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Keywords: Comedy

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

  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2017: Why 'white' isn't a racist slur

    • Sonia Nair
    • 10 January 2018
    5 Comments

    I hung out with a group of Indian-Australians while I was a university student who called themselves 'curries', but the unspoken camaraderie that ensued from this self-identification stood in stark contrast to that time I was called a 'f***ing curry' by a passing car full of white people.

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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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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Students learn where power lies

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 29 November 2017
    5 Comments

    When misused power remains unchallenged, it is the most vulnerable who suffer most. The truism finds acerbic embodiment in the Slovak-Czech black comedy The Teacher, whose setting in 1983 communist-ruled Czechoslovakia provides a historical backdrop that doubles as an analogy for any socio-political context where power can be a means to personal ends.

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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

    Alienation and angst in the age of Instagram

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 25 October 2017
    1 Comment

    On the face of it, it's a cautionary tale against relying on social media as a source of relationships and self-identity. That's a fairly retrograde take-home though, and the film is actually more than that; it's an exploration of loneliness and isolation that is universal despite a context that is very much of this moment.

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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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  • MEDIA

    How political correctness kills language freedoms

    • David James
    • 25 August 2017
    21 Comments

    The push for politically correct language may be well intentioned enough, but its consequences are often appalling. It can rob us of one of the most important of all human freedoms: the right to use words to mean what we want them to mean.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Inter-racial marriages finally get some attention

    • Megan Graham
    • 03 August 2017
    3 Comments

    About one in six newlyweds in the United States is involved in a ‘mixed marriage’, according to the Pew Research Center. At home, the percentage is higher; in 2009 approximately 42 per cent of marriages involved at least one partner who was not born in Australia.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Why 'white' isn't a racist slur

    • Sonia Nair
    • 13 July 2017
    11 Comments

    I hung out with a group of Indian-Australians while I was a university student who called themselves 'curries', but the unspoken camaraderie that ensued from this self-identification stood in stark contrast to that time I was called a 'f***ing curry' by a passing car full of white people. You often hear from white people that they can't be called 'white' because that too is racist language. This reflects a flawed assumption that societal structures advantage and disadvantage people in the exact same way.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Nearly knowing John Clarke

    • Brian Matthews
    • 13 June 2017
    2 Comments

    One of the 30 comedians, satirists, cartoonists and writers they interviewed was John Clarke. 'I first met John Clarke five years ago,' Murray recalls in his 1992 introduction to the interview, 'even though we grew up in the same town in New Zealand and for a while went to the same school. My claim to fame is that I nearly knew John Clarke. Recently when we looked though his school photos we realised that we knew every kid in Palmerston North in 1960 except each other.'

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Life before suicide

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 30 March 2017
    1 Comment

    A film about a lonely widower who repeatedly attempts suicide seems like a grim proposition. Ove has suffered one too many blows in his life, the latest being the loss of his job. He finds himself at a loose end, if not purposeless. He is the self-appointed overseer of the gated community where he has lived for years, enforcing protocols of behaviour among his terrorised neighbours. Now he's had enough, and decides to join his beloved wife Sonja, in eternity. But dying doesn't come easily to Ove.

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