Open Borders
Up until now, I’ve tried to respond to the asylum seeker issue with a mixture of compassion and pragmatism. My position has been one that I suspect is not unusual amongst those who oppose Howard government immigration policies – that is, we should assess boat arrivals as quickly as possible, deport those who are found not to have legitimate asylum claims, grant residency to those who do, and generally look after people properly and humanely in the meantime. I’ve never felt that there was any need to keep people locked up while the process happened. Keeping children in detention is particularly wrong.
Recently, though, I’ve come to realise that the position that I’ve been holding is, to a significant degree, inconsistent with my ethical beliefs. The inconsistency, I think, lies in the assumption that it’s acceptable for states to control the movement of people over their borders. It seems to be a very commonly shared assumption, and one that is universally applied to migration laws, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s valid. I’m aware that what I’m saying might cause some eyes to roll, but I hope that those who disagree with me will make the effort to articulate why.
I think that the restriction of migration can be characterised as a means of entrenching hereditary privilege. The reason that I’m an Australian, and as such am able to enjoy all the benefits of living in a prosperous and peaceful country, is that I was born here. I didn’t do anything to earn the right to an Australian passport. It just so happened that when I made my entry into the world, my mother was in the hills above Adelaide, rather than in the mountains of Afghanistan. Lucky me.
Thanks to the fathers of federation, I can get in my car whenever I feel like it and drive to any part of Australia that takes my fancy. If I find a spot that I’m particularly keen on, I can decide to live there and work there and no-one can stop me. None of us would regard that freedom as anything particularly remarkable. It’s a right that we have, as Australians, to go to whatever bit of Australia we like.
Let’s imagine that somewhere in the Queensland outback there is an amazing mineral discovery, a source of hitherto untold wealth and prosperity. As the export dollars begin to roll in, the state becomes drenched in capital. Jobs are plentiful. Mining royalties rejuvenate the education and health systems, which soon become the best in the world. Newly resurfaced roads begin to be filled with brand new European cars. Crime plummets as the criminals find that it’s more lucrative get a job. And the Victorians and Tasmanians start to look on with envy. Slowly, the northbound side of Highway 1 becomes more and more clogged with southerners, their cars loaded with possessions. Queensland natives look on with concern as the new arrivals set up camp on the outskirts of cities, each one looking for his share of the bounty. Gradually, a movement coalesces amongst the indigenes. It calls itself “Queensland for Queenslanders”. It grows in strength and influence, calling for a halt to the flood of migrants from the South. Eventually, a new state government is elected on a secession platform. A referendum is put to the people, and succeeds resoundingly. Queensland is now a wealthy republic in its own right, and border protection is a hot issue. Immigration checkpoints are hastily erected on the borders, and thousands of wishful migrants are sent packing back to their home states.
Fanciful, yes. But it is theoretically possible, as far as I know, for a state to secede from the Commonwealth, and having done so to restrict inward migration. So the “right” that I enjoy, to drive to Queensland any time I feel like it and settle there and get a job, is actually conditional, in a sense. It relies on the continued consent of those people on the Queensland electoral roll. At present, the Constitution prevents them from keeping me out, but it’s my understanding that federalism is something that the people of Queensland could, if they were so inclined, opt out of. I believe that Western Australia boasts some kind of a secession movement.
All of this is just an effort to think about freedom of movement and what it really means. When I decided that my opportunities in Melbourne would be better than they were in Adelaide, I moved here. It was as simple as that. I packed my van and drove for nine hours or so and it was done. Why is it that I could do that so easily, and yet (to construct an example) a resident of Vancouver can’t make a similarly simple decision in his own best interests to pack his car and drive the two hours south to Seattle to start up a new life? Doesn’t that seem like a fairly strong restriction on his personal freedom? Why should his options be constrained by the fact that his British Columbian forebears opted to federate with their eastern neighbours instead of their southern ones? If states can maintain their sovereignty within a federation despite the fact that people can come and go freely across their borders, why can’t nations within the globe do the same? Why should some arbitrary political boundaries (international ones) be enforced with so much rigour when others (interstate ones) are so easily traversable without that having any obvious adverse consequences?
The answer, I think, is that national borders mark much greater divisions of privilege. With a federation like Australia, there are disparities of opportunity, but they’re small, and made smaller by the operation of horizontal fiscal equalization, a system by which the richer states deliver aid to the poorer states in order to keep them reasonably equal, so that a Tasmanian public school or hospital is not likely to be more impoverished than a Victorian one. Concerns about migration tend to occur where the benefits of migration are larger – that is, where the difference in wealth or opportunity is greater. That’s probably why Americans tend to be much more concerned about protecting their southern border than their northern one. It’s presumed that Mexicans, if they had the opportunity, would move into the United States en masse, whereas most Canadians are probably happy enough where they are. Likewise, migration fears in Australia are more likely to focus on Asia or the Middle East rather than Britain or New Zealand, where a large proportion of the migrants actually come from. We’re happy enough to let people move freely, as long as there’s no perceived danger of too many wanting to do it at once.
So let’s call that the floodgates argument against open borders. If Australia decided to allow unrestricted migration today, then it would be disaster because the whole country would be overrun with new migrants from Indonesia and China and God-knows-where-else, our standard of living would plummet, and everyone would be worse off. First off, I should say that I’m not necessarily advocating the immediate removal of all migration restrictions. All I’m saying is that migration policy should proceed on the understanding that restricting freedom of movement is ethically wrong. We’ve built a barrier between us and the rest of the world, and the pressure on the other side of that barrier has become significant. Demolishing it in one hit would probably be disadvantageous to everyone including would-be migrants, so it’s better for it to be slowly dismantled, gradually increasing the flow until such time as it begins subsiding. Secondly, I think that open borders would have to be pursued on a global basis, which means that the burden on Australia would be reduced by being shared with other countries, and by the fact that some Australians would take advantage of the change to leave, making room for others to arrive. Thirdly, I think that we should be prepared to lower our standard of living to some extent. It’s worth sacrificing some of our luxuries for the sake of living in a peaceful and equitable world. The alternative is to continue trying to reinforce the barrier that protects our privilege. Better that it is dismantled willingly from our side, rather than forcefully from the other side.
In practical terms, obviously it’s hellishly difficult. Sovereign states are run by sovereign governments who are notoriously reluctant to cede any of their sovereignty for the sake of the collective good. There are some encouraging signs, though. The EU is an example of states giving up sovereignty and weakening their borders to garner common benefits. The French and the Germans, with a history as antagonistic as any two states, have nevertheless reached a point where you can drive across the border without stopping. The admission of former Soviet republics into the Union shows that there is a willingness on the part of richer states to acknowledge the inevitable and embrace their poorer neighbours, rather than building higher fences. As far as we’re concerned, I can think of two ways in which we can draw nearer the ideal of open borders. The first is to start rewriting the rhetoric about border protection. We should acknowledge it for what it is, a regrettable infringement of basic rights made necessary by the myopia of our forebears, rather than celebrating it as a national crusade. Secondly, I think that migration should be on the agenda of our free trade agreements. If free trade is the cause du jour in international diplomacy, then free trade in labour should be included. If we’re going to fight for the right to sell steel to the United States, then why not fight for the right to sell steelworkers as well (or, more correctly, steelwork)? Bilateral free migration agreements might be a mechanism by which some of the migration pressures can be gradually relieved, reducing the rush when the barriers are lowered altogether.
In the context of my new position, then, arguments in Australia about who’s illegal and who’s not take on the complexion of apartheid racial tests. That is, they’re discussions about the implementation of particular laws, ignoring the fact that the laws themselves are wrong. Once you’re prepared to acknowledge the truth of racial equality, then it becomes a meaningless exercise to see whether or not a pencil falls out of someone’s hair. And once you’re prepared to acknowledge a basic right of freedom of movement, it’s foolish to quibble over what countries someone’s been through on their way here. If that’s a brick in the migration barrier which has yet to be dismantled, then it’s still a part of the law, but it should only be implemented with apologies.
Probing Porn
Pornography is fantasy in the place of reality. But it is just that: fantasy. Pornography is not real and the only thing human beings get nourishment from is reality: real relationships. And, anyway, what do you want to say when you get to the end of your life? That you wish you’d spent more time (masturbating) on the internet? I hardly think so.
I’m going to comment on this, so wayward Google searchers be damned.
The thrust of this article (geddit?) is that blokes use porn as a way of taking revenge on women.
Men, say psychologists, also feel threatened by the “emotional power” they perceive women wielding over them. Unable to feel alive except when in relationships with women, they are at the same time painfully aware that their only salvation from isolation comes in being sexually acceptable to women.
This sense of neediness can provoke intense anger that, all too often, finds expression in porn. Unlike real life, the pornographic world is a place in which men find their authority unchallenged and in which women are their willing, even grateful servants. “The illusion is created,” as one male writer on pornography puts it, “that women are really in their rightful place and that there is, after all, no real and serious challenge to male authority.”
If porn is all about subjugating women, though, how might one explain the fact that so many gay men consume it so enthusiastically? Might it not be, as Moby says in the article, that “[w]e’re biologically programmed to respond to the sight of people having sex”? Is a little titillation really such a bad thing?
The occasional porn user in me wants to say no. Would I really take out a stroke mag because I am threatened by women’s emotional power, and by jumping from pictorial to pictorial I can reassert my authority? I don’t think so, but then, judging by this article, my taste in porn might be somewhat atypical. I’ve always found any hint of non-consensuality to be a big turn off, whether it’s in pornography or in real life. I’m not interested in fantasising about a woman submitting to have sex with me - it would be a blow to my self-esteem to imagine that she was doing it for any other reason than the fact that she found me desirable. Now, it might well be that women in porn will enthusiastically consent in circumstances where most real-life women would not, but that’s hardly the point. Why should a fantasy have to be plausible?
The article, though, seems to suggest that a lot of blokes get off on seeing women treated badly. If that’s the case, though, is it the porn that’s to blame? Does the porn actually initiate the process by which men start demeaning women, or is it just symptomatic, a market-driven reflection of what turns guys on? It’s a complicated question, not least of all because the porn industry itself is undoubtedly frequently exploitative and demeaning, particularly to women. It should be possible, though, to be down on the operation of the porn industry, and to be down on negative sexual attitudes to women, without being down on porn itself. There’s an obvious parallel with the prostitution industry. No-one could deny that there’s all sorts of disgraceful stuff going on - violence and drugs and under-age sex and indentured slavery and so on - but that shouldn’t necessarily commit you to the view that there’s something intrinsically wrong with the idea of two people entering into a contract to exchange money for sex. If guys are getting addicted to images of women being humiliated and then carrying those expectations over into their actual sex lives, then clearly that’s a big problem, but it doesn’t seem right to conclude that that’s a natural extension of a process that begins with a teenage boy jacking off under the covers with a torch and a Playboy. It might be that there’s some kind of epidemic of misogynistic sexual attitudes amongst men, and it might be that the porn industry is quite happy to cash in on that (as well as reflecting it in its own practices). But blaming porn for misogyny seems to me to be a bit like blaming Auction Squad for the housing bubble. Better to question the source of our less worthy behaviours, rather than just attack those who take advantage of them.
Bunyip and the Poll
Professor Bunyip, with the approval of Gareth Parker, takes issue with Robert Manne’s interpretation of one section of the Zogby International Survey of Iraq:
Here’s how Manne described one of its findings:
Two-thirds want US and British troops to leave within the year.
The man whose company conducted the poll, John Zogby, phrased it this way. Notice the subtle difference with the change of just one word:
Two out of three Iraqis — and seven in 10 Sunnis — want U.S. and British forces out of Iraq in a year.
Now let’s hear from Karl Zinsmeister of the American Enterprise Institute, which commissioned the poll about which he wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
Perhaps the ultimate indication of how comfortable Iraqis are with America’s aims in their region came when we asked how long they would like to see American and British forces remain in their country: Six months? One year? Two years or more? Two thirds of those with an opinion urged that the coalition troops should stick around for at least another year.
[…]
Asked if the U.S. should withdraw its troops in (a) six months, (b) 12 months or (c)two-plus years, just 31.6 per cent want the earliest possible exit. Taken together, however, those who wish Americans to remain for at least a year total 34 percent (12 months) + 25 percent (two-plus years).
In other words, Manne’s assertion that “two-thirds want US and British troops to leave within the year” is not merely wrong, it directly contradicts the poll on which he claims to base his Yankees-Go-Home assertion.
Or does it? Here’s the question in question, with the results:
“Given a choice, would you like to see the American and British forces leave Iraq in six months, one year, or two years or more?”
What does this question mean? If I was an Iraqi and I ticked “six months”, would I be saying a) “Mark down a day six months from now, and that’s the particular day on which I would like to see all American and British forces pack up and get out of the country”? Or b) “I’d like the forces to stay for at least another six months”? Or c) “I’d like the forces to be out by the time six months is up?”
I think we can disregard a). Bunyip has clearly opted for b), and Manne for c). Bunyip chides Manne for converting “in one year” to “within one year”, but he’s quite happy to insert his own modification of “at least a year”.
So who’s right? As usual, the pollsters are to blame for the confusion, because the question is ambiguous. We can only speculate as to how the question was interpreted by the actual Iraqis who were answering it (although it might help to know what the Arabic translation was like). If I was an Iraqi, I probably would have answered “none of the above” in protest (maybe that 9.3 percent who didn’t answer agreed with me). If we have to choose the most likely interpretation, though, I think that c) is the best. Here’s why:
My options a), b) and c) represent interpretations that regard the times given as absolutes, minima or maxima, respectively. It’s ridiculous to think of them as absolutes, as I’ve said. If they’re minima, as Bunyip suggests, then there’s a logical problem, because if that was the case then the pollsters would be presuming that there is no Iraqi who could possibly want the troops out earlier than six months. If I was an Iraqi and I wanted the troops to leave straight away (which, presumably, some of them do), then I’d have no valid option to choose from. Surely it was the intention of the pollsters to cover the whole range of possible responses. If we interpret the times as maxima, then they have done. If we interpret them as minima, then they haven’t.
I suppose a fourth option could be that the times given would be interpreted as a “closest fit” for the respondent’s actual feelings on the matter. So if I wanted the troops to leave in eight months, I’d tick six months, rather than a year. By that reasoning, we could interpret “six months” as meaning “between zero and nine months”, and “one year” as meaning “between nine months and eighteen months”, and “two years or more” as meaning “more than eighteen months”. But if that’s effectively what the question means, why the hell wouldn’t they have asked it that way in the first place? I think reading “in” as “within” is the more sensible approach.
Bunyip (rather inexplicably) quotes pollster John Zogby to support his point:
Two out of three Iraqis — and seven in 10 Sunnis — want U.S. and British forces out of Iraq in a year.
It seems to me that this quote says the opposite of what Bunyip says it says. If I said “I want you out of my house in a year”, what that means is that “When a year is up, I want my house not to have you in it”, or, in other words, “I want you to leave within a year.”
Note that the disagreement is about the 34 percent who responded “one year”. If they fall into the “within a year” camp, then they combine with the six monthers to give a total of 65.5 percent who want the forces out within a year (or 72 percent if we exclude those without an opinion). If they fall into the “at least a year” camp, then they combine with the “two or more year” respondents to make it 59 percent who want the forces to stay at least a year (or 65.1 percent if we exclude those without an opinion). I guess if we agree that the “one year” respondents might have meant either, we should probably get rid of them altogether. I mean, we can be sure that the “six month” people want the troops out within a year, and we can be sure that the “two years or more” people want them to stay at least a year. On that basis, 55.8 percent of the respondents want the troops out within a year.
If you want, you can divide the 200 “one year” respondents up between the “within a year” and “at least a year” camps. If you divide them equally, then 53.65 percent of all respondents want troops out within a year. Note that if we’re going to believe Robert Manne that two-thirds want the troops out within a year, then we need to believe that about 166 of the 200 “one year” respondents really meant “within a year”. If we’re going to believe Bunyip that two-thirds want the troops to stay at least a year, then even the support of all 200 “one year” respondents won’t quite make the quota.
So here’s the score:
Bunyip and the American Enterprise Institute: Even if we believe that every single Iraqi respondent ignored the most logical interpretation of an ambiguous question and favoured one of the less logical ones, you’re still wrong to claim that two thirds of Iraqis want the troops to remain at least another year.
Robert Manne: Your claim that two-thirds of Iraqis want the troops out within a year can only be true if over three-quarters of poll respondents favoured a particular interpretation of an ambiguous question, albeit the most logical one and the one that seems to be favoured by the man whose company conducted the poll. That’s probably not a valid assumption to make.
The truth: Probably somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of Iraqis want the troops out within a year. Which, incidentally, would be a disaster, in my opinion.
Gender Fundos
I hate to become merely the latest in a long line of blogs to comment on this, but I only found out about it this morning, via Roop Sandhu. I’m talking about Kim du Toit’s rant, The Pussification of the Western Male, in which he laments the decline of (his particular version of) American masculinity in the face of the feminist onslaught. Reading it, you get the sense that he must be, at least to some extent, taking the piss out of himself. It has the tone of a front-bar controversialist, being provocative in the hope of getting attention, and being just drunk enough not to recognize what a dickhead he’s being. Of course, that hardly makes him unique in the blogosphere. I’d certainly never bother linking to him if I didn’t think that, if you can overlook his homophobia and misogyny, there are some interesting issues involved.
To state the obvious, the feminist revolution was about enabling women to choose for themselves what role they wanted to play in society. To state the less obvious, it enabled men to do the same. When we look at the way we used to organise ourselves, it’s common to focus on the subjugation of women into domestic roles. It’s less common to acknowledge that men were subject to their own restrictions. If we’d been living in the 50s, my girlfriend would probably have had a few babies by now, and she’d have been stuck at home looking after them instead of pursuing her own music career. I, on the other hand, would be stuck in some 9 to 5 job in order to support not only the children but her as well, and I wouldn’t have had the option of either my financially underwhelming career as a jazz musician or my recent reinvention as a law student. (Unless I’d stayed single, that is, but I would have been subject to a lot of pressure to settle down).
We spend a lot of time talking up freedom, and rightly so. Who wouldn’t want to be free, after all? Surely it’s better to have all these choices, to be able to determine for ourselves what paths we want our lives to lead? I’d say yes, absolutely. But I don’t think that it’s true to say that freedom, in all cases, is going to necessarily bring happiness. For some people, it doesn’t.
I grew up in a post-feminist culture, so I’ll never really know what it was like to have my role in society laid out for me in advance. On the one hand, it sounds horrible, but then again, I wonder whether it might not have had something going for it. For instance, I’m guessing that in those days it was reasonably rare for people to drift from high school into university and then into a series of meaningless jobs, all the while just trying to figure out what they’re “supposed” to be doing, or where they’re going to fit in, or what they have to do to find happiness. The freedom to choose our own path has come with the responsibility to create, for ourselves, a good life, and that’s not always easy. Before we had the choice, we might just have lived like we lived and not thought about it too much. Now, we have to spend our whole lives wondering whether we might, in fact, be happier doing something else. For some people, that’s not a problem - they seem to latch on to a particular way of life and be happy as Larry (at least until the mid-life crisis comes along). Other people seem to spend their twenties and thirties in a state of almost constant bewilderment and confusion, with basically no idea of “what to do with their life”.
It’s probably not surprising that there’s a certain amount of nostalgia for the old ways. I think that’s what Kim is basically on about, together with people like Bettina Arndt. Their theme is, essentially, that freedom has brought misery, and that we were better off beforehand, when men were men and women were breastfeeding behind closed doors. To quote Kim:
We want more John Waynes, Robert Mitchums, Bruce Willises, and Clint Eastwoods. Never mind that it’s simplistic — we like simple, we are simple, we are men — our lives are uncomplicated, and we like it that way.
I think that’s a bit ironic, considering that he has just finished talking about the “concerted campaign to denigrate men, to reduce them to figures of fun, and to render them impotent, figuratively speaking.” Seems to me that if you want to render a man impotent, there’s no better way than to regard him as an uncomplicated simpleton who wants nothing more than to curl up in front of a Bruce Willis flick and oil his revolver. What better way to exclude him from any meaningful role in society?
I agree with Kim, though, that there has been a denigration of men going on. There are lots of TV commercials founded on the premise that men are basically hopeless, so it’s lucky that our product is so easy to use. Everybody Loves Raymond revolves around the bumbling foolishness of its central character. The women in the show might be conniving and deceitful, but at least they’re intelligent and in control. It’s Raymond’s incompetent attempts to negotiate the web of manipulation that give the programme it’s comedy.
I could go on. It seems to me that the depiction of women in movies and TV shows has changed somewhat. Even in a James Bond film, the women these days are likely to be equals or betters rather than just mannequins on which to hang wet t-shirts. Women, then, have been largely able to make themselves heard when they object to demeaning treatment. As women’s place in society has changed, so has the media’s presentation of them. Well and good. The thing is, though, the media have been much slower to adapt to the changes that men have gone through. Have a look at an ad for baby powder or nappies and see how many men you can count. Message: childrearing is still women’s work. If you think that’s just the shallow operation of the advertising industry, observe next time you’re at a party where there’s a baby being handed round from woman to woman, with the men being bypassed. If the infant does find its way into a bloke’s lap, there will be a gaggle of anxious women hanging around making sure that he supports the head properly, etc, etc, all on the assumption that, being a man, he is pretty much clueless. I would argue that, just as it’s no longer cool to assume that a woman under the bonnet of car has no idea what she’s doing, it should be likewise no longer cool to assume that a man in charge of a baby has no idea what he’s doing.
That’s off the track a bit. Here’s the point: I have no particular problem with Kim living whatever macho life he wants to lead, and I think it’s a joke to suggest that he can’t because he’s too oppressed or whatever. He can own a gun. He can drink beer. He can watch action films. He can read porn. He can chop down trees and dig holes and box and fart and belch and buy power tools and drive big cars. I’d rather he just get on with it. Instead, we get this:
I want men everywhere to going back to being Real Men. To open doors for women, to drive fast cars, to smoke cigars after a meal, to get drunk occasionally and, in the words of Col. Jeff Cooper, one of the last of the Real Men: “to ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth.”
To translate: “Not only do I want to live an old-fashioned macho life, I want everyone else to want to, too”. Not unlike Bettina, who could be paraphrased: “Not only do I want to live an old-fashioned domestic life, I want everyone else to want to, too.” In my opinion, they’re both nostalgics in that they long for an time when they didn’t have to labour under the burden of freedom and choice. And they’re both fundamentalists in that, not content with choosing a traditional life for themselves, they want everyone else to do the same.
McPetulance
McDonald’s Corp. is seeing red over its latest contribution to popular culture - a mention in a best-selling dictionary under the entry McJob.
According to Merriam-Webster Inc, publishers of America’s best-selling collegiate dictionary, “McJob,” is a phrase that has become popular shorthand for a dead-end, entry-level job.
The dictionary officially defines McJob as “a low paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement.”
The term was included in the 11th edition of the publisher’s best-selling dictionary which went on sale in July this year, much to the chagrin of the executives who run the world’s largest fast-food chain.
In an open letter published in the November 3 edition of the trade journal, Nation’s Restaurant News, McDonald’s chief executive officer Jim Cantalupo expressed his anger at the “demeaning,” definition, calling it a “slap in the face to the 12 million men and women who work hard every day in America’s 900,000 restaurants.”
He also took issue with the scholarship which the entry was based on.
“We have reviewed Merriam-Webster’s would-be proof that ‘McJob’ is part of America’s vocabulary and frankly, there isn’t much there.
“The base for the proof is an Internet search which dug up a scattering of references from assorted academics, pundits, and random news stories over a 15-year-period,” wrote Cantalupo.
Hands up who hasn’t heard and/or used the term “McJob”. I’m surprised that it’s taken this long to make it into the dictionary. Maybe Mr Cantalupo should ask some questions about why the word was accepted so readily into popular usage, rather than deal with it by issuing ridiculous denials. McDonalds was a pioneer (at least in the restaurant industry) in moving to a low-wage, low-skilled, high-turnover workforce. It was a conscious and deliberate way of increasing competitiveness. That might be defensible, but it’s not deniable. If Jim doesn’t want the jobs he offers to be synonymous with poor wages and conditions, maybe he should improve wages and conditions rather than attack the synonym. If he doesn’t intend to change the reality of his employment practices, then he should at least learn to accept with a little grace the linguistic artifacts that they leave behind.
Toothless
According to Miranda Devine, Steve Irwin (aka The Crocodile Hunter) is the latest unsuspecting innocent to have “made the deadly error of alienating Australia’s cultural establishment. […] Irwin has wrestled crocodiles, snakes and spiders, but nothing could compare with the nest of vipers he had just strayed into.”
Gosh. What does this “nest of vipers” consist of? Well, apparently the letters pages have “exploded with venom”, such as this piece of vitriol that A Bass of Sutherland spewed forth in The Daily Telegraph:
After his public comment to the effect that John Howard is the greatest prime minister this country has ever had, I no longer take him seriously as an apolitical or intelligent wildlife advocate.
Ouch. Steve must be smarting. And not only that:
A reporter from The Age in Melbourne questioned why Irwin had turned down an invitation to Bill Clinton’s presidential farewell dinner. “Does it tell us more about Steve Irwin than he might want us to know?” he wrote. Irwin had “thick skin”, the article went on to say. “There’s no getting through to the heart or the soul. And let’s not make the mistake of going for the head.”
She didn’t mention that the article in question (which doesn’t seem to be online) was a review of Steve being interviewed on Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope. Here’s an excerpt:
Clearly, a studio environment is not going to tame old Steve, who talks molto fortissimo and would clearly rather be up to his pecs in a swamp swarming with scaly, toothsome friends than held captive by the inquiring exactitude of Andrew Denton, whose teeth, although more horizontal in setting, remind me for some reason of the line “Never smile at a crocodile”. “I’m a handful on plane flights,” Steve shouts, entirely in capital letters. “You can’t hang your arm out of the window and look at the wildlife.”
Later, he discusses his wife, Terry, and his daughter’s first snakebite (”Blood pouring down her face; I was very proud of her”) and the forthcoming birth of his second child, who he hopes will be a boy. “That’s what we’re shootin’ for.” And that’s why Steve didn’t wear underpants for a year: “Gets the airflow round your testicles. Warm ones make girls, cool ones, boys.”
Denton tries some harder questions - why the Irwins have bought vast tracts of land, does he ever feel down, etc - which are dealt with, but on Steve Irwin’s terms. The land, it seems, is acquired in order to preserve it for the future of world wildlife. “Sustainable me,” says Steve.
More surprising is how he turned down an invitation to Bill Clinton’s presidential farewell dinner. “I was busy that day,” he says, maintaining those things don’t interest him. Is this genuine inverted snobbery or does it tell us more about Steve Irwin than he might want us to know? However hard Denton tries to pierce the thick skin, it remains tough, impermeable: there’s no getting through to the heart or the soul. And let’s not make the mistake of going for the head.
The bit about “going for the head” was a reference to a line of Irwin’s about snake handling. I can’t say I really get the joke. Miranda seems to suggest that Michael is suggesting that Steve is stupid. If so, it’s a non-sequitur - the rest of the article doesn’t say anything of the sort. I think that Michael was just trying to wrap up the point about the fact that Andrew, who has a record of laying interviewees bare, was unable to do the same with Steve. I think the line was a bit lame, but I don’t think it was nasty.
As for the point about Bill Clinton’s presidential dinner, Andrew didn’t point out (because it hadn’t happened then) that Steve wasn’t sufficiently uninterested in “those things” to knock back John Howard’s invitation to the George Bush garden party. According to Miranda, quoting Steve’s manager, Steve supports neither Labor nor Liberal parties. “He’s just not political. I don’t have a clue how he’s going to vote and he probably doesn’t either.” That’s fine, but it doesn’t really accord with Steve’s own reflections after he called John Howard “the greatest leader Australia has ever had and the greatest leader in the world”:
While Mr Howard was introduced to some of the animal residents, including a giant boa constrictor, Irwin told reporters: “That was straight from the heart; I’ve always believed it.
“I’ve travelled the world, I’ve been to areas of conflict, I’ve been to the Sari Club (in Bali) and there I see the Prime Minister backing it up as a fair dinkum Australian like no other prime minister has ever done for this country.”
All of which is a bit beside the point. Irwin’s entitled to his views, and he’s entitled to express them. Likewise, though, members of the public (and opinion writers) are entitled to their views about Steve Irwin. It might seem ungracious to rake over the $175,000 of public money which Steve received for his quarantine advertisements. But it’s hardly unusual for questions to be asked about exorbitant-seeming sums of government revenue heading into the pockets of celebrities (just ask Indira Naidoo). It’s hardly a character assassination. According to Miranda,
The vilification of Irwin is a textbook lesson in how anti-conservative forces combine to denounce anyone suspected of holding unorthodox (in their eyes) views.
No, Miranda. Your article is a textbook lesson in how conservative forces attempt to silence dissent. None of the attacks that you have listed constitutes anything like vilification. If Steve reckons that our current PM is the best that Australia has ever had, then he’s presenting a pretty extreme view, which deserves to be examined and questioned. He voluntarily presents himself as a public figure, and his comments have an impact. People like Robert Manne and Phillip Adams and Malcolm Fraser, who attack the views of the Prime Minister, routinely have their own views attacked, and rightly so. Has Steve Irwin been threatened? Have advertisers boycotted his TV shows? Has he been spat on in the street? Has it affected his employment prospects? So far, all that’s happened is that some people have exercised their right to free speech in response to Steve’s exercising his. Christ, Dicko from Australian Idol gets worse treatment. I notice that this evening that Steve’s new reality TV show in the US has been promoted unflinchingly in every news outlet that I’ve seen (even those supposedly in the grip of a leftist conspiracy). If you want to defend him, then by all means go ahead, but don’t do it by pretending that he’s being somehow victimised by the dark forces of the left establishment. “1930s Germany, 1950s USA and Soviet Union all over again, minus the violence”? Fuck off.
Somewhat Freer TA?
Driving back from Mildura the other day, I heard Andrew Peacock being interviewed by Monica Attard on the ABC’s Sunday Profile (no transcript, apparently, just audio). A lot of the interview involved Andrew refusing to be drawn on the areas of social policy on which he disagrees with John Howard. Apparently he doesn’t disagree enough to think it’s worthwhile discussing them. Anyway, what caught my attention was this bit about the Australia-US free trade agreement (my transcription, starts at about 15:15 on the RealAudio version):
Andrew Peacock: You’ve got to remember that the United States is very protectionist on much of its agricultural industry, and you’re bashing against deeply felt domestic concerns that are at play, not just in the administration but in the congress. You’ve got to work the separation of powers there. Working the administration is one thing; working the congress is another, and that congress was formed by the founding fathers to reflect domestic concerns - it’s one of those high profile domestic concerns, is protection on agriculture, so you’re bashing away all the time on that. We always, though, in our relationship with the US, we’ve had it through the Bush period as well, you’ll always run into a bit of a skirmish on trade from time to time. Different countries will pursue different things as they see it on a domestic basis as well - it’s a democracy, and they have to take people willingly.
[…]
What this government is now being able to achieve with the Bush administration on the free trade agreement I think is terrific. There’s a lot down the line still to be negotiated, and we’ve got agriculture on the table, but I wouldn’t like people to think that we’re going to have huge breakthroughs on agriculture, it will remain a bit of a …
Monica Attard: It won’t be a free trade agreement, will it?
Andrew Peacock: Well, you know, the Farm Bill … it will be a free trade agreement … the Farm Bill, which protects you with agriculture so much, will remain in place, irrespective of the free trade agreement, so what we can achieve on agriculture is limited. But if you didn’t get some breakthrough on agriculture, the critics, and there are always critics, will say that this is not worth anything. I think we will get some breakthroughs on agriculture, they’ll be spread over a period of time, but you don’t want to delude yourself that there is going to be a massive turnaround overnight.
Until now, I’ve always been happy to keep an open mind on the free trade agreement. I must admit, though, that I’d always assumed that it would involve … well … free trade. It seems to me that, if Andrew’s right (and you’d have to imagine that he’s in a pretty good position to know, having been Ambassador to Washington and everything), that, at the very least, “free trade agreement” is a monstrous misnomer.
Digital Samizdat
Chinese police and security agencies are thought to employ tens of thousands of specialists to patrol the internet for thought crimes, using the latest filter and trace software from American, European and Israeli firms.Sentences for perceived cyber-subversives have been ferocious. Four members of an internet group known as the “New Youth Society” arrested in 2001 for posting a call for a society based on democracy and law got sentences of eight to 10 years’ jail.
Reading this, I was wondering how these people got caught. Surely it’s possible to post anything that you like on the internet with complete anonymity? As I understand it, when the police catch a child pornographer, it’s usually because they have entrapped him by pretending to be a paedophile - I don’t think that they have the technical means to actually track him down (I can be corrected on this).
Obviously, there’s one major difference between a Chinese dissident and a kiddie-porn distributor. That is, the dissident wants his message to be read as widely as possible, so he needs to publish a website or something that a lot of people can find and access. If the public can find it, so can the authorities.
Fair enough, but what can the authorities do about it? Let’s say that a Chinese dissident publishes a website with anti-government material on it. The thought police could certainly go through the domain registry and find out who he was, and it probably wouldn’t be that long before they showed up at his house. But that assumes that he’s made no efforts to disguise his identity.
What if the dissident was to send me (a resident of a country with free speech) an email (encrypted, preferably), asking me to set up and register a website on his behalf. The Chinese secret police can’t come knocking at my door (presumably). I don’t think there’s anything that they could do to get the material actually removed from the internet. They might pressure the Australian government - it worked when the Chinese wanted to make sure their President’s address to our parliament was free of protests - but I doubt that they’d have much luck in this case.
What the Chinese government could do (as I understand it) is block access to my domain from within China, so that no-one Chinese could actually read the offending material. But that sounds like a pretty clumsy mode of censorship to me. This is digital information that we’re talking about - it can easily be distributed and replicated innumerable times. Surely there’s some way that supporters of Chinese democracy in the West could come up with to make sure that they stayed one step ahead of the censors. The material could be mirrored in a hundred different places if it had to be, and not one of them traceable back to the individual who originally posted it. Surely with all the smart, politically motivated buggers out there in the blogosphere, someone could come up with an authority-proof way of distributing this sort of information.
Gotta go, ethics exam …
Thankyou
The most detrimental external interference is that of the zealots and enthusiasts who embrace the most extreme long-distance stances with the “passionate intensity” of the “worst”. Blind loyalty for, and identification with, one side lead to the adoption of the most strident belligerency towards the other, hence intensifying the conflict and subverting dialogue and rational communication. Islamic fundamentalists and regressive brands of Arab nationalists have ironically joined forces with Christian evangelicals, Jewish fundamentalists, and ideological neoconservatives to fight their own proxy wars at the expense of moderate Palestinians and Israelis alike. Such radical apologists have inflicted serious damage and pain from their safe distance in Riyadh, Damascus, Washington, Knoxville, or Sydney demonstrating the type of intervention that no peace can survive. They also reinforce the worst misconceptions and fallacies by totally eradicating the legitimacy of one side, thereby justifying the false claims of the other that there is no peace partner, hence no peace option.
Nightmares
The faster songs were better than the slower ones, not because he played them any more skilfully, but because they offered fewer opportunities for outright musical sabotage.
Still, I’m home now …