I sometimes think that these same people end up running socially conservative activist groups.

Witness the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s recent decision to end funding for Planned Parenthood’s breast-cancer screening program. Their claim, which they continue to maintain, is that this has nothing to do with abortion or contraception, but is simply pursuant to a (brand new) rule that they don’t give grants to groups “under government investigation”. By a startling coincidence, an anti-choice Congressman  has (again) started an investigation as to whether Planned Parenthood spend public money on providing abortions. By an even more startling coincidence, the foundation recently hired as its VP an anti-choice politician who made defunding Planned Parenthood part of her unsuccessful campaign. And Ms. Handel quietly ended the foundation’s support of cancer research (you know, a thing that’s part of its mission) involving embryonic stem cells. Nor has there been any suggestion that the new guidelines have been, or will be, applied to any of the other thousands of organizations receiving grants.

So why is the Komen foundation lying about its reasons for defunding Planned Parenthood?

Because that’s what they do. They can’t help it.

I recall hearing an interview with an anti-choice leader of the movement to pass a “parental notification” initiative in my state, in which they added a little paragraph about life starting at conception. The woman being interviewed was shocked, shocked at the suggestion that said paragraph might be taken as anything other than a legally meaningless statement of purpose: “I’m a lawyer,” she said, and she therefore knew there was no possible way that could bleed out into any other legislation. Which, as anybody who got their JD from an actual law school instead of a cereal box knows, is not only horseshit but is the exact opposite of how laws work.

Or consider when Mark Leno introduced SB-906 in California, which explicitly stated the (existing) rule that religious groups would not be forced to solemnize same-sex marriage. You would think that anti-LGBT groups would embrace it, but unsurprisingly, they did not; because one of their anti-equality talking points is “Your church will be forced to marry gay couples!” and they didn’t want to lose it.

A principled stance would be for the Komen foundation to state that they believe funding Planned Parenthood detracts from their mission of ending breast cancer; or that they believe Planned Parenthood engaged in misconduct; or that they believe abortion and contraception are contrary to the mission of protecting women’s health. But these aren’t principles; they are socially conservative politicians. They can’t help themselves.

Battle of the Overpass

And while I also like the Great Big Sea version this is hard to beat:

Certainly, one would expect them to condemn the shooting of people other than Giffords, in much the same way that the military expresses regret when a strike on a military target kills innocent civilians. But why are they condemning his shooting of Giffords? Why aren’t they doing what politicians usually do when something they support comes to pass – rushing in to get a camera-op and claim all the credit, even when nothing they did actually cased the result?

From Sarah Palin’s crosshairs map and urging her supporters to “RELOAD” to Shannon Angle’s suggesting “Second Amendment remedies” to “take Harry Reid out” if she lost the election to Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck openly exhorting people to violence, reactionaries expressed their wish quite clearly, and they got it. Why are they now having second thoughts?

I can think of only two possibilities. Either they were so stupid and immature before (hurr, look how much this upsets the libruls) and never gave a moment’s thought to what would happen if, in fact, some disgruntled nutjob decided to put the “four boxes” into action, as if they were immature teenagers rhapsodizing about the “cool” violence in their favorite video-game shooter suddenly getting a look at real-life violence. If this is what’s going on – they were just so in love with their own imaginary tough-ass self that it didn’t occur to them for a second that, like, shooting at people just because you’re mad at then is bad – then they have no place in public discourse, and need to slither back under their rocks with the rest of the simple, muck-dwelling lifeforms, and leave political interaction to the humans.

The other possibility is that they’re pleased as punch that Giffords was shot; but they know that a lot of people who used to chuckle over their imaginary gun battles are really in group number one there. That is, it’s not a popular viewpoint to say “We deeply regret and condemn the killing of innocents, but as we said before this incident, if Congress continues as it has been, people are going to shoot Democrats, so take Giffords as a warning.” So instead of proudly standing behind a “crosshairs” political map or leaping into the photo-op to prattle about how right-thinking Americans will come out shooting if the wrong Senator gets elected, they trip over each other to pretend they probably never said any of that stuff and certainly never meant it.

Which is to say, they’re wormsucking cowards who care about nothing but their own political and financial futures, and are too craven to take the credit they’re owed. Unsurprising.

(h/t unusualmusic)

• “IANAL, but….”
• Anything describing how when you were a kid, [commonly accepted safety requirement] either didn’t exist or wasn’t used, and WE all turned out fine.
• Pretty much any sentence ending in “….and WE all turned out fine.”
• Support of tort-reform measures, unless you are a defense attorney or in some capacity employed by the Chamber of Commerce, PHRMA or the Republican Party, because at least then you’re getting paid for it.
• Any argument suggesting that matters of taste are actually matters of absolute truth. (“How can you not like strawberry ice cream? Strawberry ice cream is yummy!”)
• Statements about “religion” which make clear that you think “religion” is a synonym for “those annoying fundamentalist Christians who I had to deal with in the small town I grew up in”.
• A belief that any sexually explicit material, behavior or conversation is perfectly reasonable to have, display or wave around anywhere, anytime, because The Human Body Is Beautiful And Sex Is Natural. If you apply this standard to behavior that normal people would agree is sexual harassment, punch yourself in the mouth twice.
• Huffily stomping out of a discussion with a promise never to return. Yeah, that ever happens on the Internet.

I’m sure there’s more but your knuckles are probably split and bleeding as it is. We can pick up where we left off tomorrow.

Well, Jonathan Tweet just managed to prove LeGuin right. Robin Laws tries to moderate the dumbth of this post a little, but good grid, I thought the “but girls just don’t naturally WANT to play D&D cuz they’re girls!” thing was something most gamers got out of their system after, oh, losing their virginity or so. I didn’t realize there was a kind of middle-aged Saturn Return on this one.

I already commented on Tweet’s blog, but for the slow or LJ-averse: “they just don’t want to” is a convenient excuse. It means never having to think about whether something about, I don’t know, behavior puts females off gaming; much less stressful to pretend instead that was fixed in our genes for all time hundreds of thousands of years ago, as Early Man strode across the savannah with his spear in a Museum of Natural History-approved manner, hunting for wildebeest. (No doubt these thrifty hunters carved primitive 20-siders from animal bone.)

I’m old enough to remember when gaming-store owners gave me funny looks, instead of helping me find the latest Trail of Cthulhu supplement; when I literally had guys crowd around my gaming table at a con staring at me, not because I had a nice rack or killer boots, but because I was a female DM and such a thing had never before been heard of. I rather like not being the only girl in the room. I just wish clueless dorks would quit fucking that up with their half-assed evo-psych intellectual masturbation.

Frank Micciche writes about how the recession is hitting over-50s, and he’s right; it’s hard to compete for jobs against people half your age who are willing to work for peanuts, it’s difficult to face retirement when your nest egg got flushed to pay for executive ‘retention bonuses’ at AIG. His solution to this? Screw the next generation, of course. That’s what we’re for.

. . . .Restoring Medicare as the primary payer for all seniors would reverse this calculus.

. . .Elimination of all payroll taxes for those over 60 would not only leave more money in their weekly paychecks but also make them cheaper to employ for businesses, which would be spared their share of the payroll tax on these workers.

…On the savings side, policymakers could temporarily quadruple the amount of savings that households headed by individuals 50 or older are allowed to put into retirement savings tax-free.

Huh. And what are we going to do to cover that extra Medicare and those payroll and retirement-savings taxes? It’s as if Micciche thinks that we can just have the Summer of Finance, where if we all hold hands and think love of money at the world, the recession will go away, like, by the power of our minds alone!

Because the alternative is that he knows, but isn’t saying, that the lost tax income and the increased Medicare expenditures have to come from cutting services to and/or raising taxes on existing taxpayers.  Apparently Micciche doesn’t think or care about how that will affect Generation X and own down, since those are the people largely starting, raising and supporting families of their own – and often, their aging parents.

Hey, that’s what everybody else is for, right? Keeping the Boomers happy?

Fuckers.

And damn if the thread doesn’t immediately get clunked on by people who amaze you only by their ability to type with fingers jammed firmly in their ears, going OMFG U CALLED ME AN OPPRESSOR!! and “Racism? That’s so twentieth century, darling” and “But shouldn’t we wait for people of color to come to us before we acknowledge they have a role in SF?”

Oh Internets, just once, I would love you to surprise me.

But when I’m deciding to invest time reading a book, I don’t want to commit to reading (much less buying) multiple books if I don’t know I already like it. It’s a bit like agreeing to a first date and then having the other person ask you what kind of house the two of you should live in and how many kids you want to have; geez, buddy, I’m not ready for that kind of commitment!

And so it really pisses me off to get to the end of a book and only then find out it’s only Book 1 of a trilogy. Because that tells me that not only could you not fit a whole tale in a book-sized package, but you figured you needed to trick me into reading it, and then hope you’d hooked me into shelling out for two more books just to find out what happened next.

Not going to happen, hopeful author. I stopped caring about the characters right there and then.