A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of "justifiable homicide" to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus -- a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions.
Abortion isn't murder. Murdering abortion providers is murder. That's the fight.
We've wasted a lot of time pretending we could cozily split the difference with ignorant and hysterical authoritarian theocrats by pointing out that fewer abortions actually occur when women's healthcare and family planning sevices, including wanted abortion procedures, are readily available. Of course all that is true, but these facts seem to be relevant to few who do not also grasp that a fetus in the early stages of pregnancy is not a person while a pregnant woman is. That's the fight, and those are the terms in which it must be fought.
I don't even know why this is even an issue. It seems like a strategy for hateful, racist people to enjoy a false sense of moral superiority and moral outrage.
ReplyDeleteI don't even know why this is even an issue.
ReplyDeleteThis is true of so many issues in the United States -- from evolution, drug policy, capital punishment, taxation, gun control, climate change, infrastructure, militarism, so much more -- almost always because of the lies of Republicans, it is frankly difficult to remain conscientious or even sane in this slaughterhouse.
I can't help but think of Auden:
Some think they're strong,
Some think they're smart,
Like butterflies they're torn apart.
America can break your heart.
> > I don't even know why this is even an issue.
ReplyDelete>
> This is true of so many issues in the United States -- from
> evolution, drug policy, capital punishment, taxation,
> gun control, climate change, infrastructure, militarism,
> so much more
Of course we all know **why** these things are issues.
We may not agree with the people who make them issues (I
certainly don't), but it's naive (or worse, fatuous)
to pretend that one can't see **why** they're issues.
It also does no good politically (IMHO) either actually
not to understand "the other side" or to **pretend** not to
understand them.
All it leads to is stereotyped shouting across the barricades.
Something like what Orwell called "duckspeak" (in 1984's
"Newspeak") -- just sloganeering that might as well be a
recording; the words bounce off both sides.
I know what you're talking about, but I think you're overgeneralizing in this comment. Sure, there's always some determinable why in play, but with many of these issues on the right wing side that "why" really does just amount to straightforward ignorance or idiotic greed or incredibly ugly racism and there is no way to address the reality of the politics that is not vulnerable to the superficial ascription to the left of the accusation of "stereotypical shouting across the barricades" precisely because the reality is brutally stereotypical. In such circumstances, trying to propose fact-based harm-reduction policy prescriptions on drug policy, law enforcement, gun regulation, immigration reform, tax policy, addressing climate change, sex education and family planning, infrastructure investment, and so on actually puts you in a surreal position of disadvantage wherein you are not only struggling to advocate for outcomes and mechanisms that require effort and education to understand, which often depend on counter-intuitive insights and knowledges (national budgets aren't the same family budgets, abortions happen less often when abortions and other family planning services become more available, there are some public goods that governments demonstrably provide better than private enterprise does and vice versa, and so on), but in addition to this already difficult task you are required to pretend that your opponents are being reasonable when in fact they are just lying or fulminating or simply don't have the slightest idea what they are talking about and are flinging simplistic slogans and distraction around because to call them out on what they are doing exposes you to the charge that you are being unfair and unreasonable to describe the reality that they are being unfair and unreasonable. Frankly, it's bullshit, and only evil and stupidity ever benefit from the charade.
ReplyDeleteDale wrote:
ReplyDelete> [T]rying to propose fact-based harm-reduction policy
> prescriptions. . . [that] require effort and education to understand. . .
> puts you in a surreal position of disadvantage. . .
> [and] in addition to this already difficult task you are required
> to pretend that your opponents are being reasonable when in fact
> they are just lying or fulminating or simply don't have the
> slightest idea what they are talking about. . .
Yes. But:
1) You and I both know that mutual recognition of "facts"
requires a shared frame of reference that often doesn't
exist between ideologues of the left and right (on matters
from abortion and homosexuality to public funding of
health care to foreign policy).
2) It is nevertheless possible to recognize a coherent
frame of reference which one does not inhabit oneself.
Even folks on the right can do this, though they're
liable to call their reconstruction of the foreign frame
"evil". "decadent", "destructive", "effete"
or just plain "stupid", while when the left-wing
folks do it they'll use descriptions like "idiotic greed",
"ugly racism", or "incredibly ignorant".
3) Both sides repackage what they're hearing from the
other side according to their own model of the other
side's frame of reference ("yes, of course that's what
they'd say").
Actually switching frames of reference is a life-changing
experience. It's like leaving a cult. Frequently (especially
if it means abandoning a religion) it means cutting oneself
off from parents and siblings, erstwhile friends, even
spouse and children. How this sort of thing comes about
seems to me to have little to do with ordinary "political
discourse". Going to school, having unrestricted access to
books, the Web (and YouTube) seems to catalyze the transition
for some people once it's started, but the seeds of
change seem to come from somewhere else.
Yes, **after** such a personality-shattering experience
it's possible to "hear" heretofore unassimilable
"facts".
It's a strange thing. There are some interesting stories
on YouTube (from ex-Mormons, ex-Scientologists, and the
like, or people from conservative religious backgrounds
who have had to face their own, or a child's, homosexuality).
There's one gay male couple (with two adopted children) on
YouTube, one of whom is a cop (and he looks and talks like
a cop, too!) -- a big, beefy guy from a conservative religious
family who excelled at sports to please his father (who
has had nothing to do with him since he came out), and who once
denied his sexual orientation to the point of getting a
girl pregnant in high school. In one video, this guy describes
himself as a "recovering Republican". I had to smile at
that. But that's the kind of crucible it takes to change
people, it seems to me. Homosexuality (absolutely not being able
to conform, no matter what) is one sort of crucible. Experience
in war can be another. E.g., George Orwell's disillusionment
with the Communist Party as a result of his experiences in the
Spanish Civil War. Or Gordon Livingston's ("Too Soon Old, Too Late
Smart") disillusionment in American foreign policy as a result
of serving in Viet Nam (after graduating from West Point).
But most folks, most of the time, are just comfortably singing
along with the choir, well insulated from the discords coming
from the band next door.
Doesn't the metaphor of "switching frames of reference" you mobilize here rely for its force on the implicit recognition of a world susceptible of actually warrantable descriptions, which you then disavow in analogizing all convictions, however warranted, as cult-like?
ReplyDeleteYou are right to point out that all conviction corrals the believer into communities of belief with a yield of both pleasures and pressures that are more addictive than argumentative, and that respect for argument demands vigilance to these.
But this is hardly the only consideration that matters to those who would be reasonable, and in some conflicts -- one that arrays the environmentalist against the corporate funded climate-change denialist, the harm-reduction family planning or drug policy maker against the Christianist moralist, the civil libertarian and antigay or white racist bigot -- the comparable force of their conviction and the emotional/moral support they get from their fellows is scarcely more important than the actual substance that distinguishes them, both in terms of the actual propositional content of their belief, and the matter of the demonstrable relation of their different beliefs to the demonstrable criteria that warrant scientific beliefs as best on offer or criteria that warrant ethical beliefs as equitable-in-diversity or political/policy beliefs as optimally efficacious as constrained by equitability-in-diversity.
There are plenty of conflicts in which I am the first to insist -- as you are here, if I am reading you aright -- that we need to identify imaginatively with the point of view of interlocutors the better to learn from them and reconcile with them, but there are also times when one has to choose sides and when to refrain from so doing is no different from choosing the side with which one is substantially least sympathetic in fact.