Culture

The milieu through which we swim

One for the Albee aficionados

Those who don’t already know this trivia, anyway. Just listened to Edward Albee in a radio interview, and he said that when he originally sold the movie rights to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf to Hollywood, he asked who they… Read More ›

Note to SBS

A couple of old bones which cause a revision of an evolutionary timeline model (about which species coexisted with which others when) do not “cast doubt on the theory of human evolution”. All this discovery may mean is that instead… Read More ›

Pell draws lines

The great tradition of religious tolerance in Catholic parochial schools in New South Wales is under fire. Many thousands of children of all faiths have been educated in a system often chosen by parents due to a complex perception of… Read More ›

Hey, we can say it

An attack has been made on the Australian media from the front page of Life Decisions International (LDI), whose domain name is the far more accurate fightpp.org (PP being the USA’s Planned Parenthood, the family planning organisation that offers comprehensive… Read More ›

Soundbites on YouTube

Politicians around the world are gingerly using YouTube to make policy statements, or maybe just to get their soundbites out there while avoiding having to have a press conference. Now some Catholic seminarians have parodied the Mac vs PC ads… Read More ›

Linkalicious: Big Tuesday Edition

A veritable smorgasbord for you! 1. “Intimate Politics: A Roundtable”: a downloadable podcast of a panel of feminist scholars and their reactions (not book reviews, but further musings) to the book Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for… Read More ›

Heehaw of the Day

If you only watch one YouTube movie today featuring dancing country farmer’s daughters contortionists singing about potato salad, it should be this one.

Why so offended? It’s not like I said any bad words!

When people on the right complain about political correctness, I’m reminded how happy I am about the trade we’ve made over the last few decades – it’s more acceptable to use naughty sexual expressions, and less acceptable to use bigoted terms for women and minorities. Which is great, because it’s more fun and better for society to talk about sex (and to cuss) than it is to say bigoted things about women and minorities.