A love story that began as a result of 9/11.
I personally know another happily married couple who met because they were stranded on 9/11.
Kamala Harris on my body, my choice
The President and I are unequivocal in our support of Roe v. Wade and the constitutionality of Roe v. Wade, and the right of women to make decisions for themselves with whomever they choose — about their own bodies. And, needless to say, the right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is not negotiable. The right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is their decision; it is their body.
Interesting that she doesn’t say “birthing people.” But in addition to that, note she only states that women have that right, not people in general.
More:
And no legislative institutions have the right to circumvent the Constitution of the United States in an attempt to interfere with, much less to prevent, a woman to make those decisions.
Harris is a lawyer. Her words are carefully chosen: no legislative institutions. She goes on to specifically cite the Texas legislature as a big offender (as well as other states seeking to limit abortions) to her stated principle. Does Harris think the chief executive – that is, President Biden – has the right to limit the body freedom and decisions of individuals concerning COVID and vaccinations? Don’t be silly; of course she does.
More:
So we will have a conversation about how what is happening in Texas is affect- — affecting women in Texas. But, as we know, it’s not only Texas where this is happening. And I know we’re going to talk about Mississippi. We’re talking about New Mexico. We’re going to talk about the United States and what we must do collectively — all of us — to protect the women of our country and protect their constitutional rights.
You get the idea: we’re going to stop those state legislatures – you know, the ones that reflect the will of the people – from limiting our power to limit their power. And again, it’s about women’s rights, not rights for all people. Oh, and constitutional rights? The main problem with Roe is that it invented a constitutional right where none existed, and even many of those who like the results of the decision have admitted it rests on very shaky constitutional grounds.
Harris continues to rail against states that have limitations on abortion, and mentions that health care is a universal right (something she did not say about bodily integrity and autonomy, which she limited very carefully to women). It’s only at the very end that she adds the following:
When people are able to design their lives in a way that they can determine their own futures, we are a stronger democracy and we are a stronger nation. When people are able to make choices without government interference for themselves — in terms of their wellbeing and the wellbeing of their family, in consultation with whomever they may choose — we are a stronger society.
That’s the only time Harris mentions people in general, and note that she adds the following: “in terms of their wellbeing and the wellbeing of their family.” That limitation is in there for a reason, I think, which is that it would allow her to say, if asked, that vaccination refusal negatively impacts not just on the self and that person’s family but on others as well. Of course, so does abortion – in particular, it impacts on the man who impregnated the woman and who may want the child but has no say in the matter, and of course it impacts on the child.
The child? What child? One of the things that has always struck me about this “my body, my choice” thing is that it clearly involves the life of at least one other person by terminating it. One can even be in favor of abortion and recognize that as a troubling fact that needs discussing rather than denying. But abortion advocates such as Harris would rather pretend it doesn’t even exist. That is really the heart – and the heartbeat – of the matter, isn’t it?
NOTE: For my own views on abortion, I refer readers to these previous posts but in particular to this one.
On the failure to apply a cost/benefit analysis to COVID policy
Here are some excellent observations from Glenn Greenwald:
The quickest and most guaranteed way to save hundreds of thousands of lives with policy changes would be to ban the use of automobiles, or severely restrict their usage to those authorized by the state on the ground of essential need (e.g., ambulances or food-delivery vehicles), or at least lower the nationwide speed limit to 25 mph. Any of those policies would immediately prevent huge numbers of human beings from dying. Each year, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), “1.35 million people are killed on roadways around the world,” while “crashes are a leading cause of death in the United States for people aged 1–54.”…
Given how many deaths and serious injuries would be prevented, why is nobody clamoring for a ban on cars, or at least severe restrictions on who can drive (essential purposes only) or how fast (25 mph)? Is it because most people are just sociopaths who do not care about the huge number of lives lost by the driving policies they support, and are perfectly happy to watch people die or be permanently maimed as long as their convenience is not impeded? Is it because they do not assign value to the lives of other people, and therefore knowingly support policies — allowing anyone above 15 years old to drive, at high speeds — that will kill many children along with adults?
…It is because we employ a rational framework of cost-benefit analysis, whereby, when making public policy choices, we do not examine only one side of the ledger (number of people who will die if cars are permitted) but also consider the immense costs generated by policies that would prevent those deaths (massive limits on our ability to travel, vastly increased times to get from one place to another, restrictions on what we can experience in our lives, enormous financial costs from returning to the pre-automobile days)…
We never opt for a society-altering policy on the ground that “any lives saved make it imperative to embrace” precisely because such a primitive mindset ignores all the countervailing costs…
…[T]he use of cost-benefit analysis as the primary formula we use is uncontroversial — at least it was until the COVID pandemic began. It is now extremely common in Western democracies for large factions of citizens to demand that any measures undertaken to prevent COVID deaths are vital, regardless of the costs imposed by those policies…
Whatever is true about motives, what is unacceptable — sociopathic, really — is the insistence on assigning severe costs to just one side of the ledger (harms from COVID itself) while categorically refusing to recognize let alone value the costs on the other side of the ledger (from severe, enduring anti-COVID disruptions to and restrictions on life).
Greenwald doesn’t get into why this is happening. And I don’t know why either. But I do observe the following: (1) It is not just a US phenomenon, it appears to be widespread in western countries and in some non-Western countries as well (2) It serves the purposes of the left in that it gives them more power and more excuses for that power, as well as accustoming the population to greater levels of government control (3) It serves the purposes of the media for attracting viewers through escalating fear; and (4) It takes advantage of widespread ignorance of math and statistics.
What’s more, in psychological terms, we tend to accept the risks of things to which we’ve become accustomed. COVID is new and although pandemics themselves aren’t new, this one had a very dramatic beginning and frightened people right off the bat (as it were). The unknowns were heightened, and once people became so frightened, COVID became a huge fear for a lot of people and that fear has remained.
Fear tends to be irrational, so cost-benefit analyses don’t often convince in such situations. If cooler heads don’t prevail – and they certainly haven’t with COVID, for the most part – and drum the cost-benefit information into people’s heads with constant repetition, many people will tend to go with their fears. Instead of damping those fears down, government has purposely escalated them.
[NOTE: One of my very first posts about COVID, published March 14, 2020, was called “Gone are the days: assuming the risk.” Right from the start with COVID, I was puzzled by the lack of cost/benefit analysis and historical perspective.]
Open thread 9/10/21
A whole lot of elegance:
Reactions to Biden’s COVID speech on vaccination mandates
I’ve already said a few things earlier today. But I’ll reiterate that this COVID mandate business is being done in order to change the subject from the horror show in Afghanistan to a topic that Biden and his aides think is his strong suit.
I wonder if they are miscalculating once again. It really depends on how many Americans remain interested in liberty. I truly don’t know the answer, but that is the question.
Americans seem appallingly willing to sign away their rights–and worse, other people’s rights–for the sake of “public health.”…
What is still not clear to me is why I, having been vaccinated long ago, should care whether others choose to do the same. If the vaccine works, I have nothing to fear from them. If it doesn’t work, they shouldn’t be forced to submit to it.
Increasingly, it appears that the rationale for vaccination is that you still may catch covid, but your infection won’t be as severe as it might otherwise be. Fine: but for people under 60, covid infections are rarely severe in the first place. Young people who think they have little to fear from covid whether they are vaccinated or not are, in general, right. So the government should not try to dictate their health care decisions. Their bodies, their choice.
…The lawsuits will begin to fly as soon as the starting gun goes off.
Ace has this to say:
A friend emailed me to say Jesse Waters had made a good point on the Fox five o’clock show: Biden is not just attempting to boost his own popularity by demonizing a minority — a “distinct” minority, he said twice, with hissing distaste, as if it were a racial slur — but is setting up an excuse for why the economy is tanking under him.
When the economy continues to tank, and inflation continues to soar, Biden will just blame the unvaccinated.
I’d go further and say This is the entire reason for this unconstitutional power-grab. He knows he faces an increasingly likely wipe-out in 2022: He must do something, then, to change the trajectory.
If he can’t fix the economy, he’ll fix blame…
So divide, divide the country. Attempt to demonize a “distinct” minority to become the hate-objects and scapegoats for a transitory majority, keeping them together through shared, stoked hatred just long enough to get through 2022.
This is fascism.
Direct all of the country’s anger towards a “distinct” minority. Blame the Jews. Wait, I mean blame the unvaccinated, who are the subversive wreckers undermining society with their clannish, inscrutable ways.
A lot of those unvaccinated are black, of course. But Biden is counting on black loyalty to the Democrat Party to be absolute.
Two things come to mind. The first is Sarah Conly – remember her? Conly is the Bowdoin professor who wrote the 2013 book Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism, in favor of more government control to ostensibly promote better health. I wrote about her and her book quite a few times – for example, here and here.
And of course, there’s always that evergreen work by the genius known as Dostoevsky. I’m speaking of Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor,” part of the book The Brothers Karamazov.
In the following passage the Grand Inquisitor is addressing Jesus, who has come back to earth. Although the Inquisitor is a man of the Church, he is not in favor of what he believes Jesus offers to humankind, which is free will. Instead, the Inquisitor proposes to enslave people, and he tells Jesus how he will go about doing it. The Inquisitor speaks here of food, but I think what he says applies just as well to the current situation:
Command that these stones be made bread–and mankind will run after Thee, obedient and grateful like a herd of cattle. But even then it will be ever diffident and trembling, lest Thou should take away Thy hand, and they lose thereby their bread! Thou didst refuse to accept the offer for fear of depriving men of their free choice; for where is there freedom of choice where men are bribed with bread? Man shall not live by bread alone– was Thine answer. Thou knewest not, it seems, that it was precisely in the name of that earthly bread that the terrestrial spirit would one day rise against, struggle with, and finally conquer Thee…
Knowest Thou not that, but a few centuries hence, and the whole of mankind will have proclaimed in its wisdom and through its mouthpiece, Science, that there is no more crime, hence no more sin on earth, but only hungry people? “Feed us first and then command us to be virtuous!” will be the words written upon the banner lifted against Thee–a banner which shall destroy Thy Church to its very foundations, and in the place of Thy Temple shall raise once more the terrible Tower of Babel…
…It is then that we will finish building their tower for them. For they alone who feed them shall finish it, and we shall feed them in Thy name, and lying to them that it is in that name. Oh, never, never, will they learn to feed themselves without our help! No science will ever give them bread so long as they remain free, so long as they refuse to lay that freedom at our feet, and say: “Enslave, but feed us!” That day must come when men will understand that freedom and daily bread enough to satisfy all are unthinkable and can never be had together, as men will never be able to fairly divide the two among themselves. And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious. Thou has promised to them the bread of life, the bread of heaven; but I ask Thee again, can that bread ever equal in the sight of the weak and the vicious, the ever ungrateful human race, their daily bread on earth? And even supposing that thousands and tens of thousands follow Thee in the name of, and for the sake of, Thy heavenly bread, what will become of the millions and hundreds of millions of human beings too weak to scorn the earthly for the sake of Thy heavenly bread?…In our sight and for our purpose the weak and the lowly are the more dear to us. True, they are vicious and rebellious, but we will force them into obedience, and it is they who will admire us the most. They will regard us as gods, and feel grateful to those who have consented to lead the masses and bear their burden of freedom by ruling over them–so terrible will that freedom at last appear to men!
The COVID scare and the COVID vaccine mandates aren’t about food, but they are about the same thing: liberty versus government control “for your own good.” And, just as the Inquisitor said, there are all too many people willing to lay down their liberty – or, as Conly says, their autonomy – for what they perceive to be protection from risk.
ADDENDUM: In his speech, Biden says, “This is not about freedom or personal choice.” And of course he’s right. It’s about lack of freedom (actually, liberty) and personal choice.
Take a look at the comments to the video I just linked above.
ADDENDUM II: Another video:
Frei and Barnes on the Texas Heartbeat Law
Here’s an excellent clarification by Barnes of the Texas Heartbeat Law and the recent SCOTUS ruling on it, as well as what the next steps might be.
Vaccine mandates, Kimmel, and Biden
The only reason I’m writing about Jimmy Kimmel is that some people apparently see him as some sort of thoughtful person worth listening to, and in many ways he’s expressing views that have become all too typical.
Such as this one:
“Dr. Fauci said if hospitals get any more overcrowded they’re going to have to make some very tough choices about who gets an ICU bed,” the host continued. “That choice doesn’t seem so tough to me. ‘Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right in, we’ll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy.’”
Is this what passes for humor these days? Or is it supposed to be cutting edge thought? Not to mention the fact that ivermectin – the medicine he calls “horse goo” – has been used in humans for years as an anti-parasite medication.
It’s the same Jimmy Kimmel who back in 2017 was passionately advocating that health care should be a basic right for all, regardless of ability to pay. What a difference a few years makes. I guess it’s all right to discriminate if it’s based on vaccination status. The unvaccinated have become the new lepers.
Speaking of which – we have employment mandates on the horizon, courtesy of our fearless leader Joe Biden:
When asked whether the Department of Labor or another entity could force vaccine mandates not just on private companies with federal contracts, but major employers without federal contracts, Psaki responded with a resounding “Yes.” She then told the reporter to “stay tuned” for Biden’s speech today where he will lay out the coming action.
Here’s a preview of Biden’s speech:
The expansive rules mandate that all employers with more than 100 workers require them to be vaccinated or test for the virus weekly, affecting about 80 million Americans. And the roughly 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid also will have to be fully vaccinated.
Biden is also signing an executive order to require vaccination for employees of the executive branch and contractors who do business with the federal government – with no option to test out. That covers several million more workers.
The article continues for quite some time, describing the plans, without discussing whether a president has the power to do this and whether there will be legal challenges.
Needless to say, I’m against it. Personally, I’m fully vaccinated, but I defend the right of anyone to refuse vaccination for any reason and am against federal mandates regarding what businesses should require of employees concerning vaccination for COVID. This is extreme coercion, to threaten the livelihood of the unvaccinated (and, by the way, POC – that is, people of color – tend to be disproportionately represented among them).
I also have come to distrust the figures for people dying of COVID, because I know that anyone who has COVID and who dies is often counted as a COVID death whether COVID was actually the cause of death or not. At any rate, it doesn’t surprise me in the least that Biden and company would want to “circle back” to their happy place, which is talking about the dangers of COVID and issuing all sorts of liberty-quashing directives about it. He knows and they know that this is the area of his highest approval from Americans – which is another depressing fact.
Biden’s speech is supposed to start at 5 PM, which is now.
When did the leftism trend begin in American education?
There’s been an ongoing discussion in yesterday’s feminization of education thread concerning when the leftist rot in education actually began. That put me in mind of a post I wrote back in 2017, which I now reproduce here, about some observations Robert Frost made when he was a college professor. He certainly noticed the trend over a century ago.
Robert Frost has long been one of America’s best-known poets. During his lifetime, he was also seen as a sort of folksy New Englander on the lecture circuit.
But Frost was far more than that (as I’ve previously discussed in many posts). Frost not only had a great deal to say about politics, human nature, science, and literature, but he’d been a teacher and a college professor for many years and he had a great deal to say about education as well.
The following excerpts are from a fascinating book called Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher, by Peter J. Stanlis. I think they are remarkably apropos to what’s been happening today, because they describe some of its roots [emphasis mine]:
To Frost, progressive education [Dewey] was a closed system that would “compel liberality.” Like Rousseau, it would force students to be free, not merely from self-discipline, but from social traditions and normative beliefs…To Frost, the progressive theory of the child-centered school was false. Its worst feature was to encourage immature and uneducated students to have a decisive voice in determining the curriculum. Frost’s response was to declare, “There is such a thing as not being old enough to understand.”…
Two things in progressive education provoked Frost’s particular rage—their abandonment of the ancient Greek and Roman classics and their attempts to apply the scientific method to teaching. The latter separated form or technique from genuine content…
Frost also rejected the social objective of progressive education—to indoctrinate students in favor of egalitarian democracy. He always favored education that would allow “the cream to rise to the top.” He believed that in secondary education the progressive theory stressed emotion too much, whereas graduate studies were too centered in abstract reason…To Frost, sound education involved all of human nature….
Frost began teaching at Amherst in 1917, under Amherst president Alexander Meiklejohn:
To Frost, Meiklehohn’s conception of academic freedom was merely a collegiate adaptation of Dewey’s progressive education in the form of doctrinaire compulsory liberalism, centered in social problems rather than in psychology. Meiklehohn’s educational reforms were in the spirit of what Frost called “the guild of social planners,” men who assumed that abstract reasoning and logic were sufficient to solve the world’s great perennial problems. After meeting with some of Meiklejohn’s young faculty appointees, Dwight Morrow, an Amherst trustee, described them to a friend as “bumptious young men…who insisted that nobody thought or studied at Amherst until they came.”
Here’s how Frost described them:
They fancied themselves thinkers. At Amherst you thought, while at other colleges you merely learned… I found that by thinking they meant stocking up with radical ideas, by learning they meant stocking up with conservative ideas—a harmless distinction, bless their simple hearts…They had picked up the idea somewhere that the time was now past for the teacher to teach the pupil. From now on it was the thing for the pupil to teach himself using, as he saw fit, the teacher as an instrument…I sat there patiently waiting, waiting for the youth to take education into their own hands and start the new world. Sometimes I laughed and sometimes I cried a little internally…
Here’s more from Stanlis:
The hubris of their young teachers deluded egotistical students to imagine that through their rational discussions they could find easy and valid solutions to the complex problems of society.
Frost wrote of the experience:
I discovered what the Amherst Idea was that is so much talked of, and I got amicably out. The Amherst Idea as I had it in so many words from the high custodian is this: “Freedom for taste and intellect.” Freedom from what? Freedom from every prejudice in favor of state, home, church, morality, etc. I am too much a creature of prejudice to stay and listen to such stuff. Not only in favor of morality am I prejudiced, but in favor of an immorality I could name as against other immoralities. I’d no more set out in pursuit of the truth than I would in pursuit of a living unless mounted on my prejudices.
Stanlis writes:
It was clear that, like Edmund Burke, whom the poet greatly admired, by “prejudice” he simply meant moral habit beyond reflection built into human nature from infancy in favor of home, church, and state. Frost was convinced that Meiklejohn’s “freedom for taste and intellect” was destructive of the norms in the basic institutions of civil society and involved a chronic separation of the intellectual virtues from the moral virtues.
Well, we know how that all turned out, don’t we? Frost experienced a sort of fractal of what was to develop into our current university woes, and recognized at once what the dangers were and what the denouement was likely to be.
Open thread 9/9/21
A nice place to visit, but would you want to live there?
The feminization of college
This isn’t really a surprise:
Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.
At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.
This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Of course, college has also become an increasingly leftist propaganda experience. Not everyone needs a college degree to work at a good job. But still, this is an ominous trend because it reflects how the left has gone a long way towards destroying education in general.
Note that this trend seems to have begun 40 years ago. That would mean it started in the early 1980s, which is the time of the rise of critical legal studies and critical race theory in academia. I went back to grad school around ten years later, and I was stunned at the changes since I’d left in the 70s.
Biden sinking in polls – so what?
In a recent The Economist/YouGov poll, Biden’s overall approval rating is at 39%.
My first reaction is: why so high? It should be something like 2%, if that.
My second reaction is: it’s about time.
My third reaction is: so what? Biden can do a lot of damage anyway. After all, no one is about to remove him unless his approval falls down way below that and polls indicate it will really really hurt Democrats in Congress in 2022 and Democrats figure that they can’t cheat enough to overcome that effect. Only those practical considerations might get the Democrats to activate a Biden-ectomy, and if so it will be done not through impeachment but through the more face-saving 25th Amendment or a forceful arm-twisting to effect a resignation for health reasons.
However, looking at the poll numbers we see the following (approval/disapproval numbers in that order):
Overall: 39/50
Men: 36/53
Women: 42/46
White men no degree: 28/61
White women w/ degree: 53/42
Black: 65/26
Hispanic: 41/36
Registered Voters: 43/53
Dems: 77/15
GOP: 9/89
Indie: 35/56
Who are these supposed GOP members who still approve of Biden? As Stephen Green writes in the linked article: “I don’t know how Biden managed to get a positive nod of approval from 9% of GOP voters, unless The Economist/YouGov oversampled the Bill Kristol household.”
The numbers indicate to me that “white men no degree” are the smartest American demographic. Whereas “white women with degree” – a group of which I happen to be a card-carrying member – are pretty stupid and/or gullible and/or uninformed. Note also that black voters are not as keen on Biden as black voters usually are on Democratic presidents, and Hispanic voters really aren’t all that fond of Biden. Independents have soured on him, although a lot of them were fooled at the time of the election and probably are in some ways most responsible for placing him in office because many of them constitute the all-important swing voters.
Some days…
…I get so involved in discussions in the comments that I don’t start working on my posts till later than planned. Today is one of those times. I think that in the last few weeks, distraction has become even more enticing than usual, because the news is so hard to face.
It’s not just that it’s ominous, although it’s that. It’s that it feels as though we’re watching an aburdist play, something by Beckett or Ionesco or the like. Are we really seeing a president like Biden, who does destructive things and then brazenly lies about it – albeit ineptly and obviously – and the press for the most part looks the other way, and our Democrat members of Congress (even most of the so-called “moderates”) don’t seem inclined to do a thing about it, or to even criticize?
Are we really seeing what we’re seeing? Has America actually become a laughing stock and a caricature? The answer does appear to be “yes.”
I mentioned once that at this point the US is like Gulliver being tied down by hordes of Lilliputians. Gulliver’s Travels was a serious satire played at least in part for laughs, and there are some bleakly humorous aspects to our current plight, too. But it’s mostly bleak, and unless something changes, it will get bleaker.
And by “our” plight, I don’t just mean the US, I mean the western world and the world in general. The world may come to realize how important the Pax Americana had been.