WebbertubeSteaks: Links for Monday, 1/23/2012 January 23, 2012

Charlie Glickman – Open Relationships, Infidelity, and Cheating:

That’s the problem with Wilcox’s thinking. (Well, one of them. The fact that he’s pushing monogamy because “it’s better for women” should give anyone with an interest in gender equality pause.) He doesn’t understand that infidelity doesn’t mean that you have other sexual partners. It means that you’re not following the rules. If your rule is monogamy, then yes, having other partners is cheating. On the other hand, if your rule is “other partners are ok, but tell me first,” then as long as you follow the rule, you aren’t cheating. In effect, Wilcox is telling a basketball player that they’re cheating because they aren’t playing by the rules of soccer.

Mother Jones – The Way It Was:

One doctor's "awakening" is vividly described in The Worst of Times, a collection of interviews with women, cops, coroners, and practitioners from the illegal abortion era. In 1948, when this doctor was an intern in a Pittsburgh hospital, a woman was admitted with severe pelvic sepsis after a bad abortion. She was beautiful, married to someone important and wealthy, and already in renal failure. Over the next couple of days, despite heroic efforts to save her, a cascade of systemic catastrophes due to the overwhelming infection culminated with the small blood vessels bursting under her skin, bruises breaking out everywhere as if some invisible fist were punching her over and over, and she died. Being well-to-do didn't always save you. Her death was so horrible that it made him, he recalls, physically ill. He describes his anger, but says he didn't quite know with whom to be angry. It took him another 20 years to understand that it was not the abortionist who killed her—it was the legal system, the lawmakers who had forced her away from the medical community, who "…killed her just as surely as if they had held the catheter or the coat hanger or whatever. I'm still angry. It was all so unnecessary." In the same book, a man who assisted in autopsies in a big urban hospital, starting in the mid-1950s, describes the many deaths from botched abortions that he saw. "The deaths stopped overnight in 1973." He never saw another in the 18 years before he retired. "That," he says, "ought to tell people something about keeping abortion legal."

Note: This is long, brutal, and hard to read. It’s also a necessary reminder.

Friends Eat – You may soon be fired for being fat:

In Japan they call it the “metabolic syndrome”, or “metabo law,” for short; the term refers to a combination of health risks — stomach flab, high blood pressure and high cholesterol — all leading to cardiovascular disease and diabetes. “Nobody will want to be singled out as metabo,” Kimiko Shigeno, a company nurse, said of the campaign. “It’ll have the same effect as non-smoking campaigns where smokers are now looked at disapprovingly.” Japanese companies are penalized with fines if they don’t reduce the number of overweight employees. At Matsushita, which makes Panasonic products, the new law requires the company to measure the waistlines of not only its employees but also of their families and retirees, and they must get 10 percent of those deemed metabolic to lose weight by 2012, and 25 percent of them to lose weight by 2015.

Thinkprogress - Santorum To Rape Victims: ‘Make The Best Out Of A Bad Situation’:

SANTORUM: Well, you can make the argument that if she doesn’t have this baby, if she kills her child, that that, too, could ruin her life. And this is not an easy choice. I understand that. As horrible as the way that that son or daughter and son was created, it still is her child. And whether she has that child or doesn’t, it will always be her child. And she will always know that. And so to embrace her and to love her and to support her and get her through this very difficult time, I’ve always, you know, I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you. As you know, we have to, in lots of different aspects of our life. We have horrible things happen. I can’t think of anything more horrible. But, nevertheless, we have to make the best out of a bad situation.

Violet Blue – Pseudonyms on Google Plus? Wrong:

The change they made on this explosive issue is minor. The implementation makes it clear that this is “nickname” support and not true pseudonym support. A new field will be under your Profile/About page. This is where users can now enter a “nickname.” The nickname appears either in the middle of the user’s name (Example: Amy “IHaveAnAbusiveStalker” Jones) - or at the end in parenthesis - Amy Jones (IHaveAnAbusiveStalker). There is no option here for users to show only a pseudonym.