Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
From all at LP, may you have a 2009 full of undiluted malt scotch grade fabulousness and may your resolutions be made with resolve! 
Photo of Brisbane NYE fireworks courtesy of monkeyc.net at Flickr – reproduced under a creative commons licence.
NB: Discussion about 2008 to go here!
At Ambit Gambit, Graham Young riffs off a comment made by Jay Rosen on Twitter:
You know why there are bloggers, @Newshour? Because there is “safety first” reasoning in news. People get sick of it and take up their pens.”
Young doesn’t entirely agree – not that the performance of the media in reportage isn’t a jumping off point for the desire to blog – but that the problem with mainstream journalism is “safety first”. He presents three hypotheses which might explain the quality of political reporting and commentary. I think he’s definitely onto something here, though I’d also add that the structure of the media and its corporate logics are also factors we should take note of.
The post concludes:
…perhaps the urge to blog is driven not so much by the tendency of journalists towards “safety first”, but because journalists are by and large socially homogenous and don’t reaffirm the views of most bloggers, who in reaction create their own social networks.
Which is not why I blog at all, but then, I am an statistically inadequate sample, and this post is pure speculation on which I hope to get some feedback from other bloggers.
Part of the academic stuff I’m working on this year goes to the question of the motivation for the creation of “user-generated content”. In the context of political blogging, I’m not at all certain that the sorts of categories the citizen journalism literature employs – ie “monitorial citizen”, “public sphere” and so on – are at all adequate for understanding the desire to blog.
Probably one of the most laudable steps taken by the Rudd government has been the attention given by Senator John Faulkner as Special Minister of State to cleaning up the electoral system. Admittedly, this isn’t one of the funky and sexy issues the media likes to highlight, but the importance of the Green Paper on Electoral Reform is profound.
But while most Australians probably had other things on their mind, John Howard’s former Workplace Relations advisor and Alexander Downer’s replacement as Mayo MP, Jamie Briggs, found time on Boxing Day to denounce third party campaigns as a “a growing cancer in our democracy”.
Briggs named GetUp! and the ACTU’s Your Rights at Work campaign as examples of what he was talking about.
I don’t have any particular problem with disclosure of funding for third party campaigns, though I would object to caps on donations. But the hyperbole from Briggs (and no doubt his views are shared by Nick Minchin and others) is absurd and dangerous. Props to Andrew Norton for sounding the alarm. Norton refers to Briggs’ call for disclosure and observes:
Continue reading ‘The vigilance of (il)Liberalism never sleeps’
Hilzoy has something pointed to say about the “pornography of destruction” engulfing the Gaza strip and adjacent areas of Israel:
One of the many things that makes the Israeli/Palestinian conflict so utterly dispiriting is that it’s impossible to think of anything good coming of any of this. Worse than that, it’s hard to imagine that even the people involved think anything good will come of it.
What, exactly, do the Palestinians lobbing rockets into Sderot think they will accomplish? That the Israelis will look about them and say: Holy Moly, I had no idea this place was so dangerous!, and leave? Do the Israelis think: even though we’ve bombed the Palestinians a whole lot, and it’s never done much good before, maybe this time it will be different! Maybe Hamas will say: heavens, this is a pretty serious round of attacks; maybe we should just sue for peace — ? Or what?
Any form of peaceful resolution to the conflicts in Palestine and Israel has been blocked for a long time by a range of factors – including but not limited to internal Israeli politics and the decomposition of its party system, the legacy of past atrocities, an effective economic blockade of Palestine, the power balance in the Middle East and the hypocritical and empty promises of the Bush administration. If there is a “peace process”, its outlines were frozen in time long ago. Unfortunately, I think it’s probably too much to hope for that there’ll be any sort of progress under the Obama administration, particularly with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? And indeed since Christmas Eve? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
The New Farm festivities kicked off with a deeply spiritual mood before Midnight Mass (Italian style, described here) @ Casa Bahnisch. Surrounded by angelic presences we were! You can see the Holy Spirit church steps where we enjoyed pannetone and sparkling wine here at flickr.
For many Australians the local film industry is made up of movies like Strictly Ballroom, Picnic at Hanging Rock and Australia. The documentary Not Quite Hollywood celebrates lesser known works that are regarded as “genre cinema”.
Movies that contain ample ample breasts, buckets of blood, bikie gangs, car crashes, unrealistic looking crocodiles and violent yobbos in leather form part of the “genre” genre.
Continue reading ‘Not Hollywood, Paul and what to watch over summer’
An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
Now, I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord,
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
If Leonard Cohen was a busker in Melbourne would he be dismissed as a talentless singer by Lord Mayor Robert Doyle?
Melburnians would know that the new Lord Mayor wants the city to be free of bogans and buskers who can’t hold a tune.
At the time of writing it hadn’t been confirmed what Cr Robert Doyle plans to do about talented busking bogans.
The adept young man who was recently spotted on Swanston Street wearing clown pants and a ponytail didn’t look much like a bogan but his antics on the electric guitar would’ve warmed the heart of any fan of flannelette shirts.
Cross-posted from No Right Turn
Three years ago, the Australian government passed draconian sedition laws as part its knee-jerk response to the “war on terror”. Now, Kevin Rudd is planning to repeal them:
The Howard government’s controversial ban on sedition will be scrapped and replaced with legislation that bolsters the protection of free speech under a series of changes to the nation’s terrorism laws.Yesterday the Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, flagged plans to increase oversight of the national security apparatus and promised to accept the bulk of the recommendations from the Clarke inquiry, a 2006 Australian Law Reform Commission report on sedition and a parliamentary committee report on intelligence and security.
(The ALRC review recommended replacing the law with a narrower one bearing more resemblance to criminal incitement, with stronger protections for academic, artistic, scientific, political or journalistic speech to make it clear that merely criticising the government, or reporting or studying such criticism, was not in and of itself seditious or treasonous. They also recommended removing the ludicrous claim of universal jurisdiction which allowed people who had never set foot in Australia, let alone bore it any allegiance, to be prosecuted for “disloyalty” against it).
But its not all good news. There’s this bit:
The new counter-terrorism laws – to be drafted in the first half of next year – will cover attacks that cause psychological as well as physical harm…
This current internationally accepted definition of terrorism (as seen in e.g. New Zealand’s Terrorism Suppression Act) includes acts which are carried out for the purpose of “induc[ing] terror in a civilian population” – but it still requires that they cause death, injury, or serious destruction. So, in order to be “terrorism”, it has to involve killing people or blowing stuff up. Allowing psychological as well as physical harm runs the risk of substantially lowering that threshold, allowing the misclassification of other offences as “terrorism”, with all that that entails. Given that anti-terror laws are already overused, that would be a Very Bad Thing.
Dennis Shanahan, playing with a fairly straight bat for once, pre-reports on the unreleased findings from John Clarke QC’s report into the charging and deportation of Dr. Mohammad Haneef. According to the report:
All as expected. But the most chilling finding in the whole affair is this:
…the report, commissioned by the Rudd Government, has cleared the Howard government of any improper behaviour, conspiracy or political motivation in ordering the detention and later deportation of the Indian doctor from the Gold Coast in July last year.
I wish to heaven there had been a conspiracy. Were it a conspiracy, that would mean a bunch of evil men had colluded to pervert the course of justice, persecute an innocent man, and abuse what are otherwise sound and well-designed laws and processes.
Instead, what John Clarke QC’s report shows is that the laws worked exactly as intended. There were no procedural irregularities. No perversion of justice. No wrongdoing by the actors and participants.
The machinery of the anti-terrorism laws, the AFP, ASIO and Minister Kevin Andrews operated with chilling, ruthless and legally correct efficiency to deprive an innocent man of his liberty, damn his good name to the world, bundle him out of the country, no ifs, no buts, no beg your pardons.
Such things should only be possible due to conspiracy of evil men against good laws. That it happened due to the actions of people acting correctly according to their procedures and their conscience, reminds us all just how heinous a state’s terror apparatus can become.
PS – And on that cheery note, I wish you the happiness of the season. May you spend it with people you love, whether in person or in your heart. And may it be a million miles from any government.
Well it’s the night before the night before the night before Christmas so it must be time again to condemn. Here’s a 31st open condemnation thread. What’s getting up your goat this week so far? Which evil political, cultural, social, musical, religious and *festively seasonal* and other phenomena need condemnation? (Or loud denunciation?)
You can condemn anything you like except 1944 recordings of Frank Sinatra singing Christmas tunes. Well, actually…
Anyone wanting an update on how the federal government’s adventures into the wilds of citizen consultation via blogs [at the Digital Economy Blog hosted under the auspices of DBCDE] are going could do a lot worse than read these two posts from Lyn Calcutt at Public Opinion and Axel Bruns at Gatewatching. Bruns asks the very good question – “what if you do build it and they do come?”
Short answer: big companies from The UK, America, State Gubbermints and some Aussie companies.
Beyond the headline figure of a unilateral 5% cut on 2000 levels, the numbers that will get us there look deeply disturbing. As I argued, there are effectively two carbon prices: a floating price capped at either $40/t or the CDM price for us (the suckers) and a vortex in the federal budget to stop Aluminium smelting, petrol refineries and coal fired power plants going all Howl’s Moving Castle on us and flying off to Neverland or something (their carbon price is zero).
The biggest handouts will be to EITEs and coal fired generators under the auspices of “[securing] today’s jobs while building the low pollution economy of tomorrow.” (don’t think about that one too hard) Continue reading ‘Who’ll get your CPRS dollars?’
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