(Edit: overall, I'm happyish with this post, but I felt I could do a better summary:)
I am only concerned with how I vote, and on that front, I am only concerned with what the referendum says, though I'm taking in people's opinions about what it says.
I made a bunch of mistakes in my first post, I wrote it in one sitting which is very rare for me these days. I can defend that post though, if I had my time again, I would have spent less words on the design principles for the Voice. My interpretation of what the referendum says now boils down to:
"The Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia shall have the power to decide who and what the constitutionally recognized voice of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are and is. The Parliament will have ultimate say on what matters concern Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders."
Or even briefer: The Aboriginal Voice to Parliament, belongs to Parliament.
It's this interpretation of the referendum, that I predominantly will vote no to. I cannot in good conscience deprive the Indigenous people, whose sovereignty I already recognize, of that sovereignty. There then is a secondary reason, and that is that due to poor wording, our constitution will be open to interpretation as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders having ceded their sovereignty as "the First People of Australia" that wording is too risky to sit right with me.
The common theme of every reason to vote yes that I have found and been exposed to, can I feel be fairly characterised as an "intentional fallacy"
the insistence that the ultimate meaning of an expression must be consistent with the intention of the person from whom the communication originated (e.g. a work of fiction that is widely received as a blatant allegory must necessarily not be regarded as such if the author intended it not to be so). ~ Wikipedia summary, full explanation here.
It is my opinion that while the High Court of Australia is likely to consider the context in which the new law was written, ultimately will consider what the words say, if a future government legislates the Voice to be made up of political appointees.
My gut instinct from my first reading of the referendum, that this was a package deal, stands - recognition will fail because it comes bundled with the voice body. I have changed my opinion on whether a body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders should be enshrined in the constitution at all. I can't see a feasible way to do it without enshrining Parliament and the Commonwealth's power over it.
Tony Benn's 5 questions for power I find a useful framework for evaluating the contents of the referendum. That is why I think an ultimate autopsy of this referendum needs to go back to the Uluru Statement of the Hearts call for a "First Nations Voice to be enshrined in the constitution" an Australia with buyers remorse will not be able to undo the Voice without a referendum, and the Voice is howthe Australian Constitution recognises First Nations people (without sovereignty) meaning we would need a question to scrap the voice, and a question to recognize the Indigenous in some other way, making for complicated "yes, no" campaigns, "no, yes" campaigns, "yes, yes" campaigns and "no, no" campaigns.
Paling in relevance to the content of referendum, between my first post and this, I read the Uluru Statement from the Heart - which close to fully explained to me how we got here. I think we got here to the wording of this referendum with something Frankie Boyle referred to as Co-Pilot syndrome on BBC light-entertainment show "Taskmaster", that is, though I can't read minds - the draft wording of the referendum came out and was endorsed, despite being scrubbed of all suggestion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty, because so much had been invested just to get there. A phrase mentioned repeatedly to me was "it's not ideal" my interpretation remains that the proposed law is "bad".
TL;DR
I did further research in an attempt to inform myself, and have significantly updated what I think the referendum says/means.
I'm also grateful that I had friends present their reasons for voting yes. Down the bottom of this post, I go on a bit of a rant about my frustrations with the politics of the times, and I want to say, none of my friends closely resemble the "fools and fanatics" I am ranting about, though they may incidentally align.
Speaking candidly, I am as yet, to come across a good reason to vote yes in the referendum, and I make my case below as to why I haven't. The yes campaign is the only campaign that actually need to furnish a reason to vote for them.
There's time remaining, and if I find that good argument, I will commit myself now to sharing it, but as yet, I don't have it.
I am less confident now than four days ago, that the good argument exists. My present impression is the Yes campaign is based entirely upon everything but the content of the referendum.
Preramble to the Update on the State of the Sentiment of the Lay Voter on the Referendum to Amend the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia.
I have been unable to source the artist & writer that created this image, due to the sloppiness and callousness of those who shared it before me.
The past, I don't know, at least 3 days have been a mixed bag for me. My mind has certainly been occupied by the central question of Australia's forthcoming referendum: "Am I an asshole?"
It would be nice if it were as simple as many people make out. For example this situation from 1994:
If in 1994 you were the kind of person who was all like "Um, that's not the official Australian flag, and she is representing Australia in an official capacity hnnnnnnnnnnnnn..." then you are an arsehole for denying someone self expression and a host of other reasons. Simple, and clear cut.
Unfortunately, there's another kind of arsehole that has one standard for the above situation, and another for things like statues of Christopher Columbus, the Confederate Flag etc. the situation becomes more complicated, and you can be a different kind of arsehole that is incidentally correct on the easiest cases of self expression - those cases that you happen to like.
"We hardly find any persons of good sense save those who agree with us." ~ Francois de La Rouchefoucauld McFancyPants describing another kind of arsehole.
Unfortunately, with this referendum it's not as simple as if you vote "no" you are an arsehole, though it's likely a bunch of people will think you are.
There's at least two types of arsehole's out there. There's a "fuck you" kind of arsehole, and a "okay you asked for it" arsehole. After hearing some arguments for voting yes, and bending my mind like a pretzel looking at the contents of the referendum for sufficient reason to vote yes, I am still inclined to believe that this referendum carries a greater risk of "okay you asked for it" by voting yes, than a "fuck you" by voting no.
Where the left has degraded itself, in my opinion, has been its embrace of double standards and rejection of universalism. That is the most common theme of bad ideas originating from left-wing identifying people I come across. Bad ideas like ad hominem fallacies, slippery slope fallacies, all-or-nothing thinking, affirming the consequent, appeals to emotion, conspiracy theories, revelation as sound epistemology and an abundant overconfidence in their abilities to read people's minds. etc.
I had a brief exchange of messages with my sister who hasn't followed along, and she shared with me her impression on the ground, that the referendum was most likely going to fail, but for none of the reasons I was leaning towards no. "The discourse" isn't apparently, thinking like I do.
Australian Referendums make Thomas-Fucking-Jeffersons of Us All.
The amendment process crafted during the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention was, according to The Federalist No. 43, designed to establish a balance between pliancy and rigidity~ from wikipedia. IMO Australia's process is imbalanced toward rigidity.
I've seen Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" that depicts the Lincoln Administrations campaign to pass the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery in the United States. While it is no trivial thing to amend the US constitution, it seems a lot easier than Australia's referendum process - which requires a vote that only passes with a "double majority" which is a majority of the states and territories need to get a majority "yes" vote.
Contrasting the two systems for changing a nation state's constitution, I'm now increasingly of the opinion that Australia needs a referendum to change the process by which we alter our constitution.
Under the US system, amendments to the constitution can be made entirely by members of legislative bodies. Career politicians and legislators with staff with expertise to read proposed amendments and hash out what it means. The US system is much closer to deliberative democracy than Australia's referendum process. Granted, there are characters in US politics like Margery Taylor Green who think the moon is made out of cheese and it's coming for your guns and your babies and your babies guns or whatever.
But the Australian system makes a fucking founding father out of me when they call a referendum.
I do not take that civic duty lightly.
They also make a founding father out of my anti-vax friend, my young-earth creationist friends, my crypto-bro friends, my antifa friends, they make a founding father out of the people who went panic buying-hording toilet paper, pasta and lentils.
I care about the content of this referendum, and its lasting repercussions. Caring about that, I really just care how I vote, because I have to live with my own conscious.
Recognizing how small my vote is, even how small my influence is that my reasoning could persuade others to vote contrary to me, my ability to say "don't blame me, I voted for Kodos." is of tremendous import, in any vote I can participate in, because I have to live with myself.
I'm not a legislator with access to constitutional legal scholars to inform me. Unlike a deliberative democracy process, it's on me to try and inform my own vote. There's no judge and no legal counsel. Just a million arseholes each with their own opinions.
I elect, except when absent, people to represent me in the legislative branch. Fortunately, I don't have to accurately anticipate future legal challenges to the amended constitution and the likely High Court of Australia's opinions on them, to cast a vote that I can live with.
Some Simplifiers
Because of the Australian referendum system, requiring a double majority of lay voters to approve a change to the constitution, it needs must be incumbent upon whoever words a referendum that it be both clear and precise. The simplest way to cast a vote in good conscious, is to read the content of the referendum and gauge your confidence that you understand what it says.
If you read the words, and couldn't explain to a six year old what they mean with any justified confidence. You vote no. For any Australian referendum. Ever. I basically covered this in my last post on the subject, so just remember - tie goes to the status quo/if in doubt don't.
A second simplifying rule is to actually draw upon the hive mind. By this, the foundational rule is: "people generally lead with their best argument." A prosecutor doesn't begin their case in a murder trial be presenting the defendants cryptic fb post "omg, I feel sick" as exhibit A, when they have footage of the defendant murdering someone, followed by their prints on the murder weapon.
A very big data set that I believe replicates the rule, is 15+ years of call in show "The Atheist Experience" (ASX) where mostly theists call in to present their reasons for believing in a god, usually the Christian god, frequently Allah, occasionally the Pantheist god or some other wishy washy content.
What never fucking happens, is someone calling in and the hosts of the week asking "okay tell us why you believe in god?" and the caller says "Because the bible says..." and the hosts interrupt with "why should we care what the bible says" and here's the part that never happens the caller says "oh right, well that's my weakest reason, let me make a cosmological argument..." that. never. happens. What happens is the caller usually says with confusion "but the bible is the word of God?" and if you feel callers who are general members of the public with no particular qualifications beyond expertise on what they think, the same is true of professional debates between Atheist Sceptics and Theologians and members of the priest class. You generally don't have to listen beyond the opening statements to determine if the side with the burden of proof (Theists) have any good arguments at all.
Relevant to Australia's referendum debate, is that if you haven't heard a good argument from the yes campaign (who for me, carries the burden of proving I should vote yes) yet, then I can adjust my confidence upward, that a good and sufficient reason to vote yes does not exist.
I'll share my thoughts on the arguments I've heard thus far, just as a simple example here's an op-ed piece by Geoffrey Robertson:
Headline: If the No wins, the world will think we’re racist anyway
Excerpt: It will also open Australia up to charges of hypocrisy when its government complains of China’s discrimination against Uyghurs.
This is a bad-terrible reason to vote yes, made by a highly intelligent, highly qualified public figure. That reassures me, that the Yes campaign do not have a compelling reason I should vote yes. Like why the fuck would you argue something as tenuous as "think of the Uyghurs" as if Xi is going to say "yabba dabba doo" and crank up his oppression if this referendum fails.
but first let's talk about things I fucked up early on:
Uninformed, Misinformed, Stupid - I made mistakes.
Least impactful first. When I read the contents of the referendum, which I didn't like in terms of the language employed, I placed the blame on botching what could have been a referendum that recognized Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders and passed - something I wish to see happen - squarely on the ALP, the presiding government.
A friend made the argument that Indigenous Australians had asked for this referendum, and this is what they want, and that is why I should vote yes. I committed myself in my response to inform myself of the consultation process.
My impression of events has now completely changed and I feel even if only to myself, by being uninformed, I embarrassingly misrepresented who was responsible for this referendum. I was completely ignorant as to the contents of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart which called for enshrinement of the First Nations Voice in the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia.
PM Anthony Albanese is still responsible for translating this call to the referendum we have, but he is ultimately responsible for his commitment to listen to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
Coming to understand this, has no real impact on my decision making process, but it relieved all my frustration and even anger at the ALP as I now understand why we are having a referendum and why pretty much the only detail it specifies is what the body is to be called. Much of my own negative emotions dissipated. because understanding what happened made sense out of how we got here.
The more impactful thing I have come to understand through informing myself, is the contents of the referendum and why acknowledging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders comes packaged with "The Voice".
My initial take was skewed by memories of the '99 referendum, which had two questions, only the question regarding the constitutional preamble was relevant to recognizing Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders, and on my initial read of this coming referendum I really didn't understand why it was a package deal.
The key for me, was scrutinizing the word "in" as in "in recognition" and even the punctuation ":" initially I had thought that the first sentence of the proposed law was the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders as pre-existing the Commonwealth of Australia, and then there were 3 (iii) lines that detailed the creation of "the Voice" body, which I treated almost as a non-sequitur.
I was wrong in my initial reading, and only picked it up by reading the Uluru Statement of The Heart, which was only a result of having friends engage me.
The Voice is the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders, this change to the constitution does not simply recognize the indigenous peoples, it specifies how they are recognized. Like "we recognize Steve is coming to dinner by the place we set at the table for him."
Taking the referendum in isolation, it was hard for me to parse that it says "We recognize them through the provision of this body."
It's most impactful, because for me this packaging would be ground zero for conducting the autopsy on a failed referendum, and more to the point failure to recognize Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders in the first 122+ years of the Commonwealth of Australia. I'm currently of the opinion that this process most likely failed at the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, I'll get to that later.
Scrubbed of any suggestion of sovereignty.
Hearing reasons from friends to vote yes, focused my attention on the acknowledgement aspect, previously and I assume it comes through in my last post, most of my attention was on the words contained in i, ii, iii.
My first sticking point was capital "A" "Australia" because I'm a fucking unbearable stickler, and I was concerned the words "First Peoples of Australia" was treating Australia the nation as synonymous with Terra Australis the land mass, or "Country" as my interest in Aboriginal philosophy and religion understands it, such that it would be open to interpretation as a backdoor way to steal sovereignty for the Commonwealth and make subjects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
Anyway, long tedious story short, I'm 100% confident that given the definitions in 2B of the constitution that "Australia" in the referendum refers to geography, not the Commonwealth of Australia, and this is a mere example of how the wording is "not ideal" rather than bad - in this example only.
This also had me scrutinize the above mentioned "in" and ":" to actually for the first time understand overall what the law is saying...and I got curious as to "First Peoples" as in, why is that capitalized? What's the significance.
Because there's two big changes to the language in the long process leading up to this referendum that near as I can determine came quite late in the process. "First Nations" becomes "First Peoples" and "First Nations Voice" becomes the only specific detail in the referendum: "The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice"
This had me go and inform myself of the referendum's timeline - where did it come from and what is the significance?
Well, I couldn't quite figure out how the wording came to be, Albo announced the draft wording of the referendum on 30th of July, 2022 and that wording has not changed in any significant way from what's on the referendum. The wording has been endorsed by the referendum committee so, there is that. (*edit, I should also mention that the two polls conducted by Ipsos and Yougov that are the basis for 80% of indigenous voters support... were conducted after the draft words were released. Which checks out, however the core of my position that only the contents of the referendum matter, belabour me to make the point it is more accurate to say polls indicate 80% support what they think the referendum says. Like 80% of Democrat voters in 2008 approved of what they think "Change we can believe in" means. Then discovered over the next 8 years what that meant and switched their vote to Bernie Sanders or Trump.)
But that near as I can tell, is where all the names appear for the first time. The Uluru Statement from the Heart for example states:
We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution.
Now it is called "The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice" no "The First Nations Voice" for which I am speculating, they got some advice that the High Court would have too much fun, if the constitution acknowledged sovereign nations and sovereign people prior to the foundation of the British Colonies that then became the Commonwealth of Australia.
Similarly, we get this change from recognizing "First Nations" to "First Peoples" which explains the capitalization, again, it probably being advised that our constitution acknowledge no sovereignty of these people, but I am left unsure as to what "First Peoples" capitalized, means. It's certainly a-historical to suggest that they were the first people to be recognized by the Commonwealth of Australia. My impression of history is that Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders were among the last to be recognized by the Commonwealth.
Grammatically, the capitalization means "First Peoples" reads as a brand, like "Qantas" or "Channel Seven" or "The Grand Old Party" which the Republican party of the US call themselves, even though the Democratic Party is older. It certainly implies, just as the historical method tells us, that Aboriginals and Torres Straight Islanders were in Terra Australis first, but falls short of actually stating that, being grammatically akin to "In Recognition of The Republican Party of the United States is also known as The Grand Old Party:" near as I can determine.
This though is just the tip of the iceberg.
For me - The All Important "May/Shall" distinction
When I noticed none of my friends were addressing my concerns with the content of the referendum, dealing exclusively with peripheral arguments, I inspired myself to do further due diligence and try and search google for anything that indicated that the language was actually clear and precise and that I am subsequently, just a doofus.
Nothing has changed with words like "representations" usually in a legal context, it appears "representation" refers to something like a legal council, it remains unclear what does and doesn't constitute a "representation" though.
But pretty much everything is moot, because of the word "may" as distinct from "shall". That I did get clarity from a google search. "May" in contracts generally means it is discretionary.
I think the intention of the wording is to emphasise that the Voice's "representations" are non-binding, as in they don't have veto right, or legislative power on matters that concern Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders.
As it is worded in the referendum, it reads as the Australian Parliament and Executive Government are not constitutionally bound to receive those "representations", they don't have to answer the phone or return calls, open mail, let Voice members on the premises, or allow them to make submissions in policy discussions.
For me, I've been following via email updates from Adrian Burragubba, Wangan and Jagalingou peoples opposition to the Adani Coalmine, the precise kind of issue a body like the Voice is intended to be could make a big impact. I'm not 100% on the details despite the email updates I receive, but my impression is that the opposition lost their legal challenges to overturn Adani's approval to build a mine and other necessary infrastructure, and the strategy changed to peaceful protests obstructing Adani's attempts to build the coalmine, like unending ceremonies on crucial bits of land and stuff.
That's all to say, that even though I'm aligned with resisting Adani's coalmine, and generally any further investment in coal that is not directly reducing the environmental impact of burning coal, AND that I would vote yes to a referendum question that the constitution stipulate "We shall not touch a company as shady as Adani with a 500km pole" in a heartbeat, I was actually thinking if the wording of the referendum allows a new body an effective filibuster option because it would allow, for example a 365 day long ceremony to take place on the floor of the lower house.
In other words, does the discretionary "may" go both ways, where delegates of the Voice staging disruptive protests can appeal to "the constitution says we may make representations." And my estimation is "no" they could be ejected, or refused entrance because iii pretty UNclearly stipulates:
the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.
Incidentally, my overall impression of arguments for the "yes" vote, are all based on what they think (iii) says and not what it actually says. (iii) is the big blotch, nobody seems to want to talk about.
I think, the words "subject to this Constitution" means nothing can override i and ii, which is that they can't rename the Voice without another referendum, and they can't change the powers of the Voice so they can make binding "representations" or guarantee their representations will be acknowledged. The discretion as to whether "representations" are received at all, lie with the Parliament.
Unintended Consequences and the Future Hypothetical Voice of a Coalition Majority Government
The short term consequences of passing this referendum, are inconsequential to the point of being almost unworthy of consideration. I'll expand on that later. Suffice to say, the government of the day will most likely pass legislation implementing the Voice as intended by the long consultation process you can look at an info graphic here.
On yes campaign website Yes23.com.au/vote_yes one of their arguments reads as:
Protecting the Voice from politics and bureaucrats by putting it in the constitution, giving it the security it needs to provide meaningful and honest advice.
And by my lay, determination. This is straight up about as opposite of what the referendum does as it gets.
My lay opinion of what the referendum actually says in plain language is:
i) There will be a body that must at all times be called THE Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. (THE Voice)
ii) They can speak, but Parliament and the Executive Government doesn't ever have to listen. ("may")
iii) Parliament gets to say what THE Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice IS.
What I cannot see excluded from this wording, is a future Coalition government getting the political clout to change the legislation such that the Voice's budget is gutted and it is composed of political appointees. Such a body, would be constitutionally recognized as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.
The Voice will always be vulnerable to being unpopular with the Australian public. This is somewhat of a protection against a likely outcome, for any public institution, of becoming ideologically captured or otherwise corrupted. Like, if the Voice somehow becomes tedious raging flat-earthers, Parliament could unanimously decide to end the term of the current incumbent representatives and replace them with white academic appointees or even lobbyists from the mining industry who would then be the constitutionally recognized voice of Indigenous Australia.
I had people argue that I need to largely consider the symbolic value of this bureaucratic body, and largely ignore what this bureaucratic body is. To which I say, I am. And by my honest attempts to understand, I can see it backfiring in a major way to enshrine this in the constitution.
Nothing in the constitution prevents Parliament from dispossessing the Voice of its assets and replacing it with a single underfunded political appointee who can afford to hold the position by virtue of the generous wages he receives from his main employer - the Australian Economic Group for the Promotion of Agriculture and Mining, who will be able to say, by enshrinement of the constitution that as The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice "fuck the reef."
How likely this extreme outcome is, I would put at very unlikely. More likely is some other way to undermine the Voice that can be legislated quietly. For example, the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Act was legislated loudly, and one of the situations a well designed and protected Voice could have I'm sure, improved, whereas the 2012 Stronger Futures Policy was legislated relatively quietly.
Given that this FUCKING REFERENDUM struggles to get more attention in the media than sports and property sales, I think a future Coalition government would be able to gut the Voice under this referendum with nothing more than a few deluded intelligencia writing duelling op-eds for page ten of the local newspapers.
A lay guy's tier list for the Yes Campaign Arguments
Yes23.com.au/vote_yes lists the following broad bullet point reasons for voting yes.
Recognising
Listening
Protecting
Over 80%
That last one refers to the broad consensus and is a reiteration, or quality control statement of the "Listening" argument, it's the websites words not mine. Let me see if it complies with "strongest argument first" heuristic. I'm going to rank them on a power-level tier list, and should they conform to a fallacy I'll, as a lay sceptic, denote the fallacy.
ALWAYS KEEP IN MIND THE FALLACY FALLACY, JUST BECAUSE AN ARGUMENT IS MADE BADLY, DOESN'T MAKE THE CONCLUSION INCORRECT.
Recognising and respecting 65,000 years of Indigenous culture for the first time in Australia’s 122-year-old constitution.
I rank this argument C-tier, it's hard to diagnose, because it is for example a true dilemma that "yes" will be the first time in 122 years. The referendum says nothing about respect however, that part is a false dilemma if you are arguing that a failed referendum therefore means the public don't recognise and don't respect 65,000 years of Indigenous culture. There are more ways to do this than just voting "yes" on the referendum. I rank this as high as C-tier because recognising and respecting Indigenous culture is a good thing to want to do. The question is, does this referendum actually accomplish that? For which this actually isn't an argument at all. Just an assertion. It deserves it's C rating because it accurately reflects the likely short term interpretation of the significance of the referendum. For reference, compare the perceived significance of Obama's election in 2008 relative to it's perceived significance in 2015, 2020 etc. Or a more recent example, the perceived significance of the Matilda's advancing past the group stage in the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup, and the perceived significance of the Matilda's performance in the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup after being eliminated by the Lionesses.
Listening to advice from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people about matters that affect their lives, so governments make better decisions.
I rank this D-tier, it would be a good argument, if this was what the referendum said. I actually don't know what the fallacy is, when the premises of the argument are just wrong. Upon consideration, this D-tier argument is definitely an intentional fallacy and a straw man fallacy, it is "refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction." This is an argument for the Voice the ALP plans to legislate should the referendum pass, as distinct from what is actually under discussion, which is the content of the referendum people will vote yes or no on.
People need to fucking understand that the High Court won't be able to call Anthony Albanese to testify "what he meant" when the constitution says "on matters relating to..." nor should they, because they actually need to read the minds of millions of voters and try and figure out what they meant when they voted yes to the wording of the referendum. Only the words will be enshrined in the constitution, not what the authors intended them to mean.
Protecting the Voice from politics and bureaucrats by putting it in the constitution, giving it the security it needs to provide meaningful and honest advice.
F-tier, and if there was a lower tier, it would go there. This is absolutely a straw man, because the referendum, if anything at all, stipulates the opposite. This is misinformation, the wording of the referendum all stinks of stripping the Voice of all security bar its existence and name. It's ability to provide meaningful and honest advice is undermined by "may" and the entirety of iii gives Parliament the right to define it's powers composition etc.
Over 80% of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community support this proposal. It has been designed and agreed on by Indigenous leaders over many decades.
F-tier again, but actually not as bad as the previous reason. It is, at least, likely factually correct, I certainly have no reason to disbelieve the claims. It is however a bad reason. It is an Argumentum Ad Popularim, it also reads as a Fait Accompli and I do think it explains the present situation as an escalation of commitment.
It does support an argument for listening...if the gap between what is and what was intended were not an issue. It is certainly necessary for me to vote yes, that somebody wants the change to take place, but it is not a sufficient reason to vote yes, because in general, we don't just give people what they want.
This last one also is potentially a straw man fallacy because for me at least it is indeterminate whether at some point in the process the content of the referendum went from the proposal 80% support to something else. I will assume it's 80% support the final wording of the referendum and not everything up to the draft wording of the referendum. (*edit, this assumption appears correct.)
Precise language for me demands the reason says "...community support what they think this proposal is." That somewhere in the crucial 20% that don't support might be all of the respondents that scrutinized the wording and thought about it, rather than assuming it basically says what the Uluru Statement from the Heart called for.
All The Yes Campaign Arguments Are Bad Arguments
When we listen to people about the decisions that affect them, we get better results. For the past 250 years, we haven’t properly listened to the people who have been here for 65,000. It’s time we did. ~ Yes23.
I can agree with everything above, and vote no. A lack of listening will also likely be why this referendum fails.
I'm agnostic as to whether a good reason to vote yes exists and I just haven't heard it yet. I fully acknowledge that people are and can be persuaded by bad arguments. I'm not confident in my ability to interpret legalese, I am confident in my ability to spot the bad arguments I know, and crucially the no campaign has no burden to provide arguments at all.
What I will say, is that from one speaker for the "no" position I read, though I disagreed with much she said, had better arguments than any I have seen for "yes" and I am looking actively, for a reason to vote yes, because it would be nice to recognise the Indigenous people of Terra Australis in Australia's constitution.
So here's some more that aren't on Yes23's short list:
There are already lobby groups that can make representations to Parliament and the Executive Government, and they are privately funded, often by economic rents so where's the harm in creating a permanent publicly funded lobby for Indigenous voices?
I rate this C-tier, because I made it to myself. It falls down on two-wrongs making a right. It's a very cynical argument that doesn't get me over the line. It is bad that lobbying undermines democracy and promotes oligarchy. From all the research I've seen, cashed up lobbyists can have more impact on policy without a vote than voters do.
The thing is, enshrining what may in practice be, a lobby group in the constitution creates a permanent condition. To be swayed by this argument, one has to be a pessimist that an Indigenous Voice will never become redundant, never fulfil its mission. That it is still necessary even when there are elected Indigenous People serving in Parliament, that it will still be necessary after a Truth and Treaty process, that it will be necessary even with other indigenous bodies making representations. This argument can, but shouldn't persuade anyone.
It's not about you or what you want.
This is just a reiteration of 80% of the community supports..., and there's been a lot of consultation. All the iterations I've heard are F-tier. I know, people making it have double standards, like if I were to ask them if they found Justice Bryan Kavanaugh's testimony that he was really really upset that an investigation into allegations of sexual assault might jeopardize his confirmation to SCOTUS compelling, they would of course say that that's different because "power" AND an unflattering comparison and I understand why these concepts are hard to parse.
Too many people agree with the statement: "The only remedy for past discrimination is present discrimination." I disagree, discrimination of the kind intended, needs to just stop.
The people who want this, for the most part, have their own vote. It is the unfortunate reality of the Australian process that if you want something put in the constitution, until such time as I die, you've involved me. What I'm hearing, is that the Indigenous Community want something in the constitution and subsequently they need a referendum and they need people like me to vote yes.
What I feel I am witnessing, is a large scale demonstration of Francois de La Rocheafoucald's Maxim:
"One must listen if one wishes to be listened to." ~ A No Doubt Infuriating French Noble to Cite.
When the Uluru Statement of the Heart called for a First Nations Voice to be enshrined in the constitution, at that point an 80% consultation of 3.5% of the population becomes insufficient to accomplishing the goal stated. I would look at that and say "okay, that requires a double majority to vote yes to pass. The Indigenous vote won't carry by itself."
In my own experience, I was told "just vote yes" and "you're overthinking it" and "I read your piece but it’s still unclear to me what difference a Yes vote will make to your life, as a White Australian living overseas." I don't think there's malicious intent. There is definite hypocrisy in people advocating that I listen to others, being told what to do, being dismissed and being minimised through an argument from personal incredulity.
The stakeholders in a referendum, are all people present and future subject to the constitution. Where this campaign went wrong, was conceiving the stakeholders as only the people calling for the change.
As an Australian, I want more than anything, a treaty. I view Australia as a nation projected on top of an older largely unrecognized one. Having said that, I can imagine numerous treaties that could never be agreed to.
If someone wants me to recognize they have a PhD. in Anthropology, and they do, it is on me to acknowledge the fact. If they insist that the only acceptable recognition of their PhD. is that I refer to them with the title "Dr." when I don't refer to my doctors as "Dr." nor do I use titles in general, and my refusal to do so upsets them, that is on them.
Nobody would buy the idea that the only way to respect other people's belief in Catholicism, is by abstaining from red meat on Fridays, and the media doesn't not publish images of the Prophet out of respect for the tenants of Islam, it's out of fear that they can't protect people they have a duty of care to.
This F-tier argument that I should deny my own agency, acknowledging that I am not being asked to vote, I am being asked to vote yes is asking me to take responsibility for the feelings and beliefs of others, which I cannot do.
A failed referendum is not proof that society rejects you, all it proves is that society is not at your service. If your conclusion from having the Prime Minister, leader of the elected government of the Commonwealth of Australia resolve to support in entirety the Uluru Statement from the Heart, stating that he wants something "Done with, not done to" and puts forward a referendum to vote on a proposal based on what you asked for and approved in consultation with your representatives, that you don't have a voice and you don't have power, that is a denial of the facts.
We have a chance to vote on it.
This argument is D-tier, "it" being the subject of debate. It is arguing that opportunities are scarce to actually get this done, therefore hold your nose and vote yes.
It's the second time in 25 years Australian's have had an opportunity to recognize the Indigenous in the constitution, the other being the referendum on the '99 preamble, of which recognition were the few words contained to commend it.
It's D-tier, because again, it's shifting the blame. Those who proposed this referendum did not take seriously the gravity of getting the words and the timing and the process right, but I have to overlook this and be thankful for crumbs swept off the table. Okay, the wording might not be that bad, but it is not good enough to vote for.
The ALP/Albo have staked a huge amount of political capital on this. / punishing the government will punish indigenous people. / It will be a win for evil potato head.
This argument in my opinion, is so bad, that I urge people to stop making it. It is Machiavellian, and I reject this as someone who respects The Prince (and Frederick II's Anti-Machiavelli response pamphlet published by Voltaire). You should only make it to people who neither care about nor respect indigenous issues, and just care about the 2025 election.
This argument asks me to take responsibility for that which I can't. Well, I can respond, and am therefore responsible, I can do so with my vote. If it is the case, that the National Convention that produced the Uluru Statement, and all subsequent consultants and the ALP government fucked this referendum straight out the gates, to vote yes would be to not respond, and abrogate my responsibilities, instead rewarding bad and irresponsible behaviour.
If you do genuinely think that this is a good reason to vote yes, then take responsibility and defeat my objections to the content of the referendum. Deal with the words "First People" "Australia" "may" "make representations" "matters concerning" "including its composition, functions, powers and procedures."
My overall impression of yes voters, is that they do not want to talk about the contents of the referendum, suggesting they do not possess a valid argument to vote yes, and that it is not an unfair characterization of the yes campaign to describe it as "vote for the vibe."
one of the most extensive consultative processes they've ever undertaken
As distinct from "80% of the community" this point, or sub argument, I take is meant to mean quality assurance is bad because it is ultimately irrelevant. Yes, it boosts my confidence that indeed this is what the Indigenous people of Australia want. It doesn't validate those wants in totality, but I have to vote in totality because I only get yes/no.
Now, there is just the content of the referendum, and if anything defeats it or passes it, it should be literacy.
In the finance world, there is a thing called "Efficient Market Hypothesis" which basically regards the market as a hyper-efficient super computer calculating the value of things. I somewhat believe in this theory in so far as it is largely pointless to try and gain advantage in the market by reading the Wall Street Journal etc. It would be a massive fallacy to think that EMH guarantees that LTCM, Enron, The GFC, the Bitcoin collapse, the second Bitcoin collapse couldn't happen so they didn't.
Big data sets get things wrong all the time. I am generally pro consultation, but I am also very wary of consultants. In the systems engineering world, there's a principle "Garbage in, garbage out" and many consulting processes I've participated in, in my life have had us break up into groups and do craft activities and brainstorm ideas with pens on big sheets of paper and report back to the group.
I don't know what the consultation looked like. I just know that while it's something to say it was long and extensive, that gets me nowhere near where I need to be. I just need to be confident I understand what the referendum actually says, and I'm not, and I'm not convinced anyone is.
The Political Fashions of the Time are Lime Polyester Flares, Wide Collar Mustard Shirts and Corduroy Ties.
You can quit now, because I'm moving away from addressing the content of the referendum. One of my friends wrote me:
That it is susceptible to "fashion of the day" politics is a red herring in my view. That's an argument for waning into obscurity just as much as becoming a bureaucratic drag on legislation (which could be changed with the fashion).
To which I think I agree. However, in my defence, I was responding to arguments to vote yes that were short term peripheral red herrings themselves. The same friend made the ALP have staked political capital argument in the same post.
How I initially read it though, was that I was coming across as making a bad argument against the proposed first incarnation of the voice, that it reflected the fashions of the moment, and I would make that argument again in a different moment, permanently objecting on the grounds that everything was too "now".
I just want to clarify the fashion analogy, as there are generally recognized good periods of fashion - the 60s, the 80s, the 90s for example, and generally recognized bad periods of fashion - the 70s, the 00s, the 10s and now.
The political fashions of the times, even if the boomers retain an ironclad grip on power, amongst the lay public are some of the worst I can even imagine. It's a time in which I don't trust anyone to do anything regarding civil rights, because bad ideas abound.
Identity politics functionally is "ad hominem is okay", Greg Lukianoff and Johnathon Haidt have done valuable work documenting how cognitive distortions have gone main stream. The left are all about all-or-nothing thinking, catastrophising, mind-reading. We are going through a dark age, akin to the pamphleteering era that produced "the protocols of the Elders of Zion" and "The Witches Hammer"
Speaking of Haidt, he has a great rule, regarding where the fashion is to block people, protest their platforming etc:
If you want to know who's wrong, look at who shoots their dissidents.
People are taken seriously, who have picked up "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill, looked at the impact attempting to put it into practice has had on the plight of marginalised people everywhere and said "nope." Then picked up "Das Capital" by Karl Marx, looked at the impact attempting to put it into practice has had on the plight of marginalised people everywhere and said "let's give this another crack." Those people are taken seriously, and they should never be until they answer their case.
Winston Churchill said:
'Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm'
And I have watched the left go from one unmitigated catastrophe to another unmitigated catastrophe with no loss of enthusiasm and tragically for us all, have succeeded. They've been remarkable at spreading bad ideas and before you know it, people are calling Martin Luther King someone with internalized white supremacy.
Fashionable ideas that are impervious to feedback that they are wildly unpopular. While the people that adopt them tank their own mental health and diminish the mental health of others.
There's a quiet day coming, I don't know when when so many nice people who just want things to be nice ask themselves "wait a minute, are we the baddies?" and will I think, quietly forget that they used to be cheering for retrograde racist, sexist and oppressive ideas because they didn't think about it and they didn't want to discuss it because life is supposed to be simple, not complicated.
If it's difficult to accomplish things, why wouldn't we just give up?
The Inherent Risk of Arguing Badly
“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
[roll eyes] "Quoting Nietzsche? The Nazi Philosopher?" [checks out]
The short, one line play above^ is an example of the "ad hominem" fallacy. Just as I'm aware that Nietzsche has for many a disqualifying reputation, I'm aware of the bad reputation enjoyed by "keyboard warriors" who just point out fallacies on twitter/X threads.
See my thing about fallacies, is that they are demonstrable. It's easy. Stalin says "2+2=4" Stalin is bad, therefore 2+2 does not = 4. That's clearly false, and it's false because 2+2=4 no matter who says it. Just as 2+2=5 is incorrect no matter who says it. Anybody who tries to operate a business on the premise that 2+2 does not = 4 is going to get exploited.
In an as yet unpublished piece I wrote, I defined "Activism" as "encouraging people of no particular qualification to be active in a cause."
To be clear, I am not anti-activist per se. An example I can go to, is the activism that recently brought to an end Vic Forrest, who have been illegally logging old-growth forests and ignoring environmental regulations for years. (At least that's my understanding).
Those are perfect circumstances for activism. The law says this business shouldn't be operating, and you don't need anyone of particular qualification to disrupt their operation. You can get a 23 year old barista willing to chain themselves to a bulldozer or sit in a tree to stop works until a barrister secures a stop-work order from a judge until the legality of the logging can be determined.
I may not be up on all the facts, but Vic Forests attributed their collapse to all the legal actions causing delays which caused them to have to pay massive penalties for not fulfilling their client's orders and they are done. It could be because they could only sue some 23 year old barista for legal damages, and they were actually compliant with environmental regulations. I don't know. But I feel confident that it's more that they lost almost all legal action because they tried their hardest not to find any Greater Gliders.
My opposition, or rather suspicion is that the attitudes of the day seem to think Activism is just an unqualified good. People can't comprehend that through action, they could harm causes they care about. Particularly incompetent action, galvanizing people against them.
People seem to think Activism is like Michelle Wolfe's parody of a good-guy-with-a-gun. Where so long as there's goodness in your heart, you will only hit the bad guys when you fire.
There's nothing I can do to convince people I am arguing in good faith. The best I can manage is to use the time remaining to find a way to vote yes, and keep doing my research and trying to inform myself.
The Dunning-Kruger effect keeps me up at nights, and in any disagreement, it will always be opaque as to whether you disagree with me, because you haven't considered something I have, or whether I disagree with you because I haven't considered something you have.
Most likely, it's both. Hence the importance of listening.
Yes. One way to persuade me to change my vote, is to ignore my reasons for voting no and try and present me with a reason to vote yes that outweighs that reason.
Some of my initial arguments were bad. All the yes arguments I've been exposed to, and found, are bad. In doing so, people who want this referendum to pass, have hurt their cause, because I am left with the impression that they will be voting not for what the referendum says, but what they think it says and they think it says what it was intended to say.
When approaching a constitutional referendum like the Australian Indigenous Voice to Parliament, whatever it's official name is, heretofore referred to as "The Voice" here is how I would go about it:
The default position on any referendum question is "no" which is to say, if I have not considered the issue at all, if I feel myself completely uninformed the responsible thing is not to toss a coin and abide by the results, but to vote "no".
I subsequently have an all-or-nothing stance on voting "yes" all my concerns would have to be satisfactorily dealt with to vote "yes" meaning that the yes campaign have a very onerous task courting my vote where a complete fuckwit like Dutton doesn't really have to campaign for my vote at all. Thems the breaks in this case.
I am always concerned about fait-accomplis. For example, if I asked a women if she'd like a pizza and a root, and she pulled a face and turned away from me in disgust, to which I inquired "what's the matter? Don't you like pizza?" Like I want a solution to the problem that indigenous people are too small and too distributed to get representation in Parliament, the proposed voice however is being presented as a solution to that problem and I am not convinced it is.
Specific to the voice to parliament, I would have concerns about tokenism and handwashing, for example, the proposals to move Australia day I view as a purely symbolic gesture that would achieve no long term benefit in the elevation of the status of indigenous Australians but might make well meaning left leaning white people feel better. By contrast I do not view the Rudd governments apology for the stolen generation tokenistic, purely symbolic etc. An apology is a meaningful reparative act in and of itself.
I would have concerns about the proneness to corruption of any new publicly funded body.
I would have concerns about fashions of the moment getting enshrined into the constitution.
I would have concerns about the indigenous communities view of the proposal. This doesn't mean I would necessarily be swayed, just I would take pains to disabuse myself of the notion that "the indigenous" are one homogenous group. For comparison, I read arguments during Australia's marriage equality plebiscite from queer groups that I should "vote" "no" (in a survey) because if given equal status in the eyes of the law, many LGB persons will cease their activism. I'm glad I heard this argument, it was not persuasive.
I would have concerns about implementation.
I would have concerns about long-term repercussions.
Now, to wrap up this preramble, during the Melbourne lock downs of 2020 I among many got into it on facebook with a libertarian friend who was "concern trolling" the Victorian governments handling of the pandemic (ie. the lockdowns). I was not persuaded by any of their arguments, and determined them to be a dishonest ideologue interlocuter, however, to their credit they did prompt me to do my due civilian diligence and read the legislation of the expanded emergency powers act that I may be actually informed.
Reading it was most reassuring, basically every section clearly detailed the limits of governmental emergency powers including the timeframe in which emergency powers expired. With that in mind, this morning I decided to actually look up what the proposed voice was, rather than having journalists or whoever, tell me about it.
Now I want to stress a concern I do not have:
That uninformed people will think that the referendum not passing = racism.
Let me give you an easy example - when Australia had it's referendum as to whether to leave the Commonwealth and become an independent nation, you couldn't conclude that most people who voted "no" did so because they love being royal subjects of the House of Windsor. My overwhelming impression was that most people "didn't want to become America" there was too much confusion as to what the nation would look like and how it would function to vote "yes".
In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:
(i) there shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;
(ii) the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;
(iii) the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.
So this was helpful, because my first port of call was the Wikipedia page, that I will actually describe as misleading (rather than misinformation) because I read the proposed design principles as what would be enshrined in the constitution.
The proposed design of the voice, for me is instantly disqualifying. But it isn't fair to base the referendum decision on what would likely, inevitably be a flawed first iteration, however you slice it.
My impression as a voter
i) "there shall be a body" is my favorite part of this proposal, there is currently no indigenous body that is publicly funded. When ATSIC was disbanded, rightly or not (I have no opinion), it was replaced with nothing. So thus far I would vote "yes" we should be constitutionally bound to fund some kind of body for indigenous Australians. I do not understand why would oblige it to be called "The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice". That's too specific for a constitutional obligation, it would block for example a counterfactual history where ATSIC was scrapped and replaced with ATSIA (changing commission to authority) which would allow for a discontinuity between a failed model and a replacement model.
ii) "May make representations" this would be the literal voice, and it denotes access basically. What's a representation? Does this mean they can enter the lower house and pose questions during question time? Or does this mean there will be a parliamentary inbox somewhere that they can drop petitions and suggestions and the like into? Does it mean a delegate from the voice can sit in on a closed door meeting between a prime minister and visiting president for life Xi? "On matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people." Okay, who decides that? What is the line of dilineation? Does all mining and management of Australian resources relate to ATSI or not? Will we see the voice "make representations" on for example the Adahni coal mine in QLD and the impact on the great barrier reef? Does that relate? Or will it be confined to the autonomous management of indigenous communities. The wording is too vague to the point of why include ii at all.
iii) So this is basically saying that while the constitution guarantees a body to be called the voice, and guarantees it's ability to make representations to the public on matters relating to ATSIs, the government can legislate it into anything it wants. This should be reassuring, because it gives the power to completely marginalize the voice into obscurity, should any iteration prove badly designed. I feel, that subject to the constitution, there is nothing to stop the voice manifesting as a single person, with a budget of $30,000 per year of no aboriginal ancestry constituting the voice to parliament. That's what "including its composition, functions, powers and procedures." means to me.
What isn't reassuring is the notion that instead of using this feature to gut the voice to parliament, that parliament could expand the voice's powers to become highly costly, like Ibram X Kendi's idiotic idea for a department of Anti-racism. I would imagine that the constitution would prevent the Parliament from ever legislating the voice to have the power to veto any parliamentary legislation, but maybe it requires all legislation to have attached an "indigenous impact statement" and a pre-clearing process where all draft legislation has to go through the voice.
That's why I'm so sensitive to the fashions of the moment. Across the political spectrum most proposed ideas at the moment live somewhere between stupid and deranged. I would need reassurance that the voice not be turned into a costly bureaucratic body. I'm not afraid of it, under this wording becoming some overpowered authoritarian entity, I'm concerned with people being forced to deal with an idiotic body that needs everything to be written in incoherent postmodern language.
...
So just as a voter, I am not sufficiently reassured that this can't drive race relations backwards. The process seems arse backwards to me. It would be better to legislate this voice body, have it run for a few years, modify as necessary and then when we have a body that we know what we are talking about, do the referendum to constitutionally guarantee it.
Into the campaign: A voters impression of the design proposal
So, this is a kind of "here's what we're thinking" thing that just serves to confuse the referendum question, because nothing in the proposed constitution stipulates anything beyond the name, I mean, I'm not sure if our constitution currently defines what Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders are.
So looking at this I'll cut straight to a disqualifying criteria of the proposed voice:
Principle 3 states "the voice will have balanced gender representation at the national level." So this is automatically disqualifying, as what I feel is a classic example of a dumb idea slipping through.
It is now really dumb, because "gender" is an undefined term. But even if we took it to mean "both sexes" the only administrative solution would be that each community must elect both a male and female representative to ensure balance. When they say "at the national level" though I envision a situation where an aboriginal community, based on the makeup of the incumbents are informed they can only elect a male from their community as the female representatives are at full quota.
Of course, there are no incumbents, so I envision a scenario where the various communities by various means come forth with their chosen representatives, and there's 13 more female reps than male. What process then determines which communities have to go back, discard their chosen representative and elect anew.
This principle stinks of the hubristic current fashions wanting to be put into practice. It suggests that whoever is designing the principles for the draft voice legislation, are already ideologically captured.
I for whatever reason, do not need a voice to parliament to represent me, or my people or my demographic, to make representations, even though given the address at which I'm registered, my representative to state and federal government in no way represents me. Frankly they have been embarrassing. Be that as it may, there just isn't a history of abuse and exploitation by the state that could possibly warrant an additional body to represent me.
Having said that, were it me that we deemed it necessary to have a body to represent my interests, I would want to in principle be able to vote for whatever representative I fucking want. Under the Australian system, I am actually okay with the government saying "you don't get your first preference, who is your second preference, okay you don't get them either who is your..." all the way down my ballot, because it at the least gives me some reassurance that if I don't get who I want, I will at least get someone I can live with.
But the government doesn't dare (as yet) to condescend and throw out my first preference because the genders don't balance out. And while there are some stipulations like presumably I can't vote for a candidate who does not actually have the citizenship status to live in the electorate for their term, there is nothing to stipulate that I as a white man have to be represented by a white man. Which brings in principle 3's sub stipulation that any voice representative has to be Aboriginal or Torres Straight Islander by the three way test.
Unlikely as it might seem, I can use my cognitive empathy to imagine a scenario where I was living in a remote community, and I was getting regularly harassed by the cops, the pigs, the filth, the fuzz etc. and routinely helped out by a white woman from the big city with a law degree who was very articulate and had been living in our community for a decade and I was like "that's who I want representing me!" and the legislation says "no." I can only be represented by a member of my community, who in my circumstances is a superstitious elder that actually is a big part of my problems.
As a white man I am free to be represented by a Rhodes Scholar and MBA student who happens to be of South Asian descent, or even Aboriginal descent. For representation to the voice, the indigenous will only be able to send the indigenous to represent them under this principle.
Barely worth mentioning is that the principle states the voice will "include youth." Youth probably isn't hard to define, it'll be something like 18-25, but this is clearly impossible to administer across diverse communities Australia wide. I can only conceive that they will budget like 5 "youth" positions, and then the actual voice body will pick them from across the nation based on community recognition or something. I cannot imagine that every community will have to select one male, one female represantive plus one male youth representative and one female youth represantative to ensure this outcome.
All this design has to stipulate is that representatives have to represent the interests of the community that selects them. If they do that, it literally doesn't matter who they are. You need a clear schedule of misconduct (like taking bribes etc.) and a clear procedure for removing representatives. The most likely scenario all people face whenever there's a government job on the line, is that they will fill that position with somebody useless that collects a pay check, and enjoys catered lunches.
These are somewhat addressed by principles 4 and 5, which I wouldn't object to, beyond vague wording, which I guess is okay when talking principles. I imagine what most communities would do with the voice, is send along someone who is already in a position of authority like an elder or counciller or head of a local indigenous charity or ngo, which makes principle 4's "including the experience of those who have been historically excluded from participation." interesting wording. I'm guessing it is intended as identarian, like you have to represent disabled indigenous or LGBTIQ+ indigenous etc. but to me, it would include the experience of personality types that don't typically get involved in the community. All the non-activists, and indifferent persons that don't want to sit through Robert's Rules chaired meetings where the first hour is spent voting on accepting the minutes and treasurers reports and at some point 15 minutes before 10.30pm on a Wednesday night they reach "any other business" and rush through or roll-over all the interesting and consequential stuff.
I cannot see a way however to have both principle 4 and principle 2 co-exist. As Principle 2 states "To ensure cultural legitimacy, the way that members of the Voice are chosen would suit the wishes of local communities and would be determined through the post-referendum process." I have to plead ignorance here, but what I can be certain of is that I cannot use this document to inform me as a voter, the implication of principle 2 is that "cultural legitimacy" ellevates above a principle like "representative governance" Yes, I'm aware the Voice is an advisory board with no legislative or executive power. But this suggests to me that if there's a community out there that has a hereditary patrilineal elder system (the oldest male of a certain lineage has the final say, like the Saudi royal family.) That means Steven Ashmore 25 year old tiler saving up to study programming full time doesn't get a voice in his community because "voting" would violate "cultural legitimacy" his designated representative to parliament is going to be the elder's son (unless the national results force the elder to send his daughter).
Like I do not know if any indigenous communities operate on a hereditary basis as opposed to some form of election process. Again, I plead ignorance. What I know happened for certain, was that in 2015 a group of Aboriginal Elders presented the "Uluru Bark Petition" to voice their opposition to marriage equality. Which prompted another petition to "Reject the Uluru Bark Petition" as "not in our name" because presumably the signatories of the bark petition were speaking on behalf of their people's/communities.
I came across this researching and writing my "decolonize my bookshelf post" and found it moving, it is a response to the bark petition published in New Matilda:
“There are several reasons I am incensed to see this petition… first and most … it's because the Arrernte are named as being one of the groups of which support has been derived for this petition.
“I am Arrernte and I say plainly and clearly that THESE PEOPLE DO NOT SPEAK FOR ME. Indeed, I strongly doubt that they speak for many, if any, of the groups they have named and the fact that they have named these groups is a rude and despicable act.
“They have not consulted, they have not polled and they have certainly not discussed widely.
“They have claimed authority on this stance while having none and I am so offended by their actions that I am calling it out."
I know these feels from when fucking Australia joined the "Coalition of the Willing" for the invasion of Iraq. Part of the design flaw of Australia where you vote someone in because you want interest rates to be low and then they feel they have a mandate to activate the ANZUS treaty and send troops and resources to anybody the US President of the moment wishes to attack. But you know, I'm glad they use those same powers to help out Ukraine as they get invaded.
So there's a knight-fork here somewhere. "Legitimacy" probably needs no prefix. There's no such thing as "cultural" legitimacy as distinct from "legal" legitimacy or "popular" legitimacy or "religious" legitimacy etc. Something is either legitimate or not, and figuring that out is likely an ongoing project.
This principle as outlined, does not however, sound legitimate and represents the inherent self-contradictory nature of the political fashions of the moment.
Principle 2 leaves the door open for Australia discovering that by-and-large Aboriginal Australia is pretty Christian Culturally conservative, maybe patriarchal or any other sobering surprises that may await metropolitan left-wing white people and the zero indigenous people they know. At the same time Principle 3 seems designed to try and ensure that if the indigenous people of Australia get a voice, it will be a left-wing progressive voice.
Because of the historical absence of an indigenous voice in Australia, I genuinely have no idea what that voice may be, but the proposed principles for generating that voice sound like I wouldn't really be hearing it anyway.
An Unfortunate Conclusion
I will be waiting for a referendum that asks me: "That Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders have a minimum of one publicly funded national representative body to make representations to Parliament and the media on any issue they so choose, in operation at all times." I would vote yes to that.
I am also okay with the incumbent Labor government establishing their proposed voice to parliament, even though I feel it describes a shitshow likely to follow the lead of ATSIC, though to be honest I'm not sure what ATSIC did.
I don't trust them to establish a constitutionally enshrined body, because of the hints it follows the politics of the day with undertures to intersectionality and alternate ways of knowing. In which case, because it comes about via a referendum, it involves the white majority of Australian's putting upon the indigenous people's of Australia conditions that we do not suffer ourselves. If I can live day-to-day free from deference to Kimberle Krenshaw, so should my indigenous brothers and sisters.
The criticism of the US's founding fathers is that the wrote a bill of inaliable rights for White Land Owners and everyone else had to live under...I don't know, fucking feudalism and chattel slavery. Well this sounds like democracy for whites and anything for the indigenous be it holder of the magic stick, to hereditary titles to who dies last to anarcho-syndicalism, provided that the end result is intra-indigenous equity based on immutable characteristics like sex and age.
Having said that, I fear it does not go without fucking saying that I do not trust "the coalition" to create indigenous representation at all. I wouldn't have trusted Howard or the almost a-political Turnbull to do it, and the depressing parade of coalition leaders being Abbott, Scomo and now Dutton not to neglect Barnaby Joyce. Fucking, I don't trust those guys to fucking talk to an indigenous person let alone preside over the legislating of a representative body.
"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers." ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb (NNT), The Bed of Procrustes.
I am confident, the quickest, cheapest and easiest way to become more informed is to avoid media content somewhat generously referred to as "news". Way easier and more effective than Ground News.
Having said that, this post is largely inspired by the most prominent "broadsheet" in my life "The Age" a Victorian broadsheet that at some point was acquired and became pretty much a reorganized copy of "The Sydney Morning Herald" considered the bourgeois alternative to the blue collar "tabloid" "The Herald-Sun" or "Sun-Herald" in NSW.
If there was one thing I could convince you with, with the body of this post, it is that encouraging young people to consume news media - say via a unit in their one more-or-less mandatory secondary school subject where students have to analyse a newspaper article or editorial as if it is content worthy of ever taking seriously. We should not be doing this, particularly in the algorithm attention economy era.
I contend, it is basically instructing students to outsource their thinking. Like having a math(s) subject where teachers routinely instruct students to solve problems by referring to the answers section, but worse because those answers would have to very often be incorrect, irrelevant or stabs-in-the-dark to be analogous to the content of news.
The Lockdown Months
I had the good fortune to actually live through some of the harshest (and harshley criticized) pandemic lockdown conditions to be in effect outside of China. I had the misfortune of being locked down with my parents who had ABCNews 24, the publicly funded 24 hour news station, running almost all day, unless I muscled in and changed it to the Food Network, pointing out that at the least, cooking programs are informative.
The experience was crazy making, and given a typical day in lockdown that consisted of a walk to the shops, preparing a meal (I would have gone even crazier if I hadn't had agency over my diet) and then telecommuting to work in the afternoons, and exercising/fox spotting at night.
Part of the morning routine was watching the daily press conference given by then and current Premier Dan Andrews and his cabinet. That combined with walking to the shops and walking past the newspaper front pages gave me three data points on the quality of our local press corp.
1. Information provided by the government. (including responses to questions)
2. The inane, often irrelevant and very leading questions asked by the press gallery.
3. How (1) was then covered in the newsprint.
Subsequently, I could see plainly that the best fucking way to ensure a person was completely misinformed, and not just misinformed but confused and outraged and a danger to themselves and their neighbours was to skip the press conference and read the newspapers.
For a concrete example, though I am making this up, consider it hyperbolic or satirical if you like but I think it conveys the character of what I witnessed on a daily basis it went a little (lot) like this:
Gov: Based on today's new case numbers and the current estimates of when a vaccine will be developed there is no revision to our roadmap out of lockdown. Case numbers are still growing but at a slower rate and the [Insert suburb] outbreak has not yet been contained though our contact tracers are not discovering new transmissions, it just takes one case slipping through the cracks.
Journalist: So can you guarantee that we will be able to have a Sunday Roast with mum for mother's day?
Gov: [With patience I could never muster to be a public servant] Mother's day is this coming Sunday, so no, unfortunately I can make no such guarantee that we will see any relaxation of the lockdowns for at least 3 weeks, please refer to the roadmap documents that have been in circulation for weeks.
Newspaper: DICTATOR DAN EATS BABIES!!
It was this degree of horseshit, that I experienced day-in-day-out for like 3 months. It was a real lesson in the constraint of public sentiment on policy effectiveness, and how the media can dedicate all it's energy to reduce the effectiveness of that policy.
The thing was, it wasn't just the Murdoch-owned-Right-Wing-Populist-Collingwood-Football-Club-Mouthpiece tabloid that did this shitty journalism, but the broadsheet also. Not only that, but the Australian Public Broadcaster that aired the daily press conferences, would cut from the conference to studio where it's inexpert panel of dipshit journalists would immediately start speculating as to what very literal concrete information could possibly mean.
“No is such an ambiguous word though. What does it mean?" ~ Richard Ayoade
Let's get this clear, every day for months I watched journalists routinely fail the super-fucking-easy test of what we knew, what we knew we didn't know, and what was being done about it.
The Alternative to Legacy Media
"Opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one." ~ Salt-N-Pepa
Even though this post should largely be about the torrent of shit produced by digital broadsheet The Age aka The Sydney Morning Herald a claim I shall attempt to substantiate in the next section, I believe prominent podcast "Triggernometry" is illustrative of the pitfalls of thinking there's a viable alternative to legacy or traditional media.
I'll speak candidly, Triggernometry is a podcast started by two London comedians that I feel are mediocre enough that but for the podcast's popularity, we would never have heard of them and you probably still haven't, unlike Joe Rogan, and unlike regular guest Andrew Doyle.
The original premise and promise of Triggernometry was "this is the show for you if you're bored of people on the internet arguing over subjects they know nothing about. At triggernometry we don't pretend to be the experts we ask the experts." I first stumbled across it in 2015, where it was actually an important parasocial relationship for me, as I watched the unveiling of the society I lived in as not understanding what I took to be basic concepts like free speech, rule of law and what constitutes racism.
At some point, fairly early in terms of Triggernometry's production timeline they changed their tagline to "honest conversations with fascinating people." A most telling rebranding.
See the telling thing being is that old tagline carried with it two hefty obligations, good obligations I feel. The first and more subtle one is that the hosts were committed to not pretending to be experts. The second and more obvious one was that they speak to experts about their limited domain of expertise.
"Honest conversations with fascinating people" can be conducted with a homeless schizophrenic under a bridge. One could use this tagline to rule out for example a guest like Dr Robert Malone on the basis that it cannot be determined that he is an honest actor with any confidence. In general though, someone can be honestly wrong, and that is problematic for a podcast that's pretences to being entertainment are far less strong than it's pretences to being informative.
Under the old tagline, you can watch the hosts basically listen to Rory Sutherland a marketing and sales expert, talking about his expertise. But we are already getting into the weeds of expertise, because marketing is a domain where many highly credentialed and compensated people can be said to be experts, but are not "experts" in the same way that a heart surgeon is an expert on triple bypasses.
Someone can certainly be an expert on their own experience hence, getting a figure like former police-officer Harry Miller to talk about his experience with being investigated for a "non-crime hate incident" meets the standard of the old tagline. That is despite my suspicion that Harry Miller retells events in the tried-and-tested-way where he looks like a genius and everyone else a bumbling fumbling idiot, which I suspect is embellished rather than "honest".
Under the new tagline, it permits for a non-expert like Eric Weinstein to simply and honestly opine over "subjects they know nothing about" provided we agree that we are using "nothing" hyperbolically. One can opine over Jeffrey Epstein's death and large language model AI in a way that has no value above that of entertainment, without literally knowing nothing about the subjects.
A better example is the last contemporary Triggernometry episode I attempted to watch, an episode titled "the case against Democracy" with someone I had never heard of Curtis Yarvin. I went in with expectations that I would hear something akin to Socrates/Plato-as-Socrates case against democracy, making cases against democracy and most importantly attempting to devise a better system I feel is useful speculation though I would never expect someone to propose a workable alternative. It turns out Curtis Yarvin is more akin to a rambling stranger one meets occasionally taking the number 19 train from the CBD to Coburg in Melbourne and someone who wasted 25 minutes of my life.
I didn't even here the titular "case against democracy" because Yarvin lost me at 12:53 when he described himself as "like many many very intellectual people an Oxfordian, I believe Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford..." a statement under the chapter "being more radical than a Nazi" But that statement itself...[exhales] In a world where I would be confident average, normal citizens were competent to navigate an unregulated media ecosystem, that statement should set off about as many red-flags as an email from a Nigerian Prince that wants our help to transfer millions of dollars to our account.
To present my own case for that claim, the first thing I would present is that Yarvin never presented any arguments for Shakespeare being the Earl of Oxford, nor even substantiated, defined or quantified "many many very intellectual people" that he tellingly counts himself amongst. So an extraordinary claim like this, means whatever case he is trying to make that taking Shakespear "seriously" is more "radical" than Nazism (?) is just going to be a case built on an unjustified claim. This is distinct from something like Heterodox Acadamy platforming an Anti-Stratfordian to actually present his case against Shakespearian authorship. Again having notes on yourself like this should for a capable general population set off red-flags that here is someone worthy of attention only insofar as monitoring the attention he receives. A coalmine canary so to speak.
So I quit this interview, around the 25 minute mark, but I have this rule, which is if I see a thumbnail on Youtube that makes me groan and think "I never want to watch that" I will earmark it as something to watch in an attempt to prevent myself from falling into a bubble and being overly dismissive. So I gave Curtis Yarvin one more chance with an excerpted clip from his interview thumbnailed "why bad ideas succeed" (a very real and interesting phenomena, like "Lebron is the GOAT" for example) but he uses the example of Covid-19 entirely predicated on the lab-leak hypothesis being true.
So maybe, "gain of function" is a bad idea, but Curtis Yarvin is not a man capable of explaining why it is. He is a rambling nobody, the Ricky Gervais show could have easily subbed Karl Pilkington out for Curtis Yarvin and just had Ricky exclaiming "that's bollocks, these are the ramblings of a maniac" with identical frequency.
Better yet, in a recent interview Peter Berghosian interviewing Jonathan Rauch author of "A constitution of knowledge" played him a clip of republican primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and asked for his reaction and reassuringly for me, at least, (you can dip below the line and judge the video commenters for yourself, but please judge that against what Jonathan Rauch actually says in response) Jonathan Rauch can actually parse the argument Vivek Ramaswamy says. He can distinguish the argument "speech censorship is ineffectual and counterproductive" and that Ramaswamy makes a torrent of factually incorrect claims and is attempting to avoid responsibility.
Anyone who read my last post has some idea of how much Youtube basketball content I have consumed in the last month, but as an advocate for free speech something I am just not convinced of is that the general population can parse anything that isn't fucking straight forward. Like youtuber Skap Attack explaining how it is possible for Steph Curry to be "both great and overrated at the same time." Okay, a frankly alarming number of people can't tell the difference between "great" and "greatest" or "greatest shooter" and "greatest player" and hence can't contemplate that "the greatest shooter of all time" could be overrated as "the greatest player of all time."
A woman breaks up with her partner, her partner is upset so he waits for her outside her home and murders her one night. Again, a frankly alarming number of people cannot parse that in the sequence of events, the break up precipitated (lead to) the murder and the woman is inno way responsible for her murder.
Equally, not to play favorites, a woman is raped and murdered by a stranger while walking home from a comedy gig in Melbourne one night, and the Victoria Police tweet (or X) out some safety advice for women concerned about getting raped and murdered by a stranger and there is much outcry about "victim blaming" in response. Again, an alarming number of people cannot parse out the difference between giving information to a scared and motivated target audience as to how they can reduce their risk of being attacked, and the police not wanting to prevent and penalize the perpetrators of these attacks.
Most people it seems, especially the most active people, take action on what they hear and not on what was said, and what they hear is mostly determined by their prior convictions and not what is being said and presented.
Legacy media has loads of inherent problems that make it biased and untrustworthy. Podcasts like Triggernometry, substacks like that of Triggernometry host Konstantin Kissen, and whatever other alternative media is out there is not a viable solution.
I had an economics lecturer (a field in which "expert" is a very misleading title) who often said "I will introduce [this argument] in order to dismiss it." Alternative media has been able to exploit both the good and the bad of figures that legacy media has dismissed without even introducing. But alternative media is fucking terrible at dismissing these people. I mean seriously, Eric Weinstein is well passed his dismissal date, he practically deplatformed himself, why the fuck is triggernometry or anyone still interviewing him?
In my own internal shorthand, I call it the "financial advisor problem". Financial advice is theoretically a valuable service. In practice however, it is almost impossible for a lay person to determine whether they are getting good or bad financial advice, hence the only people well positioned to take advantage of financial advisors, are people likely qualified to give financial advice. If my notion holds any water, we would expect to find people who feel they were given terrible financial advice by an expert (as opposed to the media with something like crypto), and at least in my experience I can confirm such people exist.
What I haven't addressed, is the first burden Triggernometry dispensed of, which is a commitment to not present themselves as experts, the replacement of "we don't pretend to be the experts" with "honest conversations". Near as I can guess at least one of the co-hosts appears to think that if you interview enough doctors, you basically have a medical degree or some shit. Konstantin Kissin has released a book, insofar as it could be autobiographical I guess it's his domain of expertise, but what I would present is the valuable youtube artifact that is these 13 minutes of non-sequiturs to explain why plebians don't trust experts, claiming to EXPLAIN(ED) vaccine hesitancy.
Now, maybe it could be the actual explanation for vaccine hesitancy, but by the nature of the argument made, if it does explain vaccine hesitancy it establishes that vaccine hesitancy is moronic and people are no longer fit to navigate the world they live in.
You could use this line of reasoning to believe that genetically modified foods could turn you into some mutant with too many eyes, or lizard scales, again an alarming amount of people cannot parse the paradox in believing that eating fish with fish dna is fine, and eating tomatoes with tomato dna is fine but eating a tomato with fish dna is dangerous. Oh god, relistening to Konstantin Kisin narrate his "explanation" causes me visceral pain. It's the longest way ever to say "vaccine hesitancy is explained by stupidity."
The tide went out when Covid-19 spread around the globe. It sorted the wheat from the chaff, it was easy to see who is tribal and who is rational.
There simply is no alternative, and most people who appear to believe there is conform to a classic behaviour of conspiracy theorists:
First, conspiracy theories claim to explain what institutional analysis cannot. They appear to make sense out of a world that is otherwise confusing.
Second, they do so in an appealingly simple way, by dividing the world sharply between the forces of light, and the forces of darkness. They trace all evil back to a single source, the conspirators and their agents.
Third, conspiracy theories are often presented as special, secret knowledge unknown or unappreciated by others. For conspiracy theorists, the masses are a brainwashed herd, while the conspiracy theorists in the know can congratulate themselves on penetrating the plotters' deceptions."[104] ~from Wikipedia
Again I'd refer you to the comments below the Boghossian-Rauch interview for ample examples of people who cannot parse how someone can be pro-free speech and anti-factual errors but are simultaneously confident they can diagnose Rauch with cognitive dissonance while providing so little argument I can't even do the work necessary to determine what Rauch said to stimulate their response.
Fuck. I spent the better part of A YEAR corresponding with my vaccine hesitant friend, the first...the. first...question I asked him was if his position was falsifiable. Like was it worth any of my time to look at any of his evidence and evaluate it and he reassured me that he wanted to believe the vaccines were safe and effective. Like, this isn't someone in Mexico or Wyoming. This is a friend who lived in Melbourne, Australia a country where at least 90% of the 27 million people got 2 vaccine shots and half got a booster. This was a Charlie Church whose Church banned him from attending services if he was not vaccinated, so this guy just had to look out his fucking window to see whether people were dropping dead from vaccines or not, and after the better part of a fucking year I eventually said I was declaring Covid to be dangerous and the mRNA vaccines to be safe and effective, that his position was in fact unfalsifiable because all evidence to the contrary was dismissed as part of the conspiracy and the only evidence I would accept to concede his point was for him to produce the 150,000 vaccinated corpses necessary to convince me that the vaccines were more dangerous than Covid-19.
The thing was, this guy was an avid consumer of alternative media, to the point where he dismissed any institutionally produced knowledge on the grounds that it was either publically OR privately funded (ie. funded) and that fact checking services could be dismissed as "basically rubbish".
Okay, this is what we are dealing with, and what the newly emerged alternatives to institutional, traditional, legacy media is rife with - "I'm allowed to believe what I want" an entitlement to wilful ignorance.
All of the above, I feel really needs saying, before I take a massive dump on one particular piece of legacy media. There. Is. No. Alternative. That. Can. Assure. You. Are. Actually. Informed.
You are still better off insourcing your thinking and figuring shit out for yourself. You don't have to go looking for news of any import, it will come to you. If you are going to do your own research, start with "how do I do research?"
Prognosis Negative: Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect
A little context, I haven't been on the ground, so to speak, for years. At any rate I thought if I briefly glanced at the news stories from my local paper. Until I started looking for shithouse headlines to collate for this post, I without fail regretted the time spent even bothering looking at what my local broadsheet had to offer.
On 0 occasions did I think "oh this lets me know what is going on." From the virtual front page, to politics, business, world, culture, lifestyle, opinion, sports it's crap, crap, crap and crap. I mean, crap for different reasons - like opinion is just fucking garbage, obviously. Sport you would think lends itself to fairly objective reporting, injuries are injuries, trades are trades, scores are scores, results are results, the problem for that section has always been that there's generally more coverage than there is sports news to report. A section like "world" is crap, because this is the internet age, why the fuck would you go to a Melbourne broadsheet to find out about Trump's latest indictment. Oh and politics is crap because of flagrant biases I will justify by pointing out that every second day the front page section is essentially a hit piece on some shocking corrupt transgression by the Victorian Government, and yet these pieces of hard hitting journalism keeping the govt honest on the front fucking page, top of the news feed rarely if ever crack the top 9 stories (I can't exclude that this is because the most viewed stories is calculated as an aggregate of Victorian and NSW readers, meaning any national story will beat out any local story). Crap, crap, crap and crap.
So Jurassic Park, Westworld and ER creator Michael Crichton had this to say:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
― Michael Crichton
I have not forgotten what a shitty job the journalists did during the Melbourne lockdowns, when I was literally living in the story they were misrepresenting on a 24-7 basis. I was not impressed with the quality of journalism to get a McDonald's Drive-Thru order correct, but I thought I might forget how shit it was when I no longer lived in state, and over time be lulled into thinking the news in any way beyond naming some real places and people could possibly deliver insight.
On the two or three occasions in three years I've been lured in by click-bait headlines to read an article, the result has been vacuous. I don't trust their journalists on any subject.
Person of no particular qualification reacts to Torrent-Of-Shit That is The Age/SMH Headlines
Okay, let's go. I'll link to the articles to prove they are real, but fuck me, I've documented the shit The Age deemed "fit to print" and paid someone for the content. It's all behind a paywall. FYI.
...and let me guess "I won't believe what it is!" Like this is straight up clickbait bullshit. Whatever it is, it's going to be trite. This is going to beat out universal healthcare, paid maternity leave, the fact you can be prime minister?... fuck off.
Clearly a fluff piece. A bit of fucking whimsy. This was in response by the state government cancelling it's hosting of the Commonwealth games, a kind of Olympics for the former British Empire nations that just sucks. Like Australia can win half of the total available medal tally because the US, Europe and Asia are basically out. It costs almost as much as the Olympics to host, nobody wants to fucking host it hence Australia last hosted the games in 2018 on the Gold Coast, two games before that it was hosted by Melbourne. Australia hosted the games twice in 8 years, and was due to host it again in 2026, until the Victorian government pulled the plug deciding it was better to pay a $380 million fine for cancelling than billions of dollars for... okay, basically at this point the Commonwealth games is like the government deciding to pay a hotel to put up a bunch of howler monkeys in its rooms. So like the hotel owner is like "yabba dabba doo, gaurunteed income!" and everyone else is like "why the fuck would you do that?" the only headline necessary to cover the entirety of this story is "Government comes to senses, the Commonwealth Games suck." Not this shit from regular columnist Kate Halfpenny.
For four years, Gareth Reeves played one of the most high-profile theatre roles in the world. Now he’s back in a position depressingly familiar to all actors.
Unless I am mistaken, and slack jawed yokels now read The Age I'm not sure there's anyone to whom it would be news that an actor can land one paying gig and then be out of work and struggling on the bread line. Do people think anyone associated with a licensed Harry Potter product is basically set for life? That there isn't a vast gulf between someone who plays Harry Potter in a Melbourne stage show and Daniel Radcliffe? This is a story fit for print in The Onion "Out of work Actor plagued by hunger" Fuck off.
Some headlines need to be read in the voice of a moron, to make sure people understand how moronic it is. This I feel is one of those headlines, at the least it needs a "/p" What I suspect I would find is a freelance writer who is dating a child, or associates almost entirely with morons who cannot rise above small talk and cliches, and is generalizing out her ho-hum life to society in order to arrive at the conclusion that 21st century, 3rd decade women basically are Stepford Wives. This is what Alain De Botton would class as a news archetype, and an example of "the plural of anecdote isn't evidence." I mean is she going to Mars (trip of a lifetime) and people are actually expecting her to die and inquiring about the psychological impact on her boyfriend, or is she going on a contiki tour of Europe for more than two weeks and everyone expects them to cheat on each other. A fucking nothingburger.
So at the least, this headline promises some kind of contention. Is it going to be as salacious as the IOC will take revenge on Australia because...? Or is it going to construct a causal argument to the highest degree of confidence that Australian Olympians are going to be denied real world experience in their own locality that would give them the competitive edge? or the government dumping public money into building new training facilities and event courses again giving a competative edge? Either fucking way, we won't feel it. Nobody will not watch the Paris 2024 Olympics or the 2028 Los Angeles olympics and rue the cancellation of the 2026 Victorian Commonwealth Games. Especially nobody is going to rue the not spending of a billion dollars to win a men's rowing Gold medal. This is fucking make-work for a staff columnist.
Spew. I think this headline tells you everything you need to know about The Age's target market. Incidentally this is not the Australian paper that spawned the Avocado Toast meme. If brunch is where you are feeling the pinch of inflation, put simply, you do not have a problem with inflation. I mean when cafe's stop serving "The Big Breakfast" an Australian variation on the "Full English" and replace it with muesli and avocado toast, brunch isn't an indicator of inflation, it is an inflated indulgence of wankers who cannot operate a toaster, a fork or a bowl. Yeah, I get that it is a fluff piece meant to make "economics fun" I get it and it is shit. Have some fucking dignity.
Fun fact "influencer" and "newsworthy" are antonyms. Exactly how many fucking people have a social media influencer identity? And how many of those, read The Age? This article is a submarine archetype of explaining slang to your grandma. Not a cautionary tale of the dangers of wearing a wide brim hat and promoting "the secret" on instagram.
Again, needs vocalizing in the voice of a moron. Yeah, Princess Diana died in 1997, celebrity gossip is not a new and newsworthy phenomena. Will this article contain the phrase "a growing number of..."? I wont check and I do not care. Unless plebs are barricading themselves in the bastille, reporting on what plebs are talking about has to be the lowest form of news. This is what people are doing, like somehow we are deprived of senses. Or need our own social media feeds explained to us. This headline was categorized under the helpful subcategory of "Divorce" to tell us this story relates to divorces. Fuck me.
Clickbait, and the desperation of legacy media trying to be relevant. Full disclosure, I haven't seen Barbie, because why would I? Have you seen Fast X? Do you need a reason why not? I mean this is mostly clickbait and you could plug anything in as the thing we are all missing about Margot Robbie - she's a serious actress that has worked with Scorsese, she is kind to animals, she gives back to her community, she tried to reform Harley Quinn into a role model because the character was popular with teenage girls...it's not going to be insightful. This is cashing in on something popular.
Could it be coded transphobia? No. This is the archetype of "Hey ladies are you up to speed on what ladies are doing now?" news. A lot of women are dying their hair blond. A lot of women are getting brazillians. A lot of women are getting breast implants. A lot of women are getting butt implants. A lot of women are letting their hair go grey. A lot of women are keeping their maiden names. Women here's how to get the fuck back in line, what you need to know now. There's not no stories of this form about men (and it's still a question of whether fashion trend news about men is even targeted at men) but I'm confident they are vastly outnumbered by content that propagates the idea that women need to know how to conform to survive. Or that old women need to know what young women are doing to compete. Not in the fucking patriarchy.
Oh look, someone heard a slang. Netflix revived 90s youth soap opera "Heartbreak High" and in the first season episode something it was revealed that the highschool basketball team was an Australian White Ibis, also known as a "Bin Chicken", alas everyone involved insecure that anyone would get how hep they were with the jazz crowd, had a character say aloud "oh my god the mascot is a Bin Chicken." and point, before the shot cut to the bin chicken mascot.
Okay a taste test of some consumer product is a tried and tested piece of fluff. "Oh surprisingly the cheapest one is pretty good!" lets all hold our fucking breath. Or you know, scrap the whole food section out of respect for people not born without class.
Or you know, double down. So just when you thought they were in touch with the common unpretentious man and his "bachelors handbag" don't worry there's something for the chronic masturbators too - an article where someone takes a delicious rotisserie chicken and with a lot of time, money and effort transforms it into something worse - like a quiche or some shit. It's "lifestyle" people. This is one of those articles where they get people who snobs over pay to say "don't turn your nose up at the supermarket chook." when they already have with this "challenge".
Aka, vacuous people fall for fraud. (potentially). I listen to the podcast "feminine chaos" I like it, I like the hosts, very informative. One thing I like, is that generally they go big-picture big-issue. They understand in any given story, what principle is actually important, even as largely cultural critics. They will also keep me peripherally in touch with the shit that women think is important that I can't comprehend. Like a controversy over Alison Roman's "the stew" or an image leaked of some celebrity who has a stainless steel kitchen top counter. That's how I like to keep in touch with planet female with dare I say it, journalists I trust. Two of the few that I do. But I noticed, quickly, when collating the slew of shit produced by The Age, that what I deem to be shit unfit for printing skews heavily female.
Gay (it is relevant) comedian Tom Allen has a bit where he says "many people have come up to me after my shows and told me 'I didn't know what homophobia was until I met you.'" and I mean this as a reflection of The Age editorial quality when I say "I didn't know what misogyny was until I read the Age." and yeah, this is old, conservative (even though it is the left leaning broadsheet compared to the same market's tabloid papers) traditional media because it's content is still very much in a heteronormative gender binary. Anyway...
This did come with an image of two bronze golfballs to imply what is getting tanned are men's testicles. I'm guessing "Our Modern Guru" is The Age's agony aunt psuedonym. Is it news? no. Is it harmless fluff? no. Is it an ageing Steve Buscemi in a backwards cap carrying a skateboard saying "what's up fellow kids?" yes.
The idea that a newspaper journalist has any sudden expertise on a tech development that got hyped yesterday is laughable. This is actually the kind of journalism that can do real harm - feeding the fucking hype beast because market forces demand you be relevant at all costs. AI it is safe to say, whatever it's impact shall be, is moving at a speed more akin to the metaverse and crypto than Covid-19. A fucking respiratory illness to lives and workplaces and economies upside down in a matter of weeks. AI is...something. I would say at this point, wildly unpopular spam. But vapid reporting like this can do real harm. The vast numbers of people financially ruined by buying into the first big crypto-bubble at it's peak, did so because legacy media started reporting on the phenomena "something completely fucking useless has leapt up $5000USD again overnight, have you missed the bandwagon?"
This pursuit of relevance does real harm. The news has an opportunity, just like it did with Covid to accurately report how little is known and how little we understand because everything is very new and the world is very complicated and new things generally take about 30 years to get adopted and we are nowhere fucking near that with block-chain, the meta-verse and AI. So much of the damage of Covid-19 wasn't the conspiracy theorists, but the media simply supplying 24-7 demand for information that just didn't exist. So they filled it with speculation instead of "get this through your fucking head, this virus is new. We just don't fucking understand it, so we are playing it safe." Instead of generating a shit-tonne of monday-morning epidemiologists.
Get in line women. This is not targeted at me, hoping I will bring back the Marty McFly life-preserver look. Could also have been written "unpopular fringe group change mind about something of no significance".
TikTok isn’t the bogeyman of journalism, but it could help save it ~ Abbir Dib, Social media producer
Guess what? I'm a social media producer. Legacy media generating content on social media. 100% guaranteed crap. Unless TikTok's of the Heimlich manuover are popular, TikTok is saving nobody and nothing. Like seriously, where is an editorial on the dangers of normalizing vacuousness?
There's some rule stating that if there's a question in a headline, the answer is guaranteed to be "no" that doesn't quite hold here, except to state that this article didn't need to be written and doesn't need to be read. Maybe if the author's title was given as "stand up comedian" we could have read what if delivered by a professional may have been a funny bit.
The don't need to. People still get fooled by the old scams. People still read The Age, an unsophisticated scam filled with sophistry. I'm going to guess that had I bothered to read this article, it would be hyping up the impact AI is going to have, when the truth likely is, there are probably few technological developments that have been more anticipated and prepared for than AI. Like since Asimov at least.
Sure, OK. I mean if every suit in the world wears a traditional Hungarian cavalryman's marriage necktie because Napoleonic Parisians became enamoured with them, why not aprons? Vapid shite, don't "Sure, OK" me and then still create and print the content.
One, this is an even better example of "I didn't know what misogyny was until I read the Age" Two, are these real questions? Why is it so hard for you, middle aged white Australian woman to celebrate Paramount leader of China Xi Jinping's accomplishment of a life-long term in office, and the flowering of his One-China policy to reclaim Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet for the motherland? Could it be because it has as close as possible to nothing to do with anything you've ever cared about or had an interest in? Why is it so hard for you to celebrate Lebron James' historic eclipsing of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's career scoring record (meaningless though it was)? Or why aren't you celebrating Carlton Football Club's late season surge in form to claim a spot in the finals? Is it because you are afraid of men's sports or is it because you don't give a flying fuck?
This one actually got me on the morbid-curiosity hooks, but having read it I cannot for the life of me recall what it even said. I don't think it even lived up to the promise of its faulty premise, that anyone who is not a girl should give a fuck that girls like being girly. As the great Toni Morrison said "leave me out of it."
Notewortyh in how little of The Age's content is actually targeted at LGBTQ issues, this is of the archetype "don't let progress fool you; nothing has actually progressed since we treated gays with lobotomies and electroshock therapy" archetype, or having not read it, I'm fairly confident it would turn out to be so. Okay I bit and I was wrong, it was of the "Minor discomfort caused by non-instantaneous universal adoption of ideals is actually a serious issue" variety. I mean it's under "lifestyle" so yeah, vapid nothing-burger. Now you could write a serious and thoughtful piece about the ideas and issues this piece of shit was written about, but they didn't.
Again, there is no essential info you need to know about any dining venue, unless untrained chefs are serving puffer-fish sushi. There's not even essential information you need to know for Seinfeld's "The Soup Nazi" You don't need to be relevant, hobbies are not essential and news should not propogate these harmful consumer intuitions.
Nutrition journalism is bad enough, or if you are a journalist with a delusional readership that things they can be young forever - the goose that lays the golden eggs. I mean I don't fucking trust a newpaper to tell me gossip is good for us. Keeping in mind that Putin assassinating the leader of his former private army is for most of the world, just fucking gossip and a waste of our time. Tell me when Putin is dead, then maybe I would at least be able to determine if I can now travel to Russia.
Or was it a flash in the pan fad that is fading from memory fast, reinforcing the stereotype that "la donna e mobile" as I can reliably guess that the Age journalists will move as quickly from the Matildas and Sam Kerr to the next thing deemed relevant as they moved on from Margot Robbie and Taylor Swift to the Matildas. Literally nobody predicted on staff predicted that interest in the Women's World Cup would peak during the nation hosting the Women's World Cup. This headline is just a variation of popular youtube video title "x DESTROYS y with facts and logic" whatever the vague, incoherent, abstract and nebulous phenomena referred to as the patriarchy is, I'm going to guess kicking it won't budge it an inch.
Fire whatever editor put this headline together. It isn't even fucking clickbait. If I had to guess, this shit is going to be a "get in line ladies" piece of shit, about how if you want to be relevant you need to know that people have culture wars fatigue or some shit, so stop talking about US politics or some shit. Even this hot headed maverick girl boss is shutting up, so you know it's serious. I'm sorry, but seriously I didn't know what misogyny was until I read The Age.
teaser: Favoured by players like Ellie Carpenter, the stretchy headbands are supposed to be wrapped around ankles.
Okay, okay, okay. Gotta must resist urge to misogynise. Did the New York Times run a story on Allen Iverson's compression sleeve? No doubt they covered Air Jordan shoes. I guess...If like they picked up from media monitoring that the most searched thing on Google related to the Women's World Cup in Australia was "where did Ellie Carpenter get her headband?" then yeah, maybe it is newsworthy, but I would suggest the headline read "Even in the midst of the world's biggest tournament, female athletes are still coathangers...to women" As written, what shit. Absolute shit.
Unfortunately due to the overlapping of my sample window for collating shite headlines from The Age and Australia and New Zealand hosting the Women's World Cup, I was actually hoping for the Matildas to lose so I didn't have to put up with more of The Age's shitty op-ed cash-in on a fad coverage. So...again having not read it I don't know if the comparison is going to be to the Australian Rules Football men's competition, or to FIFA Men's soccer. Will it compare Sam Kerr ($600,000 a year from Chelsea Football Club, plus a $1M 10 year sponsorship deal with Nike) to Lionel Messi's $54M USD per year, or to Richmond FC (Not the Ted Lasso club) Dustin Martin's $1.35 million dollar contract.
Again, misogyny rising thanks to The Age. Headlines like this reinforce the stereotype that women are bad at maths. 1.5 BILLION people around the world watched the Argentina-France World Cup final last year in Qatar. I don't have a worldwide total for the Women's World cup, but the UK had 14.8 or so million watch England lose the final and Spain had about 7 million watch their ladies win. Australia's peak audience was 11 million watching the Matildas lose to England in the Semi-finals, do I think people in China, Japan, Korea, Africa, Brazil, Mexico, the US supplied the missing 1.5 BILLION viewers to a ratings rounding error for the Men's competition? No. I don't. I suspect despite whole sections of the news being dedicated to a very Matildas-centric coverage of the women's world cup, I actually doubt when the numbers are crunched that it attracted and maintained as much interest as the indigenous AFL competition. Like that isn't hard fucking journalism to look up attendence at World Cup games (averaging around 30k) and compare it to attendence at AFL matches during the Women's World Cup (about 33~37 thousand a match) and then ask yourself again "a once-in-a-lifetime-hosting-of-a-once-every-four-year-competition-attracts smaller crowds than a 24 week regular season domestic pro sports men's competition and I seriously wonder why are the players paid less?"
I actually know nothing of the compensation for pro-athletes participation on national teams. So I have no idea what the fucking argument is. One would have to go to the ratings of the Women's soccer games in the UK to make a meaningful comparison I literally couldn't find anything in terms of Women's FA Cup ratings, or viewership, a google search of women's FA cup "ratings" has google suggest I must have meant "rankings" where it is easy to find that AFLW attracts on average a million less viewers than AFL matches and it is one of the most popular women's sports in the world. Like fuck me take this seriously, why are you publishing "ugh men" journalism?
When I first turned up at university, I was confronted by two bracing pieces of graffiti: “All Men are Rapists” and “Women Walk. Men Stalk”. Anger was my first impulse. ~ Michael Bachelard
So this is the shit that is suggesting it is somehow a perplexing question as to why Andrew Tate got popular. The answer is, there's a lot of morons out there. But kudos at least on publishing this piece in the same paper that published "why don't mean go to see the Barbie movie?" and "why don't men watch women's soccer instead of AFL?" pieces.
It’s time to break free from the belief that an experience only matters if we share it with someone else.
Most people stop needing someone to hold their hand to cross the street, or chew up food and regurgitate it into their mouths at around age 5. This is literally un-newsworthy. It isn't even hilariously mundane enough to get in the Onion as a type of "16 year old discovers Led Zeppalin, annoys friends"... I mean the only newsworthy thing is that 48 is embarrassingly old to have this revelation. Did your girlfriend finally go on the trip of a lifetime alone? This is TEDx level crap.
According to my mother, it is possible to put jealousy aside for love.
How about according to an expert? I mean potentially a relatable family drama, I guess it depends on how you coped. Did you cope by being mature adults that realize you can't force someone to be with you or alone? Fuck off.
Insurance increases – and some areas being declared uninsurable – are a price signal from a hotter, riskier planet. Will they end up driving our adaptation to the climate crisis? ~ Liam Mannix
An unnecessary argument for why it is unfeasible to just ignore reality. Like this is just generating content out of the truism that if we had to pay for the damage we'd probably stop doing it.
Anthony Albanese is clearly trying to follow the example of Bob Hawke back in 1983 when he proclaimed an informal public holiday after our America’s Cup win. But there’s a vital difference. ~ Kerri Sackville, Columnist and author
Brilliant. Brilliant. Finally some coverage of jinxes for the astrology girls. It even fails as clickbait "but there's a vital difference" oooh what could that be? Could it be that Bob Hawke declared a public holiday after Australia won the America's Cup whereas Anthony Albanese is declaring one before the Matildas have even made it to the semi-finals? Given the rest of the media hyping of the cultural moment of the Women's World Cup that unfortunately coincided with my sample size, the real story to write on this matter is "Hey women, remember when Australia won the America's Cup in 1983 and everyone all got interested in Yacht racing forever?"
If you think the Matildas’ success has been a helluva ride, you ain’t seen anything yet. ~ Moya Dodd, Former Matildas vice-captain
Moya Dodd being a former matilda is not someone I can or would accuse of jumping on the hype train to cash in on a fad. But the teaser text under the headline unfortunately has an ironic valence - it is open to interpretation as "watch how quickly they slip from the public consciousness when they get knocked out." I'm sure Moya is more bullish on the future of women's soccer in Australia, and no doubt with good reason. Alas, I think it will be the much despised and maligned story of progress, where the events of this year will pump prime greater enrollment in women's soccer, leading to more talent being stuffed into the top of the funnel and eventually spitting more talent out. Keep in mind, Michael Jordan inspired a massive number of kids worldwide to take up basketball, and it has produced many great players from Kobe Bryant, Dirk Nowitzki, Lebron James etc. none of whom have in turn had the impact Michael Jordan did.
What I want to impress, is not that I hate the Matildas and hope women's soccer will fail, but the flagrant irresponsible journalism of feeding misguided hype. I'm sure being host nation typically boosts the domestic teams performance, including Qatar being in the men's world cup group stage at all. But that boost cost $106 million dollars, that's more than two times what Lionel Messi earns in a year. The safe bet, is that it's a good thing, enjoy it while it lasts, be proud of our athletes and respect them as they respect the fair weather fans they are playing for and do not deserve their respect, but don't expect it to put an end to gender inequity.
So for anyone who doesn't know, Caroline Springs was one of the earlier new housing developments on the outskirts of Metropolitan Melbourne known for "McMansions" with quadruple bay parking garages because even a baby living in Caroline Springs needs a car to get to the nearest potty. The Age has been running fluff pieces on "life in the suburbs" and this one promises to be an interesting read, but is it newsworthy? No. Does it get digital real estate? Yes. Could that have been alotted to something serious, significant and informative but wasn't? also yes.
Okay, I must have made some copy-paste error somewhere because there is no way a redundant-to-a-google-search article could possibly be considered exclusive, but given how much absolute shit The Age pays and demands payment for publishing, I wouldn't put it past them. Now this might be considered newsworthy if three people in Leongatha had died after a dog licked their face and the police suspected fould play. It didn't. That was death cap mushrooms in beef wellington (which The Age covered) Just absolute pure embarrassing shit.
A secret report shows Australia’s elite netball league is bleeding money and being propped up by the fees paid by junior and club players at a time when competition from rival sports is intensifying.
This must have been the actual exclusive, not the dog tongue safety PSA above, but I'm going to leave it for amusement's sake. When it comes to netball, the way to score an exclusive story is probably to write a story about netball. I mean, if even Sandi Toksvig thinks netball is a rubbish sport, you are in trouble. I've played netball, it is a fun game. Is it the stuff of a televised pro-sports league? That is a bridge too far. From memory, it is illegal to actually block a shot while blocking a shot on goal, if you block the shot you get called for "obstruction" you are only allowed to make a show of preventing the goal shooter or goal attack from scoring.
If you wouldn't make a pro dodgeball league, let alone a pro Twister, or operation league, I wouldn't make a pro netball league, keeping in mind another highly gendered pro sport of Roller Derby is likely more viable as a spectator sport and entertainment industry and near as I'm aware nobody has ever tried to make a pro-league out of it. If they only paid Sam Kerr what they pay Lionel Messi or Kylian Mbappe (or a quarter of what the Saudi's pay Christiano Ronaldo) she could bail out Super Netball with her pocket change. Damn you patriarchy! Why does the Arabian peninsula belong to the Saudi family with it's patrilineal heritage!!!
So this might be the only example I collected of what is usually the lead story on The Age's front page - an investigation into the corruption and criminality of the Victorian state government, and well, it seems at least that on the whole, Victorians don't care, certainly not enough to prefer the fucking twats that populate the main opposition party in our state. Stories like this may remind me of amusing Simpson's episodes where the dead vote for sideshow Bob, but that's not how voting works in Australia. I assume it means the Victorian Labor party managed to scam an extra few hundred bucks off of a mentally incapacitated and later deceased person due to some shady bureaucratic rollover procedure. Not exactly virgin sacrifices to Mammon type stuff. Not necessarily shite, but noteworthy because this is exactly the wolf that The Age (and every other news source) cried out on a daily basis during fucking lockdowns while ignoring that most citizens just wanted to fucking get on with it and wished the media would stop encouraging the grown toddlers to protest the fucking lockdowns thereby risking extending them.
He’s not stylish, he’s not cool, he’s not particularly wild or daring. But he might just be the best travel presenter on TV. ~ Ben Groundwater, Travel writer
Warning! Warning! Controversial opinion - some guy would rather travel with a chill Rick Stein than hip substance abuser Anthony Bordain. Certainly fit for print. To think this is a job. Living the mother fucking dream.
Ross Gittins is alright, alas, he is writing in a domain that I know something about. Like Michael Crichton writing about show-biz, and I've seen him on programs like SBS Insight. The main problem is that economics is a non-expert domain, as Nicholas Nassim Taleb puts it. It is "know what" not "know how" otherwise known as a social science, and it is barely a science at that. In that context, Ross Gittins is alright.
Because almost all economics opinions are like, just an opinion dude. You know, you might get something occassionally like Erdogan in Turkey or Liz Truss in the UK where their economic policy is clearly, objectively wrong. But otherwise it's just content farming, writing an opinion about historical alternatives to combating inflation with interest rates. And though markets fluctuate constantly, the interest story is a story that moves at glacial speed. It could have sufficiently been covered in one column 7 months ago, and left at that. Instead let's just ramble on... while not covering the unspoken story that Australian's have dug themselves too far into debt speculating on the property market and now our government is fucked because you can either default on your mortgage because of out of control cost of living or default on your mortgage because of interest rate rises, but the one thing for certain is the government can't bail out citizens like it can big institutions.
Fire the editor that wrote this meaningless, vapid headline. Fuck you, whoever you are. But worth noting is that one of a broadsheet's traditional duties is to sell what are essentially finishing schools to wealthy and middle class people writing propaganda for private schools.
Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell still define what it means to be a top model.
Where's our girl Elle? I didn't read it but I'm going to guess this article is going to be girl-power/girl-boss forward, ignoring how the beauty ideals of the 80s-90s are still more appealing than the new movements challenging traditional conceptions of beauty (unsuccessfully) and I will also guess they never clue in that this is actually an industrial relations story about how modern day models simply cannot get the fucking contracts the super models still enjoy. You know, like every fucking job for three decades.
Jill Dupleix grills three top chefs on how to make the move from gas to electric as pain-free as possible.
So one actual piece of information I did glean from this whole fucking exercise is that Victoria has banned any new home and maybe new kitchen renovations from having gas stove-tops, effectively forcing the widescale adoption of induction stove tops over probably decades if not a fucking century for the last gas hob to be replaced. That has resulted in an article by morons for morons.
My epic 40-day journey marks a grand return to rail travel, unlocking the sheer pleasure of seeing the continent unfold at ground level.
So the whole travel section is fluff. Privileged fluff for people who do not need encouragement. This doesn't sound like serious journalism, or even travel journalism but a "what I did on my holiday" assignment from primary school. There's potentially a positive environmental message in there, but 40 days is in itself expensive, largely unfeasible for all but the wealthiest 20% of retired baby boomers. A far more environmentally friendly suggestion is the staycation.
The city’s leafy eastern suburbs are quickly losing their greenery as private development and illegal tree-removing operations sweep the area.
This is likely the best most legitimate piece of journalism I came across in my entire exercise. If The Age produced stories like this, on a daily or even weekly basis, I could honestly say it was an institution worth keeping, rather than allowing to disappear like a tree in the Eastern suburbs that has fallen afoul of the perverse Australian economy that depends entirely on speculating on property and hoping someone, somewhere out there is actually producing a good or service.
I have no idea what the thesis of this article is or could be. At this juncture it is worth pointing out that The Age has a section called "Property" that for a long history of synergy between the major advertising revenue and being a newspaper, is basically a propaganda piece that puts North Korean state media to shame. The Age's view on property can be summarized as "house prices soar, buy now before they are out of reach." or "house prices drop, great time to buy a house before they soar again." or "crappy house sells for way too much - you too could be rich if you just buy houses!" and so on and so forth. No matter what is happening in the property market, the conclusion is you should borrow as much money as possible and buy into the property market.
There is nothing, more certain to be absolute shit, in an Australian newspaper than a story about the housing affordability crisis. Why? Because this is a crisis of affordability that has to be sold, without prices lowering or even stagnating, because the only thing Australian's have done since 1976 is bet that house prices will always go up. This is a nation where less than 20% of Boomers own like 5 houses and they won't sell it to a family that needs it to live for anything less than more than that Boomer earned in their entire lives because the way to earn your keep is to scalp a property to somebody desperate so you can live the lavish retirement you are entitled to by birth. You smart, they dumb. Why weren't they born in a massive voting cohort like you?
So I'm going to hazard a guess, that anything deemed "not to work" will either be a truly ineffectual policy that actually exacerbated property owners monopoly power, or it didn't work because housing prices fell and that's just not how you achieve affordable housing dammit!
Talk about timely coverage, a story about Rudy Giuliani's fall from grace published mid-August 2023, 3 years after his client lost office. How does The Age keep up with the times like that? It must have been a deep investigative piece. Fuck off. That's like posting an article about the Matilda's 2023 World Cup run...today.
Finally after less than a month, a literal example of Betteridge's law of headlines. Have you no shame The Age? Have you no decency? Two questions that can also be answered "no".
Betteridge's law of headlines MONSOON!!! I've talked a lot of shit about The Age and it's fine journalists. I think we can agree, when it comes to coverage of the Arts, The Age isn't afraid to take a controversial stance.
There were tears. There were always going to be tears. But once the hurt subsides for the Matildas and the nation, and it will, the prevailing sentiment ought to be not disappointment, but pride in getting so close.
Just the fucking nerve of trying to console a nation's hurt and disappointment when the Matildas failure to win it all obviously prevented Australia from being the first nation in the world to close both the unadjusted and adjusted gender pay gaps, prevent all violence against women by strangers and domestic partners, get equal representation in parliament and board rooms and transcend physical forms into beings of pure energy merging into one divine cosmic consciousness. Thank the divine cosmic consciosness for ending my misery that was The Age's cash grab coverage of the Matilda fad.
Oooh! A life of Brian reference and an op-ed for subscribers only! Sign me up!!! What great exclusive subscriber only content. Where have you been all my life. Even in death the cynical cash grab continues.
The NSW government is moving to ban conversion practices. What does it mean for LGBTQ people, religious groups and healthcare providers?
So there's a potential story there, because you probably haven't heard it from The Age, but for some in the L and G of the LGBTQ there's a sense that the recent uptick in "gender affirming care" or social and medical transitions is a form of conversion therapy as at the extreme it is practiced in countries like Iran. Conversely among the T in LGBTQ there's a view that suggesting anything else might be going on apart from gender dysphoria, is a form of conversion therapy that jeopardizes the passability (as in either "passing" or being "read") of transition by delaying it. But the valance of conversion therapy for most people is "pray the gay away" style therapy, even though the headline in this case says psychiatrist and not priest.
The headline suggests the article will be of the archetype "don't let progress fool you, nothing has changed since we treated gays with lobotomies and electro shock therapy." This is a subject matter I would never entrust to an institution like The Age.
Not just your partner, everyone else too I dare say. But according to Betteridge's law of headlines, the answer is no. Kate's answer actually implies that she is not in possession of the facts. The plural of anecdote is not data.
Good job fuckwit. It must feel so great George, to go to bed knowing you really earned your paycheck today. How fucking newsworthy to suggest if our major customers lose money, we will lose money. Brilliant. Fucking. Journalism.
Yes, Barbie the movie has heard of feminism. (And thinks it sounds awesome!) But how patriarchy-toppling is it really? ~ Diana Reid, Writer
Finally a "writer" to explain what the fucking Barbie movie is really trying to say, because if we just have the right exegesis we could topple "the patriarchy" okay and again I can gaurantee that the content of this article I haven't read will have less value than the "Rainbow Land" scene from The Campaign which also starred Will Farrell:
So if this story turns out to be "moron learns bitcoin isn't a currency" it could at least be inspiring that any fucking moron can get a story published in The Age, so long as it isn't timely, informative or thought provoking.
The fact that you have capital gains tax to pay means you’ve made a profitable investment. However, I understand wanting to reduce this liability further. ~ Paul Benson, Money contributor
Oh no! Looks like The Age need to run a correction. The fact that you have capital gains tax to pay does not mean you have made a profitable investment, or even an investment at all. It means you sold an asset for more than you paid for it, which means someone has evaluated it's future earning potential as higher than you did when you purchased it. Congratulations, you've generated a profit through SPECULATING while likely contributing nothing to society at all and now you want to contribute less? Congratulations you disgusting fucking pig, you fucking parasite, you fucking leaner being lifted up by all the taxpayers around you. Fucking kill yourself in your non-investment property you worthless human shaped tic.
Matildas mania was punctured with a bang on Wednesday. So how do we cope?
Note, if struggling for content, just publish the same story two, three times. Maybe invent some jargon literally nobody is using, or maybe was a brief thing on X for all of fifteen minutes, that's newsworthy.
One of the biggest issues with coffee culture is that coffee often replaces a meal. Here’s how to enjoy your caffeine fix while also looking after your health.
Rest assured, no matter how bad The Age's journalistic standards are, they will never be beneath posting your bi-monthly "coffee - good or bad?" vacuous bullshit latest research dietary garbage story with a half-life of half an hour.
A tortoise and a hare? Hmm, Aesop's fable reference. Intriguing...no. No that's not the word I'm looking for. What's the word I'm looking for... "not interested" it's two words!
What a clever turn of phrase. Clever. No. That's not the word I'm thinking of. What's the word? Shit. Absolute shit. And an insult that you were paid for this content, doubly because you are a fucking academic - I look forward to your paper that demonstrates and has replicated the causal relationship between people tolerating men pissing in public because "we are socialised to accept this behavior" yeah, I'm sure that holds up. You know how we tolerate behaviour that comes with a hefty fine and the possibility of being registered as a sex offender.
For some people, hangovers are quick and (almost) painless. For others, they’re something much worse.
All my life, I've felt persecuted that my boss thinks I drank on Sunday night and that's why I'm hungover monday morning, when in fact I've been whiping myself out every Saturday night and finally I have validation that Yes! two-day hangovers are real. And now I know how to deal with them. For some people, hangovers are quick and (almost) painless. For others, they're something much worse. (Lycanthropy). What the fuck is this shit. Who are we? I don't even fucking know anymore. It is truly unrelenting.
The 736 players used in the Women’s World Cup recorded some amazing statistics.
Yeah amazing statistics, if you are fucking innumerate and discovered sports yesterday, like most of The Age's Matilda fandom reader base. Where's the article on the bicycle commuter who rides a Tour De France every month? Or has been to the moon and back this year. Dear age you juvenile rag for kindergartners, QUIT THE COPE.
There was a sense of shame around medication, as though it’s a band-aid rather than a solution and that by turning to antidepressants, I just wasn’t trying hard enough.
~ Melissa Mason, Freelance writer
I think there has to be a law regarding 21st century evocations of "stigma" which is nobody who complains of stigma will ever have to substantiate that that stigma exists. This is a sad story, but I feel, quite strongly giving someone a voice to generalize their personal experience out to the population at large. Who the fuck is stigmatizing medication? Name a movie where a character is about to pop a lithium tablet or prozac or some SSRI and someone stops them and says "don't be a coward! just try harder to not be depressed!" Congratulations The Age another fucking nothingburger story.
I'm sure someone out there will find this story and relate, and know they weren't the only one. What I'm not sure of is that the stigma was the creation of the author, or the author's particular primary carers or some shit, not a typical story given most people are not even aware people they know are depressed, let alone go so far as to query their treatment plans. I guess when they are 48 they will discover the freedom of going to a concert by themself.
I've noticed nowadays almost all AI content is sponsored content by Salesforce software, native advertising articles, but again the answer to the headline's question is no. Unless you only want to live in your dream house during your dreams. "The Internet can be used to look up song lyrcis!" that is the journalistic value of this article. AI art can design houses and sofas by stealing photographer and designers entire history of work. But if you want to realize it in the real world, you will have to pay a bunch of fucking money to get it created.
...
That's it, this is not all that The Age is, but it is a lot of the shit they publish on a daily basis. The links serve only to point out that I have not made this shit up. The Age makes this shit up. An AI could produce a newspaper as informative and as morally prehensible as The Age. Is this the end of legacy media? No. It is UNRELENTING SHIT. The Age will publish more shit tomorrow.
What is worrying is that all this shit might be supplied, in response to some demand. What I hope as per my introduction to this post, is that if I walked into a secondary school and observed the curriculum I would find they no longer encourage young people to take newspapers seriously and furthermore don't even introduce them to students as texts for serious analysis, so much as how to avoid thinking news is informative and proceeding with a false sense of confidence. If there's a copy of The Age or The Herald Sun sitting around in the Senior and/or Junior common room so what. I'm not for banning entertainment.
Bias is irrelevant
Please keep in mind, news media having biases is a problem, and the measures of bias are currently restricted to a not-that-useful left-right dichotomy, though "culture wars" mean issues most people should actually have no opinion of, can wind up correlating with political dispositions.
Yes it is frustrating when someone dismisses a piece of datum, without examining it because the source is biased. I got very frustrated with a friend that dismissed any evidence that Covid-19 was dangerous, that Ivermectin is ineffective or that mrna vaccines were safe and effective on the grounds that the research were either publicly or privately funded therefore bias, therefore inadmissible.
My central concern with The Age's torrent of shit though, is NOT bias, but that it IS worthless to consumers. It is not fit to print. But anyway...
Alain De Botton, Pop-philosopher has done a lengthy talk about our media diet and suggests that we be taught story archetypes, proffering the example of a story about Prince William and Kate going to the shops, and Taylor Swift buying a sandwich or something as an example of the "They're just like us" story archetype. Which we should learn to recognize as the same story endlessly regurgitated.
Why? I guess because we should be able to learn by induction. As we should do with clickbait titles like "Boy steals woman's purse and instantly regrets it, you won't believe what happens next..." and "Four simple tricks to spot a narcissist, number two will blow your mind..." Today I saw a video titled "One simple dietary mistake almost destroys woman's legs" How long did it take for a qualified doctor hosting the video to divulge the dietary mistake? 5 minutes before she mentions anaemia, commonly caused by a lack of iron.
We should learn from two or three examples of clickbait what clickbait is and that the promised payoff is non-existent. Using our capacity to learn to punch down the emotion centers of our brain that are reacting with "maybe a housewife did discover one simple treatment for wrinkles..."
I'm wary of archetypes, being persuaded that the point of stories is that they are flexible. The specific is where the value lies, not that there isn't valuable self reflection to be had when someone like De Botton points out to you your need for reassurance that royals and pop stars also shit. That lesson need only be learned once, preferably when you realize your parents had absolutely no qualifications when they decided to become parents.
Now there's a former US network TV exec (or so he claims) on Youtube that now rants against the woke agenda ruining entertainment, but he has a video where he explains that from the perspective of a TV executive you have to greenlight something and I would readily concede that the most valid critique of the point I've tried to make about the unrelenting torrent of shit The Age produces, is one of confirmation bias where I have just cherry picked every example of content-for-contents sake - whether this phenomena emerges because top down demand new content to turnover the website with every 24 hours, or whether the staff have a bottom-up publish-or-perish economic incentive to write something, anything about the Matildas or they'll lose their job.
Certainly it is not unprecedented for careers to be based on rehashing the same fucking content endlessly and they can be viable and lucrative. Talking-head-sports-analysts can dine out on "making the case Lebron is the GOAT" day after day, year after year. Matt Dillahunty gets paid to debate again and again "Is Christianity True?" and "Is Islam True?" For me these are debates that command my attention. I have an insatiable appetite for hearing both good and bad arguments, to see both cognitive dissonance and disciplined argument in practice.
So what is so bad about endlessly rehashing the op-ed "how can we fix housing affordability without lowering the price?" well probably just the fact that it isn't a debate - it is presented as "news". A journalist, investigating housing affordability should be able to come up with a pretty clear picture as to why housing is unaffordable, if they had any interest in actually reporting the news. Housing affordability is not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of facts.
Speaking of debates Douglas Murray, Matt Taibbi, Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg participated in a Munk debate "be it resolved don't trust the legacy media" where Munk polls the audience before and after the debate on their position, in this case with 48% saying yeah, don't trust the legacy media and 52% saying no, you can trust legacy media before the debate, and after the debate it came out 67% don't trust, and 33% do trust. Keeping in mind the general public's alarming inability parse things, this result should be somewhat expected because you can resolve that legacy media not be trusted without trusting emergent media like podcasts and substacks, so the premise of the debate is very stacked in "don't trust"s favor.
Fortunately these debates aren't legally binding because the debate was lost, I'm almost sure, singlehandedly by Malcolm Gladwell who in a bold and stupid strategy continually accused Matt Taibbi for being nostalgic for the era when everyone in the media were old, white men, to a man who is himself, not white.
Again, there was something to Gladwell's tactic even though it backfired in this instance which is that I believe most people would struggle to comprehend how news media could simultaneously become more diverse andmore biased.
It should be simple: if you have a news team with 100% straight white males, 50 percent conservative, 50 percent left-wing in the 1960s and then in the 2020s you have a news team that is 45% male 45% female, 10% non-binary, 25% white, 25% asian, 25% black, 25% hispanic etc etc and it is 90% left wing, 10% conservative then we have increased diversity and the news team is more biased.
Here is a Ryan Chapman video on the subject of historic news bias:
Alas, The Age isn't spewing out a torrent of shit because of bias. Though I'm fairly confident if I wanted to find bias at The Age I'm sure in the worst case scenario I could find it, and hopefully if push came to shove I could find someone who has already found it, be that FriendlyJordies or Ground News (actually found a website that ranks it as Left-Center biased).
That sight rates the Australian Broadcasting Corporation virtually identically to The Age, slightly left-of-center and high in factuality. Let me demonstrate how limited that is in determining whether a news source is worthy of attention. This story caught my eye about hidden disabilities and a new lanyard people with hidden disabilities can wear (and very likely, people with no disabilities can also wear, given that anyone can buy one here.) anyway this quote caught my eye:
On the day of that bus trip, Ms Green was using a walking stick and wearing a bright green hidden disability sunflower lanyard, the latter of which is an internationally-recognised symbol.
Still, nobody offered her a seat and her pain worsened.
Okay, I assume that the above excerpt is 100% factually accurate and has no possible political bias and it is garbage. It identifies that the Australian public won't give up a seat to a person with a walking stick and I wouldn't be surprised if any day of the fucking week you could write a story about a 8-months pregnant woman having nobody give up a seat on public transport for them. The supposedly newsworthy item is that this woman was wearing a bright "internationally recognised symbol" as well. In some technical sense, I'm sure the sunflower on a green background is "internationally recognised" in the sense that hidden disability organisations and their affiliates in multiple country.
But as if, fucking as if people on the street should have any fucking idea what the lanyard means or even scrutinize a lanyard. Whatever the colour, most people who see a lanyard probably just assume the person has a job in a building somewhere.
My problem with the unrelenting torrent of shit, is not bias, but news-worthiness. I guess there's another problem compounding news-worthiness being that editors are picking headlines that make it hard to tell if a story is newsworthy or pure trite.
It was a response to this article. The article it responded to, had some valid points, but ironically I feel an economics professor should be able to explain why enrolments in economics is dropping. Economics students should be able to calculate the net present value of studying economics versus say, management or accounting. It puts me in mind of an earlier critique of televised news programs that feature a market report segment that I have been unable to find but feel I can recreate more-or-less.
If you study marketing, you will discover that there is less to it than other business disciplines such as accounting, economics or finance. You will basically take subject after subject where "the 4 P's" are applied to different contexts. I can no longer recall but either *p*romotion or *p*lacement was touched upon as why one might want to advertise on television during a soap opera a product like Coca Cola or Pepsi, because there's a large overlap between the market for colas and the market for soap operas. It is less efficient to advertise the latest Airbus passenger airplane during a soap opera commercial break in the hope that one of the two purchasing executives in that country happen to be watching and are suddenly prompted to sign up for a new fleet of Airbus aircraft.
Why then, does the news feature a segment where someone runs through the days movements in the All Ordinaries index, the Nasdaq and Nikkei exchanges, the big movers in the ASX200 and the current going rate on oil futures. These segments are frequent, banal and boring so we don't often think "hang on, would any of this shit be news? Or timely, relevant information to anybody who works in finance?" Not plausibly. It's hard to imagine the broker that called in sick that day watching the evening news market report segment and going 'holy shit hol-eeeeeee sh-iiiiiiiiiiiiit!'
And basically these segments really function as propaganda to convince lay people that the finance sector is doing valuable esoterica that you just don't understand.
Again, another article that comes to mind on a similar subject, that I want to attribute to cracked.com but due to their prolific listicles found no reasonable way I could track down the original article, made the point that most people have a kind of snobbery that say, Russia invading Georgia is something an erudite educated person of class needs to know about, and Kim Kardashian and Kanye West's wedding is the stuff of tabloid celebrity gossip trash.
But functionally, for most people consuming news media, Putin invading another post-soviet sovereign nation is gossip, even if you were like "holy shit, Ukraine is one of the largest producers and exporters of nitrate in the world, I gotta stock up on fertalizer!" you would be in the slimmest of minorities, and likely in an industry where the trades would have prepped you for the possibility months ahead major news media announcing the invasion.
Taking me to fucking TMZ, which used to run a daily live TV show, where they chatted about bullshit celebrity gossip and I remember this fat guy who had that 2000s bleached spikey hair combined with an early 90s goatee was talking about details of the Kim and Kanye wedding and it was like how many seats per table for guests at each venue and what the cutlery was going to be kind of details and the editor guy with his fucking drink bottle had the nerve to question the newsworthiness of that story even though apparently asking Drew Carey what he ordered at TGIFs is newsworthy. Anyway the fat guy defended reading out the tedious details by saying "people are interested and want to know this stuff"
Basically, "there is demand, so here is supply" and we get the nightmare of newsworthiness - the who watches the watcher problem. Keeping in mind, that TMZ has broken some newsworthy stories like the death of Michael Jackson, probably because they have financial incentives to follow celebrities around and ask them what they ordered at IHOP and shit.
The point not to lose sight of, is that so much more than the mundane activities of celebrities is fucking trash.
Inevitable Junk Food Comparison
Mexico has adopted a 'seals' system, whereby all products on sale in supermarkets and bodegas, basically any packaged food has to have these black octagonal warning labels on them declaring if they have excessive sugars, sodium, saturated fat, calories etc. A snickers bar for example, has 3 of the aforementioned four.
I have long questioned the effectiveness of such a policy in Mexico, because basically every fucking product has at least one black octagonal seal. So all else being equal, consumers choose whatever products they choose. I did discover that if a product has at least one seal it means a company cannot put a cartoon mascot on it, and it cannot be advertised to kids. I have fact checked this and it's true - Fruit Loops have no Toucan Sam, Crunch is Captainless, Rice Bubbles have no Snap Crackle or Pop.
I would suggest news media have similar labelling regulations applied - things like having to display their political bias on the masthead, and their factuality score in order to legally operate (the fact that you can objectively measure how misinformed a person is, still blows my mind that we don't do this over a decade after Jon Stewart's interview on Fox News' Politifact)
There is also an important distinction to be made between fact and opinion, news and speculation. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is highly critical of how many in the economics and finance profession can make a living out of creating and presenting forecasts that, accurate or not, can be discarded without scrutiny and a new forecast presented.
How much fucking newsprint is expended in Australia on "what's the RBA going to do? Raise rates, lower rates, hold steady?" month after fucking month, there is so much journalism that takes the form of having your mum ask who killed the victim, 10 minutes into a watching a murder mystery an impulse that I gradually learned to reply with "I've seen this movie before and they never explain it, so you can't answer that question just by watching the movie."
I get that people mortgaged up to their eyeballs care intensely about interest rate movements, but if the news was newsworthy what a person should be able to do is open up The Age (or whatever) and any speculative forecast carries with it a highly visible rating at how good they are at forecasting. (This would still require flagging that it is a speculative forecast and past performance does not guarantee future performance).
Superforecasters exist. There are people who are better at it and worse, they are much much rarer than the incidence of people who make a living forecasting. There are prediction markets, that are basically bets on what is going to happen.
The Dissemination Problem
We say one thing, and hear another. For example, in the Harris-Dennet free will debate, I am more persuaded by Sam Harris' we don't have free will side. Dan Dennet is a compatabilist, and has released lectures titled "stop telling people they don't have free will" and I've listened to those. Dennet's lectures are of value, and have good approaches like "what would be necessary for you to enter a contract with a robot?" but ultimately to me, Dennet has defined free will into existence by talking about the kind of free will (hyperbolically speaking) nobody actually cares about, ironically much like the "god" of theologians - an abstract theoretical deity who has almost no resemblance to the sky daddy of Abraham that most people pray to.
But Dennet has one point, which is that there is a dissemination problem in telling people they don't have free will. Beautifully captured by "Better Call Saul's 50% Off Special":
Which is to say, though it might be predictable that if you tell delinquent drug addicts you'll give them 50% off legal representation for felony charges, some morons will feel incentivized to commit additional felonies. It is less predictable but still possible, that if you tell people they don't have free will, some dipshits will interpret this as a legal defence for committing murder and shit.
People have a high propensity to straw-man or "so what you're saying..." anything they hear or read that does not comply with their conception of the world, and the great travesty of the op-ed era, is that people will even outsource their ability to construct fallacies to someone who will argue fallaciously for them, the service theologians have been providing for centuries, if not millennia.
This is just a basic problem faced by any news media. It is actually difficult to disseminate information to masses of people. Even neutral objective facts like "it rained yesterday" has the potential to be misinterpreted as "it will rain again today" and so forth.
Hence the Matildas being Australia's national women's soccer team, featuring athlete Sam Kerr, playing as host nation in the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup is going to provide numerous objective facts to report on, but disseminating information about the tournament and the athletes therein is just made harder when you have 6 op ed's running simultaneously where people of no determinable qualification opining and speculating as to the significance of Australian women playing associated football in a tournament to I don't know...violence against women statistics?
Now, there is information useful to someone like me in the meta-story of the Matilda's coverage: Women excited about Matilda's participation in FIFA 2023 Women's world cup.
Similarly, the press' coverage of the first major Bitcoin Bubble was trying to disseminate a real story that people were going crazy for magic beans. I only really saw Australian TV news coverage of that phenomena and I was left with the subjective opinion that it was not responsible journalism. The coverage likely fomented FOMO purchases of Bitcoin at one of the worst times in history to do so.
And again, there's the Hunter Biden laptop story, as a clear example of the problem of disseminating information - free speech absolutists feel strongly about this, but I have not seen sufficient evidence that they understand the dilemma of declaring something news worthy. In the case of the Hunter Biden Laptop story, it appears it would eventually indict Hunter Biden for profiting off the family name, and otherwise was a big fat nothing-burger concerning his father Joe.
In this case, the laptop came into the possession of Trump's team and was sat on as a seemingly planned "October Surprise" to try and repeat the success of the Hillary emails thing. I have not heard free speech absolutists yet criticise Rudy Giuliani for effectively censoring this information from the voters until such a time as it suited the Trump Campaign. Social Media companies are private companies that to my knowledge are legally treated as platforms not publishers, and run by such in-touch philosophers as Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk.
So, if someone comes to you with a story that the son of a political candidate murdered a child for fun 8 months ago after the primaries and announcement of running mate and debates and campaigning and campaign advertising has been done and you're like "how long have you known of this alleged crime" and they are like "7 and a half months" what do you think? Is the allegation newsworthy? Probably, because if true it would be potentially consequential, are you obliged to run the story that will almost certainly impact the forthcoming election before the veracity of the allegation can be confirmed and disconfirmed?
And then there's the reasonable expectation that for vast numbers of people, they will think the allegation is the same thing as the actual crime, and never follow up and now think they have a family that drinks baby blood to sustain their youth in office.
"Move over Misogyny, there's a new bad guy in town: Matildogyny."
Man I could be a writer for The Age, or at least an editor that picks out headlines. I've used the term "meta" too many times already, but I recall reading on the toilet at work a Psychology Today article which, again I couldn't find. It made a claim about meta-emotions, how we feel about our emotional states that we don't seem to feel meta-meta-emotions, that is we can feel guilty that we feel angry, but we don't seem to feel pride that we feel angry about feeling guilty.
So when England knocked Australia out of the FIFA women's world cup 2023, I felt angry that I felt relieved that the Matilda's were out. Because there is no way I would have felt that relief, if not for The Age's relentless coverage during a period where I happened to be looking at the headlines every day in preparation for this post.
I compared it for a friend, to the classic Onion story: "Teen Who Just Discovered Led Zeppelin Starting To Piss Off Friends." But this isn't a teenager, and these weren't articles written by a Women's Sports figure like Liz Ellis. This was trite written and published in a major newspaper by people who discovered sport fucking yesterday, and predictably got way too excited.
Part of the problem, no doubt, was that the real story was "Women of Australia excited about FIFA Women's World Cup local team." but the way a news company chose to tell that story was to let said excited (mostly) women just write op-eds excitedly.
They propagated a social phenomena instead of reporting on it. There was real journalistic work to be done to inform people with Matilda's fever instead of pandering to them. Like it literally only just occurred to me that much of the excitement arose from a false analogy that the women's international competition is as unlevel as the men's international competition. Like the Maltida's beating England or Spain would be the equivalent of the Socceroos beating England or Spain in the world cup.
The Women's A-League in Australia was founded in 2008, where the Women's Super League (England's highest level of proffessional associated football, for which Sam Kerr plays) was founded in 2010, It was proceeded by the Women's FA founded in 1991. A difference of 17 years.
The A-League was not the first professional associated football league, it's predecessor was founded in 1977. Compared to the VFA (The original AFL) which dates back to 1877, which is not as old as the oldest football clubs in England (1861) and Spains first national football competition was founded in 1929. Italy founded it's national competition in 1898 and Brazil in 1902.
The FIFA Women's World Cup has been held since 1991. Guess who has won the most Women's World Cups: Brazil? No. England? No. Argentina? No. Italy? No. The United States has won the competition 4 times since 1991. It is a very different international playing field compared to the men's competition.
But instead the allocation of words to people with job titles as specific and illuminating as "writer" "columnist" and "contributor" to just ramble about how the Matildas would cure cancer and where to buy the Matilda's hairclips is like the editorial policy was "try to alienate and irritate actual sports fans by spending most of the time speculating on cultural impact, and the least time covering the competition."
Now, everything in women's sports is heading in the right direction. It will grow, I can't say whether it will ever close the gap. There are some competitions like Tennis for which the Women's battle has been one, and the movie has even been made. There are other competitions that are complete fucking basket cases, like the WNBA (Trinity Rodman, Dennis Rodman's daughter wisely chose to play soccer, and is part of the US national team and the highest paid player in USFW ever.)
I think in these confusing times, it is easy to accuse anyone who doesn't just accept the delusional garbage memes pumped out of academia regarding real issues like women's representation in public and private sectors, women's participation and women's safety as "misogynistic" like an aggressive knee jerk reaction to get all discussion and debate the fuck back in line.
I was late to recognize that the driver of the recent uptick in climate-skepticism is largely people who don't want to ever have to consider their career choices, they would role the dice on completely destabilising the earth's ecosystems sooner than surrender the comforting idea that they can just keep driving to and from the job they currently have until they retire. It was almost too banal for me to see.
And now, thanks to the reporting of The Age, I am entertaining the thought that the pivot from "equal opportunity" a very unifying vision to "equity" in political jargon, is driven by a realization of mediocrity. Without a doubt, there are talented women unjustly reporting to mediocre men in the workplace. But they are likely a tiny minority, and probably very similar in size to talented men unjustly reporting to mediocre men in the workplace. Statistically however, the most likely outcome of equal opportunity coming into effect is not mediocre men being replaced with talented women, but mediocre men being replaced with mediocre women.
Which is to say, perhaps for many young dreamers, too much of the promise of equal opportunity rode on the idea that history was somewhat arbitrary, and maybe also, that business in particular was a meritocracy. Now, the theory has pivoted to one of social construction and conspiracy, post hoc rationalizing that if there are pay gaps there must not be equal opportunity, only oppression, and this is the social context in which journalists wrote about the Matilda's 2023 World Cup run.
The End is the Beginning is the End
Schools should absolutely not encourage kids to read newspapers. It is in my opinion far more worthwhile to give them a youtube videoessay, and teach them source methodology. Passing or failing on whether they can a) identify a claim as distinct from an argument. b) determine the factual basis for a claim. c) demonstrate how information is manipulated.
The classic "how to think" not "what to think". The irony being you have all these right wing activists trying to get critical pedagogy (though they refer to it as CRT, but the problem that should be of concern is teachers thinking it is their job to create activists not educate children) but appearing on FOX news to complain about indoctrination.
Just fucking news is the problem whether you are getting it from fucking Tucker Carlson or fucking Russel Brand or anyone in between. You don't need it. You certainly don't need to consume anywhere near the amount you do. Go buy a book. A nice work of classic fiction, if you need to fill the dead air of your day. Plenty of good paperbacks can fit in your pocket where your smart phone is.
