To mangle the Diane Duane quote… Joe Biden should always be taken everyplace twice: the second time, to apologize. This particular – week’s? day’s? minute’s? nanosecond’s? – example shows our esteemed Vice President signing off on the PRC’s draconian population control techniques. Bolding I presume Mark Hemingway’s:
But as I was talking to some of your leaders, you share a similar concern here in China. You have no safety net. Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family. The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. Not sustainable.
I’m sure that Biden didn’t actually mean to endorse the People Republic of China’s policy of population control via forced abortions; but he certainly meant to avoid making a moral judgement on the practice. Which is, by the way, vile, disgusting, and not compatible with the reasonable expectations of moral behavior from a truly civilized nation-state. I’d just thought that I’d pass that bit of cultural elitism along, since my country’s current leadership team is a bit too scared to.
Geez. Even the Russians are less backward about this sort of thing, these days.
Moe Lane
Well, considering how crappy life was for most people in the USSR and is in Russia now, it’s not like they actually had to force women to have abortions, which is one of the reasons they’ve had an ongoing population implosion there.