Feeding The Fish

If you’re in the mood for some pure sexist bile feel free to check out this Daily Mail piece imagining PM Harriet Harman - In which we learn that men and women are just plain different, a man would never vote for a woman, women will always vote for the girl regardless of their personal convictions (not that they have any real understanding of politics anyway poor lasses), that she is just like all people who claim to want “equality” when what they actually want is to punish men and that all her womanly preoccupations naturally make her hilariously unsuited for the job. You could spend days dissecting the kind of warped mindset that produces this kind of crap, why on earth I ever follow Daily Mail links is beyond me.

I mean, a female Prime Minster? Just the thought is hilarious! Like that would ever- OH WAIT.

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.

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.

mysociety need your help. Their amazing TheyWorkForYou site parses the official website, strips out all the awkward formatting and hard to search layout and reorganises it so it can be easily accessible. Now, given as they’re a small, ill-funded charity (go on, help them out!) they’d like it if Parliament took a little bit of work off their hands by instead of publishing in an obscure and hard to parse way to instead release its information in a nice, easy XML format (which is essentially pure content, no presentation) so use of it by them and by anyone else would be far more straightforward. Kudos to David Cameron for being quick off the mark in giving his support (can we buy him a tripod while we’re at it?)

So in the unlikely event this is the only blog you’ve read that’s brought up the subject (the mysociety guys tend to be treated as heroes by political bloggers and we’ll report if they sneeze), go sign up to their campaign now!

Maybe all this talk of the actual science of what the Bill entails has distracted me from the issue at hand: Should MPs have a free vote or not?

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the leader of Roman Catholics in England and Wales, became the most senior church figure to call on Mr Brown to sanction a free “conscience” vote of MPs on the Bill.

“Certainly, there are some aspects of this Bill on which I believe there ought to be a free vote, because Catholics and others will want to vote according to their conscience. I don’t think it should be subject to the party whip.”

That seems reasonable. After all, punishing MPs for voting with their conscience would be unreasonable, right Cardinals? Wait, what’s that internet? We have a quote from an article last year where the church suggested rather heavily that they might deny communion to any Catholic MPs who stepped away from the party church line?

In his sermon the Cardinal, Scotland’s most senior Catholic, said politicians who support abortion should be aware of the “barrier such co-operation creates to receiving Holy Communion” but after the Mass he would not say whether he meant that Catholic politicians who back abortion should be cast out from the Church. “I’m not going to say whether or not those who are involved in any way in helping or aiding abortion can approach the altar to receive Holy Communion. It’s not up to me to judge them, I’ll leave that to God to judge them.”

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, added his support to Cardinal O’Brien, urging all Catholics “especially those who hold positions of public responsibility” to educate themselves about the Church’s prohibition on abortion so that they could make decisions “with consistency and integrity”.

It seems to me that instead of being a triumph of the will of democracy over party politics, a free vote seems to mean that the party whips step back so the church whips can step forward. Or is that too cynical?

And in related news: James Graham draws my attention to an article by the good cardinal telling atheists they’re heartless meanies who are incapable of love, which is incidentally why our soulless secular solutions haven’t found the solution to the HIV problem in Africa: They need more love! I know, I know, I would have thought a constructive role for the church might be more telling people that using condoms doesn’t damn them for eternity or, at the very least, to stop telling people that condoms are deliberately infected with it, but I think we’ll have to defer to his wisdom on this one.

Daniel Finkelstein has a good article in The Times today on turnout and various stupid methods of increasing it (like automatically entering voters in a lottery! I’m feeling engaged now!).

But what if low turnout is a sign of angry disillusion with the political choices on offer? Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to disguise the signal with a whole load of synthetic schemes to reduce the cost of voting (with e-democracy and so forth) or increase its benefits (with lotteries and doughnuts). As it is, it doesn’t seem as though most of those who abstain in elections have given up on democracy and the law, they are just not that impressed at what they are being offered. Which is their business and that of the party leaderships. Not mine.

He’s absolutely right, If the voters are saying loud and clear we don’t like these choices, the solution isn’t to make it easier to choose or to offer incentives for choosing. Llow turnout isn’t a problem to be fixed by making democracy easier, but by making democracy better. It isn’t a disease, it’s a symptom and trying to cover it up will only make the rot in our political system worse.

Some have hailed the internet as the savour of democracy and I have found the ultimate proof, it’s not the power of the blogs to reconnect the grass-roots with politics, but imitation computer games!

I present, TAXMAN GORDON, a game that isn’t at all like Pacman!

Let me unwrap this particuarly subtle piece of symbolism:

There I am, picking up all this money off the ground, when suddenly TAXMAN GORDON comes up behind me, so I run! And I run, and then there’s this tree in front of me and it strikes me…by voting for this tree, I can keep my hard earned coins and my lives! So I ‘vote’ for this tree….and suddenly the taxman is on the run! Ha ha, how the tables have turned!

Now, it’s possibly that if you finish a level, you gain a piece of information about these stealth taxes but I don’t know, because just like Pacman, I suck at it and can’t get past the first level.

I’m hoping that other political parties jump on the bandwagon here, I’m looking forward to the Republican release of ‘Donkey CON!’ and the BNP replacing the Space Invaders with immigrants. There’s a rich new political battlefield here, and I’m glad to see the Conservatives taking the initiative.

I currently have a post over at OurKingdom discussing the problems with FPTP and my alternative electoral system.  My full length piece on the system can be found here.

Depending on feedback, I might rewrite it as a series of smaller blog posts. Alternatively I’ll find out it’s an old idea that’s been dismissed and feel a little silly about the whole thing, but isn’t learning fun!

So Gordon Brown wants to raise Cannabis from a Class C drug to a Class B drug, making it as bad as it used to be until it was down-classified three years ago.

We then find out that many government ministers and MPs did some pot in their youth. This came as a surprise to many people, either because they believed that our leaders were outstandingly moral characters who do not and have never done anything illegal ever (these people are an increasingly rare breed and a national reserve should be created to help preserve their innocence) or perhaps more commonly, people just assumed politicians were far too boring to have ever touched drugs.

Naturally this sparked the tiniest bit of outrage at the hypocrisy it implies. “But not so!” we hear them cry, “Whilst we were wrong in our misspent youth, the cannabis back then was far weaker and so this reclassification is entirely valid and unrelated to our personal experiences”.

A clear and valid point that only has the slight downside of being completely and utterly wrong.

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which examined the issue 18 months ago, will be asked to do so again. It concluded in its report in December 2005 that the strength of cannabis resin (hash) had changed little over 30 years and was about 5 per cent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Skunk, it found was 10 to 15 per cent THC - two to three times as strong, not 25 times.

Professor Leslie Iversen, a pharmacologist at Oxford University, said the widespread belief that skunk was 20 to 30 times as powerful was “simply not true”.

The biggest change over recent decades has been in the strength of indoor-cultivated herbal cannabis, but even this has only doubled to 12 to 14 per cent THC. Although exceptionally strong skunk can be found on the market in Britain, it always has been available, according to reports from the UN Drug Control Programme.

So what is the actual danger from Cannabis? Ben Goldacre at Bad Science had a look:

It was also interesting to see how the risk was numerically reported. The most dramatic figure is always the “relative risk increase”, or rather: “cannabis doubles the risk of psychosis”, “cannabis increases the risk by 40%”. Because schizophrenia is comparatively rare, translated this into real numbers this works out - if the figures in the paper are correct, and causality is accepted - that about 800 yearly cases of schizophrenia are attributable to cannabis. This is not belittling the risk, merely expressing it clearly.

So we have at 800 cases. Is this a more or less pressing concern that the approximately 112,000 deaths each year as a result of smoking? How can we have some that lethal being sold to sixteen year olds and yet cannabis is banned when arguably it’s far less dangerous?

Legalise cannabis or ban tobacco; I don’t really care which, let’s just have some consistency. At the moment we’re not banning things because they’re dangerous but because we’ve decided that there are certain socially acceptable ways to have some fun with the risk of death (as well as creating a nice little tax revenue along the way) and those are the ones we’re sticking to them, facts be damned.

I’ve got a new job so my posts here might drop off a bit but I couldn’t resist commenting on this.

So Bush reduced Scooter’s sentence from an actual sentence to just having to pay a lot of money (I doubt he’ll have much trouble coming up with it). I’m sure this comes as a huge shock to everyone. What’s more fun is watching James Forsyth try to defend it in The Spectator.

From the basis that the jurors (while quite sure he was guilty of hell of purjury) not being sure why they were trying him instead of the higher-ups who, you know, actually did it, Forsyth tries to argue that because Libby was loyal to the President, he was right to pardon him. Riiight. Libby is the former chief of staff to vice president Cheney, who recently tried to claim he wasn’t a member of the executive branch in order to escape handing files over. This is the class of clown we’re working with here.

Just because the much bigger crime nearly went unpunished does that make all others non-existent? I’d absolutely agree that Libby shouldn’t be the one on trial here, but the fact remains that Libby lied in order to cover up a crime. The reason why the people who deserve to be in jail aren’t going to trial is because Libby and people like him lied.

Libby’s readiness to put his boss’s interests ahead of his own throughout the case culminated in his defence team’s decision not to call Cheney to testify at the trial.

Yes…how self-sacrificing! He was willing to cover up his boss’s crimes instead of telling the truth, How noble!

This whole investigation and trial has been a political affair from the start. So it is only appropriate that it should end with a political decision, not a legal one.

This began as a political move to damage a political opponent by endangering lives, and ends with the President deciding to let someone off the hook for political reasons, they’ve abandoned all hints of subtly now. I think this is great for the narrative value; if the President had done the right thing and let justice progress it wouldn’t be nearly as good a story.