MedicalStory
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User ID: 1333
MedicalStory
2yr ago
"X is morally bad but it would be inappropriate for the state to punish people for doing X" is common and I believe it in certain contexts.
"X is killing an innocent person but it would be inappropriate for the state to punish people for doing X" is more like the framing that baffles me, and doesn't seem to be used in any other setting (except war, now that I think of it - but it doesn't seem correct to me that these people are bringing up the same meme that applies to war). My point was not about my morality, it's about what other people's morality is on other issues.
MedicalStory
2yr ago
Crossposted at https://medicalstory.substack.com/p/none-dare-call-it-domestic-violence since I've decided to keep a list of my long posts there.
This is an essay whose intended audience is people who are already against abortion.
We are losing. We lost an election in Kansas by 18 percentage points. Right-wing radio seems to have decided the talking point is that it will still be easy to travel for abortions post-Roe.
The argument we are losing to is the “none of the government’s business” argument. This argument is the same one that kept the government mostly out of domestic violence situations until less than a half century ago. (There is a book – a very good book for those who like biographies - “A Private Family Matter: A Memoir” by Victor Rivas Rivers about growing up with a violent and abusive father. The title derives from what the cops told Rivers to dismiss him when, as a teenager, he finally got the courage to go to them for rescue for his situation.)
Abortion is literally domestic violence – it is intra-family and it is violent. So the pro-choice side is using the domestic violence defense for literal domestic violence.
It works for them because our side doesn’t call it out as such – there is already a meme, even among libertarians, that the government should protect domestic violence victims. We avoid accessing the meme because we are afraid our opponents will run away screaming (which is bad when there’s an imminent election) or, worse, run towards us screaming (and bring the Eye of Sauron Cancel Culture upon us). I think this is true even, perhaps especially, for the professional political marketing class.
Epistemic status: I am both more confident than I should be given the evidence, but less confident than the tone that comes across as a re-read this. While the desirability of fighting abortion is beyond the scope of this essay, I very much want to be as effective as possible in fighting abortion, so I want to hear from people in the intended audience who disagree.
Some justification:
I’ve been on and off active in the pro-life movement during my life. Through this, I’ve had a fair number of discussions with the general public about their views on abortion, especially those that disagree with me. Some people argue that the fetus isn’t an entity with moral standing and right, so killing one is fine. I understand where these people are coming from. I disagree, but I understand. I don’t think this is a winning argument for the pro-choice side, or else they wouldn’t have abandoned its use a couple decades ago.
A few argue that the fetus is an entity with moral standing but having pregnancy or baby is such an imposition on the mother that abortion is ok. I still understand where these people are coming from. I absolutely don’t agree (although I do think we should work on making life easier for the mother), but I still understand. I am quite sure that this argument would never take with the general public, despite its attraction in academic settings.
But there’s one common take that has baffled me for a long time – the one that goes something like this: “Yes, abortion is killing an innocent baby and wrong, but I don’t think it would be right for me to tell (other) women what to do/choose/decide.” This had always baffled me, until I recognized it in the past few months as the domestic violence defense.
MedicalStory
2yr ago
That's a good point I hadn't thought and I take back the first paragraph I wrote.
MedicalStory
2yr ago
If HBD were true, there would be no Flynn Effect - there's no way the genes of the Western nations have changed that much so quickly.
I would even say that the changes in which societies are hovels and which are not, such as the shift in the center of civilization from the Muslim world to Europe over the past several centuries, are too fast to explain with HBD.
I'm too lazy to look up the actual numbers, but if I remember correctly, if we accept that the IQ numbers for Africa are the result of a culturally-unbiased assessment of intelligence, then Africa would be a society of actually literally retarded people, which it is not.
MedicalStory
2yr ago
I don't like Roe and am glad it was overturned, but it seems legitimate to call its reversal undemocratic because overturning Roe was unpopular according to polls.
(It is also fine to call Roe itself undemocratic for the reason you give. This is no more contradictory, in theory, than when Congress wants to defer its authority to Executive Department bureaucrats.)
In my experience, undemocratic is only used for its literal meaning, but it's also only used to show negative valence and primarily used by the left, so undemocratic right wing moves get called "undemocratic" but undemocratic left wing moves don't get that descriptor applied.
This is a roundabout way of saying that the grandparent to this comment doesn't match my experience. The media would portray the Slovenian Court decision positively, but it wouldn't call the decision "democratic".
But then why are there so many people who believe the mother is killing her helpless baby, but still think the government should stay out of it?
I don't think we should contradict anyone who says it's murder. My point is that accessing the domestic violence meme is a way of getting across to these people why the government should get involved, even though it's intuitively personal on some level.
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