I guess this means I'll be using a foreign proxy server from now on.

I'll just say it: this is Un-Australian and an international disgrace.

The problem with the American model is that once your judiciary becomes sufficiently feckless the Constitution ceases to protect anything. First they find a way to justify exceptions, then the exceptions get broader and broader (another slippery slope) until the "rights" become mere suggestions. The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.. unless you happen to live in Washington DC. Or California. etc.

Who was it who said "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance"? They were right.

That was POA (Pre-Obama America) of which you speak, obviously.

"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance" is attributed to Thomas Jefferson.

There's nothing else to say, unfortunately.

Unlike the UK government’s radically innovative Human Fertilisation and Embryology (HFE) bill, this topic isn't timely and urgent.

I was reacting to Armed Liberal's concerns about freedom of speech and Barack Obama. Your problem, if you are a principled upholder of free speech, is that your champion against Barack Obama now is John McCain, of McCain-Feingold infamy. And the bad news is the same in Australia, as in many other places. First, the political class tends to develop a consensus around the idea that it's very convenient to be able to shut people up, so there often won't be a pro-free-speech candidate to vote for; and second, slippery slopes are real.

But in the end I have no better solution that that you have to be more vigilant than "reasonable" and accommodating, or you'll be "reasonable", "fair-minded" and in time destitute of rights. That's old old news. So: "move along, nothing to see here".

I'm becoming increasingly frustrated because I'm unable to see what sort of 'vigilance' situations like these call for.

In the 'Declaration of Independence', it says, "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

The truth of all that has I think been born out, but the question becomes, when does it become insufferable and what should we do about it when it does?

The pundits on the left and right have been chest beating in the past two elections and this one that if X or Y happens, it will mean civil war. But one thing that always struck me reading the Declaration of Independence was how minor the list of greivances the Colonists had seemed to be, and how grossly unfair the charge of tyranny against the English crown seemed in comparison to the rights enjoyed by common folk anywhere else in the world. It's not like these were a bunch of eastern European serfs. That isn't to say that there weren't real and just causes behind the Revolution, but the real reasons for the Revolution the Founding Father's were hesitant to list. The real reason is that they were sick and tired of being dragged into European colonial wars which not only disrupted their trade, but killed them in fairly sizable numbers with no realizable benefit that they could discern. But that didn't really make the list of what ultimately were comparitively minor grievances if you boiled off the inflamatory language. The document only makes any sense at all if you look at it in the context of assuming that people have a right to a very great amount of freedom indeed, and that the standard is pretty low for what consitutes an actionable offense.

I personally can't imagine taking up arms against my government or my countrymen. I have a very great difficulty as a Christian even imagining doing it if the most brutal sort of tyranny was ongoing. Killing people just really isn't my thing. I'm not even really into street theater, being part of riots, or engaging in 'civil disobediance'. As a practical matter, I can't imagine one act of 'revolution' that would have a positive effect. I'm probably the least likely participant in something like 'The Boston Tea Party' you could imagine. ("Yeah, I love your patriotic sentiment, but what about the rights of the poor ship owner - to say nothing of the bank owner and the insurance agent?")

At the same time though, I understand why people on both sides have been reduced to thinking about acts of civil war (in what are hopefully no more than words and stay that), because I don't feel represented by my government either. In fact, I would say most people don't feel represented by their government. I don't see much hope of a viable third party. I don't see much hope of reform from within the parties. I don't see much hope of reversing the slide in lost liberties, especially not with the two candidates this electoral process has turned out.

What can you actually do that would make a difference? What could you actually do that would have a positive effect?

Eight years ago I might have said, 'You can have an online presence. You can change peoples minds. You can persuade the system to change by changing the voters." I don't believe that any more. I don't think you can change peoples minds by talking.

I lived in Australia for 3 years. I cannot believe that they can be this stunningly stupid.

The problem is in the concept of the "representative". To win elections at the state or national level, you can't help but be "extraordinary" in one way or another, either through wealth, general achievement in some visible field (including Hollywood), family connections, a lifetime of consuming ambition, etc. Most successful politicians have some combination of the above.

The problem is that this makes them rather poor "representatives", if the purpose of a representative is to be a proxy for the population, with views informed by a life history that is frequent in the population.

This is why I think we'll need to have at least some large, powerful branch of the legislature simply drafted from the general population, instead of produced and marketed by the various Party machines. The sheer difficulty and expense of marketing oneself to win constant elections guarantees that representatives are "unrepresentative".

Foobarista: Good luck on making the simple draft process you hypothesize non-corrupt.

Foobarista: I heard John Burnheim, then Professor of General Philosophy at the University of Sydney, arguing along similar lines to you. It was an impressive lecture. It's main merit was that he didn't just criticize democracy as we know it, he went into a good deal of detail on how things could be better, and how his idea, which he called "demarchy" could be workable, not just ideologically pure in terms of the ideals of classical democracy.

You might want to read his book, Is Democracy Possible? (1985). But I didn't, because I couldn't find anybody, including friends who had come to the lecture with me, that was excited by his ideas.

I think the root of the problem was that people couldn't see how you would bring about radical change in a demarchy. Power is so distributed that each individual just does their duty for a while, like being called up for jury duty, without excitement or a sense of glory or the ability to do great things for a particular interest, and then it's back to the farm. That's not the kind of "radicalism" that excites young political philosophy students, and nobody had a sense that this highly conservative political structure would deliver great victories to their "tribe", whether Green, gay or anything else. So why struggle for it, since nobody can see a great sectional interest in doing so?

Therefore, demarchy fails due to the "rabbit stew" problem. Recipe for rabbit stew: first, catch your rabbit. Recipe for political change: first, find a lot of people with potential political clout who can see what's in it for them.

Oh, other problem... Without radical and ideological support, without benefit from the left and their long march through the institutions, you are heavily reliant on big business support. And before you can get that, the suits need to know how this "demarchy" of yours really works. In other words: "I need this unpopular measure to become law. Who do I talk to?" Or more bluntly: "Who do I bribe?"

John Burnheim was going to elaborate pains to ensure that there wasn't a good, winning answer to that question, because he fully "got" that once there was you could kiss your sweet experiment in new, improved democracy goodbye.

#9: see my #7. QED.

[Cant. You have been warned. Use the word "illuminati" in your next non-substantive post and be banned. --NM]

EW: I'm pretty cynical about both the major American parties.

Really, the only American party you can trust on rights issues is the Libertarians, and they have their own baggage and no real shot of becoming mainstream.

You would think that the 'liberal' party in the USA would be the better free speach party, but the problem is that 'liberal' in the USA doesn't mean 'Liberal'. The Democrats are consistantly anti-private property, anti-gun rights, anti-Liberal economics, and (as much as any party in the USA is) opposed to free speach. About the only area of rights that the Democrats are consistantly for involve sexuality.

Because the USA is a historically Liberal country, 'conservative' in the USA arguably means 'Liberal'.

The GOP is the reverse of the Dems. It's platform is very strict on rights involving sexuality, but tends to be pretty open to Liberal economics, gun rights, private property rights, and free speach (except, when it involves sexual 'obscenity'). Call it a hang up if you will, but sexuality is the real sticking point in the GOP - probably because this is a historically Liberal country founded ironically by a bunch religious Puritans.

On the whole though, we don't have it that bad here yet. The First Ammendment gives your average American something simple and direct that they can understand about their speach rights, and that makes it hard to do anything simple and direct to curtail them. The thing about this election though is that it has maybe the two most anti-free speach candidates we've ever seen in US history (or at least certainly since the Wilson era). McCain is one of the architects behind the McCain Feingold bill that criminalized certain kinds of political speach and opened up the floodgates for the sort of wide open unregulated campaign financing we've seen in the last two elections. Obama wants to institute a 'Fairness Doctrine', which is squarely aimed at removing the irritant of conservative radio shows that have ended liberal monopoly of the media and his campaign has threatened to pull the broadcasting license of TV stations that have been critical of him during the campaign. And the Democrats are pretty much open admirers of European style socialist government - most of which in my opinion don't have a very strong commitment to free speach and do have government owned media. So complete control of the government by the Democrats really for the first time since the 1970's doesn't bode well.

So, while things aren't bad here yet, I don't have alot of hope going forward.

I'll have to go read that book.

My thought would be to have one house of the legislature be "drafted", and the other elected, so you'd have a tension between the lawyer&class president types who win elections and a panel of Joe the Plumbers. I've toyed with the thought of trying it in California, where state constitution changes can be done by ballot proposition, and seeing if the first 50 names in the phone book would be better than the careerist droids we have running the thing nowadays.

Foobarista: As I intimated earlier -- a big problem is figuring out how to keep the first 50 from the phone book from being bought even more cheaply than the big-budget $400-haircut careerists.

Celebrim, we have a similar problem with conservatives and sex in Australia. It makes conservatives, especially independent Christian conservatives, less than fully trustworthy on free speech.

The Australian Christian Lobby, however, has welcomed the proposals.

Managing director Jim Wallace said the measures were needed.

"The need to prevent access to illegal hard-core material and child pornography must be placed above the industry's desire for unfettered access," Mr Wallace said.

The whole "censor the internet" idea got going in Australia in 1999 because the Howard Government wanted to bring in a new tax plan, and for this and other reforms (like the partial privatization of a government telecommunications monopoly) it needed the vote of an independent Senator from Tasmania, Brian Harradine. His trade-off for supporting the government in key votes was censoring the internet. His politics were driven by his conservative Roman Catholic faith, and I can't find a link to support this, but I heard him say it with my own ears and I could hardly believe what I was hearing and that our nation's politics was turning on this - pornography available on the Internet might be used for masturbation. Which of course is an awkward topic, but Brian Harradine was solid on it being a grave sin and something the government had to act to prevent.

When you want something badly enough, like the government wanted wanted one more vote in the Senate, the means needed to achieve it start to seem less and less objectionable. So, in deference to one independent conservative Catholic's Tasmanian Senator's determination to put as many barriers as possible in the way of people masturbating, Australia has, in theory, some of the most restrictive anti-Internet censorship laws in the Western world (limited in their effect only by lack of interest in enforcing them, since nobody else was quite as passionate about preventing people from potentially masturbation to pornography found on the Internet as Brian Harradine was), and we got on the slippery slope to loss of our free speech rights.

What makes it a slippery slope is, when nobody needed the Senator's vote anymore, the legislation stood. And then it grew, regardless of which party was in power or what the rationale was.

In the 2004 elections, things got worse, as the very minor new Family First Party demanded far hasher new laws, and the "Australian Family Association" also got in on the act.

(I feel obligated to support these, because there is so little support out there for pro-family and pro-life policies, and I consider "pro-life" to be the One Great Over-riding Value. But conservative Christians seems to be incurably obsessed and flat insane on the topic of sexuality, and they will if allowed kill democratic rights, because they are that obsessed with preventing and punishing sexuality that they don't care about collateral damage.)

And from December 2007 on our moderate left government has been pushing for more and more censorship on the Internet. Again, the rationale is pornography, and again as noted above the anti-masturbation brigade are all for it - but the government also seems to be increasingly of the view that China, the rising power in our region, has some really keen ideas on freedom, and international cooperation is a wonderful thing, don't you think? It's back to (Labor) Prime Minister Paul Keating's "big picture" of Australia as an Asian country with Asian values, at least in regard to the Internet.

The rationales change as the fanatics from one side or the other get hold of the microphone - but not the fact that the government, seemingly any government, wants the power to stop people from speaking freely and making their own decisions about what information they want to access.