While I’m quite a fan of allohistory, I rarely engage in it because (a) I’m not very good at it and (b) it’s rather self-indulgent. But like most indulgences, it’s a bit of harmless fun and it won’t make you go blind.
So here goes: This letter in today’s Oz alerted me to the intriguing possibility that a bit of judicial activism by the High Court over WorkChoices might have been enough to save the Howard government from electoral oblivion.
While the High Court’s 2006 judgement on WorkChoices makes an unassailable case for the legal correctness of upholding the legislation, let’s pretend things were different. If the High Court judges had gone all activist and concocted a convoluted Constitutional argument to strike down WorkChoices, then the result of the 2007 election might have been very different. Continue reading ‘Would judicial activism have saved the Howard government?’
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On a recent comments thread on LP, it was argued that LP readers are political types rather than Big Brother sorts. Well, I don’t think many people are either/or about such things, and at any rate I’ve been yearning to lower the tone of this blog for a long time. With this in mind, I’ve decided to do a celebrity gossip post today.
Madonna’s new CD: blech
Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god (not sure why I wrote “oh my god” three times other than that celebrity gossip is usually replete with repetition and hyperbole), Mariah has gotten married again.
Celebrity gossip fans will know that Mariah used to be married to some bloke and then she stopped being married to that bloke. Now Mariah is married to another bloke.
No word as yet about whether she looked too skinny and/or too fat in her wedding gown, but if I was a betting woman I’d suggest (insert body fascist comment here).
Fresh updates from the world of emissions trading:
* GetUp has a new petition: Climate Need Not Corporate Greed. The premise is simple: call a spade a spade and make emissions trading actually impact emissions rather than just transfer $$$ to polluting industries. Also worth signing because it may be leverage against a tendency to overallocate that has been a consistent problem that previous cap and trade schemes such as US Markets in SO2, BP’s internal scheme and the EU ETS have had to come to terms with.
* The BBC Reports that a plan for national Personal Carbon Trading for the UK, arguably one of the most ambitious, complex and comprehensive Neoliberal projects in recent times, has been shelved. DEFRA research into the proposals to give every adult in the UK a personal ‘allowance’ included interviews with 92 people. The money quote is one for all the national psycho-social historians, “Just straight away it reminds me of going back to the war and rationing.”
* NSW Govt has announced it plans to join HSBC, NAB, Coldplay et al by becoming carbon neutral by 2020. The plan will include state-run operations like police, hospitals, schools, and power-stations. It looks like most of the emissions reductions will be made by eating koala buying carbon offsets rather than making significant changes to BAU.
I’m pretty sure, as I’ve mentioned before, that I was the first to dub Queensland’s National Party leader the Borg when I was covering the Queensland state campaign for Crikey in 2006.
Note also the Liberal blue. The Nationals’ Green is entirely absent from his increasingly self-centred branding. And he’s obviously trying to position himself as an urban (and urbane) man. Sharp suit, no tie in a lot of the pics, new haircut, and symbols of Brisbane surrounding him constantly. The moleskins and the rural signifiers have been banished.
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There’s a really fascinating article at Wired about blogs and websites tracking down urban eccentrics. You know who I mean. In Brisbane, I can think of “Rock & Roll George”, the Marilyn Monroe woman (always impeccably groomed), the evil homeless guy who hits people with his umbrella, the plastic bag man who used to sleep outside the Anglican church in Toowong, the fake nun in the white tuxedo who pushed an empty wheelchair down the middle of New Farm streets for many years, and the cowboy whom I once overheard refusing at Rics to explain to the barwoman why he was what he was or who he was, all the while conscious of his minor celebrity.
The article doesn’t cover stalking or the right to privacy, which raises some questions. It also doesn’t really adequately get to grips with the sociological phenomenon of why we talk about such folks and what they feel about it all. Any thoughts?
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When we looked at polar bears recently I was left with the feeling that their future was very much bound up with the future of the Arctic ice. They at least have the prospect of meeting the grizzly bears being forced further north and producing lots of little grolar bears - hybrid offspring of the polar bear and the grizzly.
No such luck for the koala bear which is highly specialised to a diet of gum leaves, which, it seems are tuning sour.
Prof Hume [University of Sydney] will present new research at a major science conference in Canberra showing that increases in CO2 decrease levels of “good” nutrients and increase toxic nutrients in eucalypt leaves.
The Pope had a lot to say about sexual abuse when he was in America recently. It’s now being reported that there’s “pressure” on him to repeat his apology to victims specifically in the Australian context, when he’s out here for World Youth Day. I have no doubt Benedict will, and I suspect the pressure in this instance isn’t needed. While an apology promotes healing for individuals directly damaged by clerical sexual abuse, it doesn’t address the broader problem, and nor do the protocols the church now has in place for dealing with complaints and reparations, welcome as they are. What should be quite familiar to Benedict is the concept of “structural sin” - something originating in liberation theology which he in his incarnation as Cardinal Ratzinger acknowledged as a valid manifestation of human evil and wickedness, even as he disagreed with the political and some of the theological overtones of liberation theology as theorised and practiced in Latin America (and in - significantly - Germany).
The Pope would also know very well that in Catholic sacramental and moral theology, an act of contrition and indeed an act of reparation are worthless without an awareness of the fault that led to a sin, and a genuine intention to “go and sin no more”, as Someone or other put it rather pithily. All this raises the question of whether the conditions of possibility of sexual abuse are genuinely being addressed.
The unfolding mass human tragedy that is the Burmese cyclone (the specifics of which I don’t have anything except that a) I hope that the junta stops putting up barriers to international assistance, and b) that it’s going to make the global food crunch worse) reminds us of the awesome power of nature to inflict death and destruction. While we have great capacity for inflicting misery on our fellow humans, nature has similar capacities and inflicts them far more randomly and far more often. Particularly when compared small groups of discontents sitting in caves in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
But how is Australia prepared for such disasters? Not very well, according to a just-published report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. For instance, while everybody expects the ABC to handle emergency services broadcasting, ABC Local Radio doesn’t have redundant communications links to all its stations. We may have invested money in tsunami sensors, but there’s no centralized telephone warning system (something that could be done very cheaply, according to the report). Our hospitals aren’t really set up for a surge capacity in the case of even rather modest incidents.
This kind of stuff is often cheap, mostly relatively easy, and could potentially spare a lot of heartache when the unthinkable happens, be it through accident or malevolence. But why don’t we do it? Because it has the unique combination of being both scary and boring, earns governments no credit until the crap hits the fan, and we don’t have a historical precedent of a mass-casualty incident. And, over the past few years, we’ve had the distraction of the horribly overblown War on Terrah - something, incidentally, the ASPI has helped in its own small way to fan here.
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that the Rudd government has a bit more of a focus on the boring bits of government than its predecessor. This is one boring bit that I hope gets more attention.
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… to establish a new star in the Ozblogging firmament.
Helen Dale aka skepticlawyer and Legal Eagle have teamed up to start a new blog - skepticlawyer by name.
Helen explains her rationale at Catallaxy. She doesn’t reflect on her old digs, and the following represents my opinion not hers. But having witnessed the degeneration of Catallaxian comments threads over recent years - yes, folks, once upon a time you could go over there and have an intelligent argument with the libertarians without being told you were a LIAR and a taxeater, being threatened with horsewhipping, having to endure reading your way around hundreds of piffle filled comments of hyperbolic idiocy, etc. - it’s a move I’m pleased she made! Although Helen’s politics aren’t to everyone’s taste, I don’t think there’s much disagreement that she’s got a fine analytical mind and can turn a neat phrase, so I am looking forward to watching this baby blog grow.
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“Be proud of what we’ve achieved - don’t take any cheek from the other side.”
Andrew Elder wrote an interesting post the other day critiquing Gerard Henderson’s critique, and pointing to a fundamental problem the Liberals have:
The Liberals and Nationals do not take the intellectual debate seriously, which is why it is left to pinheads like Miranda Devine, Tony Abbott, Janet Albrechtsen or Gerard Henderson to carry the (empty) can of rightwing intellectualism. If you really want people to take on the challenge of right-of-centre intellectual development, create an environment conducive to it.
The point’s been made here a number of times that too much political commentary relies on stale analogies with the past, and a complete inability to grasp the challenges of the present. Perhaps that’s because no intellectual work goes into it. The Nelson/Turnbull mob have been talked into the view that they can’t “disown the legacy of the Howard government” lest they lose their advantage on “economic management”. Never mind the fact that ALP polling found last year that when the question was posed as “whom do you trust to manage the economy best for your family?”, Rudd was streets ahead. It’s the distinction between a “beautiful set of numbers” and paying attention to people’s actual financial struggles. In other words, you could simultaneously think the government was keeping the shine on the numbers, but managing the economy for the benefit of big biz and the top end of town. Howard understood that back in about 1996.
This is the third in my irregular series of posts on science fiction and/or speculative fiction.
It will probably come as no great surprise to anyone that I didn’t watch Richard Dawkins’ new show Enemies of Reason: Slaves to Superstition on the ABC on Sunday night. It’s fairly well known I’m not a fan. But whatever your view of Dawkins’ work, it seems to me that tarot card readers are the least of the worries of anyone committed to the Enlightenment project. Perhaps someone who did see it could enlighten me, but if this is one of the practices Dawkins regards as pernicious, then I suspect his understanding of what constitutes reason is very ethnocentric and rather limited:
What about sticking pins into your body to free the flow of Chi energy and cure your illness?
It’s called Chinese medicine, I believe. Acupuncture by any other name.
I’d also want to put a big question mark about the too easy equation of “reason” with “progress” - for a whole range of reasons, including but not limited to whether history can actually be understood in this way and the Frankfurt School style critique of instrumental reason and the Holocaust. But all that’s by the by. I’d been hoping that I’d be able to recommend sitting down with a good book instead of watching Dawkins get his future told. One book in particular - James Morrow’s The Philosopher’s Apprentice. On the strength of a number of reviews, I’d been eagerly awaiting its appearance on the shelves of my favourite independent sf bookstore, Pulp Fiction, and I was pleased to see it arrive just when I was off work with the flu and needing some novelistic goodness. Alas, I was to be disappointed.
When some terribly serious coot makes a history of 90’s Australian pop, I doubt they’ll deign to mention TISM.
But for a kid from the country who, in those pre-Internet days, was blown away when the diet of Hits and Memories radio was turned on its head by the introduction of JJJ to Albury in 1994, TISM are special. This is Serious Mum and their p*sstake dance-pop will remain a touchstone. So I was saddened to read that Jock Paull, aka Token Blackman of TISM, got a tumour that may not have started in his brain, but crept into his lungs, and ended his life prematurely at 50.
So, in honour of a man whose name I didn’t know until now, but whose music made me laugh every time I heard it, let’s all demand a vodka rider from our nearest student union, and dance like a d******d to one of TISM’s finest moments, He’ll Never Be an Old Man River. Guitarists may pass, riffs live forever…
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… Maybe Kevin08 is one of those tricky housemates who tries to keep a low profile while attempting to snatch the big prize by doing nefarious work out of the gaze of the cameras.
I probably can’t stretch the Big Brother analogy too far, but one of the big concerns I had about the election of the Rudd government was that the momentum for campaigning around a whole range of vital issues would stall. That’s partly I think because elections provide a convenient end point - if you were horrified by what Howard was doing on refugees (for instance), the most immediate and pressing issue was to vote him out of the House. But it would be a fatal error to assume that’s the ball game.
Margaret Simons has a story in Crikey today reporting on the deep concerns the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre has about the exercise of Senator Chris Evans’ ministerial discretion on asylum seeker claims since the election. 42 claims have been processed, and 41 rejected, a 97.6% rejection rate which is the highest it’s been since 2001 (the year of the Tampa.) According to Pamela Curr of the ASRC, one of the claims rejected has been that of a woman who escaped captivity while her “owners” were in Australia on holiday - she was being held against her will as a sex slave. She was originally from Africa, and had been trafficked to the Middle East.
LP’s Indiana correspondent is having a busy night in Bloomington! Here’s Terry’s latest dispatch on the Indiana and North Carolina Democratic primaries.
The Democratic Party primaries may appear to continue the status quo in the campaign, with Hillary Clinton winning Indiana as expected, and Barack Obama winning North Carolina as expected. But the magnitude of Obama’s win in North Carolina (58-42%) and the narrowness of Hillary Clinton’s win in Indiana (52-48%) indicate that the long Democrat contest is all but over for Hilary Clinton.
As one Republican strategist unkindly put it on CNN as the early figures came in, “This is the last trip to send the family pet to the vet.”
However you slice and dice the figures, it is now apparent that Barack Obama will be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, and that the super delegates will now be close to declaring for Obama, killing off the Clinton’s hope of a palace coup at the Denver Convention.
On the popular vote through the primaries overall, and including the disputed Florida primary (although not Michigan, where Obama’s name did not appear on the ballot paper), Obama has a 49% to 47% margin over Hillary Clinton.
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Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
It will probably come as no great surprise to anyone that I didn’t watch Richard Dawkins’ new show 
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