Martin writes, among other things: What it ought to confirm is that before dealing with large amounts of money or running for government you damn well should understand the detail, or consult someone who does. Arguments about whether One Nation is unaccountable to its members or has wacky policies are beside the point. Obviously, I […]
Articles on the Hanson verdict tend to fall into two camps: one says she was a bit silly, but didn’t do anything particularly bad, and three years is ridiculous; the other says she was found guilty of defrauding the state of $500,000 — what sentence would you hand out? It’s a bit difficult to work […]
Laborite Ben thinks IT workers would benefit from collective bargaining, and thus should be forced to partake in it for their own good: I wonder if things will get nearly as bad for IT people and if (or when) it happens, whether IT specialists will consider taking membership of a professional societies more seriously. The […]
“I want to thank the Australian people who supported our cause when they demonstrated against the policies of George Bush. Say thank you to all of them,” Sawad said.
There’s certainly something wrong here. UPDATE 2003/08/22: John Howard’s reaction to Pauline Hanson’s sentence: “Like many other Australians, on the face of it, it does seem [to me] a very long unconditional sentence for what she’s alleged to have done,” [Howard] said. Peter Beattie’s response to that: Mr Beattie says politicians should stop commenting on […]
Impressive.
As David would say, there’s always a Buffy connection.
A progress report on the investigation into weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Weve been very lucky. One set of these documents that we were happiest about – actually, the Iraqis had prepared them to be moved. They were put in two very large trailers outside the national monitoring directorate, and then something happened. They […]
Martin follows up to the previous entry, with an interesting question — is it ethical to lie to achieve a moral good, that is, (when) do the ends justify the means? The only problem here is that it’s not apparent that anyone lied (ie, deliberately uttered things they knew were untrue, and that they knew […]
Wow, everyone really must miss me. Ben Fowler’s hitting my hot buttons too! Ben writes: Australians here, amongst others might be aware that our beloved PM has recently gotten some flak over intelligence he and his conservative cronies used to gatecrash the war in Iraq. The problem with this is that Ben’s not talking about […]
Obviously concerned at my lack of new entries while I’m travelling, Martin’s posted an irresistable taunt. The issue at question is “Why do modern societies work so much?” There are a few answers to this — one is simply an internalised desire to do work, ie, a work ethic. That’s a pretty trite line of […]
Ads on TV suck, right? Surely the point of TV is the shows, and since ads generally distract from the shows (by being loud and obnoixous and spoiling the mood, by breaking your train of thought, by shortening the shows, etc) they’re therefore bad. Aren’t they? There are some obvious wins to ads: they give […]
Apparently economists are real scientists now; they’ve finally managed to reach that nadir of absent-mindedness that’s a requisite for genius in the hard sciences, so much so that they’ve forgotten we’re human. A choice claim: [Clive Hamilton’s] book, Growth Fetish, published by Allen & Unwin, is a powerful attack on conventional economics and its rarely […]
Media Watch on Mike Carlton: We’re pleased to report Sydney radio, 2UE host and Sydney Morning Herald columnist Mike Carlton has also corrected the record after lately being full of praise for the ancient and eloquent Democrat Senator – of course were talking America here – Robert C. Byrd. In spite of Robert Byrd’s background […]
Raph Levien points to a comment by Tim Bray that says, among other things: Those fables were taken to the UN Security Council and ended doing severe damage to America relationships with pretty well everybody, because pretty well everybody refused to sign up for war on the basis that they were scared of Saddams WMDs, […]