I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to etc...
OK, no more mister nice guy. I'm finally ready to unleash my Perverse Vision out into the Cybersphere, throw my note in a bottle, cast my bread on the waters.
Call me a soggy blogger, call me Ishmael. Here goes.
Abortion:
Sometimes abortion IS murder. Deal with it. Your world will not fall apart.
Yes, I'm "pro-abortion", but just because a living, breathing human happens to be temporarily lodged inside a woman's body, does not make that "fetus/baby/human" (ie. an organism that could survive an early delivery, with a little help) "part" of that woman's body. That "fetus/baby/human" is NOT her body, and, just as society does have a "right" to tell us what we can and cannot do with out bodies in other instances, society has a right over some aspects of what a woman does with her body.
"Don't tell me what I can do with my body" is a red herring that the media dare not grapple with for fear of being called sexist.
Our attitudes toward abortion are related to our attitudes toward circumcision, ie. babies are "property", ergo we can do what we want with them. The only difference is that babies have no Abe Lincoln to fight for them, just a bunch of fundamentalist Christians, eeyuk.
"This land is my land, this land is my land"
I heard the argument made on public radio today (March 12 06) that the state of Israel is NOT "the last gasp of the British colonial system, but a people's legitimate search for their roots (paraphrase). My response, as a human, a rationalist and a Jew is: fuck that, it IS the last gasp of an exhausted colonial system.
Jews, gays, gypsies and communists lost homes in Germany, Poland and all over Europe, but did they go back and reclaim what was rightfully theirs? Hell no. Why confront your oppressors when you can have your turn at bat beating up on your very own perceived inferiors?
Dad beats mom, mom beats son, son beats sister, sister kicks the dog. Thus it has always been.
Maybe Native Americans finally gave up and told Whitey "OK, you win, we lost, here take all our land and just fuck the hell out of us". But Palestinians never gave up, and as long as they maintain an uninterrupted battlecry of "get the fuck off our land" then that land is theirs, period, and they have no need to compromise one inch of it. "But we made the dessert bloom" blah blah blah, is a pretty lame rationalization.
If Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had strapped dynamite to their bodies and taken any number of good German and Polish men, women and children along with them, would the West have called them "terrorists" or "freedom fighters"?
Jews have the right to "settle" Palestine? They have/had the "right" to settle in a land which they had not lived in for thousands of years, but were not willing to take back their homes and property in Germany, Poland, France, Italy etc....which they had lost only a few years earlier? Hello?
It's been an agonizing, decades-long struggle for me to say and commit to what I've just said.
Here's a modest proposal, let's carve out a piece of Germany, a piece of Italy and a piece of Poland, and call it New Israel, now there's an idea I could go for.
When bad things happen to bad people
The Geneva conventions and other internationally agreed-to policies prohibits torture. I actually heard an "expert" say that torture doesn't work.. I think what he MEANT was they he would like to BELIEVE that torture does not "work". I'm not apologizing for Abu Graebe, Guantanamo and so on, which I consider heinous manifestations of our greedy empire. All I'm saying is that, indeed, if you KNOW that someone knows where the ticking bomb that will kill a lot of folks in 30 minutes is hidden, then yeah, of course, torture the fuck out of him. Jeez. You just better have the right guy, is all.
You may say, "it's not that simple". Yeah, well sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Call me a soggy blogger, call me Ishmael. Here goes.
This blog is for "mature adults" only, because I'm a blasphemous, freethinking, foul-mouthed twit. You have been warned.
Abortion:
Sometimes abortion IS murder. Deal with it. Your world will not fall apart.
Yes, I'm "pro-abortion", but just because a living, breathing human happens to be temporarily lodged inside a woman's body, does not make that "fetus/baby/human" (ie. an organism that could survive an early delivery, with a little help) "part" of that woman's body. That "fetus/baby/human" is NOT her body, and, just as society does have a "right" to tell us what we can and cannot do with out bodies in other instances, society has a right over some aspects of what a woman does with her body.
"Don't tell me what I can do with my body" is a red herring that the media dare not grapple with for fear of being called sexist.
Our attitudes toward abortion are related to our attitudes toward circumcision, ie. babies are "property", ergo we can do what we want with them. The only difference is that babies have no Abe Lincoln to fight for them, just a bunch of fundamentalist Christians, eeyuk.
"This land is my land, this land is my land"
I heard the argument made on public radio today (March 12 06) that the state of Israel is NOT "the last gasp of the British colonial system, but a people's legitimate search for their roots (paraphrase). My response, as a human, a rationalist and a Jew is: fuck that, it IS the last gasp of an exhausted colonial system.
Jews, gays, gypsies and communists lost homes in Germany, Poland and all over Europe, but did they go back and reclaim what was rightfully theirs? Hell no. Why confront your oppressors when you can have your turn at bat beating up on your very own perceived inferiors?
Dad beats mom, mom beats son, son beats sister, sister kicks the dog. Thus it has always been.
Maybe Native Americans finally gave up and told Whitey "OK, you win, we lost, here take all our land and just fuck the hell out of us". But Palestinians never gave up, and as long as they maintain an uninterrupted battlecry of "get the fuck off our land" then that land is theirs, period, and they have no need to compromise one inch of it. "But we made the dessert bloom" blah blah blah, is a pretty lame rationalization.
If Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had strapped dynamite to their bodies and taken any number of good German and Polish men, women and children along with them, would the West have called them "terrorists" or "freedom fighters"?
Jews have the right to "settle" Palestine? They have/had the "right" to settle in a land which they had not lived in for thousands of years, but were not willing to take back their homes and property in Germany, Poland, France, Italy etc....which they had lost only a few years earlier? Hello?
It's been an agonizing, decades-long struggle for me to say and commit to what I've just said.
Here's a modest proposal, let's carve out a piece of Germany, a piece of Italy and a piece of Poland, and call it New Israel, now there's an idea I could go for.
When bad things happen to bad people
The Geneva conventions and other internationally agreed-to policies prohibits torture. I actually heard an "expert" say that torture doesn't work.. I think what he MEANT was they he would like to BELIEVE that torture does not "work". I'm not apologizing for Abu Graebe, Guantanamo and so on, which I consider heinous manifestations of our greedy empire. All I'm saying is that, indeed, if you KNOW that someone knows where the ticking bomb that will kill a lot of folks in 30 minutes is hidden, then yeah, of course, torture the fuck out of him. Jeez. You just better have the right guy, is all.
You may say, "it's not that simple". Yeah, well sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
posted by frankpoliat at 11:59 PM
0 comments
