 Hey everybody, tonight we're debating a political panel on January 6th, Afghanistan, CRT in the recent Texas abortion law, which we will start with. Folks, thanks so much for being with us. Our guests are linked in the description. And with that, regarding the Texas abortion law, what are your thoughts, folks? Let her rip. I think it's pretty bad law to begin with, honestly. And it's going to hurt a lot of people, but it's mainly going to hurt lower income and marginalized people the most because these are the people who are already struggling to have the best access to things like birth control and family planning to begin with. But that's my thoughts. I have limited knowledge on, you know, female health and things like that. Well, are we all aware of what is special about the Texas law compared to recent attempts? Because special, right? So the Texas law is interesting in that in previous heart, like, you know, a heartbeat threshold laws have been struck down because it's just a straight up ban. This one kind of gets around or potentially gets around it in that it's not criminalizing it. It's a civil. It's made it it's made it through made a civil issue reportable by private citizens, which is why the Supreme Court hasn't immediately blocked it. And it's going to it's going to go to the courts, which is interesting from a legal perspective. But I don't know how it's going to work from like a practical perspective. It's it's completely indefensible. I mean, not only is it clearly a violation of constitutional precedence on the issue, but the practice of circumnavigating the Constitution by deferring state law to incentivizing private lawsuits through bounties is insane. I mean, not only does this massively complicate things, not only will it choke up the courts. Not only is it completely disingenuous, but it encourages a culture of fear and stigmatization where industry and friendships alike are ground to a halt. Is everyone terrified, tiptoes around this ridiculous law, which was clearly put out there as bait. There's no way to survive scrutiny. It's funny, you could say almost the exact same thing about Biden's vaccine mandate that he pushed a clearly unconstitutional design to pit neighbors against others, etc., things like that. Wait, hold on. Wait, hold on. Really quickly, it's it's an employer ban. How does it pit neighbors against each other? It's OSHA because the entire idea is because the entire idea is to demonize the unvaccinated, which, again, as Karl was saying, is disproportionately poor people and people of color, the unvaccinated. That's what the entire idea is to place all the blame on them. We can talk about that another day, though, but it's funny to see the my body, my choice, people all of a sudden be real concerned about the government influencing what medications you have to put in your body. I don't disagree with the sphincter of doom that there are specific questions in the way that this would be implemented. I do have questions of what this could lead to and other things. And if you're conservative out there, that thing should matter. For example, what if they say, well, we're going to pass laws that say people that sell guns and lead to access to guns that end up harming. Someone could be civilly sued. It's not criminal, but they could be civilly. That's something that could potentially come. So we need to look at these things with scrutiny in the way that they're implemented. However, having said that Robi Wade is an abomination, the right to privacy has nothing to do with whether or not you could snuff out of life. The only thing that matters is, is that fetus a life? We may disagree on when that fetus becomes a life. But once we determine it is a life, it is inhumane to snuff out that life. It is not a choice of the woman at that point because it is a separate life. And to see so many people that are willing to say, I should be allowed to force you to have a vaccine because there's a very small chance if I force you to have that vaccine, I have a slightly less chance of getting COVID. But on the other hand, say I should be allowed to snuff out a potential life because it's my body and the government doesn't have the right to tell me what to do with it is absolutely hysterical to see the irony and the double standard. I would actually disagree there in that on a number of reasons. One, it is not necessarily hypocritical. If you are a my body, my choice, unless you are going to harm another person. So people who are pro-choice, don't see fetuses as persons. You're not actually negatively impacting, whereas those who are for vaccine mandates do think you're impacting a person. So it's not hypocritical on the part of those people. But let me stop you there. The point is the only thing that matters then is determining whether or not the fetus is a life. Can we agree that if we could objectively see that the fetus is a life, then the idea of my body, my choice wouldn't apply because it's a separate person, not a life, cells are alive. We need to determine personhood. Fine, personhood. The abortion debate centered around two questions. One, when does personhood begin or to what degree does personhood begin? And two, under what conditions to go? Does the right of one person supersede another? So it's not just, OK, the fetus is a person, maybe. And but then, OK, under what conditions does the rights of one person supersede another? So it is not the condition when you're killing one that would supersede stuffing out a life on a person would supersede the inconvenience of the law is legally indefensible. Right. So just really quickly, before we get to the moral arguments, the legality of this law is definitely not constitutional. We can all agree this is a huge underhanded move meant to bait attention and circumnavigate an obvious constitutional precedent. So it can't both be unconstitutional and circumnavigating the Constitution. We either either violates the Constitution or it doesn't. Well, I think it does, but it does so in a unique way. We I promise we'll come right back to this. I heard one voice that we hadn't heard from yet, but I'm trying to figure out where they were. Is that UK? That was me. Go ahead, Kate. OK, I'm, you know, token pro-life activists here, guys. I've been a pro-life activist for seven years. I have a vested interest in this conversation. This is all kind of like a moot point because the point of the Texas abortion ban, as it stands right now, wasn't to do some like weird shit with having citizens sue each sue each other or sue abortion doctors in Texas. The whole point of this law was to see how the Supreme Court was going to react to it. It's literally just pro-life organizations kind of poking at that bear. We haven't had a case like this go before this particular Supreme Court with all of Trump's nominations on the Supreme Court. They just wanted to know what, whether or not it would go through, whether or not it was going to face backlash in the Supreme Court, whether or not it was going to be rejected by the Supreme Court. And it wasn't. So the whole purpose of this bill is just one step in the direction of trying to overturn Roe versus Wade. Once Roe versus Wade is overturned, you're not going to this this law is going to be null and void. They're not going to care anymore. There's going to outright ban it. So I do have issues with this law. I don't see it being incredibly practical. I mean, private citizens suing abortion doctors whenever they have no stake in it, there's no loss. Like that's a hard sell and you only collect the money if you can win your case. So you're not going to see a ton of people taking up these lawsuits because it costs money to sue people. And if you don't win, you don't get that money back. So this law, like on a on a practical level, like it's it's really not going to do much unless abortion clinics and doctors that perform abortions are just going like we're going to abide by this law because we don't want to be sued. That's the only way that it's going to work. I see more abortions being eliminated in the state of Texas because of pro-choice misinformation that, you know, women are going to get sued or that women are going to face jail time if they get abortions now in Texas. That's what's really going to bring abortion numbers down. It's not going to be this law because you're not going to see a huge amount of private citizens trying to sue abortion doctors when they have no stake or lost to prove in their civil suit. In what world is the state legislator pushing forward an unprecedented bounty on people who get abortions not their fault for disincentivizing abortions? It's not pro-choice propaganda that, yeah, the state is allowing people to sue anyone who gets abortions after six weeks or anyone who assists anyone to get abortion after six weeks. That's in the text of the law. That's not misinformation. Whether or not you think those lawsuits would be common does not speak to the fact that this fear is very obviously coming from the explicit behavior of those legislators. But you can't sue the woman that has the that performed, that has the abortion performed on her. There are legal protections for the woman for both civil and there's no civil and legal protections in this bill for the woman that try attempts to get an abortion or successfully procures an abortion after six weeks in the state of Texas. Just the doctors and anyone who could be argued to have helped at any point. Yes, I may be wrong. But I think Kay's point was that the misinformation is that the people who are suing have no standing. They have no case, so it's not going to go anywhere. The fear of being being sued is not the same thing as when losing a lawsuit. So I think that's I think that's what Kay's point was. Forgive me if that's my point, like civil suits, you have to prove some sort of loss or that you have a stake in this in a private citizen that just happens to know that this abortion doctor performed an abortion after fetal fetal heartbeat was detected. That that they're not going to the chances of them winning that suit are very, very low in whenever you take the chilling effect that takes place. Like the threat of a lawsuit is more than enough to deter people from engaging in some types of behavior. And you don't know that those lawsuits are going to lose anyhow. You have no idea how these things are going to pan out, particularly given Texas's demographics, given the expense of defending yourself in a legal case. I mean, this is this is clear disincentivization. They're doing it through a legal loophole, but that's obviously the goal of this. We should be focusing on things that reduce abortions naturally and healthily, like encouraging proper contraception, good sexual health education and making sure that people can make right family planning decisions. But instead, right now, what we're doing is encouraging some dystopic 1984 neighbor spies on neighbor bullshit in an effort to address this with the sincerity you'd expect political advocates to engage in. Again, I just have to bring up the hilarity of the double standard of the people that want to blame the anti-vaxxers for everything, talking about neighbors or neighbors. Now, talking about the constitutionality of this, the truth of the matter is Roe v. Wade was an abomination in the first place because there is no constitutional right to an abortion. The idea that the Fourth Amendment right to privacy somehow untell women to have an abortion is absolute nonsense. The Constitution is very specific about what should have happened. Abortion existed at the time of the Bill of Rights and the Bill of Rights specifically said in the 10th Amendment that everything that is not outlined specifically as a power to the federal government should be up to the state government. Abortion is a state's issue. Each state should be allowed to pass the law that they want. If the federal government wants to change that, there is a process for it. That's called an amendment. They could pass an amendment that guarantees a woman's abortion. All the Supreme Court body, the Supreme Court ruling saying this is an oppression. Well, yes, the Supreme Court, real quick, the Supreme, right, the Supreme Court acted in an activist way. The Supreme Court also, right, the Supreme Court, the same Supreme Court, well the same body that also neglected to strike down this law right now. So I don't want to hear about its unconstitutionality. All that matters is what they say according to you. I'm saying that we could have opinions regarding that anyways and that this should be a state's issue. And also the reason that you're seeing this, the reason that there is such a push to go against this is because the majority of people, myself somewhat included in this as well, had no problem with the old left-wing way of looking at abortions, which was like safe, legal and rare, right? Like, I myself think that there's a point where we should say that this is a life and that we shouldn't have an abortion. I don't know when that is. I'll admit that I'm not a medical professional. Is it heartbeat? Is it brain activity? Things like that. But up until that point, I was OK with abortions occurring. That separates me from many people that are on the right. The problem is the left took this and ran with it to insane lengths. For example, the New York bill said that any time that a doctor and a woman felt that there was need for an abortion for her discomfort, including things like emotional discomfort, then they would be allowed to perform the abortion even in the ninth month. Now, what pregnancy has again? We'll get to it. Well, wait, no, let's get to it. Wait, weren't you just advocating? Right, sure, sure. Then the state of New York should be allowed to do that. But the truth is the average people are disgusted by that. So New York should have the right to do that. Should do with the road the way you can't be like, oh, I support states rights. But when I'm disgusted with what the state does, that would be my argument if I was using the states rights argument. You can't if you're because you don't understand. It's because you don't understand what I'm saying. Also, before you tear off on another tangent, you mentioned safe, legal and rare, making them available, along with sexual education and birth control makes them safe, legal and rare. That is what has been proven in developed countries around the globe. You want to see that if you would let me finish what happened was, although most people were on board with that and I have no problem with the states deciding what their particular abortion law should be. That's fine. They could hash that out in their own state. So I'm not saying that New York doesn't have the right under the states rights to do that. But what I'm saying is it disgusted the average person and they now see how there are so many people on the left that don't just want safe, legal and rare. They actually want to celebrate abortions. And that New York abortion law was celebrated by lighting New York City skyline up pig. This has led to many people saying, well, fuck it. If I have to take one extreme or the other, I'll take the extreme that says then we'll criminalize abortions in general because we're disgusted by the celebration of the death of babies that we see that's becoming mainstream in the Democratic Party in the left. Your political opinions were formed by getting mad at the left doing something? Are we doing? Which TikTok hurt you? Not me. That's not what I'm saying, but I'm saying that that's the vast majority of people in the Senate. One of you are from Stardust. If I hear you get something to say and then anybody else after Stardust, if you haven't gotten to spoken about one, do let us know. Go ahead, Stardust. Yeah, so I just have a couple of points. I think the first thing I wanted to address was the whole hypocrisy behind my body, my choice. I think it's really interesting that it applies to carrying a baby for nine months, but somebody can't wear a mask for like 10 minutes and a Walgreens. Also, I think that to be so worried about these children and not look at like the endless amount of studies that show that there are long lasting detriments to a family when a woman is turned away from an abortion. When a woman is turned away from an abortion and there's like a study that followed this, women who are turned away are more likely to stay with an abusive partner. They're more likely to expose their existing children to abuse in the house and have them be witness to that abuse. They're also more likely to not bond with that child that they're forced to carry to term. I mean, these are all very anti-family things. So I don't see how being pro-life is pro-family at all. I think if you want to be pro-family, you should be pro-choice and support the right for women who need an abortion to get one. Killing a baby for the convenience of lowering domestic abuse isn't something that I would consider. We don't think they're babies. That seems heinous and evil. Right, and then the question becomes, are they babies or not? I don't want to hear about domestic abuse. It's irrelevant to the question. It's pretty relevant. It is relevant. Actually, do you know about reproductive coercion? Like that happens all the time. Yeah, then a lot of people become pregnant because of reproductive coercion, because they have a partner who sabotages their birth controller, sabotages their contraceptive and gets them pregnant. Okay, let me just ask a hypothetical then. A majority of women who first experience domestic abuse experience it when they are pregnant. Okay, two things. One, a lot of talk of women here, I thought men could get pregnant too. What about birthing persons? Second, let me ask a hypothetical then to stardust and wash since you're saying that. So let's say that we could objectively see that a seven month fetus is a person. Somehow in the future, we're able to objectively see that. Is it worth killing that person to lower domestic violence? How do you objectively see if a person's a person? Who knows what the future science will prevail. All right, that's a philosophical argument. The question is right there. That's a philosophical argument. Okay, then when does personhood begin? That's the central contention of abortion and it's a philosophical question. Well, I don't know. So answering that question is super. Answering that question is prima facie to talking about things like domestic abuse. Because if we determine it's a person, then we wouldn't care if exterminating that person would lower domestic abuse. Before we go, we gotta continue. I wanna correct one thing. You are slightly mistaken as what the legal basis for Robi Wade would. It was not just the right to privacy. It was also the right to do process. And the courts determined that if you have X number of women of reproductive age, there isn't enough courts that could process any contentious claim that where they're, before the pregnancy comes to term, so that would violate the right to do process. So it isn't just privacy. That's ridiculous as well, but whatever. The 92 case decision also that sought to rehear this case because we had new medical information about what a fetus is and the signs of life and things like that. The 92 decision was just 15 pages of what they called a defensive stare decisis, which is Latin for precedent. So they rejected to hear the case in 1992. It's been many, many years. The case should be reheard. We now know far more medically about what a fetus is, about what viability is, about what life is. And that's the reason that it should be heard. And the right to privacy and do process should have nothing to do with this. But it's personal. Wait, hold on, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Personhood isn't even relevant to this discussion. We can't legislate. We can't legislate philosophy. We're never gonna find that objective answer to when personhood happens, okay? The real answer to this is obviously bodily autonomy, which is why Rob gets off so hard when he does the whole vaccines abortions of my body, my choice stick, you know? The fundamental argument is this, okay? If everyone could see me just a second because this is the argument we're going to be having anyway, all right? We're talking about whether or not a person should be legally committed to donate their bodily resources to keep another person alive. So an example, which is analogous to this perfectly would be imagine that you're driving down a lonely rural road and you end up getting in a car accident because you're drunk as balls. You wake up in a hospital attached to the person who was driving the car you hit. It's your fault that person's in the hospital. You're attached to them because they needed clean blood. The doctor hooked you up because this rural hospital didn't have any spare blood of that type but you happened to supply it. Now here's the question. Your life is now supplying that person's life and it's your fault that they're in the hospital. If you walk away, they die. The question is, do you have the right to disconnect yourself from that machine and walk away without being prosecuted by the state? And right now in our legal system, the answer to that is, yes. You can get in trouble for the drunk driving but not for choosing not to donate your bodily resources to preserve another life. There's a question. There's a question. Wait, wait. Why this is analogous? One sec. Just for the first time from Sybil, go ahead, Sybil. So I was just gonna say there's one key reason why this isn't analogous and that's simply because when you're pregnant, your life doesn't stop. You are not relegated to a single room where you can do nothing else except be the life support of this other person. Even if they ask you to donate blood once a month to keep that person alive and you could otherwise live your life perfectly ordinarily, you would still have the legal right to reject that. You don't have to donate your blood even if it means that person dies. And that's a person person, not a fetus. Okay, but we can see there's several things to say. This analogy doesn't make sense. One, it's because in that world, there would be other ways that we could provide for the life of that person, right? So if you're in a wreck, it's not that your specific blood would be the only thing that could keep that person alive. Similarly, when we talk about pregnancy, there is viability that you could bring someone to term or have a C-section or something like that. Even earlier in a pregnancy, as early as four months sometimes and still have a viable baby that can survive outside the autonomy of the woman. So why would we choose to kill that life that could exist outside of it with reasonable medical technology as opposed to just murdering the child? The second thing is, I have a question specifically for Vaj. I've heard of cases as early as four months. I thought it was five was the earliest. The youngest, pre-term baby. Okay, let's say five. I thought I'd heard four. Let's say that. 24 weeks, thus far, viability is 24 weeks. That's gotta be an edge case. Right, so there we go. That's tiny little fetus, baby. Okay, so real quick, to ask Vaj a question, he said that it has to do with bodily resources. Do you consider labor a bodily resource? Yes, I'm sure. Okay, so in your definition, someone shouldn't have to provide late bodily resources to keep a person alive. I don't think the state should be able to impugn a person for choosing not to commit their bodily resources to keep another alive. Okay, cool. So if I have an eight month baby, if I decide to leave my baby starve, because I don't think that my labor to go to pay for food for that baby, you say that's perfectly fine. I shouldn't be forced to use my bodily resources to pay for that baby to stay alive. There's a big difference between your body literally being committed to the supply and the sustenance of another entity, as opposed to the responsibilities that you take when you take on a child. Now to be clear, to be clear by the way, what you're talking about right now is a legal responsibility associated with rearing a child. When you accept responsibility for a child, anything that happens to them, which is a product of your negligence, you're on the hook for, but that's a contract that we built around parenthood, not a default state of being for any relationship between two entities, one of which is starving. You could walk by a baby in the woods, watch it starve and not get sued by the government. So I don't think these are necessarily analogous. What we see is, so what we see is you've backtracked on your argument that it was about having to provide bodily resources. So when proven that your rationale would literally allow, and people do make this argument as you know, Vaj, people question when personhood is philosophically. Some people say it's not until language develops. Some people says it's not until cognitive abilities around three to five months after being born develops. So this rationale of, oh, well, we define personhood as how we see, and we say that it's okay to extinguish that person because they're that entity, because it's not a person until I philosophically say it is, is irrelevant. All going back to the point to what I originally made, which was if we determine, the question is personhood. That's the question. The idea of once people decide that it's a person, real quick, let me finish. The idea of once we decide that it is a person, but we still have to exterminate it because of domestic abuse is nonsense. If we determine that it's a person, then saying, but we still have to eliminate it because it'll cause, it'll solve domestic violence. That's what you said. That's why I said it's irrelevant. Are you kidding me? It's about children that already exist in this world. And it's about that child that will be brought in and we'll have to live in an abusive household. We'll have to suffer economically for decades to come after that. So kill it. I understand. It's not a person to me. Adoptions, adoption. It's not a person to me. You can adopt. You can destigmatize other things that you can do with that child. I mean, are we gonna start prosecuting people for having miscarriages? Are we gonna start suing people for- I promise we'll come right back to you, Stardust. I think Sybil was saying something first. I promise we'll come right back to you and give you plenty of time, Stardust. Emma was talking to me. I was just gonna say that there's- Oh, sorry. My mistake. Emma, if you were also trying to get your first word in for the night, we wanted to get a chance. All right. Right now? Okay. So with the abortion, there's many other options. Adoption. There's the foster care system. I myself am adopted, international adoption. So they're just because a lot of us wanna play God. I think we have a crystal ball and yeah, the kid might have a bad life because of abuse of house or we're poor right now. Circumstances change. People, you're not gonna be in a musical state every single day of your life. That's not, you're gonna have peaks and valleys, but that's not an excuse to just eliminate a life. I just, I can't buy into that justification for that. Abortion, most abortions seem to, like 98% of abortions are out of convenience, either due to only 1% of abortions are because of rape or incest. So we're gonna justify- No, it's true, it's also convenient. What about reproductive coercion? Do we have numbers on that? Because I don't think we would. Reproductive coercion happens in abusive relationships all the time, right? People sabotage people. Then from that, okay, so we'll play along with that. Then to take that reproduction coercion and leave that to an abortion, how often does that happen? Where they wanna abort. So- And we don't know. It's gotta be just as rare as those rape and incest cases. It's gotta be in that 2%. Well, that's speculation, right? I don't get those convenience arguments because wouldn't aborting a baby born of rape or incest also be of convenience? I mean, everything is of convenience. Literally everything we've been in our lives is for the convenience of living. Correct, I agree with your point on that. That's, yes, from that moral standpoint, yes. In my opinion, yes, from that, yes, I agree to that. Yeah, so I mean, because of a fulling committing to it, I mean, the problem is, is that the abortion thing, I mean, it never ends up like panning out in some humanitarian way, right? Invariably, if you go full down this road, incest and rape and like underage, like abuse shouldn't be exemptions to abortion. Like God gave you what they gave you and we shouldn't murder a person just to compound one harm upon another. And then you start talking about miscarriages because back in the day when abortions were illegal, you slipped down a staircase. Miscarriages, here's the difference. Miscarriage isn't a choice. I can't just, if I was pregnant, you can't induce, if you're trying to miscarriage and that's your choice, a natural miscarriage, you can't just wake up and say, today I wanna have a miscarriage. That's called an abortion. So there's a difference. Legally, how does the state determine the difference, right? Cause we know this from countries or states or whatever, where abortion isn't legal, women will take trips downstairs or act as a punching bag for some trusted friend and then they have a miscarriage later. Who's the state to know? It seems like people are gonna get abortions either way. The only directions you can go with this are either, A, have the state start investigating miscarriages, which gets really scary. And it's also what's happening now, by the way, based on the Texas law, or B, you essentially just push back the weight of abortions directly onto the most harmful, like medically irresponsible means possible. But will people do it? God damn right they will, because hey, what's worse, falling down a set of stairs or losing your life to 18 years of raising a child? I think that is extremely anecdotal. Falling down a set of stairs, that is gotta be like a needle in a hand. I mean, there are different abortions that people can take. I do want to, forgive me, to start us just because I know Sybil, you had a point. And then what we can do is go back to Stardust and Carr. And then we're pretty shortly, we're gonna have to move onto the next topic as we're kind of going rapid fire. So go ahead, Sybil, and then we'll go to Stardust and Carr. No, it's okay. I was just gonna say the same thing as about de-stigmatizing things that are not necessarily keeping the baby within the family. If you desperately wanna be able to kill it, you might as well be willing to give it up for adoption or obviously we need to work on our foster system. But if we were to work on these things on the back end as well, you could have a lot less people killing babies and just more babies being born and getting a chance to live. You got it, and then Stardust, and then is it, forgive me by the way, Carr, is it Carr or do you ever go by Carr as an acronym? No, no, it's Carr, that's my name, as it's spelled. Thanks for your patience. And then Stardust, go ahead and then we'll go to Carr. Okay, yeah, so there, so as far as like choosing a miscarriage, yeah, it's a little bit harder to choose a miscarriage, but there are things you can consume. There are steps you can take. You can starve yourself if you really want to. Also, I would say that, where was I going with this? I was going somewhere with this. Right, there are plenty of eggs that are fertilized and don't implant in a woman, right? They don't implant and they come out, right? Are we gonna start prosecuting people for having that happen? It's a fertilized egg. It was, if you consider it life at conception, then it's a fertilized egg and it didn't implant. So I mean, maybe that person should have done more to make sure it implants. I don't know. I feel like this is like we could take this down so many hypotheticals, any miscarriage, right? I mean, people can be charged with neglect, right? I mean, pregnancy is not a passive act. You have to be involved with it. It's eight months or nine months of being involved, making sure you're doing everything correctly, making sure you're healthy. And then after that, either being economically and physically and every sense dedicated to that child as well as any pre-existing children. Or it's like arranging for people to adopt it, I guess. And I guess the last thing I would say is that, there are again plenty of studies that show that children whose mothers are denied in abortion have worse development growing up. They are more likely to be exposed to violence in the home and they are more likely to be suffering economically, not for a short amount of time for a significant, at least like 10 years, if not more. So, I mean- So, I have a question regarding those studies because I'm not familiar with them, did those studies account for socioeconomic status? Cause all those things you've listed are things that are more commonly found around the poor anyway. So, children, women already have at the time they seek abortions show worse child development when their mother is denied an abortion compared to the children of women who receive one. I mean, they do compare, they have a control group of children whose parents were allowed to get an abortion. I mean, there's also the same thing with physical violence. Physical violence, I guess, children are more likely to be exposed to it when their parent is denied an abortion. Also, abuse and abusive relationships tends to ramp up when somebody gets pregnant. A lot of women experience abuse for the first time when they're pregnant but it tends to ramp up regardless. So, when women are able to get abortions, I guess it affects that statistic. I think, Carl, you're right. Yeah, I don't think you can answer my question, but I'll go first. All right, I was waiting. Svinter, I promise we'll come back to you and especially if you're kind of giving a little bit of pushback because I think that rather than wrapping up with this topic with two people who lean more pro-choice, I do wanna give a little bit of time of response from a pro-lifer or I don't know if you're even a pro-lifer, maybe you're pro-choice, but to get the variety and I wanna go first with Carl, though. All right, yeah, I'll make it quick. I wanted to directly answer or at least speak on Sybil's point earlier, saying, oh, well, you can pursue adoption or fostering and things like that. That doesn't take away the fact that you are telling someone they are still forced to carry a child to term. You are telling someone they are forced to wield a cesarean scar or potentially have lifelong changes done to their genitalia. You're telling someone that they can potentially get postpartum depression, something that they may never fully recover from. You're telling somebody that if they have complications during delivery, they could have lifelong trauma, not to mention scarring or damage to their body. So we can't be blasé or nonchalant when we tell people that, oh, you just bring it to term and then put it up for adoption because even that in of itself can be a traumatic act and I don't believe that's something that they should be required to go through. And then I will put this back to the people who are certainly pro-life because nobody really addressed my point earlier. I assume that this law in Texas was set in place to lower abortions, but nobody has responded to the fact that in developed countries, excuse me, in developed countries, most of Europe, the United States and large parts of South America that actually have good access to birth control as well as available abortions that are unrestricted for whoever needs them and they are financially accessible, they have less per thousand women. There are multiple sites that report this. You can look up different websites that report these numbers. So the action that the law is taking, the only outcome that you could want from that law is to punish people for having abortions. That's the outcome that will come from the law. I want to- Go ahead. I want to give whoever would, you could say disagree with Stardust and Carr in to some degree at least, just so we have a little bit of balance before we move on to the next subject. Kay's been waiting patiently. Kay should have a- Kay, let's go. Sure. Okay, I'll try to be quick. I should have had a pen and paper to write down everything I wanted to respond to, but I'll start with- I'm sure I have to go to the next topic. So go ahead, Kay, start in the interrupts. I will address Carr's question first because I agree with you, okay? Having access to contraceptives, better sexual education, getting to the root of the problem for these socioeconomic issues that drive women to have abortions is what is drastically going to lower the abortion rate. Majority of the prolifers agree with this and it is something that there are whole organizations within prolif activism that are addressing these issues and we want to see these issues addressed. We want better access to contraceptives. We want better sex education. We wanna address the socioeconomic issues that drive women into abortion clinics, but making abortion illegal does bring it down by as much as 15%. Now, that is a small percentage, but it is a small step in trying to save lives. Now, I am not a more right-leaning conservative prolif activist. I do believe that the social issues that go into abortion are equally as important, if not more important than making abortion illegal because that's where you're going to see the maturity of abortions go down whenever you address the socioeconomic issues that women are facing. Now, can I real quick just say, I just wanna ask a quick question, just real quick. We are saying this that the definition of person with this different, I just wanna ask, are you people saying that a nine month abortion is acceptable? I just wanna ask. If we have a very quick answer, I am okay with that, but then we have to go to the next one and Rob, I promise you your punishment later will be severe. Go ahead, Emma. That's a big question that will open up a big can of worms, but I was gonna reiterate or just touch back with the other gentlemen's point about forcing someone to carry their baby to term and all these medical scarring and the bills and all this stuff. That's the same thing with abortions too. Abortions aren't perfectly safe. You can get, death is actually a severe, not common, but you can die from abortions. There are statistics, you can even get your uterus punctured. I mean, they're not, this is even by professional doctors. There are risks and heavy complications with abortions just as like giving birth. So you gotta look at both sizes. Is there right anywhere near that of childbirth's death rates? No, it's not. Okay, cool. Nine month abortions. We really do, we do have to, we already talked about this. I already, we were supposed to end with K, so I have to jump in. I do wanna mention we are gonna read some of the questions and one of them is aimed at you, Vosh, believe it or not. And then another one is more generally for the pro-choice side. I do wanna mention though, forgive me for cutting you guys off because I hate doing that to you guys, so forgive me, but I wanna let you know folks, if you wanna hear more from any of our guests, they're all linked in the description. You can check their channels out right now as we really do appreciate our guests and also wanna let you know if it's your first time here at Modern Day Debate, we are a neutral channel hosting debates on science, religion and politics and we hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you were from. With that, we're gonna go over a few questions for this topic and then we're jumping into the next topic of Afghanistan. So this first question coming in from Hate Watcher for pro-choice side in general says, should a male be able to force a female to get an abortion if she sabotaged him to get pregnant? No, that's my hot tech for that one. No, I don't think that that would be wrong, but I still don't think turning around and removing someone's autonomy by force would also, that would still be wrong and I wouldn't advocate for that either. Well, the problem there is that, now you're in a situation, given the legal structure that we have is that the mother is forcing the father to labor to support that child if she has every intention of bringing it to term. Yeah, we can, but you can solve that by changing the way parentage works much easier than you could by allowing people to force other people to get abortions. I'm not saying that I'm saying that you can't have it both ways. You either consent to sexes, consent to parenthood or it isn't. Until then it's not really a bodily, to say it's bodily autonomy is to oversimplify. I'm not saying it isn't bodily autonomy but you have to consistently apply that principle. Especially when one of the big arguments being given was coercive pregnancy. But there's a big difference to bodily autonomy and legal parentage. But your autonomy is completely changed based on your parentage, a parentage to which you consented under false pretenses. Yeah, but you can address that by addressing the legal structure, the law surrounding parentage. There's no reason to allow coerced abortions. That's like a very out of left field. I'm not saying that there should be. I'm saying that the argument why there shouldn't be, that it's just simply bodily autonomy is not enough. You have to acknowledge that his autonomy was violated in this case. And it would be further violated if he was forced to support that child against his will. I want to give the pro-choice side the last word since this question is for them. So Stardust will give you the last word and then we've got to go to the next question. I think that if there is a way in society to share the burden of child labor a little bit better, then it would be great for men to have an equal say in abortion rights, right? But as it is right now, men and women do not share the same amount of burden when curing a child the term. They are not inhibited in the same ways, right? So until we've reached that point in technology where we're able to do that, I feel like it's fair for the person who is bearing the brunt of that labor to bring that child into the world for them to have the ultimate choice in this. I know you've got another round in the chamber, S.O.D. I've got to let me make it up to you. I promise I'll make it up to you in a future debate. I know that there was a debate you requested earlier. So I promise, but this one coming in, forgive me, S.O.D. Made by Jim Bob says, Vosh, as technology brings viability very close to conception, what will pro-choice people say? What will pro-choice people say when what? As they're saying, as the technology continues to improve pushing viability back toward conception and nearly, I think that they're saying like, they say close to conception, so maybe within a month. They're talking about external wombs. Oh, that doesn't change the math. Look, it doesn't change the math. Look, if we have a system where you can do an abortion or remove the fetus and put them in an external womb and they're both roughly equally invasive medical procedures, then I would favor the latter, I guess, right? I mean, more people to play video games with in the future. But I don't think that should be an argument against abortion if the other option is much more difficult or expensive. But again, so it goes back to the question, if this is all about the definition of personhood and you said taking one to the logical extension, it would mean that we would have to exterminate people, even those, or we wouldn't allow those from rape or incest to have abortions. My question again is, will the other logical extent would be, are you saying, and they start us saying, that your interpretation of personhood would mean, even at nine months, a woman for elective reasons could terminate because it's not a person. If the alternative is being forced to carry the term, then yeah, sure. I personally, I think I have like a dotted line at a certain point. And I think at a certain point in a pregnancy, it should be up to the doctor and the person who is carrying that pregnancy. I don't know, I feel like it's 1% of abortions or perform that. Don't you induce labor at that point? Like if it's like nine months, you just induce labor, it's basic. So for example, the New York law said that, right, the New York law, that's exactly right. The New York law said that even at nine months, even if the woman's in labor, if she and the doctor both concur that there will be distress put on the woman, whether it be economic, emotional, psychological or physical distress, then they can agree to terminate. This happens, there are hundreds of thousands of third trimester abortions that occur. And logically, and I start us, I appreciate your position, but you could understand the pro-life position then of just saying, well, we think that personhood, if you're not saying personhood is at birth, then we have to have a distinction of when personhood begins. It seems like the best markers would be things like brain activity, heartbeat, things like that. But Tavash's point, you can see the monstrous nature of these people that are pro-choice that would literally allow abortions to occur even while woman's in labor. It's disgusting, but it's why people push back. If I can interject for a second, okay. Can I just say one thing? Okay, let's go ahead. What really quick, I just want to say, Rob, I think it really speaks the weakness of your points that you're incapable of holding any position without saying the left is responsible for you holding it. Everything you say is right. I didn't say me. The left went too far and that's why I believe this. Now, I mean, with the personhood argument being purely philosophical and with you not having actually posited any philosophical arguments for your belief in personhood, I don't know how you could call my belief here monstrous. It just seems like kind of an intuitive moral position. I did pause. Okay, I need to correct something. I need to correct something. I'm sorry, I need to correct something. When people are having this nine month abortion or eight month abortion, a lot of the time, women who give birth and have these complications, they either have the choice of giving birth to this child and having it suffer for three days in pain, right? Because there's a complication or they have the choice of terminating that life early. So it's gonna be a death either way. I would rather have them the ability to choose one that's going to be easier for that person. Again, according to the Gottmacher Institute. Forgive me, Rob, for doing this. Don't worry, this question is actually for you, Rob. So you might be able to work in your answer to some extent, but I do want you to first address this actual question. They say, bash the fasc, spank the tank, asks or says, Rob lied about New York abortion laws, by the way, it's extended to nine months in cases of medical necessity such as lacking fetal viability or threat of the mother's life. That's not true. When it is extended to nine months, but it talks about distress being, it defines of harm to the mother as things like emotional distress, any decision that is made that there are types of distress. I don't have the law right in front of me. What I do have in front of me though, is the Gottmacher Institute, which is one of the most prolific pro-choice institutions that exist. It claims that 80% of late term abortions in the study that they did were for things that were reasons that were basically electives, such as they didn't feel that they would be able to financially provide for the children. They didn't feel that they would be able to emotionally provide for the children. So most of the later term abortions, short, but most of the later term abortions weren't because they were concerned that the baby was going to be born with a chronic issue or the woman's life was going to be in jeopardy. I'm sorry, but when somebody carries, has made the conscious choice to carry a pregnancy up until nine months, making the decision to have an abortion at nine months is not something that I imagine is easy for anybody who has spent that time doing that. I don't think that that's, I feel like there may be a little bit more there that we could look into, but I'm not one who's going to think that somebody just changes their mind at nine months after forming, after carrying a child for that long. I don't think I can take care of that. Yeah, especially considering that carrying for nine months requires a much more physically invasive abortion procedure. It's not just taking a pill at that point, but moreover, you're talking about the percentage of people aborting a late term fetus for convenience, as you called it, for financial issues. Talk about the actual raw numbers here. What percentage of abortions are late term? Because are we quibbling over a statistical anomaly? Like, well, the numbers that I've seen is 12,000 a year. There's like 600,000 abortions a year. It really is like, they are the minority of abortions. But that's 12,000 dead babies is okay. I didn't say it was okay, I'm just saying. So it's not an insignificant number. Can I interject here really quick? Because I wanna address the late term abortion thing because there's so much misinformation about late term abortions. It's actually incredibly ridiculous. Whenever you're talking about a late term abortion, this is an abortion that takes place over a three day period. And it starts with sending the baby into cardiac arrest and then the woman has to go through the process of labor with absolutely no help. If anybody knows anything about how labor works, it's the baby and the mother working together to get the baby out of the birth canal. It's incredibly hard whenever the baby is dead and cannot help you. This is something that takes place over a three to four day period. It's an incredibly traumatic thing. And if you actually go and look at the numbers, I can't pull it up because I'm streaming from my phone. But late term abortions in comparison to the maternal death rate are actually incredibly close together. Late term abortions are incredibly unsafe for a multitude of reasons. So whenever you're comparing having a child through natural birth or through C-section or going through a late term abortion in aspect of safety, there is potentially no difference. Given that the question was for, well, technically for Rob. But speaking on behalf of Rob, thank you, Kay. And we are going to jump into the next topic as I think we're only going to maybe get two topics in tonight as we had discussed talking about Afghanistan, whether or not this has, well, we'll let you put it in your own words as we transition into this brand new topic, any thoughts on Afghanistan in either direction? Yeah, I'd like to praise the Chad Biden for doing what Donald Trump couldn't, which was actually following through in his promise to get out of Afghanistan. Trump, he talks a big game, he flaps them lips, but at the end of the day, he kept pushing that date back and back and back and whoop, back after the inauguration date. And yeah, you know, big ball Biden coming through, actually taking it to task, I respect that. I have a question for everyone. Go ahead. Just so everyone's, so does everyone agree that we should have, so let's ignore the when we left, but should we have left? Because everyone agreed because I think yes, I agree, but we should have left. I agree, we never should have went in. And the problem is, is that when, how you leave is that you had to leave in a functional way. And we kind of left the Afghan forces out to dry. So it was kind of an incompetent leaving. I'm not saying Trump would do any better. I have no reason to think that he would. I mean, Obama and Bush, they couldn't get out either. So it's more like, let's just, it kind of ripping the band aid off kind of situation. The last three presidents talked about withdrawing from Afghanistan, which I also agree is a place we didn't really belong in the first place. And all three of them failed to do it. In this case, one of them mostly did it, but did it in such an utterly fucked way that it led to a lot of loss of life and it's going to lead to even more loss of life. I'm not convinced that with all of the troops we did have there prior to the start of the withdrawal that we could not facilitate better evacuations. This is something that should have started four months ago. But instead, we're going to rush a withdrawal in the space of three weeks, leaving people fucking clinging to landing gear on aircraft and flooding a tiny ass airport in Kabul. So I would say that our current president failed in that regard as well, because it wasn't a good withdrawal. It was a messy botched withdrawal. The only thing he succeeded in possibly you could say if you squint is that he lowered the overall number of troops in the area, just to go and post them elsewhere in the Middle East because they're building up a blockade already. Not only that, but the majority of his intelligence suggested that you should leave at least some forces there above what he did leave because the Taliban, while there are fewer of them, they are better organized and the Afghan forces have been organized in a way to be reliant on a combined forces kind of situation reliant on air power like the US is. When you take that air power away, it doesn't really matter if you don't remember the Taliban four to one, you're just kind of scattered and unorganized. And that's where, go ahead. So there's two things to criticize with this first. I don't disagree Biden should have withdrew and I actually do give him credit. And despite the fact that I don't like Biden, I said that he actually withdrew was one thing I would praise about his presidency, assuming that he did it in a remotely competent manner. Instead, we see one of the most incompetent actions foreign policy wise in the history of our country. It ranks right up there with the foreign invasions probably not as bad though. And there's room to criticize Biden, which I'll get to, but it's great to see people like Vosh that support the Intel agencies and their war in Syria and criticize Trump trying to pull out of Syria, all of a sudden applaud Biden in his disaster of pulling out of Afghanistan. So that hypocrisy is fun. But the thing that we should focus mostly on is yes, there's room to criticize Biden, which I heavily will, but we've been lied to by our Intel agencies, our media by multiple administrations for 20 plus years in Afghanistan. They continue to tell us that we were making progress. They continue to send if we just stayed another year, if we just sent another trillion dollars, if we just sent some more troops to die, that we were making progress there. And they failed in 11 days, 11 days. They massively outnumbered the Taliban. They were given equipment that made them one of the most powerful militaries in the area and they failed in 11 days. That's how bad we were lied to by intelligence agencies, military people, there were 18 generals in charge of Afghanistan and the mainstream media that operate as their propaganda voices. The irony is when you hear people like Vosh say, well, Big Ball Biden had the ability to do when Trump didn't. Vosh and authoritarian leftists like him were praising those same Intel agencies and propagandists in the media when they were spreading bullshit stories when Trump tried to pull out, such as anonymous Intel agents say that there are bounties that were placed on US troops by Russia. And so if Trump pulls out, that's a pro-Russian move. People like Vosh and his ilk were praising those Intel agencies and those propagandists when they were saying that shit. So it goes to show that they can't have it both ways. The left endorsed the Intel agencies in their war against Trump. The reason they went to war against Trump was because he criticized their policies in the Middle East. They supported that fully. And now they're trying to have their cake and eat to some of them, like Vosh saying, well, we don't blame Biden, but also we didn't really support those Intel agencies that were currently supporting in Syria. It's absolute shit and interventionist and warmonger fascist like Vosh ought to be ashamed of themselves. Can I respond to that? I feel like I was addressed a few times. I think once in a while. Yeah, just a reminder, could we keep it to the arguments and not make personal attacks? Like, I'll talk about what I want. Thanks for the advice. The mod can tell me what to do. I think personal attacks are based, so. They're not helpful or useful or effective. I don't understand. Well, it's just a waste of breath. That's my opinion. We'll jump over to Vosh. Yeah, no, it's okay. Sorry. Okay. Saying that it's like, there are a lot of Republicans who have been saying that the Biden withdrawal is one of the biggest foreign policy disasters in a long time. I think that's ridiculous hyperbole no matter how you slice it. All the timetables that we would have followed if Trump had actually followed through on withdrawing from Afghanistan probably would have led to an overall comparable degree of harm. Maybe the withdrawal would have been slightly less messy, but given the fact that everything was messy under Trump, I really don't believe that. I mean, I don't know where in Trump's administration I could point to an example of stellar competence that I could then use to infer he would have done a better job. It was a messy situation all around. It seems like a lot of the bad that took place was almost like seeded into the problem an inevitable consequence of decades of mishandling the situation. Not to say Biden didn't mishandle it at some points. I definitely think that he could have done a better job preempting the withdrawal of the Afghans who would assist us, stuff like that. But altogether, I think this was basically just a gigantic foreign policy blunder packaged neatly in a two decade long mess that Trump, Obama, and Bush are all fairly responsible and complicit in perpetuating. Also, the reason why I was mad at Trump for pulling out of Syria wasn't because I'm hypocritical. It's because we were doing base shit in Syria with Rajava. We were fighting ISIS and doing a great job protecting them from Assad and from Turkey, which as far as I'm concerned is pretty cool. We were doing good work there. So there's differences in the circumstances. Finally, the issue with the Russian bounty thing wasn't whether or not it was happening. It was that Trump's response was that he talked to Putin and trusted Putin over his own intel agencies. It was the way he downplayed it more so than anything else. He was like, nah, it's nice. He said nothing's going on down there. Nothing to worry about. That was pretty funny. But in terms of the actual operative intelligence, you always take years to find out how much of that stuff is actually true. OK, so one thing that I have an issue with, whether you're praising Biden or whatever, is that we could have left at any time. And at the same time, we could actually just remove the regime in North Korea. Tons of countries could do that. But you have a massive humanitarian crisis. And no single country wants that on their hands. And that's one of the reasons why it took so long for us to pull out is that you have this political theater to shore up, where no one wants to take responsibility for anything. And this is just another example. And I don't think we should. Can I speak to that? So I would think the one justification behind all the BS that they spun us about Afghanistan is that they are not going to take. They had tens of thousands of troops in this region for 20 years. They could have very easily either secured the majority of that region and set up a proper functioning government of the people. They didn't. They set up a puppet state. That's why it was so rife with corruption. The reason that that state fell is because the actual soldiers of that Afghan military and police department were starving. Many of them weren't even being fed. So of course, they dropped their weapons as soon as they get stormed. But could we have taken some 25,000 troops that we had in there before we did the withdrawal and secured the airports and the lines out for all of the people who wanted to leave? We absolutely could have, but we didn't. Listen, there's so much more than that, right? For example, we saw General Miley say back in July, we don't need Bagram Air Base for what we want to accomplish. There were two air bases that could have evacuated people. There was Bagram Air Base, which was easily to be fortified and controlled, which our military currently did. And then there was the airport that was public at Kabul. They closed down Bagram Air Base, intentionally allowing the prison there, right? So think about this. On one hand, we were told that we had to rely on the Taliban for security in Kabul. We now know from leaked documents that actually the Taliban offered to allow the US military to be the ones that controlled the air base around Kabul. But they declined and said they were happy to have the Taliban do it. Simultaneously, we are told that they knew the Taliban eventually would overtake. But inexplicably, not only do we leave all of our weapons and assets in Bagram Air Base, we left the prison there with the prisoners, which housed over 1,000 members of ISIS, the same group that we have to be in Syria fighting. And then the Taliban, predictably, allowed ISIS to be free, which then, predictably, suicide bombed our troops and innocent people. Now, all of this was because Biden decided to close Bagram Air Base because he couldn't come up with the reasonable solution. You should get out the weapons, the vulnerable people, and the horrible prisoners before you close the fortified base. In addition, Big Ball's Biden, as Vash called him, then decided that he was going to launch an airstrike on the ISIS after that. Now, he claims that we killed two members of ISIS, but he won't name who they are. But you know who we did kill? Six children and an interpreter that worked with us. But we don't talk about Big Ball's Biden in that sense. But that's who Vash is, and that's who so much of these militaristic leftists are. They're OK with the same people that lied to us for 20 years in Afghanistan, having military interventionism in Syria. And they'll brag about when they kill children and kill interpreters just so Biden could feel like a man because he watched it so bad. Wait, when did I brag about the murder of children and interpreters? Well, you're talking about Big Ball's Biden's treatment of this Afghanistan. You were unaware that he murdered children. Hold on, Biden's Big Balls were pulling out when Trump said he would his entire presidency and then didn't. That was Big Ball Biden. That's that airstrike shit or the drone strike shit afterwards. That's not Big Ball Biden. OK, that's Little Ball Biden. He disagrees. Don't misrepresent. I'm pretty sure all presidents are guilty of doing some sort of child killing. I mean, I don't think that's really a great point. Yeah, I mean, hey, if you want to, if you want to, you can go for that point. I'm just saying everybody's guilty of child killing. Yeah, we're all complicit in it. We're all complicit in it. This is what's ridiculous. One, Biden felt the necessity to do that because of his failures that led to our troops being killed in Kabul. That's why he felt necessary to do this. Secondly, I love listening to leftists that wanted to blame Trump for every single thing that happened when he was in charge, now saying things. I'm not mad. This is just how I talk. But I understand you don't like when I'm proving you to be the show that you are. But how they wanted to blame Trump for everything. You just say one thing and then spend like six minutes talking about, and this is what I love about the left. And then you talk about six other grievances you've imagined you have. Sure. As opposed to you that brings up Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. Trump would have been different. You guys have this great tension between you. Sure. But I think some other people would like to get in as well. Great. I'll finish my point then. So the point is, real quick, that what you see is that they want to blame Trump for everything his presidency and then deflect. Jesus Christ, dude. Rather, repeat yourself 10 more times. I definitely, I respect that, and want to mention I respect it, and I appreciate everybody's input. But I do just to be sure, in case there are any people that hadn't got to put into this conversation so far, in particular, because I was behind on that. So thanks, Stardust, for saying that. Anybody in particular, Emma, or Sphinxer, or AKA, S-O-D, Sibyl, Carr, K? I'd like to hear from you. I'd like to say something. But yeah, you see, somebody else to go first, because I just spoke, so. Just a couple of remarks. George W. Bush is probably loving this. He's sitting back and watching the three other presidents kind of clean up his mess. So he's just sitting there. And here we are, fighting over Bush, Biden, and Obama. Not a lot of, or not Bush, but Obama, Trump, and Biden. And he's just sitting back, just loving this. So I find that kind of interesting. He's not really being brought up as much. And then Trump had a contingency-based plan to withdraw with the Taliban, I think, for forgetting that point. And the last year and a half of his presidency, not one American casualty in Afghanistan. So Trump had a very good foreign policy track record. You can hate him with his tweets and whatever. But foreign policy-wise, he destroyed ISIS, killed leaders. He didn't keep moving the red line in the sand. Did he destroy ISIS? Wasn't it ISIS-K that just did the suicide bombing? Did he destroy ISIS-K? He destroyed ISIS? They were jailed. They were jailed. The mother of all bombs. They were jailed, and Biden let them be free. That's what happened. Both Trump and Biden released people in jail. Who is it about? Maybe it's... But it's different. It's different than releasing people in negotiations. And that's why you won't hear me say things about the, oh, the Beau Bergdell exchange led to a lot of the people in positions of leadership. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about, we thought in Biden and Trump's administration that these people were jailed, and they were apparently jailed because we thought they were a big enough threat to warrant it. And yet the Biden administration left those people to be freed by the Taliban, which then immediately attacked U.S. interests. And I'm just making the point that it, I don't understand why we're talking about hypothetically what Trump would have done, right? Trump wasn't there. This was on Biden. And for the people that wanted to blame Trump for everything to now say, but how would have Trump done it any differently is absurd. I think I would... If I could all come in. Trump laid it out. Trump laid it out. So Trump's plan may have been massively different. The buck stops with Biden. I just want to say a couple of things and then somebody else can go. But Afghanistan has had different groups in it since the 1800s. I guess we just don't learn every single time from the prior group that was in there. But it's been really a bad idea. But I mean, I'm sure we had our reasons. And also responding to the point of like getting people out, saying the ANA would be competent while spending like six months like rushing everybody out. I don't think that would have gone over too well. I think it would, I mean, I don't think that would have inspired confidence in anybody. I don't think it was an easy thing to do. And I think all the presidents prior were probably passing the buck because they didn't want to do it even though it's this huge drain monetarily. But yeah, I guess props to Biden for doing something that was going to end badly, regardless, so, yeah. Okay, can the optics hit? That is the reason why they didn't preempt the withdrawal earlier, by the way, or at least that's the imagined reason. They did hope the ANA would be able to keep the country propped up. And if they had been doing this prolonged, like defeatist withdrawal procedure for months beforehand, the belief was that it would have demoralized the ANA as an implicit like admission that Americans knew that the country would fall the moment they left. And imagine how bad that would have been. This is one of the most. Okay, another thing to think about, right? Another thing is also the ANA was not trained and they were trained by like the US military, right? So the ANA was trained to fight in a certain way when they don't have the resources on their own to do it that type of way, right? They were kind of, they were not kind of really taught to fight in the same way that it would be in their territory. Like how is the US military going to? There were like, there was like a small group that was maybe competent, but like the rest of them, the training, the US training would not have worked in that environment. They were too reliant on like a backup group, right? So. Okay, two things on that point. One, then we were lied to by our military and intel agencies for 20 years and wasted trillions of dollars. And that's through both, that's through multiple administrations. That should be a reason that we consider not trusting those same intel agencies in generals and places like regime change in Syria, which is absolutely horrific that many left to support. Secondly, when we talk, right? Well, we see that ISIS was being fought and captured in Afghanistan as well. We see what happens immediately when we left. So that seems, if that, if the justification is we have to stay in Syria to stop ISIS, how wouldn't that same justification be used in Afghanistan? Because, okay, there are quite a few differences. First of all, our occupation with Rajava was useful because we were also defending historical allies against an encroach from Syria and from Turkey, should we withdraw? Additionally, it looks like our pushback against ISIS was actually working. All we were really doing in Afghanistan was like holding the cities while the Taliban continued to surge and swell, fighting against the ANA and dying doing it out of the border side. It seemed like the project going on with the Kurds was actually functional. We owed them as long-term allies and they were also victims of like 16 different flavors of persecution that we were preventing. I think in that case, there was a much greater potential for long-term benefit. What is this attempt at what aboutism anyway? Are you just mad? It has nothing to do with what aboutism. You're just mad that I pointed out a couple of truths from you. It has to do with holding, someone who brought up Trump then talking about what aboutism is hilarious. But even your point here doesn't make sense because if that was the case, we could see that the Biden administration is saying there's a fundamental difference between the Taliban and ISIS. Would you agree with that? I would say so, I'm sure. Okay, so then your argument that what we had to leave because the Taliban was continuingly to grow and encroach is irrelevant to if we were keeping ISIS and checking Afghanistan. Now, I wanted to withdraw in both Syria and Afghanistan, but you're saying in one area we couldn't withdraw because there'd be a resurgence of ISIS, but in the other area, Afghanistan, you favored withdrawal, which immediately may lead to a resurgence of ISIS. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. The difference being that our withdrawal from the Rojava area would mean the absolute guaranteed defeat of those people, whereas the point of the Afghanistan project was to prop the ANA up. Obviously, that didn't work, but nobody knew that for sure, or nobody knew how effectively they'd be able to hold themselves off until the months leading up to our withdrawal. Or by anyone, I mean, we didn't. I'm sure military officials knew they were lying about the success of the ANA, but... They knew damn well, because we knew there was plenty of corruption running in the ANA from day one. So additionally, we'd been in Afghanistan for 20 years, and all we really seem to be doing is propping up warlords and despots as pseudo-democratic leaders, whereas again, at Rojava, I think there was a really worthwhile project, a budding little anarcho-communist, fun-time land that we were defending and actually meaningfully affecting change in the region. So it's about efficacy. I'm not against interventionism necessarily. It seemed like it was doing good in Syria and doing bad in Afghanistan. The problem is the interventionism's being led by the same people that lied to us consistently in Afghanistan, and they lied to us in Libya, and they lied to us in Iraq, and they lied to us in Iran, and there's no reason to believe that they won't be lying to us in Syria for the regime building, which it's really not just about ISIS, it's about Toplig Assad. That's why we're really there. But the other point I want to make on what Stardust and you were talking about, which is... If Rojava topples Assad, I think that's based. Of course, that's what it's really about. But the other point I want to make is... Wait, I'm sorry, do you prefer Assad to Rojava? Please. Again, I don't care to deflect, to talk about your efforts at regime change because Assad's back up. Wait, you brought it up. You're talking about regime change. Again, that's exactly what you're talking about. You're talking about, well, yes. When I say the real reason where there's the Toplig Assad, you're like, that would be a good thing. We could have another debate on that. No, I was only saying that it happened to be a good thing. The project was the Kurds having a separate area so they wouldn't be persecuted by Turkey or by Assad. It wasn't about regime change. We understand that people want regime change and think it would be based. The leftist interventionists want that. Rojava wasn't moving into Assad. Wait, you're completely making this up. Rojava wasn't moving forces to go dethrone Assad and US soldiers weren't participating in that effort. You just said that you would be in favor of it. I said that that's the real agenda. No, I said that if it happened, Rojava's preferable to Assad, but that was not a project of regime change. Okay, well, that's what's going on there. We could see there'd been generals and others that have talked about that one of the reasons that we're there is actually to apply pressure on the Assad regime and lead to eventual regime change of it. That's one of the reasons that we're there. But the other point that I want to make like what was said here, again, what was said here by Stardust and Varsh was this, they said, no, no, I'll talk to you for hours afterwards about it but I want to address the point that Stardust made. Hold on one second. I do want to give Rob a chance to respond and then I promise we'll come right to you Stardust. Okay, both of you seem to make the argument, right? And correct me if I'm wrong, that it was about not inspiring a lack of confidence, that if we would have came out and said these people were doing poorly, it would have led to a lack of confidence in the ANA, which would have caused a debacle, correct? Both of you said that, right? I just think it would have looked really suspicious for us to be saying, everybody get out, get out, get out, you know? While telling everybody also the ANA can handle this. Okay, so what we see is, so the rationale is, well, we couldn't remove the ISIS prisoners from Bagram. We couldn't remove $85 billion of military assets, which has now made the Taliban one of the most sophisticated air forces in the world. We couldn't remove our US allies and US citizens were there because if we did that, it would have led to a lack of confidence in the ANA. Well, congratulations by not doing that. The ANA had so much confidence that they lasted 11 days. So it seems that the reason that is given of, oh, well, we couldn't be honest about it. It's because the ANA would have eventually failed through lack of confidence. What would they have failed in 10 days instead of 11? And at least we would have had our $85 billion of military equipment back. ISIS would have continued to be detained and our allies would have been brought back home. This seems like a kind of a hindsight thing. I don't think anyone expected them to fall as quickly as they did to the Taliban. It seems like a lot of the problems that we faced with regards to the ANA was a poor understanding of the operational effectiveness of the ANA. Plenty of their soldiers were fighting the Taliban. They'd been dying by the hundreds every month. It's not like they were no strangers to combat. Many of them were quite hardworking. The problem is there wasn't a perfectly consistent understanding of how effectively the broader communication and administrative operations could actually hold things together. And additionally, there is an argument to be made that things could have been potentially made worse or we could have prevented a Hail Mary if we had emboldened the Taliban by signaling our departure sometime beforehand. Just imagine, imagine a media scape, okay? We build up the ANA for 20 years and then we make it clear we think they're going to fail by hastily evacuating everyone before pulling our troops out. Then the Taliban mass around border cities starts slaughtering as they move their way inward. And what's the narrative then? We undermined the project of 20 years because Biden was looking for a quick optics win. The ANA could have held up if only we hadn't undermined their ability to defend themselves. It seems like this is one of those situations where everything was so fucked from start to finish that no matter how things were going to go, there was going to be an element of it that was mishandled. I think we can talk about the elements of the mishandling in a fair light without acting as though we had like perfect operational knowledge and hindsight on how this could have played out with the withdrawal. Rob, I have a feeling you want to respond and I'll give you a chance to respond. But just to be sure, in case there's anybody else that wants to respond as well, it's been moving fast. So in case Emma K. Karr, Karr looks like you've got your hand up. Yeah, I'll be quick. I just want to propose a slight shift in topic. If we can maybe look in keeping it on Afghanistan, look at what the panel would think our responsibility is to Afghanistan now in the aftermath of our withdrawal. I think that would be a more productive discussion. Preparations. That's a proposal. I think placing blame where it needs to be and calling out the left that said that we need to do elect Joe Biden as foreign policy acumen. Yeah, okay, Democrats, if that makes you better. That said we need to do elect Biden for his foreign policy acumen is something that we should do. We could talk about that in a second, but even still it was an impressive bit of sophistry that Vash used to deflect. But even if all of that's true, we could see how it wouldn't play out in the reality that he's suggesting. For example, we see that the Taliban understood that the ANA was so weak that they were able to totally take over the country in 11 days. So his argument, well, if we would have signaled weakness and we would have withdrawn, one, we did signal that there was going to be a withdrawal date. So they knew we were eventually withdrawing. So if they were going to use that opportunity to circle and massacre people, they would have anyways. And second, they took over in 11 days. It sounds like what Vash is saying is something that seems like, oh, that could be in the realm of reality. It's not. The Taliban took over in 11 days. So everything that he's saying isn't a defense of Joe Biden, not getting our people out, not keeping bag room air base, not getting our assets out and not getting the prisoners out. None of that's a defense of it. The reality is the exact scenario that Vash is talking about literally happened. You can't imagine a foreign power like the Taliban taking over quicker than 11 days. He's literally saying, if we would have got all those things out, they could have taken over in seven days. And then magically, they would have decided to massacre people when they didn't decide to do it in that way in 11 days. Why would they have behaved differently if they were able to overtake in a fewer number of days than 11? That's not what I said. I said that it could have been that way, not that it would have been that way. It's kind of- Okay, so it's not a defense of Biden's actions then. So hypothetically, this could have happened, but I have no reasons why it would have been done. No, it's an indication that there was- I get there's tension between you guys, but I think Kay actually, I would like to hear what she has to say. Thanks, moderator, Stardust. Real good contribution there. Jesus Christ. Well, I'm just saying, I'm getting tired of like, I'm looking to- It is true. I think you're Stardust. Whatever happened- I had no- I had no- I had no- I had no- I had no- Look, all I'll say is- No, no, you're- Hold on, buddy. I think Kay wanted you to talk. Kay, what are you at? Yeah, I'm not gonna get in on the pissing contest between the two of you, but in address to Carr's question about subject change and what our responsibility is now, regardless of who's at fault or who we should be blaming or whatever, there are people suffering, there are people dying in Afghanistan right now. And there are so many people that in the last two decades that we've been in Afghanistan have put their lives and the safety of their families on the line to be helpful to the American government and our occupation in Afghanistan. We absolutely have a responsibility to get them and their families out and make sure that they are safe. And that should be our top priority, not just determining who we should blame, who should be put on the chopping block for this. There are lives at stake, there are people suffering, we need to do something about it. And that's just, that is the heart of the argument. Yeah, I agree. We have four administrations that screwed the whole thing up. So now it's about what we need to do about it. Sorry, go ahead. No, no, I'm glad that you got to speak. I'm sorry if I'm overstepping. I just, sorry about that. No worries, you're fine. I think that, let's see, we did, anybody sinker of doom? Well, I wanted to say at least, what is known is that preliminary reports as to the viability of at least the Afghan Air Force, which was, is that without contractor support, those planes would be inoperable within six months. And Afghanistan is a landlocked country and the Taliban basically controlled everything around the border. So once the US forces left, they were essentially on their own. They didn't have, the support structure was never actually set up. Once the US was there, and once they left, it's gone. But I do agree that we should instead focus on what do we do next? Because I mean, whatever's going on between Rob and Vash, I don't want to part of it. And honestly, I honestly, I think it's one way. So I don't know. But I just want to support the Afghan people. That's, I think that we should commit an enormous amount of money to restructuring the region as best as we can, not through hard power, but rather through investment, through reparations, and through the establishment of hospice and refugee centers in the region so that people fleeing the terror of the Taliban have the ability to reach them and safe airports where they can be fairly assessed as asylum seekers in the US. I mean, this is why that you see tension. It's because I'm calling out people that deserve to be called out. So we started off calling Biden big balls, Biden. It's only because of his failures that we have the Taliban that is now running that country in the way in which they're doing it. And so what we see is- Biden made the Taliban? Holy shit, one second. How vulgar are we allowed to be on here? So again, what we see- Big balls is not a big deal. So again, cool. So again, what we see is the bragging of how Biden handled this, simultaneously saying, well, the situation is such a disaster that we have to give all these reparations and all of this money. What we should have done was set up a system where there would have been a transition of the people that were our allies, including the great Afghani people that fought with our troops to make sure that they got out of there before we closed down Bagram Air Base, which would have allowed them to be protected and get their families out. Instead, what we see happening is people like Vaj that supported the very people and the decisions and actually think it was good that caused this mess are now saying, that's okay because I get to achieve my socialist dream anyways of saying that we should finance all these people anyways, right? So it's a win-win for them. They cheer for the destruction and the bad policy and then say, oh, what a shame that happened. Now we have to do my other big government policies that we wanted that includes financing these people and things like this. The reality is those people that helped us, the people that helped us, we should help. But the problem is, what we see happening is in the rush to accept people from Afghanistan, we're not vetting people and we're bringing a lot of people. There was a story this week about child brides that we were bringing over. And so there's a lot of bad stuff that's happening in the name of, oh, we fucked up. Now we just need to bring as many Afghanis as possible or help us. Child brides in the U.S. I was just gonna say that there are states. There's great deflection. People are left. What? No, come on. I have a question. I hope these are legal in the United States. I have a question. Okay, we haven't heard from civil in a while. Rob, can you keep it at DMs? It's embarrassing when you're like this in public. I think I'm doing great, thanks. Go ahead, Sybil. I was just curious because everyone here has mentioned so far the people who have helped us. Do we feel that we have any responsibility to everyone else in the country that may be fearing right now or maybe, you know, wanting to leave because of the new rulers? I believe we do have responsibility. Yeah, huge one. Trillian is definitely worth of responsibility. Four administrations went into fucking up the landscape of that country. You know, and when we started with Bush, it was fucking shocking all and we were literally leveling goddamn cities. And in our efforts to prop up a, and I believe always functionally useless, ANA, we went and caused more terror and harm across that country to a lot of people who just want to live. And the worst part about it is those actions that we do just fuel insurgency. It just fuels the numbers joining the Taliban. So we have so destabilized that region that we absolutely have a responsibility and Australia, our fucking lap dogs and foreign intervention have a responsibility and fucking Canada has a responsibility and Germany has responsibility. We absolutely have a responsibility to every citizen of that country that wants out. Well, there's another thing that we haven't discussed yet is that China is playing nice with the Taliban because they want all those natural resources. China is not too friendly to a lot of Muslim communities as we found out. But I don't like that argument because that's basically saying, let's keep out China and continue to do what we're doing so that they don't come in and do what we're doing. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that that's another thing we have to consider as to what's going to shape the suffering of the people in Afghanistan. I'm not saying we should stay because China will swoop in. Okay, the problem I have here is, it's something that I've seen quite often. Is it with the left? What you see is people, we could call it the left, we could call it the interventionist, the neocons, et cetera. What happens is they'll say things like this. They'll say, oh, our intel agencies and our generals and these administrations, they fucked up so bad. Now we owe these people around the world. And yet they continue to support those agencies. For example, when Chuck Schumer told us that the intel agencies would find six ways from Sunday of getting back at Trump, they supported every bit of red meat that those intel agencies put out against Trump. What does this have to do with Afghanistan? I think it's great. I think you know what, I'm down with your strategy. I think since they fucked up, we should just like completely scrap every institution that we have that's ever fucked up. I think it's great. We should see that. What I think is funny is it's constant, what you see is people that constantly support the very people that are fucking it up and then say, oh, now that they fucked it up, now we owe us something. We'll stop supporting the people that are doing this interventionism regardless if they be in the Republican or Democratic Party in the first place. You should- So should we not help people? Real quick, there are ways to hate Donald Trump without supporting the intel agencies. Unfortunately, almost every person in the Democratic Party and in the left decided to support those intel agencies because Orange Man bad. And now you wanna deflect from it because it's part of your agenda anyways that you want to bring in people and you want to help people from other countries. What does this have to do with anything we're talking about? What is this? It's reality. That's the truth. You're talking about the intel agency. That's the reality. What does the CIA have to do? I'm sorry, this is just all language. This is just all language, okay? Like what do you wanna do? Do you wanna scrap the agencies? Do you wanna tell the other people? Yes, we should scrap the FBI. No, no, no, no. Do you wanna say, sorry, let's just leave you there. We're talking over, sorry. You're dealt the hands, you're dealt. How should we help the Afghans? Cause I know he wants to get rid of the CIA or whatever, but how should we help the Afghans? I just wanna ask that question. Thanks, Vosh. Thanks for taking my question. Great, great contribution is always there. Man's slaying. The way, the first thing we do is do no, we stopped like, for example, it would be like saying this, if we had a gym place. Rob, answer the goddamn question, please. Right, I'm answering it. The way we help Afghanistan is my first ensuring that we never devastate their country again by holding those accountable that we're deserving of it. The second thing we should do is the people that helped us in Afghanistan, we absolutely should try to get those allies out. Unfortunately, the amount of people that the intel agencies that the left and the Democrats supported have fucked up countries. We don't have the money or resources to help. Should we help the people of Iraq? Should we help the people of Libya? Should we help the people of Yemen? Should we help the people of Saudi Arabia? Okay, so how much money do we have to do all of this? We, hold on one sec. I wanna give, if there are any, if there are any last people that have any quick responses, I'm gonna eat my own arm. Sorry. Yeah, if foreign interventionism fucks up the planet, there are 800 military bases across the world. Yeah, we owe a lot of fucking people, a lot of fucking reparations, and we got the money for it. We spent $725 billion a year in military spending, I think that we can relocate some of that money into helping some of the people that we've royally fucked over the years. Got that right, absolutely. It's sort of utopian nonsense from people that don't understand economics and think that we have infinite money to spend. How much money should we spend on the people of the United States? It's what she literally just said. Look at the world we're doing well, we do well. Guess what, we, hey, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, let me say something, one thing, one thing, one thing. I'll head start us, I'm sure it'll be in another amazing concentration, please, go ahead. Yes, I'll be sure to not say any jokes this time. Okay, so don't you think if we focused on helping other countries and helping them succeed, maybe we wouldn't need to get involved militarily as much as often, right? The goal of the United States government is to work first and foremost for the people of the citizens of this country. There is so much money and wealth to spare. But that helps the citizens of this country. Excuse me, excuse me, you asked me a question, now I'm answering. So there's so much money that our government can spend on the people of this country. Oh, so you just talk over everybody for the entire year of this and then get upset. You ask me a question and then I answer. I'm exactly answering the question. That's right, that's exactly what I'm doing to answer. So the role of the government and the money they have would be to benefit the people of the United States first and foremost. The insanity of people saying we will continue to support the very agencies that destabilize the world, but then say, oh, now we have to pay for the world is insane. And almost all of you, I guarantee, supported those intel agencies when they were declaring war on Donald Trump. I did, we're really clear before anyone else. I just want to appreciate the irony that Kay over there said, we spend a lot on this so we should put that money towards why. And Rob's response was, I can't believe the left believes there's literally infinite money spent, like literally like X to Y. What like you, hold on, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on, hold on, hold on, I do want to hear from Sybil. Sybil, if I have five apples and I give you two, how many apples are there? Why do you want to hear from Sybil? We haven't heard from Sybil a lot. Shut up. I just wanted to ask a quick question that I haven't heard a whole lot of people talk about when they do just discuss Afghanistan. Somebody just mentioned that China is ponying up to the Taliban and treating them nicely. How do we going forward handle our relationship with the Taliban now that they're in charge? Good question. I can answer that. So our relationship with the Taliban doesn't need to be direct at all. The first thing we do is stop creating the conditions that fuels insurgencies. Chaos and instability fuels insurgencies. Every time one of our fucking bombs kills a child or civilian, the Taliban is right there to put a rifle in the hand of the crying parents and tell them it's time to even the score. So we need to stop creating insurgents in these unstable regions to begin with. Secondly, if you fuel and build up the material conditions of the people who aren't in the Taliban, it makes them less likely to seek out strongmen and warlords of ultra-conservative fucking terrorist organizations that are trying to take the country. If you help them build mutual support and aid networks and dual power structures within their communities, they have the ability to fight back at a community level against the Taliban so that you don't have an organization like that holding the whole fucking border. That's what we do. We don't need to address China directly. We don't need to address the Taliban directly. We need to provide the material resources to empower the actual people of Afghanistan to fight back against these forces domestically. Okay, two things on that one. I kept it fast. What Kars said initially was exactly what I was saying, which everyone was saying, well, we can't focus on that. We should stop the interventionism and stop supporting the agencies that do the interventionism. That's literally what Kars just said. As far as giving the assets and the money, I'll answer Vosya's Apple idea when it comes to this. The problem is when you start to do all of the programs that the left-wing people on this panel would want, okay, there would be five apples. Now let's take the analogy further, right? So the analogy would be this. You're saying we don't just help Afghanistan. We help these poor countries around the world to make sure they don't have strongmen. That would be what, 125 countries? So now we take those five apples and we're giving them to 125 countries. But plus we want to give Medicare to Al for everyone in this country. Plus we want working to be a choice. We want to pay people that don't want to work, right? So now all of a sudden, those apples, no one's giving you- We're giving really irrelevant here. We're giving really irrelevant here. Okay, okay, let's take away the healthcare for all and stuff like that. We've pretty brought that up. Kars, real quick, fine. We'll take that out, Kars. Do you agree that we should be giving this money and these assets to destabilize countries around the world? Let's prioritize the countries we destabilized. Okay, how many is that? How many is that? Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria are the most obvious immediate- We're discussing the Middle East to address you directly in response to your question. I'm talking about Afghanistan and the Middle East. I absolutely believe we should be providing resources. Sometimes that can take the form of cash. Sometimes that can take the form of food. Sometimes that can take the form of infrastructure done through local good faith NGOs in the region. All right, but what we're doing is providing for material resources and needs of the people. Okay, it doesn't work like that. Because, one, there would be not enough resources to go around to do that in all the domestic agenda that are particularly people on the left. We print the money, Rob. That's not how it works. You don't just print the money. We do it every year except we give it to Raytheon. Here we are. All right, we do have to, yeah, let's just ensure that we hear the response from Rob. And so... One, just printing the money wouldn't work. I don't even need to get into why that's nonsensical, but you can see how people think that that's a good idea. The other thing is a lot of times when we give money in the form of NGOs and other aid to these countries, what happens is it goes into the coffers of the very wealthy. So we could see that historically, the intel agencies have been sending money to poor African countries, Middle East countries, which end up going into the arms of strongmen that then use that money to facilitate their strength, which they then, like in Afghanistan, the warlords before the United States came in, forced farmers to grow opium and things like that. And that was a lot of aid that was going into Afghanistan to help lead to that. Oh, we can do better, right? If I can... Just keep printing, right? We do it every year. That's, yeah. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Every year, we print money and give it to defense contractors. We give it to Raytheon, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Boeing. I'm saying we take some of that shit that we print money to do every single year and actually do some fucking good in the region. So there's a number of problems. And on both sides, I just want to touch on bits and pieces of it. So one, we shouldn't be debasing our currency to enrich defense contractors to destabilize these regions. So we also should be reducing our defense spending. A lot of it is wasteful in that sense. So the fact that we threw trillions of dollars down a burning pit, basically, is not saying like, well, that's where the money is, that's where it came from. That was a waste of resources. You can't cite a waste of resources as a reason why we have this money. The resources were wasted and further debasing the currency will only make, well, it's not free. But at the same time, you run into another problem where look at the Red Cross with Haiti. Millions and billions of dollars are donated. Very few homes are actually built to help them. So just because we're sending resources that way, we don't have much, how much control do we actually have? You'll recall I said working with local good faith NGOs. The reason why the Red Cross fails in Haiti is because it's a massive international organization directly pumping cash into a country that has a very complicated regional and local infrastructure and political system. The money would be best in the hands of local communities, churches and groups who know the exact needs of the country instead of just going to corrupt leaders. Not that simple. Well, I agree it's not that simple, but I also take your point, like I agree with there as well. The issue is what kind of structure will we have for accountability in that regard? I agree, local communities are much more likely to be able to make more use of the resources that they are given to facilitate the needs. I will answer your question. Sorry, I just want to let you know I will answer it. Okay, so we have precedent for this. Okay, you brought up the Haitian example and I like that example actually. I can name a few organizations operating within Haiti that have a proven track record of actual success and actual itemized efficient usage of funds donated to them for things like building homes, improving infrastructure and enriching the lives of patients and their organizations helping Afghanistan that do the same. We look at these organizations and look at the body of work that they have done and that's how we vet them. We have the means to vet them. We don't just throw up our hands and say, how do we know? We know. We have people who investigate these things. We have auditors, we have lawyers, we have attorneys, we have accountants. Why didn't we use them? We have investigators. No, no, no, no. Because we were fueling a military industrial complex, Rob. I didn't mean to imply that there's no way of knowing. I was just unfamiliar with, you seem more familiar. So like maybe you were aware of how these organizations were kept accountable. I don't, I have very little trust in the, if the government funds are being taken that way, that's where I'm skeptical. And I didn't say government. The organizations that are helping the people of Haiti effectively aren't government organizations. Most of them are churches. And the people who are helping, actually helping people in Afghanistan, the majority of them are NGOs. They're not government agencies. The money comes from our government. One second. Which we can't trust. We do have, we do have a lot of questions that we have to get through. And if I, getting all of you out of here in about two hours, we definitely have to move into the Q and A. So unless there are any last thoughts from people we haven't heard from, I don't know, Emma, I think we heard from you on this topic on Afghanistan. Did you have any thoughts on Afghanistan, Emma? I'm not sure if we did hear from you. I mentioned a couple of things at the beginning. Oh, that's right. I'm good. Yeah, we can move on. Do want to say thanks to everybody for your questions. All of our guests are linked in the description. So if you're like, hmm, I like that. I want to hear more. You can hear more by clicking on their links. And that includes the modern day debate podcast. We put our guest links in the description box there as well. So if you're listening via podcast, please check out our guest links as we really do appreciate them. This one coming in from David Velar. We did not get to CRT tonight. Said CRT is a necessary tool to continue to keep white supremacy from proliferating in this country. Reach me if you need more info. David Velar, thank you very much. And hopefully we'll get to CRT next time as we had hoped to. But this time we had run short. Brov, mate, thanks for your question said. Rob, favorite word other than intelligences. Cool, great. Leftist, favorite word, bootlicking, interventionism, and authoritarian fascism. You literally didn't answer the question once again. What was the question? You were like, you were just ready to do something. No, I thought he was saying those were my favorite words. No, he's asking favorite words besides that. Oh, my favorite word besides that. The left. That's a good question. I would say, I don't know. I just think it's funny. OK, this is just great. If anybody cares what my favorite word is, it's indubitably because it's adorable. Thank you very much. It's fun to say. I like saying duty, but like it sounds like duty. You got it in, bro. This one from Wolf says, can Robert and Vosh just get a room already? Now, we've asked him to, but Madous NCOs. He would have to pay for it. He's the socialist with the money, so. This is going to go from Madous NCOs as Trump kept delaying the withdrawal because the Taliban and Afghan government didn't meet the requirements for our departure. Mr. Big Ball's Biden lover. Am I to respond to that? I feel like that was cut off yearly. Did he run out of space? That was actually it as Mr. Big Ball. You can kick the can down the road forever if you want to play that game. If you set conditions and then say you're not going to withdraw until those conditions, but then he kept setting withdrawal dates, but then he kept not doing it because the. I mean, you could justify anything with that. The argument would be how legitimate were those conditions and to what extent were they employed in good faith. And considering how often he played this juggling game with the date for withdrawal, then. Not only that, but how much in good faith are the Afghan government and the Taliban actually? Like, oh yeah, I guess I just won't meet these conditions and you'll have to stick around for a lot longer. Oh well. Yeah, why would the ANA want us to leave, right? I mean, Christ, we're, you know, keeping the walls. Yeah, and conditions was the justification for staying there, that one. You got it in this question. Coming in from, do you appreciate it? The 99 da says, Vash, will you debate Rob? Did not. It did not. Tonight was a, there was a lot of Rob. I think he means what this was. There's a lot of Rob and Vash. I think he means one on one. Andrew August says, Rob, which people did Biden specifically release that directly attacked U.S. interests afterward, or is this an empty claim? You don't substantiate a whole lot. So it's hard to tell. So according to the, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Kirby, the Taliban people that they had specific threats that were going to attack the United States at the Kabbal Air Base and that led to 13 troops dying actually came from Bagram Air Base's prison. And so what we take, if you take in conjunction everything they've said, we heard Biden say we expected the Taliban would eventually take over. We just didn't think it would be 11 days, but we know that they left Bagram Air Base, including the prison. The Taliban then, that meant that Biden and his team knew that eventually the Taliban would come in and have control of that prison. Predictably what happened was they freed the ISIS prisoners, which we're told by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were the prisoners that actually caused the suicide bombing. So it was Biden's direct action, direct action that led to those ISIS bombers being freed to kill American troops. So I think whoever said that either was misunderstood what Rob was claiming. Rob was claiming that Biden essentially allowed prisoners to be released in Afghanistan, where the question seemed to be that Biden actively released someone from an American prison, which is now- No, no, sorry. Do we know Biden wasn't the one who suicide bomb at the Kabbal airport? This one's coming in from, thank you for your question. He is an empty suit that looks like a zombie. This one from Chloe McClain says, Amazing, beta. Thank you for that, Chloe. And Justin Newman says, everyone, if you had to pick one, would you allow one abortions or two mandatory COVID vaccinations? Ooh, I'll answer that as a pro-life activist. Oh, well, it's easy for you. Wait, let her. Okay, I'm more left leaning. Pro-life activist, I am in support of vaccinations. And I think that overwhelmingly, the anti-vax whole movement with COVID is overly political. And I think it's ridiculous. And I do find a level of kind of hypocrisy with refusing to wear a mask or refusing to take the vaccine and then saying that we should care about all life. I do acknowledge that hypocrisy. I'm not super pro of the government mandating things, but this isn't the first time that a vaccine has been mandated. For me, it comes down to what can we do as a society to save as many human lives as we possibly can? And if that means taking a vaccine, if that means trying to prevent abortions in any way possible that we can, that's what we should be doing as a society to move society forward to making it better. That's a bad way to look at things because that would mean that people would never take any risk. That would mean that our speed limit would be five mile an hour that we would never leave our houses because that would alleviate people dying. The original question. The original question, yeah, I can't determine. I think that if I knew definitively that the aborted ones were all being actual persons in lives, that seems worse, but both are incredibly heinous at that point. It's definitely a difficult question. If we're just gonna go with the math and I don't think this is so immorality you just boils down to math, but just from a mathematical standpoint, let's say we all got vaccinated to day one and the 700,000 I think it is so far that has died to COVID, we're saved. That many people, babies are aborted every year. Now I'm not pro-life, but if we're just gonna go straight up math and I had to pick one and I couldn't pick neither or both, then I would have to go with no abortions. But that's just the math. That doesn't necessarily... Yeah, this is some tough utilitarian calculus. I think I would have to permit abortions but not mandate vaccines. It's rough cause I wanna also mandate vaccines, but I think the total amount of social harm done by outlawing abortion might be greater than whatever harm would be done by us addressing COVID with non-mandatory vaccines. That's a really tough one though. Well, my advocates on that one. Utilitarianism is always difficult because how do you weigh this social harm versus this social harm? Why is murder worse? How much worse is murder versus theft or whatever? Just because we have a lot of questions, I gotta speed through. Anybody else who's willing to respond to this question? Yeah, real quick, I'll say it fast. I would wanna allow abortions because they don't say and I can't mandate lockdowns, masks, social distancing and other things like that. I at least have some other steps I can take to fight COVID. Anybody else? You've got it. Just curious, that's fine. Jumping into the next one, thank you very much for your question. David Velar says, Rob is way too aggressive. Says, he monopolizes and then let's see, blah, blah, blah. Rob, do you think this is true? I would say that maybe I have a case of toxic masculinity and what I often see is that people that are used to dominating the direction that the narrative goes and that there's multiple people usually against my position on these panels don't like it when they actually have someone on the right that's willing to passionately fight back on the issues. And I'm just kind of tired of the bad faith nature that you see on many of these panels from people that are hypocrites and things like that. But I'm not angry, I actually have a lot of fun doing this. Can I respond to that? Maybe I do come across as too aggressive but I think it's warranted. Yeah, okay, so Rob, I actually have watched you debate before and I actually have an immense amount of respect for you. I think you're very skilled. I'm just butting in because I know that there's a lot of other people here who probably want to say something and also because I'm obnoxious, so yeah. I don't have hard feelings anyone here. Would you say you're a sigma male? Would I say I'm what? A sigma male. A sigma male. No, I don't really like the Greek letters, right? I stick to good old fashioned English, so. You got it in, thank you very much. This one coming in from the biologist, Bum says briefly putting politics aside, Afghanistan has some amazing wildlife, like the Bactrian deer. Am I saying that right? Yes, Bactrian. Thank you very much. They say you're welcome. I'll learn something new every day. This one coming in from the legend Rives says, Taliban met with China one month prior to the chaos. Biden is blackmailed by China. Hashtag, corn pops revenge. China moles to take bagram. Oh, I know I missed one. It's bagram. Thank you very much. Says connect the dots, guess. Beijing, Biden called it he and Xi Jinping are going to lead us all together to a glorious future of socialism with Chinese characteristics. I mean, there is more evidence that Biden has been more beneficial to China and Russia for that matter than Trump ever was to Russia. And yet again, we could talk about what we want as influential people that we are in here. We're very literally influential when it comes to the grand narrative. Most of the people that have actual influence in our mainstream media and other places couldn't wait to blame Trump as a Russian stooge for everything. Despite the fact that he was more aggressive to Russia than almost any president before him. Now when Biden comes in and he does things that are beneficial to Russia and beneficial to China, now it's laughed off as a big joke. Sure, he's doing this to benefit China. All's we want is the standard to be applied evenly from these organizations. Juicy, this one coming in from Belfazar 228 says, if you crash landed on a desert island and by the time you woke up, someone had collected all the coconuts and told you that the only way you'd get a coconut was to have the US leave Afghanistan. Would it be viable coercion? I mean, I understand this is a reference to some Vosh debate that occurred. If we're going to reference Vosh debates, there's very, there's many better ones. In that case, you'd get both the withdrawal from Afghanistan and a free coconut. So I think, I mean, this is better than what we got, which was withdrawal and no coconut. So yeah. I would like to point out that this analogy is not very great in general because just because you have all the coconuts, what else is on the island? Can you fish? I mean, is it, I don't know. Like coercion, coercion requires threat of force. You have to be under duress. You either require- That threat of starving. This one coming in from- You could get a fish. What? Oh, I was just replying to the starving. He could fish. He could hunt a bird, kill a bird. All the birds are dead. The fish were coconut fish and they got collected too. But that wasn't mentioned. But that wasn't mentioned in the initial- Peak discourse here. Next question. Nor was the presence of fish though. All right, okay. This one coming in from Amanda Troutman says, panel, what about the effect of regressive Republican policies that limited and continue to limit immigration from non-wealthy countries? It definitely has an effect. I'd say that for sure. And that's something that we're going to have to fight doubly hard to undo and fight against in terms of the narrative to actually help the people who are trying to leave and escape that violence. It has a huge, huge problem. That's why we buried half a million people in the Middle East between Afghanistan and Iraq. I'm not sure what the actual numbers and if we factor in legal and illegal immigration into the areas that people come from, wealthy versus unwealthy country. I'm not sure what those numbers are. I would think that those numbers would start to go to more. We take more people from countries we consider non-wealthy than countries we consider wealthy. Again, the problem is that the difference between car and me will be quite simple. Car and me both agree that we should stop disastrous interventionist policies that create harm. But car thinks that we should then use the wealth of the United States by printing money and other things to give to these people to help those countries. I think that that would be too massive. And there are so many problems at home that we should focus on the people at home and stop creating these problems around the world and allow these countries to fix the problems without the U.S. intervening. This one coming in from, do appreciate your question. SecretXXStars says, Rob, what if you've been muted this entire time and you're just shadowboxing hallucination of Vash's voice? I'm sorry, James, I hate to interrupt but I actually have to run, guys. I'm sorry, but my child is sick and I have to go tends to him. No worries, totally okay. Bye, Kay, have a good one. Thanks for contributing, Kay. Take care, appreciate it, Kay. And then this one, oh yes, Rob, what if you've been muted this entire time and have just been shadowboxing a hallucination of Vash's voice? Well, one, if it's a hallucination, then I'm in a lot of problems, I think, that need dealt with. And that would probably mean that all of you are hallucinated, even that questioner. But secondly, if it's not an hallucination and I'm muted and everyone is so perfectly acting that they're just watching my lips run and are able to actually come up with stuff that makes sense to what I'm saying, that would make this panel the most impressive panel that's ever been assembled. So next up, Sunflower says, what percent of failed abortions or adopted kids end up wishing they had been aborted? Even if those children have higher risk of economic hardship, et cetera, they still are glad they weren't aborted. That's a meaningless question because you could apply the exact same argument to like busted condoms or dudes pulling out too late to nut on the stomach, you know? Like how many children who were born because the guy didn't pull out fast enough say they wish their dad had pulled out fast? Like, no, like, of course, once the person's born and alive and has opinions then they are glad they were born and are alive and have opinions. But like you could say that about anything. You could say it about any contrivance that leads the creation of a human life. No, but the creative something's different than intentionally snuffing something out. It's completely different, right? Like so the question does make sense. And what it gets to, I think, is the point that we were discussing is the idea of all of these factors, although maybe tragic and things we're talking about, the real question is, where do we determine personhood or life or however you want to term it begins? Because it wouldn't be a compelling case to say, well, actually that kid would have been in a domestic abuse situation anyway so that's somehow better. No, we could see that that would be a heinous proposition, which is why we should focus on when is it a person or when is it a life? Hi, so if I can, oh, if I can contribute, it is not about saying that because they are in a situation where they're exposed to violence in their home that they're better off dead, not saying that. What I'm saying is the net harm to society of all of these children collectively being exposed to violence in their home is probably gonna be pretty fucking bad, right? And also, what about all the children? Again, sperm that fertilizes eggs and those eggs don't implant in people's wounds? Like, what about that? I'm sure maybe if they had been implanted and they grew up and they hadn't been washed out, then yeah, they would have said the same exact thing. I mean, why are we not focusing on preventing miscarriages when that's like one of the main ways that people lose children? So I think there's an important moral distinction here between letting someone die and killing someone. If you're walking by a lake and you see a drowning person and you don't intervene, that's not the same thing as going into the lake and holding their head into the water. Those are not morally equivalent. Now, I don't say that that doesn't necessarily mean that abortion is wrong, I just don't think we should start drawing analogies to that, so. The only point that I'm making is the argument that who says that they wish they had been aborted isn't really valid because you could make that argument for people who didn't have a kid at any stage prior. Like that, there's nothing about that argument that's dependent on post-fertilization of the egg. It's equally applicable to anything. Like no one's ever said, I wish my mom had swallowed me. You know, like that doesn't, it's just, I don't think it's a good argument. I don't think it's a good argument, although just to be a bit like, you know, cheeky about it, and people commit suicide, I imagine one of them probably uttered, I wish my parents never had me. But again, it's not really a good argument. Does this extend? I often say, Oh, go ahead. No, no, no, you go ahead. No, no, no, no. I've been shouting over people. No, no, I've spoken way more than you. So you go first. I just wanted to say this, our concepts on abortion, does this extend to fertility clinics? Because oftentimes they kill several, several fertilized eggs per site on several cycles, except that this is something accessed only by wealthy people because an attempted artificial insemination can cost tens of thousands of dollars per attempted cycle. So... As soon as you bring that in, you are so good, Kar, because as soon as you bring in actual science into this and you bring in the fact that there are so many fertilized eggs that don't, that aren't carried to term, then this whole thing falls apart. It really does. I disagree. My understanding of how it's done is that they fertilized several, three to eight eggs because the chance of implantation is not great. So they try to, they have that much so there's also a 50, 50 chance that you get at least one implantation. Those are all dead children then, aren't they? Failure, but simply putting them in there and then like, oh, well, they failed the implant. That's not killing, you're not killing, you're just letting the natural course of things to occur and some of them don't survive. That's not the same thing. It's taking proactive action. Well, wait, do you think pregnancy is passive? Do you think pregnancy is passive? You think carrying a child for nine months is passive? Okay, when you say passive, what do you mean? Because on the one hand, you have to modify your life, dude. You think carrying a child for nine months is not something that you passively do. So you're not just, you're not passively letting this thing live. You're taking measures to make sure that it lives. Pregnancy is also not something you consciously do. You're not consciously telling your body to send the baby resources in oxygen. If we're analogizing this to parentage and that's totally applicable because if you try to get pregnant, have a fertilized egg and then have a miscarriage, which happens all the time, by the way. Oftentimes a miscarriage will just be flushed out with the uterine lining and they'll never know. Then that would be 10 to amount to negligent homicide. That's something that you facilitate because there are things that you can do to decrease or increase the likelihood of a miscarriage. If you have kind of like a not great womb, like chances for you, like having a child aren't great, is you attempting to get impregnated, essentially the same as you throwing children into a meat grinder in the hopes that one of them will succeed. The logical extension of that thought is that the only women who should be able to reproduce are women at the absolute peak of physical athleticism. So they have the highest likelihood. I mean, we take all the cares in the world for living children. If we're assigning that moral worth to fertilized eggs, then we should only be allowing women who have incredibly high vitamin content, who are very strong, who are very likely to produce the strongest children to actually go through with it. That's such a- I have a question. I have a question. It's a deflection, the point is, actively seeking to end something's life is completely different than trying to create- Negligent homicide is a thing. It is still homicide. Yeah, you said fertilized eggs are persons. That's negligent homicide. I have a question. I have a question. Several people talking at the same time. So it is true. Rob has talked a lot. However, let's let him finish his point. I promise we'll come right back to you, Vosch and Stardust. No, I basically made my points just quite simple. The idea of negligent homicide, it's not the same thing. Actively seeking to kill something is different than trying to create something, knowing that there's a chance that that creation won't come to full term. It is a completely different thing. If it leads to the death of a child. It's not a matter of legality as we talked about. I just ask one question. I just have one question for Rob. I'm going to start asking questions to come back to you. Okay. Oh, sorry. I'll ask before it. Okay. Rob, I have a question. If you can just answer in one sentence, maybe. Sure. Do you think that personhood begins at conception? No. I think that it begins at some marker that I'm not sure, but it would be something like brain activity, heartbeat or something like that. I do not currently think, I'm open to hearing arguments, but I currently don't have a position on exactly no personhood. So why aren't you pro, why aren't you pro like, I don't know abortion up until that point then? I ran on that. I ran for Congress and ran on that. And I got screened by Republicans over and over. You ran for political office. Holy shit. This one coming in from. Interesting. Wait, wait, wait. I want to address something that I'm watching. Negative homicide does not have a standard of, you have to do everything possible to prevent death. You have to, there's a legally established reasonable standard for you and you have to have a specific knowledge of taking on specific risks. It's kind of like with driving. If you drink and drive, you have obviated yourself of not counting for risks. Not obviate. I'm sorry, that's not the right word, but you have essentially, you have been that negligent in taking on the risk. But if you are, if you are just older and you have a slower reactive time, you are not, and then you get into an accident. You are not, you're not, it's not negligent homicide. No, but if we treat fertilized eggs as persons, then essentially, if you have like a one in eight chance of a successful pregnancy, that means you're essentially leading a little train of children along a bloody path that you know one of them is going to make it out of. At the end, like that's why assigning personhood that early gets ridiculous because then you start talking about negligence and to what extent should we expect mothers to like take care of their bodies during pregnancy? Is it murder if they deliberately like take drugs while they're pregnant, not to kill the baby, but for fun? If it hurts the baby, is that the same as child abuse? There are so many legal and moral extensions of the idea that personhood gets a conception. Yeah, if they're anorexic, if you're anorexic and you're starving a kid of nutrients, how is that not any different from negligent homicide? If a kid that is a born child dies of starvation because your mental illness prevents you from going out to the grocery store and buying them food. There's so much stuff that doesn't work when you apply personhood to the fertilized egg. It just doesn't. Well, it doesn't work if you apply the standard of negligent homicide that you're applying. But negligent homicide, legally, there is a real, it's always the whole reasonable person, reasonable standard kind of thing because, but ultimately- For a life people keep saying murder. So it seems they're willing to apply a perfectly transcribed one to one version of existing law onto fertilized eggs. They started that process. But again, it's not the same thing as we said. And again, if we had to choose, even though I'm saying I'm not someone who's made the claim that life begins in conception, but if we had to choose between that and Vosh's stance, that personhood is only once a person is birthed, so you could be in labor and terminate the birth if you want. Clearly the more humane situation would be the conception people. And it's more logically consistent. Well, you could just induce labor at that point. But what if the woman chooses not to? I believe you have that choice. I do have another question. I do have another question. I'm just curious now for Rob because I found that super interesting. At what point would you say is a good point to stop people from having abortions? I'm just curious. Sure. So again, I don't know exactly. I would admit my ignorance in not being someone that is a medical professional. I think that we need to have a philosophical conversation of what a good benchmark would be. Possible benchmarks could be heartbeat, could be some sort of measurable brain activity, could be something like viability. The point where if a baby would be taken outside of the womb that it could be a viable person at that point with medical intervention. You don't have a personal preference at all. I would like to hear this argued out by professional medical people that are talking about when they feel that life begins. So what benchmark you arrive at is a philosophical question. What those benchmarks are measured at would be a medical question. So viability, 21 weeks, I believe it is. You get cardiac activity yet six weeks. It's not a heart yet, but it is cardiac tissue. So the ability to feel pain, it's actually kind of unknown when fetuses can feel pain, although the nerve's responsible for pain, at least in the head with the trigeminal nerve. It starts developing at eight weeks. So those are benchmarks, but the question is, are those benchmarks the relevant ones? Is it because feeling pain? One of those benchmarks. Animals, plenty of animals feel pain, they don't treat them as persons. So. But again, the point that I'm trying to make is we need a benchmark in order to decide this. And I would like to hear reasons why those viable benchmarks should be considered, but I don't consider the benchmark of until born. I think that it's inhumane and it's obviously horrific. So we have to justify that. Sure, I will justify. So the justification is that we can see that there is some sort of activity where at some point a fetus early in development is actually something that we should consider a life in a person, right? There are debates that could occur whether that is heartbeat, brain activity, viability, et cetera. But all of that is better. So what people are asking, again, the point that I'm making is that these benchmarks, and I'm willing to listen to medical professionals dictate as to why each of those and argue their cases, why each of those would be the preferred marker. However, all of those are infinitely superior to the argument that we should allow women to have elective abortions even nine months in because it's not a real person until it's born. I just want to point out, by the way, that at no point have I ever actually said that is the case. The number of abortions that take place that far into pregnancy are such an infinitesimal fraction of the total number that actually takes place. Late term abortions. Late term abortions. Wait, hold on. So what, that's still not infinitesimal? Wait, hold on. Wait, well, as a proportion of the total, yeah. And anyway, wait, 12,000 for nine months in or for third trimester? Late term, it says, post 21 weeks. So that's not nine months in. So it's post 30 weeks. It was 12,000 is the numbers that I saw. We must do a lot of other questions. We want to. Yeah, I was going to say, do we have more questions? We've got extra time. This one coming in from Wolfe says, why are people comparing abortion bans to vaccine mandates? Is pregnancy a communicable disease? Now, that's an image for you. Life is a sexually transmitted disease. So, yes. I often say I never asked to be born. I never did. I never asked to be born. Are you going to answer that? It's because. Born or shed, forced to wife. It's because the defense of abortion is considered my body, my choice, which means that you have medical autonomy for the decisions that occur in your body, right? And if it's so again, the person that's asking this question is probably a person that doesn't think that a fetus is a person. So they're like, what's just a clump of sales? So on one hand, we're just talking about the elimination of a clump of sales. But on the other hand, we're talking about people's medical decisions that could negatively affect a person. But if you look at it as if someone's assuming that that fetus is a life or is a person, then you could see how that example makes sense. The comparison makes sense because both of them are saying, should you be allowed to have privacy in your medical decisions, even if it results in the harm of another person? But you don't even believe that a fetus is always a person, right? So I mean, I'm a little bit confused at where, like you're saying that this person obviously doesn't believe in it, but you don't either at a certain point, right? Well, we all have our different interpretations of what the bench watcher beepers when something's a person. And you're trying to pigeonhole me into saying life begins in conception. It's not a great way. I'm not trying to do that. I'm just curious. That's all right. So the argument is quite simply, the argument that we should have about abortion is instead of talking about like domestic abuse and things like that, the question is we should all have a serious conversation of when do we consider the fetus to be a life or when do we consider the fetus to be a person? And we should all agree that after that point, we should not allow abortions, except in very specific cases of things like the baby would be born with a chronic illness or the mother's life was in danger. But so the point, wait, wait, wait, wait, could you kill a child just because it happens to have a debilitating illness? Well, then wait, then why could you kill a post-personhood fetus? It's because if we made the decision that the debilitative illness would be so much pain, life would be decided. And we're gonna make that choice for it? That's a different calculation. We're gonna kill a child because you think it's going to be sick. Shouldn't you let it be born to make that decision for itself? It would be a similar situation. It's similar philosophical conversation to people that are in coma and have it articulated in their last participant what they decide. So we allow the loved ones to make the decisions in those points where they're unable to afford and why would it matter by the way? But it's an interesting, it's an interesting. Why would it matter, by the way, if the mother was going to be hurt or potentially killed by the birth? I mean, in one case, if you abort the child, that's a guaranteed murder, whereas with the mother, it's only potential. It seems like if you accept the personhood and reject the bodily autonomy argument, then you're morally obligated to permit, or I should say to deny the abortion no matter what. And all these incessant rape exemptions are just people trying to hastily save face to avoid looking like the monsters they are for denying essential medical services. That's not true. That's not true. We would never ask anyone to undergo a medical procedure that would likely lead to their death to save another person. Get back to the question real quick. I think the main difference that I would say if we're talking about mask mandates or vaccine mandates versus abortion and why they could or could not be compared, I would say that we can take a consequentialist approach to this, okay? A vaccine mandate would save lives. Making abortions freely available would save lives. It's been shown to work and lead to less abortions in developed countries. I am speaking from an American perspective. It would save lives in America. And vaccine mandates would save lives. That's not true. So I was- I hate to do this, but we've gone on this topic for quite a while. We want to get through these last couple of questions. This one, Nicky Erin says, should fetuses be covered under all protections as born children? If yes, it is child endangerment to impregnate a woman with a high chance of miscarriage. True. Oh, that's an interesting question. It's the exact same point we already went through. Could you repeat that please? I want to make sure. I may be at the same point. I just want to make sure I heard it correctly. They said, should fetuses be covered under all protections as born children? If yes, it is child endangerment to impregnate a woman with a high chance of miscarriage. It's the same point we had. It's not. It's different. I think it's interesting. OK, so motor, driving, you're more likely to get injured if you're riding on a motorcycle in an accident than an automobile. Does that mean your insurance rates are higher, but you're not endangering people more? So you can absolutely get in trouble with the state if reckless driving gets your kids injured, or even if it doesn't, you're just found out. That wasn't my point. What I mean is is that. Drive into a group of people if you wanted to. That's not the point that I was making. If you're a motorist and you're driving an automobile versus a motorcycle, a motorcycle, you are more likely to be injured. Let's say you have a passenger who just willingly came along. They are more in danger riding the motorcycle than the automobile. Now, motorcyclists' insurance rates are higher because there's more risk, but you are not endangering people. Okay, we can take this example further if you want. If this is insistent that we wanna keep talking about this. So would Vaj and Stardust, would you both agree that we should charge people with child and turning instrument that are born into poverty situations where there's domestic abuse occurring in the house and they decide to have the child? Because they know that that child's likely to go through and in poversed existence where there's domestic abuse. So should we preemptively charge as soon as that child's born? I think you're missing my point. The mother and father for bringing a child into that situation. I think you're missing my point. My point is not about the single child, right? My point is what happens collectively to a community when you have a bunch of people who are forced to carry children to term that they didn't want and forced to carry children to term that would be born into situations where they are going to be exposed to violence and where their siblings are going to be exposed to violence. What is the net result of that? Let me explain. It's a separate argument to the argument with the question and the point that you were making here. That's a separate point. The answer to that point is, even if that's true, the question becomes, when do we consider that feed as a life or a person? Because we would never say it's okay to kill a person because killing that person would lead to a decrease in poverty, a decrease in domestic abuse, et cetera. So. But that's separate to the point this questioner's asking and the argument that you and Vosh are making that's, oh, if you know that you're likely to not be able to carry a- Please don't associate my view. I know that it's easy to do that, but- If you're agreeing with him, I don't think that it's unreasonable. He sees hazy after images of me every time he looks anywhere else, like when you stare at a light. Sure, if you're agreeing, if you two are agreeing- I don't even know what his position is. I don't know what the basis of his position is. I don't doubt that you don't. I honestly don't. I don't watch this content, dude. We do have to move to the next one. This one coming in from Daniel D. says, Rob, regarding your withdrawal from Afghanistan, do you believe that General Alden's plan could have reduced loss of life? Vence Vosh. It could have. I will be honest, when it comes to the actual specifics, it doesn't- I love the apologism for Biden. Again, I remind you that my biggest criticism becomes to the propagandist and all of the regimes and all of the parties, including Republicans and Democrats- Rob, do you have a response that isn't just repeating the same thing you've been saying over and over? Yeah, if you'd let me finish, maybe I'll get to it. So that's the biggest- Maybe, maybe, maybe. I was blaming you for this, Vosh. Those institutions- This is your fault, Vosh. Is this good? Is this good? Is this the answer you all want? No, Rob. We're fine with you- Would you like me to finish my answer? No, but you- So I remind you, that's the first organization that I'm going to play. But I would say this- Okay, so the answer is that the apologism for Biden says things like, well, we don't know what he could have done better. It is quite simple, and I don't know who exactly the generals would have been under Trump that had this plan, but it is quite simple that we shouldn't have let go of Bagram Air Base until we got our assets, including people and military assets and the prisoners that we didn't want to escape from gone. That's common sense, everyone understands. So the question was, what do you think General Alden's plan would have saved lives? I didn't hear a mention of the details of that plan and how it would have saved lives or not. So I asked when you were going to answer the question instead of ranting on the same thing you have been, and you said you would, and you didn't. So could you answer the question, please? Sure, why don't you explain to me exactly what General Alden's plan is? I don't know what his plan was. Right, which is exactly why my answer was- All right, we're gonna do it. Which is exactly what I said. I don't know what his specific details of his plan was, but it's quite simple that if we had a plan to leave Bagram Air Base, it would have been a disaster. I'm not making claims about his plan was. Okay. If you didn't know the details, that's fine. Okay, forgive me for interrupting. So sorry. I did promise to get you all out of here in about two hours. We're already 20 minutes past that, so I do want to apologize that. I do want to say all of our guests are linked to the description, folks. We do appreciate all of our guests. And so whether you're listening via YouTube or podcast, you can find all of our guests, Rob's, K's, Stardust, Sybil, Vosh, Sfinkter of Doom, SOD, and Emma's links in the description. We really do appreciate them and want to say thank you so much, everybody, for being with us. Thanks for your questions tonight, folks. We are excited about future panels like this, as this is our first one and a lively one to be sure. So thanks again to our guests. We are gonna let them go for the rest of the night, but one last, if you guys want to say thank you or goodbye, I want to say thank you so much for coming on, all of you. I love you. I love you, James. Thank you. Thank my first time with you, James. I had a lot of fun and it's been a hilarious drinking game to play for the few moments of good debate. Oh, you were drinking? The whole time. Wow. I'm really an anarchist that believes in vaccine mandates, just curious. Absolutely. Hey, listen, I believe in empowering communities. I'm not gonna perpetuate something that's gonna hurt the marginalized people. I should point out that just because you're an anarchist doesn't mean you're against rules. You're just against rulers. That's what anarchy means. No, guys, no masters. You'll be subjected to the commune's vaccine. Yeah, so you can have communities can organize and require to be part of your community. It's all about her immunity. But I support Biden forcing poor and black people to get the vaccine that don't want it. Yeah. Hold on. I'm consistent. Great anarchy. Great. Hold them down. Yeah, if you have a vaccine, yeah, you should get a vaccine. I don't care if you're a black or a rich, get that fucking vaccine. It's okay to be white. It's okay to be white. You don't need to merge your signal with anything. Okay? But I just wanted to... He calls himself the black anarchist that talked about these community marginalized communities. Look, I'm okay. All right. I just wanted to clarify, obviously I had a really great time. I have a lot of respect for everybody on the panel. And yeah, no hard feelings about anything, hopefully. So yeah. And also fuck all of you guys. Sorry. Yeah. This isn't my first time with James. My last time was with economics. Some of these subjects were kind of out of my wheelhouse, but I'm glad you guys had me. I hope I contributed to things productively and was not too boring. I'd be happy to be a part of the other one. Absolutely. I second that. I second that. Thanks Emma as well. Thanks for having me. I love you all very much. Take care. Thanks for having me. I had a lot of fun. Appreciate it. Thanks everybody. Have a great rest of your night and thanks everybody for watching and hanging out with us tonight. We will see you next time.