and you think certain opinions matter more than others
Your very defense against my charge that you take "my comments way past any semblance of what I've said" actually does the very thing you're arguing you don't do.
In some contexts, I
do think certain opinions matter more than others: a physicist versus a pharmacist, if the question regards subatomic particles, and vice versa if the question regards my amoxicillin dosage. But I've been pretty clear that I do not think certain opinions matter more than others in the way you mean: for instance, that white male opinions categorically matter
less than any other. I've talked about receptivity to certain tactics, and historical weight of certain words, and I've argued that some of the tension is that female and non-white and otherwise marginalized voices matter
as much as in a way society hasn't allowed in the past; but I've never said what you continually insist I've said / I believe. It's stupid at this point, but you need to cling to it so you can refuse to engage in the actual topic at hand.
you want equal outcomes, not equal opportunities
Not entirely true, but not entirely false, either. I want certain equal outcomes, though I'd define it as
equal access: minimum standard of living, healthcare, education, and health of ecosystem—things of that nature. To me, that's part and parcel with
equal opportunity.
But I do not want the spoooooooky bogeyman "equal outcomes" that you no doubt mean to imply: an oppressive grey Soviet fog descending upon everyone and rendering each individual an inseparable, soulless automaton. There's a lot of space in between those two points—and I thought you supposedly
liked nuance.
And just for fun, your seemingly completely comfortable with the rampant corruption and hypocrisy of your boy Bernie
As I said often during the campaign, my support for Bernie was contingent on policy, not person. I liked the
general direction he was pulling the nominally-left party. But I don't make heroes of the politicians I support, and my loyalty only goes as far as their plans for the levers of our institutions. However, while Sanders has surely been hypocritical at points, "rampant corruption" is well more than a bit much.
Good to read you say it.
maybe I don't understand your question then... I simply am not willing to compromise on an individual's liberty to do what they please, provided they don't hurt or impair the liberty of others (like abortion, for example)
The problem is, while that line-in-the-sand is nice in theory, it makes a "simply" out of something that isn't simple. There are always these negotiations of and concessions to one form of individual liberty, and they frequently trespass on other forms of individual liberty—the liberty of land-ownership is itself a trespass on the individual liberty of free movement. Likewise, "hurt" is a difficult concept to pin down—a business entity's liberty to pursue its mineral extraction unimpeded certainly has ramifications for the liberty of individuals to enjoy and use clean water down-river from that business.
So maybe what I'm asking is too hard, or too complex; but I'm asking for a much more robust rubric than a single sentence. Even your single example shows this slipperiness: you're opting to preserve one form of individual liberty (that of the unborn child to have the opportunity to be carried to term) over another (the right of a woman to make her own medical decisions about processes occurring within her own body)—and "hurt or impair", depending on how you define your terms, can cut both ways. It's also a much more complicated litigation of liberty than the simple binary you're falling back on, so I want a more expansive description of your lines.
