And pro-life people are mainly condemning the murder, because while they are against abortion, they are also against adults murdering adults as well.

But I’ll be straight and tell you how I feel about it. And yes, I’m breaking Godwin’s law here, but bear with me. And if you don’t understand how analogies work, please stop reading now. In fact, close your browser and sign off the internet. We don’t need you here.

Anyway. Imagine an SS Officer. He goes to work at Auschwitz, and kills some Jews, and comes home to his family, in the suburbs. He plays with his kids, he eats his dinner, and then he goes back to work the next day, and his job involves killing people. He doesn’t feel bad about it, because they aren’t really people, just Jews, and they are in the way.

Now, imagine that some German citizen, who happens to think gassing Jews is bad, breaks into his home and kills him. This is a violation of German law against murder, of course.

Now, let me ask you this: do you feel sorry for the SS officer? Do you feel the one who killed him should be punished?

People that believe abortion is wrong usually do so because they think it is killing a baby. KILLING A BABY. So to them, an abortion doctor is someone that kills babies for a living.

Now, if you don’t think a fetus is a baby, if it’s a lump of tissue, then yeah, murdering an abortion doctor is like murdering a dermatologist who removes warts for a living.

But at least try to look at it from the opposing point of view. If people don’t feel sorry for George Tiller, it’s because they think he killed hundreds or thousands of babies. They would be horrified if a dermatologist was murdered, but they don’t think that’s what happened. To them, an SS officer was murdered.

Was it murder? Of course. The pro-life people who are denouncing it would probably have also denounced the murder of an SS officer. Even if you don’t feel sorry for the victim, even if you think it’s better that he’s dead, it doesn’t mean you support a vigilante taking justice into his own hands.

But let’s not kid ourselves. The pro-life people denouncing the murder of George Tiller don’t think an innocent man was murdered. They think a murderer was murdered. Perhaps they feel the same way as when one drug dealer kills another. Murder is bad, but not because we always care about the victim. A murderer murdered a murderer.

I would certainly never kill an abortion doctor, or a rapist, or a child molester, or a murderer, because I don’t think it is my place to do so. But if they get hit by a bus, I am not going to weep.

Why is that I can see the abortion-is-fine point of view (though I think it’s borne of self-deception) and understand their outrage, yet they can’t understand the anti-abortion point of view at all? If a fetus is a baby, then killing it is bad, and someone who kills babies for a living is a bad person, and if that person is murdered, while we don’t celebrate one more murder (since murder is bad and all), we’re also not really sorry?

To me this seems a pretty easy concept to figure out. If you want me to feel bad that an abortion doctor is murdered, you’ll have to convince me he’s more like a dermatologist than a member of the SS. Because it really doesn’t bother me when murderers die.

This guy’s been in prison 15 years for kidnapping, raping, and murdering a little girl.

He was sentenced to death, but of course no one has gotten around to doing it yet.

Polly’s death at the hands of Davis, who had an extensive kidnap and assault record going back to the 1970s, led to the creation of California’s three-strikes law.

How about the one strike law for things like kidnapping? We have millions and millions of people in this country. Kidnapping is something no one should ever do at all, so why give people a second chance? We’re not going to run out of people, we don’t need kidnappers to shore up our numbers. Let’s get rid of the kidnappers right away, not wait until they do it two more times.

But let’s get rid of the death penalty. We’re too wussy to use it (else Davis would already be dead, as there is NO ONE who thinks he’s innocent, he CONFESSED). So let’s just stop arguing about it and lock people up forever.

I’d prefer us to execute these scumbags, but since we never will, let’s at least lock ‘em up in supermax prisons.

Polly’s still dead, and this guy is still alive, trying to get out. If you don’t remember, at his sentencing, instead of remorse, he claimed Polly told him “Just don’t do me like my dad.” A confessed kidnapper and murderer, it wasn’t enough to end Polly’s life and destroy her family, he had to make a pathetic last-ditch effort to hurt the family even more by vicious slander.

He won’t restore our liberties. He won’t reduce the power of the government.

If you think he will, you have bought into the system.

McCain (should he win) sure won’t do any of that stuff either. The difference is that Obama supporters seem to think he’s something new and special, instead of just the latest in a long line of chief executives who perpetuate the system and take more power for the federal government.

You had your chance to elect Ron Paul, or even Dennis Kucinich, but you all blew it, because you don’t *really* want change, you just want someone who talks about it, but in a nice non-threatening way (i.e. who won’t *actually* change things, because anything other than the status quo is scary).

Meanwhile Obama supports partial-birth abortions and letting die without treatment babies who survive abortion procedures anyway. Even if you think a fertilized egg or 1st trimester fetus is not a person with rights, that should horrify you.

But then, killing full-term post-partum babies should horrify Indians, and apparently it doesn’t that much.

Just remember, if you’d been alive in the times of American slavery, you wouldn’t have protested that much. Status Quo is king. Don’t rock the boat. Everyone else is doing it. It’s what we’re used to, so we aren’t shocked. No matter how shocking it ought to be.

Except hardly anyone really wants that to happen, even the progressives. 100% freedom is simply anarchy, any society must limit the freedom of its citizens somewhat if it wants to exist. For example, do even the staunchest “pro-freedom” progressives really want it to be legal for people to engage in public sodomy in the middle of a toy store? No? Well then we can agree that there are limits to freedom then, can’t we? We just don’t agree on where they are.

At some point, if the progressives got all they wanted, they would become conservatives. They would then want to freeze things in place, because to go beyond that would actually make things worse for everyone, right? They just think people don’t have enough rights at the moment, but surely they have some stopping point, if they’ve thought that far ahead…

So all the talk of unending progress is just stupid, right? They don’t really want progress forever. There are always limits.

Conservatives are fools too though. They seem to all want to return to the “good old days.” Except there were no good old days. Some things were better a few years ago, if you’re against things like socially acceptable premarital sex and pornography. But what if you’re for equality of individuals without regard to race or sex? You wouldn’t want to return to the 50s. I wouldn’t even want to return to the 80s and have to endure smoking in every restaurant and public place. (Hooray for California for anti-smoking laws.)

The difference between the groups is that Progressives act like conventional morality is stupid and we should always march towards (their version of) progress. Conservatives believe in right and wrong. Progressives believe that the idea of right and wrong, is wrong. Conservatives concept of morality may be skewed, they might like conventional morality more because it’s conventional than because it’s actually right, but at least they take a stand.

Of the two groups, I view the Progressives as the most smug in their superiority while being the most myopic. The irony of that drives me from them.

Keep in mind the Progressives have made great strides over the years. But also keep in mind that today’s conservative is yesterday’s progressive. Martin Luther King Jr., with his radical ideas of racial equality, was surely no conservative. But if he were still alive, would he be preaching for the acceptance of same-sex marriage? What do the two have to do with each other, at all, really?

Let’s not tout “moving forward” as a good thing unless we know what we’re moving to, and know it’s better than where we’re at.

As someone who is actually against such things myself, at first blush I might be tempted to say “bravo.” But the problem with that is that it doesn’t prevent the stuff I’m against. Rather, films that should be rated NC-17 are ever-so-slightly trimmed and resubmitted, resulting in the hardest of hard R-ratings.

The result is that NC-17 is barely used, and many films that certainly ought to have that rating are instead simply rated R. And idiot parents take their kids to see them.

I sure saw plenty of R-rated movies as a kid, and you know what? It messed me up. I wish I hadn’t done that. I wish my parents had been more responsible. But they’d buy me the ticket and drop me off.

I’d actually rather end the stigma of NC-17, so that movie-makers who want scenes of hideous bloodbathery or eroticerry could do so. Why? Because they are going to be passing it off as R anyway, so let them at least label it properly. It won’t be much worse than what we’ve got, and the R rating can be used for stuff that a responsible parent might actually take their child to.

The theaters only care about money. They won’t show NC-17, not because they care one whit about decency, but because they fear a boycott. And people don’t boycott R movies even if they are just as bad as NC-17. So that’s what they support.

Well, either start boycotting the obscenity regardless of rating, or let theaters know you’ll let them show NC-17. It’d be preferable to simply showing NC-17 films but saying they’re really R.

The stigma of NC-17 has done nothing to stop obscenity from appearing in film; all it does is make it more accessible to young people, the ones who are least equipped to deal with it. That I know from experience.

When Ellen Degeneres publicly proclaimed her gayness, people that disapprove of homosexual sex called her “Ellen Degenerate.”

Really? Everyone already figured that out when they first heard her name, before she ever did anything to make people not like her. She even had a joke about it in her pre-gay stand-up act.

It’s not like people were just calling her that in passing. No, they emphasized “Degenerate” as though they thought we might miss it, as though they had said something really clever, like we were going to say, “Whoa, her name does sound like degenerate, and she’s doing something bad!” with a look of total shock.

I’m all for making stupid jokes as long as you know they’re stupid. Don’t be obvious and then act clever. It’s just so sad.

There were many search engines, Yahoo, Webcrawler, Alta Vista, and they were all worthless.

Let me tell you how search engines worked in those days. They returned searches based on any of your search terms, not all of them.

For example, you could search for Poison Oak and get hits about rat poison, because the word “poison” matched, but “oak” didn’t.

Isn’t that the most ridiculous thing you have ever heard of? Every search resulted in millions of hits.

The search engine I used back then was Lycos, because it at least told you if it wasn’t matching all your search terms. It was say “3 out of 4 search terms matched” or some such. So you would start at the 4 out of 4s, and when you got to anything else you knew you could stop looking through their results.

I cannot tell you how happy I was when Google came along and had a hard AND in their searches. If a page doesn’t contain ALL your search words, it doesn’t count as a hit. To me, that was the most obvious thing in the galaxy.

Thank you, Google. I may not like everything you do these days, but thanks for being the only ones smart enough to implement a real search engine.

The problem with rudeness in society is that people who are rude don’t think of it as a weakness, but as a strength. They can do what they like without being bound by the rules, so that makes them special.

Consider: if you are moving a 3000 pound vehicle down the highway at 65 miles per hour, that is approximately 195000 thingies* of force. That’s enough to kill a whole lot of folks. And sure enough, over 40,000 people die every year on US roads.

As a safety feature, we built signals into our killing machines, so other people would know where we were going, and they’d hopefully kill less often. And we’re all taught in driver’s ed to signal before turning and before changing lanes. 5 seconds before changing lanes, 100 feet before turning.

But the problem is, when you signal to change lanes, the person in the lane next to you realizes that you are going to be ahead of them. They can’t have that! So naturally, they speed up and cut you off. You can get in behind them, if someone else doesn’t do the same thing, and if you haven’t already missed your exit.

After experiencing this for a while, new drivers, safely signaling since getting a license, figure out it does not good. Why signal? It just tips your hand! So people start signaling less and less in advance, until they only signal about 1.2 microseconds before moving, or else they give up completely and just change lanes without signaling at all.

Rude people have trained all of us not to signal.

The result? People die.

* I learned physics in metric, so I don’t know what the US force measurement is. Foot-pounds, probably, but is anyone really paying attention to these numbers anyway?

I don’t see the point in that, since Easter is already a secular holiday.

Easter is about eggs, and chocolate, and rabbits, and spring. Mainly it’s about chocolate and Jelly Bird Eggs from See’s Candies.

As far as the resurrection of Jesus goes, that isn’t supposed to be celebrated on Easter. It’s supposed to be celebrated on Sunday.

Look it up in the Bible if you want. The christians in the 1st century (you know, the ones that actually knew Jesus personally) met every first day of the week (Sunday to you and me) and remembered his death and his resurrection.

They didn’t hunt for eggs and eat candy. That stuff comes from pagan spring and fertility celebrations.

The idea that Jesus’ resurrection is to be celebrated only once a year is not in the Bible; that was added much later.

So if you want to be religious, great, remember his resurrection every Sunday. If you want to colour eggs and give Easter baskets to your kids, great.

There is no conflict between the two; they have nothing whatever to do with one another. Easter is secular. Jesus resurrection is religious, and to be observed every week, not every year.

A new device called Rapex may soon be for sale in South Africa – a country that has around 47 million people, but had over 54,000 rapes last year. (That’s just what is reported to the police. The South African Law Commission estimated 1.69 million.)

The device would be like a female condom – with teeth. 25 sharp teeth would attach to the male, causing pain and ideally giving the woman a chance to escape.

The barbs would require a doctor to remove them. Presumably that could be reported to the police.

Critics have argued that it is “a medieval instrument, based on male-hating notions and fundamentally misunderstands the nature of rape and violence against women in this society. It is vengeful, horrible, and disgusting.” And that was a woman, an anti-rape campaigner herself.

To that I say: Balderdash. It isn’t male-hating at all. It’s rapist-hating.

Rape is one of the worst things a human being can do to another, and it happens all the time. It’s true that this won’t stop it; we have to fix the sicknesses and sins of our society for that.

But what’s the problem with punishment? Rapists ought to be tried, convicted, and executed – rape should be a capital crime. Especially when committed against children, as 40% of the rapes in South Africa are.

So I don’t feel the least bit bad if a death-deserving rapist feels pain or is injured. If a male doesn’t want teeth biting into a sensitive part of his body, he can easily prevent it by not being an evil and depraved scumbag. By not acting in a way that causes the highest degree of disgust in any civilized person.

What about other objections? Some women might wear such a device to inflict pain on a consensual partner, say as revenge for infidelity. Is the abuse of a thing sufficient to ban the the thing itself? Sometimes, but how often do we figure this will happen? And if it does, why can’t we treat it the same way we treat any other crime; investigation, arrest, trial. We don’t ban kitchen knives because of the few Lorena Bobbits of the world.

The vast majority of women (and certainly all children, which I remind you are 26,000+ of the rapes in South Africa) would not be willing to let a man they hated enough to hurt in that way get close enough to them to be hurt in that way.

The device has been criticised for not being a deterrent. So what? A very basic level of humanity is a deterrent to rape, why should the victims be held responsible for deterring rape? But women wearing Rapex look no different from women not wearing Rapex, so they are just as likely to be assualted. But so what? Not wearing it has no deterrent factor either, people! So why not wear it?

Because it may end up causing more violence, perhaps. A rapist may beat the victim as retribution. That is certainly a possible outcome. But then again, that might occur along with the rape anyway. And better a beating than a beating and a rape, right? Besides, with Rapex, there is a chance that the victim may get away while the male is grimacing with pain and surprise.

But what if a rapist is enraged and kills the woman? But that can happen in any criminal situation when the victim fights back. Should we outlaw pepper spray, stun guns, knives, and handguns? Teach women to always cooperate fully so they don’t get hurt? Don’t even run, that might make the attacker mad? Rapists are the criminals here. If they are already raping someone, they are capable of any other atrocity anyway. Why should we try so hard not to make them angry? And shouldn’t it be up to potential victims to decide if they’d rather fight back and risk injury or death? Perhaps they’d rather die than be so abused, or least are willing to risk it.

One valid point is that this device does nothing to prevent gang rape, of which there is a lot in South Africa. The first rapist will get bit, but the rest will carry with business as usual. Rapex is not a cure for rape. That will not happen until we change how people think.

“It is vengeful, horrible, and disgusting.” Disgusting, surely, but rape is much more so. Horrible, certainly, but much less horrible than rape. Vengeful? Is it vengeful to spray an attacker with pepper spray? Is it vengeful to incarcerate a convicted criminal? If so, then I’d argue that not all vengeance is bad.

But hitting back in a fight is not typically thought of as revenge. Revenge, the bad kind, is hurting someone after they have hurt you, because it gives you pleasure for them to suffer pain. Hurting someone while they are hurting you is a fight, not revenge.

Lisa Vetten, of the Centre of Violence and Reconciliation, said: “This is like going back to the days when women were forced to wear chastity belts. It is a terrifying thought that women are being made to adapt to rape.”

It is, and should be, a terrifying thought. However, does that mean they should not adapt? I would much prefer to eliminate the causes of rape than have this product be necessary. But we haven’t done that, and we probably won’t in time to save the 50,000+ women who will report being raped in South Africa. It’s true women shouldn’t have to adapt to a rapist’s world, but the fact is they do.

Women already have to be careful where they go and when, to avoid sexual assault. I can pretty much go anywhere I want to. I used to go for a 1 1/4 mile jog through an industrial park late at night. My wife could never do that. In fact a woman was raped in the area I used to go jogging, not that long ago. When I go out, no one looks at me. Everyone looks at my wife. She gets hassled on a regular basis; she can’t even walk freely in daylight.

We already live in a world where women must adapt to the threat of rape. It doesn’t make sense to condemn a device which could help because it just makes clear what kind of world we already live in.

Let’s all wake up and take this crime more seriously, and perhaps women wouldn’t have to invent things like this to protect themselves.