They’ve been going back and forth for a century… Why the #ALP should savage the #Greens #auspol

It must suck being the ALP.  Is it really a party which can handle the challenges of the future?  Is it the death rattle that we can hear?  Is it like a headless chook which is technically dead but the rest of its body doesn’t seem to realise?

The saddest part for the ALP is that it struggles philosophically to express its identity.  It used to be the worker’s party, but the shift in the right wing end of the spectrum stole most of that support.  It dabbled with being the wooly-headed humanitarian party, but that just pushed its traditional voter base further into the hands of the LNP.  And now it’s got the Greens stealing the wooly-headed, confused-about-the-world vote.

What to do?

There are two major parties in the Australian landscape: the LNP (which is technically two parties but the National Party is a complete non-entity these days) and the ALP.  Due to the weird way the Senate is elected, a third party is usually elected from the run-off preferences.  Previously, this spot went to the Democrats but they suffered electoral oblivion.  Now, it’s a role serviced by the Australian Greens.

Why do the preferences run-off like that?  Neither the LNP nor the ALP want to preference the other. You can usually spot which parties are completely repugnant by who sits lower on the preference list than the other major party.  Traditionally, both major parties would prefer to have their preferences go to the Greens than to the other major party.

In the last election, this spread to the Lower House.  See for example the result of the seat of Melbourne in the last Federal Election. The ALP came up short of 50% based on primary vote alone.  It needed about 7,000 votes to be directed to it from preferences.  Instead, the 14,000 people who voted for the LNP preferenced the Greens.  Thus, the seat was ‘won’ (I still hate that word for election results) by the Greens Party based on LNP support.

Since then, it’s been a nightmare for the ALP to deal with the Greens.  As it’s in a minority government, it relies on negotiation with the Greens.  For a variety of complicated reasons, compromise has not been received as a virtue by the Australian electorate.  Thus, every time the ALP works with the Greens, the ALP is criticised for watering down its policies to work with the Greens (‘Bob Brown is the real Prime Minister of Australia’, &c.).

On the other hand, every time the Greens frustrate the ALP’s plans, supporters of the Greens see this as a triumph.  Take, for example, the asylum seeker debate.  By siding with the LNP, the Greens were able to take credit for blocking the ALP’s scheme.

Both parties (but the ALP in particular) now have to face a new reality in Australian politics.  If they preference the Greens, they create an entity in Parliament who will make the larger parties appear weak both when they work with them (through compromise) and when they do not (through siding with the Opposition).  It is in neither the ALP’s nor the LNP’s interests to support the electoral success of the Greens.

It’s weird, really.  It is a better long term strategy to support the party which will block you outright if it has the chance rather than to support a party which will work with you sometimes.

Quick post: Could @OurSayAust prevent the rorts? #atheism #auspol #bolt #democracy

I’m kicking ’round with numbers at work, so thought I’d quickly jot down an idea, musing on whether it would work.

The current OurSay model gives members of the community seven votes to distribute amongst the questions asked by other members of the community.  In a recent post, I noted how easy it was for people to rort this system, particularly if they had greater levels of social influence than other people posting questions.  This was demonstrated rather worryingly by the new atheist crowd being marshalled by an American megaphone to drown out a question relating to Indigenous disadvantage.

Would the system change if you could down vote as well as up vote?  This would give members of the community the ability to ‘punish’ transgressions against the community’s norms of appropriate behaviour.  On the other hand, would this reduce the system into a warlike state of nature.

Would the system change if you were asked to compare questions?  After registering, you’re given the option of asking your own question, or being presented with two questions at random and being asked to decide which is the better question of the two.  After answering, you’re then presented with another two for comparison, and again and again.  This would make it difficult for people to astroturf support for their question and give a ranking of questions that people generally thought were high quality in comparison to those which were not.

Anyway… Back to work…

Should a crime against a woman’s body be considered a crime against the State? #law

I usually quote a song lyric in my post titles.  I avoided that with this post lest I be accused of glibness.

A 17-year old girl faced a contempt of court charge after she posted on Twitter the names of the defendants who pleaded guilty.  She felt that the plea bargain meant that the people who assaulted her were not adequately punished for sexually assaulting her.

I find these sorts of cases interesting intellectually and I want to write about some of the challenging ideas that they raise.  At the same time, I’m worried that by discussing the ideas dispassionately and clinically, I detract from the suffering of the victim.  At the centre of this story is a young woman who was violated by some of the worst people in society.  As interesting as I find the questions about justifications of punishment, about the nature of proceduralism, and about questions of satiating the need for vengeance in punishment, I wonder if I’m doing something morally wrong by divorcing it from the actual situation that occurred.  It’s all very well for me to be semantically or conceptually or philosophically correct, but am I contributing to a culture which treats victims of crime as mere case studies for me to dissect?

I don’t know.  So, gentle reader, if you consider me to be insensitive or coldly intellectual about the violation of a young girl and the expression of her anger towards a system which perhaps failed her, you are probably correct.  I beg your forgiveness.

But let’s discuss her case.

Let’s look at the plea bargain and whether or not the victim of the crime should have had some control over that process.

A friend of mine is a public prosecutor in the US.  They’re horribly under-resourced and are physically unable to chase every bad guy.  Back when I was a wild-eyed, goblin-faced undergraduate, I argued with him tooth and nail about plea bargaining.  My argument was that for a society to be considered just, it should punish people who transgress its legal frameworks.  For any crime, there is only one just punishment and that is the punishment which is commensurate with the crime committed.  Plea bargaining results in a punishment which is incommensurate with the crime committed.

His argument was purely pragmatic.  Every minute, there are hundreds of crimes committed.  To prosecute each and every single one would require more time than the Sun’s got left to burn.  Plea bargaining means that they reach a procedurally just outcome in an efficient way.

What do we mean when we talk about something being procedurally just?

Ian, my younger brother, once stole a toy which belonged to me.  Given that I was extremely young, I thumped him.  He cried and got the attention of our mother who asked what had happened, asked me if I had a reason to thump my younger sibling, and then struck me as punishment for thumping Ian.

My heartwarming tale of childhood violence explores two different kinds of justice.  Ian had committed a crime under my loose legal pluralist rubric: he had taken something which belonged to me without my permission and with the intent to deprive me permanently of it.  In an absolute view of justice (where punishments are enacted in response to wrongs), I was justified in punishing Ian by thumping him.  Under a procedural view, I lacked the authority to enact a punishment (as the State has a monopoly on punishment).  Further, I lacked a process by which we could determine Ian to be guilty (people are innocent until proven guilty through a process of determining guilt).  This procedural view is also represented in my story.  Mum was the authority with the monopoly on punishment.  She went through a process of determining my guilt (for I had enacted a punishment against another person without finding them guilty through a process and without having the proper authority to enact punishments) and then enacted a punishment commensurate with the crime.

This leads to weird outcomes.  While it might be obvious that a person is guilty, unless they are found guilty by a competent authority through a procedure of determining the guilt, the person is legally innocent.  Thus:

http://wondermark.com/855/

Plea bargaining allows a more rapid means of coming to procedurally just outcomes.  Instead of extending the process of determining guilt, the process is shortened so punishment can be enacted.  However, there needs to be an incentive to get the defendant to quicken the process, thus the incentive is a more lenient punishment.

But let’s look at the original case.  In this instance, the defendants were admitting that they has sexually assaulted the woman.  They even took pictures and film of the event proving that they did it.  But to ensure a speedy process of determining guilt, the prosecutors decided to accept a plea bargain, entailing that the people who assaulted her would not be punished to the full extent of the law.  It seems difficult to see why administrative rapidness should be preferred in this situation.

Why doesn’t the woman have some control over whether a plea bargain should be accepted?

Criminal cases are not between two civilian parties.  Even though the crime was colloquially against the integrity and autonomy of her body, it was legally against the State.  Society as a whole was injured by the crime and society as a whole is the only agent with the authority to enact a punishment.

We see this in the name of cases.  Here we have King v The Queen.  I love the title of that case.

This appeal against two convictions for culpable driving causing death contrary to s 318(1) of the Crimes Act 1958 (Vic) (“the Crimes Act“), concerns the way in which alternative verdicts for the lesser offenceof dangerous driving causing death, contrary to s 319(1) of the Crimes Act, were left to the trial jury. In the Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court of Victoria (Buchanan, Redlich and Mandie JJA), the appellant, Trent Nathan King, contended unsuccessfully that the trial judge (Douglas J) had misdirected the jury on the lesser offence. He complained that the trial judge had pitched the standard of dangerous driving, necessary for conviction of the lesser offence, at such an erroneously low level of culpability that the jury would have been less inclined to consider convicting him of that offence.

The Queen probably doesn’t know who Nathan King is and yet she is the one seeking his punishment.  Nathan King caused the death of somebody.  It’s not the victim’s family which brings a suit against King or some representative of the victim, but the State.  In the Case of Thumping Ian, Ian wasn’t the one empowered by the State (a.k.a. Mum) to strike me as punishment.

The sexual assault case follows similar reasoning.  The woman doesn’t bring the case against the defendants.  The party with standing is the State.

In a sense, this is troubling.  It was the woman who was violated and yet the State seeks justice.  The State effectively dispossesses that woman of a means to seek her own just outcome, but that’s because (as I noted earlier) the only outcomes we’re interested in are procedurally just outcomes.

So when the State failed to seek an outcome which she found satisfactory, the woman tried to use absolute forms of justice: punishing the defendants by ‘naming and shaming’ on Twitter.  As such, she was enacting an extrajudicial punishment.  As we all know, you can only do that if you’re the President of the United States and you’re hunting terrorists.

It interferes with our intuitions about justice, but people who commit crimes are granted rights by our legal system.  Although we can understand why she did it, by naming and shaming on Twitter, she breached the rights of the people who sexually assaulted her.  It even feels like a disgusting sentence to write but it’s true.  We can’t have people going vigilante when the system doesn’t give them the result they want.

But at the same time, something’s really gross about a system which ignores the victims of sexual assault.  A plea bargain for people who filmed the sexual assault seems difficult to justify with pragmatic handwaving.

Although the crime was clearly horrific and distressing, it highlights issues about how we justify punishment and the problems with emphasising a procedural rather than absolute form of justice.  On the other hand, proceduralism prevents us from descending into a vigilante society.  The consequence is that we are less empowered to seek out our own just outcomes.  If the legal system isn’t engaged in giving a voice to victims, we can easily end up in situations where victims feel the need to go outside the formal channels in order to seek justice, and then we’re back to vigilantism.

And demons in your pocket… @OurSay – Tragedy of the Commons #pmhangout #atheism

Nobody can deny that OurSay is achieving amazing things.

In June last year, I wrote:

Although lots of people tell me regularly how awesome social media is for democracy, I’m yet to see a radical shift in how we interact with government. [...] OurSay is doing something interesting.  It takes the online aspect of social media and bridges the gap to engage with politicians and media personalities offline.  With the slogan, ‘Democracy is not a spectator sport’, OurSay invites the public to propose questions.  OurSay’s community of registered users vote on which questions are the best.  The OurSay crew pursue the winning questions and seek answers.

A little over a year later, OurSay has managed to score a massive win.  On July 21, OurSay hosted the Prime Minister for a Google+ Hang Out session.  Three questions asked by members of the public were voted on by the masses to be asked.

During the previous election, a lot of people accused the media of obscuring public debate through trivialising the policy platforms of politicians.  The assumed idea was that politicians had excellent policy arguments and, pushed by a desire to attract readers and viewers, the media only looked at the stunts and the sideshow.  Social media means that there’s a reduced need for politicians to rely on the traditional media.  In theory, this should mean politicians can ensure their message reaches an engaged audience.

In one sense, OurSay was an opportunity for politicians to bypass the media and allow the public to ask them questions directly.  In practice, the OurSay exercise showed that politicians might just be vapid, vacuous individuals.

During the nearly 60 minutes of the OurSay Google+ Hangout, the Prime Minister didn’t deviate from the dreary talking points.  Far from showing how terrible traditional media had become, it showed that politicians themselves have become parodies of themselves.  Our Prime Minister proved that she lacked insight and incisiveness.

More interesting than the question and answer session was some of the politics involved in the questions.

One question was posed by David Nicholls:

Dear Prime Minister. Against the strongly expressed concerns of mental health professionals, teacher unions and secular organisations, why do you allow the outrageous situation to continue where largely unqualified, religious evangelists have access to young children in public schools, in the form of the National School Chaplaincy Program?

Ignore the content of his question.  I’ve written about David Nicholls before: he was one of the people who was more outraged by claims that atheism was being hijacked by racists and Islamophobes than he was by the racist and Islamophobic statements made by megaphone atheists.

He’s the President of the Atheist Foundation of Australia (completely different to the Australia and New Zealand Secular Association, formerly the even more different Australian National Secular Association).

It’s not problematic that he’s president of a more-than-slightly-ridiculous organisation.  What is problematic is how his question came to be the third most popular question.

One of the louder US atheist megaphones and Islamophobes, PZ Myers runs an extremely popular blog, Pharyngula.  Myers wrote:

The Atheist Foundation of Australia would like their prime minister to answer one simple question:

Dear Prime Minister. Against the strongly expressed concerns of mental health professionals, teacher unions and secular organisations, why do you allow the outrageous situation to continue where largely unqualified, religious evangelists have access to young children in public schools, in the form of the National School Chaplaincy Program?

She’s been dodging it, of course, and I suspect that if she were backed into a corner she’d be entertainingly frantic in her efforts to escape. So let’s corner her! And she has made the mistake of making that possible.

Dear members and supporters,

OurSay is giving us the opportunity to directly ask Prime Minister
Julia Gillard a question, and we have chosen to focus on the
outrageous taxpayer funded National School Chaplaincy Program.

This Saturday, Gillard will answer three of the most popular questions
as chosen through OurSay. One of these questions could be ours.

Please follow these simple steps to make sure that we have a seat at
the table:

1) Sign up for OurSay

2) Vote seven times for our question:

3) Recruit a friend to do exactly the same

Click here to get started: http://oursay.org/s/2ea

We only have until Thursday but, if we all came together – we could
make sure that this important issue is being heard by Prime Minister
Gillard and all of Australia that very Saturday.

Regards, David Nicholls

President – Atheist Foundation of Australia

PS. Make sure that you sign up and vote seven times to get an answer
from Gillard on Chaplaincy.

It’s a poll with some teeth. Let’s make Gillard dance!

This feels like cheating.  Sure, it’s just a popular webpoll.  Sure, there are no rules against this sort of behaviour.  But this was the question which came in fourth place:

“Dear Prime Minister, the Stronger Futures legislation was recently passed in the Senate, subjecting Aboriginal people in the NT to 10 more years of Interventionist policy. This is despite overwhelming opposition expressed from Aboriginal leaders, national organisations, the general public and even condemnation from the United Nations. How can we call ourselves a country of the ‘fair go’ if the Government is now refusing to allow a human rights test of the legislation by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, as called for by the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples? ”

A question about some of the most disadvantaged people in modern Australia was jibbed by a bunch of predominately white, middle class crybabies.  Something feels wrong here.  It makes the system feel illegitimate somehow.  We have enough special interest groups hijacking traditional media.  Do we want them hijacking emerging media?

Myers received a lot of hate mail for his actions.  His response to the accusation that he unfairly influenced a popular vote so that predominately white, middle class crybabies had their question advanced at the expense of Indigenous Australians:

Suck it up.

I’m worried by this, but I don’t know what can be done about it.  Of all the global echo chambers you don’t want influencing your political discussions, it’s the pop-atheist crowd.

More importantly, the reason why I haven’t participated in OurSay for over a year is that I can’t feel a connexion with the community when I know that it can be hijacked so cynically.  So easily.  I can’t invest in a community where it’s so susceptible to trolls like David Nicholls and Andrew Bolt.  Democracy might not be a spectator sport, but OurSay is turning into an uneven playing field.

As I walk along the avenue… Omniscience, Omnipotence, and #atheism

A friend of mine sends me links to Futility Closet.  It’s awesome.

One post recently caught my attention: ‘Ordained‘.

If God makes decisions, then he has a future.

But if he’s omniscient, then he already knows that future.

Can he then have free will?

Let’s be kind and pretend that the structure is logically sound (it’s not, but we can see what it’s trying to do).  And let’s tweak it so it uses more familiar language (‘If God makes decisions, then he has a future’?).

If God is omnipotent, He can do anything.

If God is omniscient, God knows what He will do tomorrow.

If God knows what He will do tomorrow, can He change His mind and do something else?

A lot of pop-atheist debate begins with setting out a definition of terms.  The standard method is to use a lick-of-the-thumb common language approach.  Omniscient means ‘can do anything’.  Omniscient means ‘knows everything’.

The problem with this approach is that denies that there’s anything intellectually serious about theology.  Imagine the outcry if a theist began an argument against Darwinism by defining evolution as ‘That thing Pokemon do to turn into stronger Pokemon.’  When physicists use terms, they might have specialist meanings that aren’t in common with the general public.  Why do we expect theological terms to be different?

Also, if we define terms in a way which is prejudicial to the case of our interlocutors, then refuse to analyse those definitions, are we really having a discussion about the possibility of God?

When we say that an omnipotent being can do anything, what do we mean by ‘anything’?  Could an omnipotent agent make twice two equal to five?  Could an omnipotent agent microwave a burrito so hot that they could not eat it?  Could an omnipotent agent make colourless green dreams sleep furiously?  Could an omnipotent agent defeat Ganon in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past with the Fire Rod (instead of the Silver Arrows) without breaking the rules of the game?

Language allows for a lot of valid constructions which don’t necessarily link to sensible ideas.  When we’re talking about omnipotence, is it reasonable to point to this failure of language as an inconsistency in the logic of omnipotence?

Thus, theologians and philosophers play with a lot of different ideas of omnipotence and the consequences of those ideas.  Perhaps ‘omnipotence’ means ‘a being more capable of activity greater than which it is impossible to conceive’?  In which case, omnipotence might not be terribly great: what if, for some strange reason, it’s not logically possible in some world to lift more than 51 kilogrammes?  What if our ability to conceive great things is really rubbish and there are beings which are possible but not conceivable?  And so on and so forth.  Thus, theology and philosophy of religion.

But let’s be civilised about it and say: ‘While we can’t give a really good definition of omnipotence, we basically agree on what we mean.  Super-dooper powerful.  If your omnipotent being can’t change their mind, you’ve got a problem with omnipotence.’

We similarly unpack the idea of omniscience.  Are future states ‘knowable’?  This is a contested point (future propositions might not have truth values).  Are the actions of a free agent ‘knowable’?  This is another contested point.

But we don’t need to play with those ideas too much.  We can instead look at what it means to know something.  I have TiVo.  It taped a live program this evening (Q&A).  If I watch the program now, I know what the agents will say.  That doesn’t mean that the agents were restricted in power at the time it was recorded.  Knowing the outcome of the event is secondary to the determination of the event.  Similarly, an omniscient’s knowledge of future events (if possible) isn’t what determines the future event; this knowledge is secondary to the determination of those future events.

That got pretty dense.

I go through this for a broader reason than just the above argument.  When people drop these three-liners, they rarely explore the assumptions being made which underpin them.  Big name atheists — significantly moreso than big name theists — routinely make these sort of handwaved arguments without coming terms with what the arguments mean.  Indeed, ordinary pop-atheists are actively discouraged from exploring them.

I’m an atheist, and the above, to me, shows why religious education in public schools is essential to a pluralistic society in the future.  We need a population that can discuss and interrogate its religious beliefs and its irreligious beliefs intelligently and coherently.  We don’t have a population that’s capable of it at the moment.  Why?  Because religious education, where taught, is taught by well-meaning volunteers who don’t understand the importance of good religious education, and they’re opposed by a loud group of well-meaning atheists who are incapable of any reason regarding the place of religion in society.

The future is pluralism; not secularism.

Locked up with all of my people… A closer look at the #Greens’ #asylumseeker policies

Regardless of the side of the political spectrum, politics has become about appealing to the unexamined prejudices of the voters.  This is as true for the ‘Boat people should be shot’ crowd as it is for the ‘No boat person would ever make a fraudulent asylum claim crowd’.

Why is the debate so poor?  In this post, I said it was because the megaphones in the debate aren’t interested in actually debating anything.  You either agree completely, or you’re somehow intellectually/morally suspect.  That both sides of the debate demonise the public servant policy makers (i.e. the people with the most amount of information and have the most amount of time to research options) says something really telling about the discourse.

More worrying, from my perspective, is the way that the Greens have been able to brush off any scrutiny of their policies.  Glib one-liners from various media commentators shields them from scrutiny.  ’Offshore processing is so they don’t die in our ocean but die in Southeast Asia.  LOL.  Here’s a picture of a cat.’

In the previous post, I noted that many people write off the problem completely.  ’It’s a wicked problem and there are no solutions.  We know that because John Howard didn’t succeed and we’ve never tried the ALP’s approach.  Induction proves that if the former government didn’t succeed, no future government will.’

I didn’t note the other end of the same spectrum: the people who deny that there’s a problem at all.  So there’s an incentive for people to undertake a dangerous sea voyage.  According to the #auspol Lotus Eaters, this is perfectly fine and not a problem at all.  Why, just last year Europe had many more people risking their lives.  By applying the law of ‘If there’s a bigger problem somewhere else, there’s no problem here’, Australia doesn’t have a problem at all.

I’ve often complained that the Greens don’t really have policies, they sort of have vague position statements.  They got a lot better since the last election, but they’re still kind of garbage.  In theory, they’re supposed to be on their website here.

It’s a bit of a hunt, but under ‘Care for People’ (seriously? Whatever) we find ‘Immigration and Refugees‘.

The Australian Greens want:

7. the elimination of the policies of mandatory detention, and other forms of harsh, punitive or discriminatory treatment of asylum seekers and refugees.
8. asylum seekers who arrive without a valid visa to have their claims for asylum assessed while living in the community.

The Australian Greens will:

17.        abolish mandatory and indefinite detention of asylum seekers.

24.        house asylum seekers who arrive without a valid visa in publicly owned and managed open reception centres, where entry and exit to these centres are unrestricted except where prohibited for medical or security reasons specified in clause 28.

26.         grant asylum seekers an asylum application visa (AAV) and assist without delay their move into the community provided medical and security checks are satisfied or after 14 days has passed, whichever occurs first.

28.         deny an AAV if security checks demonstrate the person poses a serious criminal threat to the Australian community or if the person has not remained housed in the reception centre while the medical and security checks were completed.

31.         ensure that, if refugee status is refused and the person cannot be repatriated, the AAV will remain in force until he or she can be repatriated.

So they are going to ‘house’ asylum seekers in a centre until they’re given a visa?  And they don’t remain housed in the reception centre until they’re granted a visa, they will have their movement restricted?  Oh, so you mean you want mandatory detention?  But, wait.  Didn’t the Greens say that they didn’t want mandatory detention?  Oh, they mean they want mandatory detention but they don’t want to call it mandatory detention and they want it to look a bit more hip.

So if an asylum seeker comes to Australia and thinks that their case for refugee status isn’t certain, there is literally nothing stopping them from disappearing into the community.  And people with shady backgrounds (like the ones picked up by ASIO)?  And how would the Greens system deal with alleged people smugglers joining the asylum seeker processing processes?

What the Greens save in ‘harsh’ detention centres, they lose in these ‘urban houses’ (cough, detention centres, cough) and tracking down those who flee having their protection claims assessed.

All the while creating a reason for stateless people and the thousands of displaced people in Southeast Asia to move towards Australia.  All the while creating a reason to pay people smugglers.

How is this the humane approach again?  How is this more humane than supporting the UNHCR supported regional processing model?