Feeding The Fish

Are you ready for news from liberated and democratic Afghanistan, our allies in the War on Terror and whose government British soldiers are dying to defend? You bet you are!

A young man, a student of journalism, is sentenced to death by an Islamic court for downloading a report from the internet. The sentence is then upheld by the country’s rulers. This is Afghanistan – not in Taliban times but six years after “liberation” and under the democratic rule of the West’s ally Hamid Karzai.

The fate of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh has led to domestic and international protests, and deepening concern about erosion of civil liberties in Afghanistan. He was accused of blasphemy after he downloaded a report from a Farsi website which stated that Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the oppression of women had misrepresented the views of the prophet Mohamed.

Mr Kambaksh, 23, distributed the tract to fellow students and teachers at Balkh University with the aim, he said, of provoking a debate on the matter. But a complaint was made against him and he was arrested, tried by religious judges without – say his friends and family – being allowed legal representation and sentenced to death.

Everyone repeat after me: realpolitik is awesome.

Well that seems like a good idea!

I can see a case for independent inspectorates for schools where there is a need for different methods of education because of the special needs of the pupils. It makes sense for schools for the deaf, blind or those with learning disabilities to be vetted independently of the rest of the school system, but I don’t see why this is the case for these faith schools. Children of Muslim or Christian parents do not inherently require a different approach to education in the same way deaf children do, there is no reason faith schools shouldn’t be judged by the same body and held to the same standard as non-faith schools.

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,
makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part;
you can’t even passively take part,
and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels,
upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.
And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it,
to the people who own it,
hat unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

- Mario Savio, University of California, Berkeley, December 3, 1964

44 Percent Vote Against Clinton - This was seriously the headline in the Washington Post about the Michigan Primary. An unbelievably blatant attempt to spin a win into a failure. Let’s highlight the words they want you to read:

About 44 percent of Michigan Democrats voted against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) yesterday in the party’s primary, with the vast majority of that group marking “uncommitted” on ballots that did not include any other major candidates.

So a vast majority of the minority who didn’t vote for Clinton voted uncommitted? A minority of the democratic voters prefered Anyone-But-Clinton to Clinton, now considering her two main competitors weren’t on the ballot that really is impressive (although you’d suspect that that would also have reduced Edwards and Obama voter turnout).

She won guys, you can say it’s meaningless because she was the only mainstream candidate standing but it only makes you look stupid to try to spin a lose out of it.

I’m switching between The revived News At Ten and the Ten O’clock News. First story on ITV? An exclusive about Princess Diana! Quality and relevent journalism right from the start. Turn over to BBC? John Simpson is broadcasting live from inside Zimbabwe (where, remember the BBC is banned) and in addition to the sheer balls of that, the story was a real and important one.

So….on Day One? BBC 1 - ITV 0

The BBC Editors also got a little snip in earlier in the day on their blog:

But an inkling of potential differences might be found in a remark by an ITN senior executive, Deborah Turness. She said News at Ten’s “And finally…” item should have this effect, “‘We want people go to bed with a smile on their face or a tear in their eye”. I’d prefer to say that the BBC’s News is all made to make you think.

Ouche.

(Ooh, ITV did just raise the game by broadcasting LIVE AND IN LIVING COLOUR from under a glacier in Antarctica, which I guess is cool and all…but are they banned from Antarctica? Are there penguin death squads out searching for them? I think not! )

Obama wasn’t always afraid of being a bitter partisan hack (i.e. a politician who thinks principles are more important than conceding to the other side for ‘bipartisan’ sound bytes), Asheesh Siddique on the Guardian’s excellent Deadline USA blog brings his commencement address at Knox College in 2005 to our attention:

In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it - Social Darwinism - every man or woman for him or herself. It’s a tempting idea, because it doesn’t require much thought or ingenuity. It allows us to say that those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford - tough luck. It allows us to say to the Maytag workers who have lost their job: life isn’t fair. It let’s us say to the child who was born into poverty - pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And it is especially tempting because each of us believes we will always be the winner in life’s lottery, that we’re the one who will be the next Donald Trump, or at least we won’t be the chump who Donald Trump says: “You’re fired!” But there is a problem. It won’t work . . .

Doubtless Obama today would be all in favour of inviting these Social Darwinists to the table to help him usher in a new era of Real Change™. Whilst it’s nice to think he’d give up the unity rhetoric if he reached office and govern as a progressive, the fact remains he’d have got there by trashing progressives and progressive values along the way.

And in other news, via Corrente we learn that CNN commissioned a poll which included Rudolph Giuliani but not John Edwards. Giuliani (whose campaign depends entirely on fear and riding on the coattails of a national tragedy) is currently 20 delegates behind the republican frontrunner (and has dropped to 10% in the national polls) whilst Edwards is only 6 delegates behind the front-runner and has a greater share of the Democratic delegates than any Republican except Romney. This isn’t even a Democratic Republican split, Ron Paul currently has four delegates (as opposed to Giuliani’s one) and was also absent in the poll. Now I’m not fan of Ron Paul, but this is a stark reminder on how little the actual votes sway the media narrative, if they’ve decided your campaign is hopeless they’ll ignore it and make sure it is. This leads us to the ridiculous situation where Rudolph “9/11″ Giuliani is a Real Candidate™ for President but John “Lookie, I can kick all the Republicans Asses in November” Edwards is not. Remember, especially in the primaries, it’s not who you vote for but how they choose to report your vote that matters.

“I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.”

—William Lloyd Garrison, inaugural editorial in the anti-slavery journal The Liberator, 1 January 1831

I found this week’s quote (which may or may not become a recurring feature) on Daylight Athiesm’s excellent post on the folly of assuming moderation is always the correct position. Some people say 2+2 is 4. Some people say it’s 11. That doesn’t make the answer 7.

I’ve just read this article about how members of fringe Muslim groups tend to be over-represented in the media. I don’t doubt there’s truth in that and I can see there’s a good point in there somewhere, but the dressing just makes it hard to find. See, I’d have assumed mainstream Muslims would be angry that it’s the violent extremists that get so much press, turns out I’m wrong! It’s those nasty liberal, progressive Muslims that are spoiling it!

So, I am sick of Tarek Fatah’s tirades, the Communications Director of the fringe organization Muslim Canadian Congress. The fact is that most of his positions are outright unIslamic and unrepresenting of the vast majority of Muslims. For instance, his organization endorsed same-sex marriage, campaigned against Islamic family courts, and pretty much came out on the wrong side of every mainstream Muslim opinion. So, WHY, does any of the media give ANY credibility to this tiny group of fringe nut-cases?

Yes! Those nut-cases! They think that there’s nothing inherently evil about society recognising commitment in homosexual couples and that governments shouldn’t legitimise self-appointed courts passing down judgements that have no basis in actual law. Those guys are so wacky!

Damn you media! You’re portraying Muslims as far more reasonable than they really are! Wait…that doesn’t sound like the media I know and love….

Michael Nazir-Ali (the Bishop of Rochester) has launched a vicious attack on the evils of multiculturalism, which as he defined it:

Required that people should be facilitated in living as separate communities, continuing to communicate in their own languages and having minimum need for building healthy relationships with the majority.

Well, when you put it like that, I don’t like it much either. Naturally we then have the backlash and the counter backlash. I’m going to ignore the issue of how bad the problem is or isn’t and hone in on something the Bishop said about the cause:

Much of this has come about because of a “neutral” secularist approach which refuses to privilege any faith. In fact, secularism has its own agenda and it is certainly not neutral. It is perfectly possible for Britain to welcome people on the basis of its Christian heritage.

In the same article, he’s denounced multiculturalism and secularism, missing the point that the approach best to tackle the negative aspects of multi-culturalism IS the secular approach. Far from secularism being the cause of the problem, it’s the best way out.

The idea that Britain is a ‘Christian Country’ is the mindset that makes multiculturalism sound attractive. The desire to keep it that way and yet welcome non-Christian immigrants leads to the idea of separate spaces, that over here we can be Christians and over there you can be Muslims. This is tolerance of you living in Britain, not acceptance that you are British. As long as being a Christian is promoted as being a key part of British identity, creating a workable single culture is impossible.

If we look at the fuss in the US over placing ‘Under God’ in the pledge of allegiance only fifty years ago, we can see that it has ruined the point of the line. ‘One nation, indivisible’ is a strong, secular statement of unity, ‘One nation under God, indivisible’ has created division. We are stronger and more welcoming as a group when we don’t needlessly divide ourselves. As religion remains a core part of many people’s identity, when looking for a national idenity for all it makes sense to take that most divisive question off the table. We want an identity that speaks of inclusion and acceptance instead of separation and tolerance.

A secular basis for society allows us to create a big tent we can all feel comfortable sitting inside. We naturally need our tested foundations such as democracy, the rule of law, freedom of speech, etc to underpin the society. These aren’t simply justifiable because they’re part of our heritage (and it’s worth remembering some of them are quite recent additions) but because they’re fundamentally good ideas. There was a lot in the comments of that article about how Christians wouldn’t be granted the same freedoms in the Middle East that Muslims are granted here. That misses the point: We shouldn’t aspire to be different from countries like Saudi Arabia, we should aspire to be better.

Much as I enjoy watching the Bishop argue with the dictionary, secularism is by definition neutral. If it has an agenda, it is one I hope the Bishop can share: Making it so neither of us has to sacrifice our principles to exist in the same culture in peace.

Before we start calling the nominations today, it’s always worth remembering that Iowa only significance is its effect on the New Hampshire primary (an effect either amplified or diminished with the far shorter period in between this year, depending on how you argue it). After all, Bill Clinton received only 3% and went on to win the nomination. That said, the actual results are hugely significant in what they set up for the future.

A Clinton victory in Iowa would have likely meant a Clinton nomination as it would have restored the ‘inevitability’ narrative that unsurprisingly fell apart when the campaign really kicked off in the last month. Despite the endless commentary of pundits last summer was really only a pre-game, which Clinton hoped she could use to cement herself as the nominee in the public conciousness and let that carry her through the contest. Unfortunately at some point the campaign started believing it’s own myth and wasn’t nearly fast enough responding to Obama, who was only a non-entity last year because he was saving his money for when it really counted. It’d be interesting to see breakdowns of how significant second-preferences were in Obama’s win, I suspect they were significant because third-parties wanting to keep their candidate viable can’t give Clinton a victory as that would make her the indisputable front-runner, whereas Obama in first place potentially keeps the race open to other candidates, however unlikely.  [Update: Nope, I was wrong on that. If entrance polls are to be believed Obama only gained as much as Clinton from second preferences, most second preferences went to Edwards].

I’m personally a sceptical about an Obama presidency. He proclaims himself as The Change, yet also says that his would be a ‘reaching out’, bipartisan administration. Now this sounds fantastic…until you actually think about it. Compromise is a noble skill, but not one that lends itself to remaking the country. “We will change the Status Quo by asking the Status Quo nicely” doesn’t have a great ring to it.

It’s all very well to say partisanship is tearing the country apart but crying partisanship does imply that both sides are fighting, whereas the current ‘post-partisan’ Democrats running Congress seem to interpret bipartisan as ‘doing whatever they ask us to do without getting anything in return’. Aside a notable reduction in pork money (which was cut in half in the last year) and similar fiscal benefits (fiscal conservatives tend to be quite happy about divided government), this Congress has failed to implement any of the six points they campaigned on at election. They can on some level be forgiven for this, divided government makes the normally difficult process of passing federal law near impossible, but it does show how ineffectual trying to find ‘compromise’ is. Their continuous scale down of the pull-out of Iraq was impressive: “Bring them home! Ok, you can have the money if you promise bring them home sometime! Okay, you can have the money, but you be nice next time we want something eh? Oh I guess you’re right, we are fiscally irresponsible to try to give health care to children, we’d better stop that! What, more war money? Okay…but I want you to know, we feel very, very bad about this.” They’ve been as bipartisan as possible and have nothing to show for it but a disillusioned base. So I don’t think we can blame partisanship for all of America’s problems, in this instance, it’s more apt to blame Republicans.

So I’m disappointed that Edwards didn’t win Iowa, because whilst he isn’t dead yet, his strategy depends on a strong early rally that could carry him through the early states. He might still be in with a chance if he comes second to Obama again in New Hampshire and a few more primaries after, if Clinton status as front-runner becomes discredited we could end up with a new two horse race between Obama and Edwards, but with less than a month before most of the states have voted, but I’m just not sure there’s time for that dramatic a shift in the race.

Some however are already declaring him out of it:

He’s [Obama] made Hillary Clinton, with her wonkish, pragmatic approach to politics, seem uninspired. He’s made John Edwards, with his angry cries that “corporate greed is killing your children’s future,” seem old-fashioned. Edwards’s political career is probably over.

I don’t think ‘corporate greed is killing your children’s future’ sounds old-fashioned, I think it sounds…well, truthful. Yes Edwards sounds angry, but if these abuses of power don’t make you angry, they really should. I don’t think you get powerful corporations to hand back their power by sitting them around a table and asking them nicely. Obama really seems to believe that through nothing greater than sheer force of personality and being relentlessly reasonable he can persuade people to give up power and do something to their direct disadvantage. The ability to persuade is an excellent quality to have in a President and there’s no doubt that Obama can be formidable in that area, but if people are not willing to be persuaded then just being ‘The Persuader’ isn’t what’s needed.

I’m sure Obama has it in him to be a good president (even ignoring the incredibly low standard the current incumbent has set). He could probably can run a decent government and restore America’s reputation around the world, but I think there are better agents for changes running in this race and his would be a presidency that in retrospect will be far less than promised. I would be happy to be proven wrong.