If You See Something, Say Something

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

So, between the book banners and those who would fire people for sourced documents stating what any neuro-scientist will tell you over breakfast, the left has been on a tear and is going insane.

It is not, as some of my very young friends think, that the left has more dominance or is going more bully-like than ever.

No, this is the mark of a cultural revolution, where the dominant faction is losing its grip.  You see, they controlled the entire culture for decades and anyone who talked back was “crazy” and anyone they declared evil or stupid was evil or stupid.

If you lived through the eighties, you remember all the jokes about Ronald Reagan being both evil and stupid, both on network TV and in casual, non political gatherings.  The media reporting made it seem so, so everyone KNEW so.

Yeah, sure there were those of us who resented this, but we said nothing, because ‘everyone knew” we were wrong and the left was right.  Places like Readers Digest which were supposed to be middle of the road published crazy stuff like that the president of Mozambique was only a nurse’s aid because under the Portuguese no black person was allowed to be a doctor.  Reading this, I threw the magazine against the wall, because my SIL’s best friend, whom she helped escape from Mozambique (because the revolutionaries idea was to send all the black women to cut down jungle for agricultural space in the country’s deranged version of the cultural revolution) was black and a medical student.  But for millions of middle Americans that lie became the truth, and the revolutionaries, an armed puppet-branch of the soviets, became “liberators” of “black people”. ..  who would allow them to be doctors.  (Sort of.  If they survived assignments cutting down jungle or acting as comfort women to the Cuban mercenaries sent over to help with the revolution.)

The narrative was so uniformly shaped, so pervasively pushed that not only wasn’t it possible to question it without sounding crazy, but the inherent contradictions of the left couldn’t be pointed out.

Now, the good little boys and girls, who have done their best to virtue signal, play by the rules, and always say what “everyone knew” are getting talk back.  Worse, some of these people, like Damore, have science on their side.  which initiates meltdown, defensiveness and what appears from our point of view like roid rage.

Asking simple questions like “If men and women are exactly alike, what does a company gain from increasing diversity?” pokes a huge hole in political correctness, and makes it impossible for them to hold these contradictory ideas in their heads in peace.  If they tell you it’s because little Suzie who wants to be a programmer is being discriminated against, ask why we should instead discriminate against little Bobby, who wants to be a programmer, if they’re both exactly alike in any thing but sexual organs.  We’re not hiring them have sex, are we?  If we must have affirmative action, wouldn’t it be better to pick those people who grew up in poor conditions or something, and ignore other characteristics?

Be polite, be firm.  Ask questions.  When they tell you that you’re a Nazi or literally Hitler, tell them you’re not, but you’ve been called worse.  Then go back to questioning.

Question them everywhere you can, on every front you can without endangering either your job, your life or your family.  Question, question, question.  Their philosophy is full of contradictions and they can only hold onto it by pretending they’re not there.  Don’t let them.

The crazier you make them, the more they flail about, the more the unengaged spectators see that they’re in fact crazy.  And the more we win.

It’s time to throw this bastard child of soviet agit prop int he ash heap of history.  Go out there and poke.  If you see something, say something.  Do not let them think they can go unquestioned.

The end result of their efforts is always a soulless, murderous society.

Use your snark for good, and your logic for fun.

Go.

326 thoughts on “If You See Something, Say Something”

    2. This can backfire– I had a whisper campaign started against me because the idiot bully couldn’t figure out “snark.”

  2. That “if you see something, say something” is getting on my nerves here in NV. They use it for everything. It reminds me too much of East Germany and how everyone informed on each other. The next step to me is paid informers. *sigh

    1. After the celebration of Lena Dunham’s turn at sacrificing flight attendants (who may have never existed) to Big Brother I have tipped into thinking we’re supposed to be reminded of the Stasi.

        1. I have yet to see it…it is on my “I want to see it but I know it is going to disturb me greatly when I do” list.

    2. As Sarah says, use it against them. Point out the illogicalities of their positions and if they say you aren’t allowed to say things like that, hit them with their own slogan, “But you guys always say, ‘If you see something, say somthing.’ Well, I see something that is the reasonable outcome of what you’re intentions would create if acted upon, and I’m saying something about it! If we don’t truly examine the consequences of what we plan to do, we’ll always be trying to fix the things that go wrong. And by ‘we,’ I mean ‘you all.'”

    4. *wicked grin* Living in a building especially for the Stazi, and aware that our apartment was regularly searched, I wonder, quite honestly, how many of them would come back so they could goggle at my dad’s ‘casually’ scattered Playboy magazines, the delicious coffee (REAL coffee, not the Erzatzkaffee), and the very prominent library filled with big, heavy books, Mein Kampf sitting on the coffeetable… (He’d change the books he’d leave sitting on the coffee table now and again; he’d already read most of those.)

      I think Dad was engaged in his own subtle thought-war while hiding behind the “Oh, I’m sure I’m safe and secure in my own home” facade. Looking back, the dish drying rack always had some dishes sitting in there; perhaps they were there deliberately so whoever was sent to investigate us for ‘secret communications’ had somewhere to put the dishes they used. I think for my parents it became a game.

      I wonder how many people they… ‘corrupted.’

        3. Apparently, I tell interesting stories, full stop. Rhys seems to enjoy it when I reminisce about something at random, it’s a bit like ‘story time! yay!’ I told him last night that I’d like to hear more about what his life was like, since I apparently haven’t got a passing acquaintance with ‘normal and boring’, and would like to know what that’s like, even if it’s second hand.

          “But your life is so much more interesting!” he protests, to which I replied that just because I started life with the Chinese “Interesting life” curse and somehow survived it to the point that the curse decided it’ll stay around til’ it finally kills me doesn’t mean I don’t wanna know what I missed out on!

          Then there’s my mom, who I tried to pester about describing her life, and Dad’s life, which, from what few stories I’ve told to friends, is apparently interesting in the “It’s like peeking into a completely different era, Mark Twain style!” I need some way of being able to interview her that I can record, but she’s back in the Philippines.

            1. What’s it called?

              And, for any flaming soc-jus retards who read this, YES my mom will know it’s being recorded because not only have we talked about this extensively in advance, that I need to interview her and record what she says so I can write.

          2. This reminds me of one of my wife’s cousins, who works in construction. At family reunions we’ve come to call it “Story Time with Greg”.

    5. It’s a tool– and it’s aimed at the “you’re not allowed to notice when I’m doing something suspicious” vibes.

      2. I re-read your words– government has never wanted us to notice when they do something suspicious… whether fed or state government. *sigh

          1. You also might read our history of Nevada… Government has used this place as their private playground. They have taken land from people for their purposes. So yea– Mafia… but government here has been much worse. We have people who wish the Mafia were back… because there was less crime (lol–hard to believe) and people were more polite.

            1. Even the city and county government here have stolen land here through eminent domain… the most recent was to take a piece of property from a widow and give it to a casino to turn into a parking lot. The other one was to take houses from people and give the land to WalMart. There was a nice backlash here.

  4. When the facts don’t fit the narrative humans have a terrible tendency to attempt to revise the facts. This is particularly the case with those whose past success is derived from adhering to the narrative.

    Remember: whoever shouts their facts loudest is the winner. It’s Scientific!

    2. “…. whoever shouts their facts loudest is the winner.”

      Not only loud, left wing can be extremely angry and aggressive as well.

  6. “You’re a Nazi! You’re literally Hitler!”

    “…Is that all? I’d have thought I at least rated a “transphobe” or two. Have to try harder, I guess…”

    2. “Perhaps you’ll notice that I am neither 118 years old nor espouse any sort of government control of anything much. I think you misunderstand the meaning of ‘literally.'”

      2. Actually, if somebody said “You’re literally Hitler!” to me I would say “If I were literally Hitler, you would either be so frightened of me that you would be pissing yourself, or so entranced by me that you would follow me to hell.”

        1. “Do you really believe that?”

          “Yes, I do!”

          “Then why are you still standing in my way?”

          –Miles Vorkosigan

        2. “If I were a Hitler clone, wouldn’t I freaking LOOK like Adolph Hitler?!”

          I really need to look into this “Archer” series judging from the clips YouTube recommends I watch.

        3. I probably wouldn’t be afraid of Hitler today, if he had survived, because he’d be in hiding, hoping that no one would ever find him. But *that* Hitler had been stripped of power from the outcome of WWII. A person who’s literally Hitler, power and all, would indeed evoke the reactions you describe.

          (Incidentally, this is also a good reminder than any one person is really only as powerful as the power the people surrounding him is willing to give him. Adolf Hitler would have been able to do nothing, if it weren’t for the people around him willing to do whatever he said….and to the extent that those around Hitler were frightened, they were frightened that almost everyone else around Hitler was going to do what Hitler wanted to do as well….)

          And anti-gun zealots are similar in this regard: they are convinced that gun-owners are boiling pots of rage and anger that need the slightest provocation to snap and inflict bloody carnage on the innocent…yet they don’t hesitate to use rhetoric against gun owners that ought to cause them to snap and inflict bloody carnage. It’s as though they don’t really believe their fear-mongering!

    3. Do I look like I had my one hundred and twenty-eighth birthday at the end of April? For someone who has been dead for seventy two years I certainly get around pretty good, don’t I?

      You must tell me how I do it.

  7. No, this is the mark of a cultural revolution, where the dominant faction is losing its grip.

    Perhaps, but as you point out:

    Question them everywhere you can, on every front you can without endangering either your job, your life or your family.

    Those death throes are pretty dangerous…and weird.

    After Monday I am more comfortable being out at work at a Fortune 50 about my sexuality (kink, gender flexibility) than I am about my politics (mix of small l libertarian and Burkean conservatism). Yes, I have been mildly out about both (if I having lunch with a certain friend I will come in made up because she loves me that way and I will stand up for GOP candidates) but I know which has radically toned down over the last 72 hours or so.

    1. Hmmm, the death throws remind me of how Hitler kept getting weirder (crazier, more delusional?) the longer he was in the bunker; some of that was being isolated, some of that was drugs (probably), and, I think, disease.

      BTW, I’ve read Mein Kampf, but it was so long ago that I don’t remember a bit of it.

      1. “BTW, I’ve read Mein Kampf, but it was so long ago that I don’t remember a bit of it.”

        Same here. I highly suspect it’s because there wasn’t anything worth remembering.

          1. I read about 2/3 of Mein Kampf before deciding I’d gotten the gist and didn’t feel like slogging through the rest of the prose. Also read “Steal This Book” and decided it was the biggest waste of a prison sentence since “Mein Kampf”.

  8. I challenged a leftie once to define ‘the rich’. He’d been foaming at the mouth online about the need to make ‘the rich’ pay higher taxes to benefit ‘the poor’, and how evil it was that ‘the rich’ could leave large amounts of money and land to their descendants. So I kept asking him to define ‘the rich’, and to confirm that his own will would leave everything to the Government not to his sons. He kept dodging, so I kept asking. In the end he abandoned his own discussion group and closed it, because he didn’t want to answer me.

    1. The leftist definition of rich is “anyone who has more than me.” It is a lot like how they wish to abolish private property but not personal property and you find what they have is personal and anything they don’t have is private.

      1. If rich is “anyone who has more than me” then congratulations, you’re all rich.

        I like the rich. Because in a free market the way to get rich is to provide the most benefit to the most people, who then pay you for it. I’ll come across some neat device and my first thought is, “I hope the guy who invented this got rich off of it, because this is amazing.”

    2. I had one define ‘the rich’ as the top 10% of income. He stood there babbling for about ten minutes when i pointed out that was him during the last major film he worked on.

      2. It’s rather amazing how fast a lefticle can claw their way out of being one of ‘the rich’ (oops, I just about typed ‘the reich’ there) when confronted with just how much they have. If we could just harvest that energy we’d have artificial gravity and FTL drives by the end of the year.

        1. i have, occasionally, yes. Not recently, but the people i worked with or know from the field are all over… or were until CA decided to kill the golden goose during the entire President 0 administration..

            1. because they wouldnt give enough of a budget to the tax credit program for the film indistry, do literally the program ran dry by April every year, they raised taxes (to ‘tax the rich’ but it generally started at upper middle class), and so many of the vfx shops died or moved a lot of their production work to Canada

    3. There was a study I vaguely recall in which the respondents were asked to give a specific value to “rich” and also asked to reveal their annual income. The consistent result was that the rich made about $3-5K more a year than the respondent.

      1. In 2008 Obama’s campaign people claimed the “poor” made about $125K a year. They backed off on that steadily during the campaigning, but their final figure was still more than I’ve ever made per year. More than both of us made together, most years.

        My, that ivory tower sure is high…

          1. Oops! Missed the ivory or. Probably thinking of how many in the last administration came from the Ivy League.

    4. I have a funny definition of being rich:

      (1) No debt and living within my means,
      (2) doing work in something I enjoy doing, and that helps others
      (3) having enough income to:
      …(a) do some fun things, and
      …(b) help other people, and
      …(c) save for the future, particularly retirement.

      When you look at it this way, it’s not all that hard to be rich if you want it (although it requires a bit of self discipline)…and it also becomes clear that only vindictive people would want to hurt such people….

  9. Can women decide what we like to study and what we are good at? If you say no, that women must go into STEM even if we as individuals are not as strong there are we are in other areas, how is that different from the Patriarchy saying “women may not study anything but STEM?”

    And “but this is different” is not an answer. I’m still waiting.

    They are “pro-choice” as long as other people only get to choose from the Prog menu.

    1. My high school calculus teacher was disappointed that a couple of us who really got the calculus were going in to history and English (or something, I can’t remember). We did well at it, but it didn’t interest us enough. He was willing to be disappointed because he realized we had brains and could make our own decisions (and also, we wouldn’t do as well in it if we were coerced into it).

      1. I know that my father was mildly disappointed that I wasn’t interested in sciences. I was good at the various science classes, through familial exposure, especially Dad’s nature walks and suppertime conversation – I just wasn’t interested enough to make it a life work.

        1. I was supposed to be a doctor. I had the grades. I was interested in the theory, but I SUCK at bedside. I’m one of those people who is genuinely afraid of being round sick people, even if I love them. I can defeat it and do to look after my kids/husband. But… strangers? No way. (This is not lack of empathy. It’s more like an excess of empathy that makes it torture watching people suffer. Debilitating either way)

          1. I was sort of interested in medicine because of a family member, but 1) I have no patience for sick people [natural-born pathologist?] and 2) I have very weak math skills. Which means bio-chem 101 would have been the end of my pre-med.

          2. I AM a doctor, and I was supposed to be a nurse! That’s was the “correct” field for women in medicine in my culture. Meh, wasn’t that nice.
            I love science and math, and love what I do. Interestingly though, medicine has specialties that self-select. Right now, pediatrics is 70% female. Should I be forced to go into trauma surgery to even things up? Yuck.

            1. “Should I be forced to go into trauma surgery to even things up?”

              In properly organized society you would be assigned field according to scientific analytical tests and would love your work or be sent to reeducation camps for the pseriously psychologically damaged. Any person who did not demonstrate enjoyment of assigned work would clearly be challenging the expertise and wisdom of the state.

            2. Right now, pediatrics is 70% female.

              And half of those are not going to be around MY children more than once.

              Seriously, I do not understand why some women to into CHILDREN’S MEDICINE and are huffy at the idea of having more than a trophy kid. (Had one doctor flatly tell me that I shouldn’t have more than one after our daughter, because… she wasn’t really clear on that.)
              Ditto ob/gyn. “Gosh, I work in female reproduction, how DARE women actually use their reproductive system!” (Most of the problems I had were before I had more than two kids, FWIW.)

          3. My parents (mostly my mother) had determined I was to be a doctor. Which was close to the last thing I wanted. Not no, but hell no.

            They were set to pay for medical school, and *only* medical school. I turned it down flat. When it became apparent that I wasn’t going to knuckle under, they tentatively put “lawyer” on the table. Which wasn’t that much better than “doctor.” The only thing I was interested in was engineering. which they turned down flat.

            I dropped out of high school and got a job.

          4. I was told that I have very good motor skills, when I was cutting out tiny letters out of construction paper for a poster. The person telling me this was majoring in nursing, and she suggested I would be a good surgeon.

            But I also tend to suffer from the empathy issue to some degree, so it’s one factor that would prevent me from being a doctor, too. The other is a certain squeamishness towards blood — one that goes all the way down to not liking to squish insects (or even be in the same room as someone squishing an insect).

            Perhaps I can get over either issue, but I’d much rather not: I like mathematics too much!

      2. My mom is *still* upset I didn’t basically become Abby from NCIS. I have like zero social skills, I actively hate being around human remains and I trip over words when I’m talking– but I’m “smart enough”. *headdesk* Give me nice, NEVER BEEN ALIVE bits and chunks to work with, please!

        I’ll also do food, but I prefer words or never-been-alive stuff….

              1. Heh. Abby falls under, in the goth classification, “perkigoth” A creature more feared by other goths with hangovers or before 10am, than even the Visigoth or vandal horde…

                1. “I’m wearing all black and I’m all cheerful even though I have not had any coffee and you haven’t had any either!” Yeah.

                  1. Apparently some kind of energy drink, distinctive enough that they were able to rescue Ziva by tracking a terrorist leader with a similar habit. Apparently Caffe-Pow is an unusual purchase in the Horn of Africa 😎

                    5. It’s a bit frustrating, because there are days where I drink tea and coffee to keep warm inside and I don’t notice how many cups I’ve had, and the ‘too much caffeine’ switch trips and …. zzzzzzzz. Even if I need to start making dinner just right then. Argh.

    2. It is different because only men’s work is valuable and if we don’t force women to be men then women won’t be valuable.

      The amount of inherent self-loathing in most modern brands of feminism (which they project on to women who want to be mothers, the one thing truly and completely distinctively female) is jaw dropping.

      Smith had their measure in one of the Instrumentality stories.

          1. That was a neat story. I hated the rate of Norstrilian taxes. Taxed into simplicity again. Grrr..Spouse earned that money! Why should we have to give the majority of it to you (gov’t) because you think we shouldn’t have much money!

      2. I’m borrowing that to use on my thinks-she’s-a-feminist daughter, if you don’t mind. (She recites all the lines, but she’s too belligerent to believe she’s a victim of Everything and Everyone.)

        1. The odd part is if you really look at it the supposed Patriarchy actually places more value on “women’s work” than feminists do.

    3. You do realize that “pro-choice” means “pro my choice, not yours,” right? (It’s a rhetorical question; I know you get that.)

      1. Right. But Liberals seem to have trouble not looking down in disgust at anyone who doesn’t make the approved choice. And are often oblivious of the pressure they put on people to choose “correctly.”

        1. You need to cultivate the attitude that whatever the leftists do is at best faintly amusing, but nothing to be take seriously. If they look down their noses at you in disgust, just smile at them and say, “Bless your heart.” Down here, normal folks will recognize your distaste for them, while nothing you say to them will register to them anyway, so you’re free to say anything you like!

          1. Most of the leftists who have been looking down their noses at me personally were good gaming friends for 10 years or more. One of them is the woman who would let me ramble at her for three hours at a time when I couldn’t sleep after my mother’s death. I think they’re wrong, but that doesn’t mean their disdain doesn’t hurt like hell.

            1. I’m sorry to tell you this, but those folks were not your friends. You were deceived into believing they were because they acted friendly so long as you toed their religious line, but when they realized that you believed something different their true colors became apparent.

        2. I am not sure I’ll give you that oblivious without evidence. Too many liberals have demonstrated they don’t deserve that degree of good faith.

    4. “They are “pro-choice” as long as other people only get to choose from the Prog menu.”

      Precisely. The difference between a Liberal/Progressive/Leftie buttinski of today and a Late Victorian Ostentatiously Christian buttinski of the 19th century is not visible to they naked eye.

    5. “Pro-choice” means “Pro- the right (left) choice.”

      I strongly suspect that future generations will look on our modern abortion practices as a genocide of the unborn. That’s what it is. What is genocide but politically motivated mass killings? We tie it to ethnicity only because nationalism was the prominent political ideology when the term was invented. Since Roe v. Wade, we have aborted 10x more babies than victims of the Holocaust in the United States alone. With the way the Left harpies on about the practice, you can’t tell me it isn’t political. For them, it’s practically baptism.

      Anyways, sorry to get on the soapbox, but this is an issue that really strikes a nerve. I suspect it does for many of you too.

      1. Anyone else here remember the huge kerfuffle over “Murphy Brown”‘s decision to not get an abortion? Apparently an awful lot of the folk praising the show’s depiction of a “strong female character” thought she should only be permitted to make the “correct” choice.

      2. considering some of the various schemes i have seen i think its equally likely it will be considered how something far worse began…

        i.e. ” based on this and the horrible overpopulation we decided that ‘reproduction credits’ and mandatory abortions were okay, and then came the genetic tests and those with unsuitable genetics were exempted from receiving reproduction credits’ etc etc ad nauseam.

      3. Who says abortion isn’t ethnically linked? There’s a lot of insistence on government funding in order to ‘provide access to the poor’. The clinics seem to concentrate with urban poor, which apparently correlates with minority. One eighth the population is black, IIRC about 40 million in 2010. Fifty million dead babies doesn’t have to be very disproportionately black to diminish the size of the black voting block. If it is evenly distributed by age cohort, and just, say, 20% black, that is something like a bit over six million black voters.

        I do prefer ‘genocide’ for ethnically linked mass killings. I think ‘mass killings’, ‘mass slaughter’, and ‘mass murder’ are perfectly adequate, and we needn’t borrow genocide to describe such.

      4. I also note that if a pro-abortion person argues for ‘morality’ and ‘personhood’ arguments, they inevitably shoot themselves in the foot.

        http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/08/11/james-franco-challenges-princeton-professor-logic-pro-abortion-argument/

        Reading out the commentary to my husband trying to find the ‘logical thread’ of the pro-abortionist argument only had me realize there wasn’t any. It was a word salad.

        1. hOLY cICular lOgIc, Batman! And that lady is in charge of teaching people? Oy Vey!, Those kids are likely doomed. Uff da! I don’t imagine she’s thought through her ‘logic’ very far.

      5. Forgive me, but this one bothers me. There are just under four million births a year in the United States; the pregnancy rate is presumably somewhat higher. An estimated 2% of pregnancies are tubal: The fertilized ovum lodges in the Fallopian tube, eventually ruptures it, and kills the pregnant woman and itself. The only treatment is surgical termination of the pregnancy, which kills the embryo, of course.

        I think there are three options here:

        * You say that the embryo does not count as a human being, and the surgery is obviously necessary.
        * You say that the embryo does count as a human being, but that in some situations it’s legitimate to kill an innocent human being (the embryo is clearly “innocent,” right?) to save another human being’s life.
        * You say that the embryo does count as a human being, and the pregnancy cannot be terminated, and the woman has to die in agony, with the embryo dying in the process. For about 80,000 women a year.

        Is there an option that I’ve missed? If not, since you clearly reject the first option, do you endorse the second or the third? And in either case, for what reasons?

        I know this is a grim question. But whatever you think of abortion-for-convenience, there are real “cold equations” cases in obstetrics.

        1. I think 80k women dying in agony without abortions FOR MODERN MEDICINE IS GROSSLY EXAGGERATED. Tubal pregnancies are different, because they’re NEVER viable. They can’t come to term. And it will kill the mother.
          For the ones “left alone will result in fully functional baby” the ones that would kill the mother are CONSIDERABLY fewer than 80k a year. Half the medical abortions are “will cause the mother psychological distress.”
          Of the remaining ones, the doctors AGGRESSIVELY promote abortion as a solution. I was badgered into aborting Robert, due to pre-eclampsia. When I refused it was suggested my husband was the reason I wasn’t consenting, and was I abused. In fact, I was NOT going to have him aborted, when I’d worked for six years to get a viable pregnancy. Or, anyway, ever. I can discuss it, but I couldn’t do it from the moment I felt him move. Not only did they assure me I would die, they assured me he would be mentally retarded.
          BAH. He’s the one in medschool and either I’m still alive or my ghost is really confused.
          They over recommend abortion.

          1. Thank you. I found myself snarling partway through the read, because the rare medically neccessary abortions are the excuse pro-abortionists have been using to beat us over the head with, to allow the convenience abortions.

            I would not have ever consented for my children to be aborted, unless it actually risked my dying, and even then I would have thought long and HARD before giving consent. Hell, from the moment I knew I was pregnant, abortion was off the table.

            2. The thing is, it ain’t gonna matter. The tactics and attitude of the ‘Pro-Choice’ crowd pretty much ensure that we will see abortion widely restricted in my lifetime. And, while I say this, I am in favor of legal abortion in most cases. Of course, I am also in favor of a lot of things that result in people being killed. I’m a bit of a sonofabitch, that way.

              But the self-righteous attitude of the Pro Choice people is going to be their doom. They have two huge poison pills that they simply will not abandon; late term abortions and opposition to parental notification laws. Both are political losers. Both, in the hands of self righteous twits who can be counted on to do ‘what they know is right’ regardless of the law are deep serious gritty trouble.

              Keep performing late term abortions, over the objections of people who consider them child-murder, and you are going to get tighter and tighter restrictions. And if you are too holier than thou to participate in the writing of the restriction, they will be written by your opponents.

              As for parental notification laws; I await confidently the tale of a couple of Pro-Choice activists who smuggle an underage girl across state lines to get away from parental notification, whereupon she dies of complications. That’s a blow that will be hurting Pro-Choice DECADES after it happens.

              I mean, these idiots never did catch that the Kermit Gosnell case was a disaster, that they had totally screwed up by not catching onto what he was doing and turning him in, and that defending him was political suicide.

              It’s a very slow motion train wreck. I suppose that it could be stopped, if a bunch of smart adults took over the Pro- Choice side and kept it out of the ads of petulant twits for a couple of decades. But I really don’t see that happening.

              1. When you have elevated “a woman’s authority over her own body” to a right you will find defenders of that right no more amenable to reason than the most fervent Second Amendment advocates.

                Of course, SA advocates are not asserting a right to kill another human for their own convenience.

                It might be interesting to explore ways of turning the anti-SA arguments against Pro-Choicers … safe, sensible abortion control? It might be best to eschew the a-word which only obscures the underlying fact, and call it safe, sensible pregnancy termination controls.

                1. In fact, one reason that I am dead set against nearly all legal restrictions on abortion as such is that I think it is virtually certain that most people who propose them really want to ban abortion entirely, just as I think that most people who want propose “sensible gun laws” really want to disarm the public. The two cases are entirely parallel. And anyone who is strongly pro-choice, as I am, will recognize any proposal that even squints in the direction of prohibiting abortion, just as sure as anyone who is pro-keeping and bearing arms, as I am, will recognize any proposal that even squints in the direction of banning firearms.

                  Or, for that matter, just as surely as more than one person here, seeing my argument for the right of women undergoing tubal pregnancy to save their own lives by undergoing surgical termination, immediately concluded that my argument tended toward defending the right of women to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term, and opposed it. It’s virtually impossible to cover up fundamental moral disagreement by clever choice of words.

                  1. Your ability to set forth a logical argument seems to be shown by what appears to be your inability analogize correctly.

                    You can’t see the clear differences in these cases, so you evidently believe that the pairs in each are identical.
                    1) between terminating a tubal pregnancy (i.e. *killing the fetus*), and killing a terminal cancer patient; and
                    2) between banning/restricting abortion, which at the very least ends a nascent human being, and banning restricting access to arms, which has no inherent impact on relevant rates of crime

                    4. Sigh. As Sarah notes you have to be willing to listen.

                      Multiple people already have addressed the difference between killing to save a life (where the goal is saving a life), and just killing (where the goal is the killing itself). That you appear to be unable to wrap your mind around that difference leads you to the poor analogy you provided.

                      Similarly, abortion in general has the goal of killing, whether one considers the fetus to be a human being (as I do) or not (which appears to be your belief), the goal is to kill an organism (which whether it is human at the time, clearly under normal circumstances has the potential to become human (at viability? at birth?). The fetus is not merely an appendage of the mother, the DNA is totally different. So regulations/restrictions on abortion are regulations/restrictions on something where the **goal** is to kill. While hoplophobes claim that the goal of gun control is to reduce killing, we have over 100 years of evidence, world-wide, that shows that there is no causal connection between guns and overall rates of violent death or suicide. Gun *control* is about “control” not about death or crime.

                  2. There is a vast chasm between the presumed right of a woman to terminate a doomed pregnancy in order to save her life and the right of a woman to terminate a normal pregnancy because she doesn’t want the burden of a child. I don’t think there are more than 5% of the population that would ban abortion to save the mother’s life, and the only reason there isn’t comparable support for abrtion to save a mother’s health is the degree of dishonesty which has stretched that loophole wide enough to give birth to an elephant child.

                  3. The two cases are entirely parallel.

                    ….Other than that part where one involves killing someone trying to kill you, and the other involves killing someone who could not possibly try to kill you.

              2. I mean, these idiots never did catch that the Kermit Gosnell case was a disaster, that they had totally screwed up by not catching onto what he was doing and turning him in, and that defending him was political suicide.

                The horrific thing is that a lot of pro-abortion people did turn him in…and they were utterly ignored, deep-sixed.

                Because of those fanatics you mention.

                It’s the freaking “Soviet Union vs the Nazi” of our time.

              3. Girls have already died for lack of parental notification laws, or because they exploited the judicial bypass, because they didn’t tell their parents about the hemorrhage or the infection until it was too late to save their lives.

                It’s going to take a lot more than one case to stop them.

            3. Bingo. It’s a typical bait and switch. The bait is the mother’s life. The switch is to shift the focus from abortion on demand to terminating a pregnancy where the mother’s life is in danger. It’s an argument geared to focus on emotion and to put critics of abortion on demand on the defensive.

          2. Amen. I know 3 little kids that the doctors strongly recommended be aborted. The mothers told the docs to go to hell. Docs were persistent; the moms were immovable, dire predictions and all. Both moms and kids are happy and healthy today.
            Sad to say, so are the doctors — who ought to have their licenses yanked, each and all.

            1. I recall reading, some years back, about one of the Low Countries that has a persistent problem with euthanasia and forced sterilization scandals. They catch one, stamp it out, and a few years later they have another flare -up. The author of the article (I think it was in REASON) didn’t spell out specific causes, but he (she?) gave the impression that the country’s medical ethics were aloft totally in the hands of the medical profession.

              That might be fine, if Doctors didn’t have a tendency to messianic delusion. I’ve met exceptions, but nowhere near enough.

              Want to solve a lot of the ‘health care problem’? Start certifying more medical schools. There hasn’t been a new one authorized in decades. Doctors are technicians. They deserve to be paid as such, and treated as such. Not freakin’ worshipped. And they are not, as a group, educated to grapple with thorny moral questions. In cases like those of the three children you mention, they should know enough to keep their traps shut.

              1. Suppose the handling of OBGYN issues in this country was a de facto eugenics program. How would that work without it leaking out? Well, if you could control how doctors are taught, you could teach them practices that don’t directly target minorities because they key on things that only correlate with minorities. This would be feasible if there were a single organization, like the AMA, which controlled the instruction of all doctors.

                1. “ you could teach them practices that don’t directly target minorities because they key on things that only correlate with minorities.”

                  Imagine the reactions if gun shops located in predominantly minority neighborhoods with high rates of crime. Now, tell me where does Planned Parenthood primarily locate their clinics?

              2. “… one of the Low Countries that has a persistent problem with euthanasia and forced sterilization scandals.”

                Wesley J. Smith, yesterday at NRO gangblog The Corner:

                Canadian MDs Want More $ To Kill
                Some Canadian homicide doctors–those that euthanize patients–believe they aren’t paid enough. From the Maclean’s article:

                All in, a MAID [medical assistance in dying, e.g., lethal injection] provider can claim a maximum of $440. That would be a hefty paycheque for a couple hours’ work if that was indeed all the time it took to assess a patient and administer the fatal dose. In reality, it takes much longer…

                The amount of time it all takes varies wildly from patient to patient, says Daws, but most providers say it takes a minimum of three and a half hours. In that time, a family doctor could earn double the MAID rate by doing routine office work, and many specialists could earn triple that amount at their day job.

                Even “passionate” euthanasia-supporting doctors are refusing to kill patients because they are not paid enough.

                It’s not sustainable,” says Daws, who describes herself as a “hard-core, passionate-to-the-bone” assisted-dying advocate.

                Last week alone, she turned down three patients who wanted the service because she couldn’t afford to do it. “It’s not for lack of wanting,” she says, “but it’s financial suicide.”

                The article points out that euthanasia saves a lot of money for the country’s single-payer system–which should be a warning but isn’t once euthanasia consciousness takes hold:

                According to the Canadian Medical Association, assisted dying could cut health care costs by at least $34.7 million and up to $138.8 million a year in Canada.

                Euthanasia advocates worry that the too-low pay may be a way of inserting morality into the system:

                Both Green and Daws now can’t help but wonder whether the decision to set fees so low was a politically or ethically motivated one.

                “I would hate to think that was the intention,” adds Shanaaz Gokool, CEO of Dying with Dignity, an end-of-life rights organization. “But ultimately it doesn’t matter,” she adds. “Intentionally or not, the outcome is the same: you’re putting up barriers to access, and now that [policy-makers] know, it’s their responsibility to make changes ASAP. If they don’t, then they are intentionally obstructing access with that decisions.”

                Would that it were so. There would still be some hope for the country’s morality.

                Here’s an idea: Canada should cut death-doctor fees and put that money into suicide prevention services for those who want to be euthanized.

          3. (1) The figure of 80,000 is not one I made up. I looked up two statistics: number of births per year, approximately four million; and tubal pregnancies, approximately 2%. If you do the arithmetic, you will get 4,000,000 x 2/100 = 8,000,000/100 = 80,000.

            The Guttmacher Institute says that about one in five pregnancies is terminated by abortion. That would be 5,000,000 pregnancies and 1,000,000 abortions. If you base the number of tubal pregnancies on five million, you get 100,000, which looks like one abortion in ten is because of a tubal pregnancy.

            (2) Really, though, in terms of ethical or legal principles, the number is irrelevant. Here is one woman who has a tubal pregnancy. You believe that the embryo is a person with human rights. What do you think is the right thing for her to do? Is it right for her to end the life of an innocent human being to save her own life? Or is she ethically required to endure an agonizing death? I raise the question because I have in fact seen people argue that human life beginning at conception prohibits all abortions, always; I wanted to know if Joe Vasicek was arguing for such a prohibition.

            Of course there’s the position “I think abortion is always wrong, but I wouldn’t legally prohibit it.” But really that view has problems too. We don’t just say that killing, say, you or me is morally wrong; we punish it as a crime. If you don’t advocate the same penalties for killing an embryo, you have already taken the position that the embryo does not have full human rights.

            (3) It’s perfectly possible to think both that you have the right to have an abortion, and that you have the right to risk your life to complete a pregnancy. In fact if you don’t have the latter right than the former isn’t really a “right”; it’s an “obligation.” I am not one of the people who tried to pressure you into making a choice that you didn’t want to make; I think that getting women to abort through coercion, duress, or undue influence is clearly wrong and can have terrible consequences.

            1. Re. (1), I wonder about that 2% number. Childbirth is terribly risky from a number of different directions; if 2% of all premodern pregnancies were tubal, I have a hard time believing the species survived long enough to develop modern medicine.

              Re (2), virtually no one thinks that — and I say this as someone who’s spent 4 decades in a profoundly pro-life culture. These are folks who believe that shooting a home invader is taking a human life, but they’ll do it nonetheless, and possess the necessary means. Ditto for a tubal pregnancy — not the kid’s fault, certainly, and it sucks, but nobody is telling the mother she has to die for a kid she can’t save anyhow. I’m not saying you can’t link to a youtube vid of some slackjawed prairie Ebenezer making exactly that argument — I’m sure that moron is out there, perhaps hanging out with that humorless twit that had a problem with the Starbucks Christmas cup a couple years back — but I’ve been with these people my whole life, and never even heard someone suggest such a thing.

            2. That 2% sounds interesting. Where is your source?

              2% is one in fifty. For a premodern situation, with a woman having five to ten pregnancies, that would be something like one in ten or one in five women dead to zygotes implanting in tubes. If this was the case historically, I hadn’t heard.

              So either I’m significantly ignorant of known historical medicine (not unlikely), there has been an increase in the rate of tube pregnancies between historical and modern, or that rate is suspect.

              Furthermore, if 2% of pregnancies really do need that intervention to save the life of the mother, I wonder how they detect the problem early enough to keep the death rate at the low level it seems to be at now.

              You’ve also got a slight apples and oranges issue. Live births and abortions do not sum to total pregnancies. Pregnancies can terminate for other reasons. Especially if you are counting tubal implantations, you should consider zygotes which do not implant at all. Zygotes which do not implant would be hard to measure, and would confound estimates of statistical comparisons between that stage and birth.

              Numbers are somewhat relevant. Consider the justness of killing druggies when they are on a trip. Disassociative analgesics can cause a derangement that makes it very difficult to keep someone alive, especially with minimal risk to others. But PCP berserkers are rare. Should we make the same allowances for cops dealing with more common sorts of druggies that we should for a cop dealing with a PCP berserker? Would enormous differences in the rate of PCP berserkers change how we think cops ought to handle regular druggies?

              1. Studies do indicate that Ectopic pregnancies do turn up in about 2% of women and are remain the leading cause of maternal death in the first trimester. They are more common in older mothers.

                From American Family Physician’s article on Ectopic Prenancy by Josie L. Tenore, M.D., S.M., Northwestern University Medical School:

                To date, at least 14 studies have documented that 68 to 77 percent of ectopic pregnancies resolve without intervention. Unfortunately, no markers clearly identify which subset of patients has self-limited disease. One retrospective chart review of 236 ectopic pregnancies was unable to identify any parameters that were specifically associated with tubal rupture. Nonetheless, expectant management may be an option for the patient with a small ectopic pregnancy (less than 3.5 cm in greatest dimension) and low, declining β-hCG values who is willing and able to comply with close follow-up.

                This would indicate that a significant number of ectopic pregnancies resolve themselves. Ectopic pregnancies are more likely to occur in older women which would mean that a number of women who died as a result of an ectopic pregnancy would already have successfully reproduced before their demise. (BTW: Another indicator is multiple abortions.) So, it is possible that the species could have survived even with a 2% rate.

                1. We would expect to see a higher rate of complications in our society if they arise from older mothers and mothers with more abortions.

                  Unless repeated pregnancies also increase the chance of ectopic.

                  1. We are seeing a rise in complications. Women who have postponed starting families until their late thirties and early forties are sadly finding this out.

                2. Thank you. I did a quick Web search on “tubal pregnancy” and found a site that looked like it was factual. Just now I did a second one and found http://www.aafp.org/afp/2000/0215/p1080.html , which says that “Ectopic pregnancy occurs at a rate of 19.7 cases per 1,000 pregnancies in North America and is a leading cause of maternal mortality in the first trimester.” I hadn’t known about spontaneous resolution; taking the high rate lowers the deaths to 20,000/year.

                  One maternal death per 50 pregnancies really is pretty trivial, at the population level. I think typical lifetime number of births for a woman who is sexually active and does not contracept runs around 8 (I recall seeing that figure for the Mennonites); that would only get you up to one woman in six or so dying in childbirth in premodern times, and often after a lot of pregnancies. The great majority of women would have children throughout their marriages and not have tubal pregnancies. And really, taking all causes of maternal death into account, death in pregnancy and birth wasn’t that uncommon a hazard in most of history.

                  On the other hand, it’s not trivial to the woman who dies, or the family that loses her. And if I were married to a woman who was faced with tubal pregnancy, I would certainly not be happy to be told, “No, surgical intervention is illegal; you just have to hope it resolves on its own. That happens up to 75% of the time, after all.”

                  1. I think I responded above, but just in case:

                    Ectopic is not tubal. It includes tubal, but it is not only tubal.

                    While it is not normal ectopic doesn’t even mean the baby is going to die:
                    http://www.lifenews.com/2008/06/02/int-770/

                    It’s one of those “explain how a specific sub-type is always deadly, then act like everything in that group is equally deadly” things that folks do.

                1. So abstinence outside of marriage, having children early rather than late, and avoiding abortion as social policies would minimize the cases where abortion is medically necessary.

            3. The only thing I can find that’s even close to 2% is Ectopic pregnancy, which includes tubals but isn’t limited to them.

              The most common cause of those is tubals…. as in, the female sterilization, and if you select down to pregnancies done via artificial means the rate of “wrong place” pregnancies goes up to 4%.

              A thing to look out for in these stats is the population they sample. I know that the popularly published miscarriage rate is taken for in vitro pregnancies- that is, the couple already can’t have kids, and then the count the number of failures vs successful births.

        2. “* the embryo does count as a human being, but that in some situations it’s legitimate to kill an innocent human being (the embryo is clearly “innocent,” right?) to save another human being’s life.”

          False premise — the embryo, as Sarah notes, is not viable as you describe the circumstances. Therefore it is not being “terminated” in this scenario. Allowing the mother to die will not allow the embryo to live.

          1. Why is viability relevant here?

            Suppose that I have cancer, and it gets to the point where treatment can only prolong my suffering. My death is just as certain as that of the embryo in this case (and not merely in the sense that all of our death are certain). Does that mean that if you hold a pillow over my head, or stop giving me water till I die of dehydration, you are not “terminating” me, because you’re just speeding up the inevitable? I believe there are people in the National Health Service who think that way. . . .

            But if you think that hastening the death of an adult in that position is wrong, then why does it become right in the case of the embryo we’re talking about? Because any surgical termination of tubal pregnancy, to be effective, has to take place before things reach the point where the woman and embryo die anyway; therefore inevitably it’s hastening the embryo’s death. What’s the difference between the two cases?

            1. What’s the difference between the two cases?

              Yes, in the both the case of the cancer patient and in the case of the aborted fetus in the Ectopic pregnancy there is a speeding of an inevitable death. The difference is that in the latter case there are two patients at risk, and one of them survives who might not have otherwise.

            2. Viability matters because the ectopic embryo cannot be carried to term and delivered. It is a miscarriage internally.

              1. You know, I might grant that that makes sense on the premise that there is only one person involved, the woman, and that what is at stake is simply whether she can complete the pregnancy or not. But isn’t the premise you’re arguing from that the embryo is a separate person even before it implants in the Fallopian tube? In that case, you are shortening the life of *a separate person* for the benefit of *a different separate person*. At the point where you terminate the pregnancy, no miscarriage has occurred: the embryo is still alive and still has a little longer to live, a time that the abortion takes away from it.

                In my example of the cancer patient, the patient is also no longer viable. But I don’t want them being given a lethal injection, or deprived of water, or the like, simply because they’re going to die soon anyway. At least, not unless they have actively requested it, if there is a way to have them do so that safeguards against duress or undue influence. “No longer viable” does not seem to me to be morally equivalent to “already dead.”

                1. “isn’t the premise you’re arguing from that the embryo is a separate person even before it implants in the Fallopian tube?”

                  No. Because the “separate person” cannot be brought to term. The cancer patient has a chance of remission or successful treatment.

                  There is, as you acknowledge, a distinction between removing life support and actively terminating life.

                2. No, William, you’re missing the point. It’s more “there’s only one person that can be saved. We regret that the other one can’t, but we’ll do what we can to save this one.”
                  BTW even in Portugal where abortion was STRICTLY illegal the whole time I was growing up, operating to save the mother in cases of ectopic pregnancy was legal. NO ONE EVER BANNED THAT.
                  Yes, the child is human, but he’s already doomed. So you save the one you can save.
                  If you can’t see the difference between that and ELECTING to kill one of them because he’s too small and weak to survive outside the other and therefore you can, then you’re being willfully blind.
                  As a survivor of abortion on the baby side, “you’re human if mommy says so” is an AWFUL idea. It breaks the relationship between parent and child. I was eight the first time mom told me she wished the abortion had succeeded. After that I knew I was human “on sufferance.”
                  We must respect the weak and helpless and UNABLE humans so that we respect ourselves. It’s a sliding scale from “mommy gets to decide” to “the group or state gets to decide.” And my answer is “hell no.” Human is human. The first time a woman gives birth to a litter of kittens I’ll revise this.

                  1. BTW even in Portugal where abortion was STRICTLY illegal the whole time I was growing up, operating to save the mother in cases of ectopic pregnancy was legal. NO ONE EVER BANNED THAT.

                    That’s probably why rhetoric demanded they redefine it as abortion. Strictly speaking, it’s only abortion if you remove the kid.
                    Cutting out a Fallopian tube that’s about to rupture, even if it contains a kid, isn’t abortion.

                    But that’s about as popular as pointing out that “fertilized egg” isn’t really a thing.

                3. I still have a difficult time understanding why this exception to abortion you describe — a poor, unfortunate soul trapped in a Fallopian tube — is supposed to convince us that it should be legal to suck the brains out of a baby who is about to be born.

                  Particularly since (1) there are cases cases where a mother is dying, but the baby is still viable, and in these cases we save the baby, (2) if we could devise a way to remove the baby from the Fallopian tube, and implant the baby into the womb, we wouldn’t hesitate to do so, and save both the mother and the baby?

                  In the movie “Master and Commander”, something happened to the ship that caused a mast to be broken off into the sea, and caused someone to be thrown overboard as well. The poor soul was able to swim to the safety of the broken mast, but the captain then had to chop off the cords of the mast to save the ship and the rest of the crew.

                  Your argument that pro-life people have to accept abortion on demand because we can’t save the life of the baby in ectopic pregnancies strikes this pro-life* person as arguing that first-degree murder should be legal because it’s sometimes necessary to chop off the ropes of a broken mast that a sailor had just swam to.

                  *(Well, as “pro-life” as an anarcho-capitalist can get…)

        3. Certainly. I’d go with option #2 in that case, personally. Abortion is always the taking of human life, but sometimes that’s necessary (self-defense, etc).

            1. I think people tend to get testy on this question because the “logic” (if you can call it that) on the Left is that abortion isn’t wrong because sometimes it is necessary. Using that logic, murder is never wrong because sometimes, in self-defense, killing another person is necessary.

              1. Or that there would be no downside to shooting people for smoking weed because in some cases there’s no way to handle a PCP berserker other than shooting them so they bleed out pretty much instantly.

        4. An terminating an ectopic pregnancy is obviously a case of self-defense.

          Your argument smacks of sophistry and is just a tad disingenuous.

        5. * You say that the embryo does count as a human being, but that in some situations it’s legitimate to kill an innocent human being (the embryo is clearly “innocent,” right?) to save another human being’s life.

          This has actually been covered in Catholic theology– which, as annoying as it can be to dig through, is usually a good place to start for “is there an option I’m missing,” both moral and immoral. (Messed up sooooo much scifi for me, looking into theology. “Oh my gosh, can we use the stuff a guy learned by torturing people to death to save everyone on the ship? Uuuh…the moral aspects of this were argued out ages ago, GO READ THE FREAKING ARGUMENTS instead of doing it all on your own, badly.)

          The third option is “the embryo is a human, the woman is a human; if nothing is done they will both die. Thus an action which will save one but result in the other’s death as a side-effect is licit.”

          If I am in a sinking ship, and I shut the water-tight hatch, anyone on the other side will die short of a miracle– but it’s the only way to save the ship and all of those on THIS side of it.

          Examples, when I shoot someone I am not trying to kill them, I am trying to stop them. They might DIE as a result of that.

          If I remove the partly ruptured tube where the child has implanted, the kid will die– but the mother will die if I don’t, which means the kid is dead either way.

              1. I’m not seeing that I didn’t. Isn’t the statement “in some cases, the taking of an innocent human life is morally justifiable” a statement of the doctrine of double effect? That was the second of my three options: “You say that the embryo does count as a human being, but that in some situations it’s legitimate to kill an innocent human being (the embryo is clearly “innocent,” right?) to save another human being’s life.”

                I note that Mr. Vasicek in fact chose that option as the one he endorsed. And that I acknowledged that he had done so, and thanked him. So it seems to me that what you are asking for may already have happened, and flown under your radar.

                But perhaps I misunderstand the doctrine of double effect; I know of the conclusion, but I don’t think the stated principle makes much sense ethically, and I may be misunderstanding it. If what I am talking about is not equivalent to the doctrine of double effect, how does it differ?

                1. . Isn’t the statement “in some cases, the taking of an innocent human life is morally justifiable” a statement of the doctrine of double effect?

                  No, it’s not, and you’ve had it explained to you several different ways several different times just here, today.

                  Go ahead, explain how me chopping off your head is totally the same as me not dying in an effort to pull you out of an undertow.

                2. Quoting the article about abortion adn double effect from Catholic dot com, I will try to type out the page afterwards:
                  Intention, Causality, and Gravity

                  Three questions determine whether an action with a double effect is moral or immoral.

                  1. The first is the question of intention. One can never intend the evil effect (CCC 1752). One’s intention must be only for the good effect. The evil effect must be a regrettable byproduct.

                  2. The second is the question of causality. St. Thomas Aquinas articulated the principle that “the end does not justify the means” (CCC 1759). One may never do evil hoping that good may come of it. A bad effect may be the consequence of a morally good act, or it may occur simultaneously along with it, but the anticipated good must never be a result of evil actions. Such acts are never morally licit (CCC 1756).

                  3. The third question is of comparable gravity. Is the good being done proportional to the evil consequences of the action? In order to justify taking the action, it must be. When an action has both a good and an evil outcome, the gravity of the two must be weighed against each other. Although “circumstances of themselves cannot change the moral quality of acts themselves; they can make neither good nor right an action that is in itself evil.” Still, they can and do “contribute to increasing or diminishing the moral goodness or evil of human acts” (CCC 1754).

                  With these principles in mind, let’s revisit our hypothetical situation. (1) Your intention, as the doctor, is to save the life of your patient. Your primary goal is to protect her health. (2) You are not doing evil in order to achieve a good; on the contrary, you are doing a good—removing a diseased organ that is threatening her life. The evil of rendering her sterile occurs simultaneously with that good but does not cause it. (3) Lastly, the good of saving her life greatly outweighs the evil of her being sterilized. Thus, it is a morally good action.

                  http://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/abortion-and-double-effect

            2. It’s not like it’s unusual– it carries across to things as utterly non political as sealing the doors on a sinking ship when you’re not 100% positive there’s nobody on the other side– or even when you DO know there are people on the other side.

          2. “If I am in a sinking ship, and I shut the water-tight hatch …”

            Or, similarly, on a lifeboat rated for ten people and there are twelve wanting in. Either two innocent people or all twelve die. Not a difficult analysis, although it might well be a hard one.

              1. Shhhhhhhh … that’s sexist and ageist and does not take into account trannies, the gender-fluid, people of color nor those who identify as infants.

                1. And let’s not forget that it glorifies Marines, and British ones at that. “Soldier and Sailor too”.

        6. You can take the position of the Catholic Church, which is that you may treat the ectopic pregnancy with the knowledge that the baby will die as a result, as long as you don’t intend it.

          Your position seems to be that if you, lost in the desert, drink up the water at a location to save your life, you are saying that the other people lost in the desert who will die without aren’t human.

        7. I think there are three options here:
          […]
          • You say that the embryo does count as a human being, but that in some situations it’s legitimate to kill an innocent human being (the embryo is clearly “innocent,” right?) to save another human being’s life.

          Y’know, let’s go with that one. Yes, it’s legitimate to kill someone who’s in the process of causing the death of another person, even if the homicide would be “innocent”. And the circumstances are usually horrific: an innocent child with a bomb attached, innocently toddling toward a crowd; innocent people on a hijacked plane being used in a 9/11-type attack; an innocent baby trying to grow, who through no fault of his own is positioned so continuing the pregnancy will kill his mother. The logic of such situations says exactly nothing about the general morality of abortion or firing missiles at airliners or shooting babies in the street.

    6. My kids went to a private college prep school that had been captured by the lesbian academic and activist left. It was decided and mandated that all students had to take a new course called “Phys-Chem”. Phys-Chem was a combined physics and chemistry course taught the sophomore year in which those two disciplines were presented — math free. Honest.

      Why was this asininity forced upon every student in the school? Obviously — patriarchy. The rationale was that women were put off by mathematics as imposed by the male STEM establishment, leading to a phobia of numbers. Therefore, science would be presented in an environment free of the viewpoint of testosterone decreed math. Freed of this despotism, women would become enthused about the STEM disciplines and could then segue into what would become kinder, gentler, and more accepting fields. How this sea change would occur was not addressed. And, importantly, the males in the classes would not be able to dominate and excel with their strength in math proscribed.

      Oh, BTW, no college that read the course description would give credit for a math free course that combined physics and chemistry into one semester. So, a semester was wasted. But that sacrifice, imposed on all students, male and female, was legitimate because of the greater good.

      The course lasted one semester due to the rebellion of the students and their parents … parents of both boys and girls. Parents who lived in the real world and students who aspired to live there as well.

      1. You think the colleges would be likely to read the course description? Where would that be found?

        1. On-line Course Catalogue. Many colleges now have them, although some require student log-in to get to things like syllabi (many syllabi are copyrighted).

          1. And many more syllabi would result in firings if the alumni and donors got hold of them.

      2. How exactly does one study physics or chemistry without math? Here, let’s dump a little of X into a little of Y and see what happens exothermic chemical reaction occurs burning the instructor Now kids, what did we learn from this experiment? Other than you’re a freaking fool, nothing, because we have no idea what was actually going on.

        1. Now, Kamas, be fair– that sound a LOT like the scientific entertainment shows on the Science channel, which are freaking AWESOME but very lite on specifics. (“lite” written on purpose.)

      3. I’ve taken physics and chemistry courses. Some of the concepts can be explained without math, but if you want to do anything mildly serious with both you definitely need math. Especially with physics.

        1. I had a room-mate who was taking a Physics course designed without calculus at the same time I was taking “Physics for Scientists and Engineers”, which of course involved calculus. He explained that Physics without calculus was actually harder! And this makes a *lot* of sense to be, in no small part because calculus was designed to simplify physics in the first place.

          Similarly, a friend described to me trying to determine how fast things grow or decay in chemistry with logarithms instead of calculus made for a whole lot of work.

          I have often wondered why a little crash-course in calculus, plus a bit of the calculus necessary to solve a particular problem, couldn’t be done when needed here and there, and I really think it does students a disservice to treat calculus as something scary, that should be avoided if at all possible.

  10. Trouble is with questioning some of these SJW’s is that they will argue themselves in circles and say that this proves them right and you wrong. No matter how often you question them, point out their errors, or cite “reputable” sources (i.e. non conservative), they will just double down on the idiocy.
    Gotten to the point where I just walk away if they start resembling the worm Oubourous.

    1. You need to set two of them at it then. Each head eats the other’s tail (er, sorry about any imagery, really) until it’s just the two heads left. Then each take a final bite. Problem solved!

    3. You have to understand your audience. You’re not questioning them to get them to admit that their religious convictions are wrong, you’re doing so to show any interested but uncommitted spectators just how nonsensical their positions are.

        1. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying what you do, so long as what you do isn’t abhorrent (which in the given case it certainly wouldn’t be).

          1. Anyone not mentally deficient or dyslexic can learn elementary math. Up through Geometry. It will take a lot of effort on everyone’s part but it can be done.

  11. Go? Been there for a long time! Explains a lot about me, though. I tend to be kept away from important people who might ask me a question they will not the answer of.

    1. That is me with audit and regulators although the fear is I might ask why if they can’t do my job they think they should tell me how to do it in minute detail and then grade it.

      1. oh yeah, I was kept well away from auditors and the one DEQ regulator I dealt with didn’t seem to enjoy the experience when she asked (after touring the entire facility that was a bit over an acre) “Do you have any dry down towers on site?” and the R&D person answering didn’t even know what one was . . . and after I explained (“Several stories tall and you drop the chemicals from the top so they cool and/or dry before they hit the bottom.” and she nodded), the comment “No, but . . . We might be hiding one in the closet under the stairs.” was unappreciated.
        The ISO audit prep guy knew me well, so he’d schedule the auditors to come to my department before I started my workday. Then again, he pretty much agreed with me on ISO, but people paid him to ensure they passed.

          1. DEQ can stand for Department of Environmental Quality. I’m not sure what else.

  12. Be aware of the danger, however. If they and their friends go to HR, file complaints against you, and try to get you sent to reeducation or fired. A lot of employers want nothing to do with controversy and will fire you. Be prepared to fight the culture war because it is becoming, inch by inch, a real war.

    1. That’s where you have to fight fire with fire. Counter-file against them, complaining that their constant leftist diatribes are making you uncomfortable and you feel harassed by them. Ask that they be sent to a remedial harassment in the workplace class. Tell HR that if this isn’t resolved you will be involving the local press and legal representation. If it’s going to be a fight, fight back.

      2. this.
        very much this.
        Make certain you add their filing frivolous complaints to your list of grievances, as well. It is a form of harassment. Ensure early on their complaint is solely being made to remove you from your workplace for their bigoted reasons. Best thing is when you are the only one acting like a reasonable human being (always remain calm), and they almost always are not, it is hard for even a leftoid HR person to justify letting you go, and always escalate if HR tries to “re-educate” you. The reason they been doing this is it worked. Stop allowing it to work. If you HAVE to go through “training” EVERYBODY needs “training” and force them to shut down to train everyone at once, and let it be known the reason everyone is suffering is because some people think it is okay to harm those they disagree with. Shine the light brightly on the cockroaches (apologies to actual cockroaches).

        1. Even in social situations– if you quote CS Lewis, and they sneer about “don’t quote religious fanatics,” then respond that their bigotry is irrelevant to what the person said.

          Etc.

      3. I’ve survived 3 sexual harassment complaints. By following all the advice in SJWs Always Lie before it was published.

            1. Try to take a vacation or a just a day off and your boss is constantly on your case, reminding you there is work to be done.

              2. what was that vacation thing you speak of?
                Working now, I get some 3 weeks worth, plus other time.
                Now just to figure when I can take it and actually go on vacation.

                  1. Well, you see, when you have people who don’t take vacations, auditors start to get suspicious.

                    1. *chuckle* He hasn’t been using leave days, because we tend to save them for when he needs to – usually family medical requirements (I’m too sick, important children’s school related stuff, such things). Even so, he apparently has ‘too many.’

                  2. Sigh. I’m okay with the “Leave” days, it is the “Don’t Come Back!” days which wear on me.

                  3. They been harping at me to at least plan mine, I am thinking I will pick a very busy time to take most of the rest of my time.
                    It might make them find someone to share the workload.
                    Oh, who am I kidding? They will likely take years to do that, and all the backlog will be mine to catch up on.
                    Also, I think the guy in foam they use to cover some of my work when I am gone is changing shifts. He wanted the other position for my dept. if they posted it, to change shifts, but no posting.
                    I actually planned to go in early today, but worked yesterday at my parent’s to prevent 74yr old Dad from climbing ladders and am too tired. If I feel good tonight, I might start in early tomorrow.

                    1. Most probably they will add to your workload by having you screen potential new hires, then completely ignore your evaluations.

                    2. hah, things are likely to not go there, and my evals are short and terse. I’ve been wrong about a hire maybe twice, certainly once.
                      The guy I was wrong about comes across as just a bit off, but about a week of working with him, I’d take a entire crew of him (When I was a Supe, I coulda kissed him! Almost).

    4. In every place I ever worked, HR was (1) 100% female — often lesbian and minority, (2) actively promoting liberal prejudices and stereotypes, (3) ignoring their own standards of evidence and published processes and procedures, and (4) non-responsive to persons and issues that did not fall into their ideological viewpoint. Oh, and demanding that junior management do the actual work (investigation, documentation, counseling, training — with HR “oversight”) that HR was responsible performing.

      HR was the fortress of the liberal left, a different and hostile world where ideology prevailed and things like profit and and performance and standards and consistency and rewarding good employees and getting rid of poor employees was irrelevant. The last place you wanted to become involved with, if a straight, white, results oriented male, was HR. The stories are legion.

      The way you handled issues was to bypass HR, get to senior management involved by pointing out, in the most diplomatic manner, the legal and financial and personnel retention implications of the HR “solutions”. This was usually followed by a covert meeting between senior management and HR resulting in the contentious issue disappearing or the corrective action being forced upon HR … and then having the HR people glare at you every time the saw you … and then constantly watching your back.

      Just my experience.

      1. been lucky in that the places I have worked HR when female has been quasi to very conservative, or was male. Ours now had a shake-up as one retired and another left, and while we are a purple/blue area (high union density) it is in a very conservative area overall, so any attempts at SJWism are failures.
        I have seen HR types taken to the cleaners by the roundabout like you say. Not always justified, but I think a whiner of that type got one HR person I know of to leave by finding a better place to be because of her complaints to higher. If so, said whiner was not mollified and was eventually fired for screwing up one time too many. The HR person likely would have bent and allowed them to stay with even more of the “training” they had complained was undeserved.

      2. “Oh, and demanding that junior management do the actual work (investigation, documentation, counseling, training — with HR “oversight”) that HR was responsible performing.” Company guide says that’s YOUR job, HR.

  13. I’ve found that questions quickly lead to getting called “Racist!” and “Sexist” and “Homophobic!” not to mention “Transphobic!” and so on and so forth.
    Because the purveyors of the True Doctrine have been spoon-fed their beliefs, without being similarly equipped to defend those beliefs in a logical fashion.

    So, for instance, if homosexuality is a genetic destiny which cannot be altered or turned away from, but gender is 100% fluid — a false construct of the Patriarchy — how do you square the two opposing theories? Sane people realize that you can’t square them. Either one or the other can be true, but they cannot both be true at the same time.

    Believers of the True Doctrine don’t care if these theories can be squared.
    Because fuck you, cishet scum. :/

    1. Just respond with, “And by responding with shrieks of ‘racist,’ ‘sexist,’ ‘homophobic,’ and the like, you tell me that you can’t defend your positions against reasonable questions, calmly asked. Are you really so insecure about your beliefs that any mild questioning of them causes a complete, foaming-at-the-mouth breakdown? From the evidence in front of me, that would seem to be the case.”

      1. Ala Frank Zappa (on Crossfire, I think. One of those shows that had “conservative” republicans who were dem-lite).
        Be the reasonable person and those against you look like what they are, fools. As long as you are not spouting BS.

  15. Question them everywhere you can, on every front you can without endangering either your job, your life or your family.

    The “endangering either your job, your life or your family” is why many people keep their heads down at work and use anon online. HR won’t always (often?) be your friend, even if there’s clear evidence that you’re not in the wrong. Most people don’t have the $$$ for legal battles against an unscrupulous employer, and charitable organizations (i.e., ACLU) are extensively infested.

    So, not bad advice but it needs to be applied surgically (much as many of us would like to carpet bomb our targets).

    1. HR is the company’s friend. Sometimes your interests align with the companies interests at some level and they will help you out, but if not, they won’t.

      1. My daughter thinks everyone in our family should have a t-shirt that reads ” My native language is sarcasm.”

  17. I’ve been watching this for decades. I grew up in a house where my Academic Father subscribed to THE NATIONAL REVIEW, and encouraged me to read it. And the Lefties on campus where he worked were scared to death of him, for good reason. He was an actual scholar, and the (adopted) son of a Methodist Minister; he had his facts down and he could Preach It. They knew goddamned well they were going to come out of any argument with him looking like goddamned fools.

    What Sarah is talking about didn’t start recently; the rot began when they ousted Nixon, and then all they got for their pains was Jimmy Carter followed by Ronald Reagan. They KNEW that after chasing Nixon out, they should have had it all their own way, and they didn’t. They didn’t because they were full bore delusional, and most of their ‘allies’ were using them. So nothing they did worked the way they thought it should.

    I peg the beginning of the break-up to when Gary Trudeau put Doonesbury on hiatus for the first time (1983). After he came back he’d lost what sense of humor he had ever had about politics. Before the hiatus he had been a genuinely funny man, even if I thought he was a political imbecile. After, he took himself far too goddamned seriously, and the ‘jokes’ were too stupid, or too something, to be amusing anymore. Pity.

    They’ve been losing ground steadily for at least that long. Oh, they got a tighter grip on things like the media and the publishing houses….for a while. But that was desperation. They hadn’t felt the need to hold so tight before.

    In 1989 a big part of their world came crashing down around their ears when the Berlin Wall fell.

    What we are seeing is the same process the Political Right went through starting with the Depression. By the 1960’s, the remnants of the Old Right were self-parody. The few remaining Rightwing newspapers read like they were being published by the Birchers…after a singularly nasty bad acid trip.

    The New Right was already growing by then. W. F. Buckley was a rising star. The Left disregarded that because they were so SURE they were the New Dawn. And then they ousted Tricky Dick and fell flat on their smug faces.

    1. My daughter was born 20 years after the wall came down; part of why we home school is in hopes that some day she will be irrationally proud of that fact.

  18. … those who would fire people for sourced documents stating what any neuro-scientist will tell you over breakfast …

    To quote someone else’s snark: “Good science has to be based on solid feelings-based research.”

    Also (from the same person), “James Damore deserved to be fired for thinking that it’s OK to voice non-PC opinions in a corporate environment. No one that stupid should work for Google. You don’t have to consent to the PC views but you have to at least say things that are vague and non-committal so as not to commit the sin of dissent.”

    (And because this is the ’net, let me be explicit: the above quotes are sarcasm.)

    1. Exactly as much as a woman deserves to be raped for walking naked at night through the bad part of Chicago.
      (Not sarcasm) (And yes I know that you didn’t really mean the comment about the firing.)

      1. Walking naked at night through a bad part of Chicago would lead ME to wonder whether she had alread been attacked (and that’s where the clothes went). The other plausable explainations involve some sort of mental deficiency, or a poorly thought out trap.

        2. Name is James Damore, wrote an internal memo, it was too popular so some bullies released it, he got fired and now they’re going after anybody who didn’t’ denounce it.

    2. A guy did a very nice, rational lay-out of the shocking fact that screaming “we need more women” didn’t do much good if you weren’t willing to change the situation so that the environment you were hiring them into was more woman-friendly– and he DIDN’T mean “more dumb PC stuff,” he meant “a place that gals can work and not become freaking eunuchs.”

  20. It is mathematically possible to ensure a 50/50 gender split in STEM, but it will have a very unfortunate consequence. The reason is that women are free to to choose their occupation of preference. Because most women prefer not to work in STEM, the remaining pool of women available to work in STEM jobs is far smaller than the the pool of men available to work in STEM. The only way to ensure a 50/50 split is to deliberately consign a huge number of men to unemployment or underemployment by sharply shrinking the number of stem jobs to 2x the number of interested women.

    Say…maybe that is happening.

    1. “… women are free to to choose their occupation of preference.”

      Try asking a male nurse how supportive and welcoming his workplace is.

      BTW – “deliberately consign[ing] a huge number of men to unemployment or underemployment” constitutes a feature, not a bug.

      1. A supporting argument:

        More interesting, as Damore noted, is that in more egalitarian societies like ours, gender differences in personality become progressively greater than in less egalitarian and developed societies — because men and women have more freedom in their careers and lives. Give men and women real choices, in other words, and they will become less — not more — interchangeable. True equality of opportunity will not render us all equivalent to, or interchangeable with, one another. It will render our differences more unmissable. And what will the diversity czars do then?

        [SNIP]

        Perhaps the problem is that people have a hard time holding two separate thoughts in their head at the same time. In this case, you have to accept both that there are gender differences in the aggregate and that, nonetheless, you cannot infer anything from that fact when encountering any individual man or woman. That is not easy — and there is a very human temptation to discriminate against an individual based on aggregate group characteristics. But overall, different distributions exist, and they surely have some impact on gender disparities in various professions alongside sexism or general cultural influences. Why, for example, do “men make up only 10 percent of nurses, only 20 percent of new veterinarians, only 25 percent of new psychologists, about 25 percent of new pediatricians, about 26 percent of forensic scientists, about 28 percent of medical managers, and 42 percent of new biologists”? (Note that “the average computer programmer only makes about $80,000; the average veterinarian makes about $88,000, and the average pediatrician makes a whopping $170,000.”) Do we really have to assume it’s entirely sexism? Why, in college majors, do women dominate men in music pedagogy, but are overwhelmed by men in music technology? Why do women vastly outnumber men in bachelor’s degrees in English, foreign languages, and health professions? No doubt culture and sexism play a role. All Damore is arguing is that biology may have a role as well.

        [SNIP]

        When all else fails, the diversity promoters argue that science is not salient because it is also merely a function of sexism, racism, ableism, etc. There is no objective truth — just systems of power and oppression. The mob at Middlebury had been properly educated and chanted that science was simply a cloak for white male supremacy. At Slate, you can read a piece directly dismissing any scientific data that complicates the most extreme version of left-feminist ideology.

        [SNIP]

        [T]he deeper issue is this: A man has been demonized and fired solely for expressing his views in civil language backed up by facts. He used no slurs. He discriminated against no one in the workplace. He was great at his job. Worse, anyone who might share these views now knows they have to keep silent at Google or be terminated. This atmosphere in the American workplace — now backed by some of the most powerful companies on Earth — is thereby increasingly totalitarian. It monitors people’s minds and thoughts — and will fire them for incorrect ones, without any explanation. And it aims to suppress the truth about the world — that humans are a diverse and complex species, that evolution has played a part in who we are, that aggregate differences between groups of people are, in fact, a wonderful aspect of actual human diversity.

        http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/08/trumps-reckless-nuclear-bluffing.html

        I still think Andrew Sullivan is Fug Buck Nuts, but in this matter his thinking seems quite lucid. Thank goodness it wasn’t Mrs Palin who wrote that memo.

        HT: Andrew Stuttaford at NRO gangblog The Corner
        [nationalreview[DOT]com/corner/450430/google-and-debate]

      2. You are out of date. We have lots of male nurses, and they do great. In fact, they frequently end up in the higher acuity, higher risk parts of nursing. Trauma, emergency transport, ICU work. Hmmm…. more testosterone based….

        1. The first day after my third abdominal surgery in less than half a year I knew on sitting up and sliding my legs over the side of the bed that I was done for the day. The next day I felt so much better I really wanted to use the loo. What I remember is realizing that I was sitting on the foot of the nurse who had been helping me and a sea of legs. (I wondered, do nurse’s practice telephone booth stuffing?) Anyway it found it very nice to have strong nurses, male and female, to help leaver me up off the floor and back to bed.

          After that I was ultimately given three units of blood … and was able to get back on my feet. So to any of you out there who donate blood — THANK YOU.

        2. I? Out of date? Unpossible — it is the world which is out of time.

          I would note that my assertion had nothing to do with the number of male nurses, merely with how “how supportive and welcoming his workplace is.” If the acceptance of male nurses into the workplace has increased I can only praise that, but it seems to me I have recently read much about them still being limited in such areas as the welcoming of new life into this world.

      3. I actually had a couple of male nurses after the Chief was born– the hospital I was at has a HUGE number of training slots, and I wouldn’t reject guys for being…well, guys.

        If I hadn’t been high as a kite on birth hormones it might’ve felt a bit odd to be feeding when they came in, but they were all utterly professional and even total sweeties.

        1. Let it please be noted that you are odd. More significantly, you do not perceive men as sheep perceive wolves: you grok sheepdogs.

            1. I probably ought note that I do not oppose the right of a woman giving birth to have preferences as to who/what is sitting between her knees on such occasions. I do not have to endorse all exercises of a right to recognize its existence, and a person’s right to select their medical care-givers exceeds the rights of care-givers to be free from discrimination.

              1. Thing is, nobody ever asked me…a lot of folks just totally assumed, but nobody ever ASKED except for the ones doing the training guys.

                An awful lot of this stuff seems to boil down to “oh, well, they MIGHT want this, so we’re going to enforce it” than anything else.

        2. Yep – there were two or three male nurses on the obstetric ward when I gave birth to the Daughter Unit – including one attending on the birth, who was a volunteer at the AFRTS station where I worked. (Yeah, talk about … embarrassment.) There were only about a half dozen male nurses in the PACAF medical units at the time; the senior nurse (whom I knew through taking the same course of public administration courses) lamented that – all these guys were assigned to her hospital! But they were grand – and to see them tending to babies, and handling them with off-handed casualness – was awesome to observe. They probably made the most awesome fathers…

          1. I know I prefer fathers or grandfathers for ob/gyns. They’re a lot less likely to have “issues” with the idea of having more than the acceptable number of kids, and they don’t spend HALF THE FREAKING APPOINTMENT trying to get me to “admit” I want to hand the kids off and go back to “real” work.

              1. I really wish I could unleash y’all on the one at my first doctor’s office– the other doctor was a total granola cruncher, but a good one. (did things like point out that if I wanted to start the Princess on apple, just buy freaking apple sauce instead of baby apple mash, very careful about how many vaccinations we wanted at a time, etc)

                The gal? Seemed to be offended I wouldn’t consider sterilization.

                1. *sigh* I get that. “But you already have one of each! You don’t need any more!” I half snark that hubby and I have good genes, it’s part of our biological duty to improve the gene pool.

                  Male doctors seem more surprised and supportive that I want more children.

                1. A friend had hemorrhoid surgery. They asked if he’d mind if they filmed the procedure for medical students to see.

                  They didn’t tell him they were also going to webcast it live…

                  “Fortunately, they had my good side.”

            2. I had the opposite happen to me Alabama. Admittedly it only happened once. Doctor asked why didn’t I want to have kids? Too old ~40. Neither hubby nor I liked children. Mother died of breast cancer. etc. You should have as many kids as you can take care of.

      4. Yep. Consider how much of the “stimulus” was wasted after the president of NOW complained specifically how much of it was creating “jobs for big burly men.”

    2. “Working in STEM” does not equate to performing actual science, technology, engineering, and mathematical work. I worked in large and small R&D organizations for over 20 years and there were many jobs in those organizations that had nothing to do with the actual STEM results that issued from them. See my comments on HR offices.

      My experience with women working in STEM organizations was that those without STEM degrees concentrated in the support and peripheral offices. Those with actual STEM degrees either did actual STEM work — and were usually very good at it — or they migrated to management where they did not do STEM work, but supervised the STEM workers and judged the merits of their work (using standards that often had little to do with science or technology or ….).

      1. Additional: the latest fad seems to be “STEAM,” ‘Science, Technology, Engineering, ART and Mathematics.’

        This actually seems to be about setting core education rather than subverting male dominated fields, but we can all see how it’ll go.

          1. He was definitely not normal– and I’d argue what made him amazing was what made him an artist, rather than the artist angle helping him be a scientist/engineer.

            1. It was odd enough that people would particularly praise Turner’s work because you could see that the water wheel would actually go.

          1. Yeah. Because basket weaving and art appreciation are just as important as physics and math…

        3. From readings i have done on it, its actually a push to say that arts is just as hard and complex of a field… more pretensions.

          1. The standards of evaluation for Art are somewhat different from those of STEM. There are no juries to decide whether your equations balance, last I heard.

            1. Well, there are, but they tend to be drawn from the jury pool and lawyers involves, and legal standards of evidence…

              “Your Honor, my equations balanced, my part worked, but I could not possibly have anticipated a failure mode involving three drunk college kids with a tank of nitrous oxide, a formerly-unconscious raccoon, two rolls of duct tape, a mouse trap, thirty five dollars in change and a tube of bondo!”

  21. Tangent;

    Lately I see a lot of well meaning Libertarian people asserting that Science is never settled. Unhappily, this isn’t the case. New deas that overturn fondly held theories often have very heavy going, and only get adopted when the senior minds in the field have died off. Continental drift is a case in point; the idea had been proposed for some time. The formal theory was put forth in 1912. Scientists held on to the “shrinking apple” model of mointain building until the latter 1950’s, and it was still in my earliest textbooks (1960’s).

    What we are seeing isn’t new, or unusual in any way. Nor is it a throwback to an earlier ‘religious’ age. It happens all the time. And in a sense, this should be so. A new theory needs to have legs.

    The Left has latched on to misunderstandings of a lot of serious theory, and run them into the ground. Now they are defending them just as previous generations have done.

    Hell, whole books could be written about the popular misunderstandings of evolutionary theory, and how they were misapplied to areas where they have no business. Marx talked about societies ‘evolving’ as if said evolution was directional and necessarily an improvement, but the Social Darwinists (rich people deserve to be rich because they are rich) made much the same mistakes.

    1. I suspect the “Science is never settled” argument is based on the premise that Science is an open-ended process, a means of testing hypotheses and facts. Thus there is nothing to be settled, any more than a government program’s mission is ever truly completed.

        1. When science is “settled” is one of the very hard problems of epistemology. I’ve read Ayn Rand’s series of seminars where she specifically told a bunch of science and philosophy professors that she didn’t know enough to provide an answer to that question. (Which I think was good judgment on her part, as I’ve read a book by one of her followers that I think made rather a botch of the job.)

          The example I always think of is the conservation of mass: One of the most rock-solid certainties of science in the nineteenth century, but dramatically violated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I’m not sure how any scientific law could be more certain than conservation of mass was before Einstein.

  22. I can’t understand how affirmative action requirements don’t violate the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause. I remember when they were introduced (yes I’m that old) it was explained that it was a temporary measure to make up for past discrimination.
    That was over 50 years ago. I doubt that anyone discriminated against that long ago is still applying for jobs.
    When will it be time to end discrimination by not treating people as members of groups any longer, and treating each person as an individual?

    1. Affirmative Action continues for the same reason that Slavery continued; a powerful political faction depends on it for its continued ascendancy.

      Which is why I have scant patience for the “Slavery was doomed, and the Civil War was unnecessary” argument.

      1. And the follow up, which is one of the few times that Justice O’Conner said later that she wished she’d decided differently: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2002/02-241

        For those interested in Supreme Court decisions, oyez.org is the Court’s site and it has a lot of good, clear information on the decisions, although not in a lot of detail.

  23. Sara
    Here’s my snarky question if your company is committed to diversity does that include making a profit? Or are they mutually exclusive?

    1. Depends upon where you work in the company. If in HR, profit is irrelevant; diversity is the only reason the company exists. If you work in sales or (depending) on the production line, then without profit, your job goes away.

      I’ve had experience in a huge company that closed its local operations and in a huger organization that centralized its personnel support offices in another state. In both cases, the last local people to be let go were the folks in HR … well after there were no other employees to relate to humanly.

      1. The reason “the last ones out” are HR likely has a great deal to do with regulatory compliance and filing of infinite forms.

        1. Also note that huger remote parent company HR supplanting local HR that actually knows the local employees, say after an acquisition, also eliminates the pesky first hand background knowledge in that local HR team, so idealogical HR campaigns can proceed without obstruction.

          1. It also moves that local HR team’s decisions to a remote office tower thousands of miles away and thus insulated from having to live among the people whose lives are affected / ruined by their decisions.

            Kind of like relocating all government to the Federal level….

  25. I’m a neuroscientist. I would never support the conclusions of the Google memo. I am not saying there are no sexual dimorphisms. There are, but no one is sure exactly what i is about the human brain that makes them good at coding, good at baking, good at math, bad at leadership – so there is absolutely no scientific basis for saying women are worse at tech jobs/coding than men are. None. There is still so much uncertainty surrounding how the brain works, that one could claim that women are better suited for tech jobs than men and be just as right (or wrong) as James Damore.

    Furthermore, evolutionary psychology is for rubes and charlatans searching for a way to justify their closely held beliefs when no other science will back them up. You can argue anything – no one can prove or disprove it. So convenient – kind of like claiming you have the monopoly on the truth when you are only using belief to back it up. Damore relies almost entirely on an evolutionary psychology argument to back up his previously held beliefs.

    And Google had every right to fire him – they get to decide who to retain and who to let go. This is not a free speech issue.

    2. Funny how Harvard has coursework on evolutionary psychology. They’re a bunch of charlatans too, right Miss so-called scientist.

      So, let’s be real – you’re no more a scientist than I’m a ballet dancer. What exactly is your degree in and what was your doctoral thesis based on that I can go read up on it. Please enlighten me, oh internet warrior – err scientist.

    3. Thesis title, research advisor, and publication list please? Otherwise you’re a fraud.

      Mine are public record: oddly I can’t find yours.

Comments are closed.