Trump on Abortion

Trump’s statements on abortion have helped me see the irrationality of those who want to make abortion illegal.  First, abortion is a bad thing.  It’s not something that anyone should do, and certainly should not do lightly.  In most cases, I don’t think is something that a woman wants to do; it’s something that she feels forced to do by some situation.  If she is a young woman just starting her own life, a baby may end her chances of improving herself by finishing school, or working hard at her first job.  An older woman may feel that she is not able to cope with a baby at this later stage of her life.  A woman may be married to a man who abuses her and does not want a child to grow up in that atmosphere.  There are any number of reasons. 

In any case, it is the woman who decides to end the pregnancy.  A doctor does not just pull women off the street randomly and force abortions on the ones who are pregnant.  Trump correctly stated that the woman is at least partly responsible for the abortion.  She is morally guilty, if not legally guilty. Chris Matthews failed to discuss the moral issue with Trump because he is so messed up by his Catholic church’s teaching on the issue, as Trump pointed out.  Chris Matthews has basically cursed his church, his God, in his heart by breaking with it on the abortion issue.  He is morally damaged goods, which is part of the reason his interview was so bad. 

But the fact that the woman is morally guilty does not mean that she is legally guilty.  This to some extent explains Trump’s “clarification” that the law should continue to stand as it does.  He’s saying that although the woman may be morally guilty, I don’t want her to be legally guilty, which is the current position of the law.  Two pieces on the New York Times op-ed page defend the position that if you find abortion to be morally wrong, then you should find the woman complicit in the abortion.  One reason to exempt women is probably the one pro-lifers use, that they love the woman who is under great stress.  It is also likely that it is just a carryover from the old days when abortion was illegal.  The charlatans who performed the illegal abortions often killed or injured the women who came to them, and thus they were properly punished for the injury they did and if nothing else, for practicing medicine without a license.  When licensed doctors were penalized it might be because they were caught up in laws mainly meant to punished unlicensed practitioners. 

The two op-eds are Gail Collins’ “Trump, Truth and Abortion” and Katha Politt’s “Abortion andPunishment.”  Both point out the illogic of the pro-life stance that only the doctor and not the woman should be punished for a illegal abortion.  Of course, if the abortion is not illegal, then nobody should be punished, neither the doctor nor the woman.  

Apple Is Evil

I have been a fan of Apple products, but I am put off by Apple’s decision to side with the terrorists in San Bernardino.  I don’t believe that American citizens have an absolute right to privacy.  If this were the case, the Fourth Amendment would not allow any searches and seizures; instead it allows them upon proof of probable cause.  It is odd that people who claim an absolute right to privacy in their smart phones post all kinds of personal information publicly on the internet.  Facebook is a screaming argument that Apple’s arguments against breaking encryption are baseless.  Apple’s performance in the San Bernardino case make it complicit in murder, an accessory after the fact, or some such bit player, but nevertheless an evil participant. 

Apple has lost its moral compass.  It has been questionable whether Apple can survive without Steve Jobs.  It will probably survive for a number of years as a cellphone and PC maker, but it has lost its inspiration, its leadership, its guiding light, its genius, its soul. 

We find Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin on the side of terrorism and death.  They have no love for America, which provided them the possibility to create the corporations that they run.  They got what they wanted, and the rest of America can die screaming in agony for all they care.  Silicon Valley has no heart; it’s all about the money, power, and privilege.  Google has learned to be evil.  Surprisingly, Microsoft’s Bill Gates has been relatively circumspect on the issue.  I don’t know about the faceless drones who have replaced him. 

Hillary and Libya

The thrust of this Foreign Policy article is that Hillary and Obama at some point decided to use the Libyan intervention to bring about “regime change” and get rid of Qaddafi.  The article argues that the Libyan mission began as a humanitarian attempt to save the people of Benghazi from Qaddafi’s attacks, but without publicly saying so to the public, it became an effort to remove Qaddafi.  Whatever the administration’s stated purpose, its decision led to the assassination of Qaddafi in an ugly, disorderly way. 

Obama has admitted in his Atlantic magazine interview with Jeffrey Goldberg that the Libyan operation was not handled well.  Goldberg writes:

But Obama says today of the intervention, “It didn’t work.” The U.S., he believes, planned the Libya operation carefully—and yet the country is still a disaster….

“So we actually executed this plan as well as I could have expected: We got a UN mandate, we built a coalition, it cost us $1 billion—which, when it comes to military operations, is very cheap. We averted large-scale civilian casualties, we prevented what almost surely would have been a prolonged and bloody civil conflict. And despite all that, Libya is a mess.”

From these accounts, it appears that Hillary’s mistake in Libya was not her reaction to the rebel attack on the US Embassy and CIA facility in Benghazi, but rather her failed strategic leadership in the whole Libyan fiasco.  Somebody, ideally Hillary, should have said at the very beginning, “This is not going to work.”  There were no government institutions to take over after Qaddafi, and the Libyan people were riven by tribal loyalties.  To maintain himself in power, Qaddafi had tried to keep any challenging group from consolidating power, and he had succeeded. 

Perhaps events undercut the Foreign Policy article’s thesis that at some point the administration made a conscious decision to change the mission to protect population into a mission to remove Qaddafi.  Perhaps if there had been such a definite decision, the dangers of that new course of action to kill Qaddafi would have been weighed more carefully.  Was the failure of the Libyan intervention due to a poor decision or to the failure to make a decision, just to go with the flow after the operation started?  In any case, Hillary bears significant blame. 

Encryption and the Fourth Amendment

Apple should be willing to help the US government access information on the iPhones of terrorists and other criminals.  I do not think that anyone living under a democratic government has an absolute right to inviolable privacy.  If someone’s home is subject to a search warrant issued by a proper judicial process, his other possessions should also be subject to search when properly approved.  Apple refuses toallow any search and seizure, even when there is probable cause as determined by a court of law.  While the Fourth Amendment is explicitly a protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the implication is that the government should be allowed to carry out searches and seizures when there is probable cause. 

I think that some of the technical objections to  requiring breakable encryption on private phones could be overcome by requiring that decrypting the information could be done only by physically connecting to the phone.  This could mean that some sophisticated decryption device would have to be connected to an iPhone through a lightning cable, for example.  There might be some difficulty enforcing this physical requirement, but smart people should be able to do it.  It would mean that your phone could not be hacked from China or Russia, or even by American law enforcement while you are walking down the street with it.  Presumably experts could set up the connection protocol so that the phone would sense whether the decryption device was directly connected to the phone, and not connected through the Internet or iTunes. 

As things currently stand, I think that Apple should help the FBI access the data on the terrorists’ iPhone.  Software updates could come later, as well as hardware updates on new versions of smart phones. 

My view includes the requirement that encryption software such as texting apps also should be breakable in some way.  Other countries and the military will be able to create unbreakable communication software, but we could make it illegal to use in the US.  This is not unlike a restriction on assault weapons.  I don’t think that everyone needs to have an AR-15, although that is not currently the law in the US.  Even though arms dealers can physically sell AR-15s to anyone, I think there should be restrictions on their right to do so.  Similarly, the military and diplomatic services should have encryption that is unbreakable, but private individuals do not need it.  The ability to do search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution is more important than individual privacy.  National security justifies the use of unbreakable encryption; personal privacy does not.