There’s a lot to say about a place like Con’s, pictured here in the midst of a small row of anonymous shops on a street you’ve never heard of, in a suburb cherished by few. It’s not Con’s anymore – it hasn’t been for many years – but that’s the identity that stuck. Run by […]
history
Right, where were we? Back in the 80s, a bunch of pissed blokes ran some boats aground in Sydney Harbour, much to the consternation of the locals. Hooning around the Tasman in a tub’s nothing new, but this particular incident was deemed momentous enough that the city named a suburb after it. Ever been to […]
Don’t sit down – no long or in-depth story this time. Just a gentle reminder of the sort of shape a past life can sometimes take. For those who fled South Vietnam to escape the rule of the Vietnamese People’s Army, today’s Ho Chi Minh City will always be Saigon. No, it’s not a name […]
It seemed like a match made in heaven: a Mickey D’s right outside upper George Street’s Metropolitan Hotel. A greasy fast food basin would have been – and for many years, was – the perfect catchment area for empty stomachs hoping to dilute the copious amounts of alcohol they were about to ingest over the […]
We spend our lives mourning our childhoods. Our values and expectations are shaped throughout our younger years, sometimes subconsciously. Once we learn that, say, an ice cream dropped on the hot sand during a day at the beach won’t be replaced, the ice cream becomes a little part of us, a part we can’t get […]
It doesn't matter whether you're burying people or educating them - if you're doing it in an old Pizza Hut, prepare for scrutiny.
As I struggle with some newly discovered health problems, my attention tends to drift to different things. These are two.
The Missing Average and the two Australias.
This is a recent temperature anomaly map produced by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, reproduced today by the ABC, with Kate Doyle’s customarily excellent comments:
A few days ago, I tooted at Mastodon about a Christmas message I’d had from a Russian friend. I intended my post to convey something hopeful about peace and reconciliation, but got immediate pushback from someone who asked why, if there are are some good Russians, they haven’t stopped the war. Meanwhile, over on Elon’s […]
Despite his opposition to South Africa's apartheid, Hutt embraced notions of black inferiority
James M. Buchanan's defenders argue he was not racist because of his ties with the anti-apartheid economist W.H. Hutt, but this defense fails miserably
The great student of rhetoric Kenneth Burke described the output of his era’s “debunkers” in a manner that also captures the conduct of many libertarians who have rallied to the defense of Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan over the past few years. "It would seem they are no longer seeking good arguments; rather they are seeking any arguments, if only there be enough of them to keep running through the headlines,” wrote Burke. “Are there no eagles among their utterances? Very well, let them be instead a swarm of mosquitoes.”
One swarm of mosquitos let loose by the sentries of the libertarian cause circles around the South African economist, William Harold Hutt. Buchanan’s acolytes are adamant that his support of tax-funded subsidies for segregated private schools in the midst of Virginia’s Massive Resistance to Brown v. Board of Education had nothing to do with a racist preference for the maintenance of separate schools.