US politics

Parenthical notifications considered harmful

Abortion, Feminism, US politics
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Many American states have some kind of law requiring parental notification for underage women wanting an abortion. The point of these laws is to enable proper communication between parents and children on this topic, that parents are not kept in ignorance of their daughter undergoing a (supposedly) dangerous medical procedure. Some girls however can’t tell their parents even they required to by law and those girls end up in the courts getting a waiver. But who are those girls?

Harriet J. has the answer, based on her own experience dealing with them. Ranked from most often to least often, these are girls who:

  1. have dads missing in action
  2. or a dead parent
  3. or parents opposed to the abortion
  4. or who don’t have an ID
  5. or who have been raped
  6. or who have been raped and don’t (want to) know it
  7. or who come from an abusive family
  8. or who cannot let their parents know as they would not be able to deal with it
  9. or who are in some kind of legal wasteland

And she also knows who these girls are not:

The girl who just whimsically doesn’t want her parents to know grows up to be the woman who just whimsically gets an abortion, all nail-biting and hair-twirling and “Gosh! I didn’t realize my baby has fingernails WHAT.”

And the upshot is:

So, there you go. Girls who can’t tell their parents about their abortions? After you pass a parental notification law, they still can’t tell their parents. Girls who can tell their parents? After you pass a parental notification law, they still tell their parents, unless they fall into an ill-defined legal loophole – then they tell their parents but still have to come get a bypass. A parental notification law accomplishes two things: 1) it takes the girls who can’t tell their parents and penalizes them for not being able to tell their parents and, 2) it takes a portion of the girls who can tell their parents and makes them go through the process anyway.

But of course, as Harriet J. and her commenters are fully aware of, the overt reasons why these laws are passed are horseshit. The real reason is to a) make it that much more difficult to get an abortion, b) make it easier to shut down abortion clinics for “breaking the law” and c) perhaps most important, punish these girls for having sex in the first place. It’s the last impulse that makes abortion and sexual politics so frustrating in the US, as this is something that you can’t reason people out of, as it’s not a position they have reached through reason.

How is that megaphone working out for you?

Grand Old Paedophilia Party, IT is not magic pixie dust, US politics
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The Republicans recently launched a new website, America Speaking Out to give the American public a “megaphone” to give the party ideas for the elections this autumn. Here’s one example of what they got:

Idea for New Jobs: Construct Additional Pylons. This will keep our drones gainfully employed and increase the side of our base.

The Washington Post has more. It’s as if they don’t understand the internet at all. Yet they have nor problems finding rentboys on the web, strictly to “carry their luggage” of course.

Your daily NYT shovel of steaming bullshit

Manufacturing consent, Media, US politics, Video
Published on 1 Comment on Your daily NYT shovel of steaming bullshit

The New York Times has always been an active cheerleader for mendacious or false stories about Democratic candidates, usually staying just short of outright lying, if only through allowing third parties to lie for them, followed up by halfassed denounciations. But their smear campaign against senatorial candidate Richard Blumenthal crosses that line completely. Their story is that Blumenthal, who served in the Marine Reserves during the War on Vietnam, but not in that war itself and who has been a staunch supporter of war veteran causes, has been fibbing about his service to create the impression that he did go to ‘Nam:

But what is striking about Mr. Blumenthal’s record is the contrast between the many steps he took that allowed him to avoid Vietnam, and the misleading way he often speaks about that period of his life now, especially when he is speaking at veterans’ ceremonies or other patriotic events.

Sometimes his remarks have been plainly untrue, as in his speech to the group in Norwalk. At other times, he has used more ambiguous language, but the impression left on audiences can be similar.

Along the article they provide video fotoage of a speech in which Blumenthal says he was in Vietnam”, specifically “We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam”. But they don’t provide the whole video, which soon makes it clear that actually, apart from that quoted sentence he makes quite clear he served during, not in Vietnam. And if Blumenthal was so eager to fudge his record, you’d also expect him to mention it during the recent Democratical senatorial debate, but no:


 

The original story has been followed up with several new stories and editorials, none of which bring new evidence for the NYT’s allegations, but which do keep repeating them. The effect wasn’t long in common, with Blumenthal’s lead over likely Republican opponents dropping quickly after the original story was published. Pushback from the campaign as well as bloggers, once it became clear how false the story was has been fierce, but the paper stands by its now disproven accusations:

The New York Times in its reporting uncovered Mr. Blumenthal’s long and well established pattern of misleading his constituents about his Vietnam War service, which he acknowledged in an interview with The Times. Mr. Blumenthal needs to be candid with his constituents about whether he went to Vietnam or not, since his official military records clearly indicate he did not.

The video doesn’t change our story. Saying that he served “during Vietnam” doesn’t indicate one way or the other whether he went to Vietnam.

Local reporters meanwhile — the ones actually in Connecticut having followed Blumenthal for years — are puzzled over these allegations:

So I asked reporters, anchors and columnists to tell me (a) whether they could remember Blumenthal ever claiming to have served in Vietnam and (b) whether they had been under the impression for whatever reason, that Blumenthal had served in Vietnam. Here are the answers so far.

Mark Pazniokas of the Connecticut Mirror, who may have covered Blumenthal more often than anybody else, referred me to his quote in an NPR national story: “Every time he talked about his military record, he was quite clear that he had been a military reservist and never came close to suggesting he was in Vietnam.”

Greg Hladky of the Hartford Advocate, formerly of the New Haven Register and Bridgeport Post, right up there with Paz in Blumenthal coverage: “Never personally heard [Blumenthal] say he was in Vietnam. I knew he had been the the Marine Corps Reserve, talked about that briefly during interview for a profile I did recently, and he never mentioned being in Nam.”

It goes on like that, with half a dozen or so prominent local journalists saying that, no, they never got the impression served in ‘Nam, knocking the stuffing out of the idea that Blumenthal consistently lied about his service. The question remains why the New York Times went for this smear campaign on such slender evidence. Smearing happens all the times, but usually a supposedly unbiased newspaper like the NYT is careful not to be too transparant…

Sarah Bloody Palin

Palin, US politics
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The most depressing thing I’ve read all week:

Palin has figured out that this is really all you have to do to win elections in this country — flatter middle Americans’ moronic fantasies about themselves.

[…]

Sarah Palin on the other hand really is the kind of person who you can picture eating egg salad off a ping-pong table. That and her utterly genuine stupidity and meanness can take her a long way — all by themselves, I think these things can win the White House for her — and it seems like she senses this on an animal/reptilian level. Hence the renewed emphasis on jacking off her audiences of late.

Not to worry. The next post down has kittens.

Libertarianism: suited only for bright twelve year old sociopaths

US politics, Wingnuts
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Now it’s certainly true that socialists and communists and their fellow travellers can spent endless hours discussing theoretical matters that have little or no relevance to our current political situation. To normal people, the debate about e.g. whether or not the Soviet Union was a state capitalist society or a degenerated workers state must seem not only pointless, but slightly offensive in how it neglects the real truths of Stalinist oppression. But at least these discussions, no matter how ritualistic they’ve become over the years, can serve some purpose in analysing where the 1917 revolution went wrong and how to prevent that next time. Can the same be said about the debate currently raging in libertarian circles about whether or not the 1880s should be considered the closest any society has come to a libertarian utopia?

I mean, for any sane non-libertarian person the 1880s, with its oppression of anybody other than white, protestant, heterosexual males, is not exactly a good era to want to emulate, even if it is slightly better than libertarianism’s previous utopia, the 1850s. It should be a given even for libertarians that, though there is genuine reason for concern, 21st century America is much freer for a majority of its inhabitants than the 1880s ever was, simply due to the fact that non-white, protestant heterosexual males are no longer considered second rank citizens under law. But apparently for libertarians this is not so obvious.

Crooked Timber has two nice posts up about the handwringing in libertarian circles on this subject: adventures in libertarian blindspots and the more libertarianism thread.

Those are great reads, especially the comment threads, but it’s the third post on the subject where it gets silly, as CT reports on one Bryan Caplan trying to partially rescue this libertarian utopis by arguing that actually, women were too free in the 1880s and what freedoms they didn’t have weren’t important anyway:

In what ways, then, were American women in 1880 less free than men? Most non-libertarians will naturally answer that women couldn’t vote. But from a libertarian point of view, voting is at most instrumentally valuable.

This is stupid enough on its own, especially when you consider that voting is only one part of political participation, but it gets worse. Caplan continues his post by considering the legal position of women in the 1880s, concentrating solely on his own limited understanding of the law at that time, as researched via Wikipedia and explaining why this doesn’t mean women were less free then. He acknowledges that women who married lost their legal standing as a person in her own right, but argues a) that women who wanted to could get exceptions to this rule if their future husbands consented, b) people expected this “division of labour” as he calls it anyway, so didn’t care about its unfairness, c) this traditional understanding “made a lot of sense” back then anyway and d) ” the letter of the law rarely makes a difference in marriage” anyway. No wonder he concludes:

I know that my qualified defense of coverture isn’t going to make libertarians more popular with modern audiences. Still, truth comes first. Women of the Gilded Age were very poor compared to women today. But from a libertarian standpoint, they were freer than they are on Sex and the City.

One wonders if women were so free why feminism ever got started…

Caplan focuses monomanically on political/legal theory as if by parsing this you can decide people are free without taking into consideration the whole reality of the society in which they live. If some women could keep control of their finances that means all women were free and the failure of the vast majority of women to do so is their own personal fault. This is of course a logical consequence from believing in libertarianism, which at its core maintains that in the absence of governmental interference, anything an individual does is of their own free choice and which does not recognise any non-governmental pressures. Now of course most libertarians are bright enough to not quite believe it, know enough history to know that people do not need governments to oppress each other and hence are slightly more pragmatic in their beliefs. But a post like this, which is actually taken serious by other libertarians, is good in re-exposing this reality that libertarianism at its core only makes sense if you’re a bright twelve year old sociapath.