naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Still, there was nothing even remotely close to J6 on the Democratic side.
There’s a fundamental difference between being bitter about an election result and actually thinking the result was actually illegitimate. I will of course grant you that occasionally the language can appear superficially similar, but the difference is real and very important. Democrats absolutely accepted the result of the election.
They did not. When Hillary Clinton says Trump is an "illegitimate President," I just don't understand how you conclude that this is "superficially similar" language with a "real and very important difference." She wasn't alone. Is it your position that because she didn't say "literally illegitimate" or "actually illegitimate," we should assume she's just being rhetorical?
The process was not in question, and this was telling in the actual actions taken: they thought Russia meddled a bit too much and so the solution is policy to stop it happening again.
Russia is an easy target, of course, but listen to the examples of outright election denialism in that video. Much of it targets process, too. There are allegations of conspiracy. Trump is louder and coarser than most, but on substance he's not saying anything Democrats haven't been saying for years.
Hell, even after 2000, Democrats still by and large accepted the result despite some very potent arguments that they had been robbed by some uncontrollable aspect of the administrative state (broadly). Sure, you had a decent chunk of individuals who continued or even still continue to believe the election result was rigged or undemocratic or whatever, but this didn’t translate to the political class, and it didn’t lead to a fundamental dispute of elections more broadly...
To the contrary, I would say that it translated to the political class very well, in a variety of ways. But you're not entirely wrong: the Democrats have, I think, been better at translating their losses into action. They are doing everything they can to disassemble any part of the system that doesn't guarantee their victory and continued ideological dominance of the government and the press.
...and in the actions, Florida got its shit together and fixed a lot of the issues for subsequent elections.
I don't want to read too much into it, but I can't help but notice that after Florida decided to take elections seriously enough to avoid a repeat of 2000, it changed from "purple" to "reliably red."
The immediate reaction of Trump and his allies was not merely bitterness but action that should be disturbing to all. They tried both literally and rhetorically to do an end run around the actual election and legal processes to corruptly (mens rea according to the evidence we’ve seen) subvert the actual election, irrespective of fact.
And yet nothing they did is without recent precedent in Democratic opposition to election results. Democrats have refused to certify elections results. Democrats have rioted in DC. Democrats have tried to do an end run around the actual election and legal processes to corruptly subvert the actual election. None of this makes Trump's own misdeeds good, by the by; the point here is not "whataboutism." The point here is that I can't understand how anyone can pretend with a straight face that any of this hasn't been done before by the exact people now decrying it.
Do you see the difference? “Let’s fix it” is of a fundamentally different character than “let’s change it”.
No: you are treating Democratic attempts to ensure their own permanent victory as "fix" while treating parallel Republican attempted to ensure their own permanent victory as "change." There is no difference of character there, much less a fundamental one. Rather, this is simply "our noble soldiers versus your barbarous brigands" in electioneering parlance.
That Trump’s personal motivations largely aligned with the country’s in his first term wasn’t an accident but was at least in some sense lucky - but I’m not convinced this can be taken for granted in a second term to the same degree.
Are you suggesting that, if Donald Trump wins in November, you would reject the outcome of that election?
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses?
Serious question: is there anything the government could feasibly do now, to nudge Democrats towards accepting the result of the election in the event that Kamala loses?
Because my answer to your question is "Well, it could stop rigging elections."
Someone will inevitably cry, "But there's no clear and undisputable evidence of widespread or coordinated voter fraud sufficient to have changed the outcome of 2020!"
Sure, let's grant that. But let's also observe that setting up elections to come out the way you want them (i.e. rigging, in the most boring metaphorical sense) can be done in numerous legal and quasi-legal ways. In fact most attempts to "rig" elections are conducted in entirely legitimate ways, and people don't object because if everyone is free to do what they can to influence the outcome of the election, well, that's just democracy!
However there are at least two important institutions in our culture which we broadly expect to refrain from influencing elections. One is the government itself, including government actors like FBI agents and military personnel. Another is "the Press," that amorphous blob of journalists and corporations that purports to contribute to the political process by ensuring the dissemination of facts.
These two institutions have all but entirely abandoned the pretense of political impartiality. The recent example of 60 Minutes doctoring an interview in Kamala's favor can serve as just one instance of persistent and repeated behavior from the press. Disparities in the Justice Department's treatment of, say, 2020 DC rioters versus 2016 DC rioters can serve as just one example of persistent and repeated behavior from the government. The bureaucracy and the press are dominated by Democrats, such that a prospiracy to thumb the scales for Democratic candidates is basically inevitable.
One of my biggest problems with Donald Trump is that he often says false things that are directionally correct, which takes attention away from real problems to focus on fake ones. But one reason he might do this is simply that the truth is complicated and most people haven't got the attention span for it. I have not taken the time to make a lengthy linked catalog of ways which the government and the press abused their putative impartiality in part because most examples are, in isolation, small and easily dismissed. I'm not interested in getting dragged into a back-and-forth over the real significance of, say, dismissing Biden's violation of federal law due to his being an "elderly man with a poor memory." We used to impeach (or try to impeach) executives who used government power to hamper (or try to hamper) their political opponents. But not anymore! It's just that I notice the direction of these things, and the small examples pile up quickly.
(Well, don't worry. The FISA court ordered numerous corrective actions, which I'm sure will be followed meticulously any time they do not interfere with Democratic victories at the polls. What more do you want? Surely an impeachment would be far too much of a hassle.)
When Trump was first elected President, one common meme was for people to say and post, "NOT MY PRESIDENT." Hillary Clinton called Trump an "illegitimate President." Would you say that Democrats "accepted the results of the election" in that case? Because my read is that they very much did not, indeed still have not. Why didn't they accept the outcome of that election? What could the government have done, to nudge them toward greater acceptance?
Because if you can't answer that question, or you think it's a meaningfully different question, then I don't think anyone is in a position to give you a satisfying answer to your question, either.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Even among ourselves, for whatever reason, it’s rude in most circles to criticize others for casual sex, excessive drinking, or drug use. It’s really a strange thing that doesn’t happen in other places.
Earlier this summer some of my more religious connections circulated a tweet from Burk Parsons:
In many churches today, it is considered worse to judge evil than to do evil.
I have been thinking about the word "moralizing" in connection with this comment. Asking Google for the definition gives me this:
noun: moralizing; noun: moralising
the action of commenting on issues of right and wrong, typically with an unfounded air of superiority.
"the self-righteous moralizing of his aunt was ringing in his ears"
adjective: moralizing; adjective: moralising
having or displaying an overly critical point of view on issues of right and wrong, typically with an unfounded air of superiority.
"he was given to moralizing speeches"
One of the logical consequences of asserting the "equality of persons"--a genuine ideological cornerstone of Western liberalism--is the idea that "no one is better than me." This is like, trivially false on its face, of course: probably many people are better than me at baseball, for example, or at knitting. "Everyone knows" (the consensus-building argument goes) that it's not total equality of skills, resources, etc. which egalitarianism demands, but rather a kind of "political equality" in which no person should be afforded greater rights or privileges than any other person by virtue of their birth or social position.
Most people seem to intuit that being great at baseball or knitting doesn't make you a "better person" than others, in any egalitarian-relevant sense. But there are other things that people seem, for whatever reason, to reflexively associate with individual worth and worthiness. One of those is intelligence. Another, I think, is moral praiseworthiness. Maybe it is because we do recognize some acts as criminal, and treat the status of "criminal" as naturally and permissibly forfeiting one's (political-equality-grounded) rights?
So: criticize someone's immoral-but-not-illegal choices, and a common response will be, "You think you're better than me?"
Of course, one needn't regard oneself as "better" to recognize bad! And I have certainly met my share of outright moralizers, people who derive apparent satisfaction from looking down on others, especially with an "unfounded air of superiority." (Snobbily religious folks, for example, as well as wokists--if that's not just a different word for the same phenomenon.)
My own memory is that as recently as the 1990s, people who drank, smoke, etc. were at least somewhat prone to saying "I know this is a terrible choice, but I'm still going to make it--but I really respect people who don't make this choice." I don't think I've encountered that sentiment in a memorable way since 2014 at the latest. My unfounded guess would be that something like "unconditional self-love" has largely replaced the pursuit of excellence and merit as a central motivator for those aforementioned "snobbily religious" types. And loving oneself unconditionally presumably comes part and parcel with rejecting any culture that asks or invites us to change.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
I get nervous about the death penalty for the same reason I think it should probably be legal: death is irrecoverable. When the state puts someone to death in error, that is an error that should shake the government to its foundations. Basically everyone involved in allowing that to happen should be removed from government office or employment, permanently, and strictly speaking at least some of the police, lawyers, and judges involved seem to have earned the death penalty themselves as a result. And wrongful execution does seem to happen, sometimes, and the consequences for it happening are basically nil; redistributing a bunch of tax money to the family of the innocent deceased is no solution at all.
But by the same token, when a murderer ends someone's life, there's just literally nothing anyone can do to "make it right." We sometimes allocate money to the bereaved, but their loss is inescapably paltry by comparison to the permanent, irrecoverable loss imposed on the deceased. The death penalty is society's way of saying, "the impossibility of restorative justice in these cases means that Hammurabi is all we have left."
Discourse on this topic is frustrating because a rather labyrinthine motte-and-bailey complex has arisen in connection with the retribution/deterrence/rehabilitation theories of criminal justice. In the United States, at least, we refuse to really commit to any particular theory of criminal justice (probably as a result of the democratic process). Instead, we engage in laundered mob justice, demanding our lawyers dress it up in whatever theory has the best fit, or happens to be in fashion. This strikes me as... inadequate.
So I end up being kind of weakly opposed to the death penalty, more because I tend to despise government than because I have any philosophical objections to executing known murderers. This is all in much the way that I vehemently reject the idea that "all cops are bastards," while comfortably believing that, say, "all traffic cops are bastards" is basically correct.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Is it acceptable to just lie for victimhood points at this point?
Earlier today I started doing a writeup on these events after seeing headlines to the effect of, "box knife used to carve racial slur into flesh of college student." My first thought was "if it's not a straight up hoax, then it may be the most unambiguously racist crime I've ever heard of." But I ended up abandoning the post because I couldn't figure out what to say beyond "I'd like to say 'wait and see' but I kind of doubt we'll ever see."
Reading between the lines, it seems like the actual events were: two college kids who were friends got up to some shenanigans with a sharp object, including writing "the N-word" on the chest of the black friend. The writing is variously described as "scratching," "cutting," and "carving," depending on who is talking about it, and the implement is variously described as plastic, ceramic, a box cutter, a box knife... no pictures of the implement or actual slur appear in evidence. Some upperclassmen reported these shenanigans to their coaches, who kicked both the perpetrator and the "victim" off the team.
To carve a legible word into someone's flesh requires either dramatically overpowering strength, a gang of lackeys holding the victim down, or the cooperation of the victim. The victim also was apparently not the one to report the events, though the victim's family is quite upset about the whole thing. So my best guess is that the two friends decided to do something edgy together, or maybe the victim is easily suggestible for some reason. But of course the whole story now is about racism instead of about the general foolishness one gets when young athletic males are gathered together with no purpose but to "have some fun." And not just any racism, but "carving the N-word into the flesh" of the victim! Now that's a headline to sell some papers! Nuanced discussion of how racial slurs have become one of very few kinds of language young people can use to genuinely shock and disturb, such that most utterances of racial slurs are probably disconnected from actual racism (of the "race X is inherently superior to race Y" variety), is right out.
Now, for all I know the perpetrator is 6'7" and can bench press a horse, while the victim is 5'5" and 100lbs. soaking wet, and the perpetrator is a Good Old Boy who always wanted his own scarified slave or something, and this was every bit as horrific as the headlines imply. But I don't know, and I doubt I ever will, and as long as no one really knows, we can all just tell ourselves whatever story we want to tell ourselves about how these events totally reinforce all our existing beliefs and biases.
Hopefully you can see how that's not a tangent at all, despite me not commenting on the exhausting superposition of "gravesites" which are probably mostly not gravesites. But so long as they might be, well, then there is money to be made and power to be grabbed by peddling a narrative. The story is more useful--arguably to both proponents and opponents--as long as it remains uncertain.
Truth is the only casualty, and who (but the occasional Internet autist) cares about that?
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
Did or does Marxism talk about how? Or was it mostly an analysis of current pressures, with a prediction that socialism and communism would inevitably come to pass?
This is a surprisingly complicated question, over which scholars reasonably differ. I do think most of Marx's own writings assert a kind of historical inevitability. He was also unquestionably an advocate for that change, but not to the point where he ever did any real revolution-organizing of his own. But it turns out he was just factually wrong on many questions of economics, and he certainly never formulated a practical approach to revolution.
This ties back to Marx's Hegelian roots. The disciples of Hegel fell into two distinct camps: conservative Hegelians who viewed the unfolding of history as inevitable, but also as collectively transcending any one person's insights or inputs. For them, attempting to "reform" the system was just interfering with processes which no human could reasonably comprehend (or, therefore, effectively guide). Whereas the radical Hegelians were basically accelerationists; they believed that the arc of history bent toward justice and that meant the faster history could be made to "progress" toward the predicted utopia, the better off everyone would be. Arguably Marx's problem with the radical Hegelians was that they weren't sufficiently radical. But stated a little differently, Hegel's focus on "spirit" Marx saw as ineffectual and disconnected from practical reality; he wanted more of a focus on the material origins of oppression.
This focus on oppression as the enemy is substantially what percolates through leftist political thought--to the point that even non-Marxist liberals will often talk about "oppression" as a major focus for political activism (though what actually constitutes oppression, as opposed to say inconvenience or violations of preference, turns out to be a difficult question for honest thinkers). Certainly any theorist styled "critical" is focused on the practical alleviation of perceived oppression. Today, I think most people who like Marx are also very interested in political activism rather than in the academic question of Socialism's putative inevitability. But I assume there are at least some academics out there who could be accurately characterized along such lines.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
Voting patterns are not a useful criteria to determine equivalence among ideologies.
Yes, that's true. That's why I limited the (tangential, and so unelaborated) point to "practical terms..."
As for the rest, I've had this conversation many times over the years, and the answer ultimately depends on your question, which you don't appear to have clearly stated yet. Calling out a "Nicene Creed of Marxism" is akin to the "true Communism has never been tried" trope. In my experience, cultural Marxists tend to regard themselves as Marxists, or Marxists-plus, or also Marxists, while avowed Marxists may or may not accept cultural Marxism, but I have never seen a rigorous attempt at putting empirical numbers to these things. Presumably, that would be difficult or impossible now; "cultural Marxism" has been a somewhat contested term for a long time, and its memory-holing into an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory" has only made that worse.
So in general I would say that the term "cultural Marxist" should probably be avoided simply because it's been hopelessly muddied. But at the same time, when people insist that it just is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, or that it has nothing to do with Marxism as an ideology, I just have to point out that this is wrong as a matter of history. It certainly evolved from Marxism; it certainly is intellectually downstream of Marxism; it certainly shares many structural features with Marxism. If a "true Marxist" feels the need to gatekeep and insist that "cultural Marxism" is an ideological heresy, like, fine? I don't have a horse in that race, I'm happy to taboo "cultural Marxism" so long as the conversation is not explicitly about the term "cultural Marxism."
But you seem to be attributing fallacious reasoning to the people talking about cultural Marxism, whereas I and others responding to you are focused instead on the mischief of the people who muddied the term in the first place. If there was a group who called themselves cultural Marxists (there was) and this group believed the things they are accused of believing (they did) and later on the term was abandoned by its users because it had become a useful tool in the enemy's toolbox (it had), then getting conspicuously annoyed with the aforementioned enemies who go on using the term anyway seems like misdirected ire from anyone who is not, well, part of the group-formerly-known-as-cultural-Marxists.
all-my-enemies-get-their-talking-points-from-the-same-source fallacy
All my enemies get their talking points from Plato. What pisses me off is that they don't seem to realize it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
It wasn't me, but several of my posts on reddit were included in the maintenance of a cultural Marxism "thread" (maybe on CWR?) for a time, that included numerous materials. But at some point the creator deleted it, presumably either by quitting reddit or by being banned from it. This was not my first post on the topic, but Google is not helping me find older ones and I haven't got the bandwidth just this moment to dig up the others.
I have never once heard a leftist refer to themselves unironically as a "cultural Marxist".
You're probably just not old enough to remember, then.
... because the phenomenon isn't particularly Marxist, and the "culture" part is just obvious
This is only kind of true. The cultural Marxists are the ones co-opting Marx. Marxism is modern and materialist; cultural Marxism is postmodern and sociological. The idea was to use Marxist insights to determine how to distribute sociological, rather than material, "equality." It's all right there in the book. As @MadMonzer correctly observes, the actual Marxists often object to the cultural Marxists (today this manifests as, say, Brian Leiter or Freddie deBoer criticizing Wokists).
But in the United States, the cultural Marxists and the originalist Marxists vote as a bloc, so in practical terms...
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
The New York Times reports...
Huh. I admit I did not expect the article I was fisking to turn out to be at the start of a chain of information laundering for Kamala's campaign, but I guess I should have.
It's amazing to me how transparently false the narrative is, that these deaths are directly downstream of Dobbs. There seems to be more evidence that these deaths are directly downstream of the news media's scaremongering; I'd bet that both women honestly believed abortion laws in Georgia to be far more restrictive than is actually the case.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
Wow. Sure enough, another case of (headline font!) woman likely killed by abortion pills has death blamed on unrelated abortion laws. But also, good heavens:
An autopsy found unexpelled fetus tissue, confirming that the abortion had not fully completed. It also found a lethal combination of painkillers, including the dangerous opioid fentanyl. Miller had no history of drug use, the medical records state; her family has no idea how she obtained them or what was going through her mind--whether she was trying to quell the pain, complete the abortion or end her life. A medical examiner was unable to determine the manner of her death.
Her family later told a coroner she hadn't visited a doctor "due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions."
Of course, it seems unlikely to me that she knew anything about such legislation beyond what panicky, sensationalist journalists told her. To say nothing of the fentanyl (huh!?) and the possibility that she committed suicide.
This second article also repeats the "almost certainly other deaths" canard. Apparently ProPublica now exists to spread blood libel against conservative legislators.
You can find writing with poor epistemological standards produced by any group.
But of course--my post was not about a group (except, perhaps, "journalists") per se. It was about a particular kind of argument that is driving huge chunks of American political discourse, of which this article was a particular examplar. In other words--
I'm not sure what is to be gained by dissecting arbitrary examples.
There was nothing arbitrary about this example, and instead of engaging on the substance you decided first to try meta, and failing that you're now retreating to "eh who cares it's not interesting."
On this forum, especially, the most common assumption is that every news article is trash
Sure. But as you observed--90% of everything is trash! So it must be a safe assumption, right? But also, if we're going to talk about anything at all, part of that conversation is going to involve sifting through the presumptive trash, or better yet--trying to transform that trash into treasure, through our own effortful engagement!
so I don't know what insight there is to be gained.
Maybe none? But you would have to actually try to engage on the merits to decide that, and so far you've made two comments declining to even try. Which is of course your prerogative! You are under no obligation to try to understand, or to find things interesting. But your commentary thus far has been even less worthwhile, or so it seems to me--wouldn't it be more interesting to actually engage on substance?
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
So you agree the ProPublica article is garbage? Interesting.
Breaking down bias or bad epistemology is certainly within the scope here. Per the rules you can't simply be dunking on some fringe loon, of course. But effortful, sourced, particularized commentary that refrains from taking broad swipes at general groups is basically welcome, though, yeah. The rules do not forbid criticism of anyone's ideas, in- or outgroup. It's the approach that matters.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
So, after she arrived at the hospital, do you think they should have operated sooner or no? Or do you think we don't have enough information to make a determination?
I'm not a physician, so it's not clear to me whether the article gives enough information on this particular choice or not. The committee (which I assume includes some medical personnel, but which apparently does not consist exclusively of physicians) seems to think the operation should have occurred sooner, and that doesn't seem obviously wrong to me:
After reviewing Thurman’s case, the committee highlighted Piedmont’s “lack of policies/procedures in place to evacuate uterus immediately” and recommended all hospitals implement policies “to treat a septic abortion on an ongoing basis.”
The claim that Georgia's abortion law is specifically responsible for the "lack of policies/procedures" in question does not appear justified by the evidence available. Nobody in a position to know ever said, "we delayed this critical operation because of the law," and the article always stops just short of actually making that assertion. The whole essay is an exercise in suggesting a certain interpretation of events. From a purely technical standpoint, it's well-crafted propaganda. Ultimately, the story doesn't hold up, but in order to do the work it appears intended to do, the story doesn't have to hold up. It just needs the approximate "truthiness" of statements like "Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating cats."
I need to fisk this article.
Recently I have been faced with repeated assertions by people in my social circles, both offline and online, that "at this point the only possible reason to not vote for Kamala Harris is that you're an irredeemably evil human being." Now, I'm no stranger to extreme political rhetoric! Demonizing "the other side" is nothing new. But in the past month or so I have been getting it from people who are not usually prone to that sort of thing, even in an election year. These are people who have tended to say things like "I wouldn't vote for Trump, but I understand why someone in $CIRCUMSTANCE might." They are people who have at other times bemoaned growing partisanship and the death of discourse, or praised charitable reading and balanced presentation. Somehow, after making it through 2016 and 2020 without ghosting me and blocking me on social media (like a fair few others in my life), somehow 2024 has finally managed to convince them that Trump is a political emergency against which no exigency is forbidden.
I say "somehow" but truly, for most of them I think the real explanation is Dobbs. Or rather--not Dobbs itself, but the absolutely panicked response the progressive news media is having over the existence of any corner of the country in which any baby in utero, and a not-insignificant number of babies ex utero, is protected from destruction against its mother's wishes or whims.
I am myself weakly pro-choice, in the libertarian "decriminalize but don't legalize" sense--at least in the first few weeks of pregnancy. I oppose any sort of government spending on abortions, but I tend to oppose government spending on damn near anything, so that shouldn't surprise anyone. However, I simply will not vote for anyone who advocates abortions in the third trimester, much less the euthanization of born-alive botches. I find that level of pro-abortion sentiment to be astonishingly ghoulish.
So: the article. When I saw the headline "2 women die in Georgia after they couldn't access legal abortions and timely care," my first thought was, "Damn, seriously? That's really surprising!"
My second thought was--"Wait a minute..."
In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.
She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body.
Ohhhh. So the headline could literally have been, "woman in Georgia killed by abortion pills" with no noticeable loss of information?
She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.
But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.
Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.
It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.
How do we know it wasn't too late, 20 hours earlier? Answer: we don't! Of course, I'm happy to point a finger at government bureaucracy as a contributing cause, as was the committee from which these two women's stories very conveniently leaked:
The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school,
Lest ye be tempted to believe we're talking about a low-value citizen! She was gonna be a nurse someday, probably maybe!
should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.
Tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, the experts, including 10 doctors, deemed hers “preventable” and said the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a “large” impact on her fatal outcome.
Their reviews of individual patient cases are not made public. But ProPublica obtained reports that confirm that at least two women have already died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state.
There are almost certainly others.
Did you catch that? There are almost certainly others! That's the sound of a journalist telling you "I could find no evidence that my beliefs are true, so I'm going to make shit up instead."
Thurman’s case marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed “preventable,” is coming to public light. ProPublica will share the story of the second in the coming days. We are also exploring other deaths that have not yet been reviewed but appear to be connected to abortion bans.
Why would we report the news today, when we can drip-feed you artificially inflated horror stories once a week from now until the Fifth of November? Why would we tell you the facts we know, when we can wait for an unnamed "official committee" with unknown political biases to give us speculative inquiry into the hot topic du jour? Stay tuned for your daily dose of rage bait! (I say without a hint of irony, surely.)
Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care declined to explain their thinking and did not respond to questions from ProPublica.
No fucking shit they declined to explain their thinking, even if HIPAA didn't exist they probably wouldn't have deigned to defend their medical judgment to a muckraker.
Communications staff from the hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Good.
Georgia’s Department of Public Health, which oversees the state maternal mortality review committee, said it cannot comment on ProPublica’s reporting because the committee’s cases are confidential and protected by federal law.
Shocking.
But Republican legislators have rejected small efforts to expand and clarify health exceptions — even in Georgia, which has one of the nation’s highest rates of maternal mortality and where Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women.
Remember, it's not enough to be pro-choice; you have to be anti-racist. But let's not be unsympathetic, here: a woman is dead, and so is her baby. Or, it turns out, babies--
Thurman, who carried the full load of a single parent, loved being a mother. Every chance she got, she took her son to petting zoos, to pop-up museums and on planned trips, like one to a Florida beach. “The talks I have with my son are everything,” she posted on social media.
But when she learned she was pregnant with twins in the summer of 2022, she quickly decided she needed to preserve her newfound stability, her best friend, Ricaria Baker, told ProPublica.
We're talking about a woman who was already raising one baby on her own, so there's no question that she understood the consequences of sexual activity. Imagine if someone had suggested to her that she could "preserve her newfound stability" by finding a stable partner before engaging in sexual activity. Here is another equally-accurate alternative headline: "woman dies in Georgia as a result of premarital sex!"
On July 20, the day Georgia’s law banning abortion at six weeks went into effect, her pregnancy had just passed that mark, according to records her family shared with ProPublica.
Thurman wanted a surgical abortion close to home and held out hope as advocates tried to get the ban paused in court, Baker said. But as her pregnancy progressed to its ninth week, she couldn’t wait any longer. She scheduled a D&C in North Carolina, where abortion at that stage was still legal, and on Aug. 13 woke up at 4 a.m. to make the journey with her best friend.
On their drive, they hit standstill traffic, Baker said. The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect.
Perhaps the headline should be "woman dies in Georgia after getting stuck in traffic?" Or maybe "woman dies in Georgia after being turned away from a legal abortion clinic?"
Instead, a clinic employee offered Thurman a two-pill abortion regimen approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, mifepristone and misoprostol. Her pregnancy was well within the standard of care for that treatment.
Getting to the clinic had required scheduling a day off from work, finding a babysitter, making up an excuse to borrow a relative’s car and walking through a crowd of anti-abortion protesters. Thurman didn’t want to reschedule, Baker said.
"I would kill my twin babies to preserve my newfound stability. But only if it's super convenient."
And of course: Thurman is given a legal option "well within the standard of care." It would appear that she accessed a "legal abortion" with no difficulty at all! Right, ProPublica?
Deaths due to complications from abortion pills are extremely rare.
Deaths due to complications from anti-abortion laws are extremely rare.
This was the point where I knew I had to react to this article in a public way. I recognize that ProPublica is an advocacy group and that RawStory is like, maybe on the level of the Daily Wire in terms of ideological bias and propagandizing. But the only reason I saw the article was that it was being shared by a couple of the aforementioned friends in my social feeds--people who I might even have described, in the relatively recent past, as political moderates. This is the new narrative, same as the old (pre-Roe) narrative: all restrictions on abortions are woman-killing laws!
Except, you know...
Baker and Thurman spoke every day that week. At first, there was only cramping, which Thurman expected. But days after she took the second pill, the pain increased and blood was soaking through more than one pad per hour. If she had lived nearby, the clinic in North Carolina would have performed a D&C for free as soon as she followed up, the executive director told ProPublica. But Thurman was four hours away.
On the evening of Aug. 18, Thurman vomited blood and passed out at home, according to 911 call logs. Her boyfriend called for an ambulance. Thurman arrived at Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge at 6:51 p.m.
Look, I'm not a physician, but if you are bleeding through more than one pad per hour you go to the fucking hospital. This woman was bleeding like crazy and just didn't do anything about it for days.
But sure--anti-abortion laws are what prevented her from getting timely treatment, totally. And I've got a bridge you might want to invest in.
ProPublica obtained the summary narrative of Thurman’s hospital stay provided to the maternal mortality review committee, as well as the group’s findings.
Apparently not a HIPAA violation?
The narrative is based on Thurman’s medical records, with identifying information removed.
Well that's alright then! But ProPublica somehow managed to identify her anyway. Interesting.
At least we finally got the name of the committee! Not that there's much information on the web about it. Who are its members? What are their politics? How often do they provide conveniently timed confidential medical information to partisan "investigative" reporters?
The world may never know. Also:
The committee does not interview doctors involved with the case or ask hospitals to respond to its findings. ProPublica also consulted with medical experts, including members of the committee, about the timeline of events.
Here I will excise the precise timeline of the woman's hospital experience. If any of our physicians would care to comment on it, I'd be interested to know what a medical mind makes of the timeline as presented. It sounds harrowing, but mostly it sounds to me like the primary causes of this woman's death were, in descending order of contributory effect: poor life choices, abortion pills, poor self-care, medical bureaucracy, and then maybe legal bureaucracy. Georgia's particular abortion laws barely have any role to play at all in this tragedy.
Until she got the call from the hospital, her mother had no idea Thurman had been pregnant. She recalled her daughter’s last words before she was wheeled into surgery — they had made no sense coming from a vibrant young woman who seemed to have her whole life ahead of her:
“Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”
There is a “good chance” providing a D&C earlier could have prevented Amber Thurman’s death, the maternal mortality review committee concluded.
Which she would apparently have received if she'd driven four hours to the followup she was duly informed might be necessary. When people die because the steps required to stay alive seem so inconvenient that a 28 year old woman with a son cannot even communicate the situation to her mother, it seems wildly irresponsible to suggest that the problem is with the law. Especially when you drop this nugget:
It is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide a D&C to Thurman, though the summary report shows they discussed the procedure at least twice in the hours before they finally did.
"The law totally did this! Well, in fact we have no evidence whether the law had anything to do with any of this. But you stopped reading eighteen paragraphs ago, so now we'll mention that fact for completeness. Wouldn't want a lawsuit to interfere with our 'reporting!'"
ProPublica asked the governor’s office on Friday to respond to cases of denied care, including the two abortion-related deaths, and whether its exceptions were adequate. Spokesperson Garrison Douglas said they were clear and gave doctors the power to act in medical emergencies. He returned to the state’s previous argument, describing ProPublica’s reporting as a “fear-mongering campaign.”
Sounds like Garrison Douglas knows what's up.
Thurman’s family members may never learn the exact variables that went into doctors’ calculations. The hospital has not fulfilled their request for her full medical record. There was no autopsy.
For years, all Thurman’s family had was a death certificate that said she died of “septic shock” and “retained products of conception” — a rare description that had previously only appeared once in Georgia death records over the last 15 years, ProPublica found. The family learned Thurman’s case had been reviewed and deemed preventable from ProPublica’s reporting.
If there were any HIPAA violations involved, well... I wouldn't count on an investigation from the federal government. I'm sure they've got their hands full shadowing James O'Keefe.
The sting of Thurman’s death remains extremely raw to her loved ones, who feel her absence most deeply as they watch her son grow taller and lose teeth and start school years without her.
They focus on surrounding him with love but know nothing can replace his mother.
On Monday, she would have turned 31.
Her twins, had they survived, would be nearly 2 years old.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
This all seems correct to me, but what I'm wondering is about the nature of "radicalization" when the relevant ideology is ungrounded, emergent, deliberately obscurantist, etc. I think usually such ideologies just don't produce extremism, because it's hard to be a zealot for something so conceptually slippery. This particular case is exceptional in several respects, which might mean the best thing to do is chalk it up to noise in the system. But I don't feel sure of that. At minimum--I do not, at all, agree that these notebook pages contain, quote, "nothing interesting."
What the hell is an orange Emily?
It's a /r/PoliticalCompassMemes/ thing... orange Emily is the Woke wojak, basically. She started on 4chan as Art Hoe Wojak. She's usually lib-left but sometimes mid-left or even auth-left (especially when wearing a peaked cap). Characteristically the feminist inverse/counterpart of the purple coomer wojack, who is the "bad lib-right" character. There is pretty consistent "full compass unity" against orange and purple, they are characters who almost never get to be "based" or featured as the heroes in agenda posts (but see a counterexample here). Orange Emily hates Nazis more than anyone else, but is sure that everyone who doesn't identify as a black genderfluid differently-abled Wiccan is a Nazi.
So, you know. An unrealistically excessive exaggeration of negative stereotypes. Except, apparently, for this one time when...
Would it reveal the shooter was…
I think the main thing your list omitted was "targeting Christians for being Christians," which the notebook (now I want to know what law enforcement or media figure first called it a "manifesto," because certainly everyone has been calling it that for a long time) seems to not explicitly confirm, while also not actually weakening the case for that idea.
Following the link to this forum's discussion was an interesting exercise; it seems to me that many, maybe most of the posts in that thread have proven basically correct. Very few of the posts address the notebook at all.
Compared to those, what we got is pretty tame!
True, but you quoted a user with 21 posts, who hasn't been here in almost a year, who got moderated in that thread for (among other things) denying without evidence that anyone died at Sandy Hook, which like... yeah. Reality is always going to be more tame than whatever someone like that cooks up.
Basically, there's nothing interesting to it. Alas, the mystery box strikes again: fantasy was better than reality.
Er. Obsession with "brown girls," "queer" and trans identity, fixation on sex and sexuality, a bit of "gay Jesus" blasphemy, like... if I were trying to write a fictional story about a mentally unwell person who had become the avatar of "orange Emily" Internet degeneracy, I could not model that character on Audrey's notebook because everyone would accuse me of unrealistically excessive exaggeration of negative stereotypes. You don't find anything interesting about that? It doesn't make you think, "huh, maybe this culture war stuff really can be damaging?"
Because, to be clear--maybe Audrey in a different culture becomes a terrorist, or a torturer, or whatever. The biological/sociological interactions that manifest in what we call "mental illness" are complex and poorly understood. But I think in many cases the radicalization process is deliberate. Muslim terrorists cultivate radical killers into ideological pawns. Race supremacists cultivate violent actors and train them to have maximum effect.
Whereas the "Woke" meme lacks central authority, tends to train institutional actors rather than radicals, and it's kind of an emergent ideology/neo-religion that mostly surfs on the backs of several not-entirely-comfortable-with-each-other-but-otherwise-basically-normal social and cultural institutions. Will there be more essentially "accidental radicals" in this vein? Or is Audrey just such an extreme outlier that there's simply nothing to learn here?
I'm open to the possibility that Audrey and most mass murderers are in fact such extreme outliers that they should not budge our priors much. But every time a scorned man goes on a misogynistic shooting spree, I'm assured that this is what we should expect from the Manosphere, and this is what the people asking to see the so-called "manifesto" were, I think, really asking after. It doesn't look much like a manifesto to me! But maybe this is just what a manifesto looks like, from the "orange Emily" ideology. How could we know? We don't seem to have a lot of cases to compare. Hopefully, we never will--but that brings us back to what makes this one more interesting than you seem to imply.
Beyond that, of course, the media's steadfast refusal to report on the thing lent it a great deal more mystique than might have otherwise been the case.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
I don't think we should be assigned disabled children to improve our character.
Nor do I, nor does anyone I know.
I think parents of disabled kids are probaly nice for the same reason fat people or disabled people often are. They have to be or no one will help them.
And while that is bad in various ways, it is possible to notice the tradeoffs, no?
I'm pro kids, but not for improving your own character. I know plenty of selfish terrible parents. It doesn't see to cure any character defects that I've ever witnessed, I've certainly seen adding kids to the picture make it worse.
You seem to have missed all the parts of my comment where I already accounted for that. It's true: having kids won't necessarily make you a better person! But having children, even healthy ones, has a way of confronting us with our own limitations, and expanding our circle of concern beyond our own immediate desires in a very non-hypothetical way. If you have never seen a selfish woman become "selfish" on behalf of her children instead, or a disinterested father become a doting father at the first sight of his child, then you simply can't have observed very many parents in your life. It's a cliche for a reason: having kids really can change you.
But as I said several times: it's not guaranteed, which is why the choice to become a parent has to be grounded in the possibility and pursuit of a worthwhile transformation, rather than in the certainty of any particular [whatever].
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
Reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality again (again).
EDIT: Posting on the Motte!
Can I solicit some feedback from mottizens on if you have kids, do you regret it, how is it working out?
My children are grown. I have no regrets. I am proud of how they turned out. I do sometimes experience disappointment in them, too, but mostly in a self-recriminating way. "If I had only known then what I know now I could have been a better parent"--true, but I would not know what I know now if I had not been a clumsy parent then. I do not know where the quote comes from, but I find it to be accurate:
When you're a kid, you don't realize you're also watching your parents grow up.
So I watched JD Vance's "cat ladies" tempest in a teapot with some amusement. It was not well put, but I think he was broadly correct. People who don't raise children never really become adults, in the sense of being robustly full members of a community that existed before them, and will persist when they are gone. They simply do not, and likely cannot, value the world in the same way. Now, probably some people who do raise children also never really become adults in this sense; there are no guarantees! But people who never raise children, whether by chance or by choice, are different from people who raise children. There is a shift in perspective that cannot be replicated through mere exposure to the relevant ideas. One must have the experience.
The difference is perhaps best captured in Bertrand Russell's "knowledge by description" and "knowledge by acquaintance." L.A. Paul explores this with specific reference to parenting in Transformative Experience. The book is not long but even so it is a bit padded. The basic thesis is this: you can't really know what it's like to be a parent, until you have kids. (Paul also uses the example of becoming a vampire!) Consequently, you can't decide to have kids based on what you think having kids would be like for the person who you currently are, because the experience will transform you into a different kind of person, and you can't know in advance whether having kids will be good for that person. Rather, you can only ask yourself whether you value the possibility of transformation.
I have seen such transformations play out in ways large and small. Parents of disabled children are routinely subjected to harrowing difficulties, and yet they are often some of the most humble, charitable, pro-social people you could ever wish to meet. It would be strange indeed if nature only gave disabilities to the children of people who were already amazingly virtuous! So I can only conclude that while these people would not have chosen to have a disabled child, it is nevertheless a worthwhile transformation to court.
More specifically, why do you lean toward "yes?" Why does your wife lean toward "no?" In most cultures, your wife will bear most of the opportunity costs, but it sounds from your post like her objection is really just "want a bigger house." How big? I don't mean this as a personal attack, but I would descriptively call that a "shallow" objection; it's a 100% solvable problem if you want it enough to prioritize it over other things. Plus, babies don't care how big your house is. This, basically.
All of your concerns meet similar responses. What if your kids are lazy? Well--what if they're not? What if your kids are crazy? Well--what if they're not? The risks of parenting are real, but so are the rewards. All you can do is decide whether you are ready and willing to undertake the transformation (with the additional caveat that the transformation will be different if you wait--the best time for a woman to have babies is in her 20s, maybe 30s, and hesitation will only increase the eventuality of the risks with which you are specifically concerned).
There are probably some specific situations in which people should choose to not raise children, but those people should also understand that there are some perspectives and emotions that this really will close off to them. This does not make the childless less human, but it does give them less exposure to the totality of the human experience. Some people who have children "fail" to grow in these ways, or through no fault of their own (or perhaps fault of their own!) produce regrettable offspring. There is no cosmic scale on which you can weigh your possible futures in advance! All you and your wife can decide is whether you collectively regard the project of raising children as intrinsically worthy, regardless of how it turns out. In my experience, it definitely is! But of course: your mileage may vary.
It's not weird at all, once you understand checks and balances, enumerated powers, and the structure of the Constitution generally. It's hard to rig American elections successfully. And yet for example "gerrymandering" is widely agreed to be a (frequently successful!) form of election rigging, even though it does not necessarily guarantee the desired outcome.
A totalitarian or even just an excessively powerful executive can afford to be hamfisted in their rigging of elections; to successfully rig an American election usually calls for greater subtlety, and even then there remains a greater likelihood of failure.
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