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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.
Abortion is probably the major break between the "dissident" right and the traditional mainstream socially conservative/fundamentalist right. Despite considerable overlap on most other policy positions, abortion is a serious wedge issue. My take is that abortion is almost universally eugenic: even outside obvious cases like screened-for genetic diseases, you can just look at abortion rates by race. (From Vox: Out of 629,898 abortions reported to the CDC for 2019, Black women accounted for 38.4 percent of them. By comparison, white women made up 33.4 percent of those abortions.) What percent of aborted children would ever become net taxpayers, had they not been aborted? Given that abortions are correlated with low socioeconomic status, promiscuity, high time preference, and a whole slate of other negative things, many of which are heritable, my suspicion is the number is quite low.
When your political enemies are sacrificing their children to Baal, I don't know that trying to stop them is a winning long-term strategy. Ironically this particular savior complex pattern matches well to the self-destructive white guilt that characterizes much of the left. Any moral system that insists you have some obligation to black crack babies across the country is trivially extendible to cover unfortunates all across the world and I suspect there's cognitive dissonance in not doing so.
At this point I am tired of right-wingers bringing up abortion. My attitude is, they should stop talking about it so much and they should do it now. Even if you legitimately view it as murder, the fact is, if you bring it up so often that it makes you lose elections, you're not going to be in a position to stop it anyway. I mean, what are you going to do? Blow up abortion clinics? That has been tried, and it did not even put a dent in how many abortions are performed.
The right-wing fixation with talking about abortion is politically suicidal. If some right-winger personally thinks that abortion is evil, then by all means, fight against it. But constantly talking about it on the national stage does not help. It is just virtue signalling. What would help is to win some fucking elections. Trump did more for anti-abortion activists by winning in 2016 and nominating those Supreme Court judges than almost anyone else, and one thing he did was, he didn't talk about abortion all the time.
The right needs female voters. The 19th Amendment is not going to be repealed magically. You need female voters, so you need to talk about issues where there is not such a gigantic disparity between the average man and the average woman's views.*
I say this as someone who is agnostic on the whole question of whether abortion is or is not murder. I do not think there is any actually rational answer to that question, it is a matter of perspective. I am not so unempathic that I am incapable of feeling bad for aborted fetuses, but at the same time, I also have to think about actually winning against the left. I know it seems obvious, but it does not seem obvious to some people for whatever reason. If you really care about the well-being of fetuses, losing elections by talking about abortion the way the right currently all too often does is not going to help them.
*Edit: I just looked at the statistics, and the gap between men and women's attitudes on abortion is actually smaller than I thought it was.
This is such an incomprehensive take to me. Pro-life movement had one of the biggest victories recently with repeal of Roe v. Wade, even leftists tacitly admitted that
As for "winning elections" this to me seems as a strange thing, what do you need to win elections for? Presumably to pursue your preferred policies. If your candidate "wins elections" but then he goes against your deepest held values, does it even make sense to call him your candidate anymore? And it is not such a small number of people - according to Gallup the number of people who say abortions should be illegal under all circumstances ranges from 10%-20% since 1975.
One thing I also noted, is how right and left differs in treating their ideological fringes. Leftist mainstream people have no problem tolerating or celebrating even the most unhinged leftist radicals. Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers can get a cushy job at public University and get praise from Wall Street Journal columnist as a model citizen. Marxist radicals such as Angela Davis can be popular champions of police reform movement no problem. Democrats nurture and take care of their radical fringes, they defend them and propagandize in their favor, and then they use their vigor and energy to replenish their ranks and to push Overton window in favor of their policies. Kamala can have the most insane takes like taxing unrealized capital gains or transitioning children of illegal immigrants for free - and you see the ranks closing and defending her exactly on the grounds of pragmatism: it's only a rhetoric to mobilize more radical voter base, nothing to see here. She is still our joyful momala.
While the right absolutely shits not only on "far fringes" like J6ers, who have nothing on leftist radicals like Kathy Boudin - the mother of Chesa Boudin and professor at Columbia after being released from prison in 2003 - bombing the senate building. That would be absurd, but the right also shits on anybody who is not moderate like pro-life activists. They even shit on people who go against mainstream leftist narrative, it is "moderate" right who will be the first to execute their up-and-coming talent for racism, sexism, being pro-life - exactly like you do now. The rightist moderates completely adopt leftist versions of morality and sins, and push it on fellow rightists, moving the Overton window. It would be absolutely inconceivable, that some right-wing version of Bill Ayers such as some former abortion clinic terrorist would be a chair of charity organization, a university professor at state university and could ever be called as "model citizen" by WSJ or similar media.
So yeah, the right will not win elections with castrated elite, with no semblance of balls or spine, which tone-polices and cancels their own people in accordance to leftist sensibilities. And even if they win, they won't do shit with that victory. Or maybe even worse, they will take their victory and cave to leftist preferences as we saw it in UK with immigration, because supposed conservatives are terrified of being called as racists or booed if they go take their kids from private school/university. Who needs enemies with wussy wankers as allies.
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