Comments on: Liberalism: a luxury in this time of war?

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 06:01:53 +0000

Gummo;

This is why asking programmers “Do you plan to stay on late tonight or go home soon?” is likely to get a “yes”.

By: Gummo Trotsky

Gummo Trotsky — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 15:41:37 +0000

PS – don’t underrate the power of TV shows in forming people’s views of what’s real. Neither Stalin nor Goebbels made that mistake when it came to the influence of cinema.

By: Gummo Trotsky

Gummo Trotsky — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 15:38:42 +0000

You either mock them as trolls, or you respond to their arguments and enter into a debate.

It’s times like these that I wish that English had two distinct “ors” like Latin – “aut” for the exclusive sense (as in “Crash through or crash”) and “vel” for the inclusive sense which I’d prefer to see applied to those two approaches to trolls.

Doesn’t have any effect on the trolls – they’re incorrigible – but it’s more fun for the spectators if you can bring it off.

I suppose we could borrow “xor” from the realm of programming languages, but that would look a bit nerdy.

By: gilmae

gilmae — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 13:08:27 +0000

There are two ways to reply to a troll. You either mock them as trolls, or you respond to their arguments and enter into a debate. Both are ill-advised but if you go with the former – no one ever does with these op-ed trolls – then at least you aren’t allowing them to frame the argument.
If you try and argue with them you are implicitly taking their argument seriously; and to my mind lending them credibility.
Besides which, come on! She invoked a television show as her opening gambit. The only connection a scene in a television show has to reality is that generally they both involve humans. The scriptwriter has without fail provided the viewer with a practical demonstration of a strawman argument because that’s their job. When someone like Akerman or Albrechtson invoke the manufactured scenarios of television they reduce the whole debate to the level of farce from which it cannot recover.

By: Gummo Trotsky

Gummo Trotsky — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 07:00:52 +0000

I agree with gilmae. Like Mirko Bagaric, Albrechtsen is very much the MSM equivalent of an Internet

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 02:59:26 +0000

She sort of lurched about a bit. Certainly didn’t give much in the way of compelling replies. I had the feeling she was out of her depth.

I would have been too, in fairness. The room was full of clever students and not a few debating types.

By: Ingolf

Ingolf — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 01:57:33 +0000

Interesting background, Jacques. How, if at all, did she respond to the grilling? To judge by the article, she’s clearly locked into a particular viewpoint so I’m more curious about whether she showed any debating skill.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 01:01:53 +0000

I met Albrechtsen when I went to the CIS’s excellent Liberty & Society conference in April last year. She was at the opening dinner. Was a little put out that I hadn’t heard of her until that point (being a loyal reader of the Northern Territory News).

She gave a speech, peddling something very much like what she did in the article referred to. She was put out even more when the 30 or so students present put her to the rhetorical sword. She got grilled more completely than cheese on toast in a nuclear reactor. It was wonderful.

By: Brendan Halfweeg

Brendan Halfweeg — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 11:40:05 +0000

The issue of loss of civil liberties is exactly why libertarians can not coddle up to the idea that prosperity and big government go together. In order to protect civil liberties government must be kept small.

Small constitutionally limited governments simply don’t have the resources to fund military adventures and forcibly limit civil liberties.

By: Paul Frijters

Paul Frijters — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 06:42:22 +0000

may I join in wholeheartedly with this chorus?
The readiness in some quarters to abandon civil liberties that took centuries to amass for what has sofar, for the West, proved to be less costly in terms of life over a 5 year period than your average day of WW I is just shocking.

By: Ingolf

Ingolf — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 23:47:40 +0000

Bit sad, all the same, that someone on the board of the ABC feels free to write with so little regard for the facts. The overall thesis was predictable but the misrepresentation of the SCOTUS decision kind of surprised me.

Anyway . . . .

By: conrad

conrad — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 22:02:16 +0000

Actually, I like Albrechtsen, since she is a good constant source of poor quality arguments that we can use for teaching where I work.

By: Nabakov

Nabakov — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 19:12:04 +0000

Let’s roll with her point for a bit. OK, giving up some hard won freedoms may be necessary to win the war on terror. But we get them back when it’s over, right?

So how do we know when it’s over? Is she gonna advance some metrics and benchmarks here so that at some point we can all say “Yay! The war is over. No more rationing free speech and other liberties! Whoopee! Now we can say our fearless leader is a complete ratbag, etc, etc”

Look, the MSM is steadily and remorselessly losing readership and circulation to the interwebs 2.0. Those who still have a paying gig within its op-ed arena have to shout louder and louder to attract a dwindling audience.

Bert Camus once said tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes. These days MSM pundits bellow punchy and provocative polemics over a billion online interactions.

The likes of la Albrechtsen, Mirko et al are basically carnival geeks working the media midway.

I suspect they’re read and thought about more by those who disagree with them than by those they claim they are catering too.

Boy, it’s gonna be so embarassing to be one of them such a few years down the track. Kinda like having your three year old attention-grabbing poo experiments as your main credentials for getting into a good secondary school.

By: cam

cam — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 13:48:14 +0000

gilmae, this is the second blog post discussing her troll I have seen today Yes. IHBT2

By: James Farrell

James Farrell — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 13:05:47 +0000

…this is the second blog post discussing her troll I have seen today…

The other being Tim Dunlop, as cited in Your ML.

I

By: Ken Parish

Ken Parish — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:28:14 +0000

I agree with gilmae. Like Mirko Bagaric, Albrechtsen is very much the MSM equivalent of an Internet “troll”, writing only to stir up controversy by pressing a current “hot button” in the hope of generating lots of attention and argument. Hence I’m not going to bother addressing her nonsense, any more than I rose to Gummo Totsky’s entreaty to analyse Bagaric’s silly arguments about the High Court. Nevertheless, it’s mildly gratifying that Ingolf has bothered to do so. For what it’s worth, I agree with his analysis (and especially his summary of the US caselaw).

I suppose the risk in ignoring such pundits is that some innocent but open-minded readers might assume that Albrechtsen/Bagaric is speaking truth and commonsense because no-one has bothered to detail the arguments against them. However, I’m fairly sure that there aren’t very many political innocents abroad likely to read opinion columns in the sorts of newspapers where Albrechtsen’s and Bagaric’s trollery appears. They can be safely treated with the contempt they deserve.

By: Tom Noonan

Tom Noonan — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:16:36 +0000

Maybe bin Laden is not laughing. I think the whole dogma surrounding 9-11 and the subsequent warfare, based largely on assertions by the US administration, defies rational belief. Now unpicking this dogma is mind bogglingly difficult, when we get down to exactly who did what and who knew who, in the CIA, ISI, Taliban etc; anyway the official story is simplistic beyond belief. As a result we have invasion of Afghanistan, then Iraq for more cover, and it is by no means that an invasion of Iran is off the table. Therefore why not accept Albrechtsen, and get with the program. It’s a mad mad mad world, and afterall her ultimate master Murdoch is probably laughing.

By: gilmae

gilmae — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 11:44:54 +0000

au contraire, this is the second blog post discussing her troll I have seen today, second in a quite limited range of Australian political blogs that I read. It would seem that Janet has done a superb job; two people have fed the troll already, and bit down on a farcical, contradictory argument. She’d fit right in at k5 or on usenet.