Mehdi Hasan has provoked a big online debate about abortion, after publishing a column in the New Statesman on whether abortion is a Left/Right issue in politics. Mehdi says that although the Left is usually identified with the pro-choice* argument and the Right with pro-life*, the arguments deployed are (in his view) the opposite of what the Left and Right usually deploy. The Left use the language of individualism and choice, while the Right use the language of vulnerability and equality.
This article sparked a furious online debate about the central issue – Kenan Malik has an excellent pro-choice rejoinder to Hasan’s piece. There has also been a meta-debate about whether it was even possible to have a reasoned debate about the issue. I was taken with Hopi Sen’s analysis, comparing what a person thinks they said with what people on the opposing side actually hear (see these amusing stanzas for a shortened version).
I tend to think of the central question as a Devil’s Alternative type question. Whatever you choose, the outcome is bad. Trying to devise rules – legal or ethical – for a Devil’s Alternative problem seems futile. Is abortion right? is a trick question: The stuff of utilitarian philosophy lectures and episodes of 24, where you try to work out the course of action that causes least hurt… Knowing full well that any choice you make leads to permenant unpleasant consequences. Perhaps the only way out of the mire is to punt on the central ethical question, declaring it essentially incomplete in Gödel‘s sense: we are not equipped to process such a question properly. It is undecidable. A paradox that exposes the limits of our language and ethical structures. Continue reading
Tag: Politics (Page 30 of 57)
Well well, this is interesting. The bookmaker Paddy Power have offered odds on a Change.org petition reaching 100,000 signatures. It’s 4/1 in September and 7/4 in October.
It will be interesting to see if this affects the rate at which people sign the petition. If it does, then we will see a new era of campaigning. Just as now, activists spend time trying to get re-tweeted by Stephen Fry, in the future Ladbrokes and Paddy Power may become targets of the same kind of secondary lobbying.
But there is more: there is a kind of open source game theory on offer here. If everyone in the country who agreed to sign the petition, while placing a £10 bet, we would all get paid for our social activism!
At the time of writing, the petition only has 26,000 signatures. So the conservative analyst would not favour September. However, we have seen in the recent past how social media and we interconnectivity it brings can have exponential effects. Remember how Claire Squires posthumously raised almost £1 million for the Samaritans.
I don’t know much about how bookies set their odds on certain outcomes, but participating in this particular ‘market’ seems odd. Unlike a sporting event, an election, or a financial exchange, there is no other person, group or team that can adversely affect the rate at which the figure in question rises. It’s not as if there is a counter petition, and the bookies are taking bets on a race between the two. Opponents of this campaign cannot marshal their own supporters in a comparable way. So the bet is simply about how quickly a political constituency can mobilise itself. I wonder if someone who knows more about this might comment?
I am entirely in favour of the petition, by the way. In my opinion, page 3 demeans and objectifies women. A formal ban on this kind of publication would be anti-free expression, but social pressure on an editor to make a particular decision is entirely right and proper.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkWeMvrNiOM
Apparently, the booing of Conservative politicians as they present medals to Paralympians has become a bit of a Thing. First George Osborne, then Teresa May (apparently, Boris Johnson got a big cheer, but then, he’s a Veblen Politician to which normal political rules do not apply).
I’ll say first off that it makes me a bit sad. It must be uncomfortable and odd for athletes receiving the medals. Not what they imagined when they set out on their Paralympic journey.
However, that does not mean that the jeers were wrong or should be condemned.
First, is there not a cynicism to the politicians presenting the medals in the first place? It feels like they are trying to piggy-back on the goodwill that the Olympics generated. If this is the case then they deserve whatever reception they get!
Second, I think it is an example of people using whatever means are at their disposal to dissent. I am reminded of a couple of things: Obama 2008 supporters misusing the features on the My Barack Obama website to protest his FISA policy. Or, the Jeff Goldblum speech from Jurassic Park: “Life Finds A Way”. In the absence of a good method to express disapproval of a Government, people will use what ever means are available, be that the arrangement of Teddy Bears, the licking of ice-cream, or the shouting of a common religious phrase from roof-tops. I am not saying that the British political system is comparable to the authoritarian regimes in Iran or Belarus, but even in an advanced social democracy people can still feel alienated and disenfranchised by the political system.
Finally, these boos cannot be dismissed as the co-ordinated actions of an already partisan group (as a slow clap at the Women’s Institute or the Police Federation or at the TUC might be described). These are a diverse group of citizens from every demographic in the country. The jeers are part of a real and widespread sentiment: that they happen to the extreme discomfort of both the politicians and the Paralympians is part of the message.
A final thought on the Olympics. It was a giant middle-finger towards the terrorists, wasn’t it?
I remember that week in 2005 very well. As well as the announcement confirming we had won the Olympic bid, that week in July also saw the G8 protests at Gleneagles and Edinburgh, and the Make Poverty History events, also centred in Scotland, that culminated in the Live 8 concerts. There was a real sense of political momentum, a feeling of people power, and for once, and absence of the usual cynicism associated with politics. I was living in Edinburgh at the time, and attended several of the events, including the Make Poverty History march around the city. We all wore white, and from the air the crowds formed a white ring that resembled the plastic wrist bands that had become the emblem of the movement.
And then four idiots spoiled everything. (I have written before – on the first anniversary of 7/7, actually – about what an act of deflation that was. The constructive political ‘moment’ around G8 was destroyed by their actions, and the country and the government fell back into fear and reactionary politics).
We know that the aim of the four terrorists, and those who assisted them, was to sow division within our society. It would be wrong to ascribe to them a consistent ideology, but their confused brand of fundamentalist Islam was at odds with cosmopolitan London and multicultural, multi-racial Britain.
The fact that Londoners and tourists alike continued to use the London underground system was an immediate retort to their actions. The fact that the party that they spoiled on 7th of July 2005 was reformed as a celebration of modern Britain during these recent Olympic Games, is also something to be proud of. The success of the games is the most eloquent possible response to their actions (a complete ‘pwnage’ in modern digital parlance). That the person who emerged as the darling of these games was a Somali born, British Muslim man comfortable in his nationality and faith, makes the refutation of the terrorist ideology all the more complete.
I hope that other disaffected young men like Mohammed Siddique Khan and his group Will have seen these Olympics and realised that there are other paths to follow. Perhaps the Mo-Bot and the cheeky smiles of the Games Makers are together a more effective counter-terrorist measure than detaining people without trial could ever be.
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, as played by Armie Hammer in The Social Network. I'm well aware that these two are even more priviledged than your average Straight White Male, but they are the perfect illustration. I'm also aware of the hyper-realistic implications of choosing to illustrate the point with a picture from a stylised film, rather than a picture of the actual Winklevoss twins. Umberto Eco has written whole books on this subject.
Via Kottke, a fantastic explanation of white male ‘privilege’ using the metaphor of role-playing games. If ity hasn’t already become a meme, then it should be.
Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.
This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.
It’s essentially a pop-culture way of thinking about John Rawl’s ‘veil of ignorance‘ from as described in his Theory of Justice. I think this will be useful for debates around political correctness, like the Diane Abbott palaver a few months ago.
Formerly, the meta-data for this blog was simply “white middle class heterosexual English man” which was my attempt to make a similar point. See also, this piece of juvenalia where I spoke of the British as “privileged, Platinum-Plus humans”, a line I now realised I subconsciously ripped off from The Onion. Indeed, The Onion followed up on the theme with the fantastic ‘Judge Rules White Girl To Be Tried As Black Adult‘ sketch.
Update
At the New Statesman, a report on a growing “men’s rights” movement.