Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
The battle of Fromelles at the Western Front 92 years ago remains the worst day in Australian history. On 19 July 1916, in a monstrously botched enterprise, no fewer than 5,533 Australians became casualties. This toll is equivalent to the entire Australian casualties in the whole of the Boer, Korean and Vietnam Wars put together. In one night at Fromelles.
Continue reading ‘Remembering Fromelles’
An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
Russia’s state-run Rossiya TV network is conducting an online poll to decide who is the greatest Russian of all time.
The results thus far are dispiriting. In first place is the last Tsar, Nicholas II, followed closely by Josef Stalin (who wasn’t even Russian) with Vladimir Ilych Lenin (who was largely Tatar, German, Jewish and Swedish rather than Russian) in third place. In fourth place is 20th century popular singer Vladimir Vysotsky with Tsar Peter the Great fifth. No sign of Mikhail Gorbachev or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the poll, but Nikita Khrushchev is in the final 50. Andrei Sakharov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky are in but aren’t on the leaderboard, unlike those lovable rogues Boris Yeltsin and Ivan the Terrible.
Are LP readers better judges of Russians than Russians themselves? I’ll put in a plug for Gorby, Jules Martov, Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky and call for your responses. If nothing else, this thread might bring Fyodor out of the woodwork.
We’ve done our best to provide a reasonably comprehensive coverage of World Youth Day here at LP, in part because the News Limited papers, being major sponsors of the Pope fest, have studiously ignored most of the actual hard news, except to cast stones at those criticising the Church’s conduct on several justifiable grounds, in favour of happy-clappy stories about the happy-clappy pilgrims and general hagiography. As I commented earlier, the irony is that B16 himself is treated more like a pop star than a Pontiff on a mission, so in the interests of balance and fairness, if anyone’s actually interested in the full text of what the Pope had to say, you can read it here. As journalist and veteran Vatican watcher John L. Allen jr. observes, it’s classic Ratzinger.
In contrast to the media coverage earlier in the year when the People’s Republic of China suffered such an overwhelming public relations disaster in the context of protests from human rights and Tibetan activists against the Olympic torch, very little has been heard of Tibet in the mainstream media of late. All that we’ve seen lately in the Australian press is the solemn warnings from the Australian Olympics Committee that any athletes wearing an innocuous t-shirt with a generic human rights message offered to those interested by the Australia Tibet Council would be immediately sent home. Lest they annoy the Chinese government, and violate the “spirit of the Olympics” presumably. The corporate sponsored Olympiad brooks no petty “mixing” of politics and sport, of course.
Continue reading ‘Tibet, human rights, history and the 2008 Olympics’
A lot of the debate about WorkChoices, quite properly, revolved around not just the severe distraint that the legislation placed on bargaining power in the employment relationship but also on its failure to accord employees basic civil rights in the workplace. Much of recent thinking on employment has revolved around extending the rights proper to civil society to the workplace - and reframing a perspective that saw rights only at issue insofar as they revolved around liberal principles of contract. But basic rights within the workplace should just be a baseline, as it were. I don’t agree with all of the arguments in his paper, but I’m pleased to see David Coats from The Work Foundation publishing a provocative piece for the new(ish) Australian thinktank Per Capita entitled Quality of Work and A New Politics of A Quality of Life. [link to pdf]
The principal goal of progressive politics is to create a society in which people have the capabilities to choose a life that they value. Allied to this of course is the profound conviction that unless certain goods are provided collectively – education, healthcare, infrastructure and physical security for example – then some citizens, generally the poorest and most vulnerable, will fall by the wayside. The opportunity to choose a life that one values is inevitably diminished if an employee is condemned to insecure poorly paid work with limited opportunities for progression. “Bad work” in this sense is a significant constraint on individual liberty.
There’s no doubt, I think, that work continues to be central to our late modern society not just in terms of the creation of wealth, but also in enabling or potentially enabling fulfilment, creativity and self-actualisation. Continue reading ‘Bad work and the denial of liberty’
I’m writing from an office in the Sydney CBD. Catholic ‘youth’ (some of them looking a tad middle aged) have been streaming down the street towards the harbour for the past two or more hours. (The Pope is due to take a harbour cruise soon, so I guess they’re all going down to see him.) It’s official - there are a lot of people attending WYD. And they come from all over the world. I know this because they are all waving national flags. There goes the American flag, here’s New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, Fiji, Australia, of course, and the Aboriginal flag … followed by a flag which is light blue with a yellow circle in the middle, Germany, Canada, more Americans, more flags which are unfamiliar to me… Continue reading ‘Greetings from Flagsville’
Picture: The 112 West Preston-St Kilda tram
Melburnians regularly talk about the old days of tram travel.
These were the days before a tram trip could result in having to give your name and address to a “customer relations officer” because you’re either a fare cheat or forgetful*.
Continue reading ‘A streetcar named “arrrghhh”’
This was my response to the argument that Kevin Rudd’s Emissions Trading Scheme Green Paper was a fine piece of pragmatic politics: Continue reading ‘He’s from Queensland and he’s here to help cave in before the debate starts’
I’m not sure if it’s in the BBC’s charter, but the venerable public broadcaster is allegedly trying to reach out to people with disabilities, and to increase social awareness of disability issues. Through such charming initiatives as their online Paris Hilton like trash celeb persona - “Disability Bitch”:
“Hi, I’m Disability Bitch. I’m disabled and I love it. Everyone should be disabled. Everyone should be like me.
“I own an extensive collection of colour-coordinated wigs and an even more extensive collection of colour-coordinated mobility aids, all of which complement my natural beauty…
Whatevs, darl. But there’s more. She’s not an all purpose disability bitch, but part of a reality tv franchise. In pursuit of its social inclusion agenda, the BBC is running a reality tv show - “Britain’s Missing Top Model” - the premise of which is that chicks missing limbs or in chairs can also be teh hotness and get to be in glossy fashion mags. It’s “Stylish, sassy, chic … disabled?”… The idea, I guess, is supposed to be that disability is no barrier to objectification. Continue reading ‘Disability and body image and reality tv’
Elliott Bledsoe reminds us not to take men wearing robes all that seriously. Make sure you look at this photo very carefully indeed.
Note: If you don’t like what you see - tough - it’s now legal to be annoyed.
Continue reading ‘World Youth Day: The dark side of the force?’
It sounds like some dumb reality tv show, doesn’t it? But we all know who didn’t get voted out of the house.
As almost everyone in the world knows, it’s election year in America.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (don’t ask, you already know the answer!) might be in trouble. Iraq might be - kinda, sorta - an election issue. But if - like me - you’re following the American Election via either the blogosphere or (oh noes!) the MSM, you’d notice a huge disconnect between how big an issue climate change is here, and how totally miniscule it is in the U S of A.
I hope Al Gore might have something to say at the Democratic Convention.
But that might not occur. And even if it does, and that and all the Arnie stuff aside, it’s going to be pretty much a side issue. Lord only knows what we can do, but those of us who, like me, are Democrats Overseas, might consider a bit of lobbying. But we might think as well about remembering that climate change is a global issue, and trying to get the Australian government to use whatever leverage it has to get it treated as such. Continue reading ‘The World’s Top Emitter’
dk.au’s quite right that from a policy angle, the ETS Green Paper is highly problematic. In the short term, politically, obviously what Kevin Rudd is doing is stealing Malcolm Turnbull’s clothes on petrol, adopting his proposal of an excise cut. This snookers the Libs on petrol, but then, they were hardly getting any political traction on that issue anyway. It’s a missed opportunity in more senses than one - it plays to the populist narrative and avoids the much more important task of communicating why an ETS - and a rigorous ETS - is necessary. You can’t do short term populism and long term policy at the same time. Ross Garnaut made that point effectively last week. The government might have done well to take note.
More broadly, I think the context for this is that Labor is looking to cut the Greens out of the Senate equation on emissions trading. Continue reading ‘Bait and switch’
“Damn! I think we just passed the last exit for the Holocene!”
“I’m sorry, honey, I wasn’t looking.”
“We have to get off this highway. What’s the next exit?”
“It’s a long way ahead. Goes to somewhere called Perdition.”
That’s syndicated columnist Gwynne Dyer’s little allegory in The Salt Lake Tribune on where we are at with global warming. The Holocene has treated us well in the last 10,000 years or so. The civilisation project is coming along nicely and our numbers have increased about a thousandfold, many living with a degree of comfort and wealth simply unimaginable in the history of the species during the last ice age.
James Hansen, she* writes, says we need to go in a different direction from that recommended by scientists to date. Tamino at Open Mind in his recent post on Hansen also points out that the Holocene has served us well, with CO2 levels “varying between about 260 and 285 ppmv (parts per million by volume)”. He quotes Hansen as saying:
“We’re toast if we don’t get on a very different path,” Hansen told The Associated Press. “This is the last chance.”
Continue reading ‘Last exit on the road to Perdition’
Weak. Pick up the phone now and call up a Green Power provider ’cause the government has bought into the electricity generation and ‘trade exposed’ industry blackmail about blackouts and ‘moving offshore.’ Lenore Taylor and the guy from Australian Science nailed it in questions: if they’re true blue about lobbying for a truly global agreement they should call these bluffs or follow the UK’s lead and start formalising some supply chain pollution controls. For the record, all of the $500m supposedly earmarked for renewables will be going to Coal and today’s signals are that the Rudd Government’s travesty of renewables policies continues fatuous.
Continue reading ‘Wong ALL Wrong’
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