Facial Recognition Reveals Political Party In Troubling New Research (techcrunch.com) 275
Researchers have created a machine learning system that they claim can determine a person's political party, with reasonable accuracy, based only on their face. TechCrunch reports: The study, which appeared this week in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, was conducted by Stanford University's Michal Kosinski. Kosinski made headlines in 2017 with work that found that a person's sexual preference could be predicted from facial data. [...] The algorithm itself is not some hyper-advanced technology. Kosinski's paper describes a fairly ordinary process of feeding a machine learning system images of more than a million faces, collected from dating sites in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., as well as American Facebook users. The people whose faces were used identified as politically conservative or liberal as part of the site's questionnaire.
The algorithm was based on open-source facial recognition software, and after basic processing to crop to just the face (that way no background items creep in as factors), the faces are reduced to 2,048 scores representing various features -- as with other face recognition algorithms, these aren't necessary intuitive things like "eyebrow color" and "nose type" but more computer-native concepts. The system was given political affiliation data sourced from the people themselves, and with this it diligently began to study the differences between the facial stats of people identifying as conservatives and those identifying as liberal. Because it turns out, there are differences.
Of course it's not as simple as "conservatives have bushier eyebrows" or "liberals frown more." Nor does it come down to demographics, which would make things too easy and simple. After all, if political party identification correlates with both age and skin color, that makes for a simple prediction algorithm right there. But although the software mechanisms used by Kosinski are quite standard, he was careful to cover his bases in order that this study, like the last one, can't be dismissed as pseudoscience. The most obvious way of addressing this is by having the system make guesses as to the political party of people of the same age, gender and ethnicity. The test involved being presented with two faces, one of each party, and guessing which was which. Obviously chance accuracy is 50%. Humans aren't very good at this task, performing only slightly above chance, about 55% accurate. The algorithm managed to reach as high as 71% accurate when predicting political party between two like individuals, and 73% presented with two individuals of any age, ethnicity or gender (but still guaranteed to be one conservative, one liberal).
The algorithm was based on open-source facial recognition software, and after basic processing to crop to just the face (that way no background items creep in as factors), the faces are reduced to 2,048 scores representing various features -- as with other face recognition algorithms, these aren't necessary intuitive things like "eyebrow color" and "nose type" but more computer-native concepts. The system was given political affiliation data sourced from the people themselves, and with this it diligently began to study the differences between the facial stats of people identifying as conservatives and those identifying as liberal. Because it turns out, there are differences.
Of course it's not as simple as "conservatives have bushier eyebrows" or "liberals frown more." Nor does it come down to demographics, which would make things too easy and simple. After all, if political party identification correlates with both age and skin color, that makes for a simple prediction algorithm right there. But although the software mechanisms used by Kosinski are quite standard, he was careful to cover his bases in order that this study, like the last one, can't be dismissed as pseudoscience. The most obvious way of addressing this is by having the system make guesses as to the political party of people of the same age, gender and ethnicity. The test involved being presented with two faces, one of each party, and guessing which was which. Obviously chance accuracy is 50%. Humans aren't very good at this task, performing only slightly above chance, about 55% accurate. The algorithm managed to reach as high as 71% accurate when predicting political party between two like individuals, and 73% presented with two individuals of any age, ethnicity or gender (but still guaranteed to be one conservative, one liberal).
Either it's B.S. (Score:2)
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I don't think that's a stretch and I bet I'm always 100% correct.
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The computer program did not see any guts.
Faces were compared with other faces of the same age, ethnicity, and gender.
It isn't clear from TFA if hair and eyewear were included in the images.
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Also when the red maga cap was ignored by the algorithm much of the predictive power disappeared.
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My theory is that it would focus on traits that are influenced by such behaviors as smiling or frowning. Results in different patterns of wrinkles or facial muscle development. For example, there is strong evidence that conservatives are more easily frightened, which is likely reflected in frequent facial expressions.
Of course the interesting thing about deep learning is that we frequently don't need to know how it works. If you have enough training data, patterns may emerge without any explanations we can
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Of course the interesting thing about deep learning is that we frequently don't need to know how it works. If you have enough training data, patterns may emerge without any explanations we can understand, even with hindsight.
This is going to be the problem with commentary on this study. A lot of people are going to assume that facial recognition means human-identifiable facial traits without realizing that deep learning often means patterns not comprehendible by people, especially visually.
What I love about some of these odd deep learning outcomes is the notion that there are patterns out there that are invisible to us because we lack the data, the cognitive power to discern the pattern or because of psychological biases that
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Or it could be due to chin shape, influenced by amounts of testosterone and other genetic factors that also affect brain development or neuroplasticity through aging.
Part of the question is how much of political affiliation is learned behavior vs ingrained. And even learned behavior could affect your health / genetic expression / etc and vice versa. One entire party is motivated by fear of the unknown (and of the known), which likely has a lot to do with how the brain is currently wired. It could mean th
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Yea, I was just thinking how easy it would be for even 3rd parties aware of the gathering of this data to "weight the scales" so to speak, in order to push a particular agenda. This evidence, due to the nature of the algorithms in the system that compiled it, may seem very very convincing, and may actually be accurate, considering the sample size, but it's still merely correlation, not causation.
But just think of how fascinating it would be if I were wrong, and Republican ideology really is a mutagenic age
Genetic differences (Score:5, Interesting)
or somebody just discovered heat maps again. Now that I think about it either way it's bullshit.
The current best model of the human brain is the "Big 5" personality traits [wikipedia.org]. This measures human personality using 5 categories. It is based on the linguistic hypothesis: that knowing someone's behaviour is important enough for survival that our language has evolved to describe it accurately.
You take all the adjectives used to describe personality traits and do a multivariate analysis. If the adjectives are plotted as bubbles in 3d space, multivariate analysis will tell you how many bunches, or clusters, the bubbles make. Personality adjectives form 5 distinct groupings, and social psychologists simply named each one.
The big 5 has a variance of about 0.4, which means it predicts about 16% of behaviour, which is huge, in social psychology terms. The measure has been repeated many times, is stable across different languages and cultures and historical documents. It's the closest we have to an objective theory of how the mind works.
Of the 5 traits, conservatives tend to score higher on "Conscientiousness" and liberals tend to score higher on "Openness". You can read about the various traits at the Wikipedia link, but informally "trait conscientiousness" is the tendency for self discipline, duty, achievement, completing tasks, and so on. "Trait openness" is the willingness to experience adventure, art, imagination, new things and so on.
Each trait is normally distributed, and everyone falls somewhere on the normal curve for each trait. So far as anyone can tell, it is impossible to move someone from their position on the curve. You can sometimes train people to imitate being at a different position, but it's not a real move: you can train people to be less neurotic, but they are only learning to be tolerant of their worry - it doesn't actually remove the worry.
Different cohorts of people have different tendencies over the five traits: women tend to score higher on agreeableness and neuroticism, men tend to score higher on conscientiousness, and so on. (This is perfectly rational from an evolutionary standpoint: women have to bear and raise children, so they tend to be more agreeable/social and on the lookout for potential problems.)
So we have these 5 traits which are very likely genetically determined, and we know that liberals and conservatives tend to score differently. The research is only showing that these same genetic differences show up in the morphology of the human face.
It's perfectly reasonable to expect genetic differences to cause visible differences in an organism.
(For reference, the difference between an average conservative score and an average liberal score is not that great. If you knew the scores of two random people you could predict accurately 43% and 57% of the time, which is not that far from a coin flip. Where the measurements really shine is at the tail ends: since normal curves are non-linear, a high conscientious person and a high openness person are very likely to be conservative and liberal respectively. People whose life revolves around political matters will tend to score highly in conscientiousness (R) or openness (D) depending on their political affiliation.)
I don't know why th research in the OP is troubling. Unless, of course, you expect some sort of purge or difference in treatment between the two parties.
That would be a violation of the basic ethical principle upon which our civilization is based: that all people have an intrinsic value.
If not all people have value, then you can have honor killings, clan warfare, witchhunts, and genocide. You simply label someone as a "non-person", and then it's OK to hurt or kill them.
If everyone has value, then we can agree on basic rules that holds everyone as equal under the law, and prevent people from taking the law into their own hands and generally doing things that encroach on the rights of others.
Being able to *detect* individuals within the two parties is not the same as treating those individuals differently based on that measurement.
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Jordan... is that you...
You are wrong on one point (Score:4, Insightful)
"Federal Laws Don't Prohibit Political Discrimination It is illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for employers to make job decisions based on race, color, national origin, religion, and sex.
To my knowledge it is the same for commercial stuff too, not only jobs.
Re:Genetic differences (Score:4, Informative)
This is perfectly rational from an evolutionary standpoint: women have to bear and raise children
Evolution is not a collection of just-so stories that lets you happily rationalise whatever you want.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/co... [smbc-comics.com]
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If you know that much about psychology I'm surprised you aren't assuming exactly this. People aren't known for being nice, especially in mobs (or political parties).
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Of course there are biases in the training dataset -- they had to do a survey to get the dataset and that survey is almost certainly biased in various ways. Just "people on online dating sites or willing to put their photo on facebook and willing to self-identify as one political affiliation" is a hugely biased sample. So this trained machine is just finding the bias in the survey used to construct the training set and using that to perform well on the subset of the same survey used as the test set. It d
You don't need facial recognition! (Score:2, Funny)
Black and in jail: Democrat
White and in jail: Republican
Young, glasses: Democrat
Black & Poor: Democrat
White & Poor: Republican
Rich Male: Republican
Rich Woman: Democrat
Super-Rich: Democrat
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The old saying is, "A Republican is a Democrat who has been mugged. A Democrat is a Republican down on his luck."
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The old saying is, "A Republican is a Democrat who has been mugged. A Democrat is a Republican down on his luck."
This is really funny, I'm stealing it.
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The fuller version is here [twitter.com]. Includes libertarian as well as conservative and liberal :)
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Well, that's probably good enough to get you to 70%, but why did the program do better than people?
Forgot one (Score:5, Funny)
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Super-Rich: Democrat
Super rich and should be in jail but recently pardoned: Republican
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Did Marc Rich change parties before his death? Who, specifically, did you have in mind that supports that presumption?
"A" I (Score:2)
my opponent's party (Score:5, Insightful)
are clearly all shifty-eyed savages with heads shaped [wikipedia.org] indicating a disposition for criminality.
Headline is misleading (Score:2)
What we really need (Score:3)
That's cool, but what we really need is an AI that can detect lizard people from just a photo.
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If you think your favourite shady organization with an agenda can't download a pre-trained image recognition model and fine tune it on pictures attached to a political affiliation, you're dreaming.
This barely qualifies as research, and at least the fact that it's possible is out there. I would be absolutely shocked if these guys were the first ones to do this. They're just the first ones to publicize it.
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Only 80% accurate on sexual preference? (Score:2)
using this system - (Score:2)
- are anarchists invisible?
moreso than usually, i mean.
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Real anarchists don't exist. There are people who believe in some minimal level of government, but those aren't actually anarchists.
I've known several people who claimed to be anarchists, but they respected most laws. Probably as many as those who claim to be law abiding, though not necessarily the same ones.
There do exist looters. There do exist people who want to cause chaos and destruction somewhere where they won't need to face the results. Those aren't anarchists, however, as they plan on returning
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I think what you mean is: No True Anarchist would live in a densely populated area.
Lots of self-identified anarchists have their own takes on how anarchy should work, and what makes up the critical core set of beliefs and practices. You may disagree with them, but that doesn't make them pretend anarchists.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org] ... And so forth.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Misleading Interpretation (Score:4, Interesting)
There might be something in the face structure itself. For instance, wider faces are linked to higher aggression [thestar.com]. But I don't think necessarily explains the results.
FTA:
“Head orientation and emotional expression stood out: Liberals tended to face the camera more directly, were more likely to express surprise, and less likely to express disgust,” Kosinski wrote in author’s notes for the paper.
So at least part of what they classified wasn't as much the face as the expression and the photo the person chose to represent themselves on a dating app. A choice which is hardly random and probably does signal political affiliation as much as possible.
The most obvious way of addressing this is by having the system make guesses as to the political party of people of the same age, gender and ethnicity. The test involved being presented with two faces, one of each party, and guessing which was which. Obviously chance accuracy is 50%. Humans aren’t very good at this task, performing only slightly above chance, about 55% accurate.
I'd be curious to see how humans perform at this task with a bit of training. I don't know that I'd do much better than chance, especially given whatever sterotypes I might have. For instance, I suspect that cute girls must share my politics... but what kind of political affiliation is duck face???
But I suspect after a few examples I'd start to recognize the Conservative vs Liberal head shots.
I'm joking, but... (Score:5, Funny)
:P
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That's kind. The default response is normally "Ha they've identified that ${other_party} are all a bunch of complete morons based on recognising the drool dripping from the mouths in their vacant faces".
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It's the most plausible explanation, though. They trained their network to detect something else in the photos, which vaguely correlates with other attributes.
It smacks of the advanced military AI of the 80s which could detect friendly and enemy thanks. But only if the friendlies were seen in sunshine and the enemies were under rainy clouds.
Because the Civil War Isn't Starting Fast Enough (Score:2)
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I for one welcome our robot overlords...
Accuracy is everything (Score:2)
And anything short of 90% probably isn't that useful. But the accuracy numbers are not that great 60 to 70%. 60% isn't that far from a coin toss (although the algorithm isn't worse than a coin toss)
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This is definitely a study that ought to be reproduced before it is used for anything serious.
Judge a Book by the Cover (Score:2)
So let us have AI judge people by how they look.
"Obviously chance accuracy is 50%" (Score:2)
Why ?
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Sorry, that was when given one of each. Carry on. As you were.
"Reasonable accuracy" (Score:4, Funny)
black = Democrat
Should make voting easier (Score:2)
determine a person's political party, with reasonable accuracy, based only on their face.
And maybe it will allow opinion polls to get within a mile of an accurate forecast.
Run it against AI generated faces (Score:2)
I wonder what it would look like if run against AI generated faces. Or if its data could be fed into the face generating algorithm to create faces.
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And if you were a person who favored a more democratic party/system in, say, China?
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Like all things in this world, it is not necessarily your goal but the methods you choose to try to achieve it. So you can be active for a more Democratic Party system in China but make sure you adhere to the current laws when you do it.
The facial recognition system is just keying to familial similarities in facial recognition, whilst most members of a family will align with the same politics, it is not a sufficient proportion to make it significant enough.
Facial recognition can probably be tuned to detect
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Like all things in this world, it is not necessarily your goal but the methods you choose to try to achieve it. So you can be active for a more Democratic Party system in China but make sure you adhere to the current laws when you do it.
And if the law is "don't advocate for any political change or for the ruling party to be removed from power"?
So many obviously correlated attributes of faces. (Score:2, Interesting)
There are differences in the major US parties. One set of differences are that they attract different demographics.
* People of the majority race in a country are more likely to be members of racist majority parties.
* People of the minority races in a country are more likely to be members of racist minority parties.
* People with neater hair cuts (say, getting professional haircuts weekly) are more likely to be members of parties that favor the rich. Somewhere on reddit someone said that the richest &
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* Members of racist majority parties in a country are more likely to be people of the majority race.
* Members of racist minority parties in a country are more likely to be people of the minority races.
FTFY
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FWIW, I think the racism is a secondary effect. The primary effect is connection to power.
Should political parties have personalities? (Score:2)
Yes, I would like to invoke the rule that the answer is no, but I mobile and can't easily look it up just now. It's actually a relatively good FP, but I'm getting the impression there's been a purge leading to a surge in the average quality of FPs.
I should clarify my premises. One is that your face may tend to reflect your personality, and another is that the political parties, at least in America, have developed distinctive personalities for the kinds of people in the rank-and-file. But the FP clai
Re:Not useful information (Score:5, Insightful)
I see that the article has made a big mistake - the opposite of conservative is progressive. The opposite of liberal is authoritarian.
The main problem is that liberal has been hijacked for other means way too often for people to understand that.
For the US:
Democrats - we want to tax high incomes more, so top level management fears them.
Republicans - we want to manage your bedroom behavior.
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The opposite of liberal is authoritarian.
Wait, wouldn’t fully liberal mean you wanted no regulation and small government? The American political spectrum fits together like an MC Escher Ouroboros; change my mind.
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Here in the UK, prior to being corrupted by large amounts of US TV, the definitions were:
Labour party wants to row the ship of government
Liberal party wants to steer the ship of government
Conservative party wants to let the ship of government go where ever the wind blow is, even if that means on to the rocks
For the most of the last 100 years, their performance has been consistent with the pattern. The people swin
Multi-axis politics (Score:5, Insightful)
What is a "conservative"? I am for small government, and pro-abortion.. Am I a conservative or a liberal?
Packing everything into Red vs. Blue is too simplistic, and leaves lots of people feeling like there is no party that can possibly represent them. What those of us outside the US find shocking, is that USAians are apparently unaware of the way their politics have been forced into this simplistic choice. The US desperately needs to get rid of winner-take-all elections, so that a multi-party system can develop.
Re:Not useful information (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not useful information (Score:5, Informative)
Only if by "left alone" you mean "stop paying pensions and such owed to retirees".
Those claims you may have seen bantered about which state GOP states are net tax recipients? Yeah, turns out they're mostly counting money going directly to people who retired there and taxes paid by many of those same people before they retired. The actual underlying claim is that people like to retire from high cost of living states to low cost of living states and the government pays money out in retirement pensions, including military/social security/etc...
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Every time someone has made that claim on /. and elsewhere, and I checked their source by reading the origin of their numbers. Most recently, this discussion [slashdot.org] traced back to the Consolidated Federal Funds Report from the Census Bureau.
But sure, if you have a new source with other numbers, I'm happy to look through whatever they cite as their source, assuming you can't just find it yourself.
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Re:Not useful information (Score:5, Informative)
The Republicans don't really care about bedroom behavior anymore, that's just a trope now.
They very much care about (restricting) a woman's access to reproductive services. That may not be bedroom behavior, but it certainly is related.
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The Republicans don't really care about bedroom behavior anymore,
Yeah bullshit.
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The Republicans don't really care about bedroom behavior anymore, that's just a trope now.
Yeah they are more about making sure that bedroom behaviour leads to unwanted children now.
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It's not so clear, what party tends to want to tell doctors when or if they can do abortions.
Murder isn't a business (or almost murder) (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of that party considers killing a baby who is being born to be murder.
Murder is not the same thing as running a business.
Other members of that party hear the argument that abortion isn't quite murder, one can make a fine distinction, and conclude "it's not *exactly* murdering babies" is pretty bad thing to do. They figure jaywalking is illegal, littering is illegal, "almost the same as murdering babies" should probably be illegal.
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And the opposite party thinks the death penalty is murder.
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Except a baby is innocent and helpless.
People on Death Row are there SPECIFICALLY because of choices THEY made and perpetrated.
Seriously, how do you "rehabilitate" someone who thought it was "okay" to kill an expectant mother, cut her open and steal her baby?
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People on Death Row are there SPECIFICALLY because of choices THEY made and perpetrated.
100% of them?
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Murder is defined as unlawfully killing someone, so in every case where the wrong person was executed it meets the dictionary definition.
The real problem with it is that the definition of illegal is arbitrary. If you make something a capital crime then killing becomes legal, otherwise it's not. So the distinction is also arbitrary.
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It kind of is here. The killing would be declared unlawful, which has a slightly different meaning to illegal.
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The fact that your parties polarize these issues is in and of itself absurd. This abortion "debate" is only a debate in religious backwaters, let's not pretend like any developed country has the same backwards view. Pompeo was recently touting a joint statement indicating that abortion wasn't a human right, and using this to defend the US's backwards position. The signatories are pretty much exactly what you would expect - the US, the countries where the "terrorists" come from, and some African recipients o
Re:Murder isn't a business (or almost murder) (Score:5, Insightful)
If only all the people executed were actually guilty.
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If only all the people who committed crimes that went on to get executed "full well" knew their life was forfeit at the time of committing their crime.
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I am pretty sure that neither party thinks that babies can be killed.
Perhaps you meant "fetus"?
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So you think the government should be allowed enough power to make such life-and-death decisions? When did communists like yourself start infiltrating Slashdot?
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It is. The difference being a baby is innocent and has done nothing to deserve losing its life.
It's easy to look at a baby's parents and home environment to see if they'll grow up to be a criminal or not.
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Is electing to remove someone’s breathing or feeding tube when they can no longer function without mechanical assistance murder? Should miscarriages entail murder investigations? Should mothers of still born children be charged with murder? It’s a pretty slippery slope when you group littering and murder under the same “criminal” banner. Outside of becoming paralyzed, rearing a child is by far the single most disruptive event in a person’s life.
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Supporters of abortion rights often do not accept that a foetus is a baby or a human being. Clearly it starts out as an egg, a part of the parent, and eventually grows into a full human being, and somewhere between those two points it becomes morally objectionable to remove it.
That's generally how it works in similar situations, e.g. the more developed and intelligent an animal is the more we feel obliged to care for it even if we end up killing it for meat. Most people don't think of eggs as unborn chicken
That's right. With on exception (Score:2)
> the more developed and intelligent an animal is the more we feel obliged to care for it even if we end up killing it for meat.
That's right. The exception of course is that if your dog I having puppies, it's illegal to smash the puppy's face in while it's being born. It's not illegal to do that to babies, in states run by a particular party.
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Are you seriously trying to claim that it is legal to smash a baby's face in while it is being born? I will have to ask you for some kind of evidence there.
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Yes, but most countries work around this problem by restricting abortions at the stage where the fetus is viable. It's crazy to me that the debate in the US focuses only on the all-or-nothing position, and not on reigning back in late-term abortions. The vast majority of countries where abortions are a right still don't allow this beyond the point of viability except for in cases of medical necessity (e.g. to save the mother's life).
Re:Not useful information (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because telling weirdos who take home human fetuses from abortions and store them in their garage, only to be discovered after their natural death is a Bad Thing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
And if a doctor just doesn't give a shit and is performing the equivalent of coat-hanger abortions on a dirty folding table?
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Not sure what you mean or why you're asking me about how abortion has affected my life personally or why you're telling me "You don't need to make this the hill you die on. Its not worth it.".
My point was to try and make it clear that conservatives are also adamant about restricting behavior and that in some situations conservatives are more restrictive like in other situations democrats are. Hopefully implying, that overall neither is more into telling others what they can or can't do.
I'm sorry if my examp
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Is the party you're thinking of that "wants to let you run your business" finally willing to start letting business owners and not the city government decide how many parking spaces the business will provide for customers? Because land can be very expensive and so each parking space can cost the business over $100 per month in amortization, maintenance, taxes and so on.
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I see, you think it's the proper role of government to force business owners to make wise decisions.
Why do you hate freedom?
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I won't say one politiball team is BETTER than the other - each has their own good and bad points. Certainly one party is very clear about wanting to tell you how to run your business. To the extent that some of their leaders advocate that the government, not you, should run it (communism).
Wow, that went sideways pretty quickly. Communism doesn't just want to run businesses. It wants to own them.
Pretty much any government, no matter who runs it, exists to apply some controls on the behavior of businesses. But the extent varies across a spectrum. It's not black-and-white.
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It also depends A LOT on what the business is.
Also, does enforcing fraud laws constitute telling you how to run your business? What about truth in advertising? Right to repair? Prostitution? Gambling? Pollution of rivers?
P,S,: In cities the businesses don't generally own the parking spaces. That's more a suburbs kind of thing, and perhaps some shopping centers. This isn't really true for apartment houses, etc. so hotels, builders of apartment houses, etc. need to supply spaces even in cities. Possi
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It also depends A LOT on what the business is.
Yes, of course. As it should. Businesses are not all equal in the extent to which their (mis)deeds can harm the public.
Also, does enforcing fraud laws constitute telling you how to run your business? What about truth in advertising? Right to repair? Prostitution? Gambling? Pollution of rivers?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. I'm sorry, what was your point?
P,S,: In cities the businesses don't generally own the parking spaces. That's more a suburbs kind of thing, and perhaps some shopping centers. This isn't really true for apartment houses, etc. so hotels, builders of apartment houses, etc. need to supply spaces even in cities. Possibly builders of private houses, though that's not usually done within cities. (I've seen housed demolished except for one wall so that the replacement house could be considered just an upgrade to the old one. But parking spaces didn't enter into it.)
Again, not sure what your point was. Municipal laws can be byzantine and seemingly inconsistent, but that doesn't mean there's no need for them.
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It's not just indistinguishable, it's the way Mussolini defined Fascism. The corporations (well, large businesses) were the sticks in the bundle, the government bound them together, and the army was the axe included within the bundle with it's blade sticking out. Fascism was defined as government and business working together in harness, using the fasces as it's symbol.
And the US as fascist before Mussolini invented the term. Look into the building of the transcontinental railroad (among many other thing
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AI output: Trump supporter.
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At this point, the majority of America is anti-Trump.
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If I recall correctly, the majority of America has always been anti-Trump. It's just that the minority who support him are loud, violent and aggressively ignorant, and they are supported by a well-oiled propaganda machine that drowns out facts and honest analysis.