Club Troppo

[caption id="attachment_20629" align="aligncenter" width="525" caption="I (KP) couldn't find a cartoon satirising the absurdity of the apparently dominant American attitude to Obamacare, except this one that does so unintentionally ..."] [/caption] No time to write a considere...

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This week's dramatic events in the Australian media have underscored the Schumpeterian "creative destruction" being wrought before our eyes by the Internet and associated technologies and cultures: Fairfax's announcement of the sacking of 1900 staff, closure of print facilitie...

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by Maria Popova - capacity to “learn, unlearn, and relearn” emotional behaviors and psychological patterns is a form of existential literacy.

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Why hasn't (Darwinian) evolution evolved the building blocks of Lamarkian evolution? Well it has once - with us - but why hasn't it done so at the biological rather than the cultural level? Perhaps smuggled into Lamarkianism is the idea of telos, which can exist within conscio...

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[caption id="attachment_20414" align="alignright" width="316" caption="NT government croc catcher Tommy Nichols"] [/caption] News Ltd polling guru Peter "Mumble" Brent disagrees with my assessment of the likely state of play in the run-up to the NT election on 25 August: I don...

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by Anne Twomey - Parliament's abject surrender of its powers of financial scrutiny to the Executive, just to save a few school chaplains.

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http://youtu.be/uiyMuHuCFo4 HT Brad Delong

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This was the best bit in the essay that Ken quoted recently . Care is impliedly conceptualised as resulting from poor fortune, to be provided for as a ‘service’ rather than something essential to realising our humanity. Incapacity is spoken of as a ‘risk’, as if it were someho...

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Bill Easterly thinks colonialism is not all bad. The European Origins of Economic Development by William Easterly, Ross Levine. A large literature suggests that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outco...

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As Ken Parish's post below shows, there is now a widespread view that Gina Rinehart will win control of Fairfax , publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and then seek to move their editorial stances well to the right. From people who believe that, you hear both wa...

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From @danilic (zoom in to read some of the smaller text)

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[caption id="attachment_20275" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Hendo"] [/caption] The Northern Territory is facing an imminent general election, on 25 August to be precise. We know this because the Henderson Labor government introduced fixed four year terms after rushi...

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[caption id="attachment_20266" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon"] [/caption] Federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon's media intervention into the Ashby v Slipper case provoked a Twitter discussion that's worth recording and then musi...

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by Sarah Joseph - considers the moral and practical dilemmas of Australia's asylum seeker policy

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by Jeremy Waldron - some reasons for regulating hate speech are bad ones but some (like protecting dignity) are not.

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Here's a great picture of the sub-assemblies of the Boeing 787 (Dreamliner - ok it's a silly name, but it's somehow fun to say). Its touted by Deloitte as an example of how disaggregated industries are. But looking at it I wondered, might it tell us something else. What (the h...

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by Anne Twomey - Politicians may be more likely to funnel pre-election and other funding through properly legislated and overseen programs.

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by David Ritter - The reality for today's Australians is material abundance, accompanied by tiredness, time-poverty, jadedness and anxiety.

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by Gabrielle Appleby - States may have more to lose than money on legal bills if they join "Twiggy" Forrest in opposing Labor's mining tax.

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