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Is this culture war? I'm not entirely sure anymore. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, and I'm not, not really, just wearied of it all.
So... list of recommendations of new SF/Fantasy popped up on a social media site (okay, it's Tumblr) and it's a mix of some continuing series (that I've never read but have at least heard of, e.g. Murderbot and the Ann Leckie Radch universe) and new novels. Much what you'd expect, except this one stuck in my attention like a splinter:
My immediate reaction was "that means abortion provider". And whaddya know?
So where's the culture war? Well, apart from the pro-life protestors being portrayed as screaming bigots and (of course!) the obligatory raped twelve year old*, it's just that I'm tired. There's not even the honesty of calling this what it is: abortion. No, it's "reproductive health care". That is the new shibboleth, I understand that, it's just... okay, the battle has been lost. Abortion is now enshrined as a fundamental human right, like food and water. We've long moved on from "sadly necessary, safe legal and rare" to "of course you're going to kill the baby, but it's not a baby, it's not a life well technically okay but not a real life, it's not a person, what do you mean murder, now please sign my petition about shrimp and AI are conscious entities that we should give legal rights so they can't be enslaved".
Yeah. I'm tired and I don't know where we're going from here on in, but if AI does turn us all into paperclips, we have no bloody leg to stand on in opposition.
*You think I'm joking?
Nonsensical, near AI-written woke novels are not new. They are also rarely best sellers; thé best selling speculative fiction writers are still white men writing books about adventures and fighting, and women churning out ‘young adult’ slop about tomboys having love triangles in a dystopia of large hams.
Paying attention to this is, literally, exactly what they want. In the course of normal human events this novel is read by a dozen activists and the publisher loses money.
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People say abortion, and I perk up. Great! Let's talk Eugenics! Can we abort adults, too? But no, no, it's actually just about letting people screw around and pretend it's free of consequences. I wish we were steely-eyed Übermenschen coldly exercising our power of life and death in order to maximize our competitive edge, but no, in truth we're just a horde of hedonist degenerates who kill babies because foresight, commitment and responsibility get in the way of maximizing our dopamine release. But hey, no problem - just elevate the baby-killing business to a sacred cow of the civil religion and focus on the raped 12-year-old, because that's the modal abortion case, or at least we can pretend as much.
FWIW, I recently read Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima, and in there an Abortion scene just went...oddly uncommented. Hard to tell what the author thinks of abortion. Of whether it's a philosophical or political issue for him at all, or just a question of practicalities.
I think the world doesn't have enough high decouplers in charge to let your country in particular voice this opinion again. I can see some African country adopt a Yakub-like ethos and start doing eugenics with little to no outcry if they somehow get rich enough.
Well then someone else better step up, because it will need to be voiced sooner or later.
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And literally worse than demons if the blurb you quoted is accurate.
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There'd be some funny bits if this was just the dark mirror to those wacky christian film and book publishers, but Saga's a Simon and Schuster imprint, and not even one of the really wacky imprints. But it's still the same thing, just with a slight glazing of prestige. And given the extent that mainstream publishing is dying, it's not that much prestige.
It's... hard to figure out what deeper to say.
I haven't read the book, so I can't review it. It's possible that there's something interesting or deep under the obvious political allegiance, though I'm pretty skeptical. And while I've bought some books with really bad covers and interiors -- Morning Glory Milking Farm is going to be on my Kindle account forever -- I'd like to at least pretend I've got some dignity. At least the normal slop is cheap. And I don't think it would sate many frustrations, rather than highlight what a more serious engagement with the author's favored policies could have done instead.
If we want to focus on how it's a shallow version of its own politics, that's something with more meat and doesn't require a few hundred pages of less-than-AO3 grade urban fantasy. And it is shallow, both from that summary, from its own synopsis, and from the various reviews.
It's trying to rip from the headlines, except the headlines kinda suck. Chicago had a 2024 big deal over coordinated protests, except they looked like this. The city's had buffer zone laws since 2009! There were a couple heavily-reported cases in the US involving 10-12-year-old rape victims, but the controversy in each case involved questions like is the rape exception well-known enough written by reporters or whether the case had happened from people wanting the rapist prosecuted. I'd wager that the climax of the book involves a physical attack, probably a firebombing, except the real world versions of that are a lot less exciting, too.
Yes, it's a fantasy story, there aren't (presumably) Indian demons stored in a random museum you can touch, either. And the Indian demons (presumably!) aren't the real-world metaphor the author's trying to discuss, here.
Except they're not trying to discuss it. Anti-abortion activists are monsters or the outgroup in a deeper way than vampires or demons or dragons would be. The protesters being entirely unsympathetic and uncomplicated is the point, not a failure. It's the same reason that you make Dracula a dick in addition to a bloodsucker if you it to be really cathartic when he gets ground into concrete. There's an irony when that comes from someone talking up the complexity of real solutions, but there's nothing deeper to that complexity than people disagreeing with her.
That seems more critical than the weird discourse norm where whatever progressives want today is The Biggest Most Important Right Ever that can't have any limits at all, and then those actually-written-down-rights have all those penumbras and exceptions and balancing acts. But it's also less fun to point at.
I can't even accuse them of hypocrisy with the "it's not abortion, it's reproductive health care!" bait-and-switch, since it may have started as pabulum to persuade the centrist ordinary people to their side ('abortion legal yes but with some restrictions' people), and while I'd love to think there's some shred of conscience deep down that makes them wince away from the reality of the term I think it's more that they're a generation that has grown up on this and have imbibed that "it's reproductive health justice natural human right".
But imagine if the term "oncologist" was used for someone who gives you cancer. That's where we're at here.
"Oh, you work in reproductive health care? So you promote fertility, you help people who want to become parents, you help women through pregnancy to the delivery of a healthy child?"
"No, we promote sterility and defeat fertility, be that temporarily via contraception access or permanently via vasectomies and tubal ligations. We help people not become parents. We help women terminate pregnancies so
no living child resultswe safely dispose of the products of conception, using emergency contraception, medical abortion medication, and surgical abortion"."How is that reproductive health care?"
"We care for your health by preventing reproduction! After all, studies show abortion is safer than pregnancy!"
By your reasoning if the clinic says "plastic surgery" they would have to take away plastic surgery from you.
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IIRC thé vast majority of what planned parenthood does is STD treatments, which is uncomplicatedly reproductive healthcare.
Source
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How is this? I've been looking for a contemporary "spicy" book to read to get a better sense of the genre, and I've seen it mentioned a couple times.
It's not great as 'spicy' romance goes. That may not be what you're asking.
Pros: it is extremely accessible.
It's straight, and not asterisk-straight or orgy-straight or furry straight or werewolf pinata straight or MMF straight. There's a blink-and-you-miss it mention that might be a gay (or gay4pay) guy existing for a background sentence, but the story is pure girl-on-guy.
Despite the name (and front cover), it's surprisingly vanilla. The guy's basically just a rich dude with a big dick and horns, the woman's just service sector employee even if her 'it's not sex work' deflection is pretty transparent, the actually erotic scenes aren't actually focused around glory hole or prostitution kink. Most of the book focuses on handjobs and a large volume of semen, but without the rod-and-tackle 'worship' that's likely to be off-putting to straight guys (though it's definitely not written for men in terms of pacing and tone). Some very mild size difference and enhibitionism (don't get caught kink), but less than someone familiar with the genre would expect. That's more common than you'd expect from the 'female gooner' genre, but if you're looking for remotely deep monsterfuckery (artist: pantheggon. cw: f/f, mind control) you're going to be unimpressed.
It's also relatively short, as this sort of smut goes, while still being a full book rather than a short story. There's a joke about even really bad or dubcon smut being a better love story than Twilight, and damning with faint praise, but it's also half the length of the first Twilight book. If you want a sample without spending days on it, that's a bonus.
It's heavily tied into woman's psychology, and there's a lot of early scenes that are very sexual but not very erotic to support that framework. That makes it less interesting for most male readers, myself included, but if you want a good glimpse into monsterfuckery as permission structure to experience the desirable taboo, it's here, if not in a particularly grand form.
Cons: there's not much more to it than smut. Charitably, it's a romance... and so little will-they-or-won't-they (or even who-will-they) that I'd be hesitant to put it in that category; at most you get some who's-this-other-girl that resolves in minutes. That isn't unusual in the genre, but it makes it worse as a representative compared to some of the often-ludicrous plots or dramas that can come up. Still, the tension's low enough that it's a bit of a slog if you're not looking for the next sex scene, and all your suspension of disbelief has to go into the setup.
The windup to the sex isn't very erotic, and I'd expect it's even less erotic for straight guys. Part of that's a genre convention matter where the not!sex worker runs into a bunch of loser johns so The One really stands out, but it means you get a lot of premature ejaculation jokes in your porn, and not even sexy premature ejaculation, and it's not the only form (or worst) on that. The protagonist and her husbando-to-be do better, and there's some decent pacing so that when they finally get with each other outside of work it feels more reciprocal, but for the first half of the book you're getting a woman jerking a guy off, and the later jilling herself.
The prose is okay at best. There's the descriptions are sometimes a little off and you get some tense mismatches, but you're not facing a ton of simple typos or physical impossibilities. If you read a lot of fanfic, there's some tics that are really annoying (my god people, don't write sequences of a person's body parts acting individually during conversation scenes!); casual readers will probably just find them weird. Likewise, it's very fanficcy when it comes to sex scenes. If you want an idea of what conventions AO3 smut takes to a sex scene, a bunch of them are present here and distilled. Nothing to the point of dubious lube (cw:ouch), but don't think too hard about the anatomy.
The guy is boring, even by the standards of the genre. He's well-off, and tall, and has a deep voice, and is an ethical businessman, and he's divorced but it's not acrimonious, and he listens, and it's like they started with the character and then forgot to give him anything else to do. That's... probably better for a straight male reader, but it's a little unusual given the centrality of Guys Showing Vulnerability.
That said, most of the better stuff I can name is either furry, older, gay or bisexual, or some combination of all three. That's probably more an artifact of what I read than the state of the field, but limits my ability to speak on the matter.
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FYI it's worth remembering that "smut written for women" and "smut written for men" are completely separate genres, even within nonvisual literature.
"Is Morning Glory Milking Farm closer to Henry Miller or Murakami?"
All I'm saying is, if you have any interest, even peripherally, in being genuinely entertained, you should seek out smut deliberately targeted toward your own gender. (Which, based on my preconcieved notions of the motte's demographics, I'm guessing is probably male.)
If you're interested pruriently, smut for your own gender is a better idea. If you're looking to point and laugh instead, I'm guessing "Morning Glory Milking Farm" will work quite nicely for male Mottizens.
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If you're curious about it, ShoeOnHead did a review of it.
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Alexander Wales wasn't impressed by the quality of the worldbuilding.
Wales is either disturbingly autistic, writes for an autistic audience or is really good at writing like one for the lulz.
It’s the latter. Both of the latter.
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That's the best book review I've read since Field & Stream reviewed Lady Chatterly's Lover:
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Based on the review you linked, it sounds like the book was written by someone who used to volunteer for Planned Parenthood, and it draws on her experiences from that time (even if she adds supernatural elements.) While it is still probably crap (since 90% of everything is crap), that at least feels like a book that could have some interesting roman à clef-style presentations of real experiences the author had, if it was in the hands of a competent writer.
There definitely seems to be a one reality, two screens effect here.
Pro-life people like you get to claim that the battle is lost, and abortion is now enshrined as a fundamental human right. While pro-choice people can point to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v Wade four years ago, and a patchwork of state laws that look like this and claim that the battle is lost, and women's rights are a dead letter in much of the United States.
I tend to be a federalist on a meta-level, and so I tend to think kicking a controversial issue to the state level to let the voters decide is probably the better choice. Especially since I assume a federal ban, or a return to federal permissiveness will probably continue to have a corrosive effect on American politics.
While I'm sure much of the grey tribe are more "blue" when it comes to the abortion debate, I actually don't think that the combination of positions you outlined here is a very common one overall.
And they're be wrong and stupid, given mifeprestone mailing and that abortion is up considerably post-Dobbs.
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This isn't going to stick. In a world where abortions were minor surgeries and where travelling across state lines to have the surgery was (a) hard to conceal and (b) likely to be a long way because abortion policy would follow the red/blue divide, which is approximately sectional, rather than being an idiosyncratic feature of each state, this could stick. But in the world we live in, most abortions involve a small number of pills which can be posted from a legal clinic in a blue state, or in extremis illegally by a private citizen who obtained the pills with the tacit approval of her blue-state government. So either the federal government enforces laws* against mail-order abortion pills, or red state abortion laws are unenforceable. And enforcing those laws against the wishes of the (people and governments of) the blue states where the federal crimes are being committed is likely to become an ongoing ICE-in-Minneapolis level ugly political standoff.
Admittedly all this is an improvement because it takes federal abortion policy away from SCOTUS and puts it back into democratic territory.
* One relevant law is already on the books - the Comstock act prohibits sending abortifacients through the US mail. My understanding is that there is also a broad power for the FDA to restrict prescribing of drugs which are at risk of being illegally diverted without the need for new primary legislation.
IIRC current telehealth rules revolve around the locale of the patient, and traditionally doctors are licensed by the states and only have authority within those states. While blue states have allowed this (and I'm not even sure it bothers me too greatly), I wouldn't expect it to not get challenged in court WRT state extradition law and such, or for red states to find an equivalent axe to grind to upset blue state authorities on similar jurisdictional grounds.
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See, that's my point. Murdering the child in the womb is a woman's right. If you can't kill your baby it's the exact same as being chattel. How the fuck did we get to this point? I lived through it, and I still don't understand it.
I think your framing here is pretty uncharitable, as abortion activists aren’t broadly in favour of infanticide, nor do they frame abortions as such. It’s an issue concerning bodily autonomy, that as an autonomous and free agent women shouldn’t be obligated to provide for a foreign body that demands sustenance from her, just the same as we don’t provide for rights to tumours, ticks or other parasites, even if we understand that their removal from a host body will likely result in it’s death. A fetus passing away after being separated from the host is as such not the moral fault (if there is any to be found) of the would be mother, but rather an “innocent crime”, more of a natural occurrence than anything you could or should hold a person liable for.
The problem I've always had with this framing, is that it only seems to exonerate rape victims, and perhaps people who never received comprehensive sexual education. Basically everyone else understands that sex can lead to babies, and thus knows that they could be on the hook for that consequence.
To use a slightly whimsical analogy. Imagine a strange lottery, where besides the jackpot and small prize offerings, there is also a widely advertised "downside" of participating in the lottery, where there is a chance your circulatory system will be connected to that of an unconscious, famous violinist for 9 months until they have recovered from whatever disease ails them. The fine print does mention that you can unhook yourself from the violinist at any time, but they are guaranteed to die in that circumstance, as they will have become utterly dependent on you for their continued life and existence.
Unlike the original violinist thought experiment, where a person is hooked up to the violinist against their will, it is not at all obvious to me that it is moral to unhook yourself from the violinist once you have been hooked up in the lottery scenario. You voluntarily chose to take part in a lottery where you knew there was a chance that you would be hooked up to the violinist, and now that their life is dependent on your decision and they depend specifically upon you, I'm not sure that I think it is okay to unhook yourself, purely from an intuitional perspective.
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At an evolutionary level, females being able to control which males procreate is generally done after the fact, rather than before. Both men and women can be ruthless about whose genes get passed on.
Every year, six hundred thousand dudes get culled from the gene pool after they got their swimmers in.
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As a rhetorical device, anyone who wants to can try to frame something as a right, in order to try and put it beyond the realm of debate and discussion.
As a political reality, unless the government enshrines it in some way, none of the rhetorically claimed rights are truly rights.
I guess I don't understand what you're confused about here. You even cited other non-existent rights in your OP here: food and water. No such right to food and water exists, at least in the United States.
No, she’s saying, “how far did we fall, that the right to kill your own baby in the womb on demand is considered to be the most important right a woman needs, the main thing that distinguishes women from chattel?”.
You may disagree with the framing, of course. Personally, I am more sympathetic to the pro-abortion side than Here and think the Euros (but not the UK or Anglo countries) have it broadly correct. First 8 weeks or so it’s not really human in any meaningful biological way IMO. After that period is ended the right to abort should, aha, terminate.
In anglo countries we seem to have got into this weird maximalist position where if you can’t kill a baby a month before birth then you are a slave, the baby has no rights until literally the moment it’s squeezed out of the vagina, and the whole thing is celebrated and glorified in a way that is very weird from the outside - a miscarriage is a tragedy but a late stage abortion is a beautiful assertion of the right to one’s body. I get the reasoning but it’s a bit much.
Yeah it's just the contradictions inherent to it all.
Miscarriage/hypothetical forced abortion is a tragedy but a willing one it's a clump of cells
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I've never understood how, if Alice in Austin is pregnant and does not want to be, Bob in Big Spring compelling her to remain pregnant is less of an imposition than Carol in Cambridge telling Bob to mind his own.
For Alice it's no less of an imposition, but there ought to be fewer dissatisfied Alices and Bobs. Handling things on a more local level means that more people live in localities where their preferences are law, and that, if the current state of the law is intolerable to you, it's easier to move somewhere where it isn't. Abortion is something of an odd case here: There's little reason to care whether shoplifting is de-facto legal in California if you don't live in California, but pro-life people care very much whether 'baby murder' is permitted anywhere. But on the margin I still think they'd rather it happen somewhere else than right next door, so Federalism does increase satisfaction of preferences.
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Strange, then, that she voluntarily did the pregnant-making thing.
Yeah no... Sex is not the pregnant making thing. Sex is just Sex. It can be done for any number of reasons. Pregnancy is merely a risk of Sex. Provide an actual argument that the sole telos of sex is procreation or leave your Christian-derived beliefs in your own life.
Others have already explained my point better than I could have, so I'll just say the following: I'm not arguing from Christian-derived beliefs. Sex out of wedlock, okay, fine, not ideal but it can work. Aborting retarded and unviably sick kids, nasty but necessary. Deleting public welfare to remove the bottom from society so that people can actually fatally drop out, now that's my hobby-horse. No, I'm pretty sure I'm not arguing from Christian-derived beliefs.
I'm arguing from a hatred for naive, short-sighted, hedonistic, asocial stupidity, no matter how deeply entrenched that stupidity is in the zeitgeist, or to what a degree I myself share in that stupidity.
Life. Life cannot be without procreation. Procreation is sex. Sex makes new life. That makes sex, honest sex, one of the most important acts in the human world. Declaring that sex can be done for any number of reasons may be factually correct, but it's also comically missing the point of it. No matter how much fun it is for how many people, that fun exists only to make people have sex in ways that produce offspring. Everything else is a byproduct, a side-effect, a distraction. Sex being fun is great, because it makes us make babies. Sex being decoupled from the baby-making is a civilization-endangering cultural stupidity.
I mean from a purely eugenic argument, the vast majority of people who get abortions are poor, short sighted, high-time preference individuals who are a net negative on the society that hosts them. A civilization that is full of them is already endangered. It is civilization-destroying to let the stupid outbreed the intelligent. Abortions combined with your lack of public welfare would greatly reduce that amount of people in the bottom rung of society.
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It doesn't require a shred of Christian belief to recognize that sex is the pregnant making thing. That is basic biological fact. We enjoy sex because it was advantageous (from an evolutionary POV) for us to do so, but that is not the primary purpose. The primary purpose is to reproduce.
So are these:
Arguments deriving morality and telos from biological determinism lead to the justification of behaviors the vast majority of humans consider abhorrent. To deploy it in this one case is cherry picking an arbitrary boundary line.
This post is one giant strawman. Nobody said that it's immoral to have sex for pleasure, people said that sex is "the pregnant-making thing". Which it is.
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I know the "pregnancy isn't a natural result of sex!" crowd hates Christians with a white-hot passion mirroring their hatred of having consequences of their own actions more generally and so want to blame them for all the evils in the world, but it's entirely possible to come to the conclusion that pregnancy is a result of sex from a secular perspective.
"Sex is just sex" is nonsensical, like saying "Russian roulette is just Russian roulette, I didn't know I might die."
Well, I don't. Nor do I hate dealing with the consequences of my own actions. What I do hate is hypocrites and unfairness. So if all you pro-lifers want to commit to an unlimited duty to suffer every risky outcome of your actions, I'm willing to accept every risky outcome of my own. Until that happens, this has nothing to do with the straw effigy you've created in your head. From my vantage, you want your cake and to eat it too.
And Christians want everyone to use their frame of the universe while not even considering any others, again, hypocrisy.
I'm all ears, please share a non-culturally-Christian argument on the unitary telos of sex:pregnancy.
Nature does a perfectly fine job of that, and you've displayed your unwillingness to accept it. I do not think there is any argument I personally can craft that can overcome your bias against it.
Edit: I'll take a quick stab. For one, I never said unitary telos.
I recognize that not every sex act leads to pregnancy. However, pregnancy is the natural consequence of sex absent interference. We are sexually reproducing beings. Ergo, pregnancy is a natural consequence of having sex. To have sex is to accept that risk.
The natural argument is bad, biological determinism is not deployed in almost any other argument because it has very horrible ramifications. So using it for "this one case" is an arbitrary boundary drawing that fails to lead to a general solution.
This is better.
There is a causality logical assumption in this that is incorrect. If A -> B it does not mean that B -> A. ie If pregnancy occurred, then sex/reproduction-related conditions occurred. Does not follow: If sex occurred, then pregnancy follows.
Pregnancy is a natural risk of sex, but not every sex absent interference results in an intended pregnancy. People have plenty of sex with the purpose of getting pregnant, and not getting pregnant even when its the intended outcome. The reverse is also true.
Agreed
I do not agree. Assumption of risk is never assumed to be accepted, hence why every risky activity involving other parties generally requires you to sign papers assuming that risk onto yourself and acknowledging it. This is what I mean by "an unlimited duty to suffer every risky outcome of your actions" Most people do not believe that, but then to draw an arbitrary line around sex is in essence trying to have your cake and eat it too.
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Any biologist? Yes, sex in humans doesn't result in pregnancy literally every time, but it's the regular natural outcome and the prime evolutionary purpose of its existence. It takes considerable contrivance in terms of decades of biochemistry and materials science to prevent regular sex resulting in pregnancy, and sometimes even then sometimes that contrivance fails.
It's like exploring flooded caves or BASE jumping off buildings - it's not meant to go wrong, but everyone knows it sometimes does, and the only reason you're at risk is because you enjoy the activity enough to put aside the possibility of failure. Most people don't want such high risk and consequently don't do those activities.
To note, from what I’ve heard, a substantial part of contraceptive failure- I don’t use the things myself- is that people don’t like them. They discomfit people because they’re unnatural, so people take shortcuts, they cheat, they try to get away from it.
It’s an entirely human reaction to refuse to do the thing right, when you know the thing itself is wrong.
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I mean would you extend a biological and evolutionary determinism to everything else humans do?
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For me it, it is more about pragmatism. Most court-mandated expansions of civil rights in the United States started underwater with the public, and got more popular over time. Roe v Wade did not, and instead it created a wedge issue that made the quality and tenor of American politics worse over the affected period. I actually think politics (narrowly considered) has gotten slightly better since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, because the abortion debate has cooled down as a national issue, and become a state-level one.
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Abortion opinion has stabilized, and pro-life views are better represented legally now than they've been in decades. Socially, although the book is definitely something that reeks of the 2020s, abortion opponents aren't in the worst place they've been.
There's a narrower critique to be had about why this particular book was published and marketed, and here vibe-wise I agree there's been a shift in the culture war aspect. But it's more about the class that written works now originate from: not to put too fine a point on it, well-educated, materially comfortable women, who have cohered into a distinct block that takes a maximalist pro-abortion position. This was relatively uncommon in the safe, legal, and rare era, but it now dominates elite institutions, including publishing. Men mostly don't care about abortion except insofar as opposing it cuts off social opportunities, so pro-abortion wins by default.
What I would like to know is sales numbers on the book, and how much purchased copies of it are read. Does it have an actual audience that reads it?
Probably, though I agree sales of books are going down. It's one of those "fifty different versions of romantasy/urban fantasy/paranormal chick-lit churned out by not even mid-tier authors now self-publishing is viable" and will sell on Kindle but not set the world on fire with sales figures.
There's a small but definite audience for this kind of feminist LGBT+++ representation stuff, and the bonus cherry on top is probably that "she's a BIPOC author!" so the white readers can pat themselves on the back for their broadmindedness in expanding their reading list (we're a good few years on from Racefail but there are still new finger-waggers coming up who want to lecture us all on what we're reading and how we need to read more Black queer feminist genre works or whatever, there was an amount of this for Black History Month in the USA).
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I should probably put on the hat, but I'm tired too, and I suppose I'd rather just argue with you.
No, we haven't. We refined our apparatus for retrieving and signal-boosting the most offensive possible formulation of any given argument. Now you get to be exposed to a mawkish, progressive strawman of your position. Now I get to read your performative strawman of mine. Wonderful.
Do you think those people don't exist? Aren't representative? There's no need for algorithmic refinement to make Internet Feminists sound like unrepresentative strawmen, they do just fine on their own.
Aren’t representative.
Actually, I’ll bite the bullet and say they don’t exist. Show me someone who argues for shrimp welfare and abortion in the same breath, and I’ll show you a rhetorical flourish, a pairing selected specifically for its shock value. A modest proposal, even.
But the Internet is vast, it contains multitudes, so I’ll stick with the more defensible claim. Sermons intended for the choir don’t reflect policy. As @MadMonzer noted, the vast majority of the U.S. maintains some intermediate position on abortion, one which looks an awful lot like “safe, legal, rare.” Viability is the most common limit. This reflects a moral intuition that abortion is permissible, but unsavory in direct proportion to the amount of gore. That’s more or less where the Overton window has stayed since the development of modern contraception. Neither the religious right nor the Tumblr left is happy about it; how fortunate that neither of them dominates the public square!
Ozy, maybe? Nicholas Decker. Probably Matthew Adelstein/Bentham's Bulldog.
How unfortunate that they escape containment and poison policy and common discourse!
One's a lot closer than the other, but Ralph Northam's out of office now. I guess we'll see if Spanburger resurrects that position.
I only wish everybody here poisoned the discourse as hard as shrimp guy. Look at that! Polite explanation of the two main schools of thought.
Abortion laws do not follow Tumblr. California and New York and Virginia all have third-trimester bans. The states with no time limit include Alaska and Michigan. Saying shit on the Internet is free, but when the rubber hits the road, most Americans—most American politicians—endorse the same moderate position which HereAndGone is lamenting.
Not for lack of trying, of course.
Not the same thing and I disagree with you about the politicians. But fair enough that saying shit on the internet is free.
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In every jurisdiction where the issue has been subject to democracy (mostly countries outside the US, but now including red and purple states which have had abortion referenda post-Dobbs) the voters behave a lot more sensibly than the advocates. "Abortion legal until the baby is pronounced alive by the duty paediatrician" is not an electorally serious position except in places where trolling conservatives is more important than policymaking. "Abortion banned from day one and the law actually enforced" is not an electorally serious position in post-sexual revolution societies. If it is still the case in ten years time that every non-referendum state in America is at one of those two poles, it will be because state-level democracy no longer works.
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Is the twist that the Shadow Daddy demon is actually Moloch himself, and his real interest is protecting the industrial-scale supply of child sacrifice?
Probably Kali or similar, given the cover imagery. And yeah, if it were Moloch or Lilith that would be a twist, but it'll be played straight: the demons are the good entities (easier to pull off with Hindu mythology) and the 'good' guys are the monsters, those wicked awful Christians!
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That might be a genuinely interesting story.
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