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naraburns  nihil supernum  28d ago (text post)   27011 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

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Personally, the Republicans have lost a lot of goodwill from me by acting like the pro-life mission was accomplished with the end of Roe. Oh, you think the issue should be left up to the states? We tried that with slavery, too, it didn't work, and abortion is at least as morally abominable; it's outright Old Testament-style ritual child sacrifice, and it's entrenched in our society as an institution that something like half of the population (or more) equates with freedom, catharsis, and womanhood. There's so much doublethink about it; fetuses are treated as human or nonhuman per current convenience. It fully corrupts the parent/child relationship; every member of our society learns when they grow up that their mother once had the fully legitimized option to have them slaughtered, and depending on her social environment and character she may well have seriously considered it. It's a horror lurking in our collective unconscious which we willfully repress, in much the same way that we repress our own mortality by avoiding the thought of hospitals and old folks' homes, keeping them sterile, out of the way, antimemetic. But the dull suit put on abortion is something more willful and evil; it's Nazi death camp shit, but without a geopolitical crisis to put an end to it. We are ashamed of it as a society and we should be. Roe v Wade was just the Dred Scott v Sandford equivalent; getting rid of it is good but it's a band-aid on a decapitation.

We should avoid civil war if at all possible, but if there was anything to do it over, it would be abortion; if our country was salvageable, Republicans would collectively be courageous enough to run on a platform of hanging abortionists and their biggest enablers and cheerleaders from lampposts, and they would win and implement it. I have no intent to throw my life away pursuing this purge of our society on my own (or with some kind of FBI-bait terror cell); it's hard to say how much of this is personal cowardice and how much is observation that it hasn't worked to fix the issue in the past. But contrarian Confederate apologia aside, there's a reason that we still celebrate John Brown today, even if we wouldn't ourselves have done the same thing if we'd been born in his time, even if it took some legitimate unhingedness on his part to do what he did, and even if his actions ultimately decreased the world's utility instead of increasing it. He was driven crazy by something that should drive people crazy. You should feel sick and guilty for not feeling pushed to action to the same extent he was; we all should. Our country is in a terrible decline which it has thoroughly shown that it deserves, and if we are suddenly and violently annihilated soon by some terrible external calamity like a nuclear war of extermination, which seems likely, we will collectively deserve that as well. Obviously many innocents would die as well, and I would hope to forestall it as long as possible - out of self-interest and concern for the people close to me if nothing else - but if you believe in God, you should be terrified; God's justice is terrible and does not wait forever on matters like this. If you don't believe in God, you should at least feel like you've been living in a version of Nazi Germany that's survived peacefully in a position of dominance over the world for many decades. It's terrible. Our current world is terrible. If it's the best it's ever been it's still terrible.

Paul Hill's body lies a-mouldering in the grave. His soul is marching on.

I think abortion is out of the bag. To revert it, you would have to convince people that pregnancy and childbirth are the inevitable consequences of and the primary reasons for having sex. You'll have as much success convincing people to have less sex as you'll have convincing them to eat less to lose weight. They'll blame lithium, seed oils, PFAS, but will accept only Ozempic and gastric bypasses as legitimate solutions.

There are already multiple normalized things that divorce sex from pregnancy. Condoms, the pill, the morning-after pill, oral sex, anal sex... hell, even pulling out works until it doesn't and reinforces the idea that you can have parenthood-free sex.

People are already willing to make an exception for rape, incest, Down syndrome, etc. If you are working from the "abortion is murder" standpoint, then these exceptions are not defensible. If you are willing to compromise on them, there's no Schelling point for you there.

Something like 24 weeks is probably the best middle ground that can hope to achieve bipartisan support.

It fully corrupts the parent/child relationship; every member of our society learns when they grow up that their mother once had the fully legitimized option to have them slaughtered, and depending on her social environment and character she may well have seriously considered it. It's a horror lurking in our collective unconscious which we willfully repress, in much the same way that we repress our own mortality by avoiding the thought of hospitals and old folks' homes, keeping them sterile, out of the way, antimemetic.

I'm not actually against abortion, but I have to say you're not wrong about this. I do remember being a kid (7-10 age range IIRC) and telling Mum "thanks for not aborting me", and her not being super-reassuring about it (I don't think she seriously considered it, but I'm damned sure that during my adolescence she often wished she had). It's a bit creepy.

I actually remember learning what abortion was in 5th grade and being so repulsed I lectured the teacher who was trying to convince us it was a good thing. (Says something about where I grew up that something like that could happen, thanks Quakers). Not even confusion, just an instant angry threat response: "this is an attack on us kids"

Years later I read that one PKDick story and remembered "oh yeah, this is exactly what it felt like in the moment. Did my beliefs change, or did I just lose that animating perspective?"

The angry threat response and instant friend/enemy distinction is probably the most stable (and valuable) part of my political identity, come to think of it.

Not that I necessarily disbelieve you, but it's funny how this literally sounds like one of those "and then everyone clapped" memes about kids with unusually strong and specific ethical beliefs.

This, and the comments upthread, are quite alien takes to me. Seems pretty ironclad logic that abortion, by definition, cannot be a threat to any kid who's out the womb. Neither was I ever existentially tortured by the idea that local laws allowed my mother that option; it might have helped that she never expressed anything like regret at having me. As for corrupting the parent/child relationship, it wasn't too long ago that "I who begat you shall kill you" was supposed to be the example of highest paternal honor.

Seems pretty ironclad logic that abortion, by definition, cannot be a threat to any kid who's out the womb.

Anything which hinges upon a technical definition is only as ironclad as the inability to change that definition.

I definitely wasn't as young as OP, but I remember getting into a debate with a female substitute teacher in 7th or 8th grade about abortion (and in retrospect it was a wildly inappropriate topic for a substitute teacher to bring up). I had pretty strong convictions early on, though I attribute that to my religious upbringing, my parents, and an interest in history, ethics, and other topics from a fairly young age.

I was dumb enough to not despise neocons until I was in college though.

The angry threat response and instant friend/enemy distinction is probably the most stable (and valuable) part of my political identity, come to think of it.

Am I interpreting you right that you instantly identify people with different politics than you as enemies, and see their policies as threats?

Yes.

people with different politics than you as enemies, and see their policies as threats?

SteveKirk is clearly talking about a specific policy, right?

every member of our society learns when they grow up that their mother once had the fully legitimized option to have them slaughtered

telling Mum "thanks for not aborting me", and her not being super-reassuring about it (I don't think she seriously considered it, but I'm damned sure that during my adolescence she often wished she had). It's a bit creepy.

I actually remember learning what abortion was in 5th grade and being so repulsed ... just an instant angry threat response: "this is an attack on us kids"

The policy in question, is abortion. The 'threat', is the 'threat' of being aborted.

The angry threat response and instant friend/enemy distinction

The directionality is clearly, your policy is a threat to me, and so, I see you as an enemy. Not, your policy is different from mine, so I see you as an enemy, and as such, your policies are threats.

I am honestly flabbergasted, can you include quotes from the rest of SteveKirk's comment and the rest of the comment chain, to help show how you arrived at the interpretation that you arrived at, I can't even imagine how you are parsing these comments to end up where you did.

Thanks for explaining. That makes a lot more sense.

SteveKirk is clearly talking about a specific policy, right?

He was in the first part of his comment. Then the words “my political identity” made me think he was using the last sentence to generalize to his overall perspective on politics, as opposed to keeping it specific to that one topic. The words “stable” and “valuable” further made me think that the emotional response is a core and cherished foundation from which all his other political beliefs are based on.

The 'threat', is the 'threat' of being aborted.

That’s another reason I interpreted it differently. It doesn’t seem to me like the threat of being aborted is still relevant as an adult, so it didn’t come to my mind at all that “angry threat response” might still refer specifically to the feeling he had as a kid, even after all these years.

Then he says the phrase “friend/enemy distinction” — I mean, who’s the friend or enemy in a discussion like this? I can only assume the enemy is the person he disagrees with politically, because it certainly can’t be the person he agrees with. And that fits with “threat” — the threat presumably comes from this enemy person he’s discussing politics with, because where else would he be feeling the threat from?

In short, I started out parsing “The angry threat response” in a generic rather than a specific sense, and I read the rest of the sentence in that sense as well. So it sounded to me like he had this emotional way of responding to the topic of abortion as a kid, and now as an adult he still not only responds to other political issues in that same emotional way, but he considers it to be a core part of how he approaches politics, to the point where he instantly identifies other political participants as either friends or enemies. Which of course sounds ridiculous, so I had to ask.

I can't even imagine how you are parsing these comments to end up where you did.

Hahaha, does that help?

you instantly identify people with different politics than you as enemies

is very different from,

your policy is a threat to me, and so, I see you as an enemy

Failing to see this seems to be the core area of confusion. The assumption in your post, which is 'ridiculous', is that any political difference is threating. The idea that someone who is threatening you politically, could be viewed as an enemy, is far from ridiculous.

The idea that he might generalized the principle from the specific instance, is totally anodyne. It's just his conflict theory origin story.

Years later I read that one PKDick story

Which?

"The Pre-Persons"

"The Pre-Persons"

Thanks, nice catch

Huh, I had no idea Dick was opposed to abortion.

Well, that's one reading.

What's yours?

I think I was mostly kidding. But, c.f. Peter Singer who's a widely-respected philosopher who argues (IIRC) that post-birth 'abortion' should be allowable up until two years of age on the basis of etc. From there it's not much of a leap to suggest that some people might read "The Pre-Persons" and yes-chad it.

Basically I just no longer hold the assumption that something being plainly horrific and satanic is enough for the great mass of people to recognize it as such. And so the conceit here is that sure, maybe the Dick story scans as obviously anti-abortion to us, but that's no reason to suppose it did for him. Grim humor really.

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I should put more thought and words into the following, and I probably will, but it's the topic here.

I don't want to couch the following too heavily one way or the other. I love women but I don't generally respect them. The most intelligent woman I know, the one I most enjoy talking with, is also the most morally abominable person I know. I've told her that, I call her that directly as I chastise her to do better, she halfheartedly justifies herself, and our conversations move on. I don't know if "right" is something she could consider me since I would question her concept of rightness, but she knows I won't be swayed, and our odd interactions continue. However better I am it's not by much, it's only distance keeping us from sleeping together.

As is loved repeating here, women be, men do. Philosophers have seen this as intrinsic good, so do I, it's God's intent. My aspirations are all in pursuit of a beautiful wife and many children. I don't expect or want her to match me, only match with me. So in a decade people might see her only value as what I saw in her, but everything I did was so she saw value in me. I see this as good, that the whoever whose quote I can't remember and can only poorly paraphrase, this graceful being elevated above the coldness of the world, pursued because it is the way of things for her to be pursued, and that itself is her good value and her virtue.

Loved, honored, but not respected. A man is respected for what he has made himself; a woman is honored for what she is. And that's the mother.

I suspect the majority of women find the idea of pursuing an abortion, not emergency contraception, maybe not abortifacients a few weeks after the specific moment of conception, but decidedly no farther than the first trimester, as morally unfathomable. This is because the argument that a fetus is not a child is ruthlessly cold logic, and most women are not ruthlessly cold beings. They are mothers of man, and no words exist to convince her the baby growing inside her is not human. It is her child.

The delineation of fetus and child is the kind of argument a man makes with other men, and it's still a coinflip. Name a single political matter in our world resolved on the cold logic of women. Welfare, maybe? That's just pragmatism. There isn't one, that's not how women think. They vote for it, why? Consensus, they go with the flow and become the river. Resistant to perturbations and attempts at diverting unless overwhelming, in this they maintain, as is their glorious purpose, so only unquestionable power can overcome, for good and ill. Consensus even when morally offensive? Yes, because she can go in the booth, and amidst whirling thoughts and feelings of consensus and the powerful quiet voice of What if you need one?, even as she would never get one, even as she pulls the lever for it, she still means it absolutely when she tells herself "I will never get one."

Plenty, what, half of the opposition, more? Heed a different consensus and silence the quiet voice and pull against.

But I think there are some, few in total, where the knowledge of these creatures wearing the skin of women would end the debate. Those who crafted rhetoric in the name of women using a method of argumentation that doesn't work on women. How does it persist? Because it works on enough men to keep the debate there, rather than the grand deception. Those creatures don't care that a human is inside them, because they don't like it, they don't want it, and things they don't like are Other and may be killed without thought.

This is the most charity I can give the subject, and what I think is the most charity that can be given. Anything less is the final argument against suffrage.

I’ll be honest in that most people are, in my view mostly consensus driven as far as actual morality goes. Maybe one in a hundred would have something akin to actual morality— as in a code of morals that the person would risk any substantial losses to uphold a moral code. It’s hidden in various ways behind arguments about the definitions of words — in this case fetus vs baby or child, though similar arguments were had in arguments about slavery and the definition of Negro and just how human those Negroes are, or perhaps in the Nazi era there were arguments about how much Jewish ancestry tainted a person as untermensch. The arguments might well sound rational, but the purpose is not to define terms but to define away humanity. Pragmatism often does the same, hiding cruelty behind the line items of a budget. There is always money for more bombs, but rarely for school lunches. We can afford prisons, but paying for schools is not pragmatic enough.

Morality is something we should strive to develop, but in 99% of cases, it is simply to be expected that people will go along with whatever the wider society wants to do. The limits are not some strange scruples that people hold, but thei4 own aesthetic preferences. As long as the nasty business is done in ways that you don’t have to actually watch the deed done let alone do it themselves. Keep it within those bounds and you can get most of the public to be perfectly fine with anything the wider society wants to do. You want to flatten a city, most people are perfectly fine with it, so long as the bombing isn’t on their screens.

I think men and women are more similar than you think, but that some of the women you know are good, and women are always better at this than men, at more easily obfuscating their own cold calculation. Women have always killed unwanted children, often in ways far more brutal, far more immediate, far more visceral than anything (all but a handful of) people in the west do today.

The most intelligent woman I know, the one I most enjoy talking with, is also the most morally abominable person I know.

What makes her abominable? I’m sure she has been awful, but I can’t help thinking that very smart women often don’t fully understand the depth to which a smart man can fall in love with a woman he perceives, at long last, as his intellectual equal. I was never intentionally cruel, but I have caused my share of unintentional hurt, undeserved.

DiscourseMagnus naming Paul Hill resulted in me reading about a number of abortionists who were killed or who people attempted to kill. Garson Romalis was one, a Canadian who interned in Chicago in the 60s. An OBGYN, he saw wards of women suffering from folk remedy abortifacients, by his time rarely dying or at least per Wiki "only about one each month." But the severity of complications from those failed remedies are what he named as his motivation to supporting its legalization and performing abortions. I wonder about the demographics of the ward, of the most common ethnicity of the women he treated and the specific circumstances of each.

I am unsurprised by infanticide in less civilized peoples, and in those peoples who are otherwise civilized but who live in times like war and famine that demand cruelty. That's a switch, that's knowing you're going to die, or your entire family might die, it's the survival response changing the brain. A people murdering children, in your article so many daughters because of whatever marginal social and economic benefits rather than "We're going to die if we don't have a son", well I guess I don't consider them people. And such concerns do not exist in the United States, the majority of abortions performed here are out of convenience. I do think if the purchase and prescribing of emergency contraceptives and antiprogestins shortly after conception are included in the totals, the numbers are to a measure inaccurate, but that's only some, and only if they are.

As for the last, abominable was my echoing Magnus. She isn't violent or criminal but she is deeply immoral, and I think I've now described her enough that her behavior should be clear. I love her as I love all my friends, but the way in which I know her means I would never pursue her for dating and marriage. She doesn't match with me. Where I find her attractive is that she's a tall and thin woman and my sin is desire.

You're probably right, intelligence is probably a hard snare for me even as I say I don't care about it, but knowing her has cultivated in me a cynicism and suspicion that will always persist. So be it.

I suspect the majority of women find the idea of pursuing an abortion, not emergency contraception, maybe not abortifacients a few weeks after the specific moment of conception, but decidedly no farther than the first trimester, as morally unfathomable.

Which is why, if you want to preserve that right most easily, you set the Overton window a step or two beyond that. It takes more work defending scoundrels that way, because the people who tend to seek late-term abortions tend to be, to put it lightly, substandard human beings.

Though it's worth pointing out that if you ban pre-natal abortions, they'll just carry out plausibly deniable post-natal abortions instead ('had a post-partum mental break so bad it killed the kid' or 'baby forgot to breathe and died' are things women are justifiably afraid of, which is why we generally limit our prosecution of a mother's own baby dying to obviously depraved-heart shit like 'gave birth, left the baby in the trash can'). There are limits on what degree baby death is and isn't acceptable to prosecute, the ideal number of cases marked as SIDS that were actually just bog-standard smothering is not zero.

All laws work like this- you protect "hate speech" and all the reasonable people are never worried they're going to get arrested for something more anodyne, like posting dissent on Twitter; protecting ownership of fully-automatic firearms means hunting rifles and handguns aren't meaningfully questionable, and so on. Those who are pro-those-freedoms [in their motte version] correctly and rationally view attacks on the bailey as attacks on the motte, until they get tired of defending the bailey against the disgusting anti-social "celebrate my abortion" people (and the Venn diagram of those people, the "encourage tomboys and effeminate men to castrate themselves" people, and the "queers for a nation/religion famous for killing queers" people has converged into a circle, and it wasn't before).

As is loved repeating here, women be, men do. Philosophers have seen this as intrinsic good, so do I, it's God's intent.

It's funny how God's intent always seems to come with the assumption that man and woman is, and ought, to continue holding and pursuing diametrically opposing interests even after they're past the point in the relationship where that should, at least in theory, no longer be true.

Perhaps the notion that people who enter the mutual "my life is yours" agreement actually intend to align on some details is much too modern for a good Christian relationship to incorporate (since a relationship that a man has with God is naturally 0-100 in terms of the effect the man's status/input/development has on God, and if women are to men in earthly relationships as man is to God in heavenly ones the same effect would naturally be true there).

Then again, if the average marriage was that easy, there probably wouldn't need to be rules about marriages in the first place.

Real poetic and stuff, but too "battles of the sexes" heavy for me to really resonate.

Men and women are different, but they are still ultimately the same species. The variations among our minds can dwarf the average variations of the sexes. The tallest woman is much taller than the average man. The most caring and consensus driven man is much more so than the average woman.

Whichever woman you are talking about might just be a psychopath. They aren't all that rare. I knew at least one maybe two hot women psychopaths in college. Not a moral bone in their body, though a little less dangerous than the three male psychopaths I've known that have to find balance while dealing with a male sex drive.

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