Following backlash against the scrapped publication of Parliamentary minutes from the run-up to the Iraq war, Jack Straw has announced that there will be a series of reforms to the current Freedom of Information Act. He promised reporters that the new Act would be more efficient and less easily circumvented, but he refused to divulge how this would be achieved or exactly what the proposals were.
Speaking on BBC Radio 7, he said that the new rules would stop politicians ‘publishing embarassing information in obscure places where it would be unlikely to be widely seen, such as Hansard or this show’. When asked where the information would instead be published, Straw looked puzzled, and after a pause said that the new proposals favoured openness but that the specifics of the proposals were not intended for public dissemination.
Straw went on to explain that while it is important that the public has a right to access information about government, that must be balanced with other concerns, such as security. ‘Of the nation?’ prompted the presenter, to which Straw replied, ‘well yes, obviously, but also of my job.’ When pressed for more information, he explained that ‘if the public know how to get information, then so do al-Qaeda, and that could pose serious threats.’ Instead, the government is set to bring in a replacement Act, whereby the public has a right to access large amounts of government information, including Parliamentary minutes and MPs’ expenses, but will not be told how to do so. He promised, however, that details of the process would be made freely available to anyone who asked to see them, as long as they submit their request in a correctly formatted letter to the new Information Commissioner’s office, whose address was also available on properly presented request.
The new Act is expected to come into force at the start of April, however Straw promised that information important to the public, such as war minutes and MPs’ expenses, would be covered by the new rules immediately ‘to aid transparency in government’.
I just read that Barack Obama, while in the Senate, used Robert Kennedy’s old desk. Then he went on to be President. This is, of course, eerily similar to that character from that US serial drama about a junior politician who goes on to be President despite a relative lack of experience and a question about an illegitimate child.
What was his name?
Thing.
Oh yes, that was it. Nathan Petrelli, who also picked out Kennedy’s desk (mostly to annoy Linderman). He repeatedly becomes President in eerie alternate futures.
I’d say it was a magic desk, but it didn’t work out so well for Robert Kennedy.
(Oh, and the poll on the second link is great: “Who Can Stop Arthur?” So far, “nobody” is losing with no votes, Claire, Peter, Hiro and Noah are on 2 each, Sylar has 15, but the runaway winner with 34 votes is Matt’s Turtle.)
The other day I made fun of John McCain for referring to Czechoslovakia, a country which hasn’t existed for 15 years. After that, I read a comments thread with similar accusations about Barack Obama, and I thought “I should check these out — I’d hate to be mocking one candidate while the other does worse things”. I like to think of myself as an equal opportunities sarky bastard. (In that spirit, allow me to roundly mock commenter Reid for saying “Hussein will not be elected President” and leaving it at that, as if the very fact that Obama’s middle name is Saddam Hussein’s last name makes any difference to anything at all.)
They didn’t seem to think the Czechoslovakia thing was important, and you can make a good case for that, but their reasons are ridiculous:
“This is basic elementary school geography. I don’t care what excuses you make for them. It also illustrates their level of awareness of the world.”
Can you draw an accurate map of Africa?
How about if I draw the lines, can you put in the names?
Nobody can do that. How is that even remotely like not knowing what countries are called while discussing their politics?
Kinda depends on which week you left elementary school.
What? For the record, Obama studied law at Harvard, and McCain was 5th from bottom of his class of almost 900.
I’ll tell you, as a truck driver, the average person person can tell you the name of the next town.
One of my favorite stories–I was lost, trying to find a consignee–instructions from the dispatcher were bad, nothing matched up with the map. Called the consignee and talked to several people who, given the intersection of major (for the area) highways where I was sitting could not tell me how to get from where I was to where they were.
I finally found the place by circling town (it was just a little bitty place) in decreasing-radius circles until I spotted a likely candidate in the dark.
I have literally no idea why this story is here. Possibly it’s a failed attempt to reference the Kentucky thing (see below) but probably he started thinking about something else and just kept typing.
The Czech Republic is very important to lots of people, and given that they ought to quit changing names every few years. They have been through, what, four since I left grammar school? Larry Sheldon | 07.18.08 – 2:03 am | #
The Czech Republic has been the Czech Republic since its inception in 1993, and while the full name of Czechoslovakia changed many times before then, “Czechoslovakia” was never wrong for long, assuming that Sheldon left grammar school some time after 1918. They stopped being Czechoslovakia when the country broke in two — what the hell where they supposed to do? Both be Czechoslovakia?
Still, here goes nothing, a full round-up of all the gaffes they accused Obama of making, and a few other things they said about him. Are they worse than McCain’s total ignorance of how to work a computer? Are they worse than his apparent failure to read and understand the Constitution? Let’s have a look.
Fifty Seven States
One of their favourite Obama ‘gaffes’ is his supposed assertion that there are 57 states. The first problem I have with this is that it clearly demonstrates Republicans can’t count, because what Obama actually said was this:
I’ve now been to 57 states, [with] one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii I was not allowed to go to, even though I really wanted to go, but my staff would not justify it.
That makes sixty states, you feeble-minded buffoons. Of course, that would make it harder to draw absurd parallels with the 57 member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, except that it wouldn’t because there are only 57 states in that if you exclude the three ‘observer’ states. (I wonder if it’s ever the same people who promoted the Jeremiah Wright clips who think Obama is a Muslim.)
I’ve now been to fifty… seven states? I think one left to go. One left to go. Alaska and Hawaii I was not allowed to go to…
Pretty clearly, Obama said “fifty” instead of “forty”, because he was thinking about the number of states that there are. That’s the kind of mistake people make all the time. And afterwards he acknowledged his error, rather than repeating it as McCain did with Czechoslovakia.
No dice on the 57 states thing, I’m afraid. I’m not a hypocrite yet. I just missed a clip of a mildly amusing error.
Which States Border Illinois
Again, Obama’s knowledge of US geography is called into question. One (presumably conservative) ‘news’ website reports this as “Media Snoozes While Obama’s ‘Altered States’ Gaffes Continue”. If this is as serious an error as they’re implying then the media is clearly complicit in some kind of propaganda campaign. We can’t have a President who doesn’t know the local geography of the state that elected him to the Senate, can we? So what’s the deal?
Well, Obama said this:
Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known [in Kentucky], coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it’s not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle.
And the not-so investigative journalists at News Busters cleverly dug out their atlas and noticed that Kentucky shares a border with Illinois. Therefore, they conclude, Illinois is zero miles from Kentucky and Obama is a fool. We need a map.
(All maps taken from Wikipedia)
Note that I had to Google search to find this — Sheldon simply assumed that we all knew about this.
They’re right, too. Illinois is closer to Kentucky than Arkansas, which by what is clearly a really significant amount. Here, for those interested, is the same map with the population densities shown. (By which I mean I looked at the population maps on Wikipedia and pasted them on top of the state map, ignoring the projection differences as hard as I could. I made this in a couple of minutes in Paint.NET, so it’s not very good.)
You can clearly see that the entire population of Illinois lives almost as far from Kentucky as they possibly can. In fact, probably further from Kentucky’s borders than the population of Arkansas live. That’s not really fair, though, as the population of Kentucky are over to the west of the state, away from Arkansas, so the population centre of Illinois is still nearer to that of Kentucky than that of Arkansas is, but I think this shows that simply going by closest borders isn’t a good plan.
Really, taken in context, Obama’s statement was about politics. I don’t know much about state-level politics, beyond the fact that everyone in Texas is insane and Louisiana is apparently doomed, and California is governed by a robot from the future, but I was able, thanks again to Wikipedia, to find out what larger ‘regions’ the states are usually divided into (Guess how long this map took me):
So is seems likely to me that Arkansas is probably much closer, politically, to Kentucky than Illinois is. Of course, Obama’s statement is still mildly silly — you obviously shouldn’t refer to distances between states when your state is zero miles away — but I can’t bring myself to consider this a “gaffe”. And nor, apparently, can anyone else much, because the media didn’t bother reporting it. “Snoozed”, if you won’t.
I’m still not a hypocrite. I am, however, heartened that the US media would ignore inconsequential things instead of sensationalising them (you know, this one time).
Obama is a Marxist
This is something a couple of Republicans have said, and I can’t even be bothered deconstructing it. Learning Marxism for the sake of a blogpost would be going far above and beyond and I’m not doing it. The actual odds that this is anything other than another Republican who can’t tell Marxism from Liberalism from Communism from Socialism are so vanishingly small that the possibility isn’t worth considering.
Hell, one commenter said McCain was a Marxist, although he called himself “a “bleedingheart” libertarian”, which is like calling yourself a tree-hugging capitalist.
Obama can’t tell ’surrender’ from ‘re-deployment’
This accusation doesn’t make any sense without context and no context was given. I genuinely don’t know what point is being made here. I had a look on Google and that didn’t seem to help. I presume it’s a reference to Iraq, and I know Obama wants to slowly take troops out of there, and I think he’d send a few more to Afghanistan, which I think would be called “re-deployment”. I imagine the commenter here decided that that constitutes “surrender” and phrased his accusation in a way designed to make himself look as foolish as possible: you can’t conflate two concepts then accuse people of not being able to distinguish them. It’s so absurd as to be almost brilliant.
Yeah, that was pretty dumb. I’ll give you that one. And even though it was the same Larry Sheldon who said it as said all that other rubbish, I’ll even refrain from cancelling it out against his nonsense. In fairness, Obama did say it only once rather than repeatedly, and the significance of the attack on Pearl Harbor was the timing and lack of warning rather than the actual weapons used, but still, Obama messed up pretty good there.
On the other hand, this was an isolated incident, whereas what I did was to combine three McCain issues — his age, his repeated references to countries that don’t exist and his inability to work a computer — and wrap them up into one coherent package of 1992-ness. This is just pointing and laughing at a mistake. I think I’m okay with myself here.
Obama Went To Harvard
Yes. Yes, he did. Isn’t that good?
Lastly, I feel for the sake of completeness, I should lay out what I consider the better case for Saying “Czechoslovakia” Doesn’t Matter, since I defended Obama just now and if I’m being fair I should do it properly. First of all, he could be discussing the Czech Republic and Slovakia. If this is the case he should say “the former Czechoslovakia” as we do with Yugoslavia, but that’s still just a speech thing rather than a shocking ignorance thing. Secondly, he may just be in the habit of saying “Czechoslovakia” — that happens — but if that was true I’d expect him to reliably pronounce it correctly. To be honest, though, I don’t think any of that case matters, because it only dents one of the three things I flagged up as indicators that McCain may be living in 1992. In context, I think it looks pretty bad for him, and even if it doesn’t matter, he and his staff should be able to spot things that make him look dumb and change them. The fact that they can’t or don’t is at least as worrying as the mistake itself.
Obviously I don’t think that an election should be decided or fought on a Who Said The Dumbest Thing competition. But if this is the best collection of “gaffes” they have then I’m happy to keep poking fun at McCain, safe in the knowledge that I’m not indulging in too much selective reporting.
This hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for Christianity in Britain. We learned that the Church of England is suffering because young people aren’t interested and the people who are are dying of old age, and we learned that Cliff Richard has decided to pitch in to help, presumably because he is almost uniquely placed to sympathise with that plight. His contribution is to publish a book of his favourite Bible stories, including the story of how God killed everyone in the world except for one family and then regretted it, the story of how God murdered all the innocent first-born sons in Egypt despite having “hardened the Pharaoh’s heart” to ensure he wouldn’t release the slaves, the story of how God masterminds and helps with the genocide in Jericho, the story of Solomon, who was granted wisdom and then went off to worship someone else, and the story of how God had his own son tortured to death to “pay for” sins committed by other people according to rules God devised in the first place. I can see how that will help.
Also trying to help is the Church Army, who want to hook youngsters into the faith by analogising it to Doctor Who. They point out the many similarities between the Doctor and Jesus, and the storylines in the show and in the Bible. And there are many similarities, although frankly almost every single one of them is pathetic. They say
The Tardis was considered to represent a Church by being an ordinary object that points to something higher while the Doctor was likened to Christ in his willingness to sacrifice himself for others.
What? You could liken The Brittas Empire to the Bible if you’re willing to go that far.
Not all that clear, I’m afraid. I thought that was a sub-par and rather silly bit of technobabble which had to be tolerated to tell what was, in the event, a damn good story. A story which, incidentally, really didn’t bear more than a passing resemblance to Jesus’.
We saw the Doctor persuaded to save a family of Pompeians in one of the most recent episodes, surely a reference to Genesis and Abraham’s bargaining with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.
I’m not at all sure it is a reference to that. It’s just a good dramatic theme. Nobody should read anything into the fact that it’s come up more than once. You might equally well argue that the fact that Biblical themes can be independently rewritten by a gay atheist suggests that they’re made up. Besides which, there’s shitloads of Bible and rather a lot of Doctor Who. Certainly there are parallels — but that just makes it more pathetic that these people are using such crap examples.
I don’t really know if Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor (as if that’s a real name) was tryong to help when he made a terribly dull speech entitled “Faith In Britain: A Personal Perspective”, which is buried somewhere on this webpage that’s sufficiently poorly designed that I can’t link directly to it. This is from the same lecture series as the previous winner’s speech. He says, for example, in this speech that
Only a modern person would think that religion is a private matter, something the individual does in his or her solitude
which presumably makes Jesus a “modern person”, since Matthew 6:6 says
But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, prayto thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
I don’t mind that, of course. Ignorance of what the Bible says is what keeps Christianity going. What annoyed me was this bit:
I would want to encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem because the hidden God is active in their lives as well as in the lives of those who believe.
He must be very well hidden.
Why can’t he “encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem” because we’re smart enough to reject nonsense even when it surrounds us? Because we’ve managed to develop morality without been spoon-fed it by a book of made up rules? Because we’ve got enough confidence in our convictions to go against the flow and stand up for what we don’t believe in? If a Christian were to tell me that they regard me with deep esteem because of something God did, I would find that patronising and offensive, and I’d say so.
He also says this:
What did we do to generate unbelief? We spoke too easily about God, we spoke perhaps in the wrong way and we treated God as an idea rather than a living mystery to be approached in silence and prayer rather than in the arguments of the mind. If Christianity gave European thought the impression that God can be conceptually determined and pinned down and proved as a hypothesis, then it is hardly surprising that there has been resistance, as science and culture have developed, to worshipping this idea of God. We as Christians need to examine what we might have done to give people a misleading view of God. Faith in Britain might be improved by a deeper grasp of the mystery of God on the part of believers.
Now, I may have got the wrong end of the stick here, but to me that reads “whatever you think God is like, you’re wrong. He’s not like that, nor is he like anything else in particular, because he’s fundamentally mysterious and can’t be pinned down or rigorously defined. Of course, that doesn’t stop him existing and it doesn’t stop us knowing how he feels about gay people and stem cells.” If that is what he means, then he’s a moron.
It’s for largely this reason that I’m not sure Religious Crackpot of the Month is really viable any more. I think clearly all these people require recognition, but they can’t have it because it was this month that I read
The primary cause of unhappiness in Britain is not lack of material wealth but a loss of faith in God and religion, a group of MPs says today.
Apparently, there’s a report out by a group of all of five MPs who
argue that if values related to relationships, responsibility, trust, self-esteem and potential – all with their roots in the Judeo-Christian beliefs that once underpinned Western legislative philosophy – were to have greater emphasis in society, everyone’s wellbeing would improve.
Theos seem to be quite large and well established. They have a website that looks very professional (although it is in fact crap — it doesn’t even have an RSS feed), and describe themselves as
a public theology think tank which exists to undertake research and provide commentary on social and political arrangements. It aims to impact public opinion about the role of Christianity in society.
They go on to say
It was launched in November 2006 with the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor.
You probably know what I think of those endorsements.
Its first report “Doing God”: A Future for Faith in the Public Square examined the reasons why faith will play an increasingly significant role in public life.
They call themselves a “think tank”, although that’s a bit rich unless you count quoting the Bible as ‘thinking’. Really, they’re just a load of antidisestablishmentarianists hell-bent on reversing the work done since the Enlightenment in secularising society:
what Theos stands for
Society is embarking on a process of de-secularisation. Interest in spirituality is increasing across Western culture. Faith is on the agenda of both government and the media. In the arts, humanities and social sciences there are important intellectual developments currently taking place around questions of values and identity. Theos speaks into this new context. Our perspective is that faith is not just important for human flourishing and the renewal of society, but that society can only truly flourish if faith is given the space to do so. We reject notions of a sacred-secular divide.
We can, though, at least make some assumptions. In a seriously secular country, the vast majority of people wouldn’t believe in God, however vaguely. Few would claim to belong to a religious group. And nobody would pray. What would be the point?
No. It’s entirely possible to be religious and secularist at the same time. Take this speech by Barack Obama (which I’ve copied from Dwindling in Unbelief):
We all know the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his only son, and without argument, he takes Isaac to the mountaintop, binds him to an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as God has commanded.
Of course, in the end God sends down an angel to intercede at the very last minute, and Abraham passes God’s test of devotion.
But it’s fair to say that if any of us leaving this church saw Abraham on a roof of a building raising his knife, we would, at the very least, call the police and expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away from Abraham. We would do so because we do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that we all see, and that we all hear, be it common laws or basic reason.
Theos can publish all the inane sophistry they like, but the bottom line is that God doesn’t exist and even people who think he does can’t agree (in the case of Murphy-O’Connor, even with themselves) what he’s like or what he wants, and even those who feel they have a clear idea of both of these things can’t offer even the slightest shred of evidence or indeed any good reason to listen to them. So until Theos can prove that God exists, they will remain a sectarian group of crackpots trying to further Christianity’s already excessive influence on British politics.
I heard today, in an article about Obama suggesting Clinton follow suit (which presumably means his campaign considers Clinton is either doomed or suggestible), that Mike “But If We Change The Constitution, Then We Can Make All Kinds Of Crazy Laws” Huckabee refuses to withdraw. Which is fair enough and all, but “it is mathematically impossible for him to catch up to John McCain’s lead”. This makes sense. We already knew he don’t think too good. So that can only be good news. McCain is more than slightly screwy, but has to be the best of the Republicans on offer.
So it’s looking like Obama versus McCain. That’s probably the best result we could have hoped for (although in one respect it would have been better had Romney won the Republican nomination, because he’d have been a lot easier for the Democrats to beat in the election).
And now we have to wait for about a year for the election, because of America’s habit of making primaries more and more ridiculously early every time. Within our lifetimes, they’ll be held before the previous election.
