Housekeeping
In light of the news under the abortion heading, I have moved my email off of Google and onto Proton Mail. Please see my updated contact information.
I still have a few steps to take before I’m completely disengaged from Google. But this was a big one.
Gilead
Abortion
Fig. 1. Sign at demonstration in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, May 3, 2022. Janni Rye, via Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
Please note, I do not consider Business Insider to be a reliable source. In this case, the story about a Nebraska mother who helped her daughter get medication to induce an abortion[1] comes from an earlier TechCrunch article,[2] and concerns about social network and other technology companies guarding user privacy are longstanding.
Most alarming is that some online pharmacies selling the medications to facilitate an abortion are sharing personally identifiable information (PII) with Google,[3] which I would expect—I am not a lawyer—to violate the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) even if Google is not bound by HIPAA once it receives the information.[4]
Google is here evil and this is one reason I am seeking to phase out my use of Google products (I have now moved my email to Proton Mail). The company has a record of making promises it is at least very slow to keep regarding abortion misinformation[5] and has been reported to target advertising for so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” that exist to dissuade women from getting abortions to low-income women.[6]
Eric Lutz, “Walgreens Caves To Antiabortion Republicans — Including In States Where Abortion Remains Legal,” Vanity Fair, March 3, 2023, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/walgreens-abortion-pill-access
Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert, “Facebook and Google are handing over user data to help police prosecute abortion seekers,” Business Insider, March 4, 2023, https://www.businessinsider.com/police-getting-help-social-media-to-prosecute-people-seeking-abortions-2023-2
White Christian nationalism (Trumpism)
Fig. 1. In terms of geographic area, Pennsylvania is very much a white Christian nationalist kind of place. Photograph by author, January 5, 2023.
Josh Marshall argues that organizations like the Heritage Foundation and Fox News arise from a fundamental conservative misconception about their counterparts, the Brookings Institute and CBS News respectively. Conservatives, he writes, saw these organizations and others as ideologically “liberal.” rather than as scholarly or as caring about “truth.” And so, in his telling, they founded “mirror” organizations.[7]
I have mostly seen Fox News as a successor to conservative talk radio, which my grandfather listened to. But Marshall’s argument is interesting because it begins to reach to the question of epistemology, how you know what you claim to know. As I have explained, conservatives approach “truth” not so much from lived experience, but rather from a conception of the world as they think it should be. “Truth” as you and I experience it is “temporal” and “relative,” therefore seen as inferior to “permanent” and “absolute” “truth.”[8] In this understanding, our “truth” is of course biased and their (conservative) “truth” is not.
This will be difficult for us to grasp because it assumes that a conservative ideology is more truthful than what we see with our own eyes, more truthful than what we learn with scientific study, more truthful than physical evidence, and more truthful than our own experience. To us, this is either delusional or fundamentally dishonest; but they really believe in their way of knowing, just as we believe in ours.
This is also why I was on to something, even though I didn’t understand it at the time, when one of my favorite professors, Valerie Sue, at California State University, East Bay, complained of harassment from the then-new solipsistic post-modernist department chair, Isaac Catt (who didn’t last very long). Catt claimed that “theory,” residing in our minds, was more real than what we saw because, as his flavor of post-modernism had it, anything we saw was filtered through the lens of perception and we could never really be sure of what was on the other side of that lens. And this is what solipsism is all about: It is the idea that the only thing we can be sure of is what is in our minds.
It turns out that this relates to Plato’s Forms. Plato understood what we see in the world as imitations of the Forms, the Forms being the ideal of each object.[9] And he held a dichotomy between air as intellect and earth as, among other things, the sensual. Men were air; Women were earth.[10] Thus, crudely, men were real; women were imitations.
Catt pretended to be “liberal,” as in the New Deal idea of liberalism, but this was belied by his solipsism, which parallels Plato’s notion of Forms in contrast to the pale imitations we are surrounded by,[11] which parallels a valuation of men as intellect over women as sensual.[12] Sue, who preferred quantitative methodology and called herself “quantitative girl,” fell right into the disparaged side of this dichotomy. It’s no wonder she felt harassed: She was.
But she was harassed in a way that you had to understand the theory in order to understand at all. I suspected it. I hadn’t put it together. And the faculty committee charged with investigating her claim either didn’t understand it at all or failed to apply it. She felt betrayed and, in a way, she was.
The sexism we see in Plato’s dichotomy parallels a conservative valorization of “absolute” or “permanent” “truth” over “relative” or “temporal” “truth,” the latter being our “truth.” It’s not a lie, per se, but it is very much a different way of knowing, and I’m wrestling with a notion that the use of a way of knowing to stigmatize entire classes of people is itself an abuse of the benefit of the doubt that we human scientists extend to these other ways of knowing.
Josh Marshall, “The Deep Archeology of Fox News,” Talking Points Memo, March 3, 2023, https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-deep-archeology-of-fox-news
- [1]Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert, “Facebook and Google are handing over user data to help police prosecute abortion seekers,” Business Insider, March 4, 2023, https://www.businessinsider.com/police-getting-help-social-media-to-prosecute-people-seeking-abortions-2023-2↩
- [2]Runa Sandvik, “How US police use digital data to prosecute abortions,” TechCrunch, January 27, 2023, https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/27/digital-data-roe-wade-reproductive-privacy/↩
- [3]Jennifer Gollan, “Websites Selling Abortion Pills Are Sharing Sensitive Data With Google,” ProPublica, January 18, 2023, https://www.propublica.org/article/websites-selling-abortion-pills-share-sensitive-data-with-google↩
- [4]Jennifer Gollan, “Websites Selling Abortion Pills Are Sharing Sensitive Data With Google,” ProPublica, January 18, 2023, https://www.propublica.org/article/websites-selling-abortion-pills-share-sensitive-data-with-google↩
- [5]Meghan Bobrowsky, “Google Says Maps, Searches Will Identify Clinics That Provide Abortions,” Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-says-maps-searches-will-identify-clinics-that-provide-abortions-11661457587; Darryl Coote, “N.Y. AG to Google: Stop directing people seeking abortions to anti-abortion centers,” United Press International, June 30, 2022, https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2022/06/30/New-York-Google-Maps/9871656579373/↩
- [6]Poppy Noor, “Google targets low-income US women with ads for anti-abortion pregnancy centers, study shows,” Guardian, February 7, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/07/google-targets-low-income-women-anti-abortion-pregnancy-center-study↩
- [7]Josh Marshall, “The Deep Archeology of Fox News,” Talking Points Memo, March 3, 2023, https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-deep-archeology-of-fox-news↩
- [8]David Benfell, “A theory of conservative epistemology,” Not Housebroken, February 7, 2023, https://disunitedstates.org/2022/08/06/a-theory-of-conservative-epistemology/↩
- [9]Richard Tarnas, Passion of the Western Mind (New York: Harmony, 1991).↩
- [10]Jack Holland, Misogyny (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006).↩
- [11]Richard Tarnas, Passion of the Western Mind (New York: Harmony, 1991).↩
- [12]Jack Holland, Misogyny (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006).↩