The Powers That Be and the wonderful birthday present they gave me

Supreme Court rules (PDF here, if you've lots of time) 5-3 (Roberts had to abstain) against Bush administration on military tribunals and other Guantanamo "we don't need no stinking geneva conventions" practices. The Times article is actually gleeful (not surprising, since NYT is of course an enemy of the state and should be closed down):

The Times wrote that the Court "in sober tones shredded each of the administration's arguments"

The decision was such a sweeping and categorical defeat for the Bush administration that it left human rights lawyers who have pressed this and other cases on behalf of Guantanamo detainees almost speechless with surprise and delight, using words like "fantastic," "amazing," "remarkable." Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a public interest law firm in New York that represents hundreds of detainees, said, "It doesn't get any better."

[ ... ]

among those in attendance, there was no doubt that they were witnessing a historic event, a definitional moment in the ever-shifting balance of power among the branches of government that ranked with the court's order to President Nixon in 1974 to turn over the Watergate tapes or with the court's rejection of President Truman's seizure of the nation's steel mills, a 1952 landmark decision from which Justice Kennedy quoted at length.

And the very best quote of all:

In the courtroom on Thursday morning, the chief justice sat silently in his center chair as Justice Stevens, sitting to his immediate right as the senior associate justice, read from the majority opinion. It made for a striking tableau on the final day of the first term of the Roberts court: the young chief justice, observing his work of just a year earlier taken apart point by point by the tenacious 86-year-old Justice Stevens, winner of a Bronze Star for his service as a Navy officer during World War II.

Thank you, PTB. A birthday present to give me faith in my country again. Maybe it'll last long enough so that I don't spend the 4th of July in my usual bitter "how am I supposed to be proud and happy about my country these days?" funk.

Hah!

I subscribe to this Babycenter email newsletter that tells me what's happening in my pregnancy each week. This is convenient for me, because I gave away my pregnancy books after Ari was born and no longer remember a damn thing about what happens when. Not that I much care, this time around, but Ari likes to know what's happening.

This week the email tells me that "You're also probably looking and feeling a whole lot better as you adapt to pregnancy. Less nausea, fewer mood swings, and "glowing" skin contribute to an overall sense of well-being."

Hah.

I am SOOO supposed to be napping

Ari has gone off with the babysitter (and her friend, who apparently never gets to hang out with kids and is just along for the fun of it) to the children's museum. This is a fabulous place to which we have a membership and in which I invariably develop a migraine. Hence, a perfect thing to send the babysitter off to do.

Anyhoo. Here are the big stories in the blogosphere these days:

1. Kos is a fascist (a blogofascist!) who is controlling left blogistan with his strong-arm tactics. He makes members of the left blogosphere do horrifying things like support Ned Lamont against Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary. This is something ordinary Democrats would never, ever do. Because Democrats aren't allowed to actually decide to kick our guy out of the Senate, if, say, he spits on all our values, policy positions, and political speech. Now, which people sound more like fascists: a bunch of very loosely organized bloggers who disagree with Joe Lieberman and think the people of Connecticut should have the option to vote for an actual Democrat, not just choose between two Republicans; or Joe Lieberman, who is shocked, shocked that some people think voters should have the chance to, you know, vote?

There's a whole bizarre rabbit hole of weird anti-Kos accusations to explore, if you're interested. I don't personally know anyone who is interested. I don't personally know anyone who reads Kos very much. I never do. Anyone who sincerely believes that left blogistan is Kos-centric has not spent a lot of time in left blogistan. Or in blogistan, period.

2. The mainstream media is seriously debating whether the mainstream media is guilty of treason and should be prosecuted. Or perhaps, private citizens should just take matters into their own hands when the NYTimes publishes completely unsurprising stories about how the Bush administration is doing yet more totally unsupervised spying on Americans.

3. I am sure there is a 3, but I'm suddenly actually really tired. Nap time.

puking

I begin to believe that I shall not stop puking this pregnancy.

I am nearing 16 weeks now.Certainly the pukes have diminished in intensity and in frequency. But they continue. Every few days is a REALLY bad day, and I puke up something every couple of days. My child fetches me my "puke bucket" whenever I sit suddenly down on the floor and start breathing heavily. Today he was interested in the color of my puke. I had eaten blueberries. "MY puke is green," said the kid. "Well," I said, "today mine is purple."

I am sorry to burden you, readers, with my tales from the darker side of pregnancy. It's pretty self-absorbed and whiny of me, I suppose. But then, I think women don't whine enough about pregnancy. Perhaps if there were more whining, people who have never been pregnant would understand what an incredible burden it is. Then again, they'll probably just dismiss me as a pathetic whiner. Oh well.

Condescension, Al Gore, and Global Warming

In the 2000 election, people complained a lot about Al Gore being condescending. They said he lectured too much and talked down to people. They said he acted like he was smarter than everybody else.

I think people have a very mistaken idea about condescension. Al Gore is not condescending. He assumes his audiences are intelligent and able to think, but he also assumes that they may not have the information and understanding of a particular issue that he has. He offers his listeners that information, not to show off how much more he knows than they do, but as a prerequisite to what he expects his listeners to do, which is think seriously about what he is saying. It is the very essence of respecting your audience to assume both that they think, and that they might require some facts to think about. Only utterly incurious people find it humiliating to be told things they do not know, or believe that it is so shameful not to know something that it is insulting and condescending to suggest to someone that they don't know something by telling it to them.

What is condescending is to offer your listener superficial sound bites, fake facts, sophistry, demagoguery and emotionally manipulative propaganda in place of actual facts and actual arguments. It is condescending to assume your audience does not want to be told a fact it does not already know, and does not want to think about such facts in any case. When we accept that kind of crap from our political leaders, we are not only being condescended to, we are condescending to ourselves. We are humiliating and shaming ourselves.

Yes, Biscuit just saw An Inconvenient Truth. Yes, it was good, and we love Al Gore. But we already loved Al Gore. We loved Al Gore in the year 2000, although I must admit I paid very little attention to him before that. In 2000, Al Gore said one of his favorite recent movies was Being John Malkovich, and George Bush said his was Forrest Gump. And that's a totally liberal elitist thing to love Al Gore about, but we don't care. And we already knew that global warming was a hideous disaster. What we did not know was that a slide presentation could be done so well as to make even Tufte proud. And also, that Al Gore appears to use the same model Powerbook as me. Wow, I feel so close to him now. Anyway, go see the movie, and especially drag your oblivious SUV-driving friends and relatives to go see it. And then support politicians who support a carbon tax, which is probably the only way our country will be able to, you know, not be blamed for leading the way (proudly, defiantly, shamelessly) to the next mass extinction.

Oh, and go carbon-neutral. It's not enough, but it helps. And it's ever so easy. All it takes is money.

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On a related topic, Max and I have noticed that sometimes people make fun of us for using 'big words' with Ari, or for taking the time to explain concepts like "compromise" and "nuclear fusion" to our 3-year-old. (Okay, Max's dad does all the heavy science explanation, but still.) This is because, despite the evidence of their own childhoods, in which people were always treating them as though they were stupider than they actually were, most people persist in believing that children are stupider than they actually are. So I'm very sorry that people find it disturbing that our 3-year-old talks about the need to "stabilize" his block towers so they don't "topple", but mostly I'm sorry for all the kids in the world who don't have anyone to treat them like they have got brains. Of course we recognize that childrens' brains are not as developed as adult brains, and that there are limits to their understanding, but we prefer to observe those limits in our child, rather than predict them. We respect them wherever we find them, but we don't assume we know in advance what they are. Are we smug, irritating intellectuals or what?!

Why I will probably never write a book.

Sometimes I think I'd like to write a book. Then I think, god, I'd go through all that work to write the book, and it probably wouldn't get published. And then, if it did get published, I'd have to go on a book tour, which would be awful. Or else my publisher would not send me on a book tour, and the book would not sell, and then I'd have to look at it on remainders tables for years and years. And even if the book sold well, it wouldn't make me very much money, and then I'd have to write another book, hoping that that one might make me some money. Which it wouldn't.

So in the end it turns out that I'm lazy and unmotivated and not especially ambitious, and I probably don't have anything all that interesting to say, and spotty blog posts will thankfully never lead to exhausting book tours involving too much plane travel and hotel 'continental' breakfasts.

( And how will I ever get a job again if I keep posting stuff like this on the internets? "highly motivated self-starter" indeed. Reader hint: if I suddenly disappear off the face of the internet, assume that I am job-hunting rather than that I have been taken to Gitmo. Much as I hate and fear the current administration, I will admit that at present the first explanation is more likely than the second. Anyway, currently this blog does not appear on a google search for my real name. Now, if you search for "torture girl", that's another story...)

I heart Joe Biden, at least for 5 seconds

via Atrios:

DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: [blah blah blah crap cut and run war on terror blah ]

BLITZER: All right. You want to respond to the vice president, Senator Biden?

BIDEN: No, I don't want to respond to him. He's at 20 percent in the polls. No one listens to him. He has no credibility. It's ridiculous.

Bored Now.

I'm having a relapse of the pukes today, so have been lying in bed reading the internets. It's one of those days when no one seems to be updating their blogs fast enough. Which, hah, I should talk. So I'm listlessly refreshing netnewswire, which tells me only that Europe hates Bush, Florida continues to be a hallucinatory nightmare of a place, and I've missed a big argument on the feminist blog circuit about blow jobs and their place in the reproduction of patriarchy. Oh, and fut-ball fans attending World Cup games in underwear.

Oh wait, yay, some news. Episcopal Church backs down on gay bishops, in bid to prevent schism. Too bad. I say, what's a little schism? Not like there haven't been any before.

miffed about abortions

Max is angry at the angry anonymous commenter(s) to my most recent post. I'm having a heavy puke day, so I can't get up the energy to be mad. Mostly, it's always exciting to find that anyone not related to me is even reading the blog anymore. Not like we are responsible, mature bloggers who get replacements to blog for us when we can't do it, or have, like, paypal things set up. We don't even have google ads or an Amazon partnership set up. sure, we've toyed with trying to acquire fame and fortune as bloggers, and we've had our moments, but technorati tells me this ain't one of them.

I'm nobody, anonymous. Who are you? are you nobody too?

[oops, while I was helping our son do some coloring, my anonymous commenter outed himself. Hello Miff, I'm flattered you looked us up again! We actually had figured out you were you, but no one likes to be outed by others, so we treated you as anonymous until you suggested otherwise]

It does not bother me, then, to admit that my most recent posting was intemperate. I wasn't trying to convince anyone of anything. In case you missed the last three months of my life, I've had a pisser of a pregnancy. I've been sicker than a dog. We've had to hire babysitters to watch our son, because I've been too busy puking to do so. I can't cook, so our food bill is out-of-control. If I had a paying job, I wouldn't have been able to do it. We suck up the expense, and I suck up the hideousness, of my pregnancy because we really, really want another kid. Hell, I got pregnant even though my last pregnancy caused me to have a nervous breakdown.

So I'll admit it would have been a bit over-the-top to accuse every single person who is not pro-choice with hating women. People's ideas of right and wrong are based on all kinds of motivations, values, and histories. Though, in point of fact, I don't seem to have accused every single person who is not pro-choice with hating women. What I actually said was "the assholes running our country hate women, and think it's okay to enslave us." I also called these same people "crazy will-to-power fucks".

If you or anyone you know is one of the people running the country (and by this, I mean, a member of the Bush administration), then yeah, I'm calling you an asshole, a woman-hater, and a crazy will-to-power fuck, and I stand by those statements. I'm willing to argue with reasonable people, but I'm not alone in believing that this administration sucks ass, so I hardly think that I'm advancing a radical left-wing nutty position by stating that.

I also won't back down on my contention that pregnancy is a type of slavery. And to support the abolition of abortion, whatever your reasons, is to support a policy that enslaves women. The choices you and your loved ones make to deal with pregnancies are entirely your own. The day you come to me and tell me I must endure 9 months of enslavement I do not want, because you value a potential life I carry more than you value my freedom, well, that's the day you've said that my slavery is A-OK with you. Why is the presumed father not sentenced to such slavery? Well, because he's not a woman, and he's not pregnant.

The way I see it, my posting, intemperate as it was, still left a lot of openings for someone to argue that I am full of crap, none of which require that I be dismissed as a crazy left-wing nut. For your convenience, I'll list some below:

1) You could argue that pregnancy is not, in fact, a form of slavery. I'm not at all just blowing off steam when I say I think it is. That is my deeply held belief based on my experiences of 1.4 pregnancies (the .4, by the way, still ongoing) and my observation of pregnancies in other women. But you could certainly argue otherwise.

2) You could argue that even if pregnancy is a form of slavery, the value of an embryo or fetus trumps the rights of humans not to be enslaved. I don't happen to think it does, but, again, people disagree about stuff like that.

3) You could grant that pregnancy is a form of slavery but that women who get pregnant deserve to be enslaved for their stupidity or irresponsibility in getting pregnant in the first place. Pregnancy as a form of punishment. When people ask why they should be sympathetic to irresponsible women who get themselves knocked up, I presume that is their implicit argument. If you make this argument and want to be fair about the punishment, though, you should be prepared to sentence men who knock up women with 9 months of slavery as well. If you aren't, well then, yeah, I'll call you a woman-hater: you think women should be punished for a crime that men should not be punished for.

I'm sure there are plenty of other attacks you could make on my position, but hey, why should I do all the work? I've got a kid to entertain, and more puking to do. And man, will it ever, ever, ever stop raining?

Can't stop watching it

I saw this video for the first time in at least 25 years -- probably more like 30 -- when I borrowed a DVD of The Electric Company from the library. It actually makes my eyes well up, for a number of reasons. I think the most important is that it represents a long-dormant childhood memory. But I also think it's profoundly beautiful, with lovely filmic city poster artifacts, long-gone NYC cityscapes, and the spirit of New York that lived in the piece that Luc Sante wrote a few years ago in the New York Review of Books (here). It is stunning how different American cities looked just 30 years ago, and it's striking how much more wealthy and opulent the private realm has become since then.

Oddly enough, Ari refuses to watch it with me. I don't know why, especially since he loves most of the rest of the Electric Co.

abortions

lately I've been working on a little science-fiction story about a girl who tries to get an abortion, say, 20 years from now. Pregnancy induces cravings for sci-fi in me, and I end up rereading my old Larry Niven novels (okay, actually they're my brothers, I stole them from him.) Pregnancy also makes me think a lot about abortions, and how very fucking important they are. So the story's been percolating along in my head, between episodes of vomiting. Then I read this little story in the Washington Post today. (via Steve Benen filling in for Kevin Drum at Political Animal). It's about a 42-year-old married mother of 2 whose doctors wouldn't prescribe her Plan B one day when she and her husband got a bit too frisky and forgot the diaphragm. The doctors wouldn't tell her why, just wouldn't prescribe. Two of them. In Virginia, not South Dakota. So she couldn't find anyone to prescribe, and she thought she'd take her chances, and her luck was not so good that month, and she had to get an abortion, which was pretty damn difficult, it turned out.

All because the assholes running our country hate women, and think it's okay to enslave us.

So then my sci-fi story seemed, I don't know, a bit redundant.

***
Pregnancy is slavery. Those of us who choose it are not slaves, exactly; more like knights who have pledged allegiance to a powerful king in exchange for some eventual reward. We are enslaved to our own desires.

But to o force a women to carry a pregnancy she does not choose is to enslave her, to make her the instrument of your own will, for no reason other than that she is a woman, and pregnant. It's repulsive. And a society that rejects a simple, inexpensive, safe alternative to abortions, and rejects abortions too, is not concerned about saving lives, but simply about controlling them.

I don't expect or want the development of artificial wombs anytime soon. I'm willing to accept 9 months of full bodily enslavement to see the result of the little experiment in genetic recombination that Max and I set up. But I'll be damned if I'll be forced into slavery for some genetic experiment I'm not interested in (yes, even one I might inadvertently set in motion myself).

The way things look these days though, some day I'll be damned. Or if not me, then you, or my daughter, or yours. We are losing this battle, people. The crazy will-to-power fucks are still winning. I think I'm gonna go puke.