Club Troppo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVAmGArS0tU The Overton Window is a quite well known expression describing the demarcation between political/policy discussion that is and is not acceptable in mainstream discussion. Sometimes what removes your idea from the window is that, what...

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Adam Smith put it memorably above. I'll be forever grateful for my time at the Australian Centre for Social Innovation because it has shown me the generality of that statement. Whether Smith intended it or not, it applies not just to business people of the same trade, but to p...

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https://youtu.be/lUF6klWuB38 Yes, folks, every now and again you hear yourself talking in sound-bytes - well I do anyway. It's kind of fun - like when you look at those 3D pictures that were in vogue in the 1980s - I think there was one every week in the Good Weekend - and you...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqoXrjQQ9x8 This is a re-post of a post I did on Testament of Youth last December when the lead actress and I sat down to watch it for the first time (as you do). My excuse for reposting it is that the film has now been released in Australia and...

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https://youtu.be/n3AeM3Q9mU4 On a difficult subject, let's throw the conversation over to some people who know nothing about it, but who have flawless makeup on and vigorously assert mutually inconsistent propositions. If you think the first 90% of the video is exemplary, wait...

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I sent the passage below to my friend Alex Coram noting "I like this post from Brad Delong - though you may not". Alex, you see, has a deeper understanding than me of these things. I was right - he wasn't that impressed - but for reasons that I also agreed with and might have...

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https://youtu.be/sXlmF3eI9R0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcEfKovFzf0 The earlier ad was removed from YouTube. It was even schlockier than the second one I've put up here, but until I can find the other one again, it will now have to do. So are we here at Troppo - not to me...

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https://youtu.be/e3e2nNNJ7-4 Regular readers will know of my enthusiasm for the recent movie adaptation of Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth about the disaster that was WWI and how it blighted the lives of a generation. It's opening in Australia today - read my review on the...

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Delia Lawrie's announcement today that she was resigning as NT Labor Opposition Leader isn't really surprising in light of yesterday's news that Attorney-General John Elferink had referred her conduct over the Stella Maris controversy to both NT Police and the Director of Publ...

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Woolies and its marketers plumb the depths of vileness. Apparently they've taken it down with a delicious non-apology. It "regretted" it had caused offence. File next to corporate pedophilia under "The banality of corporate exploitation". Anyway, it's a worthy subject for a co...

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https://youtu.be/I4dglIt77Tc I expect l ots of Troppodillians will know of Stewart Lee - the guy in the video above - given how good I reckon he is, but I'd never heard of him until, at the beginning of the Easter weekend YouTube noticed I'd been checking comedians out to deci...

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( NB See my previous post on this important NT Supreme Court decision ). News that CLP Attorney-General John Elferink has referred the Delia Lawrie matter to the Director of Public Prosecutions is hardly a surprise, given adverse comments about her behaviour in a Supreme Court...

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[caption id="attachment_27165" align="alignright" width="300"] The old, heritage-listed Stella Maris Seamen's Mission in Darwin's CBD[/caption] Northern Territory Labor Opposition Leader Delia Lawrie is a fearsome political warrior, a divisive figure who seldom compromises or...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hN6HfGUGQBc If you think TroppoLabs is mainly about keeping the Merc Sports and Rooter in basic working order, think again!

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[caption id="attachment_27129" align="aligncenter" width="865"] From this link [/caption] [caption id="attachment_27128" align="aligncenter" width="865"] From this link [/caption]

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Grossly offensive political ads about the alleged dangers of Chinese purchase of electricity “poles and wires” during the last week of the New South Wales election campaign say much more about the Labor-affiliated unions who placed them than they do about the Baird government’...

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https://youtu.be/lGn8ZLMU1-Q Something that’s fun for chess patzers like me is watching really good players play blitz and seeing how much further their chess intuition goes. This is normally savoured at live tournaments but I just discovered Banter Blitz which pits grandmaste...

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In answer to my post earlier today about the data retention bill, frequent commenter Patrick Fitzgerald made a rather important point about the data retention zeitgeist: Embrace the panopticon Ken, buy yourself a webcam, attach it to your head and stream live 24×7. Plus for go...

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Data security and retention are very much in the news at the moment. Indeed the Abbott government’s data retention bill is currently being debated by the Senate and will inevitably be passed given that the Coalition did a deal with Labor whereby the latter will support it in r...

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I remember being excited when Barack Obama was elected, but largely because he was such a fine orator and black and reasonable. I didn't hold out very much expectation that this 'change' that we were supposed to be believing in would be all that exciting, though of course poli...

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