Spreadin’ Love 435

~ Laura

Kate Harding rants about Peter Beinart's call to put a mom on the Supreme Court.

Jillian Michaels, the trainer from The Biggest Loser, pissed off everyone by saying that she didn't want to wreck her body with pregnancy and that she wanted to adopt in order to rescue a kid. I can't believe that I just posted links to this. I so honestly don't give a shit what Jillian Michaels says, but it just keeps showing up in my Google Reader. Boobquake? Also, a hot topic. Also, don't give a shit.

Let's see if I find something link-worthy later today. I'm walking away from the crap storm that is the Internet.

Published by Laura

29 thoughts on “Spreadin’ Love 435”

  1. Why do all these Facebook “movements” involve women doing ridiculous things involving their breasts. (Announcing the color of one’s bra to raise breast cancer awareness? Please!)

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  3. Didn’t the earthquake in Taiwan provide at least some evidence that the “Iranian” theory of earthquakes might have hit on something that plate tectonics missed?

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  5. what amazes me about the Jillian Michaels thing is that NO ONE is calling her out on the “rescuing a kid” deal. That kind of thinking, in progressive adoption circles, is really OUT, like 10 year OUT.
    You don’t rescue a kid, they aren’t a possession or a pet. When you adopt them, you are wanting to parent a child, every kid deserves parents, period.

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  6. I almost sent you the Jillian Michaels link. Haha! The thing is, I actually sympathize with her “I don’t want to do that to my body” stance. I had a couple of people say that to me (luckily after I’d already given birth) and I’m like, yeah, it does screw up your body, or at least changes it. And if you can’t handle the changes to your body, then you certainly can’t handle the changes to your life. Which makes her adoption thing problematic.

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  7. Seems like Jillian Michaels buys into two pretty pervasive cultural ideas: The best body is a tight, unmarked, “youthful” body; and adoption rescues a child. On balance, the adoption assumptions are MUCH MUCH worse.

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  8. “Seems like Jillian Michaels buys into two pretty pervasive cultural ideas: The best body is a tight, unmarked, “youthful” body; and adoption rescues a child. On balance, the adoption assumptions are MUCH MUCH worse.”
    Not seeing it. An adoptive home would have to be pretty bad to be worse than growing up in an orphanage in a country where once you age out of the orphanage, you are immediately homeless and have your choice of high-risk careers in prostitution and street crime, followed by stints in prison and an early death by violence or disease (drug resistant TB, etc.).

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  11. Amy P, google around a little. Adopting because you want to rescue a kid is a really bad reason. How would you want to be that kid? No one should have to feel grateful to her parents. Plus, no parent should adopt with the expectation that the kid is going to thank her. Adoption happens because a child lost her first parents. The child can have a whole range of feelings about that experience, but for the adoptive parents to feel like they’ve rescued the child? Just. Not. Good.
    We started to look at adoption when we weren’t having any luck with infertility treatments, and “set aside your ideas about adoption as rescue” was pretty high on the checklist. You might want to take a look at a book like “Twenty Things Adopted Kids with their Adoptive Parents Knew.”

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  12. I take it you went for the herbal tea, MH?
    My guess is the real difference is I’m angry about fewer things, not less angry.

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  13. I answered I was not at all angry to every one of the questions, except one, to which I gave a score of two. That gave me a score of 22. I think these quizzes are silly.

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  14. Took a sip myself. Iced, with plenty of sugar. Just as God intended tea to be.
    Semi-seriously, though, the things in public life that make me cross aren’t on the TP agenda. Though I suppose things like torture, spying on Americans and erosion of civil liberties could fall under “government intrusion”, so I marked myself mad about that. Otherwise, meh; it’s a typical Republican agenda.

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  15. I answered I was not at all angry to every one of the questions, except one…
    You haven’t been reading enough newspaper articles where people with a yearly salary greater than your lifetime earnings complain about how things are unfair to them and where people with 4,000 square-foot homes make like they are Oliver Twist and nobody will give them any gruel.

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  16. Otherwise, meh; it’s a typical Republican agenda.
    Much of it is, but the big business part isn’t there. Which is nice, if it lasts.
    Also, during my brief period of living in the South, I quickly learned to say “unsweet tea.” If you don’t, you’ll start to think of Coke as a sugar-free.

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  17. Jody,
    To add a bit more nuance, while I think that a lot of adoptions are objectively rescues (insofar as they save a child from neglect, homelessness, prostitution, crime, prison, disease, and premature death), I think you are correct on the subjective side of it. A parent who meditates too much on ingratitude or speaks too freely along the lines of “After all I’ve done for you…” is being a bad parent, even if they are factually correct.

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  18. “I answered I was not at all angry to every one of the questions, except one…”
    Oh, I didn’t take the poll seriously. The poll questions were all worded in a way that made it impossible for me to answer. For example, “*Obama’s* conduct of the war in Afghanistan” and, no chance of saying that I’m ecstatic about the passage of the health care plan.
    I’ve come to believe that most polls are unbelievable, that they are too manipulated by the form and tenor of the questions. That in the end, all you can use to assess what people believe is to assess what they do, the decisions they actually make. So, voting is meaningful, but saying that you’re really mad at congress, isn’t.

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  19. That in the end, all you can use to assess what people believe is to assess what they do, the decisions they actually make.
    But that has a weakness also in that what somebody does is determined by an interaction of that person and the situation in which they acted. The reading of what is “person” (i.e. what they believe) and what is determined by the situation in which the person finds themselves is perhaps more difficult to untangle than a neutral question wording in a survey.

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  20. people with a yearly salary greater than your lifetime earnings complain
    “Dans ce pay-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un financier pour encourager les autres.” As I have been saying for some time.

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  21. Sure. I think the bailout would have had many fewer problems if it were coupled with just a small bit of defenestration.

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  22. Amy P: to add even more nuance, being adopted does NOT equal a guarantee that a child will never experience crime, disease, prison or neglect. Adoptive parents are not saints, and do not act as such, and portraying them as rescuers puts them on an unrealistic pedestal and helps no one.

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  23. Ann Althouse finally has a thread on the Beinart piece about how there ought to be a mom on the Supreme Court. In the thread, The Thin Man says:
    “But wait, wouldn’t it be nice to have a jurist who could make everyone baloney sandwiches when they get hungry? And if it’s raining outside, who’s going to make sure they all put on galoshes?”
    I agree with MH on the difficulty of analyzing intention based on action. Also, some things are just plain hard. You can be a fantastic baseball player and only bat .333. (Not that I know anything about baseball.) Not even touching on controversial issues, if you have good theory as a parent and yet only stick to your theory in 1 out of 3 sticky spots, you are still doing an amazing job.

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  24. “Amy P: to add even more nuance, being adopted does NOT equal a guarantee that a child will never experience crime, disease, prison or neglect.”
    Right. But if the circumstances are at all favorable (no major mental illness on either side, etc.), you could radically improve the odds. The thing is, if an adoption doesn’t give a chance of a radical improvement in circumstances, I find it difficult to justify removing a child from their friends, their native language, their culture, the food they’re used to, and their native country.
    I was a occasional visitor to an orphanage outside St. Petersburg in 1994 (I used to tag along with some Russian Baptist girls who taught a Sunday school class). It was way out in the countryside (a village woman we used to visit had no running water and I recall seeing a horse-drawn wagon hauling milk). The physical conditions were very plain but adequate, and the kids were sweet and eager to make friends and practice English. If it was just a question of childhood, I don’t know that I could justify taking those kids away from everything that they have ever known, but they can’t live at the orphanage their whole lives. Eventually they age out and go out into a (literally) harsh, cold world that has no place for them and where even middle class families with education, jobs, an apartment, friends, relatives and connections struggle.

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  25. I think the bailout would have had many fewer problems if it were coupled with just a small bit of defenestration.
    This applies to many things beyond bailouts.

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  26. This applies to many things beyond bailouts.
    Yes. According to the booklet “Defenestration and You,” it also works for religious disputes, those who are insufficiently amenable to communist rule, and people who take your parking spot.

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  29. The personal loans seem to be useful for people, which are willing to ground their business. As a fact, it is very comfortable to get a short term loan.

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