Oh dearie me, Jack and mini-J really are living in bubbles they’ve blown themselves, convinced everyone else they think they’re speaking for thinks just like them.

Nabakov’s the one to talk about self-inflated bubbles. This is the guy who congratulates himself for overseeing a “$200 billion dollar economy”. Way to go for delusions of grandeur.

Nabakov says:

No matter how you crunch the data for the last four federal elections, whether by primary or two part preferred, you’ll find that at best the winning margin has barely broken 7% of the electorate and 4% of the overall population. Even if those percentages really represent people for whom cultural wars/luvvies/wets etc ad nauseam are the key issue, it’s not at all the kind of sea change that seems to gives youse guys a stiffie when stimulating yourself online.

You get points for venturing a substantive comment and more for coming up wit a fact. Unfortunately you are clueless about reading data, let alone building a theory from same. Still, simple error makes a refreshing change to pretentious skites, catty remarks or cringe-inducing literary self-indulgences.

Psephologists have known for a long time that partisan re-alignments are “moveable feasts”, so to speak. That is because competitive parties in healthy polities tend to shamelessly chase the “median voter”, the lucky fellow who best represents the civil norm. This chap typically holds out for the best deal from competing parties. But occasionally he crosses the middle of the road.

These changes in psephologic function are analagous to changes in economic functions. One can say that “normal politics” follows a fairly predictable cyclical movement along the function ie the pendulum-swing. Whereas “exceptional politics” involve an unpredictable secular movement of the whole function ie the sea-change.

A cliff-hanger may still betoken a massive cultural “sea change”. 1972 revealed a tipping point had been reached in cultural sentiment. Those were the awful days when “with-it” LN/P politicians wore polo necked skivvies. Mercifully they left the safari suits to the ALP.

And a landslide may merely imply that one party is “on the nose” with the electorate for quite prosaic reasons - scandals, incompetence or simply official staleness - without any great ideological cleavage or techtonic shift in the populus. 1975 is an example of this cyclical movement in the pendulum. Fraser followed with “politics as usual”.

Of course sometimes a party may stick to principles and get caned. 1996 has burned itself into the memory of ALP numbers men, the year that Keating tried to define himself as the avante garde of progressive culture. It triggered a landslide victory for the consciously conservative LN/P. Which suggested that “the times were a-changing” at that moment, contrary to your selective memory.

That, and the fact that Keating-Hewson have been replaced by Howard-Rudd. That brute data may be a little too bulky for your sensitive cruncher to process.

Since then the ALP has steadily been moving to the Right on cultural policy. A conclusion that you would have known earlier, if you were paying attention.

Nabakov says:

See Jack, that’s how to turn quantative data into qualitive conclusions without all the handwaving, ludicrous leaps of logic and general clutching at straws to build strawmen.

What I see from you is a fairly transparent attempt at intellectual bluff, holding a very poor hand. I am not so much impressed as embarassed on your behalf.

Spare us any further the buzz-talk about “number crunching”. Just point to any correct predictions (of the harder, futurer kind) that you have made regarding federal politics.

In short, put up or shut up.

What’s with the “mini-J� thing?

Jack Strocchi’s tiny, excitable and dialogue-challenged clone.

No matter how you crunch the data for the last four federal elections, whether by primary or two part preferred, you’ll find that at best the winning margin has barely broken 7% of the electorate and 4% of the overall population. Even if those percentages really represent people for whom cultural wars/luvvies/wets etc ad nauseam are the key issue, it’s not at all the kind of sea change that seems to gives youse guys a stiffie when stimulating yourself online.

See Jack, that’s how to turn quantative data into qualitive conclusions without all the handwaving, ludicrous leaps of logic and general clutching at straws to build strawmen.

And honestly mini-J, if you really think being a parrot is your chosen on-line vocation, at least find an owner with lines worth repeating.

At least it shows I am paying attention

If you really were, you would never have to had to write that.

If you do not think the culture war has not resonated in Australia, then we get yet another insight into why Howard has won four on the trot. The 1996 drubbing of Keating was a referndum on Keating’s flicking of the switch from vaudeville to culture warring. It has taken Labor 12 years to finally wakeup.

Satirical online site Crikey.com said the video was clearly an inside job and had led to friction between the company’s producers - a claim an Endemol spokesman was quick to deny.

This in turn has made my correction nonsensical. I therefore must correct my incorrect correction.

At least it shows I am paying attention

I keep bumping into old friends who have that smug look Alpha-males get with a Presybterian Asian chick in tow.

Sheesh!

As a sociologist, I’m automatically sceptical of claims that social interaction is somehow debased if it takes place online. There’s an element of the privileging of speech over writing that the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida famously traced back to Plato, and there’s a bigger element of a romantic suspicion of technology.

Mark your skepticism of the “debased…on-line…social interaction” claim made by “romantic…technophobes” does not make sense. Given that “as a [web-hung] sociologist” you are making a pitch for “[on-line] writing” over the unworthyly “privileged [off-line] speech”.

And I wouldnt put it about that you are overly familiar with the works of Derrida. Dropping this charlatan’s name stopped earning brownie points more than a decade ago.

Basically Australians are still hedonistic, lazy, pragmatic, skeptical and with a keen eye for bullshit. Most election campaigns here, federal and state, tend to revolve around hip pocket nerve stuff.

…the core message of our major centre right party at the last federal election was interest rates will go up faster under the other bastards. Yup, that was it. No big appeals to national myths, building a bridge to future or promises of delivering the Kingdom on earth for your kids, just “under us, your mortages will be cheaper to service.â€?

The “hedonistic…pragmatic, skeptical and with a keen eye for bullshit” character tends to be true by default, at least amongst the populus. Although the “lazy” bit is out of date now, given the long hours we work to pay off our big mortgages. What we might call the three “B” foundation of AUS conservatism - Bush, Beach and Backyard - tends to keep us away form the Barricades.

But the conservative “economistic” presumption is occasionally rebutted. Even AUS is subject to occasional irruptions of populist reaction that transcend the “hip-pocket nerve”, eg the massive 1890’s class war strikes, various anti-conscription movements, Hansonism, Cronulla etc.

Nabakov says:

Despite increasingly desperate and ludicrious attempts by the right wing of the ruling federal party and their various media/think tank cheerleaders, the whole religion/sexuality/culture wars thang has never really caught on here as a serious election issue cum wedge. It seems to be a big issue on some blogs and among some more vocal pundits.

No, you seem to be suffering from a bit of short-term memory loss. Alcohol-induced, by the sound of things.

Two out of the last four elections were fought on “culture war” issues that “really caught on here as a serious election issue cum wedge”. The 1996 election was dominated by cultural identity issues, “special interests” v “for all of us”. And the 2001 election was dominated by national security issues, with strong “civilizational clash” undertones ie Tampa, 911. Howard won both because the conservative nationalist “times suited him”.

AUS’s underlying conservative nationalism is pragmatic rather than dogmatic. Our citizens expect a tradesman-like performance from their govt. The populus tend to hit the roof when elites are found out getting up to mischief with foolish principles and/or knavish practices.

You cant blame them when pernicious rubbish like “strong” multiculturalism, take-it-or-leave-it work “choices”, decontructionism, entrepreneur LBO’s, ATSIC, boutique hedge funds and other obvious con-jobs are trotted out as the NBT. Suckered “victims” are what you get when modish fashion trumps a model tradition.

Nabakov says:

our current centre right government is still somewhat to the left of the Republicans while all our centre left state goverments are still somewhat left of the Democrats.

AUS citizens are generally happy for federal polities to nominate ideological ends, whilst provincial polities fashion institutional means. The Feds dream up “the Big Picture”, such as it is, whilst the states work out the “nuts and bolts”.

The GOP is the great outlier in OECD political orthodoxy. It populist function is primarily to protect the US’s Christian Caucasian identity polity in the aftermath of the 1965 double-whammy Civil Rights and Immigration Act. The god-fearing, gun-nutting, race-baiting good ole boys have made of it a kind of red-neck Alamo, Predictable given US demographic trends.

Nabakov says:

To sum up, we’re getting more and more like the US in election tactics but the things that seperate from the US like our much more pragmatic attitudes toward sex, religion and the role of Government (regardless of which party’s in power, they all end up as muddling through dirigistes) show no sign of abating.

Not all that true. Our electoral tactics (as opposed to mediating technics) are no more negative now than they were in the good old days. “Reds under the Bed”, “Trade Wars”, “the Yellow Peril” were all staples of AUS political discourse for almost a century. And the US will “end up as muddling through dirigistes” when it eventually nationalises its health insurance industry.

The main difference b/w AUS and the US is demographic, specifically the quantities and qualities of minorities. The US’s great size and various differences allow every crack pot group or bright idea to attain critical mass.

AUS is, by comparison, is a fairly white-bread nation with almost 90% Caucasian and almost 70% Christian. Minority immigrants, if properly selected, inducted and enculted, tend to fit in to the hegemonial culture with alacrity. I keep bumping into old friends who have that smug look Alpha-males get with a Presybterian Asian chick in tow.

“the sort of acquaintances you wouldn’t starve�

I don’t know about the English language, it just depends what kind of party it is, feral sparrowhawk. If they’re semi-strangers eating somebody else’s student newspaper pizza, I’d articulate them somewhere a level below the sleazy bloke who follows you to the bus stop from the pub, and somewhere above Displaced Person.

I’m not on facebook, basically because I spend too much of my time on blogs like this one and I figure if I join Facebook it will absorb even more of my life (I don’t know how some of you do it). However, I’ve watched younger acquaintances use it, and its quite clear to me that it is deepening at least some of their offline friendships as well as building others.

I do worry a little about the cheapening of the word “friend”, but I actually think the problem here is that we lack more subtle differentiation than the three we have - friends, acquaintances and enemies. I’ve had a few occasions where I have told amusing or relevant stories about people I know where I’ve said “a friend of mine did…” and thought “are they really a friend?” The problem is that “someone I know…” or “an acquaintance..” just sound silly. But the poverty of the English language in this zone is hardly Facebook’s fault.

I saw a superb example of this when the editors of a student newspaper put a poster on the front of their office with amusing things people have said in the office. One piece refers to a bunch of people hoeing into the office pizzas. One editor said “they’re our friends” the other reproved her arguing they were not. The first one responded, “Yeah, they’re acquaintances, but not the kind of acquaintances you’d starve.”

I thought that was beautiful - clearly we need a word for “the sort of acquaintances you wouldn’t starve”. Perhaps Guy wouldn’t be so worried if Facebook users had 900 people in that category and a few dozen friends.

For a start, you imply that Rundle is attributing all this atomisation to ‘capitalism’, when the word is not used in the article, and the argument seems to be that technology per se is one of the main drivers of individualisation.

Where do social networking sites come from? Aren’t they profit making businesses? And isn’t Rundle’s politics well known?

You also haven’t acknowledged Rundle’s structural point - that the meaning of the term ‘friend’ is being transformed by the idea that tenuous online connections constitute a friendship (as well as genuine friendships being carried on the net).

Yes, he has. See this para:

Now, there would be some interest in analysing the degree to which “friendship� may have changed in its meaning recently, and I’m sure it has - though there’s a lot of research suggesting that ties of friendship are now more important than they were for a time (they were also very important at other periods of history), and persist longer and more meaningfully beyond the formerly compulsory life stage of nuclear family formation. And here, surely, social networking is just mirroring a real social shift, and facilitating its extension, rather than devaluing some essence of the “friend�.

You parade the tired old excuse for an argument that people who have a critical view of technological developments simply don’t understand them - as if any technological development is so obviously wonderful that any critical attitude must imply incomprehension of it.

But Rundle makes several elementary errors of fact which if he’d used Facebook, or researched it, he wouldn’t. So he writes about it without understanding.

You seem to commit a bit of an own goal by your negative and somewhat bitter view of your local pub - won’t they let you play pool with them? Is that why you went online in the first place.

Cheap shot. “Bloggers are sad nerds” argument. Addressed in comments by Mark anyway, where he talks about the local he likes going to, and the local he doesn’t. You’d need a peg on your nose to like the Brunswick.

As for the idea that writing for Crikey (are there two Mark Bahnischs or what?) is putting yourself on a pedestal, while running your own vanity blog is somehow part of the conversation….please.

“Vanity blog”? WTF? And all Mark’s Crikey articles are posted here where people can talk about them, and converse, and he’ll converse back.

Nothing to see here. Move on.

but you were too defensive

Alvar Wave, does the word ‘projection’ mean anything to you?

Personally, I thought these blokes had a more persuasive anti-Farcebook argument.

Your response might have been more likely to get a run in Crikey if youd replied to Rundle’s arguments, rather than a fantasy of them.

For a start, you imply that Rundle is attributing all this atomisation to ‘capitalism’, when the word is not used in the article, and the argument seems to be that technology per se is one of the main drivers of individualisation.

You also haven’t acknowledged Rundle’s structural point - that the meaning of the term ‘friend’ is being transformed by the idea that tenuous online connections constitute a friendship (as well as genuine friendships being carried on the net).

You parade the tired old excuse for an argument that people who have a critical view of technological developments simply don’t understand them - as if any technological development is so obviously wonderful that any critical attitude must imply incomprehension of it.

You seem to commit a bit of an own goal by your negative and somewhat bitter view of your local pub - won’t they let you play pool with them? Is that why you went online in the first place.

As for the idea that writing for Crikey (are there two Mark Bahnischs or what?) is putting yourself on a pedestal, while running your own vanity blog is somehow part of the conversation….please.

Plenty to criticise in the original article but you were too defensive to come to grips with the arguments in it