sj_zero on Nostr: Only tangentially related to anything, but... At the moment, the left is calling for ...
Only tangentially related to anything, but...
At the moment, the left is calling for the destruction of Israel and death to the Jews because Israel is more powerful than Palestine, and the strong are always morally inferior to the weak (paraphrasing and simplifying obviously)
Which really makes me wonder if eventually the left will drop abortion as an issue the same as they dropped eugenics as an issue (and they pretend that didn't happen, but as an example, Tommy Douglas, the socialist father of universal healthcare in Canada was a proud advocate of eugenics).
No human is less powerful than an unborn baby, so an adult woman killing that baby because it's powerless, unseen, and inconvenient seems totally at odds with that ideology. It's the ultimate power imbalance. A child who has no choice in being created is totally powerless and dependent, and the powerful adult human female from a rich country kills it.
Bodily autonomy is the argument the left primarily relies on, but in my view an unconvincing argument because rights often end up conflicting with one another. In this case, you have the right of a mother to choose whether to carry a baby to term in conflict with the child (who was created by the usually willful acts of the mother in the first place and didn't ask to be created) to not be murdered. In most circumstances, we would consider this a clear moral choice, the right not to be murdered being the highest right. Consider the argument of American slavery, where the rights for someone to be secure in their property rights ran up against someone else's right to Liberty and not to be considered someone else's property.
Another thing is that women who are typically more left-wing and collectivist with other people's money and freedoms sound like Ayn Rand when it comes to personally supporting a child they acted to bring into being. "It's a parasite! What do we do with parasites? We kill them!!" Particularly women in their second and third trimester have to dehumanize a baby to explain why a baby who could be born immediately and likely survive should be murdered in the womb.
Some might make an argument about freedom and bodily autonomy, but leftism isn't liberalism, leftists don't necessarily believe in personal freedom as a core value. All the most totalitarian regimes of the 21st century started with leftism. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and Pol Pot all ideologically came from leftism, with Mussolini being part of the socialist party in Italy, and Hitler being elected leader of his Soviet during a brief socialist uprising in Germany. It seems there's no reason to think this one freedom is somehow sancrosanct when none of the others are protected.
Modern day China is closer to fascism aka state socialism than Marxist class socialism, but I characterize both as left-wing, hoping to break down society in a revolution and build something new in pursuit of utopia. I think that China will be the first to break with the idea of bodily autonomy for women. As we are on the verge of a population collapse which is going to dramatically change the way people look at having kids, I'm certain that China will be the first country to claim government authority over women's bodies and not just not allow them to have abortions, but probably start forcing them to have kids because to not have kids is "an anti-revolutionary act". Most people don't know that the Chinese government is far from socially progressive in a western sense, being highly racist (there's a lot of talking in the United States today about immigration and citizenship, outsiders cannot get citizenship in China, and a Chinese police track where Africans travel to and perform routine midnight raids on those houses whether there is evidence of wrongdoing or not), considering being gay anti-revolutionary and therefore something to be attacked rather than embraced, and so on so there is no good reason to think that they would follow the Western progressive idea of bodily autonomy for women.
As a skilled craftsman myself, I have often considered a criticism of class socialism's suggestion that the working class "seize the means of production". Personally, I know that a skilled individual is as much ore more "the means of production" as a machine. Give someone with no trades skills a high technology shop with all the latest tools and they won't be able to create anything with it, but a world-class craftsman could potentially arrive shirtless and shoeless in a forest and create all kinds of amazing things (watch "Primitive Technology" on youtube for a great example of this, the guy literally does this). This plays out in practice by class socialist governments effectively enslaving the skilled workforce because they require such people and lack the positive incentives of capitalism to get them to work. In the same way, women's bodies as "the means of production" can be similarly collectivized, and some leftists at times have suggested that women ought to effectively be sexually available to any man who wants them to prevent class systems from developing of attractive and unattractive men. This means that it isn't outside the realm of the possible for leftism to not just abandon "bodily autonomy" as an argument for abortion, but potentially as an argument for women's sexual autonomy in general. This shows the dangers of collectivist ideology, in that it can justify any range of totalitarian control of the individual.
If nothing else, I think the discussion above suggests that abortion isn't necessarily an inherently leftist stance, and instead is more a stance of the left due to previous ideological horse-trading with different factions within the left (giving some space for feminists) than a principled stance based on core ideology. Indeed, one could just as easily make right wing arguments in favor of abortion, including as I implied the objectivist individual liberty argument, or a social darwinist argument. The Japanese historically allowed post-birth infanticide using language implying their agrarian past where farmers would cull weak or diseased plants or animals to ensure the strongest thrive, and a moral argument that infants mostly exist in the spirit world and it's only through their childhoods that they become more human and entrenched in the material world. Sparta famously encouraged infanticide in the name of maintaining a strong warrior aristocracy, a deeply far right idea. In Rome, the patriarch of a family would have the right commit an abortion, and even to kill an infant within his family, and indeed any of his children or even his wife, but far from being framed in a left-wing way, it was due to their deeply patriarchal, hierarchical society.
Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled programming...
At the moment, the left is calling for the destruction of Israel and death to the Jews because Israel is more powerful than Palestine, and the strong are always morally inferior to the weak (paraphrasing and simplifying obviously)
Which really makes me wonder if eventually the left will drop abortion as an issue the same as they dropped eugenics as an issue (and they pretend that didn't happen, but as an example, Tommy Douglas, the socialist father of universal healthcare in Canada was a proud advocate of eugenics).
No human is less powerful than an unborn baby, so an adult woman killing that baby because it's powerless, unseen, and inconvenient seems totally at odds with that ideology. It's the ultimate power imbalance. A child who has no choice in being created is totally powerless and dependent, and the powerful adult human female from a rich country kills it.
Bodily autonomy is the argument the left primarily relies on, but in my view an unconvincing argument because rights often end up conflicting with one another. In this case, you have the right of a mother to choose whether to carry a baby to term in conflict with the child (who was created by the usually willful acts of the mother in the first place and didn't ask to be created) to not be murdered. In most circumstances, we would consider this a clear moral choice, the right not to be murdered being the highest right. Consider the argument of American slavery, where the rights for someone to be secure in their property rights ran up against someone else's right to Liberty and not to be considered someone else's property.
Another thing is that women who are typically more left-wing and collectivist with other people's money and freedoms sound like Ayn Rand when it comes to personally supporting a child they acted to bring into being. "It's a parasite! What do we do with parasites? We kill them!!" Particularly women in their second and third trimester have to dehumanize a baby to explain why a baby who could be born immediately and likely survive should be murdered in the womb.
Some might make an argument about freedom and bodily autonomy, but leftism isn't liberalism, leftists don't necessarily believe in personal freedom as a core value. All the most totalitarian regimes of the 21st century started with leftism. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and Pol Pot all ideologically came from leftism, with Mussolini being part of the socialist party in Italy, and Hitler being elected leader of his Soviet during a brief socialist uprising in Germany. It seems there's no reason to think this one freedom is somehow sancrosanct when none of the others are protected.
Modern day China is closer to fascism aka state socialism than Marxist class socialism, but I characterize both as left-wing, hoping to break down society in a revolution and build something new in pursuit of utopia. I think that China will be the first to break with the idea of bodily autonomy for women. As we are on the verge of a population collapse which is going to dramatically change the way people look at having kids, I'm certain that China will be the first country to claim government authority over women's bodies and not just not allow them to have abortions, but probably start forcing them to have kids because to not have kids is "an anti-revolutionary act". Most people don't know that the Chinese government is far from socially progressive in a western sense, being highly racist (there's a lot of talking in the United States today about immigration and citizenship, outsiders cannot get citizenship in China, and a Chinese police track where Africans travel to and perform routine midnight raids on those houses whether there is evidence of wrongdoing or not), considering being gay anti-revolutionary and therefore something to be attacked rather than embraced, and so on so there is no good reason to think that they would follow the Western progressive idea of bodily autonomy for women.
As a skilled craftsman myself, I have often considered a criticism of class socialism's suggestion that the working class "seize the means of production". Personally, I know that a skilled individual is as much ore more "the means of production" as a machine. Give someone with no trades skills a high technology shop with all the latest tools and they won't be able to create anything with it, but a world-class craftsman could potentially arrive shirtless and shoeless in a forest and create all kinds of amazing things (watch "Primitive Technology" on youtube for a great example of this, the guy literally does this). This plays out in practice by class socialist governments effectively enslaving the skilled workforce because they require such people and lack the positive incentives of capitalism to get them to work. In the same way, women's bodies as "the means of production" can be similarly collectivized, and some leftists at times have suggested that women ought to effectively be sexually available to any man who wants them to prevent class systems from developing of attractive and unattractive men. This means that it isn't outside the realm of the possible for leftism to not just abandon "bodily autonomy" as an argument for abortion, but potentially as an argument for women's sexual autonomy in general. This shows the dangers of collectivist ideology, in that it can justify any range of totalitarian control of the individual.
If nothing else, I think the discussion above suggests that abortion isn't necessarily an inherently leftist stance, and instead is more a stance of the left due to previous ideological horse-trading with different factions within the left (giving some space for feminists) than a principled stance based on core ideology. Indeed, one could just as easily make right wing arguments in favor of abortion, including as I implied the objectivist individual liberty argument, or a social darwinist argument. The Japanese historically allowed post-birth infanticide using language implying their agrarian past where farmers would cull weak or diseased plants or animals to ensure the strongest thrive, and a moral argument that infants mostly exist in the spirit world and it's only through their childhoods that they become more human and entrenched in the material world. Sparta famously encouraged infanticide in the name of maintaining a strong warrior aristocracy, a deeply far right idea. In Rome, the patriarch of a family would have the right commit an abortion, and even to kill an infant within his family, and indeed any of his children or even his wife, but far from being framed in a left-wing way, it was due to their deeply patriarchal, hierarchical society.
Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled programming...