…we should not take too seriously the portrayal of Biden as a leader deeply formed in the experience of grief…he is also a Cold War warrior, with a demonstrable inclination to pursue the Democrats’ hawkish orientation towards war where it encounters resistance.
Rather than addressing the realities of our place in the region, the Morrison government’s emerging defence strategy is an attempt to hold the old assumptions in place. It is utopian conservatism at its worst.
Amplified by the powers of high technologies, capitalist expansion has moved to a new level, recalibrating the borders between humans and the natural world and producing effects across species.
…we have to face the fact that the United States is in serious decline. It is powerful militarily, in the technical sense, but socially it is falling apart. What future is there for an empire-dependent outlier community in this circumstance?
As lockdown restrictions begin to be lifted, do we have to remind ourselves that we have become deeply committed over forty years to a global way of living, producing and distributing that has been expanding and cross-referencing in ways that have no comparison with the past?
Intellectual practice as social form, high-tech science as bearer of the Anthropocene There could hardly be a more dramatic development than is occurring today where the balance of powers between the natural world and one of its component species - 'Homo sapiens' - shifts, such that 'Homo sapiens' becomes a significant driver of changes that begin to shape, even unbalance, the natural world. This process is what is increasingly being called the Anthropocene.
Consumers who are deep in debt may have become excited about recent talk of negative interest rates. If they were to materialise, debts would carry no cost and would decrease in value the longer they were held! But these negative rates, where they have already occurred, do not apply to consumer debt. They circulate at another level - between banks and central banks. All the same, negative interest rates are truly unprecedented. Indeed they defy…
The 18 May election has ended any sense in which Australia can feel apart from the political stresses and upheavals that over the past decade have come to characterise much of the West. Certainly what has been called the revolt against the elites has now been confirmed here. Of course it is a particular kind of leadership that is being rejected, one associated with globalisation, immigration, education and inner-city life-differentiated from, and a parallel universe…
