Whatever happened to Christians believing that no force is equal to omnipotent God?
All of this black-magic-powerful-demons-your-God-is-fighting-my-God stuff seems so profoundly anti-Christian to me.
The "On The Road" posts at fivethirtyeight.com have been documenting this situation all across the country, for weeks, so it doesn't seem to be a factor of "places they've given up on."
Instead, the McCain campaign just seems to have an incredibly inadequate ground game, to the point where the occasional well-functioning, active campaign office the fivethirtyeight.com guys come across is legitimate news.
A few weeks ago, I asked a friend who is a well-connected Republican about this. His reply was that (a) Democrats don't necessarily know what to look for when judging the Republican ground game (meaning, I guess, that it would be organized out of churches, etc., and not out of campaign offices?) and (b) it would all swing into high gear in the last three weeks, because they had a good enough machine to get the vote out fast.
Except, here we are, less than ten days before the election...
I find it puzzling, and also worrisome. I just feel like they ought to have better game than this. I wonder if it's just that the ground game relies on the socially conservative base, who aren't that hyped about McCain even with a Palin sweetener.
Wow, the Rusk program looks really, really good. I am so very glad that Scraps' ability to pay is not going to compromise his care.
It disturbs me that he looks like he's going for Obama's ass.
Thinking of Scraps, Velma, Kristen, Scraps's parents, Patrick and Teresa, everyone. And feeling really useless.
Teresa, I hope that you are not straining your own health right now - although I know how impossible it would be to hold back and take care of yourself.
This is so awful.
It sounds like things went as well as they possibly could, which is still not much of a recommendation.
Best wishes to Teresa for a speedy recovery, and best wishes to Patrick (and Elise) for coping with an incredibly stressful situation.
The real purpose of sentiments like "think of it as evolution in action" is to reassure ourselves--that because we're smarter than that, we're in control. That misfortunes on that order won't befall us. To help ourselves pretend that we live in an ordered world in which certain kinds of stupidity are reliably punished and certain kinds of intelligence are generally rewarded.
...And to make us feel better about harm coming to someone else, because they probably deserved it, or at least, it's all for a greater cosmic good. It's a way of insulating ourselves against human connection with people who are different from us.
Some people are stupid; yes. Some people are reckless; yes. It's very difficult to help some people; yes. But no person is worthless.
Thanks for saying what you did, Patrick.
I just made zucchini bread for the first time since childhood. It was the confluence of two circumstances: Michael's coworker sent him home with a zucchini approximately the size of a newborn baby, and Jo Walton was about to visit. I wanted to serve Jo a quintessentially American food. She seemed to think that zucchini bread qualified.
Me@125: Sorry. When I wrote the comment, it wasn't piling-on yet.
Lance@113: Allow me to suggest, gently, that this would be a really good place to stop digging. The fact that you don't know Scraps doesn't mean he's not well-known around here.
@35: However, my feeling is that the speaker was overlooking a
key fact: even provided with superior tools, the vast majority of
people will never attempt to build anything.
The hell they won't. Americans spend more than $2.5 billion a year on scrapbooking supplies. The largest arts & crafts chain in th U.S., Michael's, had $3.39 billion in sales in 2004.
People garden, coax along the perfect suburban lawn, crochet, knit,
decorate cakes to look like other things that aren't cakes, do their
own home renovations, quilt, putter in basement workshops, direct
Sunday School pageants, design cutesy insipid "blinkies," banners, and
avatars that other people can use in their message board .sigs, make
Halloween costumes for their kids, put together webpages to honor their
miscarried or stillborn babies, sing in church choirs, carve duck
decoys, write awful self-published romances, hand-paint sweatshirts...
And that's just some of the creative output of the
middle-class middlebrow white suburbanite, a demographic I chose
because they are widely considered by geeks to be the least creative
and most intellectually bankrupt segment of the population.
Now, are they creating anything you'd want to see? That's a different question.
Rikibeth @152, the point is that none of those herbs can really be described as either "safe" or "a sure thing." They're in the "pregnant women should avoid these" category, not the "why bother going to Planned Parenthood?" category.
Dena @121, Bruce @128: In fact, about 1 in 4 confirmed pregnancies end in miscarriage. Given that most women who are interested in childbearing will be pregnant more than once, the number of women who have had a miscarriage is probably well over half. It's a crazy-high statistic given how rarely you hear miscarriage discussed.
I think there's somewhat of a taboo against discussing miscarriage with healthy women of childbearing age. When I allowed it to be known that I had one, I was amazed at the number of women who came out of the woodwork to tell me about theirs - other mothers, grandmothers, childless women. In most cases, I had no idea. I think that as long as I appeared to be on a happy maternal trajectory, they wanted to spare me the horror.
It's an enormous hidden sisterhood. At least, these days, it's likely that a woman who miscarries will be able to access that sisterhood for support. In my mother's generation, even that was taboo. She told me a story of encountering an 80-year-old woman who was finally able to tell about her miscarriage, and her grief, after 60 years of silence.
Adrian @131, the distinction I make is that fertilization is something that happens to gametes, and pregnancy is something that happens to a woman. A fertilized egg that doesn't implant passes out of the woman without ever affecting her, biologically or (because it can't be detected) emotionally.
Once a fertilized egg implants in the uterus, it stimulates all the massive hormonal changes of pregnancy, as well as the associated physical and emotional effects. Then the woman is pregnant, and it's possible for her to experience a miscarriage or have an abortion. But prevention of implantation is neither.
Thanks for the sympathy, everyone. I'm okay.
On the one hand, I can sort of see the argument that she might have been focusing on shocking the control-women's-bodies crowd, and completely missed the idea that her project might inflict pain on women who are infertile or have suffered pregnancy loss. That's a pretty distant or theoretical pain for a 22-year-old to understand.
I can sort of see it. Except for this: there's a perfectly good word for what she claims to have done, and it is abortion. When you deliberately end a pregnancy, you are having an induced abortion. That word would seem ideal for her shock-the-patriarchy purposes, but she didn't use it. She chose to use the word "miscarriage," which aligns her with desperately grieving couples experiencing accidental loss.
You can't even casually Google "miscarriage" (much less do the kind of research into the symptoms and course of miscarriage which one imagines would've been called for by faking one) without getting a pretty good idea of how badly it hurts and how intense and prolonged the emotional aftermath can be. She had that information available to her. She would've had to work very very hard not to see it. And she still chose to call what she did "miscarriage" (the technically incorrect term) instead of "abortion" (the technically correct one).
So, no. I can't really credit her with ignorance.
Also, as someone who recently experienced a devastating miscarriage and is now desperately worried that I won't be able to conceive again, let me just say this: lz Shvrts cn g fck hrslf wth rsty cthngr, th slf-drmtzng, nsnstv btch.
@57: I don't believe a word of it.
College students (and their student newspapers) are probably a pretty credulous audience when it comes to claims about pregnancy and miscarriage. It's an area about which the vast majority of them will have very little experience, plus a great deal of fear.
But from the standpoint of experience, I question the plausibility of what she claims to have accomplished. How many times is it possible to conceive, miscarry, and conceive again in a nine-month period?
The article says she "inseminated herself as often as possible." How nice. But regardless of how often she inseminated herself, there was only a 24-48 hour window per month that she was actually fertile. A healthy couple has about a 20% chance per cycle of conceiving during that window. Let's be generous and give Shvarts another 5% chance because, as a college student, she's pretty much at the peak of her fertility. We're still talking about only a 58% chance of conceiving at all within a given three-month period.
And then "miscarrying," which seems to be the word she's using for induced abortion. After a miscarriage, it takes time for the pregnancy hormones to subside to zero, and then for the reproductive system to reboot itself and for ovulation to resume. Yet we're to believe that she went through this conception-miscarriage-conception process repeatedly.
But even putting all that aside, and crediting Shvarts with some kind of super-fertility, it comes down to this: If it were easy to produce a "natural," "herbal" miscarriage using legally obtainable over-the-counter products, there wouldn't be an abortion issue for shocking college students to make art about. It isn't. (Yes, I know that there are herbal products pregnant women can't use because they are classified as abortifacients. That doesn't make them reliable abortifacients.) Procuring a home-brewed abortion is difficult, unreliable, and dangerous. If it weren't, there would be no need for abortion clinics.
If it's not a total hoax from beginning to end, then I suspect that what happened is that Shvarts "artificially inseminated" herself periodically without particular attention to fertility (or the viability of the donor sperm - which also takes some finicky care). Then, at about the time her period was expected, she took herbs that are known to sometimes be abortifacients and collected her menstrual blood in a jar. "Edgy" and "daring," without, you know, necessarily involving any inconveniences of reproductive biology.
Well, great. Now here I am sitting at my desk chanting Como se dice, como se llama ...and I couldn't even get any of the damn YouTube files to load. It's an earworm I don't even have to HEAR to be infected.
I really am astounded by the will.i.am song. It's beautiful and
stirring. I watch it often enough that my two-year-old answers the
question "What does Mr. Obama say?" with "Yes we can!"
Also: I, too, love this about people. There's so much creativity out
there that is just ready to burst out when you give people the
opportunity.
#16: You wrote I think if the country is ever to move beyond a two-party system (which is only twice as nice as a one-party system), it needs many more Naders running on all sides of the spectrum.
No. If our country is ever to move beyond a two-party system, we need to abolish the electoral college - and probably our first-past-the-post voting system, as well.
If I saw Nader ever work outside of an election year to reform the U.S. electoral system so that third-party candidates would become meaningful, I would credit him with some desire to reform American democracy.
Similarly, if Nader and his people worked tirelessly to build the Green Party from the ground up, fighting to get Greens on city councils and in state legislatures across America and running candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives, I would credit him with a genuine desire to build the Greens as a legitimate third party in the U.S.
Given that he only appears every four years for a bout of spiteful, Republican-funded grandstanding, I can only conclude that he relishes the role of spoiler.
#9: You wrote It doesn't really matter anyway. In 2004, Nader got 0.38% of the vote. There's no indication he'd do any better this time.
It's not the percentage of the overall vote. If 2000 taught us nothing, it's that in American presidential campaigns the share of the overall vote is, if not precisely meaningless, then at least highly misleading. What matters is where. Nader campaigned ruthlessly in battleground states. A tiny fraction of the votes in Florida (in 2000) or Ohio (2004) was enough to tip the scales for Bush.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 1 |
| 2008 | 19 |
| 2007 | 2 |
| 2004 | 1 |
| 2003 | 5 |
Total: 28 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Rivka:
Show all comments by Rivka.