Orange Juice & Ryvita

Food, politics, underemployment and the consumption of time and leisure

Author Liam Hogan

  • TAFE

    I AM NOW THREE weeks into a year long course in Residential Drafting. I've decided, having investigated a few options including a hugo static site that I just can't be bothered to set up a studyblog, and besides, I have this one. The report so far: it has been a shock to the system, in at least three ways.

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  • What I'm reading: Andor, homoploutia, Prussia

    Gabriel Winslow-Yost, The Revolution Will Not Be Star Wars, NYRB

    No spaceshiploads of refugees get turned away by neutral planets, no companies profit by selling the means of the massacre or buying up abandoned properties, no public grows bored of hearing about the deaths. The secrecy around it all protects the galaxy’s inhabitants from any question of complicity. How little, beyond the fashion, it resembles the Holocaust—or, for that matter, the genocide we’ve all been watching, or not watching, for the past year. Disney is in the business of fantasies, and this is genocide as we would dearly prefer it to be.

    And how could it not be? It’s Star Wars, after all. The point is not that Andor fails in its effort to depict political violence but rather that, for all the show’s intelligence and skill and ingenuity, major elements of its subject are simply incompatible with its nature. What it depicts most clearly is what Star Wars can’t show.

    Branko Milanovic, New Capitalism in America

    In contrast to the old-fashioned capitalists, the homoploutic elite feels that it merits its high incomes: they might conveniently forget the capital part of that income, and focus solely on the labor part for which they have studied hard and work hard. Three things are linked here: ownership of lots of capital, high level of education, and a highly paid job. Thus, instead of a class-based society of the old capitalism, we now have an elite-ruled society.

    Secretary of Defense Rock, America as Prussia in 1806

    Beneath that surface prosperity, however, the foundations were rotting—strategic clarity had vanished, institutions had become performative, and the elite was unable or unwilling to respond to a rapidly changing world. When the reckoning came, it was not gradual but immediate. The Prussian state collapsed in weeks. The lesson, as Clausewitz knew, was that apparent stability is often the most dangerous phase of decline, when a state still looks functional just before the storm.

    The civic and intellectual disconnection afflicting American strategy today is inextricably linked to the broader assault on the nation’s institutions...

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  • Firms

    A HALF FORMED THOUGHT: it's a very well observed desire on the part of AI/LLM backers that these machines substitute for the labour of less trained white collar workers. The chatbot will replace assistants, junior researchers, graduates, clerks, and so on. The implication, that the path to entry into a middle class career path for younger people will close, is either pronounced silently, or expressed with a shrugging acceptance. Those workers just aren't valuable. Oh well.

    It strikes me that this is not entirely new as an aspect of our modern capitalism, though. What workers through the 1990s and 2000s experienced, culturally, in organisations, were the expansion of other practices that also tended to close off pathways to career. Outsourcing of routine and back-of-house functions. The breaking of union agreements and 20th century industrial rules. The expansion of superficial 'merit' practices in hiring, which simultaneously tended to prevent internal promotion, and encouraged ambitious workers to look first to other firms to get ahead. An emphasis on continual study at university and a stress on individualisation of training. These added up to a model of white collar worker whose value was essentially portfolio-based, one they could pick up and take anywhere, infinitely substitutable.

    What these all have in common is that they attack the basis of the mid-20th century unit of capitalism, the firm, vertically coordinated organisations with a strong claim to the loyalties of, and control over the working behaviours of, their employees, and a value proposition based on cultural practices (like loyalty, and overwork, but also quality control, reward, and creativity). A company is just a legal entity on paper, but a firm is a collection of people and relationships. The destruction of firms is both good and bad, and many old-school firms run on literally patriarchal lines won't be mourned. But a capitalism without firms is also a capitalism without careers.

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  • Homeland

    JACKSON LEARS IN THE London Review of Books is one of those authors who I generally will click on instantly, stopping what I'm doing to read. His most recent article The Righteous Community is predictably very good, and you should read it immediately. Except. Except.

    The legacy of the war on terror ‘flourishes in America’s refusal to see the world as something other than a battlefield’, he writes. This aggressive stance promoted the eastward expansion of Nato, provoking Putin’s actions in Ukraine. As in the war on terror, the US was determined to take the offensive against the alleged aggressors – the Russians – who, despite their pretensions to civilisation, were in the popular imagination barbarians too. As Beck writes, ‘during the first two years of the [Ukraine] war, America’s response has been to escalate the conflict at every opportunity.’

    This is almost entirely wrong in every clause of every sentence: NATO's eastward expansion, as with that of the EU, has been driven by Eastern European and Baltic countries---and now Scandinavian ones too---acting as their own agents and preferring a European rather than Russian political future. American response to the 2022 invasion under Biden, instead of being escalatory, was at every stage reactive to Russian nuclear posturing; arms shipments (rockets, tanks, long-range missiles) that the Ukrainians asked to buy were delayed against supposed red lines which, year by year, have proved imaginary. American response to the 2014 annexation of Crimea under Obama was even more obliging.

    There is a certain critical American exceptionism that can only see the rest of the world reflected in American perfidy, as though every other country only ever acted because of the actions of Americans. Vladimir Putin needed no provocation to want to dominate what he has seen as former Russia, and he has always been clear that Russia's war is about Ukraine, not NATO. There is one country that can end the war in Ukraine tomorrow: it's Russia. But back to Lears:

    Those of us who seek to conceive an end to endless war must somehow learn to challenge embedded American fixations and fantasies, as well as habits of mind and heart.

    The most pervasive American fixation and fantasy is the one that keeps the United States on a special, exceptional, pedestal.

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  • Kebab

    TODAY, 11 JULY 2025, is World Kebab Day. I have solemnly observed this totally not-made-up Day with a beef kebab, with hommous, tabouleh, onions, tomato, lettuce, and garlic sauce. It is an honour and a privilege to eat one of the world's greatest hand-held meat-in-bread dishes, while sitting in the glorious calm winter Sydney sun. Don't thank me for my service, it is enough to take part.

    For the record, mine is from Saray on Enmore Road in Newtown.

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  • Ambassador

    THERE IS A CERTAIN tragic drama to the rough month between the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of the First World War. Everyone who ever studied history in high school (or watched the really pretty good 37 Days) knows the basic story and I'm, in spite of myself, a bit fascinated by it: here was a closed world, an exclusive masculine society of gentlemen, of the upper class in their own countries but also members of a cross-national exclusive elite, speaking the same languages, familiar with the same Greek and Latin and French, bearers of an enormous responsibility to their governments and the world. They all valued their ability to maintain a kind of concert peace amongst great powers. They were aware of themselves as a class and as a professional corps of diplomats, habituated to the exercise of unaccountable influence, answerable at best only to a Cabinet and at worst to an uninterested monarch, and regardless of their shade of politics (from liberal to reactionary) had a kind of mutual sympatico that let them always empathise with one another regardless of their countries' positions.

    So, how well did a group of highly skilled, professionally serious, high-minded, exquisitely literate and trained communicators handle the world-historic outbreak of violence? Pretty badly, as it turns out. Nobody mourns them.

    The United States will be represented in Malaysia by its new Ambassador, former Ashfield Councillor, reject from the Liberal Party, 'alpha male' influencer and success coach, probable self-parodist (though who can be certain, honestly) Nick Adams. It's absolutely typical Trumpism to elevate the last guy whose book he read or whose TV slot he saw. How will the Hooters-loving, performatively chauvinist influencer go as plenipotentiary to a majority Muslim nation already at odds with the US over its support for the war in Gaza? Is diplomacy better in the hands of top-hatted and tailed gentlemen or MAGA fabulists?

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  • Drafting

    WHEN I BEGAN THIS blog a... number of years ago it was because I was unemployed and had a lot of time; cooking blogs were the rage, I had less grey hair, etc. etc. Life intervened of course and I both got work, and stopped blogging intermittently, and the blog description became increasingly less and less descriptive of what it actually did.

    Now, like so many other things in 2025, like fascism, it threatens to become very relevant again. I'm currently about to start a new bit of study, a Cert IV in Residential Drafting at TAFE. I may set up a specific studyblog, or I may not.

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  • What I'm reading: smoky rooms and serious people

    Dan Davies, black boxes and smoky rooms:

    Some Planning Inspectorate reports read curiously like Agatha Christie novels. Chapter by chapter, you get detail of the objections and analysis, and then a concluding section in which the Inspectorate assumes the role of Hercule Poirot and explains which of them were red herrings and which were killers.

    Ned Resnikoff, Serious People:

    As one prominent Sacramento YIMBY put it, “This election separated the wheat (people with sincere views on urban policy reform) from the chaff (people who use urban policy reform as a cudgel against their enemies).” Among those who genuinely care about housing affordability, Mamdani attracted support both from the left and (though not without reservations) from the center. The centrists who loathe the left more than they care about YIMBY policy reform denounced Mamdani, while the leftists who hate shitlibs more than they like winning elections did everything they could to make clear that shitlibs were not welcome in the Mamdani coalition.

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  • Andropov

    IT'S A WELL KNOWN observation that organisations that prize loyalty over competence tend, in the end, to failure. History is full of examples of failed gerontocracies, and political systems that chose long-running death over renewal: poor old Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko, elderly placemen lacking imagination, all of them causes and symptoms of the USSR's degrading later-20thC crunch. The British car industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Wests Tigers. The list goes on.

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  • Ugly Ducklings

    PRU GOWARD AS MINISTER in 2017 sold off the public housing that was the last vestige of the working-class presence in The Rocks. Now the housing stock which she saw as too valuable to be wasted on the poor is winning architectural awards:

    Even by the miserable standards of more than a century ago, the Workmen’s Dwellings in Sydney’s The Rocks were considered dark and gloomy.

    Now they’re a popular Instagrammable backdrop often used in wedding photos.

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