Club Troppo

Recently John Quiggin's blog hosted a guest post from me and I wanted to put a follow up post here largely because it may attract the attention of some readers of this blog who didn't see my post or contribute to it when it was on John's blog. In the next iteration I might see...

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Or, Lapsing, then Lapsing into Solo-dom I think this will be my last post on Troppo . For some time, I've been thinking seriously about a number of conflicting impulses relating to my blogging life. For a start, I really need at this time to focus all my writing energies on my...

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We haven't had a good mindless partisan political stoush on Troppo for ages now. A couple of days at least. So I thought I'd draw readers' attention to this NT News story and see if it elicits the expected polarised Pavlovian reaction: A lesbian is pregnant with twins after ha...

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Old fashioned jingoism and new fashioned marketing collide on the British campaign trail The candidate's grandfather was an illegal immigrant , his campaign strategist is Australian , and his party's voter database software was developed in India . But as Party Co-Chairman Dr...

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A little while back, on one of my literary posts, on nominations for the 'dullest authors', a couple of people commented on how they found Australian writers , in the main, boring and/or unreadable. I thought I'd actually give you a chance here and now to nominate those Austra...

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Norm Geras has collated the results of the 'five favourite composers' poll he ran, and it won't surprise you to know that number one, at 345 votes, is Beethoven, closely followed by Mozart at 340 votes and JS Bach at 335 votes. In fourth place is Schubert, at 119 votes, and Ch...

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"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." - George Orwell. In his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language , George Orwell wrote: In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things l...

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One of my favourite bloggers, Phil Gomes over at Citystate has a very interesting reflection on the eclipse of op/ed columnists by bloggers - well worth reading . One of the constant bugbears of the blogosphere is the degree to which it's parasitic on mainstream media. Lately,...

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I'm indebted to "Santamaria socialist" The Currency Lad for his recommendation of John Edwards' new book Curtin's Gift: Reinterpreting Australia's Greatest Prime Minister . I read a lot of Australian political history at Uni, but not much in the way of political biography - th...

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In the comments thread Al Bundy has some kindly advice for parents who want to ban junk food from schools . Nic White says that kids should be able to eat what they like, while Andrew Norton and Michael Warby think that the real problem is that governments are running the scho...

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Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to ban the sale of junk food in California's schools. Naturally, the Center for Consumer Freedom is outraged. When former governor Gray Davis tried to do the same thing Consumer Freedom accused him of confusing the roles of government and f...

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You tend to get a bit complacent about cyclones after a while. We get one or two cyclone watches most years, but they seldom come close enough to do any damage. Fortunately, large ones have a very tight centre, so that really destructive winds don't extend over all that large...

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Sadly, Irish comedian Dave Allen has passed away unexpectedly . His show was one of the highlights of my week's viewing as a kid. May his God go with him .

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If you read nothing else this weekend in the papers, make sure you read The Australian's Middle East correspondent, Nicolas Rothwell, on the colossal blunder Osama Bin Laden made when he attacked America on September 11 2001, and the massive quakes it set off in the Middle Eas...

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Richard Ackland discusses yet another appalling High Court decision in his SMH column this morning. It isn't quite as breathtakingly repugnant as last year's Al-Khateb decision where a strong numerical majority held that it was perfectly lawful for the federal government to ho...

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I love crime fiction; have loved it ever since I discovered it at the age of 12 or 13. Crime fiction, well-written, is one of the most satisfying reading experiences there is: technically, the crime story provides a superb structure; characters are usually at crisis points in...

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A week or so ago I posted and asked about the available options for buying music legally across the Internet. I discovered that the alternatives seem to be quite limited in Australia; there are some pretty good sources, but the biggies like iTunes and Napster don't offer their...

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One of the nice things about blogging and teaching law is that the two often complement each other. Yesterday while searching for additional readings for my first year public law class I stumbled across the fact that legendary US federal judge and incredibly prolific " law and...

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In a classically neo-conservative review for the Public Interest , Kay Hymowitz argues that advertising is corrupting children: The truth is that hundreds of times each day, between television, the Internet, billboards, school vending machines, and curriculums, kids are prodde...

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There's an interesting discussion going on the Howardian power grab vis-a-vis the states over at Catallaxy sparked off by the resident representative of the Carlton-living, latte right Federalist faction of the Liberal Party , that is to say, Andrew Norton. Atypically for rece...

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