ABC supporters across the country are dismayed and angry with the national broadcaster. The biggest threat to the ABC today is its craven and distorted performance in television current affairs reporting. In 1997 I led a delegation to meet with Bob Mansfield, the heavyweight businessman who had been recruited by John Howard to wield the Continue reading »
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As the novelty of Donald Trump’s win wears off, we have moved beyond the superficialities of the views of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Ambassador Kevin Rudd about the Trump agenda and persona. And we are recognising that the fate of AUKUS is but one of the international issues that face us with Trump Redux. Continue reading »
The fossil fuel corporations and their enablers treat us with complete contempt. This is not very polite to say, I know, but they spit in our faces and laugh. The great majority of people around the world want more serious efforts to stop global warming. The International Energy Agency advised some time ago that there Continue reading »
Exceptional courage and commitment is needed to spend decades pursuing freedom for your people and to do so with few resources against considerable odds. Ali Kazak has shown courage and commitment. As the key educator and advocate for Palestine in Australia, he has been running up steep sand hills with false history and Israeli tanks Continue reading »
Labor needs the Greens. It seems to calculate that the Greens have no choice about preferencing them. That might once have seemed logical, but it is by no means certain when Labor’s defence policies are anathema to many Greens, when Labor policies on refugees and immigration are indistinguishable from the coalition’s, and when their climate Continue reading »
Last week the state of South Australia moved another step closer to criminalising coercive control, with the bill passing through the House of Assembly on its way to the Legislative Council. South Australia’s Criminal Law Consolidation (Coercive Control) Amendment Bill 2024 was introduced by the Labor Government in August this year. This legislation aims to Continue reading »
It is time to think more broadly about security than the narrow military concept about which there is endless debate. Security for individuals and communities does not depend on a nuclear powered and nuclear armed submarine. We are humans and human security is about many things including health, and it is health which our organisation, Continue reading »
Discussion about the Middle East is difficult. Conflicting views are deeply held and even reasonable people struggle to speak, and to listen, dispassionately and with respect. Publishers have a right to take a position on the issues but also have a responsibility to support informed discussion that is fair and has a degree of balance. Continue reading »
China has the biggest influence on Myanmar’s civil strife but Russia also has sway, supplying arms to the military junta. As opposition forces continue to rack up battlefield victories over Myanmar’s military, questions over who outside of the war-torn state is helping to fuel the crisis are being asked. China is easily the most influential international actor Continue reading »
In response to the election, a significant number of people on social media and elsewhere...
Okay, so look. I’m your basic galvanized steel thrie-beam guardrail. My job is to keep vehicles from flying off the escarpment and squishing all the people driving on the westbound lane who don’t wanna die just because some mope on the eastbound couldn’t be bothered to keep his hands on the wheel. You know what I wasn’t built for? This Trump bullshit.
If a Mazda spins out at one hundred miles per hour, or a school bus driver has to turn around to yell at Jimmie Jr.—I’m your man. But you drive an eight-ton semi with an airplane propeller stuck to the grill into me at top speed? I mean, there’s only so much malarkey I was engineered to handle, you know? We’re built for normal problems, not the kind of thing you get when you hand the wheel over to a lunatic.
Thus far much of the commentary about Trump’s cabinet and staff picks alternates between “He...
I happened to catch the movie “The Apprentice” recently about the relationship between Donald Trump and his mentor Roy Cohn, the notorious lawyer who was involved in many of the mid 20th century’s most high profile political events. I don’t know that the film told me anything I didn’t already know but it did remind me of just how vicious Cohn was and how much Trump loved that about him. He learned his lessons well. The thru line between Cohn’s nefarious career and Trump’s own ruthlessness is about to manifest in this second term. It’s almost as if it’s coming full circle. Cohn’s first big splash in national politics took place when he was only 23 years old when he was one of the lead prosecutors in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. He was so well-liked by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that he recommended him to be the lead counsel for Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations communist witch hunt.
With Trump’s election signaling a potential shift in U.S. policy, Yemen’s Houthis mobilize for a violent response to looming American intervention, escalating tensions in the Red Sea.
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Advice from Carole Cadwalladr Friends have already secured permanent residency in Canada. Others are headed there in January. But then they have the means. Following post-election racist texts targeting Black people come a spread of similar intimidating texts targeting Hispanic and LGBTQ people. They warn recipients they have been “selected for deportation or to report to a re-education camp.” The FBI still does not know their origin. “The FBI did not say whether it believes the offensive messages to LGBTQ and Hispanic recipients are from the same source as the previously reported messages,” NBC News reports. Some of my LGBTQ friends were concerned even before this report.
A conversation with Issue 58 cover artist Ellen Weinstein.
The post The Rituals of Art, Science, and Superstition appeared first on Nautilus.
Cokie’s Law über alles Longtime readers recall Cokie’s Law. Digby coined the term in 2008 for how skillfully the right wing tosses smears into the air to be carried by the media like the wind. Smears, lies, and disinformation become a “legitimate” subject of mainstream reporting not because they are true or meaningful but because they are “out there.” The law is named for the late NPR/ABC reporter Cokie Roberts: “At this point,” said Roberts, “it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.” Thus right-wing smears, lies, and disinformation become, in campaign parlance, “earned media.” James Fallows on Saturday did not reference Digby’s law, but essentially conceded that “the death-cloud of misinformation, ignorance, lies, myths, fears, stereotypes” has come to represent, like the shadows in Plato’s cave, an “artificial reality playing out in the minds of citizens.” Fallows: —It’s not a new problem in American democracy.
The right is strongly pro-natal. Some of it is for religious reasons, some of it is because they want to control (no, don’t even, the constant talk of male leadership leaves this unquestionable), but a lot of it is that they figure if they out-breed their opponents they’ll win.
Now if you’re talking ethnicity or “race” this is indisputable. Want more whites, or latinos, or whatever, if you breed less than others, that’s going to tell.
But when you’re talking ideology and culture, it isn’t.
The anti-abortion right thinks that out-breeding will work for them, but out-breeding only works if the kids you’re popping up keep your beliefs.