A Venture into Cloudcuckooland
Congressman Mast offers a money wager that his colleagues will prove unwilling because unable to answer a question clear to every student who failed to flunk grammar school biology class.
This display is remarkable:
Here we see more of the same.
Note that while two of the witnesses are willing to offer criticisms of the question, and the motive of the question, they are unwilling because unable to answer a simple yes or no question concerning their moral code. Either they have moral reservations touching later-term abortions or not. If not, why not say so?
These women are apparently honest enough not simply to lie, and pretend they have reservations (when, in fact, they do not) while also being not honest enough to answer.
It cannot be shame. They must regard an honest answer as being poor tactics or bad publicity.
But ponder this: is it wise for any republic to be ruled, or even to be advised, by experts who simply act toward ends they prefer not to be discussed?
What sort of moral code is it that cannot be discussed in private except in a special backward vocabulary of Alice-in-Wonderland mirror-words and mere jabberwocky, and cannot be discussed in public at all?
Perhaps they are correct to elude, at all costs, the publicity that accompanies any honest display of their reality-hating gibberish.
Here is an example that received its due fifteen minutes of internet fame. Senator Hawley is accused of encouraging violence by affirming that men cannot get pregnant. The accusation is leveled by a credentialed intellectual with staring eyes and a ring in her septum:
Let is be emphasized that this loon is a highly credentialed professional, a doctor of the law, whose profession is to teach, train, and mold young minds into the mysteries of the legal profession. She is, in effect, a professional logician.
She is a logician, that is, who does not regard ad hominem as an informal logical error. One wonders what her students pay in tuition.
Please note the difference, yet again, between criticizing the question and answering the question. Please note the tone, not merely of condescension, but of disgust.
This is not merely the tone of a nobility addressing vulgarity, but of refinement recoiling as if from an oozy slug.
I would have equated it to the righteousness of a saint recoiling from the sins of a sinner, but I cannot bring to mind, nor find in scripture, any passage voicing such loathing and contempt. Anger, and pity, I can find in Jeremiads against sin, and the sharp shock of fear in fire-and-brimstone homilies. Saints hate sins, not sinners. There is nothing like this.
Note also what unspoken rule was allegedly breached. Affirming that male pregnancy is unreal affirms affirms that words have meaning. A is A. Truth is true. Logic is logical. Reality is real.
But reality allegedly causes suicide in the over-sensitive, so a due maternal compassion for the weak requires reality be treated as optional, and banished.
The problem is that “reality” is the word used to refer to those things which are not optional. Everything else can be banished: morality, sincerity, honesty, thought, truth, life, anything manmade. The name of any named thing can go unspoken. But reality cannot be banished.
Those who battle the realness of reality cannot vanquish reality. The heavens hang overhead, untouched, even by the tallest battlement of the Tower of Babel. Such a battle only ends with the unreal men destroying themselves.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
