who want to argue what ought to be public policy and law ought to expect those of us who don’t share their religious positions to be much more amenable to secular arguments than we are to whatever they think that the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Allah, God, or Sam Colt thinks we ought to do.

  23. Joel, let me help clarify from a religious POV. We believe that conception is a miracle, that God joins egg and sperm together to create life. It happens because God wants it to happen. We also believe that Human life is vastly more valuable than the average zygote.
    I have no doubt that Clownie will accuse me of believing that Jesus rode a dinosaur into Jerusalem, but that’s not my problem. The world is a marvelous place.

  24. I’m not quite at “life begins at conception”, but I do know it begins long before it passes through the magical vagina that bestows human rights.

  25. We believe that conception is a miracle, that God joins egg and sperm together to create life.

    That’s why prospective parents cry out “OH GOD! OH GOD!” during the conception. They’re paging God to do his little sperm-egg join thingy. Some couples mistakenly cry out “OH CHRIST YEAH! OH JESUS!” but that’s not the son of God’s department.

  26. Kermit, I understand — in a general way — and respect — sorta — your belief (although I do tend to go back to Heinlein on such issues), but I’m not at all persuaded that your beliefs, no matter how sincerely held (and I’ve no doubt about your sincerity, honest) ought to much inform public policy, or law.

    That said, you’ll have a very easy time persuading me that a whatever at 8.5 months is somethingorother deserving of some level of protection by both society and law. Perhaps (well, not perhaps) as much as a newborn baby, but moreso than a blastula; in fact, I’m already persuaded.

    (I don’t know how important my ability to be persuaded ought to be to you, granted; that’s another issue for another day, as I’m to bed.)

    That said, your view is not the only religious POV. My tribe’s POV is that the life of the mother is simply more important than that of the somethingorother that hasn’t been born, and that if the choice (as it sometimes — rarely, but sometimes) is between the two, the mother’s life trumps. (I happen to agree with that, for both personal and policy reasons, but, again, that’s another issue for another day.)

  27. That’s why prospective parents cry out “OH GOD! OH GOD!” during the conception.

    Or in the case of some serious DFLers, “OH MAO! OH MAO!”.

  28. “Some couples mistakenly cry out “OH CHRIST YEAH! OH JESUS!” but that’s not the son of God’s department.”
    You have very strange beliefs, oh Tim on StP. Crying out to CHRIST and JESUS at the moment they create another human being seems to me to be a very pro-religion thing to do. Perhaps you’d rather people squawked the praise of flying spagetti monster? Or perhaps screamed ‘REASON!” at the moment their reason left them and they conceived a child?

  29. or, given how homely most Democrats are they probably screamed REASON when they conceived a new piece of kleenex.

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