Assoc. Professor Hirst Responds

ASSOCIATE Professor Martin Hirst has responded to the post citing his opinion that America's First Amendment is an anachronism.His observations can be found in the comments thread of the relevant post, but as they may inspire Billabong visitors to share their own thoughts, they are also pasted below.

Feel free to comment -- politely, of course -- and let us thank Professor Hirst for demonstrating what free speech is all about. It's a nice little system, the civilised exchange of ideas. Pity if anything were to happen to it.

ethical martini said...

    sorry, I am semi-literate and I think I know the difference between anachronism and irrelevant, but I'm happy for you to enlighten me in your special way. 'Anachronism' something that is of a previous time that may not be quite so relevant (so there is perhaps a link?) in the modern contemporary world.

In relation to the first amendment I think the fact that it is always being tested in the courts shows that it is contested and shows that it may well display the characteristics of an anachronism - that is, it it showing its age. Further, societies move on, this is not America of the revolutionary years anymore. When the 1st amendment was drafted it was a frontier country, young and flexing its muscles. America today is a very different place full of decay and exercising imperial power across the world. the first amendment has not saved it from that malaise.

Our values have changed and so have our ideas. I also note that the 1st amendment is not absolute, it bans certain things too: The Supreme Court has often defined certain speech, also known as “at risk speech,” as being unprotected by the First Amendment:

* Burning draft cards to protest draft — prohibited because of superior governmental interest.
* Words likely to incite imminent violence, termed “fighting words.”
* Words immediately jeopardizing national security.
* Newspaper publishing false and defamatory material — libel.

We may today in our enlightened way agree or disagree with some of these bans. I for one don't agree with the ban on burning draft cards as I do not support the idea of a higher national / state interest in such matters of political dissent. I do however support the ban on 'fighting speech' and this is the essence of the Racial Discrimination Act, for example, in Australia.

So, in the context of the tweet that this blog found so outrageous (you can read above) my comment that the 1st amendment is anachronistic should not be read as an attack on the right of free speech. My comments at the media inquiry on Tuesday (mainly answers to questions from the inquiry chair that I did not know were coming as I was there to talk about something entirely different) will be published in full in the next 48 hours, read them for yourselves and then judge me on that.

I have never met the 'professor' nor he me. But he launched an attack on my person without provocation and then reacted in a very snippy way when I responded in a light-hearted fashion. It seems he is infringing my freedom of expression to denounce me and my reputation in such a manner. It was, IMHO, troll-like behaviour.

I have no problem with a conservative viewpoint being put, but you guys get very personal very quickly and are at the same time provocative and defensive when people like me try to stick up for themselves.

I spoke at the media inquiry about the need for civilised discourse - that is engaging with ideas, not slandering your opponents, - try it. Take a deep breath and exhale, close your eyes, relax and repeat after me - a trotskyist is not a stalnist; trots do not eat babies, permanent revolution doesn't mean gulags we're all individuals.

BTW: I can quote orwell too.

NOTE: In pasting Assoc. Prof Hirst's comment a technical glitch stripped all the paragraphs. The text has seen been re-set. If the breaks above are not those of the original comment, be assured no malice directed the "enter" key.

AND A RELUCTANT UPDATE: It is not good manners to invade the stage, push the speaker from the microphone and disagree with his or her points while offering no opportunity of immediate reply, so an hour's reflection and two cups of coffee have been invested in considering whether or not to address Associate Professor Hirst's four key points. This post represents his turn to spout off, and commenting on his comment might strike some as a a taking unfair advantage of the "publish" button. Whatever Hirst might say, the opportunity will always be there to enjoy the last word.

That said, and after much reflection, readers' appreciation of his four asterisked points would benefit from a little background on relevant US Supreme Court rulings, which can be found here. As the author notes, the court's logic has been all over the block, although a general retreat from the "fighting words" ruling is evident

The four points and where they run aground on reality:

* Burning draft cards to protest draft — prohibited because of superior governmental interest.
The court did not examine free speech, (dubiously) rejecting the notion that it is relevant to the burning of draft cards. It did, however, safeguard Americans' right to burn their flag.
 
* Words likely to incite imminent violence, termed “fighting words.”
This ruling sprang from the arrest of a street-corner orator and his refusal to leave the soapbox when, in the officer's opinion, further remarks were likely to inspire a riot. By contrast, SCOTUS also stood by a Klansman's right to burn his cross, in part because that act was not an incitement to "imminent" violence and, perhaps more importantly, because advocating violence in theory is protected. Relevance to the Bolt decision: Zip
 
* Words immediately jeopardizing national security.
The key word is "immediately". See the Pentagon Papers, whose publication the court refused to sanction

* Newspaper publishing false and defamatory material — libel.
US libel laws defend news organisations' right to get it wrong so long as those mistakes are not the fruit of malice. As a result, it is virtually impossible in the US for public figures and officials to win damages. Again to mention the Bolt case, Judge Mordy's ruling is inconceivable in the context of New York Times v. Sullivan


Associate Professor Hirst is right, however, to cite US standards, even if he fails to grasp their meaning. In regard to free speech, Australia would be a better place, and its democracy healthier, were we to import US laws and attitudes as a job lot.

Attack Of The Towering Trot

THE next poor fellow to divorce the former Mrs Bunyip will learn rather quickly that harsh words come in two varieties. The first sort hurt but their effect is muted, as hearing grim truths about one’s poor habits and regrettable activities tends to encourage silence rather than anger, silence with sometimes a dash of shame. The other kind, they’re the barbs that can escalate the simplest spat into what attending police will log as “a serious domestic”.  It is one thing to hear genuine vices proclaimed – screamed, actually – but quite another to be heaped with convictions for offences no more than contemplated, a category that includes all those misconceptions about what went on that night on the mooring with Joan (who was drunk, going through a difficult time and just needed a little help with her self-esteem).  The thing about legal papers and lawyer bills is that, eventually, they turn those bitter moments into memories. Slowly the temper cools, blood pressure medications can be chucked and it becomes possible as anger subsides to fall asleep without balled fists and grinding teeth.

Such has been the happy state at the Billabong for the past few years, but not last night. When the light was dimmed and imagination re-ran the day in its sepia stutter of mise-en-scenes, it was the spectre of a snarling Martin Hirst that rose from the drowsy subconscious. And once again, as he did through most of yesterday afternoon, he was flinging terrible, unjust slurs and charges. Wearing one of Mrs Bunyip’s less-fetching aprons, wielding an ice pick in one hand and a fashionable martini in the other, the phantasm's words were honed by cruelty and cut with a rapier’s slash.

The Billabong  is “a low-rent rightwing blog” and the Professor “a troll” cum “dribblejaw” who feeds faux “facts” to Andrew Bolt. This death-beast percolation fires up the jackboot media, yesterday inspiring a garden-variety reporter to call Deakin University’s Associate Professor of Media Studies (just as he was settling down, no doubt with a chic martini) and grill him in that evil, Murdoch way.

ethicalmartini ethicalmartini 

#mediainquiry I just had a call from #thedAilytelegraph on a witch hunt for reds under the bed. Weds #newslimited papers doing a hatchet job

3 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

Vile, foul remarks, but there were more and worse memories to haunt last night’s dark hours. When a tweeting admirer urged Associate Professor Hirst to spurn a “fascist” Bunyip and pay no heed at all to posts about the academic’s proud Trot pedigree, he rejected with a revolutionary’s zeal the very notion of staying schtum. He is out for blood, he explained in his response, replying that “baiting them is fun. They are nasty and don't have a sense of humour or social justice.”

In the case of a mild and inoffensive Bunyip, Hirst might be right about the social justice bit. But nasty? No sense of humour? What a hurtful man he is to say such things, so hateful it requires a real effort to extend good fellowship’s hand and remind him, gently and calmly, why empty vessels will always make the most noise. It is no more than logic, really. If a sense of humour is lacking at the Billabong then something else must be responsible for the chuckles at his expense that he sense, and a process of elimination nominates him as the source of all that mirth.

If Hirst would but spike tweets like this one, that would be a big step toward his goal of being taken seriously – quite a challenge for a fellow who works at Deakin, of which a modest commenter notes: “ATAR entrance cutoff in 2011 to the Deakin faculty of Media and Communications at the Geelong Campus was a stunning 59.05”.

ethicalmartini ethicalmartini 

#mediainquiry #newslimited asks are you now or have you ever been a #Trotskyist nothing about my opinion. As a #socialist I am not allowed

4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

Associate Professor Hirst, it is not that you are a socialist. There are still quite a few of those about, especially in the common rooms of universities until recently devoted to the useful disciplines of wool classing and crutching. The real problem is that you are a Trot, which in this day and age suggests, you know, a self-absorbed preciousness.

Advocating the hopeless cause has always been a fine way to stand out from the pack, to wrap  ego in the pure and burnished glow of inspirational otherworldliness. Mainstream Left and dominant Right? Why, don’t you know that each is wrong, and ’tis only from the throne of theory and Trot abstractions that the shortcomings of all others’ agendas can be divined and, with a contemptuous wave, dismissed. It is the playground of your noxious, know-it-all teenager -- an expanding demographic which has come to include university-supported Peter Pans of the middle-aged variety. And best of all, the Trot creed cannot fail because it will never be put to the test, meaning Associate Professor Hirst can remain the smartest and most interesting guest at any inner city barbecue. He will think so, anyway, which really is the most important thing.

Still, it remains something of a mystery why the Press Inquiry made Associate Professor Hirst its lead witness. Trotsky was, after all, an advocate of doing away with censorship, as he explained in 1938:

“Any workers ‘leader’ who arms the bourgeois state with special means to control public opinion in general, and the press in particular, is a traitor.”

Since the inquiry’s other witnesses have been rather keen to fit free speech with overseers, hobbles and reviewers, not to mention generous, grant-bestowing “parents”, Hirst would seem once again to have been cast as the loneliest voice in the room.

But then, when you recall what else Long Winded Leon had to say about free speech, the genius of kicking off a show trial with a thinker of Associate Professor’s stature becomes crystal clear:

Once victorious, the proletariat may find itself forced, for a period of time, to take special measures against the bourgeoisie, if the bourgeoisie adopts an attitude of open revolt against the workers’ state. In this case, restrictions to the freedom of the press go hand in hand with all other measures used in preparation for a civil war. When forced to use artillery and aviation against the enemy we will obviously not tolerate this same enemy maintaining his own centers of information and propaganda inside the camp of the armed proletariat.

The revolution, Associate Professor Hirst’s revolution, is not yet upon us or ever likely to be, so those restrictions are needed now and, to all intents purposes, forever after.

It all makes perfect sense to the superior mind, especially after a few martinis.  

Free Speech, Who Needs It?

THERE are a couple of things all civilised folk must surely detest about America. The first is its President and the second, only slightly less offensive, is the serving of salad before the main course, rather than with it. Still, they do have the First Amendment, a magnificent statement:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Who could disagree with something quite so noble? Why, the very first witness to go before today's Media Inquiry, Deakin University Associate Professor and avowed Trot Martin Hirst, who tweeted the following observation after leaving the stand:

ethicalmartini ethicalmartini 

#mediainquiry 50 minutes on US case law regarding #freespeechWhy? This is Australia, US 1st amendment is an anachronism in my view

3 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

What is it about the First Amendment the journalism professor finds so outdated?

UPDATE: Actually, there is something else to like about America -- its citizens come up with sites like Rate My Professor, where those paying for an education can let others know if they are getting their money's worth. Wouldn't it be just wonderful to have a similar outlet in Australia?

Media Regulation: What A Crew!

AFTER Martin Hirst, pride of Deakin, has trotted out before the Press Inquiry his rationale for applying the gag, the big show will continue with a trio high-profile witnesses, each with his own dubious motive. Stephen Mayne’s is, as always, to get some attention for Stephen Mayne, which might make for an interesting competition, as fellow witness Bundoora Bob has never been known to open his mouth for any but the same reason. If Wayne Swan hopes to preserve that highly unlikely move to a surplus he keeps talking about (and is today talking down), a quick tax on the first-person pronoun would see the budget pushed firmly back into the black by the end of tomorrow’s hearings. (For the curious, Andrew Bolt has more on Mayne and the mysterious bureaucrat who invited him and why.)

Crikey's Eric Beecher, by contrast, is likely to be singing for his supper. A keen advocate of the peculiar notion that incompetent and failing newspapers, like the Age, must be preserved at all costs, he is especially keen to see those costs borne largely by the taxpayer. The fact that Beecher is sometimes referenced as a potential acquirer of Fairfax, or parts of Fairfax, should not be allowed to colour his audience’s perceptions with suspicions of self-interest. If he argues for subsidies, it will be solely as a means to save such invaluable thinkers as Laura Tingle, Butch Carlton, A Dill Horin and blonde economics writer Jessica Irvine from doing their reporting to Centrelink.

The key witness, the one who really needs watching, will come at day's end. She is Professor of Law at the Parkville Asylum Adrienne Stone, another of those who believe free speech should not be, well, free. In talking to the ABC about the same law later used to lynch Andrew Bolt, here is how she summed up the need for authorities to keep the gag handy. Read it carefully and marvel at her circular argument’s hermetically sealed, self-referential logic:

Perhaps freedom of expression, a true commitment to freedom of expression, would require us to tolerate that material that freedom of expression means freedom for the thought that we hate.

I have to say that although I'm sympathetic to what I take to be the sentiment behind that idea, I think that there is a better understanding of freedom of expression available to us, and one that doesn't see a very strong philosophical kind of inconsistency between, on the one hand, a commitment to freedom of expression and on the other hand, an anti-vilification law. Because it seems to me that there's a good argument to say that this kind of highly offensive, untrue material—levelled at someone because of their race, ethnicity or religion, or some other like characteristic—that it's neither valuable in free speech terms...and indeed it might even undermine those values which freedom of expression is directed to. So in fact I think the best argument, our best understanding of freedom of expression would accommodate laws of this kind.

So they are the main voices likely to dominate the witness box – an old Trot, a short wanker, a tall wanker, a rent-seeker and an academic who supports freedom of speech except she doesn’t.

If you are not obliged to play golf on Tuesday, why not turn up? Up until now, we have not had too many show trials in Australia. Tomorrow will bring a little taste of what to expect if this lot gets its way.    

Media Regulation: Take It From a Trot

BEING a principled Bunyip can have its downside. Make a promise to be somewhere and do something and, much as circumstances might change in the interim, the obligation to turn up and perform as promised cannot be shrugged off. That is why tomorrow morning will see The Professor on the first tee at Imperial Bearbrass, where Double Bogey Daddy needs someone with a reliable short game to compliment his long drives in a very social Ambrose event. Unless it buckets down, always a possibility (fingers crossed) in Melbourne, there will be no getting out of it.

What a pity! It would be much more interesting to secure a seat in the Marsh Auditorium at 555 Londsdale Street and witness the inaugural public hearing of the Independent Inquiry into Media and Media Regulation.

It should be a great show, perhaps the finest display of partisan politics and naked self-interest ever to be gussied up with a retired judge and pointed at the public purse. Start with the very first witness, Dr Martin Hirst, who will be introduced, to quote his bio, as “associate professor and journalism curriculum leader in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University.”

That is not Hirst’s most notable distinction, however. As is thumbnailed on the bio page of the archival website Marxist Interventions, the inquiry’s first source of wisdom “has been active in socialist politics since 1975 and claims to have been the only Trotskyist to ever work in the federal press gallery as a journalist.”

No mere scribbler or teacher of aspiring scribblers, Hirst is the real, revolutionary deal, as one of his fellow Trots commented after a June, 2007, demonstration outside the Australian High Commission in Auckland, where he was teaching at the time. The grievance was John Howard’s intervention in the Northern Territory’s troubled Indigenous communities, which the trans-Tasman ferals saw – Surprise! Surprise! -- as racist neo-imperialism. It was a rough and tumble gathering, with at least one arrest for assaulting police, the rioters egged on by Hirst, as a comrade on the barricades explained:

...very good speeches from all the groups in support-Julia and Joe from Socialist Worker, Martin Hirst, Lecturer in Media studies at AUT, Jared from Workers Party, Jim Gladwin from Citizens against Privatisation, and statement read out from Kulin Nations and Aboriginal declaration of sovereignty’ by UNITY editor Daph Lawless in Consulate occupation that broke through police lines.

Yes, it would be fun to attend tomorrow’s hearing, not least because the witnesses get even better after that.

More on the other stars of the show a little later in the day.


UPDATE: If you fancy a little preview of Hirst's likely theme, go here, where he has just posted a little essay about Andrew Bolt, the Mordy-Litijus tribe and why free speech is acceptable only so long as people like Hirst find its sentiments congenial:

The Herald &Weekly Times justification on this point seems to imp[ly that anything goes in the freedom of speech stakes . . .  This argument takes no account of the public benefit and public interest in having a legal means to curtail hateful, hurtful and inflammatory propaganda."

Trots, as everyone knows, go out of their way not to give offence.

UPDATE II: While he approves of gagging free speech he finds unpleasant, Hirst squeals when he perceives the same motoives in others. Listen closely from the 3:00 mark, when Hirst accuses the U.S. of "trying to shut me up" for disagreeing with its campaign against terror and terrorists.