the wrathful dove

I guess I should have gone into more detail on my last erant, but at the time I was just trying to quickly fire off a little rant over a pet peeve of mine.

My good friend Josh decided to poke at me a bit in the comment section:

You too are using “dirty semantics propaganda” by suggesting that “pro-choice” is dishonest and that it should instead be called “pro-abortion”.

If you have a frank discussion with many people who are pro-choice, you would likely hear sentiments similar to what Rudy Giuliani recently expressed: that they are in fact, personally, against abortion – not pro-abortion, as you would like to call them. However, all things considered they do not believe in legislation that outlaws abortion. There are a myriad of reasons. Obviously, considering your rigid viewpoint, you’re not likely to agree with many of them, so I’ll spare you a list.

Let’s consider these facts:

• The sidebar of this blog advertises The Dennis Kucinich 2008 Presidential campaign
• I have blogged passionately about supporting Dennis Kucinich
• I have contributed to the Kucinich campaign financially
• I intend to volunteer my time in supporting his campaign

Representative Kucinich is a strong supporter of the “pro-choice” position and is at the same time a man whom I admire and consider an intelligent and moral human being. So I think it’s hardly fair to call my anti-abortion views rigid if one means to suggest that they are not nuanced and informed from a consideration of both sides of the argument. Read more

I often read the website ZNet. It is a great daily source of articles coming from a perspective that is critical of the media and the establishment. A lot of the content of the site reflects an anarchist viewpoint and promotes the idea of participatory economics. It’s a good site and I recommend it as a daily news stop along with Antiwar.com (which comes from a Libertarian party perspective but is nevertheless a great source of information).

Today, I was browsing ZNet when an article on abortion from the neo-liberal magazine The New Republic caught my eye. The article by Princeton feminist scholar Christine Stansell was entitled “A Lost History of Abortion”, and despite my better instincts, I clicked on the article and started to read it. That is until Ms. Stansell decided to play her hand and use language manipulation from almost the get-go. In the second paragraph, she refers to those who oppose abortions as “the anti-choice movement”.

And that just irritates me to the extreme. Read more

Last Thursday, MSNBC hosted a debate between the ten Republican candidates for President. Recently, I blogged about the previous week’s Democratic version of this event. In the interest of fairness, I decided to watch these debates as well. Furthermore, I was interested in seeing Congressman Ron Paul speak. For those not familiar with him, Dr. Ron Paul is an honest and principled man who values liberty and who has served his congressional district in Texas since 1997. Despite my philosophical disagreements with him on several points, I respect Dr. Paul and would recommend voting for him to any liberty loving true conservative. Dr. Paul has been an outspoken critic of big government, big media, big corporations, and the Iraq War. Thus, I expected to see him given the Gravel “potted plant” treatment as seen in the Democratic debates.

Despite my lofty intentions of cheering for Dr. Paul while documenting the bias of big media and the banality of the American elections circus on both sides of the aisle, I’m afraid that my wife and I had a hard time stomaching this one and will not be watching any further Republican Primary debates. Clinton and Obama are pretty awful, and it was fairly sickening to watch them get so much attention in the Democratic primary while they spouted vague “feel-good” political talk, dodged questions, and buttered up the public, but many of these Republican candidates simply made my jaw drop and my stomach lurch with all their meaningless “feel good” praise of some idealized version of America that lives only in their fantasies and their bending over backwards to compare themselves to Ronald Reagan. To make matters worse, my own political beliefs made it very hard to evaluate things like whether a candidate was delivering a good or great answer in the sense of one that truly answered the question when so often they delivered answers that I found deeply disturbing and upsetting. Just ten to fifteen minutes into the debate, my wife and I were pausing the TiVo and seriously pondering if we could make it through another hour and twenty minutes.

We persevered, and I’m delivering my report on the event, but I’m afraid that I just can’t handle doing it again. Read more