Sunday, 19 April 2015 - 10:12pm
This week (and last), I have been mostly too busy to log—or even do—much extra-curricular reading. Here are some exceptions:
- Why is so much of the discussion of higher ed driven by elite institutions? - Corey Robin at CT: "[…] the way that elite institutions dominate our media discussions really skews how the public, particularly that portion of the public that is not in college right now, sees higher education. There is a war being fought on college campuses, but it’s not about trigger warnings or safe spaces; it’s about whether most students will be able to get any kind of liberal arts education at all—forget Shakespeare v. Morrison; I’m talking essays versus multiple choice tests, philosophy versus accounting—from mostly precarious professors who are themselves struggling to make ends meet."
- Lecture by David Graeber: Resistance In A Time Of Total Bureaucratization / Maagdenhuis Amsterdam (video): "Twenty or thirty years ago, when you said 'the university', people meant the faculty, the staff. Now when you say 'the university' you mean the administrition. We are no longer a community of scholars, we're a business. […] Creating knowledge, learning things, studying things, understanding the world, is no longer the point of a university."
- Joe Biden’s Israel stunner: American Jews should let Israel protect them - Corey Robin, Salon: What the…? I don't even… A country's vice president warns its Jewish population to keep a bag packed, just in case. Then receives "applause, and then photos, and then kosher canapés".
- Academia’s 1 Percent - Sarah Kendzior, Vitae: "The fate of aspiring professors is sealed not with job applications but with graduate-school applications. Institutional affiliation has come to function like inherited wealth."
- Letter from Amsterdam: Humanities, Rally! - George Blaustein at n+1: "David Graeber noted in passing that the demands of humanities students are, in a sense, actually quite conservative. It is the students who speak up for pure knowledge, for the value of study for its own sake, for the cultural or human heritage, for some of the things teachers aren’t always good at voicing anymore."
- Edutopia - Megan Erikson at Jacobin: "The great irony is that the very Silicon Valley reformers promoting and funding techno-utopian models for American schoolchildren refuse to submit their own children to anything like it, choosing innovative pedagogical models instead of newer touch screens."
Shakespeare for postmodernists
"Existence or its antithesis, that is the discursive frame which requires, calls for, indeed demands, critical interrogation:
Whether subjective value judgements may be made vis a vis the slings, arrows, and so forth, from the members of that class of projectile weapons which we may tentatively formulate, and iteratively reformulate, as 'outrageous fortune',
Or whether we privilege the reflexive brandishment of such tools ourselves in a combative stance with regard to a putative 'trouble-sea',
And through the resulting tensions, attenuations, wearing-downs, and so on, reach a stasis of resolution."
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1.
Sunday, 5 April 2015 - 7:15pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Joe Hockey Blows Thought Bubbles On Housing Bubbles - the indispensible Ben Eltham at New Matilda: "The reason Australia has such a major housing affordability crisis is relatively simple. Our houses cost too much. A property bubble, driven by investors seeking capital returns, has inflated the price of Australian capital city housing well above its true value."
- The U.S. job skills mismatch and up-skilling - Nick Bunker, Washington Center for Equitable Growth: "New research […] looks at what happened to employer requirements for positions during the Great Recession and the resulting recovery. What they find is that an increasing supply of unemployed workers leads to an increase in the requirements for jobs that employers posted. With a larger pool of talent to pick from, employers get to pick the cream of the crop."
- Applauding Themselves to Death - George Monbiot: "While almost all governments claim to support the aim of preventing more than 2°C of global warming, they also seek to “maximise economic recovery” of their fossil fuel reserves. (Then they cross their fingers, walk three times widdershins around the office and pray that no one burns it)."
- The Death of Blogs has been Greatly Exaggerated - Mark Thoma guest post at the Fiscal Times: "The reporting today on economic issues is so much better than it was […], and that is due in no small part to the interaction between reporters, the public, and academics willing to blog and put complicated, technical matters into terms that the general public can understand."
- Roosevelt’s money policy, 1933-1934 - Eric Rauchway, Crooked Timber: "He wanted to establish an international system of managed currencies, with an agreement that would allow them to remain stable for long periods, but adjustable in case of need – that was what he told the World Economic Conference at the end of summer 1933, and that was why it broke up – because other countries weren’t yet ready to join the US."
- Economists! Be more Marxist - Chris Dillow, Stumbling and Mumbling
- Don’t be surprised by Abbott’s comments about ‘lifestyle choices’ - Sydney's Christopher Mayes and Jenny Kaldor at the Conversation: "Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s claim this week that people living in remote communities were making a “lifestyle choice” that taxpayers shouldn’t be obliged to fund was not just the result of an unguarded moment. Rather, the phrase reveals an underlying view that social circumstances are the responsibility of individuals, rather than societies."
- Australian firm to assume Indiana Toll Road lease, pay $5.73 billion - South Bend Tribune: Rent seeking is now a major export earner! AU FTW!
- NSW can pay for the infrastructure it needs without privatisation - Frank Stillwell at the Conversation: "[T]here are viable alternatives. Indeed, in economic matters, there are always alternatives."
- Political philosophy now illegal in the UK - Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber: "Well, almost. The British government has just produced the guidance for its “Prevent” scheme for education, which aims to stop young people from being drawn into “extremism”."
- Blyth Devastates Congress' Approach to Budget - The Real News Network: Blyth absolutely nails it, in record time.
Death Cult comparison
| Deathiness Criteria | Islam | Christianity |
|---|---|---|
| Belief in an afterlife | Yes. | Yes. |
| Prophet's cause of death | Peacefully, of natural causes aged 62 or 63, while being comforted by his wife. | Agonising torture and public execution lasting days. Ultimate responsibility assigned to a conspiracy, resulting in millenia of persecution for the prophet's own people. |
| Prophet's posthumous appearances | Not so much as a postcard. | Countless occassions beginning with full corporeal appearance to disciples, thence a multitude of forms from a blinding light to grilled cheese on toast. |
| Holy day celebrating birth of prophet | Not one of the significant holidays, nonetheless celebrated by most adherents, often with a street party, including music and nibblies. | Date of birth unknown, so celebrating the prophet's birth has become part of the traditional pagan midwinter festival. |
| Holy day commemorating death of prophet | No commemoration of the prophet's death. However of the two major holidays one celebrates Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son, which could be seen as a little bit deathy, although in the end the son was unharmed (physically, at least). | Four straight days of contemplation of the terminal suffering of the prophet, subsequent resurrection, and ascention to the astral realm. Date of death unknown, so celebrated during the pagan fertility festival in the Northern Spring. |
| Posthumous deification of prophet | Nope. | The fundamental, if complicated, tenet of the religion. |
| Posthumous deification of other leaders | None. | Church continued the Roman practice of deifying leaders and other significant figures, who were also often assigned divine responsibility for particular earthly and heavenly matters. Not all sects recognise this practice today. |
| Conclusion | A teensy bit deathy. | Really quite deathy indeed. |
Wednesday, 1 April 2015 - 6:20pm
Oh, sorry - I should clarify. This is great news for these parasitic, perfectly horizontally-integrated private bureaucracies which deal with the problem of "jobseeking" (There are plenty of unoccupied jobs in Coffs Harbour! You're just not seeking hard enough!), administer "programs", police compliance with the punitive "human services" system, stand guard over work-for-the-dole chain gangs, provide laughable "training", get a commission when you (not they) find a job, and then get you back on the books again when one of the pillars of the Coffs business community feels it's more convenient to sack you than address their own managerial incompetence.
So yes, this is great news for the ultimate in welfare cheats, the prodigious red tape dispensers who are being relieved of their own red tape (i.e. public accountability), who need do nothing except listen to their cash registers go ka-ching! every time they shunt a person from one useless arm of their organisation to another.
Wednesday, 1 April 2015 - 12:55pm
"Fake SCU degrees, North Coast TAFE diplomas for $6500 a pop" is a very misleading headline, since that's the top price for a forgery purporting to come from any Australian university. I was thinking "There are people who would pay $6500 for a piece of paper claiming that they attended Australia's least reputable credential mill? Why?"
I think the Regional Universities Network should jump on this bandwagon right away and demand HECS funding for purchases of forged degrees. It's the ultimate in customer satisfaction for the "less academically prepared students" who are SCU's target market, and if anything's going to generate positive word of mouth, it's alumni who never actually had to deal with SCU.
Sunday, 29 March 2015 - 8:13am
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- “I found myself turning into an idiot!”: David Graeber explains the life-sapping reality of bureaucratic life
- Unemployment Not Due to Lack of Motivation - Xavier Smerdon, Pro Bono Australia: "You cannot punish people out of poverty"
- Iran and America’s Memory Hole - Dr. Arnold J. Oliver at Informed comment: As Doonesbury put it at the time of the revolution, "The Shah? What Shah?"
- Slandering the 70s - Paul Krugman, New York Times
- The Important Things Standardized Tests Don't Measure - Marion Brady at WaPo: "[R]eal learning is natural and inherently satisfying."
- The Higher Ed Disruptors Are Still With Us - Eric Loomis at Lawyers, Guns & Money: "This is classic Shock Doctrine. Underfund the universities, make people believe that they can’t provide a proper service, replace them with private companies, and then profit."
- Metaphor alert on data: should it be anyone’s property? - Nicholas Gruen, On Line Opinion
- Militarism and the myths of Anzac - Anonymous Trot at Solidarity.net.au: "As historian Joan Beaumont said last year: 'The emphasis on Gallipoli and the Anzac legend has really been part of our political culture. It is not part of history.'"
- Underperforming nursing students 'could endanger public safety', say university academics - Linton Besser, Peter Cronau and Hagar Cohen for ABCs Four Corners: "Academics are confronted by a rising tide of student appeals for higher marks. As an increasing portion of them are part-time casual teachers, working through a series of 12-week, single-semester contracts, there is a reluctance to fail students as teachers said the work required to manage appeals was effectively unpaid."
- Tony Abbott And His Amazing Take On Invisibility - world-class snark from Richard Hil at New Matilda: "The ETS, he announced with Aristotelian hubris, is 'a so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no-one.' Flushed with self-importance, Abbott gazed into the distance, as if he had just delivered the rhetorical equivalent of the Gettysburg address. Journalists gazed back and forth in bemusement, trying to figure out if this was indeed another gaffe, or a memorable utterance destined for a place in Brainy Quote."
Sunday, 22 March 2015 - 7:42pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Benign and powerful: the contradictory language of metadata retention - Adam Henschke in the Conversation: 'More than mere inconsistency, these “rhetorical contradictions” are used to convince us that we needn’t worry about retention and use of metadata, but at the same time is absolutely necessary for our individual and national security.'
- The Right Thing to Do: Homeless edition - Ian Welsh: "Utah’s Housing First program cost between $10,000 and $12,000 per person, about half of the $20,000 it cost to treat and care for homeless people on the street."
- Profits up, investment down: why it matters for low pay - James Meadway, New Economics Foundation Blog: "[UK] Wages have fallen since the crash in 2007. Profits (net surplus outside of the North Sea) have gone through the roof. If it’s not quite a zero-sum game, it starts to look very close to one. The recovery has been driven by consumer spending. With real wages falling, this has come from a rise in borrowing by households." Yay for the credit card welfare system! Also: Almost 80% of UK Self-Employed Workers Living in Poverty - Catherine Phillips, Newsweek. Having been in that situation, I can easily believe it.
- Talking Trash: High-Status Explanations for Watching Low-Brow TV - The Reading List, The Society Pages
- A negative interest rate world? Why? - Ian Welsh: "In the United States more than all the gains of the last “recovery” have gone to the top 10% (really the top 3% or so.) There has limited broad based demand for new goods. Luxury goods, investment art, and London and Manhattan real-estate do not scale. Without widespread demand, opportunities for new businesses, with new employers, are limited."
- New Zealand Spies on Neighbors in Secret “Five Eyes” Global Surveillance - Ryan Gallagher at the Intercept: "Everything we do is explicitly authorized and subject to independent oversight." Oh. That's all right then.
- How Higher Education Perpetuates Intergenerational Inequality - Timothy Taylor: "The effects of these patterns on inequality of incomes in the United States are clearcut: higher income families are better able to provide financial and other kinds of support for their children, both as they grow up, and when it comes time to attend college, and when it comes time to find a job after college. In this way, higher education has become a central part part of the process by which high-income families can seek to assure that their children are more likely to have high incomes, too."
Sunday, 15 March 2015 - 1:50pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Knowledge Isn’t Power - Paul Krugman at the Gray Lady: "[W]hatever serious people may want to believe, soaring inequality isn’t about education; it’s about power."
- #SpeakBeautiful: Reinforcing a dangerous metric - jennydavis at the Society Pages: "In its very name, #SpeakBeautiful centers physical attractiveness as the proper metric with which to measure women’s value. Rather than decenter or reject this metric, it asks women to give one another high scores."
- Technology should be used to create social mobility – not to spy on citizens - Cory Doctorow at the Grauniad: "Our networks have given the edge to the elites, and unless we seize the means of information, we are headed for a long age of IT-powered feudalism, where property is the exclusive domain of the super-rich, where your surveillance-supercharged Internet of Things treats you as a tenant-farmer of your life, subject to a licence agreement instead of a constitution"
- We Suck at HTTP - Deane Barker, Gadgetopia: "We have broken HTTP. We’ve done it for years in fits and starts, but apps have completely broken it. HTTP was a good specification which we’ve steadily whittled away."
- Can helicopter money be democratic? - Simon Wren-Lewis
- Making Do with More - Brad DeLong: "All of the extracting and growing and building and making and carrying--even the carrying from the kitchen to the restaurant table, and even the making that is the transformation of coffee grounds and water into hot caffeine-laden liquid--takes up only three in ten jobs in the United States today."
- Power from the People - Florence Jaumotte and Carolina Osorio Buitron at the IMF(!) say "the decline in unionization in recent decades has fed the rise in incomes at the top".
Friday, 13 March 2015 - 9:41pm
My wife was stranded at Park Beach Plaza all afternoon. Fortunately she's made of sterner stuff than me. I can't spend more than ten minutes in that rats maze of sensory overload, with its resident population of waddling rednecks, rippling folds of tattoos seeping from the gap between their singlets and their track suit pants, pushing a pram or two and leading a winding trail of barefoot foetal alcohol syndrome offspring from one consumer delight to the next, without going loopy.