Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen is always worth listening to. In The New Republic, Sen introduces some analytical distinctions into arguments about multiculturalism which are well worth consideration. Though largely drawn from the British and Indian experiences, his points also have validity in a slightly different cultural context here in Australia. Sen begins the argument with a recognition of the inevitability of multiculturalism as a fact in many societies today:
The demand for multiculturalism is strong in the contemporary world. It is much invoked in the making of social, cultural, and political policies, particularly in Western Europe and America. This is not at all surprising, since increased global contacts and interactions, and in particular extensive migrations, have placed diverse practices of different cultures next to one another. The general acceptance of the exhortation to “Love thy neighbor” might have emerged when the neighbors led more or less the same kind of life (”Let’s continue this conversation next Sunday morning when the organist takes a break”), but the same entreaty to love one’s neighbors now requires people to take an interest in the very diverse living modes of proximate people. That this is not an easy task has been vividly illustrated once again by the confusion surrounding the recent Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed and the fury they generated. And yet the globalized nature of the contemporary world does not allow the luxury of ignoring the difficult questions that multiculturalism raises.
In other words, multiculturalism is a social fact. In a real sense, Sen shows, it’s not possible to be against multiculturalism, as it’s impossible to return to a monoculture in many immigrant societies. The only question is how we deal with it. It’s here that, while praising British attitudes and practices in community relations and contrasting them with the French integrationist model, Sen takes aim at some shibboleths of contemporary multiculturalism policy.
Continue reading ‘Amartya Sen and the dilemmas of multiculturalism and plural monoculturalism’
I’m happy to note that we’ve joined some other blogs like Troppo in being archived by the National Library of Australia. Lots of kudos to the National Library for recognising that the blogosphere is part of our history, and worth preserving long after we’ve stopped posting and paying our hosting bills (though God forfend!) to give a snapshot to future researchers and citizens of the state of political commentary and debate on the Australian internets in the 2000s.
I’m also chuffed to observe that we’ve been nominated in the Best Group Blog category of the Koufax Awards. This is a big blog awards in the US for liberal and lefty blogs (which they neatly dub Lefty Blogtopia), and I’m both surprised and pleased to find us included. I haven’t checked all the links for the nominated blogs, but I think we’re the only Australian blog in the category. (That’s despite the presence of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, which looks to be from California.) I used to think that only three political blogs from Australia had a substantial US readership (while not forgetting that there’s a fair bit of crossover in the feminist blogs), but I was recently surprised to check the stats and find that 25% of our readership is from the USA. If any American readers are looking at this post, perhaps you’d care to tell us what brings you here, and what you find interesting about the place. Incidentally, our nomination was courtesy of a fine Kiwi blog, No Right Turn.
Holocaust denier David Irving has been given a three year jail sentence in Austria for denying the Holocaust via a speech and interview he gave in Austria in 1989. While Irving’s views on the Holocaust are rightly condemned, the laws that brought about Irving’s conviction have also under have also come in for criticism. In the Australian blogosphere Jason Soon and Andrew Leigh have criticised the decision for likely achieving the opposite effect intended by the laws.
Another argument against the laws was brought to my attention via Dispatches From The Culture Wars.
“In fact, having a law that says you mustn’t question a particular historical instance, if anything, creates doubt about it, because if an argument has to be protected by the force of law, it means it’s a weak argument.”
Continue reading ‘Free Speech and the Legitimacy of a Point of View’
Here’s some good news from the world of medical research — the Queensland Institute of Medical Research last week announced that it was inching ever closer to a vaccine for malaria. Apparently, as with many vaccines, a tiny exposure to the parasite which causes Malaria can induce a strong immune response, which may offer future protection. QMIR is apparently hoping to begin clinical trials of the vaccine soon.
FWIW, the QMIR is a research body that was initially created by the QLD government. It often works in conjunction with private enterprise too, but if you want to donate to the QMIR to aid its fight against numerous horrible diseases, you can.
Firstly, who’s got any idea why the media’s full of Howard tenth anniversary retrospectives when the date doesn’t roll around til next week? Is this something like the twelve days of Christmas?
Secondly, is the perennial column on why the ALP needs ideas the easiest to write when you haven’t got an idea for a column?
Thirdly, does anyone have any idea when Labor figures will stop saying we can’t just wait for the government to fail, we must have ideas and actually do the somewhat harder work of having some… well, ideas?
Last week, Parliament had a rare conscience vote on the approval process for RU486. I didn’t see it highlighted in the media at the time, but I thought Catherine King, Labor MP for Ballarat made a particularly powerful point, which can also be read as a riposte to Tony Abbott’s rhetoric about sectarianism (btw - ever noticed how Tony and Cardinal Pell often use identical talking points? Not that I’m implying anything…):
If we are genuine about reducing the number of abortions, we should be funding better family-planning and counselling services, better sex education and contraceptive choices. I think one of the unfortunate aspects of the debate is Tony Abbott’s proposition that it is a debate between people of religious faiths versus the rest of us. Frankly, as someone educated in Catholic primary and secondary schools, I found Kerry Nettle’s T-shirt both unnecessary and unhelpful. It was offensive at worst and juvenile at best. But, more than that, I find the notion that somehow those of us supporting the bill have less belief or faith than those opposing it deeply offensive. It is from my Catholic upbringing that I get my deep sense of social justice. I would not have become a member of parliament without it. I am Catholic. I know there is an official Catholic view about RU486 and against abortion, but I do not think that all Catholics share this view, just as I do not think they all share the official Catholic view on contraception. Even where Catholics do support the official position against abortion, I am not convinced that they universally believe that public policy decisions should be dictated by our religious beliefs. If this puts me at odds with the church, I suspect it will not be the first or last time.
In other news, a group of Catholics concerned about Cardinal Pell’s putative failure to set forth the Church’s teaching on the primacy of conscience have delated him to Rome. This is a bit cheeky, if not hypocritical, particularly on the part of former Marist Father Paul Collins, who devoted an entire book to the evils of what he calls the Inquisition, to which he has just reported the Cardinal. Dr Pell’s response is here. But there is a serious point to this issue - as Jesuit Father Frank Brennan makes clear.
Update: Two well argued and greatly contrasting positions on the primacy of conscience from Frank Brennan SJ and Cardinal Pell which provide context for the complexity of the Catholic position on matters of conscience, and how they intersect with the secular political sphere.
Peter Singer poses the question in the LA Times: is it always wrong to negotiate with terrorists? While the dangers of negotiation with kidnappers and the payment of ransoms are widely understood, should exceptions never be made?
Singer points to the demands being made by the captors of Jill Carroll: the release of 5 women being held prisoner by the US military in Iraq. It appears that none of these women pose a major threat to Coalition forces. At the very least, the decision as to what kind of threat is posed, and whether these prisoners will be released in the near future, could be accelerated. Singer points out that it “would be a terrible irony if that conclusion [to release the women] were reached after Carroll had been executed.�
So what do you think? Is negotiating with kidnappers always wrong; an unbreakable rule? Or is it in some cases a lesser of two evils? Continue reading ‘A whiter shade of grey’
Last night I watched a doco on SBS, Prescription for Survival - The Rise of the Superbugs, which was all about drug-resistant diseases. Not something particularly pleasant with dinner, but it’s an interesting topic — if by interesting you mean blood-freezingly awful.
One really disturbing fact presented by the doco was that up to one third of all people on the planet are infected with TB. That doesn’t mean they will all develop TB, but it’s a terrifying statistic. Another terrifying statistic is that after HIV/AIDS, TB is the second most deadly disease in the world, killing some two million people each year. Malaria is the third, killing a mere one million.
The development of antibiotics — TB is caused by a bacteria, whilst HIV is a virus and Malaria is caused by a protozoan parasite — was supposed to be the end of bacterial disease. Unfortunately, thanks to the whole ’survival of the fittest’ paradigm, nature has sidestepped even our most powerful anti-bacterial drugs and now a whole host of horrible diseases are multiple drug resistant (MDR). These are known, rather euphemistically I think, as Superbugs. (Superdeadlybugs might perhaps be more apt?)
Continue reading ‘Germs, Profits and Fear’
So what are you doing here?
Don’t worry, you’re not alone. US publication Advertising Age found that 25% of American workers read blogs during work time, and calculated that 9% of their work week or 551000 work years across the American economy in 2005 was spent on this pastime.
LP’s stats seem to confirm this. For instance, on Saturday 11 February we had 7994 page views and 23811 hits, while on Monday 13 February we had 10210 page views and 39598 hits. And guess what, Monday, traditionally the day with the highest absentee rates and lowest productivity of the week was our biggest day.
But don’t panic, other research cited in the Atlantic Monthly suggests that a study of productivity across nine countries found that 37% of time at work was wasted - but laid the blame at the door of poor management and supervision, rather than blog addiction.
Go over to read Andrew Norton at Catallaxy to find the answer. Always pleasing to note points of bipartisan agreement between lefties and libertarians… [NB: Go there too for a serious sociological argument in the post.]
After waiting for the humour and fallout from the Dick Cheney quailtards and lawyers shooting spree to subside, it becomes clear that the back story coming out of this incident is how the rules of the media game have changed. Or at least how the current US administration and Cheney in particular plays that media game.
Taken as two parts, this piece by Sidney Blumenthal in Open Democracy, and another by Jay Rosen at Press Think serve to flesh out sequences and connections, and outline the new rules.
Sidney Blumenthal:
Both the vice-president and the deputy chief-of-staff, as it happens, owed their previous, lucrative jobs in the private sector to their relationships with the Armstrong family. Anne Armstrong, Katharine’s mother, was on the board of Halliburton that made Dick Cheney its chief executive officer. Tobin Armstrong, Katharine’s father, had financed Karl Rove & Co., Rove’s political consulting firm. Katharine herself is a lobbyist for Houston law firm Baker Botts, a major Texas power-broker since it was founded in the 19th century by the family of James A Baker III, the former secretary of state and close associate of George HW Bush’s.
So armed with this background on Cheney’s connections (of course these are connections that are inevitable given his central place in American history) and associations with a ruling class that really writes it’s own rules, we come to this rich in detail and thought provoking piece by Rosen that effectively denies a classic coverup really happened, and which places the media management in it’s real context. It’s about the rollback and marginalisation of big media as we know it.
As they say, read the whole thing.
Continue reading ‘Rolling back the real quailtards’
Danna Vale has received some support for her remarks on Islamic fertility. Go read all about it at Gianna’s place.
It must be a slow week in columnist land (there’s obviously a limit to the ways that you can argue that being Saddam’s biggest donor isn’t really a problem for the AWB) as Christopher Pearson has only just got around to discussing Macquarie Uni economist David Throsby’s call for a national cultural policy. Certainly you’d imagine that libertarians would deny the need for such a policy, and indeed that’s so. Pearson notes that his fellow columnists Saluzinsky and Albrechtsen have already put the case against, and he’s inclined to join them. But suddenly, despite his apparent conviction that “A lot of important art and cultural activity happens with very little input from the enabling state” (Quite so), he changes tack. The market provides culture. But apparently that won’t suffice, and we need to put aside ideology. There is a need for a cultural policy after all, it seems.
It’s Donnellyism. (Oops, does that make it sound ideological?)
Apparently there’s a “grass roots debate” that’s “focused on a literacy crisis and on whether senior English students should have to study a minimum of two or three novels”. The grass roots in question must be the opinion pages of The Australian, where such themes are regularly tub-thumped by culture warriors Kevin Donnelly and Luke Slattery.
Or if cultural policy is properly focussed on schools, then perhaps Pearson knows something about grassroots debate among parents and educators?
Seemingly not.
Continue reading ‘Cultural Policy or Culture Wars Policy?’
Cross posted on Troppo.
I am running a surreptitious campaign to introduce the open source ways of the internet to the ABC. Being stacked with salaried people, the ABC is poorly in touch with the resources of the voluntary sector - the sector that produces LP and comments on it day in day out - and the other 27,999,999 blogs out there.
When Michael Duffy was trying to get podcasting for his program Counterpoint, and facing ABC resistance because of the cost of hosting the download bandwidth, this problem was solved on Troppo where someone pointed out that the bandwidth cost could be distributed via bit-torrent.
I was talking to Peter Mares who’s just taken over Terry Lane’s Sunday arvo program, The National Interest. He commented that though he intended a low key change and so had changed very little about the program, the main reason he’d not changed the theme music was copyright complications. I said there must be millions of public domain tracks on the internet and the problem wasn’t their availability but the time it would take to listen to enough to find something worthwhile.
My solution? A competition. Can anyone suggest a track available on the internet with a brief riff that might be suitable as the theme music for The National Interest.
I guess the track needs to be creative commons, though it could still have some restrictions on commercial use. I expect that the ABC would be able to negotiate something pretty low cost with such a source.
Is there no end to the ability to get something out of nothing in this wired world?
Let’s find out. Let the competition begin.
A headsup for Jim’s excellent IR policy site where you can follow developments, media stories and access commentary. Jim writes:
—————————————–
The frenetic policy debate on industrial relations during 2005 has ongoing repercussions.
The oxymoronic Work Choices Act does not come into formal effect until sometime in late March, but attacks on workers’ conditions do not need formal legislative sanctions. The assault on workers’ wages and conditions occurs on a number of fronts. Media reports in February contain four groups of stories that will concern Australian workers. The first is the use to which the skills shortage and skills migration programme will be put to pressure Australian workers’ conditions. The second is the Award Review Task Force, which is to compress award classifications with effects on wages and workers’ careers. The influential ACCI advocates a universal four-level classification structure. The third is the reported slowdown in the labour market, which some commentators have predicted will exert downward pressure on wages. The export of Australian workers’ jobs offshore is another.
Meanwhile, the Chairman of the new Fair Pay Commission has announced a surreptitious wage freeze for low pay workers, and hinted at lower real wages. The Minister for Workplace Relations has openly advised the automotive industry to avoid bargaining and unions. Andrews has also hinted that regional workers could get paid less than metropolitan employees.
Comments on these and other issues arising from developments in February can be accessed at IR Policy & IR Reform.
You can also keep up with media reports, published opinion pieces, and access other resources from that web page.
Jim McDonald
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