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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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I mean, look, I’m basically in total agreement with the people strongly encouraging women to abort all Down’s Syndrome fetuses. Abortion is a very difficult issue when it comes to public policy, and I’m not willing to say that mandating the termination of such pregnancies would be the optimal legal approach.

However, this is a wholly separate issue from the removal of obviously-ill adults from public spaces. The constituency calling for broad coercive efforts to remove the mentally ill from public transit has close to zero overlap with the consistency attempting to get women to abort babies with mental illnesses. Now, I personally would love it if these two consistencies to converge, as I would be an enthusiastic member of such a hypothetical coalition; the reality at this time, though, is that they are two separate and unrelated - in fact, usually two diametrically opposed - political phenomena in every first-world country worth discussing.

I get what you're saying, but I'm saying I can also understand why people in that situation would be twitchy about anything that looks like cracking down on the visibly mentally ill.

Because all the promises about "of course we don't mean your baby" have turned out to be lies.

There should be a way to get laws about adults who need to be institutionalised can be taken off the streets even against their will because they are not competent to make decisions and they are not acting in their own good, but the way things work it's plausible that there would be a lot of vague language inserted for both those who don't want to 'stigmatise' and those who do want to be draconian, and that this kind of language could be interpreted in unintended ways when it comes to provision of services and legal cases. As well as a shit-ton of scaremongering - look how Aduhelm got approved even over FDA resistance, because of the canny use of patient's groups and families of sufferers who were whipped up to protest about "this would cure my mom but the cruel bureaucrats are wrapping it in red tape!"

I don't trust public policy motives because the entire topic is way too politicised. You would have idiots screeching about how this is throwing the mentally ill and the homeless into cages and hellholes.

The constituency calling for broad coercive efforts to remove the mentally ill from public transit has close to zero overlap with the consistency attempting to get women to abort babies with mental illnesses. Now, I personally would love it if these two consistencies to converge, as I would be an enthusiastic member of such a hypothetical coalition

To make sure I understand you - are you saying you would support coercing women to have abortions against their will in such cases? Because if so, do you really not understand why people would have "the spectre of Nazi death camps looming" when you're saying in effect "pass this legislation and then we can get on to the whole Lebensunwertes Leben bit"? Because while I'd support "if we need coercive laws to solve this problem for the good of all including the homeless/mentally ill, okay", I'd definitely oppose you on that last. And if you make one conditional on the other, then sorry, one set of principles over-rides the other for me, thus blanket refusal.