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Boing Boing reports:
The Orwell Prize will mark the 70th anniversary of the Orwell Diaries by serializing them, one day at a time, on a blog — reminiscent of the way that Phil Gyford syndicated Pepys’s Diary.
That’s so cool. Though actually I suspect Pepys would have been the better blogger. He was LJ circa 1660.
The whole revival of Orwell thing is weird and so overdetermined. On one hand, there’s the Orwell as anti-po/mo theme. On the other, there’s Orwell as the “hero” of the “Decent Left” theme (cf. you know, everything Christopher Hitchens has recently written). What’s ignored and effaced totally is Orwell the polemicist in favour of imagining a postwar social democracy. If you read what he was saying in the 1930s, what he was wishing for - as a “realistic utopia” - was something very like what was envisaged in the whole Beveridge/Keynes libertarian social democracy vision. 1984 was also really meant to be more about the distortion of this “new Jerusalem” by the statist Labour Party than “Stalin”. But anyways… Orwell as a writer - and here I’d gesture to the almost forgotten Burmese Days - is also much neglected. Perhaps his diaries will stimulate a respectful consideration of him in regard to his own concerns not some dumbarsed political point scoring about teh war on terror or whatevs.
The text of the papal apology, delivered this morning at a Mass in St Mary’s Cathedral, can be read here.
The symbolism of the setting for the apology - a mass for seminarians and members of religious orders and the consecration of a new altar for the Cathedral - was no doubt intended by the Vatican to signal that the Pope was speaking sternly to those at the centre of the institution. But it’s also deeply problematic - as it suggests that the problem is only one for the church, excluding the victims who were left outside while the pomp and panoply of the liturgy took place for the exclusive benefit of the hierarchy.
Continue reading ‘Pope Benedict XVI apologises to victims of sexual abuse in Australia’
In contrast to the media coverage earlier in the year when the People’s Republic of China suffered such an overwhelming public relations disaster in the context of protests from human rights and Tibetan activists against the Olympic torch, very little has been heard of Tibet in the mainstream media of late. All that we’ve seen lately in the Australian press is the solemn warnings from the Australian Olympics Committee that any athletes wearing an innocuous t-shirt with a generic human rights message offered to those interested by the Australia Tibet Council would be immediately sent home. Lest they annoy the Chinese government, and violate the “spirit of the Olympics” presumably. The corporate sponsored Olympiad brooks no petty “mixing” of politics and sport, of course.
Continue reading ‘Tibet, human rights, history and the 2008 Olympics’
A lot of the debate about WorkChoices, quite properly, revolved around not just the severe distraint that the legislation placed on bargaining power in the employment relationship but also on its failure to accord employees basic civil rights in the workplace. Much of recent thinking on employment has revolved around extending the rights proper to civil society to the workplace - and reframing a perspective that saw rights only at issue insofar as they revolved around liberal principles of contract. But basic rights within the workplace should just be a baseline, as it were. I don’t agree with all of the arguments in his paper, but I’m pleased to see David Coats from The Work Foundation publishing a provocative piece for the new(ish) Australian thinktank Per Capita entitled Quality of Work and A New Politics of A Quality of Life. [link to pdf]
The principal goal of progressive politics is to create a society in which people have the capabilities to choose a life that they value. Allied to this of course is the profound conviction that unless certain goods are provided collectively – education, healthcare, infrastructure and physical security for example – then some citizens, generally the poorest and most vulnerable, will fall by the wayside. The opportunity to choose a life that one values is inevitably diminished if an employee is condemned to insecure poorly paid work with limited opportunities for progression. “Bad work” in this sense is a significant constraint on individual liberty.
There’s no doubt, I think, that work continues to be central to our late modern society not just in terms of the creation of wealth, but also in enabling or potentially enabling fulfilment, creativity and self-actualisation. Continue reading ‘Bad work and the denial of liberty’
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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’
It sounds like some dumb reality tv show, doesn’t it? But we all know who didn’t get voted out of the house.
As almost everyone in the world knows, it’s election year in America.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (don’t ask, you already know the answer!) might be in trouble. Iraq might be - kinda, sorta - an election issue. But if - like me - you’re following the American Election via either the blogosphere or (oh noes!) the MSM, you’d notice a huge disconnect between how big an issue climate change is here, and how totally miniscule it is in the U S of A.
I hope Al Gore might have something to say at the Democratic Convention.
But that might not occur. And even if it does, and that and all the Arnie stuff aside, it’s going to be pretty much a side issue. Lord only knows what we can do, but those of us who, like me, are Democrats Overseas, might consider a bit of lobbying. But we might think as well about remembering that climate change is a global issue, and trying to get the Australian government to use whatever leverage it has to get it treated as such. Continue reading ‘The World’s Top Emitter’
A fortnight ago, after the characters at The Opposition Organ went into full on attack mode, confecting a picture of governmental chaos and evil spin from Kevin Rudd and his minions, we could witness the construction of one of those “media narratives” we’re constantly told by… the media… are so important. Last year we saw the then Government Gazette go into brain explosion mode, trying desperately to shore up the foundations of the then media narrative - that Howard was a political genius blah blah with a veritable plague of rabbits concealed in his Akubra. That was a bridge too far. Because it showed the narrative dissipating before our eyes as the effort being put into walling it off from reality was too painfully evident. Something similar is happening this year, with the cracks very indiscreetly showing, as the beleaguered “political class” of punditocrats effectively bemoan their lack of influence by letting a few too many cats out of the bag while trying to sew up the rips in the fabric of their dreams.
So we had Andrew “Insider” Bolt, who recently “celebrated” ten years of his column by “toot[ing] [sic] [his] own triumphs [sic]” (the link is to Grodscorp’s fisking not to Bolta’s auto-Birthday party), claiming - how embarrassment! - that it was journalists who swung the Gippsland by-election (the link goes to the post at LP not to Bolt’s blog). On Saturday, we had Christopher Pearson joining his News Limited colleague Glenn Milne in touting the saviour like potential of Peter Costello - the “man of the future”, we’re told! Although he apparently has “no malice” for Brendan Nelson, what’s one of the factors that Pearson cites as demonstrating that Nelson is doomed?
Partly it’s a case of not having won over the press gallery.
Yep, that’s the reason why Nelson bombs in the polls. Must be all those journos who live in Gippsland being over-sampled. I actually suspect Costello’s smart enough not to believe this nonsense, though I also imagine he takes the flattery in the spirit with which it’s given. Continue reading ‘Good spin and bad spin and media narratives (and the Garnaut Report)’
This post isn’t quite as long as I thought it might be, and I think that’s a good thing. There’s no doubt the Garnaut Report [link to pdf] is seriously big as well as eminently serious, and I suspect a lot of the blogosphere’s climate change wonks are waiting to digest it rather than rushing in to write insta-commentary. Although the report is a very serious piece of policy work, its release is also a political event par excellence, and taking the time to understand the report’s arguments and proposals is a template that could usefully be applied to other big political happenings - including but not limited to the Budget - even if it goes against the grain of the 24/7 media cycle. It’s also worth noting that these sort of issues really lend themselves to the power of aggregating distributed knowledge - given the number of seriously informed people out there participating in the climate change debate - and therefore the comments threads are possibly more important than some of the posts themselves - which informed the approach we took at LP on Friday by posting an open thread.
So, what has the blogosphere had to say about the Garnaut Climate Change Review interim Report? Continue reading ‘Garnaut: the blogosphere reacts’
[Via Boing Boing] Iran is contemplating legislation which would make blogging a capital offence - if it “disturbs mental security in society”.
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Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber posts about a paper he co-authored with Eric Lawrence and John Sides - “Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation and Polarization in American Politics”. The paper, which is a work in progress, can be downloaded from here [registration required] or here [direct link to pdf].
There is active debate among political scientists and political theorists over the relationship between participation and deliberation among citizens with different political viewpoints. Internet based blogs provide an important testing ground for these scholars’ theories, especially as political activity on the Internet becomes increasingly important. In this article, we use the first major dataset describing blog readership to examine the relationship between deliberation, polarization and political participation among blog readers. We find that, as existing theories might predict, blog readers tend to read blogs that accord with their political beliefs. Cross-cutting readership of blogs on both the left and right of the spectrum is relatively rare. Furthermore, we find strong evidence of polarization among blogreaders, who tend to be more polarized than both non-blog-readers and consumers of various television news, and roughly as polarized as US Senators
The data on which they rely in order to form their conclusions is American, of course, but I doubt the picture would be very different in Australia. It’s interesting, in passing, to note that those blog readers who do look at blogs outside their ideological comfort zone are more likely to be left-wing than right-wing. As the authors state in the abstract (part of which is reproduced above), the jumping off point for the research is partly the political science debate about the value of deliberation.
Continue reading ‘Blog readers and political polarisation’
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To be fair to Morris Iemma and his bunch of clowns masquerading as a government, New South Wales isn’t alone in imposing risible and over the top security regulations for major “public events”. We’ve seen similar things in finance talkfests with Melbourne and CHOGM in Queensland saw Peter Beattie invent preventive detention for “known public nuisances”, as well as going to ludicrous lengths to prevent protest. But Iemma’s mob seem to have made it an art form, perhaps because as I’ve speculated before, their sense of authoritarianism compensates for their total ineffectuality in governing just about anything else than public events. (Compare - “public services”.) But the latest bunch of regulations for the Pope Fest really take the cake. It’s more or less private governance. Where’s the public benefit in preventing pilgrims attending World Youth Day in Sydney this month from being annoyed? Will their world really come to an end if someone hands them a condom or wears a t-shirt with an anti-homophobia message? What possible public justification does the NSW government have for denying basic rights to freedom of expression at the instance of the fragile petals in Cardinal Pell’s hierarchy?
Continue reading ‘Annoyed!’
The new Senate won’t formally sit until 26 August, but scrutiny of the Greens Senators, Family First’s Stephen Fielding and South Australian Independent Nick Xenophon has already been ramped up, since they all now collectively hold the balance of power. Props to my CPD colleague Ben Eltham for interviewing Xenophon and thus introducing him and some of his policy positions to those of us who aren’t familiar with South Australian politics.
While the Greens’ policy positions are well known, or if they’re not, they’re reasonably accessible, and thus transparent for those who take the time to look, Xenophon’s disclaimer of any left/right ideological commitment and indeed the relatively narrow range of issues on which Fielding has taken a prominent stand raises an important question. Unfortunately, we’ve lost our most prominent blogging Senator - from the Senate, that is, not from blogging. One of the Democrats’ more laudable stances was accountability to their membership (although aspects of that commitment - particularly the low threshold for a leadership challenge - were also probably a large contributor to their downfall), and Andrew Bartlett carried this level of accountability to a broader public through blogging the work of the Senate, which also allowed for public input into his legislative and policy decisions.
Continue reading ‘Open Senate?’
The Young Liberals’ “Make Education Fair” campaign, which I wrote about a few months ago, has resulted in a Senate inquiry, one of the last legacies of the Coalition’s majority in the upper house. The terms of reference are:
Continue reading ‘Students and academic freedom’
Last year I wrote that Dr. Mohamed Haneef was an Australian Dreyfus. This year, Turkish trade unionist Meryem Özsögüt is a Turkish Mohamed Haneef.
Ms. Özsögut, a member of the management board of a Turkish public sector union, has been detained for six months allegedly in connection with “being a member of a terrorist organisation” and “for making propaganda in favour of the terrorist organisation”.
More on Ms. Ozsogut’s detention can be read here. A petition to request her release can be signed here.
P.S. The PSI, to which I’ve linked, is an international federation of public sector unions whose Australian affiliates include the Community & Public Sector Union, the Australian Services Union and the Communication, Electrical & Plumbing Union.
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I’ve been reading Jerry F. Hough’s Changing Party Coalitions: The Mystery of the Red State-Blue State Alignment on and off over the weekend, after it arrived from Amazon on Friday. I’d been wanting to have a read for a while - after I saw this review. Part of what Hough - a long time Sovietologist and comparative politics scholar - is trying to do is to expose some of the myths that we tend to create about past political patterns and partisan alignments - based on our present understanding of voter motivation and party image. He makes the point - not in itself an unusual one but rarely developed to its full analytical potential - that the Democrats and Republicans have effectively swapped ideological sides several times, though his analysis of the Jacksonian-Jeffersonian mythos of the Democratic Party suggests that the Donkeys were never actually to the left of the GOP before FDR. It’s also highly relevant to note that Adlai Stevenson was the first “New Democrat” - adopting a “suburban strategy” that effectively turned its back on the New Deal’s economic agenda, and that JFK, although his ideas on foreign policy were quite distinct from Adlai’s, shared his economic conservatism and was effectively a do-nothing President in the domestic policy field. The fact that “left” and “right” or “liberal” and conservative” have shifted ground from the New Deal party system to a cultural focus, and that McGovernite cultural liberalism was a big part of that shift, obscures for instance the truth that Richard Nixon was arguably a moderate liberal domestically, while McGovern’s economics had more in common with Goldwater than Johnson.
Hough’s also fascinating on the contingency of racial and national identity, and although some of his own commitments are shaped by a relatively conservative developmentalist political science ideology of modernisation, his injection of a long historical perspective and a sociological toolkit into political analysis of the American scene is a very valuable contribution. Changing Party Coalitions was written in 2005, but his discussion of the dynamics of the recent “Red State-Blue State Alignment” is quite prescient - and very useful for thinking about what Barack Obama’s biggest political challenge might be, and why Hillary Clinton was able to do well as a very unlikely standard bearer of the white working class.
Continue reading ‘Beyond the red state-blue state dichotomy’
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