http://www.sauer-thompson.com/philosophy/ 'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx en-us thoughtfactory@internode.on.net Fri, 09 May 2008 23:19:13 +0930 http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/05/new-post-65.html new post... http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/05/new-post-64.html new post... http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/05/preface-to-ted.html The following quote begins Ted Mullighan preface to his 600 page Commission of Inquiry on sexual abuse on South Australian tribal lands in the Western Desert in central Australia in the far north-west of South Australia in and around the Musgrave Ranges. The report is entitled Children on the APY Lands, and it uncovered a sad stream of stories from the Lands, identified the nature and extent of child sexual abuse on the Lands and made recommendations to prevent and respond to it. I have known for many years that the plight of the Aboriginal people in this country is the greatest social issue in our history and remains so. Prior to the mid-1970s, life for the Angangu on the (Pitjantjatjara) lands was generally healthy, peaceful, safe and content. There was an effective system of social order, law and governance, and mutual responsibility. During the '80s and '90s, life changed... http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/05/new-post-63.html Steven Schwartz, vice-chancellor of Macquarie University, in a recent speech made a distinction between a hamburger university--the management training facility for the McDonald's restaurant chain.--- and a real university, which is what we have in Australia What distinquishes the latter from the former Schwartz asks?In answering this he takes us to a definition of neo-liberal university as engines of economic growth. In answering his question Schwartz says that it is not the narrowness vs the broadness of the curriculum, nor whether the university is a private or public institution. .He goes on: One place to look for the answer is in research. Universities seek truth; their aim is to discover, preserve and disseminate knowledge. Hamburger U does this, too. For example, it discovers and preserves knowledge about how to cook consistently great chips. But let's be honest, Hamburger University's academics are not high-flying researchers, unlike our university academics, who... http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/05/liberal-constit.html Though the idea of democratic decision-making constrained by constitutional terms has become pervasive in modern governance, but its popularity has not erased the deep questions of legitimacy that such constraints raise. many hold that if democratic self-rule is the legitimate form of government, then what can justify restrictions on (current) democratic majorities? In his review of Howard Schweber, The Language of Liberal Constitutionalism, Brian Bix says: When most constitutional law scholars think about constitutional theory and language, they consider arguments about how the terms of the United States Constitution (or some other constitution) should be interpreted: according to the Framers' original understanding, according to the Framers' views about application, according to the accepted meaning in the general population at the time of ratification, according to changing or modern understandings, etc. Schweber is making a different sort of point: that the sort of language one uses in arguing within and about... http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/05/the-lack-of-dem.html The lack of democracy in contemporary liberal democracy has given rise to many calls for the reinvention of the category of the political. Many say that this is an imperative and unavoidable task. Gabriel Riera, in this review of Antonio Calcagno, Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time, observes that:: Today our political space appears overdetermined by a set of notions: the crisis of the nation-state, of the concepts of citizenship and sovereignty, the omnipresence of globalization and empire, the dangerous appeal to a permanent state of exception, and finally, the pressing impact of biopolitics. He adds that instead of providing a useful map with which to orient and to intervene in an active transformation of the political space, this constellation of notions marks a limit, an impasse, and signals a difficulty of orientation for political theories or philosophies that still depend on the sovereign One.... http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/05/reverend-wright.html There has been a lot of media talk (largely condemnation) in the US about Reverend Wright, a pastor in the United Church of Christ, with Barack Obama repudiating Wright's recent address at the National Press Club under political pressure. Obama is outraged by Wright's comments. So what did Wright say about the black church and liberation theology? Here is the section of the Jeremiah Wright Jr. address on reconciliation: Reconciliation, the years have taught me, is where the hardest work is found for those of us in the Christian faith, however, because it means some critical thinking and some re-examination of faulty assumptions when using the paradigm of Dr. William Augustus Jones. Dr. Jones, in his book, God in the ghetto, argues quite accurately that one's theology, how I see God, determines one's anthropology, how I see humans, and one's anthropology then determines one's sociology, how I order my society.... http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/04/david-harvey-sp.html In Spaces of Hope David Harvey calls for a revitalization of the utopian tradition as a way to regain the possibility to think of real alternatives in opposition to the hegemony of market rationality under the conditions of globalization that means we all live within the world of capital circulation and accumulation. This subjects our bodies to physical and social processes which ‘produce’ different kinds of bodies. So the overall forces of capitalist production which operates on the global scale intersect with bodies which function on a local scale.... http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/04/david-harvey-on-1.html David Harvey describes neoconservatism thus: the neoconservative project, which is not only about the mobilisation of moral authority; it’s also about the imposition of order, a militaristic sense of order. I don’t think democracy is what they are about at all. I think the only democracy they have in mind is the kind of democracy that exists in the US, which is the democracy of money and raw military power. My view of them is best described, I think, by Karl Rove’s dream, to have the US follow China. We have a one party system called the “Republucrats”; beneath it you have a raging, completely unregulated capitalism.....To mobilize that, I think neoconservative morality is not just simply an abstract morality; it is hierarchical. And since it is hierarchical, then it is always therefore about the hierarchal imposition of order....Neoconservatives are not against the market system, but they want it to... http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/04/new-post-62.html I'm off to New Zealand for 2 weeks holiday. You can follow the progress on junk for code. In the meantime we have this interview with George Soros on the global financial crisis. In response to the question, 'Was this crisis avoidable?', he says: I think it was, but it would have required recognition that the system, as it currently operates, is built on false premises. Unfortunately, we have an idea of market fundamentalism, which is now the dominant ideology, holding that markets are self-correcting; and this is false because it's generally the intervention of the authorities that saves the markets when they get into trouble. Since 1980, we have had about five or six crises: the international banking crisis in 1982, the bankruptcy of Continental Illinois in 1984, and the failure of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, to name only three. Each time, it's the authorities that bail out... http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/04/okaying-torture.html The Bush administration’s narrative around torture after 9/11 is a familar one. Al-Qaeda was a different kind of enemy, deadly and shadowy. It targeted civilians and didn’t follow the Geneva Conventions or any other international rules. Nevertheless the Bush administration had acted judiciously, even as it moved away from a purely law-enforcement strategy to one that marshaled all elements of national power.The events at Abu Ghraib were the actions of a few bad eggs and had nothing to do with the broader policies of the administration. The administration’s actions were inconsistent with torture. The abuses at Abu Ghraib were unauthorized and unconnected to the administration’s policies. This account--The Green Light by Philippe Sands in Vanity Fair... http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/04/interpreting-th-1.html In this review of George William's Human Rights under the Australian Constitution in the Melbourne University Law Review by Glenn Patmore and Mathew Harding highlight William' analysis of the methodology of constitutional interpretation.They say that in chapter four, which is called ‘Constitutional Interpretation and Human Rights’. Williams follows the development of constitutional interpretation from Amalgamated Society of Engineers v Adelaide Steamship Co Ltd to the present. He argues that the legalism and, more particularly, the literalism for which the Engineers’ Case stands, is a mask that the Court employs to disguise in value neutral terms what are in reality judgments based on policy and judicial values. By ‘legalism’ Williams means a close adherence to legal reasoning that creates ‘a reliance on technical solutions rather than considerations of policy.’...] Williams illustrates the impossibility of a pure literalism with a clever observation about the Engineers’ Case itself. He reveals that in rejecting... http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/04/new-post-61.html James Allan, Garrick professor of law at the University of Queensland, does go on and on about the badness of a bill of rights is in various op-eds in The Australian. This time he is referring to the panel on the future of Australian governance at the 2020 Summit, and he notes that it consists of three retired High Court justices associated with implied rights and none who have that interpretively conservative outlook that characterises the present High Court. Allan adds: Not just any retired justices but the ones who gave us the execrable implied rights jurisprudence. Those were the cases from the 1990s where the High Court discovered (or, more honestly stated, made up) some implied rights, and it did this even though the founders of our Constitution explicitly rejected any US-style bill of rights. And it did this despite Australian voters consistently rejecting such proposals in referendums. The... http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/04/new-post-60.html Has there been a shift in the way the Commonwealth government views higher education with a change of , government? Angus McFarland, the president of the National Union of Students thinks so. In an op-ed in The Australian he says that a new Rudd commonwealth government allows us to re-conceptualise the role and function of the university student within higher education institutions and society. The shift is away from consumer to citizen and this shift undercuts the understanding of universities as ivory towers that offer no broader benefit to society. McFarland's argument is this: The Howard years involved the development of the neo-liberal, free-market view of the university student. Neo-liberalism positions economics as the basis of all relations in society. In this context, students were positioned external to universities. Students were clients. Students were customers paying fees for degrees. Universities were businesses providing a service to consumers. Two key policies... http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/04/new-post-59.html Neo-liberalism has manged to roll back social democracy. By that I don't just mean that Hayek blew the whistle on the fundamental problems of central planning as Nicholas Gruen argues at Club Troppo. Gruen's argument is that Hayek was right about the inadequacies of central planning and the significance of local knowledge. Neo-liberalism also turned the regulatory world of social democracy on its head. As David Bensman argues in Dissent By deregulating financial markets, neo-liberal ideology cast financial institutions as our primary innovators—the principal engines of wealth creation. America returned to the pre-welfare state days when financiers hobbled engineers, when mergers and acquisitions (they were called trusts and monopolies back then) provided the fast track to profits and glory, when conspicuous consumption represented greatness. ‘Financialization’ is the name economists gave to neo-liberalism’s impact on the global economy. The notion that creative financing is central to economic growth has become so...