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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   21281 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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The ABC's called it: the Australian referendum to enshrine special Aboriginal representation in the Constitution has utterly failed. They needed a majority nationally and a majority in four of the six states; they've gotten at last count 41% (possibly less; pre-polls are counted last, and while I wasn't expecting it they seem to have more No than the on-the-day vote) of the national vote and have lost in all six of the states (again, I was expecting Tasmania and/or Victoria to buck the trend - Victoria being the most urbanised Australian state, with 75% of its population in the state capital of Melbourne, and Tasmania having a long tradition of hippie-ism and being the birthplace of the Greens; they were also polling the highest Yes).

Most of the Yes campaigners - at least, those the ABC talked to - seem to be going with the line of "the No campaign was misinformation and this doesn't count because they were tricked"*. That's wrong (there were a few people with crazy ideas, of course, but for the most part what the SJers are decrying as "misinformation" is true or plausible), but it's at least wrong about a dry fact and not nearly as divisive as going "this proves Australia's a racist country".

The result does seem to have emboldened people to actually stand up against SJ; Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was very hesitant to go with No (though he eventually did), but in his speech upon hearing the result he specifically said that this result was Australians rejecting activists' claims.

At-least-partial credit to @OliveTapenade, who said:

If No wins, I think it will be taken as evidence that the Australian people are deeply racist and ignorant (hence the need for Truth)

...the last time we discussed this on theMotte. They mostly seem to be leaning on "ignorant" rather than "racist", but yes, they're saying "this demonstrates need for Truth".

*NB: this doesn't, for the moment, include Prime Minister Anthony Albanese; all he's said on the matter of "why No" IIRC is that referenda never succeed without bipartisan support.

One of the things that was remarkable about this campaign was how overwhelming the Yes campaign's resources were. Over the course of the campaign I saw ads and billboards and people handing out pamphlets and even a choir promoting the Yes case. In comparison I saw exactly one (1) bumper sticker for No and nothing else. At the polling booth there were half a dozen volunteers for Yes and the whole fence was blanketed with their signage while No had one guy with one sign. And I've heard there were other polling places that didn't even have that.

I really wish people would learn that all this campaign paraphernalia is completely worthless, and arguably counterproductive. It was extremely clear the people with money and power wanted a Yes victory, but that doesn't actually convince anyone.

The proposal was the result of starting with the idea of putting Aboriginals in the constitution and then jerry-rigging it into an advisory body after people complained that they wanted something practical, but also trying not to do anything concrete or specific that could offend someone. It was a mess of an idea and really someone should have had the balls to stop this process before it got to this point instead of shunting off the responsibility of putting it down to the voting public.

I don't feel any joy in this result, though it's the outcome I voted for. We've had a bunch of angst and drama for no gain, and it seems clear no one is going to learn anything from the experience. All the talking heads are busy convincing themselves that the problem is somehow the sales job and not the product. No one is even thinking to ask if maybe it just wasn't a bit implausible that you needed a constitutional amendment to create an advisory committee, or that an advisory committee was going to somehow fix all the massive problems Aboriginal Australia faces. Maybe we just need to lecture people not to be racist harder next time. Yeah, that'll work.

...Australia allows campaigning at the polling place? That's an absolute no-no in Finland, you can't even walk in to vote wearing your preferred candidate's pin.

There's a 6 metre buffer zone outside the actual school hall/whatever that is being used as a polling place. So it's routine to run a gauntlet of campaigners trying to shove paper in your hand as you walk through the gate. It annoys a lot of people.

There's an old Chaser sketch exploring different ways to try to get through unscathed.

Only six meters? In Texas the electioneering exclusion zone is the same as the exclusion zone for guns, and people are regularly sent to the bathroom to turn political shirts inside out before being allowed to vote. Political action committees produce lists of endorsed candidates on unofficial letterhead(that is it doesn’t say ‘vote for real true conservatives’) so they can be carried into the polling booth.

Yeah, only six metres. And you're allowed to take party political material in with you - it's routine for parties to give out "how to vote" cards recommending an ordering of candidates (e.g. us first, our allies second, weirdos and fringe candidates in the middle, and our enemies at the bottom) to voters walking in.

(I know you specifically don't need to know this, but for non-Australians reading, I hope this is helpful.)

I'll add that the how-to-vote cards do have a practical function. Firstly, Australia's voting system is relatively complex compared to countries like the US, so having a little more advice on how to correctly fill out a ballot seems reasonable. Secondly, we have preferential voting, and one of the purposes of how-to-vote cards is to explain how the party would like you to vote.

Let me give a specific example - here's a Labor how-to-vote card for the 2015 Canning by-election. For a vote in Australia to be valid, it has to number every box in order. If you just write a '1' in the box of your favourite candidate, your vote will not count. However, there are twelve candidates in Canning! Twelve! Is the average voter really going to research every one of them and rank them in order? The how-to-vote card tells you how the Labor Party would like you to rank all the candidates. If you already know you want to vote for Labor, why not follow their advice?

Canning is an extreme case - there usually aren't twelve candidates. But anecdotally, I find that in my electorate it is usually somewhere between five and seven, and that's still a lot. Thus every party gives out cards like this.

The better cards, in my opinion, also give a little bit of information on the candidate's or party's platform, but that's up to the party. Still, they do have a useful role in educating and streamlining the voting process.

That said one worthwhile sidenote is that because a lot of voters just follow the order that their preferred party says, the people who decide the orders on the how-to-vote cards can have a lot of influence - this is where so-called preference deals can have a big influence. Often the parties will negotiate with other behind the scenes a bit for their preferences, and it can have a significant impact.

Obviously none of this matters for a referendum, because there aren't any parties and a referendum is a straight Yes/No question, but it is an interesting quirk of the way the Australian electoral system works.

It is hilarious that preferential voting which was a Reddit fan favourite of 2010s and was surely going to herald true democracy…. ended up creating more backroom politics

It also succeeds at doing the thing it is meant to do - preventing vote-splitting from making third parties counterproductive.

E.g. the seat of Pumicestone in the 2017 Queensland election gave the most votes to the left wing Labor candidate (the amusingly named Michael Hoogwaerts), with 35%. The right wing vote was split between the Liberal National candidate with 30% and the even more right wing One Nation candidate with 23%.

FPTP would have given the seat to Labor, despite most voters voting for a right wing candidate. Instead, the Liberal National won it on preferences.

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For what it's worth I do think preferential voting is superior to first-past-the-post, but you're right that it does not end or remove backroom deals. I don't believe there's any form of democracy, or even of government entirely, that's immune to scheming and dealing behind the scenes.

In this specific case, alternative vote (i.e. not requiring every box be filled) would be an alternative to Australia's mandatory full preferential voting that would significantly weaken the power of preference deals.

What’s the problem with it though. In effect some uninformed voters voluntarily hand their preferred parties the power of their residual votes to use as they see fit, along with the main one. If the voter himself says : ‘I’ve seen all I wanted to see, go to the backroom’, it’s not really backroom politics.

For a vote in Australia to be valid, it has to number every box in order. If you just write a '1' in the box of your favourite candidate, your vote will not count.

Whoa really? Where I live there have been occasional rumblings about switching to preference voting, and I've mostly been agnostic about it. But this part seems like a negative, to me. If it's clear who someone meant to vote for, the vote should count.

I'm curious what the reasoning is here? Is this specific to Australia? Something to do with mandatory voting?

That's just how it works in Australia. To my knowledge, when preferential voting is proposed overseas, as in the UK Alternative Vote referendum in 2011, the proposal has been for optional-preferential voting, rather than our mandatory full-preferential system. Likewise I believe New York uses optional-preferential rather than full.

As to why that's the way it works here, I don't know specifically.

We adopted preferential voting with the Commnowealth Electoral Act of 1918, after WWI - the intent was that, since politics of the day were a relatively unified Labor Party which would likely win a plurality vote every time against a gaggle of competing alternative parties, preferential voting was necessary to ensure fair representation. In 1918 the Nationalists were in power, and there had just been a by-election which Labor won with only a third of the vote, against two conservative candidates who split each other's vote. Preferential voting was intended to prevent travesties like that. Naturally Labor opposed it at the time, but today both major parties are solidly behind it.

(Interestingly, the general dynamic of Australian politics still mostly holds today, in that Labor is consistently the biggest individual party, and it's opposed by a rough coalition of not-Labor parties, which today are called the Coalition. The general structure of Australian politics has been the interests of labour, represented by the Labor party, against the interests of capital, represented by the National/Country/United Australia/Liberal/Whatever party. That said, this might be changing as over the last few decades, Labor have been increasingly losing touch with their earlier working-class and union base, and both major parties are seeing their primary votes collapse, as voters leave the big parties for more ideological alternatives.)

Anyway, I don't know why we chose full-preferential voting in 1918. For better or for worse, we did, and no one seems to want to risk touching the electoral system today. So it's likely to stay.

(We did not have mandatory voting in 1918 - that was introduced in 1924, after the 1922 election only had 60% turnout, which at the time was considered extraordinarily low, and indeed too low to give the government a real mandate. I realise that sounds quaint now with countries like the United States usually showing sub-60 turnout - I guess it just goes to show what a different time it was.)

I use the how-to-vote cards to triangulate minor parties' and independents' positions based on the patterns of how major parties rank them. I'm a relatively-high-information voter as regards the major parties' positions (for 2022, once my single-issue-voting plan failed due to hearing crickets from all parties, I went through all the online platforms - or at least, four of them, since I seem to recall the UAP not even having one, and I don't think I checked the Nats since for some reason Bendigo gets Libs), but minor parties and independents are harder and I usually don't bother.

One thing I will note about preference deals is this: there used to be a cordon sanitaire against preference deals with One Nation (I recall the Libs putting One Nation last under Howard), but it collapsed and the Liberals now preference One Nation second.

We have ‘how to vote’ cards too, they’re just plain black and white with no letterheads or logos of a political party or advocacy group of any sort. It would be illegal to carry a flier into a poll booth but you can have a list to remind yourself.

One of the things that was remarkable about this campaign was how overwhelming the Yes campaign's resources were.

The amount of resources there are behind progressive politics is pretty much always immense, basically every influential institution was supporting Yes. At the entrance of my train station, there were Yes campaigners outside for days, handing out flyers to people. Even bodies that should strictly be impartial such as local governments (City of Sydney) were putting up advertisements all over the place telling people to support the Voice, which is frankly inappropriate and clearly overstepping the bounds of their ambit. As you note, it ended up being very clear that this was not some grassroots campaign for change, but a well-funded, dominant group filled with people who have an overwhelming influence over what the public gets to hear and see.

It's also very clear that the well-funded progressive elite, the people who populate the opinion-setting parts of the media, academia, and various other institutions, have hugely lost touch with the rest of the country and simply don't care to listen to them. Then every single time people turn against their policies, there always seems to be such a great amount of surprise and dismay that people would disagree with them, and a knee-jerk assumption that the reason for lack of support can simply be chalked up to stupidity or racism. Perhaps some of it is performative, but I do think that they really believe it.

and simply don't care to listen to them.

Well, why should they listen to the opinions of a mass of inferior peasants, if they "really believe" those opinions are driven by stupidity and racism? If you have power, why not enforce the objectively correct and moral position over the objections of the ignorant and the wicked?

The issue is that this kind of rhetoric and behaviour only really helps you gain status within a peer group that already agrees with you, it doesn't help get people on board. It may be fashionable to dehumanise your outgroup and form representations of them as evil and stupid that justify not listening to them or trying to sympathise with their concerns. But the reality is that if you fail to try and properly understand the rest of the country, and form caricatures of them that simply do not align with how they really think and act, you're almost certainly not going to be able to convince them nor will you be able to convert people to be in favour of your policy proposals.

The entire Yes campaign has seemed to believe that the morality of an indigenous Voice is so self-evident that they don't even need to try and form much of a coherent argument in favour of why it's a good decision (well, outside of empty sympathy-mongering, sloganeering and other such tactics that attempt to substitute actual argument for emotional appeal, I believe @OliveTapenade has covered that topic in detail in this thread and in previous ones too).

One of the main arguments I see in favour of the Voice is that Indigenous outcomes are poor, it's the fault of whites and therefore Something Needs To Be Done. But even accepting the premise that the Indigenous deserve something, it doesn't answer the question of why what they deserve is a constitutionally mandated lobbying group that exists to promote their interests and their interests alone (especially considering the failure of ATSIC to solve these problems and how it became a corrupt, mismanaged fuckfest). Australia pumps lots of money into Indigenous causes all the time, does this not already constitute help? It's also unclear why providing help even requires any amount of differential treatment based on race at all (if the Indigenous are disproportionately poor, any policy focusing on socioeconomic status instead of ethnicity will also disproportionately help the Indigenous while also not neglecting other Australians in need). The woke arguments simply have not addressed these issues and do not stand up to this kind of scrutiny. Regurgitating empty platitudes about "listening to people affected" are not arguments, they are slogans, and not particularly convincing ones either.

The reality is that it's not as clear cut as they think, and their failure to make sensible arguments in favour of the policy or properly acknowledge the arguments of their opponents drives home to people just how intellectually vacuous the argument in favour of the proposal is and has always been. It really seems like Yes just can't conceive of reasons why one would vote No, and instead of actually dealing with the core-level issues inherent to the proposal they are supporting it mainly on vibes alone.

This is what I mean when I say they have "hugely lost touch with the rest of the country". Of course, I won't interrupt my enemies in the middle of making a mistake.

But even accepting the premise that the Indigenous deserve something, it doesn't answer the question of why what they deserve is a constitutionally mandated lobbying group that exists to promote their interests and their interests alone (especially considering the failure of ATSIC to solve these problems and how it became a corrupt, mismanaged fuckfest). Australia pumps lots of money into Indigenous causes all the time, does this not already constitute help?

The standard reply to this was, "This is what they asked for."

If you suggest that a legislated Voice would do, the reply is to note that the Uluru Statement asks for 'a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution'. To counter with any other suggestion would be patronising and even racist, whitefellas once again failing to listen and telling Aboriginals what's good for them.

You might ask the question whether or not the Uluru Statement actually reflects the desires of most indigenous people. You might also argue that democracy is inherently a process of deliberation and compromise between different interest groups and there is nothing clearly racist about replying to a suggestion with, "We don't think that's practical at the time, but here are some alternatives that meet you halfway." However, I think the Yes campaign was very hung up on the idea that this is definitely the one thing that Aboriginal people asked for, and that it is so fundamentally reasonable that no one could possibly object to it. Both those ideas seem blinkered to me.

Ironically, at the time in 2017, Malcolm Turnbull's response was to say that "the government does not believe such a radical change to our constitution’s representative institutions has any realistic prospect of being supported by a majority of Australians in a majority of states". Despite being roundly criticised for that at the time, six years on it appears that he was entirely correct. Perhaps the drafters of the Uluru Statement might have done better to do some listening of their own, and consider what Turnbull - a sympathetic politician - was telling them was practically possible.

The standard reply to this was, "This is what they asked for."

I'd add that what people deserve is a matter that is able to be litigated, not a matter that is unilaterally decided by the beneficiary and that everyone else is obligated to blindly agree with. Making "what people asked for" the basis for one's reasoning is untenable, as even in a situation where someone has been wronged and everyone agrees they deserve compensation there are indeed requests that can be made which are unreasonable or disproportionate or just plain impractical. Just because you deserve something doesn't necessarily mean you deserve to get what you want. And these are holes that can be poked even after one has assumed that the progressive framing of poor Indigenous outcomes is correct, and I don't.

The issue is that this kind of rhetoric and behaviour only really helps you gain status within a peer group that already agrees with you, it doesn't help get people on board.

Does the evidence pan out there? The impulse to avoid shame and being seen as part of a low-status group seems quite strong (e.g. I'd consider it the finisher of old school internet atheism, "in this moment, I'm ecstatic" or how that one went), and I don't know if the current Moral Majority was ever particularly more conciliatory on the path to its present degree of mass support. (If you do accept them as the descendants of the hippies of yore, they were already calling their outgroup fascists back in the late sixties!)

A lot probably depends on how many members of their remaining opposition still subscribe to their status hierarchy, and either side has a correct feel for this figure.

If you do accept them as the descendants of the hippies of yore, they were already calling their outgroup fascists back in the late sixties

I remember once watching a rerun of an episode of Dragnet — which ran back in the 50s — with a couple of proto-hippy California college students calling Joe Friday a "fascist pig."

A lot probably depends on how many members of their remaining opposition still subscribe to their status hierarchy, and either side has a correct feel for this figure.

Or how many notables among their remaining opposition can be subjected to sufficient negative consequences as to make others among the opposition switch sides out of fear of the same — "Kill the chicken to scare the monkey" and such.

it doesn't help get people on board.

…

you're almost certainly not going to be able to convince them nor will you be able to convert people to be in favour of your policy proposals.

So what? So long as you have your fellow elites on board, you can just use your power as elites to force what you want on the powerless peasant masses. You don't need to "convince" or "convert" the peasant masses, just find ways to punish them for being ignorant bigots and voting wrong until enough of them eventually vote your way — assuming that, as it seems to be in this case, that you can't just impose your goals through the permanent bureaucracy, courts, academic consensus, or other such powerful institutions more insulated from democratic feedback.

"Democracy" is, and always has been, more of a sham than a reality. Society is always ruled by a small elite, and that elite always ends up getting their way, and the masses are pretty much always just powerless peasants who can do nothing but submit. Why should lords, with their superior breeding and wisdom, bother to listen to the ignorant opinions of dirty, stupid peasants, as opposed to just whipping the low-born curs into compliance?

So long as you have your fellow elites on board, you can just use your power as elites to force what you want on the powerless peasant masses.

Probably the wrong time to be making this claim, seeing as the powerless peasant masses just beat the elites handily.

Are we sure this is not due to some Russian trickery with the elections?

As we know, it's not real democracy if the people vote for the opposite of what the establishment want them to.

Surely Trump/MAGA/QAnon must be involved somehow! 😀

The Sydney Morning Herald helpfully reports:

Anti-Voice rallies organised by pro-Putin conspiracy theorist

Putin strikes again.

I wish I was ten percent as competent as the left believes Putin is.

I wish I was ten percent as competent as the left believes Putin is.

So does Putin.

It's also very clear that the well-funded progressive elite, the people who populate the opinion-setting parts of the media, academia, and various other institutions, have hugely lost touch with the rest of the country and simply don't care to listen to them.

From the descriptions of the amount of resources thrown behind the yes campaign(eg people handing out fliers in train stations for days) it almost sounds more like it was people who don’t have day jobs.

I have to wonder if this is going to end up like Irish referenda on social liberalisation (e.g. divorce); the pro- side argue each time that the loss doesn't represent the true views of the country, that there was misinformation and fear mongering and outside interference, and they're going to go again. Then eventually after a series of votes, where they finally get "yes" by a very slim majority - that's it. The people have spoken. No more referenda, this is now the law of the land, sorry "No" side you had your chance and don't get another chance to campaign (unlike us who got three or four goes to get the result we wanted).

I will be interested if the pro-Voice side push for another vote down the line in X months/year's time.

Ultimately this is always the nature of the game with progressive causes; opposing them requires constant vigilance and to win every single conflict, while they only require one (quite possibly gamed and/or cheated) win, and then that's it, the ratchet has advanced and never shall it relent. Anyone who tries to roll things back is painted as a vile fascist dictator trying to remove 'human rights' (that didn't exist until 5 seconds ago).

This is possibly why the Supreme Court abortion thing hit progressives so hard, because this is never supposed to happen.

Honestly I don't believe this entirely. The issue of try-try-try again-pass is real yes, but as Brexit shows it's an advantage inherent to the "Anti-Status-Quo" stance rather than inherently an advantage for progressives.

The problem is that conservatives believe you can just rest on your laurels and do nothing whatsoever to uphold your beliefs beyond voting, while progressives understand that to win you have to fight for your beliefs every single day. If conservatives tried half as hard to ban gay marriage as the progressives did to legalize it, it would be illegal.

Progressives collectively throw hundreds of billions of dollars towards their social goals, have numerous people whose entire lives and careers are dedicated to furthering the cause (many of whom abandoned more profitable avenues to do so) and have millions more who make art, put the values into their work, make public displays of loyalty, etc. Conservatives aren't even in the same ballpark of effort and commitment.

The sole exception would of course be Christian Evangelicals, who do all the same things progressives do to to actually attempt to win. And would you look at that, they did in fact get Roe v Wade overturned! Turns out conservatives can win if they actually care and put their money where their mouth is!

Progressives collectively throw hundreds of billions of dollars towards their social goals

They can do this because it's other people's money. They've infiltrated corporate and government institutions and act as corrupt agents, turning them towards the goals of the left instead of the nominal goals of the organization.

Currently that is the case, and my only response is "Yes, and if Conservatives cared enough they'd be stealing our money to fund pet causes too."

But it wasn't always true. The early progressive movements were largely funded by progressives, progressive sympathizers, and donations by those who supported the associated causes. Conservatives could do the same, but they don't. An expected counterpoint would be the funds seized from the trucker protest but 1. That's not America, and 2. You have to actually put money towards building power structures (like the Federalist Society), not just in response to a single politically hot event.

The progressives aren't about to let the conservatives pull the same trick; now that they've done it, they've closed the door to conservatives doing it. Progressive organizations get to engage in conspiracies in restraint of trade with no one blinking an eye. Conservative organizations get the stink-eye from the IRS.

I don't entirely disagree with this, though I would say it occurred largely because conservatives didn't care enough about their own values to maintain them. They could have done what progressives are doing now, but failed to do so, and instead let sinful behavior take control of the most powerful state to ever exist.

The solution now is to find new tricks, new takeover methods, that the opponent doesn't see coming. It is a war after all. You can't just reuse the old methods identically, but there are consistently functional principles that are timeless.

The solution now is to find new tricks, new takeover methods, that the opponent doesn't see coming.

And if no such things exist to be found?

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It is a war after all.

Sometimes the enemy just outclasses you.

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What I'm trying to get at is that "well this vote shows the people do/don't want this thing" only applies to the "anti-" side of any proposal after the "pro" side get their victory. I understand this tactic, but I don't see how you can shift from "we don't agree with this result so we'll keep going till we get the one we want", to "this result is now written in stone and can never be challenged". Unless you don't care a whit about the charge of hypocrisy and can be certain the tame media will never apply it to you, but always and only to your opponents.

That's my takeaway on the whole abortion debate: "why can't both sides compromise?" Well, because for one side, 'compromise' means 'surrender your principles, give us what we want, but we won't give you anything in return'.

"Why don't you permit abortion for rape/incest/threat to life of mother?"

(1) You don't? Heartless monsters who hate women and want them to die! (2) You do? Okay, you've already given in on the permissibility of abortion, that means you have no principled objection, so why not give in on the other cases we want? If you don't, then you're a hypocrite!

"If you really thought abortion was murder, why aren't you bombing clinics/putting women who get abortions in jail/executing abortion doctors?"

(1) You don't? Ha ha, you hypocrites! So that means you're lying and you don't have any principled objection to abortion, you only hate women and want to punish them for their sexuality! (2) You do? You heartless monsters! You hate women and want to punish them for their sexuality!

This is possibly why the Supreme Court abortion thing hit progressives so hard, because this is never supposed to happen.

And why pro-life pregnancy centers receive so much ire. They are not exactly neutral institutions, but the vast majority of the things they do seem to be genuinely charitable(eg providing diapers to poor mothers), whether or not you think the state should be subsidizing them. It’s simply that pretending partisan advocacy NGO’s are just basic charity organizations and the only reason to ever oppose them is because you’re evil and hate whatever charitable work they supposedly do is only supposed to work in one direction.

Which referenda are you thinking of? Gay marriage passed in 2015 with a healthy majority (there was only one county in which the No vote achieved a majority), and abortion passed in a landslide in 2018.

Not to dispute the existence of the phenomenon you're describing. My uncle lives in the UK and is every inch the archetypal Guardian reader. He's been insisting for the last seven years that the Brexit referendum was illegitimate because of Russian interference/"misinformation"/whatever you're having yourself. Although I think the prospect of the UK campaigning to rejoin the EU is effectively nil.

Gay marriage passed in 2015 with a healthy majority

Yeah, and both major parties supported it, which is a huge sea change in public opinion within my own lifetime. So the constant 'we are an oppressed minority living in a church-run society which is bigoted against us' script is quite plainly untrue, yet it keeps being pulled out whenever new changes are proposed.

Could not agree more.

Is that actually what happened in Ireland? Or did support for the pro side grow over time, and then continue to grow even after they won the referendum, making campaigning for a reversal pointless? Considering the 2019 referendum to further reduce divorce requirements was a blowout with over 80% approval, I somehow don't see a reversal of the 1995 referendum as likely to win more than 10% of the vote.

My point is less about "did support grow" (yes, like the rest of the world, we were not unaffected by 'whiskey! democracy! sexy!') but that the side advocating for the change insisted after every reversal that they weren't going to stop campaigning until they got the result they wanted, and when they did get it, suddenly now no further votes were needed or wanted. Following figures pulled out of my backside but 'We lost by 60% to 40%, the struggle is not over" until "We won by 51% to 49%, that's it, this is now immutable unchangeable law and we don't need any further votes on this, and the No campaign can just go away".

That's in part why I am so rigid on "not an inch"; after abortion was legalised (to a limited extent in my country) all the public appeal about "well this is only for really hard cases and it will be limited and no it's not going to lead to abortion on demand" was dropped and the activist groups were quite clear, and publicly said so, "This is only the first step, we're going to continue until we get the liberalised abortion we want".

There is never any 'we only want this one small concession, why are you being so inhumane and heartless?'.

Albanese's said he respects the result and the will of the people; he's not going to try it again this term (trying it again would also pretty much guarantee that that 60% would vote against him come the next election, and I don't think he's that stupid).

Down the track, who knows. Do note that Australia is TTBOMK the only country to repeal a carbon tax, so our right does actually roll things back from time to time (even if I might not agree with that particular rollback).

Do note that Australia is TTBOMK the only country to repeal a carbon tax, so our right does actually roll things back from time to time (even if I might not agree with that particular rollback).

I'm one of the more lunatic environmentalists on this site and I even supported rolling back the carbon tax. The carbon tax doesn't do anything to actually slow down the burning of carbon in any real way, it just gives a bunch of extremely rich people the ability to play financial games and suck some money from the public teat.

I think the Voice proposal is dead. It was a shitty idea, pushed more for "something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it" reasons than genuine conviction I think. There will continue to be efforts to get treaties or whatever other idea comes along, but that's it for the Voice.

For comparison, the rejected Republic referendum back in the 90s really did kill the Republican movement. Even 25 years later, with the Queen having passed away, there is still no heat or energy behind the idea of getting rid of the monarchy.

This is veering pretty close to waging culture war and, while not building consensus, assuming consensus.

My understanding of the spirit of the Motte is that when you write on the Motte, you should not assume a background of people who share your political views.

That is, my understanding is that this is not supposed to be a place where you share excited "inside opinions" about how your preferred politics are going.

I say this not as someone who is for the "Yes", but just as someone who does not want more culture war waging here.

Is there something I assumed that you'd like explained in more detail?

Might as well be proactive regarding the "misinformation" issue. Using the top result on Google (the people on the news tonight IIRC didn't specify what they objected to, with one exception that I'll come back to) and the official No case mailed to every Australian at government expense (along with a Yes case of equal length).

1 - "Australians will lose ownership of homes Variations of this claim include: Australians will be forced to pay reparations or the voice will increase taxes (ie, the voice will cost you money)"

Certainly, the idea that the referendum would directly imply reparations, that's false. The more measured case (and this one definitely is in the official No campaign) is that a Yes result would have a) built a Pro-Aboriginal consensus, which might make people more friendly to reparations, b) directly provided some level of soft influence to Aboriginals - that's the whole point, giving them an advisory body - which they might then use to advocate for reparations. I shy away from using this as motive to vote - feels a bit Machiavellian - but it seems plausible enough to me in terms of the facts (on both counts) and the Uluru Statement which inspired the voice does call for a "treaty" of some sort.

As for the latter part, certainly "voting for the Voice will directly raise taxes" is clear misinformation. The official No case merely said the Voice "will be costly" and said we don't know how much funding would be allocated to the Voice. It's not misinformation to say that government bodies cost money - that's extremely, obviously true - and "we don't know how much funding would be allocated" is also true.

2 - "The voice is legally risky Variations of this include claims that the voice is a third chamber of parliament, will dictate laws to the government, or will destabilise democracy"

Basically, the question here is "would the Voice have the power to block legislation". The No claim is that because the proposed change to the Constitution gives the Parliament the power to decide what powers the Voice has, Parliament might give the Voice the power to block Aboriginal-related legislation. The claim of misinformation is that this wouldn't or couldn't happen. To refute that claim, I cite the very article claiming it's misinformation:

Constitutional law experts are largely in agreement that there is nothing in the voice’s addition to the constitution which would lead to legal risk.

"Largely". That is, there are some that disagree (and indeed the official No case quotes a former High Court judge). So on the "could" question, there is some chance that trying it might work.

I ran the numbers, and was quite confident that the Parliament would not in fact do this; even if they tried, it would almost certainly fail to pass the Senate. But "the chance of X is very low" doesn't make "X could happen" misinformation; small probabilities of harm can be relevant to a vote if the harm is large enough. So on this one, I'll go to the wall on "plausible if unlikely; not misinformation".

3 - "The voice will divide the nation"

This is the one which was explicitly mentioned on the ABC coverage I saw. Not by an interviewee - one of the ABC journalists was interviewing the head of the No campaign, said this "wasn't factual" and asked him whether he regretted lying.

I don't understand the claims that this is misinformation. The claims that it's false (including the journalist, although not the article I'm beating up on) mostly just say "the Australian Constitution already gives the power to make laws for a specific race". The Constitution definitely does do that (it's extremely rarely used), but I'm not seeing why that makes "a specific body created to advocate for one racial grouping is dividing people into buckets by race" false.

The article I'm beating up on said that there are lobby groups already. Yes, there are, but not Constitutionally-recognised ones representing specific races. Again, not seeing the relevance.

My verdict: this is entirely true, the claims of misinformation border on misinformation themselves, I'll go to the wall on that.

4 - "The voice will force treaties"

See above under #1. The official No case said that this might lead to "Treaty" via people listening to the Voice and/or activists being emboldened, not that the Voice would directly force it. So the strawman/weak-man they're attacking would be misinformation, but the official case's point on this is quite plausible.

The article gets classy and says "There is no evidence for either, as the federal government has not indicated it will be engaging in those processes no matter what the outcome of the vote is." - do I really need to lay into this?

5 - "There are no details Variations of this claim include: you don’t know what you’re voting for and the voice is a Trojan horse for ‘secret agendas’"

I'm just going to quote the words in the article immediately following this:

There is plenty of detail. None of it is set in stone, because that is the parliament’s job, but we have an in-principle guide of what the voice under this government (because legislation can always be changed) would look like.

Exactly. We didn't know what we were voting for, because they had the legal option to change their minds afterward. Unlikely, perhaps, but not impossible.

Verdict: Largely accurate, not misinformation, I'll go to the wall on that.

6 - "The voice will allow the UN to take over Australia"

This is complete misinformation, no objections. (As you might expect, this one did not appear in any form in the official "no" case; this is just crazies.)

7 - "The Australian Electoral Commission will tamper with your votes"

Misinformation in the most blatant form that they're quoting, no objections. The AEC is highly trustworthy.

However, attention was drawn to the fact that ticks are counted as Yes and crosses are counted as invalid (not No). This is a known fact, the AEC went to court defending it against the alt-right UAP and won. This isn't tampering per se, the AEC told people to write Yes or No rather than to use a tick or cross, and it's not new for this referendum, but objecting to this policy isn't "false", it's an Ought statement saying that the speaker would prefer a different policy. On that one I'd say "not misinformation"; no Ought statement can be misinformation and the AEC 100% did the thing being objected to.

Note also on this one that the Yes campaign chose a colour representing itself that is identical to the AEC's official colour. They got in a little bit of trouble over this, although not a lot. So there were some things in AEC purple that were not impartial - they were Yes campaign material - although that's the Yes campaign being scummy and not the AEC.

Overall, I think it's fair to say that the No campaign's "misinformation" largely wasn't any such thing*, although as I noted there were crazies who said false things.

*There's one thing in the official No case that I think borders on misinformation. That's when they said "there is no comparable constitutional body like this anywhere in the world". Out of context I think that's false, although it's in the middle of an argument that there would be legal questions raised and in that sense it's justifiable because while similar bodies exist, it's not a 1:1 clone of them. Definite side-eye on that one, even if it makes a bit more sense in context.

The more measured case (and this one definitely is in the official No campaign) is that a Yes result would have a) built a Pro-Aboriginal consensus, which might make people more friendly to reparations, b) directly provided some level of soft influence to Aboriginals - that's the whole point, giving them an advisory body - which they might then use to advocate for reparations. I shy away from using this as motive to vote - feels a bit Machiavellian

Only if you think reparations are just and good but you just personally don't want to pay for them. If you are against reparations for fundamental or even pragmatic reasons, then "vote against a proposal that will have bad consequences further down the line" is perfectly reasonable.

Note that "it will cost money without achieving anything useful" is also a valid reason to be against something, even if it doesn't come out of your pocket.

Here we're not talking about "if I vote for the Voice the Voice will be able to extract reparations, which is bad", we're talking about "if I vote for the Voice it will shape the national conversation in a way which might lead to people voting for reparations, which is bad". The latter, unlike the former, is going into the Dark Arts realm of treating people as manipulable and prioritising optics over ground truth, hence my term Machiavellian.

It's not a matter of me thinking reparations are good, it's a matter of me saying "these corrupt means are not justified by this good end".

Now, I happen to have plenty of non-Dark-Arts justifications for voting No - "Aboriginals are already overrepresented in Parliament", "special racial privileges are bad", and "vague language that could be twisted into veto" are the ones I can think of offhand - so I did indeed vote No with a clear conscience. But I frown on this one particular motivation; we're Rats and we're supposed to be better than that.

I don’t really get your point. Let’s say you think the voice is a mild good thing, but are 100% opposed to reparations. Clearly your Yes vote helps reparations, invites reparations, legitimates reparations to a degree. Imo it’s perfectly acceptable to vote No as a signal, and action, indirectly targeted against the outcome you really care about, reparations.

Often governments will use referenda as a show of support. Is it machiavellian to vote according to your support for the government instead of the relatively unimportant question being asked?

Yes.

"100% opposed" is not entirely clear; I'd describe myself as 100% opposed to reparations IRL but I still don't think they're, like, Holocaust-level bad. If I did think they were Holocaust-level bad and I also thought the Voice was a mild good thing, I'd probably vote No and feel bad about it. Dark Arts can be the lesser evil, and even I do use them on occasion, but they're still Dark Arts and becoming inured to their use is a bad idea.

What is your objection? That it’s a sort of lie, because you vote no when you really believe yes?

For me, every referendum has implicit questions baked in, such as ‘do you support the current government’, or here ‘do you support reparations, the woke stuff, the ‘yes’ side generally, etc’, and although it is not official, it is legitimate to vote on those.

My theory is that a lie is only a lie if the counterpart expects the truth, and the more he expects it, the more it is a lie. But in this case, other voters, and the government, expect you to answer based on those other questions too, so it’s not a lie (or rather, any answer would be a lie in some way, so any answer is morally fine).

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The latter, unlike the former, is going into the Dark Arts realm of treating people as manipulable and prioritising optics over ground truth, hence my term Machiavellian.

That's politics. If you're not willing to think that way, you'll get steamrollered by people who do.

The latter, unlike the former, is going into the Dark Arts realm of treating people as manipulable

But people are manipulable, and pretending otherwise is not going to help you navigate politics. If you're worried about the signal of your vote being misunderstood by other people to bad effect, it's perfectly valid to account for that.

I also think the worry is less that a yes vote would by itself naturally lead to support for reparations, but rather that it would be used by proponents as an argument to make it seems to have more support that it actually does. In which case the proponents are the ones employing Dark Arts, and you're merely depriving them of their tools. That would just be recognizing Dark Arts and taking countermeasures, i.e. Defense against the Dark Arts.

prioritising optics over ground truth

The point of voting is to signal the will of the voters, not to figure out some sort of "ground truth". A vote is always a public signal, and it's entirely fair to think about what exactly you're signalling compared to what you want to signal.

>Is there something I assumed that you'd like explained in more detail?

>>Might as well be proactive regarding the "misinformation" issue

Huh? What was the assumption you felt went against the rules? What is and isn't misinformation is a different argument. You wrote a lot here without address your initial objection.

Edit, I'm an r-slur.

The posts you quote are both mine; I replied to myself. I made the first post you quote, and then later (later enough that editing felt like people might miss it) decided to not wait for a reply and proactively explain the one controversial claim I made in the OP (that the claims of misinformation were mostly wrong).

Sorry for the confusion, although they both do say "magic9mushroom" at the top.

D'oh! I need to start looking at user names.

It makes sense, I should probably drink a little less on the weekends

Sorry, I was drunk-posting when I read the above and I think I read something into it that was not there.

On re-reading it, I realized that even if there is some little bit of culture war waging in it, which I'm not sure, it's very minor by Motte standards, to the point that it would probably be hard to write anything about politics without having a similar degree of slant.

My apologies!

I mean, I did neglect to explain what I meant when I challenged the "misinformation" claim, and you prompted me to remedy that. But yes, apology accepted.

That is, my understanding is that this is not supposed to be a place where you share excited "inside opinions" about how your preferred politics are going.

This seems to be basically a complaint that someone is expressing their political views which you don't necessarily agree with.

I don't see anything in the OP that would constitute "culture warring." We talk about culture war here, and that usually means including one's own takes on it.

Yes, I over-reacted. See my follow-up answer to magic9mushroom.

I've been refreshing the counts for the past few hours, and this referendum failed even harder than I thought it was going to as well. 60% rejecting the proposal and losing all states is a pretty damning result for The Voice. I'm particularly surprised by Tasmania's rejection, because it was a state that Yes supporters were relying on to support the referendum, and surveys before the referendum indicated it might vote yes.

Something that Mundine stated in the aftermath of the referendum results did resonate with me quite heavily:

Warren Mundine, the leading no campaigner, has credited his side’s focusing on migrant communities for helping defeat the referendum.

Mundine spoke to Sky News, noting “some of them come from countries where they were second-class citizens” and were open to a message about the voice causing a divide.

We knew that the migrant community is 50% of Australia, either born overseas or their parents have been born overseas. We deliberately target that group.”

I'm the kind of migrant that has experienced this, and am incredibly opposed to affirmative action. Progressives might think their ideas are revolutionary and new, but their mindset of victimhood, group accountability and unequal racial treatment on that basis is basically endemic in many third-world countries, and many migrants have been on the wrong side of policies that look and quack a good amount like progressive politics.

As a result, I was in support of No from the very beginning, and though I couldn't vote in it I am happy with the outcome of the referendum. If the Voice had ended up with too much influence it would essentially have been a permanent, constitutionally mandated lobbying group which constituted an outright subversion of a proper and impartial democratic process, if it ended up with too little influence it would have basically been useless. Both would have warranted a No vote.

surveys before the referendum indicated it might vote yes

"Shy Tory" effect? If indicating you are thinking of voting "no" gets you tagged as a racist white supremacist hater -phobe -ist, then why on earth would you admit to any pollster your true intentions? I think it also indicates we should be sceptical about polls that are all "X is a sure result" for whatever side, because it does depend where you are polling, who you are polling, and how the questions are phrased.

What is the pollster going to do to you?

How confident are you the pollster isn't compiling a list of political enemies? What do you gain by answering honestly? If the answer to the first question is "less than 100%" and the answer to the second is "Nothing," why would you ever answer honestly? It just seems like the obviously wrong decision (for non-Kantians, at least.)

I've never heard of someone in the US pretending to be a pollster to create a list of potential enemies, so I'd be basically 100% sure.

This same argument would cause you to expect a shy progressive effect that doesn't seem to exist.

Modern Western society does a lot more cancellation, hecklings and punishment of the insufficiently-left than the insufficiently-Right

As long as the chance is not zero, the argument says you must lie.

What's more important - that you answer a poll honestly or that someone likes you? In this world of anxiety and influencers it doesn't matter who the pollster is, only that they exist and might think less of you.

Is there less of a shy tory effect in online surveys where there isn't even anyone on the line who might judge you?

I dunno man,I have tended to give the answers the surveyors wanted to hear whenever I've been picked for one. Though these were over the phone, not online.

It's just a bit awkward and easier to tell them what (you think) they want

Don't think it's shy-Tory. The No result was stronger than the polls in most states, but it's not stronger than the trendline of the polls (the polls showed Yes collapsing over time, so it's not surprising that Yes continued to collapse between the last polls and voting day). And the very last polls in Tas do show a sudden and massive shift to No, fairly consistent with the actual outcome. Maybe something happened in Tasmania that I don't know about.

Nah, more likely just small subgroup samples. Tasmania only has 500k people, it's normal for polling to be unreliable. You have to poll a lot of people to get enough Tasmanians to get a reliable subsample.

Agreed, the Aboriginal grievance industry is still very fixed in this idea of blackfellas vs whitefellas, and it's increasingly disconnected from the very immigrant-heavy multiethnic country that actually exists. Their messages just do not resonate with people who neither share their grudges nor feel any white guilt for their circumstances.

I fully expected it, but I'm still gratified to see No performing extremely strongly in areas with heavily non-Anglo demographics. A country like this can't work if people don't buy into the idea that race doesn't matter.

...the last time we discussed this on theMotte. They mostly seem to be leaning on "ignorant" rather than "racist", but yes, they're saying "this demonstrates need for Truth".

Sorry to keep spamming replies, but I want to note directly that there at least some leaning on 'racist'.

For instance:

Meanwhile, the CEO of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, Nerita Waight, said she was "horrified" by the result.

"In 2023, we had a chance to move forward rather than to stand still," she said.

"Australia voted today and now I clearly know what lies at this country's heart — racism.

"In my view, there is no way this doesn't impact detrimentally on the path to reconciliation and healing."

Or:

The big winners of this campaign are racism and misinformation. Before his term expired, the race commissioner Chin Tan called racism a “tentacled monster that feels impossible to slay, and its venomous nature seems to have only mutated in recent times”.

Tan said his greatest fears were realised and the debate was allowed to “degenerate into one about race”.

Or:

Many Indigenous people have maintained Australia is a racist country.

This is not to say every person who voted “no” on October 14 is a racist.

Motivations driving individual voting preferences are complicated, contested, perhaps even contradictory. We must be careful to not equate an individual “no” vote as a marker of individual racism. But ignoring patterns of racism and the relentless racist dialogue from some in the “no” campaign is to be wilfully, and knowingly, indifferent.

Racism is a drug, and Australia has an addiction.

Now to be fair, these are only a few voices, and the dominant line from the Yes campaign has been more muted. There are people who have taken other perspectives:

Yes campaigner Marcus Stewart, a Nira illim bulluk man of the Taungurung Nation and elected co-chair of the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, said Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were hurting.

“It’s a tough result, it’s an emotional result,” he said. But he stressed that people who voted No were not racist.

“The Australian people have decided that the 92 words that were put to them wasn’t the best pathway that they saw for us to improve the lives of our people,” Stewart said.

“Australian people are not racist if they voted No. I want to be absolutely, categorically clear.”

Overall, I think now there is going to be a battle to interpret the result, and it no doubt will be ammunition for people who want to argue that Australia is systemically or structurally racist. But at least right now the claim that the defeat is because of racism appears to be more of a minority view.

Another supporting detail: the highest voted post on /r/australia right now is

The referendum campaign has cemented racism into the body politic, and the ‘baseless’ rejection of ‘Yes’ will create a bleak future for Australia and those who stood with First Nations people

although oddly it's the only post on the sub where people who voted No aren't being downvoted to oblivion. I can't understand the voting patterns on there.
What's the reputation of "The Saturday Paper?" Is it one of those online propaganda rags, or does it have an actual history? Their coverage page on this has been wild.

Reddit is dominated by the very young. This may give some insight into the future; unless the opinions of the younger generation change, we can anticipate that in twenty years, this No vote will be seen as racism, and they'll try again for a successful Yes.

But older voters aren't paying attention to this. They're dusting off their palms and throwing a shrimp on the barbie or whatever Aussies do.

we can anticipate that in twenty years, this No vote will be seen as racism, and they'll try again for a successful Yes.

And then another generation or so after that, the old "conservatives" will be valiantly-but-futilely trying to conserve the outcomes of that successful Yes against the next big move leftward. Cthulhu may swim slowly…

Well, I think a lot of what people refer to as leftward drift is, or is really, drift toward the kinds of attitudes that go along with wealth, security, and technological advancement. Even though the social foundation has been worsening for some time, technology continues to improve, creating a curious anxiety and helplessness in modern individuals.

But my guess is that the economy will soon drift downwards as well, spurring a rejection of hollow technological distractions, and giving rise to something that might look like conservatism, but isn't exactly - I don't foresee a return to religion, for instance.

  1. Reddit is dominated by a particular kind of young person. The question is how representative is the modal Reddit user compared to their cohort?

  2. As you allude to, will their politics age as they get older? Maybe a lot probably depends on whether you think their beliefs are deeply held or merely fashionable beliefs.

True. My sense is that woke attitudes correlate negatively with age, and from what I read, attitudes formed in young adulthood stick around. See for example https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/adolescence-lasts-forever

From that, I presume that Yes is going to gain some ground over the next few decades as No dies off. To me a bigger question is what the even younger generation will end up wanting or believing once Reddit goes the way of the Tasmanian Tiger.

This might be surprising, but I actually hadn't heard of the Saturday Paper before this referendum. The impression I get is that they're pretty progressive - their original vision in 2014 reads as progressive to me.

This guide puts them as leaning left - about as much as the Conversation or Crikey, only slightly lower quality. Considering the quality of the Conversation or Crikey, I do not find being lower than them encouraging.That said, that chart also puts the ABC and SBS dead centre, which I doubt a neutral outside observer would, and putting The Age as dead centre also feels off, to me. The sense I always had in Melbourne was that The Age is the centre-left paper and the Herald Sun is the centre-right paper. It seems to me that the chart (which USC took from Reddit, of all places) is probably directionally correct, but what it labels 'center' is actually centre-left, and what it labels 'leans left' is actually solid left. This site also puts the Saturday Paper as on the left as well, which seems right.

You've already covered it, but like you as soon as I saw the left leaning ABC and SBS framed as centrist I knew the guide was biased in itself.

It's a left-wing/socialist paper I think.

I mean, Reddit major sub.

Kinda surprised to see that from Marcus Stewart. He's someone I usually expect to be pretty loose with accusations of racism (e.g. he accused the much-more-visibly-Aboriginal Jacinta Price of racism during the campaign).

I think there's going to end up being a split between the Labor types who recognise the need to win swing voters to get anything done and see how counterproductive the "everyone else is racist" argument is, and the Greens types who are more interested in being angry than getting wins.

Yeah, there was one on the ABC too. But the panellists pushed back really hard. I said "at-least-partial" intending to imply that full credit is arguable.

The issue with aboriginals is that the urban population is full of whites with distant aboriginal ancestry (almost uniformly 75%+ European) using their newfound (they certainly wouldn’t have considered themselves aboriginal in 1973) identities for the usual grievances / racial spoils, and the rural population, where almost all aboriginal Australians who are half or more native live, deals with the same problems as every indigenous community from Greenland to Hawaii (principally alcoholism, drugs and - a less charitable commentator would say - fecklessness).

The problem is that modernity is unavoidable (especially in the developed world) and so when presented with the choice of continuing their harsh, strenuous pre-modern existence (as much as that might even be possible) or living off welfare and getting drunk all day, they pick the latter. It’s sad that visitors can no longer go to an Indian reservation and - outside of certain exhibits - witness the natives living in tipis and wearing carefully sewn native fabrics and headdresses and whatever, but let’s be real, that takes a lot of work compared to buying $2 t shirts made in Bangladesh. And, in defense of the natives, there are plenty of Europeans who similarly live off welfare and spend their days drunk or high, too.

Really, though, the above are just a few years ahead of the rest of us. If we survive the singularity then we, too, will spend our lives on our little reservations, everything provided from above, occupying our time in what will probably be ways no less degenerate than the average dweller in an aboriginal settlement somewhere in the northern territories.

the above are just a few years ahead of the rest of us. If we survive the singularity then we, too, will spend our lives on our little reservations, everything provided from above

It's worth considering that the rickety, shitey-arse state of many reservations etc. is as much the result of incompetence, indifference and bad faith from conquerors, as it is the inherent fecklessness of indigenes. Perhaps a hyper-competent, hyper-intelligent robot overlord would simply provide a better standard of reservation.

Competently-administed mandatory eudaimonia would actually be a wise policy on the part of any hypothetical roboking that was disinclined towards genocidal eradication. To keep humans in a sub-par state of flourishing would mean less predictability - there's always the chance of some freak behaving who-knows-how. Having all the decorative/ethically-sourced humans in a state that is the absolute pinnacle of human excellence means you can plan accordingly, and the odd freak won't "hop the fence" so to speak.

Even that practical concern aside, I think an AI inclined to keep us would probably keep us well. And for the humans, this is a life at least as fulfilling as that experienced by all the chaps in the old testament, in Greek myth, etc - a life of challenge, overseen by known gods. Not too bad really.

I kinda disagree that the conquers were negligent. I think that humans without a purpose, who have everything handed to them end up in a state rather like zoo animals. They no longer need those behaviors that produce flourishing in the wild state, so they no longer really do them. The6 become essentially domesticated in the sense that they simply expect things to be handed to them rather than going out and getting them, and expect the keepers to maintain and build their life for them.

Not negligent per se; let's just say they didn't sincerely prioritise the flourishing of those they hadn't the heart to murder.

Suppose for example I'm the governor of some territory with a load of indigenes and colonists. Even if I set aside a physical space for the indigenes and make some financial allowance for basic medical treatment and what-have-you, there just aren't enough men or dollars or hours in the day to really ensure the indigenes' flourishing.

An AI will only be able to conquer and master humanity if it is significantly more capable than us. Consider how we might expect, say, a mediaeval army versus a modern polity to care for spare people in their charge. Now consider than any humanity-beating AI would be far more competent than a modern state, and by a much greater degree than the modern state outclasses some mediaeval horde.

I think an AI good enough to beat us could also husband us well without breaking a sweat.

I don't think it's true that a purposeless life need be as squalid as those of many modern indigenes - many perfectly nice and even quite good lives don't have any purpose that's apparent to their possessors. And honestly, life in divine obedience to a real machine God seems at least as purposeful as any of the religions of the book. I reckon it would beat "modern hedonistic self-actualisation" too.

I didn’t say that, I think the purposeless people in those conditions, no matter how “nice” you make them or how “well kept” they are will eventually turn even a middle class suburb condition into a shithole given enough time. Humans simply are not built for idleness, no animals are. And animals unable to act upon their instincts fend to have mental issues and end up creating worse conditions.

Right, so the AI creates busywork for humanity.

It works for dogs. Dogs that have jobs even if it’s just competitive frisbee or obstacle courses or herding tend to be better adjusted than pets left at home.

Sorry, that was a failure to convey tone correctly on my part - I agree with the busywork proposal, I wasn't being facetious. Perhaps some holy commandments like an obligation to pray x number of times per day etc

That might explain why the aboriginals use substances instead of working(at least partially; I doubt there are many jobs to be had near the reservations), but the squalor of their conditions is because the Australian government herded them into the middle of nowhere, in one of the least densely populated countries in the world, and proceeded to provide squalid conditions instead of nice ones.

It might be unrealistic to expect government housing for an entire ethnic group to be nice middle class suburbs, but ‘it sucks because they ruined it for want of something to do’ requires evidence that they did in fact ruin it instead of it just being cruddy to begin with.

Having lived in Darwin for a while, there was an essentially never-ending loop of 'Nice new accommodation is built for local indigenous, indigenous move in, Indigenous culture around extreme sharing within groups and territorial violence between groups leads to nice new accomodation becoming teeming slum, nice new accomodation is built'

Well, it was an exciting night.

It was a very solid result. Antony Green called it at 7:24 PM AEST, only 84 minutes after polls closed in the eastern states. Polls were still open in WA at the time the result was known. I'd say this is about the best result No could have hoped for - they crested 60% nationally, and achieved a full, six-state sweep. That's about the same margin of victory that same-sex marriage had back in 2017, except this was more difficult. SSM was a plebiscite (i.e. optional voting), not compulsory voting like this referendum, and SSM was overwhelmingly supported by media, government, academia, and so on. For No to achieve the same margin of victory with the entire population, and going against the will of the elite blob, is very impressive.

I'd like to suggest, though, that the No campaign not take too much credit for it. There are now Yes leaders specifically blaming the No campaign for the result - Marcia Langton is predictably blaming disinformation - but I'm not sure that's accurate. Even leaving aside that, as you correctly note, the refrain of "misinformation!" was itself sufficiently questionable, some might even say dishonest, as to qualify as misinformation, we have to reckon with the relative lack of power and reach of the No campaign.

Anecdotally - I'm from a Victorian electorate that went No with around a 53-47 margin. Yet the No campaign had almost no public presence here. Yes yard signs were relatively common. I visited two different polling booths on the day, and both had Yes signage and highly engaged Yes campaigners handing out flyers, but no No campaigners. Businesses put up large Yes signs in their windows and by their doors, but there was no equivalent for No. The Voice campaigns, on both institutional and grassroots levels, may be examples of Hanania's theory about cardinal preferences. For better or for worse, the Yes campaign seemed more organised and had a louder voice.

To step beyond the anecdotal for a second, just glancing at the endorsements is striking - Yes had so many more endorsements, including five out of six state premiers, a huge number of professional associations, pretty much every sporting club, all the big banks, almost every religious institution and charity, even the grocery stores. Financially, in terms of ad spend, Yes spent far more money than No did. Given the relative weakness of the No campaign compared to Yes, if the conclusion is indeed that Yes failed to get their message across in the face of opposition, then Yes must have been punching considerably under their weight.

Money aside, the No campaign does strike me as having been more effective than Yes, though. They were running a 'fear and uncertainty' strategy, but that was probably the right call for them. People vote No for a huge number of different reasons, and No doesn't need a one-size-fits-all argument. In general, however, they found a few central arguments (the Voice will divide Australians on the basis of race; the Voice is a vehicle for radical activists; the Voice is expensive and wasteful; the Voice is legally risky) and pushed them clearly enough. The No cause, if not the campaign, also did a good job presenting Aboriginal people themselves as harbouring legitimate differences of view about this. Remember that most Australians do not see or interact with Aboriginal people on a regular basis, so probably most people's image of Aboriginals is coming from media representation. The fact that this referendum made us all familiar with prominent Aboriginals in every camp - Conservative Nos like Jacinta Price or Warren Mundine, Progressive Nos like Lidia Thorpe or Michael Mansell, and Yeses like Marcia Langton, Noel Pearson, or Thomas Mayo - effectively disarmed the Yes campaign line that "this is what Aboriginal people asked for". (Even on polling day I saw Yes placards touting the claim that 80% of Aboriginal people support Yes - a figure that was known to be false at the time.)

The Yes campaign, on the other hand, badly struggled to make its case. I feel that one of its major issues was the inability to imagine the mindset of someone who disagrees or has doubts, and they often resorted to clichés. "If you listen to people you get better outcomes" is so generic as to be uncontroversial, but it doesn't speak to why a constitutionally-enshrined Voice is necessary for that. In other cases I felt they never quite reached the point - they argued that it should be constitutionally-enshrined so that governments can't get rid of it, but given that bodies like ATSIC were abolished with bipartisan support, it seems as though there might have been popular support for abolishing past bodies that failed. It's not clear why we should want to give up the power to abolish a body if it isn't working.

In other places I feel they fell for the fact-checker's fallacy - that if you can quibble the factual accuracy of a statement, that's somehow going to win an argument. I've talked about the way the argument went around race before - if you're responding to someone worried that it's wrong to divide Australians on the basis of something they can't control, like their race or their ancestral background, nitpicking "indigeneity is different to race" or "the word 'race' is already in the constitution" is going to be ineffective.

But overall I feel their biggest failure was, in a sense, typical-minding the entire country. It's understandable that Yes supporters have positive affect around the idea of Yes, but obviously other people don't, so appeals to moral righteousness or attempts to guilt-trip people aren't going to be effective. Take statements like this - McManus and Albanese ask for Australians to be 'decent', to 'show what a wonderful country this is', to 'show kindness', to show 'generosity of spirit', and so on. But anybody who believes that voting Yes is the decent, kind, or generous thing to do is already a Yes voter! You have to win over people who don't believe that! Anecdotally I had Yes-supporting friends telling me things like, "Ask yourself the old question, what would Jesus do?", apparently seeing it as obvious that that leads to a Yes vote. But it doesn't.

This is a refrain I make a lot of the time, but things are not obvious. I think the Yes campaign thought that Yes was obvious. But it wasn't.

Anecdotally I had Yes-supporting friends telling me things like, "Ask yourself the old question, what would Jesus do?"

Do you mind if I ask if your friends were actually Christian themselves? I'm try to gauge how common these sorts of arguments are made by the agnostic and atheist.

The person who told me that specifically was an old family friend who I'm close to via church. She's the local organist, and I sometimes preach and lead worship. So we're both Christians. That said, she is an extremely progressive Christian, whereas I'm more traditional, so we do have our theological disagreements. It would probably be fair to call her a churchgoing agnostic.

Thanks for this detail.

Most people irl who say things like that are at least nominally Christian, although often not true believers. It’s only on the internet that there’s an epidemic of atheists using that argument for spurious reasons.

Polls were still open in WA at the time the result was known.

My understanding is that this would be a bit like calling a US presidential election for the democrats when California hadn’t finished counting; California/WA has such predictable partisanship that you don’t really have to actually check.

It's not exactly like that - they didn't assume anything about what the WA result would be.

To pass, the referendum needed a 'double majority'. That means both a national popular majority (i.e. over 50% of all voters nationwide) and a majority of states (i.e. at least four of the six states need to vote over 50% in favour).

Polls closed at 6 PM in the eastern states, and results started coming in quickly. Tasmania and New South Wales were both rapidly called for No, and then South Australia was called for No shortly after. By that point, three states had voted No, which made it impossible for a majority of states to vote Yes. At that point even if literally every single voter in WA voted Yes, it would not have made a difference.

I don't disagree, particularly, on the No campaign per se, although I don't know all that much about it since my main source is the ABC which didn't want to talk about it very much (I suppose that's evidence in its own right). On the other hand, there are two people who I'd say do get quite a lot of the credit (or the blame, I suppose, depending on your allegiance) - Pauline Hanson and Peter Dutton. Hanson and One Nation did the hard work of being the first to say "no", which started an honest-to-God respectability cascade, and Dutton's JAQ and insistence on the booklets were masterful. I'm not saying I endorse Dutton's strategy - more Machiavellian than I'd like - but it was very effective (looking at the polling shows a pretty-clear effect from the booklets).

I think Jacinta Price did more than anyone. The fact that she was against it so strongly and so early, was able to articulate the reasons why so well, and was visibly Aboriginal herself was in my view a major factor in getting the Nationals and then the Liberals to commit to a No position.

I don't know if it was actually going to be called "the Voice" or if that was just a placeholder name, but it's so comically ominous. "There will be a Voice!" "We must consult the Voice!" "What will the Voice say?". Like something out of a Lovecraft story with a cult and an Old One.

I assumed the Yes campaign's insistence that the Voice would have no legal force was just a bad-faith position, as it's fairly easy to conceive of a dynamic where the Voice doesn't need legal force because it has the liberal media waiting to brand any government's disregard of the Voice as ipso facto evidence of racism, which will be used to declare that government's positions as morally illegitimate. When your enemy is campaigning to build a new weapon, don't vote to give it to him.

the Voice would have no legal force

Apparently I haven't been following this closely enough. Why were they bothering to have a referendum then?

As far as I can tell (from the full text quoted below), they don't actually have any power that a random Australian citizen lacks. Some guy could put together a club with his buddies, give it a fancy name, and carry out the same practices, create the same reports, and talk to the same people as the proposed "Voice".

Is there anything to it beyond a constitutionally-enshrined lobby group?

The lack of clarity around this is part of the reason it lost so badly. At least on the center and right there's also been some perception of the Voice as a possible Trojan Horse where in a few years a left wing government could give Aborigines a veto (or something less dramatic but still disruptive) and the High Court would shrug and say "Well, the constitution says Aborigines have a 'Voice', that could mean anything, so this is constitutional".

The constitution would require that the Voice 1) exist, though its specific form and powers would be up to parliament, and 2) be permitted to make representations to parliament and executive government. So it would be required to have access to government in a way that a random club would not.

That said, yes, beyond that it is toothless. There would have been no requirement for the government to take its advice in any way, and parliament would have the ability to disband, reform, or reconstitute the Voice at will.

It would probably have just been a publicly-funded indigenous lobby group in parliament. If it had passed I very much doubt it would have changed anything of note.

There was sort of this weird rhetorical loop between 'The Voice is a symbolic powerless body with no legal force' and 'The Voice will action real meaningful change due to its power' in which the former is probably more accurate but it never got firmly nailed down.

Considering that the voice's powers would have been whatever parliament decided they would be, "it would have no legal force" is a facile claim.

I don't know if it was actually going to be called "the Voice" or if that was just a placeholder name

Definitely "Voice". Let me quote the actual text of the proposed amendment:

There shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;

The term "Voice" is lifted from the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The word choice may have something to do with the significantly-aberrant Aboriginal use of English.

The constitutional amendment would have been:

Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples

129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice

In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:

  1. There shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;

  2. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;

  3. The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.

So, yes, it would have been called the Voice.

I'm glad this lost despite the overwhelming support from most institutions but like all one-sided election results I get the impression (anecdotally) that people are reading too much into the result - on the left that Australians are all racist or heartless or at least misinformed, on the right that we've heroically stood up to say no to wokism or some such.

As much as I'd like to believe that Australians are categorically opposed to this kind of thing, the voice was polling 60-40 or better earlier in the year, so its failure probably comes down to swing voters being unhappy with the details - or lack thereof. I believe the median voter wants to help Aborigines - but they don't want to spend too much money on it or give a political blank check to the government.

on the right that we've heroically stood up to say no to wokism or some such

I think there's some degree of a respectability cascade going on, where SJ's hold over the populace through fear and guilt has been shaken and being conservative is starting to look more palatable and less like being a moral mutant. Note how terrified the Liberals were of actually taking the "no" side early on, but now Dutton's saying this is a victory over activists.

I don't think this is the entirety of the reason for the vote we got; there's causation both ways there, with the vote itself (and the polling) damaging the apparent SJ consensus - there's a reason I said it "seem[s] to have emboldened people" - and the proposal and Yes campaign sure did stuff up a lot. But it's got me hopeful. Still not really worth the price of having a giant CW fight, but silver linings.

I know we aren't supposed to make low effort posts, but you make sense, and your analysis convinced me to change my mind on this issue.

Note how terrified the Liberals were of actually taking the "no" side early on, but now Dutton's saying this is a victory over activists.

That kind of opportunistic "run with the hare and hunt with the hounds" reaction (if the 'yes' side had won I'm sure he'd be claiming this was a victory for equality or the likes) reminds me of the pithy and tart bon mot by e.e. cummings:

a politician is an arse upon
which everyone has sat except a man

If the referendum had been just to acknowledge indigenous people in the constitution, I feel it'd have gotten over the line. Tying it to adding another body for Indigenous advocacy to the untold score of them that already exist was the issue.

ABC (the Australian one) has a votemap by electorate. Unsurprisingly, electorates with the highest aboriginal population roughly correlate with an increased NO vote.

Heavy YES votes were concentrated in progressive areas, particularly those with low aboriginal populations (such as in inner Melbourne and Tasmania).

As discussed, there is muted sniping that this is somehow a racist result, rather than people voting against any group being given special privileges above other citizens, or against deliberately ill defined powers and the likelihood of additional spending being given to first nation people.

Aboriginals have been allocated additional resources and spending for multiple generations and still face huge disparities in quality of life and success (insert standard HBD argument here). Australia already has a federal ministerial portfolio to address their needs. Of course after all of this focus being met with little success, progressives wish to pour even more money into the pit by backdoor means such as through the voice to parliament. Thankfully it didn't pass the sniff test and Australians (for all of their cultural flaws) seem to still have working bullshit detectors. For now.

(insert standard HBD argument here)

While I don't believe it's the main reason, there is also the possibility that it's the help the aboriginals are getting that's causing the disparities in quality of life and success -- that is, "helping" is largely counterproductive.

(insert standard HBD argument here)

I think much of this doesn't even need the standard HBD argument of "evolution doesn't stop at the neck". Even if evolution does stop at the neck, Aboriginals had no cities and no domestic animals and thus were not selected for disease resistance to the extent Old Worlders were; same thing as why most Native Americans died in the Columbian Exchange. And they weren't selected for dealing with alcohol because TTBOMK they didn't have any. You don't even need to talk about the brain to get a biologicalist explanation of The Gap (whether or not that's the whole story, I'm not sure).

NB: I think there is cause to put at least some additional resources into figuring out ways around the effects I mention, even if I don't think a failure to get parity automatically equals being terrible. Having shitty immune systems isn't their fault.

They mostly seem to be leaning on "ignorant" rather than "racist", but yes, they're saying "this demonstrates need for Truth".

Yes: the BBC, having given both sides, puts the balance on the side of the "No" campaign being misleading:

Supporters said that entrenching the Indigenous peoples into the constitution would unite Australia and usher in a new era.

No leaders said that the idea was divisive, would create special "classes" of citizens where some were more equal than others, and the new advisory body would slow government decision-making.

They were criticised over their appeal to undecided voters with a "Don't know? Vote no" message, and accused of running a campaign based on misinformation about the effects of the plan.

... Many of the nation's best constitutional minds have disputed those claims, arguing that the Voice would not have conferred special rights on anyone.

But the campaign's slogan "divisive Voice" which covered No banners and posters, ultimately resonated with voters.

Having earlier themselves described the Voice as:

a proposal to amend the constitution to recognise First Nations people and create a body for them to advise the government.

How can you have a special body to advise the government and not have special rights?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-67110193

As for misinformation, there were dirty tricks on both sides:

https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/voice-to-parliament/yes23-campaign-deletes-tweet-suggesting-no-voters-could-put-a-cross-on-voice-to-parliament-ballot-after-aec-flagged-it-would-not-be-counted-as-a-formal-vote/news-story/fba4dbf82898246908f446f7232e4aaf

No leaders said that the idea was divisive, would create special "classes" of citizens where some were more equal than others, and the new advisory body would slow government decision-making.

that sentence is kind of ambiguous. i guess the last 'and' makes the reading a bit more clear because you would expect that to be an 'or' if the 'No' at the start was not part of 'No leaders'.

Journalists' job is not to be good writers, so they often don't use punctuation like inverted commas in such cases, even though it would help for the reason you suggest.

Honestly something that amused/amazed me on the life outcome gap between Indigenous & Median Australians is that it's about the same size as other countries with their Indigenous populations, regardless of treaty, reconciliation, privileges etc.

Maoris have about the same gap

One suggestion that occurs me, particularly as regards strategy, is this note:

This is key to understanding the Yes side. No decisions were taken without the authority of the key Indigenous leadership, including Pearson, Langton, Davis and Dean Parkin, who often made collective decisions in phone hook-ups and meetings separate from non-Indigenous members of the campaign.

These leaders formed the ballast of the government’s 21-member referendum advisory group charged with finalising the amendment and advising the cabinet on referendum strategy.

“Megan almost had veto power on some issues,” says one source unwilling to go on the record due to the current sensitivities.

I'm sure we've had discussion before of how excessive deference to identitarian concerns comes at the expense of competence of merit - this might be a good example of that.

But it's also potentially a good example of how celebrity or ego-driven campaigns can fail. Foreigners might not recognise them, but Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton, and Megan Davis are very prominent names that any Australian who's been paying a moderate amount of attention to indigenous issues would recognise. All three of them have been active in the field for decades.

However, the way the world looks from the relatively small world of professional Aboriginal activism - Pearson and Davis are lawyers specialising in indigenous issues, and Langton is a full-time activist - can be distorting, or might have contributed to poor judgement of the state of the Australian people. It might have been better for the Yes campaign if politicians or non-indigeneous campaign managers had been able to push back or develop other strategies. But a politics of deference, whether that's deference to Aboriginal people or deference to supposed subject-matter experts, cannot allow that.

Another round of naive techno-optimism :

I ran across this interesting tidbit from Los Angeles news : the March 2024 ballot includes a proposed Responsible Hotel Ordnance to provide vouchers to homeless people and to require hotels to report vacancies daily and accept vouchers if they have room. The pro and anti reactions you'd expect are in full swing, with the unexpect-to-me wrinkle that the hotel worker's union organized the petition campaign. Bill text here, courtesy of LA city clerk. There's some historical context here in that Project Roomkey was (is?) a COVID-era initiative to rent idle rooms from hotels and motels during the pandemic downturn and use them to house homeless people, under the reasoning that this would reduce the risk of transmission among the homeless population by controlling their living conditions and reducing contact rates.

I mention this only to set context for my actual topic: for purposes of high-density commie-block-style housing of the feral, incompetent, and non-economically viable, how difficult is it to build rooms that can't be damaged beyond repair by an adversarial occupant? Online discussion points out the inevitability of a lawsuit after someone trashes their residence in a fit of, uh, exuberance, and the comparisons to open-air prisons write themselves, but I'm interested in the actual engineering challenges of building an individual space so well that a tenant can't render it unfit for use, modulo bleach, power-cleaning, and replacing some Ikea furniture. I figure the key is to keep the interior of the room entirely sacrificial, and to have the room's border act as a firebreak for damages, so that even if the occupants render everything inside into unusable scrap, it doesn't propagate to your service trunks in the hallway. What's this cost? What are the regulatory hurdles? Who's solved this before, and how well?

I am curious: the hotel workers' union organized the petition, but I have a hard time imagining it originates from the rank and file. Hotels would presumably have to hire significantly more staff to handle this, but 1) existing workers would have to deal with homeless people and 2) it would almost certainly reduce the proportion of their work that results in tips. If you're an existing worker, what's the advantage here?

In a world where AirBnB is even marginally legal it wouldn't reduce their work resulting in tips, it would eliminate it entirely. Over time the average hotel aims for a 60% occupancy rate assumption, maybe it's higher in LA so call it 80%, that's a huge number of rooms going to the homeless every night. And given that it's impossible to know which rooms won't be booked or when, that means mingling in the lobby and the elevator with the homeless, it means that I'm probably getting one of those indestructible concrete rooms.

Getting a hotel room is already often a tough sell over an Airbnb cost wise, throw this ordinance in and unless they entirely ban Airbnb and any other kind of system, Airbnb will dominate. I don't hugely object to sharing public space with the homeless, but I'm going to prefer paying for private spaces where I don't when I'm traveling. No hotel nicer than a motel 6 can possibly survive this.

Yeah. If I'm a hotel owner, this is pretty bad, but I can in theory just get a perpetual income stream of "market rate" vouchers from the city. Workers are just screwed. If owners have any moral obligations at all toward their workers, they need to fight this as much as possible. Preferably with a bunch of commercials featuring rank and file workers talking about how bad it will be for them, with little to no reference about how it affects hotels as an industry.

Oh, no, it will absolutely destroy the hotel industry if any alternative exists for any hotel nicer than a roadside drunk-tank.

Why would I choose to stay in a nice hotel if I share the space with homeless derelicts? If I walk out to get ice for my drinks and have to be leered at by various vagabonds? If I have to worry about my car being vandalized in the parking lot by my fellow guests.

When I could just stay at an AirBnB that is a similar cost and doesn't have a homeless person next door? Or, if I'm a tourist, why would I travel to the town where my hotel will be part homeless shelter when I could travel to literally anywhere else?

Airbnb not necessary, you can just get a hotel room outside city limits.

Especially in LA, which has tons of other municipalities embedded within it.

I didn't even consider it from the perspective of the paying hotel guests.

If I was confronted with a hotel where 40% of the guests were homeless, then believe me I'm cutting out the middle man and pitching a tent myself, in terms of proportions, there are fewer of them on the streets.

Now consider it from the perspective of a hotel guest with a wife or even worse a child. You going to be comfortable with them going down the hall to grab some ice or a soda? You going to let them run down to the front desk to buy a snack or even turn the corner ahead of you?

What happens when in the inevitable inability to effectively empty and clean full hotel every night, with a large percentage of unruly and mentally ill guests, a cleaning woman misses something and your kid steps on a needle walking around the room barefoot or jumping onto the bed?

What happens when someone's girlfriend gets raped in a stairwell

What happens when a toddler finds some candy that fell on the floor or in a corner and puts in in thier mouth before you can stop them, but whoopsie! it's** fentanyl and now their dead!**

The workers union organized the petition against the vouchers, surely.

Not so, source. Seems like it's a pressure tactic from the unions:

Earlier this month, a bargaining group representing hotel owners filed unfair labor practice charges against Unite Here Local 11 with the National Labor Relations Board. According to the complaint, the hotel workers’ union is demanding that the hotels support the Responsible Hotel Ordinance.

And there’s more.

The hotel owners say the union is also demanding a 7% tax on guests of unionized hotels, which a union official said could fund affordable housing for hotel workers.

Technically, unions can’t bargain with hotels for a tax increase. What they’re probably doing is trying to strongarm the hotels into backing, or not opposing, a new initiative for a tax increase. That would probably cross the line into an unfair labor practice.

The hotel owners say the union is also demanding a 7% tax on guests of unionized hotels

Ok, I nearly thought I understood, but now I'm confused again. If my union was campaigning to impose a special tax on unionized businesses where I work, then I would leave the union. Is the idea that guests will still use unionized hotels even with this tax increase?

To the extent this is thought through at all, the idea seems to be that the tax would be set aside to give housing subsidies to hotel workers, with an implicit assumption that demand for unionized hotels is highly inelastic.

Ah, thanks.

Assuming that monetary incentives won't make a significant difference to behaviour seems to be the first principle of left-wing economics, much of the time.

I'm seeing speculation that it's leverage in a labor dispute. Since the union brought the proposal, they can withdraw it at will. Therefore the hotels should accede to their demands or the hotels will risk the proposal getting put to a popular vote.

Apparently union construction labor is known to bring lawsuits against projects that don't use them, in the same vein.

If the union in question is SEIU, then "calculated dick move" is a racing certainty. If any other union, I would take the over on "maggot extremists on the paid staff acting without meaningful membership supervision".

None. Your union boss is a liberal activist and he is responsible for it. He will never have to clean shit out of sheets for minimum wage.

Maybe you sign it because you're supposed to, but you, as a hotel worker, have no skin in the game. It's just a job - and a crappy one at that. You'll flee for greener pastures the second the obvious consequences of this bill become apparent.

Hotels would presumably have to hire significantly more staff to handle this

This is really more than an aside. More work for their members seems like a pretty slam dunk argument for a union supporting a ballot initiative. See in a different vein;

Hotel industry spokespeople have said they believe the ballot measure is a negotiating tactic by the union, which is currently on a rolling strike against unionized hotels in Los Angeles.

This is such an extremely poorly-thought-out idea that it's kind of hilarious.

The obvious problem is that any kind of substantial homeless presence in hotels would have such a negative impact on business that hotels would go to great lengths to avoid it. Perhaps they would follow some of the suggestions listed in other comments and sell hotel rooms at bargain prices to people who are flexible in their booking (e.g. booking day of, or willing to move around their booking) or even gift some guests an extra room or two. More simply, they could gift employees free rooms whenever there's a vacancy. It's also possible that most hotels in LA proper would simply close and relocate to cities in the LA area which wouldn't be affected by this law (there are many other municipalities essentially embedded in the city of LA).

But after thinking about it a bit, I think an even bigger problem is something pointed out in the article: the number of vacant rooms in a hotel can change unpredictably from day-to-day so you either have to constantly kick out homeless residents on short notice or essentially accept a permanent fraction of your rooms being used to house the homeless. Even worse, if you opt for the latter then every time there's a dip in your number of regular customers, you risk having to increase the "permanent homeless" fraction of rooms. And if you opt for the former option then you will constantly have to get into fights with homeless people who don't want to leave and risk a huge public relations disaster if that ever goes poorly. Not to mention it would be insanely disruptive to regular customers.

I think the hypothesis mentioned in the article—that this is a negotiating tactic by the hotel workers' union—makes a lot of sense. Basically it is a threat against hotel owners that if they don't increase salaries then they will be put out of business by an insane law. If this is really the union's strategy then it seems a bit risky. There is always a chance that even the law will take on a life of its own and get passed even if negotiations succeed and salaries are raised. And then everyone (hotel owners and workers alike) will be out of a job.

I think the union, as the sponsor, is allowed to unilaterally withdraw the proposition. Though someone else could propose it if it truly took off, they'd have to go through the efforts of getting signatures etc.

It would be interesting to see what chaos arose if it did somehow pass.

I think the union, as the sponsor, is allowed to unilaterally withdraw the proposition.

Interesting, I didn't notice that part. Even taking this into account, it still seems a bit dangerous: if the union hasn't reached a deal with hotel management by the deadline to withdraw the proposition then they need to either reveal their threat to be an empty one or go through with it, in which case it could well pass.

I generally am pretty open to unions and employers playing hardball with each other. The reason this sticks in my craw a bit is that, if it is a cynical maneuver, it's transparently an empty one: the union won't pull the trigger on it because it hurts workers at least as much as the employers, so it gives no actual leverage.

I guess the ambiguity of whether it's cynical or borne of genuine progressive beliefs does give it some edge, though.

Depends on the relative mobility. In many unlearned/non-specialized professions, anything that blows up the entire profession gives leverage to the workers over the employers, since the workers will just move to a different profession with minimal friction, while the employers will need to accept large losses if they want to switch to anything else. Though I guess it's still an odd move for the unions in particular, since the union itself also has a lot more to lose.

And if you opt for the former option then you will constantly have to get into fights with homeless people who don't want to leave and risk a huge public relations disaster if that ever goes poorly.

In practice I suspect hotels would call the cops to remove them, and just deal with it if they don’t show up. Employees would then be gifted that room in perpetuity unless someone tried to reserve it.

Having cops constantly going to your hotel also sounds disastrous for business. I agree that hotels would do a lot of things to try to keep rooms from going empty, including gifting all excess rooms to employees each night, if allowed. A lot would depend on what enforcement looked like I guess.

I thought we (or rather the enlightened ones) were doing away with police and replacing them with social workers or mediation teams?

Who counts as homeless in America? In Ireland putting homeless people up in hotels is the standard thing to do but I haven't seen any news of hotels complaining about business being affected by an intake of rough sleepers and drug addicts. Add refugee accomodation and it's very lucrative and a much more stable source of income for a hotel owner or landlord than serving the market.

This is very interesting and thanks for bringing it up! Do you know a place where I can read the details about this program? Everything I was able to quickly find (e.g. this article) talks about "homeless families" being provided accommodations in hotels in Dublin. Depending on what homeless families means, this might be quite different from the most visible segment of the homeless population in LA, which seems to consist of single people with no children present. This makes me wonder if there is some screening that goes into who is eligible for the program in Ireland or if the homeless population in Ireland is just significantly different from the homeless population in LA. Also, I believe the rate of opiod abuse is much lower in Ireland, which might make a big difference.

That kind of temporary accommodation is paid for by local councils/homelessness services and is generally because the shelters and other places are full to the brim and can't take any new entrants. It's for families and is meant to be short-term emergency accommodation, not rough sleepers and "people with complex needs". Councils don't like having to fall back on it because it costs money and isn't a permanent solution, but if you don't have beds or spaces and you have, say, a woman with three kids who otherwise is going to be on the street - well, there's not much choice.

A lot of hotels also took on refugee/asylum seekers in Direct Provision. Usual sort of complaints about this, from the people in that accommodation to the locals; general perception (unfair or not) is that the hoteliers were making profit at the expense of the community.

I don't know if the Californian proposal does mean the rough sleepers etc., it sounds like it (because if they're going to discriminate amongst the homeless based on 'are they normal or not?' I can imagine seventeen different lawsuits from seventeen different NGOs and activist groups about that).

Report for July 2023 here, it seems to be a mess to download but that's the government websites for ya!

In relation to the terms used in the report for the accommodation types see explanation below: PEA - Private Emergency Accommodation: this may include hotels, B&Bs and other residential facilities that are used on an emergency basis. Supports are provided to services users on a visiting supports basis. STA - Supported Temporary Accommodation: accommodation, including family hubs, hostels, with onsite professional support. TEA - Temporary Emergency Accommodation: emergency accommodation with no (or minimal) support.

Irish homeless numbers are way smaller than California; the latest data is as follows:

The number of people accessing State-funded emergency accommodation as of August 2023 is 12,691, according to figures published by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage.

This figure does not include people sleeping rough, people couch surfing, homeless people in hospitals and prisons, those in Direct provision centres, and homeless households in Domestic Violence refugees. These people are not included in the regular monthly homeless figures as they are not accessing emergency homeless accommodation funded through Section 10 of the Housing Act.

By comparison, the numbers for Los Angeles (where this bill is proposed) alone, for June 2023:

The 2023 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count results were released today, showing a 9% rise in homelessness on any given night in Los Angeles County to an estimated 75,518 people and a 10% rise in the City of Los Angeles to an estimated 46,260 people.

sell hotel rooms at bargain prices to people who are flexible in their booking

Special off-peak booking! Bargain prices! Stay three days for the price of two! kinds of promotions. If the choice is between "take a cut on pricing to get the rooms occupied by normal people" and "be forced to accept government vouchers for the homeless", then any sensible decision is going to be "cut the prices".

If the voucher scheme was for a filtered set of applicants (i.e. people temporarily needing accommodation who are not crazy, druggies, or criminals) then it might work for a while. But if it's "take anybody we send with no discretion", it never will get off the ground because a hotel is not set up to be a supervised living support system.

You can get prison-style furniture and toilets and whatever that are relatively resistant to trashing. Not trashing-proof, some asshole might try and burn through your rock-solid prison toilet with homemade thermite or something. However, one of the issues that comes to mind is flooding, either deliberately or through drug-fueled incompetence or just idiocy. How do you deal with assholes blocking the drains in your units and getting the water running? Maybe you can have some kind of shutoff meter or something, but those can be defeated and even IDK 10 gallons of water just sitting in a unit is a lot and can cause mold and other damage.

Prisons have guards that walk by and see if an inmate is flooding his cell with toilet water or some shit like that, and they put a stop to it reasonably quickly - within hours, I think, but I'm no corrections officer.

Smart thing would be to have each unit have a concrete waterproof curb around the perimeter and multiple drains throughout. Preferably some large drains such that blocking them would be an actual challenge.

You have people with privacy and tools. If they have a grudge against you, they could very well remove the grates and seal the drain with contractor bags stuffed full of rags or something. You also have toilets and plumbing. Flushing a bunch of old T-shirts down the toilet and chasing it with something like rancid fat or concrete can block pipes pretty badly. Any halfway determined asshole with access to the entire contents of a goddamn hardware store can create a pretty damn bad clog with $20 worth of goods from the local hardware store plus or minus commonly available scavenged or stolen items like trash bags, old fryer oil, paint/glue/adhesives, or something else.

I suppose that you could just use a Singapore-style solution where you beat or flog people for damaging the hell out of the apartment and then maybe boot them out, and the hobos that can live in apartments without royally fucking it up get to live there.

Also how do you deal with these guys deciding to cook meth or something in the apartments? IDK - maybe you just do the same thing as you do to the guy that floods the place.

If you let angry prisoners get $20 worth of goods from the local Home Depot and a whole week unsupervised, they could probably burn down the prison.

You have people with privacy and tools.

This is the problem in a nutshell. In prisons, there is monitoring with cctv cameras and physical patrols.

If people aren't in custody under mental health laws or under criminal arrest, then you must allow them privacy. You can't deny them tools like cutlery, lighters, crowbars, sheets, kerosene and all sorts of other mundane items denied to prisoners.

You can build a room that is vandal resistant and will hold out against limited tools for the time it takes for the custodians to respond. You can't build a room where people with unlimited tools and time can maliciously or negligently work towards the room's destruction (or even the entire building).

To even build a vandal resistant room would make it unsuitable for use by paying customers. You either cater the facility to housing the homeless, or you acknowledge that designing the rooms this way will not make them viable for generating income from paying hotel guests.

Or you discriminate against those who get vouchers for hotel accommodation to be the people who aren't crazy, criminal, or addicted enough that they'll get roaring drunk/high and smash shit up (getting quietly blotto and just passing out in bed is another matter).

And if you do that, and leave the hardcore on the streets, then you the city will be facing lawsuits out the wazoo from every activist do-gooder and 'homelessness industrial complex' out there. How dare you make it so that Crazy Joe who would steal the pennies off a dead man's eyes, deals drugs, and beats and terrorises the shit out of his fellow homeless, can't get a hotel room beside normal people!

Yeah. There's definitely a use case for a shit tier hotel room like this but I wouldn't want to be around a bunch of people that can't even live in an apartment...it seems like it would be safer for me to just camp in the woods or something.

If they have a grudge against you

Oh, yeah. The homeless aren't a monolithic block, there are a lot of degrees and shades of difference. There's the people who are just temporarily homeless and still have it together enough that if they get support, they get back on the ladder of normal society, there are the unfortunates who are mentally disturbed or mentally ill in some degree, there are the people fucked up by alcohol/drugs, there are the people who lost jobs/got divorced/got sick and their lives fell apart bit by bit to where they're homeless, there are the criminals and so on. And the kind of grifters who do want to milk the system will indeed have grudges if they're not getting everything they want and perceive that they are owed. So if they steal shit, sell it, and want it replaced (often by better stuff) and you don't comply - they have no problem doing the likes of the above.

but I'm interested in the actual engineering challenges of building an individual space so well that a tenant can't render it unfit for use, modulo bleach, power-cleaning, and replacing some Ikea furniture

That depends on the tenant. These are homeless people, so generally not long term planners(who can wear through anything) or possessing tool collections(they’d pawn them for drug money). But they do have small items- lighters, knives, etc.

Now Sheetrock is delicate, but you don’t need it. Bare, polished(a rough surface can itself be used to damage things) concrete with electrical/plumbing access routed through stainless steel conduit. You’re probably going to want to seal everything; liquids can do a lot of damage. Obviously, you don’t have built in furniture, or if you do it’s the same concrete and stainless. That means you need to worry about the other furniture being used to smash things up, so it’s flimsy ikea. You can’t harden windows, so they’re right out.

Also, the doors have to be decent and locking, because I’m assume you’re hosting multiple homeless people in this facility and letting them run away instead of fight is probably a necessity.

Congrats, you’ve invented the prison cell.

You can’t harden windows, so they’re right out.

Bars or grates could be used over the windows; they could be made out of Lexan or something, too.

Even so, the biggest problem here seems to be good old fashioned flooding, either through malice or gross incompetence.

Even so, the biggest problem here seems to be good old fashioned flooding, either through malice or gross incompetence.

No ensuite bathrooms is the answer. If you want to use the bathroom, just go to the shared one that is supervised. Actually, the most malicious customers would just piss on the floor and smear everything with their feces.

I mean these things are designed to be able to be cleaned by a guy hosing the place down with a power washer. Shitting all over the place isn't as bad as flooding it or cooking meth in it.

Bars or grates could be used over the windows

Pretty sure that's illegal. That's a fire safety violation. "But concrete doesn't burn." Fire code doesn't care.

Concrete may not burn, but lots of other things do. You might get away with "can only open the window a limited amount so people can't commit suicide by flinging themselves out the window" but bars/grates like that, very probably not.

It seems very unlikely the people of Los Angeles will vote for this given popular sentiment has now turned thoroughly against the homeless.

SF voted to ban homeless tents on streets years ago, a judge stepped in and forced them to allow it.

These sort of things aren't decided democratically in California. The bill will fail but then a left wing group will get a friendly judge to mandate it's major points.

There's a specific ruling for the 9th circuit where you can relocate the homeless, but only if you have a place to relocate them to, which SF didn't. (And regardless of whether that's a good ruling, if you don't have a place to put homeless people you're probably not really getting rid of tent cities, just moving them around.) AFAIK there's no similar law/ruling that would apply to the above situation, though IANAL.

To be more precise about that ruling, SF didn't have to merely have a place for an individual person to move to, but places for the entire estimated homeless population. I.e. it could have a space open for someone, but unless it had spaces open for every homeless person on the streets that night, it wasn't allowed to force that individual to move his tent. Given that many homeless refuse any offer of shelter, the ruling requires SF to have a substantial overcapacity of shelter beds before doing anything.

Gotcha, thanks for the added context.

how difficult is it to build rooms that can't be damaged beyond repair by an adversarial occupant?

Ask the Department of Corrections. Such rooms tend to be all hard surfaces (cinder block and concrete) with stainless-steel appliances (by which I mean this, not this). Even then, they need to make sure the occupants don't have any tools.

Even then, they need to make sure the occupants don't have any tools.

Yeah. Preventing potentially hostile people from destroying these things is a system; not only are there tough, destruction-resistant fixtures but there is also a lot more restriction on tools and equipment and guards or orderlies surveilling the place and checking in on people to make sure they're not flooding the place with toilet water.

Flooding is the weak point, because homeless people don’t hold on to many tools- anything beyond ‘lighter, Swiss Army knife, maybe a screwdriver’ gets pawned. You could fix that with redundant drains and shutoffs for every room, I guess. These aren’t evil geniuses, they’re drug addicts with borderline mental retardation.

Still seems like it would be better not to do this.

Combination Toilet, Suicide Resistant

Worst toilet I've used

Submitted 4 months ago

By Trash man

From Wayne County jail

It's no fun when your the one in the holding cell sharing this terrible toilet with 40 other people. Washing your face with toilet water is barbaric

Bottom Line No, I would not recommend to a friend

Hilarious. Thanks for the link.

Do the vouchers at least insure the hotel against damage and lost revenue if the room is trashed? If they just cover the cost of a single night at some government rate, no hotel will accept a voucher like that, ever.

how difficult is it to build rooms that can't be damaged beyond repair by an adversarial occupant

Not that difficult, it's called a prison cell.

Not even just damage what if the homeless person rapes people or robs them or steals stuff out of rooms?

Infests it with bedbugs, contaminates it with a diy meth lab, etc, etc.

Prison cells are also supported by guards, unlike apartments. Can't bring a sledgehammer into a prison cell.

Prediction: If this passes nice hotels will almost never have vacancies. They will have some rewards program that guarantees there are never vacancies because any empty room will be given to a person in the rewards program or perhaps given to a friend of a hotel employee. Or, you go to the hotel expecting to have one room, and the hotel decides to give you two as a bonus for being such a good customer.

It really is striking that people that propose these sorts of things seem fundamentally incapable of arriving at this simple level of second order thinking. Problem with people on the streets? Well, give them hotel rooms, simple as! If confronted with fairly obvious workarounds like this, the answer would be to litigate against the hotels, of course.

I have some experience with building services security engineering and design, including for specialised correctional facilities.

how difficult is it to build rooms that can't be damaged beyond repair by an adversarial occupant

Not difficult, but the rooms would not be comfortable. You are looking at various design elements used in detention and forensic mental health facilities. No carpet, but lanolin flooring with drainage in each room. Vandal resistant paint. Plastic furniture like you've suggested. Potentially anti-ligature fixtures and fittings. Basically you'd be able to (and need to be able to) high pressure hose the place out. I would start with a basic expectation that people will smear shit on the walls and roof and potentially start a fire on the floor and go from there.

It would be unjust to get private citizens or companies to fund this type of housing out of their own pockets.

I would start with a basic expectation that people will smear shit on the walls and roof and potentially start a fire on the floor and go from there.

Unhappily, yeah. And that's only the people who are mentally unable to live independently, not the malicious fucks who love to destroy things just because (and then complain that they're not getting replacements and upgrades and how it's unfair and they're being discriminated against).

provide vouchers to homeless people and to require hotels to report vacancies daily and accept vouchers if they have room

New startup idea: uber for staying in hotel rooms, where hotels pay background-checked people to stay in hotel rooms to prevent them from being vacant.

If it means cheaper or even free hotel rooms for the likes of me, I don't think I'd mind at all, although you'd probably get a bunch of them shutting down as it's no longer profitable for them to pay to keep rooms full, and letting them go empty is even worse. Long term almost certainly a net negative for society, but you can apply that label to so so many modern government programmes.

I haven't seen @grendel-khan here in a while, so I'll chime in and say that the problem is the lack of housing, as usual. And so, instead of working to fix the housing problem by building more, LA wants to tackle it with a bizarre solution guaranteed to generate Culture War heat (granted, not that a fight against NIMBYs would be any less hot, but even so).

The government forcing private businesses to fix their screw ups is so obviously morally wrong.. Plus this will obviously not work. A bad event will happen and this will go away. It blows my mind people still propose these kinds of solutions.

There used to be cheap, minimal lodgings for those who would otherwise be homeless; they were called flophouses.

The point there, though, is that the people using them were at least trying to work and make some kind of money. They catered to transients and the poorest working class, not the homeless as we know the term now.

And the problem is not "get the guy off the street by giving him a (temporary) room in a hotel, problem solved". For the homeless who are "down on my luck, living in my car/couch surfing, otherwise trying to get my life back together", sure, this would help. If what they basically need is a bed to sleep in, a way to wash themselves, and some means of cooking basic meals or finding cheap meals while they look for work/help/have work just need to find somewhere to live, that's enough.

But the really hardcore homeless, the people who don't want to go to shelters where they are allowed to drink and take drugs, the criminals, the mentally ill - this won't do a damn thing. Even having to talk about making the rooms destruction-proof demonstrates this. You'll have people who cannot live independently because they can't take care of themselves and will clog the toilets by trying to flush rubbish down it, you'll have people who are criminals and will steal for sale anything not nailed down, and you'll have the crazy/malicious types who wreck shit just for the sake of it.

Unless you're going to discriminate between the "just need transient accommodation" and the hardcore types, this won't work. The hardcore need supervision, support, social workers, counselling, and someone calling in at a minimum once a week to check on them and make sure they aren't neglecting to eat or endangering themselves by trying to light fires in the middle of the room.

Hotels won't like or want that kind of hassle, and who can blame them? They're not set up to be asylums or halfway houses. Regular guests won't want to be staying in rooms besides the crazy and criminal. And that kind of intensive support is so expensive that the city won't/can't pay for it.

So the bill may be passed, all will congratulate themselves that they're Tackling The Problem, and it'll end up worse than ever.

At best, you'll get a new version of flophouses where dilapidated properties are turned into tiny 'rooms' with no facilities and the vouchers are going to pay what, in effect, will be a slum lord. Maybe that's better than nothing, but it's not a lasting solution.

But probably this is indeed a cynical bargaining tool by the union: give in to us on this particular demand, or we'll flood your premises with the feral and nobody sane will ever want to stay in your hotel again and you'll go broke.

Just chiming in with the usual reminder that what desperate people look and act like after decades of neglect and deprivation is not a very useful indicator of what they would look like had they been receiving aid and care that entire time instead.

Which is to say: yes, many people living on the street are now destructive and oppositional, making it difficult to treat and assist them in the short-term. But that's not an indication that there's some percent of the population that's genetically and inevitably incapable of not destroying everything around them, it's the result of what they've suffered under our system, and the self-medicating they've done to live through it.

A comprehensive system of social welfare that didn't let anyone fall through the cracks to begin with would prevent most of them from getting to that point, making schemes like this much more practical and useful.


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