New Dumbass of the Day Winner

Anti-choice advocate Jill Stanek wrote a post so amazingly stupid that I had to strip the award away from David Rivera. Stanek reports that Chinese citizens (literally) eat their babies. Stanek links to a Epoch Times article.

The Next Magazine, a weekly publication from Hong Kong, reported that infant corpses and fetuses have become the newest supplements for health and beauty in China. Not only is the placenta considered a beauty remedy, but also aborted fetuses are much sought after delicacies. In Guangdong, gourmet body parts are in high demand and can even be purchased through hospitals. The magazine's investigations into this form of cannibalism took them to Liaoning province.

According to The Next Magazine, during a banquet hosted by a Taiwanese businessman, a servant Ms Liu from Liaoning province on the mainland inadvertently revealed the habit of eating infants/fetuses in Liaoning province and her intention to return for the supplement due to health concerns. The Taiwanese women present were horrified.

The Chinese eating their babies is an old urban myth.

The claim that baby or fetus eating is an accepted practice in China (or Thailand, or Japan, or Korea, or Israel, as other variants of this same rumor claim) is more or less a modernized version of an ancient legend known as "Blood Libel." It has typically taken the form of one culture accusing another (or a subculture) of ritually sacrificing infants and in some cases eating them. The Greeks accused the Jews of it, the Romans accused the Christians, Christians accused the Jews again, and so on throughout history.

Folklorists say the driving forces behind such legends are ignorance, xenophobia (fear of other peoples and creeds) and/or one culture projecting upon another its misgivings about unsettling moral trends at home. One might speculate in the present case, for example, that the spread of horror stories in the West about the crass use of fetuses as food in Asia is fueled by qualms about the practice of abortion and the so-called "cannibalization" of fetal tissue for scientific research in our own countries. There are few more emotionally charged issues in modern life.

Jill Filipovic takes Stanek to task for posting such shit as factual information.

Interestingly, Stanek has argued that the pro-life movement is not racist. I’m sure she’d take issue with any accusation of racism here. But I’m going to do it anyway: This is a racist myth. Jill, you are perpetuating it. I’m hoping that you’re perpetuating it because of your fantastic combination of ignorance and zealotry, but I don’t have that kind of faith in you. Unless you’re a complete moron — which you may actually be — I have a hard time believing that you don’t know the history of these kinds of myths. I have a hard time believing that you’re gullible enough to believe this.

The wingnut blogosphere eats up posts like Stanek's. These are the same people that firmly believe John Kerry shot himself. That has become a debunked urban legend. Conservative bloggers do not let facts get in the way of making an argument. These blog posts will never win the mainstream public over. They will be too busy laughing their collective asses off at this nonsense.

Side note on Stanek: She was fired from the hospital she worked for and can no longer get a job in nursing. Telling anti-abortion activists to picket your own hospital and leaking documents is a good way to get shitcanned.

Stanek on Barack Obama: "I don't mean to minimize those killed by AIDS. The point is abortion and homosexuality are not just issues that have nothing to do with AIDS. They are related."

When does Stanek talk about AIDS when it doesn't help promote her social conservative views on homosexuality and abortion? Stank wrote a World Net Daily article titled 'Republican Party + homosexuals = anti-life.' Stanek wrote, "AIDS is a behaviorally transmitted virus, most often in the U.S. by promiscuous homosexual sex." This is the same thinking that believes the African AIDS epidemic is because of gay tribal men.

Congratulations, Jill Stanek. You are the Dumbass of the Day.