Tuesday, May 08, 2007

He's at it again ...

I hate to keep beating this particular dead horse and have no intention of defending Buffet, but I would once again ask Mark what exactly he means when he keeps saying stuff like this:
Perhaps the favorite pastime of the majority of extremely wealthy people in this country is finding new ways to kill or cull the poor of the world.

Near as I can tell, support for abortion is by no means limited to the extremely wealthy. Nor do I think that one needs to attribute these kinds of conspiratorial or class warfare-esque models for them in order to explain why they do so other than the fact that they want to kill the poor. If anything, I think that one of the reasons the anti-natalist mentality exists among the upper and upper middle classes is because they themselves do not wish to worry about taking care of "unwanted" children despite having more than the financial means to do so. There also seems to be an ideological component to it in that they see abortion as (wrongly) guaranteeing their personal autonomy. I think that these explanations are a lot more plausible reasons for explaining support for abortion than asserting the existence of a conspiracy by the rich to kill off the poor.

That said, I think that Blackadder did a really good job of clearing up Mark's latest slander against conservatives in the same post. Mark's reply that he was really talking about the Derbyshires and the Rands of the world is a little less than persuasive given that he seems to me to be talking about Christians given his reference to original sin. When last I checked, neither Derbyshire nor Rand had any particular use for the concept.

Moving right along, it's clear to me that Mark didn't see the GOP debate or go to any length to read the transcript. If he had, he might well recognize that it was quite far from a celebration of the Cult of Reason that he and his paleocon fellow travelers seem to believe that the GOP has become. If he had read the transcript and followed the reaction, he might well have recognized that arguments about Giuliani being functionally pro-life appear increasingly hard to fathom and as I and others have predicted all along a lot of his support appears increasingly tepid if not fading. I would also continue to claim that one of the reasons that Giuliani attracted so much support in the first place was that given the current moribund state of the Bush administration a lot of conservatives were looking for an alternate leader. I still think that they are, except now many of them are looking at Fred Thompson rather than Giuliani, which should be a good thing as far as the pro-life movement is concerned.

I see that Mark remains a functional pacifist on the subject of Iran. Judging from his reaction to the fact that his conspiratorial prediction that the United States was planning a massive attack on Iran to coincide with Good Friday that had no basis in reality whatsoever (as would be clear to anyone with even a remote understanding of logistics, let alone geopolitics), I don't think he's over that one yet. It is events like this that serve as a reason for why I think that Mark's social and political commentary needs to be challenged: not only is it often wrong but it is also bad.

Finally, I see that Mark has managed to give President Bush some credit on his support of pro-life causes. He contrasts this to claims that he hates Bush, but I think that the real contrast would be between his reaction to a statement by the President vs. his reaction to the Supreme Court (unfortunately, the final arbiter on this subject) when it came to the partial-birth abortion ban. Apparently, some days you win easy and some days you lose big over at Catholic and Enjoying it. A rather disturbing parallel to Russian Roulette comes to mind ...

4 comments:

kathleen said...

"Perhaps the favorite pastime of the majority of extremely wealthy people in this country is finding new ways to kill or cull the poor of the world."

yes, that's why buffet gave billions (with a "b") to the Gates foundation for prevention and cure of AIDS and malaria. (though extremely wealthy people adopting children from third world nations might reasonably be perceived as "culling" in the generic sense.)

Anonymous said...

And it's not exactly as if the people who favor spreading abortion and contraception in the Third World don't also favor the same thing (and sometimes more, i.e., public subsidies) at home.

In fact, if there's a current public figure who favors abortion, contraception and euthanasia abroad but opposes them at home (the stance that would justify Shea's rants) ... I am unaware of who that person is.

kathleen said...

maybe Shea knows something about Bono that we don't know

Anonymous said...

That particular post along with Shea's subsequent comments really are a stunning specimen of baffling incoherence.