“Learning to hit and getting hit are two of the greatest benefits of the martial arts. The first takes more time for some than others. It isn’t uncommon for a lady to think that she’d never be strong enough to physically injure a man. The only way to develop the confidence that it is possible is by actually doing it.” ~ Gavin DeBecker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Skills that Protect Us From Violence. (more…)
Allan E. Parker Jr., president of the Justice Foundation [a conservative group based in Texas] says that abortion is like tobacco. People get lung cancer because they are not informed about the dangers of smoking, and that it is the responsibility of the state to provide that information. This is why we now have legislation on the table to make it mandatory for an adult woman to have and review a sonogram and/or wait 24 hours and/or meet with a “specially trained” counselor before she can have an abortion.
The Guttmacher Institute [a research group that focuses on sexual and reproductive health issues] has said that there exists “a considerable body of credible evidence” collected over the last 30 years showing that legal abortion poses no long-term danger to women’s physical or mental health.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, on the other hand, feels differently. From his majority opinion in the recent decision to uphold the “partial-birth” abortion ban: “While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained. Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow.” Pretty scientific, eh?
At least the incomparable Ruth Bader Ginsberg called him on it: “The court invokes an anti-abortion shibboleth for which it concededly has no reliable evidence.”
But let’s be fair. Mr. Parker’s organization has collected statements from 180 women (!) who said that having an abortion had left them depressed, distraught, and/or in emotional turmoil. “Thirty-three years of real life experiences attests that abortion hurts women and endangers their physical, emotional and psychological health,” he has pointed out. (Which, if you think about it, is kinda the exact opposite of what Guttmacher found…)
Isn’t there a word for that? I feel like I learned it in statistics class, when you study basic research methods and how people use bad research to mislead the public. Anec–anecdo–oh, who the hell cares. Anti-abortion is pro-woman, right, Wanda Franz, president of the National Right to Life Committee???
I know. How about we all go and get knocked up, so we can know the empowerment of having Justice Kennedy’s minions convince us not to have abortions? Now *that’s* what the feminist movement *really* needs. Also, as I heard him telling Alito, every time you have an abortion, God emboldens a terrorist.
This relates somewhat to this post from about a year ago. [One-sentence summary — Attempting to realize an artistic inspiration is terrifying because the instances in which it actually turns out the way you envisioned are so maddeningly rare, and sometimes you have to work at it for an excrutiatingly long time before you get there.]
Making art is like a roller coaster — it’s either really good or really bad. I’m speaking not about the actual product but about the psychological and emotional experience of going through the process. When you make something good that you know is good and that you are proud of, there is no better feeling. It’s exhilerating. On the other hand, when you try and try and try and nothing is good, or it starts good and then goes downhill, it can be heartbreaking. And it shouldn’t be, because creating art is like panning for gold — most of it is silt, but you have to sort through the silt in order to find the gold. Statistically (assuming the geographical circumstances under which one would be panning for gold at all), the gold is there, and if you work at it long enough, you’ll get there, but you go through a hell of a lot of silt in the process.
So when you try to make good art and come up with nothing but silt, you should actually feel good about it because a) you’ve gone through a lot of silt, which, statistically, brings you closer to gold the next time, and b) unlike actual, literal silt, artistic silt often contains its own microscopic flecks of gold, even though you may not see it for a while. Sometimes what tastes like silt at the time is just raw ore you don’t have the tools to refine yet.
But, in spite of all that, sometimes I hate looking at it, and feel worse than when it wasn’t there at all. I feel a little sick for bringing something malformed into the world that wasn’t there before. And that makes the entire process hard to start sometimes.
So something recently got me thinking about the Viet Nam war, and since I haven’t *actually* studied the Viet Nam war since the tenth grade, I decided to do a little reading to try & refresh my memory. Here’s a sampling of what I’ve run in to.
“The Gulf of Tonkin incident is an oft-cited example of the way in which [Lyndon] Johnson misled the American people to gain support for his foreign policy in Vietnam.” ~ Louise Gerdes
“[McNamara and the Pentagon] did not knowingly lie about the alleged attacks, but they were obviously in a mood to retaliate and they seem to have selected from the evidence available to them those parts that confirmed what they wanted to believe.” ~ George C. Herring
“U.S. public opinion overwhelmingly supported the deployment [of 3,500 US Marines to South Vietnam]. Public opinion, however, was based on the premise that Vietnam was part of a global struggle against communism.”
“The primary goal of the war was to reunify Vietnam and secure its independence…The Marines’ assignment was defensive…Regardless of political policies, U.S. commanders were institutionally and psychologically unsuited to a defensive mission…General William Westmoreland informed Admiral Grant Sharp, commander of U.S. Pacific forces, that the situation was critical. He said, ‘I am convinced that U.S. troops with their energy, mobility, and firepower can successfully take the fight to the NLF.’ With this recommendation, Westmoreland was advocating an aggressive departure from America’s defensive posture and the sidelining of the South Vietnamese. By ignoring [Army of the Republic of Viet Nam] units, the U.S. commitment became open ended.”
“The Johnson administration employed a ‘policy of minimum candor’ in its dealings with the media. Military information officers sought to manage media coverage, by emphasizing stories which portrayed progress in the war. Over time, this policy damaged the public trust in official pronouncements. As the media’s coverage of the war and that of the Pentagon diverged, a so-called credibility gap developed.”
“During the 1968 presidential election, Richard M. Nixon promised “peace with honor”. His plan was to build up the ARVN, so that they could take over the defense South Vietnam (the Nixon Doctrine). The policy became known as Vietnamization. This unfortunate term implied, that to date, only Americans had been dying in the conflict.”
“The war was the central issue of the 1972 presidential election. Nixon’s opponent, George McGovern, campaigned on a platform of withdrawal from Vietnam.”
Does any of that sound spooky to anybody else?
Psychutaneous Leakage -> This should be obvious, I think.
Psychutis –> the psychological barrier between the outer, more public and resiliant sense of self and the inner, more personal and vulnerable one
Psychutaneous –> of or pertaining to the psychutis