An Australian citizen currently languishes in jail in a foreign country, having been seized from an aircraft on the basis of an arrest warrant issued in a third country. The crime alleged to have been committed by the man relates only to the fact that he has repeatedly expressed views deemed unacceptable by that country.
Yet to date no one, not even the usual conservative suspects, has spoken out about the treatment of Frederick Toben, arrested at Heathrow while en route from the US to Dubai on a German warrant for Holocaust denial. Toben’s only supporters have been the appalling David Irving and the grotesque Lady Michele Renouf, a sort of Mitford-style far-right socialite.
Well, it may have been a miserable week on the ground, particularly if you’re trying to borrow money or are close to collecting your super pay out, but it’s been a great couple of weeks for being out of the Earth’s atmosphere.
It’s like the heady days of the Space Race in China at the moment. They’re having parades for the astronauts (I refuse to use the abomination “taikonaut”) who successfully completed China’s third crewed space mission, and the first space walk. From a western perspective, this isn’t all that impressive - they purchased a lot of the technology straight from the Russian space program, who’ve been doing this since 1965 (the first American spacewalk followed a couple of months later). But even re-implementing known space technology is pretty damn difficult. The bigger question is what the Chinese are likely to try in the future. Beating NASA back to the moon is a distinct possibility.
Meanwhile, perhaps the most scientifically important achievement of NASA crewed space program, the Hubble Space Telescope, has had the world’s most fortuitously timed fault. A final shuttle mission to service the Hubble was due to launch a couple of weeks from now. However, one of the Hubble’s systems responsible for transmitting scientific data back to Earth failed. There’s a backup component, but, unsurprisingly, NASA wants to replace the system, so they’re modifying the mission to include the replacement. On the downside, it’s also pushed the mission back to February next year. But better a failure now, when it can be fixed, than one later, when the shuttle won’t be available to fix it.
There’s no doubt that electoral systems structure party competition - something that will become very obvious to us when we start to focus on the New Zealand election. The American system is one of the great contributors to the anti-democratic lack of choice between the two major parties, and to the inflated emphasis on personalities among the candidates. Continental PR systems consistently develop coalitions and reflect a social fabric which emphasises a degree of consensus you don’t find in adversarial single member systems, and the resulting politics is decried by neoliberals for eschewing “economic reforms”.
Writing in the Centre for Policy Development’s Insight, Bill Bowtell takes a look at our electoral system:
Standing beside US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, Georgian President Mikhael Shaakazvili described Russia as “evil”. It’s probably too much to expect that he might recognise his own degree of responsibility for the war (not forgetting Vladimir Putin’s of course), but the use of language such as this is reminiscent of Rice’s boss and the moralisation of international relations and conflict usually associated with George W. Bush’s regime. Opinions will differ on whether the use of such emotive rhetoric makes the settlement and resolution of conflict easier or more difficult. Of course war is an evil, but some international actors have acted as if it’s a necessary evil over the course of this decade, and indeed made a virtue of pre-emptive war. So it’s been difficult not to notice the hypocrisy of American claims about the inviolability of sovereign states in the 21st century.
In what I think is quite a balanced article in the New Statesman, Misha Glenny looks at the influence of the reality-free thinking of the Dick Cheney faction on the lead up to the Georgian conflict, without minimising the autocratic and bellicose behaviour of the Putin regime. At Open Democracy, Donald Rayfield looks at the realistic options Georgia has, and some of the background to the war, while Neal Ascherson similarly examines how Georgia could progress beyond this war. Both write as avowed friends of Georgia, but both don’t think inflammatory rhetoric from Washington helps at all - they believe that it in fact hinders any positive outcome. This isn’t to adopt some deracinated Kissingerian realism, but rather to argue that the Manichean language of good and evil does anything but achieve the objectives it ostensibly sets out. As Ascherson powerfully demonstrates, there’s evil enough to go around on both sides of this conflict, with atrocities committed at least since the fall of the Soviet Union. A recognition of that - rather than positioning one side as a plucky sovereign democracy and the other as the incarnation of Satan - might actually provide a basis for realistic and peaceful progress.
There was some interesting discussion here at LP recently on this thread about the right to free speech, which I think took far too narrowly American and thus falsely universal a view. In the common law tradition of Britain and Australia and comparable countries, there hasn’t historically been a legal right to free speech (except in Parliament!). Though that’s changed to some degree here, and in Britain because of the importation of civil law jurisprudence via the European Union, it has always been the case that protection from intrusion and protection of reputation have been significant barriers to press “freedom”. Defamation law, however, is a blunt instrument when it comes to protecting privacy, and the Australian Law Reform Commission has released a report suggesting higher barriers for media intrusion into people’s private lives. The report can be found here and the salient recommendations are covered in this story.
The Right to Know Coalition - an organisation of Australian media companies - vigorously opposes any new legal protections for privacy.
In an op/ed pushing this barrow in The Australian, UQ’s Garrick Professor of Law James Allan makes the case against, predictably roping in the general conservative suspicion of any measure that might resemble a bill of rights. He concentrates on a recent UK case which turned on a right to privacy, brought by motor racing boss Max Mosley. Mosley’s adventures with sex workers and domination scenarios in a basement were reported by a British tabloid, and the story had all sorts of salacious elements - including the fact that Mosley’s famous father Sir Oswald was a home-grown British Fascist. But the court found that there was no public interest in revealing all this, and indeed it’s hard really to see what that public interest might be. The suggestion from the media crew is that “ordinary people” don’t have to worry about such intrusions into their private lives. But is that so?
It was a very easy contrast to make for the media - while World Youth Day 2008 has been acclaimed as a success by the Catholic Church in Australia, Anglicans were tearing themselves to pieces, with the decennial Lambeth Conference reduced to a farce. A large number of quasi-schismatic conservative bishops boycotted, having earlier set up a quasi-church outside the Anglican Communion’s traditional structures at GAFCON in Jerusalem.
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’
Not since the Hanging Gardens of Babylon has there been an urban innovation…oh, hang on…
Not since the gardens of Versailles have we seen…oh, wait…
Not since ivy…
Ok, so it’s not really a new concept - but there is something enormously appealing and compelling about the vertical gardens designed by Patrick Blanc, which have transformed more than a few nondescript buildings and shopping malls across Europe.
Using a kind-of trellis system and felt impregnated with seeds, Blanc can design growing walls which live off grey water and nutrients drip-fed from the top of the structure. The system is lightweight and doesn’t damage the building, as it’s suspended a few inches out from the surface.
There’s an intriguing by-election coming up in Great Britain where former Tory leadership contender and shadow Home Secretary David Davis has resigned his portfolio - and his seat of Haltemprice and Howden - “in order to force a by-election over the 42 day detention issue”. Legislation is currently before the House of Lords enabling terror suspects to be held without charge for that time period. Neither the Labour nor the Liberal Democrat parties are running a candidate, and Davis faces one major opponent - former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, whose candidacy was cooked up at a birthday party for Sun editor Rebekah Wade, though some also see the hand of Downing Street in his crusade. Rupert Murdoch was at the party and MacKenzie has already stated that Murdoch would be personally funding his campaign - which would be illegal because Murdoch is not a UK citizen. British politics has been thrown into turmoil as Davis proclaims that his constituents now have a chance to vote to “save Magna Carta”.
One of the most striking things about the Rudd era is the virtual disappearance of terrorism as a political issue. Aside from a passing reference in his 2020 Summit introductory speech, I have barely heard the words mentioned. While this can be partly attributed to the passing of time, it’s not the only reason. Look at what’s happening in the UK, where Gordon Brown has just bribed and blackmailed a bill authorizing 42 days of detention without charge for terrorism suspects through the Commons, despite widespread rebellion from Labour backbenchers.
The details of this grubby bill, and the tortuous process of getting it through the Commons, can be read at length at the Guardian, for those interested. In short, even the police and intelligence services (who never see an additional power they don’t like) seem remarkably unenthusiastic about the idea; the head of MI5 has even publicly stated that they haven’t requested it. The odds of it actually becoming law are not particularly high, either; the Lords will likely block it, and a court challenge is highly likely (and stands a good chance of succeeding). Regardless of the idea’s merits, however, Gordon Brown thinks he’s going to get a desperately needed win with the wider British public.. The Guardian quotes a poll with 69% of the British public approving the new measures.
It’s a moderately interesting hypothetical whether similar “tough on terrorism” laws would be a political winner in Australia at the moment. I’m very, very glad that Australian Labor don’t seem interested in finding out.
All the standard info is here and here. The country’s official website is here. But I’m still not finding anything that explains Azerbaijan’s entry in the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest!
Sadly, Dustin the Irish Turkey will not be taking the Eurovision Song Contest final stage tonight, after being eliminated in the semi-finals. But there’s still plenty to look forward to - awful Europop, truck-drivers key changes by the bucketload, hosts who can mangle an autocue in two languages, and some fairly bizarre pieces of surrealist theatre to accompany the inane tunes.
After making the sacrifice of sitting through both semi-finals, I can inform you that the only half-decent song amongst them this year is the French entry, “Divine”:
I have no idea whether it will be, but the songs that impressed me last night were the ones from Albania, Georgia and Portugal (and to a lesser degree Malta - good voice, lousy song). I didn’t see Friday night’s so not dissing any of the songs from the first semi (but I would like to diss Mr Denmark, who I hope has a long career in policing as he apparently desires).
Here’s an open Eurovision thread. Please no discussion of winners until 12.45am - because otherwise you’re doing the spoiler thing for our Perthling friends. So unless you want to earn the justified enmnity of Anna Winter, you’ve been warned!
May I also add, if SBS are reading, that next year I think we want to see more Julia Zemiro and less of the Pommie commentary…
Image of the Prague skyline courtesy of Pavelm - licenced under Creative Commons.
I didn’t comment, but I read the thread on Kim’s post on the crimes of Joseph Fritzl and discourses in the media (Austrian and otherwise) about cultural and national responsibility. I found the thread a fascinating read, and I’m not certain that anyone could finally arbitrate the question of whether a certain Nazism or its social legacy was actually at stake here or whether to think that is to misunderstand the nature of causation and social pathologies as they manifest themselves in individual lives and choices. That’s forcing the two positions argued somewhat, and occluding a lot of nuance, but I suspect that the debate’s conditions of possibility include different levels of explanation and different methods of thought and intellectual work - I thought some of the borders of the social scientific and humanistic worldviews were both marked out and blurred in that discussion. It ought to be possible to integrate the two, but saying that is harder than doing it because there is a certain split - that’s not just manifested in disciplinary training and territory in the academy - between a more hermeneutic and a more positivist style of thought. That’s actually a dividing line that’s inscribed in our everyday culture as well as in our intellectual traditions in the West, and it’s possibly a most unfortunate divide. But then national borders, and cultures, are contingent constructions of Western modernity too.
Anyway, that’s something of a prelude to some thoughts the thread stimulated for me. I remembered I’d written a post back in December 2004 on W.G. Sebald’s work. At the time, I wrote, apropos of his A Natural History of Destruction:
Literature has often been seen as a mirror of meaning, a way of sense-making, what the literary scholar Erich Auerbach called, following Aristotle, Mimesis. To take the example of the hitherto unparalleled destruction wrought by the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648, German literature produced such classics as Johann Jakob Von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus (first published in 1669) and much more recently, Günter Grass ’ The Meeting at Telgte.
There is a massive, and often fine, literature of the Holocaust. But going in search of a similar literature of the suffering of German citizens during the Second World War, Sebald was surprised to find it scant, and largely unsatisfactory.
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
There was some interesting discussion here at LP recently 
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 - 
Recent comments
Nanuestalker, Mark, Nanuestalker, Nanuestalker, Kim, Nanuestalker [...]
Kim, Thomas Paine
Kim, Darryl Rosin, Darryl Rosin, Kim, Darryl Rosin, Kim [...]
Kim, OldSkeptic, OldSkeptic, Lefty E, Kim, Ambigulous [...]
Chris (a different one), FDB, Chris, ken, Lefty E, ken [...]
Kevin Rennie, Megan, paul walter, Mark, Fine, Paul Norton [...]
Andrew E, alister, Robert Merkel, Chris Anderson, Robert Merkel, PinkyOz [...]
GregM, FDB, via collins, paul walter, jinmaro, Adrien [...]
brettc, Adrien, steve at the pub, Fine, professor rat, steve at the pub [...]
Adrien, Ambigulous, Adrien, Adrien, Helen, Ambigulous [...]
j., j., myriad, Paul Burns, Ambigulous, myriad [...]
steve at the pub, Huh, paul walter, Helen, steve at the pub, Huh [...]