bruceb

This strikes me as important enough to warrant comment. Most of my readers will have seen this already, but not all, and the detailed linkage may be useful to some.

The United States has already made itself a nation of war criminals in rejecting the Geneva Accords and then proceeding to flout them widely and publicly. Now our leaders have decided to add degradation and misery on another front: the FDA has announced our withdrawal from the Declaration of Helsinki.

This is the set of standards governing, among other things, the testing of drugs and treatments on human beings. The alternative standard the FDA wishes to endorse has plenty of room for outsourcing such testing to poor countries who'll administer experiments with limited information and compromised consent rules for the subject, and with relaxed standards for preparation against things like spills into the environment. The Helsinki standard has been on the hate list of pharmaceutical companies for a long time, and this move by the Bush/Cheney administration isn't a surprise, but it is appalling.

If any other nation were to slide from moderately conservative republican norms into this sort of calculated cruelty to humanity, pundits here would be talking it up as grounds for invasion and overthrow. It is something of a shame that in practical terms nobody can liberate the citizens of the United States that way. We'll have to do it ourselves. Voting's no magic, but it's the place to start. Please, if you care about the dignity of the human being and the desirability of the rule of law, do not reward the Republican Party with your vote. The Democratic Party is often bad - often a collaborator, in fact - but not always, and at the moment they're showing signs of some partial sanity. Support them this time as a step in the right direction and then see what has to be done next.

(It won't be easy or fun. It'll take institutional pressures within the party, coordinated use of funding manipulation, lobbying, outside-the-part organization, and a bunch more. What can really be said for it is that it'll beat having business entirely as usual as of late.)

As usual with my jeremiads, there'll be a heavy hand on the delete key for arguments.

A 2006 blog comment thread about whether Barack Obama is the Antichrist (a serious discussion, that is, among people open to the possibility) is still going on. You can always skip down to comment #900 or #1200 or whatever; there's always something fresh coming along.

I've got myself on a very strict rationing of political blogging because I'm trying to get my life in an overall better balance, and most things about American politics these days just throw me into a rage. But I am not keeping a complete silence on the matter.

Jim Henley explains why he was right all along about the war on Iraq. He was, and his explanation is good. It's got some sarcasm in it, and I'm sure someone will use that as an excuse to dismiss it all. That's fine. I'm not actually soliciting defenses of the war and occupation - more actively, I will delete them from my LJ. This is just to point you at something I think very much worth reading and reflecting on in election season.