j.m:thinks>

The UTS Writers' Anthology: Five Minutes with Kate Simonian

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 22:06:43 -0400

The UTS Writers' Anthology: Five Minutes with Kate Simonian:

1. What was the name of the first story you ever wrote, and what was it about?

My earliest extant story is ‘Rebecca’s Wonderful Adventure,’ an incoherent tale about a giant hovering mouth that terrorises the inhabitants of an imaginary land. I got a gold sticker.

2. Where do you…

Bass Music Release Sheets: 16th July 2012

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 18:55:49 -0400

Bass Music Release Sheets: 16th July 2012:

bassreleases:

Short Things:

3024019 - Jacques Greene - Ready EP [3024] ♪♫ £$

999YTIVIL - Alex Coulton - Bounce (w/ Pev Version) [dnuoS ytiviL] ♪♫ £$

AMB1205 - Colonel Red - Spacesleep EP [Apollo] ♪♫ £$

AUS1239 - Bicep - You / Don’t Do it [Aus Music] ♪♫ £$

AUXSYM007 - Indigo -…

momentumbooks: Should ebooks look like print books?

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 19:56:11 -0400

momentumbooks:

Should ebooks look like print books?

Sick! Big up @dj_zhao! guardianmusic: “Dj Zhao, a Berlin-based...

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:19:20 -0500

Sick! Big up @dj_zhao!

guardianmusic:

“Dj Zhao, a Berlin-based DJ, has put together a compilation of punk-ish tunes from bands out of Africa. The compilation mainly consists of South African bands but Mozambique, Angola, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and DR Congo are represented as well.

“DJ Zhao does take some liberties when it comes to the term “punk,” riffing off the style’s aesthetic, approach and attitude opposed to the straight 4/4, three-chord type. Which really, is an excellent decision resulting in a highly eclectic offering that covers “rock, punk, Afro-garage, Techno, Bass Music and beyond.” Thanks Afropop.org!

Butterz Winter Zip Reupped

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:46:07 -0500

Butterz Winter Zip Reupped

Open Letter to Michael Spence re: #UsydCuts

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 21:31:17 -0500

Dear Dr Spence,

As a postgraduate student at the University of Sydney, I was shocked to learn about the plans to decimate the university’s teaching staff. I have been privileged to study under the supervision of individuals of outstanding erudition, and a willingness to go above and beyond their defined duties to support my learning and that of my fellow students. Thanks to their patience and support, I will be graduating this year, well-equipped for the future, ready and willing to contribute to intellectual life.

As I understand it, a failure by the university accurately to project future costs and revenues has resulted in a budget crisis. The brunt of dealing with this crisis is to be borne by staff members, many of whom will be made redundant, and many more who will see their hours cut. All this after the construction of that ostentatious new law building, and the entirely superfluous replacement of the bridge over City Road; after scrapping vital subscriptions to many academic journals; and the notorious ‘dust test’ for the stock of the Fisher Library, a treasure that the university should consider itself honoured to maintain, not merely for the sake of its staff and students, but for the intellectual good of the people of Sydney.

It is disingenuous to claim that the university had planned to sail on as usual, had management not failed in their budget projections, and—simultaneously—that many academic staff are ‘not pulling their weight’. Either there is a crisis in staff competence, which, if it were true (and my own personal experience strongly suggests that it is not) would need to be addressed in any case; or there is a budgetary crisis, that is being dealt with by a misguided set of policies. The use of quantitative measures—such as a crude numeric count on publications—on intellectual activities that must by their very nature be considered and judged qualitatively, is the most egregiously unjust and anti-intellectual part of the plans. But massive staffing cuts, whatever metric is used to determine where the cuts fall, are indefensible after throwing money away on prestige projects and window-dressing.

University management should own up to its own failings, stop scapegoating academic staff, and get its priorities straight.

Regards,
Joshua Mostafa

Brett Scott’s arguments in a recent Guardian interview (see below, HT @sunny_hundal) boil down...

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:19:00 -0500

Brett Scott’s arguments in a recent Guardian interview (see below, HT @sunny_hundal) boil down to wishful win-win thinking:

If you want to alter the value of Shell negatively, find a way to show the fund managers that the company is actually riskier than previously thought. For example, argue that it doesn’t pay enough attention to the social discord it creates. Argue that it will be exposed to future climate change legislation and reputational [sic] damages.

That is absolute fucking twaddle. Fight on the ground of investor self-interest and any gains are tactical, reversible and entirely contingent on maximising profits aligning with social justice - we all know how that works out. Elsewhere in the article he does have some interesting things to say (such as his explanation of derivatives), but this kind of kumbaya liberalism is really exasperating.

Ideas in danger

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 20:49:31 -0400

lareviewofbooks:

Every whittling down of content is a step in the further destruction of the newspaper’s true value, and when the paring is based on publishing again whatever sold best in the past, we get a leaner, briefly more profitable paper, but one in which no new idea (since a new idea, by definition, is not a proven commodity) ever appears.

Read More

All your bombs are going to have belong to someone else

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 19:45:05 -0400

All your bombs are going to have belong to someone else:

China Miéville:

Avant-garde physics is open to the idea that the future can affect the past. It is not disputed that Breivik technically did it: the question, surely, is who is going to have made him do it?
Europe awake. Yestermorrow there will was be going to have been Jihadi retrocausality to contend with.

Bang on the money. In light of the latest EDL revelations, the rhetorical contortions of right-wing commentators are even more disgraceful as they try to use Breivik as a threat of what is to come if their dire warnings of future ‘Eurabia’ are unheeded, yet at the same time distancing themselves from his actions as the product of madness rather than ideological conviction (since they themselves are the propagators of that ideology).

Notebooks are better than laptops because...

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 18:18:02 -0400

Notebooks don’t get email.

Hostile quoting

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 01:07:00 -0400

I was reading a post on Religion Dispatches this morning which quoted from a Jerusalem Post editorial, and I was reminded of a phenomenon in blog writing that seems widespread and pernicious in its dependence on, and reinforcement of, the kind of tribal reading that we do today on the internet (contrasted with traditional journalism, which takes, or at least pretends to take, a more or less middle-of-the-road standpoint).

The post quotes three paragraphs verbatim from the Jerusalem Post editorial. The writer, Sarah Posner (who is actually a really good blogger, with whom I’m actually entirely in agreement in the linked post—I’m just using her post as an example) does not critique the editorial directly, except to refer to it as ‘chilling’, and to pick out certain clauses, to which she draws the reader’s attention by italicising the text.

This kind of approach—let’s call it hostile quoting—is very effective, as it damns the quotation with its own words. No time or space is wasted in spelling out the reasons why one might object to the quotation. It only works, though, on the basis that the readership shares the writer’s own perspective, and will also find the quotation objectionable, misguided, foolish or malevolent, in exactly the same way as the writer does. Preaching to their choir, then; or in last year’s folk-philosophical term, ‘epistemic closure’.

Such writing is hardly likely to change anyone’s mind; yet if one were to try to classify it, a better category than persuasive writing would be difficult to find. As such, it sets itself a very easy task: to persuade readers not to change their minds but to confirm them in their opinions and viewpoints. Perhaps that’s a little uncharitable; some of this kind of writing could pass for analysis, rather than persuasion. Even then, such analysis is more often of the kind conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg refers to as ‘Conservatives in the Mist’ rather than serious analysis (and I assume, with John Holbo, that there is no corresponding genre the other way around—I don’t regularly read any right-wing blogs). But the volume of posts, from blogs of any political persuasion, that consist solely of hostile quoting—or if they have any commentary on the quote, just a short sarcastic interjection—is pretty large. I don’t have time or patience to quantify it, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t a substantial proportion of political blogging. In the hostile-quote post, the blogger climbs for a few moments out of the trench, listens to what the other side are saying and—rather than engaging them in debate—rushes back to repeat whatever’s been overheard, in full school-bus-style detail (so she was like; and then she said; I was like, FAIL!) in order to tut-tut over the misguidedness of them.

What does it mean? Perhaps a small sign of a larger trend: the reversion of communication from texts written with a readership of unknown ideological disposition, to a more chatty, cliquey form of discourse: back, as the Economist recently put it, to the coffee house. The political consequences of these trends can be quite severe: the U.S. deadlock over national debt and taxation policy can be seen as part of this severance of ideology from real-world constraints.

Egalitarianism in one country?

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 04:59:00 -0400

Lane Kenworthy considers the correlation of social democratic outcomes in a nation’s politics with a strong labour movement, in the context of American politics:

But what if you live in a country with labor unions that are weak, and getting weaker? What if your country is the United States?

He goes on to list a set of strategies to deal with the problem (outreach, incrementalism, baby steps) all of which, it seems to me, are already being undertaken by the Democratic Party. I think it’s reasonable to take the Obama administration as Exhibit A in considering the effectiveness of Kenworthy’s prescription.

The weakness of this approach becomes clear when we consider two big issues: healthcare and climate change. On the first, despite intense opposition and some really poor tactical decisions by the administration, some kind of weak-tea solution was achieved, in not inconsiderable part due to the administration’s presentation of the plan as cost reduction. The second, far more important, problem was quickly thrown into the too-hard basket, because no coalition could be assembled with sufficient clout to counteract the interests of corporations dependant for their profits on the unabated use of fossil fuels.

To find an effective coalition of interested actors able to bring about social justice, environmental protection and some approximation of equality, we should look at the reason that a labour movement has historically been a crucial element. Labour movements represent the interests of the many against the elite. We hear a lot about the interconnectedness of our world; national governments’ scope to determine policy is circumscribed by the forces of globalisation, by corporations and capital flows that know no borders, and by transnational institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF, or the EU.

If the world is becoming a village, then there is little point in trying to achieve equality only among all members of the household within the rich house on the hill, when the people in the shack by the river have nothing. Elites, of course, would prefer us to carry out our efforts separately, because they can then use the threat of national competition to drive down worker conditions and rights.

None of this is to say that internationalism is easy, given the lack of supra-national democratic institutions. But to confine our efforts to the nation, with or without a strong labour movement, is to concede defeat; capital, which has no such limitations, will easily nip any such efforts in the bud (Jane Hamsher’s post on Standard & Poor’s political interference highlights a particularly obvious intervention, but ‘the market’ is always there in the background ready to punish any efforts at democracy proper).

Petition in support of David Hicks

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 00:59:25 -0400

Petition in support of David Hicks:

The Australian Government’s actions amount to censorship.

"Above all we need to ensure that no one voice, not News Corporation, not the BBC, becomes too..."

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 21:36:49 -0400

“Above all we need to ensure that no one voice, not News Corporation, not the BBC, becomes too powerful.”

- A slippery weasel trying to make hay while the rain pours.

Democracy’s coming home.

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 06:09:51 -0400

Democracy’s coming home.

Listening to Michael Dougherty and Michelle Goldberg on...

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 06:07:00 -0400

Listening to Michael Dougherty and Michelle Goldberg on Bloggingheads, and thinking about what’s wrong with liberals. The problem with American politics is the giant vacuum on the left (Bernie Sanders the honourable exception). Dougherty, who seems to be the kind of thoughtful old-school conservative sadly lacking today, describes the resentment the Tea Party feels against Wall St and establishment Republicans; while he does not agree with them, he explains where they’re coming from.

Goldberg, meanwhile, ends up defending technocrats; it is Dougherty who briefly refers to a more radical left critique of the cosy arrangement between capital and government. Goldberg starts talking about scapegoats. What she does not say, cannot say, is that it liberalism’s failure to provide a left critique of - and indeed complicity in - the obscenity of bank bailouts followed by austerity measures, has left the space open for Beck, the Tea Party, and the Zeitgeist movie’s crypto-anti-semitism.

Slow news is good news

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:33:00 -0400

I like to read the Economist occasionally*. What makes it far more interesting than a newspaper or a magazine like Time or Newsweek, is that is has regular sections on each region of the world. That has an excellent corrective effect on the tendency of news to focus in on crises. Even from the viewpoint of understanding the crises, it helps if you’ve read about what’s happening in the quiet times in-between. Most news media are highly parochial in their choice of what to report, until something happens that’s too big to ignore. The result is that the only thing we hear about Japan is the tsunami; and we learn nothing about any Arab country that is not currently either in the throes of a revolution or being bombed by the Americans.

To live in one of the rich countries of the world, especially if that country happens to be a democracy, entails an ethical obligation to try to understand the world, and the consequences of one’s nation’s foreign policy. This is what makes the ADHD-pandering news cycle so reprehensible.

I don’t think the internet, in which, the user’s own choices and inclinations (reinforced by the ‘filter bubble’) drive the content displayed, is a good medium to acquire this kind of broad knowledge. I tend to find I only read the sections of the Economist about the regions of the world I know least, when there’s nothing else to read except the in-flight shopping guide in the back of the seat pocket in front of me.

A TV programme would be a better medium for comprehensive world news, because the listener has a relatively passive, linear relationship to the content, which is exactly what’s required in this case. (Both of these words—‘passive’ and ‘linear’—are deeply unfashionable, due to the rhizomatic Zeitgeist of the web, in which the writer is dead, the reader is also a writer—but the live kind—and we all participate in a wonderful soup of free-flowing information…fashion is fine for clothes, but in thought, it’s risible bullshit… global civics is a matter of duty—another unfashionable word—not curiosity.)

The programme should cover at least each region, perhaps cycling through a set of countries each week. There should be some sort of weighting for population; the regions of China should get more coverage than the regions of Belgium, for instance.

I imagine it would be hard to find a home for such a programme. It would be a ratings-killer. Perhaps a public broadcaster would be the natural home for such a station, but probably not a national public broadcaster. Either a nonprofit cooperative or a transnational institution of some kind. Although there’s no such station (is there?) Maybe it could just start on the BBC or AJE. I wonder if it could make use of existing video feeds and reportage? That would certainly lower running costs! It could be little more than an intelligent and global-civics minded curation of AP and Reuters videos.

The more I think about this, the more I think it’s eminently feasible… and wonder if in fact someone is already doing it? Anyone know?

*Of course, the Economist is a neoliberal publication, and its editorial perspective correlates very closely with the interests of a wealthy elite (just look at the carbon tax headline above). However, that is precisely why it makes for such good reading: rich investors need to have some kind of grasp on what’s happening across the world, so that they can move their money around in a profitable way, avoiding instability and seizing opportunities to make themselves richer. While the New Internationalist, say, also provides a global perspective and correlates much closer with my own biases, there’s something discomforting and tiresome about reading propaganda that one basically agrees with.

The IDEAlists.: Louise Swinn

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 23:02:07 -0400

The IDEAlists.: Louise Swinn:

the-idealists:

Louise is a publisher, writer, reader and book connoisseur.

What motivates you?

The knowledge that good stories will out, and that books can change lives.

What’s your vision of the next twenty years for the world and society in general?

Can consumerism get any more extreme in the…