On the longer time scale that we feel in nature, the violence of colonial capitalism seems almost fleeting. ‘Mother Nature will outlast all of this’, Barkandji man Woddy Harris told me, gesturing across his hometown of Wilcannia, two hours’ drive from Broken Hill, and which has a majority Barkandji population. I wondered about this when, […]
Academia
One of the big puzzles in the last months, for those observing the politics in the US and elsewhere, is this: why is there apparently so little protest against the attacks on democracy and the rule of law, and why does it happen in some but not other cases? I want to share a hypothesis, […]
Within ten minutes I regretted my decision to walk to Creedon Street in the outback town of Broken Hill. At first, I thought it was the shoes. Stupid things I’d bought on the internet, they were little more than plastic-coated cardboard soles strapped to my ankles with nylon laces. The desert sand scratched between my […]
I’m publishing an email I just sent to Ireland’s Minister for Justice, Jim O’Callaghan, on a truly hideous and anti-democratic European law that Ireland is strenuously supporting. It’s looking like Germany, which was strong on data protection, may crack and support this law, too. This week is make or break week for ‘chat control’, a […]
A European justice minister who does have principles! The EU “chat control” proposal I wrote about the other day has been scuppered by Germany’s justice ministry saying forcefully that it will never support this particular form of mass surveillance. Here’s what their minister, Dr. Stefanie Hubig, had to say: “Chat control without cause must be […]
I have a long-standing pet peeve about the conflation of academic freedom and freedom of speech, especially in the context of (purported) campus debate. In order to illustrate why one should not conflate academic freedom and freedom of speech, I introduce two uncontroversial theses about each. Thesis [I]: lying and deception are protected features of […]
(I wrote this piece a week or so ago, meant to do a bit more work but haven’t got around to it. Hence slightly dated allusions) The culmination of Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK was a press conference at which both American and British leaders waved pieces of paper, containing an agreement that […]