Unfuckingbelievable.
A philosopher's intellectual calm and patience can be stretched only so far before insults and/or damnation become the only appropriate response.
This isn't about the morality of abortion, but about a simple, anti-science, anti-reason, anti-fact rewriting of reality. "Fetal life" in Arizona now begins at a point when fetal life does not - in reality - begin.
(To pile crazy on top of crazy, this new law is titled "The Women's Health and Safety Act.")
I don't know what's more crazy, this, or the notion that Sarah Palin was remotely qualified to be president.
Only ignorance and/or bad faith can explain these phenomena. One can only hope that these intellectual mutants will be correctly acknowledged as such in the light of history - assuming the mutants don't already destroy us all before we get there. That's right: fucking mutants.
EDIT: On a more constructive note, perhaps in the coming days I will lay out some thoughts on the abortion matter. In the meantime, let us note one thing about the goddamned "pro-life" right-wingers in America, who have mutated even well beyond what they were in 1976 when Miss Rand had already called them goddamned so-and-sos: Their fierce defense of "the sanctity of life" in the form of the unborn cannot even come close to be taken as a cognitively unbiased (if not downright hypocritical) position on the sanctity of life - not when they show such stark indifference toward children in poverty (now standing at 22% in America - and rising), toward death-row inmates (who pose no threat to society when locked up, and who may or may not have been wrongfully convicted, or who may be mentally retarded), or toward the many children killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, to which these fucking mutants have decided to turn a blind eye while chanting about how the USA is "the greatest country on earth" because of its nationalism and militarism and anti-intellectualism, i.e., because of mutants like themselves. I have no doubt that a dedicated individual could come up with instance after instance of the mutants' double-standards on "the sanctity of life." (Just human life, I suppose, too. Many of these same mutants don't think twice about scarfing down enormous amounts of factory-farmed meat and diminishing their own health in the process. And what about the sanctity of the lives of members of future generations who may very well have to suffer the consequences of these mutants' epistemologically-fucked environmental negligence?) That being said, there are legitimate moral concerns and arguments about abortion that need to be addressed to those of good faith, cognitive balance, and epistemic-intellectual sanity. It is just too bad that it is not these folks who dominate American political discourse today. (Speaking of which, how the fuck does presidential hopeful Mitt Romney get away with releasing only two years - tops - of tax returns? What, am I the crazy one here?)
EDIT #2: Aaaaand yet more insanity from the past couple days. I wonder how the pro-freedom, small-government Tea Partiers might react to this GOP-platform proposal for gratuitous federal meddling into people's private choices, choices made using their own hard-earned money no less? Are the feds supposed to be conducting this frivolous meddling before addressing real problems this country faces? Who are these fucking idiots? (Note, further, that the Romney campaign has vowed to crack down on the porn menace, in addition to the vow to fight tooth and nail the same-sex marriage menace. All while not releasing more than two years of tax returns because "it's none of our business." Words fail at this point.)
