Sometimes love is not enough and the road gets tough, I don’t know why… How to improve political debates

There are a lot of Australian hot takes about the US Presidential debate.   There is no good reason for the vast majority of them to exist.  We now have access to some of the finest hot takes directly from the US — hot takes that are sensitive to the nuances and details of the US electoral system that are completely alien to us here in Australia.  When it comes to US politics, hide Australian threads, ignore Australian posts, and do not reply to Australian posters.

What we can reflect on — and, indeed, should reflect on — is how we can improve political debate in Australia so that we do not end up with the shitshow that is the United States.  To answer that question, we need a really crisp idea of precisely what it is that we want from our political system and our political media.

The passions that collide in me, the wild abandoned side of me… Should ASIO have a Twitter account?

The United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigations has had a Twitter account since November 2008.  It shares information about the history of the organisation, about current work of the organisation, and about investigations currently being undertaken (‘Wanted Persons’).  With the blue tick verifying that Twitter knows this is The Official Twitter Account of the FBI, the FBI account also reduces the possibility of somebody making a fake FBI account to push various unwanted messages.

Its tweets are mostly innocous.  Some barely get a dozen responses.  One tweet about a man being charged with possession of an illegal firearm received responses no more enthusiastic than a heart emoji, a person responding only with the letter ‘k’, and another person claiming to be the first respondant to the tweet: ‘First!’

Others get a bit more of a response.  One post about China-related threats resulted in a flood of messages that alleged the real threat to the US was President Trump.

As far as the FBI is concerned, it gets a minor benefit at the expense of having one of its junior comms officers having to read waves of unhinged nutcasery every few weeks.  Should the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) do the same?

I’ll never look behind me; My troubles will be few… On @JeffreyASach’s Missing Quadrant

Jeffrey Sachs — the legal academic, not the economist — posed the question of the missing quadrant:

X-axis is the degree to which a person disagrees with you politically.

Y-axis is the degree to which a person seems fundamentally decent and good.

What’s the twitter handle of the person in the upper-right quadrant?

Or, perhaps more easily, who is the person that you think is fundamentally decent and good with whom you also disagree politically.

The underlying assumption — which I think is correct — is that most of us are not on friendly terms with people with whom we politically disagree.

As I’m conservative and overwhelmingly have liberal, progressive, and radical friends, I think this is an issue that needs to be explored in detail as I think it is a consequence of a media environment that is completely incapable of presenting rational, informative, constructive disagreements between people.

The exotic sound of data storage, nothing like it… A new argument /against/ banning hate speech

In an issue of Legal Theory last year, Maxime Lepoutre put forward an argument against hate speech laws.  It’s worth seeing if we can sketch out a credible version of his argument that’s accessible, and then if it helps us to develop public intuitions about a complex area of law.

It is no secret that I am strongly in favour of hate speech laws.  A lot of my justification for hate speech laws is situated in scepticism about the inherent value of speech.  If most speech acts are worthless, then toxic speech like hate speech is even harder to consider worthy of protection.  Rather than being a restriction of speech, hate speech laws are properly construed as a carve out of the protections that society affords speech.  But not a lot of this is accessible and not relevant to Lepoutre’s argument, so it’s mere prologue to the main course of looking at his argument.

Lepoutre is taking aim at the much more mainstream accounts of hate speech laws within the liberal tradition.  First, people should be allowed to do whatever they want unless there is some reason to restrict that freedom.  Second, there’s a kind of private-public partnership deal with regulation: the State only needs to restrict people’s freedoms if social forces are proving to be insufficient.

The key form of this social force is ‘counterspeech’.   The general idea is that the State shouldn’t play a role in regulating speech because good citizens will speak out to denounce the hate speech.  At it’s simplest, this idea has an uncanny resemblance to the argument that ‘The best way to deal with a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun’.  Lepoutre’s idea is much more sophisticated: his idea of counterspeech requires the State to be an active leader of public debate, including ‘a host of expensive and taxing measures, such as erecting historical monuments and enacting aggressive civil rights legislation.’  It might be worth raising an eyebrow at the suggestion that we replace hate speech laws with historical monuments, but it’s not an outright silly idea.  It’s not enough to suppress the bad; Lepoutre wants the State to give greater platforms to the good.

I wanted rock ‘n roll, I got a science museum… Getting tested for the ‘roni

It’s hour 25 and I’m in isolation, awaiting the results of a COVID test.  The second test, actually.  I’ve been sampled twice in 24 hours.

The last time I saw my family was before Christmas.  Our previous family tradition was me spending a lot of time travelling, then a lot of time listening to various homophobic and/or racist comments and resisting the urge to Ruin Christmas for Everybody.  Why do it?  Our new family tradition is different; I stay at home, drink too much of something extremely nice, and eat my bodyweight in seafood (a measure that is growing each year).  And custard.  So much custard.  A season of all the different custards.

My nephew made the extremely good decision to be born about three weeks after Christmas.  Instead of coming down for Christmas, I fly down for his birthday.  Mini-Christmas one evening; birthday celebration the next.  Far more civilised.

But that didn’t happen this year.  Mum was going on a cruise for January.  And my brother was going away during February.  We would reschedule the Feast of St Mark the Wise and Glorious until March.

That was the plan. Before the dark times… Before the ‘roni.

Business men, they drink my wine… A legal analysis of a joke from my grandmother

My grandmother sends me a great many e-mails.  It’s often quite useful as I can keep an eye on the sort of alt-right nonsense that somehow finds a home amongst our elderly.  I think of it as a window into the Grey Supremacist movement across the Anglosphere: insane conspiracy theories about how somebody, somewhere is getting money that should instead be going to retirees.

But she also sends me jokes and riddles.  Here’s one I received today:

To the heart and mind, ignorance is kind… Political centrism, tribalism, and jingoism (a response to @DrCraigEmerson and @GrogsGamut)

There is something to be said for metapolitics: the analysis and critique of how we do politics.  And it’s a difficult task because the intuitively obvious ideas is often intuitively obvious for ignoble reasons: they tend to be those ideas that are dogmatically repeated because it suits those in power.

We always need to engage in the debate about how we debate.  It’s how we draw the lines between the legitimate and the illegitimate in public discourse.  It’s how we ensure that we are not rendering invisible the systematic oppression of the voiceless.  It’s how we make sure that political debate is achieving the sorts of noble goals that we think that we want.

When the metapolitical debate goes mainstream–as it has done with recent op-eds by Craig Emerson and Greg Jericho–it is disappointing to see it explored uncritically, with a lot of finger pointing and unexplored assumptions.  Emerson reduced the discussion to the concept of ‘tribalism’, in which there is a moral parity among those who are ‘extreme’ or ‘unreasonable’ in their views; Jericho reduced the discussion to something he called ‘centrism’, by which he meaned a kind of political approach where two opposing views were entertained not for their merit but for the fact that they were in opposition.  It is worth noting that there’s something idiosyncratic about Jericho’s version of ‘centrism’, so the idea is worth unpacking in detail as we go through.

Fundamentally, at the heart of the debate is the role that political parties have in Australian politics, leading to the idea of partisan jingoism: ‘my Party, right or wrong’.

I love the country but I can’t stand the scene… On policing, protests, and politics

I’ve argued before that we need a better theory of protest.  The context for the earlier piece was the woeful public discussion about whether or not vegan protesters were ‘entitled’ in a democracy to disrupt the ‘rights’ of others.  I noted that often the arguments advanced offer little more insight than whether or not the speaker agrees with the message of the protesters.  ‘I don’t care about the wants or needs of others, we really do eat too much meat and only a Police State would shut this protest down.’

The public debate about that protest was whether or not we like vegans.  The Extinction Rebellion protests over the past few weeks, again, has reduced to whether or not we like environmentalists.  The framing of the debate has made it very easy for politicians to express (quite worrying) legal ‘crackdowns’ on environmental protests.

The argument I advanced was in very broad terms: we can be more analytical in our approach to discussions about protests within a democracy that get us away from unworkably absolutist positions.  By separating discussions about message from methods, we can look at the impact that particular protest activities have on others, and then do a kind of proportionality analysis on whether or not we think the protest is justifiable.

The protests at the International Mining and Resources Conference (IMARC) in Melbourne provide an opportunity to explore some other dimensions of protest.

And we will live together, until the twelfth of never… Banerji, Folau, and Clubb are not arguments in favour of a Bill of Rights

Advocates for an Australian Bill of Rights present less than half of an argument: ‘Look at all the wonderful things Australia could have if only it had a Bill of Rights!’  The High Court decision in Banerji (which held that a public servant does not have a constitutional right to go completely rogue about their employer and sledge their boss online) has encouraged some advocates to reheat their inedible souffle in favour of a Bill of Rights.

In The Canberra Times, Crispin Hull writes:

Get it through your thick skulls. There is no freedom of speech in Australia. Stop watching American movies.

Okay.  He continues:

Australians should understand that to qualify as a liberal democracy a bill of rights is pretty much compulsory. History tells us that liberal democracy is both gained and lost gradually, step by step. In recent years, Australia has been taking some of those steps.

He provides no argument in support of this view.

Gillian Triggs, the former Human Rights Commissioner, argued along similar lines:

If anyone doubts the need for a charter of rights in Australia, the Banerji decision of the High Court handed down last week demonstrates why legislative protection for our common law freedoms has become a matter of national urgency.

Triggs argued that this was because the High Court did not discuss issues that were entirely irrelevant to the matter before it, and then notes:

A similar charter protection in Australian law may not have saved Banerji on the facts of her case, as it is arguably necessary to protect the integrity of the public service.

Coolio.  Meanewhile, Josh Bornstein of Maurice Blackburn and Per Capita, turned to a discussion of Israel Folau, the sports celebrity who did a homophobia and got sacked:

[T]hose cheering on the loss of Folau’s livelihood and career have undermined the cause of countless other employees who espouse controversial progressive views and suffer the same fate. […] While Folau’s views are objectionable and arguably even hate speech, perpetual unemployment is a grossly disproportionate punishment.

It was harder to find impassioned defences of Kathleen Clubb, the woman who challenged Victoria’s laws which prohibited anti-abortion protests within the vicinity of abortion clinics.  The Human Rights Legal Centre called it a ‘significant win for gender equality’. Academics from the Castan Centre for Human Rights were strongly supportive of the decision.

Here’s why Australia should not, on the basis of the above, have greater protections for human rights in Australia.

It’s like I’m powerful with a little bit of tender… On xenofeminism

I’m reading Xenofeminism by Helen Hester, and it’s amazing.  I disagree with it a lot, but it is in engaging with ideas that we can hone our own views and develop our arguments.

In a previous post, I argued that we have an expectation that people who are minorities should also be able and willing to engage in theory.  That is, it is not sufficient that a person is same-sex attracted, or trans, or queer; they also have to be ready to explain and to defend their preferred gender theory.  This is, of course, nonsense.  We don’t expect the same from the straight white male — if anything, we might be in a better position if all of Australia’s straights were capable of explaining and defending their preferred gender theory.

When explaining why I disagree with xenofeminism, I need to bite a few bullets that I rather hoped I wouldn’t have to bite.  As a conservative, what do I really want to preserve about ‘culture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘nature’?  Xenofeminism presents a number of really interesting challenges in ways that I wasn’t expecting.