Club Troppo

Larvatus Prodeo » Butget Orthodoxies and the Politics of Greed How much for one of those PhD's again?

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Tim Dunlop muses about the need for an Australian Bill of Rights, in light of some comments by the head of the federal Attorney-General's Department, Robert Cornall, to the effect that perhaps some individual rights might need to take second place to the collective/community r...

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At last a Labor leader who understands what is needed and can articulate it - powerfully, coherently and convincingly. It's what Australia needs, in contrast to the cynical patrician populism of Costello's budget. This is the position statement Beazley should have given 7 or 8...

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I posted on the theme of bullshit under the heading " Why is John Clarke so funny? And why now? " a while back. Just to let Troppodilians know, the author of "On Bullshit", Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, Harry G. Frankfurt, is being interviewed tonig...

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I wasn't going to post this Courier Mail column as I agreed with Andrew Leigh's criticism of it that it didn't say much about the budget! But prompted by Peter Browne's request to post it on APO , I re-read it and thought it was quite good! (I don't always think that when I re...

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UK Troppo reader Alex Deane has just published a book, and writes to tell me he quoted extensively from some of my blog posts about values. The book is called The Great Abdication: Why Britain's Decline Is the Fault of the Middle Class , and the Amazon blurb describes it this...

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What I don't know about economics would fill a library. Moreover, the mainstream media is full of budget analysis and comment, as are some other blogs. So I think I'll give it a miss, except for these shoot-from-the-lip glib oversimplifications. The tax cuts (despite the skew...

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A recent post over at Catallaxy put me in mind of an old cartoon of mine. Apologies to more high minded Troppodillians, but it amused me.

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I can't decide whether American economist Richard Florida , who is currently doing the rounds promoting his latest book The Flight of the Creative Class , is one of those public intellectuals that Tim Dunlop loves, or just a populist poseur. Florida is responsible for the vogu...

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No doubt I'm the last to discover it, but I thought this essay 'An imaginary "scandal"' by Theodore Dalrymple was a great piece, marred only by the occasional ideological sloganeering.

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"There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and removed from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those ha...

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The Atlantic and Australia's new magazine The Monthly discuss the art of the interview In the Atlantic Stephen Budiansky unearths a World War II document on how to interrogate Japanese POWs while in The Monthly Kerryn Goldsworthy looks at how the ABC's Andrew Denton "lures his...

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I guess it's still too early to make confident predictions about precise numbers of seats, but the Sydney Morning Herald is suggesting that the Blair New Labour government has been returned with a greatly reduced majority of around 68 seats (down from 160 in 2001), while the T...

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That's the title of my newest book, which is a collection of my shorter pieces--essays, short stories and a few papers I gave at conferences--which has just been released by the small Australian publisher, Altair Australia Books. Nearly all of the pieces have been published be...

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The National Library of Australia wants to preserve Troppo Armadillo in its Pandora online archive . It's a welcome compliment to the consistent quality of writing by Troppo contributors over quite a long period (by blogging standards anyway). However, because there are so man...

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I ducked over to The Spin Starts Here just now to see if Caz and the crew had blogged a satisfyingly vicious coverage of the Logie awards. But disappointingly, they've fallen down on the job and spared the TV Week extravaganza, Rove's "F" word and all. Nevertheless, apparently...

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Below is this week's column. It raises the issue of regulation to combat wrongdoing - and the paradoxical results it often brings about. Regulation generates lots of debate between the right and left. The left often argue for regulation at least where it is putatively directed...

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I'm in mourning. James Russell ( Hot Buttered Death ) has chucked it in and moved on to the Old Bloggers Eventide Home . James was one of the relatively early entrants to the ozplogosphere, although his blog soon developed into an eclectic mix of posts about the bizarre and un...

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Graham Ring has an article in today's Age where he bemoans the lack of success of Victorian Aboriginal claimants in either prosecuting native title claims or negotiating successful outcomes with governments. It's entirely understandable that an activist associated with the lob...

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The Weekend Australian's editorial described the non-custodial sentence handed out to hit-and-run-killer Adelaide criminal lawyer and former police prosecutor Eugene McGee as a "travesty of justice". Certainly a $3,100.00 fine and licence disqualification appears grossly inade...

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