Category: Old Dish

SHARON, ROBERTSON, AHMADINEJAD

Here are the specific responses to Ariel Sharon’s stroke by two leading fundamentalists in the world, Pat Robertson and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Julian cites them below. Robertson:

“He was dividing God’s land. And I would say, Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the E.U., the United Nations or the United States of America. God says, This land belongs to me. You better leave it alone.”

Ahmadinejad:

“Hopefully the news that the criminal of Sabra and Shatila has joined his ancestors is final.”

The difference, of course, is that only one of these maniacs is on Karl Rove’s A-list rolodex.

– posted by Andrew.

YIGAL AMIR, SWORD OF GOD?

Bloggers such as Steve Clemons and John Aravosis have noted Pat Robertson’s grotesque suggestion that Ariel Sharon’s stroke was some kind of divine retribution for “dividing gods land.” I did an extra double take (I guess we’re on triple takes) at this, however:

And the same thing — I had a wonderful meeting with Yitzhak Rabin in 1974. He was tragically assassinated, and it was terrible thing that happened, but nevertheless, he was dead.

What’s that now? The Rabin assassination was “the same thing”? Because this “terrible thing” caveat notwithstanding, the only way I can parse that introductory bit is to read Robertson as suggesting that Rabin’s murder, too, was an act of God—which would entail that God guided Yigal Amir to kill the Israeli prime minister, perhaps even made sure the bullet found its target. Which, funnily enough, is Yigal Amir’s take on the killing as well: That he was acting under divine guidance to prevent Israeli land from being ceded. The only puzzle is how Robertson can think that divine intervention constitutes a “terrible thing.” Shouldn’t he be proclaiming these murders and cerebral hemorrhages holy, even miraculous? And if Robertson endorses Amir’s defense that he was only carrying out God’s will, will Robertson follow that thought to its logical conclusion and demand that Amir be freed?

—posted by Julian

“C” IS FOR COOKIE

On the heels of news that the NSA website had been improperly placing persistent tracking cookies on Web visitors computers, Declan McCullagh writes that dozens of government agencies have been doing the same. I’m not exactly prepared to freak out over a few cookies, but it is, apparently, illegal.

—posted by Julian

WOMBS—NATURE’S LITTLE ZYGOTE ABATTOIRS

I don’t think Ross’ post below gets at what’s of primary interest about “nature’s waste” when it comes to zygotes. The point is not that personhood is somehow a function of survival rates (as he points out, the death rate is always 100 percent eventually), nor that hey, nature kills ’em so why can’t we—indeed, I’d love to see conservatives in general resist the urge to conflate the natural and the normative. What’s key is, as he suggests, the question of personhood, and I think our reaction to learning about “nature’s waste” is at least a handy intuition pump in this case.

Our reaction to a genocide is, obviously, different from our reaction to an earthquake that kills millions. Still, anyone with a moderately well developed moral sense reacts to the earthquake with horror and sadness. And if someone is unmoved, we can articulate at least somewhat clearly what’s gone awry: If it’s a failure of empathy because the victims are far away, we can focus attention on how the victims suffered just as you and your neighbors would, had plans and hopes in many ways like yours that have been destroyed, and so on.

Now, my response to learning this fact about nature’s “waste” of zygotes is not anything like my reaction would be to learning that some plague had wiped out millions of people I’d never met. (For the reactions to be similar, among other things I would have to feel as though it were extremely important to change our public and private medical research priorities, ranking spontaneous miscarriage of zygotes higher than just about every other illness.) Maybe that’s a theory-laden intuition, and people’s response to this fact just tracks pretty well their position in the abortion debate. But if, as I suspect, most of us do not now feel as though we are daily surrounded by little killing machines, I think that shines a spotlight on the morally salient features that are missing to account for that relative lack of concern. And I think it comes down to the things I suggested we’d appeal to earlier to show someone who failed to react to the earthquake properly—facts about mental states and related features absent by stipulation.

Now, Ross might say that even if I’m right about people’s common reaction to this, that’s a merely intuitive as opposed to logical argument. But when we get to questions like “what is it about people that matters, morally?” we’re down at the ethical equivalent of accounting for the rules and operators of logic themselves. The foundational question, in each case, can’t be answered within the system except in a kind of rule-circular or coherentist way. That’s not to say a raw, pre-reflective intuition ought to carry a whole lot of weight in itself, but they’re also ultimately the brute facts we’ve got to work with. Maybe we just need our intuition reconditioned by a bit of reflection and abstraction, as in the case of the bigot or the man unmoved by far-off disaster, but it may also draw our attention to the lack of the raw material with which we’d ordinarily do that work.

—posted by Julian

ZYGOTES

Andrew writes:

If you believe that human beings exist from the moment a zygote comes into being, there are almost no environments more dangerous for humans than inside their own mother.

Well, sure – but if you believe that human beings exist from the moment a zygote comes into being, you could just as easily argue that the safest environment for a human being, at that stage of its development, is inside its own mother. Yes, it’s still a pretty dangerous place – but so was the environment outside the mother’s womb, until the last hundred years or so. A kid born in Chicago in 1870, for instance, had a fifty percent chance of reaching the age of five. But that didn’t make him any less of a human being.

And it’s not quite true that, as Andrew puts it, “comparing the scale of what humans do to the unborn with what nature does is like comparing a high tide with a tsunami.” It’s more like comparing a middling tsunami to a major one. There are about 4 million births a year in the United States, and if we suppose that only a third of zygotes make it through to birth, that means that about eight million human lives perish naturally in utero. This is obviously a lot more than the between 1 and 1.5 million abortions that have taken place every year since the mid-1970s – but not so much more that the latter statistic fades into insignificance.

And even if it did, so what? “Nature” kills everyone, eventually. The death rate for people in the stage of development we call the eighth decade of life is probably around eighty percent or so. That doesn’t make it less of a crime if someone bumps my grandmother off. We don’t have laws against murder because we want to lower the death rate to zero – we have laws against murder because we accept that 1) everyone dies, but 2) it’s not okay to kill them.

Obviously, nature’s waste is a strong intuitive argument against the pro-life position – i.e., if zygotes and embryos perish in such great numbers, how can they be that important? If we don’t know these lives exist, and don’t grieve when they’re accidentally snuffed out, why isn’t okay to kill them? But I don’t think it makes for a very strong logical argument. The crux of the abortion debate is whether there ought to be a legal distinction between human lives (which zygotes and embryos and fetuses obviously are) and human persons – defined variously by brain activity, ability to feel pain, level of self-awareness, possession of language, ability to survive independent of their mother’s body, or what-have-you. And intuitions aside, I don’t think even the most ardent pro-choicer wants to start defining “personhood” based on survival rates. You won’t like where it takes you.

– posted by Ross

UPDATE: I simply want to echo every single point of Ross’. There’s a distinction between wilfull taking of human life and nature’s toll, beyond human control. The argument about zygotes does not logically alter the absolutist pro-life case, but it does, I think, provide context for an intuitive sense (echoed by Aquinas) that it’s too extreme a view. The tsunami-tide metaphor may be excessive. But the ratio of natural abortions to procured ones is still around 8:1. As for “personhood,” Ross is right again: that’s a separate question. I deal with all this in the book. The blog post was designed to nail down a fact.

– posted by Andrew.

THE ORWELLIAN WORLD OF DICK CHENEY

Try reconciling what we know for a fact about what the administration has done and the words uttered by the vice-president yesterday:

I was in Washington in the 1970s, at a time when there was great and legitimate concern about civil liberties and about potential abuses within the executive branch. I had the honor of serving as White House Chief of Staff to President Ford, and that experience shapes my own outlook to this very day.

Serving immediately after a period of turmoil, all of us in the Ford administration worked hard to restore people’s confidence in the government. We were adamant about following the law and protecting civil liberties of all Americans, and we did so. Three decades later, I work for a President who shares those same values. He has made clear from the outset, both publicly and privately, that our duty to uphold the law of the land admits no exceptions in wartime. The President himself put it best: He said, “We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them.”

So why violate our principles by authorizing torture of detainees? Why retain the right to torture them even after a law has been passed to prevent it? Why violate the terms of the 1978 law that was precisely a result of the worries about civil liberties after Vietnam and Watergate? And is there any connection between what the vice-president says and what he actually does? My extended take here.

– posted by Andrew.

YGLESIAS AWARD NOMINEE

“Weirdos and charlatans and self-interested hacks like Lou Sheldon and Grover Norquist have long discredited the conservative ideas they purport to represent. Their political allies in Washington and Congress may be tempted to defend them. I hope they don’t. We’ll all be better off when they’re gone.” – Tucker Carlson, on his blog.

BROKEBACK REVISITED: This time, a kiss didn’t exactly go as planned. (Hat tip: Boozhy.)

– posted by Andrew.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY I

“The men were taken by ambulances to a nearby hospital for examination.” – USA Today, yesterday. The MSM strikes again. USA Today is the largest circulation paper in America. Blogs are no less reliable. The best blogs are more reliable.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: “The country’s on the verge of a civil war,” Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, Tuesday, about Iraq.

THE INFRASTRUCTURE: Over the past three years, I’ve heard many, constantly shifting defenses of administration policy in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad. The latest has been that, while U.S. troops cannot control violence or maintain order (we never sent enough to do that), they can protect the infrastructure and push the democratic process forward. One problem: the critical energy infrastructure seems to be helpless in the face of insurgent violence. So we didn’t even send enough troops to protect the pipelines.

HOW HUMANS DIE II: Every human life begins in zygote form – a tiny speck of genetic material that exists the moment a sperm conjoins with a fertilized egg. Natural law philosophers, those who provide the intellectual spine of the pro-life movement, argue that human beings exist from that moment on. The Pope reiterated that point in his Christmas message. If that’s true, human life truly is nasty, brutish and short. The numbers are hard to pin down because most unborn children – to use the pro-life term – die so soon after coming into existence that the mother is not even aware that she has become pregnant. The scientific consensus is that, at the most conservative end of the spectrum, half of all unborn children die before they even get a chance to get implanted in the uterus (some estimates put that figure even higher at around 70 percent). Of those that successfully get implanted, the mortality rate is lower, somewhere around 35 percent. The most recent research has consistently increased the estimates of early death. The numbers for such infinitesimal occurrences are inevitably vague. But we can securely say that a clear majority of human beings die before they are even a few weeks’ old. We’re talking about millions of deaths annually in the United States – a human toll unknown in any other environment. Natural abortions, in other words, far exceed the number of procured abortions. Comparing the scale of what humans do to the unborn with what nature does is like comparing a high tide with a tsunami. You can explore more of this here, here, and here.

– posted by Andrew.

MAN ON FIRE

That would be David Brooks, in today’s column:

I don’t know what’s more pathetic, Jack Abramoff’s sleaze or Republican paralysis in the face of it. Abramoff walks out of a D.C. courthouse in his pseudo-Hasidic homburg, and all that leading Republicans can do is promise to return his money and remind everyone that some Democrats are involved in the scandal, too.

That’s a great G.O.P. talking point: some Democrats are so sleazy, they get involved with the likes of us . . .

. . . Back in the dim recesses of my mind, I remember a party that thought of itself as a reform, or even a revolutionary movement. That party used to be known as the Republican Party. I wonder if it still exists.

Of course, you probably don’t have Time$elect, so you can’t read the whole thing.

– posted by Ross

HOW HUMANS DIE

Thanks so much for your numerous responses to the zygote question. I’m deluged with information in a matter of hours, so no need for more. I’ll write up a post detailing what I found out for tomorrow’s Dish. But the bottom line is clear: if you believe that human beings exist from the moment a zygote comes into being, there are almost no environments more dangerous for humans than inside their own mother.