Reading

The long-rumoured report on Australian military atrocities in the Afghanistan war has just been released (and immediately kicked down the road by the national government). I have been thinking about why the Australian military were there in the first place.  It's a familiar story: "forward defence", stop-them-over-there, Defend Democracy, our government's need for some violence to scare the voters with, and the same government's habit of doing whatever the American government wants done... But then, why do we have wars anyway?

For a Backdrop CMS site I'm currently working on, I needed to create a node programatically (i.e. via some PHP code, as opposed to the UI). Generally when I need to do something in Backdrop, I'll search for similar solutions in Drupal 7 and then migrate them over (Backdrop still has some catching up to do in the 'online help and tutorials' department; hence this blog post).

So I went looking for how to create nodes programatically in Drupal 7, and there were plently of results. The answer is basically to create an object or array of values (your 'node'), then run it through node_save(). Unfortunately each answer had a different idea about exactly what values you should initially assign to your 'node'. Wanting a more bullet-proof solution, I kept looking and finally saw a suggestion someone made to check out the Devel Generate module. It creates nodes programatically, so it has the code to do just this. Since that module already exists in Backdrop, I had a look.

Devel Generate creates nodes by:

All too revealing of how the system works ... how the talented former chief of the FT, capitalism’s house journal, was in thrall to ‘movers and shakers’

Even a brilliant newspaper editor can undersell a good story on the front page. At the start of Lionel Barber’s account of the world from his perspective as editor of the Financial Times between 2005 and 2020, there is an extensive list of dramatis personae, almost all of them male. (“One day,” he writes later, “I will deal with the alpha male problem, but not today.”) The players are broken down into their categories: politics, business and finance, royalty, journalism and diplomacy. The heart sinks – if journalism sits so easily in such a cast list, how can it do its job of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable?

 A video recording of my 2020 Cunningham Lecture, "Do We Need Intellectuals", is now online, open access, here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ycEQDEFyfo&feature=youtu.be

 All welcome!

In the endless cycle of tinkering with this website I have once again changed things around. I had a go at modifying a bash script (BLASH) to parse my markdown files into the html files you’re now looking at. Very quickly the loops and structures became ungainly. No doubt …