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Author Topic: Aborpopulation  (Read 37766 times)

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Mongrel

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Re: Re: What the fuck?
« Reply #260 on: August 11, 2012, 02:00:40 PM »

I don't mind religious folk, even very deeply religious folk, but when you get the ones who just make everything up as they go along to justify their particular vision of their faith, it's not even really a religious thing anymore.

I think the key is to recognize that vicious defensiveness of the weak. It's all the difference between say, a hardcore Amish fellow who hears your view and says "Well I don't agree with anything you have to say, so I'm just going to go back to my farm and you stay over there in your sin-filled city." versus say, the Fred Phelpses of the world. This supposed archetypal Amish guy doesn't need to prove you wrong, he just knows.

Which is okay! I'm fine with that!
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Thad

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Re: Re: What the fuck?
« Reply #261 on: August 11, 2012, 05:10:42 PM »

You know, as vocal as the anti-choicers are about hating abortion, I blame some of the losing ground in the culture war on liberals. They've constantly been taking the "But what about rape and incest" bait and helping to define abortion as something that is a Bad Thing. As such they find themselves often tripped up trying to justify why we should allow a Bad Thing. This is something that the fundie right is really good at, which is allowing their framing of an issue to become the dominant one. See also how they trip people up with the "Being gay is a choice" argument, which is still not a valid reason to prevent gay marriage.

I understand your point, but starting with "But what about rape and incest" is a reasonable thing to do for two reasons:

1. If the other person says "Not even then" then you have already cut to the part where you know you will never achieve any common ground and can cut your losses and walk away.
2. If the other person says "Well, okay, those are exceptions, obviously" then you've put them on the defensive and can start chipping away with "What about the life of the mother?  What about the health of the mother?  What about physical deformities?"  If you are a competent debater dealing in good faith with a person who has a disagreement but is willing to reconsider, then, at minimum, you will give that person something to think about.

Suppose there was a place in your town where people murdered babies.  Like, no dissembling or anything, people brought their babies in and the people at this place just smacked 'em with a hammer and threw the corpses in the trash.  Not a day goes by without a baby being murdered.  And you knew about this, and knew that this was all happening with the full sanction of law enforcement.  Nobody's gonna do anything about these babies being murdered.

You'd burn that place to the fucking ground.

These people claim to believe that that's what every abortion clinic is, and yet don't show anything near the outrage that they should, were they true to their beliefs.

Depends on whether you're talking about people who legitimately believe the "Killing anybody for any reason is wrong, always" line.  I've got some pretty serious issues with the Catholic Church's stance on abortion, but the Vatican is at least consistent by opposing wars and the death penalty.  (Plus the church's stance on birth control and masturbation, absurd as it is, at least manages to treat potential humans as equivalent to actual humans across the board.)

Now, American Catholics aren't really known for agreeing with the Vatican on most of those subjects.  But that's a whole other story.
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François

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #262 on: August 11, 2012, 06:21:55 PM »

Every time one of them grabs your neck and chokes you, you win.

This, so much.

Fundamentalists are the new Pharisees. They're the ones who bugged the apostles about ritually washing their hands, about picking corn on sunday, about sharing meals with prostitutes and other pariahs. They're the ones who threw a man into the gaping maw of the Roman Empire's justice system for daring to say the rich should share their wealth with the poor and that there's no religious precept against paying taxes, even to an occupying military force. Jesus was a walking, talking, universal free health care system, and they killed him.

The antichrist walks among us. He protests abortion clinics, opposes gay rights, and supports war, all in God's name.

If something you say makes a fundie mad enough to attempt to do you harm, physical or otherwise, chances are it should be reassurance enough that you're doing God's holiest work, whether you believe in Him or not.
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Shinra

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #263 on: August 18, 2012, 06:34:53 AM »

In absolutely horrifying news, A teenager denied leukemia treatments in the Dominican Republic because she was 9 weeks pregnant when she was admitted to the hospital has died from her treatable cancer.

In related, silver-lining-to-a-horrific-tragedy news, I imagine that Romney/Ryan's campaign is probably very irritated with this story entering the news cycle right now.
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Thad

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #264 on: August 18, 2012, 08:50:12 AM »

Trying to make a sarcastic joke here but it's just not coming.  Suffice it to say I can't see how the fuck anyone thinks "dead mother plus unborn baby" is a better result than just "unborn baby".
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Rico

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Re: What the fuck?
« Reply #265 on: August 19, 2012, 03:16:34 PM »

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Brentai

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Re: Re: What the fuck?
« Reply #266 on: August 19, 2012, 06:05:10 PM »

It's true, I can't.
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Friday

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Re: Re: What the fuck?
« Reply #267 on: August 19, 2012, 06:23:38 PM »

We'll see about that.
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Romosome

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Re: Re: What the fuck?
« Reply #268 on: August 19, 2012, 08:03:38 PM »

It's always impressive when someone actually manages to say something so totally crazy, disgusting, or just fucking stupid that a major election campaign has to go "Whoa we probably don't agree with that maybe"
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Mongrel

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Re: Re: What the fuck?
« Reply #269 on: August 19, 2012, 08:16:02 PM »

I can't really find it all that funny as long as this line is in the article:

Quote
The PollTracker Average shows Akin leading McCaskill by a margin of 49.7 percent to 41.3 percent.
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Thad

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Re: Re: What the fuck?
« Reply #270 on: August 19, 2012, 08:58:17 PM »

Well, we'll see how those numbers go now.

And if that still doesn't tip McCaskill over, maybe somebody can get Rush Limbaugh to mock Michael J Fox's Parkinson's again.
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Shinra

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Re: Re: What the fuck?
« Reply #271 on: August 20, 2012, 07:23:03 AM »

I can't really find it all that funny as long as this line is in the article:

Quote
The PollTracker Average shows Akin leading McCaskill by a margin of 49.7 percent to 41.3 percent.

Republicans are demanding Akin quit the race now and the consensus seems to be that Akin torpedoed his chances of a win by saying the stupidest thing anyone has said into a microphone in American politics in the last ten years. The comments are so shitty and controversial that it's going to spin the spotlight firmly onto the abortion issue, and considering that Ryan has said some shitty things re: abortion in the past the Romney camp is trying very hard to distance themselves from Akin. If Obama or a super PAC don't seize on the opportunity to connect this idiot's phrasing with Paul Ryan's voting record, then I just give up.



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Thad

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #272 on: August 20, 2012, 09:59:33 AM »

Decided to move this over here, even though it could just as easily have stayed in WTF or moved to the Election thread, since both of those are more likely to have crosstalk and since this really is about the abortion debate.

Anyhow, Doctorow, under the delightful headline Whence springs Todd Akin's belief in magic, rape-proof vaginas?, links to Justine Larbalestier (and Justine, if I butchered your name that's because you inexplicably made the title text of your blog an image so I can't just copy-paste it) who quotes Making Sex by Thomas Laqueur:

Quote
    Samuel Farr, in the first legal-medicine text to be written in English (1785), argued that “without an excitation of lust, or enjoyment in the venereal act, no conception can probably take place.” Whatever a woman might claim to have felt or whatever resistance she might have put up, conception in itself betrayed desire or at least a sufficient measure of acquiescence for her to enjoy the venereal act. This is a very old argument. Soranus had said in second-century Rome that “if some women who were forced to have intercourse conceived . . . the emotion of sexual appetite existed in them too, but was obscured by mental resolve,” and no one before the second half of the eighteenth century or early nineteenth century question the physiological basis of this judgement. The 1756 edition of Burn’s Justice of the Peace, the standard guide for English magistrates, cites authorities back to the Institutes of Justinian to the effect that “a woman can not conceive unless she doth consent.” It does, however, go on to point out that as matter of law, if not of biology, this doctrine is dubious. Another writer argued that pregnancy ought to be taken as proof of acquiescence since the fear, terror, and aversion that accompany a true rape would prevent an orgasm from occurring and thus make conception unlikely.

So, you know, gross-ass eighteenth-century pseudo-science claiming that if a woman's pregnant she must not have been raped.  (Also, she's probably a witch.)

It puts me in mind of what Constantine was saying the other day about how the fundamentalists try to shift the debate to something that doesn't actually matter -- if we're actually HAVING a debate about whether a woman trying to get an abortion was really raped or is just making that up, then yes we've already lost because we're acting as if that matters.

But, thing is, there's no debate.  Because when someone even brings up that question in public, the backlash is immediate and harsh, as we're seeing here.

I think this is another case of the religious right spending too much time preaching to the choir and wildly misunderstanding what mainstream opinion actually is.

I'm grateful to Akin for actually saying this shit out loud.  A whole lot of Republicans have learned to temper their anti-choice rhetoric and slowly whittle away abortion rights using ginned-up nonsense like "partial-birth abortion".  Akin has come out and said what fundamentalists actually believe, which is misogyny with a distinct anti-science aftertaste.

As I said recently, this is a mainstream view in the Republican Party; it may not be a majority but it's a very loud and powerful faction.  And it's pretty abhorrent to most of America.

I'm not quite as ready to write Akin's political obit as Shinra is, though.  I think this will probably sink him -- it IS the top story on Google News today, and his own party seems pretty unhappy with him -- but it's not a sure thing.



EDIT to add:

Akin apologized Monday for what he called a serious error in using the wrong words when he stated in an earlier interview that "legitimate rape" rarely resulted in pregnancy.

"I was talking about forcible rape," Akin said on former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's radio show. "It was absolutely the wrong word."
Appearing on former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's radio show, Akin said rape is "never legitimate."

"It's an evil act. It's committed by violent predators," Akin said. "I used the wrong words the wrong way."

So uh he seems to think the problem is that people thought "legitimate rape" meant he believed that there were occasions that rape was "legitimate" as in "acceptable"?  As opposed to, you know, all the stuff that's ACTUALLY wrong with what he said?

Not sure if invoking strawman or sincerely has no idea what was wrong with what he said.
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NexAdruin

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Re: What the fuck?
« Reply #273 on: August 20, 2012, 10:18:34 AM »

http://mediamatters.org/video/2012/08/20/huckabee-interviews-akin-to-discuss-distraction/189447

Some guy named Akin said something about rape not being legitimate.
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Brentai

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #274 on: August 20, 2012, 10:51:49 AM »

He's distracting people from the actual issue by zeroing in on petty semantics.
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sei

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #275 on: August 20, 2012, 11:01:26 AM »

Politicians being politicians.
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McDohl

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #276 on: August 20, 2012, 04:22:57 PM »

Hey Thad.  I seem to remember you having some sort of begrudging respect for Mike Huckabee.

Yeah, about that...
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François

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #277 on: August 20, 2012, 04:55:42 PM »

By the same logic, the Nazi doctors' "medical experiments" provided data on the living human body's reactions to various types of trauma that is still useful today since there are no ethical means to acquire that data in the first place, so I guess it's a good thing nobody stopped the Holocaust before that happened, right?
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Royal☭

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #278 on: August 20, 2012, 05:50:27 PM »

Akin explains himself

Quote
You see, what I said was, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” But what I meant to say was, “I am a worthless, moronic sack of shit and an utterly irredeemable human being who needs to shut up and go away forever.”

Brentai

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Re: Aborpopulation
« Reply #279 on: August 20, 2012, 06:06:13 PM »

Hey Thad.  I seem to remember you having some sort of begrudging respect for Mike Huckabee.

Yeah, about that...

I think he's just trying to tempt people into saying they wish James Robison had been aborted.

I don't.  I wish he had been born to a mother with absolutely no means of taking care of him, and then had slowly wasted away as she was repeatedly denied food and medicine for a child she never asked for.
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