Running the numbers: Obama/McCain polling and changes in their support

At the time of writing, The American Research Group has provided some statistics on the American Presidential election. What grabbed my attention was the detailed breakdown of some of the numbers. Now, it's possible to tie yourself into all sorts of ridiculous knots with this kind of demographic detail with questions about how Candidate A is faring against Candidate B amongst female immigrant blue-collar dog owners. Nevertheless, this is eye-catching:

National
Likely voters	Aug 30- Sep 1	Sep 13-15	Change (pts)
McCain:
Democrats	5%	19%	+14
Republicans	83%	84%	+1
Independents	43%	43%	0
Obama:
Democrats	88%	75%	-13
Republicans	11%	9%	-2
Independents	45%	49%	+4

This is the breakdown of support for each candidate among Democrats, Republicans and Independents, respectively. Note the striking swing among Democrats away from Obama and towards McCain. There has been a slight swing away by Republicans as well, but not a huge amount, and Obama's gained some Independent support (although McCain hasn't lost any). But it's that 2-digit swing towards McCain from people who identify as members of Obama's own party where Obama's hurting most, to my amateur eye.

The cause? Difficult to say, but it's tempting to view it at as a gender issue. After all, the same period shows Obama losing 5% of women and McCain gaining 7%. But that's ALL women, not just Democrats. Nor is it right to assume that the Democratic support Obama's lost is mostly female, although it very well could be.

Both surveys were taken after Obama had officially accepted the nomination instead of Hillary Clinton, so that alone doesn't explain it. The first survey was taken after Sarah Palin was announced as VP for McCain, but before she gave her convention speech. That's a possible area for analysis. But given the two week gap - a very eventful two weeks - between surveys, it's difficult to pinpoint the exact issue. More data is required. Unfortunately, I suspect that the required data is more detailed than most survey companies are willing to put up for free on their websites.

Sarah Palin and the Bush Doctr...the what now?

Sarah Palin flubbed a foreign policy question about the Bush Doctrine in her one and only interview to date, and conservative commentators, including Australian ones on the Sunday morning TV I was watching yesterday, have scrambled to defend her, saying how incredibly complex and arcane the whole definition of the "Bush Doctrine" is, and she can't possibly be expected to effectively answer such an obvious "gotcha" question like that.

I'm not going to waste even a second with the irrelevant charade of the Bush Doctrine's "complex definition". The fact is that Palin would have to demonstrate that she'd even heard of the Bush Doctrine before it's possible to get into the question of whether she understands it. She failed to do so:

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?

PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?

GIBSON: The Bush -- well, what do you -- what do you interpret it to be?

PALIN: His world view.

Um, no. Besides the obvious initial stall for time and attempt to pump for more information to obscure the fact that she has no idea what was just asked of her ("In what respect, Charlie?"), the fact that she guesses that it has something to do with Bush's "worldview" tells me that she had no concept that the "Bush Doctrine" even existed, let alone what it was. In fact, the confusion demonstrates that she is unaware of the concept of foreign policy "doctrine" at all.

Bottom line: when Charlie Gibson asked Sarah Palin what she thought of the Bush Doctrine, she didn't even know it was a question about foreign policy until Charlie Gibson told her it was.

Edit: oh, and to pre-empt (heh) what I expect to be the most likely line of defense, please don't waste your time and mine if all you're going to do is "use enhanced interrogation tactics" on the definition of "worldview".

Why I'm saying sorry to Sarah Palin, and why I still support Barack Obama

"Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us"

When I first got past my reaction of "Sarah who?" to Sarah Palin's selection as McCain's running mate, I deeply regret that my next thought was how to discredit her. She was, after all, a Republican: something that after the past 8 years seemed to me to mean the same thing as "enemy". That reaction - condemning someone before I even knew who they really were - was wrong, and I am sorry for it.

Despite that, my opinion of the pick of Palin as running mate is still that it was a deeply divisive move. But I think that this is no fault of Palin.

Whose fault is it in reality? No small part of the blame needs to lie with those of us who jumped to the attack before we knew the first thing about her. Are we so upset about the last 8 years, the destructiveness and blazing hatred put out by the national Republican Party, that we will adopt the same hateful and destructive attitude towards all Republicans? I do not seek to end Republican hatred and destruction only to see it replaced with Democratic hatred and destruction.

I know that many believe that attacking as hard and as viciously as possible is the only way to effectively counter the Republicans' smears and attacks. To that I say two things. First, Sarah Palin is not like other, established Republican figures. I'm sorry if you think otherwise, but she's just not. As Governor of Alaska, she's been a long way from the follies and failures of the Bush Administration, and bringing such an outsider in to the campaign was probably the best thing that the McCain campaign could have done to burnish the national Republican party's severly tarnished image. Treating her as part of the established Republican brand is factually wrong and won't work.

Second, and most important, attacking Sarah Palin is EXACTLY what the McCain campaign wants Obama and his supporters to do. They want it so much, in fact, that they've actually been forced to distort the truth - repeatedly -in order to make it look like Obama's attacking her in the wake of his refusal to do so.

The glee which I've seen in some "movement" conservative opinion leaders when they talk about the supposed "disgusting attacks" on Palin by Obama is actually a little sickening: they like it when they think she's getting trashed, because it gives them an excuse to trash Obama. They're celebrating the idea of Palin getting thrown to the wolves, and even convincing themselves it's happening where it isn't so they can celebrate some more. The only conclusion I can come to is that they want it to happen.

While we who mindlessly attacked Palin before we truly knew who she was deserve some blame for festering the divides that have once again opened in the wake of Palin's introduction to the world stage, it is the Republican party and the so-called "movement conservatives", not Obama or his supporters, and not Sarah Palin, who have deliberately sought to create that division, and who are cynically, even gleefully, trying to exploit it to victory, no matter what the cost to America, to the world, or even to Sarah Palin herself. I include the quote from Obama's inaugural 2004 speech above to remind people that he knows the score. That is why I still support him. And I believe I can support him quite effectively without any need to get a hate-on for Sarah Palin, however much the McCain campaign might want me to.

Wanted: artistry of lipstick on a Republican pig

Obama, from what I've seen of him, wants the American Presidential election to be about the issues that are important to America. Republicans, from what I can see, currently want it to be about lipstick. I should be outraged at the phoniness of the Republican outrage about this so-called "personal attack on Sarah Palin", but if Republicans want this campaign to be about lipstick, then I think it's possible to oblige them, without sacrificing the any emphasis on the issues that are of importance to America and to the world.

If I was any good at this kind of creativity I'd do it myself, but since I'm not: I ask anyone who cares about the issues facing America to create this imagery by any method they can: a pig, identifiably associated with the Republican party, which has at least one of the Republican failures of the last 8 years clearly written or identifiable on it: failing economy, sub-prime mortgage crisis, ruined international reputation, record levels of debt, The Iraq war and so forth (I was originally going to say put all the failures on one pig, but I realised that they may not actually fit on just one, given the sheer number of them). Then put very obvious lipstick on the pig. The tube of lipstick used should be readily identifiable with the McCain campaign.

I would trust that any attempt to portray any actual Republican person as a pig would be denounced as a personal attack, in keeping with Obama's desire to focus on real issues rather than the phony distractions of personality politics. I realise of course that Republicans see a "personal attack" in everything these days, and may see one in something as stupid as the remote possibility that the lipstick on the pig may be roughly the same colour as some lipstick that Sarah Palin may or may not have once worn, so use your best judgement as to what genuinely is unpalatably personal and what is just the frothings of "movement" conservatives engaging in their Two Minutes of Hate.

I'm sick of American elections being won or lost by bullshit. If Republicans want America to obsess about lipstick on a pig, I say give Americans the McCain lipstick on the Republican pig of failure good and hard. And let's bring the focus back on actual issues in the process.

Touching on Bristol Palin's family life, considering the relevance of gay marriage to it

Not sure if I should write this, but...

Several bloggers I read, that happen to be openly gay, have been the most vocal proponents of the idea that it's okay to make the family situation of Sarah Palin an issue, in spite of Obama's harsh words on the subject. It's sort of understandable that gay people would be the ones who feel most annoyed at the obvious double standard of so-called "pro-family" people like the Palins in a situation like the one they're in: denouncing gay people as causing the breakdown of the family, while there's an as yet unmarried, pregnant teenage daughter in their family.

Do this bisexual man want to ask a few questions myself? Weeelll...

I do have one question that relates to the general political issue of gay marriage rather than to any so-called "character" issues that may or may not be highlighted in the Palin family's private life. Anti-gay marriage writer Stanley Kurtz has claimed that gay marriage in the Netherlands (more accurately, registered partnerships in the Netherlands, but many conservatives like to skip over the difference) is at least partially to blame for rising amounts of out-of-wedlock births there. The actual mechanism by which this actually happens isn't made altogether clear. Apparently the existence of alternatives to "traditional marriage" makes people abandon the institution in favour of cohabitation, which is bad. And totally different from, say, two teenagers entering into a shotgun marriage because the girl got knocked up, which I suppose is good: it is, after all, a traditional marriage form (including the "father who didn't want kids having to marry the girl he got pregnant" bit, that's a very old and common marriage tradition in our society that has not yet been destroyed, sad to say).

So anyway, a question for people who opposes gay marriage:
How did gay marriage help cause this Bristol Palin's out-of-wedlock pregnancy? Since you so readily claim that it's acceptance of relationships like mine that contributes to the existence of family-unfriendly situations like the one in which Sarah Palin's daughter has found herself, please illustrate the mechanism by which that occurred in this situation. I don't see it, and I'd like you to point it out. I hope you agree that if you claim that gay marriage has nothing to do with this situation at all then I think you're entirely correct: gay marriage has NOTHING to do with the family situations of other people, and gay marriage opponents should stop falsely claiming that it does.

Obama and Sarah someone

On Friday, I watched online as Barack Obama laid out his ideals and addressed the issues that he believed were most important to America. I had hoped that the ensuing political discussion would be about the issues and ideals he'd laid out rather than the petty sniping and personality politics that so turns me off the whole political process.

By Saturday, and pretty much every day since then, the talk from political observers, both Republican and Democratic, has been about the personality, gender and life experiences of someone named Sarah Palin. Issues? Ideals? What are they?

I am not a Democrat (well, obviously, since I'm not an American, but even if I was American, I'd still value my political independence). I do not care to support any political party blindly. I'm interested in this US political campaign because I want to see some repairs done to the political system of the world's oldest existing liberal democracy; I think it's fundamentally broken. I want to see America once again have a political system that promotes the ideals that make a liberal democracy work - accountability, involvement by the people in the task of government, ability of multiple different polities to work together, if not always well, then without any actual bloodletting - above phony considerations of a candidate's "character" that is, in reality a media-constructed fantasy about the person, so carefully crafted by their campaigns. I don't care if the effort to restore the overarching importance of core liberal democratic ideals, and end all the bullshit about fictional "character" issues, comes from a Republican, Democrat or other candidate, so long as it comes from somewhere.

I have been deeply impressed by the commitment that the Obama candidacy has had to those liberal democratic principles. I am anxious to see both Republicans and Democrats stop obsessing about the minutiae of Sarah wotsername's life story, and return to working towards promoting those overarching liberal democratic ideals over the phony politics of personality.

You know, some part of me can't help wondering if part of the point to this pick was to get people on both sides focused away from the big issues and back onto the petty, election-winning but ultimately country-destroying, stuff again.

Bigpond music store: problem

Telstra Bigpond has a new online music store. Better, they're offering downloads in MP3 format, which should satisfy all but the most radical advocates of open media formats.

I should be happy with the fact that DRM just got another nail in its coffin, but....

From the linked article:

BigPond now gives iPod users an alternative place to purchase their favourite music in a format that will work on their player. And if they are BigPond customers they will save money on the tracks and download them free of data charges

So an ISP is giving its current and potential future customers preferential access to that ISP's own music store. And why do I suspect that Bigpond's deal with the major Australian record companies will give Bigpond exclusive online MP3 distribution rights?

I was open to the possibility that Itunes' and the ABC's "what download quota?" deals with Iinet could be equitable since both Apple and the ABC were free to make similar deals with other ISPs, but when an ISP is giving preferential treatment to a music download site that it itself runs?

This is not a neutral Net.

Channel Seven reneges on airing GetUp ad, doesn't give straight answer why

Australian Internet activist organisation Get Up is fuming that Channel seven didn't broadcast the ad that they bought time for, intended to draw attention to the situation in Tibet, during the Olympic opening ceremony. Seven's excuses have so far been, in sequence:

1. GetUp hadn't actually paid for the ads to be broadcast. When GetUp produced spreadsheets showing that the ad had indeed been bought and paid for, Seven switched to:


2. The ads weren't shown because the Olympic opening ceremony ran overtime. This somehow extended to bookings made with Seven's regional broadcasting partner, Prime Television, to broadcast the ad in timeslots before the ceremony had even started. Seven has pulled a Sergeant Schultz on that one and claimed to know nothing about what Prime may or may not have allegedly possibly chosen to do or not do. Prime has released no information whatsover. Seven has since shifted position again, and is now claiming that:


3. GetUp supposedly ambushed Seven by claiming that they'd booked time to air their Fuelwatch ad rather than the Tibet ad. The beauty of this of course is that there's simply no way for GetUp to prove their innocence of the charge, making the issue now one of who you believe is telling the truth. I would point out that Channel Seven has already stated on verifiable lie when they falsely claimed that GetUp had not paid for airtime for an ad which they had actually paid for.

GetUp meanwhile is again soliciting donations to run their ad on channel seven. Hopefully. It may be difficult to convince people that the ad will not again be refused for arbitrary and shifting reasons. That may discourage donations in my opinion, unfortunately.

In political theory class today I was intrigued to hear the opinion of many of the youth there that while they were concerned about abuse of government power, they believed the power of transnational corporations was at least as worrying, if not more so, than that of government. I'm vaguely interested in the question of whether the GetUp situation is an example of the Chinese government's abuse of power, corporate abuse of power by Channel Seven, or some combination of both, but I definitely believe that this dishonest approach to the issue by channel seven is a deeply disturbing manifestation of an abuse of power.

Where's that credit card....

Global politics: thought for the week

I think the thing to take home from global political events this week, like the Georgia/South Ossetia/Russia conflict and the Beijing Olympics (and the Olympics is very much a global political event), is that China and Russia have indirectly , but concretely, challenged the US claim of supreme sovereignty over the entirety of geopolitical affairs.

Georgia at the the Olympics

Looking at the lower end of the current medal tally, I saw that Georgia had managed to snag a sinlge bronze medal. "Wouldn't it be funny given the current situation there," I thought snarkily, "if Georgia won their medal in an unbelievably ironic sport like shooting?"

Turns out it wasn't nearly as funny as I thought.

A pity that the Women's 10m Air Pistol bronze medal winner's hug of the Russian competitor have received little coverage outside of the immediate geographical area. Not that I'd expect it to make much difference to the power-plays going on in the region, alas, but it'd be nice to share this small piece of optimism for humanity.

Left-libertarianism?

I've seen the label a couple of times now, and it's the one that seems to come closest to encapsulating my political philosophy. Some aspects of the label appeal to me, some don't. Of course, I could say that about every political label under the sun, but this one seems much more appealing than most.

Not the revolutionary version, no, nor do I think, as Wikipedia suggests , that "left-libertarianism" is just another name for Libertarian Socialism (which is itself, according to that link, just another name for anarchism anyway). No, it's a different ideology in its own right. And it has more than a few adherents.

The thing that finally solidified the label as appropriate for me was reading a short excerpt from self-described "left-libertarian" Ellen Willis in my Political Theory reader. I searched for a few of her writings online and, after reading them, found myself agreeing with a lot of what she wrote, although not all of it by any means (the two full pieces that I read are here and here; they are critical of both the Second Gulf War (the first one not so much) as well as the modern American anti-war movement, and are fairly controversial in content,imho).

So I suppose I could call myself "left-libertarian" from now on - if it weren't for those pesky other people describing left-libertarianism as an ideology that is the basis of yet another Glorious Revolution. I don't want a revolution. I just want to see government and other sources of coercive power in society curtailed.

J D Unwin quote from Hopousia: confirmed

Zhasper's Google Book search didn't pick it up for some reason, but a search within Hopousia only for the phrase "human records" (with quotes) yields a positive match for the quote on page 84: "In human records there is no instance of a society retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a..." and the Google quote ends. Based on other information (this Good News Week article), the full quote carries on over to page 85. Context is still sorely lacking, so it is not yet possible to determine if the quote truly means what anti-gay activists claim it means.

The good news: a copy of Hopousia is currently being registered as sitting on the shelf in the library catalogue of the University of Sydney. The bad news: no way in hell do I have time to get it and look through it properly. I'm barely keeping up with my coursework as it is.

That doesn't mean I won't skive off and have a peak it anyway of course...

Final thoughts: I find the whole idea of "cultural energy" questionable. I'm not the only one, and questions were being raised about the standard that Unwin was using even at the time his work was published. Here is part a review from 1935 of Unwin's original book "Sex and Culture"( full reference for this review is: Benedict R. 1935, 'Review: [untitled]', American Anthropologist, Wew Series, vol 37, no 4, part 1 (Oct-Dec), pp 691-692. I hope I got that right):

The author has studied eighty primitive societies, being guided, he states, only by the character of the descriptions available, and he concludes that there is an invariable correlation between the de- gree of sexual restriction and cultural achievement.

In order to attain this absolute correlation , he has had to manipulate his definitions both of sexual restrictions and of cultural achievement. His correlations, in fact, only concern the limitation of pre-nuptial freedom in women and the nature of religious rites. It is never quite clear why he regards pre-nuptial restrictions as being so much more dynamic than post-nuptial, but restrictions upon the sexual opportunities of women are more desirable than upon those of men, he says, be- cause women are more important in child rearing.

In defining cultural achievement the standard is surprising. The lowest level recognized is that characterized by religion without post-funeral honor of the in- dividual dead or without worship in temples, these two being the criteria of the middle and highest level of primitive cultural achievement. For a culture to rise from the lowest plane to the next higher level it is only necessary to restrict pre- nuptial freedom of women; to rise to the highest level, where they will be capable of building temples, it is only necessary to demand tokens of virginity. It is not necessary that the restrictions shall be enforced for all females in a society. Thus, Samoa has the necessary cultural energy because restrictions are imposed on one girl in the village, the taupou, and rates as a culture with the most stringent re- strictions, whereas Zufii, for instance, ranks as one with complete absence of re- strictions, having, in the author's words, not even "irregular or occasional con- tinence."

It is impossible within the limits of a brief review to criticize the long list of absurdities that are involved in the correlations in this volume. They can be indi- cated from the author's handling of American Indian material. No tribes of North America north of Mexico have, according to his definitions, either temples or an- cestor cult, and must therefore have no restrictions upon sexual freedom. He has described twenty-five tribes from North America, but he has omitted without com- ment or excuse the entire area of the chastity belt. If, as he says, he was guided in his selection entirely by the excellence of the ethnographic material available, it would have been natural to include at least the Menomini and the Cheyenne. The latter's prohibition of pre-nuptial sex life would of course have played havoc with his one-to-one correlation between high cultural status characterized by temples,
and the existence of pre-nuptial restrictions.

[..]

The volume is an extreme example of the manipulation of anthropological ma- terial to support private programs of social reform, in this case, a program of return to the immediate Victorian past. It makes clear, as has already been abundantly demonstrated in anthropological literature, that any thesis, no matter how unlikely, can be upheld by a suitable rearrangement of cultural facts from primitive peoples. Only insistance upon a greater scrupulousness and a greater intelligence can pre- vent the recurrence of such volumes of special pleading.

I don't think Ruth Benedict was very impressed.

Hunting down an anti-gay (mis-?)quote - J D Unwin

One of my hobbies is hunting down misuse of statistics and academic writings by anti-gay activists. An "academic quote" I picked up on recently was an alleged quote by a person named J D Unwin. The quote in question shows up a lot, such as in this flyer from the Traditional Values Coalition. Gotta love that title: "The Destruction of Marriage Precedes the Death of a Culture". Alarmist, much?

Anyway, the quote is "In human records there is no instance of a society retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist upon prenuptial and postnuptial continence". It's allegedly from a book by Unwin called "Sex and Culture". Anti-gay activists have latched onto it because they believe that it proves that gay marriage will destroy all our society's "cultural energy" once legalising gay marriage destroys the entire institution of marriage in society...somehow. They're always a bit vague on how we get from one to other.

The book is, unfortunately, long out of print (it was first published in 1934). So I count myself lucky that I found myself a copy. A searchable electronic copy too, no less. A group of sites claiming affiliation with something called the Men's Right movement apparently think it's very important too, and they, er, made it available for a time.

It's easy to see why the Men's Right's people like it once you have a look at it: contrary to claims of anti-gay activists, it's not sexual regulation in general that Unwin describes as a supposed gauge of "cultural energy", it's the sexual regulation of the female that is the gauge (and it's ONLY the sexual regulation of the female - men can do whatever the hell they like when it comes to "sexual continence", apparently. Is that REALLY the message to men that you want to send, "pro-family" activists?).

At 648 pages, it's a large book, and I'm a busy person, so I won't be reading the whole thing anytime soon. But as it's searchable, I searched for the quote listed above and found....nothing. A possible mis-scan in the text rendering the search unsuccessful? I tried several searches for various partial text of the quote and...several near misses on phrases that seemed characteristic of Unwin's language (such as "instance of a society") but not the actual quote itself. It's not in there.

The one and only semi-original source I can find online for the supposed Unwin quote is an article in Christianity Today. Phillip Yancy claims to have personally read Unwin's work, and his phrasing seems to confirm that he believes the quote was in the book Sex and Culture. But he did say that Unwin had written other stuff...

I tried plugging a part of the quote along with Unwin's name into Google Scholar and finally got something: Google Scholar thinks it might be in a book, also by J D Unwin, called Hopousia. No text from Google at all unfortunately, not even a preview, and the book is also long out of print. Yancy mentions it in his Christianity Today article, so I suspect that Yanny has read both works and got confused about which one the quote in question could actually be found.

And that's as far as I can get. I have zero access to this "Hopousia" and no idea where I can get it. I sacrifice this post now to the Great Google in the hopes that someone else who wants to track it might be able to continue the search. All I'll say in conclusion is that this is a good demonstration of how claims by anti-gay activists about what "statistics prove" and "academic research has shown" is generally attributed to material that they've never actually laid eyes on. After all, if even one of the people citing this "quote from Unwin's 1934 book" had actually READ Sex and Culture, they would have known that the quote isn't there.

Or perhaps they did, and just don't care.

Monthly download limits, exemptions from them, and Net Neutrality

Like most ADSL users in Australia, my connection has a monthly download limit. Exceed it, and my connection speed is then throttled down to only slightly faster than dial-up for the remainder of that billing period. Not something I want to happen in a hurry.

So I should be chuffed that my ISP has decided that downloads from iTunes are what my ISP calls "freezone" - they don't count towards my monthly download quota. Likewise, the ABC's new iView service is freezone. In fact, the ABC is specifically lobbying Australian ISPs to exempt their new digital baby from download quotas. My ISP is apparently the first to do it: "...the broadcaster was trying to convince internet providers to exclude ABC channels from download limits and by last night iiNet had agreed."

I should be pleased. But I can't help wondering what the implications of exempting some web services, but not others, from monthly download limits will be on the principle of Net Neutrality...

Full Daily Show and Colbert Report episodes legally available online

I hadn't realised that full episodes of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report were now being made available at the Daily Show's official website. They're available for everyone, too, none of this "you are not authorized to see these clips because you're not in the US" crap I got when they were announced as being available on Mahalo.

Daily Show homepage here, links to full episodes on the bottom-right.

Hmm, I wonder if the show may seem less clever now that I can see full episodes rather than just clips of the best bits?

WYD: can now "annoy" but cannot "inconvenience"

Glad I didn't get round to buying the t-shirt now, since it seems it won't be necessary. Amber Pike and Rachel Evans of the NoToPope coalition have successfully overturned the "annoyance" part of the WYD regulations in court: Court backs WYD activists' right to annoy.

Premier Iemma's spin in the linked article is entertaining: he's emphasising the fact that the regulations' prohibition on "inconveniencing" was upheld, and trying to make out that this means his government still got everything it wanted:

Premier Morris Iemma says the Government will not be appealing against the court's decision. He says police still have adequate powers.

"Two words have been struck out - the words 'and annoyance'," he said.

"'Inconvenience' is still there and they can still achieve the same objective, and that is to ensure that people who do want to make a point in a protest can do so without disrupting the pilgrims or the events.

Did Mr Iemma just admit that his government's attempt to crack down on "annoying" behaviour during World youth Day wasn't actually necessary for the maintenance of order? Then why did your government try and crack down on it, mate?

The current tight-rope for the presidential nominess

Glenn Greenwald describes the most relevant current divide in American politics far better than I was able to do:

While there are substantial, important differences between Republicans and Democrats, critical political debates are at least as often driven not by the GOP/Democrat dichotomy, but by the split between the Beltway political establishment and the rest of the country. As the above-chronicled events demonstrate, all of these assaults on our core civil liberties and the rule of law are not Republican attacks with Democrats fighting against them. They are attacks launched by the political establishment against the citizenry, and they ought to be responded to as such.

Tangential to Greenwald's post, I believe that any presidential candidate currently has the tough job of satisfying the desires of both the citizenry and the American political establishment if they want to get elected. Sure, I'd like a president to represent the people exclusively the way a democratically elected leader is supposed to do, but I don't think that the current American political climate makes that possible.

This is what I mean when I say that Obama hasn't been pivoting towards "the centre", he's been pivoting towards the American political establishment.

"Pilgrims" in Sydney

What a strange feeling it is to say that Sydney, this not particularly religious city, is currently attracting "pilgrims". I'm still putting the word in inverted commas while I get used to the idea.

I passed some of them wearing World Youth Day passes, talking in a language that I think was French, as I was walking to work today. My workplace isn't exactly dead centre of Sydney either. They ignored me, which pretty much sums up the entire WYD experience for those of us who actually live here - we're completely irrelevant to the proceedings.

The insularity appears to be bad news economically: an article in the Sydney Morning Herald claims that the pilgrims (there, I'm getting used to it) are causing a downturn in business in the city, as regular patrons flee from the proceedings and the pilgrims are simply not interested in anything not specifically WYD-related.

And I can't resist posting this bit from the article above, which is quite revealing about the mindset of all these pilgrims here who claim to follow a Saviour whose teachings placed so much emphasis on helping the poor:

A local Big Issue vendor said he was also having one of his worst days in memory.

Trevor sells the magazine, which benefits the homeless and long-term unemployed, on the corner of Elizabeth and Market street every day, but said today was barely worth the trouble.

"It was dead this morning," he said.

"On a good day I'd make between $100 and $150 ... today I reckon I'll take about $25."

The young vendor said all the office workers seemed to have disappeared from the CBD, and that the pilgrims were not interested in buying the magazine.

"They only stop and ask for directions to the church," he said.

Obama on Iraq - much less "repositioning" than claimed

If you believed, say, The Washington Post, Barack Obama has gone back on a significant promise he made during the Primaries to withdraw troops from Iraq.

FARGO, N.D., July 3 -- Sen. Barack Obama raised the possibility of slowing a promised gradual, 16-month withdrawal from Iraq if he is elected president, saying that Thursday he will consult with military commanders on an upcoming trip to the region and "continue to refine" his proposals.

"My 16-month timeline, if you examine everything I've said, was always premised on making sure our troops were safe," Obama told reporters as his campaign plane landed in North Dakota, a state no Democratic presidential candidate has carried since 1964. "And my guiding approach continues to be that we've got to make sure that our troops are safe, and that Iraq is stable. And I'm going to continue to gather information to find out whether those conditions still hold."

Obama's own website currently has this to say on Iraq:

Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.

What's also said, and strangely missed by, well, everyone, is this:

He will keep some troops in Iraq to protect our embassy and diplomats; if al Qaeda attempts to build a base within Iraq, he will keep troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region to carry out targeted strikes on al Qaeda.

Am i misunderstanding the significance of this? His website says that a certain situation that Obama believes would mean that he should not withdraw some troops from Iraq would mean that Barack Obama would not withdraw some troops from Iraq. Seems to me like this is exactly the kind of "planning to respond to the existing situation in Iraq" that Obama claims that he has consistently been doing. If I read the website right, the "16-months" promise, is not absolute, and never was.

Obama has been consistent in stating his goal to be cleaning up the Iraq mess in as minimally painful a way as possible. He has consistently stated that the way he would go about achieving that goal would be based on what's happening at the time. If this makes him inconsistent on what his exact proposed policy is, I have no problem with that. I think being willing to re-evaluate your course of action based on new facts is a good thing, and it's something that's been sorely lacking in, say, the presidency of George W Bush.

Obama's position shifting?

I see Obama's changing (or "fine-tuning" if you prefer) of some of his positions constantly getting described as an example of him "swinging to the centre" and pivoting away from positions supposedly held only by his "left-wing base". Longtime blogger Glenn Greenwald has ably demonstratedhow inaccurate this framing is, on the specific question of withdrawing from Iraq: the supposedly "leftist fringe" position of setting a timetable for withdrawal within 1 to 2 years is actually preferred by nearly 60% of the American population.

I do believe that Barack Obama's position has...finessed on several issues. On the recently passed FISA legislation, it has definitely actually changed, from opposition to support. I do believe that this has been a calculated move intended to shore up support, but I don't think it's intended to shore up support amongst "centrist" voters, or any voters at all, for that matter. I think it's an attempt to shore up support among what some American bloggers call "the Beltway Elite": Washington insiders.

It may seem like blasphemy to an American to point out that their political system isn't a perfect democracy, and that prospective candidates need to accomodate power-centres that exist independently of, even in opposition to, the power wielded by the voting public. But given that their Congress now has an approval rating of just 9%, the lowest ever, and that the same poll shows that 72% of Americans believe members of Congress are more interested in furthering their own careers than in helping people, it may be more believable than it used to be.

To the extent that Obama's redefining himself, I suspect it's not a case of swinging away from the "left wing base" to the "centre", but away from the voting public to the Beltway Elite. This is probably necessary - I recall reading a blog claiming that George McGovern lost against that crook Richard Nixon because McGovern's own party hated him and worked against getting him elected - but it's still frustrating. And I do wish more people would call it what it is - placating the powerful - rather than constantly mischaracterising it as being based on what actual voters want.

Andrew Bolt vs the art community

Andrew Bolt lays in to Olympia Nelson's father Robert for refusing to lay down and dumbly accept the rhetorical beating that Australia's self-appointed moral guardians are giving to the art community. I could respond, but it seems Robert has already done so in comments. I'll repost here:

Robert Nelson answers Andrew Bolt

Dear Andrew

Let me answer all your questions. Incidentally, I counted eight, not seven.

“One: The argument never was whether looking at a naked child was child abuse. It was whether taking suggestive pictures of naked children exploited them, and left others in more danger.”

Rubbish. Polixeni Papapetrou’s genre stands accused of stripping children of their innocence, which is tantamount to child abuse. Your statement is illogical. If a picture really strips the innocence of a child, it’s clearly abusive. Your reasoning is devious if you think you can now soften the accusation.

“Two: It’s not girls from nice families like Olympia’s that run most risk of abuse when we endorse sexy shots of children.”

So would you care to explain how Olympia’s photograph exposes other children to risk?

“Three: Nelson loaned his naked daughter to defend pictures he actually detested before the public dared attack Henson, too. Three years ago he admitted Henson’s work was “pornographic”, showing a “vulgar relish in depicting naked, pouting teenagers” in a “teasing sexual spectacle” to present them as a “passive target for the viewer’s lust”. Why now defend pornography you once said you hated, Robert?”

No contradiction at all. We are not defending Henson’s pictures in every respect by seeking to justify the artistic use of child nudity in art. I can remain critical of Henson while supporting the principle that his work is art. Also, I have at no stage said that Henson’s work is pornography and not art.

Four: To defend Henson, Nelson and Art Monthly have switched an argument about pornographic shots of a pubescent 13-year-old into one about a mum’s picture of a child too young and demure for most to be thought sex bait. Why the whitewash, Robert?”

You contradict yourself in the very next paragraph where you’re claiming that the pictures inside the journal reveal “a soft-porn pose”. Please decide which you mean. There is no whitewash from us but a great deal of hogwash emanating from you.

“Five: Nelson focuses his defence on the cover shot of Olympia—one even newspapers feel is safe enough to publish. But inside the magazine is one closer to the issues raised by Henson—a shot no paper will publish that has Olympia in necklace and earrings, splayed naked on her arched back with chest bared in a soft-porn pose. Robert, now that your daughter is developing breasts like one of Henson’s models, will you have her pose like that again? If not, haven’t you wilfully ignored a critical difference between Henson’s pictures and that cover shot of your wife’s?”

Polixeni Papapetrou is the artist, not I. If Polixeni and Olympia want to do naked photographs at this age, I will most certainly not intercede to prevent it. This is their inalienable moral right. Do you seriously want to strip them of this right?

“Six: Nelson presented Olympia at the press conference as a girl mature enough to consent to or even suggest the nude pictures taken of her. In fact, Olympia was just six when they were taken, and little girls tend to dress up for pictures, not strip. Indeed, Nelson admits not all the photos were her idea, and I doubt any would have occurred to her without prompting. My suspicion was strengthened by the way Nelson prompted some of Olympia’s answers and actions. Robert, how much was she coached?”

Our house was besieged by reporters. We thought we might do as Bill Henson did and remain silent. As you say, Andrew, it didn’t do Henson any harm to keep his mouth shut. Still, I couldn’t bear the thought of hiding from the media and I spontaneously decided to put on my brightest shirt and speak directly. I rushed out of the house without even putting my shoes on and told them that we’d be ready in 15 minutes. I then completed getting dressed and emerged as promised. You can check this story with the news hounds. Andrew, I should get a new job as a coach if I can achieve Olympia’s performance in the space of 15 minutes while putting my shoes on and jotting down a few notes of my own.

Seven: And even if a six-year-old suggests nude shots, who is responsible for what happens next? The child, or the parent?

The parent. We take full responsibility. Please do not imply that Polixeni or I are in any way shirking this by allowing Olympia to have her voice. Brendan Nelson implied this with his disgraceful intervention, saying that Olympia speaking out compounded the damage. This was similar to Hetty’s sanctimonious and cowardly attack on Olympia, saying that she has been brainwashed, thus invalidating the child’s voice.

“Pedophiles often exploit just this excuse: “It was her idea.” Robert, as a good parent, aren’t you horrified to give this line of argument any weight?”

The fact that Olympia instigated some of the images was never used as the unique reason to produce or display the images. It has been raised as evidence of Olympia’s consent, as this has been consistently at issue. Andrew, you know full well that this was the basis for saying that some of the works were her idea. Why do you twist things so deviously in such an aggressive campaign against an artistic family?

If there is any matter that is at all unclear, please get back to me. I can’t read your blog because I have a day job and have to work for a living, but you know where to find me. Our family will not be bullied by this campaign. Neither Kevin nor Brendan nor Hetty nor Andrew leaves us in the slightest bit fazed. In spite of their collective zeal, they have failed to produce a good argument that Polixeni, Olympia, Robert and Maurice have done anything wrong.

Yours

Robert

Even the child being "defended" sees this for what it is

Fascinating: in the wake of the moral panic triggered by a photo of an unclothed 6-year-old girl on an art magazine, the girl herself says that she has no problems with the photos. You'd think that her claim not to need any defense might at least slow down the people rushing to defend her from the big bad artists just a little bit. Not so. And the rhetorical move used to counter her claim is entirely predictable: accuse her parents of putting her up to it

Mr Rudd is standing by his comments and has warned against allowing children to speak out on the issue.

"If people want to make a political point in opposition to me, I don't think it's right they use underage children to make that point," he said.

"They can engage the political debate as much as they want, it's a free country, but when it comes to protection of children, that should be a foremost responsibility for each of us."

Because, apparently, children have no will of their own and no ability to form an opinion that is different from their parents. One of the commentwrs at the ABC website ("kieran" at 07 Jul 2008, 03:02pm) put it best:

It may be the norm for you to treat your children like this (stifling them, leaning on them, making sure they say what you want them to say), however there are parents who do give their children the freedom to think... I can think of a number of parents who are like this, and they are generally involved in the arts (the whole freedom of expression, etc).

Olympia Nelson deviated from the script that the fiction of a child as a helpless and angelic non-entity would require her to follow. It's depressing, but not at all surprising, that her comments are hammered into fitting that script of child as helpless non-entity regardless.

This really is more about defending a magical ideal of childhood that exists in our society than it is about defending any actual child, near as I can tell. Or that's how I read it from the way that the moral guardians are refusing to admit that Olympia Nelson might possibly have a mind of her own.

World Youth Day Regulations are kind of but not really like regulations at sporting events

One of the justifications given by defenders of the World Youth Day regulations - for example by Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione towards the end of this news article - is that they're "no different to those used at sports stadiums and other large public arenas". I don't think many people are familiar with the regulations at sports stadiums. I wondered if this was actually true.

Sporting venues in New South Wales are governed by acts and legislation describing what actions can and can't be performed by the authority in charge of maintaining that venue (usually a private or state-run corporation that's given permission to manage the land). For example, Sydney Olympic Park would be governed by a regulation like, say the Sydney Olympic Park Authority Regulation 2007 - REG 17:

(1) A person who contravenes any provision of this Regulation while at a sportsground, or who trespasses or causes annoyance or inconvenience [emphasis added] on any part of a sportsground, may be removed from the sportsground or the relevant part of the sportsground by a person authorised by the Authority or a police officer.

(2) A person authorised by the Authority or a police officer acting in accordance with this clause may use such force as is reasonable in the circumstances for the purpose of discharging his or her functions under this clause.

So people are actually telling the truth that restrictions on "annoying and inconveniencing" people have already existed in some type of NSW legislation. But calling the WYD regulations "no different" from something like what goes on at sporting events is really stretching it.

First, sporting venue regulations apply only to sporting venues. This seems fair to me: a person is paying money to enter that space, and should reasonably expect to find their behaviour restricted should they choose to pay for permission to access it. World Youth Day regulations prohibiting "annoyance" and "inconvenience", while they do not apply to the whole city, apply to some pretty important public parts of it. Issue 75 of the Government Gazette of the State of NSW has the complete list starting on page 5822. It includes the Domain, The University of Sydney, Hyde Park, The Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Sydney Jewish Museum (wtf?), the list goes on. The worst part, and a part which NEVER applies to my knowledge during, say, State of Origin matches, is that the regulations governing the event also apply to transport sites: all the inner city railway stations, Liverpool and Campbelltown stations for crying out loud, as well as various other stations and bus interchanges. This is hardly "no different" from what happens during major sporting events. It's unprecedented.

Also unprecedented is the existence of a $5500 fine rather than merely, as the Sydney Olympic Park Authority Regulation above says, removal from the grounds. Looking at the Government Gazette's reprinting of the regulations, a fine would be incurred for disobeying an instruction to cease engaging in "annoying or inconveniencing" activity rather than for the activity itself. This is less problematic than it could be. But even so, giving civil authorities this much arbitrary power to censor public speech is still asking for trouble. I'm very glad that the State Emergency Service and Rural Fire Service have indicated that they're going to refuse to use these powers.

I actually feel slightly less concerned about the regulations now I've had an opportunity to study them thoroughly, but I still view them as an unwarranted attack on the public expression of freedom of speech. Describing them as similar to those regulations that are in place at sporting venues is misleading in my opinion, as they go quite a bit further than anything that's ever been in place before.

Welcome to the art/children moral panic

Having utterly failed in their witch-hunt against Bill Henson, the self-appointed "moral guardians" of children believe they've found a more readily exploitable target in the form of Art Monthly Magazine. Art Monthly decided to put a photo of an unclothed six-year old on its cover for the most recent issue, and the Sunday Telegraph yesterday ran a front-page article fulminating about how "sick" the imagery was. The rest of the Australian media has since taken off in their reporting about this allegedly evil act.

I deliberately say "unclothed" rather than "nude", because, unlike everyone so far who has piously denounced it as horrific, I've actually seen the image in question, and "unclothed" is a more accurate description. The, according to some ignorant commentators, "illegal" photo is at the time of writing still readily available at the Art Gallery Monthly Website. Funny - the way the papers described it, you'd think the child in question was posing like a Playboy centre-fold or something. The actual reality I see here hardly seems like it warrants all this hand-wringing.

And how interesting that in this currently oppressive media environment, the very act of verifying for myself what the media is trying to dictate to me as the truth about this photo actually feels like a dangerous enterprise. Will I now be accused of trying to access "child pornography" merely for daring to try and make up my own mind about this issue based on my own direct observation of the photo in question?

I don't think I've ever seen something in Australia, including the various emo panics, that so readily fits the definition of a moral panic like this does. The music scene I guess has become accustomed to defending itself against the routine finger-pointing that they have to endure, and can blunt the impact. The Australian art community doesn't yet have that experience.

Take this article from the Daily Telegraph. Members of the art community complained about what Art Monthly did. Reading the actual article, it's clear that they simply didn't want to deal with another round of media-driven conflict about "the community vs the arts". But the Telegraph gives the article a highly misleading title "Art lover slam child porn pictures" which makes it look the disagreement of the art community with the decision to publish is because they agree with the accusations leveled by the Daily Telegraph that the photos are child porn. The liars.

Who asked for the WYD laws? And are they really about "protecting merchandising revenue"?

There seems to be some confusion in the Australian media about it. WYD organisers 'didn't ask for rules' is the headline in the Age, although the article quotes Premier Iemma as saying that the laws "were brought in following consultation with the church and advice from the World Youth Day authority". A headline in The Australian points the finger at the Catholic Church: Church's power request.

The Australian understands the Government acted after a meeting of the Local Organising Committee of the Catholic Church on May 23. The committee, chaired by Cardinal George Pell, was concerned not only with quarantining protesters but also with protecting revenues from merchandise sales and advertising.

Protecting merchandising revenue? Really teaching us what's important to the Christian faith there, Cardinal.

So who actually wanted the laws brought in?

Anti-WYD/Pro free speech t-shirts - what would I like?

Are there protest T-shirts for WYD available that protest the anti-annoyance laws without gratuitously attacking Catholics themselves? I don't actually have a beef with the followers - they didn't ask for these regulations as far as I know.

Let's see...this one isn't too bad: "free speech*" with "*$5500 may apply" just under it. This one is interesting: "WYD 08: Is this really what Jesus would do?", but doesn't address my main concern about the whole suppression of freedom of speech thing. Here's one that's apparently pretty popular: "$5500: a small price to pay for annoying Catholics". Okay I guess, but I don't have a beef with the followers.

And there's the dilemma: I want to protest these regulations by being annoying, but I don't actually see the point in annoying Catholics. It won't change their mind. They're not going to suddenly up and say "oh gosh I've been wrong all this time!" based on anything I can do or say. It just, well, annoys them.

The boyfriend is kind of irritated about the whole thing as well. He was considering going in to protest before he learned that the Sydney protests were being organised by people with whom he has strong ideological disagreements. Maybe we should do something together? There's a kiss-in being organised...

Maybe this one is the best option: "WYD has annoyed and inconvenienced me. Pay ME $5500".

Idiotic World Youth Day regulations

Five and a half thousand dollar fine if you "cause annoyance" during World Youth Day.

You know, I didn't actually feel motivated to be annoying during World Youth Day until I heard about this.

Maybe I should see if I get myself one of those annoying T-shirts that they're talking about?.

Christianist website caught auto-substituting "gay" with "homosexual" - but why?

A number of blogs I read have had a chuckle at the discovery of Christianist "news" site OneNewsNow modifying the content of news articles that they reproduce, replacing the word "gay" wherever it apppears with "homosexual". The process is apparently automated, and was discovered when news reports about an athlete named Tyson Gay appeared on the site. His name was automatically modified in precisely the way you'd expect. My personal favourite response is from Dispatches From the Culture Wars, where a field day is being had over the unintentional double entendres that appeared in the modified article.

Commenters there are also trying to answer the question I have: why? Why would they want to substitute "gay" with "homosexual" in the first place? Several possible answers have been put forward
(1) 'There's nothing "gay" about the gay lifestyle': I've heard this explanation given before, where the earlier meaning of the word "gay" as "happy and carefree" means that the word carries connotations which anti-gay activists don't want attached to the concept of homosexuality. In previous years I've seen attempts to redefine gay people as suffering from something called Same-Sex Attraction Disorder (they're not gay, they're SSAD geddit?) but that seems to have fallen off my radar. Does it still occur?
(2) It's all about the sex: simply put, "homosexual" has the word "sex" in it. The idea apparently is to put "sex" (as opposed to "love" or "relationships") front and centre in people's minds. The focus on sex, the ickier the better, to the exclusion of any other human attribute has previously been noted as an anti-gay strategy. This justification is a little weak by itself, but can tie into...
(3) The Queer Eye for the Straight Guy effect: thanks to inroads made into popular culture, the stereotype of the gay male now has several positive attributes associated with it: we are, apparently, fashionable, stylish and quite useful to have around. Perhaps avoiding the use of the word "gay" in favour of the more clinical "homosexual" neuters this positive effect.
(4) A final possibility which I've seen raised but which I personally find unlikely: the word "gay" is sometimes presumed to refer to male homosexual people only (with "lesbian" being used to refer to female homosexual people). The reason I doubt it is because I don't believe that anti-gay activists know that such a distinction gets made by some people. Or that they would care if they did know.

It's most likely a combination of the above factors. Whatever the specifics, the ultimate purpose is to dehumanise gay people, and to prevent any positive connotations from being ascribed by the language used to describe gay people.

Some painfully bad news quotes

Hmm, who can give the most stupidly over-the-top quotation in a news article?

From 6 months ago, we have, in the article Websites linked to series of young suicides, the following contenders:

British Labour MP Madeleine Moon worrying that Internet memorial sites for suicide victims are dangerous to our youth:

"What is concerning is that you're getting internet bereavement walls. That's not going to help anyone," she said.

"What people need is not to go into a virtual world of the internet to deal with emotional problems... They need to stay very much in this real world and talk to real people."

People: the Internet is part of reality. Deal with it.

From the same article, I do feel a bit that the unnamed police officer who got quoted was being pushed into providing something, anything, that fed the reporter's narrative. This was offered up as a reason to believe that, yes, the mere existence of a memorial to a dead friend on the Internet (as opposed to, say on a wall, at a grave, or any of the gazillion other ways that people's deaths have been memorialised since, well, ever) could be seen as a way in which the Internet encourages youth suicide:

"They may think it's cool to have a memorial website," an officer told The Times.

"It may even be a way of achieving prestige among their peer group."

Sheesh.

But it's hard to top Russian state officials, whose "Concept for a State Policy in the Area of Spiritual and Moral Education of the Children of the Russian Federation and Protection of Their Morals" is awe-inspiringly bad. Nevermind the hysterical claim of Stanislav Govorukhin that "Today we have a lost generation of wandering morons whose parents’ moral vision was robbed by perestroika", it's in talking about goth and emo that things just get plain weird:

The drafters of the concept took a particular negative stance in regard to the Goth and emo youth subcultures, which are characterized by black clothing, piercings and a depressed outlook on reality. They authors compared the danger those subcultures hold for society to the dangers of skinheads, soccer hooligans, National Bolsheviks and even anti-fascists. Emo youths, according to the concept, “are subject to suicidal tendencies” and Goth children cultivate bisexuality. “The cost of the sexual services of an underage boy prostitute with Goth attributes is lower than for students in military schools but higher than for usual gay prostitutes,” the authors say, demonstrating their knowledge of life.

I suppose an anti-Western cultural backlash was inevitable (thank you so much, George W. Bush), but this kind of xenophobic outrage against "Western" concepts like emo and goth is downright scary.

More thoughts on the "emo" and "social networking" youth moral panic

Another tragic teen suicide that's vaguely related to emo and the Internet, another round of reporters writing bad articles that will actively contribute to the problem prompting all their hand-wringing.

The teenager this time is Sam Leeson. He was a thirteen year old who hanged himself. The Daily Mail reports that he was an "emo teen" who got bullied for it, and proceeds to list Blink-182 and Good Charlotte as examples of emo bands that he liked. They have the decency to list the Foo Fighters and Slipknot as "alternative" rather than "emo" at least, so it's nice to know they're trying to classify emo music accurately, even if they do fail. Blink-182, emo? People will be trying to say that Nirvana counts as emo music at this rate...

There's been plenty of pushback against bad reporting on emo in the media, with sites like Alterophobia springing up, and protests happening, of all things. The Daily Mail article is thus somewhat muted compared to its earlier dire warnings about the "emo suicide cult", as others have noted. It would be nice to think that this easing off on blaming emo would translate into thoughtful reporting, of a type that doesn't involve seeking a convenient scapegoat to account for deep-seated social problems being expressed in the attitude of teens towards each other and themselves, but that wouldn't sell papers now, would it? All attention is turned instead towards the other scapegoat that inevitably appears in these stories: the Internet, and the youth province of social networking sites.

Sam Leeson had an account on Bebo. From news.com.au: Bebo blamed for 13-year-old boy's death. Sam's mother "has blamed Bebo, a teenage social network similar to MySpace, for her son's death, and demanded a crackdown on websites that allow cyberbullies to target other users."

Unhelpfully, people in the comments section of this article at Mashable find it bemusing that someone could kill themselves just over cyberbullying, flat out saying that it shows Sam had something seriously wrong with him that the parents should have noticed...somehow. One goes so far as to say that "The parents should be charged with murder for allowing this clearly sick child to get on the computer for chatting at all!"

Some of this attitude is somewhat understandable given that certain facts did not appear in the media reporting. One such fact is the existence of offline bullying of Sam Leeson: claims that Sam "had been bullied by Severn Vale pupils particularly on the bus", that students from another school "apparently threatened him to kill himself, or they would kill him". The bullying was both offline and online. Why is it only the online bullying whose existence gets acknowledged?

Well...from Digital Journal:"Sam’s parents didn’t realize that he suffered from bullying until they checked his Bebo page after his death". Think about this. His parents didn't know about ANY bullying, both offline and online, until they found online evidence of it.

The Internet has changed things, but not in the way that people getting all hysterical about the "new menace" of cyberbullying claim. All that's happened is that the bullying which has always been there is now much more readily visible to the people who ought to be concerned with it. "Cyber-bullying" is not a new form of bullying. It is not threatening in some unspecified way that "real" bullying is not. It is just the extension of it into an online environment. Nothing more, nothing less.

The problem, then, is not Evil Emo Music[tm], or Evil Internet[tm]. The problem is what it has always been: the existence of bullying. What's changed is not its prevalence, but its visiblity. This could be seen as an opportunity, should people concerned with the issue be willing to take it. It is such a shame that they are proving unwilling or unable to do so.

Fighting Windows

Dear God but Windows Vista is a steaming pile of crap.

Our Internet access is finally on at home, so naturally I set about decking out the computer with all the essentials I've come to expect (well, except for a Linux OS, but Nick's stood firm in the face of my nagging about it). Firefox downloaded no problem at all, and then I tried to install Flash...

Automatic install: fail. Okay, switch to manual. Download, run, get told I need to quit Firefox before it can run. Quit Firefox, run installer, try to run Firefox. The ever-helpful Windows system tells me "there is a problem with the program", and it doesn't load. Windows helpfully tells me that it will find out what's wrong for me "if possible". Naturally, enough, it doesn't. No "sorry, couldn't help" either, it just does nothing. Firefox, she is broken.

I switch to the omnipresent Internet Explorer browser to find the problem. Don't get me wrong, the latest version of IE is much better than the earlier ones, but still, I want my Firefox extensions. Anyway, I find the fix. It's fiddly, and wouldn't be necessary if Windows Vista didn't have a seriously brained attitude to security.

For anyone else who faces this here is the link I used. I had to uninstall Firefox (completely uninstall, including user data and settings), disable User Account Control (UAC), re-install Firefox, and then install Flash (which now worked fine as an automatic install).

Now, I'm wondering: UAC is that godawful part of Vista that insists on asking "do you want to allow this operation?" whenever you install a program, uninstall a program, run an executable from any disk at all for crying out loud, and generally get in the way. I swear, some MS would-be software engineer heard someone say "security tends to come with a trade-off in usability" and heard "the more usability you lose, the better your security". What, besides, nag the user incessantly and unnecessarily, does this thing actually do? The help file says it's supposed to prevent malware from being installed by "ensuring that the program being run is the actual program you want to run", but, honestly, that seems an awful lot of trouble for a very weak form of protection. It's one that's totally dependent on the user not just clicking through regardless, I'll note.

So, do I actually need UAC activated in Windows Vista? I'm thinking no.

"We don't want to make Obama look racist by endorsing him"

So Google News' front page randomly decides to serve me up an article from allAfrica.com. The title is Nigeria: Senate Turns Down Motion of Commendation to Obama.

The motion was dismissed before it could be voted upon, on the basis that Hillary Clinton has not as yet conceded (although she has now stated that she will do so on Saturday).There's also this fascinating explanation for why the Nigerian Senate shouldn't rush to Obama's support:

Bringing his own counsel to bear, Senator Aminu said, "It's good for Obama for one thing but I don't like how efforts are being made to portray him as a racist. It wouldn't serve him right for the largest Senate in black Africa to portray him in such light.

SRSLY?

The Democratic Primaries are over

It says something about the whole process that I have not read a single report of who actually won the last two Primary contests held today. Instead the news has been replete with reporting that Barack Obama has finally gained the majority of pledged delegates and superdelegates that he needed to win. He now appears to have a lock on the nomination.

Hillary Clinton has not yet conceded, and used tonight to deliver a speech in which she once again raised the hotly disputed claim that she won the popular vote, asserting that more people have voted for her than for any Democratic candidate for the nomination in history. She then asked people to go to her website and make suggestions about where she ought to go from here. News reports had earlier quoted her as saying that she is open to the possibility of being Obama's VP.

All three candidates gave speeches tonight, although at the time of writing the full versions have not yet shown up on Youtube. I admit my daily blog diet has an overabundance of strong Obama supporters in it, but this is the short summary of their impressions of each speech:

McCain's: Yawn-worthy
Clinton's: Tacky and graceless
Obama's: HOLY SHIT THIS GUY IS GOOD!!

In any case, the first stage of the interminable process of replacing George W Bush at is nearly over. Here is an electoral map of where things currently stand for the actual Presidential election itself.

Apropos of nothing in particular, something I've been wondering for a while now: why does DailyKos have the nickname "Great Orange Satan"?

The people's choice?

What the Daily Show has for some time been calling the Long, Flat, Seemingly Endless Bataan Death March to the White House proceeds apace.

Today was a meeting to decide the fate of the delegates in Michigan and Florida. Look it up if you want to find the exact details, I'm getting thoroughly sick of the whole thing. Bottom line: the two states will have delegates seated, but the number of delegates will be cut by 50% for each. Some Michigan delegates will also be apportioned to Obama, although Hillary still gets the majority of them.

To summarise the objections from the Clinton camp to Obama's nomination that still exist, as well as some brand new ones:
1) Hillary Clinton is leading in the popular vote
2) Hillary Clinton beats in John McCain in the general, while Obama loses
3) A black, racist liberal elitist like Obama cannot possibly win the general under any circumstances.
4) Awarding any Michigan delegates to Obama at all is unfair and undemocratic because he chose to remove his name from the ballot, therefore receiving no delegates is entirely his own fault.

Argh.

For now, I only want to deal with (1), and mainly because what I'm about to say is I think one of those unpopular things that needs to be said: the popular vote in these Democratic Primaries is not a valid metric of what the majority of people want. You can think Michigan and Florida for that.

Because Obama was not on the ballot in Michigan, people who wanted to vote for him were not able to do so. I have also personally communicated with people who chose not to vote at all in either the Florida or Michigan Primaries because they had been told in advance that their votes would not count. Without these two groups voting, the existing vote tallies in those two states do not accurately reflect the will of the people in those two states. Therefore, including them in the overall popular vote tally, as Hillary Clinton does, is wrong. The fix? There isn't one: an accurate "popular vote" tally that includes all 50 states and sundry other competitions (Puerto Rico, Guam, Democrats Abroad, etc.) is no longer possible.

Actually it'd be enough to discredit the "popular vote tally" as a valid metric just by pointing out the absurdity of including a state in which 0% of all votes were awarded to Obama, but (a) I wanted to be thorough, and (b) as stated above, many Clinton supporters are now saying that it's Obama's own fault that he received no votes in Michigan.

Bill Henson, "agenda-setting", and the strange malleability of politics

For all the talk of new media changing the media structure, blogs still tend to be more reactive than proactive. It's still the mainstream media and political leaders that set the public agenda of what's discussed, on blogs as much as anywhere else.

I haven't really felt inclined to discuss the Bill Henson situation because I feel like it's an issue that's been dragged kicking and screaming onto the public agenda. I did see some of Henson's work, photos of adolescents' bodies, when doing cultural studies at uni last year. I think it says something about the hysteria around the issue that I honestly cannot remember whether the adolescents in the images that I saw were completely nude or not. Either there was no full nudity, or the context was such that the question of exactly how much clothing was not being worn simply had no reason to stick in my mind.

The only real reason I'm commenting now is because Malcolm Turnbull has recently voiced his support of Henson and artistic freedom, condeming the raids that were done on the art gallery. Meanwhile, the previously linked news article says that the Prime Minister is standing by his initial criticism of the gallery display.

Just to re-iterate: it's the Labor Prime Minister that's currently advocating censorship on the grounds of sexual immorality, and it's the Liberal front-bencher currently defending freedom of expression in the face of that censorship. Weird.

The so-called "emo suicide" in the UK - some more detail

Why is it that I find myself blogging most when I have uni assessments due?

The UK tabloid media have gone all-out on Hannah Bond's suicide. The Sun: Suicide of Hannah, the secret "emo". The Telegraph: Popular schoolgirl dies in 'emo sucide cult'. Even the more upmarket Times is in on the act: Girl, 13, hanged herself after becoming obsessed with 'emo'. I think it's only that last article which points out that the suicide actually happened in September last year. I wonder why it's suddenly news now? Was the inquest into her death only just now completed?

Hannah's profile is no longer on Bebo. Someone else has put up a memorial page using her former username: http://www.bebo.com/LivingDisaster. Looks like the 4chan people have decided to have some fun in the comments section recently. There are other memorial sites there, such as http://www.bebo.com/RIPhannahxXx. Most recent commenters, those who were genuine friends of Hannah and aren't just there for the lulz, are really pissed at the recent media coverage. Unsurprisingly.

In spite of the ludicrous claims of the media that members of the so-called emo "cult" spend their time "talking about death and the glamorisation of hanging and speaking about “the black parade” - a place where “emos” believe they go after they die", none of that appears anywhere in any of the comments left by any of Hannah's friends. Unsurprising, since the whole idea of it is complete and utter crap. The phrase "black parade" does appear in the comments of the 4chan people who are mocking the death, though. Over and over again. So I expect the mainstream media to do what it does every time it discusses emo, and utterly fail to make a distinction between the genuine and the mocking commentary on emo. I fully expect to see "in-depth investigations" from the mainstream press, which will say stupidity such as "we investigated Hannah's bebo profile and were shocked at the number of times the 'black parade' was mentioned and glorified".

Looks like the emo kids are going to be the targets of a full-blown moral panic yet again. Pity.

Hillary Clinton should not drop out....yet

An editorial from Motherjones is getting some well-deserved linkage around a lot of blogs. The most important bit is where it highlights what Clinton's three options are now, and the ramifications of them:

First, keep fighting like nothing has changed. When their candidate is challenged, Clinton supporters respond with huge monetary shows of support. And when their careers are challenged, the Clintons themselves kick it into another gear. Hillary Clinton can double down on the upcoming primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky (where she leads by large margins), ratchet up the calls to seat Michigan and Florida, make a zillion phone calls to superdelegates every day, and hope that Obama gets caught in another Reverend Wright-esque sandstorm. (It wouldn't hurt to drop the gas tax pander.) Rumors persist about one last piece of truly nuclear opposition research the Clinton campaign has held back about Obama. It could release some such thing; the only danger is that if Clinton does not win the nomination, the Democratic nominee may be fatally wounded. But wounding the nominee is obviously not a concern if the Clinton campaign chooses this option, anyway.

Second, she can drop out immediately. Despite the calls for this that are certain to ring through Obama-friendly parts of the blogosphere today, this may not be the best option for Obama. If Clinton drops out this week, Obama may lose the upcoming primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky to someone who is not on the ballot.

Third, lay the groundwork for a graceful exit in a few weeks. Assuming that Clinton sees the end of the road on the horizon, this choice has several advantages over option number two. First, the Clintons have donated a lot of their own money to the campaign; staying in and continuing to raise funds allows them to retire some of that debt. Second, the last two weeks of the campaign can take a conciliatory tone, attempting to convince Democratic voters who have cast their lot with Clinton that Obama ain't so bad after all. This would go a long way in rehabilitating Bill and Hillary Clinton's reputations within the Democratic Party, and position Hillary for a vice presidential selection, should she be interested. If she hopes to be a future Senate Majority Leader or a candidate in 2012, this route may be the necessary one.

I find myself thinking that option three is indeed the best one, politically speaking. So, I suspect, would most Democratic powerbrokers. Should Obama be the nominee, the realpolitik of it is that he most likely cannot within the general election without the support of people who are currently supporting Hillary Clinton. The terms of Hillary Clinton's exit would have to be such that there is no perception of being unfairly forced out, and that there is a call for Democratic supporters of Hillary to be Democrat supporters first and Hillary supporters second. Ideally such a call would come from Hillary Clinton herself.

The first, not being forced out, requires all remaining primaries to be held. Yes, it's tough, but as someone else once told me, the best way for Obama to win the primaries is to, simply, win the primaries. There must be no doubt who came first overall.

The second, the call for unity, reminds me of just how ugly and dirty a game politics can be. How would it go? The Democratic powerbrokers would be having a little conversation with Hillary, saying something like "you can stay in, frankly we don't think you're going to win, but we're not going to subject you to the humiliation of a lockout. We'll even throw in a nice little earner for you later down the track: how does Senate Majority Leader sound? In return for us being so nice and not chucking you out on your ear, you stop playing attack politics on Obama and start saying good things about him every chance you get. You'll endorse him when he wins, right? Make sure your supporters will back him even though he's not you? Good. Then you can stay in, and keep telling people you're in it to win it, although of course we all know different (*evil chuckles*)."

That last bit was gratuitous, but I do think politics can get that nasty. I'm under no illusions that Barack Obama will magically stop things being nasty, but of course I don't think it's down to him to stop it. It's down to us.

UK's Daily Mail going for the anti-emo moral panic again

I was wondering why a google search for "emo initiation" was even being made, let alone having the searcher get refered to an entry on my blog. I guess I shouldn't be suprised by the fact that it's the Daily Mail whipping up hysteria about emo and Britain's threatened youth[tm] again.

And how: Girl, 13, hangs herself after becoming obsessed with Emo 'suicide cult' rock band is the headline. My Chemical Romance is given as the prime example of these so-called "suicide cult" bands. I admit to being pleased that, as of the time of writing, every single one of the 41 comments on the article all say basically "you can't blame My Chemical Romance for this!!!"

More disturbing - disturbing because it shows just how crap the Daily Mail's coverage is, that is - is the claim of the existence of an initiation rite into emo subculture that requires a person to cut themselves before they can join. There is simply no such thing. "Emo" is a style of music, and, more recently, a kind of fashion. That's ALL it is. Anybody can "join", since there are no membership requirements to like music and dress in a certain way.

Yes, I'm aware that the poor girl who killed herself told her father that she cut herself as part of such an initiation. Either someone lied to her that such a thing exists, or she lied to her father about the real reason she cut herself. I suspect the latter: from personal experience, I know that the self-hate associated with depression and suicidal tendencies make it almost impossible to explain what you're going through, and why you take actions that seem stupid and self-destructive, in a way that you believe another person would ever be able to understand. I find it entirely plausible that Hannah simply couldn't explain why she did what she did, and came up with that explanation simply as a way of providing an explanation for something that she couldn't actually explain.

My adolescence was spent in what could be considered an "alternative subculture" (grunge, to be exact), and I wish to high heaven that people would stop blaming subcultures for "causing" the problems that their children face once they hit adolescence and start trying not to be children any more. Please, PLEASE understand this: the subcultural identification is not responsible for the problems, the problems are responsible for the subcultural identification.

The music helps people cope with depression, suicidal feelings, the realisation that nobody else can ever know what it is you feel and what you think, not completely, or perhaps not at all. The identification with people of similar tastes help you realise that others can at least partially understand you in a way that adults - who've already gone through all this - cannot. But the process is not perfect, and the fact that it fails sometimes, as it failed in Hannah's case, is no reason to deny that help to the youth that need it.

Cracking down on "emo" tendencies will oppress for no reason those who identify with the subculture. Those who aren't drawn to it for emotional stability will be forced to wear the stigma of falsely being considered emotionally unstable. Those who are drawn to the music and the style looking for emotional stability will only become more emotionally unstable if that outlet is denied to them. It will makes things worse, not better.

*sigh* I wish parents would try to be a little more understanding of their children, especially when they're entering the phase of not being children anymore.

Maybe the Democratic Party ought to split in two....

This is one of my more crackheaded ideas I think, but there's a certain seductive logic to it....

With the Republican Party so discredited in the electorate, and with the reins of power within the Republican Party so tightly held by the far right, is it possible, as I've seen suggested, that the Republican Party is actually dying? Will this be the final election in which they compete as a serious contender?

If the Republican Party is dying, the Democratic Party would be poised to become the only major political party in existence. I instinctively distrust one party rule, no matter which party. I assume that most voters in democratic societies feel much the same way, and would look for a way to redress the balance. A new political party would eventually spring up - perhaps forming when, say, a large and dissatisfied bloc within the existing single party tears away and strikes out on their own.

Which brings me to the rift in the Democratic Party between supporters of Obama and supporters of Clinton. And the crackheaded idea that, if all the above is going to happen eventually, why wait? Divide the party between the two candidates now, circumventing the problem of trying to get the two sides to line up behind one candidate, and get on with it.

The problem of course is that the Republican party is not completely discredited in the eyes of the vast majority of the American voting public. Not yet, anyway. And fielding both Obama and Clinton under separate party banners could, in the winner takes all system of the US Presidential election, very easily hand the presidency to McCain by default.

And yet....I have yet to see a poll which offers people a choice between three preferred candidates rather than two. I wonder if such a poll would paint a slightly different picture to the two-person preferred question that every pollster has been asking. Plus with optional voting, turnout matters, and in the 2008 primaries the Democrats have been absolutely killing the Republicans in turnout, even long before McCain finally clinched the nomination. More democrats are motivated to take part in this election. A lot more.

Interestingly, the rivalry between Clinton and Obama is also at least partially responsible for the massive increase in turnout for the Democrats. If both continued to run under separate party banners, would that still result in increased turnout for both at the presidential election? Enough for both of them to gain more votes than McCain? Could a continuing focus on Obama vs Clinton conceivably turn the resulting lack of media focus on John McCain into a positive for Obama and Clinton, as "lack of investigation of McCain" turns into "McCain's campaign founders due to lack of media interest"?

Like I said, crackheaded, and the actual effect of such an official split would most likely be to end up handing the presidency to John McCain by default (which would at least be slightly amusing given that he only really won the Republican nomination by default when all the other candidates proved too sucky). But still...

Hillary's gas tax holiday: why she's really pushing it

First, I have to give Hillary Clinton credit for successfully hijacking the issue from John McCain and making herself get identified in the media as the most prominent proponent of it.

But yes, the gas tax holiday idea is economically stupid, not least because, as Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw said in this article: "What you learn in Economics 101 is that if producers can't produce much more, when you cut the tax on that good the tax is kept . . . by the suppliers and is not passed on to consumers". Cut the tax and the oil companies will continue to charge what the market can bear, which means they'll jack up the price so that it was exactly the same as it was before the tax was cut.

But it's not at all politically stupid once you figure out what the real goal is: it's not to reduce gas prices, it's to make Hillary Clinton more popular.

So the oil companies will raise their prices if the tax goes away? Then it's not Hillary Clinton's fault that the gas tax holiday hasn't reduced the price, it's the fault of the evil old oil companies for "denying hard-working Americans the relief of the Hillary Clinton[tm] gas tax holiday". The fact that such "denying of relief" is an economic inevitability must be carefully ignored, indeed must be actively suppressed. Hence you see Hillary painting all those pointing out the truth of what will happen as "elitists" who are "working against the interests of ordinary Americans".

The image she's aiming for is one of Hillary Clinton heroically sticking up for the little guy in the face of evil special interest groups that are putting profit before people. The actual result of the gas tax holiday is irrelevant to the effort of painting this image. Criticism of the results of the policy, while important to make, won't make the slightest difference in whether she pushes this idea or not. Indeed, they can be helpful in painting the picture she's trying to create if she can get the objectors identified with the evil special interest groups she's presenting herself as opposing. It's all about the image, not the policy.

What's really disturbing about this is such an image strategy depends very heavily not just on voters not being well-versed in how the gas tax holiday would actually play out, but on making a virtue of ignorance: people must not know what would actually happen and why. The ramifications of that are a little too disturbing for me to contemplate right now.