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Those who believe in a woman’s right to control her own reproduction are rightly afraid of those who believe that fetuses deserve the same legal protection as born children, but these are not the only enemies of choice. More insidious is the opposition from “pseudo-choicers” who believe abortion should be available - when they think it’s appropriate.

Just as Henry Ford reputedly offered his customers “any colour you want, as long as it’s black”, these “pseudo-choicers” support a woman’s right to choose, provided she makes a choice of which they approve. They agree that abortion is not murder, and they agree that the decision to end a pregnancy can be difficult - so difficult, in fact, that a foolish, hormonal woman cannot be trusted to make it alone.

My ex-boyfriend was a willing, even eager partner in the act that led to my baby’s conception, but afterwards began to have second thoughts, especially given that the burden of supporting me and the baby would fall mainly upon him. When the pregnancy was confirmed, after the first shock had worn off, he suggested that “now you know you can get pregnant, have an abortion and try again when it’s more convenient.”

I didn’t even consider abortion, because I very much wanted to be pregnant, but just in case this didn’t seem like sufficient reason, I marshalled others. He thought becoming pregnant was easy, but I’d tried and failed several times before I met him. And I didn’t know how an abortion might affect my chances of becoming pregnant in future. Most importantly, I had this chance to have a child, and I didn’t find convenience a compelling reason to throw it away.

I explained my reasons to him without making any impression. For him, there are two classes of women: those who can become pregnant easily and those who experience more difficulty. My pregnancy proved that I fitted into the first category: case closed. When I tried to argue, he became impatient. “I’m just trying to be rational,” he said.

The implication was that I was being irrational because my analysis led to a different result than his. Rationality doesn’t work that way: the conclusion depends on the premises. His disinclination to pay child support was no more rational than my disinclination to undergo surgery I didn’t feel I needed, but he couldn’t see that. His feelings were perfectly rational; mine were irrational, emotional and (dare I say it?) hysterical.

Luckily he had no power to compel me to accept his definition of rationality. If I’d been less certain of my own wishes, he might have been able to persuade or coerce me, but all he managed to do was convince me that for all his fine words about supporting my choice before we knew whether I was pregnant, he didn’t believe the choice was mine to make. That realisation marked the beginning of the end of our relationship.

If the right to choose means anything at all, it has to include the right to make a choice that is incomprehensible to others. A woman’s decision to end or continue a pregnancy doesn’t need to make sense to anyone other than her; she is often the only person with all the information - knowledge of her own personality and wishes - necessary to understand it.

Believing that affluent women in stable relationships should choose pregnancy and single women on benefits should choose abortion is not pro-choice. It is paternalism, with a hefty dose of classism and more than a nod in the direction of eugenics. Believing that a woman’s decision is not or should not be the final word in the debate is anti-choice, whether it’s expressed in terms of rationality or in terms of the rights of the fetus.

Rationality, to me, suggests that since the woman is the one who must live with the consequences of her decision, she should be the one to make that decision without having her competence called into question. The line between offering advice and passing judgement may be narrow at times, but no-one on the outside can tell which decision is the right one. Those who would tell a woman that her choice is wrong, selfish or irrational are not, whatever else they may be, pro-choice.

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This post was removed by request of the author.

The “Recently Commented Posts” list has been restored to the sidebar.

While reading about the gay teenagers recently hanged in Iran (see previous post), I came across the story of Ateqeh Rajabi, a sixteen year old girl executed last August for “acts incompatible with chastity” - and, apparently, for talking back to a judge. The man she committed the “acts incompatible” with, in contrast, was sentenced to 100 lashes. From the Telegraph:

So what was the judge (one Haji Rezaie) doing sentencing an “unchaste” 16-year-old to hang? He said that she had a “sharp tongue” and had “undressed in court”.

It seems that all she did was to take off her headscarf and insist that she was the victim of an older man’s advances: but even if she had stripped naked and called the judge a fat ignorant bastard, those actions would hardly merit death, even under Islamic law. Nevertheless, the judge was so outraged that he decided he would personally put the noose round the child’s neck.

Note, however, that this was not a lone act by an isolated judge; the Iranian Supreme Court approved of Rajabi’s execution before it took place.

Frontpage Magazine published a symposium about Ateqeh Rajabi’s death. One of the experts interviewed was Donna M. Hughes, a women’s studies professor and an expert on international abuses of women’s rights, who argues that “misogyny is central to Islamic fascist ideology, just as anti-Semitism was central to Nazism.” Here’s Ms. Hughes’ account of the execution:

Rajabi talked back to the judge, reportedly insulted him and said that the real perpetrators of moral corruption should be punished not the victims. That sounds like an accusation to me and possibly a threat. Does the judge know who these real perpetrators are that she referred to? We know that judges and other officials have been caught running prostitution rings. In her outrage at the unfairness of the charges against her, one account said she “undressed in court,” although according to Alasdair Palmer in The Sunday Telegraph (August 29, 2004), she only took off her headscarf.

To us in the West, that seems like such a small act of defiance, but to the Islamic fascists, it is a threat to their entire ideology and system of social control. A woman or girl pulling off a headscarf is a challenge to the whole theocratic terrorist state. If a girl is allowed to get away with it, the whole system will start to crumble.

Some news stories have said that Rajabi was mentally ill. She doesn’t sound mentally ill to me. She sounds furious and tragically sane and intelligent enough to see through the corruption and injustice of the insane mullahs’ system. She was foolishly courageous enough to confront a perpetrator of the misogynous system.

Haji Rezaii, the sadistic judge, chose to personally take part in snuffing out her life. He personally put the noose around Rajabi’s neck and gave the signal for the crane to hoist her body into the air.

Afterwards, Rezaii said that his real reason for executing her was her “sharp tongue.” In truth, her real crime was speaking truth to power.

The entire Frontpage symposium is worth reading - the most interesting article about Iran I’ve read in quite a while. One of the three experts they interviewed is a Freudian psychoanalyst with a (to my mind) dubious theory blaming Iranian misogyny on over-closeness to mothers; but the other two experts, Ms. Hughes and Iranian expatriot activist Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi, are fascinating.

I can’t even think of anything to say. From OutRage!:

Two gay teenagers were publicly executed in Iran on 19 July 2005 for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality. […]

Iran enforces Islamic Sharia law, which dictates the death penalty for gay sex.

One youth was aged 18 and the other was a minor under the age of 18. They were only identified by their initials, M.A. and A.M.

They admitted to having gay sex (probably under torture) but claimed in their defence that most young boys had sex with each other and that they were not aware that homosexuality was punishable by death.

Prior to their execution, the teenagers were held in prison for 14 months and severely beaten with 228 lashes.

Their length of detention suggests that they committed the so-called offences more than a year earlier, when they were possibly around the age of 16.

Under the Iranian penal code, girls as young as nine and boys as young as 15 can be hanged.

Three other young gay Iranians are being hunted by the police, but they have gone into hiding and cannot be found. If caught, they will also face execution.

Direland has the best article on this I’ve read. This atrocity has been getting more attention than previous ridiculous Iranian execution of teens, possibly because the photos (which you can see at Direland) are so vivid.

(Nothing in this post is written by me; each of the following paragraphs is quoted from a longer essay, which it is linked to).

• Pinko Feminist Hellcat wrote: I am tired of looking for the middle ground, which has nothing but quicksand. I am tired of being reasonable, since in this political climate, being reasonable means elevate the fetus and ignore the woman. Being reasonable gets women who want an abortion shamed and blamed. Being reasonable gets the peanut gallery to examine your situation, pass judgement on you, and decide if you made a worthwhile decision.
• Jack Balkin writes: Siegel argues that exemptions in abortion statutes like those in Roe and Doe demonstrate, often in quite telling ways, that abortion restrictions are deeply tied to stereotypical views about the sexes and about the duties of women: “Whatever respect for unborn life abortion laws express,” Siegel notes, “state criminal laws have never valued unborn life in the way they value born life.” Instead, states “have used the criminal law to coerce and intimidate women into performing the work of motherhood.” “Abortion laws do not treat women as murderers, but as mothers: citizens who exist for the purpose of rearing children; citizens who are expected to perform the work of parenting as dependents and nonparticipants in the citizenship activities in which men are engaged.”
• Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan wrote: The trouble with these particular developmental milestones is not just that they’re arbitrary. More troubling is the fact that none of them involves uniquely human characteristics–apart from the superficial matter of facial appearance. All animals respond to stimuli and move of their own volition. Large numbers are able to breathe. But that doesn’t stop us from slaughtering them by the billions. Reflexes and motion are not what make us human.

  Other animals have advantages over us–in speed, strength, endurance, climbing or burrowing skills, camouflage, sight or smell or hearing, mastery of the air or water. Our one great advantage, the secret of our success, is thought–characteristically human thought. We are able to think things through, imagine events yet to occur, figure things out. That’s how we invented agriculture and civilization. Thought is our blessing and our curse, and it makes us who we are.

• Richard Carrier wrote: There is even less to say about the rest of Roth’s arguments. “Every one of us has been a prenate at the beginning of our lifespan,” and every one of us was a sperm and an egg at the beginning of our conception, and every one of us will be a corpse when we are dead. What inbetween creates a person? The brain, and specifically a complex cerebral cortex. Even more specifically, the pattern or program adhering in that structure. Likewise, “The great social movements in history have been those which expanded the circle of human rights, drawing more and more human beings inside the circle. To exclude an entire class of human beings goes against the grain of progress,” is an entirely question-begging argument: for this to have any merit, she must assume a priori that she is right and I am wrong about when a human being exists. And we certainly would not want to extend her argument to the next logical stage: death. After all, that is a “class…to which we [will] all belong” and if we are going to expand the scope of human rights to all human bodies, then that will have to include corpses–and that means in the near future, when we can regenerate brains, death itself would become illegal. Something is amiss.

In Oregon, Measure 36 - the same-sex marriage ban - was, we were told, not about denying rights to lesbians and gays. It was about “protecting marriage.”

“Same-sex couples should seek marriage-like rights through another avenue, such as civil unions.”
“Oregon’s measure was written specifically not to address civil unions.”

–Tim Nashif, Oregon Family Council Director and an organizer of the Measure 36 campaign

By claiming not to be against civil unions, the organizers of the same-sex marriage ban demonstrated (or tried to demonstrate, anyway) that they weren’t actually opposed to legal rights for same-sex couples.

Now that same-sex marriage is banned in the Constitution and the legislature is considering Civil Unions, however, suddenly their claims have changed:

“We would be against any measure that takes all the benefits of marriage and then calls it something else. We don’t think Oregonians had that in mind when they passed Measure 36.”
“SB 1000 takes everything that marriage is and calls it civil unions.”
–Tim Nashif, Oregon Family Council Director

“Please understand there is no greater threat to marriage right now than civil unions.”
–Oregon Family Council Communications Director Nick Graham

Typical sleazy hate tactics - but you can bet that Oregon’s “liberal” press will let them get away with it. Track the Lies has more examples.

While the discussion begins about John Roberts, and his decidedly sketchy history of arguing to overturn Roe v. Wade, conservatives seem to be latching on to the non-answers Roberts gave to the senate when he was first nominated to the United States Court of Appeals - DC District to the brief he co-authored and asserted this:

We continue to believe that [Roe v. Wade] was wrongly decided and should be overruled. As more fully explained in our briefs, filed as amicus curiae, in Hodgson v. Minnesota, 110 S. Ct. 2926 (1990); Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 109 S. Ct. 3040 (1989); Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 476 U.S. 747 (1986); and City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, 462 U.S. 416 (1983), the Court’s conclusions in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion and that government has no compelling interest in protecting prenatal human life throughout pregnancy find no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution.

When asked for clarification by the Senate, his response was one of ambiguous non-transparency that could only be seen as a non-answer:

“Roe v. Wade is the settled law of the land…There is nothing in my personal views that would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying that precedent.”

The push now seems to be one where conservatives are chastising liberals for assuming his intentions would be to support the overturning of Roe v. Wade, because his early statements were made on behalf of the first Bush Administration as they framed their arguments for the Rust v. Sullivan case in 1991. While obviously there are a great many issues that need to be looked over thoroughly with regards to this new nominee to the SCOTUS, the definitive need for some transparency with regards to his regard for women’s reproductive rights needs to be addressed before he’s given a pass to the most powerful court system in the country, if not the world.

I did a lot of digging around after the nomination was announced, and all I could find that would give indication towards what his personal beliefs would be, if we are to be charitable and disregard his earlier brief that detailed why Roe v. Wade should be overturned, and came up with a few issues that seemed of particular import with regards to his personal beliefs.

- He’s considered a devout and faithful Catholic, which tends to imply he would agree with and support the Catholic stance of anti-choice on abortion.
- His wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, was vice-president of Feminists For Life, the notoriously anti-choice appropriators of the term ‘Feminism’ that support the banning of legalized abortions.

So what’s the bottom line here? Well, that still remains to be seen, and while as reports state John Roberts may well be a good person that is on some levels a friend to women, that he’s trustworthy to acknowledge the rights of women (and men) for reproductive autonomy and privacy in their family planning choices. So while it could have been worse, patience and transparency in the senatorial debates seem to be the only thing that will tell us by what margin.

I’m seeing a lot of comments such as this one on Media Girl:

But now, our last line of defense for Roe v. Wade before it’s inevitably overturned (Roberts has actually argued that Roe was “wrongly decided and should be overruled”) is the Senate.

Even if Roberts is confirmed (and let’s face it - he will be), that doesn’t make it inevitable that Roe and Casey will be overturned. Although it’s impossible to know for sure, with Roberts replacing O’Connor, there are probably four votes for overturning Roe: Roberts, Rehnquist, Thomas, and Scalia. That still leaves a five-vote majority against overturning Roe: Ginsberg, Kennedy, Breyer, Souter, and Stevens. Bush will have to replace one of those five with an anti-Roe vote before Roe can be overturned, and it’s not certain he’ll get a chance to do that.

I’m not saying that it’s a bad idea to plan for how to respond if Roe is overturned, but let’s not call it “inevitable” just yet.

However, even if Roe isn’t overturned, abortion rights can still be chipped away at. With Roberts on the court, the previously unconstitutional “Partial Birth” Abortion ban will probably become constitutional. But even after that happens, there will be further lawsuits to determine how the PBA ban is interpreted - pro-lifers will want to interpret it broadly to ban a lot of abortions. But even with a majority of the Court favoring a PBA ban, it’s not certain that a majority of the Court would accept a broad interpretation of the PBA ban. (In particular, I think it’s possible that Justice Kennedy, who would be the new swing vote, would balk at that.)

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Who is Karen Minnis, you ask?

She’s the Speaker of the House in Oregon. And she’s the main barrier standing in the way of Civil Unions for lesbians and gays in Oregon.

Basic Rights Oregon believes that they have the votes needed to pass a Civil Union bill in Oregon - but that can only happen if Karen Minnis allows SB1000, the Oregon Civil Union Bill, to be voted on. As the BRO Blog says:

Call Speaker Minnis now at 503-986-1200 and tell her:

• The people of Oregon ought to know where their representatives stand on SB 1000.
• Bring SB 1000 to an up or down vote on the House floor immediately.

It doesn’t matter if you’re an Oregonian or not - give Karen a call, and ask her (politely is more effective) to let the House vote on SB1000. And if you’re an Oregonian, BRO has some additional suggestions for you.

And if you’re a blogger, please consider linking to this post, or BRO’s post, ASAP.

I don’t do a lot of posts like this, because I want to save them for times when I really think calls can make a difference. Today is probably the essential day, and calling takes thirty seconds. Civil Unions aren’t the ultimate goal, but they can mean a hell of a lot - they can mean insurance, and hospital visitation, just for a start. Please call Karen today.

As many of you noticed, “Alas” was offline for about 16 hours, from late yesterday afternoon to early this morning. We’re back online now, obviously. The rest of this post is a detailed discussion of what went wrong and what I’m planning to do about it.

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I’m 23 weeks pregnant: almost two-thirds of the way through. So far, I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy a normal, complication-free pregnancy.

Which means that I suffered two weeks of feeling vaguely sick during every waking moment, unable to face any food apart from crackers and chopped apples. I vomited at the sight of blood for the first time in my life. I had days when exhaustion overwhelmed me and I couldn’t do anything but sleep. For the whole of the first trimester, hormones sent my emotions so far out of whack that a DIY show could reduce me to floods of tears.

I’ve given up or cut down on favourite foods and drinks that, although harmless to me could do untold damage to my baby. I had to take a vile-tasting liquid medicine for a recurring condition rather than the usual straightforward tablet, which contains an ingredient that could harm the baby.

My nipples became so tender that I had to wear a bra even in bed. By the time that had stopped, my breasts had grown large enough to make me uncomfortably self-conscious. A visit to the bank manager is now torture because my waistline has thickened so much that none of my smart clothes fit. I have to take exaggerated care whenever I lift anything that it doesn’t press against my stomach.

These are all minor niggles compared to the joy of knowing that I’m having the baby I always longed for. And when November comes and the oxytocin works its magic, none of them will bother me again. But it has had one effect on me: what patience I ever had with the argument that “if you don’t want the baby you can just put it up for adoption” has vanished forever.

Women who want an abortion don’t object to the fetus, they object to the pregnancy. If the technology existed to remove a fetus unharmed from its mother and transfer it into an artificial womb, with no more complications than an abortion presents, abortion would disappear. Putting the baby up for adoption doesn’t solve the problem: the woman is still forced to act as a life-support system for nine months.

I want this baby passionately, and I still wish it was possible for me to take a break from being pregnant every now and again. Just pop the baby into an artificial womb for a couple of hours and do my own thing without having to worry about how it might affect the baby. And if I feel like this with a wanted pregnancy, how much worse would a woman feel who became pregnant as a result of contraceptive failure and remains pregnant because she’s been denied access to abortion?

Pro-lifers often brush this question under the carpet. There’s no admission that pregnancy is a process, and one that uses up a woman’s physical and emotional resources, sometimes alarmingly. They treat pregnancy as a passive state, purely a question of not having an abortion.

That’s not how it is. I may not be consciously controlling the progress of this pregnancy, but I’m not waiting passively for my due date either. I’m not the same person, physically or emotionally, as I would have been had I not become pregnant. For me, those changes are worthwhile: a small price to pay for my baby. But to insist a woman accepts them against her will, despite being by her own admission not ready for motherhood, is neither fair nor reasonable.

Edit: When I said that artificial wombs would eliminate all need for abortion, I thought I was stating the majority pro-choice position. Turns out there’s a lot more to the question than I believed. For “disappear”, please read “be enormously reduced”.

While looking for something else, I came across this post on the right-wing blog Power Line, attacking a groundbreaking study of the minimum wage by economists David Card and Alan Krueger. From a summary of the study by John Schmitt (pdf link):

The study received widespread attention, not because its findings were unusual (most studies since the mid-1980s have found that moderate increases in the minimum wage have little or no impact on employments), but because its methodology was so careful and convincing. Card and Krueger surveyed 33 1 fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and 79 restaurants in eastern Pennsylvania in the two months before the April 1, 1992 increase. They then reinterviewed the same restaurants about eight months later. The study’s unique design allowed them to use the restaurants in eastern Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage did not increase, as a control group to gauge the response of the New Jersey restaurants.

By comparing changes in employment in the two states (a procedure they referred to as “differences-indifferences”), Card and Krueger were able to estimate the employment effects of the New Jersey increase. Using this approach, they found that the differences in employment growth between the two states were not statistically significant. They concluded, therefore, that the minimum-wage increase did not lower employment in New Jersey.

Tihs is important because the main argument against the minimum wage is that raising the minimum wage hurts low-income workers by raising unemployment among low-wage employers (such as fast food restaurants). If this isn’t true - if small increases in the minimum wage don’t actually hurt employment significantly - then the case against the minimum wage becomes much, much weaker.

(The minimum wage is also especially important to feminists because women are more likely to earn the minimum wage than men. Raising the minimum wage probably has the effect of reducing the wage gap between men and women, and also between some people of color and whites).

To refute Card and Krueger’s study, Power Line quotes a 1995 Reason Magazine article by Benjamin Zychler, which accuses Card and Krueger of using bad data:

Moreover, the Card/Krueger study turns out to have a major flaw: The survey data upon which it depends are lousy.

Suspicious of the Card/Krueger data and findings, the Employment Policies Institute [EPI] gathered the actual payroll records from the Burger King franchises in the Card/Krueger zip codes and compared them to franchises surveyed in those zip codes. The survey data were wildly inconsistent with the payroll records.[…]

So Neumark and Wascher [two right-wing economists working with EPI] reviewed the payroll employment data gathered by EPI. When they applied the payroll data to the same econometric model used by Card and Krueger, they got completely different results. The variation in employment changes declined markedly, and analysis of the new data yields an estimated 4.8-percent decline in New Jersey employment relative to the Pennsylvania sample as a result of the higher minimum wage. Where payroll data could be compared with survey data for specific restaurants, Neumark and Wascher also found numerous errors in the Card/ Krueger data. […]

In short, using the actual payroll data instead of the survey “guesstimates” effectively refutes the Card/Krueger findings yielded by the New Jersey/Pennsylvania “natural experiment.”

That seems pretty damning, doesn’t it? The problem is, Power Line has quoted an article which was written when the story was only halfway through. It turns out that there is “lousy data” here - but the lousy data wasn’t Card and Krueger’s.

The attack on Card and Krueger relies on payroll data gathered by EPI - an anti-minimum-wage think tank funded to a significant extent by the fast food industry. Even Neumark and Wascher had to admit that the EPI was not a neutral party. Normally this sort of problem is solved by transparency; researchers make their data and methods available to the public (or at least to other researchers) to prove that they haven’t cooked the data.

However, EPI has refused to do that. Essentially, the attack on Card and Krueger consists of a biased think tank saying “we have data that proves Card and Krueger are wrong. But it’s super-secret data that we won’t let anyone check, so you’ll just have to take our word for it.”

To get around the “super-secret data” problem, the economists the EPI was working with, Neumark and Wascher, gathered their own data. The results didn’t make the EPI’s secret data look good. From The American Prospect:

When Neumark and Wascher analyzed the Employment Policies Institute sample and their own sample separately, a funny thing happened. The slightly expanded Employment Policies Institute sample indicated that the minimum wage did have a significant negative impact on employment in New Jersey (at least in one of the two statistical tests). But Neumark and Wascher’s own data found no statistical difference in employment growth in the two states. Quite unintentionally, Neumark and Wascher had vindicated Card and Krueger.

Neumark and Wascher scrambled to explain their results. They maintained that the combined data provided the best basis for determining the employment effects. But their position was undermined by major differences in the two samples. The Employment Policies Institute restaurants showed much more uniform employment changes than those in the Neumark and Wascher sample. In fact, basic statistical tests demonstrated convincingly that the Neumark and Wascher sample showed so much more variation in employment changes across restaurants that it was highly unlikely that the two samples were chosen randomly from the same population of restaurants.

In response to the controversy, in 1997 the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics made relevant payroll data for New Jersey and Pennsylvania available to researchers. The BLS payroll data is the most authoritative data available; it cannot credibly be accused of being gathered in a biased manner, or of being a “guesstimate.” The results? Not surprisingly, the actual payroll data contradicted the “secret methodology” data right-wingers prefer; raising the minimum wage in New Jersey did not lead to decreased employment.

Furthermore, researchers were now able to examine BLS data from 1996 - when an increase in the national minimum wage caused the minimum wage to go up in Pennsylvania, but not in New Jersey (because NJ had already raised their minimum in 1992). Once again, the data showed no increase in unemployment in the state raising its minimum wage, compared to the state that didn’t.

In short, Power Line’s attempted refutation of Card and Krueger’s study is based on a fraud. The best evidence available shows that there are no significant effects on employment caused by reasonable increases in the minimum wage; and the only way the right has been able to refute this is by using data so embarrassing and dishonest that they don’t dare let other researchers examine it.

The right’s cooked “super secret” data aside, the best evidence available shows that low-wage workers benefit from raising the minimum wage. (Well, duh.)

This post was removed by request of the author.

This post was removed by request of the author.

Sometimes artists complain that creating is a lonely act, but does that always have to be the case? Not in our household! Here you see Sydney and Amp working side by side. Awwww….

In this picture, Amp is working on an illustration for a role-playing game created by Emily Care. It’s unclear what Sydney’s working on, but it involves a lot of scribbles.

Here, as you can see, Sydney offers Amp some constructive criticism.

Oh-oh - someone mentioned what artists get paid, and now they’re both pissed!

I just now finished reading the new Harry Potter novel, which I enjoyed quite a lot.

Here are some scattered thoughts. Don’t read on unless you don’t mind spoilers.

Edited to add: No, really, there are serious, serious, spoilers here - some very key plot points revealed. Don’t click unless you’ve read the novel or don’t mind spoilers at all.

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