 Hey everybody, today we are debating the ethics of abortion and we are starting right now with Steven's opening statement. Thanks so much for being with us, Steven. The floor is all yours. When we talk about protecting human life, we're talking about protecting conscious experiences. So when I look to see what ought to be protected in the womb, it's going to be some creature that is having or at least capable of having a conscious experience, the necessary parts in your brain that form to have conscious experiences form at around 20 to 24 weeks. So I think things like first trimester abortions are absolutely fine and permissible. That's my position on abortion. You got to kick it over to Tree who is also on the pro-choice side. Thanks for being with us, Tree. All right. Thank you for having me. My parents divorced when I was five years old and my mother got on welfare and taking custody of me. And we moved into a Roche infested department in one of the most dangerous ghettos in America located in Anacostia, DC. While there, I witnessed junkies overdosing, black women and black men shooting and stabbing each other, pimps physically abusing their women, along with women being sexually assaulted and constant fights every day. Every now and then while playing hide and seek with my friends, we will come across a dead body. But as a little girl, there were two things I had to do to stay alive in the hood. One, avoid predatory men who pursued young girls like me at the time to either trick us out or to just flat out rape us. And two, to survive the constant beatings of my mother. Saying that my mother beat me was just putting it lightly. She tortured me and I'll spare you the details because I doubt seriously that she was an adult would survive what I did as a child. At the age of 11, I couldn't take it anymore and I ran away and my father took custody of me and that's when my life changed for the better. I was the first child on my father's side to attend college. On that day that I left for college, my father looked me in my eyes and said, keep your head in them books and your goddamn legs closed. If you get pregnant, you are no longer welcome back into my house and you'll be dead to me. Everything was going great until the spring of my sophomore year. I was dating a guy and we were very sexually active, but we used condoms and we was very careful. On one day while having intercourse, the condom broke and I freaked out. I called a local clinic and they told me to come back in 30 days to take a pregnancy test. On the 30th day, I went into the clinic to get a pregnancy test. However, this was not a Planned Parenthood clinic. This was a clinic funded by a Christian organization to convince Black women to avoid abortions. After giving the woman a cup of my urine, I was placed into a small room with a TV and a VCR and was told to watch a VHS tape called The Silent Screen, which was a pro-life propaganda piece that will pull the heartstrings of women, making them feel guilty about wanting to have an abortion. When the tape was over, the counselor came into my room with a box of Kleenex tissue and she was shocked to see that my face was just as dry as it was then before I even entered the room. While sitting there at the desk, she said that she had my test results back and she said, now before I share your test results, I want you to know after watching that video, knowing that the test could come back positive and you could be pregnant. Do you still want to kill your baby? Do you want to go to hell? Do you want your baby to go to heaven while you meet the devil? I looked at white woman in her eyes and I said, lady, I'd rather go to hell than to live on earth as a poor black woman. She got up, got my test results, and I wasn't pregnant. But I want you all to know that if I was pregnant, I would not hesitate to get an abortion. So I want to ask my opponents, instead of going for banning abortions, how about you do the following. First, eliminate child poverty, improve the maternity leave here in America, improve Medicaid and Medicare to help healthy, to help and also help fund health facilities that will help lower the maternal mortality rate among black women who, by the way, have the highest mortality rate than any other race in America and improve the foster care in America. Just to name a few. Why aren't you fixing these problems first instead of adding to it by trying to ban abortions? I yield. You've got to thank you, Rush, for those opening statements from the pro-choice side. We're going to kick it over to Rachel and Kenden for their openings as well. If it's your first time here at Modern Day Debate, folks, we're a neutral channel hosting debates on science, religion, and politics. We hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you are from. And don't forget to hit that subscribe button because we have plenty more juicy debates coming up in the future with that. Rachel and Kenden, thanks so much for being with us. The floor is all yours. Do you want to go for it, Rachel? Sure, I'll go for it. Tree gave a really compelling personal anecdote there. And I think that what she proved is that even children who are born in the worst of circumstances can make a really fantastic life for themselves and that they're valuable and their life has meaning and they can grow up to affect the world in a really wonderful and positive way just like she has. I'm not going to take that angle on this. I'm going to stick to a more logical, rational type of argumentation here, which is to say that if you look at it historically, abortion was something that 100 years ago when it was first legalized in the USSR was supposed to be temporary. It was considered a stopgap measure until birth control would be legal and widely available. And then it was generally believed that abortion would be safe, legal and rare. If you're my age, I'm 41 years old, you might remember the propaganda of the 80s and 90s was that abortion was a necessary evil and the phrase was safe, legal and rare. We're 100 years into birth control being legal. It's widely available, super cheap and or free for almost anyone. You can walk into a clinic and get birth control usually for free. You can get condoms for free from health centers all over the place. You can get a prescription from Medicaid and get a $4 a month prescription for abortion or for birth control pills. We have 18 plus well tested forms of birth control yet abortion is still extremely popular. It hasn't gone away. It hasn't become safe, legal and rare. In fact, now the argument is people want absolutely no limitations on it whatsoever. We have shout your abortion. We have people who are proud to have abortions. We have people who want to tell you how they've had multiple abortions and see it as like a fight the patriarchy kind of thing to have an abortion. You're pushing back against the system by doing this. The problem with that is that it does not fight back against the system. It doesn't push back against anything. It's actually very conducive to the system. If you have a problem with things like that, abortion actually is a eugenics industry at this point. In the USSR, when they made abortions free in state hospitals without any restrictions between 1920 and 1935, it got so bad that they got to the point where Stalin, when he took power, had to make abortion illegal again because you had three abortions for every one live birth in Russia and the birth rate plummeted. This was after they'd already been through World War I in a famine and it was clear that they were not going to survive as a nation unless they did something to stop abortion. We could easily end up in that situation again if we do what the far left wants or what abortion advocates want, which is it's a woman's choice up until the baby is born. I don't think there's any historical evidence that abortion is helpful. I don't think there's an argument that it helps babies, this argument that your life isn't worth something if you're going to be poor or have a really rough time of it. Believe me, we have a lot of sympathy for those situations. I was in situations like that myself. However, there's more to life than that. My position is that it's a human life from conception and that you wouldn't have to kill the baby if it wasn't murder. You got to cook it over to Kenden as well. Hello everyone. Yes, I'm Kenden Farr. Much like Rachel, I'm not so much a pro-life as anti-choice. I don't believe that any human agency should decide whether an individual human life should end arbitrarily. I've noticed as well whenever we talk about this issue or whenever one talks about this issue, a lot of the terms that we use are euphemistic. The word abortion is actually the wrong word. Abortion is another word for miscarriage. What we're actually describing as a termination, which is more honest because we're terminating a life before it's truly emerged from the womb and flourished. We also refer to clumps of cells as opposed to fetus or baby just tied to anesthetize. Is that the right word? To soften the bloat, to massage the truth. It destroys human life, but not just human life, but all life chances, any impact that a human being might have. I noticed that the personal autonomy argument only reapplies in this issue, my body, my choice. You very rarely hear that phrase in any other context. Unlike deaths, I don't really care when the baby becomes conscious or not because eventually if left with no devices, if it's a healthy normal pregnancy, it will become conscious. I'm mindful of the fact that consciousness is an inevitable part of the growth within the womb. It appears to me that the pro-choice advocacy is mainly economic rather than moral. Abortion is seen as the cheaper option, and this is where I want to tap into what Tree was saying earlier. Now Tree has obviously given us a harrowing story, and I have genuinely sympathy for her and she's obviously come up hard and I respect that. She talked about how instead of banning abortions, why don't we improve the welfare system and healthcare provision for women and things like that? As someone who lives in northwest England and as someone who has studied the American healthcare system quite tentatively, it's my opinion that the healthcare system in your country is a joke, no offense to any Americans listening. The problem is that because abortion is no longer just safe, legal and rare, it's as common as cookies, there's no incentive to improve any of your welfare systems because it's cheaper simply to kill the baby. In the same way, it's the difference between building shelters for the homeless and exterminating the homeless. Both would solve the problem of homelessness, but one of them is brutal and it's unconscionable. For me, abortion is unconscionable. You don't need to improve food stamps or women's shelters or anything like that if there's no baby to feed, and I think that's the reason why a lot of pro-choice activists take that position, at least in politics. That's kind of an opening statement. That's my ramble over. I'll kick it over to somebody else. You've got to thank you very much for that opening. We're going to kick it right into open dialogue. Why don't you know, folks, if you'd like to hear more, if you'd like to learn more about any of our guest views, you can by clicking on their links, which are down in the description box waiting for you right now, and that includes if you're listening to this debate through the podcast. As we put our guest links in the description box for the podcast as well. With that, thanks so much. Destiny, Tree, Rachel, and Ken in the floor is all yours for open dialogue. I would like to ask Rachel, I want to say that don't look at my story as a typical thing. I am not the norm. I'm very rare. A lot of children die in the hood through stray bullets or through the abuse of their own parents. As a matter of fact, the reason I just spared this because I didn't have that much, but the reason why I ran away is because I began to get taller and as I get my father's six foot seven and I'm six foot three. So I began my mother's five foot one. So I began to have a growth sprout and I began to get stronger and I got tired of those beatings, those horrific beatings. And one day I just grabbed the belt that my mom used in the belt buckle and the way she looked at me. That was like the worst beating I ever got. And I thought she was going to kill me. But then in my head, because the ghetto has raised me in such a hard way, I thought, well, I'll kill my mother before she kills me. And I thought, well, let me, because I was a Christian at the time, let me run away. Let me run away so I don't go to jail. And my or I won't die from my mother killing trying to kill me. Because eventually she said, we have a thing in the black community that that black parents say, tell to their children, I brought you into this world. I'll take you out. That's how they feel. And it has happened many times. So don't look at my situation as something that's the norm. It's not the norm. Also, I want to address your argument in reference to birth control. Birth control has been going on for centuries. You're pagan, right? Did you or did I somebody was telling me you were you practice to pray pagan religion? Rachel? No? Sorry. Oh, no, I'm Orthodox Christian. Oh, that makes it easier. Well, why is it that God is allowed to kill babies, but I'm not? Well, to address to address your argument here, just because, you know, your your story is very emotional. It's very harrowing. But we can't base an entire debate of ethics over, you know, my personal story, yours, Destiny's or Kendall's. And although suffering is a reality of life, it's we're never going to eliminate suffering. You're never going to completely eliminate poverty, disease, abuse or suffering. And I eliminated my suffering by well, if I had an abortion, I would have eliminated my suffering if I had an abortion. Well, but to say that the way to solve these problems is to just kill babies before they're born is a very eugenics sort of statement to say that it would be better for them to be dead than to grow up in poverty. First of all, I mean, I was eugenics equivalent to an income situation. Well, that's exactly what Margaret Sanger proposed was that, you know, these people are she thought blacks were inferior. She thought we were subhuman. That's the reason why Margaret Sanger did that. You're making the argument that it would be better for people to be dead than to be poor or suffer. And I'm saying that you can't eliminate suffering. My argument is, is that I have dominion over what's going on in my uterus and nothing within my uterus have more dominion over me. I am, that's why I thought she was a God. I thought she was pregnant because I was going to bring the goddess and the God situation in there. But since you are religious, I'm just saying like, you know, God don't have no problem with abortions. But let me just say this, there was no such thing as abortion during the biblical time because abortion is a medical procedure. There was lots of miscarriages and there was straight out just God killing like after you give birth, like God just killing children, just straight up killing children. So I'm saying, obviously, God does not have a problem with just killing children after they're born. And there's also scriptures in the Bible where he also have women to drink a potion that gives you a miscarriage. So if there's no problem with having miscarriages and God killing children, why is it, why is it a problem for me? I'm not making a religion. I am Christian, but I'm not making a religious argument. I'm making a logical argument, which is that you don't stop suffering. You don't end suffering by killing people before they can live by by that logic. It would make sense to just wipe out the planet than we end suffering. Just kill all the homeless, just kill all the drug addicts. That's the false comparison because there's something growing inside my uterus. Okay. Yes. And that thing is a person. So at what point does the fetus, what point does the baby inside your uterus have bodily autonomy? Because you're making a bodily outside my uterus. Okay. But at one point you couldn't survive outside someone else's uterus. Well, here's that you asked me a question. I answer it. I asked it. It hasn't it hasn't autonomy autonomy where it can survive outside my uterus. Usually when it's like five months, right? It's usually when it's five months. Okay, but that argument also doesn't make sense. And here's why, because when a baby is viable at 22 weeks, it still can't survive without intense round the clock care until it's what I mean, at what point do we no longer need people to survive? Are we going to, are we allowed to kill everyone before they're 16, before they're 18, before they're 12? If you depend upon my body to survive, I get to make the rules. If you survive, if you are dependent upon me, my body, my wound, in order to survive, I dictate the rules, what I say goes. Okay, Trie, but that would, then that logic would have to apply to a baby who was born at term at nine months. When that baby is born, if the mother does not feed it, it dies. Yes, it's the exact same argument. No, no, no, no. Baby can be. No, no, because a lot of women can't lactate. Okay. No, but someone has to feed it. It's dependent on some, but it does. So that person can say, Look, if I don't feed you, you get to die. And that is a thing. No, no, no. Other people could feed the baby. It's not, there's we have a thing called as a community to raise a child. Okay, depends on some. You're saying that if I died after a given childbirth and my child lives, you're saying that my child is going to die too, because mommy's not dead and breastfeeding. That's just silly. Hold on, hold on. Let me just finish saying this. The child, you're just straight out lying. The child can be fed through other means, through formula, through a wet nurse, and through other means. The child does not need me after this. You're missing what I'm saying. I'm saying the logical extension of your argument is that nobody has a right to live until they are no longer dependent on someone else for survival. That's not my argument. My argument is if you live, I'll stop. No, if you depend upon, here's my argument. Listen to me closely. If you depend upon my body to survive, I get to dictate the rules. What I'm saying to you, like I said earlier, if the body, if the baby kids, I think from a distance research prior to coming here, because I just was told today I can come. A child has a chance of surviving a preemie at five months. So, hey, there is that. But so therefore underneath that, and I'm willing to say, I like the heartbeat bill, but I also rather say in three months is a good number. But there's no hill I'm willing to die on. What I'm saying is, is that I'm giving you the date where I'm giving you my cutoff period. The baby can survive outside my body. Good luck. I'll give you a quick, but then we got to kick it over to Steven. Steven, you look especially enthralled. So go ahead, Rachel, and then we'll kick it off. I'm just, I'm letting them do the back and forth instead of, because for abortion arguments, there's like 12 different ways to approach it. So we keep like, you want to get to like 20 different arguments, so rather let them run down the whole like. Right. What I'm trying to do is show that what Tree is doing is making an arbitrary decision about when someone is autonomous and can live on their own. And that biological extension, her argument means that when a baby is born, if the person who is charged with taking care of it says, look, this baby is a burden to me. It depends on me to live. I have to get up in the middle of the night. I have to feed it or the group or the home that it's at. Whoever is charged with taking care of a child because children cannot survive without round the clock care for years after birth. That's neither mother to do that. I'm telling you that logically, because this is, I do debates all the time. I'm a student of logical argumentation. If you're going to argue that you have the right to kill a human being, because it depends on you for survival, then by logical extension, you would have to apply that to after birth abortion or after birth. The baby does not have to depend upon a mother after she gave birth to it. And you know that you're just being disingenuous. I'm not. It's not disingenuous. It's perfectly logical. So answer this question. I'm gonna show how very you're disingenuous. If the mother dies at birth, the baby's gonna die because there's nobody to give breast milk to it. There's the baby's gonna die because there's nobody gonna feed it. Someone has to feed it, right? Answer the question. If the mother dies- If someone doesn't feed it. No, answer the question. I did. No, you're not. I'm answering the question. Yes. So you're saying that when a mother dies that nobody's gonna take charge of the baby and feed it. That's what you're saying. If someone doesn't, it will die. But when has that happened? I'm telling you that logically- The argument you're making could be used. Just to be sure that we can hear each of you. That doesn't happen. The baby is born. If the mother dies, somebody takes care of the baby. She's saying that if the baby doesn't die, if the mother decides that she doesn't wanna breastfeed the baby, the baby's gonna die. That doesn't happen. That's not what I'm saying. You're not understanding. I'm sorry, but you don't understand logic. What I'm saying is that the argument you're making could be used for people to say- Ill-logical. If this baby depends on me to live, then it is within my rights to kill it at any point if I decide to breastfeed her and some- That's not what I'm saying. It is a logical extension of your argument, ma'am. I'm sorry that you don't understand the argument. I did not say that. I said when the baby- You don't understand the argument. No, you don't understand my argument. And do you know I'm questioning you? Your argument is based on feelings. That's why you're reframing it. You're reframing my argument. Hold on. If we have too much speaking over each of them, you won't be able to hear either of you. Just wanna be sure that there's not- No, she's reframing my argument. She's sitting up here saying, if you had the baby and you don't, if you gave birth to the baby and you don't feed the baby, then that means you killed the baby. That's not exactly what I'm saying. That's not what I said. That's not what I said. Okay, I said- She doesn't understand what I'm saying. Hold on, because you won't ask this question. I'll just feel. No, she didn't- No, you- This is- Wait, hold on. Let's let the tree finish, and then we'll come back to Rachel. Hold on, I'm gonna ask, I'm gonna ask Kinden. And I'm gonna make it plain again. If the mother dies, after giving birth to the child, does that mean that the child dies because there's no one to take care of it? That was not my argument. That was your argument? No. I thought you- I'm sorry, I thought you- Yeah, why are you still talking? You said you- I still hear ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. Okay, I'm at- And also I'm talking to Kinden. I'm trying to give somebody else the talk. Kinden, answer that question. If a woman dies, after she gave birth to a baby, the baby's outside the womb, does the baby die too? Not necessarily, no. Okay, the man can have it now. Do you wanna go for a Disney? I'm not sure how to come back from that. Wonderful being honest. So this is like my simple question for Kinden and Rachel. Are when you consider a person dead? The problem of death is a great philosophical conundrum. Even scientists find it difficult to identify death. We know symptoms of death. For example, obviously decomposition is the obvious one. But obviously the body doesn't die at once. It dies in stages. There's brain death. There's all sorts of things. So when do I consider a person dead? When they're six feet under and they've decomposed so thoroughly, they're not even a talented doctor could bring them back. That's the best you're gonna get. If I were to chop a person's head off and I were to show you the body and it's not six feet under yet and hasn't begun to decompose, you would say that that person is still alive? No. So with this, I don't think that decomposition, we can decompose as living people. Frostbite might be an exception. Yeah, this is living necrosis. Yeah, and we're probably dead before decomposition happens. Probably dead before we're buried, hopefully. So backing up, I think we, I'll try again. Like reasonably, I understand there's a hot philosophical debate, maybe, I guess, around when a person is dead, but when will we roughly consider a person to be dead? I think we've all kind of come to a consensus on this, societally speaking. Yeah. Me, it's when the soul is no longer in the body. Where is the soul at? Well, now that's a metaphysical question. That's a philosophical question that I'm sure you're not interested in because I remember in our previous debate when I talked about souls you scoffed, so. Well, sure, but like, how do you tell me, when do you know the soul's left the body? Let me ask that. If I show you a corpse that's rotted six months, do you think that the soul is still in that body? Or if I show you somebody that just had a heart attack and they're on the table, is their soul still in their body? I think I can grant you this without damaging my argument. We'll just, let's just say that death is after the heart has stopped and there's no more brain activity. Let's just grant you that and see where it goes. Sure, okay, I think that's fair. I think without, before we even get into slide debate tactics, I think people generally agree that death is when you cease having a conscious experience. There's, it seems like there's not happening anymore. It used to be heart death. We found ways to keep the heart going a little bit. And as long as there's some sort of brain activity going on where it seems like you can have a conscious experience, people seem pretty comfortable to say you're either alive or dead based on that, right? If you're in a coma, why do we keep people in comas alive? Because hopefully they wake up. If we think that they're never gonna wake up then we pull the plug. So I think generally we say that death happens at the cessation of a conscious experience. So turning around, I would apply that to the beginning of life. If we don't say that life ends when the body is completely decomposed, when the body is completely destroyed, when some biological processes happen, when we say death happens when a conscious experience ends, but when I look to the beginning to see, well, what is the start of our experience that we wanna protect? I'd probably say it's the beginning of a conscious experience. I think that's the most consistent way to define the parts of life that we're interested in protecting. But like the coma patient who has the possibility of a conscious experience in the future, so does the unborn child in the belly of the woman. So the coma patients, so oftentimes people will bring up this potential of life and they'll make an ontological error where they'll say the potential of life, therefore we should protect it where they're trying to instantiate all of the concepts that go along are all of the properties of life they try to give to the potential of life. But that doesn't really work. We can talk about two different things. We can talk about life, we can talk about the potential of life, the potential of life is not life. There is no other category where we would treat the potential of something as something else. The reason why we would protect a coma patient isn't because they have the potential of being alive, it's because they already were alive and they asserted some, hopefully ability to stay alive, right? If you go into the hospital unless you filled out a do not resuscitated DNR, people assume you probably wanna be kept alive. So I reject the idea that because there's a potential of life, it ought to be granted the same ontological properties as a life itself because I don't think anybody else treats any other category that way. No, okay. Potential of life is not the phrase I should use, it's the potential of consciousness. The baby is still, the fetus is still alive, even if it's not capable of thinking and dreaming and planning its future. And so the potential of future consciousness developing is true, but there's not one yet. Nothing exists yet to assert itself. There's nothing to regard. Yes, but it's an inevitable part of the growing of the development process. Yeah, sure. If the pregnancy is healthy and viable and there are no complications, this clump of cells to use that popular phrase will eventually develop into a baby that is able to do cogitate. And it is inevitable that when we drop a seed on the ground, a tree will grow, but the seed is not a tree. And my hand holding the seed is not a tree. The potential or the future development of something is not the same thing as the stage is preceding it. So it is true that oftentimes left to their own device as a pregnancy will grow into something that will have a conscious experience, that conscious experience is not there yet and you cannot treat the development of something in the future as the thing that exists now. There are two fundamentally different things. Potentially, but the seed itself, I agree, the seed is not the tree, but the seed is tissue, whereas the sapling or the root system and everything is the organism in its earliest form. So while you might not call the seed with the roots and everything else a tree yet, you would acknowledge that as long as nobody sabotages the growth of the sapling, the tree is inevitable at that point. Absolutely. But there's a lot of statements that are being thrown in now that are, I'm not gonna obfuscate, makes it sound really bad for you, I don't mean that. But it's clouding the argument and I don't think they matter. So the seed is tissue, the seed is an organism. A corpse has a lot of tissue. A corpse arguably has more biologically going on than a seven month old fetus, which I would say has a bigger right to life than a decomposing corpse, right? But so the presence of tissue, the presence of organs, the development or whatever of some biological system isn't sufficient to say that something is alive, right? It might be one necessary condition, but it's not sufficient. Seems like in order to get that sufficient to be protected as life, we need to have that conscious experience, something that exists that's asserting itself to exist and that doesn't exist in fetuses until around 20 to 24 weeks. Okay, well, in response to that point, I would suggest that sufficiency is a matter of personal taste. That obviously you've drawn the line with the development of consciousness. I can respect that as long as it's consistently applied and obviously we'd have to talk and hash that out. The problem is that as I said in the beginning, I'm not so much pro-life as anti-choice. I do not like the idea of people deciding whether a thing should live or die based on economic or social circumstances over which it has no control. The thing I always bear in mind with this is that the child didn't ask to be conceived. It's growing in the belly. It's entirely at the mercy of external forces that as you pointed out in the first few weeks of its existence, it's completely unaware of. The idea that human agencies should be able to decide whether thumbs up or thumbs down, whether this creature should die or not, opens the door to all manner of horrors. I don't want to take it too far off the path. One of the reasons I oppose the death penalty is precisely this reason. I'm not comfortable with state agencies having the right to decide whether this person deserves to live or die. And one of the big reasons, because I should come clean on this, I used to be a teacher and part of my teacher, a high school teacher, my part of my teacher training was I was taken on what we call an SEN school, special educational needs. I imagine you must have an equivalent in the United States. And the deputy head teacher. Well, the deputy head teacher, what you would call a vice principal, was taking me on a tour of the building and he was showing me the work that the kids were doing. And these are kids with severe learning difficulties, severe disabilities. They're learning to tie their shoelaces and make a hot drink. It's very basic life skills. And he was talking about the nature of it and he never renders malformations. But we don't get many kids with... And of course, we don't get many kids with Down syndrome anymore. And I went, oh, okay. And why is that? And he goes, well, because, well, there are two theories and one mainstream tools are better at integrating them, which is a good thing, that's positive. But the other reason is the parents just abort them. And I went, oh, okay. And that issue, that answer haunted me as he took me around the rest of the school. And the reason it haunted me for a good 15, 20 minutes, I had to solve it, is that that was a eugenics argument. The people had decided that because their child had Down syndrome, it was unworthy of life. It was unworthy of existence. Whereas I would argue that it falls upon a society or culture as Tree was mentioning in her opening statements, we ought to provide more resources for people who, through no fault of their own, have difficulties and complications. So that's my position. Okay, so if possible, it would be nice to stick to one of these at a time. So every single thing here it's a non sequitur or not relevant to the argument. So initially you said that anti-choice, whether things should live or die based on economic or social circumstances, that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about if there is a thing to be protected that is being killed. Because we can all agree that if it's not a thing worth protecting, it doesn't matter if it's being removed for economic or social circumstances. The same way that I might remove a tumor from my neck, I might abort a, or I might cause a miscarriage or abort a fetus because it doesn't serve whatever purpose. So we're not talking about killing a child based on economic or social circumstances. We're talking about whether or not a life exists that ought to be protected. You make the statement too, like the child didn't ask to be conceived. That would be like me making the statement, how do you feel about something five years after your death? You can't, you have no feelings. There is no person or entity there to have a feeling. A child doesn't ask to be conceived because the thing that is conceived does not exist to assert its preference. It doesn't exist to assert any point of view. So yeah, it doesn't ask to be conceived but that's a, as nonsense as statement is, as talking about the preference of somebody that's already dead. There's nothing there to speak of. For the first few weeks of existence, we talk about something being completely unaware that's my argument. There is no awareness. There's not even a conscious experience there, hence forth, nothing to protect. And then when we say open the door to all manner of horrors, that's up to interpretation. I mean, given my subjective view of this, if we say that my interpretation of everything is correct, I always say that the manner of horrors it's being open to is forcing women to be incubators for things that don't even have conscious experiences yet. I would say that's a potential manner of horror. If you can see a potential horror that might logically flow from any of my stated positions, I'd be interested to hear them. I don't think there are any. I think I'm pretty consistent. That's why I started, how do we define death? And then I walked that back to how do we define life? I don't think I'm making any concessions about how we treat living people based on my views of abortions, whereas you necessarily are making the concession that a woman must be forced to do something with her body against her will to incubate something, which I would argue is a much bigger concession than what I would ask for. You talk about opposition to the death penalty, not relevant. One is to support the death penalty and support or be against abortion. One is talking about whether or not a life is in existence yet and the other is talking about the appropriate punishment for a moral agent that is making a choice that we all agree is immoral. One of those punishments could very easily be death. That's fine. If you're a moral agent and you're making a choice between one thing or another, part of that necessarily entails consequences to your actions. If you can make decisions, then you are ready to deal with the consequences, et cetera, et cetera. And then you talk about, a lot of people bring up eugenics arguments all the time. I don't believe people are against eugenics. And I don't think eugenics is in and of itself necessarily a bad thing. For instance, everybody will say that they're against eugenics, but then if you ask, why ought we oppose incestual relationships? One of the first answers that comes out of everybody's mouth is, well, you can make kids that have like really fucked up bodies. They might have dozens. Okay, well, that argument against incest is an argument in favor of eugenics. When you tell a woman, hey, it's not really the best idea to get pregnant after age 35 because the rates of Down syndrome start to increase dramatically. That's a eugenics argument. Women opting to have children earlier in life because they can have healthier pregnancies and have healthier children. Kind of eugenics argument. So I think that there are certain types of eugenics that are probably very bad. So not having black babies or not having babies with brown eyes, that's probably not good. But other types of quote unquote eugenics where we're checking for fetal health, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. So to circle all the way back, I still haven't heard a single good opposing viewpoint for why we shouldn't value the beginning of life when the conscious experience starts rather than when just the formation of some cells begins. I haven't heard any controversy. I think I can jump in and maybe help because I see where you're coming from, Destiny, what you're trying to say. And I wanna know, are you aware of the fact that scientists generally have trouble understanding what consciousness even is and that we don't necessarily know for sure that babies, let's say at 16 weeks of gestation, do not have some kind of conscious experience? An example of this would be, if I take a high dose of DMT and I'm seeing machine elves and I'm hallucinating all kinds of fun, crazy stuff, I'm having a conscious experience, but what does that mean and where does the value of that come in? So I think to cite consciousness is somewhat arbitrary. Could you maybe give us a better definition of when you think consciousness starts, why you've chosen that as the marker, why that's the bar that you've chosen? So I said at the very beginning of this debate, the reason why I chose, so I don't believe that consciousness is arbitrary. I think for the purpose of a debate, maybe somebody could wheel that line out, but when we step into the real world, it is very clearly the line at which we draw between alive and dead when it comes to people in hospitals. This is not an assertion of philosophy, it's not a game that a neuroscientist might play and it's not just in the domain of internet debate, it is a choice that is made every single day in hospitals all across the world throughout all the history of time, throughout all the cultures of society for when a person is dead or alive. When you no longer can wake up again and be a conscious person, you're considered dead. So if you knock me out, if you hit me in the head and knock me out and I'm unconscious and nobody's sure if I'm going to wake up again, it would then be ethical to kill me. Well, if you're never gonna wake up again. How do we know if I'm never, never is a very metaphysical concept. How would you know if I'm never gonna wake up again? So let me understand, do you think that these determinations are never made? I think that they're made, but I do think that they're arbitrary. For example, when you said we generally pull the plug on people if we think they're not gonna wake up, that's not something that I would necessarily do. And that gets into a whole nother debate over whether you think that life extension is a good idea or how far we should take that. What I'm saying is your argument is resting on the fact that if somebody is unconscious and we don't think they can have a conscious experience in the future, it's ethical to let them die. And as Kenyan said, or Kenan said, we know that babies will have, like the vast majority of them will have conscious experiences if we don't kill them first. So I'm trying to- Yeah, can you tell me what you mean when you say arbitrar? I need to understand what you mean when you say arbitrar. I mean, you're kind of basing it on a preference or something that's not very objective or something that you don't have a good epistemology for, something you don't have a good logical reason for. So when we talk about the beginning of life, we're almost necessarily in some normative category because we're trying to create a definition. We're not going to find this epistemically, like scientifically, right? So necessarily it's going to be somewhat arbitrary, of course, but any definition that you give is going to be just as arbitrary as any definition that I get, right? Whether or not we ought to value something as living as necessarily a normative position, right? You can't think of any, even if you tell me life begins at five seconds past conception or at the moment of conception, I'm going to ask you, why do you value it at that point? And that's when the normativity comes in, you're going to have to adjust it. So say that my position- That's actually why I would reject the idea of using normative ethics because depending on, you know, the time and the ethos that you are raised in will determine what the normative ethics of the time are. So I don't think that we can use just normative ethics kind of infers like a consensus, right? Can you give me an example? Can you give me an example? Just a very simple, quick statement. What is an example of something about when life begins that you believe is devoid of normativity? What do you mean? Something- Like what's the statement of like, this is when life begins that you think is an enormous statement? I think we know when life begins but you're not hinging your argument on that. You're hinging it on when consciousness begins and I'm asking you to tell me how we establish when consciousness begins. Hold on. So all of us are trying to figure out like when human life, when the thing is like a human worth protecting, we're all trying to figure that out. So I'm asking you, what's an example of a statement you believe is not normative? Is it a moral statement? What's an example of that? Well- Is there all gonna be normative statement? So my moral statement, which is that if it's a human being and you intervene to kill it, even if it's in the earliest fetal stages that that would be unethical because if you did not intervene, it would probably grow and more likely grow and have a conscious experience and be born. You would probably say that that's not normative, right? Well, the part that I would say is normative is when you're saying that like this is a human being, like at the very beginning of this moment of conception that that's like, real quick, when I say normativity or normative statement, that's another word for like a moral statement. I would say that that statement has some level of subjectivity to it. We can't go into the world and discover like what is a human, when do humans exist, right? These are statements that as humans, like we decide these things. There's not like an answer to that. But I think we can. I think we can definitely determine that something's human. Your argument is that it doesn't matter if it's human, it matters if it's conscious, right? Okay, let me try this one more time. What I'm saying is that you can't say that my definition is arbitrary when we're talking about like, when do we begin to protect a life as like a thing that is worth protecting? Because every single statement is going to be somewhat arbitrary by your definition of arbitrary. All of them are arbitrary. There isn't like, this is objectively correct. They're all arbitrary. No, I'm speaking specifically to your argument of when consciousness begins. Sure, that's fine. I'm just saying that they're all arbitrary. I don't think that's a good like contentional argument. But I'm sorry, moving past that one real quick. So you're telling me, if you want to point to the idea that it's hard to draw some distinction between A and B, like when is a person going to have a conscious experience again, like in the coma versus never, and you're going to try to argue that, that like, well, because you can't give me the exact answer for this, that actually there's a specific name for this logical file that I can't think of it. But basically like, if you have two different categories and there's a lot of overlap or blur, and it's hard to distinguish one from the other, you can, what? Oh, I thought I heard him say, sorry. But yeah, if it's hard to distinguish between A and B, or there's a blurry line in the middle, therefore there's no difference between the two. That's, that doesn't logically follow. Like, for instance, if I point out- Let me clarify then. Let me clarify because it sounds like we're getting off in tweets. Can you tell me- Hold on, let me finish real quick. We're not getting any tweets. I don't like that you said that. Okay, so let me just finish this quick example, okay? You're trying to say like, oh, well he could be countries, could not be countries. If I were to show you a person and I were to stick a mini micro bomb in their brain and blow it up and they had no brain left, but they were still like a person looking at you, okay? But their brain was exploded. And then I give you another person who fell asleep and I say, which one is more likely to become conscious again? You're always going to point to the sleeping person. So it might be hard to tell the difference between one or the other in a lot of narrow edge cases, but you can't use that to say like, well, we have no idea because clearly we make these judgments all the time about who will become conscious. Perfect, that's perfect. So tell me when consciousness begins. So it's hard to know exactly when, but it seems to be the case that conscious is an emergent property from several structures in the brain that start to exist and communicate with each other at around 20 to 24 weeks during gestation and the brain of the fetus. So we don't know. Well, we don't know exactly, so what I'm saying is there's no ethical line you could draw where you could say, this is conscious now and it's not conscious now and that's where we can draw the line of where we can abort something. When you tell me that I don't know exactly when it is, what you could do if you wanted to attack Mark and say, well, you need to broaden your range of it. Since you don't know exactly 20 to 24 weeks is not good. You should say 16 to 28. If you want to do something like that, then you could do that. But you can't say because I can't give you an exact argument that I'm incapable of making that distinction very, very, very quickly. Loki makes a wager with some goblins, eventually he loses and what he'd wager was his head. They take him back to the prison, they go to chop his head off. So they lay him over the thing, they pull his hair up and then they set an ax across the back of his neck and he says, you can chop my head off but you cannot take an inch of my neck. You can't take any of it but you can take my head but not any of my neck and they move the ax back and forth and they're not entirely sure where does the neck end and the head begin and he ends up walking. It's called Loki's paradox, I think. Just because I can't tell you exactly where one begins and one ends, doesn't mean I can say, look, there is no such thing as heads or necks because it's hard to tell when it starts. It doesn't work that way. So what I would say to that is that if you to hinge your entire ethical argument on consciousness and when consciousness begins when we cannot even quantify what a valuable conscious experience is. If I'm dreaming, am I conscious or am I not? If I'm DMT tripping, am I conscious, am I not? If I'm 18 weeks gestation versus 24 weeks gestation, am I conscious or am I not? I would say that it makes much more sense logically to say we're not going to intervene and kill something before it can have a conscious experience because that's our preference because it would be either more convenient for us, it would be less hardships for us because we foresee that the child might not have a good future. I'm saying these are all very bad. I'm not making any of those arguments. It could be clear also every argument you're making can be very easily addressed. When you take DMT or when you're dreaming, even if you were to temporarily completely cease your conscious experience, you already existed and you already asserted something. If Rachel says, I'm gonna do this, don't let me die. And then you disappear from consciousness. They do exist. You're just saying that because they're not conscious yet. No, no, we're not talking. You're saying that if it's not conscious yet, it doesn't matter if it already exists. No one here is denying that fetuses exist. And I'm saying that if you stop it from having the conscious experience, then it can't have it. No one is saying whether or not fetuses exist. We all agree that they exist. The question is, has there been a conscious experience yet to assert itself or any preferences? For Rachel, for you, before you take DMT. How does a 20 week gestation in fetus assert itself? Because it's having a conscious experience. How do you know that? You don't know that. Because the necessary, I don't know what to put it. Scientists told you? No, you don't know 100%. Technically, if you wanna get ultra philosophical about it, there's something called a philosophical zombie. I don't even know if you're having a conscious experience. It's not an insult, but we don't technically know if anybody is right. How do you know you're not just a brain and a vet? How do I know I'm right? How do any of us know? So I'm saying this is a very silly place to place an ethical argument off of, in my opinion. It's not silly, only in debate terms, as it's silly in the middle of a debate. But if you step into the real world, these are the decisions that we make in hospitals every single day across all of time and across all of space. Why do you debate? If you think that debate is silly and there's this delineation between the real world and philosophy and that we can't use logical argumentation to determine these things because in the real world, we just all agree, or in the real world, these are all fallacies. It's a logical fallacy to say, well, in the real world, it works differently. No, no, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying- So what's the point of debating? No, no, I'm not trying to hand wave debate. What I'm trying to do is to take, because if I'm in the middle of making an argument, sometimes I'll take a step back and I'll say, have I committed myself to a position that actually seems highly incongruable with a macro picture? So when we're in the midst of an argument and we start saying things like, well, really, we don't have any idea if any conscious experience exists. We don't know anything about it. Well, let's take a step back on a macro scale. Do we really believe that? Clearly we don't believe that. If we look at how we behave in the real world, if we look at how we behave in hospitals, where we're deciding when to kill people or not to kill people, clearly we have some concept of conscious experiences. When we look at how we treat people with medicine, when we look at how we analyze structures of the brain, when we look at where like death comes from, right? It's not when you cut off your arm. It's not when you lose a kidney. It's when your brain stops to function. It seems like we have some conception of where conscious experience comes from. So we go back then to the debate and we look at the microscopic arguments we're making to say things like, we don't know anything about conscious experience. It seems like not the best faith of an argument. It seems like a debate argument because that's not true. All of us have some concept of like how consciousness works and how we decide when people are dead. Yeah, I don't wanna soak up the whole entire debate with you and I going back and forth on epistemology and philosophy and logical argumentation. So we'll just kind of leave that there for right now. I think we've kind of exhausted that and we'll let the other two panelists say some things. Rachel and Kenden, are you both life absolutists? Can you define that? Meaning that everybody should live no matter what. Under no circumstances, no one should die under any circumstances. Actually, I'll even say under no circumstances, should anyone be killed? I would not be a life absolutist. There are too many variables there. So for example, in the case of self-defense, I know there are people like Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, who refuse to defend themselves, even if someone comes at them with a knife. I'm not one of those people. Is it that situation? For example, in the case of self-defense, if there's a chance that one of you is gonna go down, it's an animal reflex to defend yourself. So if you believe that, if what you mean by life absolutist is someone who cannot think of a situation in which killing another human being would ever be invisible, then no, I'm not one of those people. Okay. There must be exceptions to it. I hate absolute rules. So there must be an exception to an absolute rule. If you see what I mean. If that's not an absurd thing to say. But there are certain decisions. Rachel, can you kill the spirit? No. So what's the problem with abortion as a Christian? Well, again, I don't know if I wanna get into a religious framework because that's not really in honor of the panel. I don't wanna sit here and talk about like theological concepts because everyone else here besides me is secular. So I don't think it's actually proper to get into God. Cause then we would have to define who God is, what God, which God. I'll take your definition of God in the Bible. Is that fair? I mean, whatever God you wanna say, I'll stand by. Because people interpret the Bible differently. Even Christians. Yeah, I was gonna say as well though, because it would put right, I would argue that not that Rachel needs me to defend her, but it would put her on the spot. Because of course, any religious argument we, she makes in defense of the pro-life position can be easily discussed with, yeah, because I'm not religious, so it doesn't matter. You know, that kind of invalidates the position. That's true for you, Kenden. But when I'm talking to Rachel, you know, I wanna see what is the root cause of why she really is against abortion. Because, you know, if you're saying killing, then I'm saying, I would object to saying, well, you can't kill the spirit. And that's why I asked her. No, so that's why I don't, I'm not making a religious argument. I'm making an ethical argument. Well, could spirit be spiritual too? I mean, does it really have to be religious? Yes, but you're forming a strawman because I'm not making that argument. That's not the argument I'm making. I'm saying- I'm not, I'm asking you a question. I didn't even frame nothing. I asked you a question. I asked you, do you believe- Well, I mean, you could ask me what my favorite color is or what my favorite dessert is, but we're here to debate the topic and that's not my argument. But you accuse me of strawmaning you and I'm saying, no, I did not. You're lying on me again. I asked you a question. I asked you- Not lying. Do you, yeah, you did. I asked you- Everything I said that you don't like is lying. No, I mean, no, I asked, did I not, yes or no? Did I not ask you, can you kill the spirit? Did I not ask you that? Yeah, and I said no. So how was that strawmaning you? Because then you went in to say like, well, if God does this or tell me why God says we can't have abortions and I'm telling you- I didn't say that. I did not say that. Okay, I answered your question. I answered your question. So are you going to actually make an argument? So well, I was about to make an argument till you basically interrupted me by saying, I falsely accused me lying, saying that I strawmaned you and I just showed you I didn't. So the reason my argument was it's like, I don't believe you can kill anything. And by the way, I'm agnostic, I'm not religious. So, and I know Christians who also, everybody on several faiths believe that you can't kill energy. So I wanted to know like, what's the big deal? I told to get the argument of conscious, not conscious sent in, I get that. I just wanted to get a grasp on what is the root problem to terminating an abortion, kill the baby, whatever you wanna name it. So did you just tell me that because you can't kill energy? I didn't tell you anything but what I was just saying. You just said, I don't believe you can kill energy. Right. Right. And did you say that would you agree then that you can't kill the spirit as you put it? Well, I'm not religious, but that's what I'm asking. But I'll go ahead and say, I mean, I'm not asking, but I'll just say, sure, you can't kill the spirit. I'll go ahead and tell them. So then by that extension, I'm gonna try again to help you understand the logical extensions of the arguments you make, which is then it's no problem if I kill you right now, because I can't kill your spirit, I can't kill your energy, what's the big deal? You're gonna reincarnate, you're gonna still exist in some form. It's just a dead end, it's a total non sequitur. It's not even worth considering when we're trying to have an argument here. Well, killing me right now is against the law and nice try, you wouldn't even have that opportunity before I get you first. And I'm only talking about- I don't know about that, I'm a firearms instructor and I teach defense, yeah. You don't know what I'm doing. Well, you're trying to get all bad on me, so I just thought- I mean, I'm just saying, do you know my firearm experience? Okay, so- Do you know mine? No, you just, I mean, you just assume that you can get me. But you're trying to, this is ma'am, I'm with all of you- Okay, so, but anyway, let me get back on that. I get to do your head here, and you don't understand how to make a logical argument without walking into a giant fallacy. You're in contests with me and I just took you on it, okay? So here's my thing. So let me go ahead and say what I gotta say. So- Destiny, I'm sorry that this person is- This person? I'm enjoying this, I'm having fun. This person? What do you mean by this person? Uh-oh. I mean, so you want to dehumanize me now? No. How wide are you, okay? I'm saying that you do not understand the basic framework of logical argumentation. You'll take a position that can be extrapolated to something absurd, and you don't even understand it. No. That's what that is. You did it with me and you did it with Destiny. I am following the logic of your position, ma'am. No, you're not. No, you're not. Stop lying again. So, okay. Here's my thing. I want to get back to the argument on what I said in my opening statement. To try to ban abortion is like a slippery slope. Do y'all want to go to now banning plan B? Next? When will it stop? I mean, right now abortion is legal. What is plan B? Plan B is a pill. If you have sex and the condom broke or it was unprotected or if you raped or stuff like that and you believe that you're about to get pregnant, you take this pill, it's called plan B pill, that will prevent a fertilized egg from attaching to the walls of a uterus. So in other words, that is, if you really want to be technical, that is a way of aborting a child because you're preventing a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus, therefore being discharged through the cervix and out of the vagina and dying out. The only nuance I would draw there is that if you're still talking about tissue, then it doesn't vex me too much. I'm also rather soft on the topic, probably I shouldn't use this the way, I'm gonna phrase this poorly, but in the cases of rape, I understand that because it's not just a physical but also a psychic trauma and I'm also a coward, I couldn't look a rape victim in the eye and say, well, tough, I couldn't do that. Now, if that's an inconsistency in my argument, then that's fair enough for me to take it to pieces if they want to. No. But because I couldn't, I mean, so let's make this personal to treat, right? I'm gonna make this personal to you, right? If you told me that you were pregnant and you were pregnant through rape, I couldn't say, well, sorry, you're gonna bear the child if you're rapist. Because I know I can't do that, I don't have the stones to do that. When it comes to that particular scenario, I tend to be rather soft. It's still, I'm still killing a child, I would still maintain that position. Also, when it comes to medical abortions, medically necessary abortions like ectopic pregnancies, that's a non-issue for me because obviously in that scenario, the baby dies either way. My fundamental abortion argument, anti-abortion argument is that, you could draw the line at consciousness, but we don't even know if consciousness exists. You could talk about the quality of life when it's born, but who's to say whether someone's quality of life, who sets up the scale. There are certain decisions that I don't believe human agencies should make. And one of them is whether an entire human timeline, because that's ultimately what we're talking about here. An entire human timeline should be snuffed out before it's emerged from the uterus. That's my fundamental pro-life position or anti-choice position. Yeah, so I don't know what you're supposed to do with that. I'll just drop that there. You can pick it up and do it. Well, okay, well, one last thing. Like I said in my opening arguments, why go for banning, like I said, abortion is not completely banned throughout the entire country. By the way, I saw your debate, you did very well. And I wanted to address something in reference to... You didn't say this, it was said to you about back alley abortions. That's not gonna be a thing, okay? We have too many programs, we have too many foundations that will actually pay for women, no matter what state they're in, whether abortion is abolished completely or if it's a heartbeat bill. They will pay for that woman to get a ticket to a pro-abortion state to have that abortion and they will provide her medical needs as well as her room service and her travel fees. So the whole, this whole argument of, we're going back to the co-hangers, that's not a thing. So I just wanna let you know. With that being said. I'm sure that's true. No, I said I'm sure that's true. Yes, when I was talking about the fight with Stardust. Even Canada has stated that they will pay for abortions. You have Amazon, you have, there's so many corporations out there that specifically stated that they will pay for a woman's abortion. But can I pick up on that trees? Is that all right? Yes, sure. Yeah, the reason why corporate, in my opinion, the reasons why these big companies, well, the two reasons why these big companies are prepared to sponsor their employees, to fly to California. They don't want to pay for the maternity leave. They don't want to pay for the maternity leave, they don't want to lose. Yeah, now, if we're talking about the ethics of abortion, I would argue that that's a complete abnegation of the topic. Because what you're doing is, what these companies are doing is saying, well, we could sponsor young mothers and make sure they've got diapers and formula and baby grows and things like that. Or we could just pay this bitch to kill a unborn kid. That's the cheaper option. And as a corporate entity, that's the decision we're going to make. And that is so callous and cold and calculating, it's actually preventing. Oh my God, I am still listening to Keenan, Kenden, and you are butting in Rachel as always. Kenden, can you please finish your argument? I was very, I was enjoying you thoroughly before she was rudely interrupted by her. Sorry, please pick up what you were saying. But I was going to say, well, Rachel, you know, I was, I'm sure Rachel wasn't- You haven't really been talking that much. So I would like to hear more of your voice and her voice if you don't mind, but go ahead. Well, my argument is, is that the only reason these big companies are paying women to fly to, I don't know, Honolulu or wherever they're gonna have these clinics to have these procedures is because it's the cheaper option. And if you remember when I'm opening arguments, I said most of the arguments for abortion are purely socioeconomic, like someone of your background tree, born in hardship, raised by abusive parents or whatever, or callous pair of people. Those are problems we can address. But my argument is, is that abortion is used as a kind of ejection button. It's like, oh, the emergency shoot or whatever. It's like, well, ignore all the social problems that affect, and I realized that you live in a different country. I don't know where in America you are, but I've been, oh, you're in Georgia, right? Well, I'm one of the few British people I know who's been to the South side of Chicago, and I've seen areas of Greater New York City that are a bit run down. And I can imagine that it'd be totally tempting that if you were pregnant and you lived in those circumstances to go, right, well, I can't raise a kid here because I live in a slum, so I'm gonna destroy this child. Whereas my argument is, is that if you increase, if you deny that option, that get out clause, it would encourage, hopefully, people to provide all of the welfare reforms that you mentioned in your opening statement, do you really think our government would do that? Though seriously, our government is this shit, okay? Let me repeat your argument back to you, so I'm not accusing, I'm not knowing your logic. You're saying that, you're saying that if we allow abortion to be illegal, this will force, if not encourage facilities, including the government, to impose upon good Medicaid, good Medicare, and also good programs to help not rectify, not eliminate child poverty, but relieve it tremendously. Did I understand it correctly? It would encourage them to do something. Okay. Force is probably the wrong verb. Okay, now force. Because obviously I'm, because now, because my thinking is entirely wishful. I cognize that the United States, oh, it seems to think that all welfare is communism or something, and it's not very keen on it. A blended system of capitalist economic forces and social welfare provision, it seems like a difficult marriage, a troubled marriage for the United States. But it certainly would encourage it. It would strengthen the arguments for any kind of welfare provision. Whether it actually works or not, it is something that, well, I'm gonna, I mean, you're all Americans, you tell me. Whether it actually works or you live there, I'm merely spitballing. But my argument would be, is that there is simply no incentive. If it's cheaper to just exterminate human beings before they're born, that's the option everyone's gonna go for. And anything like school starts, shore starts, or food stamps or whatever, that stuff will never improve because there's no incentive to improve it. Does that make any kind of sense? Yes. Yeah. The only thing I was gonna add to what Kenyon, Kenyon, sorry, I keep saying Kenyon. I don't know why I'm saying that. Kenyon was saying is that corporations have an even bigger incentive, which is not just the short-term cost, but the longer-term cost. We have data from a century of countries around the world that shows that where you legalize abortion, female participation in the workforce goes up exponentially. Like by a large margin, I think it's something like it went up like 10 to 12 times in countries where they made abortion legal. So of course corporations have a very vested long-term interest in providing abortions to females that they want to have in the workforce. That's all I was gonna say. Well, I was gonna say, and if I can pick up on that, Rachel, one of the other, you often find that a lot of people who are pro-choice are also anti-capitalist, especially in the United States. They hate the corporatocracy, if that's even a word, runs the United States of America. And obviously lobbies, politicians all the time and things like that. By constantly treating this issue as an economic one, a socio-economic one, and ignoring any kind of spiritual or moral, what are philosophical ramifications, you turn, as Rachel's alluded to, women as well as men, of course, into just cogs in the corporate machine. And the advantage of having a home life, is away from the markets, away from the factory, making widgets or whatever, is that it takes power away from them, I would argue. Again, you want to tear that apart, you can do. Yeah, go ahead. I don't know. I think that when you provide, excellent, and I'm speaking from experience, I used to live in Germany for five years. The maternity leave is two years. Is it two, really? Oh, yeah. Oh, they take care. The Germans are doing it properly, then. I'm gonna jump to you when you're impressed with that. Yeah, and it encourages the women to not leave the workforce, but also allow to have a baby. Germany also provide them a, not a nanny, but somebody come and help clean the diapers and also, oh, shoot, sorry about that, my freaking phone, to also clean the diapers and to also help around the house with the mother. So, this is something that should be here. So my argument would be why not have that here in America first and then start going for the abortion? Well, timing could well be an issue, I suppose, but why not do both at the same time? I suppose you could argue. Why not get rid of abortion and improve your welfare service? But the trouble is as well, I think because Roe versus Wade in your country, was, it was, I don't wanna say sneakily done because it was done in public, but it was slipped in. Is that the phrase I want to use? I think this has been a hot, since 1973, Roe versus Wade was put into place, wasn't it? Since the 1970s, Roe versus Wade has been a hot button issue. It's not even about abortion at that point. It's the way it was done. It was the way it was punted upstairs to the Supreme Court. It was passed without grassroots support, really, no popular vote, no consideration of state legislature. It's anti-democratic, it's undemocratic, I could argue, it's anti-federal because yours is of course a federal system as you know better than I do. And so I think Roe versus Wade has been there like a thorn in the side of constitutional conservative America since the 70s and that's why they're desperate to get rid of it. Also, a lot of Republicans in your country believe rather than having a bloated, centralized state welfare system, they believe in local government, they believe in local charity, religious involvement, of course, religious charity. So yeah, a lot of the people who oppose Roe versus Wade also oppose very welfare provisions that I would actually endorse. We're gonna agree on that one, actually. I'm gonna tell you, this is, see the CUC server that's over here, they're so hypocritical. They don't wanna take care of these unplanned pregnancies, they lose their crap when it comes to welfare. And let's not talk about anchor babies. So they sit up here and they hate when women have a bunch of unplanned pregnancies, they always wanna do this fatherless home situation. But yesterday, I said, don't you care your baby, don't you care your baby? Because the Lord said so. I can't stand that. And I don't come from that position at all. I think like, hey, like I want abortion to be available so that we don't have to worry about a bunch of welfare. Okay, I'll be on that hill, because but you cannot sit up here and deny financial assistance from the government, which my side bitch about all the time, and then sit up here and encourage the very thing that's gonna cause us, that's gonna raise our taxes and cause us to pay the welfare that a lot of people on the right don't wanna do the cut service. Yeah, as I say, I'm not addicted to welfare in the sense that I don't particularly want everybody to be slaves to welfare state. But I recognize I've had this conversation thanks to James and Stephen Ryan of the YouTube channel, Cider and Port. I don't know if he's watching, but then I've just provided his YouTube channel for him. This is where the conversation starts. It's not where it ends. And I think the trouble is particularly in the American conversation, it's either pro-life or pro-choice. And that's it, but of course there are ramifications for what I am proposing and what Rachel is ultimately proposing is an increased number of babies in the civilization that we're discussing. So what are you going to do about it? It's no good preserving, ensuring forcing women to carry a baby to term and giving birth if mother and baby are going to die in the street because they're sleeping in a cardboard box. You know, there has to be some kind of adjustment, maybe not a massive one, but there has to be some kind of adjustment. Yeah, so what was I going to put on a point and it's gone. I'm going to leave that there, I think, because I'll stop, I'll stop rambling. I'll try and remember what I was coming up with. Does anybody else want to tear apart what I've said? Destiny's been very quiet for a while. I don't think any of the conversation topics are relevant to anything. I think that the only thing that matters with abortion is determining when it's a life or not, and that past that point, every conversation topic is meaningless. Because any topic you talk about socioeconomic or any issues, we would never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, except killing a one-year-old child. So if we think that a fetus is a life, then I don't care what any other arguments are. You just shouldn't have an abortion. So I usually don't engage with anything past that, past that distinction of when is it worth protecting and when is it not? Because I don't think it's relevant. Well, the only thing I would say is that, you know, life does begin at conception. Even the medical forces would acknowledge this. I don't think consciousness is a particularly good barrier because, of course, there's some debate about whether consciousness even exists. There, because the potential of consciousness, like waking up from deep sleep or a coma, exists for most babies. It exists, you know, there's very few babies. You know, still births and miscarriages are fortunately rare. And as someone who's dealt, you know, in my private life, you know, I have female friends who have fallen pregnant, who have miscarried and who have had still births and all sorts of things. It's worth preserving because it's a living, it's an organism at that point. It's worth preserving. It's gonna become a baby. It's gonna become a human being. And I find that all lines that are drawn about, you know, whether it's a true human being or not are entirely arbitrary. It's entirely down to personal taste. And I don't think that any human agency, whether it's government or religious or social, should have the right to determine whether something should live or die or not, based on a definition that someone's written down somewhere, which is obviously subject to revision. So yeah, there we go. Okay, I disagree with every single statement. So we say life being is a conception. Sure, there is a life, some kind of life there, some kind of living thing, but we don't protect all living things we're concerned with protecting human life, right? So when does that thing become something worth like protecting is the question. When we talk, we don't even know if people are conscious. I don't know how to engage with that. I think I've demonstrated adequately that like consciousness is something that all of us consider and it is the thing that we consider for when people are dead or not. You can keep a body alive for a long time with a bunch of different fancy machines, but if they're never gonna wake up, we don't waste the money to do that because there's no purpose in doing that. We don't say that things are worth preserving just because they're organisms. There's a million different types of organisms we wouldn't preserve. When you talk about the fact that it's going to become a baby or human being, it seems like you're acknowledging that there is a distinction between what it is and what it's going to become. And it is not the thing that it's going to become. That's why it's going to become that thing. And you do not have all of the inherent properties of the thing you're going to become when you haven't become it yet. Therefore, there is a distinction there. When we say that it's entirely arbitrary, sure, but that's not a way to get rid of any arguments because obviously we need to decide at some point, we're not gonna kill five-year-olds and say, well, it's all arbitrary. And its personal taste also doesn't apply here because we're talking about social values for the entirety of society. You can't say it's not my personal taste to kill five-year-olds. And to say that the government doesn't have the right to turn or something should live or die, that is probably one of the most important functions of the government is to protect life. Governments will make rules on whether or not how we can kill each other or who's entitled to live or die based on certain things. You're not allowed to just dump your child on the street and watch them die or you have some obligation to take care of children in your house. You can't just kill your grandma because she's really fucking annoying. So yeah. I agree with everything that Stephen just said, strangely enough, except for the fact that I would not say that consciousness is the thing that we would use. It shouldn't be- What would you say then, I guess? What is so- Right, so what I would say is it is a human life. That we know for sure. We don't- But I'm asking at what point do you endow it with like moral consideration? What does that happen? Immediately, like you would have to say conception and my definition of that would be like implantation because you don't know if a fertilized egg is gonna be, you just, there's no practically- Wait, why would you say implantation and not conception? Well, because up until it implants that's not any, it's not necessarily human life. You can't say that cell division is happening or things like that because you just won't know. Like, what are you gonna do with it? Let's say that we take an egg from a person and we start growing it in an incubator. Is this never gonna become a human because it didn't implant in a uterus? Oh, well that, okay, that would be an exception then. So if we did do that, then yes, it would be a human life. Okay, then are you in favor of also plan B since that prevents implantation? I'm not really in favor of plan B, but as a legal, so there's- Wait, how well you got it? You have to say why. Right, right, I'm gonna say why. I'm gonna totally explain why. So there's a difference to me between the ethical argument and the legal argument. Ethically- I'm only asking ethically, I don't care. Right, ethically I'm against it. Legally, I would probably come in it further. Okay, I'd super eject the legal shit. I super don't care because I don't have any legal argument right now. So how can you be against it if you think that implantation is the moment of life begins? Because I'm against any measure that prevents human life. So if you've already, you don't know, right? When you take a plan B, you don't know if that egg is fertilized or not. You don't know if- We need to, you have to amend that statement because I'm guessing you don't think that condoms are a form of abortion or something, right? That even though they prevent human life. No, I think there's a difference between abortificent types of birth control and non-abortificent types. Well, how is it an abortificent if you don't think it's a human life until implantation begins? So let me clarify. It's not that I don't think it's human life. I was mainly making a pragmatic like legal argument of where I would go. I'm not looking for pragmatic legal arguments as an ethical debate. So eject all the legal arguments. Yes. I think that any attempt to prevent implantation would also be an attempt to prevent human life from continuing its natural- Sure, but if so, if we're saying that preventing implantation is in and of itself immoral, then implantation can't be the point at which you say it's endowed with some moral consideration. It must be the moment before that. It must be conception and not implantation. Implantation is just another step on the journey to becoming a fully-fledged human being. Yeah, this is kind of consistent. Right, this is the conundrum of what to do is because people want to have sex ever since women's liberation. Everybody just wants to have sex. Well, hold on, don't care. That's not relevant to the conversation. A lot of people also want to kill their fucking kids. I have an 11-year-old. I'll be honest about that, but that doesn't make it a moral writer. I don't say that. That's horrible. Okay, if you've had a two-year-old kid, right? Okay, but somebody that wants to do something, just we're focused on the ethics. So I'm going to delete, we're not talking implantation, we're talking conception, the moment of conception. Purely ethically, and this is the stance of my church, is that no, you don't try to prevent humans from being born for any reason, out of personal convenience or anything like that. So we're going to say the moment of conception then is going to be the moment that we endow it with all of the moral consideration that we would for any normal human being, right? Yeah, I think so, yeah. Okay, yep. So, okay, if we have that figured out, why? Why? Because as you said yourself, it's a human life. I don't base it off of conscious experience because I think that that's, you get into some really subjective territory. Okay, do you think that like a corpse should have the same protections as a fetus? Do you think a corpse is alive? I don't, but your definition is that it's a human life. I don't know, what is a human life to you? What does that mean? Well, okay, a human life would be if you can see cellular activity and there's so bacteria is alive, right? I'm not trying to equate human life to bacteria, but I'm saying we know that an embryo at any stage is human life, it's alive. If it wasn't alive, you wouldn't have to kill it, that's my whole problem with abortion. People want to say like, oh, well, you're not technically killing it because, but you wouldn't have to kill it. Okay, hold on, so that argument is total nonsense. No one is saying that you're not killing anything. What's being said is you're not killing like a human life that has moral consideration. Well, you're not saying that, but a lot of people will say. There's not a lot of people in the car who know it's just me though, okay? So saying that like, well, if it's alive, you would not kill it. We don't kill human life, no. Sure, obviously, by definition, we don't kill human life or most sane people should say that, right? So, okay, so then backing up, there's a lot, there's so many different, it's just, okay. Well, you say that it's a human life because you can see cellular activity. So I'll skip ahead to all the boring stuff and we'll qualify this one because I'm assuming you can see decomposition and dead bodies, that's technically cellular activity, but we'll clarify that you probably don't mean that type of cellular activity. We'll say maybe a nicer phrase might be some sort of like metabolic activity, or some homeostasis activity where the body is making. Cell division, something like that. I'll say something like that, okay. Even if that was the case though, okay. If I could demonstrate to you, if I could show you a body where I put a body on a table and I could hook it up to blood bypass machines, dialysis machines, everything, I can leave it functioning and all that, but I scooped the brain out and the person will never wake up again. Would you say that that is a human life? No, because, well, here's the distinction. I think I can help you with this. We're talking about intervention, right? We're talking about human intervention. The reason- Wait, no, no, no, no, no, that's, I'm just, I'm trying to figure out what it is you're protecting. I don't know what that- Life. Human life, right? No, no, it's not life. It's not human life, it's something more than that because a decomposing body is human life. I'm trying to figure out- It's not though. How is a decomposing body human life? That's bacteria living off the dead tissue, but the body is no longer alive. The dead tissue is literally, it doesn't all die instantly. It's literally part of the development is you, from the moment of conception the absolute decomposition of every last cell in your body is all part of your biological journey from start to finish. No, no, no, no, no. I don't think that that's, so number one, you're relying on like some, some sort of scientific definition, right? No, I'm trying to figure out what your definition, I'm not trying to rely on anything. And I'm trying to help. There's some bounded area in you. But surely if the human being is dead, if the bacteria are feeding off the dead tissue, the tissue is breaking down. It's not working. That's happening in your living body right now. Bacteria feeds off the dead tissue. You're saying if we could take all kinds of crazy measures to animate some kind of dead course. Hold on, wait, I have to, wait, wait, wait, wait. I can't let you, I can't let you poison the argument with words like that. Crazy arguments. There are bodies that can be kept alive almost indefinitely that are in like long-term commas and hospitals. That's not crazy. That's not far out. Not only is it not crazy far out, there have been very real medical debates about this in the United States. I'm sure you remember Terry Shiva, right? Yeah, these are huge issues of people like that. So these are not crazy things. These are very real, very grounded, very pragmatic issues. Grant, thank you. I imagine that technically if someone were brain dead, but you could hook their bodies up to various machines to keep their organ systems running, that you would qualify as human life. However, if the person, the patient, let's use that word, if the patient were brain dead without the possibility of recovery and therefore without the potter of consciousness of all the rest of it of going into the world impacting human society in hopefully positive ways, you could argue that switching off the machine and then harvesting the organs for donation wouldn't make much of a difference. But at that point, because it's on the downward trajectory at that point, if the person has reached a physical maturity, they've suffered a head injury, they're not going to experience consciousness again, et cetera, et cetera, they're on the downward slope. We don't know. I think that whether or not something is alive, we view fairly binaurally, binaurally in a binary manner. We don't say that since you're on the downward slope, now we're going to kill you. Like grandma's on the downward slope, we're not killing her, right? So I'm trying to find where the bounds are for what you consider to be a life worth protecting because that's where I'm going to find where your definitions are. Because everything that's said so far has been hazy. I understand what you're saying. That's all I'm looking for. But I think that there's a distinction between intervening to prevent a life from progressing as it normally would and intervening to end a life faster than it might normally end. I think there's a difference there. I don't think you can say that they're exactly the same. Sure, those are different things, but it's not relevant to what intervening to prevent why we're ending one. So why do we keep talking about corpses and how long we're going to preserve life versus the conversation about abortion is about people stop. The whole reason you have an abortion is to prevent that human being from further developing into. Yeah, but it's the same reason why you would wear a condom or practice abstinence is to prevent the formation of a human being. Yes, but once it's already formed. Yeah, abortion isn't contraception because contraception takes place before conception. That's great. And as fetus, the potential to become conscious is not a conscious being either, right? I agree with you. Cluster cells are not human beings actually. Sure, we're all cluster cells. But we're all cluster cells. We're all cluster cells. I'm a cluster of cells. But I'm saying that there needs to be something a little bit more, it seems, because when I'm pushing you on the like, what is a dead person? Or when are they dead? Or if I scoop a person's brain out, even if I can show you all of the other organisms are functioning fine, it seems like that brain doing something is pretty important for us to determine whether or not that thing is still alive. I don't think that it's in the brain. And I think you're making like kind of an unequivalent analogy by trying to say, well, the score says- When you say it's not in the brain, when you say it's not in the brain, could you give me an example of a thing with a brain that like this is a life that has to protect, right? Destiny, if I may interject, sorry, this is one of the dangers with the consciousness argument or the quality of mental life, if you like. To be clear, I don't think I've had any dangerous parts of my argument. I feel pretty consistent with mine. I'm still pushing. I'm not even at mine. I'm trying to get one from you guys, but go ahead. Well, no, the problem is that what do you mean by consciousness as well as the other problem? When I say consciousness, you don't have to ask and pretend I don't have an answer. I can answer every question you have for me. So when I say consciousness, it seems like we have an awareness and that awareness is an emergent property from the communication of several underlying structures in the brain. And those structures that are necessary to communicate with each other for the emergent property of a conscious group here seem to be in place and communicating with each other at around 20 to 24 weeks in gestation. Okay, so what if someone is experiencing, experiences a traumatic head injury and their consciousness is impaired? Would that make them a lesser life? No, I don't think so. Having an impaired consciousness or a higher consciousness doesn't make you lesser. You might, but you're still having a conscious experience worth protecting, even if it might be somewhat impaired. Right, but do you not think that if a baby is going to develop a consciousness, that you know that that's coming, that the potential of consciousness is just as valuable as consciousness itself? No, there's no other ontological category you can give me where the potential of a thing is the same thing as the thing that just never ever exists. I'm curious, or can you give me an example of like, if I put together like a thing here and a thing here and then somebody comes by and they destroy it, would you ever say, I had the parts to build the building, you destroyed my building? Or would you say, no, you destroyed the parts of the building. The potential of a thing to become a thing is its own thing. It's not the same thing as the thing it's going to become. That's not true. Well, no, but no, but there are two problems. The gestation of a human being is a unique scenario anyway. But also, if you're talking about, but no, but if you're talking about like, that you've got the bits of the building and you haven't built it yet, then you're not, you're talking about tissue, if you like. Whereas if you're assembling the building and you've put the foundations in and you've got the major structures in, for example, and then I come and knock it over with a wrecking ball, you could argue that I've destroyed your building, but the building was being assembled. So if you just talk about- No, you would say you've destroyed the foundations of a building. You wouldn't say you've destroyed an entire building. If 9-11 happened with a foundation dug out and there were no towers there, people wouldn't say, oh my God, they blew up two buildings. It's like they've crashed into the foundation of a newly constructed building, right? That was in the progress or the process being built. But the thing that you're going to become is not the thing itself. These are two separate things. I just, I think, so backing up again, I'm just trying to figure out, it seems to me, I'm curious if either of you answer this, if you scoop, if I can take out, okay, so here's a thought challenge that I would give to both of you. I would argue that I can remove every single organ, at least one organ from anybody, from any person. I can take all any organ out and replace it with some kind of machine. I can give you a fake heart. I can do dialysis for your kidneys. I can process things to your liver. I can do all these things, but if I remove the brain, something has fundamentally changed with that person. If I take out the brain and I keep everything else working, it seems like something has changed there. Do you agree or disagree with that? Do you think you can remove brains from people and still have like a functioning, like working human? You can just substitute that out with some other thing. Well, no, I mean, it's, you know, you can't communicate with the body once the brain has been removed. That's certainly true. Well, so then let's say theoretically, if you believe that to be the case, now I'm not gonna say this is happening, but let's say theoretically that a fetus had no brain until six months. Would you then agree that the fetus with no brain until six months doesn't even have a thing worth protecting yet or? No, but what it has is that it's going to, because you know that a brain is coming and you know that if you intervene, that human life will be sabotaged before it's truly developed. It's not the same thing as removing a brain from a, well, it's a different scenario, isn't it? Okay, so if I push you on this category, so when you say you know something is coming, okay? So now you're not protecting a particular thing. It seems like you're making the concession that the thing in and of itself is not really worth protecting, but it's gonna become something that will be worth protecting. I would say no. And here's the reason that it's not, we're not talking about something composed of parts that's going to become a thing. It's human life and we do have a scientific definition for that. When you have human life, you have things like cell metabolism, you have reproduction of cells. That's not something you have in dead bodies. First, it's just not true, okay? Hair in your nails will grow for, I think maybe weeks, at least it's days after death, but I'm... No, actually, I think I'll just... No, that's a myth, yeah. That's a myth. The tissue shrinks, it's the illusion. It's not that the tissue is growing. You don't have cellular reproduction and division going after the body's dead. That's not true. Okay, sure, maybe you don't. Even if that was the case, if I can give you a healthy body without a brain where the cells are still metabolizing and everything, it sounds like you guys earlier said you wouldn't agree that that's a living body worth protecting. Well, again, you're talking about... There's a big... This is not analogous, right? To say, okay, there's a human life. It is taking its natural process. It is already a human life. And now we're gonna talk about... There's a body and we're gonna do all kinds of scientific Frankenstein stuff to keep it alive without brains or alive without organs. These are not analogous. Okay, okay, hold on. We're talking about intervention. Nothing here is analogous. We're not talking about intervention. We can't even have that conversation yet because I still don't know what you value in a human life. The reason why I'm asking these hypotheticals is I'm trying to figure out because however eager you are to attack my definition of consciousness, you've given me nothing yet. Your position... I can give you something right now. Okay, but just be careful because you keep saying things like human life cell division, but any time I've tested any of the examples you've given with a hypothetical, you're saying... You're asking scientific questions with your hypothetical. And I will tell you... Wait, I'm not... None of these questions are science. Human life is intrinsically valuable in and of itself. It doesn't have to already meet certain criteria that you're arbitrarily putting in there. It is human life and the purpose of abortion is to come in and prevent human life. It's to come in and kill the human life. Okay, but preventing human life isn't all wrong. Because I'm trying to get a simple narrow definition because you would say condoms aren't... No, it's something that's already alive. It's something that's already human life and you're coming in to end the life. Sperm are already alive. So there's something else to happen. Sperm of tissue. No, that's not... Sperm of tissue. The ovaries... Tissue is alive. The tissue in your body is alive. What do you mean? It's not a human being. You have to have both... Yeah, but neither is a fetus. A fetus is not a human being. It is a human being. The fine human being. Now that I was going... Steven, beat me to it. The fine human being. Well, that's what I'm trying to figure out. I'm trying to figure out what is like that. When we say human being, when does the life become that thing that human being that's worth protecting? At conception. At conception. OK. Because it now has both sets of DNA from the sperm and the edema. If we intercede to kill it, it would continue to develop. And it's already human. Wait, OK. So you kill a tadpole. You're still killing it. But would you say when you kill a tadpole, you kill a frog? Yes. Every day you're killing a life. I'm saying you're alive. Wait, no one here is arguing whether you're killing a life or a living thing. It's a human, whether it's an embryonic stage, a fetal stage or a fluid level of stage. So in my, hold on, wait, hold on, wait. And then show you can go. So in my opinion, when arguments come to the point where you circle the drain this hard and then there is like a hard pivot on every single question. I think that I think that I think that the conversation is run as course. So I'm good on where I'm at for establishing my points. I think I set up consciousness as a pretty valid thing. I think I argue that convincingly, this is why you're dead at the end of your life. It's when your consciousness is to exist. I've tried for like 30 minutes to figure out like, what is your thing for life that you would protect? And I've got like 50. It's not that I don't like it. It's that every time I try to push on what about this or what about that? I get these answers like, well, that's a while. Because they're not analogous. Because you're coming up with things that are right. So then it can be dismissed. It can be dismissed without logical penalty. Human life is human life regardless of the stage of development. Is that clear enough? I gotta run downstairs real quick. No, nothing was clear in your definitions. It was nothing was. Human life is human life regardless of the stage of development that it's in. It doesn't matter if you're an embryo or if you're 90 years old, you are a human life and that is worth protecting. I think that's super clear. Define human body. Well, this is the problem, this is the problem because what I think the frustration is, is that because a different... Say again? Q&A coming in soon. Okay. Okay. Let them answer my question. I'll drop everything to it. That's what I want to add. See, the problem is trees that because one of the reasons why I love coming onto debates like this and James has invited me a few times because I always approach these debates assuming that I'm wrong because it must be... If I was right, everyone would agree with me. So I want to hear from different points of view. The trouble is, is that I think particularly with abortion, it's one where everyone thinks that they're right. And I think I'm kind of like that way too. The problem is, is that you're asking how do you define human life? That has trouble for less of us. I've got a definition right here for human body. The human body is the physical substance of the human organism composed of living cells and extracellular materials organized into tissues, organs and systems, which is exactly what I just said. You know, I got to fact check you because you're known to lie. You said that's the definition of a human body. Yeah, go ahead and Google it. Define human body. I don't lie. It's just that you don't understand logic. It's not lie. The thing is, is that these definition of trouble people from the limit. You lie by omission, okay? The human body, the physical substance of a human organism composed of living cells and extracellular materials. That's what I just said. Let me finish, shut up, and organize into tissues, organs and systems in a human body. So you left out the organs. I think I said all of that. You're going to need to hum that. Back it up and watch it when I saw it. She did that. I did. She did that. She did that. So here's the deal. Here's the deal. What organs does a fertilized cell have? Well, it says composed of living cells and extracellular materials and organized into those things. So- And organized tissues. And it says, comma, comma, organs. And systems. And systems. Yes. Even embryos have systems. That's how they sustain their life. I just asked a question. Do- Is it alive or is it not? No, no, no. I just asked a question. Does a fertilized egg based upon this definition have an organ? It has systems, tissues, and cellular materials. Yeah, it definitely has tissues, but it doesn't have organs. Thank you, Kendra. Notice how you answered the question as she just skates by it. She does that every time. I asked, does this fertilized egg have an organ? She got a ha, take you, and take them. And then you just asked the question, yes, it has organized tissues, but it doesn't have an organ. That's all I wanted to know. Thank you for answering my question. Here's the question I would put to anybody who's prepared to answer it. If a fetus or an embryo is not a human being, what is it? Human fetus. I mean, okay, but it's still human. Yes, it's still human life. I mean, a tadpole is not a frog, right? It's like one stage, like a corpse is a human corpse. A body could be a human body. Fetus can be a human fetus. We can talk about the biological body that exists, but it seems like the thing that we value, that we treasure, that we're trying to protect is the conscious experience. It seems to be the thing that we're aimed at. I don't agree. Okay, that's fine. I know you don't agree, but you guys ever gave me a good, kind of like other... But you haven't given a good reason why that needs to be the thing. What if I believe that all human life is valuable? That there's a soul in the body at conception. And in the embryo at conception, there is a soul and that you don't have any better push back against that idea. I would ask you, I absolutely would. I would ask you, where is the soul? It's not something you can like, well, it's not something you can physically locate, right? That if it's not something that I can measure, I can't have no, there's no way. How does this can't be measured either? It absolutely can be in some ways. Yes. In some ways, see, you had to qualify that because we don't, this is something that's hotly debated in a philosophy of science. Yes, it is. This is your whole argument is Loki's wager, that if I can't pinpoint 100% exactly what consciousness is, you're telling me that it is the same validity as your concept of a soul, which has no physical manifestation whatsoever. Right, I'm saying if you're going to choose consciousness, you have no way to be back against my concept of a lesser soul. If you are going to employ debate terms and rational and logic and all that during this conversation, you have to understand the absurdity of saying that since I cannot give you a concrete 100% like analysis of where this particular thing is, that very concept becomes equal to every other absurd thing that I can possibly think of. That is ridiculous. I understand that you don't like it, but what I'm saying is that we're on equal ground. I'm not saying that I don't like it. I'm telling you that we're not on equal ground. I'm saying that consciousness versus the soul, we are on equal ground. You can't unequivocally prove in some sort of, you like to, you want to prove it in a material sense. If I make a statement, if I make a statement, if I make a statement that there is a pink demon floating behind you that spins around every time you turn around to look at it. And then you tell me, I think that there is like oxygen floating behind you. We, not all of us can prove that. Are we on equal ground when we make those statements? Yes, we are. Okay, I rest my case. That's it, okay. I rest my case. We're absolutely not. But if you think we are, then I understand more of your argument. Okay. This may be your time for Q and A. If you happen to have questions, folks, we have got to move fast because we have a huge list already. We're going to move fast. In the meantime, I want to remind you, our guests are linked in the description such that if you want to learn more about their views, you certainly can by clicking on their links below. Al Dan, thanks very much, says murder is a legal term. Laws reflect interests of the state. How does abortion hurt the state? It's murder only of those who live fear for their life. Well, abortion, sorry, murder just means unlawful killing. So technically, if anything is permitted by the law, it's no longer murder. Abortion doesn't threaten the state. And I don't think any one of us made that argument. What I think it does is it threatens, there's a kind of cultural, that's what I'm looking for, a kind of the social value that we place on other human beings. That would be the only argument, but abortion doesn't threaten the state at all. In fact, the state would like certain women, particularly they're poor, to kill their unborn sponges, to reduce the burden on the welfare state. So you could argue that abortion is that the government would be rooting for. I just, I think that it should. You got this one coming in from. Didimus says, owing a baby resources is not the same as owning it your literal body. By Rachel's logic, stealing is the same as rape. Well. What? Stealing? Okay. I'm trying to wrap my head around that. I'm not sure. This is again, people not understanding that if you're going to make the argument that, hey, this thing depends on me for survival, therefore I have the right to kill it, that you can logically extrapolate that to say that children who are one year old, two year old, six month old, depend on me for survival. How dare they? They have no right there for I can kill it. And there are people who do make this argument. It's just a lot. The problem is that there's a fundamental difference between saying somebody that's wired to and growing inside of your body is going to be fundamentally different than an external being that exists, whose responsibility for life can be shared upon a bunch of people that are volunteering for being paid to do the work. No, no, wait, wait, when you say that might be what I'm saying is I'm totally breaking the analogy. For you to say that everything I was saying earlier was disanalogous, your comparison is disanalogous. To say, hey, would you want to take care of my three year old son? And you're like, oh yeah, sure. And they knock you out and you wake up and all of a sudden you're hooked up to a dialysis machine where your kidneys are, and they're like, oh, well you said you take care of it. It's the same thing. No, it is totally not the same thing. So you're saying that it's a responsibility argument? No, it's not a responsibility argument. There is fundamentally a difference between somebody being hooked into and relying on your body versus somebody that could be taken care of by multiple parties that are being compensated for. Everybody here understands that it's super, super easy. It's not like invasion of the body snatchers. This is an alien where a baby just jumps in your body and takes it over and it's like some kind of parasite succubus, right? We all understand how babies are made. We all understand how to avoid that. Sure, so now when you say that what you've basically admitted is you've conceded every part of your earlier image. Okay, it is fundamentally different. But don't you in some ways, don't you in some ways consent, don't you consent to that baby kind of taking over your body for a while? Which by the way, that's not even, that's not, hold on, that's not a bad argument, right? There are arguments to be made, but by making that argument, you've conceded there's fundamentally, there is a difference between something growing inside of you versus a bunch of people being able to share the responsibility of taking care of an external created being. That's, those are fundamental things. But you also can't say that there is no analogy that it's not a logical extension. It's not saying the two things are completely analogous. It is a logical extension to say that if this life depends on me for survival, I have the right to kill it, that well then people will and do make the argument that, okay, what about a two week old baby? So it depends on me to live, right? The problem is you've created a slippery slope to use the term that you've created a slippery slope. That might be, but it's still valid. No, you've created, no, you've created, I can explain why it's not valid. So you've engaged in a slippery slope fallacy because you're saying that you've created one circumstance and you're saying that it will lead to the second. The first being- No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying- Hold on, that I'm literally, I didn't even say what you're saying. You're- You're some rule just interrupted you, Steven. Shut, shut, shut, shut, shut. You're saying that if you say something that depends on me for survival can be killed, then a one or two or three year old child can be killed because they depend on people for survival. The only reason why this slippery slope works for you, though, is because you are uncharitably interpreting the first statement as, depends on me for survival. But that's not really what a fetus does. The fetus grows inside of you while plugged into your body depending on you for survival. It's not something that requires you to just feed it to give it food or to change its diaper. It's something that is cooked up to your body, fundamentally altering your entire existence and growing inside of you. Now, once you- So why just saying- Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I just wanted to finish real quick. Once you've amended the prior statement to say that, that I don't think you should be compelled to grow something that's relying on your body, you can't jump from there to say, Oh, well then wouldn't you just say you kill all children? Well, no, of course not. Children aren't hooked into your body, relying on it for growth. There are external parties that can be involved taking care of that child. That's why your argument is disanalogous and why it's a subversive fallacy. Yes. It might not be completely analogous, but what I'm saying is that you can't say, look, this thing is like a baby growing inside of you is not any different than have you ever had? I mean, you've got an 11 year old. I've got a bunch of kids. When that baby comes out, it still completely depends on you for survival or it will die. No, it doesn't. Rachel, how many times? How many? No, you are, it is a fact of the matter that you are dead wrong. How many times in the nine month period that you were pregnant with any child did your husband carry that baby for you? You're assuming that someone else will. No, I need you to answer the question. I need you to answer the question. It's not true. Because you're wrong. And then my next question, so you won't answer that. The answer I'll tell you guys in chat. No, you're assuming that there would be a third party that would stand in. I'm assuming that he never took the baby out of your tummy and carried it for you. We're talking about the logical extension of the argument that she made. The answer to number one is zero times. Then if I were to ask you next, how many times did your husband feed your kid after it was born? The answer is probably more than zero. That's the difference, Rachel. No, what I'm saying is that although these things are not, these situations are not analogous. That does not mean that the extension of the logic of the argument is not valid. Those are separate things. If you're going to say something depending on me, well, because it's in my body, okay, whether the location doesn't have anything to do with the fact that that life depends on some outside thing to survive. You're assuming a third party or somebody else will come in. None of that matters. I'm saying it doesn't matter. I'm saying the extension of the logic of the argument is still valid. And we can repeat the same words all you want. It's true. But it's not. Because if I were to ask you how many times- You just don't like it. Again, you just don't like it. How many times did your husband feed your five-month-old fetus? That is not the argument I'm making. Never. I'm saying the logic of her argument is- And I'm showing you why your logic is breaking down because there's a fundamental difference between taking care of like an externally born child versus a thing growing in your body. No, so do you think that you just feed it like every couple hours and it's fine? No, it requires 24 seven around the clock here. It's just outside the body rather than inside the body. Yeah, but it doesn't require your 24 seven care. It doesn't matter who is the caretaker. It kind of does because if women could take- No, because then that caretaker can kill the child by logical extension. Rachel, if it didn't matter who would do it, then a one-month-old pregnant woman would say, man, I'm just going to give my one-month-old fetus to somebody else and let them fucking grow it. It kind of does matter because that's what pregnancy is all about. Well, and people do that, right? People have- No, they generally don't. It's usually pretty complicated or hard to take a fetus out of a body with one-month fetus. Actually, by that logic, then, why not just birth the baby and let someone else take care of it then if you don't want that? Why not just follow the pregnancy to term? What I'm saying is that if you're going to- Okay, I will admit, but I'm a guy and I don't know fuck all about any of that shit because who knows, okay? I did watch my baby's mom do that though. It seems to be a pretty involved process for going all the way to the delivering the baby more so than an abortion. Am I right or wrong on that? Women are the gatekeepers of reproduction. That's a fact of life. There's nothing that can be done about it. That's not what we're talking about. You said, why not just take it to term? Because that's a bit more complicated and arduous. Let's go back to how you said that my logic is not correct. I'm saying, again, that it doesn't matter if it's inside the body or outside the body, the location does not defeat the argument. I'm saying that if you're going to make the argument that this life depends on anyone, someone, many people, one person- Yeah, nobody made that argument though, which is good. Because if we did, that would be a really good counter-argument, but nobody's saying that. No, you're saying that the location is the thing that makes it different and it doesn't. Listen, let me get it from you. Appreciate it first name, last name says Destiny. I would like you to look into Biafra. What is that? And support my nation. Okay, we could use anybody's support. Please look into Nazdemadi Canoe in our plate. Thank you for that as well as Hypnolama says, wow, Tree's logic is so broken. Destiny, don't pander. You know her logic was flawed. If anyone is dishonest, it's that. About what? He didn't say which logic? Yeah, I was going to say, okay, he's made the accusation, but he needs to explain what Tree's got wrong. I mean- It's probably some cuck-servatives who's mad that I basically just called them out that they want to sit up here and have black babies and when they want to sit up here and cry about 1350, 1350, 1350, no fathers in the home. Yes, still they want to sit up here and give out the very same thing that's going to cause that to increase. Yes, 1350, I've heard about this one. Yeah, no. I was only going to start doing internet things and I don't know what 1350 was. It's quite hilariously stupid, but yeah, nevermind. Yeah, sorry, go on. This one coming in from, do appreciate your question. Endos is Rachel. Biologists aren't concerned with moral epistemology. Quote, unquote, human is specifically a biological definition. Why is having specific DNA sequence inherently valuable? Substantiated, by the way, pigs have 98% of our DNA. So this was an ethical debate and if you want to use scientific terms like Stephen does to try to establish meaning, then we would have to get into a metaphysical argument about whether God exists, what the meaning of life is, what is meaning, how do you know what's good, how do you know what's bad, what are morals, things like that. We didn't want to get off into crazy metaphysical stuff for the purpose of this panel. So my argument was never that there's like some kind of DNA or some kind of scientific medical definition of life that matters. My position was that human life is human life regardless of the stage of development, whether it's in its earliest embryonic stages or whether it's a nine-year-old person who's on their death bed, it's still a human life. That's how I define the value of human life. You got it, thank you very much for this question coming in from real men love blueberry waffle says Rachel, are you being honest by your reasoning? Do you defend the infanticide order by God on the Medianites, Amalekites and Canaanites as justified? I can't speak to that because I am an Orthodox Christian and we are in the West and in the West, the predominant interpretations of the Bible are Roman Catholic and Protestant, which I disagree with and I don't think are correct. And I don't have the time to do an entire like Bible hermeneutics for somebody to put those things in context. So that's why I stay away from those kinds of things in these debates and we just do it ethically, not on the basis of my Christian God. This one coming in from Sal Willis says because of Ohio's six-week ban, a 10-year-old rape victim has already had to cross state lines to get abortion care. What happens if you have a nationwide six-week ban? And how often is rape provable? I think that's for you, Ken and or Rachel. Well, this is the big problem. One of the reasons we have such low, I mean, I'm sure it's true in the United States is definitely going to be true in the UK. One of the reasons we have such a low conviction rape for rape is because rape is one of those crimes that's almost impossible to prove. There are no witnesses. There's very little physical evidence sometimes, especially if the victim has a shower afterwards or whatever, it can be destroyed. So the proving rape regardless of abortion is always going to be a nightmare. In terms of pregnancy through rape that might lead to an abortion, those pregnancies are actually astonishingly rare. Most abortions are performed on healthy women who are conceived by accident rather than by force and who just don't want the trouble, the inconvenience, the ordeal of bringing a baby to term. So while obviously, if we're talking about a young girl who's been raped, I mean, that's just horrendous. There's no way you can massage that. There's no way you can ground it. What we're in danger of doing, I think, is focusing on these extraordinarily unlikely scenarios, plausible but unlikely scenarios. Distracting ourselves from the main point, which is abortion is still killing a human being is that perfectly justified. So with that one, as I say, I'm rather soft on the topic of rape, but trying to prove it as the interrogator has put it, it is hard. I'm not sure if I've got an easy solution for that one, if I'm being brutally honest. You got it? Yeah, so sorry for that non-answer there, James, I do apologize, but there you go. No worries. Sal Willis says, I am a mother of one married and have an intrauterine device because I don't want more children. If life begins at conception, am I a serial killer? No, this is another time where when we're talking about logical argumentation versus people's emotions surrounding this topic, abortion is an extremely emotional topic. There might be things that are logically consistent and ethically consistent that are going to make people upset. This would be one of them. That's why I don't advocate for things like IUDs or other forms of birth control. People will disagree, they will get upset, they will get emotional. I'm saying it's still logically consistent that no, you don't want to try to prevent human life. You avoid sex then at that point. You got this one coming in from? Wait, real quick. So the answer to that question was yes, lady, you are a serial killer, Rachel's eyes. I wouldn't call her a serial killer. She absolutely is. She's taking active steps to prevent life and she is preventing a conceived egg from implanting, from implantation. She's a serial killer, or at least her husband is because he's one of the babies in. The only thing is, well, the distinction I would draw, maybe this is where people want to correct me on this, is that if the egg is fertilized, it still hasn't started dividing necessarily and it's therefore not complicated enough to be. Okay, so then wait, hold on. So then in that case, it's not the moment of conception, it's the moment of first mitosis or what like? Yeah, as I say, we're splitting hairs, aren't we? Yeah, well, that's the thing, yeah. You have to, at a certain point you have to. Oh, you don't, well, the reason why you have to is because when you provide an inconsistent definition, that's when the 50 million asterisks will explore your afterwards, because you have to keep saying like, well, I've provided a consistent definition. Then call her a serial killer. Tell her she's a serial killer. But that's not technically true. It's not that you're a serial killer. This bitch has killed fucking 20 kids by this point probably, right? If her husband's coming her 20 times, there's been 20 conceived eggs, she's a serial killer. Or how many people do you need to kill to be a serial killer? You have some super vague definition of consciousness that you can't even pinpoint. So it's like, yeah. Are you conscious right now? Does it feel very vague? I guess it feels kind of vague for my end. I think you're pretty conscious. Right, we don't know. We have to assume. We truly don't know. We act as though we are. We truly don't know. I truly can't figure out if any other person in this conversation is conscious or not. It's so mysterious. This is legitimate. This is a legitimate debate. It's not. No, this is not a legitimate debate. The legitimate debate is gonna be like, what are the precise areas? No, no, no, it's not. There might be debates about the precise, there might be debates about the precise mechanisms that give rise to consciousness, but nobody's debating if we are or it's conscious. That is squarely in the realm of esoteric philosophy that we'll write papers back and forth because we're totally done. It's not that I don't like it. I don't like that you won't call the woman a serial killer when she has met all of your definitions for murdering fucking fetuses over and over again. I don't know why you won't call her a serial killer. This one from OG snoop says, destiny are people with Down syndrome conscious. Yeah, they seem to have the necessary structure in the brain to have conscious experiences. So yeah, of course. Made by Jim Bob says destiny a human is and becoming at every moment from conception to death. Steven was once a fetus, same human being different stage. And a building was once, you know, a bunch of discrete materials. It doesn't make the discrete materials a building. You're talking about composition and that's different. I'm not talking about composition. I'm talking about emergence and ontology. When something becomes something as the emergence of other things coming together, it does not mean that it is the things that was proceeding it. So if I lay out a hundred boards on a deck, I don't say, oh, those boards are a boat because I'm about to hammer them all together and make a boat. They are fundamentally something different. The DNA is already combined though. It doesn't matter DNA in and of itself. If I cut my finger off, my finger has all the DNA of my body. When we talk about, this is actually a topic of metaphysics is substance. There's a difference between like the substance of a thing and the relationship of things to make another thing. An emergent thing that appears is fundamentally different than the discrete parts that make that thing up. If I cut off an arm and I hand it to you, or if I cut off all the pieces of a body and give it to you, I can't say, oh, look, it's a human. It's not human because it's not put together like a human. The human itself is fundamentally different than the sum of its parts and the things that exist discreetly beneath it. Yeah, there's an endo says, Rachel. Biologists aren't concerned with moral epistemology. Quote unquote, human is specifically a biological definition. Why? I don't know, we read that one, sorry. Bull of Spaghetti says, condescension doesn't cover up pure idiocy. Okay, I don't know who that was. I don't know who that was. Who said four? Coffee mom, thanks so much, has don't conflate abortion with infanticide, thanks. Okay. This one doesn't explain why, but. Just the obligatory quote, what about the test of the unfaithful wife in the book of Numbers? Unquote, question for brolifers, biblical abortion. I don't use the Bible as a source for this particular argument because that would be hypocritical. I'm not a Christian. So I don't know what that story, I've read the Bible. I can't remember that story. So I can't deconstruct it any meaningful way. Yeah, and I would give the same answer I gave earlier, which is that I don't believe you can properly interpret the Bible without the Orthodox church. So that's why I don't argue these things. This one coming in from Bull of Spaghetti says, prove that there is a soul. What is the evidence for a soul? Well, you can't prove the existence of a soul any more than you can prove the existence of consciousness. It certainly seems that way, right? We all operate as if there's consciousness. We all operate and act as if there's a soul. But what do you mean by prove it? Like, do you want material proof or you know what I mean? That's when you get into, can you materially prove these things or are we having a metaphysical debate? What gives rise to a soul? God. Okay, if I show you a desk, does a desk have a soul? No. If I show you a human foot, does that have a soul? The foot in and of itself. If I just cut a foot off and I give it to you, does this have the soul of a person? No. So, okay, so you can tell me where it's not. Can you draw some kind of boundary around where it is? Okay, I will try to, but again, we're getting into a theological debate here. In orthodoxy, we have something called in essence, energy's distinction. We don't think that human beings are just substance and we don't think they're just energy. We think they're a combination of both. And we would believe that when you are conceived, you have something called a noose, which is similar to the Western concept of a soul, which combines your mental faculties with your emotional faculties and your spiritual faculties. Where are the faculties found? There's not a physical location necessarily, but when people talk about the heart, that's usually what they mean. Then again, you get into a metaphysical debate. So if somebody has like, it's a physical location, not everything. So like consciousness doesn't have a physical location either. Well, yes, it does. It arises from a physical location. No, a lot of scientists don't believe that the brain is where consciousness necessarily resides. Again, if you get into scientific philosophy, I challenge you to find me a single published scientist that thinks that consciousness arises from something that's not the brain. I will send you some discourse between scientific philosophers. No, I don't want somebody to do the philosophy of science. That's a fundamentally different topic. The philosophy of science is extremely important. You can't do science without it. Unfortunately, you absolutely can. No. So philosophy of science is a markedly, yes. Philosophy of science is a markedly different thing than the practice or exercise of science. Well, then you're a materialist. Then you're talking about only materialism. So then it's a whole nother debate. Oh, he says two questions for Rachel. Rachel, you were getting so much attention. It's not even funny. They said, should you be forced to donate organs to someone that is dying? No. And two, do you understand that women can't choose to be pregnant? I totally disagree with that. Yeah, they can. Yeah, they can totally choose. Oh, no, no, no. No, in all scenarios, maybe. In my case, we used the condom. It broke. Now, let's say for a rape. You just don't have sex, and then you'll never get pregnant. Well, that was not the question. If you just don't have sex, you can choose to never get pregnant, right? Because they go to the monastery and they never have sex and they don't ever have to worry about it. The way the question was, the phrasing of the question was poor. The phrasing of the question was poor. It is, of course, possible for a woman to choose to get pregnant if she, you know, because that's how people plan families, right? You can choose to be pregnant if you engage in certain activities. It is also true to say that sometimes a woman falls pregnant by accident, so she didn't choose to be pregnant in that scenario. Or without her choice. A woman can be pregnant without her choice. Yeah, but you can also, there is a foolproof way to not get pregnant if you don't want to get pregnant, and that is a fact. And this is why Christianity is losing. To sit up here and tell people they can't have sex. I'm not making a Christian argument. That's a secular argument. I'm not making a Christian argument. You don't want to get pregnant, don't have sex. This is so stupid. No, it's logically correct, and it's true, and it's a fact. Is that not correct? If you don't have sex, are you going to get pregnant, Trie? To be fair, Trie, yeah, abstinence. To be fair, abstinence, however unlikely it is, is a really good way of not getting pregnant. Right. You might not like it. You might be a most wanted, but it's true. Are you guys saying, realistically, that if you're teaching abstinence, which is what they're doing in a Christian church and people still getting pregnant up in the church? No, no, no. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. That's a separate argument. That's a separate thing. Trie, Trie, Trie, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not Trie, I'm not saying that people are actually. I'll answer your question. Yes, it's true. If a woman does not have sex, she can't get pregnant. Exactly. I will yield. Yeah, but I'm talking to you, I'm talking to him. I will yield to that. What I'm saying is, is that the question is, I will say that a woman, like you said earlier, a woman can have sex and choose not to get pregnant. She can use a condom. She can also be on birth control. These things are not 100% effective. But if she makes the conscious effort to prevent pregnancy and she gets pregnant, I believe it's just evil to make her have a baby if she doesn't want to, especially if she's in poverty and especially if she's 10 years old as in that story you shared earlier. Well, these, yeah. Where's this one coming from? Creepfighter says, is the soul as detectable as, okay, that's weird. Rhettx101 says, destiny slash treat, if lines are arbitrary and meaningful conscious experience is hard to define, would it be reasonable to say a person with an encephaly has a reduced conscious experience and perhaps meaningless? Wouldn't it makes more sense to put the line at the point when the equipment develops? That's where I put the line at, but the equipment develops for around 20 to 24 weeks. Gotcha, on range process, congratulations on discovering fetal transplant. Gnostic informants says, Rachel, what happens to souls of aborted babies? Do they go to hell? If they go straight to heaven for being sinless, then why risk hell from world sin? Again, this is a conversation that I cannot give you my entire theology. It would take a long time to give you my entire theology. All the different Christian churches disagree on this. My church's position is that we don't 100% know. We rely on God to make that decision, we assume, and we think it's highly likely that because they have not been able to commit a sin that of course aborted babies would go to heaven. That is generally the position of the church, but there's a lot of things that my church doesn't say we know unequivocally for sure because we don't know the mind of God. Again, it's a separate argument. I did not make a single Christian argument in this entire debate, yet all the questions are, well, if God real, why that thing happened? Explain Christian woman, so. That's how it goes though. That's just how that goes. Both spaghetti says, does Rachel agree with Noah's flood? There's a lot of going into Christian type arguments or against this argument, but we'll go into Roger Bernanke says, Kenan and Rachel, is there no difference for you between an abortion one week after conception and an abortion one week before delivery, such as maybe eight months, eight and a half months into it? If there is, then why? Well, the difference is purely the matter, I suppose, that's been removed from the uterus, but the result is the same and entire human timeline has been stopped. So yeah, okay. An abortion not one week in, you're dealing with, I don't know how many cells. I did say someone with a calculator could work it out. If you're doing, you're talking about abortion one week before birth. Well, I mean, that's, you're just killing a full grown baby at that point, but the product is the same, no more human life to worry about. Yeah, it's just a matter of degree. It's just a matter of degree at that point. It's third degree murder versus first degree murder, something along those lines. I'm not trying to make a perfect analogy, but it's a matter of degree. Gotcha. Endos says, Rachel, it's not, quote, this thing depends on me so I can kill it. Instead, it's, quote, this thing uses my body and I have a right to get my body back. Should people have that right to get their body back from it being used? Well, the fetus has a body as well. The baby has a body. The baby is a body. And if we're going to make a, we never really got into a personal autonomy argument on this panel, but it's one of the easiest to defeat because then you can just pose the question, at what point does someone have bodily autonomy? Is it at two weeks gestation? Is it at six months gestation? Is it after birth? Is it at two years old? There's a body in your body. You have bodily autonomy perhaps, but why would then that body within your body not also have bodily autonomy? You got this one coming in from do appreciate your question. Farron Salas says question for Rachel. Since you are relying on a metaphysical faith based argument to bolster your position like the soul, do you not see that as a defeater to your own position? No, because all of the arguments I was trying to make were secular arguments. And Destiny and I have a bit of a history where we tend to push each other into this metaphysical area where we are trying to just deconstruct each other's philosophy. My arguments against abortion and my opening statement, and if I do get to make a closing statement are secular arguments, which is that it has nothing to do with metaphysics or God or the Bible or my religion. They're secular arguments that are the same as Kendens. This one from Rattox 101. Go ahead, Kevin. No, no, no, I was just gonna reiterate what I said earlier in the conversation, which is if you are a Christian and you make a Christian argument, my, the automatic counter-argument is I'm not a Christian, stick it up your crack, you know. That's why you can't argue these things with a religious perspective. Among religionists that have a shared faith system, that's fine, but if you're a Muslim and you want to make an Islamic case against abortion, the instant response is I'm not a Muslim, go away. And that, so again, there's no point of making religious arguments like that. Anyway, I don't know what that adds to the conversation, but you know, Carol. Rattox 101 says, Tree, if personhood is granted at conception, then why then would you also consider making an omelette animal cruelty? No, because omelettes are made of unfertilized eggs for a start. I'm also vegan, so. Well, I mean, I'm practically a vegetarian at this point, but no, you don't make omelettes with fertilized chicken eggs. You make omelettes with eggs. If the egg is technically the chicken's period, that nothing's happened there, it's just innate, it's just tissue in a shell. So no, it's, I don't. You've got to have me and Tree back to debate how she can be vegan and be pro-abortion because that's a doozy. We'll have to do that one. Juicy. Tree, or Chance 101 says, Tree and destiny win, in my opinion. You got a fan out there. Rocky Shepherd says, is abording biological life being formed in the womb? The same as killing a born baby. No, because I would say born babies have all the structures in place necessary to be having some sort of conscious experience, and then once that experience is happening, you probably protect that experience. Like I said before, I think that's about 20 to 24 weeks in gestation. Rocky Shepherd says, yeah, I don't know. Ken didn't know that you're a non-religious pro-life person, so I don't know if these are, these aren't super useful to your pro-life position. Rocky Shepherd says, the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. I'm not sure what you're getting at there, Rachel, but I think this is for you. Yeah, a beautiful phrasing, but as I say, try to avoid religious arguments. Yeah, and if- I try to avoid religious arguments. If I was having this panel with people who wanted to do purely a metaphysical argumentation, I would take the transcendental argument for God. They might take a different position and then we would battle it out on that, but that's not the nature of this panel. I'm arguing with three secularists. I'm not going to sit here and prattle on about the transcendental argument for God and all that philosophy that goes into that, because you guys are all just going to go, I don't care, right? So there's seven- Well, I'd be interested to hear those arguments. I just don't believe that they're, I just don't have any faith in them. So, you know, feel free to educate me on Orthodox Christian views or when it comes to revulsion. But yeah, I mean, it's not going to persuade people outside the church. And you know that, you accept that. So yeah. Coming on from JFMD says, MD here, I think they mean medical doctor, Rachel would help herself by studying neurobiology. They say all scientists believe consciousness is neurophysiological. How do pro-lifers justify that one body has a right to another for survival? Well, that's the thing is that gets into the bodily autonomy argument. We're saying both our bodies, right? The fetus has a body, the mother has a body. When you try to argue that with pro-choice people, they will say, well, yeah, but the mother has lived longer and they'll try to like qualify that the mother's life matters more because she's had more experience or like other vague argumentation like that. And it's like, if we're going to argue bodily autonomy, the fetus has a body, the baby has a body. Wait, that's not even the bodily autonomy arguments. That's the worst bodily autonomy I've ever heard. The difference would be is that the mother has a body and the baby has a body, the baby's body is aggressing on the mother's body. That's the difference. How would it be, see, but then we're gonna get into a debate which I don't want to do in the Q and A. We don't have to, but I'm just saying that the formation, it is aggressing. It's consuming resources from your body whether or not you consent to it. That is a form of aggression, absolutely. I'm just saying that if you want to have the bodily autonomy argument, saying that like, well, the mother's older and live longer, that's not the bodily autonomy argument. That's just some crazy Twitter argument. I've never heard them in my life. The bodily autonomy argument is you have a parasite inside of you that is aggressing against you. It's stealing resources and it's stealing, kind of is, and it's stealing resources from your body and that's why you have the right to remove it is self-defense. That's the bodily autonomy argument. No, there is an argument that it's actually a symbiotic relationship because the fetus, whereas it's growing, works with the mother for its own survival. You know, it's in the interest of the developing baby to keep the mother alive. It provides stem cells and those sorts of things. No, no. Well, then you're saying that reproduction is possible. Hold on, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You're saying reproduction is hostile to the organism? That doesn't make sense even if you believe in evolution. That wouldn't make sense. It absolutely makes sense. How would that make sense evolutionarily? That reproduction would be hostile to the host's organism. Well, there's more to sickness, Rachel. Because, yeah, wait, hold on. Yeah, Jesus, not even morning sickness. Look at fatality rates of mothers delivering children before we had modern medicine. Like, you can't just say that evolution gives us an answer to everything very neatly and cleanly. Like, pregnancy and delivering children is a cost of survival. It's not a benefit to it. So if you're having an ethical argument, you could say it's worth the cost, is all I'm saying. I'm saying that's a whole separate argument. That doesn't make it a symbiotic relationship. There's never been a point in history where I was like, oh, God, my body's weak and I'm fucked. And I'm going to get pregnant so that my feet is going to bolster me like it's a two player game. No, no. There's actually a number of medical conditions that do improve during pregnancy. That is a thing. Destiny, I didn't make that argument. I didn't say that pregnancy gives the woman superpowers. What I said was is that the word parasite implies that it just sucks the nutrient. It just sucks things out of the woman's body. Of course, pregnancy is difficult. Of course, people, women have died in childbirth. We are all aware of this. But there is our elements of symbiosis going on in that relationship. It is not purely the fetus takes and the mother gets nothing. I mean, if you're going to be that, then you can call literally every single parasitic relationship because parasites generally don't want their hosts to die. But I mean, it's just a silly argument to make. Fetuses are a drag on a woman's body almost universally. It's one that I have seen embryologists make. So I'm only going by what medical journals I've read on this topic. So if you don't like that argument, that's absolutely fine. But I mean, I'm just merely pointing out that the word parasite is because of its negative connotations doesn't quite represent the relationship between mother and baby and mother and fetus. That's it. That's what I'm making. Okay, well, do you think that I'm just curious? I just, just so I can get my head straight because I don't know, for everybody in this call, do you think that a woman's body is in a more powerful state or a more compromised state when she is pregnant? I don't see what that has to do with the ethics of a person. You never ask a question. That's a net, that's a net. I just can't have an answer to that. She never asks the questions where she gets caught, dude. That's her M.O. I don't think a woman is more powerful when she's pregnant. And I would imagine that she is more compromised in the sense that because she's carrying a baby and obviously her belly swells and therefore walking becomes incredibly difficult and things like that. But that doesn't address the point that I made. Sure. I just, I don't think that like fetuses in general are taking way more than they're giving. That's the point. What does that have to do with the ethics of abortion though? It doesn't. Every single argument isn't about every single thing you want it to be. We were having a very narrow description or a very narrow discussion on whether or not a fetus could be seen as like parasitic. By definition, it's not a parasite because it can't be a parasite of the same species. But in terms of function, fetuses are a drag on the host every time. So hence the aggression part because that's what we were talking about. For bodily autonomy, the bodily autonomy argument is one of self-defense. You're defending your body against an aggressive parasitic thing that is a drain on you. And then I heard counter arguments to you guys like, well, it's not always a drain, which is an insane thing to say about a pregnancy. Well, I've had five of them and I don't think you could really say it's always a drain. No. Rachel, this is the most bad faith, unbelievably stupid thing you could ever possibly say. Don't a bunch of you pro-choice people always say, well, a lot of women don't even know they're pregnant until like six months. If that could be. Six months? Rachel, Rachel, Rachel, I am not an incel. Please, hold on, stop. I am not an incel. We'll say a lot of women don't know they're pregnant. We're not here to talk to retard or about what retards say. Okay, that's not what the conversation is about. You can probably go like one or two or three months sometimes without knowing you're pregnant in exceptional cases. In exceptional cases, yeah, some an anorexic woman or somebody that just doesn't show well. What's on who's obese? It's usually obese. Or maybe yeah, maybe can go six. It's usually obese people. Sure, or it could be obese. Sure, I've seen anorexic women that don't show well either. There's a lot of like very crazy outlying exceptions, maybe, but generally by most people are gonna know by like two or three months that they're pregnant, generally speaking, especially if they're watching their periods and everything. Especially because you usually know, you usually start to have other symptoms. Right, but again, it's like if you're gonna sit here and say, oh, fetus is a drain on the mother. It's like, well, okay, but I'm a drain on society. If you get into a utilitarian... Oh my God, hold on. I am so sorry. I forgot that I needed to qualify my statement 50 million times over. Otherwise you're gonna take the most bad faith interpretation possible. Let me amend the statement slightly for you. Rachel, Rachel, Rachel, Rachel. The fetus is going to be a larger drain the longer you get into gestation. You are absolutely correct. You fucking owned me when you said, oh really? You think they're a drain? How big of a drain is a one week old fetus then, honey? You got me there, I fucked up. So let me go back and amend my statement and tell you that as the pregnancy goes on, it becomes a larger and larger and larger drain through the second and third trimester. Is that better for you? Well, yeah, I guess, but it's arguable and I don't think it's pertinent to the ethics of abortion. It's, wait, you think it's arguable whether being six or seven months pregnant leaves you in a more compromised or a more empowered state? You think that's arguable? I think it depends on what you're talking about specifically and that it's not... Sure, what could I possibly be talking about where being six or seven months pregnant is an asset to you versus a liability to your body? Well, it's a great asset to me if I'm passing on my genetics. Isn't that the purpose of life? I mean, from an evolution perspective, me getting to reproduce and pass on my genetics is like... Can you give me one thing that isn't the thing itself? So yeah, it is true that being pregnant, one of the benefits to your body of being pregnant is that you are pregnant. Can you give me something besides being pregnant as the benefit to being pregnant? So you again, you want a material benefit to pregnancy? Sure, as I said, there are many conditions which actually improve. In fact, I had an autoimmune condition that improved when I was pregnant. I felt better. I didn't have as many issues. I didn't have as many problems. Do you think that autoimmune conditions, so as a woman that's been pregnant multiple times, I'm sure you've heard that with second and third pregnancies... I think James wants to move on, but maybe we could do this on your channel. Okay, sure, I agree. I just want to back up real quick to show that this is why I like to take a step back from the base to see some crazy shit being said. When you have people unironically making the argument, they're like, oh yeah, well sometimes pregnancy is really good for your body, LOL. You can see that on a macro level, okay, some wild shit is being said, probably getting away from reality. It's getting raped can be a positive experience. It doesn't mean that we advocate for everybody to try it. This one from Luis Montes de Oca. Thanks for your question. It says, for destiny, do you believe that there is a difference between conception and contraception when it comes to protecting the potentiality for consciousness? Maybe, when you talk about the potentiality of things, you're talking about different things than what the thing is itself. Like that's a whole other classification of things. Like a potential life can literally be like a sperm and egg could be potential life when they're brought together or a zygote could be potential life or fucking two people going to a school dance where their son travels back to the future to play the right rock song and get in the furniture. That could be a potential life, right? You see him disappearing from the picture when the guy gets into a fight and the, right? So I mean, like a whole bunch of things could be potential life. That's just like a whole vague concept to talk about when you wanna go deeper into it. This one coming in from Chicky Nuggets says, Rachel, do you say that women should only have the right to her own body when it had been violated by another man? Can you repeat the question? I'm not sure of the phrasing. Do you say that women should only have the right to their own body when it has been violated by another man? I think what the person means is, am I saying that women only have a right to their body when they have not been violated by another man? I'm guessing that that's what the person is saying. I think so. Yeah, I would say that the crime of rape is separate from the abortion. Again, this is gonna be a very emotional thing. People are gonna freak out, they're gonna have tons of feelings and they're gonna get a lot of feelings wrapped up in it. Too much out of have rape babies. But logically, no, I'm not saying what I want. I'm not advocating, I'm not saying an opinion. I'm not saying this is what you must do or what you should do. I'm saying that the fact of the matter is that whether or not it's ethical to kill a baby that's a product of rape is separate from the ethics of the rape itself. So it's a whole separate topic. And I don't necessarily, my conception of human rights is probably not like analogous to what this person is saying because they're talking about like women's right to her body and I don't, that's a whole nother thing too. You got it. What are you gonna say? I don't believe a woman has a right to her own body. I don't believe that, I believe that people have a natural right to their own body in some sense. But again, it's whether we're talking about ethics or legality when we're talking about rights. So. You got it. This one coming in from Dufres. Your question below, Spiatti says to rephrase the question, some women can't get pregnant no matter how much sex they have. How can people control if sperm meets the egg? Well, again, if you... Yeah, go ahead, Kenan. No, the argument is, is that if you engage in behaviors that you know where you know there's a likelihood of conception, then obviously it is your responsibility to ensure that if you don't want to be pregnant that you take certain steps. As Tree has pointed out, of course, contraception is not 100% foolproof. It's still possible to wear a condom and it splits or there's a hole in it or something, you know, but yeah, I don't know, I'm just splitting the headache at this point. So I was gonna say, James, could you just repeat the question for me to make sure I've answered all the points of it? Yeah, it was just that. Some women can't get pregnant no matter how much sex they have. And then they said, how can people control if sperm meets the egg? Well, yeah, you could just make sure that the sperm isn't anywhere in the uterus. That's the argument, I suppose. Right. You could take steps to make sure that there is no sperm in your uterus. It doesn't always work, but yeah, you can work on that. It's a pretty obvious answer. This one from Real Men Love Blueberry. Waffle says, Rachel, if you thought God genuinely ordered in fantasy, would it be moral? How can you dodge this? Let's see. You said, what do you think? If you thought God genuinely ordered in fantasy, is it moral in that case? Again, it doesn't have anything to do with abortion, and I would have to give you a whole lesson on Bible hermeneutics in order to properly position that question of would God order in fantasy? Well, it would go against the necessary characteristics of God, and we'd have to get into a whole separate debate. So again, sorry, guys, I'm not trying to be uncharitable. It's just that I'm not a Western Christian. I'm not Protestant or Roman Catholic. We have a different interpretation of the religion and the Bible as a whole that is probably a little bit outside your purview, and I don't wanna soak up everybody's time trying to explain that. This one from Jupiter Garmin says, Rachel says, don't have sex, don't get pregnant. They said, but Rachel, how can you say that if you believe that a virgin occurred, or a miracle occurred 2000 years ago where a virgin gave birth? Well, I suppose if you are incarnated with the living God, but by the way, Mary did consent to that. An angel of Lord came to her and told her that this was the plan, and she said, let it be me. So we do believe that she did consent to that. So there's that. I'm sorry, I'm not trolling. Do you have a different Bible? I'm not trolling. No, it's in the Bible. If you look it up, when the angel of Lord came to Mary, she said, let it be me. Okay. This one, pure Aussie gold says, pro-choice, people, you already made your choice. Now you gotta be an adult and deal with it. How hard is it to use contraception? Is, they said, I remember one, the V was precious, but now you all wanna play ring toss. Wow, what a great question. Well, there are consequences to behavior if he's right about that. The consequence of like, well, hold on. We're not arguing about whether there ought to be consequences or whether consequences exist or not. It's whether we're killing a baby or not. That's the whole question, right? And right. And we're saying if getting pregnant is the worst thing you can imagine, it's gonna ruin your whole life. There's a really easy way to just make sure that doesn't happen, that's all. This one from Rodgers. Okay. Oh, James, what do you got? Rocky Shepherd says, question is for Rachel. Is abortion a biological life in the womb the same as murder of a baby that is born? Again, that's a matter of degree. Yes, it is, but it would be maybe closer to like third degree murder versus first degree murder. But yes, I would say that they both would be. You got it. JFMD says, apologies, but Kenden's approach to obs... Let me know if I say this right. Obstetrics is not correct. They said pregnancy is not symbiotic and can often be deleterious. And then in parentheses, they put such as heart failure, pre-E or pre-EF or H-E-L-L-P, help acronym... Well, as I say, as I'm not a medical man, I'm sure that there are, you know, what do I know about this sort of thing? But I do know from reading medical, so that there is some symbiosis. You do get some benefits from being pregnant in at least some scenarios. So I'm not suggesting, you know, it's all glory and that a woman experience is no inconvenience or whatever. I'm merely pointing out that the fetus does actually give back to the mother in some circumstances. That's it. I mean, as I say, I don't have a medical degree, so I'm not going to be able to comment intelligently on embryology or... I think there's an important distinction that Kenden and I would make as well, which is that I would assume he's on board with me in saying that in the very rare fringe cases that you have to like take a baby early because of a medical issue, the difference is that in abortion, you kill the baby before it comes out. Whereas most of the time, things like preeclampsia happen and the third trimester and the baby can be delivered early. Now you can deliver the baby and if it does not survive, despite everyone's best efforts, that's different than killing it inside the womb and then extracting it, right? So in cases of medically necessary early delivery, I don't think anyone has any problems with that, but that's different than going in and killing the baby while it's in the womb and then just extracting it. There's one coming in from only a couple more questions left. Dianne Neur says, Tree, how does punishing the child for the sins of the father make sense to you? It doesn't. I don't know, when he said, but when he said punishing the sins of the father, you're telling me like, I mean, I was punished. Is that what you're talking about? It doesn't. Yeah, I don't exactly understand what you're talking about. I think, I think, I think, is that... It's not just for looking like my dad. That was the reason why I took a lot of blows by my mom because I reminded her of my father so much. Is that, it's sort of for interrupting Tree, but is that not a question about pregnancy through rape? The idea that, you know, the father has committed the sin by raping a woman, but the woman then aborts his child. The child is innocent of any crime. Is that what they're alluding to? Or am I just making that up out of whole cloth? I don't know. I don't know what there's. There's not enough detail. There is, there really is. It's not enough in there, so. This one coming in from, Bull of Spaghetti says, does Rachel think women should raise S.A. babies? I don't know what S.A. means this, like, salt after sexual assault. Sexual assault, yeah. Sexual assault, okay. I'm not saying they need to raise them. I know a couple of people that I'm acquainted with online who are pro-life activists who were the product of sexual assault and they do argue that they don't think it's ethical to kill babies who are the product of that. I don't see why you couldn't give birth and then put the baby at production if you didn't want to raise it. My mother a few years ago, she befriended a Jehovah's Witness and as I'm sure everybody knows, Jehovah's Witnesses believe abortion is murder and therefore they won't take life in any circumstance. And she felt pregnant by rape. She was raped, was obviously a renders. And she was encouraged to have an abortion. She said no because it conflicted with her faith and she had to wrestle with that. She's given birth to the child, she's now raising it and the way she squares in her head is that something good, the child came out something evil. That is one way of looking at the, I'm not saying everybody should think like that. I'm merely pointing out that, you know, there are people who choose to raise the children of those horrendous crimes. So I'll leave that as inspiration for anybody else. Does Rachel not understand that women die from childbirth? Sure I do, but we are not talking about women dying from childbirth. In fact, I'm not aware of a single medical case where they had to kill the baby in order to save the mother. Again, deliver the baby early to save the mother, sure. Kill it inside the woman then extract it to save the mother, no. So yes, women can die in childbirth. There are instances where you have to take the baby early. You're not counting ectopic pregnancies here, I guess? Well, ectopic pregnancy is not... There's no possible way unless they come up with some way to implant that, you can't do anything about it. Again, I'm talking about when we can voluntarily intervene to stop the life of a baby. That's what we're talking about. Okay, and you don't think there are ever times where mothers might become so sick in the first trimester that like the pregnancy becomes incredibly like arduous for the woman's body. So like say for instance, when she gets pregnant and then also discovers that she has cancer, that's a compossible or I'm sure there have been cases of this where... I'm not saying that about a different... Well, sure, I know, but in the case of like, I'm only saying this because you made the really strong statement of like, there's never been a case where you need to perform an abortion where the baby can't be saved. I'm sure there have been cases where... No, no, no, I don't mean where the baby can't be saved. I'm saying like, so if that were the case, and then you are, this is an equivalent argument, right? Where if it were the first trimester and something came up where it was going to be either a death sentence for the mother or a death sentence for the baby, then either way, you're out of life. And in that case, I would grant the... I'm not gonna sit here and argue that. I would grant that to you because it's not worth even trying to defend and it's morally neutral in that case because it's a life for a life. What I'm talking about is people will try to argue that at 20 weeks, 24 weeks, 30 weeks, something like that, the mother develops high blood pressure preeclampsia or another condition. Therefore they need an abortion. I'm saying at that point, you can deliver the baby, try to save it. If it doesn't survive, everyone did their best. There's nothing you can do. That's different than going in and killing it in the womb and then just extracting it. You got it. This one coming in from, last question. Pancake, great, asked this very early. So we're gonna get this one in. Thanks very much to those biologists. They said, Kenden, biologists classify sperm as very much alive. Does that mean that sex without impregnation could be seen as genocide? No, sperm are not a species. They're not a genus. You can't commit genocide against sperm. That doesn't make sense. This last one, the real last one. Aftershock says, for the pro-choice, is your hypothetical where a human's brain is taken out, doesn't take into account that it will, they emphasize, get its brain in nine months. Not never, like the hypothetical suggests. What? They said, I was trying to remember where it was, the hypothetical where a human's brain is taken out. Okay. They say, this doesn't take into account that it will get its brain in nine months. Namely, that human that had its brain taken out will get its brain in nine months. They say, not never. Oh, they were trying to point to some earlier. I mean, if you're gonna get your brain back, then you would say like, oh, well then there's, because there was some preference that was asserted by something that can make those assertions. And it's made that and it's coming back, so of course you would respect it, right? Like a person going to sleep. You got it. With that, folks, we wanna say, our guest or link to the description, you have heard them for, it's been what, two and a half hours, if you wanna hear more, if you wanna learn more about their views, which hey, I mean, you must, there's gotta be somebody on this panel where you're kinda like, yeah, I identify it. You know, you felt like you had a dog in the fight. In that case, their links are below. What are you waiting for? Go ahead and click on those links so that you can learn more about their views. We do appreciate our guests. I wanna give a huge thank you. Destiny Tree, Rachel and Kenan, it has been a true pleasure to have you here today. Thank you. Thank you for inviting us. My pleasure and I'll be right back in just a moment with a quick post-credits scene about upcoming debates, folks, so stick around and thanks so much for being with us, folks. Amazing, my dear friends, give me a moment. I'm just gonna pull up my camera here. Wanna say again, huge thanks to our guests. Seriously, they are the lifeblood of the channel. I mean, that's putting it lightly. My dear friends, the guests that we have had on tonight, they really are. If it wasn't for them, this channel just wouldn't exist. Imagine me debating myself every night. Terrible channel idea, but with all of our guests, that makes it a fun time. So we really do appreciate our guests. Let me, there we go. We're back in terms of the Zoom is up and ready. There we go. All right, thanks for your patience. All right, here we go. Wanna say our guests are linked in the description, including if you're listening via the podcast, we put our guest links there. Wanna say hello to you in the old live chat. Wanna say I've got a little bit of battery and then I've got to run for real. For some, I noticed during the debate, I don't know if you noticed at the beginning, I was looking all over the place on the floor because I realized it was like, oh gosh, where did I put my other charger? Because I used two computers. I got one for the actual streaming computer. I don't have one for the one that I used to watch the live chat. Very embarrassing. So I only have a little bit before this battery runs out. Wanna say thanks for being with us. Good to see you there in the old live chat. Side Show Nav is our head moderator if you're new here at Modern Day Debate. We are a neutral platform, hosting debates on science, religion, and politics and our goal, our vision that we are passionate about. We love doing this. I honestly love Modern Day Debate. I see myself doing it for the rest of my life. I really enjoy it that much that I'm like, hey, I'm just passionate, but it's fun and it's exciting to do new things here. Is our vision is to provide a neutral platform so that everybody has their chance to make their case on a level playing field. You could say when it comes to tolerance and when it comes to inclusivity, we are radical. So we have had some controversial people in the past. We will have some controversial people in the future. I cannot tell you who yet, because it's not confirmed yet and I wanna be a professional because I don't want them to say, hey, James, like we haven't actually confirmed yet that we're gonna come on Modern Day Debate. But I can tell you there's going to be somebody on Modern Day Debate, likely this summer who will, it will shake the foundations of the debate world. We're really excited about that and believe me, it's going to be a barn burner and I am pumped for it. But I wanna say, before I talk more about upcoming debates, let me say hello in the old chat. Winter sun extras, thanks for being with us. General Balls Act, good to see us. Good to see you. And Crystal Rock, thanks for being with us. As well as Let's Farm, good to see you. It says Modern Day Debate has a discord. Here is the link. That's true, we have a discord and Let's Farm has done a fantastic job. He's kind of the lead at the discord. The same way that, like I said, SITRONAV is kind of the lead of the Moderator's Sure Modern Day Debate. They have done a fantastic job in terms of putting those things together, namely the discord in Let's Farm's case and SITRONAV and keeping the chat here on YouTube reasonable and civil, kind of civil. And we do appreciate that so much. Brooks Sparrow is kind of the lead mod at Twitch. I highly encourage you folks. If you didn't know, we do have a Twitch channel and it is live right now. It's got 13. So our Twitch is, it's a small, a little more quiet community. Saying hello to you there in the old live Twitch chat, CrazyFist89, Fun12, and everybody else watching there in the old live chat. I see those two, you guys have been going back and forth a lot. But we are also, we are on D-Live. I don't know if any of you guys used D-Live, only about one person uses D-Live out there. But it is a streaming service that we are on and we are on a podcast for real. If you didn't know that, Moderator's Day Debate on any podcast app. I'm talking to any. So Spotify, of course. Apple Podcast, duh. What's that one with the heart, like heartfelt podcast? I heart radio, that's what it is. We're on there too. We're also on Google Podcast, Attic, you name it. We are on every single podcast app. You believe me? I'm not making this up. Also though, so if you're listening, you're like, yeah, I like the debates are fun. I get it, I enjoy it. It clicks with me. Want to say, you want to save on your data. If you are like me, you're thinking like, I like being frugal, I will be honest. I'm always looking for ways to be frugal and I'm proud of it. And I would say, hey, folks, be frugal with your data. If you don't have unlimited data or maybe you're like, yeah, you know, it's like pretty convenient. You don't even have to rely on your data because here's the thing. Let's say you're on a train and the train goes into a tunnel on your commute to work, something like that, whatever it is. And you're like, ah, I have unlimited data but I still can't listen to the debate because I can't get access to my data while I'm in this tunnel, whatever it is. You can download the debate. See at the bottom right of your screen? Stitcher, Apple Podcast, Spotify, Podcast Attic. You can download it on any of those apps. And then, even if you don't have unlimited data, so if you're like, yeah, I don't have unlimited data, you know, I've got to be wise with how much data I use. Well, no problem because you've got it downloaded in one of those apps. Or you go through a tunnel, no problem. You don't have to use your data. You don't need data, even if you have unlimited, you're like, hey, go through the tunnel, that's all right, I can still listen to it. How nice is that? Also, good to see you there in the old live chat, King101, glad you are back. Crystal, rock, good to see you again. Media and Fire, happy to have you. And Pancake, great, happy to have you here. Kimo, makey, may I say it right? Let me know. Jupiter, Darman, thanks for being with us. Middle left, pumped to have you with us, as well as John Smith and Lendi, aka Batasai. May I say it right? Let me know. Thank you so much for being a channel member. We do have channel memberships and we do have a Patreon. So if you want to become a member, you have access to these based and or red-pilled emoticons that I am about to use. For example, the one that I just put in the old live chat, if you're watching the live chat, where you can call somebody a soy boy or you can use this one, amazing. And you can also use the juicy one. I love these. Tapotzle did a fantastic job of making these emoticons for us. So I am indebted to Tapotzle. I'm super thankful for them for doing those. Now, Mark B, good to see you there in the old live chat. I see you. As well as Ariel Suarez says, cheers, James. Good night. Thanks so much for everything. Thank you so much. I appreciate your support. And that's right. If you're watching from Europe, it's got to be getting late over there now. Let me try it. Let me chest this out. What time? Because I think, I can't remember. I don't remember. I think Kenan is in Ireland. What time is it in Dublin, let's say? So for Kenan right now, it's presumably going on 2 a.m. So huge thank you to Kenan for staying up super late with us. And soul, soul, I see you there in the old live chat. Soul, soul said, my husband sent me here. Hopefully I get some good info. I am glad that you were here. I'm so glad that your husband sent you. And hey, you can share this channel folks. That's something if you are like, hey, you know what? I bet I've got a friend who might enjoy debates on this topic. Hey, you can click that share button below. It's there for a reason. If you click share and spread the word, that word of mouth, it works. It really does folks. So I do wanna say, hey, help us grow as we are absolutely determined. Like I said, to fulfill that vision of providing a neutral platform so that everybody can make their case on a level playing field. And we mean everybody. So Biden, backers, Bernie Bros, Trump supporters. What is DeSantis, what do you think would be like the proper nickname for Santas? Ron, Ron, let me think about this. If you back Ron DeSantis, we'll just say that. If you are a Christian, atheist, Muslim, agnostic, one of the many strange creatures in between, no matter who you are, black, white, gay, straight, you name it. There are just too many, all these different demographics. We are thrilled to have you here. Democrat, Republican, you name it. We are glad you are here. We are welcoming people from all walks of life. And it truly is. I don't know if you ever watch. During the old live chat, we have a very eclectic makeup at modern day debate. So there are tons of people from different walks of life. I noticed that earlier during the actual debate, if you guys saw the poll, I put, where do you lean politically? You know, it said right, left, center, or self-loathing, soy boy, all of them. We have all of them here and we are pumped about that. Want to say, mind your friends. We are pumped. Got to tell you a couple of things. We are working on this huge project where we have these in-person panels. They're going to be epic. They're going to be amazing. And you don't want to miss it. So we really think that these are going to be a huge step for modern day debate, the channel. If you are new to us, or maybe you've been here for a while, I've got to tell you, our story is just beginning. Believe me. And we're grateful. Don't get me wrong. I don't want to minimize, like I am absolutely grateful for the fact that we've hit 73,000 subscribers. Thank you guys. Seriously, you have helped in so many ways. And you guys are like, James, how, like, you're just saying that. You know, James, like, no, no, no. I'm not just blowing smoke up your ass. I'm serious. Here are some of the ways in which you've helped. One is that, it's true. Thanks so much for saying that in the old live chat. I see you there. Tioga says, hit like and Hannah Anderson says, please hit like and subscribe. And I agree. So we do appreciate that so much. That means more than you know. We really do appreciate it. It really does help. When you subscribe even, because you might be thinking like, well, how does that help you? It's like, well, it's social credibility. If people see more people subscribe to modern day debate, it's more people where they're like, huh, it's like, wow, a lot of people are following that. There must be something to it. It's social credibility. It's like on Amazon, if there are a lot of reviews. If you see that an, let's say an item has 4.5 stars and then another item, the same type of item that you're looking for has 4.5 stars. You're like, hey, they got the same rating. Obviously though, all things being equal, if that were the case, you'd go with the one with the most ratings. So likewise, hitting like really does help. Like we're at 274 likes. We can easily get to 280. It's just another six likes and we'll be at 280, which is a power number, you guys. That's huge. For a live stream, that's fantastic. It's a power number. 280, we can totally get there. So hitting like really does help seriously. YouTube does say that they use that in the algorithm where the more likes a video gets, they will actually recommend our videos more. And I've got to tell you, in terms of marketing, YouTube does a fantastic job. I would not want to start, I'm not trying to put anybody down. Whoever started on Twitch and not who wasn't on YouTube but they started on Twitch and they just naturally grew to be huge on Twitch, good for them. Like that's epic, that's awesome. Especially because it's so hard. Because YouTube recommends videos like a champ. Like they have recommended our videos so many times. And Twitch, they recommend videos too but not the way YouTube does. YouTube has recommended our videos nonstop and that has helped us grow immensely. And hitting like really does help. So we do appreciate that. We have crushed that goal. We're at 284 likes right now. So seriously, thanks for that support. That really does mean a lot. So we just blew past 280, thanks for that. And here's another one I mentioned earlier. If you hit share, if you've got somebody where you're like, oh man, they'd enjoy this debate. Or maybe you're like, man, I thought that one side did so well. Or so terribly, whatever it is. You're like, I've got to show the world this debate so they can see just how good or bad one side did. Well hey, go for it. Hit that share button and you sharing really does help a ton. For real, I'm not making this up. Likewise, during the Q and A when you submit questions, it would be so boring and quiet and just if it was just me coming up with questions on the spot, that wouldn't be very fun. Come on, real, let's get real. It wouldn't be very fun because it's like, ha, I cannot be as creative as the whole community when you guys are putting in questions. And it's not the case. So for example, today, even on a day like today, we don't always, sometimes we have debates where we just don't have enough time and we get crunched and we don't always get to the standard question. So what we have is we have super chat questions and then we have standard questions. We read the super chat questions first just to kind of say, hey, thank you so much for your support of the channel. And then we do try to read standard questions. It's not every single debate. Sometimes we do run out of time or like, sorry, we didn't get to the standard ones but as an example, tonight, we got two pancake great and aftershocks questions. Just standard questions, not super chat. So we always try our best to get through as many as we possibly can. And that's why you can tell like I usually kind of, you know, like kind of nudging the debaters during the Q and A because I'm trying to move through as many of your questions so you can be as involved as possible. And we do appreciate your creative input and being a part of the show in a real way. Like you really are a part of the show. We have blown past that goal of 280. We're now at 292 likes. That's fantastic. So thank you guys for that support. It means more than you know. Good to see you in the old live chat. Get the down and John Smith. And Dylan Motz. Thanks for coming by as well as lead tornado. Good to see you. Pure Aussie gold. Happy to have you. Pancake great says thanks James LOL. My pleasure pancake great. And Sadie Marie. Thanks for your support. It says if you enjoy the debate, please smash that like button. I couldn't agree more. Thank you for that Sadie. And let's see. Samar Rao says hi James. How was the setup for the live debates in Colorado going? Good Samar. Are you the person that was saying that you live in Colorado? Because we can use help. We are gonna need two camera people when we do these live, well they're not technically gonna be live because we're gonna edit them. When we do these in person dialogues in Fort Collins, that's where we're gonna do them. So if you are interested in helping, like let me know. Are any of you guys in Colorado? Let's see. What percent of the population in the United States in Colorado? Let's see. Population of Colorado. Okay, 5.6. And population of US. So 5.6 divided by 329.5. 5.6 divided by 329.5. So Colorado represents 1.7% of the United States population. So 1.7% of those who are watching right now at times, which is what it was, 400, means that about seven of you who are watching right now between YouTube and Twitch, oh wait, we got a global audience, I forgot. So it's less than that. It's less than that. But nonetheless, I forgot, not everybody's from the United States. Sorry. Sometimes they believe, yes, we are the only people in the world. But long story short, there's gotta be some of you in the live chat that are from Colorado. I know, yeah, for example, I don't want to, I don't want to, what's the word I'm looking for? Docs. I don't want to dox you, but Tioga is in Colorado, everybody. Okay, sorry, Tioga. So there's gotta be others though. Samar, were you one of them? Samar says, yes, that was me. Didn't think you would see that. I'll shoot you an email. Yeah, Samar, let me know, because for real, I could use your help. If, like, there are different things that I'm sure we could use your help with. One is potentially being a cameraman. And potentially, if you want, maybe as a person in the actual discussion, maybe. So that depends on this first one, we're almost full, so it would depend on what your views are. And nonetheless though, we plan on doing these once a month for two hours. And we have blown through that goal of 280 likes. We're at 301 likes. That's gigantic, you guys, for a live stream, that's fantastic to get to 300. So 301, to be exact. Anman says, thanks James, for an unbiased debate platform. Your work means a lot to everyone, regardless of bias opinions. The amount of topics your channel provides is amazing. Keep up the good work. Thanks, Anman. Seriously, that means a lot. It means more than you know. And I'm pumped about the future, so we're excited about that. And yeah, we are pumped about the variety. We also, thanks for your support. James Crawford says, James provides the content we need. Hit that like, thanks for that. I appreciate that butt. And I am pumped, though, you guys. Dent Carter says, I'm surprised people like Jimmy Dorchank, Kyle Kalinsky, or even Alex Jones, never took part on the modern day debate. It would be incredible. Well, one of those we are working on setting up this summer in a debate. So I have, let's see. Kyle Kalinsky, I can't even find his email out there. It's so hard. David Pakman actually responds to us. David Pakman's another name, another fellow that we'd like to get on because he's very well spoken, very well read. And so it would be a huge debate to have David on. And then Jank and Jimmy Dorch. Those guys are pretty, they're even on a higher level than Kyle, I think. I don't know, maybe. In terms of how many subs, I would guess Kyle has more subs, but frankly, we'd guess that Jimmy Dorch has more engagement. Jimmy Dorch, let me look up his YouTube channel. So Jimmy Dorch, actually he's got more subs too, probably. He's got a million subs. And then looking at his most recent videos, the most important thing, which I try to tell people, is the most important thing is not how many subscribers the channel has, it's how many average views the channel has per video. So Jimmy Dorch, let's see, his average is like, I don't know, of his last, like, let's say, oh wow, he puts out a lot of content. Let's see, if we go back and adjust the, those videos in the last two days. So I would guess his average is like 60,000 views. Good, but let's look up Kyle Kulinski. I think last I checked he had 800,000 subs, and now he's at, wow, he's close to a million. Wow, he's crushing it. And I could be wrong with this, let me see, let's look at his actual videos. What's his average viewership? Seems like it's about the same. I would say if we take the videos from the last two days, yeah, good engagement is still definitely strong. But so I would say they're pretty neck and neck, not looking at it now. But yeah, that's pretty interesting, pretty juicy. Thanks for your super kind support. Pugsy16 in the old live chat at Twitch says, James looking powerful tonight. Twitch chat is dead, yeah. Thank you for your kind words and yes, Twitch chat is kind of slow. It's the calm, serene live chat. Crazy59 says, hey dude, and Pugsy16 says hello, hello, hello. Thank you for being with us guys in the old Twitch chat. I'm pumped. And you guys are watching modern-day debate when you could be watching Amaranth. So thank you for that. Am I saying it right? The redhead is that, that's her name, right? But thank you, Denmarkard says I'm surprised. But yeah, thanks for your support, Denmarkard, your kind words. And let's see here. CrystalRox says I'm watching from down under. Wow, far away indeed. Hannah Anderson says, I have a great night everyone and an awesome fourth. Thank you for that. Tioga says huge. Tioga is a huge Trump backer. She was there at the January 6th, you know, like we're trying to stop the vote. She is like, like radical. Tuck Frump, good to see you here a lot. Happy to have you here. And then let's see Get The Down. Let's see Median Fire, happy to have you. Samar says, Colorado citizens rise up. Samar, what city are you in? Since I already doxxed Tioga, what, are you a lot, can you tell me on here? LedTornado says James get Lauren Southern on. We're working on it for real, no joke. I do talk to Lauren. She's very polite, Twitch DMs. I do like send her invites and she does actually get back to me. So would you appreciate that? Cause I know that Lauren's probably got a lot of messages. General Balzac says Jimmy Dore is a big producer on the lines of Crowder. Yeah, he's got his content, the amount of content he's putting on is huge. And then James Crawford says, James pretending he's not a tier three sub. That's funny. What is it? The Amaranth, that's her name though. And then who are the other ones? Hassanabi. And then what is that guy, Dr. Ninja? Is he still on there? Xander Hall, I'm looking on Twitch right now. I see Xander Hall is going. And then I see Sansol Stardust, my little sister, doing her controversial channel over there. Right now her title says Breaking Drama. Zanya NCC Wick versus Dylan Burns on Chud Logic. I honestly, Stardust is like one of my favorite peeps. I just, for some reason, I think she's just fun. I just like her like chill demeanor, even though she's doing things that are triggering people like big time. When she hosted an interview with Richard Spencer, which even I wouldn't do. And I'm not trying to put her down or anything. I'm like, cause we've hosted, we have hosted Richard Spencer, but he was like opposed in a debate. And I'm not saying that what she did is wrong, but she's, you know, she's pushed the boundaries and she's just kind of calm and like, what? So, I do, I like Stardust, she's fun. But Pancake Grates says we're not simps. What does simps mean again? I forgot. Samar says I'm in Boulder currently. Good to know. Thanks Samar. Samar, that's really close. You're like 45 minutes away from where I'm sitting right now. So I can tell you that that's a really quick drive. Cause, so Samar, seriously, like I would please do email me cause I really do want your help. I really could use a cameraman and like it really would go a long way. So I am pumped. You guys, we think that this, so if you guys have seen middle ground videos by the channel Jubilee, that's what we're shooting for, our own version of that. And it's going to be at a stadium. It's going to look so cool. And we just bought, we've been testing out different fancy audio equipment because I'm investing big time in this. It's like really good audio equipment. So not just like what we usually do. Like we're trying with this. We're trying really hard to wear and it's going to be so well edited. Believe me, honestly, it's going to knock your socks off. We think that these videos are going to have the potential to take modern day debate to the next level, for real. Like we're talking, we would have to average like 4,500 new subscribers per month for the rest of the year to hit our goal of 100,000 subs by the end of the year. We think that these videos might actually be able to get us to that point. Well, we usually don't have that many. We usually have about an average of only about 1500, which don't get me wrong is big. Like we're thankful. That's like 50 per day. So that's about two every hour. That's cool. Don't get me wrong. But 4,500 per month, let me do that per the hour. 4,500 divided by 30 divided by 24. That's six new people per hour. So that would basically be three times as many new subscribers as we currently are at. We would have to be just crushing it. And we think that these videos may actually allow us to do that. Like we really think we could take modern day debate to the next level. Plus our in-person conferences and stuff, we can use this new technology, this new tech and way of filming for those events to where like modern day debate seriously can be like a premier channel. And by that I mean like by 2023, be in the 100,000s and also be putting out content that is just hugely successful where people are like, man, like that channel is awesome. So I am excited and I wanna say thank you guys so much for your support. It's already awesome because of you and I already give you guys reasons why you guys really do make this channel awesome. And the guests, the guests of the lifeblood of the channel, I can't thank them enough. We really do appreciate the guests. And all of the guests, no joke, come on for free. They just love to debate. And so the way in which they like potentially we hope that they benefit, the way the model of modern day debate that we hope the way it works is that they're getting exposure by going on a channel with 73,000 subs. Although I gotta be honest, Destiny for example, he's been on here so many times and Destiny has so many subscribers, like 450, 430,000 that he doesn't really get much new exposure by coming on a modern day debate. However, one thing that it's valuable for Destiny and we hope at least, this is my hope, is that it's almost like I'm an external secretary or broker for Destiny. So I'm looking for people like, hey, who would be a fun matchup? Who would be fun to see on screen together? And then I say, hey Destiny, would you dig this? And sometimes he says no. Most of the time he actually says yes. Destiny is actually really easy to work with out of all the influencers. He's one of the easiest. And we hope though that it's useful because then he has new content. He's got content that people enjoy watching in his channel because Destiny's channel in a real way is kind of a debate channel. It's not all he does, but he does it so regularly that it's a debate channel too, as well as a gaming channel and politics channel. But Let's Farm says, check Central Committee on Twitch. Thank you for letting me know that. I'm looking on Twitch. I don't know what that means, but thank you for letting me know that. What does a simp mean again? For real, I forgot. Dan Carter says, modern-day debate is one of the best channels on YouTube. Thank you for your kind words. Seriously, that means more than you know. And then King101 says, first stream in a long time to surpass the three hour mark, ha ha, it's true. Yeah, this is the first time in a while. I'm just enjoying this so much. Even though I said I was gonna go in a minute, I just have enjoyed this so much. I can't pull myself away. I'm enjoying it. I'm pleasure to be here. So thank you guys. Don't turn that and make it dirty, you sickos. But CultureCope, thanks for coming by. You're glad that you're here. I see you there in your live chat. Samar, this is my, SychoNav, my old nemesis. That's right. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. ASOP, thanks for coming by. So it's more just content for his own channel. Right, yeah. So we hope that it is. Like, I hope that we can be of value to the guests because, like, we're just grateful to have them on. They're the lifeblood of the channel. Modern day debate just wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the guests. So we hope that we can provide them value in some way. And let's see. I just saw it. Pure Rossy Gold says destiny versus hate on pro-life, pro-choice. That would be interesting to say the least. Jupiter Darmus says modern day debate isn't premiere. Sips tea out of my modern day debate mug. Do you have a mug? Well, thanks for your support. That's kind of you to have bought a modern day debate mug, seriously. Like, I gotta be honest, I'll tell you. I love telling you guys the inner workings of modern day debate least. I don't know what other channels are like. This probably isn't going to exactly market our own materials in the best way, but we don't sell too many mugs or t-shirts. I would say it's like maybe like, I don't know, maybe one mug and one t-shirt a month? Like, it's not a huge way. Like, we hope it's like people like it. And I have, like, frankly, I've got modern day debate stuff at home, which is like, like, I don't know, I hope. Yeah, I mean, like, I think it's, I like it, I think it's cool. Like, so I'm thankful for Teespring that they let us make that stuff. But let's see here. But that's cool, I'm flattered. What I'm saying though, the fact that there are a few like people that have bought t-shirts or mugs, I'm saying thank you, because we do. It's true, we have merch. If you look below the video, folks, we do have like t-shirts and mugs. And so if you do like modern day debate and you're like, yeah, like, that'd be cool. I'd love to get a t-shirt or a mug. And Kanye Twitty, thanks for coming by. Says, sympathetic mostly to girls. Oh, that's right, is that sympathetic mostly to girls? That's not what simp means. And then Jeremy Nolan says, thank you, James. Thank you, Jeremy, appreciate that. And then Sadie Marie says, I'm gonna order a modern day debate mask later. Do we have masks? I honestly can't remember if we made them. But code-blooded 2000, thanks for being here. Lettornado says, get Steph and Malinu on. We are gonna reach out to Steph and Malinu about a possible debate with Destiny this summer. I don't have to do that yet. Any produces simp equals bootlicker. But I can't remember, what does it mean? Let me look this up. Meaning of simp. Because it was pretty like, it's a pretty like, let's say, internet slang describing someone who shows excessive sympathy and attention toward another person, typically someone who does not reciprocate the same feelings and pursuit of. That's not what, there was an acronym for it that was very crude and very like, straightforward to put it one way. Let's see here. Oh, I see. Suckers, idolizing, mediocre, okay. It's not squirrels in my pants, just for the record. Is it really suckers? I thought it was another even more derogatory word. But you know, it works. I mean like, it doesn't have to be that derogatory. It's not like I require that. Kanye Twitty, good to see you though. And Sadie Marie says, yes we do, yes we do what? Sightseeing Ave says, I saw that. We need a modern day debate, Speedo James. That's true, we do. I'll let you design that Bob. So, let's see. JRM, glad to see you in the old live chat. Dylan Motz, thanks for coming by. I put my balls on your drum set. Thanks for coming by, we're glad to have you. But yeah, thanks guys. Seriously, it's fun to hang out with you. You guys make this fun. I'm pumped and excited about the future for real. We are working on some cool stuff. And so thank you guys for your support. It's always fun, it's always a blast. You guys make this fun. And I love you guys for real. And yeah, I mean, shoot me if you want to say hello. I always like hearing from people, seriously. I know that I got to be honest. I'm a little behind on emails. So I feel bad about that. But Samar Rao says, what happened to the other debate with Destiny and Malinu? I'm spelling it wrong a few months back. Did it get canceled? Malinu let me know that he was taking some time off from debates. And Tioga was so sad because she's the huge fan of Stefan Malinu. But he said he's going to take some time off from debates. And I was like, OK, not a problem. And so that one never actually happened. It was going to be on ethics. So that would have been cool. Let's see. Benjamin23 says, I love your show and I love to support it, but mistakenly gave a larger than intended super chat. Is there any way to get a refund and then re-donate the intended amount? Yes, I am open to that. If you email me at moderndaydebate at gmail.com and then if you can let me know when you sent the super chat, I don't remember seeing one from you recently. So maybe it was from a long time ago. Did you send one recently? But if I can look it up and verify that you sent it, that makes a big difference. And then, yeah, I'm open to that. So let's see. 1234567ASAP says, simp is probably short for simpering or simpleton. I don't know if that, I think it's a little more involved than that. But nonetheless, you can let me know if I'm wrong. Want to say, you guys, you tug on my heart strings. You make this fun. I enjoy you. And so thank you for your support and a very funny, pure Aussie gold. You're a funny, funny person. But want to say thanks, guys. I love you. Thanks for everything. I appreciate you guys. You make this fun. Looking forward to seeing you at the next one. And we will. Oh, that's right. I told you we're going to have more debates. So I never even told you what they are. So let me show you right now. At the bottom right of your screen, did dinosaurs live with man? That's going to be coming up this. Let me see if I can fix this. Fade. I'm monkeying around at OBS. And it's acting funky right now. See if this looks different. I've got to fix this. That's all right. But yeah, we do have that one. And then we are going to look at what else you might have coming up, just so you guys know. Because I did say we'll mention those. I actually want to tell you about them. Is we've got a number of debates coming up. We might have a debate on whether or not Islam is dangerous or violent. That's a week from now on a Saturday. We might have a flat earth debate on Friday the 8th. We might have an evolution debate on Friday. That is still up in the air. So a number of science debates and more political debates. We're going to go into those directions. Not as many religion debates, though we'll have some of those too. So love you guys. Thanks so much for all of your support. I enjoy being with you guys. Thanks for making this fun. And I hope you guys have a great rest of your holiday weekend. We'll see you at the next one.