Bruce Buchan

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.

Animal rights and animal wrongs: the conflicts and compromises of Animal Liberation Queensland with the animal agriculture industries, 1980–1989 Throughout the 1980s, the mission of the recently formed Animal Liberation Queensland (now known as AnimalKIND) led the group to interact regularly with the animal agriculture industries. The relat...

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.

The absolute fallacy of conservatism is that existing generations have done such a good job of stewarding our physical, economic, political, and moral inheritance that we would accept the obligation to honour their posterity. What a miserable deception.

The Greeks had a fable about a king who turned everything he touched to gold. But its a fact that America’s wannabe king turns everything he touches to shit.

If the claim is that criticism of the policies of the government of Israel constitutes antisemitism, then any person making that claim is thereby obliged to defend those same policies. Every interview with a public figure making that claim must be conducted on this basis.

Define ‘party’ and specify ‘with’.

You can say this about fascists, some like to get paid for their violence, but most are happy to enact their rage, resentments, inadequacies, and homicidal intent for peanuts. The ICE Freikorps seem to fit that description.

I certainly remember alcohol taken to final tutorials at Flinders Uni in that era.

Trump is literally a reverse-Midas. Everything he touches turns to shit.

Whatever their uses may be, I have neither seen, read, or heard anything to persuade me to use, recommend, or tolerate any LLM. I have however found considerable evidence to make me mistrust, despise, and wish destruction upon all the corporations who have forced LLMs upon the world.

40 or so years of neoliberal governments have taught us at least two things. First, that hollowing out our public life and institutions only enables corruption and fascism. Second, that ‘the market’ is a source of no kind of moral value whatsoever.

As a species, humans richly deserve the extinction we are working so assiduously to accelerate by cooking the planet. The many millions of other species we are burning with us are due an infinitely greater share of our attention, obligation, and our urgent action than our own.

When I studied political science in the 1990s, we were taught that ‘conservatives’ were in favour of property and tradition, and an attenuated notion of the common good. Turns out in the 2020s that conservatives only favour their own advancement by excusing corruption and defending pedophiles.