Qantas dispute: How Joyce’s actions could backfire
The actions of Qantas in locking out its workforce yesterday, led by CEO Alan Joyce who on Friday received a 71% increase in his remuneration, have huge potential to backfire. Bernard Keane encapsulates Joyce’s strategy: Alan Joyce’s logic is the elegant [...]
London burning IV: Tory authoritarianism triumphant
British Prime Minister David Cameron’s speech to the House of Commons in the aftermath of the English riots set the tone for a bizarre crackdown: Responsibility for crime always lies with the criminal. But crime has a context. And we [...]
The Global Village still has idiots
WA’s Attorney General wants to give parents legal rights over their children’s Facebook pages. Miranda Devine, in her typically careful way with words, describes social media as “barbarism, unleashing the worst elements of human nature, with no restraints” and quotes [...]
How have your (non political junkie) friends reacted to the CEF?
One of the benefits of Facebook and its lax privacy policies is that you often get to see casual acquaintances, who you don’t normally talk politics with, are reacting to things in the news. The political junkies in my social [...]
Social capital, social networking and the Brisbane floods
My colleague in several incarnations, Dr John Harrison, has a neat post on social capital and the SEQ floods at jmaced: The good thing is that communities with high levels of social capital recover from adverse circumstances faster than those [...]
Democratise or die: the future of the ALP
One of the ironies of the British election, as I noted at the time, was that a campaign and a result which seemed to portend an end to politics as usual brought forth a reactionary result – the coalescence of [...]
Facebook, privacy and social utility
The biggest story in social media over the last couple of months has been the rapid decline in trust between Facebook and its users. Far from being a phenomenon restricted to techie activists, Facebook’s campaign to push an ever increasing [...]
Government: Don't feed the trolls
The last couple of weeks have seen a fair bit of furore about those intertubes. Anna Bligh wrote to Facebook about the defacing of a couple of memorial sites for a child and a teenager who’d been murdered in Queensland. [...]
Rudd on Qanda open thread
The first Q&A for the year features Kevin Rudd and an audience of yoof in Old Parliament House (no doubt screened according to approved Abetz principles to include quotas of Young Libs, LaRoucheites, etc). I won’t be liveblogging it, because [...]
Haiti: Social and historical contexts
When disaster strikes, there’s always a reflex to suggest that politics is a dirty word, that humanitarian considerations trump any sort of consideration of the context of the impact of horrendous events. There’s something of the ‘act of God’ and [...]
Guest post by Tim Watts: “I’m not Racist, but… I’m Complacent"
My mate Tim Watts, who’s been doing some great work online on violent racist incidents in Melbourne, has provided this guest post. Previous discussion of the spate of attacks on Indian students at LP can be found here. -MB “I’m [...]
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