Dave's Archives

I thought I'd iron out some common appropriations of English words and phrases as used by politicians and journalists. Let me know if you have any more suggestions.

accountability. 1. (n.) The state of being duly sniped at while virtuously refraining from voicing any counterargument that would draw attention to the ridiculousness of the snipes. 2. hold to account (v.) To uphold democracy by sniping at one's opponents.

ban (v.) To voice an opinion that something is perhaps not entirely constructive. Examples include: (a) to suggest that Lord Monckton is not conducive to an informed debate on climate change, and (b) to suggest that junk food advertising during children's TV programming is not conducive to public health. Also, fascism.

balance (n.) A journalistic ideal whereby truth and rationality are kept in check by things that aren't true or rational.

come clean (v.) In response to an innocuous misunderstanding, to suddenly, unreservedly and inexplicably admit the most outlandishly horrible interpretation of events. This is entirely hypothetical but nonetheless widely anticipated, as shown by its most common usage, "When will _____ come clean on …?". For instance, in response to the question, "When will the minister come clean on budget figures?", said minister may choose to either truthfully describe the dry nuances of the budget, or "come clean" by spontaneously blurting out that tax revenue is being siphoned off for secret genetic experiments on pregnant mothers.

debate. 1. (n.) A choreographed joint press conference held by exactly two people who hate each other. 2. (in parliament) (v.) To toe the line by reiterating talking points, after all decision making has concluded.

democracy (n.) A system of government in which the protagonist wins.

free speech (n.) The right of the media to report in an unrestricted fashion anything that is misleading, voyeuristic, harmful to powerless individuals, or demonstrably false.

hypocrisy (n.) An assumed failure to adhere to someone else's distorted interpretation of one's own principles. Hence, a hypocrite is a person who has principles that are possible to misinterpret.

mandate (n.) An obligation of government to behave according to whoever is talking.

message. 1. (n.) A narrative invented by politicians to alleviate journalists from their own jobs. 2. send a message (v.) To commit an act of extraordinary and disproportionate stupidity in the blind hope that others will back off.

not rich (adj.) Having a second percentile income (excluding those who can't work or can't find work).

political correctness (n.) A diffuse, pathological quality of all progressive social movements that utterly devastates the lives of the well-off.

public interest (n.) The set of things that people will pay money for despite their better judgement. Hence, the sexual activities of famous people are in the public interest, whereas information on their public responsibilities is not.

tax (n.) Anything complicated done by the government that involves money. Hence, poker machines involve money, so any government policy concerning poker machines is a tax.

values (n.) A set of unspecified attributes we possess that makes us better than everyone else. Hence, a "values"-based electoral campaign is one in which voters are simply reminded of how wonderfully amazing they are.

win (in a debate) (v.) To voice arguments with which the speaker broadly agrees.

I'm going to contradict myself on Andrew Bolt. In a previous post, I defended Bolt's right to free speech, as have so many others, in the face of his court case. At the time, my esteemed nemesis, the Slightly Disgruntled Scientist, came to a different view. Since the judgement, I find myself changing my mind, and I feel I ought to say something.

David Marr eloquently describes just how low Bolt actually sank, and also gives this important context:

The nine [who took Bolt to court] chose not to sue. They did not want damages but a public correction and a promise not to print such stuff again. So they brought an action under the Racial Discrimination Act, which has embedded in it a strong freedom-of-speech defence: insulting or humiliating people because of their race or colour is not unlawful when it is done "reasonably and in good faith" in pursuit of a matter of public interest.

Jonathan Holmes maintains that this is nonetheless about free speech, and discusses the relevant sections from the Act: 18C and 18D. Section 18C describes the kinds of behaviours considered racially intolerant and thus unlawful. Section 18D overrides it, making allowances for (basically) anything done, as Marr quotes, "reasonably and in good faith".

Holmes is concerned that Justice Bromberg has set the bar too high, making 18D essentially useless:

[Justice Bromberg] specifically mentions, not just the wrong facts, but "the derisive tone, the provocative and inflammatory language and the inclusion of gratuitous asides."

In other words, if you want the protection of section 18D of the act when writing about race in a way that's likely to offend, you need to be polite, not derisive, calm and moderate rather than provocative and inflammatory, and you must eschew 'gratuitous asides'.

If you did all that, of course, you'd be unlikely to offend anyone in the first place. So there doesn't seem much point in section 18D. And you'd also struggle to express your view in a way that would attract readers in a popular newspaper.

But consider Justice Bromberg's whole sentence (in paragraph 425):

The lack of care and diligence is demonstrated by the inclusion in the Newspaper Articles of the untruthful facts and the distortion of the truth which I have identified, together with the derisive tone, the provocative and inflammatory language and the inclusion of gratuitous asides. For those reasons I am positively satisfied that Mr Bolt’s conduct lacked objective good faith.

I have underlined the parts quoted directly by Holmes, and made bold certain parts not quoted. To my untrained, unqualified eye, Holmes is misreading the judgement. From my reading, Justice Bromberg is not suggesting that offensive language in itself renders 18D inapplicable; he is talking about offensive language in the context of untruths and distortions. The combination of those two is damning in a way that neither can be by itself. To me, it seems entirely possible that the protections of 18D could apply to anyone who (a) is wrong but avoids derision, provocation, etc. or conversely (b) is right but in a derisive, provocative, etc. manner.

Thus, I have no problem imagining, hypothetically, that Sections 18C and 18D might both apply. That is, someone may be insulted, offended, humiliated or intimidated (18C) by material that is (a) wrong but politely worded, or (b) right but derisively worded (18D). (In fact, people can often be insulted and offended by things that are both correct and polite.)

I do have a great deal of respect for Holmes. Maybe I'm misreading the judgement and Holmes is correct. Even so — even if the Racial Discrimination Act is too broad and infringes genuine free speech — consider the consequences for those violating the act. As Malcolm Farnsworth points out, in an article delightfully named "Help, help, I'm being repressed":

There is no penalty for Bolt.  Removal of two blog posts and an apology will satisfy Justice Bromberg. It's slap on the wrist time, but the confected outrage has poured forth.

So what are we getting worked up over? Why should we fear this judgement, when the most onerous consequence of engaging in racially offensive speech is the requirement for an apology?

I think we've been programmed by contemporary political narratives to treat free speech as one of those places where, perversely, we stop thinking. We exhibit such conditioned deference to the term "free speech" that we consider it an absolute right. As a result, we have a tendency to focus on the most minute of infringements. It's all-or-nothing, we assume. The pedants in all of us seek out the most trivial, technical, legalistic injustices. We then swing wildly into conspiracy theorist mode, and extrapolate this to the whole of human experience, imagining that tyrannical oppression is upon us.

Of course, free speech has never been an absolute right; not in the freest societies on Earth. We are constrained by myriad factors in what we can say, which makes worrying about technical infringements all the more ridiculous. Defamation law is the closest approximation to the Racial Discrimination Act, and we don't blink when people are sanctioned for spreading malicious untruths to damage the reputations of others. As the Slightly Disgruntled Scientist puts it:

The difference is that defamation affects one person. Humiliation based specifically on sexuality, gender, ethnicity, or any other class of institutional marginalisation affects (a) the person targeted, and (b) any other member of such a group. Gay people still have to choose between publicly disclosing incredibly private information up front, or not running for any kind of publicly scrutinised office. Indigenous Australians now have to consider just whether their skin is dark enough to go for, say, an Aboriginal liason position, or risk being targeted by the likes of Bolt (who implicitly undermines the legitimacy of such positions, with the consequence of further marginalisation of a whole group of people).

Now, I do think that free speech is essentially about protecting our right to say things that others would prefer remained unsaid. Powerful political parties and interest groups do tend to find certain facts and opinions inconvenient, and have certain means of persuasion that need to be countered by legal protections. But it's hard to find a justification for speech that is racially offensive and factually bogus and not in good faith. This sort of thing does not serve democracy at any level, and in fact causes real damage.

If Mr Bolt's right to speak freely has been infringed, it is the most minor infringement imaginable. He has maliciously spread damaging untruths in publications read by millions of people, and been given a slap on the wrist.

The judicial arm of government has taken the executive's asylum seeker policy out the back and had it shot, such was the extent of its mutilation and suffering.

The Labor Party is busy saving whatever face it can, but this is really very hard to spin. I fervently hope its strategists are even now exchanging self-conscious glances, recognition dawning of the sheer arrogance and stupidity of what they tried to accomplish.

One of the ABC's opening articles on the great event generated comments that fell neatly and predictably into two camps. This time neither group wanted to take a stand alongside the architects of unconscionable incompetence. Nevertheless, the two popular messages made an interesting contrast. Half the commenters applauded the High Court's decision - a very honest and straightforward show of respect for the rights of refugees.

The other half are tied up in a complicated psycho-political game, in which the decision itself is not opposed, but its consequences are nonetheless an object of outrage. "The government can't do anything right," they opine, citing the High Court's decision as evidence. This is fair comment, as far as it goes (though in my view Labor's actual level of incompetence doesn't begin to compare to the stratospheric reaches of Abbott's self-contradictory, populist whinging, and in general this government is not significantly more or less incompetent than any other government). You have to ask, though, what principles this group of commenters has in mind when they voice such opinions. It certainly isn't a defence of the rights of refugees.

For someone arguing on the basis of actual principles, the High Court's decision is either justified or not and fortunate or unfortunate (or perhaps some shade of grey in between). I don't think this group especially cares whether the High Court was justified or not. What they care about is the gotcha moment, when everything falls (neatly or otherwise) into their Outraged Voters(tm) narrative structure beloved of the Opposition.

This is precisely the kind of thing that political parties in opposition do, as part of the "small target" strategy. They snipe at the government (which they preciously call "holding the government to account") without ever nailing down any of their own principles, or indeed being remotely constructive. It's more depressing to see this behaviour reproduced in (relatively) ordinary people, many of whom are presumably not party members¹. It's something deeper than the mere chanting of slogans. Ordinary people themselves script narratives and find political gotchas, almost synchonised, along the same lines as high-profile ideologues. Their rhetorical scheming seems intended to change minds, but is fairly ineffectual because they're the bottom level of a giant rhetorical mind-control pyramid scheme.

For the Opposition and its hangers-on, all our hopes and dreams seem to rest on a tiny, dysfunctional island. It's always on the tips of their tongues, and slips out at the merest hint of trouble with "boat people".

To its comparative credit, which is not saying much, the Opposition's Nauru option is only the second worst asylum seeker processing "solution" to have ever been proposed. It does at least provide a pathway to asylum, and in doing so it does still protect at least some rights. However, in the end, it's precisely this protection of rights that will completely erode any deterrent effect - which of course is the whole reason for the policy in the first place. Any deterrent effect - i.e. a reduction in the "pull" factor - can only result from the perception that refugees will not ultimately be granted asylum. In our care, they must eventually be granted asylum, and perception must eventually catch up to this reality. We cannot, legally or morally, simply leave asylum seekers to their own devices in the middle of nowhere, as the High Court seems to have reaffirmed. Once prospective asylum seekers are tuned in to this fact, any off-shore processing "solution" simply becomes a circuitous bureaucratic construct, whose dubious rationale vanishes altogether.

The Coalition may point proudly to the immediate impact of its Pacific Solution as evidence that putting asylum seekers in the middle of nowhere "works", but the limited data available is badly over-interpreted. The policy coincided with a dramatic decline in global asylum seeker numbers - the "push" factors - which masked its true impact. What impact it did have could not possibly have been permanent.

Nevertheless, I'm sure there are boundless prospects for further inventive stupidity on this.

1. Some of them might be, but party membership in Australia isn't terribly high overall. [↩]

I had not previously been aware that the rules of parliamentary broadcasting preclude "satire and ridicule". Annabel Crabb raises the issue at the ABC, and reports that many politicians themselves are unaware of this.

First, prohibiting ridicule does seem a little redundant. One may well decree that there shalt be no ridicule, but it's meaningless when the regular vacuum of sanity and cool-headedness in the chamber simply pulls in ridicule from all angles, irrespective of intent. An analogy might involve trying to bail water out of a ship that is not merely full of holes, but simply lacks a hull altogether. The attempt to prohibit ridicule is itself just a little ridiculous.

Satire, meanwhile, might actually make Question Time watchable at some level, without immediate risk of brain malfunction (see my previous Venn diagram). The provision against satire reminded me, of course, of the royal wedding, in which ABC2 and The Chaser were prevented from making the whole viewing experience worthwhile. More seriously, satire is essential for a healthy democracy. It is one of the most important forms of free speech, because, unlike political slogans, rhetoric and the like, it works with and gives force to nuance. It tears down idiocy mercilessly and reveals inconsistencies in public discourse that might otherwise be blunted by conventional narratives and sensibilities.

A satirical take on Question Time would not just be more entertaining than our current straight broadcasts, but ultimately even more important. It is important that we laugh at our leaders' attempts at manipulating public opinion, because that's our best shield against it.

However, there are conceivable technological workarounds for this sort of thing. A satirical broadcast could, in principle, be split into the original footage and some set of superimposed or overlaid video, audio and programmatic instructions for automatically combining them. These elements, when combined, could produce a seamless work of satire. However, imagine further that the actual combining is done by a piece of software on the viewer's television, computer, etc., and that up until that point they are separate data streams, provided even by separate organisations.

Organisation A provides the original, unadulterated footage, while organisation B provides the satirical overlay. Organisation A cannot be held responsible because it has nothing to do with the satire. Organisation B cannot be held responsible because it isn't broadcasting the footage. (None of this is especially novel, I suspect, though I haven't really investigated.)

Maybe I'm missing some legal subtlety here. Maybe there's still some arcane legal case against organisation B - I don't know - but if the technological means fell into place (and it's really just a matter of writing the software), I don't immediately see how any legal avenue could plausibly stop it.

His Great and Wondrous Beneficence the Lord Christopher Monckton did, after all, give a lecture at Notre Dame University. Attempts (initiated by Natalie Latter) to dissuade Notre Dame from lending Monckton its credibility did not come to fruition, though drawing attention to his Lordship's rank lunacy is always a small victory in itself.

As the letter puts it:

We all support academic freedom and the freedom to express our ideas and beliefs. However, Notre Dame University has a responsibility to avoid promoting discredited views on an issue of public risk. Notre Dame's invitation to Lord Monckton makes a mockery of academic standards and the pursuit of evidence-based knowledge.

This has been laughably characterised as an attempt to "gag" Monckton (who has a minor obsession with characterising people as fascists and war criminals, suggesting for instance that climate scientists ought to stand trial for genocide). Does anyone honestly think that Monckton actually could have been gagged?

This call to preserve academic standards morphed (perhaps predictably) into a spurious fight for free speech. Tell me, dear reader: when was the last time you exercised your apparently fundamental democratic right to give a public lecture at a university?¹ Do you believe that you have that right; that a university has a duty to invite you to give a lecture if you see fit to give one? Why should Monckton be afforded this privilege, when clearly "ordinary" members of the public are not?

Some, such as Professor Chris Doepel at Notre Dame, argue that all points of view must be heard. This is the refrain we hear from creationists asking that "Intelligent Design" be taught in schools. It's a convenient rhetorical tool for engineering doubt. The consensus of virtually all the relevant experts, arrived at by considering the entire gamut of objective data collection and analysis conducted over decades, is made to look like only one set of opinions, rivaled by another set of opinions formed simply by making things up. Doepel makes the following self-refuting remark:

The university does not take a view one way or the other on the positions advocated by Christopher Monckton.

But that is a position on Monckton. An individual person might legitimately claim not to know enough to form an opinion², but it beggars belief that a university - a place wherein truth is uncovered and disseminated - would have formed no position on one of the most outspoken and controversial figures of our time. A refusal to condemn Monckton's views, for an institution that cannot possibly claim ignorance of what he stands for, is effectively an endorsement of those views. We certainly know where Notre Dame stands on legitimate climate research and climate action, then.

Others (such as the Fremantle Mayor Brad Pettitt) believe we should just let Monckton speak, and take the time to refute his claims. But this is to accept the false dichotomy that either he be allowed to speak wherever he likes, at any institution, or we tie him up in the basement. Monckton was clearly never in any danger of actually being silenced, not even if Notre Dame had heeded the call to preserve its academic integrity. Universities have credibility in the first place precisely because they discriminate between views supported by evidence and views not so supported (the same as scientific journals, and the scientific process in general). One can delude oneself into thinking that this is somehow undemocratic, but then reality isn't democratic. At some point, for the sake of advancing the human cause, we must stand up and pass judgement; not on each other, but on our ideas. Science, technology, economics, etc. are not served simply by sitting and listening politely and "fairly" to endless regurgitations of refuted arguments. We have the media and the Internet for that; universities should know better.

Some believe we should just ignore Monckton. However, the man is steering the public debate in ways that are fundamentally detrimental to the prospects for sensible policy making. We cannot just ignore him. Academic institutional credibility aside, he already has all the media coverage anyone could dream of. This isn't the result of some PR folly by his critics, but rather his oratory skills and the cozy hardline ideological relationship he has with some very loud and obnoxious media personalities.

It is incumbent upon academics to preserve the integrity of their institutions, and to confront misinformation that threatens to derail rational decision making. Free speech is a right, no doubt, but credibility must be earned.

1. It is entirely possible, I suppose, that you have indeed given a public lecture at a university, but I think you'll agree that it's not exactly a right. [↩]
2. I sometimes admire those willing to admit ignorance rather than pick whichever view "feels" better. [↩]

Just as I hoped, we have a hung parliament.

A few days after the event, all I can say is this: Rob Oakeshott, you legend. Oakeshott, one of the three independent kingmakers, has proposed a unity cabient, wherein the two major parties would share power.

Doubtless there is much scepticism to be had over whether this could actually work, but in principle it has great appeal. This was the way the system was always supposed to work. Oakeshott and his colleagues Bob Katter and Tony Windsor are espousing the high-minded ideals of parliamentary democracy, wherein parliament becomes a mechanism of government, not just a rubber stamp for the ruling party.

On the other hand, there is another tempting argument: neither party truly deserves to be in power. As punishment for their vicious, purile and jaw-droppingly narrow-minded political strategising, we should now force them kiss and make up, and more importantly to swallow their poorly-chosen rhetoric. As punishment for their lack of competence and vision, we should force them to pool whatever little talent they do possess and share both the power and the responsibility. No more blaming it on the previous government, or snide armchair governing from the comfort and financial wonderland of opposition.

Of course, there can only be one Prime Minister, but it probably doesn't matter whether it's Julia or Tony so long as both are involved, along with their ministers. Stick Adam Bandt in there somewhere for good measure.

But they hate each other, I hear you cry with horrified incredulity. Why yes - that's largely the point. If they can't get along, they'll make each other miserable. I call it a win-win.