Archive for July, 2005

Hendo’s Big Night Out

Published
by
Mark
3 years, 2 months ago
in Culture and Politics
. 23 Comments

Gerard Henderson had a night at the theatre:

At the start of the second act an Arab-looking male suggests that the contemporary problems of the world turn on the fact that the issue of Palestine has not been resolved - without any mention of the notorious corruption of the Palestinian Authority during Yasser Arafat’s time.

Then, at the end of the play, an Iraqi female condemns the policies of the coalition of the willing but does not address the fact that without the invasion Saddam would still be in power and without making the point that, right now, the resistance in Iraq is primarily killing Iraqis.

Meddling Priests

Published
by
Mark
3 years, 2 months ago
in Politics
. 36 Comments

In the wake of Peter Costello’s chiding of Archbishop Aspinall for his views on IR (”Archbishop Aspinall’s theological degree doesn’t make him an expert on IR”), there’s a delicious irony in the blurb Tony Percy attaches to an op/ed piece on IR:

Father Tony Percy is parish priest in Ardlethan, rural New South Wales, and has a B Comm (Hons) from the University of New South Wales.

As someone who has a B Comm (Hons) from Griffith University, I tip my mortarboard to the good Father. He also has some very cogent things to say about the employment relationship being more than just a contract, and the realities of individual bargaining.

In other IR online news, it’s nice to see that Rob Corr has contributed to a US blog telling readers about the Australian union movement’s strategy.

Happy 50s Families

Published
by
Mark
3 years, 2 months ago
in Culture and Politics
. 41 Comments

I’m glad that I’m not the only one out there who thought the way that Bush’s appointee to the Supreme Court vacancy’s family dressed was just a tad atavistic. What is this? Dog whistling through retro fashion choices?

Turn the page and see for yourself.
Continue reading ‘Happy 50s Families’

Shopping for a Soulmate

Published
by
Kim
3 years, 2 months ago
in Culture, Life and Sociology
. 213 Comments

The SMH reports that Wal-mart has dealt a blow to the lovelorn:

Wal-Mart has halted a program at one of its stores in Virginia to help single shoppers find love in its aisles, Associated Press reports.

Taking a cue from Wal-Mart stores in Germany, customers were encouraged to place a red bow on their shopping cart on Friday evenings to advertise their availability. “Flirt points” were set up around the store.

Customer Dale Firebaugh, 63, who had hoped to meet his match, said he was disappointed at the decision. “Where can someone over 40 who doesn’t smoke or drink or go to bars meet someone?”

Just before I moved to the US in 1996, I read Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City and was amused at the reaction of new to towners in San Francisco who were shocked to find that supermarkets and laundrettes were pick up joints.

In the new millennium, Brisvegas is home to persistent urban myths about a Coles suspiciously close to Mark’s place where singles purportedly position bananas strategically in their trollies to signal availablility (and whether they’re into lerve or a bonk) and boys buy cat food (though they own no cat) and roma tomatoes (destined to rot in their fridges) to prove to that special chick in the checkout line that they’re snaggy.

I must admit my local Woolies at Bulimba, though I’ve observed no such deliberate dating behaviour, is becoming increasingly glammed up. Woe to the urbanette who goes shopping in her old trackies and uggies these cold winter nights.

Quite seriously, what’s wrong with meeting the love of your life, or the lust of one night, at a supermarket?

I mean, for a lot of us (not “all of us”), Methodist dances where John met Janette, arranged marriages, and the local Rotary Club nosh-up no longer cut it. We have online dating, sms flirt, speed dating, and workplaces with formal policies on office romances. In America, there are dedicated dating sites for Republicans (tagline: “sweethearts not bleeding hearts”), Catholic singles (helpfully, you can browse by diocese), incredibly fabulous and funky New Yorksters, lesbians who don’t look like any I’ve ever known and disabled folk. That’s of course to mention the less MA-rated options.

Where do you go to find a partner in the late modern world?

Trust

Published
by
Mark
3 years, 2 months ago
in Life, Politics and Sociology
. 28 Comments

There’s an interesting discussion at Imagining Australia on a paper [pdf file] Andrew Leigh has written looking at issues of trust with regard to immigration and community relations.

The question of trust is central to a lot of social scientific literature - for instance, on the efficacy of economic transactions, in Criminology and Crime Prevention studies, and very prominently with regard to social capital (with big implications for welfare policy and social policy more generally - not to mention urban planning and Architecture).

Andrew wrote in the Fin Review:

In places where people trust one another, institutions, markets and societies seem to work better. Trusting societies have more effective bureaucracies, schools that function more efficiently, less corruption, and faster growth. Trust acts as a kind of “social glue” that enables business and communities to operate more effectively. For these reasons, social capital, once solely the domain of sociologists, has increasingly attracted attention from economists.

I’m inclined to think that asking a survey question such as “Generally speaking, you can’t be too careful in dealing with most Australians” (from an Edith Cowan study - Andrew didn’t design the study, he’s re-analysed the data) is not fine-grained enough to capture the everyday quality of trusting those with whom you interact. It’s also somewhat ambiguous - in that an immigrant might assume that “Australians” refers to Anglos, or people who’ve been here longer. Note that in these studies, we’re talking about people you don’t know, or people with whom you have an (initially at least) instrumental relationship.

In comments at Andrew’s place, Andrew Norton wrote (in part):

Though I am not sure to what extent these questions get at what we need to be concerned about. Would I leave my front door unlocked? I don’t trust the people in my area enough for that. But do I feel frightened in the street, believe local officials are corrupt, or that I will be ripped off in the shops? No, I don’t.

And I responded (in part):

For instance, where I live (New Farm in Brisbane), I most certainly wouldn’t leave my door unlocked. I did once, and someone came in while I was in my study and nicked my backpack from the hall. Conversely, another junkie tried to break into my garage and was chased away by neighbours. On the traditional indices, the fact that most of us neighbours chat to each other, sometimes socialise, and watch out for each other would place us very high on the trust scale. But there are people on the streets (sometimes mentally ill homeless people) whom I’d cross the road to avoid. Then, the suburb has a nice community feel and I know and chat to local shopkeepers, waitresses etc.

I’d be very interested in readers’ experiences of everyday and routine interactions and the question of trust.

Give a man a gun and a badge, and he thinks he’s the law

Published
by
Phil
3 years, 2 months ago
in Politics
. 66 Comments

[I wrote this over at my blog on first light yesterday, and have amended it to include commentary from around the Ozblogsphere. Clearly this is a tragedy. There is a lot of commentary on why the young man ran from the police and their actions in response, so I’d like to point you to this link within the piece that I see as an extension of what I’ve written. Go there to see the world as it is for many others like Jean Charles de Menezes, I think it explains his reaction and the direction we are in danger of going]

Now we know why we’ll need identity cards, it’s so authorities can identify the corpse of some poor bastard that has been killed in our over zealous and irrational reactions to the War on Terror.

A man shot dead by police hunting the bombers behind Thursday’s London attacks was unconnected to the incidents, police have confirmed. The man, who died at Stockwell Tube on Friday, has been named by police as Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, 27.

Jean Charles de Menezes was undoubtedly a man of colour, so he now automatically comes under suspicion because of circumstance and the tenor of the times, and of course Jean Charles de Menezes will just be considered collateral damage as far as those who wish to tighten a noose around our civil liberties. They’ll say “but if he had nothing to fear he would still be alive”, but Jean Charles de Menezes as a man of the global south probably knew better than any of us that police with unlimited powers are something to be feared.

Mayor Ken Livingstone, a man I respect greatly, gets in first and gets it very wrong.

Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, said: “The police acted to do what they believed necessary to protect the lives of the public. “This tragedy has added another victim to the toll of deaths for which the terrorists bear responsibility.”

Let’s remember the facts, the police caught Jean Charles de Menezes, held him down, and to the horror of many bystanders, shot him five times in the head. So, no Ken, the police killed him, not the terrorists. How can we trust any police force with unlimited powers if at the first hurdle they get it so wrong?

Let’s also remember that not too long ago Brazil was a country that has had its share of police statism and life under the Generalissimos, and is a country that has also seen vigilante police kill street kids in the fight against street crime and vagrancy, so maybe Jean Charles de Menezes’ cultural history had rightly taught him to be afraid of the very thing that we should also be afraid of. The killing of Jean Charles de Menezes sends a signal to all of us that eventually, under these unrestricted conditions of shoot first and ask questions later, our police will be a law unto themselves.

Continue reading ‘Give a man a gun and a badge, and he thinks he’s the law’

After Ellis Park

Published
by
cs
3 years, 2 months ago
in Miscellaneous
. 17 Comments

In retrospect, we never stood a chance. Even old cynics were moved last night, as the perilously steeped grandstands of Ellis Park belted out the South African anthem and sang happy birthday to Nelson Mandela. The man himself was present. The home team wore his cell number on their sleeves as they shaped up to defend the rugby plate named in his honour. The Springboks featured a record nine black players in their squad. South Africa was going to win, or die trying.

The Wallabies weren’t up for the all out war declared on them at Ellis Park last night. The Springbok win was emphatic, and South Africa has retained the Nelson Mandela plate. The question for the Wallaby brains-trust now is whether to put this game aside, as a special case, fueled by an exceptional time and place in history; or whether to employ the match in an effort to divine clues to a better future? For those who share in the mysteries of the game they play in heaven, my take is over the fold.

Continue reading ‘After Ellis Park’

Bahnisch and Quiggin on IR Changes

Published
by
Mark
3 years, 2 months ago
in Politics
. 0 Comments

Under the fold is the first fruit of my collaboration with John Quiggin on some articles on the government’s IR changes. This one will be submitted to Online Opinion, and a more expository piece is planned for print publication.

Note: Crossposted at John’s place.

Continue reading ‘Bahnisch and Quiggin on IR Changes’

Before the Law

Published
by
Kim
3 years, 2 months ago
in Culture
. 8 Comments

I’ve been thinking about Kafka tonight, whom I’ve been rereading of late. One of the most interpreted passages in Kafka is the odd sermon that the Priest (who turns out to be the Court Chaplain) preaches in a darkened Cathedral to Joseph K. in the penultimate chapter of The Trial. It contains the parable which I’m posting, which was written as a fragmentary short story by Kafka and published prior to and separately from The Trial. It bears rereading, and thinking about. I’m posting it really because *up to a point* I agree with the traditionalists that some of the classics - in their day, like Kafka’s corpus, often on the cutting edge of modernist innovation - ought to be read and reread (not as some sort of deracinated dryasdust pedagogical exercise in the manner of Dr Casaubon but as a pleasure), and speak to us clearly today without the apparatus of critical theory. So I would like to learn from others’ readings.

Continue reading ‘Before the Law’

Cycling, terrorist bombings and risk

Published
by
Phil
3 years, 2 months ago
in Culture and Miscellaneous
. 34 Comments

One of the unintentional consequences of the recent bombings in London has been an increase in sales, and usage of bicycles.

Bike retailers reported an almost 400 percent increase in sales July 7, the day of the first attacks, the Association of Cycle Traders said. “Since then, we would say a realistic increase is probably between 40 and 100 percent,” said Mark Brown, the association’s general manager…………Some commuters said they turned to bicycles and scooters out of fear, while others called it a practical solution in a city that has suffered repeated transit disruptions since the first wave of attacks killed 56 people.

But of course cycling itself comes with some risk attached, as Professor John Adams accurately describes.

Cycling from A to B (I write as a London cyclist) is done with a diminished sense of control over one’s fate. This sense is supported by statistics that show that per kilometre travelled a cyclist is 14 times more likely to die than someone in a car. This is a good example of the importance of distinguishing between relative and absolute risk. Although 14 times greater, the absolute risk of cycling is still small - 1 fatality in 25 million kilometres cycled; not even Lance Armstrong can begin to cover that distance in a lifetime of cycling. And numerous studies have demonstrated that the extra relative risk is more than offset by the health benefits of regular cycling; regular cyclists live longer.

Given this risk, it’ll be interesting to see how many forced converts revert to their normal patterns of transport once the acceptance of a suicide bombing risk is incorporated into daily life.

In Britain on an average day nine people die and over 800 are injured in road accidents. The mangled metal, the pain of the victims, and the grief of families and friends, one might suppose, are similar in both cases. Measured in terms of life and limb, 7/7 represented six days of death on the road. But thousands do not gather weekly in Trafalgar Square to manifest their collective concern. Why?

Professor Adams goes on to highlight, and place in context many of the risks we face in our daily movements.

Such a perspective, by putting the perceived threat into a context with which most people feel less anxious, would undermine popular support for “security” measures - such as those currently invoked to detain “terrorists” in Belmarsh and Guatanamo without the need to provide traditional proofs of guilt, and the further police-state powers of surveillance that governments are in the process of granting themselves.

It’s an interesting look at risk, something we cyclists face on our daily training and commuting runs.

P.S. For those interested this is a cross post from a new cycling blog I’m setting up right now, it’s called The Hard Road.

Lefty Poll (Vast Left Wing Conspiracy responses invited)

Published
by
Mark
3 years, 2 months ago
in Culture, Life and Politics
. 119 Comments

One of the funniest moments in the blogosphere so far this year has been a seemingly never ending thread at Troppo which segued into an endless Rafean inquisition, until diverted in its dying moments into a more sedate and learned disquisition on the finer points of Baroque opera by Rob and James Farrell. The thread inspired an intervention by cs I think must be close to the top of the pops this year for best comment, which in turn inspired a new blogosphere analytical concept - conspicuous indignation.

Yeah, conspicuous indignation has become a kind of right-wing performance art. Loved the flamboyant little gig your crowd played over the disco-anthem in the run-up to New Year! Gave me a good belly laugh every day. An empty-headed outrage that achieved the usual zilch and is now well forgotten of course, but that’s not the point. Posturing as ordinary, patriotic, virtuous, down-trodden victims of traitorous, biased, hectoring, arrogant, sanctimonious, tree-hugging, big word-using, chards-guzzling, latte-mainlining, inner-city liberal elites is the whole performance art of the thing.

As you say, the ABC is the RWDB’s most favoured source of getting all conspicuously indignant, although silly old Prof Bunners never runs short of fuel from the Fairfax press and Tim B will always be glad to have Margo to stoke his virtuous fire. Your lot have been fulminating over the ABC since the dawn of time, or however long it has been since Howard was first elected. But it gets nowhere of course, for that would close the theatre, and then you’d have to find something else to act powerless over and get all furious about being betrayed by. One of the tricks is to get indignant over a cause you can never win. Meanwhile, back in the shadows, your government moves to further concentrate the already concentrated ownership of commercial media, but no-one is allowed to worry about that in the new PC.

Perhaps Nowra’s onto something. If you ever get sick of uselessly complaining about the ABC and academics and journos that don’t toe your line, maybe the right could have a full-scale indignant re-run of the cold war now that its long over - a sort of post-modern McCarthyism. Can you imagine anything more pointless? Perfect! Might even further boost sales for the Che t-shirt, coffee mug, poster production line. That should keep the corporations happy while also safely maintaining the flow of fuel. Way to fulminate! Must be off - the chards will be cold by now.

Ah, the best of the blogosphere.

But, what, I hear you ask was all this about? And when do we get to find out what the poll is? Read over the fold, dear comrades.

Continue reading ‘Lefty Poll (Vast Left Wing Conspiracy responses invited)’

Sp*m

Published
by
Mark
3 years, 2 months ago
in Miscellaneous
. 18 Comments

I got a bit tired of moderating so many comments mentioning various prescription drugs and a popular Texas card game, so some of these words are now on the “nuke” list. This shouldn’t affect any genuine comments, but I won’t be notified if comments containing these words are killed, so if it does happen to you, please email me if your comment doesn’t appear.

You should be able to see if your comment is in moderation. If so, there’s no need to let me know as I’ll have been automatically notified.

Saturday Salon

Published
by
Mark
3 years, 2 months ago
in Miscellaneous
. 111 Comments

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

Incivility and the Politics of (In)Authenticity

Published
by
Kim
3 years, 2 months ago
in Culture, Life, Politics and Sociology
. 71 Comments

Ok, on BB just now, Rita was talking over Vesna and insisting that she had good comments on her school reports for taking criticism well. And talking over Vesna some more. Vesna was saying, very admirably given the extreme horror of Rita (”I’m so mad at myself that I’m so kindhearted sometimes”), that Rita needed to cushion the blow sometimes. “But that wouldn’t be me”, exclaimed Rita, proceeding to talk over Vesna again.

Perhaps it’s particularly noticeable on reality tv shows (where the contestants are almost by definition attention-seeking individualists), but is this a pointer to a link between some sort of cult of personal authenticity and well, rudeness? I’d have thought basic respect for your interlocutor and recognition that we’re all in this being human game together would trump “being true to yourself” if it means trampling on others.

It really annoys me!

In other news about inauthenticity, NSW Premier Carr, taking time out of calling for “terrorists” to be stripped of their citizenship (obviously trying to outflank Howard from the right), managed to comment on the Bec Cartwright nuptials:

No one on the Hewitt/Cartwright camp was talking today but NSW Premier Bob Carr wished the couple well.

“My best wishes to the two of them,” said Mr Carr, who was not invited to the wedding.

“Marriage is always a touching affair and this is a very stylish one. I wish them well.

“The world needs this joy at this moment, as ever before.”

Does he really mean this? Or does he take the public for fools? At the same time as we’re all obsessing about our authenticity, politicians seem to be trading in inauthenticity - in spin and crud for public consumption.

It’s surely connected to a solipsistic and self-obsessed worldview (not dissimilar in form to that of BB housemates) - contrary to those of us who insist on living in the reality-based community, pollies and pundits of all stripes and political persuasions demonstrate their will to power by making pronouncements which they must know to be untrue, if they’re at all intelligent, minimally self-aware and/or fit to hold their offices. The temptations of power seem to include refusing to accept that any other view might be right, and trying to shout such views down rather than listening to them in a democratic conversation.

Continue reading ‘Incivility and the Politics of (In)Authenticity’

Friday Pointless Meme Day

Published
by
Kate
3 years, 2 months ago
in Life and Miscellaneous
. 13 Comments

If there’s one thing this blog is missing, it’s a slavish adherence to pointless memes.

Hence, I would like to direct you to this page, to enjoy a spot of Friday Dog Blogging. Warning: cat people may find this deeply offensive.

I’ve been playing around with a Flickr account today (because I was bored and all the cool kids are doing it) and it is very easy to do. Painless, practically. Highly recommended for the bored happy-snapper.

Anyway, these are pictures of our dog, an eight month old German Shorthaired Pointer. Her name is Jasper. Of course, she is the best dog in the world, and perfectly trained, and wonderfully obediant. Not. Sigh. But she is cute, if I do say so myself.

Unless you’re a cat person, of course.