Leslie Nassar 1973-2016

No one has a bad word to say about Leslie Nassar, now that he is dead. (See Helen Razer at Crikey for a more traditional obituary.) He is a man made famous for saying bad words about other people, so this is unusual. Those who were lucky enough to know him, work with him or follow him on social media through his long and storied career know that when he cut you, it's because you deserved to be cut. For everyone else, the word I'm seeing most often to describe him and how he acted towards others is "lovely", which brings to mind the way Paul McDermott calls someone a "lovely feller" in a soft voice, like he's reciting The Sentimental Bloke. That is perfect.

I got to know him in the year 2001, when I joined the community of an epochal computer games forum called PlanetCrap. He went by the nickname of szcx back then, IIRC because he preferred those keys to the usual wasd configuration when playing shooter games with a keyboard. Most of the denizens of that forum were European or American, with szcx and I just about the only regular Aussies. I first met him in 2002, which is where I took the above picture. In that community, he was always an intelligent and nice influence, but could take the fight up to trolls and villains as much as anyone when the need arose.

Even back then Leslie was liable to get into trouble. He went to Portland, Oregon for work on a visa sponsored by his employer, but went over the border to Canada to try to renew it after his employer lied to him about his status... only for the Canadian authorities to dob him in to the US Department of Homeland Security for overstaying his visa, and get him shipped to a detention centre in Seattle. After three weeks of incarceration and what amounted to torture, he was deported to Sydney. Hopes that he might emigrate to the US to join his American partner were dashed for a long time.

As a man to meet and talk to, you wouldn't meet a more agreeable conversationalist. He was always interested in what you were doing, empathetic to your life's trials and tribulations, and obviously had a mind as quick as the latest computer chip, and sharp as the blades he shaved his head with. He was very well connected, though of course later he burned some of those bridges with the @fakeStephenConroy controversy that saw him gain his first taste of instant public notoriety but then get blackballed nearly out of the digital industry when certain Telstra executives held a grudge against him. Thankfully, he landed on his feet with a contract with Victoria Police, which meant he had to move down to Melbourne where he lived a stone's throw from my place in Brunswick.

We hung out more in those times. By that stage his first daughter had arrived, who turned out to have a one-in-a-million syndrome similar in some ways to Downs, meaning his family needed lots of quality medical help which at the time would have been outrageously expensive in America in the pre-Obamacare era. Even if he could get a visa and/or citizenship, the cost of supporting his child made the thought of moving to America out of reach.

America's loss was Australia's gain. Many other people know more about his work at the ABC setting up podcasting, at Q&A with TweeVee TV and the viral sensation that was @DeptOfAustralia and I'm sure that history will be well documented elsewhere. I knew him by that point as a friend and business mentor, at a time when I really needed both. As such, he was a constant source of positivity and a perfect foil for radical ideas, even when his own family was under threat from external forces and the danger of his professional radicalism was so present in his personal life. His fearlessness was not false bravado. He could speak with authority on how to construct a life as an anti-Telstra tech terrorist, something I shared with him in my business.

Leslie's death hits me particularly hard because he was a fellow traveller in life. He is the same age as me, and we both built young families later in life after long periods as lone wolves. I only wish I was nearly as talented has he was, in both a technological and comedic sense. I am only pretending to be an ubergeek, really, and when I try to run some of the same sort of funny material as he does, I tend to come off as a nasty smartarse whereas he could always make it sound like it was from the heart (because it was). He may have been a boy from the working class suburbs of Adelaide, but he always had more class than most of the rest of us put together.

It sounds like Leslie's latest project, Wrangling Cats, was more of a lifestyle business. He had finally got to move back to America, in Idaho where his in-laws lived, and it seemed like he had figured out his life and what made him happy and secure. That is what makes it all the more tragic, that his life was taken away so senselessly by a 20-year-old kid driving home drunk on a Saturday morning (whose life has also been ruined now, BTW). There were more than 30,000 road deaths in America last year, about 10 deaths per 100,000 of population. The equivalent figure for Victoria, where we have spent so much energy minimising deaths like these, is around 3.5 per 100,000. Leslie had so much more to give, primarily as a father and husband. What a waste of human potential.

He is survived by his wife and three daughters of eight, three and one years. If you would like to donate to a fund for his family, his most recent business partner set up a GoFundMe page. It's the least any of us can do.

A deleted comment from Club Troppo

View image | gettyimages.com

I don't want to make a habit of antagonising the Troppodillians, but the following comment was just deleted from a Club Troppo post by statistics academic Chris Lloyd on gay marriage (quoted text from one of Lloyd's comments in italics).

On the contrary, showing an argument may be flawed by showing it leads to untenable positions is quite mainstream.

You did not show this at all, Chris. No one has showed how gay marriage leads inevitably to polygamy or bestiality. There is no logical argument that can show this. It is like saying allowing marriage between two people will lead inevitably to polygamy because once you allow two people to become one, there's nothing preventing three people becoming one. It's just silliness, literally 1 + 1 = 3.

Anyway, I am open to arguments that marriage contracts are more substantial than I realised, and some commenters have claimed that it is (though I have not had time to check the claims). 

"Time to check the claims"? Do you not realise what marriage means beyond the bare contract? Have you been living in a hole? Well, I guess MBS is a bit of a hole. I hope you are not one of those ivory tower intellectuals like Peter Singer who could argue themselves into foolish positions because they don't keep touch with the real world.

If de facto’s are at a disadvantage then there is another discussion to have about whether this is acceptable. 

Not really, Chris. It is discrimination, plain and simple. You're trying to bargain to preserve your privilege. It is unbecoming of an educated man such as yourself to cling to such antiquated thinking.

Finally Paul, I do not accept that my tone is any more arrogant or condescending than yours. And linking it to gender is not OK so I will ask you to not use the word mansplaining again.

Playing the victim is also beneath you, Chris. If you jump into such a fraught issue with weak arguments like these, expect to get pushback.

Not exactly sure what the problem with that comment was; most likely the admittedly gratuitous crack at Lloyd's employer. His post is another in an increasingly frequent series of High Broderist scolding from the right on that blog, which continues to cause me dismay.

Club Troppo, Parishioners and High Broderism

When I first started taking interest in Australian poliblogs a few years ago, my first thought was that the Club Troppo web site sounded interesting, based as it was on the self-professed "political centrism" of Ken Parish and Nicholas Gruen. Back then, you had Larvatus Prodeo on the left (now deceased) and Catallaxy Files on the right, and Troppo nominally in the centre as the major group blogs in the Australian political scene. To me, group blogs are the most interesting variation of the form as they encourage dissemination of a range of ideas and viewpoints, producing a variegated editorial line instead of a blaring one-note foghorn. I wish I was part of one of these collectives, and indeed I did contribute a piece on the NBN to Club Troppo in my early time as a poliblog watcher.

As you may glean if you read the comments to that piece, my encounter with the resident Troppodillians was less than successful. Nicholas ended up calling me a mercantilist, which in the modern context is an implacable insult by a liberal Western wonk - never mind that Chinese mercantilism has been kicking the West's butt in the 21st century (that's for another post).

Anyway, one of the Troppo's latest is by Parish, and he engages in some classic "both sides do it" high Broderism to attempt to lay blame for mindless federal obstructionism at the feet of Labor:

... the cycle of retaliatory fiscal mischief goes back decades. I would date the phenomenon back at least to Paul Keating’s cynical and unprincipled demolition of John Hewson’s Fightback policy in the lead-up to the 1993 election, a tactic that Keating pursued relentlessly notwithstanding that he himself had advocated a GST only a few years previously and that John Howard by contrast had had the guts and integrity (not words that most on the Left would associate with him) to support most of the Hawke/Keating government’s necessary deregulatory, market-based reforms over the previous decade.  The gloves were off on fiscal policy from that moment on.

There were many valid and principled reasons for a centre-left leader to oppose Fightback!: slashing of welfare, abandonment of awards, cutting Medicare to ribbons, tax cuts for the rich and widespread privatisations. Yes, the GST was the issue on which the election was won and lost, but it would be disingenuous to concentrate solely on the media frenzy over it and ignore all the other Reaganomics elements which should be anathema to a centrist wonk, as Ken is. Wonks look at the whole policy picture, not just the media sideshow. Fightback! would have kickstarted the pure Reagan/Thatcher model of gutting the social safety net and widening the inequality gap between rich and poor, which Hawke and Keating had implemented while preserving many elements of the Australian social contract that were hardfought over many decades by unions and the rest of the left.

The rest of the article attacks Labor for insufficient adherence to its own ideals, especially around privatisation in the context of Paul Keating's defence of privatisation in the lead up to the NSW election, and then puts the hard word on Labor to establish a Troppodillian idée fixe, the Independent Fiscal Authority. Little to no mention is made of the Liberals in all of this. There is no responsibility for reform laid at the feet of Tony Abbott or any other Coalition leader. The implicit assumption is that the right's position is not even worth discussing.

High Broderism is a term related to Washington Post columnist David Broder, who is the premier exponent of the Beltway village theorem of a controlling group in the centre defining what is and is not acceptable policy according to the conventional wisdom set by an elite of influencers and policy professionals, with anything outside this window labelled as "extremism" and denounced across the press and "respectable" broadcast media. In America, this elite is an unelected and unaccountable set of media commentators and political operatives effectively working as a team, with tenured columnists at the WaPo, NYT and WSJ spruiking for those insiders whose policies they agree with and shunning those with other ideas, with little reference to their popularity with the actual public.

In Australia, we don't really have a "Beltway" as such. Power is more concentrated around Collins St and Sussex St, and Capital Circle just doesn't have a ring to it. Nevertheless, we do have an unelected "controlling group in the centre" in this country which traditionally has sat above political cycles, but it's not made up of pundits and apparatchiks: it's the public service. As befits a country more built along Westminster lines, public servants are the rocks around which the political tides rise and fall, guiding the country with Appleby-esque aplomb past this or that faddish though bubble. As academic advisers to and occasional employees of various governments over the years, Gruen and Parish are part of the wider cadre of public sector policy wonks, which gives their position in the Australian poliblogosphere some quantum of extra weight.

There is a good reason why the likes of Parish address their criticisms solely to Labor: it would be useless to ask the right to pay him any attention, because the local yokels are following the trend in the rest of the West of abandoning all pretence of scientific method in favour of hokum, humbug and junk economic theory. More to the point, Parish and his wonkmates are not only not going to get a gig advising any Coalition mob, the Liberal razor gang has been conducting a quiet pogrom to purge the public service of those not deemed sufficiently discipular to wingnut orthodoxy, from the head of the Treasury on down. His natural role, and that of the reality-based community within the public service - the Parishioners? - is to advise Labor because advising the Liberals on policies backed by traditional Keynesian theory is a fool's errand. This leads to a tendency for he and his posse to lecture Labor and let the Coalition off the hook.

That is not to say Parish et al do not criticise the Liberals. High Broderism denotes opprobrium directed at all sides. The responsibility for fixing the mess thus described, however, is left to the Left to get right to the right-thinking job of giving in to the Right.

Whoa! Reality Based Community on Facebook

I have had the idea to start one of those Facebook pages to bring together some disparate blog sources, since a group blog structure might not work for everybody. All are welcome to apply to become mods if you have suitable blog posts of your own to contribute and disseminate. The theme is not leftism, as in the recently departed Larvatus Prodeo, or centrism as in Club Troppo, or any flavour of rightism. It will not be a collection of "hate sites", as Homer Paxton references. It is called Reality Based Community, referencing a quote from an unnamed aide to George W. Bush (allegedly Karl Rove).

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Bush's reign coincided with the Matrix films, bringing the theories of Jean Baudrillard to CGI life. Baudrillard rejected the Matrix's treatment of his concept of the desert of the real, where the crude map crafted by humans becomes the new reality, regardless of the actual arrangement of rocks and plants that the map is supposed to describe: that the map as composed then becomes imposed. The Matrix's interpretation was that the system would incorporate the efforts of anyone who tried to change or break it; Baudrillard's rejoinder is that the Matrix films are a "symptom" of the system, invoking Agent Smith's monologue about humanity as a virus.

The pseudo-Freud who speaks at the film’s conclusion puts it well: at a certain moment, we reprogrammed the matrix in order to integrate anomalies into the equation. And you, the resistors, comprise a part of it. Thus we are, it seems, within a total virtual circuit without an exterior. Here again I am in theoretical disagreement (laughter). The Matrix paints the picture of a monopolistic superpower, like we see today, and then collaborates in its refraction. Basically, its dissemination on a world scale is complicit with the film itself. On this point it is worth recalling Marshall McLuhan: the medium is the message. The message of The Matrix is its own diffusion by an uncontrollable and proliferating contamination.

Baudrillard's contention is that the more the system evolves towards perfection, the closer it is to destruction. He would no doubt get along famously with Thomas Piketty, whose theory of r > g (the rate of return on capital is greater than the rate of economic growth) suggests that the endpoint of capitalism is also inevitable (or at least subject to periodic collapse). And of course, a dinner party with these two would also welcome Karl Marx, another whose theory is that capitalism already carries within itself the seeds of own mortality.

The 21st century has been a live Baudrillardian experiment. Is it possible that Rove was correct, and neocons rewriting the map with their post facto justifications caused a quantum smooshing to produce a post-fact cosmos? Are we all Schrodinger's cat in a box, and is Karl the observer who collapses the waveform to decide reality?

Perhaps it is unfair to single out neoliberal capitalism for criticism in this way. From the perspective of environmentalism, any kind of economic creed which does not put sustainability at its core dooms humanity, because sooner or later the earth is going to run out of free lunches. The command economy in China is currently doing a slap up job of polluting its way to disaster. Thus there is room in the RBC for critiques from both left and right of politics, or from the supposedly dispassionate eye of plain old science.

Is it going to be inequality that is the revenant reality that bursts the Dubbya-era bubble universe, or will it be climate change that washes away this egghead post-modern decadence... or another world war between 0.01%er elites fighting over lebensraum that isn't covered in oil slicks? Hopefully, we'll learn a bit about it through the Reality Based Community.

The adventures of m0nty

G'day, my name is Paul Montgomery, also known as m0nty. Yes, I know that nickname looks dumb with the zero instead of the letter o, but there aren't nearly as many m0ntys out there as Montys. Googlejuice is important for names in this day and age.

I grew up mostly in the country Victorian town of Seymour (with two years in Bangalore). I will copy the start of this short biography from a post I made in 2005 at my other blog which is mostly about technology startups, Tinfinger.

I am a journalist by trade, having gone through the RMIT Journalism course finishing in 1995, and then spending a year co-editing the RMIT student newspaper Catalyst (the Web site used to be a lot more grotty in my day when I was its first Webmaster, but also filled with content which I coded and put up singlehandedly: Catalyst circa 1996). Before that I had an ill-advised year at the University of Melbourne doing Economics & Commerce, but after a year of arguing with lecturers about how stupid economics was, there was a parting of ways which benefited both sides.

After finishing with university, I was lucky enough to get the second job I applied for: journalist at a weekly technology newsmagazine which was then called Computer Week, later PC Week Australia (since folded). [...] I wasn't really cut out for the news grind, with my style more suited to the expansive feature where I got a chance to explore issues in depth and run really long quotes.

At the height of the dot com boom, I decided that I needed to try my hand at the business before everything went pear-shaped. I joined a business set up by medium-sized Australian Internet service providers to promote a peering network called AusBONE, acting as CEO. Unfortunately, partly due to my own inexperience and partly due to industry movements, it didn't work out. It was a valuable experience nonetheless. After that, I moved back to Melbourne to take up a job editing corporate newsletters with Delphi Consulting, which promptly went belly up less than a year later for reasons completely unrelated to anything I had done (anyone see a pattern here?).

I am now in Geelong, having spent a good amount of time in the interim working in sales for Neighbourhood Cable which, apart from keeping me fit hoofing it around the backblocks of Geelong, gave me a direct insight into what broadband users are thinking. Or so I tell myself.

 From there, the period from 2005 to 2009 is covered in this long post about my startups FanFooty and Tinfinger, and 2010 to 2011 on just FanFooty in this follow up post. Since then, the main change in my life has been finding my partner, to whom I will be married in September at the ripe old age of 40.

There, I think that was comprehensive enough!

Whyalla the fuss over a loaded dog?

In front of the vet clinic in Whyalla stands a two metre tall steel sculpture of the Loaded Dog, the eponymous hero of a famous Henry Lawson short story in which a dog picks up an explosive cartridge, runs past a fire to light the fuse and causes havoc at a gold miner's camp. I couldn't think of a more appropriate mascot for a blog, this blog, which will hopefully carry some ordnance into the Australian political blog scene.

This blog begins with a federal election under way, the culmination of three years of some of the most poisonous political debate ever seen in this country, the details of which I should hopefully not need to explain to you. If not, then you're probably on the wrong blog and I'm not going to explain it to you. Snipers, opportunists, rentseekers, carpetstrollers, lobbyists, ex-journalists and allround yahoos have all had their freedom of speech exercised from the Right, to the detriment of the quality of the national narrative. In this vein, Loaded Dogma is intended to fire back from somewhere more of the Left, not to silence those voices but to answer them, or at least present an alternative point of view. Everyone tends to think their point of view is the Centre, of course!

To expand, I characterise my political views as being an institutionalist. There are a lot of theories that go by this name or variations thereof, especially in sociology, but none that I know of that use it to describe a purely political point of view. This is what I posted about it recently:

I am an institutionalist. I believe society is only as strong as the institutions which define it, and keeping those strong and healthy goes a long way towards ensuring general society gets on. To the extent that you want to label me a lefty as a consequence, be my guest.

Neocons are, by the definition I understand, anti-institutionalists. They share a lot of conservative values with traditional conservatives, but one on which they differ is that neocons want to dismantle large parts of the web of social institutions that go to make up social democracies. In the Australian context, neocons want to tear down a lot of the building blocks of society which Menzies laid in place.

As you can see, it is a definition I make as much in opposition as supposition. While I expect I will have to write a few blog posts filling out this belief structure of mine, I would add here that I am very much a Labor man and have been all my life, albeit never joining the party. In my mind, this is perfectly compatible with trust in institutions as the bedrock of society, something that might otherwise be construed as conservative philosophy. To my way of thinking, it is a measure of the changes in the Right in the last two decades that conserving societal institutions is now the domain of the Left. As I said later in the thread that quote was taken from: Labor is now the party of institutions.

I have spent a lot of time over the past few years at Catallaxy Files, self-labeled as "Australia's leading libertarian and centre-right blog". I have sympathy for libertarian arguments, but it would be fair to say that I have been acting as a troll there, causing arguments and annoying the locals. However, I have a theory about trolls: we are all trolls, to the extent that trolling is merely the desire to elicit a reaction, which is after all the ultimate goal of all human communication. This unscientific classification of humans and trolls is not right. There is a bit of troll in all of us humans, and even a bit of humanity in the most vicious troll. It's a spectrum, like autism. Perhaps it is autism? Whatever it is, I will be posting articles which travel the length and breadth of that spectrum, from heartfelt pleas for humanism all the way through to blaggardly trollistic obloquies.

This does not mean that I will take a laissez-faire approach to comments. Freedom of speech only extends as far as everyone else's freedoms, and once you encroach on the latter you will get moderated. I also retain the right to moderate those who engage in personal abuse.

My next post will be a short biography, for those of you who don't know me from one of my other appearances on the Web.