Stealth Editing.

This morning Comment is Free published an article by Anne Perkins about politicians wives who stand by their husband after he's been caught cheating. It originally contained the line:

In recent American politics there has been Mrs Craig standing next to Senator Larry ("I am not gay") Craig, and Mrs Vitter beside her erring senator-husband David. Of course in British politics the list is long and getting longer all the time: Mrs Mark Oaten, Mrs Rhodri Morgan, Mrs Tim Yeo, Mrs David Mellor.

There was a slight problem here, Rhodri Morgan has not been exposed for having an affair, in all likelihood she confused him with another prominent Welsh politician the badger watcher Ron Davies. Needless to say Mrs Rhodri Morgan has now found herself replaced by Mrs Jeffrey Archer in the gallery as the Guardian's libel lawyers went into convulsions.

Personally I think Mrs Mark Oaten is deserving of special praise for standing by her man considering the stink that was emanating from his brief case.

Snubbing Washington's Hookers.

This Eliot Spitzer scandal is confusing me for two reasons, first of all why is it being covered so much over here when it's only a state governor involved? Finding out that someone who has styled themsleves as a 'crusading lawyer' is actually a sleazy little shit sure can't be news. From what I've read of the man this assessment by Reason's David Wiegel seems closest to the mark:

"The irony of Spitzer's scandal is that, unless we find out something far worse than what we know, this is the rare case of him not abusing power. He took some time off from a hard day of ruining careers with innuendo and novel applications of the law to buy some sex. Fine by me."

The second source of confusion is why he needed to have New York hookers brought down to the capital, why couldn't he use Washington's own prostitutes? In this age of frivolous accusations of racism I can only conclude that Spitzer's penis is racist and has discriminated against the largely black women of Washington DC in favour of white New Yorkers.

Update: Of course one thing that isn't confusing is the fact that he managed to spend thousands of dollars on his prostitutes, he's a Democrat after all.

Terrorism & Identification.

There was something I was going to say in my previous post about India's warning over Sikh extremists in the UK but didn't because of a lack of time.

The phenomenon of ethnic diasporas supporting extremists back in there homeland is not unusual, as well as Sikhs and Tamils that I mentioned in the previous post there are also examples like the support for the IRA from plastic paddies in the USA and support for the Nazis by the German American Bund and so on. If a country takes a large number of immigrants from a volatile part of the world then it is quite likely that they will become involved in that conflict to some extent. This also one reason why the problem of Islamism is so different and potentially hard to defeat compared to the others.

If a Sikh in the West is an alienated loser and wishes to channel his self pity into supporting terrorism there is only one potential outlet* for him to identify with, the struggle of Sikh separatists in India. Once that conflict is resolved the aforementioned oddball has nowhere to channel his loserness.

However with an alienated Muslim loser there are dozens of conflicts for him to whet his self pity with from Sudan to Israel/Palestine to Kashmir to Thailand to the Philippines. It is almost impossible to resolve all of these conflicts, so there is almost always some grievance that can be nurtured. This will remain the case for as long as it is considered normal and acceptable to show solidarity for overseas groups based purely on their ethnic background.

* I realise that in theory they could identify with ideological terrorism like the various far left groups that infested Europe and the USA during the 1960s and 70s, but in reality these groups never seem to attract a broad swathe of support and tolerance so their support has remained confined to a tiny slither of the spoilt offspring of the very rich. Most major terrorist groups are based around ethnic identity.

Question.

What is the point of liveblogging the Budget? The whole point about New Labour budgets is that they hide all the nasty information so that you don't realise you're being robbed until months after the event.

Still Complacant About Terrorism.

Londonistan was supposedly the nickname given to the capital over the UK's relative
softness on islamist groups prior to the 9/11 attacks. Whilst Britain has gotten tougher on Islamawhackos it appears that we might still be a little complacent over other terrorists. No doubt this warning is all down to the Sikhophobia of India's current government led by er Manmohan Singh or something.

Senior Indian officals have warned have warned that Sikh militant groups in the UK may be planning and funding attacks on targets in India.

On 4 March, the BBC's File on Four programme quoted senior Indian police offiers as saying that money raised by Sikh groups in the UK is being used to "fund militant activities in the Punjab".

I've heard of similar claims with respect to Tamil Tiger sympathisers raising money in Tamil diaspora communities around the world, including Britain.

Apart from being an unfriendly act, allowing terrorist activity to go unhindered as long as it doesn't affect us is a dangerous game to play, because it can so easily spill over. The clearest example of that with respect to Sikh extremists is the 1985 bombing of an Air India flight from Canada to the UK which left over 300 people dead.

Designing Disability.

A deaf couple who wanted to use IVF to ensure that they have a deaf baby are angry that the government is proposing to ban the knowing use of embryos with a genetic defect in IVF treatment. This isn't the first time that a deaf couple have deliberately tried to ensure that their child is also deaf. The reason why it is deaf couples trying to propagate their disability rather than couple's with another disability is because uniquely the deafness creates a linguistic minority and a subculture that goes with it.

The problem is that some deaf advocates take the view that because deafness is a cultural identifier it is therefore not really a disability. This leads to situations such as opposition to treating deaf children with cochlear implants because it shrinks the 'community' or doctors failing to offer easy genetic screening for deafness (ironic considering the first story I linked to) in foetuses because of pressure from deafness advocates.

I would guess that the initial reaction for most people to parents 'designing' their children for deafness is probably that it is abhorrent and close to child abuse, that was certainly my first reaction. Considering the matter in more depth certainly creates more sympathy towards the motivations of the parents but it doesn't change the conclusion. The absence of hearing impairs the quality of life of a child and increases the risks they face ( for example they can't hear fire alarms, oncoming traffic etc) and the benefits to the deaf community don't outweigh them.

We're Doomed.

So big stormsthis night and last, following on from an earthquake last week, if we have plague of locusts next week then I'm emigrating.

Quick Points.

Three quick points that don't quite merit separate posts.

• Barack Obama's foreign policy adviser Samantha Power is forced to quit after being reported referring to Hillary Clinton as a 'monster'. Quite right, honesty has no place in politics. It wouldn't be a huge surprise to anyone who read her first book 'A Problem From Hell' that the isn't a fan of the Clintons. There have understandably been criticisms of interventionism in recent years after the very poor handling of the Iraqi occupation, but it is often forgotten that doing nothing also has a price which is hidden. Samantha Power's retelling of Bill Clinton's almost vegetative approach to the genocides of the 1990s in Rwanda and Bosnia cost far more lives than the Iraq war ever will.

• The government has decided to allow 66 Ethiopian refugees to settle in Middlesbrough has been criticised. I have to say that for once I think that the government have got something right though (saying that feels horrible), the fundamental problem with our asylum and immigration system is the large numbers of people who enter either illegally or on bogus pretenses and then claim asylum. What has happened in Middlesbrough is closer to how the system should operate, the Ethiopians fled to a Kenyan refugee camp and then applied lawfully to be allowed to resettle somewhere else permanently and were accepted. Controlled immigration is not a major problem, uncontrolled immigration is.

• The BBC and other media outlets have been shocked, shocked I tell you, by the abuse suffered by uniformed RAF personnel in Peterborough. This is the same BBC who recently devoted a whole episode of their flagship current affairs programme, Panorama, to a sleazy activist lawyer to repreat already discredited claims about British servicemen conducting massacres (and being so ruthless that they left no actual evidence) of Iraqi civilians. If I went around spreading vicious lies about someone who was later attacked I'm pretty sure that I would face prosecution.

Left, Right, Right, Right.

Spain has an election tomorrow with the result very much in the balance. The Socialists are slight favourites but if the Popular Party does win the election we could well be heading in the near future to a situation where all the world's major industrialised democracies are governed by the right. At the moment the major developed countries are split, with the right governing the USA, Canada, Japan Germany (albeit in a coalition with the left) and France whereas the left is in charge in Spain, Italy and of course the UK. Italy has an election coming up too and Burlusconi is the clear favourite to be the next Prime Minister, in the UK the Tories have consistently been polling better than Labour for months, although there isn't an election until 2009 at the earliest. Even so it's possible that after the next UK general election the world may well move in the direction of a broad centre right consensus.

Update: Boo hiss, the Socialists have won in Spain thus ruining my plot for global right wing domination.

Eurofanatics Deploy The Chewbacca Defence.

I'm wondering, have the euro-fanatics now simply developed so much contempt for the electorate that they can't even be bothered to try to appear honest. I watched Question Time last night and watched veteran Liberal Democrat being caught out by David Davis when she claimed that the Lisbon Treaty was a minor and unimportant treaty with no constitutional significance and then five minutes later telling the audience that if the treaty was rejected it would mean Britain would have to leave the EU.

Amazingly Baroness Williams isn't even the most ludicrous proponent of the treaty, that honour goes to David Aaronovitch. The other day Peter Briffa mused on how magnificent it must be to be Aaronovitch:

It must be quite fantastic being David Aaronovitch. I mean, imagine waking up every morning, turning on the Today programme, and basically nodding in approval every five minutes at every new government initiative.

His attitude to the referendum is exactly the same as the government's, obviously, but his argument, if you can call it that, is even less coherent than theirs:

‘There’s been no referendum on our membership of NATO – a treaty organisation. Nor on immigration. Nor on the death penalty. Nor on the Act of Union in 1707. I haven’t had a chance to vote on that. Nor did my great-great-great-great-grandmother!’ Laughter and some angry heckles.

During questions from the floor Aaronovitch was roundly booed when he suggested that people didn’t want a referendum. ‘Oh OK, you lot do,’ he said. ‘But some people believe the Americans blew up the twin towers.’

Or as the lawyer told the jury "sure 600 witnesses saw my client climbing out of the window with a bag marked 'swag', but did you know that some people believe that Prince Phillip killed Diana?". Presumably Aaronovitch is a big South Park fan.

Quote of the Day.

This was actually said last year, but it's topical enough in light of the government forcing through the EU constitution yesterday with the connivance of the Liberal Democrats (there were 13 honourable exceptions. This is Lib Dem MEP Andrew Duff who expounding to a European media outlet on how to ram the revised constitution through:

If the English can be defeated then the opposition in Prague will disappear".

Competitive Victimhood.

On the subject of the Democratic primary.....

The archetypal New York Times headline it is said would be "World to end- women, minorities hardest hit". Well it seems that the 'blacks' versus 'women' victimhood competition that the Clinton-Obama fight embodies is manna from heaven for them and their columnist Maureen Dowd:

With Obama saying the hour is upon us to elect a black man and Hillary saying the hour is upon us to elect a woman, the Democratic primary has become the ultimate nightmare of liberal identity politics. All the victimizations go tripping over each other and colliding, a competition of historical guilts.

People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?

As it turns out, making history is actually a way of being imprisoned by history. It’s all about the past. Will America’s racial past be expunged or America’s sexist past be expunged?

Leaving aside whether "America sexist past"* is in urgent need of expunging for a moment the next question is whether it makes any sense whatsoever.

If I understand it correctly in order to expunge the guilt of America's past racism against black slaves and their descendants who were heavily discriminated against up until the 1960s, Americans should vote for a guy who was conceived by a middle class Kenyan father and a white mother in 1961 and then raised in one of the most racially tolerant societies on the planet, Hawaii.

In order to expunge America's sexist past they should vote for the woman whose career has essentially depended on her being married to Bill Clinton, and in order to do this has stayed married to him even as he has conducted affairs with and sexually harassed his female subordinates. By Dowd's logic Pakistan must have really put sexism behind it when they elected Benazir Bhutto all those years ago.

This no doubt makes perfect sense to some Diversity Studies professor out there somewhere but it's baffling me.

* Does anyone really believe that the USA's past was especially sexist? Sure women had fewer rights than men until the 20th century and that is deeply regrettable but by any reasonable comparison to other societies the USA fares pretty well.

Hasta La Vista..... Oh She's Still Here.

Hillary is out there. She can't be bargained with. She can't be reasoned with. She doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And she absolutely will not stop, ever, until she is President.

Sheesh her campaign is harder to kill off than Rasputin.

Ian Paisley.

I'm not sorry to see him go, for decades he pretended to be opposed to the sight of Unionist leadersentering power sharing arrangements with terrorists. Then last year he showed that he didn't object in principle to politicians prostituting themselves to terrorism but that he was merely haggling over the price all along.

The potential realignment of Northern Irish politics could be interesting to watch, a lot of the UUP couldn't join the DUP because of Paisley, so now he's gone there could be a surge to the DUP, but having only one Unionist party is simply not a tenable long term solution so there could be an entry by the mainland parties into the province.

Taffophobia Latest..

Most pointless Comment is Free entry ever from complaining Welsh woman Yvonne Roberts:

As Chris Bryant, the Rhondda Labour MP, told the Western Mail last week: "It's the British Broadcasting Corporation not the English Broadcasting Corporation."

Bryant was complaining about the coverage last month where the BBC's focus was almost entirely on England's win against France. The latter was televised but the Scotland and Wales games were confined to Five Live.

There is just one problem with this as the very first comment points out:

All the games were live on BBC One.

Is there some militant Welsh nationalist without a television somewhere who enjoys complaining about imagined taffophobic insults?

Just Defect Already

Back when the speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin was elected amid a betting scandal there were just eight MPs who were willing to take a principled stand and vote against him.

The rest either approved of the sleazy way he had been elected or weren't brave enough to take a stand. One of the eight was the dwarvish John Bercow, who back in 2000 was a coherent right wing Tory who had been surprisingly effective in his handling of parliamentary procedure to oppose the government, sometime in 2001 he began to drift to the left, initially in a kind of Portillo-esque way towards a socially liberal, fiscally conservative and remaining a eurosceptic. After a while he began to drift way further to left to the point where his only contribution to the Conservative Party was theatrical resignations. By 2005 he was a Conservative in name only and was an enthusiastic Blairite, who regarded even David Cameron as dangerously right wing.

Now in 2008 he has gone so far to the left that he is in George Galloway territory, believing that the corruption mired Speaker whom he voted against 8 years ago is now the victim of a class based conspiracy:

"What a pleasure it is to see you in the Chair, Mr. Speaker, and to know that we have as our Speaker somebody who is simply not prepared to be pushed around, either by snobs or by bullies."

Also in those eight short years he has gone from being one of just eight MPs who were willing to
oppose the sleaze of the political class to being one of just 5 Tory MPs who are supporting the government's pledge to abandon the commitment that all three major parties made in their manifestos to hold a referendum on the European Constitution. Isn't it time the pock marked midget just defected to Labour or the Socialist Workers Party?

Why Actors Are Stupid.

I see that the recent 'Best Actress' winner Oscar winner Marion Cotillard has outed herself as a truther. She's hardly the first thespian to be revealed as a halfwit and she won't be the last. In most lines of work being dumb is a severe handicap to one's job performance but the interesting thing about luvvies is that it is often very good ones who are short of a few braincells, as well as Cotillard the list of actors and actresses who are attracted to idiocies like far left politics or Scientology is vast, Tom Cruise, Sean Penn and Gwyneth Paltrow are all very successful at what they do but an interview with any of them is enough to confirm that they are utter airheads.

My belief is that the lack of intelligence is what makes them good at their job, credulousness is part of their job. I'm not being facetious but I honestly think that some of them are good at letting directors mould their on screen personalities because they are highly suggestible. If they were highly intelligent they couldn't act.

Ethical Preening As A Substitute For Evidence.

Earlier in the week I got into a discussion on another blog about the death penalty, well I say a discussion but it was more me slapping around a half witted and abusive troll, but having done so I want to elaborate on one aspect of the anti death penalty argument. That is the claim that it does not act as a deterrent, unlike most of the other arguments this makes an empirical claim rather than an appeal to moral judgment which means that it can be looked at objectively, unlike fatuous assertions that it is "uncivilised" or "cruel".

Some opponents of capital punishment such as Amnesty International say "It has never been shown to deter crime more effectively than other punishments", this can only be described as a bare faced lie. The evidence that scholars who have examined this over the last few years tends strongly towards the likelihood that it does in fact deter would be murderers. Some studies have suggested that up to 18 murders are prevented for each execution, with other studies finding smaller but still impressive effects of 4 or 5 murders prevented per execution. Of course the studies aren't conclusive, with such a small data set (the USA which is the subject of these studies only executes around 60 murderers a year despite having more than 15000 murders.) but very few people actually care about the evidence. On a purely utilitarian basis the case for letting killers swing (or fry) is very strong.

As it happens I'm not currently in favour of restoring the death penalty because personally I dislike the thought of actively taking part in an innocent persons death (miscarriages of justice will always be with us), more than I dislike a far larger number of innocent people being murdered by those who would have otherwise have been deterred. This is a common psychological trait in which actively participating in a death is felt to be worse than passively allowing it to happen. My opposition isn't categorical and if our murder rate were to increase somewhat the balance of moral values would for me change somewhat, certainly I believe that countries with murder rates as high as those in Jamaica would be right to bring it back.

Most of the discussion of the Sun's recent reports on the by the enlightened classes has consisted of denouncing Sun readers as ignorant, knuckle-dragging fascists who are too stupid to form a sensible opinion, yet the empirical evidence strongly suggests that they are better informed than the nation's leading opinion formers.