Orange Juice & Ryvita

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

Category Politics

  • 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.

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  • Language Models

    THE POINT OF MAINTAINING a blog is a fundamentally personal and political one, shared with almost all writing that matters. Now, certainly, this blog will never ever matter; but that infinite irrelevance is even more reason I feel to think out the politics of maintaining it.

    Here is my policy: I don't like AI, and will never use it for writing.

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  • What I'm reading: Commonweal vs. Branko Milanovic

    A Sick System: On the killing of a health insurance CEO, by the editors, Commonweal

    Americans are suffering too much, dying too soon, and going broke in order to prop up a completely unnecessary but very profitable industry. The time has come for us to begin phasing it out. The only questions should be how fast to do so and by what means: we could add a public option to Obamacare’s individual insurance market; we could gradually lower the eligibility age for Medicare or allow people to buy into Medicaid. But until we change direction, the problem will just get worse, leading to more despair and to more acts of rage. It is right and necessary to condemn such acts, but we no longer have a right to be surprised by them.

    To be young, perchance to dream by Branko Milanovic, on Vojinović's The political ideas of the Young Bosnia

    'A feeling of pride and fear mounted in him. Then another commotion, more yelling, disorder, running: nothing has happened they were shouting now: his Majesty was unharmed, a fiendish and dilettantish attempts on his life has failed. People began to slowly trickle back home. He thought of doing the same. But perhaps it was not good to be seen running away right now. It may be suspicious. He walked into a pastry shop. Should he take a baklava or a millefeuille? He decided for the latter even if it was more expensive. He realized that the money was in the same pocket with his pistol, moved a little away from the crowd and carefully took out 12 hellers. He counted them one by one. He had very little money. Like all 19-year olds he liked cakes. Somebody yelled again; cries became stronger and closer. He left the millefeuille after the first bite and walked three or four steps out of the store. There right in front of him was a stopped car, with His Majesty and the wife, berating the driver. He touched the pistol as if to make sure it was still there. Then he took it out…'

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  • Orcs

    ORCS ARE CREATURES FROM Tolkien, and specifically Tolkien, who created them as fantastic creatures of dread, and large numbers. Certainly, JRR Tolkien worked in veins of antiquarianism, and everything he wrote was a meta-reference to some Old English or Celtic or Norse forebear, as anyone who's got bored by his books knows, but the forebears of orc-dom in British, Irish, and Northern European myth are not the orcs of modern myth. Traditional goblins are solitary, intelligent, skilful, tricky. Hobgoblins are humorous, though the butt of the joke might be you. Elves will definitely steal your baby, and fairies will definitely trick you. Demons, though certainly folkloric, relate specifically to the rules of Christianity and formal religion. The orcdom of uncountable ugly barbarian numbers, who are enemies and only enemies, and who have been made massively popular in the Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer 40K games franchises, appear to arrive fresh, culturally whole, in the late 20th century. Or did they?

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  • Fifty grand

    ARTS DEGREES AT AUSTRALIAN universities are predicted to cost more than fifty thousand dollars:

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  • Hobbes

    WE LIVE IN AN age identified by meritocratic principles. Those aren't ones which describe the world as it is, since clearly the best people are not selected to the highest positions of privilege (I mean, look around), they're principles that describe the world as it ought to be, and which serve to justify what will be. The meritocratic model of the world is one in which it's the inequality of human achievements, intelligence, hard work, talents, that justifies the existence of inequalities of power and privilege, and which aims to exclude accidents of undeserved success. The meritocratic model says, good things should come to the good, and by implication, lays the judgement of failure on the failed. From here, let me introduce a seemingly irrelevant but actually critically relevant event: US President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden.

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  • State Parties

    THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT HAS released its Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill and it's not very good, and can't really work. But that's not what interests me about it. That this bit of legislation has been such a prominent part of the government agenda is, I think, a sign of a move away from Labor's role as a State party.

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  • Kingsmillism

    FRAN KELLY IS TO return to the airwaves at Radio National after having, three years ago, retired. She will replace Sarah Macdonald. Edit: she will present a new 6pm program. This is our media labour economy in a nutshell; absolutely dominated by three or four major institutions (the ABC, Nine-Fairfax, and the Murdoch papers) which combine to form what is effectively a cartel for media, and within that, explicitly hostile to young people and new entrants.

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  • Prices

    WE ARE ALL THATCHERITES in 2024. Neoliberalism may be on its way out in favour of a new mercantilist order, but the fundamental concept-order behind how we structure States remains. Ministers are the custodians of legislation, and of budgets, and of the administrative/regulatory state, and those three levers are all they have. Outside the State lies the market, the working of which determines prices and conditions. Simple dichotomy: on one side the rule of human laws, on the other side the rule of economic laws; a divide that makes sense so long as you don't know what economics is.

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  • Immoderation

    BLUESKY HAS BECOME THE happening place if what you want is to talk about Bluesky, as the well-trod joke goes. There's an ongoing exodus of people leaving twitter, as the result of the US Presidential election making stark, finally, what it is, to other microblog services (Bluesky, but also the fediverse), or to nothing. The experience of being part of a social network is always about the message you're receiving, by dint of membership, and sometimes, as is happening now, lots of people decide it's not very good. In 2022 I wrote that the then experience of twitter shared a lot with the 20th century experience of talkback radio, especially in the power of the choices producers made, to shape the message people heard out of the random chat:

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