Progressive culture since 1954
Time itself has waged war on the statue and its very meaning: the source of despair is no longer its grandeur, but the forcefulness of its wearing away at the hands of nature. This is a warning to all humans, but particularly to those who clutch at immortality – even the most elementary forces of history will overpower their hubris.
The third battle of Ypres did not fit easily into this celebratory narrative. Despite having played a leading role in the British victories at Menin Road, Polygon Wood and Broodseinde, the Anzacs’ contribution to the offensive ended in muddy, bloody defeat in front of Passchendaele. It was hardly the stuff upon which to build a bellicose national legend.
‘Don’t’ and ‘Panic’. Those two words should feature heavily in any response to the softening opinion polls about equal marriage.
Newspoll puts the percentage of voters supporting same-sex marriage at 57%, down from 63% in August and 62% in September 2016. That might be a fall but the margin for ‘yes’ remains huge, particularly given how many people have already voted.
They could have shown something safer, more palatable. Or they could have run the risk but hedged against catastrophe – they could have braced themselves for a modest turnout and polite, uninspired applause. At the very least, they could have chosen a humble venue to hide the empty space.
A picture is worth a thousand words, says a proverb coined at the new dawn of advertising. But words are all I have to convey the images that I cannot see. And most people seem to think that someone who is blind has no interest in art.
While the right’s response to the postal survey has been somewhat predictable, what has also been hard to watch is the response of some in the ‘yes’ campaign. Despite the unfolding homophobia and transphobia around the postal survey, it is clear that groups like Australian Marriage Equality and GetUp have decided to steer away from these topics. These groups have rolled out doctors and heterosexual families to provide reassurance that marriage equality does not involve a gay agenda of radical ‘gender theory’.
What we don’t know about Joan of Arc could fill a server farm. Yet the basic facts of her life are simple enough that they’ve continuously inspired children’s books. A teenage peasant who never held a formal position of power, she is more famous today than the French king she fought for or the English king she opposed. (Charles VII, to us, is simply the king who met Joan.) She has spawned movies, plays, fashion lines, advertisements and 1920s flapper hairstyles. Christians, feminists, transgender activists, neopagans, leftists, the French Resistance and Marine Le Pen supporters have all revered (and repurposed) her story.
Driving through the West Bank, you get the sense that the hope-turned-disappointment cycles of the failed, successive peace accords have been replaced by grim resignation to the reality of an implacable occupation and settlement project. All the trappings of occupation and land theft have only reinforced the incongruity of the Israeli settlements, not least of which is the prison-like fencing and barbed wire that encircle them.
The argument that is made with the most passion is the one that says that the rights of minorities should not be the subject of a popular vote. This seems reasonable, but it rather misunderstands the nature of rights in a society like Australia. Here, rights are not to be found in the Constitution. They are not inherent in the human being; nor are they bestowed by the gods. Rather, rights are accumulated over time. At particular moment in history some section of the population will decide that, for example, women should have the right to vote, or own property.
All my doctors counsel me against being open about having a serious mental illness. Finding ways to massage the truth to people – and explain away periods of absence from the workforce – has become second nature to me. But, as a gay man who has been open and proud about his sexuality, I can’t help but feel a bit conflicted. Is the counselling to stay secret actually denying people their proper supports in society and jeopardising mental health?
The problem is less that these new ways of organising society have been radically successful than they’re being run in a way which is exploitative and undemocratic. Since 2008, Scholz has been considering the ramifications of the internet for labour. As the trends to platforms became more pertinent, he shifted his focus from cognitive work to labour in the more traditional sense. ‘In the United States in 2016, 24% of workers had worked on some kind of platform. Every third person is a freelancer – fifty five million people. How do you make an intervention in this kind of work?’
The ‘free market’ line is a lie. Like many of the platform firms, Uber is a venture-capitalist funded monopoly-in-formation. As Srnicek writes, the point about platform capitalism is that it depends on ‘network effects’ to work: the more users it has, the more valuable it becomes, the more users it gets. The result, as with Facebook and Google, is monopoly. Uber’s price-cutting practices, hugely subsidised by venture-capital, are intended to expedite its own market dominance.
People in the town and the city both define themselves by not being of the other. Complacency is dangerous; unwilling to shift from the town, because of a belief in its value, though no-one is sure where that stems from, residents and buildings disappear into the holes that start to appear everywhere. It’s unclear where they lead, if anywhere, but people do not return. The town is minimally populated with characters who don’t care for much outside of their immediate surroundings, and wouldn’t bother to leave, even if it means they might disappear too.