Kerry Packer is dead. With one of the media giants now a supernova, how long will the current center of gravity hold? Interesting times ahead for cross media issues and for PBL/Nine.
Archive for December, 2005
I fly out tonight for a month-long adventure in Ireland, England and a little bit of France. If you want to see what I’m up to, Carita and I will be using Flickr to post our photos and commentary.
But my belated Christmas gift to the LPers is something that came to me through my new job. Spark & Cannon records and transcribes court proceedings in WA, and at Christmas they produce Tales from the Court, a book of highlights from the year’s transcripts.
Here is a selection of my favourites.
“First come the burps, gurgles and cramps, then rising bile, burning and acute pain that make Christmas anything but a season to be anything but jolly,” Professor Holtmann said.
Hope everyone had a great day. And now in the great tradition of the season, I’m on to round two of my stomach extending plan while watching the cricket and sailing.
The winner of our ‘talk up your fave book’ contest - thank you very much to everyone who entered - is Another Outspoken Femail, proprietor of Health Philosophy Politics and Other Rants, who contributed this wonderful post:
My favourite book has long fallen from grace. The author toppled from her inner city pedestal. This is not a literary classic. I don’t mind that the grammar is at times dodgy. I love Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip.
I had flirted with it on the shelf of many bookshops in Sydney, finally buying it early in 1982 as I was about to take flight from the city. I took this tale of torrid Melbourne life with me to Wellington, a rather squeaky clean town at the time. I had only been to the place Garner wrote of briefly, but I could smell the scent of sprinklers on hot asphalt and taste the bacon eaten on the back doorstep of the ‘old brown house a mile from the city’. She wrote of elation and pain, what every young, and not so young, woman knows of love. I dived right in at the deep end and emersed myself in her world.
I now live in Melbourne but it’s a long time since brandy alexanders were 50 cents a shot and most of the old haunts are long gone. I have resided in rambling shared houses in many of the suburbs Nora cried in and torn down the streets late at nights on my own clunky bicycle. Fortunately I didn’t fall in love with a junky, but that is the vicarious joy of fiction. Thanks to Monkey Grip, I don’t need to.
Whenever I am sad I read it. Whenever I feel my life is dull I read it. Like an old, worn t-shirt or vegemite on toast, this is what comforts me during the bumpy bits in my life and a novel any loftier just would not do.
AOF, a LibraryThing membership is on its way to you this evening. Hope you enjoy it!
With the decision in Dover the debate regarding science and religion is only intensified. Of course there is a lot of history regarding the theory of evolution and its impact of religious thinking. And to understand this debate you need to understand where it all began. And I have just read just the book provides the suitable background by taking you back to Victorian England, Charles Darwin and the emergence of evolutionary theory and his battles with a certain Bishop
Continue reading ‘After Dover III’
Well, it’s a bit early this week, but the working week is over and it’s cocktail hour. So please utilise this thread to discuss anything you like.
And on behalf of LP bloggers, let me extend to all our readers my very best wishes for a wonderful long weekend. Merry Christmas! Happy Festivus! Merry Bah Humbug! Let the pagan and celtic midsummer bacchanalian revels begin! (We’re a pluralistic lot, we LP bloggers). Love and kisses to all!
A report in today’s Sydney Morning Herald discusses British research which suggests that parents of daughters tend to be more inclined to vote for left of centre parties than parents of sons.
The researchers suggest a couple of explanatory mechanisms for this phenomenon.
First, women are increasingly aware of pay discrimination in the workplace. Second, women “derive greater marginal utility from public goods like community safety”.
Women are “intrinsically more left-wing than men” because they prefer a larger supply of public goods and higher tax rates - they value health, education and creches, and rarely get paid so much that they worry about top tax rates.
The difficulty with this (aside from a tendency to gender essentialism) is that it suggests that the gender effect on parents’ voting behaviour would only kick in once their daughters reach adulthood. I personally suspect that a form of secondary socialisation of parents by their adult daughters sometimes does take place. One of Kim Beazley’s virtues is that over time he has abandoned the Moral Rearmament nonsense of his youth in favour of a more liberal position on issues of gender, family and sexuality under the influence of his two adult daughters. I could even credit that John Howard has been less gung-ho than expected in terms of attempting to roll back the gains of feminism as a result of being the father of a professional woman, and open to her influence.
What remains unexplained is the effect which being a parent of female, rather than male, children or adolescents might have on voting behaviour.
This is my last post before Christmas so here’s wishing you all a festive season full of temptations which you are not successful in resisting.
As a follow up to Shaun’s and dk.au’s posts on the Dover decision on ID, it’s just occurred to me that by a strange but meaningful coincidence, Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach speaks to us about these clashes - note in particular the last stanza —
Or so SBS reported tonight, in the context of Elton John’s nuptials. Just you wait and see, old man.
The ABC website has more of the PM’s comments:
“I believe very strongly that marriage is exclusively a union for life of a man and woman to the exclusion of others,” he said.
“That’s the common understanding of marriage in the Judeo-Christian tradition and I would be opposed to the recognition of civil unions.”
It might just be me but I thought Howard came across as very sour after the vision of a couple enjoying recognition of their shared love. What is it about love that cultural conservatives want to constrain, narrow down and straighten? I’ve never yet heard a convincing argument as to why civil unions (NB: not marriages, PM) pose any “threat to the institution of marriage”. If I decided I wanted to spend my life with a woman, and have that commitment legally recognised and celebrated, I completely fail to see how this stops those who want to do the same for their heterosexual partnerships, or derogates in any way from the sincerity of their commitment.
Continue reading ‘Same sex civil unions: Won’t happen here, says PM’
Perhaps since it’s pretty clear that the whole Howardian spirit of Christmas thing vs. Festivus is a complete beat up (Wal-Mart may wish its customers “Happy Holidays” but I’ve been almost deafened by Carollers and louder than normal Xmas muzak every time I’ve walked into a shopping centre lately), the Christmas wars seem to have moved on to Santa vs. Jesus. In this thematic, Santa stands for evil materialism and Jesus for true holiday holiness.
Of course, the ever astute Julia Baird points out, the best way to take evil materialism out of your holiday is to ignore it:
Presents do not equate to materialism. Or they don’t have to. Nor are presents separate to family, or even religion.
Which is why it is understandable but still odd that everyone mutters about commercialism at this time of year. It is so easy to avoid. If you hate the pressure of buying expensive gifts, buy cheap, thoughtful ones. Make something yourself, write personal cards. Or if even that is too much, offer your time - to mind someone’s children, walk their dog, proof read their essays, help in the garden. The point of it all is to spend your time thinking about other people - what they like, what they need, what might make them happy.
It’s true Jesus was anti-materialist. But he was also about selflessness and giving.
Baird notes, apropos of our friend James McConvill, that Santa vs. Jesus is a false dichotomy. What’s also interesting that in breaking news, Pope Benedict (already well known for his Prada shoes) seems to be smashing the dichotomy altogether, reviving some medieval ecclesiastical headgear, which gives him a strange resemblance to Santa. But then, after all, the Christmas tree was invented in Germany…
Elsewhere: Laura demonstrates the true spirit of bloggy Xmas.
Chortling over, PZ Myers posts on strategy for the anti-ID movement:
I’ve heard [ID proponent Phillip] Johnson speak, and he’s smooth and confident, and slyly appeals to his audience’s prejudices. Of course, he also lies like a (censored) [sic]. It simplifies lecture preparation if you can simply make up glib lies to fill in the holes, another strategy to which scientists will not resort.
This is another hard problem, and I can’t pretend to be a great speaker myself. I do think that what we need, though, is to be able to give talks with fire: a passion for the subject and well-warranted anger at the distortions of the creationists. We need to be able to both communicate the meaty information (the real strength of science) and the concrete meanings of that often abstract data. This is hard work. It’s also work that is rarely effective in a one hour talk, and takes a generation and a multitude to push the message across. We’re behind the creationists on that, and we need to get working on it.
Quite a feat considering the relatively miniscule funding behind ID. A Salon article cited by PZ states:
Intelligent design did not spread through culture on its scientific merits. It got a big push from religious and political advocates. Funded by millions of dollars from some of the same religious supporters that helped put President Bush in the White House (conservatives like Philip F. Anschutz, Richard Mellon Scaife, and Howard and Roberta Ahmanson), the Discovery Institute has pushed a fringe academic movement onto virtually all the front pages and TV sets in the country The New York Times has reported that the institute has granted $3.6 million in fellowships to 50 researchers since 1996. Those investments produced 50 books on intelligent design, innumerable articles, and two I.D. documentaries that were broadcast on public television
If funding directly correlated with public and scientific interest, there would be no contest here. But there’s more at play and a lot more at stake.
Continue reading ‘After Dover’
There was a bit of discussion on the Saturday thread about the Aeon movie. I’m not sure I’ll even be able to bring myself to see it. All reports suggest that Aeon’s total individualism, her moral ambiguity (particularly in her very strange relationship with Trevor - which almost sums up the ambiguity of desire), her anarchist ideals, and importantly, her post-human body and most importantly, her lack ofcostume won’t be reproduced faithfully. Perhaps, though, the silver lining will be that the movie will send people back to, or just to, the animated series.
Trevor: The dream to awaken our world.
Aeon: You’re out of control.
Trevor: I take control. Whose side are you on?
Aeon: I take no sides.
Trevor: You’re skating the edge.
Aeon: I am the edge.
Trevor: What you truly want, I can give.
Aeon: You can’t give it, can’t even buy it, and you just don’t get it.
Ps: Read an interview with Aeon’s creator, Peter Chung, here.
Continue reading ‘Aeon Flux: You can’t give it, can’t even buy it, and you just don’t get it!’
stoush.net beat me to it but Judge Jones has handed down his decision in the Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District case. Judge Jones has ruled that Intelligent Design is a religious idea and is not to be taught in science class. Science wins again. Full text of Judge Jones decision is here.
While science should not be decided in the courtroom, the ID proponents failed miserably in presenting any actual science during their testimony. Michael Behe and Scott Minich spoke at length on ID during the trial yet admist much handwaving failed to produce any actual evidence for ID. It was akin to bringing a spoon to a gunfight.
What really killed for the defense was the deceitful behaviour of the professed Christian members of the school board. As Judge Jones noted:
It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy
In a not so unexpected move for ID watchers, The Discovery Institute had branded the Bush appointed Jones as a ‘judicial activist.’ The prescience of Jones is in his final paragraph and a sharp reminder of why the ID proponents failed to win:
Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.
The Panda’s Thumb has extensive coverage and commentary on the decision.
Guy Barnett, philosopher:
“There should be a ban on cloning, because cloning is cloning is cloning, and this so-called therapeutic cloning is in fact that, it is cloning.”
Hugh Niall gives a good overview of the recent review of Australia’s legislation for regulating research involving human embryos and prohibiting human cloning.
The current focus is on Recommendation 23, which argues that therapeutic cloning should be permitted for research into disease. He examines the arguments for and against therapeutic cloning, or stem cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). I agree with his analysis, and I personally support it, but I want to know why people “universally� condemn reproductive cloning.
The difference between the therapeutic and reproductive comes down to whether the embryo is used to create a stem-cell line for research purposes, or whether the embryo is implanted into a woman’s uterus to develop.
The majority of people seem to be comfortable with the first – but support seems to drop dramatically for actually letting cloned people be born. I definitely agree that we should not allow it while cloned organisms appear to face enormous health risks.
But if in the future cloned people faced no more health risks than a non-cloned person (ignoring for a moment how we got to that point), would it still be wrong? Continue reading ‘To clone, or not to clone.’
Big congrats go to Troppo Armadillo for getting the gong as Crikey’s best blogger of the year.
The blurb in today’s email reads:
BEST BLOGGER OF THE YEAR:
We read hundreds of them a week, but Troppo Armadillo stands out for consistency, entertainment value, variety and the must read factor of the renaissance blogger’s musings on law, politics, economics and life in general.
Other contenders: Larvatus prodeo, Tim Blair, Professor Bunyip.
[reproduced with permission]
Well done to Ken and all the Troppo gang!
Update: Ken’s found the citation on the Crikey site - here.
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