Ask Me Anything | July 2023
What's on your minds, Substack supporters? It's time for Ask Me Anything!
Post your inquiries below by sundown (your time) on Thursday, July 20. Peter will have answers for you next week.
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Did you hear about the article (Pfeffer, et al, Journal of Qualitative Research in Health, 2023) in which "trans" sociologists and allies claim that women who believe they are "male" and get pregnant should not be discouraged from taking testosterone, because "gendered pregnancy" (their new phrase) is focused too much on "normal babies?" A critique of this advocacy by Christine Lahl, of Center for Bio-Ethics and Culture, this justification off consuming carcinogens while pregnant, was at Colin Wright's blog, Reality's Last Stand, today July 17. The authors in Journal of Qualitative Research in Health prefer to ignore and disrespect a focus on the healthy fetus, imagining, perhaps, that they could birth a "trans" baby, oh joy!
Thank you for holding these AMAs!
Suppose a new democratic country is formed and the citizens construct a system of justice with theft classified as unjust and illegal. People suspected of theft are prosecuted and convicted if found guilty while the country grows from infancy. Then the citizens of the same country decide that it is unjust to prosecute people who steal because the suspects are assumed to be stealing only to survive. Theft is no longer prosecuted and eventually theft is officially legalized. Is the justice system of this country predicated on truth or values?
Context:
I was recently playing around with Google Books Ngram Viewer which displays a graph showing how often user provided keywords or phrases have occurred in a corpus of books over a user specified search range between 1800-2019. https://books.google.com/ngrams/info I was astonished to see the trends of the words “truth” and “values” on the same graph. I simply didn’t expect them to be inversely proportional. Graph: https://ibb.co/MfcyjLc The words “justice”, “moral”, and “religion” trend on the same scale as “truth” and “values” which I added to the following graph: https://ibb.co/7j6ZVzS So, this had me thinking about the relationship between truth, values, and justice. Thank you again for asking and answering my question!