Today, I signed up for Bluesky and Threads, taking a brief look at each of them, and announced my final departure from Twitter, to take place when Musk removes the Block feature[1]. Meanwhile I’m still using Mastodon as my main microblog along with this blog and Crooked Timber for long-form blogging. I’m trying to maintain a couple of Substack newsletters and commenting on Substack Notes. And I still post occasionally on Facebook.

This is clearly too much, but it reflects the transition from the Facebook-Twitter era of “social media” (with blogs as a holdover from a more optimistic past) to whatever comes next. I’m going to make the case for a combination of Mastodon and Substack as the way forward.

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I’m pretty despairing about the prospects for the Voice referendum. The current strategy is failing badly. There is an alternative that I believe might work, but I have pitched it in a few places and had no interest. So I’m putting it for the record and on the off-chance that someone might pick it up.

On present indications, the Voice referendum is doomed to defeat. Polls show the Voice failing to win either a majority of votes or a majority of states. Past experience suggests that support for referendum proposals invariably declines over time, and that most fail. In the last fifty years, the only successes have been marginal tweaks to such items as a retirement age for High Court justices and the procedure for replacing senators. But two earlier successes offer some hope.  The 1946 referendum on Social Service and the 1928 referendum on the Loans Council succeeded because they provided a firm constitutional basis for vital policies that were already in operation. The other important , though primarily symbolic, success was the 1967 referendum recognising Indigenous Australians

So, the ideal approach to the Voice would have been to legislate it first, and constitutionally entrench it later. But there’s still a chance to do the next best thing. The Parliament, in consultation with First Nations and community in general, could legislate a model that would come into effect if, and only if, the referendum was passed. The government has insisted that the design of the Voice should be left to “the Parliament of the Day’, but as far as initial design is concerned this is a distinction without a difference – next year’s Parliament will be the same as this year’s.

In my previous post on utilitarianism, I started with two crucial observations.

First, utilitarianism is a political philosophy, dealing with the question of how the resources in a community should be distributed. It’s not a system of individual ethics

Second, (this shouldn’t be necessary to state, but it is), there is no such thing as utility. It’s a theoretical construct which can be used to compare different allocations of resources, not a number in people’s heads that can be measured and added up.

Failure to accept these points is at the heart of the kind of ‘longtermism’ advocated by William McAskill and, earlier, Parfit’s Repugnant conclusion. The claim here is that the objective of utilitarians should be to maximise total utility, including people who are brought into existence as a result of our decisions. In particular, that means that it is desirable to bring children into existence who will have a miserable life, provided that no one else is made worse off, and the life is not so bad that the children in question regret being born.

As well as being intuitively unappealing, this idea makes no sense in the two main contexts in which it is relevant: families deciding how many children to have, and polities deciding whether to promote pro-natalist policies[1]

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From my Substack Newsletter

My fellow Crooked Timber blogger Ingrid Robeyns has long been making the case for limitarianism, that is, the idea that there should be an upper limit on the amount any one person can own or consume. As Ingrid has observed, limitarianism is a constraint, rather than a complete ethical principle, so it’s important to consider how it interacts with other principles. In the case of utilitarianism, the answer is surprisingly well, at least in (using Ingrid’s terminology) this and nearby worlds. But understanding this requires a little bit of background and some arithmetic.

Shorter JQ: utilitarianism implies limitarianism. The full argument is over the field (no tricks this time, I promise).

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In view of the apparent end of what passed for democracy in Israel, it’s time for me to repost my comprehensive proposal for US policy covering all aspects of relationships between the US and the Middle East. It’s over the fold.

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As is usual with trends of all kinds, some recent electoral successes for far-right parties in Europe have been extrapolated into a narrative in which the rise of the far-right is just about unstoppable.

That narrative took a blow with the recent Spanish elections in which the far-right Vox party performed poorly and its coalition with the traditional conservative Popular Party failed to secure a majority. Possibly as a result, the leader of the German CDU backed away from a suggestion that his party might go into a similar coalition with the AfD. And a similar coalition government in Finland appears to be on the verge of collapse.

From the other side of the world, it’s hard to know what to make of all this, but important to try to understand it. So, I’ll toss out some thoughts and invite readers closer to the action to set me straight.

As I wrote a few years ago, the rise of a Trump-style far right has been driven by the collapse of the neoliberal consensus that dominated politics throughout the capitalist world from the 1970s, with power alternating between hard neoliberalism (represented by traditional conservative parties) and soft neoliberalism (represented by formerly socialist and social democratic parties). As the failures of neoliberalism became undeniable, there was no longer enough support to sustain two neoliberal parties, and alternatives began to emerge on both left and right.

The most dramatic manifestation of this process on the right has been Donald Trump’s takeover of the US Republican party, which is now well to the right of any of the European far-right parties (with the possible exception of Fidesz in Hungary), and still commands around 50 per cent electoral support.

In Europe, though the more common party has been the rise of a far-right party commanding around 20 per cent of the vote. In most cases, this doesn’t look to me like an upsurge in the popularity of rightwing ideas. Rather, this 20 per cent has always been there, waiting for the circumstances in which views that are normally unacceptable can gain political expression.

In my own home state of Queensland, for example, the racist One Nation party scored more than 20 per cent of the votes in a state election in 1998, before fading back into single digits.

A 20 per cent vote for the far-right enough to make it difficult for traditional conservatives to win government in their own right, but usually not enough for the far-right to lead a government of their own. Hence, the contortions mentioned above.

A lot of attention has been focused on the neo-fascist origins of some of the far right parties. But some parties with fascist roots seem to have shifted towards the centre as they got closer to office. By contrast, Fidesz and AfD, which started out as ordinary centre-right parties, are now thoroughly anti-democratic and look more like old-style fascists.

What is needed is a convincing left alternative, which is far from being evident. Marxism has proved to be a dead end. The traditional centre-left parties have yet to recover from their embrace of soft neoliberalism. Greens have more appealing ideas, but have yet to break through in most places. Perhaps the need to respond to the climate disaster will finally generate some real change. We can only hope.