I’m in favor of abortion or, in the rather impoverished language of contemporary debate, I’m pro-choice. That would include the choice of art students to artificially inseminate themselves and then induce miscarriages as part of their work. But a lot of the response on the internet to Aliza Shvartzs’s artwork has been of the “I’m as pro-choice as anyone, as long as women don’t make choices I disagree with” variety. I think it’s a real weakness of the pro-choice position that abortion is so often spoken of in hushed terms, treated as unpleasant, tragic, something awful that must, perhaps, be allowed in some circumstances when entered into with the proper degree of gravity. But this isn’t really a pro-choice position at all; treating abortion as somehow an especially grave matter buys completely into the pro-life position that there’s something wrong about abortion (indeed, the idea that you can have an abortion, but only if you treat it with the requisite degree of moral seriousness, is not conceptually different from the idea that you can have an abortion, but only if you are the victim of rape: it depends on a misogynist distinction between “responsible” and “irresponsible” women). For more on this see an old LBO post by shag, and this excellent post on the current controversy.

Of course, this particular piece of art didn’t actually involve any abortions; but it did a great job of highlighting fault-lines among those who consider themselves pro-choice.

The minor flap over the Hilary Clinton Walmart videos seems like an interesting example of the role of cynicism in ideology. My first response, like I imagine a lot of people’s, was standard-issue cynicism: she’s being paid by Walmart, of course she’s going to enthuse about them; it doesn’t mean she really believes it. But of course this response precisely misses the point. Clinton’s feigned enthusiasm is an accurate expression of her position because it doesn’t reflect her “true” internal beliefs. That is, her willingness to pretend to be a devoted fan of capital is due to the fact that she actually is a devoted fan of capital.

This, I take it, is the point of Žižek’s idea of overidentification. When I first heard of it, I had trouble distinguishing it from an idea of taking people seriously in order to expose their hypocrisy, an extraordinarily dull liberal position. No, ideology is not about hypocrisy or lies, a gap between what people say and what they really believe. On the contrary, it is the belief in this gap which is ideological, and an ideology that functions so effectively we rarely notice it.

Via an article about Obama’s push for the vital typographer vote (”hipster font attracts support from hipsters” is broadly the take-home message), I discovered this:

Ron Paul has some impressively mad people making impressively ugly campaign posters for him. Be sure to check out “Liberty Spears the Enemy” in particular. “Liberty Spears” is unfortunately not Britney’s new anarchist identity. Or not yet, anyway.

Now I’m not going to deny that Kyra Phillips looks super cute in her faux-military olive fatigues. But isn’t there something just plain weird about the willingness of journalists to, still, after five years of clear and documented bullshit, identify with the military? If it was just the stylish caps, I wouldn’t mind, but it leads to horribly fawning interviews like this one (skip forward to 18 minutes or so in to see how bad it can get):

Nazi Philip wanted Diana dead, Fayed tells inquest.

Awesome. I wonder if Fayed is in touch with Lyndon LaRouche:

The now rapidly accumulating evidence of a European plot to establish a fascist dictatorship over western and central Europe, when this ongoing activity is compared with the fascist plot led by the cabal gathered around New York’s Mayor Bloomberg, and around traditionally fascist figures such as George Shultz and Felix Rohatyn of Pinochet regime notoriety, makes it fair to say that an immediate threat of an international fascist coup d’etat is currently in full swing in both the U.S.A. and western and central Europe. It is only during this month that the implications of this trans-Atlantic fascist plot have exposed themselves as a clear and present immediate danger to civilization world-wide.

There’s something amazingly compelling about the grammatical structure of that paragraph.

As 4chan takes the lulz to the streets, hilarity is already firmly ensconced in US corridors of power. In response to a symbollic anti-recruitment resolution from the Berkeley City Council, some tool from South Carolina has proposed legislation in the senate (the “Semper Fi Act 2008″; I’m not sure whether that bit of hilariously camp macho posturing is its official title or not) removing some federal money and that from Berkeley. Aside from the fundamental misunderstanding of the role of a national legislature here (which is even worse than last years “senate condemns a newspaper ad” silliness), it’s funny how the right wing are so keen to portray the US military as delicate flowers whose feelings need to be protected from horrid, mean leftists. Why do they hate the troops so much? And why are American legislators so keen to bring the political process into disrepute?

And Bill O’Reilly last night was outraged: “It’s not a matter of saying … they were voting on taking their parking spaces away, they’re making it difficult for them to operate.” The horror! How will those poor, poor marine recruiters cope with having to walk around the block to get to work?

Satirical genius, or spectacular tin ear for rhetoric? You decide!

“…We’ll nationalize your fucking banks.”

So goes the social-democratic version of the famous anarchist slogan. Of course, the third-way version is more about:

A period of state ownership in which the government would seek to stabilise Northern Rock and find a buyer, while protecting taxpayers’ money

“Protecting” taxpayer’s money, eh? What an incredibly, stupidly, minimal vision of what a political system might acomplish.

Turns out hipster favorite Ron Paul believes in the “North American Union” theory being pimped by such eminent fascists as Lou Dobbs and Alex Jones (short version, George Bush is s3cr3t1y a dirty Mexican socialist OMG!). And he wants to abolish the federal reserve (that’ll teach those Jewish bankers)! No word yet on his position on degenerate art or his policy towards the Slavs.

I wouldn’t have thought American politics would be able to find new ways to appall me, and yet: Senate Approves Resolution Denouncing MoveOn.org Ad. Further stupidity:

Mr. Obama had voted minutes earlier in favor of an extremely similar resolution proposed by Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California.

Ms. Boxer’s proposal, which failed, called for the Senate to “strongly condemn all attacks on the honor, integrity and patriotism” of anyone in the United States armed forces.

This is one of those strange limit-cases of contemporary liberalism: it’s an important principle of liberal democracies that the civilian government has formal control the military, but only, apparently, on condition that it never disagrees with the military.