Republicans Go To Hell

Something that no longer astounds me is the way people claiming extreme religious devotion are capable of unspeakable acts of barbarism. I grew up with a church-going mother who really believed the bits about good works, etc., and would never relate to this sort of behaviour.

In the latest example, Republican Missouri senate candidate Todd Akin has caused widespread offence and even a little dismay in his own camp by claiming that “legitimate rape” victims can’t get pregnant, echoing a superstition long debunked by medical science that you can only get pregnant if you enjoy it.

He’s subsequently issued a non-apology (I used the wrong words) and refused to withdraw (ironically the only form of contraception his end of the loony bin recognizes) from the race. Other Republicans have urged him to withdraw (that word again), without specifying exactly what he said wrong.

The problem is, they don’t want to say, because they want the votes women haters represent.

Women’s groups have been rallying to support Akin’s Democrat opponent Claire McCaskill, as they should – and I hope not only women but also men and others who have less bizarre takes on religion work hard to stop him too. I know my mother would have.

I wonder how soon we’ll see a PAC formed by Rapists for Republicans. If his views ever became enshrined in law, all a rapist would need to do to escape conviction (in line with 13th-century British law) is to ensure the victim became pregnant, thereby enabling the “she must have enjoyed it” defence.

If anyone cannot see how unspeakably barbaric these views are, tell us your secret. How did you manage to live to be 800 years old?

I should also add here that though this is very much a Republican disease – the “religious right” has become something of a tapeworm in the brain of the Republicans – there are plenty of Democrats on the wrong side of women’s issues. But the Republican position has become so extreme that I focus on them specifically.

The US right has a long and repulsive tradition of denial of rationality, including tobacco denial, ozone hole denial and climate change denial. If there’s evidence for something, that doesn’t count, if it contradicts you beliefs. It’s sad that this sort of thing has become mainstream in a country that could land astronauts on the moon and bring them back safely, and pushes the boundaries of science in so many areas.

The root cause of this sort of lunatic view is a deeply anti-rationalist view of the world that says you literally believe what you are told by your religion, even if it’s contradicted by obvious, verifiable evidence. The thing that’s behind that is the bizarre view that there is a supreme creator of the universe, who is infinitely wise and powerful, and has the ego of a spoilt toddler, who smashes everything if he doesn’t get his way. If you think about this for only a second, why would someone that wise and powerful care a jot what I think of her? This representation of the creator serves one and only one purpose: the personal agenda of the religious hierarchy. Create extremes of afterlife – a wonderful paradise versus an extreme of barbaric punishment in hell – and a set or rules that must be followed to get to the right place, and you have a wonderful control tool for the gullible.

Don’t get me wrong: I know some very religious people who are wonderful, and do not fit the characterisation here. The point is that there is a huge self-interest for the megalomaniac to twist this sort of belief system to advantage. And look at what they’ve done:

• politicians who all but justify rape because they have a pathological objection to abortion
• suicide bombers who have no scruples about killing dozens or even thousands in the most barbaric fashion
• Zionist zealots who cannot see that the Palestinians may have some sort of case

I would personally rather believe that there is no supreme creator being and be totally responsible for my own actions. If I’m wrong, a being powerful enough to create a whole universe is unlikely to be so capricious as to punish an honest mistake. On the other hand, such a being is certainly not going to take lightly being held responsible for all manner of barbarism for such a feeble reason as “I thought I was meant to take everything literally, especially if I could read it as excusing extremes of cruelty and treating my fellow humans as worthless.”

One reason though I really would like there to be a hell is so I could see the faces of the Republican women haters, suicide bombers, apartheid politicians, Zionist zealots and others who used their creator’s name to excuse unspeakable barbarity at the point when they realise their mistake. To echo a line from The Simpsons: “See you in hell. From heaven.”

And since we are ending with comedy, here’s a starting point for the new Republican approach to trying rapists:

---

Update

In case you think this is a random outlier, here's another one (not the actual candidate speaking but a pretty convincing take-down of Indiana Republican senate candidate Richard Mourdock's position that a woman gets pregnant from a rape because “it is something God intended to happen”):

Like Akin, he doesn’t understand what the fuss is about, and claims his words have been taken out of context. Then there’s the tea party Tennessee Republican congressman Scott DesJarlais who was recorded making a phone call to his mistress urging her to have an abortion. To add insult to injury, he's a doctor, so he's facing an ethics enquiry.

Small government, it seems, is one small enough to get into your bedroom. But not if you’re a Republican. Maybe they have smaller bedrooms.

You can’t make this stuff up. I write novels in my spare time, and I certainly wouldn’t.

Will Microsoft Surface Sink?

In the wake of complaints that Microsoft didn’t give their hardware partners sufficient notice of their Surface announcement, it seems Ballmer thinks he can get close to Apple’s success by copying the jerk side of the Jobs persona. Nice try, but there was more to Jobs than that. There’s also the perfectionism, the sense of style and the ability to get the best out of people.

Absent all that, why announce a product with so little detail? The biggest effect this is likely to have is chilling prospects of aggressive hardware development for Windows 8. Anyone partway through a design will be strongly tempted to go Android instead, with the threat of such a big player invading their space. An example of this effect: Intel’s IA64 (Itanium). IA64 never delivered in a big way, yet it essentially killed off development of future generation MIPS processors for the high performance market, and killed both the HP PA-RISC processor and the Alpha (by then also owned by HP, but for practical purposes killed by Compaq, who bought DEC and drank the Itanium Kool-Aid).

I don’t understand why the media have been so conned into reporting this as the product that will knock down the iPad. That story has been done so often it’s become ridiculous. The only thing Microsoft adds to the game is some hardware innovation that no one really wants. We have at this stage no data on some rather fundamental details like when it will ship, performance, battery life and what communications it supports besides WiFi. To add an edge to the bizarreness of the whole thing, the case is made with a technology called “VapourMg”. You can just imagine the jokes that will provoke around Microsoft announcing vapourware.

The big thing missing here is how Microsoft will tackle Apple’s massive lead in free and low-cost apps targeting this market. And also Apple’s massive lead in a customer base in hundreds of millions who’ve entrusted their credit card details to a 1-click order process. The x86 version will run standard Windows software and dropping the price on those will be a huge risk when Microsoft and partners are dependent on a much higher pricing model on desktops, and the cheaper model with an ARM processor will require recompiles at very least, and it will look very odd if Microsoft has two very similar looking options with radically different pricing policies on apps. The most likely scenario is that the two will have completely different software models, adding confusion to the market. It’s not just a matter of choosing based on speed and screen resolution; if trading up to the faster model means replacing all your software, the two devices might as well be different brands.

What they still don’t get about the Jobs story is the big breakthroughs happen when you don’t listen to your customers. Arrogant though that sounds, customers used to an old paradigm aren’t the best people to ask about game-changing ideas. I bet this thing was designed based on focus groups who said, “If only we could get a tablet that worked just like a desktop machine.” Guess what? The same people in those focus groups won’t buy one, any more than people in 1900, asked what an automobile should be like, and who said it should have a horse manure scoop, would buy one for that feature.

Tablets with keyboards have been done, and failed. Doing the keyboard better in some way (thinner, sort of possible to ignore because it’s a semi-rigid dust cover you can presumably fold out of the way) doesn’t fix that. I don’t see the value of a keyboard without tactile feedback (if they’ve achieved that with something a few mm thick, that would be a real first, and no one has mentioned that). It means you have to keep looking to type, negating the value of separating it from the touch screen.

Microsoft is trying to find a reason to use Windows in this new form factor, and it doesn’t add up. If Microsoft wants to get into hardware, they would do better making an Android tablet and adding value, as others like Samsung and Amazon have done. There really are only two operating system kernels in wide use (if you don’t count embedded systems where the market is highly fragmented): variants on UNIX (including Linux and Apple’s OS X and iOS), and variants on Windows. Maintaining your own kernel without some significant value you can add is nuts. The cost is huge for no perceptible benefit. Apple discovered that only after nearly going broke (I told them to use a UNIX kernel with a Mac outer layer in the late 1980s: there are times when they should listen).

Another missing detail: how well will it work away from a rigid surface (aka desktop)? If Microsoft have invented a notebook computer you can’t use on your lap top, that would be an interesting first.

In the meantime of course the rest of the field won’t stand still. Apple, Samsung and the rest of the Android crew have time to think up other ways to add value.

I’ve been wrong before but not as often as the journalists who’ve reported yet another iPad killer. Time will tell.

The real significance of the Zuma wang painting

Some may be wondering why the ruling ANC made such a massive issue of a painting hung in a gallery that would have been seen by maybe a few hundred people had the government not made it such a massive issue. There’s been comment along the lines that the ANC obviously doesn’t understand the Streisand Effect. For those who haven’t heard of it, in 2003 Barbara Streisand’s lawyers tried to have a picture of her mansion, part of a web site illustrating coastal erosion, removed. Before they made the issue public, the picture had been viewed 6 times, 2 of which were her own lawyers. Arising from the publicity of the case, the picture was viewed over 400,000 times during the next month.

Of course the ANC knew what they were doing. All this happened in the context of a situation where the ruling party is facing increasing flak for corruption, nepotism and failure to deliver.

The thing that really brought it home to me was when I was listening to SAfm and right after we were told that  the gallery and the ANC had reached agreement, with some details to be announced after a march of 15,000 people, the Gauteng Transport MEC was on air explaining that e-tolls (an issue that had raised ire across a swath of constituencies that usually hate each other) were perfectly normal, in line with the accepted economic principle of user pays.

The thing is, the user pays principle is a cornerstone of liberal economics, and the ANC claims to be fundamentally opposed to liberalism, to the extent of a visceral hatred of the rather tame opposition Democratic Alliance. I’ve heard this hatred justified by a claim that the DA represents a throwback to the apartheid regime, a rather odd claim given that the rump of the National Party abandoned the DA project and joined the ANC.

So what’s this all about, really?

The ANC is mobilising around populist outrage to disguise the fact that they have not only failed to deliver, but they have become their own enemies.

Another day another election

With the dust barely settled on the Queensland state election, council elections are looming on 28 April. The last time I was involved in a Brisbane election, it was a by-election for the Walter Taylor ward, vacated by a sitting councillor who was elected as a federal member. The Greens candidate Tim Dangerfield made history by beating the once-mighty Labor party into third place.

Can this happen again?

After Labor's massive rout in the state election, I would rate Tim's chances highly for doing at least as well. And why shouldn't he? If the Greens run the sort of thoughtful campaign they ran in his by-election (I'm not on the team this time, but I know the people there), he deserves wider support.

What are the local issues?

Excessive and inappropriate development is a big problem. With the LNP riding high on their massive state win, unless they lose a few votes to candidates with strong local concerns, this trend is likely to continue. Public transport in the area remains a problem, with traffic on Coronation Drive and Moggill Road, and to schools and the University of Queensland, a testament to poor planning. Not only does public transport not serve the area well, but other options like bike paths are inadequate. There are some excellent bikeways around Brisbane, but they only solve the problem for longer-distance travel, and do nothing for the problem of riding safely through areas like St Lucia, where narrow roads with parked cars make cyclists vulnerable.

The area covered by the ward, the suburbs (or parts of them in some cases) Indooroopilly, St Lucia, Chapel Hill, Fig Tree Pocket, Kenmore and Toowong, is extremely diverse in density and local character, and includes some of the best areas of Brisbane in which to live. Messing up any of these by poor planning and favouring developer interests over community interests would be criminal. Even if Tim stands little chance of winning, a strong vote for a committed and informed candidate will give the incumbent, who has shown little interest in community concerns, a wake up call.

I'll be watching Tim's campaign to see how he handles these and other issues. Anyone else who can vote in the area with concerns about planning and community development should do so too.