This post is likely to be of interest mostly to those who are hosting a blog on Wordpress.com.
Looking at Fire Fly’s blog, I noticed that she’s discovered that a new feature on her hosted-by-Wordpress.com blog. It turned up without direct notification, and is opt-out, not opt-in. … » Problem No.1 (She’s disabled it, and you should too if you blog on wordpress.com - see below for instructions)
This new feature generates a list of “Possibly Related Posts” at the foot of your own posts, and it searches through a database of all other Wordpress.com blogs to do so. Now, just consider the variety of attitudes people have to the words “feminism” and “racism” for instance, and can you guess where this is going? Oh yes it did - the list of “possibly related posts” on Fire Fly’s feminist blog included links to posts written by white supremacists and anti-feminists (often in the same link) - fanfuckingtastic, eh? So your readers might well think that these posts are being recommended by you, instead of automatically, and what does that do to a poster’s credibility? …. » Problem No.2
Did I mention that these “possibly related post” links are not visible or able to be edited when you are writing your post? … » Problem No.3
Not only that, by having this feature enabled on your blog, it also means that posts from your blog are being included in the list generated by this “feature” on other people’s blogs, which for Fire Fly included those self-same white supremacists and anti-feminists, thus sending their readers to her blog. This is why she titled her post thusly: Warning! The new WordPress feature is utter trollbait. … » Problem No.4
Reading an article in The Age this morning about the death of Pamela Bone I was struck by the following paragraph:
She married young, and between having four daughters and working such jobs as night shift in a fruit cannery, she read Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer. She went back to school, left an unhappy marriage, and brought her girls to Melbourne and a job as a court reporter at The Age. Her journey fuelled a lifelong interest in the question of personal resilience — where it springs from, and how it might be encouraged.
At a time when affluent societies seem obsessed with the notion of self-esteem (happy, happy, joy, joy), Bone’s “interest in the question of personal resilience” is something that should be promoted. Here’s hoping her story will serve as a model for other women who find themselves stuck in a “fruit cannery” (literally or metaphorically speaking) when they’re capable of so much more.
It’s well known that the AFP harboured, and still harbour, strong suspicions about Mohammed Haneef. However, even if you make that assumption, the investigation and subsequent prosecution seems to have been stuffed up on several levels. Aside from the courtroom blunder that saw the criminal case against him collapse, I’ve been told by people who should know about these things that the AFP would have been much better off keeping him under surveillance - including in India, with the cooperation of Indian police - to see if they could turn up actual evidence that he’s anything other than a doctor with the misfortune to have the wrong relatives.
Today, a “source” is tellingThe Age that Kevin Andrews’ office prevented this from happening by revoking his visa, without even telling the AFP:
Senior public servants in a number of agencies in Canberra, including the police, were caught unawares when Mr Andrews suddenly announced that he was cancelling Dr Haneef’s visa.
“That spoiled it for the police,” the source said.
“It was done without any warning. The police knew that was an option but not that it was to be used so quickly or in such a cavalier fashion,” the source said.
One might be tempted to think this “source” is Keelty, or somebody close to him, making yet another attempt to blame somebody else. But, if accurate, the inescapable conclusion is that Kevin Andrews preferred political grandstanding in the leadup to an election over actually catching and convicting somebody who was genuinely thought to be a for-real terrorist.
At The Road to Surfdom, Ken Lovell deconstructs Tony Abbott’s latest contribution to the economic debate:
“If anyone has created the current inflation, it’s Wayne Swan, with his wild and irresponsible talk,” he said.
You can make of that what you like. The opposition were previously running the line that there was no inflation problem (in order to “defend the Howard record”), and this absurd nonsense is apparently how that message morphs when the inflation figure hits a 17 year high.
The chatter among economists and on the business pages for a while has been about whether the Reserve Bank should dump its 2-3% orthodoxy - because a lot of the push factors are in effect exogenous to the domestic economy - so as to avoid tipping the show into recession. I was writing about this almost two months ago, and copped a bit for my pains.
What really surprised me was the fact that the defenders of economic orthodoxy - the same mob who always bang on about a globally integrated economy - were apparently so sanguine about the degree to which any nation state can exert sovereign control over inflation within its territory. As I suggested back then, economic orthodoxy is a moveable feast, and Henry Thornton documents just how far it has moved by today - to a position where the “suspension” of inflation targeting is being mooted.
At the same time, the stock in trade of political journalism Glenn Milne style is still debating whether Wayne Swan will come up with a credible message to target voters with in the light of changed economic conditions. That’s about as useful as debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Continue reading ‘Targets’
The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada has just decided that while Canada’s 15,000 polar bears are threatened by climate change they are not in immediate danger. The Committee found that numbers are decreasing in some places and increasing in others.
Hence polar bears are to remain a ’species of special concern’ rather than an ‘endangered species’. But that does not mean that all of us and the Canadian Government in particular can relax. The classification requires the Government to take legislative action.
This piece was written last week, and didn’t make it into print among the plethora of musings on the Australia 2020 summit. It should be noted that after I put pen to paper, the stories about the final communique having a rather tenuous link with the discussions in the stream emerged. That’s disappointing, but hardly surprising. I learnt a long time ago that whoever writes the minutes of a meeting is in an incredibly powerful position. It might also be interesting to compare the outcomes with pre-summitcommentary.
Cate Blanchett was in danger of being upstaged by her new son Iggy, and 2020 Summit delegates were treated to a plenary session featuring Prime Ministerial favourite Hugh Jackman’s comedy stylings. The arts crowd were delighted to be back inside the tent, while culture warriors were licking their lips at an opportunity to resurrect slogans about “Keating era luvvies” - when they could take time out from watching La Bohème, that is.
But what did the Creative Australia stream achieve?
Last week, I was having a look at Tony Bennett, Mike Emmison and John Frow’s 1999 book, Accounting for Tastes in my QUT Creative Industries postgrad class. Bennett et al were doing something similar to Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction, mapping the social patterning of cultural taste. But unlike Bourdieu’s work on France in the early 60s, the data their team collected in Australia in 1994/5 showed social status/education level, age and gender to be more powerful predictors of taste than social class.
The chapter on music was particularly interesting - for instance, they found only 1.6% of respondents aged 18-25 and 4.0% of those aged 26-35 nominated classical music as their preferred genre, while 11.3% of the 60+ cohort did. As Bennett et al correctly surmised, without longitudinal data you can’t tell whether there’s a cohort effect (that is to say - older respondents liked classical music in their youth and continued to have that preference) or whether musical tastes change with age. But their qualitative interviewing found a lot of stability in music preferences over time - that is to say, people still liked the same or similar music as they grew older. Continue reading ‘Avalon II’
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
After a big burst of thesis writing, I’ve spent a rather miserable weekend, lamenting the fact that I didn’t get a flu shot this year. But before the lurgy got its grips into me, I did go down with an old Uni friend to The Bowery in Ann Street in the Valley - Brisneyland’s best bar to be sure - for a propitiatory Laphroaig or three. When the nights start getting cooler, it’s time to unstop the malt scotch bottle!
If you’d like to see a larger image of the photos, click on them then click on “full view” once you’re inside the gallery.
So, it’s time again to condemn. Here’s an eighteenth open condemnation thread. What’s getting up your goat this month? Which evil political, cultural, social, musical, religious and other phenomena need condemnation? (Or loud denunciation?)
Australians, at least numerically speaking, are a pet-loving bunch, with dogs, cats, budgies and other creatures making up part of our families.
Recently, a ferret and its “mum” were seen outside a supermarket, perhaps waiting for “dad” to purchase whatever it is that ferrets eat.
On any Sunday afternoon, the park located not from where I live is full of dogs running around with different degrees of vigour, and owners running after them with various levels of stamina.
Not a post about Roxy Music… I’ve just been watching Ghost in the Shell director Mamoru Oshii’s rather stunning film Avalon on dvd. It’s effectively a live action anime - made in Poland in Polish using Polish actors for a Japanese and international audience, rather than for a domestic one.
I’ve found the user comments on IMDB quite interesting - and this actually sums the film up very neatly:
…this movie is what one could call a cyberpunk poem.
I typically go hunting down comments and reviews after I’ve seen a dvd - not sure why! Because Avalon didn’t get a theatrical release in the US, I wasn’t surprised not to find too many mainstream media reviews. You can get a little bit of a sense of what it’s about from this short notice in the Village Voice [and a lot more from Cyberpunkreview], and from the trailer and an excerpt beneath the fold. But I wasn’t too surprised to see this sort of thing - from Peter Bradshaw in the Graudian:
If Hungarian miserablist Bela Tarr ever remade The Matrix, it might look like this, but I don’t think Tarr would have made it quite so boring.
You’ve got to feel a bit sorry for Griffith University Vice-Chancellor Ian O’Connor. His hamfisted attempts to defend Griffith against accusations of being a “madrassas” trawling for Saudi dollars have landed him in all sorts of bother, with his attempts to draw a fine distinction between “research by senior staff” (who apparently get all their briefing notes from Wikipedia) and correct citation in academic work being a classic case of digging yourself deeper into a hole. His self-justification reads more like the logic-splitting you might get from a student who’d been called for plagiarism. Revise and resubmit, of course, would not be an option in the sort of mediated culture war blowup the good Professor found himself in the middle of - and that’s the problem in a nutshell. He’d have done better, probably, to have ignored the frenzy of the press beat ups, released an anodyne statement and tapped someone with a brain on their shoulders to write him a measured response. Just some gratuitous pr advice…
What he’s succeeded in doing is obscuring the real issues, and playing the game on the turf of those who wanted to cast stones at Griffith. But he’s also succeeded in obfuscating the questions he does have to answer about Saudi funding for Griffith’s Islamic Research Unit.
In Friday’s SMH, Peter Hartcher gave a sanguine appraisal of the Rudd government’s symbolic actions since winning the election, and concluded that Rudd has been “a keen student” of Howard in the effective political use of symbolism.
I find this statement unsatisfactory, as the two seem to have studied completely different tactical playbooks. While Howard engaged in culture war of the trench variety, Rudd is clearly a proponent of blitzkrieg.
I don’t recall much about Anzac Day from my primary school years, and for a number of reasons my high school recollections of Anzac Day are very much coloured by having read Alan Seymour’s play “One Day of the Year” in Grade Eight in 1980 - a play which captured a range of ambiguous reactions to this commemoration. The themes are well summed up in this review by Stephen Dunne of a 2003 performance in Sydney:
Central to Alan Seymour’s modern Australian classic is the paradoxical nature of Anzac Day. We chose as our venerated, inescapable symbol of military remembrance a campaign that was both a tactical fiasco and a defeat.
In the 1980s, the ritual of Anzac Day appeared to be on its last legs. At least in Brisbane, the public commemorations were ill attended, and such commentary as was about often consisted of discussions about whether it had a future, mixed with reflections at Australians’ lack of bombastic patriotism and what I think was a central theme - the immense suffering produced by war. Interviews with old diggers often highlighted this - and while there was also a sense that war had been inescapable, there was also a definite belief that other modes of solving humanity’s problems were much to be preferred. Vietnam Vets, on the whole, were at that time still largely unintegrated in the day.
Indeed, some of the last surviving Anzacs were to have their moment in the spotlight in the 90s, when the official script had generally changed, and appeared out of synch with a revived nationalism - some refused to march, and some would say nothing other than their experience of war had been of its futility. Many resisted becoming symbols of a national spirit, preferring to remember their own personal stories and the meanings the experience of war had for them, their mates and their families.
It has often been said that as Australians we have a predilection for remembering and even celebrating our failures. The ABC does a lot of remembering at these times. This year there have been a couple of segments covering an event that may eventually take over from ANZAC in our consciousness, an event that occurred 90 years ago on the third ANZAC Day.
I speak, of course, of the Australian counter-attack that took the French town of Villers-Bretonneux. This year for the first time there will be a dawn service on the actual day.
The Australian flags are hung, toy kangaroos are crammed in shop windows and now all the small French town of Villers-Bretonneux is waiting for is Anzac Day.
Up to 6,000 Australians are expected to descend on the rural town on Friday for a dawn service commemorating the 90th anniversary of its liberation by Anzac [actually Australian, I think] troops on April 25, 1918.
The rural town, in the heart of the Somme region north of Paris, holds annual memorial services for the diggers - but this year is the first time it will host a dawn service on Anzac Day itself, instead of the nearest Saturday to April 25.
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
Looking at Fire Fly’s blog, I noticed that she’s discovered that a new feature on her hosted-by-Wordpress.com blog. It turned up without direct notification, and is opt-out, not opt-in. … » Problem No.1 (She’s disabled it, and you should too if you blog on wordpress.com - see below for instructions)
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