Abortion and other news

Abortion

Another lawsuit to block bans on abortion has been filed. This on is from Kentucky. Religion News Service reports:

3 Jewish women file suit against Kentucky abortion bans on religious grounds

It's the third such suit brought by Jewish organizations or individuals since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, claiming the state is imposing a Christian understanding of when life begins.

Three Jewish women in Kentucky have filed a lawsuit arguing that their religious rights are being violated by a set of state laws that ban most abortions.

The lawsuit, filed in Jefferson Circuit Court in Louisville, is the third such suit brought by Jewish organizations or individuals since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in their ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In all three suits — the first in Florida, the second in Indiana — the Jewish plaintiffs claim their state is infringing on their religious freedom by imposing a Christian understanding of when life begins.

Under current Kentucky laws, life begins at the moment of fertilization. Another law bans abortion after six weeks when cardiac activity is first detected.  

Abortion will be on the ballot next month when Kentuckians decide the fate of a proposed constitutional amendment that would eliminate the right to abortion in the state.

A map of states' sentiments (below) about abortion complied by the New York Times indicates that if the 2022 election in Kentucky has not been subverted by authoritarian Republican election haters, the proposed abortion ban would fail by about 3%.

From the shameless hypocrisy files (or not?)

The Independent writes:

Biden slams ‘socialist Republicans’ for hypocrisy after they asked for money they voted against

‘I didn't know there were that many socialist Republicans’

President Joe Biden on Friday hit out at Republican members of Congress for repeatedly requesting federal funds for projects in their districts when they’d voted against the very bills which had made the funds available to them.

The question is, in light of yesterday's unsettling inquiry here under the heading 'A sobering thought or two', whether one can call this Republican politician's behavior hypocrisy, or is it merely pragmatism in the face of changed circumstances? It seems to be hypocrisy no matter how one analyzes it. And most tellingly from a reason and logic point of view, it looks, walks and quacks like hypocrisy.

Is there a philosopher in the house?

Some thoughts and news

A sobering thought or two

Comments to me here recently raised the issue of how to assess what politicians and others say and do. The argument is that one needs to look at both words and deeds. This blast got me thinking:

An example is Biden's campaign pledge to end new oil drilling on public lands and federal waters. This summer he announced plans for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and in Alaska. So you have words and then action. Promises and realities. .... Climate activists were angered. Then again, the fossil fuel industry was not satisfied either because it wasn't enough to drive prices down and meet energy needs for Europe (and line their pockets in the process). I see this disjuncture of word and deed as largely a byproduct of what I interpret as unwise sanctions policies. So, we have his rhetoric (no new drilling), the reality (announces new drilling) and then judgments will vary about just how to explain the disjuncture in this case since they don't line up.

Is Biden hypocritical or pragmatic here? Is he going too far or not far enough in terms of ramping up oil production here? Are the sanctions well planned or did the US and Europe shoot themselves in the foot with them?

My response:

I don't know how to answer any of those questions. I'm not sure there is any definitive answer. Most people who support or oppose Biden will probably mostly answer with their biases, e.g., group or tribe loyalty, and/or how they define applicable concepts, e.g., hypocrite vs. pragmatic, or well planned vs. shot in the foot.

Is politics more inscrutable than discernable? Seems so, at least on initial impression. Stepping back, if modern politics is mostly inscrutable, history cannot be any less so, but could be (probably is) more so.

Response to my response:

There is no one definitive answer to questions like that. That's part of what I'm saying. At this level (that of interpreting political actions in terms of broader conceptions of what is good, bad, productive, harmful) there frequently are not "definitive answers."

So, is it even possible to assess words and deeds? In politics and history, maybe it usually isn't. I melted down into a blob of confusion and philosophical nihilist thoughts, but I got better after a while. 

Me before I got better

Fun times in Mexico

Meanwhile, someone hacked the Mexican military. What they found was disquieting. Maybe another democracy is on the verge of falling to autocrats, plutocrats and kleptocrats. But who knows, maybe that would be an improvement . . . . . nah, never mind. The NYT writes:

A major hack targeting Mexico’s Defense Ministry has shed light on the country’s most secretive and powerful institution, documenting its expanding influence over the civilian government, attempts to evade cooperation on a landmark human rights investigation and spying on journalists using the spyware known as Pegasus.

Detailed in the data breach are the military’s own internal probes and suspicions that powerful government officials, like state governors and the current interior minister, are linked to organized crime networks, including drug cartels.  

As journalists in Mexico search through the enormous hack, the information revealed in news articles so far has illuminated the military’s growing hold over civilian institutions and its close relationship with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The Mexican military has a history of human rights abuses and massacres of civilians, and has long resisted oversight and accountability. The leaked emails show — in military officials’ own words — how the institution maneuvers to sidestep the government, empower itself and protect its own members, however junior.

Things do not look so good for democracy in our neighbor to the south. 

Global moral order - status update

This is from a review of a 2017 book:

More than hundred years ago Andrew Carnegie established Church Peace Union aimed at fostering world peace by promoting dialogue among the world’s faiths. .... Michael Ignatieff’s 2017 book, The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World, initially was conceived as part of the celebration of the centennial of Carnegie’s project. The idea of the book was “to commemorate the illusions about moral progress that gave rise to Carnegie’s bequest in 1914, as well as to investigate what moral globalization looks like in the twenty-first century”; ....

In each location, Ignatieff finds a common emphasis on what he describes as “ordinary virtues” – the collection of habits and intuitions such as trust, tolerance, forgiveness and reconciliation. These are not the result of abstract moral reasoning, but are rather “unreflexive and unthinking”. In all locations, as Ignatieff underlines, the individuals they talked to never separated their own private dilemmas from the wider social context of conflict in which they lived: “Generalities about human obligation and moral reasoning [mean] little”; instead, “context was all” (рр. 26–27). .... ordinary people think through moral situations in terms of concrete human relations with their family and friends.

The book shows that in view of the actions of individuals within a local community, the language of human rights is ambiguous. As Ignatieff argues, the human rights revolution has changed what many of us believe about the duty of states; but he doubts it has changed us (р. 216). At the same time, the spread of democracy and of the idea of human rights universalized the notion that citizens have a right to be heard. .... So, Ignatieff writes, “we are in a new moral era in which the struggle for equality has produced a clamor, sometimes violent, for recognition and acknowledgment” (р. 28).

.... the most striking feature of the ordinary virtue perspective is how rarely any of the participants evoked universal principles of any kind – that is, ideas of general obligation to human beings as such – and how frequently they reasoned in terms of the local, the contingent, the here and now, what they owed those near to them and what they owed themselves.

Well, if morals are local but our big problems and existential threats are global, we're possibly hosed. Someone needs to figure some way to globalize moral values that are anti-self destructive and unite the disunited. At present, that does not appear to be possible. 

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for raising the words and deeds issue, and pointing out Ignatieff’s research and the book review.

Judge Brown's oral argument hearing

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson spoke up in one of her first oral hearings at the Supreme Court. Apparently, she is not going to be shy. On Tuesday, oral arguments were made in a dispute over whether Alabama’s racial redistricting plan is legal or not.

The case, Merrill v. Milligan, asks if Alabama has to create a second majority-Black congressional district. The state and probably the right-wing majority on the court will say no. The radical right argument is that the Voting Rights Act’s requirement to do so is unconstitutional.

A WaPo opinion piece comments:

First, some background: Republicans have been telling themselves a useful fiction, namely that racism has vanished, and any attempt to teach about the enduring effects or to remedy enduring discrimination is unfair to White people and is unconstitutional. We see the phenomenon in their contrived war against “critical race theory” in schools (even though it not taught to children).

.... The result [of the Civil Rights movement] was, among other things, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which specifically targeted measures that discriminated against Black voters in the South.

And that brings us to Jackson on Tuesday. Mark Joseph Stern writes for Slate:

In a series of extraordinary exchanges with Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour, Jackson explained that the entire point of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments was to provide equal opportunity for formerly enslaved people, using color-conscious remedies whenever necessary to put them on the same plane as whites.

Jackson took her colleagues through the history of the Civil War amendments, revisions to the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and even the Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction from 1866. Jackson informed her colleagues: “The legislator who introduced [the 14th] amendment said that ‘unless the Constitution should restrain them, those states will all, I fear, keep up this discrimination and crush to death the hated Freedman.’ ” Jackson observed, “That’s not a race-neutral or race-blind idea in terms of the remedy.”

The right-wing’s fixation on a “colorblind” society serves to strip Congress of the power under the 14th Amendment to address discrimination. The right-wing justices are so determined to show the Constitution to require their “colorblind” result that they’ve ignored the history, meaning and intent of the document they claim to revere.

The court’s six-justice conservative majority has shown repeatedly that it has the votes to achieve the radical, partisan outcomes it desires, so it need not make convincing arguments — or even coherent ones (see it’s ruling overturning abortion rights). That’s what makes Jackson’s remarks so effective. Essentially, she said, “I’m making sure everyone understands what is going on here.”

Arguments like that are probably noy going to make any difference in the outcome. Alabama will be able to limit the influence of Black voters by gerrymandering. As the opinion itself points out, the six radical right Republican judges not not need to make convincing or even coherent arguments. All they need to do is vote for the radical right imperative in this case, which is taking power from voters and giving it to increasingly radicalized, anti-democratic Republican state legislatures.

Some people complain that the US has never been a democracy, citing things like the Senate and electoral college, both of which are inherently anti-democratic. Maybe so. But if they complained about insufficient democracy (voter power) before, they should expect even less going forward. Republican Party elites are taking power from citizens and giving it to themselves. This is an anti-democratic power grab, pure and simple.

News updates

The human mind is usually comfortable with incompatible beliefs

The NYT writes: 

Like many other conservative residents of storm-battered southwest Florida, Pamela Swartz has long been leery of government spending. But as she stood among the smashed boats, gutted homes and overwhelming loss left by Hurricane Ian, Ms. Swartz said that federal aid could not come soon enough.

“This is their time to step in,” said Ms. Swartz, whose garage in Fort Myers Beach had been flooded by Ian’s devastating storm surge. She was already frustrated after trying to file a federal storm claim. “This is what we pay our taxes for.”  

“Our governor is the greatest,” said Jay Kimble, a maintenance worker on Fort Myers Beach who lost everything. “I know he’s going to do everything he can to get us back on our feet. I’m not a Biden fan at all.”

Most conservatives like these two routinely vote for Republican politicians who routinely try to reduce taxes and domestic spending. That includes spending for disaster relief. Taxes are great when they are needed for themselves, but horrible socialist tyranny and treason when tax dollars go elsewhere. One could call it hypocrisy. But whatever one calls it, the typical human mind is usually quite comfortable with it. It does not have to make sense. It just has to feel right and good.

From the milquetoast rule of law files: The first time an executive 

has been prosecuted for bad behavior after a computer hack??

The NYT writes:

In 2016, while the Federal Trade Commission was investigating Uber over an earlier breach of its online systems, Mr. Sullivan learned of a new breach that affected the Uber accounts of more than 57 million riders and drivers.

The jury found Mr. Sullivan guilty on one count of obstructing the F.T.C.’s investigation and one count of misprision, or acting to conceal a felony from authorities.

The case — believed to be the first time a company executive faced criminal prosecution over a hack — could change how security professionals handle data breaches.

This is only the first time? Corporations have been hiding huge hacks from everyone for decades. Once again, the exceptionally holey (full of holes) Swiss cheese that is the rule of law, has reared its ugly head and nailed a corporate elite. This nudges the track record up to nailing white collar crooks to about 1 in 10 million from about 1 in 20 million. Good job! The rule of law is working as intended. The elites remain secure in their homes and beds.

Clearly, this will change how corporate security professionals handle data breaches. They will up their plausible deniability game and find a low level employee to take the fall. The janitor did it!!

Election truth denial and what to do about it

The WaPo writes:

A majority of Republican nominees on the ballot this November for the House, Senate and key statewide offices — 299 in all — have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Candidates who have challenged or refused to accept Joe Biden’s victory are running in every region of the country and in nearly every state. Republican voters in four states nominated election deniers in all federal and statewide races The Post examined.

Although some are running in heavily Democratic areas and are expected to lose, most of the election deniers nominated are likely to win: Of the nearly 300 on the ballot, 174 are running for safely Republican seats. Another 51 will appear on the ballot in tightly contested races.

A WaPo editorial board opinion comments:

Yet the greatest single measure to protect U.S. democracy lies in Congress. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced his support last week for the Electoral Count Reform Act, which would make it harder for conspiracy theorists to hijack the electoral process and overturn a legitimate vote. It is an essential response to the wave of election deniers likely to take office next year — and, as such, it is the most important legislation federal lawmakers will have considered in recent years.

Time will tell if democracy can be defended or if it will fall. Most Republicans in congress will oppose trying to defend democracy and elections. Even McConnell's claimed support is probably just insincere window dressing.