Orange Juice & Ryvita

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

Category Politics

  • Productivity

    NOBODY UNDERSTANDS WHAT PRODUCTIVITY is and nobody cares. Yes, sure, you might think you know the macroeconomic definition, that it's a ratio of economic inputs to outputs, but you, in 2025, would be wrong. You have the notion that measures of economic activity actually lend themselves to interpretations about the real world, but like the characters in Spufford's Red Plenty you are trapped, ideologically, in a fairy-tale past where such conceptions did matter, and now, they don't. Sorry.

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  • Accomplishments

    THE TEALS HAVE AN accomplishment-based ideology, and each one of them prizes their achievements, of which, to be fair, they have a large number. Monique Ryan was a doctor and hospital administrator. Zoe Daniel was a prominent journalist. Zali Steggall was a barrister and led NGOs, and oh yes, won an Olympic gold medal. That accomplishment-mentality leads them to meritocratic thinking; they work hard, they achieve, they win, and not unexpectedly, they make the logical leap that they win because of their accomplishments and all that hard work; the just reward of effort and aptitude. They contrast themselves against the major Parties (and Greens), who, by contrast, stress collective effort and solidarity, and have a fundamentally different sense of power. The essential truth of meritocratic thinking is that you can't share wins.

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  • Methodism

    THE IDEOLOGICAL BASIS TO the American tariffs, and to whatever else the hell they seem to be doing to their economy and society, has a long-standing history.

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  • Gronk

    THE LIBERAL CANDIDATE FOR Whitlam in this Federal election believes that women should not serve in combat roles in the ADF. This is at the obvious level just evidence that the man is a gronk. His views about women are backward, creepy, juvenile, and most importantly, wrong. At a grander level though this man's views aren't about women at all but about manhood and masculinity, part of the Triumph of the Operator:

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  • Managers

    THE LONG AWAITED AMERICAN tariffs are announced. They promise to be as catastrophic for the largest economy in the world, whose currency is the global reserve, as anyone had predicted. 'The Markets' as at the time of writing are responding, also, predictably, but as though they could not quite have believed that a politician who made repeated statements that he would do a thing, is on record over decades supporting a thing, once in a position to do the thing, would do the thing. Who'd have thought?

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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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  • 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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