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.

One of the things about democratic governments that most people do not understand is that they are based on the simple idea that given the opportunity, many humans will literally say and do anything for power over others. What they want is clear a pathway to power (or money, status, fame, etc). 1.

I don’t know much about Ilhan Omar, but she has two powerful recommendations. First, she is an articulate and courageous critic of American fascism. Second, as this incident shows, she is a demonstrably stronger and more admirable person than the deranged cowards who would silence her.

We’ve become far too complacent about political hypocrisy. We expect it of our political class. It sickens and infuriates us, but we tell ourselves ‘they’re all the same’. Years ago Judith Shklar eloquently warned us that hypocrisy leads inevitably to cruelty.

A yearly reminder to the flag wavers on our national day: just like donating to charity, or being kind to animals, if you have to advertise it to all and sundry you’re not actually doing the thing. You’re engaging in self-promotion. There are better ways to love your country than waving a flag.

Here we are again. January 26. The date on which British colonisation of Australia officially commenced. It’s a poor excuse for a national day. We could do a lot better if only we allowed our imaginations free, for once, from the dark shadows of colonialism. #ChangeTheDate.

Pardons issued by an impeached and criminal president should be nullified.

One of the advantages of being a historian of the #C18th is making shrub. Equal parts freshly pressed fruit juice (or syrup) and alcohol of choice. This is strawberry vodka, strawberry brandy, cherry vodka, cherry brandy, and strawberry Irish whisky. Fruit sourced from the beautiful Adelaide Hills.

The Adelaide Hills. South Australia’s best kept secret.

Without doubt the best undergraduate course I studied at Uni was a multi-disciplinary unit called ‘Revolution: A History’. It studied theories and practices of political change from the ancient to the modern world. Now seems a good time for it to be revived. I think it would be a popular course!

A sign of our mutual incomprehension is the return of the ‘profession of faith’ as a surrogate for virtue. Yet there is nothing more tiresome under the sun than someone else’s statement of faith. It’s about as compelling as being inveigled to endure the viewing of another person’s holiday photos.

“We need writers now more than ever, as our media closes up, as our politicians grow daily more cowed by real power, as Australia grows more unjust and unequal. Adelaide Writers Week is the canary in the coalmine. Friends and colleagues in the arts, beware of the future. They are coming for you.”

It is somehow fitting that on the anniversary of the Trumpist insurrection, a failed state put the former tyrant of another failed state on trial in a judicial system riddled with deliberate inequities. Happy anniversary.

Trump is the broken centre of a tangle of brokenness intent on breaking all it can grasp. All the breaking accomplished by the concatenation of breakers he has unleashed is merely a spreading reverberation, a perpetual repetition of the original shattering of his broken ego.

I don’t think we should discount the possibility that nobody in this Admin, least of all the President, knows what they are doing, or why they’re doing it. There are probably 3 or 4 (and most likely more) factions advancing their own agendas under the guise of Trump’s rapidly advancing senility.

The career reflections of a born chancer. It’s almost as if she profited politically, personally, and financially in a fit of absence of mind. She was moved by self-pity, chased every unworthy resentment, sought new opportunities for cruelty, and bequeathed fascism. Some career.

The humiliation of the United States has already plumbed greater depths than anyone thought possible. And still he sinks it further into degradation.