All aboard the electoral phantasmagoria
Crack out the absinthe, it’s officially election season.
read more
Leakism: a guide
A ‘good caricature, like every work of art,’ said the Italian Baroque painter, Annibale Carracci, ‘is more true to life than reality.’ This is why, I think, Bill Leak’s cartoons are so often failures. Like several pundits that take up column inches at the Australian these days, his views are so out of touch with the majority of the population that they can – in moments of ideologically charged rage – seem almost deranged. For your run-of-mill red-baiting-climate-change-denying-antifeminist columnist, this isn’t such a problem. But for a cartoonist, it’s unforgiveable.
read more
A clandestine trip to the propaganda-filled secret floor of a North Korean hotel
American student Otto Warmbier is said to have stolen a propaganda poster in North Korea. Freelance journalist Tim Robertson thinks he knows where.
read more
Reforming Islam?
Yassin al-Haj Saleh is a celebrated Syrian writer and political dissident who spent sixteen years and fourteen days in jail at the behest of Hafez al-Assad’s regime for being a member of the Communist Party. He, like Tony Abbott, believes there needs to be a ‘religious reformation in Islam’; however, his progressivism couldn’t be more different than Abbott’s reactionary divisiveness.
read more
Football fantasies
With the dethroning of umpteenth prime ministers in the space of just a few years, the much talked about twenty-four-hour media cycle and the apparent loss of advantage that incumbency once used to guarantee, it’s become common to hear pundits declare that nothing is predictable in Australian politics anymore. Such end-of-history posturing has a tone of fatalism that I often think reflects the media’s diminishing influence as the only vector through which politicians can speak to voters. Nonetheless, something very odd happened the other week that gave one pause for thought – perhaps they’re on to something.
read more
Against Common Sense
Speaking to a crowd of like-minded conservatives in New York recently, Tony Abbott made an appeal to them: ‘In today’s world, we need less ideology and more common sense’.
The refrain came amidst a plea to protect the institution of marriage; that’s to say, not allow people of the same sex to marry. Why his position is the common sense one isn’t exactly clear: is it because it’s in keeping with Church law? Or, simply, because it’s in keeping with ‘tradition’?
read more