Adoption is an alternative to parenting, not abortion

My Sunday movie was Hit the Road. It is a movie from Iran released in 2021, before the current protests. It looks like it won a bunch of awards and was nominated for several more. I was interested in it because it was at the Detroit Film Theater maybe six months or a year ago and got a lot of good buzz. As the title suggests, it is a road trip. Dad is in the back seat with his leg in a cast sticking out between two front seats. Mom is in front and older son is driving. In the back seat with Dad is six-year-old younger son. All that buzz gave me the impression that it was a lively and humorous trip because of the antics of the boy. But it is more serious than that. At the beginning that seriousness is hinted at when parents realize the boy has a phone. They take it and bury it by the side of the road. The movie reveals the reason slowly as the adults talk about the situation naturally assuming the others know why they’re traveling and as they keep the reason from the boy. The director lets us figure it out for ourselves. Keep in mind this is Iran. The boy playing the boy is quite good. One wonders what the director had to do to find him. The other actors are quite good too. Karim Sadjadpour tweeted with a photo:

Iranians are protesting their ruling theocracy in different ways: The display window of a popular Tehran bookshop features books about fallen dictators—Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Ghaddafi, Saddam—alongside feminist titles including “Women who Read are Dangerous”.

I watched the Rose Parade today. As I have for a few years now I’ve gone directly to the KTLA website for their livestream. The big advantage of this is there are no commercials in the entire two hours of the parade. Today’s watching wasn’t quite as good because there were frequent pauses in the streaming. Some were quite short, others were a few seconds long. At times they were quite frequent. I had no way to tell if the problem was KTLA equipment, something with the internet between here and there, or my computer. Towards the end of the show I began to wonder – though I have no way to verify it – whether my internet provider was defying net neutrality by slowing down access to a TV station that didn’t go through their site. I just did a search. Net Neutrality was overturned by the nasty guy. Biden vowed to restore it. But I can’t tell whether that’s happened yet. Ray Levy Uyeda of Daily Kos Prism reported that youth climate advocates are using the courts to sue the government to stop supporting polluters. Their central point is state governments are denying their right to life by supporting the fossil fuel industry even though they know how damaging fossil fuels are to life. The youth are turning to the courts because the usual methods of making things happen – protesting and voting – aren’t getting reforms to happen. Some of these suits were dismissed. Some are proceeding. Some had the result of the court saying, yeah the government is doing what you accuse it of, but we can’t force a remedy. Hannah Matthews works as a doula and frequently works with people who need an abortion. She has a new book coming in May, You or Someone You Love. She did an email interview with Marissa Higgins of Kos and talked about what it is a doula does. Here are a couple things she says about abortion:

There are so many misconceptions I will be working to correct for the rest of my life: that abortion is the opposite of parenthood (I, like most other Americans who have abortions, am a parent, and abortion is often an incredibly integral part of a family's origin story or a powerfully loving act of parenting one's existing children). That abortion is dangerous (it is safer than taking Tylenol, antibiotics, or Viagra, and 14 times safer than childbirth). That adoption is an alternative to abortion (adoption is an alternative to parenting, but it still requires someone to carry a pregnancy, give birth, and undergo what is often an indescribably traumatic life experience). But probably the biggest is just that "abortion" is one thing—and thus we can debate it, define it, legislate it, and police it. Every abortion is different, and the only "expert" on a given abortion is the person having it. Period.

On those who claim abortion is a state rights issue.

I think this argument really lays bare the cultural misunderstanding of what abortion actually is, and how intertwined it is with other forms of health care. If your child (or sibling, or partner, or other loved one) is pregnant, and a complication develops that threatens their life and/or has the potential to cause them suffering, injury, illness, etc., can you really honestly say that you would feel ok with them dying because they weren't able to cross state lines in time, or couldn't afford to travel, to get the care they need? Or that you would find it acceptable for them to be forced to pay thousands of dollars and travel thousands of miles in order to survive, or to save their children/family from untold suffering? Of course not. This isn't a zoning law or traffic regulation we're talking about. States shouldn't be deciding their citizens' basic civil rights.

Charles Jay of the Kos community wrote about hidden film history. Which actor in the movie Casablanca worked hardest to resist the German Nazis? It was Conrad Veidt, the one who played the Nazi villain. Veidt was a movie star in Germany. One of his early films was Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others). It is considered the first pro-gay film ever made. Only portions of it survive. Jay included a clip of a couple minutes. I watched it. Part of the plot is about blackmail. Another film, this one made in Hollywood, was The Man Who Laughs. He played a character whose mouth was frozen into a grin. That became the inspiration of The Joker of Batman fame. He had a Jewish wife, so when Hitler came to power Veidt refused their offers of continued employment, even when they offered to declare his wife as Aryan. He went on to act in Britain and then in Hollywood. He knew he would be asked to play Nazis, so he stipulated that if he did the Nazi must be the villain. He wanted to emphasize how dangerous they were. Off the set he did all he could to support the Allied war effort. That included frequent large donations. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Amanda Marcotte of Salon:

There are many possible explanations for why the GOP is going so dark, most of which revolve around the fact that the party's authoritarian base voters and its big-money donors have a lot more influence than potentially winnable independent voters do. But the unnecessary, gratuitous viciousness of so much of this stuff — seriously, no one asked Ron DeSantis to relitigate the pandemic! — makes that kind of bloodless explanation seem unsatisfying. It's time to ask a different question: Is it possible that GOP leadership is composed of the same unhinged sadists as their voting base?

I think it is not only possible but highly likely. See... Joan McCarter of Kos reported that House Republicans have listed what they intend to do in the first few weeks after they take control of the House (though a fight for Speaker comes first). Some of the bills they intend: defy Biden by prohibiting emergency use of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and increasing drilling on federal lands, make immigrant lives harder, repeal funding for the IRS that makes it possible to do its job of auditing rich people, and:

That forced birth agenda includes codifying the long-standing Hyde Amendment that prevents federal funding for abortion and “funding for any insurance plan that includes abortion on demand.” That’s private health insurance coverage they’re talking about. They’ll also vote on a cruel “born-alive” bill that would require medical personnel provide care to infants born with conditions that will keep them from surviving outside the womb for any amount of time, torturing the babies in their only minutes on Earth with futile medical interventions and preventing parents from having the experience of being with their newborn for whatever time they’ll live. It’s just sick.

McCarter also wrote there is no such thing as a “good” Republican. She wrote that after Politico wrote a glowing article about retiring Ohio Sen. Rob Portman and another five retiring Republican senators who it claims are consensus builders. McCarter reviewed Portman’s work: He voted with the nasty guy 90% of the time. He helped his party tie the previous record of using the filibuster. He voted twice to acquit the nasty guy after impeachment. I had come to the conclusion of no “good” Republican a few years ago. So many in the party had come to represent several quite bad things that someone declaring themselves to be Republican meant they agreed with or at least tolerated all those bad things. To me it was not possible to declare being a Republican and reject all those bad things – not that many tried. Kerry Eleveld of Kos wrote the nasty guy has made his intentions known for the 2024 campaign. He sees just a few options. He will be the Republican nominee. Or he’ll run as a third party candidate, almost surely dooming the actual nominee’s chances. Or he’ll launch a revenge tour to denigrate the nominee and tell his base the Republican Party is too corrupt to deserve their vote. All three sound good for the prospects of the Democrat nominee, though the first sounds the most dangerous to the country. The House Ways and Means Committee released six years of the nasty guy’s tax returns. The years included his time as president. I’ve written before about how little taxes he paid because he had so many businesses that lost money. This time I’ll focus on the size of the returns – 2,700 pages for personal returns, 3,000 pages for his many businesses. That’s close to a thousand pages per year. I had heard there was one IRS agent assigned to these returns, which was finally done in 2019, and the IRS was sued when he asked for more help. During his time in the Oval Office the nasty guy repeated that he couldn’t release his returns because they were under audit – but no audit was begun until 2019 and only then because of Congressional prodding. A couple of the details of the returns: He had a bank account in China. He gave money to his kids and called them loans to avoid gift taxes. John Burns-Murdoch of the Financial Times tweeted (with charts and a link to a full article):

NEW: conservatives have a Millennials problem. In both UK & US, it’s not just that Millennials aren’t voting conservative because they’re young. Every previous generation grew more conservative with age, but Millennials are not playing ball.

Lake Superior State University has released its 2023 list of words that should be banished for misuse, overuse, and uselessness – “words and terms that are overworked, redundant, oxymoronic, clichéd, illogical, nonsensical—and otherwise ineffective, baffling, or irritating.” Some of the words and phrases in this year’s list: GOAT, which stands for Greatest Of All Time, has been applied way too easily, making it useless. Not long ago “goat” suggested something unsuccessful. Moving forward: What other direction would we go? Amazing: Overuse that renders it hollow. Inflection point: a pretentious way of saying turning point. Gaslighting: Overuse has disconnected it from the real concern of “dangerous psychological manipulation that causes victims to distrust their thoughts, feelings, memories, or perception of reality.” I disagree this one should be banned. Gaslighting is real and, as the hosts of Gaslit Nation remind us every week, many in government, especially Republicans, actively engage in it. I suppose it is to their credit they get people to overuse it to render it meaningless.