Quick notes
I apologize for the break here at TYoH. There will be a Letter to Wormwood tomorrow about law school interviewing, of sorts: for once I have neither law review work or interviewing, and a brief space to breathe.
Instead, I'll leave you with a bit of political blather from NARAL: The Crawford Wives. Because, you know, if you're a woman and you support George Bush, you're obviously a robot. No way you could have made up your mind to disagree with NARAL. (I'm not making that up. The ad-copy from the post-trailer page: "Yet, they unquestioningly support President Bush even as he robs women of the right to make private decisions about their personal lives." Unquestioningly. I wonder how they know that these women never questioned Bush, never thought for themselves.)
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend in England who was complaining about the lack of all-woman shortlists in the Conservative Party. When it was pointed out that completely without the aid of such lists, the Conservatives had managed to not only have a woman as Party Leader, my friend just chuckled and said, "Oh, sure, but she wasn't really a woman."
There's a T-Shirt in this somewhere for conservatives everywhere. Something like, "Become a Republican Woman: either we'll keep you barefoot and pregnant, or make you our leader and liberals will pretend you have no ovaries." But a bit snappier.
And in other news, the BBC reports that 2 million pages of pornography were accessed by the Department of Work and Pensions over eight months. I leave the one-liners in more capable hands: sometimes the UK government just makes it too easy.








Comments
T-shirt possibilities:
UK Gov (front)
Department of Working Perverts (back)
(A his and hers set:)
Liberal women have no ovaries
Liberal men have no balls
Liberals do it in the private sphere
Liberal women are f***ing hot
I like 'em armed, barefoot, and pregnant (front)
If you do too, vote Republican! (back)
Unfortunately there's a bit of a high "getting chased down the street by outraged people" factor to some of these ideas - but I feel they need to be expressed anyway. :)
Posted by: Jen | August 27, 2004 04:54 AM
Hmm, maybe I'm a robot, too, along with Condoleezza and everyone else in the ad. Well, it's a relief to have that all cleared up for me by NARAL :) I always wondered (in my fleeting moments of independent thought) why I should be a conservative pro-lifer who's worked for a Tory MP. Now I know it's just my programming!
I know this may be an over-generalization, but at least in my experience I find that conservatives are more willing to acknowledge that there are intelligent, thoughtful people on different sides of any number of issues, while liberals are more likely to assume conservatives must be idiots, must not have thought through issues at all, or must be blind followers. Certainly I've been accused of those things for the mere fact of being a more orthodox Catholic, and the fact of being pro-life, and the fact of being conservative. It makes me very appreciative to find people with whom I can have thoughtful and civil discussions about issues even where we're strongly opposed. Respectful people like that are definitely out there, and I know a lot of them - but they're not typically found in NARAL.
expzdPosted by: Kimberly | August 28, 2004 11:25 AM
Kimberly:
I'd be wary of that overgeneralization. It's probably merely selection bias. (Reasonable people tend to hang out with reasonable people, and people of a particular political/religious persuasion tend to hang around with their own.)
I'm sure it wouldn't take me twenty-five minutes to come up with a number of hot-headed election campaign adds featuring the kind of logical defect mentioned above, from either side of the aisle. (Twenty-five minutes is also a good approximate time it would take me to get to a Barnes & Noble with wireless access, grab a copy of anything by Ms. Coulter, and start posting excerpts. Needless to say, I've got better things to do today.)
NARAL gets picked on simply because they decided to advertise it on the Onion, and I read the Onion.
jqgklPosted by: A. Rickey | August 28, 2004 01:40 PM
True enough. Thanks for the caution. I guess since I never read Ann Coulter, I don't think of her as a "typical" conservative - but that's a perfect example of selection bias, and she is pretty sweepingly offensive towards most liberals.
Posted by: Kimberly | August 28, 2004 02:52 PM