Janet Albrechtsen, and a principled call for the unfettered right to ban blue jeans and Janet Albrechtsen ...

Imagine the startling revelation, more shocking than a nude St Kilda footballer. Janet Albrechtsen wears jeans, or so the photo illustrating her profile at The Australian suggests.

It immediately brought to mind American conservative George Will's Forever in Blue Jeans, which in turn was a riff inspired by Daniel Akst's Wall Street Journal rant Down with Denim.

Yes, conservative commentariat commentators have way too much idle time on their hands. Here's Akst:

If hypocrisy had a flag, it would be cut from denim, for it is in denim that we invest our most nostalgic and destructive agrarian longings -- the ones that prompted all those exurban McMansions now sliding off their manicured lawns and into foreclosure, dragging down the global financial system with them. Denim is the SUV of fabrics, the wardrobe equivalent of driving a hulking Land Rover to the Whole Foods Market. Our fussily tailored blue jeans, prewashed and acid-treated to look not just old but even dirty, are really a sad disguise. They're like Mao jackets, an unusually dreary form of sartorial conformity by means of which we reassure one another of our purity and good intentions.

Dear lord, the most secret and shocking insight about Albrechtsen's mindset revealed to the world, perhaps she's just one step above a Red Guard.

Akst wanted jeans taxed; Will went further:

Denim is the clerical vestment for the priesthood of all believers in democracy's catechism of leveling -- thou shalt not dress better than society's most slovenly. To do so would be to commit the sin of lookism -- of believing that appearance matters. That heresy leads to denying the universal appropriateness of everything, and then to the elitist assertion that there is good and bad taste.

Denim is the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances. But the appearances that people choose to present in public are cues from which we make inferences about their maturity and respect for those to whom they are presenting themselves.

And he went so far as to offer a profound style guide:

Today it is silly for Americans whose closest approximation of physical labor consists of loading their bags of clubs into golf carts to go around in public dressed for driving steers up the Chisholm Trail to the railhead in Abilene.

This is not complicated. For men, sartorial good taste can be reduced to one rule: If Fred Astaire would not have worn it, don't wear it. For women, substitute Grace Kelly.

These musings are of course a load of bollocks, a dollop of pretentious horseshit, of the kind we need to shovel out of the Augean stables on a daily basis, which naturally brings us to Janet Albrechtsen's column in today's Australian - Think. Again - under the header Drowning in compassion, wherein she berates the intellectually lazy human-rights industry for not confronting the hard questions.

It is of course profoundly intellectually lazy to lump everything into the strange cardboard box "the human-rights industry", but I guess it's not as profoundly offensive as Tim Blair, who recently managed to start off his discussion of the recent Christmas Island tragedy, Foolish forced to face deadly reality, by referencing not just 9/11, but starting off with the Holocaust. I was going to do a piece on it, but it's so staggeringly offensive, and so myopic, and such an idle defence of Andrew Bolt, and Blair himself - long a rabid campaigner for the Iraq war and all the death and displacement thus caused and so with abundant blood on his hands - that words failed me.

But back to Albrechtsen, and you have to admire the nice touch which manages to turn the recent deaths into a nice joke - drowning in compassion ...

Get it. The human rights industry is drowning in compassion, while real people drown in the sea, and dipstick commentators wear jeans ...

Well Albrechtsen quickly moves away from the asylum-seekers to a generalised rant about human rights:

This growing cohort of good time human-rights boys and girls treat any talk about human rights, regardless of the issue, as all upside and no downside. Captive to a kind of moral solipsism, so many members of the modern human-rights movement cannot conceive that other views apart from their own exist, or if they do exist, are worthy of debate. So, they don't bother with debates. Moral posturing is so much easier, and alluring to unthinking followers.

Note the condescending language - boys and girls - moral posturing - unthinking followers - and the flippant use of 'moral solipsism'. Yep, it's Humpty Dumpty argument time again.

If we take moral solipsism to refer to egoism - the holding of self-interest as being some sense primary in moral calculations - or as a kind of perverse variation on metaphysical solipsism - only the self exists - or as a kind of epistemological solipsism, the doctrine that we can only know facts about the self, and other facts cannot be known, or known only in a secondary way then we discover that the entire meaning of Albrechtsen's sentence is fraudulent, and that 'captive to a kind of moral solipsism' is meaningless.

That's why she proceeds to redefine the meaning to suggest it's a kind of moral solipsism to evoke other views existing apart from human rights boys and girls, when if you took her language literally, she actually says that they hold a self-interest which is in some sense primary in their moral calculations.

I know it's a bit early in the morning for this kind of talk, but as a frequent misuser of solipsism, it's hard not to see this as a typical Albrechtsen howler.

It's the kind of intellectually lazy thinking that Albrechtsen should be skewering. Instead she showers us with more lazy rhetoric by moving past the boat people and her favourite whipping boy Julian Burnside (oh that Dame Lash, always severe) to Wikileaks and Julian Assange:

When Khan appeared in the City of Westminster Magistrates' Court last week court to support WikiLeak's Julian Assange because she believes "in the principle of the human right to freedom of information and our right to be told the truth", she was uttering the kind of mindless rhetoric that, once again, defines the human-rights industry.

And I say that as someone on the record as a staunch defender of free speech. Even here there are always limits if you stop to think about it.

Talk of mindless, idle rhetoric.

Actually if you think about it, Jemima Khan might well agree there are limits to freedom of speech. She might well take a view on child pornography, but that wasn't what she was talking about in that little thought grab. She was talking about a principle, in much the same way as the American Bill of Rights talks about principles, and then sets about codifying what said principles might mean.

This isn't a problem, unless of course you're a jeans wearer with an axe to grind:

That's the problem of course. Most human-rights activists don't think enough.

Yes, that's the problem of course. Commentariat columnists don't think enough, preferring to shoot off their mouths, in the name of their irrational argument with the world, which cheerfully refuses to conform to their conformist views.

Whether we're talking about those fighting to defend Assange and the simplistic claim for an unassailable right to information or the rights of boatpeople to unfettered asylum, too many human-rights advocates suffer one central problem.

They are exemplars of the human rights as absolute, unconditional, unqualified, inherent rights-of-man school.

For them, a human right can be stated shortly, simply and without any qualifiers. A right to information. A right to asylum. No ifs, no buts. End of discussion.

Which of course is complete nonsense, perhaps induced by too much tightness from the wearing of the jeans, the kind of provocative straw man argument that passes for debate amongst commentariat commentators.

If you can find someone who argues for human rights as absolute, unconditional, and unqualified, please drag them into the light. I'd love to meet someone who suggests that it's their right to drive on the right hand side of the road in Sydney ... and then watch them do it. Or build an atomic bomb and drop it on News Corp ...

Even the most noxious forms of libertarianism doing the rounds in the United States, inside and outside the Republican party, don't push the notion of individual liberty, freedom of thought and action this far, and yet the odious Albrechtsen fits up the human rights industry for the charge.

By golly, she would have made a good NSW copper back in the old days. Out with the telephone book, a good dusting up, sign here on your confession please, and off to jail, and no, you don't pass go, but you do collect five hundred thumps and bumps ...

Having set up the straw men, it's then all downhill, as Albrechtsen set about lecturing people, or rather hectoring them, in the way that Dame Slap once trounced the children in the magic land above the faraway tree:

Simple logic says there is no such thing as an absolute or unqualified human right. If such a thing existed, then the best candidate for such human-right sainthood would surely be the right to life. And we know that even that most basic right is hedged by laws and other restrictions devised by those elected to govern us.

Alas, we cannot even agree on when life begins. At birth or conception or somewhere in between? And then there are the laws of self-defence. And the laws of war.

Ain't it grand? Simple logic. From asylum seekers through WikiLeaks to abortion. And even there a a blithering disregard for the argument, because it's not a matter of where life begins, be it at birth, or at conception, so much that a woman in control of her own body may choose whether, in her circumstances, she wishes to bear a child ...

But back to the rhetoric and the straw men:

The right to life is everywhere limited, qualified and explained by parliament and laws. Ditto the right to free speech, which is regularly fenced in by laws set down by parliament.

Laws create limits about defamatory speech, incitement to violence and national security.

Yes, but where is the evidence that Julian Burnside, or Jemima Khan, or others in the alleged 'human rights industry' are promoting anarchy and an abandonment of laws, so much as in the specific matters mentioned, better treatment of asylum seekers, and the right of WikiLeaks to make the information it has freely available, while not being called an intellectual terrorist into the bargain and threatened with assassination or state-sanctioned murder?

So the prima donnas who damn parliamentary or executive attempts to regulate refugee flows with saccharine one-liners about the immutable rights of man are practising one heck of a deception. Theirs is an unworkable, unsustainable utopian world where no hard decisions need be made.

Actually the unworkable unsustainable utopian world belongs to Albrechtsen, as she berates her straw men ... and thus avoids having to make any hard decisions. Like where she stands on WikiLeaks, whether she wants abortion banned, and how does she feel things have worked out from the Iraq war as people continue to flee the country.

Personal responsibility moi?

Could it be that history will now record George W. Bush more kindly than his critics would prefer? What is happening in Iran cannot be separated from what has happened in Iraq. This year, during provincial elections in Iraq, Iraqis came to polling booths in their millions to vote, by an overwhelming margin, for national, secularist parties. Iraqi security forces - not coalition troops - ensured Iraqis could vote safely and securely. There were no suicide bombers endangering polling stations. People turned up with their children to cast their vote. (here)

Oh it's all so spiffing, such a splendid delusional utopian world, how strange that people should still be catching boats to Australia ...

The same applies to a whole host of emotionally laden claims about human rights, whether it's about the right to access information, the right to housing or free university education or the right to asylum.

Pick just about any right and reason demands a legitimate debate about where one draws the line, places limits and qualifies that right.

By all means, argue about where to draw the line, but you can't sensibly argue parliament doesn't need to set some limits.

Actually what you can first do is argue about the principles, and put them in place, but for years of course, Albrechtsen has argued against a bill of rights, American style, and instead suggested everything is already in place, thanks to the common law traditions of the country, and parliament, and then in the usual conservative fashion, spends her time suggesting the need to draw lines and set limits, and hedge in and define and restrict, in ways designed to send Walt Whitman and William Blake and a few others into a frenzy.

So where do we draw the line? With Senator Conroy's "great big filter"? With the goose McClelland demanding the right to survey all our internet travels? With the cabin'd and cribb'd and cramp'd attitudes of the typical conservative, fearful of freedom and human rights, wanting to kneel down to their religion, their god, and their right to wear unholy jeans?

Okay, so what's the most laughable reference in the whole piece by Albrechtsen?

As Michael Costa wrote recently in the Australian Literary Review, "Labor will never be able to match the Greens in a rhetorical battle on so-called social justice." The task of thinking Australians, be they politicians, political pundits or punters from middle Australia, is then surely to reason the Greens out of relevance.

And it's not a hard task.

Oh roll me down the aisle again, a hard line borderline ratbag from the NSW right, and him admitting he and the Labor party won't be able to win a rhetorical battle on so-called social justice? Well he's damn right there. Why those loons are hard pressed to run the trains on time and to a budget, let alone reason the Greens out of relevance, or join in a rhetorical battle about social justice, unless it's social justice for developers ...

But I got distracted. Let's get down to the closing arguments, or more to the point, the closing specious rhetoric:

Claims, for example, to open the borders, to let the boats arrive, to put out the red carpet for desperate asylum-seekers cry out for a dose of the balancing act demanded by real sustainability.

A balance between the short term and the long term, between idealism and pragmatism, between emotion and reason, between social and financial factors. And so on.

Ever hear a peep, let alone a squeak, from the Greens, or human-rights activists or members of the Labor Party's hard left about such matters?

Sustainable human rights - in other words, ones that work and last - require all sorts of difficult trade-offs.

Rights that are compassionate but not open-ended. Rights that relieve distress but are not economically ruinous. Rights that maximise freedoms but protect national security, our troops and the need for frank and private diplomatic exchanges.

Straightforward intellectual rigour demands such trade-offs.

Translated, what I think this means, is that WikiLeaks should be banned, Assange jailed for all eternity as an intellectual terrorist, abortion banned, and boat people stopped by a shot across the bows, and if that doesn't work, a couple of shots into the engine room, and then let them sink and drown, as an example to the world, and so that Australians don't drown in compassion ...

And at that point, having delivered a message of stinging intolerance, Albrechtsen signs off by wishing her readers a sustainable and very merry Christmas, happy in the thought that once again, she's smitten and smoted mightily, and spread unhappiness throughout the land ... either amongst readers who can't stand her slipshod thinking, or amongst readers eager to join in her paranoid, distorted, unhappy view of the world ... a world where Christian charity and caring for the poor and the helpless is a long way away from theirs and Bill Orally's idea of a genial Christmas ...

Why is it that Christians are first to hand to take the Christ out of Xmas?

Never mind, it reminds me ever more forcefully, that perhaps there is a good case for banning jeans. Or at least banning commentariat commentators wearing jeans. Like Janet Albrechtsen.

There I've taken my first difficult trade off step in the matter of an intellectually rigorous understanding of freedom of expression. The world would be better off without Janet Albrechtsen. A compassionate but not open-ended understanding of the right to blather would preclude, and exclude, her specific right to blather ...

By all means argue about where we might draw the line, place limits on and qualify her right to speak ... but let's start from the principle that she has no right to speak at all. Or wear jeans ...

(Below: is that blue the evil blue of denim? Is Albrechtsen a serial offender? Is she a Maoist jacket jeans freak, a double agent intent on bringing down western civilisation, or at least mocking Grace Kelly and George Will?)