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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30123 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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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/

Last year, the state filed a federal lawsuit claiming Planned Parenthood improperly billed Medicaid for $10 million in payments during the period when the state was trying to remove the organization from the program.

Texas is seeking more than $1.8 billion in reimbursement, penalties and fees.

So Texas wants to lawfare Planned Parenthood out of being able to operate. This isn't new. What is new is this part:

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a conservative who previously worked on anti-abortion cases as a religious liberty lawyer, will hear arguments from both sides today in Amarillo.

"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?

The 2022 lawsuit, filed by Paxton before he was impeached this year, argues that Planned Parenthood erred by not appealing the initial termination through administrative channels and instead pursuing the case through the courts.

Though they’re seeking to claw back $10 million in payments, they’ve asked the judge to order Planned Parenthood to pay an additional two times that value, plus civil penalties and interest from the day the payment was billed as well as expenses, costs and attorneys fees.

The estimated $1.8 billion payment would likely bankrupt Texas’ three Planned Parenthood affiliates several times over at a moment the organization argues they are needed more than ever.

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:

“Our organization knows we always have to be making decisions that are the most ethical and the most compliant with any rule or regulation out there, so it just felt like a great injustice,” she said. “I had hoped that if you play by the rules and do the right thing, it will turn out right, but that’s not the case.”

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.

It really is so wonderfully charming how devoted Texas Republicans are to ensuring poor and underclass women are forced into having more babies than they currently do. This certainly won’t lead to problems down the road, because impoverished single mothers famously raise the most well-adjusted sons who commit crime at well-below-average rates.

Hopefully SCOTUS eventually limits this specific form of depressing ridiculousness.

I've gotten flack for making the argument that if pro-lifers really believed abortion is murdering babies, they'd actually act like babies are being murdered. But unlike you, I actually believe pro-lifers do, in the abstract, believe abortion is morally wrong. Which is why I find your argument kind of silly. It's also commonly presented even more strongly by HBDers: "Do you really want those people breeding more?" That's a good argument if you believe the progressive framing that pro-lifers don't actually care about babies at all and banning abortion is purely a way to punish women/own the libs. But if they really do believe abortion is wrong, then of course it's wrong even if it means more of "those people" are breeding, and arguing that they should be in favor because the kind of women who have abortions are mostly the kind of women you want to have abortions is missing the point.

Not to pile on to a totally unrelated thread as I do just that; but a conception that allows both views (and which I think is true in most cases) is anti-abortion as a cultural signifier.

Ie, most compelled-birthers (probably) have no real concept of what a fetus is and (probably )do not believe in their hearts that an embryo is alive (which we can observe from the prevalence of abortions among anti-abortionists being only marginally smaller than everyone else of their race and class).

It's not that they are doing it to own the libs, it's that they are doing it because they have to do it to be part of the club, style of thing.

  • -14

Please do elaborate on this:

which we can observe from the prevalence of abortions among anti-abortionists being only marginally smaller than everyone else of their race and class)

Abortions do not generally decrease in a given area or among a given population in correlation with their religious beliefs or political beliefs (not in all cases; eg. seventh day Adventists and JW's and orthodox jews have WAY less abortions.)

So, if you are a white woman who is firmly upper middle class, you are exactly as likely on a population level to have an abortion weather you are an evangelical republican or a satanic communist.

The only people who actually poll for this or collect the information are (naturally) pro choice NGOs and certain states (Guttmacher, state of Texas, and so on) but it is enough to be a revealed preference type of thing, imo. It is hard to collect and noisy data though.

I'd be willing to bet that's incorrect.

You can search out the data from some polling agencies; which generally agree with me (hence me believing it) or you can go off of anecdotes from workers at abortion clinics; but that is all there is and the data is such that if you gave me even one even Trafalgar survey saying otherwise I would return to neutral.

"Compelled birth". Ah, the amount of new horror scare terms being dredged up by the baby-killers (you don't mind that term, do you? sauce for the goose and all that) in order to sow fear and terror is wonderfully creative, in a twisted way.

Yes, the horrible forced-birthers are lurking around, jumping out to kidnap women, tie them down to a surgical bed, do IVF on them without their consent, implant embryos in them and then wait around for nine months until they can then force their victims to deliver the baby without any anaethesia or pain relief at all.

It'd make a great B-movie.

(Because of course it's not that two people voluntarily have sex and sex makes babies and oops they were too careless in the moment and now the natural result is happening).

The Orwellian march of language is something else. Ending a human life is healthcare. Asking for normal pregnancy is forced birth/compelled birth/slavery.

I mean, I only whipped out the phrase in question because people here keep calling pro-choice people baby killers, so I thought some nice harmless hyperbole would be fun.

And you can really argue with it either. The woman in question wishes to abort the fetus; anti abortionists wish she would not. She is a baby killer, they want to force her to give birth. It is what it is.

people here keep calling pro-choice people baby killers

That sounded wrong to me, so I searched it. All mentions of the phrase were negative towards it, i.e. using the phrase the same way you did.

There have been plenty of comments claiming that abortionists is actual murder, but none ever just outright say "Hey did you hear what the baby killers were up to this week?" and use that as the group designation. Doing so, or calling pro-lifers "forced birthers", is an instant claim that none of your opponents have principles and all are acting in bad faith. Surely they are not actually pro-life; they disagree with me, are therefore evil, and therefore want to compel innocent young women to give birth against their wills. Surely they're not actually pro-choice, they just want to murder babies.

Using those terms is a terrible norm. Nobody wants to keep arguing about whether pro-life people are actually pro-life or just hate women. Nobody wants to keep arguing about whether pro-choice people are actually pro-choice or just hate babies.

So long as you're happy to own the name, that's fine with me.

This comment is kinda borderline, it's gotten two reports and I might overlook it if you weren't already on thin ice for boo-outgroup and weakman responses. I'm not going to perma-ban you, or even tempban you this time, because I think maybe this comment looks like progress in the right direction? But I am warning you.

In case you find this confusing, notice that the substance of your argument is fine (pro-life arguments as a social signal is a perfectly defensible position, presumably the same is true for pro-choice arguments, and most run-of-the-mill arguments, really) but your presentation is not. In particular, "no real concept of what a fetus is" and "do not believe in their hearts that an embryo is alive" are weak men. As the rules note:

We want to engage with the best ideas on either side of any issue, not the worst.

I do think it's possible for sizable groups of people to be systematically mistaken about certain object-level facts, and to hold their positions on the basis of these mistaken claims. I also think it's possible for sizable groups of people to be systematically inaccurate about their own beliefs, both through wilful dishonesty and through unconscious error. I don't want to debate the validity of any particular example, but I do think that such things are at least possible, and therefore these are legitimate claims that people should be allowed to defend here.

Do the mods agree? If no, why not? If yes, what is the preferred mode of presentation for these sorts of claims? (If we need to work with a particular example, let's say that someone really does believe that pro-life advocates are systematically mistaken about certain biological facts about fetuses - what is the best way to present that claim in a way that doesn't violate the rules?)

I think there's an important distinction between "I think your beliefs are founded on faulty premises you haven't considered" and "you don't actually believe what you claim to believe." There are times when it is appropriate to call someone a liar to their face, but they demand a heck of a lot more work than DBDr put in. If you're going to accuse your opponents of being manipulative liars, you need to bring receipts.

I do think there is a more nuanced middle ground like you're hinting at, where large groups of people believe a comforting lie in order to protect their self images from their own selfishness or greed. And there is value in examining those situations, but you need to be really careful that you're not just building up strawmen to attack. Generally, I think extraordinary circumstances should be required before one breaks their charitable assumptions about others' beliefs.

what is the best way to present that claim in a way that doesn't violate the rules?

Effortfully, charitably, and with evidence. The way to not violate the rules is, tautologically, to not violate the rules.

To your specific question, if you can find a pro-lifer on Twitter who obviously "has no real concept of what a fetus is," that's likely insufficient. If you can find and link three or five examples of recognized and respected pro-life organizations repeating a specific factually-wrong claim you want to specifically challenge, that's much more interesting. Even a poll of pro-lifers demonstrating widespread acceptance of some clearly false claim might suffice, though it would need to be framed carefully and with epistemic humility (if "most people are stupid" is just as good an explanation of the evidence as "these particular people are stupid," then you might just be engaged in a kind of roundabout isolated demand for rigor).

I've seen articles explaining how conservatives underestimate COVID risks, or how progressives overestimate police brutality or gender wage gaps. Those kinds of trends in group thinking are interesting and worth discussing--but not when they are just stated, without evidence or argument, as a dig on one's outgroup.

It looks to me like nara is explicitly saying that you can make those claims, you just have to A) provide evidence, and B) frame it in a way that is less antagonistic, dismissive, and strawmanny.

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