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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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It feels like I wouldn’t know how to respond to it.

Even having to play devil's advocate, the response seems pretty easy to me, because the argument Dave Barnhart made is incredibly self-refuting. He's not listed good reasons to support abortion. He's listed good reasons to oppose abortion and inexplicably framed these good reasons as bad.

"Thank you for pointing out how easy it is to advocate for the unborn. How undemanding they are. How morally obvious. And how even those without money, power or privilege are just as capable of advocating for and protecting the unborn as the rich, powerful and privileged are. But this only raises the question of why you, despite recognising how easy and morally uncomplicated it is to advocate for them, still fail to do so."

Yeah this could do with some editing to make it slightly snappier but it's not my argument, so that's best left as an exercise for an adherent.

As for the second paragraph, it would be less snappy, but you can just respond to that by saying there's no reason to only care about one thing. Does someone who cares about the poor therefore not care about the sick? No. So why exclusively apply such reasoning to someone who cares about the unborn?

I suppose the basic message here is that there’s neither bravery nor value in doing things that are easy. Difficult and worthy endeavors are to be taken up precisely because they are difficult. Or something like that.

suppose the basic message here is that there’s neither bravery nor value in doing things that are easy.

That was my argument against the "I punch Nazis" movement of the late 2010's. It turns out no one wants to hear it.

If Barnhart thinks that a cause has to be difficult and brave to be worthwhile, then maybe he should switch to an even harder, more controversial cause than the poor, sick, or homeless. So why not advocate for Nazis instead? In reality, nobody, including Barnhart, decides what causes to support on that basis.

From which it logically follows that advocating for a group which is easy to advocate for in addition to a group which is difficult to advocate for is more difficult than advocating for just the latter group and paying the former group no mind.