Elsewhere (223)
Ben Shapiro on abortion and evasion:
Today, The Atlantic ran a bizarre piece by Moira Weigel titled, in Orwellian fashion, “How the Ultrasound Pushed the Idea That a Foetus Is a Person.” Which is somewhat like saying, “How the Microscope Pushed the Idea That Cells Exist,” or “How the Hubble Telescope Pushed the Idea That There Are Stars Outside Our Solar System.” […] But Weigel goes even further, assuring readers that ultrasounds were primarily a form of warfare against women rather than a tool allowing doctors to identify problems with foetal development as early as possible.
“What is a foetal heartbeat?” asks Ms Weigel. “And why does it matter?” As we’ve seen, pregnancy is a subject that leaves some feminists looking not only disingenuous but actually monstrous.
Roger Kimball on academia’s inauguration meltdown:
Academia has an infantilising effect. I understand that. Many professors dress and act like adolescents right up to the time they are ready to hand in their tenure and live off their generous pensions. The Peter-Pan aspect of academia is not entirely the professors’ fault. After all, the points at which the real world intrudes upon academia are so few and so tenuous that academics may be forgiven for some of their hyperbole and inadvertently comic displays of self-importance. They exist, like kept women of yore, entirely at the pleasure of an affluent society they despise. So in a way it is not surprising that they endeavour to transform their entire campus into a sort of existential boudoir, which is French for “room for pouting in.”
Peter Wood on attempts to make ‘progressive’ activism mandatory for students:
New Civics has appropriated the name of an older subject, but not the content of that subject or its basic orientation to the world. Instead of trying to prepare students for adult participation in the self-governance of the nation, the New Civics tries to prepare students to become social and political activists who are grounded in broad antagonism towards America’s founding principles and its republican ethos.
And Malhar Mali interviews the people behind the excellent Real Peer Review:
@RealPeerReview is a Twitter account that has steadily gained popularity and fans by exposing the humorous, nonsensical, and absurd trends in scholarship that are sometimes found in academic research. From Ph.D. theses, M.A. theses, to articles in disciplinary journals, the account highlights laughable “scholarship” such as exploring the black anus, how pumpkins and pumpkin spice lattes are oppressive and symbols of white privilege, a paper on a researcher’s experience of completing jigsaw puzzles, and how a scholar felt while drinking coffee and reading the Guardian.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
boudoir, which is French for “room for pouting in.”
Ah, a safe space!
Ultrasound shows the unborn baby is an unborn baby.
Therefore we must discourage ultrasounds.
#FeministLogic
#FeministLogic
See also this by Sean Davis:
The word dehumanise comes to mind.
How jaded and bitter a person do you have to be to feign shock at people who express joy over the creation of human life?
When you’re so intellectually-invested in abortion as an objective, unalloyed good, anything that brings that at all into doubt is… what’s the usual word these days? Ah yes, “problematic”.
I would also add that in many ways they’re like stereotypical royal courtiers of yore, living in a world of useless micro-gradations that they consider to be the height of refinement. At a fancy court you’d get booed for not being familiar with the fifteen pieces of cutlery scattered about your plate and their proper order of use at a meal. Similarly, in today’s clown quarter you’ll get booed for not being familiar with the fifteen genders assembled and their proper pronouns of address.
Exactly.
Heels are half an inch higher this season, and that shade of blue is out.
And you absolutely must stop with the cisnormativity of displaying vaginal symbolism at the Women’s March.
When everything is a five-alarm fire, nothing is.
Trump orders wall. Trump threatens Chicago with sending in the Feds. Trump cuts migration from countries Obama bombed. Trump ends funding for foreign abortions. Trump argues over the size of his inauguration crowd. Trump offers to rehear the Keystone pipeline. Trump summons Chaos (James Mattis). Trump calls CNN “fake news”. He hasn’t been in office a week, and he seems to be doing too much too fast for the press to keep up even if the press were to focus on the important things rather than, for instance, whether or not the weather turned sunny after one of Trump’s speeches. It’s fascinating to watch. Donald Trump, practically the incarnation of “look, a squirrel!”
“What is a foetal heartbeat?” asks Ms Weigel. “And why does it matter?”
Wow.
Wow.
In the comments following the Just Thwarted Sperm post, rjmadden shared a quite graphic article titled Mugged By Ultrasound, which recounts how, “Advances in ultrasound imaging… have forced [abortion] providers ever closer to the nub of their work.” And how, “This intimacy exacts an emotional toll, stirring sentiments for which doctors, nurses, and aides are sometimes unprepared.” At the time, I wondered if improvements in, and wider access to, high resolution real-time scans would change popular opinion on the subject. Apparently, they are doing.
Oh, and Trump ‘discarded a tradition fostered during the Obama administration of calling on a reporter from the Associated Press first’.
AP not happy, dedicates story to this non-event, has audacity to complain that The One Newly Called On First published fake news.
Look, a rabid dwarf squirrel! And a giant miniature space squirrel! Isn’t this a wonderful squirrel, folks? Under President Trump, squirrels will be great again. We will make yuuuuge squirrels, I’m telling you. The best squirrels.
It’s really fascinating to watch the ever more intricate contortions of logic abortion supporters go through in order to maintain their belief that abortion is a completely amoral process. I’d have more respect for them if they simply acknowledged the humanity of the fetus, but said what they really mean: they don’t care. They are willing to sacrifice others for their own personal gratification.
Another article from areomagazine makes an interesting observation:
https://areomagazine.com/2017/01/23/gad-saad-on-hysteria-and-collective-munchausen-around-donald-trump-speaking-out-as-an-academic-and-evolutionary-psychology-101/
[sorry for clumsiness of link, bit of a techtard]
sorry for clumsiness of link,
[ Gasps, splutters, faints with indignation. ]
Re Women’s March…
https://twitter.com/TimRunsHisMouth/status/823922489780817920
American technologist Jason Kottke links to The official org chart of the US government, asking readers to take notice of what’s right at the top: [the Constitution].
One day earlier, How to Address President Obama and Donald Trump, in which Kottke stamps his feet and shouts, Again and again, almost to a pathological degree, Trump has demonstrated, in word and deed, that he has not earned and does not deserve our respect and the title of his office….And since I am all for the “one-person-at-a-time” rule, this site will also continue to refer to Barack Obama as “President Obama”. He’s earned it many times over.
In between, Kottke passes on a list of every book Barack Obama recommended during his presidency (as compiled by Entertainment Weekly), noting:
Our most widely read US President, for sure.
Update: I’m getting some pushback on my assertion that Obama was “our most widely read US President”….. I didn’t mean that he had written the most books read by the most people (that is perhaps Teddy Roosevelt) or had read the most books (George W. Bush and Roosevelt were both voracious readers, as were Jefferson, Clinton, and Lincoln). I meant that compared to previous Presidents, Obama has read books from the widest spectrum of viewpoints and authors. Among the list of 86 (which are not the books he read in office but just the ones he publicly recommended) are books on politics (of course), science, economics, sports, and medicine, some classics, children’s books, plenty of fiction, and science fiction. Most importantly, the list includes many books written by women and persons of color…..outside of Clinton and perhaps Carter, I would wager very few Presidents have read many books by women and no more than a token few books by black authors.
Again with the menstruation.
Again with the menstruation.
Biohazard aside, it is always amusing to see these ninnies portraying themselves as street fighters. “Comrades, to the barricades ! What, I am the barricade ?”
Biohazard aside,
As noted in an earlier thread, it’s quite odd to watch a gathering of feminists complaining about “objectification” and insisting they’re more than their bodies, while wearing “pussy hats,” shouting about their vaginas and the things that leak out of them, and flashing their tits at people. It’s all rather confusing.
It’s all rather confusing.
It’s almost as if it were a mass of over-indulged, self-obsessed adolescents…
Tyler Cowen at Bloomberg: Why Trump’s Staff Is Lying
The words that came out of Spicer’s mouth are not obviously false. “This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe”. Yes, one might think that a large audience is a predictable result of population growth + increasing access to broadcast media, compounded by Trump’s attention-grabbing loudmouthed-ness.
A particular family of claims repeatedly being interpreted into Spicer’s mouth are obviously false, though. These are claims that focus on physical attendance count or a similar metric rather than total viewers.
Gee, why might physical attendance be low? Might there be something predictable about it?
But Tyler Cowen, who should be condemned to journalistic hell for his sins against reporting, just takes it for granted that everyone knows Spicer is lying without even giving a reference before he proceeds to give an “analysis” of why this supposed phenomenon is happening. Perhaps I should say “for shame”, but I have no evidence that this Bulverist can feel shame. Let me instead say a local proverb: “Thief thinks every man steals.”
“When you’re so intellectually-invested in abortion as an objective, unalloyed good, anything that brings that at all into doubt is… what’s the usual word these days? Ah yes, “problematic”.”
The Atlantic ran a bizarre piece by Moira Weigel titled, in Orwellian fashion, “How the Ultrasound Pushed the Idea That a Foetus Is a Person.”
Looks like someone at The Atlantic has changed the headline to ‘How Ultrasound Became Political’.
Looks like someone at The Atlantic has changed the headline to ‘How Ultrasound Became Political’.
While morally outlandish, the original title was at least less coy about Ms Weigel’s feminist pieties.
“What is a foetal heartbeat?” asks Ms Weigel. “And why does it matter?”
Foetal heartbeats are a pro-life conspiracy. Damn the Patriarchy!
Incidentally, dicentra is having a Twitter debate that’s not unrelated to one of the topics of this thread.
Re the Gad Saad link: Munchausen syndrome by proxy is when you have somebody under your care — say your child — and you harm that third party to garner sympathy.
You just have to see the pictures of leftists taking their offspring to these events to know that he’s on to something.
Non trivia.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/youve-been-wrong-about-where-the-death-star-trench-was-1791582520
Incidentally, dicentra is having a Twitter debate…
This one that the leftists always pull out is so tedious:
It is life immediately after conception because cellular respiration begins. If an object has no cellular respiration, it is either dead, or an inanimate object. Unless, in this case, “something” dies, that “something” is not going to turn into a turtle or mongoose, so I would be betting on “human”.
However…
There you have it, most leftists are neither alive, or human.
From Dicentra’s debate, her opponent asks: Then what rights should a woman have to her own body? You want to infringe on that..
The right to keep her legs crossed maybe?
Actually I like the idea of my right to control my own body overriding the rights of all other lifeforms. True, I have no uterus or vagina, but I have a penis. As it IS my penis, where I put it is my business and no one else’s. The desires of my intended recipient are irrelevant, because requiring consent would be a violation of my right to control where I put my penis. My Penis, My Choice! Keep Your Laws Off My Penis! Rape! On demand and without apology!
And I wouldn’t even have to kill anyone to consummate my bodily autonomy, so who could possibly complain?
(do I really have to put in a /sarc tag?)
WaPo notices that Trump is moving fast and flinging squirrels: 11 stories from President Trump’s first 100 hours that deserve more attention
A sample of the breathless fervor on offer:
Oh, and my first attempt to post this comment led to ALWAYS_ONLINE_NO_COPY_BOX error. Thoughts, David?
first attempt to post this comment led to ALWAYS_ONLINE_NO_COPY_BOX error. Thoughts, David?
I occasionally see timeouts that require me to refresh the page before posting a comment I’ve been mulling for too long, but I’ve no idea what that is.
#InsufficientTechSkillz
It can’t survive on its own. It can not reproduce and it drains resources from its host.
Charming criteria.
http://www.steynonline.com/7064/ive-got-a-crush-on-you-baby via http://www.steynonline.com/7684/wrong-and-wronger
I’ve no idea what that is.
I assume that Typepad is using CloudFlare, since that’s a CloudFlare error message.
CloudFlare is a service that ensures that your web site stays up – it blocks DDoS attacks, manages traffic spikes, and caches copies of your web site’s dynamically generated pages (like this one) on proxy servers so that if your actual site goes down, people still see the last copy that was cached.
In this case, ALWAYS_ONLINE_NO_COPY_BOX means that there’s no copy of that web page in the proxy servers, and the proxy servers can’t talk to the real web site to get the real web page.
Clear as mud?
Somewhat related, from the archives: A dogmatically progressive “non-binary” parent who describes the child she’s carrying at four months into pregnancy as “nothing… a bundle of cells.”
I would also add that in many ways they’re like stereotypical royal courtiers of yore, living in a world of useless micro-gradations that they consider to be the height of refinement. At a fancy court you’d get booed for not being familiar with the fifteen pieces of cutlery scattered about your plate and their proper order of use at a meal.
Consider Henry II, with a focus on such labels as king, princess, duke, earl, being, in fact, job titles where all such involve doing the job, or else . . .
Consider math, where there are entire areas of information that are rather obscure and understood by rather a few—at which point the reaction of the few when encountering the many is A) Ah, let’s review Such, where Thus, Thus, That, The Other, Etc, which is then followed by B) Got it? Good, welcome to the study. Now that we are all equally briefed, let w be an instance of . . . . . . . .
Charming criteria.
Indeed, and more of the idiotic boilerplate arguments they come up with. The ICUs of the world are full of people who can’t survive on their own, neither can any newborn mammal, nor are either capable of reproduction without some serious outside help, and both require “host resources”. When that is pointed out, the only counterpoint I have ever heard is, “that’s different”, or that in their odd cosmology the nanosecond before a sprog pops out it is a clump of cells, and the nanosecond after apparently atmospheric gases turn it into a human.
I occasionally see timeouts that require me to refresh the page before posting a comment I’ve been mulling for too long, but I’ve no idea what that is.
Um. I’m not quite parsing what that in what that is. relates to . . .
. . . . But at least of the logic of website operations, and based on the same experience, an educated guess is that first a page is delivered to a browser with the primary understanding that what is delivered is the current and therefore primary data, with a known particular timestamp.
After a bit of time, while someone is staring at the current and primary page delivered to the browser, and typing things up, one of assorted others who’ve been doing the same hit the Post button on that browser view, to update the page on the website. At that point the browser states to the website, I have update data.
The website response is Um, hang on a second, lemme compare your time stamps with mine. My timestamps state that my current and primary was created before your update, therefore yes, I will accept your update as the later edition. The updated page then becomes the new current and primary.
And then in turn, when those still typing then hit Post, the website announces Ah, No. My information is newer than yours and therefore gets precedence. Refresh your view of my current and primary to get that actual current and primary, and then let’s see about getting yours in here . . .
—and of how the JavaScript and other is set up, I’m slowly starting to dig my way in to doing my own, but haven’t the particular understanding of the coding. Yet.
Oh, yes, and:
When you’re so intellectually-invested in abortion as an objective, unalloyed good, anything that brings that at all into doubt is… what’s the usual word these days? Ah yes, “problematic”.
Bingo.
It can’t survive on its own. It can not reproduce and it drains resources from its host.
Hmmm, sounds like every Progressive I’ve ever met.
Thank you, David
[ Italics safely contained, he vanishes into the night, a figure of mystery. ]
My Twitterlocutors in abortion debates operate from two basic premises:
1) All “pro-life” arguments are a pretext to punish women for being nasty little sluts. It’s all about controlling whether a woman can have sex without permission from Teh Patriarchy or whether she can control her own sexuality. All this blather about an embryo or fetus being human is just a way to make women PAY for their naughty behavior. OH YES YOU DO TOO BELIEVE THAT! YES YOU DO! YOU DO TOO! YOU DON’T EVEN CARE ABOUT WOMEN!
2) A woman is justified in using lethal force against a third party who is using her body without her consent. [insert parasitism analogies]
That second one is a fairly recent escalation, which when I see it leads me to believe I’m dealing with a full-time online Activist rather than a random Twitter user. (An actual random Twitter user INSISTED that none of the prochoice crowd sees abortion as a means of contraception, seriously, no one. I had to produce some recent examples to debunk that.)
The first premise is at least 100 years old: The earliest feminist writers identified child-bearing as the primary means by which men kept women under control. Slaves to their own biology, I guess.
Which, in an age with zero birth control, that’s effectively the case, but HELLO THE PILL IS OLDER THAN A HALF-CENTURY and with plenty of methods to make sure Nobody Gets Conceived–including reversible surgery–there’s no reason for a woman to feel oppressed by her own ovulation.
Except that third-wave feminism is about “empowering” women by making sure that they are sheltered from all unwelcome consequences of their actions (oh hey, just like Leftism), so insisting that sex and pregnancy are naturally linked is MISOGYNY.
Also, back in the day when there was no reliable birth control, there was also this little thing called a SHOTGUN WEDDING in which men were forced to take responsibility for THEIR sexual behavior. I’ve got several relatives in that category (parents’ and grandparents’ generations) who stayed married for life.
Feminists have no problem saying that (a) women by themselves can choose to carry or not carry a conceived infant, and (b) if she chooses to carry the man HAS TO PAY ALL THE BILLS.
Reciprocity?
*snort*
Meanwhile in other news, some sort of actress gets her activist on:
I hope she doesn’t get any virtual blisters or virtual flat feet from all that virtual marching.
My Twitterlocutors in abortion debates operate from two basic premises
Remember that not every person who is pro-abortion believes either of these two propositions.
Your premise that birth control is infallible is however flawed. There are plenty of cases that you ignore:
— a girl living at home with parents who won’t allow her to take the pill makes a mistake at a party and gets pregnant.
— a person taking the pill forgets to take the pill or mistimes the changeover from “on” to “off”.
— the woman thinks she is no longer fertile, but is wrong and conceives aged 51.
Yes they are mistakes, but we all make mistakes.
That’s why I am happy for early-stage abortion to be legal — basically as soon as it becomes clear that you have conceived. Before we have a person on our hands.
I don’t like the tendency of the US sides, pro and anti, to insist that abortion is always wrong or always right, and that there are no acceptable exceptions. That’s rarely how morality works.
Weirdly in the US both sides of the abortion debate then tend to take diametrically opposed sides on the death sentence and gun control — pro-Life apparently only applies to foetuses, and killing people yourself with a gun or allowing the State to do it are fine — whereas pro-Choice troop out to say that it’s barbaric to kill any adult, no matter how repulsive, and that guns are always bad. If you are going be strongly pro-Life, then in my book you better be against the death penalty and not for loose gun control or your argument loses all its emotional force that life is sacred.
Trump needs to increase funding for research of Cluster B.
Before we have a person on our hands.
Therein lies the rub.
Given that there is little agreement among those who wish to draw a line for “person-hood” somewhere post-conception as to where that line should be, primarily because medical advances keep pushing outside the womb viability closer to the moment of conception, the best we can say is we don’t know when person-hood begins. Ignorance argues for restraint, not destruction.
As for mistakes happening, what moral framework allows us to require that which is wholly innocent to bear the consequences of such a mistake or accident?
I used to be a feminist because I wanted to be defined by things other than my breasts and uterus. Do I even have to say that I’m no longer a “feminist”?
If you are going be strongly pro-Life, then in my book you better be against the death penalty and not for loose gun control or your argument loses all its emotional force that life is sacred.
Life in the womb is utterly innocent, having taken no willful action to be where he or she is. Any time a woman consents to sex, she consents to the risk of pregnancy. The fact that contraception isn’t 100% (or that women forget to take pills) is part of the risk. That’s not the same as saying that no abortion should be ever ever ever performed, ever. It is to say that if a teenager accidentally conceives, she’s better off bringing the child to term and then turning him or her over to adoptive parents or raising the child herself.
Or do you know women who opted against abortion, carried to term, and then regretted it? (Yes, they often regret giving up a child for adoption but not that they carried to term.)
The death penalty addresses the fact that someone committed a willful crime, not that the person is loathsome. There are plenty of loathsome people in this world who have committed no capital crimes and therefore shouldn’t be in jail let alone on death row, even though they’re doing enormous harm to society. This very blog catalogs the antics of such people.
As for gun control, there is a positive correlation between strict gun controls and gun violence: cities like Chicago and Washington D.C. have extremely strict gun controls and high violence levels, whereas Utah has had extremely liberal concealed-carry laws and low gun violence. That’s because urban GANGS account for most gun violence, and they never obey the law at all, never mind gun-control laws, but they create enough fear (and they’re Blue Empires) so the politicians “crack down on violence” to exactly zero effect.
Being armed for the purpose of self-defense is not a violation of valuing life.
Consenting to capital punishment for capital crimes is often predicated on the fact that someone unlawfully and immorally took a life, and therefore the most extreme punishment must be exacted.
It only LOOKS inconsistent to those who don’t hold the positions themselves.
Doesn’t mean it is.