Blacklist
For MT users running MT-Blacklist, I’d strongly recommend manually blacklisting a couple of URLs which between them have contributed about 60 comment spams to this blog over the last couple of days. I don’t think they’ve made it onto the centralized blacklist yet:
rape-stories DOT biz bestiality-pics DOT org
UPDATE: I didn’t realise how simple and painless it was to add entries to the centralized blacklist.
f you would like to submit comment spam to the MT-Blacklist Comment Spam Clearinghouse for possible inclusion to the master blacklist, please forward your Movable Type comment notification to
mtbcsc-spamsubmit at jay allen dot org
Stick that email address in your address book, and it’s a two-second process to send off a comment spam for the blacklisting pleasure of your blogging comrades.
From now on, I’ll also be importing the master blacklist file very regularly to keep the blacklist up to date, a process which is also easier and less painful than I might have imagined.
Gay Marriage etc
The Federal Government has moved to ban same-sex marriages despite warnings from Coalition MPs that it could cause an electoral backlash and cost at least one seat.
[…]
Wary of giving the Coalition any political advantage, the Labor Party announced it would support the changes to the Marriage Act, although Labor MPs are still to debate the issue.
Q1: I’m a person who thinks that gay couples should have all the same rights as heterosexual couples. I live in a safe Labor seat. How can I vote so as to make a difference on this issue?
Q2: If the answer to Q1 is that no voting decision on my part can possibly make any difference even in combination with a large number of other people who feel the same, then does that signify that there’s something badly wrong with our system of democracy?
Wedging Wankers
My eagerness to see the back of John Howard is tempered by the cynical conviction that politics in this country, without major changes to the electoral system, is irreparably broken. It’s been encouraging to see Mark Latham emerge as an alternative PM; it’s been equally discouraging to that he’s done so largely by means of Howard-style opportunism:
The Opposition yesterday stirred fears that the Federal Government’s $3000 lump sum maternity payment would send a signal to teenage girls to become pregnant.
Labor leader Mark Latham quoted in Parliament a 2003 cabinet submission, recently leaked, that suggested fortnightly payments rather than lump sums might be a better form of payment for teenage mothers.
While Labor argues that a fortnightly payment is better, it is also trying to “wedge” John Howard on an issue likely to touch a nerve among some conservative voters and in some working-class electorates.
But Mr Howard told Parliament the issue of teenage pregnancy was exaggerated.
The more these two try and wedge each other at the expense of the vulnerable, the more I become convinced that radical change is necessary. More to follow when I’ve had time to assemble some coherent thoughts.
Paddy & Moore
Here’s Paddy McGuinness on the Australian non-right on Michael Moore:
Moore is the hero … of those in Australia who would think themselves better educated and more cultured than the average footballer.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - if you tell these people what they want to hear, they will accept anything.
I’m putting this in not because I have that much interest in Michael Moore or Paddy McGuinness, but because it’s a nice two-paragraph example of a member of one class of people condescending to another class of people for supposedly condescending to a third class of people. According to Paddy, it’s not okay to look down on footballers, but it is okay to look down on people who like Michael Moore.
“[I]f you tell these people what they want to hear, they will accept anything.” Imagine that being written by a left-leaning columnist, about fans of a right-wing media figure (Alan Jones, say). He (the lefty columnist) would be labelled (quite rightly) as an elitist snob. Fans of left-wing media figures, though, are fair game. I’m not a fan of either Jones or Moore, but I know that there are large numbers of people who support each, and I’d think twice about dismissing either group as being stupid.
In the neo-PC world of the contemporary op-ed column, it sometimes seems as if there is only one legitimate form of snobbery, and that’s the prejudice directed against left-leaning educated urbanites.
Movable Gripes
I’m a bit bewildered by the grumbles of Robert Corr and others about the changes in Movable Type’s licensing and distribution.
I, like most others who use it, downloaded Movable Type and installed it and have been using it ever since without paying a cent. If I was sufficiently wealthy and/or virtuous, I would have made a donation, but even if I had (which I haven’t), I wouldn’t have felt that my donation entitled me to anything in particular, other than the right to appear on MT’s list of recently updated blogs, and perhaps the right to a little self-righteous satisfaction. Donation or not, I’ve been the beneficiary of a freebie for some time now, for which I’ve provided no consideration whatsoever besides a link on my sidebar (which I can’t imagine has generated great streams of internet traffic in their direction).
My guess is that Robert’s in the same position. Which is why I find it bizarre to talk about Six Apart having “betrayed” him (or me, or anyone else in a similar position). No-one is going to deprive us of the opportunity to use and keep using this tool for as long as we like. Who promised us that we would be entitled to an unlimited period of free upgrades? If the Trotts and friends decided tomorrow that they wanted to give the whole thing away and take up furniture restoring, then those of us who’ve not paid anything (and those who have paid only a minimal donation) would have nothing to complain about. It would be a bit different for TypePad users who pay a monthly subscription and have their blogs hosted centrally. But nothing SA does directly affects me or any other MT user, except insofar as it deprives us of the opportunity to sponge more off them in the future.
The most you could say about the changes is that they’re stupid from Six Apart’s point of view. Perhaps they’re making the tool less valuable than it has been in the past. If a user reckon’s that’s the case, though, then they’re (presumably) still at liberty to install older versions and keep using them just like I’m doing now. If those changes result in the dominance of MT being supplanted by different tools with a different approach, then that’s fine, it still doesn’t affect me directly. I’m inclined to think that the directors of Six Apart are probably better placed than I am, though, to make the call as to what’s best for their business. It seems to me that they’ve donated a hell of a lot of time into producing the tool which I and thousands of others use for nothing, and it’s only reasonable that they should want to start getting some return on their investment in whatever way they see fit.
It would be a different situation if, for instance, Hotmail decided to start charging for its ordinary email accounts (I understand that there’s already a premium service which you can opt to pay for in return for extra storage etc, but that’s a different thing). Although plenty of people have used Hotmail for years without directly paying for it, and they’d probably have no legal grounds for complaint if the service was withdrawn, there is a trust relationship which has been built up between Hotmail and its users. Lots of people have been (for better or worse) using a Hotmail address as their exclusive email address for years, and they’ve done so on the well-grounded belief that the service is going to continue in one form or another without them having to cough up for it.
But when MT starts charging, it doesn’t deprive me of their service. They can only charge for upgrades, because I’ve got their software running quite happily on my server, and I can continue to keep it running as long as I like. They can deprive me of a free upgrade path, but I don’t regard that as being any betrayal of trust.
Gerard & Jones
Gerard Henderson weighs in on Alan Jones and his supposed absence of any power. Gerard defines “power” rather narrowly:
The concept of power, when used in relation to democratic pluralistic societies, is clearly a misnomer. […]
[It] is properly associated with rulers who can do what they want to do. As in totalitarian and authoritarian regimes and military dictatorships.
Well, if he’s decided that there’s no such thing as power in democratic societies, then I suppose that rather pre-empts his conclusion that Alan Jones doesn’t have any. In arguing for Jones’ relative political impotence, though, he asserts that:
At the most, Jones has an influence over about five marginal seats in western and south-western Sydney.
And that:
Jones had some influence on the extent of Liberal victories in western and south-western Sydney in 1996 when Howard defeated Paul Keating. But it is likely that the Liberals would have won without Jones.
All of which seems to point to a pretty significant degree of what most of us regard as power. According to Gerard, it’s only “likely” that the Liberals would have won in 1996 without Jones, therefore Jones wields no power.
To be fair to Gerard, his argument based on bizarre semantics (his insistence that “influence” be substituted for “power” when talking about people like Jones) rather than actually playing down Jones’ place in the political spectrum (which is just as well, since he does a pretty good job of playing it up). It’s more a case of “Here’s what Jones wields, but it’s not power”, rather than “Jones wields nothing”. All in all, though, his article seems to credit Jones with a lot more importance than do Tim, Geoff, Brian and others who subscribe to the “Jones’ power is just an invention of paranoid politicians” school (as discussed below).
Jones and the Battlers
Tim Dunlop and Geoff Honnor seem to agree with Brian Toohey’s SMH article about the Jones-Flint-Howard affair (in what, by the standards of the blogosphere, could be regarded as a consensus). I don’t live in Sydney, and I don’t think that I’ve ever listened to Alan Jones’ radio programme, so each of the above three commentators is in a better position than I am to analyse the political system that revolves around Jones’ breakfast show. I’ve had my own (mis-?)apprehensions about the power of the shock jocks, though, which are inconsistent to some extent with what I’ve learned from Brian’s piece, particularly this bit:
Although he rates well, Jones has only about 13-14 per cent of the Sydney listening audience at breakfast. Far fewer are likely to be swinging voters.
Or, in Geoff’s words:
Jones speaks to around 11% of Sydney’s radio audience every morning. They are largely elderly, conservative and are about as attracted to the notion of “swinging votes” as they are to the notion of “swinging sex.” This mob would vote for an old right hand boot if Jones instructed them so to do and - given the uncertain eyesight of many of them - probably have. But to look at it in another way, Jones misses out on 89% of the Sydney radio audience every day.
Norman dissents from that position in Geoff’s comments:
A significant proportion of his listeners [who represent an even more significant proportion of the small but vital category of readily “swingable” voters] are loyal to his idiosyncratic, ever changing positions.
This accords a bit more with my (admittedly uninformed) understanding. I’m not sure what the evidence is about the proportion of Jones’ listenership who are swinging voters. I suspect that there’s a degree of subjectivity about the claim that they’re all elderly blue-bloods who spend their retirement crocheting life-size John Howard action figures. Maybe it’s true, but it would surprise me if it was, if only on the basis that talkback radio (and tabloid journalism generally) is usually a bit wider in its appeal. Importantly, I would also have imagined that swinging voters were over-represented among the listenership, for reasons that I’ll explain.
There was a study into the results of the 1996 Queensland election (the reference for which I’ll look up if anyone’s interested), which had some far-reaching conclusions for the conduct of politics in Australia. If you remember, it was the election where Pauline Hanson’s One Nation won a whole swag of seats and put the frighteners on major parties state and federal, with the result that they were soon scrambling over each other to implement her policies. Anyway, the study analysed the results across wards and electorates and concluded that Pauline’s victory was handed to her by a “blue collar revolt”. That is to say, people from the former working class, made redundant by the economic reforms of the Hawke-Keating period, and understandably pissed off about it, gave the ALP the arse in large numbers and turned to Pauline Hanson as the alternative.
All of which is pretty old news. When people are doing it tough for one reason or another, a simple and effective allocation of blame is an attractive commodity. Pauline offered it, and lots of former manual workers, who had found themselves unexpectedly on the scrap heap, bought it. It’s to their credit that they only gave her one term, but that’s beside the point.
The point, if you haven’t guessed, is that the shock jocks offer a similar commodity, so it would surprise me if they weren’t popular amongst this class of former-blue-collars (who, for the sake of brevity, we’ll call “Howard’s Battlers”, since that’s the title that they inherited when he started trying to woo them away from Pauline), for the same reason that Pauline was popular.
If that was true, it would mean that there was a decent bunch of swinging voters tuning into Alan Jones et al. More importantly, though, would be the fact that Howard’s Battlers tend to be concentrated in former working-class areas, which can then effectively become swinging electorates.
I know that I’m drawing a pretty long bow with a paucity of evidence, and I’ll be happy enough to concede if I’m shown to be wrong, but if I was John Howard looking at Pauline’s success in 96 and wondering how I might best communicate with that dangerous concentration of disaffected voters shorn of their party allegiances, to whom Pauline’s policies obviously spoke loudly, I might have come to the conclusion that the path of least resistance was through Jones and Laws (maybe Jones in particular, who has rugby league credentials to go with his headkicker credentials). Even if it’s no longer true that there are flocks of redundant seamstresses and fitters and turners looking for a convenient scapegoat (and Pauline’s lack of recent success may suggest that it was a short-lived phenomenon), might not a PM with memories of 1996 still be nervous about a subset of Jones’ listenership heading for a small number of polling booths and combining to cost him seats? The absolute numbers need not even be that large, provided that they’re concentrated in seats which are already a bit marginal.
This is part of a wider objection I have to our electoral system, which is that small numbers of people with similar views who happen to live in close proximity to each other can wield much more political clout than much larger numbers of people with similar views who happen to be geographically dispersed. Next time Jo wants to watch another double episode of Sex in the City, I might tackle that one in more detail …
Crawler Crawling
One of the things that has been diverting me from blogging has been the task of designing this website for the Marinucci Trio, that great jazz band from Melbourne. Check it out, but be kind with your critiques.
(If one can’t indulge in a bit of constructive Google bombing on one’s own website for the sake of self-promotion, what can one indulge in?)