Lex Anteinternet: Two random items. Andy Griffith and Taylor Swift

Lex Anteinternet: Two random items. Andy Griffith and Taylor Swift: 

Two random items. Andy Griffith and Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift

On "X", fka "Twitter" a man who was the father to a large family of daughters (it was either 7 or 9), and who is very conservative, posted an item expressing relief for Taylor Swift.

His points were really good.

Populist right commentators are all up in arms about Swift right now, for reasons that are darned near impossible to discern.  It seems to stem from her expressing support for Democratic candidates in the past, including Joe Biden in 2016.  Well, guess what, she has a right to do that.  You have a right to ignore it. 

She also expressed support for abortion being legal.  I feel it should be illegal.  That doesn't mean she's part of a double secret left wing conspiracy.

But, and here's the thing, there are real reasons to admire her, or at least her presentation, and the father in question pointed it out.  He'd endured taking his daughters to Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, "Lady Gaga" etc., and found them disturbing.

Indeed, they are.

Miley Cyrus went from a child actress to being a freakish figure posed nude on a ball, looking like she was a meth addict who was working in a strip club.  Ariana Grande has at least one song that's out right graphic about illicit sex.  Lady Gaga has made a career out of being freakish, until she couldn't any longer, and like Madonna is another woman who was the product of Catholic Schools who took to songs that are abhorrent in terms of Christian, let alone Catholic, morals.

Swift, in contrast, can only be criticized a bit for dressing semi provocatively on stage, but only somewhat so. Off-stage, she's always very modestly dressed.  Indeed, she's a throwback, with her ruby red lipstick and classic nearly 1940s appearance.

And in terms of relationships, it's noted that she's dating a football player.

Now, we don't know what their private lives are like, but they're admirably keeping them private.  It's hard to know what Swift's views are on most issues.  And we really don't need to.  But in their visible relationship, made visible to us only because of media fascination, they're quite proper.  As the poster noted, the football star is "courting" her.

It's not that there's nothing to see here.  There's nothing to see here which any conservative in their right mind wouldn't have an absolute freak out about.  They're behaving exactly the way in public that supposedly Christian conservatives want dating couples to do.  No piercings, no weird tattoos, no scanty clothing.

Which would all suggest all the angst is about something else, and what that is probably about is the secret knowledge that huge numbers of real conservatives can't stand Donald Trump and won't vote for him.

The Andy Griffith Show

I was at lunch two days ago at a local Chinese restaurant, and across the way an all adult family was discussing the plot of the prior night's Andy Griffith Show rerun.  It struck me that that may not have happened since the 1960s.

It's interesting. 

The Andy Griffith Show went off the air before the Great Rural Purge in Television, but not my much.  It ran from 1960 to 1968.  It was consistently focused on the rural South, and it felt like it depicted the 1950s, which it never did, save for the fact that what we think of as the 60s really started in about 1955 and ran to about 1964.  Indeed, while the show was in tune with the times in 1960, it really wasn't in 1968.

But that in tune with the times is what strikes me here.  The family was speaking of it as if it was a currently running show, not like it was something from 60 years ago.  That suggests that in some ways people have groped their way back in the dark to idealizing the world as it was depicted then, rural, lower middle class, devoid of an obsession with sex (although it does show up subtly in the show from time to time), and divorce a rarity.

Now, the world wasn't prefect in 1960 by any means.  But the show didn't pretend to depict a perfect world, only one that was sort of a mirror on the world view of its watchers.  To some degree, that world view had returned.

Epilog

The Taylor Swift story also appears on the most recent entries for City Father and Uncle Mike's Musings, both of which are linked in on this site.

Lex Anteinternet: Health care, abortion and the Law of Unintended Consequences. How becoming obsessed with a political fantasy sabotaged, maybe, the effort to ban abortion in Wyoming

Lex Anteinternet: Health care, abortion and the Law of Unintended Co...: 

Health care, abortion and the Law of Unintended Consequences. How becoming obsessed with a political fantasy sabotaged, maybe, the effort to ban abortion in Wyoming

A headline on Vox:

Thanks, Obama! The hilarious reason why a judge just blocked Wyoming’s abortion ban.

Republicans just got a painful reminder that political stunts can backfire.

The article concludes:

For the moment, however, the Obama-era amendments writing anti-Obamacare talking points into two state constitutions have proved to be a thorn in the side of Republicans who hope to ban abortions. Let that be a lesson that a state constitution is a foolish thing to change for the sake of a political stunt.

Vox is more or less correct in its thesis as to how we got here, even if it's absurdly optimistic about anyone "learning a lesson".  Where it isn't fully correct is in the assumption it was a stunt.  Fired up by conspiracy theories and propaganda, a fair number of those voting for the amendment and the bill that took it to the electorate believed that they were operating against almost certain Obamacare "Death Panels".  One Natrona County former legislator has stated:

I’ll be very grieved if they actually use that as an instrument of death,  That wasn’t our intent at all.

Of course that wasn't the intent, but did you read the constitutional amendment?  There were concerns at the time.

The Equality State Policy Center, for one, was worried about the bill, with its lobbyist, Dan Neal, stating:

I’ll bet that even the original supporters of this amendment can’t tell you exactly what it will do, given the vague language and all the changes made to it during the Legislature’s deliberations in 2011.

Yup.

And as for grieved?  Bereaved would be a better term.  By yielding to paranoid propaganda, those who sponsored this, and then voted for it, have blood on their hands.

And there's a lesson in there.  

In the rules that govern logical thinking, Chesterton's Fence, which should be the first rule of Conservatism, holds:

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

 A corollary to that might be called Yeoman's Gate, which holds:

Before you go through a gate to get to the other side of a fence, completely figure out. to the extent you can, where the path goes.

Which brings up the topic of the Gatekeeper:

If somebody is holding a fence open, urging you to go through, or keeping it close, trying to bar you from doing so, ask what interest he has in either action.

None of these principles were applied.  If they had been, it should have been clear that a certain sector of the Obamacare fearmongers were people who were using it for their own political self-interest, not out of any real concern. Those people were among the gatekeepers.  "Run through", they yelled, "the big scary blood Marxist bear of Obama is right behind you!. . .And by the way, vote for me next election, here's my flyer full of BS . . ."

And the pathway lead right to here.

A person should likely ask the same questions about the more radical bills that floated in the last legislature, and most particularly about the Crossover Voting bill that just passed.

Why did we allow crossover voting?  Nobody really asked, did they?

Where does the path lead, now that we've crossed it?

And why was the gatekeeper so eager to for us to go through?