Ignatieff Differentiating Himself

As a political leader, Ignatieff is starting to sound very interesting. Of particular interest is this article from the Globe and Mail yesterday.

And in contrast to Mr. Harper, the new Liberal Leader, who is well-travelled and well-known in Britain and the United States, even has an advantage when it comes to Mr. Obama, who is visiting Ottawa next week.

"I just pick up the phone to some of my friends in his administration ...," Mr. Ignatieff said on CTV's Question Period earlier this year when discussing how close his ties are with the Obama White House.

Well, Harper used to brag about his connection with Bush II. I'm not sure that this means much in terms of relations with the White House under Obama, really.

Ignatieff's profile on the world stage is almost guaranteed to be better than Harper's. Harper was an unknown on the world stage until 2006, and since then he's done little more than demonstrate that he's a puppet for the neoCons in the Bush Whitehouse.

And while Mr. Ignatieff says he can pick up the phone to call the White House, his senior staffers say that his MPs can pick up the phone to call him. In fact, about 300 Liberal staffers, MPs and senators showed up to partake of Canadian wine and cheese at his office Tuesday night where he thanked them for being the "real guts of the organization."

By far, this is the more important aspect of the distinction between Ignatieff and other political leaders in Canada lately. He's clearly reaching out to the membership of his party and making himself accessible. How much that contact will influence his decisions and direction is hard to say, but from an organizational culture standpoint, it's a very interesting aspect of his leadership, and it will result in a much more cohesive party in the long run.

This is in extreme contrast to the iron-fisted, top-down style that we've seen from Harper. As I have expressed before, Harper's style has distinct limitations that we should not ignore - micromanagement doesn't scale well to large numbers of issues; and there have long been signs of various factions within the Conservatives squirming to make themselves heard. This is not exactly unifying the Conservative party.

Perhaps most telling is the Conservative party's lack of reaction to Ignatieff:

"Canadians are concerned about the economy right now, they don't want to see politicians playing political games at the moment," the Prime Minister's communications director, Kory Teneycke, said, explaining why they haven't done to Mr. Ignatieff what they did to Mr. Dion. "But we're not focused on politics right now. We're not planning to go to a campaign right now."

I'd have to suspect that it also boils down to the fact that Ignatieff has already shown that he will not be bullied about by Mr. Harper's tactics. That simply doesn't give the Con$ the kind of easy target that Dion made.

Ignatieff's much stronger presentation in the House of Commons also flies in the face of the kind of slime throwing that the standard attack ad tactic relies on, and I think people are picking up on that as well. (Not to mention the stunning crash of Rovian style campaigning in the United States has got to have made the Con$ a whole bunch more cautious)

More on the Lawrence King Murder

Almost a year ago, Larry King was murdered by a classmate.

For most of the last year, we've seen a steady stream of 'blame the victim' coming out from those who think it's just fine to blow someone's brains out if they are GLBT.

Today, the Prosecution filed a brief in court that paints a bit more of the picture - and it's not pretty:

McInerney was the aggressor, teasing the effeminate King for weeks and vowing to "get a gun and shoot" him, according to a prosecution brief. Multiple students provided accounts of a growing hostility between the two boys, the document shows.

Lovely ... and it gets worse, as the prosecution's brief also paints a little more of the picture:

In her statement of facts, Fox contends that King and McInerney had an acrimonious relationship for months prior to the shooting. They sparred with "typical 8th grade, back-and-forth insults; some sexual, some not," she wrote.

Witnesses said King was usually not the aggressor. But after months of teasing by McInerney and other male students who called him "faggot," he had began to retort, according to prosecutors.
...
A few minutes later, prosecutors allege, McInerney told one of King's friends: "Say goodbye to your friend Larry because you're never going to see him again."

Ugh! What a nasty little piece of work. I remember kids like that when I was in Jr. High - they made my life decidedly unpleasant when I came into their sights. Fortunately, the chances of any of them being able to lay hands on a firearm were pretty much nil. Larry King wasn't so fortunate.

The prosecution brief also reveals for the first time that McInerney was familiar with firearms, and that he had used that particular weapon in the past during target shooting with his family.

Investigators found a training video in his possession titled "Shooting in Realistic Environments," as well as skinhead and neo-Nazi books and similar writings from the Internet, prosecutors wrote.

Delightful. Not only was the accused your basic garden variety middle school thug, but he's also shown us that he had fantasies about being a neo-nazi. This isn't exactly a poster child for upstanding citizen, is it?

Regardless of whatever may have happened in the school hallways, there is nothing that redeems the accused's decision to go get a gun, and pull the trigger twice. There is a degree of intent and premeditation being described here that is absolutely chilling - especially when it is coming from a thirteen or fourteen year old boy.

H/T: Trans Group Blog

Harper Ignores Khadr ... Still

Even with the US government putting the world on notice that the Guantanamo Bay prison that Omar Khadr is being held in will be closed down in the next twelve months, I see that Harper is continuing his 'head-in-sand' approach to the whole business.

Despite the plea, a spokesman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper reaffirmed there will be no change in policy regarding Khadr unless the U.S. changes its position and dismissed the plan as a "PR stunt and nothing more."

"We are not interested in what Mr. Khadr's lawyers have to say or opposition leaders or, frankly, the media," Kory Teneycke told the Canadian Press.

The arrogance of this position is beyond belief. The only thing about it we can take away is that the HarperCon$ are nothing if not consistent. So far, the Harper government has dragged its feet for months (and longer) on every case where a Canadian citizen is held in questionable circumstances abroad.

Like it or not, Khadr is a Canadian Citizen - he was born here. Canada has a responsibility to its citizens, and the Harper government refuses to carry out its responsibilities in this area.

If Khadr really did something criminal, then bring him home and make him stand trial. The sham courts of the 'military tribunals' are not legal courts, and President Obama has already made it quite clear that they are about to come to a grinding halt.

What I think of the Khadr family is immaterial here. This is, like the Brenda Martin situation, a matter of rescuing a Canadian citizen who is being held illegally by a foreign power.

Ideology cannot be allowed to trump responsibility in our government.

Crumbling PMO Organization?

There's been quite a flurry of departures from the PMO in recent weeks, and even The National Post is commenting on it.

But strange things are happening in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's close-knit office. A senior advisor and at least one strategist are moving on, which has some Conservative observers concerned about internal morale and questioning the operation's top official.

This is interesting all by itself. When senior advisors start jumping ship, one of two things is wrong. Either the ship is sinking, or the captain is coming unglued.

Harper is a micromanager in the extreme, and micromanagers tend to fall apart when the number of issues that they have to deal with exceeds their ability to get a grasp on each and every one individually.

When a country is blasted by the kind of economic storm currently blowing around the world, the number of issues goes up dramatically. It can come as little surprise that things are rapidly exceeding Harper's ability to manage.

MPs confide there's a darkening mood in the big guy himself, hardly surprising given the stormy economic challenge Mr. Harper faces. One source says there was a blowup between a furious Prime Minister and key players last week. And PMO chief of staff Guy Giorno is now plotting the second major internal shuffle in eight months.

Uh huh. In short, Harper's losing his cool because things aren't going his way. Hardly the mark of strong leadership.

My counter-argument to saddling the Conservatives with the crumbling economy is that none of the other federal leaders would have managed affairs much differently if confronted and confounded by an imported global recession shedding jobs and creating bankruptcies at such a horrific speed.

Here's where I disagree with columnist Don Martin. All of the other parties were running the flag up the pole last fall, while Mr. Harper was blithely promising Canadians that the "fundamentals of our economy are solid". Anyone with their eyes open could see the storm clouds gathering on the horizon, although few would have guessed the pervasiveness and severity of them.

Second, Mr. Harper has not managed this situation well at all. Instead of managing things to the benefit of Canadians, he has tried to turn it into another weapon in his constant, ongoing partisan warfare. The November FU was nothing more than a bunch of vacuous statements, followed with actions designed to inflame the situation - mere weeks after he was reluctantly re-elected by a Canadian public forced to choose between three marginal leaders.

Then he suspended the management of Canada's affairs for almost two months in order to draw up a budget that just might be passed by the House of Commons - if he didn't try to poke another stick in the opposition's eyes.

Harper hasn't managed a damn thing yet. He has, however, overseen the most vicious partisan warfare I've ever witnessed in this country; and now is poised - like his predecessor, Brian Mulroney, to plunge Canada still deeper into debt. (and, I wonder, just what kind of accountability the HarperCon$ will be demanding of those who are the beneficiaries of the government's sudden largesse?)

Learning Moments

University is about learning. Make no mistake about it - for those who choose to spend four or more years of their lives toiling away writing an endless stream of exams, term papers and assignments, University is a place where much is learned.

Not just in the classroom though. University is the place where many young men and women also learn to take responsibility for themselves and their actions. Whether it is the choice to attend a lecture (or not), or to work during the school year to pay for sundries like food, choices and trade-offs must be made. Sometimes, one gets it right; other times, well, it's a miss; and hopefully, the misses aren't too disastrous.

Such is the case today for Campus Pro Life.

They made their choices, and now the consequences are coming home to roost. They chose to be confrontational and uncompromising. Now they are facing consequences from all sides - the UofC itself has asked that trespass charges be laid; and the Student's Union has now voted to sanction the group as well.

I'm not feeling overly sympathetic to Campus Pro Life's position in this matter. Not because I disagree with their philosophy, but because they chose this path in the full knowledge that it could have serious implications for them.

They now collectively find themselves on the receiving end of quite a life lesson - I hope that they learn it well.

Microsoft and R&D Spending

I'm far from being the world's biggest fan of Microsoft, but when shareholders are whining about R&D spending, I tend to sit up and take a bit of notice.

At $8 billion per year, Microsoft's R&D budget is enormous - especially when their revenues are $60 billion - that's about 13% of revenues. A lot by any measurement.

However, the investment community is being a bit silly here. Consider the following logic:

"During 2007, Apple spent $782 million on R&D, Oracle spent $85 million while Microsoft spent about $7.5 billion. In 2007, Apple annual revenue amounted to $24 billion and net income totaled $3.5 billion," says Montgomery. "According to 2008 annual report, Apple increased revenue to $32 billion and net income to $4.8 billion. During the same period Microsoft spent $8 billion on R&D and increased revenue from $51 billion to $60 billion. Therefore, Apple has a R&D budget that equates to approximately 10% of Microsoft’s; however, during this period Apple increased revenue by $8 billion and Microsoft increased revenue by $9 billion."

Let's get a couple of things straight here. R&D produces two things. Ideas, and product. (How much of Microsoft's $8 billion is upkeep on existing software? - who knows) However, neither of those equates to market share gains. R&D groups don't typically do a lot of marketing themselves.

Business growth is the responsibility of the marketing and sales arms of the organization - not R&D. Much of what an R&D organization does (especially in software) may not pay dividends for years - if ever. If Microsoft needs to be criticized by its shareholders, it's not on the subject of R&D spending, it's on the utterly clumsy marketing job they've done since about the mid-point of Windows XP's lifecycle.

Vista was a turkey beyond all turkeys. The packaging for it was awful - I still haven't figured out which version of Vista I would recommend for someone buying a new PC. Whoever came up with that marketing strategy should be fired - what a disaster!

Quite frankly, more recent offerings of the Office platform haven't won them any friends either. Lots of change, but nothing compelling enough to justify the cost of an upgrade; and completely new licenses are abusively expensive. Which leaves people looking at alternatives like OpenOffice.

If Microsoft has a problem, it's not R&D - it's in their marketing and image machine. Whoever's running that show just doesn't get it.

Debunking Dr. Paul McHugh

One of the most infuriating things I run across all too often are arguments from religious conservatives that try to bash transsexuals based on the utterances of one Dr. Paul McHugh.

In particular, they like to cite a paper that McHugh wrote in 2004 for the NeoCon magazine "First Things". His article in "First Things" is a doozy - drawing conclusions that are astonishingly subjective.

Those I met after surgery would tell me that the surgery and hormone treatments that had made them “women” had also made them happy and contented. None of these encounters were persuasive, however. The post-surgical subjects struck me as caricatures of women.

The short comment here is that in McHugh's view, transsexuals didn't measure up to his idea of beauty. For a supposed professional, working in mental health, McHugh should have long ago discarded such idiotic believes from his practice.

First, they spent an unusual amount of time thinking and talking about sex and their sexual experiences; their sexual hungers and adventures seemed to preoccupy them. Second, discussion of babies or children provoked little interest from them; indeed, they seemed indifferent to children. But third, and most remarkable, many of these men-who-claimed-to-be-women reported that they found women sexually attractive and that they saw themselves as “lesbians.”

Ummm...wow. There's more assumptions in that one paragraph than a pharmacy has pills. Starting off with the idea that transsexuals are sex-obsessed. In reality it doesn't work that way. Transsexuals have varying levels of interest in sex - and it's all over the map. Perhaps McHugh only remembers the conversations about sex because they piqued his curiousity. As for children, not everybody is cut out to be a parent; and some, are so distressed by their situation that the idea of creating the emotional space to care for a child isn't even a point of discussion. (I know several ladies who have no desire whatsoever to raise a family - period) As for his astonishment that someone might transition and identify as a lesbian, it only goes to underscore Dr. McHugh's limited understanding of the diversity of human sexuality.

He [sic. Meyer] found that most of the patients he tracked down some years after their surgery were contented with what they had done and that only a few regretted it. But in every other respect, they were little changed in their psychological condition. They had much the same problems with relationships, work, and emotions as before. The hope that they would emerge now from their emotional difficulties to flourish psychologically had not been fulfilled.

Transition doesn't cure any problems that a person is dealing with besides the gender identity issues. To assume that it would is foolish and shortsighted indeed. I'll address how deeply flawed Meyer's study is later.

One group consisted of conflicted and guilt-ridden homosexual men who saw a sex-change as a way to resolve their conflicts over homosexuality by allowing them to behave sexually as females with men. The other group, mostly older men, consisted of heterosexual (and some bisexual) males who found intense sexual arousal in cross-dressing as females.

So the idiocy that is J. Michael Bailey starts even earlier than I thought. Unfortunately for McHugh, there are a surprising number of transsexuals who don't fit into either category that he has so narrowly described.

Yes, it is reasonable to assume that a transsexual exploring the idea of transition would be curious about the sexual experience as a woman, and may well find that notion arousing. What is unreasonable is to claim that the arousal indicates a primary motivation for transition. Among other things, taking cross-sex hormones does all sorts of things to an individual's patterns of arousal.

Having looked at the Reiner and Meyer studies, we in the Johns Hopkins Psychiatry Department eventually concluded that human sexual identity is mostly built into our constitution by the genes we inherit and the embryogenesis we undergo. Male hormones sexualize the brain and the mind. Sexual dysphoria — a sense of disquiet in one’s sexual role — naturally occurs amongst those rare males who are raised as females in an effort to correct an infantile genital structural problem. A seemingly similar disquiet can be socially induced in apparently constitutionally normal males, in association with (and presumably prompted by) serious behavioral aberrations, amongst which are conflicted homosexual orientations and the remarkable male deviation now called autogynephilia.

More or less, McHugh is drawing conclusions from a deeply flawed follow-up study on transsexuals and from a second study which is based on reassignment of Intersex infants. What he completely fails to draw from the Reiner study that he refers to is the logical corollary to the study's findings - namely that a person's gender identity is wired at some fundamental level of the brain, and does not readily shape itself based on social cues. This is in fact the underlying persistence of the transsexual narrative in the first place. Why McHugh fails to see this reality is simply a clue to his view of the world. (and I would feel very sorry for anyone who had to deal with him as a therapist for gender issues)

While I agree that there is evidence that suggests parallels between transsexualism and various Intersex conditions, I think it is important to point out that for the most part, Intersex people do not seem to describe the kind of psychological distress about gender that transsexuals do. Although some experience something similar if they are inappropriately assigned a gender as infants, in general this does not appear to be the case among IS people.

Many point to the case of John Reimer as an example, and his case is neither about transsexualism or intersex conditions - and in many respects proves the notion that there is something about gender identity that is profoundly fundamental to us as individuals - and is not subject to being "changed" by our social environment.

One might expect that those who claim that sexual identity has no biological or physical basis would bring forth more evidence to persuade others. But as I’ve learned, there is a deep prejudice in favor of the idea that nature is totally malleable.

I think if McHugh were to park his assumptions that sex equals gender and gender is sexuality for a while, he might come to the realization that just maybe the transsexual is in fact reinforcing a kind of essentialism about gender that he claims the transsexual narrative violates.

McHugh likes to stand up and brag about how he had the Gender Clinic program at Johns Hopkins shut down in the late 1970s because he didn't think that transsexuals benefited from surgery (or transition, probably) at all.

McHugh's position flies in the face of research spanning close to twenty years before his decision to close the clinic at Johns Hopkins. It relies upon a single paper, which is deeply flawed:

Because this publication is cited frequently by the professional and lay literature it seems important to us to demonstrate extensively why the results of this work are not very enlightening and cannot support the conclusions derived from them.

The scoring system used by the authors is undifferentiated because it is, for example, not evident if an arrest happened because of cross-dressing or for real crimes; if the partnerships classified as gender-appropriate, resp., as nongender-appropriate were partnerships of operated that existed over the time period of the operation or they were entered into post-surgically; if they are living partnerships or sexual partnerships; if the surgical results permitted to have sexual intercourse or not and if the psychiatric contacts, resp., inpatient treatments, came about exclusively because of the persistent pursuit of the goal sex reassignment or happened because of other psychiatric illnesses. One does not learn, for example, if also the routine contacts to the care-providing psychiatrist are counted or not.

The valuing done by the authors is absurd because, for example, the gender of the partner with whom a patient lived was evaluated pre-, resp., post-surgically as opposite. A single who possibly was not capable of having a long-term relationship and not maintain it received a better score (0) than an MFT who had lived for years with a female friend (and had an intimate relationship?) and did this past the time period of the operation, but whose relation after the operation was evaluated as nongender-appropriate (-1). An inpatient psychiatric treatment was evaluated more negatively (-3) than a jail term (-2). The professional of plumber (Hollingshead job level 4) counted exactly as much as post-surgical "gender-appropriate marriage" (+2).
The tables and figures shared by the authors do not seem serious because after the scoring table a maximum of only eight minus and five plus points can be achieved, but in the results table (p. 1014) a range from -18 to +19 points is given. How these figures came about remains totally in the dark. The presumption made by Fleming et al. (1980) that every category could be scored multiple times, is negated by the following thought: It is imaginable that with a multiple evaluation a number of 18 minus points can come about - by three stationary psychiatric admittances (3 times -3) plus three jail terms (3 times -2) plus three "nongender-appropriate partnerships" (3 times -1). It is unfathomable, however, how 19 plus points can be achieved with the scoring system,unless by, for example, five gender appropriate marriages (5 times +2) plus three different academic professions (3 times +3) within a follow-up study period.
One asks the question how it came about that a renowned professional publication published such opaque figure material. Meyer & Reter considered the shared data for the, in a sense, most objective data of their sampling and left out as good as all subjective statements of the follow-up study. It is possible that there was more to be learned from them.

Not without a problem is also the use of the not-operated as a control group, especially because 40% (14 of 35) of the not-operated had surgery in the course of the follow-up study and the other 21, even if not very decided, further pursued the goal to be operated. If the operated, in the course of the follow-up study, were counted in the partial sample right away of the operated, the average follow-up study period would have been shortened. How the other results could have been changed by this cannot be fathomed; the authors do not have any comments or calculations for this (comp. the remarks to the publication by Edgertom & Meyer [1973] and the critiques by Fleming et al. [1980], Lothstein [1982] and Abramowitz [1986]).

In short, McHugh's conclusions are based on even more limited data about transsexuals than normal, and it is based on what are clearly very flawed methods for gathering and quantifying the raw data.

Meanwhile, by far the majority of follow up studies (at least up to 1990/91) draw very different conclusions than does McHugh.

Worse yet, by McHugh's own admission, he wasn't going to look at anything to do with transsexualism objectively. His decision was already made by 1975.

This interrelationship of cultural antinomianism and a
psychiatric misplaced emphasis is seen at its grimmest in the
practice known as sex-reassignment surgery. I happen to know about
this because Johns Hopkins was one of the places in the United
States where this practice was given its start. It was part of my
intention, when I arrived in Baltimore in 1975, to help end it.

This is not someone whose opinion is objective at all. He had already drawn his conclusions, and no doubt directives to Dr. Meyer's team resulted in a study that fails the 'null hypothesis' test and is deeply flawed. In short, McHugh set out to find evidence to support his position, and didn't actually give one whit to the fact that his position was at odds with the conclusions of a lot of other researchers.