Argument awards

Matt Daws wins the inaugural SBBS Arguing About Abortion Awards, for not only spotting the vital premise: "such arguments are essentially pointless", but also remembering the author’s previously expressed views.

Larry comes a close second, with views as well-justified as Matt plus the image of the author running amok with a chainsaw in a maternity ward. However, he loses the top spot for lacking Mr Dawes’ willingness to admit the futility of even bothering to have this debate when we’re all starting from such insanely different premises.

Honourable mentions also go to Squander Two, with a set of well-expressed points (the willingness to admit that there is no solution, without the willingness to say this makes the whole bloody thing pointless counts both for and against S2 here), Matt T (who gained many points for adding stats where others were bolloxing about hypotheticals, but lost a few for emotive reductions of the argument), and dsquared, who wins a million points for quotable quotes, but loses them again for failure to back said quotes up.

Andrew Bartlett only said one thing, but it was sensible. So did Ally, and she’s a woman, and therefore the only person to actually have the right to participate in the debate under the original conditions expressed [*]. And Jimmy Doyle wins the Oliver Kamm Wooden Spoon for condescension, vapid verbosity and unprovoked personal abuse. The prize is an hour’s tutorial with Jimmy Doyle, so it’s probably just as well for all concerned that things turned out the way they did.

The next SBBS Arguing About Abortion Awards will take place either when hell freezes over, or when four randomly selected, well-educated people can sit in a room and have an argument about abortion that doesn’t turn into an acrimonious and bitter ranting match. And lo, the pot has spoken.

Also, some clarifications:

1) I’m well aware that my original opinion on this matter makes absolute sense if you believe the foetus not to be a person, none whatsoever if you believe it to be one, and somewhere in between if your views are elsewhere.

2) I stand by my views on the Catholic church (not the ‘burn them all’, but the dislike of clerical authority and teachings that Mr Doyle labels as ‘shallowness, ignorance and bigotry’). I believe, on the empirical evidence, that the world would be a better place should the Catholic church cease to exist tomorrow (just as I believe about Wahabbi Islam, Protestant fundamentalism, and the VHP). On the same basis, I really don’t care whether or not the Church of England, the Quakers or the Baha’i continue to exist: none is doing any serious harm (or indeed, anything particularly serious) any longer.

[*] The male-dominated nature of the debate may or may not say a great deal about men, the Internet, SBBS readers, or all three.

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10 thoughts on “Argument awards

  1. Surely the real winners (in a moral victory sense, at least) are those of us who chose to stay out of it all. Or does sitting on the sidelines make us objectively pro-whatever someone doesn’t like?

  2. On point 1) I liked your original post – at least it made sense.

    On point 2) I am not sure that I entirely agree about the usefulness of the Catholic Church. Surely any institution that is prepared to oppose Dan Brown‘s current deified status must have some good points?

  3. Ta. Sorry I missed you off the award list originally – err, you were first in a large thread, and also I’m crap.

  4. "Obviously, hating the Catholic church…is not racist. Just necessary."

    No provocation there, then.

    "No man should hold any views on abortion other than these [link]….

    "I’m well aware that my original opinion on this matter makes…no sense whatsoever if you believe [the foetus] to be [a person]…"

    No vapidly verbose volte-faces from our John B!

    It’s a bit harder to come up with a pithy illustration of condescension, but perhaps John B will consider awarding himself a special Ted Rall commemorative set of wooden surgical lobotomy implements for Most Self-Indulgently Flippant and Facetious Treatment of a Serious Moral Issue.

    I learnt rather a lot from that tutorial, by the way. Cheers!

  5. Glad to hear it; indeed, I imagine it was one of your most successful in some time.

    If you fancy explaining why the statement "Obviously, hating the Catholic church…is not racist. Just necessary" counts as personal abuse, please do. If I’d substituted "all Catholics" or "Jimmy Doyle", I’d understand your point.

  6. I don’t fancy explaining why that counts as personal abuse, because I never said it was. My implication was that it was a provocation, and so your attribution to me of "unprovoked personal abuse" was erroneous. Or am I being too verbose?

  7. Now I think about it, it’s clear that, like Matthew Yglesias, you didn’t realise that ‘the Catholic church’ IS ‘all Catholics.’ But then ignorance about Catholicism is kind of like the weather. (Cf the Guardian editorial yesterday that said "Catholics oppose abortion under all circumstances," echoed today by Catherine Bennett: "[Murphy-O’Connor] is, after all, not only opposed to late abortions – he [is] opposed to them entirely" — only someone without the most basic grasp of the church’s position could fail to know that this is dramatically false.)

  8. Or, depending on how you look at it, all Christians (after all, the Apostle’s Creed is still used within the C of E).

    I thought the context made clear I meant "The institutions and leaders of the Roman Catholic church"; however, I’ve amended the original post to clarify.

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