this year I want to: 1) write better when I blog 2) pay less attention to the hitcounter 3) write more about things other than politics 4) pay more attention to politics outside of what’s happening in Holland, the UK and US 5) not just try and chase the ourage du jour.
Also, more sex.
I know y’all are waiting with bated breath for the results of the Dutch parliamentary elections, as the tensions and excitement of that tough election campaign slowly ebb away. Good news, the SP, the one true Dutch socialist party has won big, with 25 seats after about forty percent of the votes have been counted, almost tripling from their 2003 results of nine seats. The biggest losers are the freemarket liberals VVD, who lost about a third of their seats and became the fourth party after the SP. In other words, the socialists have won out over the liberals, especially as the other liberal party, D66, lost half its seats.
Meanwhile the Christian Democrats, traditionally the largest party in the Netherlands, have also lost but much less than their coalition partner VVD, going back from 44 seats in 2003 to 40 seats now. Profiting from their loss is the more outspoken Christian / leftist ChristenUnie, who may be against abortus and gay marriage but who at least remember Christ instructions about feeding the hungry and clothing the needy…
On the rightwing asshole front, the LPF (the grave robbers of Fortuyn) is finally going to disappear from parliament, but unfortunately the man with the hair, cryptoracist Geert Wilders, has picked up the LPF votes, with 9 seats for his Partij voor de Vrijheid, the Party for the Freedom of Anybody but Muslims. Another of the rightwing firebrands, Marco Pastors, has also picked up a seat. Though it’s disappointing these demagogues will enter parliament, at least the various splits on the right kept them from gaining more.
In the centrum of politics, the social democratic PvdA and Green GroenLinks, have lost just as big as the liberals have, reversing the situation in the 2003 elections when the social democrats picked up many of the votes the SP seemed to have in the bag until a few weeks before the election. Then people voted strategically and saw their hopes of a centrist government dashed, now they’ve realised it’s better to vote for the party they really support.
Some commentators have already said this is an election in which the middle has been deserted for the far left and rightwing fringes. They are wrong. It was the true left, the SP, who won to the disadvantage of not just the centrist left, but also the centrist right, while on the rightwing
fringe the seats have just been rearranged, rather than any having been gained. Wilders just picked up the votes lost by the LPF as well as some of the more rightwing of the VVD votes, but did not gain anything beyond it.
This is encouraging. It means that not just have the neoliberal policies of the CDA/VVD government been rejected, but the voters have not chosen for the easy, populist and bigoted siren call of the extreme right, but rather for principled leftwing parties. Not just for the SP, but also the Christen Unie and the Partij voor de Dieren (Party for the Animals), all parties that chose a principle course. A true rejection of the neoliberal consensus that has ruled the Netherlands for the past 25 years.
All of which however does not make the formation of a new government any easier. Neither the left nor the right is able to form a government on their own, so some sort of left-right coalition has to be formed, with my money being on a CDA-PvdA-SP coalition, or maybe a VVD-CDA-PvdA coalition. It’s going to be interesting.
Via Pharyngula comes this frankly bizarre, racist research paper, the abstract of which is below (emphasis mine):
Abstract: For cultural, social, and institutional reasons, Asians cannot make original contributions to basic science. I therefore doubt Miller’s prediction for the Asian future of evolutionary psychology. I believe that its future will continue to be in the United States and Europe.
Now since the author, Satoshi Kanazawa seems to be of Asian descent himself, it may be that this is some sort of weird April Fools joke or something, but he seems deadly serious. Looking at the list of publications in his biography, (as well as the original paper P.Z. Myers discovered) and it seems clear Kanazawa has his own agenda: to “prove” that differences in intelligence, health and income are determined by evolution and builtin differences between races/genders rather than the product of societal pressures. I may be doing Kanazawa a disfavour, but I don’t think so.
Thoughts?
That’s the latest meme in the “deny the undenyable” sweepstakes, the attempts to wish away the Lancet report. I first came across it yesterday, in the comments to this post over at Charlie’s, when Charlie brought up the simple fact that because the occupiers refuse to keep records, the Lancet studies are the best estimates we have of Iraqi deaths. Several people responded to this with variations on ‘the “occupation” ended a couple of years ago’, as if the tens of thousands of foreign troops waging war on the Iraqi population is somehow magicked away by some sort of meaningless handover ceremony. Clue: the US and UK forces are not under Iraqi command.
You have to wonder about the mindset of people who are able to ignore 600,000 deaths by arguing that well, the Coalition wasn’t in control so that makes it all right…
First things first: the report is now online (PDF file). I still need to read it properly, but in the meantime I’d like to talk about the likely media reaction to the report. Already in the LA Times article I linked to below you could see the narrative about the report taking shape, which was confirmed for me by the BBC news report on it during PM.
What is stressed in both cases is 1) how controversial the previous Lancet report was, 2) how out of line the new report is with other and/or official counts (with specific emphasis on Bush’s own estimate of 30,000 deaths earlier this year and the Iraqi Bodycount Project) and 3) the official rejections of the report. What is not reported is that the scientific accuracy of the previous report was never in question, other than by political hacks (See Tim Lambert’s sterling debunking work for more details), nor is explained how the differences in methology between the Lancet report and the Iraqi Bodycount Project makes them incomparable. The latter after all only counts deaths reported in western media and hence misses the vast majority of Iraqi deaths.
This approach is not that surprising: it’s safe ‘n easy, lazy journalism, biased towards the status quo. While Americans may think the BBC is largely immune to the inane habit of “balanced reporting” where the opinion of both sides in an argument is given equal weight, no matter where the truth lies their own newsmedia is infected with, reports like this sadly show this is not the case. Even the BBC is biased towards the status quo and not much interested in investigating the truth. There’s no calculated malice behind this, just the everyday pressures of being a news organisation, one of which is getting the news out now rather than after careful investigation. Later perhaps the claims of both parties can be examined for truth, but by then the newscycle might have already moved on and in any case the false claims are well established.
(This Lenin’s Tomb post has more evidence of the increassing laziness of the BBC’s news teams, in their answer as to why they didn’t pay any attention to the BNP terrorism case.)