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Keywords: Ghost

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

  • RELIGION

    I am afraid of dying, but I have hope

    • Moira Rayner
    • 27 March 2018
    5 Comments

    This Easter, and Orthodox Easter, and Passover, and at the changing of the seasons, I am prepared to reassert my faith. That whatever evil brings, compassion, courage and passionate commitment to the old values of honesty, accountability and care for others will bring the enormous change that was promised so long ago.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    New ways of gauging films' feminist cred

    • Neve Mahoney
    • 22 March 2018
    1 Comment

    The Bechdel test, which deems there must be two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than men, has become shorthand for gauging gender imbalance in films. But it isn't always a good test. If you take the rules literally, Suicide Squad, which is aggressively misogynistic, passes on a technicality.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Dispelling lazy thinking on trade deals

    • David James
    • 20 March 2018
    6 Comments

    The recent furore about Donald Trump's imposing of tariffs on steel, from which Australian companies have been exempted, raises an interesting question about the economics discipline. Which is better, an oxymoron or a tautology?

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  • ECONOMICS

    Don't let business mindset stifle the arts

    • David James
    • 20 February 2018
    2 Comments

    The practice of appointing business people to oversee arts bodies is as questionable as referring to the arts as an 'industry'. Business and the arts work on almost diametrically opposed rationales. Understanding this might go a long way towards assessing the art world more intelligently.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Welcome to the Matrix of materialism

    • David James
    • 27 January 2018
    7 Comments

    A visitor from an earlier time would be stunned to see how much we understand the world using monetary measures. Finance has come to be considered the first reality, not defined by, or reflecting, reality. To see how this creates distortions, consider GDP, which is taken to be a reliable measure of national wellbeing, but in fact is anything but.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Economic doom looms in Oz's game of homes

    • David James
    • 12 December 2017
    1 Comment

    It is not difficult to imagine a scenario where the game of musical chairs in Australia will come to a shuddering end, imperilling the banks and dragging the economy into a deep recession. As we saw in the GFC in America and Europe, government money will be thrown at the banks to rescue them at the expense of ordinary citizens.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    With remembrance goes compassion: Manus

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 26 November 2017
    21 Comments

    The refugees on Manus Island are not simply actors in a dramatic poem. They are human beings like us to whom we have a responsibility. They could have enriched us by their ingenuity and bravery had we accepted them. We should continue to listen to their voices and keep them in our hearts.

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  • ECONOMICS

    In the end, debts cannot be paid

    • David James
    • 08 November 2017
    3 Comments

    Once upon a time, usury was considered a sin and lending was subject to strict controls. Now, the world is in the grip of usury. It cannot continue. At some point it will have to be retired, or swapped to equity. A good place to start is third world debt, which is the most immoral variant.

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  • MEDIA

    There is no such thing as capitalism

    • David James
    • 27 October 2017
    14 Comments

    In literary studies, one of the most important requirements is the need to define one's terms accurately. It has always come as a shock to me that economics is almost completely devoid of such precision. Much of the terminology of the 'discipline' of economics is either nonsense, or thinly disguised tautologies.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    My Telstra Catch-22

    • Brian Matthews
    • 06 October 2017
    5 Comments

    'I am being charged for items I did not buy and have never heard of. The cost of these 'purchases' was added to my normal Telstra phone bill. When I protested, Telstra said it was not involved, it simply administered the charges ... Entirely innocent from the start, I lose - no matter what happens.' On 23 August I wrote these words to Telstra for reasons that will soon become apparent.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ghosts of letters past

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 03 October 2017
    4 Comments

    Conscientious friends have recently sent me bundles of the letters I wrote them decades before. I found myself strangely reluctant to look at them, or even loose the letters from their envelopes. The longer I procrastinated, the more I asked myself why I was doing so, and concluded that memory is another form of haunting: those letters are home to ghosts.

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  • MEDIA

    Is Google and Facebook's imitation game doomed?

    • David James
    • 26 September 2017
    3 Comments

    There are very few examples of companies that have been able to genuinely change when confronted with new circumstances. It looks increasingly that Facebook and Google are approaching this situation. The challenge is likely to come from some quarter that is new and surprising, just as the demolition of conventional media came from companies that could have barely been imagined 20 years ago.

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