I have decided, arbitrarily, that if the Twins should after the 15th of May ever have more than twice as many wins as losses, a collapse is impossible, and they are sure at least to win their division before losing to the Yankees, or Astros, or someone, in the playoffs. I suppose my idea is that while you can fall, you cannot fall from that high to a place low enough so that the Cleveland Indians are ahead of you. (Cleveland is pretty clearly the best of the rest in the AL Central, the Twins' weak division.) And yesterday was their chance! A 5-game winning streak had left the Twins at 30-15, so one more win would have calmed me, but it wasn't to be, and now, at 30-16, they are again a winning streak away from my imagined safe place for them. Math is a bitch when you're trying to attain W = 2L + 1.
After their loss, I switched over to MSNBC, where Kasie Hunt was talking with Nina Totenberg about the Republicans and the abortion laws that they've enacted in some red, red states. I should say, before I get a day older and stop even noticing, that it may not be for nothing that Totenberg works for National Public Radio while the telegenic Hunt . . . is on TV. Totenberg reminds me vaguely of Susan Collins, the pro-choice Republican senator from Maine who voted to confirm Kavanaugh after he assured her he would of course uphold Supreme Court precedent (such as Roe). Boy, is she going to be surprised! I can almost see her expressing her dismay to Kasie Hunt in the halls of the Capitol. Who could have seen that curveball coming? Perhaps, in addition to making faces on TV, she will have to write the justice a stern letter.
Anyway, they were talking about the politics of these laws, and agreed that, whereas the Dems had been on the defensive over late-term abortion, these new laws make the Republicans look like the extremists. Well, yeah, even I agree with that, and I am old, white, and male, like the red-state legislators who vote for these measures and get mocked for it on Twitter. No one ever points out, however, that the R's "extreme" legislation follows almost necessarily from the premise that "human life begins at conception." For example, allowing exceptions to a general abortion ban in cases of rape is not consistent with the premise that the fertilized egg is a person as surely as is my second grader. (I think we can agree that you can't execute people for the offense of having a criminal for a father.) I'm not inclined to praise these legislators for their "consistency," because
(a) many of them are in every other way careless about supporting children; and
(b) when your premise requires you to adopt the view that women must bear the children of men who have sexually assaulted them, you should reexamine that premise.
Nevertheless, at least their argument is coherent, in the sense of formally valid: if the premise is true, the extreme conclusions follow. It's odd to me, however, that in other respects it seems that proponents of a thoroughgoing ban do make concessions to political expediency. The punishments they've devised, for example, are all on the doctor, not on the woman who presents and pays and (as they think) arranges the murder of her own child. Why? I'd say it's because they think it would be too extreme to subject women to criminal prosecution and long prison sentences for the offense of having an abortion--the Rs would lose elections over it. But the same consideration should apply to the ban that allows no exception for rape, and in that case they're proud to take a political hit. Since their consistency is inconstant, it begins to resemble a mere accident. Their opposition to abortion seems to me like an oppressively bright strobe light that's swinging around wildly in a strong wind, so that it's hard to say, at any moment, why it's shining here and not there.
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