Mike

Douthat on Late-Term Abortion

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Last week, Russ Douthat of the New York Times wrote an opinion piece, “What Do Liberals Believe About Late-Term Abortion?”, in which he outlined some of the parameters of the debate regarding both late-term and abortion in general. This year the Democrats have used the abortion access issue as key part of their electoral strategy.

Some excerpts.

First, Douthat provides a definition:

“The phrase ‘late-term’ itself is contested, but for the purposes of this discussion I’m talking about abortions that take place around or beyond the threshold of potential fetal viability, which (thanks to medical advances) currently sits somewhere in the range of 22 weeks to 25 weeks of pregnancy.”

Then to put the number of late-term abortions in perspective:

“… (the) belief, that these procedures are vanishingly rare, turns on the question of what “rare” means. Relative to other abortions, yes, late-term procedures are extremely rare: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1 percent of American abortions take place at or after 21 weeks, which, by my calculation, would be slightly under 10,000 out of slightly under one million.

“On the other hand, relative to other causes of childhood death that liberals take extremely seriously, thousands of late-term abortions loom quite large. The CDC reports that in total just over 10,000 American children under age 14 died of natural and unnatural causes in 2022. As the demographer Lyman Stone points out, if you included late-term abortion in those numbers, it would instantly be the leading cause of childhood death, eclipsing diseases, drugs and gun violence.”

He then covers the implications:

“…if you accept that they will be killed in meaningful numbers (numbers that would almost certainly increase under Harris’s preferred legal order), well, then you need to either retreat to the life-begins-at-breath position — radical but consistent, mystical but stable — or else come up with some other marker that establishes personhood at, say, 35 weeks of pregnancy and consigns viable fetuses before that line to a less-than-human status.

“Having followed these debates for many years, I think it’s fair to say that the pro-choice side — not every pro-choice individual, but the political collective — consistently refuses to make this choice, preferring to occupy an ambiguous zone where late-term abortion is permitted in law, minimized as a reality and left unjustified by any consistent argument about human life or human rights.”

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A Canadian October Surprise?

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So you know Kamala’s campaign is in trouble when you start seeing the media throwing more Hail Marys than the UNM football team.

Some are more obvious than others.

I saw on CNN this morning an Anderson Cooper special that covered her past 3 ½ years as Vice President. She looked fantastic with plenty of footage of her with world leaders, in the White House Situation Room. She looked poised, confident, the epitome of a leader…. of course that perception was probably helped by the fact that the sound was off.

Then there are others which are more curious.

Headline in today’s Washington Post: “These Five Tumultuous Years in Montreal shaped Kamala Harris.”

I have been waiting more than five years for this story to drop. Long story short, her divorced mother took a job at the prestigious McGill University Faculty of Medicine in Montreal and a young Kamala and her sister moved from sunny California to a foreign land of snow and poutine.

You would think a story like that would be worth something, if not to her campaign in 2019 which crashed and burned in spectacular fashion, then to her as a Vice President trying to cut an image on the international stage. You could have spun it as giving her an international perspective and some heft, she could have used it.

Yet to my knowledge no American media outlet has picked it up, only a passing reference to her friend Wanda Kagan who she met while in Montreal. Even her biography published for her first presidential campaign, “The Truth We Hold,” barely gave it a page. Hold that thought for a minute…

The Post article is full of choice nuggets pushing an angle of that racism and turmoil that Kamala had to endure.

There are the allegations, based on one witness and a lot of loose speculation, of the sexism and racism her mother faced both at the University of California and then in trying to find another job. No word in the article that McGill had a world-class med school and that life in Montreal, while cold five months of the year and juiced with money that looks like it came from a Monopoly game, is actually quite pleasant. However, that would provide a chaff cloud of reality that would deflect from a good story about a young woman’s heroic coming of age in a racist, sexist world.

Toward the end of the article Kamala’s school-age friend, Wanda Kagan, left Montreal:

“Ward felt the city ‘was just too racially divided’ and she returned to her native New York City.”

As for Kamala, after a year at Cégep she attended Howard University in DC where for her:

“The Washington campus was a world away from the racial, ethnic and cultural divisions she had seen so often in Quebec.

“As she settled into a seat at Cramton Auditorium for an orientation in 1982, Harris recalled in her memoir, she realized that everyone looked like her. ‘This is heaven!’ she wrote.”

So both Kamala and Kagan found New York City, and Washington, DC, less of a racial hellhole than a Canadian city? That sort of muddies the water about the narrative of racism. Not to mention that DC, to this day, remains a heavily segregated city. Of course Kamala was writing specifically about her experience at Howard and how she thought it was heaven that everyone looked like her. Hmmm.

So why did this article drop now, and why was it given top of the page treatment by the mouthpiece of the DC swamp? Let’s cover the facts.

We’re little more than 3 weeks before an election that the Left has breathlessly told us (ad nauseam) will determine the future of “our democracy.” We’re also in that critical part of the campaign when we start seeing the “October Surprise.”

At this critical juncture of the campaign, a vital part of Kamala’s media praetorian guard just happens to decide to run a 3000+ word investigative piece covering five years of her life that both she and the rest of the media have deliberately ignored for the past five years.

She spent those five years living not just in another country, but in a distinctly different culture. You would think that for someone desperately trying to establish her bona fides as someone who wasn’t an intellectual lightweight, this would have been something she would wanted to have brought front and center during the past 3 ½ years.

So when a media outlet does finally write about her Montreal experience, it focuses on the racism she encountered in a country that the Left favorably compares to the United States. I never thought I would see the American media report that people had to leave Canada and move to the US for its better racial climate.

Something doesn’t fit. Kamala’s campaign is collapsing and the Washington Post dedicates valuable real estate at the most critical part of the campaign to finally getting around to her time in Montreal?

Is the Washington Post trying to get ahead of something? What exactly happened in Montreal that Kamala and the media (until now) don’t want to talk about?

Random Thoughts (2) : Education Edition

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1) Richard Fernandez:

“The actual purpose of much that is called education is not to teach a trade, or take you stumbling to the limits of the undiscovered but to put you in a position to laugh at people.”

2) From Thomas Sowell’s Ever Wonder Why?

Anyone who is serious about wanting to help minority young people must know that the place to start is at precisely the other end of the educational process. That means beginning in the earliest grades teaching reading, math and other mental skills on which their future depends. But that would mean clashing with the teachers’ unions and their own busybody agenda of propaganda and psychological manipulation in the classrooms.

“The path of least resistance is to give minority youngsters a lousy education and then admit them to college by quotas. With a decent education, they wouldn’t need the quotas.”

3) From the Brookings Institution’s SAT Math Scores Mirror and Maintain Racial Inequity

“Relying on a three-digit number to assess a student’s math ability clouds their drive, their resilience, and may impact their confidence in pursuing postsecondary education…

…..In 2019, the SAT developed an adversity score to contextualize students’ scores to their school and neighborhood. Under pressure, the College Board then abandoned the single statistic in favor of an Environmental Context Dashboard, which provides information like the portion of students at a high school receiving free and reduced lunch, median family income, and advanced-placement enrollment.

Colleges are starting to consider socioeconomic status in a more systematic way, and the College Board is too. This is vitally important, given how far achievement has already splintered along racial and class lines by the time students are about to graduate high school.”

I will add that at the end of the Brookings article the authors do detail ways of boosting disadvantaged students’ actual pre-college performance. That’s what is called in the trade as CYA, but ask yourself which is more likely to happen in the post-Fair Admissions v. Presidents and Fellows of Harvard world? Hiding affirmative action programs under some version of an “Environmental Context Dashboard” or actually breaking the rice bowls of the K-12 establishment?

More vouchers please.

CBS and Objectivity

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CBS has had an interesting week. First there was the interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates by “CBS This Morning” co-anchor Tony Dokoupil regarding Coates’ book “The Message.” Dokoupil treated Coates well, like a Republican, in that he asked some pointed questions about Coates’ book; his claim Israel was a white supremacist ethnostate akin to the Jim Crow South, that he treated Palestinians exclusively as victims without agency, and that he failed to state how Israel was surrounded by enemies pledged to destroy it.

Tough, but civil…. and then all heck broke loose

Apparently the morning show staff was so traumatized by the interview that CBS held a struggle session the next day. One of the criticisms that was hurled at Dokoupil was that he ignored the “one-sheet:”

”…the network went through its standard protocol of vetting questions through its legal, standards, and race and culture departments. The properly vetted questions were then included on what’s known as a ‘one-sheet,’ from which everyone within the show works.”

It’s standard protocol to vet questions through a race and culture department?

The other controversy at CBS came from the 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris where CBS not only cut out an unflattering clip of Kamala that it had previously released as a preview, but when challenged released a “transcript” that left out the verbiage from the previously released video clip. That’s some pretty awesome memory holing.

So what about objectivity?

Objectivity as a guiding value of journalism emerged in the 1890s as a reaction to yellow journalism. Objectivity was the idea that if a journalist simply dug out and ordered the facts the truth would emerge naturally, a way of freeing the writer from cultural and personal bias.

Walter Lippman, capturing the contemporary spirit of applying scientific tools to the social sphere, made an explicit appeal to reporters to develop a rigorous journalistic method based on verification of evidence. Objectivity would lie in the method and practice of journalism, not within the journalist himself.

This “objectivity” has been a hallowed symbol of American journalism for nearly a century. Cronkite might not have meant it when said “And that’s the way it is,” but even as a hypocrite he was still restrained by that tether to the symbol of objectivity.

Even the CBS chainsawing (editing is too polite a word) of the Kamala Harris interview, while repugnant, we can at least recognize as just good old partisan corruption. This is something Dan Rather can appreciate.

Well, now even the pretense of that tether is gone. If the Obama years didn’t do it, then certainly the last eight years of Trump Derangement Syndrome have allowed the liberal part of the media to let its freak flag fly and cut ties with “objectivity.” In their 2023 report, “Beyond Objectivity”, Leonard Downie and Andrew Heyward interviewed 75 news leaders, journalists, and other media experts in order to to investigate the new landscape of media values and practices.

Some choice parts…

Kathleen Carroll, former executive editor of the Associated Press:

“…said she has not used the word objectivity since the early 1970s because she believes it reflects the world view of the male white establishment. ‘It’s objective by whose standards? And that standard seems to be white, educated, fairly wealthy guys,’ she explained.”

Sally Buzbee, former executive editor of the Washington Post:

“Yet, Buzbee no longer uses the word objectivity ‘because it has become a political football. If the term objectivity means the world view of middle-aged white men, it has become attacked as a word that is used to keep the status quo.”

Saeed Ahmed, former director of digital news at NPR:

“As a journalist of color, I have been told time and again that my identity doesn’t matter, that I have to shed it all to worship at the altar of objectivity,” said Ahmed, “I bristle at that notion. My lived experiences should inform what I cover.”

There are a number of dimensions in here.

The first is the standard DEI mantra of equating a certain percentage of racial/gender/LGBT+ identities in their newsroom with a diversity of viewpoints.

The second is that since “objectivity” was a concept associated with a certain identity, being white men, that it should be discarded in favor of each person pursuing what they considered their version of the truth as it relates to their personal identity.

So far, this should not surprise anyone.

The third dimension is the most critical part, what happens (or doesn’t) when each individual pursues their own version of “truth.”

The 20th Century German mathematician Kurt Gödel stated that even though a system may be consistent, its consistency cannot be demonstrated within the system. Such a result does not imply that it is impossible to prove the consistency of a system, but only that such a proof cannot be accomplished inside the system itself, but rather it needs an external frame of reference.

Taking Gödel a further step, there are two types of consistency; that of consistency of the concept and the consistency of the match-up between observed reality and the concept’s description of reality. This is also known as the distinction between a reliable and a valid argument. To put it plainly that means an argument that is internally consistent (reliable) could also be externally inconsistent (invalid) because it fails to match with an external frame of reference (what most of us call reality). Anybody who has dealt with a smooth talker in sales or politics has experienced this intuitively.

What Downie, Hayward, and all the people they interview have done is essentially jettison objectivity as an external frame of reference, deriding it as a socially constructed reality (of white men), in favor of a “diverse” system of identity-based viewpoints. However, since the “truths” of those diverse viewpoints are rooted within the individual there is no basis, by definition, of validating them by an external frame of reference. This is the essence of nihilism and post-modernism, that there is no external truth but rather the old cliché of “my truth” through which the external world must be observed.

The Dokoupil-Coates interview, the struggle session that followed, the existence of a “Race and Culture Unit” represent this repudiation of objectivity. There is no truth at CBS beyond one’s individual feelings as represented by their chosen identity.

This is of course an unstable equilibrium. People in social endeavors from polities to workplaces, run on some form of common understanding, a frame of reference external to the individual. People as individuals also form their understanding of the larger social and physical environment through interacting with it. People, like Gödel’s arguments, need some grounding in an external frame of reference. When Chesterton said, “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes in anything,” he might have meant it as a curse but really it is psychological reality.

So the issue becomes, if “objectivity” is no longer the dominant approach or ideology of the newsroom, by definition there needs to be an external frame of reference, another organizing principle, for that organization to function. It cannot exist on individual truths because those are by definition outside of the scope of social interaction. There has to be something else.

For the po-mos truth outside of the individual is socially constructed (Downie and Hayward are so far out of their depth at this point, they are just along for the ride). If you believe, as most post-modernists do, that social relations are racially or gender-constructed and therefore oppressive by nature, that means somebody is going to get the chop. As Lenin put it the struggle between oppressor and oppressed is eternal, it’s simply matter of who is doing what to whom at a certain point in time.

So in reality, what CBS means by vetting through its “Race and Culture Unit” is that the network doesn’t report the news any more, or even just support Democrats, but has chosen sides in a revolutionary struggle.

For CBS it is all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. CBS had won the victory over itself. It loved the world beyond Objectivity. It was free.

Redefining Hypocrisy

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There is a value to hypocrisy. La Rochefoucauld is purported to have said, “Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.”

To be clear, hypocrisy is not in and of itself virtuous — just the opposite as it is a serious sin. However, hypocrisy is not nihilism, because by definition hypocrisy implies a recognition of an external moral order. That recognition provides both validation of that existing order, and a tether which ties the hypocrite’s behavior to it and therefore restricts the extent of public deviation.

There is another element to hypocrisy. If we can further define hypocrisy as the difference between public image and private behavior, then scandal is when that deviant private behavior is publicly exposed.

Then we have Doug Emhoff, a.k.a. Mr. Kamala Harris.

As a politician’s spouse, Emhoff has two roles to fulfill. The first is to be supportive of his wife’s career and the second is not to draw negative attention to himself. This is especially important given Kamala’s national profile and her progressive politics.

Sometimes these roles come into conflict. Some First Ladies (Jill Biden, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Reagan) have taken an active and fairly public role in their respective husbands’ administrations and drawn heat. However, that is different than being a personal embarrassment. We have presidents’ brothers (Jim Biden, Billy Carter) and kids (Hunter Biden) who were personal embarrassments, but as of yet there haven’t been any spouses. (1)

Then we have Emhoff.

There has been a lot of ink spilled over the past month or two about how Emhoff has “reshaped the perception of masculinity” given his marriage with Kamala. There was the fawning interview he did last year with MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart when Emhoff stated : (2)

“There’s too much of toxicity — masculine toxicity out there, and we’ve kind of confused what it means to be a man, what it means to be masculine. You’ve got this trope out there where you have to be tough, and angry, and lash out to be strong.”

Oh my.

A few months ago there was the revelation that Emhoff had, during his first marriage, impregnated the family nanny. Then a few weeks ago we had the story about how he struck a woman on a street in France. Now we have allegations from former co-workers regarding his misogynist behavior at his law firm. (3)

I don’t know about you but where I come from cheating on your wife with the family help, hitting women, and engaging in sexual harassment in the workplace pretty much define toxic masculinity.

So, back to the definition above, we now have a scandal, not just with Emhoff’s actual behavior but in the Harris campaign’s use of him as a symbol of the “New Man” — implicitly contrasting him with the mouth-breathing Christian nationalists.

Emhoff’s private behavior is between him and his wife. However, when a false image of Emhoff is created, and then weaponized to be used in politics, it becomes a public matter and hypocrisy loses its last vestiges of public value.

(1) I didn’t use Hillary as an example of someone whose conduct detracted from their spouse, because she was in full partnership with Bill.

(2) There’s a documentary to be made regarding Jen Psaki. This was someone who spent 16 months as the press secretary for the Biden puppet show. Then there was the unprecedented conflict of interest when she announced that she was leaving for a gig at MSNBC, but then delayed her departure for weeks. And now she does what amounts to a campaign commercial with Doug Emhoff?

(3) I heard some scuttlebutt a few years ago that there were some skeletons in Emhoff’s past. L.A. lawyer, entertainment industry, would seem to raise questions. It never ceases to amaze me that people who rise to a high level think they can just escape their past. You would think that at some point, at least by the time of the Psaki interview, Emhoff might had let on about his past deeds. It leads me to conclude that the Harris campaign wasn’t paying attention, or didn’t care because they were desperate enough to risk it. Never underestimate desperation.