Idiots With Degrees

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Proof that someone with a law degree can still be an idiot —

The infamous one-child policy paired with the practice of sex-selective abortion has left China with 32 million more boys under the age of 20 than girls. In Chinese culture, sons are an economic asset and daughters a liability.

Chinese culture has long been grossly oppressive of women (think footbinding). Footbinding has stopped, but there are living women with bound feet, so we’re not talking about something ancient. The practice of footbinding, like female circumcision, reveals women complicit in their own oppression, forcing their daughters to go through what they’d been through because they’d been taught it was right. And cultural conditioning that extreme takes many generations to fade away. Just because the practice has stopped doesn’t mean the subservience and self-abasement that enabled it is also gone.

So, what does this genius have to say about the male surplus story?

In countries where a woman has a virtually unfettered right to choose abortion, the result is that women overwhelmingly choose to abort female fetuses.

How many fallacies can be packed into one sentence? He ignores China’s culture. How many husbands of those women gave them no choice but to abort their daughters, for example?

Second, as I read in an article by Michelle Goldberg just this morning, 60 percent of the world’s population live in countries with liberal abortion laws — 60 percent of the world’s women have “a virtually unfettered right to choose abortion,” in other words. And this has been true for a long time. By this mouth-breather’s logic, 60 percent of the populations on this planet ought to have the same lopsided surplus of males as China.

However, they don’t. I believe the only other nation in which sex-selective abortion is common is India, a place famous for bride burning. Yeah, those women have lots of “unfettered” rights.

Where women are genuinely free to choose to carry a pregnancy to term or not, the male-female ratio in newborns has remained within nature’s “norm” of 106 males to 100 females. Oh, except in some places where the prevalence of environmental estrogens is reducing the number of males somewhat.

What’s really hysterical about Mr. Idiot’s conclusion is that he has a bleeping law degree, or so he says. He also wrote:

Supporters of unrestricted abortion, such as the Center for Reproductive Rights, support China’s efforts to ban sex-selective abortions, based on principles of non-discrimination against women. But it seems as if the CRR and other pro-choice groups are trying to have it both ways. If a woman has a right to choose, then who is the CRR or the government to decide what is the right choice? Or is this Western hypocrisy at its worst, giving women in wealthy Western countries choices of which women in poorer countries are deprived?

He links to a page of the CRR, which carries this statement:

Our shadow letter underlined many areas of concern, including: harmful effects of the one-child policy such as forced abortion, coerced sterilization, and increased trafficking and abduction of women; limited access to infertility treatment; maternal mortality; sex-selective abortions; and deficiencies in sex education. The Committee, through its Concluding Observations, expressed concern over rights violations ensuing from these practices. It advised the Chinese government to investigate and prosecute instances of forced sterilization and abortion and to strengthen and enforce existing laws outlawing sex-selective abortion and female infanticide.

In other words, women in China have very little to say about their own reproduction. They are forced to have abortions and sterilization procedures they don’t want, for example. We do not know what percentage of Chinese women freely choose sex-selective abortions, compared to those who are not given a choice by their husbands and culture to abort girls. But “freedom” and “China” are not words that fit into the same sentence, as a rule.

Mr. Idiot clearly is anti-choice and anti-women. He is also anti-brain. One wonders how some people manage to learn to tie their shoes, never mine get advanced degrees.

Update: Captain Ed twists CRR’s statement into approval for male infanticide. I’m not kidding.

Update: Are righties congenitally unable to think? Don’t answer that. Here we have Sister Toldjah in a post called “Coming Soon to America?” Does she think the U.S. is about to enact a “one child” policy?

Anyway, the main point seems to be to pick apart the CRR statement calling for China to “enforce existing laws outlawing sex-selective abortion and female infanticide” as an inconsistency, since us evil libruhls are known to oppose any restrictions on abortion. However, the pro-abortion rights Alan Guttmacher Institute has funded a lot of research into the problems caused by China’s policies going back several years. This is what happens when extreme male dominance meets abortion technology — lots more boys than girls.

What the troglodytes don’t get is that widespread sex-selective abortions are not happening because women have been given the right to make the choice. They happen because a culture so devalues women that they are treated as disposable. And under no definition of the words “rights” or “freedom” can anyone say Chinese women enjoy reproductive rights. Clearly, they do not.

Update: Great minds, thinking alike. See Kathy at Comments From Left Field. In short, the whole concept of “free will” seems to elude the Right.

The Big Tea(se)

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Andrew Sullivan points out that the astroturf “tea parties” being organized and promoted mostly on Faux Nooz don’t seem to have a coherent purpose. They’re tea tantrums, not parties, he says.

What are they protesting? Tax hikes? Most of the people who will show up for the parties have just had their taxes cut. So scratch that. The big budget spending proposals and bank bailouts? Dudes, none of us likes running up the deficit and bailing out banks. It’s painful. It’s going to be hard to pay off that debt. But what are your workable alternative proposals to stimulating the economy and preventing the collapse of the banking system?

Cue: cricket chirps.

Finally, illegal immigration. A serious issue, but what did the Boston Tea Party have to do with that?

The Right Blogosphere responded to Sully mostly by calling him names (you guessed it; he’s not a “real conservative”) and throwing more tantrums. The most substantive response I could find still did not address much of what Sully wrote.

The Right expects a world-record tea party turnout on April 15, but just in case the parties fizzle, they’ve got an excuse ready — sabotage by ACORN infiltrators. I swear, ACORN is the new bogeyman.

John Cole:

The best part about all the attention the tea parties will get the next couple of days is that it will all be on film. The usual suspects are already trying to do damage control, pretending that they will have been infiltrated by no-gooders (who else- Soros funded ACRON!), but that is pure nonsense, and the country is going to get a good look at some pure, undiluted, right-wing crazy.

Pass the popcorn.

Leaving 20th Century Economics Behind

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Eric Hobsbawm writes in The Guardian about the economic realities of the 21st century.

The 20th century is well behind us, but we have not yet learned to live in the 21st, or at least to think in a way that fits it. That should not be as difficult as it seems, because the basic idea that dominated economics and politics in the last century has patently disappeared down the plughole of history. This was the way of thinking about modern industrial economies, or for that matter any economies, in terms of two mutually exclusive opposites: capitalism or socialism.

This is exactly right, I think, but until a majority of our politicians and what passes for public intellectuals grasp this, our policies will drag way behind realities.

We have lived through two practical attempts to realise these in their pure form: the centrally state-planned economies of the Soviet type and the totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market capitalist economy. The first broke down in the 1980s, and the European communist political systems with it. The second is breaking down before our eyes in the greatest crisis of global capitalism since the 1930s.

The True Believers of both sides will argue no, no, no, pure Marxism/Free Market Capitalism has never been tried. But “pure” anything has never been tried. That’s the reality of our human condition. Any endeavor that requires human input is never pure. It will suffer some degree of corruption. Put together people, money, and power, and corruption is a certainty. That’s why any workable, sustainable model factors in corruption and makes some provision to keep it to a minimum.

That’s what the Marxists and the Ayn Rand culties cannot understand. Give all power to a central government planning authority, and you’re screwed. Give all power to an elite cabal of corporate heads, and you’re screwed. There has to be a way to reign in the power, to diffuse it, to oversee it and make it accountable to other power. That’s one reason the public and private sector need each other — to keep each other semi-honest.

The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left.

From here, Hobsbawm talks about recent British history, New Labour and Thatcherism. But similar things go on here (is it the almost-common language?). Our Right has effectively taken itself out of the conversation (even though it won’t shut up) because it can’t let go of its old ideologies and aphorisms that don’t work any more. I’m not sure if what passes for a “Left” here is fully cognizant of the new reality, either.

But unlike the Right, the current Left has no one economic model that we all put on an altar and worship. At least some among us are looking hard at the current reality and thinking through solutions that might work in the real world, as opposed to solutions that make good sound bites and look good on a bumper sticker.

But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people.

That’s something else that neither the Marxists nor the free-market Randbots ever understood.

Red Alerts

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Yesterday I described the partisans of the Right as being in a big potato sack race, hopping to crazyland. Well, this guy got there. He’s making a Big Bleeping Conspiracy Deal out of the fact that newspapers use press releases. I’m sure the same newspapers who are “complicit” in pushing the “radical” agenda of Families USA have also in the past published stories based on press releases from the “totally off the sanity charts” Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.

(Do these people live in caves? They’re so … innocent of how the world actually works, one wonders.)

Another news story that’s got rightie panties in a twist is from Rasmussen: “Just 53% Say Capitalism Better Than Socialism.” Younger people actually are evenly divided on the capitalism v. socialism question. The older the demographic, the higher the approval of capitalism over socialism. No big surprise.

I have words of comfort for those predicting the End of America — I doubt that most of the respondents know what “socialism” is any more than you do. I suspect only a very small portion of the respondents would say yes to the end of private ownership of property, for example.

But since the meatheads on the Right keep erroneously defining President Obama’s policy proposals as “socialism,” I can see how “socialism” might look good to a lot of people right now. It’s just that “socialism” isn’t really socialism. This country is no more going to embrace real, undiluted socialism than it’s going to fold itself up and fly to Jupiter. So chill.

Update: See also Chris Good and Melissa McEwan.

Hopping to Crazyland

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Call it Clash of the Titan Wingnuts. Pam Geller of Atlas Shrugged is accusing Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs of being an infiltrator, a neo-nazi, a fellow traveler of jihadists. Macranger calls CJ a “closet liberal” (ouch!).

Johnson actually said something sensible, which of course is beyond the pale for a wingnut. Commenting on a Politico piece called “Extremist rhetoric won’t rebuild GOP,” Johnson said,

This turn toward the extreme right on the part of Fox News is troubling, and will achieve nothing in the long run except further marginalization of the GOP—unless people start behaving like adults instead of angry kids throwing tantrums and ranting about conspiracies and revolution.

Based on blog reaction to Johnson, we needn’t be concerned that the Right will take Johnson’s advice.

I want to shift gears for a moment and look at some numbers — Nate Silver shows us that the GOP has lost considerable popularity in recent years. “[T]hose persons who continue to identify as Republicans are a hardened — and very conservative — lot. Just 24 percent of voters identified as Republican when Pew conducted this survey in March, which is roughly as low as that total has ever gotten,” says Nate.

If you go to Pollingreport.com you can find a page with “Dem versus GOP” approval ratings going back several years. There have been more Dems than Republicans all along, but since the 1970s the Dems took a big dive in party dominance. However, in very recent years they’ve been coming back.

A question asked sporadically by the ABC News/Washington Post poll, “Overall, which party — the Democrats or the Republicans — do you trust to do a better job in coping with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years?” shows the Dems consistently ahead going back to 1992, except for the years 2002 and 2003, when the GOP came way out on top. But by 2004 the Dems had the advantage again.

A Gallup question, “Looking ahead for the next few years, which political party do you think will do a better job of keeping the country prosperous: the Republican Party or the Democratic Party?” had the two parties evenly split, 42 to 42 percent, in 2002. But in 2007 the Dems were up, 54 to 34 percent.

So this movement in public opinion away from the GOP and toward the Dems isn’t something that just started this year. It appears it started in 2004. It just took awhile to become obvious even in mass news media.

At The New Republic, Chris Orr has an intriguing analysis of what’s happening on the Right. Essentially, the Right is already so marginalized its members have nothing else to do but compete with each other for position within the movement. And to do that they’re all trying to out-flank each other on the Right. So conservative politicians and media personalities are in a big potato sack race, hopping to Crazyland.

See also No More Mister Nice Blog.

Sedition and Crowded Theaters

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In the comments to the last post several of you mentioned sedition, so let’s talk about that. Sedition is the incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority, the dictionary says. You can find plenty of that in the delusional rantings of Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck.

We know now that part of what set off Richard Poplawski’s shooting of three policemen was the belief that Barack Obama was going to take away his firearms. This belief has no basis in fact, but it’s been propagated by well-paid right-wing media figures and the National Rifle Association. Isn’t this something along the lines of falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater?

We don’t have to speculate that right-wing hate speech has real-world, violent consequences. It’s happened. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

As a liberal, I am loathe to dig up the Smith Act — which I understand is still on the books — or enacting any anti-sedition legislation to prosecute people for their speech. In U.S. history sedition laws mostly have been used by people in authority to harass citizens they don’t like, or whose associations were suspect, not to suppress speech that was actually dangerous to anyone. And you know if sedition prosecutions become an issue now, as soon as the Right gets back into power (which is bound to happen eventually) everyone they don’t like will be in jeopardy. Got to suppress the fifth columnists in the name of freedom, of course.

So, what’s to be done? I haven’t a clue. You know they can’t be shamed into shutting up.

Update: Here’s a couple of videos I just picked up from Kos:

Newt is a politician. It’s hard to make them go away.

See also Joan Walsh.

Insanity Unleashed

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Kevin Drum writes that the crazy Right is getting crazier.

A sense of besiegement has been the right’s stock in trade for as long as I’ve been alive.

But there is something different about their tone these days, and I can’t quite put my finger on exactly what it is. My tentative take is that there’s an inchoate quality to their fears that’s new.

See also “Scenes from the Real America” at the Washington Independent.

I don’t know that the wingnuts are any more “inchoate” than they’ve ever been. I don’t know that their problem is that they don’t have an enemy. I mean, who was their enemy in the 1990s? Bill Clinton, black helicopters, and the phantom liberal elite. Now they’ve got Barack Obama, Muslims, and the phantom liberal elite. What’s the diff?

Are they less sensible now than in their glory days when they stampeded us into Iraq or went after Dan Rather like a pack of rabid wolves? Yet there is a difference, as Gary Kamiya says.

With the collapse of the GOP into the party of Rush Limbaugh, and as Limbaugh and his ilk grow ever more reckless in their attacks on Obama, the boundaries between “respectable” right-wing paranoid hatred and “extreme” right-wing paranoid hatred are getting more blurred. Right-wing fanatic du jour Glenn Beck teased his recent Fox show with images of Hitler, Stalin and Lenin and said that he was wrong to say that Obama was leading America to socialism — because Obama is actually a fascist. “They’re marching us towards 1984,” Beck intoned. “Big Brother, he’s watching.”

I think the real difference is that, deep down, they know they’ve lost. They can’t admit it to themselves. They are still blustering as if they represent mainstream America. They still pretend to themselves the majority of Americans give a bleep what they think.

But the truth is, the majority of Americans don’t give a bleep what they think. They’re jokes.

President Obama is popular. Legislation gets passed without conservative votes. The nation is not in shock and awe of, or even paying attention to, their “tea parties.”

Remember back in January, when the stimulus bill passed in the House with no Republicans votes? For a time House Republicans seemed actually proud of themselves for standing together. Then they noticed nobody but them cared how they voted.

They threaten to “go Galt.” America says fine; go right ahead. Don’t let the door hit your butt on your way out.

This is the real danger. They still have the sense of besiegement, but before 2006 they felt they had power, and that they represented the mainstream. Now about all they have is paranoia and guns.

Watch your back.

Blackbird

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Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free.

Blackbird fly
Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

News item: Beatles Stars Reunite at Concert, dedicate song "Blackbird" to President Obama.

Whose Fault, Again?

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I see that North Korea launched a rocket over the Pacific. Without bothering to look I’m guessing the Right Blogosphere is (ignorantly) blaming Bill Clinton/Jimmy Carter. Choe Sang-Hun and David Sanger write for the New York Times,

The motivation for the test appeared as much political as technological: After acquiring the fuel for six or more nuclear weapons during the Bush administration, and negotiating a halt of its main nuclear reactor in return for aid, North Korea’s recent statements appear to be a bid for attention from the Obama administration.

I agree about the “bid for attention” part. Of course, the big reason North Korea is a problem is that its sitting on a pile of plutonium, which it took out of storage and began processing after ham-handed treatment by the Bush II Administration pissed them off. I have a background post on North Korea and its nukes here. See also the North Korea archive.