6 - # of Straya threads or # of times we've changed Prime Minister in a decade?

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If I ever watch any sort of morning programming, it's the ABC's, which is by comparison very likeable and pleasant.
 
I saw a lot of the ABC's morning show on the aforementioned work trip where a colleague kept putting it on. Sure it didn't bother me but I'd have been just as happy if it hadn't been on, and would've probably found out more about what was happening in the world if I'd just checked my phone for five minutes.

Jones is just peculiar, period. He's almost like a parody of a semi-disgraced-but-still-popular radio demagogue in some classic film we haven't heard of. And he picks the strangest things as causes celebre (the business about a certain Wagners quarry and the 2011 Lockyer floods for instance).

As for morning telly, I guess I'm slightly out of the loop, but it is depressing if true, how ubiquitous it all is. For reference, my parents are quite old and barely watch tv at all (the 6.00pm news maybe). And I will not have it on at all in the mornings. Fuck that. Triple J was bad enough, and I've about kicked that habit in favour of silence.

I must admit I take a strange sort of amusement in Jones's causes, because as you say they're so fucking odd. I like watching him burst a few blood vessels over something totally niche, claim it matters to the regular pensioners listening to him, and then take credit for election results if there's any swing in the direction he advocated.

I find it weird this instinct to turn to the TV to clear the silence. I always reach for music myself; to be honest the telly is more a distraction than anything. I've known relatives to just leave the TV on during the day even when they're not watching it, and I'm all "why do you have these fucking infomercials on? Is anybody watching this? Can I turn it off?"
 
I'd totally go for music to clear the silence, if anything, but the telly is insufferable. Daytime telly is just another word for 'suicidal thoughts'. Nighttime telly ain't much better, and this is why I let mine lapse when the analogue signal turned off.

I'd probably listen to more music while I work, but it only sounds good to me with headphones, and those things get uncomfortable after any length of time.

The only thing Jones has got half-right, almost like a stopped clock one might say, is his opposition to Coal Seam Gas.
 
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Not to sound unkind or nothin', but if if you took away Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Top Gear and Ghostbusters-The-Remake, about half The Guardian's staff would be needing to revisit their resumes.

Ok, actually I do mean it to sound unkind.
 
If I ever watch any sort of morning programming, it's the ABC's, which is by comparison very likeable and pleasant.

I remember back in the good old days, when I was a kid, the ABC's morning programming often included the stop-motion-animation version of The Wind In The Willows, and that puppet thing that Bill Oddie did after The Goodies finished. Good times. And on Saturdays, RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE RRR RRR RAAAGE.
 
As far as I can tell I only own a telly to watch sport and the occasional thing on the ABC that I remember to watch when it airs rather than later on iView.

Not to sound unkind or nothin', but if if you took away Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Top Gear and Ghostbusters-The-Remake, about half The Guardian's staff would be needing to revisit their resumes.

Ok, actually I do mean it to sound unkind.

Oh I wouldn't say that, there's always some Tory to whinge about.

(I love a good Tory-related whinge.)
 
OK, this guy's written some shit columns of late but this one amused me and nails the whole "but why is nobody from the community condemning this?" bullshit we always hear: I'm sorry about Sonia Kruger's stupid, inflammatory comments

Heh. Yeah, collective guilt does get a bit old after a while. Especially since the 'where oh where are the good Muslims who will condemn this' pantomine is so much question-begging when talking of a global community with far less identifiable (indeed none) leadership than many Christian denominations*.

That's before we even get onto the part about how asking someone to disavow something they never had anything to do with in the first place is a bit like asking you when you stopped beating your wife. (Not applying this to things like the Apology (to the stolen generations) of course, since that was more properly understood as a political gesture; as if anyone in the room personally abducted children and dispersed communities.)

So, it's a clever column, but I think he can stuff his sorrys in a sack.

*That said, the hardline Wahabbists who provide among other things the ideological buttress for the Saudi monarchy, should indeed apologise. Profusely. On their knees.
 
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As far as I can tell I only own a telly to watch sport and the occasional thing on the ABC that I remember to watch when it airs rather than later on iView.



Oh I wouldn't say that, there's always some Tory to whinge about.

(I love a good Tory-related whinge.)


There's always Jeremy Corbyn to whinge about. Seriously, wasn't it just a matter of weeks ago that the paper's columnists were running a semi-coordinated campaign to discredit him as an anti-semite?
 
There's always Jeremy Corbyn to whinge about. Seriously, wasn't it just a matter of weeks ago that the paper's columnists were running a semi-coordinated campaign to discredit him as an anti-semite?

Needs more Nick Cohen articles where he proclaims himself a leftist while bashing anything remotely left of centre.

My hatred for the non-Aus section of The Guardian grows exponentially.
 
The Aus section is ok - not fantastic but ok - but the 'global' paper (hard to tell where the blurry line falls) is pretty abysmal. That it masquerades as 'progressive' merely adds insult to injury.
 
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I don't know what you guys really want out of a "progressive" paper though, given that the vast majority of other prominent mainstream publications are further to the right (closer to the centre, in the case of the left-leaning ones), while those more to the left are generally niche publications very few people take seriously.

Certainly in Australia I'm not sure where else to look for well-resourced news with a strong opinion section that isn't in some way trying to repeat the Murdoch party line or pander to people who might be sympathetic to it. The Fairfax papers can best be described as occupying the centre, something like New Matilda is a fucking waste of time right now, anybody who reads Independent Australia needs to find something better to do, and the socialist rags are impossible to take seriously.
 
I don't know what you guys really want out of a "progressive" paper though, given that the vast majority of other prominent mainstream publications are further to the right (closer to the centre, in the case of the left-leaning ones), while those more to the left are generally niche publications very few people take seriously.

Certainly in Australia I'm not sure where else to look for well-resourced news with a strong opinion section that isn't in some way trying to repeat the Murdoch party line or pander to people who might be sympathetic to it. The Fairfax papers can best be described as occupying the centre, something like New Matilda is a fucking waste of time right now, anybody who reads Independent Australia needs to find something better to do, and the socialist rags are impossible to take seriously.


I just want them to be a little better I guess... and remember, it is the international version of the publication catching some of the opprobrium here. Of course it's all one big website and it bleeds at the edges. That they are better than the Murdoch or Fairfax stable is... not nothing... but those outlets are simply trash at this point. You'd want to be better, you know?

Agreed, for the most part, about New Matilda (one or two contributors strongly excepted), and Independent Australia is like a cesspool for David Icke fans. As for The Conversation... I don't even know why that site exists. It is clickbaity blandness personified, only with a slightly upper-middle-brow twist of Grattan on top. Reminds me of those dreadful 'centrist' blogs who consistently miss the forest for the trees on every great question of the age.
 
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Just reading tonight's #qanda tweets is enough to make the blood boil. Thank christ I'm not watching.

I watched a clip of a man who asked Hanson a question. I'm regretting letting it go for long enough to hear Hanson's response, it's the same old tired cliches + a reference to that fraud Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
 
Looking at news reports of Q&A and it sounds just as excruciating as I expected. I don't know how Sam Dastyari didn't storm out, but I love that Pauline Hanson somehow apparently didn't realise he's a Muslim even as he offered to take her out on election night for a halal snack pack.

Agreed, for the most part, about New Matilda (one or two contributors strongly excepted), and Independent Australia is like a cesspool for David Icke fans. As for The Conversation... I don't even know why that site exists. It is clickbaity blandness personified, only with a slightly upper-middle-brow twist of Grattan on top. Reminds me of those dreadful 'centrist' blogs who consistently miss the forest for the trees on every great question of the age.

I must admit this is the first time I've seen The Conversation called clickbaity. I'd say it's one best quality is how it resists being so, even at the risk of being dull.

My problem with it is that it suffers from the same problem of much of academia, or funding thereof: a delusion that the STEM disciplines are the only ones that matter. So you get heaps of articles about science and medicine but fuck-all about the humanities. To give them credit they've made an effort to improve on that front, but it seems to be largely by getting political scientists to talk about the issues of the day.

There's also the fact that in its first few months it had easily the best comments section of any halfway prominent news website, but then the anti-vaxxers and climate denialists and other cranks discovered it and the whole thing went down the shitter in that regard. I've probably said before it's a big part of why I don't submit articles there any more (and thus don't help to mitigate the STEM-centric problem about which I complain!).
 
Looking at news reports of Q&A and it sounds just as excruciating as I expected. I don't know how Sam Dastyari didn't storm out, but I love that Pauline Hanson somehow apparently didn't realise he's a Muslim even as he offered to take her out on election night for a halal snack pack.



I must admit this is the first time I've seen The Conversation called clickbaity. I'd say it's one best quality is how it resists being so, even at the risk of being dull.

My problem with it is that it suffers from the same problem of much of academia, or funding thereof: a delusion that the STEM disciplines are the only ones that matter. So you get heaps of articles about science and medicine but fuck-all about the humanities. To give them credit they've made an effort to improve on that front, but it seems to be largely by getting political scientists to talk about the issues of the day.

There's also the fact that in its first few months it had easily the best comments section of any halfway prominent news website, but then the anti-vaxxers and climate denialists and other cranks discovered it and the whole thing went down the shitter in that regard. I've probably said before it's a big part of why I don't submit articles there any more (and thus don't help to mitigate the STEM-centric problem about which I complain!).


The comments threads probably aren't great, yeah.

My 'clickbaity' comment might be a little unfair, but it so happens that I keep an old half-defunct page from a certain blog bookmarked that has a bunch of rss feeds for a bunch of Australian sites like this, and so I often see The Conversation's latest headlines all grouped together in a list, and they really have that tone about them. Whoever subedits over there has a house style, let's say.

And whatever the backgrounds of their contributors, they seem to make some play at commenting on the political questions of the day just like any other of these sites. Just sometimes in a vaguely clueless and technocratic way.
 
And whatever the backgrounds of their contributors, they seem to make some play at commenting on the political questions of the day just like any other of these sites. Just sometimes in a vaguely clueless and technocratic way.

I think it's because of that eternal quest for "relevance", so you get political scientists encouraged to write as much as possible - despite the fact that from my experience of studying political science some of these people are really bad at checking their sources or reading historical precedents. But much of the rest of the humanities gets left out in the cold. If we can't link our research to the news of the day, forget it. Meanwhile some pop physics article with limited relevance to anything gets an easy run.
 
I think it's because of that eternal quest for "relevance", so you get political scientists encouraged to write as much as possible - despite the fact that from my experience of studying political science some of these people are really bad at checking their sources or reading historical precedents. But much of the rest of the humanities gets left out in the cold. If we can't link our research to the news of the day, forget it. Meanwhile some pop physics article with limited relevance to anything gets an easy run.


So maybe that's the problem right there. There's a certain 'gee whiz' tone to some of the stuff that sticks in my ass sideways.
 
Reminds me of Doctor Karl on Triple J, after a while you'd get to know the bullshit he'd spout every week, about how we're all going to be spherical clouds of data in the future, or how robots and AI are going to take over (I'm not saying this is wholly wrongheaded, but to chuckle while saying it... you silly man). Or how cancer will be cured or some other nonsense. In most areas of human endeavour, progress has in fact slowed to a crawl.
 
Seriously what is up with that.

It gives a fascinating insight into the rather skewed perspectives of some posters though.
 
These are the hands that built America...'s subprime mortgage crisis.
 
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