“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” – Jesus

Can I make a relevant man-admission? As a bachelor wannabe gentleman who has no problem buying tampons for his lady friends (or his man friends!), and who has been somewhat normalized to blushworthy feminine hygiene conversations, I honestly had no idea that ultrasounds involved vaginal penetration.

Seriously. I had no clue. I’ve never had a gynecological exam. I’m a dude and I don’t pretend to understand women or their bodies better than they do. Here lies a big problem… I may very well be an idiot, but I’m also willing to bet that Virginia legislators know even less about vaginas than I do. Worse, they either haven’t thought through the ethics of forced transvaginal ultrasounds at all or they’re sadistic twisted fucks because forcing women to endure vaginal penetration against their will is the definition of rape.

R A P E.

“Because the great majority of abortions occur during the first 12 weeks, that means most women will be forced to have a transvaginal procedure, in which a probe is inserted into the vagina, and then moved around until an ultrasound image is produced. Since a proposed amendment to the bill—a provision that would have had the patient consent to this bodily intrusion or allowed the physician to opt not to do the vaginal ultrasound—failed on 64-34 vote, the law provides that women seeking an abortion in Virginia will be forcibly penetrated for no medical reason. I am not the first person to note that under any other set of facts, that would constitute rape under state law.”

And like other guys it took an intelligent women like Dahlia Lithwick to make me see the obvious.

Just to be clear…

Governor McConnell and Virginia legislators are poised to sign state sanctioned rape into law. And they damned well know it. According to Thinkprogress.com when one lawmaker was questioned on this point he “suggested that women who consent to sex also consent to vaginal probing.”

I used to think we as a society were gradually progressing towards the dystopia of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but brazen legislation like this makes me wonder if George Orwell’s 1984 dystopia is a more realistic prediction.

::Update:: A nice woman pointed out to me on facebook that a transvaginal ultrasound is not required for most pregnancies. While I have no way of knowing otherwise plenty of women are supporting the claim that transvaginal ultrasounds would be required for some pregnancies. Its already my understanding that the transvaginal ultrasound would be something that would come up for women seeking an abortion later into the pregnancy. I’ll also note that republicans are making no such counterargument so I am inclined to think that they would if they could.

If even one woman is required to have a transvaginal ultrasound against her will then its still state sanctioned rape. Even if that nice woman is one hundred percent correct and the law doesn’t require female penetration in certain cases everything associated with this legislation is really creepy and gross… its the difference between old white men legislating state sanctioned rape or state sanctioned sexual harassment and humiliation.

“I’ve always believed Ayn Rand was really the Grand Duchess Anastasia. I think that one in West Virginia is a fake. Ayn Rand acted a hell of a lot more like a Romanov than that woman in West Virginia. And I think after the Bolsheviks killed her family and she escaped, she decided she would found another atheistic religion to compete with Communism, and that’s how Objectivism got created.” – Robert Anton Wilson

Being the token member of my social circles who has actually read Atlas Shrugged I am frequently asked questions about the book and Ayn Rand‘s philosophy of objectivism. This is unusual because I claim no expertise but answering repeated questions and objections has paradoxically had the effect of helping me develop a few opinions.

Here is the most controversial one: Ayn Rand is flawed but she isn’t the devil incarnate. Her books are about so much more than unapologetic greed and unabashed capitalist worship. They contain some very positive messages that many young people growing up in conservative households might otherwise miss.

Its hard for people raised in more left leaning households to understand but for a certain sort of teenager Ayn Rand serves the same sort of initiatory role as authors like J R R Tolkein or Kurt Vonnegut. The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are in this respect very much matrix style red pills that catalyze life changing reevaluations of values. Some of the values on display in Rand’s fiction are lame but others are interesting and even praiseworthy.

Make no mistake. Ayn Rand is subversive, and the fact that many conservative parents are encouraging their children to read her books provides me a strange sense of hope for the future. Why? Because for all the attention given to Ayn Rand’s bad traits she is not a conservative but a philosopher in her own right with opinions that would make conservative parents blush if they knew what their children were being exposed too. Here are some good points!

For starters Ayn Rand was an outspoken atheist in a time where taking a strong public atheist stance was wildly unpopular.

Ayn Rand was an outspoken peace advocate and strongly condemned wars of aggression. Criticizing american involvement in the World Wars is taboo even in 2012. Ayn Rand displayed incredible moral clarity and bravery doing so in her intellectual prime half a century ago when those conflicts were still fresh in the public consciousness.

“A government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.”

“Do not ever say that the desire to “do good” by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.”

“If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged “good” can justify it — there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations.”

I want to emphasize once more that young conservatives are reading ideas like this and are being influenced by them. Daniel Lakemacher was a former Guantanamo prison guard who turned into a peace activist after reading a copy of Atlas Shrugged that had been donated to the prison library. Inspired by this success story the libertarian peace activist group LOLA mailed copies of Atlas Shrugged to soldiers in Iraq seeking to open more minds to war’s incompatibility with morality.

Ayn Rand can also be read in a feminist context. Though she often placed herself in opposition to the feminist movement the characters in her books frequently defied gender stereotypes, and her much maligned claim that a female shouldn’t be the President of the United States was based on her metaphysical belief that women shouldn’t lower themselves to assuming an office so inherently masculine and immoral. This undercurrent of feminine empowerment might provide young people a counter to the more misogynistic messages a young person being raised in a culturally conservative household might encounter. Despite her flaws and differences with mainstream feminism Ayn Rand is a strong female voice who’s critical perspective about gender will provoke young conservatives to think.

Thats it. There you go. My goal in writing this little apologia isn’t to convince anyone to become an Ayn Rand fan. My goal is to suggest that the strawman frequently attacked in her place isn’t entirely accurate and that Ayn Rand is more interesting, nuanced, and subversive than her liberal detractors let on.

I reject this conceit and claim that Nietzsche had the New Atheists’ number and anticipated their movement as far back as 1882 when he wrote The Gay Science.

Nietzsche of course is notorious for famously proclaiming in The Gay Science that:

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

In Nietzsche’s view the decline of Christianity’s absolute moral authority meant nothing less than the shattering of western civilization’s entire ideological edifice. Nietzsche understood that to proclaim Christianity dead was to call into question everything that Christianity had touched and informed in its near two thousand year history. If we join Nietzsche in accepting God’s death we abandon the basis of nearly two thousand years of values and assumptions so deeply ingrained into us ideologically that we’re often not even aware of their christian roots at all.

The death of God was not a moment for atheists to declare victory, but the beginning of a radical shift in public consciousness that was unable to fall back on past moral certitudes. For Nietzsche distancing oneself from Christianity was a heroicly difficult undertaking fraught with danger of descending into madness or nihilism. There were no more guarantees. Rejecting christianity wasn’t something one could do with the flip of a switch. It required a serious and honest interrogation of our highest values.

“After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave-a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. -And we-we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.”

Compared to Nietzsche’s atheism the New Atheism, with its fixation on supernaturalism and the authority of traditional religious institutions, is interesting but ultimately superficial because it paradoxically doesn’t take the implications of a post god world seriously. Instead of accepting Nietzsche’s challenge and radically reimagining what a post christian world might be like New Atheism assumes that the post christian world will just be a more progressed version of our own ruled by benevolent technocratic elites. Instead of ruthlessly interrogating society’s morals the New Atheists largely accept secularized versions of christian morality. Instead of seeking new authorities in a post god world New Atheists resort to a positivist materialism that owes its very existence to the christian materialist tradition.

Responding to the death of God with a mere rejection of strawman supernaturalism is insufficient. By failing to rise to Nietzsche’s challenge to undertake the transvaluation of all values New Atheism has thus far proven itself incapable or unwilling to rise above the level of projecting Christianity’s shadow on a cave wall. If we are to proceed bravely into a new post god world we will ultimately have to vanquish the New Atheism as well.

In the spirit of starting a new blog on the right foot I’m going to start the party with a good old fashioned grenade. Lesser evilism in electoral politics is immoral and counterproductive and I’m going to lay out an argument explaining why.

The argument for lesser evilism usually goes like this: Democrats are consistently disappointing, but whatever their faults may be their policies are usually a little better for the county than those of Republicans. Because Republicans are a little worse than Democrats on issues of importance to progressives it makes sense for them to try to influence the system in what little ways they can. A related argument is that little differences in policy actually make a very big difference in a country of three hundred million people. Corruption in politics is a fact of life, but if a few more people get good healthcare and funding for their school programs voting will have been worth it.

There is some truth in this, but this outlook is problematic for two reasons.

The biggest problem with lesser evilism is that it encourages Democratic politicians to ignore their base in favor of potential votes that require more effort to capture, and the lobbying pressure of monied interests. By refusing to make their votes for Democratic candidates conditional on supporting progressive goals progressives reinforce a dysfunctional relationship that makes it safe for their concerns and goals to be ignored. By refusing to withhold their votes they participate in the cyclical machinery of their own class exploitation.

Secondly, the surrender of the progressive base’s goals to “pragmatism” requires an enormous opportunity cost of misdirected activism. In 2008 thousands of activists who would otherwise have donated their labor and capital towards traditionally left social movements and causes unwittingly directed their energies towards a presidency that would betray the very causes the activists thought they were supporting.

I am putting forward the economic argument that the small victories to be gained by supporting the Democratic status quo are not worth the price being paid for them. Occupy Wallstreet has proved that direct activism unaligned with traditional powers can have an enormous impact on national politics. I would also argue that Democratic loyalists need to stop fancying themselves as hard nosed pragmatists and recognize the naivete of their stubbornness to recognize what everybody else has long known.

Your party is just not that into you.