Wednesday, 19th of March, 2008

Dagmar Krause’s version of the very best Brecht/Weill songs. I like the recorded version better (from her hard-to-find album Supply and Demand but also on the Brecht/Weill compilation Lost in the Stars) but this is still wonderful.
Instant Edit: According to this old page, the Lost in the Stars version is different, and superior. Well, there you go! I still need to find her two albums of Brecht songs, plus old Art Bears, Slapp Happy, Henry Cow… :)

Thursday, 13th of March, 2008

Go on, do it!

Wednesday, 13th of February, 2008

I remember that way back when the whole sorry mess began, when our oh-so-very-ex-Prime Minister John Howard refused to say “Sorry” for the unimaginable injustices and humiliation suffered by tens of thousands of Indigenous Australians as revealed once and for all in the Bringing them Home report, FourPlay played at the big inaugral Sorry Day event at the Sydney Opera House Forecourt. It was a matter of pride, and very moving, to take part in that, however briefly, but that’s nothing like the pride we can feel today after our new Prime Minister’s remarkable speech at the opening of Parliament. I was at work, and watched what I could on YouTube, but thanks to Peter Martin, I’ve now been able to read the whole speech. It’s quite long, and as Martin describes it, both gripping and well-judged.

If you didn’t get to see it, or indeed if you did, I commend you to read the whole transcript. It’s a beauty. We can only hope that there will be real, honest and productive action taken, in co-operation with Indigenous communities around Australia, to turn things round — to bring some hope for future generations. Rudd mentions the really big problems, and it’s worth quoting:

Our challenge for the future is to cross that bridge and, in so doing, to embrace a new partnership between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians—to embrace, as part of that partnership, expanded Link-up and other critical services to help the stolen generations to trace their families if at all possible and to provide dignity to their lives. But the core of this partnership for the future is to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians on life expectancy, educational achievement and employment opportunities. This new partnership on closing the gap will set concrete targets for the future: within a decade to halve the widening gap in literacy, numeracy and employment outcomes and opportunities for Indigenous Australians, within a decade to halve the appalling gap in infant mortality rates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children and, within a generation, to close the equally appalling 17-year life gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous in overall life expectancy.

Friday, 4th of January, 2008

Unfortunately YouTube are LAMERZ and pulled all of StSanders’ videos, but below you can see it via Wired. This post here has ALL the StSanders “________ shreds” videos! The Jake E. Lee/Ozzy Osborne one is the one I posted here:

But the Santana one is hilarious too (as are most of them…)

Note to the puzzled: I can’t get these to load in Firefox. It may be some plugin thing, but Internet Exploder will play them. Don’t know about non-Windows computers though (will see when I reboot into Ubuntu!)

originally via the incomparable Graham Linehan

Have a read of this:
Can atheists be parents?

via the estimable Graham Linehan, who couples the link with a wonderful image you need to see…

ETA: OK, it seems this is from 1970! The date stamp on the article is: “Monday, Dec. 07, 1970″. So why is it up on the TIME website with nothing else commenting on the date? Weird!

Tuesday, 18th of December, 2007

A few days ago I finally posted my ridiculously comprehensive 2007 list at the Utility Fog blog. Over at the Mess+Noise boards today there’s a thread on “Official…ish Top 10 of 1997“, of which I thought, “Hm, 1997, the year the Clouds broke up, and surely that dire period where indie music was pathetic and nothing much of interest was happening.”
Could be, but then again… could be not! Upon searching my mp3 player for 1997, here’s what I came up with (and I haven’t done the fancy UFog-like linkage, sorry):

1. µ-Ziq - Lunatic Harness
2. Amon Tobin - Bricolage
3. Aphex Twin - Come To Daddy
4. Autechre - Envane (lucky it doesn’t say ”top 10 albums”, although Chiastic Slide is awesome)
5. Björk - Homogenic
6. Farmers Manual - fsck
7. Fennesz - Hotel Paral.lel
8. Mouse on Mars - Autoditacker / Instrumentals (really can’t choose)
9. Plaid - Not For Threes
10. Squarepusher - Big Loada EP (Hard Normal Daddy came out this year, but Big Loada is packed with classics)

So, a fucken awesome year for idm, which shouldn’t have been surprising - and also two absolutely seminal releases for Mego-style glitch. Also this year:
Arcon 2 - Arcon 2
Beth Orton - Trailer Park
Bill Laswell - Oscillations remixed
Boymerang - Balance of the Force
Can - Sacrilege (I liked it… I still like it!)
Clouds - Never Say Forever (their last release)
John Fahey & Cul de Sac - The Epiphany of Glenn Jones
Michael Fakesch - Demon 1 EP (his first solo release, with a Boards of Canada remix that’s up there with the best BoC tracks ever)
Godspeed, You Black Emperor! - F# A# infinity
Heligoland - Creosote & Tar EP (not the Adelaide band, this is Tim Friese-Greene of Talk Talk etc)
Nine Inch Nails - The Perfect Drug versions (Plug’s remix here is one of the best drum’n'bass tracks evar)
The Orb - Orblivion
Paradise Motel - (Please Keep Me Safe)
Plug - EPs 1, 2 & 3 (compiled by Nothing, obviously through Trent Reznor’s interest)
Radiohead - OK Computer
Regurgitator - Unit
Robert Wyatt - Shleep
Soma - Stygian Vistas (legendary Aussie electronic release, for me at least)
Third Eye Foundation - Ghost
Various Artists - Altered States of America
Various Artists - Buena Vista Social Club
Various Artists - Random (a tribute to Gary Numan)
Various Artists - Spunk Jazz (in some ways, this spelled the end of drill’n'bass, but it’s pretty good still)
Peccadillo - Little Sins (first album release from a band I was in, year before FourPlay’s debut album. I can’t argue that the album really stands up, but hey, it doesn’t suck, and the songwriting’s great…)

Monday, 17th of December, 2007

You can unsubscribe, but what action can be enough to counter our complicity in this? The link takes you to the horrifying account of a man kidnapped and tortured in a CIA black site.

There are people who are, shall we say, more complicit in these atrocities, however, and they must not get away with it. (They will, I know). And in our little corner of the world, our brave new Rudd government is happily allowing the Federal police to place a control order on David Hicks when he’s shortly, finally, released. He’ll be reporting to police three times a week. I guess we can all feel a little bit safer that this misguided, broken, harmless man is still being vigilantly watched.

Thursday, 29th of November, 2007

There’s some really interesting discussion going on over at GreensBlog about the Greens’ chances in the senate, which are stronger than you might think. At Larvatus Prodeo late last year, Paul Norton explained that the media regularly underestimates the Greens’ electoral success because they tend to do considerably better out of pre-poll and absentee votes than the Coalition. You can follow the links to see some theories as to why this is - but this post of Tim’s gives us some figures:

For those who like detail, check out the AEC’s data from the last election by vote type. The numbers show the total Greens vote at just under 7%, but almost 11% of absent, almost 10% of provisional and almost 8% of pre-poll. Given that these three account for just under 12% of all votes cast, and they are all counted after election night, you can see why it stands to reason that the Greens vote might seem lower than expected at first, but climbs steadily as the count moves on.

This is fascinating, and the good news is that as those pre-polls and absentee votes come in, the Greens are doing very well in ACT — potentially enough for Kerrie Tucker to overtake the Liberal candidate! In Victoria, Richard di Natale has a good chance too, especially considering there were three very Greens-friendly events on that weekend: Queenscliff Music Festival, Earthcore and the Great Victorian Bike Ride.

If they can pick up at least one of these seats, they would represent one fewer Liberal senator, meaning that Labor wouldn’t have to negotiate with Family First (they’d still need all the Greens and Nick Xenophon, or a National or Liberal to vote with them); if they pick up both of these, the Greens would hold the balance of power on their own, meaning that they would be the only group (other than the Liberals) who would have the power on their own to negotiate with Labor over policy details. As it stands, Labor would either need the Libs to vote with them, or would need all the Greens plus Xenophon plus Family First in order to get anything through the senate…

In the comments to Tim’s senate post (which also accounces the awesome fact that the Greens are projected to end up with something like 1,080,000 first preference votes in the Senate — yes, well over a million!), there’s a discussion initiated by Rob Mailler (who apparently has a bit of a bee in his bonnet about this) suggesting that the Greens should moderate some of their “lower priority messages” in order to gain a small proportion more of the vote (and presumably thus get an extra senator through). The discussion has revolved around whether the pragmatic choice of toning down other policies in order to best serve the climate change agenda is desirable.

I’m interested in this question of “principle vs pragmatism”. I think there’s an issue that all “framers” face, which is one of identifying what one’s ultimate aim is. Framing is all very well if you’re attempting to convince a group of people of one or two simple points. You find a way of coming at it from a point of common ground, using terminology that simply and effectively makes your point of view attractive. It’s like that with all rhetoric; it’s not meant for conveying nuanced, complicated matters, nor for convincing people of a multitude of policy matters all at once.
In the science blogosphere lately there’s been lots of heated argument about framing vis-à-vis “The New Atheists”. Some feel that the strident promotion of atheism by various recent writers damages the chances of promoting science to more moderate/open religious believers, tainting it by association by implying that science equals atheism. To best represent science to the masses, we should downplay our atheist beliefs.
There are two things to point out here to the so-called “appeasers” (a horrible term, by the way). First is that with works like Dawkins’s The God Delusion and others recently, the aim is to help atheists “come out” - quite literally to “promote” atheism; if this conflicts with science-framers’ perceived maximisation of science’s attractiveness, then so be it, the atheism-popularisers might say.
But of course the other issue the atheists will bring up is whether the science-popularisers are right about atheism’s unpalatability - i.e. does strident atheism really taint science? Both of these points have meant that the atheists and the science-framers have been arguing at cross-purposes, but there is a very real problem in working out how to keep on-message about a number of issues at once.

In any case, this might be a bit of a furphy when it comes to “New Atheism vs framing of science”; there should be — and is — room for many different voices, and the occasional clashes that occur when one voice says “taking science seriously must mean abandoning belief in God” and another says “Look here, your belief in God doesn’t preclude taking evolution seriously!” are acceptable. Most people have minds of their own, and can choose to say “Well I don’t like that Dawkins chap, but the nice Mr Wilson is saying some interesting things. Maybe I should give evolution another look!” (This would be sad, since Dawkins is one of the most misrepresented thinkers in the world, but that’s another blog post…)

A political party, however, needs to present a coherent and united front. Indeed, some Greens candidates & party members’ failure to stay on-point has been mentioned as a drawback for them, and it’s true that the Greens should make sure their representatives don’t muddy the waters. In the case of this discussion, what’s being suggested is that they take a pragmatic approach whereby they become more populist in some of their policies in order to give themselves more of an opportunity to effect real change with regards to what might be considered their “core” policy of combating climate change.
But of course the fact is that the Greens don’t want to be a single-issue party. In fact, being just the “climate change” party is damaging to the Greens — having detailed, well-thought-out policies across the board is a real plus. Certainly if it turned out that some minor policy point was turning away a significant number of votes that they might otherwise capture (such as an Inheritance Tax), it might be worth dropping. But I would’ve thought that there are worse barriers to mainstream acceptance: their eminently sensible and undroppable drugs policy, focusing on harm-minimisation is one, as the murdochs never hesitate to bring up the spectre of “injecting rooms on every corner”. Here’s a case where if they dropped this policy they could very well grab a bunch more votes, but that’s the last thing they’d want to do!

How the Greens can combat the frankly ridiculous idea that they’re “extreme Left”, that they’re just a bunch of drug-loving, tree-hugging hippies, or a socialist front, I’m not sure. But the best way is simply to get more and more air-time to publicise their views on a whole range of matters, which will come with balance of power (hopefully!) and the gradual increase in votes. Finding ways whenever they’re given air-time to convey simple facts like the inaccuracy of early media reports on the Greens’ success, finding ways to frame harm-minimisation that can strongly combat the “War on Drugs”/”Tough on Drugs” imagery that’s been so effectively framed by the right; these are important. I’ve been mostly very impressed with Bob Brown when I’ve seen him or heard him in the media of late, but I think there’s still plenty of room for improvement…
Plus of course an excellent initiative like GreensBlog can only help :)

Here’s to the future!
(and methinks I really should become a member of the Greens so I can stop talking about them in the 3rd person…)

Sunday, 25th of November, 2007

is what I changed my Facebook status to on my Treo last night at the venue where I was playing a gig, once it had become clear that it was a Ruddslide, and what’s more Howard had lost his seat to Maxine (they’re not calling it yet, but I can’t see how Howard can hang on to it - which is simply wonderful!)

I’m disappointed that the Greens haven’t had the out-and-out success we hoped for, but I think they still have a chance at getting a 6th senator in and holding balance of power. As it stands, the ABC are giving them 5 senators, with Nick Xenophon in SA and Steven Fielding for Family First also required for any Labor legislation to pass (in addition to the Greens). Another Greens senator would mean Family First are out of the picture.
My dear brother Tim was blogging (sporadically, between other commitments) live from the tally room last night, where you can read a bit more about the current situation for the Greens. GreensBlog, which is his awesome and revolutionary project, is Politics 2.0 in action, and you should add it to your RSS feeds (or at least bookmark it) forthwith.

It’s very sad to see the end of the Democrats. It’s particularly sad to see Andrew Bartlett go, so let’s hope he continues to contribute to the blogosphere (here’s his post analysing the senate results as they stand).

It’s still going to continue to be hard work for progressive activists now that we have a Labor government. Hopefully the Greens can make some headway at influencing Labor in the Upper House, but there’ll still be plenty to protest about.
Still, let’s hope that the blackest years are over. Let’s hope we can show the world that taking climate change seriously and taking workers’ rights seriously will be a benefit for the economy and improve the lives of everyone. Let’s hope we can give our Indigenous Australians a fair go. Let’s hope we can get rid of the outrageous incursions into free speech and civil rights that the “War on Terror” has brought with it. Let’s hope we can encourage a culture of compassion and engagement, not least through fixing our education and health systems…
At least now we can be hopeful!

PS wonder how long this‘ll be up? Second time I’ve seen it listed!

Wednesday, 24th of October, 2007

Stirring tale of mighty Rudd ascension:

I’ve been musing since yesterday over the demise of private BitTorrent site OiNK, and especially of the rather forbidding message now hosted there (”A criminal investigation continues into the identities and activities of the site’s users”). In particular, I was thinking how this criminal investigation, if it finds anyone much, is going to turn up a huge selection of massive music fans with huge CD & vinyl collections, and what’s more a huge selection of professional musicians and DJs. Because many, many musos, and probably all DJs, are obsessive music fans.

I was going to write something up about it, about how despite its rather insanely huge selections, once I was able to check out its wares (well, its warez), I didn’t find much that I wanted, because I’m such a completist anyway; and about how most of the music I’ve “stolen” from filesharing over the years now exists on my CD/vinyl shelves anyway — eventually I’ll find a way of buying a physical copy of anything I like, and what, in the end, is the difference between a second-hand copy of an out-of-print item and a downloaded mp3 of the same, from the record company’s point of view? (Answer: nothing. The fuckerz really hate second-hand record stores too!)

And the strange morality of OiNK was something that struck me very much - enforced sharing ratios, enforced sound quality, stringent rules about formatting and information supplied; could I square that in my head with the illegality of the whole exercise? I’m not sure. Even the fact that it was forbidden to share leaked pre-masters and studio sessions, which in a weird way was actually reassuring.
To me if you engage in filesharing it’s as a way of getting to hear music in advance, and secondarily to get to hear rare items that frankly nobody deserves to get inflated prices for on eBay… (I know there are plenty of kidz these days for whom it’s just the way they get their music. Why, they feel, should they be forbidden from having some particular music just because they can’t afford to buy it? Sure, they need some educatin’ about how musicians need to make a living, but they also weren’t the denizens of OiNK on the whole, I’d say.)

In any case, the wonderful Jace Clayton aka DJ /rupture has written the perfect post on the matter, so go read DEFENDING THE PIG: OiNK croaks. Thanks Jace!

Tuesday, 23rd of October, 2007

Finally, Greg Egan has started writing fiction again, and not only do we have a new novel, Incandescence, coming out in 2008, we have a bunch of new short stories too.
There’ve been a couple of novellas in anthologies over the last year or so, and Asimov’s published the excellent “Dark Integers” (a sequel to Luminous, and an equally engrossing excursion into international espionage in the world of mathematical philosophy). Now there’s another new story, one that you can read online for free, if you’re willing to register at Technology Review (or, er, use BugMeNot).

I strongly recommend reading “Steve Fever”. It’s fun, quite short, and nicely demonstrates Egan’s touch - a personal story about strange technologies used to interrogate some pretty deep ideas about the world. It reminded me of Kathleen Ann Goonan’s remarkable nanotech quartet, especially Queen City Jazz, in which a nanotech virus infects people’s minds with an urge to travel down the Mississippi river. Goonan uses her solidly-thought-out scientific and technological ideas to tell a story about the history of America, its literature, blues and jazz music, and a kind of search for transcendence. Egan has often aimed at some of these themes himself (including transcendence within a scientific-materialist world), and Goonan was no doubt influenced by Egan’s astounding earlier works, so it’s nice to hear the echoes coming back again.

Wednesday, 26th of September, 2007

via

Sunday, 19th of August, 2007

Regarding Kevin Rudd’s visit to a strip club, as revealed in a story by Glenn Milne, this is how Glenn Milne acts when drunk:

Friday, 20th of July, 2007

This is the most evil thing I have ever seen.
I first saw her going anti-clockwise for some reason, and it was indeed only when I focused on the shadow foot and forced myself to see it turn the other way that I was able to turn my eyes inside out. It hurrrrrrtsss us.

It gave me a similar sensation, if more unpleasant, to the one gained from examining these sentences in detail:
Why do more people watch television than I do?
and
More people have been to Russia than I have.

Are they ungrammatical? Well, yes, but that’s not exactly why they’re so fascinating. It’s very nearly impossible to apprehend them as simply ungrammatical - they feel strongly as if they’re genuine sentences.
A bit like Douglas Hofstadter’s self-referential sentences (some of which are paradoxes, some not), they threaten to eat your brain if you look too closely at them. They are still sending me into fits of giggles every time I look at them too closely, half a day after discovering them (over here at Jed’s website as it happens).
“More people have written about this than I have”, and to prove it (huh? no, wait…), here’s a great post about it, with links to a few nice Language Log posts, which characterise them as “Escher sentences”, a lovely coinage indeed.

Wednesday, 13th of June, 2007

In the Guardian’s “Comment Is Free” section, which I off-handedly slagged off (kinda) in the previous post, AC Grayling has some on-the-money comments about the incredible fuss that some half-dozen or so books on atheism have stirred up in the last year or so — essentially pointing out that there are hundreds (at least) of religious books published every year, and isn’t it funny how terribly insecure those poor religious folks must be that they get so het up about a few books advocating for the Case Against.

In a way I’m more intrigued by the agnostic and even atheistic folks who think the strident atheists ought to be quiet and not rock the boat. On a similar tack, here’s Jeffrey Shallit on the cliché of the militant atheist — a convenient and inappropriate bit of framing, that one. Fundamentalist Christians and Moslems (and indeed Jews) could easily be described as militant. Most atheists, even the most strident, are as un-militant as they come.

Tuesday, 12th of June, 2007

It seems Fairfax don’t have any qualms about hosting content on their site that hasn’t been through seven levels of subediting… I guess either you go all-out with blog comments (a la the Grauniad’s Comment Is Free) or you don’t bother.

Hence, on a “Mashup” (stupid co-opting of a term there!) post about privacy and Google Maps, we get this informed opinion:

You privacy people are unbelievable. Its people like you that are ruining this country, this is America, dont like it then leave,Morons. If i get a photo of me running naked down to my local store, oh well.
Posted by: RoDog on June 11, 2007 12:44 AM

Well, RoDog, maybe if you weren’t a moron (oh, sorry, a “,Moron”) you’d notice that teh intarweb doesn’t reside exclusively in the USA.

Yay!

Friday, 1st of June, 2007

US philosopher Martha Nussbaum has an excellent clear-thinking article in Dissent on the idiotic academic boycott of Israel.

Tuesday, 29th of May, 2007

It turns out that the, er, “Office of the Messiah” is in Tasmania.

Who knew?

Sunday, 27th of May, 2007

Ray Comfort is a Creationist famous for some mindbending arguments against evolutionary biology involving bananas and coke cans, which appeared on YouTube not too long ago and were roundly lampooned the world over.
Well, his new “argument” is a little parable revolving around electricity called The Three Wise Fools, once again about as wrong-headed as you can get.

This is just to point you to PZ Myers’ spot-on response.

Monday, 16th of April, 2007

Yep, we’re stuck in San Francisco. We were packing this morning and I rang Victor, Jordan’s uncle in New York at one of whose apartments we’re staying there… and he mentioned that we might be delayed when we got there, because there’s huge storms there right now (apparently abating though).
Shortly after which Ange was looking on the American Airlines site and discovered that it looked like our flight had been cancelled! Not that they’d, like, told us yet - I guess they have lots of people to tell, but anyway, not only stuck but the first flight they offered us was for Tuesday morning! Ange managed to get them to find a flight leaving at midday tomorrow (Monday) to St Louis and then on to New York (arriving 10:45pm), so we’re missing a day of New York and having a day of travel. American Airlines were fabulously unhelpful really - as the guy at reception at the hotel said, “Welcome to US airlines”.
Yup.

Anyway, lots of reading will be caught up on. I do owe a whole week’s worth of travelblogging, which I hope to get to shortly! For now, suffice to say that San Francisco is an awesome place. Among the places visited are the best comics shop in America, probably the best science fiction specialist bookshop, and a couple of awesome record stores… But there’s so many awesome little bookshops too, there’s the SFMOMA and a bunch of other great art galleries/museums, lots of cool/funky areas and so on. So yeah.
Also met up with and hung out with my old friend Karen, which was lovely too.
Details to come soon!

Thursday, 12th of April, 2007

Oh hell. Kurt Vonnegut is dead. His body of work has been hugely important to me for many years. I haven’t read much of his recent stuff, but he means a lot to me. Sad now.

Yes, I have a big travel-blog post queued up but I’m doing other stuff, m’kay? It’ll get posted tomorrow, San Francisco time, for sure! Suffice to say, SF is awesome!

Monday, 9th of April, 2007

Yep, from tomorrow (er, that would be today’s date), Angela and I are heading overseas on a fabulous jaunt, taking in San Francisco, New York, Montreal and Chicago. I hope to keep up the travel blogging while we’re away, as will Ange, so you can get twice the bang for your buck this time through!
Expect the run-down on all the record stores, bookshops (especially the science-fiction-oriented and second-hand) and comics shops along the way, as well as all the good eatin’ we can get in, fine hot chocolates, and walks around foreign cities.
And I hope to hire a bike in at least San Francisco at some point! Stay tuned…

Saturday, 7th of April, 2007

xkcd OTM again

“OTM”, you ask? Sorry, you may need to read more ilX to understand that, or somewhere like that. OTM = “on the money” or “on the mark”, okeys?

Sunday, 11th of March, 2007

Genius, I tell you.
via Talking Squid - thanks Chris!

Saturday, 10th of March, 2007

Find out what political party your views are closest to, and where you sit on the political spectrum.
You can take the test here. It’s quite worthwhile because, a bit like the Political Compass people, they acknowledge that “left” and “right” mean different things whether you take them economically, socially or indeed in terms of what they call “traditional values”.

My results are here
Not surprisingly, I identified myself as far left and a Greens supporter, and that’s what I am. I’m not as far left as I might have though, but I felt that as I was answering, choosing to go with Agree rather than Strongly Agree with a number of statements where I felt I’d prefer a more tempered position than the one stated. I’m sure if I did again tomorrow I’d get a slightly different result, and it’s worth noting that the test is in “beta testing”, so once they tweak the questions a bit more, I may end up a bit further along to the left than I did (and I think I probably do belong even further left).

This is interesting though: the cumulative results and analysis page. As of writing this post, the distribution of people’s self-perceived preferred political parties was:
34% ALP, 23% Libs, 22% Greens, 13% Dems, and the others.
However, according to the test results, the distribution should be more like:
29% Greens, 26% Dems, 12% Libs, 11% ALP, etc.
On the one hand, this may show a certain bias in the building of the test, but on the other hand I think it also shows that a lot of people are probably considerably more aligned with the Greens than they might think…

Tuesday, 6th of March, 2007

So the Independent Australian Jewish Voices website was launched a few days ago. I signed up, as did the rest of my family, as we’ve been quite disturbed by the one-sidedness of “Jewish” representation in the media for some time.
Any readers of my blog will know that I’m neither anti-Israel nor a “self-hating Jew” or something, but I am by no means happy about all of Israel’s actions on the world stage. And the trouble is that it’s by no means obvious to the world at large that the Jewish community has multifarious voices (indeed, in Israel itself there is constant vigorous debate, but who would know, from an outsider’s perspective?). Unfortunately when anyone, Jewish or not, criticises Israel in any way — however balance — there is a predictable and immediate uproar from certain prominent sectors of the Jewish community, usually purporting to represent Jewishness, Jews as a whole.

Cue the IAJW launch. The reactions chronicled in this SMH article couldn’t be a better advertisement for why “independent” voices are needed from the Jewish community — and not just those of Antony Lowenstein, who is a signatory but by no means the only voice on offer. Let’s hear the statement from good old Colin Rubenstein of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, always good for an over-the-top quote:

“Some of the individuals are clearly committed to the delegitimisation of Israel,” said Colin Rubenstein, the executive director of the council.

“They’re simply using their Jewish ethnic background. It is clearly a small number of Jewish-born individuals who make their Jewishness known while they are being critical of Israel,” Mr Rubenstein said.

Hear that? “Jewish-born individuals”, what the frak? Somehow I thought that since the Holocaust, all Jewish-born individuals were Jews, all ethnic Jews were Jews. I guess I was being naïve huh? Clearly anyone who wants open discussion of Israel and the Middle East is no longer fit to call themself a Jew.
How disgusting.

Sunday, 4th of March, 2007

…and back to linklogging again. Just a link to a very thoughtful article by Vancouver philosopher Stan Persky on Dawkins’ The God Delusion, which makes some good points in its favour against its critics on the more-or-less atheistic side of the fence. Persky admits that the book could have been better, but that it probably does a good enough job for now, in the context that it’s not meant to be an all-encompassing piece of philosophy or theology — it’s meant to be a middle-brow polemic aimed at giving believers a way out. It’s consciousness-raising, as Dawkins puts it.
A remarkable number of the reviewers of The God Delusion, as with Dennett’s Breaking the Spell before it, simply have not read the book. Which is kinda funny, and kinda sad… (and of course completely unsurprising).

Thursday, 1st of March, 2007

Barry Jones on why “It’s not too late to save the political process”.
Let’s hope he’s right. If Labor gets in at the next federal election (let’s hope so!) then they’ll need to be held up to as much scrutiny as the Libs ought to be being held up to now.

Saturday, 24th of February, 2007

It’s really hard to know whether Conservapedia is somebody’s hilarious hoax or whether it’s deadly serious. By now, as lefties the world over go and have fun with it, it’s probably full of lots of deliberately stoopid stuff, but there’s no doubt that if it was started in all seriousness then there’s plenty of po-faced idiocy there as well.
I mainly just wanted to point out Jon Swift’s fantastic satirical post on it — you must continue on to the comments, where various clueless people make it clear they don’t understand the satire.

Meanwhile, fellow Frogworthian Stuart comments at his blog, Le Rayon Vert.

Tuesday, 6th of February, 2007

up at Cyclic: Bracken and Pedro. Check ‘em out!

Sunday, 7th of January, 2007

A nice and sarcastic poem from Greg Laden (via PZ):

A Prayer to the Faith Based

I’m sorry, and I don’t mean to offend you,
And you didn’t even ask for this but
I’m going to put in a plug for your beliefs
So that you won’t get too mad at me as I utter words
With which you or someone you know may not agree,
(No matter how utterly wrong you may happen to be)

It is good that you are religious
And I will personally defend your right to believe
Whatever it is you do in fact believe,
And I affirm that it is OK to put
Phrases regarding your beliefs on my money
And for you to assume that
I will swear to your god

when I am on jury duty
when I am drafted into the army
when I am elected to office
when I am in the witness stand
and whenever else I must affirm
that I am moral and will not lie.

i Will Capitalize Your Word for God
And the Name of Your Holy Book
And Other Entities and Documents
As You Dictate These Rules To me.

I offer this pandering to your particular beliefs,
regardless of what they may happen to be,
despite the fact that your cultural ancestors,
the mavens and leaders of one church or another,
burned at the stake or otherwise humiliated mine,
The early scientists and freethinkers,
I affirm this because I cannot at the moment
Remember where I put my spine.

Amen.

Sunday, 24th of December, 2006

For some time, Benjamin Rosenbaum has been one of the brightest new sparks in the sf world, creating stories with equal parts mythical resonance, rigorous scientific speculation and empathy with the human condition. He can bring a strange mix of the Talmudic and scientific methods to the philosophical backgrounds of his stories, and his blog is often home for intense philosophical arguments involving such others as Ted Chiang and David Moles.
I’ve mentioned Jay Lake before in these pages, and in terms of range, Rosenbaum is certainly comparable.

In this post, I’m urging you to go and check out Ben R’s most recent story, online at Strange Horizons: The House Beyond Your Sky. It’s an immensely-far-future tale which is vintage Rosenbaum (as described above), and the less I say about it the better. However, Ben does have an illuminating blog post about the story, which includes a prologue which was removed from the final version, but which it wouldn’t hurt to read before you dive into the story.
It’s another short one, well worth taking a few minutes out for right now. It’s going to be hard to beat for short story of the year, and I know I’m not the only one who thinks so (caveat: both of those links above are Jonathan Strahan, Perth editor with exemplary taste, but still.)

Sunday, 17th of December, 2006

Easily one of my favourite authors at the moment is Jay Lake, whose LiveJournal is a constant source of fascinating ruminations on (and discussions of) science fiction, writing, politics, morality, philosophy, child-rearing and more.

He’s been appearing in some Australian sf markets recently, and it’s lovely to see that Damien Broderick has got a new story of Jay’s up on the COSMOS Magazine site (COSMOS is a great newish Aussie science magazine that’s been featuring a new sf story every issue since the beginning. They now seem to be buying enough that they’re publishing a few exclusively on the web, like here).

This one’s a science fiction story, and a space opera at that, and it’s a beauty. And it’s short, so you can easily hop over there now. Go read The Dead Man’s Child.

Wednesday, 13th of December, 2006

You probably haven’t seen all of these.
They don’t include one that I was taught in my youth though:

Jane, where John had had “had”, had had “had had”. “Had had” had had the teacher’s approval.

Admittedly this one’s even better though:

“Wouldn’t the sentence ‘I want to put two hyphens between words Fish and And, and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign’ have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and and and and Chips, and after Chips?”

Mylo, whose music I can’t say I particularly appreciate, turns out to have a philosophical past, and he seems to pretty much have his head screwed on right too.

Wednesday, 22nd of November, 2006

I hate Ben Peek. He reviewed my band’s album launch, so now I have to go and buy his damn book from Wheatland Press (and while I was there I had to buy Polyphony 6, edited by Deborah Layne from Wheatland and Jay Lake) and review it.
Terribly cheap to PayPal from Wheatland, so don’t feel weirded out by buying a Sydney author’s book from Oregon. Although, let’s face it, even the wonderful Wheatland site isn’t as pretty as the new FourPlay online shop, so maybe Ben will hate me right back.

Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, written by Ben Peek, illustrated by Anna Brown, and a cover by Andrew Macrae. Buy it from Amazon, buy it from Wheatland Press.

PS isn’t that cover awesome? I hate Andrew Macrae too. But not as much as Ben Peek.

Friday, 17th of November, 2006

I’ve seen this incredibly stupid article linked from a couple of blogs recently — it’s called “It’s not easy being an atheist”, and it’s by Pastor Steven W Cornell, a man who clearly prefers not to think too hard about worldviews other than his own.
Anyway, go and read it for today’s dose of supreme wrong-headedness, and then, via the always-reliable PZ Myers, you can read Southern Fried Skeptic’s response: “It’s not easy being a christian”, which pulls Cornell up for misrepresentation and use of straw men and does a beautiful job of rebutting each of Cornell’s points with a matching Christian straw man.

The trouble with someone like Cornell writing about what it must be like to be an atheist is that he’s categorically unable to break out of his own blinkered world-view, and therefore everything about life gets defined in a Christian’s straightjacketed way - morality cannot exist without god/faith, existence is a miracle, life without god must lack “ultimate” purpose… But hey, c’mon, there’s more craziness than that in the guy’s article, if you’re up for it:

The atheist must also deny the validity of historical proof. If he accepted the standard rules for testing the truth claims of historical documents, he would be forced to accept the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The account of Jesus’ resurrection is strongly validated by standard rules for judging historical accuracy. The extensive manuscript evidence of eyewitnesses to the resurrection is presented in an unbiased, authentic manner. It is the atheist’s anti-supernatural bias that keeps him from allowing history to prove anything.

Never mind all of the inconsistencies between the different gospels’ accounts; it’s presented in an “authentic manner”, folks, so that’s all there is to it!
Oh, and before that, there’s “The atheist must also suppress the demands of logic”, which turns out to just be the usual simple-minded intelligent design crap.

Getting back to blinkered worldviews, the most interesting thing about these kinds of people is how they couch everything in terms of “denying” god, being “biased against” god. Sorry mate, the thing is, you have to have a pretty good reason to get god into the discussion in the first place. As I’ve mentioned before (I think), many of us atheists (yes, I have the grammar right there) do not consider our position a rejection of theism/deism/religion as such at all. Ours is the natural way to understand the world — there just isn’t any good reason or need to introduce some kind of supernatural, transcendent element.
Of course, you can have a transcendent experience within the physical world; after all, we are finite beings. But there’s no good evidence to suggest that the universe isn’t finite too, albeit very large. Very, very large. Immense, in fact. Sorry. But yes, experiences that take us out of our normal embodied/constrained mode of perception, experiences that seem to touch on something far greater than ourselves — sure. What makes you think you’re touching on something infinite, though? What reason do you have for declaring that it’s something radically other, something non-physical, not itself constrained to the laws of the universe?
You have no reason. When you realise how massive, powerful, powerfully creative, and complex the universe as apprehended by science really is, you simply have no reason.

(PS Please don’t be offended by this post’s title if you’re religious yourself; I’m not necessarily talking about you, but jumpin’ jehosophat, this guy really is an idiot!)

Friday, 20th of October, 2006

What a bunch of assholes you are…

(I know, I could’ve pointed to dozens of other serious things, but right now the imminent demise of our only half-half-decent newspaper proprietors is a crying shame.)

Wednesday, 11th of October, 2006

xkcd is, hands down, the best webcomic in existence.
Today’s comic is proof.
(Oh, and remember to hover your mouse over the comic to read the “title” text, or otherwise right-click and look at the properties. There’s always an extra joke in there…)
(What’s that? You don’t have a right mouse button? Sucked in, Mac user! I’m sure there’s some unweildy keyboard alternative… Funny how Macs are so keyboard-unfriendly in most other ways.)

Tuesday, 26th of September, 2006

My brother’s partner is doing a PhD in criminal law, about the length of sentences as it happens.
Somehow I don’t think that this extremely long sentence by Matt Cheney is what she has in mind. I’m only about 1/4 of the way through that sentence, but it’s extremely fine. I will have to try and get the whole thing in when I’m home tonight. Wow.

Saturday, 23rd of September, 2006

I’m sure I’ve talked about the amazing Israeli author Etgar Keret before here (oh yes - in relation to his exchange of letters with Palestinian author Samir El-Youssef). I just wanted to link to a fantastic interview with him in The Believer, which gives a really interesting insight into life in Israel, especially for people of our generation.

In this sense, it’s hard for me to know the differences between disliking Israel, disliking the region, and disliking human nature in general, because the rhetoric used in Israeli politics and in many political systems says, “Life is good, everything’s great, but those guys are assholes.” Many of the problems in Israel are not unique regional problems. They’re widespread human problems that in Israel are kind of extreme. Being xenophobic or irrationally violent — the Middle East didn’t invent this.

But if you ask me if I’m disillusioned by the Zionist idea, I must say that I was born disillusioned by the Zionist idea. Maybe my parents have been disillusioned, but I never shared the Zionist idea. If you ask me if I’m disillusioned by the corruption, I’m not very surprised by the corruption. If you ask me if I accept the situation, I don’t accept it. If you ask me if it could be better, yeah, it could be better. If you ask me if in the end it will be good, I’ll say to you that in the end it will be bad. There is no contradiction there. If I have any message to try to pass, it’s that the only way to deal with this is to be able to contain the ambiguity, to be able to live in an extreme, harsh reality and still not dehumanize any group of people in it.

and:

I try to stress when I do political debates that there is no contradiction between having very firm ideas of what you want to do and still being able to understand where the other is coming from — to humanize them. In Israel if you support one idea, you dehumanize one group, and if you support another idea, you dehumanize the other. It’s completely tribal. When people read my stuff, they say that I’m confused or I don’t care about things, because if you talk about the reality in Israel at the moment and you introduce any ambiguity to it, people think you are doing something wrong, that this is not the way you’re supposed to use the rhetoric, like you’re an opera singer who whispers.

Monday, 28th of August, 2006

War-Torn Middle East Seeks Solace In Religion.

Give this a go.
I’m interested in what results are found after enough people answer the above. It only takes half a minute and could be worth it in the long run… maybe.

Friday, 18th of August, 2006

Fascinating. Bruno Latour, scion of “science studies”, is worried enough by the Right’s co-opting of much of the discource of “critique”, “Theory” or whatever you want to call it, that he’s asking whether maybe its time is over:
Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern
And he sounds almost entirely reasonable. Unfortunately it’s all too easy to get the idea from his and others’ writings in general that they are skeptical all the way down about facts, evidence and objective reality. Here he writes:

While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we have now to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? And yet entire Ph.D programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always the prisoner of language, that we always speak from one standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we meant? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not? Why can’t I simply say that the argument is closed for good?

Fascinating.

Sunday, 13th of August, 2006

Recently, my band has decided forthrightly to stop flying with one of the cheap carriers here (you can guess who). Why? Apart from the obviously lower level of comfort on their flights (but they are generally cheaper, so it never stopped us in the past), we recently encountered a remarkable level of hostility from them regarding the realities of our job. We were told that they have a rule about not allowing instruments in the cabin — something we’ve never been informed of before — and in addition they stopped us from taking our boxes of CDs on board with us.
We were lucky on that flight not to have smashed CD cases on arrival, but while CDs in the hold might be just tolerable, violins and violas in the hold is a complete farce. Here’s a great news item from BBC online, which describes how the Bolshoi Theatre musicians will have to travel by train now that the cabin baggage restrictions are in force in the UK, because their insurance doesn’t cover instruments in the hold. And a cellist describes her horror at putting her instrument in the hold. Admittedly I transport mine that way, because I simply can’t afford to pay for another ticket for it, but it does get bashed around — even the Qantas baggage handlers have no respect for musical instruments plastered with Fragile stickers. This quote resonated depressingly with me:

At Zurich airport, she found the prams lined up neatly in the baggage hall but she had to wait for her cello to come in on the bulky items conveyor belt on which it had been placed upside down.

Yep, the fuckers inevitably stick the cello belly-down on the conveyor-belt (in fact, in Australia is’t even sometimes on the main conveyor belt with the other luggage). How stupid can you be? Well, it doesn’t always come out on the conveyor-belt, but when it does, it’s hardly ever the right way up. And things do shift around inside the case, so if I’m putting it on a long flight I try and pad it with clothing as much as possible.
(Nice to see a comment on the BBC page from the wonderful cellist Steven Isserlis, too!)

These issues are just some of the reasons that I suspect that the UK’s full ban on cabin baggage can’t last long, especially if the rest of the world doesn’t follow suit. Who cares about no liquids? Noone really; but not being able to take one’s expensive laptops and musical instruments, often with limited insurance, on board would be disastrous for many of the most frequent air travellers.
Meanwhile, we no can longer trust that the above-mentioned airline will do the right thing by us, and thus cannot travel with them any more. This means more expensive travel for us (and the necessity of trying to confirm times as early as possible so as to get the cheaper flights before they get taken), but the alternative is unacceptable.

Friday, 11th of August, 2006

MySpace sucks, doesn’t it?
But it has its uses. Like this.

Friday, 4th of August, 2006

Here’s something rather troubling. The Gay Police Association in the UK were so concerned about the increase in “very serious homophobic incidents on the grounds and justification of religious belief” that they took out an advertisement in the Independent’s Diversity supplement in June. Certainly the ad contained some strong imagery, “depicting a Bible beside a pool of blood under the heading ‘In the name of the father’”.
Christian groups have gone mad over it. To the extent that the Metropolitan Police are investigating “whether the advert constitutes a faith crime”. Say what? Whaaaat? See, this is where you get when you create legislation stopping people from criticising religion. You’re protecting one set of minority groups over others. Choice quote from some Christian cop:

He stresses that while he wishes to say nothing against the GPA - with whom he says they have good working relationships - “we are getting to a position where, to state any position contrary to the GPA position, is homophobic.”

Not like those Christians, who start Metropolitan Police investigations and call for the chairman of the Gay Police Association to resign as soon as their oh-so-frail belief system is challenged. *sigh* Look forward to the Spanish Inquisition, coming soon to a free, democratic, open society near you.

Via Ophelia Benson.

Tuesday, 1st of August, 2006

Here’s a stunning blog post from Lisa Goldman on the affect the conflict has had on the (relationship between the) editors of Time Out Beirut and Time Out Tel Aviv.
Read it all to get an idea of the effect of this war, but also a tiny bit of a concept of what is at stake for Israel. There’s no doubt they’ve made many very bad moves, but it may be that responding with full force to Hezbollah was not one of them, as such. It’s worth never forgetting what a tenuous position Israel is in in the area, although it’s worth tempering that somewhat against the natural Jewish paranoia.
This isn’t to say that I don’t utterly deplore the way that Israel has variously blamed civilians for not getting out in time (when often they have no means to get out of areas after they’re leafleted), declared civilians to be basically terrorists purely based on their location, and destroyed so much. It’s a tragedy - for Israel&#