Homonculus Rising

The pro-choice camp was dressed down from all corners last week over its inability to get over ideology and realistically consider the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. Cathy Young's article at Reason is a good example:

Refusing to recognize a full-term unborn baby as a person is an extreme position that flies in the face of reality. But "Laci and Conner's Law" goes to the opposite extreme, recognizing the fetus as a person throughout the pregnancy and, at least in theory, enshrining the notion that life begins at conception.

The prochoice movement might have been able to avoid this debacle with a compromise solution: a bill recognizing the unborn child as a homicide victim after viability. (That, incidentally, is the law in Massachusetts; only 16 states make fetal homicide a crime from conception.)

For assaults that cause a miscarriage before viability, more severe penalties could apply without making the fetus a separate victim.

Why was such an option not even proposed?

I think that the problem is that pro-choice forces have been so adamant for so long about staving off this perceived slippery-slope that were a reasonable compromise to show up, we'd call it a Trojan horse. It's assumed that if you give an inch on some gesture that might be construed as a right for a fetus and blast, lift-off: Life and rights scale back to conception, Roe is undermined, clinics around the nation close down—dogs and cats, living together. For me that concern has only been confirmed by debates with pro-lifers in which, if I recognize that an 8.9999 month-old fetus is sort of close to a baby, my argument is a house of cards and I clearly endorse murder, infanticide, the Holocaust, the New York Yankees, ex-girlfriends and all manner of bitter, leafy green vegetables. It doesn't help that people like Kathryn Jean Lopez have shamelessly trumpeted the pregnant Lacy Peterson murder case as an urgent justification for the Unborn Victims of Violence legislation, suggesting the bill be named the Conner Peterson bill and that it be passed "before Conner Peterson's memory gives way to another news cycle." (No agenda at hand, just her deep affection for little Conner, I'm sure.)

To make a crude analogy, the Lacy Peterson case makes for the sort of intractable moral ground that the left has with the hypothetical rape-pregnancy. I expect a very pregnant woman (who very much wanted to be pregnant) would feel exceptional loss from a forced miscarriage and I'm willing to put all the ontological baggage aside for a moment and say, of course, let's not hurt pregnant women because they're pregnant. The Peterson case is actually a bad example since it's already murder, which you shouldn't be doing regardless—consider a beating of a pregnant woman, etc., where maybe the crime might come with surprisingly few pentalties but the ramifications would be great.

Here's the deal: I think you can have these rational laws on the books and still keep your ontology intact. A fetus isn't a child just by our recognizing that the forcible termination of a pregnancy ought to be penalized. For many of the bill's supporters the goal might be to force the courts to recognize that a zygote is actually a homunculus. (Fighting not against legislation or officials but against semantics, the words themselves.) Faced with a bill that wasn't wrong and the weight of the abortion debate, the pro-choice faction administered the ideological purity test and accordingly failed to accomplish anything. Maybe compromise was impossible with the moral righteousness of Lacy and Conner standing with the right, but it would've been worth the effort to try for actually good legislation.


Note: I wrote this about a week ago with the intention of fleshing it out; here it is with not a lot changed.
posted by kriston at 8:21 AM........

Sunday, April 04, 2004

You Tell Me II

Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris:

It is clear to me, and to at least some people close to Kerry, that the single best thing Kerry could do to win is pick John McCain as his running mate. In fact, this seems so obvious to me as to be nearly beyond debate. With McCain as veep, we win, period.

And yet there's this sort of oh-it'll-never-happen tone to the discussion. Either this is a put-on, or a reflection of the gut difficulty tribal Democrats have with political intermarriage. Maybe Jim Johnson is one of them. Or maybe ? and this would be my fervent hope, and really the only read that makes political sense ?Johnson is in charge of the Potemkin search effort, or the fallback search effort, while Kerry is quietly talking to McCain, and McCain is laying out his terms.

If I were McCain, those terms would be stiff. I'd be saying, "Here are my ten issues (balance the budget, campaign finance reform, staying the course in Iraq, whatever). Make them yours. If, once in office, I see you backsliding on these issues, I am warning you now, I WILL stir up trouble. You think Gore and Cheney had power in the West Wing, you ain't seen nothing yet. Yes, I will be a loyal veep, yes I will back you up on the issues important to you, even those I may disagree with. Yes, you will have to make decisions that I may not agree with that I will have to support publicly. But on these 10 issues, my issues, I will be the judge of how tenacious you are in fighting for them, and if you abandon them you will rue the day you picked me as your running mate."

Something like that. I think that your enthusiasm about a McCain nod depends more on how empty or full your glass is than on anything McCain does or does not bring to the table. Since I think voters tend to follow shiny objects more closely than issue consistency, I'm looking for the option with the biggest bang. He's the one.

For all the liberal programs on the airwaves or pundits on cable, the Democratic Party hasn't yet shown that it understands the message behind the medium. McCain's not the key to victory, but he's closer than anyone else.


Answer me this: What else does McCain have to gain from vocalizing his frustrations with W?
posted by kriston at 7:08 PM........

The Darkness

I know I'm being suckered here, but if this is wrong I don't want to be right. The album's just good.


I hang my head and rock.
posted by kriston at 2:33 PM........

Saturday, April 03, 2004

Fiction Mash-ups

Too much time between now and Saturday night? Be your own DJ, mix the novel you want to read.

• Slaughterhouse V. - Billy Pilgrim and the Whole Sick Crew search for V. on Tralfamador.
  
  
• On the Road to Perdition - Sidetracked from their quest for revenge, the O'Sullivans call Allen Ginsburg and roll to Monterey. (snaps)
  
  
• Middlesex and the City - Candace Bushnell needs to tell you something....
  
  
• The Name of the Rose that Grew from Concrete - An English monk solves murder mysteries in an Italian abbey by navigating an ancient, labyrinthine library and finding... Tupac?
  
  
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests? - A hole is hollowed out of the book so that you may discretely store your recreational drug of choice.
  
  
• The Bell Jar Curve - Intractable depression turns out to be a class function spurred by bad statistics.
  
  
• A Room with a View of One's Own - Required for V. Woolfe's senior finishing school seminar.
  
  
• Crime and Discipline and Punishment - Newest from the authors who brought you the Chicken Soup for the Soul series.

Go ahead, try your hand. From your pointy-headed friends at Crooked Timber (John Holbo took some really good ones—I liked Divine Comedy of Errors).


Whoever thought this up deserves some points.
posted by kriston at 9:46 AM........

Friday, April 02, 2004

You Tell Me

Trouble in paradise?

"I believe my party has gone astray,'' McCain said, criticizing GOP stands on environmental and minority issues.

"I think the Democratic Party is a fine party, and I have no problems with it, in their views and their philosophy,'' he said. "But I also feel the Republican Party can be brought back to the principles I articulated before.''

[...]

The Arizona Republican took on President Bush for failing to prepare Americans for a long involvement in Iraq, saying, "You can't fly in on an aircraft carrier and declare victory and have the deaths continue. You can't do that.''

McCain said the U.S. should seek more U.N. involvement in Iraq. "Many people in this room question, legitimately, whether we should have gone in or not,'' he said, adding that that debate "will be part of this presidential campaign."

I'm not caught up in the McCainity, I'm just impressed by its enormous potential, I swear. Really, anyone here think Dick Gephardt would be a better running mate?


He was a 'miserable failure' in the primaries, after all.
posted by kriston at 2:58 PM........

Harumph Harumph

Job growth surged last month and that's spectacular. Still, my job isn't to go around calling Bush spectacular, so I'll hand the mic to someone else:

"After three years of punishing job losses, the one month job creation announced today is welcome news for America's workers. I hope it continues," said Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in a written statement. "But for too many families, living through the worst job recovery since the Great Depression has been, and continues to be, far too painful. . . . That's why I've proposed a strategy that revitalizes our manufacturing sector and puts us on track to create 10 million new jobs in the next four years."

Guess that's not his job, either. We hope the payola is around the corner, particularly for the manufacturing sector, but maybe we're seeing signs that the economy is ready to overcome the retractionary pressure it's seen for the last few years.


By manufacturing, of course, we're talking about fast food. The economy got biggie-sized.
posted by kriston at 2:38 PM........

Bodyguard

Blackwater Security Consulting, the company that employed the four contractors killed in Fallujah, also provides security for Paul Bremer. That's really surprising to me, especially given hesitations about these organization's efficacy:

There are some indications that the four security guards killed in Al-Fallujah were mistakenly targeted as U.S. forces. U.S. officials say the attack in Al-Fallujah appears to have been preplanned. And some military analysts have suggested that the security contractors offered particularly vulnerable targets because they were operating without the kind of intelligence information, communications, and backup forces used in U.S. military operations.

You'll see critics call these organizations mercenary, and while that's certainly true in some cases, I'm willing to believe that they're not all swarthy Hessians.

It seems to me that no matter how professional these organizations are, it's still a terrible idea to commission them with postwar security. Not because the market can't do it better—it seems like the military is unable or reluctant to parallel all of these MP functions—but because the military can't incorporate them. Whatever level of cooperation exists in Iraq between the military and security firms will never amount to private security playing a fully functional role in the military hierarchy; the further out of that hierarchy a firm is, the more bleed you'll find along the lines of intelligence, coordination, and contingency strategy.


Zzz... Zzz...
posted by kriston at 2:10 PM........

! - ?

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