$3 billion to keep the Mexicans out
$300,000 to give them a reason to stay
Maybe, just maybe if we were a little more generous with the disaster aid we could be a little less paranoid about the borders. I’m just sayin….
Monthly Archives: November 2007
Libertarian means liberty dumbasses
Hey you! Yeah you!
What?
Gimme your kidney.
What? No! I don’t want to give you my kidney.
Doesn’t matter. Gimme your kidney. I need it or I will die.
I’m sorry, but I don’t want to give you my kidney. I don’t want to risk my life to give you my kidney.
But I’ll die without it.
But I could die giving it to you. And even if I didn’t die, I’d miss a lot of work. I might even lose my job. I can’t afford that.
You might die if you give me a kidney, but I will die if you don’t give me a kidney.
So how is that my problem.
You made the choice to sit next to me knowing full well that there are people in the world who need kidneys. If you didn’t want to give up a kidney, you shouldn’t have taken the bus.
I’m just trying to get to work. I didn’t plan on giving up a kidney.
Then you should have made better choices.
There’s like 40 people on this bus. How was I supposed to know who needs a kidney? I just sat down in the only open seat.
If you didn’t want to give me your kidney, you should have stood up in the aisle. But it’s too late now. The next stop is the hospital.
There’s a dustup over at Shakesville because Melissa had the ovaries to call out Ron Paul and his supporters on their hypocrisy. See they’re all for libertarian ideas, until it comes to women having the most basic of property rights – the right to control their own bodies.
See, it doesn’t matter if you think a fetus is a person with full rights or a potential person with no rights. One of our basic principles is the idea that a person has the right to control what happens to their own body. We do not force people into organ donation. We do not force people into medical experimentation (ok- sometimes we do but it’s generally done secretly and people get pretty pissed when it happens) and for the moment we do not force people into military service. We no longer forcibly sterilize people either. We have made mistakes in not allowing liberties to certain people in the past with slavery, but our goal as a nation is to move towards greater liberty- not less.
Your body is the only thing you can be sure of owning for your entire life. But for half of us, there is a high risk that control over our own bodies will be taken from us if we get pregnant. That is not a little threat. It is a deal breaker in a political candidate, even if that candidate is the most anti-war.
If a political candidate is not willing to allow half the population liberty over their own bodies, that same candidate cannot be trusted to protect any liberties.
For Wonder
That Colbert-Stewart threesome may become a Colbert-Stewart-Olbermann orgy. And Daniel Levin deserves a statue for letting himself be waterboarded in order to decide if waterboarding is torture.
Water-boarding, he said, is torture.
Legally, it is torture!
Practically, it is torture!
Ethically, it is torture!
And he wrote it down.
It’s Election Day!
And I am going to vote the Stranger’s cheat sheet. Lazy, perhaps. But they keep much better tabs on local pols than I can and with few exceptions I am generally in agreement with the paper on politics.
Go vote folks. It may not be for president, but it’s still important.
If turtle sex is what it takes
then turtle sex is what you get. This picture was taken at the zoo in Villahermosa, Mexico. Villahermosa and most of the state of Tabasco are under water right now. Much like Katrina, very little help is coming to the poor people there. Huhm, I wonder why that is- could it be because they are brown and poor? I have to think of the fires in California just a few weeks ago. People couldn’t line up fast enough to offer evacuees yoga lessons and entertainment.
This monkey statue, also in Villahermosa looks to the sky to ask “Why is there no help for the people here? Why is the United States only offering $300,000 (yes- thousand, not millions) in aid?”
All silliness aside, Villahermosa is a lovely city and aside from it being the place where I got “whatevered” for not being a Mexican and the people are drowning in water up to their rooftops. Brownfemipower has lots of good information- you should go read over there RIGHT NOW
Just a little more information- the only good pictures I found of the flood are at Brownfemipower’s place. The sad job our media is doing of covering natural disasters that affect poor people is disgusting. I am truly ashamed to be an American and a neighbor to Mexico right now.
Oh Hell! I guess the secret is out now
Women- not stupid, really.
I am a mother. I became a mother at a very young age, just a week shy of my 20th birthday. I am now and always have been pro choice and when I found out I was pregnant with the Kid I had to decide if I was going to have him. I was rational about it. I knew that I was going to end up parenting alone. I knew all the drawbacks and I still decided to have him.
I was pregnant before that and I’ve been pregnant since then. I have the bizarre fortune of being extremely fertile and if 2 methods of birth control aren’t used at all times I will end up pregnant again. I should totally donate my eggs to science. But in the mean time- I have one child, but I’ve had more than one pregnancy. I was just as rational, if not more so, in deciding to end those pregnancies as I was in deciding to keep the Kid.
Contrary to popular opinion, I was not ever coerced into abortion. Actually, when I was pregnant with the Kid more than a few helpful “friends” tried to push me into having an abortion and when that didn’t work, into putting him up for adoption. Neither were a possibility at the time. I cannot explain it, but the Kid was the kid I was meant to be mom to. I didn’t feel the same way about the other pregnancies.
When I found out I was pregnant with the Kid, I was at a Planned Parenthood. For the same price as a test kit from the drugstore I got a full examination and a pregnancy test. The doctor asked if I knew what my options were and what I wanted to do. I said I was having a baby and I was happy about it. There was never any pressure to change my mind about it from anyone at the clinic.
When I had an abortion I actually went through more counseling than when I decided to have a baby. The clinic staff always made sure that having an abortion was exactly what I wanted. I was as adamant about not having a baby as I was about having the Kid. I am sure that if I wavered at all they would have given me space to figure out what I wanted before doing anything. Throughout the whole thing I was asked repeatedly, at each step, if this is what I wanted. I was given more chances to opt out of an abortion by abortion providers than I was ever given to opt out of pregnancy by obstetricians (number of times an OB asked me if I wanted to be pregnant- ZERO).
So when some non-doctor in a suit wants to ensure that women are getting abortions of their own free will, I know that he has no idea what he’s talking about. Abortion providers already go out of their way to make sure women are making their own choices, because that is what reproductive rights are about. It is not about racking up numbers and profits, it’s about ensuring that women become mothers when they want to and that they have options to not become mothers when they need them.
We are not stupid. We know exactly what we are getting ourselves into when it comes to pregnancy and abortion. We know, better than most men, exactly the kind of work that parenting requires and how much of a sacrifice that is. What I don’t understand is why you would ever want to make someone perform those sacrifices who doesn’t with her entire being want to. That is not healthy for the mom or the kid.
About those horrible things we do to ourselves
“God Transcends Nationalism”
I just want to clairfy I’m not trying to advocate for anarchy here. I’m just problematizing the the previous claim that one should see elected legislators as instruments of God. I believe each person, including the members of the board of supervisors, is flawed and finite and should discern the will of God for themselves rather than assume that persons in power will automatically work out a divine plan— Rev. Nancy McLadd, Bull Run Unitarian Universalists
Sunday Art Blogging
I don’t know much about Barbara Kruger. I just know that I love her work. This is normally the part where I give you a little history about the artist, but instead I am going to do something else. I am going to tell you why it is that these pieces hit me in the gut and make think.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the things women have to go through to make themselves presentable to the world. It’s not just a matter of looking a certain way, pretty enough to be worthy of attention but not so sexually available as to be prey for a rapist, but that women do things on a regular basis that cause them harm in order to be accepted in the world.
I wrote a while ago about the girl whose vagina was obliterated by pus after she got an infection from waxing- twice! More recently there have been problems with lead in lipstick. What about infections from manicures or toxins in nail polish? Did you know that manicurists suffer from high rates of respiratory diseases and pregnancy complications? What about all the stuff we put on our hair to make it shiny, straight, wavy, curly or another color? A lifetime of putting chemicals on our hair, face, nails and bodies has got to have some effect. Then there’s the shoes. Oh god I love how pretty high heels are but the pain from wearing them. Even our underwear causes us pain- whether it’s the discomfort from wearing a thong or the horrible things that happen when we wear something other than comfy cotton granny panties (yeast infections and the like).
And I haven’t even gotten into the risk of death from plastic surgery. The stuff above are just the little things we do to ourselves everyday. I’m certainly no feminist saint on the issue, I have one closet full of shoes that make me cry and another full of products to make my hair and skin perfect and a drawer full of matching bra and panty sets that make me spend the day uncomfortable.
Why do we have to spend so much time making ourselves into something we are not? Why is our default position when it comes to our looks that there is always room for improvement? Why does it seem that everything we do to “improve” ourselves involves some kind of pain, discomfort or risk?
Your body is a battleground means more to me than just how are reproductive freedom is usurped by old white men in business suits. Everyday we do things to our bodies so that we can get by as best as we can in the world with as minimum hassle as possible. It would be nice if we were actually free to be ourselves (whether that self is a lipsticked, high heeled soccer mom or an all natural makeup free ceo in birkenstocks) instead of having to put on an acceptable image for public consumption.