Club Troppo

Bill Muehlenberg is outraged at reports that villagers in Surrey and Kent have been told to remove wire mesh from their garden shed windows because it might injure burglars. It's just one more idiotic example of political correctness, writes Muehlenberg ... or perhaps it's jus...

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Kasparov on Fischer in the NYRB. It would be impossible for me to write dispassionately about Bobby Fischer even if I were to try. I was born the year he achieved a perfect score at the USChampionship in 1963, eleven wins with no losses or draws. He was only twenty at that poi...

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Parts I , II , III and IV . This post is continues directly from part IV. From part 4 - If the necessary conditions I listed in part four are valid, there is a good case to be made that Japan came very close to having the conditions to create the modernity virus in the 17th ce...

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As PollBludger notes , the latest numbers present conflicting stories of the state of play in federal politics. Essential Research shows Labor and the Coalition still neck and neck as they were at the election and have been ever since. Nielsen on the other hand shows the Coali...

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Parts I , II and III . We are often in the habit of calling the modernity virus “Westernisation”, for the simple fact that it occurred first in North West Europe. From this unique spontaneous beginning it spread elsewhere, in fact nearly everywhere. Many human developments lik...

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I should concede that the analogy drawn in this post between Dave Tollner and Tony Abbott is an imperfect one (image from NT News ) Northern Territory politics is nearly always very silly but equally unfailingly highly entertaining. It was the inspiration for the "Troppo" in t...

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At Menzies House , Tim Andrews argues that "we should have public debate free from fear of attack, and free from fear of retaliation." According to Andrews, it's not acceptable for activists to try to influence a media outlet's editorial policy by targeting its advertisers. An...

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Yes, folks. It's that time again. Crikey are reminding me that it's time for your group subscriptions. If you've already got one through me, I'll be shooting you an email to find out if you want to repeat the dose. We got sixty subscriptions last year so got to the maximum dis...

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Part I and II I'm anticipating some misapprehension for this post, mainly for reasons of semantics and my choice of meaning to attribute to poorly defined words. This will probably require an entire clarification post based on what misapprehensions arise in comments. In the la...

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Psychologist Jonathan Haidt shares this story written by a young gay woman in 1985: Until about a year ago, I was very quiet about my sexual orientation... I often didn't understand the sexual jokes made by my colleagues… the people making the jokes thought that we all felt th...

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Observant Media watchers might have noticed a story on the ABC The Drum site this morning to the effect that Club Troppo and Larvatus Prodeo had quit the Domain blog group headed by Graham Young's Online Opinion . LP's letter to Graham was apparently leaked by person/s unknown...

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HT 3 Quarks: Perhaps rather apposite in view of some recent controversies and debates. Bhikhu Parekh in The Philosopher's Magazine: Western thought has long been dominated by the view that while error is plural, truth is singular. We can be wrong in many different ways but can...

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Part I is here As an analogy, lets think about Modernity as a virus. By "Modernity" I mean society in which consistent growth in material living standards can occur, and where more than a small minority live above subsistence. The kind of society that was unprecedented before...

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Attached is a post by James Kwak . It strongly rejects a comment by Caplan and Beaulier that Behavioral Economics will Undermine the welfare state by expanding the set of choices. Caplan and Beaulier believe that poor people are more inclined to make irrational judgments becau...

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It's easy to miss the point in the debate about Online Opinion 's loss of advertising revenue. As Kim at Larvatus Prodeo points out , the debate isn't really about free speech -- it's not as if publishers have a right to corporate funding. The important point is about how onli...

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* Below is a guest post written by Ken G, a long-time Darwin resident and media/IT professional. Ken discussed his ideas not only with Darwin "storm chaser" enthusiasts but with Darwin residents who went through Cyclone Tracy. It's a keen amateur perspective on a frightening w...

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Christopher Pearson writes in the Weekend Australian about a current situation involving Club Troppo and other prominent oz political blogs: GRAHAM Young is the founding editor of a well-regarded e-journal called On Line Opinion, and is a regular contributor to The Australian....

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A few days ago I started writing an idle thought into a short post. It turned into a long post. So I split it in two. Then I realised it was reliant on ideas I had but hadn't written down, which might confuse others. So I wrote posts on them. Then they required another post. E...

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In Part I of this post I explored factors that might account for the massive proliferation in the volume of legislation and subordinate regulation in Australia over the last 30 years or so. The post was prompted by an article by the IPA's Chris Berg. In the previous part I sug...

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Salma Hayek, who is apparently unrelated to Friedrich and may well be totally uninterested in either rule of law or regulatory reform ... That isn't gratuitous , is it? Chris Berg of the conservative thinktank Institute of Public Affairs takes aim at the proliferation of regul...

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