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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
Suggest a caption (via Terry Sedgwick).
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Unlike the Quranic Society, James Farrell is staking out a position on the Islamic private school.
Helen “skepticlawyer” Dale responds with a long thoughtful post (which looks suspiciously like a recycled university paper) on whether religious discrimination can be justified.
International
Bloggers monitoring possible corruption in China earthquake relief efforts.
Daniel Drezner argues that Al Qaeda is losing.
Hilzoy can’t understand why the media and blogs are obsessing over Obama’s confusing Auschwitz with Buchenwald, but ignoring the revelations that McCain’s senior economic adviser is in the pocket of a Swiss bank.
At openDemocracy, Carsten Weiland puts Israel-Syria peace talks under the microscope and wonders whether they represent “a new beginning or merely a rehashing of old constellations and positions”.
Wylie Bradford looks at Burma: cyclone, aid and sanctions.
Amazon.com has marked down Hillary’s book from $29.99 to $19.49 and notes second hand offers as low as $1.22. And in a further indignity, Daniel Drezner suggests some more realistic post-candidacy jobs for Mrs Clinton, while Doug DeLong visits the blog inner sanctum of the increasingly desperate and depressed Clintonistas.
Economics
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Predictions the Australian dollar will break on through to the other side by the end of the year. Oh, and interest rate rises. You can see why economics is the dismal science, because “Henry Thornton” agrees.
Joshua Gans posts a transcript of a radio interview he did on the FuelWatch fiasco.
Law
Eugene Volokh and Rick Hills continue to batter “slippery slope” arguments to death slowly.
In what may well be the policy proposal least likely ever to be implemented, Peter Timmins suggests the federal government should publicly release all legal opinions it obtains about the constitutionality or otherwise of new legislation.
Legal Eagle ponders why more judges don’t blog.
Norman Geras doubts the legality of George Monbiot’s plan to effect a citizen’s arrest on former Bush flunkie John Bolton when he visits the UK.
Eric E Johnson posts about the Museum of Intellectual Property he’s creating (it’s actually a museum of IP items that have generated landmark IP litigation).
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Issues analysis
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Mark Richardson points out that word doesn’t mean what she thinks it means.
Harry Clarke on the danger faced by the world’s poor due to food shortages driving up prices.
Andrew Norton cites some happiness research that finds church-goers are happier than those who – on Sunday – watch football, eat their patented moon waffles and find pennies.
Emanuel Paparella reflects upon the challenges Richard Rorty sets for the field of philosophy
Rorty holds that with Descartes there begins within modern philosophy a scientification of the same which has in turn produced several centuries worth of fierce debates between rationalists (Kant, for example) and empiricists (Hume, for example), idealists (Berkeley, for example) and materialists (Hobbes, for example) which were all based on a false premise. The false premise was the idea that the mind was a theater of representation, forever dealing with a reality outside itself which it observes objectively. Also faulty, for Rorty, is the later attempt to replace mind in the equation with language. He is convinced that the arduous philosophical search for foundational values, true nature, a priori truths, though sometimes fascinating and stimulating would forever fail to yield the hoped for results, that is to say, non-controversial results concerning matters of ultimate concern.
Phillip Lillingstone argues for the abolition of compulsory voting.((Fairly lamely I must say, and he also completely misunderstands a Victorian Supreme Court decision ~ KP))
At openDemocracy, Dejan Djokic examines the disturbing use of UK anti-terrorism detention laws against a research academic (also covered a few days ago in Missing Link.
Arts
Oceans Never Listen’s artistic weekend in Sydney.
Decomposing Trees links to an online stream of wordless music concerts in NYC.
Destination: OUT looks at Masayuki Takayanagi, “one of the earliest noise guitar improvisers anywhere in the world. Not to mention one of the most significant.” I (Tim) am yet to listen to the sample mp3s provided, but the post describes Takayanagi’s style as “Hendrix through a meat-grinder”, which sounds promising.
Ballard a snob? Not so, writes Simon Sellars:
As for perceived classism, this is most obviously undercut by Millennium People, which savages the middle classes, along with their complaints and separatist claims, by suggesting they are entirely complicit in their own problems. But in Kingdom Come Ballard also clearly mocks his own privileged world view with a number of sly digs at his own public persona.
Nicholas Pickard reckons Company B’s production of My Name is Rachel Corrie is “a play very much worth seeing.”
Edward Champion offers a tribute to recently deceased director and actor Sidney Pollack
Tim Sterne offers us the novel idea of a tribute album that covers songs from tribute albums. ((And may the person who stole my Jimi Hendrix tribute album with Pat Metheny’s version of Third Rock from the Sun find themselves in the Dantean seventh layer of hell with the music of Celine Dion resonating in their ears ~ SH))
Scott McLemee considers the manner in which a Vh1 documentary about the Sex: The Revolution in its exploration of the changing tides of American sexuality strangely echoes many of the main ideas found in Foucault’s The History of Sexuality.
Sport
“Captain” Watson metaphorically bleeds all over his blog site about his beloved Geelong’s flogging by Collingwood.((Mind you it wasn’t very long ago that Geelong supporters just shrugged their shoulders resignedly at these sorts of performances. It was the lot in life of a Cats fan, just as the Collywobbles were and possibly still are. ~ KP))
Shaun Cronin as usual previews the forthcoming weekend NRL round.
Matt at Green and Gold Rugby previews the Waratahs versus Crusaders Super 14 final and reviews the season’s performances by each of the 4 Australian teams.
Sal Marinello examines drug use in sport present and future.
Snark, strangeness and charm
Graham Young has found himself (potentially) blessed with a special place in history.
(One for longtime readers via Adrian the Cabbie) In what will almost certainly prove to be the snark post of the year, “Caz” and “The Hack” have finally been outed.((Well that was quick. The “outing” blog has been deleted by WordPress.com. Threats of defo action from “The Hack”, one might suspect. You can currently still find a couple of update posts at Google cache here and here. And here’s the Google cache of the original page. Maybe someone might want to copy it before it disappears too. For any interested sleuths, apparently their names are Jamie Duncan and Caroline Hamilton. Don’t forget to keep us informed. I’m sure Jeremy Sear will be interested. ~ KP))
Update – The “outing” site is back up at a new WordPress blog at http://carolinehamilton.wordpress.com/ or possibly at http://thelulzstarthere.wordpress.com/.
Dale discovers global art by GPS suitcase but predicts a sordid future.
Will Stephens accuses The Guardian of being fascistic opponents of free speech, and Will Wilkinson tells us why he hates happiness denying “collectivism” and its unlikely purveyors.((Who’d have imagined it? ~ KP))
 TroppoSphere, in case Missing Link email subscribers haven’t noticed, is now available as a convenient gateway to a world of news and expert opinion and analysis for those with feed reader phobia. It contains feeds to most of the blogs and other sources whose best/selected content we most regularly feature in Missing Link, as well as general news feeds and those from selected online magazines like openDemocracy, Reason, Slate, Spiked, New Matilda, Australian Opinion Online and Online Opinion. |
The links through to our blog from ML always seem to be really long… and sometimes they don’t work. I’m curious because sometimes they work fine.
Caz and The Hack haven’t stayed out for long: that blog you linked is now comes up with a page saying ‘This blog is inactive.’
Still, there’s always the Google cache.
Suggested caption: “Thank God for those activist judges on the Supreme Court of California!”
Helen
All I do is copy the link address from Google Reader. There must be something about the way Jacques has implemented your feed that means it generates convoluted addresses when displayed in a feed reader. I have no idea why. It doesn’t happen with Troppo addresses in Google Reader (mind you, the way Jacques had us configured until recently meant that our posts weren’t received at all by many feed readers, let alone with long addresses!)
The Caz and the Hack outing post has now been moved here:
carolinehamilton.wordpress.com
Spread the lulz
Team Lulz
skepticlawyer: I can confirm the links in your feed are quite verbose indeed. Almost lawyerly so :- )
It’s the result of a plugin that tracks click activity from feeds.
I feel really bad for Jamie Duncan and Caroline Hamilton. Who knew that years of tormenting, stalking and harassing people on the internet could eventually come back and bite you on the backside?
It’s a sad day for online bullies everywhere.
“try coping the URL from the website itself”
It’s too time-consuming. With so many things in a short time to get ML published each morning I have to take as many shortcuts as possible. If I waited while every feed post opened in its own browser window I’d be here until lunchtime.
Fair enough, Ken – and if it gives Jacques useful info about ML, then don’t change a thing!
Hi,
We have had some problems with WordPress. They don’t want Team Lulz using peoples’ actual names in the URL.
So, we have moved here: http://thelulzstarthere.wordpress.com
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Spread the lulz,
Team Lulz.
This wasn’t filed in ‘Missing Link’. Wondered why I didn’t get my email…
Yes you’re right. Ooops! I’ll send it now (albeit belatedly – subscribers will get yesterday’s and today’s almost on top of one another.
Hey, two good chewy things to get through on the weekend – won’t hurt em! Have to say ML is just getting better & better… although you’ll have to teach me how to insert those pretty flickr graphics come August.
Hey Ken, I wasn’t suggesting “the least likely policy proposal to be implemented”- it was that highly respected former parliamentarian and ALP number cruncher Robert Ray who said Parliament should know what the government has been told by its legal advisers regarding constitutionality of matters to be considered by parliament.The government responded along the lines we’ll tell you when it suits.But I’m with Ray-we should have a more rigorous standard of disclosure than this.
Hi Peter
No I realise you weren’t suggesting that. I was (whatever the about-to-retire Ray may now piously profess to favour). Having dealt with Ray on several occasions when he was Defence Minister, I find his belated posture of champion of openness and transparency quite amusing.
Caption: “God, I hope the super glue on my chin is going to hold.”