Many of its frequent users have spoken recently of the tragedy of Twitter being destroyed 'as a community', it is clearly nothing like a community in any real sense. Indeed it substitutes for real community in its absence.
Perversely, distrust of these institutions means that when people’s intuitions appear to be rejected, or the knowledge they value undermined, it becomes a type of validation: if they say it’s false, it must be true!
In over sixty-six years of Christmas stamps, Australia has never issued one featuring an Aboriginal artwork, let alone a Black Virgin and Christ child.
Colonialism is a system of violent occupation, theft and exclusion, and systematising of this occupation through generations and into any imagined future.
Climate scientists and neuroscientists are concerned, for slightly different reasons, that the risk of fires is increasing in scale, frequency and spread.
The stunnng tone deafness of US foreign policy pronouncements across the past few decades shows no sign of slowing its descent into further depths of denial and sheer unmeaning.
Monarchists, patriots, and Star Wars fans all relate to their respective objects of attachment in a similar way. In each case these objects become part of the individual’s identity; their self-worth is entwined with the prestige of the object.
I’m edgy when writing about the limits of hope. I’ve read many accounts that more or less insist that without this emotion there is nothing but bottomless despair. I don’t buy that.