Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Introverts and separations

The realization that my summer is rapidly drawing to a close has resulted in a lot of aimless wandering through the goody-filled halls of the Internet, and today I came across an old article from The Atlantic that does a better job of expressing what it means to be an introvert than anything else I've ever read on the subject. Now if only there were a way to make extroverts realize how true it is...

I've also been following the horrified responses to recently upheld law in South Dakota that forces doctors to read a scripted statement (which was written by the legislature and has an only tangential relationship to science and reality). Even before you get to the free speech problems and the garbage science it is based on, the statement has a serious problem with basic logical coherence. As pointed out in the Human Nature blog on Slate, if a fetus is "a whole, separate, unique, living human being" then nobody needs to worry about getting an abortion, which the state defines as "the use of any means to intentionally terminate the pregnancy of a woman known to be pregnant with knowledge that the termination with those means will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of the fetus." If the fetus is already whole and separate, then who could think that there's a reasonable likelihood that removing it from the womb would cause its death?

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