A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill
Politics
Australian
Mark Shorter’s upcoming performance at MOP projects explores patriarchal modes of power and exchange. The performance will employ the symbol of the golden Tabuk rifle, a version of the AK-47 that was produced by Saddam Hussein for his personal guard. It was also the gun that was donated to the Australian War Museum by the United States Army as a token of gratitude for our participation in the Iraq war. (via The Art Life) |
Mark Richardson parses Ted Baillieu and sees the discarding of communal identity.
Gary Sauer-Thompson sees signs of movement on water reform. But Lyn Hanrahan Calcutt thinks we’re stuffed on other fronts.
Jim Belshaw has a terrible feeling of deja vu.
David Jeffery looks at the excise on Alcopops, while Tony the Teacher selfishly advocates a more drastic solution from a position of almost inconceivable deprivation.
International
Kevin Rennie on the selling of Iraq.
John Quiggin forms a strange alliance with former Malaysian PM Mahathir in looking forward to Bush, Blair and Howard being charged with war crimes over Iraq.
Tim Blair covers a journalistic groundswell of disenchantment with Barack Obama, while Steve Chapman dissects Hillary’s serpentine manouevrings:
She thinks McCain is better than Obama and McCain is no better than Bush. Which can mean only one thing: Bush is better than Obama!
Of course that’s probably not what she actually believes. But it’s a tribute to her talent for bold deceit and bizarre logic that she can attack Obama for doing something that she herself had done so recently, and more fervently.
Economics
Peter Martin on the Government’s inability to control mortgage rates. ((Isn’t that what everyone bar the Howard government had been saying all along anyway?~gilmae))
Conservative economist “Henry Thornton” and non-economist Mark Bahnisch both reckon the RBA (or perhaps the Rudd government) should abandon its maximum 3% inflation target as too hard and damaging in the current international climate, but conservative economist Stephen Kirchner disagrees:
In this context, it is worth pointing out that the RBAs inflation target is already overly generous by international standards. The ECB, BoE, BoC and RBNZ all have inflation targets with ceilings or mid-points of 2%. The Fed has no formal target, but Federal Reserve officials have long stated a preference for inflation not to exceed 2%. The 2.5% medium-term average that the RBA would deem a policy success would constitute a policy failure by the standards of comparable countries.
Law
Robert Merkel puzzles about the circumstances surrounding the cancellation of Dr Mohammed Haneef’s visa and Kevin Andrews’ role in it.
Eugene Volokh looks at the perils of being an atheist in the US Army.
Colonel Mo Davis was an implacable military prosecutor of ozterrorist David Hicks, but Jonathan Adler points out he’s due to give evidence for the defence today in the trial of Osama bin Laden’s driver Salim Hamdan.
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Issues analysis
Harry Clarke finds encouraging news in a report on drug use in Australia.
Nicholas Gledhill finds that he has grown older and more cynical.
Chris Bertram and Norman Geras both reckon Simon Blackburn is unduly elevating elitism and giving philosophers a bad name.
Arts
(via The Art Life) I think we’re supposed to despise the Sydney Cityrail inspectors in this YouTube. Personally (KP) that’s how I reacted to the feral passengers they were trying to bust. |
Lynden Barber offers a review of Border of Despair, the latest German film to venture into exploring the malignancy of the old East Germany through the eyes of Sara Bender an East German attempting to make her way across the old Checkpoint Charlie into West Germany.
Dean The Happy Antipodean reviews Thea Astley’s short story collection Hunting the Wild Pineapple based in part on the nascent Queensland counterculture of the 1960s.
Lucy Tartan offers a reading log of her weekly reading, while Flop Eared Mule offers a list of her music downloads leaping across an array of musical genres.
Cam Riley reviews a book on Saladin and Richard Lionheart, Warriors of Heaven.
Alison Croggon partially takes issue with fellow critic Sebastian Smee in metablogging on theatre criticism.
Sport
If you thought like me (KP) that the Kangaroos selection of serial cowardly criminal thug Paul Gallen was a disgraceful joke, Mike Salter points out that the “penalty” handed out by a soccer appeals committee to Olyroos goalkeeper Danny Vukovic (for striking a referee no less!) makes the thugby league administrators look like stern dsiciplinarians.
Snark, strangeness and charm
Martha Nussbaum on sex work (via Will Wilkinson):
However, the difference between the sex worker and the professor who takes money for the use of a particularly intimate part of her body, namely her mind is not the difference between a good woman and a bad woman. It is, usually, the difference between a prosperous well-educated woman and a poor woman with few employment options.
Adrian the Cabbie reckons MacBank management are a bunch of mongrels.
Sorry about the dodgy formatting folks. I’ve been struggling with it for the last hour and will keep trying to correct it. I eventually stupidly agreed to upgrading to the latest version of WordPress only to discover (surprise! surprise!) that it’s completely fucked (at least for users doing complex tasks – as ML certainly is). It throws formatting all over the place, including unpredictably and repeatedly shifting large parts of Missing Link posts down to the bottom of the post, and changing font sizes idiosyncratically. Never again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The link to my drastic solution requires a drastic solution.
It’s OK Ken. Thanks for ML, it must be heaps of work.