<story><title>Why is it traitorous to understand the people you disagree with?</title><url>https://dynomight.net/traitorous/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dvt</author><text>Almost every serious non-partisan legal scholar agrees that Roe v. Wade is on tenuous legal footing. It&amp;#x27;s purely a logical argument, and it doesn&amp;#x27;t follow very well from the Constitution. We have a very simple mechanism to rectify this: amend the Constitution. But that ship has long sailed, and the problem now is &lt;i&gt;stare decisis&lt;/i&gt;†, which complicates things further. So there&amp;#x27;s a very real justification for keeping Roe in spite of its shortcomings. But that&amp;#x27;s neither here nor there.&lt;p&gt;The issue isn&amp;#x27;t that people don&amp;#x27;t understand arguments, it&amp;#x27;s that they misrepresent them. A rational, reasoned, mature, back-and-forth debate on abortion won&amp;#x27;t get you views and clicks, so of course no one does it. &lt;i&gt;Panem et circenses.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;† And of course Casey, which reaffirmed Roe.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>corrral</author><text>The fundamental problem, which isn&amp;#x27;t going to get addressed short of the country falling apart, most likely, is that our particular system of government is &lt;i&gt;a bit shit&lt;/i&gt;, and keeps getting worse the better everyone gets at gaming it.&lt;p&gt;Its very shittiness is why we can&amp;#x27;t realistically fix it. We&amp;#x27;ve been relying on courts &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; stretching reasoning on the constitution to its breaking point, just to be able to have a mostly-modern state &amp;amp; economy, in terms of function and outcomes, and it&amp;#x27;s been like that for most of a century. Maybe it would&amp;#x27;ve been better if the courts hadn&amp;#x27;t done that and had instead forced us to a crisis point much sooner, so we&amp;#x27;d have to actually fix our governmental system, but who knows what suffering that might have caused.&lt;p&gt;Concerted attempts to change the course of the courts might finally bring us that crisis, though. We&amp;#x27;ll see. If they&amp;#x27;re maximally successful, I think it&amp;#x27;ll have to, because the US is gonna go downhill &lt;i&gt;fast&lt;/i&gt; if kinda-shaky 20th century rulings supporting broadened federal power are wiped out &lt;i&gt;en masse&lt;/i&gt;.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why is it traitorous to understand the people you disagree with?</title><url>https://dynomight.net/traitorous/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dvt</author><text>Almost every serious non-partisan legal scholar agrees that Roe v. Wade is on tenuous legal footing. It&amp;#x27;s purely a logical argument, and it doesn&amp;#x27;t follow very well from the Constitution. We have a very simple mechanism to rectify this: amend the Constitution. But that ship has long sailed, and the problem now is &lt;i&gt;stare decisis&lt;/i&gt;†, which complicates things further. So there&amp;#x27;s a very real justification for keeping Roe in spite of its shortcomings. But that&amp;#x27;s neither here nor there.&lt;p&gt;The issue isn&amp;#x27;t that people don&amp;#x27;t understand arguments, it&amp;#x27;s that they misrepresent them. A rational, reasoned, mature, back-and-forth debate on abortion won&amp;#x27;t get you views and clicks, so of course no one does it. &lt;i&gt;Panem et circenses.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;† And of course Casey, which reaffirmed Roe.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swearwolf</author><text>We do have a simple method, in amending the Constitution, but that’s been incredibly difficult to do for pretty much the entire history of the United States. For an issue like this one, it’s basically impossible.&lt;p&gt;The true simple solution would have been to codify the right to an abortion in federal law, as candidate Obama promised to do but President Obama failed to even attempt. Recently I’ve been introduced to the hypothetical that maybe the Democrats didn’t really want to do that because fear mongering about Republicans overturning Roe was such an effective fundraising tool. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case.</text></comment>