fitzroyalty

I have admired the writing of Theodore Dalrymple for several years. He writes with great clarity and conviction about social issues, including parenthood, social responsibility, crime and ethics. He cannot be simply defined as progressive or conservative; his views avoid convenient categorisation and focus on the crucial aspect of an issue. He can be controversial; his logic is something I find instructive in evaluating and elucidating my own views on social issues. In summing up his worldview, he states:

Tolerance is the greatest moral virtue and broadmindedness the greatest intellectual one. Moreover, no decent person can be other than a feminist.

Dalrymple has written a new book - Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy. In an edited excerpt published in the Weekend Australian newspaper on January 20, he argues that heroin addiction and, by extension, recreational drug consumption that starts at use but becomes addition and abuse, is an existential problem rather than a health problem.

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I?ve recently read about the newly defined demographic of the NEO (new economic order). I?m probably one of them. It?s a demographic based on economic power, and it crosses race, class and gender. NEOs are likely to be tertiary educated, well travelled, comfortable with selective conspicuous consumption and motivated by innovation and ideas. They are also early adopters and regular users of the internet and information technologies. The concept is explained in a website and in this book.

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A January 23, 2007 report by the Australian Productivity Commission - Men Not at Work: An Analysis of Men Outside the Labour Force - interested me a great deal. Before saying why, be warned that this piece features another of my rants and will no doubt be offensive to some.

I read about the study in a January 24 article in the Age newspaper. It acknowledges that there is a relationship between men who are unemployed and men who are single, and suggests that there is no simple causal factor linking the two. Rather, there is a complex correlation between singledom, unemployment and other social factors, such as education, in the lives of men described as “underachievers”.

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Photo by Edwina Pickles at the Sydney Morning Herald.

I’m writing this several days after seeing Lou Reed perform his Berlin album in sequence with a theatre style stage set with video projections at the final night of three nights only at the magnificent State Theatre as part of the Sydney Festival. I went to Sydney over the weekend to see the show, went home again, then went to Sydney again for work on Thursday.

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Down Caledonian Lane is a bar/cafe that makes the cheapest top quality coffee in the Melbourne CBD, and has the perfect vibe for lazing away a couple of hours. St Jerome’s is also the coordinator of the Laneway music festival, which I attended this year (the Sydney show), and which included The Gossip, who I really enjoyed.

The inside of St Jerome’s, pictured above, is cosy and warm, while the courtyard out the back is open and cooler, albeit with some of the sometimes challenging smell of Melbourne laneways.

I’ve been following the media’s reporting of the proliferation of graffiti paintings of Wandjina, a character in Aboriginal Australian mythology, in inner-city Perth by an unknown artist. The phenomenon has been thoughfully blogged about by Rosemary Lynch, and is also covered by the ABC blog Articulate. The photo below, by Technobohemian, is of one of the many images in the Flickr Wandjina pool.

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