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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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I guess I'll start us off with a quick one:

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2024/03/17/trump-gop-must-endorse-three-exceptions-for-abortion-to-get-elected/

This isn't an article so much as a clip-n-quote of something Trump said. I'll copy paste here because it's not long and this way you won't have to click the link:

When asked about the rape, incest and life of mother exceptions, Trump said, “If you look at France, if you look at different places in Europe with, if you look at a lot of the civilized world, they have a period of time. But you can’t go out seven months and eight months and nine months. If the Republicans spoke about it correctly, it never hurt me from the standpoint of elections. It hurt a lot of Republicans. I think you have to have, you have to have the three exceptions.”

He added, “I tell people, number one, you have to to with your heart. You have to go with your heart. But beyond that you also have to get elected, OK? And if you don’t have the three exceptions, I think it’s very, very hard to get elected. We had a gentleman from Pennsylvania who was doing pretty well. He refused to to go with the exceptions, and he lost in a landslide for governor. Nice man lost in a landslide. You have to go with the exceptions. The number of weeks, I’ll be coming out with a recommendation fairly soon. I think it’ll be accepted.”

I'm pro-life and believe life begins at conception, not just as a Christian, but much more importantly because I consider it the cleanest and most sane policy from a secular perspective. Because to me it seems obvious the only way to avoid making Tenochtitlan-sized mistakes at some point along our path is to avoid meddling with the primeval forces of nature and attempting to play God in the first place.

Once you start introducing 'exceptions,' you're just immediately back to condoning all abortion. "My health is at risk because if I'm not permitted to abort I might harm myself" is a free at-will golden ticket as long as you're able to memorize and repeat a sentence of that length.

Trump, quite obviously, doesn't really feel strongly about abortion and is attempting to pick the most palatable position. That's the problem about integrity in politics - none of the voters have any so it's almost always counterproductive for your electability if you do.

But taking the tack that "the GOP must accept exceptions" instead of "the issue must be returned to the states" is another huge own goal from the New York liberal Trump. If you're going to have a slippery real estate mogul as your standard bearer, you're going to end up with some very ugly and counterproductive wheeling and dealing for the movement.

avoid meddling with the primeval forces of nature and attempting to play God in the first place

I truly believe that God wants us to play God. We didn't get a paradise on earth. There are all kinds of blind chance BS that wrecks people - cancer, random accidents, horrible parasites from the rainforest, earthquakes and volcanoes. I don't think God is benevolent in an earthly, human sense and I lean towards Deism rather than Christianity. You don't leave your beloved children in the snake pit and watch as some inevitably get eaten by snakes, you wouldn't structure the universe that way - just don't make the snakes in the first place! You wouldn't send an earthquake against your devout Lisbon Christians on a feast day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake

But we do have the tools to fix our problems, if we are determined and committed. There's no law of the universe that says cancer remains forever. If we're wise and efficient, we could cure it. Mole rats live without cancer, it's not impossible. For earthquakes, we could still the Earth's core or disassemble the planets and stars directly.

If God didn't want us to kill, he wouldn't have allowed for weapons, strangulation, bone-breaking... Our skin could be infinitely tough. If God didn't want us to live forever, he could have some mechanism that annihilates souls at a predetermined age. If God didn't want people to sin, he could send down legions of angels or lightning bolts. If God didn't want abortion, he could render fertilized embryos invulnerable.

In reality we have incredible freedom of action, the physical properties of the universe are very permissive. We are encouraged to advance down certain pathways, those who advance are rewarded with wealth and power while those who lag behind are rewarded with humiliation and expropriation. Some choices are of course dead ends - Aztec sacrifice was uncompetitive. These choices are where God's will is most apparent. Our role is to accept the challenge and choose wisely, we can't shrink away from the powers already within our control.

Abortion isn't going away, we can't uninvent the pill, retroactive action may be one of the few things that God really doesn't want. We need to choose how to use this technology such that it improves rather than detracts. You know that it can't be effectively banned, people don't want it, countries can't coordinate on this for a global and effective ban. US states can't even coordinate on banning it, it makes only a marginal difference in outcomes if it's legal in one state, illegal in another. Better to manipulate structures so that children are valued more, that people don't end up in situations where they want to abort, that the abortions that do take place get rid of antisocial or unhelpful people.

But we do have the tools to fix our problems, if we are determined and committed. There's no law of the universe that says cancer remains forever. If we're wise and efficient, we could cure it. Mole rats live without cancer, it's not impossible.

Not directly related to your post but this part made me think of one of my favorite blog posts (about small pox eradication): 500 million but not a single one more.

Is that Jaibot? Did they move away from their own blog and onto Substack?

It is! I suspect so. I recall the original link I had to the article on their blog went dead some time ago but I found the link to the substack via an EA forum post.