A historic moment

[fpb]

This election has already given us a historic moment; a moment which, I think, may well feature in future histories, become the centre of scholarly debate, and perhaps even be remembered as one of those factoids that everyone remembers about historical figures - like Pontius Pilate washing his hands, or Washington's troops starving at Valley Forge, or the fat figure and six wives of Henry VIII.

No, I don't mean the debate, although the results of the debate may well come to connect themselves with the event I mean. The event I mean is the publication, by the Obama campaign, of the following blog entry:



This is incredible. If it means anything, it means that the Republicans, if elected, would engage in a campaign of tearing out uteri from living women.

I think I can say with a clean conscience that no campaign ever stooped this low. This is a record, and, I would say, probably unsurpassable. My friends who are historians and know what I am talking about can make the mental experiment: project yourselves into the minds of Julius Streicher or Gabriele d'Annunzio. Try to imagine Streicher saying that about Jews, or d'Annunzio about democratic politicians. You can't. You know you can't. They would not think of it; and if they did, they, even they, would laugh at it as at a crazy joke. The evident and rather unpleasant sexualness of the enclosed drawing, featuring a lightly-dressed, apparently underaged young lady with her clothes being blown all over by the wind - the very image of the worst kind of irresponsible male fantasies - makes the thing even worse: it as good as invites women to identify with this near-paedophile fantasy image, and to imagine that there is something there that is worth something for women to keep and that it threatens women to lose. The abyss of abjection in the association of visual idea and depraved gag literally challenges description and analysis.

This does, of course, confirm my old belief that abortion is the central issue and the driving force of so much that seems unhinged and bewildering about modern politics. But it also suggests a desperacy lurking somewhere below the confident gloss of Obaman politics; as though these people felt the breath of the Avenger of Blood breathing over their neck, and feared it even where the rest of us can't begin to feel any presence except theirs. It is like the crazed language of British medical bodies on the subject of abortion - language that a child would know was insane. But it also suggests an essential hollowness at the heart of the Obaman message. If that is the sort of thing they resort to, they must feel they have exhausted every other weapon. Now, add this to the effect of Romney's definite victory in last night's debate, and see what you get.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on your robotic repetition of Democratic talking points (what I mean is that there is not one of your supposed points I haven't heard before, often in the exact same words - which scarcely suggests independence of thought). If Planned Butchery does anything other than abortion, it must be counting the taxpayer money they get; it certainly isn't women's health. As for the rest, I don't know about Aspirin, but I can tell you that Coca-cola is a fairly efficient contraceptive, accounting for 90% of sperm. As a Catholic, the prospect of women no longer dosing themselves with infernal brews of chemicals and hormones and abortifacients does not particularly displease me, and the notion that "women's sexuality" should consist in being able to say yes as often as possible without consequences comes across as somewhat less than feministic. As I said of the trashy picture that goes with this vile filth, the whole thing seems to be about convincing women that an image of women as scantily-clad teen temptresses with flimsy clothes blowing in the wind is somehow something they should fight for, and should dread to lose.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

" I haven't heard before, often in the exact same words "

A poor heuristic, here; facts are facts. People defending evolution will make the same points, too. As for the supposed wording, *shrug*, I wrote everything not in quotation marks myself, the quotes coming from Wikipedia.

"If Planned Butchery does anything other than abortion, it must be counting the taxpayer money they get; it certainly isn't women's health"

Cancer and disease screening have nothing to do with health?

As for Coca-Cola: http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/sperm.asp

And the "infernal brews" are just women's own hormones.

No point in arguing about values when we can't even agree on facts.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah?. I double dare you to try and get a vaginal infection treated, or a case of breast cancer assessed,at any of their "clinics".

Plenty of point in arguing about values when your pseudo-values distort your facts and you don't even realize it. The Akin affair, to anyone interested in facts, has long since died down - the poor sap had just done what abortion supporters routinely do, stupidly repeating what had been talking points among the more idiot branches of the medical profession when he was young. He has withdrawn his dumb statement and shown that he understood it was dumb - which is more than abortion supporters ever do. And as a believer in representative government, I find it interesting that you should ban certain representatives from discussing matters of public interest due to their genital apparatus; somehow I doubt you would ban women from any similar discussion - unless of course they happened to belong to the wrong party. And apart that contraception is not only about the goddamn pill - it is about even worse devices, such as IUDs that frequently injure the womb - anyone who, in this day and age, has not heard about the lousy effects of the unnatural mix of hormones and chemicals you feel so smug about, on both the bodies of women and the environment, is hiding in a cave, metaphorically speaking.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

"And as a believer in representative government, I find it interesting that you should ban certain representatives from discussing matters of public interest due to their genital apparatus"

Your values are distorting your reading comprehension. I didn't imply men should be banned; I noted that *women* were not included in a health panel about their own health options. They were the ones effectively banned. The appropriate analogy would be a panel entirely of women deciding on payment for prostate exams, or on paternal visitation and custody rights.

"IUDs that frequently injure the womb" -- this seems to be about as accurate as your belief that Coca-cola is an effective contraceptive.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

As for your defence of your views on representative government, if the said panel had women in it and came to the same conclusions, you would just conclude that they weren't "real" women. That's what your party did to Sarah Palin and does to any women who dares disagree with their notion of "women's" sexuality - which is actually a male sexual fantasy which some unhappy women have internalized, to their own very evident distress expressed in shrill anger and unreasoning hatred.

About the vast health dangers of contraceptives (depo-provera causes bone loss, IUDs injure the womb, the Pill messes with the natural hormonal cycle - etc) and the increasingly disastrous effects of the Pill on the environment (rise of sexual disfunction among fish and other animals) the trouble is that your values so interfere with your sense of reality that you could read whole reams of articles and reports and dismiss them as biased junk science. I have been through this before, which is why I won't bother giving you the references I have. I would have to expect you to have an open mind before I wasted my time, and anyone who can repeat with a straight face that most of what Planned Slaughter do is not abortion is too bound up with abortionist fables for reason.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

You are not, in fact, a telepath; claims of what I would do are inappropriate as well as inaccurate.

"Planned Slaughter" is also uncalled for. And while I may have overestimated the amount of non-reproductive health services they provide, it still seems solidly the case that their provision of birth control vastly outnumbers their provision of abortion. You are caught up in your fables, as well as your paternalistic dismissal of the agency of women who enjoy sex and lifestyles you disapprove of.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

What Planned Mass Murder is killing is human life. It is nothing else: not beef, not sheep, not slugs, not worms. Those are homo sapiens bodies they rip to bits and dispose of. I understand you are all right with that, but don't try to deny that what goes on when one organization accounts for, at a conservative estimate, one million living beings a year, is slaughter and nothing less. Chicago meatpackers slaughter cattle for money. PP slaughters human bodies - always for money.

"Women who enjoy sex". I have news for you: all women enjoy sex, otherwise the human race would have gone extinct long ago. The kind you mean is women who have somehow become incapable of doing without sex, who speak as though sex were as necessary as breathing and eating and drinking , the addicts; a sad product of the prevalence of advertising and pornography, women who have internalized the worst kind of male behaviour and make their lives a misery in consequence. And I was not speaking from telepathy, but from experience. I have argued this kind of thing a few times now, and I know what to expect.