Author: Ophelia Benson

Someone posted a shoe-fetish shoe (picture of) at Facebook, which naturally triggered a lively discussion of the semiotics of catch me-fuck me shoes. I pondered the agony to the calf muscles that would be caused by attempting to stand on the damn things – the heels look taller than the foot is long, so how is that even possible?

Anyway, some fella came along to straighten it all out with an aphoristic insight into the nature of women.

Great shoes, fancy clothing, cosmetic surgery, lipstick, waxings, hairdos, jewelry, makeup, and perfume are all unnecessary. However, if they were eliminated, I think the gay male population would increase rapidly and the women of the world would all look like the babushka ladies in Russia …uggggh!!!

Such a sweet compliment, isn’t it?

A puppy of my acquaintance.

[media id=27125 title=”Cooper MB2″ width=”150″ height=”150″ class=”aligncenter size-thumbnail wp-image-27125″ ]

Eric got to Ross Douthat ahead of me, but I’ll duplicate his effort anyway just because Douthat’s piece irritated me so intensely.

He says

the moral case for assisted suicide depends much more on our respect for people’s own desire to die than on our sympathy for their devastating medical conditions.

I don’t think he demonstrates that, and I don’t think it does – I think it depends on both. For one thing, if people don’t have devastating medical conditions, then they don’t need assistance with suicide. Part of what people fear is losing the physical ability to exit; that’s where the “assisted” comes in.

Fortunately, the revolution Kevorkian envisioned hasn’t yet succeeded. Despite decades of agitation, only three states allow some form of physician-assisted suicide. The Supreme Court, in a unanimous 1997 decision, declined to invent a constitutional right to die. There is no American equivalent of the kind of suicide clinics that have sprung up in Switzerland, providing painless poisons to a steady flow of people from around the globe.

That’s the bit that makes me so angry. That smug gloating pleasure in the knowledge that people who are suffering and desperate to die cannot do so. That smug certainty that he knows best and that what he thinks he knows gets to trump what other people want for themselves.

Douthat is, of course, a theist.

Texas governor Rick Perry called a court ruling that banned school prayers at a public high school graduation

“reprehensible.”

“The First Amendment prohibits governments from interfering with Americans’ rights to freely express their religious beliefs, and accordingly the U.S. Supreme Court has maintained that Congress may convene every day with a prayer,” Perry said in a statement.

Oh yeah? But then governments are interfering with Americans’ rights to freely express their beliefs that there is no god, aren’t they. My religious belief is that god is a non-existent imaginary agent. I don’t get to say that at public school graduation ceremonies or Congress’s morning prayer. Since other people do get to say that god is a real, non-imaginary agent, the state is interfering with my rights to express my religious beliefs.

It is also, of course, interfering with the religious beliefs of Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Wiccans, Scientologists, Crefto Dollarians, and so on.

I look forward to your letter, Governor Perry.