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Notes -
Texas tries to put Planned Parenthood out of business again(and might succeed this time)
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/08/15/texas-abortion-planned-parenthood-lawsuit/
So Texas wants to lawfare Planned Parenthood out of being able to operate. This isn't new. What is new is this part:
"A conservative who previously worked on anti-abortion cases as a religious liberty lawyer" is a technically accurate description of Matthew Kacsmaryk. It is, however, leaving out the context that was the judge who suspended FDA approval for mifepristone, had only previously worked for conservative activist groups, and also got handpicked by the plaintiffs. There is a 0.0% chance he will rule in favor of Planned Parenthood under any circumstances.
So what's the practical effect?
So basically similar to what New York tried with the NRA. It should go without saying that while I find Planned Parenthood an unsympathetic defendant, this would not be happening to a less politically charged organization and 180 times the overbilling amount is just absurd. Also the legal interpretation seems dubious and probably would've been dismissed by a less biased judge.
I do want to point out some incredible naivety:
PP is, uh, not going to get left alone in the culture wars, and that's their fault for constantly making themselves a target in every way they can come up with. It's fair to point to people who don't have access to whatever healthcare services they provide(do they actually provide mammograms? The claim seems debunked but the people who did the debunking are not fans of PP) but trying to paint Planned Parenthood as an innocent victim of broadsides unleashed for no reason, even if it's playing pretty hardball, is not totally in contact with reality. Planned Parenthood is not in any universe apolitical and their side did after all start the trend of trying to punish the opposition.
The current era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.
I don't like Planned Parenthood even a little. Anyone on the right celebrating this should understand that just as it did not start here, it absolutely will not stop here. The other side is going to look for a way to escalate until they find one, and then they're going to use it, likely without mercy. Why wouldn't they? There's no common understanding of rules being pursued here. The entire point of a legal system is to settle disputes. This is not a legal fight, but a war by other means, and those means remain fluid, as they have been since 2014. Reds accepted legal outcomes as binding because they were making a mistake. Realizing that acceptance of legal outcomes was a mistake, a weakness, does not stop people from abusing the courts, but rather incentivizes greater abuses while those courts retain some shred of validity; get what you can and the devil take the hindmost.
The biggest reason I can see for why they wouldn't do it is that they have already gone even further. How many red states are launching spurious prosecutions of Joe Biden to waste his time and money before the campaign period even starts? I don't think you're wrong per se, but I do think that you're warning about something that has already happened and has been happening for several years.
I'm aware of that. I've been saying exactly the above for several years as well. I'm on the record as of years ago that peaceful coexistence isn't possible, that there is no "we" anymore and that the absolute best thing Reds and Blues can do for each other is to move away from each other and each pretend the other doesn't exist.
I wrote the above because it's factual advice that other Reds need to hear, and because maybe when it's framed in terms of a Red advance, Blues will be able to understand that it is a general argument, not a partisan one. A lot of people on both sides act as though the cycle we're in can be won in some sort of clean, survivable fashion, where the right election is secured or the right indictment is conducted or the right person is put in jail. They act as though the Culture War can be resolved through some sort of formal, duly-appointed process that wraps up all the resentments and settles all the accounts. They act as though "ways to hurt the outgroup without getting in too much trouble" is a small, highly constrained set mainly involving saying mean things on twitter.
None of this is an argument for restraint in this instance. Unilateral disarmament is idiotic. So is blindness to the true nature of our conflicts.
Hmm, I don't think that.
I think the cycle gets broken when both sides decide the cycle of violence is just so damn tiresome maybe we should stop, and go back to the messy, sustainable-for-who-knows-how-long? detente that keeps hostile groups from engaging in constant all-out warfare all over the world.
Obviously this fails more often than not. Israel and Palestine, Ireland, the Balkans, all briefly break into peace between periods of all-out-warfare. If you're right, we're coming to the end of one of the longer briefly peaceful periods.
I hope you're wrong, but anyway, I don't have that many more years left. Sucks if you have kids though, I guess.
Here's my take on that: I believe the detente worked in the US when a very shared concept of Christianity was ubiquitous in the first order cultural and institutional hegemony yet a very broad liberalist defection was not just tolerated, but treated as respectable through it's explicit allowance in the Bill of Rights. Eg 60s-2012ish.
During this time, take the 90s, it's was often the case likely that one was surrounded by irreligious liberal indulgence that was tacitly approved in social circles, yet that was socially boxed within a very visible sense of propriety that was more-or-less Christian. I think for example, Seinfeld demonstrates this well equilibrium. A bunch of non-Christian New Yorkers were able to live openly and happily, but a lot of the social-boundaries and humor found by nudging them was in the traditionalist propriety frame (see e.g. The Contest).
The problem is that this was always unsustainable because the liberalism continued to gnaw through the hegemony as if it was it's cage, not it's scaffolding.
There's two possibilities, that I'm unsure about: 1 (my suspicion) is that this was fundamentally untenable because the liberalism was deinstitutionalizing force coupled with modernizing technology and we always would have atrophied here as more people became irreligious and traditional institutions weakened, and communities evaporated into an atomic monoculture.
The other possibility is that this detente could have been held if the liberalizing had been defanged a bit somehow. The (classical) liberal, as I said, loved gnawing the nearest scaffold/boundary as a matter of right, whether that be teaching creationism in schools, public prayer, Blue laws, co-ed dorms, pushing boundaries in media, or whatever. Again, this wasn't one mono-effort, but a million different cuts that each time saw either a local limit on liberalism and uderstandably fought it, or (less understandably) openly rebelled against the yardstick of the hegemony even when they were free to ignore it.
I'll give an example of the latter: living in sin. Even as late as the 90s two unmarried people living together was seen as improprietous in large portions of society, but was widely practiced and pretty much blanketly tolerated. If people wanted the detente to remain, those even taking advantage of the freedom should have supported social disapproval, and not agitated for it's normalization.
Anyway, long story short, the whole culture house fell apart right around Obergerfell, and the traditional hegemony of cultural propriety (Im using this word as a placeholder for a much broader concept) was pretty much over. Was it gay marriage? Was it cellphones and social media? Reverberations of Catholic priest scandal? The end place of a long and steady momentum? Whatever.
The detente cannot exist any more or be returned to because the necessary tension between liberalism and shared cultural restraint snapped and the institutions of the latter fell over.
The most likely way back is for progressives to finish institutionalizing their own illiberal hegemony, and then get enough liberal tension coming from it's dissenters. But the if you want the old detente back, you're not getting it. And if you want to try, I (tongue-in-cheek) suggest all the agnostic liberals here go crypto with that and publically invest in either supporting progressivist takover or rebuilding American Christianity as the hegemonic force so you can start to rebel against it again. In other words, become an accelerationist is one direction away from your libertarian sensibilities or the other.
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That’s not really how wars or other forms of power struggle work. Nobody stops because it’s hard or tiresome, or whatever else. They stop when it becomes clear that one side is going to clearly lose. And that side tends to try to negotiate a peace that’s as good as they can get.
Israel/Palestine is basically a stalemate, the Israelis are prevented from getting the upper hand to the point where the Palestinians would want to stop, the Palestinians aren’t constrained by international pressure, but are hemmed in by Israeli forces and lack military grade arms. So Palestinians launch random attacks or shoot a couple of missiles. Israelí forces blow up a couple of houses, and everyone waits for the next round. If the Israelis would destroy whole villages, they’d probably stop the rockets, because the cost is too high. If the Palestinians were able to destroy infrastructure in Israeli cities and blow up major buildings, they’d win. Nobody can win, and unilateral disarmament breaks the stalemate.
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I think the obvious issue is it’s not just two people playing a prisoners dilemma. There are a thousand different groups representing each side (probably more on the left). Every non-profit (all who need to make a name for themselves/raise funds) is making a choice between cooperate or defect. Each individual entity can’t negotiate to cooperate with the opposing tribe alone. So in that situation defect always has the bigger payout. If each side was controlled by one force then negotiate to cooperate could be in-play. But it’s not one red versus one blue player.
Though admittedly it always feels like team blue is organized and coordinate amongst themselves - but all these cases are being brought by individual prosecutors trying to boost their careers.
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Which again argues against restraint in this instance, or unilateral disarmament. Because no one gets tired of winning.
Indeed, restraint is off the table.
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Or when something comes along that makes everyone too busy getting rich or building things or rebuilding to the new paradigm to waste cycles mucking about with identity politics of various flavors. Asteroid mining could do it. AI could do it. Shake up the wealth and status layers, and break people out of their settled, established lines of conflict.
What won't do it is a lawsuit or an election.
Quite commons is to have both side unite against a common enemy.
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