Club Troppo

We've been celebrating the 60th anniversary of various events towards the end of the Second World War in the last few months, like V(E) day and the liberation of Auschwitz-Burkenau. We can also celebrate the 65th anniversary of the landmarks of the first years of the war. I've...

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That's what a rather good piece in this week's TIME magazine, on the French campaign re the EU constitutional vote this Sunday, called that aspect of French psychology which projects a self-image of a small, proud, gallant, quarrelsome and , besieged people fighting with their...

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I've just been reading Crooked Timber posts on (and by!) Steve Levitt . I heartily recommend it. I read Kieren Healy's and John Quiggin's reviews but haven't read the others yet. How these guys toss off such well written, informed and thought through stuff at the rate they do...

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Which of these is the odd one out? (a) Cargo pants (b) Mudhoney (c) John Howard If you believe the conservative columnists it's 'c'. Only John Howard is still cool in 2005. Cargo pants and grunge bands like Mudhoney are hopelessly '90s. Only decrepit Gen-Xers think it's hip to...

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This week's effort is about super choice - as will be next week's. It's amazed me how much effort has been put into choice of fund and yet, particularly in the light of how little people know, how little effort has been put into trying to make those choices reasonably informed...

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What is federal Transport Minister John Anderson up to with his planned federal takeover of Australia's ports? And what does the ACCC know about regulating ports, let alone operating them? It's the national competition and consumer protection watchdog, for God's sake. I starte...

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Having an 11 year old daughter, I watch a lot more reality TV talent shows than I otherwise would. (My seven year old son prefers to use the TV to study the footy a figure of quiet pathos as he clutches a black and white striped 'Beanie Baby'). Herewith a review of one of the...

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I was very pleased to read Michael Duffy's latest column in which he laments the tribalism of the Australian right and the extent to which it is driven by the desire to score points off the left rather than build its own contribution to our life. As he says Howard's tenure is...

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A while back Mark Bahnisch commented in response to a 'centrist' post by me that centrism was all very well, but hard to get passionate about . I didn't really follow that then - saying that if one wanted to get passionate one would surely be passionate about specific principl...

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..to cheer us all up--or not, as the case may be! There's this game doing the rounds in the blogosphere, which goes under the unofficial moniker of 'Ten things I've never done.' The whole point is they're supposed to be reasonably ordinary things--no point writing you've never...

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For quite some time now I've been feeling radically uninspired about blogging. It's getting harder and harder to get enthusiastic about topics, or to find ones I haven't already posted about, sometimes multiple times. I've always been opinionated about political and broader pu...

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Nicholas Gruen reckons the Darwin-Alice Springs railway is a "white elephant". That's certainly long been the prevailing view of a high proportion of southern politicians and bureaucrats. In part it depends on how you define white elephant, I suppose. There would be a multitud...

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Here's this week's effort . Another lamentation on our national loss of vigor in economic reform. I argue that recently its been displaced by the much abhorred 'wedge politics'. I try to downplay the idea that 'wedge politics' is anything special or limited to the Howard Gover...

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Something relevant to today's announcement of a rapprochement betwen the Catholic and Anglican Churches on the subject of Mary, and the impression, in much of Britain, that the Anglican Church is all but dead.. An interesting Times Online article by journalist Ruth Gledhill, c...

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(via Tim Dunlop ) Australian law academics Mirko Bagaric and Julie Clarke are apparently about to publish an article in the University of San Francisco Law Review arguing that the use of torture, even if it leads to "annihilation" of the tortured suspect, should be lawful and...

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This post is a rant dug up and brushed up out of an email. It was prompted by reading the Monthly, but I didn't want to hijack Sophie's more serious review of it and it is not really in response to it. One point of disagreement with her is that while I like to read Helen Garne...

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Just drawing readers' attention to the fact there's a longish piece, by Richard Johnstone, on the blogging phenomenon, in the May issue of Australian Book Review. You can find it here

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There's a real feeling in Australian media/literary/intellectual circles that we are somehow lacking in something because we don't have a magazine of the venerable calibre of the New Yorker or the Atlantic Monthly. That's why every so often there's an attempt to remedy the sit...

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T1 and T3 ( here and here ) are squabbling again, this time over the number of war-related deaths in Iraq. Tim Lambert has long argued in favour of the credibility of the Lancet study which purported to show that some 98,000 Iraqis had died as a direct and indirect consequence...

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I have just been to see the German film 'Downfall'. If you're concerned about it 'humanising' Hitler, it does. It presents him as a three dimensional character with charisma, and gravitas. He's even courteous a lot of the time at least when he's not apoplectic with rage partic...

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