A Muslim artist has sparked outrage with his depiction of the ripped-apart bus destroyed in the 7/7 terror attacks.
The artwork shows four angels flying above the bombed bus - the same number of Al Qaeda terrorists who took part in the atrocity which left 52 commuters dead and maimed hundreds more on London's transport network.
Also seen are scores of ghostly souls shooting from the number 30 bus, which was travelling through Tavistock Square when it was devastated by suicide bomber Hasib Hussain.
I want to shock.
John Holk & The Sequins-If You See Her. One of the most pleasant surprises I've come across in a while, this Detroit band with a fondness for vintage Western wear and sweet Jayhawks/Gram Parsons-styled melodies has released the twang-pop record of the year. If You See Here is one gloriously melodic track after another, from the opener "No Other Way" to the jangly title track to the wonderfully gentle "Carry the Load", a thematic cousin to "The Weight". But the top track here is "Autograph", a catchy clever number with wonderful harmonies that would make Gram & Emmylou proud. I've thrown around to phrase "year-end top 10" more than ten times this year, but this one is guaranteed a spot. If I can make an analogy, what The Red Button was to 60s Britpop, John Holk & The Sequins are to early 70s country-pop.
Brother Slade-No Relation. This Tennessee band wears their hearts and lifestyle on their collective sleeve with a rockin, honky-tonkin' collection of fun, melodic tunes. So often I've compared the sound of bands like this to Tom Petty, but here they cut out the middleman by calling the opening track "Tom Petty Song", and it's one of my favorite tracks of the year, both sounding like Petty and name-dropping him of course (amusingly rhyming him with "yeti" in the process). Songs like "Girl with a Mobile Home", "Look What the Trailer Park Drug In" and "Too Hot to BBQ" are pretty self-explanatory, but they'll stick in your head as well. And "Time Well Wasted" and "You Are the Train" a pair of well-written, well-performed country-rock gems. You can say this one Slade me.
Stone Love compilation album here. One of the best Stone Love releases out there, with every track worthy of a rewind. Hard to pick out my favourites!!A similar question has been raised about the long-term political stability of a liberal society. Non-liberal societies are typically held together by shared conceptions of the good, such as a common religion, or by common ethnicity. Members of these societies are willing to make sacrifices for each other because of their commonalities. But what holds a society together when its members come from different ethnic and racial backgrounds and do not share a common conception of the good life?
Some liberals suggest that the tie that binds the citizens of a liberal society is simply a shared commitment to liberal principles of freedom and equality. It is debatable whether this is a 'thick' enough bond to keep a multicultural society together. After all, a liberal society makes many demands on its members: they must be willing to accept considerable sacrifices (e.g. military service), to take an interest in public affairs, and to exercise self-restraint in their personal actions and political demands. Liberals have tended to focus on the rights of citizenship but a liberal society would stop functioning if its citizens did not also accept certain duties and exercise certain virtues. It seems likely that a sense of commonality is needed for individuals to accept these sorts of duties.
Conservative critics have argued that the stability of liberal societies is based on a pre-liberal sense of shared identity. Citizens of England, for example, do not see each other primarily as individual rights-holders, but as fellow members of the English nation, with a shared history and culture. This gives rise to a sense of solidarity which is prior to, and deeper than, a shared commitment to liberalism. It is this national solidarity which explains why the English work together, and make sacrifices for each other. Conservatives worry that this sense of being members of the same 'people' or culture or community is gradually being eroded by the individualism of liberal rights, which treats people in abstraction from their communal ties and responsibilities.
Interestingly, many nineteenth century liberals agreed that liberalism is viable only in countries with a sense of common nationhood, a view shared by some recent theorists of 'liberal nationalism'. Most post-war liberal theorists, however, have rejected the idea that liberalism should ally itself with nationalism, and have instead asserted that a common commitment to liberal principles is a sufficient basis for social unity even in multicultural countries. Habermas's idea of 'constitutional patriotism' is one example of this view, explicitly offered as an alternative to nationalist theories of social cohesion.
One difficulty with this view is that it provides no guidance on how the boundaries of distinct political communities should be drawn. Indeed, it provides no explanation for why there should be distinct political communities at all. Why shouldn't all societies that share liberal values merge into a single state, aiming ultimately to create a single world state? If we reject the nationalist belief that states have the right and responsibility to express particular national identities, languages and cultures, why shouldn't liberals favour abolishing existing nation-states and replacing them with a thoroughgoing cosmopolitanism of open borders within a single global state?
Few liberal theorists are willing to take this step towards an unqualified liberal cosmopolitanism and most believe that nation states remain the only viable forum for the implementation of liberal-democratic values. Yet equally few liberals are willing to acknowledge that these liberal nation states depend for their viability not only on adherence to liberal values, but also on the inculcation of deeper feelings of national identity.
Whether the cohesion of a liberal society depends on some prior sense of identity remains an important topic for debate.
Liberalism. One of the major political ideologies of the modern world...Liberalism first emerged as an important movement in Europe in the sixteenth century. Today...it is the dominant ideology in many parts of the world.
both Protestants and Catholics accepted that the state could not impose a common faith ... Liberalism has simply extended this principle from the sphere of religion to other areas of social life where citizens have conflicting beliefs about the meaning of life. A liberal state does not seek to resolve these conflicts, but rather provides a 'neutral' framework within which citizens can pursue their diverse conceptions of the good life.
Liberalism's critics, however, argue that liberalism emerged as the ideological justification for the rise of capitalism, and that its image of the autonomous individual is simply a glorification of the pursuit of self-interest in the market. Liberalism replaced the web of mutual obligations which bound people together in ethnic, religious, or other communities with a society predicated on competition and 'atomistic' individualism.
A major challenge for liberal philosophers has been to explain why individual freedom should have priority over competing values such as community or perfectionism.
Kantian liberals, for example, argue that the capacity for rational autonomy is the highest capacity humans possess, and so is worthy of inherent respect. To restrict someone's freedom of choice, on this Kantian view, is to treat them as less than a fully mature and responsible human being, and this is wrong, regardless of the desirable or undesirable social consequences that might follow.
This Kantian view has been very influential in the liberal tradition. However, it rests on a controversial claim about the nature of moral value and moral respect...many critics argue that using the state to promote the Kantian ideal of rational autonomy is as 'sectarian' as using the state to promote Protestantism.
Critics of the Kantian approach argue that liberals should therefore avoid appealing to the value of autonomy, and instead defend liberalism simply as the only viable basis for peaceful coexistence in culturally and religiously plural societies.
Kantian liberals respond, however, that without appealing to the value of individual autonomy, there is no reason why coexistence between groups should take the form of guaranteeing the rights of individuals. Why not just allow each group in society to organise itself as it sees fit...
critics argue that the unfettered exercise of individual choice will undermine the forms of family and community life which help develop people's capacity for choice and provide people with meaningful options. On this view, liberalism is self-defeating - liberals privilege individual rights, even when this undermines the social conditions which make individual freedoms valuable.
The Brigadier-The Secret of No Success. The power pop concept album about life in an office isn't exactly a novel concept as recent releases from Greg Pope's Edmund's Crown, Owen Sartori and Semion have demonstrated, but in our world the tune comes first. And Matt Williams (a/k/a The Brigadier) puts a tuneful spin on the topic with his latest opus, nowhere more evident than in the jaunty opening track "Doing the 9 to 5", which sees Williams moving away from the Brian Wilson-via-XTC sound of his previous releases into something more along the lines of Badly Drawn Boy. Other standouts include the irresistible (and rocking, as far as Williams goes) "Just a Little Kiss Miss Busy", the George Harrison-inspired title track, and the catchy "Money is the Motivator". His previous releases have been consistent, but here the highs are higher (especially the tracks mentioned here), making this the best Brigadier yet.
Blake Jones & The Trike Shop-The Underground Garden. My only previous exposure to Blake Jones & The Trike Shop was on an IPO compilation before he sent me his latest full-length, and until now the loss has been mine. This is buoyant, just plain fun and catchy as all get-out pop that draws on everything from dance-hall English pop to the Beatles and Brian Wilson (cf. "The Five Deadly Fingers of Dr. Theremin") with a touch of Zappa thrown in. The fun-house Beatles of "Forestiere Gardens" will leave it's "oh yeah" refrain burned into your brain, the shambolic "Sing Along" will have you doing just that, and "Sun Up" starts as a rewrite of "Magical Mystery Tour" then takes its own magical mystery tour into a synth-pop break and then back again. Some tracks are just plain goofy, like "Fighting the Big Dumb Noise" and "Here Comes the Bus", while others are sublime, like "Send the Band to Liverpool" an amalgam of various styles of 60s pop. If you can get past the quirk factor, there's a lot to like here. And even if some of the tracks here might be goofs, there are 15 of them and anyone with taste in power pop should be able to come up with 10 they'll really like.
Nadine Sutherland is a female voice acknowledged around the globe with her tracks such as Action, Baby Face, as well as Anything for you, and many many more. This album was released in 1997 with many more tracks for you to enjoy.
In the late 1800s China was faced with the problem of modernisation. One of the "reforming" Chinese intellectuals was a man named Kang Youwei. Kang sought to delineate absolute moral truths based on a scientific or mathematical approach that supported his universalism ... Using the Confucian value of benevolence, he proclaimed the equality of humanity as well as a notion of individual autonomy. [1]
He was perhaps the most influential politico-philosophical writer of the 1890s in China ... Although Kang had not yet formulated the principles of his utopian vision by the 1880s, many of his radical notions were already developed.
Marriages should be freely contracted and subject to change; children should be raised in public nurseries with no filial obligations (nor would parents have obligations toward their children); and sages and teachers would have no special authority.
Kang's vision of the king was that of a mediator, chosen by the people for their own protection as two individuals choose a mediator in a dispute. [2]
In form and organization, as Zhu Weizheng points out, Kang's short and early utopian work ... was "in complete imitation of Euclid's Elements of Geometry,"...
Indeed, Kang Youwei appealed to the authority of science to lend legitimacy and persuasion to his social and political theory, and he claimed, for example, that basic principles such as "human beings have the right of autonomy' and that all societies should be organized on the basis of "human equality" were all "geometric axioms". [3]
he argued for the eventual abolition of state boundaries and the unification of all nations on earth...racial differences would gradually disappear when "all races will merge into one, and there will be no distinction of the intelligent and the ignorant"...the abolition of families to cultivate world citizenship, the elimination of private ownership...
he would have marriage abolished and replaced with an agreement or contract...sex, he argued "will be a matter of each individual's gratification of desires, with no formal denomination or capacity, no limits or boundaries"...
"in the world of Great Unity, men and women will be equal and everyone will be independent and free. They will be dressed in similar attire and hold similar jobs, and there will be no difference between male and female. As for sex, there will be no difference whether it is between a man and a woman, or between a man and another man."
there will be no individual or group differences, there will be no separate nations...all will be equal and free [4]The gist of Kangism? People have to be made the same so that everyone has the same measure of individual autonomy. Distinctions of nationality, of race, of sex, of sexuality, of wealth and of intelligence all have to be collapsed. A global state is to replace the family as a better, more uniform mechanism of regulating equal individual wills.
I’m sure that all these will be well-written and also that none of the ideas in them will be particularly challenging.
And, as the world seems to be coming apart at the seams, there seems a marginality to the concerns, a degree of preciousness in the approach...
That’s the core of the magazine, and there’s something missing, i.e. a core. From global economics, to what appears to be the meltdown of West Asia, from a critical account of Ruddism ... to the changing nature of identity … The Monthly seems to be missing a great deal of it. In the early period of Warhaft’s editorship there were essays by Anne Manne, which constituted the closest the publication came to mixing some Big Ideas into among the reportage ... Apart from the PM’s contributions of course...
All well and good, but aren’t there any other bloody ideas around, except those that flow from the PM?...
When the world is in face-masks, General Motors is asking to be nationalised, the Taliban is marching on Islamabad, the Chinese are calling for a new global currency, more live organ transplants are the result of cash transaction than donation, and the newspaper appears on the verge of winking out of existence, etc etc the failure to take on Big Ideas becomes unignorable, a gaping hole. To not recognise that the left-liberal ideology, really a late Whitlamism, of a well-connected elite is simply a bubble on the stream, is to miss a great historical opportunity...
That relative absence of ideas applies, I hasten to add, not only to the absence of writers further left than a leftish-centre, though their absence is striking — no Jeff Sparrow, Katherine Wilson, Mark Bahnisch, John Quiggin, Geoff Boucher, Larissa Behrendt, Humphrey McQueen, Terry Janke, Mark Davis (the Gangland one), Julie Stephens, David McKnight, Anita Heiss and that’s right off the top of me head — but no interesting classical/neo-liberals either — Jason Soon, Andrew Norton, Charles Richardson, Rafe Champion — or genuine conservatives like Mark Richardson, John Carroll, Pierre Ryckmans. No longer critical pieces from the likes of Christos Tsiolkas, Owen Richardson, David Bennett, Eve Vincent, Bob Ellis, Germaine Greer, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Mischa Merz, Gig Ryan … and on and on. Even leaving out people whose writing is too academic or activist you can field a pretty impressive team.
I would dare to suggest that a contents at least partly drawn from the above would render a publication with more punch than the current line up. Doubtless some of these people have been asked and declined (and some have got the occasional guernsey), but I know that most would jump at the dollar-a-word fee. Some are overexposed and you’d use them sparingly — certainly more sparingly than the limited roll-call of the existing Monthly contributors — but so many of the existing writers are, compared to the above lot, so goddam tepid.
Lady Patra, Lady Ann, Queen Paula, Sister Nancy, Lady Mackerel and more... enjoy!
Yet, it seems to me that those with a family often have more tangible stages punctuating their lives: there's the day they become parents; later, they may become grandparents; and inbetween there are all the defining events that will be remembered and celebrated, such as the one my friend was enjoying so much, the marriage of her child.
Perhaps, in a few years, she will also see the birth of her first grandchild and another chapter of that particular family's life will begin as their lineage continues onward into the future. It's something people like me will never know.
And that - for me, at least - is a jolting part of being childless. However pretentious it may sound, there's the startling fact that my husband and I have severed the thread in our personal ancestry (unless, of course, he should decide to run off with a fertile 20-something).
Despite our respective nephews and nieces taking up the family baton, he and I know that we are not passing anything of ourselves on to future generations.
After an infinite genealogical timeline - impossible to imagine - we have drawn the mark in the sand. Enough. No more. Our bloodline stops here.
I always wanted and assumed I'd have a brood of my own. I grew up imagining an idyllic family life and, naturally, I only ever thought about the special times - playing with my children on a sunny beach, seeing them set off on their first day at school, celebrating birthdays and Christmas down the years.
My offspring would - of course! - be beautiful, well-behaved and clever, and would grow up to become happy, well-adjusted and brilliant young adults with fulfilling careers and eventually wonderful children of their own.
I spent my 20s having a fabulous time and building a career. But I spent my 30s - when I thought babies would surely be the next thing to come along, especially as all my friends were reproducing - slowly coming to terms with the fact motherhood simply wasn't my God-given right.
The June-Green Fields and Rain. Rainbow Quartz has had a great second half of 2010, with new releases from the likes of The Volebeats, The High Dials, The Parties and The Gurus, but the cream of the crop is Green Fields and Rain, the sophomore effort from Parma, Italy's The June. This is a Grade-A mix of psychedelia and Beatles-pop not unlike some of Noel Gallagher's more poppier offerings in Oasis. The sitars and "Tomorrow Never Knows"-like opener "Feel the Sunshine" is a treat, as is the Merseyside pop of "Good News" (replete with a Beatles-like "oooo" in the chorus). "Pete on the Street" is an irresistible pop confection, and "I'm Looking Out" recalls "Strawberry Fields Forever", favorably. I'm not always the biggest fan of bands going blatantly retro, but these guys have the songs to back it up. You have my permission to swoon over The June.
Lannie Flowers-Circles. A couple of years ago, Texas' Lannie Flowers released "Same Old Story" which was essentially a medley of 36 songs of about one minute each. It received a lot of love in the power pop community but didn't make my lists since it didn't lend itself to my preferred listening habits of shuffling the most recent two months of albums I come across. It was either listen to it all the way through to the exclusion of other stuff, or have one-minute out-of-context snippets pop up randomly in my playlist. It was more my problem than Lannie's, so I'm thrilled to report he's released a new album which consists of 15 proper 3-4 minute tracks. And the talent he showed in 60-second bursts has transitioned nicely to full-length songs as Circles is another year-end contender for me. The title track is killer power pop in the vein of Jason Falkner and Jim Boggia, "Turn Up Your Radio" will have you doing just that (assuming it played stuff as good as this), and "Not in Love" might just be the quintessential power pop track with its straight-up hooks and handclaps. Circle this one on your shopping list.
Who is the tuffest?????... This one is a compilation of some Tuffest & Ninjaman tunes, out of Japan on the Alpha Enterprise label. As reggae (in general) has proved, it has reached all corners of the world. This label primarily directs their attention at the oriental market. Mostly are re-releases of tunes from original Ja, Uk and Us pressings but they also have plenty of releases which have never seen the light of day on the other side...
A How Yu Fi Say Dat Request bless...A study of 339 young people aged 14 to 17 who live in Sydney's west and south-west suburbs found only one-third of them called themselves Australian even though two-thirds were born here.
Instead they identified themselves by their ethnic background as Tongan, Chinese, Lebanese, and so on, and 16 of the indigenous young people identified themselves as Koori or Aboriginal.
Less than half of them also felt ''Australian'' all the time and one-fifth did not feel ''Australian'' at all.
Jock Collins, a professor of economics at the University of Technology, Sydney, who presented findings from the study at a conference in Europe, said the unwillingness of these "cosmopolitan" youth to identify as Australian should not be seen as a problem.
"A lot of these young people have links to their parents' nations of birth and they have diverse and multiple identities," he said. "They incorporate their migrant identities with elements of 'being Australian'."
The need to story oneself with multiple narratives, whether drawn from traditional - or consumption-based identity markers, is particularly relevant...
Neo-liberalism describes the idea that people are encouraged to see themselves as if they are autonomous, rational, risk-managing subjects, responsible for their own destinies and called “to render one’s life knowable and meaningful through a narrative of free choice and autonomy"...
Neo-liberalism allows people to make sense of themselves in individualistic and psychological terms, understanding their consumption practices as freely chosen markers of their identity
It is likely, however, that young people’s subjectivities are constructed through a variety of identities shaped by ‘traditional’ orientations to class, region, family and gender, and more ‘liquid’, flexible ones orienting around leisure-based activities, such as sports or shopping.
This context has opened up the possibility for young people to engage in a playful pick-and-mix approach to identity as they move through a kaleidoscope of temporary, fluid and multiple subjectivities that often celebrate hedonism, sociality and sovereignty over one’s own existence.
Maffesoli’s theory of neo-tribalism ... characterises daily life as a continuous movement through a range of small and potentially temporary groups that are distinguished by shared lifestyles, values and understandings of what is appropriate behaviour. These groups give a sense of belonging and identity, examples of which include gathering to watch football in a bar, participants on service user websites or regular commuters sharing public transport.
What distinguishes neo-tribal social formation from traditional social groupings is that people belong to a variety of groups, many of them by choice, so that neo-tribal memberships are plural, temporary, fluid and often elective
when groups create opportunities to practice sovereignty over their existence they are creating spaces in which to engage in values that orient around sociality, emotionality and hedonism. In relating neo-tribalism to young people, it may be useful to recognise the similarities between Maffesoli’s concept of sovereignty and Hakim Bey’s ‘Temporary Autonomous Zones’ (TAZ), a term he uses to describe transitory unsanctioned self-governing sites
Thus, the proliferation and globalisation of near instant forms of technological communication make available a dynamically-shifting range of stories and forms of knowledge that can inform young people’s identity management. Subjectivity, then, is not considered to be constructed from pre-formed essences which exist independently outside of time, talk or other social activity, but are constantly (re)produced in interaction, constructed from the range of subject positions available to the individual...
It may be that young people will experience fractured and multiple subjectivity in the same way that they are encouraged to consider high street clothing – as tools of identity to be temporarily appropriated, experienced and then cast off in favour of some new look or experience. Future subjectivity may therefore be conceptualised as a collection of multiple, diffuse selves existing across time and space, that have differing degrees of relationships with each other and perhaps no longer needing to be held together by the concept of a ‘core self’.
It is likely, therefore, that in the future young people will need to find ways to exist in the plural.
