Tag Archive for 'skepticlawyer'

Guest post by Legal Eagle: Earliest political memories

Published
by
Guest Poster
2 months ago
in Life, Politics and Sociology
. 156 Comments

Cross-posted from Skepticlawyer.

Today my daughter was playing with her pink superball while my son was asleep (it’s small, so she’s only allowed to get it out while he’s sleeping). I heard her mutter to her toys while brandishing the pink superball, “This is the Prime Minister, and if you do something he doesn’t like, he will bounce in your eye.” My husband has pointed out that she may have learned the concept from a book entitled Blossom Possum (beautifully illustrated by Rafe Champion’s late wife, as it happens). I have also tried to explain to her what a Prime Minister does, but given the actions of the superball, I’m not sure if she quite “got it”.

Anyway, after I posted this incident on my Facebook page, the post started off a string of reminiscences about people’s childhood political memories. It transpires that an amazing number of my friends just loved Bob Hawke when they were kids. I don’t know if that means my friends’ families were generally Labor-leaning, or that Bob had a special appeal which made him loved by kids? When my sister was a little girl, she loved Bob. One general election, she asked Dad who he voted for, and Dad teasingly said he voted for Andrew Peacock because the Liberals gave him a shortbread round (actually he’d bought it at the school stall at the voting booth). My sister sobbed and sobbed, and said, “Now the forests will die because you haven’t voted for Bob!”

Mark Bahnisch commented that when he was in Grade 2, he wrote a poem about Gough Whitlam. Then Mark and I decided that we should write a joint post about what everyone’s earliest political memories are. I remember that I never liked Joh Bjelke-Petersen as a child. In addition, with a child’s merciless observation, I noted his head was shaped like a peanut, and thus I thought it was extraordinary that he was an ex-peanut farmer. Like my sister, I also loved Bob Hawke when I was little.

Do you remember whether you liked particular politicians when you were young? Or did you dislike particular politicians?

Facebook, social media, subjectivity and workplace privacy

Published
by
Mark
7 months ago
in Blogging, Culture, Language, Life, Media, Sociology and The Web
. 36 Comments

One of the most interesting teaching assignments I’ve had for a while is tutoring in a course in New Communications Technologies offered through the School of Humanities at Griffith. Some of the class discussions we’ve had so far this semester have been really interesting – confirming some hunches I have about the fallacies of the ‘Digital Natives’ discourse among other things. But one of the most intriguing aspects of our interchanges has been the articulation of differing views on and revelation of different levels of knowledge about the issue of privacy in the use of social media, and particularly social networking sites such as Facebook (whose use is now so ubiquitous that like Google, it’s morphed from a proper noun into a verb).

It would seem that I’m not the only person facilitating such conversations in a university context. Melissa Gregg, from Sydney Uni, wrote a really ace post the other day about some issues which had arisen in tutorials she convened about Facebook and employers’ demands for profiles as part of the recruitment and selection process. She writes about this at home cooked theory:

…for me, the most disturbing revelation came in tutorials, when students started talking about how many employers are now asking for print-outs of Facebook profiles from job applicants. It sounded particularly common in entertainment and service industries, even though I detected some were suggesting it was commonplace in corporate interviews as well–that it should be taken for granted if you were looking to work for a significant firm.

Her remarks sparked some interesting comments, and prompted a post on the legal issues surrounding this sort of demand by Legal Eagle at Skepticlawyer. Legal Eagle’s post, as usual assured in its comprehensiveness and insight, correctly notes that the law has not kept up with technology in this domain, as in many others.

There’s another set of issues arising here about the increasing blurring of professional and personal identity. Continue reading ‘Facebook, social media, subjectivity and workplace privacy’

Who is Sharon Gould?

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 2 months ago
in Blogging, Ethics, Media, Politics and Science
. Closed

Apparently it’s now the question on everyone’s lips – apropos of the Keith Windschuttle Quadrant hoax. “Sharon Gould” was the pseudonym used by a hoaxer who submitted an egregious article embodying “outrageous propositions” about GM research and splicing human genes into food to Windschuttle, which he published. Crikey revealed the hoax. Don Arthur, writing at Troppo, doesn’t know the answer to the question of the moment, but he links to some people who have some ideas, and has done a bit of googling off his own bat. Both Jason Soon and Nexus6 believe they have identified Katherine Wilson as the hoaxer. I offer no opinion on the matter.

But I wanted to clarify something – in comments at Troppo, mel wrote:

I wonder if Wilson tipped Mark Bahnisch off about the hoax …..? AFAIK he was the first blogger to flag the issue.

Aside from – as appears to be his wont – making false and self-serving statements regarding moderation on this blog and throwing in a bit of personal abuse for good measure – never a good start – mel is committing a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, which abounds these days. I posted about the Crikey story because I happened to be online when I received the Crikey email. That’s all. That was the first I’d heard of it. I don’t read Quadrant as a rule, and I’m actually not all that exercised about this whole affair.

Continue reading ‘Who is Sharon Gould?’