The best argument for atheism, the one impossible to refute, is the behaviour of those who proclaim their faith in any form of deity.

Trump’s Iran folly has exposed American weakness. Trump’s economy accelerates imperial decline. Now Trump has assured China that it won’t leap to Taiwan’s defence. Australia’s AUKUS deal is like an overpriced ticket to a stateroom on the Titanic. It’ll get us underwater, but without any subs.

That multi-million or billion $$ increases in military expenditure are assented to without demur, while our public universities are systematically starved of funds and public education turned to private profit, is the clearest sign of the complete unfitness for office of our political classes.

In dark times, when hope begins to ebb, and faith in your compatriots wanes, it is important to take solace where you can.

Trump is a perfect medium for the ancient body politic metaphor’s corporeal inscriptions of misrule. His putrescent colour a sign of his weaponised fakery. The tiny grabby hands grasping for ever more corruption. The bodily decay advancing as he shambles the zombie US empire toward catastrophe.

As is now painfully obvious, political centrism (government by neoliberal technocrats) is in its final death throes. The only beneficiary of their demise is the racist, nativist, xenophobic, idiot-right. The only viable alternative to the catastrophe of their rise is an avowedly antifascist left.

I don’t know who needs hear this but, the transformation of the public good of higher education into a private commodity financed by astronomical student debt, is one of the most flagrant swindles committed against the public interest ever perpetrated in broad daylight.

I’m not saying it’s faked, but I am saying that if those flakes were going to fake something, they are definitely stupid enough to fake this, and their flakey supporters are definitely stupid enough to believe it wasn’t faked.

Here is an indisputable truth that no public figure will ever avow: the Australian people will achieve far greater security from ensuring all can live with dignity, than they ever could from increases in defence spending.

Cost recovery from the looting of the Trump years may not net huge sums, unfortunately. But the pain it will cause will warm hearts for a generation or more.

When will the chronicling of the US president’s sordid decline give way to the more optimistic narrative that embodies citizen expectations for a post election corruption and insider trading commission, and war crimes prosecutions board?

Trump is an abysmal president and walking, talking catastrophe of a person, but if he takes his evident displeasure with Australia to the degree of cancelling the awful AUKUS deal, I’ll be the first to thank him.

Has nobody around him thought to suggest to the former PM that his comment strongly suggests he is “Trump, with no brains”? #auspol

The concept of ‘civilisation’ emerged in the 18th century – and it has been cursed from the very start. 👉 theconversation.com/what-ac...

Here is me in The Conversation: theconversation.com/what-actuall... The American President’s threat to kill a civilisation make us all barbarians now, equally at the mercy of a madman’s nightmare of civilisation.

For my entire adult life I’ve lived under an American imperium. As non-Americans, we were invited to marvel at America’s limitless power. In 2026 we finally discover that the only limitless thing America owns is humiliation. Without doubt the most sordid end to an empire.

The US has shown itself once again to be a force for illegality and systematic corruption globally; a facilitator of genocide and perpetrator of war crimes, led by a demented moron who is served by a junta of spineless sycophants intent on self aggrandisement. Australia needs a better kind of ally.

Trump says he will bomb Iran "back to the stone age". Another President already said that in 2006. Nothing better captures the impoverishment of this moment than a plagiarised boast by a corrupt but empowered moron whose only genius is to ruin - buildings, businesses, economies, countries, lives.

Governments should tax companies adopting AI proportionally, according to how and where they use AI to replace human workers, to help pay for the social and environmental costs of using AI.

Jurgen Habermas was part of my university education too. I was never that much interested in his ideas, and gravitated toward Foucault. Now that he has gone, I feel that we should much rather live in the world Habermas thought possible than the one we do inhabit. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...

B possesses an object of value. A steals said object from B. A places said object in a museum. Descendants of A may view said object for free. Descendants of B may view said object for a fee. That is extortion, and most of the world’s leading cultural institutions are perpetrators of it.

If it is true that we are not responsible for the evils of the past, then we should immediately stop honouring the values we routinely locate in that past, such as Christianity & western civilization. If we honour the past we have a responsibility to address its wrongs. Abstaining won’t get it done.

Australia abstained.

I honestly can’t see that there is an ethical or even pedagogical reason why academics like me should be pressured to include LLMs in our teaching, nor tolerate their use by our students. Much worse by far though, are those colleagues who employ LLMs to fabricate their own scholarship.

Losing wars is rarely fatal to empires. What is fatal is looking ridiculous, to friends, dependents, and enemies alike.

There’s not much to be said for empires, and even less of their endings. But at least Rome had the self respect to be conquered by barbarians. America’s end is a spectacle of self-humiliation to appease the demented whim of a pedophile President whose only genius is to inspire deserved revulsion.

It’s easy to despise the corporations and CEOs who have been gifted their impunity. Far harder to hold to account the myriad of decision-makers who have worked so assiduously for 40 years to guarantee our current economic servitude.

“Here individuals are interested not only in their own affairs but in the affairs of the state… it’s a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a person who takes no interest in politics is someone who minds their own business; we say that they have no business here at all…”. Pericles via Thucydides.

A little known fact about Griffith University is that unlike all other Australian universities, it has resident dinosaurs.

There is a long and bitter history here, that does not seem to be well-known despite a very substantial (and growing) historical scholarship. A short thread on scientific head hunting… www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

We live in the era of politically performative cruelty. There is no escape from this spiralling downward to the drain. #auspol

The Board of Peace is Bored of Peace.

We all know that Trump has gone to war to distract from his appearance in the Epstein files. This is Trump’s Pedo War.

Our economic measures are deranged. We take the most economically powerless (the unemployed) and consider their rising number a sign of economic ill health. Why don’t we use the rising wealth of the most powerful and bloated as this sign? We could call it GDB: Gross Domestic Billionaires.

The problem facing political centrists is that after 30+ years of despised neoliberal privatisations and market reforms, public policy discourse has become functionally meaningless. Swathes of the public no longer comprehend it. It is now a foreign language almost nobody speaks.

Some political problems have no solution, yet demand constant remedial attention lest they become far worse. Corruption is a classic case. It will never be eliminated, yet the cost of shrugging our shoulders and letting it rip is the death of democracy and human decency.

A female politician well-known in this country for her racism and inarticulate bile, has race-baited her followers by suggesting there are no "good Muslims". Many have responded to her rant with embarrassing enthusiasm. It makes Australians like me who love this country feel ashamed and sickened… 1

No existing democracy is perfect. Every nation’s democratic institutions have their own failings. But one thing Australian democracy has succeeded in doing to admiration is to make the running and the results of elections the least contentious measure our democratic life.

In an age of flagrant frauds, the term ‘artificial intelligence’ is the most brazen of con jobs. It isn’t ‘artificial’ because it’s based on stolen, misappropriated, plagiarised, and unattributed human knowledge. Nor is it ‘intelligence’. It’s only a predictive text extruder.

It still bears repeating that a person whose ambition impels them to any action has no judgement. Such a person is never to be trusted, much less entrusted with power of any sort.

Here is your reminder that over the course of the thousand year (give or take) history of universities, they have contributed far more to the rise of democracy and human decency than any parliaments, media platforms, or systems of law now existing.

Published online today: “Animal rights and animal wrongs: the conflicts and compromises of Animal Liberation Queensland with the animal agriculture industries, 1980–1989” by Marie-Elyse Smith. #AnimalRights #Vegan #Activism #AustralianHistory aus01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

The early 2000s war in Iraq followed closely by the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 convinced a generation of democratic elites that flagrant and repeated lies incurred no political cost. They didn’t invent political deceit, they merely learned they could do it without consequence. And here we are.

The epochal failure of the anti-corruption discourse of the 1990s and early 2000s was that it convinced democratic elites that the struggle was merely one of compliance, making it a managerial demand used to discipline subordinates, leaving higher level practices of corruption to flourish.

The absolute fallacy of conservatism is that existing generations have done such a good job of stewarding our physical, economic, political, and moral inheritance that we would accept the obligation to honour their posterity. What a miserable deception.

If the claim is that criticism of the policies of the government of Israel constitutes antisemitism, then any person making that claim is thereby obliged to defend those same policies. Every interview with a public figure making that claim must be conducted on this basis.

Trump is literally a reverse-Midas. Everything he touches turns to shit.

Whatever their uses may be, I have neither seen, read, or heard anything to persuade me to use, recommend, or tolerate any LLM. I have however found considerable evidence to make me mistrust, despise, and wish destruction upon all the corporations who have forced LLMs upon the world.

As a species, humans richly deserve the extinction we are working so assiduously to accelerate by cooking the planet. The many millions of other species we are burning with us are due an infinitely greater share of our attention, obligation, and our urgent action than our own.

When I studied political science in the 1990s, we were taught that ‘conservatives’ were in favour of property and tradition, and an attenuated notion of the common good. Turns out in the 2020s that conservatives only favour their own advancement by excusing corruption and defending pedophiles.