I never believed the hopeful myth that Osama bin Laden was just a smear of DNA in a cave in Tora Bora. I mean, this was a guy who'd survived the war with the Soviets and then years of being tracked by Western and Arab intelligence services, long before 9/11, not to speak of su...
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Just a very quick post, to draw attention to Julia Baird's op-ed column in today's Sydney Morning Herald, which quotes yours truly a couple of times, one from my book In Hollow Lands, once from my controversial piece the other day. It's generally about Halloween; and she has i...
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Or so said Second Lieutenant Melissa Stockwell on her return to the States after a routine trip in a Humvee from the Green Zone in Baghdad to the morass of Mosul outside Iraq's sanitised Western occupied zone led to an attack on her armoured vehicle, which because of the disor...
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"Cute kittens grow up to be cute cats" writes Arthur Chenkoff . They sure do! Take Private Hammer for example. Hammer is a brave tabby cat who provided some much appreciated support to American soldiers in Iraq: "He was born at the site," said Staff Sgt. Rick Bousfield. "There...
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Troppo is gaining a decidedly genteel, cerebral flavour of late. Nothing wrong with that, but for this Scots-Irish member of the oz trailer-trash class there's a need for an occasional leavening of down-market physicality. And what better way to do it than muse about Brigid De...
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I've been reading two very different, but equally extraordinary books recently. One's a huge, sprawling novel--the amazing first novel of English author Susanna Clarke--'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.' The other's a huge, sprawling combination of history and intelligence inv...
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Peter Hartcher hypothesises in this morning's SMH that Bush will win next week's US Presidential election despite his poor economic stewardship and a botched occupation of Iraq that may yet turn into a Vietnam-style quagmire. The reason? Scots-Irish "trailer trash" support the...
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It's the trinity of spring in our productive garden, in our cool highlands climate where the traditional seasons really mean something. By the time eagerly-awaited spring rolls in, we're all heartily tired of eating those hardy winter stalwarts, leeks, 'a toutes les sauces' ,...
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Nicholas Kristof says President Bush cares more about 'higher meta-truths' than facts. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof illustrates George W Bush's "casual relationship with truth" by quoting a short passage from Bush's autobiography: One night, Laura and I were out o...
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Or is Wicca a legitimate religion? Sophie's stirred Troppo commenters up into a debate questioning whether membership of the Church of Satan ought to be considered a legitimate religion. Among other things, I do some work in the sociology of religion, and having published some...
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The op-ed debate about the merits or otherwise of Indian author Arundhati Roy being awarded this year's Sydney Peace Prize is apparently being conducted in an alternative fantasy universe. I can't think of any other explanation for Sydney Peace Foundation Director Stuart Rees'...
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As readers will see from the post immediately below, Sophie Masson has joined the growing team of Troppo bloggers. She probably won't have time to blog very frequently, being a busy working author and occasional op-ed pundit in the daily press, Quadrant and elsewhere. I'll pos...
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Springtime greetings to all Troppo Armadillos from your newest blogger! And for my first post, I'd like to start with a piece which began life inspired by the reactions of some Troppo critics to my recent piece in the Sydney Morning Herald , about Satanism. I don't intend to d...
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Wendy provided me with some food for thought the other day when she serendipitously drew my attention via her post on a light switch puzzle to the fact that the English political philosopher Norman Geras has a blog . Geras is the author of an excellent book, The Contract of Mu...
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It's the quirky news story of the week. Leading Hand Cranmer, 24, a technician on board HMS Cumberland , has been given permission to perform Satanic rituals at sea. According to Warlock Helnock , editor of Rule Satannia magazine: Chris did a piece for issue 5 of Rule Satannia...
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Don Watson has a new book called Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words, Contemporary Clichés, Cant and Management Jargon . I don't know if it's any good but the image of a weasel sucking out the contents of an egg while leaving the shell intact has always appealed to me. Accordi...
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Writing in today's SMH, someone named Peter Bartlett reckons diversity is overrated when it comes to media ownership. "Synergies" are far more important: To ensure a high standard of media requires high quality people and players, providing resources to investigate and follow...
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Is there a 'counter-cultural conspiracy' to keep conservative Christian opinion out of the media? Political activism is more about mobilizing existing attitudes than it is about cultivating new ones. As a result, one of the best ways to influence public opinion is to keep view...
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Rocco Buttiglione believes that homosexuality is a sin, that the EU risks being swamped by asylum seekers, and that supporters of free markets should not form alliances with libertines. Activists like to portray Australia as a uniquely racist nation. They tell us that the civi...
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This comment a few minutes ago by the aptly nick-named "fool" is fairly typical of comments on very old Troppo posts. Comments on old posts are almost always either blog spam or moronic (and sometimes both). In fact, the entire Ubersportingpundit empire (including Troppo ) has...
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Former Whitlam Minister Barry Cohen postulates a provocative reason why, at least in his opinion, current federal ALP politicians lack breadth of policy vision and an ability to engage effectively with the interests and concerns of ordinary Australians. Their career paths and...
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(via Gary Sauer-Thompson ) Frequent Troppo readers will be aware that American jurisprudential scholar Ronald Dworkin is one of my intellectual heroes. Phillip Adams' favourite borrowing source the New York Review of Books has just published a multiple author article titled Th...
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(via Catallaxy ) The release of a study by the Communications Law Centre of the University of New South Wales on social attitudes to several behaviours including smoking marijuana, homosexuality and adultery throws the issue of defamation law reform into sharp relief. As CLC's...
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What odds Mark Latham will still be ALP leader in six months time, with all these frontbenchers voting with their feet? The cover story that he's just clearing away the deadwood from the Hawke and Keating years certainly doesn't apply to Lindsay Tanner or Annette Ellis (althou...
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As a bred (if not born) Queenslander with a long memory of the Joh years, I can never quite recapture the feeling of relaxation that used to wash over me driving over the NSW border into the land of Wran in 1985 and 1986. I was having a beer with a couple of friends on Saturda...
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As readers will notice from the post immediately below, Mark Bahnisch has joined the ever-growing team of Troppo bloggers. Mark is employed at QUT as a sociologist, has a first class honours degree in Industrial Relations from Griffith and a Graduate Diploma in Industrial Rela...
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Robert Manne is an interesting thinker. His personal trajectory from anti-communist intellectual and ideological conservative to social democrat has been well documented in his own writings and in reports on the controversy over the end of his editorship of Quadrant magazine....
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What do evangelical Christian journalists mean by 'objectivity'? The current issue of the Columbia Journalism review carries a story about the World Journalism Institute - an institution which "seeks to identify aspiring journalists who are Christians and help them become prof...
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Is opposition to fundamentalist Christianity a kind of prejudice? The Democrats in America are increasingly influenced by an educated urban elite who intensely dislike fundamentalist Christians, say two American academics. According to Louis Bolce and Gerald D Maio data from t...
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Religious people have some wacky beliefs. But do they have an obligation to justify them to the rest of us? Philosopher Jamie Whyte is cranky about the way religious people can get away with believing whatever they want. "An interesting change has happened" he said, "It used t...
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Don Arthur's post about Miranda Devine's latest ravings generated some comment box discussion about the extent to which the "yoof" vote might have been part of the reason for the Coalition's strong election showing. Don's post seems tacitly to assume that yoof still tend to vo...
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In the course of one of his repetitive self-pitying anti-babyboomer rants , Paul Watson raises a question that has interested me for some time. That is, the extent to which modern Australian society still involves some reasonably intact version of an extended family structure,...
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Loyal RWDB that he is, Professor Bunyip gleefully reproduces the American blogospherical right's latest attempt to smear Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry over his Vietnam war service, while simultaneously putting an ingeniously innocuous spin on the fact that Presi...
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The most enjoyable thing about a Miranda Devine column is the unintended irony. Devine's latest piece - 'Riding the Conservative Revolution' - starts off by making fun of Daily Telegraph letter writer, Petrina Frost . Silly old Petrina couldn't understand how John Howard could...
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The prospect that the Howard Government might have a Senate majority in its own right has some giddying ramifications, and it has caused some Liberals to become, err, rather ambitious about the sort of reforms that the government can and should make. Obviously, as a old fashio...
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I must have been around 12 years old when my liberal minded parents handed me over the fundamentalist Christians. Every Sunday, and sometimes during school holidays, the youth leaders taught us catchy songs and explained how we could avoid spending eternity in hell. My mum use...
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Tim Dunlop is very very rude about a bloke named Jim Wallace , who is executive chairman of the ominously-titled Australian Christian Lobby. We here at Troppo Armadillo are much more deeply civil, but I must agree Tim has a point. Wallace unsurprisingly claims that " Christian...
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Today is the second anniversary of the terrible tragedy in Bali, where 202 people were killed. I was watching Sky News this morning when I noticed an old familiar face- Damian Squire and his girlfriend have returned to Bali to commemorate those that died. Damian Squire is a st...
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American progressives have spent decades struggling with the moral politics of the right. But for the Australian left a morally motivated opponent is something new. Activists who developed their campaigning skills fighting neoliberalism in the 1980s and 90s risk being out mane...
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To help readers get a bit of perspective and rise above the depression or elation of the election outcome, I thought I'd draw attention to an interesting post by Andrew Leigh of Imagining Australia (the blog rather than the book), where he nominated the three best things Austr...
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A major factor in whether the present Coalition government surmounts the challenge posed by its remarkable electoral success and goes on to achieve Menzies-like longevity, will be whether Howard and the rest of his leadership team are capable of exercising wisdom and restraint...
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If I never hear another Labor "strategist" claim that the ALP lost because of Howard's "great interest rate lie" it will be too soon. As Paul Kelly pointed out on the ABC TV Insiders program this morning, the real reason Labor lost so badly was because most of the polls showed...
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We should have known, really. The election eve flagship polls are just as conflicted as the earlier ones. Morgan has Labor a shade in front at 51-49 2PP; ACNeilsen has the Coalition in front by a country mile at 54-46; and Newspoll has them 50-50. So anyone's guess is as good...
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I was talking on the phone to my brother the other day and, included amongst the trivia that expands our conversations; the state of Dad's health, child pornography, our travel plans (he's going to Europe via the Trans Siberian railway next year, I'm following the Silk Road to...
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Thus spoke the Chief Armadillo : I suspect the reality is that it remains impossible to predict with confidence who's going to win. He's quite right. To me it does seem impossible to have any confidence in an election prediction. But if pressed, I would predict a.... ...fairly...
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With so much commentary on the upcoming contest between "Ease the Squeeze" and "Be Inert and Embalmed" I thought I'd shift attention to Scandinavia where once again a decision will be shortly announced for the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. If I were not so time-p...
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As you can see from the post immediately below, Don Arthur has joined the Troppo blogging mob. Don is a longstanding stop-and-start blogger, due to the demands of employment and postgraduate study and research. His most recent blog is here , but Don found he was unable to upda...
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In a series of posts John Quiggin argues that the era of dry politics is over (see here , here , and here ). Andrew Norton almost agrees . He argues that market oriented reform is here to stay, but so is big government. In the US the Weekly Standard 's Fred Barnes writes that...
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The more I think about it, the more depressingly convinced I become that Howard is going to win on Saturday. It's not just the opinion polls or Howard's confident demeanour, or the fact that the betting markets have turned decisively against Labor. It's also that basic conserv...
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John Quiggin hypothesises that John Howard's new-found enthusiasm for tax-and-spend policies may be based on " a fundamental change of view about what the Australian public wants from governments, one in which more and better services rank ahead of tax cuts ", rather than just...
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It seems that my previous posts on values ( here and here ) were reflecting the zeitgeist to an even greater extent than I imagined. At the same time, High Court Chief Justice Murray Gleeson was also reflecting on the role of values (albeit from the perspective of a judge call...
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As has happened through most of the election campaign period, two of the major opinion polls are contradicting each other, and the latest Newspoll is yet to be released. ACNeilsen shows the Coalition comfortably in front (52% to 48% in two-party preferred terms) while Morgan's...
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Fortuitously given the ongoing skirmish between Chris Sheil and myself about the utility of the label "left", RWDB bete noire David Marr delivered a long lecture partly on that very subject a couple of days ago. It's reproduced at tiresome length on Margo's Web Diary. Incident...
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Christopher Sheil , the blogger about whom one dare not speak the name "left", posts an extract from a new book by animal lib Oz philosopher Peter Singer, which deconstructs/demolishes the libertarian justification of inalienable rights to private property. Of course, there ar...
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