Tag Archives: China

Polemics

Abortion debate: a secular case against legalized abortion

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Unborn baby scheming about being only two months old
Unborn baby scheming about being only two months old

Note: this post has a twin! Its companion post on a secular case against gay marriage is here.

Now, you may think that the view that the unborn deserve protection during pregnancy is something that you either take on faith or not. But I want to explain how you can make a case for the right to life of the unborn, just by using reason and evidence.

To defend the pro-life position, I think you need to sustain 3 arguments:

  1. The unborn is a living being with human DNA, and is therefore human.
  2. There is no morally-relevant difference between an unborn baby, and one already born.
  3. None of the justifications given for terminating an unborn baby are morally adequate.

Now, the pro-abortion debater may object to point 1, perhaps by claiming that the unborn baby is either not living, or not human, or not distinct from the mother.

Defending point 1: Well, it is pretty obvious that the unborn child is not inanimate matter. It is definitely living and growing through all 9 months of pregnancy. (Click here for a video that shows what a baby looks like through all 9 months of pregnancy). Since it has human DNA, that makes it a human. And its DNA is different from either its mother or father, so it clearly not just a tissue growth of the father or the mother. More on this point at Christian Cadre, here. An unborn child cannot be the woman’s own body, because then the woman would have four arms, four legs, two heads, four eyes and two different DNA signatures. When you have two different human DNA signatures, you have two different humans.

Secondly, the pro-abortion debater may try to identify a characteristic of the unborn that is not yet present or developed while it is still in the womb, and then argue that because the unborn does not have that characteristic, it does not deserve the protection of the law.

Defending point 2: You need to show that the unborn are not different from the already-born in any meaningful way. The main differences between them are: size, level of development, environment and degree of dependence. Once these characteristics are identified, you can explain that none of these differences provide moral justification for terminating a life. For example, babies inside and outside the womb have the same value, because location does not change a human’s intrinsic value.

Additionally, the pro-abortion debater may try to identify a characteristic of the already-born that is not yet present or developed in the unborn, and then argue that because the unborn does not have that characteristic, that it does not deserve protection, (e.g. – sentience). Most of the these objections that you may encounter are refuted in this essay by Francis Beckwith. Usually these objections fall apart because they assume the thing they are trying to prove, namely, that the unborn deserves less protection than the already born.

Finally, the pro-abortion debater may conceded your points 1 and 2, and admit that the unborn is fully human. But they may then try to provide a moral justification for terminating the life of the unborn, regardless.

Defending point 3: I fully grant that it is sometimes justifiable to terminate an innocent human life, if there is a moral justification. Is there such a justification for abortion? One of the best known attempts to justify abortion is Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “violinist” argument. This argument is summarized by Paul Manata, one of the experts over at Triablogue:

Briefly, this argument goes like this: Say a world-famous violinist developed a fatal kidney ailment and the Society of Music Lovers found that only you had the right blood-type to help. So, they therefore have you kidnapped and then attach you to the violinist’s circulatory system so that your kidneys can be used to extract the poison from his. To unplug yourself from the violinist would be to kill him; therefore, pro-lifers would say a person has to stay attached against her will to the violinist for 9 months. Thompson says that it would be morally virtuous to stay plugged-in. But she asks, “Do you have to?” She appeals to our intuitions and answers, “No.”

Manata then goes on to defeat Thomson’s proposal here, with a short, memorable illustration, which I highly recommend that you check out. More info on how to respond to similar arguments is here.

Here is the best book for beginners on the pro-life view.

For those looking for advanced resources, Francis Beckwith, a professor at Baylor University, published the book Defending Life, with Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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Hunter Biden: sex-trafficked prostitutes, Ukraine bribes, Russia payments, China deals

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Did Joe Biden collect foreign cash through his son Hunter Biden?
Did Joe Biden collect foreign cash through his son Hunter Biden?

I’ve been asking some of my Democrat friends about why they would vote for Joe Biden. And their answer is that he has excellent moral character. So, imagine my surprise when I read about this new report on Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Have you ever heard the expression “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”? Well, we’re about to find out something about the tree from a rotten apple.

The Federalist had 3 posts about the report.

Here’s the post about sex-trafficking:

An earthshattering report released by Senate investigators Wednesday outlining the Biden family’s long list of conflicts of interest at the upper echelons of government unearthed new allegations of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son making multiple payments to Eastern European prostitutes.

According to the joint report out by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee with the Senate Treasury Committee, Hunter Biden made a number of payments to foreign nationals with “questionable backgrounds” consistent with “organized prostitution and/or human trafficking.”

Records on file with the committee, the report says, “confirm that Hunter Biden sent thousands of dollars to individuals who have either: 1) been involved in transactions consistent with possible human trafficking; 2) an association with the adult entertainment industry; or 3) potential association with prostitution.”

The report continued, detailing that some transactions were Russian- and Ukrainian-linked to what “appears to be an Eastern European prostitution or human trafficking ring.”

This is not hard to believe, given what we know about Hunter Biden’s sexual misbehavior:

In November last year, Page Six reported that an Arkansas woman who successfully sued the former vice president’s son for monthly child support was a stripper at a club Hunter Biden frequented. Hunter Biden, according to the paper, was a regular guest at the Mpire Club in Washington D.C.’s Dupont Circle, where Lunden Alexis Roberts, the mother of Biden’s baby, went by the name “Dallas” on stage.

Here’s the post about China:

According to the joint report from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee with the Senate Treasury Committee, Hunter Biden, along with business partner Devon Archer, “engaged in numerous financial transactions with Chinese nationals who had deep connections to the Communist Chinese government.”

These connections, investigators wrote, include Ye Jianming, the founder of CEFC China Energy Co. Ltd (CEFC), and his associate, Gongwen Dong, who reportedly carried out transactions for Jianming’s companies. Ye, the report noted, who formerly held positions with the People’s Liberation Army, also possessed financial connections to former Vice President Joe Biden’s brother, James Biden.

For years, according to the Senate report, Hunter Biden leveraged his vast network of connections to ultimately create the investment firm Bohai Harvest RST (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Co. (BHR), which prioritized investing Chinese capital in overseas projects. The financial group received its approval for a Chinese business license after a series of meetings arranged by Hunter Biden on a government 2013 government trip to China with his vice president father, both flying aboard Air Force Two.

The firm, according to the Wall Street Journal, “is controlled and funded primarily by large Chinese government-owned shareholders” and channeled at least $2.5 billion into automotive, energy, mining, and technology deals on behalf of these investors.

“BHR’s extensive connections to Chinese government intertwined its existence with the decision-making of Communist party leaders,” wrote investigators in the Senate report, highlighting the presence of a consortium that includes the China Development Bank tied to Ye, which controls 30 percent of BHR as an example. Once Ye fell from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s good graces, the Chinese bank pulled lines of credit from Ye’s CEFC.

Here’s the post about Ukraine:

Among the key findings in the report are substantial allegations that Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, from which Hunter Biden raked in upwards of $50,000 a month for serving the board, paid a $7 million bribe to the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office to close an investigation seven months following Hunter Biden’s addition to its leadership.

I thought this was interesting – how did the Democrat lawmakers respond to the Senate investigation:

The Senate’s report marks the first phase of revelations to emerge from the probe launched in 2017, long before Joe Biden jumped into the crowded presidential race in the spring of 2019.

In a desperate bid to shut down the investigation out of concern that its findings could harm their attempt at the White House in November, Democrats, true to form, repeatedly attacked the ongoing probe as an instrument of Russian interference in the upcoming U.S. election, accusing Republican senators of being Kremlin agents.

Finally, a post on Daily Wire had another interesting detail:

Hunter Biden received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, the wife of the former mayor of Moscow.

I think this is real Russia collusion, with real evidence from the Senate this time.

The report was entirely ignored by the mainstream media when it was released Wednesday. So I hope you aren’t relying on them for news. A lot of people are going to be very surprised when Donald Trump brings up this material during the debates – assuming that Joe Biden even shows up.

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If Biden wins in November, don’t expect him to confront China’s totalitarianism

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China has 1 million Uighurs in Chinese in concentration camps, although they deny it
China has 1 million Uighurs in Chinese in concentration camps, although they deny it

As a Christian, I’m obligated to stand up for chastity, sobriety, right to life, and natural marriage. But there are other things happen in the world that also catch my attention. For instance, I’ve noticed that socialist China is basically a totalitarian nation, with concentration camps similar to those of Nazi Germany or communist USSR. And Joe Biden has connections to them.

This story is from the far-left Foreign Policy:

Two recent disturbing events may finally awaken the world to the scale and horror of the atrocities being committed against the Uighurs, a mostly secular Muslim ethnic minority, in Xinjiang, China. One is an authoritative report documenting the systematic sterilization of Uighur women. The other was the seizure by U.S. Customs and Border Protection of 13 tons of products made from human hair suspected of being forcibly removed from Uighurs imprisoned in concentration camps. Both events evoke chilling parallels to past atrocities elsewhere, forced sterilization of minorities, disabled, and Indigenous people, and the image of the glass display of mountains of hair preserved at Auschwitz.

[…]Over a million Turkic Uighurs are detained in concentration camps, prisons, and forced labor factories in China. Detainees are subject to military-style discipline, thought transformation, and forced confessions. They are abused, tortured, raped, and even killed. Survivors report being subjected to electrocution, waterboarding, repeated beatings, stress positions, and injections of unknown substances. These mass detention camps are designed to cause serious physical, psychological harm and mentally break the Uighur people. The repeated government orders to “break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins”; “round up everyone who should be rounded up”; and systematically prevent Uighur births demonstrate a clear intent to eradicate the Uighur people as a whole.

Here is drone footage of the Chinese Muslims being sent to concentration camps by train:

https://youtu.be/L6a5FrXiHYU

These camps are run by Chinese communists. They are secular. They are leftist. The Democrats are in charge in China.

And in fact, the Democrats here in America are not terribly concerned by any of this socialism in China. And that’s because the son of the Democrat presidential candidate has links to the CCP.

Fox News explains:

For almost six years, the firm connected to Hunter Biden in China has moved more than $2.5 billion into various automotive, technology, energy, and mining endeavors.

[…]Biden served as one of nine directors of the private equity firm Bohai Harvest RST – better known as BHR Partners – which is 80 percent mandated by shareholders in the Chinese government, according to the Wall Street Journal.

[…]The firm was registered less than two weeks after Biden flew with his then-vice president father on Air Force Two for official business in China in December 2013…

[…]In the closing days of that December, China’s central bank, the Bank of China in conjunction with Rosemount Seneca – the firm Biden founded in 2009 with John Kerry’s stepson Christopher Heinz and family friend Devon Archer – set up the $1 billion investment joint venture called Bohai Harvest RST.

[…]“The Bank of China is a major Chinese state-run bank, overseen by the powerful China Investment Corporation,” Isaac Stone Fish, a senior fellow at the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, told Fox News. “While it often makes decisions based on economic considerations, it exists to serve the interests of the Chinese Communist Party.”

So, it seems to me that if Biden is elected President, it’s unlikely that anything wil be done about China’s concentration camps. He’s just too close to the Chinese goverment and the Chinese Communist Party.

On the other hand, China doesn’t like the Republicans very much, because they’re actually trying to do something about the concentration camps:

China announced Monday it is issuing sanctions against U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and three other U.S. officials for “interfering in China’s internal affairs,” a move that drew a dismissive reply from Cruz.

The announcement came days after the United States issued sanctions against three Chinese officials for Beijing’s human rights abuses against ethnic minority groups in the Xinjiang region.

If Trump wins in November, then expect to see the United States continue to take action against China. They’ve already been doing it over the past 3.5 years.