Please do not use science to justify your superstitious, magical views

I really should avoid looking at these atheists against abortion sites — they just fill me with righteous rage at their stupidity and pretentious abuse of science…as with this promotional image.

But that’s an 8-cell zygote. It hasn’t even gone through compaction yet; it hasn’t so much as formed a blastocyst. This thing was only fertilized perhaps two days before — it would have been tumbling through the fallopian tubes still, wouldn’t have reached the uterus yet, and definitely wouldn’t have gone through implantation. Implantation is one of those critical phases in development: one half or more of fertilized zygotes fail to implant and are spontaneously aborted, and the woman wouldn’t have even known fertilization had occurred, her body wouldn’t have begun the physiological changes of pregnancy, and if the process ended here, she wouldn’t have even noticed a delayed menstruation.

The odds favor this zygote ending here or shortly afterwards, even without any intervention. Nature spawns these embryos freely, and throws them away casually, almost with the wild abandon that we produce gametes in general. It is not a precious little person, it is an experiment, a trial run, a test probe, a pilot study, a beta run. No one should care if it aborts or not; most of them do, and we are completely unaware of most of them.

No one does abortions at this stage. The woman isn’t technically pregnant until implantation occurs, and she wouldn’t be going in for an abortion two days after insemination. The only time this would be an issue is in the case of in vitro fertilization, which would yield a dish with a dozen or a score of zygotes at this stage, which would be evaluated for implantation. Are they really arguing that women getting IVF should be compelled to carry every single conceptus to term?

And the wording is just bizarre and misleading. No “one” ever ends at this stage; because any spontaneous abortion at this point would not produce a “one”, in the sense of an autonomous, aware individual. You might as well be looking at a field of ejaculated human sperm and insisting that NO ONE SHOULD END HERE! It makes about as much sense.

Gah. It makes no sense. And worse, it’s atheists indulging in ridiculous magical thinking.

(via Beth Presswood)

White people need saving?

I had no idea. Suddenly, the fact that a black teenager can be gunned down and his white assailant goes unpunished and unhindered means the entire white race is under assault. O Lord, I hope no one threatens these fearful trembling innocent white Americans by shooting more black people! They can’t possibly bear more oppression.

The photograph is of the lovely John King, who has been protesting events in support of Trayvon Martin in Indiana. Apparently, Martin was a ghetto hoodlum, and therefore deserved to be shot. It’s going to lead to an interesting cycle: every black boy wearing a hoodie needs to be murdered, and when people protest the execution, white people like King will claim their views are being oppressed, so they need to lash out and kill more black boys, which means privileged white people will be blamed even more. How dare they say such mean things about us gentle people of European descent!

Too bad about the black kids. But what’s more important, a few lives of the wrong color, or the precious white sense of entitlement?

Still getting it all wrong

I can sort of sympathize: here’s a Christian pastor who’s trying to be relevant and a little bit progressive, and actually make real life issues, like sex, part of his church. And then, splat, look at this pratfall.

"On one side, (we’ll have) what men want or desire: your stripper pole, your video games, your sports," Scruggs said. "The woman’s side (is) orderly, neat. It’s all about love, candy, teddy bears, roses and being wined and dined and cherished."

This is what we call not really getting it. He’s dimly aware of a problem, but thinks the answer involves pushing stereotypes harder.

Irrational humans

I really have a hard time wrapping my mind around the strategies of anti-choice activists. I’ve encountered a few, and I’ve browsed some of their websites, and am so unimpressed with their tactics…but they seem to work effectively with some people.

We’re all familiar with their favorite choice of signage: preferably something with lots of blood splatters and body parts. This is quite blatantly an attempt to inspire aversion to what goes on beneath our skin, and encourage people to ignore the messiness of reality. It’s ugly but it works, to a degree (it also leads to desensitization; I notice that those sign-waving picketers aren’t prostrate with grief, as you’d expect if they were really feeling the message of their signs).

Their message could be whipped around and applied directly to, for instance, surgeons and oncologists. They also do bloody messy things, and they lop off parts and scar living, adult people. Shall we demand an end to surgery?

And then there’s the Big Lie. I have yet to meet a single anti-choice advocate with a shred of honesty and principle; the ones I’ve talked to are even more nauseating than creationists. They have a party line, and they stick to it…reason doesn’t even exist for these people, just blind, fawning adoration of babies, which they imagine to be sleeping inside the blood and meat of a living woman. So they say things like this without a stirring of conscience:

That’s just bizarre. What biologist has ever claimed that an oocyte was not alive? Of course it’s alive: sperm and egg are perfectly healthy, normal living haploid cells, the fertilized egg is a living cell, the immature oogonia and spermatogonia in the gonad are living cells, the primordial germ cells in the developing gonad are alive.

The argument is never about whether some state is alive or not. Your appendix and tonsils are great masses of living cells, but if the organ becomes inflamed, doctors will cut them out and throw them away. Every time you poop, about a third of that mass that you excrete and flush away consists of living bacterial cells, yet no one hesitates and feels regret at the tragic loss of life when their hand is on the handle.

The argument is about whether that living thing is a person requiring extensive legal and moral protection, and it’s entirely clear that “life” is not a sufficient criterion, or people would be lobbying for the protection of turds and tonsils. We are not absolutists about protecting all life; we can’t be.

Even the anti-choicers know that. That’s why, if you look at the awful site that image came from, you discover their other argument: it’s a baby. It’s got fingers and toes and a face and its heart beats. This is a purely emotional argument, trying to compel you to empathize with something on the most superficial grounds. This is the motivation behind all those intrusive ultrasound laws — you are supposed to surrender reason and decide that because something has a face and hands and heartbeat, it is exactly the same as a teenage girl who wants to go to college, or the young woman who discovers her much-hoped-for pregnancy has gone awry and the fetus is lethally deformed. It’s demeaning to real human beings.

But here, here’s a living creature with a face and hands and a heartbeat.

It’s even got far more autonomy and functionality than a twelve-week fetus, and is adorably cute. Shall we also declare that women and newts are morally, socially, and legally equivalent? It seems to be the way we’re going.

I have a new favorite insult!

I shouldn’t be this petty, given the ghastliness of these recently disclosed documents from the National Organization for Marriage. NOM is openly linking up with the Catholic Church, which is providing millions of dollars for campaigns to poison people into hating gays. They’re talking about fomenting hatred: they want to “interrupt the process of assimilation” of Hispanics into the wider culture by making gay marriage a sticking point; they say “The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks – two key Democratic constituencies.”

This is despicable. They’re targeting minorities to train them to find a new reason to hate, an artificial reason that widens the gulf without addressing the real problems of discrimination.

That isn’t funny. Their methods aren’t funny, either: they have lots of money, and they’re throwing it into hate-mongering ads, just like the Mormon church did with Proposition 8. But one of their proposed tactics did tickle my warped sense of humor:

"Hollywood with its cultural biases is far bigger than we can hope to be. We recognize this. But we also recognize the opportunity – the disproportionate potential impact of proactively seeking to gather and connect a community of artists, athletes, writers, beauty queens and other glamorous non-cognitive elites across national boundaries."

Yeah, they’re going to recruit famous dumbasses who can fall for their lies and toxic message…because don’t you know how effective Victoria Jackson has been as a spokesperson for tea-party insanity? But I do love how they openly admit that they have to recruit stupid people…ahem, I mean “non-cognitive” people… to their cause.

Let’s help NOM out and make a list of non-cognitive elites they can recruit. I’ll start.

Victoria Jackson
Pat Boone
Chuck Norris
…

Yes! Glamor and inanity go so well together!

Clenched tentacle salute to the bold revolutionaries of the Nude Photo calendar!

Go read the interview with Maryam Namazie about the Nude Photo Revolutionaries Calendar. This is an important effort to raise awareness of the oppression of women, and it’s going to be an honor to share the stage with her next month at the Imagine No Religion conference.

In addition to raising awareness, though, they hope to raise money for women’s causes. The calendar is very close to breaking even on their printing costs, so you should buy one, or two or three — further purchases will benefit women directly, in addition to raising consciousness. Also, by the way, pissing off the conservatives: read the comments on the interview to see what I’m talking about.

Can America get any more racist?

My flight home yesterday wasn’t great. I was generally feeling exhausted, and then in the airport, I made the mistake of watching the giant televisions they mount all over the waiting areas. You know, the giant televisions that apparently represent American political thought to every person on the planet who happens to travel through one of our airports. And the news was all about Trayvon Martin. Not about the injustice of a young black man being killed in the prime of his life; not about ghastly gun laws that justify murder; not about the bigotry of the police, who saw a dead black man and a vigilante standing over him, and shrugged their shoulders and let the vigilante walk away; no, different concerns engaged our brilliant news media.

Trayvon Martin had been discovered with an empty baggie that once contained marijuana. Uh, what? Does that matter? Are we now going to declare that past trivial legal offenses justify the death penalty now? If I gunned down that odious racist Dan Riehl, I think I could trust that a little digging would discover that perhaps he had a parking ticket somewhere in his sordid past, or perhaps he shaved the truth on his tax returns. I don’t know of any such crimes, but I’m confident that we could find something ex post facto to slime his reputation and rationalize anything I might do to him. That is, if I thought I was commissioned to act as an executioner for crimes that have not been tried, with the right to deliver the Maximum Penalty for even the pettiest of crimes.

It’s all very Judge Dredd.

And that’s not all! Maybe you’ve seen the usual photo of Trayvon Martin as a smiling young kid in a t-shirt; that’s a sneaky effort used by “hysterical race baiters” to portray him as a normal human being, which he isn’t, because he’s black. So they’ve ginned up photos of random black teenagers (they all look the same, you know) in sagging pants and posturing rudely, all to show how the real Martin conforms to their stereotypes. Or they show other photos of Martin when he’s wearing a hoodie and not smiling…because the sullen black man is dangerous. He better be smiling, and even prancing and singing, or apparently he deserves to be shot.

This seems to be the new strategy of the racist right: if they can show that Trayvon Martin wasn’t like Beaver Cleaver, then they can justify the murder. Trayvon Martin’s crime was not being white enough. They’re going to use this incident to put the whole of black culture — every bit of that diverse group that doesn’t conform to the mandatory Dick and Jane universe — on trial. Black Americans, you better practice smiling real big; you better put away that Wu-Tang Clan stuff and learn to love 1001 Strings and Pat Boone.

That was my ten minutes of outrage in the airport. It made me wonder whether black people might feel a little bit estranged when they step into a giant building like that with huge screens everywhere blaring racist apologetics.

I tuned it out before I ripped the armrest off my chair and started smashing expensive electronics everywhere, and turned to my iPad and the soothing rationality of the internet.

Then I read Jezebel.

Oh, fuck.

OK, people, did you really think pointing me to Crommunist’s post would make me feel better?

We surely do have a screwed-up country

Jesse Taylor tells a story about growing up black in America.

There’s a reason that Trayvon Martin’s story hits me so hard. When you’re thirteen and threatened with a bullet through the chest for getting your braces tightened, it teaches you how the world works, and does it in a hurry.

Or you could just read everything you were afraid to find out about the Trayvon Martin murder.

Doctor with a conscience

It’s good to see someone standing up against Republican idiocy. What we’ve been seeing lately is right-wing theocrats using doctors as a cudgel to batter women (oh, excuse me: sluts and whores) without stopping to think that maybe doctors could refuse to be their tools.

Come to think of it, doctors get far more training in ethics than politicians do, and it shows.

Abby Johnson doesn’t know what she’s talking about

Abby Johnson is one of those anti-abortion advocates. She has a different story, though: she was employed by Planned Parenthood for several years, and claims to have had an epiphany while participating in an abortion (a claim that doesn’t actually hold up), and become a forced-birth activist instead. She’s gone so far over to the Dark Side that she endorses Santorum for President, which means she’s a credulous dingleberry for god now.

But there’s one virtue to her: she’s such an awful liar for her cause that she inspires outrage in reasonable people who hear her, and they scurry out and do the research that shows she is making stuff up whenever she talks about abortion. In case you ever have to deal with Ms Johnson, she recently spoke at Colorado State University and motivated a couple of bloggers to do a very thorough takedown. Read why Abby Johnson is a liar about Planned Parenthood, and why Abby Johnson is a liar about biology. These are useful, concise resources in any argument about abortion.