Chinese advertisements

[kirisutogomen]

The answer is the tag, rot13'd, but to save you the trouble, I'll tell you. First, the original ad before I mucked with it. (Yes, it was left-right mirrored like most people guessed. I'm still curious as to why among people who are entirely illiterate in Han characters the mirroring was blatantly obvious to some and not at all to others.)




And another for the same service from a competing provider:



These are ads for abortion clinics. Chinese abortion clinics advertise on prime-time television. They offer student discounts. Not sure if they have special holiday sales, nor if you get abortion coupons with your newspaper.

Now, unless you take the position that a fetus at any stage has the moral standing of a lintball but that magically at the moment the head crowns it suddenly becomes a full human person endowed with a complete set of inalienable rights plus a stylish carrying case, there's got to be a point at which you say, "Hrm. My liberal sensibilities tell me that I should advocate fiercely for a woman's right to choose, but I don't actually want people to treat abortion like a trip to the hair salon. What does my victory condition actually look like?"

And then there's the issue of sex selection, which really kicks over a Pandora's hornets' nest of other issues.

Comments

[dcltdw]

I'm still curious as to why among people who are entirely illiterate in Han characters the mirroring was blatantly obvious to some and not at all to others.

Pattern recognition. I can't read Spanish or Russian or Arabic, but with enough exposure, I can probably tell if it's right-left mirrored. In the case of Spanish, it's probably very little exposure given my knowledge of English. Arabic... I have this vague idea that there tend to be swirls underneath letters that go from either L->R or R->L. So my pattern recognition is halfway there, at least in this regard. That, or I'm totally confused. :)

Now, unless you take the position that a fetus at any stage has the moral standing of a lintball but that magically at the moment the head crowns it suddenly becomes a full human person endowed with a complete set of inalienable rights plus a stylish carrying case

*raises hand* I need to think this through (no morning coffee yet), but yeah, I think that's me. My victory condition is "people have complete ownership of their own bodies and nobody else's".

[rifmeister.livejournal.com]

The text has an obvious directional "flow". If you know that Chinese reads from left-to-right, the long tail under the third-character in the big yellow line and the ellipsis at the end of the text under the box are pretty strong cues. The separators in the line above the big yellow line are more plausibly slashes than backslashes.

I also want to say that I've seen a bunch of the glyphs enough time that they look wrong backward, but I might be fooling myself there. For instance, I think one year of Japanese classes is enough to say that the second character in the big line and the fourth character in the line below it look "wrong" mirror reversed; maybe that's enough that I don't count as totally illiterate.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

The mirror flip was most obvious to me because of the slant of the yellow italics. The swashes also looked wrong, but it might have taken me longer.

I think I share your squeamish feeling here, but thinking of it practically - I think our victory condition should have a component of "early is better than late", and if an abortion is as easy and acceptable as a trip to the hair salon, and is advertised with ads that suggest to me "stay young and fresh and pretty [not large and awkward]" then that seems more plausible. (I don't know if there's anything in the ad that suggests that they cater to late term - it does have to be a much more surgical procedure than early).

And sure, perhaps people should not treat abortion like a trip to the hair salon - but what are the alternatives? If you don't want to have kids, how much angst and soul-searching must I require of you before I approve of your choice? Can the angst be done before you get pregnant, or does it have to be after?

And...is it better if someone decides to have a kid with all the thought of deciding to have a haircut? Is choosing to be a parent lightly an improvement?

[tirinian.livejournal.com]

I think I cued off the formatting, rather than the characters. The text in the box turned into a "ragged left" margin with bullet points on the right, and the ellipses were at the beginning rather than the end of the line under the box. That seemed wrong for a left-to-right language.

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

I don't know whether this is a completely personal thing, or comes from my Chinese cultural background, but I do not think it makes sense to have newborn babies instantly granted the moral standing of a full human. For entities with low self concept, like animals, human babies, or severely mentally handicapped humans, I think their moral standing should be based on the attachments that other people have (or potentially have) to them. Also, somewhat based on the fact that the more something seems human (even if they are not fully functionally human), the more the way society treat them will tend to color how all humans are treated.

So, in my opinion, there is a continuum even after birth. For example, I think it is wrong to be verbally cruel to a person who understands what you are saying because you are doing psychological harm to them. But if you said the same thing to a brain-dead person, it's not doing any harm to them. It would be wrong for a parent to physically restrain their 20 year old, normally functioning son and force him to get circumcised, because it would psychologically harm him to have his own determination of his body violated. It is not wrong for a parent to force their infant son to get circumcised, because the amount of harm to them is low. Similar with ear piercing for infant girls, versus forcing a normally functioning 20 year old to do it.

[psychohist.livejournal.com]

I don't think abortion on demand implies that the fetus has the moral standing of a lintball. In fact, the fetus can have the moral standing of a full adult and abortions can still be justified. Its similar to a case where someone who is dying is hooked up to your bloodstream, because a supply of your blood is the only way to save him. I don't think you're obligated to continue allowing him to live off your blood, and I think the choice is yours alone.

With respect to the ads, I agree with firstfrost: they are likely to encourage people to get abortions earlier rather than later, and I consider that a good thing, not a bad thing. For that matter, I would go further and say that anyone who can be enticed into an abortion by a pretty ad is probably not ready to be a parent.

[dpolicar]

Short answer: my ideal victory condition looks like people having the power to make the choices that affect them, and people using that power to make choices I endorse.

I don't expect that to happen, certainly no time soon, but that's my ideal victory condition.

Various real-world approximations of that ideal are possible, but you're right that at some point in any real-world approximation I will need to draw some more-or-less arbitrary thresholds to compensate for regions where the ideal function just ain't computable.

So, yes, in the real world choices arise between people not having the power to make the choices that affect them (on the one hand) and people using their power to make choices I decry (on the other).

My sensibilities mostly tell me that given that choice, I err strongly on the side of people having the power to make the choices that affect them. Whether those sensibilities count as "liberal" I really don't know, but I'm comfortable enough with that label if I have to pick a label.

That said, I'll admit that in the real world situations arise where the reason I decry person A's choice is precisely because it takes away person B's ability to make the choices that affect them. And yeah, as you suggest, those sorts of situations throw my sensibilities into a muddle. "Let people make their own choices" as a guiding principle has a way of short-circuiting when faced with people who make the choice to prevent other people from making their own choices.

With respect to abortion in particular, one can go down the rabbit hole at this point of "but there isn't a person B, there's just a fetus!" Which I mostly consider a distraction, since I tend to think one can always in principle evaluate the value of an existing system in terms of the expected value of the evolution of that system, even if one can't always actually compute the result. In other words, I would say that the value of a fetus is expressible in terms of the expected values of the people that fetus can become, so the personhood of the fetus doesn't really matter much -- whether the fetus is a person or not, the value of a person is relevant in determining the costs of terminating its development.

That said, it's a damned effective distraction, which is why abortion is so beloved as a topic of discussion among people who would rather confound their opposition than think clearly. But I digress.

Anyway, yes, examples like this are problematic for me. I don't feel too bad about that... I'm mostly a Godellian in such matters. That is, I believe that for any decision system powerful enough to make useful decisions at all, there will be decisions that system is incapable of making. And when it comes to those decisions, users of that system will have to do something annoyingly ad-hoc.

I'm not crazy about that fact, but I don't see any way around it.