Lembit has put a video up on YouTube (hat-tip: jamesgraham_rss):



It's... interesting. Perhaps it's because it's a walk and talk, but (as James says) he does seem almost angry in it, and there is an ordering, rather than asking, quality to his appeal for our votes. Even in the music. And yet, because it's Lembit he's not threatening when he issues orders, he's almost endearing. Almost. I defy you to watch that video and not think of Mr Motivator.

And then there's the little digs at the opposition. Always been a Lib Dem Loyalist is obviously a dig at Chandila, and all the stuff about which committees he has served on goes to both opponents, but what is all this stuff about primary versus pastel colours? I mean, he's clearly trying to say I'm interesting, and Ros is dull, but given the overall tone of the video it comes across as saying You don't want GIRLY pastels, you want nice butch bright MANLY colours... Fail, Lembit. Big, butch, manly fail.

You know, I don't want to be snide about Lembit's campaign. I like him, and I don't want to be hurtful, and he's clearly trying to do the right things... But if you're going to do a video appealing to Liberals, don't do it in a tone of You Must Do As You Are Told And Vote For Me; and if you're going to do a campaign website for the presidency of a web-savvy party, don't use the bog standard Prater Raines template without even tweaking it; and if you're going up against someone who has nice glossy leaflets then stuff printed on someone's deskjet doesn't look endearingly amateurish, it looks incompetent.

* sigh *

I'm sorry about this. I know there are people reading this who have huge amounts of affection for Lembit, and I feel like I am being really mean to him in posting it, but he's really NOT doing himself any favours right now.

I wait patiently for Chandila to issue a video so that I can pick on him too, for balance.

If Boris wins then he'll behave as Boris will: sticking broadly to Ken's spending policies, making a tokenistic gesture like scrapping bendies for Routemasters, and basically proving that there isn't really a Rizla to slip between the two main parties on how they run things economically. And then maybe some of the young impressionable things I know, who don't remember living under a Tory government, would be maybe less inclined to believe that they actually ARE a party of small government and economic competence rather than just posturing as one because it's electorally expedient. And then they'd be less likely to vote Tory at a general election.

I have no objection to some Tories. I really like Ken Clarke. I have a big soft spot for Teresa May. William Hague is personally annoying but has some politically viable ideas... I actually have a big soft spot for Boris. At least he's entertaining, and there's a shrewd intellect under that foppish mop of blonde hair. But a party led by posturing posh boy Cameron and the twelve year old George Osbourne, and prominently featuring the dubious talents of Nadine Dorries? That's the stuff of nightmares, surely? I mean, yes, Brown is not doing well, and his cabinet is awful... But does anybody seriously believe a Cameron-led government would be better?

The first was an advert on "Dave" for a partwork featuring Strawberry Shortcake, teaching young girls how to make cakes "just like mum". You knew it was for girls because of the squeaky woman doing the over-excited voice-over, the fact that everything in sight was a putrid shade of pink, and that lovely phrase cook just like mum.

I know what my reaction to that would have been as a child:

But I don't want to cook like mum! Mum is a crap cook!^# I want to cook like DAD! He's a professional chef!

Why is this shit still allowed? Why is it still permissible to attempt to close cooking off from fifty per cent of the population? I mean, I'm not complaining in this regard, because my ability to cook paid a lot of my way through uni; especially since most of the boys couldn't cook a slice of toast without help. But really, cookery is a valuable life skill, and should not be restricted to one gender or the other.

The second thing that annoyed me was this entry by elliphant. Seriously, how difficult is it to understand?

If it has fish in it, IT'S NOT VEGETARIAN
If it has gelatine in it, IT'S NOT VEGETARIAN
If it has anything that had to be killed in it, IT'S NOT VEGETARIAN

I'm not even a veggie, and I can understand that if something had to die to make a product then it's not veggie. Why is it so difficult for so many people? What happened to those poor ladies made me feel ashamed of the entire British hospitality trade.

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^# Having experienced lots of other people's cooking since I was a child, I can now confidently assert that my mum's cooking is actually quite good compared to pretty much everybody else, it's just that in comparison to my dad, most people's cooking looks crap.

I've mentioned before the Lib Dem tendency to try and be cool and clever and ironic (which, IMHO, ends up making them look like prats) when I talked about how stupid it is that they perpetuate the damaging "Clegg = Cameron" meme by hamfisted attempts to take the piss out of it. Another example of this is their Homophobia is Gay slogan, which, while well-intentioned, is giving the entire party's tacit approval to the use of the word gay as a perjorative term. A couple of years ago it because a trend to use "gay" to mean something bad, but if it hadn't been seized upon and trumpeted by various people it would have fallen out of fashion (like many many many other trendy terms have) to be replaced by something else. As it is, at least partially because of the Lib Dems, it has become entrenched to the point that it's ubiquitous.

I still don't quite understand how it happened, though. I mean, they'd never have started up a campaign called Misogyny is a bitch or Racism is a nigger in the woodpile... Actually, I'm getting the uncomfortable feeling that I'm giving them ideas there, so I'm going to stop.

Why do people support "positive" discrimination? (a.k.a Affirmative Action for those across the water). I say this after reading the comments to alixmortimer's post here.

Because I'm tired (work-dogs-small child) I'm just going to copy and paste my comment (#27):

I may be being simplistic, here but:

- allowing yourself to believe that the ends justify the means allows you to do all SORTS of unpalatable things.

- you KNOW that any woman/black person/etc. who got a job on the basis of positive discrimination would face “you only got that job to fill a quota” accusations throughout their working life (as my local MP still does) and that this would increase, not decrease, the amount of resentment felt to those groups by the dominant group.

Apart from anything else, is it not insulting to women/black people to suggest that they can only compete on an unlevel playing field? Because to accept that women can only compete with men if there is positive discrimination is to accept that women are less valuable.

I WILL NOT vote for any party or candidate who endorses positive discrimination.

Why do we have to import the bad American ideas like the Silver Ring Thing and Creationist Zoos and entrenching discrimination by legitimising it as a course of action? Why can't we import the good ones like the fruit of the poisoned tree doctrine and Soul Food and separation of church and state (OK, so it hasn't actually happened over there, but it's a good idea).

I want to talk about the process of argument and the mechanics of debate today, and I'm going to use the "Intelligent Design" debate to illustrate it, purely because a couple of my friends have been talking about it recently. I'm using "Intelligent Design" as an example, but it could equally apply to the recent fracas at the Oxford Union, or any number of other political hot potatoes. It certainly applies to Prime Minister's Question Time.

There is a hierarchy of evidence. This applies in law as well as science. The most reliable evidence is evidence that you have observed yourself, especially if you have observed it many times. This is empirical evidence. The next most reliable evidence is the empirical evidence of other people, especially if there are lots of them and they all agree. Getting towards the unreliable, there is "I read it in a book", with citations to show how reliable the book is. Then we have hearsay. Hearsay is when you (or your witness) haven't actually observed anything yourself, but you sort of recall someone else saying they have observed it, only you can't quite remember where or when... Then there is bald assertion. This is when you say that something is so, and you don't NEED evidence, it just IS, and you know it!

If you are watching or listening to a debate, you will often see/hear horrendously bad debating tactics used in order to derail the opposition. Both sides of the "Intelligent Design" debate can be guilty of this, and it makes me very very cross. Muddying the waters to make your opponent look bad makes you look bad too, and we need to teach this to children (and politicians) so that proper reasoned debate can be had.

- If you use ad hominem arguments, YOU LOSE.
- if you try and assert a position with no evidence to back yourself up, YOU LOSE.
- if you think that because you read it in a book or saw it on TV it's true, YOU LOSE.

I actually physically head-desked at this comment to Mat's entry. Not because of the position the commenter takes (she's been a friend for ages, and I love her dearly, before you think I'm just attacking a random person, too!), but because of the phrase accepting without question all the evolution stuff we learn in high school. The whole point of science, or research, of good debate, is that you don't accept ANYTHING without question! You look at the evidence, weigh it and evaluate it, see if there is research to back up or contradict your position. Just because your teacher says so, doesn't mean it's right. Just because the government says so, doesn't mean it's right. Just because an eminent scientist says so, does not mean it's right. If LOTS of eminent scientists AND your teacher AND the government say so, then it's PROBABLY right, but this is still not enough to be certain.

I know people like certainty; I know most people feel comforted and reassured by someone who is absolutely certain that X is true. But if that person has no basis for their certainty, or a very shaky basis ("it says so in the bible" or "my priest says so") and they are arguing against a person or group with lots of very good evidence on their side (a couple of millennia of empirical research by thousands of scientists, much of it church-sponsored) then how is that the person with the shakiest evidence gets the most credence? How in the name of monkey bollocks have the creationists even got to the point where the "Intelligent Design" debate is even called a debate? I don't understand why so many people give as much weight to "well, we've believed this for years and anyway God says so" as they do to "We've shown that this is true by experimenting and replicating the results many times".

* sigh *

This is descending into rant. I am happy to promise that I will teach my daughter to question, to research, to not accept things without question, and to always look for the motivation of the person asserting bald facts to her. But how many others are willing to do the same? People like certainty. Most people don't actually WANT to think, they want to be told what to say and do because it's easier. This makes me profoundly depressed.

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So, onto more cheering subjects: Vince Cable watch

Today's Cable fangirling comes courtesy of Mike Smithson on politicalbetting.com and Charlotte Gore. Gratified that I am that so many people seem to be coming round to my point of view, the scenario Mike Smithson postulates, that whichever of the two posh boys wins the Lib Dem leadership election will be overshadowed by the towering Collossus of Vinceness, might be a bit of a worry for my Lib Dem friends. Happily, Millennium Elephant has the solution:

Clearly the PROBLEM with the Liberal Democrat Leadership contest is that there has been a TRANSPORTER ACCIDENT and Captain Kirk has been split into his AGGRESSIVE KILLER side and his FLUFFY BUNNY side. The ANSWER is obviously that we need Mr Scotty to FIX it so that we can RE-COMBINE him.

Anyone got a spare transporter?

HMRC have sold my details to the mafia let my details fall into the hands of criminals "lost" my bank details, along with those of about 15 million or so other people. Now, really, given the track record of government departments on IT issues, and leaving laptops everywhere, etc. etc., I shouldn't be surprised that Teh Revenoo thinks it's perfectly OK to put everyone's bank details on an unencrypted CD-ROM and send it via the normal mail service (not even registered!), but really, those are my bank details! FFS, Darling, can't you be a bit more careful with my sensitive data?

Predictably, the BBC's Have Your Say on this topic is full of crowing from the anti-ID crowd. I'd join in, if I didn't think it was undignified. My only comfort is that (given my long travails with teh revenoo) I am fully aware that any data they have lost is likely to be inaccurate, out of date, and with typos in it. If it's all 15 million child benefit claimants' bank details, too, then the security services'll be making some effort to find the discs because (for example) among those 15 million are the current Prime Minister and his predecessor.

Seriously, though, are we really going to trust this lot (or, indeed, any lot, all governments being huge behemoths which are only as competent as their least competent flunky) with a huge database of personal information including our very DNA? Are people still going to insist that if you've done nothing wrong you've nothing to fear?

The Lib Dem leadership thing has gone rather pearshaped, hasn't it? The "Calamity Clegg" incident on the politics show yesterday (that I briefly referred to as it happened) has blown up into something much bigger than it should have done, by the fault of both candidates and a gleeful media egging them both on.

Huhne should not have said that he hadn't seen the document and then proceeded to use the contents of it to attack Clegg anyway: this shows him to be less than honest at a time when most of us are fed up to the back teeth of lying politicians. However, Clegg's behaviour has been worse, or at least, far less befitting of a potential party leader. As it happened, he sat on the sofa with a kicked puppy expression on his face, and now he has lodged a formal complaint. WTF? OK, so Huhne's camp used a disparaging term to describe him. That wasn't nice. Has this guy ever even seen PMQs? It's a bearpit at the best of times; if and when he stands up for the first time as leader of the Lib Dems he is going to face a barrage of jeers from pretty much everyone in the building. If one word from Huhne causes him to get all tearful and then go running to the Whip's office, how the monkey knackers is he going to cope with day-to-day business in the House of Commons?

My opinion on the matter has been solidified. Neither of them are going to be a great Lib Dem leader. Vince Cable would be better by far than either Clegg or Huhne. However, given the choice that the party has? Huhne might not be nice but he is the practical option. Nice does not last long in British politics, no matter how much we might wish it would. Clegg can't take the verbal, and he can't think on his feet, and "permission for lip to wobble, sir?" is the response of a foot soldier, not a general. Not impressed at all.

OK, so whenever some media dude interviews a Lib Dem (there's another Chris 'n' Nick debate going on on the telleh right now) they always want to know which of the two main parties the Lib Dems would ally with in the case of a hung parliament.

Now, obviously, no sane Lib Dem would say "Tory" or "Labour" because you then automatically alienate a subset of voters (as Millennium Elephant explains in detail here). But can anyone explain to me why they can't just say We'll vote how we want to vote on whatever issue comes up, and they can choose how they are going to ally with us.? Why does it always have to be an organised coalition? Why can't it be an issue-by-issue, sometimes we agree with one, and sometimes we agree with the other, and sometimes we agree with neither thing? I mean, that's what it actually is, isn't it? In policy terms, sometimes the Lib Dems agree with Labour, and sometimes with the Tories, and sometimes with neither. So why can't they do that in a hung parliament?

(also? Nick is doing better in cosy sofa interview setting than he did on Question Time, but I still prefer Chris. He's being more substantive and detailed and less soundbitey and... Oh dear. Chris just admitted that he has no idea where a briefing document that supposedly came from his office came from and he's not seen it before. He's doing a passable save, but...

At least they both appear to be having some passion today. Nick is now doing his very attractive ID Card spiel, and looks better than Chris on that issue...

* sigh *

I'm really glad I aren't a party member, and I don't have to decide between two options I'm not really attracted to. I'm also leaning towards the view of lots of other people. Can't the Lib Dems junk them both and keep Vince? I like Vince.

* polishes Vince's head affectionately *)

ETA: James Graham at Quaequam Blog has a good dissection of the Lib Dem leadership contest so far. Plug plug. I am linking because I liked the line about Mill at the bottom.

There has been much discussion of late about dear Mister Cameron's speech regarding rape and how it's time to get tough on it. And, although he makes some good points, some of his underlying nastiness and misogyny made me so unfeasibly angry that I am feeling homicidal urges. While, as a good liberal, I cannot condone some of the authoritarian overtones of the tips given in this men's rape prevention leaflet (OMG you mustn't make sexist jokes! Because if you stop making sexist jokes it will stop you having sexist thoughts!), I think they have it bang on when they say that:

[r]ape prevention is a men's thing, because men can make rape stop. Immediately. Right now. Rape will stop when men who rape stop raping.

This contrasts sharply with Dave's true blue Tory undertones, when he says that society has become increasingly "sexualised" over the past decade, during which time treating women as sex objects has become viewed as "cool". Rape is not about sex in and of itself, Dave. Rape is about one person using sex to exert power over another person (typically man over woman, but not always). Rape is not caused by or increased by women having the freedom to dress how they like or go out drinking with their friends. We've all had that email, haven't we? The "if a woman is drunk, don't rape her" one? And yet some people still seem to feel that the concept of the fault being with the rapist rather than the victim is contentious (see the comments in the entry linked). Some people seem to think that it's OK to blame someone else for their consciously chosen actions. I consciously chose to rape this woman, but it's OK, because she was wearing a short skirt; this is the root of the problem, right here. Rape is caused by some men (not all men) having the view that women are lesser beings, and that they have the right to do what they like to them. Rape is caused by some men thinking that lesser beings matter much less than their own gratification or hang-ups, or anger. Raped isn't caused by the lack of consequences for the rapist (we all know the statistics on this one: one in four women experiences sexual violence over her lifetime, only a quarter of rapes are reported, of those which are reported, only one in twenty will lead to a conviction...), but it certainly doesn't make a rapist think twice about his actions when he lives in a society which still expects women to be passive worshippers of the almighty cock, and is surprised when we are not. The vast majority of rapes do not lead to the rapist being being punished partly because we live in this sort of society, but this is not, by a long shot, the only problem.

Now, given the nature of our legal system, as Bob Piper says, it is always going to be the case that where rape has happened between two people who know each other, with no other witnesses, it is going to be very difficult to prove consent or lack thereof beyond a reasonable doubt; and that is, unfortunately, how the majority of rapes happen. It's not the guy in the Flasher's Mac leaping out of the bushes, it's the friend who won't take no for an answer, or the boyfriend who wants to win an argument by physical prowess or the husband who uses sex as a way to keep his wife in line.

All of this seems to have escaped our Dave. He seems to be under the misapprehension, held by a lot of authoritarians, that sexual freedom leads to more sexual violence. Rape has always happened, and happens under even the most sexually repressive regimes (it's just that in those regimes it's even MORE acceptable to blame the woman for it). And while educational initiatives such as teaching children in compulsory sex education lessons might have an impact (and is an idea that I approve of wholeheartedly), continuing to place the blame for rape on the shoulders of the victims is bloody stupid, and contributes to the one in two young men [who] believe there are some circumstances when it's okay to force a woman to have sex.

So, yes, C- must try harder. Which is not good. OTOH, it's better than an F, which is what Dear Old Uncle Gordon gets, because the Labour have been stripping funding from rape crisis centres and not discussing this at all. And as for the party of my fiancé, they haven't even talked about rape since 2003, and even then it was with a focus on stopping innocent men being convicted rather than how we can prevent it in the first place (which is, actually, something I am bang behind, but a topic for another post perhaps)...

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Oh, and while I'm being all feministy, innerbrat does a fine dissection of sexual prejudices in the reporting of scientific studies, and the BBC uses any excuse to post pictures of Nigella's cleavage. Actually, the wording of that article amused me greatly (because if you don't laugh, you'll cry). It starts off being about how there appears to be a correlation between waist/hip ratio and smarts, but quickly descends to being all about how curvy women may/may not be more attractive to men. Because women can't be discussed as valid creatures in their own right, only with reference to how useful or attractive they are to men; this is, as we all know, not even a woman's primary function, but her only function...

NB: any links which may have been in the original entry are no longer there. Sorry.

( Originally posted 21st October 2005 )