Author Liam Hogan

• Burger

  AMERICA EXISTS AT MANY levels. It's a real nation of people with geographic territory and a federal State, it's the constantly self-referenced ideal of constitutional self-government, it's the religious-liberal experiment of shining lighthood and the city on the hill, it's a historical tradition of progress and of dynamism. It also exists of course as a culinary-industrial tradition admired and imitated around the world, for example by Khrushchev, who ate a hot dog and declared it 'good, but not enough'.

  Posted 2 April 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• What I'm reading: China

  Long Ling, 'Diary: In the new Beijing'. London Review of Books Vol. 47 No. 6 · 3 April 2025

  For the purposes of data monitoring, the city is divided into sections, called ‘grids’. Grid workers, employed at the lowest level of the civil service system, are required to know the households in the grids under their jurisdiction: they need to know which apartments have elderly people, which have tenants, which have pregnant women, which have family members overseas, which are in the middle of lawsuits, which have bad relationships between mother and daughter-in-law, which have frequent quarrels, which are rich, which are poor. Even an elderly woman who doesn’t know how to use a smartphone and doesn’t watch TV is constantly feeding data into this network by turning lights on and off, using the toilet or turning on the stove. ‘With this eye of wisdom,’ Li gestured to the building around us, ‘everyone will be looked after.’

  Howard W. French: 'Toffler in China'. New York Review of Books, 10 April 2025

  How competent or thorough these emerging online means for surveillance and political control will prove to be is still an open question. What is certain is that the enlistment of citizens in the policing of the population has venerable roots in China, dating at least as far back as the Mao period. At that time even family members were notoriously encouraged to inform on one another, and neighborhoods had their own resident inspection committees that reported on every aspect of people’s behavior, including whether or not women were missing their menstrual periods, a possible sign of evasion of strict birth control measures.

  The ambition of the current efforts, though, is beyond doubt. The embattled lawyers in Total Trust lay out its scope. “The system uses big data and human surveillance. It divides every community into grids and assigns an officer to each one,” one says. “Each grid officer is in charge of about four hundred households, or one thousand residents,” explains an officer. Equally clear is that the system under construction is not placing all its bets on technology.

  Posted 1 April 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• Salsipão

  A BEER AND A pie at the football was once the Australian norm and tradition, with sausage sizzle as the alternative and substitute for local matches. But now we, in both respect to multiculturalism and market service to gentrified crowds, do better. I went to see Sydney FC defeat Jeonbuk FC in the Asian Champions League (2) at Moore Park Stadium, and ate salsipão with my craft beer on tap. My goodness what a world of glorious sport we live in. True to my dinner, Diego Costa scored.

  • Chorizo, barbecued and chopped up
  • Chimichurri
  • Cherry tomatoes
  • Fried onion

  Posted 14 March 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• Theme

  THE BLOG HAS A default theme for now, by popular demand.

  Posted 10 March 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• What I'm reading: the bazaar is open for business

  Jacob Weisberg, The Lucky One (NY Review of Books)

  On screen and facing the public, he was a conviction politician. But behind the scenes—as with the arms for hostages trading—the bazaar was open for business.

  Ronald Reagan has been a central figure in my reading lately. Rick Perlstein's Reaganland, and the above review of Max Boot's biography, which I think I'll get to soon. Reagan seems to be a central figure also in our current affairs; a world-historical reactionary with a sunny show on his face of American virtue---in which he fully believed---covering over a core of pragmatic transactionism. Reagan's America is the one that endures into the post-Cold War: sunny in speech, dirty in acts, religious and sordid, a dynamic culture in a gerontocratic and ossified political system.

  Like everyone else I have been shocked at the United States' rush under its current President to withdraw from its commitments and alliances. Call it a pair to the moral shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a moment of sheer clarity, about what the world is and what Australia's part in it is (very little). I don't think we're ever going to see those submarines, no matter what promises are on paper. But the shock is I think less at the unexpectedness than from, in the philosopher's phrase, being at last compelled to face, in sober senses, the real conditions of American realism and transactionalism in the way it treats other countries and its friends.

  Reagan's habit of telling stories about American exceptional virtue was based on genuine belief. His practice of acting according to interests, rather than values, was what made him significant. This present moment was always there and the shock of American cynicism is just our own recognition---we knew all along.

  Posted 7 March 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• Chilli

  A HAPPIER BLOG ENTRY with no unpleasant surprises, nor native animals. This is simply the chilli recipe. You will need to light a camp fire. Begin at 3pm to 4pm: this is a key element to the process. First, let the fire get hot, then cool down a bit so it's plenty of coals and a little bit of flame, not too much. Warm up your camp oven or cookpot.

  Posted 26 February 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• Lizard

  COOKING WHEN CAMPING INTRODUCES certain challenges. You're away from your usual kitchen, you have to improvise with less, it's hot or cold or maybe rainy, you have to manage a fire, and every now and then, if you're in Australia, a large lace monitor will wander through like the bully of the town, to a Morricone whistle. (You'll have to provide the ocarina yourself).

  Posted 24 February 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• Kings

  MONARCHY IS ONE OF the older and more ridiculous of human conceits. The more you think about it the weirder it gets. Elective or hereditary it's permanent; there's no such thing as rotating kingship, and the idea is that you do it unaccountably until you die, restricted only by God or the Mandate of Heaven. They are, like the current world's political situation is, totally ludicrous, but very, very serious.

  Posted 20 February 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• What I'm reading: Eschatology and newspaper cabinets

  Paul Musgrave, How My Brain Rotted

  Over the past twenty years or so, the adult world that I was brought up to expect—a world featuring travel agents, newspapers, and the nightly news—has been more or less deposed, replaced by a creeping goo of permanent adolescence in which everything is social media.

  Timothy Burke, Apocalypse Now

  They’re not stupid: they quite intelligently understand that they no longer need any of what they are destroying and that they no longer care about the long-term. The only thing that matters is the pleasure of power right here, right now. Let us eat, be in a k-hole and have a ton of fun laying waste to an entire society, for tomorrow we might live forever. Even if we don’t, we can’t possibly lose whatever we do.

  Put all of that together and you have a lot of people in charge who are fundamentally immune to arguments couched in terms of prudence, risk, duty, that are about preserving what you have today in order to pass it to your heirs. It’s the end times.

  Posted 13 February 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• What I'm reading: Defector

  DEFECTOR IS A MODEL for what journalism should be; sport and politics, and independently and worker-owned.

  David Roth, 'Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government'.

  They don't know anything about what they're wrecking, naturally—these are creatures that do and eat and shit on things, not ones that know—but it is more salient that they don't care enough even to try to know anything about it. They are busy and stupid in a way that mirrors their rancid imago—hardcore in a way that is mostly just erratic and impatient, secretive but grandiose, prissily paranoid, conducting their nasty business on an amphetamized and whimsical timetable—but they are also not really doing anything for the reasons that people or institutions do things.

  Posted 6 February 2025 | Author Liam Hogan