@graciousplum: I think what people are objecting to isn't the idea that population control is important -- it's maybe your framing access to abortion as particularly big part of that issue. There's often some intersection there, sure (in some countries more than others), but obviously the issue of "population control" is one that centers more on access to contraception, education about family planning, etc.
(Full disclosure: this post made possible in part by the reproductive efforts of Ethiopians.)
@bananastand: I had no idea it was going to tie in, and I was actually sitting on the couch doing the puzzle while watching the Simpsons. The experience was almost confusing, like someone had dosed my drink while I was in the bathroom.
@PilgrimSoul: I follow you, yeah, though I have a bit of trouble with the way you're putting it. I think it's fair to say that one of the problems with family abandonment is that the obligations of custody and guardianship wind up falling disproportionately on mothers. But in this case, she was the person who had that guardianship, and his (possible) failure to share that obligation is different from her inability to perform it correctly; the same would be true if their positions were reversed.
(I absolutely agree that no one's clocking all the circumstances here. It's true: we react with more shock and horror to people failing their own children than we do to other people actively victimizing those same children, because we have a moral knee-jerk that the failing is somehow "worse.")
@tweenmama: Umm I'm just referencing that phrase "soft bigotry of low expectations."
The point is that we are unsurprised and lacking in outrage about certain crimes because we "expect" them -- and sometimes this means we'll give harsher punishment for crimes we somehow don't "expect." Even if the crimes are similar, or our expectations are wrong.
@PilgrimSoul: Ha, you know, chances are that he did abandon the family, but that first statement of yours is kinda ridiculous -- like I said, we have zero idea if the guy's even alive. (Death being one of many, many ways you can be "not in the picture" without abandonment being involved. . . .)
In any case: the reason I was asking after your thrust here is that I think it's dangerous to morally equate not being around your child (a problematic thing that's nonetheless done by loads of people without anyone dying) with actual involvement or complicity in torture, abuse, and manslaughter. I find it really hard to believe that you think that, or that you'd apply that same standard in other cases.
@PilgrimSoul: I'm not sure what the thrust of this is -- that her biological father shares some level of culpability?
His family was at the child's wake, but I can't recall anything about him specifically. I'd be a little wary about making claims of "abandonment" without knowing anything about it; for all we know, he's deceased.
So far as I know, there's not much legal distinction between hurting someone else's child and hurting your own, but people tend to have some instinct that the latter is worse -- that's surely most of the double standard here.
(It comes from the other direction, too -- there's a form of low-expectations bigotry involved in being somehow "unsurprised" that a man would beat a child to death (we put that down to a tragedy we almost "expect" to happen, to someone, somewhere), but being extraordinarily shocked and appalled that the child's mother would be either complicit in it or hapless to stop it.)
The word "useless" is doing a lot of work here! Sure, tehse things don't have any concrete practical utility, but as someone who spent some teenage years living around this part of Michigan, I can tell you they surely have some cultural usefulness: having a duck-hunting Santa is a pretty good way of communicating stuff about your culture with the people around you, and reinforcing how your group and worldview work. Which is really the point of all holidays; there's nothing "useful" about parades or fireworks or outlandish turkey consumption beyond the cultural work they do.
@Your Screenplay Sucks: From what I know about that dog, you do not want it. Not unless you're really into re-training.
@NefariousNewt, Serving at the Pleasure of the President-Ele...: We're talking about the Supreme Court here: the very basis of their job is to argue semantics! The entire case before them is semantic: whether the legislature intended to take guns away from (a) people convicted under domestic-violence laws, or (b) people convicted of lesser charges as a result of domestic violence. That's the bulk of the question before them.
@Archetype: Or else it's just, you know, not at all the question before the court?
@PinkSoxHat: That's a very broad "they" you're using! But part of my point here is that their methods are always going to be linked to the perceived place of their argument. I'm not sure how much gets achieved by saying it's incumbent on them to come occupy the middle ground; the radicals here aren't people who have much taste for the middle ground to begin with. (And there's no doubt in my mind that there'll always be a fringe of radical dissent on this one.) It's been interesting to me to watch politicians on the left this decade trying to actively entice people into those middle-ground tactics you name, with the promise that those things are supported all round.
I'm not sure why this kind of violence should be entirely baffling. If someone has a fixed belief that abortion is the "murder" of unborn people, it's not exactly a huge leap to use force or violence to "defend" those people, the same way we do more or less every other case. All it takes is a belief that your moral conclusion about abortion trumps the government's conclusions about its legality. (Which, again, isn't an insane conclusion in itself; it's the same point plenty of abolitionists operated from.)
Which is part of why I think any defense of abortion rights over the long term actually needs to provide space for people with objections to it to voice those objections and feel like they're being taken seriously -- because when there's no outlet for that sentiment, and when it can't be contained someplace where people can peacefully dissent, it radicalizes further and moves toward violence.
@kitschenette: If it makes you feel any better, this kind of atmosphere (which I can certainly imagine happening in undergrad workshops) doesn't translate very far up the line: MFA writing programs tend to contain more women than men, and young women are probably edging out young men in publishing fiction at this point. I'm sure there are plenty of self-important men in the literary world in general, as there are in every world, but I don't think that atmosphere has so much purchase anymore; as industries go, the book trade is way way up there in terms of inclusion of women.
The summary here is strikingly different from every other thing I've read about Leonowens and this book. Not untrue (depending on your definition of the word "dignity"), but different. The most fascinating things about her seem to have been her capacity for total self-reinvention, her adaptability, and her abilities as a salesperson!
@winchesterwolcott: I know you're not saying that. And I agree that we shouldn't make assumptions about individuals. I just mean that even if we don't "believe" in the construct of race, the construct exists: it influences people's lives in ways they can't just not-believe in, and it explains why a lot of things about the world are the way the are. I think it's important to recognize that, even if it gets messy or confusing or gives us headaches sometimes.
I know you're not equating poverty with laziness -- it was just an example of something that sometimes requires race to understand. You can look at a lot of urban poverty and say, well, there is a whole history here, a big long story that has to do with race, and that's critical to understanding what's going on. But if you try too hard to keep race out of everything, you might just look at the disproportionate number of black people involved and say "well, it must be something about them that explains this."
(This is a weird conversation to be having on this site, a place that spends a lot of time paying good attention to the hard-to-escape ways the constructs of sex and gender work in the world!)
@winchesterwolcott: I think this line of thinking is really dangerous and untrue. If we all magically abandoned the concept of race, this wouldn't do anything to change the concrete effects those concepts have already created in the world, and wouldn't do anything to fix them. There are plenty of conservatives in the world who adopt this kind of "color-blind" thinking and use it to decide that, for instance, if a lot of black people live in poverty, it's due to some failure or laziness on their part. But one major reason a lot of black people live in poverty is that the effects of race and racism still exist, and it takes some acknowledgment of that -- and some historical thinking -- to see and understand a lot of things about the world.
I mean, similarly, we could say that men and women are all people, and gendered distinctions are meaningless and "confusing." But then we'd be abandoning the true thing about the universe that explains why women have very different lives and opportunities than men -- not because they've made it that way themselves, but because there are things called sex and gender that have meaningful effects on people's lives!
@STICKSnSCONES: Eh, I think part of why people were suspicious of this was that even just judging from the picture, that mark looks like something that would fade away about 24 hours after the flash went off.
@the_decider: Actually, the one thing I'd say about Mangum versus the other instances discussed here is that she didn't make up the people who she claimed victimized her, creating a racial dynamic out of thin air: there was a racial dynamic to begin with, even in the parts of what happened that nobody disputes. She may well have had it somewhere in her mind that this racial dynamic made it more likely that her story would be believed, but I think that's slightly different from claiming to have been victimized and then inventing a likely suspect: some large black guy, some unknown white guys, some dangerous-looking Puerto Rican guy, etc. Mangum's intent seems rather different.
@cmg: I'm a little put off by your confidence that a criminal couldn't possibly know something about the Bill of Rights you hadn't noticed before!
