April 22, 2013 – 10:46 pm
Chrissie Amphlett and the Divinyls provided a decent chunk of the soundtrack to my young life; reports of her early death (aged 53) hit me in the childhood memories, hard, much like the arrest of Rolf Harris, or pictures of Berliners crawling over the remains of the Wall. I have, by saying those things, disclosed [...]
By skepticlawyer
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Also posted in Fark!, Literature, Popular culture, science fiction
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Tagged Ayn Rand, Bleak House, Chrissie Amphlett, cultural capital, DC Comics, Dr Who, Ender's Game, geekiness, geeks, high culture, Jane Austen, Jarndyce v Jarndyce, literary criticism, National Organisation for Marriage, Orson Scott Card, Reason Foundation, Star Trek, Star Wars, Superman, the Divinyls, Tolstoy, Ursula Le Guin
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April 22, 2013 – 10:30 am
Novelist Kerry Greenwood (the author of the Phryne Fisher books, now a successful TV series), has recently published a book on the Somerton Man mystery, Tamam Shud: the Somerton Man Mystery. The book interweaves Kerry’s memories of her late father–a wharfie who loved telling stories–and her memories of Adelaide with the famous mystery of the unidentified man [...]
By Lorenzo
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Also posted in Art, Australia, Events, History, Society
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Tagged Castle, Drizzt Do'Urden, Dungeons & Dragons, Faerie, fiction, I am a Dark Elf, J R R Tolkien, Kate Beckett, Kerry Greenwood, Non-fiction, On Fairy Stories, Phryne Fisher, Richard Castle, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, secondary belief, Somerton Man, Sydney Review of Books, Tamam Shud, true crime
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January 19, 2013 – 6:40 am
If you’re going to win an argument or persuade someone to your point of view, it helps if you can tell a story. And by this I don’t mean any old story, but the sort of story that kept you awake at night as a kid, or made you cry, or made you afraid to [...]
By skepticlawyer
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Also posted in Economics, Law, Saturday chit-chat
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Tagged A Christmas Carol, Andrew Norton, Carl Sagan, Charles Dickens, Free to Choose, Jane Goodall, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Paul Krugman, richard dawkins, Road to Serfdom, Salman Rushdie, Steven Horwitz, Steven Levitt, Steven Weinberg, Sweatshop labour, The Undercover Economist, tim harford, Tyler Cowen
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October 2, 2012 – 9:30 am
I recently had the unexpected experience of reading a book that appalled me; this is not a reaction I can remember having to a book before. The book has a title I agree with: Ideas Have Consequences. Regarded as a classic text of postwar American conservatism, the book is a long jeremiad at the corruption [...]
By Lorenzo
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Also posted in History, Philosophy, Politics, Society, Technology, The Right
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Tagged Beethoven, Dostoyevsky, Etienne Gilson, Great Depression, Impressionism, Jazz, Leninism, Modernism, nominalism, Plato, Richard Weaver, Scientific Revolution, steven pinker, Walter Bagehot, William of Ockham
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September 7, 2012 – 7:42 pm
There have been many campaigns, over the years, to improve literacy in Australia (and in other developed nations, too). It is well known that even with universal, compulsory education, a percentage of young people finish their schooling and really struggle with reading and writing. Finding ways to address this is a common and worthy cause [...]
By skepticlawyer
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Also posted in Academia, Australia, Literature
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Tagged Andrew Norton, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Brisbane Writers' Festival, Germaine Greer, IEA, Jane Cowell, literacy, Matthew Condon, Nick Earls, numeracy, Queensland Literary Awards, State Library of Queensland, Steve Horwitz
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SL and I must be en rapport because we’ve both jumped on the Fifty Shades of Grey bandwagon at the same time: her earlier comments are here. The common thread is that neither of us are impressed, and neither of us likes bad writing. The difference with my review is that I broke my resolution [...]
Brought across from Facebook, with minor emendations: [Skepticlawyer] is getting rather sick of repeated requests for her opinion on 50 Shades of Grey, so here is a public announcement to the effect that she will not be reading it, with her reasons: 1. I have a low tolerance for bad writing. The fact that I know [...]
Very good interviewers are few and far between: most interviewers manage to alienate someone. For my part, I find Jeremy Paxman’s self-aggrandisement as irritating as Chris Moyles’s faux idiocy — and that’s just as a watcher and listener. I’ve also lost count of the number of interviews I’ve gone through where the interviewer wants to [...]
By skepticlawyer
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Also posted in Blogging, Media, Skeptics
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Tagged Bristol University, Bruce M Hood, Caroline Watt, Daniel Loxton, Hayley Stevens, Hoyden About Town, Joey Haban, Julian Morrow, kylie sturgess, Lyz Liddell, placebo effect, Project Barnum, Secular Student Alliance, Stephen Fry, Taslima Nasrin, the chaser, The Chaser's War on Everything, The Scope of Skepticism, Tim Minchin, token skeptic, university of edinburgh
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[SL recently discussed Christos Tsolkias' piece in her recent post on left-wing politics. At the end she said: Tsiolkas’s essay impressed me so much that I decided to review the book from which it comes, Left Turn, which is edited by two prominent lefties, Antony Loewenstein and Jeff Sparrow. But then I thought better of [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Australia, Economics, Feminism, Guest Post, Human/Civil rights, Media, Personal liberty, Philosophy, Politics, Society, The Left, The Right
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Tagged Adam Smith Institute, Antony Loewenstein, book review, Christos Tsiolkas, Dave Bath, Guest Post, Jeff Sparrow, Left Turn, Media, Politics, The Economist, The Left, The Right
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The other day, Pavlov’s Cat drew my attention to this piece on why bullies bully, particularly in schools. The tl;dr version? Telling kids that they’re all that produces narcissistic, entitled little monsters who think the world owes them a living. Contrary to the mythology, bullies have high self-esteem, not the opposite. Well well well (three [...]
By skepticlawyer
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Also posted in Literature, Personal liberty, Public Policy, The Left
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Tagged Andrew Bolt, Antony Loewenstein, Cassandra Wilkinson, Centre for Independent Studies, Christos Tsiolkas, Jeff Sparrow, Left Turn, SDA, Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association, Shoppies, sinclair davidson, Trade Unions
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