Category Archives: Philosophy

A Modest Abortion Regulation

Professor Althouse has a suggestion.

While I don’t have a strong position personally on whether or not abortion should be legal (other than it’s none of the federal government’s business, either way, and that Roe was a constitutional atrocity), I’m always struck by the callousness of the “pro-choice” movement, which seems to be more of a pro-abortion movement. For instance, they don’t even want to get “bogged down” with the apparently inconsequential issue of whether or not a developing child can feel pain in the womb. And as Yuval Levin notes, as with other issues on the Left, they won’t even grant sincere good will to their political opponents:

The headline in the print edition [of the NYT] is “Unfazed by 2012, G.O.P. Is Seeking Abortion Limits.” As if the people struggling to save the lives of innocent children whose only crime is that they are unwanted by their mothers or would disrupt somebody’s plans should be “fazed” into inaction by the 2012 election.

The article itself offers no sense at all that the pro-life cause has any moral component, no notion that perhaps this isn’t just about this or that election. Just a perfect confusion about why anyone would want to spend time worrying about this issue.

“The re-emergence of abortion as a driving issue among the conservative base has left some moderate Republicans baffled,” the article notes. Has it really? Baffled?

The Times sometimes changes the headlines of its stories when they go online, and I wondered if maybe the online editors saw that this particular headline was ridiculous. So does the story have a different one online? Yup: The online headline is “G.O.P. Pushes New Abortion Limits to Appease Vocal Base.”

Even better.

In a similar vein, KLo writes about the pain of Penelope Trunk:

…it’s almost as if we prefer abortion. It’s an expectation. We’ve adapted our lives to it. And so a whole ideology needs to exist to insist it’s okay, that women and men aren’t feeling what they’re feeling. That this is good, when not very long ago we absolutely knew better. And it was not just priests or self-identified pro-lifers who knew better.

It’s all of a piece with the death merchants of the Left who think that humanity is the world’s biggest problem.

The Sheep

look up:

What is this but the nightmare of political modernism? The constant watchers with cold, unsympathetic eyes. The men in trench coats falling in step as you leave your home. The knock on the door at three in the morning. The monster state crushing the individual, the “boot stamping on a human face forever.”

You cannot answer this with legalisms or minutiae. By pointing out that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts have been on the case since 1978, carefully overseeing all government surveillance programs, that the 1986 Electric Communications and Privacy Act (ECPA), the Patriot Act, and its supplementary legislation provided for further and even more rigorous safeguards. Or that the “concept of privacy” is “evolving” under the pressure of new technology, being “redefined” into something vaguer and more metaphysical that it was.

You can’t make those arguments because, obviously enough, the safeguards didn’t work. If they had worked, nothing like this NSA program would have ever seen the light of day. If FISA courts had any real power, if government attorneys had any serious intention of serving the interests of the public, the NSA effort would have been limited to a paper proposal, like thousands of other crazy ideas. (For their own part, the conservative elite have waltzed their way into the dunce corner all by themselves with the argument that national security trumps everything. Memo to NRO, Commentary et al — it doesn’t. It never has.)

Americans know full well what “privacy” is. They know it simply involves being left alone, particularly by those in power. They know that it does not “evolve” without turning into something else completely. Privacy is an aspect of human nature and, like marriage, parenthood, ownership of property, or self-defense, cannot be destroyed or modified by legislation or government activity. Those who attempt to do so are challenging the fountains of the vasty deep, and will be washed away in the attempt.

Involving as it does the NSA, it’s unlikely we will ever learn exactly who was behind this, who gave the orders, and what the precise purpose was. But in a way, that doesn’t matter. We know what the source is, and the rest we can guess.

I think we’re going to find out a lot more before this is over, though. We won’t have to guess.

[Update a while later]

The new Panopticon — the all-seeing eye:

The other day, my college age son quietly went around the house and put electricians tape over the camera lenses on the displays of all our home computers. I laughed when I discovered what he had done. . .then paused: after all, it wouldn’t be that hard for someone to remotely turn that camera on and secretly watch me and my family. I left the tape on.

This is what it has come to. The revelations of recent days about the NSA being able to spy on the phone calls of millions of everyday Americans, without warrant, in search of a few possible terrorists has made everyone just a little more paranoid – and a little less trusting of the benign nature of our Federal government. The reality is that we may not yet be paranoid enough.

I keep my webcam on my desktop unplugged unless I’m using it, but maybe I should tape my laptop camera. And no, I’ve never trusted Google with my data. But so many people I email with are gmail users, it probably doesn’t matter.

And then there’s this:

No doubt once again there will be a mad scramble in the Capitol to do something – new regulations, new oversight, new attempts to protect civil liberties. But, thanks to Moore’s Law, the technology will have already moved on. Is it too much to ask, just once, that Congress get ahead of this mess before all of those newly-purchased copies of 1984 turn into tour guides? The leaders of many top Silicon Valley companies have besmirched the reputations of their companies (“Do no evil” indeed) and lost the hard-earned trust of their international customers in the last few days – for what? Haul them in before a Senate committee and find out what threats the NSA and other agencies made to make these powerful billionaires give up so much.

Meanwhile, Congress, get ahead of the technology curve for once. You can start by asking about where the data goes from cellphone cameras. Then talk to the GPS folks about the ability to track the location of private phones and use their phone and tablet cameras. Query Google about the future plans for those autonomous camera cars. Get Bill Gates and ask him about what he had to give up to quiet that Microsoft anti-trust case of a decade ago. All may prove dead-ends, but who can now be sure?

Who indeed?

The Supreme Court

Why the Obama administration keeps losing:

These cases have nothing in common, other than the government’s view that federal power is virtually unlimited: Citizens must subsume their liberty to whatever the experts in a given field determine the best or most useful policy to be.

If the government can’t get even one of the liberal justices to agree with it on any of these unrelated cases, it should realize there’s something seriously wrong with its constitutional vision.

Do tell.

Leviathan Fail

Jonah Goldberg reviews Kevin Williamson’s new book:

Williamson offers a wonderfully Nockian tutorial on how all states — and nearly all governments — begin as criminal enterprises, while acknowledging that not all criminal enterprises are evil. Criminals — whether we’re talking So­mali warlords, Mafia dons, or the Tudors of England — often provide vital goods and services, from food to security. Often what makes them criminal is that they are competing with the State monopoly on such things.

Sidestepping the distinction between State and government, Williamson in­stead identifies what causes the Dr. Jekyll of government to transform into the Mr. Hyde of the State. He calls this elixir “politics.”

Williamson’s core argument is that politics has a congenital defect: Politics cannot get “less wrong” (a term coined by artificial-intelligence guru Eliezer Yudkowsky). Productive systems — the scientific method, the market, evolution — all have the built-in ability to learn from failures. Nothing (in this life at least) ever becomes immortally perfect, but some things become less wrong through trial and error. The market, writes Williamson, “is a form of social evolution that is metaphorically parallel to bio­logical evolution. Consider the case of New Coke, or Betamax, or McDonald’s Arch Deluxe, or Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt Shampoo. . . . When hordes of people don’t show up to buy the product, then the product dies.” Just like organisms in the wild, corporations that don’t learn from failures eventually fade away.

Except in politics: “The problem of politics is that it does not know how to get less wrong.” While new iPhones regularly burst forth like gifts from the gods, politics plods along. “Other than Social Security, there are very few 1935 vintage products still in use,” he writes. “Resistance to innovation is a part of the deep structure of politics. In that, it is like any other monopoly. It never goes out of business — despite flooding the market with defective and dangerous products, mistreating its customers, degrading the environment, cooking the books, and engaging in financial shenanigans that would have made Gordon Gekko pale to contemplate.” Hence, it is not U.S. Steel, which was eventually washed away like an imposing sand castle in the surf, but only politics that can claim to be “the eternal corporation.”

Read the whole thing, and buy the book.

Why A One-Way Trip To Mars?

Three applicants explain.

And over at Space News, Rod Pyle has the story on why Bernie Taupin had it right: “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.” What he doesn’t mention is that the issue came up as a result of a question from me to Lansdorp. I think that it would be bioethically irresponsible, given the current state of knowledge, to send a fertile woman there, at least with men along, and it didn’t appear to me that he’d given the matter much thought. I’ll probably write a piece on this, maybe even today.