The Antisocial Socialist

From nom_de_grr:

This is absolutely the most outrageous news story to come out of my hometown in a while.

In a nutshell, Planned Parenthood was going to donate some land to Habitat for Humanity, but an anti-abortion group called the American Life League pummeled Habitat International with 10,000 emails, demanding that Habitat nix the deal. Because donors were threatening to walk over the association with PP, Habitat was forced to pull out.

In one of the nation's more expensive towns to live in, three affordable houses for struggling working people will not be built because a pro-life pressure group is on a slash and burn campaign.

I stopped getting upset about politics a long time ago, but this is just too much. Seriously, this blog post is a CALL TO ACTION. Click here to donate to the Sarasota chapter of Habitat for Humanity, and while you're at it, shoot them an email telling them why you are giving them your support. And click here to let Habitat International know how abhorrent and unacceptable it is that they buckled to such nasty political pressure.

PLEASE REPOST.

Thanks.

This year's topic is a simple one: tell us, and your readers, why you're pro-choice.

Because no one has a right to use someone else's body without his or her consent. It's that simple, though it seems to be a ridiculously hard concept for some people to get their heads around.

There are other good reasons for being pro-choice, in that when women are able to control our own reproductive choices, it benefits everyone (lower crime rates, fewer deaths through back-alley abortions, more resources available for existing children), but it basically comes down to a basic respect for individual autonomy that is crucial in any just and functional society.

Also, because I like to "spread my legs without consequences."

New Gaybortion!: There's porn of everything.

Before you lose all respect for me, read this.

And because I can, the Ted Nugent Quote of the Day:

How, ask ye, does an old fart like that historical goofball Nuge have so much dangtootin' fun and be in total control of his adventurous life? Memorize this, kids—write it down, and spread it as far and wide as you possibly can. Ready? I CELEBRATE EACH AND EVERY DAY OF MY JOYOUS LIFE WITH SUCH INTENSITY BECAUSE I AM FIFTY-TWO YEARS CLEAN AND SOBER!

Got that? The old boy is absolutely on fire! No drugs, no alcohol*, no tobacco, no poison, no BS! No idiots getting me to buy into any numbnut peer pressure—NO WAY! Peer pressure is for stupid sheep. And ya know what sheep do don't ya? They mindlessly wander around like lost jerks and stick their sheepy nose up some other sheep's butt and follow them around with no direction of their own. In other words, they got no life. They got no spirit. They got no attitude. They got no nothin'. How worthless can a life be? Peer pressure can kiss my ass.

I know, I know. It's not as good as yesterday's. But it does highlight something I haven't ranted about in awhile, which is that I really hate Fun Conservatives. You know, those guys who like to go on about how they like rock n' roll and talk a lot about non-conformity and being a rebel? Hey, sorry. If you're going to be a conservative, accept with grace the inherent un-hipness of your political position and have the decency to be a curmudgeonly stick-in-the-mud. Face it—there's nothing cool about imperialist war games, trickle-down economies, or totalitarian control of other people's bodies and sex lives. Cool people only torture other consenting adults. Stop trying to be Wild and Crazy Fun Dad. You're embarrassing yourself.

* Budweiser, Anheuser-Busch, and Coors excepted.

1. If you need a laugh, and share my sick sense of humour, check out Stop My Abortion! The story is roughly: Woman gets pregnant, woman can't afford a child (especially after she gets fired from her job for being pregnant), woman asks the holier-than-thou pro-life movement to put its money where its mouth is. If pro-lifers donate $40,000, she won't get an abortion. So far, she hasn't raised anywhere near that, but that hasn't stopped her from posting some utterly hilarious entries.

The set-up is clearly a joke, but you wouldn't know from the flood of angry comments and e-mail (along with the occasional donation). This may challenge Kerblog and Cats That Look Like Hitler for the shortest amount of time between me discovering a blog and me blogrolling it.

2. Speaking of the recently blogrolled, Twisty has an excellent post about the breast cancer industry. Why did I take so long to blogroll I Blame the Patriarchy? You know what to blame.

3. Some of you may be wondering how the garden's doing. For those who care, I have posted some food porn.

( You must be over 18 to click here )

In visual form, here is one thing that pissed me off on the walk home, and three things that didn't.

New Gaybortion: It's not violence. It's pest control.

And photos of more uplifting things:

( under here )

...except that in New Brunswick, the last hospital that performs provincially funded abortions is about to stop. It's already hard to get an abortion in New Brunswick—unlike in the rest of the country, you need the permission of two doctors. Abortions at the private Morgentaler clinic cost $750 in a province where the average yearly income is around $7000 less than than the national average.

Read this. (Hat-tip to the author. ;))

It's not a ban, of course; just market forces. We have several years still before we catch up to the wingnuttery levels of our ideological masters neighbours to the South, but it's nevertheless an attack on women's reproductive rights and universal health care. And it serves the wingnut agenda just fine—ensuring that poor women have no choices, while ensuring that if their own daughters should wind up in a delicate situation, they'll have access to discreet and private care.

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OMGsquee. I must read this stuff: Bengali science fiction from the 1880s.

Amanda Marcotte always finds/writes the best stuff. Case in point: Time to hand the podium to the pinkos, which demonstrates in handy chart form what I'm been saying about the American (and now, Canadian) Left for years. Her starting point is this must-read article by Joshua Trevino (Republican think-tanker and founder of RedState.com), which, in the plainest possible language, describes how an idea moves from "unthinkable" to "policy" and demonstrates how one shifts the public discourse from left to right.

It's nothing that hasn't been said before, and it really should be obvious, but I still see liberals—particularly American Democrats—scratching their heads over this stuff. Trevino writes:

The mission of a think tank is to introduce ideas into public discourse and normalize them within the public discourse.

The example he uses is that of privatizing schools (Amanda uses reproductive freedom), and among the most recent related stories, I offer Howard Dean claiming that marriage is "between a man and a woman."

The moral of the story, as Amanda writes?

The speed at which people can be pulled rightward and yet still consider themselves “moderate” says a lot about why people are moderate in the first place. Most people don’t sit around reasoning out why they believe what they do so much as absorb the discourse, realize they have emotional reactions to both sides and split the difference. The abortion debate is a clear-cut example of this–”moderate” pro-choicers, for instance, tend to think that women should be under the state thumb but allowed a few more choices than strict anti-choicers would allow them. The good news is that this means that there’s no real reason to freak out anymore that having people with actual progressive opinions on the left are going to run off voters.

Your homework is to use the Overton Window (see the Trevino link) to describe public opinion shifts on an issue of your choice. Go!

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Some other neat stuff on the blogosphere lately: Teresa Nielsen Hayden raises the point that militarizing the border can result in keeping people in as easily as it can keep people out.

Then again, with border patrols like this:


President George W. Bush rides in a U.S. Border Patrol dune buggy during a tour
of the Yuma sector near the U.S. Mexico border in Yuma, Arizona, Thursday, May 18, 2006.
White House photo by Eric Draper. (Hat tip: jk_fabiani)

...do USians or non-status immigrants actually have anything to worry about?

The spelling leaves something to be desired, but Social Darwinism vs. Some Endangered Tigers is a rollicking good read.

Finally, you've probably seen it before (especially if you read zombie_survival), but the zombie-cockroach story is really gross and cool. The post turns into a debate between reality-based people and IDers, which is then suddenly halted by the appearance of one of the scientists mentioned in the article. Awesome.

EDIT: One more link: Stick it up your ass, fuckin' Starbucks. Just in time for tomorrow's IWW event.

In lieu of a thoughtful post (I've been doing too many of those lately, which has caused a surprising increase in readership)...

( Two funny images, cut for size. )

In other, completely irrelevant news, I saw the best cat on the way to work today. He was orange and almost as big as Marinetti, and he was playing freakin' soccer when I walked by. No, really. There was a soccer ball and he was playing with it. When he saw me, he came over and grabbed my arm, then followed me for a block. I took pictures because he was ridiculously cute.

EDIT: One more comic, this one a must-read:

( under here )

EDIT II: rohmie and kynn both linked to this story about Cecilia Fire Thunder, President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and my current hero. She wants to set up a Planned Parenthood clinic on reservation land in South Dakota, where the government has no jurisdiction. Here's how you can help.

EDIT III: Okay, okay. Here's the kitty:

What does this say? And in which language?

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The Ted Nugent Quote of the Day:

Stay on the True North track. Compared to our apathetic, lame critics, be an extremist. "Live free or die" is extreme. I play extreme, firebreathing rock 'n' roll, greasy rhythm and blues guitar. I eat extremely delicious, awesome meat. I live and hunt with extreme intensity...

And he goes on and on like this, in an extremely boring way, for a page, until we get to:

Davy Crockett was an extremist. Lewis and Clark were extremists. Rosa Parks was an extremist...

I should add that he compares himself to Rosa Parks throughout the book. And if that's not bad enough:

Homosexuality is extremely weird. Jerry Garcia is extremely dead. Pimps, whores, and welfare brats are extremely disgusting...

And then another page or so. I am not extremely surprised to find that no editor is credited anywhere in this book.

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Pass on the Googlebomb: Bill Napoli

First of all, in the "what the hell are you smoking?" category, we have this loverly article, courtesy of ARA.

White Nationalist Conference Ponders Whether Jews and Nazis Can Get Along
By JONATHAN TILOVE
March 3, 2006
NY Weekly

For the small, hardy band of right-wing Jews who attended this past weekend's American Renaissance Conference, the biennial gathering of white nationalists ended on a sour note.

The events Saturday, February 25, passed without major incident. But then, late Sunday morning, none other than former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke approached the microphone on the floor during the question-and-answer session for French writer Guillaume Faye. After congratulating Faye for stirring remarks that "touched my genes," Duke asked if there weren't an even more insidious threat to the West than Islam.

( Taking the Jew-hatred out of white nationalism is like taking the Christ out of Christmas... )

( Cut, because it's triggering. )

Ugh. I can't deal. Here's a bunny.

For the women of South Dakota, permission slip for an abortion.

It's a little thing, I know, but I'm really glad to be going to the IWD march this weekend.

On a much lighter note, if it wasn't $45, I would totally need an Eat Flaming Death, Fascist Media Pigs! t-shirt. Hopefully, it'll go down in price at some point like their other shirts. Short of that, I'm making it into an icon. (Hat tip: lovableatheist.)

Finally, please sign this.