Club Troppo

No doubt everyone's heard of the fracas over the premature end--or at least the postponement--of the latest Great White Hope for Aussie filmmaking, Eucalyptus. From what you read in the press, the reasons for the implosion are fairly complex, but centred around the script. I h...

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Aside from IR, the big issue Cabinet will be discussing today is welfare reform . A single payment, which I support, is still too difficult according to Minister Kevin Andrews. One reason might be, as the Fin reported yesterday, that there is no portfolio of Social Security an...

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OK, by 'popular demand'--well I can call it that if I want to!--and following on from 'dullest authors', here's the latest list: what are the most boring, awful movies you've ever seen? Of course there are many, many candidates for this, as the wide field for the Golden Turkey...

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As part of my work, I regularly read US periodicals such as The Public Interest and Foreign Affairs . The former is home to leading neo-cons, while the latter is more the house journal of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment. Both are enormously influential in setting t...

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With the electoral process done and dusted for another three years, political talk has been in short supply hereabouts. As you may have noticed. Troppo isn't the only blog to have wandered off the political playing fields, for want of anything better to write about. Tim Dunlop...

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On the weekend, we went to see one of the best new films I've seen in quite a while--French director Julie Bertuccelli's first feature film(her previous work has been in documentaries), Since Otar Left. It is an almost perfect film, with glorious acting, fantastic setting, gre...

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or, Bollywood Bliss I'd never seen a Bollywood film before today. I'm a longtime fan of Hong Kong cinema, particularly the work of director Tsui Hark , and this genre has well and truly become a crossover phenomenon, both in terms of style and effects in action films, and in H...

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A couple of polls for a leisurely Sunday.. First of all, and Troppo Armadillians who've been commenting on music and composers recently might like this, Norm Geras over at Normblog is now conducting a poll of 'five favourite classical composers.' Just send him a list of your f...

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Looks like Troppo was right to place Saintinastraitjacket in the "centrist" category on the blogroll - he's done the Moral Politics Test and scored the perfectly centrist position . It's a better test than some, and one of the fun things is that you get compared with US Presid...

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...is the title of an article by Sigmund Freud, who along with Marx and Nietzsche, has been seen as an originator of the "hermeneutics of suspicion" and thus a spiritual parent of postmodernism. In the wake of the Troppo theory wars, John Quiggin has reminded us that one of hi...

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Since, as we all now know, Troppo is home to lovers of literature, I'd urge you all to visit Catallaxy where two posts are of interest. Andrew discusses the importance of the opening line in written expression , which has led to some great examples in comments, and Jason has a...

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Overlooked in the vigorous debate over postmodernism that has consumed Troppo over the past week or so is the distinction between postmodernity and postmodernism, which is one strongly established in sociology (often associated with the work of Zygmunt Bauman .) Bauman argues...

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As a follow up to his last commentathon, which raised over 2k for the tsunami disaster relief fund, John Quiggin has opened another comments thread - this time he is donating $1 for every comment up to 1000 to Medecins Sans Frontieres , with a preference for the money to go to...

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Richard Ackland blogs writes about the Swain High Court decision in today's SMH. You know, the bloke who got $3.75 million for diving into a sandbank between the flags at Bondi Beach and making himself a quadriplegic. Ackland apparently shares my bemusement about the basis for...

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Despite Janet Albrechtsen's recent tirade on the necessity of free speech, femonazis and PC etc etc, the "debate" on abortion seems to have disappeared from the headlines. This in itself points to the limitations of the media as a true public sphere for the resolution of issue...

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The NSW Court of Criminal Appeal has just reduced by 10 years the head sentence of Kathleen Folbigg, who was convicted of the murder of 3 of her infant children and manslaughter of a fourth over a 10 year period. The head sentence was reduced from 40 to 30 years and the non-pa...

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This will be my last entry in the Troppo literature wars, which I suspect are running out of steam with the same positions being reiterated. However, I wouldn't be doing my job as a sociologist if I didn't point out that the way that we read literary works and assess their val...

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OK, so I've criticised pretty strongly the current hopeless approach to the teaching of English in schools, most particularly in NSW, which is the one that I know about. It's been fantastic to have this chance to express these things, and to debate it with you all, and it's al...

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Our new home is on the wrong side of the Nightcliff peninsula in Darwin, the Rapid Creek side where part-Aboriginal families were housed from the early 1960s. The area long ago began to be gentrified, but it still bears the imprint of its recent history in somewhat lower house...

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Longtime left commentator Martin Jacques has an interesting article in the Guardian about the politics of New Labour's Third Way, a phrase we're unlikely to hear anyone in the ALP utter any time soon in the wake of Latham's departure into the ether. But the similarities betwee...

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