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OK, first thing: I cannot recommend highly enough keeping a roll of black electrical tape in your house. I have MacGyver tendencies and I love to work them.
Reason I originally bought my electrical tape: Damage to the coating of a power cord I didn't want to replace, and so instead sealed with electrical tape.
Subsequent uses I've found for it:
- Repairing a damaged (black) music stand. The stand no longer collapses, but that's fine - I don't need to travel with it, and what it DOES still do is "be a music stand".
- Holding together, and discreetly in place, the pocket triangles for the suits of the groom and groomsmen at Chas and Dean's wedding. Their suits were black, so the black tape was easier to make invisible, while firmly holding the pocket triangles in place, when they were really reluctant to do that before (especially the groom's, since his suit had a false pocket.) And sticky tape isn't sticky enough for just about anything other than gift-wrapping.
At some point I will deconstruct one of those pocket triangles and post pictures, because, seriously, in the end they required an amazing amount of tape, both sticky and electrical. (Part of the problem: The fabric pieces were themselves slightly too small to work easily.)
- Emergency substitute knee brace.
No, really. Oddly, the medical fabric-type tape usually used for this kind of thing gives me a hideous rash, but electrical tape doesn't. Some tape wound tight around my bad knee reduced the pain substantially in an emergency when I couldn't use my actual brace.
- Decorative markings on my Tape Box.
I had a sturdy cardboard box that was doing duty as a bedside table. I decided to make it prettier and sturdier, and wrapped the whole thing in silver duct tape, which I then gave a better-defined appearance by judicious marking with black electrical tape, because I'm just that cool.
It's also entirely possible I'm going to be "hemming" some jeans with electrical tape later, because I'm getting sick of treading on my cuffs. Of course, I am reminded of my mother's tale of a guy she knew when she was about my age, who hemmed his trousers with a stapler. She rolled her eyes hard at him and then made him watch her redo them properly so he could do better in future.
Me, I like being inventive about solutions to problems, so I think stapled cuffs would be cool.
... I was going to post something other than an advocacy of electrical tape (I do have duct tape too, but electrical has benefits duct does not, really it does), but I have to leave in five minutes to go see my endocrinologist. (For, we hope, some answers regarding this aggravating hypoglycaemia crap. Although I may poke him about the HEY SUP WITH THIS OTHER STUFF THAT I MENTIONED LAST TIME AND YOU KIND OF IGNORED issue.)Current Music: Ladysmith Black Mombazo - Knockin' On Heaven's Door (with Dolly Parton)
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Because the good lord knows, this is a subject where there's no risk of pissing anyone off, right?
See, here's the thing.
Right-to-lifers, a body of people that no doubt includes good individiuals but is overall pretty loathsome, have a tendency to refer to their opposition in the abortion debate as "pro-abortion". I've seen people who are in that opposition get suckered into doing the same thing - I've done it myself.
My brother-out-law Chas tends to call me on it, because, as he rightly points out, I'm not pro-abortion. I am profoundly, heartfelt anti-abortion in my convictions. Looking at the terms literally, I'd say I'm also pro-life, in that I'm in favour of life, and all that.
However, I am also deeply, profoundly pro-choice in my convictions.
Abortion is bad. An abortion is a sign that something has gone wrong. It's just a matter of where that wrongness happened - whether it was the wrongness that is rape, or the wrongness that is bad sex education, or the wrongness that is a pregnancy that endangers a mother's health, or the wrongness that is a foetus so malformed as to be unviable.
Nobody wants abortions to take place - it's just that abortions can be necessary, which is why they should be safe, legal, and accessible. Including, perhaps especially, late-term abortions, because late-term abortions are not elective, not really - late-term abortions are for pregnancies that were wanted, chosen, intended to be kept, but which have become life-threatening, or which feature children who cannot live.
That's serious stuff. That's the situation where people are hurting, grieving, and perhaps gravely ill - that's a situation where things need to be as easy for them as possible, as safe as possible, as gentle on their grief as can be achieved.
If you disagree on this point, you are wrong, and I will not "respect" your "beliefs".
Second point of language: People are very careless with the word "abortion". When we talk about abortion, we're almost invariably talking about induced abortion - as opposed to spontaneous abortion, which is what you mean when you talk about "miscarriage", and the like - which, by the way, happens kind of a lot. The majority of first pregnancies result in spontaneous abortion. I'll come back to this later.
So let's consider the question of the demonised induced abortions - the ones where the woman is old enough, the foetus is viable, but the woman can't handle pregnancy and wants it terminated. If you remove any religious aspect from it, I'm not that sure what the argument against choice is. An embryo at that stage isn't a person; I'm not sure it's even alive by a sensible definition. It's incapable of anything approaching independent survival. Given that the female body will, in pregnancy, sabotage itself for the benefit of the foetus, if anything an unwelcome foetus is a parasite.
However, people bring religion into it. I'm going to speak only about Christianity here, because they're the most vocal in my cultural context, and because I am myself a Christian, and therefore can speak about Christianity with more authority and knowledge than I can about most religions.
The question depends on the point at which life begins - the point at which the potential baby goes from being "two separate cells, a sperm and an egg" to a living soul. It's the soul that matters - from a religious perspective, that which has no soul cannot be murdered.
The thing is, the question of when the soul is formed/attached/however it works is one that, strictly speaking, only God can answer. It is beyond the scope of we mere mortals.
So what did God say about this question?
Well, let's look at our only real source on the word of the Lord: the Holy Bible.
I admit, I haven't memorised the full text, but the only point I know of where this question is addressed is Genesis 2:7:
then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
If you take the Bible literally, which fundamentalists claim to do, then a living being is formed when the first breath of life is taken. Not breathing yet? Not alive. Not a soul.
I don't know that this is, in fact, the Truth of the beginning of a person's life. I can't know. I'm not God, and I don't speak for God, not really - I can say what I believe to be true about God, but that doesn't have to mean anything to anyone, especially if you don't worship my, or any, god(s). More than that, I don't want to. I have my own beliefs about my God and other gods - I feel less than obligated to explain my faith.
However, I do know that people who say that "life begins at conception" have no valid theological underpinning to this - it's just an excuse for extremism, an excuse to try and deny a woman control of her body.
And it is rooted in misogyny. It can't not be - ultimately, trying to dictate others' abortion rights is saying that you are better-equipped to make the decision than they are. It's saying that women can't be trusted to make the right choice, and should have that choice taken away from them.
Which is why they're not pro-life, they're just anti-choice. If they were pro-life, John McCain would have lost all of his support, all across America, the moment he put "health of the mother" in scare quotes and called it the extreme pro-abortion position.Current Mood:  tired Current Music: neworleansisbroken
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