Ok, so I’m totally not getting why anyone dislikes River Song. Can anyone enlighten me?
Update: Particularly given the big hints about the nature of River Song’s relationship with the Doctor, I thought sending her off to a world where she looks after made up children was a big disappointment. She should have been liberated to be a scholar adventurer in another timestream (h/t Shakira) or if there wasn’t enough of her to save, to have had adventures in all the books in all the world (h/t P). It was a library after all!
[As the astute will note, discussion of this ep is proceeding on FB and gchat… We need a fanfic revolution!]
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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!
On Friday night, I went along with some friends to the opening of the Brisbane Artists Run Initiatives Festival at Jugglers Art Space. And a good night it was. And last night I saw the wonderful Linda E and Poly Toxic @ the Powerhouse as part of the Pasifika Festival.
Last week local newspapers were filled with the very sad story of the suicide of an Australian actor.
This man had apparently been suffering from depression, and in some of the photographs that appeared in the media of him his eyes revealed a great deal of emotional pain.
[Via Boing Boing] I must confess the idea of listening to some music tracks to get myself in the mood for reading a particular book has never occurred to me. But it has occurred to William Gibson. Here’s his playlist for Spook Country. I must say the dude’s got good taste. Excellent to see Lucinda Williams and Neko Case make an appearance.
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Bene mentioned last night a desire for some commentary on the cynically timed announcement of McCain’s running partner as Sarah Palin, so here goes: here’s a short bit from the LA Times, who sums her up as a risky choice due to her inexperience, the very charge that the McCain campaign has been harping on with respect to Obama (others don’t buy that line).
How will she fare in the TV debates against the veteran politicker Biden? Will Palin’s history of running for Miss Alaska back when Obama was applying to Harvard Law School help balance the whole “celebrity” schtick? We’ll have to wait and see over the next two months (which could be a very long two months of infuriatingsexism levelled against a different female candidate this time (the concept of vpilf.com is especially obstreperating)). But if the McCain campaign has chosen a woman at least partly to appeal to Hillary supporters, well: anti-abortion advocate Palin is not the woman those disaffected Dems are looking for, that’s for sure. How insulting to left-leaning women generally for the GOP to think that she could be: as if all that matters to Hillary supporters is that Hillary was a woman, so Palin is interchangeable just because she’s a woman too. Continue reading ‘Obligatory Obama acclamation & McCain Veep selection thread’
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Obama has accepted the Democratic nomination. The full text (as prepared) should include a hat tip to Kevin Rudd - yep, the working families have made an appearance.
For what it’s worth, there are some strange tropes in American politics, even if the broad sentiments are things most of us would endorse. For instance, Obama explicitly mentions the idea of “in ten years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East”; it’s nonsense, and Obama is smart enough to know it. China’s economic growth is to be feared; here, of course, China is the magic pudding that keeps on paying more for our dirt, no matter how much of it we send over. And climate change seems to be right at the bottom of the list of priorities.
Reaction from the American lefty blogosphere has generally been enthusiastic, but then again Obama’s ability to give a good speech has never been in doubt. Here’s hoping it puts him on track for a successful campaign. Aside for what it means for Americans themselves, McCain’s foreign policy is just scary.
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The MSM is full of reports and commentaries praising Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard for taking on the teacher unions with their proposals for “a new national system of school transparency” based on publication of information and ranking of the performances of schools and those who work in them.
However, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has a different view. Its Improving School Leadership study finds that the kind of public reporting and ranking of school performance proposed by the Rudd government does not, on the evidence, improve school performances and may even be counterproductive. Continue reading ‘OECD in league with communist teacher unions’
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Earlier this week at New Matilda, I explored the growing problem of the media’s fascination with corporate-backed reports and surveys. There’s already been plenty of discussion here about the BCA report into emissions trading, and my colleage Ben Pobije put a satirical skewer through Bernard Salt’s pop demography.
I want to specifically have a look at BankWest and the latest edition of that bank’s so-called “Quality of Life Index”. This report got a massive free kick from a range of media outlets. Even the ABC had no problem covering the report, making sure they included the corporate sponsor’s brand when referring to the “BankWest Quality of Life Index” on ABC TV news, before going on to give BankWest executive Ian Corfield some free media on the national broadcaster. A Google News search on this topic yielded 167 mentions — not bad going for a report that has some serious methodological flaws.
The BankWest study because it shows just how easily busy journalists and credulous media outlets can be taken in by what appears to be rigorous research. The media reported the findings of the report with little analysis of what it actually said, and no examination of the dubious reasoning behind its impressive league tables of best and worst local government areas in the nation. “The BankWest Quality of Life Index has debunked the myth of Australians’ ’sea-change’ and ‘tree-change’ desires,” is how the ABC story led.
So, Barry O’Farrell and the Coalition rained on Morris Iemma’s privatisation parade. Now, the Dilemmster announces that he can still privatise the retailers and generation sites without parliamentary approval.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Iemma’s original argument some high sounding blather about the sovereignty of the people’s representatives in Parliament assembled and governing in the people’s interest not those of the unions and the party machine? Internal ALP democracy was supposed to give way to parliamentary democracy.
Pathetic. Contempt for his own party, the people of New South Wales and democratic institutions.
Club Troppo’s Don Arthur and I started a correspondence by email about some of the issues I raised in my post the other day about neo-liberalism and thinktanks, and the very rapid Blairisation of the Rudd/Gillard agenda (which has certainly become even more evident in the interim with the latest instalment in the “education revolution” and the momentum that some liberal and libertarian bloggers are correct to assume is building up towards vouchers in all forms of education). I don’t want to try to represent Don’s side of the discussion, but I did want to talk about a few things that I put to him, and thank him for the very stimulating opportunity to clarify my thoughts.
One argument that’s often raised by liberals in denying that talk of neoliberalism makes sense is the claim that the state is still large as a percentage of GDP, that Howard did redistribution, and so on. That’s a point that Andrew Norton often makes, in claiming that there’s a degree of social democratic consensus still embodied in the governing practices of the Australian state. John Quiggin has made the same, or a very similar point, from a different political position. There’s some truth in this, but only some. No, Margaret Thatcher didn’t succeed in rolling back the state very far. But expecting her to is to make a false assumption - that the ideological objective only has meaning insofar as it achieves its ostensible aims. What she was actually doing was building up a stronger state in some areas to contain the damage from its withdrawal from some areas. You need a strong state to attack the weak, basically.
Crikey’s Eric Beecher was quoted in this Sally Jackson piece as saying online media will not be able to bridge the quality gap that’s being created by the long emergency we’re seeing in the usual MSM outlets.
Mr Beecher warned that Fairfax’s decision this week to sack staff at its flagship broadsheet newspapers — The Sydney Morning Herald in Sydney and The Age in Melbourne — would blow a hole in this country’s traditional quality media that all of the new media’s bloggers and websites would not be able to fill. He said that included the online publications he was involved in, such as Crikey and Business Spectator. “What’s at risk here is the role of well researched, serious journalism to act as a check and balance in the system of democracy,” he told ABC. “Online media can replace part of it. The four websites I’m involved in employ 30 or 40 full-time journalists, which is quite a lot in independent media terms, but compared with 300 or 400 journalists on big daily newspapers it is fairly small.
I don’t necessarily think he’s wrong but I do think it’s way too early to tell, after all we’re still in a period where a thousand flowers have yet to bloom.
But he warned that few observers had predicted the current threat to quality journalism.
Odd, I distinctly remember seeing Philip Knightley speak on this exact topic a few years ago here in Sydney, and he wasn’t the only esteemed MSM survivor to sound a warning, it’s been said for years.
Poor old Morris. He can’t take a trick. After cunningly switching the introduction of the electricity privatisation bills to the Upper House (to avoid the chance of a symbolic defeat in the House that actually determines government and presumably to unleash the persuasive charm of Michael Costa), now he’s finding to his surprise that his troops in the Liberal Party won’t do his bidding. Wtf? But it’s the logic of NSW state politics at the moment. Confused columnists at The Australian are also decrying the Liberals for doing something which is a political no brainer - going with public opinion rather than propping up Iemma. The “business community” might be unhappy, but on that see this post from Andrew Elder, who I think reads the politics somewhat better than Tim Dunlop does. Dunlop seems to have partially swallowed the “test of O’Farrell’s mettle” theme. I think it’s perfectly sensible, and indeed appropriate, for an opposition to oppose highly unpopular legislation which is misconceived anyway.
Update: A new post on Iemma’s latest move - dispensing with parliamentary democracy altogether.
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Kevin Rudd’s address to the National Press Club yesterday (you can read it here) was notable as much for what he didn’t say as for what he did. I’d be very surprised indeed if the expectation that he would spell out a “narrative” wasn’t created by Labor types themselves. It’s not the sort of thing that journos just make up. But with his tick a box recital of what the government had done on education, he’s signalling that he’s not going to play that particular game - pragmatism rather than oratory is his weapon of choice. But like a lot of what Rudd has announced as PM, there’s very little detail to back up his various initiatives in the latest “chapter” of the “education revolution”. That’s ok, though, apparently for a usually sceptical media, because he’s representing himself as taking on the teachers’ unions.
As Bismarck commented on this thread, it’s an old trick. As old as Bill Clinton actually - who first trialled it in Arkansas when he wanted to demonstrate that he wasn’t a “traditional” Democrat. And, as we all know, Arkansas now has a school system that’s the envy of the world (ahem)…
At one stage, having read a lecture by Mark Davis in Overland, I thought his new book was going to be an update of Gangland. I’ve just started reading The Land of Plenty: Australia in the 2000s (expect a full review in due course), but it appears very much as if at some point in the course of writing, it turned into an update of the late Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. Certainly the idea that we’re coasting on our luck, riding on the back of another resources boom, is both enough to set in train a comparison between the Australia of 1964 and the nation of 2008 and to recognise a powerful structure of feeling which Kevin07 articulated all the way to the Lodge.
One of the more interesting arguments Davis makes in the opening chapter is that “being Australian is an ethical project”. He quotes Nettie Palmer, writing in Meanjin in 1944:
A new country that is merely an imitation of its predecessors, that discovers no new thoughts or forms, that contributes nothing to the meaning of the world - would it deserve to exist?
In a way, the dislocations and the sense of insecurity Davis seeks to trace over the past three decades reflect a disjunction between the nation and the state - a disjunction embodied in the casual bipartisanship of the major parties, even if some of the wellsprings of everyday doubt and pain were harnessed by Kevin Rudd and Labor in 2007. If one were to compare political ideologies, both conservatism and social democracy - in quite different ways - want to see the state as a vehicle for creating meanings and symbols, for fostering a shared and collective culture. One looks back, the other forward, but it’s characteristic of both to regard governance as something like steering a ship - while one may tack often, there’s an intention of heading in a determined direction.
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Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
At one stage, having read a lecture by Mark Davis in 
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