Day: October 4, 2000

The recent FDA approval of the abortion inducing RU-486 became a hot political issue this week as Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush tried to dodge statements he made back in January that if he were president he would have serious reservations about the FDA approving the drug, while several politicians chimed in to say they would do all in their power to reverse the FDA’s decision.

Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan reaching deep into his rhetorical bag referred to RU-486 as “a human pesticide,” adding that if he should be elected, “I would use all the power of my office, including appointments at the FDA, to prevent its being put on the market.”

Unlike Buchanan, who has no real chance of winning in November, Sen. Tim Hutchinson, R-Arkansas, does hold elective office. Hutchinson told ABC’s “This Week” that there “a lot of questions” about whether or not the drug is safe and hinted that Congress might try to put additional restrictions on the drug. Rep. Tom Coburn, R-Okalhoma, said he would introduce legislation that would do just that. Given all of the burdensome restrictions that are already placed on the drug’s use, it’s hard to know what else they want to do.

For a variety of reasons, the Republican position on abortion is not the dominant view of the American people (neither is the pro-choice view, however — most Americans seem to be somewhere in between, wanting abortion to remain legal, but sometimes approving of limited restrictions on its use). Using backdoors like this to try to get their way is a bit unseemly.

On the other hand, if they succeed they’re just beating the feminists at their own game. After all there are any number of feminist tracts likening the birth control to the poisoning of women by patriarchal power brokers (the difference being when Mary Daly attacks birth control, feminists hail her as a genius, whereas were some Republican Senator to do so, he’s immediately pounced upon by feminists).

RU-486 is certainly safe, and since it leads to abortion very early in the first trimester (and by manipulating hormone levels rather than through a surgical procedure), it also meets the objections of a lot of Americans with concerns about late 2nd and even early 3rd trimester abortions. The FDA placed too many restrictions on its use, but overall it did a good thing by finally bringing this drug to market.

Source:

Abortion opponents question safety of new pill. The Associated Press, October 1, 2000.

One of the things that struck me about Tuesday’s debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush was how far Republicans managed in the last two decades to push the political establishment toward the Right on cultural issues. Gore immediately launched into denouncing “cultural pollution” at the beginning of the debate and used the phrase again in his final remarks.

Add to that Ralph Nader running around the country talking about the evils of sex and violence in movies, television and computer games and the conclusion is obvious — the real winner of this year’s election is going to be Pat Buchanan.

When Buchanan gave his fiery speeches at successive Republican conventions calling for a cultural war, Democrats cried foul, many Republicans thought he went overboard, and Left magazines like The Nation went to town on him. Dan Qualye, who wanted to be Pat Buchanan-lite was roundly ridiculed for his claim that the depiction of Murphy Brown becoming a single mother glorified single motherhood and was a bad message to be sending to teenage girls.

In the upcoming election, however, four of the five presidential candidates who are going to poll more than 1 percent of the vote completely embrace Buchanan and Qualye’s message. To see how close the candidates actually are, I visited their web sites and pulled off quotes from speeches by Nader, Gore, Buchanan and Bush. See if you can tell which quote belongs to which candidate:

• After generations of feeding our children this filth and permitting moral polluters to dump their poison into our cultural well, why are we surprised that ours has become a sick society.
• To start with, we all share a responsibility for changing a toxic culture that too often glorifies violence and cruelty.
• We live in a culture of moral indifference, where movies and videos glamorize violence and tolerance is touted as a great virtue.
• It is time to say that our children matter more than this brutalizing entertainment.

The real surprise was that from the speeches I could find (and I may have missed a few), only one of the four candidates who denounced the pollution of American culture didn’t also call for legislative and/or judicial punishment of content producers — George W. Bush. In fact, Bush’s statements on the matter have been relatively low key compared to the rest of the field, probably because he wants to avoid the sort of cultural warrior taint that dogged Buchanan and Bob Dole (though Bush did champion the endorsement he received from South Carolina’s attorney general who has promised a lawsuit against Hollywood for targeting minors).

Only one candidate, the Libertarian Party’s Harry Browne, pointed out the obvious that, “If you ask the government to impose morality, you are asking that moral questions be decided by those with the most political power. This means that people like Teddy Kennedy and Newt Gingrich will dictate personal morality to you.” Unfortunately, Browne doesn’t have a chance, and so it is Buchanan’s ideas that will win in November, and that, unless counteracted, will lead to the sort of restrictions on speech of which Buchanan could only have dreamed when he fired the first salvo in his self-declared “cultural war.”

(The quotes, by the way are from Buchanan, Gore, Bush, and Nader respectively).

Monty Manley rips into Linux and some parts of the Open Source community in an article at osOpinion, The Failure of Linux: Credibility and Responsibility. This is tangentially related to some of the stuff Mark Morgan and I were discussing about free vs. commercial web sites (which reminds me I need to post my thoughts to some of the issues he raised in his reply).

One thing Manley doesn’t like, in both open source and traditionally licensed programs, is the large number of bugs:

Alone of the major engineering disciplines, software has inculcated in its users an expectation that it will fail: that it will be late, buggy, balky, and over budget. Programmers, unlike other engineers, tend to have low credibility in their organizations since their time and budget estimations are invariably far off the mark. Often, programmers will simply refuse to provide time or money estimates, preferring instead to give the old “it’ll be ready when it’s ready” answer.

First, note that this is an exaggeration since there are some areas where the lack of bugs is an extremely high priority and software runs extremely stable. Software that runs medical devices, for example, generally requires extremely stable software — wouldn’t want a respirator crashing.

Second, unlike Manley I like buggy software. No, I don’t mean I enjoy rebooting Windows ever few hours, but on the other hand I’m glad I don’t have to wait forever or pay extremely high prices while Microsoft and application developers root out every last bug. For the most part, bugs are annoying but they are not deal breakers at current software prices, especially if they are quickly corrected by software patches.

Manley also claims that companies are being “forced” to use something like the GPL for software:

This surfeit of freeloader zealots has had an unfortunate side-effect: many companies have felt themselves forced into GPLing their bread-and-butter products (as with Trolltech’s QT) just to stay in the good graces of the community. The GPL is a fine license, but it isn’t for everyone, and it has weaknesses that can stymie future development. I think some software houses have been made to feel guilty about charging for their wares, as if their talent and effort are somehow less important than the will of the community. I think most experienced programmers would agree that it is not only silly but morally wrong to deny someone a fair price for a good product, and yet that is all too often what the Linux hordes do to smaller software companies.

Huh? This seems to me to be an example of good old-fashioned market competition. Consumers, in this case Linux users and programmers, let it be known that if Trolltech didn’t meant certain specifications, they wouldn’t use QT. That’s no different from companies I’ve worked at handing vendors specification sheets and saying they won’t even consider bids for software that can’t meet the specifications.

Lord knows software companies constantly impose demands and requirements on end users, what’s wrong with end users putting demands on software companies once in awhile? (What Manley’s claim about Trolltech really reveals is that maybe that company might want to re-think its market and strategy).

A pro-animal rights individual on an animal rights e-mail list recently posted an account of a September 27 appearance at Youngstown State University by Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. The account claimed Nader was questioned about his views on animal experiments, specifically experiments in primates to better understand HIV. The person reported that Nader replied,

If they keep messing around they are likely to create another virus. You know how AIDS started don’t you?

I don’t take animal rights activists word for much, especially second hand accounts like this, but if anyone runs across any coverage of Nader relating to this visit or that features any of his comments on animal testing, I would greatly appreciate it if you sent it my way (post it here or e-mail it to me at [email protected]). Thank you.