The Fall of Minneapolis documentary, and accompanying book, deserve more attention than you gave it at the end of your How To Get Pregnant podcast. As Megan correctly said, documentaries have an objective and should be evaluated with care. Suspicion is the best initial stance. But this documentary and book provide lots of empirical evidence, both varied and consistent, beginning with the bodycam tapes, including the language of the autopsy, and including also much damning oral and written testimony. I found them persuasive, and it will take more than vague claims of “partisanship” to convince me otherwise.
Here are my conclusions from this evidence. The convictions of Chauvin, Thao, Keung, and Lane were in practice lynch mob justice, even if they don’t reach the physical viciousness of the lynchings of the 1920s with which we are familiar. But the other and perhaps equally appalling story is the disintegration of the Minneapolis police department. The patrol officers, lieutenants, captains of a professional group of public servants, many having served for decades, were completely abandoned. That the politicians – mayor, governor, attorney general – were immediately and completely responsive only to the opportunities for publicity is not surprising to anybody who’s been awake in the last twenty years. Nor that the media were sheep. But that the leaders of the police department were as dishonest and cowardly as they seem to have been, that surprised me. The interviews with those officers who were finally able to speak out after leaving the force are powerful, actually brought tears to my eyes.
Please take another look and let us know what you think. Loury & McWhorter have dealt with this topic in two podcast episodes.
I actually hadn’t seen it. Sometimes one of us wants to talk about something so we will, but only that one has actually consumed the material we use as a jumping off point.
All of this may be true, but I question the materiality of any of it to any broader social concern. There is literally nothing that could have happened to George Floyd that could have justified burning neighborhoods to the ground.
I’m all for someone getting to the bottom of what happened, but let’s not lose the forest for this one tree.
I had no strong feeling either way regarding surrogacy until I watched a Louise Perry podcast with Jennifer Lahl.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo4zDkJHq1Q. It was eye-opening, and now, while I am not completely against surrogacy, I have a lot less cavalier, sure-why-not attitude toward it. Kittens must remain with their mother for 8 weeks before they can be adopted, and, babies are not kittens, but there is something unsettling about these videos of babies taken from the birthing bed and handed into the arms of strangers (no matter how worthy as parents, and whatever sexual orientation they may be). One thing I can't condone, however, are the occasional photos of the new parent lying on a hospital bed, exhausted, covered with a towel, as if, as if, they had gone through labor. Stolen valour.
Same here. I was on the fence until I heard that podcast.
Of course, if you throw your hat in with the pro-natalist crowd, they believe we are going to need surrogacy and artificial wombs just to procreate at all in the future.
Sarah—I think that you will change your tune after you go through your first adoption. Adoption might be more stress-inducing and hormone-deranging than even childbirth is.
My (white) parents have adopted two girls (not white-passing), and I think my mother would argue that the process was more excruciating (paperwork, waiting, worrying, more paperwork, doubling down, getting interviewed, being judged, going to court, racist comments from strangers in public, etc.) than childbirth. And her first birth was a near-death emergency c-section followed by a medivac and prolonged hospitalization for the child and an abdominal infection for her.
People work so hard to adopt (often with more focused intention than most natural reproduction receives) that bonding with the adopted child is more “natural” than one would think.
Meghan, you should get Mickey Kaus to come on to talk about social equality. You guys have been talking about it for a little while now and it is something that he has written about. He also had your mug.
Wasn't talking about military service exclusively, which I think I was pretty clear about. I meant service in general. Something like Americorps, at least in its original conception. (I'm sure it's long since been corrupted.) Requiring some kind of "give back to the community" form of service, pre-college, could be eye-opening for affluent kids and opportunity-building for poor kids. Obviously not simple and obviously there would be any number of downstream unwanted effects. But it's worth thinking about.
I understood you weren't talking about military service exclusively. Volunteering for a national service? I'm all for it - Americans are very good at this. Taking a year or more before deciding on college also seems like a good idea, especially the way colleges are these days. But mandatory? Who decides? What if you refuse, what is the penalty? No, this is fraught with unintended consequences.
re: finishing high school is mandatory -- is it really? I'm unaware (but will change my mind with evidence) of a federal or state law that requires it. It's certainly encouraged, but it seems each year some percentage of kids don't (but then sometimes do go on to get the equivalent degree.)
My responses here have always assumed we're talking about adults, and of the government requiring of adults: you must spend a year of your life doing what we want in service to the country. And it's to that that I say: absolutely not.
I'm not judging what any other country decides: they make their own choice based on their history/culture. I'm saying it's a terrible and unproductive choice for the USA. As others have noted, the military doesn't want it. So what government bureaucracy is going to decide what your 18-year old adult should do for a year: they don't have a clue.
By the way, military really doesn’t want a draft, despite their current recruiting problems.
Having a large number of low-motivation, “have to be there” people in the military (for only two years, like draftees used to serve) would alter everything about training junior personnel, and create a hugely expanded babysitting function for the career professionals.
The next level of consequences would be that people who did not cooperate or perform well would have to be disciplined in some way (or else it isn’t really compulsory service at all), and that would cause a meltdown in our current political environment. You think crybullying is big now, wait until people realize that they can get a year of their life back by claiming that the system is oppressing them because of racism or sexism or whatever.
Wait till they learn about “non judicial punishment”, where a navy ship commander can reduce somebody’s rank and pay, confine them to the ship, and even put them on bread and water for a few days with essentially no due process.
Question on a minor point about trans-racial adoption: do the opponents ever produce evidence of a sufficient number of suitable black/Latino families willing and able to adopt kids from the child welfare system?
Without doing a shred of research, I bet the answer is a resounding no. (But you know the system so I'm willing to be pleasantly surprised.)
I don't know offhand but I suspect you're right. Which is why historically a lot of kids stayed in the system rather than being adopted out. On the other hands, caseworkers are under pressure to get kids in permanent placements and just close the case, so a lot of bad decisions can get made that way. I think my point was that during periods when interracial adoption fell out of favor, the emphasis was on family reunification, even if those families are severely compromised. Before I knew anything about the foster care system, I would have reflexively frowned on that. But I learned that biological family placement (with relatives if not with parents) is often (not always) the "least bad" option.
Late to the pod but it's pretty easy to be pro natalist and against artificial reproductive technologies from a natural law perspective. Even though this ethical perspective negatively impacted my family size
I never know if I quite qualify for these types of labels, but I’m not someone who really has an internal monologue. Unless I consciously start doing it, my thoughts are largely processed “silently” if that makes any sense.
All that to say, most of my mental images are blurry at best, even if I try to sharpen them mentally. My dreams are very few and far between. When I do dream, the objects are almost completely abstract. As if someone has relayed to me the plot of my dream after playing several iterations of telephone. Even my most vivid dreams are not visually vivid. They are mentally engaging rather than visually so. They are much more of a law-and-order episode than they are an “Alice in wonderland” visual experience.
If you subscribe to Blocked and Reported, they just did a premium episode where Katie reviews research on outcomes for children born to surrogates and through donation.
when sarah said she wouldn't remember her son (at younger ages) if she didn't have photos.... I just talked back to my computer screen with "what about your dreams???"
I often times dream about my children as toddlers even though they are adults now. And I dream about a beloved aunt, dead for more than 10 years now. It's always a joy to recognize/see her again.
The argument that every child deserves a biological mother doesn't mean that kids now born to gay dads through surrogacy will instead end up with their mothers and be better off. It means they won't be born at all -- they only exist because of the agreement of the gay father, the surrogate, and the egg donor. If surrogacy isn't allowed, then poof, no more babies. So the argument is really that only children who end up living with biological mothers should be allowed to be born. Basically - to protect the child, we can't allow him or her to be born.
Megan & Sarah,
The Fall of Minneapolis documentary, and accompanying book, deserve more attention than you gave it at the end of your How To Get Pregnant podcast. As Megan correctly said, documentaries have an objective and should be evaluated with care. Suspicion is the best initial stance. But this documentary and book provide lots of empirical evidence, both varied and consistent, beginning with the bodycam tapes, including the language of the autopsy, and including also much damning oral and written testimony. I found them persuasive, and it will take more than vague claims of “partisanship” to convince me otherwise.
Here are my conclusions from this evidence. The convictions of Chauvin, Thao, Keung, and Lane were in practice lynch mob justice, even if they don’t reach the physical viciousness of the lynchings of the 1920s with which we are familiar. But the other and perhaps equally appalling story is the disintegration of the Minneapolis police department. The patrol officers, lieutenants, captains of a professional group of public servants, many having served for decades, were completely abandoned. That the politicians – mayor, governor, attorney general – were immediately and completely responsive only to the opportunities for publicity is not surprising to anybody who’s been awake in the last twenty years. Nor that the media were sheep. But that the leaders of the police department were as dishonest and cowardly as they seem to have been, that surprised me. The interviews with those officers who were finally able to speak out after leaving the force are powerful, actually brought tears to my eyes.
Please take another look and let us know what you think. Loury & McWhorter have dealt with this topic in two podcast episodes.
John Stalnaker
I actually hadn’t seen it. Sometimes one of us wants to talk about something so we will, but only that one has actually consumed the material we use as a jumping off point.
You’ve convinced me to re-think this.
Thanks Sarah, I’m glad you’re exploring the subject and will be very interested to learn what you think.
All of this may be true, but I question the materiality of any of it to any broader social concern. There is literally nothing that could have happened to George Floyd that could have justified burning neighborhoods to the ground.
I’m all for someone getting to the bottom of what happened, but let’s not lose the forest for this one tree.
Been trying to get pregnant with my husbro for 13 years but all our babies come out like shit.
Egg Mother is a good band name
I had no strong feeling either way regarding surrogacy until I watched a Louise Perry podcast with Jennifer Lahl.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo4zDkJHq1Q. It was eye-opening, and now, while I am not completely against surrogacy, I have a lot less cavalier, sure-why-not attitude toward it. Kittens must remain with their mother for 8 weeks before they can be adopted, and, babies are not kittens, but there is something unsettling about these videos of babies taken from the birthing bed and handed into the arms of strangers (no matter how worthy as parents, and whatever sexual orientation they may be). One thing I can't condone, however, are the occasional photos of the new parent lying on a hospital bed, exhausted, covered with a towel, as if, as if, they had gone through labor. Stolen valour.
Same here. I was on the fence until I heard that podcast.
Of course, if you throw your hat in with the pro-natalist crowd, they believe we are going to need surrogacy and artificial wombs just to procreate at all in the future.
It's all a little too much Brave New World for me.
Sarah—I think that you will change your tune after you go through your first adoption. Adoption might be more stress-inducing and hormone-deranging than even childbirth is.
My (white) parents have adopted two girls (not white-passing), and I think my mother would argue that the process was more excruciating (paperwork, waiting, worrying, more paperwork, doubling down, getting interviewed, being judged, going to court, racist comments from strangers in public, etc.) than childbirth. And her first birth was a near-death emergency c-section followed by a medivac and prolonged hospitalization for the child and an abdominal infection for her.
People work so hard to adopt (often with more focused intention than most natural reproduction receives) that bonding with the adopted child is more “natural” than one would think.
Meghan, you should get Mickey Kaus to come on to talk about social equality. You guys have been talking about it for a little while now and it is something that he has written about. He also had your mug.
First!!!!
Let me be the first to celebrate that.
Isn’t saying “first” with many exclamation marks a celebration though? Anyway, I celebrate you both
ErnieG: 1
Gaudium: 1
Required national service?? ABSOLUTELY NOT.
Wasn't talking about military service exclusively, which I think I was pretty clear about. I meant service in general. Something like Americorps, at least in its original conception. (I'm sure it's long since been corrupted.) Requiring some kind of "give back to the community" form of service, pre-college, could be eye-opening for affluent kids and opportunity-building for poor kids. Obviously not simple and obviously there would be any number of downstream unwanted effects. But it's worth thinking about.
I understood you weren't talking about military service exclusively. Volunteering for a national service? I'm all for it - Americans are very good at this. Taking a year or more before deciding on college also seems like a good idea, especially the way colleges are these days. But mandatory? Who decides? What if you refuse, what is the penalty? No, this is fraught with unintended consequences.
Finishing high school is mandatory, using various methods. This isn't a compelling argument to me.
re: finishing high school is mandatory -- is it really? I'm unaware (but will change my mind with evidence) of a federal or state law that requires it. It's certainly encouraged, but it seems each year some percentage of kids don't (but then sometimes do go on to get the equivalent degree.)
My responses here have always assumed we're talking about adults, and of the government requiring of adults: you must spend a year of your life doing what we want in service to the country. And it's to that that I say: absolutely not.
I'm not judging what any other country decides: they make their own choice based on their history/culture. I'm saying it's a terrible and unproductive choice for the USA. As others have noted, the military doesn't want it. So what government bureaucracy is going to decide what your 18-year old adult should do for a year: they don't have a clue.
OMG you're right. I had a brain fart. School is required until some age though.. 13? 14?
Probably, but it likely varies by state, and you always have to factor in home schooling, right?
By the way, military really doesn’t want a draft, despite their current recruiting problems.
Having a large number of low-motivation, “have to be there” people in the military (for only two years, like draftees used to serve) would alter everything about training junior personnel, and create a hugely expanded babysitting function for the career professionals.
The next level of consequences would be that people who did not cooperate or perform well would have to be disciplined in some way (or else it isn’t really compulsory service at all), and that would cause a meltdown in our current political environment. You think crybullying is big now, wait until people realize that they can get a year of their life back by claiming that the system is oppressing them because of racism or sexism or whatever.
Wait till they learn about “non judicial punishment”, where a navy ship commander can reduce somebody’s rank and pay, confine them to the ship, and even put them on bread and water for a few days with essentially no due process.
I could not agree more. Vietnam ended any interest in a draft.
How about requiring national service from all pundits who support national service?
Meghan,
Question on a minor point about trans-racial adoption: do the opponents ever produce evidence of a sufficient number of suitable black/Latino families willing and able to adopt kids from the child welfare system?
Without doing a shred of research, I bet the answer is a resounding no. (But you know the system so I'm willing to be pleasantly surprised.)
I don't know offhand but I suspect you're right. Which is why historically a lot of kids stayed in the system rather than being adopted out. On the other hands, caseworkers are under pressure to get kids in permanent placements and just close the case, so a lot of bad decisions can get made that way. I think my point was that during periods when interracial adoption fell out of favor, the emphasis was on family reunification, even if those families are severely compromised. Before I knew anything about the foster care system, I would have reflexively frowned on that. But I learned that biological family placement (with relatives if not with parents) is often (not always) the "least bad" option.
Late to the pod but it's pretty easy to be pro natalist and against artificial reproductive technologies from a natural law perspective. Even though this ethical perspective negatively impacted my family size
On aphantasia, I've always wondered if those with it dream, and if so, what form it takes.
I never know if I quite qualify for these types of labels, but I’m not someone who really has an internal monologue. Unless I consciously start doing it, my thoughts are largely processed “silently” if that makes any sense.
All that to say, most of my mental images are blurry at best, even if I try to sharpen them mentally. My dreams are very few and far between. When I do dream, the objects are almost completely abstract. As if someone has relayed to me the plot of my dream after playing several iterations of telephone. Even my most vivid dreams are not visually vivid. They are mentally engaging rather than visually so. They are much more of a law-and-order episode than they are an “Alice in wonderland” visual experience.
Anyway-that’s my two cents.
Gotta say, some of this felt a little like a Penelope Trunk segment.
Sorry (or thank you)
If you subscribe to Blocked and Reported, they just did a premium episode where Katie reviews research on outcomes for children born to surrogates and through donation.
Coincidentally I got a blocked and reported email today with some surorgacy-related content from Julie Bindel in it: https://juliebindel.substack.com/p/surrogacy-stories
https://juliebindel.substack.com/p/the-pimping-of-pregnancy
https://thecritic.co.uk/end-womb-trafficking/
https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/04/the-conservative-pro-life-case-against-surrogacy/
when sarah said she wouldn't remember her son (at younger ages) if she didn't have photos.... I just talked back to my computer screen with "what about your dreams???"
I often times dream about my children as toddlers even though they are adults now. And I dream about a beloved aunt, dead for more than 10 years now. It's always a joy to recognize/see her again.
The argument that every child deserves a biological mother doesn't mean that kids now born to gay dads through surrogacy will instead end up with their mothers and be better off. It means they won't be born at all -- they only exist because of the agreement of the gay father, the surrogate, and the egg donor. If surrogacy isn't allowed, then poof, no more babies. So the argument is really that only children who end up living with biological mothers should be allowed to be born. Basically - to protect the child, we can't allow him or her to be born.