An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
Archive for February, 2009
Yes, you get out when the punters start buying in, in droves.
When the scam artists and product pimps join the party in massive numbers.
When self appointed social media evangelists get shrill with their ‘I told you so’s’ – endlessly quibbling over lists about who’s in and who’s out.
When the celebutards join the fray and the grasping desperate famewhores who follow them won’t stop vying for their fickle shallow attentions.
And yes, it’s absolutely time to get out when the MSM, on it’s last legs, looking for credibility and eyeballs, now attempts to save itself by not going a day without mentioning their new found shiny thing.
No, you can’t follow me, I’m not there anymore.
Oh, I had lightly buttered toast and jam with a coffee for breakfast. You?
Image via realdanlyons.
Understandably the news of the Victorian fires has tended to suppress news of the floods in North Queensland. No-one is complaining about that. But apart from an inundation the size of South Australia that has lasted now for 8 weeks, with stock losses and other devastation (the “bill” I heard recently was $210 million and counting), a new threat has emerged, the toxic overflow from at least 10 open cut mines in the area.
The Environmental Protection Agency has already ordered landowners downstream of the Lady Annie copper mine, 120km north of Mt Isa, not to drink water from or swim in Saga and Inca creeks and to destock paddocks. A helicopter is being used to take samples and graziers are talking about fish kills 20km from the Annie mine, acid eating away at steel pickets and water 1m deep pouring off the site.
Other mines in the northwest minerals province the EPA says have discharged contaminated material are the Great Australia Mine, Birla Mt Gordon, Ernest Henry Mine, MIM, Century Mine, Leichhardt Mine, Selwyn Mine, Lorena Mine and the Yurbi concentrate rail loading facility.
So people can’t drink from their normal water supply and paddocks bordering contaminated streams have to be cleared of stock. The burgeoning organic beef industry in the area is at risk from residual contamination.
Of all the supposed flaws in the proposed CPRS, the one that seems to have gained the most traction is the concern that, as Jeremy Sear puts it “the more you sacrifice at home – the more some corporate polluter can emit instead.” GetUp is planning to run a full-page ad in The Oz tomorrow demanding the government fix this issue.
This issue has been discussed a number of times on LP. dk.au has emphasised the importance (and apologies if I’m oversimplifying here) of the sociological aspects of the issue, and the need for people to be involved in the decarbonization process – if they see their voluntary efforts being lost, support for the process will vanish. I don’t think it’s a big problem, myself. Despite all this, I don’t think anyone who cares about climate change thinks it’s the biggest problem with the proposed CPRS. The biggest problem, by far, is the twin evils of locking in monumentally inadequate carbon reduction targets and too-low projected carbon prices. The second-biggest problem is the ladeling out of free permits to Big Carbon.
All the voluntary participation in the world isn’t going to make more than a marginal difference to Australia’s carbon emissions. Tighter targets will make a big difference. So why spend all this lobbying effort to fix problems at the margins of the scheme, rather than tackling the big one head-on?
It wouldn’t be a Queensland election without drama. Pauline Hanson redux, a slather of independents contesting LNP heartland seats, beatups about gaffes, the awful musical stylings of the Borg, billionnaire magnates suing pollies for defamation and cancelling press conferences, and the list goes on.
Pineapple Party Time is increasingly your one stop shop for Quinceland election analysis, commentary and news – now with added google reader widget goodness so you can use it as a portal to pick and choose from the MSM’s smorgasbord as well as getting what I’d argue is a better quality of analysis and commentary from the blogging team of our very own Mark, Possum, and William “The Poll Bludger” Bowe.
For your edification and reading pleasure, there’s a joint effort by William Bowe and Possum on the “shock poll” showing the LNP ahead on primaries and the parties even on 2PP, Mark on the political situation as at Day Four, the spectre of Joh, the Borg’s juggling act from left to right and the dead tree media’s obsession with stories about dead trees, and Possum hosts an open thread. William looks at the vote by regions, and the gap between Federal and state results, while in earlier posts, Mark wraps up Day Three and analyses the impact of Barnaby’s campaign jaunt and Campbell Newman’s non-appearance.
They’re really blogging up a Brisbane summer storm over there!
It probably won’t have escaped anyone’s notice that the Obama administration’s very large to do list includes the future of General Motors and Ford and the closely linked issue of climate change and energy efficiency. Funding has been cobbled together to keep the big auto makers afloat for the next little while – after a bunch of Republican senators proclaimed the virtues of “free markets” while incidentally championing non-union car plants in their own Southern states. The legislative sausage machine can be such a boondoggle factory in the US that it’s probably hoping for far too much for any rational way forward for a restructured car industry to emerge from all the argy-bargy, as someone who believes in “making things” would have it.
What that path might look like is discernible from an excellent article in the New York Review of Books by economic historian Emma Rothschild. She’s critical – rightly in my view – of the oscillation between short termism and a horizon that’s seemingly so far in the future that it never need factor into political calculation when it comes to immediate action. 2050 is an aeon in politics. Her analysis also has the virtue of examining the American auto industry within the contexts of car culture and actually existing inequality – quite pointedly shining a light on both inequalities in access to transport and the actual as opposed to imagined patterns of residential demographics. One can only hope that the sort of thinking her piece embodies makes it onto the table in one way or another.
It’s surely a time when a lot of taken for granted assumptions should be questioned, and industry rentseeking and dealmaking as usual should come under closer scrutiny. In this country, too, as we rush to preserve manufacturing skills and jobs we might pause and reflect on the fact that manufacturing is going down the gurgler not just here or in the developed world but in developing countries as well. That was recently highlighted by The Economist, which of course offers the predictable recipe of doing nothing and letting the market rip, as it were. But one need not adopt that ideological view to think that some of the work that was done last year on the Australian car industry and innovation and so forth might need a lot of rethinking.
Today’s wrong, irrelevant, reactionary bile column editorial calling for ‘more hot air’ on emissions trading:
This is a complex issue that we cannot afford to rush, despite Senator Wong’s determination to push her plan through parliament by mid-year. Moving early on carbon reduction plays to the deep-green gallery that warns that the world is doomed without immediate action. But there is no guarantee other countries will follow Australia’s lead. US Energy Secretary Steven Chu has floated a carbon tax and if the Americans took this path, Australia would be stuck with an immediately obsolete model.
That’s right kids, the huge EU Emissions Trading Scheme, RGGI, WCI, Japan’s Voluntary Scheme, New Zealand’s movements – all irrelevant because of a comment from Steven Chu! Boy if a single quip by him makes Australia’s policy positions ‘immediately obsolete’ coal is certainly in trouble, because:
“Coal is [Dr. Chu's] worst nightmare”
STOP PRESS This just in Barack Obama calls for progress on an Emissions Trading regime: over to Lenore Taylor…
Ouch. Good thing they’re good at predicting the Queensland Election date
Elsewhere: Frank Jotzo takes it back to basics at the East Asia Forum:
who foots the bill, where does the money go, and how much change is induced. These are questions that must be addressed regardless of whether the policy instrument of choice is an emissions tax or trading scheme. And they must be addressed with the long-term public interest at heart, without fear of change and without favour to large emitters.
We haven’t had a warporn thread for a while, as the government’s Defence White Paper is still in limbo. But it seems that various bits and pieces are starting to emerge, so to speak. The ABC is reporting that the upcoming defence white paper will recommend the doubling of the Australian submarine fleet, when the Collins-class subs are retired by 2025 or so. Unsurprisingly, this is being described as “Australia’s biggest-ever defence project”, even larger than the purchase of the next generation of combat aircraft.
Continue reading ‘Skipper, I have the conn…er…skipper?…able seaman?…work experience kid???’
Lots of reading – over at Pineapple Party Time – about the state campaign. Possum looks at the Borg’s economic gaffe and the solar panels the wrong way round that Mt Cootha LNP candidate John Pollard has installed on his roof, the LNP sacking their Young LNP president during the campaign even though he’s the candidate for Bundama, and the non-appearance of Clive Palmer on the hustings. Meanwhile, The Poll Bludger adds to his argument that the early election effect won’t play out the same way it did in WA and the NT.
Mark also highlights the Borg’s economic policy gaffe, asking whether he’s following the tradition of throwing the election away at the start of the campaign, and wraps up yesterday’s events, focusing on policy and the leaders, takes a look at the predictions game and the size of the LNP’s task in overturning Labor’s majority. There’s also a piece on Stuart Copeland’s independent run for Condamine and the misleading nature of the reporting of Newspoll.
With all the discussion of blogwars around the place recently, I thought it might be apposite to put a different perspective. I was inspired (as I often am) by a couple of comments by Pavlov’s Cat – on a thread here this morning and on one of the many recent threads elsewhere comparing journalism and blogging. Those thoughts meshed in with some work I’ve been doing recently for a couple of interlinked academic projects – one being my ongoing work on social media with Axel Bruns for the Smart Services CRC and the other being a paper for the upcoming ANZCA conference.
In the course of my research, I’ve been reading lots of net history. There are exceptions to the rule, but the same dichotomised themes tend to recur again and again without resolution, and as a number of authors, including the excellent Fred Turner, point out – too many concepts have been taken over from 90s style cyber-utopians and Californian boosters without much reflection on their adequacy. One of those is Howard Rheingold’s “virtual community” (and to be fair to Rheingold, he’s much more nuanced than some of his academic epigones!)… We seem to be stuck in a hermeneutic circle – of the bad kind – suspended between online writing as media substitute and online communication as pure public sphere. If what occurs online falls short of either (heavily) ideal(ised) type, then it appears to fall into the worthless category by default.
Let’s have a look at some antidotes.
Continue reading ‘Blogging as a technique for the cultivation of trust’
Folks might recall the contest we held in conjunction with Overland for the best two word definition of Ruddism. The prize is a free sub to their estimable mag. We ended up asking Jeff Sparrow to judge the entries – since it’s he who kindly offered the prize – and he’s released a shortlist. Winner to be announced soon!
Folks with long memories might recall I covered the 2006 Queensland election for Crikey. In discussing with the Crikey peeps what might be the best way to go in terms of reporting on and analysis of the 2009 Queensland election, we settled on a dedicated campaign blog – written by me, Possum and The Poll Bludger. The idea is to harness the interactivity and dynamism Crikey has now introduced through its blog network, as opposed to having everything dominated by the timing of the daily email and fixed deadlines. We’re also interested to see how a campaign specific blog goes. I don’t want to enter into yet another boring and misconceived MSM v. blogs debate, and it’s worth noting that compared to, say, the Courier-Mail, we’re targeting a narrower audience much more intensely interested in politics. But I still think it’ll be interesting to assess how this form of campaign coverage goes.
You can find the blog here – Pineapple Party Time!
Posts on PPT will be exclusive there. That’s really because I’ll probably get fairly fired up about the state campaign – since it’s in my neck of the woods and I’m part of that small minority who really does get quite enthused at election time – so I wanted to avoid LP having its front page constantly dominated by Queensland election stuff. The other reason is that – as I said – I’m interested in exploring a number of questions about the viability of event specific blogs in a real time environment. What we’ll be doing here is a daily links post from either me or Kim, which will also provide an open thread for LPers to discuss the Quinceland campaign, post links, speculate, etc, etc. Me aside, all the other LP bloggers who care to are absolutely free to post election stuff here.
There are a couple of cross-posts up at PPT – there to seed it with some comment for the launch announcement in today’s Crikey email. There are also two new posts – one on the Stuart Copeland candidacy in Condamine and the Newspoll and the other on the question of whether the early election will impact on the result – a question that’s somewhat more important than all the rest of the kerfuffle about the early election speculation.
I’m hardly the first to say this, but given the current Coalition not-knowing-what-they-stand-for foment, it’s worth revisiting a few nostrums of the right to examine some basic contradictions in their policy positions, and whether they are salvageable.
What I’d like to examine is the conflict between the right’s economic support for increased casualisation of labour, and their social policy goals of increased family stability, neighborhood and community cohesion.
Recent comments
reb of Hobart, reb of Hobart, Ginja, Saint Furious of Ikea, John D, joe2 [...]
Gummo Trotsky, Ville, joe2, Mercurius, Kersebleptes, adrian [...]
Martin B, Sam, Lefty E, Mark, Paul Burns, PinkyOz [...]
David Irving (no relation), Saint Furious of Ikea, joe2, Zorronsky, Liam, el oso [...]
jules, anthony nolan, jules, anthony nolan, Legal Eagle, jules [...]
Darryl Rosin, Sam, Paul Norton, Sam, Paul Norton, anthony nolan [...]
Robert Merkel, Kiashu, Fran Barlow, Robert Merkel, Kiashu, Mervyn Langford [...]
informally yours, Saint Furious of Ikea, informally yours, Chris, informally yours, Saint Furious of Ikea [...]
rumrebellious, RightHandThread, Nabakov, rumrebellious, Nabakov, RightHandThread [...]
Mark, Saint Furious of Ikea, Luke Walladge, Mark, Paul Burns, Bert [...]
Paul Burns, Fran Barlow, CMMC, Gummo Trotsky, Guido, pablo [...]
BilB, Peter, BilB, OldSkeptic, anthony nolan, mitchell porter [...]