The Post-Partisan Emporium

"Brain-dead gestators are feminist, actually" The flip side of claiming only our minds make us human Mary Harrington Why shouldn’t we gestate human babies in the bodies of brain-dead women? Bioethicist Anna Smajdor poses this question in a  paper  published last November in the journal  Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics.  Smajdor suggests that provided - she is keen to emphasise - the brain-dead individual previously granted consent, their bodies should be available for “gestational donation”. Furthermore, procuring a baby in this way “should be an option for anyone who wishes to avoid the risks and burdens of gestating a foetus in their own body”. And, she suggests, the bodies of men might theoretically also be induced to gestate. This, we are to be reassured, would resolve feminist objections to a scenario that might otherwise be strongly redolent of every feminist worst nightmare: reducing women, quite literally, to our function as ‘gestators’. Smajdor is right t...

The unvaccinated knew what we didn't. Some of them said too little. Most said nothing at all. A lot of blood is now on their hands. As the world struggles to come to terms with the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, one question that continues to surface is why the unvaccinated didn't do more to warn us about the potential dangers of being injected. While well intending citizens lined up, did the right thing, and received their COVID19 vaccinations -- now seeming to do more harm than good -- their unvaccinated friends stood by and let them do it. Some of them said too little. Some said nothing at all. Even though they knew what we didn't. Our blood is now on their hands. Those are strong words. But the unvaccinated had access to important information about the potential side effects of vaccines. They knew about the risks of severe allergic reactions, blood clots, and other serious health complications. They knew that vaccines did not immunize us. They knew it was...

Is Transgender Surgery the New Lobotomy? By Simon Webb Lotus Eaters Photo  by RODNAE Productions Since the end of the Second World War, there have been several fads for unnecessary, and sometimes even harmful, surgery. One remembers the medical enthusiasm for the circumcision of newborn babies in the late 1940s and the large number of tonsillectomies performed in the 1950s. Prefrontal lobotomies were also popular at around that time, although all three operations have now fallen out of favour. In recent years, another type of surgery has enjoyed something of vogue: the amputation of healthy body parts, so that the patient’s physical appearance more closely matches the mental image they have of it. Such procedures were at one time known as ‘sex-change operations’, but today, we usually refer to it as ‘transgender surgery’. For those who are not part of this fashionable movement for what is really an extreme form of cosmetic surgery, there seems something slightly bizarre about the w...

They have oligarchs. We have socially responsible entrepreneurs. Riley Waggman Thomas Röper’s “war of the systems” seems a bit fishy The world’s benevolent captains of industry gathered in the Swiss Alps last week to discuss tax-extraction schemes and other sustainable ways to make life intolerable. All the famous space lizards were in attendance, except for the Russian ones, who were blacklisted by the World Economic Forum last April. As expected, Thomas Röper, curator of German-language Anti-Spiegel,  announced  that Russia’s exclusion from SchwabCon 2023 was ultimate proof that Moscow  “opposed the West’s plans with all [its] might.” “The WEF meeting in Davos shows the front line in the war of the systems,”  Röper wrote. What are these two distinct systems, purportedly locked in mortal combat? The western system is an oligarchy controlled by unscrupulous, conniving fat cats; in sharp contrast, the Russian system is run by a sovereign government that doesn’t allow ...