Macaquin
23d ago
Which effectively means that if you start acknowledging the “do no harm” principle, you effectively cannot ever cut spending. So heartlessness is the only defense against the weaponized empathy. It doesn’t work on people who state openly that they don’t care about the empathy puppy.
How exactly did not eliminating something like PEPFAR prevent any further cuts to spending? The State Department did exactly that weeks before your comment and Rubio still managed to fire the majority of USAID's workforce.
No one, as a matter of the practical reality, has ever had to commit to some totalizing "do no harm" principle, you can simply (to the extent "you" have discretion over the matter) weight the cost of aid cuts against the benefits of doing so. Those benefits certainly include the strictly political and strategic value that defunding partisan enemies involve, but if those are being alleged they need to be specified in concrete terms. "The left will use any morsel of moral thinking against you in some unspecified and indeterminate way" is a useless thing to say without information about what this amounts to in concrete legal or organizational terms, and nobody insisting that we desperately need to halt every last cent of aid has given such an account here.
Macaquin
25d ago
This kind of posturing is very hard to take seriously absent a compelling case that USAID funding is a meaningful obstacle to conservative victory as such. Your pro-life vs pro-choice analogy doesn't work because the pro-choicers' victory necessarily depends on pro-lifers' defeat.
Macaquin
2mo ago
Why would this say anything more about the actual nature of the pro-life movement than what NPR wants it to be?
Macaquin
2mo ago
The surface content of this speech isn't hard to address: Being strongly against abortion and understanding it to be actual infanticide means judging your peers, judging your friends, judging your family, and in some cases judging yourself. And judgement (which Christians especially have to understand) isn't free righteousness: it means burning bridges or having them burned for you, it means condemning your society in general, and it means permanently ending your ability to be mentally at ease with the state of the world around you, because abortion isn't a faraway war with dubious link to your circle of responsibilities, but something that most likely happens near you and is perpetrated by people you know and have to find productive ways to engage with regardless. It's not very different from being a child and realizing your parents are terrible people. Especially when you will (and, as a Christian, should) continue to love them through their ugliness.
I don't expect any pro-choicer to be wowed by these considerations, but why would they be? That's not the substance of the question. That's whether abortion is bad. Which is all anyone cares about here, and that's the real problem with this sermon. Pro-lifers are supposed to oppose abortion because it's systemic infanticide; if (as the sermon pretends) the problem is that people are relishing in righteous feelings over serious righteous conduct, why isn't the main fault that they're instrumentalizing what should be a serious cause for personal gain? The whole frame makes no sense without assuming that pro-lifers are wrong on the substance first (or that would necessarily be the most important thing) and should care more about this pastor's pet causes instead. The speech is blatantly about laundering those ideas and not interrogating anyone's sinful hearts. It's not just the usual annoying and self-indulgent partisan fap session, but essentially dishonest in presentation.
The other points just obviously don't have substance. How are orphans and widows being thrown under the bus? No one knows. What specifically do you want to question about "patriarchy"? No one knows. The idea unifying these examples is that abortion is suspect because it's one issue that does not revolve around finding and justifying the debts you owe to other people, and that this is sort of the "legitimate default attitude" if you're a morally serious person. You probably feel it's hard to address decisively because this is a very peculiar idea that doesn't get defended as seriously as it would have to be.
Macaquin
2mo ago
on the other hand, his support for the AfD and his criticism of Muslim immigration makes him pretty much impossible to use as a cudgel by the right wing.
It seems the attacker was only a critic of Muslim immigration on unusually principled anti-religious grounds. Here he is in 2019 (fedora and all -- wow!) discussing his website for aiding the asylum claims from secular Gulf refugees. More recently, he accused the German state of conspiring against atheist Saudi asylees and threatened to fight and kill over this:
First: I assure you that if Germany wants a war, we will fight it. If Germany wants to kill us, we will slaughter them, die, or go to prison with pride. Because we have exhausted all peaceful means and all we have received from the police, state security, the prosecution, the judiciary, and the (Federal) Ministry of the Interior is more crimes against us. Peace is of no use with them.
Rather than the hard right, it will be assimilationist centrists and center-rightists who want to make the problem of immigration to be about Islam who won't have much to milk out of this.
Macaquin
2mo ago
To make this argument work, you have to consider the problem with private promiscuity to be just that it's a lack of honesty. Then it's only that to the extent those involved placed some idiosyncratic value on avoiding the act. Many people have such standards (such as religious diet restrictions) which outsiders don't have much reason to care about.
On the other hand, if there's some intrinsic reason promiscuity is bad, women who do it publicly aren't only doing the same thing but honest. They're suspect because its publicity creates an added inappropriate relation, now with a public who shouldn't be involved at all, above the men involved.
None of this is to say you should be tolerant of the presentable slattern either...but treating it as just a matter of hypocrisy demeans the issue.
This article just presents the trivial fact that many liberals strongly -believe- they're under threat of persecution and silencing. So what? That's not evidence they're right. How much Swalwell spends doesn't matter without evidence he needs it. If a wide range of business leaders believe this, it could be a different story (and we have conveniently few details here), but this is nothing new. All major social media sites altered their policies at the behest of the previous administration's pressure. Boo hoo.
"The wicked flee when no one pursueth" is how this reads to me.
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