It’s easy to despise the corporations and CEOs who have been gifted their impunity. Far harder to hold to account the myriad of decision-makers who have worked so assiduously for 40 years to guarantee our current economic servitude.
“Here individuals are interested not only in their own affairs but in the affairs of the state… it’s a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a person who takes no interest in politics is someone who minds their own business; we say that they have no business here at all…”. Pericles via Thucydides.
Probably a few of those too.
A little known fact about Griffith University is that unlike all other Australian universities, it has resident dinosaurs.
I can see a case for it but only where consent is freely given. I absolutely agree that colonially sourced remains should not be displayed, and repatriated wherever possible.
Whatever we choose to call it, the science of amassing human remains sourced from abused, murdered, enslaved, or colonised bodies takes us back to Europe’s era of Enlightenment. This history necessitates a reappraisal of the supposed ‘age of reason’. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Where or whenever this ‘collecting’ started, it involved very specific crimes including theft, murder, massacre, and enslavement - the inevitable concomitants of empire and colonisation. It’s why @lindaaburnett.bsky.social and I refer to it as head hunting. yalebooks.yale.edu/2025/11/20/h...
Turnbull showed Australia’s importance in the 1800s in sourcing ‘specimens’ of human evolution (Science, Museums and Collecting, 2017), but Heaney (Empires of the Dead, 2023) tells us that this quest originated in colonial South America in the 1600s and 1700s…
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but Fabian (The Skull Collectors, 2010) drew our attention to the importance of collecting crania in Victorian science, while Redman, (Bonerooms, 2016) focussed on the role of museums as centres of collection…
There is a long and bitter history here, that does not seem to be well-known despite a very substantial (and growing) historical scholarship. A short thread on scientific head hunting…
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...
Thanks for this important work. Many would not know of the now very substantial (and still unfolding) historical scholarship that explains precisely why this ‘collecting’ took place, and exactly what kinds of crime it involved - theft, murder, enslavement, colonisation, empire.
We live in the era of politically performative cruelty. There is no escape from this spiralling downward to the drain. #auspol
The Board of Peace is Bored of Peace.
We all know that Trump has gone to war to distract from his appearance in the Epstein files. This is Trump’s Pedo War.
Our economic measures are deranged. We take the most economically powerless (the unemployed) and consider their rising number a sign of economic ill health. Why don’t we use the rising wealth of the most powerful and bloated as this sign? We could call it GDB: Gross Domestic Billionaires.
In flight corruption.
The problem facing political centrists is that after 30+ years of despised neoliberal privatisations and market reforms, public policy discourse has become functionally meaningless. Swathes of the public no longer comprehend it. It is now a foreign language almost nobody speaks.
Some political problems have no solution, yet demand constant remedial attention lest they become far worse.
Corruption is a classic case.
It will never be eliminated, yet the cost of shrugging our shoulders and letting it rip is the death of democracy and human decency.
Love for humanity and the stranger is all that matters. I want to make it clear for any still in doubt. If your response to hate and fear and violence is to subject others to hate and fear and violence, you have no humanity. And you do not belong on my timeline. If you are here, fuck off. Fin. 3
Weeks ago a horrifying mass murder on a Sydney beach, committed falsely in the name of religion, was defied by one unarmed Muslim man. His act of courage was no more a religious act than that mass murder. Ahmed Al Ahmed acted from love (for humanity & total strangers), and the shooters from hate. 2
A female politician well-known in this country for her racism and inarticulate bile, has race-baited her followers by suggesting there are no "good Muslims". Many have responded to her rant with embarrassing enthusiasm. It makes Australians like me who love this country feel ashamed and sickened… 1
The only ‘values’ our governing parties care about are property values.
Conservative coiffures.
No existing democracy is perfect. Every nation’s democratic institutions have their own failings. But one thing Australian democracy has succeeded in doing to admiration is to make the running and the results of elections the least contentious measure our democratic life.
In an age of flagrant frauds, the term ‘artificial intelligence’ is the most brazen of con jobs. It isn’t ‘artificial’ because it’s based on stolen, misappropriated, plagiarised, and unattributed human knowledge. Nor is it ‘intelligence’. It’s only a predictive text extruder.
It still bears repeating that a person whose ambition impels them to any action has no judgement. Such a person is never to be trusted, much less entrusted with power of any sort.
Here is your reminder that over the course of the thousand year (give or take) history of universities, they have contributed far more to the rise of democracy and human decency than any parliaments, media platforms, or systems of law now existing.
Published online today: “Animal rights and animal wrongs: the conflicts and compromises of Animal Liberation Queensland with the animal agriculture industries, 1980–1989” by Marie-Elyse Smith.
#AnimalRights
#Vegan
#Activism
#AustralianHistory
aus01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...
The early 2000s war in Iraq followed closely by the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 convinced a generation of democratic elites that flagrant and repeated lies incurred no political cost. They didn’t invent political deceit, they merely learned they could do it without consequence. And here we are.
The epochal failure of the anti-corruption discourse of the 1990s and early 2000s was that it convinced democratic elites that the struggle was merely one of compliance, making it a managerial demand used to discipline subordinates, leaving higher level practices of corruption to flourish.
