If the Government doesn’t do something, you do it.
If the Media doesn’t report something, you report it.
We are deliberately taught to depend on these institutions so that, in dark times, we are left helpless. Stop relying on the State to do something. Take action, organize with each other and go forward.
No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They’re not affordable things. No prince ever says, ‘This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.’ You enter into one and it uses up all the money you’ve got, and then it breaks you and bankrupts you.
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| — | Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (2009) |
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.
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| — | Howard Zinn (via mynameskatetoday) |
But understand that their priority is to maximize profits. And that’s not always going to be good for communities or businesses or workers…And when you’re president, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits.
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Perfect response to that bullshitty “Run the country like a business” argument. A modern democracy/republic is not a business, the goals of providing a product/service and providing a prosperous society are vastly different. (via joegressivism) |
The Windsors have a Parliament. Our British cousins gave their rights away; so did the Hapsburgs, and the Hohenzollerns, too. The Romanovs will not. What I was given, I will give my son.
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| — | Tsar Nicholas II (via fyeah-history) |
Dear Pro-life Crowd,
You keep espousing lies. The problem with regulating abortion is that one could get pregnant, not tell anyone, have an abortion, and leave no evidence of such event occurring. It’s just like drugs. Oh yeah, you can crack down on it, but ultimately you aren’t going to stop it. The only way of doing so would involve infringing on the privacy of women. That isn’t an option. So my question to the entire pro-life community is do you know the repercussions of your philosophy? I’m not debating whether or not a fetus is alive or not and personhood is a different question all together.
There are about 1,000,000 abortions a year. Let’s be extremely conservative and say that outlawing abortion will stop 90% of abortions from happening. That will still leave about 100,000 abortions a year. I would love to see the statistics, in terms of income, of the average income of women getting abortions. Let’s not forget the fact that unwanted children are more inclined to be neglected. So let’s say 1/3 of the un-aborted are neglected and prone to criminal activities. that’s 300,000 thieves, murderers, rapists, serial killers, and otherwise criminals being brought into the world per year. the number of illegal abortions will increase. The damage and exponential death toll will eventually exceed the death toll of abortions. Not to mention the economic impacts of such a decision.
Sadly, I don’t think that’s good enough of an argument so I will revert back to the basic philosophical distinction.
Basically, government doesn’t tell anyone to do anything with their bodies. Period. What is inside a person’s body is their own privacy. The reason we don’t recognize the rights of the unborn is because A) No one in the history of mankind has done so and B) it’s impossible to determine the existence of the unborn and regulate the protection of the unborn without infringing upon the rights of the pregnant woman. I could show you a picture of a woman, and then the same woman a month pregnant and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. In an anti-choice world where everything is utopian and covered in bubble rap, simply outlawing abortion would be enough. Sadly for them, we don’t live in that world. We live in a world in which the government (supposedly) needs a warrant to invade your privacy, and law enforcement needs probable cause before they can stop and investigate you. Because at an early stage it is impossible to tell whether or not someone is pregnant, the only way at which law enforcement could stop abortions from occurring is if they allowed law enforcement to have access to every uterus at any time, regardless of probably cause or warrant. That is not on the table, as I’ve already said. So, outlawing abortion would entail using hearsay and inconclusive evidence, much like current drug enforcement. As I said, one could crack down on these things, but ultimately it’s futile because people will still get away with getting abortions with no threat from law enforcement, much like current drug use. If one can get away with getting an abortion, no matter how hard we try to crack down on it, what’s the point of doing such law enforcement? All it does is infringe on privacy and doesn’t fully fix the problem.
You could say I’m arguing against abortion regulation because it’s impossible to stop 100%, and that that’s a futile gesture as rape and murder aren’t stopped 100%. This is a dumb argument. In abortion, society is unaware of the existence of the victim without infringing on the rights of privacy of the individual. In short the government doesn’t even know the fetus exists and can’t recognize its citizenship or personhood (notice we don’t award birth certificates or grant natural born citizenship until you have actually been born). While in the case of murder or rape, there are victims that are recognized by the government, whom the government knows exists. So, if you were going to ask me the difference between killing a newborn and aborting a fetus, I’d simply point out that multiple people can acknowledge the existence of a newborn (even if they don’t have a birth certificate) whereas a fetus A) cannot survive on it’s own B) the mother can opt to not have the fetus in her uterus an C)at the moment it is revealed to the world, it is dying and D) the only people knowing of this occurring would be the doctor and the woman, which are both protected by privacy rights.
I didn’t even touch late-term, as I feel that is a harder subject, but regardless I think anti-choicers need to stop simply saying “Let’s protect all life” because I’m more than willing to bet that they’d support the mother’s right to drink and smoke while pregnant as well as other not-pregnant woman activities as it is her choice. Making abortion illegal causes more problems than solves them. The slippery slope is more in the direction of government control of many aspects of our sex lives if we have a “pro-life” government, than other repercussions of a pro choice government. I don’t see any realistic slippery slope possibilities for having a pro-choice government at all.
“Whenever the people are well informed,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “they can be trusted with their own government.” But what happens now, two centuries later, when science has become so complex and so powerful that it influences every aspect of life, while most politicians’ last science class was in high school? Are the people still well-enough informed to be trusted with their own government?
This is the subject of my new book, Fool Me Twice. But it’s also the subject of a larger conflict over the nature and role of government, and the role of science as the best basis for determining public policy that is fairest to all Americans.
Every major policy challenge the United States is facing today is either wholly or partly driven by science, and yet this year in particular we have seen every mainstream candidate for president adopt one or more positions that run contrary to the best available evidence science has to offer.
Many of the campaign season’s most memorable moments - from Michele Bachmann’s campaign-ending assertion that HPV vaccine causes mental retardation, to Rick Perry’s comparing himself to Galileo, to Mitt Romney’ flip-flop on global warming, to Jon Huntsman’s tweet heard round the world, to more by NewtGingrich and RickSantorum, all seem to be pivoting on science.
Why? The conventional political wisdom is that Evangelical voters and Tea Party libertarians, who form large portions of the American voting block and even larger portions of the new Republican base, are increasingly anti-science, in the words of Jon Huntsman. In other words, you can’t run from anti-science and hope to get nominated or even elected president, as Huntsman himself seemed to demonstrate.
Overwhelming majorities of American voters want the candidates to debate the big science issues facing the country. In fact, overwhelming majorities of religious voters want the candidates to debate these big science issues. For Pete’s sake, even overwhelming majorities of born again religious voters want the candidates to do this, and rank it as even more important than their debating faith and values.
The survey reveals deep concerns among Americans about their country’s ability to maintain leadership in science. Just forty-two percent of likely voters believe the United States will remain the world leader in science just eight years from now. Isn’t that worth a debate? Eighty-five percent of voters are concerned that an uncertain future for science funding in the US will cause scientists to leave their jobs or move to other countries, but the candidates aren’t talking about it much.
And yet I’m willing to bet that a good chunk of people who are worried that we will no longer remain the world leader in science also believe that it is acceptable to include “questioning” science in the classroom.
We should want to see the candidates debate science so that we immediately know who NOT to vote for.
Don’t believe in global warming? Off the list.
Think evolution isn’t supported? Off the list.
Believes vaccinations can cause autism? Off the list.
If we want to remain the leader in science, we need to stop pushing anti-scientific candidates and views into the mainstream debates.
