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 [...]
Not the Twitter election
Malcolm Farnsworth has an excellent piece at The Drum on how claims that the 2010 federal election was going to be a Twitter campaign are very wide of the mark. I’d recommend reading the whole thing. If the premise is [...]
Possum needs a job!
If anyone wants to employ “one economist possum, slightly used, occasionally abused, good with numbers and other stuff. Intermittently snarky but always well humoured”, please see Possum’s post at Pollytics. I’d be very sad to see Possum become a less [...]
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 [...]
New Matilda to fold: What comes next?
Crikey is reporting that New Matilda, which launched in August 2004, is to cease publishing on June 25. Editor Marni Cordell sums up the website’s achievements, and discusses its financial plight, in an editorial published this morning: The online media [...]
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 [...]
The Deveny post we had to have
There’s been a lot of discussion on the Condemnation thread about The Age‘s sacking of Catherine Deveny for tweets she made on Logies night, so perhaps we should have a thread devoted to it. As a discussion starter, there are [...]
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