Insanity & Doom Update XXXIII

Item Noname talks trauma, transitions and Telefone

It’s a few weeks before the Women’s March, and Chicago rapper Noname (aka Fatimah Warner) is explaining how the song Bye Bye Baby, off last year’s debut project, Telefone, is about the idea of abortion as an act of self-love. The inspiration came from knowing many women who had gone through the experience and realizing that there wasn’t really anything in music that recognizes that reality.

“There are very negative connotations around having an abortion, that it’s a selfish, hateful act. That’s not what I see,” she says. “I don’t think that abortion is without love. Sometimes having a kid is not the chase. For a woman to make a decision that’s about her needs is about self-love. Women’s right to have freedom and agency over their bodies is important.”

Here is the video with lyrics. The lyrics are crude and child-like—“My tummy almost got ready; For biddi-baby spaghetti”—which is not a surprise. We are not dealing with a major intellect.

But notice the truth in the article. Abortion as an act of self-love. This is accurate and precise. of course, women (no more than men) do not have complete “freedom and agency over their bodies”, and in any case, the baby is not the woman’s body. It is its own body.

And the women rapper admits this in the song title. Bye Bye Baby. She knows, as all know, that they are killing a person. But they do not care. Self-love comes first.

Item Alfie Evans and the Experts

In each case, the doctors and judges had plausible medical arguments that the limits of treatment had been reached. (Although in the case of Evans, their expertise was undercut by the boy’s refusal to swiftly die, as predicted, when his breathing apparatus was removed; he lived for five days before expiring.) But in each case that judgment was deployed for wicked ends, stripping parents who were not unfit of their ability to act as parents, denying them the ability to choose not only last-ditch treatments but even where and how their ailing children died.

It is easy see the relevance here of Aviv’s story about Jahi McMath, a teenager from Oakland declared brain-dead after a horribly-botched tonsillectomy, whose family managed to spirit her away to New Jersey, where religious-freedom laws allow families to reject a “brain-death” ruling and keep a loved one on a feeding tube indefinitely.

Since then Jahi has survived for years despite confident medical predictions to the contrary, and she now gives pretty decent evidence of retaining some form of consciousness, some ability to listen and respond. In California her status as a dead person is under litigation; in a small apartment in New Jersey, in the care of her mother, she is very much alive.

How can you, a new parent, possibly know what is better for your child, or your father, than the all-knowing most beneficent government, staffed as it is with credentialed experts? Answer: you cannot. Surrender. The State is Mother, the State is Father.

Here, incidentally, is the link to the ruling in the Alfie Evans case. Depressing.

Item California Schools Force Students into Gender Sensitivity Training, Say Parents have No Say

A Facebook user named Stefanie Duncan Fetzer recently posted a memo she uncovered from the Orange County Department of Education explaining to their employees that parents have no right to oppose what the schools decide to teach their children.

The situation started when Orange County School District told their parents that they would soon be teaching their children material that discussed gender, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation. Some parents objected and told the schools that they’d prefer to pull their children out of these lessons, so the school checked with the government and learned that, thanks to California’s fascist laws, they could force the students to take the class…and the parents couldn’t do anything about it. (Other than move out of California that is.)

Ellipsis original. The memo spoken of is embedded at the link.

Again, State expertise trumps parents’ wills over their own children. This is tyranny. You may try homeschooling, which is still legal. But experience in Germany shows that once it reaches a critical threshold, in numbers or in distance of parents’ from State beliefs, the State moves in to close it down. We’re going to run out of places to hide.

Update Victory: Outraged California parents block radical elementary sex ed

Concerned parents have successfully fought against the implementation of a controversial new sex education program for elementary school children.

After a marathon meeting, with testimonies and discussion stretching until 2:30 AM Thursday, California’s Fremont Unified School District board voted against the controversial sex ed curriculum.