Fred: This morning I took Mabel to the bank and the grocery store.
She's 97 and she likes Trump.
She likes the new justice because he opposes abortion.
She asked me how I felt about that and I said I did not agree with her and I regret seeing that argument coming up all over again.
But we talked about this subject for a while and she mentioned her grandson, who was born with a birth defect and only lived to be seven.
The child might have been aborted but they were glad they had him for those seven years.
Mabel also said her late husband Norris approved of abortion so it's different in every family.
I told Mabel that if the court overturns Roe v Wade, abortion will still be legal in California by act of the legislature.
She said she did not know that, but I said I was pretty sure of that.
A difficult subject for most people, but we got the groceries and she did her bank business and I got her home in one piece.
Alan: We are going to hear a lot about abortion.
Here is the distillation of my reading...
There is markedly less abortion in countries where abortion is safe and legal.
If your goal is to limit the number of aborted fetuses, support legal abortion.
If your goal is to increase the number of aborted fetuses, make abortion illegal.
Clearly this is counter-intuitive and therefore incomprehensible to people who chant: "Why, it's just common sense."
As a nation, we need a lot less common sense and a lot more uncommon sense.
Very often, appeals to "common sense" are subtle manifestations of self-centeredness whose purpose is to "justify" the postulate that "my opinion is just as good as knowledge."
I have a right-wing friend -- a hardcore biker to this day -- a guy who did hard time at Sing Sing for attempted murder.
For nearly 20 years "Georgie" forwarded me every right-wing mass emailing that appeared in his in-box.
Methodically, I corrected the logical, factual and contextual abominations.
One day, around the time "Georgie" stopped forwarding dittohead drivel, he said to me -- and I quote -- "I like being partly right."
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.” "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/07/abortion-rates-are-typically-two-times.html
She's 97 and she likes Trump.
She likes the new justice because he opposes abortion.
She asked me how I felt about that and I said I did not agree with her and I regret seeing that argument coming up all over again.
But we talked about this subject for a while and she mentioned her grandson, who was born with a birth defect and only lived to be seven.
The child might have been aborted but they were glad they had him for those seven years.
Mabel also said her late husband Norris approved of abortion so it's different in every family.
I told Mabel that if the court overturns Roe v Wade, abortion will still be legal in California by act of the legislature.
She said she did not know that, but I said I was pretty sure of that.
A difficult subject for most people, but we got the groceries and she did her bank business and I got her home in one piece.
Alan: We are going to hear a lot about abortion.
Here is the distillation of my reading...
There is markedly less abortion in countries where abortion is safe and legal.
If your goal is to limit the number of aborted fetuses, support legal abortion.
If your goal is to increase the number of aborted fetuses, make abortion illegal.
Clearly this is counter-intuitive and therefore incomprehensible to people who chant: "Why, it's just common sense."
As a nation, we need a lot less common sense and a lot more uncommon sense.
Very often, appeals to "common sense" are subtle manifestations of self-centeredness whose purpose is to "justify" the postulate that "my opinion is just as good as knowledge."
I have a right-wing friend -- a hardcore biker to this day -- a guy who did hard time at Sing Sing for attempted murder.
For nearly 20 years "Georgie" forwarded me every right-wing mass emailing that appeared in his in-box.
Methodically, I corrected the logical, factual and contextual abominations.
One day, around the time "Georgie" stopped forwarding dittohead drivel, he said to me -- and I quote -- "I like being partly right."
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.” "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/07/abortion-rates-are-typically-two-times.html
No comments:
Post a Comment