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Maybe the folks here do, because we're all policy wonks ignorant of politics. But I've run into people in the wake of the 2016 election who didn't know what Clinton's position was on opioids, or on Appalachian economic development, or on climate policy, or on Net Neutrality.
This is enough of a problem that if you explain Republican policies in a reasonably objective way to people, they'll frequently think that you're making things up, because of course no one would do something that evil. (Example, example, example.)
The modal voter isn't nearly as well-informed as you seem to think they are. I don't know to what extent the debates would inform them on policy (I've written elsewhere on the potential value of the format), but the starting place isn't where you're describing it.
Matt Yglesias. Data for Progess. Vox.
Dude....Sources matter.
You may be right to dismiss biased sources. But you’ve got to put in the effort instead of skipping to dismissal. Make your objections clear so that other people can engage with them.
Okay. Fair.
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Yes, but the contents also matter, and this is just lazy of you. Who do you think is going to write about this sort of thing? The right?
Yglesias is pointing out that the stated positions of conservative interest groups (e.g., no abortion even in cases of rape our incest) are sometimes really unpopular (per Gallup polls quoted by the FRC), and conservative politicians have become quite good at tiptoeing around this.
DFP did some surveys that discovered that Republicans specifically had some weird ideas about the party's platform; a majority thought they had a healthcare plan that would protect people with pre-existing conditions and opposes the rollback of certain environmental protection rules, nearly half thinks they want to expand Medicaid. These are all wrong. People don't know the party's platform.
The Vox article involved Sarah Kliff interviewing a lot of people who had lost their healthcare under Republican policies, who said things like:
Or:
What part of this do you think is fake or misleading? A significant portion of voters don't know their party's platform, and won't believe it if you tell them because it sounds bad.
True, but he's told but half the tale. As Trump accurately pointed out on stage (to little fanfare) Biden, and the mainstream (not even progressive) Democratic position is that abortion should be legal at all points of the pregnancy, even during labor of a viable fetus. Even "borne alive" bills cant get DNC votes (although Ill admit I think this bill is unconstitutional, as would be all federal abortion bills, but that obviously doesn't factor in the voting for your average Democrat given they voted for the one above). The extreme left position seems to be something like a child acquires the right to life some unspecified time after leaving the womb, but will not specify that amount of time, and it is much longer than 1 second.
I don't think there's the symmetry you think there is. Institutions on the right are specifically very keen on women in those circumstances carrying to term.
On the left, it's not so much the idea that women in the 40th week can and should and would just change their minds like that, but rather that in situations like, say, this one, having the heavy hand of the government involved will just make things worse. And that narrowly written exceptions don't actually help, given situations like this.
The idea is, if I understand correctly, that the heavy hand of the law will just make things worse, because the Shirley exception is not an actual usable piece of law.
I think that the first half of your post is the very charitable explanation that I think is false for the majority.
And that Shirley exception post is like, one of the worst examples of deceptive argumentation I've ever seen and is a rebuttal of an argument I've never seen.
I saw this this week, and I thought of you.
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Sorry, can you be clearer about what you think is "false for the majority"?
I understand that you may not have seen that precise argument... but it's in the quotes upthread. “You can’t get rid of it.” “I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this, he would not take health insurance away knowing it would affect so many peoples lives." Surely this bad thing can't actually happen.
As it's written:
There absolutely is disbelief that awful things could actually happen; you see it everywhere. Surely it won't be that bad. Surely people will be reasonable. Surely it will work out for the best.
I think you're being overly narrow in what you think of as The Shirley Exception.
This. I think they just really like abortion and the idea that a woman can change her mind about child rearing at any time.
I dont encounter this in real life. This is just a weaponization of womans tears argument. People intrinsically know hurting some people is almost always going to happen for anytime you make an optimal policy. These tears are why destructive policies like medicare and medicaid almost never get dismantled. We operate in the opposite environment than "The Shirley Exception", we live in the tear win almost always world. Even though tears are almost always wrong.
Okay, but why do you think that? Yglesias is pointing to the stated positions of mainstream conservative interest groups. You're pointing to what, exactly?
You're referring to Richard Hanania's idea that women get what they want by pitifully crying so that men will look or feel like monsters by not acceding to their demands?
I understand that you're citing your own lived experience here, but maybe we can do better than that? "Woman's tears" didn't help the 13 year old who's now raising a baby. "Woman's tears" didn't make it so the woman carrying a corpse didn't have to fly halfway across the country and pay twenty-five thousand dollars to save her own life. But the people putting these policies in place were very clear that Shirley these things would not be allowed to happen. Or that Shirley, it would happen to someone else. (If you can stomach reading an advocate's view, here's Jill Filipovic explaining why abortion policy is so hard for precisely that reason.)
The world you're describing, where women can easily just cry to get whatever they want, does not appear to be the world in which we live, certainly not in terms of abortion policy.
Medical care for the indigent and elderly is an extraordinarily popular policy. While I'm curious about why you think it's "destructive", either way, I don't think you need an extra explanation about "women's tears" to explain why very popular policies are hard to dismantle.
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