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Notes -
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.
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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.
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.
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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).
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.
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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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