Jonathan's Blog:

A bill passed by the Utah House and Senate this week and waiting for the governor’s signature, will make it a crime for a woman to have a miscarriage…. In addition to criminalizing an intentional attempt to induce a miscarriage or abortion, the bill also creates a standard that could make women legally responsible for miscarriages caused by “reckless” behavior. Using the legal standard of “reckless behavior” all a district attorney needs to show is that a woman behaved in a manner that is thought to cause miscarriage, even if she didn’t intend to lose the pregnancy.

via Dan Savage.

Apparently this is in response to a case where a 17-year old girl who was seven months pregnant paid a man $150 to beat her up and try to induce a miscarriage. Read that again.

The problem isn’t just this batshit crazy law, it’s every batshit crazy law and policy which means girls can’t get an abortion without their parents being told — where that could well mean being disowned at best — being force-fed bullshit anti-abortion propaganda, probably having to find someone to drive them for hours to get to an abortion clinic.

It’s every batshit crazy law and policy which means teenagers don’t get told about contraception, because apparently if you tell a teenager not to have sex, there is no chance whatsoever of them having sex before they get married. It’s every batshit crazy law and policy which means even if teenagers know about the morning-after pill they probably can’t find a pharmacist who’ll sell it to them, because apparently even if your job is to sell drugs to people who need them, you don’t have to if you disapprove of their need.

It’s every batshit crazy parent who can’t accept that teenagers will have sex, that there’s nothing wrong with that, and that it’s a parent’s duty to make sure their child is informed enough that they can do it without catastrophic consequences; and who doesn’t make sure their child can always come to them if they need help. It’s every batshit crazy pastor who….

To all of them: PEOPLE FUCK. Men fuck women. Men fuck men. Women fuck women. Women fuck men. People who don’t identify with either gender fuck other people. Nervous teenage boys (and girls) fuck nervous teenage girls (and boys). And as long as it’s consensual, there’s abso-fucking-lutely nothing wrong with it. (Nothing wrong with masturbation either, really batshit crazy Republicans). And some of those nervous teenage girls fucking nervous teenage boys are going to get pregnant unless someone (preferably quite a few people) tells them to use condoms and makes sure they can get condoms. And unless you help them prevent pregnancy and STIs as a result, and help them if they get pregnant or an STI, guess what? They, (especially those nervous teenagers) are going to get pregnant and get STIs and their lives are going to be fucked up because no-one helped you.

Fuck you, conservative Christian Republican fuckwad idiots. Or rather, don’t.

What the hell have we been doing while North Korea turned itself from a comedy Stalinist dictatorship with a mad leader in charge of a ridiculously large military which occasionally exchanged small-arms fire over a disputed sea border into a comedy Stalinist dictatorship with a mad leader in charge of a ridiculously large military which torpedoes non-hostile ships across a disputed sea border, and has half-a-dozen-plus nuclear warheads and medium-range missiles to put everyone off doing anything about it? Seriously, what the hell. What. The. Actual. Hell.

We let a state run by an absolute nutter (and his dead father) aquire nuclear weapons in basically the last decade. And what did we do? Slap on a few sanctions which will not affect the ruling élite one jot. Nothing to stop it getting to the point where we essentially cannot take any action beyond token sanctions for fear of nuclear retaliation – the “they won’t actually use them” argument is unconvincing when it comes to Kim Jong-il.

Why? In a word, China. In a few more, China and its UN Security Council veto. But also a fairly serious lack of will to take any other route – a UN General Assembly resolution, over which China has no veto; or unilateral military action without a UN resolution, something neither the Bush Administration or the Blair Government were particularly averse to. OK, so there are some issues with taking unilateral military action (even just airstrikes against reactors) against a country with 1.21 million people in the armed forces, but the threat would have been an awful lot more persuasive if North Korea knew they couldn’t rely on their Chinese buddies to stop it.

The UN is fundamentally broken. It gives ridiculous influence to one outright undemocratic country and one Chinesely-undemocratic country. It is incapable of anything more than sending peacekeepers – if you’re lucky. International law prohibiting unilateral military action would make sense (not that it would stop Israel) if the UN were capable of authorising liberal intervention. But it isn’t, and so protecting people from dictators has to be done illegally, with the tacit understanding that no-one cares as long as it works; or not at all. If the UN is to be good for anything, it needs to be a club of democratic nations, dedicated to spreading democracy, via the barrel of a gun if neccessary.

If the UN had been capable of taking action against Saddam, which was needed and justified, we would have been able to do it in such a way that Iraq did not collapse into anarchy the moment his statue got dusted with the Stars and Stripes. It would have worked. If Bush and Blair are morally guilty, it is for failing to plan and implement an ordered replacement of Saddam, and for failing to protect civilians. An undemocratic state is an illegitimate state is no state, so they had every right to invade in the interests of the people of Iraq. But much of the blame also has to lie with the framework of the UN.

Liberal democracy is an ideal we should not be afraid to spread with the assault rifle and the targeted bomb, the paratrooper and the jet fighter. But we are, and that is why we have to be afraid of Stalinist personality cults spread by the hand grenade and the nuclear missile, the torpedo and the million-strong Red horde.

“Chemical” does not mean additive. It does not mean an artificially synthesised substance. It does not mean something with the potential to harm. It does not mean toxin.

It means a pure substance comprised of atoms or molecules. It is not a perjorative. Use “synthetic chemical”, “harmful chemical”, “dangerous chemical”, “carcinogenic chemical” (although the “-ic chemical” is redundant). Not just “chemical”. Water is a chemical*. Air is a mixture of chemicals. “Chemical” is not shorthand for “nasty industrial solvent”. Learn that.

*Dihydrogen monoxide