Trump Clarifies Clear Lack of Abortion Policy
April 9: Landmark climate victory … Student-debt relief … Trump abortion “policy” … Tesla settles …
Massive Legal Victory in Climate-Change Fight
For the first time, an international court has issued a ruling on climate change, and it’s a landmark victory handing climate activists a powerful weapon to force new government policies.
The European Court of Human Rights this morning ruled in favor of Senior Women for Climate Protection, a group of thousands of pissed off Swiss old ladies who argued that Switzerland’s failure to cap emissions threatens their human rights by increasing the risk that Europe’s infamous and worsening heat waves will turn Swiss senior citizens into fondue.
The ruling cannot be appealed. And it establishes a legal precedent that climate activists and other people who oppose becoming fondue can now use as the basis for lawsuits to force countries to meet actual, meaningful emissions targets, or face massive fines.
Court President Siofra O'Leary said Switzerland was guilty of "a failure to quantify, through a carbon budget or otherwise, national greenhouse gas emissions limitations," and of failing to put measures in place to comply with limitations.
One immediate outcome could be that Switzerland is forced to align its 2030 emissions targets with the Paris Agreement cap of 1.5° Celsius, or 2.7° Fahrenheit.
According to Ruth Delbaere, legal campaigns director at the Avaaz network of activists, the ruling "sets a crucial legally binding precedent serving as a blueprint for how to successfully sue your own government over climate failures."
The ruling comes just as the European climate agency Copernicus announced that each of the last ten months has set a new monthly record for global heat. (I was a bit confused by this, so to explain: This doesn’t mean each month has been the hottest month in history, it means, for instance, that last March was the hottest March ever, not the hottest month ever.)
Researchers say the new heat records are due in large part to a powerful El Niño weather system warming the Pacific and also due to a powerful industrial system burning fossil fuels, deforesting forests, and churning out animal meat at apocalyptic rates.
Biden Rolls Out Student-Debt Relief for 30 Million
Pres. Joe Biden yesterday continued his campaign to chip away at student-loan debt one borrower at a goddam time if he has to.
Ever since the right-wing Supreme Court quashed Biden’s try at wholesale debt relief, he’s been chipping away at it in increments. Yesterday’s was a big increment.
The Higher Education Act lets the Department of Education waive some debt. So yesterday Biden announced they’re gonna mega-waive a shit-ton of it. More than 30 million people’s worth.
Assuming Republicans in Congress or on the Supreme Court don’t block it, the new plan will cancel interest payments for borrowers who make less than $120,000, and cap them at $20,000 for people who make more than that. That measure alone will erase debt entirely for an estimated 23 million people.
All debt will also be canceled for anyone who’s been paying off their loans for two decades or more. That’ll free another two million people from debt. Well, student-loan debt, anyway. They’ll still be saddled with the same, broader, oppressive debt regiment under which we all subsist.
The banks and legislators and regulators who did all this, however, remain at large and are to be considered a danger to society.
Trump Clarifies Clear Lack of Abortion Policy
Obviously, the most important thing about D4FRFP1 Donald Trump’s abortion-policy announcement yesterday is that he released it just minutes after I sent out yesterday’s TFN, thereby enwrongening pretty much everything I wrote.
Luckily, even after Trump’s video came out, America’s punditry-industrial complex also managed to get it wrong. So let’s take another crack at it, shall we?
A lot of the punditry centered on speculating about whether Trump would really veto an abortion ban, consistent with his claim yesterday that it should be a states’ rights issue. The answer, of course, is: What day is it?
There’s no point trying to divine what Trump will do, because he’s a creature of impulse. He’ll do what he wants to do in any given nanosecond, driven largely by whatever smart-sounding thing he heard last.
And the video itself shows this. It was just over four minutes long and by my count had 14 edits. I’m not sure why that is, but at a minimum it tells us he couldn’t or wouldn’t just produce a video on this subject that consisted of him speaking — presumably from a prompter — coherently and with logical flow. Which he didn’t.
The first minute-and-a-half, overlooked by much of the industrial punditry, was actually about IVF. Trump said, wrongly, that the Republican Party “will always be with” supporters of IVF. Which, y’know, not true! The party is deeply split on the issue. Alabama’s Republican judges aborted IVF until Republican legislators resuscitated it.
You can’t simultaneously hold that every embryo is the moral equivalent of human life and also that it’s okay to flush tens of thousands of them as the surplus byproduct of fertility processes. But that’s what Trump did.
And he did the same thing on abortion. For one thing, he referred to “abortion rights,” a thing that his evangelical base considers less real than a magical carpenter ghost. And Trump also said he supports exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother — which, again, is morally inconsistent with the evangelical belief that embryos are people.
Former Vice President Mike Pence called Trump’s leave-it-to-the-states position “a slap in the face to the millions of pro-choice Americans who voted for him.” Pence, of course, has a deep personal connection to the issue, having narrowly escaped an attempted late-term abortion on Jan. 6, 2021.
The states’ rights position, of course, is a recipe for chaos and turmoil, and not just the kind Trump feeds on. Yes, abortion regimens will vary from state to state, constantly shifting as states refine and revise their laws and policies.
But there’s also the pendulum effect. Some swing states are going to swing back and forth between legal and illegal abortion, possibly with every election. One side wins, abortion is legal — that energizes the evangelicals and de-energizes pro-choicers. Then, sure enough, the switch flips back with the next election: The abortion horror stories motivate pro-choicers and demoralize evangelicals and poof we’re back to legal abortion again, thanks to America’s wholesale aborting of longterm memory. Rinse and repeat.
Here’s how abysmally hollow Trump’s thinking is on abortion, and how consciously he’s exploiting the sincerely held and sincerely stupid beliefs of his evangelical supporters.
Reportedly, Trump knowingly, and strategically chose to deceive them by waiting until he had clinched the nomination to say publicly that he didn’t support a national abortion ban.
Even better, and definitely hilariouser, Trump reportedly prefers the number 16 for the number of weeks at which to ban abortion … because it’s round, unlike the not-fully-developed heads of 15-week-old fetuses with their disgusting soggy fontanelles.
But Trump did something really important yesterday. In a way he hasn’t before, he revealed just how much he wants his followers to sacrifice their principles for his victory — and also gave them a mission and a moral charge that’s logically impossible.
In short, he gave them conflicting direction about how a good American is supposed to figure shit out. To wit (italics added to emphasize logical incoherence):
“You must follow your heart OR in many cases your religion.”
“Do what’s right for your family AND do what’s right for yourself…your children…[AND] our country.”
“You must follow your heart on this issue, BUT … you must always win elections.”
“Always go by your heart BUT we must win.”
Which the fuck is it?
Trump’s multiple-choice directives all reflect differing values and priorities that are often in conflict with each other. Leaders are supposed to reconcile these conflicts and/or provide direction in navigating them.
Trump’s argument for subordinating the heart’s priorities to the priorities of winning elections is that political victory is necessary “to restore our culture.” By saying so, he’s revealing that he doesn’t understand that there is literally no aspect of our culture more important to Pence’s millions than abortion.
Not woke theme parks.
Not books that make empathetic children feel for other people.
Not infuriatingly sexy drag queens.
Trump is effectively saying that if he endorsed a federal abortion ban it might hurt his election chances. Maybe that would motivate evangelical turnout, but not enough, in his calculation. It’s a guess about odds — and one he’s willing to gamble on, but without saying what specific outcome of his victory will be worth sacrificing the sweet, precious, microscopic unborn.
Vatican Explains Why God Doesn’t Like Surrogacy or Gender-Affirming Surgery
The Vatican yesterday issued a new report explaining why surrogacy and gender-affirming surgery are bad, extending its unchallenged historic streak of getting science wrong. In the new report, the Vatican says that both practices violate God’s plan by changing things as they were meant to be from birth.
The report was approved by Pope Francis, whose deadname was Jorge Mario Bergoglio from birth, until he changed it when he transitioned.
The report, coming in at 20 pages, took five years to complete, which should tell you just how long it takes to make up complete fucking bullshit claiming to prove what a magic sky-wizard thinks about human genitalia and uteruses.
Claiming that gender-affirming surgery and surrogacy threaten human dignity, the report is called “Infinite Dignity,” which is hilarious, because if human dignity were infinite, we wouldn’t have a problem. Also hilariously, the Vatican makes an exception for “genital abnormalities,” saying surgeons can have at it — because apparently sometimes God screws up when knocking out a set of baby genitals.
Also apparently not a threat to infinite human dignity: Prosthetic limbs, stents, and cavity fillings.
It’s worth noting that this report represents a pretty good case of what’s been called “God of the Gaps.” Religions don’t have — or understand — what science says about something, so they make up God stuff to fill in the epistemic gap.
The history of knowledge is a history of that gap shrinking. Every generation, religious leaders gradually shrink the body of stuff they attribute to God and hope people won’t notice their infinite history of getting it wrong. I mean, the Vatican issued this report on the same day we had an eclipse…which must have been a miracle because the sun and the moon orbit the Earth!
Tesla Settles Wrongful Death Suit
Tesla yesterday agreed to pay an amount so big they won’t tell us, in order to settle a wrongful-death suit.
The family of Walter Huang claimed that Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s claims that self-driving Teslas were actually self-driving and could therefore drive themselves somehow led Huang to believe that his Tesla could drive itself. So apparently he was playing a videogame on his phone when his Tesla crashed in California in 2018.
Did Huang screw up by playing a videogame while not driving? He did. Did he screw up by believing the people who stood to profit from convincing him he could play a videogame while not driving? Reader, he did.
As a result, Huang’s Tesla self-drove out of the lane he was in, self-drove off the road, self-drove onto a paved area separating the road from an exit ramp, then self-sped up to 71 miles an hour, and then self-slammed into a concrete barrier. The Tesla’s forward-collision system apparently didn’t want to interrupt Huang’s game so it never went off. The Tesla didn’t self-brake and neither did Huang.
Because of all that, Huang died, and Tesla has now agreed (I swear, I literally wrote “a greed”) to pay Huang’s family an undisclosed amount. Let’s call this undetermined number a muskillion dollars.
The settlement came one day before trial was set to start today. Which likely means that Tesla was worried that a jury would punish the company for self-killing Huang.
But here’s the thing, Tesla didn’t kill Huang. Tesla doesn’t exist. People wrote “Tesla” on many pieces of paper, so that everyone would agree to pretend that Tesla exists so that the people who wrote “Tesla” on many pieces of paper could get many other pieces of paper that we’ve all agreed to pretend are worth many muskillions of dollars.
In a sane society, when people lie about shit in order to make money, and kill other people as a result, we apply accountability to those people, not to the pretend legal entity they made up to avoid being held accountable.
TCB
NEW REPORTING I swear it’s coming. Today. For real. Probably! This is an important one, which I teased a little on yesterday’s Nicole Sandler Show, which you can check out here if you missed it.
It has to do with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and what evangelicals want from Ukraine. You can help make my work sustainable by becoming a paid subscriber, supporting original reporting that actually reveals things instead of just offering hot takes that satisfy our collective confirmation biases. Yeah, I said it!
BE IN TOUCH I’ve been so busy on this story, I haven’t checked TFN’s socials lately, but I will! We’re live on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Spoutible. We are also verging on self-parody with all these platforms, I realize. But come say hi, anyway.
Go get ‘em, kids…!
D4FRFP = Disgraced, quadicted, fraudster, rapist, former President.
Also apparently not a threat to infinite human dignity: Viagra.
P.S. Great catch about the number of edits in the Trump video. Can you imagine the terror his campaign managers felt that anyone should see the outtakes?