Club Troppo

I got an email from the hosting company this morning alerting me to the amount of trackback spam and they have disabled the trackback script. I'm content to leave it off. Trackbacks are nice, but they are not worth the effort to keep afloat. It is a considerable pity that this...

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The Good Professor weighs in on the Schiavo case : Well pardon a Bunyip being frank, but this business isn't about compassion. It's about control -- control of both the individual and society's direction. As so many advocates of slow starvation are now demonstrating, they beli...

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A case of the Dreaded Lurgi hasn't prevented me from reading the papers, as per usual. As I was wiping snot off the monitor, I came across this article , describing the controversy about these 'do it yourself' DNA kits. It is not quite at the 'do it yourself' stage, but it is...

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The other day, in Sydney, I went to see Bride and Prejudice with my daughter. In case you don't know, this is a Bollywoodised version of Jane Austen's great work(which is always put at no 2 on world 'top hundred' reading lists these days, behind Lord of the Rings!). I'd heard...

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The East Timor-Australia maritime boundary issue is in the news again, with the Financial Times running an article quoting Timor Leste Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri as hoping that an agreement might be able to be reached by July. Apparently Australia has increased its offer for...

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Ken's jumped the gun on me , so I may as well officially launch my new blog and declare it open! Troppo readers are of course very welcome visitors. And thanks everyone for all your kind words on my farewell post here .

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I must confess I hadn't taken much notice of the Terri Schiavo case until now. Schiavo is a severely brain-damaged (vegetative?) American woman currently being effectively starved to death through cutting off her intravenous feeding tubes. Perhaps partly because of instinctive...

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Here is a discussion board post I've prepared for my first year Introduction to Public Law students here at CDU, to focus their minds on fundamental constitutional concepts in a topical, real world context. I thought some Troppo readers might also be interested. Richard Acklan...

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One of the more disturbing items in this morning's news is a report that not only are police pushing for special inquisitorial courts with reduced standards of proof for the trial of terrorism suspects, but that apparently the only objection our highly principled Amnesty Inter...

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Is anyone surprised that Mark Bahnisch resisted his blogging addiction for approximately 1.5 seconds at his new digs ?

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Now that Mark Bahnisch has gone solo and presumably taken his sociology/philosphy minded readers with him, we can get back to politics. It's good timing on Mark's account because after a six month slumber after the election, some interesting things are happening, not least to...

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Last night my kids were watching the swimming championships on the tele and the National Bank ad came on. "You said you wanted us to listen. So we listened. You said you wanted better service: We've given you better service". Or whatever it says. Then we switched to John Clark...

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In the post immediately below , I argue that it's an error to label John Howard as a "neocon" comparable to George W Bush. However, that isn't to say that there aren't some interesting and instructive parallels to be drawn, especially in terms of the rhetoric and mindset of co...

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This story from Indonesia rather suggests that early optimism about its progress towards liberal democracy was seriously premature: Indonesians will be barred from kissing in public under new laws criticised by human rights groups as draconian. Justice Minister Hamid Awaluddin...

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(via Jacques Chester) Apparently the Howard government has now introduced into the House of Representatives a Bill that effectively abolishes compulsory student unionism in Australia. The principal operative provision reads: (1) A higher education provider must not: (a) requir...

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Apparently left-leaning fact-checker extraordinaire and UNSW IT academic Tim Lambert is celebrating April Fool's day early, and has set up a mirror site of Tim Blair's blog . But there's a very real question of just who's the fool here. Naturally it's got all TB's RWDBs huffin...

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Bunyip's unlikely nemesis? Bloggers and spammers could be forced to put their names to political commentary in a bid to close a loophole in the nation's electoral laws. Roused by last year's furore over anonymous political websites such as www.johnhowardlies.com , the Howard G...

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Australian citizenship is a valuable thing - too valuable to be wasted on people who don't understand our fundamental values, beliefs, and traditions. In Britain they've been working on a new ' Britishness test ' for would-be citizens. Their Labour party says that it wants to...

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"Jane", the lesbian student teacher at the centre of several recent Troppo posts that mostly generated more heat than light, has posted an extensive response here . I strongly urge everyone who read any of the original posts to read Jane's response. It certainly sets to rest m...

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A wise innkeeper never lets a bed get cold before renting the room to a new guest. So it is here at Troppo . Scarcely has Mark Bahnisch rubbed the sleep from his eyes and ventured out into the big bad world of blogging, than Nicholas Gruen leaps in between the armadillian shee...

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