Idiots

Second law of the left: they never think their own tactics can be turned back on them. It’s great being sociopaths until everyone else behaves the way you do 🙂

I see quite a bit of hysteria even over this side of the pond. Uniformed, of course 🙂

Steve:’Keeping their knickers on is literally another Holocaust or something.’

Was skimming a lengthy ‘Guardian’ article this morning on ‘activist abortionists’ in the US (who secure legal-in-other-countries abortion drugs for women) and thought, if only a fraction of that effort went into securing contraceptives….

JuliaM – Right?

Tho the standard narrative about terrified, poor girls “forced” to stab their babies with coat hangers doesn’t make sense, because the massive rise in abortion came after a massive increase in the availability of cheap, effective contraception.

They frame this as a women’s rights ishoo, but I think it’s mostly about fear and loathing of personal responsibility, partly a revolt against biology (which is indeed unfair to women in many ways), and mucho gusto the poisoned fruit of a toxic culture that tells people children are a burden instead of a blessing. They’re both, natch, but a life without meaningful burdens is cursed – a frivolous, Eloi existence that ends with being et by subterranean Boris Johnsons.

Wat – And we’re supposed to take moral lessons

Yes.

“shadows of the penumbra”: Are you perhaps alluding to the claim that “penumbras, formed by emanations” permeate the US Constitution?

SCOTUS can be pretty Stalinist, can’t it? Especially when a shitbag such as Justice William O. Douglas is a member.

I did like this bit in his WKPD entry: “Douglas said he suffered from an illness at age two he described as polio, although a biographer reveals that it was intestinal colic.” Was this bit intentional irony: “Picking cherries, Douglas would say later, inspired him to a legal career.”?

This claim by him amused me. “Teaching at Yale, he and the fellow professor Thurman Arnold were riding the New Haven Railroad and were inspired to set the sign Passengers will please refrain… to Antonín Dvořák’s Humoresque #7.” It amuses me because my father-in-law and his young chums sang the British equivalent long before Douglas’s purported invention of it.

Also: ‘Judge Richard A. Posner, who was a law clerk at the Court during the latter part of Douglas’s tenure, characterized him as “a bored, distracted, uncollegial, irresponsible” Supreme Court justice, as well as “rude, ice-cold, hot-tempered, ungrateful, foul-mouthed, self-absorbed” and so abusive in “treatment of his staff to the point where his law clerks—whom he described as ‘the lowest form of human life’—took to calling him “shithead” behind his back.” Posner asserts also that “Douglas’s judicial oeuvre is slipshod and slapdash”‘

Moreover: ‘In general, legal scholars have noted that Douglas’s judicial style was unusual in that he did not attempt to elaborate justifications for his judicial positions on the basis of text, history, or precedent. Douglas was known for writing short, pithy opinions which relied on philosophical insights, observations about current politics, and literature’. Et bloody cetera.

It’s worth noting that his pose as a great defender of individual rights seems odd given that ‘In 1944, Douglas voted with the majority to uphold the wartime internment of Japanese Americans in Korematsu v. United States’. Hypocrisy of a high order, eh?

You can try and do it the nice way, but ultimately the only way to debate with these people is via 9mm parabellum applied just behind the ear.

Grikath, you’re right, but there is, in reality, only one side trying to impose their beliefs onto other adults. As i’ve noted before, no states are advocating mandatory abortions…….

@Addolff

“no states are advocating mandatory abortions” but the abortion is sadly mandatory if you’re the one being aborted. Yeah, I know you hedged by “impose their beliefs ONTO OTHER ADULTS” but the whole reason there’s any conflict about abortion, rather than it being seen as a simple medical procedure like having a kidney taking out, is that it does involve terminating a human life – and one that doesn’t get their own independent say in the matter. We don’t just leave little kids are for the parents to decide what to do with – if a mother wanted infanticide for a newborn, society would intervene on behalf of the wee’un, in order to represent the interests of the one who at this stage has no personal opinions to voice.

When abortion rights come into political debate, amazing how many quite senior politicians come up with what they see as slam-dunk arguments which aren’t, and which are sufficiently absolutist that they’d only really be compatible with abortion for any reason right up until the moment of birth. “How dare they say what women and girls are allowed to do with their own bodies?!” for example. If you believe in anything other than totally relaxed abortion laws, you too are saying what women/girls are allowed to do with their bodies… and of course if you accept (admittedly many don’t) that a female fetus comes under the same general category of women/girls, then no logical way out remains – you can’t have one’s freedom without the freedom of the other being constrained, and the law becomes a tradeoff of rights/freedoms. You can argue where that tradeoff should be made, you can even argue that an adult matters far more than a fetus, so that even the fetus’s most vital rights/freedoms should be completed overridden, but you have to argue it as a tradeoff and not as a slam-dunk.

[email protected].

I’m not arguing it as a slam dunk, only as an argument through what we actually know. ie: what the mother wants. Not what other people totally unconnected with the person who is pregnant wants or what those unconnected people think possibly, could, may, hypothetically, be what the foetus wants. As others have said, there is no ‘right or perfect’ answer to this……..
For anyone who argues that the mother should not have the right, etc. etc, surely neither do you……

Of course all this learned debate depends on whether you think democracy is worth a fuck. When was any last actually sighted?

Come to think of it, the Present POTUS and VP are an emanation and a penumbra.

Tim is completely correct. Even though Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, abortion is one of the few remaining big issues that still need deciding in the U.S. Marijuana is mostly decided (bans are barely enforced), same-sex marriage is settled and we’ve actually overcompensated on many other issues (affirmative action, gender equality, etc.). In fact, for some of those decisions, there are now efforts to backtrack a little to make them less extreme in the progressive direction.

Unlike much of Europe and South America, where abortion was more easily decided on moral grounds (especially in predominately Catholic countries), the U.S.’s battle between church and state is yet to be fought. The argument used to be around including the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, displaying the Ten Commandments in front of courthouses, or printing “In God We Trust” on our money. Now, there’s a real reckoning surrounding when life begins and whether a baby has bodily autonomy during its fetal development.

That’s in addition to the newly rekindled battle between federal and state/local governments. In general, the overarching size, power and involvement of the federal government (mostly via Congress) began in 1936 with the Supreme Court’s re-interpretation of the General Welfare Clause, which grants legislative power to act in the interest of the “general welfare” of The People:

“Prior to 1936, the United States Supreme Court had imposed a narrow interpretation on the Clause, as demonstrated by the holding in Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co., in which a tax on child labor was an impermissible attempt to regulate commerce beyond that Court’s equally narrow interpretation of the Commerce Clause. This narrow view was later overturned in United States v. Butler. There, the Court agreed with Associate Justice Joseph Story’s construction in Story’s 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. Story had concluded that the General Welfare Clause was not a general grant of legislative power, but also dismissed Madison’s narrow construction requiring its use be dependent upon the other enumerated powers. Consequently, the Supreme Court held the power to tax and spend is an independent power and that the General Welfare Clause gives Congress power it might not derive anywhere else. However, the Court did limit the power to spending for matters affecting only the national welfare.

Shortly after Butler, in Helvering v. Davis, the Supreme Court interpreted the clause even more expansively, disavowing almost entirely any role for judicial review of Congressional spending policies, thereby conferring upon Congress a plenary power to impose taxes and to spend money for the general welfare subject almost entirely to Congress’s own discretion. Even more recently, in South Dakota v. Dole the Court held Congress possessed power to indirectly influence the states into adopting national standards by withholding, to a limited extent, federal funds. To date, the Hamiltonian view of the General Welfare Clause predominates in case law.”

If not for this half-assed/malevolent decision, the abortion debate–and many other issues–would have been settled at the state level, and by now possibly even resolved at a nationwide level without the involvement of Congress, after observing and comparing the success rates of 50 different state policy experiments.

Which is supposedly the entire reason why the United States has states to begin with.