TOM THE DANCING BUG: In which the President is forced to get "Pro-Life"

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Anonymous

Gotta love Obama’s Hollingsworth Hound pose in the last panel!

Should have had Ahmed Matar in the corner saying “Gotcha!”
ill lich

Well Mister44, are you saying the opposite, that it’s OK for one man to order the killing of many thousands of other people’s kids?
- chgoliz
  
  Well of course it’s OK…because it’s a MAN doing the killing, youbetcha.
  
  I was particularly impressed with the very sensible suggestion that a president have to spend some time looking at pictures of the “collateral damage” that occurs in wartime while making the decision. Looking at a blob of tissue a few millimeters across should not cause the level of soul-searching as putting actual children in danger of being killed.
  - bruhinb
    
    “I’ve made myself feel every death, see every innocent face I have murdered to save humanity.”
    
    Riiiight!
Unmutual

One of your best, Ruben!
Chris Spurgeon

I’m a life-long liberal, in favor of legal and easy-to-obtain abortions, and opposed to any President having the unilateral ability to commit US troops to large scale military engagement without Congress passing an act of war.

But I gotta say I just don’t care for Tom the Dancing Bug at all. If it went away from BoingBoing I wouldn’t miss it.
- donniebnyc
  
  For shame, BoingBoing, for shame!
  
  How dare you engage in targeted, subliminal, hypno mind control forcing people like poor Chris to repeatedly click on things they just don’t care for at all.
  
  Have you no decency?
- SamSam
  
  And I’m glad you gave such a rational, cogent explanation of why you think so.
- EeyoreX
  
  I gotta say I just don’t care for Chris Spurgeon’s comments at all. If they went away from BoingBoing I wouldn’t miss them.
  - Chris Spurgeon
    
    Heh.
thatbob

Whereas I *love* Tom the Dancing Bug, and would not not miss your self-important opinions of it if *they* went away from BoingBoing! Diversity!
knoxblox

On wars and kids:

I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if Sasha and Malia are quite aware that children as well as other people die during wars, and remind Barack about it constantly.

As for Barbara and Jenna, I don’t know. Maybe they were too busy partying to worry enough about it, so George didn’t get any good advice.
Anonymous

Parents who give up their kids for adoption have the same levels of grief and suicide as people whose kids die. Obviously, this should still be an option for people who want to do it, but its not a reasonable thing for anti-choice people to demand of anyone.
- Anonymous
  
  There are lots and lots of older children in foster care that need families. If they really cared about children they’d care about the ones that aren’t cute babies or perfect healthy white kids.
Anonymous

Weird, that looked like Nixon to me at first.
didymos

*ahem*

“…the diametrically-opposed orbit of which”. Earth is a thing, not a person.
- Anonymous
  
  The use of “whose” with both persons and non-persons has a well-established history, including the lyrics of our own national anthem (“whose broad stripes and bright stars”).
- morkl
  
  Well, Counter-Earth may be!
Knight

Ruben, I’m confused. Does the Principle of Double Effect not apply on Counter-Earth, or have they just not discovered it?

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/
wil9000

Another excellent one, Reuben!

And by the way, whenever I’m talking with a “pro-life” person, I like to ask them their opinion of contraception. If they are anti-abortion and anti-contraception, I can at least meet them there, as their “stop abortions in any way possible” allows for preventing conception in the first place. But if they are opposed to any contraception, they’re not really anti-abortion, they’re just anti-sex, and I’ll point that out to them. It never goes well.
- IronEdithKidd
  
  I’m curious, what kind of reaction are you getting after you tell these pro-life types that they’re anti-sex?
- Anonymous
  
  not even ‘anti-sex’… most of them just seem to be ‘pro-fetus’ because it’s socially acceptable… but once the little fetus is born, he better be getting a job and supporting himself pretty quickly or these types will quickly be against him again… no entitlements! no welfare! no tax cuts! no health care! he just better start pulling his weight around here after they worked so hard to make sure he was born!
  - Anonymous
    
    It just dawned on me. Why are folks so quick to protect a blob of parasitic cells, but once you’re born you’re on your own? Because once you’re born (and old enough to talk), you can speak for yourself. And if there’s something anti-choicers love more denying women the right to their own bodies, it’s putting words in people’s mouths.
Anonymous

Voluntary readers should not be forced to click on links we don’t want to read, nor read troll comments.
For that matter we should never have to think or RE-consider.
Keneke

TTDB is cool and topical and all, but why are they always posted here? Is the author someone’s best friend? Is there payola involved? I just feel…coerced to read it.

“Forget bananas. Look at this webcomic. Look at it.”
- travtastic
  
  They’re clearly labeled. Get over it.
- donniebnyc
  
  Please, please destroy your computer immediately!
  
  Hurry, do it now, and end the misery you suffer as you click on every link you see, coerced to do so by their presence on your screen.
  
  You poor bastard!
- SamSam
  
  True! Also, BoingBoing articles are cool and topical and all, but why are they always posted here? Are the bloggers someone’s best friend? Is there payola involved? I just feel…coerced to read it.
Anonymous

I go out of my way to interact with anti-abortion protestors. I figure if you’re out there with a sign shouting at passersby, you are inviting contact, eh?

I tell ‘em that I admire any person willing to go out and take action on their beliefs, and interact with the public, and that I have a couple of questions to put to all of them.

My first question is to ask how many of them have adopted children – raise your hands folks! – and then I ask the folks who adopted due to infertility to drop their hands.

Then I speechify at them, because they are hypocrites who aren’t really prepared to change anything. If they wanted to change things, they’d be at home making sandwiches for their huge adopted families, not posing with badly spelled signs. I explain to them how adoption agencies work in our state, and the financial assistance available to adoptive parents, and what they can expect when they sign up for adoption, and what Jesus had to say about people who parade their faith in the marketplace but do not act on it at home.

Eventually somebody runs away. Usually me, pursued by furies, but sometimes them, pursued by the demons of shame.
Anonymous

Gilbert Gottfried is the counter-earth POTUS? How horrifying.
Anonymous

while most of these comments are arguing about the morality of abortion, i think a bit more salient point is: how the HELL can someone who’s pro-life simultaneously be pro-war? it’s madness.
- chgoliz
  
  No, it follows easily once you understand that the term “pro-life” is code and doesn’t actually mean they care about life.
Mujokan

Looks like you jerks killed that time traveler guy.
Anonymous

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. :)
Anonymous

What is so puzzling about the “Pro-Life” groups is that they also fight education about and provision of birth control. If birth control were readily available, had no social stigma and kids were well educated in their use, the number of un-wanted or unintended pregnancies goes down (and the number of abortions in kind).

If the goal was to reduce or elminate abortions, you would think they would be all for providing proper education and resources for women to avoid pregancy, but instead they are the same groups screaming for “abstinence only” sex education which is proven to increase unwanted preganancies.
jtegnell

Come on, Ruben, you can do a better Joe Biden than that!
Anonymous

Amen and I wish to God we were that planet and not this one. Stupid humans.
RebNachum

Cool shout out to EC wordballoonznfontz, yo.
Anonymous

Don’t hyphenate adverbial compounds when the adverb ends in “-ly.” Especially when you’re correcting other people’s grammar, and ESPECIALLY when you introduce that error into what you’re trying to correct!
Mister44

So the moral of the story is: it’s OK to kill kids if they’re your kids?
- travtastic
  
  We need to end this masturbation holocaust. Quintillions of tiny souls being snuffed out, every minute. :( :( :(
  - Nelson.C
    
    Well, you could try masturbating less often than once a minute. [/comedy_trombone]
    - travtastic
      
      You make it sound so easy.
  - benher
    
    I just killed a few million myself this morning in the shower. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s another civilization I must attend to.
- phosphorious
  
  “So the moral of the story is: it’s OK to kill kids if they’re your kids?”
  
  Yes. From a purely conservative/libertarian perspective you can do whatever the hell you want to your own kids.
  - Anonymous
    
    Not at all. From a purely libertarian perspective, ‘your’ kids are their own people, not your property. You have an obligation to do right by them, including by respecting their autonomy and cultivating in them an expectation of respect.
- Anonymous
  
  There’s always one, isn’t there? *facepalms*
- Faustus
  
  Hahahahahahaha! Nice one, and eating eggs is killing chickens.
  - Evan
    
    Eating eggs is killing chickens, but nobody cares, because we eat chickens anyways. Sometimes I wonder if my life would be easier if I could justify anything with dumb and illogical arguments like you just did…
    - quicksand
      
      Eating chickens is also killing chickens.
      - knoxblox
        
        Erm…unless the chicken is already dead. I usually like my chickens dead before I bite into them.
- Anonymous
  
  “So the moral of the story is: it’s OK to kill kids if they’re your kids?”
  
  That word “kids,” I don’t think it means what you think it means.
Old Mary

I have slept with perhaps 100 men in my lifetime and only TWO of them asked “are you using birth control” before we did it. So I think only those two guys (and one was just in high school, strangely enough) have the right to say I can have an abortion or not. Everyone else, you gave up your say in the matter!
Anonymous

@Mister44:

Good thing we live on Earth Prime, where blastocysts are regarded as fully functioning people, but it’s OK to kill actual children if they’re brown and live in another country.
jon_anon

Reply to Mister44 (even though obvious troll is obvious): that’s what you’re gonna go with, that a woman exercising control over her body is equivalent to an army bombing actual people – living breathing kids who’ve experienced stuff and dreamed of the future? No one likes abortion, but forcing a woman to bring a pregnancy to term when it might be damaging to her health, or psychological well being, definitely does not put you on the same side of the moral equation as someone trying to prevent needless civilian deaths in war (again, that’s deaths of actual, independent fully-formed human beings, not potential humans). Framing the most difficult, painful choice a parent might ever have to make as “killing your own kids” is just indicative of your seriously arrested development and inability to see nuance in the world.
- quicksand
  
  “No one likes abortion”
  
  Why not?
  
  anon #22: “My first question is to ask how many of them have adopted children”
  
  It’s actually very hard to adopt kids these days. Adopters outnumber adoptees.
  - Anonymous
    
    As I understand it, potential adopters outnumber white newborns. A wait for a non-white newborn can be brief or nonexistant- a family member of ours adopted two mixed race children, and my own family adopted a special needs four year old. As I understand it many non-white and non-newborn children wait years for a family to adopt them, if they are adopted at all. And if having a child was not the #1 predictor of a woman falling into poverty, I imagine there would be far fewer abortions.
  - Anonymous
    
    Actually, adopters only out-number adoptees IF you restrict the count of adoptees to infant children without disabilities. Once you include the millions of school-age and older children languishing in permanent foster care and all of the special-needs infants, adoptees become the majority. It’s just that far too many adopters only want “perfect” and “undamaged” children (also, sadly, many of them are not interested in children of color).
  - CeeN
    
    At any given time, there are at least 100,000 children (conservative number based on the data available for previous years) awaiting adoption–and that’s just in the US. There is no shortage of children, though if you want a very young child then you may encounter some sort of shortage.
    - quicksand
      
      I take your figures at face value, but I’ve known people who had a lot of problems trying to find a kid to adopt.
      Maybe most of those 100,000 are older children, perhaps.
      - Ito Kagehisa
        
        @quicksand, I am an adoptive parent and have considerable experience with the subject.
        
        The people you met who “had trouble” finding an adoptive child were most likely not willing to build a family based on what was good for a child, but rather were shopping for an accessory to their own lifestyle. That misunderstanding of the purpose of adoption is the only thing (other than abject poverty or severe mental illness) that will make it difficult for the average person to find a child to adopt.
        
        When I made my first visit to an adoption agency 15 years ago, the tired, frazzled woman at the front desk looked me up and down, and said “We don’t have any healthy white babies”.
        
        I passed the test, but I suspect your aquaintances did not. There are thousands of children in care that need parents, and the workers do not lightly turn away potential parents. But there’s something fundamentally wrong with people who see adoption agencies as places where they can shop around and pick the “best” infant, and the workers don’t like to entrust any child to those people.
        
        @jtegnell, yeah, no lie! Joe didn’t look like that even before all the surgery and hair transplants.
    - Chris Hansen
      
      Well, I’m out of a job.
- Anonymous
  
  Thank you jon_anon for posting almost exactly what I was thinking in such a concise and thoughtful manner.The troll would only revel in any bombastic or vitriolic feedback anyway.
- El Zilcho
  
  Fuckin’ ay.
Anonymous

I only come to this website for recipes and frankly am disappointed every damn day. And I’ve been coming here for years!!!

When I first saw the comic, I thought it was Bush. Am I the only one? And since we’re sharing how we deal with the lifers…sometimes I tell them that if my mom hadn’t had an abortion, I wouldn’t be here. It was her first marriage, she was young, and things weren’t going well. I really don’t think she would have had me 15 years later if she had seen that pregnancy through.

Of course, gawd could have ended her first pregnancy in a miscarriage since he has absolutely no problem killing things – and then maybe I would still be here. So who knows. Now, where are the damn recipes!!!
Anonymous

Remember, half formed fetuses have more value than kids and adults. The sooner they are born the sooner they talk back and fornicate!
lrivers

Protecting all children is our most important duty. Until theyâ€™re born, at which point, theyâ€™re on their own, just as Jesus would want it.

TOM THE DANCING BUG: In which the President is forced to get "Pro-Life"

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