With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
I think the abortion issue turned out to be very interesting this cycle.
Since the rollback of Roe was a fait acompli, all abortion related stuff ended up down ballot (where it belongs, IMO). Dems tried to tie the issue to Trump but I don't think it landed. If the Florida GOP bans it, why should I care in Maryland? What does that have to do with Trump?
I understand the arguments that this affects some women in some places negatively (it also affect some embryos in some places negatively--just sayin') and I would love it if every state had a sensible middle-of-the-road abortion policy. But the fact that we can now run 50 different simulations on what the sensible policy actually should be maybe In a few more generations we can put this issue to rest forever.
I'm not anti-abortion but I was VERY anti abortion as a single voter issue since 1973. For the first time I can remember, it feels like actual progress in our elections happened. All of the air has escaped that particular balloon and I wonder what will be next. I can imagine immigration getting somewhat solved. Any other single-issue voter concerns on the chopping block?
Personally, the Republicans have lost a lot of goodwill from me by acting like the pro-life mission was accomplished with the end of Roe. Oh, you think the issue should be left up to the states? We tried that with slavery, too, it didn't work, and abortion is at least as morally abominable; it's outright Old Testament-style ritual child sacrifice, and it's entrenched in our society as an institution that something like half of the population (or more) equates with freedom, catharsis, and womanhood. There's so much doublethink about it; fetuses are treated as human or nonhuman per current convenience. It fully corrupts the parent/child relationship; every member of our society learns when they grow up that their mother once had the fully legitimized option to have them slaughtered, and depending on her social environment and character she may well have seriously considered it. It's a horror lurking in our collective unconscious which we willfully repress, in much the same way that we repress our own mortality by avoiding the thought of hospitals and old folks' homes, keeping them sterile, out of the way, antimemetic. But the dull suit put on abortion is something more willful and evil; it's Nazi death camp shit, but without a geopolitical crisis to put an end to it. We are ashamed of it as a society and we should be. Roe v Wade was just the Dred Scott v Sandford equivalent; getting rid of it is good but it's a band-aid on a decapitation.
We should avoid civil war if at all possible, but if there was anything to do it over, it would be abortion; if our country was salvageable, Republicans would collectively be courageous enough to run on a platform of hanging abortionists and their biggest enablers and cheerleaders from lampposts, and they would win and implement it. I have no intent to throw my life away pursuing this purge of our society on my own (or with some kind of FBI-bait terror cell); it's hard to say how much of this is personal cowardice and how much is observation that it hasn't worked to fix the issue in the past. But contrarian Confederate apologia aside, there's a reason that we still celebrate John Brown today, even if we wouldn't ourselves have done the same thing if we'd been born in his time, even if it took some legitimate unhingedness on his part to do what he did, and even if his actions ultimately decreased the world's utility instead of increasing it. He was driven crazy by something that should drive people crazy. You should feel sick and guilty for not feeling pushed to action to the same extent he was; we all should. Our country is in a terrible decline which it has thoroughly shown that it deserves, and if we are suddenly and violently annihilated soon by some terrible external calamity like a nuclear war of extermination, which seems likely, we will collectively deserve that as well. Obviously many innocents would die as well, and I would hope to forestall it as long as possible - out of self-interest and concern for the people close to me if nothing else - but if you believe in God, you should be terrified; God's justice is terrible and does not wait forever on matters like this. If you don't believe in God, you should at least feel like you've been living in a version of Nazi Germany that's survived peacefully in a position of dominance over the world for many decades. It's terrible. Our current world is terrible. If it's the best it's ever been it's still terrible.
Paul Hill's body lies a-mouldering in the grave. His soul is marching on.
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.
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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