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Kindly old Ron Paul has some, ah, thoughts about abortion and something called “honest rape” in which reprehensible moral sentiments and utter incoherence struggle valiantly for the upper hand.
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this would pretty much describe the “compleat ron paul”:
as well, it would pretty much describe anyone who ever voted for him.
FTW!
Jesus Fucking God. The Horror.
Worse, he’s just a symptom of a larger problem. America at most points in the past used to filter out cranks and their ludicrous obsessions like this from serious political discussion.
Now, he sounds reasonable to people in positions of influence which should require them to be smart enough to know better – that’s the real problem. The current elites in our country resemble nothing so much as folks who have been chewing lead chips since birth.
Disease, war, frontier justice, dueling, tarring and feathering – perhaps we have been premature in eliminating some of the more extreme hardships that filtered out some of this nonsense or just provided more immediate remedies than waiting several generations to see the self-destruction of a highly functioning, progressive society before applying common sense to the issues at hand.
Now, he sounds reasonable to people in positions of influence
Like such as the median voter. This is because of Obama’s failure to heed the thrust of his own campaign rhetoric about war, whatever his clarity about his intentions for Afghanistan.
I was supportive of the pro-Afghanistan ant-Iraq stance of the party and the nominee in 2008, and I was wrong enough for it, as now even our government essentially admits. That position was crafted in the old reality. The onset of crisis ought to have led the president to set a new course; the fallout would have been containable and the long-term benefit considerable. But policy inertia and the strength-weakness dynamic of hawk and dove had already taken hold by the time a full review of the conflict was complete.
A greater stimulus might have had some minimal impact in bringing about a quicker recovery, but if there is one course of action that was entirely under the president’s control that could have led him to a nearly assured re-election, it would have been a correct reading of the sustainability of public support for a war that was eight years old at the time he took office. If he is out of office next year he’ll have that decision to look back to and regret, politically and substantively.
Again, I was a supporter of the decision on the merits at the time, and this is the first time I’ve been so explicit with a statement of error on my own part. I don’t think it;s deniable now.
By election day of 2012, American troop levels in Afghanistan will have been falling for a year and a half. In the very speech in which he announced the increase in troop levels, he also announced a timeline for ending the war – like the timeline for ending the Iraq War, which worked out pretty well. We’re also likely to see progress made towards a peace deal, and other visible evidence (like Panetta’s statement about the combat mission ending as soon as next summer) that the war is winding down.
Which is to say, I don’t see Obama suffering politically for being on the wrong side of the public on the Afghan War.
When the sane people are busy doing reprehensible things, the insane begin to get a second look from the non-fringe. That’s not new, and it’s not peculiar to Paul.
Additionally, Paul’s isn’t by any means the worst of the forced-pregnancy voices. Again, against a background of crazy, he seems no worse than average to many.
Yes, but he manages to bundle so many different kinds of crazy into one tightly wound, batshit package.
One-stop shocking.
That’s the thing. To those people who think that the rights to life/obligations of parenthood begin at conception, Paul is reasonable.
The majority of women I know (who have provided any opinion on the issue to me) find abortion to be morally reprehensible because they believe it do be on par with killing a baby.
They fall much closer in opinion to the “monster” here than to you guys.
Do those women you know talk about honest rapes, too?
The problem with Paul isn’t that he takes a view on the morality of abortion that reasonable people can hold. It’s that his specific ideas about the laws governing abortion stem from an incredibly misogynist viewpoint, and don’t make much sense when considered apart from that viewpoint.
His stances on abortion laws are not principled applications of moral ideas about when life begins any more than his civil rights stances are principled applications of libertarian ideas about rights.
And Ron Paul reveals that he’s a shitty doctor as well as a shitty human. Estrogen alone is not a reliable way to prevent implantation of a fertilized egg, so all he’d be doing is making the rape victim nauseated.
If you’re going to give someone only one thing to prevent implantation, the one thing would be progesterone, not estrogen.
Worse than that because he’s not just a doctor – he’s supposed to be an OB-GYN. This isn’t just him getting a medical question wrong, it’s him getting his own specialty wrong.
In fairness, he’s often spoken of as being some sort of expert on economics, and he’s wrong there too; to misuse something the late lamented Molly Ivins once said of another Texas politician, he’s bi-ignorant.
As I believe I’ve said elsewhere, possibly not here, I suspect Paul is far more OB than GYN. He’s interested in the gynecological aspects only to the extent that they result in a live baby that he can claim to have “delivered” (a word laden with all sorts of symbolism).
Ask any childless woman who has tried to find a ob-gyn willing to tie her tubes, and she can tell you all about this type of asshole. Alas, they’re as common as dirt in the ob-gyn field.
A lot of male doctors who specialize in ob-gyn and plastic surgery do so because of their need to control and “improve” women. It’s so transparently misogynistic. The ob-gyns in particular get away with it because they’re seen as heroic baby-deliverers rather than the enormous waste of money they are for the vast majority of pregnancies and deliveries.
No, sorry, still not acceptable for an Ob not to know it’s progestin, not estrogen. Also, shots???
When he voted to ban intact deliveries (safer in certain cases vs. dismemberment) I tentatively marked him as “probably incompetent Ob/Gyn”.
With this mistake, and his requirement that patients justify rape to his liking before being allowed access to proper medical care, he’s removed any doubt. He is incompetent.
Oh, I think this is much more poly-ignorant than merely bi-ignorant.
Polygnaramus
Omni-ignorant perhaps
See, most libertarians are hedgehogs – spectacularly wrong about one big thing. Ron Paul is more of a fox, who can be generally wrong about almost everything.
I like it! A true libertarian genius.
I don’t have the time to read what Ron Paul said, so I don’t know if I’m reluctantly agreeing with him, but progesterone delays ovulation rather than preventing implantation. (In fact, administration of progesterone when putting embryos into women appears to increase success of IVF.) The reason Plan B, with the progesterone agonist it contains, works to prevent pregnancy is by preventing ovulation/fertilization, not implantation. (So, by any definition of pregnancy – I go with implantation, myself – Plan B prevents rather than halts a pregnancy. For an examination of how a lack of clarity on this plays into wingnuts’ hands, see any number of things Amanda Marcotte has written at Pandagon.)
oops, prevents, not preventing
He’s talking about 1) pregnancy prevention (patient raped, should go to the ER immediately), and 2) pregnancy termination (patient is 7 mo pregnant and says she was raped). You don’t administer estrogen for either one. It’s progestin for #1, and a surgical procedure for #2.
Estrogen does nothing. Progestin is what he’s talking about. I am not an OB/GYN, but he is, so my mistyping is not as bad as his flat-out error.
“Let’s not talk about whether abortion is murder in the first day after a woman is raped. Let’s talk about the situation that happens several times every day when a woman wants to abort her baby the minute before it is born.”
You sir, are a monster.
How could you not relate this back to the virgin rape statements of Bill Napoli when he was a State Senator in South Dakota.
i went to a meeting at my university where he answered questions about his votes particularly related to university funding. Mainly he said all these bills came to his desk and they were complicated and he really didn’t understand them — at which point I felt a little sorry for him, in over his head having to rely on his pages to understand the legislation — but then he said when he didn’t understand bills he just voted against them, which I think sums up the Tea Party quite well.
To be fair, most legislators don’t understand the bills that come to their desks, and they shouldn’t. Bills are written in dense legal language by people who spend literally decades immersed in the craft of taking what a legislator tells them they want done (‘write me a law banning X under Y circumstances’) and making the actual implementation of that request interact properly with the rest of the US code.
But taking that dense pile of legalese and having it re-stated so you can understand exactly what it does? THAT IS WHAT YOU HAVE A STAFF FOR. Your staff is happy to do this! Your staff probably includes a bunch of guys whose sole ambition in life is to do this!
Christ.
But taking that dense pile of legalese and having it re-stated so you can understand exactly what it does? That is what you have helpful lobbyists for.
Fixed for accuracy.
Actually, a lot of lobbyists will happily explain that this is a useful purpose they genuinely perform, and it’s often true – given their biases. It’s just that the lobbyists giving their explanations and being listened to mostly come from one side of the argument …
Well, this is what they’re both for. Lobbyists do indeed serve to explain how legislation is supposed to work, and this is not entirely a bad thing. If a bill is being proposed, it’s nice to be able to know what business thinks and what the unions think and so on, and such interest groups will be happy to send people to tell you in person. The problem is that legislators also need an unbiased source of information, which is why Congress needs to retain a fairly intensive staff on hand. It’s a bit too dismissive to use “fixed” to say that representatives only listen to their lobbyists, the roles of staff and lobbyists are both a legitimate and actual force. The status quo is just a bit unevenly distributed.
This is also why term limits are stupid. Given time, even congresscritters can, if they wish, become experts in a field. With term limits, they become even more dependent on lobbyists.
Yep, and they also become far less effective at legislative politics as they do not understand how the system actually works. Not to mention that, in low population states like Montana, you pretty quickly start running out of qualified candidates and the whackaloons take over.
The only god thing about term limits is Bill Napoli is no longer in the SD State Legislature because of them. He’s too crazy for statewide election and termed out of the legislature thank goodness.
If Montana is any predictor, he will only be replaced by someone even worse.
Best description of my coworkers evah!
Most legislators are themselves lawyers. Many of them (and certainly the committee chairs who are most responsible for putting together bills) will generally have much, much more experience at the job than the vast majority of their staffs, who are usually pretty young, because congress pays horribly.
Mainly he said all these bills came to his desk and they were complicated and he really didn’t understand them — at which point I felt a little sorry for him, in over his head having to rely on his pages to understand the legislation — but then he said when he didn’t understand bills he just voted against them, which I think sums up the Tea Party quite well.
Isn’t it a metric f***-tonne better on average that legislators vote against bills that they don’t understand rather than vote for them?
Well, that guarantees we will do nothing about global warming.
Of course, having that clueless bunch try to fix the problem with legislation they don’t understand is SURE to work.
You’re right; we should do nothing instead. The Free Market is bound to start pricing externalities correctly if we let it.
The Free Market — blessed be Thy Name — is bound to start pricing externalities correctly if we let it.
Just bringing your sentence into accord with the proper Scriptural grammar.
Of course it won’t. I just find it remarkable that you think our current political structure will.
Just ignore this past century of massively subsidized energy consumption.
I never said I thought we would solve this problem. I said I thought it would be good if we at least fucking tried. I’m painfully aware that we won’t, in no small part due to people parroting idiocies such as “Government is the problem, not the solution.”
Its like you see no cost in trying.
Government is not the problem. The nature of the state is such that everything it does comes with systematic problems and costs.
It isn’t as if government agencies can just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks without costing everyone.
Yes, Brad, I do understand there will be costs to fix problems. I also understand that there are costs to not fixing problems. And I can make judgements in individual cases which risks I think are greater. And in my particular example, I can evaluate the “do nothing” position, and think it is completely insane.
The difference is that the government may possibly make the situation better if we are lucky, while THE MARKET will most likely make it much worse (as they routinely avoid paying for externalities) and at best do absolutely nothing.
“
GovernmentThe market is the problem, not the solution.”Fixed that for you, Brad.
I never said what you just quoted me as saying.
But you did say that government would always make things worse, and advocated doing nothing. So it really is a fair Shorter Brad.
And in turn, I see you openly acknowledge that our legislators derive their understanding of what practical effects bills will have from lobbyists, then call for those legislators to have substantial nationwide control over energy prices in order to force the energy industry to internalize certain costs, and I think you are insane.
No. I said government always has systematic problems and costs.
The point is this: If one wishes to justify state activity, one must do more than define the problem.
What has the government ever done for us?
True, but you do indeed argue consistently that market solutions are always better than government solutions. My point is that it is exactly the market which is the problem here.
No, the problem goes much deeper than “the market”.
Our government has spent a century subsidizing energy consumption, so even if the market was naturally clearing at pollution-inputed prices, we would still be facing major problems from “externalities” because of the role government has played in reducing the costs of energy consumption.
And before you go in that direction, that does not mean that government is the problem.
It just means that government has been far more of a source of externalities than a solution to this point.
Brad -
But, to repeat myself for the 9 millionth time, still less a source of the externalities than the market. The market is also the ultimate source of the problems with the government, since the first thing an astute businessman with the money does is buy the politicians. This is a feature and not a bug in capitalism.
There’s a difference between ‘I don’t understand what this law will do’ and ‘I don’t understand the mechanism by which it will do it.’
The Congress understood that voting to fund NASA would get us to the moon. They odds that any of them had a deep and thorough understanding of the science that made that possible is real doubtful.
Legislators should vote against bills whose purpose they do not understand, although assuming they’re doing their jobs those bills will be few and far between. Voting against laws whose mechanisms they don’t understand doesn’t just mean, contra Mal, that we’ll do nothing about global warming; it means we’ll do nothing about ANYTHING.
No. That is effing stupid.
If they don’t understand the bill, they shouldn’t vote on it at all. They are allowed to abstain. Chiming in based on ignorance is about as destructively stupid as you can get.
If they can’t be bothered to understand the bills presented in their own committee, they should get the hell out of the legislature.
the problem is that he had no desire to learn what the bills were about and was actually proud of this
Ron Paul, hero of the stupid.
Speaking only for myself, I am under the impression that women who have carried a fetus four/fifths of the way to term suddenly turning into crazy people is so vanishingly rare that if you tried to statistically track them as part of the overall population, they’d vanish into the margin of error.
I take comfort in this fact. It’s one less thing for everybody to worry about! We can concentrate on matters of women’s health that actually exist and are real problems, the list of which is very long indeed.
Apparently Ron Paul feels as though he needs to go looking for problems where none exist. In a way I pity him.
He is laying it out pretty plain:
“If you are raped, you should visit the hospital and prevent implantation. If you do not, you are out of luck. And anyways, I would regard your claim of rape at seven-months pregnant to be dubious.”
That’s pretty much exactly what I would expect from Paul.
‘Twas me. Slay away.
“If you are raped, you should visit the hospital and prevent implantation. If you do not, you are out of luck. And anyways, I would regard your claim of rape at seven-months pregnant to be dubious.”
And if you have suddenly gone crazy and “homicidal,” we’ll deal with that by giving you a baby to take care of.
Helpful Advice about what to do when you’re raped in order for men to believe your little stories is neither helpful nor advice. It’s a command designed to ensure that one fails. Nobody could possibly live up to dudes’ ideal wank princess cum rape victim.
Except that if you were unlucky enough to have him as your doctor, he wouldn’t even fucking know what to do to prevent implantation.
I now see why he says that he never had a patient whose life would be saved by a termination. He probably had dozens but was too incompetent to recognize that. Estrogen, my ass.
Yeah, that was always a myth.
I was going to come in with a joke about gold-standard rape vs fiat-money rape, but I don’t have the stomach for it.
Aqua Buddha, my friend, don’t you start away uneasy…