Do think tanks buy scholars who agree with them, or pay scholars to agree with them? In Australia its more the former than the latter. Hence the question mark over their publications. Is ihis judgement justified?Megan McArdle at The Atlantic has some ideas on on think tanks. MCardle says: Read more »
I have just come across Telos online. Amazing. Things are changing for the better. Gee, am I going to have some fun digging around in the archives to see what has been happening in the last decade or so. Read more »
The Burmese junta's refusal of international humanitarian aid in response to Cyclone Nargis is, the UN laments, “unprecedented”. When is it right for nation states to intervene? Read more »
The following quote begins Ted Mullighan preface to his 600 page Commission of Inquiry on sexual abuse on South Australian tribal lands in the Western Desert in central Australia in the far north-west of South Australia in and around the Musgrave Ranges. The report is entitled Children on the APY Lands, and it uncovered a sad stream of stories from the Lands, identified the nature and extent of child sexual abuse on the Lands and made recommendations to prevent and respond to it. Read more »
The lack of democracy in contemporary liberal democracy has given rise to many calls for the reinvention of the category of the political. Many say that this is an imperative and unavoidable task. Gabriel Riera, in this review of Antonio Calcagno, Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time, observes that: Read more »
There has been a lot of media talk (largely condemnation) in the US about Reverend Wright, from the United Church of Christ pastor, with Barack Obama repudiating Wright's recent address at the National Press Club under political pressure. Read more »
In Spaces of Hope David Harvey calls for a revitalization of the utopian tradition as a way to regain the possibility to think of real alternatives in opposition to the hegemony of market rationality under the conditions of globalization that means we all live within the world of capital circulation and accumulation. This subjects our bodies to physical and social processes which ‘produce’ different kinds of bodies. Read more »
The Bush administration’s narrative around torture after 9/11 is a familar one. Al-Qaeda was a different kind of enemy, deadly and shadowy. It targeted civilians and didn’t follow the Geneva Conventions or any other international rules. Nevertheless the Bush administration had acted judiciously, even as it moved away from a purely law-enforcement strategy to one that marshaled all elements of national power.The events at Abu Ghraib were the actions of a few bad eggs and had nothing to do with the broader policies of the administration. Read more »
David Hetherington, an executive director of Per Capita, a progressive think tank, says that: Read more »
I missed out in being one of the 1000 participants to Rudd's 2020 Summit. In fact two of the groups I applied for --those on cities and a digital world -- disappeared into the ether. What does that say about Rudd Labor? I don't really know apart from it being a turning away from Web 2. So we have to leave it to others--- the best and brightest-- to come up with Australia's next big ideas. Read more »
On the 20th of March Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson signed the Close the Gap Statement of Intent along with a coalition of health leaders. The statement committed Australian governments to close the indigenous health gap by 2030. It was not the first national plan for Aboriginal health. Read more »
Steven Schwartz, vice-chancellor of Macquarie University, in a recent speech made a distinction between a hamburger university--the management training facility for the McDonald's restaurant chain.--- and a real university, which is what we have in Australia What distinquishes the latter from the former Schwartz asks?In answering this he takes us to a definition of neo-liberal university as engines of economic growth. Read more »
Though the idea of democratic decision-making constrained by constitutional terms has become pervasive in modern governance, but its popularity has not erased the deep questions of legitimacy that such constraints raise. many hold that if democratic self-rule is the legitimate form of government, then what can justify restrictions on (current) democratic majorities? Read more »
The lack of democracy in contemporary liberal democracy has given rise to many calls for the reinvention of the category of the political. Many say that this is an imperative and unavoidable task. Gabriel Riera, in this review of Antonio Calcagno, Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time, observes that:: Read more »
There has been a lot of media talk (largely condemnation) in the US about Reverend Wright, from the United Church of Christ pastor, with Barack Obama repudiating Wright's recent address at the National Press Club under political pressure. Read more »
David Harvey describes neoconservatism thus: Read more »
I'm off to New Zealand for 2 weeks holiday. You can follow the progress on junk for code. In the meantime we have this interview with George Soros on the global financial crisis. In response to the question, 'Was this crisis avoidable?', he says: Read more »
In this review of George William's Human Rights under the Australian Constitution in the Melbourne University Law Review by Glenn Patmore and Mathew Harding highlight William' analysis of the methodology of constitutional interpretation.They say that in chapter four, which is called ‘Constitutional Interpretation and Human Rights’. Read more »
James Allan, Garrick professor of law at the University of Queensland, does go on and on about how bad a bill of rights are in various op-eds in The Australian Referring to the panel on the future of Australian governance at the 2020 Summit he notes that it consists of three retired High Court justices associated with implied rights and none who have that interpretively conservative outlook that characterises the present High Court. He adds: Read more »
Has there been a shift in the way the Commonwealth government views higher education with a change of government? Angus McFarland in an op-ed in The Australian thinks so, as he says that a new commonwealth government allows us to re-conceptualise the role and function of the university student within higher education institutions and society.His argument is this: Read more »
Neo-liberalism has manged to roll back social democracy. By that I don't just mean that Hayek blew the whistle on the fundamental problems of central planning as Nicholas Gruen argues at Club Troppo. Gruen's argument is that Hayek was right about the inadequacies of central planning and the significance of local knowledge. Read more »
The US is in recession territory. Investment banks are on the verge of collapse, the mortgage crisis is spreading, meltdown is happening, unemployment is rising and the Federal Reserve is taking on significant amounts of risk to avert further meltdowns on Wall Street and Main Street. The nation is reeling from the subprime crisis and the response of the Bush administration is more deregulation of financial markets. Read more »
Are we in a 20 year-long (or more) political experiment that will hollow out public life and corrode or destroy "public capital"? One where the notion of the public realm has been corroded by individualist, marketised ideology? A world where the relationship between the individual and government is characterised by widespread low levels of trust in government in a democratic state. Is Rudd simply Blair 2.0, to be it crudely? Read more »
The Rights of health consumers is on the political agenda now that the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care released a draft Read more »
In his 'One thousand days' article in The Australian David Burchell argues that there seems to be - at least on the basis of the public record - a serious strategy deficit in the Rudd Government. He says: Read more »
In his review of Bill Readings The University in Ruins Dominick LaCapra says that the contemporary academy is based on a systemic, schizoid division between a market model and a model of corporate solidarity and collegial responsibility. Firstly: Read more »
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