Roundup: Glurge, The Suitcase Non-Bomb, Media Bias, etc.

Another reason to hate fetus-glurge: It gives ammo to the other side.

Lay off the glurge, already!

Prochoicers, I can assure you that this stuff probably gets a thousand times more on my nerves than it does yours, because nobody's assuming that you find this tripe appealing.

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Abortion-rights activists are now abuzz about a "bomb threat" at an abortion-advocacy rally in Jackson, Mississippi. Seems somebody put a suitcase in a trash can, and somebody called it in to the police as a "suspicious package."

Is it a bomb threat every time somebody tosses an old suitcase? I thought a bomb threat meant that somebody actually said that there was a bomb, or somebody put something that seemed to be a bomb -- like a ticking box -- someplace. I didn't think a discarded suitcase qualified.

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Diary of a Rat addresses bias in the Washington Post article I cited in a previous entry. Well done!

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Unified View is trying to get an intelligent discussion going about abortion. (Good luck!) He started the ball rolling and so far nobody's playing. Zygote, achromic, L, and Tialoc, why don't you pop in?

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It's lively at Philosophy etc., where there is a discussion about whether it's wrong to harm a fetus that will be brought to term. Richard postulates that though the fetus has no rights, the person he will become at birth does have rights, and that this future person's rights include the right not to be subjected to something prior to his existence that will mar his existence when it happens.

Seems like it's simply be a lot simpler to recognize that fetuses exist and that it's wrong to hurt them. Look at how complicated you make it, when you try to maintain the non-existence of fetuses while maintaining the existence of a prenatally-harmed person at birth.

When Abu Hayat ripped Ana Rosa Rodriguez's arm off, he ripped Ana Rosa's arm off. He didn't go into some sort of time warp and impose an injury on the Ana Rosa that would come into existence at her birth some hours later. What the hell was she when her arm was being ripped off? A theory? In which case, couldn't her mother have just theorized her arm back on?