Three years after COVID gave the world a first reminder as to just how many, and how blithe, assumptions our current global arrangements were based on, the eruption of an old-fashioned land war appears almost unseemly in a high-tech era.
Australia’s history is replete with missed opportunities for asserting sovereign independence, for peacefully relating to our region, for sustainable development and for conciliation between settlers and Indigenous peoples.
Excuse the strain, we’ve been roundly Amerified. Our tastes, waistlines, the secular statehood of our core antagonisms; all have given up the canestalk for lashings of fructified corn.
How will the Voice, if it comes into being, handle the further deracination of Culture in the hands of sympathetic technocrats, used as a tool itself of enlightened governance of Indigenous people and their aspirations?
AI that seeks recognise, interpret and simulate human emotions may or may not be a pseudo-science, but it certainly is a jostling field that should be critiqued as a commercial rhizome.
This is all very complicated for the Left. How might we distinguish a pacific left-wing move to end the war through negotiation from a cold-blooded Kissingerian realism.
The Left appears to have very little to say about AUKUS, even though it amounts to the most comprehensive imposition of hegemonic whiteness currently on offer.
With demolition, the University of Melbourne has declared itself incapable of inheriting the memories embodied, literally as carbon and figuratively as student and staff experience, in these buildings
Bike lanes, changes to city planning codes, emissions reduction initiatives, domestic energy policies and international climate commitments are fast becoming some of the fiercest frontlines in the upcoming election
