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Geekery Today gets favorable reviews in my absence

I have returned from three days trekking around the state--petitioning for an independent candidate in Birmingham, helping the UA Libertarians with a Operation: Politically Homeless in Tuscaloosa, and putting on a protest / press event at the DEA office in Montgomery. More on these events coming up soon.

In the meantime, however, check this out: the folks at The Weblog Review have been kind enough to review Geekery Today, and I received a 4 out of 5. According to my all-too-kind reviewer,

I learned a lot at Geekery Today, and with the amount of information available at this weblog, I could certainly see it turning into a magazine and hitting newstands everywhere.

Add some brain food to your daily dose of surfing and check this site out

Geeze, I think I'm going to blush.

Struggle Over European Abortion Politics

Yesterday the Beeb featured an online fact sheet compiled from an Alan Guttmacher Institute survey of the status of abortion across Europe. The survey is interesting, but paints an overly rosy picture of the status of reproductive choice in Europe.

With a few exceptions, nearly all the countries in the map are given green status for reproductive choice, meaning that abortion is permitted on request. However, this needs some serious qualifications. Countries which are counted as abortion on demand can still have extensive regulations and red tape banning abortions after a certain period of time, mandating waiting periods and government-specified counselling, and similar standard measures from the anti-choice Right's toolbox for chipping away at access to abortion. By the standards of this survey, every one of the 50 United States counts as green—whether they rank as an A or an F in NARAL's rankings of abortion access. The only way for a nation to not be counted as being in the most liberal category vis-a-vis abortion is to return to the state of affairs in the pre-Roe United States. For example, Greece has had on demand abortion laws for the first trimester since 1986, but illegal abortions remain prevalent because of lack of public awareness and extensive delays and red tape imposed by government regulations. Turkey is listed as on demand even though a woman must have the consent of her male partner to be able to legally obtain an abortion (!). Worse, Latvia is inexplicably listed as an on demand country, because abortions can be approved for any reason--never mind that every abortion in this liberalized state must be approved by a committee of bureaucrats.

Unfortunately, Alan Guttmacher Institute's report, as most of their reports, is fundamentally a document on family planning rather than women's right to choose. Just who holds the reins of power over a woman's body is irrelevant in this survey; what is relevant is whether or not someone has the right to authorize an abortion. What they are talking about, all in all, is a doctor's rights to perform abortions, not a woman's rights to choose whether or not to have an abortion. To those of us who fight for abortion rights on the basis of pro-choice feminism, however, we have to worry just as much about the arbitrary veto power over a woman's body that is given to a husband or a committee bureaucrat, as we do about blanket bans in countries such as Ireland or Malta.

However, while the report is overly rosy about the state of choice in Europe, not all is gloom and doom. There have been key victories across Europe, and many signs of hope:

  • France: in 2001, the French government liberalized abortion laws by extending the period of time in which a woman may have an abortion from 10 weeks of pregnancy to 12 weeks (this brings it up to the standard of the US, where Roe categorically protects the right to abortion in the first trimester).

  • Ireland: a referendum to tighten Ireland's ban on abortion, which is already one of the harshest laws in Europe was narrowly defeated in spite of heavy lobbying by the Catholic Church and the ruling party in favor of the amendment. This was merely holding the line rather than an advance to take back choice, but the failure of slippery-slope anti-choice arguments, and the lopsided vote in urban districts (61% of Dublin voters rejected the amendment), augurs well for future progress in Ireland.

  • Poland: after the fall of Communism, the influence of the Catholic Church caused Poland to pass some of the toughest anti-abortion laws in Europe in the 1990s, and doctors in some hospitals began to use the anti-choice climate in the government to stonewall and illegally refuse some abortions which were still permitted under Polish law. However, the 2001 victory of the pro-choice Democratic Left Party (mostly former Communists) and the public debate over abortion may begin to roll back the tide of anti-abortion legislation in Poland.

  • Portugal: also saddled with intensely anti-choice laws, a referendum in 1998 only upheld Portugal's present anti-abortion restrictions by the razor-thin margin of 51% to 49%. The President of Portugal, Jorge Sampaio, favors liberalizing abortion laws and has indicated he will work to hold another referendum on the issue.

  • Switzerland: Switzerland was also a member of the worst abortion laws in Europe club, until the the Swiss Parliament finally voted to legalize first trimester abortions in 2001. Right-wingers attempted to delay and possibly derail the passage of the law by forcing it to go to a referendum. However, the tactic failed: just yesterday, Swiss voters blew away Switzerland's abortion restrictions in a landslide, with 82% rejecting an opposing referendum which would have made Switzerlands laws even tougher (banning abortions even in the case of rape), and 72% of Swiss voters supporting the decriminalization of abortion in the first trimester. The new law will go into effect in October.

  • The European Union: as EU legislation reduces border restrictions between European countries more and more, it is becoming harder and harder for anti-choice governments to control European women's efforts to secure abortions. For example, despite Ireland's blanket ban on abortions, nearly 7,000 Irish women receive abortions each year by crossing the Irish Sea to clinics in the UK. EU immigration protections prevent the Irish government from stopping these women from leaving the country.

  • The High Seas: Women on Waves, founded in May 1999 by Dutch clinician Rebecca Gomperts, sails to countries where abortion is illegal (in particular, Ireland) to provide legal counseling and reproductive health services while in port, and delivery of professional, safe, and legal abortion services offshore outside territorial waters.

The situation in Europe offers no room at all for complacency, but a lot of room for hopeful struggle. We will win this one if we fight for it.

For further reading:

Raise the Nation

The folks at Insanity House, an advocacy group for single-parent and non-traditional families, has developed the Raise the Nation Foundation, a non-profit foundation helping single parent women continue their education or re-pay education expenses.

One of the most damnable things about the 1996 welfare deform package is that it gives major economic incentives to states to convert their welfare program into a government-sponsored temp agency for shitty, dead-end labor--with no particular provisions for giving single mothers (by far the largest group of TANF recipients) the time and resources to go to University or vocational schools so that they can better provide for themselves and their families in the long term. The paradigm has been either to run women's entire lives through do-gooder government bureaucratic busybodies, or else Right-wing "reformers" who prefer to use the government bureaucratic busybodies to drive poor women into more dead-end low-wage "jobs" and ensure that they remain perpetually available to capital.

We need groups like Raise the Nation which provide grassroots mutual aid and support for women in economic need to take charge of their own education and economic well-being. Thank goodness for them.

For further reading:

Abercrombie & Fitch Say Sexualization of Children is “Cute and Fun and Sweet”

Clothing-makers Abercrombie & Fitch are once again in the news for paedophile-chic clothing lines. This time it's thongs for seven year old girls, imprinted with such cute and fun and sweet slogans as eye candy, sexy, and wink wink.

A&F apparently thinks that it is cute to portray little girls as eroticized future sex objects. However, this is pretty obviously a lie; as usual, they are trying to attract attention to their stupid clothing line by being edgy. The thing that people don't seem to get is that this kind of shit isn't even remotely edgy. It's the same old cultural detritus, repackaged. The quasi-child porn thing was already old when Calvin Klein did it; it was even older when Britney Spears did it; and it's older than dirt by now. It's not only not cute, it's not edgy, either. It's just also-ran, offensive and stupid.

Take action!

Write a complaint to Abercrombie & Fitch asking them why they think that portraying children as sex objects is cute and fun and sweet, and ask them to pull the line from stores. Public outcry has already forced them to remove their racist caricatures of Asians from stores, and now it's time to turn up the heat on their paedophile-chic.

Leftists and Libertarians Shocked To Find They Agree

Lakshmi Chaudhry has written a column examining chances for a left-libertarian alliance [AlterNet]. The column focuses on the recent direction of articles from the Cato Institute, which have made bold stands for civil liberties, against corporate welfare, and against the ever-expanding military-security Leviathan of the "War on Terrorism."

This shouldn't come as that much a surprise. Cato has always held a good line on issues such as foreign policy towards the Mideast (1991) and corporate welfare (1995). The supposed animosity between Cato and the Left is based on fights that emerged from Cato's role in fueling the economic policies of the 1994 Republican Reaction. But of course, the Republicans never seriously followed Cato; they merely altered the nature of tax-and-manage bureaucratic coercion. They turned welfare into a government-sponsored temp agency for shitty dead-end labor. And they never saw a massive corporate welfare boondoggle they didn't like. Meanwhile, Cato kept calling for a society based on free association and mutual aid—not State privilege for corporations and a hawkish military.

The move towards a more robust and self-conscious Left-Libertarian alliance is emerging as the natural consequence of the growth of the "War on Terrorism," which like all global warfare, naturally brings the nexus of economic, military, and governmental power into the starkest relief. When the military-industrial Leviathan rises from the sea, it naturally draws together those who are fighting government power and those who are fighting boss power. The last time this happened on a wide scale, the radical libertarian Murray Rothbard allied with the radical left in the Peace and Freedom Party against the Vietnam War and imperialist "anti-Communism" worldwide, and the repression of dissent at home. And the "War on Terrorism" is now playing the same role. Former Libertarian Presidential candidate Harry Browne has written a column condemning United States foreign policy as "terrorism" and urging against a second war on Iraq. Cato itself has published a lengthy report addressing the need to understand the "root causes" of terrorism against the United States and urging an end to military interventionism overseas. Leftist and Libertarians are being brought together as government policy increasingly seems designed with the explicit purpose of proving the dictum, "War is the health of the State."

This is all for the best. I've been urging the Left to look to Libertarianism for a while, and I don't think this should come as much of a surprise. The struggle for social justice is a struggle for equity and against power and privilege. And Libertarianism, properly conceived, is a struggle against the power and privilege of the government over the governed. Now, a lot of members of the Libertarian Party are little more than Young Republican rejects who don't think that the Republicans go far enough on social welfare or public education. But at their best, the Libertarians have a lot to teach those of us on the Left who have remained too complacent about the bureaucratic State as a solution to societal ills. And the Left has a lot to teach Libertarians about the ways in which the systematic power of "private" hierarchies and exploitations undermine the necessary psychological and cultural conditions for maintaining a free and open society, even if they do not directly involve the use of physical violence. Statism in the polity is deeply linked with authoritarianism in the society, and we need to fight them together.

For further reading:

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