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Notes -
Abortion is in my mind due to the debate last night which has led me to this article:
https://thedispatch.com/article/claims-about-children-born-alive-after-abortion-attempts-in-minnesota-are-true/
The gist is: in Minnesota, if a baby was born you were required to care for it to keep it alive. Sometimes an abortion would result in a living baby being born, and doctors were required to give that baby supportive care (they were likely premature, so wouldn’t necessarily survive, although premature babies born wrong 23 weeks survive frequently, that said none of the cited instances of this led to a baby surviving).
In 2019 this was changed to allow doctors to let a baby sit there until it just dies on its own.
Here’s some thoughts about this:
At the point where this is even a question, you’re clearly talking about a living human being.
Simply ignoring a baby until they die is the way that infanticide (usually killing baby girls) is done all over the world
This is another instance of “conservative politician says something that gets immediately ‘fact checked’, but it turns out is at least directionally and likely just literally true.
We should be caring for living human babies whether the mother wants to kill them or not. “Oops I meant to kill it before I could see it out here in the world” is not a valid excuse.
If anything the fact that there were so many cases of this in a single state in such a small period of time moves my needle even further towards being aggressively anti abortion, up to jailing the doctors doing this and charging them with murder.
Ironically, I think Trump uses this (maybe unintentionally?) to his advantage. He can say something that sounds outrageous, and is indeed only half-true. But the second somebody goes to do any research to confirm or debunk it, they discover that the actual truth is less bad but... still pretty fucking bad. And now they have that information in their head, and it makes them marginally more likely to vote Trump.
By making his puffed up lies that have a core of truth so ridiculous-sounding, it basically invites someone to be like "NO WAY that is true" and actually look up information.
People here have talked about how Trump lies like a used car salesman whereas most politicians lie like lawyers, and that's an example. Same with him making claims about dogs and cats getting eaten. Maybe not literally true, but a bit of research will bring other things to people's attention.
Too bad for Trump virtually nobody does that, and most avenues silo you away from trying to. You have the official spin teams like NYT and Snopes somehow leaving you believing a lie while still only telling the technical truth themselves. Then all the actual independents who did their own research get siloed into a "misinformation" or "conspiracy theorist" bucket. And then, if you manage to break through all those barriers, if you try to share what you learned with anyone, they've been so conditioned they'll still act like you are the weirdo for putting that much effort in or caring so much, and discard what you say.
In some ways, that's the beauty of it. It only has to work once per person. A person who has seen the media gestalt lie its ass off once willl probably develop amnesia and remain a goodthinker. Eventually though, the statement "the media lies its ass off" will lodge in their memeplex like a grain of sand.
And, like a grain of sand it will grow into a pearl that takes up increasingly large amounts of space whenever the topic rears its head
Even this works to Trump's advantage. I'm sure you've seen all the pearl-clutching opinion pieces about how conspiratorial thinking is destroying democracy. It's all the same pipeline. After a certain point, realizing that the media can and will bullshit you means that there's no going back to those outlets. The only way is forward, even if forward sends you to (or through) crazy town.
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