Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Logical Extremes

Hamas said its political leader Ismail Haniyeh has been killed in an overnight strike in the Iranian capital Tehran.

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Polls showed that in 1964, two years after the Cuban missile crisis, only 38 percent of Americans knew that the Soviet Union was not a NATO member. In 2006, only 42 percent could name the government’s three branches. The average American works harder at being informed when choosing a refrigerator than when picking a president.

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The estimate is that, with the end of the academic year, the student protests will move elsewhere. Does that mean go on holiday?

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Braves agreed to a deal with the San Francisco Giants to acquire All-Star outfielder and two-time World Series champion Jorge Soler.


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Logical Extremes

Abortion will be a linchpin in American elections forever. It ranks as the prime national question among several demographics despite demonstrable threats to the very existence of the republic, so much so its abrasiveness has become a threat itself. One who tried to pour oil on the waters was Nisbet.

Robert Nisbet, a philosophically sophisticated sociologist who provided intellectual ballast to conservatism in the second half of the 20th century, considered it incoherent for conservatives to make opposition to abortion a fundamental tenet of their doctrine. He said “the major theme of Western conservatism” is “the preservation, to the extent feasible, of the autonomy of social groups against the state.” And particularly the preservation of “the family’s authority over its own.”

Abortion has been considered an intractably divisive issue because it supposedly was not amenable to the basic business of politics: the splitting of differences. Nisbet noted, however, that “there is no record of any religion, including Christianity, ever pronouncing an accidental miscarriage as a death to be commemorated in prayer and ritual.” This, Nisbet implied, indicates an ancient, durable, and widespread cultural tendency to say this: Societies that assert an interest in protecting life before birth are not required, by custom or a settled, articulated logic, to ban all deliberate terminations of pregnancies. (from Will)

This may all be true. But it does seem to be an effort to avoid the basic question that is raised by partial-birth abortion. And philosophical efforts to avoid definitive decisions are unsettling. And, as an aside, why is precedence a trump card? It isn't with the ancient institution of slavery.
 

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