View From The Couch - 13/Dec/2015

Deporting Permanent Residents Has Got To Stop

This is a new kind of human rights abuse - except they tried this shit ten years ago and it backfired.

Mr Bolvaran, who turned 42 on Thursday, came to Australia as a one-year-old when his family fled the Pinochet regime in 1974 and lived in the country since.

During his time in Australia he met and fell in love with Rachel Delucia, with whom he has three sons, two of them under the age of 10.

But his life in Australia was not always so idyllic, as Mr Bolvaran freely admitted.
He fell into the wrong crowd, racking up a petty criminal rap sheet that included drug possession and stealing.

Unfortunately for Mr Bolvaran, who lived in Brisbane on a permanent resident visa, he got caught up in changes to the Migration Act that saw visas cancelled if the holders were sentenced to 12 months or more in prison. 

Those legislative changes have proven to be a sore point between New Zealand Prime Minister John Key and his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull, given the number of Kiwis affected. 

Mr Bolvaran, who could only speak limited Spanish and had no family support network in Chile, was deported last month. 

"I miss my kids … It's my birthday and I miss the hell out of my boys and my partner," he said.
"I'm so far away from her and everyone. This is where I was born, but I'm lost here. I don't know what to do with myself." 

Mr Bolvaran was jailed in July after he pleaded guilty to a string of offences, including drug possession, possession of a knife in public and receiving tainted property.
After serving time in the Brisbane Correctional Centre at Wacol, Mr Bolvaran was transferred to Villawood Detention Centre in Sydney to await deportation.

It's terrible policy. First of all, it metes out a second punishment to the time served. Obviously the punishment doesn't apply to a citizen, so it means there are de facto two sets of laws for the people of Australia: one for the citizen and another that is far more destructive and punitive for permanent residents.

It also makes the Criminal Justice system merely a partial criminal justice system and the Department of Immigration gets to punish somebody for the same crime, a second time (i.e. forget "double jeopardy") just based on their visa status.  You wonder how the esteemed judges feel about that, should it ever be brought in front of them. If a government body that wasn't the judges handing out legal punishments, you'd think judges might "take a very dim view of that sort of thing". I'm sure it violates something called "the Separation of Powers". Hmm... let me think now.., yes, yes it would.

If the punishment is meant to be a deterrent for crime, it's not going to work because it targets a socio-economic group that is likely not to come in contact with the information. None of the cases that have been reported on the issue show that such legislation has any deterrent for criminality. It's imaginary, and prejudicial.

What's worrying is that the ALP are saying they're in lockstep with the government when it comes to this astoundingly stupid legislation. This make you wonder just how good a mind these idiot politicians have, when even a legal novice like this blogger can spot the obvious legal problem with enforcing such bad laws. So much for Shadow AG Dreyfus being such a legal eagle. The thing that make your citizens and permanent residents really lose faith in government as an institution, is when it gives bipartisan support for bad laws.

This is a bad law. Somebody needs to challenge it.

Wrapping It Up In Paris

It would appear that Paris meetings to deal with climate change ended successfully. Maybe 6 years of even more extreme weather events persuaded more governments. In some subtle way, this is what has happened in Australia over the last decade. There are holdouts who still believe that climate change is not real or a UN conspiracy, or has stopped, but in most part the middle of the electorate thinks it is real enough and needs to be dealt with.

Of course, the Paris Summit and its global climate agreement has nothing in it that is binding or demands accountability, so it is a little bit like everybody agreeing to a wishlist for Santa, and if everybody's good, we'll get global warming under control.

When you think about what happened at Copenhagen in 2009, and how it led to the demise of Kevin Rudd, followed by massive infighting in the ALP government, and the subsequent denialist stupidocracy of the Abbott Government, only to see the return of Malcolm Turnbull as leader of the Liberal Party mere 3 months ago - and therefore offering some hope of serious climate policy - it's been a terrible, terrifying, 6 years.

It's 6 years of missed opportunities; it's 6 years of stalled investments; it's 6 years of more carbon being pumped into the atmosphere that could have been restrained; and 6 years of having to live with people who have utterly unscientific views about climate science and having to argue with them as if they had a leg to stand on or had any intellectual merit. The 6 years of extra arguments, extra discussions, extra politicking, extra effort, all makes me feel faint when I reflection it. And this agreement merely gets us to a starting line that might help us get on top of the challenge.

And with Greg Hunt as the minister for the environment still, I have to say I have absolutely no faith that we'll get anything done.

More Budget Cuts To Come

We are - on the whole - way too complacent about the Australian economy. Especially with the collapse in commodity prices for iron ore, nickel, and oil, a lot of our major export earners are suddenly hitting the wall where they can't be profitable digging stuff up form the ground. If you wanted proof the mining boom was well and truly over, then look no further. BHP of course is taking a double punch because of the dam bursting in Brazil, so its shares have slid down from $25 to $17. The resources sector has been in a two year retreat, but lately it's becoming a nosedive.

Clive Palmer is suddenly running around looking for line of credit to keep his nickel refinery going, and that's obviously because of the collapse in nickel prices. All of this decline in income has now shown up with diminishing revenue for the government. This in turn is going to mean the Coalition Government's favourite thing, more budget cuts.

The Treasurer's task of finding spending offsets will be made more difficult by a sharply worse picture on the revenue side of the budget, which has been hammered by plunging commodity prices and stagnant wage growth. 

Leading economists believe the government will be forced to reveal a worsening of the budget deficit of between $33 billion and $39 billion over the next four years. 

The grim picture was a focus of Mr Turnbull's talks with state and territory leaders on Friday. The Council of Australian Governments' joint communique warned of "emerging budgetary pressures across all levels of government, particularly in the health sector".
On Sunday, Mr Morrison said MYEFO update key forecasts to present a "realistic outlook for economic conditions moving forward". 

"As was demonstrated by the recent National Accounts data, our economy is transitioning from resource investment led growth towards broader based growth," he said. 

"Part of this transition involves dealing with the challenges of lower commodity prices and a declining terms of trade from their historic peaks in the wake of the mining investment boom. 

"The government will continue to restore the budget by controlling expenditure and supporting policies that grow the economy. The budget will not be restored by increasing the overall tax burden on Australians."

So says ScoMo. A lot of this stuff killing revenue is outside of the government's control. Yet the fixation with budget deficits will mean there will be a fresh round of razor gang activity but really, they'll probably find they have to spend the money anyway. It's like the domestic violence thing. The Abbott Government cut $300m out of domestic violence related expenditures. Turnbull has had to go back out and spend $100m. When it's all said and done, he'll probably have to spend the other $200m anyway, because there were probably very good reasons that $300m was earmarked for the program.

If you think it through from a historic perspective, at this point in time these razor gang exercises in austerity are redundant, if not futile. Certainly since the second budget of the Gillard government, there's been significant cuts to government programs. Add 2 of the Coalition's own efforts and you'd have to say 4 years of cuts would have been pretty deep. It's very visible that the Federal Government is running pretty lean these days. What the government has to do is get more serious about tax reform. 

The problem is, it's not a government that likes wage rises, seeing that they represent the employers' lobby. All the talk of raising revenue has been around raising the GST, another regressive bit of policy-talk. In that sense it's a government of vested interests that won't talk its own constituents down from their fighting-a-class-war posture. It would rather just hand over the bill to the wider community and be proud they're trying to balance the books. It's only 3 months or so of Malcolm-In-The-Hot-Seat but this government is looking sclerotic already. When the slowdown hits the wider electorate, and it will, I doubt Malcolm Turnbull is going to stay so popular.  

View From The Couch - 16/Nov/2015

The Aporia Visited Sam Harris As Well

The recent attacks in Paris had a certain depressing quality that comes with repetition. My own sense of expended aporia has not left me, and yet here I am writing about it because ultimately the more I work towards articulating the problem, then maybe the problem will show itself in at least an outline. Notable today was Sam Harris who had a podcast up, and perhaps unsurprisingly he was making the point that the philosophical points to be made had already been made in response to acts of terror. Indeed, as Harris points out, if people are calling this attack a wake-up call, then they've been missing a lot of things along the way.

While I am not of the atheist persuasion to bang on about the the problem of Islamism and Wahibbism that is is funding the Sunni extremists, I do relate to Sam Harris' position that the Western small-'l' liberal mindset is so effete and navel-gazing, it can't dare name an enemy when it is there; it cannot bring itself to properly brand the enemy for exactly what it is, lest it offend people. I'm not one to be so vocal about this, but if religion is what drives you to do some of this stuff, then there's a problem with your religion.

Yes, it's not exactly a popular thing to say. Neither does it mean we go around pinning the blame on any and every muslim for the events in Paris. Yet it does seem pertinent for the small 'l' liberal people to get up and take notice of the fact that the events in Paris this week, and Charlie Hebdo earlier this year, tells us there are people who would piss upon the values we hold dear, and shit upon our niceties and politesse. These cunts want to kill us all if they could, and maybe, just maybe, we ought to take philosophical note of that.
Just writing that is going to put me at odds with my friends.

A Year On From The Man Monis Thing

Back last year when I was still working with the Events Lighting company, we got this job from the City of Sydney whereby we would install colourful "disco lights" to be shone upon silver sequin fabric flags. The flags would flutter in the wind as they reflected lights like a mirror ball. It was a fabulous idea. Not content with that, there were colourful lights installed everywhere along Martin Place. Then of course on the first week it was up, the Man Monis Lindt Cafe siege happened.

If you go back and look at the news footage of the Monis siege, you can see in the background of the shots where people were running out of the cafe, the changing lights. Early on in the evening, it occurred to the City of Sydney that the disco banner lights were somewhat inappropriate to the unfolding situation. They rang up our office and asked to have it turned off. The Little Tyrant replied,

"I tell you what, if you can find a bullet proof vest, I'll tell you how to turn it off from a phone, far away."

Needless to say, the lights stayed on. The incongruity of the disco banner lights grew as the evening wore on. Eventually the siege was broken that night, but the disco banner lights were there, all night long, adding colour so to speak. Man Monis turned out to be a lone nutter more than a proper jihadist, and we all chalked that one up to the terror threat being over-stated.

Still, a year on, I can't but help think what a fiasco the whole thing was.

The Enemy Isn't Like What You Think

Here's a must read article about the kind of person who ends up in ISIL. It makes for sobering reading because it illuminates the depth of the problem.

For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”

This whole experience has been very familiar indeed to Doug Stone, the American general on the receiving end of this diatribe. “He fits the absolutely typical profile,” Stone said afterward. “The average age of all the prisoners in Iraq when I was here was 27; they were married; they had two children; had got to sixth to eighth grade. He has exactly the same profile as 80 percent of the prisoners then…and his number-one complaint about the security and against all American forces was the exact same complaint from every single detainee.”

These boys came of age under the disastrous American occupation after 2003, in the chaotic and violent Arab part of Iraq, ruled by the viciously sectarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki. Growing up Sunni Arab was no fun. A later interviewee described his life growing up under American occupation: He couldn’t go out, he didn’t have a life, and he specifically mentioned that he didn’t have girlfriends. An Islamic State fighter’s biggest resentment was the lack of an adolescence. Another of the interviewees was displaced at the critical age of 13, when his family fled to Kirkuk from Diyala province at the height of Iraq’s sectarian civil war. They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.

So there you have it; the perils of buying into identity politics. Not only that, we can see full well what the dividends are for America's misadventure in Iraq. In a bid to - allegedly - strike at the heart of terror by bringing down Saddam Hussein, thus ending the terror threat of things like 9/11, they turned a whole generation of men in Iraq into exactly the sort of people who become terrorists. Talk about snatching a bomb from the jaws of defeat. There's been nothing more self-defeating than American imperialism in the Middle East.

Paris Burning

This Is Serious, François

France seems to be the easy underbelly for terrorist strikes. The abject evil, the banal brutality and the inferiority-complex-charged vitriol walked into Paris and opened fire. The carnage that is being reported is staggering in scope as well as qualia, quantity as well as quality. Whoever the perpetrators were, they meant to do maximum damage and if we're keeping score, they did a heck of a job on the French - because the French are promising a merciless retaliation. 

It has only been a mere ten months since the Charlie Hebdo incident. If anything, the ferocity of this attack underscores the notion that Charlie Hebdo was just the beginning. We may opt to ridicule the terror threat, but in reality, it is a bit like the exchange in Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil', where the minister says the terrorists are bad sports. It's looking like a certain amount of terror-threat paranoia is a healthy option. let's face it, we've been at war with Islamists for some time now, whether we admit it to ourselves daily or not.

Look, just today we drone-bombed Jihadi John. Remember Jihadi John?  That idiot English boy who got himself wrapped up in the ISIS business of beheadings and video? Well, the US is reasonably certain they got the twerp. And that usually means, they found where he was staying and called in a drone that launched a smart-missile and the-rest-is-history-Jihadi-John. Is this good? Is this ethical? We don't know, but this seems to have turned into the frontier of our wars; and let's be honest with ourselves, this is a kind of post-colonial backlash war that's been repressed since the end of World War I, so nearly hundred years on, it's sort of on for young and for old. Foolishly, the western retreat from its own colonial aggression in the late twentieth century opened up the vacuum to be filled by some genuinely awful antagonists.

It's not some kind of mistake. The West shrunk back far enough and the islamists are trying to seize the moment. I'm not advocating the West go back in, but we have to understand that we're in some kind of war right now, and that events like in Paris aren't just blowback, they're efforts to hurt our polity. And while we strike this pose of "no compromise with the terrorists", we're locking ourselves further into this cycle of violence. Make no mistake, the asymmetry of the war is misleading, and we might fool ourselves into thinking we're not at war in the same manner that a citizen in 1939-1945 was at war.

The only reason we think that is because in light of the 9/11 attacks, the war we unleashed upon
the Taliban and Saddam was so remote, it left us the luxury to imagine we are not at war. Yet, since the fateful invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, we've had war. And as wars go, it's a pretty crappy protracted affair, with very vague victory conditions - far worse than the Hundred Years War or the Thirty Years' War, where people were waging wars wherein the context was lost and it was just more people fighting for the sake of fighting; Wars with reasons and processes that make 'Game of Thrones' look stream-lined in its plot perspicacity. Frankly, this one has the sort of metaphysical idiocy of the Crusades, once waged by the West on the Muslim world. This time the metaphysical idiocy is coming back from the Muslim world, but on the whole we have the recipe for something that could last a very long time.

Worse still, it's a war without decisive battles. There won't be land forces meeting on the field to contest terrain. There won't be battleships or aircraft carriers going toe-to-toe on the high seas. There won't even be a dogfight between fighter jets. Instead, it's going to be one side with the high tech espionage with drones and the other side with the suicide bombers. And it will drag on, tit-for-tat for decades to come.

That's just about how over a hundred people have ended up dead in Paris. It's insanity on a stick.
I don't know how to express just what I feel about all this, except to say that whatever it is that I feel, it's overwhelmingly negative, grim, and distressed. Whatever it is France intends to do, whoever it thinks is going to hold accountable and punish, so far the language says it's going to be war and more war as they re-commit to expanding the cycle of violence. John Kerry might bang on about finding the culprits and punishing them, but it just goes to show that the Secretary of the State for the United States of America hasn't got any historic perspective on this war, and he's even a veteran of the Vietnam War. The rhetoric is practically schoolyard-childish; and it just doesn't look like he's got a grip on what kind of hell kind war that's been unleashed.

You see why this is all so distressing, beyond the violence and the body count and the metaphysical idiocy.

Being Charlie Hebdo

Islamophobia Isn't Like Homophobia

In the years since I wrote this entry here 8years ago, the world has become just that little bit more volatile. Back then Islamophobia was a new word. Now it has gained currency - much in the way that a general acceptance of such things as Anti-Terror laws have become acceptable. I guess etymologically speaking Islamophobia would mean a fear of Islam. It doesn't mean hatred of Islam, but if we are to believe Yoda, fear leads to anger and anger leads to hate so we're two steps away from hating on Islam if we admit we're phobic, under that schema.

Based on the recent events in Paris where 12 journalists and cartoonists were shot to death by terrorists, it seems to be a legitimate fear to possess.

8 years ago, I joked that the term likens Islam to spiders, heights and homosexuals. I kind of stand by that. I'm not a big fan of the way the term is bandied about in shows like Q&A as if the term actually has some definitional - and therefore epistemological - truth to it. I wince every time I hear some talking head on the TV mentioning it, whereas the term Homophobia never struck me as odd in the same way. It really is a little like Muslims want to get a pass on the same identity-politic basis as LGBT people - even though their own religion wants to stone LGBT people. I smell hypocrisy there.

I guess whoever coined the term did so in the hope that if you could identify the phobia, you can smoke out the prejudices; which is exactly what the term homophobia has done for the gay community. If anything the construction of the term homophobia is even more precarious than Islamophobia because what we really mean by a homophobe is not somebody who fears homosexuality, but somebody who has gone straight on to hating on homosexuals. Even allowing for the more precarious construction, the term homophobia has allowed the world to move in to a direction where there is genuine emancipation of the LGBT community so in some sense there is hope yet for the term Islamophobia.

Be that as it may, the problem of all this is that terms like 'Islamophobia' force you into accepting a version of their identity politics, even if you don't accept identity politics at all. Identity politics is a pretty crappy tool. You can only claim so much ground arguing on behalf of the specific conditions of your birth. You can argue a position right up to equality, but arguing for exceptions is going to get you in trouble. Identity politics is at its core, pretty dumb. Ultimately it's the business of showing your scars and saying "somebody pay up or else back off".

I'm sorry, I'm done buying bullshit. I don't want more identity politics - my own included - when there already is enough in the world. I want more honest appraisals of what real equality means and how it gets achieved. And I dothink it gets achieved through such things as Freedom of Expression (heck, as much as it gets held back by religious dogma, but that's a separate topic). So if anybody calls you an Islamophobe, your answer should be "I'm not stupid enough to buy into your identity politics". If they shoot you for that answer, I guess that would be the point. They want the conversation to go to the Sword or the Koran.

All the same, the claim is that mocking the Prophet is simply not acceptable. That it's somehow reasonable for fatwahs to be put upon Salman Rushdie or that it is somehow understandable that people get so angered they go and shoot a bunch of cartoonists.

The law applies to us equally. There's no scope for identity politics based exceptions. That's how "equal in the eyes the law" works. So if somebody goes around shooting people, regardless of the perceived provocation, they have go before the law. And if they argue in court that cartoons were enough provocation to commit acts of murder, then they may find society and its values are dead set against you. And this would have nothing to do with their religion being belittled or persecuted. This is basic law-&-order kind of stuff. There isn't going to be some exception in French Law or European Law that is going to make this kind of thing okay.

If holding to equality makes somebody an Islamophobe, then maybe the fears are well-founded.

Takes Two To Terrorise

This business of shooting the editorial staff at Charlie Hebdo could have been carried out by once person. In which case we might have involved the lone-nut theory; yes, the same one I invoked with the Martin Place Siege. The, "that's not an act of terror because it's just one person." argument. I've been wondering a little about that call but I'm a little less certain of it now. I am now thinking that maybe we have a fear of the possibility that terror acts carried out by one suggests each and every individual is potentially a terror threat. And if that were true we would opt to abandon trust and liberty and give into our darkest xenophobic needs.

If anybody on their own is a terror cell then we have to start building a category outside of the individual and say "all muslims are potentially terrorists". It flies in the face of our own tolerance to say such things. So we opt with saying the lone gunman is a nutter. It may not even be true, when properly diagnosed.

Two brothers on the run with guns however constitutes a legitimate terror cell. This seems to be our acceptance of things base on events at the Boston Marathon as well as this week's Charlie Hebdo massacre. I guess it takes two people to have a conversation, which could then be characterised as a conspiracy. A lone person talking to himself is by most social counts, more crazy than conspiratorial.

'We' Do Terrible Things - But Do We Deserve What We Get?

One of the discussions I had this week in the aftermath involved talking about what the Colonial powers of the 19th century - that is Western Europe and Russia and the USA - still do today in the middle east. For a start the USA supports Israel and Israel isn't exactly a joy for the Arab world. Then there are the puppet regimes with dictators that dominated the second half of the Twentieth century. Name like Hussein, Gaddafi, Mubarak, Assad, tell us exactly how problematised the Arab world has been for a overlong time. Those countries have fallen into various states civil distress and in all these cases they offer up terrible choices.

We found out that much as we dislike Saddam Hussein, his government was stable enough to keep the waring factions from erupting into violence. We found out in Egypt that the alternative to a military government was the Muslim Brotherhood who essentially ruled in a way that made things worse, and whose democratic credentials quickly paled. Libya is oner-reported but it doesn't seem like things are getting better there, and Syria is in a terrible civil war where the enemy of our enemy ashore Assad, is ISIL. Even without the issue of religion - ignoring it outright, even - the Arab world is filled with difficult political issues.

The argument offered to me this week was that 'we' in the West are dropping bombs and insulting their prophet. That we should be more understanding when they rise up and exact their vengeance. As if Charlie Hebdo and its irreverent cartoons were just too much to bear; that this magazine constituted just provocation.

I have no problem with the notion that their grievances are legitimate. I have immense difficulty accepting that the terror act in paris this week is a legitimate act of war or defiance. At some point we are responsible or our own actions. These guys knew what they were doing. It doesn't matter that bombs are falling Syria or drone strikes are happening in North Pakistan or that Iraq and Afghanistan are in strife, if you live in Paris (or Boston or Sydney).
Yes, it's political. But it's shitty politics.

There Is A Problem With Islamism

This is hard to write because I have Muslim friends, but you're allowed to disagree with friends. My own reading of the Koran is mostly idle interest and morbid curiosity. There are parts of history where Islam found tremendous high points worthy of admiration and awe. Even so I'm really troubled by the way it keeps expressing itself in the contemporary world with violent bursts.

Bill Maher was seen in an interview talking about the problem of Islam as a religion and in it he has an interesting point. This is a religion where they behead people in Mecca for falling-out of religion. It's violently hostile to secular thinking. As Maher notes, it's amazing the world doesn't look at this a bit closer and harder. It would be like crucifying people in the Vatican forecourt for lapsing as Catholics.

Islam is ideologically opposed to our tolerance, even of Islam itself. Even though we talk about moderate muslims who are not violent benighted majority the 1billion-plus believers on the planet, at its very core is this beheadings at Mecca. There are crazy off-shoots of all the religions. Christianity alone has things like the Ku-Klux Klan and the Westboro Baptists Church but they are fringe. There are militant Buddhists in Burma rounding up and persecuting Muslims in Myanmar - but that is fringe stuff too; in the main Buddhism at its core is temples and tourism and selling trinkets. Hinduism, and Confucianism, alike have their odd violent fringes but it's not central to the practice.

Looking into Islamism at its core is like staring in to 8th century Dark Ages thinking in the desert of Arabia. it's unflinchingly uncompromising and brutal. It's so extreme one can think we're lucky they didn't enshrine cannibalism. There isn't a heart that says "turn the other cheek". It's "mock our prophet and we come shooting."

If we are indeed small-'l' liberals, it is worth considering how tolerant one must be to tolerate that which would kill you for your tolerance. Because that's a principle at stake. Our credo for tolerance says we believe in Freedom of Expression and standing by the cartoonists who lampoon Islam. They believe it's their duty to retaliate against the words (and especially images) with violence. It keeps coming around to the same collision point. If we're strictly talking the ideas, then Islam has a problem.
Yes, we're phobic for a reason.