Politics

The IVF conundrum

I have been meaning to blog about the controversy that is the new IVF bill and reactions thereto. Setting aside the position taken by the church – a position to which it is entitled but which should obviously not be taken as the universal truth in a secular society – there is also the position of the LGBT lobby that begs consideration.

The premise of the LGBT lobby’s assertion is that IVF should be accessible to same-sex couples and single parents. I have serious problems getting my head around this one for the reason that I see IVF as a scientific aid to couples who are finding trouble having children. IVF in that context assists these couples. What the new bill is proposing to do is to regulate the matter in such a way that such couples no longer find themselves in an illegal situation when having recourse to the benefits of scientific advances.

I find that the qualms expressed by Andrew Borg Cardona in today’s column are very much the ones that I have – in particular with regard to the fish and bicycle argument. It is hard to envisage a fundamental right for LGBT couples to IVF though, like Andrew I would not be one to set up barricades should such a law eventually come to pass. The incongruence is between the idea of what is accepted in current society (and what has been transformed into law) and the possibility of a fundamental change in that very level of mores.

Without entering into the issue of whether same-sex couples having offspring (obviously with donors involved) is moral or immoral – I do feel confident in asserting that this kind of development would warrant a wider platform than a back-door entry via an enabling clause in a bill in parliament.

Here is the relevant part from Borg Cardona’s article (by the way Andrew … convoluted moi?)

The question is: Is it really the case that same-sex couples have a fundamental right to raise a family, a right that shouldn’t be denied by the law itself?

Speaking for myself, and a philosopher or ethicist I ain’t, I have this nagging doubt worrying my logical bone like a slightly lethargic puppy. It’s not something that exercises me to the max, far from it, and if the law were to be changed to accommodate same-sex couples, I’m not about to take to the barricades. In the case of two males, obviously, legislation concerning IVF is pretty much a fish and bicycle proposition, while, equally obviously, for two females, it is very relevant that the law is limiting the facility to male-female couple. Thankfully, no one has tried to square the circle that would be a lesbian and gay couple, who would appear to have no bar to getting married or resorting to IVF, somewhat paradoxically.

The real question to be getting back to is, then, can you extend the definition of a fundamental right to embrace people who don’t have the wherewithal to achieve what they’re trying to achieve? I really don’t know but my perhaps less liberal side tends towards the “not really” side of the argument.

From Sarkozy to Saatchi & Saatchi

It’s out. The Nationalist party has “launched” a new billboard – complete with press release and comments by the party President. The PN is really trying its darned best to water down the importance of a press release and a press conference. First we had PBO calling not one but two press conferences and now Marthese Portelli, Tonio Fenech and Chris Said were wheeled out in order to explain… a billboard. You know that your billboard campaign has started on the wrong foot when you need to explain or, worse still, justify the content.

While the 2008 campaign was wrought with messages of “taste” and “guilt by association”, the PN in 2012 is resolute in reminding us how much of Labour’s current lineup has its roots way back when the Commodore 64 was launched (note the nerdy reference here). One thing has not changed – the absence of original thought in the creative department. In 2008 we had the plagiarised Sarkozy slogan “ensemble tout est possible” and for 2012 the PN has kicked off with a plagiarised poster from the UK Conservative party campaign back in 1979.

Do note how Marthese Portelli takes care not to mention the Conservative party in her “explanation”. The emphasis in some quarters is on “Saatchi & Saatchi” – you know, the Versace of political campaigns. Like that should make the whole plagiarising business disappear instantly. I wonder whether Saatchi & Saatchi could claim any royalties for this “cut and paste” job – which might go some way into explaining PBO’s estimates for billboard costs.

The original poster did say “Labour isn’t working” (changed to “Labour won’t work” for obvious reasoning) but it also had a little addendum: “Britain’s better off with the conservatives”. Now that’s vanished of course – and I am quite sure the PR department is smart enough not to deviate the attention of the voter with the assertion “Malta’s better off with the nationalists”. Because that is essentially the part of the formula the PN cannot afford to gamble on. The campaign HAS to focus on Labour’s perceived inadequacy to govern (and Labour goes quite a long way in reinforcing that perception) but it also HAS to shift the focus away from the current state of the nationalist party.

So. Are we better off with the conservatives? What is the PN doing to allay fears that their conservative elements will not dominate a future legislature? Well. Right now we have the rush to change laws on expression, the IVF bill with all its controversies and a number of other minor laws crying for attention (still slapping nudists with criminal fines are we?).

In the end this is not a game changer but it is a clear indication that the nationalist party will definitely find it tough going if it were to act as though all were fine and dandy. And it will take much more than an article by a human rights lawyer to convince the intelligent voter that the PN vote is the vote for change.

 

The joke’s on you

I’m just back from a late night showing of a fantastic The Dark Knight Rises. It’s definitely my favourite from the Christopher Nolan series if only for the plot that jumps straight at you as a masterpiece of political intrigue. What happens to society if you give it the freedom to choose? What happens when you unleash the angry, when you release the envious and the underachieving and give them a free run to destroy those who they perceive as the elite?

It didn’t help me much that my current read is Francis Fukuyama’s “The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.” It’s a highly recommendable exploration into how society comes up with its institutions and orders itself in order to survive. In particular it is a look at (1) the state, (2) the rule of law and (3) accountable government. But more of that later in future posts.

Before going out I thought of rehashing a photo that’s been doing the rounds about another smart and funny billboard that the PL thought up in answer to the as yet empty billboards that apparently cost the PN €200,000 to erect (tee-hee). You know the one… it points at an empty PN billboard and has the amazing two-liner “gonziPN – Gvern Bahh”. There’s something irritating about Labour’s complacent attitude with regards to the facile catchphrases that ultimately all point to the same baseline: “Gonzi Iggranfat mal-poter”, “Gvern bla ideat” and now “Gvern Bahh”.

Friends of this blog seem to identify a pro-nationalist streak in me whenever I take a dig at the immense vacuum that is Labour. It would keep Stephen Hawking busy for quite a while – the vacuum that is. Unfortunately when I weigh my reaction about such campaigns as the “Gvern Bahh” campaign I find that the anger element far outweighs the funny (oh Labour can be smart) element. Why? Because, as I have said a hundred million times before Labour is in a constant mode of denial whereby it assumes that simply pointing out the deficit of the incumbent will give it a free ticket to govern.

Labour assumes that the intelligent voter can be wooed simply by saying – hey you’re in shit so might as well have us be the new provider of daily fecal matter. The voter is in a bit of a situation like having to choose between two restaurants. The first is your traditional run of the mill Pizza & Pasta Italian that is having a bit of a down time with the chef having lost control of the kitchen.

The other restaurant just has the one guy standing outside pointing out how bad the plates in the Italian restaurant are of late. The only hunch is that we have no idea what the second restaurant sells, whether they actually have any kind of food on the plate and whether it is the type of cuisine that is to our liking (they claim they can cook anything but refuse the smallest of tasters). Yet we laugh at the jokes about the not too al dente spaghetti and the colour of the crockery in the Italian joint.

Yep. We only have two restaurants to choose from and sadly the only kind of joke there is to laugh at is a joke at our expense. You’ve got it right mate… the joke’s on you.

and a nice tune to finish this off… all the way from the free airwaves of 1991 (I recall a DJ Schembri if I am not mistaken)…


 

 

 

 

Summer siestas

It’s sizzling hot (apparently). August’s heat approaches with the certainty of a sunrise and the last events of the political season are being played out. Let’s not fool ourselves. There is going to be a break – a pause – as the politicians scramble to the safety of the seaside… or like mercenaries they will find some earthly form of hell where to regroup. In the meantime though the last notes of this particular act are being played out.

As I blogged earlier today, the Nationalist party is keen to have the last word on all things leak and Mistra. It’s not about Mistra they will tell you but about Joseph Muscat being a blabberer – a peċluq – as we would have it in the vernacular. The Labour party rightly retorts by focusing on a totally different point and reminding “GonziPN” that Dr Sant was right about the geezer who favours Earl Grey. That geezer marched off for his summer holidays in a huff having notified the PN that he is no longer one of their own (like they needed it in writing) and having informed the Speaker of the House that he is henceforth to be considered as an Independent. His cohabitation having been clarified he will now apparently be off and wed so, unless he takes the matter of wedlock lightly, that should keep him out of the news for a while.

The grumbling has started. It’s become a catchphrase of sorts now. “Oh how they have bored us.”, “Enough already”, “Why don’t they just resign and call an election”… and more of the same. You cannot really blame the electorate for having sussed out that most of these theatricals are to nobody’s benefit and that they can be more boring than spending an evening watching Musumeci Robert put up aphorism after aphorism on Facebook. Then again I have the niggling feeling that this is the usual thinking “sal-ponta ta’ l-imnieħer” as the vernacular would also put it.

Why? Because while it has become stylish to feign a lack of interest and to sing-a-long to the “bored with politics” and the “politicos” (a new word that, that has entered the collective vocab) few seem to understand what actually lies behind the corner. While everybody claims to no longer be intrigued by the squeakings of officials and spinmasters the truth is that their urge to “call an election” and get it over and done with turns out to be more of an emotional impulse than a thought out reflection.

And the reason is simple. When the curtain finally falls and the electoral campaign is in full swing we should be finally seeing two parties displaying their wares and what they have to offer in terms of governance for the new season. Mr Voter would be choosing from among these wares and therefore should be expecting to see a bit more than slogans and mud. Are the parties ready for that?

I have a strong feeling that the timing of PN strategy until now points clearly to a summer of preparation for an election. As I type slogans are being hatched (or copied from French campaigns), manifestos are being hurriedly beefed up and a strategy based on what the party can offer (and what new guarantees it can promise) is probably being brewed. The PN elected in 2008 is split and a good target for derisory facebook statuses or smartass expressions of surprise. The PN2012 team will be making damn sure that the new team has none of that.

And Labour? Well, once Muscat has recovered from the spumante he will return to the island to find that his provision of ammo is running dry. He has spent the last nine months honeymooning with the man who he now calls the second Prime Minister and has concentrated exclusively on the “iggranfat mal-poter” theorem. Once the relevance of that whole issue is officially declared passé, Muscat will find that he has very little time to reinvent a machine that he has groomed to produce more of the same old comatose opposition by default. It may be too late.

Four to five  weeks. That’s approximately how much time the parties have to get it together and regroup. I’m betting that the PN will attempt to use the summer pause for a Janus effect. One face looking back and another decisively forward. Will Labour manage to do anything other than the obvious and the predictable?

More importantly will the electorate prove to be a sucker for cosmetics one more time?

Even More Lessons in Irrelevance

It’s the battle of the leaks. You can barely read a bit of news nowadays without a leak being mentioned somewhere or other. So who gave the game away to the Nationalist party that Dr Sant had a trick up his sleeve? Who gave away the hints that it would be Mistra and that JPO would be the target? Who in the Nationalist party leaked the parts of the contract to the Labour party so that they could make a meal out of JPO? Who knew about the leaks? Who stayed mum?

You hear so much about the leaks going this way and that that after a while you forget what was actually leaked. Then you get caught in the cross-fire discussing the leaks and before you know it Joseph Muscat is accusing the PN of being inconsistent in their lies (you can only lie consistently).  It’s a short step away from Alice’s Wonderland. It’s not so much reading the news as deciphering it. After a while you really have to take a deep breath and wonder – but what is all this really about?

What do we learn from the leaks business? Not much really. We already knew that both our main political parties could number enough slime-balls among them to be able to throw a successful Back Stab Themed Party (no harm or pun intended). We learnt that at some point in the campaign someone in the nationalist party found out about JPO’s Mistra dealings and started a damage limitation exercise because the Labour party were onto the said dealings.

We learnt that the damage limitation exercise is what we saw unfold before our eyes – the hounding of Alfred Sant by watery eyed JPO. The PN provided him with a press card (Press Ethics? What Press Ethics?) they shuttled him around yelling at the Leader of the Opposition like a mad man. And now we have it on the authority of Gordon Pisani (PN Communications man) that the services of Daphne Caruana Galizia were enrolled in order to ghost write an article for the hapless dentist who in the meantime kept (according to the latter day version) lying through his teeth about the Mistra situation.

Now we don’t really care whether DCG is ghost writing per amor patriae (dulce et decorum est) or for mercenary remuneration (or we wouldn’t care had this actually not been denied many a time when the question was asked) – her work, her business, her rewards after all. After all we too share the immense fear of seeing Joseph Muscat elected to government come next election so we should keep mum about the fishy picture that is emerging here.

It’s hard really for the non-partisan observer to separate the wheat from the chaff. We’ve hardly begun to ask the questions actually. The problem is that no one has. The press are busy reporting allegations about leak and counter leak but fail to want to dig deeper. And when people like Daphne ask very pertinent questions  .- such as was the RCC conversation that appeared on ONE News the result of an illegal phone tap – you cannot help but remember that this is a person who ghost writes for the spin machine of one party so there is always the suspicion of a tint of bias. Incidentally, the Super ONE spin on that conversation is one hell of a mindfu*k. Implika????

The Labour party is having a free ride on non-sequiturs, basing itself on the biggest non-sequitur of all: if the others are swimming in shit then we must be right. Joseph Muscat is on a roll sending irrelevant message after irrelevant message out to the electorate without even trying to fake any interest in real policy and real ideas. There they go again cracking stupid jokes about Gonzi’s Coalition with JPO and how this is about “Flimkien Kollox Possibli”. The Labour party was even unable to see the real purpose of this parliamentary recess and is still hoping that some new twist will happen that will precipitate the end of this government. They still think JPO is relevant. They still have no idea about how the constitution works and how governments are formed or fall. Yes, the Labour machine is still fuelled by ignorance.

Do you know who the biggest loser is? The biggest loser in all this is the voter. The more I speak to people the more I get the same reply. “U mhux kollox jibqa l-istess la jghaddi dan kollu. Flok buzillis wiehed ikun hemm iehor u xorta jien inhallas u nidghi“.

Well,  at least our quoting Tommasi di Lampedusa millions of times in the past eight years might finally make sense.

Because yes, once the fireworks are over, once the cacophony dies down and the new die is cast then you realise that for all the main protagonists in this saga there is one thing that is more irrelevant than anything else – and that is you… the voter.

Or in the words of the Italian poet (yes, the Italian of Espresso, Panorama and Corriere della Sera):

Perché io sono io, e voi non siete un cazzo.

 

 

 

More Lessons in Irrelevance

So he resigned. Not much to be surprised about there. It’s a miracle that the cohabitation had survived so long into the legislature but then again he has had his moments and the government has had to survive more than its fair share of confidence votes thanks to the likes of the newly resigned MP and his colleague Franco Debono. We now know for a fact that the PN election team were conned by the tantrum throwing dentist – and whether by force majeure for want of anything better they set about ghost writing articles and driving home the idea of JPO the victim until a day after the election.

Once the election was over they had a time bomb ticking in the house. Four years ago it was only the inner circle of campaign directors, executive members and spin consultants that knew of the big con. Then slowly JPO uncovered his cars. The more he went maverick the more it was clear that not all was united in the PN house. The divorce bill last year was one of the final straws so to speak. All the while their mouths stayed mum. The ticking bomb was left to tick. They could not do otherwise – the slim majority precluded them from kicking out the man who had garnered over 5,000 number one votes thanks to their hardy work. Damn.

Nobody spoke of government by coalition then even though it was always clear that the band of representatives flying the PN banner was anything but a unified party supporting the same ideas. Again, just look at the divorce vote and see what I mean. This was no coalition in fact. It was uncomfortable cohabitation. The couple was in trouble big time and domestic disagreements could only be kept quiet in order to give the outside impression of a united facade.

Coalitions arise after elections when two or more parties need to combine the number of seats they have in order to enjoy a majority in the house. Before they agree on a coalition they take a long hard look at their electoral programmes and see how much of each one will survive into the coalition. Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando is not in a coalition with the Nationalist Party. In his resignation letter he stresses that he will continue to work with the Nationalist party in order to implement the electoral programme. That would not make it a coalition. Worse still, JPO has already – repeatedly – operated outside the nationalist party’s electoral programme.

From the moment he conned the party’s intelligentia with his Mistra move to this day he has blatantly operated against the interests of the party he supposedly represented in parliament. That is not a coalition. That is a renegade, a rebel, a splinter – call it what you like but don’t call it a coalition.

Comparing the uncomfortable cohabitation between Gonzi’s PN and Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando to a coalition is either a petty example of political spin or a manifestation of crass political ignorance.

The comparison to a coalition is irrelevant.