Feeding The Fish

Ok I’m in the last stages of wrapping up for my month-long North America trip (no new posts for a while), just wanted to weigh in on one last thing: Clinton calling for Obama’s assassination by invoking Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June? That’s awful! That’s outrageous! That’s…not true.

Watch the actual video:It’s clear she was simply referring to people who wrapped up the nomination later than the current date and the thing about Bobby Kennedy is that the date he had the nomination in the bag is the same as the date he was assassinated - it’s no surprise the two are seen as the same moment in time in some people’s minds. I see nothing factually wrong with what she said, nor anything vile in it. This just seems like another fake scandal that will carry on because the person everyone seems to love to hate is involved, facts be damned.

Update: Whilst I agree that the constant campaign for her to drop out is without precedent and is just disgusting at times, I disagree with the specific point she’s making here because in those cycles there were still enough delegates left in play to make a difference. Whatever path she has to the nomination can’t rely on straightforward delegate wins at this point but by pointing out flaws in Obama’s legitimacy as nominee (barely ahead in popular vote, most delegate support from caucus states, stood in the way of Florida and Michigan recounts, etc) and then making the argument that she’s more electable. To be honest, while I think she is more electable (and is a better candidate), I’m coming round to the idea that either of them will do just fine come November and this phase where McCain looks semi-viable is going to be short.

Update: In the interest of looking at the issue closer, Slant Truth has noticed  there’s a divide on how this is seen in primarily white blogs vs primarily black blogs. Perhaps this is unsurprising. I still think I’m right (just like always) but I think it’s something that does resonate.

Great story today that during the 1997 election the Conservatives were having Tony Blair followed by a guy in a chicken suit (for refusing to debate John Major), who after expression doubts Daniel Finkelstein had to keep on side (quote of the day: ‘It was my job to stop the chicken defecting to the Labour Party. ‘).  To counter this dastardly threat Labour responded by having a guy in a fox suit on hand to harass the chicken as Three Line Whip explains:

Things got so farcical that at one stage, with Blair due to appear at a Glasgow press conference, the Tory chicken was so spooked by Labour’s fox that it hid out in the offices of a friendly (to the Tories) newspaper office overlooking the Labour venue only to leap out when the PM-in-waiting eventually turned up.

If this seems a little familiar to some, fans of the West Wing will remember that Josh in season 6 likewise had guys dress up in chicken suits to harness other candidates for not wanting to debate his candidate (which makes you wonder if one inspired the other or if chicken suits are just part of the political zeitgeist). However, unlike the Tories, he went on to win his election and the man who thought chicken suits were a good idea is now chief of staff to the fictional leader of the free world. There’s probably an important lesson to take away from this.

It’d be safe to say I’m happy about this, there was a bit of worry there for a while but MPs demonstrated that they’re with the public and the science on this one. This is exactly the reason that no matter how low New Labour goes I’m still very concerned about the prospect of a future Conservative government; not only because I’m not convinced that Cameron is being that successful in moving his party (as James Graham notes he often seems to be rebelling against them rather than leading them in a new direction) but also because in this case Cameron bought the 20 week argument which not only lacked evidence but, as I’ll go into later, makes no sense in the long run. Of course, living in a safe Conservative seat my opinion on all of this is pretty meaningless so let’s get into abortion, something I first studied for RS GCSE coursework (which mostly consisted of finding and using bible verses in support and opposition), the overriding sense I took away from that was that abortion was something that was inherently wrong, but sometimes necessary. Unsurprisingly perhaps for anyone who’s read this blog before, this isn’t something I hold by now.

I see absolutely no moral difficulty in abortion provided care is taken to place the upper limit before the physical changes that make consciousness a possibility have occurred. If we have someone who is absolutely and irrevocably brain dead, then is removing them from a life support machine murder? They’re undeniably physically human but mentally there’s nothing there. I really see no difference between that situation and a baby at 24 weeks except that whilst the brain-dead person was once capable of feeling pain and human thought (and there’s always the faint concern that there is something possible to revive there), the baby has definitely yet to develop physically enough to allow any of that to happen. Would it be easier if we remained a nice blobish ball of cells until they magically rearranged themselves into an almost working baby? Yes. Do I have any moral qualms about terminating life that is physically but not mentally human? No. There is nothing sacred about human DNA that means anything containing must be preserved at all costs, but there is something special about human consciousness that we should take consideration of, and we do by placing the limit at 24 weeks before it’s possible for it to physically have emerged yet.

To me it doesn’t matter how viable something is, if it’s not joined up upstairs we should feel no compulsion to save it. Yes, it’s useful this time round that the 20 week crowd were talking bollocks but one day they won’t be, I think it’s fairly safe to say that the viability will continue to drop. Studying this at 16 I stupidly followed this line of thinking to reason that abortion is only a short term issue until technology developed. What if one day we can create artificial wombs that can be used to sustain a embryo from 12 weeks? What if we’re able to physically transfer embryos from one to the other? They’ll be no need for abortion! They can just be transfered and put up for adoption! Won’t that be wonderful? But wait, what if the machines get so good they can take over from 5 weeks? Or from two weeks? Or even from day one?

The argument from viability taken to it’s ultimate conclusion says we have a responsibility to bring all the viable embryos we can to term. Given that we can develop an embryo from a single week, don’t we have a responsibility to save all we can? But wait, what about all those week-old embryos that don’t manage to implant on the uterus wall? There’s nothing different about them except bad luck, should we allow them to die because of that? How can we not act if we have it in out power to prevent this natural genocide of two thirds of all human life? It’d be best to force women who might have unattached embryos knocking around (or perhaps all women, just to be safe) to collect and turn in their menstruation so any embryos can be extracted and brought to term.

This (hopefully) is plainly absurd and horrifying, but it’s exactly the position the argument from viability leads us to given perfect technology. It’s been a useful ally in this debate because the 20 weekers used it whilst lacking evidence that viability has dropped, but there seems to be a general spirit that if it were true it’d be an entirely reasonable argument - This just ain’t so. The only cut off of importance in development is the brain, the seat of what makes us human and sentient, and the key changes we’re talking about here don’t appear till after 26 weeks. 24 weeks will still be an entirely reasonable upper limit for abortion even if viability was possible from zero weeks and that’s something we’ll have to remember when this comes around in ten or twenty years when viability really has dropped.

I’ve always felt there was something suspect about the argument that a child would be damaged without a man as a parent (or alternatively a woman as a parent) mostly because I couldn’t see what advantage having an explicitly male role model would have over having good role models and in part because it seemed awfully convenient that the ‘facts’ showed that gay couples having families is bad because they’re inherently damaging the child. I’m always relieved when my opposition to things I feel shouldn’t be true can actually be supported by Real Science.

IVF requires a huge degree of financial and physical commitment. You cannot accidentally get pregnant, have the baby, and let it take its chances, as heterosexual couples do all the time. Duncan Smith claims that, without fathers, boys join gangs and teenage girls become pregnant. But “there’s nothing magical about fathers,” says Susan Golombok, professor of family research and director of the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge, and co-author of Growing Up in a Lesbian Family. “Fathers who are very involved with their children are good for children. But fathers who are not very involved - they aren’t as important, and can even have a negative effect. It’s a very simplistic notion to think that fathers are important just because they’re male.”

Don’t boys need male role models? “The thing is that fathers make absolutely no difference to their children’s development of masculinity or femininity,” she says. “Studies that have looked at single-parent families have not found that boys are less masculine or girls less feminine. In fact, it seems that parents make very little difference to the masculinity or femininity of their sons and daughters. The peer group is more important, and the stereotypes that are around them in their day-to-day life. Even in families where parents try hard to influence their children’s gender developent, where they try to stop their sons being very masculine, for example, and try to make them more gender-neutral, actually find that whatever they do makes no difference whatsoever. Fathers are important more in terms of emotional wellbeing, not in terms of role models.”

As for the lesbian issue, says Golombok, “There’s now been more than 30 years of research in Europe and the US, that has found very consistently that children raised in a lesbian household are no different from children in heterosexual families, both in terms of their psychological adjustment, and also in terms of their gender development, and in terms of their relationships with other children.

Another win for my irrational gut positions then, It’s possible I’ve learned entirely the wrong lesson from this.

Let’s take a little issue with this snippit of Daniel Henniniger’s article in the WSJ on how democracies are better able to manage crisis:

Among the Western intellectual classes in the U.S. and Europe, there is no idea more routinely mocked than George Bush’s proposition that what the world needs today is more democracies. Much of this has to do with the Iraq war and the apparently bottomless, neurotic antipathy to Mr. Bush. But make no mistake: The steady stream of pushback against “exporting democracy” as quixotic or inappropriate has gone far toward throwing out the democratic baby with the Bush bathwater.

I don’t think anyone really disagrees that more democracies is better (with the possible exception of a century of US and British foreign policy) and the argument that they respond better to natural disasters isn’t a new one, I just think it’s hard to imagine anyone who invade a country and dismantle it’s government without any plans on what to replace it with (or even how to go about doing that) is really taking their aim of ‘exporting democracy’ that seriously.

Bush gives up golf to share the pain of the families of dead soldiers.

For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families.

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights.

“I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man’s life,” he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It’s just not worth it anymore to do.’”

If you made this guy up you’d be accused of being unrealistic.

Just watched some crap reporting on the embryology bill on the BBC. Hybrid embryos are apparently made by mixing human and animal DNA….really? Here I was thinking it it’s just human DNA in an animal cell with maybe a tiny tiny bit of animal DNA floating around (which is more than likely identical to some part of the human genone anyway), as opposed to mad scientists making humans with elephant trunks for giggles.

The debate on abortion was in it’s entirety an image of a fetus at twenty weeks, telling us that campaigners saying the limit should be reduced to 20 weeks and some scientists say this shouldn’t happen (doubtless because they’re mean and hate babies). Naturally, no explanation as to why they think 24 weeks is preferable i.e. that there has been no increase in survival rates for infants born before 24 weeks in the last decade, that some life threatening abnormalities can’t be detected until the 20-21st week and so on. That there are real practical reasons for 24 weeks apparently doesn’t match up to a neat video, nor apparently does the fact that some campaigning for a reduction have openly spoken in favor of an even lower limit (15 weeks or so) and that their support for 20 weeks isn’t a result of a practical change but more a case of what they think they can sell people on this time round. It’s really amazing how every time something like this comes around it’s the lying opportunists who almost always get seen as the principled ones as opposed to those immoral, shiftless scientists who insist on supporting their position with, you know, actual evidence.

Then there’s some rewording over IVF treatment which legally recognizes same-sex couples as parents of children conceived during their relationship. This section was dominated by concerns over ‘traditional’ family… because as we well know that, just as the existence of gay marriage threatens the very existence of heterosexual marriage, gay people raising children means that no straight people will bother any more, there’ll be anarchy in the streets, cats and dogs together at last, a Tory government, etc.

And because posts with a one line remark at the end always seem more reasonable, here one is.

The Barefoot Bum has a nice bit on why the US conservative movement is so successful:

The Republican strategy is very simple, and very powerful: When they win an election, move the government to the right. When they lose an election, prevent the government from moving to the left. Sure, they’d like to win every election, but they know they won’t, and they have a plan in place for when they lose, and thus they can afford to lose on principle.

The Democratic “strategy” is precisely the opposite. When they win an election, they try (with diminishing success) to prevent the government from moving to the right. When they lose an election, they themselves move to the right to win the next one.

This is one of those things that immediately obvious about US politics from the outside, the Democrats are eternally on defense and willing to compromise over anything they perceive will help them win elections. The driving force being the idea that once they sit in the Oval Office and a majority of Congress, everything will be right with the world again and they can push the conservative movement back….except they can’t because they’ve laid no groundwork for moving a liberal direction because they got into office by compromising on essential policies. Case in point: Obama has before even reaching the general election compromised on the idea of universal health care (and attacked Clinton’s universal plan using exactly the same ads Republicans once used) by doing this and accepting the conservative view on the issue as legitimate he hands them a victory because even when they lose they still get to set the boundaries of the issue.

The conservative movement’s reaction to compromise isn’t “well they’re meeting us halfway, let’s be reasonable about this”, it’s “let’s talk even further right so the point of compromise moves ever further our way”. In this way even losing isn’t bad for Republicans because with the current Democratic mindset even in losing they have shifted the mainstream in their direction. Republicans constantly talk about their extremes and simply by talking about ultra-conservative ideas makes them seem more reasonable, Democrats on the other hand are constantly in a rush to paint themselves as more reasonable versions of those nice electable Republicans.

The process which an idea journeys from the unthinkable to popular policy was neatly summed up by a right-wing think tank as the following:

–Unthinkable
–Radical
–Acceptable
–Sensible
–Popular
–Policy

And that’s a process every outfit claiming to be progressive should have pinned to their walls. There is no sense censoring yourself to seem more electable if the other side is constantly priming the electorate with an ever more conservative worldview - you have to be out there talking about the unthinkable ideas until they become an accepted view on the issue or you’re letting them win even when they lose.

Thanks to Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor we have a new addition to the standard ‘Hitler and Stalin killed people because they were atheists’ line. As always I feel obliged to remind that Hitler wasn’t an atheist, but that’s far from the biggest crime against history here - it’s not just because of their atheism they killed millions of people, it’s because they ruled by REASON!

Danger because, if you go just by reason, I think, without faith, without belief in God, you can imagine, for instance in the last century, some of the faith(less), or supposedly faithless societies - people, whether it’s like Hitler or Stalin, bringing up - having a country in which, if you like, a God free zone, a dictatorship ruled by reason, and where does it lead? To terror and oppression.

Yes! Damn that reason they were so known for! It seems there are those out there who see it as ungracious for atheists to attack a religious figure after he asks people to ‘respect atheists’, but when his speech is laced with reminders that all atheists are just little Hitlers in waiting, I really see no need to be gracious or give the tiniest bit of respect. This statement confuses me a little:

Of claims that faith has no basis in reason, he replied: “To believe in God is not unreasonable.”

Wait, so to believe in God is reasonable… but societies ruled by reason lead to terror and oppression! Well now I don’t know what to think…

Via Rachel from North London:

‘According to documents recently published by the National Counter-Terrorism Center, a US agency responsible for coordinating the government response to terrorism, officials are now being asked to stop using terminology that could “unintentionally legitimate terrorism,” and reorient their vocabulary away from language that might frame radicals in a sympathetic light. This entails ceasing to describe radical cells as either Islamic or Muslim, and also rejecting the term “Islamist,” which experts argue is confusing to the general public. Instead of using words such as jihad or mujahedin, which “have positive connotations for Muslims,” the report recommends replacing these terms with “‘death cult,’ ‘cult-like,’ ‘sectarian cult,’ and ‘violent cultists’” as more accurate indicators of “the ideology and methodology of al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.”

This makes a lot of sense to me in the same way it’d be pretty stupid to refer to western militant groups as ‘crusaders’  - even though it functionally means something we should see as bad, it still retains a lot of positive connotations.