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Comment by rcstank | Hacker News Reader

Is this not a slippery slope fallacy?

Not when people have publicly stated they're actively working to ban birth control, no.

No - historically the Comstock laws in the US banned distribution of contraceptives and contraception information and abortifacients and information on abortion. This is something that the US has done in the past and has support among many of the current day anti-abortion crowd.

It's not a slippery slope fallacy if you've already climbed the hill and someone greases it behind you. People said similar things about Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court recently overturned it.

It is not. Significant minorities of the anti-abortion movement are also anti-contraceptive. There are articles and even draft legislation published by these groups from 15+ years ago detailing the ultimate goal being bans on contraceptives.

You could believe they can't achieve those goals, I guess, but believing they want to is not a fallacy in this context come on.

> It is not. Significant minorities of the anti-abortion movement are also anti-contraceptive.

Many of them want to ban contraceptive methods they view as “abortifacient”. We can argue about whether they are right to give certain methods that label-but there are contraceptive methods nobody calls that, such as condoms. People are ignoring the distinction between “want to ban some methods of contraception” and “want to ban all methods of contraception”-almost nobody belongs to the second category. Few other than conservative Catholics are completely morally opposed to condoms, and very few of those want the state to enforce that particular moral judgement. From the logic of their own beliefs, condoms are a sexual sin but not the taking of innocent life, so there is not the same need for the state to ban it.

What the fuck business is it of the government or other people not directly involved in the sex act what birth control I am using so long as it is not harmful to the people using it or the public at large?

Who cares though? It makes no difference to the people whose lives are affected by the banning of contraceptives. This sort of sophisticated model of their interiority is simply not valuable to me. I don't care if they're internally consistent I care what they want to do.

I think it is important to steelman one’s opponents rather than strawman them, to seek to present their position accurately rather than oversimplifying it. To me that is an important norm of civil discourse, and I care about the norms of civil discourse. That increasingly many people don’t doesn’t bode well for society’s future.

One really distinct american political dynamic of the last decade or two is liberals caring about the norms of civil discourse while the far right succeeds in its wildest dreams by ignoring them. There's no referee to call when they do that, there's no virtue in losing civil rights but keeping the moral high ground.

Is that what has actually happened? One can point to plenty of liberals/progressives defying those norms, and plenty of conservatives respecting them. Both “sides” contain civil and uncivil people; claims that one side is worse than the other rely heavily on ignoring the faults of one’s preferred side while highlighting those of the other

I also don’t agree that the “far right succeeds in its wildest dreams”-I think that kind of talk relies on nonsensically grouping together Clarence Thomas with David Duke, Trump-supporting Orthodox Jews [0] with neo-Nazi antisemites such as Andrew Anglin

[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/orthodox-jews-back-trump-by-ma...

Yes that is what happened. Major revanchist victories across wide swathes of cultural and civil advances: abortion, queer rights & safety, affirmative action, retributive justice system. Adhering to civil norms in this context is itself a fault, that's my point. To the extent democrats are my preferred "side" I condemn them for this.

Why is it nonsensical to group thomas and duke? Because thomas is black? To the extent they share values and goals and are acting on and succeeding in them it absolutely makes sense to group them. It doesn't mean I think they are friends, but I am acknowledging domains where they work towards the same ends.

> Yes that is what happened. Major revanchist victories across wide swathes of cultural and civil advances: abortion, queer rights & safety, affirmative action, retributive justice system. Adhering to civil norms in this context is itself a fault, that's my point. To the extent democrats are my preferred "side" I condemn them for this.

Okay, but you spoke of "liberals caring about the norms of civil discourse while the far right succeeds... by ignoring them". Now you seem to be saying something different – that norms of civil discourse don't matter, only the outcomes do.

You obviously don't agree with the opinions of the conservative SCOTUS majority, but they are all very civil in how they talk and write. I don't think it is fair to accuse them of ignoring the norms of civil discourse

> Why is it nonsensical to group thomas and duke? Because thomas is black? To the extent they share values and goals and are acting on and succeeding in them it absolutely makes sense to group them. It doesn't mean I think they are friends, but I am acknowledging domains where they work towards the same ends.

It is nonsensical to group them because their values and goals and ends are very different.

In Thomas' brief dissent in Lawrence v Texas [0], he said that although he did not agree with the majority that Texas' sodomy law was unconstitutional, he thought it was "uncommonly silly" (quoting Potter Stewart's dissent in Griswold) and "If I were a member of the Texas Legislature, I would vote to repeal it". Do you think if David Duke were a Texas state legislator (actually he was one in Louisiana from 1989–1992) he would have voted to repeal its sodomy law? I really doubt that.

Duke is pro-Nazi and pro-KKK (indeed, he used to be the leader of a faction of the KKK); there is zero evidence that Thomas has any sympathy for Nazism or the KKK. Duke says virulently antisemitic things all the time; when did Thomas ever say anything like that? His critics point to a 1981 speech in which he praised Louis Farrakhan – however, he was praising Farrakhan's teachings on Black empowerment, not his Jew hatred (in any event, that was over 40 years ago; when was the last time Duke said something antisemitic? probably today)

These are just a few of the reasons why Duke is accurately called "far right", but Thomas isn't "far right", he's just "right".

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/02-102.ZD1.html

I can see that. It's very similar to significant minorities in the gun control movement. On either issue, premature movement to counteract them could bring more harm than good.

Edit: why disagree?

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