TheAgitator.com
Abortion Art Was a Hoax
Thursday, April 17th, 2008Actually not so much a hoax as a sick attempt at performance art.
Sorry to the commenters who didn’t like my original post, but I stand by it. That was vile. And no, there’s nothing at all unlibertarian about saying so (and no, I wasn’t actually wishing violence on the woman).
Thanks to the commenters who pointed it out.
You’re welcome.
Come on. Anyone with two brain cells to can put two and two together. You’re already on record supporting the ridiculous notion that fetuses have rights, and that after a certain time period, abortions are “abhorrent.”
http://www.theagitator.com/2007/04/23/abortion-stuff/
Of course, even if fetuses HAD rights, _no human being_ has the “right” to remain physically connected to another human being from which they suck out sustenance. Even if you’re on your deathbed and you need to suck out my plasma to survive, you don’t have the right to tie me down and take it.
Your previous post was just a manifestation of your mistaken, and yes, profoundly illibertarian view of abortion. And while I have no particular reason to doubt that your “five minutes alone” exhortation was anything but hyperbole (if it were serious, that would be illibertarian), it was still, well, perfectly vile hyperbole.
Being against purposefully creating potential life simply to kill it for art is not “illibertarian” (if I even really know what that means). Abortion is a difficult issue for people who don’t see the world in black and white (which is what I think libertarians are - gray seers). Weigh the rights of the life in being against the potential life. In the case of the “performance artist” and her claims, the potential life is so much more valuable than the value the life in being posed to society that the winner is a no-brainer.
JJH2,
At the grave risk of repeating a question raised in the previous (and very lengthy) thread, do you think someone who is pro-choice could not find these acts, had they been real, awful?
Yale University’s faculty and administration probably leans heavily pro-choice, and yet Yale’s spokesperson was willing to say, “Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards . . . .”
Should pro-choice faculty and administrators agitate for a retraction, e.g., “Had these acts been real, they might have been icky but nothing more”?
#2 — I don’t believe I’ve never tried to hide the fact that I believe fetuses have some rights. I understand that other libertarians think differently. I don’t find them vile. I just disagree with them. The farther along the pregnancy, the more I disagree with them.
On the other hand, impregnating yourself to intentionally have an abortion on a canvas to make some sort of artistic statement would be vile. Pretending to do as much is just tacky. I don’t think you need to be a fundie pro-lifer to think so.
Personally, I don’t think that being pro-choice is a libertarian view anymore than being pro-murder would be. We all agree (for the most part) that the government should be limited in it’s scope, but there ARE certain laws that should be in place. We aren’t anarchists. If someone truly believes that fetuses are persons and have rights, then it would not be the lease bit illibertarian (is that even a word?) to be pro-life.
JJH2,
Since the Fetus doesn’t have a choice in the matter, I’m not sure you can blame it for “violating” the mother’s rights.
Working from the assumption that a fetus does have rights, however, we can analogize to criminal/tort law. If you invite someone to your house, you cannot accuse them of trespass. You don’t need to expressly say, “Hey fetus! Come on in!” Your actions can imply that invitation. Having consensual sexual intercourse is an implied invitation, especially if it is done without a contraceptive.
Rape would not lead to an implied invitation under this analogy, of course.
So does leaving a window open in an area prone to burglaries mean that you invited the burglar in?
Can someone explain the aristic value in inciting shock to create conversation. It just sounds like such a lazy catch-all for artists who want to create a lot of attention without actually having to explain and defend their creations. It doesn’t take creativity to be vile or abhorrent. Even as art, isn’t it a failure if your purpose must be explained in a press release. Couldn’t this just as eaisly have been about drawing the attention to the ambiguity of our perception of blood, or the role of the father, or any number of other issues? It’s sad to think that there are probably truly talented people doing real projects for the course, and they have to contend with this jackass.
#6:
Speak for yourself. Principled libertarianism, consistently applied, necessitates anarchism. You simply can’t justify coercive government from the Non-Aggression Principle.
#7:
The issue is not about “blame” - I don’t “blame” a fetus for anything. But _enforcing your rights_ doesn’t depend on the blameworthiness of the person or thing offending them. No _human being_ has the right to remain attached to your body, feeding off of you, even if it’s blamelessly put in that situation. Your consent argument is nonsense. Not only is sex not consent to pregnancy any more than walking outside is “consent” to being struck by lightning; but even if it were, you can’t “consent” to a person that doesn’t exist.
#5: Radley:
Since fetuses don’t have rights, and aren’t persons, I fail to see anything vile about exercising a perfectly legitimate right of self defense to expel it from your body, just like any other undesired parasite. And even if fetuses did have rights, and were persons, there would ALSO be nothing vile about exercising a perfectly legitimate right of self-defense to expel parasitic _persons_ from your body.
Wait wait wait? So I’m not allowed to be a Libertarian if I’m I don’t believe in abortion?
Shit.
I have posted this link here before and I’ll post it again. Please have a look at the case of pro-life as viewed through libertarianism. At least, one brand of it.
Libertarians For Life
http://www.l4l.org/
It’s just informational and I am not trying to lure anyone into a futile debate over the subject.
Kennedy:
Lots of people who self-identify as libertarians believe lots of illibertarian things — that fetuses have a “right” to feed upon and live inside women, that the Constitution is morally binding on anyone, that a minarchist state is justified, that the invasion of Iraq was justified in terms of self-defense, that modern mass warfare can even ever be legitimately used as self-defense.
Libertarians who believe any of those things are simply wrong. Thankfully, their errors in reasoning and principle are not terribly difficult to identify, although stubbornly difficult to correct.
I agree with your indefinite antecedent. The original post was vile.
More seriously, you never discuss why what the woman did(n’t) is “vile”. Instead, you vilify her.
Less seriously, maybe they’ll change the name of that rag to “limbic response” since “reason” isn’t applicable.
After seeing the video of her rant, I have to change my original comment. she’s not just a bitch, but an ignorant bitch.
A few commenters in the original post touched upon this, but I wanted to bring it up more explicitly:
In this society we are accustomed to government intervention in private affairs (even if we don’t want it) frequently. One of the results of this is, that if you start condemning something as bad or immoral, many people may assume you WANT to get a ban on it passed into law. Somewhere along the last few decades the bright distinction between condemning something, and trying to get legislature to forbid it, has been lost on too many people.
The corollary of course - and I first realized this listening to a talk show discussion about a “whites only” high school prom a few years back - is that too many libertarians are _reluctant_ to forcefully say “that’s bad” or “that’s immoral”. They fear, in this soundbite world, that the host will say “so then, why NOT ban such a thing if you are against it ?”
Remember too - one argument against legalizing drugs (or gambling, or prostitution) is “the government should not be _encouraging_ such activity”. This is clearly related to the above !
Who ever said that allowing something is EQUAL to encouraging it?
I have to agree 110% with Radley on this one. I don’t think being libertarian means that you should love abortion. Thinking abortion is vile is not un-libertarian, it’s being human.
Purposefully impregnating yourself to induce abortions is vile, and pretending to do so is tacky (sorry to paraphrase Radley, he said it best first)
and #10, you are crazy to refer to a fetus as a parasite that needs to be expelled. Just your loathsomeness for people who value human life appalls me.
To JJH2 (#10):
Thank you for demonstrating for us the meaning of “begging the question”, since newscasters use it improperly so often:
“Since fetuses don’t have rights, and aren’t persons…” is NOT an argument in favor of abortion right, it’s the whole crux of the question for a libertarian. If one could “prove” what you say, then nearly all pro-lifers would become pro-choice. On the other hand, if one could “prove” that one is a person at conception, then opposition to abortion would be necessary to a consistent libertarian viewpoint (minus your bizarre fetus-as-parasite opinion).
The whole issue is when one becomes a person as opposed to a potential person, and that is a philosophical and spiritual question, more than a scientific one, that will almost certainly never be settled in this life, which is why the abortion issue is so difficult, particularly for thoughtful libertarians.
Regarding your view of the fetus as a parasite, would you apply the same standard to a newborn infant? They area also drawing their sustenance from other people and are completely incapable of supporting their own lives; it’s only the mechanisms by which they “leech” off of others that changes. So once the thing is expelled from the mother, is it acceptable to boot it out the door and tell it to “get a job, ya bum?” If not, why not?
I don’t think being libertarian means that you should love abortion. Thinking abortion is vile is not un-libertarian, it’s being human.
What _is_ profoundly illibertarian, though, is characterizing persons who disagree with your moral (or political) positions as non-human.
too many libertarians are _reluctant_ to forcefully say “that’s bad” or “that’s immoral”. They fear, in this soundbite world, that the host will say “so then, why NOT ban such a thing if you are against it ?”
I agree with this. I actually think that a big part of the failure of libertarian ideas to catch on outside a narrow niche in our society is allowing ourselves to leak from “laissez faire” to “laissez penser”. There’s nothing wrong with aggressively pursuing a moral agenda - provided naturally that you don’t attempt to coerce (but only encourage) others to follow it.
Bill (#18)
You are _completely incorrect_ on the begging the question accusation since, in my first post on the thread, I clearly contend that _even if fetuses had rights_ NO PERSON has the “right” to remain forcibly attached to another person from which they suck out sustenance. Not only do “pro life libertarians” make the absurd contention that fetuses have rights, but they make the _even more absurd” contention that fetuses have SPECIAL rights that _no other human being actually has_ which is a right to remain physically connected to another person in order to siphon off nutrients from them. If you need some bodily fluid of mine, you have no legitimate right to tie me down and suck it out at gunpoint, even if you will die otherwise.
What an indictment of what passes for ‘education’ in the art world. Art used to be about technical excellence, able to carve an image out of a slab of stone or giving a painting a feeling of life and movement. Now, it’s just be controversial and pretend you have some ‘deeper meaning’. These clowns aren’t artists, they’re talk radio in a different medium.
You may now resume the regularly schedule knife fight about what is and isn’t libertarian.
I wouldn’t blame you for finding this vile, though I guess I don’t get the same emotional reaction. I guess I see why people do, but at less than a month old I don’t see how that clump of cells is in any way a person. Just because it can become one doesn’t make it a person, anymore than me being able to go to law school makes me a lawyer.
I do blame you for not having your spider sense tingle on this one, a little. But if this really makes you angry, I certainly dig why it didn’t.
I’d rather argue about what art is. I have a very simple definition that I thin should be universally adopted. Art is anything which is presented as “art”.
And I really have to kind of admire this now. I think it is good for art just to fuck with people sometimes, and this succeeded admirably. I really don’t care if she is a stupid obnoxious person, or what her intended message was. She has played a really good practical joke on a lot of people and given a lot of blog commenters something to do for a couple of days. Seems like everyone wins.
JJH2,
Perhaps I should have divided out the two horns of your argument and said you begged the question with one of your two points. But the problem is still the question of just when human life begins. You don’t seem to like the notion that it begins before birth. Where exactly is your bright line? When does one acquire the right to life?
There’s also the troubling view of fetus-as-parasite that you put forth. I would still contend that the question is one of parental obligation. Why is the woman bearing the child not responsible for its sustenance when the fetus is in the womb, but suddenly becomes responsible for it once it is born? Or don’t you believe that parents are responsible for their children? If you concede that the fetus is human, for the sake of argument, and still believe that it’s acceptable to end its life because it’s feeding off its mother, then why isn’t just as acceptable to stop feeding a human baby, which cannot provide for itself either, and frankly can be at least as much trouble for the parent(s) as it was when it was in the womb?
Tom G. hit the nail on the head. Radley’s original post never said anything about what the government should or shouldn’t do in response to this “art.” It was clear (at least to me) that he was simply expressing his own personal feelings. I don’t believe the government should impose my morals on anybody else, nor should it impose anybody else’s morals on me. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have morals.
I can no longer sit back and allow fetal infiltration, fetal indoctrination, fetal subversion, and the international fetal conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our prescious bodily fluids.
This has been interesting in exposing the “true faith” camp of libertarianism. For them the whole of human experience is equivalent to rights talk. So long as no one’s property rights have been violated, then it is improper to even form an opinion or (gasp) have an emotional reaction to something. Taking a giant dump on your dog on your front lawn? Don’t you even think about calling that wrong - he’s got every right to do it!
Fortunately most libertarians are also human beings, and so aren’t so restricted in their analysis of social interaction.
#27:
On the contrary, there’s a significant difference between Justice - the subset of morality that governs when it’s justified to utilize force or coercion, and simple morality - which includes all cases of things being moral or immoral. Lots of things are immoral but not unjust - for example, making fun of your “friends” behind their backs. Your friends don’t have a “right” for you not to talk shit about them (and hence it’s not unjust, and they cannot prevent the action with violence or coercion), but it’s clearly immoral, as in, just plain old wrong. Neither I, nor any “true faith” libertarian (whatever that is) have denied that people are entitled to whatever emotional reaction they may have. But I HAVE staked out a strong position both on the Justice of abortion, and on the Morality of demonizing a person for choosing to engage in it. Your inane Robo-Libertarian dichotomy is a straw man and a red herring.
Bill (#24):
The “right to life” is a misnomer. Nobody has a “right to life” if by that you mean a positive obligation, enforceable by coercion, to physically attach themselves to another human being to parasitically draw upon them as sustenance. Even if you need my kidney to live, and even if I had one to ’spare,’ you don’t have a “right to life” that enables you to legitimately tie me down and take it from me.
As for when a fetus, or baby, because a “Human” in the sense of having rights — well, they obtain that when they have the cognitive capacities which are a prerequisite for the possession of rights - which is the capacity to operate as moral actors. If we are correct in denying the moral status of humans to Great Apes, such that they don’t have any rights, then we must necessarily deny the moral status of human to homo sapiens until they’ve achieved some level of capacity to operate as moral actors which is greater than the most developed Great Apes - which would be a few years old.
I defend full-blown infanticide from a libertarian perspective here.
This debate perfectly conforms to the sterotype that libertarianism is a philosophy for people without children. JJH2’s more extremist position is, unfortunately, a mark on all other libertarians. Libertarianism will never, NEVER, be anything other than a secular religion of cranks unless that mentality is purged.
What a monstrous philosophy - treating newborn children as sub-human.
#29 and #30 –
Congrats. You’ve just lost all right to be taken seriously.
#31:
Being popular and being right are two different things. If it’s unpopular to be right, then it behooves you to be unpopular. There’s no virtue in selling out what’s right for popularity.
#32:
If you had ever bothered to offer a coherent argument for your position that dealt with the issue under discussion (what are the prerequisites for a being to have rights), I’d be more inclined to take your dismissal seriously. As you haven’t, there’s no particular reason to think that your dismissal is justified.
This is why libertarians rarely win - you guys eat your own.
JJH2,
It’s not a matter of popularity. It’s a matter that you’re wrong, and you are too blind to see it. The error in your radical philosophy isn’t an error of reason. As G.K. Chesterton said, a madman has lost everything BUT his reason. Your error is a manifest mistake of affections that have destroyed the value of humanity itself. You remind me of Professor Frost from C.S. Lewis’s work “That Hideous Strength.”
#28
“I HAVE staked out a strong position both on the Justice of abortion, and on the Morality of demonizing a person for choosing to engage in it.”
Ah, but you have just conflated the justice aspect of abortion with the larger issue of the morality of it. Yes you have a right to vacuum out the fetus if you no longer wish it to gestate. But you could also wait until it’s time to take it out of the oven and let a couple adopt it. Or: through no (or little) fault of your own, you find yourself pregnant and unable (or unwilling) to carry it, so you have an abortion..vs, as an art project you claim to get yourself pregnant numerous times for the sole purpose of aborting the proto-humans inside you.
Personal morality is, well, personal. And I suppose it would be impossible to use reason to get someone to find something wrong when it’s a matter of it being judged so based on your personal beliefs and feelings. But if you claim to see the bigger picture on morality (it’s more than just rights talk), I don’t see how you can feel to understand why some people would consider her actions repugnant (and engage in some emotional hyperbole) yet not rights-violating. Do you really think demonizing her by typing words on a website is a greater moral “sin” than intentionally having multiple abortions for the sake of an A on your art project? Really?
#36
Er, I haven’t conflated anything. I’ve addressed BOTH issues. I don’t think morality is “personal” in the sense that you seem to be using it - by which I think you mean, true by virtue of the fact that a person happens to hold it. I don’t fault people for their emotional reactions necessarily, but I do fault people for their expressions of moral outrage which are unjustified. There’s absolutely nothing immoral about ejecting a fetus from your body, especially one that’s around 8 weeks old, _even if you got yourself pregnant just for that purpose_.
#37
You said earlier that it would be immoral to talk badly about your friends behind their back. But it isn’t immoral to get pregnant for the sole purpose of abortion as art installation? Check your premises.
#38:
Um… yeah, that’s right. The obvious difference between the two cases is that your friend is, presumably, a human being with thoughts, feelings, desires, and expectations that you’ve fostered through your relationship with him or her.
Whereas a 2 week old fetus is a largely undifferentiated clump of cells with zero moral significance.
It’s not the premise where you get tied up, but the application.
This whole discussion makes me sick. A fetus is not a “parasite” latched on to the insides of an unwilling female. Besides rape, it is entirely a woman’s actions which lead to impregnation. In essence, a choice.
Now, I don’t know enough about the topic to get into a structured debate, but all I know is that my gut says “wrong” when someone kills a human being in early stages of development. Especially when it was their choices that led to the pre-person person being there in the first place.
I know many others feel differently, especially here, but to hear the way some of you have written about unborn children has truly made me sick.
Yay internet abortion debate!
#40:
“A fetus is not a “parasite” latched on to the insides of an unwilling female.”
It certainly _is_ if the female is doesn’t want to have it latched onto them.
Consenting to an action with a particular person doesn’t mean that you consent to all possible consequences of an action that a third party can perform upon you. Just because I consent to walk with my friend in the park, doesn’t mean that I’ve therefore consented to a third person robbing me at knife point. At the time of sex, there’s not even a third party to consent to. You can’t consent to a sperm, or an egg cell.
But really, pregnancy is an organic process. You can no more “consent to pregnancy” than you can consent to being struck by lightning. It happens or it doesn’t, but it doesn’t make sense to refer to either in terms of consent. And just because it happens doesn’t mean you’re obligated to let an organism feed off of you for nine months.
Kennedy,
Your gut is right. Reason and logic have little to do with it. As I alluded to earlier:
“The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ’s.
Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large….”
Curses! Refuted by C.S. Lewis’s unbreakable “expand the circle of your mind” brand of Christian theosophy.
“Just because it doesn’t make any sense, doesn’t mean it’s not true!”
Heh. If you have a sense of humor about this, perhaps you’re not as corrupt as you pretend, so long as it’s self-depricating humor. In fact, I’m willing to bet that deep down you don’t believe what you’re saying. You would probably have serious problems with a mother that fed her newborn baby into a shredder just because she was tired of taking care of it and that it was a “parasite.” I’m chalking this conversation up to the “anonymous on the internet so I can be a rabble-rouser” effect.
Bill, what you said, in #18. That’s about the whole thing.
A long time ago I was a member of a libertarian mailing list. There were a few early L4L members on that list. Someone would bring up abortion and it would take over the mailing list. So I had a list of all the people who had ever brought it up, and when the topic came up I’d add that person and send them a note that the topic was discouraged here because it takes over, but all these people want to talk about abortion in a libertarian context, please form a new list.
As for the instant case, take a look at her own release, at http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24559
——–
To protect myself and others, only I know the number of fabricators who participated, the frequency and accuracy with which I inseminated and the specific abortifacient I used. Because of these measures of privacy, the piece exists only in its telling. This telling can take textual, visual, spatial, temporal and performative forms . copies of copies of which there is no original.
This piece . in its textual and sculptural forms . is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body. The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above, as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse.
———
This is the bullshit that is typical of conceptual or performance artists, playing with the truth, and the notion of truth, and so forth. I’ve taken a college-level modern art class. A classmate to play at objet trouve with dining hall food, and he tweaked the “artists” in our house by putting his stuff up in our exhibition space for a few days. He and I both did our term papers on his work. Since I did apply the right analysis, and it was long enough, and the course was the biggest gut on campus, I received a B with the comment “Bogus but cute” from the teaching fellow.
Is it OK if setting aside the abortion question I find art that’s made out of stuff that comes out of the human body to be icky? (To avoid charges of misogyny, it’s not just menstruum, but anything, and especially stuff that I have to clean up after my barely civilized kids leave it around or on the laundry. Possible exception for deciduous teeth and locks of hair, as distinct from the hair that around the drain.) I have no desire to see Annie Sprinkle’s Public Cervic Announcement either.
JJH2:
“As for when a fetus, or baby, because a “Human” in the sense of having rights — well, they obtain that when they have the cognitive capacities which are a prerequisite for the possession of rights - which is the capacity to operate as moral actors.”
So you’ve taken the position that infants have no rights, including a “right to life”.
Initially I said you’d begged the question; now I’m beginning to think your argument is actually a “reductio ad absurdum” in favor of the other side.
Like Radley, I’m beginning to think it’s pointless, but I’ll give this one more shot:
Is there any circumstance in which a person is obligated to care for another? Based on the arguments you’ve provided above, is there ANY moral reason for a parent to feed and care for an infant if they don’t feel like it?
I’m starting to get light-headed.
Sydney (#44)
I have a sense of humor about most things. It’s an unfortunate byproduct of short, text-based communication that you get a dramatically incomplete picture of people and their intentions. You misrepresent my position to suggest that I am claiming I would have “no problem” with a woman putting her baby into a blender. In fact, I said no such thing. And in this very thread I offered the difference between Justice, a subset of morality, and Morality generally. Even if putting a baby into a blender doesn’t violate the baby’s rights (because it has none), that doesn’t mean that I don’t think there are lots of morally significant reasons NOT to do that. But none, or almost none of those reasons, apply to a 2 week old fetus, which is a brainless, organ-less lump of cells lacking any morally significant attributes at all.
>>then why isn’t just as acceptable to stop feeding a human baby, which cannot provide for itself either, and frankly can be at least as much trouble for the parent(s) as it was when it was in the womb?<<
Because while a pregnant mother doesn’t have the option to give the fetus to someone else to feed, the mother of an infant does.