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Articles 1 - 11 of 11
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Is A Us Marine Base In Darwin Really A Good Idea?, Anthony Ashbolt
Is A Us Marine Base In Darwin Really A Good Idea?, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
The American alliance is simply too costly for Australia both in terms of human lives and international relations. While our political leaders prattle on about “getting the job done”, an Orwellian nightmare persists in Afghanistan and the police we train torture detainees and are deeply enmeshed in the drug trade, the troops we train turn into Taliban and the Government we prop up is no better, in moral or philosophical terms, than its enemy in the field. The American Century is well and truly over and it is time to forge new associations and to think not in terms of …
Falling Everywhere: Postmodern Politics And American Cultural Mythologies, Anthony Ashbolt
Falling Everywhere: Postmodern Politics And American Cultural Mythologies, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
History repeats itself, endlessly and sometimes tiresomely. Numerous writers and scholars have worried about the divisions - social, political and cultural - which began permeating American society in the 1960s. The unravelling of America, the coming apart of America, became familiar refrains. During the 'sixties itself, Daniel Boorstin's new left barbarians were at the gate threatening the very genius of American politics which Boorstin had postulated in the previous decade. This genius, itself a cousin of American exceptionalism, revolved around the erosion of ideological division, and the lack of vigorous difference within the American polity. Rather than this producing a …
Symbolic Politics And Cultural History, Anthony Ashbolt
Symbolic Politics And Cultural History, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Transcript of an interview with Professor Michael Paul Rogin, Robson Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, conducted in the Cafe Grace, Berkeley, November 1, 1995.
Public Education And The Public Good, Anthony Ashbolt
Public Education And The Public Good, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
When Julia Gillard became Minister for Education and Everything Else That Moves, as well as de facto Prime Minister, she expressed a desire to have a conversation about school funding. This politics of inclusion (social inclusion is one of her many portfolios after all) was short-lived and it became clear that conversation was code for acceptance of the status quo. So Julia went off and had a conversation of her own with utopian dreamers whose vision of the good society revolves around testing regimes, job credentialism, disciplinary control of schools (particularly teachers), and whose heights of ecstasy are only achieved …
Save Public Schools, Not Corporate Fat Cats, Anthony Ashbolt
Save Public Schools, Not Corporate Fat Cats, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Kevin Rudd's vigorous attack upon "extreme capitalism" revealed he does not understand the nature of the current crisis. This is not a meltdown caused purely and simply by rogue traders, bizarre mortgage lending, gross corporate salaries and payouts and, in general, the politics of greed. All those are symptoms of a much more systemic disease. That disease is the ideology of privatisation and deregulation, an ideology Mr Rudd has shown no inclination to challenge. This Government's persistent embrace of neo-liberal ideology and practice is highlighted by its school funding policy and also its market-driven approach to schooling policy in general.
Private Funding Has Been Taken To Extremes, Anthony Ashbolt
Private Funding Has Been Taken To Extremes, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Kevin Rudd's vigorous attack upon "extreme capitalism" revealed he does not understand the nature of the current crisis. This is not a meltdown caused purely and simply by rogue traders, bizarre mortgage lending, gross corporate salaries and payouts and, in general, the politics of greed. All those are symptoms of a much more systemic disease. That disease is the ideology of privatisation and deregulation, an ideology Mr Rudd has shown no inclination to buck. This Government's embrace of neo-liberal ideology and practice is highlighted by its school funding policy and also its market-driven approach to schooling policy.
Review - Perry Anderson, Marxism And The New Left, Anthony Ashbolt
Review - Perry Anderson, Marxism And The New Left, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Perry Anderson is a towering figure in the annals of contemporary Marxism. As such, he deserves a special sort of intellectual history, one that engages and illuminates and challenges. Blackledge only succeeds in a partial and rather unsatisfactory way. In a sense this is a book in two parts, even though it is not divided as such. The first deals with the Anderson of the 1960s and 1970s, the second with Anderson’s later developments. The first part is very dry and somewhat confused intellectual history, the second has a few acute observations about the shifts in Anderson’s thinking. I suspect …
Book Review - George Irvin, Super Rich: The Rise Of Inequality In Britain And The United States, Anthony Ashbolt
Book Review - George Irvin, Super Rich: The Rise Of Inequality In Britain And The United States, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
In a splendid essay in The London Review of Books (11 September, 2008), Ross McKibbon took the hatchet to New Labour. He expressed particular distaste for the ‘democracy of manners’ that has made Britain resemble Australian and American society. This democracy of manners is, of course, all surface egalitarianism concealing profound inequality. He bemoaned ‘the moral exclusion of those who were once considered part of Labour’s constituency – the social underdogs’ (p. 22). The government, in particular, sidelined young working class men, portraying them as outside ‘the sphere of moral worth’. McKibbon acknowledged that Britain ‘is a very much more …
Review: A Time For Choosing: The Rise Of Modern American Conservatism, Anthony Ashbolt
Review: A Time For Choosing: The Rise Of Modern American Conservatism, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
The steady rise of the radical Republican right as an electoral force since the mid 1960s is an intriguing, albeit chilling, feature of contemporary politics. What was once considered fringe and unacceptable, to the point where Goldwater was decimated by Johnson in 1964, has now become mainstream. We now have an administration that compels National Parks bookstores to stock a book which argues that the Grand Canyon is only 4500 years old, being the result of the global flood described in Genesis. This reflects both the persistence of fundamentalist beliefs in ordinary Americans and a dramatic transformation in American political …
Reviews: Suburban Warriors - The Origins Of The New American Right; The Book Of Jerry Falwell - Fundamentalist Language And Politics; Blinded By The Right - The Conscience Of An Ex-Conservative, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
The triumph of a neoliberal economic doctrine in America has been accompanied by, indeed partly propelled by, a conservative social and moral agenda. The paradox is this - as neoliberalism cuts its swathe through tradition, remaking the social order out of the ruins of a New Deal consensus, it removes the material conditions that can sustain social and moral conservatism. Thus it is that the Supreme Court recently upheld the doctrine of privacy in Lawrence vs. Texas and effectively challenged state laws banning sodomy. In a dissenting decision, Justice Antonin Scalia warned that the Court had taken the wrong side …
Public Education For Our Future, Anthony Ashbolt
Public Education For Our Future, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt examines the funding inequalities in education and problems with policies of social exclusion.