Abortion, that always-contentious issue

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “OBloody Proofreader Hell” writes:

I think many, if not most, here, tend to be anti-abortion, while I take a much more middling approach, as I do not believe it is possible to defend anti-abortion without a referral to religion, and as such it should not be Law. It is also a reasonable assertion that at least 1/3rd or more of the populace is pro-Choice. And again, with that much opposition, it should not be a matter of Law.

Things which are made Law should match a general agreement of the people, ca. 90% or more supporting, which is one reason for the historical “Jury Nullification” standard, as that produces much the same defacto metric of support.

Abortion is a very heated issue almost guaranteed to spark intense responses. I’ve written on the subject many times, and I’ll add here that although I disagree with some of the arguments that OBloody advances, I find them interesting enough to devote a post and discussion to them.

(1) Is it possible to advance an argument against abortion that isn’t couched in religious terms? I believe it is. For example, now that ultrasound images of a fetus are highly detailed, one can certainly argue on scientific grounds that this is a small human life. Or, one can argue the same on general philosophical grounds without ever invoking religion. The fact that each argument is in league with religion (or some religions) doesn’t mean it’s a religious argument, although of course religious arguments against abortion are also commonly made.

(2) And it is extremely possible to advance an anti-abortion argument that is not religious if the abortion prohibition is only after a date that arguably can be said to constitute viability of the child outside the womb. Over the years, that date has been pushed back and back and back, until now it consists of something like 24 weeks (although younger babies have survived, and I have little doubt that the number of weeks for this metric will further decline over time).

(3) The ideas that laws must be made with the agreement of 90% of the people is certainly not the way law has been regarded traditionally, and it certainly is not mounted for other types of laws. Roe was a SCOTUS decision, which even many of its proponents agree was not based on anything in the Constitution but on extrapolations from some idea of privacy that was never articulated in that document. Prior to Roe and its nationalization of a right to abortion, states had the right to legalize abortion and quite a few already had done so. If it had been left to the states, my sense is that it would probably have been legalized in more of them – through legislative action, which is more responsive to the will of the people in each state – with different laws governing in different states as to the details. If a national prohibition on abortion was passed it should have been done so through an amendment to the Constitution, a process that would have assured pretty high majority approval – although not 90%, an unrealistic standard. And likewise if a national right to abortion was passed, it should have been done in the same way – by constitutional amendment.

The National School Boards Association versus the non-compliant parents

The New Neo Posted on by

Andrea Widburg (“Bookworm”) has written an article describing the new campaign of the DOJ at the behest of the National School Boards Association:

One of the recurring news stories over the last few months is that parents are speaking out at school board meetings to protest Critical Race Theory, masks, and transgender pressure in their public schools. The schools respond by trying to silence them and there have been a few minor scuffles that local police quickly settled. The National School Boards Association (“NSBA”) responded by demanding help from the FBI—and “moderate” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has agreed.

The ostensible reason the feds of the DOJ have been pressed into service is that somehow the local authorities aren’t able to enforce their own local laws, which already prohibit violence and death threats and the like, because of some sort of huge spike in threats that local police can’t handle. But is this the case?:

While the NSBA letter footnotes a number of news stories in support of its request, few of them document actual violence at school board meetings. There is this statement in a report on the famous Loudon County school board encounter: “A third person received a minor injury, officials said, without releasing details.” And in Mendon, Illinois, “school officials attempted to escort Felde out of the meeting when he struck one of them before leaving the school.” It doesn’t sound like a national wave of violence that is too severe for local authorities to handle.

This is most likely just the way for the federal camels to get their noses into the School Board tents, and one of the desired goals is to intimidate the opposition with the fear of being treated as the non-violent (vast majority) of January 6th protestors have been treated.

[NOTE: Here’s the letter the NSBA wrote to the Biden administration. This passage is of special interest, I think:

This propaganda continues despite the fact that critical race theory is not taught in public schools and remains a complex law school and graduate school subject well beyond the scope of a K-12 class.

I’ve heard that sort of argument before: of course we don’t actually teach CRT! That’s like saying they don’t teach genetics or physics or philosophy or economics or almost anything under the sun, which can also be graduate school subjects well beyond the scope of a K-12 class. But of course, those things are taught in rudimentary, more simplistic, and introductory forms. And the anti-racism initiatves (about “white privilege” and the like) are all based on CRT and derive from it, even though that don’t go into the theory of CRT in detail.]

Open thread 10/5/21

The New Neo Posted on by

I usually don’t like cover bands. But I’ll make an exception for this one. Here’s their story, which started with a musician and his 15-year-old daughter.

This was their first song at their first concert, leading to YouTube fame:

I binged-watched quite a few of their videos.

Sinema stalked and harassed; Biden comments

The New Neo Posted on by

The left does not allow disagreement with their leftist agenda. So Sinema must be made to suffer:

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema was followed into the bathroom by a group of immigration activists who confronted her in her classroom while she was teaching at Arizona State University.

Video shows the small group follow the senator through an ASU hallway and continue to berate her as she goes into a bathroom stall.

The activists were targeting Sinema (D-Ariz.) for her stance on President Biden’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better infrastructure bill, which would provide a pathway to citizenship for many illegal immigrants.

The main harasser:

…is an illegal immigrant. LUCHA (Living United for Change in Arizona) — the distributor of the video on Twitter — refers to her as “an immigrant youth.”

Reward that lady with citizenship!

I wonder how many Democrat voters are aware of what’s in that bill. Probably very few.

Oh, and this is what Biden had to say about it when asked:

When asked Monday for a response to the incidents, Biden said: “I don’t think they’re appropriate tactics, but it happens to everybody.”

“Everybody”? Hardly.

“The only people it doesn’t happen to are the people who have Secret Service standing around them,” Biden said.

Like Joe Biden, who is completely protected. And of course, most people on the left, because it’s mainly the leftists who do this sort of thing to the right.

He added: “So, it’s part of the process.”

Just regular, normal stuff.

Obesity and COVID death rates

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s some recent research on the relation between COVID deaths and obesity:

To identify potential patterns in data, the researchers employed cutting-edge techniques of statistical analyses.

“The main finding from the analysis is a statistically significant positive association between COVID-19 mortality and the proportion of the overweight in adult populations spanning 154 countries,” Beladi said. “This association holds across countries belonging to different income groups and is not sensitive to a population’s median age, proportion of the elderly, and/or proportion of females.”

Beladi added that when the proportion of the overweight people in a country’s adult population is one percentage point higher than the proportion of the overweight in a second country’s adult population, based on this study, it is reasonable to predict that COVID-19 mortality would be 3.5 percentage points higher in the first country than it would be in the second…

They added that on average, the COVID-19 pandemic has been more fatal for adult populations residing in parts of the world characterized by excess body weight.

When I read about this study, something struck me as odd. I once did some research on what the world’s fattest countries are, and the answers surprised me at the time. Those countries are for the most part not places with high COVID tolls. If this research is true, why would that be?

One reason is, of course, that weight is only one factor in COVID deaths and there are many others (including, for example, method of defining and reporting). But still, isn’t it odd that the countries with the fattest populations aren’t the highest in COVID deaths per million? Some of them of course, are small islands such as Tonga and Samoa, which are relatively isolated. But many are Arab countries such as Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAR, and Qatar, as well as Turkey, Egypt, and Libya.

Then compare that list of obese countries to this list of COVID deaths per million/population (scroll down a bit to find the chart, and then look at the “Deaths/1M pop” column), country by country. Better yet, compare this much longer and more complete list of countries ranked on obesity (scroll down about 2/3 of the way to find it) to that COVID death rate chart. Your should be able to immediately see that it seems far more haphazard than the study might indicate. Just to take a few examples, Peru has the highest COVID death rate in the world, but it’s on the thinner side as countries go. Bosnia and Herzegovina, next on the list in terms of COVID deaths per million, is even thinner. Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechia have extremely high COVID death rates and are more or less middling in terms of European obesity rates, which are not all that high to begin with. As for those Arab countries that have very high obesity rates, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Qatar, their COVID death rates are very low.

Perhaps there’s something I’m missing, but this seems odd to me.

Going to the report itself, I don’t see much light shed. The number of countries involved in the obesity research was 154, but we don’t know which they are. One hint, though, is here [emphasis mine]:

We observe a statistically significant positive association between COVID-19 mortality and the proportion of the overweight in adult populations spanning 154 countries. This association holds across countries belonging to different income groups and is not sensitive to a population’s median age, proportion of the elderly, and/or proportion of females. The estimated elasticities of COVID-19 mortality, with respect to the proportion of the overweight in adult populations, are consistently higher for sub-samples of countries that belong to a higher income group.

So is this reported effect found only or mostly or most strongly in high-income groups within certain countries? Also, are some of the puzzling anomalies I see the result of other factors such as differing ages of the countries’ populations, differences for which the researchers have corrected? I have no idea, but perhaps there’s something like that involved. I know more than the average person about crunching numbers, but not enough to be able to decipher this. Perhaps some of you can do so.

There’s another clue towards the end of the article, where it says this: “our findings call for immediate and effective regulations (e.g. restrictions on ‘serving’ the market for food and beverages with items, the intake of which can result in the accumulation of excess body weight) that are long overdue.” Aha! So they’re seeking to make it more difficult (or at least more costly) for people to make their own food choices as they see fit, a la Bloomberg’s big gulp order. This fits in with much else that we’ve seen from health authorities regarding the use of COVID statistics to control people “for their own good.”

Making Facebook “safe”

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter Barry Meislin, who wrote, “Nothing that we didn’t know, but nice to find out that AT LEAST ONE Facebook employee has a conscience.”]

However, it seems to me that tons of Facebook employees have consciences, as do the people at the helm there who set the policy. In fact, they’re loaded with consciences, positively dripping with them. The question is: conscience about what?

The linked article discusses a Facebook whistleblower named Frances Haugen:

“The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world,” Haugen told 60 Minutes Sunday.

Haugen accused the company of placing profit above the good for the public, despite assurances from Facebook leadership that the company was working to make the platform safe.

I certainly agree that Facebook and other social media companies are helping to tear our societies apart. I’m not sure about ethnic violence around the world, though; it seems to me that was rife long before Facebook existed.

But note that word “safe.” To me that’s a warning bell, a tell of leftism. No platform that allows a free exchange of ideas can be “safe” in the way that the word is commonly used today. So in the name of “safety,” speech is limited. But what speech?

More:

“There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” Haugen said.

In other words, they were acting like capitalists.

Documents revealed that Facebook’s own internal research showed that the company knew some of its products were harming the mental health of some of its users, most notably teen girls.

“Facebook’s own research says, as these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed. And it actually makes them use [Instagram] more,” Haugen said.

So that seems to be about the fairly well-known (at least, it’s well-known to those in the therapy field) fact that when anorectics get to compare notes online or elsewhere (including in person, in hospital treatment centers) they often exchange information on how to be better anorectics and get thinner and thinner, as well as learning more effective ways to evade the authorities.

If Facebook bans such discussions, it does so in order to protect minors. To me, that’s a different thing because children are involved. Protecting adults by banning such discussions is much iffier.

And of course it’s not as though Facebook is a small operation, or a personal blog such as this one that features one person with others commenting on the views of that one person. Facebook is a vast vehicle for the exchange of ideas among people with their own pages, and it has enormous reach and power. Facebook and other such platforms started out very committed to openness but have clamped down more and more as time goes on. It sounds as though Haugen would like them to clamp down more.

And of course, to clamp down on the viewpoints that tend to be on the political right:

Haugen, a data scientist with a computer engineering degree and a Harvard MBA, said she took the job at Facebook in order to combat misinformation after losing a friend to online conspiracy theories. But although she admits that the company took some steps to combat misinformation during the 2020 election, many of those policies were only temporary.

Gotta clamp down on that election “misinformation” more and more, so we’ll be “safe.”

There actually is a dilemma here. Protecting children is one thing, but censoring political views on such a vast scale is another. And when Facebook decides what’s “misinformation,” it certainly isn’t unbiased in its application of the standard. We already know that full well, and we know which side will suffer and which will profit.

Emotion in popular songs: Part II

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: There isn’t a previous post called “Emotion in popular songs: Part I.” But I realize that this one was actually Part I on the subject, and now I’m posting a Part II.]

Commenter “Brio” wrote the following on a post about the Everly Brothers:

Never been a fan of the Everly Brothers or the Bee Gees. I will listen to them when they pop up on the radio, but I would never spend a cent buying their music.

I prefer singers who sing with emotion rather than just mouthing the words. None of those three Everly Brothers videos show any emotion to me.

I have a very different reaction. To me the Everly Brothers, while not the most hyper-emotional of singers, certainly convey emotion. But emotional reactions to songs and singers are highly individual.

Brio added: “the feeling is more important to me than a harmony.” I certainly like both feeling and harmony, but for me, harmony adds its own emotion. Is it the emotion that comes from the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, the unity of the separate into the one? Is it just the extra beauty of the aural complexity? Whatever it is, I like it immensely, although by itself it’s not enough to make me like a song or a version of a song.

In addition, I tend to divide singers very roughly into Apollonian and Dionysian types. My guess (and it’s only a guess) is that a commenter such as Brio much prefers the latter. The quintessential Dionysian singer would be Janis Joplin, I think, although there are plenty of others. Nina Simone falls into a curious category of being both for me. Her piano playing has so much of the classical, her voice is so unusual and like an instrument itself (some sort of brass or woodwind instrument, I think), and yet she puts a lot of over-the-top emotion into many of her songs as well.

The Beatles vs. the Stones I think are somewhat Apollonian versus Dionysian. I like them both, but I much prefer the Beatles, although I am far from liking everything they did . But strangely enough, the more Dionysian Stones rouse almost no emotion in me at all except appreciation of the tremendous beat and power of their music. And (also perhaps rather oddly) only a few Beatles songs – such as “Yesterday” and “Eleanor Rigby,” for example (both with string accompaniments) – stir any emotional reaction in me but nostalgia.

And then there’s the music of Leonard Cohen – he of the low monotone and no pyrotechnics at all, quite Apollonian in my book – which I find very emotional. The emotion is in the words and the music itself, and something evocative in his unbeautiful but resonant and full-of-meaning voice. And two other big favorites of mine, Richard Thompson and Mark Knopfler, are also emotional in their playing (guitar in both cases) and yet Apollonian in their physical stillness while playing, and in their singing voices. On the other hand, Whitney Houston and her vocal flourishes leave me utterly cold, despite that glorious voice.

And the Bee Gees? (You knew I’d get around to them, didn’t you?) They are a special case to me because they have so many voices and ways of singing. I have noticed that a lot of people find their singing very emotional, even perhaps hyper-emotional, expecialy the voice of Robin and especially in his 60s incarnation, where he sounds as though he is constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Nevertheless, the Bee Gees seem to me to be a very Apollonian group, because they exercise total and complete control of their voices and of their arrangements. Some people perceive it as too slick. But I love almost everything they do. Even their disco songs – so very strongly loved and hated – are IMHO the best disco songs ever made. I defy people not to succumb to the beat. The falsettos are in the disco songs not to be annoying (although some people find them so), but to heighten the urgency and the excitement; their regular voices were way too beautiful for that, and they wanted a different sound.

But they can do falsetto in so many ways it’s astounding, including a lovely sound that’s closer, for Barry, to that of a countertenor. “Too Much Heaven” evokes tears in a great many of the YouTube reactors, for example, and it often happens almost instantaneously (and somewhat mysteriously, because a lot of them are puzzled by their reactions).

“Nights On Broadway,” one of the Bee Gees biggest hits from 1975, is another love/hate song. I love it. It has a driving catchy rhythm, a tenacious hook (watch out!), and sounds upbeat. But the words are about a love that’s ended, and a hopeless pursuit of the loved one that amounts almost to stalking. The tune masks the darker words to a certain extent unless the listener is really paying attention (that’s also true of others Bee Gees songs such as “Stayin’ Alive”).

And in the middle of the upbeat catchy part of “Nights On Broadway,” we come to the hyper-emotional (although still Apollonian) bridge, in which the frenetic pace stops and we enter something quite different. The music slows and Barry says “I will wait…” and then we wait to hear the rest, which is (to me, anyway) transcendently and almost heartbreakingly beautiful and full of yearning (in this live version from 1975, the bridge begins at 2:57 and ends at 3:50):

“Singing them love songs, singing them straight-to-the-heart songs…”

Frei and Barnes on recent developments concerning the January 6th “insurrection”

The New Neo Posted on by

Or, as they now call, it the “flaccid insurrection.”

I’ve cued up about a 10-minute segment that I think is good. Some of this is a review of things you probably already know if you’re a regular reader here or on other blogs on the right, but some of it is new and it’s all a good summary of where we are at this point.

If you’re impatient or in a hurry for any reason, it works if you go to “settings” on the video and make the speed 1.25:

I agree with them that much more might be coming out about FBI involvement, and that one of the clues is that the NY Times is now reporting on some of this – which indicates it will come out in court and they are trying to “get ahead of the story” and spin it as much as possible to their liking. I also have started to think that the Capitol Police may have instigated some of the violence by attacking non-violent demonstrators, and Frei and Barnes indicate that apparently there is some video evidence of this. It would certainly be interesting to see what it might be.

Glenn Loury on race and a host of other things

The New Neo Posted on by

Take a look and/or have a listen. The full audio interview with Bari Weiss can be found at the link, but there also are printed excerpts. Here’s a bit:

BW: The word racism has been redefined, particularly by Ibram X. Kendi. First of all, it’s no longer about personal bigotry. It’s about any system that results in disparity. So if you have any kind of disparity between racial groups in any given institution, school culture system, it is evidence in and of itself that racism is present.

GL: That is exactly what Kendi is saying. He’s not mincing words about it. What it brings to mind is George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” in which he talks about how words and the meaning of words fall in the service of political programs. And people think they can make reality by playing with words. I don’t know why anybody takes Ibram X. Kendi seriously. That’s a silly book, “How To Be an Anti-Racist.” Kendi’s formulations are sophomoric. They don’t bear up under the least bit of serious, rigorous social scientific scrutiny. He’s not standing on any literature. He’s not citing any intellectual development that has any deep roots in anything. It’s pablum. It’s froth on the intellectual surface of our life. And it behooves us all to think pretty hard about why it is that we’re content with that kind of analysis. When civil disorder in American cities is consuming the lives of black people like a machine, our political leaders and intellectual class and journalistic representatives haven’t got a word to say about it. Black Lives Matter is almost completely irrelevant to what matters in black lives.

BW: And yet corporations and the entire elite establishment has taken up the cause of Black Lives Matter. And the cynic in me would say it’s just about the cheapest and easiest thing that they could possibly do.

GL: Nothing that Black Lives Matter is about has any intersection with the things that actually matter in black lives. What about education? The gap in the cognitive development of the human potential of African-American youngsters relative to others in this country widens. It’s a yawning chasm.

BW: Glenn, if one really cared about black lives and wanted to insist on a movement that actually fulfilled the promise of black lives mattering, what would be the top three priorities of that movement?

GL: I think self-determination and taking responsibility for our lives. I’d say education. I’m sorry this is partisan, but the public-school unions are poorly serving, on the whole, the places where black students congregate and the intellectual needs of those students. Now, there are other people to be faulted as well. But opening up that system to innovation is absolutely imperative to improving the quality of black life in this country.

And the public safety piece of this narrative, that the police are out to get black people, this contempt for law, the lawlessness of the George Floyd protests, the celebration of that lawlessness, the silence in the face of it. Patriotism. And by that I don’t mean blind loyalty to a flag salute, I mean seeing yourself as an integral part of the American project. This is our country. We don’t stand off from it.

The social costs of left-to-right political change

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter David Foster writes:

Many people don’t like changing their opinions, and many people don’t want to lose jobs, business opportunities, and friendships by holding & expressing unapproved opinions. Such behavior becomes much easier to self-justify when the vast majority of ‘information’ flowing across one’s view supports the safe opinions.

I would add “and when almost everyone in one’s social acquaintance shares those opinions.”

I’ve spent about seventeen years chronicling, among other things, the social costs of such political change. It was nearly twenty years ago (!) that I made my own political transition – which, by the way, was from relatively moderate Democrat to somewhat-libertarian conservative – and the political climate was different then. It was already hostile and bitter, but not even close to as extreme as it is now.

Would I have done the same in the current climate? Yes. But I understand that one reason it’s so difficult to do, and one reason a person might adopt a stance of not wanting to hear information contrary to the beliefs that person already holds, is that it is now extremely threatening to make that particular change.

As David Foster writes, it now potentially involves jobs, business opportunities, and friendships. Sometimes it also involves marital tension and even dissolution, heartbreaking conflict with relatives including one’s own children, and even the threat of imprisonment depending on how activist one becomes. Social media shunning and viral calls for cancellation are also possible. The Gulag doesn’t loom – yet – and perhaps an actual Gulag as in the past will never arrive here. But if it doesn’t, it will be because it won’t be necessary. There are other ways to make people miserable, ways that don’t seem so overtly evil and yet nevertheless do the trick.

When I underwent my own political change most of this had not yet escalated to that point. And yet even back then I risked – and experienced – social disapproval and hostility from some friends and relatives. I had previously been so naive as to be unaware of even the possibility that that would be happening, and so it came as a real shock. For most people today, such a reaction on the part of their friends and family would almost certainly not come as a shock, because it would be difficult to be that naive in the current climate.

As I said, it wouldn’t have stopped me, but I think I completely understand why others would be reluctant to tread that path. Who wants to become a pariah? It’s easier to not expose yourself to views that could challenge your belief system, particularly when you’ve been told for most of your life (and almost everyone around you believes) that those sources are unreliable and even mendacious. To understand that it is more the opposite, and that the sources you have trusted your entire life are much more pervaded by lies and that you have previously swallowed them, is very very difficult to acknowledge. So most people don’t want to risk even the distant possibility and reject it out of hand.