Windschuttle Sokaled

An enterprising hoaxer - claiming to be acting in the tradition of Ern Malley - has published a spurious article on a scientific topic in Quadrant with the aim of demonstrating that Keith Windschuttle would print “outrageous propositions” which accord with his ideological disposition. The article was also designed to lampoon Windschuttle’s mode of historical research. You can read the story - by Margaret Simons - at Crikey.

Update: There’s more from Simons at her blog Content Makers.

Update: Windschuttle responds.

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The Pill and male infertility

This report about an article in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, has attracted a bit of attention because of a claim that the oral contraceptive pill was contributing to male infertility:

The pill “has for some years had devastating effects on the environment by releasing tonnes of hormones into nature” through female urine, said Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, in the report.

“We have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill,” he said, without elaborating further.

Continue reading ‘The Pill and male infertility’

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Evan Thornley: “Nothing in his (political) life became him like the leaving it”?

[With apologies to Shakespeare’s Macbeth.]

It may be that political news abhors a (Christmas/New Year) vacuum, but hasn’t Evan Thornley’s departure from politics at the point when the Victorian ALP caucus was about to elevate him to a Ministry set the cat among the pigeons? Writing in Crikey today, Andrew Crook thinks there’s more to all this than meets the eye - the story is reproduced with permission over the fold.

Continue reading ‘Evan Thornley: “Nothing in his (political) life became him like the leaving it”?’

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On reading (and writing) the acknowledgements page

Image of a PhD dissertation courtesy of raffyd at flickr - reproduced under a creative commons licence.

My 2009 began in a very sober mode (if not mood) - today was the deadline for finishing the edit of my PhD thesis recommended by the panel at my final seminar so it can go forward to external examiners after being checked by my supervisor. So, after Boxing Day, I locked myself away from the world, and with my flatmate being away for the week, hardly spoke to a soul while I madly edited and refined and revised. Obviously, I was quite immersed in the totality of the dissertation and all its pathways and byways (which it was my task to smooth out somewhat), but what I think kept resurfacing in my mind was the need to write an acknowledgements page. I hadn’t realised til I checked the guidelines for formatting a thesis at QUT that this was actually required - my first impulse was to make it as minimalist as possible to avoid the temptation to tell the long and very emotional story of the whole journey towards Doctoral graduation (and make no mistake, every PhD student and PhD has one). But in the end, I enjoyed composing it, and unlike the acknowledgements in my honours thesis ten years ago, I resisted the temptation to include multiple Latin tags. I contented myself with one - from Virgil’s Aeneid - Book 1, line 33:

Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem!

Continue reading ‘On reading (and writing) the acknowledgements page’

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Economics and ideology: u r doin it wrong!

This post is a sequel to my previous one on economic faith and doctrines. When reflecting further about the ideological construction of “oppressive state intervention” and some of the comments made on the thread, I kept thinking about the fact that the liberal economy needs an enormous amount of state intervention and support to function, and that a social democratic perspective can be non-statist. One of the easiest elisions to make in thinking about politics and the economy is to equate anti-statism with the right and statism with the left. The two binaries do not map on to each other so simply. In fact, it’s a sure sign of thinking that’s really far too prone to ideology to assume that they do.

So I was happy to find this point rather elegantly made by the Canadian academic Leo Panitch:

Continue reading ‘Economics and ideology: u r doin it wrong!’

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So what happened to Peak Oil?

Earlier this year, the price of energy, particularly oil, was one of the biggest issues in world politics, and particularly American politics (climate change has always been a second-order issue there). The spike in the oil price drew mainstream media attention to a theory that had been doing the rounds of the blogosphere - and, later on, the mainstream media - Peak Oil. To recap, the Peak Oil hypothesis states that the level of world oil production will reach an absolute peak, and then start to decline, on a fairly rapid basis. The consequences? Some time in the not too distant future, oil at $1000 a barrel (equivalently, petrol at $10 a litre), dire economic consequences to the point of food shortages, and, amongst some of the wilder fringes of its adherents, even the collapse of modern civilization.

When oil reached $150 per barrel, peak oil proponents were suddenly popping up on Lateline and its equivalents on a fairly regular basis. But, just as suddenly, they disappeared, to be replaced by the heralds of the subprime crisis. If nothing else, it demonstrates the inevitably limited attention span of the mainstream media. But it’s worth considering what the events of the past few months mean for peak oil, both the hypothesis itself and the predictions of dire consequences.

Continue reading ‘So what happened to Peak Oil?’

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Eyeless in Gaza II

Since the previous thread on the Israeli attacks on Gaza was becoming unwieldy with 425 comments to scroll through, and several commenters requested a new thread, comments are continued on this thread from here.

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Guest post by Angharad: Ending homelessness – but not with the help of the AMA

Commenter Angharad discusses Kevin Rudd’s homelessness white paper which didn’t get much discussion because of its timing, but deserves some because of the importance of the issue. -MB

A few days before Christmas, Kevin Rudd launched a white paper on homelessness The Road Home with far less fan fare than the climate change white paper a few weeks earlier.

The white paper was, on the whole, well received by the homelessness policy community [disclaimer – I was close to the action on this one]. It sets out a strategy and identifies targets like “halve overall homelessness by 2020” and “offer accommodation to all rough sleepers who need it.” It’s been signed off by COAG and has a substantial increase in funds. So far, so good and it has as a better chance of succeeding than anything currently in place.

But the Australian Medical Association is not happy and says it won’t work. Continue reading ‘Guest post by Angharad: Ending homelessness – but not with the help of the AMA’

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Lazy Sunday! (New year’s edition)

Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? And indeed on New Year’s Eve and since? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!


Rollerblader by *phenomenologist on deviantART

To see a larger version of the image - taken a while back - click on it and then click on full view when inside the gallery.

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Saturday Salon

An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.

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2009: New year’s resolutions (the sociological edition!)

Happy New Year 2009 image courtesy of zltgfx at flickr - reproduced under a creative commons licence.

There are quite a few cultural constants of New Year’s Eve - fireworks (and the illegal ones in my neck of the woods certainly woke me up with a bang at midnight), revelling, and resolutions, the topic of today’s post. I haven’t traced the origins of the custom, but it makes intuitive sense that the social rhythm of time would prompt reflection and introspection and a desire to make a new beginning at the most significant turning point of our secular calendar. Perhaps time off work also contributes. No doubt there’s an aspect of secularisation in this cultural moment - examination of conscience and a resolution for amending the self have been part of a huge constellation of mindsets and practices in the West for a very long time, as Michel Foucault taught us.

From a sociological point of view, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts about freedom are interesting here. Merleau-Ponty pointed out that we adopt, and test against our surroundings, a set of dispositions and practices oriented towards the world - something similar to what Pierre Bourdieu subsequently dubbed a habitus. And that word’s not chosen lightly, because as over time we make certain choices, we shift the field for making subsequent choices - aware or unaware, we pursue a certain direction. We’re part of that lifeworld in which we choose, and can’t really stand apart from it. And over time, the “sedimentation” of those choices can narrow our sense of the possible. Probably one of the reasons why another stock cultural truism of the New Year is that resolutions are doomed to fail is that we over-estimate the degree to which individual will alone can reshape our behaviours and attitudes. Not surprising in a deeply individualist society (and some of that sense of the choosing self also harks back to the dissemination and transformation of the confessional urge).

Continue reading ‘2009: New year’s resolutions (the sociological edition!)’

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Economic faith and doctrines

Gary Sauer-Thompson has trained an observant eye on an editorial in the Fin:

Yes, the road ahead looks difficult. But this is no time to abandon our faith in the capacity for enterprises and markets free of oppressive state intervention to reinvent ourselves and bounce back. Human ingenuity will prevail, confidence will eventually return and the wheels of commerce will spin again. There is too much evidence that the world, despite periodic setbacks, continues to progress.

He parses this intriguing paragraph thus:

Interesting isn’t it. The defence of free market capitalism depends on faith not on reason. Reason cannot do the job any more given the global financial crisis and its aftershocks on the economy. So faith is called in to plug the gaps.

Of course, faith was always a big component of economic liberalism. Enlightenment doctrines (and Marxism is another), having toppled God from his epistemological throne as the prime cause, took on some of the characteristics of the theism they thought they’d banished. So economic science has always been contaminated by ideology. Normative values such as “progress” and “ingenuity” underpin a worldview which partakes in blindness as well as insight. Now that a leap of faith is required to defend one’s choice of belief, we’re beginning to see this aspect of economic liberalism in plain view. We’re being asked to sign up to a metaphysics.

Coincidentally, John Quiggin has posted the inaugural number in a promised series of observations about economic doctrines which have been discredited by the Global Financial Crisis. First cab off the rank - the efficient markets hypothesis. Continue reading ‘Economic faith and doctrines’

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2009: The year ahead

As is traditional in Australia, the first day of the new year saw the release of cabinet records from thirty years ago at state and federal level. Incidentally, the underwhelming nature of what was revealed should put a big question mark over whether this level of concealment is really necessary given a greater preference for open government. But, nevertheless, the theme of the day was something like “the more things change…” and intriguingly the press pack appear to have been put onto that scent by one John Winston Howard, who I’d have thought wouldn’t want anyone to remember he was Treasurer three decades ago. But to claim that the conjuncture of circumstances we now enter is anything but weakly analogous to those which pertained in 1978 is wrong.

Prediction at the minute level is a fool’s game, though it’s one a lot of people like to indulge in. Nevertheless, I think it’s safe to say that 2009 will be an interesting year. Many patterns which were becoming evident in 2008 - a year of transition politically and economically - will crystallise into a more definable shape this year.

Perhaps most important is the election of Barack Obama.

Continue reading ‘2009: The year ahead’

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The summer of Australian culture, New Matilda (and new media) style

Image of the State Library of Victoria from avlxyz at flickr reproduced under a creative commons licence.

One thing I used to notice when I used to buy newspapers was that around this time of year “culture” steps out of the weekend review pages and takes pride of place as “holiday reading”. Short stories are serialised, the state of art forms and cultural genres worried about, and reviews abound. And not just on Saturday and Sunday.

2008 saw, in my view, a number of tipping points in the mediascape (and I’ll have more to say about this in a later post). For instance, according to the Pew Centre, the net overtook papers for the first time in the United States as a source of news. The current counter to the “death of the newspaper” narrative from some of the editorial and journo crew is a claim that everyone suffers if folks don’t have a comprehensive perspective on what’s going on, limiting themselves to following fields of niche interest. Margaret Simons has something to say about this theme at Content Makers, riffing off a piece by Sally Young at Inside Story. Now, I strongly doubt that there were ever people who read the paper cover to cover as a matter of civic duty. [Young doesn’t make that claim, but it’s implied in some of the less nuanced arguments from folks in the news biz.] Indeed, the division of newspapers into sections, and the usual relegation of matters cultural to the weekend in itself exemplifies the fact that judgements - highly normative (and often gendered) ones - are being made about what people should read. We’re to assume that serious stuff - politics and crime - occupies the minds of serious people, until they get to take a Christmas/New Year timeout. I’m actually not sure these people exist, and the ideal type of the reader imagined in the mind of the all knowing editor and publisher is one of the big problems with print media.

Anyway, all this is a bit of an introduction to a feature that New Matilda has been running over the last little while - a focus on Australian culture. There’s all sorts of interesting reading - Jason Wilson and Melissa Gregg on why we can thank John Howard for Underbelly, Judith White on museums and galleries, Robert Miller on the state of the film industry, Sue Turnbull on the state of Australian television, David Musgrave on Australian’s relationship to poets and poetry, John Hunter on small presses and independent publishers and Lynden Barber with the obligatory Baz Luhrmann review. All are well worth a read.

Returning to my theme, though, as part of the “State of the Cultural Nation” series, Barry Saunders writes on new media and a “surge” in democracy and citizen journalism:

Continue reading ‘The summer of Australian culture, New Matilda (and new media) style’

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Happy new year in 2009 from LP!

From all at LP, may you have a 2009 full of undiluted malt scotch grade fabulousness and may your resolutions be made with resolve! :)

Photo of Brisbane NYE fireworks courtesy of monkeyc.net at Flickr - reproduced under a creative commons licence.

NB: Discussion about 2008 to go here!

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