Index for posts concerning Abortion

Dear Girl sitting in front of me eating dates and knitting pt 2 by Bear
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A journey into the political ideas of Distinguished Bean… (Compare/Contrast with the Congressman from Texas) by Distinguished Bean
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Amendment 48: Another Crack at Banning Abortion by Darth B'strad
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Another Obama Post! by Darth B'strad
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Racism in a test tube! by Darth B'strad
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A Woman’s Right? by Bieren Skidels
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Abortion and the Death Penalty by Bieren Skidels
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Dear Girl sitting in front of me eating dates and knitting pt 2

Posted on April 22nd, 2009 by Bear.
Categories: Death Penalty, Ethics, Abortion, Constitutional Law, Terrorism, Philosophy, Republicans, Parental Advisory.

Wale is not a delicious meat. You shouldn’t eat it, because most people would consider that cannibalism due to the fact that you’re fucking huge. It’d be like me saying “Yeah, they don’t have laws in Japan about peopling, but I understand because people are delicious.”
Wales are awesome. You’re not.
Fuck you,
Sam

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A journey into the political ideas of Distinguished Bean… (Compare/Contrast with the Congressman from Texas)

Posted on January 17th, 2009 by Distinguished Bean.
Categories: Political, Abortion, War, Law, Constitutional Law, Terrorism, education, Economics.

When i began to develop politically, morally, and economically, i took on specific views on most of the issues spanning the political spectrum of today. I began to take stances and apply my own intellect onto the issues, however, something was weird. I was raised old fashioned Republican and thought it was faultless, however, when i began my journey i began to contradict myself and confuse my past. My views didn’t fit one political party, let alone a single frame of thought. I suddenly realized that there was a party out there that, for the most part, was saying what i was thinking. However, even then, i felt very confused. Suddenly i read and studied the history and ideas of the 10 term congressman Ron Paul from Texas. I was absolutely amazed on how much i lined up with his political thoughts. I truly and honestly believe that if people could step past party boundaries, politicians like him, who actually thought ‘outside the box’ , would have a chance at positively influencing the country. I have recently read his book Revolution: A Manifesto. I felt like he did an incredible job of covering the issues pressing our nation today, so i have decided to post brief summaries that i found on the site http://www.ontheissues.org/Revolution_Manifesto.htm, that sum up his views and political thought.

Abortion is murder
A popular academic argument for abortion demands that we think of the child in the womb as a parasite.but the same argument justifies infanticide, since it applies just as well to an infant outside the womb.newborns require even more attention & care.

People ask an expectant mother how her baby is doing. They do not ask how her fetus is doing, or her blob of tissue, or her parasite. But that is what her baby becomes as soon as the child is declared to be unwanted.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 59-60 Apr 1, 2008

Roe v. Wade decision was harmful to the Constitution
The federal government should not play any role in the abortion issue, according to the Constitution. Apart from waiting forever for Supreme Court justices who rule in accordance with the Constitution, Americans do have some legislative recourse. Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over a broad categories of cases.

Wasteful government spending backed by both parties
Truth is treason in the empire of lies. There is an alternative to national bankruptcy, a bigger police state, trillion dollar wars, and a government that draws ever more parasitically on the productive energies of the American people. It’s called freedom.

School prayer is not a federal issue
[Limits on Constitutional authority] holds true for issues like prayer in schools. Such issues were never meant to be decided by federal judges. The whole point of the American Revolution was to vindicate the principle of local self government.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 61 Apr 1, 2008

Private funds for arts work better than government funds
Some Americans appear to believe that there would be no arts in America were it not for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). While the government requested $121 million for the NEA in 2006, private donations to the arts totaled $2.5 billion that year, dwarfing the NEA budget. NEA funds go not necessarily to the best artists, but to people who happen to be good at filling out government grant applications. I have my doubts that the same people populate both categories.

Free trade agreements threaten national sovereignty
I opposed both the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization, both of which were heavily favored by the political establishment. Many supporters of the free trade market supported these agreements. Nearly six decades ago when the International Trade Organization was up for debate, conservatives and libertarians agreed that supranational trade bureaucracies with the power to infringe upon American sovereignty were undesirable.

The “living Constitution” is the death of democracy
A living Constitution is just the thing any government would be delighted to have, for whenever people complain that their constitution has been violated, the government can trot out its judges to inform the people that they’ve simply misunderstood: the Constitution, you see, has merely evolved with the times.

Those who would give us a ‘living’ constitution are actually giving us a dead constitution, since such a thing is completely unable to protect us against encroachments of government power.

Replace Medicaid with volunteer pro-bono medical care
In the days before Medicare and Medicaid, the poor and elderly were admitted to hospitals at the same rate they are now, and received good care. Before those programs came into existence, every physician understood that he or she had a responsibility towards the less fortunate and free medical care was the norm. Hardly anyone is aware of this today, since it doesn’t fit into the typical, by the script story of government rescuing us from a predatory private sector.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 84 Apr 1, 2008

Private medical savings accounts, not government meddling
The most obvious way to break this cycle is to get the government out of the business of meddling in health care, which was far more affordable and accessible before government got involved. Short of that, and more politically feasible in the immediate run, is to allow consumers and their doctors to pull themselves out of the system through medical savings accounts.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 89 Apr 1, 2008

Conscription is unconstitutional–including National Service
Nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government given the power to conscript citizens. The power to raise armies is not a power to force people into the armies.

Lesser forms of the draft, such as compulsory “national service” are based on the sam unacceptable premise. Young people are not raw material to be employed by the political class on behalf of whatever fashionable political, military, or social cause catches its fancy. In a free society, their lives are not the plaything of government.

Contract with America was a toothless cop out
The Republican leadership urged these freshmen congressmen to focus on a toothless, soporific agenda called the Contract with America that was boldly touted as a major overhaul of the federal government. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The Brookings Institution in effect said that if this is what conservatives consider revolutionary, they have conceded defeat.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 3 Apr 1, 2008

11/5/07: Set fundraising record of $4 million in single day
I was a reluctant candidate, not at all convinced that a sizable enough national constituency existed for a campaign based on liberty and the Constitution rather than on special interest pandering and the distribution of loot. Was I ever wrong.

On November 5, 2007, we set a record when we raised over $4 million online in a single day. Not only is the freedom message popular, it is more intensely popular than any other political message.

Terrorism is just like any other murder: you look for motive
People were bound to start wondering eventually, why we were attacked? Not because they sought to excuse the attackers, but out of natural curiosity regarding what made these men tick. Looking for motive is not the same thing as making excuses; detectives always look for motive behind crime, but no one thinks they are looking to excuse murder.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 15 Apr 1, 2008

War in Iraq was senseless invasion of sovereign state
The war in Iraq was one of the most ill considered, poorly planned and just plain unnecessary military conflicts in American history.and I opposed it from the beginning.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 21 Apr 1, 2008

Mandate declaration of war before military aggression
In 2002, as war with Iraq loomed, I proposed that Congress officially declare war against Iraq, making it clear that I intended to oppose my own measure. The point was to underscore our constitutional responsibility to declare war before commencing major military operations, rather than leaving the decision to the President or passing resolutions that delegate to the president the decision making power over war.

And finally, due to the recent heat of the conflict in Israel/Palestine, i have found an excerpt from a speech he made concerning the conflict.

“collective punishment” against Palestinians is immoral.

“Many innocent children are among the dead. While the shooting of rockets into Israel is inexcusable, the violent actions of some people in Gaza does not justify killing Palestinians on this scale,” said the outspoken Republican.

Israel launched Operation Cast Lead on December 27 against Gaza to put an end to rocket attacks launched from the coastal enclave.

At least 888 Palestinians have been killed during the Israeli operation, while some 3,700 others are reported wounded. At least 10 Israeli soldiers have died in the now 16-day onslaught.

Hamas, the democratically-elected ruler of the impoverished strip, demands a cessation of an 18-month Israeli blockade on Gaza before it stops rocket attacks on Israel.

The US Congress endorsed a resolution Friday to support Israel in its offensive in Gaza, “recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza.”

Congressman Paul, however, says the resolution “clearly takes one side in a conflict that has nothing to do with the United States or US interests.”

“At the very least, the U.S. Congress should not be loudly proclaiming its support for the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza,” Paul added.

The Israeli operation has entered its third week now, despite international calls and a UN Security Council resolution which urge an immediate end to the attacks against the densely-populated strip.

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Amendment 48: Another Crack at Banning Abortion

Posted on October 15th, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, Abortion, Law, Constitutional Law, Local.

Quite clear and simple on this one: this is going to force the Colorado state Government to look at every unborn child as a human being. In theory this should ban all abortions in the state of Colorado. However I don’t think that should it pass that abortions will actually get banned in our state. More than likely our state supreme court will just throw this one out like they did to our vouchers amendment. But it certainly wouldn’t hurt to see what could happen here. For all we know the national supreme court could also pick this up and reopen the debate there! I signed the petition to get this one on the ballot and I’ll vote yes on this one.

Here are the Amendments.

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Another Obama Post!

Posted on July 8th, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, Immigration, Energy, Environment, Abortion, Party System, War, Law, Constitutional Law, Terrorism, Republicans, Democrats, Iraq, Israel, Economics.

Yes yes, that’s right! I’m posting on Obama again because this is just too important to pass up. Townhall.com has had two of my favorite talk show hosts: Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager. I’ll start with Prager’s article first:

My bottom line is this: The gulf between John McCain and conservatives is miniscule compared to the gulf between John McCain and Barack Obama. This is true regarding virtually every issue of significance to America. The America that a President Barack Obama would shape, with the help of a Democratic Congress and a liberal Supreme Court, would be very dissimilar from the America shaped by a President John McCain.

Conservatives who will not vote for McCain are well-intentioned utopians. They are comparing McCain to a consistently conservative candidate. The reality, however, is that McCain is not running against a consistently conservative candidate. He is running against a consistently left-wing candidate. And America cannot afford to have its first leftist president ever. It can afford liberal presidents — such as Bill Clinton, or Jimmy Carter (who governed as a liberal but became a leftist after leaving the White House), or John F. Kennedy, or Lyndon Johnson, or Harry Truman — i.e., all the Democrats who have been president since World War II. But the Democratic Party has moved well to the left of liberalism. And Barack Obama is at the left of that left-wing party.

Furthermore, given the strong possibility of a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate, and a liberal Supreme Court for decades to come, given the number of Supreme Court appointments a Democratic president will be able to make, an Obama victory will move America more radically leftward than ever in its history.

The Supreme court is good reason in it’s self! It’s taken a long to just to get it to a swing court. An Obama presidency will ensure that it stays a swing court and possibly reverse what we have wanted all along. The next president has the possibility of picking the next six supreme court justices.

That is why the argument that an Obama administration will be so destructive that Americans will reject the left and then elect a real conservative to undo the damage done in an Obama presidency is deeply flawed.

First of all, other than impeachment, there is no way to undo Supreme Court appointments, two or three of which a President Obama would likely make. And given how active most liberal judges are, it won’t matter much if the country has some conservative epiphany and then elects a Republican president and Congress. Because even if the Congress and the president will not pass liberal legislation, a liberal Supreme Court will. On almost any social issue that matters — the right to bear arms, late-term abortion, the definition of marriage, capital punishment, and many others — a liberal Supreme Court will rule on these issues, and there will be nothing that a post-Obama Republican president, even with a Republican congress, will be able to do about them.

Moreover, the argument that Americans will have a conservative epiphany after four years of an Obama presidency is predicated on America being greatly damaged by his policies. What kind of mindset welcomes such damage to the country it loves for the sake of potentially gaining politically after the damage is done? Is it, for example, really worth a considerably weakened economy (which Barack Obama’s tax and other economic policies would likely lead to), with its widespread suffering and unforeseeable social and political consequences, just to — hopefully — get a conservative into the White House four or eight years later?

And the damage won’t necessarily be undone. Even Ronald Reagan, the most popular conservative to ever serve as president, could not roll back most liberal creations. He never could get rid of the useless Department of Education, for example. Nor could a then-popular President George W. Bush do a thing about Social Security even when he had a Republican House and Senate. And how will Barack Obama’s successor undo the damage done to Iraq, the Middle East, the War on Islamic Terror, and the credibility of America’s assurances to allies once Iraq slides into chaos as a result of America’s precipitous withdrawal from Iraq?

Therefore, as well meaning and sincere as many conservatives are, this mode of thinking — let the country suffer under a left-wing president, Congress, and Supreme Court and then it will come to its conservative senses — will likely lead to a downward spiral from which it is hard to see the country escaping for a generation, if it is lucky.

There is one person who can prevent this unhappy future — John McCain.

He will not raise taxes, the last thing we should be doing in a weakened economy.

He will reduce government spending, and thereby prevent the state from controlling even more of American life.

He will ensure that America wins in Iraq. That will make one of the biggest and richest Arab states the freest of the Arab states. And it will hand Islamic terrorists the biggest defeat they have ever suffered. It will teach potential enemies not to attack America (whether Iraq did so directly is irrelevant to the point). And it will reassure America’s allies around the world, many of whom, as in Iraq, risk their lives for America and liberty, that America will never abandon them.

He will appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court and to federal benches, thereby depriving the left of its most powerful weapon in reshaping America in its image.

He may attract enough Hispanic votes (while securing the borders) to prevent that critical constituency from identifying with the Democratic Party, something that would ensure left-wing victories for decades to come.

He will develop nuclear power, environmentalist (read leftist) opposition to which has been morally indefensible. We would all love to have a solar powered or wind powered country. However, on planet earth at this time, nuclear power may be the cleanest source of energy we have. That is why France, not heretofore known as politically conservative, relies on nuclear power for nearly 80 percent of its electricity.

Now to Hugh Hewitt’s bit:

The key: McCain will pursue victory in the war, deter our enemies because of his reputation for strength and defend the country via aggressive pursuit of terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever they are, and get most of the judicial nominees right. He’ll keep taxes where they are if he can.

Obama, on the other hand, is just now coming into focus for other than the already committed Obamians. He had a stumbling, bumbling close to his primary campaign, and the opening weeks of his general campaign have been marked by flip flops and lurches left.

Here’s the core of Obama:

He’s hard left.

He wants the marginal rate on total federal taxes, including his social security tax hike, to immediately rise at least 57% on the highest earners. Obama wants to raise taxes even in a weak economy, though this is a recipe not just for recession but worse. Obama also wants to raise taxes on dividend income and to return the death tax to its highs of eight years ago.

Obama has proposed more than a trillion dollars in new spending.

Obama is going to absolutely destroy this economy even worse than it is.

Obama wants to cut and run from Iraq, with withdrawals of crucial forces beginning immediately upon his entry into office. Obama has never met one on one with General Petraeus and has not been to Iraq in more than 900 days. He is indifferent to the incredible progress made by our troops and the Iraqi Defense Forces and the Iraqi government in the last 18 months.

He supports the decision extending habeas rights to Gitmo detainees and he thinks the most liberal member of the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is a great model for future Supreme Court appointments.

Obama supports gay marriage, and opposes the California constitutional amendment to restore marriage to the definition overturned by a 4-3 vote of the California Supreme Court in May. He supports abortion on demand, including partial birth abortion.

If any of you care about abortion and gay marriage, Obama’s going to shove it down your through.

Obama has the slightest grasp on history, and routinely makes the sort of errors about basic facts that shock knowledgeable observers, like arguing the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit in Vienna was an example of the benefits of one-on-one diplomacy.

Obama is not a strong friend of Israel. He spent 20 years in a church that was openly hostile to Israel, and he reversed himself on Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel after one day of criticism by Palestinians.

Obama is running a dirty campaign, and the serial assaults on John McCain’s service, most visibly by Wesley Clark but by many others closely associated with Obama, is repulsive. These are not hits by independent 527s but by close associates and advisors of Obama.

Michelle Obama’s campaign rhetoric has been very divisive, is full of anger and resentment about “moving the bar,” and not being proud of the country, and has led to her high negatives with the public.

Obama’s close friends, mentors and associates are deeply troubling: the radical pastor Jeremiah Wright, the unrepentant terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, the convicted swindler Tony Rezko, and now a long line of “public housing developers” who took the money and failed to deliver on promises of safe and secure housing for Obama’s poorest constituents.

Obama’s judgment on key appointees is suspect, and he has had to fire the head of his vice presidential search team because of ties to the subprime mess and dump numerous “foreign policy advisors” for their hostility to Israel.

Obama’s deal with the Teamsters to end federal oversight of the union smells very bad indeed and telegraphs the sort of cronyism we could expect from an Obama Adminsitration. Obama’s mentor and real estate partner is Rezko, who helped the Obama’s buy their home, a home on which the Obamas received a mortgage that looks to many like a sweetheart deal.

Obama, like the other leaders of the Triple D Democrats –the Don’t Drill Democrats– doesn’t care about the price of gas, and refuses every initiative to increase supply and thus bring that price down.

Obama has broken his word on his commitment to public financing of the campaign and to meet John McCain in frequent debates. Obama can’t be trusted to keep even high-profile promises he made even only weeks ago.

Away from a teleprompter Obama stumbles and stutters and lapses into a closed circle of cliches that betrays almost no reading or curiosity about the world around him,and a massive ignorance of the war in which we find ourselves. Even when he works from a prompter he says nothing at great length with wonder phrasing but zero substance.

His crowds are enormous and his coffers overflowing, the products of a highly energized and vitriolic left that expects –believes it will be owed, in fact– the spoils of the election. If Obama wins, the sharpest lurch left in American history is ahead of us.

Barack Obama is not only the most radical nominee of a major American political party in history, he is also the least prepared and the least informed. He has spent less than four years inside of the United States Senate, and much of those years have been spent away from his job and away from the capital he wants to lead. But he is protected and his campaign nurtured by a MSM that swooned for him long ago. The prolonged and serious scrutiny of his background and his proposals will not be forthcoming in any consistent way between now and November.

And that’s the argument against Obama. So what’s the argument for him? Oh, yea that’s right: he’s for change! Well if you are looking for big changes to where the government is in control of every aspect of your life then Obama is your man. I’ll pass on that! I’m voteing for McCain.

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Racism in a test tube!

Posted on June 11th, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, Ethics, Abortion, Crime, War, Law, Philosophy, education, Race.

Actually Bieren and I had just talked about this article the other day and I just so happened to stumble on it today. Henry Louis Gates Jr. had himself an interview with James Watson who is the father of our understanding of DNA. Here’s what he wrote up at the Root:

James Watson has long assumed a certain special status among American scientists. The molecular biologist was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962, along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, for, as the Swedish Academy put it in its announcement for the prize, “their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material.” Watson and his British colleague Crick are remembered popularly for identifying the elegant and unexpected “double helix” three-dimensional structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, commonly known as DNA. Watson’s important contribution to this uncanny discovery was to define how the four nucleotide bases that make up DNA—guanine (G), cytosine (C), adenine (A) and thymine (T)—combine in pairs to form its structure. These base pairs turn out to be the key to both the structure of DNA and its various functions. In other words, Watson identified the language and the code by which we understand and talk about our genetic makeup.I have been among those who have long held Watson in high regard for several reasons. First of all, the discovery of DNA’s three-dimensional structure was counterintuitive; it was an ingenious act of deduction, using models made of cardboard and paste with an exacto knife and a straight edge. How Watson and Crick, working at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, became the first scientists to identify this elusive structure is the stuff of drama, especially when we recall that Watson was just 25 years old when he and Crick published their findings in the journal Nature on April 25, 1953.

Though Watson would tell me during our recent interview that he had a rather low IQ, as proof that IQ tests aren’t really that important, he enrolled at the University of Chicago when he was merely 15 and earned his B.S. in zoology there in 1947 at the age of 19 and a Ph.D. in zoology from Indiana University at age 22. He was 34 when he won the Nobel Prize. Not too shabby for a guy with a “low” IQ.

Watson’s youth and a certain absent-minded professorial quirkiness made him an American hero, the symbol of American enterprise and intelligence. What’s more, unlike Crick, or Einstein, say, Watson was an American born and bred: His discovery, coming at the height of the Cold War, would be hailed as attesting to American genius and the unrivaled potential of the free market system versus communism. The intrigue over allegations that Watson and Crick made unauthorized use of the seminal work on X-ray diffraction by Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant scientist who died before the Nobel Prize committee made its decision, only made Watson’s story all the more titillating.

And Watson—never camera shy or publicity averse—contributed to the power of his own myth first by writing “Molecular Biology of the Gene,” a 1965 textbook that, updated, remains enormously popular today, and, three years later, “The Double Helix,” an account of the dramatic story of his discovery that also contained startling and scandalous revelations of petty tensions, jealousies and rivalries among scientists whom we all had assumed were motivated primarily by the pursuit of truth. Watson’s book did nothing less than deconstruct the myth of the scientist as secular saint, laboring away in a laboratory for knowledge’s sake at the service of mankind. (One scientist summed up Watson’s view of the scientific profession as “with malice toward most and charity toward none.”) But Watson’s account also made his quest to determine the structure of DNA gripping and exciting, one of science’s greatest and most compelling triumphs. Though he was a professor at Harvard University at the time—he taught there from 1956 to 1976—the Harvard University Press refused to publish the book because of its tell-all nature. A commercial press published it instead, it became a best-seller and Watson’s celebrity only grew.

sounds like an interesting guy that that I would like to have a beer with. However he just sank his reputation with one interview:

On Oct. 14, 2007, one of Watson’s former assistants, Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe, wrote an article about him in London’s Sunday Times that quoted him making racist comments about black people by suggesting there are inherent, unalterable biological differences in intelligence between black people and everyone else. The response was swift and impressively devastating. The father of DNA had spoken the unspeakable. Echoing racist remarks that have been used to justify the enslavement and colonization of black people since the Enlightenment (think Hume, Kant, Jefferson, Hegel), Watson’s comments implied that he believed that nature had created a primal distinction in intelligence and innate mental capacity between blacks and whites, which no amount of social intervention could ever change.

He had uttered the unutterable, the most ardent fantasy of white racists (David Duke would wax poetic on his Web site that the truth had at last been revealed, and by no less than the discoverer of the structure of DNA). His words caused a ripple effect of shock, dismay and disgust among those of us who embrace the range of biological diversity and potential within the human community. It was as if one of the smartest white men in the world had confirmed what so many racists believe already: that the gap between blacks and whites in, say, IQ test scores and SAT results has a biological basis and that environmental factors such as centuries of slavery, colonization, Jim Crow segregation and race-based discrimination—all contributing to uneven economic development—don’t amount to a hill of beans. Nature has given us an extra basketball gene, as it were, in lieu of native intelligence.

Watson is no stranger to controversy. Since the heated critical reception to the publication of “The Double Helix” 40 years ago, he has seemed to delight in making, with some regularity, outrageously provocative comments, comments designed at best to disturb the status quo, to shock if not awe both his fellow scientists and the general public. His autobiography, “Avoid Boring People,” published in September 2007, lambastes his fellow scientists as “dinosaurs,” “deadbeats” and “has-beens.” By the time the London Sunday Times article appeared, Watson had been engaged in several controversies over genetic screening, genetic engineering, homosexuality, obesity and the purported relation between skin color and libido.

But none of those controversies could begin to prepare him for the intensity of the firestorm ignited by the Sunday Times article, which quoted him as saying that “he was inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa,” since “all of our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really”; that “people who have to deal with black employees find that [the belief that everyone is equal] is not true”; and that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.” Five days after the article was published, he profusely apologized in a statement to the press; on Oct. 25, he abruptly retired from his position at Cold Spring Harbor, after 40 years of service there.

That’ll kill the career of anyone and is clearly a very stupid thing to say. However, Gates decided to go interview Watson to see if he can get some clarity on what Watson thinks (and Gates is black). I certainly that is a big thing of Gates to do and I only have praise to give him for doing it.

I thought of that slightly awkward dinner conversation and his gracious gift as I arrived at his offices at Cold Spring Harbor on March 17 for our interview. We talked for well over an hour, with no holds barred.

“Well?” one of my friends asked later. “Is he a racist?”

I don’t think James Watson is a racist. But I do think that he is a racialist—that is, he believes that certain observable traits or forms of behavior among groups of human beings might, indeed, have a biological basis in the code that scientists, eventually, may be able to ascertain, that the “gene” is some mythically neutral space and what it purportedly “measures” or “determines” is independent of environmental factors, variables and influences. The difference, the distinction, between being a racist and a racialist is crucial. James Watson is not the garden-variety racist as he has been caricatured by the press and bloggers, the sort epitomized by David Duke and his ilk, and he seemed genuinely chagrined, embarrassed and remorseful that Duke and other racists had claimed him as their champion, as one of their own, because of his remarks as quoted in the London Sunday Times. And, as we might expect, he apologized profusely for those remarks, contending that he had been misquoted, at worst, and his remarks taken out of context, at best. (I have not been able to determine if the writer who reported the remarks taped them or reconstructed them from notes or memory.)

But I did leave Cold Spring Harbor convinced that Dr. Watson believes that many forms of behavior—such as “Jewish intelligence” (his phrase) and the basketball prowess of black men in the NBA (his example)—could, possibly, be traced to genetic differences among human beings, although no such connection has been made, and will probably never be made on any firm scientific basis, it seems to me. And I have to say that it was ultimately chilling to me when he remarked, with what seemed to me to be monumental naivete, that “if they find genes for all kinds of Jewish intelligence, I don’t think it’s going to affect me in the slightest,” especially when we couple that sort of remark with his passionate belief that “everyone should be judged as individuals. No one should be judged by a term like ‘black.’”

And that’s a belief that I firmly reject. I think that the social behaver of groups has much more do with the victimhood mentality that anything that genes has to do with it. Here’s my post on victimhood but now back to the article:

Yet precisely because of the misuses of science and pseudoscience since the 18th century, which put into place fixed categories of four or five “races” to justify an economic order dependent upon the exploitation of blacks (and other people of color) as cheap sources of labor, starting with slavery and continuing through Jim Crow and beyond, it has never been possible for a person of African descent to function in American society simply and purely as an “individual.” And if the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama has taught him, and us, anything at all, it is that this perhaps ideal state of affairs—to function as an individual and to be judged on your individual merits—still remains a most elusive and somewhat naïve dream.

Watson’s error is that he associates individual genetic differences (which, of course, do in fact exist) with ethnic variation (which is sociocultural and highly malleable). Character traits—abilities and behaviors, such as intelligence or basketball skills, that are popularly attributed to groups and are defined as “genetic”—will, in fact, continue to delimit the freedom of choice and expression of individuals who fall into those “racial” categories, regardless of our individual attainments and achievements. In the end, visions that are racialist may end up doing the same work of those that are racist. This is a lesson Watson has lived, and it is one from which we all might learn.

And that’s right on point with what I think.

Having spent the past three decades studying racist discourse in the West (starting with my Ph.D. dissertation on the Enlightenment), I know that such conclusions—say, about an entity called “Jewish intelligence”—would deleteriously affect me as a black person because it would reinforce stereotypes about Jewish people being genetically superior to us, and that such a conclusion would reinforce stereotypes about black people being inherently less intelligent than other members of the human community. If such differences in intelligence were purported to have a genetic basis, as David Duke proclaimed on his Web site with such naked glee, all of the social intervention in the world could have only so much effect. (Head Start? Why bother, when nature is to blame.) Sooner or later, in a time of increasing economic scarcity, members of these supposedly “different” or “lesser” ethnic groups or genetic populations could very well find their life possibilities limited and perhaps even regulated. Who among us can doubt that this would be true?

Likewise, I worry even more that Dr. Watson confessed to me that “we shouldn’t expect that different persons have equal intelligence, because we don’t know that. And people say that these should be the same [that is, that all human beings, that all members of different “racial” groups, should have the same basic range and potential for development of intelligence genetically]. I think the answer is we don’t know.” And later, he remarked in passing that “we’re not all the same,” by which he meant genetically. Rest assured that in the very near future, some scientist somewhere will claim to have proven this through our genes, and that claim will be deeply problematic for the future development of black people in American society.

I actually don’t put much stock in IQ test. I think you are as smart as your driven to be and also remember that wisdom is different from knowledge and in this society we really lack wisdom. I wish I had a heck of a lot more wisdom but you can also learn to be wise.

As I drove away from Cold Spring Harbor, I realized that my conversation with Dr. Watson only confirmed something I already, with great trepidation, have come to believe: That the last great battle over racism will be fought not over access to a lunch counter, or a hotel room, or to the right to vote, or even the right to occupy the White House; it will be fought in a laboratory, in a test tube, under a microscope, in our genome, on the battleground of our DNA. It is here where we, as a society, will rank and interpret our genetic difference.

And he very well may be right here. This whole conversation is filled with land mines but I will try here to get some clarity on this subject. As I had explained in a prevous post of mine, I believe that there are only two races! NO! Not black and white but rather the decent and the indecent. Also that’s where my post on victimhood that I sited earlier comes in because victimhood is the dominant trait of the indecent while the dominant trait of the decent is self control. In my post on victimhood I am reviewing an article by Dennis Prager and in that article he is talking about the reasons that people do evil. Number two on that list just so happens to be genes:

2. Genes. The contemporary term for devil is “genes.” Just as with the devil, when we observe a person engaging in evil behavior for which we have no rational explanation, we speak of it as coming from the person’s genes.

And here was my response to that idea:

I don’t believe in an evil gene. There are too many examples of evil parents having wonderful kids and vice versa. I think that one is a stretch.

Now, after reading this article it seems that Dr. Watson does believe in genes being the reason that people do evil and I think that this is a dangerous line of thought. As Gates had said in his article this is something that takes away from the American value of freedom and I say that it enforces a sense of victimhood. It says to people they can’t get ahead because of their race and this is the same line of thinking that fed the racism early on in our county’s history. We have to be careful in how we conduct our research here so as to not fall back into the same trap of the past. This sort of thing can lead to a reemergence of lie of the right, that race determines behavior. That’s not true! It’s values that determines behavior and not anything else that you could possibly label any one in a group of people. That leads me back to my post on racism because in that I talked about the defining traits of the decent (being self control) and the indecent (being victimhood). That’s a concept that Viktor Emil Frankl had came up with with his experience in the holocaust and he wrote about in his book Man’s Search for Meaning. I really don’t care all that much about IQ and oddly enough Dr.Watson himself is the proof that it doesn’t matter. With the fact that he has a “low IQ,” he was still able to make a big discovery despite that and forever land his name in the history books. Not bad for a guy who has “low IQ.” His conversation with gates and clarification makes it so that I can’t list him in the race of the indecent but his remarks does give ammunition to them and makes this world just a little bit more dangerous. Now the question is: will we be seduced by this kind of science so that we will go back to the old racial hatreds or continue to not care about race? But even if he is right that still means that we shouldn’t be raciest but to work even harder to mix them. Children of mixed racial backgrounds tend to do very well in our society (and I know from experince). Start combining the “athletic ability” of blacks with the “intellect” of whites and you’ll get better more well rounded people but I still think it’s all BS. Gates my be right that this battle will be fought in a test tube but I think we can fight it in better way: by teaching Americans the good values left to us by our forefathers and pushing people to be better than they are! That’s what the decent do, they fight the battle within them selfs to make them self better and thus they slowly (one battle at a time) make society better.

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A Woman’s Right?

Posted on April 28th, 2008 by Bieren Skidels.
Categories: Political, Abortion.

to have abortions at leisure…?

I don’t it will matter how artistic or liberal you are… This is an example of a my generations “freedom” missing the point.

You can read about Yale student Aliza Shvart’s art project here.

She describes her art project as follows:

For the past year, I performed repeated self-induced miscarriages. I created a group of fabricators from volunteers who submitted to periodic STD screenings and agreed to their complete and permanent anonymity. From the 9th to the 15th day of my menstrual cycle, the fabricators would provide me with sperm samples, which I used to privately self-inseminate. Using a needleless syringe, I would inject the sperm near my cervix within 30 minutes of its collection, so as to insure the possibility of fertilization. On the 28th day of my cycle, I would ingest an abortifacient, after which I would experience cramps and heavy bleeding.

The idea here is to expose, or explore the a myth of body in today’s society. “To call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge int he body.” This serves then to make “obvious how the act of identification or naming — the act of ascribing a word to something physical — is at its heart an ideological act, an act that literally has the power to construct bodies.”

The reasoning here is not necesarilly evil, and the idea itself is interesting and mostly true… I would agree — But, the effect of this project seems from its mark. The use of “abortion” as some symbolic tool to an artistic end brings up obvious political, ethical, and emotional responses — most of which Aliza probably intended. And as far as we know (as she stated) we don’t really know or can’t prove exactly what happenned. The act, or “piece” was presented in “textual and sculptural” forms — namely her body, the blood, and a presentation of what these two things “are”.

The same point is made by a good telling of the “aristocrats” joke, however, Yale and Aliza now consider such hypothetical banal humour art, this is troubling. Also, it shows a blatent misunderstanding and respect of the society which is being explored. Why should one learn or expose anything about a society by undermining the act of life within that society. As such, the art seems a step backwards (well backwards) and cliche — on par with the destruction of indiginous cultures in the attempt to understand their mythology (think Claude Levi-strauss gone wild). In fact, I would describe the piece as exactly that — Claude Levi-Strauss structural analysis applied by my own generations shallow sorority girl gone artisticly philisophical, and whoops it doesn’t seem to say much.

Of course, it got me to think about it, and maybe that was the point, but in the end — I don’t think anything: true or false… I don’t seem to think anything but that it was… yes I will use the word (and possibly be accused of missing the point of all art)

innappropriate as art.

1 comment.

Abortion and the Death Penalty

Posted on November 20th, 2006 by Bieren Skidels.
Categories: Political, Death Penalty, Ethics, Abortion, Crime.

I believe abortion is wrong (murder), however, I also believe it has been the most effective crime deterrent in our time, much more effective than the death penalty.
Ever since Roe vs. Wade, for every one person executed under the death penalty, approximately 45,000 abortions take place (in America), a large percentage to poor single mothers most likely to bear criminals, stopping the criminals before they start. (contact me for reference to studies on this subject and other relations between crime and demographics - for a start read Freakanomics by Stephen J. Levitt)

http://www.pregnantpause.org/racism/mistaken.htm talks about how abortion can target poor blacks, depending on how it’s applied

I will know make some comments and conjectures:

1. I heard someone say “evangelicas (insert Republicans) are people who care about you before you are born, but not after…” - the question is: The right often justifies the death penalty by appealing to its reduction of crime (as a deterrent), applied in the same way this argument should *loosely* apply to abortion as well?? The death penalty has always required the approval of the judicial system, so has abortion. So you’re on the jury, a statistical distribution has been suggested for the application of the death penalty in order to stop crime before it starts - am I talking about the statistical chance of a murderer killing again, or am I talking about the statistical chance of an unwated (poor,inner-city,etc…) baby killing in the future?

Does the death penalty work as a deterrent? Well, abortion did… and so does the death penalty when applied to lesser crimes than murder:

Hazing the Dragon in Singapore

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