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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   31489 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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By the way, I also enjoyed this exchange, which I forgot to mention in the original post. My enjoyment was purely because of @naraburns's writeup on the subject:

TW: Yeah. Well, the question got asked, and Donald Trump made the accusation that wasn't true about Minnesota. Well, let me tell you about this idea that there's diverse states. There's a young woman named Amber Thurmond. She happened to be in Georgia, a restrictive state. Because of that, she had to travel a long distance to North Carolina to try and get her care. Amber Thurman died in that journey back and forth. The fact of the matter is, how can we as a nation say that your life and your rights as basic as the right to control your own body is determined on geography? There's a very real chance, had Amber Thurman lived in Minnesota, she would be alive today.

What's funny to me is that Tim Walz actually got the story wrong, didn't he? Amber Thurman didn't die in any journey back and forth, she failed to go to the hospital for an infection and died in a hospital in Georgia. What an incredible lie. And it makes me wonder about the other examples he mentioned earlier.

Yes, it seems like every case I have seen as demonstrating the effects of overturning Roe v. Wade has been misrepresented in some way. Inspired by your comment, I looked up the Amanda Zurawski case that Walz cited in the debate. In their ruling on Zurawski v. Texas, the Texas supreme court wrote:

As our Court recently held, the law does not require that a woman’s death be imminent or that she first suffer physical impairment.2 Rather, Texas law permits a physician to address the risk that a life-threatening condition poses before a woman suffers the consequences of that risk. A physician who tells a patient, “Your life is threatened by a complication that has arisen during your pregnancy, and you may die, or there is a serious risk you will suffer substantial physical impairment unless an abortion is performed,” and in the same breath states “but the law won’t allow me to provide an abortion in these circumstances” is simply wrong in that legal assessment.

So the current rhetoric coming from Democrats on abortion is certainly very misleading, with Kamala Harris claiming that women need to be in the middle of bleeding to death in parking lots in order for doctors to provide treatment. In very general terms, it's fair to say that if there were no abortion laws at all, then doctors would not even theoreticallly have to worry about being prosecuted for breaking those laws. But in every single abortion case I have seen cited as an example of the disastrous consequences of Dobbs, doctors either were grossly negligent (Amber Thurman), or at best, believed that the law restricted them in ways that, properly interpreted, they were not restricted at all.

I definitely want the law to be clear, but I have this sneaking suspicion that a lot of the supposed "misunderstandings" about what the law prohibits are driven by opposition to the law.

Well yeah. Joe Biden lied constantly throughout the 2020 and 2024 election cycles. He never, or rarely, got called out on it. And now the lies continue, only it’s only ever the republicans that get “fact checked”. And now they’re trying to “ban misinformation” online. Does anyone really not see how transparent this all is?

I think what's most remarkable is after 40+ years of having a reputation for having a problematic relationship with truth, Biden got rehabilitated into some sort of Washingtonian "I cannot tell a lie" figure. And people actually went along with it! I've said it before, but I'll say it again. It wasn't until TDS that I really understood Orwell's "We've always been at war with Eastasia" chapter. I remember reading that, and thinking he was just being cartoonishly over the top. But apparently I owe Orwell an apology. I never should have doubted him.

I thought “Ministry of Love” was over the top long ago as well. I too owe him an apology.

Ok no one else is asking so I'll ask. How so? Would you care to clarify or expand on this?

Oh, sure. Sorry wasn't trying to be opaque.

The Ministry of Love is of course the organization that tortures and re-educates wayward citizens. It seemed to me the first time I read it like a deliberately absurd exaggeration to name something the literal opposite of what it is, but "reasoning from names" seems like a common strategy.

See, e.g., "antifa just means anti fascism -- why would you oppose that?" or "why would you oppose 'inclusion' initiatives, you worthless bigot?" or "a disinformation governance board makes you nervous? what, you want incorrect information to spread unchecked?"

It's a common trope that to name something is to wield power over it, for instance Adam names creatures in Genesis, demons keep their true names secret in much of fantasy, and there are plenty of folklore beliefs about the power of a true name.

The inverse also seems true to me. If you can't properly name a thing then you can't control it. Giving something reprehensible a benign-sounding name seems to really short-circuit something in our brains. It becomes difficult to even reason about it properly I think.

Orwell had a deep understanding of how language can manipulate people and I shouldn't have doubted him.

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