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'm not actually against abortion, but I have to say you're not wrong about this. I do remember being a kid (7-10 age range IIRC) and telling Mum "thanks for not aborting me", and her not being super-reassuring about it (I don't think she seriously considered it, but I'm damned sure that during my adolescence she often wished she had). It's a bit creepy.
I actually remember learning what abortion was in 5th grade and being so repulsed I lectured the teacher who was trying to convince us it was a good thing. (Says something about where I grew up that something like that could happen, thanks Quakers). Not even confusion, just an instant angry threat response: "this is an attack on us kids"
Years later I read that one PKDick story and remembered "oh yeah, this is exactly what it felt like in the moment. Did my beliefs change, or did I just lose that animating perspective?"
The angry threat response and instant friend/enemy distinction is probably the most stable (and valuable) part of my political identity, come to think of it.
Am I interpreting you right that you instantly identify people with different politics than you as enemies, and see their policies as threats?
SteveKirk is clearly talking about a specific policy, right?
The policy in question, is abortion. The 'threat', is the 'threat' of being aborted.
The directionality is clearly, your policy is a threat to me, and so, I see you as an enemy. Not, your policy is different from mine, so I see you as an enemy, and as such, your policies are threats.
I am honestly flabbergasted, can you include quotes from the rest of SteveKirk's comment and the rest of the comment chain, to help show how you arrived at the interpretation that you arrived at, I can't even imagine how you are parsing these comments to end up where you did.
Thanks for explaining. That makes a lot more sense.
He was in the first part of his comment. Then the words “my political identity” made me think he was using the last sentence to generalize to his overall perspective on politics, as opposed to keeping it specific to that one topic. The words “stable” and “valuable” further made me think that the emotional response is a core and cherished foundation from which all his other political beliefs are based on.
That’s another reason I interpreted it differently. It doesn’t seem to me like the threat of being aborted is still relevant as an adult, so it didn’t come to my mind at all that “angry threat response” might still refer specifically to the feeling he had as a kid, even after all these years.
Then he says the phrase “friend/enemy distinction” — I mean, who’s the friend or enemy in a discussion like this? I can only assume the enemy is the person he disagrees with politically, because it certainly can’t be the person he agrees with. And that fits with “threat” — the threat presumably comes from this enemy person he’s discussing politics with, because where else would he be feeling the threat from?
In short, I started out parsing “The angry threat response” in a generic rather than a specific sense, and I read the rest of the sentence in that sense as well. So it sounded to me like he had this emotional way of responding to the topic of abortion as a kid, and now as an adult he still not only responds to other political issues in that same emotional way, but he considers it to be a core part of how he approaches politics, to the point where he instantly identifies other political participants as either friends or enemies. Which of course sounds ridiculous, so I had to ask.
Hahaha, does that help?
is very different from,
Failing to see this seems to be the core area of confusion. The assumption in your post, which is 'ridiculous', is that any political difference is threating. The idea that someone who is threatening you politically, could be viewed as an enemy, is far from ridiculous.
The idea that he might generalized the principle from the specific instance, is totally anodyne. It's just his conflict theory origin story.
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