Doritos Commercial Features an Ultrasound of a Baby, and the Left Loses Their Minds

Yup.

Twitchy rounded up some of the most hysterical histrionics.

This one from NARAL:

Apparently there was also some ad about babies conceived on Super Bowl day. I didn't see it. But NARAL of Ohio did, and they took the opportunity to agitate for IUDs.

These organizations are ostensibly pro-"choice," but they seem hostile to the idea that sometimes people actually want to have children.

There isn't even the "Kids are great, but make sure you want to have 'em when you have sex" sort of caveat.

They're just assuming that everyone should hate children, childbirth, and the continuation of the Race of Man, because obviously.

There's a creepy book called the Conspiracy Against The Human Race by Thomas Ligotti (the horror writer/dark fantasist that True Detective ripped off). He takes the position of extreme philosophical pessimism: That existence is painful and unbearable, and that the proper position towards it is deliberate human self-extinction -- either suicide, or, less dramatically, simply no longer having children.*

The title of his book is a near-acronym for "Cathar." The Cathar heresy is claimed to have posited that we live in the devil's world and that begetting children into it was therefore sinful.

NARAL seems to be objectively pro-Cathar. The idea of "choice" seems written out of their agitation completely; they seem on Ligotti's self-extinction side of things.

Old ideas never die; they just start receiving federal funding.

* The book is nevertheless fascinating for exploring, with apparent seriousness (?), such an outlandish, almost science-fiction idea. It's not persuasive, but it is compelling.

I'm not sure if he means it all seriously. I think he might have had a weird idea in mind: That he would write the world's first non-fiction horror novel. That is, all of the stuff in his book is "real," in the sense that he's dredged up actual quotes and premises from little-known pessimistic philosophers.

His goal, I think, is to construct a cosmological horror novel not from Lovecraft's mighty beings but from real (if little-credited) philosophical ideas.

Anyway, interesting. Very strange.

Update: Commenters are warning me that we don't know what the Cathars actually believed, and the records of their beliefs are provided by their enemies, who I believe included the Inquisition.

So let me walk that back and say that popularly, it is imagined that this is what the Cathars believed, and that Ligotti's title cannot be coincidence.

posted by Ace at 04:26 PM

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