1. Robin T.


    I’ve been away for a while and I come back to this? Has your body been recently snatched by a pod? It’s really hard decide where to start in responding to this, um, trying to find a polite word, oh, OK – “horse hockey”. (Thank you Col. Potter!)

    If you are going to declare a “war on women” by the right, even the “hard right”, you had better come up with something better than life vs choice. I’ll debate you all day long on that. In the main it is a conflict between morality and self-indulgence. (Shields up.) And how do you define “hard right” anyway?

    And as for higher education, it is the left wing loonies who have destroyed our universities – suppressing speech and thought whenever they can while increasing fees astronomically. How dare conservatives ask ivory tower academicians to live within a budget like the rest of us poor slobs!

    C’mon, Joe. Less Kool-Aid please.

    • Bookscrounger

      Make you a deal: less rhetoric and invective, and we can talk collegially.

      How about it?

        • Bookscrounger

          The ‘War on Women’ is a minority who oppose legislation guaranteeing equal pay for women and other protections, in addition to reproductive services.

          As for ‘hard right’ it’s pretty much the same as the ‘hard left.’ Humorless people who are driven by ideology, and who completely miss the humanity.

          Same for the left wing in the universities. There is intolerance at both extremes. What is concerning me is that by cutting funding, the wounds are deep, and lasting; and the other party isn’t the victim, but our kids, their futures, and the future of the democracy. It takes decades to build up a strong department; one administration can wipe it out.

          And the irony is that it’s the highest-priced faculty who move on to other states. Those are engineering and business, and they aren’t typically liberal. Meanwhile, the lower-paid arts and liberal arts, where the strong liberals are often found, stay on. So the culture that is most harmed is the conservative culture.

          In Louisiana, UL and LSU are the only schools that will survive this reasonably intact. The other schools in the state have been decimated, or worse.

          That’s why this is so upsetting to me; I always thought that education was a bipartisan issue.

          And for the centrists, it is.

          • Robin T.


            Everyone wants good education, although they may disagree on how to achieve it. I can’t really speak to what’s happening in Louisiana today since I’m pretty far removed from it. In general, though, America spends more per student on elementary and secondary education than almost every other country in the world. For those expenditures we get an 80% graduation rate, and it’s arguable whether those graduate really have a secondary education.

            Your focus seems to be on college education. I think this issue comes in a distant second to the crisis in secondary education in this country.

            My bigger issue with your post is the “war on women”. Separate response.

          • Bookscrounger

            This is a post about the War on Children.

            If you will read through my posts, I focus on overall education. But college is the lens that creates our world: it educates the teachers and leaders, they lead and educate everyone else. Reduce the great universities back to their beginnings as fundamentalist Bible schools (and there are those who would be quite happy with that) and the modern world never emerges. Progress was and is a struggle because of the fundamentalist (and see my post on Scientific Fundamentalism) opposition.

          • Robin T.

            Regarding the “war on women”, this is a fiction created by the Democrat Party to ‘factionalize’ the electorate. It simply does not exist. Responsible people, and anyone who deems themselves to be centrist, should eschew the use of the term.

            With respect to reproductive rights, if there were really a ‘war on women’ you would have to indict vast numbers of women as the perpetrators. Go to a prayer vigil at a Planned Parenthood clinic. In my experience the women have outnumbered the men 2 to 1. Among them, women who suffered great harm, physically and/or emotionally, from the abortion experience.

            The pro-life movement is decidedly pro-woman and is led, in large part, by women. Please let’s not equate standing up to the abortion-as-big-business crowd to being anti-woman. Let’s stop using the false and incendiary “war on women” political slogan.

  2. Durl

    “… the practicalities of policing women’s reproductive systems …”. The real issue is not the policing of women’s reproductive systems. It’s finding the balance between the rights of the mother and the rights of the human being she is carrying. At some point, the unborn child should have rights.

    In a course I took years ago, the instructor asked the class 2 questions:
    1. Who is in favor of murder? No one raised a hand.
    2. Who is in favor of forcing people to do things to their body that they do not wish to? No one raised a hand.

    He then said: Folks, what you have before you is the crux of the abortion debate. Each side is entrenched in one of the 2 camps, and sees only the issue they think is most important. Goes right back to your discussion of being blind to what we don’t see or want to see.

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