I'm intrigued by the timing of this video release. Did the CMP release it immediately after the California charges against Daleiden and Merritt were announced? Haha, I'd like to think so.
"PLANNED PARENTHOOD’S STAFF ARE CONSISTENTLY EXTREMELY CALLOUS . . ." Right. Daleiden and Merritt are heroes, but with the hindsight of only a couple of weeks of launching their first video, it became clear that they should have made the callousness the main issue from the beginning. That is, I feel that that became clear, and I wonder if the CMP people themselves might have come to that conclusion also. Callousness as an issue is not as tangible or as consequential as the legal violations the CMP claimed to have exposed, but they hadn't exposed such violations convincingly enough, and their exaggerations were a chink in their armor that was exploited with great skill by the PP forces. The issue became the legal things PP was arguably innocent of, instead of the moral things they were obviously guilty of. "The shocking callousness of Planned Parenthood’s staff was one of the reasons CMP’s first two undercover videos got as much attention as they did." And I feel that public attention could have remained focused on that callousness and could have given rise to attempts to understand the mechanisms of it, such as your "become so numb to the slaughter that it doesn’t feel weird or off-putting to make jokes about it." I wish that had been where the public conversation had gone, instead of to the question, was there proof of legal violations. Possible legal violations should have been addressed as "suspicions," or "for investigation," to be brought to the attention of the authorities. PP was able to emerge with a plausible claim of being legally blameless, which diverted attention from the issue of moral blame, and the issue of the psychological trauma so evident (if people's attention had focused on it) among PP workers. Good article.
Right. Daleiden and Merritt are heroes, but with the hindsight of only a couple of weeks of launching their first video, it became clear that they should have made the callousness the main issue from the beginning. That is, I feel that that became clear, and I wonder if the CMP people themselves might have come to that conclusion also. Callousness as an issue is not as tangible or as consequential as the legal violations the CMP claimed to have exposed, but they hadn't exposed such violations convincingly enough, and their exaggerations were a chink in their armor that was exploited with great skill by the PP forces. The issue became the legal things PP was arguably innocent of, instead of the moral things they were obviously guilty of.
"The shocking callousness of Planned Parenthood’s staff was one of the reasons CMP’s first two undercover videos got as much attention as they did."
And I feel that public attention could have remained focused on that callousness and could have given rise to attempts to understand the mechanisms of it, such as your "become so numb to the slaughter that it doesn’t feel weird or off-putting to make jokes about it." I wish that had been where the public conversation had gone, instead of to the question, was there proof of legal violations. Possible legal violations should have been addressed as "suspicions," or "for investigation," to be brought to the attention of the authorities. PP was able to emerge with a plausible claim of being legally blameless, which diverted attention from the issue of moral blame, and the issue of the psychological trauma so evident (if people's attention had focused on it) among PP workers.
Good article.