[L]last year, when Trump addressed the crowd, some complained that the polarizing president distanced those who aren’t fans of Trump from the antiabortion movement. In this shifting environment, the march leaders picked science as their theme this year — under the headline, “Unique from Day One: Pro-Life is Pro-Science.”How many marchers were there? The first sentence of the article gives the only clue: "President Trump and Vice President Pence surprised thousands of protesters demonstrating against abortion on the Mall in Washington...." Thousands? That surprised me because I searched for a news story on the 2019 March for Life after I happened across this aerial video of a mindbogglingly huge crowd.
March for Life president Jeanne Mancini and other leaders of the movement said before the march that they wanted to include a politically diverse audience of anyone who opposes abortion — which, according to polling, includes at least a quarter of Democratic voters, although antiabortion Democrats in Congress are a rapidly dwindling group. ...
“I think the most dangerous thing we ever did is make this a partisan issue. It’s a human rights issue,” said Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, 35, president of a group called New Wave Feminists that brought about 50 marchers to the event....
How many people am I seeing in that video? I googled "how many people at March For Life 2019," looking for another news report. First, I clicked on USA Today:
Thousands of anti-abortion activists, including many young people bundled up against the cold weather gripping the nation's capital, gathered at a stage on the National Mall Friday for their annual march in the long-contentious debate over abortion.Thousands!
CNN: "Crowds of people packed the National Mall on Friday for the March for Life, an annual march against abortion." Crowds!
Is the video I looked at fake news?
Anyway, here's the video and text of Trump's address (which, unlike Pence's, was presented on video at the event). Excerpt:
This is a movement founded on love and grounded in the nobility and dignity of every human life. When we look into the eyes of a newborn child, we see the beauty and the human soul and the majesty of God’s creation. We know that every life has meaning and that every life is worth protecting, As president, I will always defend the first right in our Declaration of Independence -- the right to life.Did he mention the science theme — "Unique from Day One: Pro-Life is Pro-Science"? That's debatable. He said: "Every child is a sacred gift from God. As this year's March For Life theme says, each person is unique from Day One." He said "unique from Day One," which is the proposition some of the speakers discussed in scientific terms. But he doesn't say "science," and his stated support for the proposition is religious: "Every child is a sacred gift from God."
Posts
82 comments:
Well, at least they're acknowledging there's a March for Life, even if it's to bash Trump and Pence. Progress!
Some were probably thrilled to have both Trump and Pence addresesd the crowd.
Yes, reports on the size of the crowd are fake news year after year. I'm convinced npr (for example) writes its reports before the event happens. After all, if there are a million attendees, many of them young women, they have to report that they didn't find any of the latter.
Looked like tens of thousands to me. Is Althouse surprised that MSM embargoes news about this large, annual event?
My understanding is that the March for Life is routinely larger than the Pro-Abortion March that also happens yearly but it gets a lot less media attention, as in none from the MSM. At least that's what I am told by people who routinely attend the March for Life. Is it any wonder so many of us assume the MSM are liars?
Ann said....
That surprised me because I searched for a news story on the 2019 March for Life after I happened across this aerial video of a mindbogglingly huge crowd.
Holy Cow. Mindbogglingly is right. Can't wait to how they describe the crowds for the womens march.
My newspaper has zero articles on the event. I would not trust most media estimates in any event. If you are pro life, why wouldn’t you want your Pres and VP to be pro life too? Isn’t that good for your cause?
“Some said” “if true” “sources claim” tools of the trade for fake news
During the mid-term elections of 2018, Herndon-De La Rosa posted a picture of her and Beto O'Rourke at a rally. She wrote an article explaining why she voted for him, despite his strong support for abortion rights.
That's a sure way to remove partisanship from the issue: make it clear to candidates on both sides that they can win the votes of pro-life activists no matter what stand they take.
I just hope Trump doesn't polarize America's premier example of goodnatured political disagreement, the abortion debate.
Only pro abortion gets media attention.
Everybody else is unique. I am not.
I'd guess large anti-abortion crowds favor the democrats.
How many marchers were there?
Dozens! Scores! Hundreds!
“I think the most dangerous thing we ever did is make this a partisan issue. It’s a human rights issue,” said Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, 35, president of a group called New Wave Feminists that brought about 50 marchers to the event....
@Althouse, I am assuming that you are aware — even if Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa is not — that the Democrats made abortion a partisan issue, by running people who are pro-life out of their party, and they did this back in the 1980s. Bob Casey, Sr., was the last prominent pro-life Democrat I can think of and he’s been dead for something like 20 years. I know Republicans on both sides of the issue but I can think of no 21st century Democrat politician who is pro-life. Most Democrat politicians are like Barak Obama, who as a state senator in Illinois sponsored legislation requiring hospitals to kill any baby born alive as a consequence of a botched abortion.
CNN is filled with people who are on the Clinton Foundation payroll, I'd bet.
anyone who opposes abortion — which, according to polling, includes at least a quarter of Democratic voters
I wonder what the reasoning is there.
"I don't much like killing babies, but what I really hate is white people"?
"...but I really like when the government makes other people give me their money"?
"...and Bob Casey says he doesn't either, and he doesn't seem like the kind of fella who would lie about that"?
And I would be surprised if the number was not multiple tens of thousands.
FWIW I am pro-abortion, but abortion by any method and at any point during gestation is repulsive to me. Some common sense regulation is decades overdue.
(I am going to banned from this blog yet.)
There should be a neutral standard for reporting crowd size. What surprises me isn't that the media are not really neutral, but that they are SO far from a neutral standard that it's a very very obvious joke. I'm surprised they don't make any effort to cover their bias.
@Althouse, since when have they not reveled in their bias?
March for Life is undoubtedly larger than the women's march.
It is held throughout the country. Has been for decades. There is a routine news blackout of the event.
The women's march organizers were aware of the date of the March for Life and chose to try to outdo it.
They will be a flash in the pan, like Occupy.
@bgates, Wikipedia writes that Bob Casey, Jr. “identifies as pro-life” but his NARAL scorecard is 100%.
MSM has always tried to minimize the number of people taking part in protests that MSM doesn't like. I still recall a front-page article in a Pittsburgh newspaper covering a pro-life march in the city, sometime in the 1990s. Thousands and thousands of people marched. The only photo accompanying the story was a picture of 5 or 6 counter-protesters standing on a street corner. That was one of the last times I bothered reading that newspaper.
"How many marchers were there?"
Dozens! Scores! Hundreds!
Binders full!
I had to make sure!
Obviously not the famous Confederate trick of going round the block over and over...
You can see traffic resume.
The March of Life has drawn consistently large crowds for many years. The reporting on the event over the years has shifted from reasonably good in the early years to decidedly biased in later years to dwindling in still later years to virtually nonexistent today. It is a shameful example of why I trust very little of what the MSM reports. Understanding what’s going on in the world requires reading critically from multiple sources before reaching any conclusions. Not that I am anti-critical thinking, but it can be exhausting. Why can’t we just have straight news reporting?
Lol right. So pro-science. All scientists refer to zygotes and embryos as "children." Ok, whatever you say.
Can't we get these shitheads stuck in the 1920s, 1950s and 1980s out of office today? How long do their ninny-ass views have to be inflicted on us and promoted for?
If Post could not spin it into an anti-Trump story, they would not have noticed the March at all. Usually they are quite blind to over a 100,000 people marching down Constitution Avenue to the Supreme Court. And have been for the 30 years I've been here.
I can admire the effort to prevent pro-life from being seen as a right-wing movement, but that ship has sailed. The left made it partisan decades ago.
Anyone who even wonders whether it’s ok to accept an address from the President of the United States is a loon who shouldn’t be in charge of anything.
The pro-life movement is definitely not being energetic and outspoken enough about their cause. Not only should they define zygotes and embryos as people, they should come out in favor of allowing ectopic pregnancies to come to full term. That'll learn the satanic, rational liberals and moderates!
I can admire the effort to prevent pro-life from being seen as a right-wing movement, but that ship has sailed. The left made it partisan decades ago.
Oh, why stop there? I'm sure you feel that the left made science itself a partisan issue decades ago.
You know, by rejecting creationism, intelligent design, voodoo economics and the unscientific non-consensus asserting that the earth's temperature is kept warm with volcanoes, sunspots, and whatever else the Phillip-Morris PR firm says is causing it.
Looking at thr video, I count 25 people shoulder to shoulder in the front row. It appears to me that twenty rows pass the cross street every second elapsed. The body of the march first crossed at 0:03 and finished at 0:56. At 500 marchers per second that’s 26,500 in the march itself. But the march was not that uniformly dense. On the other hand many people walking along on the sidewalk should probably be included in the crowd size estimate. And others probably joined at the mall, after the marching.
I’d say 20-30k is a reasonable estimate based only on the video.
Blogger Ann Althouse said...
There should be a neutral standard for reporting crowd size. What surprises me isn't that the media are not really neutral, but that they are SO far from a neutral standard that it's a very very obvious joke. I'm surprised they don't make any effort to cover their bias.
There was. It was done by the park service until they were sued by the Million Man March and were forbidden to make crowd estimates by the judge.
Ann Althouse said...There should be a neutral standard for reporting crowd size.
There are neutral techniques for crowd estimates. I tried to look up the Park Service estimate, wondering if they’d do that during the shut down. Turns out they haven’t done crowd estimates for years, since Louis Farrakhan threatened to sue them over their estinates for the Million (sic) Man March.
The nature of propaganda systems is that they dont need to worry about credibility, or rebutting critics, however poorly. It doesnt work that way. Indeed, it works better if critics are ignored or simply silenced. It may work even better if the propaganda line is seen to be obviously wrong even by the general public.
The point of successful propaganda is to fill all the publics available attention with an engineered message, keeping out anything contrary. It gets through by osmosis. It works through unreason, not reason.
Even telling obvious lies is a technique. The message there is simply that opposition is impossible, as even blatant falsehoods have to be swallowed, or else. Resistance is futile.
Orwell had it all figured out 70 years ago. The professionals in this biz had it much longer than that.
A couple of nights ago, while on vacation, I happened to be watching CNN. They said the March for Life crowd size has been getting smaller and smaller every year and this year, only about 10,000 people were expected to show.
"Some complained" is journalese for "me and my friends".
The Atlanta Journal constitution reported, direct weasel quote, "a couple hundred" marchers at the much larger march at the capitol here. All of their photographs were of individuals or close-ups of the front of what was a long procession. No crowd shots, no head count.
Last week there was more coverage of some thirty socialists who shoved homeless guys out of a park where they sleep to hold what they called a "counter-inauguration." The media also didn't report that those protesters held KKKemp signs and handed out buttons picturing our new governor in a Klan hood.
When I was a democrat lobbyist, I didnt even have to ask reporters to exaggerate the size of our protests. Photographers would literally lie down on the pavement to take the famous "leg shot" to pretend a dozen people were a massive crowd. Some years they wouldn't even cover the March for Life with its thousands of participants but I could get them to turn out for anything we staged.
Multiple sources are reporting the DC march was 200,000 to 300,000. That's a lot of "thousands."
Calling it bias doesn't do it credit. Media Lies or fake news isn't strong enough. It is information suppression.
Lol right. So pro-science. All scientists refer to zygotes and embryos as "children." Ok, whatever you say.
Criticizing non-existent language is pretty lame.
Here's their "science" statement. They call an embryo an embryo, and their science-y claim is unremarkable:
"Medical and technological advancements continue to reaffirm the science behind the pro-life cause – that life begins at fertilization, or day one, when egg meets sperm and a new, unique, human embryo is created."
If anything, it's the pro-abortion people who misuse language, claiming that something not-human magically turns into a human being at a certain time.
Thousands of dozens. Dozens of thousands.
True, yet not quite a lie. Not quite. Good enough for the rubes.
Lance said...
Looking at thr video, I count 25 people shoulder to shoulder in the front row. It appears to me that twenty rows pass the cross street every second elapsed. The body of the march first crossed at 0:03 and finished at 0:56. At 500 marchers per second that’s 26,500 in the march itself. But the march was not that uniformly dense. On the other hand many people walking along on the sidewalk should probably be included in the crowd size estimate. And others probably joined at the mall, after the marching.
I’d say 20-30k is a reasonable estimate based only on the video.
1/19/19, 9:08 AM
Seems light. The sanity check would be "would all those marchers in the video fit in half full baseball stadium? Michigan football stadium fits 100,000. Which seems closer?
Criticizing non-existent language is pretty lame.
Nowhere near as lame as appointing oneself the intrauterine version of Holden Caufield, at large.
Our Professor Althouse said... I'm surprised they don't make any effort to cover their bias.
I kinda miss the olden days (1990's?) when places like NPR pretended to be fair. They used to have someone that they called a republican give a backup to their stories. Of course, their republican would be a journalist from the Washington Post; who would agree with 96% of what they had said; but, it would at least Seem to be an opposing view.
Now they follow up a democrat with an opposing view from a more leftist democrat.
Here's their "science" statement. They call an embryo an embryo, and their science-y claim is unremarkable:
"Medical and technological advancements continue to reaffirm the science behind the pro-life cause – that life begins at fertilization, or day one, when egg meets sperm and a new, unique, human embryo is created."
That's only a scientific statement if you have scientific evidence to say that sperm and egg are dead, un-alive things. Which they most certainly are not. But keep on trying!
(BTW, the theory that life was constantly, spontaneously created from dead material - spontaneous generation - was shown to be incorrect in the 19th century. But it's interesting to know that the anti-choicers/forced pregnancy advocates seem to love speaking this way when talking about fertilization).
BTW, the theory that life was constantly, spontaneously created from dead material - spontaneous generation - was shown to be incorrect in the 19th century.
Everyone knows that and nobody claims that gametes are dead. People say "life begins at conception" but what they really mean is "life continues in a new body at conception."
All scientists refer to zygotes and embryos as "children."
IOW, you are still full of poopy-doo.
Left-wing ideologies made everything political long ago.
It goes back to, well, probably the romantic movement, which made such all-consuming passions fashionable. It established the fashion of political fashions.
One root was Chernyshevsky, who raised the concept of a totally dedicated hero to a political cause, with no other interest. A political monk or hermit, as an ideal. This became very influential in all revolutionary movements inspired by the Russians. There are interesting takes on it in Figes, "Natashas Dance", and the process by which it and other politics (elitist slavophilia for one) took organic culture and stuffed it with a propagandist meaning, if often semi-consciously. You will never hear "Prince Igor" the same way again. Indeed, you will not walk through a "Whole Foods" store the same way again either.
By Gramsci's time it was common. Gramsci's point about the need for the "long march" was that the "hegemony" that could or would resist revolutionary communism was every social and cultural institution, so all had to be politicized and the culture fundamentally changed in order for the revolution to succeed.
You find the concept developed across the spectrum of the left through the nineteenth century, and to this day. Everything is political. Even the reaction to "everything is political" is to make everything political. There are no innocents here anymore, as there is no way to fight back without becoming the mirror of your enemies.
What you have now is that politicization of everything, left over from the long march. The goal, however, revolutionary communism, is dead. What you have left are the corrupt zombies of the process.
People say "life begins at conception" but what they really mean is "life continues in a new body at conception."
If they can't say what they mean then you're admitting that they're sloppy propagandists and that no one should trust them. Which is probably why so many people don't.
IOW, you are still full of poopy-doo.
Whatever you say, Intrauterine Holden Caufield. You go on up there into those vaginas and SAVE those human sea monkeys! Put on your miner's hat and shrink down to Incredible Voyage size first, though. Those mean old non-mommas are kind of weird about people like you poking about unpermitted into their pussies, especially a full-sized adult male like yourself - or what I presume is a full-sized adult male. (Perhaps you're a midget?) But then, this is the kind of knowledge that you might have also figured out from your attempt at a sex life so I'm probably not telling you anything new.
ANyway, get up on in there and SAVE them! Save them from their mommas! Force those pregnancies to term!
20,000 were at the Capital One Center youth rally alone.
Hillary and Governor Cuomo from New York want abortions legal up until the day of birth. Talk about immoral. They make me sick. So glad she is not our President!
17,000 is the average attendance for an NBA game. I'm guessing two to three times as many based on the video.
The March for Life is the REAL Women's March!!
Sort of off-topic, but not really - I wonder what Gramsci or Orwell would make of "Whole Foods".
Eye-balling the tape and comparing the crowd to a full house at Michigan Stadium (110,000) and Soldier Field (62,000), I'd say 60K to 90K people in the march and on the sidewalk. A crowd! Thousands! It's science! They are non-people!
The strange juxtaposition of Ralph Ellison and the pro-life movement: they are Invisible Men (and Women).
The March has consistently drawn 100,000 or so people on any given year, and some years it has been closer to 200,000. Of course, most of the media refuses to report the actual numbers. That crowd looks like it would easily fill a large college football stadium. I would not believe an estimate that is any lower than 80,000.
Holy cow! Wherever you stand on abortion, that video is jaw-dropping.
All serious scientists say:
You go on up there into those vaginas and SAVE those human sea monkeys! Put on your miner's hat and shrink down to Incredible Voyage size first, though. Those mean old non-mommas are kind of weird about people like you poking about unpermitted into their pussies, especially a full-sized adult male like yourself - or what I presume is a full-sized adult male. (Perhaps you're a midget?) But then, this is the kind of knowledge that you might have also figured out from your attempt at a sex life so I'm probably not telling you anything new.
@PPPT: I am sick of the left claiming the mantle of science. I'm in the academic leadership of a College of Science at a state university. So I can speak with a little bit of knowledge on this. Both sides have their mockable anti-science moments.
What? You don't think the dems do? How about anti-GMO? How about nuclear energy? Fracking anyone? The left's positions on all of those things are based on hysteria, not science. Don't even get me started on climate change. Talk to an actual geologist.
As for abortion, yes, I'd say the anti- side is more pro-science at this point in time. The R-vs-W standard was based on nearly 50-year old medical science. Let's update our standard of where viability starts, shall we? And let's stop hiding the facts of what actually happens in an abortion. For some reason, the pro-abortion side doesn't really want the facts to be out there and available.
Liberals: "Science is what I say." Geesh.
The Left wants:
1. Millions of American women to abort their babies;
2. Millions of illegal immigrants to flood our southern border
The Right to life March is treated by the media like a fetus born alive after a botched abortion--ignore until the story dies because it's inconvenient
Trump is an imperfect vehicle, complained people who largely believe there has only been a single perfect vehicle for a message - ever?
I question the logic and faith of the interviewees.
@PPPT: I am sick of the left claiming the mantle of science. I'm in the academic leadership of a College of Science at a state university. So I can speak with a little bit of knowledge on this. Both sides have their mockable anti-science moments.
And yet, you can't claim that the left has instituted any actual policies so hostile to nearly every scientific field as has the right. What has the left done in your life that in any way parallels what the Trump admin has done to increase mercury emissions - even despite the unwillingness of the coal lobby to see any point to it? Nothing. Or for that matter even their hostility to basic economics - forcing utilities to buy coal at uncompetitive rates.
The rest of what you bitch about is cultural stuff that simply speaks to the left's willingness to do the scientific thing of questioning the long-term viability of or larger issues surrounding this issue or that. GMO is a sham - yet another patentable non-answer in search of the "problem" of insufficient profits for a monopoly like Monsanto on natural grain and livestock. Or a market that would otherwise be unwilling to make use of their probable carcinogen Round-Up/glyphosate. To promote that isn't science; it's marketing.
Nuclear energy has a waste and long-term storage issue, if you haven't heard. It's important to look into that, not that the right ever would - but you still can't show me any "left-wing policy" that impeded nuclear development on that or any other basis anyway.
Yes, we won't get you "started" on climate change. Suffice it to say you're not an actual geologist and if you were you would dazzle us with this brilliant (and necessary) assertion any climate denier must support on how atmosphere and climate somehow have minimal relation to each other. Which of course would surprise anyone who's observed the "climate" (or complete lack thereof) on the moon. Or any other atmosphere-free celestial body.
Changing a timeline for viability will not give the state any standing to force pregnancies to term. It may allow the state to fund its own incubators for growing its own new national army of motherless preemies. (And what a dystopian horror show that would be). But try demonstrating how you're going to pull that one off, first. Maybe it would require a little bit of those $5 billion in earmarked "Mexican funded" border wall funds.
But hey, at least you thought that one through about as sloppily as you thought the other issues through.
Ann Althouse wrote "Thousands!"
I can tell you the exact moment that "journalists" lost me forever. I try to see things for myself, so I've attended Occupy protests and Tea Party protests over the years. In September 2009, I attended the gigantic Tea Party rally on the US Capitol lawn and National Mall. The low end of crowd estimates was in the 60-75 thousand range, with many estimates of the crowd being well into six figures by the end of the day.
As I left the rally, I passed a Code Pink protest with perhaps a couple of dozen participants. When I got to my car and turned on the radio, the NPR host introduced a segment on "today's protest in Washington," and I was stunned to find that the segment was focused almost entirely on the Code Pink protesters, making it seem like a Code Pink action with a few dozen semi-pro protestors was more newsworthy than many thousands of "just folks" gathering for a protest. The extent to which news reports that day ignored or downplayed the Tea Party event truly was mind blowing. When the Tea Party event was covered, it generally seemed to focus on a fringe group of Lyndon Larouche supporters (without identifying them as such) carrying "Obama as Hitler" posters, in a not-so-subtle attempt by the "journalists" to paint the Tea Party with a racist/loony brush. (By the way, the same Lyndon Larouche folks would show up at Occupy demonstrations with the same signs, along with the assorted hammer-and-sickle flag carriers, but you wouldn't hear any of them mentioned in reports of those events.)
If it were not for the fact that I occasionally listen to a few minutes of Limbaugh and read conservative blogs, it would've been entirely possible to miss one of the largest protests in DC in decades if mainstream news sources were the only thing I consumed. After that day, I stopped believing that the media was merely biased. It clearly demonstrated it was something much worse.
@PPPT: Thanks for chiming in to illustrate basically all of my points. Yes, the left has successfully blocked nuclear development during pretty much my entire adult life. Thanks for that. And I hate to break it to you, but the facts are really not on your side on GMO, fracking, or climate. Oh, and I completely forgot about wind and solar. The list is so long it's hard to keep track of.
By the way, no, I'm not a Geologist. That was only my undergraduate minor. My PhD is Mathematics. Critical thinking is what I do.
Meanwhile, you can go on eating your "organic" produce (grown at a much lower yield per acre -- hungry folks around the globe really owe you one) and driving your (probably coal-powered) electric car, and, of course, feeling all morally superior. It's what you do.
BTW, I used duckduckgo to search for how many attended and they linked to this article. Could be as high as 300k.
@PPPT: Thanks for chiming in to illustrate basically all of my points.
You can't cite a single one that illustrated any of that.
Yes, the left has successfully blocked nuclear development during pretty much my entire adult life.
Again. Cite how. A single citation.
I realize that as a right-wing douchebag you're anti-safety though. Is that what you're talking about? Wanting to end the NRC or something?
Thanks for that. And I hate to break it to you, but the facts are really not on your side on GMO, fracking, or climate.
Again. A single citation. And I never said a thing about fracking, you illiterate douchebag.
As for climate, I take most of what I get from NASA or NOAA. Go show me the public links of theirs that you "disagree" (without any evidence) with.
Oh, and I completely forgot about wind and solar. The list is so long it's hard to keep track of.
Well, you are a forgetful person. Stupid people are likely to have bad memories. But once again, I didn't say anything about that, either. It's hard to know what someone disagrees about when they mention a topic, but no assertion to do with it. I presume you just mean that these are more industry-lobbyist supported themes that you are prejudiced to believe the older industry lobbyist on, but don't know why or even in regards to what supposedly scientific issue. You just like the fact that it creates political controversy for a right-winger such as yourself to confuse marketing with science.
By the way, no, I'm not a Geologist. That was only my undergraduate minor. My PhD is Mathematics. Critical thinking is what I do.
Critical gathering of facts and the scientific explanations for them however is something that you obviously have no ability to do.
It's refreshing to see how impotent you are to actually engage a single argument, though. Makes me more confident of how wrong you must be about the invisible conclusions your political sideshow is forcing you to presume to swallow full-throated.
...feeling all morally superior.
I'm hearing a lot of feelings from you. And no facts. Just the way your side likes it.
Keep having contempt for anyone interested in actually engaging the issues that you can't engage at all. And simply want to embrace a foregone, lobbyist-funded conclusion for.
That's really convincing stuff, Mark.
Life is good.
For the record, I'd point out that mathematics is not a "science." Mathematicians themselves can't even agree on whether math reflects an intrinsic part of the natural universe or if it would just exist on its own as some part of a theoretical and impractical basis.
As such, for a mathematician to call himself a critical thinker is as loopy as an English professor to call himself a critical thinker. Neither thinkers' criticism rely on real-life validation in the actual universe as a part of naturalistic observation.
Nope. Counting shit isn't "science." The science part comes in when you figure out how to associate one real-life observation with another. Scientists hire the mathematicians and statisticians, not the other way around. And frequently mathematicians rely on scientists to even develop their own fucking field for them. Newton developed calculus because it more accurately described the physics he was observing. This continues to happen to this very day. But mathematicians know full well that that they can invent tons of shit that may or may not have any application in the universe of things.
This is why they typically tend to be eccentric weirdos who lack an appreciation for common sense, and prefer to rant on about things in the theoretical and often nonsensical universes their minds inhabit. Ted Kaczynski is a great example of that.
@WisRich
Seems light. The sanity check would be "would all those marchers in the video fit in half full baseball stadium? Michigan football stadium fits 100,000. Which seems closer?
If I read you correctly, you're estimating 50K? I think that's possible. Like I said, my estimate is based entirely on the video. And assumes that the video was taken of the 2019 march.
Please note that the largest MLB stadium (Dodger Stadium) holds 56,000. So by your sanity check my 20-30K estimate holds up ;)
Also note that crowd estimation is very non-intuitive. It doesn't help that the video playback has been sped up and has been filmed from long distance, making it hard to pick out individuals. So any estimate from the video will be very rough.
But I think it's very safe to use 15K and 50K as lower and upper bounds. Once again, just based on the video. I have no idea how many people joined the protest gathering after this video was taken.
Appealing to science is a tactic recommended by say bishop Robert Barron, as the official religion of the pro-choice crowd is what he calls scientism. The mindset of these people towards God was best expressed by Hitchens who called God a totalitarian. Lucifer was given the intelligence of perhaps a million men, but try to tell them that. My last argument with a Democrat was about how Elizabeth Warren is intelligent because she attended Harvard. I lost that argument. If you recall Trump's naive pro-life statements when he was a presidential candidate, it is no surprise he mentioned God. But He's catching up. Probably no one will give a speech on par with the "We Shall Not Weary" speech the late Father John Neuhaus did 20 years ago. (Neuhaus, a high school dropout, was an advisor to popes and presidents.) But that's fine. "Just showing up" as Woody Allen would say is the important part.
Althouse said..."Thousands!", etc.
The under/no reporting of this event has been true for years. I think I detect surprise at this from your comments (though I may be reading you wrong). If you are surprised, it would benefit you to think about the honesty of the sources who produce the news you read. (And yes, I know this is not the first time you've heard this.)
"The main dividing line between pro-life and pro-choice is not which side cares more about women, families, and their basic freedoms. It's how each group applies the scientific facts to determine what constitutes women's rights."
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2019/01/48339/
Human life evolves from conception. A coherent nervous system is observable around one month. That said, elective abortion is a cruel and unusual punishment of the wholly innocent, and a summary judgment a la witch or warlock trials, or early twentieth century progressive ideology that embraced concepts including "life deemed unworthy", "Jew privilege", diversity, and social justice.
Pro-Choice is two choices too late. Planned parenthood is a wicked solution, albeit to a hard problem (e.g. pleasure, leisure, political leverage, GDP).
I did what Birches said. If Google didn't tag that article it's pretty blatant bias. Also there has been no coverage of local pro-life demonstrations that occur nationwide. I saw maybe 500 to 1,000 people in the Huntington, NY shopping district a few years back and a similar crowd in Southeastern Palm Beach County last year. Every gun grabbing demo by 20 teenagers in this neighborhood makes national news.
I visited London back in October and saw various staged protests. None of those protests could have filled one frame of that video of the March for Life, yet the protests made the news every night. I've heard no news story about the March for Life that hints at that much support. It convinces me the majority is very vocal, and it is the minority just hoping for them to remain silent.
I've been downtown in the middle of the annual Right to Life marches multiple times. It's tough to speak to the size of the crowd because one only sees the parts not the whole. I'd like to speak to other issues on the march.
1) The DC cops love these people. The march leaders know the ropes by heart by now, and so the regs & regulations & paperwork are followed to the letter. The marchers are never violent & they thank the cops for their service as they march by. It's the friendliest mob imaginable. They sing hymns as they march, they listen to speeches, they disperse to the local restaurants after they're done to drop hundreds of thousands of dollars into the local economy, & they then climb onto buses & drive away.
2) The march has become much more institutionally Catholic over the years. In the 80's, I remember more of an evangelical presence.
Here ya go
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/01/100000-supporters-turn-out-for-annual-march-for-life-usa-today-reports-more-than-a-thousand-cnn-and-msnbc-completely-ignore/
"Antiabortion" a.k.a. anti-summary judgment, anti-cruel and unusual punishment, pro-equal (not "=" or politically congruent) rights, pro-life, pro-human rights, pro-science, life deemed worthy, perhaps "baby privilege", a reconciliation of inconvenient truths to power. #HateLovesAbortion and other wicked solutios
Human life evolves from conception. A coherent nervous system is observable around one month.
“Human life” — in the context of a single human life, e.g. one's own body — doesn't evolve at all. Human life develops from single-celled conception into the gargantuan, trillion-celled, messy and fallible body(-ies) with their brain(s) that we know and love.
This may seem like a trivial, merely semantic distinction, but it is not. “Evolution” — that is: biological evolution, the consequence of the operation of the twin evolutionary principles of mutation + natural selection acting over time — does have a place and does occur in the context of our individual (e.g. human) bodies, it's just that the result of such evolution isn't the adult (human) body, it is cancer.*
Making a sharp distinction between evolution and development thus makes sense in avoiding confusion about what you're talking about.
––––
*As a review article in the journal Nature put it a decade back (quoting…):
Cancer is an evolutionary process
All cancers are thought to share a common pathogenesis. Each is the outcome of a process of Darwinian evolution occurring among cell populations within the microenvironments provided by the tissues of a multicellular organism. Analogous to Darwinian evolution occurring in the origins of species, cancer development is based on two constituent processes, the continuous acquisition of heritable genetic variation in individual cells by more-or-less random mutation and natural selection acting on the resultant phenotypic diversity. The selection may weed out cells that have acquired deleterious mutations or it may foster cells carrying alterations that confer the capability to proliferate and survive more effectively than their neighbours. Within an adult human there are probably thousands of minor winners of this ongoing competition, most of which have limited abnormal growth potential and are invisible or manifest as common benign growths such as skin moles. Occasionally, however, a single cell acquires a set of sufficiently advantageous mutations that allows it to proliferate autonomously, invade tissues and metastasize.
(/unQuote)
(Nature Vol. 458, No. 7239, pp. 719-724 (9 April 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature07943)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v458/n7239/full/nature07943.html
––––
Mutation + natural selection is evolution.
Original Mike said...The under/no reporting of this event has been true for years. I think I detect surprise at this from your comments (though I may be reading you wrong). If you are surprised, it would benefit you to think about the honesty of the sources who produce the news you read. (And yes, I know this is not the first time you've heard this.)
Thanks for the comment. I'm not the slightest bit surprised about the "under/no reporting" of this event, assuming you are referring to the March for Life.
Even with respect to the 2009 Tea Party rally that was the subject of my comment, I fully expected biased reporting about it at the time or even an absence of reporting about it. What I did not expect was how on-the-scene reporters from "reputable" outlets could cover a dozen or so leftist protestors standing in the middle of a city-sized group of conservative protestors and somehow portray the leftist demonstration as the (singular!) "protest today in Washington." The sheer amount of work that was required to hide the truth of the day's events viscerally laid bare the extent to which the media was actively, willfully manipulating the national discourse in an egregiously dishonest way.
As an aside, that Tea Party rally occurred around the time of the much hyped opening of the new "Newseum" building in DC. I walked past the Newseum on the way back to my car, and I felt angry and nauseous as I looked at the posters hanging on the side of the building with hagiographic portrayals of famous journalists. Disgusting. I think that day was the day I finally switched from being a lifelong optimist to being among the most cynical of pessimists.
I was in Washington DC in January 2004 for another event which coincided with March for Life. As a pro-life person, I was aware of the MFL, but nothing compares to actually seeing it. There were tens of thousands of people of all ages. Young and old. Men and women. It was an amazing thing to see. I checked the news stories about it when I got back home to Texas and I was stunned by the lack of reporting and the dishonesty of the reports that were actually filed. I could easily believe the 100K attendee figure.
Post a Comment