Oh, great: the State Department apparently wants to establish an advisory Commission on Unalienable Rights, which purpose is to “provide fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.”
I am no Benthamite; nonetheless, he nails this: Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.
Status determines treatment.
I.
I make this point to my bioethics students every semester. US regulations on what can be done to which research subjects illustrates this nicely: it is acceptable to kill mice, for example, in the course of research, while human subjects cannot be killed. And while research on chimpanzees isn’t banned, federal funding for such work has effectively ended.
Human embryos are both protected and not: the Dickey-Wicker amendment prohibited all federal funding on research involving the creation or destruction of embryos, but privately-funded research continues. And, of course, hundreds of thousands of embryos are created every year in fertility clinics across the country.
And then there’s the matter of abortion. Some consider the fertilized egg to be fully human, some the early embryo, some the fetus, and some, a baby. As I’ve noted elsewhere, I take a developmental view of the matter, figuring that the fetus gains personhood status at some point in the third trimester.
It’s clearly human tissue from the beginning—a Homo sapiens zygote won’t develop into a puppy—but when is it one of us, deserving of the same protections we grant ourselves? That’s what the fuss is all about.
II.
Well, partly. The other part of the fuss has to do with the status of the person gestating said embryo/fetus.
I say person because not everyone capable of gestating another being is a woman: some are transmen, and some don’t identify as a woman. It’s important to recognize that.
It’s also important to recognize that an attack on the right to decide whether to continue or terminate a pregnancy is an attack on women.
Whether you are a man or genderqueer or cis-gender, if you are capable of getting pregnant, then to the anti-abortionists that capacity in and of itself overrides all other identities and considerations and marks you as an untrustworthy being, i.e., a woman.
You—we—are hosts, victims of abortion-violence, sinners, irresponsible, would-be murderers, all due to our capacity to gestate. All due to our woman-ness.
It doesn’t matter if we can’t or won’t get pregnant (in which case we are lesser women, unable or unwilling to fulfill or womanly destinies): what defines us, in the ideology of the antiabortionists, is the ability to gestate a zygote through to delivery. It might be conceded that we can do other things besides gestating, but once the egg envelopes the sperm or the conceptus begins burrowing into uterine lining or a clump of cardiac cells begin beating, then and only then can we become fully woman.
By which is meant: subordinate.
It’s not only the from-the-moment-of-conception antiabortionists who think this; cf this exchange after the somewhat-pro-choice Damon Linker referred to the fetus as a (tiny) human:
This is a perfectly normal kind of exchange among the somewhat-pro-choice: I don’t support outlawing abortion in the first weeks, but later on? Bien sûr!
What’s wrong with this? After all, didn’t I just say I hold to a developmental view of the fetus?
Well, do you think the pregnant person isn’t also able to make such judgements? Do you think she needs laws to tell her that an 8-week embryo is not the same as an 8-month fetus?
Saying you need laws and regulations to enforce this distinction is to say that you don’t trust pregnant people—women—to make this distinction for themselves.
Alabama Senator Clyde Chambliss extends this argument to its nonsensical ends, apparently arguing that a woman could only end a pregnancy as long as she didn’t know she was pregnant. That is, once Eve gains knowledge, she is no longer to be trusted to act on that knowledge.
The somewhat prochoicers might be unhappy that I tie their thoughtful uneasiness to Chambliss’s confident ignorance, but they are different points along the same line drawn to downgrade the paradigmatic woman—the pregnant person—to someone unable to make up her own mind.
III.
Oh, and then there’s this:
The naked embryo lacks status. It can only gain status once located in and at the expense of s/he who would bring it into the world.
There can be only one person, and the one who’s pregnant, isn’t it.
Yes, we’ll soon need to set up Jane Highways to get women from the Gilead states to Canada free states, but in the meantime, Jezebel put together a list of organizations to throw money at to support women.
For those of us who haven’t already been fighting, gear up: it’s gonna get worse, and soon.
I just though of that; I think I like it. Yeah, I think so.
Maybe I’ll add an “!” after the breach; maybe I’ll choose something else, but I think this might be a winner.
And while I hear Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V‘s in this, there’s also a little bit of LEEROY JENKINS! in this, don’t you think? Or is that just me?
Eh, both work.
For better and for worse, the 2020 presidential campaign is upon us. This means I have to come up with a theme for campaign-related posts.
I’m a little leery of doing this, given that my jokey “Circus Maximus” theme turned out to be horrifyingly on the nose. Also, this next campaign is going to be a shitstorm (“Shitstorm 2020”?), and, man, coming up with something that doesn’t make me wail or want to defenestrate my computer is going to take some work.
I have no real ideas at this point. Final Countdown? Apocalyptic, sure, but without that soupçon of wit to lighten it all up. Maybe something from REM’s “End of the World”. . . ? Nah. And, actually, just typing that, I realize that I don’t want anything apocalyptic. Yeah, things suck, but compared to climate change, the stakes of this election are. . . less.
How’s that for perspective? “We’re killing our planet and its creatures, so the fuckery of the Republicans is comparatively minor.”
So I’ll need something serious, mostly-but-not-completely earnest. Mordant. I’ll think of something.
~~~
As for the primary, I’m not planning to say much about it beyond the fact that I don’t fucking want to hear one second more of the Bernie/Hillary rehash. Enough. Both candidates lost. Next!
~~~
I have little faith that the (mainstream) media will do a decent job of covering the elections, and if people are treating the polls as anything other than a nerd-game at this point, well, I don’t know what to say to that.
~~~
I stated back in 2016 that the election broke me, and, yep, still broken. I will make no predictions, and will remain leery (which I failed to do the last time around) of those who do. I’ll pay attention to the polls once 2020 rolls around and listen to smart people say smart things, and, yeah, I’ll consider the odds, but I ain’t laying any bets down.
Honestly, I don’t know how I’ll cover the elections. That my old knowledge has shattered doesn’t mean every piece was wrong, but I don’t know how, or how far I’ll go, to put them together.
On y va.
Reading something else, I came across this, and decided, what the hell, let’s listen:
That’s nice. Long, languid, a bit of a urgency, then easing back; fits a late-night mood.
~~~
I didn’t know much about Traffic, so wasn’t really a fan, but my college therapist, N, was.
I remember her referring to “Stevie Winwood.”
Stevie. I knew “Steve Winwood,” who’d come out with a solo album in the ’80s. I had a copy, and must have mentioned it to her.
Huh, I just looked him up on YouTube, and one of the suggestions was for “Arc of a Diver.” I think that was the song she mentioned, described to me. I can still see her motioning her arm over.
That wasn’t my song, though.
It’s not that I was a huge Steve Winwood fan, but there was one night, at the Regent St Retreat, when “Higher Love” came on, and I just, I just danced.
In a time I mostly stumbled, this night, a regular week-day night, after work, I just danced, closing my eyes and wrapped in the glow of the dance floor lights.
I don’t know if I told N that—I told her so few good things—but wouldn’t it be nice if this was what I mentioned to N, that this is what prompted her to tell me about her own fondness for Stevie Winwood.
I’d like to think that this was something good that we shared.
No, the Senate won’t convict—remember, impeachment is only the first part of the process to remove a president—but that a conviction is unlikely does not mean no investigation or vote should take place.
I’ve often snarked on tactics and consequentialism and overall Machiavellianism, but even at my bitchiest, I’ve never gone full nihilist. Politics matters, and elemental to that politics is some understanding of principle.
Political principle isn’t a pure thing, but at its root are two lines: This must be done and This must not be done. Where you draw those lines, how much space is between them, what you think is justified inside of those lines, are all at play in politics, but if you don’t have any lines at all, then what you’re talking about isn’t politics, but something else entirely.
I understand the concerns that House Dems have about backlash and every other downside to impeachment proceedings, but, goddammit, if protecting our (shabby) democracy and trying to expose and inoculate against (further) corruption of our elections isn’t worth the risk, then what the hell is even the point of being in politics?
Oh, and yeah, this goes for Republicans too, but good fucking luck finding any at the federal level who haven’t gone full nullification.
So this falls to House Democrats. Some may be afraid, some may not see the point, but let there be enough to say: This must be done.
My mum’s a McCue, from a line which apparently traces back to 19th century Cork. So I’m of Irish descent. There might be some from my dad’s side as well—he’s a true American mosaic—but the McCue is a solid line.
That said, having grown up in southeastern Wisconsin, the culture was more German (which, yep, my ancestors also were) than anything else. Bit of Dutch, bit of Swedish, some Polish, heading toward Milwaukee, but I grew up in the land of bratwurst, sommer sausages, stumpf fiddles, and polkas.
Still, McCue, which was enough at some point in grad school to set me off on an “I’M IRISH” kick.
It was a shallow kick—I still haven’t read any good histories on Éire—but even a few inches will lead one into jigs, reels, Irish punk, and, as they happened to be recording when I was kicking—Black 47.
I do try to keep in mind the Pogues’s line “we celebrate the land that made us refugees” to keep any romanticism in check, but even a nationalist-skeptic like me gets choked up at a good, rousing, Rising song.
As a teen I took great pride in my cynicism; now, even though that seems a cop-out, a way to justify resignation, it’s tough to avoid.
So, yeah, I know there’s a fair amount of bullshit about the revolution and a dangerously blinkered revival of the (New) IRA, but however contrived my Irish identity, and whatever my unease with nationalism, I am not ungrateful that I can still be moved by a song celebrating liberation.
Over 8 years ago the economist Robin Hanson wrote a post on “gentle silent rape.”
It was a thought experiment, an attempt to understand why rape is punished more often and severely than cuckoldry, something he found “puzzling,” given that, as he had argued in a previous post
Biologically, cuckoldry is a bigger reproductive harm than rape, so we should expect a similar intensity of inherited emotions about it.
Men would rather be raped than cuckholded, he’d said—no mention is made of what women prefer—but in trying to figure out what, besides sexism, could account for the discrepancy in the social response to rape and cuckholdry, he wrote that
It occurred to me recently that we can more clearly compare cuckoldry to gentle silent rape. Imagine a woman was drugged into unconsciousness and then gently raped, so that she suffered no noticeable physical harm nor any memory of the event, and the rapist tried to keep the event secret. Now drugging someone against their will is a crime, but . . . .
Now compare the two cases, cuckoldry and gentle silent rape. . . . Consider also that it tends to be easier to prove cuckoldry than rape, so if we avoid applying the law to hard-to-prove harms, that should favor punishing cuckoldry more than rape.
I cut out all sorts of nonsense—by all means, go read the entire, short, post for yourself—as it focuses on what should be the appropriate punishment for cuckholdry (fines? torture?), and I, like so, so many others before me, want to focus on the gentle silent rape.
Why now? Well, I heard a couple of interviews with Miriam Toews, a Canadian author who wrote a novel based on the real-life mass drugging and rape of Mennonite women by Mennonite men in a Bolivia, a years-long ordeal which was only exposed in 2009.
I’d never heard of this before, and I won’t go into the entire, horrifying and enraging tale here—again, click on the links to read what happened—but upon listening to an interview today I was reminded of that old Hanson post: Hey, didn’t some economist write about the relative non-harms of rape of which the women have no memory?
It was a bonkers post, one which Hanson continues to defend (while declaring that any mention of him as pro-rape is “bordering on slander“). Hey, he’s just, y’know, asking questions.
I’m all in favor of asking questions, and it’s important for scholars to turn conventions inside-out. To analyze a phenomenon fully, it makes sense to poke at it from every angle, to press even on the sore spots.
But if, as Hanson claims, you’re simply “trying to understand the world and work out puzzles and theories,” then you’ve got to bring those puzzles and theories back to the world you’re trying to understand.
He says he’s a “nerdy intellectual type” who’s “probably personally less able to and inclined to think those things through,” which is a helluva statement from someone who’s trying to understand the world.
It’s also irresponsible as hell.
By all means, apply your “simple evolutionary heuristic to ask roughly what would we guess the overall level of concerns about these things to be”, but then you need to, as the economistically-minded are so fond of saying, “mark to market”, to see if that heuristic or puzzle or theory actually does tell you anything about the phenomenon you’re prodding.
Had he done so, Hanson might have come across the story of the Mennonite women in Bolivia, might have considered whether gentle silent rape was even a thing worth conjuring, and whether he had any understanding of harm, much less the world, at all.
“Don’t touch me!”
That was pretty much my mantra throughout my teen years and into college. No hugs, no kisses, no thank you.
There’s no trauma beneath that, just an angry, depressed and otherwise-articulate kid who couldn’t figure out any other way to set boundaries, be they physical or emotional.
As I got older I eased up, and today can reasonably tolerate and even enjoy non-romantic physical affection. (Except for holding hands: hate that.) It’s been years and years since I’ve flinched at a friendly arm flung around my shoulder.
Which is good; flinching is socially awkward. Also, given that I live in a city in which I am often snug up against others on the train or bus—although most of us have the decency to pretend we each have our own space—it’s probably for the best I don’t freak when I don’t have at least 36″ between me and the next person.
You know what this is leading to, right? Fuckin’ Joe Biden.
I’ve certainly enjoyed the ‘Uncle Joe’ of the Obama years, the Onion bits about Camaro Joe and the guy who’d ‘get out over his skis,’ but it was always a scam—hell, I enjoyed it because it was a scam.
Oh, sure, he might really (really) like gettin’ up close ‘n personal (in that hoarse-whispered Scranton ‘Joey’) way, but the man was a senator from the state of banking and credit for decades and ended up VP and, jesus, you gotta be full of knives if you’re going to get anywhere in DC.
Especially if you’re going to be as folksy as Joe.
In fact, that folksiness was, if not all, then certainly also about the power. He was the one who pulled you in, who cracked the slightly-off jokes, who caressed your shoulders, and, uh, sniffed your hair—not you. He may not have been mean or nasty, but he was in charge. He liked being in charge.
There’s no point in disentangling motives: the power granted him the leeway to be touchy-feely, and the touchy-feely-ness perpetuated the power. It’s not complicated: he likes both.
I never met Biden and don’t know how I would have reacted had he leaned in, uninvited, toward me, but I’d like to think my inner teenager would have reared up and snarled.
AbsurdBeats 