Club Troppo

More attentive Troppo readers may have noticed occasional laudatory references (by Mark Bahnisch and others) to the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein, a lefty sociologist/political theorist whose work is currently all the rage with former Marxists who remain convinced that capi...

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Trackback spam is coming in thick and fast this afternoon. As blogs' defences have eliminated much comment spam, this is the new spammers' method of choice. What's extremely outrageous is that some of the spam that Troppo has been reeling under appears to come from legitimate...

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Directly inspired by Nabokov's comment on my earlier post, 'Best Shakespearean plays', I'm giving you all an opportunity to bury or praise the screen versions of Will's work. Here are my own cheers and boos: Cheers: Trevor Nunn's 1999(I think)version of Twelfth Night, set in a...

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Shaun Carney sums up the intended result of the Howard Government's IR reforms : In practical terms, the changes would be likely to drive wages down at the lower end of the market while also increasing the number of people who can be employed. In that sense, the consequence fo...

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There seems to be some presupposition in the debates over the culture wars that once upon a time, there was an orderly, well educated and prosperous Australian society with no social cleavages and where everyone knew the 3 Rs and knew their place. It's the hidden premise, if y...

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Here's the chance for a bit of listmania--what are your top five favourite Shakespeare plays, and why? Before I list my own faves, I'd like to give you a bit of my own personal background regarding Shakespeare. As a child growing up in a French family, albeit mostly in Austral...

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The Northern Territory's Martin Labor government is about to introduce so-called "whistleblower" legislation here. I only found out when an ABC radio compere rang up wanting me to do an interview about it (which I will be on Monday morning). I had to confess that I'd been so b...

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Here's a guest post by Kevin Donnelly (who as many readers will recall, is an educationalist who has written extensively on curriculum issues, especially regarding the teaching English in high schools). Also see the various posts about education policy in the Troppo archives ,...

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One thing I share with Neo-Conservatives (and there aren't too many to put it very mildly) is a belief that politics is and ought to be about much more than the economy (though I deplore their economic irresponsibility). This insight, of course, is not original to Neo-Conserva...

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Frequent Troppo commenter and proprietrix of her own blog, yellowvinyl , who's a friend of mine, rang me today to let me know that she has cancer. She asked me to pass on her apologies for being testy in comments threads, which I'm sure are wholly unnecessary in any case. She'...

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...quoth Federal Treasurer Peter Costello . 0.1% growth in the December quarter, 1.5% over the year. This character is looking more and more like a clown, or as Homer Paxton argues, a barrister with no grasp of economics making the best case. Since everything's currently (and...

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In my previous post on right wing postmodernism , I referred to the work of American political theorist Sheldon S. Wolin. Wolin also has some relevant points to make about the "underclass" debate , which surfaced on Troppo in the wake of the Macquarie Fields riots. Wolin trace...

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Chris referred in his post on po/mo and history to right postmodernists such as Kojeve and Fukuyama. These figures - both enormously influential - and both central to my PhD thesis, would be worth a post in their own right. But I want to pick up on something said in comments b...

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Does anyone know what the current situation is with music download sites in Australia? I briefly used dodgy sites like Kazaa and Morpheus a couple of years ago, and allowed [my daughter] Rebecca to do so as well. I eventually made her stop doing it partly because I was conscio...

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First, it was Kinsey : ... the right-wing police have turned their sights on Bill Condon's new biopic, Kinsey, in the same hysterical terms that greeted Alfred Kinsey himself more than half a century ago: Such immoral subjects shouldn't be made public. Robert Knight, the (pred...

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John Quiggin (who's collecting quite a bit of Troppo attention lately) has a post dealing with a recent NSW Court of Criminal Appeal decision which set aside the verdict, conviction and sentence against an alleged heroin dealer. Here's the newspaper story about it, and here ar...

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As Labour ministers backed down on aspects of the Terrorism Prevention Bill after losing a division in the House of Commons and being roundly condemned by MPs from all parties for the anti-civil libertarian aspects of the bill, a big contrast can be drawn with the latest devel...

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John Quiggin's full black beard is probably the most famous in Australian blogdom . Prominently displayed on his blog 's masthead, the beard attracts regular comment - not all of it favorable . Recently two postgraduate researchers at the University of London reported that, am...

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On another thread, Chris pointed out an uncanny resemblance between Princess Mary and Emma Peel . This leads me to muse - why is it that the film adaptation of The Avengers is largely without grace, charm or wit compared to the wonderful original tv series ? Bad scriptwriting,...

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Something like that was the reported 'slogan' of the 'Kelly Gang' of the Glenqarie Estate in Macquarie Fields, in Sydney's south-west. Two of the members of that hell-raising group of family and friends died in a high-speed car chase, setting off several days of riots. It's al...

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