How many times did I venture forth to the extreme wilderness of the north? … In defence of research methods

The equivalent of the ‘Is it potato cake or potato scallop?’ debate in academia is ‘Why should we care about research method?’  It’s a zero-stakes argument because the people who care about methods mostly ignore the people who don’t, and the people who don’t care about methods don’t understand the people who do.  If anything, the argument has subzero-stakes as the people who argue against method largely don’t know what methods they’re arguing against.  Giants really didn’t care that Don Quixote was tilting at a windmill.

As a person who would very, very happily teach research methods for the rest of his life, I am on the ‘Research method is good!’ side of the argument and, fundamentally, I don’t really care about what the ‘Research method is bad!’ side of the argument is talking about.  The arguments I see from them don’t seem to be discussing research methods at all, but some kind of imagined dogmatism that I don’t think I’ve encountered from serious research methods people.  What I do care about is good scholarship, and the thing that distinguishes good scholarship from bad scholarship is good research method.  It is as simple as that.  If people want to disagree with that, then they’re going to need to start explaining at which windmill they are tilting.

It ain’t always what it seems when you cling onto a dream… Elon, doxxing, and discussing banned content

For the last little while, I’ve been pondering a legal policy problem about censorship.  To spoil the punchline of this post: the puzzle is how to facilitate a discussion about banned content with the wider public without disseminating the banned content itself.  I have been playing around with Twitch on my LegalReckoning profile for precisely this reason, but it turns out to be surprisingly difficult as the recent Elon drama demonstrates… in a weird way.

Quick Post: Why did @ConversationEDU publish Denis Muller’s unscholarly opinion?

The Conversation has long struggled with a basic philosophical point: what is the difference between academic opinion and the opinion of academics?  Prior to the pandemic, there were significant lapses in judgement on this theme.  A person whose sole academic credential was that they were currently studying a juris doctor degree was published for their (negative) views on Israel.  Here, there’s no criticism of the person for having these views–it’s just that it’s not clear how they were informed, scholarly views.  There were also problems with publishing articles by academics that had utterly nothing to do with their scholarly expertise (particularly the opinions of Jane Caro).  During the pandemic, these issues were beefed up to eleven.  The Conversation attracted international criticism for publishing an article by a professor from the University of South Australia that radically miscalculated the current spread of C19.  The problem was a basic one: none of the editors had the ability to fact-check the article and relied on the espoused expertise of the author.  Further problems were caused by publishing people who were notorious liars (one even claims to be a professor when he is not) about their credentials and who had undeclared commercial interests in their ‘scholarly’ opinion.

At the base of these problems are my view about the role of academics in public debate: how do we help the public to have reasonable, sensible differences of opinion?  The Conversation, on the other hand, errs much more in favour of academics pushing their own view to the exclusion of reasonable alternatives.

This is where we get to Denis Muller’s recent piece about News Corp.

Quick post: No, academic Twitter is not worth saving

Search your feelings.  You know it’s true.  Twitter has never been a good platform for information or discussion.

I had a job that I absolutely loved in government law prior to coming back to do my PhD at the intersection of political science and empirical legal research.  There has been recent public discussion about the role of juries, and most of this discussion has been absolutely horrific.  Columnists and journos have made sweeping assertions that are not supported by evidence or good theory… but academics themselves have not been much better.  I bang this gong a lot: the role of the expert should not be to tell the public what the correct answer is, but to help the public form their own views within the borders of reasonable opinions.

Of particular interest was a media company publishing an opinion piece calling for the end of juries.  What was fascinating was that, during defamation law reform, Australian media companies were firmly of the view that juries should remain.  Indeed, those who were following the Barilaro v Shanks defamation case tended to have extremely strong opinions about Barilaro opposing Shanks’ motion for a jury–a topic I tried to explain here in a YouTube video.  And when the same opinion piece said that juries in defamation law were virtually unheard of, this seemed something of a surprise given that some of our biggest cases of the last few years were jury cases.

Silly me for raising this on Twitter where I then had people with significantly less experience wade in to disagree with me, although exactly what they were trying to argue remains something of a mystery.  Fundamentally, I value my time more than to argue with people who just don’t know what they’re talking about, and yet that is the vast majority of experiences on Twitter.  Indeed, one of my interlocutors ended with ‘See Mark we don’t care about data’.  Twitter is an absolute waste of time for serious discussion because you routinely are not being exposed to intellectually serious people.

Never for money, always for love… Authorising political content and the mysterious lack of anonymous right wing Twitter accounts

Bit of a secret–don’t tell anybody–but there’s an election coming up in 2022.  And so I found myself noodling with some questions of electoral law.  The one that has captured my imagination is the requirement to authorise political materials.

I want to present to you an idea that does not have a neat, tidy resolution.  Reasonable people can disagree about how they want their political system to handle this.  On one side of the scale, think about the mischief that arises from people being able to pump political material into the public square anonymously: people spinning political content to look apolitical or otherwise neutral.  I think most people want to be able to check the source of serious political claims.  On the other side of the scale, think about the extent to which a person should be required to give up their privacy just to participate in political activities.  We often think about the big ticket items here: what if people want changes to laws that negatively affect LGBT Australians without ‘outing’ themselves to their family?  But we don’t need to be nearly that dramatic: what if you just want to advocate for this or that policy without maniacs trying to get you sacked from your job?  Or what if you just want to run a blog about economics on the side without the Press trying to doxx you (the Greg Jericho case)?

That’s the problem in broad brushstrokes. Privacy is important and people and their families shouldn’t be ‘fair game’ just because they want to engage in democratic culture, but we also know that there’s a threshold at which people are producing a lot of very partisan, very political content and we want to be able to verify the source of the content.  From this broad sketch, we fill in the details about the problem and end up with a range of reasonable opinions…

No soldier in that gallant band hid half as well as he did… When offensiveness is the point

Jimmy Carr is no stranger to controversy or outrage.  The most recent regards a joke made on his Netflix special His Dark Materials in which the punchline was that the genocide of Romani was a ‘positive’ of the Holocaust.  Most reasonable people were offended by the joke because the joke was offensive.  Nothing in this argument is a defense of the joke.

I instead want to flip the debate a bit to look at an aspect of the ‘freedom of speech’ debate that doesn’t get a lot of attention: what happens when people are trying to be offensive?

But when you wish upon a dream life ain’t always what it seems… Of Pride Guernseys and Islamophobia

Being a Muslim in Australia must really suck.  No matter what you do–or don’t do–you’re always at risk of creating hot take content.  For the past week or so, Haneen Zreika’s decision not to wear a Pride Guernsey has been fodder for the chattering classes when.  People ‘just asking questions’ have stirred some pretty gross Islamophobia, particularly the idea that being Muslim is incompatible with upholding human rights (loosely understood) and liberal values (even more loosely understood).  In the backdrop of the discussion are also fairly borked intuitions about the new Religious Freedoms Bill and, it seems, even more hostility towards the idea that any concession should be made to religious beliefs.

We be the colours of the mad and the wicked… Are we becoming scared of protest?

Last year, I argued that Australia was developing a new standard for political protest: the ‘Theatre Kid Threshold‘.  If you rocked up to a political protest with a gallows that looked too good, you were no longer protesting but, instead, advocating violence.  I argued that this was a bad intuition, radically expanding what we understand to be a death threat and the apprehension of harm.  I also argued that–let’s be serious–what was driving a lot of the discussion was opposition to the message of the protest.  Which is fine and I agree with that intuition, but we might want to use other legal methods for achieving that end instead of inflating what counts as advocacy for violence.

I touched very lightly on the idea that the protest was a form of terrorism, an idea that gained some traction in the week surrounding that protest.  It’s an idea that has gained significantly more traction in the past week following the protests at Old Parliament House.  Perhaps more interesting from my perspective is the Othering of the protestors: right wing commentators have described the protesters as left wing; left wing commentators have described the protesters as right wing; there have been very disturbing denials of the Indigeneity of some of the protesters; there was one very incorrect use of the term ‘stochastic terrorism’ by an author who recently wrote a book about the alt-right.

A boring version of this blog post is me patiently working through the relevant law to explain why the protest at Old Parliament House wasn’t terrorism.  A slightly less boring version of this blog post is an argument that we should use ‘terrorism’ as a label of last resort and that contemporary popular uses of the term are missing the ‘terror’ element.

But I want to start 2022 with a blog post that really gets the blood pumping.  I’m going to sledge Sami Shah.

In a passion it broke, I pull the black from the grey… Skip @Atlantic_Ctr’s ‘A Descending Spiral’

John Johnson was a shy child.  He was doing well at school until his father lost his job and became a violent alcoholic, and then his mother died of tuberculosis, and then the local saw mill closed down, pushing the entire region into an economic depression.  As Johnson grew up, he made friends with the wrong kind of kid, and he self-medicated his shyness with drugs and petty thefts.  Then, one day, Johnson was walking along the road humming a jaunty tune, when he accidentally tripped over, tied up eight people, and shot them all in the back of the head.  He was sentenced to death.  The appellate court refused to mitigate the sentence, noting Johnson had previously been convicted of a string of aggravated sexual assaults and two other murders.

If the above paragraph convinces you that the death penalty is wrong and should be abolished, then you are going to love Marc Bookman’s A Descending Spiral.  Anecdote after grisly, unrelenting anecdote about absolutely horrible crimes motivated by the unexamined assumption that the stories show that the death penalty is wrong.  For literally everybody else in the world, this is a frustrating, irrational, and emotionally exhausting series of stories written in a ‘true crime podcast style’.

I was cautioned to surrender; this I could not do… When should allegations result in resignations?

Forget ICAC and the Register of Member’s Interests, for a moment.  Let us distract ourselves from questions about Gladys Berejiklian and Christian Porter.  The recurrently anachronistic King Arthur sits at his round table with knights whom he has appointed for their outstanding character, noble virtues, and exceptional integrity.  King Arthur himself feels that he can govern only if he maintains unimpeachable moral authority, and it is on this basis that he has been able to resist challenges from those who wish to claim the throne.

One day, a meeting of the Round Table is suddenly interrupted: a man bursts into the room and makes astounding allegations about Sir Lancelot.  Should Sir Lancelot resign his position?  Should King Arthur sack him?