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The Great Covid Panic: now out!
It’s here, the booklet I am sure you have all been waiting for. The one which Gigi Foster and Michael Baker slaved over for 10 months. It is also on Kindle. It is dedicated to all the victims of the...
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Gladys’“unerring, Dunning-Kruger infused, self-belief and self-regard”
Here’s a (lightly edited) exchange between me and a friend who, I’m going to assume would prefer to remain nameless. If they want to change this, they will let me know and I will change it. The...
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Practical steps towards Ivan Illich’s world
For anyone who’s interested I recommend David Cayley’s series of CBC radio documentaries on Illich. (He’s the best broadcaster I’ve come across). The first series of five programs focuses on Illich’s...
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Will you join me in the alt-centre?
It’s a funny thing with names. Names given in jest and contempt are adopted by their targets. After over a decade of marketing consulting services as “Lateral Economics”, I decided it wasn’t so much a...
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Theorisation: Reinventing Orwell and smothering him in verbiage
I’ve spoken about what I call “strategisation” before. This involves dressing something up as particularly strategically apposite. The example I gave is this assertion: Services will continue to make a...
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If we tolerate this, our children will be next … Guest post by Dennis Glover
Question: Given that history repeats, what year is this? Fifteen months ago, when Donald Trump’s rag-tag militias stormed the Capitol building in Washington D.C., I thought for a moment we might be...
View ArticleAustralia enters the post-party phase of Western democracy
Originally published on The Interpreter. Two federal elections ago, in 2016, the primary vote for the Labor Party and the Liberal-Nationals coalition reached record lows, while the number of voters...
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Why AI isn’t coming for us any time soon
As some of you may know, I am now publishing a weekly substack of articles I’ve found interesting on the net and in some cases offering some summary commentary. In an unprecedented move, the kind of...
View ArticleFast foodification: what is it, what’s driving it, how do we stop it?
In this discussion, Peyton Bowman and I discuss my term ‘fast-foodification’. I coined the word trying to describe modern politics. The techniques used by politicians and their professional enablers...
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Gruen: detox democracy through representation by random selection
I use Troppo to make various notes for file as it were for reference in future. And on wanting to record something I found that I hadn’t reproduced this post — which was originally at The Mandarin —...
View ArticleAn Alt-left?
I What is it with James Burnham? I associate him — via Curtis Yarvin — with the alt-right. And Burnham is the founding text of what I call the Alt-centre (of which I am the founder and which I’m...
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Economic Ideas and Policy Outcomes: Ross Garnaut’s Gruen Lecture
Austro-Hungarian Economists Below is Ross Garnaut’s lecture in honour of my Dad. Economic Ideas and Policy Outcomes: Applications to Climate and Energy Fred Gruen signed up as Professor of Economics in...
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Should Liz Cheney be your hero?
Like me, Leslie Cannold is deeply grateful for Liz Chaney right now — you know, the way she’s speaking truth to fruitcakery. Liz Cheney is my hero. On positions of policy, I disagree with her almost...
View ArticleJournalism as a system of domination: Peter Dutton edition
.@FergusonNews asks Opposition Leader @PeterDutton_MP: What would prevent you now from taking the next step and that is backing the referendum on the Voice? #abc730 #auspol pic.twitter.com/ebAUd6uM7P...
View ArticleThe David Solomon Lecture: Government 2.0 a couple of years on . . .
Finding a formatting mess when I looked this up on Troppo, I’ve reposted it here for the record. I’m a bit embarrassed by my wooden speaking style. Here’s the David Solomon Lecture I’ll be giving at...
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Polarisation and the Case for Citizens’ Juries
Cross posted from Quillette from 16 Feb 2019, but now behind a paywall. When a conversation is not a conversation: party political discourse in the early 21st century I It looks like liberal democracy...
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What kind of Character is Sam Bankman-Fried
A friend sent me this article documenting Sam Bankman-Fried’s now well known text exchange with Vox journalist Kelsey Piper. I couldn’t help but think of Alasdair MacIntyre’s characters. As MacIntyre...
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Fighting political polarisation
From this week’s Substack of mine. Thomas B. Edsall has an important writeup of research into reducing political polarisation. But to me it seems to be heading in an unhelpfully scientistic direction....
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How did the Chilean left crash their referendum?
I’ve been looking for an explainer of what’s been going on in Chile and, thanks to Brad Delong for pointing it out. Of particular interest was the way a government won 55 percent of the vote and then...
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Understanding the present by listening to the past: Walter Lippmann’s “The...
One way to get beneath the surface of what’s going on is to read people who were writing about issues, as they emerged rather than in more modern times when they’d become the norm and become infused in...
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