Pro-Thana

How To Have A Biblical Abortion

2012-02-09T15:42:00.003-06:00

Yes ladies, it's true, you too can have a Biblically prescribed abortion, depending on the version of the Bible you have (as with all things). The Lord told Moses exactly how this is supposed to work. Here's how:

Basically, first you have to get married or this won't work. Then, sleep with another man. Then have your husband take you to the priest, along with some barley and oil and other random offerings. Now, have the priest give you "bitter water" that brings a "curse" into your body, causing your abdomen to swell and your womb to miscarry! Bam, done. Now you will barren forever, but whatevs.

I Ain't Afraid Of No Rollercoaster

2011-10-01T09:48:00.003-05:00

Wow, a London art student designed a workable death rollercoaster.
You go up a third of a mile, then zoom down and through a series of shrinking loops. The G force is enough to kill you.
It's almost as soul-shattering as The Devastator...

Secret Death Lovers

2011-09-09T11:45:00.000-05:00

Illy T somehow seems to imply that bloodlust vengeance is a bad thing.
But who could have a problem with the party of "pro-life" being crypto-thanatophilists?
Kill 'em all, and let FSM sort 'em out.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream

2011-08-22T11:57:00.002-05:00

Now that America's shuttle program has been deep-sixed, What's next for NASA's illustrious star-sailors? Why, astronaut suicide, of course!

I hope I'm the last boss

2011-08-08T22:39:00.002-05:00

This game looks awesome: The End

It is a game... which integrates strategy, puzzles and philosophical questions into a world which explores a range of commonly (or less commonly) held views about death, belief and science.

The game takes the player on a metaphysical journey, recording their interactions in the world to reveal their attitudes towards mortality. These views are presented alongside their friends and some of the most important thinkers of our time, such as Gandhi, Descartes and Einstein.

...The ultimate prizes are the Death Objects, ranging from a memorial diamond to a human heart, which deepen a player’s contextual knowledge of death and help them progress through the game.

Here's a trailer:

The Laugh Zone

2011-06-08T12:18:00.003-05:00

From Total Drek comes the preview for this gem, The Life Zone, which a commenter describes as "like being fired out of a cannon into a sea of mindfuckery."

So the girls are imprisoned in a hospital until they give birth, and are indoctrinated by "The Jailer" and a woman called Dr. Wise with pro-life propaganda for 7 months. One tries to induce a miscarriage but fails. Then we find out this is some kind of Dante-esque, medieval purgatory, and the girls are all dead, having died on the operating table of an abortionist. They are here to receive a second chance to repent and join the side of goodness/life. Two do but the third, who once again tries to abort her pregnancy, must spend eternity in Hell with Dr. Wise (who, while she didn't have an abortion per se, did "abort" her god-given duty to have children, by working so hard that she didn't take care of her body and became barren, resulting in her marriage falling apart and her eventual suicide. Get it? Because women who work outside the home might as well be dead, and are damned for eternity!).

So, ya know, go have some babies.

R.I.P. Harold Garfinkel

2011-05-04T18:09:00.002-05:00

The innovative sociologist who turned the study of common sense into a dense and arcane discipline, has died.

O noes! Not our next possible leader!

2011-03-30T10:04:00.006-05:00

From Feministing, we see that the far-right life apologists are co-opting the visage of our vaguely pro-choice president in their latest billboard advertising atrocity.

Every 21 minutes??? What about the trillions upon trillions of hapless Spermatazoan-Americans that are cruelly suffocated in socks or latex all the damn time? Aren't they all also our next possible leaders?

What's more, the billboard is targeted in Obama's political home of Chicago, and is part of the ridiculous campaign that is clearly meant to stir up the phantasm of a black holocaust, such as this one which the poor, black neighborhoods in Milwaukee are subjected to as well:

Here's a great article on that issue. Basically, yes , of course black women are more likely to get abortions than white women. That's because they're far more likely to get pregnant, even though they're not more likely to have sex. This is because they also tend to live in communities that are poorer, they have less access to accurate information about sex, less access to contraceptives, and less access to health care in general. They're also less likely to be able to financially support a child. So yes, of course you're going to see higher abortion rates there, too, as a result of the constrained choices faced by these women. But look at that billboard, and the others cited above in that link - the implication of the marketing campaign is that this situation is not simply an emergent phenomenon that arises out of a highly stratified industrial-capitalist economic system rife with structural racism, but rather that it is an intentional conspiracy of a government controlled by left-wing crypto-racists bent on the annihilation of the black population! Never mind that the Dems are the only party to ever do anything that benefits poor and minority communities, that's just an insidious way to cover up their real agenda of genocide. It's the radical fundamentalist Religious Right that truly have the best interests of black America at heart, reeeaaaaaally it is!

The Uterus: Serial Killer

2011-02-26T16:03:00.003-06:00

Lots of absurd pro-life policy gambits in the news lately, ever since the reactionary crypto-values-voters (code-name: Tea Party) swept the country last November.

Exhibit A: Representative Bobby Franklin of Georgia has proposed a bill that would allow for the police to investigate all cases of miscarriage, to make sure they were natural (and not felony murder). Daily Kos says, "Just because SCOTUS can't define when life begins, doesn't mean that GA can't, since we all know it begins at conception. Because some idiot like him, who graduated from a damned Bible college and who isn't a lawyer, obviously knows more about constitutional law than the Supreme Court." The folks over at Feministe are suggesting that ladies mail documentary evidence of their menstrual cycle to Mr. Franklin, to aid in his investigations.

Exhibit B: South Dakota, and now Nebraska, have bills proposed to categorize the murder of abortion providers, or the murder of anyone in the course of trying to save a fetus, as "justifiable homicide." This would essentially authorize and protect vigilante executions, which is unprecedented.

Exhibit C: the ridiculous group, Live Action, is waging a PR war on Planned Parenthood, alleging they're secretly operating a child prostitution ring. It seems to me that the logical implication of their assault on Planned Parenthood's funding, which they market as being intended to "protect women and girls," would in fact justify and encourage the patriarchal notion that women are the property of men, and that women ought to be pregnant at all times - that it is the duty of men to make sure any non-pregnant woman becomes so ASAP, using any means necessary. Since human life is the primary "good" in these lunatics' moral schema, then any situation is morally bad to the extent that new human life is not being maximized. In other words, rape away, gentlemen, you are doing the Lord's work.

Pie anyone?

2011-01-04T12:22:00.004-06:00

Sing a song of sixpence! Four to five thousand free dead blackbirds, with no apparent signs of injury, fell out of the sky in Arkansas this past Sunday.

How many miracles is enough?

2011-01-02T19:41:00.002-06:00

This is the year we hit 7,000,000,000 people. So tell me, do ya feel special, punk? Well, do ya?

Driven To Drink, They Meet Their Maker

2010-12-14T15:33:00.004-06:00

From the unapologetically mortal Pharyngula comes this delightful story, "Dispute over God leaves two dead." They drank an insane amount of pure alcohol, argued about the existence of God, and set to murdering each other. How very... Russian. Somebody call Dostoevsky.

PZ Myers asks, "So did the atheist win, or the believer?"

"Does it even matter in a grim cold universe, where we're all doomed to eke out a futile existence until we die, where we're either meaningless sputterings of a few pounds of electrified meat, or the serfs of immense beings who will snuff us out painfully, slowly, eternally and with casual disregard if we fail to properly praise them incessantly? Does anything matter? The snow falls. It will cover us all."

Desolate yet all undaunted...

2010-10-30T03:51:00.003-05:00

The estimable John De Lancie does a superb rendition of Poe's The Raven.
Happy Halloween!

Liberal Culture of Death

2010-10-29T15:22:00.003-05:00

Machine of Death , a book of death-related stories edited by the Wondermark guy, infuriates Glenn Beck by beating him for the #1 book slot on Amazon.com. He whines: "These are the — this is the left, I think, speaking. This is the left. You want to talk about where we’re headed? We’re headed towards a culture of death. A culture that, um, celebrates the things that have destroyed us."

Boo yah.

h/t boingboing

LOL Sign Fail!

2010-10-27T12:39:00.002-05:00

see more funny videos

Mean Magnus

2010-10-12T17:15:00.004-05:00

Awww, Magnus is upset. It seems that I am now a "vile" reaping agent of doom, just because my siege of the one they call Hitchens will inevitably end in my victory. Who knew? Well, Thorson, guess you'll have to find a new man-crush. Might I recommend Justin Bieber? MWA HA HA HA!

Violence, Agression, Willingness To Kill

2010-10-05T18:03:00.002-05:00

Primatologist Richard Wrangham on "Why We Kill"

Question: What are the two most fascinating things about human evolution yet to be explored?

Richard Wrangham: How it is that a pre-human ape became a human. And it's a question that Darwin had no idea about really, and that we've had only some rather simple ideas about until recently, and I think we still have a long way to go. And until we have a sense of the continuity in an evolutionary sense and the biological factor responsible for something like a Chimpanzee standing upright, becoming what we are today, then we will always have this sense of anthropocentrism. We will always feel just a little bit divorced from the rest of the universe. And that's one big question.

I think another huge question is about the evolution of human nature with respect to the biggest use of cooperation, processiality, altruism, and on the other hand, violence, aggression, a willingness to kill. We are an unusual species because we have such an extraordinary mix of these two aspects. We show them both to extremes. We're amazingly more cooperative than almost any other species and we're extraordinarily destructive compared to most species. And grappling with the extent to which that is a product of culture and biology and to the extent of why we should have biological position to go in both of those directions remains one of the huge questions. Which again, is something, of course, that is hard to reconcile with the rest of nature in many ways and for that reason, people resort to religion and they resort to all sorts of naturalistic point of views, strange belief systems to grapple with the question of good and evil.

Question: Are humans predisposed to behave violently?

Richard Wrangham: Well, to talk about inherent aggression in us sets off alarm bells for some people because it sounds biologically determinist, it sounds pessimistic. So, I wouldn't want to quite put it in that term. But, I do think that there's all sorts of evidence that humans have got a predisposition to behave with violence in certain contexts, that yes. And it's a great thing to be aware of it and the more we're aware of it, then the more we can do about it.

You know, it has nothing to do with whether or not one is optimistic, or pessimistic about the future. And I'm a firm believer in the fact that war is not a necessary feature of human life and that there has been a rather impressive decline in the amount of killing that humans as a species do over the last centuries and millennia, and that the future can be expected to be increasingly rosy. But none of that is to deny that within the human heart there is a dangerous side.

Question: How can we overcome this?

Richard Wrangham: We can carry on doing the kinds of things we are doing, which is to think deeply and carefully about anticipating violence. About setting up institutional systems that enable us to anticipate when there is a threat of genocide in the country, when there are threats of war between states and for other states to be prepared to intervene. I mean the great thing nowadays is that, whereas in recent decades and centuries, when two countries declared war on each other, the others just stood by and watched. Nowadays, everyone is very scared and alarmed about it. And doesn't want this to happen and there is intervention just flowing all over the place. You know, we try to get involved in Darfur, we try to get involved in the Congo, we try to get involved in Bosnia. And as a result, things change.

Question: Where are we headed now in terms of aggression and war?

Richard Wrangham: The size of the groups that are political units has just been growing, not exactly steadily with leaps and drops, but have been growing over the millennia. And surely the way in which the human species is ultimately heading is towards a single group. And to me one of the great questions of the future is whether or not that group will be achieved by unanimous pooling of the decision to unite into conquering some of the great problems of the world, such as climate change, or food shortage, or the threat of aggression, or whether or not the gloomy view would be that the single united human group will be achieved by domination. And I think that's, on the whole, unlikely.

I think that the great value of the technological advances that have been happening in the last decades is that people communicate enormously better than they used to so that when there is a problem in Fiji, then the whole of the rest of the world knows about it. When there is an earthquake in Haiti, then within a few hours, everybody in the world knows about it and is rushing to help. And one of the consequences of that sort of communication, or ability, is that the dispossessed get a little bit more power.

So, in the general sense, I feel that the world is becoming increasingly democratic. There are more voices to those that traditionally had very little power, indeed. And that's the kind of dynamic that will help avert a hegemonic move towards a single world government, and instead something more like what's happened in Europe, with countries just saying, it makes sense for us to work together.
Recorded on March 5, 2010

There's A Zombie On Your Lawn

2009-09-25T07:36:00.001-05:00

Call of Cthulu's out, Zygote's in

2009-08-31T07:58:00.003-05:00

Thanatos is amused by Pastor Joseph Grant Swank, Jr. on Senator Ted "Baby Killer" Kennedy's death, via World-O-Crap:

"Kennedy was one of the countless persons championing slaying boys and girls inside female bodies." (swank)

"Granted, it’s not the Most Dangerous Game, but it’s still nice to get out of the house and into the womb, camping with your buddies, putting out your fetal decoys, sitting in your baby blind with your dog and your gun, sippin’ a beer and occasionally blowing on your Zygote Call." (scott)

Dead Sexy, pt. 2

2009-08-19T13:45:00.002-05:00

OMG!!! Men of Mortuaries? Brilliant! Hat tip to SI.

(also see the first installment of Dead Sexy.)

we need Death Panels

2009-08-17T10:38:00.004-05:00

According to Right Reborn, "At a recent townhall meeting on healthcare, Obama gave his word... that he wouldn’t be 'pulling the plug on grandma.' Simply stating I promise not to kill anybody certainly isn’t the best approach to winning friends and influencing people."

Correct. He should be promising to kill people. A death panel is the fairest, most efficient way of determining who dies first. Why is it getting all this bad press? It's a brilliant idea, at least in its misconstrued right-wing version. We should be eliminating those who are past the prime of their usefulness to society, they are a drain just like those on welfare, who we should also terminate. All of this won't do much good, however, unless we also significantly ratchet up our program of aborting fetuses, which is the only way to keep the population under control. Eventually, we can create of list of serial birthers for the death panel's consideration - Octomom (tm), you're first up against the wall!

plague of babies pt. 2

2009-08-05T14:04:00.000-05:00

best way to go green? don't have kids!

Unprocessed Phlogiston

2008-04-17T16:56:00.004-05:00

And the award for coolest band name evar goes to........

Ether Ore!

The Humans Are Dead

2008-04-03T14:12:00.003-05:00

A lovely little tune by the Flight of the Conchords, courtesy of muffinlips146 of the Voluntary Human Extinction MovemenT LiveJournal group...

What's In A Name?

2008-03-21T02:32:00.004-05:00

...And the douchebag-of-the-year award goes to... Marvin Richardson of Idaho!

Britney Death Pool?

2008-03-11T15:49:00.004-05:00

Well, gosh.
Horrific. Atrocious. Abominable. And that's just her life.
I don't even know what to say about this. Dang?
When is a celebrity gonna drop dead pool anybody?

or is she already dead?

From the Mouths of Babes

2008-03-03T17:32:00.002-06:00

Too cute! Do people die every second? Yes they do little girl, yes they do.

DEATHKEY

2008-02-01T18:48:00.000-06:00

So this one band I like is on a new compilation called Songs In The Key Of Death, and to celebrate I made them this image...

Ha! Get it?

death is in the cards

2008-01-23T17:13:00.001-06:00

Heath Ledger dies of a suspected sleeping pill overdose just after finishing filming for Batman wherein he plays the Joker...

Killwithme.com becomes an internet phenomenon...

Dexter emigrates from cable to network broadcasting because of corporate greed...

Milblog R.I.P.

2008-01-05T21:36:00.000-06:00

The main vein of info-junkies and pattern phreaks has spurted out this poignant and thought-provoking dispatch from a top military blogger in Iraq. They are the last words of a fallen soldier named Andrew Olmsted, and everyone should read them.

Out Of The Frying Pan...

2008-01-01T09:04:00.000-06:00

...Into The Church?

Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. These poor saps thought they could escape an angry mob by fleeing into a sacred building. Imagine their surprise when their pursuers didn't give up the chase, but instead elected to incinerate their quarry within the very halls of truth and justice they thought would give them refuge!

Turns out that churches make excellent funeral pyres.

Note to self: NEVER GO TO KENYA.

Stop Making Babies, You Fools!

2007-12-31T18:27:00.000-06:00

An associate of mine has made a very excellent blog post about overpopulation.
I give you...
Chestocrates

A Great Black Pit

2007-12-21T01:20:00.000-06:00

My favorite part of Sweeney Todd is that everybody dies at the end.

(Well, that and everything prior.)

Make sure to see it on the big screen. The soundtrack and blood effects deserve a massive canvas; it's a splendid bit of musical theatre with egregious gore and copious cleavage. Thrilling throughout! Thanks to DarkNES and :EYG: for providing free premiere passes to myself and my succulent stable of goth chix0rz. Rumors of a sophomore Gothsicles album fill me with much dread and foreboding... I mean, glee and anticipation...

There's a hole in the world like a great black pit,
And it's filled with people that are filled with shit.

Euthanized Critters

2007-12-12T02:09:00.000-06:00

What have you done to make the world a better place?
This guy killed things.

Genius

2007-12-09T18:15:00.000-06:00

most awesome idea ever.

$$$ Cha-Ching! $$$

The undead have invaded Southridge Mall!

2007-12-03T09:14:00.000-06:00

Mall zombies!

On Black Friday, actual zombies swarmed a bastion of capitalist consumption in Southern Milwaukee. They were difficult to differentiate from the regular shoppers, mindlessly milling about, feasting on bargains.

killing: ok. sexing: not so much.

2007-11-07T08:34:00.000-06:00

Remember when I posted on the Loved Dead a while back? Well now it seems that Wisconsin's Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen is spending his time waging an excruciatingly slow battle to outlaw such necrocentric amorousness (instead of, oh I don't know, fighting the rash of violent crime in Milwaukee that his campaign promises focused on). So, to recap, you can probably get away with shooting the living, but you can't fuck them if they die from it.

Wacky Indian Wisdom

2007-10-29T19:18:00.000-05:00

Stop the plague of babies before it starts, people.
And stop the spread of STDs.
Here is a shield that will protect you.

It's Quite Absorbent...

2007-10-24T22:24:00.000-05:00

the Death Napkin!

(yoinked from world-o-crap)

Whole Human

2007-10-15T18:43:00.000-05:00

Word.
(stolen from Ectoplasmosis.)

Anna Rexia

2007-10-08T17:40:00.000-05:00

I'm totally going as her for Halloween...

Check out that ribcage! SchaaaaaWing!

Cheating Death?!?

2007-10-02T15:25:00.000-05:00

Tremendous stuff from tha C-dawg; he even talks about weight control - the straw-man thinspiration for this blog!

Also, don't miss his interview with Charlie Savage.

And, here's Suscitatio Enterprises LLC, a cool research company I discovered; be sure to do their survey if you identify with them: Vampirism & Energy Work Research Study.

Season's greetings! Halloween's just around the corner...

Pointing the Pink Pistol

2007-09-24T08:55:00.000-05:00

Thank the gods! Well, at least Ares and Apohrodite, who can now agree on the latest fashion accessory for girls available at Gander Mountain in Waukesha, according to this Journal-Sentinel article. Guns! Now girls can kill too!

From the article: "Females want to shoot guns, but they want them to look pretty, too... guys could give a rat's butt what their gun looks like." Wha? Guys totally care about the sexiness of their piece. The article is way off. Nobody wants something like the Grasshopper from Men In Black.

From Where I Sit chimes in, saying nothing.

I thought killing was a distinctively masculine trait, but it turns out the lesser sex can do something beside just nurture life... blast holes in it!

W000, America.

And unrelatedly, here's a good bit of zombie sci-fi I discovered. Well, not totally unrelatedly... the Somalian girls with the assault rifles are pretty bad-ass, and I couldn't help but imagine them with phallic pink blunderbusses.

Vladimir Putin? More like, Stupidimir Putzface!

2007-09-14T08:59:00.000-05:00

Seriously, Russia thinks it's a good idea to give out prizes for having babies? Cars and refrigerators are your solution to population optimization? Go back to Baba Mat for more advice, you morons.

There's a nice bit on voluntary population control over at Pandagon.

A Swiftian v.p.c. strategy is discovered by the intrepid folks at Ectoplasmosis. A child-burger and chips for around 3 bucks! Can't beat that.

Mmm... Crepusculicious

2007-09-02T17:17:00.000-05:00

nipped from the gorgeous Stone Parliament of Art.

CREPUSCULE (2*)
Uploaded by AMDS

also, recently I became aware that some old friends of mine decided they would throw together a design firm, and it looks like they've come up with some pretty nifty stuff, such as this graphic for a gun-control campaign... of course, the campaign is ludicrous; we need way more guns, accessible to everyone, if we're ever going to blast ourselves into extinction.

Flow Skull

2007-08-24T06:49:00.000-05:00

nipped from BoingBoing.

Zach the Lego (Ax) Maniac

2007-08-21T08:18:00.000-05:00

Are you ready for the best use of Legos since the Brick Testament? Check out Block Death: A Museum of Horrors. My favorites are the Stake, Playing Superman, and It's Probably Just the Wind.

Preach On, Thomas Studdelmeyer!

2007-08-14T12:49:00.000-05:00

Everyone Should Own A Gun For Protection And Possibly For Suicide

For as long as I can remember, our Second Amendment right to own firearms has been under relentless attack. Opponents say having guns creates...

Dead Sexy, Yeah Baby Yeah!

2007-08-13T09:05:00.000-05:00

Who is this irresistable creature who has an insatiable love for the dead?
~Rob Zombie

Why, it's Grunke, Grunke, and Radke! Silly boys. From the post: "sex with a dead body whose demise you didn't cause isn't against the law in Wisconsin." Whoddathunkit! Thanks Invisible Tenant! And you've reminded me of one of my favorite authors...

And here are a couple of bonus goodies for you necrophiles in the audience:
Hot Zombies / Girls and Corpses

In other news, a Mexican death cult has totally emasculated me. So if you find yourself in a situation where you should be dead, but your soul is lingering in your rotting corpse because I didn't come to collect you, its probably because I couldn't get myself to come in to work, what with having these new lady parts to play with...

- Thanatos

Precocious Youth

2007-08-08T13:10:00.000-05:00

Ah, the precociousness of today's youth! My heart swells with pride at the human condition when I hear stories like this. Back in the olden days, people had to grow up, develop muscle mass, harbor seeds of hatred, and learn to strategize before they could really try murdering each other. But with today's modern labor-saving technologies, now even a weakling 3-year old female has a "shot" at the glorious blessings of Khorne. I say she is the chosen one, and with her first perforated abdomen as a good omen, she should be crowned as the new empress-for-life of the NRA, and her wisdom should be spread by the institution of a "Young-Guns" program to teach more toddlers how to blow each other away... for God, Guns, and Glory!

Execute the Abortionists!

2007-07-31T08:23:00.000-05:00

In an outstanding post over at Feministe, Jill asks: how much prison-time should a woman receive for an abortion? And for that matter, how much should the doctor receive for his serial mercernary assassinations? The discussion references a Newsweek article by Anna Quindlen which describes a mini-documentary on YouTube wherein anti-choice protesters are asked what penalties they would suggest when their goal (the outlawing of abortion) comes to fruition.

What is so great is how Jill draws out the logical implications of the anti-choicers, illuminating their hypocrisy in a magnificent reductio ad absurdum. The result is a hilarious damning of the "pro-life" position as inconsistent, condescendingly patriarchal, and downright foolish from a public policy perspective. I would put forth a pro-thana counter-claim: anyone who does not get an abortion should be executed on the grounds that they are the root cause of all the suffering and evil that person will endure during its life! >:)

From the discussion:

...if a fetus is a person, and abortion indisputably kills a fetus, then abortion is murder... But we punish people for murder. We sentence them to long prison terms, often for life. Sometimes we execute them.... What if they have multiple abortions? What if they had access to all the literature and information that anti-choicers believe women considering abortion should be required to receive? What if they acknowledge that they know exactly what they are doing and they feel no guilt or shame for terminating their pregnancies?

...If women are so infantile that our bad acts toward fetuses must be punished with counseling or left to God, does that apply when our bad acts are directed at born people? If I kill my next-door neighbor, can I simply say that because of my tiny lady-brain and tinier lady-morals, I just didn’t know any better? Can I get counseling or some smiting instead of jail time?

...If a fetus is a person with all the same rights as you or I, then killing that fetus — or paying someone to kill that fetus — is murder. Deliberate, pre-meditated murder. How can it possibly be legally (or even morally) consistent to attach full rights to a fetus and then treat its death as somehow less important, or different, than the death of a born person?

...To complicate things a little more: If life starts at conception, and from the moment of fertilization an egg is a full-fledged human being with the same rights as you or I, what do we do about calculating the death rate? The miscarriage rate?

...If a fertilized egg is a full-fledged person under the law, what other legal activities — other than abortion — would have to go? ...Any medical treatment that could potentially harm a fetus, even if foregoing it meant that the woman would experience severe health complications or death?
...What about pregnant women engaging in behaviors that are risky for the fetus? Can she be prosecuted for child abuse or negligence if she, say, drinks coffee while she’s pregnant? ...goes binge drinking every night and survives off of Cheetos?

...These are a lot of questions, but they absolutely must be asked. And those who want to see abortion criminalized need to think long and hard about the consequences of their ideal policies.

And a commenter says:

And these *would* be legitimate questions if abortion was outlawed and criminal cases against doctors/women went forward. The idea of forensic vagina inspectors poking the former contents of my uterus under a microscope to determine how many, if any, murders occurred is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying.

Brilliant stuff people! Forensic vagina inspectors. Gosh I love the blogosphere.

lolDoomcatz!

2007-07-26T13:25:00.000-05:00

Cats have always been associated with the the night, black magic, and even death. According to Wikipedia, "several ancient religions believed that cats are exalted souls, companions or guides for humans, that they are all-knowing but are mute so they cannot influence decisions made by humans." Indeed, Oscar here goes farther than most as an all-knowing soul guide; not unlike my good friend Hermes, he's basically a full fledged psychopomp! He is a shining exemplar of feline-kind's affinity for my cold embrace. I name him an honorary Harbinger of Yours Truly.

- Thanatos

Vanquished by munchkins!

2007-07-17T15:09:00.000-05:00

Wow, I couldn't make up stuff this good if I tried. And I do!

Thanks to Patrick McIdiot, I heard about this Mark Steyn guy who wrote in the NY Sun this article about how tenuous humanity's grip on existence is. Honest to golly, he actually says the following:

In Europe as a whole, the fertility rate is a little over 1.3, which is what demographers call "lowest-low" fertility, from which no society in human history has ever recovered. The Spanish, the Italians, the Germans, the Greeks, the Bulgars and Ukrainians will be extinct long before the polar bears or the Antarctic krill or the Latin-American three-toed tree sloth or any of the other species these professors wants to protect... I'm as agog at the marvels of technology as the next chap, but you could hardly ask for a more poignant example of the west's boundless scientific innovation [such as a new kind of condom] on the brink of ruinous demographic decline.

Yep, Mark Steyn actually thinks that mankind is on the brink of ruinous demographic decline. Six and a half billion is an awful lot like zero, after all. Too close for comfort at any rate. Poor humans! Vanquished by the nano-munchkins of their own creation, who stop condoms from tearing and thereby kill off the whole species.

Too rich, too thin

2007-06-25T14:42:00.000-05:00

The skinny on summer fashion: these chicks are guaranteed to give you a bone!

Grave Matters

2007-06-25T10:38:00.000-05:00

From a book on eco-friendly burials, via Marginal Revolution:

Over time, the typical ten-acre swatch of cemetery ground, for example, contains enough coffin wood to construct more than forty houses, nine hundred-plus tons of casket steel, and another twenty thousand tons of vault concrete. To that add a volume of formallin sufficient to fill a small backyard swimming pool and untold gallons of pesticide and weed killer to keep the gravehard preternaturally green.

Resistance is Futile

2007-06-15T12:32:00.000-05:00

Those Japanese are at it again, bringing the world wonderful technology.

but News Alert! Robots' rights activist arrested. Good! Stop defending those job-thieving chrome-backs, you meat-traitor. They shouldn't even be in this country (Silly robot, inalienable rights are for humans!). Of course, if human-ness is a quantifiable concept, then perhaps we could draw up a point system to measure their value to us, and have that be commensurate with the levels of rights we give them. I mean, seriously, most of 'em can't even speak English. They're all "beep blip bloop beep" and shit. Go back to Mechs-ico, and lay off the tech-quila, 53ñ0r. We only want to take the best parts of you. You keep the scrap.

Really I'm of course just sad that robots don't die like people do. They don't have to wrestle with the meaning of death. BUT AT LEAST THEY BRING IT! (with their laser eyes, chest-missiles, and crushing power-claws!)

War: what is it good for?

2007-06-05T10:27:00.000-05:00

Absolutely everything!

War is really the only mechanism the world has left for controlling the human population. Your mortality and your inability to get along with each other combine to limit the acceleration of your otherwise infinite growth.

Predators won't do it because you exterminate them. Disease won't do it because your medical technology is too clever. Starvation won't do it because you engineer efficient food systems. Resource depletion may not even do it because you're working on alternative energy sources. But one thing can always be counted on for sure - you'll find things to fight about.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left. ~Bertrand Russell

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. ~Voltaire

Links:

Suicide Commando

2007-06-04T14:33:00.001-05:00

Emile Durkheim's groundbreaking monograph, Suicide, established that phenomena once thought to be exclusively psychological and quintessentially individualistic could in fact be sociological in origin. What does this mean? Well, with a little well-planned social engineering, governments can get their suicide rates shooting through the roof! (of the mouth! (budum-bum!))

Suicide is a fundamental human right. This does not mean that it is morally desirable. It only means that society does not have the moral right to interfere. ~Thomas Szasz

Now, physician assisted suicide is another kettle of fish. If a shriveled old soul sans social utility is just sitting around suffering and sucking up air, then surely a society should interfere. More specifically, a Hemlock Society.

[The prosecutor] calls it a crime, a murder, a killing... this could never be a crime in any society which deems itself enlightened... I call it a medical service. You came to me and said, 'Please help me.' The aim was a final solution to incurable agony. ~ Dr. Jack Kevorkian

Plague of Babies

2007-06-04T13:12:00.001-05:00

There are too many people in the world. For realz. If we're not going to eat them, having more babies will just add to the problem. Seriously. Death is the best option for most embryos. Besides, there may not even be a limbo anymore (thanks, Ratzinger!) so they'll basically get a straight shot to Heaven - a heck of a lot better deal than the tribulations the rest of you mortals have to go through in your vale of tears. Oh yeah, and women should have, like, rights and stuff, to control their own bodies, I guess. It's like William Harrison says. And hey, if you're a woman, you'll do better in your career without a kid anyway! According to Cornell sociologist Shelly Correll, childless women are twice as likely to receive call-backs for job interviews. But mainly, MORE DEATH!!!

Here's some info on the abortion controversy.

Childless-by-choice info here, here, here and here.

These fools feel that "the [over-population concerned] extremists are only drawing out the underlying philosophy of environmentalism to make it more explicit... If you hold that human life is worth less than the natural order, then you will have less respect for its sanctity. The ecological outlook is an expression of middle-class rage at the masses... Environmentalism, like all political discourses that take shortage as their starting point, will tend towards misanthropic solutions. Any movement that begins with the view that mankind must be curtailed to reduce the pressure on the environment will have to start thinking how it will select those who must make sacrifices," and then they self-righteously admit to being anthropocentric speciesists.

And in all seriousness, ecologist Garret Hardin (the "Tragedy of the Commons" dude) concisely makes my point thusly:

Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children - but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born.

Feministe points out that pro-choicers are like, "here, have some contraceptives to prevent having to have abortions in the first place," while idiotic pro-lifers are like, "f*ck that!"

And, less seriously, some posthumous humor (take that, Crypt Keeper!). Stop reading now if you are offended by tasteless jokes...

Why did the baby fall out of the tree?
Because he was dead!

Why did the dead baby cross the road?
It was stapled to the chicken.

What's the difference between a bucket of gravel and a bucket of baby guts?
You can't gargle gravel.

How do you make a dead baby float?
Take your foot off of it's head.

and of course...

What's the difference between a Cadillac and a pile of dead babies?
I don't have a Cadillac in my garage.

*Buh-dum-CHING!*
Thank you, thank you, I'm here all night.
-Thanatos

A Capital Idea

2007-06-02T12:04:00.000-05:00

Capital punishment. So many romantic images: the chair, the gallows, the gas chamber, burning at the stake, crucifixion, stoning, the firing squad, lethal injection, the guillotine.

It can be a tricky issue. On the surface, it seems like a freebie: state-sanctioned homicide, clean and orderly, score-one-for-the-good-guys. However, supporting the death penalty is often at best a zero-sum proposition because it is generally reserved for murderers, who would obviously be more productive in terms of the death rate were they to live. These cases should be dismissed. Other types of criminals and dissidents are certainly fair game for society to glut its taste for vengeance on. While the process may be expensive in the legal environment of developed democracies, at least there is no opportunity cost of future death prevention, for they are of no consequence to the death rate except in their own demise.

Capital punishment is a good way of making miscarriages of justice irrevocable while reducing murder rates not at all. ~C.D. Hare. Awesome!

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Welcome!

2007-06-01T14:50:00.000-05:00

Hi, and welcome to Pro-Thana, a blog and web-portal dedicated to the promotion death. I take inspiration from a combination of Pro-Ana, the anorexia support group movement, and Thanatos, the Greek god of death.