Reading

Created
Mon, 02/10/2023 - 10:04

 

I've been reading Leonardo Sciascia's The Moro Affair, for the second time, and finding it just as disturbing as the first time, though perhaps for new reasons.

 

I first read Sciascia's work when I heard about The Day of the Owl, a crime novel. A police-procedural, in fact, that knocked the usual police-procedural into a cocked hat. When published in 1961, I gather, it had some impact in Italy because it dramatised the connection between the Mafia and the Christian-Democrat (DC) government. Sciascia, a Sicilian who became one of Italy's major public intellectuals, wrote several other superb crime novels with a philosophical and political edge, a range of other books, plays, and a lot of political journalism. In the 1970s he was elected to the Italian parliament on the Communist (PCI) ticket, but left the party in disgust when its leaders proposed their 'historic compromise' with the corrupt Christian Democrat regime.

 

Created
Mon, 02/10/2023 - 08:30

Tell me, what planet are we actually on? All these decades later, are we really involved in a “second” or “new” Cold War? It’s certainly true that, as late as the 1980s, the superpowers (or so they then liked to think of themselves), the United States and the Soviet Union, were still engaged in just such a Cold War, something that might have seemed almost positive at the time. After all, a “hot” one could have involved the use of the planet’s two great nuclear arsenals and the potential obliteration of just about everything. But today? In case you haven’t noticed, the phrase “new Cold War” or “second Cold War” has indeed crept into our media vocabulary. (Check it out... Read more

Created
Mon, 02/10/2023 - 04:58
Today, we live in an era of high tension between China, our largest trading partner and the US, our closest ally. We risk being goaded into war by the Australian and American hawks and their Chinese equivalents in reaction. Of seeing our sovereignty eroded and becoming the “USS Terra Australis” the largest aircraft carrier in Continue reading »
Created
Mon, 02/10/2023 - 04:56
The ten years of the Belt and Road Initiative has proven that the rise of China has not brought colonialism, disaster, war, refugees, and crises. Instead, it brought the world trade, commodities, tourists, infrastructure, economic growth and civilisation. No matter how Western politicians, media, and think tanks vilify the BRI, they cannot cover up a Continue reading »
Created
Mon, 02/10/2023 - 04:55
A campaign of ethnic cleansing, or what the former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, has warned may qualify as ‘Genocide’, is currently taking place against the 120,000 indigenous Christian Armenian population of Artsakh (aka Nagorno Karabakh). A historic Christian Armenian enclave within the borders of today’s Azerbaijan, its Armenian population Continue reading »
Created
Mon, 02/10/2023 - 04:54
On October 14, we can change our Constitution to recognise the original inhabitants – now one of the most disadvantaged groups in Australia. Their suffering stems from the autocratic decisions made about and for them by Colonial and Australian governments. But how can we decide which way to vote? Here is a decision-making model that Continue reading »
Created
Mon, 02/10/2023 - 04:53
There are twice as many international students from Singapore than there are from Indonesia studying in Australian universities, although Singapore has a population of 6 million and Indonesia has a population of 277 million. In 2019 (before Covid) more students in Australian universities came from Nepal than from any SE Asian country. There are many Continue reading »
Created
Mon, 02/10/2023 - 04:50
International law of the sea is set to be subverted as America seeks to exercise extraterritorial defence claims over foreign exclusive economic zones beyond those of three Pacific island states. The United States is about to upend the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the basis of international law with regard Continue reading »
Created
Mon, 02/10/2023 - 01:30
“Never Seen Anything Like It” It’s not clear if Matt Stoller’s brand has been tainted by his brief late-night association with Russell Brand a decade ago. Stoller has nonetheless plunged ahead with his blog, BIG, where he covers “the politics of monopoly power.” Stoller reports — will wonders never cease? — that federal enforcement actions against monopolies is on the upswing: Before the Biden administration, antitrust was mostly dead. It had picked up a bit under Trump, but mostly no one thought much about this area of law. And the reason was pretty simple. Nothing was happening. The FTC was using its authority to go after powerless actors, such as Uber drivers, church organists, bull semen traders, and ice skating teachers. The changeover has been absolutely stark, and it’s accelerating. Many of my sources in the competition policy world are giving me the same message, which is that this is the most extraordinary month they have ever seen in antitrust. There are the big fights, the cases against Google and Amazon, the suits against private equity and meat price-fixing.
Created
Mon, 02/10/2023 - 00:00
The press ignores the “Banality of Crazy” “Sometimes, you have to write when you’re angry,” Brian Klaas begins. Works for me. Klaas also hates writing about Donald Trump. The orange train wreck gets too much free press as is. But sometimes you just gotta. The banality of evil in the Trump age has become the banality of crazy. A Democratic congressman (Jamal Bowman) does something stupid in a rush to get from the Cannon Office Building to a snap vote in the House chambers and … what you’d expect to happen happens: It’s telling that Republicans aren’t even slightly concerned about the absurdity of calling for Bowman’s expulsion while harboring enablers of Trump’s alleged criminality in their ranks. They know they’re pointing the camera away from themselves and at Dems. That’s the ball game.
Created
Sun, 01/10/2023 - 22:20
Dan Evans and Tom Latchem reveal Dan Wootton’s departure from GB News looks set to be permanent – and examine the true cost to the network of sticking by a £600,000-a-year employee who broke editorial codes with impunity and engaged in sordid activities posing as the fictitious ‘Martin Branning’ and ‘Maria Joseph’
Created
Sun, 01/10/2023 - 21:41

For three decades, Ronnie Kasrils engaged in a transnational crusade to bring about the destruction of apartheid in South Africa. A founder member of uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party (SACP), the former government minister began his revolutionary odyssey sixty years ago this […]

Created
Sun, 01/10/2023 - 13:34
Dear ES/PE community members, find below an abundant list of great academic opportunities: 10 job openings, 10 calls for papers for conferences (some are partly funded) and special issues, 5 PhD fellowships, 4 visiting opportunities, 2 postdoc positions, and a grant in economic sociology, political economy, and related fields, with deadlines from today till October […]