Category Politics

• Character

  A GENEALOGY OF THE concept of ‘local character’, as it applies to places, would be like making a family tree for a usurping new monarch: energetic, but short. ‘Local character’ is everywhere in the language of talking about places and planning, though it’s only surprisingly recently that the terms have had meaning. The NSW Department of Planning describes the concept this way:

  Posted 3 February 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• John Bolton

  

  I HAVE LONG BEEN fascinated not by American politics—the most tedious of hobbies—but by one of its characters in particular: John Bolton. If you were an adult during the time of the leadup to the 2003 Iraq War you’ll remember him for his part in war-cheerleading, if you’re younger you’ll know him as the most foreign-policy aggressive of the current President’s constantly rotating staff, but if, like me, you’re a connoisseur of the worst people in the world, you’ll know Bolton simply as the most hawkish person ever to haunt Washington DC.

  A logical process works in John Bolton’s head, and it’s extremely simple:

  Posted 28 January 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• State Bakery

  ONCE, THE NSW GOVERNMENT tried to run a State Bakery. As readers may know, the Party card of the NSW Labor Party, to which every member signs a pledge, are partially as follows:

  ...I will actively support the Constitution, Platform and Principles of the Australian Labor Party including the democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange, to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other antisocial features in these fields...

  Posted 23 January 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• Log off

  HAVING FACEBOOK ARGUMENTS WITH people is generally unpleasant, frustrating, and pointless. You won’t win them, and they only increase the engagement figures of the kind of people who engage marketing consultants, or use the word ‘yarns’ without irony. Arguing on facebook and twitter is why everyone’s racist uncle is in charge of our political parties and civil institutions, jumping into your conversation to say, well, ‘you might not like Trump but he reflects how real people think’, or other infinitely facile opinions that simply cannot be engaged with because there is no ‘there’ there, and people with critical self-reflection skills get off social media, retreat further and further from any sphere that can be called public, and work on their hobbies and addictions.

  The key image of the early 21st century is major corporations shitting in the gemeinschaft.

  Posted 17 December 2019 | Author Liam Hogan

• Lavarch Report

  THE NEW SOUTH WALES Labor Party has released its review document, the Lavarch Report, which recommends some superficial administrative changes to the workings of Head Office in response to decades of carpetbagging behaviour and unprincipled, shameless, grifting on the part of the NSW Right.

  Posted 6 December 2019 | Author Liam Hogan

• Vegemite Bagel

  JOSEPH ROTH'S RADETZSKY MARCH is one of those novels that years ago, someone you know told you was really good, and that you should read it. Whoever gave you the tip was right. It's that good...

  Posted 27 November 2019 | Author Liam Hogan

• Pizza

  PIZZA IS AN ASSEMBLAGE, in the philosophical sense that it is a collection of individually discrete items, brought together and consisting of a unified whole, that can be understood at many levels simultaneously—grouped ingredients and whole-of-dish. It exists as the platonic ideal of a round, baked flatbread with toppings, as a process of putting-together, as the embodied final outcome which is this evening’s dinner, and as mistake: incorrect pizzas with inauthentic aspects make Italians mad. I make dough, I put ingredients on it, I bake it, I photograph it for my neglected blog; at which point has the pizza come into being?

  

  Posted 19 November 2019 | Author Liam Hogan

• What I'm Reading (late August)

  THE AMERICAN AFFAIRS JOURNAL was at least until quite recently a safe haven for political ideas of the American conservative-establishment Right and was ambivalent, at best, about the election of Donald Trump. It smells of cigars, well-heated offices, and careers full of sinecures.

  A pair of articles in its most recent edition, though, show the kind of sharp swing to the left normally associated with a football winger, stepping inside a defender to pass. The italics are mine:

  The Financialisation Of The American Elite:

  Many structural reforms are necessary to change this. With regard to education, it is time to reform the top MBA programs. These schools shape our business culture, and, in so doing, exert an outsized influence on the business practices and the career pursuits of some of our most talented young people.
  The schools should begin with an explicit renunciation of share­holder capitalism. This will be the easy part.

  The New Gilded Age Or Old Normal:

  The longer-term trend toward more inequality in capitalist economies, which prevailed before this period, has re­sumed after it. That leads us to conclude that there may well be no technocratic or tax policy fix for capitalism’s tendency to generate ever more inequality. This conclusion is obviously less optimistic than the one reached by Thomas Piketty in his seminal 2014 study of income inequality, which argues for ameliorating income share out­comes by raising taxes on the rich.

  Irving Kristol, the neoconservative, famously described the turn of his intellectual life as that of a ‘liberal mugged by reality’. Read closely and there’s a lot more mugging going on.

  Posted 21 August 2019 | Author Liam Hogan

• Designing a jail

  IN THE NEW INQUIRY, Monica Mohapatra writes about the uneasy appeal of design thinking to make better prisons. The piece is excellent. Read it.

  Design approaches to jail have recently become appealing to ruling classes because they garner a profit from aesthetic changes that are easily branded as prison reform. Underlying this facade of reform is the fact that architectural improvements serve to make jails more palatable for a future where jails will neighbor more communities...

  Posted 28 March 2019 | Author Liam Hogan

• The years have made me bitter

  THE YEARS HAVE MADE me bitter, the gargle dims my brain
  'cause Dublin keeps on changing, and nothing seems the same
  The Pillar and the Met have gone, the Royal long since pulled down
  As the great unyielding concrete makes a city of my town.

  On the 23rd of March, last Saturday, NSW went to a State election and narrowly re-elected its government. The Coalition, unpopular for its performance but with a well-respected leader, faced a Labor Party with an unremarkable campaign and an unknown leader whose comments about Asian demographic change were reported in the last week, to catastrophic effect.

  Posted 25 March 2019 | Author Liam Hogan