The Thursday rant #3
This week’s ranter: MikesBooksandThinks, Retired
Engineer. Politically a shade to the right of Atilla the Hun. Writes in
his blog about books he has enjoyed, but mainly about politics and
politicians he detests!
Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom!
Imagine the impact which the exports of your country are having upon the
economies of the countries to which you export! Your own factory has
tripled in size since you moved from the tiny plant which started you off
in commerce, expansion continues, and your work force has multiplied by
over fifty times since you started out.
At the end of your working day, as you climb into your new Mercedes while
watching the evening shift pour through the gates, you allow yourself a
quiet smile of contentment! You are successful!
You steer your limousine along one of the new expressways, built in the
past two years to accommodate the explosion in commerce and car ownership, and onward towards the expanded house which is but the latest symbol of your success.
Your wife, waiting at the window while holding your son in her arms, waves
as you drive in through the automatic gates into your brick-lined drive;
and you greet her as you tousle your son’s hair.
Then your mood changes, you push away from your family and stand, rigid
with anger, at the window overlooking the garden; for there are two roses
blooming which had not flowered when you left for work this morning.
One rose commemorates the second son you would have had, if he had not
been aborted by the hospital staff as his tiny head emerged from your
wife’s body; aborted and killed because he was not authorised by the State!
The other rose, more poignant still, is in memory of your cousin, dead now
these sixteen years, mown down along with five thousand others in
Tiananmen Square by the tanks of the Mongolian Shock Army, as the Chinese
Communist State moved to crush any vestige of dissent against it’s rule
and diktat.
I suspect that if you’re a rich businessman, getting round the one-child policy is probably not too difficult.
The Chinese one-child policy is not enforced by infanticide at the point of birth and it is stupid, pernicious, racist garbage to pretend it is. The Sharpener would not print a screed which claimed that Jews murdered infants and should not publicise similar blood libels about the Chinese.
dsquared,
hit a nerve there, I see!!!
Been to China recently?
DD: I think it’s pretty obvious that Mike’s referring to the State and not the race, isn’t it? Anyway, we’re not in the business of censoring thinkpieces.
I’ve never been to China, but they don’t murder infants. This is just a fact. Surely it isn’t censorship to require that “thinkpiece” contributors restrict their accusations of infanticide to ones that can be backed up?
I’m not sure there’s any onus on Mike to back up his accusation, unless he feels compelled to prop his credibility. It’s certainly not up to me to insist he does. He’s not making a specific allegation of infanticide – just using a graphic allegory for the one-child policy. On my reading, anyway.
OK, Dsquared, here’s what you have to do.
First, take a deep breath.
Next, read this:http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2005/s1386454.htm
which is a report from ABC earlier this year.
The key quote is here:
LIZ FOSCHIA (ABC reporter): Zhu Ching-Ping was one notable Chinese asylum seeker, who was deported from Australia six years ago when she was more than eight months pregnant.
MARION LE (Chinese refugee advocate): She was forcibly removed from Port Headland against her wishes, with her husband and they returned to China where the baby was aborted ten days short of full term, injected in the head.
There are lots more similar reports here:
http://www.asylumlaw.org/docs/china/CHI_1/Table_of_Contents.pdf
Alternatively, you could read Amnesty International’s 2005 report on China, which points out that forced late-term abortion is still occurring in order to enforce the policy. Or – tell you what, you’re a bright guy – read all of them.
Once you’ve done that, you can apologise for calling Mr Cunningham stupid, pernicious and racist. Or, alternatively, you could pretend that you are still in the right, because there is some sort of crucial difference between infanticide at birth and infanticide ten days before birth. Which of these options you choose is entirely up to you.
I’m seeing two reports of “late term abortions” there, which are meant to be supporting the claim “as his tiny head emerged”.
By the way:
Or, alternatively, you could pretend that you are still in the right, because there is some sort of crucial difference between infanticide at birth and infanticide ten days before birth
There is no such thing as “infanticide ten days before birth”.
My mistake: I should have written “infanticide ten days before term”. AKA extremely late term abortion. Which consists, for your information, of inducing labour followed by destroying the child during birth, in more or less the way the article specifies. (Foetus, whatever. What do you call a child born ten days premature?)
Come on. I’m not trying to make some sort of anti-abortion point here. But you’d keep a lot more of your self respect if you didn’t keep insisting on this farcical distinction.
By the way, there’s the other kicker line still to address – come on, post something like “Five thousand people did not die in Tiananmen Square. Only 2,600 people were killed during the crackdown, according to the Chinese Red Cross, and it is stupid, pernicious, racist garbage to suggest otherwise.” You’d be on much firmer ground there.
Or, better still: “No one died in Tiananmen Square in 1989. All the massacres occurred elsewhere in the city and on the approach routes to the square, and it is stupid, pernicious, racist garbage to suggest otherwise.”
Up to you, obviously.
[What do you call a child born ten days premature?]
A child. What do you call a foetus ten days overdue? A foetus. The distinction between someone that has been born and is a separate person, and someone that hasn’t and isn’t is one that is made by every code of common law in the world apart from one or two states of the USA.
1. Well, here we’re dealing with induced labour followed by perinatal killing – actually while the child is crowning. As I said. What’s the moral judgement there? Or, for that matter, the legal position? How ‘born’ is ‘born’?
2. Let us accept your position that very-late-term abortion of this type is not infanticide. Read the post – he never used the word ‘infanticide’. He said ‘aborted’. So it is you, not he, that first made the ‘late-term abortion=infanticide’ equivalence – when you accused him of accusing the Chinese government of infanticide.
Therefore: either it is infanticide, and you were wrong to accuse Mike of talking rubbish; or it is not, and you were wrong to accuse Mike of making allegations of infanticide, when he did not do so.