Archive for August, 2005

Flirting is Hard Labour

Published
by
Kim
3 years, 4 months ago
in Sociology
. 52 Comments

Hard to read the newspapers on the workplace these days without coming across articles about work and sex. Employers are formulating policy on office couplings, execs are getting sacked for inappropriate romances, and a US Court has held that promoting someone you’re bonking is discrimination against people you aren’t bonking.

Here’s the latest from the world of management research:

Flirtatious women don’t get ahead at work. That’s the finding of a study of female master of business administration graduates by Tulane University in the United States. In the survey of 164 women between the ages of 24 and 60, about half admitted to occasionally engaging in sexual behaviour in the office - including wearing revealing clothing, flirting, giving male colleagues massages and sending risque emails. These women earn between $US50,00 ($65,000) and $US70,000 a year, while the half who said they never use their sexuality at work reported earning $US75,000 to $US100,000. Those in the flirtatious group had received fewer promotions. The results of the study, “Sex as a Tool at Work: Flirting to Success or Flirting with Disaster”, were presented at a international management conference in Hawaii last week.

It’d have to be a pretty well done study to isolate out intervening variables, is all I’ll say.

Two quick thoughts - one more serious, one less so.

Given that work is still normatively a masculine sphere in our culture, it’s not surprising that it’s women who are the ones giving massages and sending risque emails - at least in these stories. Where’s the research on whether boys who do these things in the workplace end up getting paid more? Why the focus on women as sexualised beings instead of as professionals?

And a discussion starter for a more frivolous conversation. Who’s had a bonk at work?

Fin de Siecle

Published
by
Kim
3 years, 4 months ago
in Politics
. 24 Comments

Way back in March, Sophie Masson stirred up something of a hornet’s nest by comparing 19th century anarchists to Al-Qaeda. Although these characters hardly represent the best of the libertarian movement, and Sophie was way off base in her political/philosophical analysis in my opinion, there is at least one commonality.

Bombs.

So it’s very interesting that The Economist has also made a connection. In the 19th century, when Presidential and crowned heads fell, and a bomb was hurled into the chamber of the French National Assembly, the state responded with legislation that attacked free speech and liberty.

France, too, resorted to unusual measures. After the bombing of the French Chamber of Deputies, 2,000 warrants were issued, anarchist clubs and cafes were raided, papers were closed down and August Vaillant, the bomber, was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death in a day. An apologist who declared that not a single man in France would grieve for the president if he confirmed the sentence (as he did), and then was assassinated (as he was), was jailed for two years for incitement to murder. The French parliament made it a crime not just to incite sedition but also to justify it. Criminal “associations of malefactors” were defined by intent rather than by action, and all acts of anarchist propaganda were banned.

Similarly, in Britain soon after last month’s bombings, the prime minister, Tony Blair, announced that “condoning or glorifying terrorism” anywhere, not just in the United Kingdom, would become a crime. Places of worship used as centres for “fomenting extremism” are to be closed down. Measures will be taken to deport foreigners “fostering hatred, advocating violence to further a person’s beliefs, or justifying or validating such violence.” Naturalised Britons engaged in “extremism” will be stripped of their citizenship.

It didn’t do anything to stop terrorism then. But it did curtail liberty and increase the power of the state. QED.

The Question Tony Jones Didn’t Ask…

Published
by
Kim
3 years, 4 months ago
in Politics
. 37 Comments

Australia only has one law, and it’s a secular state. There are not two laws. Anyone who teaches to the contrary doesn’t understand Australia… If they object to Australian law, there might be other countries they might be more comfortable in.

Quoth Peter Costello.* On Lateline tonight. The “second law” he’s talking about is of course, Sharia law.

Cos might be better off droning on about the current account, rather than bolstering his leadership stakes by ranging outside his portfolio.

I’m surprised it didn’t occur to Tony Jones to ask him if he’d say the same to Tony Abbott, who seems to think that “God’s law” about women’s reproductive freedoms trumps the secular law made by the Parliament of Australia under the Constitution.

Just saying…

* I’m typing as he talks - so it’s not quite a direct quote - pretty close, though - check the transcript when it goes up.

Chicks Rock (and Roll)

Published
by
Mark
3 years, 4 months ago
in Culture and Life
. 30 Comments

Astute readers of LP might have noticed that I was disappointed on Saturday about the Little Birdy concert being cancelled. The story was that Katy Steele had a throat infection and that the gig would go ahead on Monday night (not the most fabulous night of the week for a late night where the second support doesn’t start the set til 8.50pm). Nevertheless, Ellyse and I turned out last night at the Tiv - only to find out that Little Birdy still weren’t able to play. But we got to see the excellent Tegan and Sara for $10, and to have an earlier night (and save our Little Birdy tickets for October).

One thing that’s always interesting when you see a band you know live for a first time is what the artists actually look like. Tegan and Sara (who are Canadians and sisters) are both quite short. During the gig, which was unashamed 00s Rock & Rool - with a stunning Springsteen cover among other good things, I was wondering about small women and large guitars.

The first time female singers and groups outcharted male singers and groups in the US was 1996. And teenage girls, it’s reported, are buying guitars like rock cakes.

But the Fin Review [as usual link not available] reported yesterday that it’s only been in the last year or two that guitar makers started even thinking about whether women might need different shaped guitars than men.

Go figure.

Note: This post not brought to you courtesy of Telstra, but from a net cafe.

Update: Here’s Tegan and Sara on the vicissitudes of being rock chicks.

Also, Sydney and Melbourne readers - Little Birdy have cancelled the rest of their tour but the gigs on Friday and Saturday are going ahead with T&S headlining. Sadly, the Canberra gig has been cancelled. Check their website for venues and booking details. Highly recommended!

Night from dialup purgatory!

Please Explain, Barnaby!

Published
by
Mark
3 years, 4 months ago
in Life, Miscellaneous and Politics
. 28 Comments

Once again, my participation on this estimable blog will be short and sweet today as the Telstra broadband cable in my street has been down all morning.

The great irony both of Barnaby’s “extraction” and of the government’s structural separation and over-regulation of Telstra is that Australia generally is behind the eight ball when it comes to telecommunications access, and many problems exist in cities as well as back of Burke.

Far from having a free market, we have a massively regulated telecommunications system where the ACCC is the effective price-fixer in many instances. With the structural separation of the network and wholesale aspects of Telstra’s business from the retail business, this will only give more power to Federal government agencies to interfere at the cost of needed investment and infrastructure - and of consumers.

It’s unsurprising that Telstra is unwilling to invest heavily in infrastructure, when government diktat means its competitors will rake off profits, and its return on huge capital investments will be low.

It’s a joke, Barnaby.

On that note, I’ll sign off from my dodgy and expensive “dial up backup”.

Sheil on Blogs and Op/ed Dinosaurs

Published
by
Mark
3 years, 4 months ago
in Miscellaneous and Politics
. 41 Comments

In case you missed the link in The Age’s business section, here’s cs on blogging and politics. The shorter cs? Bad news for the columnists, and blogs will help to get some political balance in the opinion wars:

Amid all the discussion over the impact of the new forms of media on mainstream outlets, little analysis has been offered of the practical consequences for political opinion making.

These will be significant, at least in Australia. The rise of alternative online media, especially the extraordinary growth of the blogging phenomenon, may finally disturb a structural advantage long enjoyed by the conservative side of Australian politics.

Much hullabaloo has been made of independent internet sites and bloggers scooping the mainstream media in breaking stories and battering it to death with fact checking.

The new media’s limited resources mean these achievements are only ever going to be intermittent, and the independents will never substitute for the substantive news functions of the main outlets, let alone professional investigative reporting.

Mainstream political opinion makers, on the other hand, are looking straight down the barrels of the new media guns.

Mick gets there, at last

Published
by
cs
3 years, 4 months ago
in Culture
. 0 Comments

For Stones fans only (and tks to Amanda), here is a neat pre-tour interview with Keith. Everything’s quotable, but this one about the new album tickled me most:

“Mick playing great guitar helped,” Richards continues. “I sleep downstairs and the studio is upstairs. One night I thought I was hearing this old Muddy Waters track I didn’t know, but it turned out to be Mick working on a slide part for “Back of my Hand”. He’s always been a good, smooth acoustic player, but the electric seemed like an untamed beast for him until this year. When I heard him this time I thought, ‘My God! The boy’s finally got it’.

Currency Catholicism

Published
by
Mark
3 years, 4 months ago
in Politics and Religion
. 150 Comments

Fresh from his comments thread denunciations of Islam, The Currency Lad is now seeking a pontifical blessing for his views, and attacking a few straw cultural stereotypes along the way. Referring to Pope Benedict’s talk to Muslim representatives in Germany, C.L. makes this sweeping statement:

By paraphrasing in the header a famous maxim about the power of Rome, what dispute am I suggesting Pope Benedict has finalised, by example if not decree? Simply the question of whether there should ever be a direct linkage made in public discourse between terrorism and one particular religion. The chauvinists of cultural equivalency still insist no comment on Islam be allowed into the agora unaccompanied by a Borgia. To anyone paying attention, this has now become officially silly.

You’d actually be hard pressed if you read the (short) text of Benedict’s remarks to find in it the “linkage” C.L. claims. But I’m unaware that there is a taboo on mentioning that distortions of Islam - political Islamism - which do have religious and political roots are associated with terrorism. And since I agree with the Pope, and C.L., that truth should be the basis for dialogue, I’ll reproduce the text beneath the fold, and let readers judge whether C.L.’s putative ally in white said anything that will bear the weight C.L. wishes to place on it for his own political reasons.

Continue reading ‘Currency Catholicism’

History Wars, Early Modern and Postmodern

Published
by
Mark
3 years, 4 months ago
in Culture and Politics
. 51 Comments

History is the most dangerous product ever concocted by the chemistry of the intellect. It causes dreams, inebriates nations, saddles them with false memories… keeps their old sores running, torments them when they are not at rest, and induces in them megalomania and the mania of persecution.

-Paul Valery.

As Marilyn Lake writes on Howard’s practice of appropriating military history for the culture wars, I’ve been reading a tale of history wars at the threshold of modernity - which continue to work their influence on the world. Edwin Jones’ fascinating The English Nation: The Great Myth looks at the way in which successive generations of politically inspired historians and chroniclers instilled in academic and popular culture the vision of England as an island apart, standing resolutely separate from, and often against Europe. By contrast, Jones argues, up until the Henrician Reformation, English culture was very much European, with Anglo-Saxon writers often bilingual and writing fluent Latin, with English learning celebrated on the Continent, and sharing a common Christian legal and humanist culture. The invention of the early modern State in England by the Tudors required a deadening of folk history - and stirring up a nationalism which portrayed the Pope and Catholic powers as constant and inveterate enemies, and England as a more civilised and enlightened land than the Continent. Propagandists like Henry VIII’s Minister Thomas Cromwell in effect fought the first history wars - so successfully that an Anglocentric understanding of history still haunts Great Britain’s culture and its politics.

Jones, a pupil of the great Herbert Butterfield, one of the first to expose the Whig view of history, documents how modern scholarship has revised the traditional (and deliberately mythical) interpretations of episodes such as the martyrdom of Thomas a Becket, the Popish Plot, and the Glorious Revolution. The sclerotic institutions of British democracy, whose pathologies were much highlighted after Blair’s narrow victory, are not in fact the product of a millennium’s progress towards freedom, but arguably much inferior than current European constitutional practice with its attention to human rights and subsidiarity. Importantly, as well, he makes the link between the transformation of English patriotism into xenophobic nationalism and the British Imperial mission. As Gordon Brown tries to deflect colonial responsibility for Africa’s current woes, and as Tony Blair reorients Britain away from Europe to an imaginary Anglosphere dominated by the American imperium, reflecting on the continuing impacts of history wars centuries old is timely indeed.

Solidarity Forever

Published
by
Mark
3 years, 4 months ago
in Politics
. 13 Comments

[Via Naomi at wsacaucus.org.] Not many of the news reports I saw in Australia about the strike at Heathrow recently highighted the reason why baggage handlers walked off the job. It was a solidarity strike with catering employees - of British Airways’ contracted out meals business - a company called Gate Gourmet. The largely middle-aged female Asian workers were sacked by megaphone summarily, because they were unionised, in a dispute provoked by the US multinational, and have been replaced by Eastern European contract workers on lower wages.

As Polly Toynbee comments in the Guardian:

The Gate Gourmet saga raises deep questions that go a long way to explaining why Britain is a low-pay, low-skill, low-productivity economy with a pay scale that every year drives the top and the bottom further apart. Gate Gourmet is not an anomaly or a freak case of wild West Texas management. It is British business’s state of mind, it is the CBI and the chambers of commerce, it is the essence of political discourse on industry, where the only value is the short-term quick buck in share price, where “flexibility” and outsourcing are always good and regulation always bad.

The questions raised by this dispute are just as applicable in Australia:

Gate Gourmet screws down pay in very British style while FTSE company directors pay themselves a very British 16% rise, with a typical CEO on £2.5m. So where is the indignation? Where is the leadership that dares even whisper a question about this growing social dislocation? People are left to presume that there is no alternative to some malign economic force beyond human control. The truth is that penury and greed are political choices, not economic destiny: we can be Nordic, not American, and we can be John Lewis, not Gate Gourmet, employers if we choose.

There’s every chance such tactics could be used in Australia against low paid unionised workers in the name of Howard’s “workplace flexibility”.

Gate Gourmet also operates in Australia, and the LHMU urges people concerned to take a few seconds to email Gate Gourmet in an electronic picket.

Update: John Quiggin notes the rise in lockouts in Australia in this context.

Fiction and factions

Published
by
Robert
3 years, 4 months ago
in Politics
. 27 Comments

This post is cross-posted at Red Rag.

Every time there is a factional ruction in the ALP, Shane Maloney’s Murray Whelan is trotted out to explain it. In 2003, for instance, it was New South Wales and this passage:

“Even now, a great white or a blue pointer was rising from the deep, circling for the kill … or something worse. Some nameless horror from the primordial depths. A creature of suckered tentacles or poisonous spines. Anyone familiar with the leading personalities of the NSW branch of the Labor Party would know exactly how I felt.” - Shane Maloney’s new book Something Fishy.

Such are the thoughts of the fictional Victorian Labor MP Murray Whelan as he seeks refuge from a human killer in Bass Strait. The author’s jarring gag has a special edge at present with the once-powerful NSW Labor Right poised for some blood-letting.

Now it’s the Victorian branch where the knives are out, and here’s Whelan in the press again:

While similar places and people probably exist in plague proportions in the Liberal and National parties, the Victorian court case, and the selection of a lifelong party professional as the new Premier of NSW, demonstrates there are many, many Murray[ Whelan]s in real-life Labor.

And their presence goes a fair way to explain the mind-set of a party that seems happier fighting over preselections for seats it already holds than worrying about winning some new ones.

When I saw Stephen Matchett’s column in The Australian yesterday, I got excited — I assumed it meant a new Whelan novel was about to hit the shelves. Alas, we’ll have to wait a bit longer, though Shane Maloney’s website reveals that “[t]he author is presently toiling on number six, with a total of seven in mind.” Happy happy joy joy! I just hope they come sooner rather than later.

It’s not surprising that Maloney’s works are called upon by columnists. They paint a very real picture of an aspect of the Labor Party — overworked electorate officers dealing with eccentric bosses and mad constituents, grey meetings where members pretend they have an influence, and secret meetings where the real decisions are made. Matchett highlights a passage from Something Fishy that must resonate with everyone who has been a member of the Party:

The Australian Labor Party is composed of two main factions. Them and us. Ideologically distinct only at their extremities, their function is the distribution of spoils. But fighting over the spoils of defeat was a ritual for which I could muster little enthusiasm.

But it’s easy to let that aspect of party politics — “politics as a trade, not a cause” — overshadow the real reason most people are involved. I get angry when I see people who join factions for their career prospects, or who hop from one to the next on the promise of some perk. Thankfully, those people are fewer than the press, or Maloney’s novels, would have you believe. I’m a proud member of a faction because I believe in its cause. If the Labor Left was a party in its own right, that’s what I would join.

Continue reading ‘Fiction and factions’

Saturday Salon

Published
by
Mark
3 years, 4 months ago
in Miscellaneous
. 104 Comments

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

The Question Hidden in the Meta-thread

Published
by
Mark
3 years, 4 months ago
in Politics
. 18 Comments

Chris’ thread was lurching towards closure when I posed a question or two, sparked off by an overlooked comment in his post. Here it is again, should anyone wish to discuss it… Ps - to my great disappointment, no one noticed the deliberate spelling error in the comment.

Continue reading ‘The Question Hidden in the Meta-thread’

Heterosexual Privilege

Published
by
Kate
3 years, 4 months ago
in Culture, Life, Politics and Sociology
. 18 Comments

Crossposted at MtM.

I’ve re-read my post on What Makes People Gay, plus Susoz’s very valid comment, and I’ve been going over my own unease at the story, and the research the story was reporting. Which may or may not be valid. Leaving aside all questions of science, and accuracy, I am trying to rexamine why that story is interesting to me — and my own sense of unease at what I posted.

I was troubled even as I wrote the piece and I was thinking about not posting it, but in the end I did anyway despite my reservations. Now I feel even more reserve. So I’m going to write my feelings out and see where I arrive.

I’ll admit, I am deeply curious about sexuality… I wonder at why I have been attracted, almost exclusively, to men, and why some other women are attracted to, well, other women, and the same for men. I wonder why gay people are willing to risk their lives in countries like Iran. I wonder why some religious people are so frightened of gay people. I wonder why some non-religious people are frightened of gay people.

I wonder if I could ever fall in love with a woman. I wonder how I’d react if my brother came out. Or my child.

And so I came across that story and read it and thought, ohh, interesting, I might write on this. And there were nagging voices in my head, but I ignored them.

So, here are those reservations.

Continue reading ‘Heterosexual Privilege’

The stoush within the stoush

Published
by
Phil
3 years, 4 months ago
in Politics
. 24 Comments

The stoush over the sale of Telstra between Barbaby Joyce and Bob Katter last night on Lateline was a thing of beauty.

It was a terrific good cop/bad cop routine by Tony Jones and Katter that flushed out Joyce and exposed him for the party hick/hack that he is. That Telstra would be sold was always a fait accompli, and in the end his inexperience meant that he would always defer to his more senior party members, so it came as no surprise to hear his comments on personal views vs state and party interests.

However, my job is to represent my State and to represent my party and we have a unanimous resolution that I am responsible for and I’ve taken that to Canberra and given my best efforts to represent my State by attaining everything that’s on that resolution.

However, what really interested me about the comments made by Katter and Joyce was the obvious stoush within the stoush; that is, between independents who were former National Party members and the national leadership of the party, Joyce was speaking for them.

Continue reading ‘The stoush within the stoush’