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Jay Lake
Date: 2013-01-20 05:31
Subject: [links] Link salad goes bump in the night
Security: Public
Tags:child, fundraiser, funny, gender, guns, links, media, movies, nature, personal, politics, science, sex, videos, weird
The Acts of Whimsy cancer fundraiser and the Lakeside Kickstarter for the documentary about me, [info]the_child, and cancer are still live. Both have made goal, but additional support is always welcome. Please check them out if you have not done so yet. Note that the next unlock goal at $44,000 is [info]the_child's video, "How to Write Like My Dad". We're almost there!

Acts of Whimsy (redux) — My own Act of Whimsy. Heh heh heh.

Paul Cornell on (among other things) the whole Acts of Whimsy thing

Jay Lake, separated at birth?

Eat Like a Mennonite — Living a plastic-free life.

The Antikythera Mechanism — One of my favorite antiquities.

Wanted: Surrogate for Neanderthal Baby — Wow. The ethical implications of this are mind boggling.

Barnacles Mate via "Spermcasting"It can be hard to find a sexual partner when you are glued to a rock. Reminds me of my dating life in my teens and twenties. (Snurched from Daily Idioms, Annotated.)

Restricted Movie Review: The MatrixFeminist Mormon Housewives on the rather famous movie. Sometimes as an atheist in a religiously-dominated culture, I feel like I've taken the blue pill. Religion practice viewed from the outside is very different from religious practiced viewed from the inside.

“Happy birthday, dead baby!” and other charming tactics from “pro-life” clinic protestersBut for me, the tactic that takes the prize was arranging for a children’s choir to serenade entering clinic patients with endless choruses of “Happy birthday, dead baby!” At least one of those on the receiving end of this stunt was a woman who arrived at the clinic because she had experienced an emotionally devastating miscarriage Mother of the Child required exactly that same procedure almost two decades ago. The perversions of the doctor-patient relationship perpetrated by the forced pregnancy movement made it very difficult for us to secure a DNC, because most hospitals wouldn't permit the procedure in their ORs for fear of protestors. That's when my opposition to the so-called "Right to Life" movement hardened from a general pro-choice philosophical conviction to a deeply personal understanding that anti-abortion activists will commit any evil, persecute any woman, in the name of their narrow, unscientific religious convictions. (Via Slacktivist Fred Clark.)

NRA lied: No armed guards at Obama girls’ school — Imagine that. Conservatives lying about something important. Unpossible! Everyone knows character counts! Of course, when your entire narrative is composed of counterfactual fantasies and self-valorizing paranoia, I guess lying is essential.

3 hurt in accidental shooting at N.C. gun show — Yep. We're definitely all much safer with more guns. Plus this: Five Injured In Accidental Gun Show Shootings On ‘Gun Appreciation Day’. Yep, responsible gun ownership for the win.

David Brooks now totally pathologicalModerate Republicanism is a tendency that increasingly defies ideological analysis and instead requires psychological analysis. The psychological mechanism is fairly obvious. The radicalization of the GOP has placed unbearable strain on those few moderates torn between their positions and their attachment to party.

Kansas GOP House Speaker ‘Prays’ That Obama’s ‘Children Be Fatherless And His Wife A Widow’ — Stay classy, conservative America. It's what you do best. (Note this is not some fringe figure, this is an senior elected GOP leader. A whole lot of people who consider themselves reasonable conservatives and resent being tarred with the crazy brush voted for this man. Which pretty much voids their self-image as reasonable and not part of the conservative crazy.)

White House Rejects Petitions to Secede, but Texans Fight On — As conservatives have said for years, America: love it or leave it. I guess the Right doesn't love their country any more. (Thanks to Dad.)

Unmerited Self-Congratulation Is a Recipe for Continued Republican FailureIf you were wondering when Republicans had started apologizing for their party’s flaws, you aren’t alone. The Republican Party has many afflictions and problems today, but a lack of triumphalism about its own virtues isn’t one of them. I believe you left out the word "smug", Mr. Larison.

?otD: How's things?




1/20/2013
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hour (2,100 words on "Monsters in the Mountains at the Edge of the World" to 4,500 words and first draft complete)
Hours slept: 7.755 hours (solid)
Body movement: 0.5 hours (stationary bike)
Weight: n/a (scale out of batteries!!!)
Number of FEMA troops on my block enforcing disability rights: 0
Currently reading: The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks

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stillnotbored
User: stillnotbored
Date: 2013-01-20 16:53 (UTC)
Subject: (no subject)
That's when my opposition to the so-called "Right to Life" movement hardened from a general pro-choice philosophical conviction to a deeply personal understanding....

This.

My two children were born more than fourteen years apart, with the girlchild being oldest. One morning she and I took her brother, who was about two and a half at the time, to the doctor's office. This was a large medical complex, full of office suites that spread down the block.

One of those suites was occupied by Planned Parenthood.

I parked in the back parking lot. A knot of men and women carrying signs stood near the building, but I didn't think much of it. I often saw anti-choice people on the street in the Bay Area, frequently in front of high schools, which was disturbing. I got out and started to get my son out of the carseat in the back.

The girlchild started to get out of the front seat on the opposite side of the car. The entire group of protestors swarmed her, pinning her to the side of the car. They shoved leaflets in her face and pleaded with her not to kill her baby.

Their automatic assumption was that a teenaged girl in the parking lot of a building housing Planned Parenthood, accompanied by a toddler, must be there for an abortion. Forget all the other doctors and labs in the building.

Being a teenager, the girlchild laughed at them, but I lost it in a most spectacular way. The gentle women shoving pictures of dismembered, bloody fetuses into my daughter's face were shocked when I told them to get the fuck away from her. I don't think I've ever been that angry.

That moment was when I lost all tolerance and all respect for the anti-choice viewpoint. How narrow minded these people were, how tied to one worldview and an ignorant set of assumptions was a revelation.

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joycemocha
User: joycemocha
Date: 2013-01-20 17:23 (UTC)
Subject: (no subject)
Hey, thanks for the Feminist Mormon Housewives link. There's some amazing (as in good) stuff on that site, including a reference to "Heavenly Mother" at one point which warmed the cockles of my feminist heart (And the Mansplaining post? Priceless.
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Portland: ancient unicorn burial ground
User: janetl
Date: 2013-01-20 17:35 (UTC)
Subject: (no subject)
The thing about guns as a means of self-protection is that the failure mode is really, really bad. You hear talk of "responsible gun ownership", gun safes, background checks, gun safety classes, etc. Those are all very good things to have in place around guns, but perfection is impossible. Mistakes will always happen in any system. Manufacturing, aviation, rocket science — a lot of study, lots of money, and smart people all work to make these processes perfect, but there are still failures.

Failures with guns are the school security guard leaving his gun in the bathroom, the guy at the movie in Oregon who doesn't feel his gun fall out of the holster and children find it, the fumble at the gun show (above), the person who loses his mind and steals a gun from a friend or family member and shoots up a mall or school (Clackamas mall, Sandy Hook, Kip Kinkel), the man who thinks there's an intruder in his home and shoots his fiance (yesterday's news), the depressed person who has a particularly bad day and there's a gun in the house.

You posted awhile ago about people needing to own the cost of their decisions. If we want to drive a car, we have to face the fact that thousands of people die in car accidents every year (failure more). Guns have a nasty failure mode, too, and the failure is most likely to hit you and your loved ones. I know, humans (me included) make a lot of irrational decisions, but this type of irrational is driving me crazy at the moment.
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