Nicholas Gruen
Ken Parish |
Club Troppo is a group blog that has existed in various guises since 2003. Troppo has numerous contributors who post with varying frequency on an eclectic range of topics, including politics, law, economics, life, philosophy, sport and the arts. From a contributor viewpoint, Troppo is a fairly anarchic collective.
We’re also very receptive to additional/guest contributors who can add an extra dimension to the Troppo team. Troppo has fostered several new bloggers who have gone on and branched out to become “stellar” blogosphere talents. The advantage of blogging at a group blog like Troppo is that you are under no pressure to post frequently, so it’s ideal for busy people who just don’t have the time to maintain a solo blog. If you’re opinionated but personable and reckon you can write a bit, feel free to contact us.
Troppo contributors often tend towards an “essay blogging” style rather than just short, link-based posts. Maybe that just means some of us are verbose, but we like to think that we’re exploring and analysing issues in greater depth than is usually possible in the mainstream media. We also tend towards a default attitude of scepticism towards rigid political ideologies (and ideologues) of both right and left.
From a reader’s viewpoint, we hope you’ll experience Troppo as a sort of cyber-coffee salon, where bloggers and readers muse about the issues of the day in an atmosphere of stimulating, mutually respectful civility. We encourage robust debate as long as it is conducted civilly. We reserve the right to delete any comments that offend our subjective norms of civility (although we’ve very seldom needed to do so). In this respect, Troppo is a benign dictatorship, and no correspondence will be entered regarding any comments we choose to delete. We have discovered from hard experience that constructive debate can easily be derailed by ad hominem abuse. At the same time, we encourage diversity of opinion, and enjoy testing our ideas and arguments against readers who think differently. We don’t want Troppo to become like some other Australian blogs which seem to use censorship to maintain a “group think” mentality where those who disagree with the dominant group are bullied. Feel free to disagree, but keep it civil and play the argument not the person.
The “Troppo” in the title refers to the fact that this blog was commenced by Ken Parish, an academic lawyer living in Darwin in Australia’s tropics. The animated armadillo in the banner flows from a previous incarnation of the blog when it was called “Troppo Armadillo”. The armadillo motif in turn springs from a quote by American op-ed writer and humourist Jim Hightower:
There’s nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow line and dead armadillos.
Ken Parish and Nicholas Gruen both see themselves in a broad sense as political centrists, although it shouldn’t be assumed that this self-labelling necessarily describes any other Troppo contributors.
Rafe Champion also sees himself as a political centrist, not in the middle of the unhelpful left-right spectrum, but in another dimension which is widely but unhelpufully depicted by obscurantists of the “left” as “far right”.
Club Troppo is administered by Jacques Chester, a former law student of Ken Parish.
