I promise not to do this too often (and the source’s willingness to jump aboard the Natural Birth bandwagon seems like a matter almost as damnedable), but this NYT article, via Broadsheet, is breathtaking.

Some of you might have known women growing up that had to live through the pre-Roe period. It’s worth bearing in mind that for us (born in 1987 and 1986, respectively), even our grandparents were pretty young when Roe was decided.

Good on the NYT for publishing this. We’re much too blasé about what the Republicans want to take away from us; allowing them to remain as coy as they are about the kind of world they want to see is despicable, and our peers’ children (2002-) need to have something to remind them the consequences of reactionary excess.

One of my favorite little hobbies is language usage as a sociological instrument, especially political. The topic of dog whistles is especially amusing and diverting to me - but not exactly what I primarily like to look at.

Some words, or some usages of words, are so unusual outside of the context of a political fringe that using them almost immediately identifies you as a member of it, or at least someone who spends time primarily around members of it. This occurs by one of two ways: either it is from popular literature in a certain circle or it is based on a shared ideology that doesn’t really exist outside of that circle. The closer one is to the fringe when learning English (be it as a child or, more prominently, in ESL), the more identifiable one’s politics are this way.

There are a few favorite examples of mine, and I’ll leave aside the growing collection of hobby-horses ridden by over-enthusiastic Slavic neoliberals (’communistic’ and such dated usages clearly denoting a steady diet of Voice of America) for now. My single favorite is the equation to suicide - it’s not a single usage so much as a chain of them (’philosophy/culture/etc. of self-destruction/suicide/etc.’), and it’s very popular among Randroids because Rand herself used it. One of her pithier little bits of nonsense attempts to prove it, and Rand being who she was, you know exactly how this ‘proof’ reads: written with the formal structure and pompous tone of the ancient Greeks the Randies love so much, intending an aura of intellect by cribbing obsessively from these gayest of history’s men and instead falling into ridicule.

To cut it short, she calls capitalism the stuff of man’s nature (invoking Darwin - albeit, and you’ve got to love these people’s relationship with ‘reason’, in a pretty confrontational tenor), considers self-interest vital to survival, and then poses that altruism is self-negation, ergo death.

There is a gaping hole in this argument so simple that only someone with a sexual fetish for the pretenses - that is, that capitalism is reasonable and reasonable self-interest is the only way to survive - could ignore or attempt to work around it. That is: everyone dies. Everyone. Carnegie? Dead, sure. But J.P. Morgan? Also dead. Rockefeller? Dead. The women who made his morning coffee? Dead, and probably later. Bill Gates? Not gonna see 2050.

If you’re religious, and also you have a really warped concept of righteousness, I guess there’s a way around that. But ‘rational’ argument, without recourse to an invisible man who loves the wealthy, fails decisively on this point. If they are cornered with it, they’ll generally gamely struggle for a few minutes before calling everyone else in the room a bunch of suicidal Marxists. And speaking of -ists, there’s another uniquely ideological usage: Day By Day’s brilliant ‘Kantian nihilism’, a phrase that would make any student of philosophy past his sophomore year laugh and which makes no sense outside of the deliciously absurd world of the Randroids - where Kant and nihilists, being mutual enemies of the purely rational St. Ayn, were clearly cut from the same collectivist cloth. (And don’t even get me started on Ayn Rand’s enemies. I’ve got a lot to disagree with Kant about, but her puerile squabble with his legacy over ontology is amazing in its brazen illiteracy - only a peasant who had by some cruelty of fate acquired letters would devote serious energy to slapping at Kant’s nebulous-where-not-banal ontological ramblings, and in doing so think she had given herself the air of a thinker.)

Ah, I could go on about Randroids all day, but that’s not what Djur is paying me for. (Evidently, he is paying me to fight high-powered insiders like Barack Obama and his discouraging lack of a tough foreign policy to fight our homeland’s enemies - probably why I haven’t gotten a check yet.) Allow me to share with you one of my favorite odd usages of the political right: ‘pimp’.

There’s no one specialized form of this, but - true to their hideous nature - the most common one one encounters from wingnuts is ‘welfare pimp’. (I guess some stereotypes die really hard - for instance, all of them if you’re a bigot.) This, which seems to be the horrible, racist ur-form, implies that any politically prominent member of the black community is simply finagling welfare payments for them to ride their lazy race’s decadent, leeching satiation to office. Never mind that in a literal reading of this the only person who could possibly be tarred as a welfare pimp would be history’s most crooked Welfare bureaucrat, for legislators have fairly limited street-level visibility and almost no power over the comings and goings of their local constituency. (Besides the power to get pork funneled - but pork typically being white as the driven snow, you never hear about pork pimps.) This term, which only really makes sense in the first place if one’s definition of ‘pimp’ is ‘cunning and/or exploitative black man’, slowly generalized to imply anyone in the black community doing anything (one heard of ‘disaster pimps’ after Katrina), and later to more general, less specifically racist ends.

I can get behind the usage of ‘pimp’ in a manner so as to imply the pimp to be an exploitative, destructive asshole. And in the Candyland the Republicans inhabit - where you can live like a king on less than $10,000 in a big city, tax cuts increase government revenue, and Party can always find you - anyone basing their political appeal on welfare could indeed be classified as that. But the more general use of the verb to imply any kind of exploitation has to keep in mind that it’s attached to a very, very ugly reality for men, women, and other; black, white, and Jewish; young, old, and fat alike.

You have to be inundated in a world where ‘pimp’ refers to uppity serviles using their limited resources in a shady, devious way to worm their way to the top for the word to completely lose its meaning. It is actively disgusting to refer to a woman pimping her own daughter, and all the more so because the image fixed in many people’s minds of the now-adult Chelsea Clinton is the gangly young girl noted pill enthusiast Rush Limbaugh referred to as a dog. (I remain convinced Oxy is the sort of drug you pop before a high school policy debate in eager anticipation of calling your opponent a statist for refusing to admit ’separation of church and state’ doesn’t appear in the Constitution, but I digress.)

David Shuster is not just an asshole. He’s a crazy, illiterate asshole who let his attachment to the worst political scene in the 20th century override his common sense. Only in the fevered imagination of such a cretin could the standard relationship between a 28-year-old woman and her politically ruthless presidential candidate mother be described using the word ‘pimp’.

Then again, only in that same imagination could the aforementioned mother be considered the same threat to the conservative order of things that the people 'welfare pimp' was shot at represented. I don't know if anyone is ever going to make the vapid beltway heads eat the shit they've been giving rave reviews of for the last eight years, but the optimist in me says they will. I like to think that the plain wrongness of everything they've had to say will eventually bite them in the ass - but then again, I always was a shameless reality pimp.

Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee sweep the Iowa caucuses. Exit polls cite the primary motivator as a desire for “change,” further cementing the nation’s awful stereotype of Iowans as easily-led hayseeds. Next up is New Hampshire, a state so blessedly deranged that John fucking McCain is the man to beat. Dodd and Biden have both apparently dropped out, feeling the change in the wind — no more is it the day of the merely bland honky with suspicious hair.

There’s going to be some entertainment in watching the bloody fight within the Republican party over “conservative” priorities. Obviously, they’d prefer a candidate who slashes taxes as readily as he kills Haji and praises Jesus, but what can be sacrificed? Will the squat little psychopath Giuliani’s white-hot desire to exterminate the Saracen be enough to make up for his crippling association with Jew York? Can a Smithite queer-lover like Romney adequately defend America from the looming threat of dhimmitude, even if his economic record in fell Taxachusetts is admirable? Could Thompson perhaps fit every Arab in the entire world into his baggy, Aqua Velva-scented jowls?

At this point, I’m just half-heartedly pulling for anyone who won’t bomb Iran, which in this post-NIE environment appears to be anyone but Clinton and the Republican war party. A federal subsidy for Oregon hops growers would probably buy my vote, or else I’ll have to switch to Budweiser.

Sorry for the lack of posting recently. I’ve been alternately busy, drunk, and unwell, and Alec has been fucking bears. I hope to get back to a more normal schedule shortly.

This is an article from MTV.com, inadvertently noticed when chortling at the buffoon from Death Cab For Cutie who claims he’s being persecuted by the Man. It’s not as if I expected insightful and penetrating journalism from the online arm of that great engine of juvenile vapidity, but this is technical idiocy on a par with “They’re stealing the Internet!” Alec was going to write about this, but he determined that it would interfere with the necessary triangulation of the interests of large and small businesses to more fully enhance the moderating power of the vital center. You know, I’m getting worried about him — in the posting queue here at It Is *Dancing*, he has a ten-page article that consists entirely of the words “Thanks, Ralph.”

BitTorrent To Serve Up Fall Out Boy, ‘Harry Potter’ Legally

Imagine if, back in the day, record labels had said to Napster, “Sure, take our stuff,” instead of bringing down the big legal hammer and crushing the pioneering peer-to-peer service. Times have certainly changed.

It truly is a brave new world, in which media companies have recognized that distributing promotional material for free can increase their profits. Such an unprecedented revolution of media distribution is certainly worthy of note, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that BitTorrent, Inc. has a partnership itself with MTV. Why, that piece of information would suggest that the media business is an incestuous, oligopolic orgy of “co-opetition”. In fact, it’d suggest that the media industry is a sort of sodomistic Ouroboros, where titanic media conglomerates slurp each other off into increasingly staggering levels of profit.

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/10/24/richardson_obama/index.html

Note that Clinton is the only major candidate not to have come out against the bill - and Obama has (finally!) clearly indicated he intends to help stop the bill from reaching the floor.

Obama’s is a bigger move than it looks like, for the record: Obama, as a freshman senator from a state dominated by a single party (which is lousy with Daly-era machine holdovers). Dem lifers, who consider Reid one of their own, can crush him like a bug. If he doesn’t take the nomination - and at this point, it’s still very much in the air - he’ll have little to nothing to go home to, and will be a lame duck for the next two years.

I appreciate Richardson’s stance on the issue, although it is ever-so-convenient that, as an executive figure, he doesn’t actually have to put his money where his mouth is. Dodd and Obama are both in the odious position of finding themselves drawn by their campaign commitments to oppose a bill that the party lifers (generously bankrolled by AT&T et alia) love.

I’m disappointed in how long it took him to do this, but I’m pretty much all for Obama at this point. Here’s to hoping he doesn’t fuck it up.

(And Clinton? Still doing nothing - by all indications, she doesn’t intend to hand back a damned bit of the power Bush unilaterally grabbed. Fuck her noise.)
ADDENDUM: Well, there’s a lot to keep my support for Obama from being unambiguous. A major tick in the ‘con’ column, adding to his religiosity — which I find mildly repellant, although in general I understand him to be closer in the spirit of his Christianity to my parents than most Christians I’ve ever known: that is, genuinely interested in social justice, charity, and the equality of man, instead of just angry at people putting dicks in their mouths.

But on that score, his campaign unwittingly blundered into supporting a black evangelical/gospel group including virulent homophobes, ex-gays, and so on. A blogger subbing for Greenwald (I know, right - who the hell would let Greenwald top him???) calls black homophobia the third rail of the black religious community - one that Obama has dealt with head-on before. I’m willing to chalk up the involvement, along with the failure to eject the ex-gay asshole from the gospel thing (his campaign chose instead to engage in vicious rhetoric against him . . . but keep him in the tour), to inexperience. But it’s still pretty damning.

Doesn’t detract from my general reason for supporting Obama, but it’s still deeply disappointing.

I’ve riffed on this a few times various places, so I felt it necessary to put down my essential two cents in one place. To wit: we’ve got a compelling interest in state healthcare even by the debased standards of modern politics and management.

Why? Because the current system - and any system even close to it - is abusive beyond belief.
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Right: Four out of five creepy bus magnates favour keeping homowork out of Scotland’s schools.

Generally when I’m in reverie about the compelling amount of bullshit that makes up this American dream today, I keep in touch with reality by reminding myself about the bullshit suffered by our Redcoat neighbors across the sea. Surveillance cameras — Afghanistan — Keep the Clause — Princess Diana — Robbie Williams — holy fuck, does Britain suck. Let’s not even get started on the antigastarbeiter swarthy-horde BNP fucknauts or the tiresome god-botherers who back them up. However.

It strikes me that in the UK, and in Europe and the rest of the damn world in general, there’s actually a certain amount of struggle going on. At the very least, the English can be relied on to piss and moan about fooking Labour being a bunch of fooking cunts, and they actually win their strikes from time to time. We’ll kindly overlook the homoeopathic remedies to prevent your poor wee laddies from going gay after doing their homowork. In the US, not even the UAW can be relied on anymore to put the management’s balls in a vice. In Burma, we’re seeing protesters go up against assault rifles to demand basic freedoms. We’ve got a government run by insane apocalyptic cultists and larcenous gangsters that’s killed around a million-plus people, destabilized what was already the world’s most volatile region, and appears to have its knives out for one of the only remaining hopes for a modicum of stable, indigenous independence there. And we pretty much just sit down and let it happen.

Sure, we bitch about how the cowardly Democrats aren’t doing what we elected them to do, but let’s be honest with ourselves — they never will. What are we going to do? Vote Green? Vote Republican? Issue primary challenge after primary challenge to run the warmongering bastards out? No. It was tried once, and now Joe Lieberman is more powerful than ever as the Democrats’ swing vote. For their efforts, the Lamont boosters were excoriated as Stalinesque purgers, partisan fanatics willing to stab one of their own in the back for the minor heresy of enthusiastically supporting a criminal and inhuman war. It’s not fucking worth it, friends. The Democrats aren’t our cowardly and meek representatives that need a good kicking to get back into fighting shape. As an institution, as a party, they are wholeheartedly behind the program of American imperialism, corporatism, and exceptionalism.

Britain’s in the same boat as we are, but at least they have the moral fortitude to fight for the oars.