Whited Sepulchers

A moving condemnation of New York's new infanticide law.

I have been hearing defenders say that the only women who would seek an abortion at nine months are those whose child poses a mortal threat to them. The argument is that the child must be removed for the mother's health, and is probably dying itself anyway. If so, you could see an argument that some sort of abortion is necessary to save the life of the mother, and the child cannot be saved; and in that case, at least utilitarians would think it unethical not to abort. (Catholics, of course, are taught that it is never right to do an evil action, even to prevent another evil.)

However, this study of later term abortions suggests that medical reasons aren't really the main reason.

Later abortion recipients experienced logistical delays (e.g., difficulty finding a provider and raising funds for the procedure and travel costs), which compounded other delays in receiving care. Most women seeking later abortion fit at least one of five profiles: They were raising children alone, were depressed or using illicit substances, were in conflict with a male partner or experiencing domestic violence, had trouble deciding and then had access problems, or were young and nulliparous.

"Nulliparous," if you don't want to look it up, means that they've never delivered a baby before.

Now this study is for 'after 20 weeks,' rather than 'nine months,' but it's interesting that "experiencing a medical emergency" isn't even one of the five profiles.

As I think of Mike's point, I wonder how this law could be constitutional. The 14th Amendment says "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside" and that no state shall "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Once the birth occurs, the argument that 'it's the woman's body, so it's her choice' clearly does not apply; and the child, having been born, is a citizen due the protection of the laws.

Unless, of course, the child is not a person. That's been the dodge all along.

The Backchannel

The core insight -- that people put on a public face different from who they are in confidence -- is so obvious as to be undeniable. Apparently, journalists really don't like to admit it.

And academia:

Since the beginning of my graduate education, I have been someone who other academics feel that they can come to in order to voice their shock and dismay at just how toxic the culture within academia has become. They tell stories about petty witch hunts and show trials within their departments. They share their fear about objecting to arguments they find unfair or unsupported. They say they feel compelled to follow current academic fads for fear of being labeled. They are convinced that stepping out of line with the constant search for offense will render them permanently unemployable, even though they are themselves progressive people. You’ve heard the litany before. They share it with me.

Because they know that they can trust that I won’t ever betray their confidence, and because of my (self-aggrandizing, I admit) indifference to my professional reputation, they email me. They find me at conferences. And they always say the same thing: I could never say this publicly, but…. The Tuvel situation is just one example of a pervasive culture of fear, a feeling that even when one has the strong sense that an injustice is being done, academia is not a place where such reservations can be freely voiced.

Some will insist that this is just the secretly conservative saying what they truly believe, that this is all white men decrying a changing academic world. I suppose on balance the backchannel to me is paler and maler than the academy writ large. But the truth is that all kinds of people discuss this stuff with me: white and black, male and female, trans and cis. And the people who approach me aren’t mostly those rare academic conservatives, who barely exist these days, but rather liberals and leftists who believe in the movement for equality but find that the way that movement operates in the contemporary university has become toxic and unjust.

I've had similar experiences. Not everyone in the academic world is completely sure of gun control; not everyone is committed to abortion rights. Some -- maybe most -- of the women doggedly pursuing academic careers would rather be home with their children.

They just can't admit it, not in public.

Up Helly Aa AAR

Sounds like the fire festival was a lot of fun.

However, it sounds like the festival may not be around much longer. It sounded like entirely too much fun for the current version of the UK, and the decision to form a "new squad called #MeToo" looks like an attempt to destroy it before any more fun is had.

I have no clever title for this

New York State passed the most permissive abortion law in US history.  Virginia says "hold my beer".

Now I've made few bones about the fact that I find the Federal government to be far too obtrusive in our lives.  I'm a (small 'l') libertarian who would rather let people figure out complex issues in their own lives and keep government out of it.  As such, while I find abortion morally hateful, I'd rather not have the government put it's greasy paws all over the issue (indeed, my solution is to leave abortion laws up to the States).

But let's be clear, this proposed law in Virginia legitimizes blatant infanticide.  No civilized nation on the planet has any qualms referring to a child born and breathing on its own, separated from the womb completely, as a human being.  Virginia's proposed law would then let the mother and two doctors declare "yeah, but it's inconvenient so put it to death".  Not withhold extraordinary care, not take it off life support, no... actual positive steps to kill the baby.

I literally cannot type coherently about this.  It's beyond insanity.

Everything is Racist? Mary Poppins and Coal Miners

The NYT runs a piece examining the underlying racism in Mary Poppins, the 1964 movie about a book from the early 20th century. The books were moreso, the movie eliding almost all of that content out. But it remains, sort of: there was an association with lower class men who got very dirty doing their work, and blacks whose condition was thought lower by nature. I recall reading about a similar thing from the Raj days, in which a British military officer was stunned to realize -- while his men were taking a communal bath on maneuvers -- that the lower-class infantrymen were white underneath their uniforms. All the marching in the sun made them darker, and he assumed they were somehow of a lower (i.e. darker, according to the fashion of the times) race.

A photo of coal miners relaxing after work receives similar treatment.

I might have thought this was all evidence of progress; even in 1964, people realized the old mode was a problem and began to elide it into non-racist forms. They were still classist, but those classes in Britain were rapidly fading even in the 1960s. That class consciousness was a major source of humor in Monty Python just because it was on the way out. The racism of the earlier period was already embarrassing in the 1960s, and was being written out.

Progress on classism, too, in the fact that working men no longer show up at the bar covered in filth from head to foot. Working conditions have improved dramatically, even for coal miners. If that weren't true, people wouldn't look at this photo and think, "Blackface!" They'd look at it and think, "Oh, coal miners."

But apparently actual progress is forbidden by progressives. We need to make sure to hold on to the grievances that actual progress might weaken, since the real goal isn't progress but power.

Authoritarians and "Patriotism"

Listen, it wouldn’t be fair to accuse presidential hopeful Kamala Harris of supporting state control over the means of all production. To this point she’s only focused on the energy, health care, auto-manufacturing and education sectors. Good candidates prioritize....

Human Dragons on Piles of Rubies

Hot Air was pretty close to agreement on that point last week.

Ocasio-Cortez is basically stating a premise that most Christians would hear in church — that the gross hoarding of wealth violates the self-sacrificing love that should exist among God’s children in terms of overall distribution of Creation’s bounty intended for all. Calling the system “immoral” might be a bit hyperbolic, but many people would at least agree that recent outcomes of our economic system have become imbalanced, if not warped. The problem isn’t capitalism itself but in our lack of effort to enforce anti-trust laws to keep wealth — and therefore political power — accruing into fewer and fewer hands. That trend has accelerated the rise of populism on both sides of the ideological divide and corroded confidence in our public institutions....

Shotgun Weddings in the UK

More knives and hammers than shotguns these days, I guess. But still.

Well, the practice is a little different too in that the forced marriage happens before sex, rather than as a consequence of it. And it might not lead to sex, either.

That's Just Orthodoxy

Headline: 'Co-founder of Satanic Temple: Pence "really scares me"'

Ivanhoe:

“I uncanonical!” answered the hermit; “I scorn the charge—I scorn it with my heels!—I serve the duty of my chapel duly and truly—Two masses daily, morning and evening, primes, noons, and vespers, 'aves, credos, paters'—-”

“Excepting moonlight nights, when the venison is in season,” said his guest.

“'Exceptis excipiendis'” replied the hermit, “as our old abbot taught me to say, when impertinent laymen should ask me if I kept every punctilio of mine order.”

“True, holy father,” said the knight; “but the devil is apt to keep an eye on such exceptions; he goes about, thou knowest, like a roaring lion.”

“Let him roar here if he dares,” said the friar; “a touch of my cord will make him roar as loud as the tongs of St Dunstan himself did. I never feared man, and I as little fear the devil and his imps. Saint Dunstan, Saint Dubric, Saint Winibald, Saint Winifred, Saint Swibert, Saint Willick, not forgetting Saint Thomas a Kent, and my own poor merits to speed, I defy every devil of them, come cut and long tail.—But to let you into a secret, I never speak upon such subjects, my friend, until after morning vespers.”

Ain't No God in Thailand

CNN:



Fox:

A Belarusian model, who said she had proof that President Trump’s campaign colluded with the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential election, has now backtracked and says she made up the claims....[T]he model now claims her story was just an effort to attract media attention and save her life while she was detained in Thailand.

“I think it saved my life, how can I regret it? If journalists had not come at that time and that story had not come to the newspapers, maybe I would die [be dead by] now,” she told CNN.

Can't blame her much for that. It's an old story.

A Reasonable Plan

Headline: "Abolish the Federal Government and Realign the Nation Based on Football."

It actually works out pretty well!

Reason: The Shutdown Proves We Can Shrink the Government

I'm willing to believe.

I do wonder, though, if Americans' emotional reactions to having government workers unemployed doesn't make it impractical. Nobody likes suffering, but the suffering associated with losing a job is inherent to private capitalism. Government jobs provide security, and who doesn't like security? Seeing all those people upset at losing their security was clearly upsetting to lots of ordinary Americans who sympathize.

To make the government much smaller is the wise move. Is it still within the realm of the possible, without waiting for the whole thing to first collapse under its own weight?

The Worst Candidate of All

We've seen a bunch of people throwing their hats in for 2020, but one of them is head and shoulders worse than all the rest: Sen. Kamala Harris.

How awful is she? Let us count the ways. Of course we know about her recent argument that membership in the Knights of Columbus should be thought disqualifying for judges, meaning that she violates her oath to uphold the Constitution and its prohibition of religious tests for office.

She is a politician who is confirmed in the Jackboot Thug approach to authority. She strongly supported granting search warrants against you based on no evidence beyond the fact that DNA found at the scene of a crime was similar to that of your relatives.

Harris was also a big booster of familial DNA searches, a controversial technique whereby investigators compare a DNA sample to other samples in a DNA database to find possible relatives, then use additional genetic testing and analysis to confirm the match, all in order to solve crimes. Due to privacy concerns, the technique hasn’t been adopted in Canada, and was outlawed in both Maryland and DC. Among the concerns are the not-infrequent cases of human error in DNA evidence, the fact that familial testing would disproportionately impact communities of color, the potential revelation of family secrets, and the already existing instances of mistakes being made with the technique....

In fact, California’s use of familial DNA testing is particularly invasive, as the state allows the collection and preservation of DNA samples from anyone who is arrested, even if they’re not charged with a crime. The ACLU originally sued to block California’s DNA collection when an Oakland woman had been arrested during a San Francisco protest against the Iraq War and forced to give a DNA sample despite not being charged with any crime.

She also supports civil asset forfeiture, in which the state can take your property without proving you guilty of anything, and you have to prove your innocence to get it back. She made it a practice to withhold exculpatory evidence from defense lawyers in criminal cases.

She also celebrated "using the stick" to make American families "behave," including sending poor parents, even single parents to jail if their kids were truant at school.

She has expansive ideas about how she'd like to use the new power she hopes to win.

But the queen of the ban was just getting starting. Along with banning private health insurance, Harris also wants to ban for-profit colleges, assault weapons, fossil fuels, personal cars, and presumably members of the Knights of Columbus serving as federal judges. It’s quite a list, and a sign of the times in the party of Jefferson and Jackson.

Speaking of health insurance, did you ever get any you only kind of hate after Obama's promise that you could keep the stuff you liked? Too bad, it's gone again.

And, of course, she's a committed opponent of the 2nd Amendment. She'd have to be. You couldn't leave Americans in possession of firearms before you made them give up their cars.

There may be no good candidates next year, but so far this is by far the worst one.

Up Helly Aa

Tuesday, 29th January is the annual Up Helly Aa festival in the Shetland Islands.

One of these years I just need to set aside January to spend in Scotland, with a slight trip into England for the Jorvik festival in York.

BB: Calvinist "Choose Your Own Adventure"

You'll never guess how it ends.

What we click on

From Jim Geraghty: North Dakotan columnist Rob Port with a difficult but accurate observation: “Free markets and democracy are very good at delivering people what they want, even when they claim they don’t want it.”

51st Highlanders

A part of the Dunkirk story you may not have heard.

A Documentary Debut

You're meant to be clever enough to understand that this is clever.

I always think, 'Abyssus abussum invocat,' and display a Tolkien-like wariness about even using the name. Perhaps that means I'm not clever enough. I do appreciate the attempts to defend a Constitutional principle; I don't, especially, appreciate the way in which actual religious belief is viewed as dispensable. There are many things I would do to tolerate and make room for sincere religious feeling that I wouldn't do at all for someone who's just trying to make a political point. The toleration of sincere religious belief is humane, in the strictest sense of the word; the other applies a kind of acid to the humane principle.

The worker's lament

David Burge on the carnage among the clickbait factory workers.

A Bishop Apologizes

Covington Catholic's bishop has submitted a page-long written apology for his conduct in last weekend's scandal.