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Keywords: Such Is Life

There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.

  • MEDIA

    Vagina dialogue

    • Moira Rayner
    • 25 July 2012
    20 Comments

    Johnson & Johnson's 'Carefree' ads talked unblushingly of women's vaginas, inter-period discharge and daily smells. According to some, we shouldn't talk about such things, not on television. Until recently commercial products for absorbing menstrual blood didn't exist, with dreadful effect on women's participation in community and public life.

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  • MEDIA

    Justifying garden-variety torture

    • Max Atkinson
    • 12 July 2012
    6 Comments

    Any discussion of the morality of torture must distinguish two kinds of justification. The first is concerned with cases so exotic they have nothing to do with the ordinary affairs of mankind, such as the nuclear bomb ticking away in a New York basement. A real-life justification must provide a rationale for a wide range of common garden cases. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Rape ambiguity in India

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 17 May 2012
    5 Comments

    It remains unclear whether the encounter was consensual, although the power imbalance in the relationship makes such an encounter ethically dubious even if it was not strictly rape. If it was rape, it is inconceivable that she later becomes her assailant's willing lover.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Shaky surpluses and dirty nappies

    • Jen Vuk
    • 09 May 2012
    4 Comments

    You could you call it coincidence that the week I'm asked to write on budgets, ours blows out. I call it life. Such is the cyclic nature of our 1.5-incomes-and-two-kids lives that just when we think our savings are safe, a new enrolment fee is due, the kids' jeans are suddenly a size too small and I've run out of nappies.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The politics of suicide

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 02 May 2012
    14 Comments

    Albert Camus said suicide was the one serious philosophical problem in that it poses the question as to whether life is worth living. Some suicides are a private solution to anger and despair, but others, such as suicide bombings and the recent suicide of retired pharmacist Dimitris Christoulas, are both public and coercive.

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  • RELIGION

    Easter in detention

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 06 April 2012
    13 Comments

    Over many years I have celebrated Christmas and Easter in places where people are locked up — in refugee camps, prisons and detention centres. To be in these places at such times is hard. It is also a privilege.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stynes a man of flesh and steel

    • Joe Caddy
    • 27 March 2012
    8 Comments

    Jim Stynes was such a determined character that he joined me in swimming the 1985 Pier to Pub at Lorne, even though he did not know how to swim — he completed the 1200m open water swim doing a kind of dog paddle. In 2001 I officiated at his wedding. Today I will officiate at his funeral.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Zero tolerance for ritual humiliation

    • Michael Mullins
    • 12 March 2012
    19 Comments

    The Church is recognised as having tolerated abuse of children and young adults, and sometimes regarded it as character building, in connection with corporal punlshment and activities such as drinking rituals at university residential colleges. But the Catholic college at Sydney University has broken with tradition by implementing its zero tolerance policy.

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  • MEDIA

    Feminism, Greer and Tankard Reist

    • Lyn Bender
    • 08 February 2012
    33 Comments

    Germaine Greer has said she did not want to be a high priestess of feminism. What may have been extracted from her views and the constant evolution of feminism has been diminished by being reduced to a formula such as that used to denounce Melinda Tankard Reist.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Best of 2011: Rescuing JFK

    • P. S. Cottier
    • 12 January 2012

    'Kennedy was a cold warrior, but Johnson took it to the next level. He had the same my-balls-are-bigger-than-yours complex as Dubya.' The narrator journeys into the past in order to produce a kinder America. One that may not throw itself into Vietnam with such lust. Published 16 November 2011

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Best of 2011: Songs of England at war

    • Philip Harvey
    • 05 January 2012
    1 Comment

    Gallipolli was a disaster and a relatively minor conflict, but it is upon such 'minor' conflicts that Empires are built. These songs go to the heart of a contradictory dilemma: the love of country on the one hand and the ugly extremes of patriotism on the other. Published 23 February 2011

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Aboriginal community ditched by church and state

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 24 November 2011
    8 Comments

    The remote community of Toomelah was a state-run Aboriginal mission with a strong church presence. A raft of social problems have emerged in place of the traditional culture that was usurped by these influences. Cultural extinction is perhaps the biggest issue facing such communities.

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