Club Troppo

I've been reading two very different, but equally extraordinary books recently. One's a huge, sprawling novel--the amazing first novel of English author Susanna Clarke--'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.' The other's a huge, sprawling combination of history and intelligence inv...

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Peter Hartcher hypothesises in this morning's SMH that Bush will win next week's US Presidential election despite his poor economic stewardship and a botched occupation of Iraq that may yet turn into a Vietnam-style quagmire. The reason? Scots-Irish "trailer trash" support the...

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It's the trinity of spring in our productive garden, in our cool highlands climate where the traditional seasons really mean something. By the time eagerly-awaited spring rolls in, we're all heartily tired of eating those hardy winter stalwarts, leeks, 'a toutes les sauces' ,...

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Nicholas Kristof says President Bush cares more about 'higher meta-truths' than facts. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof illustrates George W Bush's "casual relationship with truth" by quoting a short passage from Bush's autobiography: One night, Laura and I were out o...

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Or is Wicca a legitimate religion? Sophie's stirred Troppo commenters up into a debate questioning whether membership of the Church of Satan ought to be considered a legitimate religion. Among other things, I do some work in the sociology of religion, and having published some...

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The op-ed debate about the merits or otherwise of Indian author Arundhati Roy being awarded this year's Sydney Peace Prize is apparently being conducted in an alternative fantasy universe. I can't think of any other explanation for Sydney Peace Foundation Director Stuart Rees'...

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As readers will see from the post immediately below, Sophie Masson has joined the growing team of Troppo bloggers. She probably won't have time to blog very frequently, being a busy working author and occasional op-ed pundit in the daily press, Quadrant and elsewhere. I'll pos...

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Springtime greetings to all Troppo Armadillos from your newest blogger! And for my first post, I'd like to start with a piece which began life inspired by the reactions of some Troppo critics to my recent piece in the Sydney Morning Herald , about Satanism. I don't intend to d...

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Wendy provided me with some food for thought the other day when she serendipitously drew my attention via her post on a light switch puzzle to the fact that the English political philosopher Norman Geras has a blog . Geras is the author of an excellent book, The Contract of Mu...

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It's the quirky news story of the week. Leading Hand Cranmer, 24, a technician on board HMS Cumberland , has been given permission to perform Satanic rituals at sea. According to Warlock Helnock , editor of Rule Satannia magazine: Chris did a piece for issue 5 of Rule Satannia...

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Don Watson has a new book called Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words, Contemporary Clichés, Cant and Management Jargon . I don't know if it's any good but the image of a weasel sucking out the contents of an egg while leaving the shell intact has always appealed to me. Accordi...

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Writing in today's SMH, someone named Peter Bartlett reckons diversity is overrated when it comes to media ownership. "Synergies" are far more important: To ensure a high standard of media requires high quality people and players, providing resources to investigate and follow...

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Is there a 'counter-cultural conspiracy' to keep conservative Christian opinion out of the media? Political activism is more about mobilizing existing attitudes than it is about cultivating new ones. As a result, one of the best ways to influence public opinion is to keep view...

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Rocco Buttiglione believes that homosexuality is a sin, that the EU risks being swamped by asylum seekers, and that supporters of free markets should not form alliances with libertines. Activists like to portray Australia as a uniquely racist nation. They tell us that the civi...

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This comment a few minutes ago by the aptly nick-named "fool" is fairly typical of comments on very old Troppo posts. Comments on old posts are almost always either blog spam or moronic (and sometimes both). In fact, the entire Ubersportingpundit empire (including Troppo ) has...

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Former Whitlam Minister Barry Cohen postulates a provocative reason why, at least in his opinion, current federal ALP politicians lack breadth of policy vision and an ability to engage effectively with the interests and concerns of ordinary Australians. Their career paths and...

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(via Gary Sauer-Thompson ) Frequent Troppo readers will be aware that American jurisprudential scholar Ronald Dworkin is one of my intellectual heroes. Phillip Adams' favourite borrowing source the New York Review of Books has just published a multiple author article titled Th...

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(via Catallaxy ) The release of a study by the Communications Law Centre of the University of New South Wales on social attitudes to several behaviours including smoking marijuana, homosexuality and adultery throws the issue of defamation law reform into sharp relief. As CLC's...

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What odds Mark Latham will still be ALP leader in six months time, with all these frontbenchers voting with their feet? The cover story that he's just clearing away the deadwood from the Hawke and Keating years certainly doesn't apply to Lindsay Tanner or Annette Ellis (althou...

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As a bred (if not born) Queenslander with a long memory of the Joh years, I can never quite recapture the feeling of relaxation that used to wash over me driving over the NSW border into the land of Wran in 1985 and 1986. I was having a beer with a couple of friends on Saturda...

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