Thankyou Belgium!

‘After the end of the world’ by Danie Mellor (Art Gallery of NSW) poignantly captures colonial necropolitics. First Nations ceremony and ancestral remains become matters for colonial curiosity and involuntary repossession. This is a continuing subject of my and my colleagues’ research.

I spoke today at the AHA conference on scientific enslavement in Australia, with @amywayness.bsky.social and Gemmia Burden. Calling stolen First Nations body parts enslavement is a provocation to rethink our colonial history. More on this with @lindaaburnett.bsky.social in History Australia soon!

Sharing the news of the Royal Society's Notes and Records Essay prize winner Maria Florutau. Her essay, ‘The manul or Pallas’s cat…’, was deemed by the judges as ‘outstanding’ and rich in primary sources that insightfully ‘encapsulates the entanglements of knowledge and empire in Eurasia’.

A new front in the global war against the humanities “…although staff across the academic body were impacted, the cuts were "disproportionately concentrated in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS), where 85% of all staff placed at risk of redundancy (445 out of 523 FTE) are based".

This should become an axiom in political science: a government is beyond all hope of survival when it begins arresting its citizens for publicly witnessing a metaphor of its own corruption.

It’s a swamp. A stagnant pool of water filled with algae. Trump didn’t “drain the swamp.” He made one, right in from of everyone’s eyes.

I’m no psephologist, nor any kind of expert on British politics, I just hope these low figures indicate that voters for the Raving Loony Party and Count Binface have been strategically voting. And that British voters more generally have started composing the political epitaph for Reform and Restore.

The Age of Trump demonstrates the value of an education in the humanities every day. It poses hourly questions of ethics and epistemology, repeatedly shows the relevance of history, demonstrates distortions of language. Even the Reflecting Pool has become a gaping metaphor in paint and algae.

Australians have indulged Pauline Hanson’s public career for 30 years. She’s rusted into our political establishment. Yet in all that time she has only manifested a relentlessly sour, ignorant, resentful, narrow, and miserably bigoted point of view. What in heavens does that say of us as a nation?

Each year Griffith University campus becomes an arena for a struggle between males of two different species moved by bloody minded wilfulness as the hapless ground staff do battle with the male Brushturkeys assembling their incubating nests. The current score is 1 - nil to the Brushturkeys!

A new policy I’ll be adopting in my course in the coming months: if the student uses AI to produce their assignment, I will not provide any personalised feedback.

It’s is seriously beyond irony that as elected centrist governments face ever more stridently racist and fascist insurgencies, they are presiding over the wholesale destruction of universities, and making a university education prohibitive for those who most need it: their own citizens.

I firmly believe that what activates ordinary people politically is not ideology, justice, corruption, hate, or even patriotism. It’s aesthetics. That is why culture wars work. It’s also why Trump is losing.

If algae in the Reflecting Pool is a metaphor, the removal of his name from the Kennedy Centre is an allegory.

Australian universities are being driven off a cliff by an empowered managerial class with no accountability.

It only took 50 years of neoliberalism to rebuild the ancien régime. The billionaire class is not united, but they all know they are defined by their interests. They act accordingly. Their chief interest is to ensure that the populace remains unable to act in its own interests. They are succeeding…

Given the choice between doing that or hosting a tour with Richard Marles, I think I’d also choose resignation.

Replace Australia’s Productivity Commission with a Foreign Investment Commission. Every Australian company held accountable for investing in genocide, wars of aggression, ethnic cleansing, or breaches of international law. All hearings in public; penalties imposed on boards of directors, personally.

Look, the world is a mess and humanity faces enormous problems, but can there be any more catastrophic sign of our predicament than the pronunciation of the word “versus” as “verse”, “versed”, or “versing”?

All colonisation is a determined effort to realise fantasies of erasure. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

The vacuity of ‘centrism’ among our political and media classes is that it was always premised on an explicit preference to work with whichever fascists, racists, bigots, or xenophobes most useful in the determined struggle to keep popular demands for social justice powerless.

Despair.

Which country would be dumb enough to pay $58 billion for 3 used nuclear submarines to these guys?

The greatest democratic liability democracies have is not fascism, self-interest, elitism, ignorance, intolerance, or even corruption. It is that a clear majority of voters in most countries believe all politics is a scam, and that nobody, including them, can do anything but vote for more scammers.

What will it take for the world to intervene diplomatically, establish an international commission to reopen the strait of Hormuz, and cut this ailing empire and its demented president out of our lives for good?

Back in the early 2000s I could confidently assert that the average Uni student was more digitally literate than I. No contest. But when it comes to navigating information online, and understanding how AI works, I am now much more digitally literate than the average Uni student. Go figure.

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.