As a former fulltime factchecker, I enjoyed this analysis of the ongoing feud between the Obama administration’s health care plans and pro-life groups.

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Brigitte would like to bring some inside baseball into the mix and warn anyone not to ask Andrea to fact-check your stuff. She’ll find plenty of mistakes and other inconsistencies, and then you’ll have to work way harder and longer than you thought just to make sure you have your facts straight. It’s a pain… But hey, when she fact-checks other people’s stuff? That’s just grand.

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Andrea adds: I am sorry for how, er, fastidious I was about that. But fact checking can be brutal work, tedious and boring, and the only way I could think of to make it interesting was to challenge myself to really find errors. (Talk about poor incentives, a successful fact check was one where I actually corrected something.) Fact checking Miss Brigitte rarely uncovered errors, I might add. Very disappointing!

Interesting. The same crowd (yes, I’m generalizing) that tells people like me not to impose my beliefs on others (“If you’re opposed to abortion, don’t have one”, they say) are up in arms about Michelle Duggar’s 19th pregnancy. Look at the comments here. A few samples with a warning, some are very crude:

@ xifeng882: They claim that it’s “up to God” to determine how many children they’ll have. I can’t even imagine what kind of toll this has taken on Michelle’s body.

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Does this family recieve any type of social financial assistance, food stamps, child care, health care via our tax dollar ? If so, why ?! There is a local couple here who are “religious” who also have a bunch of kids and they get welfare assistance-why should my tax dollar pay for their choice ? Let their church ‘help’ them if God is leading them to have so many kids !

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Why hasn’t someone sewed her vagina shut yet?

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I still don’t understand why people who love children so much don’t adopt or foster.  Why produce so many kids of your own when there are so, so, many children out there who need loving homes?  Have one or two of your own, then adopt.  It seems so egotistical to have a huge family that is *all* your biological kids . . .

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I dont think these people have to have sex anymore, he just has to jack off in her general direction, her hole should be big enough now.

There’s more – some worse, some better. I don’t know much about the Duggers but as far as I can tell they are happy, debt-free, not on welfare. The kids looks well-cared for.

Their kind of life is not for me. But why should I care? They’re having a load of kids the old-fashioned way, they’re not using all kinds of weird fertility treatments, and they’re certainly not killing unborn babies. Who, exactly, are they hurting – other than, potentially, Mrs. Duggar’s reproductive system? (Although so far it seems remarkably healthy.) What gives other people the right to make crude comments about this woman’s sex life, especially after having spent decades insisting that nobody had any business criticizing other women who’ve had abortions?

Just wondering.

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Véronique adds: I think this large family is good news. I also think it’s none of my business but since they do have a TV show, I guess they de facto made their business everybody else’s business. Why would you judge and heap vitriol on a woman who, even if you don’t share her morals or her views on contraception, deserves to be admired more than condemned?

Two things really get me from that post and its comments. First, isn’t it interesting how “reproductive freedom” is a one way street? As in: you should be free not to reproduce, but if you do, you’re fair game. And these people call us judgmental and close-minded! Secondly, why do pro-whatevers always need to resort to vulgarity and name calling to make their point? Seriously. If you think that global warming has no bigger problem than Michelle Duggar, make an argument. I just don’t get people who think that being rude is being cool, funny or intelligent.

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Rebecca notes: So, we’re not supposed to care about what people do in the privacy of their bedroom … unless they’re a religious married couple. And we’re not supposed to judge other people’s reproductive choices … unless they’re choosing to bear children. And we must never make derogatory remarks about a woman’s sexuality … unless she’s a happily married mother. Got it.

New “toys” and accessories for toddlers: Nipple tassels and poll-dance dolls. That’s got to be a new record.

[h/t The Corner]

A columnist makes an interesting case:

At first blush there’s no difference between an honour killing and any other murder. If a woman is killed for insurance money or for honour, she’s still dead.

But on closer analysis there is a difference and an important one.

Killing a spouse for insurance is brutal and monstrous but it is an act only focused on the deceased.

But honour killing kills the deceased and threatens others. An honour killing uses violence as theatre to intimidate others. It stands to enforce a sexual code of conduct by violence and threats.

An honour killing is part of an organized effort to subjugate women to a specific and oppressive view of society. Although the total number of honour killings in Canada is still relatively small, probably less than 50 in total to date, the impact on the community as a whole is huge. When compared to a worldwide figure of perhaps 5,000 honour killing a year the implied threat is heightened.

I often wonder where feminists are on this topic, and they usually answer that if only I knew how to Google I’d know. Which is funny since intense Googling usually brings me to posts from feminists complaining about people like me Muslim-bashing, which, regardless of what you think of my motives, has little to do with the matter at hand – namely, what are we doing right here in Canada to make sure all women are protected from that kind of violence. So this morning I will refrain from asking about the whereabouts of feminists and just say that I’m glad the Sun published that column.

Here’s a blog entry from SciFi site io9.com, about anti-TV messages in new and old TV shows. It touches on a lot of issues, including reality TV:

Network also raises an important question that many other anti-TV stories deal with. Why is reality TV so evil? It’s partly because reality TV turns surveillance into entertainment, but also because it encourages people to look at each other as fictional characters. Either way, human life is devalued.”

I don’t watch pulpy TV for guilty enjoyment as much as I used to; whether it’s gotten tawdrier, I’ve grown up, or I just don’t have the time to indulge, I don’t know.
It’s worth thinking about both of these points, though: reality TV erodes our ideas about the divide between public and private, even if the subjects give their consent, and it does have the effect of lending detachment to human experiences, positive and negative. Do people become more promiscuous, less committed, and callous towards others as a direct result of watching reality TV? Probably not. But do we become desensitized by treating as entertainment such things as marriages unravelling (Newlyweds, Jon and Kate), the quest for love and/or Jacuzzi sex (The Bachelor/ette franchise), parenting (Jon and Kate, Super Nanny), back stabbing competition (The Apprentice) or the quest for fame and fortune (American Idol)? It’s hard to imagine that we’re not influenced by it.

I know; it’s not exactly a new point. But it’s good to see more and more people making it, because it’s true.

Barbara Wilding, the longest serving female chief constable, said that a growing rift between young and old generations, combined with the pressures of an ageing population, is a significant challenge for police.

“Elderly abuse is something that we have yet to really grasp,” she said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. “It is one of the things that I think will be the next social explosion.”

She drew comparisons with the first discovery of widespread child abuse in Britain in the 1970s, and said that the abuse of the elderly was “the same sort of social issue – it can be covered up and the victims do not have a voice.”

Asked about the potential impact of changing the law of assisted suicide, which is currently illegal, Miss Wilding replied: “From a policing perspective we need to be very careful on this to make sure it does not become a way of getting rid of a burden. I will be watching any change in legislation very carefully”.