Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, December 12, 2023, and National Ambrosia Day, a dish from the Fifties that is a form of degraded fruit salad; as Wikipedia notes:
Most ambrosia recipes contain canned (often sweetened) or fresh pineapple, canned mandarin orange slices or fresh orange sections, miniature marshmallows, and coconut. Other ingredients might include various fruits and nuts: maraschino cherries, bananas, strawberries, peeled grapes, or crushed pecans. Ambrosia can also include mayonnaise or dairy ingredients: whipped cream (or whipped topping), sour cream, cream cheese, pudding, yogurt, or cottage cheese.
My mom used to make it with fake whipped cream. Here’s a photo from the link above:
It’s also Gingerbread House Day, and National Poinsettia Day, the fourth day of Hanukkah, and that’s all we have to celebrate today. But remember, only 13 days until the onset of the most joyous holiday of all: Coynezaa.
And there’s a Google Doodle today; click on the screenshot below to play “Playground,” an interactive game in which you can “uncover 25 of the most-searched people, places, and moments from the past 25 years.” It’s boring.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the December 12 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The Texas Supreme Court finally ruled, damn their hides, and decided that the woman who sought an abortion to save her own life wasn’t entitled to one. Although the woman, Kate Cox, was entitled to one given that her fetus had trisomy 18, invariably fatal either in utero or very soon after death, she sought assurance that she and her doctors would not be prosecuted. A lower court affirmed her right to an abortion, but the *()&%^E$*&} top court in Texas overruled that order.
The Texas Supreme Court on Monday overturned a lower court order allowing an abortion for a pregnant woman whose fetus was diagnosed with a fatal condition, hours after her lawyers said she had decided to leave Texas for the procedure in the face of the state’s abortion bans.
The court ruled that the lower court made a mistake in ruling that the woman, Kate Cox, who is more than 20 weeks pregnant, was entitled to a medical exception.
In its seven-page ruling, the Supreme Court found that Ms. Cox’s doctor, Damla Karsan, “asked a court to pre-authorize the abortion yet she could not, or at least did not, attest to the court that Ms. Cox’s condition poses the risks the exception requires.” Texas’ overlapping bans allow for abortions only when a pregnancy seriously threatens the health or life of the woman.
. . . Ms. Cox asked the lower court for approval after she learned that her fetus had a fatal condition, and after several trips to the emergency room. Her lawyers and her doctor argued that carrying the pregnancy to term risked her health and her future ability to have children.
. . .The case was believed to be the first to seek a court-ordered exception since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, clearing the way for Republican-controlled states like Texas to enact near-total bans on abortions.
It marked a new chapter in the legal history of abortion in the United States, with pregnant women now going to court seeking permission for their doctors to do what they determine to be medically necessary without fear of severe criminal or civil penalties
I still wonder what the basis is for ruling that she has to carry a doomed fetus to term, and that there’s no guarantee the fetus won’t die before it’s born. Did the Court play doctor, deciding that the fetus wasn’t really a danger to her life or future health?
*It’s no surprise that hate crime incidents and bias incidents have skyrocketed in the last few years, and I take no pride in noting that the biggest increase occurred in Jews. The WSJ has the story, and I give some excerpts and a figure:
Police in major cities including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and San Francisco have seen a rise in reports of hateful events, including hate crimes, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the nation’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza. Jews are often on the receiving end, according to cities that have broken down data, while reported attacks on Muslims—which include some of the most violent instances reported recently—are also on the rise.
Preliminary data from major cities show that in the 32-year-history of tracking these numbers, the U.S. this year will likely top the prior national record for reported antisemitic incidents, 1,140 in 1993, said Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. And hate crimes against Muslims are on track to hit their highest level since 2016, when there were 310, he said. That marked the second worst year, behind 2001.
“What I think we’re seeing here is a tectonic shift in what’s going on with hate crime, and it’s not going to get better,” Levin said.
Many cities are showing increases both from a year ago and since the period immediately before the Hamas attack in Israel. Jumps around big events like the Middle East conflict are common, as are seasonal bumps around religious holidays or celebrations such as Pride Week.
. . .The number of hate-motivated incidents is almost always worse than official statistics reflect because such attacks often go unreported, said Brendan Lantz, director of the Hate Crime Research and Policy Institute at Florida State University. This is particularly true when attacks are perpetrated against members of already marginalized groups who are less likely to call police.
The hate crimes reported to police since the start of October, many of which are still under investigation, include property vandalism, aggravated harassment, physical assault and murder.
The figure below is from the WSJ. To put it in perspective Jews constitute between 1 and 2.2% of the American population, depending on how one defines “Jew.” Muslims, easier to census, constitute around 1.1% of the population. Blacks are about 13.6%, and Asians about 7%. The data below show that, on a per capita basis, Jews are clearly the targets of both NYC hate crimes and bias incidents way more often than other groups, religious or ethnic, though Asians are, surprisingly disproportionately represeted among hate crimes (but not more so than Jews). I’m not sure there should be a separate kind of crime called a “hate crime,” but one thing’s for sure: there’s way too much bigotry in America.
*Here’s a curious WaPo op-ed by Claire Finkelstein: “To fight antisemitism on campuses, we must restrict free speech.” Finkelstein is identified as “Algernon Biddle professor of law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a member of the school’s Open Expression Committee and chair of the law school’s committee on academic freedom.”
And she doesn’t understand free speech. Or rather, she thinks it’s overrated:
This [the answers of the MIT, Harvard, and Penn Presidents in a House hearing] is because the value of free speech has been elevated to a near-sacred level on university campuses. As a result, universities have had to tolerate hate speech — even hate speech calling for violence against ethnic or religious minorities. With the dramatic rise in antisemitism, we are discovering that this is a mistake: Antisemitism — and other forms of hate — cannot be fought on university campuses without restricting poisonous speech that targets Jews and other minorities.
No, restricting speech will not curb antisemitism; it will still be there, and perhaps in even greater measure, but will just be hidden. How do you know who your enemies are if they’re forbidden from speaking? Finkelstein goes on:
Countering speech with more speech might just mean adding to the hateful rhetoric on campus and would not solve the problem. And university presidents can set up all the task forces, study groups and educational modules they like, but what kind of educational effort could possibly bring together warring groups that are busy calling for one another’s violent demise?
Umm. . . . clearly banning “hate speech”? That will bring the Jewish students together with Students for Justice in Palestine, won’t it? NO! I have no good solution (yet) except to enforce the First Amendment’s restrictions (no speech targeted at individuals or small groups), hold civil debates under the auspices of the University, and enforce University regulations about illegal sit-ins and demonstrations. But we need to realize that some comities are just not reachable. And then she calls for what is already in place, at least here: enforcement of the First Amendment as it’s been interpreted by the courts:
Second, even public universities that are bound by the First Amendment are not helpless in the face of hate speech. They do not have to stand idly by and wait for such speech to turn into “conduct.” Public institutions can restrict the “time, place and manner” of demonstrations; they can restrict speech that incites violence, that involves threats of violence against specific individuals or that involves the targeted harassment of members of the community.
Yep, we have to ban hate speech, because it intimidates students. But who is going to determine which speech is allowable? This sounds good, but remember that Muslim students called for banning depictions of Muhammad because it created an unsafe climate for them. The same with any number of “unsafe” remarks about black people.
And have calls of “from the river to the sea” really produced palpable violence on campus. I know of one or two incidents that might qualify, but it’s not a huge problem, not compared to putting regulations on speech. When Finkelstein says something like this, it sounds good, but she forgets that it’s not just Jews that are involved and can potentially restrict speech; it’s any identity group:
That underscores the point: With or without the First Amendment, calls for genocide against Jews — or even proxies for such sentiments, such as calling for intifada against Jews or the elimination of Israel by chanting “from the river to the sea” — are, in the present context, calls for violence against a discrete ethnic or religious group. Such speech arguably incites violence, frequently inspires harassment of Jewish students and, without question, creates a hostile environment that can impair the equal educational opportunities of Jewish students.
Words are now “violence”, so the distinction between physical and psychic violence has all but vanished.
*From the Free Press we have a piece by Bari Weiss (citing other articles) called “How to really fix American education“. The whole short piece:
On Saturday, less than a week after the most sordid congressional testimony in recent memory, University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and chairman of the board of trustees Scott Bok resigned. Already, many are making the case that their resignations aren’t a moment of victory, but rather another sorry example of cancellation.
That’s the debate some editors at The Free Press are having right now in Slack.
Our own Peter Savodnik believes that Magill’s resignation is lamentable: “Her resignation is a blow to academic freedom. It amounts to little more than a cave—yet another prominent American institution succumbing to the angry mob.” For Jewish students, he argues, “it will make it worse by making an already illiberal academic environment even more illiberal.”(Read Peter’s essay here.)
I agree with Peter that being a good steward of the university’s brand and mission—and furthering that brand and mission through fundraising—is the main job of a university president. But Magill didn’t lose her job because she was canceled; she lost her job because she revealed in front of the country that she was not up to the task. She embarrassed Penn. And in the process of that hearing she exposed the grotesque hypocrisy not just at her university, but inside modern American higher education.
A quick thought experiment: imagine if large numbers of students and professors had marched through the campus of Penn over the past two months saying that all black people should go back to Africa and whoever remains should be subjected to genocide. Should the president of Penn defend those people merely as exercising their rights to free speech?
I think that it would be monstrous to do so.
Yet that’s what happened when the ACLU defended (and the courts approved) a Nazi march through the Jewish suburb of Skokie, Illinois in 1978, including a display of swastikas. (The march never took place.)
It doesn’t mean that students wouldn’t have the legal right to scream for a violent uprising against Jews or anyone else. Indeed, as the good lawyers at white-shoe law firm WilmerHale clearly pointed out to Magill and the other presidents who appeared before Congress, legally, of course they do. But the job of a university president is not merely to highlight basic constitutional rights. It’s also to form and lead a community with a singular aim: the pursuit of truth.
Here Weiss is starting down the slippery slope of distinguishing legal rights from what should be done on campus. For freedom of speech, I disagree with her. There are other ways to mitigate tension than to prohibit the utterance of words that adhere to the First Amendment.
My main point here is that Magill’s resignation, by itself, doesn’t solve anything. But it—along with the turmoil at Harvard—marks an important moment. Now everyone can see how deeply academia is broken. And you can’t fix something until you look, carefully and realistically, at the thing itself.
Yes, academia is broken. But it’s not broken because of too-strict adherence to the First Amendment. It’s broken because DEI has too much power, that there’s hypocrisy in treating different identity groups, and that colleges have bought into critical social justice.
Weiss also touts two new pieces from the paper as must-reads:
The first, a searing essay by Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, argues that “all parents in the world who want to see their children grow up in a free society marked by tolerance and humanity should recommend their children not study at these places of shame.”
The second, by historian Niall Ferguson, looks back at how Germany’s universities became the handmaidens to Hitler. “Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill morality,” he writes, “has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich.”
*The pessimistic Elder of Ziyon, an anonymous Jewish writer, quotes an Economist/You Gov poll and gives his summary this title: “The haters have won. Young Americans are becoming more Antisemitic. US Jewry may be doomed.” Emphasis is in the article.
A new survey by The Economist/YouGov of Americans confirms, and goes beyond, other recent polls that point to a frightening future for American Jews.
The big news from this poll is that a large number of Americans aged 18-29 are ignorant, anti-Zionist and antisemitic.
Less than half of Americans under 30 – 46% – feel that denying the Holocaust is antisemitic. The rest said either it wasn’t (17%) or they weren’t sure (37%.)
That’s incredible ignorance. And that ignorance follows throughout the poll.
Only 38% felt that it was antisemitic to say that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than the US.
20% of young Americans themselves say the Holocaust was a myth, the highest percentage of all demographic groups surveyed (liberal/conservative, Republican/Democrat, male/female). One in five Americans under 30 say it was a myth! What will the percentage be in the next generation?
For all the following results, young Americans had the highest poll results across all demographics:
23% of them felt that the Holocaust was “exaggerated.”28% say Jews have too much influence in America.36% say Israel exploits Holocaust victimhood for its own purposes.33% support boycotting Israeli products.31% say Israel has too much control over global affairs.30% say the interests of Israelis are at odds with the interests of the rest of the world.19% say Israel has no right to exist.32% say Israel is an apartheid state, behind only liberals (36%),40% say Israel is deliberately trying to wipe out the Palestinian population, behind only liberals (48%.)That is a truly astonishing and troubling percentage of young Americans who cannot distinguish reality from lies. And in general, the younger people are, the more unmoored they are from basic facts.
Yes, that’s true, and antisemitism is coming to the fore, but I’m not sure it’s increasing rather than just becoming more evident. Surely it’s higher than most of us want, but I’m not yet prophesying doom, nor planning a move to Israel.
*Although Harvard President Claudine Gay has substantial support from her faculty, the NYT reports that her future is still not certain, and one Harvard professor gave her odds of 50/50 if staying on. I consider her not that competent, but it would be much harder to get rid of her because she’s Harvard’s first black woman president, and the “optics wouldn’t be good.”
The future of Harvard University’s president, Claudine Gay, was on the line on Monday as the school’s governing body met amid calls for her removal following the widely criticized comments she made last week about antisemitism on campus.
As donors ratcheted up a pressure campaign to oust Dr. Gay, about 700 members of Harvard’s faculty came to her defense in several open letters. One, from Black faculty members, called the attacks on the president “specious and politically motivated.” The letter, which was drafted and signed by some of Harvard’s most prominent professors, said that Dr. Gay “should be given the chance to fulfill her term to demonstrate her vision for Harvard.”
Dr. Gay, who assumed the university’s top job in July, is Harvard’s first Black president.
Critics of Dr. Gay, too, pressed their case publicly. One of the most outspoken, William A. Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager, wrote on the social media site X on Sunday evening that “President Gay’s mishandling of October 7th and its aftermath on campus have led to the metastasis of antisemitism to other universities and institutions around the world.”
A letter expressing “no confidence” in Dr. Gay was also gaining support on Monday. Signed by Harvard students and alumni, it urged her to resign or be relieved of her position. “It is not appropriate for Claudine Gay to serve as President of Harvard, as she does not represent our collective values or the Harvard that we have come to know,” that letter said.
I don’t think that donors or social media should decide Gay’s fate, or influence the Board of Overseers should let themselves be influenced by it. I don’t think that Gay should be fired for what she said before Congress. I just don’t think she should have been hired in the first place, as she didn’t have a particularly distinguished career in either her academic field (political science) or in administration. It’s pretty clear that she was an affirmative-action choice, and that’s what will make it nearly impossible for Harvard to push her out—even if they decide to do that. There are also accusations of her plagiarizing in both her doctoral thesis and subsequent papers. I initially dismissed these, but after having seen the examples they see pretty damning.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is plumping for you know what:
Hili: Are you interrupting your writing?A: Yes, I’m going to make myself a cup of coffee.Hili: I’m going with you.
Hili: Przerywasz pisanie?Ja: Tak, idę zrobić sobie kawę.Hili: Idę z tobą.
*******************
From Stacy; this is on the Obvious Plant Instagram site but I’m sure this is a one-off:
A duck meme from Killian, with a real quote (my emphasis):
Another duplicitous product from I can’t remember where:
From Masih, a suspect beat up like crazy, apparently before being arrested:
Shocking display of brutality by Islamic agents: a suspect, merely live on Instagram from home, faces harsh treatment. The exact accusation remains unclear, yet it’s a grim reflection of a regime relying on beatings, torture, and execution. A grim testament to the mullahs’… pic.twitter.com/c1Bww9cKkE
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) December 11, 2023
A good answer to a question everyone on the liberal MSM is asking:
Israelis don't have the luxury of not fighting Hamas. Because if we don't bring the Hamas October 7 monsters to justice, they'll do this all over again. @CNN pic.twitter.com/Kkp36i0NFr
— Eylon Levy (@EylonALevy) December 9, 2023
Indolent snow art, sent by Jez:
Someone is bored.. 😂 pic.twitter.com/JEuwZwF920
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) December 11, 2023
From Barry, who calls this “what the hell was I thinking?”
Mistakes were made.. 😅 pic.twitter.com/Py21A2iScO
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) December 5, 2023
From Luana. Is self-segregation like this okay?
“Our students affiliate voluntarily with whichever dorm they want to. It’s not exclusionary, it’s actually positive selection by students.”@MIT President Kornbluth when @RepBurgessOwens asks about “Chocolate City,” a Blacks-only dorm, and whether a whites-only dorm would be OK. pic.twitter.com/zaGHdmVlLW
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) December 5, 2023
From the Auschwitz Memorial, a Scot who lived but three weeks in the camp:
12 December 1892 | John Fletcher was born in Dundee in Scotland. In 1921 he became a French citizen and changed his name to Jean.
In #Auschwitz from 8 July 1942.
No. 45544
He perished in the camp on 29 July 1942. pic.twitter.com/z1CCzIgdUc— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) December 12, 2023
Two tweets from Matthew. First, a rare shot of the world’s only marine lizard, the Galápagos marine iguana, having some underwater noms:
🔥Galapagos Marine Iguana' daily routine. pic.twitter.com/eWxdtRY7PN
— NatureIsAmazing (@OurNatureRocks) December 10, 2023
And a beautiful stag. I’ll put the clip of him roaring below:
Close up with Huge Wild Stag on #Exmoor late in rut of 2023 rut. Longer clip with him also roaring athttps://t.co/uaqC60g2pH@DickKingSmith #wildlife #deer #MondayMood pic.twitter.com/XYKtFX1rcO
— Langbein Wildlife (@JochenLangbein) December 4, 2023
ROAR!
Corn Man (assuming it is him on the skateboard) is clearly wearing a non corn coloured sweater. He is a traitor to the cause.
On this day:
1866 – Oaks explosion: The worst mining disaster in England kills 361 miners and rescuers.
1870 – Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina becomes the second black U.S. congressman.
1901 – Guglielmo Marconi receives the first transatlantic radio signal (the letter “S” [•••] in Morse Code), at Signal Hill in St John’s, Newfoundland.
1935 – The Lebensborn Project, a Nazi reproduction programme, is founded by Heinrich Himmler.
1941 – The Holocaust: Adolf Hitler declares the imminent extermination of the Jews at a meeting in the Reich Chancellery.
1945 – The People’s Republic of Korea is outlawed in the South, by order of the United States Army Military Government in Korea.
1963 – Kenya declares independence from Great Britain.
1969 – The Piazza Fontana bombing; a bomb explodes at the headquarters of Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura (the National Agricultural Bank) in Piazza Fontana in Milan, Italy, killing 17 people and wounding 88. The same afternoon, three more bombs are detonated in Rome and Milan, and another is found unexploded.
1988 – The Clapham Junction rail crash kills thirty-five and injures hundreds after two collisions of three commuter trains—one of the worst train crashes in the United Kingdom.
2000 – The United States Supreme Court releases its decision in Bush v. Gore.
2012 – North Korea successfully launches its first satellite, Kwangmyŏngsŏng-3 Unit 2.
2015 – The Paris Agreement relating to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is adopted. [Meanwhile, it looks like COP 28 is going to overrun after the final draft agreement was rejected.]
2021 – Dutch Formula One racing driver Max Verstappen wins the controversial 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, beating seven-time World Champion Lewis Hamilton to become the first Formula One World Champion to come from the Netherlands.
Births:
1805 – Henry Wells, American businessman, co-founded Wells Fargo and American Express (d. 1878).
1821 – Gustave Flaubert, French novelist (d. 1880).
1863 – Edvard Munch, Norwegian painter (d. 1944).
1870 – Walter Benona Sharp, American businessman, co-founded Hughes Tool Company (d. 1912).
1881 – Louise Thuliez, French school teacher, resistance fighter during World War I and World War II and author (d. 1966).
1893 – Edward G. Robinson, American actor (d. 1973).
1915 – Frank Sinatra, American singer, actor, and producer (d. 1998).
1918 – Joe Williams, American singer and pianist (d. 1999).
1924 – Ed Koch, American politician, 105th Mayor of New York City (d. 2013).
1927 – Robert Noyce, American inventor and businessman, co-founded the Intel Corporation (d. 1990).
1940 – Dionne Warwick, American singer.
1943 – Dickey Betts, American musician and songwriter.
1943 – Grover Washington, Jr., American singer-songwriter, saxophonist, and producer (d. 1999).
1947 – Chris Mullin, English journalist and politician. [Helped overturn the wrongful conviction of the Birmingham Six. His published diaries are excellent.]
1949 – Bill Nighy, English actor.
1957 – Sheila E., American singer and musician.
1962 – Tracy Austin, American tennis player and sportscaster.
1972 – Wilson Kipketer, Kenyan-Danish runner. [Second fastest of all time over 800 metres, setting the world record and breaking his own record two more times all in 1997. He dominated the 800 m distance for a decade, remaining undefeated for a three-year period and running 8 of the 17 currently all-time fastest times.]
1975 – Mayim Bialik, American actress, neuroscientist, and author. [On November 6, 2023, Bialik and Noa Tishby stated that they were against calls for a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Palestine saying, “No country in the world would be asked to stop protecting itself under attack from all of its borders”.]
1994 – Otto Warmbier, American student imprisoned in North Korea (d. 2017).
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above:
1921 – Henrietta Swan Leavitt, American astronomer and academic (b. 1868).
1939 – Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., American actor, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1883).
1941 – César Basa, Filipino lieutenant and pilot (b. 1915). [First Filipino fighter-pilot casualty of WWII. He and five other fighter pilots successfully fought off 54 Japanese A6M Zero fighters; Basa joined the battle with just 15 minutes of fuel left after a two-hour reconnaissance mission. He received a fatal head injury when a Japanese fighter strafed his aircraft.]
1968 – Tallulah Bankhead, American actress (b. 1902).
1985 – Anne Baxter, American actress (b. 1923).
1999 – Joseph Heller, American novelist, short story writer, and playwright(b. 1923).
2007 – Ike Turner, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1931).
2014 – Norman Bridwell, American author and illustrator, created Clifford the Big Red Dog (b. 1928).
2020 – John le Carré, English author (b. 1931).
Kate Cox has left Texas to have an abortion. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/11/texas-abortion-kate-cox-lawsuit
This is itself illegal in some, but not all counties in Texas, I believe.
Fr. Dr. Blancke is absolutely incensed over this issue. She went to school and started practicing in Tx, and we still have a home there.
It has always amazed me that so many people who value liberty and personal autonomy cannot see that those beliefs are incompatible with micromanaging women’s reproductive choices.
I have tried to gently pry logical arguments from the few people I know that are anti-abortion. I come up with three rationales-
1. They are religious, and follow church edicts without question.
2. They use childish reasoning. Abortion is an unpleasant thing, so it should be banned.
3. They have convinced themselves that they are standing up for the handicapped.
My mother-in law, who was a Nurse in Texas for over 40 years, has observed that abortion prohibitions lead invariably to high suicide rates among young girls.
Max,
I venture forth here hesitantly because this is not an issue with which I often engage, as the partisans of both sides are prone to “ready, fire, aim” without hearing any nuance or seeing any merit in the other. Nor can we cover the topic comprehensively in a comments section. That said, I offer this as a fourth rationale: they believe that the child is a human being worthy of protection like any other human being. (And here I am speaking of the majority of abortion cases, where medical risks afflict neither mother nor child, where neither rape nor incest are involved.) As most Americans do not support abortion up until the time of birth, I suspect that most Americans have a sense that at some point in utero the heap of cells becomes a person. There is a reason why activists do not want pictures shown of the late-term aborted; it is the same reason why some in leadership do not like videos showing the realities of warfare or pictures of the coffins of returning soldiers to get too much publicity. The images humanize the events; they call one to consider the costs even if the cause is just. In this humanization one can sense the tragedy. Yes, tragedy. How many among us—even those who support choice—really see the aborted at any stage no differently than we might see the rooting out of tooth decay, or the tossing away of a diseased tonsil? For those who see a worthy life in the unborn, they cannot comprehend how the physical passage through the birth canal somehow endows one with dignity and right to protection, whereas, unborn, unseen, the child has no such right. When this perceived right of the child to protection collides with the right of a woman to have values, fears, or priorities that are incompatible with the continued life of the child—again, we are not speaking of the well-touted rape, incest, and medical exceptions—then some who are pro-life choose to side with the party who is most defenseless. It’s not that they don’t see the competing right to autonomy, a right they generally value. They simply don’t see autonomy as being absolute when its exercise eliminates another’s life.
I was trying to confine my remarks to the more specific issue of terminations for medical issues.
You certainly bring up the rationale for opposing abortion in general, and do so thoroughly and well.
My thinking on the issue tends towards natural rights. I think everyone agrees that a baby, having been born, is entitled to it’s own basic rights, separate from that of the parents. Much of the debate seems to revolve around defining when the child obtains those rights, which also come with government authority to take custody of and responsibility for the child if abuse or neglect is proven.
In Texas right now, it seems like the child gains those rights on conception, and at that moment it’s welfare is subject to the dictates of the state. The only method the state has to ensure that it’s requirements are met is to control the behavior of the mother, and any interaction she has with her physician.
Which, as you say, conflicts with her autonomy. If we follow the slippery slope, then the state can require her to take prenatal vitamins, prohibit her from engaging in behavior that they decide poses a risk to the fetus, and prosecute her if she does not obey. Perhaps that will not happen.
I decided long ago that the best policy is to treat the baby as a person from the moment of birth. Anything less puts women under undue scrutiny from and authority of, a state that might well have different priorities than she.
It is by no means a simple issue, and one is always able to come up with hypothetical situations that make it much more complicated. If we were to draw the line and say that what happens inside a woman’s body is outside the purview and authority of the state, I think we would be better off.
Did anyone see the eXtweet that was deleted, shown here :
https://x.com/chayaraichik10/status/1734402857020125417?s=46
It says Emhof invented a new Chanukah story.
Re Texas Supreme Court: what the court said was that the doctor stated a sincere belief in the need for abortion but did not say that an abortion was reasonably necessary medical treatment. It left open the possibility of returning to the district court this time invoking the magic words — but of course the woman lacks the time for the process. The word is pusillanimous.
The TX anti-abortion law was written to be purposely vague. Efforts by medical professionals to clarify it have been ignored.
This way, the Biblebangers don’t have to come out and admit that there will be no exceptions, a position which is a political non-starter, to say the least. They can just have their people in the court system reject any and every request for an exception.
L
We know how universities would use the ability to restrict speech, because they’ve been doing it. They would shut down viewpoints that conflict with Progressive opinions and intrude those opinions into official policies.
I agree that it would be very hard for Harvard to sack their first black-woman president after only a few months, but that should still happen.
It’s not only her lack of competence and her meagre and derivative academic career, it’s that she is a DEI entity through and through and so can’t be the person to guide Harvard down a better path. Her treatment of Roland Fryer, just because Fryer’s research findings contradicted DEI ideology, is an example.
“As Gay herself said in her opening remarks to the lawmakers, “… The free exchange of ideas is the foundation upon which Harvard is built.” A mere two days after Gay mouthed these words, however, Harvard canceled a student event featuring two Democratic lawmakers …” (link).
Harvard Corp Fellows announced this morning their unanomous support for Claudine Gay. No surprise: almost exactly the same board that hired her to do what she is doing…prioritize DEI. Even if she were fired, the same board would have the same specs for her replacement. So settle in folks.
On the abortion case in Texas, I recommend the piece in The New Republic, by Matt Ford, responding to some of the details of the case, in particular the idea that the risk of uterine rupture from a Cesarean does not fulfill the legal criterion for serious risk to a major physical function. As Ford says, it would be difficult to exceed the malice of that claim.
Sorry, that’s not correct. The issue isn’t the risk of uterine rupture from a Cesarean section. The risk it that of uterine rupture if a woman with a prior section goes into labour, which an elective C-section is intended to prevent. The article states this correctly.
The article states further:
When Paxton asked the Texas Supreme Court to intervene and block the TRO last week, he went even further to second-guess their medical judgment. “Ms. Cox claims an elevated risk of uterine rupture if she delivers the baby vaginally because she has had two prior C-sections. She therefore believes a C-section is the safer option if the baby survives to term. But while Ms. Cox alleges ‘that a C-section at full term would make subsequent pregnancies higher risk,’ [she and her doctor] plead no facts suggesting that a subsequent pregnancy would place Ms. Cox ‘at risk of death’ or result in a ‘serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.’”
https://newrepublic.com/article/177471/ken-paxton-kate-cox-abortion
A-G Paxton is correct and he did not second-guess a medical judgment. I’ve read the pleading (I think it’s called) in which Ms. Cox asked for the exemption from the law. It’s true: she and her doctor did not cite any facts that would support a claim that a subsequent pregnancy would place her life or bodily function in danger if she has to carry this pregnancy to term or until it dies. The subsequent pregnancy (which she wants) would probably be delivered by C-section to avoid the risk of uterine rupture from going into labour.
What she wanted in Texas was to abort the current pregnancy early, so as not to need a C-section when this current malformed fetus decided it was time to be born. What Paxton is observing, correctly, is that her doctor didn’t claim that a C-C-section at the end of this pregnancy would impair her ability (or risk her life) to have another C-section later. This is hair-splitting but the law clearly intends to prohibit the abortion of malformed fetuses before they die and the A-G is thwarting her attempt to get around the law. That’s what attorneys-general do.
Her doctor could have said, “A fourth C-section is so much more dangerous to the mother than a third C-section that every means should be employed to get the woman’s family sorted by avoiding a fourth.” This doesn’t seem to be true, so he wisely didn’t so claim in the pleading. (I’m saying “he” for the doctor just it make it easier to distinguish patient from doctor with pronouns.)
Of course it is reasonable and sensible to want to abort early instead of delivering (by any route) a doomed (or even stillborn) baby later. Obviously. Unfortunately it is illegal in Texas and I think Paxton is correct on what the doctor’s opinion said and what it didn’t.
As to whether Paxton is right that he could have got a conviction despite the Court’s TRO, who knows? Her doctor and hospital decided not to take the chance.
Well, at least that was the plan, and that’s what SCOTUS held that the Nazis had a right to do under the First Amendment, but the march never actually took place in Skokie. Instead, after all the federal and state litigation, it was eventually moved to a public forum in downtown Chicago next to the federal courthouse. See here.
My understanding is that the march started on a small bridge in suburban Chicago, where Henry Gibson ended up in the creek. Only a couple days later did the march, escorted by numerous members of law enforcement and the military, make its way to the Richard J. Daley Center (not the federal courthouse), ending at the Office of the Cook County Assessor.
Fair to assume that “invariably fatal either in utero or very soon after death” is a typo, I assume
Ceiling Cat, the link to this Hili dialogue didn’t work on Twitter: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/…/tuesday-hili-dialogue…/
I mean the link to this Hili. I see what I copied above takes us to another post of yours, which isn’t a Hili post, even though the link is for a Hili post. So, link broken. I noticed since I often come here from twitter, from which I get a “403 forbidden” error.
Fascinating! I had no idea that a marine lizard exists.
Reminded of this from googles “most-searched” Top 10 quotes in NZ.
“How big is his hole?” Nicola Willis in parliament questioning Grant Robertson about a fiscal hole.
Robertson’s reply “That is not in the public interest, I can assure you.”
Q and A New Zealand parliament. Nicola Willis is now our Finance minister.
“20% of young Americans themselves say the Holocaust was a myth.”
What I found nearly as astounding was that another 30% said that they could “neither agree nor disagree” with the assertion that “The Holocaust is a myth.” Was this ignorance, or was it fear of saying what they believe? As to those who strongly disagreed with the “myth” statement: only 43% did so.