It seems quite reasonable to me to be concerned that your state prohibits abortion after the 6th week, or that reproductive-aged women and their family members might be reluctant to move there; his assertion that abortion is "what multiple generations of Americans have grown up seeing as a fundamental right" is entirely correct, at least for Americans from the US. And this level of rhetoric seems positively tame for an abortion debate:
I have friends who are sincere, thoughtful pro-lifers. I admire, if nothing else, their principled dedication to a moral stance that regularly gets condemned in academia. But I’d also say to them: even if you think of abortion as murder, a solid majority of Americans don’t, and it’s hard to see a stable way of getting what you want that skips the step where you change those Americans’ minds.
> It seems quite reasonable to me to be concerned that your state prohibits abortion after the 6th week, or that reproductive-aged women and their family members might be reluctant to move there;
Sure, but no one ever gets called a nutter for the reasonable things they say - if you pick only the reasonable statements of course he is going to look reasonable.
How about this one?
> More than that: if Texas continues on what half the country sees as a journey back to the Middle Ages, with no opt-outs allowed for the residents of its left-leaning urban centers, Dana and I will not be able to remain here, and many of our friends won’t either.
When, according to him, half the country disagrees with him, he'll just move, and (the delusional part) he thinks all his friends will move too. Note he was careful to say that neither he/his wife nor his friends/family will actually be affected by this, but yeah, it's a reason to move?
> fueled the growth of the radical right that’s now all but destroyed America.
Yeah, right. a tiny group so far in the minority that it isn't even a rounding error has "all but destroyed America". His argument is the same as Make America Great Again, with the same level of evidence for his claims.
Add in the fact that he thinks this political issue is a threat to computer science ... well, it's obviously a threat to his identity as a person, so he is extending "anything that is a threat to my identity is a threat to humanity, and by extension everything produced by humanity ... like Computer Science".
Yeah, he's a nutter; he's obviously very engaged in this discussion and sadly he has tied his identity of self to it and feels threatened when the discussion happens because he proposes that the mere discussion of this topic will result in a scorched earth-type of endgame.
Thank you for clarifying which parts you thought were off-base!
> When, according to him, half the country disagrees with him, he'll just move, and (the delusional part) he thinks all his friends will move too. Note he was careful to say that neither he/his wife nor his friends/family will actually be affected by this, but yeah, it's a reason to move?
He and his wife were both born because their parents and grandparents, endangered by a political movement seeking a journey back to the Middle Ages or a bit earlier, did move, even though they hadn't yet been affected (which is what he actually says about his current situation; your extrapolation to saying they will not be affected is unjustifiable and indeed directly contradicted in the paragraph you're quoting from). Their relatives who didn't move were all killed. This may add useful context to the situation. The same thing is happening right now in Kabul, a fact to which Aaronson alludes in the post.
> Yeah, right. a tiny group so far in the minority that it isn't even a rounding error
You probably aren't up to doing the same kind of math Aaronson does if you think the 32% of the population that opposes Roe v. Wade "isn't even a rounding error". It may be relevant that only about a third of the domestic population supported the political movement I mentioned above which killed most of Aaronson's extended family.
Your purported quote, "anything that is a threat to my identity is a threat to humanity, and by extension everything produced by humanity ... like Computer Science", appears to be entirely fabricated, by you. I can't find any evidence Aaronson ever said that or anything like it; certainly he did not say it in the post we're commenting on or in the comment thread below it. Perhaps you hallucinated it?
I think calling someone a "nutter" for the reasonable things they said would be far preferable to calling them that for unreasonable things they didn't say.
> > Yeah, right. a tiny group so far in the minority that it isn't even a rounding error
>
> You probably aren't up to doing the same kind of math Aaronson does if you think the 32% of the population that opposes Roe v. Wade "isn't even a rounding error".
But that wasn't who he was referring to by the phrase "radical right who all but destroyed America", was it? He specifically differentiates between the 32% you are referring to and the "radical right" by saying that one was fueled by the other.
The "radical right" is so tiny that it's hard to even get numbers on them.
> Your purported quote, "anything that is a threat to my identity is a threat to humanity, and by extension everything produced by humanity ... like Computer Science", appears to be entirely fabricated, by you.
Okay then, how do you start with premise that "Abortion banned for all practical purposes" results in the conclusion that "Computer Science is threatened"?
Because for the life of me, I don't see any way that abortion laws should have an effect on computer science unless you trace a very unlikely and circuitous path between the two.
Do you see a non-insane way of drawing his conclusion from his premise?
> I think calling someone a "nutter" for the reasonable things they said would be far preferable to calling them that for unreasonable things they didn't say.
Sure, but I didn't hallucinate his fear that lack of legal abortion threatens computer science. After re-reading his entire post, this time more carefully, it appears to me that this matters so much to him that he confused it with mattering that much to society.
Not much different from those people who claim "You're all going to hell for eternity because you follow the wrong god".
> But that wasn't who he was referring to by the phrase "radical right who all but destroyed America", was it? He specifically differentiates between the 32% you are referring to and the "radical right" by saying that one was fueled by the other.
I think he's saying that (possibly) Roe radicalized the right, convincing them that democracy was a dead end. It isn't clear that he intends to exclude any anti-abortionists from his "radical right"; certainly the anti-abortionists could be mostly radical right.
> The "radical right" is so tiny that it's hard to even get numbers on them.
If that were true, Trump wouldn't have even been nominated, much less elected.
> Okay then, how do you start with premise that "Abortion banned for all practical purposes" results in the conclusion that "Computer Science is threatened"?
You made up the quote "Computer Science is threatened". Aaronson didn't say that, or anything like it; you're just falsely claiming that he did. The only mention of computer science in the post or any of his comments is when he says that he often uses the blog to "advertise positions in quantum information and theoretical computer science at the University of Texas at Austin," mentions "a Berkeley CS student named Pratyush Mishra", says he was once "a CS theory PhD student at Berkeley", and mentions a requirement for "a Masters in CS" to apply for CS grad school at a different university in another country.
(Unlike your fabricated quotes, those are things Aaronson actually wrote, which is why I put them in quotation marks.)
> Sure, but I didn't hallucinate his fear that lack of legal abortion threatens computer science.
There's certainly nothing in his post suggesting such a fear.
I do think you can make a reasonable case that academics will tend to flee places where they are being denied basic human rights, given the opportunity, and that this will impede research in those places, not only in computer science but in any field. There are definitely exceptions; the Soviet Union had many excellent academicians throughout the Cold War, for example, in part because they weren't legally allowed to emigrate. But that doesn't impede any field as a whole, because the refugees keep doing research in whatever they were doing research in before, just somewhere else. And, if there's nowhere available for them to flee to, they'll stay put and keep doing research, perhaps with the occasional promising research career cut short by death from pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes, or execution by stoning for walking in public with non-related men.
I have friends who are sincere, thoughtful pro-lifers. I admire, if nothing else, their principled dedication to a moral stance that regularly gets condemned in academia. But I’d also say to them: even if you think of abortion as murder, a solid majority of Americans don’t, and it’s hard to see a stable way of getting what you want that skips the step where you change those Americans’ minds.