What’s Next?

There’s an article at The Times neatly demonstrating the idea that Obama’s rightward wing is genius politics and the left will just have to get over it, he knows what he’s doing,the Unity Ponies are a comin’, etc.

Since securing the Democratic nomination a few weeks ago, the only change coming from the Illinois senator has been in what he seems to stand for. Last month he dropped his opposition to a Bill before Congress that would give telecoms companies immunity from prosecution for carrying out illegal wiretaps on potential terrorist suspects.

…

This is another example of how smart the Obama campaign is. They understand that the biggest impediment to an Obama presidency is lingering doubt about whether their man is a straight-down-the-middle American. Despite having a couple of bestsellers to his name, he is still something of a blank page to most voters, one on which his opponents are trying to doodle all kinds of unflattering portraits of an extremist.

…

What is more, by abandoning so many left-wing totems, Mr Obama is emphasising that his promise of change is more than just a swing to the left of the old political pendulum; that his promise of post-partisan politics is a genuine one.

The trouble with this theory is that Obama was a solid centrist at the start; he’s already where most Americans are.  Being “post-partisan” is nothing new, Clinton called it “triangulation” and the short of it is selling your soul to the right on issues of your choice in the hope of getting elected.  Most of these changes aren’t just running to the centre, it’s running to the far right. The idea that the President has the power to break the law as he sees fit is something that should have been thrown out with Nixon, now what Bush did illegally is being approved by the Democratic nominee. This is not a token issue, Obama gives himself an enormous increase in presidential power by going down that road.

I’m also not sure as to the genius of convincing the voters he’s not a blank page by reminding people his principles are so unimportant he will jettison as many as needed to get elected, people keep rejecting Democrats for doing exactly that. The Democratic nominee running right is nothing new, but they keep losing!

Funnily enough, Republicans never seem to have to “run left” to win elections, McCain is the second most conservative voting senator yet gets described constantly as a moderate. The Republican genius is to keep talking so much about ultra-conservative ideas that the center moves in their direction. Democrats never fight this, they’re told that the “smart” thing is to move to the new center (no matter how artificial) and become kinder versions of those nice, electable Republicans.

People keep insisting that this is the “smart” thing to do, despite much of a record of success, despite the obvious danger if it’s allowed to progress any further. Obama just wants to win the election; Republicans are more concerned with changing the nature of the debate so it’s consistently more favourable to them. In the long run they still win, the democratic nominee in 2012 is likely to accept even more of Bush’s ultraconservative ideas as a given to try to distance themselves from what doubtless will be described as the most liberal government ever (despite its likely actual centrism) and we’ll be told again that this is genius!

Sitting wherever I was sitting in a far away land looking up the home news, I was a tad disappointed to see the 42 days legislation had managed to slip through, it’s hopelessly unnecessary destruction of certain civil liberties proved once and for alll that Gordon Brown is a strong capable leader and doing a good job. It was a little more of a shock and then seeing the Home Secretary had resigned because of it was downright shocking, I’d never seen anything suggesting Jacqui Smith opposed it or was principled enough to resign over the matter…wait Shadow Home Secretary ? How does that make any sense?

Looking into it a bit more, it seems that yes, David Davis had resigned to fight a by election on the issue. On the surface it’d seem the only way it really works is if Labour stands in opposition which it never seemed likely they would (ignoring the fact the candidate for the area was opposed to 42 days) for several reasons:

1) They didn’t do that well in 2005 and even if they didn’t they’re still amazingly unpopular at the moment.

2) They’ve already won the vote, any attempt to refight it would just give them another chance to lose.

4) The party finances are in such an awful state it’s suggested they flat out couldn’t afford it.

Labour is not going to spend money they don’t have to redo a fight that they’ve already won when the battleground is so inherently hostile to them, that should really have been obvious from the start. I almost wonder if the Lib Dems should have stood a candidate to lure Labour in, but still there’s no guarantee and that’s almost a worse situation. A by election seems a really ineffectual way to go, but on the other hand I can’t think of many other big moves that were available and it has giving oxygen to the issue and kept it in the news, so maybe it’s doing all it needs to.

The next government will be a Conserative government, if Labour is not interested in being champions of civil liberties we are best served if there is a significant faction in the Conservative Party that is.  I don’t for the life of me think Cameron would try (or be able) to rein in elements of his party that made it clear they wouldn’t vote for a reduction from 42 days, so standing with David Davis and ensuring the Conservatives see there is a strong groundwell of support if it gets sent back down from the Lords (also shaming a few more Labour MPs into changing their votes) is still the best chance we’ve got.

Ok, so I’m back from my saunter around North America. It was thrilling to experience firsthand just how broken the American media is: They really talked for several weeks about Obama and his wife sharing a  fist-bump when he got the nomination. This might signifies him as someone who respects his wife and apparently considers an equal, so an obvious sign he is wrong for America and may in fact be a secret Muslim terrorist (one Fox newsanchor saw this truth and described it as “a terrorist fist jab“, I love that country.)

This aside, there have been more important developments in the Presidential race: Obama won! But then almost immediately pisses off his base by supporting the FISA bill, not only legalizing Bush’s previously illegal wiretaps and giving immunity to the telecoms companies that broke the law to help him but also delivering the next president unprecedented power. That’s style!

Now, there are some crazies out there who see the ability to wiretap without a warrant to step on some of those fourth amendment rights (as Obama is a former constitutional law professor, he should really know better.) This is naturally billed as a compromise, but it’s that delightful form of Democrat compromise which involves giving away in exchange for the warm glow of being “strong on terror” by doing absolutely everything Republicans want.

This leads to the internet equivalent of snowballs in hell: substantial critiques of Obama rising to the front of reddit.  It is of course a complete surprise to me that Obama would move to the right given how much he’s used their talking points to attack Democrats (yes yes, he wasn’t the only one) and progressive ideas. It is also a shock that “post-partisanship” is in fact, exactly the same thing as Clinton’s triangulation. There has been so much change we’re right back to 1992.

This “compromise” plays perfectly into the perception that Democrats have nothing intelligent to add to the debate or they wouldn’t keep going with the Republican line, as do these rumours that he’s planning to keep Gates on as Secretary of Defense. That just seems to send the message “Oh, don’t worry about voting for a Democrat, we’ll have solid Republicans around to do the hard foreign policy stuff.” You can have as bi-partisan cabinet as you like, but for the love of pete, what I keep hearing about Obama is that his foreign policy is like, super awesome - you don’t get there by keeping Bush’s guy on, nothing says ‘Democrats aren’t serious’ more. If we could get the Barack Obama who ran for the nomination (and actually seemed to be have an independent take on foreign policy) back to run for President that’d be a slight improvement.

The best possible path I see to the Presidency for McCain (and despite my growing validation of my dislike for Obama, I still don’t think McCain has a chance) is a national security narrative and Obama is playing right into his hands by saying that the Republicans have it right to focus enormous unchecked power in the hands of the president - but that he’s a far more trustworthy guy to wield that power. Does that really seem a credible argument to anymore? Obama is developing a nasty habit of accepting Republican’s framing on national security (just as he has previous accepted their framing on health care). This is not how you bring about change.

But then we hear from the people who seem utterly incapable of accepting Obama is not, in fact, super-Jesus: Oh, it’s genius, Obama is moving to the center to get votes! He’s just lying to all those independents and republicans to get them to vote for him, and he’ll get back to be a principled leader once he’s elected!  This would be great…if he wasn’t already at the center and this is really moving to the far right.  This does give us a chance to catch all the Obama shrills who are now officially useless as infomation sources (I’m looking at you Keith Olbermann, “boldly standing up” to the ACLU isn’t something that should be applauded in the Democratic nominee, it’s just a way of making him sound bold in a way that  “Obama caved to the far right” doesn’t. )

This line is encouraged by the reemergence of the media narrative that any Democrat running for president is automatically the most liberal person possible (In reality, Obama has a very centrist record) and all Republicans are cuddly moderates (for example, McCain is clearly at the center of the political spectrum with the 2nd most conservative voting record in the Senate). This is the classic game where Democrats will election after election feel a need to move to the center to win, whilst Republicans will calmly respond by talking even more about ultra-conservative ideals and move the public idea of where the center actually is even further to the right. This is a formula that means that the right’s stupid ideas are winning time after time even when they lose elections.

Whilst there were a lot of flat out lies and innuendo around Clinton’s public perception the idea that she was a centrist candidate was basically true - but there seems to be this strange perception that Obama is far more liberal than she is, when in fact their voting records are virtually identical. The concerning thing about the result of the primary is that a lot of people seem to have projected a lot of positions onto Obama he doesn’t actually have and voted for a fictional candidate, and the real thing is likely to disappoint.

Next post: The crazy shananigans that have been going on here whilst I’ve been gone.

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.