There is nothing quite like scare campaigns – from the mild suggestion of unintended consequences to claims that we’ll all be ‘rooned’.

Politicians have used them for years ranging from the Yellow Peril to the Red Menace and from drugs to s.x rock and roll. More recently it has been the demonising of the few refugees, in comparison for instance to those trying to cross the Mediterranean, coming to Australia by boat. The Red Menace, on the other hand, was probably dead by the time Malcolm Fraser warned that if a Labor Government was elected people should hide their money under their beds and Bob Hawke replied that it was no good putting any money under the beds because that’s where the Reds were! read more

Australian Attorney General George Brandis thinks it is medieval, politically correct and a rejection of freedom of speech for scientists and others not to engage with climate denialists.

Presumably he also thinks it’s medieval for people not to engage with creationists who believe the earth was created 10,000 years ago and Adam and Eve shared the world with dinosaurs; and, perhaps medieval not to engage with people who think the Sun revolves around the earth. Now the blog doesn’t know how good a lawyer Brandis is but he’s obviously an awful Attorney General and worse historian. After all the point of medieval life – and the church which dominated it – was not to engage with contrary beliefs but to seek to obliterate them with torture, censorship and auto da fes. read more

The key characteristic of the Enlightenment was the pursuit, production and promulgation of knowledge. Its impetus was the need to combat ignorance, superstition and fear. Unfortunately today the need is still as great as we face the systematic pursuit, production and promulgation of ignorance.

In the past week the blog has come across two pieces on how the production of ignorance is flourishing. The first from the George Mason University Centre for Climate Change Communication was an article published in the American Geophysical Union open-access journal. The Centre, in announcing the paper’s publication, said: “The climate science community needs to do more to communicate the scientific consensus because: (a) most Americans don’t know there is a scientific consensus on this point; (b) this lack of awareness undermines people’s engagement in the issue; and (c) research by our team – and others – has shown that simple messages that communicate this basic scientific conclusion are highly effective, especially with political conservatives.” read more

While the recent UN International Court of Justice finding against Japanese whaling is a great victory it does raise an interesting question. Was Japanese whaling a bloody, but clever diversion, from a much bigger problem?

No, the blog has not become addicted to conspiracy theories but a friend recently outlined a slightly alternative view of the role of whaling in Japanese society and economy which he had discovered while living and working in Japan. Whale meat is not some long honoured traditional Japanese food but rather an emergency measure introduced by the post-war US administration of the country. Unlike the rights of the native peoples of the Arctic region there is no long-standing cultural rationale. The recognition of such a rationale is why the Inuit and Greenlanders, for instance, still take some whales and share them among the community. Having tasted a small portion of one in Greenland, out of courtesy to a village host, the blog thinks it’s a tradition which seems to be of little culinary appeal whatever the cultural justification. read more

The list of PR lists has grown yet again with the Salt & Shein Power 50 – a list of Australia’s most influential corporate affairs executives

The list was prepared by an external consultancy and nominees were selected on the basis of their track record as senior practitioners; the regard they are held in by their senior management and peers; influence within their organisations and the corporate affairs industry as a whole; and, their track records as thought leaders. read more

It is often remarked that the best books about politics are those written by political  losers – people who have been less than successful in their political careers or people who failed to get to the top and were condemned to watch from the sidelines.

The first evidence cited of the validity of this position is always, of course, Machiavelli’s The Prince. Imprisoned, tortured and banished he ended up writing a tract still quoted almost 500 years later. Indeed, the list of illuminating texts by the unsuccessful is long – Cicero, Burke, Madison, Mill, de Tocqueville and Max Weber for a start. read more

Over the almost 50 years the blog has been in the media and PR businesses there has been ongoing debate about what the PR business was, where it was going and how practitioners should be educated and trained.

Now a new book, Strategic Public Relations Leadership, by Anne Gregory and Paul Willis has set a new direction for that debate and raised some important questions for everyone in the industry. read more

If only Kim Carr and Stephen Conroy cared as much about Victorian ALP internal reform as they cared, respectively, about the future of manufacturing industry and the level of licence fees for media owners and how quickly the Finkelstein media inquiry could be buried.

Between them – and their factions – the movement towards party reform in Victoria has not only stalled but gone into reverse. Late last year the ALP ginger group, Local Labor, got commitments from both leadership contenders, Shorten and Albanese, to extensive party reforms. Most of the reforms they favoured stemmed from the successive reports on party democracy from key recommendations of reviews such as by Mark Dreyfus (1998), Hawke/Wran (2002), Faulkner/Bracks/Carr (2010) and Alan Griffin (2011). read more

What with the Tea Party, the religious right, Fox News and others it’s easy to think that there are only few US citizens with a handle on reality or a concern about issues such as climate change and the state of their nation.

For instance, most Americans have little grasp of the realities of just how unequal US society is (http://www.upworthy.com/9-out-of-10-americans-are-completely-wrong-about-this-mind-blowing-fact-2 ) even if they are generally aware that there is a problem and are increasingly angry about it. On the other hand there is now significant evidence that large numbers of Americans are not only concerned about climate change but want to do something about it – despite the blog’s rather dismissive (and partly inaccurate due to hyperbole) comments in its last post. US Secretary of State, John Kerry, in a visit to Indonesia recently compared climate change to weapons of mass destruction and one wonders whether the message might also have been directed to Indonesia’s neighbours. Moreover, despite the views of Australians such as Newman, Warburton, the IPA et al it seems the weapons of mass destruction are, in this case, more real than the ones many of the climate change deniers in Australia were so certain would be found in Iraq. John Kerry plans to make a number of speeches on the subject around the world in the next year and hopefully one of them will be in Australia. read more

Climate change, evolution and Shakespeare have two things in common. First, the evidence for all three is settled. Second, there are an awful lot of people who don’t accept it.

The blog got to pondering this after a recent Humanities 21 meeting when Dr David McInnis, was talking about Lost Plays (www.lostplays.org ) in the time of Shakespeare. He didn’t actually talk about the Shakespeare authorship debate but he did highlight how much theatre from the period has not survived and what we know about Shakespeare’s collaborations as a result of the study of many plays. Before the talk the blog accidentally overheard a conversation between two women, in which one was explaining why we should doubt whether temperatures were rising read more