hypocrisy

Of all the writing about the 5th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, one of the more interesting pieces is by Mary Ellen O’Connell (pictured) of Notre Dame Law School. In Learning from the Iraq War: The Wisdom of International Law, she argues that the most tangible lesson is that the US ignores international law at its peril.

Going into Iraq, we ignored the UN Charter, which prohibits the use of force except in self-defense or with Security Council authorization. Once in Iraq, we ignored the Hague Regulations, requiring us to put a stop to looting and to make only necessary changes to local law and government. We ignored the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit secret detention and abuse of prisoners of the kind we saw at Abu Ghraib.

The talk on Iraq is all about what went wrong, whether the surge is working, and when we can get out. We hear virtually nothing about international law and look set to repeat our mistakes. Violating the law has cost our nation and Iraq dearly. It has denied us the guidance of rules based on long experience and moral consensus. We have lost standing in the world, a literal fortune, and precious lives. Rather than internalizing the lesson of law violation in Iraq, we continue to defy the law in serious and self-destructive ways.

At some point, sooner or later, America needs to understand that international law does indeed apply to everyone — including America. Otherwise any US action against any other nation breaking the law is nothing but hypocrisy. (Hat-tip to Blog Them Out of the Stone Age.)

You’d think that Abercrombie and Fitch, who use imagery of the shirtless male throughout their marketing, would appreciate a few more shirtless men, right? Apparently not.

New York-based Improv Everywhere, who cause “scenes of chaos and joy in public places”, placed 115 shirtless men in A&F’s store on 5th Avenue.

After about 15 minutes… security employees started approaching all of our men and asking them to either put a shirt on or leave. They informed us that the model was a paid employee and his state of undress didn’t justify ours. So despite the fact that the store constantly bombards you with the image of the shirtless male, Abercrombie still maintains a “No Shirts; No Service” policy. Some agents protested that they were trying to buy a shirt, but the staff countered with the not-so-logical, “If you put on a shirt then you can buy a shirt”…

Two agents were actually stopped while in the process of checking out! They were waiting in line for 10 minutes to buy some $45 shirts, only to be grabbed at the register. One of them was in the process of handing over his credit card as he was nabbed and informed he wasn’t allowed to make a purchase!

There’s plenty of photos and videos, some of which are quite, erm, scenic if you’re so inclined.

Whaddya think about the Hillsong Church, eh? No, actually, I’ll go first. It worries me.

Of the various controversies about Hillsong, two stand out for me:

• Fundamentalism is A Very Bad Thing, whether it’s about Islam, Christianity, Marxism, Free Market Economics, wind power generation or whether the milk goes in first. The Church of Virus lists Dogmatism as one of the Three Senseless Sins, and while CoV is somewhat tongue in cheek it’s nevertheless spot on. Fundamentalism denies individual thought or adaptation to changing circumstances. Fundamentalism is nothing more than intellectual bullying: “I will tell you what to think.” This is dangerous. When people cease to think for themselves they become slaves. Hillsong is a Fundamentalist organisation: internal debate is not permitted.
• Prosperity Theology is a hypocritical perversion of what that Joshua bar Joseph bloke was actually saying. OK, the gold-plated silk-clad parasites of the Vatican aren’t exactly a shining example of his teachings either. But to appropriate the Jesus brand and leave out all the difficult bits is a lot like that Che Guevara t-shirt as a symbol of enlightened rebellion.

Now I’m all for freedom of religion. Please, everybody, think for yourselves and decide your own beliefs! That’s a fundamental human right. I support you in your endeavours. But another fundamental right is freedom of speech. I get to say why I think you’re wrong (and vice versa), and out of that interchange some glorious new synthesis might arise.

Hillsong denies those fundamental human rights to its own members — by suppressing thought through Fundamentalism and suppressing free speech by denying dissent.

Pinky Beecroft, the sometimes-scrambled former lead singer of Machine Gun Fellatio, has been attending Hillsong and wrote about it for Manic Times. Long, but packed with ironic observations.

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A spot-on observation from Dave Snowden:

…autocratic managers and the dark side of management consultancy have discovered how to keep their penny and still eat the bun.

The way it works is this. You spend a lot of money putting in control systems based on idealised process flows and ways of working. This applies in customer relationship management and health & safety alike along with many other fields. It looks really good on the flow charts. However the day to day reality of dealing with customers, or doing the job (say on an oil rig) means that people have to break the rules. Your business depends on their doing so and as long as it has a good outcome you ignore it. However if something goes wrong, you bring out that rule book and the idealised model and now you have someone to blame: the poor schmuck who has been making your business work for you.

Thanks to Johnnie Moore for the pointer.

Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson reckons Australia needs a Bill of Rights. I reckon he’s right about rights. And that’s because the central issue reminds me of when we were running The Core magazine…

The Core’s sole source of income was advertising, and most of it came from nightclubs. Nightclub managers are [coughs] the most honourable and [chokes] reliable [gargles] businessmen and women who can be found. Their integ… [coughs] [chokes] … sorry, I seem to have something caught in my throat.

They’d brag about how their new club night would be the biggest, brightest thing ever. “It’ll be huge,” they’d say. They’d want to book a heap of advertising — on credit, of course — and wanted discount.

“Sure,” I’d say, showing them our rate card and the discounts on offer.

“We’ll book a full page for 8 weeks then, for that 25% discount,” or whatever it was.

“Sure,” I’d say again. “Just sign here.”

And then they’d freeze.

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Crikey has brought to my attention a media statement by the Australian Federal Police regarding the Mohammed Haneef case. In part it reads:

AFP Professional Standards has investigated suspected leaks to the media and is satisfied that there has been no unlawful disclosure of information by AFP members. The matters identified as possible inappropriate conduct by officials of other agencies will be referred to the appropriate authorities.

The AFP has acted appropriately throughout the investigation.

Well that’s good then. Some “other agencies” are to blame.

However the statement also says:

The continuing attempts by Dr Haneef’s defence team to use the media to run their case is both unprofessional and inappropriate and the AFP has raised this aspect with the Queensland Legal Services Commission.

Uhuh. And how about an equivalent sentence complaining about the government’s attempts to use the media to run their case? Yes, Ruddock and Andrews, I’m looking at you. Is your behaviour not also “both unprofessional and inappropriate”? No, no equivalent set of words? Oh.

I was under the impression that in Western democracies the police (as well as the “other agencies”) were there to independently uphold the rule of law, not act as the minions of the government of the day. Silly me.

The media’s full of the Howard government’s magic $3.7 billion “extra surplus” today. It’s hard to know how to start making sense of it all. But here’s one thought which struck me: the tax-free threshold for personal income tax.

Democrat Senator Andrew Murray says in Crikey today that the amount you can earn before being taxed has stayed at the same figure of $6000 since the year 2000.

If it had been indexed since 2000, it would now be well over $7000. Had the 1980 personal threshold of $4,041 kept pace with earnings, the tax-free threshold would now be well over $15,000.

Senator Murray also points out that the minimum income required for basic subsistence is around $13,000. That is, if you earn less than that, you simply don’t have enough money to cover the basic living expenses of accommodation, food, clothing, education, medical care, transport and so on. Sure, you might be able to fake it for a while, but eventually something will give.

This quote from Saturday’s Daily Telegraph (not online) really hit me:

They [toys being sold at Christmas in a superstore] are probably made under awful conditions, but what do you do? Accept it… or leave the kids with nothing?

Huh? Read the full article and think again, people. Is giving cheap trinkets to your children so important that you’ll choose to treat other human beings so appallingly?

I can forgive someone for doing this out of ignorance — after all, ignorance can be cured with knowledge. But to know that this is happening and still choose the trinkets! That’s disgusting. I think I’d prefer to walk away from your Omelas.

On the other hand, the very next day it was raining and I bought a $3.50 Chinese umbrella to stay dry. Am I any better?

Most of the more enthusiastic web developers worry me. In their wild-eyed enthusiasm for the latest, coolest technology they seem almost oblivious to wider or longer-term implications. Nick Bradbury, creator of FeedDemon, a popular RSS reader for Windows, had an interesting take on this recently.

Back in 2004, I asked: “What are we actually building here? A lot of people in my profession wear rose-colored glasses and believe we’re helping to make information free to the world, but some of the early proponents of television believed the same thing. Are we really just building the next version of TV, one even more powerful because it knows your name and shopping habits?”

I thought I was being cynical then, but now I’m not so sure. Google continues to carve out a huge share of the Internet advertising market, in large part by figuring out what we’re paying attention to. The quality of the content doesn’t really matter to them — only the number of eyeballs they can advertise to does. Sounds a lot like commercial TV, doesn’t it?

So far, has the Web been better than TV, or just more targeted? And is it really worth giving up so much privacy in order to get it?

One of the biggest changes facing society right now is a massive loss of individual privacy. And one of the best introductions to the issues is Simson Garfinkel’s book Database Nation.

Garfinkel is a leading researcher in computer forensics, so he’s well aware that “privacy on the Internet” isn’t really about your email address being used to send you spam — despite that being the focus of most website privacy statements.

As he says in Database Nation:

To understand privacy in [the 21st century] we need to rethink what privacy really means today:

• It’s not about the man who wants to watch pornography in complete anonymity over the Internet. It’s about the woman who’s afraid to use the Internet to organise her community against a proposed toxic dump — afraid because the dump’s investors are sure to dig through her past if she becomes too much of a nuisance.
• It’s not about people speeding on the nation’s highways who get automatically generated tickets mailed to them thanks to a computerised speed trap. It’s about lovers who will take less joy in walking around city streets or visiting stores because they know they’re being photographed by surveillance cameras everywhere they step.
• It’s not about the special prosecutors who leave no stone unturned in their search for corruption of political misdeeds. It’s about the good, upstanding citizens who are now refusing to enter public service because they don’t want a bloodthirsty press rummaging through their old school reports, computerised medical records and email.
• It’s not about the searches, metal detectors and inquisitions that have become a routine part of our daily lives at airports, schools and federal buildings. It’s about a society that views law-abiding citizens as potential terrorists, yet does little to effectively protect its citizens from real threats to their safety.

Actually, you could argue that privacy has already been lost — we just don’t realise it yet.

It’s now impossible to drive anonymously across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Every mobile phone is a tracking device. Every web page you look at is logged by your Internet service provider. And a generation is recording every little detail of their lives in LiveJournal or MySpace or Facebook or whatever social media website will make all those look so last week.

My take on this?

Society will have to come to terms with the fact that everyone has skeletons in the cupboard — that joint they smoked, for instance. Roughly 1 in 7 of the men listed on birth certificates isn’t actually the father — but now routine DNA screening for diseases is uncovering uncomfortable bedroom secrets.

Many “bad” things are really quite common — they’re just not talked about. Our private worlds remain private. Or at least they used to.

We’ll have to get used to the idea that politicians, teachers, bus drivers — whoever! — are all flawed humans. We can’t ban those who smoked a joint or has “a history of mental illness” (depression affects 800,000 Australian adults a year) or committed a crime (copyright infringement is now a crime, you know) or there’ll be no-one left!

So long-term we might get a more tolerant society, with a more reality-based view of the world.

However in the shorter term I can see a decrease in tolerance. As new technologies reveal more of our hidden private worlds, people will be shocked to discover “all these criminals” and so on, and there’ll be a crackdown.

It could be an uncomfortable few decades.

John Howard’s racist intervention into the management of Aboriginal child sex abuse cases seems to be based on genuine personal shock, at least according to one feature story yesterday:

“I thought the report was just horrific,” he said yesterday. “This is very genuine. I am distressed. It is terrible. Little children. Don’t underestimate the personal interest and commitment to this. Or Mal Brough [Howard's Minister for Indigenous Affairs]. He is quite passionate about doing something on this subject. I said to him, ‘We’ve got to do something, we’ve got to grab hold of this. The territory’s not going to do anything.’”

But once that’s out of the way, the spin begins:

“It’s just terrible. Just imagine if it was Dickson, or Brunswick or Marrickville or whatever. It’s just intolerable and you’ve just got to do something about it.

Cute choice of examples, Mr Howard. I don’t know about Dickson (are you reading this, Antony Green?), but I live in the Marrickville electorate and Brunswick is the Melbourne equivalent — both multicultural Labour-voting areas.

Howard’s choice is 100% political. Mention left-wing heartlands so those on the left take the example personally and sympathise with the pain, and those on the right are reminded that these mixed-race communities are a hotbed of sordidness. He certainly doesn’t say “Just imagine if it was Mosman or Elsternwick.”

I mean, there’s no child sexual abuse in suburbs with deciduous trees, and Howard wouldn’t risk upsetting core Liberal party voters by even suggesting it were possible.

Howard doesn’t mention that the Little Children are Sacred report is the 13th enquiry into Aboriginal child sexual abuse since he became PM — three of them federal enquiries!

He doesn’t mention that NT chief minister Clare Martin proposed an interventionist solution a year ago — which he ignored.

He doesn’t mention that federal funding to tackle this issue was cut 4 years ago.

But he does keep emphasizing that he’s taking control, that he’s in control, that once more he’s Big Strong Daddy.

And as I write that a sudden thought crosses my mind. Isn’t Big Strong Daddy the one committing most child sexual abuse?

[P.S. There's interesting comments on this issue attached to my original post. Enjoy.]

Australia’s reputation as a nation of drunkards is confirmed! More than two million of us drink alcohol at risky/high levels, according to figures released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. And yet the alcohol industry remains a part of “respectable society”, and even attracts government assistance!

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