Club Troppo

I concluded my last post on this topic with asking rhetorically whether I was optimistic that we'll find our way through, and what measures might be taken to maximise our chances of a happy ending. Here's the second part of the argument which was published in an edited form on...

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Nick Cater is sensitive about accusations of racism. In his book The Lucky Culture he writes: To judge someone as prejudiced is character assessment; to call them racist or, even worse, a racist, is character assassination. One can be a little bit prejudiced or a little bit ig...

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http://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water-1 http://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water-2 HT Brainpickings from a while ago. [H]ere's something . . . that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is a...

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I have just completed a lengthy answer to a very thoughtful comment on my previous post on climate change . And because the raises lots of Very Big issues about how one talks and reasons about ethics, I thought I'd exercise my prerogative and turn the exchange into a post for...

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Prelude: Lento It's after midnight and the other members of the household are either asleep or pursuing their own consolations in the silence of their own rooms. So, much as I might desire the consolation of recorded orchestral music played at concert hall volume, it just woul...

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http://youtu.be/nuIiqKytvnU I saw a preview tonight. Incredible, fabulous stuff. Go if you can.

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Interlude: Ruminations on 'the costs of speech', monkeys and Dexter In The 2013 PEN Free Voices lecture, reproduced on the ABC's Religion and Ethics web site , Waleed Aly makes the following observations on Freedom of Speech: … let us grind this out, beginning with a trite obs...

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Here’s a true modern puzzle for you: why is the rate of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and obesity, increasing in the US, Australia, urban China, and most Western countries? Which mental health problems again? Depression, anxiety, and obesity are the bi...

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Simply Delightful : Conservative billionaire Gina Rinehart called for the sterilization of the poor today, arguing that the only way to alleviate poverty is to stop the "underclasses" from multiplying. In a video uploaded to her official YouTube account, the Australian mining...

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Stepping out in her new role for the Guardian, Katharine Murphy contacted me and asked me for an economic question to put to the PM. It was nice of her to ask, and I thought it a worthy challenge, but couldn't really come up with much for a day or so. I didn't want it to be a...

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Cross posted from the Lowy Interpreter Blog .* I was contemplating writing a post on Martin Wolf's latest Jeremiad on climate change when Sam Roggeveen sent me a link to his own post asking for my response to his musings on the same subject. So here's my response – or the firs...

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A Peculiarly Australian Cause Celebre In one of the less nebulous sections of the Liberals' curiously fisk-resistant manifesto i , you'll find this special promise for Andrew Bolt and his fans and supporters: Protecting freedom of speech – supporting an open media We will prot...

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In Saturday's Australian , Rebecca Weisser argues that the ABC is biased. To fix the problem she suggests creating "a commission of inquiry to rework the charter so that it stipulates that balance in programming is fundamental to the operation of the ABC". For political elites...

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On reading Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit which I'm enjoying, I have been re-reading Keynes' fine essay on Marshall. One real mystery - at least for someone who doesn't know more like me - is Marshall's famous opposition to women's equality at Cambridge. Anyway Keynes has a sect...

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VIDEO: Goodes gutted by girl’s name-calling In the absence of Jacques intervention, Wordpress's coding interferes with my ability to 'embed' this video on Troppo but I recommend it. Funny how my team and those around it can be depended on to play the role of baddie - though of...

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Once again we're arranging ourselves into our usual trenches. Are you a free trader or a protectionist? And so we get the usual rehearsal of lessons from our recent experience as Ford closes. Fair enough. If you have to consume the lesson in a single slogan I guess "don't assi...

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This is sort of in the vein of the intermittent series ( 1 , 2 ), its adopted sibling and an older post on "hollowing out" . But it's also much less thought out. Earlier today, following the announcement that Ford would shut its Geelong plan t, Scott Steel tweeted The lesson t...

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As I said a few months ago , tax evasion is the big cliff in terms of the future of the EU project. It was thus fascinating to see the tax evasion games played out at the latest ‘summit’ In Brussels yesterday. To understand what really goes on at these summits, imagine yoursel...

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Well, as Ned Kelly may have said on the scaffold, "I suppose it had to come to this". Ford has been prosecuting a strategy of risk minimisation which has principally been about investment minimisation in Australia for at least a decade and naturally enough, if you don't invest...

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O ne of the most successful memes of the right in the last decade or so is that redistribution is the politics of envy. Of course politicians have to appeal to the emotions, and they have to appeal to all denominators including the lowest common ones. Well they don't have to a...

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