EtherHouse.com

Bellicose women for porn rights!

Daily Pundit links to a story of some anti-porn crusaders and their disingenuous drive to curtail established First Amendment rights under the guise of "protecting the children."

This quote just slays me:

Some of his middle-age male friends limit their time alone in hotel rooms to avoid the temptation of graphic pay-per-view movies, Brownback said.

The hell....? Why dither around with half-measures? Why not cut off your damn hand instead?

There are so many things wrong with this line of thinking I can't even begin to delve into them in a single post. I'll hit the obvious highlights:

• So Sam Brownback's friends can't control themselves around porn. This should be my problem ... how?
• I agree that porn, and scenes suggestive of porn, should not be on broadcast TV. Unfortunately, for most of these crusaders, that's a Trojan horse designed to open up opportunities to ban sexually explicit material wherever it's found -- and to police the internet.
• I'm hardly the first to say this, but: If I can do it, why shouldn't I be able to watch other consenting adults do it? I've never heard a remotely satisfactory answer to this one.
• Finally: Anything that hardline conservative Christians and hardline leftist feminists agree on is bad fcuking news.

Hey, "It exploits women, and men are beasts" feminists!

Hey, "We've got to curtail everyone's rights... for the sake of the children" conservatives!

I'm about to tell you something that'll make all your heads spin until your brains are flat against your skulls.

I'm female... I support Bush... I consume porn... and I vote! Deal with it, and mess with my First Amendment rights at your peril.

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A Jesusland of one.

John Hinderaker at Power Line has a post up today about Amnesty International that got me thinking. He posts a flyer from Amnesty that compares Bush to... guess what? Oh, you'll never guess. Go on, I dare you! Give up? A Nazi! Innovative, eh?

My cue to roll my eyes and scroll ahead to the next post. I believe I've heard this song before. But then he writes:

Amnesty International was once a great organization, notable for opposing tyranny of all stripes.

Really? Not in my living memory. But sure, I'll take Hinderaker's word for it. I've only really started paying attention to politics, foreign policy, and international organizations in the last few years after a lifetime of being a largely apolitical little-L libertarian. But I can say this: I can barely believe that Amnesty International was ever anything but a society with an Orwellian name and a brief for excusing dictators and rebuking America (or, as my vague impression had it, anything to do with the free market or capitalism). Watching the watchmen -- Amnesty and the UN, in particular -- was one of the factors that led me to wilfully turn my head from all things political early in my adulthood. The cognitive dissonance of knowing that groups like these were meant to be taken as the world's conscience disgusted me, until I learned to laugh with ironic detachment. (And then I had to unlearn that ironic detachment very quickly one morning at about 8:45. Now I'm back at "disgust.")

I'm not a kid. I can remember back a couple decades. So these sentences really struck me:

Whatever happened to the left? When did it give up on the cause of freedom? I don't know. But the American left's abandonment of the cause of liberty is one of the saddest facts of modern history.

The idea that the left ever championed liberty is unfathomable to me. I'll take it on faith, if my betters tell me it was so. Just as I take on faith that Manhattan was once a forest, and Broadway a footpath. But I can't really picture it.

I grew up surrounded by the left, in the heart of Manhattan. As a young teenager, I listened to Pacifica on WBAI. I read Mother Jones and the Village Voice. I was truly curious. I wanted to understand, and I wanted to believe as everyone else did. But I never could. There was such a dissonance between what I was told was true ("the left champions freedom") and what I knew from observation to be true (the left never met a form of tyranny, interpersonal or political, that it didn't like). This dissonance became more and more deafening, until I concluded (because I never met anyone who wasn't somehow on the left) that all of politics, and all of national affairs, and all international bodies, and all forms of political belief and action were based on an enormous lie that no one was allowed to question on pain of excommunication, and I became a laughing buddha of detachment.

(Until that morning at 8:45.)

All my friends, all my coworkers, still look with pious eyes to groups like Amnesty International and International ANSWER for moral guidance, and gratefully swallow the bromides they're given. I don't know anyone who would disapprove of the latest Bush=Hitler flyer.

I guess I'm a Jesusland of one.

 

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Poison? A Comb? Whatever killed Arafat, it CERTAINLY wasn't AIDS!

Charles at lgf observes the French government's delicate gavottes around the sensitive issue of the cause of Arafat's death. "Sensitive," of course, because to admit he died of AIDS, and not from Zionist poisoning, would apparently cause the Middle East to explode in violent recriminations.

Oh, wait -- it's already been in the process of doing that for several years.

In any event, I expect that eventually we can all settle down with a nice synthesis of the competing theories: Arafat died of AIDS, which he was given by the Zionists to discredit him. Nice try, Mossad, but it's not gonna work this time.

Personally, I blame those castrating Zionist combs.

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Carter the Unstoppable Sanctimony Machine

While we're on the topic of bashing ol' Jimmuh... Somehow, years ago, I got on the Habitat for Humanity mailing list. Here's a sign o' the times: I just got my first H. for H. mailing that wasn't "from" President Jimmy Carter. In fact, the mailing didn't mention him at all. Has the other 48% of the country finally woken up to what a liability this cringing, appeasing embarrassment still is? Is the tide turning? Is money talking, and bullshit at last walking?

Whoops. Sorry. I forgot to show the proper respect to a Nobel "Peace" Prize winner, a category that includes that other exalted Great Statesman of peace, Yasser Arafat. In October 2002, the unbiased gentlefolk of the Nobel Committee had this to say about our beloved ex-Prez:

In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power, Carter has stood by the principles that  conflicts must as far as possible be resolved through mediation and international co-operation based on international law, respect for human rights, and economic development.

Avoiding threats of the use of power... respect for human rights... economic development... Yep, that describes Arafat to a tee!

 

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