[photopress:Clive_Hamilton.jpg,full,pp_empty] The left got into trouble when it lost its ethical moorings, said Tony Blair. Influenced by the Christian socialism of John Macmurray , Blair saw New Labour as heir to the communitarian traditions of ethical socialism and New Liber...
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Left and right are both calling for the manic Sheik Al Hilali to be deported from these fair lands. The left take offence at his comparing uncovered women to "raw meat". The right take offense at his support for terrorists. Listening to ABC radio this morning, I seemed to be...
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Great piece by Margaret in today's Crikey. Last Tuesday Crikey published an editorial criticising Chris Masters's Jonestown for the way in which it "outed" Alan Jones and treated its subject matter with "breathless, censorious innuendo." It took my breath away. It wasn't only...
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In early 1996 my father Fred fell from his motorbike on the farm and cracked a rib. He had blood in his urine, which the doctors called haematuria which means bloody urine in Greek. The doctor told him that the indicated procedure for haematuria was a cystoscopy to check the b...
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What would you call a situation in which a man . . . [P]unched his wife in the face and she fell to the ground. He kicked her before smashing her face with a rock. She suffered multiple fractures to her skull, ribs, vertebrae, and shoulder blades, as well as a ruptured liver....
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Why Rudd is wrong about Hayek Friedrich Hayek argued that human beings are "almost exclusively self-regarding", says Kevin Rudd . In contrast, modern Labor "argues that human beings are both 'self-regarding' and 'other-regarding'." But what Hayek actually argued was that human...
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Methinks this is a tad biased, but nevertheless an interesting run through the two contenders in the 'browser wars'. The authors conclude that in five out of five areas Firefox is better than IE7. I'd like to believe it but, as I've said, I think there's a bit of bias in there...
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There are few things we enjoy more here at Club Troppo than a good rant about morality and values. Some even think we're a bit precious about it. Anyway, I was mightily pleased to see bipartisan agreement between The Bomber and The Rodent about the desirability of making immig...
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On Insiders last Sunday, the topic of the day was the growing debacle in Iraq. It included sound bites from the PM, a longer interview with Paul Kelly and some predictable political tap dancing from Kevin stay-on-message Rudd . The armchair discussants included David Marr and...
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Today's newsletter to the finance industry 'The Sheet' outlines a series of unfortunate events by which a consumer was lent money that he could not repay. Again and again. Fortunately the nasty lenders lost their money and the poor consumer didn't have to pay - anything. Kremn...
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I am reading David Kuo's book, Tempting Faith . It is an entertaining read. Kuo is up and down like a dunny seat - running from radicalisation to depression to radicalisation again and then back to depression - but he is a good writer. It is also rare in that it is one of the...
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It is clear that the Work Choices legislation, coupled with the welfare-to-work measures, has strengthened considerably the power and autonomy of employers relative to non-managerial, non-professional employees. Even before Work Choices, there was a trend for earnings inequali...
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Its been harrumphing and gasping aplenty in Australia's two ring media circus this week, as the Alan Jones Biography hits the stands, and the pundit-o-rama gets all precious about Mr. Jones' secret life being public fodder. A loathsome attack bleats Tim Blair. Rank homophobia...
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https://youtu.be/NAn6iDCpK5k A while back I turned on the tele late one Weekend night and saw that they were replaying old Videoclips of the Beatles. I watched mesmerised for around 45 minutes after which they went onto something else. I think I would have stayed a fair while...
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Microsoft are a much maligned company. Their software's got better over the years. And I'm sure this won't happen to everyone, but I just downloaded Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. It took a long time to install as it installed about four other pieces of software. Then it asked...
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There was an interesting debate in the Senate on October 16th between Andrew Murray, Chris Evans and Eric Abetz. It pretty much represents all that was good and bad with the Senate. Andrew Murray argued for discrete budgeting, line by line, in parliamentary entitlements which...
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I have a particular dislike of Richard Dawkins and enjoyed this demolition of Dawkins' latest attack on God. If you read carefully you'll notice that it's not done on behalf of religion. It does not presupose religious belief. The author - Terry Eagleton concedes, having concl...
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The Victorian Government is interested in taking Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) into education as the Blair Government has done. PPPs have so far represented a scandal of economic reform. A method used to shift debt off governments' balance sheets so they can commit to deb...
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I was going to do a brief post congratulating Muhammad Yunus for his winning of the Nobel Prize and mentioning a similar great Austrailan initiative of a similar vintage which you can donate to - Opportunity International . If I could do one tiny fraction of the good these peo...
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If you've been having trouble connecting to Jason Soon's group weblog Catallaxy then maybe you've been looking in the wrong place. If you bookmarked the old site at badanalysis.com then it's time to update -- you won't be automatically redirected anymore. Catallaxy is fast eme...
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The readers of Melbourne's Herald Sun went into deep shock yesterday, when former Dutchman, and contrived controversy confectioner, Andrew Bolt launched his missiles of mockery in support of international pop sensation Madonna's right to spend her wealth on acquiring African o...
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Here is a brief extract from the beginning of a staff discussion paper (pdf) on the regulation of the professions published by the National Competition Council in 2001. I think there's something missing from it - do you agree and if so what do you think it is? The challenge of...
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Fred's last post prompted several commenters to mention subsidies for private schools. It's worth taking a closer look at this issue in isolation. As Harry Clarke reminded us some time ago in a related discussion, subsidising private education is efficient if it reduces the bu...
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Well boy anyway. It's the 13 year old . . . Well here's another clue - the whole picture. It's the most prodigious chess player that ever lived - the amazing and now pretty much certifiable R. J. Fischer. This picture was taken in 1957, the year Bobby burst onto the internatio...
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Today's AFR has a letter of mine on education inequality. What follows is an extended version of the letter, drawing on material from my other writings. The current passionate crusade by Howard Ministers to weed out the so-called "left-wing" bias of the education establishmen...
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If I'm not mistaken the Beazer is actually getting some traction right now. Witness yesterday's delightful poke in the Prime Minister's eye in Parliament, where the Beazer with an admirable paucity of prolix jabbed out these belly punches on the failed strategy in Iraq. One: S...
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[photopress:cat_lady.jpg,full,pp_empty] Time for a cartoon, methinks.
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One of the curious aspects of an open economy is that economic liberty is synonymous with economic integration. In this respect immigrants have taken to Australia with a will and make up a significant proportion of our productive output. According to the 2003/2004 Tax statisti...
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I promised myself I'd post a couple of very cute chess puzzles on Troppo when I saw them. Now after the chess fest of Kramnik's great victory (he can't have made too many trips to the dunny when he was playing rapid chess with Topalov which he won), and after a long day at a b...
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The Pew Charitable Trusts are spending $2.2 million to start a national discussion on income mobility in America. The initiative attempts to raise the profile of income mobility by forging consensus on the issue with leading thinkers representing a broad spectrum of think tank...
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"Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you're half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you're going a hundred miles an hour down a suburban side street....
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There aren't many topics that can tempt me out of self-imposed blogging retirement, but Coolhand James McConvill is one of them. I have to confess I've been wondering idly what happened to McConvill ever since his blog suddenly disappeared a few months ago at about the same ti...
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Apologies for not keeping you all up to date on the Great Match. My excuse - well I got less excited because Kramnik dug himself out of the hole he was in. He's won 3 games to Topalov's 2 over the board. But right now as I type there is a play-off because (if you recall from t...
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Obviously the biggest news of the day is the recent Lancet article which concludes that the number of excess deaths in Iraq since the war began is around 655k with 95% confidence interval (393k,943k)*. Cause of death is also attributed with over half due to gun shot, 90% viole...
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A clever bit of econometrics seems to confirm something that Mark Latham argued in his tome Civilizing Global Capital. That the tele undermines social capital. It seemed a plausible argument, but what was the evidence other than the historical concurrence of the rise of tele a...
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Liberals aren't comfortable talking about right and wrong. After all, the whole point of liberalism is to avoid arguments about morality. Rather than arguing, liberals want to establish institutions which will allow everyone to pursue their own idea of the good life. Morality...
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Edmund Phelps is a good choice for this year's Sviriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences . He's best known as the joint inventor, with Milton Friedman, of the concept of the natural rate of unemployment, in the late 1960s. The NRU essentially means full employment - or labo...
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It all started with Barbie , "the vampy fashion doll" that "helped to bring about the sexualization of childhood." At least that's how the Manhattan Institute's Kay Hymowitz remembers it. According to Hymowitz , Barbie is "not-so-spiritual godmother of Britney Spears" and a si...
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A paper done for CEDA is coming out of embargo tomorrow - Wednesday. Here is the 'op ed' of the paper which is appearing in the AFR. I'm told the paper will be downloadable from the CEDA website, but it's not as I write this and I'll be out of range for most of tomorrow. If yo...
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Given the discussion on liberty and liberalism below , it might be a good time to revisit what Australian Republicanism is. Unfortunately most current perceptions of republicanism have been defined by the 'minimal' campaign run before the 1999 referendum which ended up promoti...
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Who are Australia’s top libertarian identities? At Thoughts on Freedom, John Humphreys nominates Andrew Norton . That's odd because I always thought that Andrew identified as a classical liberal rather than as a libertarian. About a year ago Andrew wrote a post for Catallaxy o...
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Get a load of this! Curtesy of Brad DeLong's site . Brad lets us know this. After some viewing I think that this isn't just a series of pretty pictures. This is a real story. What we're watching is the innards of helper T-cell activation. The lymphocyte crawling along the arte...
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Heartening news for Australian patriots in today's Age (A hotspot of soft-Leftism if you believe the paranoid fantasies of Gerard Henderson on Sunday's Insiders ). According the Nielsen Poll Labor's primary vote jumped three points to 42 percent ahead of the coalition on 39 pe...
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A few days after fighting between Hamas and Fatah took a dozen lives and led to the destruction of various Palestinian government buildings, the Fatah-affiliated head of Palestinian intelligence services believes Palestine is on the verge of civil war : We are already at the b...
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In his 1984 book Losing Ground , Charles Murray argued that welfare hurt poor families by creating incentives for self-defeating behaviour. Last month, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed that poor families ought to be rewarded for making the right decisions: "This polic...
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If you want to go fill in a form on the subject for a PhD student - click here and do so. I have. (Hat tip: Chris Lloyd)
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I'm reading up for a two day workshop at an fine institution I discovered a few years ago called Cranlana . Named after the Myer Family's mansion in Toorak where it is housed it's a (small 'l') liberal talk shop which holds 'colloquiums' at which various topics are discussed....
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The debate started by Don Arthur (Is bad Peter Saunders a neo-conservative?) has been very interesting and helpful (my particular thanks to Don for developing the distinction between the Hayek and Saunders positions). But as the subsequent discussion has branched out into equa...
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Topalov wins another marvellous game. He played with great precision and energy throughout though it was a more traditional storming of the kingside than the last miraculous game. Kramnik was passive and it's not looking so good for him. Though it's still drawn (if he gets bac...
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Those who are not opinionated out from commenting on public intellectuals, feel free to have a bash below.
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[photopress:Australian_Intellectual.jpg,full,pp_empty] Australians love a good competition. We can turn anything into sport. So if shows like Australian Idol can give young singers a chance to crack into the music business why not have an Australian Idol for public intellectua...
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Have a look at this write up of the budget by a financial planning consultant. Now that all manner of restrictions have been lifted from the super system, the standard method for avoiding tax for those in their late forties and early fifties, will involve something like this....
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Nothing's easier to understand than a story. It's as if human beings were hardwired for narrative -- stories with beginnings, middles and ends populated by people doing things. According to cognitive scientists Roger Schank and Robert Abelson that's not far from the truth. Bac...
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Peter Saunders likes to call himself a classical liberal . Leftist commentators prefer to call him a neoconservative . But what is neoconservatism and how does it differ from ordinary versions of conservatism? And what has he done to earn the label? Andrew Norton says that "no...
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It completely beats me what Topalov is playing at. He is known for his swashbuckling attacking style, and is being slowly ground down by the very hard to beat Kramnik. His response? Get your manager to make all sorts of allegations that you're cheating and play quite aggressiv...
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Extreme anger is as good a reason as any to come out of blogging retirement temporarily. The ABC's Andrew Denton has demanded that Channel Nein apologise to Joanne Lees for publishing a poll on yesterday's Today program asking viewers if they felt Ms Lees was innocent of Peter...
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Alan Kohler has a piece on T3 in Wednesday's Herald that, as you would expect, does a pretty decent job of unpacking what's going on. He notes the huge commissions being offered to the stock salesmen, and concludes that: ...you can't believe anything most brokers say about Tel...
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RMIT's Rob Watts attempts to save the welfare state by attacking liberalism Neoconservatives are winning the welfare debate because they take values seriously, says RMIT's Rob Watts . In a recent paper on the welfare-to-work debate ( pdf ) he rejects the idea that the left is...
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Guest Post by James Wheeldon of http://www.jameswheeldon.net/ The Commonwealth Government is about to embark on a $20 million advertising campaign to encourage retail investors to pick up Telstra shares in the "T3" third tranche of its privatization. It is generally accepted...
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From the pre-game commentary Slater was well held by the Dragons. He is probably due for a blinder. King could be ready to explode as well, his best work was done in defence the other night when he practically closed down Gasnier. The biggest danger for the Storm will be the p...
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A mate of mine made this tongue in cheek comment the other day to a Canadian fellow; Why do you hate America so much that you decided to be born somewhere else? Which is an appeal to the absurd in nationalism and the arbitrary nature with which it deals with individuals, citiz...
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I vaguely remember - at about the time of the September 11 attack as part of the 'everything has changed' meme, a lot of invitations to the left to apologise for all the things they'd done wrong. All their naivite, all the things they stuffed up, all the things they didn't und...
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