Tag Archives: morality

It’s Not Morally Dubious

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Allysia Finley has an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that talks about the arrogance and self-appointed moral superiority of scientists in our nation. One of her comments especially drew my attention, though. In the context of abortion and Roe v Wade, she wrote,

…the American Medical Association’s then-President Jack Resneck Jr asserted that states that restricted abortion would be “risking devastating consequences, including patients’ lives.” Why? Because “evidence and experience show us conclusively that the risk of death during or after childbirth is approximately 14 times greater than the risk of death from abortion-related complications.”
Comparing the risk of giving birth with that of terminating a pregnancy is morally dubious.

Including patients’ lives. Resnick doesn’t care a fig for the patients he so cynically ignores: those babies being killed by abortion. That’s the devasting consequence[] that Resnick ignores.

There only thing dubious about Resnick’s overt comparison is the comparison itself. What Resneck was comparing, and what Finley seems to have missed in his comparison, in fact was the certainty of the death of the baby from abortion with the mere, and empirically very small, risk of death from abortion-related complications and the empirically nearly as small (because 14 times nearly nothing still is very close to nothing) risk of death from childbirth complications. That comparison is not at all morally dubious. It’s clearly morally wrong, and it’s undisputedly morally abhorrent.

I Have a Suggestion

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Alexander Ward, Alex Leary, and Matthew Luxmoore are rightly skeptical about any agreements Russian President Vladimir Putin might make vis-à-vis Ukraine that would be short of his outright conquering Ukraine or include NATO troops on Ukrainian soil as guarantor of an agreement, even were those troops nationally provided rather than as a NATO contingent.

One of the lesser questions requiring an answer is the location of any meeting among Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Putin, the principals, and President Donald Trump (R), currently the primary broker of any deal. On this, I have a suggestion, stipulating that the negotiations would proceed in two phases.

The first phase negotiations should be held in the Ukrainian city of Bucha (not the village Bucha, which is a bit south of the city.) The second phase should take place in the Ukrainian city of Makariv, about 20 miles west of Bucha.

These locations, even three years after the fact, would let both Putin and Trump see the results of the desolation and butchery Putin’s barbarian hordes inflicted on Ukrainian civilians in those early days of the barbarian invasion.

Homicide Rates

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These data are from USAFacts, and they’re at the county level, since that’s the maximum data fineness that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USAFacts‘ source, publishes.

The top 10 homicide rates—homicides per 100,000 population—were in these counties as of 2023 (the latest data available from CDC):

The closest major city is for context; the rates are for the indicated county.

Every single one of these counties is run by Progressive-Democratic Party politicians.

The 10 counties with the largest increase in homicide rates, 2023 over 2018, are these:

Again, the closest major city is for context; the rates are for the indicated county. All of these counties are Party run, also. Given the overlap between high rates and rising rates, it shouldn’t be surprising that at least most of these are Party run.

One item of note here, while acknowledging that these data are a year and a half-ish old, is DC. That county had the third highest homicide rate and the ninth highest rate of increase in its homicide rate. It seems true that DC’s homicide rate is lower today than in 2023, but it’s still among the highest in the nation.

No less a light than PBS cited a Rochester Institute of Technology report that indicated that DC’s homicide rate per 100,000 had fallen in 2024 to 27.3. What those “fact checkers” chose to ignore was that even in the RIT report, DC’s rate was the fourth highest of the 24 cities that RIT looked at, and it’s still higher than that 2018 starting figure by 33%. That last, though, is my calculation from comparing RIT‘s 2024 value with the starting value in the second figure above. The RIT report did not look at rates of increase of homicide rates.

Yet this is the poor performance of DC’s governance that Party is so desperate to defend as they zealously oppose President Donald Trump’s (R) concerted effort to clean the place up.

Not Entirely Sufficient

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Harvard University and the Federal government apparently are nearing a deal that would pressure Harvard to abide by federal regulations around merit-based hiring and admissions as well as protecting students’ civil rights in return for a $500 million payment to “workforce and vocational programs.”

Pressure only, though, no overt, absolute requirement.

The administration wouldn’t appoint a monitor to oversee Harvard’s compliance with the deal. The university would pledge to continue to abide….

That’s a serious weakness in the supposed deal. Harvard’s management team already isn’t abiding by those regulations, and it already isn’t protecting its students’ civil rights—much less better reducing the school’s antisemitic bigotry and its pro-terrorist stance. Since it’s not doing, it can’t be continuing.

An addition to this deal is needed: Harvard should be required to put up a cash bond, say $500 million, for 10 years against its performance of its pledge. At the end of those 10 years, should the university actually have abided, the principal would be returned, and the accrued earnings on the principal paid to those workforce and vocational programs.

Blinken Misunderstands

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Ex-Secretary of State Antony Blinken wants a Palestinian state to be recognized, but his way and on his schedule, not those of France, UK, and Canada. I won’t go into those latter three’s offers, which individually and together amount to nothing more than Israel’s abject surrender.

Blinken, on the other hand, has centered his view on the idea that an Israeli occupation of Gaza

would perpetuate the misery of innocent Palestinians and be a recipe for an enduring insurgency that bleeds Israel militarily and morally.

Blinken’s position here, though, proceeds from a false premise, and given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s publicly stated position on the matter, I have a hard time believing Blinken is unaware of the falsity of his premise. It’s either that, or he thinks Netanyahu is lying.

The fact of the matter is that Netanyahu does not want to occupy Gaza. He has said—and he’s right about this—that it’s necessary for Israel to control by its physical presence all of Gaza in order to finish destroying Hamas and driving the remnants out of the strip. Following that, Israel would withdraw completely in favor of Arab governance of Gaza via a body assembled and operated by a collection of Arab states. That’s an Israeli occupation in name only, with a clearly stated and publicly measurable milestone for Israel leaving. That’s not occupation in the sense that Russia wants for Ukraine or that the People’s Republic of China wants for the Republic of China.

An extension of that offer from Netanyahu is this: he’s saying it’s time for the Arab nations of the Middle East to put up or shut up. Those nations’ leaderships must accept and honor their own responsibilities and do the things, with their own resources, necessary to govern Gaza and restore the residents to safety, prosperity, and the liberty of determining their futures themselves. With this, there would be no need for a “Palestinian state,” which is an idea that failed with the collapse of the Oslo Accords decades ago and has continued to fail ever since.

I claim that a good start to this process would be for the Arab members of the Abraham Accords to put up.