On the Card Game of Politics
Our own Stephen J brings this point by the late Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle, of blessed memory, to our attention. She write about the people who used to screech about 9/11 being an inside job:
I wonder if the nuts even believe what they are saying. Because if something like 9/11 happened in Canada, and I believed with all my heart that, say, Stephen Harper was involved, I don’t think I could still live here. I’m not sure I could stop myself from running screaming to another country. How can you believe that your President killed 2,000 people, and in between bitching about this, just carry on buying your vente latte and so forth?
His comment:
That said, it occurs to me in hindsight I should be less judgmental of this reaction, because there are things I believe to be true with all my heart that don’t have as much of an impact on my behaviour as they should. Remove the plank in my own eye first, and all that.
My comment:
I have such a plank of my own.
At one time, I was neither pro-abortion nor anti-abortion.
Condemn me now if you will, but such was my honest opinion at one time. Abortion was an issue, the only issue known to me, logic could not solve. Neither side, given its axioms, proposes a self contradiction in any argument I heard: one side said humanity was a property that developed in the womb, like brain development, and the other said humanity was a property that exists categorically, like membership in one’s species.
But it did strike me as odd that the anti-abortion partisans, who very clearly believed that human babies were being murdered in countless numbers at abortion mills, rarely or never firebombed the places, whereas arson against animal testing labs by PETA activists was commonplace.
For I thought that I, if I were sure babies were human, would eagerly use violence to prevent the monstrous crime of child murder.
Well, then I became a father, I saw clear as day that one has a duty to defend one’s child whether he has that elusive quality called “humanity” or not. Indeed my second column ever written when I first started keeping a journal was on this topic (https://scifiwright.com/2003/03/on-infanticide/) So I became anti-abort, but I did not start burning down abortion mills.
The fact of the matter is that an evil being done because the consensus of society approves, or, at least, permits the evil, must be fought by changing the consensus. Even in an monarchy, if the monarch outlaws an evil practice, if the consensus does not agree, the evil will continue in secret, or perhaps provoke rebellion, and the laws be only unwillingly enforced by lax policemen who secretly see the criminals as innocent.
In terms of the Card Game of Politics, playing the “direct action” aka violence card, such as burning down one abortion mill, or shooting a monster like Kermit Gosnell, allows the opposition to play the victim card, which trumps the violence card, and is actually counterproductive. So much so that when the pro-lifers do not acts of arson or violence, they are accused of it falsely, so that the pro-death can play the victim card, and have laws passes to arrest grannies standing near the entrance praying.
That being said, during this election cycle, the leadership of the pro-life movement, who were taken unawares by the repeal of Roe v Wade, and had no organization ready to lobby the states for pro-life legislation once such laws were deemed constitutional, but who campaigned against Trump, the man who, more than any other, is to be lauded for the repeal of that evil law, was labeled a traitor to the movement, because he was not fool enough to back the idea of a federal statute banning abortion nationwide — an idea that some of the prolifers did back.
So there are hypocrite among the vocal prolife movement, who are either fools unaware that their folly may scuttle the movement, or are grifters trying to scuttle the movement treasonously.
Nationwide laws preventing abortion are as unconstitutional as nationwide laws permitting it. Even if the courts allowed such a thing — the Supreme Court has notoriously neglected its duty in the past, and will do so again — all that would result, if this battle is fought at a federal level, is a reverse of any such statute once every four to eight years, whenever the opposition party to the current one gains power.
If we cannot convince the states to pass an amendment to the US Constitution, we cannot get a permanent federal law on this issue. At the moment, and for all the foreseeable future, this will be fought on a state by state basis.
That said, it is nonetheless the case that the sight of Joe Biden welcoming Donald Trump to the White House with broad smiles big handshakes and affirmations of cooperation and cordial relations as power is peacefully transfer to him, make it clear that the talk of Trump as Hitler was a hoax of preposterous proportions.
If I were president, and Kermit Gosnell was the president elect, and the psycho collector of pickled dead baby parts came to the White House, and I would not grin like a goose, nor shake his hand, nor utter any word of courtesy, aside from what was minimally required by the discharge of my office to transfer power peacefully.
All the Nasty Nazi Nazi talk was just a hoax, as much a fake as Russia Russia Russia.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
