The problem with Stephen Fry’s atheism
By now, if you own a computer and have a reliable Internet connection (no mean feat in this wide brown land of the NBN) you’ve likely seen Stephen Fry’s fuck-you to god. If you’re one of those liberal atheists who favours pithy internet videos over books, is dismissive of anyone that tells you Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens are most certainly not progressives, argues that Islamopobia is just neologism of the PC class and gets a kick out of calling yourself an anti-theist, then you were probably one of those people that shared it.
read more
Death By A Million Contradictions: Trying To Understand Tibetan Self-Immolation
Wandering through the rambling streets and markets of Lhasa, watched over by the majestic Potala Palace, I found myself preoccupied with the thought that there must be more fire extinguishes per capita here than in any other city in the world. Soldiers and security guards march in formation around Barkhor Square with foam-filled red canisters strapped to their backs.
read more
Ebola through the looking glass
The Ebola epidemic encapsulates the inequality that is one of the defining features of this neoliberal age: The world’s poorest are most affected, but have neither the resources nor means to manage. While the world’s richest, with both the resources and the means, react in a manner that best serves their own political and economic interests.
read more
The gratuitous cruelty of Scott Morrison
It’s reflective of just how punitive Australia’s refugee policy has become that the government still has the ability to horrify thinking Australians this long after Kevin Rudd announced his PNG Solution. At the time it seemed the lowest ebb in what has been a very dark decade for Australia’s treatment of the world’s most vulnerable people. But under Scott Morrison, there have been almost weekly revelations of further brutality inflicted upon refugees that still have the power to shock and abhor a nation that has long struggled to empathise with non-white victims.
read more
China, the United States and the Politics of Human Rights
It’s become a matter of routine that every year the United States and China – from their respective positions of moral superiority – take part in a diplomatic tit-for-tat in which they each document the other’s human rights violations. In America, this takes the form of a State Department Country Report, which, incidentally, they issue for every nation. In China, the report’s published by the Information Office and runs in the state-owned Chinese and English-language newspapers.
read more
Aung San Suu Kyi: Colluding With Tyranny
Aung San Suu Kyi, writing after being awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 1990, set down what she believed the test ought to be: “Saints,” she posited, “are sinners who go on trying.” The woman affectionately known by many of her fellow countrymen simply as The Lady is, to many, the closest thing to a living, breathing saint. In Myanmar – a deeply superstitious country, in which astrology and numerology are popular even among members of the elite – the personality cult of Aung San Suu Kyi is imbued with divinity, and many actually believe she’s a female bodhisattva.
read more