It’s been a long battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to become the Democratic nominee for the next US Presidential race.

The process for choosing the nominee is complicated. The final decision will be reached by delegates at Democratic National Convention in August. Most of these delegates will have been sent by their States with instructions on who to vote for, and different States will send different numbers of delegates. How the States decide who their delegates will vote for varies; some States let people vote, others hold caucuses.

At the end of the selection process, though, it’s simple: whoever gets the backing of a majority of delegates at the National Convention wins.

For most of the selection process, Obama has been the clear favourite. In fact, for months there have been calls for Clinton to concede defeat, but she’s hung in there. Today, as Obama closed in on number of delegates needed to win the race, Clinton came out with a strangely positive statement: “We’re winning the popular vote.”

Winning the popular vote? She’s as good as lost!

This is one of those sneaky stats that dresses up a defeat as a victory. Here’s how it works:

Clinton isn’t claiming to have the most delegates (she doesn’t, Obama does); she’s claiming have the most votes, and she’s right.

By focusing on votes, Clinton gets to ignore several States that are sending delegates to vote for Obama. In States that held caucuses no votes were cast. In Colorado and Minnesota, for example, zero votes were cast for Obama and zero votes were cast for Clinton, but at their caucuses there was strong backing for Obama and the majority of their delegates will vote for him at the conference. In the caucus states, Obama has done much better than Clinton but without getting any more votes than her.

By focusing on votes, Clinton also gets to include some States that aren’t sending any delegates to the party conference at all. In an attempt to grab centre-stage, Michigan and Florida brought their votes forward so that they would be among the first to choose a nominee. In doing so, they broke party rules, and as a punishment were stripped of their delegates. They held their votes anyway, and both States backed Clinton. In California Clinton beat Obama by over 420,000 votes, and in Michigan (where Obama’s name wasn’t even on the ballot paper) by 328,000 votes, but none of these extra votes translates into extra delegates at the National Convention.

So that’s how Clinton was able to say that she’s winning the vote even as she loses the nomination. It just goes to show that you can put a positive spin on any set of data if you have enough ingenuity.

There are many different arguments against abortion, but most of them have a similar structure.

Generally, they start with the nature of the unborn. The claim is made that the unborn is a particular kind of thing (e.g. a living human being, or a living human being that can feel pain, or a living human being that could survive outside its mother).

Pro-life arguments then assert that things of this kind have a right to life. It is stated that it’s morally wrong to kill a living human being, or a living human being that can feel pain, or whatever kind of thing the unborn has just been claimed to be. An intermediate conclusion can now be drawn: The unborn has a right to life.

Abortion, of course, kills the unborn, so it’s a small step from there to another intermediate conclusion: Abortion involves the violation of a right to life.

That isn’t quite it though. To be complete, pro-life arguments have to weigh the unborn’s right to life against whatever women’s rights might be violated by prohibiting abortion (e.g. the right to decide what happens to one’s body, or the right to reproductive freedom), and assert that the right to life takes precedence.

If you have to choose between killing someone (on the one hand) and denying someone reproductive freedom (on the other), then the right thing to do is to deny someone reproductive freedom (or so goes the argument).

Only then can the conclusion be drawn: Abortion is immoral.

So a rough summary of the pro-life argument could go like this:

(R) The unborn is a being of type x.
(R) Everything that’s a being of type x has a right to life.
Therefore: (IC) The unborn has a right to life.
(R) Abortion kills the unborn.
Therefore: (IC) Abortion violates a right to life.
(R) The right to life takes precedence over any rights violated by prohibiting abortion.
Therefore: (C) Abortion is immoral.

There was a documentary about religious fundamentalists on Channel 4 last night. It included two clips of pro-choice protesters chanting. In both cases, the chants completely misrepresented the pro-life position.

I know that expecting tight logic from a demo chant is probably a bit optimistic, but it irritated me anyway.

The first chant, coming from pro-choice campaigners trying to disrupt the pro-life March for Life rally, was “March for life, that’s a lie. You don’t care if women die.”

This is, presumably, a condensed version of the argument that if abortion is prohibited then some women will go to illegal abortion providers, putting their safety at risk (and that abortion should therefore be legal so that we can make it as safe as possible).

Accusing those who believe that abortion should be prohibited of not caring if women die seems a bit strong, though.

A pro-life campaigner may well care if women die, but think that protecting the lives of unborn children is more important than protecting the lives of mothers trying to kill them. I strongly suspect that this point of view is far more common than the view that it doesn’t matter at all if a woman having a back-street abortion dies, that the chant misrepresents pro-lifers, that it’s attacking a straw man.

The second chant, “Women’s rights are human rights”, seems just as unfair to the pro-life point of view.

The accusation here is that the pro-life position doesn’t take women’s rights seriously, that it treats them as less than human.

The pro-life argument doesn’t work by denying women rights, though; it works by attributing to the unborn a right even more fundamental than those women’s rights that are broken by prohibiting abortion. Again, then, the chant attacks a straw man.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the pro-life argument is sound, just that these chants are no good as responses to it.

So what should pro-choice protesters chant?

“It’s just a bunch of cells” (to the tune of the football chant “You don’t know what you’re doing”, presumably) would be to the point, denying that the unborn is the kind of thing that has rights that we ought to protect.

“Women’s rights come first” would also work, challenging the idea that it’s more important to protect the unborn’s life than it is to protect its mother’s freedom.

I’m sure that a pro-choice protester (who would have much more motivation to do this than me) could come up with something catchy that makes these kinds of point.

Logical chants are clearly possible; are they really too much to ask for?

In 2004, the Hunting Act was passed to make hunting with dogs (particularly fox hunting) illegal. In 2004-2006, there were 14 prosecutions under the act. But does the number of prosecutions reflect the number of offences that have been committed? Is the law being enforced?

Tory MP Anne Widdecombe argues that it isn’t, that the law is routinely broken and that more needs to be done to police it. She recognises that police resources are stretched, and so her proposed solution is to license and protect hunt monitors, members of the public who film hunts to collect video evidence of offences.

Without considering the specifics of any particular alleged breach of the law, we can see why the general context of hunts makes it difficult to discover whether an offence has been committed.

First, there are difficulties in collecting evidence. Hunts are fast-paced, and take place over a wide area on an improvised route, making them very difficult to observe. The fact that hunts go into wild areas, away from people, also reduces the number of incidental witnesses to them.

Second, many witnesses are likely to have reasons to distort the truth about what happened on a hunt. Those on the hunt (and the landowners) will want to avoid prosecution for any offences committed, so may lie about their actions. Hunt monitors tend to be opposed to hunting, looking for ways to incriminate the hunt, which means that their evidence must be treated with extreme caution. Add in the financial interests that locals have in the hunts continuing, and reports of hunters intimidating witnesses, and there will be concerns about the credibility of most of the witnesses to a hunt. 

Third, interpreting the evidence can be difficult. The law is complex and technical. Whether an offence has been committed can turn on such details as the number of dogs, what the dogs are being used for, why the animal is being hunted, or whether it is harmed. In some cases, understanding whether the law has been broken will take legal expertise that many observers lack.

All of these things make it difficult to be sure of just how many hunting offences are being committed. They also go some way to explaining why offences that are committed may go unprosecuted. If we want to see the Hunting Act enforced, then the challenge is to find a way of collecting evidence that addresses these problems.