| '''Eric Weinstein''': I talked about sometimes dining Ă la carte intellectually, where I canât get my needs met in a low-resolution world anyplace and so I sort of pick and choose which bits of things I need. And I sort of think of this as political flatland, that people are trapped in pro-life versus pro-choice. And my real position is a plague on both your houses. Iâm not pro-choice to the extent that Iâm willing to call a child four minutes before its birth fetal tissue, nor am I pro-life to the extent that Iâm going to call a blastosphere a baby. Both of those seem patently insane to me. And nowhere do I get to discuss Carnegie stages and embryonic development, which would be sort of a more scientific approach to what quality of life is it that weâre trying to preserve. And yet I caucus, if you will, with the pro-choice community, not because I hold the idea that itâs simply a womanâs right to choose, because obviously thereâs something else thatâs going on inside of the woman, thereâs the whole miracle of gestation and reproduction. But if people see that I caucus pro-choice, then they say, âOkay, youâre willing to sit with somebody whoâs willing to terminate a third trimester pregnancy frivolously because theyâre ideologically committed to it. Ergo, youâre evil. Ergo, we can no longer be friends.â And my key point is, âLook, Iâll drop these people in a heartbeat if you give me some nuanced room in which to maneuver, letâs talk about the neural tube formation. Letâs talk about what we think of as life, is it the emotional connection to seeing something one recognizes as human? Is it the quality of the brain? Is it something mystical, ineffable? Are you coming from a religious tradition?â The key point is to make it impossible to have a discussion. And, you know, I remember being beaten up on a picket line, in a picket line where there was a group that was picketing an abortion clinic, and I was demonstrating for the right to keep it open. And I got beat up in Rhode Island on camera. And after this incident, I think I had a chance to talk to the person I thought had hit me with the picket sign. And it turned out that we could come to, we couldnât get all the way there, but there was at least a partial rapprochement where we could say, âWell, I see where youâre coming from, I see where youâre coming from. Maybe we can understand that youâre both motivated by the best interests as we perceive them.â That has gone away in large measure, because what weâve taken, or at least this is my understanding, is our institutional media and our sense-making apparatus and they have become complicit in making the center, that is the sensible and analytic center, absolutely uninhabitable.
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