The Flagrant Dishonesty of Most Arguments For and Against Abortion

In 2019, Caitlyn Flanagan published a noteworthy article about abortion that recognized that most "arguments" about the legality of abortion are dishonest.  Most of these "arguments" have zero chance of moving a person on the other side of the issue to a new understanding or a new position. Most such "arguments" fail because they refuse to give the other side its best foot forward. They are worse than straw man arguments or least charitable readings.  They are like athletic competitions where only one team takes the field.  Most of these "arguments" are thus political rants and rallying cries, not good faith discussions.

Here is an excerpt from Flanagan's excellent article, titled "THE DISHONESTY OF THE ABORTION DEBATE: Why we need to face the best arguments from the other side":

The argument for abortion, if made honestly, requires many words: It must evoke the recent past, the dire consequences to women of making a very simple medical procedure illegal. The argument against it doesn’t take even a single word. The argument against it is a picture.

This is not an argument anyone is going to win. The loudest advocates on both sides are terrible representatives for their cause. When women are urged to “shout your abortion,” and when abortion becomes the subject of stand-up comedy routines, the attitude toward abortion seems ghoulish. Who could possibly be proud that they see no humanity at all in the images that science has made so painfully clear? When anti-abortion advocates speak in the most graphic terms about women “sucking babies out of the womb,” they show themselves without mercy. They are not considering the extremely human, complex, and often heartbreaking reasons behind women’s private decisions. The truth is that the best argument on each side is a damn good one, and until you acknowledge that fact, you aren’t speaking or even thinking honestly about the issue. You certainly aren’t going to convince anybody. Only the truth has the power to move.

Photo Credit: Creative Commons with permission by Mark Baylor

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Things the Left-Leaning Media Refuses to Discuss

I enjoy listening to Tara Henley's podcasts, even though she unable to get along well with her former employer, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Here is how Bari Weiss describes her departure from CBC:

The story of Tara Henley is the story of countless liberals. Until recently, they were the ones pushing everyone else to be more tolerant, more understanding, more open-minded, more compassionate. Then, something happened — call it ideological succession or institutional capture or the new illiberalism — and, all of a sudden (or so it felt to them), they found themselves to the right of their friends and colleagues. Their crime? Refusing to abandon their principles in the service of some radical, anti-liberal dogma. If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you know well what we’re referring to. (See under: Paul Rossi or Maud Maron or Dorian Abbot.)

And so it was with Henley, an accomplished Canadian journalist whose book, “Lean Out: A Meditation on the Madness of Modern Life,” kind of says it all. Last week, she resigned in style from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and struck out on her own here on Substack.

Henley's most recent article offers a list of many of the issues that left-leaning news media currently refuse to cover. The title to her article is "Meet the press: Why much of the media looks and sounds much the same."

Here’s a good place to start: Ask yourself how many liberal media pieces you’ve seen over the past two years that, say, interrogate COVID restrictions critically (especially early on, with school closures, lockdowns, and mask mandates). Or evaluate Black Lives Matter as a political movement, assessing its strengths and weaknesses. Or offer opposing viewpoints on transgender athletes in women’s sports; or mass immigration; or diversity, equity, and inclusion philosophies, trainings, or policies. Or acknowledge the excesses of #MeToo, or prejudice against the white working class. Or present critiques of identity politics. Or explore downsides of puberty blockers and gender transition surgery for teens; or delve into the growing censoriousness on social media and in education, Hollywood, the arts, and NGOs. Or probe inner city gun violence. Or reflect the positive sides of masculinity. Or talk about God. Or reference anything that’s currently deemed a conspiracy theory in non-derogatory terms (see: the lab leak theory). Or express genuine curiosity on the reasons behind the rise of independent media, whether that’s Joe Rogan or Substack.

This, I would argue, is the no-fly list. These are the tripwires.

I’ll admit that, months after leaving legacy media, I still feel an instinctive trepidation even running down this list — that’s how ingrained this is.

I would like an offer a concurring perspective from my work as a consumer attorney. Based on cases I have handled, the best way for a merchant to rip off a customer is to tell some truths (to gain some trust) but refuse to tell the full story. This is the same technique that an auto dealer uses when telling you that the brakes of a used car are "excellent" while simultaneously failing to disclose that the same car was in a flood or that the car's frame consists of two half-frames welded together in a chop shop. Failing to disclose material facts is such a powerful way to rip people off that almost every state has a consumer fraud statute that allows individuals to sue a business for financial damages resulting from such violations while advertising or selling services or merchandise (see this chart, which is helpful as an overview, even though from 2009).

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Why Liberal (and Conservative) News Media Stays in its Own lane

Tara Henley's newest article is "Meet the press: Why much of the media looks and sounds much the same." She makes some excellent points that apply to liberal news media as well as conservative media. Reporters appears to lost a sense of curiosity. Whatever happened to the childlike curiosity in these well-trained journalists? Has it been snuffed out? Unlikely, because reporters know how to attack viewpoints that threaten their world views. What they lack is motivation to examine bullshit emanating from their own tribe.

Why is this? Sometimes, editors are refusing to allow reporters to following their instincts to be curious. This is happening in many places, resulting in excellent reporters striking out on their own. This group includes Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss and Tara Henley.  There is a second less obvious reason: Many reporters feel internalized pressures to not ask certain questions. Henley offers this list of questions left-leaning reporters refuse to pursue:

Ask yourself how many liberal media pieces you’ve seen over the past two years that, say, interrogate COVID restrictions critically (especially early on, with school closures, lockdowns, and mask mandates). Or evaluate Black Lives Matter as a political movement, assessing its strengths and weaknesses. Or offer opposing viewpoints on transgender athletes in women’s sports; or mass immigration; or diversity, equity, and inclusion philosophies, trainings, or policies. Or acknowledge the excesses of #MeToo, or prejudice against the white working class. Or present critiques of identity politics. Or explore downsides of puberty blockers and gender transition surgery for teens; or delve into the growing censoriousness on social media and in education, Hollywood, the arts, and NGOs. Or probe inner city gun violence. Or reflect the positive sides of masculinity. Or talk about God. Or reference anything that’s currently deemed a conspiracy theory in non-derogatory terms (see: the lab leak theory). Or express genuine curiosity on the reasons behind the rise of independent media, whether that’s Joe Rogan or Substack.

Why are so many reporters afraid to be curious?

Often, it’s not a boss telling you what to cover, or how to cover it, but your colleagues, the mood in your newsroom, your competition, your Twitter feed, and, increasingly, your own anxieties. (And, just as important, what you are not being told. As writer Freddie deBoer has put it: “Everyone who works in the industry lives with a dim but persistent feeling that they have committed some kind of faux pas and are paying for it, but never know where, what, or why.”). Thus, consensus is manufactured in myriad small but insidious ways, and if you want to keep working you figure out the unspoken rules.

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A Peak into the Dystopian Pro-Censorship Mind of the Washington Post.

This hatchet job aimed at Saagar Enjeti (and Elon Musk) provides a peak into the dystopian pro-censorship mind of the Washington Post. And there are many layers of dysfunction. Saagar and Krystal of Breaking Points offer a detailed analysis.

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FIRE’s Advice to Elon Musk

I whole-heartedly agree with Greg Lukianoff's Advice to Elon Musk.

Dear Elon Musk,

My name is Greg Lukianoff. I’m the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit nonpartisan organization. Since 1999, we have helped thousands of students and faculty members fight back when their free speech rights were threatened and have helped millions more through lawsuits and policy reforms. I am also the co-author of “The Coddling of the American Mind,” which investigates how a culture of safetyism and censorship harms individual mental health and American democracy. Since its early days, I have been excited about social media’s potential and concerned about its leaders’ efforts to mitigate its downsides by restricting free expression. I agree with Mark Zuckerberg’s 2020 statement that “Facebook,” or any other social media company, “shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth.” Yet leading technology and social media companies have begun to act in precisely this way. They implement vague content moderation policies, remove and censor accounts with little or no explanation, and arbitrarily attach warning labels to content.

It doesn’t have to be this way. With the right leadership operating from a foundation of intellectual humility, social media platforms can become models of the value of free expression, even helping generate knowledge that moves society forward. As Twitter’s owner, I hope you will encourage much-needed changes to the platform that will make it a positive force for free expression, interpersonal connection, and broader community understanding. And, in so doing, inspire leaders at other social media companies to do the same.

To that end, I hope you will consider the following:

-- Look to First Amendment law for guidance on implementing free speech-friendly policies. As a private company, Twitter is under no legal obligation to enforce First Amendment free speech standards. However, it makes great sense to voluntarily borrow their wisdom. First Amendment law is the longest-sustained meditation on how to protect free speech in the real world. This body of law, honed over the course of a century, can provide practical guidance and real-world precedents for managing the platform.

-- Eliminate viewpoint-discriminatory policies and practices. Viewpoint discrimination — singling out specific points of view for censorship while leaving others alone — is practically the definition of censorship. Banning or otherwise punishing speakers on the basis of their viewpoint not only chills speech but can intensify polarization. Twitter should craft policies that explicitly state that no one will be banned or otherwise penalized for merely expressing an opinion.

-- Use categories to clearly define sanctionable speech. American law takes a categorical approach to distinguishing protected and unprotected speech. The advantage of the categorical approach is that it limits the arbitrary censorship that can result from ad hoc balancing tests by limiting what can be banned to certain well-defined categories of unprotected speech. Categories of unprotected speech in the law include incitement to imminent lawless action, defamation, obscenity (essentially hard-core pornography), and true threats. Further, correcting a common misunderstanding, speech that is materially part of the commission of a crime is not protected. By reflecting categories of speech already existing in law, Twitter policies can be understood with clarity and enforced with consistency.

Knowing what people think — even if it’s troubling — is essential to understanding the world as it is and to deciding how to act within it. Unfortunately too many of today’s leaders — whether in education, at social media companies, or in the larger corporate and governmental world — preempt this process of understanding through censorship, believing they’re acting in the interest of either factual accuracy or emotional or psychological safety. Furthermore, they attempt to lead through confirmation, taking institutional positions on hotly contested issues, imposing a “correct” way to think.

Twitter can — and should — blaze a new trail, aspiring toward a positive vision of a freer and more constructive public conversation. It can do this by producing guidance and implementing structures that embrace institutional disconfirmation: an iterative process by which existing ideas, assumptions, and theories are revised through subtraction, eliminating what we decide is false to inch towards a “better approximation of the truth.” This process, which lies at the heart of the scientific revolution and underlies academic freedom today, encourages people to produce real knowledge that benefits us all.

I hope that you will use your influence at Twitter to preserve and prioritize humanity’s fundamental right to free expression, while guiding innovation in the direction of constructive and meaningful discussion.

Sincerely, Greg Lukianoff President and CEO, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)

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