opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr

When I alighted on Medium, almost all the Classics content there was Eidolon.

Eidolon is an unabashedly leftist (well, more to the point, identity-politics–driven) Classics online publication. When Eidolon isn’t talking about the collisions of Classics and modernity, it talks a lot about how to stop making Classics complicit in US white supremacist discourse.

The latest contribution to Eidolon by its editor weighs in on a comparable shit-fight in mediaeval studies, between Asian mediaevalist Kim and White mediaevalist Brown (and throwing some elbows of its own): Learn Some Fucking History. It is inter alia a call to arms that says it is not enough to correct white supremacists on matters of history; classicists also have to (somehow) atone for how the discipline has previously contributed to white supremacist discourse… in a way that goes beyond correcting white supremacists on matters of history.

Somehow.

Yes, it is that frustratingly open-ended; and since we’ve departed the realm of scholarship and are now in the realm of culture war, I don’t think it’s particularly effective polemic either (and I’ve commented as much):

… If the alt right are impervious to correction via historical fact, they’ll be a lot more impervious to correction via reception theory. And if the audience you’re seeking to convince are those “who aren’t hardened keyboard warriors”, and who are still open to being persuaded, then I’d have thought they’re going to be more readily persuaded via historical fact than via reception theory, too.

If doing historical scholarship is not actually “fighting” the alt right, neither is doing critical theory scholarship. And if the aim is persuasion of the middle (as opposed to street-fighting, or preaching to the converted), then penitence and sackcloth has limited rhetorical appeal. (As do ad hominem attacks.)

Another reader’s response to Zuckerberg’s essay, though, was so righteous, and so clear-eyed, that I thought it deserved republication here (with permission). The more so as the only response it’s had to date was to reiterate some ad hominems.

By: Grrrrrobert. [Original comment on Medium]

Profs Kim and Brown have longstanding internet beef. Why not mention that? You write like Brown’s current salvo came from nowhere. Her and Kim have been clawing at each other’s flesh like near-sighted Maenads for awhile. Admittedly, almost no one is as cool as this Maenad. No one could be.

I ❤ confused leopards.

Brown comes close. Her point is solid. Do your job. Social media is the dark side.

And this call to ally with Kim, and pile on Brown, is begging a number of questions in any case. The main being “Why?” and “To what end?” They are both adult academics with jobs and a personal grudge.

And speaking of begging the question, the question is severely begged by Kim’s statement quoted by Brown. “How are you signalling in your classroom that you are not upholding white supremacy, when you are teaching the subject loved by white supremacists?”

Why? To What End?

Has the field reverted to 19th century norms? Are current history departments pumping out white supremacy and apologist articles?

No. No they are not. Show us an open white supremacist in the field, with a job, doing white supremacist work. In the classics or in medieval studies? Where is a University which is willing to hire a White Supremacist leaning classicist or medievalist? Where are they? Nowhere. So what has happened? What is Prof. Kim saying? She’s saying Brown is a Nazi and a white supremacist.

Thank God. Thank God that Prof Kim lives in a country with liberal libel laws. In the U.K. or Germany or Ireland she’d be drowning in lawsuits already. She has no case. She would deserve them.

Brown says she isn’t a white supremacist. Her work doesn’t reflect white supremacy or Nazism. I believe her.

Some tiny minority of college aged racists with reactionary racist politics twist various disciplines’ historical arguments for their politics. So now all medievalists (and by association academics whose work is twisted in the same way) are suspected white supremacists, and in the classroom we must immediately disclaim? Or else we’re picking a side?

Wait. What? The whole thing is actually off the rails.

I still occasionally work in 20th century history in a public capacity as a Referent for a Concentration Camp Memorial. Hitler wore pants. Often. I dare say he liked them. I do not have to signal to the world that I am not a Nazi by wearing only my kurze Lederhosen. (He wore those too, unfortunately, see below) At this rate,in order to properly signal, I will have to lecture naked to signal that I am not a Nazi.

Nazis ruining everything. As usual.

Ye Gods.

Lots of holocaust revisionists and other Nazi apologist filth have a steeped interest in German and 20th century history. That doesn’t make the group of people licenced to teach seminars and do tours at Dachau suspected Nazis.

Why do I have to signal anything at all? The more I signal that I am not an alcoholic the less people believe me.

Yes, I have read Prof. Kim’s article, and I do take issue with the idea that academics have to be activists, especially active signalling activists. It is not a given that

“Today, medievalists have to understand that the public and our students will see us as potential white supremacists or white supremacist sympathizers because we are medievalists.”

That’s rubbish. No one cares about medievalists, or classicists really. The only time either get noticed is when administrators see how much money they are worth if their departments are dissolved.

And we are not supposed to be “ideological arms dealers.” We are supposed to do history or whatever our disciplines are and well.

The work should work for you. The public history done at Dachau does exactly that. No politics are required, just the truth as far as we can prove it. For people doing public history at the Gedenkstätte, their personal politics and activism are not actually welcome.

Plus too much politics, unless the work is about politics, ruins the work.

And now apparently everyone who even wants to approach the subject has to pass some kind of ideological purity test? And if you refuse you are taking the side of the Charlottesville marchers?

What?

I can understand Brown’s anger in the face of something like that. And her rhetoric.

No academic needs to signal their good intentions as a result of 19th and early 20th century sins of other academics. And especially not as a reaction to the minority (if there are any) actual modern classics or medieval students and scholars that are open white supremacists. Where are they? Do we actually have any holocaust-denial style modern publishing classicists or medievalists?

Nö, we do not.

Is there a Wiedergutmachung?

Yes, our work can be misused by people who want to do evil with it. That’s true. There’s no way to stop that except to stop doing the work.

In any case. Good solid work can easily do 10 times the good of a sermon. It’s harder to do. Preaching is easy. And it takes longer to do, and longer for the effect to sink in, like the difference between a bush and a Tree.

But a well planted tree eventually overshadows all the bushes. And think of how everyone can benefit. The Maenad has some where to hang her snake, lean her Thyrsus, a place for the Leopard to nap, and somewhere to shady to sit. Everyone wins.

De Koine en de Oude Dialekten van Griekland

The most interesting thing about Tsakonian is not that it is descended from Doric. That impresses nationalists, but the survivals of Doric are less overwhelming than the nationalists would like to think. The most interesting thing about Tsakonian, compared to other dialects of Greek, is the extreme phonological and morphological meltdown that it underwent. There’s nothing like it in the history of Greek. It’s like how Latin phonology melted down into French.

Or how Germanic morphology melted down into English.

Not enough Greeks know of the Dutch hellenist Dirk C. Hesseling, a pioneer of Early Modern Greek studies. Those few Greeks who do know of Hesseling are unlikely to know that he was also a pioneer of creole linguistics, working on Negerhollands, the now extinct Dutch creole of the US Virgin Islands.

That means that Hesseling was an early inventor of hammers; and that motivated him to look for nails, not only in creole linguistics, but also in Greek linguistics. Accordingly, Hesseling suggested (one year after publishing his book on Negerhollands) that the morphological meltdown of Tsakonian might be explained—just as the meltdown in English has been explained—by Tsakonian having been a creole at some stage in its history. It would have to have been an early stage, and Hesseling looked at the history of the Peloponnese, and suggested the Avars as being involved.

• Hesseling, D. C. 1906. De Koine en de Oude Dialekten van Griekland. (Comptes rendus de l’Academie d’Amsterdam, Afdeeling Letterkunde, 4th series, part 8.) Amsterdam.

Now, there are several reasonable responses to Hesseling’s surmise.

• It’s unknowable what happened in the Peloponnese in the 7th century, but the hypothesis is intriguing. Tsakonian does look oddly like English.
• It’s unknowable what happened in the Peloponnese in the 7th century, but the hypothesis is unnecessary. People aren’t as enthusiastic about the Viking Creole origin hypothesis of Middle English as they used to be; and it’s not like you need a creole to explain changes as radical as Tsakonian’s. (I owe that argument to my old colleague Gabby Bodard, who is not a linguist or a neohellenist, but is pretty clueful.)
• It’s unknowable what happened in the Peloponnese in the 7th century, which makes the hypothesis methodologically useless, as an instance of ignotum per ignotum—explaining an unknown with another unknown. We have no idea, after all, what language the Avars spoke, let alone whether they came to the Peloponnese in the requisite sort of numbers.

The following, I submit, is a non-reasonable response:

• Taking offence on behalf of Tsakoniandom, as the resident not-very-good linguist (Michael Deffner).
• Alerting the town fathers of Leonidio about the offensive speculations against the patrimony of the Tsakonians.
• Getting the town fathers of Leonidio to pass a vote of condemnation against Hesseling’s paper.

I know of the incident from Hubert Pernot, Hesseling’s collaborator, arguably the best historical linguist of Modern Greek there has ever been, and without argument the best scholar of Tsakonian there has ever been. (Not enough Greeks know about him, either.) Pernot’s sad note about the town fathers incident, in his grammar of Tsakonian, was a laconic “that’s not how scholarship is done.”

There are reasons to fear that that is how scholarship is done now; at least by some. In the next post, I’m going to write about l’affaire Tuvel, which I consider a glaring example of this. In this post, I’m going to write about a less clearcut example: the article in the centre of the controversy was incendiary, and there are good arguments to be made that it was not scholarly. And yet petitions calling for it to be expunged are still, in my view, counterproductive.

The Case For Colonialism

Two petitions have recently circulated on change.org about The Case For Colonialism (Petition 1, Petition 2), published as a viewpoint essay in Third World Quarterly, calling for that essay to be withdrawn from the journal.

It is hard to defend that article. It seems to have been straightforwardly incendiary, as its abstract shows:

For the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. It is high time to question this orthodoxy. Western colonialism was, as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found, using realistic measures of those concepts. The countries that embraced their colonial inheritance, by and large, did better than those that spurned it. Anti-colonial ideology imposed grave harms on subject peoples and continues to thwart sustained development and a fruitful encounter with modernity in many places. Colonialism can be recovered by weak and fragile states today in three ways: by reclaiming colonial modes of governance; by recolonising some areas; and by creating new Western colonies from scratch.

In addition, concerns have been raised about the editorial process having been bypassed; and the editorial board did in fact protest the publication, and mass resigned. The article has in fact been retracted, and it took me a fair while to find a copy elsewhere.

How does one address speech of this ilk?

The both liberal and libertarian answer is, with more speech: debate. Because the moral agent is meant to be in the business of persuasion, and dissuading their audience from harmful arguments by refuting them.

The both radical and reactionary answer is, with less speech: censorship. Because the moral agent is meant to be in the business of combat, and safeguarding their audience from harmful arguments by quashing them.

Censorship is on the ascendancy, after a few decades when it wasn’t; whether it’s in the academic domain, or the political, or the societal. Censorship still has a poor reputation in the West—which is why academic venues are quick to argue that what they do, in suppressing speech they disapprove of, is not censorship, and why petitions to withdraw articles focus on accusations of academic malpractice, rather than offence.

They do well to. Because suppressing an opinion on the grounds that you hold a contrary opinion is not how knowledge is furthered—nor how a society is furthered. There’s a reason censorship has a poor reputation.

Here, I suggest, are some valid responses to the paper:

• Pointing out that the discourse of international relations is suffused with a covert version of the paper’s overt colonialism;
• querying the editorial process of the journal;
• refuting the arguments of the paper in detail (and here, and also here);
• pointing out the poor choices of examples in the paper;
• reporting the controversy in the context of other retractions of papers

Here, I suggest, are some less valid responses:

• That the article is offensive.
  • Scholarship is not about making anyone feel good. Whether you’re oppressed or the oppressor. Both now get to use the tools of scholarship to their own ends; and both are meant to be subjected to the blind review of their peers still.
  • The outcome of scholarship is not meant to be the remediation of social ills. It is meant to be knowledge and understanding—which you can then, if you choose to, apply towards the remediation of social ills. And the unwelcome gadfly has a critical role in impelling understanding. (If they’ve making a cogent case, which hardly appears to have happened here. It’s more clearly the case in l’affaire Tuvel.)
• That the article is damaging.
  • That’s giving academic editorials a power they simply do not have; and racists are not waiting for academic editorials to justify their beliefs: they already have plenty of commentators in the media or in their local pub, with far broader reach, to appeal to.
• That the article should be subject to the judgement of a change.org petition, circulated to people unlikely to have read the paper to begin with.
  • That is no more how scholarship is supposed to be done, than town hall meetings in Leonidio is. That’s what editorial boards of journals and journal editors and publishers are for; and that’s the mechanism that got anything done.
  • Poorly, as it turned out:
• Threatening the journal editor, and thereby allowing the retraction of the article to be couched in these terms:
  

  Following a number of complaints, Taylor & Francis conducted a thorough investigation into the peer review process on this article. Whilst this clearly demonstrated the essay had undergone double-blind peer review, in line with the journal’s editorial policy, the journal editor has subsequently received serious and credible threats of personal violence. These threats are linked to the publication of this essay. As the publisher, we must take this seriously. Taylor & Francis has a strong and supportive duty of care to all our academic editorial teams, and this is why we are withdrawing this essay.

  • The change.org petitions got the retraction they sought. I’m sure those aren’t the words they wanted it retracted under. Making a martyr of both the author and the editor is an own goal.

Here are counterarguments I would expect, and am not compelled by:

• That I am speaking from a position of privilege, and I do not appreciate the pain the editorial has caused.
  • I’ll admit that the essay’s contention that underdeveloped countries should pay the West to colonise them got an arched eyebrow out of me instead of tears. But education has a better long-term prospect of reducing the amount of hateful speech in the world than quashing it. And it has done so already. Repeatedly.
• That the underprivileged should not have to eternally explain the obvious, and prove (as the Greek saying goes) that they are not an elephant: that this amounts to yet another microaggression. In fact, one of the comments about Third World Quarterly said that the contention of whether colonialism was a good thing should be considered an “asked and answered” question for that journal—that the journal’s founding premise, after all, was that it wasn’t.
  • Not every brown person in the West should eternally have to play the role of Explainer In Chief to clueless white people. I can even concede that Third World Quarterly might not have been the right venue for the article.
  • It is good and meet that people do step up to that role, though. Because that repairs the world. And because the alternative to such education is a separatism that simply can’t be enforced any more. (And that education should be part of people’s Bildung and upbringing; it shouldn’t be primarily the responsibility of visible minorities to begin with.)
• That the article is violence, and violence must be met with violence. Hate speech is now suppressed by society, and it should be.
  • Suppressing hate speech is now the Zeitgeist. The thing is that hate speech doesn’t end that way, and an over-eagerness to label speech hate speech is infantilising rather than salutary. If the article was indeed, as has been speculated, the work of a Milo Yannopoulos-style provocateur, then elevating it to hate speech is the last thing that should be done with it: it’d be the reaction the provocateur was hoping for.
  • As for violence (even if I do concede that hyperbolic usage of the term): if it isn’t coming from the State, with its monopoly of violence, the exercise of violence is a risky game. Usually the guys on the reactionary side of the street have more crowbars than you do, and the crowbar count shouldn’t be how pressing moral issues of the day are decided. (Crowbar count differential is why social justice has not prevailed historically, after all.) And involving the State is something the petitioners have been very, very careful to avoid: they know the State has no great affection for progressive activists either.
  • The State doesn’t get to get involved in the US anyway, because of the First Amendment. Journals and fora are quite happy to point out that the First Amendment does not obligate them to provide a forum for those they disapprove of. That of course also makes them powerless to prevent their adversaries from setting up their own journals and fora elsewhere. And blocking out the speech of those you don’t want to engage with may give you repose; but it doesn’t give you outreach. It doesn’t redress the problem; it merely pushes it out of sight.

That aside, I found this response from Bleeding Heart Libertarians speaks for me. As a group that identifies both as libertarian and as committed to social justice, I suspect they might speak for me in a few more facets, too.

That an article upsets people is no grounds for its withdrawal. […] It might be argued that Gilley’s paper should be retracted because his arguments do not support his conclusion, and so these are undermined “as a result of… [argumentative] error”. But to argue in this way would require that one first demonstrate where Gilley is mistaken–one would have to engage with his work, not simply call for its retraction. And even if one could show that his arguments were flawed this should not be used to support a call for retraction, for this would justify the retraction of any paper whose conclusions have been arrived at through erroneous argumentation. And this is not how academic debates are conducted—and nor should it be. Instead, persons present their conclusions supported by the best arguments and evidence that they can muster. These are then subject to critical scrutiny with the aim of identifying and correcting errors in the arguments. If the arguments are found not to support the conclusion then the original paper should be rebutted—not retracted.

But there’s more to be said in this case. The petitions demanding the retraction of this article secured over 15,000 signatures. I very much doubt that everyone who signed these petitions actually read the paper. Demanding that a paper be retracted because you don’t like its arguments is bad enough. Demanding that it be retracted because you don’t like what you think its conclusion is without having even read it is despicable. Moreover, if you’re an academic, a demand for retraction on either of these grounds would be a clear abdication of your professional responsibility.

And if that’s too libertarian for you, well, this from Current Affairs is more mainstream liberal, and more pragmatic than principled in rejecting retraction. And I’m ok with its take too:

And so I’m worried about how the response to this article may play out. I am not signing the petition to have it retracted, because I believe that the journal shouldn’t retract it simply because there was public pressure. I am also very concerned that this could be a PR coup for the right, as so many of these things are. It’s tough, of course, because for the reasons I’ve outlined above, the article shouldn’t have been published. Gilley did not meet the standards that should be expected of an academic. He falsified history. When evaluated by a fair standard, he has not upheld the honesty and rigor that should be expected of someone in his position, and the article is a factual disgrace as well as a moral one. But it would be very easy to fall into a certain predictable trap, where the left calls Bruce Gilley a racist, and Gilley declares that they simply can’t handle the truth. And while I’m sympathetic to the argument that we should avoid that by Not Even Addressing Such Rubbish, bad arguments fester when they go unaddressed. (This is why I put myself through the ordeal of reading The Bell Curve.)

I think, then, that all responses to this article should be rigorous and careful. I think everyone should try to read the full thing, to know what Gilley argues and what he doesn’t argue. And we must repeatedly emphasize that the reason Gilley’s piece is so wretched is not just because it advocates something that contradicts our sense of justice, but because he has deliberately produced a false version of history. I am sick and tired of people on the right saying those of us on the left simply Can’t Respond To Their Arguments. I’ve read their arguments, and they’re bad.

This was difficult to write. I think the next post will be easier, in that the calls for retraction were more clearly unjustified. It will also be harder, because the article in the centre of the controversy is thornier, and warrants very close study.

I write this with trepidation. I don’t wade into political matters, and I’m a conflict-averse kind of person. I am also discovering I’m more politically moderate than I used to fancy myself, and that is never a comfortable thing.

But, having the courage of my convictions is a novel experience; one that drove me off Quora. Now that I’m off Quora, the discourse I’m exposed to, on Facebook and on Medium—from my putative ideological stablemates—is much less considered, and less thought through: a sad consequence of the democratisation of social media, which unearths the poor arguments that used to whirl around the pub and the café, and elevates them into common, tub-thumping currency. On both sides.

(Yes, it was ever thus; and yes, the mobs used to run out of control and burn and lynch. But “my side” was supposed to be moving past that kind of thing.)

And I could let that pass, or I could try out saying, on occasion, no, that stance is not cool. That argument makes no sense, and discredits my side. And I will not assent to it.

Here’s an example.

Like many Australians, I voted on the Australian marriage equality plebiscite a couple of weeks ago. Like many Australians on the left, I had misgivings about putting human rights up for vote to the mob. Not that the party of Tony Abbott has earned my trust about administering human rights any more than the mob. (Nor for that matter the party of Joe de Bruyn, who blocked Labor from voting for marriage equality when it had the chance.) But once the vote was approved, after some rather specious attempts to block it on the basis of how it was funded, I felt obligated to vote my opinion as a citizen, and vote YES I did.

And if the mob turns out to have voted YES to marriage equality after all, as polls indicated, we now have the bizarre spectacle of Andrew Bolt’s latest editorial, after months of decrying the evils of the gay marriage, saluting the outcome as a blow for trusting the Wisdom of the People.

But the libertarian-cum-social conservative stylings of Andrew Bolt are not what I’m writing about here.

A week after I voted, I got an SMS from the YES campaign, urging me to vote.

A lot of people who’d voted YES got the SMS. Not a few people who’d voted NO got it too—notoriously including arch social conservative Cory Bernardi, who was busy organising his own robocalls for the NO campaign.

People broadly expressed confusion and annoyance at getting spammed with political SMSs, in offices (like mine did) and online. Some people went so far as to say they would reconsider their vote in light of their annoyance.

The following things were said in retort, including on The Project, Michelle Grattan’s editorial on The Conversation, and a few friends on Facebook:

1. SMS spamming is a legitimate component of modern-day political campaigning, just as robocalls were.
2. The SMS was sent to randomised numbers, so noone’s privacy was invaded.
3. Any objections to the SMS are mischief-making by conservatives.
4. You have no right to protest being spammed by the YES campaign, because YOU KNOW WHO HAS THE RIGHT TO BE ANNOYED? GAY PEOPLE WHOSE RELATIONSHIPS ARE BEING INVALIDATED!! THAT’S WHO!!
5. If you’re prepared to change your vote based on annoyance about being spammed, then you are a very superficial person.

Well, no.

1. Either spam is bad or it is good. If spam is bad, and this is spam, then this is bad.
   • Spam does not become non-spam just because it is sent out from people we agree with.
   • Spam does not become non-spam just because the content of the spam looks innocuous: “The Marriage Equality Survey forms have arrived! Help make history and vote YES for a fairer Australia. VoteYes.org.au.” The comparable spam sent out shortly afterwards at a grassroots level from the Christianists of Rise Up Australia looked innocuous too: “Vote NO for SSM. Please watch this brief video and pass it on to your contacts.”—until you clicked through to their fire and brimstone sermon on YouTube.
   • Spam does not become non-spam because the government SMSs bushfire warnings to residents who might be affected. (Yes, I actually saw that argument; mercifully it was advanced in a comments page, rather than by anyone with a clue.) I’m not aware of the Australian Marriage Equality campaign becoming an arm of local government.
   • Spam does not become non-spam just because it advertises a political party instead of detergent.
   • For that matter, spam does not become non-spam because currently legislation says it is not spam: “It is important to note that if these calls, emails or SMSs are not commercial — that is they do not have a commercial purpose — they are generally allowed and not required to comply with the obligations under the Do Not Call Register Act 2006 and the Spam Act 2003”. Legislation can change, and the more SMSs of this kind you see, there more pressure there will be to change the legislation. And to me (and not just to me), this is spam.
2. We have the lobby group’s assurance that the numbers were randomised, and that noone’s privacy was compromised.
   • And I should trust an unelected partisan lobby group, who tells me that the paperwork is in the mail, why?
   • Journalists (doing what Michelle Grattan used to do) have queried whether this is the case—although the own-goal of sending an SMS to Cory Bernardi does suggest the campaign was not targeted with laser-like precision.
   • “If a few highly confidential numbers were by chance reached, it’s hard to see what harm was done”, says Grattan. I used to respect Grattan. But this is exactly the line of thinking that has brought us the Victorian State Premier today calling civil liberties a “luxury” that a leader like him does not have, because terrorism. “Some people have the luxury of being able to have that notional debate. Those of us in positions of leadership do not have that luxury.” Well, no. Slippery slopes are real, whether they involve handing over all your drivers licence photos over to the feds for facial recognition, or giving lobbyists carte blanche to call unregistered phone numbers.
3. I don’t always enjoy reading The Australian, Murdoch’s broadsheet. It has enough left-baiting and retrograde social conservatism to make me scowl of a Saturday morning.
   • Yet it also hosts ideological diversity (as long as it’s not left-wing); and I was gratified to see one commentator on its pages (Van Onselen? Kenny?) recently say that, just because you might not like the advocates of marriage equality, does not mean that the cause isn’t right.
   • Same goes in converse for the protests about the SMSs. Just because right wing bigots are among those protesting the SMSs, doesn’t mean the SMSs were a good thing. And to read every protest in this currency under a lens of who benefits politically is the kind of myopia that… well, that I would sadly expect from someone who has covered politics in Canberra for decades.
4. The “you are not allowed to complain about SMSs” line is one that has done the rounds in Facebook, and one that I reserve especial contempt for. It’s the argument of the motorist pulled over for speeding, and telling the cop, “why aren’t you out there catching murderers.”
   • Felonies are more serious than misdemeanours; that does not excuse misdemeanours, or exempt them from being sanctioned.
   • I agree that it is ethically and socially wrong that the gay and lesbian friends I know in long-term relationships do not have them recognised by the State to the extent that my straight friends’ relationships are. I agree that this causes them more distress than being spammed by a lobby group causes me. That is not an argument in favour of spamming: it is a blatant attempt to shut down discussion through exercise of piety. And it astonishes me that anyone would think this a constructive contribution to the discussion.
   • Then again, it came from Facebook. Which is not the home base of constructive contributions to debates.
5. As for the superficiality of the voter swayed by their annoyance over SMS—
   • If you’re in the battleground of civil rights not being a matter for the vote of the mob, then the stupidity and mercuriality of the mob is an argument for you to use.
   • Once you’re no longer in that battleground, and you’ve agreed to campaign for a vote, you’re in the business of winning votes. You win votes by persuading those voters who can be persuaded: not those already bolted on at your side of the argument, nor those who follow Cory Bernardi or Rise Up Australia and think you the devil, but those in between.
   • Maybe they’re undecided because they’re superficial; maybe their votes are up for grabs because they lack civil engagement.
   • But telling them so to their face is not how you win their vote. And winning their vote is your business now, not asserting your moral superiority over them. As Talleyrand said—and the more I read of culture war battles, the more relevant his dictum seems to me: it’s worse than a crime: it’s a mistake.