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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
One for nostalgic codgers like me (KP) – Paul McCartney performing “A Day in the Life” and “Give Peace a Chance” live at the Liverpool Sound festival a few days ago, with Yoko Ono in the audience. Ah, those were the days my friend … (via Angus at Twelve Major Chords who bravely anoints “A Day in the Life” as “arguably the finest piece of modern music ever”) |
Jason Wilson highlights the valuable (and interesting) qualitative polling of the Australian electorate being done by Graham Young et al (including Mark Bahnisch), while Mark himself wonders why the MSM don’t commission qualitative polling instead of having the usual pundits write dubious interpretations of the public quantitative polls.
Tim Dunlop approves of the Rudd government’s decision to review current policy of banning Australian foreign aid being spent on programs involving abortion or birth control.(Why they even need a “review” before abolishing such a manifestly stupid policy is another question, especially when it will just give the conservative churches plenty of time to exert covert pressure on religiously-affiliated politicians to maintain it. – KP)
International
Hillary Clinton has all but conceded. Jason Soon is gleeful. Andrew Leigh is rapt. dr faustus is merely pleased. In the US blogosphere everyone is posting about it but no-one saying anything worth reading as far as I (KP) can see (although Ilana Mercer makes a useful point about Obama).
Mark “OzConservative” Richardson finds a familiar sinister left-liberal self-hating theme in the recent rant by a Catholic priest at Obama’s (now former) church.
Desmond McGrath looks at Hungary’s “rude awakening from welfare state dreams“.
Law
Jeremy Sear rises again from the dungeons of snarkery to post a long but interesting piece on prisons, sentencing and victims’ rights.
Economics
Brad De Long weighs the pros and cons of carbon taxes versus cap and trade emisions permits. Will Wilkinson appears to exhibit the mandatory conservative libertarian sceptical stance on climate change, but nevertheless makes some useful points on whether a carbon tax is better than a tradeable emissions permits system:
We already know how to collect taxes, more or less. Cap and trade, on the other hand, basically requires creating an entire new set of institutions, on dubious scientific grounds, in a context of insufficient information about their optimal design. Which doesnt seem promising. The real-world political economics of it seems to me less like implementing an excise tax and more like the process of creating a stock exchange in a developing country.
Chris Dillow argues that “conventional economics” can be the ally of environmentalists, not its opponent.
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Issues analysis
Economist Max Sawicky zeroes in on Obama, the work ethic and American exceptionalism, and continues the theme by pointing us to this video on the economics-based case for a sea change.((highly recommended. I don’t know that I accept the premise, and residents of the third world certainly wouldn’t, but it’s interesting and well made. ~ KP)).
Andrew Norton owns up to his part in some protectionism likely to cause some students to have to drop out of university.
Joshua Gans finds evidence for his previous hypothesis that men suffer more opprobrium than women for taking parental leave.
Cameron Reilly suggests the idea of citizen-submitted bills and sortition in order to abolish the party system.
Eric Posner calls bullshit on Rick Hills’ argument for anti-intellectualism.
At openDemocracy, Bryan K Murphy proposes a radical solution to irregular transnational migration.
Arts
via the Stumblng Tumblr |
Decomposing Trees is waiting in anticipation for the new Spiritualised album Songs in A&E released on June 9.
Boyd van Hoeij reviews Kahazk film-maker Serget Dvortsevoy’s Tulpan which took top prize in Cannes Un certain regard section.
With the recent glut of arthouse films concentrating on nomadic life on the Asian steppes (The Story of the Weeping Camel, Die Höhle des gelben Hundes / The Cave of the Yellow Dog, Mongolian Ping Ping, Khadak) all becoming at least minor success stories, it is no wonder that more European companies are interested in financing these exotically dressed up fables mainly made for Western consumption. The story of Asas coming of age is in fact firmly entrenched in a conservative rites-of-passage narrative in which a successful birth of a young lamb is coupled with the birth of Asa as a young and capable herdsman.
Shooting Down Pictures offers a video-essay of the Paul Schrader (probably best known as the scriptwriter of Taxi Driver) film Light Sleeper.
Valentina Polukhina offers some transcripts of interviews in 2003 and 2004 with Susan Sontag, William Wadsworth and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott about the enduring influence of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky
Nico finds nothing of herself in Sex and the City.
Sport
Tony the Teacher quotes some commonsense on Twenty20 hit and giggle cricket from former Indian captain Bishen Bedi.
JC at Cricket-Blog is still living the dream of a Warnie comeback despite his manager ruling it out.
Moses at Beer and Sport discusses the current fiasco with introduction of Stellenbosh Rules in rugby at international level.
Leinad doesn’t hold out much hope of an interesting World Cup qualifier return game between Australia and Iraq in Dubai.((Then again, most soccer games IMO are pretty much like chess games with human pieces minus most of the intellectual complexity, enlivened only by occasional entertaining histrionics from players faking being fouled. ~ KP))
Snark, strangeness and charm
In response to studies finding that some modern consumer items use lots of power even in stand-by, dr faustus searches for a tool to measure the power being drawn by a device.
Jonathan Pearce exhibits a weird libertarian conception of intelligence and courage supposedly exemplified by Angelina Jolie!
 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. |
A propos of nothing, “goad” appears twice in the “Do not … the tigers” sign. And to think they could have used “pwn” instead …
Thanks for the daily dose of Missing Link!
*Sigh* It seems Tim Dunlop is manifestly determined to replace Philip Adams and Tim Flannery as Australia’s looniest lefty. Frankly any person who wants their Government to actively fund other countries to kill their own children is not quite sane in my view.
“It seems Tim Dunlop is manifestly determined to replace Philip Adams and Tim Flannery as Australias looniest lefty.Frankly any person who wants their Government to actively fund other countries to kill their own children is not quite sane in my view.”
This may come as a quite a surprise to you saint but Tim Dunlop is not really alone here. There are many other people who believe a woman has the right to manage her own reproductive systems. It’s not like birth control is a complete novelty imposed by Government fiat in civilised countries or anything.
But let’s suppose for a giddy minute that your hyperbole that unthinkingly equates free frangers with baby killing does have some vague basis in reality. Isn’t ita good thing then that we’re stopping all those pesky third worlders from breeding like minks and so draining the carrying capacity of a planet manifestly destined for the likes of those that like to tell others what they can and can’t do with their own biology?
Re the tiger sign. They could have saved money, materials and verbs by just printing up a sign that says “If you hassle ’em, you feed ’em.”
I remember a great warning sign at some UK Zoological Park’s elephants’ enclosure.
“These animals weigh more than your car and don’t have your sense of humour. So be please be on your best behaviour.”
Somehow I imagine saint was equating abortion with baby killing.
Maybe abortion is baby killing. Maybe making it readily available means that not only fewer babies, but also fewer other people die.
/Utilitarian libertarian exits, running backwards over sand.
Somehow I imagine gilmae was right.
And skepticklawyer, why this terror of people having babies is beyond me. Frankly there is also some measure of incoherence about people who bleat about reproductive choices on one hand (I note as usual, it get’s thrown to the woman, the man bears no responsibility and has no say), and carry on about overpopulation/too many babies on the other…or even *snort* pretend to worry about other people dying.