I'm asleep on a pile of paper

[sovay]

Well, I guess Tuesday was spring. It was so sunny and mild and so blooming that I walked around my neighborhood taking pictures of flowers and and I looked forward to visiting the Arboretum in the next week or so. And then yesterday, on top of the computer-related emotional roller coaster, the temperature spiked past eighty degrees and the cats melted onto the hardwood and we needed two fans in the windows of the bedroom for me to get to sleep after dark, which made so little difference to the heat that spatch and I both had trouble believing it was one in the morning when it was. Today it is sticky and hazy and distinguishable from August only in that the trees are still in flower instead of that late dry green leaf. I am not looking forward to trying to sleep tonight. I hope our air conditioner is up to it.

Bertie Owen and his twenty-year-old external keyboard are still hanging in there. I am pleased that I was able to finish my interrupted review. I am now trying to decide if I really want to watch Four Daughters (1938) for John Garfield and Jeffrey Lynn now that it's handily on TCM or if it's going to be like that time Seven Sweethearts (1942) happened to me.

spatch found me this excellent Talmudic commentary on incels.

It is too hot.

Comments

Re: background

[sovay]

When discussing the twitter thread at home the other day, it seemed to us that the woman was being denied agency - what if she would have been willing to stand on the other side of the wall, as the doctor suggested, not that was likely to help?

I think the repeated "she may not" is less about curtailing the woman's behavior and more in the sense of "she has no obligation to". @drnelk addresses the wording in a later tweet:

"This translation makes it sound like she wants to, but that's not an accurate read of text. The rabbis are refusing the doctors' demands to use her as his treatment. I think of JJ Thompson's violinist."

Re: background

[asakiyume]

*nodding*--but now I want to know about JJ Thompson's violinist, but I think I'm googled out for the night. Tomorrow is another day!

Re: background

[sovay]

but now I want to know about JJ Thompson's violinist, but I think I'm googled out for the night. Tomorrow is another day!

This one I know! It's a reference to Judith Jarvis Thompson's "A Defense of Abortion" (1971), in which she famously argued that the right of a fetus to life—granted for the sake of argument—does not outweight the right of a woman to her own body, using the memorably absurd thought experiment of a woman who wakes up one day to find herself sharing a circulatory system with a famous violinist:

"He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, 'Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you—we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.' Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says, 'Tough luck. I agree. but now you've got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person's right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.' I imagine you would regard this as outrageous, which suggests that something really is wrong with that plausible-sounding argument I mentioned a moment ago."

Re: background

[asakiyume]

Wow, that is fascinating and makes me think yet again how problematic thought experiments are. Entertaining, but problematic.

But anyway, thank you for explaining the violinist (and sharing the source material)--I appreciate it.